Fortified Wine Exam

Much has changed since I started the WSET Diploma in January 2014. Then, I was working for a wine merchants in Manchester, now I'm working at a winery in Napa. Oh, and I'm also married. That's how much time it's taken to complete the Diploma, my studies prolonged by my move to California. It was a year ago that I took the exhausting and exhaustive day-long Unit 3 exam (Wines of the World); this week, I was back in San Francisco to take the final exam on fortified wine. This is one of the few exams I've genuinely looked forward to, if only because it would mean a welcome and overdue end to studying for the Diploma. I also love fortified wine, especially sherry, but that doesn't make being examined on it any easier. I'll find out in a couple of months how I did, but here's how it went on the day.

Unlike last year when I nearly missed the exam due to a three-hour car journey caused by faint drizzle, I made the exam in plenty of time by taking the beautiful ferry trip across San Pablo Bay into San Francisco. A fellow student and I met before the exam to taste a little bit of sherry to acclimatise our palates and to steady the nerves. 

At this late stage, I don't see much point cramming information into one's overloaded brain, but most students were busy reading books when we walked into the exam venue. Given the wide range of subjects covered, it's impossible to guess which pieces of information you're likely to need to know and which you're not. For me, it was more a case of staying calm and relaxed until the exam eventually began. 

theory

The exam is 65 minutes long, with a blind tasting of three wines and three theory questions, each of which take ten minutes to answer. I tackled the theory questions first, in part to get them out of the way but also because running out of time is a real danger with the theory questions. 

Turning straightaway to the questions, I felt a sense of relief as the topics were relatively straightforward. I left the trickiest topic (Key Madeira Shippers) till last, going straight to Fortification of Sherry. This involved describing when fortification happens (after fermentation which is different from most other fortified wines), and the different levels of fortification that result in the many styles of sherry. The next question was on Rutherglen, an area of Australia I would love to visit one day and about which there is a lot to write. Key Madeira Shippers I found trickier because there are only seven independent producers plus a co-op in Madeira and production is small, so it was hard to know what the examiners were looking for. I felt that I answered all three questions comprehensively, though, and that all my studies had been worthwhile.

Students taking the exam in Europe were asked about Key Madeira Shippers, The Fortification and Maturation of Vins Doux Naturels, and Pale Cream Sherry, while students in Asia were asked about Key Madeira Shippers, Sherry Varieties, and The Fortification and Maturation of Vins Doux Naturels - all questions I would also have been confident answering.

tasting

The tasting was harder. My ideal tasting would have been three distinct styles of sherry, but as soon as I saw the bottles of wine I knew we were in for a port tasting. The question revealed that the wines were indeed from the same region; we didn't have to answer which region, but which style each wine was. And this I found very difficult: the first and third wines were a similar deep ruby colour, while the middle wine was much paler and more faded. On first sight, I guessed this was a tawny but overthought it: the colour was more garnet than tawny and although there were lots of dried fruit aromas I didn't sense the nuttiness that is typical of a tawny, so I put that it was an LBV. Wrong: it was a tawny. Always go with your first instincts - at least when you're right. The other two wines were very similar and I really didn't have a clue what style each one was. The first was complex and intense, and I guessed it was a young vintage port: it was a ruby. The third was less complex and less intense, so I guessed it was a ruby: it was a vintage port. I hope my tasting notes were accurate enough to make up for mistaking the wines; if not, I also hope my theory answers were strong enough to compensate for the tasting. I really don't want to have to do this exam again; I want this Diploma over and done with.

wines tasted

Taylors First Estate Reserve Port ($20) 

I'm going to have to seek out a bottle, because I thought it was fantastic!

Niepoort Tawny Dee (not on sale in the US, sells for £6-10 in the UK) 

used to sell this wine in the shop in Manchester, so disappointed I didn't recognise it.

Ferreira Quinta da Leda Vintage Port 1999 (again not on sale in the US, but would be around $50) 

once more, disappointed I wasn't able to spot a vintage port that's nearly 20 years old - at the same time, I didn't find it that impressive.

I'll be getting the results in a couple of months, let's see how I do ...

Update, 16 August

I just got the results for this exam. As I hoped, I passed the theory with distinction; as I feared, I failed the tasting. That's frustrating, because that's the only element of the Diploma I didn't pass. However, my theory answers compensated for my tasting and I came away with an overall pass. Which means the Diploma is done and dusted!

