BD or not BD?

But that should not be the question.  It is all to easy to hang the biodynamic tag on a producer or a bottle of wine, and get into discussions about whether adoption of biodynamic winemaking has lead to improvements, or whether biodynamic wines are better than non-biodynamic wines.  It is one of those subjects that has recently hit the consciousness of wine drinkers, and looks like it is here to stay for a while, fuelled it seems by a steady stream of producers converting to biodynamics, and journalists keen to report on the success stories.  There are of course also dissenting voices, often with mumblings of mumbo-jumbo.  And a common standpoint for wine drinkers is that many biodynamic wines are very good, and if biodynamics makes good wine they are all for it.

But no one really seems to be too concerned about exactly what that biodynamic tag means.  Neither is it always clear what criteria they are using for deciding which they prefer.

I hope it is obvious that there is a huge spectrum of non-biodynamic viticultural practice, ranging from the environmental destruction advocated by agrochemical companies in the 1960s, to organic farming.  Less clear maybe is that there is also considerable variation in biodynamic practice.  I have myself heard producers say they are biodynamic, but don’t take any notice of the “astrological nonsense”, or that they do not bother with all the biodynamic preparations. And pretty much all of them seem to take the view that if a procedure urgently needs performing they are not going to hang around for the next leaf day or whatever.  Even Demeter certified producers have a lot of discretion. For example, the Demeter Farm Standard does not require tasks to be performed according to a lunar calendar, and allows mechanical stirring of biodynamic preparations.  On the other hand I have also noticed that some biodynamic winemakers are happy to add to the cannon of biodynamic thought by taking existing theory and extending it to new areas, deciding for example that wine must be matured in wood because a vital energy cannot penetrate steel or concrete.  Another example of a recently invented idea is that the position of the moon affects how wines tastes.

How do you judge the quality of the production method anyway?  Do we need a panel of judges who taste the wines blind and allocate points out of a hundred?  While there are procedural objections you could raise to that approach, I think it is a lot better than having a recently proselytised producer enthusiastically pushing a glass into the hands of a journalist. And what do we compare the wine to?  To other wines of about the same price?  To wines from the same producer and age, but of earlier vintages?  That is always tricky due to vintage variation, and at what age do we make the comparison. Or perhaps it is not the wine that is important.  There is also the quality of the vineyard, and the environment in general.  That is probably even harder to judge, at least if you are comparing with a regime that does not involve chucking chemicals about willy-nilly.  In the biodynamic field trials I can find results for, the criterion for success is a large yield of vegetables – hardly confidence inspiring from a wine point of view!

In truth there are a myriad of different decisions and interventions that are taken in the production of wine, starting with the selection of vineyard, and ending in the release of bottles to the market.  It is those interventions, in conjunction with the weather that nature throws at it, that determines the quality of the wine – not a broad-brush philosophy. My approach would be to judge the interventions one at a time, or in small groups.  We can then design an experiment and start getting somewhere.  An easy one might be to have someone stir one batch of biodynamic preparation in the Steiner-approved manner and another batch that is for example “shaken not stirred”, and to then judge the results by an agreed criterion.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that my incredulity kicks in and I have to ask myself why even bother with the experiment.  Is there any realistic chance of there being a difference between shaking and stirring?  And the same applies to any number of other possible biodynamical interventions you could imagine.  Equally unfortunately, I think I can also hear the voice of biodynamical theorists saying that I have missed the whole point: that biodynamics is about a holistic approach that cannot be judged by science.  Not what most would call conventional science at least.  Steiner based his ideas on Goethean science that emphasises the importance of human consciousness interacting with the world.  So conventional science, by stressing the importance of blind and double-blind trials, seems to run into direct conflict with Goethean science at a very fundamental level.

More on biodynamics later as I find it a fascinating subject.  But for now, I would urge you not to pay too much attention to whether your wine has a biodynamic label, literal or otherwise.  If you really care, you need to be asking questions about the method of production in a lot more detail.

The cult of the natural

For as long as I can remember in the relatively short life of my wine geekdom, the standard temperature advice for long term storage of wine has read something like: ideally around 12 or 14°C, avoid extremes of heat and cold and diurnal temperature variation, but seasonal temperature variation will cause no damage.

So as I was reading Jasper Morris’s “Inside Burgundy” over Christmas, I was rather surprised to see the idea that “Arguably [natural conditions that vary somewhat from Summer to Winter] is to be preferred: it reflects the rhythm of the earth.”  After my standard sceptical harrumph to such notions, I thought little of it.  Until I stumbled across an article by Steven Spurrier for The Wine Society in the Society News January 2011 where I read something similar: “Today (October 24th) my cellar is 10°C and will descend slowly to 6°C by January, rising to 16°C by August. I feel that such variation suits the wines, as a constant temperature cannot be natural.”  What’s going on here?  Since when did seasonal temperature variations not only be harmless, but become desirable?  Did Jasper plant the idea into Steven’s mind, or does the meme originate elsewhere?  Some biodynamical proclamation perhaps?  I bet there is no basis in empirical evidence.

