Jamie's
Blog
Wednesday 3rd April 2002
There’s
some great entertainment to be had over at the Wine Lover’s
Discussion Group, one of the net’s busiest locales for wine
discussion. The episode in question begins with an
innocent-looking question
about magnetic wine ageing, which then spawns three further
threads developing the topic. Some of the posts are genuinely
funny. Every now and then, someone new pops up trying to peddle a
device claiming to alter the tannic structure of a wine by means
of magnetic fields. You can understand the appeal of a device that
aims to simulate twenty years’ worth of cellar development with
just a few minutes zapping by a magnetic field. But anyone even
slightly scientifically aware would be extremely skeptical about
these sorts of devices. As one poster says, ‘The claims don't
make sense unless everything we know about chemistry is wrong’.
Another quips, ‘The only difference between this and a scam is
that a scam is pitched in such a way as to be believable’. They
are quite right of course: there really is no way that a magnetic
field like this could alter the chemistry of the wine in any way
that would simulate ageing. Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary proof, and the burden of proof in this case lies
with the one making the bizarre claims. And, of course, there’s
no data to back these claims up with. Yes folks, it is quite
appropriate (and not at all closed-minded) to dismiss magnetic
wine ageing immediately and forcibly. The whole thread was
reignited by the involvement of a wine celebrity. I’ve blogged
before about the fascinating interactions that ensue when a wine
celebrity gets involved in an online discussion, and this is no
exception. In this case, the celebrity in question doesn’t
participate directly, but through private e-mails to one of the
individuals on the board, which are then disclosed. It turns out
that, against their wishes, the wine celebrity’s name was used
as an endorsement by someone selling a magnetic wine ager.
Remarkably, the celebrity in question had taken the magnetic wine
ager seriously enough to test it with a couple of bottles of wine,
in a rather misguided spirit of open-mindedness. You can read the
discussion that ensues here,
here
and here.
Sunday 31st March
On Friday night I broke my first Riedel glass. It’s a sort of
rite of passage. Riedel glasses are de rigueur among wine
nuts, and the first time you break one is a coming-of-age moment.
I must confess, though, that while I’ve always admired the
Riedel portfolio, I’ve never owned a full set, let alone several
sets of these ‘stems’ (as they are known among the
cognoscenti). I own just one Riedel, and it’s the cheapest one
they do – the Overture, at a mere £6.50. But it’s a brilliant
glass, and for the last few years I have been using it as my
standard tasting glass for both reds and whites. The other
all-round-useful glass Riedel make is the vinum Chianti, at £11
or so. This is a versatile stem, slightly larger than the
Overture, and it was one of these that I broke on Friday. Riedel
glasses have very thin rims, and when this one smashed it
completely disintegrated with a high-pitched tinkle. Embarrassing
when it’s someone else’s glassware, but these things happen.
My host wasn’t upset though, and proceeded to open one of the
Jamet 1999 Côte Rôties that he’d purchased en primeur
on the basis of my glowing recommendation. Very generous of him.
Do I still rate it as highly a year on? Probably, yes. It’s
still highly perfumed, but some of the initial sweetness and
prettiness on the nose has given way to more meaty, savoury notes,
with lots of green olive character that’s such a hallmark of
traditional styled Northern Rhône Syrah. The palate is currently
quite challenging, with firm, fine-grained tannins and high
acidity, and there’s the merest whiff of oak. All in all a
brilliant interpretation of Côte Rôtie, but one that could do
with five years to open out fully.
Friday 22nd March
I have a cold. Colds are bad news for those who have to taste
wine professionally. The human olfactory system is a relatively
blunt and frustratingly inconsistent tool at the best of times, so
the deterioration in performance induced by viral infections
effectively puts an end to serious wine tasting. Even if I can
still smell relatively well, I’m reluctant to trust judgements
made with an underperforming nose, so I’ve shelved plans to
attend the big Spanish trade tasting this week, and also a smaller
Languedoc bash put on by a retailer. I wonder what the really
serious wine pros do when they get colds. What would happen if
Robert Parker, on whose palate so many peoples’ livelihoods
depend, were to be struck down with a bout of coughs and sniffles
just before one of his all-important Bordeaux preview tastings?
