The lost generation

Listen to almost any member of the French wine establishment and, sooner or later, you’ll hear them say that the recent ascension of easy-to-drink, easy-to-understand, branded, varietal New World wines can be put down to a lack of sophistication on the part of younger drinkers. Just give these poor unenlightened souls time to grow up properly and they’ll naturally come to appreciate the naturally subtler, more food-friendly character of wines from France.
I’ve always thought this as questionable a notion as the one that suggests one that a significant proportion of the people who are listening to Coldplay and Carla Bruni today will one day wake up to discover a taste for Mozart and Bach. My journalistic instincts have always been to raise two questions: when do these metamorphises take place – at what age? – and why? To which, the usual response is that the change in behaviour is linked to the establishment of a traditional home and nuclear family.
Well, in the UK, at least, I have some interesting data that Gallic optimists won’t want to hear. When one of Britain’s biggest supermarkets analysed the purchasing patterns of its customers it apparently discovered a striking fact. Women who buy nappies almost never buy French wine. To be more precise, their overriding tendency is to choose examples from the New World.
Delving elsewhere, I can tell you a little more about those nappy buyers. According to an official report called Social Trends 2007 published by the British Office for National Statistics, the average age for a woman in the UK to give birth is 29.3 (this is two months older than in 2006, by the way, and 30 months older than in 1971). Other figures from the same source reveal that, in 2006, there are now more first-time mothers in the 30-34 age group than in the 25-29 age group, and an almost 50% increase from ten years ago in the number of women over forty who are now having babies. Over one British mother in eight is now aged between 40-44 when she has her first child.
Add, say three years or so of nappy wearing per child, and that makes for a lot of 30-45 year-old British women who have evidently failed to develop the wine tastes that the Old World optimists might have hoped and expected. As someone who is trying to make and sell French wines, this is not the kind of news that I have any pleasure in reporting. Like other lovers of French wines, I'm painfully aware that the 30% of shelf-space they currently occupy in most of the larger shops is not justified by their sales. With all of the major retailers looking to prune their wine ranges, there seems little chance for France to escape the approaching secateurs.
There's no silver bullet that will solve France's problems - I'm doing what I can with the wines I'm involved with (which can be seen at hughkevinandrobert.com ) but what I can say is that the sooner my French friends bury their panglossian notions that everything is going to come right by itself, the better.

(Pre) Olympic trials and tribulations

After the near euphoria of the Hong Kong Vinexpo in May and, given the steady flow of news about growing wine consumption in China, it would have been reasonable to expect the run-up to the Olympics to have been a boom period for the Chinese wine market. Little could be further from the truth. With just one month to go before the first fireworks would be lit at the opening ceremony, hotels and restaurants in the major cities were far quieter than usual. Some major hotels were admitting occupancy rates of under 60%, at a time when Beijing was about to see the opening of over 5,000 new hotel rooms in time for the Olympics.

The explanation for the empty restaurants was simple. The authorities' fear of terrorism (supposedly from Tibetans or Falun Gong) has fueled one of the heaviest clamp-downs on internal movement and the allocation of visas to foreigners. Anyone seeking a business visa in June and July discovered that they were almost unobtainable and most people with work-related reasons for traveling to China over this period did so with tourist visas, though even these were often provided slowly or sometimes not at all. Officially, from April 30 would-be tourists could be required to provide a letter from their employer stating that they were taking holiday leave between the arrival and departure dates shown on their airline ticket. There is no evidence of this rule being enforced, but tourists could also be asked to offer up a bank statement confirming a minimum of US $3,000, or showing (but not giving) US$700 in cash to the official in the visa office. These moves led to many Chinese-based businesses canceling meetings that involved overseas colleagues – or relocating those meetings to Hong Kong.

The low-key pre-Olympic mood was also attributable to widespread anti-Chinese sentiment in the west, in the wake of suppressed protests in Tibet and China's apparent support for a Sudanese regime that is widely blamed for the crisis in Darfur. This is also thought to have contributed to slower than expected sales of tickets for Olympic events. While it is unlikely that there will be many empty seats in the dazzling new stadiums, there are questions over how many will be filled with wine drinking foreigners.

