Screw vs Cork

Frustratingly, I recently opened a bottle of Le Grand Prebois Blanc, and it was faulty. Instead of smelling like peaches, almonds and marzipan, it smelt much like dirty wet socks. The surprising thing about this was: Le Grand Prebois Blanc is sealed by a screw cap, shouldn’t it be more immune to bottle faults?

Wines stoppered under screw caps will not be “corked”, that musty effect that occurs when chlorine, mould and cork meet to ruin an otherwise lovely beverage. Screw caps have their own, if less common, flaws. Because screw caps offer a tighter closure than cork, there is a greater chance of a wine being “reduced”, ie, not having enough oxygen in the bottle. A reduced wine can smell of cabbage or rubber, not great for enjoying!

That said, there have been enough studies now that seem to point to screw caps as a superior preservative of wine, both over time and as a resistance to shorter term faults (see Jamie Goode’s Wine Anorak site for more). On account of the newness of screw caps, we don’t have anything other than laboratory simulation of very long term bottle ageing under caps, though premium wine producers like Bonny Doon in California are optimistic and pleased with early results.

The largest complaints against screw caps seem to be customer perception, followed by adherence to tradition. Personally, I’d rather increase the chances that my wine comes without stopper fault, and to that end my preference must be for screw caps. In the least case, it is worth noting that, increasingly, screw caps are not necessarily a sign of a lower quality wine.

July’s 3 Most Interesting Wine Stories

As August 2010 launches into our lives, I thought it worth a little look back at July 2010. Here are what I reckon are the 3 most interesting wine stories for last month:

1. A Spanish ice wine was given official Denominacions (DO) status for the first time ever. This is particularly scandalous because it is the first European ice wine to allow artificial freezing of grapes. The traditional ice wine regions – Germany, Austria and Canada – only allow natural freezing of grapes on the vines. As you may guess, artisan & vine will be boycotting artificied Spanish ice wine.

2. Automated wine dispensers launched in the US. Brilliant. A vending machine for wine in a supermarket. You need to insert an age ID card and pass the breathalyzer installed on the machine then push a button.

3. Momentum grows for “Vins de France”, an alternative to the arguably outdated French appellation controllee (AOC) system. Vins de France will allow wines to be blended across regions for “more consistent” flavours. The wines will be labelled by grape variety, to compete with New World wines. This is the opposite of creating wines with a sense of place; register Boycott #2 for artisan & vine this month.

Image: amidst news stories and innovations, wine at it's best continues to originate from simple, healthy grape vines.

Natural wine definition

It’s occurred to me today that this is probably the only Natural wine blog site without a natural wine definition. This is partly because I find definitional debates, in general, too often rooted in pedantics and anecdotes when life seems to me to exist more organically in the realm of principle.

That said, as the home of London (indeed the UK's) first natural wine bar and shop, I feel obliged to define what exactly that means, at least my interpretation of it, which we are entirely transparent about thoughout our wine list and website.

At artisan & vine, all of our wines are either local (English) wines or natural (only the Davenport wines are both). “Natural wines” are not yet legally defined within the EU.

HERE'S MY SINGLE SENTENCE TAKE ON THE NATURAL WINE DEFINITION:

At artisan & vine, a natural wine is one made in a biodynamically or organically farmed vineyard, with indigenous (wild) yeasts, and minimal or no added sulphites or flavour enhancers.

The principle is to make wines that demonstrate a clear Sense of Place. They taste like they come from somewhere rather than something.

Why are organic wines not enough? Organic wines are not what they seem. Within the EU, a certified “organic wine” only guarantees you organically grown grapes; the winemaker may add flavours (such as wood chips or caramel), stabilisers (such as sulphur dioxide), and preservatives during the wine making production. This is how mass produced cheaper wines can be created.

Natural wines are wines created with minimal intervention from the wine maker. Natural wine making requires the artisan to carefully attend to all steps of the growing, fermenting, and blending processes, knowing that additives cannot be used to correct the imperfections of nature. As Tim Atkin MW concluded in his May 2010 article in The Times, “Natural wines are the opposite of mass-produced wines, of “spoofulated”, personality-free beverages that could come from almost anywhere. These are hand-crafted products”. Often this makes natural wines commercially unviable on a mass, low cost scale. Vintages can vary significantly from year to year based on climate conditions, and personal attention means very low yielding vineyards. I reckon you’ll taste this difference.

Image: Pierre Breton's fantastically healthy natural vineyards in Bourgueil, Loire Valley.

