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An unedited version of a cover article that appeared in the G2 section of the Guardian on March 4. 2008 (invaluable additional reporting from the Global Warming Conference by Felicity Carter)
For anyone who feels they have finally mastered the concept of postmodernist books and architecture, there's a brand new intellectual and linguistic challenge, in the shape of "post classic" wines. The term was coined by the world-leading viticulturist Dr Richard Smart at the second World Conference on Global Warming and Wine in Barcelona late last month before an audience of the great and good of the wine world and – via a carbon-saving video link - Al Gore. If even a few of the more alarming predictions made by experts at that event prove to be accurate, over the next 50 years, many of the world's most famous wines may either simply cease to exist or be altered beyond recognition. And the effect may not be restricted to wine. For Dr Smart, wine may be "the canary in the coal mine of agriculture".
According to French tradition, the character of a classic wine – its DNA if you like – is attributable to four factors that are collectively known as terroir. Three of these – the slope of the vineyard, its soil and subsoil and the climate - were, it was believed, immune to human influence. The other ingredient – the choice of grape variety – was dictated by custom or law, so a Burgundy producer, for example has to make his red wine from Pinot Noir grapes; even the thought of his experimentally planting a few Merlot or Shiraz vines is as acceptable to the French wine establishment as birth control to the Vatican. For true believers in terroir – a group that now includes a growing number of Californian self-termed terroiristes - the part played by the winemaker is very similar to that of a musician performing a musical score. One vineyard should always produce the liquid equivalent of the Eroica while another will give you Clair de Lune. This is nowhere more evident than in the cellars of small Burgundy estates whose vignerons might produce small batches of wine using the same grape variety and methods from each of a number of plots situated often only yards apart. The variations in weather from one season to another and the winemaker's skills will all naturally affect the final result, but in theory at least, the Meursault he makes from his Chardonnay vines in the Perrières vineyard which was planted on the site of an ancient quarry, should always taste recogniseably stonier than more immediately softer, more appealing wine from a plot called les Charmes made from the other side of the road.
To a Gallic chauvinist, the subtleties of terroir are rarely if ever found outside France. Aimé Guibert of the Domaine Mas de Daumas Gassac in Languedoc Roussillon has dismissed all New World wines as "industrial" and said that "every bottle of American and Australian wine that lands in Europe is a bomb targeted at the heart of our rich European culture". But you only have to watch a gifted, experienced taster such as Michael Broadbent, former head of Christie's wine department, or wine critic Oz Clarke successfully identify Cabernet Sauvignon from Coonawarra in Australia, the Stags Leap area of Napa in California or Curico in Chile when presented with them "blind", to see that unique combinations of grape, site and climate abound across the planet. Even a complete vinous novice can spot the differences in flavour and style between the Rieslings top Australian winemaker Jeffrey Grosset produces in his Watervale and Polish Hill vineyards in the Clare Valley. Which is just as well, because the Polish Hill can cost a fiver a bottle more. And the effects of those combinations transcend the climatic influences of particular years or winemakers. In other words, a 1955 Chateau Latour should be as recogniseable in a line-up as the 2005, even though the cellarmaster and the weather of the two vintages were quite different.
Whether this will be as true of the 2055, however is another question – and that was the issue that most troubled the 350 delegates to the Barcelona conference. According to research across 50 wine growing regions by climatologist Gregory Jones of Southern Oregon University, Bordeaux will be 1.2˚C warmer in 50 years, while Chianti's vines might be baking in temperatures that are a full 2˚C hotter than they are currently. Stated bluntly, both areas will be enjoying a similar climate to North Africa today. This warmer weather will give riper, sweeter grapes, which then become stronger more alcoholic wines: "post classics" that lack the fine, complex subtle characteristics and defined flavours that are now associated with the world's finest wines.
Many wine lovers will have already noticed the phenomenon. In the 1991 edition of his seminal book on Bordeaux, David Peppercorn recalled that the great reds of the Medoc in the 1940s usually had alcoholic strengths of 11-11.5%. By the late 1980s, he regretted that the trend towards 12.5% had become "the norm to be aimed at". In 2005, the norm was closer to 13.5% and critically well-received reds such as Chateau Balthus and l'Ynsolence weighed in at a wopping 14.5%. In California, where, in 1971, red wines averaged 12.5%; the Martinelli winery now makes a Zinfandel with an alcohol content of 17.4%
Whatever you might think of a red wine that's a strong as a gin-and-tonic, there's no denying that California's Zinfandel grape is actually quite well suited to producing high alcohol wines. But that's not true of a number of classic European varieties. According to Dr Richard Smart, (you’ve introduced him), Burgundy may become too hot for the Pinot Noir, the grape with which it has been associated for over a thousand years. Jacques Lurton of Chateau la Louviere in Bordeaux expects the widely-grown Merlot in his region to be increasingly supplanted by the less heat-averse Cabernet Sauvignon and legal but currently unused grapes such as the Malbec and Carmenere that are now more usually associated with wines from Chile and Argentina. And what's true of these ancient French regions will be apply to areas like Barolo in Italy, La Mancha in Spain, Australia's Hunter Valley and Rioja, all of which will effectively be rewriting the melodies and orchestration of their terroir.
As the world's top viticulturist Dr Richard Smart told the conference, research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and INRA (the French national agronomic research institute) show that even a one degree rise in temperature leads to significantly different weather patterns. Smart's point about "different" weather is a crucial one. What we are already seeing is a greater variation between vintages, and far greater unpredictability. For one of Germany's most respected estate owners and winemakers Ernst Loosen, "Every year seems to be another challenge... a new problem. How do we handle these weather patterns? How am I to keep the style of my wine? It requires a lot of experimental stuff".
Among the solutions to Loosen's and hundreds of thousands of other winemakers’ problems will what his compatriate Hans Schultz of Geisenheim University called "climate adjustment" or "shaping wines with technology". This will include new ways of growing and training vines and the introduction of irrigation to the classic regions of Europe. Watering vines is currently illegal in these areas because of fears of the overcropping it might facilitate but, as Jacques Lurton revealed to the conference, grapes may ripen better in higher temperatures, but if all that sunshine isn't accompanied by rain, they can simply shut down and stop ripening completely. If the legalisation of irrigation seems to be an undramatic move, lovers of classic wines may be more affronted by the use of sophisticated reverse osmosis filters to remove alcohol from wine. These machines are already widely employed in California where it has been estimated that some 55% of wines initially pack too much of a punch.
The alternative to altering the way wine is made in traditional regions will be to shift production to places where the process is easier. Spain's leading winemaker Miguel Torres who is spending millions of dollars on research into ways to counter climate change is, for example, developing new vineyards high in the Pyrenees. Others are looking beyond their own borders. The challenge of course is to choose which countries offer the best prosects.
For Dr Smart, some areas that already produce wine will fare better than traditional parts of Europe. Tasmania, New Zealand and Argentina are all on a "lucky list"; at the very top is Chile, thanks to the cold current that runs runs along its long coast. The southern hemisphere, Smart believes, will be generally less badly hit than the north because of its smaller land masses, and larger cooling oceans. But there is one northern hemisphere region that has caught his fancy. China is currently the seventh largest wine producing country in the world. Most of its existing vineyards are less than ideally situated, but there is a cool, new, unexploited region to the to the north west of Beijing that shows real potential.
Anther surprising possible beneficiary of post classic wine may be England, though when English winemaker Stephen Skelton stood up at the conference wearing a Union Jack shirt he was at first, perhaps understandably, taken less than seriously. When he began to describe his experiences, however, the audience began to take more notice. "For the first seven years of my wine growing I never saw a day with a temperature of over 29 degrees,” he said. “Since 1994 there has only been one year when it did not rise about 29. Last year was actually the second warmest year... in 356 years of record keeping, even though it was overcast in June and July.” For the moment England's strongest suit lies in its sparkling wines – which not only beat Champagnes in blind , but which sell at Champagne prices.
Skelton has apparently had interest from two major Champagne houses but so far the costs of investment, have proved too high. Another worry is the thought that global warming might lead to a stoppage of the gulf stream, leaving England a better place to develop ski slopes than vineyards. This theory of possible gulf stream failure has recently been dismissed by some experts but it still has supporters, and there are even suggestions that the stream actually did stop for 10 days in 2004.
One person who evidently does not believe in the fragility of the gulf stream is Bernard Seguin of the French research institute, INRA, who pointed out that, with just two degrees of global warming, there will be places in Finland that might enjoy a climate that is very similar to that of wine regions in northern France today.
And then of course, there are those who simply dismiss global warming as being of little concern – or as being manageable. Bruno Prats, former owner of Chateau Cos d'Estournel in Bordeaux said that he was very confident in the future of that region, provided the producers amended the blend of their grapes to suit the new conditions. In his view, the spicy Petit Verdot, traditionally a bit player in red Bordeaux where it rarely makes up as much as 5% of the final wine, may have a major role to play. But Prats is hedging his bets: today, the wine he makes comes from Chile. Another participant in the conference who seemed relaxed about climate change was the Bordeaux-based superstar winemaking consultant, Michel Rolland who has successfully helped to produce wine almost everywhere, including such unlikely countries as India and Uruguay. "So far" he said "climate change has been very good for us…Perhaps the warming will stop? We don't know,". But, it is interesting to note that, like Prats, Rolland has cannily invested some of his money in high altitude vineyards in Argentina.
Rolland might in any case respond to the suggestion that the move to post classic wines is exclusively explained by a changing climate by saying that long before climate change was a cloud on a distant horizon, many of us had already begun to discover wines that bear more than a passing resemblance to the ones that Old Europe is wrestling with today. Way back in 1993, Oz Clarke, author of an excellent recent book on Bordeaux, published an equally good one called "The New Classics", in which he heaped justifed praise on then-new regions such as Casablanca in Chile, Margaret River in Western Australia and Marlborough in New Zealand. All of these were places that were already delivering wines that offered a new spin on the traditional efforts of regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy. Fifteen years ago, however, the idea that southern hemisphere countries could be talked of in the same breath as those Gallic meccas was complete anathema. When Clarke launched his book at an international tasting event in New York, many of the French members of the audience ostentatiously left the hall. Today, some of those same Frenchmen and women are busily prospecting for vineyards on the other side of the world.
When lovers of classic wines that taste the way they did in the 1950s and 1960s have wanted to apportion blame for the fact that their modern counterparts have become bigger, richer and less "elegant" and "austere" - to use the old fashioned wine taster's vocabulary – the two words that have sprung to their minds have rarely been "global warming". Far more usually, they have pointed their fingers at the US guru Robert Parker and his favourite winemaker Michel Rolland. Parker, the "emperor of wine" whose opinions shape the destinies and even the pricing policies of the most famous wines in the world, likes the big flavours that are associated with ripe grapes. His tasting notes rarely include words like "elegant". The bottles that get the highest marks tend to be described as "opulent", "inky" "blockbusters" with "gobs of fruit". That 17.4% Zinfandel was, for example, a wine he particularly liked.
Parker owes his success to the fact that large numbers of people across the world agree with his tastes – or, at the very least, have lost their inclination for the way wines used to be. A glance at the shelves of Tesco or Thresher reveals that, far from being at the dawn of the age of the post-classic wine, we’ve been increasingly surrounded by it, and enjoying it, since the arrival of the first bottles of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon and Rosemount Chardonnay two decades ago. Today, it is an inconvenient truth that while thousands of producers in Europe still strive to make classic “elegant”, food-friendly, wines with moderate levels of alcohol, to judge by the supermarket shelves, the bottles most of us apparently prefer to uncork come from Australia and the Americas. Or from European producers who welcome the unusually warm weather of years like 2003 and 2005 to make wines with more than a passing resemblance to those more opulent New World offerings. No wine exemplifies this trend better than Chateau Pavie, the St Emilion estate that, since a change of ownership, has fully embraced the post classic style - to the approval of US critics and the dismay of many a Brit. Robert M. Parker described the “inky” wine from the hot 2003 vintage as a “brilliant effort...a wine of sublime richness... with extraordinary richness". In Britain, Jancis Robinson, thought it "Completely unappetizing. Porty sweet. Ridiculous wine more reminiscent of a late-harvest Zinfandel than a red Bordeaux”. For the moment, at least, you pays your money and you takes your choice between ckassic and post classic Bordeaux, but who knows how long that will last? And how long it will be before we switch our allegiance to the post-post-classics of China, Finland and, just possibly, maybe even Yorkshire.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
Going for the throat
A column that originally appeared in Meiningers Wine Business International magazine
"Wine is part of civilization". "Wine offers a consumer an unequalled link with a specific piece of soil or region". "Wine is a necessary accompaniment to food…" These are comments almost guaranteed to get a small nod of appreciation from most readers of this magazine – and most members of the wine industry. But how about this? "Wine is an alcoholic beverage which has to compete with vodka, beer, Coca Cola and coffee for its 'share of throat'". In other words, wine is just another beverage competing for consumer attention. I'll admit that ‘share of throat’ is not an attractive expression. But it's one that is common at Starbucks and Coca Cola.
According to research conducted in 2006 by NPD Group, a New York consumer research firm, "consumers eating breakfast outside the home order soda pop with 15.1% of their breakfasts, compared with 7.9% in 1990". Coke and other soft drinks appear less often at the home breakfast table in America, but the trend is still striking. In 1985, only one morning meal in every 200 would have been washed down with a carbonated soft drink. Today the figure is just under one in 40. And, over the last 15 years, coffee consumption with breakfasts outside the home plummeted from 49 to 38%.
For many of us, this statistic – like the one that says 17% of US meals are now eaten in cars (where they are presumably not accompanied by wine) – is yet another example of the increasing barbarism of North American life. But, in the case of at least one carbonated drink, there's a kind of logic. A standard 12oz serving of Diet Coke contains 46 milligrams of caffeine. That's 30mg less than a similar serving of Starbucks’ cappuccino or latte, and 34mg less than Red Bull, but is probably still enough caffeine for some people to kick start their day.
The ‘share of throat’ issue is just as important for tea manufacturers who saw their total British tea market plummet by around 12% over five years, from £707m in 1999 to just £623m in 2004. This helps to explain why the tea industry has increasingly shifted its focus to Ready-to-Drink – RTD - bottled and canned iced tea. Sales of iced tea in Hong Kong now account to over 15 litres per head and sales in China grew by 29% in 2005, boosted, as Just Drinks reported, by leading brands such as Tingyi, Uni-President, Wahaha and Coca-Cola.
