cluelessaboutwine - wine blog

Grapes in Space

2009-11-03T12:31:00.006Z

Big Brother is watching your grapes.

There is a satellite up there somewhere hurtling through space assessing which bits of your vineyard are ready to harvest (whilst carefully avoiding all the other space junk mostly responsible for misdirecting us and brainwashing us in our own homes). 'The Oenoview System' does this by analysing the reflectivity of a vineyard, and translating the colours into meaningful data.

Some English vineyards have already signed up for the service.

Hmmm....call me a cynic, but whenever I fly home from abroad there is always dense depressing cloud cover. Lets hope the weather plays ball when the satellite passes over to take a snap, and that a grey image does not mean 'harvest now'. Presumably you would also have to wander into the vineyard to verify the data first hand, rather than put all of your precious grapes into one basket.

I like 'The Man from Del Monte' approach.

Maybe this satellite can also scan crowds to assess whether anyone has swine flu, and perhaps even let me know how I am feeling?

'There's an app for that' drones some smug developer...grrrrr.

There is a very well known wine called 'Campo Viejo' that may benefit from this high tech approach -

It is made in Spain's Rioja region in an ultra modern underground plant. As everything is automated you just have to push one big red button and you end up with 10,000 bottles per hour. The sort of place you may see Blofeld's cat. Adding the satellite to its armoury would nicely complete the picture.

How Not To Cook

2009-10-20T10:48:00.014+01:00

Friends came over for dinner the other night and I decided to make a pudding.

My confidence had been building as I managed to make a passable lemon tart the other day thanks to Gordon Ramsay and his 'Sunday Lunch' book.

I thought that for a change I would dip into James Martin's book called 'Desserts'. The picture on the front was of James happily turning out a Tarte Tatin.

I, like most of the population, have spent the last few years being coaxed into a false sense of security with the relentless bombardment of cookery programs and spin off books. Another soufflé appears on 'Saturday Kitchen', and I don't even blink an eye. I have subconsciously prepared, cooked and eaten it in an instant, despite never having actually done so. Comfort cooking from your armchair. In my fantasy professional chef alter ego I even become a critic, offering my thoughts on food displayed by the odourless 37 inches of transistors that make up my rather vulgar flat panel TV.

All cooks (including friends) passing on recipes continuously say -

'Oh it's so easy'

Don't let this frivolity fool you. Be on your guard. Modesty belies the blood sweat and tears required even in the simplest process, especially when it comes to pastry.

I am not denying that it's great being exposed to good cuisine and technique on the box, it's just that there is often a major disconnect between seeing and doing. Cookery only to entertain, massaging your brain through the post work early evening humdrum whilst you devour your salt overloaded ready meal.

So my obvious naive choice was the Tarte Tatin.

I lovingly picked the last of the apples from the garden along with some fresh thyme. I also sourced a block of pre-prepared puff pastry from the depths of the chest freezer in the local shop (I did not dare look at the use by date). All that remained was to make the caramel....

I cannot tell you how difficult I found it to create the perfect golden brown caramel from simply heating up caster sugar. I quickly ruined the first batch (and rendered the pan useless). I then made the same mistake with the second attempt. I now had two pans neutered with a rapidly solidifying magma.

Much like Pompeii, the wooden spoons remained erect in the hardening rock, frozen in caramelised time in their last act of stirring. Quickly into the sink...the pans were now listless boats without a sail, slowly sinking beneath the depths of the washing up bowl.

The recipe looked good, but did not seem as well explained as Gordon Ramsay's offerings. The text should have contained the warning 'danger to pan health'. The tone of the picture of James Martin now changed to smugness

'Only I, yes I have the skills to perform this Tarte Tatin miracle'

The worst part of it all was my premature reveal of the nature of the pudding to my friends. My spirit (and pans) broken, I threw in the dish cloth and improvised some dodgy puff pastry, apple and muscarpone tartlets.

At least the lemon chicken and olive main course was a success.

As for the wine, my friends bought a Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc 2009 and I provided a George Duboeuf Chiroubles 2007. I will try and mention these in my tasting notes.

Any caramel tips most welcome.

Approaching Early

2009-10-12T20:56:00.009+01:00

It is the end of the working day and I am sipping a glass of Zinfandel. Believe me, after the day I've just had, I have earned it.

This morning I had to travel to somewhere relatively near London by train. Yes, it was very expensive, and yes the seats in our trains were made for one buttock, not two. I was getting near to my destination and my hands had become clammy, bathed in intimate body heat circulating in the hermetically sealed carriage. My clothes had started to become part of my skin, fused by the hot nylon seating. I was very irritable, exacerbated by the man nearby conducting loud business on his 'thebigiamPhone' (the Apple touch screen tapping is the real pandemic this country is suffering). To temper my mood I had already read all of the discarded freebie newspapers, and spent lots of energy avoiding the person next to me lolling on my shoulder.

