Info Mine - Sherry

The Wine Mine Blagging Toolkit - 5 wine nuggets with which to impress your friends...

1. Sherry comes from the area around the Andalucian towns of Jerez and Sanlucar de Barrameda. Its name is an anglicanised version of Jerez (the original Arabic name of which was Sherish).

2. The British love of sherry dates back to Sir Francis Drake's sacking of Cadiz in 1587, following which he brought back nearly 3,000 barrels of sherry which had been waiting to be loaded onto Spanish ships. Many sherry producers were founded by British families and, despite declining popularity in recent years, the UK remains the largest export market for sherry.

3. Palomino is by far the most prevalent grape variety in sherry production and is used in the dry, clear sherries, Fino and Manzanilla. The other two important sherry grapes are Pedro Ximenez (also known as PX) and Moscatel. These latter two varietals can be used to make sweet sherries.

4. Following harvesting and pressing in early September, the Palomino grapes are left to ferment in stainless steel until late November. The resulting dry white wine (about 11% abv) is then fortified using destillado. The destillado is a 50:50 mixture of distilled white wine and older sherry. This fortified wine is then stored in American oak casks and aged in the solera system, which involves moving portions of the wine down through a series of barrels, for at least 3 years (see photo). The age of a sherry is given as the age of the youngest component part in the final blend.

5. In bottle, sherry will not develop further, although it can keep for ages without deteriorating. Once opened however, it will oxidise, especially at the lighter end of the spectrum (Fino and Manzanilla). So drink it quickly!

See the official sherry site here.

See a later - and more complete - post on sherry here.

Wine duty up again

Chancellor Alistair Darling has put UK alcohol excise duty up for the the second time this year, raising the duty component on a bottle of still wine to £1.58. This represents a further increase of 8% in a year which has already seen record duty increases in April's annual Budget.

Whereas the cost of a bottle of wine would have been brought down by the recent VAT rate cut, it has now gone up overall due to this duty rise. Exactly what the Chancellor is trying to achieve with all this is unclear. Is there method in his madness?

Anyone for Beaujolais Nouveau?

First published on Harpers' TalkingDrinks website as Life of a Salesman: anyone for Beaujolais Nouveau? Click here for the original article.

As I write this, the wine bar across the street is doing a Beaujolais Nouveau Day breakfast, complete with red, white and blue bunting and a blackboard shouting Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivée! Despite a steady decline in popularity since its heyday in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Beaujolais breakfast is a wine world idiosyncrasy that refuses to die, blithely rooted in a time when blackberries were fruit and latte was Italian for milk.

This year’s Beaujolais Nouveau harvest was apparently the worst since 1975, but that did not stop the traditional French street parties and has not deterred the Japanese from opening a ‘Beaujolais Nouveau Spa’ (whatever that is).

The Beaujolais Run, a race to bring the first bottle of the new vintage back to London, was created in 1972 by Sunday Times journalist Allan Hall as a challenge to his readers. A sort of up-market booze cruise, it became an annual event, but it was never about the wine itself. Just as well, as ‘young red plonk’ is about as kind as a Beaujolais Nouveau tasting note can be with a straight face.

In search of inspiration for this week’s instalment, I abandoned France for Germany and tried the Dr Loosen Riesling Spätlese 2007, a good low-alcohol option (8% abv), although with a fair bit of residual sugar. The Dr Loosen sales blurb informs us that a great wine requires a “fiercely held philosophy” and that it “begins in your head” (I thought that was where it ended up if you drank too much).

All of which confused me so I headed back to the motherland - for all their philosophising in other areas of life, the French are reassuringly no-nonsense when it comes to winemaking. At the other end of the alcohol spectrum, the J. L. Chave Mon Coeur Cotes du Rhone 2003 had great fruit concentration and zingy acidity, but at 14% was a bit hot. Chateau de Beaucastel Châteauneuf du Pape 2003 was my favourite of the week - a big, spicy nose, dark cherries, pepper and bitter chocolate on the palate and a lovely long finish. Less fanfare than the Beaujolais but a lot more substance.

Info Mine - Yeast

The Wine Mine Blagging Toolkit - 5 wine nuggets with which to impress your friends...

1. The job of yeasts in wine production is to metabolise carbohydrates - that's "turn sugar into alcohol" to you and me. So yeasts are the agents of fermentation.

2. Although the primary purpose of yeasts is fermentation, they can also impart certain flavours to the wine, especially as lees (see 3 below).

3. Once the fermentation gets to about 18% abv, the yeasts die, turning into lees - dead yeast cells. Lees can also be produced (i.e. yeast can die) due to lack of sugar and nutrients. Wines which remain in contact with their lees for a substantial amount of time have a richer, creamier texture and biscuity/bready flavours (they are sometimes called sur lie wines). This is an established technique used in champagne production. Other examples include some white burgundies and some Galician wines.

4. Following lees contact, wines will be cloudy with suspended particles. There are various ways of clarifying the wine, including filtering, racking (allowing the dead yeast cells to sink to the bottom of the tank, then gently pouring the clear wine off) and fining (adding substances which attract solid particles and proteins - traditionally egg whites and ox blood, but also bentonite and synthetic chemicals).

