Christmas Drinking

I'm back in the UK for Christmas, where enough rain has fallen to alleviate California's drought for the next ten years. I've met up with friends and family, indulged in a number of pub lunches by blazing log fires, and had plenty of good wine to celebrate. With the rich, hearty food I've been eating, I've been looking for wines with plenty of acidity to give a refreshing lightness. The other aim has been simply to drink memorable wines. 

Eyrie Melon de Bourgogne 2009

I bought this wine on a trip to Oregon two and a half years ago, and because of its uniqueness I have been saving it for a special occasion - which turned out to be by a fire in a cottage in the Lake District while playing Bananagrams with my wife and sister. Back in 1965, David Lett, one of the founding fathers of Oregon wine, planted Alsace and Burgundy varieties in the Willamette Valley, including Pinot Blanc. Some of the cuttings he bought from UC Davis, but upon planting them he realised that they weren't Pinot Blanc at all, eventually concluding that they were Melon de Bourgogne, which is grown only on the Atlantic Coast of the Loire Valley (Chalone in Monterrey encountered the same problem with Pinot Blanc cuttings they bought from the university). With just a small plot of this unfashionable and undistinguished variety, Lett never made a commercial wine from them. After his death in 2008, his son Jason decided to make wine from the plot - now over forty years old - in tribute to his father. The wine is superb, rare proof that old-vine Melon takes on more substantial and complex characteristics than is generally associated with the grape. It's nutty and yeasty, with rich stone and tropical fruits, enlivened by an acidity that's still fresh six years after the vintage. I feel this wine will still be drinking well in another ten years. ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Château Musar 2003

A legendary wine from Lebanon, known for its volatile acidity and great ageing potential. I was delighted to find it on a pub wine list for just £45. Made from a unique combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan, and Cinsault, the twelve-year-old wine maintains its freshness from its almost aggressive acidity - for a red wine at least - gripping tannins, and black fruits, alongside mature aromas of dried fruits. It's a wonderfully appealing, individual wine on its own; perfect also with the roe deer, lamb, and duck dishes we enjoyed on a wet wintery night. ✪✪✪✪✪

Ioppa Ghemme 2004

This was the wine we had on Christmas Day to accompany the turkey. Ghemme is in northern Piemonte, where the wine is made mainly from Nebbiolo, making it a good-value alternative to the better known Barolo and Barbaresco. It's a little bit different from those famous areas, as the climate is cooler and the Vespolina grape is added (in this case 15%) to soften Nebbiolo's aggressive tannins. Age had also mellowed this wine, but the tannins were still firm, the acidity lively, with fresh red fruits: a perfect accompaniment to the rich turkey dish with roast and mashed potatoes. ✪✪✪✪✪

Muga Rioja Reserva 2009

Muga are a producer who merge the best of traditional Rioja and more modern trends. A mixture of old and new, French and American, oak is used to age the wines, retaining that slightly reductive funk one associates with old-fashioned Rioja while adding an oaky spiciness more contemporary drinkers are used to. This would also have been perfect with turkey, but we drank it by the fire while opening presents. It's light and supple enough to drink on its own, with that unexpected power and depth that Rioja at its best offers. ✪✪✪✪✪

Ridge Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 2009

One of the best value wines in California (at £30/$50), as the grapes come from the Monte Bello vineyard which produces the state's greatest Cabernet-based wine. I had hoped to age this wine longer, and even at six years old it was a little young, with its intense, firm, drying tannins. But it's still a beautiful, delicious, and quietly magnificent wine, with ripe black fruits evocative of California's sunny climate. We were also a little drunk by the time we opened this wine, at the end of Christmas Day. ✪✪✪✪✪✪

Syrah and Shiraz

Grape varieties are known by many different names: Tempranillo is also called Tinto Fino, Tinto de Madrid, Tinto País, Tinto de Toro, Ull de Llebre, Cencibel, Tinta Roriz, and Aragonês throughout Spain and Portugal. These different names come from local tradition and language differences – another Spanish grape Garnacha is known as Grenache in France and the rest of the world. The most famous name difference is Syrah, as it is called in France, and Shiraz, its Australian name.

Syrah’s spiritual home is the northern Rhône, in the small, hilly appellations of Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, and Cornas. This is as far north as Syrah will ripen, producing intense, gamey, long-lived red wines. In 1831, Scotsman James Busby travelled around England, France, and Spain, commissioned by the Australian government to bring back grape varieties potentially suitable for Australia’s warm climate. He brought nearly seven hundred grape cuttings, including Syrah, or Shiraz as it became known in Australia.

The name change has always been confusing: why did it develop a completely different name in Australia? I had always thought that because the Australian wine industry developed in relative isolation, the name of the grape had mutated locally, just as grape varieties had taken on different names throughout Europe. Australians also speculated that the grape had come from Shiraz in Persia (modern-day Iran, which is today the biggest grower of table grapes) rather than from France.

I was recently reading A History and Description of Modern Wines by Cyrus Redding, a textbook about wine first published in 1833, around the same time James Busby brought his cuttings to Australia. It’s an interesting book and still very readable. He lists dozens of different grape varieties grown across Europe, some of them now forgotten (Orleans, a grape once important in Germany), some familiar (Merlot, Grenache), and others that are familiar but spelt differently (Pineau, for instance). His description of the northern Rhône is the most surprising: "Hermitage is produced from the Scyras, or Shiraz grape." The name Syrah is not mentioned anywhere in the book.

This small detail would make it seem that the grape is called Shiraz in Australia because that was one of its French names when Busby was travelling around the country. Redding also notes that "it is said to have been brought from Persia," again showing that this theory about its origins is not an Australian invention, but one that had previously existed in France.

I went to James Busby’s account of his travels around France and Spain, Journal of a Tour through some of the vineyards of Spain and France (1833), to see what he called the grape. He spells it as Ciras, listing Scyras as an alternative. There seem to have been many spellings of the grape’s name. Busby spells it Ciras, Redding Scyras, and John Livingstone-Learmonth’s book The Wines of the Northern Rhône lists other spellings such as Syra, Chira, and Sirac. All of these spellings revolve around the word Shiraz, again suggesting that the origin for the Australian name is French.

Busby takes the story of the grape's Persian origins further: "the tradition ... exists in the neighbourhood [of Hermitage], that this variety was originally brought from Shiraz, in Persia, by one of the Hermits, who resided in the Hermitage of which the ruins still exist on the Hill where the celebrated wine of that name is produced." The theory that the grape came from Persia persisted until quite recently, but it was disproved by Carole Meredith of UC Davis. She discovered that the grape is probably the off-spring of Dureza, a grape found in nearby Ardèche, and Mondeuse, from Savoie to the east of the Rhône.

the Hermitage chapel, which dates back to the 1200s; photo from foodwineclick.com

Modern-day clones of Shiraz (and Chardonnay, which Busby calls Pineau Blanc or Chaudeny) in Australia can be traced back to Busby's original cuttings, but the grape nowadays grown in the northern Rhône is probably quite different from that of the 1830s. Cloning since the 1970s has focused on developing grapes with bigger berries, producing more expansive and riper flavours. The original, smaller Syrah still exists, called Sérine in Côte-Rôtie (as Redding himself notes) and Petite Syrah in Hermitage – not to be confused with California’s Petite Sirah, whose origins are yet another story.

