Jamie's
Blog
[For the uninitiated, a 'blog'
(or weblog) is a web journal with links. This gives me a chance to
add short, 'off the record' style items that wouldn't merit a
separate article. I'll try to keep entries informal, frequent,
brief and (hopefully) interesting. We might even have the odd
guest blog. Let's see how it goes.]
Monday 14th January
Fancy a bit of wine travel? If you've got an innovative idea you
could earn yourself a £3000 travel bursary, courtesy of the
Geoffrey Roberts trust. Got to be worth a try. The press release
is as follows: "Geoffrey
Roberts Award 2002 - go travel! The Geoffrey Roberts Trust has
three thousand pounds (approximately five thousand US
dollars) to give away. The annual Geoffrey Roberts Award is an
international travel bursary worth given to a potential achiever
in the worlds of food, drink or hospitality. The committee of the
Geoffrey Roberts Trust, a UK-registered charity established in
memory of a pioneer importer of fine New World wines, is now
seeking applications for the 2002 Award, deadline March 29, 2002.
Full details and an application form are available at www.jancisrobinson.com/geoffreyroberts.
Previous winners have included Jane Adams
who played an important part in introducing the farmers' market
concept to Sydney, Australia; Peter Kindel who travelled round
Europe with Caroline Smialek researching farmhouse cheese
production and is now big cheese at Artisanal, Manhattan's haven
for cheese-lovers; and South African Kate Thal who is using her
bursary to research organic wine production and has been running
the wine division of a major London restaurant group. The 2001
entries came from eight different countries and the winner was Dru
Reschke, a 26 year-old whose family have farmed in Coonawarra,
South Australia for several generations and now make their own
wine. He wants to develop his potentially extremely valuable
scheme for processing toxic winery effluent using enzyme research.
He plans to travel to the US to see how winery effluent is managed
by the big California companies and to survey wine tourism there
with a view to improving wine tourism back home in Coonawarra.
News of his Award reached him on his father's 60th birthday, so it
was announced to all and sundry at the celebrations at Coonawarra
Town Hall that night. Runners up included Patrick Farrell MD MW, a
California doctor who wants to write a book about wine and health;
Fiona Bird, Scottish mother of six who is keen to encourage more
children to cook; and a lively 20 year old Teh Peijing who wants
to broaden the range of wines imported into Singapore. The judges
were James Herrick of the Languedoc, David Brown of La Potiniere
and John Mariani of New York, as well as committee members Sally
Clarke of Clarke's restaurant in London W8, Willie Lebus of
Bibendum Wines and wine writer Jancis Robinson. Applications are
invited from anyone of any age, based anywhere in the world, who
can convince us that they will learn something while spending this
travel bursary that will improve the worlds of food, drink or
hospitality."
Thursday 10th January
There's been a bit of a Spanish theme to my day, and one chap
in particular, Alvaro Palacios, has had a significant role
(although only through his wines). First, at a press tasting put
on by 'The Bunch' (a fairly loose coalition of independent
retailers, involving Tanners, Adnams, Corney & Barrow, Yapp,
Lay & Wheeler and John Armit), the wine that intrigued me the
most was the 1999 Bierzo from Descendientes J Palacios.
Bierzo is a small, hilly region in the northwest of Spain, inland
from Galicia and at the margins of Castilla y León, and this wine
is the first vintage of a new project shared between Alvaro
Palacios and his nephew. Two wines have been made: Bierzo Carullón,
the top wine, and this regular Bierzo from bought in grapes (both
are predominantly Mencía, the local grape, that was once thought
to be the same as Cabernet Franc). Beautifully packaged with an
elegant capsule, this is an opaque purple colour in the glass.
Concentrated and dense, there's lots of lush, pure fruit, lots of
oak and a fair whack of tannin hiding underneath. A big wine, it
will be interesting to see how this develops. Yours for £16.45
from Corney & Barrow. Then, this evening was a tasting of new
Spanish releases at La
Vigneronne. Lots of very tasty stuff here, including a lovely 2000
Torres Fransola (their splendid premium Sauvignon), a
wonderful, dark, meaty 1997 Alion and three lovely Riojas
from CVNE (1994 Vina Real and Imperial and 1991
Vina Real). There was also a sensationally good 1982
Contino Gran Reserva, full of life and energy even almost 20
years on. But the most interesting wine for me was again from
Alvaro Palacios: his 1997 Finca Dofi. This Priorat wine is
initially a little too showy and oaky on the nose, but the palate
has a beautiful mineral intensity underlying the complex herby
fruit. Really interesting stuff. It'll set you back a cool £45.