Now, just pause for a moment and consider what you have just read. Coca Cola is helping to convert the Chinese from a traditional hot, unsweetened beverage to a cold sweet one that, apart from the absence of bubbles, bears more than a passing resemblance to some of its other products.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven't so much as mentioned wine since the opening paragraph, but I make absolutely no apology for its absence. The wine industry globally spends far, far too much time analyzing its own navel. The interminable discussions over screwcaps and other alternatives versus corks, the use or abuse of oak chips and the European legality or otherwise of designations like Vin de Pays des Vignobles de France all remind me of the discussion had by orchestral players on the Titanic about which songs they would play as they sank beneath the waves.
As a member of the wine industry, just ask yourself how much time you have devoted to watching trends in the rest of the drinks industry over the last year. Did you notice, for example, the way that heavy promotion by one brand – Magners – about serving cider on the rocks (anathema to traditional cider drinkers) contributed to a growth in the previously dormant UK cider market of 23% in 2006? Maybe you didn't, but I'll bet the trend didn't go unnoticed by E&J Gallo, the South African brand Stormhoek and Piper Heidsieck, all of whom launched wines specifically intended to be drunk on ice. Wine may indeed be part of civilization, but civilization itself is evolving at a frightening rate.
Looking for the new paradigm
From an article in Meiningers Wine Business International
In the last issue of Meininger's Wine Business International, Dan Jago, wine supremo of the UK giant Tesco asked his suppliers to give his customers more reasons to spend more money on a bottle of wine. That call, from the largest wine retailer in the world, reminded me of a couple of other things I'd read in recent months. First there was a line from " Small is the New Big" a new book by the American writer Seth Godin, whose previous works include the hugely recommendable Purple Cow, and A ll Marketers Are Liars: The Power of of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-trust World. Godin suggests that anyone in any kind of business today needs to answer three basic questions:
Who are you?
What do you do?
and, most importantly,
Why should I care?
Now, hold onto those thoughts and then turn your attention to another visionary American called Marc Engel, Associate Partner and Director of Wines Research at a Californian marketing research agency called B/R/S. Last year, he gave a talk at the Wine Evolution conference in Paris entitled Engaging the Wine Consumer: A New Paradigm. The difference between Engel's "new" paradigm with the one that went before, is the gulf that separates a monologue from a conversation. Traditionally, wine producers – like makers of other products – tended to say "Hey, consumer, here's my story and why you should buy my wine.". That "story" might have been about terroir, history, Parker points or whatever, but in Engel's view it tended to be a "one-size-fits-all approach in which [the winemakers] assumed there was a singular type of person who perceived and used their product as suggested. This approach was paternalistic, even authoritarian".
Consumers, by contrast now say "Hey, winery, catch my interest and I'll build my own story around you based on what's important to me." Catching that interest could be achieved by a few words in a magazine, by an eye-catching t-shirt, a bargain price tag or a memorable label – or, and this is the tricky part, by something else altogether. Successful players in today's market have to be like a clever trout fisherman who has learned the subtle art of using a rod and fly. Or, more prosaically, a successful participant in sessions of speed dating where the skill lies in making the required impression on a potential date in less than three minutes. Of course, explaining that mastering speed dating is a necessary way to run your business more effectively may take some explaining to loved ones at home, but sometimes, one simply has to make a few personal sacrifices.
In the last issue of Meininger's Wine Business International, Dan Jago, wine supremo of the UK giant Tesco asked his suppliers to give his customers more reasons to spend more money on a bottle of wine. That call, from the largest wine retailer in the world, reminded me of a couple of other things I'd read in recent months. First there was a line from " Small is the New Big" a new book by the American writer Seth Godin, whose previous works include the hugely recommendable Purple Cow, and A ll Marketers Are Liars: The Power of of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-trust World. Godin suggests that anyone in any kind of business today needs to answer three basic questions:
Who are you?
What do you do?
and, most importantly,
Why should I care?
Now, hold onto those thoughts and then turn your attention to another visionary American called Marc Engel, Associate Partner and Director of Wines Research at a Californian marketing research agency called B/R/S. Last year, he gave a talk at the Wine Evolution conference in Paris entitled Engaging the Wine Consumer: A New Paradigm. The difference between Engel's "new" paradigm with the one that went before, is the gulf that separates a monologue from a conversation. Traditionally, wine producers – like makers of other products – tended to say "Hey, consumer, here's my story and why you should buy my wine.". That "story" might have been about terroir, history, Parker points or whatever, but in Engel's view it tended to be a "one-size-fits-all approach in which [the winemakers] assumed there was a singular type of person who perceived and used their product as suggested. This approach was paternalistic, even authoritarian".
Consumers, by contrast now say "Hey, winery, catch my interest and I'll build my own story around you based on what's important to me." Catching that interest could be achieved by a few words in a magazine, by an eye-catching t-shirt, a bargain price tag or a memorable label – or, and this is the tricky part, by something else altogether. Successful players in today's market have to be like a clever trout fisherman who has learned the subtle art of using a rod and fly. Or, more prosaically, a successful participant in sessions of speed dating where the skill lies in making the required impression on a potential date in less than three minutes. Of course, explaining that mastering speed dating is a necessary way to run your business more effectively may take some explaining to loved ones at home, but sometimes, one simply has to make a few personal sacrifices.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Industrial Strife
An article that first appeared in Meininger's Wine Business International
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. What an Anglo-Saxon might call a perfectly decent glass of Chardonnay or Shiraz might strike a Frenchman as the essence of industrial wine. The precise definition of what is and isn't an industrial wine is, however, really very hard to pin down, especially now that the French authorities have finally decided to permit the use of oak chips – usually cited by Gallic stalwarts as typical of the industrial methods used in the New World.
The person who deserves the greatest credit for promoting the concept of industrial wine is Aimé Guibert the passionate creator of the Mas de Daumas Gassac estate at Aniane in the Herault, who last year proposed an absolute division between wine described in this way and what he called "Vigneron wine". Guibert is a fascinatingly complex character. A forthright spokesman for French and European wine and their history, he has paradoxically managed, by example, to do as much to undermine the hierarchy of the French appellation system as many a New World – loving critic. A bottle of Guibert's top 2003 red currently costs rather more than the some retailers ask for a Chateau Rauzan-Gassies of the same vintage. In other words a Vin de Pays de l'Herault trumps a second growth Margaux. Guibert is also one of the heroes of Jonathan Nossiter's film Mondovino which, among other things, chronicled the saga of the winemaker's successful fight to keep Robert Mondavi from investing in a swathe of hillsides close to his own estate. The film revealed that Guibert had, in fact, discussed a possible sale of his beloved domaine to Mondavi before negociations broke down and the Americans resolved to go it alone. It did not, however, include the fact that Guibert had previously had similar talks with Southcorp, owners of Penfolds, Lindemans and other Australian brands he would certainly qualify as industrial. There are some who would mischievously describe such contact as sleeping with the enemy; Guibert might call it pragmatism.
A similar pragmatism is evident in Guiberts argument about industrial wine. Europe he implies, in a style thats reminiscent of Orwells Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad makes real wine while the Australians and Americans make the other stuff. French vignerons he states always produced real wines, intimately linked to the climate and soil. Quantity was not a problem. They produced very little, but it was good. This is an attractive picture, but one that adds a rosy tint\nto reality. In the first half of the 1800s, the French author Stendhal visited chai, or wine factory where out of wine, sugar, iron filings and some\nflower essences, they make wine of every country . A few decades later a correspondent to Punch noted that a firm in Sete (then known as Cette) had won a bronze medal for imitation wines at the Paris Exposition of 1867. Industrially produced wine is no more modern than the protesting winemakers we have recently seen in Bordeaux and the Languedoc. In 1907, people died when growers rioted against a wine glut and low prices. In the 1930s, a Statut de la Viticulture was enacted to try to eliminate surpluses but these continued, thanks partly to the fact that, as recently as the late 1950s a third of the wine grapes in France were productive, low quality, American varieties and hybrids planted after the uprooting of phylloxera-hit vines at the end of the 9th century. In 1971, a more serious attempt to tackle the ituation came with the implementation of the Plan Chirac which led to the\nwidespread uprooting of vines and vineyards, but surpluses are still endemic. Today, France has given up a third of its wine-producing land and there are few who would claim that what has been lost yielded what Guibert calls little but good\u0026#39;. When I moved to France in 1975, the fastest selling wine came in glass\nor plastic litre-bottles with absolutely no indication of origin; the only reason for buying one example rather than another lay in its alcoholic strength. Hardly the Vin Vigneron son of the Old Europe, made in small quantities with lots of time that Aime Guibert prefers fondly to remember.",1] ); //--> 'industrial'. There are some who would mischievously describe such contact as sleeping with the enemy; Guibert might call it pragmatism.
A similar pragmatism is evident in Guibert's argument about industrial wine. Europe he implies, in a style that's reminiscent of Orwell's 'Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad' makes real wine while the Australians and Americans make the other stuff. 'French vignerons' he states 'always produced real wines, intimately linked to the climate and soil… Quantity was not a problem. They produced very little, but it was good'. This is an attractive picture, but one that adds a rosy tint to reality. In the first half of the 1800s, the French author Stendhal visited a 'chai, or wine factory' where 'out of wine, sugar, iron filings and some flower essences, they make wine of every country'. A few decades later a correspondent to Punch noted that a firm in Sete (then known as Cette) had won a bronze medal for 'imitation wines' at the Paris Exposition of 1867. Industrially produced wine is no more modern than the protesting winemakers we have recently seen in Bordeaux and the Languedoc. In 1907, people died when growers rioted against a wine glut and low prices. In the 1930s, a Statut de la Viticulture was enacted to try to eliminate surpluses but these continued, thanks partly to the fact that, as recently as the late 1950s a third of the wine grapes in France were productive, low quality, American varieties and hybrids planted after the uprooting of phylloxera-hit vines at the end of the 19th century. In 1971, a more serious attempt to tackle the situation came with the implementation of the Plan Chirac which led to the widespread uprooting of vines and vineyards, but surpluses are still endemic.
Today, France has given up a third of its wine-producing land and there are few who would claim that what has been lost yielded what Guibert calls 'little but good'. When I moved to France in 1975, the fastest selling wine came in glass or plastic litre-bottles with absolutely no indication of origin; the only reason for buying one example rather than another lay in its alcoholic strength. Hardly the '"Vin Vigneron" son of the Old Europe, made in small quantities with lots of time' that Aime Guibert prefers fondly to remember.
So how does Guibert define the difference between Vigneron Wine and Industrial wine today. 'When the estate extends beyond a few tens of hectares; when the vigneron doesn't know his vines; when he doesn't see his grapes come in year after year marked by the difference in seasons and vintages… it's no longer wine; it is perhaps an industrial wine, but no longer wine in the traditional European sense of the term.'
Hmmm. Guibert raises some interesting issues here. Chateau Latour has 65ha of vines and Chateau Margaux has 78, do these figures fall within Guibert's 'few tens of hectares'? Or are these wines industrial? Presumably, according to his rules, 'Vigneron' status would go to Australian wines like Bass Phillip Premium Pinot Noir (4ha); Jasper Hill Emily's Paddock (3.2ha) and Tahbilk's 1860 Shiraz (1/2 ha, planted in, yes, 1860). But what is one to make of large volume French wines like Guigal Cotes du Rhone (500,000 cases) or Duboeuf Beaujolais, or wines produced by big cooperatives such as Chablis or Tain in the Rhone. The grapes may be grown and picked by vignerons, but it's hard to imagine how their individual fingerprints are going to survive the process of crushing, fermenting and blending by the negociant or coop.
Vigneron Wines, Guibert continues 'have a planting density of 7,000-15,000 vines per hectare; the same area of vineyard for industrial wine would have only 2-3,000 vines. This statement ought to worry Bordeaux where the density in the more basic parts of the region is often less than 2,000 and where even such top quality estates as Chateau Magdelaine in St Emilion have only 6,000 vines/ha. Besides, the density argument ignores the fact that the number of vines needed per hectare changes in direct proportion to the amount of sunlight the plants receive. Cool, cloudy Northern Europe needs much more tightly packed vines than sunny South America or Australia.
Curiously, and perhaps wisely if he wishes to pursue a Europe = good; New World = bad argument, Guibert does not raise the subject of irrigation, a process that is is often referred to by others as typical of the industrial character of the New World. Unfortunately for this argument, there is a growing move towards dry-farming in countries like Australia where water resources are short, and growing calls for irrigation to be allowed in Europe during the hot dry summers caused by global warming. But what of the use by Christian Moueix of a helicopter to keep his vines dry during a rainstorm? And what of the widespread use in France of reverse-osmosis, must concentrators that cleverly remove excess rainwater from grape juice. Isn't the use of these by some of the top chateaux in the Medoc just a touch industrial?
Other pieces of commonly used equipment that are widely used in both New and Old Worlds include harvesters, rotary fermentation tanks and of course the big giropalette riddling machines that have almost universally replaced the human beings who once shook the yeast from champagne bottles. What could be more industrial than those? And what of the use of micro-oxygenation developed in Cahors and now used by Bordeaux chateaux such as Canon La Gaffelière? The newest computerized pneumatic bag presses and pumps to be found in top Old World cuveries are a lot more high-tech than their predecessors, but they are also more gentle to the grapes. And doesn't the continued use of traditional basket presses by big Australian firms like Hardys (for its Chateau Reynella reds) undermine accusations of industrialization? Meanwhile Pascal Delbeck of Chateau Bel-Air has come up with an ingenious notion in the form of a subtly porous latex bladder that can be introduced into a tank and inflated with oxygen which it then gently introduces into the wine while removing undesirable aromas. Delbeck is a highly spiritual, gently bearded giant, and one of the least likely industrializers I can imagine. But what if his invention had been devised at UC Davis or Roseworthy instead of in St Emilion?
One of the New World 'industrial' practices that is most frequently criticised in France is the use of oak chips or staves as a cheap alternative to new barrels. I've always thought that this was a slightly odd target to choose, given the readiness of French critics to applaud "garage" Bordeaux that have been given 200% (both alcoholic and malolactic fermentation ) new oak treatment. If it is legitimate to flavour wine with wood, does it really matter whether the wine goes into the oak, or vice versa? However, there is a far more dubious New World practice that has gone unnoticed. When Californian winemakers add tannin, they can opt for it to come in liquid form with extra vanilla or mocha flavouring.