The Tasting Room

Since moving to Napa nearly eighteen months ago, I have become closely acquainted with the tasting room. These can range in style from a casual lounge bar to cold sheds to a more formal, appointment-only setting. Nearly every winery has to have an area to greet customers, as on-site sales form an important part of their business. For the first few months I was here, I visited many tasting rooms, forming a view of California's wine culture through not just the wines themselves but the personalities and knowledge of those working in the tasting rooms. Then I got a job working in a tasting room, giving me a view from the other side. These are some of the things I've learnt about tasting rooms and American drinking habits.

the varietal

Americans use the word varietal interchangeably as adjective and noun - Chardonnay is a varietal, rather than a variety - and the varietal wine rules large. "I don't like blends" is a phrase often heard in the tasting room (the Californian rule for varietal wines is that it must be made from only 75% of that variety, meaning that many varietal wines are in actual fact blends). Those winemakers who wish to move away from varietal wines to more complex blends face an uphill struggle to convince customers that a wine isn't just about one grape variety (though one way to do that is to make a blend so expensive that customers will assume the wine is beyond criticism). The addiction to varietal wines also leads to set opinions that are hard to budge: "I don't like Chardonnay," is another frequent phrase heard (23% of wine sold in the US is single-varietal Chardonnay), followed by a refusal to taste anything made from Chardonnay.

sweetness

"Do you have any sweet wines?" is a question I am often asked, usually by someone from an older generation. I speculate that this continued fondness for sweet wines comes from the taste for underfermented wine developed during Prohibition. It's certainly remarkable how many drinkers don't like anything that isn't sweet, leading to the popularity of "port" (locally made fortified wine that doesn't care for any international naming rules) and White Zinfandel. Wines that are dry but have ripe fruit flavours are often mistaken for being sweet, and it's hard to explain that sweetness in a wine comes from sugar.

the bachelorette party

It used to be the stag group, but is there anything more horrific than a bachelorette party (a hen night in the UK)? A group of young women, all scantily clad with an obligatory large sun hat to protect the exposed skin, being driven around in a limousine, while drinking copious amounts of wine all day long. They're shrill, deafening, drunk, and often very rude: having to deal with them is not quite what I got into wine for.

the walk-ins

Both Napa and Sonoma each have nearly 500 wineries. The main reason people from across the country visit the two counties is to go to the tasting rooms and taste wine, yet there are people who come with no interest in wine whatsoever. They drive all the way to a winery, walk in and say they're just having a look; or they just want to buy some merchandise as a momento of their visit to wine country (branded coasters are very popular); or they may be a couple who have had an argument and realise they want to spend even less time together in public than they do in a car. "Do you want to taste some wine?" I ask. "Not today." It's rather like going to an art gallery and not wanting to look at the art.

the vines

autumn vines

In quieter moments, I look up from the tasting room and see Zinfandel vines planted in the 1940s. They're beautiful, with their thick trunks, bushy canopies, individually planted rather than on trellises. There are even a couple of rows planted in the 1880s. They speak of California's history, when it was still young and developing, and of the European immigrants who helped establish the wine industry. Here they still are, rather humbling, and a reminder of the intimate connection between wine and nature.

spitting

It doesn't happen. The wine is there to be drunk, not merely tasted. To spit or pour away the wine is a waste: "my father would turn in his grave if he saw me pouring good wine away."

the British accent

John Peel, the late British radio DJ, first made his name in the US in the early 1960s by exaggerating his Liverpool accent to take advantage of the British Invasion led by the Beatles. My British accent is likewise an advantage: Americans assume I am knowledgeable, erudite even, and to be trusted. It's a little embarrassing, but what can I do?

the locals

These are the people who have seen Napa and Sonoma change from small rural communities into internationally recognised wine regions. They remember jug wine, collecting it as children for their parents; they've ridden horses and seen funeral processions go through the vineyards; they recall the personalities who have shaped California wine, some of them famous, some of them unknown. They show how young, yet how rich, California's history is.

Chablis

"A dry wine, diuretic, and it tastes flinty." That's a description of Chablis from the 1830s which - although I don't know if Chablis makes one go to the toilet any more than other wines - mostly still holds true today. The wines, almost always from Chardonnay, have such high acidity from the cool climate that they feel dryer than most, furthered by a mineral, chalky, flinty mouthfeel. Those dry, often austere, flavours can make Chablis a difficult wine, appealing more to those with acidity fetishes than those who like their wines rich and fruity. However, as I have recently discovered tasting the wines of one Chablis producer, this perception of Chablis is complicated by a surprising variety of styles.

the appellation

Chablis is south west of Paris, one of the furthest north regions in France where quality wine is made. Back in the nineteenth century, when it supplied much of Paris's wine, the vineyards extended further south to connect it with the rest of Burgundy. However, after phylloxera hit and the railway connected Paris to the cheap wines of Languedoc, the lower-quality vineyards weren't replanted, meaning that there now exists a 100km gap between Chablis and the Côte d'Or. During the twentieth century, Chablis began to retreat even further: the cool climate results in spring frosts that can wipe out a vintage before it's even begun. The 40,000ha planted in the 1880s had reduced to 500 by the 1950s. Spring frost is now countered by sprinklers and heaters, which have led to a resurgence in the region, with plantings back up to around a still small 3,000ha.

Chablis is divided up into Chablis AC, the broad appellation whose quality can vary; the Premier Cru vineyards, which controversially extend into areas not traditionally associated with quality Chablis; and Grand Cru, seven vineyards on a slope overlooking the village. There's also Petit Chablis, whose soils are different from the rest of Chablis and which can produce good-quality and good-value wine.

the producer

Laroche are a producer I've found hard to avoid: one of their wines was a staple of hangingditch, the shop I worked at in Manchester, and now the wines are imported into the US by Wilson Daniels, whom my wife works for - which is why I've had the chance to taste their wines recently. One of the most interesting aspects of Laroche is that they are one of the few top French producers to use screwcap closures on all of their wines, even the expensive Grands Crus - or at least they were until recently, as their new vintages have returned to cork closures. They're coy about why they have made this return, but one can only conclude they feel that the guaranteed cleanliness of the wines comes at the expense of their ageing capabilities. We are still at an early stage of understanding how wines may age under screwcaps, but Laroche have been quick to abandon the experiment, perhaps because the quality of corks has improved greatly over the last ten years.   

from screwcap to cork

the wines

St-Martin 2014 (c.$30)

Made from grapes taken from selections of Laroche's 60ha of holdings around Chablis, their entry-level wine has the high acidity characteristic of the region. What I like about it is the body and weight that comes from eight months of lees ageing, meaning that the acidity doesn't overly dominate. It needs those nutty, bready aromas from the lees, because otherwise the aromas would be rather too neutral. ✪✪✪✪

Les Vaudevey Premier Cru 2013 (c.$46)

Of the wines listed here, this perhaps feels - despite some oak ageing - the most classically Chablis: a very restrained nose of lemons and lightly baked apples, with high acidity and a dry finish on the palate. There's a slight creaminess from those baked apple aromas, with some nutmeg. It's all very subtle, and I'd like to try this with a food equally high in acidity. ✪✪✪✪

Les Vaillons Vieilles Vignes Premier Cru 2013 (c.$53)

The "vieilles vignes" aren't that old, planted in the 1970s and 80s, but the nose is more expressive and there is more weight to the wine on the palate than the previous Premier Cru. It's that extra weight which distinguishes the two wines, as the baked apple and nutmeg aromas are otherwise quite similar. ✪✪✪✪✪

Les Blanchots La Réserve de la Obedience Grand Cru 2012 (c.$165)

This is the stand-out wine, but also the one that's least typical of Chablis, with a rich, oaky creaminess that lends the wine a true Burgundy feel (the wine has been aged in 25% new oak). However, the acidity is still bracingly high, refusing to let the oak drag the wine down into a heavy brusqueness. This is like Burgundy on acid. ✪✪✪✪✪✪✪

Chablis, with its acidity and restrained aromas, is still not a region I have quite come to grips with. I would certainly like to experience more Chablis producers to gain a better overall understanding of exactly how the Premier and Grand Cru wines differ from each other - Patrick Piuze is one producer worth indulging in. But having recently tasted these wines at home and at various events, I now appreciate the variety of styles made in Chablis, which have far greater body and weight than I previously appreciated, even if they all share one characteristic: acidity. 

