Jonathan Healey

No need to fear competition by Chinese reds

2012-02-03T17:39:00.007Z

FOLLOWING the surprise victory of Chinese red wines over French ones at a blind taste-off in Beijing in which the top four of the top five wines chosen by five French and five Chinese judges were “Made in China”, The Connexion asked readers: “Should French wine growers be nervous?”

My answer is "no, they should not".

Even the event’s organisers acknowledged this was not China’s “1976 moment”, referring to a legendary blind taste-off in Paris at which Californian wines were ranked higher than competing Bordeaux wines.

The Beijing competition pitted China’s best estates’ best wines against a ragbag of run-of-the-mill Bordeaux wines. Since the wines had to cost between 200 and 350 Yuan (€25 to €40) and French wines are subject to heavy import duties in China, the Bordeaux wines selected for the competition would have cost half that in France, so they were not exceptional.

To overcome the price disadvantage inflicted by duties, a few big European names have been tempted to make their own wine in China. Moët & Chandon is, with local state-owned agriculture company Ningxia Nongken, making “Champagne” along the Yellow River flood plains in Ningxia, China’s third-poorest province where farmers earn less than €2,300 per year.

This watermelon-producing region is not steeped in wine culture, but Moët’s experts say Ningxia’s soil and climate closely match the terroir of Rheims. Really? Ningxia is 800 km west of Beijing, just south of the Gobi Desert and Mongolian steppes. The climate is semi-arid with hot, torrentially wet summers and winter temperatures as low as minus 25°C, when winemakers protect vines by burying them.

Curiously, Ningxia’s vaunted terroir, ideal (Moët’s experts say) for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, is also where the top four Chinese Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot-based wines at the Beijing taste-off originated. With its capacity to produce Champagne, Burgundy and Bordeaux imitations, tiny Ningxia province is an obliging hussy of a terroir. Luckily it is not also subject to typhoons, like Shandong province – another of China’s up-and-coming wine regions – where legendary French wine producer Château Lafite recently opened up a vineyard.

However, the Torres Spanish winemaking dynasty invested millions of euros in winemaking projects in China but subsequently pulled out. Family patriarch Miguel Torres told me: “China doesn’t have any good terroir.” Where the land is suitable, the weather isn’t right; where the weather is right, the land isn’t suitable.

The other problem for foreign companies wanting to make wine in China is that their new (and unwanted) business partner is likely to be the local communist party honcho.

Nothing can be done to avoid the second problem, but companies with millions to invest can always transform their terroirs, for example by importing pudding stones or adding minerals to the soil, even by changing weather patterns to make them more vine-friendly. California winemaker Michael Mondavi mused about the possibilities of terraforming in the wine film Mondovino: “Wouldn’t it be cool one day to make wine on the moon?” No, it wouldn’t, Mr Spock. It would be illogical. Who would buy it?

Foreign wine manufacturers setting up in China are hoping to capture local market share; they’re not yet talking about widely exporting. However, given the Chinese middle class’s extreme brand-consciousness – for whom Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne are key names – even this is a questionable business plan. Face would be lost if you entertained your Chinese business colleagues with anything but the real stuff.

Marketers selling “Made in China” wines are betting consumers’ perceptions can be changed. So we have the spectacle of Chinese wine industry officials trying to establish their country’s wine culture credentials, like an American presidential candidate trying to establish his Irish roots. But do seven 4,600-year-old ceramic pots from Shandong province containing fragments of grape seeds constitute a wine culture? Does the birth register really say O’Bama?

First published in The Connexion (February, 2012)

Bomb victim’s daughter presses for Sarkozy corruption inquiry

2012-01-05T14:41:00.005Z

President Sarkozy’s 2012 re-election bid could be hit by allegations of illegal kick-backs and irregular arms dealing – which campaigners believe led to the deaths of 11 French workers in a 2002 bomb attack.

JONATHAN HEALEY spoke exclusively to Sandrine Leclerc, daughter of one of the victims.

Nicolas Sarkozy is being urged to explain his involvement in a potentially highly damaging 17-year-old corruption scandal involving suspected kickbacks from arms sales to Pakistan.

Investigators suspect the alleged kickbacks were used to fund a failed presidential campaign Mr Sarkozy ran for his mentor and ally, former Prime Minister Eduoard Balladur.

The case – known as L’Affaire Karachi – centres on a bomb attack in the Pakistani city which killed 11 French naval workers in 2002.

Investigators are looking at claims the bombing was motivated by anger at then president Jacques Chirac’s decision to stop huge commissions on the €800m arms deal being paid to Pakistani officials and middlemen.

Chirac suspected kickbacks from the deal supplying Pakistan with three Agosta submarines were used to finance Balladur’s political activities. Chirac had beaten Balladur, his bitter political rival, in the 1995 presidential election.

Sandrine Leclerc, daughter of one of the attack victims and co-author of On Nous Appelle Les Karachi (They Call Us the Karachis), spoke to The Connexion about the expanding investigation into the affair that saw two of Sarkozy’s close allies arrested in September.

Mrs Leclerc said: “We are encouraged by recent developments which support our conviction that political corruption and the stopping of commission payments linked to the Agosta contracts were excellent motives for the deaths of our loved ones.”

In September, police arrested Thierry Gaubert, a financial advisor to Sarkozy in 1994-1995 when he was Balladur’s budget minister and campaign treasurer. Mr Gaubert is being investigated over links to a Franco-Lebanese businessman, Ziad Takieddine, who is charged with fraud over the submarine sales to Pakistan.

Sarkozy’s special advisor and former Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, is the subject of another investigation into whether he unlawfully obtained information from an investigation into the affair and then contacted Mr Gaubert before his arrest.

Transcripts of telephone conversations published in French newspapers are said to indicate Mr Hortefeux warned Mr Gaubert that his wife had “given up a lot” when questioned by investigators.

Police also arrested Sarkozy’s close friend Nicolas Bazire, who was in charge of Balladur’s private office and presidential campaign director.

A witness at Mr Sarkozy’s 2008 wedding to Carla Bruni, he is accused of complicity in the misuse of public money.

The lawyer for the victims’ families, Olivier Morice, said these developments had created “panic at the highest levels of the state.”

Mrs Leclerc also wants Sarkozy to clarify his role in the setting up of Luxembourg company Heine, which victims’ families and investigating judges suspect was used to channel tens of millions of francs in kickbacks into Balladur’s campaign coffers.

“We want to know why Mr Sarkozy would set up a shadow company in a tax haven to channel commissions if they were legal. We believe complex and inventive financial schemes were devised to manage kickbacks.”

The investigative website Mediapart has quoted a Luxembourg police report linking Sarkozy to the setting up of two Luxembourg companies at the time, including Heine.

Mrs Leclerc also wants the Conseil Constitutionnel France’s highest constitutional authority, to make public its deliberations concerning Balladur’s presidential campaign finances.

His accounts were rejected by the body because of the movement of suspect quantities of cash, but they were later validated by then committee president, Roland Dumas.

Sarkozy has angrily denied allegations of kickbacks and irregularities in Balladur’s campaign financing and has repeatedly promised to hand over all relevant documents.

“He hasn’t kept any of his promises: to hand over documents; to keep victims’ families informed; to meet with us – we’ve had everything but his support,” Mrs Leclerc said, referring to undertakings Mr Sarkozy made to families during their only meeting with him in 2008.

The families achieved “an important step forward” last month, when the Conseil Constitutionnel ruled documents relating to the Karachi attack, which the government had withheld due to military confidentiality, should be handed over.

The committee said the rules surrounding state defence secrets were too restrictive and that this was preventing judges from carrying out their investigation.

Mrs Leclerc said the victims’ families had been hampered in their search for the truth from the beginning, at every turn and from the highest levels.

“After the bombing, we were encircled by government officials. It was bizarre. We were told what to do and think. We were told Al-Qaeda was responsible. A lawyer was imposed on families.

“I never saw the lawyer. It turned out he was the lawyer for the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. He bluntly told my co-author, Magali Drouet, to ‘get over it’.”

The families hired lawyer Olivier Morice in 2008 when Mediapart and Le Point published details of a 2002 government report which concluded that the bombing was probably linked to the ending of commission payments on the Agosta contracts – an opinion shared by the current judge investigating the attack, Marc Trévidic.

The judge initially appointed to investigate the bombing, Jean-Louis Brugière, maintained for six years that the attack was the work of Al-Qaeda.

“Bruguière told families that the attack was certainly the work of Al-Qaeda, though he had evidence to the contrary.

“We would have been happier if the bombing had been the work of Al-Qaeda. The idea that our loved ones died because of a political financing scandal is grotesque,” Mrs Leclerc said.

Victims’ families want Mr Bruguière, who retired in 2008, to answer accusations that he obstructed the course of justice by failing to reveal to families the doubts of French pathologists who conducted an autopsy on the presumed bomber.

Mrs Leclerc said the families are also considering laying a complaint of manslaughter against Chirac and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin if they suspected retribution would follow the decision to stop Agosta commission payments.

Mr de Villepin has asked to be heard by the judge investigating the Agosta deal, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, reputed to be one of France’s most ruthless independent investigative judges.

Mrs Leclerc said the Legion of Honour medal posthumously awarded to her father had been buried in anger “somewhere in the garden” by her mother. “My father didn’t die for France. He probably died because politicians put their own financial and career interests before the safety of French defence workers,” she said.

First published in The Connexion (December, 2011)

My ultimate New Year's resolution for wine Tour de France

2012-01-02T14:12:00.004Z

IF YOU USE the Mayan calendar, you will know that it’s coming to the end of its 5,125-year cycle this year. If you’re also inclined to apocalyptic thinking, you might assume that the Mayan calendar’s expiration heralds the actual end of days, too.

While no dark horsemen are stalking my 2012 calendar, why risk assuming the end isn’t nigh when now is the time to make what might be your last New Year’s resolution? So, I resolve this year to try the best wines from France’s 12 wine-growing regions and treat myself to bottles from each region’s legendary producers. Call it a “wine bucket list”.

Here’s my year ahead, travelling anti-clockwise around the Hexagon:

January - The Loire’s bone-dry Muscadets and smoky Sauvignons are refreshing after Yuletide’s excesses, and Anjou rosés appeal, but a still Vouvray from legendary Domaine Huet and a Cabernet Franc Chinon from Domaine Joguet will add bouquet to the bucket.

February - Bordeaux lets you indulge your most aristocratic red and sumptuous sweet white wine urges. A Pomerol from Château Petrus will satisfy the former while a Sauternes from Château d’Yquem will do the rest.

March - The South-West caters for all, it’s Bordeaux on a budget. Bergerac and Buzet suggest lightweight Clarets, while Monbazillac is the sweet white wine. Cahors and Fronton do darker reds. But bucket space is reserved for a burly Tannat from Madiran’s Château Montus.

April - The Roussillon is an accumulation of contrasts – hot and cool, windy and calm, mountain and sea – producing correspondingly diverse wine styles, notably the complex Banyuls and Maury sweet wines. But into the bucket goes a dry white from Domaine Gauby.

May - The Languedoc does soft and fruity, rich and aromatic. A tangy Picpoul with lunchtime oysters precedes a spicy Pic Saint-Loup with the evening’s roast beast. But I’m adding the atypical Mas de Daumas Gassac to the list – because being a maverick is a Languedoc trait, too.

June - The Rhône Valley divides easily into two: while Syrah dominates the north, I’m instead bucketing a Viognier from Condrieu-based Domaine André Perret; Châteauneuf-du-Pape is the south’s epicentre, from where I’ll add a Grenache classic from Château Rayas.

July - Provence is delicious, almost creamy rosés by day; sunny, herbal and rich reds by night. Cézanne and Van Gogh’s pine tree-topped hillsides are also the source of the seriously sturdy, appellation-defying, must-bucket Cabernet-Syrah blends from Domaine de Trévallon.

August - No farewell would be complete without recognition of the generous, velvety charms of Gamay from one of Beaujolais’ ten cru villages. The pourrie (disintegrated) schist terroir gives Domaine Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon wine its structure and room in the bucket.

September - Burgundy’s prized Chardonnays and plush Pinot Noirs are unlike anything from neighbouring Beaujolais. Reason enough to bucket a bottle of Chablis from Domaine Raveneau and reds from the Rousseau, Leroy and La Romanée-Conti vineyards.

October - The Jura makes great wines from Burgundy grapes, but it’s a vin de paille from grapes dried and concentrated on straw mats from Château d’Arlay that I’m bucketing – and from the Savoie, a light, floral, evanescent Roussette-based white from Domaine André & Michel Quénard.

November - Pretty Alsace is the home of France’s spiciest white, the full-bodied Gewurztraminer, and Riesling, a lively balance of fruitiness and acidity – a bottle from Domaine Zind Humbrecht will satisfy a thirst for the former, and a world-beating Riesling from Maison Trimbach’s tiny Clos Sainte-Hune nearly fills the bucket.

December - The finest vintage Champagne imposes for an end of the world celebration, so top up the bucket with ice and add a Blanc de Blancs from Krug’s Clos de Mesnil, a bottle of Pol Roger’s Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill and a Cristal de luxe from Louis Roederer.

The end of the world predicted by sages and seers has never happened, of course, and those who anticipate it typically refer to the period afterwards as “the Great Disappointment”. But if you follow my advice, you won’t be disappointed. You will, however, be penniless. Happy New Year!

First published in The Connexion (January, 2012)

Champagne lovers need to look for a taste of terroir

2011-12-03T20:58:00.008Z

WHY wait for the New Year to make an ambitious resolution that you may not keep when you can make a modest, festive, achievable one now before joining hands to sing “Auld Lang Syne”? Think differently about Champagne and make more interesting choices this Yuletide.

Years of marketing Champagne as a luxury accessory have transformed the way we think about bubbly. Hardly anyone thinks about Champagne as they do about other wines: it’s reserved for particular moments, it’s associated with brands, not chateaux or grapes, and yet it seems to come from no place in particular. A Bordeaux wine comes from the Médoc, Pauillac, Margaux, St-Emilion, Pomerol, and so on. But can you name a single Champagne terroir?

It comes as a surprise to most people to learn that Champagne even has different terroirs, yet Champagne is a region with five main vineyard areas – the Vallée de la Marne, the Montagne de Reims, the Côtes des Blancs, the Côte de Sézanne and the Aube – and seventeen Grand Cru villages.

The big, brand-name firms (which account for over 70 per cent of Champagne sales) are concentrated in the Vallée de la Marne, Montagne de Reims and Côtes de Blancs zones, in the north of the region around Reims and Epernay.

Few of these illustrious houses, like Moët & Chandon and Krug, own more than 30 per cent of the vineyards from where their grapes are sourced. Some possess no vineyards at all and make no apology for this deficiency. They argue that they are free to buy the best grapes (or ready-made wine) every year on the open market. Not holding land doesn’t preclude the production of quality Champagne claim these négotiants-manipulants (merchant-producers) correctly; it does preclude the production of wine expressive of terroir, though.

The big names promote their wines as coming from “Maisons” where master-blenders craft crisp bubbles from red and white grapes like icicles from rainbows. This is not simply a marketing gambit. Artistry is indisputably happening when Monsieur Krug blends up to 50 wines from 10 vintages to make his Grand Cuvée, though I can think of no other wine region where the art of blending has become more exalted than the actual terroir.

The elevation of the art of blending Champagne is a case of making a virtue out of a necessity. The region is sufficiently far north that growing grapes is a capricious activity; blending stocks of wine from different harvests and terroirs is one way to counter the vagaries of vintages.