Use of other flavouring essences certainly goes on, as the recent scandal in South Africa revealed, but it is far from certain that this – or the addition of flavoured tannins - is restricted to the New World. The firms that produce these products are multinational and it is hard to imagine either that they refuse to sell them in Europe, or that European winemakers are collectively so morally perfect that they'd refuse to buy them. But if flavourings are frowned upon, what is one to make of the use of clones, cultured yeasts and enzymes developed to increase a wine's aromatic character? Much of the 10 or 11 grams per litre of sugar that is to be found in many of the 120,000,000 bottles of Yellow Tail that were sold last year (and in the myriad copies of this all-conquering Australian brand) will have come in the form of grape concentrate. This is effectively the same stuff that is legally used to chaptalise - raise the alcoholic strength of - French wine, but its use today is far more widespread than it used to be.
One internationally applied example of industrialization that is mentioned by Guibert and with which I'd agree is the widespread use of fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. With any luck, the products used to protect the grapes from disease and insects shouldn't have too much effect on the flavour and character of the wine (though it has happened), but the fertilisers certainly will. Two or three decades ago, the acid:alkaline balance – the pH – of most red wine would have been below 3.4; today the figure is often likely to be closer to 3.6, 3.7 or even 3.8. In simple terms, wines with lower pH will be 'harder' and more obviously acidic and less immediately drinkable, but they will have greater resistance to bacteria and oxidation and possibly greater longevity. Much of the change in balance can be attributed to a trend to later harvesting driven by a taste for riper grapes, but many believe that the phosphates in fertilisers have contributed significantly to the rise in pH. (As Jean-Claude Mas a go-ahead producers has noted in Languedoc Roussillon, vines planted on previously untended land produce grapes with lower pH). Whatever the cause, Old World winemakers have had far more need to correct the balance of their wines by adding tartaric acid; a common technique in the New World, but traditionally frowned upon in Europe. The practice of acidification most famously came to light in Burgundy where the laws had to be changed after they were challenged by the winemaker at the Hospices de Beaune.
Ultimately, it seems to me that, with the exception of bio-dynamic producers who abjure most technology and chemical treatments (and for the moment we're talking about an infinitesimally small proportion of the global wine industry) any attempt to categorise wines as purely industrial or artisanal involves tiptoeing through a minefield. If I had to choose, I suppose I'd rather drink a wine that has been made from organically grown grapes but produced using oak chips and sweetened with grape concentrate than one that is bone dry, aged in an old barrel – but reeking of sulphor dioxide and made from vines that were dripping with chemical treatments. But quite frankly, given that choice, I'd far rather opt for a beer, even an industrial beer. Sometimes it can be very tough picking the terrorists from the freedom fighters.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Sunday, June 10, 2007
India or China? The new wine frontier?
In the classic 1967 movie The Graduate, there was a memorable exchange between the young hero Benjamin, who is just finishing school and wondering about his future, and a friend of his parents.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Around the turn of the century, I had a similar conversation with a successful Indian banker in Hong Kong. If I wanted to focus my efforts profitably, he solemnly said, I should never forget the simple four-letter word: CRIB. In response to my vacant reaction, he explained that the acronym stood for China, Russia, India and Brazil, the quartet of dynamic countries with large populations and fast-growing economies. At the time, all but the most narrow-minded Western wine professionals were aware of the potential of Japan, and many had travelled to Singapore and Hong Kong, where they had enjoyed vinous encounters with English-speaking expatriates. The CRIB markets, however, were largely unexplored.
Today, in wine terms, the picture has changed radically for at least three of those countries. Brazil may still be largely off-piste for almost everyone except Portuguese winemakers, who exploit the common language, and enterprising pioneers, who share my belief that inexpensive wine from Brazil’s northerly, two-harvests-per-year vineyards will soon take the Anglo-Saxon world by storm. Russia, India and China, on the other hand, are on almost every serious wine salesman’s itinerary.
Setting Russia – which will eventually be treated as an eastern extension of Europe – aside, the biggest puzzle for Western wine companies often seems to lie in deciding whether to focus their
efforts and limited resources on China or India. Which of these two countries' rapidly growing middle classes will offer the biggest pot of gold. Curiously, many apparently sophisticated outsiders, apparently dazzled by images of rapidly growing middle classes, treat India and China as if they were alike. In fact, however, they are as dissimilar as, say, Japan and the UK.
One essential difference lies in current wine consumption. The 1.3 billion Chinese currently get through a glass of wine per person per year: a tiny amount when compared to the 20 or more litres of most European markets, but enormous when set against the teaspoon per person that is being drunk by 1.1 billion Indians. Culture plays a large part here: alcohol – of any kind – is traditionally viewed unfavourably by most of the subcontinent’s religions. As the admittedly anti-alcohol campaigner Shanthi Ranganathan pointed out to the World Health Organization in 1994, ‘In the Hindu scriptures drinking is referred to as one of the five heinous crimes, which include murder and adultery….” Ms Ranganathan went on to say that the ancient Tamil poet and ethical authority Thiruvalluvar called alcohol a social evil, and that a drunkard was like a dead body. According to the laws of Manu, which governed the day-to-day activities in ancient India, people who consumed alcohol were committing a sin for which they would have to atone by having the image of a flask branded on their forehead.
If the 830 million Hindus are largely discouraged from drinking, there are also 160 million Muslims who are positively banned from doing so. A further 19 million Indians might be expected to pay some attention to the injunction in the Sikh Code of Conduct, which states that ‘A Sikh must not take hemp, opium, liquor, tobacco, or any intoxicant’. The 4.2 million Jains are also supposed to avoid alcohol (along with meat and fish), and a precept of Buddhism – to which some 8 million Indians adhere – is ‘I undertake to abstain from intoxicating drugs or drink’.
Of course, religious rules are not always observed, as Catholic Italy’s falling birth rate proves, but they do help to set a social tone. Would-be exporters to India might do well to ponder the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, still a figure of huge reverence, was a stalwart campaigner for abstinence, and Gujarat, his home state, has maintained a state-wide ban on alcohol almost since the end of the Raj. Between 1977 and 1979, India underwent two years of nationwide Prohibition, and Tamil Nadu was ‘dry’ for 23 years. Even now, there is scarcely a state election at which calls for Prohibition are not heard, especially from women’s organisations. Weddings, which in India traditionally last for days and can include up to a thousand or more guests, involve little or no alcohol – unless the guests are Christian or Parsi.
Within India, it is often said that the challenge lies in converting the male population from beer to wine, but average consumption is a meagre litre of beer per head of population (in China it is 23 litres). And, given a similar growth of 7–9% in both countries, the gap seems likely to widen rather than to shrink. Curiously, there is one form of alcohol in which India can claim to be a world class consumer. The subcontinent recently became the number one drinker of whisky (mostly Indian whisky. it must be said) with an annual market of over 450m litres.
The anti-alcohol mood that is easily encountered in India has to be contrasted with the stance taken by the Chinese government since 1987, when it decided to encourage the production and drinking of wine. If poor people were going to consume alcohol, the old men in Beijing cleverly realised, it was far better for them to drink liquid produced from grapes than from grain that could be used to feed humans or their animals. In particular, the government sought to switch consumption from baiju, the traditionally popular strong spirit made from sorghum. So, while Indian duty rates outside hotels can be as high as 500% on imported wines, in China duty has dropped since 2001 from over 200% to under 50%.
India’s swingeing duty rates on wine have helped to slow the development of a strong wine retail sector of the kind that is already to be seen in China. But wine retailing in China is also benefiting from the rapid growth in supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, which have yet to make their mark on India.
Official bureaucracy is an issue in both countries, but it is more annoyingly endemic in India, where petty officials have extraordinary powers when it comes to alcohol. F&B managers in international hotels regularly have to welcome teams of uniformed ‘inspectors’, who choose busy Saturdays to carry out painfully slow stock-takes of every bottle on every rack. This behaviour is not unconnected with the corruption that is mentioned in almost every conversation in India.
There are several other key differences between India and China that ought to concern the wine industry. India may boast two wineries – Sula and Grover – that are producing world-class wines, but most of its other producers are underperforming woefully, as the recent release by Pernod Ricard of a set of decidedly lacklustre wines under the Seagram brand illustrates. Far too much emphasis has so far been placed on one region – Nasik, near Mumbai – despite the fact that the Grover Reserve, India’s best red, was produced from a vineyard close to Bangalore.
So far, much of India’s winemaking focus has been on uninspiring Chenin Blanc and under-ripe Bordeaux-style reds. China is increasingly looking to develop a locally grown variety called Cabernet Gernischt, which is similar to the Cabernet Franc and shows great promise.
China’s wine industry, compared with India’s, is huge – and growing bigger by the year. The area of its vineyards expanded from 181,000 hectares (ha) in 1988 to 453,000ha in 2005, and in 2003, China produced 4.1% of the world’s wine – less than Australia and Argentina (4.6% and 4.4% respectively) but more than Germany (3.1%) or South Africa (2.8%). According to a study by the London-based International Wine and Spirit Record, by 2009 the Chinese will be drinking 766 million bottles of wine, more than 50% than in 2004.
Alongside this growth in local wine will almost inevitably come an expansion in the market for imports (this has been the model in other sectors), and it is expected that China’s big wine and spirit producers will enter the fray as importer-distributors. Great Wall is already reported to be seeking to build a portfolio of non-Chinese wines. A similar model exists in India, where the UB group, owner of United Breweries, which enjoys a near monopoly in its sector, is now also a major wine distributor. UB has recently bought Bouvet-Ladubay, the Loire sparkling wine producer, and similar purchases can be expected from Chinese wine companies over the next year or so, though it is likely that the money may be spent in Australia rather than France.
As someone who is watching both markets closely in the belief that, in the medium-to-long term, they will both hold more of the keys to the future of the global wine industry than a traditionally important country like the UK, I’d still advise strongly against over-optimism by anyone who imagines that there is easy money to be made in either. And, on balance, I’d bet on China offering the greater opportunities in the short term.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Around the turn of the century, I had a similar conversation with a successful Indian banker in Hong Kong. If I wanted to focus my efforts profitably, he solemnly said, I should never forget the simple four-letter word: CRIB. In response to my vacant reaction, he explained that the acronym stood for China, Russia, India and Brazil, the quartet of dynamic countries with large populations and fast-growing economies. At the time, all but the most narrow-minded Western wine professionals were aware of the potential of Japan, and many had travelled to Singapore and Hong Kong, where they had enjoyed vinous encounters with English-speaking expatriates. The CRIB markets, however, were largely unexplored.
Today, in wine terms, the picture has changed radically for at least three of those countries. Brazil may still be largely off-piste for almost everyone except Portuguese winemakers, who exploit the common language, and enterprising pioneers, who share my belief that inexpensive wine from Brazil’s northerly, two-harvests-per-year vineyards will soon take the Anglo-Saxon world by storm. Russia, India and China, on the other hand, are on almost every serious wine salesman’s itinerary.
Setting Russia – which will eventually be treated as an eastern extension of Europe – aside, the biggest puzzle for Western wine companies often seems to lie in deciding whether to focus their
efforts and limited resources on China or India. Which of these two countries' rapidly growing middle classes will offer the biggest pot of gold. Curiously, many apparently sophisticated outsiders, apparently dazzled by images of rapidly growing middle classes, treat India and China as if they were alike. In fact, however, they are as dissimilar as, say, Japan and the UK.
One essential difference lies in current wine consumption. The 1.3 billion Chinese currently get through a glass of wine per person per year: a tiny amount when compared to the 20 or more litres of most European markets, but enormous when set against the teaspoon per person that is being drunk by 1.1 billion Indians. Culture plays a large part here: alcohol – of any kind – is traditionally viewed unfavourably by most of the subcontinent’s religions. As the admittedly anti-alcohol campaigner Shanthi Ranganathan pointed out to the World Health Organization in 1994, ‘In the Hindu scriptures drinking is referred to as one of the five heinous crimes, which include murder and adultery….” Ms Ranganathan went on to say that the ancient Tamil poet and ethical authority Thiruvalluvar called alcohol a social evil, and that a drunkard was like a dead body. According to the laws of Manu, which governed the day-to-day activities in ancient India, people who consumed alcohol were committing a sin for which they would have to atone by having the image of a flask branded on their forehead.
If the 830 million Hindus are largely discouraged from drinking, there are also 160 million Muslims who are positively banned from doing so. A further 19 million Indians might be expected to pay some attention to the injunction in the Sikh Code of Conduct, which states that ‘A Sikh must not take hemp, opium, liquor, tobacco, or any intoxicant’. The 4.2 million Jains are also supposed to avoid alcohol (along with meat and fish), and a precept of Buddhism – to which some 8 million Indians adhere – is ‘I undertake to abstain from intoxicating drugs or drink’.
Of course, religious rules are not always observed, as Catholic Italy’s falling birth rate proves, but they do help to set a social tone. Would-be exporters to India might do well to ponder the fact that Mahatma Gandhi, still a figure of huge reverence, was a stalwart campaigner for abstinence, and Gujarat, his home state, has maintained a state-wide ban on alcohol almost since the end of the Raj. Between 1977 and 1979, India underwent two years of nationwide Prohibition, and Tamil Nadu was ‘dry’ for 23 years. Even now, there is scarcely a state election at which calls for Prohibition are not heard, especially from women’s organisations. Weddings, which in India traditionally last for days and can include up to a thousand or more guests, involve little or no alcohol – unless the guests are Christian or Parsi.
Within India, it is often said that the challenge lies in converting the male population from beer to wine, but average consumption is a meagre litre of beer per head of population (in China it is 23 litres). And, given a similar growth of 7–9% in both countries, the gap seems likely to widen rather than to shrink. Curiously, there is one form of alcohol in which India can claim to be a world class consumer. The subcontinent recently became the number one drinker of whisky (mostly Indian whisky. it must be said) with an annual market of over 450m litres.
The anti-alcohol mood that is easily encountered in India has to be contrasted with the stance taken by the Chinese government since 1987, when it decided to encourage the production and drinking of wine. If poor people were going to consume alcohol, the old men in Beijing cleverly realised, it was far better for them to drink liquid produced from grapes than from grain that could be used to feed humans or their animals. In particular, the government sought to switch consumption from baiju, the traditionally popular strong spirit made from sorghum. So, while Indian duty rates outside hotels can be as high as 500% on imported wines, in China duty has dropped since 2001 from over 200% to under 50%.
India’s swingeing duty rates on wine have helped to slow the development of a strong wine retail sector of the kind that is already to be seen in China. But wine retailing in China is also benefiting from the rapid growth in supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, which have yet to make their mark on India.
Official bureaucracy is an issue in both countries, but it is more annoyingly endemic in India, where petty officials have extraordinary powers when it comes to alcohol. F&B managers in international hotels regularly have to welcome teams of uniformed ‘inspectors’, who choose busy Saturdays to carry out painfully slow stock-takes of every bottle on every rack. This behaviour is not unconnected with the corruption that is mentioned in almost every conversation in India.