WSET Educator Course

This blog has had a bit of a hiatus recently, as I was busy preparing for - and then doing - a WSET Educator Training course in San Francisco. The course was an intense, challenging, yet highly rewarding experience, which I feel has improved my teaching methods and helped me greatly understand what the WSET want students to learn from their courses - something I've wanted to get to the bottom of for a long time.

the course

Just to give an idea of the intensity of the course: I walked into the classroom at 8:30 on Monday morning, to be greeted by Master of Wine David Wrigley, who created the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting and who was leading the course. At the back of the room sat another MW, Mary Ewing-Mulligan of the International Wine Center in New York, and two MWs in training, Jim Gore of the WSET and Mary Vari from Toronto's Independent Wine Education Guild. As introductions go, that's as intimidating as it gets.

Feeling intimidated at the beginning of the course is quite usual, though, and the friendliness and support of the teaching staff quickly became clear. Together with the tutors, the class, which featured students from the US, Canada, and Jamaica, formed a strong bond which saw us through some challenging sessions.

The first day was mostly spent learning about best teaching methods. My favourite advice for preparing a lesson was that you should create a list of topics where knowledge is assumed, those that must be covered, those that could be covered, and those that must not. As well as being a good preparation tool, this really clarified what was expected of students at the different WSET levels. Those levels are divided into Beginner (Level 1), Intermediate (Level 2), and Advanced (Level 3). An important thing I learnt is that Level 1 is aimed at those in the service industry wanting, or having, to do a one-day course, while Level 2 is for those who want a more in-depth knowledge of wine. However, both courses are for students who have no assumed prior knowledge.

Having learnt this, we were given a series of facts about Chablis to divide into assumed, must cover, could cover, and must not for a Level 2 class. Each group of would-be teachers placed the most basic facts about Chablis into assumed knowledge. As David pointed out, we'd all fallen into a carefully-laid trap: there is no assumed knowledge at Level 2.

Realising the difference between each level was one of the most valuable aspects of the course. Level 2 is, I finally learnt, called Understanding the Label for a reason: at the end of the level, students should be able to explain a wine label - what the wine tastes like, what the terms mean, what the grape varieties used are. Meanwhile, at Level 3, which is called Understanding Style and Quality, it's about the why - why the wine tastes like it does.

On the second morning, we were led through the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting by Jim Gore, in which I had to give a tasting on a standard Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Again, most valuable was understanding the approach the WSET wants for each level: Level 1 is quite simple, learning about the different basic types and styles of wine; Level 2 is about how the taste of a wine reflects what's on the label; while Level 3 is about why the wine tastes like it does, going much further into describing its different structural elements.

I also learnt that the WSET are going to formally add BLIC (Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity) to the Level 3 Systematic Approach to Tasting. This is a way of assessing the quality of the wine which, although not perfect, makes it clearer than before what students should be looking for in a wine when drawing conclusions on the wine's quality. Is the wine balanced? How long is the finish? How intense are the aromas? How complex is the wine? Although the student still has to write an accurate tasting note that logically leads to quality conclusions, using BLIC will help focus students when thinking about quality. (Another change when the WSET Level 3 is relaunched in August is that the spirits component of the book is to be removed, with a separate Level 3 for spirits to be created at some point.)

teaching

By far the most intimidating and challenging aspect was being assessed teaching. On the afternoon of the second day, we all had to give a 15-minute class on an assigned topic, in my case German labelling terms. Teaching the topic also required creating a PowerPoint presentation and a detailed session plan. Despite plenty of experience teaching, I have never been so nervous presenting in front of a class. Maybe it was the two MWs at the back of the room assessing me; maybe it was because all the pretend Level 2 students in my class were my peers already holding or studying for the Diploma. My presentation went well enough and got good feedback from both the assessors and the other students, but my throat was dry, I stammered for words, and wasn't as coherent as I wanted to be. Fortunately, the third day was mostly free to revise our presentations and work with fellow students to help us improve: the collegiate nature of the course definitely benefitted everyone's presentations and confidence, including my own.

assessment

The final day saw us being formally assessed, and after three days of learning, studying, and practising, I felt no way near as nervous as I did for the practice assessment.

The fifteen-minute class was immediately followed by a ten-minute tasting also at Level 2; in my case the wine was a Chianti Classico. Although we were only able to taste the wines a few minutes before our assessments, we had been promised that the wines would be typical of their region. My Chianti Classico was certainly that, and it was quite straightforward talking the class through the red fruits, high acidity, and medium tannins of the Sangiovese. 

After the morning-long assessment, we all sat in a large room waiting to be called in and told whether we had passed or not. The hours passed as we waited, nervously joking with one another. Three hours later, I was finally called in to be told I had passed and I had the makings of a very good teacher.

This means I am now fully qualified to teach Level 2. Once I have finally finished the Diploma (just the fortified wine unit to go), I will have to return to become a fully accredited WSET Educator by teaching a Level 3 tasting and learning how to mark Level 3 papers. Then, I hope, I will never have to do an exam again.

Mercurey

Mercurey is an appellation too easily passed by: when I visited Burgundy earlier this year, we drove straight from Santenay, the Côte d'Or's most southerly appellation, to Beaujolais, missing out on Mercurey and the other Chalonnaise and Mâconnais winemaking areas. At the time, I regretted not being able to explore these overlooked areas, but that's the way it goes sometimes. However, even passing through I was able to appreciate the green, pastoral countryside of the Chalonnaise, quite different from the wide, stony land of the Côte d'Or. In the Chalonnaise, there is less of an emphasis on winemaking than in the Côte d'Or: there are cows, sheep, trees, and grass, the vineyards spread out between villages and farmsteads.

It's also far less celebrated than the Côte d'Or, meaning its wines do not fetch the high prices of its famous neighbour. The wines attract less attention and fervour, but still retain the high quality expected of Burgundy. All this means great wine can be had for affordable prices, not always the case in Burgundy.

history

The Chalonnaise is to the west of the river port of Chalon-sur-Saône, a town whose importance dates back to Roman times. The name of Mercurey itself gives away the area's Roman roots: it's called after the Roman temple built there to Mercury, the god of commerce and thievery. The Saône is a large, historic trading river that winds its way through southern Burgundy and Beaujolais down to Lyon, where it connects with the Rhône. As ever, wine and trade are historically connected. The wines were highly valued by the Dukes of Burgundy - Philip the Bold called them "the best and most precious" wines in 1395 - but their relative distance from the centres of Beaune and Dijon kept them away from a proper appreciation of their quality, a situation which still exists today.

