Angel
New Member
Certain wine-drinking and bottle-opening techniques and technologies can be no less mysterious and sophisticated than those of vine-growing and wine-making
I recently attended the annual London Wine Fair (where, like every visitor, I was entrusted with a personal tasting glass at the entrance), and today feel like talking about wine, although talking (or writing) about wine, as opposed to drinking it, is like walking through a cloud of titillating smells seeping out of a Michelin-starred restaurant and not being able to get inside…
Living in Britain, a country which ‘The Oxford Companion to Wine’ calls ‘one of the most fastidious, yet open-minded, wine-consuming nations’, I get the impression that I am constantly surrounded by wine connoisseurs of the highest calibre all too familiar with the technologies not just of wine-making but with those of wine-drinking too. At parties and lunches, my friends and contacts take genuine pleasure in sniffing wine, swirling it in their glasses, “allowing it to breathe” and making loud slurping sounds with their lips before swallowing it. As I came to realise with time, however, many of them, rather than being connoisseurs, were ‘wine snobs’, trying to camouflage their dipsomania by pretending they cared about what they drank.
One of them was a compulsive eater, who used to measure sausages by metres (“I ate half a metre of sausages for breakfast”). He drank wine in large quantities in between courses “to clear his palate”, as he would put it. He queried waiters about the vintage with the same ardour KGB interrogators used when questioning suspected dissidents. He sniffed the cork and dutifully swirled the wine in his glass, only to gulp it down greedily before biting into a sausage.
Examples of wine snobbery are numerous in the UK. A businessman who paid £4,950 for a bottle of 1985 Romanée-Conti. A case of Chateau Petrus sold for £22,848 at Sotheby’s. Once, while doing a restaurant review for the Daily Telegraph, I was offered the most expensive wine bottle on that London restaurant’s menu, priced at over £1,000 – for free, no doubt. And, you know what, unable to overcome my shyness (or rather sheer stupidity), I refused and went for the ‘modestly’ priced £40 one. The sommelier immediately lost all respect for me and stayed rude and withdrawn until the end of the meal. Question: who was the wine snob there – moi or the sommelier?
I recently learnt of the existence of the National Correspondence of Corkscrew Addicts organisation (NCCA), whose members wrote letters to each other on a single subject: which corkscrews were the best for opening wine bottles. And once in Fortnum & Mason I saw on sale a CD entitled ‘The Sound of Wine’, on which the fermenting noises of 14 different wines were recorded. What a productive pastime: to sit in an armchair listening to the melodious noises of wine fermentation! It was hard not to agree with the American authors of a useful and witty book, ‘Wine for Dummies’, the first book on wines that I acquired for myself many years ago: ‘In some parts of the world, people have a very interesting attitude toward wine. They just drink it.’
Britain certainly belongs to a different part of the world, where people prefer talking and writing about wine, even listening to it, and thinking of themselves as ultimate wine experts. Actual drinking does not matter. But it is next to impossible to find a person prepared to confess his (or her) ignorance in matters of wines and wine-making (they would be more willing to confess to not remembering the Prime Minister’s name). I am probably the only one…
In the course of the last couple of decades, however, another wine-related occupation has been gaining popularity in Britain. I am talking about the relatively young, yet quickly growing, industry of British wine-making. I am very familiar with one – a small and cosy Fritzden Vineyard not far from Hemel Hempstead run by Simon Tolley, a former BBC cameraman, and his wife Natalie. I visit it frequently on my way to meditation sessions at the near-by Amaravati Buddhist monastery (as only an aspiring Buddhist, I allow myself to so far ignore one of Buddhism’s main precepts urging not to cloud one’s mind with intoxicating substances) for a quick tasting or just a brisk walk around their compact vineyard, with just over 6,000 vines of the varieties specially cultivated for cooler climes. I particularly like two of them: Solaris, whose name comes from the title of the science-fiction novel by one of my favourite writers of all time, Stanislaw Lem, and that of the eponymous Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie (if Solaris, the planet in the novel, had its own mind, Solaris the wine definitely has its own peculiar taste and aroma); and Rondo – a ‘cosmopolitan’ red derived from the Russian grape Zarya Severa (the Dawn of the North), and an Austrian variety Sankt Laurent. The latter, picked up in early October and pressed with minimal skin contact, produces refreshing and aromatic rosé. All the grapes are grown, pressed and bottled right there – in that small Hertfordshire vineyard.
