jamie goode's wine blog

A brilliant Orange wine from Austria

jamiegoode — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:52:48 +0000

Tried this today: it’s a brilliant Austrian skin-contact white. Just beautiful: one of the best examples of an ‘orange’ wine that I have tried.

Schell Mann Achtung Wine 2007 Thermenregion, Austria
From Fred Loimer, this is a skin-contact white (an ‘orange’ wine) made from Grüner Veltliner, Muskateller, Rotgipfler, Traminer, Zierfandler, all grown together in a mixed vineyard planted in 1936. It’s amazingly fresh and aromatic with lovely peach, melon and citrus aromas, as well as some spice. The palate is fresh, vital and quite grippy with lovely fruit chartacters and a nice spicy, dry finish. It’s actually a full yellow colour – not orange. A remarkable wine of real precision and interest. 94/100

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Some nice surprises from the Balkan wine festival

jamiegoode — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:31:53 +0000

So, after two day’s judging, today was the Balkan wine festival here in Sofia, where a number of producers gathered to show their wines. I just wanted to report on a few particular highlights.

First of all Borovitza, from northwest Bulgaria. This is a brilliant winery, making small quantities of wine from some really good vineyards. It’s owned by Dr Ognyan Tsvetanov (above), who is a very smart, thoughtful winegrower with an interesting story. I was particularly struck by three of his wines. The first was the cuvee Americano, a white blend aged in Bulgrian oak with no added SO2. Its very richly textured and intense.

The second was the Orange Garden 2008, an orange wine made from Marsanne, Roussanne and Viognier with fermentation on skins and then just under 4 years in oak. It’s powerful and really smoothly textured with lovely complexity.

Finally, the Gamza 2009. I pointed out that this elegant, cherryish red reminded me of Kadarka, a Hungarian variety. It turns out that they are both the same variety. It’s a bit Pinot-like, but with more body. Such a beautiful wine.

I was also really impressed by the Heaps Good Wine Company, which is run by Kiwi Nick Gee in Slovenia (he has a Slovenian wife). He’s making superb wines. The Pinot Gris is rich and textured, with lovely ripe fruit. The Pinot Noir is super-elegant with some sweet cherry fruit and a reassuringly light colour, and it is a nice contrast to the special selection Pinot called the Gambling Priest, which has more stems and a bit more structure. Both are really compelling and elegant.

I also liked Nick’s Blaufrankisch, which is a really elegant black cherry fruit expression of the variety.

Finally, Vina Caric from Croatia. Really convincing wines including a white blend called Cesarica, that’s fresh and textured, and the Plovac Ploski 2008, a warm, medium-bodied red wine with amazing savoury complexity alongside sweetly aromatic fruit. It’s really elegant.

In Bulgaria, judging wines of the Balkans

jamiegoode — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:05:12 +0000

I am currently in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I am judging the Balkans International Wine Competition, along with a merry band of excellent judges from different Balkan countries, plus three of us from outside the region.

We have spent two days judging and we have just finished. The competition was flawlessly run and this afternoon – where all of the judges got to retaste the gold medal-winning wines to decide the trophy winners – showed just how good some of these wines are. I’m really eager to find out the names of some of the winners.

Last night we had dinner at Kotileto restaurant. It’s owned by a Bulgarian, but the chef and cuisine are Serbian. The Bulgarians put a greater accent on vegetables, while the Serbians place more on meat, and especially barbecued meat. The key meat is pork, with veal and lamb second, apparently.

The food was hearty, rich and enjoyable. The wine was all Bulgarian, with a couple of very nice bottles.

This fresh, intense white was a blend of four grape varieties, made by Marash winery.

A convincing Gewurztraminer

Three amazing natural wines from Mas Coutelou

jamiegoode — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:48:54 +0000

These are lovely, lovely wines. I followed them over the course of a few days, so I’m fairly confident in my recommendations, too. They are made by Jeff Coutelou, in France’s Languedoc. Jeff works naturally, using very little sulfur dioxide at all. All are young, dense and grippy, and I think that you’d be safe cellaring them for a few years (maybe 3?) even though they have minimal aded sulphites.

But I just love drinking these wines in their vivid youth, and despite their youthful structure, they show some complexity and good balance between the sweet pure fruit and more savoury flavours. They are stunning value for money.