However, making a house-blend with a safe, consistent style, absorbing differences in vintage, grape and terroir to perpetuate a brand is not the same – and certainly not as risky – as making a wine that’s expressive of terroir. To find such a wine, you have to seek out Champagne from independent récoltants-manipulants (grower-producers). Happily, there are about 2,000 of them, identifiable by the letters RM on labels. Some of the most interesting produce Champagne from the Côtes des Bar vineyards, 100 km south of Epernay, in the heretofore unfashionable and derided Aube.

Smaller, independent producers blend wines to make Champagne, too, but they do so from fruit grown in their own vineyards, not from grapes or wines sourced from any of the many thousands of growers across the region, and not based on in-house recipes.

The distinctions of terroir, grape variety and vintage make these wines more idiosyncratic than those from the big houses, and they do express the growers’ own villages. As one grower-producer puts it, “Champagne used to be singular, now it’s plural, with many winemakers, villages and styles.”

Sensitive to this appetite for individuality, originality and specificity, some big houses also produce single-vineyard Champagnes with an emphasis on provenance rather than blending. Krug’s Clos du Mesnil, Moët & Chandon’s Dom Pérignon and Bollinger’s Vieilles Vignes Françaises are supreme examples. But these cuvées are typically the houses’ most prestigious and expensive wines.

The good news this Yuletide is that you don’t need to spend a fortune to pop open a grower-producer’s Champagne with a taste of terroir that’s off the beaten track and blend. You may be surprised how well it accompanies Christmas dinner, too.

First published in The Connexion (December, 2011)

Beaujolais Nouveau - a joyful aperitif or whiplash in a bottle

2011-11-07T13:02:00.006Z

WHEN I was ten years old, I helped my father to make space in our garage for the arrival of his Beaujolais Nouveau. I thought it must be a big car because we cleared all along one wall and my father said nothing to dispel my misunderstanding. Since I wasn’t aware nouveau means ‘new’ and I associated the venerable-sounding name, Beaujolais, with something old, my imagination toyed with images of classic French cars, like a vintage Bugatti or Delahaye.

The day a consignment of wooden cases finally arrived, I half-hoped, in my confusion, that the Beaujolais had to be assembled, like a 1:1 Airfix model, from parts packed inside them. Crestfallen and betrayed to find only bottles within, I began a long hate-affair with Beaujolais Nouveau, associating it with dupery and disappointment – exactly the associations many wine lovers hold towards this particular vin primeur (new wine) today.

When I was old enough to taste the stuff, I wondered what all the fuss was about, though its boiled sweets and banana flavours (the latter an unfortunate result of an industrial yeast used by some of the wine’s mass producers) did appeal to an immature palate. Yet planes, trains, automobiles and hot-air balloons still race to deliver humble Beaujolais Nouveau to destinations around the world, with much ballyhoo, on launch day (the third Thursday in November).

That ‘tradition’ was invented, in 1970, by wine-loving Dukes of Hazzard, Clement Freud MP and restaurateur Joseph Berkmann, at a boozy dinner in Romanèche-Thorins. After midnight, they loaded their cars with cases of Beaujolais Nouveau and raced to be first back to London. Two years later, Alan Hall, a columnist for The Sunday Times, challenged readers to a race to be the first to bring back a bottle to his desk. The ‘Beaujolais Run’ was born. Tellingly, the race’s winner received a bottle of Champagne, not jejune fermented Gamay juice.

Curiously, the annual Goodwood to Beaujeu charity ‘Run’ is now almost wholly a classic car rally, though Beaujolais Nouveau has none of the leather and wood aromas associated with vintage motors. It is not a gentlemen’s club in a bottle.

In fact, better examples (yes, they exist) are a by-word for juicy, refreshing and appetisingly acidic plonk. Served slightly chilled, Beaujolais Nouveau is a fruity, joyful aperitif that goes well with just about any dish imaginable.

For vintage flavours, though, test-drive a bottle of Cru Beaujolais from any one of the 10 premium growth vineyards in the appellation. They don’t get the attention they deserve from wine critics, who dole out points and routinely reward flavours akin to sucking jam off a 2x4 – as if powerful equates with greatness – but Cru Beaujolais can be lithe, seductive, superb wine. Unfortunately, the Nouveau phenomenon diverted our attention from these more serious wines for decades.

Nowadays, November is no longer just about balloons, buntings and Beaujolais Nouveau at your local caviste – everyone’s doing vins primeurs. And they’re doing them with quirky, eye-catching labels and vivid cork and cap seal combinations in celebration of their novel, one-off, frivolous spirit. Primeurs, then, are unabashed prototype wines, with go-faster stripes and stick-on flames, mock-ups that reveal some qualities of the harvest to be found into more traditional offerings down the line.

A hasty launch means primeurs have not been road-tested and most don’t need to pass the local appellation’s Contrôle Technique. They rev out of cellars, often pumped from their tanks while still fermenting, some showing symptoms of disequilibrium. They may handle unpredictably: too much acidity and they over-steer giving your tongue whiplash; too little acidity and they under-steer sloshing over the palate. But well-balanced examples handle just right, gripping your tongue’s curves tightly for a couple of slick, quick, fruity laps.

Primeurs will never be vintage wines, like Bugattis or Delahayes are vintage cars; they don’t have the tread for the long haul. And like motor-show prototypes whose windows don’t open and whose steering wheels don’t turn, you should forgive their shortcomings. Wine heritage will not be diminished as you pile up empty bottles, and there’s no good reason to make space for them in your garage – unless you’re having a laugh.

First published in The Connexion (November, 2011)

Choosing from the wine list can be simple...

2011-10-01T17:31:00.006+01:00

NOWHERE is encountering wine more fraught with obscurantism, rapacity and indifference than on restaurant wine lists. Who hasn’t experienced a sinking feeling under the weight of a carte des vins padded with leather and countless unfamiliar châteaux and appellations? What to do? Pass it to your neighbour? Flatter their superior wine knowledge but condemn them to solitary head-scratching while the rest of the party whoops it up. What if it is you?

Even if you know about wine, perusing a French restaurant’s wine list is invariably an unwelcome and disorienting distraction – sometimes the prices are the only recognizable entries. In the absence of knowledge about provenance and vintages, and unless money is no object, the decision may well come down to price, or a house wine. That’s a shame.

House wines, or bottles from the cheaper end, are typically inexpensive (to the restaurateur) plonk with the largest mark-ups on the list. In other words, if you can’t afford a more expensive wine, the restaurateur will make you pay dearly for it. So choose wines from higher up the list (assuming the selection is organised by price) as they are often disproportionately better wines with less exorbitant mark-ups.

Organising a wine list by price is a tacit admission by the restaurateur that the punter probably won’t know how to choose. But the game is not lost. Colour, appellation, producer and vintage can still guide your choice.

Any list should mention each wine’s millésime. If years are not mentioned, the restaurateur presumably regards all vintages as equal. They are not. Even if you know nothing about the merits of recent vintages, the year at least lets you judge a wine’s youthfulness or maturity. If a list features bottles of the same wine from different recent vintages, you should wonder: why doesn’t it feature only the best year? Is the restaurateur just selling repeat-order leftovers?

It’s also useful to know the reputations of the chateaux featured on a list; but few of us have the encyclopaedic familiarity needed for the task of choosing from a dozen producers of one appellation.

However, such a list doesn’t necessarily betray the restaurateur’s discernment; it’s more likely indifference.

From such a grab-bag, blindly pitch a forefinger on to the page – an element of surprise is at least assured. Better lists narrow the choice of producers for you.

Similarly, there’s no good reason why a wine list should slavishly include entries from all the appellation zones, unless the chef actually prepares dishes from every region. A restaurant specialising in regional gastronomy is best served with a list proposing suitable local wines, not wines that go better with dishes from elsewhere.

One way to simplify your choice is by colour. At a stroke, confusion is reduced by a third. But what if opinions differ around the table? Diners could order by the glass – but check the wines have not deteriorated since opening as few waiters taste re-corked wines at the beginning of the service to check their condition. However, since restaurateurs charge their highest mark-ups for wine sold by the glass, it’s often more economical to order a bottle of each colour desired.

Then, suddenly, the wine arrives. Are you really going to drink it with olives and bread when you ordered it to complement the main courses? The restaurateur wants you to. The waiter may even top up your glasses with insistent “courtesy”. This should be discouraged. It reveals that the restaurateur is more concerned about profiting from you than with you enjoying your food and wine.

Curiously, if you are female, waiters may spare you the burden of perusing the list (or testing the wine). Even in France, where women make the majority of wine purchases, the carte des vins is routinely offered to males. It’s hard to fathom. Surely women are more qualified? Do restaurateurs not want customers to make smarter wine choices?

First published in The Connexion (October, 2011)

Last of the summer wine

2011-09-22T12:34:00.007+01:00

FOR the first day of Autumn, a last of the summer wine from Compo, Clegg and Foggy country (Holmfirth, Yorkshire):

A refreshing and enjoyable white made from Seyval* and Solaris**

* an important hybrid in English winemaking, created in France by the Seyve/Villard son/father-in-law partnership (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seyval)

** hybrid with Muscat, Reisling and Pinot Blanc ancestry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris) developed in Freiburg, Germany.

Starts sweetly, with medium acidity, and a fresh, dry finish. Notes of elderflower, citrus, banana and hazelnut.

Holmfirth Vineyard Solaris Seyval White is available on-line for 9.99 GBP (holmfirthvineyard.com).

A class of wine

2011-09-05T09:56:00.006+01:00

IN THE SPIRIT of la rentrée scolaire, let me serve you a fresher’s class of wine. Pick a bottle, any bottle. Inspect the label. If a year isn’t indicated, the wine was blended from a number of vintages; which is typical for non-vintage Champagne – the blend is intended to convey a ‘house’ style – only superior ‘vintage’ Champagne is made from one year’s crop. However, it’s not good news if it’s a bottle of still wine – a still wine blended from different years is not designed to embody a ‘house-style’, it’s meant to be cheap. Pick another bottle.

Now, look again at the label. Who made, bottled and/or commercialised the wine: a merchant (négociant), a cooperative (cave coopérative), or an artisan (vigneron indépendant)? Preferably, the same person should make, bottle and commercialise a wine. While merchants blend wines from many producers (including cooperatives), and cooperatives produce wines with grapes from hundreds of growers, only artisans make, bottle and commercialise their own wines. Such wines aren’t automatically better, but there’s a good chance they will be. And they’ll be more individual and expressive of terroir.

If opening the bottle means untwisting a screwcap or sliding a plastic cork out of the neck, make sure the wine is not more than a year old; otherwise there may be problems with reduced sulphur aromas (like bad eggs or burned matches) from the screwcap’s hermetic closure, or problems with oxidation from the insufficiently airtight plastic cork. In either case, the closure was probably chosen for its cheapness, not its effectiveness, so choose a bottle with a real cork. But don’t bother sniffing corks: their vinegary smell communicates nothing important about wine.

If your wine’s red, consider decanting it. While decanting does nothing to soften up tannins, it does help to dissipate aromas associated with the addition of sulphur as a preservative. Contrary to popular belief, you’ll want to decant a young wine longer than an old wine: by virtue of their age, older wines have already lost much added sulphur and so the risk with decanting them is that they’ll collapse into a vinegary necrosis long before a younger wine.

Next, pour the wine into a glass big enough to plunge your nose into and in which you can later swirl the wine.

Now, inspect the wine against a white background. Its clarity will tell you how it’s been filtered: the more heavily filtered, the duller the lustre, the poorer the wine. Colour tells you about age and style: red and white wines go brown with age (a bad sign), while concentrated colours equal low yields and long macerations (a good sign), pale can be good, too. Viscosity tells you about sugar and alcohol content, though little about quality: the longer and slower the ‘legs’, the sweeter and more alcoholic the wine (in fact, alcohol tastes faintly sweet).

Before you swirl, sniff. You’ll want to know what the wine smells like before swirling because it’s at this point you’ll notice if there’s a fault (like dank hamster cage, vinegar or bad egg smells). Swirling aerates the wine and provokes the release of the things you really want to smell: the aromas associated with the fruit and how the wine’s been made and matured – these aromas may mask faults, so sniff before your first swirl.

Aromas can be ‘primary’ – associated with grape varieties (e.g. fruity, floral, vegetal, animal); ‘secondary’ – associated with vinification methods (e.g. buttery, toasted, vanilla); and ‘tertiary’ – associated with time spent in the bottle (e.g. nutty, gamey). Wines possessing all three categories of aroma are said to possess a ‘bouquet’. Such wines have a correspondingly complex ‘mouthfeel’.

‘Mouthfeel’ refers to flavours, body, balance and length. ‘Flavours’ are non-volatile elements of taste and usually confirm impressions gleaned from sniffing the volatile aromas. ‘Body’ refers to your impression of the wine’s weight (light, full-bodied) and texture (coarse, silky). ‘Balance’ refers to how the first two criteria interact: the greater the harmony between ‘flavours’ and ‘body’, the better the ‘balance’. ‘Length’ refers to the taste’s longevity after swallowing or spitting – the longer the better (provided it’s pleasant).

For homework, pour another glass, look, sniff, drink and feel free to do a Jilly. School’s out!

First published in The Connexion (September 2011)

Bas-Armagnac XO Domaine du Tariquet

2011-09-01T14:25:00.006+01:00

DOMAINE du Tariquet - France's largest family-owned estate - sent me a selection of wines including this excellent Bas-Armagnac that I enjoyed on the rocks this summer.

The youngest of the brandies in the Bas-Armagnac XO was aged in oak barrels for at least 15 years. It's made from Baco 40% and Ugni Blanc 60%.

What it's like:

An intense bouquet, steeped with the aromas of freshly baked bread, toast and underlying candied fruit. Fresh, supple and well-rounded on the palate, revealing a subtle union of vanilla oak and fruit. Good length, with the aromas of dried fruit and toast on the finish.

I also enjoyed their Ugni Blanc & Colombard white Classic (floral, citrus and tropical fruit aromas), minerally Sauvignon Blanc and rich Chardonnay.

Many thanks!

La Pie Colette

2011-08-31T11:42:00.006+01:00

GREAT VALUE juicy-fruity organic Merlot (80%) and Malbec from Domaine Mouthes Le Bihan in the Côtes de Duras. The name is a play on the French verb picoler (to tipple).

6.80 Euros from my local caviste.

Keep it simple ... in a glass the size of a space helmet

2011-08-01T17:12:00.004+01:00

AUGUST is the thirstiest month, beading droplets down cold frosted glasses, parching mouths and lips, melting hard ice with summer rays. Apologies to T. S. Eliot, but what is a wine lover to drink when summer temperatures undermine even a chilled rosé’s capacity to slake dehydration?

For inspiration, I consulted The Gentleman’s Companion (Volume II): An Exotic Drinking Book - Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask by Charles H. Baker, Jr. (1939, Crown Publishers, New York). Despite finding “scant humour in dipsomania, in potted gentlemen or in horny-handed toilers who fling their pay chits onto the public mahogany”, Baker has a penchant for any fluid that “furnishes a sure ticket to amiable paralysis of the lower limbs”.

Though, in the heady haze of his purple prose, it’s difficult to focus on the “lively liquid masterpieces” in his “regiment of 267 assorted potations” from “greater and lesser ports of Orient and Occident, and the South Seas”. A little Baker goes a long way. And then there’s the problem of sourcing his ingredients, like the kava root for a Samoan cocktail that should be chewed by “the loveliest tribal virgin when your yacht sails into her lagoon”.

Unfortunately, keeping it simple is not the way of contemporary mixologists either. For example, the London Cocktail Club proposes this recipe for a breakfast-time Bacon and Egg Coupet: dry-fry rashers of bacon, remove liquid, add Jack Daniels, simmer for 2 minutes, infuse for 2 hours, freeze infusion, scrape off fat, add egg white, sugar and lemon juice, and serve with a slice of crisp bacon. We have Ferran Adrià and his experimental El Bulli laboratory/restaurant to thank for this trend. Time, gentlemen, pulease!

