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Proof

2010-01-25T17:35:00.009Z

The news is buzzing with alcohol advice.

The Tories want to make drink labelling clearer, getting rid of the ubiquitous 'unit' and bringing in the maths. The World Cancer Research Fund has advised that drinking lower alcohol wine (at around 10%) could reduce the risk of getting related cancers by 7%.

It is all a confusing muddle for us drinkers. For example why does a few percentage ABV's either way make so much difference to my intoxication and therefore health? We have all had that slightly 'other' mushy head feeling after drinking a small glass of 14.5% ABV wine, which just does not seem to happen with 12% ABV. Can 2.5% make all that difference? Do people even bother to look at the strength of wine, especially as the alcohol percentages on bottles are rendered in a small window of intervals making them seemingly meaningless anyway?

So lets try and work out some practical examples of inebriation and how it affects us.

I pour a 175 ml glass full of 12%ABV wine (perhaps a nice Beaujolais or German Riesling)

Down the hatch...well moderately over 20 mins.

First of all ABV means Alcohol by Volume. Which in turn means the amount of alcohol (ethanol) mixed up in the essentially skillfully flavoured water that is wine. So 12% of my glass of flavoured water (err wine I mean) is alcohol.

Next we are familiar with the term 'unit' of alcohol. It actually means 10ml of alcohol (the Tories propose changing the term 'unit' to centilitres of alcohol as one unit is 1cl)

So how does that relate to my glass of wine?

Well to work out how many millilitres of alcohol are in my glass is easy. 1 litre of wine at 12 % ABV contains 10 x 12 ml (always 10 x the ABV) of alcohol which makes 120ml. So my 175 ml glass contains 0.175 x 120 which is 21ml.

There we have it, 21 ml of alcohol in my glass of wine (2.1 units)

To put that into context a small carton of Ribena is about 200ml, so about a tenth of that, or indeed a third of a 65 ml Yakult, which you may well need the following morning. Basically a small slurp of pure ethanol.

Let go a bit further, into the human body.

In about 30 mins the 21 ml of alcohol will be in my blood. This is where measurements get confusing. The BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration) is measured in milligrams per 100 ml of blood. The quantity of alcohol that is in half of a Ribena carton sample of our blood (if I am not careful I may put you off Ribena for life). We need to get out our imaginary scales.

10ml of alcohol (1 unit) is 7.9 grams. So we divide our 21ml of alcohol by 10 and multiply by 7.9. This gives us 16.59 grams of alcohol coursing around our blood stream.

Roughly 10 grams of alcohol increases the BAC of an average person (whoever that is) by 20mg/100ml of blood.

So hey presto I have 16.59 grams in my blood, which equates to approx 33mg/100ml.

Finally.

Lets wait until all the alcohol has flushed from my system, at a less than impressive unwavering speed of 15mg/100ml blood per hour. So at least two hours of abstinence.

Now break open a 14.5% bottle of wine (perhaps a New World Pinot Noir or Old World Rhone) and pour into the same 175ml glass (obviously washing out the old wine dregs with water first as I do not claim to be a master blender)

Same calculation leaves us with 25.4 ml of alcohol in the glass which will lead to an 21% increase in the amount of alcohol in my blood compared to the 12% ABV wine.

This is 20.1 grams which equates to approx 40mg/100ml blood.

To fully see the implications of this difference from 10%ABV wine to 14.5% ABV wine, imagine we had two 175ml glasses of each at different times and compared -

2x 175ml glasses of 10% ABV wine = 35 ml of alcohol or 55mg/100ml blood
2x 175ml glasses of 12% ABV wine = 42ml of alcohol or 66mg/100ml blood
2 x175ml glasses of 14.5% ABV wine = 50.8 ml alcohol or 80mg/100ml blood

You can see the small ABV% difference has massively increased the BAC (Blood Alcohol Concentration for those of you that have had a drink to get you through the maths and cannot remember me expanding it before). You do not have to travel very far up the BAC scale to feel the effects of alcohol. Certainly at 50mg/100ml the word squiffy comes to mind, but I am a bit of a lightweight. Here is a good explanation of the progressive effects.

The drink drive limit in the UK is 80mg/100ml of blood, but I would not risk getting behind the wheel after two glasses of any wine.

If the Tories manage to get into power and make these labelling reforms, I hope they issue everyone with a comprehensive calculator. As I have demonstrated (I hope), it is a little complex to unravel.
It sounds like the World Cancer Research Fund has taken the stance that making people drink less is impossible, but changing the alcohol content and hopefully achieving the same thing is. I suppose there is a fine balance between 'other ' health benefits of drinking wine in moderation and the health risks. Of course we may just drink more to get round the lack of 'punch' if that is what we want from wine.

I am all for less alcoholic wines on the market. I am slightly fed up with the proliferation of big boozy bottles. We almost forget what wine is all about, the ethanol muddles up our heads before we can really appreciate it.

So what is 'proof' anyway?

18th century sailors who were paid in rum would 'proof' it by pouring the stuff on their gunpowder. If the gunpowder still burnt well then the rum was considered good enough as it was not too 'watered down' or 'under proof'.

Whereas I am keen on their being more variation of 'under proof' wine on the market, lets hope our choices are not all eventually too 'watered down', as where is the fun in that. Variety is the spice of life (much like a big Rhone).

You can't keep an old brand down

2010-01-08T13:03:00.008Z

A New Year and Threshers has risen from the dead. It will be saved along with Bottoms Up after the break up of First Quench. A miracle indeed. An interesting move by new owners SEP Properties. They plan to make Threshers the new Majestic online and franchise Bottoms Up as the brand replacement for off licences Threshers, Victoria Wine and The Local.

So the High Street will not look so bleak, but will at the same time retain the slightly dull homogeneity. There will appear to be less choice, where in fact there was originally only the branded illusion of choice.

Not the only New Year Lazarus, as we have seen another tired old brand just escaping a coup. Gordon Brown slipping like an eel from the grasp of conspirators in the Cabinet.

It certainly has been a lively start to 2010 (Happy New Year by the way).

The snow just keeps on coming, adding more coal to the fires of the global warming sceptics (governments that refuse to act through short-term self interest). By the way what exactly did we get from the climate change Copenhagen conference?...Nothing it would appear, well nothing 'legally binding'. At least Obama tried to salvage something I suppose.

Irrespective of that, things look bleak if you are to believe the latest science on natural methane emissions (like CO2 except 20 times worse). Scary stuff.

The reactionary nature of both media camps to the climate change argument is all about current 'weather' to aid their cause. It is worth remembering that the' inconvenient truth' is in the climate trends over several decades, not a flurry of snow in the winter.

So bearing in mind our unpredictable weather how did the UK do with its 2009 vintage?

If you look back to last years grape harvest in the UK, near perfect conditions (helped along by a longer warmer Autumn than usual) are just being reported to have produced an amazing vintage.

One of the 3 million odd bottles produced could be yours (if you are quick when they go on sale that is). It only equates to one bottle for every 20 of us in the UK. Hardly a glut. More like a drought. Not bad though for our very limited wine growing regions. If global warming takes hold these will be sure to increase, unless our small island is mostly under water with rising sea levels.

How do you now find this UK wine. Well apparently you do not....technology does it for you. 2009 saw an explosion in all sorts of wine related iPhone apps, from manually searching databases in the 'Cloud', to the recent Tesco label recognition app for those of you who (like me) do not like typing on a small screen.

The iPhone 'seeing' a label and pulling out wine notes for you is the practical tiny beginnings of what's know as AR or Augmented Reality, where technology blends into the real world. I incidentally consider myself a bit of an outcast with my Blackberry and its very limited app store. It is however in my opinion a far superior phone and 'email catcher'. I could buy an iPod Touch for apps, or maybe the wise thing is to save my cash until the Apple Slate is released

I could probably cope with the big keys on that screen.

So here we are at the beginning of a new decade, marking for me four whole years of wine blogging. I am still surprisingly clueless, and still find wine fascinating stuff. It is also still a major constant in my life, so I continue to feel obliged to scribble about it.

Wine Quango

2009-12-29T23:48:00.003Z

All I need is roughly one and a half pence from each and every one of 'you'. By 'you' I refer to all 60 million ish tax payers in the UK.

A quick fumble of figures and I make that around £870,000, which by happy coincidence happens to be the exact recent valuation of the government's wine cellar. This 'hospitality' cellar in Lancaster House off The Mall, consists of approx 40,000 bottles. More maths and you arrive at about £20 per bottle on average. Not only that but the value has increased by £85,000 in the last eight months mainly due to an additional 500 bottles added to the collection.