Mas Coutelou 7 Rue de la Pompe 2012 Vin de France
A varietal Syrah from the Languedoc. Wonderfully vivid and meaty with peppery raspberry and cherry fruit on the nose. The palate is grippy and firm but has lovely purity and focus. Brooding, spicy, meaty and backward. Lovely structure and purity. 92/100 (£9.95 Roberson)

Mas Coutelou Le Vin des Amis 2012 Vin de France
A blend of 75% Syrah, 25% Grenache. Rich, dense, vivid and pure. Quite backward with real grip under the vivid black fruits. Powerful and structure with amazing fruit quality, dominated by fresh blackberry and black cherries. 93/100 (£12.95 Roberson)

Mas Coutelou Paf La Syrah 2012 Vin de France
A special single-plot cuvee of Syrah. Wonderfully floral, sweetly fruited cherry nose with some pure liqueur-like notes. The palate is fruity and vivid with raspberry and cherry fruit as well as some acid bite. Very pure, fruity and silky with some tannic grip. Incredible fruit purity here. 93/100 (£18.95 Roberson)

Distracted by a book revision

jamiegoode — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:39:30 +0000

Apologies for the slight slowing down on my blog. I haven’t been posting every day, as I normally do, because I have been fiendishly busy, revising my Wine Science book.

The original was really good, and I was happy with it (even though I was plagued by self-doubt as I sent it out into the world). But it is 8 years old, and needs updating.

My biggest problem is that I could make it three times the size, and rewrite it completely. But then I think it would be less good as a book. So I’m doing a selective rewrite. There will be enough in it that’s different to make it a COMPULSORY purchase even for someone who already has a copy. But I’m trying to keep it the same sort of size.

My deadline is Thursday, and as I’m off to Bulgaria tomorrow afternoon, it leaves me relatively little time to complete the task.

Still, despite the pressure, I am really excited, and thrilled that Mitchell Beazley (who have practically stopped publishing wine books) have agreed to pay £££ for a revision. In the USA it will be published by University of California Press.

Competition, price and why cheap wine will never be profitable

jamiegoode — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:03:29 +0000

Have you ever tried to buy a mobile phone on contract? Or choose an energy supplier? The pricing structure is deliberately complicated, making direct comparisons incredibly difficult. And the various suppliers NEVER compete on price.

This is, from their perspective, a sensible choice.

As soon as one player comes in with simple, understandable pricing, and begins to compete by offering lower prices than the others, then all profitability will be sucked out of the market. They all realise this.

And while I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that there’s a cartel arrangement, all the major mobile phone companies seem to offer deals that are pretty similar. (The only people who compete on price seem to be minor resellers of SIM-only deals.)

Across lots of industries where barriers to entry are high, there seems to be a sort of gentleman’s agreement not to compete on price. Airlines are interesting in this regard, because low cost carriers have broken through what was a rather complacent industry. When they started out, though, the response of the mainstream carriers was to drop their prices to unsustainably low levels on certain routes where they were facing competition, in order to try to squeeze the competitors out, so they could then raise their prices again free of these pesky competitors. The other strategy – one that seems to be taken by ISPs – is to buy out smaller companies who are offering competition, both for customer acquisition purposes but also to avoid the wrong sort of competition.

What about wine? I don’t think cheap wine will ever be profitable. There are lots of producers in the game, many of whom have written off their large capital cost of vineyard ownership years ago. And there are more producers than are needed to fulfil the needs of the modern retail market, so the main route to market – the supermarkets - have all the power in their hands. The producers need them, but from the retailer’s perspective any producer will do, so there’s little reciprocity in the arrangement. And cheap wine is caught up in an attritional price war. There’s always someone with wine they are desperate to shift, and so they will sell at a very low price.

The quality of cheap wine is now better than it has ever been. For the target market, therefore, there is infinite substitution. If one wine becomes too expensive, then there’ll be another ready to take its place. Cheap wines are all packaged the same way, and they all taste pretty similar. There are very few strong brands in wine, so producers of cheap wine have no competitive advantage that they can leverage. It’s just a straight price fight, and I can’t see this changing any time soon. This means it’s never going to be profitable playing at the bottom end of the market in the off-trade.

On soils and wines, part 6 – water relations and wine quality, plus a bit about clays

jamiegoode — Sun, 12 May 2013 20:25:51 +0000

So, the next instalment in my exploration of the importance of soils for wine. This is really thinking aloud, so I’d love to hear comments and corrections.

One of the most important properties of vineyard soils is how they control water supply to the vine. Vine roots are designed to be particularly effective in taking up water and nutrients from the soil, because owing to their climbing habit in the wild, they are establishing themselves in soils already colonized by other plants. Supply vines with too much water and they will grow big, lush canopies and not put much effort into grape production.