Suddenly a breath of fresh air as an announcement fought above the hum of groped phones.

"Ladies and Gentlemen we will soon be approaching early....."

Unheard of, a train arriving before it is due. The pain of the journey was all but alleviated until I realised the next station was called Earley.

Finally, I arrived at my destination (late), and stopped at the newsagent to buy a real paper and some peppermint gum to dispel the stale coffee feeling in my mouth. While I was mildly concerned about killing the shop assistant with my perceived cone of death breath, she said..

"That's 78p ..why don't you buy a pack of five for £1.00, five packs are on offer"

Was my breath that bad?

I declined as I did not want five packs of gum. This did not go down well at all. There was disbelief on the assistants face. I had to explain that despite the offer I could not possibly eat five packs, and was not in the habit of cellaring it for a rainy day. A small queue of impatient commuters was developing and the pressure forced the assistant to put down the five pack and let me have what I wanted.

At the end of the long working day I popped into a supermarket for some food, on way the back to the station. More complications, this time bag related. I could not simply pay for the food before deciding on my bag. There almost seemed to be a different bag for every penny between 5 and 10 pence. No chance to try before you buy. I ended up going for the extravagant 'bag for life' (all of 10p), which is possibly the greatest misnomer of all time, or else I must be leading lots of parallel lives. Bizarrely the checkout person seemed impressed with my 10p extravagance when a lesser bag would have sufficed.

In this bag was the Zinfandel (Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel 2007) ready to be shaken and boiled on the train ride home, further more confusing its own sense of identity...

I will shortly be writing a note on the bottle in my tasting section, and elaborating on the indeterminate origins of Zinfandel.

Water Boatmen

2009-10-02T09:45:00.012+01:00

When you fart in the bath you expect a rich aroma to rise up from the bursting bubbles. Champagne bubbles however contain relativity odourless carbon dioxide, not the hydrogen sulphide that gives your own emissions that rotten egg smell.

So it comes as quite a surprise to find out that in recent tests the bubbles in Champagne have been shown to dramatically increase its aromatic quality. The bubbles literally pull smelly compounds out of the liquid. They do much more than excite the tongue and look pretty.

I therefore presume that better quality, quantity and behaviour of bubbles will equal more flavour. The French innately understand this very well with the 'Methode Champenoise', producing lots of elegant streams of small bubbles from the intricate fermentation process.

Drinking Champagne is a punch to the senses, a bit like a collection of highly perfumed ladies zorbing into the sharp thorns of a rose bed.

Unlike the zorb which you can physically open and sniff, how on earth do you examine the contents of a delicate bubble of Champagne, held together by no more than surface tension.

Maybe you could employ a few water boatman to investigate...? In actual fact scientists always over complicate things and used high-resolution mass spectrometry in this case, whatever that is.

So should novice wine tasters 'SodaStream' all their fine wine to maximise the 'aromatic lift'? Turn all of your nice Clarets into Lambrusco, and let those little bubbles do all the work for you...maybe not.

Diet Wine

2009-09-22T18:18:00.022+01:00

As I am slowly writing down a few tasting notes, I thought I would give you my take on tasting in general.

Imagine you are in a very large cathedral listening to the most amazing choir singing a well known piece of music. That is much how odour works (no, I am not referring to the underarm discipline of the choir). Smell is made up of a mind boggling amount of minuscule individual chemical blobs that combine together in beautiful harmony inside the nose (rather than the ear). When we add that effect to the basic senses derived from the tongue (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, dryness and so on), we end up with the 'taste' word we use to recognise food and drink. A sort of sensory fingerprint we know and love.

That's why when you drink wine it tastes...well....like wine of course.

What about all the other weird individual flavours people detect in wine, apart from 'wine flavour'.

To hark (sorry) back to the choir analogy, the next you time hear them perform the same piece of music there is a new conductor. The music has different emphasis. You can pick out subtle changes.

Wine is exactly like that. Some chemical blobs may develop more than others during the wine making and maturing process (including cellaring). The individual blobs are often sometimes exactly the same chemical make up as the ones that for example give butter its flavour. So when some pretentious wine buff says 'oh, it's so buttery', it technically probably is, except I would like to see him spread that on his toast in the morning.

The glass of alcoholic grape juice still tastes like wine, it's just that those buttery bits are singing a bit louder.

The problem with wine tasting charts and studied expectations is that tasters can reel off the premeditated weird and wonderful taste trivia, without making the effort to actually taste it. A security blanket in case the wrong floral comparison is plucked from the air. Pre-primed suggestions can also confuse the senses and introduce imaginary flavour friends that do not exist.