Happily, wine cocktails (popular before Prohibition-inspired, high-octane American concoctions conquered the world) and cocktails using aromatised wine-based aperitifs (like Vermouth, Americano 505, Ambassadeur, St-Raphaël, Byrrh or Dubonnet) offer the thirsty drinker simpler pleasures, like the Martini. Indeed, aromatised wine-based aperitifs are often enjoyed simply on the rocks with just a zest of citrus fruit or an olive.

H. L. Mencken called the Martini “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet”. Noel Coward liked his dry and uncomplicated – he suggested filling a glass with gin then “waving it in the general direction of Italy”. Of course, he should have waved it in the general direction of France, as French Vermouth is drier and lighter than the sweeter, darker Italian version.

Many cocktails using wine or aromatised wine-based aperitifs employ just three ingredients: the base, a modifying ingredient, and a special flavour/colour agent. The base is still or sparkling wine, or the aromatised wine-based aperitif. Common modifying ingredients include spirits (gin, vodka, rum, brandy), aniseed-flavoured pastis (Pernod, Ricard), bitters (Angostura, Campari, Mandarin), and fruit juices. Special flavours and colouring agents include liqueurs (like Grand Marnier, Chartreuse, Cointreau) and syrups (like Grenadine). Ice and soda water cool and lengthen the drink.

Inventing wine-based cocktails around these three categories (base, modifying ingredient, and special flavours/colours) is as easy as creating new characters in one of those children’s books where the pages divide people horizontally into head, torso and legs. Of course, some combinations will be sexier than others! Alternatively, try the Mixilator (the random cocktail generator from the Internet cocktail database: www.cocktaildb.com).

Meanwhile, Baker shares this uncharacteristically simple recipe for a Parisian Cocktail: take 1 jigger of Byrrh, add the strained juice of 1 lime. Shake with lots of cracked ice briskly and serve with no further trimmings. If that tempts you into buying a bottle of the underappreciated Byrrh, here’s a recipe for Byrrh Fizz: mix 2/3 Byrrh with 1/3 orange juice, add a soup spoon of sherry brandy, top up with soda water.

But what August needs is the cocktail equivalent of a cold shower after a hot day at the beach. Make that a Piscine Impériale: Champagne, Mandarine Napoléon, cucumber and ice-cubes, served in a glass the size of a space helmet.

First published in The Connexion (August, 2011)

Alain Rey: the words of Monsieur Dictionnaire

2011-08-01T14:09:00.009+01:00

HE IS THE mostly widely appreciated author in France, his books found in almost every French home, yet you have probably never heard of him. If, however, you happen to have a copy of Le Grand Robert, Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Le Dictionnaire culturel en langue française or Le Petit Robert, you will find his name inside any one of them.

For more than 50 years, the linguist, editor, writer and broadcaster, Alain Rey, has been the “lexicographer-in-chief” of the French language, responsible for defining how French speakers actually use their language.

As a member of La Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie, the government committee that approves the introduction of new French words, Mr Rey is a trenchant critic of educators and politicians who would like to build a museum around the French language, whether in the name of orthodoxy or national identity.

His penchant for using living writers to illustrate usage, his inclusion of slang in the dictionaries and his delight in non-standard usage locate him firmly on the progressive, modernizing side in debates about where the French language should be going.

In his books and popular radio and television programmes, he has exposed French speakers to the ideological content, etymological development and cultural baggage hidden within their utterances.

Born in 1928 at his parents’ brasserie in Pont-du-Château, near Clermont-Ferrand, Mr Rey studied political science, medieval architecture and art history - “whatever fascinated me” - at the Sorbonne. He thought of becoming an inspector of historic buildings or museum curator. Then, in 1952, after military service, he saw an advertisement for a linguist, placed lexicographer and dictionary publisher Paul Robert, and became Robert’s principal collaborator. He remains the editor-in-chief of Le Robert.

Between 1993 and 2006, Alain Rey presented Le mot de la fin (The Last Word) at the end of France-Inter’s morning radio programme. He also presented Démo des mots (The Word Show) on France 2 after the nightly television news and, from 2007, contributed to Laurent Baffie’s Europe 1 Sunday radio show. In 2005, he was honoured as a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and is regarded by many as a "national treasure".

When I caught up with the free-thinking octogenarian in Toulouse, he talked with his customary modesty, infectious enthusiasm, erudition and wit about lexicography, the rise of English, the threats to the French language, immigration, education and the debate over national identity.

What is the most difficult word to define?

The word mot itself. It comes from the Latin muttum, meaning an indistinct sound, a mutter. The word mot signifies a sound that means something other than the word itself. Words organise experience into things and events, but the word mot is completely isolated.

What is the most important quality for a lexicographer?

Exactitude. Proust would replace a beautifully poetic phrase with a simpler and more prosaic one if it conveyed more exactly the meaning he wanted to express.

Samuel Johnson called lexicographers “inoffensive drudges”. Does that definition suit you?

The word “drudge” also means someone who does housework and compiling a dictionary is all about cleaning, dusting and polishing; except lexicographical housework consists in rearranging definitions, replacing examples and updating usages. I would be disappointed if people were not a little offended by my work, if each new edition of a Robert dictionary were received passively. Of course, the compilation of correct usages is important, but that excites me only moderately. When they are stimulating, what I most enjoy are linguistic transgressions and wordplay.

What is your favourite quotation about dictionaries?

Jean Cocteau said, “A chef d’oeuvre is just a dictionary in disorder”. I like to think he meant to imply that a dictionary is a chef d’oeuvre in good order.

Which words do you wish people understood better?

All of them. But people ought to pay special attention to how words are used in a military context. “Collateral damage”, for example, should really be “collateral catastrophe.”

Which words do you most dislike?

Bureautique (office automation) is awful; so many scientific words tend to be inelegant. The habit of using the letter “e” as a prefix for any new word in the electronically mediated world is also depressingly unimaginative.

George Bernard Shaw longed for “a beautiful word that means doing something tomorrow.” Can you help?

What’s wrong with “procrastination”, a fine word!

Are there any foreign words that you would like to see adopted by speakers of French?

Every word spoken in French was once a foreign word; principally of Latin origin. It’s the same with any language. English is littered with Latinisms, French words of Norman origin, like “parliament” and “government”, and words of Germanic origin, too.

Nevertheless, I found myself in the middle of a sentence in French recently and the best word that came to mind to express my thought was the English word “collapse”. It expresses more completely than any French equivalent the degree of total disintegration I wanted to communicate.

Currently, with the collapse of tyrannies, currencies, reputations, economies and nuclear reactors, it’s a very useful word.

Is English a threat to the French language?

Not in itself. Any encounter with a foreign language can enrich the native tongue. The encounter becomes less enriching when foreign words are adopted at the expense of perfectly good native alternatives – like using “email” instead of the French courriel (a blend of courrier and électronique) – or when neologisms nearly all come from one source, as today with English. I frequently update dictionaries with Anglicisms, but it would be nice to be influenced by other sources, too.

However, English is very dynamic because of the inventiveness of its users, especially the Americans, as well as its encounters with other languages and the innovations added by its countless non-native speakers. French people love to invent English words, like tennisman.

So French isn’t under threat?

Each language exists in a permanent state of crisis from censure, invasion or neglect. However, the French language has never been more under threat than today, and the crisis has never been more badly managed. Not because of English.

Current problems date from the introduction of mass education after World War II, with overloaded classrooms and a standard curriculum that undermines progressiveness.

So, the threats are today chiefly internal. There’s a problem with the rules of the language itself. The conventions of usage have become so codified and ossified it is increasingly complicated for users of French to innovate and renew the language without making unacceptable transgressions.

Take the word bravoure (bravery). Common usage invites us to invent the word bravitude, but that’s not acceptable, even though everyone understands it. So we have bravoure – a word hardly anyone uses. The result is stagnation. In this respect, English is much more forgiving and flexible and thus a more fertile ground for innovation.

English nouns can easily become verbs and no one bats an eyelid. Germans are forever inventing new words, too, and Italians never tire of new suffixes.

Also, the disappearance in France of regional languages and dialects is a catastrophe. French speakers whose mother tongue is Catalan, Basque, Corsican or Creole contribute more linguistically to French than those who know only national curriculum French.

There is an illusion in this country French fell from the sky complete, and many speakers see no reason to examine or renew it. Purists who hold this opinion are badly informed. A language thrives and remains relevant only if usage is allowed and encouraged to evolve.

Do you think the debate about “national identity” in France is enriching for the French language?

Absolutely not. Historically, periods of linguistic creativity coincide with a people’s desire to establish their identity by embracing and building on differences. The 16^th century was a period of tremendous creativity for French as people from across French-speaking territories, with all their regional differences, united to establish it as the shared, home-grown alternative to Latin. To be a convincing alternative, French had to enrich itself.

The debate today is not about embracing differences, though, but effacing them.

So the proposition that immigrants should take a French test is a bad thing for the French language?

Not only is it a bad thing for French, it’s a bad thing for France. It’s intended to discourage immigration, which is the same thing as discouraging renewal. It will contribute nothing to the language; rather, it will encourage linguistic and cultural stagnation.

Do electronic means of communication, like SMS messaging or Twitter, risk impoverishing the language?

SMS isn’t a language; it’s a way of writing, shorthand, like algebra or chemical formulas. People who know how to write French can easily dissociate writing text messages from writing the actual language. There’s nothing new in how people employing today’s communication technologies play with language. In the 19^th century, people would write Je t’m as shorthand for Je t’aime. Such shortcuts are word games that play with the sounds of words in ways that demonstrate how meanings are constructed. That’s revelatory.

Will devices like the Kindle or iPad change how people read; discourage or end marginalia, or replace books?

I think people will always want to hold books, to carry them around, to fold them and give them away. However, I never write in margins. Books are too precious. I write on slips of paper while reading; usually a note about a word an author has used in a surprising way. That’s one way my research happens.

Do words move you most on a page, or when spoken?

Verbal is the most forceful, the most living, the most imbued with lyrical quality, the most expressive and direct. It is what people speak and is the basis for dictionary compilers.

Some prefer your radio work to your television work; does each medium compel you to treat your subject differently?

Perhaps they prefer me on the radio because they don’t see me! Actually, I prefer the radio, too. It’s more direct, there are no technical intrusions, no make-up. I say what I want to say and that’s it. With television there’s the whole mise en scène; I play a role – I even have a contract as an actor when I work on television – but the persona, the mask through which words are spoken, can be a distraction when, in fact, it’s the words that are important.

Words can lose their original meaning through forgetfulness and/or ideological spin, so “democracy” (people power) now virtually means “free market capitalism”; which word would you lock away until people learn to use it again correctly?

Liberty!

Alain Rey’s new book, Le Dictionnaire Amoureux des Dictionnaires (Editions Plon, 2011), is an unconventionally subjective dictionary about lexicographers who – like Alain Rey –never attain satisfaction because, as he says, “they spend their whole lives running after a language which never waits for them.”

First published in The Connexion (August, 2011)

What women really want

2011-07-22T09:33:00.010+01:00

10,500 women responded to an internet survey* of wine preferences and drinking habits.

Colour preferences:

Contrary to expectations, just over half of respondents (51.1%) expressed a preference for red wine. Just 26.4% said they prefer white. For women over 46 years old, 58% preferred red. Only 15.7% said they prefer rosé, however that’s 160% more than in 2009 when just 6% of women expressed a preference for rosé.

Drinking occasions:

69.7% of respondents associated wine with conviviality, preferring to drink wine in the evening with friends – that’s 10% more than in 2009. For 28.6% of women, drinking wine is part of an “art de vivre” – curiously, for American women, the figure jumps to 71.5%.

Purchase criteria:

Contrary to expectations, price is the third consideration, behind origin and grape variety. 62.3% of respondents said they choose a wine for its origin – for women over 40, the figure increases, while 18-30 year olds report a greater sensitivity to price. 48.9% of respondents said they choose a wine for its grape variety – though for American women, grape variety is the most important criteria.

Seduction habits:

66.6% of respondents reported an association between wine and romantic encounters. That figure is higher in countries with a strong wine heritage. Such encounters appear to be egalitarian in terms of wine knowledge: 58% of women consider themselves as well-informed as their male counterparts – for American women, the figure is 67%.

Design issues:

Winemakers are adapting wine styles and packaging to attract female customers: there are today more sweeter and sparkling wines available, with more “feminine” designs on wine labels. Such labels often overlook the element of origin; however, French wine labels, with their emphasis on “terroir”, continue to convince.

* Published in the Midi Libre (June 2011)

- Photo: Galatée Faivre ID VIN marketing and 20B4 [vin before]

Rosé is not a grape and it's not red and white wine mixed

2011-07-03T13:17:00.009+01:00

UNTIL I overheard the following exchange between a shopper and a sales advisor in the wine aisle of a well-known British high street retailer, famous for its socks and underwear, I didn’t think much needed to be said about rosé wine:

Shopper: "What gives it this lovely pink colour?"

Wine sales advisor: "It’s the rosé grape."

Oh dear [insert emoticon for pulling out hair!] Just as "yellow" is not a type of cheese, "rosé" is not a grape variety. It’s a colour. Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon are grape varieties. A wine’s colour depends on the length of time grape juice remains in contact with crushed grapes’ skins. It’s called maceration.

Red wines are red because the juice macerates with red grape skins for anything up to four weeks. White wines are white because they are rarely macerated with grape skins for more than a few hours, if at all. In fact, white wine can be made from red grapes because grape juice is virtually colourless. That’s why white Champagne, called Blanc de Noirs, can be made from the red grapes Pinot Noir and/or Pinot Meunier.

Rosé wines are pink because the juice stays in contact with crushed red grape skins for less than a day, giving juice little time to take on much colour. Of course, red grapes must be involved in making rosé wine, as only red skins have the necessary pigments. However, even a pink wine may contain juice from white grapes, like Chardonnay.

In France (and in other European Union countries), rosé wines cannot - by EU law - be made by actually blending red and white wines, though this practice is typical in New World winemaking. Curiously, rosé Champagne is the exception: a dose of red wine is indeed added to white Champagne to make it pink.

So, with summer here, you may be wondering what kind of rosé to buy? And, do rosé wines go with food?

There are, roughly speaking, two types of rosé: the very pale, salmon-coloured, bone-dry pinks associated with Provence; and darker pinks that can resemble very pale reds. The former are rosés de soif (thirst-quenching, summer aperitifs); the latter are rosés de bouche (more complex pinks that happily accompany meals any time of the year).

Unhappily, many rosé wines come sealed under screw caps, not corks. If you buy one with a screw cap, make sure it’s not more than 18 months old, otherwise you may find the taste tainted by reduced sulphur aromas – like rotten eggs or burned matches – an unwelcome side-effect of screw caps’ hermetic seal (see April’s ‘The Terroirist’ column).

Also, spend a bit more than the average 4 or 5 Euros on a bottle as you’ll get a much better wine for your money. I recently tasted several dozen rosés from all over France and found the difference between ho-hum and memorable is about 2 or 3 Euros. And don’t hesitate to splash out even more for an exceptional rosé because there’s nothing inferior about good pink wine.

Winemakers favour certain grape varieties for making rosé wines. The popular soft and fruity off-dry to semi-sweet Anjou rosé is made with Gamay and Grolleau. Côtes de Provence rosés rely heavily on the dry and earthy Tibouren. The Languedoc’s supple pinks often include red-fruit flavoured Cinsault, while gutsy Grenache is popular in rosés from the Roussillon. There’s a trend for making rosés from unexpected and/or neglected varieties, like Carignan, too.