If those 500 bottles were the sole reason for the rise in value, that would make each new bottle worth about £170.

It all seems a bit ridiculous. You can find excellent wines for under £10, so even an average of £20 per bottle is extravagant in these so called times of 'austerity'. Maybe the wine 'experts' making these purchases need to apply real practical knowledge and not simply buy overpriced claret for effect.

My modest wine cellar still resides in a cupboard in my loo, and I have had to stock up massively for Christmas. I managed to purchase a few bottles of vintage Cava, and a selection of red and white wines, all amounting to about 30 very tightly packed bottles.

I had to turn off the vicious towel heater lest I cook it all.

The Cava somehow seems appropriate in the arena of the loo. The 'throne' is one of those swanky ones with a low sloping side. Some obsessives may even call it an accidental inspection shelf. Anyway the slope very much reminds me of a shipbuilders launch way, slowly and purposely delivering each new creation into the ocean, helped on its way with a bottle of sparkle.

Sorry, I digress.

I kept the average price to about £7.00 a bottle, with no one bottle over £10.00. I am still working through them (with lots of help) and will write some tasting notes. So far so good.

Note to government - I could be your one man 'wine quango', slashing your average price per bottle in half, keeping the tax payers a bit happier....

Snow Dome

2009-12-23T13:08:00.003Z

It has been snowing here.

Yes, the UK does seem to grind to a complete full stop at the slightest flake, so you can imagine the chaos an all night blizzard caused.

I needed to go out to get some provisions, so I put on my best Hunter wellies and made my way tentatively to the car. Oh dear, the car window was open just enough for the elements to take full advantage overnight. There were frozen lakes on the seats and a snow drift over the steering column. Throw in Father Christmas and I give you an instant snow dome on wheels. To add insult to injury the car would not move, iced into the drive. I was getting a headache trying to master the automatic handbrake and traction control. Cars used to be simple.

Back indoors.

So all I had left in my weekly muddy organic vegetable box (sometimes I am sure they post apply the mud to add authenticity) were some hairy beetroot and a bit of limp looking salad. In my wisdom, I had learnt the hard way several years ago that raw beetroot are most unpleasant, and the ones the supermarkets package up for you have already been 'cooked'. So I set about boiling them.

What to drink? Only very average cheap red wine left, so mulling it was an option.

I discovered some 'Gourmet Mulling Syrup' containing goodness knows what. I added this to a cheap bottle of Grenache warming in a pan, along with some apple juice, sugar, cloves, sliced orange and brandy, all topped off with a stewed pot of breakfast tea. There would be no driving anywhere after a few sips of this rocket fuel. I felt distinctly like the Asterix character Getafix, preparing a magic potion. Frankly I was prepared to throw in anything within arms reach. The ingredients may sound a little odd to you (needs must), but that is nothing compared to what appeared to go into Oz Clarke's mulled wine in 'Oz and Hugh Drink To Christmas'. Sausage, chilli and even cigars.

My beetroot were ready. They had the appearance of steaming Bison balls, most unappetising. I left them abandoned on the side while I prepared beans on toast with a side dish of grilled fish fingers. A classic 'get out of jail free' empty cupboard solution.

Warm wine in hand I turned on the TV. The best program of a bad bunch was a whole tedious hour about an exploding Sperm Whale on a street in Taiwan. That pretty much sums up television today. So I picked up a book and enjoyed my mulled wine with the salt ridden processed food, hoping one may combat the other and that I may remain in some sort of happy healthy equilibrium, fending off high blood pressure.

I felt great, and I needed to find a menhir to lift.

Paranoid

2009-12-15T11:24:00.002Z

I had a free breakfast presented to me on my walk into work yesterday. Someone had kindly left a half eaten kebab on top of the pedestrian crossing button pad. Chilli sauce dripping down....nice. About as unappetising and unattended as Gordon Ramsay's neglected restaurant empire.

On arrival into work still suffering from the lingering cold virus, and now slightly queasy, I checked my email. There was my OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 'Word of the Day' mail that I subscribe to, which helps illuminate forgotten corners of my language.

'nasal'

Great. It was going to be a good morning. Someone at OED was having a seasonal sneeze.

How could I lift my mood? Well apparently the right colour is the way forward. A wacky story appeared in the 'online soon to be pay-per-view' papers about how red and blue ambient lighting can improve the taste of wine, probably due to a positive mood effect. Just as unscrupulous bar owners may serve a gin and tonic as pure tonic with the rim of a glass dipped in gin, they may now also use the right lighting to trick you into paying more for very average wine.

Red light delivered a sweeter and more fruity wine (it also is know to deliver lots of other sweet and fruity things that we shall not dwell on here..). Blue and red light can make customers pay more for a bottle.

Note that this is not about changing the colour of the wine in the glass, just the background lighting. The trick here is to make sure you buy good wine so it does not need a helping hand. Perhaps it is even a hindrance if you have say a nice minerally crisp dry white wine that is turned into Liebfraumilch at the flick of a switch. A dumbing down.

Why wine in particular? Surely this science applies to everything.

Maybe I should invest in a pair of red lensed glasses and be in permanent happy stupor? So that's why Ozzy Osbourne always seems so spaced. I want to meet his fairies.

What's in a Synonym?

2009-12-10T15:11:00.009Z

I have a cold. A man with a cold is not good.

How long does it take for a cold to go nuclear?

The answer is just over a week when the stuff in your hankey is the same radioactive colour as the contents of Montgomery Burn's power plant in Springfield (The Simpsons). I have enormous explosive potential and my poor monitor is cowering away from me as I type. All very dull.

So far I cannot label it as 'flu' (swine, bird or any other variety of animal) as I do not ache and have no temperature. So I have to be at work infecting others. Everyone seems to have a cold anyway, so I suppose that is the best protection when around me. Fight one cold with another and end up with a messy stalemate.

I have continued to drink wine and have had an interesting time with one particular grape...

I was at a friends for dinner and was poured a Sardinian wine, new territory for me as they are not easily available in the UK. Piero Mancini Falcale Cannonau di Sardegna. With practically no Italian, and no handy portable 'web enabled phone' to hand, we were trying to work out which grape it was. We all drew a blank but agreed that it was delicious.

The conversation went on and we were discussing our love/hate grape varieties. Grenache came up for someone as major dislike.

In general Grenache delivers high alcohol and yields, has more than a dash of spice, and you often find it blended with other wines.

It is famous for the big wines in the Rhone in Southern France, for example Lirac or Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I recently tried a good Lirac (Domaine Maby) from Yapp Brothers who have a great selection of Rhone wines. It was a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre and incredibly strong at 14.5%. Better on its own than with a meal. Once poured keep away from open flames.

Anyway, after dinner I went home and looked up the mystery Sardinian bottle. It turned out that Cannonau was the grape, and that it was almost certainly a synonym of Grenache. The one and the same variety. I will mention this to 'that person' at the dinner party, which will probably cause a raised eyebrow, and perhaps a softening towards his stance on Grenache.

This is the problem and the joy of wine. There was a fair bit of wine knowledge around the table, but to know it all is impossible. In fact to know even a meaningful amount is tough. As soon as you start throwing grape synonyms into the mix your job amplifies exponentially. A bottomless pit, like looking at a fractal.

According to Wikipedia here are the synonyms of Grenache -

Phew!

I have stated before in my Primitivo vs Zinfandel review that there can be great value in sourcing grapes under different names. It takes a bit of work, but will improve your knowledge and enjoyment of wine, with the added bonus of more cash in the bank.

Heavy with cold I cracked a screw top £6.99 Grenache open last night. It was like inhaling a bowl of snuff mixed with petroleum. Perfect for my malaise, but that's about it. Very different from the Sardinian masterpiece.

To Have and to Hold

2009-12-05T21:29:00.004Z

Oh, to curl up on the sofa with a nice glass of wine and a good book.

These everyday yearnings to find time to relax are now becoming even more illusory. You are probably only too aware that Borders has gone into administration along with First Quench (who own Threshers, amongst others) squeezing wine and words out of the High Street.

Personally I will not miss the buy one book and get two you will never read offers, or the bleak battery farm shelves of unhappy books prostituted by the bored scribbles of invisible staff.