How would the trade cope without his ratings? It would be a
disaster. When I was researching a recent feature for the wine
trade magazine Harpers,
I spoke to a number of scientists researching taste and smell.
This produced some fascinating insights. More senior readers will
be interested to discover that human olfactory performance drops
off steadily after the age of 40. This is partly thought to be due
to normal ageing processes, but also because of pathology. Putting
that in more straightforward terms, each time you have a cold, it
permanently knackers your ability to smell to some small but
appreciable degree. So by the time you start drawing your pension,
the chances are you will have had multiple colds and the damage
they will have wrought to your olfactory epithelium will be
noticeable. So it’s the same old story: as you get older you
gain experience but you lose performance. The good news is that
there is no noticeable reduction in the sense of taste (i.e. the
relatively limited information that comes from the tongue) with
age.
Thursday 14th March
I’ve been feeling a little sluggish today after an enjoyable
wine dinner last night at the House of Commons, hosted by Decanter
columnist and MP Sîon Simon. Present were four ‘members’ and
two ‘strangers’ (to use the official terminology) -- myself
and Decanter editor Amy Wislocki. Some nice wines, too. Sîon
brought two lovely Rhônes. First, the deep, rich meaty JL Chave
Hermitage 1988. Still deep coloured, tannic and tight, but with
lovely complexity. Hermitage is a patchy appellation, but I’ve
never met a Chave that I didn’t like. Second, the 1998 Côte Rôtie
from Rene Rostaing. Yes, it’s a bit young, but it displayed
plenty of that savoury, meaty, green olive Syrah fruit that makes
this one of my favourite appellations. Rostaing has a bit of a
reputation for overdoing the oak, but not here: this was authentic
enough for me, and I’m a bit of a Northern Rhône
traditionalist. My contribution was a bit more hit and miss. The
1995 Arbois Savagnin from Jacques Puffeney fell into the latter
category: it’s not supposed to be a vin jaune (the Jura’s
answer to fino sherry, matured under a flor of dead yeast), but it
still had that tangy, salty, fino nose, coupled with vicious
acidity. Weird. How I feel about a wine like this depends on my mood. Some days I can sort of persuade myself that I actually
like this sort of oddity; other days I wonder how the winemaker
could have spawned such a vinous Frankenstein. The second Goode
contribution was the 2000 Cotat Sancerre ‘La Grande Côte’.
This is no doubt a worth effort, but it got a bit lost in the
crowd. Or maybe it’s just that there’s a limit to how good
Sauvignon can be. Fortunately I hit the mark with the 1996 Ridge
Geyserville. Predominantly Zinfandel in the classic Ridge style,
this seemed much fuller and richer than another bottle of the same
wine I had a couple of weeks back, which had begun to drop its
fruit a touch. One other scribbled entry in the notebook reveals
that I quite enjoyed the 1990 Gevrey Chambertin from Mortet, which
showed some tasty undergrowth character and quite a bit of chewy
tannic structure. A good evening.
Wednesday 13th March
I’m in the process of pensioning off my old IBM Thinkpad 600
laptop on which wineanorak has lived for the last couple of years.
The new machine is a faster but somewhat flimsier-feeling Dell,
which currently lacks the comfy familiarity I have with my
Thinkpad. I’ve also bitten the bullet and decided to move away
from Outlook Express as my e-mail program, which I've now
officially replaced by Eudora.