Yes, that's the only hitch: these days, premium Spanish wines
ain't cheap.
Wednesday 9th January
Went to an interesting tasting last night. It was organized by
Peter May, who runs the Pinotage
Club (very 'niche'), and the wines on show were the ten
Pinotages voted as South Africa's best in a well-known blind
tasting competition organized by the ASBA bank and the Pinotage
Organization. I won't say much about the wines here (full write-up
will of course follow), but the tasting format deserves a mention.
There were sixteen of us seated either side of a long table, and
we poured our own samples using a snifter glass on which Peter had
marked a line. This measure was carefully calculated so that each
person got precisely one sixteenth of a bottle (46.875 ml). It
sounds odd, but it's an ingenious solution to the tricky problem
of getting enough samples out of a single bottle, and 46.875 ml is
actually quite a good sized pour. For each wine, participants on
one side of the table then had to comment turn, and although
people were allowed to pass, few did. I found it a revealing
exercise, and a great way to assess a set of wines. First, there
was plenty of time to evaluate each wine in detail, and, second,
it was instructive to hear other people's views. Here was a bunch
of geeks, who just by virtue of being motivated enough to pay to
attend a wine tasting must represent the upper-most segment of the
wine-buying public, yet there was an amazing spread of opinions.
It would have been impossible to come up with any sensible
consensus, and it's certainly not a case of some being right, some
being wrong.
Saturday 5th January
Popped into the local Oddbins (Twickenham) last night and was
surprised to see the 1999 Beaucastel on the shelves. As most
readers are probably aware, Beaucastel is one of the leading
properties in Châteauneuf du Pape, making wines that invariably
age brilliantly (see my notes on a recent
Beaucastel vertical tasting), and it's not a wine you usually
see on the shelves of high street wine merchants. I asked about
the price (it wasn't indicated) and was nicely surprised: at £19.99
a bottle this is a real bargain. Had you bought en primeur last
year you'd have paid £225 per case in bond from Bibendum (they
aren't especially expensive), which works out at £23.40 per
bottle when duty and VAT are tagged on. A typical shelf price for
this wine would probably be in the region of £30, if you can find
it. Should you get hold of some, don't drink it now: 1999 ws a
good vintage but it really needs tucking away for five years, or
better a decade. It will last 20, I suspect. Note
added later: my press contact at Oddbins tells me this was a
pricing mistake. I was charged the price for the 1997 (no longer
stocked); the 1999 should have been £25.99, and is available in
Fine Wine stores plus a few selected branches.
Wednesday 2nd January
For those of you who may have missed it, can I recommend to
you Andrew Jefford's recent
evening standard piece. He suggests that the last year "…has
been the worst year for British wine drinkers that I can remember
and the free market is revealing itself to be a strange and greedy
friend." This breif but punchy article takes a rather Waltonesque
look at the state of wine retailing, combined with a rather
non-Waltonesque criticism of Britain's alcohol culture
("Moderate drinking and informed enjoyment are beautiful and
life-enhancing; drunkenness is pathetic, ugly and sad.") He's
right, of course. On the high street, Threshers, Wine Rack,
Victoria Wine and Bottoms Up (all part of the same chain, owned by
a Japanese investment bank) are very poor these days; only Oddbins
continues to shine, although we'll all be watching carefully now
that the Castel Frères takeover has been confirmed. And the
supermarket ranges are contracting, with the continued rise of the
brands. The shame is that even as recently as two or three years
ago, they were so much better. He finishes on a positive note:
"Not all the news, of course, is bad. It's a great time to
be a wine merchant: the death of the high street and the rise of
brands mean there are yawning gaps for wine merchants to exploit,
though few do this with any imagination. If you're prepared to put
a bit of effort into your shopping, too, it's a great time to be a
drinker." This brings me back to one of my new year wine
resolutions: I must shop more creatively this coming year.