In the absence of that hard evidence, what might science teach us about temperature and the ageing of wine?  Well, many different complex chemical reactions contribute to the maturing of wine.  Each one will progress at a rate that depends on temperature, and as it takes place the products of the reaction become available for other reactions.  Roughly speaking, if you increase the temperature by 10°C the rate of any chemical reaction will increase by a factor of two, so your wine will mature about twice as fast.  But it is not quite as simple as that.  Because the rate of each reaction will respond to the increase in temperature slightly differently, the paths taken by the reactions will never be the same for wine matured at different temperatures, and they will always result in a different wine.  And if you vary the temperature with time, you will get yet another wine.  How big these effects are I wouldn’t like to say.  You will certainly notice a wine maturing faster at a higher temperature, but the difference between a wine cellared at 5°C for 10 years and one matured at 15°C for 5 years is going to be more subtle.

And what is so natural about laying down bottles of wine in a cellar under a domestic house anyway?  Wouldn’t leaving them lying around outside be more natural, and make the wine even more subject to the rhythms of the Earth?  Does that mean the wine would be even better?  In fact maybe we should abandon the nasty industrial glass bottles and revert to goat skins.

OK, maybe I am reacting to a couple of offhand comments with undue sarcasm.  And I certainly don’t really want to single out Messrs Morris and Spurrier for criticism.  It is a trend in wine writing, and also in society in general, to glorify the natural – man-made artifacts and environments are rejected, and natural is treated as being almost synonymous with good.

Meanwhile I am wondering if I need to adjust the temperature of my Liebherrs for the seasons.  I don’t think I’ll bother, but I fear that future models might come with annual temperature programmes as standard.  Until then, 12°C it is.

Beaujolais and the benefits of a good map

There is a myth abroad that the less prestigious straight Beaujolais, as opposed to Beaujolais-Villages and the Beaujolais Crus, originates in the sandy alluvial plains of the South and East of the region.  In fact I have heard this said so often that I thought it appeared in many introductions to the wines of the region, but when preparing to write this blog post I could only find one textbook, albeit a rather influential one, making the claim in such an extreme way.  The culprit is the WSET Advanced Certificate textbook.  Maybe it has been rewritten now – the most recent version I have is from 2004 – but the damage has already been done.

When I visited Beaujolais, also in 2004, in our hotel and at several producers I noticed a raised-relief map of the region showing the geology and the limits of the various appellations, and after quite a search I managed to buy one – from De La Vigne au Verre, a gift shop in the centre of Fleurie.  There is a picture of it above to show you roughly what I am talking about (be sure to note the invaluable reminder of why there is an “s” at the end of Beaujolais).  The salmon pink areas are for straight Beaujolais, turquoise is used for Beaujolais-Villages, and the other colours for the Crus.  I understand contour lines on maps pretty well, but I must say a raised-relief map makes it so much easier for me to appreciate the landscape.  A quick glance at this map immediately casts doubt on the idea of sandy alluvial plains of the South and East of the region; it is pretty obvious even in the image above.

The alluvial plains lie by the river as you might expect, to the East of the region only, and there is little or no viticulture of any sort on them.  The largest areas vineyards on low lying hills are actually to the river side of the Beaujolais-Villages area; not in the South.  Most of them are classified as straight Beaujolais, but from the geology and relief alone the reason for the location of the border between Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages is not immediately obvious to me.

Southern Beaujolais is actually quite hilly – not noticeably less so than the North.  Some is calcareous, and thus not so good for Gamay, but around 50% of the area is schist and granite.  One can only assume that the main reason the granitic parts are deemed only to be worthy of the lowest appellation is the orientation of the the slopes.  But even then some slopes do not seem to be much less auspicious than many in the Beaujolais-Villages area.  I suspect there are quite a lot of decent wines produced here being sold for not very much money at all.  A few years ago I enjoyed several bottles of a straight Beaujolais called La Doyenne, Domaine des Pierres Dorées **-***. The domaine is based in Le Breuil, which is in this promising-looking area of Southern Beaujolais, and according to Nick Dobson the grapes were from old vines grown on sunny slopes of granitic outcrops.  I see he does not stock it now, so presumably it was a hard sell.

Having dealt with low-end Beaujolais, let’s turn our attention to the Crus, which are exclusively in granitic and schistous areas. Côte de Brouilly stands out on my map literally and figuratively.  The Cru limits are basically defined by the all the slopes of an extinct volcano – even those that are facing North.  And Brouilly is the area around the volcano, some quite hilly and some flat. These two Crus lie to the South of all the others, and are largely separated from them by a river. The Crus of Saint-Amour, Juliénas and Chénas seem a bit detached to the North.  They have as their focus another river valley, and also have slopes facing in all directions.  Most of the Crus however, including the most prestigious ones of Fleurie, Morgon and Moulin-à-Vent, basically lie on one gentle slope that is largely South-Easterly facing.  Looking at the relief map it is easy to jump to the, possibly false, conclusion that it is the angle and direction of the slope that are the key factors in being a top Beaujolais Cru.  That and the granitic soil of course.  Or perhaps there is something more specifically special about the soil and rock on that particular slope.  But if not, it has to be said that other bits of Beaujolais-Villages look hard done by.