Côte Chalonnaise

The Chalonnaise winemaking region is just 25km long and 5km wide, a narrow stretch of land whose vineyards are scattered between farmers' fields. Its wines constitute 16% of Burgundy's total production. There are five villages which have their own appellations: Bouzeron (Burgundy's only senior appellation for the Aligoté grape), Rully (known for its sparkling wine under the Crémant de Bourgogne appellation), Mercurey, Givry, and Montagny, which produces the best white wine in the region. Although Chalonnaise is a continuation of the Côte d'Or, it has a variety of soils creating a real diversity of styles of wines around the region.

Mercurey

the vineyards of Mercurey, with wines tasted highlighted

The variety of soils is most realised in Mercurey, a small village to the north of the Chalonnaise. Vineyards face north/north-east, while others face south/south-west. Altitude is as important as aspect, as Mercurey is in a valley with styles of wines changing according to the vineyard's position in the valley. There are five different types of marl soils and another fifteen of limestone, changing from pebbly, stony, and shallow limestone to deep soils near the river without any limestone. It's a large appellation, which accounts in part for its diversity (only Chablis and Pouilly-Fuissé are bigger). 3.5m bottles are produced a year, 15% of which are white and the rest red. There are 32 Premiers Crus vineyards, covering 168ha (27% of the area); no Grands Crus, and no plans for any - Mercurey needs to get its wines better known around the world, rather than enter the painful world of French wine bureaucracy.

I attended a tasting of six Mercurey wines, one white and five red, which was interesting proof of the village's diversity, quality, and value. The wines were surprisingly fruit forward for Burgundy, meaning that they are likely to appeal to a wide range of consumers, but did not lack for complexity. The diversity may make it difficult to explain Mercurey to consumers, but the wines can be summed up in two words: fruits and acidity.

Mercurey wines

Maison Louis Max Les Rochelles 2013

From a co-operative producer, this was the one white we tasted, and it was a classy example of a Burgundy Chardonnay. A smoky nose at first, with fresh, ripe fruit aromas of pears, nectarines, and apricots. There was a dry, stony, flinty aspect to the palate, which is apparently characteristic of Mercurey, giving the wine a very nice texture, followed up with a crisp pear finish and white pepper spices. As with the reds, the acidity was high and refreshing, lightening the smoky, oak nature. ✪✪✪✪✪

Domaine de l'Europe Les Closeaux 2013 (c.$30)

The only village Mercurey we tasted, and the most fruit forward and immediate. The nose was very fruity and Pinot Noir, with raspberries and red cherries. The tannins were lightly grainy, with refreshing acidity. A simple, straightforward, if very pleasant wine: I was surprised to learn that the wine retails for a rather pricey $30 when one of the virtues of Mercurey's wines is its value. ✪✪✪✪

Domaine Nathalie & Jean-Claude Theulot Les Champs Martin Premier Cru 2013 ($37)

A darker colour and a much more complex nose, with restrained red and black fruit aromas of strawberries and blackberries. Taking time to open up, there were also subtle aromas of orange pith, paprika, and liquorice, as well as smoke and oak. On the palate, there was a refreshing acidity; the fruits were ripe and intense, with more liquorice and paprika aromas, while the tannins were firm and structured. An exceptional wine: and at $37 for a Premier Cru it reaffirmed my belief in the value of Mercurey. ✪✪✪✪✪

Domaine François Raquillet Les Vasées Premier Cru 2013

The reds we tasted moved further south around the appellation with each wine. The soils change, as does the elevation, and the difference between the wines was noticeable. This was much fruitier, ripe and rich, with vanilla and coffee beans also marking the wine out. A very open wine, with soft, unaggressive, but structured tannins. The vines are fifty-five years old, definitely adding a fruity concentration to the wine. ✪✪✪✪✪

Château de Chamirey Les Clos du Roi Premier Cru 2012

The use of oak varied in the reds: for me, 25-30% new oak seems optimum. This had 40% new oak, and it was too much, giving the wine a toasty, oaky character, augmented by clove aromas. Intense and tannic, the much-needed acidity lifted the wine out of its oaky heaviness. ✪✪✪✪

Domaine de Suremain En Sazenay Premier Cru 2012

Perhaps my favourite of the tasting and, in contrast to the previous wine, aged in just 10% new oak. However, the nose was quite closed and needed some thought to appreciate it. The palate really expressed the quality of the wine: the acidity was so lively and uplifting, indicating that it will last many more years, the tannins were ripe giving the wine a fruit quality that wasn't initially apparent on the nose, and the oak was balanced and integrated. ✪✪✪✪✪

The Value of Bordeaux

My difficulty with Bordeaux is that the wines I can afford to drink, I don't want; the wines I want to drink, I can't afford. Although the wines of Bordeaux are much imitated around the world, this is why their reputation has suffered in recent years. Inexpensive Bordeaux offers little of either the quality or value for money that similar wines from Australia, South Africa, Chile, or, indeed, other areas of France give, while the premium wines compete with more accessibly priced, yet still high quality, wines from all around the world (Napa is an exception to this rule, its market not too much different from Bordeaux's). Bordeaux relies too heavily on investors and the nouveaux riches of the US and China, instead of producing wines that the general consumer can afford to buy.

I went to a tasting in San Francisco that challenged this reading of Bordeaux's market, and which demonstrated that the Bordeaux wine industry is determined to compete at the lower end of the market by aiming to produce good-value, inexpensive wines. Whether those wines can compete with established New World brands remains to be seen.

whites

The dry white wine of Bordeaux has two advantages: it rarely fetches the exorbitant prices of the reds, making it often good value, and one of the two important grapes is Sauvignon Blanc, a grape riding the wave of international trends. The other grape is Sémillon, which back in the 1960s was the most planted grape in Bordeaux, black or white. Sémillon results in high-quality wines, but it's not fashionable, its waxy weightiness not always inviting. Put Sauvignon Blanc on a label, the wine sells; mention Sémillon, it stays on the shelf. As a result, Sauvignon Blanc is becoming more and more widely grown, and this is how the dry whites of Bordeaux are going to compete on the international stage.

There were sixteen dry white wines available to taste; eleven of them were Sauvignon Blanc dominant and these were the most inexpensive whites on show ($8-$20). They had characteristic grassy, vegetal aromas with a dry, refreshing acidity; simple, but pleasant and attractive wines. However, I am not sure how well they would fare on the international stage despite the affordable prices: the wines are not as pungently aromatic as New Zealand's, nor as steely and flinty as Loire's.

My overall impression is that $15 is when a dry white Bordeaux becomes interesting and engaging. That's also the price point when Sémillon becomes more involved in the blend, and the use of oak is more likely. My two favourite whites were Château Grand Abord (Graves, 2014; $17), which was 80% Sémillon and showed a creamy, lightly oaky spiciness and baked apples, and Château Respide-Médeville (Graves, 2013; $29), an almost equal blend of Sémillon and Sauvignon, with a little Muscadelle thrown in. The latter demonstrated everything good about white Bordeaux blends, with fresh, floral, stone fruit aromas, a nutty, spicy palate, with a refreshing acidity - but at $29 it's appealing to a very different market than the more inexpensive, green, vegetal Sauvignon Blancs.

reds

This is where pricing gets difficult and it's hard to find good-value wines. The inexpensive reds, which started at $10 at the tasting, just aren't that good. The tannins are bitter and green, the fruits far more restrained than similar wines from Australia or Chile, and there's little or no oak to give the wine structure or longevity. Most are not appealing, fruity, or forward enough for those consumers buying wine in the $10-15 range.