Monday
31st December
New year's eve, and chance to reflect on the past year and think
towards the next. And time for some wine resolutions. Number 1:
drink less but drink better. Always a good idea. Number 2: be more
creative in buying wine, supporting the merchants who really do
good work, even if it's more hassle than popping into the local
supermarkets or high street outlets. Number 3: buy more
educational bottles, leaving my comfort zone more frequently. Part
of the joy of wine lies in its diversity. Number 4: travel more.
It's hard to write about wine regions with any great insight if
you've never caught the real flavour of them first-hand. Finally,
number 5: keep perspective, seeing wine integrated as part of a
rich, healthy lifestyle, not as an end in itself. I'm sure I
could think of more, but that's enough to be getting on with.
Saturday 29th December
Four wines last night shared with internet wine personality Yixin
Ong, who was stopping over at our modest abode in Twickenham as
part of the first leg of his world tour. First, a youthful,
expressive Riesling from the Wachau in Austria (Knoll's Ried
Loibenberg Loibner Riesling Federspiel 1999). Very minerally
and a little closed last night, I'm sipping the remnants as I
write, and it's showing a lot more complexity. Completely
different, the next wine was quite a nice surprise: the fairly
modestly priced Zind Humbrecht Herrenweg Turckheim Riesling
1993 was punching well above its weight. Very expressive nose,
minerally and limey; palate fruity, spicy and with a touch of
residual sugar. Alsace again for wine three: Marc Kreydenweiss'
1998 Clos du Val d'Éléon. It's an unusual blend of Pinot
Gris and Riesling from an old vineyard that Marc has restored, and
is another mineralic wine, but with a touch of Pinot Gris fatness
and a slightly austere palate. I like it, but Yixin isn't keen.
Finally, a surprisingly rich cool-climate Italian red from the
Lagrein grape (thought to be an ancestor of the Syrah grape by
some). The Laimberg Lagrein Dunkel Riserva 1998, Südtiroler
Alto Adige is a very deep, almost black colour, and shows an
attractive rich, sweetness to the fruit, but it avoids being
confected or artificial. It's quite a big, dense wine, but a real
softie: I'd be interested to know what sort of oak this sees.
Fiona was probably bored stupid by a lot of the wine talk, but she
was polite enough not to say anything about it. Yixin is only in
his early 20s, but he has wine knowledge beyond his years. One of
the many topics we agreed on was the state of wine discussion on
the internet. It was a lot better a couple of years ago in the
golden era of the Wine
Lover's Discussion Group (WLDG), where many of the leading
internet wine personalities first met (I'll probably get into
trouble for saying this). These days there's not enough
interesting discussion there, and the alternatives that have
sprung up tend to lack both the breadth of knowledge and
international spread of participants that the WLDG enjoyed in its
glory years. Best are the ones that don't take themselves too
seriously.
Thursday 20th December
Unable to shave for a few weeks following my op, I'm currently
sporting a beard. I don't like it, but at least while I'm a member
of the face fungus club I've got a good excuse to turn my sights
aside from wine for a short while to focus on real ale, the
bearded folk's tipple of choice (apologies here to all bearded
readers for this gross mischaracterization). I'm actually a great
admirer of cask-conditioned ales (to give them their correct
name), a unique and living product, but one which has been under
severe threat in recent decades. That cask ales still exist at all
is largely thanks to one outfit, the Campaign for Real Ale
(CAMRA), a grass-roots organization of enthusiasts who have
lobbied and campaigned successfully to preserve and promote this
worthy drink. According to their
website, CAMRA's mission is to act as champion of the consumer
in relation to the UK and European beer and drinks industry,
aiming to promote quality, choice and value for money; support the
public house as a focus of community life; campaign for greater
appreciation of traditional beers, ciders and perries as part of
national heritage and culture; and seek improvements in all
licensed premises and throughout the brewing industry. They also
publish the successful Camra
Good Beer Guide, which steers drinkers to pubs where cask ales
are taken seriously and are properly kept. If you want to know a
bit more about real ale and how it is made, then there's a well
written primer here. It makes me wonder whether there's a need
for similar organizations to CAMRA, but fighting to preserve the
regional identity and character of the classic wine styles. In the
light of the rise of branded, manipulated, international style
wines, I suspect there is.