There are several other key differences between India and China that ought to concern the wine industry. India may boast two wineries – Sula and Grover – that are producing world-class wines, but most of its other producers are underperforming woefully, as the recent release by Pernod Ricard of a set of decidedly lacklustre wines under the Seagram brand illustrates. Far too much emphasis has so far been placed on one region – Nasik, near Mumbai – despite the fact that the Grover Reserve, India’s best red, was produced from a vineyard close to Bangalore.
So far, much of India’s winemaking focus has been on uninspiring Chenin Blanc and under-ripe Bordeaux-style reds. China is increasingly looking to develop a locally grown variety called Cabernet Gernischt, which is similar to the Cabernet Franc and shows great promise.
China’s wine industry, compared with India’s, is huge – and growing bigger by the year. The area of its vineyards expanded from 181,000 hectares (ha) in 1988 to 453,000ha in 2005, and in 2003, China produced 4.1% of the world’s wine – less than Australia and Argentina (4.6% and 4.4% respectively) but more than Germany (3.1%) or South Africa (2.8%). According to a study by the London-based International Wine and Spirit Record, by 2009 the Chinese will be drinking 766 million bottles of wine, more than 50% than in 2004.
Alongside this growth in local wine will almost inevitably come an expansion in the market for imports (this has been the model in other sectors), and it is expected that China’s big wine and spirit producers will enter the fray as importer-distributors. Great Wall is already reported to be seeking to build a portfolio of non-Chinese wines. A similar model exists in India, where the UB group, owner of United Breweries, which enjoys a near monopoly in its sector, is now also a major wine distributor. UB has recently bought Bouvet-Ladubay, the Loire sparkling wine producer, and similar purchases can be expected from Chinese wine companies over the next year or so, though it is likely that the money may be spent in Australia rather than France.
As someone who is watching both markets closely in the belief that, in the medium-to-long term, they will both hold more of the keys to the future of the global wine industry than a traditionally important country like the UK, I’d still advise strongly against over-optimism by anyone who imagines that there is easy money to be made in either. And, on balance, I’d bet on China offering the greater opportunities in the short term.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
A Good Movie?
A Good Year - a reviewEver since rumours began to emerge that Ridley Scott was making a "wine film" in Provence with Russell Crowe, at least some members of the wine world have been rubbing their hands in anticipation of another Sideways. Well, I'm sorry to be the one to pour cold water on those hopes. Firstly A Good Year is – and is not – a "wine film". In a world of remakes, this movie could easily be reshot for a Saudi Arabian audience with remarkably few changes to the script. Running the screenplay through a "search and replace" programme that substituted "horse" and "stable" for "wine" and "cellar", and a relocation from southern France to southern Ireland would go a long way to permitting A Good Year to be reshot as A Good Season. Russell Crowe would still undergo a rural epiphany, but instead of giving up a career as a city slicker for life among the vines, he'd turn into a race horse trainer.
Of course, one might reasonably say that Sideways was simply a classic buddy-movie/ road-movie that happened to be set in a wine region, but it was a much, much better film than A Good Year. Scott's movie certainly looks good; indeed if the tourist authorities of London and Provence had commissioned him to knock up one of his commercials for them, sections of this film are almost certainly what he'd have delivered. The actors are all pleasant enough to watch too – indeed I'd happily watch Marion Cotillard, the female lead read the collected speeches of Jacques Chirac, and demand a rendition of the works of Donald Rumsfeld as an encore. But the film is one of the most lightweight efforts I've seen in a long while – and quite impossible to recognise as the work of the man responsible for Blade Runner. Don't get me wrong: this is not a bad film. Indeed, it's the kind of undemanding stuff I'm happy to find on offer in a plane on the long flight to Australia. But even romantic comedies – the category in which this wants to be included – need more of a plot than is on offer here. The film and the Peter Mayle novel on which it was based, were apparently cooked up by Mayle and Scott over a boozy lunch in much the same way that the two men must have conceived of clever 30 second commercials in the days before Mr M took root in France.
The story, such as it is, can be recounted in three sentences without spoiling the enjoyment of the film. Max, an orphan, spends summers, as a child, with his uncle Henry (nicely played by Albert Finney) who appreciates the finer things of life and owns a beautiful Provencal chateau and vineyard. By the time we meet him as an adult, Max has evolved into a noughties London version of Michael Douglas in Wall Street. But then, of course, Uncle dies, Max returns to Provence, falls in love with the place and with the delicious but hard-to-get café-owner Fanny (Marion Coutillard) and decides to give up on London and move into his old uncle's shoes.. And that, is more or less it. Russell Crowe is well cast as the city slicker but never begins to make us believe in the rural epiphany.
So what about the wine? I'm all too aware of the tedious readiness of bee-keepers or collectors of toy soldiers to pick holes in the veracity of cinematic moments concerning their special interest. But it seems fair to to consider A Good Year'd vinous veracity, given the fact that wine and winemaking supposedly lie at the heart of this movie, and that scriptwriter Marc Klein who admits that he knew nothing about Provence or wine when he took on the project, apparently "spent almost a year" researching both. It is very hard to see what Klein learned, that he could not have picked up by reading a couple of magazine articles. Stated bluntly, when it comes to wine, the film is almost totally incoherent. Early on, Max's best friend – a wine buff, we are told - sets the tone by wrongly identifying a Burgundy as a Bordeaux in a restaurant. Easily done, but less easy when the shape of the bottle is clearly visible. We are subsequently asked to believe that wine-loving Uncle and his devoted French winemaker Duflot not only produce a wine that is so revolting that almost no one in the film ever manages to swallow it, but also a "garage wine" with a cult reputation. Oh, I forgot to mention that the provenance of the garage wine is supposedly a mystery (which must make commercial distribution a little tricky) though anyone who has seen the vineyard artlessly and incongruously strewn with gravel might well guess.
Perhaps my biggest disappointment, though, was the fact that despite Ridley Scott's brilliant (though easily accomplished) job of making us all want to follow Max in moving to Provence, he fails to evoke the peculiar magic the wine can have on people. Two films have done this brilliantly: Sideways, in which you can almost smell the Pinot Noir that Maya is drinking and Babette's Feast, in which we first see Stephane Audran luxuriating in the first taste of great wine – any wine – after a long puritan sojourn in the snowy wastes of rural Denmark. Even more memorably, a few minutes later in this same film, comes the sight of an old woman who plainly sucks lemons as a hobby being seduced against her will by a glass of red. Ridley Scott is a very sophisticated evocative director; maybe one day he'll return to the subject of food and wine a lot more fruitfully than he did here.
A spoonful of sugar
A piece that originally appeared in Wine International magazine
The attraction of sweetness is one of nature’s little tricks to draw animals and birds to the fruits that will provide the energy they need. But its appeal is more complex than that. In his latest book, ‘Taste’ ( from maxlake@bigpond.com) Max Lake, the Australian surgeon-turned-winemaker-turned-authority-on -flavours-and-smells (of whom more in these pages, soon) points out that sugar evokes ‘warm and pleasant feellngs’. Even more interestingly, sugar apparently fosters what the men in white coats at the food factories call ‘go-away’ – a handy piece of jargon referring to the way it ‘allows fatty foods to be swallowed without leaving the inside of the mouth coated in fat particles’. In other words, the addition of a little sweetness to your prawn flavoured crisps enables you to eat a little more – and get a little fatter. No one knows more about this than the burger chains whose buns routinely contain 25% sugar.
If you except milk shakes, cream liqueurs, tea, coffee and hot chocolate, fat isn’t a significant component of most drinks, but in wine, as in Coca Cola, sugar can help to improve what the white-coated ones call ‘mouthfeel’. But it does more than that. As Lake points out, sweetness is a potent seasoning that brings out other flavours. Tomato sauce tastes better with a tiny amount of sugar and a wine with a higher sugar content has ‘a more lifted bouquet’ than one that is otherwise identical.
The wine world has traditionally been ambivalent towards sweetness, when it falls outside the realm of bottles that make a point of being fortified or made from super-ripe grapes. Almost everything else is supposedly dry.
Except of course, that it isn’t: most supposedly dry wines contain a certain amount of sugar. In France, where Mars Bars and Coke are relatively recent arrivals, this might commonly be around the two grammes per litre (0.2% of the finished wine) that the yeasts were unable to convert into alcohol. In the New World, especially North America, a ‘dry’ wine might have five times that level of sweetness. Interestingly, US wine writers argue over whether the sugar begins to be perceptible at five, six, seven or eight grammes. Most Frenchmen would claim that it is noticeable at four. Much, however, depends on acidity. Brut Champagne, for example, with up to 15 grammes of sugar can taste quite dry – if it has is enough acid bite. New Zealand Sauvignon is often sweeter than it seems – for precisely the same reason. I find sweetness in red wine more offensive, but the success of Piat d’Or in the 1980s and Yellow Tail and Blossom Hill today prove there are plenty of people who appreciate it. Some popular reds in the US now carry seven or eight grammes of sugar, and there is a move in France to follow suit. Producers of Rhone reds and of Muscadet – once the embodiment of dry white wine, but now increasingly hard to sell –are now making wines with four or more grammes.
All of which may come as news to the authors of websites and books promoting the Atkins, anti-carbohydrate, diet, most of whom presume anything less than a ‘medium sweet’ white to be totally free of sugar, and thus of carbs.. In fact, as Sutter Home’s website frankly acknowledges, a glass of typical Californian Chardonnay has around 3 grammes of carbohydrate, so, one bottle would give you around 15 grammes , or one carb. Which funnily enough, is roughly the same as you’d get from a teaspoon of Mary Poppins’ sugar
Cuisine in the Land of Oz
A piece originally published in Wine International magazine
The Australians are an ungrateful lot. None of them ever troubles to thank the British for giving them a truly priceless gift: the inferiority complex they used to refer to down under as ‘the cultural cringe’. If the Brits hadn’t made all those jokes about yoghurt having more living culture than their former colony, and about wine with names like Chateau Chunder it is quite possible that the fiercely competitive Aussies might never have had the drive to build the Sydney Opera House - or its world class movie and wine industries.
But while the rest of the world has been focusing its attention on Margaret River Cab-Merlot, Mad Max and Moulin Rouge the Aussies have been proving at home and away that they are every bit as skilled and inventive with their frying pans and casseroles as they are with their fermentation vats and film cameras. Somehow, extraordinarily, this young country has developed a vibrant food culture with which some self-satisfied British foodies might have a hard time competing. For anyone doubting the depth and breadth of interest in the subject that now exists in Australia, there was no better place to be than Adelaide in October 2003 for a biannual event called Tasting Australia. Created by two British imports, David Evans and popular local television-chef Ian Parmenter, this is an extraordinary celebration of quality hedonism I’d love to see copied elsewhere. For a solid week, visiting journalists and cooks such as Fernan Adria of El Bulli, Nick Nairn and Rick Stein leave their hotel rooms at dawn to tour around key regions of South Australia and experience local wines and foods, ranging from recent Aussie passions such as olive oil, verjuice - an alternative to vinegar, made from unripe grapes - and quince paste (produced in the Barossa Valley by a local food doyenne called Maggie Beer), to yabbies - local crayfish - roo tail - gourmet possom pate and goat’s cheese from a tiny, wonderfully-named outfit called Udder Delights. As a veteran of three of these events, the most vivid memories I have carried home are of the enthusiasm, commitment and knowledge of the producers of all this food and drink. I learned more, for instance, about the character of different varieties of olive tree in Australia than I was ever able to discover in Italy.
The Aussies could actually teach their European counterparts quite a lot about 21st century farming. Instead of relying on subsidies from Brussels and bribes to leave land to its own devices, they are out there looking for ways to make food taste better - and bring in more profit for the farmer. While our cattle farmers are still coming to terms with the way their efforts to create cheap steaks and burgers resulted in mountains of mad cow carcases, their counterparts down under have quietly been moving into the realms of luxury meat. And you can be sure that there’s little that’s more luxurious than Wagyu beef. Once known as Kobe after the Japanese region where the cattle were traditionally farmed, this is carefully reared, corn and grain-fed meat with unique, fine, fat-marbling. As a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald put it, Wagyu beef now ‘pops up on restaurant menus as frequently as Boney M albums at garage sales’ - despite a cost to the chef of up to £20 per pound. But so too, do all sorts of other locally produced ingredients ranging from Australian Manchego cheese to wild lime chilli marmelade made from outback-grown ingredients known locally as ‘bush tucker’.
The media tour was only part of the Tasting Australia experience; the public, in the shape of some 30,000 residents of the Adelaide and its suburbs were also treated to a Writers’ Festival and a ‘Feast of the Senses’ in parkland on the banks of the River Torrens which flows through the city. Here, to the accompaniment of good live jazz people interestedly browsed and grazed their way past dozens of stalls offering samples of local fare and theatre sessions at which big name local and visiting chefs flexed their culinary muscles. The Adelaideans take this kind of event in their stride, partly because they are used to living in a city that boasts more restaurants per inhabitant than anywhere else in Australia and, I’d wager, most cities in Europe. The Central Market, one of Adelaide’s jewels claims to showcase 48 regional styles of food, and is enough of an attraction to warrant guided tours.
All of which begs a question: is there any such thing as Australian cuisine? To which I’d respond with a query of my own: given a set of bottles that might include unoaked 12% Hunter Semillon, 14.5% Barossa Chardonnay, Tasmanian Pinot Noir and Margaret River Zinfandel, can anyone define a single style of Aussie wine? The answer in both cases is that ‘Australianness’ consists of of an appreciation/requirement for flavour (the blandness often found in the US is rarely encountered here), coupled with a readiness to experiment and an unusual openness to all sorts of influences, from Italy to Indonesia. The most extraordinary thing about this is the speed at which both food and wine cultures have evolved. 50 years ago, when Max Lake the surgeon-cum-winemaker-cum-gastro-philosopher first visited Europe with his wife Joy, the flavours on offer shocked them to the core. Looking back, Joy says now ‘I’ll never forget the taste of my first Italian coffee, but that was just the start of it...’ Today, while the comfortable blandness of Starbucks lattes has regrettably gained a tiny foothold in Sydney, it is easier to get a decent coffee in Australia than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. Revealingly, this country is second only to Italy in its per-capita ownership of domestic espresso machines, and in its taste for real coffee in the shape of a ‘short black’ a ‘long black’ or a machiato - an espresso with a small shot of milk. Caffeine-lovers down under can now pay the Coffee Days Gourmet Coffee Club $27.50 (£12.50) per month, for which they get a pound of beans from a different part of the world. After which they are invited to pop along to a chatroom at www.coffeedays.com.au where they can discuss their reactions. The rationale behind the company is simple: according to is founder Mark Rotenstein ‘Australians love coffee, but we haven’t educated ourselves to the same level as [we have about] wine’.
