Kindle Notes & Highlights
the great element of a picnic – the open air
The joys of picnicking are not the joys of the exquisite, the rarefied, of rich sauces and great growths of wine, but the simple pleasure of refreshment. Bread, cheese and beer is a prefect meal under a hayrick at harvest time, if the bread be warm and crusty, the cheese creamy and strong and the beer as cold as a stone.
Thus one expects Gevrey-Chambertin to be a heavy16, full-bodied wine – even for burgundy. Volnay, on the other hand, or Beaune, having been endowed by nature with a more slender frame and delicate sweetness, should conform to (at least) these characteristics.
Wine is grape juice. Every drop of liquid filling so many bottles has been drawn out of the ground by the roots of a vine.
It would not be so fascinating if there were not so many different kinds. Although there are people who do not care for it, and who think it more than a nuisance that a wine list has so many names on it, the whole reason that wine is worth study is its variety.
From crushed grapes come an infinite number of scents and flavours, to some extent predictable, to some extent controllable – to some extent neither. The kind of vines, where they are planted, how they are pruned, when they are picked, how they are pressed and how long they are aged all bear on the eventual taste. And behind each of these factors there is a tradition or argument or set of reasons why it should be done this way rather than that, and a wonderful variety of ideas about the ideal in view.
Wine is the pleasantest subject in the world to discuss. All its associations are with occasions when people are at their best: with relaxation, contentment, leisurely meals and the fre...
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The idea is to establish pleasure as the only arbiter in wine-drinking.
Asti comes firmly under the rubric of ‘other flavours’. Its overwhelming sweet-Muscat breath makes it one of the easiest wines to fall in love with … and to grow tired of.
Prejudice and narrow-mindedness have no place; preferences are what it is all about.
What it does is to provide scraps of land and scattered episodes of weather that bring two grape varieties to a perfection found nowhere else. In certain sites and in certain years only, the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay achieve flavours valued as highly as any flavour on earth.
The German way with wine has a different logic from that of the French, the Italian or any other country.22 It is highly structured and methodical, making its full explanation a daunting task, but it has a unity of purpose that makes the principle, if not the practice, easy to grasp. In Germany ripeness is all. All German quality criteria are based on the accumulated sugar in the grapes at harvest time.
Length of lingering aftertaste is one of the most clearly defined differences between wines that are simply good, and those that deserve to be called great. The longer the full flavour of a mouthful remains clearly discernible after swallowing, haunting your tongue, your palate, and your throat, the better the wine – provided, of course, the flavour is clean and sweet in the first place.
If everybody didn’t want the same few wines, there would be no stupid prices.
We probably all started, as children, not liking it at all. Then one day we tasted a sweet sherry or a flowery sparkling Muscat and were intrigued. Bit by bit we learned how appetizing drier table wines can be. At some stage we learned that low-price wines are usually thin in their flavours, or at best monotonous; that extra quality consists of a more satisfying depth of taste under taste, a certain definite ‘attack’, and a lingering sweetness as you swallow.
To go on from here to associating particular flavours with individual grapes, countries, regions, or even individual winemakers takes time and, above all, practice. It is an effort that most people never make. It will never come just by drinking, however much you swallow. It will come only with deliberate awareness; each time pausing for a second to concentrate, to sniff, sip, think, and memorise before settling down to relaxed enjoyment of the glass. How you seize it, how you approach it, and what you expect from it depends on your upbringing.
Don’t look at the label. Ignore (for the moment) even the price. Let yourself be guided by one thing: how much do you like what you have in your glass? This is rule one of enjoying wine,
Good wine is as close as we can come to imbibing the very nature of a specific spot on the earth’s surface. Do you need to be a mystic to find the prospect at least intriguing? When you learn, as you soon do, that the taste, and hence the pleasure, can change within a stone’s throw, the mystery begins to seep into you. Don’t fight it. There are too few direct links between nature and art.
‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’
it is, before all else, a human story. It begins with the worship of wine as a supernatural being: the bringer of joy. It climbs to the heights of dramatic inspiration, and descends to the depths of fraud, drunkenness, betrayal and murder. It involves passionate spiritual convictions, none more so than the Islamic belief that wine is too great a blessing for this world. It visits the physician at his task of healing, the politician in the act of cheating, the monk in his cell and the sailor at sea.
The scent above all is the clue. In the words of Claude Arnoux, the priest who wrote Dissertation sur la situation de la Bourgogne in 172876, the wines of Burgundy have ‘sweet vapours’. They are drunk ‘in two ways, through the nose and through the mouth, either at the same time or separately.’
You and I believe, because our senses keep telling us, that wine was made to wake us up to beauty, not to send us into a senseless stupor.
Its beauty lies in its variety, its infinite nuances, its trick of never being precisely the same again.
God, how hard it is to be honest, even with yourself. You tasted a glorious, a singing Riesling the other day; then you read that it had scored 63 out of 100 on a magazine panel. Your judgement falters: if that’s what they say, maybe I got carried away. Carried away is exactly what you have to be. How did Gerald Asher, did Robin Yapp, did Kermit Lynch become wine-lovers’ saints?77 By being carried far beyond averaged scores, by a moment of recognition that the wine they tasted was both true and beautiful, and that unless they said so they betrayed both it and, more importantly, themselves.