However, it would be churlish to overlook the Gold Medal prize winner in the rosé category at this year’s International Wine Challenge, which beat 367 challengers from 21 countries recently in London. Made from the little-known, early-ripening Rondo (a red grape variety well-suited to northern climates), it’s a refreshing deep-coloured pink with a smooth, long and creamy finish.

Unfortunately, Denbies winery, in Dorking, 25 miles south of London, in Surrey, only produced 7,000 bottles of the IWC prize-winning Chalk Ridge rosé in 2010, and it’s sold out. It cost £11.99 per bottle. So, while customers eagerly await next year’s vintage, the famous British retailer (above) has time to make good on its wine buyer’s stated promise "to help our customers make informed choices."

First published in The Connexion (July, 2011)

Champagne is just another wine with bubbles

2011-05-29T13:09:00.010+01:00

THE PERSISTENT, spumy patter at a recent Champagne event in London, hosted by Perrier-Jouët and G.H. Mumm, was all about the economics of the luxury lifestyle market. The theme – Champagne: greater than the sum of its parts – admits bubbly is made of parts, but Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and terroir were scarcely mentioned. In fact, you could’ve spent the whole day junketing with Champagne executives without uttering the ‘W’ word.

Because, after decades of being positioned as a luxury brand, it’s easy to forget Champagne is wine; hardly anyone thinks of a ‘Champagne House’ as a winery anymore; instead, Champagne is an aspirational accessory, gift-wrapped in the (frankly mawkish) myth of a blind monk, one Dom Pérignon. And since luxury goods of such venerable provenance are priced to impress, Bernard Arnault, CEO of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, is now the world’s third richest man.

So, pricey, ostentatious and consigned to being sprayed over newlyweds, new ships or Grand Prix champions, Champagne doesn’t play anything like the part other wines do in wine lovers’ lives. Who considers it, for instance, to go with food (for which it’s well-suited and versatile), or as an aperitif on a Tuesday?

Yet the lightest and driest Champagne, a Blanc de blancs (made from 100% Chardonnay) is a great aperitif and, with floral and citrus notes, roundly accompanies meals with simple flavours; a Blanc de noirs (made from berry-flavoured Pinot Noir and/or fruity and floral Pinot Meunier) goes with more robust dishes. Food pairing options are extended by Champagne’s wide range of styles: brut, sec, demi-sec, doux (from dry to sweet). It comes in pink, too.

However, the good news for wine lovers in France looking to bring sparkle into their wine lives is the many domestic rivals to over-priced Champagne. Almost every French wine region produces a forcefully bubbly Crémant or Mousseux made like Champagne, by the Méthode Traditionnelle – with a second fermentation in the bottle – and some are made with Champagne grapes. They are equally versatile with distinctive personalities from unique terroirs.

Arguably the best are the crisp and clean Crémants d’Alsace. The finest are floral, herbal and even spicy blends of Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir, Riesling and Chardonnay. A ‘Top of the Pops’ should also include the Loire’s Chenin Blanc-based Vouvray Mousseux. The best are fresh, dry, complex and savoury, with telltale notes of apple and honey. Sadly, a fair amount of Vouvray is industrial and imperfect.

Still, the Loire produces France’s most famous other ‘Champagne’, Saumur d’Origine; and one that’s supposed to be better than all the Loire’s sparklers: Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc-based Crémant de Loire. Tourraine Mousseux is worthy, too. Choose carefully, there are excellent wines here.

Crémant de Bourgogne is high in the top 10. Made from Burgundy grapes, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc, good examples have refreshing mineral dryness, austerity and balance reminiscent of Champagne. Aged 9 months before release (3 years for Champagne), they’re made exclusively from the first pressing.

‘Honourable mention’ goes to Crémant de Die, the crisp, clean and cheerfully unassuming Clairette-based Rhône Valley sparkler; and two Languedoc bubblies: the crisp, apple-scented, Mauzac-based Blanquette and the Chardonnay-based Crémant de Limoux. A ‘hardly ever mentioned’ category would include the delicate, pinkish bubbly from tiny Bugey and the ho-hum Crémants from the Jura and Bordeaux.

France also produces less frothy, lower alcohol Méthode Ancestrale wines (bottled before the first and only fermentation is over). There’s the naturally sweet and light Mauzac-based Ancestrale from Limoux; the semi-sweet, slightly herbal, anonymous Gaillac bubblies; the Rhône Valley’s somewhat grapey Clairette de Die; and tiny Clairette de Bellegarde from around Nîmes. But we are far from Champagne now.

Jancis Robinson says it’s hard to find a worse-value wine than cheap Champagne, as industrially-made versions are a dumping ground for unripe grapes and bulk wine. So, for the same money, buy a quality rival. Ultimately, of course, there is nothing finer than the tautness and grace of a quality Champagne. That’s what Dom Pérignon discovered when he exclaimed to his Hautvillers Abbey brothers, “I’m drinking stars.” Astronomical comparisons aside, though, let’s not forget Champagne is sparkling wine, and just enjoy it more!

First published in The Connexion (June, 2011)

Photograph of Daniel Elena celebrating victory at the 2005 Cyprus Rally by Leonid Mamchenko.

Why books and wine are natural bedfellows

2011-05-29T12:42:00.008+01:00

THE VISION of golden light shining warmly through the upright pages of a Biblically-proportioned book, on a poster outside the Salle Polyvalente in Balma (near Toulouse) around Easter, seemed to suggest religious revival was the order of the weekend. A glass of red wine next to the book, softly diffusing the same golden light, appeared to affirm the promise of transubstantiation.

In fact, the oddly evangelical poster was promoting a book-and-wine fair – the 12th annual Rencontres du Livre et du Vin – a sort of ‘Hay-on-Wine’ transplanted from the Welsh-English border to the Midi-Pyrenees. This year’s event brought together 50 local and nationally-renowned authors, around 15 publishers, plus 10 winemakers from as many terroirs under a giant, orange, papier-mâché Baobab tree that dominated the interior of Balma’s multi-purpose hall.

It was children’s day when I visited. The exhibition in the entrance featured paintings of Balma done by local children and executed in Van Gogh’s style. Inside the hall, a class of 6-year-olds, cross-legged around the great Baobab’s trunk, were listening to a story. A few strays from the class were watching winemakers setting bottles, glasses and crachoirs (spittoons) on upended barrels. The authors were sitting quietly, or in quiet conversation with visitors, around the walls, behind trestle tables covered with their oeuvres.

Decorum reigned. This was no knees-up wine festival. Neither was it a hyped-up book fair. As advertised, it was a Rencontre – a convivial opportunity (unique in France) to meet winemakers and authors under the same roof.

Curiously, the event unites two activities that aren’t often associated: drinking wine and reading books. In Alberto Manguel’s comprehensive ‘A History of Reading’, wine isn’t mentioned once, though food comparisons abound (“devoured a good book, lately?”).

Proust’s cork-lined bedroom is discussed, but there’s no suggestion he constructed it from wine bottle closures. And not a piece of domestic furniture has ever been invented to reconcile the two activities, like a reading seat cum wine-bucket with wineglass retainer, since there’s never been demand for such an apparatus. So, why books and wine?

“They may not seem, at first, to be natural bedfellows,” admits veteran broadcaster and long-time editor of the Robert dictionaries, Alain Rey, one of this year’s event’s honorary Presidents, reflecting on wine’s capacity to stain both bed sheets and paper.

“But the event unites two products of French terroir that require passion and dedication to produce and to be appreciated. A wine has layers of aromatic complexity to be discovered by the sensitive palate; similarly, a book reveals its layers of plot and linguistic complexity to the devoted reader. Both activities are enhanced through connoisseurship. Both are civilising.

“The common goal of authors and winemakers at the Rencontres is to express their terroirs – their sense of place and time. Their works speak of local conditions and so have universal appeal. The authors aren’t producing Internet-inspired oeuvres with no sense of place, or globalised wines devoid of the taste of origin... they’re interested in quality, not quantity.”

Senegalese-born writer Fatou Diome, this year’s other honorary President and author of books about women’s experiences of clandestine immigration, expands on two ideas – imagination and place – central to the theme of this year’s event: ‘Imaginaires et territoires francophones’.

“The idea of ‘territoires francophones’ is immediately appetizing. It conjures up fertile domains of the imagination and an irresistible pleasure for words... plus the best crus from a thousand vineyards, all at the same banquet,” says Diome.

A more prosaic account of the Rencontres was offered by Marie-Hélène Chinisanas, Balma city counsellor and one of the event’s organisers: “The goal is to encourage reading. The wine element makes the event more festive.”

Organic/natural winemaker Anne-Marie Selle of Château Bouissel, Campsas, in the Fronton appellation, was there because she’s a bibliophile. Her delicious, violet and blackcurrant-scented 2009 La Négrette is made entirely from the eponymous local grape; her vineyard’s gravelly-silt terroir (between Toulouse and Montauban) contributes to the wine’s suppleness, she says. It’s quite unlike Grenache/Syrah-based wines from the Roussillon, my adopted department.

If wine festivals are your thing, now is a great time to indulge that passion, starting with La Fête de la Vigne et du Vin on June 4th (held annually on the Saturday following the Thursday of Ascension) with events across France (www.fetedelavigneetduvin.com).

Bordeaux hosts its annual Bordeaux Fête le Vin festival from June 28th to July 1st (www.bordeaux-fete-le-vin.com). While Saint Rémy de Provence is where to soak up Provencal sunshine, local produce and rosé wine from July 29th to 31st at La Fête du Vin et de l’Artisanat d’Art (www.fetesetsalons.com).

The streets of Châteauneuf-du-Pape go medieval from August 5th to 7th as the town celebrates its annual Fête de la Veraison with a festival of baroque music and the recreation/re-enactment of traditional winemaking-village life (www.chateauneuf.com). In Colmar, from August 5th to 15th, the Foire aux Vins d’Alsace combines wine fair and music festival with well-known French and international acts (www.foire-colmar.com).

Summer’s end is a busy time for winemakers, so wine festivals are not common in September and early October. But as soon as the harvest is in the fermentation tanks, Les Fêtes des Vendanges take place across winemaking regions. These are usually the best-attended events in the wine year.

There are competitions, too, like wine-basket-carrying and barrel-tossing bouts, which can give harvest festivals an ‘It’s a Knockout’ meets the ‘Highland Games’ spirit.

Then, almost before the coals (or vine stocks and shoots) of harvest barbeques have gone cold, winemakers are ready to celebrate the release of their first wines from the new vintage, with Vin Primeur events taking place in November. The most famously over-hyped is the launch of Beaujolais Nouveau.

However, most wine festivals, like Balma’s Rencontres, are about authentic, local French life, they’re about getting a taste of terroir – something hardly encountered if you’re too often in supermarkets, or on the Internet. And they’re free. There’s no special etiquette, or wine language, to master. Just show up with a thirst for culture.

First published in The Connexion (June, 2011)

Pass the cup of crimson wonder: biodynamic, organic or natural?

2011-05-01T14:12:00.013+01:00

IF SKIPPING around Maypoles swigging wine from acorn cups is your thing, let me recommend as musical accompaniment Jethro Tull’s springtime ditty, Pass the Cup of Crimson Wonder, a celebration of mystical nature, ancient wisdom and wine.

Tull envokes the ‘Green Man’ and it is tempting to see him as one of the growing number of vignerons en Biodynamie (Biodynamic organic winemakers) in France who apply Rudolf Steiner’s occult horticultural tips to viticulture.

Apostles of Steiner’s Anthroposophy religion coordinate agriculture with lunar and planetary cycles. They eschew chemicals, applying plant and manure-based treatments: like organic winemakers with astrolabes. Occasionally, they stuff and inhume animal parts to make compost, or scatter the ashes of pests to avert them.

It’s easy to criticise Steiner’s total lack agricultural credentials. Nevertheless, do Biodynamic wines actually taste better than other wines? I’m agnostic when it comes to paganism, but I attended a Biodynamic wine tasting on a "leaf day" (propitious for aromatic expression, say acolytes). Some wines were terrific, others were having a bad "leaf day".

However, my palate doesn’t descry “cosmic forces” and I can’t judge if a wine’s complexity comes from “the influence of Sagittarius rising”, or if the universe really spirits “enabling information” (or whatever) into vineyard treatments via the silica in cow horns used in their preparation.

Ultimately, Biodynamic farming rituals make more sense as metaphors for Steiner’s spiritual vision than as horticultural precepts. Practicing them is really more about manifesting faith in his vision than winemaking. What’s most important with esoteric practices, like Chinese medicine or palm-reading, is the intuition of the individual practitioner, or winemaker.

The best wines came from talented, independent winemakers. The worst came from large producers cashing in on the premium prices Biodynamic wines command.

This pattern exists in the booming Agriculture Biologique (organic) wine sector in France, too. There are the conscientiously-made, artisanal AB wines and les vins bio industriels. Among the latter ranks an attractively-packaged, mass-market Cabernet Sauvignon called Autrement from Languedoc négotiant (merchant), Gérard Bertrand. It’s a thin, joyless, over-priced wine whose astonishing insipidness undermines the virtues of its AB label. Among the former rank the independent winemakers in any Carnet d’Adresses Bio (available from an Office de Tourisme).

This Beltane, my crimson wonder will be Volubile – a "natural" wine from Isabelle Frère’s Le Scarabée winery in Roussillon. "Natural" wines are highly popular in France just because they can’t be made industrially for the mass-market. In the absence of artificial treatments, they require utter dedication.

Curiously, labour-intensive "natural" winemaking is often described as "non-interventionist" yet, as New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov says, a truly non-interventionist winemaker would be “a successful producer of bird food”.

"Natural" wines are defined more by what winemakers don’t do, than what they do. They don’t: add sulphites to grapes (which kill ambient yeasts they rely on for fermentation); use industrial yeasts (designed to give specific flavours); use high-tech winemaking tools (to make cookie-cutter wines); add sugar, enzymes or acid (to compensate for what’s lacking); fine or filter; or use new barrels (which compromise a wine’s expression of grape and terroir).

Instead, they farm organically, plough and harvest manually, and select grapes fastidiously. They keep caves spotless to avoid having to add sulphites later on as a preservative. Consequently, their wines have a purity, delicacy and freshness that mass-market bottles can’t match.

Volubile isn’t cheap (10 Euros a bottle for a humble Vin de Table), but it’s the only cuvée Frère makes and it puts many more expensive, appellation wines to shame.

Maddeningly, ‘natural’ wines aren’t highly visible (the bottles aren’t canonized with a higher authority’s logo), but an artisanal label sometimes betrays a producer. If your caviste doesn’t stock any, menace him with your Maypole.

First published in The Connexion (May, 2011)

The screwcap revolution 10 (or 11) years on

2011-03-31T17:15:00.010+01:00

BEFORE Facebook, it took time for one revolution to inspire another. Take screwcaps. Invented in 1889, in Barnsley, England, they didn’t infiltrate the wine world for another 111 years. When they did, the Tahrir Square of the uprising was Clare Valley, Australia. Then, in 2001, New Zealand fell.

Screwcappers found a receptive audience for their air-tight, anti-cork rhetoric among quality-minded and cost-conscious New World winemakers (though rarely among wine lovers). Their calls for ‘Freedom of Closure’ saw corks pushed from office like out-of-touch, end-of-life dictators.

Screwcaps promised to rid the world of Trichloroanisole (TCA) – the chemical in tainted corks making wine smell mouldy, or ‘corked’. Early-adopters claimed the closure was incorruptible and represented: “The Most Important Advancement in Wine Quality and Consistency in the Modern Era.”

Wine traditionalists and cork industry stakeholders feared the domino effect. Yet today, screwcaps aren’t widely accepted as the closure they purported to be – and they’re on the ‘Do Not Fly’ list across many French terroirs. Not because tradition blinds Old World winemakers to science. And not jealousy: the world’s leading screwcap manufacturer is a French firm.