While I am in the mood for criticism, I’d like to point out in that WSET textbook from 2004, the map of Beaujolais also leaves a lot to be desired.  The Crus are strung out as a series of dots from North to South like villages on the Côte d’Or.  But they are areas, not villages.  Some don’t even have an obviously associated village, so dots are not particularly helpful.  And even if you can get past that, the dots are not nearly in the correct relative positions, e.g. Fleurie and Chiroubles seem to be inverted.  I am a great believer in the use of maps to illustrate any subject with a geographical element, and that certainly includes any book on wine.  They do not have to be perfect, but should be accurate to extent implied by the map’s scale and level of detail, and to be fair many of the WSET maps are precisely that.  So there we have a good and bad examples of wine maps.  Good ones can be very informative, but beware being mislead by poor ones.

What’s wrong with German wine labelling

Many people complain about German wine classification being too complicated, placing too much emphasis on must weight as an indicator of quality, and confusing punters with the introduction of inferior bereiche and grosslagen with misleading names.

To me the text on a traditional label for a prädikatswein is a model of clarity.  Here’s one I’ve been drinking a lot of recently: 2000 Brauneberger Juffer Riesling Kabinett.  The information traditionally comes in the same order

  1. Vintage (2000)
  2. Village (Brauneberg)
  3. Vineyard (Juffer)
  4. Grape variety (Riesling)
  5. Prädikat (Kabinett)

Somewhere on the label there will also be the region, in this case Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, which gives some indication of the style to expect, and of course the producer – here it is Weingut Fritz Becker Erben.

If a German wine is dry or medium dry, the label will usually indicate this with the EU defined words trocken or halbtrocken respectively.  Though you may also find the word feinherb used, which is not controlled by the EU, but roughly means the same as halbtrocken.  Otherwise you can pretty safely assume the wine will be sweet, with the prädikat giving some indication of the level of sweetness.  And finally, as a special treat for wine geeks, there will be an ID unique to the particular bottling.  My wine is AP Nr 2 577 015 5 01.

So what is the problem? You have all the key information.   French labels are sometimes criticised for omitting the grape variety and level of sweetness, but that is rarely an issue with German wines.

I suppose having a smattering of German helps a lot.  For example you need to realise that Brauneberger means “from Brauneberg”, and you sometimes also see something like 2000er, meaning “of the 2000 vintage”.  And some of the vineyard names are awfully long and complicated looking.  But they are just names – take them one syllable at a time.  It may well be my geeky scientific mentality coming through, but I really like the orderliness of German labels.  It reflects the strict word order rules in German grammar.

Of course, if you do treat the prädikat as a mark of quality, you are likely to come a cropper at some point or other.  As with all wines, the best indicators of quality are vineyard and producer, and you have that information too.  I simply take the prädikat as an indicator of style.  As such, perhaps it would be useful if there were maximum as well as minimum must sugar levels specified for each one, but even so it provides useful information.

On the issue of grosslagen, as I see it they should be treated like the any other specified vineyard.  Some vineyards are better than others and of course you have to know which are the good and bad ones to make sense of the information.  There’s Google, and plenty of references books, to help you out. And of course price is also usually a pretty good indicator.  If you see a cheap wine with Niersteiner on the bottle, do you really expect it to be from one of Nierstein’s top vineyards?   In that sense it is no better or worse than Burgundy.  The most serious charge against bereiche and grosslagen is that they allow a respectable village name to be applied to vines that may be grown beyond the limits of the village.  Again, I am reminded of Burgundy.  No one seems to get upset, for example, about the name of Beaune being applied to wines from a number of different villages in the southern part of the Côte d’Or.  Not to mention the way several villages on the Côte d’Or managed to acquire the names of their finest vineyard leading to, for example, the name Montrachet featuring in the appellations of village level wines from two different villages.

So as you can perhaps now guess, I don’t think there is a lot wrong with German wine labelling.

Or at least there wasn’t.  But I find the more recent attempts to give recognition to good quality dry wines unhelpful.  How many people really understand what a Grosses Gewächs is?  And if they do, could they explain how it differs from Erstes Gewächs and Erste Lage?  I have just read an article on the subject in The World of Fine Wine and I’m damned if I can without referring back to the article.  There is also a modern trend to simplify labels by omitting information, or using a simplified front label and relegating detail to the back of the bottle.  I also find this unhelpful, as removing context makes it more difficult to work out what the remaining words refer to.  Is that word the village or the vineyard?  Or maybe it is simply a made up brand name?

Anyway, what about this  2000 Brauneberger Juffer Riesling Kabinett from Weingut Fritz Becker Erben?  This year I bought a case of it from Cambridge Wine Merchants for the princely sum of £6.50 a bottle, and I am currently in the process of trying to clear them out of their last remaining bottles, but they may have a few left by the time you read this.  £6.50 for a 10 year old wine!  I believe there is some bottle variation, the less good bottles being less intense and a bit tired, but the better ones are beautiful.  A light crisp wine, with apple and lime aromas, a fair whack of petrol, and sweetness in excellent balance with the acidity.  Not a great wine by any means, but very enjoyable if you like that sort of thing.  Some bottles maybe should have been drunk a few years ago, but the better ones are in my opinion spot on now and just about merit ****.

