The parallel universe of wine

(in which there is an Empress of Wine.)

A column that previously appeared on timatkin.com

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The most influential voice in the parallel wine world is Roberta Parker who regularly appears on television demonstrating how to choose wines to go with particular dishes, how to serve them, how to prepare wine cocktails, what to do with left-over wine and how to choose the best wine glasses. She also pays close attention to the aesthetic appeal of the labels and the practicality of the packaging (she loves screwcaps and hates having to carry heavy bottles back from the shops). Wine merchants across the world sell wines using Ms Parker’s food recommendations, but many French and British wine professionals disagree with her tendency to marry wines with T-bone steaks and her preference for large wine glasses. Roberta Parker does not like wines with high calorie or alcohol content and she could not imagine giving them “points”.

In a parallel universe 2 
(In which the French wine establishment gets to run the French motor industry)

It was decided in 1963 to hand over the responsibility for the French automobile industry to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine Controlée.

The new Renault 444 has air conditioning and airbags, but it still looks like this

And it still has the characteristic gearshift:

Any proposed new designs have to be authorised by the Minister of Transport. There is no chance of Citroens or Renaults changing

The madmen who hold the strings of the French wine industry

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Professeur Reynaud trying to hold back the waves

of social media

These are busy times for the lunatic fringes of the French wine industry. First, there is the revival of the 2009 plan to ban the blending of red and white to make rosé anywhere in Europe. (Apart from Champagne, presumably).

Then there was the proposal - by Professeur Reynaud* in a report to the French government on Les stratégies validées de réduction des dommages liés aux addictions (valid strategies to reduce the damage caused by addictions) that internet promotion of wine be no longer authorised, particularly through social media.

Setting aside the worrying state-control-of-media flavour of terms like "authorise", there is also the question of how precisely the good Prof thinks he is going to achieve this particular objective. Will he ban French wine producers from having websites? And will he also ban websites "promoting" restaurants and wine museums that belong to wineries? Will he ban winery owners from having their own websites and blogs, or will he simply censor any mention of the evil alcohol from their contents? Will he take Chinese-style steps to block Gallic access to sites and blogs hosted on non-French servers? Will Twitter and Facebook be similarly censored? And will website addresses and QR Codes be banned from labels?

There is an online petition to combat the Reynaud plans, and you may feel you'd like to sign it. https://www.change.org/fr/p%C3%A9titions/sauvons-le-droit-d-expression-de-nos-vignerons On the other hand you may prefer to simply watch it wither and die...

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*King Canute - or Cnut - is the 10th century king who is said - probably erroneously - to have tried to hold back the waves. Prof Reynaud is a psychiatrist and head of the dept of psychiatry and addiction at the Paul Brousse University-Hospital. 

worst wine ad?

Is this the worst wine ad you've seen in a while - from a June 2013 Portuguese wine magazine? Or can you offer something worse?

Twitter's new baby - Vine - and a novel way to promote (or explain) wine

If you haven't seen it, you might be interested to see this brief presentation on how to use Twitter's new baby - Vine - to market wine.

The hashtag #wineonvine was too good to miss

No country for old wines: how Robert Parker & the "natural" wine movement are threatening the wine world

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Okay... Today's tricky wine question is:

What does Robert Parker have in common with the "natural" wine movement?

Until about five minutes ago, I'd have found this a really tough one to handle, but now I have an answer whose implications have begun to rattle around in my brain.

Over the last three decades, the sage of Monkton, in common with other US critics, has been accused of fostering the market for, and the production of, ripe (some would say over-ripe), sweetly vanilla-oaky and alcoholic, immediately-appealing, young wine. Many of today's generation of wine drinkers have rarely if ever experienced older bottles and do not like it much when they do so. I can think of several tastings and dinners I have run at which the majority of people present greatly preferred vintages such as the 2005 and 2000 to the 1982 and 1990. Where, they asked, was the fruit in those older wines? It is hardly coincidental that recent vintages command higher prices than old ones.

Now, at first sight, the fans of "natural", low-SO2 wines seem unlikely bedfellows for Parker, Suckling et al. After all, they would rather go thirsty than drink some of the latter group's 100-point young Napa Cabs. But the naturalistas, in their own way represent even more of a challenge to those of us who, at least occasionally, relish the flavour of wine that's 20 or 30 years old. (And I'm not necessarily talking about great wine here).