Outlook has proved itself to be a serious liability in terms of
security: over the last couple of months I’ve been hit by two
viruses, one of which was particularly nasty and disabled my
antiviral software, making it tricky to clean up. OK, I was stupid
in not doing weekly updates to the virus scanner, but without
Outlook I wouldn’t have been hit by these malicious worms in the
first place. The transition hasn’t proved straightforward, and I
spent most of yesterday evening head-scratching, but I’m almost
done. Laptops are amazing things. It’s like having an extension
of your brain. Clearing out the old machine, I’ve rediscovered
all those old feature ideas, bits of background research and
hastily typed thoughts that without my laptop would have been lost
forever. OK, it’s nothing I couldn’t have done with good old
fashioned pen and paper; it’s just that modern communications
and portable computers have made the whole process so much more
focused, accessible and space-efficient. Just think: with a
laptop, digital camera and access to a telephone line I could
travel the wine world and still publish wineanorak on a daily
basis. Now that would be fun… On a separate issue, I've recently
had my first news piece published on Decanter's
website, on the identification of a fifth taste receptor. And for
those of you who subscribe to the wine trade magazine Harper's,
look out for a 2000 word feature on the science of taste and smell
as it relates to wine tasting, due out in the next couple of weeks
I think. Gripping reading. Other goodies to look forward to
include my first Decanter feature (commissioned but not yet
written) and a short 300 word piece in the G2 section of The
Guardian. It's starting to take off...
Thursday 7th March
As I write I'm sipping a delicious Syrah: it's my third time
with the 2000 Vin de Pays des Collines Rhodaniennes from Domaine
Mouton in the Northern Rhône. Yours for £6.50 from La Vigneronne
-- I bought eight, but should have got more. What more could you
want from a relatively inexpensive red? It's got some of that
distinctive, meaty, green-olive tinged nose typical of a good Côte
Rôtie. Perfumed and very savoury, it's medium bodied with good
acidity. Good with food, but enjoyable on its own, too. You could
spend substantially more and get something less authentic and far
less satisfying. You probably think I'm mad, but I'd prefer this
Mouton to two rather expensive Northern Rhône wines I tried this
week at Bibendum's
en primeur tasting. First, the Hermitage La Sizeranne 2000 from
Chapoutier. It's not a bad wine: medium bodied and quite chunky,
it's reasonably sophisticated, but the spicy oak currently
dominates the nose and the palate. My problem is that a wine from
this exalted appellation should be special; this is distinctly
average. At an en primeur price of £30.74 per bottle, average
just won't do. The second wine is the 2000 Côte Rôtie Cuvée
Classique from Rene Rostaing. A vivid purple colour, this has a
spicy caramel-edged nose. The palate is woody and spicy, with
firm, dusty tannins. It's currently quite wood dominated and
unintegrated, but my main problem is that it doesn't display any
of that wonderful Côte Rôtie character. I'll happily pass at £23
per bottle. Hmmm, pour me another glass of the Mouton.
Monday 4th March
Kew Gardens is an interesting place, even in March. We spent
an interesting half-day there on Saturday, which turned out to be
a brilliantly sunny spring day. Kew has a remarkable collection of
plants, but (as far as I am aware) no Vitis vinifera (grape
vines), alas. However, my browse through the various glass houses
got me thinking about plants in general. I’m fascinated by them.
Is suspect the grape vine would make most peoples' top ten list of
important plants, along with the likes of the olive tree, arabica
coffee, wheat, barley, rice (the world's most important food crop)
and cocoa. People underestimate plants. We tend to think of them
as unremarkable, stationary, background-ish sorts of organisms.
This is wrong. Instead, we should think of them as very clever
environmental computers. The outside world is heterogeneous, and
whereas we monitor and compute the environment and then use this
information to move to where we consider it to be the most
favourable (or fit for our means), as sessile organisms plants use
environmental information to determine their growth form. They can
sense light, gravity, humidity, air quality, fungal attack, insect
predation and even touch, and then compute this information to
alter their growth form and internal chemistry. Some of these
responses are pretty specific: for instance they can release
volatile signal chemicals in response to being munched by a
specific species of caterpillar that then act as an airborne SOS
to recruit the parasitic wasps that prey on this uninvited diner.
Nifty, eh? In part, viticulture is a science built around
manipulating these environmental responses in grape vines. Good
growers seek to encourage the vine to produce the best quality
grapes. It’s somewhat of a black art, as the scientific basis
behind producing great as opposed to merely good grapes is poorly
worked-out. Who understands the science behind terroir? We can
describe geology and climatic conditions, and prescribe pruning
practices and other viticultural interventions, but it’s another
matter to actually link these scientifically with grape
characteristics, let alone the qualities of the final wine.
