Version 1:  On his way to Spain, Lord Byron stops at the Grand-Poujeaux estate in Bordeaux. He tries the estate’s wine. He is enchanted. “It is,” he declares, “a medicine to drive out spleen.” From now on the wine is known as Château Chasse-Spleen.

Version 2: The poet Baudelaire visits a friend who lives near the Grand-Poujeaux estate. He tries the wine. He is enchanted. The wine is renamed after the Spleen poems in Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil.

Which version should we believe?  As Bertrand Russell was fond of saying, they can’t both be right but they could both be wrong.   Read the rest of this entry »

Funny grape, Malbec. It was once popular in Bordeaux, but after the 1950s it fell from favour. The only part of France that still uses it extensively is Cahors. But Malbec thrives in Argentina: at one point the Argentines had 50,000 hectares of the stuff. Most of the resulting wine was putrid.

This is no surprise when you consider that Argentina’s largest immigrant group is made up of Italians. Anyone who has been to Italy will have noticed a curious paradox. The country makes some of the world’s greatest wine, and everyone agrees that over the last twenty years its winemaking standards have soared. Yet the average Italian consumer is still happy to drink filth: urinous whites and sour, fizzy reds, mostly from the rancid little cooperatives I have deplored elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

The story of modern Austrian wine begins with a chemistry lesson. Diethylene glycol is a clear odourless liquid which will mix with water, alcohol or ether. You can use it as a disinfectant or as antifreeze in your car. You can sweeten food with it too, but you shouldn’t, because diethylene glycol is also a poison. It kills by causing kidney failure.

Austrian wines, like German wines, used to be classed according to their sweetness. But Austria’s climate and terrain are less suited than Germany’s to making sweet wine. So at some point in the late 1970s a few Austrian producers began to cheat. They added small amounts of diethylene glycol to their wine to make it taste sweeter and richer. Read the rest of this entry »

People need something to fret about. Today they have climate change; in the 1950s they had UFOs. All over the US people claimed to have seen flying saucers flashing through the sky. There were similar sightings in Britain, prompting the government to appoint an official Flying Saucer Working Party. And in France, the Rhône town of Châteauneuf-du-Pape pondered its own response.

Little was known about the “flying cigars”, as the French called these objects. It was not clear where they were from or who was piloting them. But such details did not matter. All that concerned the people of Châteauneuf-du-Pape was their wine. What if the flying cigars had designs on their famous vineyards? The commune had better be ready. On October 28 1954 Châteauneuf-du-Pape armed itself, not with death rays or nuclear missiles, but with an even more fearsome weapon: French municipal law.   Read the rest of this entry »

“Hannibal pressed further down the Adriatic coast. He ordered that his cavalry horses be bathed with old wine, which was plentiful in that area. This quickly healed the ulcers that had made the horses unfit for service.”   Polybius Histories

“That area” was Picenum, in the part of central Italy now called the Marches. Hannibal was the North African general who invaded ancient Italy and nearly conquered Rome. A brilliant strategist, undoubtedly, and a fearsome tactician, but even so . . .  Any soldier who uses vintage wine for veterinary purposes should be tried as a war criminal.

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