Cooley Distillery, The Dodo and The Last Independent Irish Whiskey Distillery

The most interesting statement in the Press Release from Cooley and Beam Inc this afternoon in relation to the proposed acquisition of Cooley Distillery by Beam is i think this sentence -

 “Cooley is one of only three sources for Irish whiskey, and the only independent player, so this transaction is a unique and compelling high-return opportunity to enter one of the industry’s highest growth categories,” said Matt Shattock, president and chief executive officer of Beam. 

Its a classic , a key element in its value and unique high-return opportunity is that Cooley is ‘the only independent player’ a value and asset that disappears immediately it is acquired by a multinational corporation.

No matter how, benevolent a stewardship of the ownership, on purchase by a Beam Inc owners of Jim Beam® Bourbon, Maker’s Mark® Bourbon, Sauza® Tequila, Canadian Club® Whisky, Courvoisier® Cognac, Teacher’s® Scotch Whisky, Laphroaig® Scotch Whisky, Cruzan® Rum, Hornitos ™ Tequila, Knob Creek® Bourbon, EFFEN® Vodka, Pucker™ Flavored Vodka, Larios® Gin, Whisky DYC®, DeKuyper® Cordials, and Skinnygirl® Cocktails, it ceases to be an independent player, it joins Pernod Ricard/IDL and Diageo as a non-independent player.

The purchase is set up in the form of a tender for shares ‘outstanding stock’ the offer is $8.25 a share, giving a total value of around $95 million for the business. 75% of the shareholders have already signed up, identities not revealed.

Only 5% more are needed under the deal to sign up at $8.25 and in this economic climate, cash is king, so I fully expect that the  conditional tender requiring

 ”at least 80% of Cooley’s outstanding stock accepting the offer and other customary closing conditions.”

To go through as the parties themselves have indicated, within the next four months.

And that will be that !

     “We see the opportunity to leverage our combination of scale with agility to further build consumer demand         for Cooley’s award-winning brands, and to expand distribution off a relatively small base in key export                 markets for Irish whiskey across North America and Europe.”  

      said Matt Shattock, president and chief executive officer of Beam.

      “Cooley’s brands and distilleries have a heritage that’s unmatched in the world of Irish whiskey, so they will          be a great fit with our portfolio of brands with long and rich histories. We look forward to being good                  stewards of these iconic Irish assets.”

 

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Teenage Queen Of France and The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Malbec

The twisted story of the Malbec grape is intertwined with the reputation of one of history’s most powerful women, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the only woman in history to have been both Queen of France and Queen of England.

Malbec was, during Eleanor’s reign in the 12^th century, the centrepiece wine of South West France. It was at the heart of wines from the three main wine growing regions in those days, Cahors, the Pyrenees region which today we would understand as the region centred on AC Madiran and largest of all, Bordeaux, which then meant the lands we today call the right bank, St.Emilion, Bergerac, Cotes De Bourg, Fronsac and the Entre de Mers.

What is thought of today, as Bordeaux, including famous wine regions like Margaux, St.Estephe, Pauillac or St.Julien, home to illustrious names like Chateau Lafite, Chateau Latour and Chateau Leoville Barton, was unknown in the medieval period.

In fact, Bordeaux as wine lovers know it today was only created towards the end of the 17^th century. This was because the Medoc, the land to the north of the city of Bordeaux, was essentially a swamp, a vast watery delta at the mouth of the immense River Gironde. The Medoc only became the source of great wines and beautiful chateaux after Dutch engineers were paid to come and build polders and drain it.

Eleanor was Duchess of Aquitaine, and her lands ran from the Loire to the present Bordeaux with Spain at Biarritz. She ruled almost a third of what is today France. She inherited her vast fiefdom at the age of 15 on the death of her father. He had taken the unusual step of making Eleanor, his daughter his heir rather than other male relatives.

Eleanor was well known to be an independent young woman, and a champion of the hardy rustic wines of Cahors, her heartland.

The wines of Cahors were valued at this time because they were very dense, hard-wearing wines that kept well and grew in abundance.

This contrasted with the rather more refined wines of the Loire and Burgundy favoured by the French court.

Malbec wines were about to make their first leap into fame and fortune, because Eleanor, aged 15 was about to marry the King of France’s son. Eleanor married Louis, and within a month Louis father died, making Louis, King and Eleanor Queen of France.

The wines of Aquitaine became the de facto royal wines and Eleanor, a shrewd and astute politician championed their success across France. A very important factor here was that Eleanor uniquely kept Aquitaine in her own name, it would only become part of France in the hands of her male heir. She never had a son with Louis VII.

It is from this time that tales about the miraculous nature of the Black Wines of Cahors start to circulate in earnest. The Malbec driven wines of Aquitaine became hugely fashionable.

Even better times were ahead.

At the age of 30 after 15 years of tempestuous marriage to King Louis VII, Eleanor divorced him, gave up the crown of France and returned to Bordeaux.

Four weeks later, she married, Henry, Count of Anjou, better known to us today as Henry II of England.

Eleanor subsequently became Queen of England and this delivered Aquitaine, the modern Bordeaux region and the South West of France, to English control establishing Bordeaux wines as the core of English and Irish wine drinking.

Under her sons, Richard ‘The Lionheart’ and ‘good’ King John, Bordeaux and Cahors wines continued to flourish.

The Malbec Effect

Today we have become increasingly used to what we call single varietal wines, a bottle of wine labelled for example Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon.

In even the recent past this kind of monoculture was considered very dangerous and really only practiced in regions with very highly priced wines where it was worth the risk, like Burgundy.

The problem was that if you have one variety of grape everything falls or succeeds on the weather or the health of that one type of grape.

To guard against this, many different varieties were planted. If the weather was unkind and the Cabernet Sauvignon did not ripen enough, then Merlot with its reputation for softness and fruitiness on a little less sun, or later ripening could save the vintage.

If after the grapes were harvested it turned out that the Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot had light small crops, the entire harvest could be saved by the very hardy, big boned tannic and huge cropping grape the Cahors and Bordeaux winemakers called Auxerrois, Malbec or Cot.

Eventually Malbec became known as the great saviour of Aquitaine. It always produced a big crop, it was not very fragile and it added heft and firm tannins to any red wine.

Malbec did have a weakness however, it needed dry weather above all, warm was merely a bonus, so it worked well in the Loire with long dry, reasonably warm rather than hot summers.

It also worked brilliantly well inland in Aquitaine, in places such as Cahors, situated around 200km in from the Atlantic and enjoying a continental climate, rather than in the cooler and wetter Medoc at 40km from the Atlantic or St.Emilion, some 75km in land.

Phylloxera, the vine louse disease that wiped out Europe’s vineyards in the 1880s was the final undoing of Malbec.

Malbec was by the 19^th century regarded as a bit of an ugly brute in France. Railway transportation and steam boats meant that the value of hard-wearing, blocky, hugely tannic wines that could survive long perilous journeys was less highly prized.

It was great to swell out a poor or underweight vintage, but on its own it was rough, tannic and often quite brambly or stalky.

Increasingly with the drive towards fine wine, rather than bulk crops Malbec was replaced by the more noble Cabernet Franc or Merlot as the bulking agent in many blended red wines.

Then in 1956, rot killed vast swathes of Malbec in Bordeaux and across France. Most vineyards and chateaux took the opportunity to rip up this increasingly, old fashioned and unloved grape.

This rejection of Malbec did not extend to South Western France, where in Cahors and in Madiran, they replanted Malbec in huge acreages.

Michel Rolland, the world’s most famous consultant winemaker, part owner of brilliant Argentine Malbec winery Clos de La Siete, and consultant at Cahors winery Chateau Lagrazette  believes that Cahors vignerons replanted simply because of its easy big cropping nature.

Co-Operative wineries, which dominated the south of France  mainly pay by weight not quality for grapes from each member, so a large crop, not a quality crop, was traditionally the key to a good living.

Today most of the finest Co-Ops like those in Chablis and Tain Hermitage in the Rhone, highly value quality over quantity and pay accordingly, which of course has produced much better wines, albeit in lower volumes.

Cahors growers had little time for such niceties and this sent Cahors reputation spiralling downwards during the 1960s and 1970s, just at a time when the town finally received Appellation Controlee status. Cahor’s poor reputation seemed sealed when the AC rules for Cahors stated that they must use a minimum of 70% Malbec in every wine.

Dark, tannic, headache inducing wines that needed hours of decanting and only reached drinkability after a decade, became a prominent image for AC Cahors wines. They were the epitome of glugable, rustic wines.

Malbec’s New World Salvation

The image of Malbec created by poor Cahors wines was hugely unjust. The idea of Cahors wines being ‘black wines’ long predated the dark, tannic headache bombs of the 20^th century and actually referred to the ancient practice of picking grapes at night that was fairly widespread in the South of France. This practice was believed to make fresher wines, long lived wines.

So, Black Wine was used as a positive description dating back almost to Eleanor of Aquitaine, rather than the byword for pain it became.

The best wines in Cahors, all during this time continued to be highly regarded as a secret, hidden delight for those in the know. Wineries like Chateau De Cedre, Clos Triguedina and Chateau Lagrezette owned and lavished upon by the Alain Dominique Perrin, head of luxury Richemont Group owners of Cartier, Mont Blanc and Piaget.

Despite this Malbec plantings in France went into near terminal decline outside of Cahors and the south west.

Salvation, however was waiting in the wings, in an very unlikely location.

In the middle of the 19^th century as Argentina was finding completing its struggle for independence,  the possibility of a wine industry became apparent to many agricultural scientists and businessmen alike.

Happily French oenologist Miguel Pouget brought over a potential sure thing with Auxerrois or Malbec. Here was a grape that produced huge crops without too much fuss in warm, but above all dry climates. Hot and dry is the essence of the Argentine climate in the main vine growing regions, irrigation, not drainage is the problem in Argentina.

Unfortunately in many cases, quality lost out to quantity. Argentinean wines became known for large rustic commercial crops, with an emphasis on high alcohol Cabernet Sauvignon mostly for local consumption.