Globalisation, nature, and trade: Wine & Books

The Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine by George M. Taber

Having watched the wildly inaccurate Bottle Shock, I had to read a more authentic and reliable account of the famous "Judgment of Paris" tasting. George Taber was the only journalist present at the legendary event, and so is ideally placed to give his take on what actually happened. The Paris Tasting was one of many such contests between Californian and French wine that took place during the 1970s, but the tasting was in Paris and featured some of France's leading members of the wine industry, including Robert Drouhin of Burgundy's leading négociant Joseph Drouhin, Aubert de Villaine of Burgundy's most exclusive winery Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and Odette Kahn of La Revue du Vin de France. California came out on top: Chateau Montelena's 1973 Chardonnay won, by some distance, the morning's tasting of white wines, while Stag's Leap's 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon more narrowly won the tasting of Bordeauxesque reds.

Taber gives a reliable, if slightly one-sided, background to the event. A chapter each focuses on Steven Spurrier, a well-to-do young English wine merchant who organised the event, and a potted history of the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Much of the spine of the book concentrates on the Californian wineries, producers, and winemakers who triumphed at the tasting: Jim Barrett, lawyer and co-owner of Montelena, Mike Grgich, their Croatian winemaker, and Warren Winiarski, owner of and winemaker at Stag's Leap, as well as the many people who laid the foundations of the Californian wine industry in the 1950s and 60s.

Taber peddles the American dream a little too relentlessly in these chapters: hard-working, honest Americans who achieved in less than twenty years what the French had spent two thousand working towards. All that knowledge the French had handed down from generation to generation was worthless: the Americans learnt it all in no time and did it even better. Grgich's European upbringing also becomes part of the fairy-tale: just look at what America allowed him to do that Croatia wouldn't have. Underneath this mythologising is the fact that the Californians looked towards and learnt much of what they knew from the French, using those thousands of years of knowledge to establish winemaking in nascent California.

Taber then awkwardly uses the Californian victory to herald the subsequent, glorious globalisation of wine. Fear not, Taber tells us, that wine made from ubiquitous grapes such as Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Sauvignon all taste the same no matter where they come from "because they make outstanding wine, and consumers enjoy them." Forget fusty Old World wines, drink ultraclean New World brands like Yellow Tail. Overlook the near collapse of the Napa wine industry in the 1980s due to phylloxera because growers and UC Davis professors refused to listen to the French. Ignore the advances in grape growing and winemaking introduced by the French over the last few decades, and instead dismiss French wine as on death's door (France still produces twice as much as the USA).

Moving away from the US, in Taber's eyes all this makes Cloudy Bay the ultimate success story, whose history he swallows unquestioningly. As revolutionary a taste as New Zealand's Sauvignon Blanc was when it was launched on the world in the 1980s, it's wrong to say that, "France's Sancerre ... lacks any personality and is often too acidic." Just as it's wrong to believe that "wineshops run out of their allocation a few weeks after [Cloudy Bay] arrives each spring" - there's plenty of Cloudy Bay (now owned by France's Moët-Hennessey) out there, it's just that it's dripped into the market to create a sense of scarcity. And it's ironic that Cloudy Bay has become what Taber accuses French wine of being: priced on reputation rather than quality.

Ending the book with a sweeping, one-dimensional appraisal of the globalisation of wine feels out of place in what is supposed to be an account of a 1976 tasting and the development of Californian wine. The follow-up tastings in 1986 and 2006 are referred to only as further evidence of California's superiority, rather than delving more deeply into how the wines, their producers, and indeed the rest of the Californian wine industry has developed in that time. In the end, Taber's book had the opposite effect of the Paris tasting: to drive me back to quirky, odd French wines he believes the New World has seen the back of.

Natural Wine: An Introduction to Organic and Biodynamic Wines Made Naturally by Isabelle Legeron

Which leads to a book that details a very different development in the world of wine over the last twenty years. The book is presented even more one-sidedly than Taber's, but with the passion of someone who fervently believes in a subject she knows inside out.

Natural wine is an ill-defined movement led by French and Italian winemakers reacting against the use of chemicals and sulphites in winemaking. The purpose of natural wine is to make wine that represents the purity of the land and the grape, with as little human interference as possible.