On the evidence of this tasting, quality red Bordeaux begins at around $25-30 and really kicks in at $30-40. That's a very difficult price bracket: more expensive than most consumers are willing to spend, competing with high-quality, arguably better value wines at the same price from around Europe and the rest of the world, but not expensive enough to attract the wealthiest customers.

Nevertheless, there are some good-value wines to be had for those willing to spend in that $30 price range. I was pleasantly surprised by the Bordeaux Supérieur appellation, which I had always dismissed as being rather basic (it can come from anywhere in Bordeaux, but has a slightly higher minimum level of alcohol than standard Bordeaux AC) - but it was only the pricey ones ($25-30) that impressed. The major appellations that offered good value were the Right Bank: being Merlot based and less aggressively tannic than the wines of the Haut-Médoc, they are fruity and inviting to drink at a young age. Château Moulin Pey-Labrie's 100% Merlot from Canon Fronsac ($28) had a lively acidity lifting the gripping tannins, with bright red plum and violet aromas, while Château de Viaud-Lalande's 2010 Pomerol ($30 - also 100% Merlot) had tannins well integrated with the ripe but not plump red fruits, with a nice spicy finish.

One more thing: Bordeaux's labels are hopelessly old-fashioned, most with a château seemingly drawn by a destitute artist from the nineteenth century possessing only a blunt pencil to draw with. In Bordeaux, a château simply refers to any winemaking enterprise - "a straggle of sheds," as Kingsley Amis puts it in On Drink, rather than an actual castle - but it devalues the whole Bordeaux brand when it's used with $10 bottles of wine. If Bordeaux is truly to compete with inexpensive wines from around the world, it needs to rethink its packaging as much as it does its quality.

Kingsley Amis on Drink

Kingsley Amis was a very funny writer, though he's rather unfashionable now for his middle England conservatism. This insularity, however, is part of the charm of On Drink, a book he wrote in the early 1970s. A very personal guide on how to drink properly, the book reveals the still nascent drinking habits of the new British middle class as well as Amis's own, often rather peculiar, tastes.

Amis centres his advice on drinking at home, in part because, in his view, "the pub is fast becoming uninhabitable" due to the constant presence of piped music and televisions and the rise of theme pubs. Amis was also writing in the 1970s, when middle-class dinner parties were becoming increasingly fashionable, and it is at would-be hosts that Amis aims his advice. His main concern "is not being given enough" to drink at such parties, but he goes on to tell exactly what should be bought, how it should be served, and, most importantly, how it should be drunk.

Kingsley Amis

He recommends a series of cocktails, or short drinks as he calls them, some of them classic - the martini or manhattan, for instance - some of them his own inventions, all described with painstaking and very precise instructions on how to prepare them. The Lucky Jim, named after his most famous novel, is "12 to 15 parts vodka, 1 part dry vermouth, 2 parts cucumber juice," with cucumber slices and ice cubes; Queen Victoria's Tipple is half a tumbler of red wine with Scotch: "The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once," he concludes, advice I have yet to follow. Another, The Iberian, calls for Bittall - apparently "a light (i.e. not heavy) port flavoured with orange peel" which Amis seems to like - dry sherry, and an orange slice, to which Amis adds: "I can hardly stop you if you decide to make your guests seem more interesting to you and to one another by mixing in a shot of vodka." He also recommends punches that would knock out the hardest drinker: The Careful Man's Peachy Punch contains 5 bottles of medium-dry white wine, 4 bottles of champagne cider, 2 bottles of British peach wine, 1 bottle of vodka, and 2lbs of peaches (Amis probably found the metric system a little too European).

Amis's advice to the nation's population of inexperienced hosts is so precise that it extends to listing the essential items a home bar should have, as well as the types of glasses it should be stocked with, for example: "A wine glass holding about eight ounces when full, though it's a sensible general rule not to fill it more than about two-thirds of the way up." There are still restaurants in the UK who could do with following the latter instruction.

Despite the many pages spent detailing how to prepare cocktails, for Amis, serving wine is "a lot of trouble, requiring energy and forethought," and he prefers the simplicity of taking a beer out of the fridge and opening it. Unfortunately for Amis, in early 1970s Britain, "The pro-wine pressure on everybody who can afford to drink at all is immense and still growing. To offer your guests beer instead of wine ... is to fly in the face of trend as well as established custom." Nevertheless, Amis has plenty of advice on how to buy wine and what to buy. Beaujolais "should be attacked in quantity, like beer, and, like beer, slightly chilled, and, like beer, as soon after bottling as you like." Italian wines, it would seem, were too much for drinkers in the '70s: "Some people will find some of the reds a little heavy (cut them with Pellegrino mineral water)."

Amis is at his funniest in describing an inevitable consequence of drink, the hangover. He divides the hangover in two: the physical and the metaphysical. The physical hangover is immediately recognisable, and needs to be dealt with on waking: "If your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and - on the assumption that you enjoy sex - you will feel toned up emotionally." After a morning of eating and doing as little as possible, at 12:30 "firmly take a hair of the dog that bit you." The dog does not have to be of a "particular breed," but "a lot of people will feel better after one or two Bloody Marys simply because they expect to."

The physical hangover dealt with, the metaphysical hangover is then addressed, firstly by recognising that it is only a hangover and nothing worse: "When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover." He recommends reading, particularly something gloomy: "I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ... its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have." He also recommends music - Tchaikovsky or Brahms, or "any slow Miles Davis track. It will suggest to you that, however gloomy life may be, it cannot be possibly as gloomy as Davis makes it out to be." I have to say that I prefer my own hangover entertainment to be a little lighter than Amis's.

Of course, the best way to avoid a hangover is not to get drunk, and Amis has plenty to say on this too. He advises not expending too much energy while drinking, especially by dancing: "A researcher is supposed once to have measured out two identical doses of drink, put the first lot down at a full-scale party and the second, some evenings later, at home with a book, smoking the same number of cigarettes on each occasion and going to bed at the same time. Result, big hangover and no hangover respectively. Sitting down whenever possible, then, will help you, and so, a fortiori, will resisting the tempation to dance, should you be subject to such impulses." Amis feels the importance of sitting down and not dancing so strongly that he italicises the instructions to stress their signficance.

He also makes the salient point that to blame a hangover on mixing one's drinks is to miss the real reason: "After three dry martinis and two sherries and two glasses of hock and four of burgundy and one of Sauternes and two of claret and three of port and two brandies and three whiskies-and-soda and a beer, most men will be very drunk and will have a very bad hangover. But might not the quantity be at work here?"

His final conclusion is one that any reader of this blog will find as equally difficult to follow as Amis did himself: "If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be."

When Zinfandel isn't Zinfandel

I am just about old enough to remember when it was officially declared in the mid-1990s that Zinfandel, California's most Californian grape, was the same as Italy's far less heralded Primitivo. This came as a blow to advocates of California wine: Zinfandel, grown throughout California since the nineteenth century, is, in its fruity, blowsy, unabashedly alcoholic way, California in a glass. In contrast, Primitivo comes from Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot, a region whose reputation rests on producing fruity, alcoholic wines to be anonymously blended into those from other cooler parts of Italy. It was like saying that Zinfandel is, ultimately, only good for White Zin.

As ever, the truth is a little more complicated. The DNA fingerprinting that confirmed the connection between Zinfandel and Primitivo also showed that the two are actually non-identical twins, and that neither originates from Italy. Furthermore, despite the clear similarities between the two grapes, the wines taste distinctly different: Zinfandel remains very much its own Californian thing, as winemakers firmly appreciate.

how did Zinfandel end up in California?