In the last 20 years, Argentina has transformed its wine industry, the soupy, high alcohol wines aimed at local production gave way in the long recessionary years of the 1980s and 1990s to fine wines aimed at the foreign currency, overseas markets.

This lead directly to a massive leap in quality.

The first place to see this was Malbec wines. Reducing the crop, lavishing fine wine attention on the Malbec vineyards and vinification produced unexpected results, intense wines of great piercing fruit, fine tannins and with smooth multi-layered, complex notes on the palate.

The kinds of Malbec only produced in occasional vintages in the best French vineyards were being produced annually in Argentina.

“It has really become our national grape.” Says Argentine Ambassador to Ireland Maria Esther Bondanza. “We are very proud of what these Malbec wines say about Argentina and of how they have brought Argentina to the attention of the world.”

Today, Malbec is so identified with Argentina and indeed as a perfect foil to Argentine beef that perhaps it is wise and fortuitous that the wines of Cahors do not place the grape varietal on their labels.

The best Argentine Malbec from producers like Clos de La Siete, Dona Paula, Alta Vista, Cantena Zapata, Trapiche and Familia Zuccardi are not just great examples of Malbec they bring Malbec to the status of a great wine comparable in the finest examples to the other great New World rebirths of European grapes like Napa Cabernet Sauvignons, Australia’s Clare Valley Rieslings or New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blancs.

As a wine they have surpassed and differentiated themselves from their French ancestor. Indeed in Malbec’s case there is even a growing physical difference, Argentine Malbec grapes being smaller and tighter clustered than their French cousins.

Modern Malbec

Today Malbec is still standing in the shadow of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz and Pinot Noir.

This is to the advantage of we wine lovers, because it means that Malbec is still largely undervalued, yet it is a wine with as illustrious a history as any of these grapes and today deserves our attention.

The best of new, quality orientated Cahors produce elegant, more savoury Malbec wines at prices far below comparable red wines from nearby Bordeaux. While Argentine Malbec is now offering a fine, deep rich dark fruited, slightly spicy polished red alternative to increasingly pricy Californian and Australian Cabernet and Shiraz.

Malbec is a grape whose pricing and quality in both New and Old world versions has fortuitously hit a peak when we the hard pressed wine lovers most need a exciting, well priced hero.

Malbec Heroes

Chateau du Cedre, le Prestige 2005 (90) around €21

Chateau du Cedre, AC Cahors 2007 (91) around €22 (formerly Le Prestige)

Clos Triguedina, Cahors New black wine 1994 (93) around €25

Don David, Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2007 (89) around €12.50

Altos Los Hormigas, Malbec Mendoza, Argentina 2009 (90) around €14.99

Alta Vista Malbec Premium, Mendoza, Argentina 2008 (90) around €15.95

Terrazas Reserva, Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina, 2008 (89) around €17

Achaval-Ferrer, Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2007 (91) around €18

Argento Malbec, Mendoza Argentina 2008 (88) around €9.50

Norton Barrel Select Malbec Argentina 2008 (88) around €9.99

Dona Paula Estate Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina 2008 (91) around €12.99

Clos de los Siete, Mendoza, Argentina 2008 (91) around €18.99

Wines available in Le Caveau, Market Yard, Kilkenny; Redmonds of Ranelagh; O’Briens Wines nationwide; Cases Wine Warehouse, Galway; Thewineshop.ie; The Corkscrew, Chatham Street, Dublin 2;  Sweeney’s of Glasnevin; Fallon & Byrne, Exchequer Street, Dublin 2;  Mitchell and Sons, CHQ in the IFSC, Glasthule and online at mitchellandson.com and specialist wine shops nationwide

 

Drouhin – The House At Pinot Corner

  Veronique Drouhin – The Frenchwoman Who Tamed The Wild West

 

 At first sight, Burgundy and Oregon seem more than just half a world apart physically. Oregon sits high up in the Pacific North West of the Unites States of America, a former frontier colony founded on fur and pelts, Oregon is the very model of the Wild West. 

Oregon is a Pacific coast state, just north of California and the wine country of the central and Napa Valleys, in effect, extends northwards to Willamette Valley and the Dundee Hills where the best Oregon  wine is made. 

It is also, crucially, on a latitude similar to that of Burgundy and it was perhaps this latitude and cooler climate that drew a few adventurous wine makers in the 1960s in the US, northwards, away from California to Oregon. 

David Lett, founder of Eyrie Vineyards, is regarded as the pioneer of serious wine in Oregon and the grape he wanted to begin with was Pinot Noir.

This was in 1965.

However, another winemaker had already had a look, Robert Drouhin, then head of the revered Burgundy House, Maison Joseph Drouhin, who visited in 1961.

On his return in 1986, Robert Drouhin purchased 225 acres of the very best south facing slopes in the Dundee Hills region.

The incline of those hills is similar to Burgundy, the climate is reasonably similar, but the underlying soils and rocks are very different. Oregon is full of basalt, volcanic material and more than a few meteorite craters, Burgundy by contrast is essentially limestone.

Nevertheless Robert Drouhin and his daughter Veronique, just after graduating from the University of Dijon with a higher degree in Oenology, both saw something exciting and potentially world beating about the terroir of Oregon.

 Veronique Drouhin stayed and began working on a harvest with local winemakers and essentially never looked back from Oregon.

This was hugely adventurous at the time and odd from a region that was considered to be falling behind modern standards and practices in the 1970s in the wine business, but Burgundy and cautious behaviour have served the region well and today, may be its saviour.

 

Back To The Garden

In Burgundy, the hysteria and hype of super wines as a source of investment made barely a ripple.

Only one winery even really featured in the sights of the financial behemoths who entered the wine market and decided it was ripe as a tradable commodity, a truly exotic investment vehicle. That was Domaine Romanee Conti, the problem there was that even this very well known and highly revered winery made so little that it was hard to build a market out of trading the tiny amounts that dribbled onto the world wine market. Of course another hugely crucial factor was that Robert Parker never seemed to take to or get, Burgundy. Parker scores on Burgundy wines have almost no impact, in Burgundy no one cared. Without Parker scores any sense of a market and fluctuating valuations so necessary to make a stock market, seemed to evaporate.

In addition as the vineyards are all tiny and split up amongst dozens of owners, there has never been any monolithic harvesting as a result the large transport and wineries of Bordeaux and Tuscany, and the super-sized industrial cathedrals of wine in Australia and California have never been built.

So the villages, most now UNESCO protected have never been altered and the roads are picture-postcard quaint meandering, stone walled delights in Burgundy.

In addition because all the plots are relatively small, raising and ageing is deliberately small scale, even by major players.

Many wineries and negociants revel in, reverse-snobbery, priding in just how ad hoc, and loose their operations are.

Of course for the vast majority of Burgundy producers this is also a necessity, they are in reality small businesses, where half of the employees are sons, daughters and cousins.

On the agricultural side it has meant being entirely resistant to anything that smacked of either flashiness, or expense or both. 

This has kept vast tracts of Burgundy organic and lightly mechanised in the cellar.

 

Maison Drouhin – Four Is The Magic Number 

In Burgundy, because the sizes of vineyards are so small, their ownership so complex and the quality so diverse certain families, mostly based in Beaune developed a secondary role of buying and bottling the wines of others, over time these family firms began to sell both their own wines and the bought wines together under their own name which became a brand.

In order to maintain quality and consistency those families, now called negociants began to simply buy the grapes of others and actually make all the wine themselves.

These firms were called negociant houses and it is largely thanks to them that Burgundy and it deliriously complex system of  village names, communes and vineyard names, vineyard quality from Grand Cru to Premiere Cru to regular all became common place on wine shelves across the world.

The most important negociants, mostly based in the wine capital of Burgundy Beaune are Maison Louis Latour, Maison Bouchard Pere et Fils, Maison Jadot, Maison Chanson and Maison Joseph Drouhin.

Maison Drouhin is one of the youngest negociant houses founded in 1880 by Joseph Drouhin, the great grand-father of the three brothers and a sister that are the present fourth generation to run the business.

The importance of Drouhin is that it owns more than half of the vineyards and wine that it sells under its name and controls through close and lengthy contracts the rest of the vineyards it uses.

Drouhin is therefore one of the largest owners of Burgundy’s Grand Cru and Premiere Cru land. What they do and what style of approach they adopted became hugely influential on their neighbours.

It is fortunate then that very early on in the wine renaissance of the 20^th century Drouhin opted for quality over every other consideration. Under the leadership of the father of the present generation, Paul Drouhin from the 1950s to today their entire land portfolio was switched to biodynamic farming, up to and including the use of horse drawn ploughing as it does not compact the soils like tractors and other mechanical devices.

Today all Drouhin wines are organically farmed, all self owned vineyards are biodynamic.

The three Drouhin brothers are Frederic, Philippe and Laurent,  and their sister Veronique have all allocated roles, Veronique is the oenologist, Frederic the president directing the board, Philippe the vineyard manager and biodynamic disciple, Laurent their man in the US, living in New York.

Veronique as oenologist directs a team of winemakers across Burgundy, but is solely responsible for the winemaking at the Drouhin US winery, Domaine Drouhin Oregon.

“ I fly back and forth between Oregon and Burgundy, it works well however because we have such an experienced team.” Says Veronique Drouhin.

“Being a woman has never been an issue, even in somewhere as traditional as Burgundy. This again is also due to my father who was amongst the first people in the French wine business to employ as a senior oenologist a woman, Laurence Jobard.” Says Veronique.

Jobard was the oenologist or chief winemaker of Drouhin from 1976 until 2005 and Veronique is keen to acknowledge that debt she and Drouhin owe to Jobard 

Veronique’s father Robert was an innovator and slightly maverick throughout his entire tenure at Drouhin where he stepped down in 2003, though he is still chairman.

Apart from breaking up the masculine world of Burgundy farming with a woman, he also, pushed Burgundy Biodynamic, made it fashionable to own directly the majority of your vineyards, drove serious winemakers into Beaujolais as a high quality aspect of Burgundy wines, re-embraced Chablis which  had been abandoned to generics in the 1950s and of course bought and set up a winery in America. All this marked Robert Drouhin as one of wine’s most important forces.