Sunday 24th February
Spring is on its way in Twickenham. Out in the garden the
daffodils are in bloom, providing violent splurges of yellow amid
the late winter browns and greys. The pear tree leaf buds are
swollen and bursting with latent potential, and the grass seems to
have taken on a fresher, lighter-green hue. I have finished
pruning the still-dormant vines, and in their reduced, lifeless
state it's hard to imagine that they'll be capable of bursting
into vigorous life in just a month or so. Today, though, is still
cold and wet and grey, so we've not yet seen the back of the long
English winter. In a bid to overcome my self-diagnosed bout of SAD
(seasonal affective disorder, suffered by those of us inhabiting
far-northerly latitudes), I've spent the last week in the
Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Brilliant sunshine
and temperatures in the mid-twenties centigrade are very welcome
at this time of year, and in addition to self-indulgent
beach-bumming we hired a car and explored. Of interest here is the
fact that Tenerife produces a fair amount of wine, and is the
proud possessor of no less than five Spanish DOs. I checked out
some of the vineyards, and they look really weird; unlike anything
I've ever seen before. The knarled old vines, dormant at this time
of year, are trained low along the ground, like wizened, geriatric
snakes. They are frequently supported by forked sticks, just a
foot or so above the barren-looking volcanic soil. As to the
wines, I only tried a couple, so I can't really comment. Instead,
my best wine moment of a non-wine-focused trip was provided by the
sensationally good Torres Fransola 2000. From Penedès, it's
predominantly Sauvignon Blanc, together with a dash of the local
Paralleda grape, and half of the wine was fermented in new
American oak barrels. But don't let this put you off: the oak
merely adds some texture and spicy complexity to what is a
brilliantly full flavoured, aromatic wine -- one of the best
examples of Sauvignon I've experienced. Two other more modest
Torres wines also impressed. The 2001 vintage of Vina Sol (a white
wine made from Parelleda) is a wonderful example of commercial
winemaking. Retailing for around 5 Euros, it is crisp, aromatic
and delightfully poised, with good acidity. It's red sibling, the
Sangre de Toro 2000, is a Grenache/Carignan blend showing an
attractive savouriness along with a good density of fruit. Both of
these cheapies are superb, versatile food wines.
Wednesday 13th Febraury
An interesting tasting yesterday at the Lansdowne Club, put on by
McKinley Vintners. The club's dress code stipulated that
'gentlemen' had to wear jackets and ties: a quick phone call
confirmed that this category included me, so it was the first
trade tasting I've attended wearing a suit. It's actually quite
fiddly tasting with a tie on. You have to make sure that when you
bend over the spittoons (in this case it was those awkward little
table-top efforts -- I much prefer the bigger floor-standing
ones), your tie is not in your spit stream. Very important.
Highlight of the tasting was a vertical of Champagne Gosset. We
were treated to four vintages of Grand Millésime (82, 85, 89,96),
three of Celebris (82, 85, 89), and as a special treat four older
vintages of Gosset Brut (52, 61, 75, 76). All these were
impressive wines, but most fascinating were the four 'old ladies'.
The 1976, from magnum, was fresh and still quite fizzy, tasting
pretty youthful in a complex, high-acid style. 1975 had a gentle
mousse and showed subtle, complex creamy, toasty characters with
just a touch of caramel: lovely balance. Then the 1961, which was
made some years before I was born. This was more evolved, with
some herby complexity and rich, warm flavours. How do you describe
wines like these, let alone rate them? The 1952, from a great
year, was absolutely fascinating. This is a deep yello/gold
colour. Not much fizziness, but a wonderfully complex, herby nose
with creamy, toasty elements and a touch of yeastiness. The palate
is rich and smooth: it's actually hard to pull out any dominant
features, but there are lots of savoury flavours that are all
pulling together to create a harmonious wine. Relatively few
clarets and virtually no Burgundies will be in such good shape
after some 50 years, although I should imagine that the
near-perfect cellaring conditions at Gosset will have contributed
to the graceful ageing of these wines -- after all, Champagne is
notoriously sensitive to poor storage.