Wine serving temperatures

The final onset of Summer seems to me a very good time to talk about the temperature at which wines should be served.

Let’s start with talking about why it makes a difference to serve wine at the right temperature and why the right temperature is different for different wines.

1. Our sense of smell operates on the perception of vapours. Red wines generally have a higher molecular weight than white wines, and so they need warmer temperatures for their aromatic vapours to be released. In general, the darker the colour of a wine, the heavier its weight, and the warmer it should be served.

2. Our perception of tannins are effected by temperature too. In general, the colder a wine is served, the more its tannins will be exposed; the warmer a wine is served, the softer its tannins may be perceived. For mature, soft tannins like those present in a Burgundian Pinot Noir, serving wine a little colder will show off the fabulously refined tannins better than ‘smoothing them over’ with warm serving temperature.

3. Sweeter wines are generally served better cold. The coldness emphasises the acidity, which is needed to balance the sweetness in the wine for freshness rather than syrupy-ness.

So what is the summation?

Sweet wines should be served between 4 and 7 degrees Celsius. Dry whites between 6 and 11. Very fine white wines (best Burgundy, German, Australian and Californian whites) between 10 an 12 degrees Celsius. Light reds should be served between 10 and 14 degrees. Heavier reds should be served between 14 and 18 degrees.

Now, if you get an ice bucket with your red wine this summer: you’ll know why!

Image: glasses lined up and ready to be drunk at artisan & vine

How to (finally!) taste wine

This is Part Three of a Three Part series on how to taste wine. There are three elements to tasting wine: seeing, smelling and tasting. Counterintuitive but true. Today I’m finally going to address what happens when wine is in your mouth.

Take a swig and swish.

Five main things we’re looking for:

1. Tannins. Tannins come from the grape skins or barrels that wines are fermented or aged in. You can assess how tannic a wine is by how it dries your mouth. Think of that sensation you get when you leave your tea bag in tea for too long – that is too much tannin.

2. Acidity. Acidity sounds bad. Interpret it as “freshness”. You can assess the acidity in a wine by how your mouth waters. Now you start to build a picture: a balanced wine is one where the refreshing acidity of the wine balances the drying tannins in a wine.

3. Alcohol. In a good wine, you shouldn’t taste or smell alcohol. The flavour and aroma molecules in the wine should be more prevalent than the alcohol molecules. A wine that is too alcoholic can be detected by that burning feeling at the entrance to your throat.

4. Sweetness & bitterness both take a little more practice to detect. Your best guide is that if you feel you detect too much of either: it’s probably not a great wine.

5. Length. Length is one of the most reliable indicators of a quality wine. How long does the taste of the wine stay in your mouth? The longer the better.

Image: this time last year I was tasting wine with Alain Chabanon at his domaine in Languedoc. We’re stocking his rose this Spring – it’s a real winner!

How to taste (smell) wine

This is Part Two of a Three Part series on how to taste wine. There are three elements to tasting wine: seeing, smelling and tasting. Counterintuitive but true. Today I'm addressing how to assess a wine’s nose (how it smells).

You’ve probably already consumed whatever wine you were working with yesterday, so, we start again: First, pour a small amount of wine into the glass – around 50 – 75mls, or a quarter full. This is not pretentious custom. We need room in the glass for swivelling (aeration), and also so that we can keep precious aroma molecules in the glass.

Before we swivel, take a sniff of the wine fresh poured. Older wines are unlikely to give off too much aroma without agitation. Ironically, more mass produced wines are likely to give an intense aroma from the outset. After your first sniff, swivel the glass. The aim is to let air into the wine and aromas out. Swivel for a few seconds and take another sniff. The character of the wine should now start to show itself.

The aroma of a wine is a strong indicator of the flavour to follow. Becoming familiar with the aromas and flavours you enjoy most, and being able to describe them, will help you select more wines you enjoy in future. Do you smell more fruit or more oak? Is the smell apparent with one sniff or do you need to concentrate to pick up aromas? Neither end of these spectrums is necessarily a sign of quality: you’re trying to get in tune with your preferences.

Here is a sign of quality we get from aroma: how does the aroma change as you work your way through a bottle? Excellent wines will evolve once opened and often the aroma becomes stronger or more interesting with time. Un-excellent wines (a technical term :) ) will loose flashy fragrances after opening. It’s an indicator of how well integrated flavour and aroma molecules are.