Threshers also had cheap offers like three bottles of plonk for two, keeping village tombolas very busy circulating unwanted wine for years on end. Their famous 40% off voucher was always an option before throwing a party. For that and the shear convenience of adding to the past proliferation of off licences, they will be missed.

I imagine that there will be lots of house parties that will suffer a temporary booze drought.

One minute people are in uproar about 'globalisation' and the homogeneity of the High Street, the next they are fretting about the demise. You cannot have your cake and eat it.

So maybe independents will thrive with the market opening up again? Will we just be left with less shops and further to walk for our creature comforts, or will we walk at all?

It is so tempting to detach yourself from tactile shopping and deny your senses from really exploring before purchasing, the 'armchair and laptop' is all too easy. But if I wanted to be fed life intravenously, I would plug myself into Second Life, buy a Sony Reader, join the Sunday Times Wine Club, look out for the Ocado van, and have done with it....gosh that almost seems the norm now.

Physically getting out and choosing a book or a bottle of wine, holding the item in your hands and letting your neurones fire a bit evaluating millions of imperceptible nuances is just as important as the reading and drinking part. We can deny it all we like but we need to satisfy that active foraging instinct.

Before you can say 'left click' we may find we have evolved as part man, part soft furnishing.

I know, you are thinking all these fluffy idealistic thoughts are really not practical in our modern full thrust world. You are right in a sense. There is no denying that buying wine online does seem to present a great choice at a competitive price, and certainly has its place. My problem is that I normally want to order a case of wine say made up of bottles from about three different online retailers. In my ideal world there would be a sort of wine broker that can make this possible to save the cost and hassle of three separate deliveries.

A bit like having each course of a curry in a different restaurant and hence avoiding an overdose of the 'house sauce'.

The true reason for the demise of these high street giants is probably not due to the online attraction of Amazon and Virgin Wines for example....more likely the Supermarkets a short drive away. The massive price crunching powers and accessibility is too much of a draw.

Who needs War and Peace with a bottle of Château Pétrus, when you can chance upon Katie Price's autobiography and some Blue Nun whilst buying your weekly Pampers supply.

It is all about balance and therefore important to continue to support your High Street independent wine merchant. Do not just use it on the way to a dinner party as a convenient drop in, but take some time out to enjoy the experience of examining the wine, maybe even tasting some before you buy.

So where am I going with all of this?

Basically, use it or lose it.

Stripped Medals

2009-11-26T10:58:00.016Z

Have you ever considered which 'additives' are allowed by the EU in the production of a bottle of wine. Well here they all are, plus one disallowed rogue chemical...see if you can spot it..

A bit mind blowing isn't it. Gobbledygook to those of us who are not chemists. Some of the chemicals you will ingest when you slurp. Others will not be in the finished product.

I recently bought some Argentinian Malbec (which is extremely good value) only to discover that there was most probably an illegal substance inside it, the very one I have slipped into the list.

Wine making is mostly about non-disclosure as there is no obligation in the EU to disclose most of the 50+ approved flavourings, additives, preservatives and agents on the label unlike other food products. Much like Olympic athletes vying for gold medals, there are no ingredients on the vest. You will never see 'chicken nuggets' emblazoned across the back of Usain Bolt. I feel like I have been duped much like the Ben Johnson's 100 metre sprint in the 1988 Olympic Games. The Argentinian wine tasted like a winner, but was actually harbouring a banned chemical to help achieve its position.

The reason this is all coming to light is that Germany now 'has the technology' to detect this sinister substance in wine.

The chemical in question, that you most probably did not spot in the above list, is Natamycin, an antifungal agent allowed in some food stuffs in the EU, but not wine.

For you and me Natamycin translates as 'Don't Panic' in the 'Wine Drinker's Guide to the Galaxy'. The fact that we are already eating it in other food products, and the quantities found so far in wine are very small, add up to a great big storm in a wine glass. I am a big fan of Argentinian wine, and it certainly will not put me off.

What this does however highlight is the current drive to list ingredients on wine labels, which incidentally the Co-op do voluntarily. The FSA is said to be pushing for compulsory full disclosure across the board.

Will a list of ingredients be off putting?

That depends. The catalogue of E numbers written on much of our everyday processed food stuffs, like sandwiches and Coke for example, does not seem to put people off buying them. Most of us with busy lives do not have time to read labels in detail anyway. Additives are also mostly meaningless and the presumption by the consumer is that if it is not safe to eat it won't be on the shelves. However Bernard Matthews' 'Turkey Twizzler syndrome' struck, followed more recently by programs like 'Jimmy's Food Factory', and we are becoming more cautious.

The truth of the matter is that alcohol is probably the main ingredient that could do you some damage, the rest of the 'additives' may be harmless in comparison.

The worry is that the delicate illusion lots of us have of wine being simple fermented grape juice may well be shattered. We could start to see it as just another unromantic processed food on an industrial scale. Our wine buying patterns may change radically as the love affair becomes warts and all.

One question remains to be answered - why has the EU banned Natamycin in wine in the first place?

Diminishing Marginal Utility

2009-11-18T10:39:00.013Z

I caught a glimpse of my now seemingly Orwellian Telescreen last night

"The instrument could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely." ...sigh...

and noted that 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!' was attempting to turn the tables, granting me the role of Big Brother (the producers have failed to note that the concept of celebrity is so loose and ephemeral now, it is ceasing to harbour any meaning).

What strikes you about these 'people' in the jungle are their cravings. Plain rice causes havoc with your mind and a piece of chocolate would almost be willingly traded for anything of disproportionate value in the real world. In this case the contestants 'luxury items' are traded. Who knows, Jordan may trade her implants, unzipped and removed in exchange for some sugar in her tea.

This forced abstinence made me think of a week recently when I did not drink a drop of wine. So many meals passed by without the perfect partner, the anticipation was enormous. When I finally made it, the first sip was mind blowing. A very ordinary bottle of plonk was giving me so much pleasure. Every sensory nerve ending was jumping with joy at this familiar but relatively long lost friend. I could almost pick out each molecule of aroma, my senses sharpened, practically tasting wine at ten paces on the prevailing wind alone. I was a temporary new member of the X-Men with a 'super palate', although I am unsure how I could save the world with this skill. My main arch-enemy would be Matt Skinner with his mystical remote viewing and tasting powers.

My point is that regular drinking of wine inevitably ends up in 'diminishing marginal utility' i.e. the more frequently you consume, the less you enjoy. You know that feeling... the second cup of tea never satisfies quite as much as the first. This has to be an issue for wine tasters. I would recommend putting Robert Parker in the jungle for a while and then getting him to revisit a bottle or two once released. I guarantee he would probably rework his rather odd rating system, and start the scoring base at 100 points, not 50 for his first sips, carried away on the novelty.

Unrelenting 'reality TV' though is still clearly hands down the best example of diminishing marginal utility. I am beyond sick of it.

Wine Guessing Notes

2009-11-16T12:04:00.008Z

After reading and reviewing Malcolm Gluck's 'The Great Wine Swindle', the mental recovery from the impact of the book was beginning to take place and I was starting to buy wine more freely again with less suspicion and cynicism... Until now. Let me elaborate.

Matt Skinner, a familiar name? Well probably either if you are a Jamie Oliver fan (he is apparently head of wine for parts of Jamie's empire), or if you watched Saturday Kitchen a while ago (where he occasionally appeared as a wine expert).

He is the billed as a young vibrant channel for the mostly disinterested to rediscover wine, making it accessible to everyone with little fuss and lots of straight talking. A hard line to tread. Most wine writers consistently stray way too far into deep technicalities, wanting to show off their prowess at the expense of important basic info for the layman shopper.

Forget the megapixels, does it take good pictures?

So what has Matt done to perpetuate my malaise? Well according to several new articles he could not have possibly tasted some of the wines reviewed in his latest book 'The Juice 2010', due to publishing deadlines. In other words several tasting notes were fabricated , based on previous vintages he was familiar with.

The argument is that there is little to no vintage variation in the majority of wines in the guide. But surely there must be.... or have the producers mastered the weather, and can perform cloud busting like George Clooney in the recent film 'The Men Who Stare at Goats'? Do the vines have the elixir of youth from many weird and wonderful biodynamic treatments, and remain ageless, saturated in essential oils?

To quote a reference from Decanter of Matt Skinner's own words in a GQ column -

'It's important to remember that every year is different and that no two years – even in the same spot – will ever be the same. That's the beauty of Mother Nature.'