Bordeaux is commercial, chic, intellectual, snobbish, extremely worldly – but fun is not one of its talents. And fun is what wine is all about.
In the land of the lemming two commodities are in chronic short supply: personal choice and common sense.
Wine-lovers are aware that their taste for wine is a real contributor to the quality of their life – socially, aesthetically, and not least for its effect on morale. If we smile more, enjoy our friends and families more, digest better and sleep better we are better.
WINE CHARACTERS DOCTOR CABERNET Authoritative, senior, unmistakable; a strong personality but a good mixer too. Thick-skinned and adaptable enough to make himself at home anywhere. Confident and wealthy but tending to the austere, even astringent, in taste. MONSIEUR P NONOIR A fragrant personage inclining a little to the well furnished. Sometimes lively and invigorating, even sparkling, but unmistakably a voluptuary by nature and exceptionally fussy about his surroundings. C RAH A person of substance with misty oriental origins. Of dark complexion, spicy in his taste, at times peppery in his
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Varietalism was a direct challenge to the concept of terroir, the notion that each situation and its soil give a wine a specific character – and that some are inherently better (for the appropriate grapes) than others.
days. The demand that will shape the future is for a sense of place in what we drink. The game is up for those who turn their backs on terroir.
I was astonished to learn it was common practice to make ‘interstate’ blends. In fact top winemakers’ reputations were based more on their cocktail-making skill (with wines) than faithfulness to their terroir.
hear the sceptic say it is merely the alcohol carrying the fragrance straight to his poor soft brain. A kinder (and more scientific) explanation is that the olfactory nerves in the brain – the ones that perceive smells – are immediate neighbours to the memory lobe. Whatever the physical reason, men and women of culture and intellect have prized wine above all other foods, and other stimulants too, since the era of prehistory, when it first emerged on the slopes of Mount Ararat.
It is forty years since I first realised how much wine has to offer anyone whose senses are awake, whose mind is open, and who appreciates the interactions of man and nature. Every bottle I open is still a new lesson, in a subject none of us will ever master.
Once a region discovers that it can raise its price by abandoning its individuality, it becomes a mere fashion item. Fashions change; terroir is the one immutable – the anchor of character.
strongly believe that certain attributes of good wine are essential and universal, even if the words to describe them call for a little reflection before they mean very much. The first is life, liveliness, vitality, vigour – however you want to express it. There is no good wine without it. Wine that is either stolid or limp-wristed is no good.
what wine is for: to refresh your palate as you eat.
The wine world is much more rewarding (and holds so many more possibilities) for those who taste with an open mind, rather than dismissing less obvious wines, or wines that express something they don’t understand. This is my plea for appreciation. If we could put behind us the racing mentality that must always have a winner, we would enjoy so many bottles so much more. Love them for themselves;
They have that confident richness of flavour that comes from truly ripe grapes that have not been rushed to ripeness by a scorching sun. This is where the best European regions still have the advantage over anything except the coolest in the New World (and why New Zealand has a quality advantage over most of Australia).
Because, thank God, nature is infinitely various – and in no department more marvellously than in wine.
At least 90 per cent of wine would be at least as good, probably better, under a screw cap.20 We are far too conservative about corks and corkscrews.
Oak. The smell that was once a sign that a wine had been expensively aged, maybe fermented, in small oak barrels now more often comes from a bag of oak chips or even a bottle of essence. A wine cannot be oak-matured without a high price tag. Nor is there any point: it won’t get better. It is time for consumers to recognize that oak is a foreign flavouring in wine. Great wines don’t taste of oak; they taste of fermented fruit.
common fallacy that most wines get a little bit better with a little bit of age. Specific wines do, for specific reasons. Non-vintage Champagne because it is produced in a hurry and can taste raw. Rieslings, particularly German Rieslings, because that is the nature of the grape. Many red wines with high tannin levels.
A simple wine does not become complex, or even ‘mellow’; it just loses its freshness.
‘If you grow Chardonnay, why not say so?’ is a question that still shocks growers in Chablis or Meursault. It has only one possible answer: the consistent uniqueness of what the growers bottle.
No: our subject is complicated. It is elusive; a moving target, demanding more than a little humility. The pleasure is in the diversity. Man proposes and God disposes. End of sermon. Shall we have a drink?
Some wines simply have more to say than others.
There are generous decisions and mean ones, intelligent ones and stupid ones, good ones and bad ones. Cumulatively they make not just a bottle or a vintage but an identity, and a reputation.
Real priorities are more demanding. The housewife asks ‘Is that fair value for the same price as a chicken?’ If you are a shopper who hunts down the best and freshest chicken in the market you will have the same feeling about the wine to go with it. You want real satisfaction, not a token. Curnonsky, the first French food journalist, formulated the basic requirement: food should taste of what it is. It is no different with wine.
but could you separate what you drink out of curiosity from what you drink out of conviction?
A wine-lover should be a romantic; romance can plaster over all sorts of cracks. And one sip can be enough to register a new conviction wine.