The wine market is still coming to terms with the three-week imprisonment of a number of importers including Don St Pierre, managing partner of ASC Fine Wines, China's biggest and most prominent wine company. St Pierre, whose sales have grown from $5m in 2001 to $40m in 2006. was accused of falsifying prices to avoid customs duty. The case was finally settled with the payment of a $250,000 which Don St Pierre Senior, co-founder of the firm said represented just over 1% percent of the $22 million ASC had paid in import duties over the relevant period.

ASC and other firms accused by the authorities, deny any wrongdoing, but there are expectations within China that wine prices may rise over the coming months. This is, in any case, highly likely in the light of the increase in the value of imports over the first quarter of 2008. According to the Chinese website 21food.com, the volume of wine that passed through customs was actually 4.9% lower during the first quarter of 2008 than in 2007 (a year when, according to China Wines Information, China imported 4.5 million cases of wine, over twice amount shipped in 2006). The average value of the 43.490 litres, however rose to $2.1 per litre, 71% above the figure recorded 12 months earlier.

Most members of the Chinese wine trade are waiting for the dust to settle after the Olympics, but optimism for the short term future remains high. Retail distribution is growing fast, with the arrival of new players such as Tesco and the reportedly planned opening of chains of wine shops by several Chinese wineries. As Ethan Perk of dynamic importers Jebsen International pointed out, the market is evolving very rapidly. By his estimate, only 40% of the current imports are being handled by long-established companies such as ASC, Torres, Somergate and his own, which would, a few years ago, have imported almost all of the wine that came into China.

A Tale of Two Cities

An article that originally appeared in Meininger's Wine Business International

Robert Joseph with Hugh Kevin & Robert wines in Hong Kong

There was once a New Yorker magazine cartoon in which a man having breakfast in an featureless hotel "buttery" turns to a diner at another table to enquire "Excuse me, could you settle a bet: is this the Athens Hilton or the Vienna Hilton?". I must confess that I almost had a similar moment of dislocation at the end of May. Was I in the Hong Kong Convention Centre or the Excel Exhibition Centre in London? With only a few days between them and so many of the same faces, the London Wine Trade Fair and Vinexpo Asia occasionally felt like consecutive episodes of the same television series.

But, you only had to look or listen for a moment to tell the difference between these two events. One of them was a serious commercial gathering, packed with people eager to taste and buy top class wine, while the other was… the London Wine Trade Fair. In the British capital, the talk was still of the recent hefty increase in duty rates that was threatening retailers' ability to offer three bottles of wine for £10 and seemed set to halt the growth in UK wine consumption. In Hong Kong, the chatter was about the total removal of excise duty and import licences, and the revelation by the Chief Secretary Henry Tang at the opening ceremony that, even before the abolition of duty, the volume of wine imports into Hong Kong had risen by 120% percent, while the value had gone up by 200% since 2007.

At least one British visitor sniffed disdainfully at the US$100,000 Acker Merrill had spent on hospitality before its first-ever Asian auction, and the red and gold hardback catalogue. But it was the New York firm that laughed all the way to the bank - where they deposited the $8.2 million raised by the sale; 10% over estimate, and conveniently a figure that includes the two luckiest numbers – 8 and 2 - in Chinese culture. Just as happy, presumably, were the great and good of Bordeaux whose Union des Grands Crus tasting of 2005s proved so popular that stocks of many of the wines ran out a full three hours early, allowing them to head off for lunch.

Many of those chateau owners had less than fond memories of Vinexpo 1998. Hong Kong's Peregrine Investment Bank had just collapsed, creating a panic in the local stock market, the Hong Kong Dollar had to be propped up against attacks from speculators, and Japan was officially declared to be in a recession. Unsurprisingly, attendance that year was sparse and exhibitors spent much of their time complaining to each other that most of the people who did attend were local – very local – expatriates. That gweilo – western foreign devil - focus was just as evident at the dinner to launch the first Watsons Wine Cellars shop where I only recall seeing one Chinese face.

