The Merry Drinker

One day I might write a book about wine fraud. It is almost as fascinating a subject as wine itself, and it has been going on for a very long time indeed.

In the first century AD the Roman satirist Petronius described a banquet given by a man called Trimalchio. The occasion was lavish, for Trimalchio was very rich. But being a former slave, he was also rather ignorant. At the climax of the evening Trimalchio proudly served his guests a wine labelled “Falernian Opimian, One Hundred Years Old.” Falernum, in what is now southern Lazio, produced the greatest wine of ancient Italy. The Falernian made during the consulship of Opimius was prized highest of all. But there was a small snag. More . . .

You often hear enthusiasts discuss a wine’s complexity, or lack of it. The term is seldom defined or even explained. Until the other day I assumed this was because its meaning was completely obvious. Now I am not so sure.

My understanding is this: a wine is complex when it possesses not one flavour but many. The more complex a wine is, the greater the range of tastes or “notes” you will perceive as it rolls about your mouth. The humblest wines offer only one or two notes, while the greatest are positively symphonic. More . . .

The other night I opened a red from Moulis en Medoc.  It smelled like a rugby player’s socks and tasted like oven cleaner.  “Oh well,” I told myself philosophically. “Duff bottle.  Can’t win ‘em all.”

But if we are to believe a story that ran throughout the British media last week, the fault was entirely mine.  Apparently I had opened the bottle on the wrong day of the week.  On another day the same wine would have smelled of tulips and tasted like nectar, or something like that. More . . .

You will find plenty of stories and legends surrounding wine, but almost none about grapes.  This is hardly surprising. A potent, aromatic liquid is mysterious, and therefore romantic. A piece of fruit has no mystery and is essentially dull, except perhaps as the subject of a still life.

One of the few exceptions is the Syrah grape. For centuries men have been telling colourful tales about its origins. In one version, the grape originates from Syracuse in Sicily.  Supposedly it was discovered there in the third century A.D. by the armies of the Roman Emperor Probus, then exported to a grateful world, eventually finding its true home in the Rhône valley in France. More . . .

Sipping this wine the other day, I reflected on how dramatically tastes and habits change. In the 1970s I drank Chablis a lot. Nowadays I drink it once every four or five years. This is not because I like it any less. On the contrary, I am sure I get far more out of it now than I did thirty years ago. So what has changed?

The short answer is “everything”.   If the past is another country, the 1970s are another planet.  Spacehoppers.  Jumbo flares. Chopper bicycles.  Kipper ties.  Even at the time it seemed an aesthetic wasteland; now it is beyond comprehension.

The popular wines of that period seem equally baffling, or at any rate many of them do.  Thinking back as dispassionately as I can, I should say they fell into three categories.  First you had the stinkers: Liebfraumilch; “Chianti” in raffia baskets; supermarket carafes from California.  All were indefensible.  Most have long since dribbled down the pissoir of history. More . . .

I don’t suppose any country, not even Great Britain, offers consumers as great a choice of wines as the United States. A mile from where I live, an emporium the size of an aircraft hangar sells more than 8000 labels from practically every wine-producing nation on earth.

As you would expect, its selection of US wines is rich beyond compare, and its range of South Americans, South Africans and Australasians is almost as wide. The choice of Italian wines is less spectacular, but still good. And the selection of Bordeaux is simply magnificent, everything from $16 bargains to $5000 eye-poppers.

So I feel rather churlish grumbling about this firm’s red Burgundies, but grumble I must. More . . .

My name on the label is a guarantee of irreproachable quality, recognized around the world.
André Lurton

Immodest?  Moi?  But the maddening thing is, he’s right. Lurton is one of the big names of Bordeaux, and his wines are excellent.

The family’s empire began with François Lurton’s Château Bonnet.  In the 1920s François added the Margaux property Château Brane Cantenac. Then, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his sons André and Lucien bought up many more vineyards, so that André himself now owns eleven châteaux in Bordeaux and his wider family owns properties in Languedoc, Corbieres, Spain, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Family members also consult for two dozen other firms all over the world.

More . . .

Here is an idea for a parlour game. Each player must try to name the United States’ most unpleasant export. Chewing gum? Political correctness?  Agent Orange?  Nuclear bombs? With so many delights to choose from, hours of fun are guaranteed.

My own nominee would be the Phylloxera aphid. This vicious little American pest feeds on the roots of vines and quickly destroys them.  During the 1860s and 70s it ravaged Europe’s vineyards and almost wiped out the entire continent’s production.  The only vines that could resist its attentions were those native to North America.  But American grapes produced an inferior, nasty-smelling drink of no imaginable interest to wine lovers.  What was to be done? More . . .

Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within the tent.
Genesis 9:20-21

So the first man to grow wine was also the first flasher. Best not to linger on this unhappy coincidence; of greater interest to me is where Noah is alleged to have carried out his planting, drinking, etc.: the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now eastern Turkey.

The Bible may well have got it right.  According to the experts, Turkey competes with Georgia as the most likely birthplace of wine. The country boasts over a thousand varieties of vine, and it was a vigorous winemaking nation from earliest antiquity until the 10th century AD, when Islam arrived.  Thereafter, Turkey and wine had very little to do with one another.  More . . .

The critics are somewhat sniffy about Vino Nobile. “The poor relation of Brunello Di Montalcino,” is how the Oxford Companion to Wine describes it. This seems a dismissive way to talk about a wine which has been around since at least the eighth century, was praised in the sixteenth as “perfect in both Winter and Summer”, and in the seventeenth was exalted as “the king of all wines”.

The consensus seems to be that the Vino Nobile lacks the finesse and elegance of its Tuscan cousins, Brunello and Chianti.  Various explanations are offered for this: Montepulciano has less limestone in its soil; its nights are warmer.  In consequence, we are told, the wine is too full and too alcoholic.   Drivel, say I.

More . . .