Screwcap PR simply spurred the cork industry to clean up its act. Cork ‘failure’ is now just 2-5% (i.e. better than typical condom use). During the old regime’s worst abuses, ‘failure’ was just 8-10%. It was precisely TCA’s rarity that made Spotting a Corked Wine the wine aficionado’s party trick.

And screwcap science unwound. Wines incubated just 12-18 months under screwcap’s near anaerobic conditions too often came out stillborn, smelling of rotten eggs. Whereas cork lets wine breathe and mature, wines asphyxiated by a screwcap can suffocate on their sulphides and don’t age gracefully.

Still, a recent screwcap PR photo purports to show white wine sealed 10 years ago under screwcap looking as bright as the day it was bottled. The same wine sealed under cork looks jaundiced. This is supposed to prove wine can age under screwcaps. The oddly bright (allegedly “drinkable”) bottles bring to mind images of inert laboratory specimens in formaldehyde.

Wine critics describe ‘the screwcap palate’ as bitter, coarse and astringent with blunt fruit and an abrupt, harshly dry finish. Spotting a Screwcapped Wine is their new party trick. If spotted, a copper penny in the glass cleans up the sulphides, but you might not be happy with what’s left of the fruit.

Screwcap’s advocates recommend ‘cleaning’ wine to be sealed under screwcap with copper sulphate repeatedly during vinification. This supposedly lowers the level of sulphides the screwcap traps in the bottle. However, copper ‘fining’ can seriously undermine varietal character and residues can reach undesirable levels.

So, 10 (or 11) years on, is the screwcap revolution over? I asked a Roussillon winemaker for whom adopting the screwcap would be a patriotic act: Barnsley-born, New Zealander-espoused Jonathan Hesford (www.domainetreloar.com). I found him on Facebook, where he’s a member of the ‘Outsiders’ wine group.

But he reckons just 2% of the corks he now buys show taint, compared with 10% a few years ago (his suppliers claim to have significantly reduced or eliminated TCA). And he’s sticking with corks over worries that tannins and fruit don’t evolve harmoniously under screwcaps’ very low oxygen ingress.

“Screwcaps are not really for wines made to age in a bottle,” he concludes.

Yet ‘breathable’ screwcaps do exist. They’re the industry’s equivalent of Reliant Robin’s engineers deciding four-wheeled, after all, is the way to go. Perhaps there are some among the one-in-ten screwcapped wine bottles at my local supermarket. But how can you tell? And where’s the evidence they work?

I’m happy Hesford is on the ‘unpatriotic’ side of the screwcap curve. Wine quality aside, he’s on the right side of 60 million years of Mediterranean ecology: one of France’s cork-oak forests (the Massif des Alberès) is in the Pyrénées-Orientales, where he lives – others are in the Var (the Massif des Maures), the Landes and Corsica. They are habitats for rare tortoises, owls, spotted genets and cork farmers.

Made of aluminium and polyethylene, screwcaps are the least sustainable option, says Bilan Carbone. In which case, the Green Revolution may have the last word on closure.

First published in The Connexion (April 2011)

Are we drinking better, or just better imitations?

2011-02-25T16:43:00.020Z

CHÂTEAU Vuli’s upmarket red wine is lightly oaked with a wild vanilla aftertaste. These flavours aren’t the result of careful barrel-aging, however. They come from additives secreted into the vat, including an old table, a vanilla-scented air-freshener and cardboard (to mask the unwanted taste of paint from the table).

This would be embarrassing for the appellation Grolandaise, except Vuli’s winemaker insists his methods are legal and, to flaunt the point, tosses a banana into the pinard. While not forbidden in Groland (France’s satirical double in the eponymous Canal+ TV news show), how much does this resemble viticulture in the real world?

Quite a lot, actually. The régisseur at one chateau in the south of France furtively told me he plonks staves of coconut wood into the tank to give his premium rosé its je ne sais quoi (an improbable coconut flavour) and plops coffee beans into the red tête de cuvée (his American customers like the smell of torrefaction). The results are misshapen, clumsy wines.

A more scientific way to dose additives is surely Oak Solutions Group’s ‘usage calculator’ – the firm sells ‘trū/tan’ oak tannin powder (to mix into the de-stemmer) and ‘ēvOAK’ chips (for the vats), at a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining barrels.

Oak dust can also be added during Flash Détente – super-heated grapes are fired into a vacuum where they explode, separating bitter seed tannins from softer skin tannins, in a routine industrial procedure originally used to correct low quality grapes. A condenser collects undesirable ‘flash-water’ containing vaporised pyrazines (compounds responsible for vegetal aromas, like bell pepper).

Using columns of high-speed spinning cones, ConeTech deconstructs wine into alcohol, aroma vapours and juice. Vinovation offers the same service using membrane technology and reverse osmosis. Humpty can then be put back together ‘adjusted’ to consumer preferences.

Colour found lacking? Constellation Brand does excellent business with its grape-jelly concentrate, Mega Purple. Hilariously, sweet, dark Mega Purple is frequently added to Pinot Noir (a light red wine), as consumers associate light colour with low quality. Its detectable flavour and homogenising effect has earned wines dosed with it the sobriquet ‘Central Valley red’, after the region in California where Constellation’s factory is located.

Should Vuliesque winemakers conclude their wine is not sufficiently soft in the mouth – perhaps the Mega Purple’s sweetness makes the oak taste astringent and out of sync – a dose of pummelling micro-oxygenation is the trick. MOXing mimics the subtle oxygenation of barrel-aging and racking (transferring wine between barrels) in a fraction of the time.

These insidious techniques save time and money, offering shortcuts to winemakers. They are used on an industrial scale to pump out similar-tasting wines with enhanced fruitiness, stabilized colour, vanilla notes and soft mouth-feel. In other words, cheapish imitations of expensive wines. Most extract or mask certain aromas, and are thus enemies of varietal expression and complexity.

What’s more, like the Gamma Hydra IV colonists in the original Star Trek episode ‘The Deadly Years’, perhaps these wines will decompose rapidly into a hideous, vinegary old age? Nobody knows. But that’s not the point. Such pinard is made to be consumed immediately. Cellaring it is like bottle-aging new car smell hoping it’ll be a classic perfume one day. It won’t, it’ll go fusty.

Advocates of these techniques emphasise “deliciousness” and “giving consumers what they want” – as Château Vuli does. Detractors bemoan “authenticity” and rail against “adulterated winemaking” – though I’m not convinced they wouldn’t dream of dropping a hose into overly ripe juice, adding sugar, tartaric acid or sulphur dioxide.

For now, influential wine critics and hocus-focus groups are on the side of “deliciousness”, so we’ll be seeing more of these wines. And, as wine critics influence market-sensitive winemakers in the same way wind tunnels influence car designers, these wines will increasingly share a similar profile.

That’s a shame because there’s much talk about “people drinking less, but better”. I doubt it. People may be drinking less, but they’re often just drinking upmarket imitations of better. The real losers in this story are people (like me) who want to drink more, really good, inexpensive wines. And the real scandal is that nobody’s obliged to mention any of this on labels.

First published in The Connexion (March 2011)

SEE BELOW FOR MORE ON CHATEAU VULI FROM GROLAND

Château Vuli

2011-02-25T16:42:00.000Z

Champagne and Cinnamon Toast Crunch is not my cup of tea

2011-01-28T16:52:00.019Z

"I hope the wine doesn't make a mockery of the meal" is what a friend of mine always says before pouring the wine for dinner. Since he's a good cook, his concern is as charming as it is misplaced. But his comment raises the question of how to choose an 'unassuming wine' that won't make a mockery of the meal - that will, in fact, complement it.

Wine writers do much hand wringing over this issue. Attempts to educate palates have thrown up kaleidoscopic aroma wheels, like psychedelic Periodic Tables, and overly complex pairing charts riddled with skulls and crossbones and the warning: 'Here be dragons'.

Yet, for all their efforts, identifying aromas remains difficult for many wine-lovers: like picking out a suspect, while blindfold, from a line-up wearing masks. You can't see what you're looking for (the mystery fruit) and what you're looking for is disguised (as wine).

And what's the point of elaborate lists with precise advise on what complements nettle bavarois with smoked eel when most people don't eat that sort of thing everyday, anyway?

No wonder a supermarket survey recently reported 74% of shoppers buy wine for its price, 44% choose it for its label, but only 3% describe the pairing issue as “essential”.

Wine blogger Gary Vaynerchuck caused a hoo-ha recently when he paired wine with breakfast cereal on his Wine Library TV internet show. He describes the Cap't Crunch 'n Spätlese Riesling a pinnacle pairing; the Chardonnay 'n Cinnamon Toast Crunch is almost as good; though he's disappointed with demi-sec Champagne 'n Lucky Charms.

It's impressive and intimidating to hear Vaynerchuck gush about the 23 aromas he's getting but, unless you're a wine-loving infant who can't get through breakfast without a glass of something, his advice is of little utility. And what should one make of gastronomic tips from a man whose favourite food is chemically-processed cereal?

Does he really believe wine goes with anything? Chewing gum? Toothpaste? And the traditional enemies of wine: eggs, artichokes, smoked salmon, vinaigrette, fresh fruit salads, chocolate, ice-cream and emulsified sauces?

Watching wacky Vaynerchuck chomp on spoonfuls of Cap't Crunch, it occurs to me: this isn't really a food pairing, this is a wrestling match. The cereal's papaya notes pummelling the wine's guava hints on the mid-palate. What he needs is a cleansing cup of tea to wash the sickly, blue lucky-horseshoe and soggy Champagne cookie-dough carnage off his palate.

But a cup of what? White, green, red or black? I asked Japanese tea lady Madame Kiyoko for advice at her boutique 'Cipango' (Marco Polo's word for Japan) in Perpignan.

“Maddeningly,” she says, wringing her hands, “wine critics influence how tea people talk about pairing. Lists match tea with food too precisely. And questionable inherited wisdom prevails. Why would you match smoky Lapsang Souchong with smoked salmon?” (The tea equivalent of the curiously popular pairing of unctuous Sauternes with fatty foie gras).

And yet, on one list, Darjeeling goes with almost anything – it's the Merlot of teas. How can that be?

“Few pairings are, in fact, wrong,” Kiyoko says. “If in doubt, apply the principle of inverse effort. If the food has complex, intense flavours, choose a tea with a simpler profile. And vice-versa.” Very yin-yang.

And if the tea turns out to be a 'cheeky little cuppa' that makes a mockery of the meal?

“You can regulate the intensity and complexity of tea with infusion time,” she advises. That's why Darjeeling goes shamelessly with almost any dish. Make it strong and it's perfect with fish 'n chips, the tannins in the tea cavorting with the vinegar's acidity without strangling the tongue.

Similarly, you can modify a wine's 'amusing presumption' by changing its temperature. Chill a wine to tame bold flavours, or subdue tannins. To accentuate a wine's acidity, again, chill it. Even a Merlot can be tricked into complementing spicy Indian food by chilling.

Kiyoko became beetle-browed when I asked her to try Cap't Crunch 'n Spätlese. Not her cup of tea. She recommends English Breakfast – or a tea from the same region as the cereal. But where on earth is Cap't Crunch from?

First published in The Connexion (February 2011).

Wine gadgets 'licenced to overkill'

2011-01-03T14:35:00.012Z

January is a time for resolutions, regimes, out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new, and offloading unwanted Christmas gifts on eBay. Among them should be certain wine accessories.

Oddly, wine paraphernalia manufacturers assume the bright lights of Christmas turn ordinary people into gadget fetishists, offering us flappy-paddle corkscrews, electric suction pumps, cap foil cutters, argon gas preserving canisters, and (my favourite) a wine stopper with a four-figure combination lock.

But looking at these contraptions, I wonder: whoever put James Bond's master of invention, 'Q', in charge of wine gadgets? What happened to the simple “waiter's friend”?

In Dr No, Bond didn’t even have a gadget. Then, in From Russia With Love, he had 'Q' and a briefcase with a hidden dagger, gold sovereigns, and exploding canisters. Before you could say “Goldfinger”, the briefcase had evolved into an Aston-Martin.

The same has happened to wine accessories. So which of them are pure Honey Ryder (the best ever Bond girl, played by Ursula Andress in Dr No) and which are just Plenty O'Toole (played by Lana Turner in the lame Diamonds are Forever)? Put another way, which should you keep, and which should you offload?

Flappy-paddle corkscrews are very Bond. They come in carrying cases that complement an Aston-Martin's glove-box. But they take three hands to operate and the self-congratulation that comes with using one is diminished by the silly feeling you've just used a folding helicopter to cross the street. Worryingly, mine came with spare parts, presumably for when it's betrayed by its poor manufacture. What am I bid, Plenty?

Ditto argon gas wine preservers and suction pumps. The rigmarole of preserving wine by either method is scarcely rewarded by the result. Apart from the fact that some wines actually gain in complexity from exposure to air, just how often do you NOT finish a bottle of wine within three or four days? Put a cork in it, Plenty. And pop it in the fridge.

Because serving wine at the recommended temperature is important, wine thermometers are handy. The bracelet type slips easily around a bottle and tells you if a wine needs to chill, or is already chambré. Some helpfully include the wine type associated with the temperature. I just slipped one onto my wrist, I'm a red Burgundy... very Honey Ryder. Keep them, but grow out of them. They are accessories, after all.

I do like gadgets that aerate wine as you pour. They pop sleekly into a bottle's neck and render redundant incommodious decanters. Both soften wine, but not by mellowing tannins, as we are inclined to believe. To achieve that quickly would take high pressure, pure oxygen, extreme temperatures and contact with a catalytic surface (like iron filings), Mr Bond.

What these gadgets actually do is to allow the sometimes potent odour of sulphur in wine to dissipate. That's why aerated wines smell and taste better that wines drunk from a freshly opened bottle. Alternatively, to eliminate sulphur notes, you can drop a coin into your glass, or stir the wine with a steel knife (if you happen to have those items in your briefcase).

Curiously, there are no gadgets for removing the unpleasant, dank flavour of a “corked” wine, which renders a wine unsuitable for both drinking and cooking. In the absence of 'Q', here's a tip from Andrew Waterhouse, professor of wine chemistry at top US wine school and my alma mater, the University of California, Davis: pour the wine into a bowl lined with cling film.

This messy but effective home-made solution works because the trichloroanisole (TCA) responsible for infecting corks is chemically similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic film in just a few minutes. Alternatively, if you're not worried about compromising your “shaken, not stirred” image, you can combine aerating your wine with treating it for TCA by blowing bubbles into your glass through a plastic straw.

If he had had an arsenal of wine accessories, Auric Goldfinger would have chosen more wisely than strapping 007 to a table and threatening him with a laser. He could have sucked the life out him with my electric wine pump, or threatened him with a bottle sealed with a combination lock stopper and the words, “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die... of thirst.”

First published in The Connexion (January 2011). Photograph of Plenty O'Toole by Nye Bradley.

The Wine Column

2010-12-05T08:56:00.007Z

Follow me here and every month in The Connexion, France's leading English-language newspaper.

Coming up in January's issue:

Wine gadgets 'licensed to overkill' - which Christmas wine accessory gifts actually work, and which are just Plenty O'Toole?

Are You Being Corked?

2010-09-18T13:27:00.027+01:00

Trichloroanisol, or TCA, is not the active ingredient in a new party drug even your kids haven’t heard of. It’s the bacteria in faulty corks responsible for making a wine smell mouldy, or ‘corked’.

Wine buffs - otherwise known for praising barn yard and cat pee aromas - make a fuss about corked wines, which is curious until you realize spotting a corked wine is one of their party tricks. However, should you worry about TCA? And what should you make of the alternatives to cork?