So if the unwavering year on year aroma of this wine is therefore (by elimination) purely down to post harvest chemical manipulation then it sounds like pretty horrible homogeneous big brand stuff anyway, and should probably not be in the book with 'the easy guide to the best wine' stamped on the front.

With little defence I imagine his next GQ column will be about how he accidentally fell into the Large Hadron Collider and briefly went forward in time to taste these wines.

Maybe I should write a wine guide. Just make it up as I go along......sell in on Amazon for about £5.00. Easy money...

Grapes in Space

2009-11-03T12:31:00.006Z

Big Brother is watching your grapes.

There is a satellite up there somewhere hurtling through space assessing which bits of your vineyard are ready to harvest (whilst carefully avoiding all the other space junk mostly responsible for misdirecting us and brainwashing us in our own homes). 'The Oenoview System' does this by analysing the reflectivity of a vineyard, and translating the colours into meaningful data.

Some English vineyards have already signed up for the service.

Hmmm....call me a cynic, but whenever I fly home from abroad there is always dense depressing cloud cover. Lets hope the weather plays ball when the satellite passes over to take a snap, and that a grey image does not mean 'harvest now'. Presumably you would also have to wander into the vineyard to verify the data first hand, rather than put all of your precious grapes into one basket.

I like 'The Man from Del Monte' approach.

Maybe this satellite can also scan crowds to assess whether anyone has swine flu, and perhaps even let me know how I am feeling?

'There's an app for that' drones some smug developer...grrrrr.

There is a very well known wine called 'Campo Viejo' that may benefit from this high tech approach -

It is made in Spain's Rioja region in an ultra modern underground plant. As everything is automated you just have to push one big red button and you end up with 10,000 bottles per hour. The sort of place you may see Blofeld's cat. Adding the satellite to its armoury would nicely complete the picture.

How Not To Cook

2009-10-20T10:48:00.014+01:00

Friends came over for dinner the other night and I decided to make a pudding.

My confidence had been building as I managed to make a passable lemon tart the other day thanks to Gordon Ramsay and his 'Sunday Lunch' book.

I thought that for a change I would dip into James Martin's book called 'Desserts'. The picture on the front was of James happily turning out a Tarte Tatin.

I, like most of the population, have spent the last few years being coaxed into a false sense of security with the relentless bombardment of cookery programs and spin off books. Another soufflé appears on 'Saturday Kitchen', and I don't even blink an eye. I have subconsciously prepared, cooked and eaten it in an instant, despite never having actually done so. Comfort cooking from your armchair. In my fantasy professional chef alter ego I even become a critic, offering my thoughts on food displayed by the odourless 37 inches of transistors that make up my rather vulgar flat panel TV.

All cooks (including friends) passing on recipes continuously say -

'Oh it's so easy'

Don't let this frivolity fool you. Be on your guard. Modesty belies the blood sweat and tears required even in the simplest process, especially when it comes to pastry.

I am not denying that it's great being exposed to good cuisine and technique on the box, it's just that there is often a major disconnect between seeing and doing. Cookery only to entertain, massaging your brain through the post work early evening humdrum whilst you devour your salt overloaded ready meal.

So my obvious naive choice was the Tarte Tatin.

I lovingly picked the last of the apples from the garden along with some fresh thyme. I also sourced a block of pre-prepared puff pastry from the depths of the chest freezer in the local shop (I did not dare look at the use by date). All that remained was to make the caramel....

I cannot tell you how difficult I found it to create the perfect golden brown caramel from simply heating up caster sugar. I quickly ruined the first batch (and rendered the pan useless). I then made the same mistake with the second attempt. I now had two pans neutered with a rapidly solidifying magma.

Much like Pompeii, the wooden spoons remained erect in the hardening rock, frozen in caramelised time in their last act of stirring. Quickly into the sink...the pans were now listless boats without a sail, slowly sinking beneath the depths of the washing up bowl.

The recipe looked good, but did not seem as well explained as Gordon Ramsay's offerings. The text should have contained the warning 'danger to pan health'. The tone of the picture of James Martin now changed to smugness

'Only I, yes I have the skills to perform this Tarte Tatin miracle'

The worst part of it all was my premature reveal of the nature of the pudding to my friends. My spirit (and pans) broken, I threw in the dish cloth and improvised some dodgy puff pastry, apple and muscarpone tartlets.

At least the lemon chicken and olive main course was a success.

As for the wine, my friends bought a Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc 2009 and I provided a George Duboeuf Chiroubles 2007. I will try and mention these in my tasting notes.

Any caramel tips most welcome.

Approaching Early

2009-10-12T20:56:00.009+01:00

It is the end of the working day and I am sipping a glass of Zinfandel. Believe me, after the day I've just had, I have earned it.

This morning I had to travel to somewhere relatively near London by train. Yes, it was very expensive, and yes the seats in our trains were made for one buttock, not two. I was getting near to my destination and my hands had become clammy, bathed in intimate body heat circulating in the hermetically sealed carriage. My clothes had started to become part of my skin, fused by the hot nylon seating. I was very irritable, exacerbated by the man nearby conducting loud business on his 'thebigiamPhone' (the Apple touch screen tapping is the real pandemic this country is suffering). To temper my mood I had already read all of the discarded freebie newspapers, and spent lots of energy avoiding the person next to me lolling on my shoulder.

Suddenly a breath of fresh air as an announcement fought above the hum of groped phones.

"Ladies and Gentlemen we will soon be approaching early....."

Unheard of, a train arriving before it is due. The pain of the journey was all but alleviated until I realised the next station was called Earley.

Finally, I arrived at my destination (late), and stopped at the newsagent to buy a real paper and some peppermint gum to dispel the stale coffee feeling in my mouth. While I was mildly concerned about killing the shop assistant with my perceived cone of death breath, she said..

"That's 78p ..why don't you buy a pack of five for £1.00, five packs are on offer"

Was my breath that bad?

I declined as I did not want five packs of gum. This did not go down well at all. There was disbelief on the assistants face. I had to explain that despite the offer I could not possibly eat five packs, and was not in the habit of cellaring it for a rainy day. A small queue of impatient commuters was developing and the pressure forced the assistant to put down the five pack and let me have what I wanted.

At the end of the long working day I popped into a supermarket for some food, on way the back to the station. More complications, this time bag related. I could not simply pay for the food before deciding on my bag. There almost seemed to be a different bag for every penny between 5 and 10 pence. No chance to try before you buy. I ended up going for the extravagant 'bag for life' (all of 10p), which is possibly the greatest misnomer of all time, or else I must be leading lots of parallel lives. Bizarrely the checkout person seemed impressed with my 10p extravagance when a lesser bag would have sufficed.

In this bag was the Zinfandel (Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel 2007) ready to be shaken and boiled on the train ride home, further more confusing its own sense of identity...

I will shortly be writing a note on the bottle in my tasting section, and elaborating on the indeterminate origins of Zinfandel.

Water Boatmen

2009-10-02T09:45:00.012+01:00

When you fart in the bath you expect a rich aroma to rise up from the bursting bubbles. Champagne bubbles however contain relativity odourless carbon dioxide, not the hydrogen sulphide that gives your own emissions that rotten egg smell.

So it comes as quite a surprise to find out that in recent tests the bubbles in Champagne have been shown to dramatically increase its aromatic quality. The bubbles literally pull smelly compounds out of the liquid. They do much more than excite the tongue and look pretty.

I therefore presume that better quality, quantity and behaviour of bubbles will equal more flavour. The French innately understand this very well with the 'Methode Champenoise', producing lots of elegant streams of small bubbles from the intricate fermentation process.

Drinking Champagne is a punch to the senses, a bit like a collection of highly perfumed ladies zorbing into the sharp thorns of a rose bed.

Unlike the zorb which you can physically open and sniff, how on earth do you examine the contents of a delicate bubble of Champagne, held together by no more than surface tension.

Maybe you could employ a few water boatman to investigate...? In actual fact scientists always over complicate things and used high-resolution mass spectrometry in this case, whatever that is.

So should novice wine tasters 'SodaStream' all their fine wine to maximise the 'aromatic lift'? Turn all of your nice Clarets into Lambrusco, and let those little bubbles do all the work for you...maybe not.

Diet Wine

2009-09-22T18:18:00.022+01:00

As I am slowly writing down a few tasting notes, I thought I would give you my take on tasting in general.

