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.