Monday 17th December
The last weekend we've been visiting relatives who've just
moved down to the west country. A village called Braunton, in
North Devon, to be precise. It's just inland from Croyde, where we
spent a pleasant but chilly afternoon playing with the kids on the
beach. Croyde is bizarre. The population is split neatly into two
polarized but quietly coexisting groups: half the locals are
bungalow-inhabiting retirees, the other half are the surfers
(almost all of whom are under 30). Surfing is a religion here.
Even though the temperature was only just above freezing point,
there were still three or four surfers out there chasing a few
unremarkable breakers. They're barmy. But the most remarkable
episode of the weekend occurred in a rather soulless carvery-style
pub we had a quick drink in on Saturday evening. If you order
white wine in this pub (we didn't; we were on beer), you get a
choice. It's between 'dry Chardonnay', or 'medium sweet
Liebfraumilch', both of which are dispensed from beer-style
nitrogen driven taps. A punter ordered a dry white wine, and after
three quarters of the glass had been filled, the barrel (or
whatever the pressurized container the wine comes in is called)
fizzled to a stop. The barman, with no trace of shame, asked the
aforementioned punter whether they wanted this glass topped up
'with some medium sweet'. The punter, remarkably, agreed. But then
perhaps this is not so remarkable: after all, we geeks make up but
a tiny, marginalized group of society. For most people, wine is
just a commodity, and they would no more worry about the exact
type of wine they were drinking than the brand of instant coffee
or sliced white bread they popped into their shopping trolleys. I
think this is changing, but it looks like the pub industry won't
be leading the way…
Tuesday 11th December
A few nice surprises lurking among several bottles consumed
domestically over the last week. Last night was a very satisfying
Alsace white (Materne Haegelin Riesling Bollenberg 1999).
Bone dry, with an intensely appealing savoury minerality. A
bargain at Majestic's £5.99 multibuy price. Also from Majestic
was another remarkable bargain from California: the Durney
Cabernet Sauvignon 1994, which they are shifting for a penny
under four quid. There's a touch of seductive blackcurrant fruit
on the nose, and this leads to a concentrated, intensely savoury
palate with mouth-drying tannins and a fair whack of oak. Normally
I suspect this would retail for about £10, so you can view this
either as a slightly flawed (overaked and drying out) £10 wine,
or a superb, semi-serious £4 wine. I like it. Certainly the most
unusual wine of the week was a 1994 Chapel Hill Riesling,
from the Eden Valley of South Australia. Bought a number of years
ago in a Wine Rack clearout sale, I thought I'd see how it's doing
with several years' bottle age. It's a golden colour with a
subtle, evolved, petrolly nose and a marmalade-tinged palate. It's
still alive, but I don't actually like it that much (lesson, if
you are cellaring a certain type of wine, first make sure that you
like what it's likely to turn into). Also a tiny bit disappointing
was the Terra de Lobos 2000, Ribatejo (£3.99 Waitrose).
Recommended by Jancis Robinson a month or so ago (before she went
purple), I found it enjoyable enough but was a little put off by
the bubblegum edge to the rather confected nose of sweet herbal
fruit. It smells like they've been using the same cultured yeasts
and techniques (including carbonic maceration) that are used for
most commercial Beaujolais. The next day some of this faux sheen
had blown off, and there was some intriguing chocolatey richness
to the otherwise light palate, so maybe Jancis' recommendation
wasn't too far off. I'd been expecting great things from the next
bottle, a nicely packaged Château L'Euzière Cuvée Les
Escarboucles 1998, Pic St Loup (£8.99 Unwins). Before local
winemerchant chain Fuller's was taken over by Unwins a couple of
years back, wine buyer Roger Higgs had sourced an enviable range
from this fascinating Languedoc commune. The L'Euzière is one of
the few remnants of this, and while it is nice enough it lacks the
meaty, earthy character that is so typical of its better peers.