Of course many of these innovations saw Burgundy shy away from advances of modern, scientific, chemical or industrial winemaking. To some this was Burgundy being left behind. Also in scale deciding not to build up single dominant companies but to maintain the complex old fashioned family structures looked like antique business thinking too. Add horse and organic manure and you can see why many go ahead regions looked aghast at Burgundy and feared for its commercial future.

Well the future is now and today, agile, debt free, organic, family run Burgundy looks very, very attractive. So far behind, they’re in front.

Wines of Maison Drouhin

Maison Joseph Drouhin, Laforet Bourgogne Chardonnay 2007 (88) around €14.79

-This is the Drouhin entry level white wine, it is a cross regional blend with a crisp, lemon driven wash, hints of golden apple sweetness initially then a Macon like light nut aspect mid palate and a shorter finish. 

 

Maison Drouhin, Chablis 2007 (89) around €20.69.

 -The Drouhin entry level Chablis is very austere and steely, but quite aromatic. The willowy grassy and lime touches are very attractive the core of minerality very prominent on what is their populist Chablis offering. Accomplished, uncompromising wine.

 

Masion Drouhin, Macon Villages  2007 (88) around €13.99

 

-While the regular entry level Drouhin white wine has a feel of Macon about it in the lime and steel wash, it is made by the apple sweetness, but here there is only the lime and steel, surrounded by vigorous acidity.

 

Maison Drouhin Rully Blanc 2006 (91) around €21

 -This is where Drouhin excels, in slightly left field and more competitively priced appellations. This is a gorgeously perfumed white, the chardonnay here is dense and heathery, honey like with touches of nut specifically crushed almonds, the finish has succulence but also firm acidity. It has the hints of a Puligny Montrachet but at a fraction of the price. Farming is biodynamic, horses, natural predators and hand picking in tiny baskets.

 

Maison Joseph Drouhin, AC Fleurie, Beaujolais 2007 (89) around €18.25

 -One of the most familiar sights on Irish wine lists and shelves, it is still the benchmark for great Beaujolais. The violet perfumed notes of the nose are replicated in the pink, light purple colour of the wine. The damson and raspberry like wash is clean and medium bodied the finish, meatier and more grippy than expected, cutting and complimentary with food. Again all hand harvested and traditional in its construction.

 

Maison Joseph Drouhin, Chambolle-Musigny Premiere Cru 2006 (92) around €41.59

 -At just three years old this is still an infant, it is a wine all about the word finesse, meaning restraint and balance. Nothing jumps out, the cherry, kir, raspberry tones of this red wine simply grow on the palate giving way to chocolate and mushroom with time. With age these fuller flavours will build. The persistence, the length of time the taste stays with you after you taste the wine is immense. The price however reflects this complexity and the expensive nature of the vineyards and lavish care of the grapes.

 

Domaine Drouhin Oregon, Pinot Noir 2006 (93) around €50

 -This is Veronique’s own unique project. The Oregon winery is her and her family’s home. We do not see them here in Ireland but Veronique makes three reserve wines here named after each of her children that are highly prized and priced in the US market. This is very expensive wine and just the kind to suffer at present, but it is also very fine wine. The deep darker colour is brooding, but the wash is light and energetic, raspberry and maraschino cherry with a spicy streak and meaty tannin. The fact that it would be a €100 Burgundy Grand Cru is the key to its price.

 

 

Chris De Burgh, Mouton-Rothchild Magnums (Picasso, Bacon and Warhol) and the rebirth of Wine as an Investment ?

 

The case for investing in wine, in particular very good Bordeaux Fine Wines, received a huge boost with the seeming ease that Chris De Burgh’s well chosen wines / liquid investments were transformed into cold hard cash, at prices in many cases double the estimates.

Perhaps when NAMA finish selling off the vast tracts of Land and Property that they have (if such a thing can ever be done, even in a fire sale) they might consider putting the money in an asset that has proved its worth through two World Wars, Depressions and as seen here, our current malaise.

Possibly our National Management Treasury Agency should take note too.

For wine geeks amongst us, which means me for starters, here is the detailed description Christies offered of each Magnum of Ch. Mouton Rosthchild.

The reason why it is even more important than usual here is that of course the LABELS are a work of art themselves and highly treasured as such.

So here what many potential buyers would also seem to want to know is not just the height of the wine in the bottle, an indication of decay / evaporation and perhaps condition of the wine, but how clean, undamaged, unmarked the various labels were.

Fascinating if train-spotting like details then (listed in great detail across all the sale wines on the excellent Christies website, just go to the ‘results’ section)

‘Into Neck’ – is by the way the ideal for a bottle of wine, it is shorthand for as full as when it was first bottled.

They were hoping for around £70k + for the Magnums ( €79k) but pulled in £155,250 on this one Lot ! thats

€ 176,717.00   :

Here are a few highlights :

“A VERTICAL COLLECTION OF CHATEAU MOUTON ROTHSCHILD VINTAGES 1945 TO 2005 IN MAGNUM
Château Mouton-Rothschild
Pauillac, 1er cru classé

WWII Victory Label

–Vintage 1945
Philippe Jullian label. Bottle number 572. Good capsule, slightly corroded. Bin-soiled label with small nicks. Level top-shoulder magnum (1)
Jean Cocteau label

–Vintage 1947
Jean Cocteau label. Bottle number 1570. Good capsule. Very slightly damp-affected, slightly creased label. Level just below mid-shouldermagnum (1)

Marc Chagall label

–Vintage 1970
Marc Chagall label. Bottle number 5262. Slightly damaged, corroded capsule. Bin-soiled and glue-striped label. Level top-shouldermagnum (1)

Pablo Picasso label

–Vintage 1973
Pablo Picasso label. Slightly corroded capsule. Good label, slightly creased. Epoxy and tape repair to glass base, no seepage. Level into neckmagnum (1)

Francis Bacon label

–Vintage 1990
Francis Bacon label. Excellent capsule and label. Berry Bros. & Rudd slip label. Level into neckmagnum (1)Giuseppe Penone label
–Vintage 2005
Giuseppe Penone label. Excellent capsule and label. Level into neckmagnum (1)
Above 62 magnums per lot”

You can see the whole list here (its slow to load though)

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&intObjectID=5417424&sid=2d2d6d03-d8ee-4c23-bb2a-0ce755e9c87d

 

 

 

 

Vineyards In Japan – An Expression of Solidarity

Reading this announcement

I realised that the ongoing and slow-motion horror in Japan which has the world shocked and grieving for the millions affected, has even filtered through to Japan’s small winery business hundreds of miles to the south of Tokyo and our thoughts and prayers  in the greater wine community are with them too.

FYI

Japan has a small but alluring wine growing tradition with around a dozen significant winery operations. Suntoy is the largest and oldest, its winery is called : Tomi no Oka Winery and is located in the Yamanashi Prefecture, this is about 150km south of Tokyo.

They grow a range of international varieties like Cabernet  Sauvignon, Merlot, Riesling and Chardonnay as well as a local grape varieties like Koshu. Koshu is an ancient grape and related to the main European Vistis Vinfera. The speculation is that it may have been brought to Japan via the Silk Road centuries ago.

Japan has the one main problem with vineyards, huge humidity leading to rotting in sensitive grapes.

However the Yamanashi Prefecture, a green rolling hillscape with good wind movement is one of Japan’s best chances for top quality vineyards, it is already the fruit larder of japan, so grapes have prospered.

This is not something new and fad like either, the Tomi no Oka vineyards were planted in the 1890s and have been producing wine since then, though wine made with International varieties stems from the 1950s and the breakthrough into world recognition really did not arrive until the 1980s.

I have tasted Japanese wines very infrequently. The reds reminded me of New Zealand red wines from about 20 years ago, quite correct, quite soft and light. The whites were remarkably tart and to my mind have the most potential.

There is great potential for Japanese fine wine, look how New Zealand was transformed in 20 years, but for now all we can do is express our solidarity and hope.

 

Pulling On The Green Shirt – Nationality and Wine

With the St. Patrick’s Day, a wine lover’s thought naturally turn to alarm at how quickly our national holiday has rolled around again, and of course the idea of pulling on the Green Shirt and seeking out Irish wines and maybe some Irish spirits.

As I set off to root out those Irish wines, it quickly became clear that Ireland really is an idea, a spiritual and cultural construct more than a mere set of geographical co-ordinates.

A walk to find Ireland and Irish wine brings us to shelves over which swing a large French tricolour, a Diamond shaped yellow road sign with a Kangaroo poised for action and a stern faced USA sign somewhat softened by a dash and the come-hither, sunshine infused word, California leaping out a jaunty angle.

I was surrounded by a cacophony of nationalist identities.

Moving across the supermarket and out across the large shopping complex you find as you walk along the aisles of breakfast cereals, jumpers, cosmetics or expensive trainers, as you will in the majority of our shops and supermarkets from Cork to Castleknock, that you absolutely will not see are large signs with the names of countries emblazoned on or over those other products.

You cannot walk over to the South Korean tracksuit section and compare the products to Indonesian tracksuit section. There are no flags or small cultural logos decoratively displayed over breakfast cereals.

The reasons for not doing this are complex, but it is probably best for our easy digestion not to know that Brazilian chickens, Mexican Pork or German Eggs fly back and forward across the globe, having one process done in one country, spending time in haulage containers on route to another country for the next process and finally being offered up as fresh, edible food to us.

In some products like clothes it may be possible to find, after a committed search a tiny tag giving a hint of national identity.

In the wine business, and in the ill defined artisan food section of our stores, the story is very different. Argentina and Chile battle out a fight over hardy red wines in the €10 category with vigour and panache. Argentina’s proud Malbec derived wines are frequently to be found emblazoned with the blue and white of Maradona and the Pampas.

They are not hiding their origins, it is a source of pride and a guarantee in many offerings of passionate, delicious winemaking.

