It is now around thirty years since the great Tuscan wines were discovered by the rest of the world, and their prices are no longer competitive. Delicious as they are, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile, and the so-called Supertuscans – Tignanello, Sassicaia and the like – nowadays offer poor value for money.

Part of the blame lies with the Euro, which has been grossly overvalued since its inception. But mostly this is a problem of fashion. Ever since the British and the Americans fell in love with Tuscany, they have all wanted souvenirs of their summer holiday in some picturesque casa colonica. What better memento than a bottle or ten of those smoky reds they drank with their bruschette and T-bone steaks? Up went the price, and the rest of us had to look elsewhere for affordable good-quality vino. Read the rest of this entry »

Though undoubtedly an art, winemaking is not Art with a capital A. It is one of the great crafts, like cabinet-making or ceramics. I know many people dispute this, especially the young, whose duty is to challenge all established categories. Having joined countless undergraduate arguments on this subject, I have no wish to set off another. I simply make the point that if you admit any difference between Art and Craft – and I think you should – then you must accept that winemaking belongs to the latter, not the former.

That said, Art and Craft do share many qualities. One is the ability to shake prejudice. For instance, this week’s wine has shaken my mild but deep-rooted prejudice towards Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian thinker and esotericist. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mourvèdre grape has a bewildering range of aliases. In Spain, from where it is thought to originate, it is known as Monastrell. In Portugal and much of the New World it is called Mataro, after the Spanish town of Mataró. Most of France calls it Mourvèdre, after another Spanish town, Murviedro. But in some parts it goes by the splendid name of Estrangle-Chien: “dog strangler”.

The grape is prone to rot, and so does best where the summers are fierce and there are strong winds to keep it dry. Windswept southern France is ideal: in the Rhône it is blended with Grenache to make wines such as Châteauneuf-du-Pape; in Provence it is the principal grape of Bandol.

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Italians hate simplicity. They abhor it as vampires do garlic. Consider the case of Montepulciano, one of Italy’s more interesting grape varietals. It shares its name with a village in Tuscany which makes one of the country’s great wines, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Any reasonable person might suppose that Vino Nobile was made from the Montepulciano grape. They would be wrong. The Noble Wine of Montepulciano is actually made from Sangiovese. It may contain lesser amounts of Canaiolo, Mammolo and Trebbiano. Occasionally it even contains some Gamay. But the one grape you will never find in it is Montepulciano.

Indeed, the Montepulciano grape is scarcely known in Tuscany. Its real home is Abruzzo, on the Adriatic. This province is less fashionable than Tuscany, though no less beautiful and with as much to offer. The same is true of its wines.  The best of these is Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a big, fleshy red that really is made from the Montepulciano grape. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the charms of wine drinking nowadays is its endless cosmopolitanism. Regular visitors to this blog will have read about Burgundy from New Zealand, Bordeaux from South Africa, Gewürztraminer from Italy and Margaux from New York State. Now we have a delightful Rhône wine from South Australia.

Of course none of these copies is perfect. And the makers would no doubt protest that they are not trying to create doppelgängers of the French classics. But in that case, one is bound to ask what they are doing. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I discussed a winery that has been in business for about 10 years. This week’s was founded over 1800 years ago. Château Figeac is by far the oldest property of St Emilion, in Bordeaux. It was originally called the Figeacus estate, and its early history is veiled in fog.

We do not know when its owners first grew wine. In 92 AD the Emperor Domitian issued an edict prohibiting the planting of new vines, and this remained in force until 212. But it is not clear how strictly the edict was enforced outside Italy.

The name too is mysterious. “Figeacus” may be the family name of the estate’s first owners, but it may also be a corruption of ficus, meaning “fig-tree”. Read the rest of this entry »

“What does this remind you of?” I asked Mrs Merry Drinker the other night.

She took a sip, then looked at me doubtfully. “Not . . .?”

“Go on.”

“Uh . . . Margaux?”

Margaux is my wife’s favourite wine, and I could understand her hesitation. What we were drinking was definitely not Margaux. It wasn’t even a Bordeaux. It was from Long Island, New York. Read the rest of this entry »

On the face of it, Canadian wine would seem as improbable as wine from Siberia or Greenland. But Ontario is just across the border from the New York’s Finger Lakes region, which boasts plenty of successful winemakers. The same goes for British Columbia, hard by Washington State. All these places enjoy hot summers, with large expanses of water to protect grapes from the worst effects of winter. So there is no objection in theory.

And in practice? Wine of some sort has been grown in Canada for a couple of hundred years, much of it disgusting. The European grape Vitis vinifera succumbed to disease, so the Canadians used the local versions, Vitis labrusca and Vitis riparia. These were pretty nasty, and their unpleasantness could only be partly disguised, usually by turning them into imitation port and sherry. Read the rest of this entry »

I once found myself in Leningrad, in what was then the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had only lately come to office, and it was easy to see why he was demanding reform. The place was shabby, the people ill-dressed. Long queues snaked out of the few shops that sold anything worth buying. And the food was vile. My most painful memory is of an evil-tasting grey goo that appeared on every dish I ordered. Apparently this was pureed aubergine, ubiquitous thanks to a bumper harvest.

After a week of it I asked a tour guide if there was anywhere I wouldn’t be served aubergine, pureed or otherwise. He gave me the name of a Georgian restaurant, reputedly the best in Leningrad. The place wasn’t too bad. They served a reasonably interesting meat-ball dish. In any other context this would have made little impression; after a week of Soviet aubergines it tasted like manna. But the real surprise was the wine. Read the rest of this entry »

More than once in these posts I have voiced doubts about the stories surrounding the names of certain wines and grapes, most recently Château Chasse-Spleen and Pinot Meunier. Enjoyable as these tales are, they often sound more like marketing inventions than genuine traditions, and even the more plausible ones sound decidedly odd.

One place that throws up more than its share of such stories is Beaune, in Burgundy. Although none of its wines has Grand Cru status, Beaune makes several of the region’s best Premier Crus. My own favourite is the Vigne de l’Enfant Jesus. Apparently its name derives from the fact that the vineyard used to belong to a Carmelite convent. The nuns, it is said, were so struck by the wine’s silkiness that they declared “It slips down the throat as easily as the Infant Jesus in velvet breeches.”   Read the rest of this entry »