The multisensory perception of flavour

…that’s the title of an article by Charles Spence  in the September 2010 edition of The Pychologist.  If you think the name is familiar, it might be because he had a couple of articles on colour and wine in recent editions of The World of Fine Wine.  If anything, I think his article in The Psychologist is more interesting.  It is well worth a read, and you can find it here.  It starts on page 21 of this online version.

There are some examples of how vision and sound can affect our palate perception of food and wine, but the most interesting insight for me was an illustration of how closely interlinked our senses of taste and smell are. In winetasting 101 it is drummed into us that we only sense 4 (or was that 5) basic tastes on our tongue, and everything else in our nose.  Well that is still true, but it seems that the brain is not so fussy about where the signals come from when it generates what we would describe as flavours. The two senses are so interlinked that the presence or absence of a taste on the tongue affects our sensitivity to smells.  Putting a drop of sugary water on our tongue, even if the solution is so weak as not to be detectable as sweet, increases our sensitivity to almond aromas.  At least that is the case for Europeans and North Americans, who tend to associate almond flavours with sugar, but not for the Japanese, who rather associate almond with salt.

So there we have yet one more example of how our perception of flavour can vary from person to person – this time in a rather complex way.

A week of Tenerife wine and food

Recently back from my hols on Tenerife. The focus of the holiday was by no means wine, but of course I was keen to try the local wines, and as there seems to be so little written about them I thought you might be interested in my experiences there. I am not going to give a factual summary here of the DOs and grape varieties, but if you are interested in such things you could do worse than looking here.

Casa del Vino

First stop, almost literally, was Casa del Vino de Baranda. Here is a wine museum, a tasting room, bar and restaurant. The museum was full of information about Tenerife wines, actually too much information for me, and the obligatory old bits and bobs of wine making in days gone by. The casa was an old farm house that produced wine, and as such came with a huge lever wine press that now forms part of the museum. You almost got a picture of that at the top of this page, but then I decided Mount Teide was prettier.

The most interesting thing I learned was about the local traditional method of training vines. It is a variant on the cordon system, with several branches braided together and laid out horizontally to grow up to around 3m long. The braided branches are allowed to rest on the ground during winter, but propped up by 50cm or so in the spring. These days a variety of training systems are used, but I did spot one or two vineyards that still used the traditional method.

We hit the ground running in the tasting room, which turned out to be more of a wine bar for locals, than a venue for (ahem) serious wine enthusiasts like us. There was a changing menu of something like 10 wines, which were served with bread and cheese, in proper wine glass sized portions, for 1-2 euros each. We did manage to negotiate half pours, but they were still large for tasting samples, and not a spittoon in sight. If I went again, I would avoid pre-Sunday-lunch drinking time with the locals, make sure no one was driving, and schedule plenty of time and liver capacity to enjoy the wine. Anyway, we finished up sharing 4 half-glass tasters, and then a bottle over lunch from the restaurant.

The wines

For some reason, in restaurants the most commonly recommended wine was Rueda. OK, it is not a bad choice but there are other white wines in the world, including quite a few from Tenerife. We succumbed once and had a couple of glasses, but otherwise stuck to wines from the island. Dry wines only. I understand Tenerife produces very good sweet Malvasias, but we did not seek these out, and none presented themselves in a very obvious way.

Maybe it was the just me, or the wines we tried, but I found the whites all a bit samey. Sweet tropical fruit aromas, mainly pineapple I think, almost pungent, fair acidity, maybe a tad astringent, and with a slightly cloying finish that seemed to be due to the aromatic profile rather than residual sugar. I hope it does not sound condescending – I don’t mean it to be – but I’d say they were characterful and rustic rather then smooth and sophisticated. All pretty solid *** wines, but I was tiring of them by the end of the week. Here are the white wines we tried, with actual or estimated retail prices converted to pounds at current exchange rates:
Marba, Blanco Barrica, Tenerife Tacoronte Acentejo DO, 2009, 12.5%, £7.60
Viñátigo, Gual, Tenerife, Ycoden Daute Isora DO, 2008, 13.0%, £7.40
Viñátigo, Verdello, Tenerife Ycoden Daute Isora DO, 2007, 13.0%, £10.30
Viñátigo, Blanco, Tenerife Ycoden Daute Isora DO, Spain, 2009, half bottle, £3.00
Viñátigo, Marmajuelo, Tenerife Ycoden Daute Isora DO, 2009, 13.0%, £8.70
Viña Zanata, Tenerife Daute Isora DO, Viña La Guancha, 2009, 12.5%, £9.00
So that’s one tasting note for 6 wines – no messing about on winenous! Three of these are of the varieties Gual, Verdello and Marmajuelo, as mentioned in the list above. I don’t know about the Viña Zanata, but the remaining two are mainly Listán Blanco – another name for the Palomino Fino of Sherry fame. There is also a Listrão Branco on Madeira, which I assume is the same variety.