Imagine you are in a very large cathedral listening to the most amazing choir singing a well known piece of music. That is much how odour works (no, I am not referring to the underarm discipline of the choir). Smell is made up of a mind boggling amount of minuscule individual chemical blobs that combine together in beautiful harmony inside the nose (rather than the ear). When we add that effect to the basic senses derived from the tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, dryness and so on), we end up with the 'taste' word we use to recognise food and drink. A sort of sensory fingerprint we know and love.

That's why when you drink wine it tastes...well....like wine of course.

What about all the other weird individual flavours people detect in wine, apart from 'wine flavour'.

To hark (sorry) back to the choir analogy, the next you time hear them perform the same piece of music there is a new conductor. The music has different emphasis. You can pick out subtle changes.

Wine is exactly like that. Some chemical blobs may develop more than others during the wine making and maturing process (including cellaring). The individual blobs are often sometimes exactly the same chemical make up as the ones that for example give butter its flavour. So when some pretentious wine buff says 'oh, it's so buttery', it technically probably is, except I would like to see him spread that on his toast in the morning.

The glass of alcoholic grape juice still tastes like wine, it's just that those buttery bits are singing a bit louder.

The problem with wine tasting charts and studied expectations is that tasters can reel off the premeditated weird and wonderful taste trivia, without making the effort to actually taste it. A security blanket in case the wrong floral comparison is plucked from the air. Pre-primed suggestions can also confuse the senses and introduce imaginary flavour friends that do not exist.

On the other hand it is tough to distinguish taste blindfolded. We are not talking about the Pepsi Challenge here. I have seen people struggle to distinguish apple from orange juice. Without any visual pointers wine tasting can be tricky, and so experience combined with a great palate are the major prerequisites.

Lots emphasis is made on the subtle odour compounds (aroma and bouquet) in wine, and how complex it is, so much so that we almost forget that food stuffs in general can also have incredibly complex aromatic qualities. For example the common tomato has around 400 volatile aromas (those chemical blobs I am talking about), 30 of which are key to its flavour. You can find flavours like horseradish in a tomato, but you rarely get a tomato buff at the dinner table having a good sniff. Chocolate is another with depth, but admittedly you are more likely to come across the odd chocolate connoisseur happily revealing aromas like pepper, blueberry and kumquat. And of course there is coffee, that is another blog.

Wine has its special appeal because 'aroma' (the chemical blobs present in the grapes before they are made into wine) is enhanced as the wine is made and aged, adding 'bouquet' , which basically means more smells. This exciting changing nature of a wine gives a thrill to enthusiasts.

Where there was once burnt toast there is now butter to calm it.

So applying all this new found odour knowledge, here is the perfect glass of red wine for those of you who do not drink alcohol or are on a diet -

Pour one glass of complex Claret, then make a cup of ordinary breakfast tea (no milk). Add a tiny amount of sugar to the tea, stir and wait for it to cool to room temperature. Decant your tea into another similar wine glass. Close your eyes. Sniff your glass of Claret with gusto (like you are clearing your nasal passages with a vapour inhaler) and then sip your tea.

Hey presto a nice tannic Bordeaux. Enjoy.

Vinegar Valhalla

2009-09-16T14:03:00.024+01:00

I have a Womble in my hallway, namely Bungo. A long story so don't ask. Anyway he made a timely appearance. My mother in law was clearing out her cupboard under the stairs, liberating space and therefore about 30 unwanted old bottles of wine, mainly gifts. My limited knowledge was asked for to help with spotting wine salvage. They ended up in my hall to sort and give to the local Church Fete, drink or get rid of.

Bungo's button eyes lit up, and I could see the wine was already earmarked in his fabric head for some kind of ingenious recycling, but before the bottles were presumed dead on arrival I needed to look for any gems, or failing that, embers of drinkable life.

Lots of white and rose wine, some way over three years old, mostly drink young supermarket stuff. A few unknowns that needed a bit of Internet research.

There was very little of note. I salvaged a few bottles for the village tombola that were teetering on the edge of the vinegar Valhalla, but were passable. They may indeed be in the brief window of their prime, a sweet spot, transforming an ordinary bottle into greatness.

So I am left with an undrinkable wine lake.

Normally I rarely get through a whole bottle of wine before oxygen kills it during the working week. I end up with a collection of sorry looking quarter full bottles by the gas hob, waiting to splash into most of the quirky creations I call cooking. I am a compulsive wine cook. An inescapable itch to plop in any old plonk, leaving the job for 'reduced wine' to add that je ne sais quoi to my average cuisine.

Why add wine to cooking? Why not? Seems to taste better. A good use of old wine.

Unfortunately my hallway wine catacomb was just too much to cook with. I ended up donating it to the local sewerage processing plant (hopefully cleaning out my waste pipes in the process). Bungo dealt with the bottles.

Wine and heat are both friends and arch enemies. Outside of a pan, 'cooked' is the term for wine that has been subjected to a range of large temperature movements, leaving it not as intended, and can be fairly unpleasant. It is very common, and is well worth looking out for to save buying a substandard product.

As an example, on one of the hotter spells of the year I went into a local reputable independent wine merchant and noted that there was no aircon. All the beautiful bottles (neatly arranged with personalised tasting notes) were subject to the heat of the summer's day, amplified by the greenhouse effect of the glass windows (don't get me onto UV damage). One to avoid, as if it was regular practice the wine in the shop would surely be 'cooked'.

Heat fluctuations can make the contents of a bottle expand and contract, so much so that the cork moves like a piston, letting in too much oxygen, ruining the wine, bringing it rapidly nearer to vinegar. Sometimes wine will even leak out. Look for corks that are not flush with the top of bottle, and wine staining.

Ignoring the oxygen attack, the wrong level of heat itself can also accelerate the subtle ageing process. Literally cooking the wine.

So why can't you decant a young Bordeaux, shove it into a microwave and end up with a beautifully aged wine, equivalent to 10 years in a cellar? Just think, your microwave could turn into a time machine. A second for every year....sadly ageing wine is not that simple. You would end up with more of a grotesque metamorphosis than time travel, much like 'The Fly'. Cooking wine, whilst accelerating the ageing process, weakens the structure. It also promotes unwanted reactions, ones that can leave a horrible taste in your mouth. Years in a cellar at a constant 55 F will gracefully age say a Bordeaux, without promoting the bad stuff. Excess heat on the other hand pushes the energy barrier so much that these evil processes can take place.

How do you detect a 'cooked' wine to taste, the two pronged offensive of oxygen and heat damage? Some say the fruit flavours are dulled and stewed. There can be a Sherry overtone and more than a hint of caramel. Colours can also be less vibrant.

The only way to know for sure is to simply buy two identical bottles and treat one bottle with disdain, while caressing the other in your wine cellar. Drink and compare. Although this test is only good on the premise that you have money to burn (literally) and that the wines are not already cooked.

Deglazing a pan with wine to make gravy is my kind of extreme wine abuse. What happens here is that the alcohol evaporates (sometimes with an eyebrow singeing flame) and the subtle flavours of the wine condense (all those weird esters that wine buffs hark on about when tasting wine...it may be bubblegum, bark, clove, butter and so on), almost a meal within a meal. The wine ages in a rapid structure wrenching way, much like Dracula being staked just after a good feed. You are left with 'the essence of Dracula' (almost a new Hammer film) in the pan.

So it does matter somewhat which wine you use in your dish, the flavour concentration you end up helps if it is complementary. The works of intense heat on wine are in truth little understood, and some might say a rule of thumb is to cook with a wine that you are going to drink with the meal. A good starting point, but I am loathed to chuck half a bottle of quality wine into a pan, not really knowing if roughly the same effect could have been achieved with a £2.99 plonk, or my stale leftovers.

The only real way to know how wine affects your food is to heat some up, reduce it down, then sample the results and work out any food matches....yeah right...life is way too short. I would rather live 'on the edge' and carry on splashing in random bottles before Bungo gives them to Uncle Bulgaria.

The Red Pill

2009-09-08T14:17:00.010+01:00

Finally I have experienced my first virtual wine tasting.

I was asked to do it through Twitter and the Taste Live interface. No, the Internet cannot yet pipe through streams of wine together with data, more's the pity, but I was posted three bottles via snail mail to sample with strict instructions as to when to open/decant them.

I had a leg of lamb in the oven which was not going to be ready for the tasting, and as there were no palate cleansers in the house, I had to make do with some stale scones left over from the weekend. So there I am, three glasses, three bottles, three stale scones and a computer. Kind of weird. Yes, I did have a soiree planned, but working week excuses left me all alone.

Robert McIntosh was our ringmaster who has a great wine blog called Wine Conversation.