This a beautifully presented book, which passionately argues in favour of all natural wine - not just the ethics, but its superior quality too. The latter I am yet to be convinced about (Legeron lists natural wines she recommends at the end of the book, which I will be interested to try), but her arguments for natural winemaking (and farming in general) are persuasive and even invigorating.

It's certainly a welcome antidote to Taber's espousal of the homogeneous globalisation of wine, a reaction against what one natural winegrower, Tony Coturri of Sonoma, describes as "Over-ripened, then diluted with water, acidified and 'corrected,' this is the premium Napa product, sold at 100 bucks a bottle."

As well as Legeron's passionate defence of natural wine, the book features several first-hand accounts from winemakers describing not just their approach to winemaking but also other aspects of farming: plants, herbs, bread, cider, and horses. Although highly subjective, the book has an inspirational core: making wine and growing things is something everyone of us can do if we work with nature, just as we have been doing for thousands of years. Sadly, my subsequent attempts to make bread have thus far disproved this theory.

Madeira: The Mid-Atlantic Wine by Alex Liddell

Madeira was perhaps the first "New World" wine. A small, rocky, woody island colonised by the Portuguese in the 1400s, Madeira quickly became known for the quality of its wines, particularly from the Malvazia grape (known as Malvasia elsewhere). The development of its industry was based solely on trade with Portugal's and Britain's new American colonies. It was these long distances which led to Madeira's unique taste: the wine is fortified and then aged for many years at warm temperatures to mimic transatlantic journeys.

Sadly, Madeira is too small an island to sustain its own domestic wine industry and its wine economy has been displaced over the centuries by wines from around the world. The wine too, while being one of the world's greatest, is too quirky, individual, and different to compete with wines that are released at a much younger age.

This leaves the Madeira wine industry in a sorry state: vineyards at the bottom of cliffs with unidentified varieties planted alongside bananas and vegetables; plantings are still dominated by American varieties that aren't actually allowed into the wine; there are only seven exporters; and what market there is in the UK and the US dwindles each year.

Liddell's style is as old-fashioned, determined, and sometimes difficult as the island's best wines - and like the wines I doubt this is a book that will fly off the shelves. But the book exists for a very good reason: the wines have their addicts like me, and the wine's rich history, which is such a vital part of Madeira's culture as well as the development of global trade, needs to be recorded. And unlike with Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, Californian brands are never going to successfully replicate the island's great, long-lived wines.

In two forthcoming blogs, I will be looking more closely at some Californian natural wines and California's historic and continuing use of European place names for low-quality wines.

Madeira

I spent the weekend visiting friends in Madeira, which gave me a chance to taste some of the great fortified wine at source. Like the island itself, the Madeira wine industry is quite traditional, its international heyday two hundred years ago. With its oxidised, rancio qualities, complex flavours, and astonishing ageing ability, there's no drink quite like it.

a little bit of history

Madeira is a small, sub-tropical island in the Atlantic Ocean, historically the last port of call for the Portuguese and other traders before the Americas and Asia. The style of the wine developed from its travels across the Equator. Two things would happen to this wine: first, it was fortified with distilled cane spirit to make it last the journey and, second, the barrels were used as ballasts on deck causing the wine to be baked at a consistently warm temperature, producing a dark, mellow, and extremely popular wine. By the eighteenth century, fortification was standard practice and the wine was baked on the island to replicate journeying across the Equator. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Madeira was a very fashionable drink - George Washington drank a pint a day, and it was used to toast the Declaration of Independence - but it was badly hit by phylloxera in the 1870s, when many vines were replaced with sugar cane. The wine nearly disappeared in the early twentieth century, but it's made a slow recovery and general quality has improved over the last twenty years.

lamb grazing in a back garden above Funchal

the styles

If there's no name of a grape on the bottle, then it's made from Tinta Negra Mole, an undistinguished but versatile black grape that accounts for 90% of all plantings on the island and is used to make the most basic Madeiras. These will be labelled dry, medium-dry, medium-sweet, or sweet. The "noble" grape varieties, all white, are named on the bottle and indicate a particular style:

Sercial - dry to off-dry; a traditional aperitif and the palest coloured of the four styles, with an acidic tanginess. 