On the other hand it is tough to distinguish taste blindfolded. We are not talking about the Pepsi Challenge here. I have seen people struggle to distinguish apple from orange juice. Without any visual pointers wine tasting can be tricky, and so experience combined with a great palate are the major prerequisites.

Lots emphasis is made on the subtle odour compounds (aroma and bouquet) in wine, and how complex it is, so much so that we almost forget that food stuffs in general can also have incredibly complex aromatic qualities. For example the common tomato has around 400 volatile aromas (those chemical blobs I am talking about), 30 of which are key to its flavour. You can find flavours like horseradish in a tomato, but you rarely get a tomato buff at the dinner table having a good sniff. Chocolate is another with depth, but admittedly you are more likely to come across the odd chocolate connoisseur happily revealing aromas like pepper, blueberry and kumquat. And of course there is coffee, that is another blog.

Wine has its special appeal because 'aroma' (the chemical blobs present in the grapes before they are made into wine) is enhanced as the wine is made and aged, adding 'bouquet' , which basically means more smells. This exciting changing nature of a wine gives a thrill to enthusiasts.

Where there was once burnt toast there is now butter to calm it.

So applying all this new found odour knowledge, here is the perfect glass of red wine for those of you who do not drink alcohol or are on a diet -

Pour one glass of complex Claret, then make a cup of ordinary breakfast tea (no milk). Add a tiny amount of sugar to the tea, stir and wait for it to cool to room temperature. Decant your tea into another similar wine glass. Close your eyes. Sniff your glass of Claret with gusto (like you are clearing your nasal passages with a vapour inhaler) and then sip your tea.

Hey presto a nice tannic Bordeaux. Enjoy.

Vinegar Valhalla

2009-09-16T14:03:00.024+01:00

I have a Womble in my hallway, namely Bungo. A long story so don't ask. Anyway he made a timely appearance. My mother in law was clearing out her cupboard under the stairs, liberating space and therefore about 30 unwanted old bottles of wine, mainly gifts. My limited knowledge was asked for to help with spotting wine salvage. They ended up in my hall to sort and give to the local Church Fete, drink or get rid of.

Bungo's button eyes lit up, and I could see the wine was already earmarked in his fabric head for some kind of ingenious recycling, but before the bottles were presumed dead on arrival I needed to look for any gems, or failing that, embers of drinkable life.

Lots of white and rose wine, some way over three years old, mostly drink young supermarket stuff. A few unknowns that needed a bit of Internet research.

There was very little of note. I salvaged a few bottles for the village tombola that were teetering on the edge of the vinegar Valhalla, but were passable. They may indeed be in the brief window of their prime, a sweet spot, transforming an ordinary bottle into greatness.

So I am left with an undrinkable wine lake.

Normally I rarely get through a whole bottle of wine before oxygen kills it during the working week. I end up with a collection of sorry looking quarter full bottles by the gas hob, waiting to splash into most of the quirky creations I call cooking. I am a compulsive wine cook. An inescapable itch to plop in any old plonk, leaving the job for 'reduced wine' to add that je ne sais quoi to my average cuisine.

Why add wine to cooking? Why not? Seems to taste better. A good use of old wine.

Unfortunately my hallway wine catacomb was just too much to cook with. I ended up donating it to the local sewerage processing plant (hopefully cleaning out my waste pipes in the process). Bungo dealt with the bottles.

Wine and heat are both friends and arch enemies. Outside of a pan, 'cooked' is the term for wine that has been subjected to a range of large temperature movements, leaving it not as intended, and can be fairly unpleasant. It is very common, and is well worth looking out for to save buying a substandard product.

As an example, on one of the hotter spells of the year I went into a local reputable independent wine merchant and noted that there was no aircon. All the beautiful bottles (neatly arranged with personalised tasting notes) were subject to the heat of the summer's day, amplified by the greenhouse effect of the glass windows (don't get me onto UV damage). One to avoid, as if it was regular practice the wine in the shop would surely be 'cooked'.

Heat fluctuations can make the contents of a bottle expand and contract, so much so that the cork moves like a piston, letting in too much oxygen, ruining the wine, bringing it rapidly nearer to vinegar. Sometimes wine will even leak out. Look for corks that are not flush with the top of bottle, and wine staining.

Ignoring the oxygen attack, the wrong level of heat itself can also accelerate the subtle ageing process. Literally cooking the wine.

So why can't you decant a young Bordeaux, shove it into a microwave and end up with a beautifully aged wine, equivalent to 10 years in a cellar? Just think, your microwave could turn into a time machine. A second for every year....sadly ageing wine is not that simple. You would end up with more of a grotesque metamorphosis than time travel, much like 'The Fly'. Cooking wine, whilst accelerating the ageing process, weakens the structure. It also promotes unwanted reactions, ones that can leave a horrible taste in your mouth. Years in a cellar at a constant 55 F will gracefully age say a Bordeaux, without promoting the bad stuff. Excess heat on the other hand pushes the energy barrier so much that these evil processes can take place.