A famous study on the soils of the Médoc (Bordeaux) was carried out by researcher Gérard Seguin in the 1980s. He found that many of the best vineyard sites had poor levels of soil nutrients, but that this was compensated for by deep root systems. These top sites were frequently acidic gravels, and showed magnesium deficiency due to high potassium levels, as well as low levels of nitrogen. But aside from this, it was hard to correlate potential wine quality and soil nutrient levels. Seguin stated that, ‘it is impossible to establish any correlation between quality of wine and the soil content of any nutritive element.’ He adds that if there were to be such a correlation, you could give yourself a good chance of making great wine simply with the assistance of chemical additives to the soil.

Seguin’s major conclusion was that the vital way in which the soils affected grape quality was through regulating water availability during the vegetative cycle of the vine. Moderate water deficit has been shown to reduce shoot growth (vigour), berry weight and yield, and increases berry anthocyanin and tannin content: ideal for high quality red wine production. Vine water status is dependent on soil and climate characteristics, and soil influences vine water status through its water-holding capacity. Seguin showed that in the Bordeaux vineyards, which are not irrigated, berry size is decreased and total phenolics are increased when vines face water deﬁcits, resulting in higher grape quality potential but lower yields.

A more recent study by Bordeaux-based terroir researcher Kees van Leeuwin, who has worked with Seguin in the past, examined this in more detail. Van Leeuwin and colleagues looked at 32 vintages in Bordeaux from 1974–2005 and found a correlation between vine water deficit stress index and vintage quality ratings. ‘The quality of red Bordeaux wine can be better correlated to the dryness of the vintage than to the sum of active temperatures,’ he concludes. In none of these vintages included in the study did the quality suffer because of excessive water deficit. Vintage quality ratings don’t correlate well with the average growing season temperatures, which is surprising. However, the story isn’t a simple one: some vintages, such as 1982, were excellent with no real water deficit.

In Bordeaux, the vineyards that rarely experience deficit are either planted to Merlot, or to white varieties. Closer planting, growing higher canopies, and using rootstocks that only partially use soil water reserves (such as Riparia Gloire de Montpellier) are vineyard interventions that can be used on sites that usually lack natural water deficit.

But water deficit is not always associated with higher wine quality. As part of his PhD studies, Jean-Sebastien Reynaud looked at the effect of soil water-holding capacity on wine quality in 23 different Vaud (Switzerland) vineyards. These were planted with Gamaret, a Swiss variety that’s a cross between Gamay and Reichensteiner, and is popular in Switzerland because of its resistance to botrytis. Many studies of water deficit have involved irrigated vineyards, but Reynaud looked at unirrigated sites over three vintages, 2007–2009. Water stress can have both positive and negative effects on vines. In drying soils, plant roots synthesize abscisic acid which signals to the above-ground portion of the plant and encourages grape ripening, and the partitioning of carbon resources to the fruit rather than the canopy. But it also causes stomatal closure, reducing carbon assimilation. If the stress is severe then leaves are lost. So stress tends to increase soluble solids in the grape (generally good for wine quality, especially in reds) until it reaches a certain point and soluble solids decrease when the stress is too much.

Reynaud found that water deficit improved wine colour, but there was no clear relation between water stress and the sensory attributes of the experimental wines he made. ‘In the Vaud conditions vine water stress was not the major parameter responsible for differences in wine quality,’ he concluded.

Perhaps Seguin’s viewpoint that water-holding capacity is the key soil factor for wine quality – widely accepted around the wine industry, particularly for red wines – has overshadowed the potential importance of soil chemistry. The soils he studied were of a certain type: what Chilean terroir expert Pedro Parra describes as ‘geomorphic’ soils—those where the soil isn’t formed directly from the underlying bedrock. Parra suggests that ‘geological’ soils, formed from weathered bedrock, may be quite different in this respect than geomorphic soils. Examples of gemorphic soils would include alluvial soils such as those of Bordeaux, or wind-blown loess. In contrast, the soils of Burgundy and the Rhône would be geological.

What about clays? Clays are made of the smallest of all soil particles, and because of their structure present an extremely large surface to volume ratio. They can hold water and nutrient ions very effectively. ‘I’d always thought that clay was an unlikely viticultural soil,’ says John Atkinson MW, who has a vineyard in the UK and is the author of an interesting research paper on terroir in Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits. ‘It just seemed so charged with minerals and water, and therefore overly invigorating in temperate climates. I was therefore surprised to read in Denis Dubordieu’s two volume work on oenology that Petrus’ smectite clay soil hydrically stressed the property’s Merlot vines.’