On your marks.....and we were off.

A lubricating cocktail of slurps and the tweets began unfolding. My main gripe was the delay from tweet to display of the text, so it was hard to keep track of your message and any feedback from it. This may be the Taste Live interface, my rather inadequate Internet connection, Twitter itself (which seems to run like a blocked drain at times), or indeed all of the above.

Instant messaging services (MSN, Yahoo,Google et al.) to me seem slicker, quicker and certainly more private than Twitter, but Twitter seems to fill a global generic convenience gap none the less, and joins us all together very publicly under one very leaky roof (with just 140 tiles).

Before I knew it there was quite a party going on (I was living vicariously through other people's dinner parties, pretending to be a virtual guest at various tables). Sounding sad already, I know, but much like I had just taken the red pill from Morpheus, the real world around me dissolved in a Matrix like fashion with the relentless combination of the alcohol, tweets and attached video links.

The limitation of the tweet length made tasting notes a challenge. In fact a recent report says that this could be gradually eroding our working memory. Unlike my scones, big lumps of indigestible text are ultimately better for us, but the short snappy effect certainly brings pace to the tasting.

The tasting itself was of biodynamic wine courtesy of Berry Bros & Rudd.

I will try and put up some notes on my tasting section soon, but the link above gives a good overview in the meantime.

All in all it was a good experience, slightly 'other' but nice to have peoples live views on wine. It could become addictive.

Champagne Supernova

2009-09-07T16:50:00.008+01:00

Are we all turning white wine into the sparkling variety with a SodaStream? Have we lost the will to celebrate properly in style?

Nope, none of the above.

The Champagne market is naturally driven by how flush we are feeling, leading to a boom and bust model...you know, 'that model', the one Gordon Brown claimed not to believe in any more. These resulting times are crunchy, like walking tentatively in the City of London on embedded shards of glass left over from past vintage Champagne bottles carelessly cast aside, a painful reminder of a flawed bonus culture.

We have been licking our wounds and trading down our choices.

Cheaper imitations have taken hold and are filling the fizz gap. Prosecco is a prime example, Champagne austerity for the more discerning.

Whilst people are probably realising that some cheaper alternatives are not all that bad, and at times indistinguishable, real Champagne is irreplaceable for the ultimate celebration. By presenting the Champagne bottle you are immediately broadcasting that the occasion is worth a few bob, putting your hard earned cash where your sentiment is. Champagne is showing off in style. As a bonus, the resulting drink will most likely have more finesse than bog standard sparkling wine.

I have never been to a party with fizz where there has not been an interest to see if it is actually Champagne. Guests crook their necks awkwardly to get a glimpse of the label partially hidden by the waiters cloth. The first sip always results in someone saying 'do you think this is real fizz?'. Everyone normally looks back blankly, and you then hear another slightly cynical comment like 'I doubt it'.

There is no denying that the real deal is important to people, irrespective if they can taste the difference. Why?...

'Because I'm worth it'.

There is good news on the horizon. Due to a glut in Champagne, rumour has it that there are some major deals to be had in the run up to Christmas. Some say £10 bottles. This price shift has been caused by a 45% fall in exports so far in 2009 compared to all of 2008.

Put down your Cava and step out of the building.

Maybe this Champagne 'free for all' will make it so everyday, that it will start to lose its celebratory pedestal. Like turning gold into bronze for a while.

If nothing else it is a good time to stockpile Champagne and sell it on after the glut diminishes.

Sherry Trifle

2009-09-02T13:25:00.018+01:00

I will start with a simple enough question -

'How could a sherry trifle get you into trouble at work?'

A slightly longer answer...stay with me on this -

I demolished a bottle of rather delicious Chianti over lunch with a friend this weekend. The lunch was homemade pizza, and could be considered a light accompaniment for the heavy dusty Sangiovese.

Even after the first half glass I noticed that sense of lunchtime light-headedness that does not seem to happen early evening. Like someone has hit you with the silly stick, and the world starts to bounce around in a light puffy jovial way. All life's sharp edges briefly turn wonderfully soft and curvy. I think this feeling is more noticeable with the first few sips as there is a stark contrast with your normal alcohol free state of mind. Once into the second glass you are more used to the effect, and you have forgotten what it feels like to be in a world without wine.

One acronym elegantly explains what is happening in your body.

ADH

Alcohol dehydrogenases are enzymes we are blessed with, and are the reason we can drink alcohol at all. They break down ethanol into other substances we can deal with safely. They probably evolved to break down naturally occurring ethanol generated from bacteria processing in the gut.

Anyway full marks to you Mr Evolution for allowing us the choice of this simple pleasure in life.

The reason that you feel more 'drunk' at lunch is that the enzyme builds up during the day, and there will therefore be less of it to get rid of alcohol at lunch than in the evening.

Unfortunately alcohol dehydrogenases are both sexist and ageist in their quantities produced in the body, hence the stark tolerance differences you may have noticed in your nearest and dearest.

ADH also has a crucial role to play in the wine making process. Yeasts ferment glucose to alcohol and carbon dioxide with dehydrogenases. It's the reverse process to us humans. So the yeasts make the booze and we break it down, all with the same group of enzymes. This glorious reciprocal relationship was clearly written in the stars.

We all probably agree that acronyms are intensely annoying and confusing. Here is a perfect example. There is another completely different ADH in the human body related to drinking, the antidiuretic hormone. If you drink alcohol you will suppress this hormone. This is why lots of booze can mean lots of trips to the loo. The body just passes the fluid on through, not in its normal efficient absorbing way.

This is especially true for the sheer volume consumed by beer drinkers, after all

'You can never buy beer, you just rent it'

My glass of Chianti in the safety of my weekend reminded me that modern day culture is calling last orders on the days of lunchtime tipples at work. Back in the late 80's, whilst in my first office job, I remember lunchtime drinking was more the norm, especially on a Friday. Now you mostly encounter draconian workplace rules, branding you an alcoholic and not fit for the workplace if you so much as sniff a glass of wine over a meal.

Most people agree that lunchtime is your own time, and so what you choose to do with it is your own business. Employers argue that even one small alcoholic drink will still be in your blood stream when you return to work, and hence feel that they can legally enforce a drinking ban. They also worry about the smell of booze in client meetings. I can understand these arguments and I think the obvious answer is responsible drinking, not all out bans. After all what about Christmas parties, work celebrations or even clients ordering wine at a lunch?

The body gets rid of one 'unit' of alcohol (half a pint of ordinary strength beer around 3-4% abv) per hour. So after one small glass of wine in your lunch break (allowing for a lead time for initial absorption into the blood stream, combined with a full stomach slowing the process), by the time you return to work you should already have fairly low levels of alcohol in your body, almost certainly below the UK driving limit. To top that, the raw garlic stuffed olive amuse-bouche mixed with your espresso breath will smell lots worse, and overpower the paltry amount of red wine gently caressing the beef bourguignon through your body.

If you are legally allowed to drive a car after a small lunchtime drink, how can you be penalised in the workplace? Do employers have breathalysers, and if so where do you draw the line for blood alcohol levels?

No more sherry trifle.

What Sweet Spot?

2009-08-27T14:06:00.023+01:00

As you have probably noticed I've started some tasting notes on some of the wines I am drinking in a new section of my blog.

The latest news is that us Brits are drinking 10% more alcohol than in 2000. Sales have remained the same and therefore this is not a volume shift.

Wine for example has risen in strength on average from around 11% to 13%. Glass sizes are also expanding, and I have ranted about this several times in my blog.

Two out of the three bottles I have commented on so far are New World, and they also have the much higher alcohol content, one of them being 14% ABV.

So why is this happening and is it really important?

The New World wines are getting increasingly popular due to price vs quality (or so we are told) compared to Old World wines. The climate is warmer and sunnier which promotes riper grapes. So grapes from these regions tend to be higher in sugar when picked, and as sugar turns into alcohol the heady outcome is inevitable, unless you use weird and wonderful techniques like reverse osmosis to eke it out.

All over the world, the rising in alcohol content (up to 15%+ ABV in some cases) leading to intensely boozy wine is put down to several factors. Some say it's due to global warming, improved viticultural methods and even bizarre new armies of well trained yeast. In other words... don't blame me, pass the buck onto 'uncontrollable' external factors.

Others maintain that 'big' wines score better with the critics and therefore the trend is to produce wines with higher alcohol as they perform supremely at tastings. This explanation I have to say rings true to me.

