Fortified wine Madeira is generally categorised by its four noble grape varieties Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malvasia. However, 85% of all plantings on the island of Madeira are Tinta Negra Mole. The variety is usually seen as inferior and makes wines that are not destined for the fine wine shelves.
At the annual Madeira tasting, I spoke to Danny Cameron of specialist importer Raymond Reynolds and there seems to be an argument that Tinta Negra has not been allowed to show its potential.
Cameron said, “Tinta Negra is automatically seen as inferior so it’s damned before it’s started - overheated and caramelized. A lot are rubbish but some aren’t.”
Of course, he has a vested interest in Tinta Negra as he imports Barbeito’s Single Harvest 1997, which is made from…Tinta Negra. Unlike others who treat the variety as a second-class citizen from the outset, 50% is green harvested in an attempt to ripen and concentrate the remaining bunches.
After fortification all Madeira is subject to one of two processes, which heats the wine and make it virtually indestructible. Most use the estufagem for their Tinta Negra – the wine is placed in stainless steel vats and heated by a hot coil to 45-50 degrees C for a period of at least three months.
Barbeito don’t use this for their Tinta Negra. They use the traditional and more expensive method - the Canteiro. Wines aged in Canteiro are put in casks, usually in the top floors of wine cellars where the temperature is higher, for two years. It is oxidatively aged in cask, making the wine develop a distinctive nutty rancio character. Over time the wines are moved to lower levels in the cellar where the temperature is lower until it is ready to be bottled.
The Tinta Negra was pretty good although I feel it lacked a bit of intensity compared to Barbeito’s other wines (which were all really elegant and refined – definitely the most consistently good producer on the island, in my opinion).
Most wine producing countries have pest problems – from spider mites to rabbits. But South Africa tops them all with baboons causing real issues for grape growers.
Now I’d never heard of this until yesterday but I think baboons are pretty cool (incidentally, why are their bottoms so red?) and don’t get much coverage in the wine press, and I couldn’t resist writing about them.
Baboons have been a real problem at Klein Constantia winery for some time. They eat the grapes and can often rip off the cane that’s going to provide next year’s fruit while they’re pulling bunches off.
There are now several kilometres of electric fencing around the 146-hectare property to protect the vines from the baboons. Adam Mason, winemaker at Klein Constantia says, “It’s expensive but the baboons are quite destructive and they are becoming less and less frightened of people.”
At Groot Constantia beaters are employed to scare the baboons away but as the baboons get braver and braver, you wonder how long that will continue.
Anyone got any other strange vineyard pest stories? Baboons would be hard to beat surely?
The biennial Wines of South Africa tasting has rolled into town for two days. Two days? Do we really need a two-day event? It was fairly quiet at the event on its first day with just a steady trickle of journos, importers and freeloaders. The top producers including Vergelegen and Jordan were buzzing but many winery reps looked a bit forlorn standing behind their tables.
I continue to have high hopes when I go to South African tastings and each time they are dashed. Perhaps I should be a little less optimistic next time.
There were some stars including Vergelegen’s flagship white – a 75% Semillon, 25% Sauvignon blend, aged in new French oak. The 2007 was almost Bordeaux-esque with light body, fresh acidity, plenty of nuttiness and citrus aromas. It’s a whacking 14% but you wouldn’t guess.
I also enjoyed Klein Constantia’s 2008 Chardonnay. Shame on me for having to ask where Constantia was (it’s on the narrow Cape Peninsula which projects southwards into the southern Atlantic ocean if you didn’t know either) but my South African geography is not up to scratch. While the wine has a rich mid palate with honey and white peach, it’s actually clean and fresh with a lovely linear finish – most likely thanks to the cooling influence of the Ocean breeze.
Members of the press are accused of not giving the country’s reds a fair chance but from what I tasted today, I’m still unconvinced by the general standard. There were too many wines with green, herbaceous notes, high alcohol (14.5% is not uncommon) and that savoury character, which reminds me of Stilton cheese. There are some stand outs (for example Iona, The Foundry, Jordan) but I’ve come away disappointed again. No doubt I’ll be back at the next South Africa tasting keen to be disproved.
If you’re not already sick to the back teeth of me harping on about the EU wine reform, here I am again with more updates.
Les Grand Chais de France group claims to be the largest exporter of wines from France, representing one in every five bottles of French wine sold abroad.
I’ve just spoken to Tim North, UK director of Les Grand Chais as part of my research for an article in Meiningers. Following the EU wine reform and the creation of vin de France, the white wines of France’s biggest brand JP Chenet, will be voluntarily downgraded from vin de pays to vin de France so it can blend across regions this year. North said, “At JP Chenet we think that there are big quality advantages of being able to blend from different regions especially for whites. For example Sauvignon Blanc is not aromatic in the Languedoc Roussillon; it is in the Loire but it can be a bit thin in cool years and we can also take some fruit from Gascony. We think that we can offer a great price to quality ratio by cross regional blending.”
While smaller producers oppose this sort of cross-regional blending, as it goes against all notions of terroir (or sense of place), this will enable the brand to compete with the New World’s big boys without previous restrictions.
“We were able to do this with vin de pays du vignobles de France previously but it was so complicated. We had to go through a bureaucratic process in each region before blending. We did this with our Kiwi Sauvignon in 2008 for the first time. We went through the whole rigmarole but we no longer have to get the ‘agrément’, we can please ourselves.”
“It’s what the Aussies had been doing for ages and we can do it now.”
The producer’s reds look likely to remain unchanged at least for this vintage, claiming there is little benefit in sourcing wines from outside the Languedoc with so many grape varieties and growers to choose from.
With increasing consumer demand for lower alcohol wines, the UK wine trade got together to debate the key issues involved. Unfortunately, consumer opinion of lower alcohol wines is pretty poor at the moment with Dan Jago, head wine honcho at Tesco, even saying they had ‘leper status’ (see my you tube wine channel for his speech.)
Clearly there is work to do. Currently consumers have a low quality expectation of lower alcohol wines and don’t have any real knowledge where they can be found on the shelves. More encouragingly, 42% of regular wine drinkers said they would be prepared to buy low alcohol wines if the wines on offer were of equal quality to wines at ‘normal’ alcohol levels, according to new research by major importer PLB.
Unfortunately the term ‘lower alcohol’ and ‘reduced alcohol’ wines are not defined so they’re not technically legal, so you could say lower alcohol wines is a category that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law. This is an issue the wine industry admits it needs to work on – we need a term to be able to explain to the consumer what we are actually talking about. And in terms of lower alcohol, there’s no definition of what a lower alcohol wine is – is it a 9% German Kabinett of a 12% Australian Chardonnay? Jago added, ‘We need to clarify what we are allowed to say and clarify the language of lower alcohol.’
In terms of technical know-how, there are plenty of technologies you can use – from reverse osmosis to spinning cone (my you tube channel has an interview with Tony Dann on spinning cone technology). However, Jago added they were ‘Frankenstein’s monster to a lot of people. The idea you can technically alter wine - wine should be a completely natural product, totally uninterfered, is still for many people the way in which they view this product.’
However, the message was these wines need to be brought into the mainstream and marketed as a decent drink first and a low alcohol choice second. All the major buyers were keen to see the big powerful brands bringing out low alcohol wines rather than small producers on the periphery. Julian Dyer, senior buyer at Sainsbury’s added, Let’s see if we can work on the mainstream and get the brands to work on lower alcohol wines.’