Meanwhile further down the wine aisles, sits Austria, its red and white capped wines, standing stoically tall and poised in their high fluted national bottles. The Austrian flag is stapled carefully around a row of Gruner Veltliner and Riesling that wants Irish wine consumer’s to know that, yes, it was true that in the past bad quality wine was made and Austrian Wine’s name was bruised, but these new wines here are something to be proud of and quite different from anything Alsace in France or Rheingau in Germany are producing.

What is clear is that whatever the benefits of denying or concealing the origin of many wines, wine producing nations have made it a part of their credo and in many part of their laws to proudly stand on their national identity.

In the wine lover’s world, national identity is a vital component, as is history and the story of the people who are involved in making any wine.

This is because wine has always, for over 3000 years been seen as a window on the world beyond the table of the wine lover.

Wine is a lens through which a wine other can see other cultures, and even other times.

Time Travelling St. Patrick’s Day Treasures

This, Time Travelling claim, is not all bluster. I used to read the opening chapter of Robert Parker’s Bordeaux and feel that I knew what he meant when he suggested that at a particularly fine tasting, he was suddenly caught off guard, when he opened a venerable bottle which had the same vintage date as the year of his mother’s birth.
He inhaled the wine and realised that it had not seen the world since that day, it was travelling directly from that time to him, directly. He burst into to tears.

Now, unfortunately, I do not just understand it, I feel the truth of it too.

There is a lovely phrase in the spirits world for a distillery that has ceased to be, it is called silent. Not extinct just very, very quite. In the Celtic Whiskey Shop on Dawson street, you can find Silent Whiskey, bottles from distilleries that have disappeared. The market for such whiskey is a rarefied sub-world of reserve and icon whiskey buying, itself a very expensive hobby.

The thrill of the hunt and the exotic time travelling pleasure to be able to taste the work and passion of generations long dead, as a living experience comes with a high price. A rare bottle of Jameson Crested Ten, distilled at the Bow Street Distillery in Dublin is selling for €399 for the bottle. That time travel jaunt is only back to perhaps 1971, the year the Jameson Bow Street Distillery in Dublin went silent.

While Dublin’s Bow Street Distillery is a pretty expensive travel through Ireland’s past, but for €89 you can sample the Bushmills 1989 Single Bourbon Cask, sealed up when Samuel Becket was still alive, he died in December that year, or when Charles J Haughy was eyeing up fine French shirts as Taoiseach.

You slip back to the Ireland of 10, 15 and 20 years ago, with Jameson, Bushmills and Cooley contemporary offerings for more reasonable prices.

Desperately Seeking Ireland

With all this emphasis on times and flags you mighty expect wine lovers to be some sort of class of little Irelanders, trapped in the past, but in fact the exact opposite is the reality.

Wine lovers are driven to explore other wine nations, to enjoy the complexity of their wines, their history and perhaps their culture. Wine tourism is a fact, huge swathes of travellers annually travel to regions they know only through a wine bought in their local wine shop or supermarket. They make pilgrimages to Napa Valley, the Loire, Champagne or Chianti.

Wine tourism is a billion dollar business, with almost every wine region on the globe now spending a part of their budgets letting people know that many wineries are also artisan hotels, with restaurants and of course a very large wine cellar attached.

It is here that Irish Wineries have been making the most noise and where the concept of an Irish wine is shown to be a reality and not a figment of the history books.

Chateau Montelena, is probably the most famous US winery. As winner of the 1976 Paris Olympics, the legendary blind tasting where New World wines first broke through as equal and superior to European wines, Montelena and its owner Jim Barret found themselves on the cover of Time magazine and a bottle of their Chardonnay on display at the Smithsonian Museum.

Chateau Montelena is located at the very top of Napa Valley, a three hour drive from San Francisco along small, un-US like roads. Yet hundreds of international and US wine lovers make the pilgrimage to see the famous winery, every day.

It is of course, an Irish Winery, with Jim Barret having Irish parents and having spent part of his youth in Ireland.

The film Bottleshock tells his story, Ireland could not provide for him or his parents who made their life in the US working in the hotel business, for low but liveable wages. He enlisted in the US Army during World War II, fought in Europe, landed and survived Normandy on D-Day. When he returned, the GI Act gave him a free university education from which he became a successful lawyer and subsequently bought Chateau Monetlena.

In every sense, Jim Barret is the icon of the American Dream, a self made man, given the tools and opportunities by his home, the USA.

“I have an Irish passport, it is, perhaps my proudest possession.” Said Jim Barret sitting in his office directly across from the entrance to the main and oldest part of Chateau Montelena.

Visitors to Chateau Montelena have to park in a beautifully concealed car park amongst dense woods then trek the last 500 or 600 yards uphill to the winery, unless of course, they are Irish, when they will find two spaces reserved for them, marked and clearly sign-posted, right at the front door.

“My children are of course fully American, and I am not sure if it is as important to them, I certainly will not be pushing them to look for passports. That’s something they might want to consider, but I know that they understand their heritage and we are Irish. In every sense.” Says a proud Barret.

Ireland, gave Jim Barret nothing. No opportunity, no money, no work and even today, damn little recognition on any official level.

Yet this is one of the wines that I feel most represents, Irish Wine, that I would want on my table on St. Patrick’s Day.

Jim Barret gives us an idea of Ireland and Irishness that is based on people and an approach to living, not some 19th century map maker’s idea of nationality.

In the middle ages, people used to carry their own laws and customs with them, we still have this idea today, in the world of diplomacy.

Each Irish Embassy is regarded not just spiritually, but legally as a piece of Ireland resting on a foreign shore.

We understand and indeed strive to protect that idea almost every day. Irish men and women in trouble look to that slice of Irish soil for protection, security and comfort. Not having an Embassy in Libya recently, left Ireland and Irish people at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.

Every winery, where Irish men and women have established themselves and proclaim their Irishness should be embraced by Ireland, as an outpost of the Ireland of the imagination, our true heritage.

I would love to see, as part of the rebirth of this fine country of ours, the government, particularly the Department of Foreign Affairs, reach out to these fixed outposts of Eire even in something as simple as a national wine cellar, with examples from each of these other Irish.

Across the world next Thursday, almost every one of these wineries will be raising the tricolour, donning the Green shirt and doing their bit to keep Ireland’s reputation alive and vibrant.

Irish wine lovers can reciprocate by engaging in global exploration, crossing endless borders, with the wave of their hands between nearby shelves, to seek out the Irish-of-soul wines this St. Patricks Day.

Irish Wine
Michel Lynch Blanc 2007 (88) around €12.49
Echo de Lynch Bages, 2nd Wine of Chateau Lynch Bages, AC Pauillac 2008 (89) around €39
Chateau Lynch-Bages, AC Pauillac 2008 (92) around €76

Chateau de La Ligne, Prestige, AC Entre Deux Mers, France 2005 (89) around €17.95

Thomas Barton Reserve, AC Sauternes 2005 (90) around €23
Thomas Barton, AC Graves Blanc 2007 (88) around €10.99

Domaine des Anges, Archange Blanc Cotes de Ventoux 2009 (91) around €21

Chateau Haut Garrigue La Source Cabernet Merlot 2006 (90) €15.99

Chateau Kirwan, AC Margaux 2006 (91) around €59

Les Charmes de Kirwan, 2nd Wine of Ch. Kirwan, AC Margaux 2007 (89) around €28

Chateau Phelan Segur AC St. Estephe 2006 (92) around €42

Frank Phelan, 2nd Wine of Chateau Phelan Segur, AC St. Estephe 2005 (90) around €25

Chateau de Fieuzal Blanc AC Pessac Leognan 2001 (91) around €55

Chateau Leoville Barton AC Saint Julien 2004 (92) around €60,

Concannon Winery, Petite Sirah, Livermore, California 2006 (90) €14.99

Chateau Montelena, Chardonnay, Napa Valley, California 2005 (92) around €45

Leeuwin Estate, Prelude Chardonnay, Western Australia 2005 (90) around €28

Leeuwin Estate, Art Series Cabernet Sauvignon Western Australia 2003 (91) around €50

 

Chablis, Where God and Darwin Collide

Chablis, Where God and Darwin Collide

 

 

 

 

 

Evolution and the nature of existence is not our usual reflection from wine, but in one spot in the wine world the enormity of the earth’s and mankind’s history bursts though into the air, the soils and the wine.

In one spot, Evolution and Intelligent Design collide in a joyous creation.

This is in Chablis.

Every where you step and plant your foot in a Chablis vineyard you crunch into the soil, which ios made of endless deep white and grey gravel.

The gravel is irregular, full of white and grey stones that range from the size of a euro to the size of your fist. It is an uncomfortable surface to walk across, but thankfully there is some beige sandy earth and finer soils made from endlessly ground up rocks.

If you hunker down and lift one of these stones in your hand, if you did not already know, you will be somewhat taken aback.

Look closely and you can see you are crunching on fossils, millions and millions of fossils. Fossils of what mainly seem to be shellfish or oyster like items.

Of course this is only the fraction of what is going on. These fossils are a tiny fragment of the geologic landscape, deeper down is rock, sedimentary rock that is made entirely from decomposed and fossilised shellfish, billions of years of shellfish, dying and sinking into the seafloor only after billions of years to be endlessly compressed at unimaginable pressures into the limestone white cliffs of Dover, the chalks of Kent, Champagne, Sancerre and here in Chablis.

Today we have the benefit of 150 years of Darwinism, the publication of the Origin of The Species in 1859 utterly changed the way mainstream thought looked at how our world was created.

Until that point for the majority of the Western World, the earth was created by God in 6 days, beginning on a Tuesday afternoon a few thousand years in the past.

Plenty of natural scientists, philosophers and heretics disagreed but the god fearing majority knew exactly how we, the animals and the plants got here.

Standing in Chablis in a vast ocean bed graveyard, you are tempted to ask yourself, what took Darwin so long, but of course this is simply the obviousness of a pattern or a puzzle revealed.

And, of course, some people did know something was afoot.

Chablis and The Circle Of Life

Chablis is rightly one of the most famous wines in the world.