I found more variation in the reds – both in style and quality.
Tajinaste, Tenerife Valle de la Ortava DO, 2008, 13.0%, £7.80
Tintilla, Tenerife Ycoden Daute Isora DO, Tágara, 2006, 13.5%, £10.30
Tanganillo, Tinto, Tenerife Valle de la Orotava DO, 2008, 13.5%, £6.50
Arautava, Tinto, Tenerife Valle dela Orotava DO, 2009, 13.0%, £8.40
Monje, Tradicional, Tinto, Tenerife Tacoronte-Acentejo DO, 2008, 13.0%, £9.50
Crater, Tenerife Tacoronte-Acentejo DO, Bodegas Buten, 2006, 13.5%, £14.00
In these names, it is only Tintilla that is the grape variety. All the others are dominated by Listán Negro. In addition to Listán Negro, the Crater has Negramoll and la Hollera blended in, and the Monje has Negramoll. Negramoll is the same as Tinta Negra Mole of Maderia, so together with Verdello and Listán Blanco, we are now up to three varieties in common with that island. All the reds were low on tannin. According to Jancis Robinson in her “Guide to Wine Grapes”, Listán Negro is usually vinified using carbonic maceration, so that could explain the low tannins, and also some of the flavour profiles.

I found the Tanaganillo to be rather dumb and short, tasting mainly of boiled blackcurrant sweets **. The Tintilla was oxidised, but have no idea if it was the wine itself, or if the bottle had just been left open too long. The oxidative notes were of the type I have noticed others liking, but they give me no pleasure, so *. The Tajinaste and Arautava were simple but good fruity blackcurrant wines, with some licorice noted on the finish of the Arautava, ***. The Monje and the Crater were a step up in quality I thought. Maybe it was the DO, which I understand was the first one on the island, or the other grapes blended in with the Listán. The Monje was also blackcurrant fruit dominated, but was more elegant, with a slight green edge, and aromatics that reminded me a bit of Syrah – but still only *** I think. The Crater, was maybe a tad bretty, and in that phase of development where it was starting to develop mature notes whilst still retaining some youthful dark fruitiness – all good things in my book. I may have been partly swayed by the environment where we drank the wine, but I think this scraped ****.

Restaurants – bad, ugly and good

Let’s start by getting some of the bad and ugly out of the way. If you are at the Teide Portillo Visitors’ Centre, don’t be tempted to eat at the nearby restaurant. There we had a soggy spag with packet bol, and a tough Spanish omelette, presumably warmed up out of a packet, and was the worst restaurant meal I can remember. We had lunch another day just up the road, which was better – but to be honest we may just have got lucky by choosing better from the menu – we went for soup at that place.

Also avoid Pomadoro in Puerto de la Cruz – there we had rather unsavoury squid (cooked in bad oil perhaps), tough rabbit, and a tough and overcooked fillet steak. The views overlooking the sea are great, but you can get the same experience next door at Rustica, where the fish dishes were a lot more acceptable, if not particularly great. Also be prepared to be serenaded by a dodgy guitar player, who will then come round asking for money.

The best place we found in Puerto de la Cruz was Régulo – we went there twice. It is what I would call a proper restaurant. Their customers were mainly foreigners like us, but providing tourist troughing did not seem to be its raison d’etre, unlike Pomadoro, Rustica and many other places we saw in Puerto. I had the excellent value fish soup on both occasions, and everything else we tried was tasty and nicely cooked. Huge portions though! I think there is something about Tenerife “entrées” that does not translate properly – they seem to be main course size. And my shoulder of lamb was a whole shoulder (maybe I exaggerate) that even I could not finish. Good wine recommendations there – the Arautava, and the Monje.

We had only dinners in Puerto de la Cruz, and lunches elsewhere on those days. An honourable mention for lunch must go to Casa del Vino, where we had a good but not very exciting meal. To be fair though, we did go for the el-cheapo lunch option for something like EUR12 per head for 3 courses, so we cannot complain too much. And another honourable mention to El Burgado at Playa las Arenas, near Buenavista del Norte in the North-West corner of the island. There we shared a paella, which was OK, but the best thing about the restaurant was the friendly service and the quiet and beautiful location by the sea.

All other meals were dinners, and taken in Santa Cruz. The first night we went to a place close to our hotel that we had a personal recommendation for – Meson El Portón, Calle Dr Guigou 18. I give the address because I saw it in no guide books or similar places you look for recommendations. I noted it was very full at lunchtime, which I took to be a good sign, and we returned for dinner. The place was nearly empty but we were welcomed warmly. No menu was presented, but we were lead to a display of raw fish and meat and, with pidgin English, pidgin Spanish and much finger pointing, we made our choice, – a whole pampona (a local fish) for 2, and we accepted the offer of a salad “para picar”. Wine negotiations followed a similar pattern. The salad – various things including tuna – was good, and the pampona was even better – huge, cooked perfectly and seasoned with not a little garlic. On leaving, we discovered there was an English menu outside, with one intriguing item: “ham broke black woman”. But don’t worry, the Spanish version was “jamon pata negra”. All in all, an excellent and reasonably priced evening!

On the third evening in Santa Cruz we ate at Clavijo 38. We both went for the “local fish”, which turned out to be hake. We had huge portions, a half fish each effectively, and it was nicely cooked. But expensive. Too expensive I think.

