Extended
tasting note 4
Weninger
Veratina 2002 Burgenland, Austria
As
I write, I’m sipping a bottle of Weninger’s 2002 Veratina. It’s
a reasonably high-end Austrian red. Dark fruits dominate, with a
roasted, tarry edge and lots of freshness from the relatively high
acidity. The Weninger reds are among Austria’s best (pictured right
is Franz Weninger tasting his wines). They are quite modern in
style, but they retain a sense of place and are highly food
compatible. This is a wine that, while it’s drinkable now, is saving
its best for last – or at least another five years.
When it comes to deciding what wines to drink, I’m
often at a loss. I’ve got a reasonable stash of wines at home, but
frequently I find it incredibly difficult to decide what wine to drink to
match my mood on a particular occasion. I find it much easier to buy
wine than to drink it. Tonight, I tried a tactic I occasionally
employ. I ask Fiona to randomly select a bottle for me from my stash.
A relatively risky strategy, this, because there are some
smart bottles mixed in among the everyday stuff. But it’s precisely these smart bottles I
can never find the right occasion to drink.
The Veratina is beginning to open out a bit on the
nose, as wines often do shortly after uncorking. There’s a gentle
herbiness to the fruit, which is becoming more defined, towards the
cherry and red fruits end of the spectrum. On opening, it was more
dark fruits and roasted coffee. The fact that wines do change in
contact with air means that critics have to be careful: you can have
less confidence in a tasting where you are giving wines a quick sniff
than you can in judgments forged over lunch, dinner or casual
reflection. This wine is now much more elegant than it was just after
it was opened. Our sensory apparatus – and the subsequent processing
machinery of the brain – is relatively imprecise when it comes to
flavour. This doesn’t meant that we can’t make reliable judgments;
just that we have to think a bit about what we are doing, and be
humble enough to know that we can make mistakes relatively easily.
Having said this, I’m confident that I do have a bit of a knack for
tasting wine and getting it ‘right’ (whatever that means). If I
didn’t think this, then I’d just give up and do something else. I
don’t want to be one of those wine writers who tries to stick their
finger in the air before nailing my colours to the mast (don’t you
just love that mixed metaphor, folks?); I’m happy to go out on my
own. In writing this I’m recognizing that there are different
cultures of wine (there still exist people who quite genuinely are
horrified by the fact that the Australians are making wine, or by the
sight of the grape variety on the label), and that there exist
individual differences in perception that can render, for you, one critic
useless and another spot on.
Another glass of the Veratina is poured. Franz Weninger named this
after his two daughters. It must be great to be the offspring of the
owner of a wine estate, if, that is you have an interest in wine (and
if the estate is any good). If
you were relatively able and got on with your folks, you might be the
possessor of a dream job. But you’d have to really want to do it, or
life could be hell. Perhaps its healthiest to move on, do something
else, and then if you decide you’d like to, come back to the family
business. Talking about families, regular readers of wineanorak might wonder why I seldom
mention my kids. I have two boys, both under 10. It’s not because
I’m not a devoted family man. It’s because in this day and age it
is sadly inadvisable to put pictures of your kids, or their names, on
a visible website like this; this problem is compounded by the fact
that our boys have been adopted. Much as I’d like to put family
pictures up on the website to convince you how wonderful the Goode
family is, it would be inappropriate and possibly risky. Besides, as
an old friend used to say – kids are like farts: you don’t mind
your own, but you can’t stand other peoples’. There’s some truth
in this, so I’m doing you a favour by sparing you the family photos.
So I return once more to Veratina. [Sounds like a line
from Brideshead Revisited.] Now it’s dark, sweet, chocolatey and
intoxicating. It’s deep, and drawing me further in, like a good wine
should. A wine should invite the drinker into a higher experience; not
changing the identity of the reality, but just opening it out with a
subtly shifted perspective. Wine works best not as an end in itself,
but as an accompaniment to thought or experience. In this case it is a
little like music. Each of us has a soundtrack to our lives – for
some who listen to a lot of music, this is more significant than
others – whereby the tunes that fill our mental space form the
backdrop to our experiences. An aural anchor to reality, that then is
enmeshed in our memory with those very experiences, and acts as a key
to unlock the emotions that accompanied them. If anything, tastes and
smells have a stronger ability to do this. Wine
rocks!
January
2005
Other
ETNs:
Grünhaus;
Roc des Anges; Gaillard;
Veratina; Arturo;
Wynns; Drystone;
Foundry and Columella; Meruge;
Foillard Morgon; Clonakilla
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