Verdelho - medium-dry; this can be the most balanced in fruitiness, acidity, and sweetness of the four styles. 

Bual - medium-sweet; the name is an Anglicisation of the grape Boal. This is fruitier and more likely to accompany a dessert. 

Malmsey - sweet; here, the name is an Anglicisation of Malvasia. A rich, very sweet, deeply-flavoured wine, yet balanced by naturally high acidity, with the greatest ageing potential of them all. 

Blandy's helpful explanation of the four "noble" grape styles

the ageing

Most wines are baked using the estufagem process. This can be done by heating the wine to temperatures of 55°C for at least ninety days for the lower quality wines and, for higher quality wines, heating the wine in wooden casks for six months to a year at between 30 and 40°C. The highest quality wines have no artificial heating - instead, the oak barrels are left for many years at the top of the lodges in Madeira's consistently warm temperatures of 20°C.

The youngest Madeira is three years old, which is aged in tank rather than wood. After that, there will be an indication of the wine's average age - five (tank), and ten, fifteen, or, less common, twenty (all aged in oak casks). A vintage Madeira has to have been aged for at least twenty years, and can be aged for a hundred years or longer. A Colheita is a fairly recent style which has to come from one year but has been aged for a shorter time (five years or more).

a wine cellar I stumbled across full of very, very old bottles of Madeira

what I tasted

There are only six exporters of Madeira, producing four million bottles a year. I visited three of them, all in the main town of Funchal. D'Oliveiras is located in a large, atmospheric lodge full of bottles of old wine and barrels with wine still ageing in them. However, the staff weren't very welcoming and we were given tastings of three basic wines. I got the distinct impression it would be a huge inconvenience to them for me to buy something. 

typical Madeira vintage bottles; Terrantez is another "noble" variety, but even less common - 1976 and 77 were particuarly good years for this grape

H. M. Borges weren't much more accommodating, but they did have a broader and better range of wines to taste. I stuck to tasting four similar styles: five-year-old medium-sweet, ten-year-old Boal, fifteen-year-old Boal, and 1995 Colheita Boal. At €14 for half a litre, the latter seemed a tremendous bargain until I tasted it. The ten and fifteen year olds, though, were very good, complex if slightly reserved. 

Blandy's is a much bigger and slicker operation than the other two, with a guided tour and a gift shop. There were more extensive tastings on offer, though for a fee. I couldn't resist tasting this 1960s trio, the first time I had ever tasted vintage Madeira. 

Sercial 1966 - the nose on this was the most intense and oxidised of the three, with immediate treacle, toffee, and syrup, which continued into rich chocolate, dried fruits, and Christmas cake, with further mature notes of leather, earth, and mushrooms. Given that maturity, it was amazing how fresh the palate was, due to its high acidity. The dried fruits weren't quite as intense as the nose, either, with a spicy dry finish to add to the chocolate and coffee. 

Verdelho 1968 - my favourite of the three. Brown in colour, with much less intense dried fruits - dried apricots, poached pears, raisins, and fruitcake, with a bit of fudge, and almonds and marzipan. That sounds pretty intense, but all these flavours were so balanced and complementary. Likewise, the palate was subtle, complex, and long, with mellow cinnamon and clove spices with lingering white pepper. 

Bual 1968 - a similar brown colour to the Sercial, but more similar in intensity to the Verdelho, with figs, raisins, dates, toffee, and hazelnuts. The palate was the spiciest of the three - cinnamon, ginger, and white pepper - that slowly faded away to chewy dried fruits and an everlasting finish. 

Sercial '66, Verdelho '68, Bual '68: three extraordinarily complex examples of one of the world's most historic wines

what to drink it with

The depth of flavours in great Madeira wine are so complex and intense that it needs a food to match. I tried the three vintage Blandy's with a ginger chocolate sweet; the ginger, the chocolate, and the sweetness each complemented the three wines' varied flavours. Anything with chocolate and coffee is an ideal combination, especially for the sweeter styles. I'm not convinced I'd want to try a Verdelho with soup, as the Blandy's sign above suggests; the drier styles work well as apertifs or with a nutty dish. The oxidised nuttiness of the wines makes them a great accompaniment to an almond or marzipan dish and it almost goes without saying that Christmas cake and sweet Madeira are a match made in heaven.

where's the Christmas cake?