Neal Whitaker, a British-born editor who arrived down under from the UK five years ago is fascinated by how much greater the hunger for words and images of food and wine is in Australia than in the UK - and by the fact that despite a polulation a third the size of the UK, there are actually far more food magazines down under than there are here. He carefully disassociates himself from the cynical view that Aussies read about food because there is so little else for them to do, but agrees that the cultural cringe and the isolation of being thousands of miles away from anywhere are both still far stronger than most Australians would care to admit. Whatever the cause, it was revealing that Whitaker’s most recent trip to London was for the launch of a UK version of Delicious, Australia’s biggest-selling food magazine. Vogue Entertaining, another excellent recipe-packed Antipodean monthly for which Whitaker is responsible, is still sadly only available in the UK as an import.
The food revolution has undeniably been fueled by a conspiracy of two forms of migration. On the one hand, since the 1970s, every year, vast numbers of young Australians have set out on voyages across the globe before or after going to university. Rumours that this rite of passage is, like voting, a legal requirement in Australia, have never been proved, but it’s a very rare Australian who hasn’t spent a year or so backpacking and in Europe or Asia - or probably both. If this kind of travel which involves living and generally working in foreign countries rather than flitting through through as a tourist, has been credited as inspiring the Aussie taste for wine, it has done even more to create an openness towards, curiosity about, and knowledge of a wide range of foods and dishes. It is no coincidence that the Lonely Planet guides are published in Melbourne. The newly acquired taste and tolerance for foreign food those itinerant Aussies carried home with the souvenirs of their trips, was fueled by the huge influx of Asian and European immigrants who, between 1951-2001 helped to swell the population by over 116%. (for comparison, the equivalent figures for the US and Britain are 80% and 17% respectively). The impact of that immigration cannot be exaggerated. Switch your television to the SBS network, and you’ll see the news in languages ranging from French to Lithuanian. Read the SBS Guide to Eating out in Sydney and you’ll find restaurants offering regional cuisine from Iran, Laos, Malta, the Philippines, Poland, Serbia, the Ukraine and Uruguay. One chapter is memorably devoted to ‘Lebanese, Iraqi and Armenian’ restaurants. While many of these restaurants offer genuine examples of the cooking to be found in those countries most of the cooks have been happily influenced by their environment. Stefano Manfredi, one of Sydney’s most respected chefs and restaurateurs put it well: ‘When the Italians arrived in Australia, they treated it as though it were another part of their own country, a rather larger island rather a long way south of Sicily’. Palermo, Pisa and Perth all have their own versions of Italian cookery.
The Italian acccent is evident throughout Australia, but what sets modern Aussie cooking apart is probably the way that Asian ingredients, flavours and techniques are now taken as much for granted as garlic might be here. In the wine section of a recent weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, a Clare Riesling, was paired with a vegetable tempura; for the Hunter Semillon, the recommendation was salt-and-pepper squid, while Chardonnays are variously matched with chicken satays and Sang Choy Bao. Never heard of that particular Malaysian dish? Don’t worry, nor had I. But I was just as challenged by ingredients like the galangal required for the recipe for Green Chilli Nahm Jihm that appeared in another part of the paper.
Perhaps the final word on the state of food down under, and the final adieu to any lingering culinary cringe, should go to Jeremiah Tower, the chef who is known in the US as the father of California cuisine and one of the world’s leading culinary commentators. ‘These days’, he wrote recently in the New York Times, ‘London and San Francisco are the gastronomic suburbs of Sydney. Australia is the epicentre’.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Blind faith
The way wine critics taste and assesss wine professionally has very little in common with the way most normal mortals consume it on a daily basis. And in some ways the professionals' method is fundamentally flawed. A bit of contextual information can, after all, make a huge difference to the accuracy of the way anything is assessed. I was reminded of this by a report by the Independent art critic, Thomas Sutcliffe, of the ‘Secret’ exhibition at the Royal College of Art. This annual event consists of 2,600 postcard-sized pictures by students at the college and – in presumably rather fewer numbers – by world famous artists. And, it’s the nearest the art world ever gets to a blind tasting, because all of the works are unsigned and on offer for the same price. – £35. So the picture you buy could be a good or bad original by a reputed master, or a good or bad copy or pastiche by a student.
Setting them out in this way, Sutcliffe says, levels down, rather than up. ‘Deprived of the normal guidelines for taste – track record and name and contemporary fashjion – you’re as likely to find yourself thinking that there’s not much to choose between acknowledged talent and unknowns as you are reassured that quality will always shine out... It really is quite difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and a sophisticared imitation of incompetence’.
Critics as illustrious as Clive Coates eschew blind tas ing completely, reasoning that, for example, some producers’ wines, look far better or worse at particular stages of their evolution . Giving a verdict after a single anonymous encounter is like taking a photograph of horses when they are half-way around the track – ignoring the fact that the grey that’s lagging behind the others has a history of putting on a late sprint into the winners’ enclosure. And what about the bottles twhose contents are let down by a less than great, but not actively TCA-laden, cork?
Other critics allow themselves the freedom to review their marks and words after the labels have been revealed if a wine seems atypical. But this kind of correction-by-hindsight inevitably carries its own dangers. A pair of winemaking friends in France told me of a fascinating tasting they had set up with a group of fellow enthusiasts. It all started out in a completely traditional way. Eight bottles of red were set out for assesment in camouflaged bottles. Marks were collected and totaled and an order of preference was anounced. When the results were set against the unmasked bottles, the tasters were surprised to find that they were quite different from what might have been expected. In particular, the wine they had almost all liked best most bore the label of an estate in Bandol, while the similarly near-unanimous loser carried the unmistakeable livery of Chateau Margaux. Naturally everyone present reviewed their notes and marks and poured themselves fresh samples.
Witth the knowledge they now had, the tasters were able to find qualities in the claret they’s previously missed. It was, they agreed, typical of a young Médoc to underperform at this stage of its career. And so the conversation continued, until the hosts revealed the cruel trick they had played. In fact, neither Margaux nor Bandol had featured in the tasting. All the wines had been produced iin various other parts of Languedoc Roussillon and decanted into empty bottles from more illustrious regions. As it happens, I wasn’t one of those who were duped at that event, but I might easily have been. And so might almost every other wine lover.
A few weeks ago I spent some time walking around an exhibition of what I thought were Cartier Bresson photographs (I was in the Fondation Cartier Bresson in Paris) marvelling at tthe Gallic master’s characteristic style and skill. Thanks to poor signposting, I’d carefully looked at 20 or 30 pictures before discovering that they’d all been taken by a brilliant near-contemporary called Inge Thorman.
Unfortunately for those who favour a world divided neatly between black and white, the human brain is not and can never be, an analytical machine. We all carry the baggage of previous experience and knowledge. Ultimately, we all have to choose our own way to judge everything around us – and remain ready to be made fools of all too regularly.
Setting them out in this way, Sutcliffe says, levels down, rather than up. ‘Deprived of the normal guidelines for taste – track record and name and contemporary fashjion – you’re as likely to find yourself thinking that there’s not much to choose between acknowledged talent and unknowns as you are reassured that quality will always shine out... It really is quite difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and a sophisticared imitation of incompetence’.
Critics as illustrious as Clive Coates eschew blind tas ing completely, reasoning that, for example, some producers’ wines, look far better or worse at particular stages of their evolution . Giving a verdict after a single anonymous encounter is like taking a photograph of horses when they are half-way around the track – ignoring the fact that the grey that’s lagging behind the others has a history of putting on a late sprint into the winners’ enclosure. And what about the bottles twhose contents are let down by a less than great, but not actively TCA-laden, cork?
Other critics allow themselves the freedom to review their marks and words after the labels have been revealed if a wine seems atypical. But this kind of correction-by-hindsight inevitably carries its own dangers. A pair of winemaking friends in France told me of a fascinating tasting they had set up with a group of fellow enthusiasts. It all started out in a completely traditional way. Eight bottles of red were set out for assesment in camouflaged bottles. Marks were collected and totaled and an order of preference was anounced. When the results were set against the unmasked bottles, the tasters were surprised to find that they were quite different from what might have been expected. In particular, the wine they had almost all liked best most bore the label of an estate in Bandol, while the similarly near-unanimous loser carried the unmistakeable livery of Chateau Margaux. Naturally everyone present reviewed their notes and marks and poured themselves fresh samples.
Witth the knowledge they now had, the tasters were able to find qualities in the claret they’s previously missed. It was, they agreed, typical of a young Médoc to underperform at this stage of its career. And so the conversation continued, until the hosts revealed the cruel trick they had played. In fact, neither Margaux nor Bandol had featured in the tasting. All the wines had been produced iin various other parts of Languedoc Roussillon and decanted into empty bottles from more illustrious regions. As it happens, I wasn’t one of those who were duped at that event, but I might easily have been. And so might almost every other wine lover.
A few weeks ago I spent some time walking around an exhibition of what I thought were Cartier Bresson photographs (I was in the Fondation Cartier Bresson in Paris) marvelling at tthe Gallic master’s characteristic style and skill. Thanks to poor signposting, I’d carefully looked at 20 or 30 pictures before discovering that they’d all been taken by a brilliant near-contemporary called Inge Thorman.
Unfortunately for those who favour a world divided neatly between black and white, the human brain is not and can never be, an analytical machine. We all carry the baggage of previous experience and knowledge. Ultimately, we all have to choose our own way to judge everything around us – and remain ready to be made fools of all too regularly.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Biodynamic Producers - a list
Having been invited to talk on the You & Yours BBC Radio4 programme about biodynamic wines, I thought it would be useful to try to put together a list of producers who use these methods. (I would welcome recommendations of others that would enable me to update this list). To find out where these producers' wines are available, I'd recommend wine-searcher. Alternatively, Artisan Wines of Chester are currently currently offering a biodynamic box with 12 bottles from four producers at a special price of £95 - a saving of £16. The producer speaking for the biodynamic cause is Vanya Cullen who'll be at the other end of a phone line at the vineyard in Margaret River in Western Australia while we unscrew the cap from her brilliant Diana Madeline 2003 Cabernet-Merlot (available at £29 from Noel Young)
For more information on biodynamic wines and how they are made, go to this section of Dr Jamie Goode's excellent Wine Anorak site or to the Biodynamic Agricultural Association which covers all manner of biodydynamic farming.
The following producers are all wholly or at least partially biodynamic.
Australia
Cassegrain
Castagna
Cullen
Jasper Hill
Robinvale
The Carlei Green Vineyards
Austria
Nikolaihof Wachau
Weingut Geyerhof
Chile
Santa Emiliana
VOE (Antiyal )
France
Alsace
Bott Geyl
Eugene Meyer
Kreydenweiss
Marc Tempe
Marcel Deiss
Martin Schaetzel
Ostertag
Pierre Frick
Weinbach
Zind Humbrecht
Bordeaux
Château Gombaude-Guillot
Château Le Grave (Fronsac)
Falfas (Côtes du Bourg)
Haut-Nouchet
La Tour Figeac (St Emilion)
Lagarette
Burgundy
A. et P. de Villaine
Chateau de la Tour (in part)
Domaine de la Romanée Conti (in part)
Domaine La Soufrandiere (in part)
Dominique et Catherine Derain
Emmanuel Giboulot
Jean-Claude Rateau
JM Brocard, Chablis (in part)
Lafon
Leflaive
Leroy
Pierre Morey
Thierry Guyot
Trapet
Champagne
Alain Reaut
Erick de Sousa
Erik Schrieber
Francoise Bedel
Jacques Selosse
Jean-Pierre Fleury
Larmandier-Bernier
Leclapart
Raymond-Boulard (in part)
Jura
Andre et Mireille Tissot
Languedoc Roussillon
Beauthorey
Domaine Cazes
Domaine Lèon Barral
du Traginer
Fontedicto
Gauby
Loire
Catherine et Pierre Breton
Château Tour Grise
Clos de Ch. Gaillard
Clos Roche Blanche (Touraine)
Coulée de Serrant
Dom de la Sansonniere
Dom Saint Nicholas (Fiefs Vendeens)
Domaine de l'Ecu
Domaine du Closel (in part)
Domaine Filliatreau (in part)
Domaine Saint Nicolas
Huet (Vouvray)
Chateau de Roquefort
Provence
Château Romanin
Domaine de Trevallon
Domaine Sainte-Anne (Bandol)
Rhône
Chapoutier
Clos du Joncuas
Domaine de Villeneuve
Domaine Jacqueline André
Domaine Montirius
Domaine Viret
Eric Saurel
Marcoux (Châteauneuf)
Germany
Freiherr Heyl Zu Herrnsheim
Prinz zu Salm-Dalberg & Schloss Wallhaüsen
Weingut Eymann
Weingut Hahnmühle
Weingut Sander
Weingut Wittmann
Italy
Cascina degli Ulivi
Cascina degli Ulivi (Piedmont)
Do Zenner (Sicily)
Gulfi Ramada (Sicilia)
Josko Gravner (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
La Biancara
La Castellada (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Leone de Castris
Massavecchia (Tuscany)
Nuova Cappellata (Piedmont)
Ocone
Radikon (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Teobaldo Cappellano (in part)
Trinchero (Piedmont)
Vadopivec (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Zenato
New Zealand
Millton (Gisborne)
Providence Vineyards
Seresin
Slovenia
Movia
Spain
Albet I Noya
Alvaro Palacios
Compania de Vinos Telmo Rodriguez
Descendientes de José Palacios
Dominio de Atauta (Ribera del Duero)
Dominio de Pingus
Mas Estela
USA
Araujo
Benziger
Black Sears (in part)
Brick House Vineyards
Ceago Vinegarden
Cooper Mountain Vineyards
Coturri Winery
Frey
Littorai (in part)
Patianna Organic Vineyards
Robert Sinskey
For more information on biodynamic wines and how they are made, go to this section of Dr Jamie Goode's excellent Wine Anorak site or to the Biodynamic Agricultural Association which covers all manner of biodydynamic farming.
The following producers are all wholly or at least partially biodynamic.