I’ve rarely had a wine so corked I had to return it or toss it. And I’ve always received a refund or replacement when it was more ‘hamster cage’ than ‘damp straw’. So, I’m not worried.

The real wonder is why ‘a bit corked’ should be judged a handicap? Such a wine could evoke something forgotten, a Madeleine moment, like the first time you identified a corked wine. But no. ‘A bit corked’ is the sort of incremental distinction that precisionist wine snobs love to dispute. So we have plastic plugs (not without their own probems: see image below), screw-tops, and glass bungs to thank them for.

But putting a plastic plug in a wine bottle is like fitting a plastic fascia in a Rolls-Royce.

And plastic can be anything: rubbish bins, toilet brushes, dog bowls, Cadillacs. It has no natural intrinsicness. Cork can be only two things: wine bottle stoppers and Birkenstock shoes. A plastic Birkenstock is a crock.

Screw-tops promised a free-wheeling, easy-drinking, libertarian lifestyle. That Summer of Love ended in 2008 when screw-heads tried to teach the world to embrace the screw and go square at the same time. When sommeliers started to open screw-top bottles by rolling them up their jacket sleeves, I turned on, tuned in, and dropped off. The dream was over. All that remained was to carry the screw-tops’ coffin down Haight-Ashbury in a plastic hippie wig.

Before I encountered glass bungs the most interesting fact about glass stoppers I knew was how fizzy drinks got the name ‘Pop’. The name comes from the noise a marble stopper made when forced back into the neck of an old fizzy drink bottle.

Sadly, the wine bottle glass bung makes an unspectacular suction noise when pried off a wine bottle’s neck. And it’s useless for re-corking a bottle as it needs the vacuum created when the bottle was sealed to hold it in place.

Ultimately, I’m for cork because cork forests are ecosystems where Iberian lynx, booted eagles, and Portuguese cork farmers live. A cork oak produces 4 000 corks per harvest and provides a habitat for 100s of species. Re-plant it with a eucalyptus and you get 400 000 toilet rolls, a tree that was, and no ecosystem.

I’ve been living with TCA my whole wine life. It’s not HIV for chrissakes. It’s not contagious, it’s not dangerous. I don’t want lurid plastic protection. I’m not wearing a screw-cap. I don’t want a wine that sucks. I’m going bareback, it’s natural, and to hell with getting corked.

Top Primeur

2010-09-03T06:12:00.022+01:00

Vins primeurs arrive in shops with all the ballyhoo of the unveiling of a new car at a motor show. Except winemakers aren’t launching new cars – they’re launching prototypes. This is exciting news. Prototypes are fun. These vinous mock-ups play with traditions and find innovative ways to renew them, like trendy labels and lurid cork and cap seal combinations. They are kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline babies. We don’t mind that these grains de folie do not previse exactly what the producer’s wines will look like down the road. And we don’t care that vins primeurs have not even been road-tested, or that they don’t need to pass the appellation’s Contrôle Technique (the French M.O.T.). They rev out of the pits, some still fermenting in their tanks, others in disequilibrium. They may handle unpredicatably. Too much acidity and they oversteer, giving your tongue whiplash. Too little acidity and they understeer, sloshing across the palate. A few may roll over – think Mercedes A-class. However, well-balanced examples handle just right, gripping the curves around your tongue for a couple of fruity laps in slick racing tyres. But vins primeurs will never be ‘vintage’ like a 1958 Ferrari Testa Rosa is a ‘vintage’ car. They don’t have tread for the long haul. They are insubstantial maquettes – one-offs that aren’t built to last or to go into mass production. Wine heritage will not be diminished as you pile up empty bottles – think Mercedes A-class pile-up and the loss to motoring heritage. Vins primeurs are peppy prototypes meant to be fun and frivolous. They are not meant to have wooden dashboards, leather upholstery and cigar box aromas. They are not gentlemen’s clubs in a bottle. They are boy racers for day trippers. They cheerfully get you where you want to go.

Tasting tips

It's difficult to judge a vin primeur by looking at the wine through its bottle, so look at the label and cap-seal instead. Look for the words vigneron indépendant (independent winemaker). Independent winemakers make vins primeurs to attract your attention, build customer loyalty, and get some quick cash flowing from the vintage. Of course, cooperatives do the same, but not always with the same passion. You'll be paying € 4-something, not € 3-something, for a Primeur from an independent, but go the extra Euro. Look for a mention of grape variety, too. If you like Merlot, buy a Merlot Primeur. When it's in your glass the colour should be clear and sustained all the way to the rim, not watery. It should have a simple, fruity appeal on the nose. When it's in your mouth, feel for flavour, body, balance, and length. But remember, these are easy-drinking, uncomplicated wines, they shouldn't have you reaching for your thesaurus, or doing a Jilly Goolden!

First published in P-O Life. Download the issue: vroom vroom !

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2010-08-28T15:14:00.009+01:00

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2010-08-16T18:33:00.021+01:00

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Good riddance AOCs, hello AOPs

2010-08-07T14:08:00.007+01:00

Look closely at your next bottle of rosé and you’ll notice your favourite summer thirst-quencher is different this year. It’s probably labelled Appellation d’Origine Protégée or Indication Géographique Protégée. This is good news for wine lovers.

The new designations replace the discredited Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system and apply from the 2009 vintage. And about time! As recently as 2007 up to 40% of French AOC wines were deemed unworthy of the label, according to France's leading consumer magazine Que Choisir.

The AOC system, created in the 1930s as a safeguard against fraudulent wines, spawned no less than 400 AOCs in France - that’s half the national production. Many didn't live up to a key principal of the system's founders that an AOC wine should respect terroir absolutely. With the advent of intensive viticulture and industrial vinification, it became increasingly impossible to detect terroir in many AOC wines.

Worse still, the body governing France’s AOCs, the INAO (Institut National des Appellations d'Origine), for over 20 years allowed growers and their professional associations to set their own rules, effectively regulating themselves. This led to a lot of rubber-stamping of some dodgy wines.

Brussels decided this auto-regulation should end. Today, appellation status (AOP or IGP) is no longer awarded by the same people who make the rules. Winemakers' professional associations must now be split into two separate and independent bodies: an Organisme de Défense et de Gestion and an Organisme d'Inspection.

For the first time, under the new rules, inspection goes beyond simply approving vat samples (a procedure which ignored the quality of finished products) to include random tests of wines as they are actually sold in shops and supermarkets.

The new system is based on a simple pyramid with three levels. At the top, AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée) wines should combine an absolute respect for terroir with strict quality requirements. These should be the best (and most expensive) wines on the shelf or wine menu.

IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée) wines occupy the middle ground. They must come from a defined geographic and climatic zone (like the Languedoc) but the producer can take more liberties in the vineyard and cellar than with AOP classification.

At the base of the pyramid are wines of no specified origin for which yields, blends and wine profiles are left to the winemaker (or the market) to determine. With rare exceptions (from maverick winemakers), these will be the most commercial wines.

To avoid confrontation with France’s notoriously volatile winemakers’ syndicats, the EU reforms allow winemakers to decide for themselves whether they want to be AOP or IGP producers. The INAO will judge their submissions. But with so many AOCs not up to scratch, expect some downgrading.

Bordeaux, for example, where the old AOC zone matches exactly the limits of the administrative department of the Gironde, will have to redraw its appellation’s map. Brussels is not convinced that local government boundaries determine (or correlate with) wine quality.

What will shoppers notice? The following appellations will eventually disappear from labels: AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée), AOVDQS (Appellation d'Origine Vin de Qualité Supérieure), VQPRD (Vins de Qualité Produits dans une Région Déterminée), VdP (Vins de Pays) and VdT (Vins de Table). But don’t expect to see widespread use of AOP or IGP on labels soon.

Although the new rules apply from the 2009 vintage, AOVDQS wines must continue to use the old system of classification until 2012. Meanwhile, the EU has set a deadline of 2014 for the adoption of the AOP system as a whole.

As for more information on labels about the actual composition of wines (like sulphite levels or residual contents), Brussells has decided to look the other way again.

Champagne, EMVA Cream and Russian spies

2010-07-13T12:02:00.013+01:00

When he seduced Russian spies, the world’s most famous spy ordered Champagne, not EMVA Cream. Though with a name like Empire Vatted, Cyprus’ iconic sherry certainly sounds like it’s On Her Majesty's Service. But the superiority of French wines and the determination of Spanish appellation authorities sealed the fate of EMVA Cream. And as Empire went the way of its vatted namesake, Cyprus became a haven for faux-sherry-soaked ex-pats and a hotbet for Russian spies.

And not just Russian. Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Egyptian and Turkish spies all have stars on the walk of fame outside Larnaca airport. One former spy is now a Cypriot winemaker. Uri Geller’s dad loved Cyprus so much he ran a hotel (actually a front for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service) in Larnaca in the 1950s. Even today, American and Russian embassies face-off in Nicosia with dishes and arials aimed across the street at each other. While the RAF’s collossal web of antennas like giant football nets at Akrotiri, near Limassol, effectively turns Cyprus into a vast bugging device.

So what does the French wine industry have to do with the slippery passage through Cyprus last month of FBI fugitive and alleged Russian spy paymaster, Christopher Robert Metsos, the man suspected of funneling Kremlin cash to a ring of spies embedded in US communities? Quite a lot, actually.

By the end of the 19th century, the Phylloxera beetle had decimated French vineyards. Spared this blight, Cyprus sold the French and British lots of wine while its 5,000 year-old industry underwent considerable expansion, modernisation and consolidation. By the early 20th century, four big companies dominated Cypriot winemaking. These companies still control 90% of production. One of them, KEO, is familiar to anyone who’s visited the island, though the company is best known for its thirst-quenching beer.

Under siege from a vile beetle and awash with foreign plonk, the French imposed heavy taxes on imported wine. Cyprus was forced to sell its wines elsewhere and the French industry rebuilt itself. France recovered its place as the world’s foremost supplier of fine and ordinary wines (eventually joining with Spanish and Italian winemakers to create the European wine lake).

Meanwhile, the UK leased Cyprus from Turkey and the British empire opened up the globe to Cypriot wines. By the 1960s, EMVA Cream, 5 Kings Brandy and Hirondelle were household brand names everywhere. But they weren’t very good. So when French wines appeared on supermarket shelves, Spain copywrited the word ‘sherry’ and empire ended, Cyprus was in trouble. It turned to a market capable of absorbing huge quantities of indifferent wine, sticky sherry imitations and strong spirits: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

With two of Cyprus’ biggest wine operators run as cooperatives on socialist principles - LOEL and SODAP (the latter uniting 10,000 families from 144 villages) - this was an ideological and viticultural clinking of minds. Soon VSOP 5 Kings Brandy was swooshing around ice-cubes in Kremlin tumblers, and EMVA Cream became everyone’s favourite communist-bloc aunt’s tipple.

When the USSR fell, Russian tourists headed for their South of France: the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where their wine comes from. Every year, 150,000 Russians visit the Republic of Cyprus. When I visited Ayia Mavri winery near Kilani a couple of years ago, a Russian group was in the tasting room. They were tasting wines made from French varieties, because many Cypriot winemakers understand the island’s native varieties can be uninspiring. But these Russians knew their Merlots from their Maratheftikos.

Thanks to French protectionism, there are more shops selling furs than swimsuits in Limassol; Russians use shell companies in Cyprus as tax havens; Russian energy giant Lukoil is one of the island’s biggest investors; Cyprus is the only EU member with a communist President (who got his PhD in Moscow). And 007 drinks Champagne and not Duc de Nicosie.

The day the Cypriot judge released Metsos on a paultry 16,000 € bail, Cyprus’ President Dimitris Christofias was hosting the directors of Gazprobank at the palace. Christofias, who welcomes Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Cyprus in October, must have been relieved to learn that Metsos skipped bail then fled the island. Nothing then to distract from the splendor of the state visit and the sparkle of the Duc de Nicosie.

Duero River Valley Red

2010-02-22T17:39:00.009Z

Bodegas Maurodos' 2007 Toro Prima is one of just two Spanish wines available from Garrafeira Internacional in Lisbon. So, it must be special. Robert Parker thinks so. The American wine critic gives it 90/100. But that doesn't mean it's like sucking gobs of jam off a 2-by-4.

The Prima is an astonishing feat of harmony: refined French and American oak tannins and dark, concentrated fruit.

It's good for another six or eight years, too.

The man behind Prima is Mariano Garcia - "the great man of Spanish wine and Spain's No. 1 winemaker," says El Mundo editor and wine expert, Victor de la Serna. For 30 years, Garcia was winemaker at world-renowned Vega Sicilia in the Ribera del Duero D.O., in north-east Spain.

Prima is from Garcia's family-run Maurodos estate in the nearby Toro D.O. This is high altitude, late spring frost, concentrated fruit with good acidity, sleepy Duero River Valley back-country.

Garcia has two other highly regarded estates in the same region: Bodegas Mauro, just west of the Maurodos estate; and Aalto, his latest 'avant-garde' venture, near Quintanilla de Arriba, in the Ribera del Duero D.O. Wines from the latter estate are fetching over 100 € a bottle.

Prima is a Tinta de Toro (the local Tempranillo) and Garnacha blend, though dominated by the former. It's a terroir wine, hand-harvested from bush-pruned vines.

If black fruit, dark cherries, prunes, chocolate, and truffles are your thing, plus a long finish with bright acidity and velvety tannins, then this grand, Bordeaux-style wine delivers the wow ... for a jaw-dropping 9.50 € a bottle.

L'affaire PiNOTs

2010-02-18T08:21:00.008Z

A dozen Languedoc wine producers and merchants were found guilty of fraud this week for selling fake Pinot Noir to the American wine giant E. & J. Gallo, and six were handed suspended prison sentences. Fines of between 180,000 € and 1,500 € were also imposed on guilty parties, who earned around 7 million € on the fraud.

Gallo purchased the fake 'Pinot Noir' for its Red Bicylette brand.

In 2008, French customs found that during two years some 13.5 million litres of mislabeled wine had been sold to Gallo. The producers and merchants deliberately mislabeled Merlot and Syrah wine, passing them off as the more expensive Pinot Noir.

The fraud was discovered during an inspection at Société Ducasse in Carcassonne, where 135,000 hectolitres of Pinot had been sold - at surprisingly moderate prices - whereas the company was only able to produce 15,000 hl of Pinot.

The defense tried unsuccessfully to claim that 'Pinot Noir' was "a brand that communicates a flavour and certain qualities" and not just a particular grape variety.

This astonishingly disingenuous claim defies French appellation rules and makes a mockery of wine traceability claims published on the website of the fraud's major operator, Sieur d'Arques of Limoux.

The guilty include: Sieur d'Arques (180,000 € fine); Montblanc Co-op (40,000 € fine); Claude Courset of Société Ducasse (6-month suspended sentence and 45,000 € fine); Pascal Vailhères of Nissan-les-Ensérune (3-month suspended sentence and 30,000 € fine); Jean-Paul Barral and Yves Cros of Montblanc Co-op (1-month suspended sentence and 4,000 € fine); Pierre-Marie Cros and Marcel Fernandez of Barbaira Co-op (1-month suspended sentence and 6,000 € fine); Francis Escamez and Pierre Fabre of Canet d'Aude Co-op (1-month suspended sentence, 3,000 € and 6,000 € fines); Fabrezan winemaker Pierre Fabre (1-month suspended sentence and 6,000 € fine); Didier Beltran of Cournonterral (1,500 € fine); and Ventenac-Cabardès winemaker Alain Maurel (3-month suspended sentence and 30,000 € fine).

Sirissime!