Thursday 7th
February
Forgive
the completely non-wine related nature of this entry, but we have
a new addition to our family. He's a 10-month old black and white
moggy named Oswald. But this is no ordinary feline. Oswald is in
fact a celebrity cat. We feel very honoured by his presence
in our home. His previous owner was none other than Eric Clapton,
the mega-famous, semi-iconic guitarist and rock personality (hard
evidence for this is provided by the picture on the right). But
don't get the impression that Eric doesn't like cats. The story is
that Oswald was hired by Clappo's PA at his country residence and
studio, Hurtwood Edge (a photo of which can be found here)
, to keep the mouse population down. Apparently, when she left for
the USA, there was no one left to look after the poor cat, and
through a friend of a friend he found his way to us. He's settled
in well (I'll post a photo of him soon), but has the annoying
habit of preferring the bathroom sink to his litter tray. Nice. Is
it my imagination, or do his ears prick back attentively when I
play my guitar?
Tuesday 5th February
A very profitable afternoon spent at the New Zealand trade
tasting, held at regular haunt Chelsea Galleria. This is part of
Chelsea Football Club's Stamford Bridge stadium, which is now
hardly recognizable as a football ground with all the development
that has taken place over the last few years. It seems that
Chelsea FC is an industry, loosely based around a football team.
Diehard Chelsea fans can even live there, should they so wish.
Back to the tasting. You get good trade tastings and bad ones;
this was definitely in the former category. Not too crowded, lots
of interesting wine, and well laid out (a special central series
of tables with wines organized along varietal lines, and
individual producers showing at the tables around the periphery).
It can be quite hard work tasting dozens of Sauvignon Blancs, so I
spent most of my time tasting through the ranges from different
producers. The overall standard of New Zealand wine is admirably
high. The Sauvignons now cover a spectrum of styles, from rich and
rounded to crisp and acidic. Choose which style you prefer.
Chardonnay is now the most planted grape in NZ, but the results
are mixed, at least to this palate. Few are overoaked, but there
are too many examples showing a sort of papaya/tinned peas
character that's a little off-putting. Riesling is crisp and
citrussy, but still trying to find its identity I feel. Does it
age? There are a few interesting Semillons, and some variable
results with Pinot Gris. Gewürztraminer isn't really working that
well, although a few producers have done OK. Of the reds, Cabernet
and Merlot blend quite well, although some overoaked examples
exist. But what really excites me is New Zealand Pinot Noir. I
tasted some 25 different Pinots, and these were uniformly good,
with 10 or so real stand-outs. Special feature to follow.
Sunday 3rd February
There's an excellent letter from UK drinks writer Jim
Budd in the latest edition of Decanter. (March 2002).
Unfortunately, the letters section is not on the Decanter
website, so I'll try to summarize Jim's main points, and
explain why I think what he is proposing is such a good idea. It
concerns the timing of the Bordeaux en primeur tastings,
which take place in the March/April following the vintage. Thus
journalists will soon be tasting the 2001 wines, which are still
in barrel and whose components haven't yet been assembled into the
final wine. For wines destined for long ageing, this is simply too
young. Budd suggests that considering the economic climate and the
high demand (and prices) for the 2000 wines, why not use this
opportunity to delay the 2000 en primeur offer for a year.
Thus Bordeaux would be in step with Burgundy and the Rhône,
regions that are only just offering their 2000 en primeurs
now. This extra year would make a big difference. Critics would be
able to taste the final, assembled wines which, while still
infants, would be easier to assess finally. And customers would
have to wait a year less for their wine once they had paid for it.