How do you detect a 'cooked' wine to taste, the two pronged offensive of oxygen and heat damage? Some say the fruit flavours are dulled and stewed. There can be a Sherry overtone and more than a hint of caramel. Colours can also be less vibrant.

The only way to know for sure is to simply buy two identical bottles and treat one bottle with disdain, while caressing the other in your wine cellar. Drink and compare. Although this test is only good on the premise that you have money to burn (literally) and that the wines are not already cooked.

Deglazing a pan with wine to make gravy is my kind of extreme wine abuse. What happens here is that the alcohol evaporates (sometimes with an eyebrow singeing flame) and the subtle flavours of the wine condense (all those weird esters that wine buffs hark on about when tasting wine...it may be bubblegum, bark, clove, butter and so on), almost a meal within a meal. The wine ages in a rapid structure wrenching way, much like Dracula being staked just after a good feed. You are left with 'the essence of Dracula' (almost a new Hammer film) in the pan.

So it does matter somewhat which wine you use in your dish, the flavour concentration you end up helps if it is complementary. The works of intense heat on wine are in truth little understood, and some might say a rule of thumb is to cook with a wine that you are going to drink with the meal. A good starting point, but I am loathed to chuck half a bottle of quality wine into a pan, not really knowing if roughly the same effect could have been achieved with a £2.99 plonk, or my stale leftovers.

The only real way to know how wine affects your food is to heat some up, reduce it down, then sample the results and work out any food matches....yeah right...life is way too short. I would rather live 'on the edge' and carry on splashing in random bottles before Bungo gives them to Uncle Bulgaria.

The Red Pill

2009-09-08T14:17:00.010+01:00

Finally I have experienced my first virtual wine tasting.

I was asked to do it through Twitter and the Taste Live interface. No, the Internet cannot yet pipe through streams of wine together with data, more's the pity, but I was posted three bottles via snail mail to sample with strict instructions as to when to open/decant them.

I had a leg of lamb in the oven which was not going to be ready for the tasting, and as there were no palate cleansers in the house, I had to make do with some stale scones left over from the weekend. So there I am, three glasses, three bottles, three stale scones and a computer. Kind of weird. Yes, I did have a soiree planned, but working week excuses left me all alone.

Robert McIntosh was our ringmaster who has a great wine blog called Wine Conversation.

On your marks.....and we were off.

A lubricating cocktail of slurps and the tweets began unfolding. My main gripe was the delay from tweet to display of the text, so it was hard to keep track of your message and any feedback from it. This may be the Taste Live interface, my rather inadequate Internet connection, Twitter itself (which seems to run like a blocked drain at times), or indeed all of the above.

Instant messaging services (MSN, Yahoo,Google et al.) to me seem slicker, quicker and certainly more private than Twitter, but Twitter seems to fill a global generic convenience gap none the less, and joins us all together very publicly under one very leaky roof (with just 140 tiles).

Before I knew it there was quite a party going on (I was living vicariously through other people's dinner parties, pretending to be a virtual guest at various tables). Sounding sad already, I know, but much like I had just taken the red pill from Morpheus, the real world around me dissolved in a Matrix like fashion with the relentless combination of the alcohol, tweets and attached video links.

The limitation of the tweet length made tasting notes a challenge. In fact a recent report says that this could be gradually eroding our working memory. Unlike my scones, big lumps of indigestible text are ultimately better for us, but the short snappy effect certainly brings pace to the tasting.

The tasting itself was of biodynamic wine courtesy of Berry Bros & Rudd.

I will try and put up some notes on my tasting section soon, but the link above gives a good overview in the meantime.

All in all it was a good experience, slightly 'other' but nice to have peoples live views on wine. It could become addictive.

Champagne Supernova

2009-09-07T16:50:00.008+01:00

Are we all turning white wine into the sparkling variety with a SodaStream? Have we lost the will to celebrate properly in style?

Nope, none of the above.

The Champagne market is naturally driven by how flush we are feeling, leading to a boom and bust model...you know, 'that model', the one Gordon Brown claimed not to believe in any more. These resulting times are crunchy, like walking tentatively in the City of London on embedded shards of glass left over from past vintage Champagne bottles carelessly cast aside, a painful reminder of a flawed bonus culture.

We have been licking our wounds and trading down our choices.

Cheaper imitations have taken hold and are filling the fizz gap. Prosecco is a prime example, Champagne austerity for the more discerning.

Whilst people are probably realising that some cheaper alternatives are not all that bad, and at times indistinguishable, real Champagne is irreplaceable for the ultimate celebration. By presenting the Champagne bottle you are immediately broadcasting that the occasion is worth a few bob, putting your hard earned cash where your sentiment is. Champagne is showing off in style. As a bonus, the resulting drink will most likely have more finesse than bog standard sparkling wine.