Sympathy for the devil. A few words on behalf of sulphur dioxide.

Louis Pasteur - the increasingly forgotten
man of the modern wine industry

"And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)

"And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

New International Version (©2011)

I am indebted to biblehub.com for providing these two versions of Revelations 20:10. They are very similar - apart from the notable replacement of "fire and brimstone" with "sulfur". It may be coincidental, but the use of the chemical rather than the poetic name quite vividly illustrates the way that sulphur (to use the English spelling) has been increasingly demonised in recent years. 

For a very distinguished Spaniard I met a few weeks ago, sulphur dioxide was responsible for what he evidently believed to be the recent decline of Spanish wine. Until 1978, he said, no-one in Spain used the chemical. 

Answering him felt a little like telling a sophisticated adult that the world was not, in fact, flat. Sulphur dioxide has been used by winemakers for a very long time. The Romans burned sulphor to clean the interiors of their amphora and as a preventative against the bacteria that would turn wine to vinegar. That practice almost certainly continued over the centuries, and it was given the royal seal of approval in 1487 by the King of Prussia around 125 years before the publication of the King James Bible.

In 1864 Louis Pasteur proved that micro-organisms were responsible for both fermentation and a wide range of spoilage. Dairies across the globe learned valuable lessons from Pasteur about desirable and undesirable micro-organisms, and brewers learned how to get positive results for particular beer styles by careful management of potentially negative organisms such as Enteric bacteria, Kloeckera apiculata, Lactic acid bacteria and Brettanomyces.

But the message took a long time to penetrate much of the wine industry. Over the years, I have visited wineries in which hygiene was quite obviously a very foreign concept. When the "flying winemakers" first went into European wineries on behalf of UK and US buyers, they often said that much of what they had to do involved simply focusing on cleanliness and grape ripeness. These were the "good old days" before "industrial" winemaking allegedly introduced "blandness" to European wine. 

I can look back at that time without the use of rose-tinted glasses. I remember cooperatives scheduling harvest delivery dates on the basis of their members' names. Alberto Aranjuez would pick his grapes on September 1st while his neighbour  Ziggy Zenovia would have to wait until the 14th. Irrespective of the maturity of either of their crops. Growers who arrived with their grapes at noon would see them oxidize in the midday sun as the winery downed tools for lunch. Work also stopped at weekends. One flying winemaker reported having to break into the bodega where he was overseeing the fermentation of wine for a British supermarket. "They wouldn't give me a key and I wasn't going to leave my vats to their own devices for 48 hours".

Cleanliness was often rudimentary. I met another Australian who was working at a cooperative in south west France during a particularly tricky harvest. Relations with the directeur were not good, he explained. There had been an argument over the need to rinse the hoses, with the co-op boss claiming that "the wine washes them; there's no need to do it with water". To prove his point, the Aussie had found a dead rat ("there were plenty of those") and quietly stuffed it into the end of one of the hoses just before leaving the winery for the night. Next morning, he persuaded the directeur to check the hoses with him and, naturally, "when he picked one up, the rat fell out, straight onto his face".

Most wineries now are far more conscious of the need for hygiene, but the science still seems to be fairly rudimentary, at least when set against other beverages. It is not so long ago that I was given a French Syrah to taste by its producer. What do you think of it? he asked. It's good, but a bit reduced, I responded. Affronted, the grower, said "Non! Il renarde un peu, c'est tout", If you're not familiar with the French verb renarder, nor was I because it fails to feature in my dictionary. I think it means "to fox" or "be like a fox". I know about winery cats, but I 'm still unclear over how foxes fit into Gallic vinification methodology.

Most winemakers seem to know far less about brettanomyces than their beer-making counterparts and, given the nonsense that is talked about the irreplaceability of natural corks, remarkably few appear to be aware that modern closures - Nomacorc, Diam and screwcaps - all now offer controlled versions of the uncontrollable oxygen ingress traditionally associated with bits of cork bark. Wine professionals bang on about "minerality" but as this Wine-Searcher piece illustrates, there is little scientific support for the term having anything to do with the soil in which the grapes are grown. Jamie Goode revealed in a fascinating blog post that the smoky/gunflint "pierre-à-fusil aromas positively associated with some French wines is actually caused by the presence of a sulphur compound called benzenemethanethiol

Which brings me back to that old devil, sulphur - and the drive towards producing wine with little or no SO2. My comments about "natural" wines in previous posts and elsewhere has - quite reasonably, if not entirely accurately - given me a reputation as something of an enemy of that movement, and a sulphorphile. My argument is actually against the term "natural", the holier-than-thou attitude of too many of its supporters, and, most firmly, the sheer amateurishness of much of the winemaking, and the faults that this unsurprisingly engenders.