‘I read around the subject,’ continues Atkinson, ‘and came across a report on Geelong’s [Victoria, Australia] soils. The article makes the important distinctions between soil water capacity, availability and extractability.’ Atkinson points out that clay soils hold onto their water, and their density makes rooting difficult. ‘Clays might appear humid, but extractability can limit availability,’ he adds. ‘This tied-in with a paper I’d read by Kees van Leeuwen, which reported hydric stress occurring more rapidly in vines grown on a clay-based Bordeaux soil than they did on a more typical Medoc gravel soil.’

Apparently, Petrus, the famous Pomerol estate, has more smectite clay than any other estate in Pomerol. ‘Smectite is a volcanic mineral that increases the internal surface areas of clays, and exaggerates their shrink swell properties,’ says Atkinson. ‘It is part of the montmorillonite group of clays. Expansion of the clays closes the pores in the soil, and makes conditions too anaerobic for root growth whilst impeding existing root function. Consequently, they impose a limit on the extractability of water by limiting root development. Conversely, as smectite/momtmorillonite clays dry out, they shrink and crack, allowing rootlets to populate the developing capillaries. By contrast, Kaolinite and illite clays expand and contract very little.’

‘The relevance of all this is that one could model a viticultural regime based upon montmorillonite clay, warm summers and irregular rainfall in which vines are nearly always under stress; even heavy rainfall wouldn’t penetrate the soil, because the clays expand and seal at their surfaces. Petrus would be the paradigm of this sort of interaction.’

The main focus of Atkinson’s work on terroir has been in Burgundy. The famed vineyards of the Côte d’Or are on the side of a rift valley, and because of this soil can vary over the course of just a few metres. Atkinson says that the best vineyards are those where there is limestone bedrock and plenty of active calcium carbonate, which helps create an open soil structure. The flocculated clays in these soils have the physical drainage properties of sand, but can hold nutrients. The porous limestone soils can help with drainage because of their effect on the structure of the soil, but can also act as a water reserve. The clay content in the soil is able to extract the water from the limestone reserve, and make it available in limited quantities through the growing season. The red Grand Crus typically have smectite (swelling clays), while those with kaolinite clays are better suited to white wines.

Atkinson cites the work of Frank Wittendal, who used a statistical technique called principal components analysis (PCA) to look in detail at 2816 specific climats in Burgundy. The climat is the Burgundian terroir unit, and represents a single patch of presumably homogeneous terroir. This may be a vineyard in its entirety, or may just be a part of a larger vineyard. For example, Clos de Vougeot is a 50 hectare Grand Cru vineyard with 16 climates, while Corton, another Grand Cru vineyard, has 24 climats.

Wittendal described each climat in terms of 14 soild description variables and four landscape/climatic variables, which were then fed into the PCA. The great significance of this work is that by using statistics, he was able to show that factors that would assume to be important – such as altitude, aspect, parent rock and gradient – weren’t significant in separating out the different hierarchical levels in Burgundy’s vineyards.

The PCA work shows that in terms of vineyard classification, the soil properties are really what matter, and these have precedence over altitude and slope. There is some evidence that east facing vineyards are favoured, but this is because facing east correlates well with interesting soil types, rather than the angle of the sun’s illumination.

Wittendal’s analysis was able to split the different climats up into three quite separate groups. Group 1 consists of colluvial soils. These are formed by the accumulation of fallen, eroded soils which are retained on shallow slopes. Colluvium is made of fragmented rocks. Group 2 is non-colluvial compact limestone. This is able to retain water and possibly sequester it from deeper sources. Group 3 is alluvial soils, at the lower end of the altitude and slope indicators. There is just one Grand Cru climat with an alluvial soil, a Bâtard Montrachet. Root growth in limestone and colluvial soils is quite different. In the limestone soils, roots go mainly down, searching for water. In colluvial soils, made of fragmented rocks, roots travel in all directions.

If just the red Grand Cru vineyards are included, then 80–90% of the clayey limestone soils with active carbonate are eliminated, and the majority soil type is colluvium. That is, the Grand Cru vineyards had a high proportion of gravelly, colluvial hillwash in their subsoils. Atkinson suggests that the significance of this is that the best vineyards put the vines into the optimal deficit zone, and it’s the hydrology properties of the vineyard that determine its quality potential. This is similar to the findings of Seguin and others in Bordeaux, where the alluvial sand and gravel soils, coupled with a retreating water table in the summer, puts the vines into deficit. In the best Bordeaux vineyards clay lenses run through the soil helping to buffer water availability, keeping the vines supplied with just enough water but letting them experience mild deficit.