I have never been to a party with fizz where there has not been an interest to see if it is actually Champagne. Guests crook their necks awkwardly to get a glimpse of the label partially hidden by the waiters cloth. The first sip always results in someone saying 'do you think this is real fizz?'. Everyone normally looks back blankly, and you then hear another slightly cynical comment like 'I doubt it'.

There is no denying that the real deal is important to people, irrespective if they can taste the difference. Why?...

'Because I'm worth it'.

There is good news on the horizon. Due to a glut in Champagne, rumour has it that there are some major deals to be had in the run up to Christmas. Some say £10 bottles. This price shift has been caused by a 45% fall in exports so far in 2009 compared to all of 2008.

Put down your Cava and step out of the building.

Maybe this Champagne 'free for all' will make it so everyday, that it will start to lose its celebratory pedestal. Like turning gold into bronze for a while.

If nothing else it is a good time to stockpile Champagne and sell it on after the glut diminishes.

Sherry Trifle

2009-09-02T13:25:00.018+01:00

I will start with a simple enough question -

'How could a sherry trifle get you into trouble at work?'

A slightly longer answer...stay with me on this -

I demolished a bottle of rather delicious Chianti over lunch with a friend this weekend. The lunch was homemade pizza, and could be considered a light accompaniment for the heavy dusty Sangiovese.

Even after the first half glass I noticed that sense of lunchtime light-headedness that does not seem to happen early evening. Like someone has hit you with the silly stick, and the world starts to bounce around in a light puffy jovial way. All life's sharp edges briefly turn wonderfully soft and curvy. I think this feeling is more noticeable with the first few sips as there is a stark contrast with your normal alcohol free state of mind. Once into the second glass you are more used to the effect, and you have forgotten what it feels like to be in a world without wine.

One acronym elegantly explains what is happening in your body.

ADH

Alcohol dehydrogenases are enzymes we are blessed with, and are the reason we can drink alcohol at all. They break down ethanol into other substances we can deal with safely. They probably evolved to break down naturally occurring ethanol generated from bacteria processing in the gut.

Anyway full marks to you Mr Evolution for allowing us the choice of this simple pleasure in life.

The reason that you feel more 'drunk' at lunch is that the enzyme builds up during the day, and there will therefore be less of it to get rid of alcohol at lunch than in the evening.

Unfortunately alcohol dehydrogenases are both sexist and ageist in their quantities produced in the body, hence the stark tolerance differences you may have noticed in your nearest and dearest.

ADH also has a crucial role to play in the wine making process. Yeasts ferment glucose to alcohol and carbon dioxide with dehydrogenases. It's the reverse process to us humans. So the yeasts make the booze and we break it down, all with the same group of enzymes. This glorious reciprocal relationship was clearly written in the stars.

We all probably agree that acronyms are intensely annoying and confusing. Here is a perfect example. There is another completely different ADH in the human body related to drinking, the antidiuretic hormone. If you drink alcohol you will suppress this hormone. This is why lots of booze can mean lots of trips to the loo. The body just passes the fluid on through, not in its normal efficient absorbing way.

This is especially true for the sheer volume consumed by beer drinkers, after all

'You can never buy beer, you just rent it'

My glass of Chianti in the safety of my weekend reminded me that modern day culture is calling last orders on the days of lunchtime tipples at work. Back in the late 80's, whilst in my first office job, I remember lunchtime drinking was more the norm, especially on a Friday. Now you mostly encounter draconian workplace rules, branding you an alcoholic and not fit for the workplace if you so much as sniff a glass of wine over a meal.

Most people agree that lunchtime is your own time, and so what you choose to do with it is your own business. Employers argue that even one small alcoholic drink will still be in your blood stream when you return to work, and hence feel that they can legally enforce a drinking ban. They also worry about the smell of booze in client meetings. I can understand these arguments and I think the obvious answer is responsible drinking, not all out bans. After all what about Christmas parties, work celebrations or even clients ordering wine at a lunch?

The body gets rid of one 'unit' of alcohol (half a pint of ordinary strength beer around 3-4% abv) per hour. So after one small glass of wine in your lunch break (allowing for a lead time for initial absorption into the blood stream, combined with a full stomach slowing the process), by the time you return to work you should already have fairly low levels of alcohol in your body, almost certainly below the UK driving limit. To top that, the raw garlic stuffed olive amuse-bouche mixed with your espresso breath will smell lots worse, and overpower the paltry amount of red wine gently caressing the beef bourguignon through your body.

If you are legally allowed to drive a car after a small lunchtime drink, how can you be penalised in the workplace? Do employers have breathalysers, and if so where do you draw the line for blood alcohol levels?

No more sherry trifle.

What Sweet Spot?