But it was the second evening that was the gastronomic highlight of the holiday. We went to Solana. I discovered it recommended on a Spanish wine website, where it seemed to stand out in Santa Cruz in terms of the large number of people willing to rate it highly. No mention in guide books or on trip advisor though. It is a small restaurant with 34 covers, run by Nacho Solana, chef, and his wife Erika Sanz, sommelier and all things front-of-house. There was no evidence of any other staff at all, and the personal touch added a lot to the dining experience. Nacho took it upon himself to explain the whole menu to us in detail, and was clearly truly passionate about his food. Everything sounded great and it was difficult to decide, but it helped that we were allowed to split dishes to allow us to taste more of them. The food was good, but to me not all dishes were equally successful – a personal thing no doubt, as my wife did not always agree with my likes and dislikes. We started with a fois gras mille-feuilles – no pastry, but very thin layers of fois gras and apple. I chose that, but was a little disappointed. The other half-starter though was perhaps my favourite dish – scallops with artichokes on a bed of mushrooms. It sounded like an unlikely combination, and still does, but it worked fantastically. We then moved on to two half-dishes of pork – one from a fully grown pata negra pig, and one with meat from a suckling pig cooked over two or three days. The suckling pig literally melted in the mouth, but I preferred the firmer texture and fuller flavour of the grown-up pig. And for dessert, two half portions of chocolate soufflé and tarte tartin. We asked for wine recommendations.  Erika thought artichoke was too difficult to match, but suggested glasses of Rueda with the fois gras. It didn’t work at all. Maybe it was one of the few white wines they had by the glass?  The local red wine sugestion though was a hit – that was the Crater.  Total bill for all of the above plus a coffee was under EUR130 for two. Another excellent and reasonably priced evening. If you are in Santa Cruz, go there!

(Update: see here for my vinous report on a 2013 trip to Tenerife.)

Is free wine delivery like a free lunch?

Customers never like paying delivery charges, and I believe that now big sellers like Amazon offer free delivery it is going to be more and more a customer expectation.  But delivery is never really free.  The costs are usually very real, in the sense that the merchant has to pay the carrier.  These costs have to be recovered somehow, and of course the price of the goods reflects that fact.

My general view is that if any cost can conveniently be passed onto the customer, it should be done so in a straightforward and transparent way.  When it comes to delivery from a merchant that only sells online, that clearly means charging delivery in full – what the carrier demands, and possibly a charge for packing and organising.  Then it is up to the customer to decide if he really wants that single bottle of Jacob’s Creek sent across the country, or whether it might make more sense to order a case at a time.

But when a merchant operates a bricks-and-mortar shop too, I think things are less clear.  OK, shipping is a real cost, but so is the cost of running a shop.  The online customer is not getting the benefits of the shop, and the merchant need not use the shop to service the online customer.  Perhaps the answer here is to offer an online discount on the wine, and add shipping.  But that starts to get a bit complicated to manage, and in a way it depends on what the merchant sees as his primary way of doing business.  For whatever reason, it is not a pricing model you see.

In practice many merchants charge only a small amount for delivery, and offer free delivery for wine over a certain volume, or based on the value of the order.  Another approach, which I have never really understood, is simply to refuse to ship smaller quantities, whatever the value of the order. Then there is at least one merchant, The Wine Society, that offers “free” delivery for larger orders, but cheekily gives a little-publicised discount if you collect.  But when all is said and done, it is really a question of finding a solution that is acceptable to most customers.

Sometimes however, you can get very close to a delivery service that is genuinely free.  I refer to the the free local delivery that many independent wine merchants offer.  They will often specify an area within which delivery is free, but I have recently been finding that if you are prepared to be flexible about delivery times they are prepared to be flexible about extending that area.  Basically, it seems that merchants out in the countryside regularly make van runs into their nearest big cities, and if you happen to live in the city or en route they are happy to drop of wines FOC when they do the run. They may well draw the line at the above-mentioned single bottle of Jacobs’s Creek, and do not advertise it, but Byrne’s of Clitheroe will deliver free to Manchester addresses, and Buon Vino in Settle will do the same.  I fear life might get more expensive now I know that!  Also you can see on their website that Fingal Rock in Monmouth includes London in their free delivery zone.  These are all excellent wine merchants that deserve more business, and I am sure there are many others that offer flexible local delivery if you seek them out.

The final example of excellent free local delivery I’d like to mention is a bottle of Champagne I once ordered from Portland Wine at around 10.30 one morning.  Now that is truly a local delivery, so nothing strange about that. The excellent thing is that it arrived before lunch the same day.  Unfortunately the lunch was still not free.

Reasons not to pay too much attention to tasting notes

Only two reasons for now – if I put my mind to it I am sure I could find more. In summary they are:

  1. There are often variations, sometime very large ones,  in tasting notes from different authorities
  2. There can be quite large variations in one taster’s experience of a wine – well, mine at least, and I am sure I am not alone.

Perhaps the best known example of authorities having widely divergent opinions is the widely publicised spat between Parker and Jancis Robinson over Pavie 2003.  I don’t want to discuss the rights and wrongs of the disagreement here, but do want to emphasise that the two people disagreeing here are hardly johnny-come-lately wine bloggers.