Image: large oak barrels, like the ones I’m shown at Comte Lafon in Burgundy, enrich the fruit aromas within the chardonnay; there is no need to mask inferior fruit with distracting oak

How to taste (see) wine

Given that I just spent the best part of the last week tasting tasting tasting in the Loire Valley (stories from that to follow!)… I thought it was a good topic to get into for this week’s Wine Facts. (less a fact than a tip but I know you’ll grant me that leeway).

There are three elements to tasting wine: seeing, smelling and tasting. Counterintuitive but true. Today I’m going to address assessing a wine’s appearance; we’ll cover nose and palate over the next days blog entries.

Firstly, pour a small amount of wine into the glass – around 50 – 75mls, or a quarter full. This is not pretentious custom. We need room in the glass for swivelling (aeration), and also so that we can keep precious aroma molecules in the glass.

Under normal circumstances, you will know the grape, region and vintage of the wine you’re drinking. That all the case, there are wines who lose their fruit quickly (age fast) or show characteristics atypical of their region or grape. We can judge some of these elements by sight.

Look at the colour of your wine: white wine becomes deeper with age; red wine becomes paler. All wines become browner with age. When you tilt your wine glass at an angle, older reds will be almost completely transparent at the rim: it’s not a lack of quality… it’s just age J Depth of colour – in red or white wine – will indicate how thick the skins of the grapes were and/or how long the grape juices were left in contact with their skins during maceration.

When your glass is tilted to the side: wines with a single, consistent colour gradient, are general “drink now” wines that are unlikely to evolve. Wines with a glossy appearance and subtle gradations in the wine colour are superstars – you must be drinking an artisan & vine wine J

Image: last July I tasted Catherine Massioneuve’s outstanding Cahor Malbecs across vintages and cuvees. The rich berry darkness of the wines a certain indicator of the rich flavours and aging potential.

Wine Facts: How Wine Ages

Not all wine improves with age. Some wine is more alcoholic vinegar than wine within years of bottling. How can you know which wines will improve with age and which will collapse?

In general, wines that are designed to be enjoyed for freshness and youthful fruitiness should be drunk young. Include within this category most white and rose wines and any lighter style reds, Beaujolais for example. These are wines whose fresh fruit flavours are likely to die within 2-4 years of bottling and which do not have the tannins or structure within the bottle to develop further.

Wines that taste better with aging are wines where a more complex combination of acids, sugars, minerals, pigments, tannins and flavour compounds need longer to integrate. High quality reds and whites will fall into this category.

As a general - if crude - rule, the more expensive a wine is, the more likely it is to improve with age.

The unlucky truth is that even the wine maker cannot know when exactly is the best time to drink any one wine. The best we can do is ask the person selling us a wine; they should know the story of a given wine in their shop and should taste it regularly enough to know it’s current condition.

Image: I asked Olivier from Domaine D’Arlot in Burgundy when I should drink some of his aging Pinot Noirs. He told me to call him when I was ready to open the bottle and he would let me know if it was ok or not. It’s all that exact :)

Wine Facts: How Wine is Made

As you’re reading this blog, you are probably already aware that there are a lot of variations in the important little steps to how a wine is made. This little article is aimed at giving you a summary of the key steps in making wine. By analogy, this guide is like saying the way to get from London to Edinburgh is to go North; options of train vs car vs stopovers vs B-roads vs etc etc are the sorts of “details” we’re skimming over.

The overview remains of import: there’s a lot to be said for knowing which way is North! The steps:

1. Grapes are picked and collected.

2. For white wines, the grapes are pressed so that the skins are left behind and just the grape juice ferments. For red wines, the grapes are left with their skin on to ferment, and then after the colour and flavours have been extracted, the red grapes are pressed to leave behind skin. (Fermentation is the process by which sugars in the grape are converted to alcohol).

3. Wines – whether red or white – may be aged in some kind of holding device – a bottle, a barrel, a tank. Wines can be aged for months or years or not at all.

4. Wines are bottled and labeled for distribution and sale.
Seems as simple as travelling North… the art is navigating the traffic jams, road works and then optimising lovely scenery and local peculiarities along the way!

Image: renowned winemaker Matthieu Cosse shows me some of the incredible new infrastructure they have in place at Domain La Coste in Provence where they are refining the science of natural wine making.

Wine facts: a Year in the Vineyard

How do you know if what you’re buying is a good or bad vintage? What does that even mean? It’s about what happens in the life of a vineyard in a given year. For example, in 2009, it was a relatively long, mild Summer, that means a long, healthy grape growing season, a good vintage!