There's still a lot of speculation about the origins and etymology of Zinfandel, and many of the discoveries about where it came from have only emerged in the last twenty years. But a narrative has emerged: in the 1820s, an American called George Gibbs imported cuttings from Europe and one of the varieties was probably what we now call Zinfandel - called Zanfandel and Zinfindel in New England (Zinfandel's name may be because the grape was misidentified as being called Tzinifándli, which is actually an obscure Hungarian white grape). He took it to Boston, where it was grown in greenhouses and used as a table grape. It's difficult to think of a climate less suitable to Zinfandel than cool, wintery New England. Rightly overlooked as a table grape, Zinfandel crossed continental America during the Gold Rush, settling in the Sierra Foothills where gold was first discovered and then around San Francisco. This is what I love about Zinfandel: its history in California begins at the same point that California's own history begins, with the influx of American and European immigrants into the state in search of sunshine and gold.

After its arrival in Napa and Sonoma in the 1850s, Zinfandel quickly became the most planted grape in California. The wines, though, were not the single-varietal wines Americans are now most familiar with; instead, the wines were field blends, made from a number of varieties planted in the same vineyard. Most important in these blends were Petite Sirah, still an important blending grape in Zinfandel wines, Carignan, and inferior varieties such as Alicante Bouschet. Some wineries still make these field blends: Acorn in Sonoma make a wine from over 60 varieties, while Ridge, one of California's greatest wineries, make some of the state's best Zinfandel from old-vine field blends.

so where did it come from?

Mike Grgich is one of California's most important winemakers, emigrating to the US from Croatia in the 1950s. Upon seeing and tasting Zinfandel, he immediately thought that it was the same as a Croatian grape he had grown up with called Plavac Mali. When it was discovered that Zinfandel and Primitivo were both clones of a different variety, he and others urged UC Davis researchers to see if he was right: they found that Plavac Mali was actually an off-spring of Zinfandel. Encouraged by that connection, they tested other Croatian grape varieties and found one that was both identical to Zinfandel and indigenous to Croatia: Crljenak Kaštelanski. At the time, in 2001, there were just nine vines of the variety left in Croatia, all growing wild. It really is very impressive that Grgich was able to identify the Croatian background of California's most individual grape, and that the researchers were able to find the Crljenak Kaštelanski variety before it went completely extinct.

the twentieth century, lest we forget

Old-Vine Zinfandel is now a term much seen on wine labels, first used in the late 1960s. There are many plantings throughout California, dating back to the 1880s particularly in Lodi and Sonoma, and it's amazing that these plantings still exist. California was hit by phylloxera in the 1890s, and then Prohibition. Vines of all varieties were ripped up in the 1920s, and replaced by Alicante Bouschet, a dark, intense, simple variety that home winemakers could make easily and claim to be wine.

After Prohibition and the Second World War, California slowly began to rebuild its wine industry, but Zinfandel was not the focus of that renaissance. It was seen as too old-fashioned, simple, and rustic, and French grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon were preferred for the higher-quality wines that were redefining California's reputation around the world. As much as I abhor White Zinfandel, the popularity of that style in the 1980s allowed the old vines to survive. Zinfandel was then subject to another trend: hang-time, allowing the grapes to stay on the vine beyond normal ripening to maximise sugar levels and therefore alcohol. The strongest Zinfandel, a grape naturally high in alcohol, which I have tasted is 16.5%.

That's fortified wine. But California and Zinfandel don't care. Part of the 2005 EU-US trade agreement allowed California wines to label their wines above 15%, which is the legal cut-off point for wine in the EU. California creates its own rules, which the rest of the world is sometimes forced to follow.

where we are now

I've been here in California for 15 months now, and I've come to the firm conclusion that wines from Zinfandel are some of the most expressive that California has to offer. The alcohol in the wine is slowly getting into balance - 15% for Zinfandel is natural and balanced, if high - and the use of French and American oak adds structure. And the great strength of Zinfandel is the old vines; not that many places around the world have 130-year-old vines, which result in wines with an intense, concentrated joyfulness.

Zinfandel? or not Zinfandel?

Croatia

Dubrovački Podrumi Crljenak 2012 ($27)

Croatia's vineyards are located near the Adriatic Sea, the cooling influence of which creates beautifully aromatic white wines and tannic reds. This maritime climate was apparent in the wine: the red fruits didn't have that alcoholic ripeness of Zinfandel and the palate had drying, rather than ripe tannins. Nevertheless, there was a rich complexity, with dried blueberries, prunes, paprika spices, cedar, and smoke, besides the red fruits. There was a subtle, difficult element to this wine, which emphasised just how Californian and upfront Zinfandel is, as did the 13.5% alcohol - there's few, if any, California Zins with this low alcohol nowadays. I don't like the terms "New World" and "Old World," as they simplify the complex variety of wines made around the world, but this was a case in point of how European wines can have such a different style from those made, for instance, here in California. ✪✪✪✪✪

Grgić Plavac Mali 2010 ($37)

As it's made by Mike Grgich himself, it's not surprising that this was a much fruitier and more Californian wine than the Crljenak. Plavac Mali is the grape that Grgich thought was Zinfandel, and he now makes a varietal wine from his native Croatia. The alcohol likewise was at Zinfandel levels, of 14.8%. Nevertheless, the fruits still weren't quite as jammy, and were much blacker. The wine too wasn't as spicy as either the Crljenak or a typical Zinfandel. I liked this wine, but I felt it could have benefited from being a little more Croatian and a little less Californian, as it fell somewhere in between. ✪✪✪✪

Puglia

Tenute Rubino Punta Aquila Primitivo 2012 ($16.99)

Much more like a Zinfandel, with its ripe red and blue fruits, smoky nose, and spicy palate. Primitivo, as its name suggests, is an early ripener, more so than Zinfandel. This means that the fruits here weren't quite as richly jammy as Zinfandel's, though the alcohol was still high (14.5%). Interest in Primitivo has soared since its identification with Zinfandel, with lots of single-varietal wines being made in Puglia. This has drawn more attention to Puglia, where the wines are slowly getting better and better. Although this is a good thing, Primitivo isn't Puglia's best grape - it's traditionally been used for blending - and the increased number of Primitivo wines doesn't necessarily showcase the best that Puglia has to offer. ✪✪✪

The grape identified as the same as Zinfandel produced the wine most unlike it, while the two grapes which are closely related but slightly different were most like a California Zin. Which, ultimately, just goes to show that the climate, the soil, and the winemaker are just as important in how a wine tastes as the grape variety itself.

The Winemaker and the Custom Crush

Back when I worked in Manchester for hangingditch wine merchants, one of our most popular wineries was Napa's Peter Franus. This was partly because my colleague Sophia Luckett adored the wines and would sell them to unassuming customers at any opportunity; she even hosted a winemakers' dinner in an underground, disused bank vault with Franus. The wines' popularity was also because of their forward, fruity style: these were wines that spoke loudly and clearly, true to their California origin.

Sophia visited Napa last week, exploring the genesis of some of the wines we once sold in the shop together. On her very last morning before braving the San Francisco traffic to get to the airport, we made something of a pilgrimage to visit Peter Franus's production facilities just a few miles north of Napa.

assistant winemaker Tim Dolven, Sophia, and Peter Franus

The experience was somewhat different from what we had been expecting. Rather than the romantic image of the winemaker slaving to make the perfect wine in dusty, dirty, ramshackle conditions that the name "Peter Franus" had evoked in far away Manchester, Franus makes his wine in a custom crush facility shared by forty other labels, together producing 400,000 cases a year. With his 4,500 cases, Franus is just a small cog in the machine, but the mechanical reality of winemaking was evident.