Ten years on, Vinexpo 2008 was packed, with over 8,000 professional visitors, of whom over a quarter came from the mainland; gweilos were firmly in the minority. Watsons Wine Cellars now has a dozen stores whose customers – mostly Chinese – choose from a brilliant range of 2,000 wines. Today, thanks to these stores a wine lover in even the more obscure parts of Hong Kong has far easier access to good bottles than his counterpart in London. But much the same can be said of Seoul, Osaka and Taipei… For an outsider – even one like myself who spends over a month a year in Asia – the most striking development is the speed at which the market is evolving, and the way that evolution is affecting areas that you might not have expected. When talking to a wine importer with a focus on Cambodia and Laos, I used what I thought of as a bit of my local knowledge in saying that I presumed that the main market in Cambodia would consist of the recently-built international hotels around the temples of Angkor Wat. “Not exactly”, came the response. “we’re actually selling rather a lot of good wine in Phnom, Penh. Aurelio Montes from Chile can tell a similar story about Vietnam, where he’s selling several containers of wine every year. Canny producers are increasingly studying their maps of the region, knowing that planning a trip to China that only takes in Beijing and Shanghai is like aiming all your US sales efforts at New York and Washington DC. My next excursion, for example, includes hosting a Leoville-Barton dinner in Guangzhou…

As Robert Parker who had spent two weeks of “the most exciting trip of a lifetime” hosting that kind of event across the region wrote it in his blog, “Asia Rules....and then some”.

Wine Tourism - for beginners

An article that originally apeared in Meininger's Wine Business International

Sometimes one of the best ways to understand a situation is to approach it obliquely. The view from underneath or above can suddenly provide a clarity that was previously frustratingly absent. That, at least, is a conclusion I came to when working on the Wine Travel Guide to the World, a book published in late 2006 that was aimed at consumers who travel and enjoy wine. The focus, in other words, was on “wine tourism”.

But the moment you set those two words down on paper – or make them a major discussion point at a conference (and I've spoken on the subject at several such events), it becomes clear that they mean very different things to different people, countries and regions.

A fascinating illustration of these different attitudes is provided by a pair of the world's most dissimilar wine regions. On the one hand, there's Bordeaux, home to some of the most illustrious wine estates in the world and, in itself, a brand whose name is familiar to almost anyone anywhere with even a shallow knowledge of food and drink. On the other hand... there's Queensland. This part of north eastern Australia is not quite as well known for the wine it produces. Indeed, even within Australia, you'd be hard put to it to find a wine enthusiast who could name as many as one of Queensland's 150 or so wineries.

But now compare the way these French and Australian region approach the matter of wine tourism. For a clear-headed view of the Bordeaux attitude, one of the very best places to look is a thesis published last year by Marc Torterat Wine as part of his Master of Business Administration. Torterat focused his attention on one part of Bordeaux: the Graves and Pessac Leognan. This area, close to the city of Bordeaux itself, is home to Chateau Haut Brion, arguably the world's oldest wine brand (thanks to its 17th century promotion in Britain) and Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte, the highly successful chateau-hotel-restaurant-and-spa. Torterat's paper is invaluable because there is so little authoritative information available from other, official sources. Type “Queensland” and “wine tourism” into a search engine, however, and you find a detailed website created by the state government, and aimed at producers, complete with headings such as “The Need to Plan for Tourism” and “What is a tourism development plan?“. All 150 wineries are listed on the website, with their contact details, information on what they offer visitors and, where relevant, links to their websites. The entire effort needs updating – as the case for many winery websites – but it serves as a handy aid both for anyone considering visiting the area, or for wineries thinking about how to take advantage of the the potential tourism has to offer. Usefully, it challenges the winery owners to take the business of wine tourism seriously: “A marketing campaign may very well produce results, but if the tourism infrastructure and product does not meet visitor expectations, then the response will be short lived. Visitors may travel to the area once but never return”.