Motivated consumers would also be able to taste before they buy,
just as they can now with Burgundy and Rhône cask sample tastings
put on by some merchants. This is a good thing: while critics are
extremely useful, palate preferences differ even among experience
tasters, and these differences in style aren't conveyed by a score
out of 100, which is the currency now used by most merchants in
their en primeur offers. Jim also proposes that "all
the cru classé chateaux should take part in the tastings
organized by the Union des Grand Crus, rather than the first
growths and others with similar pretensions obliging the press and
merchants to visit them. And there should be no separate tastings
arranged for influential journalists." Sensible suggestions,
but is there any chance of these consumer-benefiting changes being
adopted?
Thursday 24th January
My first assessment of the 2000
Burgundy vintage is now up. Over the next few weeks, expect to
see other critics publish theirs. I haven't really tasted enough
wines to give you any definitive conclusion, just 80 or so. In
fact, I wonder how useful verdicts that generalize a whole vintage
are, even if you break down your conclusions along regional lines.
There are just too many variables involved (e.g. when grower chose
to pick, microclimatic variation, viticultural techniques,
winemaking techniques), all of which can affect the quality of the
finished wine. The other source of 'noise' here is the rumour
mill. Critics like to talk to each other and read what the others
are writing. There's a lot of conferring over spitoons, and while
some individuals take pride in ploughing their own furrow, others
are happy to follow in their wake (forgive the mixed metaphors).
So what ends up getting marked down in vintage charts is a highly
subjective opinion, often bolstered by a self-referential form of
vinous Chinese whispers, that is impossible to ground in any
reality. Take the 1996 and 1997 Bordeaux vintages. Most
commentators would agree that the former was a 'better' year. From
my experience, this rings true. But how do you put a number on it?
And for drinking tonight, some of the 1997 wines are a much better
choice than many of the 1996s. What these charts also ignore is
the idea that people differ in their style preferences, and that
the characteristics that cause one person to choose vintage A over
vintage B might cause another person to prefer the latter. Yes,
the vintage chart is a convenient way of trying to help people
through the maze of vintage variations, but it takes so many short
cuts that I'm not sure the eventual result, a number, is any use
at all.
Thursday 17th January
The Burgundy 2000 season is upon us. Suddenly we’re awash
with cask sample tastings and en primeur offers. With the
exercise of all the self-control I could muster, I’ve restricted
myself to just two Burgundy 200 tastings, at Bibendum and John
Armit (reports to follow). Refreshingly, there's so much less hype
surrounding the release of the 2000 Burgundies vintage than there
was with the Bordeaux 2000 circus last March, which was hyped
endlessly. This prompts the question: why are the annual Burgundy
releases relatively low key compared with Bordeaux? A few
suggestions. First, much less Burgundy is made. Even the larger
domaines (I'm not including the big five negociant houses here)
may have just a few hectares of vines, spread over several
different vineyard sites. A classed growth in the Medoc will
typically have 20–40 ha of vines—and there are lots of them.
So there's a lot of top Bordeaux to sell, which means that
merchants stand to make a lot more money from their en primeur
claret offers than from their tiny allocations of domaine-bottled
Burgs. Second, many Bordeaux properties have a substantial
advertising budget—after all, claret is a very image conscious
wine. It therefore makes sound commercial sense for wine magazines
to devote a lot of space to Bordeaux. Yes, Bordeaux is an
important wine region and people are interested in it, but the
commercial reality of Bordeaux advertising money means that
magazine editors aren't worried about overdoing their Bordeaux
coverage. The third reason that the Bordeaux en primeur is
hyped so much is that top claret is an investment medium. Yes,
it's a little bizarre that fermented grape juice should be bought
as an investment, but a lot of en primeur purchases are
made by people who have no intention of drinking the stuff. The
final reason for all the hype is the way in which Bordeaux en
primeur is released. It's sold impossibly early, even before
the final blends are assembled, in the March following the
harvest. All a potential purchaser has to help them decide what to
buy is the opinions of journalists, who have bravely slugged their
way through scores of thick, tannic, mouth numbing cask samples
and tried to give their best impressions. And the wine is released
in batches (or tranches) by the Châteaux, in an attempt to
get the best possible prices from this highly speculative market.
Thankfully, Burgundy is different.
Previous entries (some gripping
reading!)
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