Believe it or not, I actually welcome the reduction of additives in wine - and would be delighted to see ingredient labelling, as pioneered by the Co-Op chain in the UK and by Ridge Vineyards in the US. Having been very impressed by the quality and reliability of Gerard Bertrand's Naturae range of Zero-SO2 wines, I'm even looking at producing an unsulphured version of our Greener Planet wine this year.

Like Bertrand, and some of the best Zero-SO2 "organic" producers in the US, we're not, however, going to do that without taking a very careful look at how we are going to end up with a wine that is stable and reliable. Like Betrand too, we'll print a "best-before" date on the label, allowing two years or so of cellaring. 

On the other hand, would I consider omitting the brimstone from a premium wine that might benefit from a decade or so of patience before being opened? No way. The finest wines I have ever drunk have all owed their survival over decades to SO2. When I raised the issue of longevity with "natural" wine fan Alice Feiring, she replied "who cares" and directed me to old bottles of Chateau Musar. Having just sampled a cloudy, volatile 2000 Musar, all I'll say is that I can think of a long list of other 2000s I'd rather drink.

But 2000 is a long time ago. As Doug Wregg, director of sales and marketing, of UK distributor Les Caves de Pyrene, and one of the strongest leaders of the "natural" movement was quoted as saying in the drinks business. "60-80% of natural wine should be drunk within the first year, after that they fall apart... Most of the wines are light, pale, fizzy and fun. They’re meant for wine bars rather than cellars... It’s a miracle when something lovely happens in the bottle a few years down the line, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it”. Neither his, nor mine.

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For anyone interested in knowing what we will be looking to avoid in our unsulphured wine may be interested in this, from an article in Wynboer by Heidi Schoeman of SunBio, Institute for Wine Biotechnology, Stellenbosch University

Uncontrolled microbial growth during and after the fermentation of wine can change the chemical composition and ultimately the quality of the end-product. Strains of lactic acid and acetic acid bacteria are usually involved in wine spoilage and can lead to ropiness, volatile acidity, acrolein formation and bitterness, tartaric acid degradation and geranium off-flavour (Du Toit and Pretorius, 2000). Certain strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) can also produce biogenic amines and ethyl carbamate precursors. Despite the significance of LAB in malolactic fermentation, it is important to control the presence of naturally occurring LAB in a winemaking environment. 

The Natural Wine Debate revisited

My two posts on "natural" wine have sparked some responses, so I thought it might be worth posting my - deliberately provocative: it was a "debate" after all - presentation at last November's EWBC, together with comments from my fellow panelists Virgile Joly, Jamie Goode and Maurizio Ugliano and from audience members like Alder Yarrow, Blake Gray and Arnold Waldstein.

And for those who feel up to it, here's the full-length version, with all four presentations. 

Why are serious wine journalism and "natural" wines so incompatible?

My piece on the RAW Wine Fair has aroused a lot of interest and some good, thoughtful responses. Some of those responses have also illustrated the gulf that lies between what I think of as "journalism" - an attempt to cover the facts of a story - and the way of thinking of some "natural" wine fans. To put the story in a nutshell, I wrote that I had found the fair interesting and worth attending, that I had tasted some very good wines, and had found some that were - in my opinion, and that of others who were there - horribly faulty.

Several respondents objected to my focusing on the faulty wines rather than the good ones, preferring Simon Woolf's approach - on Timatkin.com - which was to talk almost exclusively about the wines he enjoyed 

Woolf admits to having "skipped most of France" at RAW despite - or perhaps because of - having  "tasted more French "natural" wines that I have intensely disliked, than in most other countries"

  

This meant that Woolf sidestepped over 50 of the 180 producers present at RAW, but even so, he he still encountered some questionable bottles:

" Inevitably, with so much diversity and experimentation not everything was successful. There were wines being shown that I found challenging, if not downright faulty. But they were in the minority"

But that was as much of a mention as the "challenging" wines received. Applause for this strategy came from the US blogger - and "natural-wine" fan, Arnold Waldstein:

-Focusing on the positive and what you found interesting is so much more interesting and valuable than being polarizing, which while it affords the great writer the opportunity to exercise word smarts is really boring as it accentuates the negative. Who cares about people [sic] don't like really."