2009-10-25T07:35:00.008Z

No prizes for guessing that the Sirissime is 100% Syrah. But can you guess the meaning of Orris? I figured it's Catalan for Ours (bears): Domaine of the 3 Bears. Wrong. An Orris is a small, arched, dry-stone shelter used by shepherds during a storm. There are 3 of them on Joep Graler's remote, 12-hectare estate at Tarérach (Roussillon). The Syrah parcels from which this wine is made are at 600 metres in altitude on a granite arena.

Graler started making organic wine here in 2005, having determined that this terroir favours the maturity, finesse and elegance he was seeking. He harvests by hand, removes stems and presses the grapes by foot.

The Sirissime had a pre-fermentation maceration at 6°C, then temperature-controlled fermentation and a long cuvaison lasting 6 weeks. The cap was punched during maceration (also by foot) every two days - to avoid extracting dry tannins. The wine was matured in barrels and released in April '09. It is neither fined nor filtered, so expect a light deposit over the years (if you're inclined to wait).

The bottle has an unusual and attractive glass cork with plastic seal and metal capsule. So, what's the wine like? Due to a hail storm on 23 September, 2007, the grapes were picked slightly earlier than normal. Graler avoided extracting too

many green tannins and succeeded in producing a supple, spicy and fruity wine, with well-balanced oak. It went great with home-made vegetable curry, garlic nan bread, and dark chocolate for dessert. Retails around 22 € a bottle.

Wine tourism: reasons to be cheerful

2009-09-30T06:52:00.009+01:00

Wine and tourism industry professionals at the first International Wine Travel Market congress have something to celebrate in the midst of the world financial crisis that has battered both sectors: more people are spending time discovering wine, winescapes and wine-related activities.

In Bordeaux, the number of wine tourists is up 8% since the beginning of 2009, according to Sophie Gaillard, wine tourism official at Bordeaux's office of tourism. Meanwhile, the Golf du Médoc Hôtel and Spa reported a 20% increase in stays during the same period, according to the hotel's director Henry Martinet. Last weekend, the hotel welcomed a group of Chinese tourists for the harvest - their 'welcome pack' included secateurs, boots and a basket for the harvest.

"Wine tourists today want to participate in activites, rather than just visit cellars. They want to harvest the grapes, help choose the best bunches and learn how to make wine," explains Sophie Gaillard. Last year, Bordeaux welcomed 22,000 wine tourists.

Winemakers at the IWTM congress also expect wine tourism to play a significant role in reversing the trend of falling global wine sales.

Five million French tourists and 2.5 million foreign tourists visit French wine regions every year, with around 5,000 producers opening their cellar doors and vineyards to the public.

Bandol and Cassis

2009-09-12T20:06:00.018+01:00

BANDOL and Cassis are picturesque ports between Toulon and Marseille. Pleasure-seekers’ yachts fill their harbours and cheerful, pastel-coloured restaurants and cafés line their seafronts. Bandol is the undisputed capital of superior Provençal reds while Cassis is famous for its distinctive white wine.

Bandol’s vineyards cover an amphitheatre of slopes behind the town while the tallest cliff in France, Cap Canaille, looms over those of Cassis. The Bandol wine route takes in the dramatic Gorges d’Ollioules and three extraordinary villages perchés, Le Castellet, Evanos and La Cadière-d’Azur. The route around Cassis takes in amazing terraced vineyards where God is said to have shed a tear and given birth to the local wine. If true, God has straw-coloured tears with an herbal bouquet and salty tang. The Cassis coastline is best known for its vertiginous calanques, or mini-fjords.

Quite why Bandol developed a reputation for sturdy reds while Cassis busied itself with perfecting whites is something of a mystery. Perhaps the appetite for white wines in Cassis developed to complement a cuisine based around the local fishermen’s catch, including poached sea anemones, a local speciality from the calanques. Perhaps the tradition for reds in Bandol developed as Bandol was historically the more important trading port and reds simply travelled better than whites. There are accounts in the 18^th and 19^th centuries of Bandol reds going as far as America and India and improving with the sea voyage. And when Louis XV was famously asked the secret of his eternal youth, he replied “the wines of Bandol”. The winemaking traditions of both towns were recognised early by the wine authorities. In fact, Cassis was the first appellation in Provence (1936) while Bandol earned its AOC just five years later.

Bandol reds are generally vins de garde, spending 18 months in oak and often requiring a decade before expressing themselves fully. They are drinkable, if somewhat aggressive, up to four years old and can pass through a ‘dumb phase’ for a couple of years before becoming more mellow, complex and interesting. They are based on the thick-skinned, small-berried and notoriously finicky Mourvèdre (known as ‘the dog strangler’ in Australia for its tannins). Bandol rosés also emphasise Mourvèdre, although from younger vines. They’re intended to accompany food, unlike the thirst-quenching rosés of the Côtes de Provence. The appellation also allows Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah but the best reds are nearly pure Mourvèdre, with rich, firm, peppery, red and black berry flavours and a dark purple robe.

Cassis whites are straw-coloured, with floral and herbal aromas and a faintly salty tang due to the vines’ proximity to the sea. They are stronger and spicier than other Provençal whites and are based on Marsanne, Clairette and Ugni Blanc with some Sauvignon and Bourboulenc. They are at their best with food rather than as an aperitif and should be drunk young. Some say they are an acquired taste, even over-priced, but they certainly have character. Curiously, Syrah is excluded from the permitted grape varieties for Cassis reds, which are capable of aging but not like a Bandol.

First published in 'Discovering Wine Country: South of France' (2005). Photograph of Cassis by Jonathan Healey.

Bellet

2009-09-01T08:18:00.013+01:00

Nice’s best-kept secret, apart from excellent ravioli (this is where it was invented), is the tiny and exclusive appellation of Bellet. It’s tucked away in the hills amid swanky villas and greenhouses of carnations less than thirty minutes from the celebrated, palm-lined Promenade des Anglais.

There are just a handful of producers, some fantasy châteaux, and you can visit them all in a day. They’re dotted between the villages of St-Isidore and St-Roman-de-Bellet, within the city’s limits. Bellet owes its fame to a crisp, dry white wine based on the increasingly fashionable Rolle grape, once found only here and in Corsica.

The Niçoise have jealously kept Bellet wines to themselves for at least three centuries, and they’re still hard to find outside the city’s limits. Even today, they rarely get further than the cellars of Nice’s top restaurants like the Belle Époque Le Chantecler at the Hotel Négresco, where they’re the favourite accompaniment to local specialities like sea bass and bourride, a delicate fish soup.

The vineyards were more extensive in 1860 when Nice and the rest of the Alpes-Maritimes became part of France. In the early twentieth century, after the phylloxera blight, many vineyards were turned over to market gardening and flowers. Today they’re standing their ground against the encroachment of yet more jet-set villas and greenhouses. In fact, Bellet is the only appellation in France located within the boundaries of a city and it’s unlikely to expand beyond its current 60 hectares. Some producers make fewer than two thousand bottles a year.

Bellet was created in 1941, making it one of the oldest appellations in France. It came of age in the 1960s after some teething troubles (it narrowly avoided demotion two years after gaining AOC standing). Château de Bellet, owned by the president of the syndicat, is probably the best-known producer and guardian of the appellation’s reputation.

The wine

The vineyards are neatly planted between fig and olive trees on small parcels and narrow terraces called restanques at 200 to 400m in altitude. The land is steep and sun soaked with relatively abundant rain for the area. The grey mixture of sandstone, limestone and puddingstones is prone to soil erosion so some vignerons grow wild grasses between the vines to reduce the risk. The vineyards are immediately east of the Var valley where alternating currents of sea and mountain air prevent overheating and keep the grapes healthy.

Bellet comes in all three colours and some grape varieties are unique to the appellation. The indigenous Braque, for example, is a fragile grape that gives red and rosé wines of distinction, with characteristic rosewater aromas. It’s often blended with the dark-berried Folle Noire, another local variety (famed for its capricious nature). Folle Noire gives candied fruit and peppery notes. Bellet reds are noble wines that can be aged for decades, if you can wait that long. If you can’t, consult your bank manager and buy a 1990.

The rosés are made to accompany food and to be drunk young. They’re rosés de bouche rather than aperitif-style rosés de nez. The famous Bellet whites are delicious young but age well. You’ll find a drop of Chardonnay blended with the indigenous Rolle giving floral and citrus aromas to these sought-after wines, reminiscent of Chablis. The best are fermented and matured in oak.

How to visit Bellet

If you’re staying in Nice, visiting Bellet’s vineyards couldn’t be easier. Bus 62 from the Gare Routière goes to St-Roman-de-Bellet and takes in a good part of the route des vins. Alternatively, it’s twelve minutes by train from the Gare du Sud to St-Isidore and services are frequent. You could combine the train and bicycle or take the car and walk. The wine route is just 15km.

The tourist office can help you choose amongst the many accommodation options in Nice. The inexpensive, two-star Hôtel Floride in quiet Cimiez north of the centre near the Chagal museum has comfortable rooms and a garden.

Another option is to stay near the wine domains. Michele Golle offers bed and breakfast in a villa set in parkland with sea views and a swimming pool on the route des vins. Or try the elegant and gastronomic Auberge de Redier in Colomars just north of St-Roman-de-Bellet.

In St-Isidore, head for the main square and follow the Chemin de Crémat to St-Roman-de-Bellet. This route takes in nearly all of Bellet’s producers. Take a break in St-Roman-de-Bellet before heading back on the Chemin de Saquier to St-Isidore and treat yourself (but not your wallet) to a meal at the village’s only restaurant, the Auberge de Bellet. Back in Nice, head for the city’s best veggie restaurant La Zucca Magica, or local institution Restaurant Lou Mourelec for affordable Niçoise cuisine.

First published in 'Discovering Wine Country: South of France' (2005).

Wine of the day

2009-08-10T09:05:00.011+01:00

air is a range of organic/biodynamic wines by Antonio Lopes Ribeiro of Casa de Mouraz (see post 28 July 2009) created for Natural Merchants, USA. This Vinho Verde is made from the laurel-scented Loureiro, the delicately aromatic Trajadura and the acidy Azal. The wine is vinified by vineyard parcel, rather than by variety, to ensure an authentic expression of the terroir. It's a bright, pale, straw-coloured wine with green and silver tints. Well-chilled it bursts with citrus aromas, especially grapefruit.

In the mouth, it's clean, dry, refreshing and surprisingly full and persistent. A thirst quenching aperitif in its own right, and thoroughly enjoyable with watermellon and chocolate biscuits.

Jonathan Healey: Terroirist

2009-08-04T11:54:00.032+01:00

By Ellen Hall

Did you have to read the subtitle a second time? I did when I found it on Jonathan Healey’s web page. Not to worry! If he is a fanatic, it is about wine. And vintage MG’s. And red Harleys. Also teaching and writing.

I met Jonathan in a cosy cafe on a windy Wednesday in March. He is tall and lean, a rugged-looking Yorkshireman in his faded denim shirt. His conversation roams from London to California to Australia to France with side trips to Japan and Egypt. Not bad for a man who claims he hates leaving his Argelès home.

He discovered Argelès through a friend about 10 years ago and bought his own place in 2002. When he settled here he looked for a book on the wines of Roussillon. Unable to find one, he wrote it himself: 'The Wines of Roussillon'. Then he was contacted to write 'Discovering Wine Country: South of France' published in 2005. Both books are available at Caves du Roussillon opposite the market in Collioure.

Jonathan’s current book project is aimed not at wine drinkers but at wine makers. It’s focus is how to develop tourism on wine domains. He believes there is a lot to be done here in Roussillon and in France in general. “In California, vineyards can earn one third of their income from tourism. Here it’s 2 or 3 per cent.” His wine tourism course at the University of Perpignan is popular with French and foreign students.

From a “wine culture” at home in Yorkshire, Jonathan went on to study wine in California, near the Napa Valley. At every opportunity he’d jump onto his red Harley Davidson following Highway 29 to explore the vineyards.

“Like a lot of English people I’ve come to understand wines through new world wines. When you get a bottle of Chardonnay or Merlot or Sauvignon, you know what grape variety you are getting.” Where then does terroir fit in? “Terroir is extremely important. You have to match grape variety with a terroir which suits it.”

What hot tips can he give about the best Roussillon wines? Jonathan says he favours independent winemakers who produce handmade wines. Here in Roussillon the terroirs of interest are the Agly Valley, the Aspres and the Albères. Look for “the hilly parts of the department, those with unforgiving soils, rocky slopes”. Jonathan says young winemakers are more switched on in terms of good cellar practices, modern vinification methods. “The Catalans are focused on tradition. The best combination is old world wine with new world techniques and methods.”

Future projects include a book to help English people rediscover French wines through the knowledge gained from their experience with grape varieties. For instance, if you like Chardonnay, then try a white wine from Burgundy.

He is also writing a piece of fiction about a homosexual scandal within Ronald Reagan’s campaign team when he was running for Governor of California in the 1966.

During his studies in California in the 80’s, Jonathan started writing for the university paper. From there he went on to present TV programs. At his home in Argelès he writes at a large desk beside a picture window with a view of the Golfe du Lion. And a cup of tea!

Wine and wine-tasting he saves for the wine tours he leads in the area. One-, two- or three-day tours in Collioure, the Agly or the Aspres are available with wine-tasting in the morning and vineyard tours in the afternoon. Why not contact him and become a terroirist yourself? Or join his organic winemaking club and start making your own-label French red wine?

First published in P-O Life (formerly Anglophone Direct).

Wine of the day

2009-07-28T09:33:00.017+01:00

Casa de Mouraz makes organic/biodynamic wines in Portugal's Dão region. Their 2008 rosé has a deep, vibrant, cranberry colour with zesty red fruit, raspberry, guava, mint and boiled sweet aromas. It's creamy, though with reasonable acidity, with a minerally, persistent finish that's both refreshing and curiously heart-warming.

It's a coctail of mostly Portugese grape varieties: the revered, deeply coloured and intensely flavoured Touriga Nacional; the superior, thick-skinned, flavourful and potentially frisky Tinta Roriz (Tempranillo); the colourful, but ho-hum, Alfrocheiro; the rustic, lightly fragrant Jaen; and the erratic and mysterious Agua Santa (believed to be a cross between Touriga Nacional and the versatile, fleshy and fruity Castelão).

A rosé de bouche, this wine is great with food.

The Face of Jacko

2009-07-24T11:50:00.034+01:00

'It is indeed an admirable face-object. The make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster. Amid all this snow at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive, are two fairly tremulous wounds.'

That was Roland Barthes from his 1957 essay 'The Face of Garbo'. Michael Jackson’s face-object/mask, which shared Garbo’s ‘flour-white complexion… at once perfect and ephemeral’ was also ‘not to have any reality except that of its perfection.’

The Garbo/Jacko masks were not the Italian half-masks worn at carnivals, behind which, Oscar Wilde observed, a man can reveal himself.

Rather, the Garbo/Jacko face-objects were examples of ‘absolute’ masks (masks ‘of antiquity’, Barthes called them) in which the face becomes ‘a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature... almost sexually undefined.’

Garbo (through make-up) and Jacko (through cosmetic surgery) didn’t aim for some superlative state of existential beauty, but for an ideal state of essential beauty.

However, Garbo’s face belonged to cinema’s infancy, when, as Barthes points out, ‘one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre’. Upon the silver screen, audiences would rapturously project the idea of beauty onto her blank face and be ‘plunged… into the deepest ecstacy.’

But in the new iconographic age, ushered in (for Barthes) by Audrey Hepburn, audiences have developed a grown-up’s preference for differentiation and individuals, not for ‘essences’. Their tastes have passed ‘from awe to charm.’

Jacko’s undifferentiated ‘snowy solitary face’ belonged to another time and age and, for some, to another planet. It wasn’t charming, and the awe it inspired came from the bizarre end of the spectrum.