2009-08-27T14:06:00.023+01:00

As you have probably noticed I've started some tasting notes on some of the wines I am drinking in a new section of my blog.

The latest news is that us Brits are drinking 10% more alcohol than in 2000. Sales have remained the same and therefore this is not a volume shift.

Wine for example has risen in strength on average from around 11% to 13%. Glass sizes are also expanding, and I have ranted about this several times in my blog.

Two out of the three bottles I have commented on so far are New World, and they also have the much higher alcohol content, one of them being 14% ABV.

So why is this happening and is it really important?

The New World wines are getting increasingly popular due to price vs quality (or so we are told) compared to Old World wines. The climate is warmer and sunnier which promotes riper grapes. So grapes from these regions tend to be higher in sugar when picked, and as sugar turns into alcohol the heady outcome is inevitable, unless you use weird and wonderful techniques like reverse osmosis to eke it out.

All over the world, the rising in alcohol content (up to 15%+ ABV in some cases) leading to intensely boozy wine is put down to several factors. Some say it's due to global warming, improved viticultural methods and even bizarre new armies of well trained yeast. In other words... don't blame me, pass the buck onto 'uncontrollable' external factors.

Others maintain that 'big' wines score better with the critics and therefore the trend is to produce wines with higher alcohol as they perform supremely at tastings. This explanation I have to say rings true to me.

The problem for us ordinary drinkers is that bigger rocket fueled wines do not seem to go so well with a meal. There is a major disconnect here, and this starts to show the political absurdity of the peculiar tasting and scoring culture that can make or break a wine producer. That paper medallion on a bottle seems to be all important. Who cares if it is not fit for purpose to drink with food. Maybe these critics need to slow down a little, take stock and start eating meals, not crackers between 'micro sips'.

These huge wines almost sit like oil and water, an alcohol slick floating on top. Forget the food matching blurb on the back, just recommend a spittoon and a biscuit.

There is a wine 'sweet spot' which is extremely dependant on the individuals palate. This is the perfect point between low and high alcohol wine. Anywhere outside of this and the balance of a wine can be ruined. This is meant to be the skill of the wine maker, balancing the wine so that the majority of people will appreciate it. This does seem lacking in many cases.

Maybe we will be filling up the car with a New World Zinfandel soon, a new biofuel. Perhaps there should be signs on bottles like 'warning, highly flammable'. A big Pinot Noir may even be the new device of choice for a bourgeois revolutionary crowd, doubling as a Molotov Cocktail.

I think it is fine producing wines of all strengths, but the output should be more varied for the consumer. At the moment wines seem to be only going one way, and that is palate stripping alcohol. Much the same as wine glasses, large ones are fine as long as there are equal amounts of the smaller measures still available.

Subprime Wine

2009-08-23T13:40:00.008+01:00

Did you know that according to this article the banks in Italy are thinking about accepting quality cured ham and wine as collateral for loans to help out struggling retailers. They have been accepting wheels of Parmesan cheese for some time in turn for better interest rates, so this would just be an extension.

I love the idea of talking about wine reserves rather than gold. Giving Gordon Brown the keys to gold vault in the UK is a bit like letting Oddjob loose in Fort Knox without Bond in tow. Gold...what gold?. So we need some other valuable commodity. Why not wine......

Imagine if these deli assets were repackaged by the Italian banks and sold on as complex food based securities to other banks in the world. Say Italian borrowers default on the loans, and the banks then discover that the securities are not based on truth, just confusing maths by a nerd in a back office. In reality the ham is spam, the wine is faked and the cheese is Babybel.

Hey presto a deli crunch (sounds like an exciting new muesli bar).

Glastic Brands

2009-08-13T18:37:00.016+01:00

I occasionally watch Dragons' Den, normally by accident desperately trying to avoid the 'oh so dull' formulaic British terrestrial TV offerings (which mostly consist of patronising chefs, other peoples dull houses, fabricated news, rubbernecking real life/drama emergency services and yet more repetitive sensationalist news).

I hardly need to tell you how hard it is to find even thirty minutes of meaningful solace on the TV these days. For example this year's Ashes series is only viewable by paying vast sums of money for Sky, then letting a half job stranger put up some cheap shaped blot of chicken wire on the side of your house and violate your outside wall with a masonry drill to pipe it in. Your own personal intravenous feed.

So this week I was squeezed into the cosy Dragons' Den again to watch more ordinary 'entrepreneurs' get disappointed by a bunch of venture capitalists who appear to gain more from the infamy of their own personal branding on prime time TV than any crumbs thrown to fledgling companies.

My interest perked up when some chap was raising capital for a wine innovation. It was a very durable plastic wine glass containing wine, sealed with an inert gas to prevent oxidation, and therefore providing a shelf life of up to a year. The seal was much like the sort of pull off foil thingy you would find on a supermarket sherry trifle.