The problem for us ordinary drinkers is that bigger rocket fueled wines do not seem to go so well with a meal. There is a major disconnect here, and this starts to show the political absurdity of the peculiar tasting and scoring culture that can make or break a wine producer. That paper medallion on a bottle seems to be all important. Who cares if it is not fit for purpose to drink with food. Maybe these critics need to slow down a little, take stock and start eating meals, not crackers between 'micro sips'.

These huge wines almost sit like oil and water, an alcohol slick floating on top. Forget the food matching blurb on the back, just recommend a spittoon and a biscuit.

There is a wine 'sweet spot' which is extremely dependant on the individuals palate. This is the perfect point between low and high alcohol wine. Anywhere outside of this and the balance of a wine can be ruined. This is meant to be the skill of the wine maker, balancing the wine so that the majority of people will appreciate it. This does seem lacking in many cases.

Maybe we will be filling up the car with a New World Zinfandel soon, a new biofuel. Perhaps there should be signs on bottles like 'warning, highly flammable'. A big Pinot Noir may even be the new device of choice for a bourgeois revolutionary crowd, doubling as a Molotov Cocktail.

I think it is fine producing wines of all strengths, but the output should be more varied for the consumer. At the moment wines seem to be only going one way, and that is palate stripping alcohol. Much the same as wine glasses, large ones are fine as long as there are equal amounts of the smaller measures still available.

Subprime Wine

2009-08-23T13:40:00.008+01:00

Did you know that according to this article the banks in Italy are thinking about accepting quality cured ham and wine as collateral for loans to help out struggling retailers. They have been accepting wheels of Parmesan cheese for some time in turn for better interest rates, so this would just be an extension.

I love the idea of talking about wine reserves rather than gold. Giving Gordon Brown the keys to gold vault in the UK is a bit like letting Oddjob loose in Fort Knox without Bond in tow. Gold...what gold?. So we need some other valuable commodity. Why not wine......

Imagine if these deli assets were repackaged by the Italian banks and sold on as complex food based securities to other banks in the world. Say Italian borrowers default on the loans, and the banks then discover that the securities are not based on truth, just confusing maths by a nerd in a back office. In reality the ham is spam, the wine is faked and the cheese is Babybel.

Hey presto a deli crunch (sounds like an exciting new muesli bar).

Glastic Brands

2009-08-13T18:37:00.016+01:00

I occasionally watch Dragons' Den, normally by accident desperately trying to avoid the 'oh so dull' formulaic British terrestrial TV offerings (which mostly consist of patronising chefs, other peoples dull houses, fabricated news, rubbernecking real life/drama emergency services and yet more repetitive sensationalist news).

I hardly need to tell you how hard it is to find even thirty minutes of meaningful solace on the TV these days. For example this year's Ashes series is only viewable by paying vast sums of money for Sky, then letting a half job stranger put up some cheap shaped blot of chicken wire on the side of your house and violate your outside wall with a masonry drill to pipe it in. Your own personal intravenous feed.

So this week I was squeezed into the cosy Dragons' Den again to watch more ordinary 'entrepreneurs' get disappointed by a bunch of venture capitalists who appear to gain more from the infamy of their own personal branding on prime time TV than any crumbs thrown to fledgling companies.

My interest perked up when some chap was raising capital for a wine innovation. It was a very durable plastic wine glass containing wine, sealed with an inert gas to prevent oxidation, and therefore providing a shelf life of up to a year. The seal was much like the sort of pull off foil thingy you would find on a supermarket sherry trifle.

I find plastic glasses vulgar at the best of times, no matter how convenient they are for large functions, transatlantic meals, or even picnics. I still struggle to respect a wine that is in a screw top, so peeling back a 'glastic' seal would feel even worse.

Then there is the waste of course.

The pre-sealed plastic wine glass feels both over convenient and ground fill bound for hundreds of years. It reminds me of the Nespresso aluminium capsule which at a seemingly large environmental cost perhaps delivers one of the most over perfect domestic espressos attainable without buying an industrial Gaggia the size of a steam engine. Unless you have abnormally large fingers, are keen on needlework and are in short supply of thimbles, or indeed live in Switzerland (where they have a Nespresso recycling scheme), the capsule appears to be a litter bug, much like the sealed 'glastic'.

This recycling issue has a more interesting recent spin as there is currently an expedition to the Pacific ocean to examine a floating island of plastic that is meant to be the size of Texas. The currents have gathered it together into a massive never to melt 'plasticberg' (unless global warming really kicks off).

With the icecaps melting we may well end up with plastic caps on the world's poles. Polar explorers would have to negotiate the 'Evian' mountains, 'Muller Light' hills and the PET pinot plains. They may well be core drilling the poles in the next millennium, the various layers of brand labels will be a way of revealing the past.

No carbon dating required, just a bar code reader.

The thing is, almost everything could be recycled if certain schemes were expanded or new ones were set up, but in reality that sort of infrastructure globally is certainly not around the corner. New individual portion products that create more options for permanent waste are just depressing and will probably only add to the growing island in the Pacific.

Jellyfish

2009-08-06T15:47:00.010+01:00

I have had my first day back at work, not easy after a two week break. When I finally finished the day and arrived home, I poured a small glass of cool white wine to temper being cooked in my office (I am based directly under a copper roof without aircon, the fans turning the space into an efficient convection oven. I should bring in a lamb joint as it would be slow roasted to perfection by the end of a working day).

The large gulp of wine went down fast, like a shot of tequila, I could not help myself. It was instantly forgettable and indeed the wine's provenance did not seem to matter, it just hit the spot deep inside my belly. Immediately I felt cooler, and being a bit of a lightweight I noticed the alcohol taking the edge off the day. Sometimes a good brutal small unadulterated quaff is liberating. No consideration for its looks or the aromas and the subtle nuances. No chance for it to play around the mouth, to impart its character. No swishing and bubbling, no pause for thought. Just a base need for a wine quench.

In case you are thinking this is showing severe alcoholic tendencies, well you may be right, except this replaced my usual cup of tea (which happily meant putting aside the rather odd, unappetising looking rock cakes I made the other day as they are far from perfect wine partners).

This all raises the interesting issue of drinking wine and 'sampling' wine. Socially, when eating a meal with wine, I just drink it, as over the evening the more subtle aspects gradually permeate through my system. My subconscious has time to really study the wine as it slowly saturates my senses, and so I normally have a good rapport with it later on. I think if you read too many tasting tips and execute these regularly over the evening you look like a real buffoon, and it is frankly hard work. Your glass appears to attract more attention than the person sitting next to you, who incidentally probably thinks you are a wine bore, whilst putting up with you slurping like a coffee machine.

After all don't forget that wine is a drink, not an exercise.

Sampling wine at tastings is of course the best place to implement all of your odd wine tasting practices, as there is no chance to really dive into a bottle over an evening. Too many wines, not enough time. A sort of speed dating experience. Just eyeball, sniff, gurgle and spit it out, moving on to the next one.

On the extreme drinking level, liberal lapping of distinctly average wine is reported to be going on in much greater volume of an evening at weekends in town centres all over the country. There are recent news stories highlighting the larger measures of wine served causing all sorts of issues. I wrote a while ago about how hard it is to get a normal small measure of wine when in a bar or pub these days.

Wine on this level is just a flavoured alcohol delivery system, nothing more. Please bring back the 125ml measure, I am fed up with the super size culture we are developing.

In general I do not just pull out better bottles for special occasions. I vary my every day wine choices from very expensive to dirt cheap. I will sometimes drink a quality Burgundy say with lazy beans on toast, and the next time maybe a £3.99 big brand oil slick of a Merlot. Sometimes the best way to enjoy a good wine is to selfishly drink it with your average mid-week evening meal. No distractions.

When you do take your best wine on an outing, there is nothing worse than bringing a well thought out bottle to a dinner party only for it to be squirreled away and not drunk there and then (unless it is a present to keep like a Bordeaux that needs aging). I think that etiquette mostly demands the host to serve a guest's wine on the evening.

So, what happens if a guest has obviously grabbed the cheapest bottle of plonk (to match the petrol station flowers) out of thoughtless convenience?

This is where it gets a little tricky. You can't really not accept the bottle as that looks like wine pomposity in the extreme. You also do not want to drink it with the lovingly prepared meal you have been slaving over all day. You could say that you have a special wine chosen to match the meal, open that and leave your guests plonk obviously to hand. Just show intent to serve.

What to do with this bottle if left unopened?