Australia
Cassegrain
Castagna
Cullen
Jasper Hill
Robinvale
The Carlei Green Vineyards
Austria
Nikolaihof Wachau
Weingut Geyerhof
Chile
Santa Emiliana
VOE (Antiyal )
France
Alsace
Bott Geyl
Eugene Meyer
Kreydenweiss
Marc Tempe
Marcel Deiss
Martin Schaetzel
Ostertag
Pierre Frick
Weinbach
Zind Humbrecht
Bordeaux
Château Gombaude-Guillot
Château Le Grave (Fronsac)
Falfas (Côtes du Bourg)
Haut-Nouchet
La Tour Figeac (St Emilion)
Lagarette
Burgundy
A. et P. de Villaine
Chateau de la Tour (in part)
Domaine de la Romanée Conti (in part)
Domaine La Soufrandiere (in part)
Dominique et Catherine Derain
Emmanuel Giboulot
Jean-Claude Rateau
JM Brocard, Chablis (in part)
Lafon
Leflaive
Leroy
Pierre Morey
Thierry Guyot
Trapet
Champagne
Alain Reaut
Erick de Sousa
Erik Schrieber
Francoise Bedel
Jacques Selosse
Jean-Pierre Fleury
Larmandier-Bernier
Leclapart
Raymond-Boulard (in part)
Jura
Andre et Mireille Tissot
Languedoc Roussillon
Beauthorey
Domaine Cazes
Domaine Lèon Barral
du Traginer
Fontedicto
Gauby
Loire
Catherine et Pierre Breton
Château Tour Grise
Clos de Ch. Gaillard
Clos Roche Blanche (Touraine)
Coulée de Serrant
Dom de la Sansonniere
Dom Saint Nicholas (Fiefs Vendeens)
Domaine de l'Ecu
Domaine du Closel (in part)
Domaine Filliatreau (in part)
Domaine Saint Nicolas
Huet (Vouvray)
Chateau de Roquefort
Provence
Château Romanin
Domaine de Trevallon
Domaine Sainte-Anne (Bandol)
Rhône
Chapoutier
Clos du Joncuas
Domaine de Villeneuve
Domaine Jacqueline André
Domaine Montirius
Domaine Viret
Eric Saurel
Marcoux (Châteauneuf)
Germany
Freiherr Heyl Zu Herrnsheim
Prinz zu Salm-Dalberg & Schloss Wallhaüsen
Weingut Eymann
Weingut Hahnmühle
Weingut Sander
Weingut Wittmann
Italy
Cascina degli Ulivi
Cascina degli Ulivi (Piedmont)
Do Zenner (Sicily)
Gulfi Ramada (Sicilia)
Josko Gravner (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
La Biancara
La Castellada (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Leone de Castris
Massavecchia (Tuscany)
Nuova Cappellata (Piedmont)
Ocone
Radikon (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Teobaldo Cappellano (in part)
Trinchero (Piedmont)
Vadopivec (Friuli Venezia Giulia)
Zenato
New Zealand
Millton (Gisborne)
Providence Vineyards
Seresin
Slovenia
Movia
Spain
Albet I Noya
Alvaro Palacios
Compania de Vinos Telmo Rodriguez
Descendientes de José Palacios
Dominio de Atauta (Ribera del Duero)
Dominio de Pingus
Mas Estela
USA
Araujo
Benziger
Black Sears (in part)
Brick House Vineyards
Ceago Vinegarden
Cooper Mountain Vineyards
Coturri Winery
Frey
Littorai (in part)
Patianna Organic Vineyards
Robert Sinskey
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Pour encourager les autres? (Bad boys in Bordeaux)
It is always important to get your priorities right. Georges Duboeuf was charged recently with the crime of adding Beaujolais Villages to Cru Beaujolais - and suffered global opprobrium. A few years ago, in Bordeaux, Chateau Giscours suffered similar public shame when it was revealed that it had used oak chips in its second wine. (So, it seems had several other chateaux in the region, but they got away with it). Both these offences would probably have passed unnoticed in the New World (provided the Duboeuf blending complied with the 85/15 allowances), but in France's Appellation-driven world they were seemingly little short of worthy of the guillotine.
Unlike the behaviour of a Bordeaux negociant called Savas which has just been found trying to sell customers in Taiwan 14,400 bottles of "Bordeaux" which was in fact basic vin de table. For this little lapse, Savas will have to pay the princely fine of EUR5,940 ($US 7,442). Savas is evidently quite a careless company when it comes to AOC rules - they were also charged with illegally tinkering with the equivalent of some 22,500 bottles of wine to make it come up to Appellation standards - but not as well known as Giscours or Duboeuf, so the world is less likely to learn about this particular scandal...
Unlike the behaviour of a Bordeaux negociant called Savas which has just been found trying to sell customers in Taiwan 14,400 bottles of "Bordeaux" which was in fact basic vin de table. For this little lapse, Savas will have to pay the princely fine of EUR5,940 ($US 7,442). Savas is evidently quite a careless company when it comes to AOC rules - they were also charged with illegally tinkering with the equivalent of some 22,500 bottles of wine to make it come up to Appellation standards - but not as well known as Giscours or Duboeuf, so the world is less likely to learn about this particular scandal...
Monday, October 16, 2006
Beaujolais bad for the brain?
Beaujolais to benefit from UK, US and Japanese marketing campaign
According to research carried out for the Beaujolais region, the people most susceptible to enjoy its wines (and the ones who'll presumably be the targets of the marketing) are 40+ femails who "appreciate fruity wines which are easy to drink on all occasions". I read this shortly after coming across a letter to the Guardian that included a bright riposte to David Cameron's statement that he stood "for optimism". The writer referred to something called "the opposite test" which requires you, whenever you hear any kind of portentious claim, to ask yourself whether anyone would ever say the opposite. If not, the claim can be declared vacuous. Clearly none of Mr Cameron's opponents would want to stand for pessimism, but how many non 40+ femails would be out there specifically asking for fruitless wines that are rarely easy to drink? The Beaujolais researchers should take a look at - or perhaps a taste of - the kinds of wines 30 year old men and women enjoy drinking. They are all, more or less, fruity and easy to drink, and they bear labels like Californian White zinfandel, Chilean Merlot, Vin de Pays d'Oc Chardonnay and Australian Shiraz.
Beaujolais's problem has been one of variable quality, over-pricing and rotten brand-management. Its name is now, for all but a few (of us) who love it, debased and old fashioned. But the researchers are right in believing that there's nothing wrong with the style. The sensible solution to many of Beaujolais's woes - and the one that would long ago have occurred to a New World wine company - would be to relaunch at least some of the wines under a different name. Instead, the region and the French government are about to spend millions of euros on trying to explain the difference between Beaujolais and Beaujolais Villages and between both of these and Brouilly and Cote de Brouilly. And on uprooting large swathes of redundant vines.
(Don't) Drink Me
Health warnings on wine bottles
If today's news reports are to be believed, Britain will soon follow the US lead in imposing obligatory health warnings on wine. Inevitably and predictably, several of my friends and colleagues in the wine fraternity have risen to the bait and pointed out among other things that a) these warnings have had little noticeable effect on the other side of the Atlantic and b) that if Cotes du Rhone is to come with a warning, similar rules should apply to Coca Cola. Both responses are perfectly valid, but a more dispassionate observer might be forced to point out that, possibly, just possibly, the wine world is only reaping what it sowed. In Britain as elsewhere, the wine industry has done its utmost to pretend that fermented grape juice is not like other forms of alcohol. Unlike beer and whisky, the argument has gone, wine is part of human civilisation: stuff that is enjoyed in moderation, with food.
Of course this is so partially true as to be a nonsense. No-one who has sat through a Burgundian banquet singing proud songs about the red nose one has gained from drinking copious amounts of Pinot Noir, or watched Frenchmen in bars downing a mid-morning "coup de rouge" could honestly support the with-food and in-moderation line for a second. And nor could anybody who's spent any time in a London, Sydney or New York bar watching "Chardonnay Girls" at play.
Sugar is sweet, enjoyable, fattening, tooth-rotting and bad for your heart. Wine is an alcoholic beverage and just as inextricably associated with all of the desirable and undesirable characteristics that are attached to those two words. As Christopher Carson recently stated in the 12th annual Wine & Spirit Education Trust lecture, the time has come for the wine industry to work "with government and not against it...[and be] vigorously committed to preventing alcohol misuse". Carson's role as a bearded sage, chairman of Constellation Wine Europe and of the UK Wine & Spirit Trade Association gives him a highly influential voice, but it's a pity he didn't make some of these points rather earlier. The wine trade (and other parts of the alcohol industry) should long ago have acknowledged its responsibility and begun going into schools preaching the coolness of moderation with the same kinds of skills that the anti-meat campaigners have been promoting vegetarianism.
Health warnings are only the first step. How easy would it be to find reasons to oppose a zero-alcohol rule for first-year drivers, or unnder 25 year-olds? Or a cut in the UK drink-drive permitted limits to the levels imposed elsewhere? And anyone who imagines that raising the legal drinking age to 21 is impossible should try raising the subject in the US: there are all sorts of issues that bother Americans today, but the requirement to prove your age on the way into a bar by flashing a driving licence does not seem to be one of them.
I suspect that the battle to avoid the eventual imposition of these kinds of restrictions in Europe may have already been lost, but anyone who thinks it's still worth trying to fight them off would do better to follow Carson than the well-meaning brigade of protestors whose voices are currently being raised against the health warnings.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
2006 Bordeaux - less historic than expected
Less than 10 weeks ago, Bordeaux seemed set to produce another great vintage (as I mistakenly suggested in a blog in July). Today, as the grapes are in, the talk throughout the south-west is of red wines that resemble 1999 and 2001: ripe (unlike 2002) but lacking in depth and colour. The exception to this rule seems to be the Medoc, where some of the best wines of the vintage will have been produced, but even so, there will be few claims to greatness. Quite how the market will react to this kind of vintage after the hysteria that surrounded the 2005s, remains to be seen...
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Caveat Emptor
The collapse of the UK wine merchant and exchange Uvine with estimated debts of £1-2m will ring horribly familiar bells with anyone who has been following the wine trade over the last two or three decades. As will the revelation (by Jim Budd on decanter.com) that Graham Wolloff, the administrator brought in to try to oversee a sale of the company has apparently reported the situation to the Department for Trade and Industry, in his words, as he is "obliged to do where criminal conduct is suspected."
This story which follows hard on the heels of a similar saga at Mayfair Cellars, coincided with the news of the closure of World Gaming, an online gambling firm whose raison d'etre disappeared when President Bush moved to prevent it from taking bets from US citizens. The difference between these cases is of course that anybody who invested in any online gambling outfit did so in the knowledge of the risk they were running. There were apparently several pages of warnings in the share prospectuses that specifically outlined the likely consequences of the US authorities doing what they have just done. The people who lost at Uvine thought they were on far firmer ground. This was, after all, a highly sophisticated wine business run by Christopher Burr, a well respected Master of Wine and former International Head of Christie's Wine Department.
But, as Burr admitted in September 2006, the company which used a computer system designed to handle £50m of trade a week, never managed to make a profit between its launch in late 1999 and its effective demise seven years later, despite the feverish activity surrounding the 2000, 2003 and 2005 Bordeaux vintages.
Uvine survived for as long as it did, thanks to heavy early backing by dot.com players such as US hedge fund Moore Capital (which enabled Uvine to buy another wine merchant called Michael Morgan in 2001) and by the ongoing reluctance of the wine world to acknowledge that its feet were made of clay.
It would be good to be able to say that Uvine and Mayfair are unlucky exceptions to the rule, but they are not: there are far too many other UK firms (reportedly including some well-known names) operating at marginal profits whose retail customers would be in a similar position if the axe fell. Which raises an interesting question for anyone who bought 2005 Bordeaux, or has 2003s or 2004s sitting in a merchant's bond. In the latter case, I'd advise taking a careful look at the way records are kept and individual cases of wine identified. If there is no clear indication on your boxes that their contents are yours - or an easily followable paper chain - I'd have the wine transferred to a bond where you can take responsibility for their storage yourself. Precisely the same rules will apply to people who bought 2005s, but sadly they can only wait with their fingers crossed until the wine hits British shores.
This story which follows hard on the heels of a similar saga at Mayfair Cellars, coincided with the news of the closure of World Gaming, an online gambling firm whose raison d'etre disappeared when President Bush moved to prevent it from taking bets from US citizens. The difference between these cases is of course that anybody who invested in any online gambling outfit did so in the knowledge of the risk they were running. There were apparently several pages of warnings in the share prospectuses that specifically outlined the likely consequences of the US authorities doing what they have just done. The people who lost at Uvine thought they were on far firmer ground. This was, after all, a highly sophisticated wine business run by Christopher Burr, a well respected Master of Wine and former International Head of Christie's Wine Department.
But, as Burr admitted in September 2006, the company which used a computer system designed to handle £50m of trade a week, never managed to make a profit between its launch in late 1999 and its effective demise seven years later, despite the feverish activity surrounding the 2000, 2003 and 2005 Bordeaux vintages.
Uvine survived for as long as it did, thanks to heavy early backing by dot.com players such as US hedge fund Moore Capital (which enabled Uvine to buy another wine merchant called Michael Morgan in 2001) and by the ongoing reluctance of the wine world to acknowledge that its feet were made of clay.
It would be good to be able to say that Uvine and Mayfair are unlucky exceptions to the rule, but they are not: there are far too many other UK firms (reportedly including some well-known names) operating at marginal profits whose retail customers would be in a similar position if the axe fell. Which raises an interesting question for anyone who bought 2005 Bordeaux, or has 2003s or 2004s sitting in a merchant's bond. In the latter case, I'd advise taking a careful look at the way records are kept and individual cases of wine identified. If there is no clear indication on your boxes that their contents are yours - or an easily followable paper chain - I'd have the wine transferred to a bond where you can take responsibility for their storage yourself. Precisely the same rules will apply to people who bought 2005s, but sadly they can only wait with their fingers crossed until the wine hits British shores.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
First Glass Travel
The following interview appears in a Fine Wine supplement to the Guardian newspaper.
2006 has been a busy year for Robert Joseph. Since January when he handed over the reins of the International Wine Challenge, the world's biggest wine competition which he launched in 1984, the controversial critic has been busily revising new editions of his guide to French Wines and his Ultimate Encyclopedia of Wine, editing the first global guide to wine tourism, the Wine Travel Guide to the World and preparing his next book, a study of the future of wine.
FW: You have been writing about wine for around a quarter of a century. What are the biggest and most surprising changes you have seen?