Ask a non wine drinker to name a few wines and right up there with Chateauneuf Du Pape, Chianti and Rioja will usually come, Chablis.

It has been this famous for centuries.

Which of course is why when winemaking pioneers in California, Australia and beyond began to make a white wine from the Chardonnay grape, they called it Chablis.

In England, Chablis and Bordeaux had been generic wine names for centuries. They were not the wines that we would recognise to day however. The Chablis region which extended to Tonnerre, Auxerre and the north of the Cote D’Or included plenty of red wine too. Only with the arrival of Phylloxera and the wiping out of all the vineyards in the 1880s did Chablis growers take advantage of this to plant only white wines.

The same thing happened in Sancerre and Pouilly Fume which had long red wine histories as well.

While red wines were made throughout the Chablis zone as we might call it, the white wines of Chablis were regarded universally as their best product.

Writing in1701, Louis Liger in a book called the Economy Of The Countryside singles out the white wine of Chablis for special mention. By the end of the 18^th century you can find, if you are like myself an over-enthusiastic serendipity lover, hundreds of journals, gazettes and memoirs that talk about hovering down Chablis with oysters, shellfish from Ostend and every manner of ocean going creature.

Before we had a true understanding of what was actually beneath the soils of Chablis, people, wine lovers in fact had figured it out intuitively.

Every 18^th and 19^th century tasting note and diary entry that says they were inexpressibly drawn to bring Chablis and shellfish together is manifesting an almost eerie desire to complete some biological, geological circle.

The mother and child reunion of Paul Simon’s plate of chicken and fried eggs, but on a geologic time frame.

From death on a seabed a billion years ago, to resurrection in the palate of an oyster chomping human.

How Chablis Triumphed

Of course, meanderings about the meaning of life is not what got Chablis on the road to success as the most famous white wine in the world.

No, that was a desire for monastic contemplative isolation. As usual.

It was the Cistercians a thousand years ago that kick started Chablis as we see is regularly the history of wine regions.

Chablis is a deeply cut valley, or rather series of valleys that run for the main part east to west, giving many, but not all the slopes of Chablis a south facing aspect which means that they get the sun all day long from dawn till dusk. This is vital for full grape ripening.

Surrounding Chablis is a high plateau, not Everest like but high enough ground that has the car growling for an hour or so as you climb the autoroute from the Paris Basin southwards towards Chablis the first vineyards of Burgundy.

Burgundy’s Cote D’Or home to Morey-St-Denis, Meursault, Corton, Puligny-Montrachet and Gevrey Chambertin to name a handful, is another hour’s drive south, and down off the plateau and its signs indicating that transhumance of cattle is practiced. A word I had not heard often in the years since inter-cert geography

The region was isolated and so several monastic settlements were established including the Abbey of Pontigny, still very beautiful and worth a visit, St. Thomas a Beckett spent two years there hiding from Henry II, he was lured back from Chablis only as we know to be murdered.

The Abbey like all Cistercian monasteries wanted to be self sufficient, independent of the local lords, so this meant raising their own food, wine and generating their own revenue. Over decades the monks identified the spots where grapes grew best and planted then there.

These were considered better than Champagne then the source for most of Paris and the nobility’s still wines. The proximity to Paris and frequency of travellers stopping over en route for the south and to Santiago di Compostelo put the monk’s wines from the slopes of Chablis on the map.

Even as white wins from other regions and other countries became available with improving transport, first the canals, then the railways, wine lovers still demanded their Chablis in huge quantities.

This tells us two things, firstly that the name Chablis was a brand as strong as Apple or Coca Cola and secondly, there was something about the taste, the design, the package that made people ask for Chablis over al other white wines.

And it tells us something else too.

Terroir was the key. This is because chardonnay was the source grape for Macon which was more historical, Montrachet which was more profound, Beaune which was more elegant and Champagne which was cheaper, nearer and could be had in a sparkling form too.

People liked the acidity, the lean clean style and what we would today call the minerality, the austere stone and steel nature that we identify as being at the heart of great Chablis.

This could not be obtained unless the Chardonnay was planted in the soils of Chablis. The soils, rocks and climates of Chablis produced something that the other locations could not produce.

Slowly people began to ask, why and that brought them to look at the stones in their vineyards and little by little this brought the revelation of fossils and opened up the idea that the earth had changed, evolved. Those mountains were the floors of the seabed once, the stones were fish, and that left the lingering question, then what were we.

An apocryphal tale talks about Leonardo Da Vinci asking the Pope about a fossil he had found that was from high up in the Alps, Leonardo Da Vinci died just down the road from Chablis in the Loire. The Pope calmed any doubts by saying that the fish must have been trapped their in Noah’s Flood.

I am sure something like that calmed many questions throughout Chablis long history, but today, the entire village thrives off not just the wine, but the stone, fossil and dinosaur industry, with droves of children scouring the landscape for T-Rex bones.

In the wineries they are not unaware of this and producer’s like Brochard have an entire range of Jurassic Wines depending on the age of the sub-soils beneath his vineyards.

Tasting in Chablis has gone beyond mere statements that the wine is mineral like, local wine merchants and many vingerons claim to be able to identify the exact type of rock, kimmeridgian rock or Portland stone and so forth that a particular wine is located upon.

All this attention and high marketability for Chablis wines of course created a kind of Goldrush into the Chablis region since the 1970s.

The was backed up by legal protections to stop Californian producers in particular from using the word Chablis. Gallo of California was one of the largest producers of “Chablis” in the world until the late 1970s.

The drive to plant in Chablis lead to huge political battle that raged around what it meant to be a Chablis wine which was only recently and inconclusively settled.

On the Appellation Controllee issue the answer was simple, to accommodate the Goldrush of new plantings of would be Chablis vines the Chablis appellation was vastly expanded. Former marginal regions that could only use the AC Petit Chablis designation can now use Chablis alone, while absolutely new sections now travel under the Petit Chablis idea.

The Dangers Of Success

What reputation and sales success has meant for wine lovers is that although Chablis is a well known and understood, today it is quite a variable wine selection.

The Chablis hierocracy of wines is relatively straightforward. The Grand Cru wines are sourced from the very best tops and steepest parts of the best south facing slopes. There are seven Grand Cru. These wines last decades evolve into complex often full-bodied wines that are not unlike Cote de Beaune wines and for someone looking for lean, steely Chablis they are going to be disappointed.

Grand Cru wines have the steel, but they are also punched through with mineral complexity. When young they are often closed, tight and not infrequently exhibit a wet wool nose. If you buy a young Grand Cru and drink it then and there at say under 5 years of age you will, as I have said before, wonder what all the fuss is about and feel ripped off.

There are around 40 Premiere Cru and with named smaller sections, you can double this number. That is a lot of wine with the word Premiere Cru on it. Premiere Cru occupy the slopes from the Grand Cru downwards to wards the valleys, where the regular AC Chablis is sourced from.

A life time of study into each of these slopes is available and it is one of the reasons why wine lovers actually travel in such large numbers to Chablis, it is a very gorgeous hamlet to visit and I am afraid rather like transporters I have met fellow pilgrims who have tiny soils samples from every single climat, or subsection of every vineyard in Chablis. To me that’s going a touch to far.

The producer and their integrity is what counts for the un-obsessed, its fairly easy to grasp that on a slope which itself is a middle of a hill, there is a top and a bottom bit, the upper bit will be a tiny bit better drained, get a tiny bit more sun, be a tiny bit better ventilated. Each of these tiny factors making that upper bit a touch better. That sub-section of climat as it is called in French will usually be better even though to me and you they both look like and are named the same Premiere Cru, but one is from William Fevre, one from Le Chablisienne, another from Raveneau all good producers and the other is from a name you have not seen before.

Some generic producers will have bought in late and got a poor part, some are old tiny holdings that are superb but no one knows their name.

Below this level is AC Chablis, the mainstay of the business. If it is from a good and long standing producer they will have the better plots by and large and are producing the clean, steely wine that most of us are looking for, beyond that is Petit Chablis where you could be drinking from somewhere that was wheat fields 20 years ago or from a shadow laden corner of a north south facing valley. This is why some Chablis tastes plain bland and often unripe or watery.

The other reason is that Chablis is very far north, frost and rain are constant worries as enough sunlight, so that is why location matter some much more here than in the rest of Burgundy to its south or the Languedoc or Napa valley. In those locations the sunshine seeps everywhere in the end. Up here in Chablis you are at the margins of ripening every year.

The Wines of Chablis

Given the complexity, the vintage variation, the marginal climate and the Johnny come-lately bandwagon producers you would think the final advice would be, just move along to a safer choice, but as wine lovers know.

When its good, a cold glass of Chablis, frosted beads on the outside, cool, steely perfection on the inside of the glass and a mouthful of crispy pan-fried monkfish, mussels or salmon is so close to perfection you might think for one brief moment again about Intelligent Design.

Chablis In Ireland

The Reasonable

Charles Vienot Chablis 2008 (86) at €13.99

Chanson Pere et Fils, AC Chablis 2004 (88) around €19.50

Domaine Simmonet-Febvre, Chablis 2008 (90) around 17.99

The Good

Maison Moreau et Fils, AC Chablis 2007 (89) around €16.95

La Chablisienne, LA Singuliere AC Chablis 1er Cru, 2007 (90) around €19

Chanson, Montee de Tonnerre, 1er Cru Chablis 2006 (90) around €29.45

 

The Great

Domaine Simmonet-Febvre, Chablis Premiere Cru 2006 (92) around 22.99

Domaine William Fevre, AC Chablis 1er Cru Montee de Tonnerre 2004 (92) around €28.95

 

The Future

 

Domaine Joseph Drouhin, Chablis Reserve de Vaudon 2008 (90) around 22.50

Julien Brocard, Domaine de la Boissonneuse (Biodynamic) AC Chablis 2008 (91) around €23.50

 

Majorca, Balearic Bottles and the Song Of DNA

“The plant is crying out to us. It wants its DNA, its song to be heard, but we aren’t listening. In the vineyards across the world we are throwing that song away. In the vineyard all these plants are clones, they sing the same song. I am concerned about this and we are changing this in our vineyards. We are letting the new songs come through.” Says Miquelangel Cerda i Capo, the winemaker and proprietor of the Anima Negra Winery in Mallorca.