Peter Franus has been making wine for decades - he was winemaker at Mount Veeder winery from 1981 until 1992. He has had his own label since the late 1980s, but he has never had his own physical winery. He first used Mount Veeder's facilities, then others', before settling on Laird Family Estate in 2002, where he's still based.

Laird themselves make 25,000 cases a year, but their large and impressive facilities are mainly used for custom crush, an enterprise they established in 2001. Custom crush is a brilliant idea, mainly - I thought - used for amateur enthusiasts to make wine. It allows the latter to use the facilities of large, established operations without having to buy any of the equipment themselves, while drawing on the wineries' experience and expertise. They can be as active and involved in the winemaking process as they wish, or be completely hands-off and allow the winery to produce the wine for them.

Peter Franus isn't the first producer I've met who has used custom crush facilities at other wineries to make wine. Waits-Mast, an excellent producer of Sonoma and Mendocino Pinot Noir, first started making their wine this way, although they now have their own (shared) production facilities in San Francisco. What surprised me about Franus continuing to use a large operation like Laird's is the lack of control it affords him over the winemaking. Everything is done by Laird rather than Franus, albeit under his instructions: the pressing and crushing of the grapes, fermentation, any treatment of the wines in barrel, bottling. The only thing Franus has to take charge of is storing and selling the wines.

Does this make the wines less 'authentic'? Everything is still done as Peter Franus and his assistant winemaker Tim Dolven ask; he buys the grapes from his favoured vineyards around Napa; the wines are aged and blended as he wants; they are bottled under his label and taste recognisably his. Franus also follows the philosophy of intervening as little as possible in the development of a wine. I still find it difficult, however, to imagine many other serious winemakers willingly ceding so much control to such a large operation.

In the meantime, Peter Franus is becoming increasingly popular in a UK more attuned to California's wines - in fact, very little of his wine is sold locally. Compared to the extortionate prices many Napa wines fetch, they present very good value. We got to taste several of his wines, mainly from the barrel.

2015 Chardonnay

Still fermenting in its barrel and a little bit sweet and grapey. Even at this early stage, though, it was possible to sense its potential: there was already a bit of spiciness from the oak, with rich stone and tropical fruit flavours. The wine will also undergo some malolactic fermentation.

2014 and 2015 Albariño

It's very unusual to see Albariño in Napa Valley. The grapes are sourced from a vineyard just south of the city next to Highway 29, where it's not that far from the cooling maritime influence of San Pablo Bay. This allows the wine to maintain its acidity and gives it a saline quality that makes it surprisingly similar to those of wet Galicia, which Albariño is native to. Even though the still-fermenting 2015 was a little bit sweet, it was still possible to sense the stony, drying acidity that was more immediately apparent in the bottled 2014.

2014 and 2015 Zinfandel

From a vineyard on Mt. Veeder, these two wines had the rich fruitiness typical of the grape but with noticeable tannins from the cooler altitude. The 2015, again still fermenting in its stainless steel tank, tasted like acidic, fruity, tannic grape juice; the 2014, ageing in oak, now tasted like wine, and a very good one at that.
 

Szamorodni

One of the great winemaking regions of the world is Tokaj. First mentioned in the fifteenth century, the wines are made in north-east Hungary near the Slovakian border. The area was the first to create rules to oversee the production of its wines, including on the use of manure. The most famous wines are sweet, but as I wrote in a blog late last year, there is considerable variety to the wines, with some extremely good dry wines being made from Tokaj's most important grape, Furmint.

Over the centuries, many different styles have emerged, from bone dry to the syrupy sweet Eszencia - at up to 600g/L of residual sugar, it was used as a medicinal in the nineteenth century. While I was studying for my Diploma Unit 3 exam, I became interested in one of the styles called Szamorodni, because it's aged under a film of yeast like a fino. I tracked down a bottle, but, as there was no chance of it being in my Diploma tasting exam, I only just got round to drinking it.

Szamorodni

The grapes used for sweet Tokaji are dried, shrunken, and often botrytised, carefully picked very late in the harvest (historically, on the third hoeing). In contrast, grapes for Szamorodni are not specifically selected, instead being a mixture of healthy, shrivelled, and botrytised berries. Very popular in Poland in the early 1800s, Szamarodni means "as it comes off the vine" in Polish.   

Szamorodni can be made in both a dry (száraz in Hungarian) and a slightly sweet (édes) style. Although it has the same name, the dry style is quite different from the sweet. Dry Szamorodni is aged in cellars covered with a mould called Claspodorium cellare; it also has a layer of yeasts, which are native to the area, on top of it, protecting it from oxygen and other bacteria. Over the ageing period, alcohol evaporates from the wine without any water loss, meaning that the wine loses half a percent of alcohol. Unlike a fino, there is no fortification, although alcohol is naturally high (at around 14%) due to the sugar content in the shrivelled and botrytised grapes.

Samuel Tinon Szamorodni Száraz 2007 ($45.99; 500ml)

Samuel Tinon is a Frenchman who travelled all around the world - including Jerez and Jura, where similar wines to Szamorodni are made - before settling in Tokaj. The wine was aged on its lees for six months, before spending five years in small oak barrels. It's best served at cellar temperature, so refrigerate for 20-30 minutes before serving.

The oxidative nature of the wine could be smelt as soon as I opened the bottle: potent, nutty, and, for want of a better word, sherry-like. A light amber colour, on the palate it was richly textured, more like an amontillado than a fino, with baked apple and crème brûlée flavours. In fact, as the wine opened up, the aromas made me think of a just-developing palo cortado. The Furmint and Hárslevelű grapes also provide naturally nutty and spicy aromas, such as marzipan, all-spice, and paprika. A quite extraordinary wine: reminiscent of different styles of sherry, but with higher acidity and more aromatics from the grapes. ✪✪✪✪✪✪

with cheese

I tasted the Szamorodni with three different cheeses - manchego (thinking of the sherry connection), gouda, and English cheddar. I thought the rich, nutty texture of the wine would complement the manchego particularly well, but it may be that the two were both too dry together. Instead, it was the English cheddar - quite a simple one bought in a supermarket - that worked wonderfully with the wine: the crumbly creaminess of the cheese softened the nutty, oxidative wine while also soaking up the rich, creamy flavours.  

This Szamorodni was a complex, engaging wine that makes me want to seek out other examples. Despite being drawn to it by its similarities with fino, it was nevertheless something very individual. Aged in small oak barrels in mouldy cellars from grapes grown on volcanic soils, it was different both from the famous sweet wines of Tokaj and the classic wines of sherry. Expensive, unusual, and great with cheddar: my kind of wine.

Oregon: Confused but not Dazed

When I recently visited Jim Clendenen of Santa Barbara's Au Bon Climat, he described Oregon as the most confused place on the planet. As a fellow Pinot Noir (and Chardonnay) producer, he found it hard to understand why so many producers were searching out difficult sites that result in low yields and, consequently, high-priced wine. The emphasis on difficult sites may produce individual wines with distinct character, but it makes it almost impossible for producers to run a commercially successful business, at least on a scale that allows their wines to be known out of the state.