5. In new fermentation vats/wineries, yeasts may have to be added to the must (fermenting grape juice) to kick-start fermentation. In older set-ups there will be enough yeast in the atmosphere for this process to start of its own accord.

(For yeast in sherry making, see post on flor.)

Life of a Salesman

First published on Harpers' TalkingDrinks website on 17 November 2008 - see here.

"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."

With these words Alec Baldwin's character scares the life out of his sales force in the classic 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross. Forget performance-related bonuses and share options, this is one way to incentivise your employees that gets the message across.

Things may not be quite this bad for the UK's wine salesmen and women but it's instructive to watch how the current economic doom makes us sit up and pay attention. It was all mildly entertaining when it was about bankers leaving Canary Wharf with cardboard boxes and stunned expressions, but now the crunch has turned into a crisis/catastrophe/cataclysm and threatens our pockets and - shock horror - our jobs, it is no longer a laughing matter.

The idea of this weekly blog is to give a personal view of the wonderful world of wine, mixing in some news and observations in what I hope will be a coherent way. I'll try not to go on about the credit crunch too much - I think I speak for us all when I say it makes for rather depressing reading.

Starting with something a bit more upbeat then, last week's big trade tasting was the Farr Vintners 2008 Christmas Tasting at Vintner's Hall. On show were Krug's and Dom Perignon's rosés - both good but do they really deserve their enormous price tags? The Domaine de Chevalier Blanc 2002, billed by Farr as "Bordeaux's answer to Grand Cru white Burgundy", was a fantastic example of the top class whites that Bordeaux can produce. The Clos du Marquis 2000, the second wine of Leoville Las Cases, promised great things (it has been described by Robert Parker as "one of the great sleepers of the vintage"). Of the Vins Doux Naturels, the 1956 Rivesaltes (Cave de Rivesaltes) was the pick of the bunch and remains surprisingly fresh.

Wine Cartoons

Many thanks to John for sending me these great cartoons, illustrating the post on wine and dementia on 6 November.

Flavonoids found in red wine may help to prevent obesity, as they improve the body's ability to break down sugar...

...antioxidants in red wine may combat the harmful effect of dangerous free radicals...

Info Mine - Acidity

The Wine Mine Blagging Toolkit - 5 wine nuggets with which to impress your friends...

1. Acidity is necessary to counterbalance the sweetness in wine. Without it, wines may taste cloying and sickly sweet.

2. It can be detected by a sensation of crispness in the mouth, particularly along the sides of the tongue. After spitting/swallowing the wine, if you leave your mouth open, the speed with which it fills with saliva is an indicator of the level of acidity of the wine.

3. Wines from cooler regions (Northern France, England, New Zealand) tend to have higher acidity. By contrast, some Australian wines are so low in natural acid that they have to be artificially acidified.

4. The level of acidity is measured on the pH scale, with most wines having a pH of between 2.9 and 3.9.

5. The most common acids in wine are tartaric, malic and lactic acid. Tartaric acid has the most direct bearing on the structure and taste of the wine. Malic acid is found in green fruits such as apples and is present in higher proportions in cold climate wines. Lactic acid is milder and produces milky textures in wine. It is produced by lactic acid bacteria, which convert malic acid and sugar into lactic acid, a process known as malolactic fermentation.

New Zealand wine exports at record high

Over $100 million of wine was shipped out of New Zealand in September, a new record in terms of both value and volume.

Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir continue to be New Zealand's best sellers. Trade body New Zealand Wine Growers claims demand remains high in key markets despite the economic downturn.

New Zealand's wine industry has set itself an export target of $1 billion a year by 2010.

Wine may protect against dementia

Published today on Decanter.com - click here to go to the webpage or click on the image below for a larger version.

Organic Shrinkage

Whole Foods Market, the American-owned Kensington organic temple, has lost £10m in its first year. Does this point to an underlying malaise in the controversial and seemingly unstoppable organic food revolution? Say what you will about the economic slump/recession/catastrophe, but it seems to be engendering some much-needed consumer perspective. The principles of pesticide-free 'natural' food are unimpeachable. But what irks the organic movement's detractors is the culture of snobbishness and elitism that has grown up around it, resulting in what AA Gill calls "the sort of exploitative, chic pricing that is generally reserved for celebrity perfume". Whole Foods' company motto is "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet". The way the organic bandwagon has learnt to serve up its food with moral value is clever marketing, but is frankly bananas (see picture).

The vagueness of organic certification is also a sticking point. The Soil Association is the most respected organics body in the UK, but its blessing is not required in order to sell products as organic. In wine, stories are rife of organic vines growing right next door to non-organic vineyards and being polluted by their pesticides which freely waft over in the air and soak through in the soil. Biodynamics, sometimes branded as 'organic plus', has even less regulation.

Maybe a tightening of consumers' wallets will bring organics back into perspective and keep the focus on quality rather than smoke, mirrors and marketing.

Chilean wine boss dies

Ricardo Claro, chairman of Chilean wine empire Santa Rita, has died of a heart attack aged 74. Claro made his fortune in shipping and the media, before branching into wine with the acquisition of Santa Rita in 1980. A politically divisive figure, Claro has been labelled by some as one of the 'civilian generals' behind Pinochet's 1973 coup.

Politics notwithstanding, he will be remembered for his role in putting Chile on the international wine map. Click here for the El Mercurio obituary (Spanish).