Later in life, Garbo concealed from the public the ‘ominous maturing’ of her beauty as ‘the essence was not to be degraded’ and her face-object ‘became gradually obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles; but it never deteriorated.’

It’s unlikely Jacko veiled his face-object to protect his Essence from ‘the ominous maturing’ of his beauty. Plastic surgery was supposed to take care of that. Neither were his disguises intended to conceal his identity, like some Venice carnival-goer in a half-mask. Jacko’s masks were recognisable accessories to his image.

Jacko covered up his face-object to protect his Essence from the degradations of interpretation, from a rape in which his Garbo-like ‘deified face’ became the blank screen for others’ unwelcome projections: weirdo, victim, Peter Pan, pedophile.

He understood that an absolute face-object is plain odd to most adults today (though not to children) in a world that, Barthes said, ‘leans toward the fascination of mortal faces… constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions.’

Jacko understood that modern, reality-obsessed adults abhor singularities (as nature abhors a vacuum); that we are today no longer fascinated by archetypes (like ‘Garbo’s singularity’); that we live in an iconographic age, according to Barthes, defined by ‘lyricism’.

One wonders, finally, what the man-child himself actually saw in the mirror? Did he, like Garbo’s innocent audiences, rapturously project ideas of beauty onto his own blank face? Did he see a face (as Barthes said of Garbo’s) ‘descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light’?

Or did his reflected face-object/mask become the perfected medium onto which his own demons projected themselves? The face-object/man in the mirror begetting a nightmarish confrontation with endlessly repeated images of ever-receding imperfection.

Did he/we see in his eyes a ‘totem-like countenance’ or ‘two faintly tremulous wounds’?

Discovering Wine Country: South of France

2009-06-29T14:21:00.027+01:00

Discovering Wine Country: South of France

By Jonathan Healey

‘An abundance of entertaining information, wine and otherwise – a useful book for armchair travellers too’ DECANTER

‘An informed and delectable tour – even the connoisseur would be strongly advised to read this guide’ FRENCH MAGAZINE

The essential guide to understanding and exploring the best wines from southern France.

. Part of Mitchell Beazley’s Discovering Wine Country series

. Highlights wine tours of popular and lesser-known regions

. Details of top producers and tourist attractions

. Expert recommendations help you choose top wines

. Guidance on getting wine home safely

. Useful tips on local culture, eating out, where to stay

. Plus advice on the most effective way to travel around

. 140 pages, paperback, published 2005

Order your copy of 'Discovering Wine Country: South of France' for 15,99€ (£12.99): j.healey.pro@gmail.com

The Wines of Roussillon

2009-06-29T13:25:00.035+01:00

The Wines of Roussillon

By Jonathan Healey

'Roussillon has a wine bible' L'INDEPENDENT

'The essential guide to understanding and exploring the best wines from Roussillon' LE MIDI LIBRE

'Roussillon produces wines of a variety, originality and quality that it’s hard to imagine another wine region that offers the wine enthusiast such rich and exciting experiences.’

From the introduction: The Wines of Roussillon

. Full details of the region’s wine styles

. A fascinating account of the grapes

. Notes and recommendations on recent vintages

. 50+ of the best chateaux and domains to visit

. The story of Roussillon’s wine-based aperitifs

. An overview of Catalan cuisine and wine accompaniments

. A full calendar of food and wine festivals

. Tips about where to learn more

. 312 pages, hardback/pocket format, published 2002

Order your copy of 'The Wines of Roussillon' for 14,99€ (£11.99): j.healey.pro@gmail.com

Portugese Ginja Nut

2009-06-26T19:30:00.012+01:00

If your flip-flops are sticking to the pavement and the terrain is getting lumpy underfoot, join the nearest queue and line up for a Ginja – Lisbon’s cherry liqueur. You’re probably opposite the National Theatre on Largo de São Domingos at the pocket-size Espinheira Ginjinha bar. Look for the bar’s evocative Belle Epoque shutters, featuring men in panama hats and women in crinoline dresses with glasses of Ginja.

There’s no need to exchange a word with the patron. A simple 'shot glass' gesture gets you a small cup with two or three cherries plopped in (for a euro). Then drink it with the regulars on the street. It’s a sweet, but not syrupy, liqueur of marinated cherries that's great on ice. At this tiny bar, it’s served at street temperature, unless you ask for it fresco.

If you’re brave enough to eat the marinated cherries, spit the stones into your cup and toss your empties into nearby bins – who knows, it might catch on.

Bastardo!

2009-06-25T10:08:00.011+01:00

Bastardo is the dark red Portugese grape variety from which this wine is made (‘Trousseau’ in its native Jura). It's commonly found in Port, as it has the high natural sugar content suitable for fortified wines, and brings depth, texture and structure to the blend.

This dry red 2007 Vinho Regional Duriense comes from the exciting Conceito Winery, an up-and-coming Teja Valley producer, in the eastern Douro Valley.

A tributary of the Douro, the Teja flows through a valley of gentle hills with a mild climate and schist soils, between 300m and 400m in altitude.

Conceito’s ‘Bastardo’ has an incredibly delicate robe, almost a pale violet rosé. The apparent lightness, however, belies a surprising aromatic intensity with red berry fruit, white pepper, clove and gamey scents. In the mouth, there are juicy Burlap cherry and forest fruit flavours beautifully balanced with fresh, mineral acidity, mellow but present French oak tannins, and a persistent, dry finish. An intense Pinot Noir with great finesse comes to mind.

Conceito Winery crushes the Bastardo grapes by foot in traditional granite tanks with no de-stemming. The wine is pressed when alcoholic fermentation is complete and then aged in barrels for 10 months. As the label suggests, this is unconventional, provocative and characterful winemaking. 'Bastardo' doesn't qualify for Douro appellation standing because it is 'atypical'. Who cares?

Beating the French at their own game

2009-06-24T15:00:00.021+01:00

Peter-Danton de Rouffignac meets an Englishman who became a wine expert in France

Of all the careers to choose, becoming a wine expert is probably not the easiest, especially when you are English and newly arrived in France. But that’s exactly what editor, author and acknowledged wine expert Jonathan Healey has managed to do in his region of Languedoc-Roussillon. He is the first person to write a guide, in English, to the wines of Roussillon and has carved a niche for himself advising local vignerons on how to market their wines to the English world. His latest venture is to set up his own wine club, which will enable members to help to cultivate – and drink – their own organic wines.

“It’s not exactly what I planned when I moved to the region seven years ago,” admits Jonathan, a forty-something who looks half his age. “I had been on holiday here a few times with my parents and knew the region well. The local wines had suffered from a poor reputation and over-production, but I set out to study them and was surprised by what I discovered”.

By chance Yorkshire-born Jonathan had spent his teens and early twenties in California, where he had gone originally with the idea of taking a short holiday. He ended up completing his studies at a local community college, and went on to complete a BA and MA at the University of California-Davis.

“UC-Davis happens to be the foremost wine school on the West Coast of America and I started taking a few courses as part of my degree. I also worked for a local wine maker and learnt a lot about the New World approach to wine making,” Jonathan explains. In between studying and working, Jonathan was also editing the university’s daily newspaper and presenting local television programmes. It was a full life. He was on his way to completing his doctorate when a tragic motorcyle accident cut short his university career and he had to return to England. “It was a tough time for me,” he admits, “but I got into university teaching, and I thought that’s where my career would progress”.

However, increasingly fed up with London and the academic life, Jonathan decided to abandon his teaching career and settle in Languedoc-Roussillon. “I had no clear ideas about how I would earn a living,” he says, “though a business partner and I had some ideas about developing tourism in the area, part of which included running cultural and wine tours. By chance this got me into contact with a local publisher and very soon I was writing my first wine book. The publishers very bravely decided to take on the first book in English about the region’s wines. And in the course of my researches I met a number of exciting, often young vignerons, who were producing some distinctive wines, more than a dozen of which have AOC classification”.

Not quite sure how to take this new English expert, the local producers gradually warmed to Jonathan’s enthusiasm. Gradually a business was built up helping to translate brochures – and increasingly websites – into understandable English (“some of it was appalling” Jonathan notes), advising on PR and marketing, and introducing the idea of wine-based tourism to encourage visitors to visit local vineyards and try the wines out for themselves.

As a vegetarian and keen on personal fitness – Jonathan cycles, swims and scuba dives – Jonathan was naturally attracted to a small but growing number of local wine producers who were in the process of switching to organic production.

“Progress is relatively slow in France overall” Jonathan explains, “probably accounting for less than 2 per cent of total wine production. I was fascinated by the total contrast to California, where production is often highly mechanised, and dependant on chemical fertilisers and sometimes genetically modified grapes. It is the antithesis of everything I believe in about how wine can and should be made”.

Not surprisingly to launch his wine club Jonathan has turned to a local producer, now in his third year of going organic and about to receive formal certification. “We have insisted on a total ban on chemical fertilisers and plouging the vines will be done by horses and harvesting entirely by hand. We have designed the club in such a way that members can participate in the main production events over a period of twelve months, including tasks such as pruning and training the vines, to the more exciting harvesting, fermenting, bottling and tasting.

“The club year will run from March to the following February, and members will be able to join in as many events as they wish. I already have a group of friends who are fulltimes residents in the region who want to join, while others may wish to come down only during holiday times,” Jonathan explains.

Always willing to pass on his expertise, Jonathan emphasises that club members will benefit from practical guidance by local producers and ‘classroom’ sessions to supplement their knowledge. The club is based in an ancient Roussillon mas which was formerly the site of a fortified castle occupied by the Knights Templar. “Members have the chance to learn a bit of local history as well as organic wine-making” says Jonathan. “What nicer way to spend a few days in the Roussillon sunshine?”.

First published in French Property News (June 2009)

Wine Tours & Tastings

2009-06-22T14:40:00.013+01:00

ATTENTION: WINE EXPERIENCE SEEKERS

"We had a great day out tasting wines, learning how they're made, and enjoying the hospitality of winemakers off-the-beaten-track. Highly recommended!"

Bill & Marcia Atkinson, USA

Discover new wines, enjoy beautiful scenery and meet passionate winemakers with me on a guided tour of the best of Roussillon's wine country (full-day and half-day tours available).

From the spectacular terraced vineyards along the Côte Vermeille, to the rolling foothills beneath Mt Canigou, to vineyards overlooked by perched mountain castles, Roussillon offers the wine traveller a uniquely rich variety of winescapes, wine styles and surprises.

Alternatively, take a tour of Roussillon in the form of a guided wine tasting - a pre- lunch or dinner dégustation lasts 1 hour 15 minutes.

Contact me to arrange your group's event. I'll be happy to share with you my passion for the wines of Roussillon.

Jonathan HEALEY

Email: j.healey.pro@gmail.com

Le vin est le domaine de spécialisation de nos traducteurs

2009-06-22T12:51:00.032+01:00

ATTENTION VIGNERONS : TRADUCTIONS

Vous rencontrez des difficultés pour communiquer avec vos clients anglophones ? Mon propos est de vous aider.

En écrivant mes livres sur les vins français, j'ai rencontré nombre d'entreprises me faisant part de leurs difficultés à transmettre leur message en anglais.

Pour faciliter votre communication en anglais et par conséquent vos ventes auprès des étrangers, nous traduisons tous supports de communication :

documents de présentation (brochures, dépliants, ...)
dossiers de presse, communiqués de presse
fiches techniques et commentaires de dégustation
documents techniques (cahiers des charges, dossiers techniques, ...)
argumentaires
supports multimedia (présentations Powerpoint, ...)
sites internet, blogs
publicités

Vous êtes un vigneron indépendant et dynamique ? un groupement de producteurs ? une marque de renommée internationale ? Contactez nous pour un devis gratuit, sans obligation :

Email : j.healey.pro@gmail.com

_______________________________

PARMI MES CLIENTS SATISFAITS :

Alsace : Domaine Rieflé / Domaine Pierre Sparr

Bordeaux : Maison des Bordeaux et Bordeaux Supérieur / GRM / Domaines Mèneret-Audy / Hauterive Saint James

Bergerac : Château Monestier La Tour

Canon Fronsac : Château Vrai Canon Bouché

Jura : Champ d'Etoiles

L'Ïle d'Oléron : Vignerons d'Oléron

La Loire : Maison LaCheteau / Vins Dionysia / Domaine FL / Winery Jaud

La Vallée du Rhône: Vignerons de Vacqueyras

Languedoc : Château de l'Hospitalet / Château Grand Moulin / Maurel Vedeau / Terroirs Vivants / Domaine Fontsainte / Virgile Joly

Provence : Cellier de Saint Louis

Roussillon : Château Valmy / Château du Mas Deu / Château de Jau / Vignerons de Caramany / Domaine Vial-Magnères / Domaine Coume del Mas / Auberge des Alberès

CHILI

Alpata : Viña Las Nĩnas

ITALIE

Toscane : Tenuta la Novella

USA

Swardlick Group

Roussillon Winemaking Club

2009-06-19T13:07:00.006+01:00

With expert instruction from me and guidance from working vignerons, you tend the vines, learn about winemaking, and actually make your own organic red Roussillon wine, personalised with your label. No experience required!

Members can join in up to six key vineyard and cellar events per year - including harvesting, bottling, pruning, and convivial vignerons' picnics - and receive hands-on experience in the essentials of viticulture and winemaking, plus up to 60 bottles of own-label organic wine.

The club farms superb, organic vineyard parcels beneath the foothills of Mt Canigou in the Côtes du Roussillon appellation and uses cellar facilities in an authentic Catalan mas belonging to an historic, award-winning Roussillon Chateau. You practice sustainable viticulture and winemaking, using traditional methods, horse-drawn ploughs, and harvesting by hand with no chemical fertilisers or artificial treatments.

Membership is limited, rolling and runs annually. You decide your own level of participation and join other members for some (or all) of the following one-day events during these months:

March – train the shoots & thin-out the flower buds

May – apply organic treatments & plough around vines

July – remove excess bunches & thin-out the leaves

September – harvest the grapes & begin fermentation

November – prune the vines & check wine's evolution

February – bottle your wine & celebrate the vintage

Vineyard & cellar events are accompanied by wine theory from Jonathan plus on-the-job advice from working vignerons.

A typical day begins around 8 a.m. with coffee and croissants at the chateau where you learn about the day's activities. Then it's either a short walk to the vineyard - where you are guided in the tilling, pruning, tying up of shoots, de-budding, leaf-thinning, or harvesting (depending on the season) - or you might prepare the vats, tend to the vinification, or bottle the wine in the cellar. A vignerons' picnic is organised at midday with members providing a festive potluck of local specialities with wine. You work off lunch with vineyard or cellar activities before ending the afternoon with a de-briefing in the cellar accompanied by an aperitif around 6 p.m.

If you are stretched for time, you can attend as little as a single day. There is no obligation but the more time you spend in the vineyard, the more you will learn about becoming your own vigneron.

MEMBERSHIP TYPE

Wine Buff

2 activities per year
+ 4 cases of wine*
420 € per year

Connoisseur

4 activities per year
+ 5 cases of wine*
510 € per year

Vigneron

6 activities per year
+ 6 cases of wine*
595 € per year

*12 bottles per case

GETTING TO YOUR VINEYARD

Getting to Roussillon is easy from most parts of the UK, Ireland, and other European countries (including Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden) with regular flights to Perpignan, Girona, and Carcassonne on Ryanair.

Accommodation options in the Perpignan area are numerous and varied - from luxury Chateaux, boutique B&Bs, thalassotherapy resorts, plus hotels (up to 5 stars), or cheap and cheerful campsites - contact Jonathan for help choosing the best option for you.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

Contact me at j.healey.pro@gmail.com to start making your own, organic Roussillon wine.