Two years previously, I had visited Willamette Valley - Oregon's most important wine-producing area - and I understood what Clendenen meant. Many wineries were making expensive, single-vineyard Pinot Noirs, all of which were very good but at prices which were difficult to justify. I thought that Oregon producers needed to diversify the range of their wines to make them both more affordable and engaging. This week I attended a tasting of Oregon's wines in San Francisco called Pinot in the City, and I was interested to see just how Oregon had progressed in explaining itself to the outside world.

a little history

Oregon's winemaking history is young, beginning in the 1960s. The major protagonist in its development was David Lett, who died in 2008. He studied at UC Davis and decided, against his professors' advice, that Oregon was the best place to plant his favoured Alsace and Burgundy varieties. He planted Pinot Noir in the Dundee Hills - now the prime AVA for the grape - in 1965, establishing Eyrie Vineyards, still Oregon's best and most distinctive producer.

Sometime later, in 1979, his 1975 Pinot drew attention at a Paris tasting: Robert Drouhin of Burgundy was so impressed that he entered the same wine into a more formal tasting in Beaune the next year, where it came second only to Drouhin's own Burgundy red. Oregon, an obscure, Pacific state, was all of a sudden on the international map for Pinot Noir. Robert Drouhin took his admiration further, encouraging his daughter, Véronique, to work in Oregon after completing her oenology degree in Dijon in 1984. Three years later, Domaine Drouhin of Oregon was established with Véronique as the winemaker. That French backing further cemented Oregon’s reputation.

The last few years have seen an astonishing growth in the number of producers, including those from elsewhere in the US and France. Despite the growing industry, the state’s wineries remain very family-orientated: both a virtue and a vice.

Domaine Drouhin

Pinot Noir

As a cool-climate grape, Pinot Noir is not an obvious fit for the USA. California’s Pinots were until recently fruity, oaky, made like a light-coloured Cabernet, which is one of the reasons why David Lett and others decided Oregon was a better fit for the grape. The cool, and often wet climate certainly suits Pinot Noir, and it now dominates plantings. Of all the New World Pinot Noir regions, Oregon is the one that produces wines most similar to Burgundy: high acidity, lightly ripe red fruits, with earthy game flavours even in the younger wines. However, I am not sure that Oregon producers have the confidence to allow the grape to speak for itself: many of the wines I tasted at Pinot in the City were aged in 40% new French oak. In some cases, this use of oak was well integrated, but in many the oak was too obvious, resulting in over-aggressive, spicy flavours. Oregon’s coolness and its variety of soils don’t necessarily need that much intervention.

Nevertheless, I drew two positive conclusions from the tasting. The quality of the Pinot Noirs was consistently high, even if too much oak was being used. Moreover, although Oregon is a young wine region, enough producers go back long enough to demonstrate the longstanding quality and substance of the state's Pinots. I tasted several library wines, dating back to the 1990s (including a giant 1994 Methusalem). The spicy game I encountered in the younger wines had matured into a measured, animal earthiness, with both red and black fruits fresh enough to make the wines still immediate and appealing. It may well be that Oregon's Pinots are, rather like Burgundy's, best laid down than drunk young.

Pinot Noir at Adelsheim (2013)

other grapes

Nearly two-thirds of Oregon's grapes are Pinot Noir. No other major wine region has such a dependency on one variety - only New Zealand with its Sauvignon Blanc comes close. Where there's Pinot, there should be Chardonnay, but Oregon has a chequered history with the grape. Chardonnay clones more suited to California were initially planted so that most producers became convinced that the grape could not succeed there. One exception to this was David Lett, who planted his own cuttings taken from European vines planted in the 1930s: Eyrie's Chardonnays are still some of the best, ageworthy, and unique white wines from anywhere in the USA.

In the early 1990s, the French came up with an answer for Oregon's Chardonnay issue: clones of the grape taken from Burgundy, popularly called Dijon Clones, which were much more suitable to Oregon's climate. Scarred by their experience with Chardonnay, too few producers take advantage of these clones, but those that do make exceptional Chardonnays, with crisp, dry acidity and an almost raw texture. I believe that Chardonnay offers an alternative future for Oregon but only a handful of producers seem to dare to share that vision. I don't like to encourage yet more wines from such a ubiquitous grape, but Oregon has the potential to make Chardonnays that can compete with the world's best. Adelsheim, one of Oregon’s older producers, Domaine Drouhin, and Bergström are wineries that demonstrate the potential in the state.

I tasted more white wines than I was expecting at Pinot in the City. Many of them were Alsace grapes, with Chenin Blanc, Grüner Veltliner, and Viognier thrown in. Although producers are focusing on cool-climate grapes, for such a young region there needs to be a focus on one or two white grapes which sum up the state. With Pinot Noir, that’s how Oregon has come to be known around the world. Chardonnay fits the bill as a recognisable white grape that consumers can identify with, but so does Riesling. This is a grape that the US struggles with, but Oregon's cool, long growing season should be ideal for the grape, making the state's stand out from the rest of the country. At Pinot in the City, only one producer brought a Riesling; another, Chehalem, which makes excellent examples, brought a Grüner Veltliner instead.

There is also another side to Oregon that is rarely tasted outside the state. Cool, wet Columbia Gorge is an AVA shared with Washington, not that far from Portland but further inland - and one that Washington winemakers seem to use and understand better than Oregon’s. As Oregon reaches further from the ocean it becomes desert-like, sharing more AVAs with Washington (particularly Walla Walla and The Rocks District, which is entirely within Oregon but also entirely within Walla Walla, one of Washington’s best-known AVAs) and Idaho. To the south of the Willamette Valley, towards the dry heat of California, are more wine-producing areas, where Syrah and Spanish grapes like Tempranillo and Albariño are of interest. These AVAs are little known outside the state, and remain relatively underdeveloped.

the future

It's both perverse and arrogant of me to predict the future of the wines of a state I haven't visited in two years, or to offer advice. But Oregon is such a distinctive state, producing wines like nowhere else in the USA, that it could offer a more vibrant, varied, and challenging selection of wines than it currently does. My advice, for what it's worth, is:

• use less new oak for Pinot Noir
• make more good-value, friendly, yet still quality Pinot Noir
• concentrate more on Chardonnay
• experiment with Riesling for further variation
• for the time being, forget all other white grapes, especially Pinots Gris and Blanc
• start marketing the wines properly
• what about the rest of Oregon? Washington seems to understand its shared AVAs more, while the south of Oregon is overlooked. Get those wines into the market, as they may represent better value and give more variety.

Oregon needs to get over its Pinot Noir obsession, even though it produces such good, international quality versions of the grape. It needs to back up those wines with variety and choice. Rather than making wines for their own pleasure, Oregon needs to think about a much wider audience.

tasting highlights

Adelsheim Caitlin's Reserve Chardonnay 2013 ($45) ✪✪✪✪✪
Belle Pente Estate Reserve Pinot Noir 2011 ($48) ✪✪✪✪✪ and 2004 ✪✪✪✪✪
Bergström Vineyard Pinot Noir 2013 ($85) ✪✪✪✪✪
Chehalem Reserve Pinot Noir 1994 (magnum) ✪✪✪✪
Domaine Drouhin Arthur Chardonnay 2013 ($35) ✪✪✪✪
Erath Pommard Clone Prince Hill Vineyard 2009 ✪✪✪✪✪
Yamhill Valley Vineyards Reserve Pinot Noir 1994 (Methusalem) ✪✪✪✪