While this case got a lot of attention, it is not at all unusual for well known critics to have very different opinions.  If you read The World of Fine Wine you will see many examples of this in their tastings section.  Spending only a couple of minutes flicking through the latest edition, I find a notes on a couple of Riojas to illustrate my point.  Here we have three tasters:  Tim Atkin (T), Jesús Barquín (J), and Marcel Orford-Williams (M) – maybe not quite in the same league as Parker and Jancis when it comes to authority and influence, but not too shabby.  It is not explicitly stated, but the implication is that each taster is tasting from the same bottle – not that it makes much difference to the reader, who will be drinking a different bottle anyway.  Here are TN extracts that I hope give an impression of the tasters’ opinions, together with their scores:

CVNE Imperial Gran Reserva 1994
T: Mature, feral… gamey… smokey… sweet oak. 15
J: Spicy raw meat… red fruit… fleshy. 17.5
M: Dumb, quite fresh, hard, dry finish. Coarse. 9

Contino Viña del Olivio 2005
T: Firm, chewy… extracted… super ripe… hard to like. 8
J: Balanced structure: acidity, noble tannins… truly excellent. 18
M: Overdone… overextracted and lacking in charm. 15

In case there is any doubt, I am not criticising WoFW or their reviewers.  Quite the reverse in fact – I think it is good that they allow this diversity of opinion to be visible.  But what a range of tasting notes and scores! How is a poor punter meant to interpret this diversity of opinion?  The stock answer is that you should calibrate your palate against the critics and follow those with whom you share tastes.  But I think that is easier said than done.  OK, one might get an impression of a critic’s likes and dislikes, but I doubt very much anyone actually trawls through their own notes and does wine-by-wine comparisons.  I certainly have not enough tasted wines in common with any one critic to do such a thing, though it might be a bit easier to achieve if you are more into high-end clarets.

I would propose that the answer to understanding a wine is to taste it yourself. But it is not quite that simple, and it brings me to my point number 2: variation in my own palate.

A couple of weeks back I attended an informal stand-up tasting at my local wine merchant.  A representative of the producer was pouring, and providing interesting information about the wines, but there was no hard sell. On the back of a small but unhurried tasting sample I bought a bottle of Langmeil Hangin’ Snakes Barossa Shiraz-Viognier 2007.  I didn’t take notes at the tasting, but as I bought the bottle for £12.50 I must have thought it worth 3 or 4 stars.

On getting the wine home, I realised that I had tried it a few months back at with my tasting group, a more leisurely tasting in a home environment.  Checking my notes I was dismayed to see that I was very dismissive of it.  It got 1 star, and I actually used the phrase “cheap and nasty” – ouch! I also thought there was a whiff of hydrogen sulphide about it, and as our hostess had recently acquired a Vinturi aerator we decided to give it a spin (as it were) with this wine.  When served treated and untreated samples blind, I correctly identified the samples and decided that the machine had made the wine drinkable.

So was I now the proud owner of a £12.50 cheap and nasty bottle that could perhaps be improved by a gadget, or was my quick in-store tasting sample to be believed?  I discovered when I took the bottle to Aladdin it was OK, if unspectacular – a grudging 3 stars I guess.  But tasting it at home, both before and after the restaurant trip, it was transformed back to its cheap and nasty mode – a grudging 2 stars.

No, it was not the glass – not entirely at least.  On the Aladdin evening I used the same glass on all occasions.   It was not cork variation, as these bottles were under screwcap. And it didn’t seem to perform consistently worse with or without food.  I do not usually notice such wide variation in my experience of a wine.  But clearly this does happen, and I urge you to bear it in mind when you read any of my tasting notes, or indeed (dare I say it?)  anyone else’s.  I am usually reluctant to to publish notes anyway, and when I do I like to base them on the experience of drinking several bottles on different occasions, though I have offered a few recently based on much more limited experience.

Having said all that, do tasting notes have any value at all?  Yes, I think they do.  For me, my own notes work mainly as memory joggers about previous experiences.  And if my experiences have been inconsistent it is no bad thing to be reminded of that fact too.  But when it comes to the notes of other people I am not so sure.  In my opinion they are mainly useful as a good starting point for a dialog.

Am I going to buy more bottles of  Hangin’ Snakes?  It might be interesting from a scientific point of view, but I am going to save my liver for better stuff.  And if my opinion still counts for anything at all at the end of this article, I would recommend that you take your money elsewhere too.

Some English wines

At the end of an earlier post on visits to a couple of English vineyards I mentioned I might have more to say after trying some of my purchases.  Well I opened a few bottles last weekend for my small tasting group, and here are some thoughts.  Most wine were bought at the English Wine Centre, which tends to be rather expensive.  Where this is the case I give first what I consider to be the normal market price, so fair price comparisons can be made.