RJ: The wine world has gone through a complete metamorphosis. The most obvious change is of course the fact that most of us now drink wines with grape names on their labels, produced in countries no one thought grew vines, and more than likely poured from a bottle with a screwcap or a box with a tap on the side. And then of course, there's the fact that far more wine than ever before is branded in some way or other – from Hardy's two-bottles-for-the-price-of-one efforts to Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc which still has a cult status nearly 20 years after it was first produced. Over the last five years, wineries have been opening in the New World, at an extraordinary rate of one every three or four hours. I used to find that a pretty dazzling thought – until I took a look at what has been happening in France. In the autumn of 1989, an extraordinary 494,000 French winegrowers completed forms to say they had harvested grapes for wine. Last year the figure was 183,000. So, by my calculations France alone has been losing two winegrowers an hour for the last 15 years. There's no longer any room for the producer of just another Muscadet or Beaujolais.
But I think that all those obvious changes are actually symptoms of way that, like food, wine has become more than something you simply consume; for a growing number of people, it's a lifestyle pursuit. For some, it may simply be a matter of showing off a bit of sophistication by offering guests the smartest, newest wine on the block. But there are plenty of others who want to know a bit more about the background to what they are drinking. I get far more requests than in the past to host private tastings and to talk about wine at dinners, and there's a definite boom in wine tourism.
FW: So we're all becoming wine buffs?
RJ: Far from it, thank goodness. Wine anoraks are no more fun to be with than hi fi buffs – unless you happen to share their single-minded obsession. To be honest, I don't think that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who want to study wine and to take courses and to learn all about the difference between St Emilion Grand Cru and St Emilion Grand Cru Classé. That's where the French who think that the answer to the woes of their wine industry lies in "wine education" get it so wrong. I think that for most people, wine is like classical music. They build up their knowledge and discover what they like piecemeal - in all sorts of ways – from a newspaper article here, or a radio feature, or by wandering around a wine cellar while they are on holiday. And just as some people collect several of recordings of the same opera, others are perfectly happy with a single cd of Mozart's greatest hits. And that's where the New World wines with their immediate drinkability and informative labels have definitely scored. Their producers have done their utmost to remove the mystique from wine and to make it accessible to everybody. And that open attitude is just as apparent in the way they welcome visitors to their wineries.
FW: How do you define New World?
RJ: Actually, having just referred to the New World, I'd far rather that the terms Old World and New World were dropped; they smack of Animal Farm's "Four Legs Good; Two Legs Bad". In fact they're a convenient form of shorthand for two different philosophies: the one whose producers are driven by tradition and local custom and the other that tries to be in tune with what its customers enjoy. There are some stubbornly arrogant Old-Worlders in Australia and South Africa and some innovative New Worlders in European countries like Spain and Italy.
FW: I notice you left France out of that last list. The French are having a hard time at the moment against competition from the New World. How do you rate their chances of fighting back?
RJ: Let me start by saying that I love France, and I love French wine. That's why I find the current plight of the French wine industry so exasperating. It's like watching your best friend sinking into the mire. My best effort at a prescription is to suggest that the people who run France's wine industry (and it is horribly centralized), get the wax removed from their ears so that they can hear what people want from their wines and their labels. They could also invest in a few round-the-world airline tickets and take a look at the way wine producers in other countries receive visitors. Am I the only person to find it extraordinary that the Denbies vineyard in Surrey offers a better experience than almost any chateau in Bordeaux? In France, all too often the only way to gain admittance to a cellar is by appointment, and once you re inside, a knowledge of the French language and the likelihood that you might buy some wine can seem almost obligatory. The trouble is that nowadays, more and more of us visit wineries in pretty much the same way as the characters in the movie Sideways – as a weekend or holiday activity. That's why the exceptions to the French rule like Georges Duboeuf's Hameau du Vin in Beaujolais and Olivier Leflaive's winery restaurant in Burgundy are so welcome.
FW: Where do you think does wine tourism best?
RJ: Well, as I discovered when I was researching the book, there are some tough competitors out there. The Americans - by which I don't simply mean the Californians - are a hard team to beat. If you go online to http://www.michiganwines.com/, for example, you can find out about the nearly four dozen wineries in that state, restaurants, wine festivals and so on in a way that isn't possible for most of Europe's classic regions. The only negative thing to say about the Napa Valley is that, maybe it is a victim of its success as a tourist attraction. Around 15 million people visit the wineries there every year and, it's big business. You have to buy tickets for the tours and tastings and in some of the larger wineries it's easy to imagine that you are in part of Disneyland rather than in a place where wine is actually produced. The wine regions of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are all great places to visit. In Marlborough in New Zealand, for example, there are at least a dozen winery cafes and restaurants, not to mention vineyards where you can be taught to prune vines and wineries where you can sample all of the smells associated with wine. Elsewhere in the New World, it's more hit-and-miss, but Chile and Argentina have some great winery hotels and one of the best wineries in the world for tourists is in Venezuela.
FW: And what's the best way to go about being a wine tourist?
RJ: It depends on your level of interest – and on that of the person or people with whom you might br travelling. When I'm in a wine region, I'll try to visit six or maybe even more wineries in a day, provided distances between them aren't too great. But I'm on a mission: I have a limited amount of time to cover a certain amount of ground. For a keen wine tourist, I'd recommend four wineries as a maximum and for those with a more casual interest, maybe one or two before a leisurely lunch. As a rule, I'd recommend being as honest about your knowledge or lack of it as possible. Don't let the winenmaker or guide talk over your head, but by the same token don't let them talk down to you if you already know about how wine is made, for example. Say what you think when you're given a wine to taste, but say it politely. If you let a winemaker know that you didn't like a particular wine – and why, it might help him or her to find something that would be more to your taste. On the other hand, expressing the right kind of intelligent appreciation can be like moving onto a new level in a computer game: it could lead to your being offered a taster of something better and/or older.
FW: On a broader topic, which countries do you think are producing the most interesting wines?
RJ: That's easy. Italy is the most exciting wine country on earth at the moment because it's the one place where tradition and inventiveness are coexisting side by side, and often in the same wineries. But there are all sorts of things going on in Portugal, Austria, Spain and Southern France, so the New World is going to face a lot more competition.
FW: Does the New World really make wines that match the best of Europe?
RJ: It depends what you mean by the best. If you ask whether I have ever tasted a New World wine that is quite as good as Chateau Margaux 1953 or Mouton Rothschild 1945 or indeed Haut Brion 2005 and the answer is probably not. But that's a bit like saying that there aren't any composers who have matched Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. The far more relevant question is: can the Antipodes, the Americas and South Africa make wine that is as good as or better than the 97% that most mortals actually get to drink, and the answer to that is a resounding yes.
FW: So how do you see the future?
RJ: Well, I'm still working on the book, but there are all sorts of factor that we'll have to take into account – from global warming, which has already helped to raise the alcoholic strength of the wine we drink, to GM – which, if permitted, might enable winemakers to reduce it. If we've lost some of our reverence for the icons of the past, I wonder how long some of the newer icons will retain our interest. All I do know is that we're on a roller coaster that I for one would never have imagined 25 years ago.
The Wine Travel Guide to the World is published by Footprint at £19.99
The Complete Encyclopedia of Wine is published by Carlton Books at £19.99
French Wine is Published by Dorling Kindersley at £12.99
2006 has been a busy year for Robert Joseph. Since January when he handed over the reins of the International Wine Challenge, the world's biggest wine competition which he launched in 1984, the controversial critic has been busily revising new editions of his guide to French Wines and his Ultimate Encyclopedia of Wine, editing the first global guide to wine tourism, the Wine Travel Guide to the World and preparing his next book, a study of the future of wine.
FW: You have been writing about wine for around a quarter of a century. What are the biggest and most surprising changes you have seen?
RJ: The wine world has gone through a complete metamorphosis. The most obvious change is of course the fact that most of us now drink wines with grape names on their labels, produced in countries no one thought grew vines, and more than likely poured from a bottle with a screwcap or a box with a tap on the side. And then of course, there's the fact that far more wine than ever before is branded in some way or other – from Hardy's two-bottles-for-the-price-of-one efforts to Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc which still has a cult status nearly 20 years after it was first produced. Over the last five years, wineries have been opening in the New World, at an extraordinary rate of one every three or four hours. I used to find that a pretty dazzling thought – until I took a look at what has been happening in France. In the autumn of 1989, an extraordinary 494,000 French winegrowers completed forms to say they had harvested grapes for wine. Last year the figure was 183,000. So, by my calculations France alone has been losing two winegrowers an hour for the last 15 years. There's no longer any room for the producer of just another Muscadet or Beaujolais.
But I think that all those obvious changes are actually symptoms of way that, like food, wine has become more than something you simply consume; for a growing number of people, it's a lifestyle pursuit. For some, it may simply be a matter of showing off a bit of sophistication by offering guests the smartest, newest wine on the block. But there are plenty of others who want to know a bit more about the background to what they are drinking. I get far more requests than in the past to host private tastings and to talk about wine at dinners, and there's a definite boom in wine tourism.
FW: So we're all becoming wine buffs?
RJ: Far from it, thank goodness. Wine anoraks are no more fun to be with than hi fi buffs – unless you happen to share their single-minded obsession. To be honest, I don't think that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who want to study wine and to take courses and to learn all about the difference between St Emilion Grand Cru and St Emilion Grand Cru Classé. That's where the French who think that the answer to the woes of their wine industry lies in "wine education" get it so wrong. I think that for most people, wine is like classical music. They build up their knowledge and discover what they like piecemeal - in all sorts of ways – from a newspaper article here, or a radio feature, or by wandering around a wine cellar while they are on holiday. And just as some people collect several of recordings of the same opera, others are perfectly happy with a single cd of Mozart's greatest hits. And that's where the New World wines with their immediate drinkability and informative labels have definitely scored. Their producers have done their utmost to remove the mystique from wine and to make it accessible to everybody. And that open attitude is just as apparent in the way they welcome visitors to their wineries.
FW: How do you define New World?
RJ: Actually, having just referred to the New World, I'd far rather that the terms Old World and New World were dropped; they smack of Animal Farm's "Four Legs Good; Two Legs Bad". In fact they're a convenient form of shorthand for two different philosophies: the one whose producers are driven by tradition and local custom and the other that tries to be in tune with what its customers enjoy. There are some stubbornly arrogant Old-Worlders in Australia and South Africa and some innovative New Worlders in European countries like Spain and Italy.
FW: I notice you left France out of that last list. The French are having a hard time at the moment against competition from the New World. How do you rate their chances of fighting back?
RJ: Let me start by saying that I love France, and I love French wine. That's why I find the current plight of the French wine industry so exasperating. It's like watching your best friend sinking into the mire. My best effort at a prescription is to suggest that the people who run France's wine industry (and it is horribly centralized), get the wax removed from their ears so that they can hear what people want from their wines and their labels. They could also invest in a few round-the-world airline tickets and take a look at the way wine producers in other countries receive visitors. Am I the only person to find it extraordinary that the Denbies vineyard in Surrey offers a better experience than almost any chateau in Bordeaux? In France, all too often the only way to gain admittance to a cellar is by appointment, and once you re inside, a knowledge of the French language and the likelihood that you might buy some wine can seem almost obligatory. The trouble is that nowadays, more and more of us visit wineries in pretty much the same way as the characters in the movie Sideways – as a weekend or holiday activity. That's why the exceptions to the French rule like Georges Duboeuf's Hameau du Vin in Beaujolais and Olivier Leflaive's winery restaurant in Burgundy are so welcome.
FW: Where do you think does wine tourism best?
RJ: Well, as I discovered when I was researching the book, there are some tough competitors out there. The Americans - by which I don't simply mean the Californians - are a hard team to beat. If you go online to http://www.michiganwines.com/, for example, you can find out about the nearly four dozen wineries in that state, restaurants, wine festivals and so on in a way that isn't possible for most of Europe's classic regions. The only negative thing to say about the Napa Valley is that, maybe it is a victim of its success as a tourist attraction. Around 15 million people visit the wineries there every year and, it's big business. You have to buy tickets for the tours and tastings and in some of the larger wineries it's easy to imagine that you are in part of Disneyland rather than in a place where wine is actually produced. The wine regions of Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are all great places to visit. In Marlborough in New Zealand, for example, there are at least a dozen winery cafes and restaurants, not to mention vineyards where you can be taught to prune vines and wineries where you can sample all of the smells associated with wine. Elsewhere in the New World, it's more hit-and-miss, but Chile and Argentina have some great winery hotels and one of the best wineries in the world for tourists is in Venezuela.
FW: And what's the best way to go about being a wine tourist?
RJ: It depends on your level of interest – and on that of the person or people with whom you might br travelling. When I'm in a wine region, I'll try to visit six or maybe even more wineries in a day, provided distances between them aren't too great. But I'm on a mission: I have a limited amount of time to cover a certain amount of ground. For a keen wine tourist, I'd recommend four wineries as a maximum and for those with a more casual interest, maybe one or two before a leisurely lunch. As a rule, I'd recommend being as honest about your knowledge or lack of it as possible. Don't let the winenmaker or guide talk over your head, but by the same token don't let them talk down to you if you already know about how wine is made, for example. Say what you think when you're given a wine to taste, but say it politely. If you let a winemaker know that you didn't like a particular wine – and why, it might help him or her to find something that would be more to your taste. On the other hand, expressing the right kind of intelligent appreciation can be like moving onto a new level in a computer game: it could lead to your being offered a taster of something better and/or older.
FW: On a broader topic, which countries do you think are producing the most interesting wines?
RJ: That's easy. Italy is the most exciting wine country on earth at the moment because it's the one place where tradition and inventiveness are coexisting side by side, and often in the same wineries. But there are all sorts of things going on in Portugal, Austria, Spain and Southern France, so the New World is going to face a lot more competition.
FW: Does the New World really make wines that match the best of Europe?
RJ: It depends what you mean by the best. If you ask whether I have ever tasted a New World wine that is quite as good as Chateau Margaux 1953 or Mouton Rothschild 1945 or indeed Haut Brion 2005 and the answer is probably not. But that's a bit like saying that there aren't any composers who have matched Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. The far more relevant question is: can the Antipodes, the Americas and South Africa make wine that is as good as or better than the 97% that most mortals actually get to drink, and the answer to that is a resounding yes.
FW: So how do you see the future?
RJ: Well, I'm still working on the book, but there are all sorts of factor that we'll have to take into account – from global warming, which has already helped to raise the alcoholic strength of the wine we drink, to GM – which, if permitted, might enable winemakers to reduce it. If we've lost some of our reverence for the icons of the past, I wonder how long some of the newer icons will retain our interest. All I do know is that we're on a roller coaster that I for one would never have imagined 25 years ago.