Unlike Mr Waldstein, I for one, certainly care about what critics - restaurant, movie, theatre, literary and wine critics - don't like. I find little interest in a critical column that simply includes recommendations without any context.

Would Mr Waldstein apply the same logic to literary and movie criticism? If there was a movie that included some very good parts as well as some horribly unpleasant scenes of gratuitous violence, would a critic be wrong in drawing attention to the latter as well as the former? Should a restaurant critic skim over the badly cooked vegetables and stale prawns in a review of a restaurant that serves great steak?

If Simon Woolf as a fan of "natural-wine" found some wines "challenging, if not downright faulty", doesn't he have a responsibility to offer some kind of warning about these to his readers, many of whom might be less prepared for the "challenges" they are going to encounter?

Like Woolf, I applaud any wine producer who wants to try to do something different, but unlike him, I see no reason to turn a blind eye to the experimenter's failures - especially when I find them, in Woolf's own words, "intensely dislikable".

Double-Faults: How the RAW Wine Fair took me back in time.

It's not often that you get the chance to travel backwards or forward in time, so I'm still in a state of some shock at the 30-year leap into the past that I took on the first of the two days of the third RAW wine fair, London's annual gathering of "natural", low- and non-sulphored and low-intervention wines. Back in the 1980s, most wine tastings I attended were minefields in which a line-up of bottles would usually include some that were delicious and several that were more or less disgusting. When Charles Metcalfe and I ran the earliest International Wine Challenges (IWC), we came up with shorthand terms for these efforts. These included NTBTI - Not To Be Taken Internally - and DNPIM - Do Not Put In Mouth and my favourite: AE - Auto Eject - which referred to wines that were so horrendous that they were automatically rejected by the human body.

Some of these unpalatable efforts were searingly acidic - brimming with acetic acid - while others smelled of rotten meat or horse manure. They were mostly the result of poor winemaking that had allowed the wine to be affected by some kind of bacteria.

By the mid 1990s, the cleanliness-conscious model set by New World wines and the efforts across the globe of young Australian and New Zealand "flying winemakers" had more or less relegated those faults to the past. Even the least successful wines in the IWC tended to taste dull rather than actively nasty.

The ascendency of "natural" wines - produced with as little human intervention as possible, and little or no sulphor dioxide, has, however, taken us back to the days of actively faulty wines, in much the same way that the decision by a generation of British mothers not to give their children MMR immunisation jabs has recently led to over 1200 cases of measles.

What's that got to do with the price of eggs?

A piece that first appeared on timatkin.com

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Once upon a time, in the little village of Arse-Ende-of-Knowhere, in the county of Generallydullbutlovelyinpartshire, there was an elderly farmer called McDonald whose hens laid unusually tasty eggs. These eggs were so good, in fact, that local well-informed chefs and gourmets sought them out. No-one could say precisely why Old McDonald’s eggs were so good. Some suggested that it was because of the cool weather in his bit of the valley. Others credited his particular breed of hens or the quality of his corn. And then there were those who said that it was simply to do with the loving care McDonald devoted to his flock, especially after the departure of Mrs McDonald with a handsome Japanese chicken sexer.

Whatever the explanation, it did not take long before McDonald’s neighbours - some of whose eggs were nearlyas good as McDonald’s - decided that they wanted a slice of the action. So, one day, a meeting was convened in the village hall and it was decided by common assent that Old McDonald’s and all of the other farms in the commune would all sell their eggs under the collective but slightly abbreviated “basket” name of Arse-Ende. Very soon, Farmers McDonald, McSporrin, McHaggis, MrTartan and McKilt were all offering eggs that bore the distinctive Arse-Ende logo over whose use they now had the monopoly.

Within a short while, however, they and a growing number of other Arse-Endeans realised that the world was still overly focused on McDonald’s eggs, so they decided to employ a specialist public relations professional called Al Bumin who was tasked with promoting the Arse-Ende basket generically and putting all the farms of Arse-Ende on the map and differentiating their eggs from ones produced elsewhere.