I suppose the only use for a terrible 'vinegar like' wine that I can think of, is treating a jellyfish sting. The chances of a storm picking up a jelly fish from the ocean, transporting it many miles and dumping it on my head seems remote, but you can never be too careful in our nanny state. Anyway my health insurance may well mean I am probably fully insured for this unlikely eventuality (and not anything else) as I never read the small print and did not take the tick out of a box somewhere. Maybe the government is already working on pointless expensive glossy leaflets on the subject of killer jellyfish emergency precautions. Nice to be one bottle of plonk ahead of the game.

Another technique is to return the favour and hence the bottle when (if) your guests invite you round for dinner. Perhaps a bit inflammatory for me. Nevertheless, I have actually done that by a mistake in the past, over generous guests bringing far too much wine to drink, and hence being left a bottle or two unopened, only to be returned to them at a later date.

This speaks volumes of my poorly stocked wine collection, and my short term memory.

Hail Bordeaux

2009-07-31T14:31:00.012+01:00

Us Brits like to talk about the weather. You can't blame us at the moment as the promised golden riches of a hot summer have in reality been mostly tropical down pours. Rain drops the size of golf balls are imprisoning us in our homes. Sudden torrents of water coursing down the road, a volley of drums on the roof. All the Met Office can say after promising a 'barbecue summer' is effectively ...err sorry, we got it wrong this year.

You do have to remember that it is not their fault the rain came, although this all knowing department almost likes to give the impression of pulling the invisible strings in the sky. Fancy interactive maps, attractive smooth talking presenters and hi-tech satellites don't seem to improve on the guess work a great deal.

My lawn has gone from a dust bowl to a sort of fluorescent green colour, the broken showers promoting turbo growth and buckets of chlorophyll.

If global warming weather predictions are to be believed (o ye of little faith), then southern England will be more Mediterranean in climate. By 2030 DEFRA thinks that grapes like Pinot Noir will be easily cultivated in the UK. So if I had the cash then maybe I should splash out on a Saab 900 convertible and a nice south facing cote (slope) that may well produce a good crop of Pinot in twenty or so years time.

I have some time off work, and being stuck indoors brings its own amount of lethargy and lack of concentration, made very clear today when I started cleaning the sideboard with Windolene. So to pass the time I am drawn to deciphering a bottle of 'bored-eaux' a friend kindly gave me recently, lest I try and clean the bath with toothpaste (although that would kind if make sense if it was enamel).

My Bordeaux (aka Claret) is lesson in understated elegance with its distinctive high shoulders and subtle label. It is a mysterious guest. I thanked my friend knowingly, but the truth of the matter is that I actually normally look at clarets with trepidation as the complex scribbles and markings are tricky to understand fully.

Lets try, and start at the top.

There is a round green seal with DGDDI. This means that French taxes have been paid and the wine can be sold in (and therefore probably has been bought in) France, it is from a named origin and of higher quality. Moving down and there seems to be a metal rather than plastic foil covering the cork. This imparts a level of quality to me about the packaging. Cutting it off is altogether more satisfying.

Taking the armour from a knight not the shell suit from a layabout.

The wording on the foil is 'Bordeaux' and the makers name ' Jean-Louis Trocard'. According to this article -

'The Trocards...produce some 800,000 bottles from ten Libournais properties'

The Libournais region includes Saint-Emilion and Pomerol (famous for Chateau Petrus). These sub-regions are named on the back label of the bottle in French as the grape vine souce areas.

Sliding down those bold shoulders we can first see that the wine is as expected red, sloshing around the glass gap to the main label. Bordeaux is famous for its reds and they can be a blend of any of the following - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot. No specific grape information is forthcoming on the label which is normal.

Next there is an elegant picture of some wrought iron gates, and below that the words 'Chateau Trocard'. Chateau translates as a castle or manor house. Immediately the picture and title of the wine conjures up images of a grand French building much like Cinderella's castle. But in wine making terms chateau means an estate or vineyard. Dispel your fairy tale illusions of grandeur as there could just be could be just an old farm on the estate, nothing more.

Below that is written the vintage (grapes grown and harvested in a particular year) of 2003. Here is where the weather plays a major role, and dictates the character of the wine. Good years can fetch high prices. 2005 is meant to be the most recent sought after vintage.

Unlike 2009 where is looks like low yields from Bordeaux due to hail storms destroying some of the crop (bet the weather forecasts missed that one too, although knowing would not have softened the blow) , 2003 was a heatwave in Europe. The vintage was particularly tannic with high alcohol levels partly as a result of the roasted thick skinned berries . This tells me that maybe the contents will be a tad more bitter than normal, and maybe age even better.

Moving down still further 'Bordeaux Superieur' is emblazoned across the label above 'Appellation Bordeaux Superieur Controlee' in small italics. This means that the vines are selected in the 'general' Bordeaux region (Bordeaux is like a large complex jigsaw puzzle, each piece a wine making geographical area with its own characteristics) and tend to be older, higher quality and age well for longer than basic Bordeaux AOC wines. This ties in with the text on the back label describing the source sub-regions.

The second section of the front label states 'mis en bouteille au chateau' (bottled on the very same estate) and the makers name and address. It is 12.5% by vol and 750ml.
The back label also states that it is best drunk between four and five years old (my schoolboy French helping me out again) so I had best open it fairly soon.

I have only scraped the surface of the information this bottle is silently trying to impart, you can go into far more detail. For example reams have been written about the 2003 vintage and the effects of the climate on the wine.

I find tannic clarets are good with a meaty dinner, so I will roast a lamb and report back.

Methane Clouds

2009-07-13T22:42:00.016+01:00

My wine cellar (storage space under the stairs) has all but been converted into a loo. I am left with a fraction of the wine space, accessible from a cupboard door by the 'throne'.

The few bottles of wine I could store in there would have to endure a flatulent toxic atmosphere. They would also have to put up with warmth from a heated towel rail, and the vibrations from the big flush button on the cistern (all modern loos seem to give you a choice these days. I liked the simplicity of the 'one flush fits all', as there are way too many other decisions to make in life, mostly in fact made on the loo. The two buttons never come with a flush categorisation chart for clarity. It could be a bit like those naff pictures of dishes outside restaurants in dodgy holiday resorts).

A wine collection in my new WC would suffer the same incongruous ride as the Huygens space probe entering Titan's atmosphere, with its thick methane clouds.

Damp towels, a parky loo and a sign saying 'no number twos' are way more favourable than damaging my wine, but I am not the only one living in the house. I need a plan B for wine storage.

In the summer my garage is the 'cooler' in the film 'The Great Escape', you could fry an egg on the floor. In the winter the cobwebs freeze. I cannot afford to convert part of it to some swanky temperature and humidity controlled walk-in wine cellar.

As far as the kitchen goes, I find electric chilled wine cabinets really vulgar looking. They may be practical and gain respect from some visiting wine buffs, but they take away the organic beauty of the wine collection, and present it as a dull predictable amorphous mass of sealed plastic. Some of them look like coffins. You never know whether you are going to pull out a long dead relative or a nice claret. They are about as inspiring and predictable as a screw top plastic wine bottle.

All I want is to stumble upon a bottle covered in dust in my own deep imaginary cellar (candle in hand).

Caves rule in wine storage and have an interesting history. The Romans used to store their wine in catacombs (so they really had to be careful what they pulled out), and the French first used crayeres (old Roman limestone excavations for building material). Nowadays man-made caves built for storing wine are common place all over the world.

Caves are naturally perfect for the job. High humidity, low light, low vibration, and cool temperatures. In fact everything my WC is not.

The perfect temperature for storing wine is around 55 degrees F (13 degrees C), and that is a big ask in my house. To put that in perspective, in Great Britain 16 degrees C is the legal minimum working temperature for office type work, and 13 degrees is for work with some physical activity. So in my mind wine is recommended to exist 'on the edge', on the limit of human endurance. This tells me any living space in my house is not going to cut it.

Looking into this a bit more it would seem that wine at room temperature in the house (in a cool dark place) can be ok for a couple of years. If you want to get serious though, and store quality wines for decades, then 55 degrees F all the way. Varying temperatures promote different subtle changes in the wine, some good and some bad. This is why solid cellaring is so crucial to the outcome. Big temperature fluctuations are one of your worst enemies.

I class myself as a casual wine drinker, storing a small collection for dinner parties and the odd bottle for two to three years. Therefore I think the cupboard in the hall sounds a good bet for now.