Quelquechose qui cloche

According to very counter-intuitive research done at Brook University in Canada, English Speakers are more likely to buy wine with difficult to pronounce names. So all the focus group money spent on finding English names for wines that might prove a challenge to pronounce would appear to have been in vain. And yet, and yet, apparently the research also found that wines with difficult to pronounce names were rated higher in blind tastings! Of course if they really were blind then you shouldn't know the names. And if they were rated higher after their names were revealed then they must have been found to be better wines - and the name was entirely incidental. The difficult to pronounce names would seem to have been mixed in with the difficult to understand logic!

Australian Offer

Australia Day has passed but word reaches us that whilst Australia is still basking in the strength of its currency Moet & Chandon Champagne is selling for less than, amongst others, the Yarra Valley-produced Domaine Chandon! Trouble is if you are in the UK it's not worth a special journey - yet!

Raising yeast

New Zealand scientists at the University of Auckland have now discovered that wild yeasts differ according to region. This is interesting because there are some winemakers who swear by cultured yeast and others who prefer a so called 'wild ferment'. On a recent visit to the Douro one Port maker was adamant that he only ever made use of wild yeasts whereas he was unsurprised that another house visited earlier (at the time owned by a large brewing group) only ever used cultured yeast! Because of course, a cultured yeast to a brewery is vital - it offers the possibility of consistency of style with every brew, which are often produced on a daily basis. With wine, produced just once a year, a certain variation in vintage is sometimes considered a good selling point so may actually be advantageous. What is more it now seems certain that wild yeast would play a part in this variation. It will also be a constituent of the mix in the 'terroir' of the wine - the individual vineyard character and regional identity. So far only New Zealand has investigated yeast in this way, but it seems reasonable to suppose that New Zealand is not unique. So this is just another small stitch in the large tapestry of wine analysis....

Short Video

Britain in the beerage

Normally when an Italian, a Portuguese and a Greek go to the pub the Germans seem to pay, even if only with considerable reluctance. But the Germans drink twice as much beer as the Brits yet Britain pays more than five times as much duty and VAT. According to accountants, Ernst and Young, Britain pays more than 40% of the European beer tax bill! even though Britain represents just 13% of Europe's beer consumption and 12% of the European population. Emigration anyone?

Hearty fayre

There is rejoicing at the Hôpital de Montbard, near Dijon, because a recent trial conducted by the Université de Bourgogne has affirmed the efficacy of red wine in assisting recovery from - or perhaps more properly guarding against a recurrence of - a heart attack in cardiac patients. Just a fortnight of consumption of 1 glass of red wine with meals improved blood cell fluidity and decreased levels of LDL (so-called 'bad') cholesterol compared with those who were given water. What seems to get less mention however, is that both groups were not dining on Boeuf Bourgignon and Chaource but alas, a Mediterranean diet. They were however drinking (what else?) red Burgundy. It would be interesting to know if the effect might have been more marked if Malbec rich wine from South West France had been prescribed instead. But probably this is not the piece of research that one should look to the Université de Bourgogne to conduct...

When NATURAL WINE is not so NATURAL

There is a growing clamour about the so called ‘natural’ wine movement which seems to market itself as a half way house to organic. Organic wine itself is rather full of inconsistency and confusion (see our summary on organic wine here) and the thinking behind ‘natural’ wine is equally muddled. The promoters are proud of their non interventionist stance and lack of ‘treatment’ of wine which they parade as naturally better. Reality, we feel, lies elsewhere!
If we return to first principles we can see that wine is never natural! Because although alcoholic fermentation takes place naturally in grapes, without human intervention it all too quickly ends up as vinegar which is the real natural result. So it is all very much a matter of degree. Some so called 'natural' wines are distinctly variable bottle by bottle. Interestingly, (leaving aside Austria and Germany where producers are still conscious of the antifreeze scandal) the natural wine movement is largely confined to France - a country with a Roman Catholic heritage and where not so long ago wines with what would today be regarded as faults were routinely on sale – the Good Lord had made the wine, as it were, and that was how it turned out, faults and all. The Protestant background of somewhere like Australia has led to a much more widespread technical approach in winemaking as a way of 'improving' nature. Of course this can lead to a certain standardisation, but for inexpensive wines this amounts to a version of quality control for the consumer. Without intervention interesting variabilty can all too easily be a lottery. And even for wines in wide production careful 'interventionist' winemaking and cellar practices lead to wines that have more individuality such as, for example in the barrel ageing of any number of wines from both old and new worlds, or Château Buisson Redon's microbullage (oxygenation) to enhance ageing characters of a simple Merlot based Bordeaux 'Petit Château'.
To paraphrase the cream producers, it may not be natural but it's nice. And nicer than it would 'naturally' otherwise be!