Unfortunately, Simon and Natalie are about to move to Cornwall, which would be too far for me (and a bit of a detour) to pop in on the way to or from my beloved Buddhist monastery. But I hope that the vineyard will soon get new owners, who will carry on looking after the grapes.
Back to the last London Wine Fair, I have to say that the burgeoning British wine-making was well represented there, alongside such old and highly acclaimed wine-making powers as France, Australia, South Africa, Chile and such less known, yet up-and-coming, as Georgia (not a USA state but a post-Soviet country in the Caucasus), Croatia, Bulgaria, the Lebanon (deliciously full reds!) and Switzerland.
Let me say a couple of words about the latter.
Unbeknown to many, vines have been cultivated for over 2,000 years on the territory of modern Switzerland. As John C Sloan notes in his rare book ‘The Surprising Wines of Switzerland’, ‘fine Swiss wines remain among the country’s best and undiscovered secrets’. Some of the country’s southern cantons have both ideal terrain and perfect climate (with over 300 days of sunshine and just 600mm of rainfall a year) for viticulture, with the warm ‘foehn’ winds blowing from the mountains and drying the grapes, helping them to ripen. I was able to see (or rather to taste) the proofs of all of the above myself during last year’s visit to the vineyards of Canton Valais.
And yet, among all Swiss winemakers represented at the Fair, it was the wines from the country’s one and only Italian-speaking canton, Ticino, that stole the show. I have to confess, however, that I was first attracted to the Ticino Wines stand for a wrong reason. Walking past it, with my faithful and temporarily empty working glass clutched tightly in my right hand, I heard Russian speech – the fact that I first ascribed to the over-extensive tasting experiences at one of the Georgian stands. Having come closer, I made sure that the familiar sounds were for real and stemmed from two good-looking ladies in red ‘Schweiz’ T-shirts. Mila and Katerina were indeed Russian, but working for Ticino Wines – an exclusive distributor of the latter. They said it was their (and their wines’) first ever appearance at the Fair.
The debut was successful, and the best living proof of that was a small crowd of tasters (as well as drinkers) around the stand, all (including yours truly) admiring Ticino-made Pino Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Gamaret and, particularly, the unique White Merlot! No, it’s not a typo: I meant The Merlo Bianco – an elegant white wine from the Merlot grape variety which originally came to Ticino from the Bordeaux region of France and soon became the main variety here. The canton’s acid and limestone soils are great for cultivating all kinds of grapes, and its viticulture technology, traditionally combining Italian creativity with Swiss precision, is one of the best in Europe.
And here’s an amazing figure for you: with the population of just over 350,000, do you know how many vineyards there are in Ticino? 3,869 – a vineyard for every 100 people, including babies, children and those old enough to be past their drinking age (120 years and over), no less!
Having imbibed all those facts and figures, alongside some (very small) amounts of the superb Ticino-made Al Mercaa Riserva 2013, I was prepared (if not seriously, then definitely bibulously) to ask for a political asylum in that small Swiss canton, and it was only the memory of my own mini-wine cellar (a euphemism for a six-bottle iron wine rack on top of the fridge) plus the recollection of my local Fritzden Vineyard in the heart of Hertfordshire, that stopped me from doing so. Thus I also proved to myself that I haven’t yet become a wine snob. Not quite…
Let me finish, therefore, with a meaningful real-life anecdote about wine-tasting and other related types of snobbery.
Several years ago, a group of top British wine and food critics were invited by The Sunday Times to taste and to grade Evian, Perrier, Buxton, Highland Spring and other bottled mineral waters, to which – clandestinely and unbeknownst to the tasters – several samples of plain tap water had been added. In the end, the experts unanimously graded tap water higher than any of the famous bottled ones. The tap water, which, by the way, had come from the public toilets of Birmingham, was described by different wine and food gurus as ‘refreshing’, ‘tasting of pink grapefruit’, having a ‘fresh lemony aroma’ and even ‘having a giggly feel to it’, which proves that a snob is always a snob, no matter what he or she drinks – wine or water!
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https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/06/view-from-vitalia-of-vinology-and-wine-snobbery/