I find plastic glasses vulgar at the best of times, no matter how convenient they are for large functions, transatlantic meals, or even picnics. I still struggle to respect a wine that is in a screw top, so peeling back a 'glastic' seal would feel even worse.

Then there is the waste of course.

The pre-sealed plastic wine glass feels both over convenient and ground fill bound for hundreds of years. It reminds me of the Nespresso aluminium capsule which at a seemingly large environmental cost perhaps delivers one of the most over perfect domestic espressos attainable without buying an industrial Gaggia the size of a steam engine. Unless you have abnormally large fingers, are keen on needlework and are in short supply of thimbles, or indeed live in Switzerland (where they have a Nespresso recycling scheme), the capsule appears to be a litter bug, much like the sealed 'glastic'.

This recycling issue has a more interesting recent spin as there is currently an expedition to the Pacific ocean to examine a floating island of plastic that is meant to be the size of Texas. The currents have gathered it together into a massive never to melt 'plasticberg' (unless global warming really kicks off).

With the icecaps melting we may well end up with plastic caps on the world's poles. Polar explorers would have to negotiate the 'Evian' mountains, 'Muller Light' hills and the PET pinot plains. They may well be core drilling the poles in the next millennium, the various layers of brand labels will be a way of revealing the past.

No carbon dating required, just a bar code reader.

The thing is, almost everything could be recycled if certain schemes were expanded or new ones were set up, but in reality that sort of infrastructure globally is certainly not around the corner. New individual portion products that create more options for permanent waste are just depressing and will probably only add to the growing island in the Pacific.

Jellyfish

2009-08-06T15:47:00.010+01:00

I have had my first day back at work, not easy after a two week break. When I finally finished the day and arrived home, I poured a small glass of cool white wine to temper being cooked in my office (I am based directly under a copper roof without aircon, the fans turning the space into an efficient convection oven. I should bring in a lamb joint as it would be slow roasted to perfection by the end of a working day).

The large gulp of wine went down fast, like a shot of tequila, I could not help myself. It was instantly forgettable and indeed the wine's provenance did not seem to matter, it just hit the spot deep inside my belly. Immediately I felt cooler, and being a bit of a lightweight I noticed the alcohol taking the edge off the day. Sometimes a good brutal small unadulterated quaff is liberating. No consideration for its looks or the aromas and the subtle nuances. No chance for it to play around the mouth, to impart its character. No swishing and bubbling, no pause for thought. Just a base need for a wine quench.

In case you are thinking this is showing severe alcoholic tendencies, well you may be right, except this replaced my usual cup of tea (which happily meant putting aside the rather odd, unappetising looking rock cakes I made the other day as they are far from perfect wine partners).

This all raises the interesting issue of drinking wine and 'sampling' wine. Socially, when eating a meal with wine, I just drink it, as over the evening the more subtle aspects gradually permeate through my system. My subconscious has time to really study the wine as it slowly saturates my senses, and so I normally have a good rapport with it later on. I think if you read too many tasting tips and execute these regularly over the evening you look like a real buffoon, and it is frankly hard work. Your glass appears to attract more attention than the person sitting next to you, who incidentally probably thinks you are a wine bore, whilst putting up with you slurping like a coffee machine.

After all don't forget that wine is a drink, not an exercise.

Sampling wine at tastings is of course the best place to implement all of your odd wine tasting practices, as there is no chance to really dive into a bottle over an evening. Too many wines, not enough time. A sort of speed dating experience. Just eyeball, sniff, gurgle and spit it out, moving on to the next one.

On the extreme drinking level, liberal lapping of distinctly average wine is reported to be going on in much greater volume of an evening at weekends in town centres all over the country. There are recent news stories highlighting the larger measures of wine served causing all sorts of issues. I wrote a while ago about how hard it is to get a normal small measure of wine when in a bar or pub these days.

Wine on this level is just a flavoured alcohol delivery system, nothing more. Please bring back the 125ml measure, I am fed up with the super size culture we are developing.

In general I do not just pull out better bottles for special occasions. I vary my every day wine choices from very expensive to dirt cheap. I will sometimes drink a quality Burgundy say with lazy beans on toast, and the next time maybe a £3.99 big brand oil slick of a Merlot. Sometimes the best way to enjoy a good wine is to selfishly drink it with your average mid-week evening meal. No distractions.

When you do take your best wine on an outing, there is nothing worse than bringing a well thought out bottle to a dinner party only for it to be squirreled away and not drunk there and then (unless it is a present to keep like a Bordeaux that needs aging). I think that etiquette mostly demands the host to serve a guest's wine on the evening.

So, what happens if a guest has obviously grabbed the cheapest bottle of plonk (to match the petrol station flowers) out of thoughtless convenience?