Yes, you read that address correctly.

Anima Negra is beautiful family run winery operation, that is located in Mallorca or as we spell it in Ireland, Majorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands.

If I can press pause on the film running through your head of Union Jack T-shirt wearing Eastend boys on a beer sodden stag weekend, or blessed-out ravers in a football sized dance club for a couple of minutes I think I can convince you that this winery is perhaps the most important on the planet at this very moment.

Yes when you have upwards of 26 million tourist visitors to a series of islands that have a local population of several hundred thousand on islands like Ibiza which is just 12 miles wide and 20 miles long things can get overwrought.

Happily those 26 million do not all arrive at once, the key feature of the Balearic islands is that they enjoy 300 days of rain free, sunshine drenched weather. Secondly nearly every last one of the those visitors remains within a traffic cone’s throw of a dozen heaving, hotel and bar strewn beaches.

The rest of the islands are almost empty, totally unspoilt and in some cases UN World Heritage sites that will remain permanently protected.

The majority of Miquelangel Cerda i Capo’s vineyards are idyllic, pastoral scenes right out of the 3^rd century BC, rather than even the days before cheap air fares.

“Our vines are planted in and around apricot trees, wild flowers, beans and grass. This is the way it has always been on Mallorca, perhaps it was the fact that we had little space and had to plant a little of everything. But today we are keeping this way because it is clearly the best from a, not organic or biodynamic, but it is that too, no, from a right way. It is the good way. I wish my English was better, it is sound.” Says Miquelangel.

His practice is so sound that the Italian Slow Food movement has festooned honours on him and his brother in law in this tiny Balearic operation. His vineyards, indeed his whole operation has been described as an Ark. His work in preserving an using not just ancient techniques but ancient and local vines is of incalculable value, but his thoughts on DNA and plant growth is vital to humanity well beyond the world of wine.

The Dark Soul

“We made up the name at night, anima is soul, negra is black. I’ll show you.” Says Miquelangel, who sports a long goatee and swept back curly hair that makes him look a little like a 16^th century Pirate without an eye patch or indeed parrot.

“This has been banned in the US, it is the label of our top wine Son Negra” says Miquelangel as he passes over a painting by artist Miquel Barceló who paints a new label for each vintage of the €150 plus wine. It is the devil winged and leaping in the air with what art critics might delicately call an engorged phallus. Other labels include a goats head skull and other suitably satanic images.

The wines and the winery do not it seems want to be mistaken for anything casual, lightweight or safe, this is the Rolling Stones circa Blood On The Tracks and of course Sympathetic to the Devil and his Black Soul.

“When we looked for vineyards, when we started up, because we had very little ourselves we travelled around to find the small parcels of remaining indigenous grapes. Everyone had started puling them up to plant international varietals, we definitely wanted to save and use them.” Says Miquelangel.

What this meant doing was taking grapes and running vineyards in tiny plots across the whole of the Felantix region of Majorca. This area had done very well, like so many isolated and remote wine regions in Europe at the end of the 19^th century, because the Phylloxera louse spared many of the vineyards because of their isolation. The impressive 19^th century housing stock and perhaps oddly wealthy towns bear a testament to this transient boom in wine sales to the rest of Europe.

Eventually Majorca too was struck by Phylloxera and then the European vineyards recovered and Majorca’s moment in the vinous sun faded, but at least unlike the oversized botox mansions of Leitrim or West Meath, the legacy of partly derelict vineyards provided ongoing local business and were a basis for the present new wave of fascinating winemaking.

So, with a goodie box of patchwork properties Anima Nugra began to make wines from the local ancient grapes which made up thses many vineyard parcels including Fogoneu, Premsal Manto Negro, and, above all, Callet.

“These native grapes are planted in the traditional style, so they are in amongst the other elements in the fields, the apricot trees, the grasses and flowers. We find that they do best in this fashion, perhaps it is the competition for the roots, the competition to get the goodness from the soils. But I think also you cannot, you must also think, about the air, the perfumes and oils in the air too. It is a very complicated mix and we watch it all the time” says Miquelangel.

“We watch what is lacking, or when something needs support and we do this and we do with the other natural elements in the field, just as in the biodynamic approach, but I do not say and we do not put that on our wines, because to me, it is just good and right winemaking.” Says Miquelangel.

“It would be nice to say it was all planned but for us it has been a matter of trial. So for example our white wine, Quíbia, at first we just did not like it. No matter what we did, it just was not right. It was made from the local white grape Premsal. We make it without oak. Eventually we began to add other grapes and then we used Callet.” Says Miquelangel.

Callet is the most important ingenious red skinned grape and is a component of the local, modest, red vine.

In the Anima Negro Winery Miquelangel and his partners are making a piercing still white wine from red and white grapes.

“As soon as we added the Callet, it became the wine we have today, which we like. It is a hugely difficult process though, but we feel it is worth it to make a good local white. The problem is that the Callet is very susceptible to oxidation so we have to chill the Callet grapes quickly and thoroughly after picking, we use Carbonic snow then when it is well chilled we press quickly but very delicately and this gives us the white juice that we need. The blend is about 60% Premsal and 40% Callet.” Says a proud Miquelangel.

The idea of white wine from red grapes might initially strike you as odd or rare, but it is neither. All grape juice, or very nearly all, is white, squezze a red eating grape tonight and you will see white juice. The red colour of red wine comes from the red skins, which are left in contact with the white juice after crushing the grapes.

Here the red skins stay in the crusher and never touch the juice. This is also widespread in the making of Champagne for example where the traditional blend is white grape Chardonnay and red grape Pinot Noir.

For his main red wine, called somewhat plainly, AN, Miquelangel uses Callet and Monte Negro, with a dash of fogoneu. For his second wine, you guessed it called AN2, he uses Callet and Monte Negro, Fogoneu and a dollop, up to 15% of Syrah. His top wine, the Devil’s tipple, Son Negre is a pure Callet, perhaps according to Miquelangel the only such wine in the world. Then with unstoppable honesty he added that sometimes 5% of Manto Negre might get into the mix, but being so small he does not have to legally declare it, but in the interest in full disclosure he always does.

The Sounds Of DNA

In Vineyards across the world, the vines, of Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir or Chardonnay to take the big three, are all clones. This is also the case for the vast majority of our crops and cereals, fruit and vegetables. What that means is that they are exact genetic replicas of their parents and their fellow plants in the field.

This has been achieved through two centuries of meticulous agricultural science rather than genetic modification, though that’s possible too.

It has been done for a good reason, we have selected the best characteristics of successful plants and reproduced only those. Yields have leapt, human populations have grown on this stability in food production.

In wine the clones were taken and propagated from the best and often the famous vineyard sites around the world.

“But” says Miquelangel Cerda i Capo

Are we sure this is still a good thing.

“Conditions change, evolution, adaptation. The DNA of successful plants under conditions that have now changed is now what is being planted. Yes these may have been successful then, but what about now, as the climate changes, what about with different levels of materials in the soils. Each year these plants sing to us, they produce fruit and seeds, this is their song, this is their DNA, changed, responding.” Says Miquelangel

“We are planting seeds, we are listening to the song, we have vineyards that are filled with individuals, not clones, each different some good some bad, but all responding” says an enthused Miquelangel.

It is for this reasonthat his wines are not just praised as excellent and interesting by Parker and the US fans of any exotica, but also as important by the Sow Food movement, this is why his unique, island based winery is being seen as a Ark of Taste, an ark of biodiversity and a very important philosophical question posed to the wider world of agriculture.

For wine lovers the happiest news is that these are very exciting and well priced wines into the bargain.

Wines of Mallorca’s Ark

Anima Negra, Queriba 2009 (89) around €11.99

-A superb, fruity, pear, apple and banana like nose gives way to a light, mineral laced, lightly acidic wash and a clean finish. A sort of mid level Chablis with a touch of tropical fruit on the nose. The kind of glossy white that to me could easily bear a touch of oak, but fans of young Riesling could like this Premsal and Callet blend.

Anima Negra, AN / 2 2008 (90) around €19.99

-This is a complex blend of local Mallorcan varieties Callet at 60% dominates, then 20% Mantonegro, 15% Syrah and 5% Fogoneu. The wine is very pungent, rather spicy and heather like, with touches of bramble, not unlike a Gigondas or good Cote Du Rhone. The palate is much lighter, more like a Pinot Noir, but a soft, caramel tinged New World Pinot. I think this is where its appeal will lie in adventurous Pinot Noir lovers. Soft, sweeter finish.

Anima Negra, AN/ 2 2007 ( 91) around €14.99 in increasingly fashionable 50cl bottles

-This has almost the identical blend of grapes as the 2008 above, but owing to the vintage it is much fresher, much more savoury and if you could say it, zestier. Overall it is lighter, but it is a more balanced and elegant wine. A food wine that Burgundy Pinot Noir lovers will prefer to the 2008.

Anima Negra AN 2007 (90) around €32.99

-This is the top wine, bar the occasionally made Icon wine Son Negre. It is made from the best and oldest parcels and it tps the scale at around 14% declared, but it certainly felt at least that to me. This is a wine that in 2006 Parker gave 92 points to a then almost unknown entity. It has made them a cult in the US. To me it is clearly a blockbuster, but in this 2007 it is quite savoury too and very tannic, a delicious wine that falls between a Northern Rhone Syrah and a Californian Pinot.

 

Beaujolais, a Nouveau Tale of Vinous Envy and The Despised Grape

Beaujolais, a Nouveau Tale of Vinous Envy and The Despised Grape

In just around three weeks time on the third Thursday in November, the first bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau will depart Burgundy and head for the tables and shelves of wine shops and restaurants around the world.

It is one of the most contrived and yet affecting, and commercially effective events of the packed wine calendar.

Almost two thirds of Beaujolais’ entire production will be sold through the Beaujolais Nouveau campaign.