It's showing a bit too much oak, too. I wasn't disappointed with
the Sainsbury's Prestige Claret 2000, but only because I
wasn't expecting much in the first place. Even the fact that it's
made by an Australian can't help disguise the presumably crappy,
dilute, slightly unripe grapes it was wrought from. No value here,
even at half price (precisely £2.19, I believe). Finally, to
finish on a high note, I was very impressed by the San Biagio
Barolo 1996, Piedmont (£16.95 Berry Bros). Made in a modern
style, but still a relatively light colour for such an obviously
concentrated wine. The Nebbiolo grape isn't about fruit: instead,
in a good Barolo you get a wonderfully complex herby, spicy,
undergrowth-like character, along with a fair whack of tannin.
It's infanticide to broach this now, but it's still enjoyable even
in its youth. Quite lovely.
Monday 10th December
I don't like to be negative, but if I'm going to be any use as
a wine commentator, there'll be times when I have to criticise the
poor as well as praising the good. So when I found out about the 'Chardonnay
of the Century - Million Dollar Challenge' in a Decanter
news piece, I knew straight away that I'd have to be entering
negative mode. Why? It's completely and utterly barking. Give me a
moment and I'll try to explain why it is one of the silliest ideas
I've heard in a very long time.
The competition has two rather disparate goals. First, it aims
to identify a list of the world's leading 100 Chardonnays from
several thousand they hope will be submitted, and to identify from
this list The World's Best Chardonnay. The person submitting this
wine (be it producer or even private collector) will win a prize
CDN$500 000. Second, each wine must be submitted in case
quantities, with six bottles going into he cellars at the
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, for 'research'
purposes. More about this later.
My main gripe is that the foundation for this competition is
the fantasy that it is possible to identify the 'best' Chardonnay,
or that such a wine even exists. While a good taster can sort a
group of wines into broad quality categories, within each of these
subsets the exact ranking will largely be a matter of personal
preference and taste. While California and Burgundy, for example,
both produce some world class Chardonnays, the difference in style
is such that they can't really be compared head-to-head. It would
be just as daft within Burgundy to attempt to compare a top,
unoaked Grand Cru Chablis with a first-rate barrel-fermented
Mersault. They're different. Now add to the equation the effect of
age, and the silliness is multiplied yet further: some people
prefer old wines to young. Who's to say which opinion is correct?
Using my oft-quoted analogy, asking the question 'what is the
best wine?' is about as sensible as asking a carpenter 'what is
the best tool?'. The merit of a particular wine is highly
context-dependent. Given access to any Chardonnay on the planet,
some days I might prefer a full-on Montrachet, other days a toasty
South African, and yet other days a crisp, unoaked Chablis. Each
style can be thought of as best in its own context.
Competitions are largely a marketing exercise. The fact that
the competition allows entries from private collectors
acknowledges that half-decent Burgundy producers don't bother
entering competitions. Most of them have no problems selling their
wine every year (after all, they don't make a great deal, unlike
their counterparts in Bordeaux), and have nothing to gain (and a
lot to lose) by having their wines 'judged' by someone with little
experience or understanding of what they are all about. It will be
interesting to see whether the competition does attract the sorts
of Burgundies that are widely acknowledged to be among the best
expressions of this style.
Finally, about that 'research project', a second goal of the
competition. Dr Hennie van Vuuren is the chap behind it all. He
heads up the newly formed Wine Research Center, and states that
'the objective of the study is to determine the aging potential of
the world's top one hundred Chardonnays and to establish the
contribution of soil type, rootstock, Chardonnay clones, yeast,
barrel and aging on the quality and finesse of this varietal.' But
the University hopes to have up to 20 000 bottles of the finest
Chardonnays by the end of the contest. If research is really their
objective, wouldn't it be simpler just to ask some of the leading
producers for samples, and then use these? Why the competition? My
other question: if they are conducting research into just the top
100 (600 bottles altogether), what will they do with the other 19
400 bottles? I think I might apply for a faculty position here,
especially if they fulfil their intention to hold the competition
every four years with a different variety each time! Care for a
glass of Montrachet, Professor?
Previous entries (some gripping
reading!)
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