Knowing what happens in a Year in the Vineyard helps us to understand what creates a good or bad vintage. Here’s the shortform:

Jan – Feb: the vine grower prunes vines to concentrate nutrients toward the grapes rather than leaf production

Mar: ploughing the soil to control weeds and improve soil health

Apr – Jul: more pruning, positioning vines on their trellises for optimum sun exposure, frost and pest mitigation efforts.

Aug – Sep: harvest! Deciding exactly when to pick is critical, too early will make too acidic wines, too late will make too sweet wines.

Oct: fermentation of grapes in the winery. Decisions about ageing and blending must be made.

Nov – Dec: tasting the young wine continues, ensuring whatever wine making path is chosen: oak ageing, early bottling, blending between grapes; is on track for a winning wine!

Image: superstar winemaker Henri Milan shows me around his delightfully colourful winery in early Sept 2009.

Wine Facts: a Brief History of Wine

Every week I'm posting some Wine Facts, you can find them in this blog under the "Wine Facts" tag. This week: you need to know where you've been to know where you might go!

Pre-history through to Ancient Rome
Evidence of wine making and drinking emerges as early as ancient Babylon (3000BC) and Egypt (some sophisticated relics from 1900BC). Wine moves its way up to the Mediterranean with the Phoenicians in 1100BC and exists as a hallmark of Greek social life and culture throughout antiquity. Ancient Rome sees the first documentation of vintages and ageing with the legendary “Opimian”, of 121BC vintage, being drunk 125 years later!

The Middle Ages through to the 18th Century
The Middle Ages saw the emergence of the Church and monastical wine making. The one commercial exception to the Church’s vineyard domination was Bordeaux, with its market focused wine production for France and England. Bordeaux sets a precedent for the wine world of the future.
The wine industry grew and prospered in Europe up until the 17th century as it was the only safe and storable beverage of the time. Water and ale were largely unsafe and spirits and caffeinated drinks did not yet exist.
In the 17th century the European world opened to the Americas and Asia. This brought tea, coffee and chocolate. The Dutch developed spirits and hops were added to ale to make much more stable beer. As a reaction to these new competitive drinks, wine moved from being a necessity beverage to a prestige drink. The quality of wine improved greatly and by the 18th century, Europe had established many of its most successful quality wine regions and techniques.

The 20th Century
The 20th century saw science and industrialisation provide the basis for mass production and global distribution of wine. Hiccups around various Prohibition campaigns, a couple of world wars and more dangerous to the vine world – a lethal outbreak of the now infamous vine pest phylloxera – dented production levels from time to time, but the wine world had already proved itself hardy and continued to improve.

Today

It’s easy to get editorial on the state of the wine world today. Clearly, globalisation and the artificial tricks to producing wine for epic journeys and immediate supermarket stocking have taken their tolls on what was an artisanal product. Though, there is hope. Naturally, this brief account of the History of Wine must conclude with the spectacularly historic opening of London’s first wine bar to specialise in Local and Natural wines: artisan & vine. It says a lot for the luxury of our age that we have so many different wines and specialist wine bars to choose from.

Image: of course the Egyptians were at it.

Wine Facts: Top 10 Wine Producing Countries

Unable to share enough wine facts during our normal opening hours, we’ve decided to go “e” with the fact disbursement. Every week we’re going to include a mini-feature on interesting wine facts. You'll be able to find them all under the tag "Wine Facts" within this blog.

To kick off: the big picture – where wine is made and how much is being made. The following table lists the world’s 10 biggest wine producing countries, plus our beloved UK’s wine production*. By way of conversion, the UK’s production was nearly 2 million bottles.

1 France 51,700
2 Italy 49,631
3 Spain 38,173
4 USA 23,579
5 Argentina 15,400
6 Australia 14,260
7 China 11,800
8 South Africa 9,400
9 Germany 8,995
10 Chile 8,450
59 United Kingdom 14

Of the top ten wine producing countries, all have grown in production volumes since 1996 except the Old World superstars: France, Italy and Germany. Spain has hardly had a steady ride over the 10 year period either, with (relatively) widely fluctuating annual production figures. The most aggressive production growth in the top ten comes from, little surprise, Australia, which almost doubled its production in the last ten years.

The surprises? Did you know that China would be in the Top 10? Or that Argentina produces more than Australia?

* Source: The Wine Institute World Wine Production By Country, Trade Data And Analysis (TDA), volume figures are given in thousands of Hectoliters based on 2006 production.