Nyetimber Blanc de Blancs, 2001, £27-ish (£34.50 at EWC): At first I thought this was a 2007, but I was confused by the stroke at the top of the 1.  So the idea of  a mini horizontal with the Ridgeview went out of the window!  Soft and fruity, medium high acidity, with a distinctive touch of honeyed sweetness.  Good to drink now, but would be no problem keeping several more years. ****

Ridgeview, Bloomsbury, 62% Chardonnay, 24% Pinot Noir, 14% Pinot Meunier, 2007, £19 (£24.30 at EWC): Soft strawberry fruit, medium high acid, dryer than the Nyetimber, and with a hard slightly unpleasant finish.  Would probably improve with 10 years or so. I clearly preferred the Nyetimber, but it is only fair to comment here that others thought this Ridgeview was better. ***

Three Choirs Vineyards, Coleridge Hill, English Regional Wine, Madeleine Angevine, Pheonix, 2009,  £8.50 (£9.50 at EWC):  Watery appearance, intensely grassy and herbaceous, medium high acidity, light and slightly off-dry. Length is maybe lacking a bit.  Drink now.   The 2005 Coleridge Hill was the first English wine I bought quite a few bottles of, but at that time it was only £5.50.  I still might be tempted at £8.50 occasionally, as it would make a lovely light summer aperitif. ***

Chapel Down, Bacchus, English Vineyards Quality Wine PSR, 2009, £10.00: Watery appearance.  Pungent.  A lot of cat pee on a small gooseberry bush.  Someone else said “stale sweat on a T-shirt”.  Eek, that’s right, it was not cat pee after all.  Strangely, after having heard Sauv Blanc being described as cat pee a few times in the past, the idea of stale sweat seemed so much more disgusting.  Slightly off dry, and with excellent length.  Drink now.  Despite all the sweat and pee metaphors I did like this. Open a bottle as an alternative to a Sauvignon Blanc sometime. ***

Single Vineyard Wine, Astley, Severn Vale, English Vineyards Quality Wine PSR, 2007, £8.50 (£11.75 at EWC): Watery appearance, citrus, sweet grapefruit, medium acidity, medium dry, lacking in length, and with slightly unpleasant finish.  This is not a style I like at all.  In terms of balance it reminded me of a cheap sweetish Vouvray.  For me a sweet wine has to have good acidity and intense flavours – this was lacking on both counts.  Others at the table liked it more than me.  **

However good or bad the wines were, this was not one of the most enjoyable tastings I have organised.  So many light, rather acidic, white wines in quick succession were rather difficult to stomach.  Whilst a glass might be OK on its own, if you drink these wines in any quantity you really need food.

Trust me, I’m a wine expert

I am fascinated by any scientific study in the field of wine tasting.  So often the results challenge conventional thinking in the wine world and provide much food for thought. Here I shall describe just one piece of research that I think deserves greater recognition.  It is published in The Wine Trials book, and an academic paper that you can download for free.  Do take a look at the paper, but I am not sure I would advise buying the book.  I have the 2008 edition, and most of it is devoted to “100 wine recommendations under $15”.  I enjoyed some of the commentary in the earlier chapters, but I’m a sucker for that sort of thing and even I am not convinced it justifies the purchase price.

The study involved 17 blind tasting events in the USA, held in 2006 and 2007.  There were 506 participants, and 523 wines.  In total 6,175 samples were tasted and rated.   For analysis purposes the participants were classified as expert or non-expert tasters.  Experts were defined as those having had some formal wine training.

The main result is that while the experts’ ratings correlated with price, the non-experts actually preferred cheaper wines.

To give a feel for the magnitude of the effect, the authors give an example of the predictions of one of the models they fitted to the data.  Using the 100 point scale, if there were 2 wines, one costing 10 times as much as the other, experts would rate the expensive bottle seven points higher than the cheaper one, but non-experts would rate it 4 points lower.  The book contains a paragraph of specific results, which I think are useful to put this into perspective: “On the whole, tasters preferred a nine-dollar Beringer Founders’ Estate Cabernet  Sauvignon to a £120 wine from the same grape and the same producer: Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. They preferred a six-dollar Vinho Verde from Portugal to a £40 Cakebread Chardonnay and a £50 Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru from Louis Latour.  And when we concealed the labels and prices of 27 sparkling wines and asked people to rate them, the Dom Pérignon finished 17th – behind 14 sparkling wines that cost less than $15, eight of which cost less than $10.”

There is one very practical lesson to be drawn from this study: if you consider yourself a non-expert you would probably do best ignoring recommendations from experts!

But what is really going on here?  There is probably no single explanation.  A few possibilities spring to mind, but I think the main reason is that the wine trade, from producers to critics, is too inward-looking.  The trade decides amongst themselves what defines a good wine, prices wines accordingly, and then seeks to educate neophytes in the mysteries of the art.  Meanwhile, everyone else feels too intimidated by the whole thing to question the clothes of the emperor.  It seems to me that the negative correlation between ratings and prices indicates that the wine market is organised very strangely.

Does it matter?  Well, yes, it has some very important consequences if sellers of wine are hoping that their punters are readily going to part with more money to get a more enjoyable product.  From my reading of the situation it seems that most drinkers are only likely to trade up if they get so interested in wine that they attend a wine course, or if they decide they need to impress by serving a wine with a prestigious label.

Perhaps that is just the way of the world, but I would be really interested in exploring what non-experts tend to enjoy as a group.  Do they really just prefer sugary pap to Proper Wines?  Or is there a new wine aesthetic waiting to be discovered? Something that future wine makers could aim for with the resources that potential higher prices will yield?