The Wine Travel Guide to the World is published by Footprint at £19.99
The Complete Encyclopedia of Wine is published by Carlton Books at £19.99
French Wine is Published by Dorling Kindersley at £12.99
Wine Tourism
Monday, October 02, 2006
Discovering the earth to be round
The following article appeared in the Russian magazine Magnum and in a special Fine Wine supplement to the Guardian newspaper
I cannot remember the day I realised that the world – the world of wine – was round. But I do know that when I lived in Burgundy, like everybody else, I was fully convinced that it was flat. The Pinot Noir grape, it had been proven, only produced good wine in the soil and climate of a small region called the Cote d’Or. Of course attempts had been made to grow it elsewhere – in Sancerre, Alsace and Champagne, but in none of these places did it produce red wine that was remotely comparable to the efforts of Burgundian villages like Volnay and Vosne-Romanee. Much the same could be said for that other Burgundy grape Chardonnay, while Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc only performed at their best in the Loire. Challenging these beliefs by trying to mimic Burgundy or Sancerre elsewhere was like sailing over the edge of the world.
Then, of course, came the 1970s when a Pinot Noir from Eyrie vineyards in Oregon beat a set of red Burgundies, and Californian Cabernets and Chardonnays triumphed over their French counterparts in Steven Spurrier’s famous 1976 “Judgement of Paris” tasting. For a while, it seemed as though this was the moment when the Old World had to acknowledge the curvature of the globe. But in fact all that happened was that the flat map was redrawn. The new credo was that Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, for example, needed to be grown in places that were as similar as possible to Burgundy. In fact, of course, there were huge differences between the soils of Puligny Montrachet and Carneros in California, but the followers of the amended faith were happy to gloss over these anomalies. What mattered, above all they said, was the climate. Experts charted the “degree days” – average temperature during the growing season - of the classic regions of France and did their utmost to match these conditions when planting in the New World.
If you had asked any of the followers of the original or expanded flat earth beliefs (by which I mean 99.99% of the wine community) they would all have agreed on one absolute rule. Wine of any kind can only be produced between the latitudes of 30 and 50 in the northern or southern hemispheres. Anything closer to the North or South Pole is too cold, while grapevines simply don’t do well in the tropics because they need to rest over a cold winter.
But then news began to leak out of vineyards in Thailand, between the 14th and 18th parallels. Conditions here are tropical; indeed in the Siam vineyard which was founded by one of the men behind the energy-drink Red Bull, the grapes are grown on islands and harvested from boats. In another hillside vineyard, vineyard workers sit astride elephants and irrigate the fruit with water from the beast’s trunk. The very idea of trying to make wines in these conditions might seem to be eccentric to say the least, but the budding Thai wine industry (there are six wineries at present and others due to open soon) was not launched on a whim. The King of Thailand commissioned a study in the late 1970s that took a dozen years to decide that the project would be worthwhile.
Now the obvious question is “How good are the Thai wines?” and the honest answer is that they are not currently likely to cause the owners of chateaux Margaux or Cheval Blanc to lose any sleep. But the examples I have tasted (under the Monsoon Valley label) are a softer, more pleasant drink than most cheap Bordeaux. And, for those who judge by results, the Thais are still planting vineyards, while the Bordelais are currently uprooting theirs – and sending the equivalent of 44,000,000 unsold bottles of their wine this year to be turned into industrial alcohol.
But Thailand is only the most romantic example of a growing number of wine regions that are situated over the edge of the old flat earth. Last year, Decanter magazine tasted a range of wines from the New World and gave their highest marks to the La Reserve Cabernet Shiraz from Grover Vineyards, near Bangalore in India. At the time, most of the news coverage focused on the fact that the wine was from the subcontinent, and produced with the help of the ubiquitous Michel Rolland, but no one pointed out that the vineyard is close to the 13th parallel, around 4,000 kilometres nearer to the equator than it ought to be. This is in fact India’s most southerly vineyard – most of the others are planted closer to Mumbai but, at the 18th parallel, they hardly conform to the old 30-50 degree rule.
India is going to be a country to watch – both in terms of production and consumption – but so is Brazil, and this is where you’ll find what is certainly the most commercially intensive effort at what Thai-based wine writer Frank Norel calls “New Latitude” winemaking. In the warm, dry Sao Francisco Valley, between the 9th and 10th parallel, a carpet of vines is being unrolled. The region barely existed 20 years ago, but it is already supplying 15% of Brazil’s needs and is expected to triple production over the next four years, by which time it will be the source of one glass in every two that are drunk here.
Yields per harvest are high here – by classical European standards – but the lack of a winter means that here, as elsewhere in the New Latitude, vines can produce two vintages per year. Actually, they could produce more, but producers prefer not to wear the plants out completely. The early releases from Sao Francisco are perfectly acceptable, and again considerably more drinkable than that unsaleable Bordeaux. So far, the Shiraz shows great promise (Miolo’s Terranova is a good example), but there is no reason to suppose that other varieties will not thrive as well.
The idea of picking wine grapes more than once a year is not as novel as one might imagine. Way back in 1578, Don Juan de Pimentel, the governor of Venezuela wrote a book in which he describes vineyards near Caracas being harvested three times a year. Today, the Pomar winery, which opened its doors in 1986, is the sole quality-conscious upholder of the Venezuelan vinous tradition, but the wines it produces close to the 11th parallel have won medals in international competitions such as the Challenge International du Vin in Bordeaux. By far the most surprising award-winner among the New Latitude wineries, however, has to be Chaupi Estancia Palomino which won a Commendation (the equivalent of a mark of at least 14/20) at the 2004 Decanter Awards in London. This winery, established 15 years ago, makes its wines from vineyards at 2,400 metres above sea level – and just 10km from the equator.
All of these wines beg the essential question: how is it possible to make wines in conditions that were once thought to be impossible? The simple answer is that we now know a lot more about plants and the way they grow than we used to. Like every other living thing, vines are programmed for survival and are a lot more adaptable than was previously imagined. But vinegrowers are also a lot more sophisticated than they were. Precise use of irrigation and careful pruning will significantly affect the way the vines grow, and the amount and ripeness of fruit they produce, but there is now a new piece of artillery in the grapegrower’s arsenal. Crop regulating hormones sound as though they could only have been produced by genetic manipulation, but in fact they occur naturally in all living things. The trick today lies in extracting them from the plants and then using them to influence the way the vines grow. Those who favour absolutely natural winemaking will quite reasonably balk at this kind of procedure, but they should be equally – if not more – concerned by the huge amounts of synthetic chemicals used by growers in Europe. My guess is that Brazil and India, in particular, will both help to ensure that New Latitude wines will begin to be taken at least as seriously within the next decade as New World wines were in the 1980s. So far, of course, very little notice has been taken of them at all. But when you believe that the world is flat, there is very little reason or temptation to go peering over the edge.
I cannot remember the day I realised that the world – the world of wine – was round. But I do know that when I lived in Burgundy, like everybody else, I was fully convinced that it was flat. The Pinot Noir grape, it had been proven, only produced good wine in the soil and climate of a small region called the Cote d’Or. Of course attempts had been made to grow it elsewhere – in Sancerre, Alsace and Champagne, but in none of these places did it produce red wine that was remotely comparable to the efforts of Burgundian villages like Volnay and Vosne-Romanee. Much the same could be said for that other Burgundy grape Chardonnay, while Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc only performed at their best in the Loire. Challenging these beliefs by trying to mimic Burgundy or Sancerre elsewhere was like sailing over the edge of the world.
Then, of course, came the 1970s when a Pinot Noir from Eyrie vineyards in Oregon beat a set of red Burgundies, and Californian Cabernets and Chardonnays triumphed over their French counterparts in Steven Spurrier’s famous 1976 “Judgement of Paris” tasting. For a while, it seemed as though this was the moment when the Old World had to acknowledge the curvature of the globe. But in fact all that happened was that the flat map was redrawn. The new credo was that Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, for example, needed to be grown in places that were as similar as possible to Burgundy. In fact, of course, there were huge differences between the soils of Puligny Montrachet and Carneros in California, but the followers of the amended faith were happy to gloss over these anomalies. What mattered, above all they said, was the climate. Experts charted the “degree days” – average temperature during the growing season - of the classic regions of France and did their utmost to match these conditions when planting in the New World.
If you had asked any of the followers of the original or expanded flat earth beliefs (by which I mean 99.99% of the wine community) they would all have agreed on one absolute rule. Wine of any kind can only be produced between the latitudes of 30 and 50 in the northern or southern hemispheres. Anything closer to the North or South Pole is too cold, while grapevines simply don’t do well in the tropics because they need to rest over a cold winter.
But then news began to leak out of vineyards in Thailand, between the 14th and 18th parallels. Conditions here are tropical; indeed in the Siam vineyard which was founded by one of the men behind the energy-drink Red Bull, the grapes are grown on islands and harvested from boats. In another hillside vineyard, vineyard workers sit astride elephants and irrigate the fruit with water from the beast’s trunk. The very idea of trying to make wines in these conditions might seem to be eccentric to say the least, but the budding Thai wine industry (there are six wineries at present and others due to open soon) was not launched on a whim. The King of Thailand commissioned a study in the late 1970s that took a dozen years to decide that the project would be worthwhile.
Now the obvious question is “How good are the Thai wines?” and the honest answer is that they are not currently likely to cause the owners of chateaux Margaux or Cheval Blanc to lose any sleep. But the examples I have tasted (under the Monsoon Valley label) are a softer, more pleasant drink than most cheap Bordeaux. And, for those who judge by results, the Thais are still planting vineyards, while the Bordelais are currently uprooting theirs – and sending the equivalent of 44,000,000 unsold bottles of their wine this year to be turned into industrial alcohol.
But Thailand is only the most romantic example of a growing number of wine regions that are situated over the edge of the old flat earth. Last year, Decanter magazine tasted a range of wines from the New World and gave their highest marks to the La Reserve Cabernet Shiraz from Grover Vineyards, near Bangalore in India. At the time, most of the news coverage focused on the fact that the wine was from the subcontinent, and produced with the help of the ubiquitous Michel Rolland, but no one pointed out that the vineyard is close to the 13th parallel, around 4,000 kilometres nearer to the equator than it ought to be. This is in fact India’s most southerly vineyard – most of the others are planted closer to Mumbai but, at the 18th parallel, they hardly conform to the old 30-50 degree rule.
India is going to be a country to watch – both in terms of production and consumption – but so is Brazil, and this is where you’ll find what is certainly the most commercially intensive effort at what Thai-based wine writer Frank Norel calls “New Latitude” winemaking. In the warm, dry Sao Francisco Valley, between the 9th and 10th parallel, a carpet of vines is being unrolled. The region barely existed 20 years ago, but it is already supplying 15% of Brazil’s needs and is expected to triple production over the next four years, by which time it will be the source of one glass in every two that are drunk here.
Yields per harvest are high here – by classical European standards – but the lack of a winter means that here, as elsewhere in the New Latitude, vines can produce two vintages per year. Actually, they could produce more, but producers prefer not to wear the plants out completely. The early releases from Sao Francisco are perfectly acceptable, and again considerably more drinkable than that unsaleable Bordeaux. So far, the Shiraz shows great promise (Miolo’s Terranova is a good example), but there is no reason to suppose that other varieties will not thrive as well.
The idea of picking wine grapes more than once a year is not as novel as one might imagine. Way back in 1578, Don Juan de Pimentel, the governor of Venezuela wrote a book in which he describes vineyards near Caracas being harvested three times a year. Today, the Pomar winery, which opened its doors in 1986, is the sole quality-conscious upholder of the Venezuelan vinous tradition, but the wines it produces close to the 11th parallel have won medals in international competitions such as the Challenge International du Vin in Bordeaux. By far the most surprising award-winner among the New Latitude wineries, however, has to be Chaupi Estancia Palomino which won a Commendation (the equivalent of a mark of at least 14/20) at the 2004 Decanter Awards in London. This winery, established 15 years ago, makes its wines from vineyards at 2,400 metres above sea level – and just 10km from the equator.
All of these wines beg the essential question: how is it possible to make wines in conditions that were once thought to be impossible? The simple answer is that we now know a lot more about plants and the way they grow than we used to. Like every other living thing, vines are programmed for survival and are a lot more adaptable than was previously imagined. But vinegrowers are also a lot more sophisticated than they were. Precise use of irrigation and careful pruning will significantly affect the way the vines grow, and the amount and ripeness of fruit they produce, but there is now a new piece of artillery in the grapegrower’s arsenal. Crop regulating hormones sound as though they could only have been produced by genetic manipulation, but in fact they occur naturally in all living things. The trick today lies in extracting them from the plants and then using them to influence the way the vines grow. Those who favour absolutely natural winemaking will quite reasonably balk at this kind of procedure, but they should be equally – if not more – concerned by the huge amounts of synthetic chemicals used by growers in Europe. My guess is that Brazil and India, in particular, will both help to ensure that New Latitude wines will begin to be taken at least as seriously within the next decade as New World wines were in the 1980s. So far, of course, very little notice has been taken of them at all. But when you believe that the world is flat, there is very little reason or temptation to go peering over the edge.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Bordeaux 2006 - Yet another vintage of the century?
As August swings into view, the news from Bordeaux is of temperatures of 40 C. and national fears by the French government of a repeat performance of 2003's apalling death toll among old people. Drought is a problem, of course, as it was in 2003, (and irrigation is still illegal), and there are already quiet whispers that this could be yet another warm dry year, producing the kind of rich, intense wines that have caught the fancy of the US critics in 2003 and 2005. Another great year would be welcome of course - though it's worth noting that 2001 and 2004 were both pretty good, in their leaner, more traditional ways - but it would raise some interesting questions about the prices that have been asked for the 2005s. The buzz from New York - where such things are ultimately decided - is that some of the people who said they wanted top 2005s at any price are balking at the premium those wines finally carried. decanter.com reported that retailers such as Sam's in Chicago, Federal Wine & Spirits, in Boston', McCarthy and Schiering in Seattle and the Park Avenue Liquor Shop in New York have all seen customers going cold on cost of the new vintage and that none of these merchants is enthusiastic about buying more than their initial allocation. One of the trends of this vintage seems to be that the prople who have been buying the top wines are super-rich individuals who are new to the market. Traditional first growth buyers have traded down to second growths and even lower on the ladder.
So, the obvious question is how ready these new buyers will be to go on buying a succession of highly priced "historic" vintages. Once the goose has been laying golden eggs on a daily basis, eggs however glittery can lose their appeal...
So, the obvious question is how ready these new buyers will be to go on buying a succession of highly priced "historic" vintages. Once the goose has been laying golden eggs on a daily basis, eggs however glittery can lose their appeal...
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