Weekend...

[lsur]

Saturday, really lazy till the evening then saw 'Mondovino' at the Arts Picturehouse. This is a documentary about the globalisation of wine, how multinational companies are influencing the taste at the expense of smaller, traditional producers. A bit esoteric (I'm not a wine critic myself) but interesting idea and an insight into the monied world

Comments

Re: Wine esoterica

[ninshubur]

I haven't seen the film, but yes, that's the bloke. He has a "special" place in my heart for being at least partially responsible for the big Bordeaux price hike in the mid nineties. Prices for his favorites tripled and quadrupled (first through speculation, then through the producers understandably raising the prices themselves), other often more worthwhile Chateaux followed suit (hey, we're as good as them next chateau, so we charge the same amount) and quite a few of the Chateaux where he didn't like the style as much made some IMHO rather unfortunate changes or changed hands. It also led to the concept of the "flying" winemaker, where a winemaker who had a knack for doing Parker-style wines suddenly started to consult dozens of Chateaux. Particulary notorious in this regard is Monsieur Rolland, where it got so far that it got rather hard to find a major wine from Pomerol (small but classy Bdx sub-region) where he didn't lend a hand in making it.
Incidentally though, a lot of the wines (<90 point wines and to a lesser extent even some of his "darlings") from the mid to late 1990s languished on the shelves, in the warehouses and with unfortunate investors and are now slowly trickling back into the market at somewhat less inflated prices. So once again it is possible to get some good Bordeaux which is actually a decent value for your money and there's hope that at least some producers go back to redevelop their own style and build a loyal customer base as they used to have instead of being at the mercy of speculators and the wow-look-at-that-score-"connoisseurs". It also helps that a lot of Americans recently seem to have developed an allergy to things French...

Re: Wine esoterica

[lsur]

Yes, Monsieur Rolland is featured too. This is all a new story for me, I saw it on spec, but it's intruiging. Wine is so much to do with the earth and the climate. The Californian's introduced oak casks which change the flavour.

Re: Wine esoterica

[scy11a]

Just might have to toddle along and see this now, thanks! Glad you had a nice time and behaved yourself, even if Thierry didn't ; ) (He'll be dying his hair next, tsk, tsk)

Re: Wine esoterica

[lsur]

I had a very pleasant time, thanks for the invite. I'm a bit worried that I upset your bloke though...anyway to get back into his good books?

Re: Wine esoterica

[scy11a]

Don't worry about that - the bubbly you left speaks on your behalf : )

Re: Wine esoterica

[lsur]

Thanks! See you sometime before Xmas.

Rolland & Oak

[ninshubur]

The film sounds like a rather in depth treatment of the subject and so Rolland would have to turn up. His "home" wine (Le Bon Pasteur) btw, while being a solid effort didn't strike me as very exciting when I tried it.

As for oak, it has long been used for storage (pretty much everywhere) and as an influence on wine (mostly in France and Spain, but only for certain types of wine). The thing is that oak barrels (and new barrels in particular) leak tannins into the wine which act as a natural preservative and allow certain substantial wines from certain varieties to age and develop for longer. They add some flavour components on their own which originally were meant to integrate into the wine as it ages to give it more interesting "secondary" flavours. If you drink a young heavily oak aged wine you can easily pick out flavours that can be attributed to oak. They depend on what type of oak is used (American vs. French (various types) vs. Slovenian), how much it is "toasted" and how often it is used. The flavours added often appear to be sweet and are usually similar to Vanilla, Coffee or Chocolate and various herbs. American oak tends to impart a distinctive dill note, which makes it easy to spot in a young wine where it is heavily used. Australians tend to be the major winners in the weedy dill sweepstakes, as they tend to use American oak heavily.

The early californian wine growers started by trying to imitate French wines, especially Bordeaux, and followed the traditional methods of the area. When wine growing in California started to be big business in the 1980s people observed the following things:

- expensive wines from Europe and California have oaky flavours when young (not that you are meant to drink them at that age, mind you, but that's what they did)
- oak masks defects in a young wine
- people like vanilla, chocolate etc.
- oak imparts a buttery feel to otherwise harsh young wines and masks acids

So oak was started to be used as an active flavour ingredient which was more reliable than the grapes themselves. They found a way around the harsh tannins (the reason for oak aging in the first place) and made things cheaper by dropping treated oak chips into the tanks full of wine instead of using expensive casks. The whole process was geared to make soft, highly alcoholic, early drinking wine.

So the alcoholic oak-grape juice smoothie known as typical Californian wine was born and soon was extended into an industrial scale. Their success in imparting the oak=quality mantra into the minds of consumers was overwhelming and the sweetish plump soft-drink wine based beverage started its career. Interestingly enough, nowadays the cheaper end of the spectrum often tastes more like (albeit cheap) wine than the higher end examples of californaux style wine which has some absolutely freaky examples of dense, highly alcoholic, slightly grape flavoured oak juice.

Mind you, there are some good Californian wines (some better red Zinfandels can be rather nice and are still an uniquely Californian style of wine) and some producers who make genuinely good wines which can hold their own against top notch European stuff, but mostly it's IMHO rather atrocious. It's a pity that some of these influences are now felt in Europe where a lot of the "better" red wines tend to get some oak treatment whether it's traditional and beneficial or not. They do have to use proper casks though, since the oak chip method is AFAIK illegal in the EU, so things are not completely out of bounds.

Re: Rolland & Oak

[lsur]

I feel I've learnt more about wine in a couple of days than in my previous life so far! I'm going to get into this more, starting with your comments. Thanks.