Some nice wines from Lay & Wheeler

jamiegoode — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:25:25 +0000

Wine merchant Lay & Wheeler have been part of Majestic Wine for a while, and for the first time at this week’s Majestic press tasting some of the Lay & Wheeler portfolio was shown. Here are my notes on some of the wines.

Valdesil Pezas de Portela Godello 2010 Valdeorras, Spain
Textured, rich and powerful with sweet melony fruit and some herbal notes, as well as characters of straw and nuts. Broad and intense, yet still fresh. 93/100 (£25.20 Lay & Wheeler)

Ocean Eight Verve Chardonnay 2011 Mornington Peninsula, Australia
Powerful with lovely complexing matchstick/mineral reductive notes, as well as faint hints of cabbage, supporting precise, concentrated pear and citrus fruit. Lively and linear with real complexity. 94/100 (£25 Lay & Wheeler)

Domaine de la Taille aux Loups Montlouis Clos Mosny 2011 Loire, France
Fresh and herby with citrus and apple notes on the nose. The palate shows supple pear and apple fruit with a citrus twist. Lively, showing nice focus and purity, with real character. 92/100 (£19.25 Lay & Wheeler)

La Gerla Rosso di Montalcino 2010 Tuscany, Italy
Elegant, supple and sweet with cherry and berry fruits. Light styled and better for it with lovely purity and elegance. Smooth and pure with fine cherry fruit and mineral notes. 93/100 (£16.20 Lay & Wheeler)

Mauro 2010 Castilla y Leon, Spain
Deep coloured, this is a rich, ripe, dense red wine with notes of cherries and blackberries, and a smooth, supple texture. Lovely mineral undercurrents help keep this fresh and interesting, and not just another big ripe red. Stylish. 93/100 (£28.80 Lay & Wheeler)

Elio Grasso Gavarini Vigna Chiniera Barolo 2006 Piedmont, Italy
This is special: spicy, mineral and slightly tarry on the nose with sweet cherries, plums and some warm herbs. The palate is pure, fresh and structured with finely grained, grippy tannins meshing well with the bright cherry and plum fruit, as well as some herbiness. Serious. 95/100 (£48 Lay & Wheeler)

Video: visiting Sancerre by helicopter

jamiegoode — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:47:52 +0000

Here’s a short film shot from my recent visit to the famous Loire village of Sancerre, by chopper. It proved quite an eventful journey: on the way, the door I was sitting next to came open. It looked quite a long way down. The pilot had to land in a field in order for me to close it properly.

Sancerre is quite beautiful, surrounded by vineyards. These are proper vineyard soils, too. Until phylloxera arrived in the late 19th century, this was Pinot Noir country. Now it’s dominated by Sauvignon, with just a bit of Pinot.

Four decades of Beronia Gran Reserva Rioja

jamiegoode — Tue, 07 May 2013 20:05:43 +0000

I recently got the chance to taste (and drink) Beronia Gran Reserva Rioja from three different decades, spanning four decades in all, which was pretty cool. I’m not the greatest fan of traditional-styled Rioja, but when it’s good, it’s very good, and it can age brilliantly.

These three bottles were all compelling. The 1982 perhaps showing more signs of age than the 1973, but still superb with lovely complexity. The 1973 is ageing beautifully, and still has lots of fruit. The 2005 is just a baby: concentrated, intense, still showing plenty of oak – a little ungainly in its youth, but with a powerful core to support lots of development in bottle.

Rioja is one of those rare wine regions where it’s not really hard to taste good, older bottles, and if you like old wine (not everyone does), then it’s a happy hunting ground.

Beronia Rioja Gran Reserva 1982 Rioja, Spain
Lovely aromatics of bitter plums and sweet cherry fruit, with complex, warm herby notes. The palate is fresh and has high acidity, with flavours of plums, cherries and berries as well as some spicy warmth. Strongly savoury, with some astringency, but also lovely aged complexity. 92/100

Beronia Rioja Gran Reserva 1973 Rioja, Spain
Sweet, warm, spicy and bold with some rich cherry and plum fruit as well as tertiary, evolved aromas. The palate is quite robust with warm, spicy notes and great concentration. Showing amazing purity for such an old wine, and still has tannic grip. Compelling. 94/100

Beronia Rioja Gran Reserva 2005 Rioja, Spain
Powerful and sweetly fruited with dense, warm, spicy oak notes as well as ripe black cherry and blackberry fruit. Quite ripe and sweet but with nice dense earth, spicy structure and notes of cedar and vanilla under the rich fruit. Potential for development. 92/100

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