Wine Writers Symposium

Last week I attended the Wine Writers Symposium, an annual event held in the luxurious settings of Meadowood hotel in Napa Valley. Featuring editors and established writers, including Jancis Robinson whom I was very excited to meet, the event aims to help writers improve their work and to open up avenues for publication. There was also plenty of great wine to taste, mostly from Napa. A hard life, I know, but I won't need to taste any Cabernet Sauvignon for a while. 

croquet lawn at Meadowood

The first day offered a series of seminars on how to better our writing, focusing particularly on finding a distinctive voice. The highlight of the day was the session featuring two of Napa's wine families. We saw Molly and daughter Carissa Chappellet interviewed by Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, between them providing a familiar insight into the workings of a winery and the development of Napa's wine culture - Molly Chappellet recalled that when she and her husband moved to the Valley from Los Angeles with five children in tow (and a sixth to come) there wasn't a restaurant in the area. We also saw Dave McIntyre of The Washington Post interview Nils Venge of Saddleback Cellars and his son Kirk of Venge Vineyards. As they spoke, we tasted Saddleback's recently released 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon, a sophisticated, oaky wine, alongside another Cabernet from Venge Vineyards, much richer and more powerful if less subtle: very much a case of old and new Napa. 

just the three white wines...

 

From a wine tasting rather than writing perspective, the highlight of the week was a blind tasting of twelve Napa Cabernet Sauvignons with Jancis Robinson. Four wineries had donated three of their wines - one from the mid-1990s, a second from the mid-2000s, and a third from the unreleased 2013 vintage. The wines from the 90s were mostly holding up impressively well and maturing nicely; the 2000s were beginning to showcase their complexity and ageing potential; while the 2013s were just too young and tannic to assess properly. The next day I attended another tasting of nearly a hundred wines from 2003 to 2012. My conclusion is that, for understandable commercial imperatives, Napa Cabernets are released far too young: the 2012s have already been released, but it was only with the 2009s and older that the tannins, oak, and fruit of the wines were beginning to coalesce into a balanced, appealing structure. 

US Poet Laureate (2001-03) Billy Collins addressed the Symposium on the opening day, giving a witty speech about the nature of writing. He also set us a writing challenge - to write an over-the-top review of either a very bad or an exceptionally good wine. My naturally cynical nature found it easier to write the former; it didn't win the challenge but here is my review of Tesco's Valpolicella, which remains the worst wine I have ever tasted:

As the concept of hell becomes unfashionable even in the Catholic Church, it is reassuring to be occasionally reminded by major wine producers that hell does exist, and it's here with us in a wine bottle. Pouring a putrid purple, like the blood of a sorry anaemic, the wine sags sadly in the glass. I nervously sniff: and it smells like the winemaker has attempted to douse the flames of hell with sulphur. A reluctant slurp in the mouth - the tannins are the cold tickle of a dying man. The lethargic imitation of fruit persists, the rasping phlegm of someone condemned never to die. This is not wine, but Satan's bloody piss, available in a major supermarket near you.

The conclusion I drew from the Symposium: writing is hard but it can, and should, be fun.