Jefford on Monday: Dirt, Time and Terroir
The most significant revolution I’ve seen in the wine world over the last quarter century has nothing to do with micro-oxygenation, 100-point scores or screwcaps.
Award-winning wine writer Andrew Jefford’s Monday column on Decanter.com
The most significant revolution I’ve seen in the wine world over the last quarter century has nothing to do with micro-oxygenation, 100-point scores or screwcaps.
Do wine competition medals abuse the consumer’s trust? That’s the belief of British newspaper wine columnist Victoria Moore.
A few weeks ago, a friend from Hong Kong sent me the two ‘mind maps’ for grape varieties shown below.
It was in the ancient village of Apricale – like many in the Ligurian mountains, a kind of oozing honeycomb of stone – that I first came across the delicious concept of the albergo diffuso. A functioning hotel, in other words, whose rooms are scattered around different private houses in a village.
How fit is your palate? And how do you maintain and train it? At least half of the readers of this column, I’d guess, work with wine in one way or another; our palates are therefore an irreplaceable professional tool.
Something is changing. The evidence is probably lying quietly in cellars around the world. Here, though, is a little homage to Catalonia, since that was where I recently saw it at first hand for myself.
We can, I guess, all agree on this: there will never be enough good red Burgundy to keep the wine drinkers of the world happy.
Is there a conflict between brand and terroir? Can you express terroir in a brand without using appellation as a primary focus? Here’s a story.
It didn’t seem to attract much notice at the time, but the Casa do Douro was finally declared bankrupt and wound up at the end of 2014, with debts of 160m Euros (130m Euros of debt plus 30m Euros of accumulated interest).
My tasting year got off to a catapult start back in January. Here’s the first raw note of 2015.
I have the significant lemon in front of me. What, though, should I do with it? I’m not sure. Here’s its story.
Is mixed ripeness – some grapes barely ripe, some almost over-ripe – desirable at harvest time?
Australia’s resource boom may be drawing to a close, but there is no stopping the deep-cast mining of wine statistics and data at the University of Adelaide’s Wine Economics Research Centre under its energetic Executive Director, Professor Kym Anderson.
Most great terroirs, I’ve come round to believing, can produce different sorts of compelling wine. A distinguished site is pure potential – but there are usually several possibilities, not just one, for realising that potential.
Nice when it works out – and, for whatever reason, the world is thirsty for the wines of my adopted region at present. During 2014, AOP sales from Languedoc and Roussillon were up by 7.7 per cent in value and 5.9 per cent in quantity.
What’s the answer? I’m not sure, but here’s the question.
Democratic, certainly. Perhaps you could call it socialist. Maybe even communist, such is the rigour with which every exhibitor is scythed down to the same level -- but let’s settle on ‘egalitarian’, for the sake of political neutrality.
Anyone who visits wine cellars regularly will have noted clay, concrete or earthenware jars of various sizes and forms stealthily invading the world's wineries, both modest and grand. (And there is nothing grander than the harem of pale, shapely amphorae in which around 35 per cent of the Pontet Canet harvest is aged each year.)
Anyone seeking dental refuge from the searching acidity which will have been on display at London's recent 2013 burgundy tastings could have done worse than made their way south this weekend. All the way south, as far as you can go: to South Africa’s Hemel-en-Aarde Pinot Noir Celebration, which unfolded over the last two days of January. I pre-tasted the event, as it were, with a day of visits last November.
We all love a bubble. Or rather we all love the wine wrapped around those little spheres of trapped carbon dioxide: global sparkling wine consumption has gone up by 30 per cent over the past decade.
Will there, one day, be a Department of Terroir Studies at a leading academic institution? Who will be its first professor? How many disciplines will jockey for a position in its hive?
Just as there is no wine quite like Château Musar, so there will never be another winemaker like Serge Hochar. Let me try to explain why.