What anyone who purchases a Beaujolais Nouveau wine will drinking is a wine made in the shortest legally allowable period between picking, fermentation and bottling.

The idea of an early made wine is however not a recently invented marketing trick.

From the very earliest records of winemaking there was always a rush to make a wine from at least some portion of that summer’s crop of grapes to celebrate the end of the harvest and to test the bounty of the gods or nature depending on your religious outlook.

Over the next few weeks across Europe there are many local festivals being held which will celebrate a successful harvest with a few barrels of just completed, hopefully fully fermented grapes. These wines now even have an official EU designation as Primeurs, the word Nouveau is now more broadly defined in the EU as any wine placed in bottle and sold before the next harvest, but I do not think the Beaujolais Nouveau makers will be changing their labels any time soon

Most of these simple, just-cooked wines were for in-house local use only, partly perhaps because they did not want outsiders thinking this is what their best wines were going to be like. In the Rhone, Provence, Tuscanny, the French South West these wines are drunk at trestle table parties in the local mayor’s hall or Caves Co-Operative

The reason Beaujolais Nouveau is famous is that it was the first of these local, quickly made celebratory wines to come to the attention of an urban market and one of the first wine regions to really begin to exploit that attention in the media. Of course all this was in some way perhaps to over compensate for the fact that Beaujolais had always felt overlooked and shunned because of its location, right next to some of the most famous and sought after wines on the planet for over 1000 years.

Its next-door neighbour is Burgundy proper.

I say Burgundy proper because the Beaujolais wine region is legally part of Burgundy and to my mind should be embraced wholeheartedly by the rest of Burgundy.

However, from the Macon region, right on its border to the imperious Cote D’Or with names like Nuits St George, Clos De Vougeout, Gevry Chambertin, Montrachet and Meursault you will find almost no one willing to think of Beaujolais as a fellow Burgundy region.

Vinous Envy

In Beaujolais, we have a wine region with some major issues.

The great wines of Burgundy are as is well known, made from two grapes, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, every fine wine that you might mention is made from one or the other of these two grapes. This uniformity was not accidental.

The Dukes of Burgundy for 500 years made sure that these two noble grapes dominated, with several statutes being passed first to outlaw other grapes and then around 1450 to order the ripping up and destruction of other grapes, specifically Gamay, a grape they considered to be a crude, poor quality and rustic peasant affair that could undermine their noble wines.

Gamay is the main red grape of Beaujolais.

A Despised Grape

It is hard to imagine that anyone sensible to outside opinion or to the little matter of sales could have wanted to persist with planting and cultivating Gamay in the face of such comprehensive slander as was levelled at Gamay in the 15^th Century.

Remarkably that is just what happened in the lands adjacent to the Dukedom of Burgundy, the province of the Duke of Beaujeu, which today we call Beaujolais.

Beaujolais is a region about 100km long and around 40km wide that sits between France’s second city, Lyon and the city of Macon the southern capital of Burgundy.

Lyon is the secret to the story of the persistence with Gamay.

The vast majority of Burgundy’s admittedly high quality wines were destined for the aristocratic families of France and Europe. That left the little matter of a huge city full of thirsty workers on the very doorstep of Beaujolais.

The Romans, of course, had planted vineyards in Beaujolais first and had identified most of the best sites for vines. These good sites are all at the northern end of Beaujolais, which is quite hilly, rolling countryside full of some of France’s most gorgeous hidden valleys and picture postcard beautiful villages. Their names will be familiar to wine lovers, Fleurie, Morgon, Julienas which was allegedly named for Julius Caesar and its rival for the most authentic Roman legacy AC Regnie, where they have a better claim that their vines were planted by high ranking Romans.

These villages form the 10 Cru of Beaujolais, the ten best wine appellations which also include Moulin A Vent, Chiroubles, Brouilly and the AC Saint Amour which only seems to sell wines in Ireland once a year on St. Valentine’s Day.

All of these Cru are located in the northern half of Beaujolais, the part nearest to Burgundy and the city of Macon.

A Sub Soil Apart

Although close to Macon, the sub soil of Beaujolais and its dramatic, rising and dropping landscape of hills and valleys are made up of very different material, not limestone, but granite, with some schist and limestone patches. The hillsides and valley floors offer very different growing conditions with very fertile, clay and loam in many of the valleys.

These loamy, rich soils which occupy valley floors in the north of Beaujolais, are much more widespread in flatter southern Beaujolais. The lands are in essence too good for high quality wine production. The 10 Cru are located on poor soils and slopes that are agriculturally the worst in the region, ideal for vines destined for winemaking.

In Beaujolais, the Gamay grape, not Pinot Noir dominates because it responds well to the more challenging nature of the sub soil. Pinot Noir is a fickle, weak vine that is can be ruined by heat, cold, over-watering, drought and dozens of pests.

In Northern Beaujolais, the soils in the valleys, as I have seen can turn to mud, the hills are steep and the granite unforgiving, this is Gamay country, the gentle well drained slopes of the Cote D’Or in Burgundy is much better suited to picky Pinot.

The whole southern half of Beaujolais where a great deal of wine classified as AC Beaujolais comes from is at best a marginal area for wine production. Crops here are very large, perhaps too large, getting the grapes to 11% of alcohol is a trial every year, with the addition of sugar always on the horizon.

In March 2009 in court in Villefranche-Sur-Soane, a larger town in Beaujolais, around a dozen men were convicted in relation to sugar. Two men were found guilty of selling 600 tonnes of sugar without receipts and the rest with either possessing undocumented sugar at their wineries or in a few cases having wine that had been chaptilized.

Chaptilization is the adding of sugar to wine to provide some food for the yeast to convert into alcohol. If you have poor, plump watery grapes they might give you alcohol levels of 5% or 6%, very low in a wine. Adding sugar will solve this problem. It is naturally illegal in most circumstances in countries like France with strict rules.

The selling of sugar, no questions asked at harvest time, to winemakers is therefore a crime in France. Beaujolais is where many of these crimes are found, nature is trying to tell the southern Beaujolais something.

Beyond Beaujolais Nouveau

It will not surprise you, dear reader, to find out that Beaujolais Nouveau wines tend to come from this southern region of Beaujolais.

So, perversely perhaps, to my mind, Beaujolais Nouveau is in fact a near perfect response to a region that otherwise can produce such marginal and modest wines.

The vast bulk of these wines then are sold quickly and cheaply, for the fun and casual drinking of millions of people across the world. They are lowish in alcohol, they are light in colour, low in tannins, quite fruity and most attractive when chilled.

They have a place on the shelf, provided that place is cheap enough and that they are drunk entirely fresh.

The history as we have seen was that this was always a local event, mainly for the population of Lyon, but as transport improved Paris became a market for these young, fresh and fruity wines.

In 1937 when the Appellation Controlee system was formalised in law, the key law for Beaujolais was that they could not sell Beaujolais Nouveau before 15^th of December, showing that the wine was now more than a local curiosity and trying to increase quality by making sure the wine was fully finished.

This left little time for sales before Christmas and after World War II, this was brought back to the 15^th of November.

Then in the early 1960s, the most influential name in Burgundy arrived on the scene, Georges Duboeuf.

Georges Duboeuf was obsessed by Burgundy, today he essentially owns a whole village called Romaneche-Thorins, where he has built one of the world’s best, ok perhaps the world’s only wine theme park. The whole village is a living display of how wine is made, how the lives of winemakers and growers is spent.

It is actually quite poignant and goes far beyond a few barrels and tanks, the railway station is set up to show how transportation impacted on wine. If you are ever in the area it is well worth a detour, it is about an hour north of Lyon airport where Aer Lingus flies hundreds of thousands of Irish ski holiday makers into the French Alps each winter.

Duboeuf’s wines all feature very vibrant floral labels that set them, some might say, garishly apart from anything else on the French wine shelves, but in adopting this approach he foresaw what the New World wines would do in the late 1990s and today with their eye-catching labels.

Duboeuf created the modern craze for Beaujolais Nouveau, popularising the phrase, Il Est Arrivee, a typical Parisian Chalk Bar sign that declared they had the Beaujolais Nouveau wine for sale.

Duboeuf fostered the media mania for the race to be the first restaurant or bar to have the Beaujolais Nouveau throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Duboeuf himself has moved on in many ways and now the winery and his company try to look a Beaujolais in a rounded fashion with wines from the 10 Cru and from Beaujolais Villages dominating.

Beaujolais Villages is the name given to wine from the better northern half of Beaujolais that sist outside of the 10 Cru and it represents a very credible and rising level of quality.

The 10 Cru of Beaujolais: Fleurie, Moulin a Vent, Brouilly, Regnie, Chiroubles, Cote de Brouilly, St Amour, Chenas, Morgon and Julienas can all produce wines of the highest ambition. The Gamay on this soil and stone produces, very complex wines that range from the perfumed violet delights of AC Fleurie wines to the tannic and intense wines of Moulin A Vent. These wines can be long lasting and can evolve into very fine wines over time, Chateau de Pierreux in the heart of AC Brouilly is a wine beating at the doors of Grand Cru status.

The future for Beaujolais as a fine wine region is in the Cru wines, these named villages are the ambitious top line, they can be very attractive wines and they sell for considerably lower prices than their Burgundy cousins.

Here are some possibilities to begin your exploration.

Avant Garde Beaujolais

Domaine Lapalu, Viellies Vignes AC Brouilly 2007 (90) around €20.95

Chateau de Pierreux AC Brouilly 2008 (90) around €19

Domaine De Vissoux, AC Fleurie 2008 (89) around €20.75

Domaine de la Madone, AC Fleurie, 2008 (89) around €18

Kings Of The Old Guard

Georges Duboeuf, AC Brouilly 2007 (89) around €16

Drouhin, AC Fleurie 2006 (89) around €19

Louis Jadot, Domaine de Poncereau, AC Fleurie 2007 (90) around €20

 

Gundpowder, Treason and Rot Or How I Learned To Love The Eiffel Tower, Scientific Wines and Sugar

Gundpowder, Treason and Rot  Or  How I Learned To Love The Eiffel Tower, Scientific Wines and Sugar

While it may sound like something from a Dan Brown novel, in 1986 while performing the usual maintenance the Eiffel Tower, 72 names carved on to the four massive legs of the first floor, were revealed to the world. These huge carved panels of names formed a continuous pattern of names around the legs, rather like the names of gods running around an ancient temple.

