WineIreland

Who on Earth buys French wine?

Boyfriend and I were sitting on the balcony in the late afternoon sun, overlooking the bay.  Dublin Bay.  It does happen.  I was trying a glass of Château Beau-Site, an affordable Saint-Estèphe, for this fortnight's recommendations.  Boyfriend was having a Coke—he doesn't particularly like Bordeaux.  But it wasn't he, venting a bias; the question was mine.

Which is a tad ironic, as I have more Bordeaux to my name than I can lay claim to all of the New World combined.  Doubly ironic, as I was thinking of Bordeaux and Burgundy—I can actually see the mythical man in the street opening a bottle of wine from the Southern Rhône or the Languedoc without being sorely disappointed.

So I'm bashing Bordeaux and Burgundy, right?  Most things French?  Or the man in the street, perhaps?  There certainly are a number of them that might be improved for it.

Actually, it's the Australians I have it in for.

Not that they're a bad lot; it's just that they moved the goalposts.   And then every second New World upstart rushed in to play, all in their brand new sponsors' colours.  The New World brushed the old from the shelves.  The fans bused themselves in to the supermarkets in droves.  And though they might protest that they knoweth not what they wanted, they are wrong.

Everyone wants something that tastes Australian.  Even when it's French.

I know how to concoct a commercial blend.   I tried my hand at it recently, with Alan Kennett, the head winemaker at [ yellow tail ].  Working with four pre-selected barrel samples, let me hasten to add—not the 200+ lots Alan has to contend with.

My partners in crime and I came up with a blend that, with a bit of luck, would have sold as well as any of the other Shirazes crowding in behind the €9.99 mark.  It was easy to drink; it had the all-important velvety mouth-feel; it even had a smattering of class, containing, as it did, a decent proportion of the cool climate wines [ yellow tail ] include in all their blends.  "Unlike the majority of our competitors," Alan emphasised.

And I now know where the velvety mouthfeel comes from; I can taste it a mile off.  It is the grape juice concentrate we added to our blend—the grape juice concentrate [ yellow tail ] add to their wines, in slightly more liberal proportions than the 1% we contented ourselves with.

Grape juice concentrate is not a crime—the Germans have been adding it to their whites for years.   [ yellow tail ] is merely running with the pack pursuing the consumer's Euro.  But the not quite dry, unctuous--easy!--palate that the commercial New World bequeathed a generation of red wine drinkers most decidedly is.  A heinous crime of terrible proportions.

It's a bit like adding black pepper and chilli to everything—another terrible sin I'll probably be tortured for forever.  It's not that you can't taste anything else; you can.  Often, quite exquisitely highlighted by the sharp edge of the spice.  It's just that you keep adding chilli and black pepper to everything because you can't imagine your favourite food without it. ^*

It is horrible when someone who enjoys wine needs to be smothered in velvet before they'll cop on that the wine they are drinking actually is nice—never mind good.

Finally, I get to the point.

I just rated a wine silver—but I caution you to think twice before buying it.  What have I added to my chilli?

Nothing I haven't already written up all over the place.  You will find a small set of markers cropping up in every second review: Elegance.  Structure.  Verve.  Complexity.   These are what I hope to find in a wine.  Easy treats wrapped in faux velvet just won't do.

Neither should they do for you.

But the overwhelming majority of us cut our wine-drinking teeth, if not on Blue Nun (an initiation I was spared due to sanctions and the international community's general distaste of the shameful shenanigans of our great leaders at the southern tip of Africa), then on some other crowd-pleaser designed to be liked by a generation of Coke drinkers.

We have been conditioned to like easy-going wines.   And our first reaction is to recoil a bit when they are not.

Hence my little clauses of caution: "Unless you are willing to dig your nose and your palate into the wine, you are going to miss the point of this one a bit," they warn.  "If the idea of concentrating on what is in your glass does not sound tedious from the outset—this one's for you," they clamour.

It is not being snooty or elitist; it is about being willing to spend the harder currencies of attention and time in getting to grips with what's in your glass.

And it is not that hard.  Our short article on the basics of wine tasting (which is even shorter when one skips the first three paragraphs :-) contains more than enough information to get you started.

Then you just have to keep tasting.  I can imagine worse fates.