Back in Bordeaux, as I say, information is less easy to come by. While researching this article, and having just received an email that described the Medoc as “exceptionally gifted” in wine tourism, I telephoned the Bordeaux regional tourist office to ask for some statistics. How many wine tourists take advantage of the area's exceptional gifts? I wondered. The representative – who preferred not to be named – responded directly. “We have no idea”. I was a little surprised. The Napa Valley, I pointed out has recorded its wine tourist numbers carefully, noting growth from 15m in 2002 to 20 million in 2005, with spending rising from $1.3 billion to $2 billion. Surely Bordeaux has some kinds of statistics to set alongside these. “No”, came the answer. “If you can persuade the chateaux to tell us what they are doing, I'd be very grateful. We contact them and we try to get information back, but it never comes”.

Marc Torterat had slightly better luck than I did, discovering a total potential market of 450,000 visitors (based on interviews with tourism professionals in the region) and an actual number of 100,000 visitors for the region as a whole. This figure, however seems questionable when once learns that Chateau Mouton Rothschild (which does record the number of people who pay to enter its chais) welcomes some 18,000 of them. Are we really to believe that nearly one visitor in five join an organised group tour or make their own appointment to see around and possibly (for an extra €8.50) taste? According to Torterat, other classed growths in the Medoc report 5-8,000 visits.

While it would be useful to have some more accurate statistics for Bordeaux vineyard visits, Marc Torterat, who is now a consultant in strategy and marketing, makes a very perceptive point about wine tourism in general. “wine is not necessarily the first motive in visiting a region. For example, heritage is the dominant motivation for visiting the region of Burgundy, wine being only fourth. In Bordeaux, seaside recreation and visiting the Atlantic Ocean come before wine and food, being listing fourth.... This means tourists would require other types of attractions and would visit wineries along other sites”. In this respect, regions like the Medoc perform doubly poorly. On the one hand, the chateaux generally offer little beyond the chance to taste wine and possibly look at barrels - in many cases, there is not even the opportuity to buy – but on the other, the region is poorly stocked in alternative activities. The Hunter Valley, for example, offers golf courses and garden resorts; in the Médoc it is often hard even to find a restaurant.

Any analysis of the way wine tourism is viewed in the Old and New Worlds reveals that in Europe, most producers focus on the business of tasting and selling, most probably placing a significant amount of their effort into annual festivals at which all of the producers of a village or region gather to show off their wares, possibly alongside foods and handicrafts. In the New World, there is a far greater emphasis on offering a broader experience at the winery on a daily basis. Winery restaurants – a rarity in France – are commonplace in areas like Marlborough in New Zealand and Margaret River in Australia. And where food is not offered, there is often a picnic or even a barbecue area where visitors can cater for their own needs. The best explanation for this difference in approach may lie in the traditional European notion of “to each their own craft”. Many French producers have only recently even begun to bottle sell their own wine. Historically, the job of a vigneron lay in tending vines and crushing and fermenting grapes. The process of transforming the wine into cash consisted of negociating with a broker or merchant. Once one understands this basic attitude, it is easy to comprehend why wine labels are often so unadventurous (usually being bought from a local printer “off the peg”), and why the very thought of setting up a restaurant is a total anathema. The contrast with, say, the newer wineries of Patagonia could not be more striking. In that southern part of Argentina, selling food for money is an almost inevitable part of the initial business plan.

In the New World, there seems to be a far greater readiness to consider what the Queensland authorities call “tourist expectations” in a broader way. It is revealing to look at the criteria that were recently established in the Rhone Valley for its “Welcome of Quality” “Welcome of Service” and “Welcome of Excellence” ratings that wineries are invited to apply for.