The most obvious question is who were they and why were they there, the less obvious question, why had they been covered up.

Well, the names were those of 72 scientists and engineers, all French of course. They had been engraved on to panels attached to the structure of the first floor legs by Gustav Eiffel perhaps as homage to the rationalist, scientific community that had made France and Europe the powerhouse of the 19^th century.

While generals and statesmen are often honoured in this way, this unique tribute is dominated by chemists and mathematicians.

One name is given pride of place that rings down to wine lovers and surely he is the only person involved in the world of wine to be honoured by a 1023 foot tall, 10,100 ton iron monument.

His name is Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal.

For some he is the scourge of sweet wine making, for others he is the scourge of honest wine making but for anyone who is prepared to approach every issue with an open mind, he might be described as the father of modern winemaking.

Gun Powder, Treason and Rot

In 1777, a young man named Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal was finishing his study of medicine at the University of Montpellier, he had been delivered a fresh body to dissect in the University laboratory. The man had died not many hours previously, Chaptal placed a scalpel to the head of the corpse and made a small blow. The corpse, clutched his hand, moaned and shock its head. Chaptal fled the lab and never practiced medicine despite graduating later that year.

Instead, he toyed with chemicals and according to the Journal of Chemical Education, something I thought I would never refer to in an article about wine, he wrote a tremendously badly received play about Polish politics and some dire poetry.

Recovering from the corpse incident and living in his native Languedoc he became fascinated with some of the chemistry of winemaking and distillation. A Doctorate, study in complex chemistry and movement to Paris looked like seting the course of his life.

However in a move we recommend to all entrepreneurially minded readers, he then inherited a vast fortune.

With this he bought mineral rich lands in the Languedoc and set up a huge chemical works. He also accepted the post of Professor of Chemistry in the University of Montpellier. Working night and day he developed stable gunpowder and better techniques of making gunpowder from saltpetre, as well as a dozen other vital chemicals for the industrial  revolution in France.

Most of this is now lost to us, because although he went on to become a Minister, a Count and confident of Napoleon, his discovery of the chemical process by which you could advance the movement of non fermenting grapes into wine is what he left his name upon.

Chaptalisation is the process of adding sugar in very specific quantities and at very specific temperatures to a wine must, the grapes and skins in a pulpy pre-fermented juice.

This was not investigated and developed by Chaptal to make sweet wines, rather it was a bi-product of his study of what was going on to make wine at all.

Unlike the hands off view that many wineries like to portray wine making can be a complex, a very complex and labour intensive process depending on the underlying chemistry.

He was one of the first to set out on a rational and scientific basis what was going on inside the vats and barrels of a winery. Not by guesswork or apprenticeship but by objective science.

What he and other natural scientists found was that in a very complex set of chemical reactions, yeasts, transformed the rich soup of grape pulp into wine by transforming the sugars in the grape into alcohol, with a bi-product of carbon dioxide and heat and a myriad of other smaller and even more complex reactions.

These other reactions continue over the whole winemaking process and include interaction with the chemical structure of the holding vessel such as wooden barrels, the pips, the differing parts of the grape skin and varies according to the heat and density of the materials. Density changes with temperature.

So, many winemakers are conductors of an annual symphony of a micro-bacterial version of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring. Rushing to control temperature, pressures, densities, ph levels, sugar must weights, volumes and somewhere in all this taste.

Chaptal proposed that such chemical reactions could be perfected by the rebalancing of the primary material for the transformation into alcohol. That primary material is Sugar.

In 1907, rioting, the burning down of portions of the centre of Montpellier and Narbonne and the death of half a dozen unfortunate souls during mass protests by almost a million people lead to a series of laws, banning Chaptalisation.

So, Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal entered the 20^th century consciousness by being cited in a statute criminalising his technique of rectifying what would have been poor wine.

I am sure that is not why the names on the Eiffel Tower were covered but it certainly did not hurt sciences image to have Chaptal concealed on France’s most famous monument.

Sugar, Sugar

In countries where the climate consistently hampers full ripening of grapes, you are faced with a few options. The most obvious solution is to make sparkling wine, this seems to work best with less than wholly ripe wines and specifically there is even a process for adding sugar in a non-controversial way through adding a dosage, a mixture of high alcohol concentrated liquor and sugar, after the primary fermentation. The bubbles often being a result of the secondary fermentation of unused sugars releasing Carbon Dioxide into the now sealed bottle.

The second solution is to employ Chaptalisation

No one seems to talk about Champagne’s use of sugar as Chaptalisation. What we really mean by Chaptalisation is adding sugar to conventional wine.

The addition ion sparkling wine is seen as morally different because it has another purpose than to make up for the lack in the weather in any particular vintage.

Do this in Bordeaux and many parts of France and you will end up in jail. As we saw last week, in Beaujolais having unauthorised sugar in your cellar is an offence in itself as is selling sugar knowingly to a winery.

In some areas however, Chaptalisation is allowed. It is legal in Germany, it happens lawfully in the Loire and in parts of Burgundy.

It is not an easy process to get right, the sugar has to be added at the right moment in the fermentation to extend the process, if you have too much sugar the yeasts can be overwhelmed.

When done correctly however, the result is a wine with a higher alcohol level than it could have hoped for without the sugar. Sugar levels are checked in the vineyard and in the winery hourly during the harvest period so the deficit if there is going to be one is well signalled.

Here is the fundamental question. Is it wrong, to cure with science the lack that nature has supplied at any one moment.

In the southern hemisphere, in the Languedoc, in Italy and California they have another problem, the reverse, to much sugar, leading to a soupy, jam like confection. They can cure this by acidifying, adding needed acidity to cut through, calm down and bring some edge or savoury element to the wine.

In Bordeaux and amongst most organic and biodynamic wineries all of this is frowned upon and sanctioned.  Here they argue that it is about the game of what nature gives you.

And yet if it is technical, non chemical scientific intervention they do not mind, so reverse osmosis machines which can essentially suck out water from watery wine, concentrating it are not illegal, although the better wineries profess not to use them.

If we want to avoid being part of an anti-scientific then we must object to these techniques if we want to, on some other grounds than the morality of going against nature, because the whole of our civilisation is based upon this, broken legs, TB, typhoid and trapped miners have been rectified by our technical genius despite the action of nature.

Wines Of Scientific Intervention

On one level we can say that all wine is created by our intervention, but there are plenty of wines, many great wines, which offer only the most uncluttered view of what the climate, what nature and the vineyard offered.

On the other hand here are wines and regions where human ingenuity and scientific, rational intervention has produces some great tasting wines.

Champagne

As we described above, Champagne is a brilliant creation of a highly interventive process of creation. The grapes are picked and fermented, then they are re-fermented after the addition of a complex addition of the dosage including sugars, a re-fermentation is encouraged in a bottle to produce and trap Carbon Dioxide, which we call bubbles. The whole process is accompanied by a cross year blending to get consistency, resulting in the Non Vintage tag being placed without any worries on the outside of the bottle. Some of the world’s most delicious wines are the result

Champagne Bollinger Special Cuvee, Non Vintage (92) around €50

Champagne Veuve Cliquot,  Non Vintage (90) around €46.99

Champagne Billecart-Salmon Brut, Non Vintage (90) around €49.99

Champagne Moet et Chandon, Brut NV (89) around €39.99

Champagne Beaumont des Crayeres, Grande Reserve NV (90) around €29

Port

Here we have a great fortified wine which is produced by adding alcohol to fermenting wine to kill the fermentation process before it has naturally finished with a view to producing a rich, highly fortified wine with strong ripe fruit, residual sugar and of course the spirit added. It is as un-natural product as could be imagined with the Port Wine styles then being created by human intervention to either leave the wines to bleach into Tawny Ports, to leave them to age for years until they smooth out then decant them into bottles late in the process or pour them straight into bottles to age an near glacial speeds, giving one of the  world’s longest lived wines.

Late Bottled Vintage Port

Ramos Pintos, Traditional, LBV 2004 (90) around €23

Quinta do Castelinho LBV 1997 (90) around €24

Quinta do Vale Dona Maria, LBV 2002 (91) around €26.50

Taylors LBV 2001 (91) around €25

Tawny

Niepoort, Senior Tawny, NV (90) around €21

Taylors 10 Year Old Tawny (91) around €29

Quinta do Castelinho, Tawny Port NV (89) around €17.99

Vin Doux Natural

Probably not strictly speaking merely a wine and definitely not natural, this has to be one of the most contentious categories in wine, yet it makes some very fine and enjoyable wine experiences.

This is a sweet or dessert wine created by the addition of alcohol, like Port, to halt the fermentation process in its tracks, thus leaving a great deal of unfermented sugar in the resulting wine. The difference between Port and this type of wine is one of timing and grapes of course. Frontignan, Beaumes de Venise, Rivesaltes, Banyuls and Maury are all regions that produce Vin Doux Natural, here the problem is too much sugar. The grapes get very ripe and so a varity of techniques were found to give them some cut, in this case alcoholic cut, not acidity. Two styles exist, with those like Beaumes de Venise opting for a clean, white or golden dessert wine with a hefty kick and high sugar, whereas Rivesaltes opt to create a sherry like baked, raisinated wine of amber colour and wonderful nutty, fruit cake like complexity.

Maison Jaboulet, AC Beaumes de Venise 2001 (88) around €29

Gabriel Meffre, Laurus, AC Beaumes de Venise 2004 (89) around €17.50

Mas Amiel AC Maury 2001 (89) around €37

Mas Amiel, 6 Years Old, AC Maury (90) around €23

Gerard Bertrand AC Banyuls (89) around €24

Natural, hardly,

Beautiful, yes.

TC