Those wineries that want to be considered for a “Welcome of Quality” have to offer cleanliness, a place to park, “at least one correctly functioning toilet and a water distribution point available to its visitors”, chairs, a tasting (using wine glasses and apprropriate temperatures), a spittoon and non-alcoholic drinks for children (though not carbonated examples). To be considered “excellent “ - the highest possible rating – the bar is not raised very much higher, The glasses must now be crystal, englidsh must be spoken (and available on the mandatory) website and the staf should have some training and be able to “offer other services: arranging visits to other wine making cellars, restaurant reservations and booking accommodation”. Little, in other words, that will set one “excellent” winery apart from its neighbours.

The idea of an oficial, regulated system of wine tourism seems, though, to appeal to the European industry, in direct contrast to the laisser-faire attitude of the New World. And, while winemakers in the the Antipodes and Americas go their own way, benefitting from, but not relying on generic local websites and promotional bodies, in Europe, there seems to be a preference for officially-structured organisations. Perhaps the best known of these is a body called “The Global Network of Great Wine Capitals” that was launched in 2003 and brings together Melbourne, Bordeaux, Porto, Cape Town, Florence, and two cities that are apparently known as Bilbao-Rioja and San Francisco-Napa Valley. Santiago was also briefly part of the group, but dropped out at an early stage, to be replaced by its neighbour on the other side of the Andes, Mendoza. The aim of the network is to build “business networks and relationships in the viticulture industry” and to “encourage international winery tourism, as well as economic, academic and cultural exchanges between these famous capitals of wine”.

In fact, the group's highest profile activity has been in running a series of annual conferences and the creation of a set of “Best Of Wine Tourism” awards which are listed on the – greatwinecapitals.com – website and promoted through a limited amount of advertising and public relations and a colourful brochure which can be viewed on, and downloaded from, the website. The awards, for categories ranging from “Sustainable Wine Tourism Practices” and “Innovative Wine Tourism Experiences” to “accommodation”. “architecture” and “parks” reveal much about the differences between the various regions. Not to mention the fact that the organisation was established by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce (rather, revealingly, than either the tourism or wine promotional organisations).

The prizes are given by an unnamed “international panel” which seems to have an interestingly Gallic and generally European bias. Of the 210 awards made since the announcement of the 2004 list in 2003, 40, nearly a fifth, have gone to French entrants. Spain, Italy and Portugal have 34, 31 and 24 respectively, while Australia has to make do with 21 and the USA a mere 12. But when one considers the winners themselves some more interesting facts emerge. First, there is the fact that the same names seem to appear with curious regularity from year to year, making it easy to imagine that the number of entries is limited. But second, and more curiously, in France awards are given for Best Winery Restaurant to establishments such as Chateau Grand Moueys that actually have no restaurant at all but would cater for a party if required. Hardly what one might consider “wine tourism” as we know it.

The issue of wine tourism is, however, set to become a far more important issue over the next few years. For many – and I would say most – wineries, the business of welcoming visitors and sellling them wine will no longer be an option. It will be a necessity for survival. As routes to market become ever more narrow and prices are squeezed downwards by wholesalers and retailers – not to mention currency fluctuations. And, as producers globally struggle to escape the tyranny of Parker Points, the appeal of direct sales will inevitably grow. And as it does, my guess is that there will be a major move by European producers to learn the tricks of wine tourism from their New World counterparts. If they haven't left it too late.

Studying the (post) classics

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.

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.

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.

First they ignore you
then they laugh at you
then they fight you
then you win.

- Gandhi

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.

A Good Movie?

A Good Year - a review

Ever 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

Mary Poppins doesn’t often feature as an authority in articles about wine but, after tasting a range of the biggest-selling reds and whites in Britain and America and analysing the stupendous success of Yellow Tail (the Australian wine whose annual sales have grown from zero to over 120,000,000 bottles in under five years, I thought it time to give her the recognition she deserves. A spoonful of sugar not only helps the medicine go down; it does positive wonders for ordinary wine and food. The Romans knew about this, of course – and made plentiful use of honey. Asian cooks favour palm sugar while the sweetener of choice for manufacturers of supposedly savoury foods, from peanut butter to flavored crisps is more likely to be corn syrup, but the principle is the same.
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’.

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.

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