This is where it gets a little tricky. You can't really not accept the bottle as that looks like wine pomposity in the extreme. You also do not want to drink it with the lovingly prepared meal you have been slaving over all day. You could say that you have a special wine chosen to match the meal, open that and leave your guests plonk obviously to hand. Just show intent to serve.

What to do with this bottle if left unopened?

I suppose the only use for a terrible 'vinegar like' wine that I can think of, is treating a jellyfish sting. The chances of a storm picking up a jelly fish from the ocean, transporting it many miles and dumping it on my head seems remote, but you can never be too careful in our nanny state. Anyway my health insurance may well mean I am probably fully insured for this unlikely eventuality (and not anything else) as I never read the small print and did not take the tick out of a box somewhere. Maybe the government is already working on pointless expensive glossy leaflets on the subject of killer jellyfish emergency precautions. Nice to be one bottle of plonk ahead of the game.

Another technique is to return the favour and hence the bottle when (if) your guests invite you round for dinner. Perhaps a bit inflammatory for me. Nevertheless, I have actually done that by a mistake in the past, over generous guests bringing far too much wine to drink, and hence being left a bottle or two unopened, only to be returned to them at a later date.

This speaks volumes of my poorly stocked wine collection, and my short term memory.

Hail Bordeaux

2009-07-31T14:31:00.012+01:00

Us Brits like to talk about the weather. You can't blame us at the moment as the promised golden riches of a hot summer have in reality been mostly tropical down pours. Rain drops the size of golf balls are imprisoning us in our homes. Sudden torrents of water coursing down the road, a volley of drums on the roof. All the Met Office can say after promising a 'barbecue summer' is effectively ...err sorry, we got it wrong this year.

You do have to remember that it is not their fault the rain came, although this all knowing department almost likes to give the impression of pulling the invisible strings in the sky. Fancy interactive maps, attractive smooth talking presenters and hi-tech satellites don't seem to improve on the guess work a great deal.

My lawn has gone from a dust bowl to a sort of fluorescent green colour, the broken showers promoting turbo growth and buckets of chlorophyll.

If global warming weather predictions are to be believed (o ye of little faith), then southern England will be more Mediterranean in climate. By 2030 DEFRA thinks that grapes like Pinot Noir will be easily cultivated in the UK. So if I had the cash then maybe I should splash out on a Saab 900 convertible and a nice south facing cote (slope) that may well produce a good crop of Pinot in twenty or so years time.

I have some time off work, and being stuck indoors brings its own amount of lethargy and lack of concentration, made very clear today when I started cleaning the sideboard with Windolene. So to pass the time I am drawn to deciphering a bottle of 'bored-eaux' a friend kindly gave me recently, lest I try and clean the bath with toothpaste (although that would kind if make sense if it was enamel).

My Bordeaux (aka Claret) is lesson in understated elegance with its distinctive high shoulders and subtle label. It is a mysterious guest. I thanked my friend knowingly, but the truth of the matter is that I actually normally look at clarets with trepidation as the complex scribbles and markings are tricky to understand fully.

Lets try, and start at the top.

There is a round green seal with DGDDI. This means that French taxes have been paid and the wine can be sold in (and therefore probably has been bought in) France, it is from a named origin and of higher quality. Moving down and there seems to be a metal rather than plastic foil covering the cork. This imparts a level of quality to me about the packaging. Cutting it off is altogether more satisfying.

Taking the armour from a knight not the shell suit from a layabout.

The wording on the foil is 'Bordeaux' and the makers name ' Jean-Louis Trocard'. According to this article -

'The Trocards...produce some 800,000 bottles from ten Libournais properties'

The Libournais region includes Saint-Emilion and Pomerol (famous for Chateau Petrus). These sub-regions are named on the back label of the bottle in French as the grape vine souce areas.

Sliding down those bold shoulders we can first see that the wine is as expected red, sloshing around the glass gap to the main label. Bordeaux is famous for its reds and they can be a blend of any of the following - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot. No specific grape information is forthcoming on the label which is normal.

Next there is an elegant picture of some wrought iron gates, and below that the words 'Chateau Trocard'. Chateau translates as a castle or manor house. Immediately the picture and title of the wine conjures up images of a grand French building much like Cinderella's castle. But in wine making terms chateau means an estate or vineyard. Dispel your fairy tale illusions of grandeur as there could just be could be just an old farm on the estate, nothing more.

Below that is written the vintage (grapes grown and harvested in a particular year) of 2003. Here is where the weather plays a major role, and dictates the character of the wine. Good years can fetch high prices. 2005 is meant to be the most recent sought after vintage.

Unlike 2009 where is looks like low yields from Bordeaux due to hail storms destroying some of the crop (bet the weather forecasts missed that one too, although knowing would not have softened the blow) , 2003 was a heatwave in Europe. The vintage was particularly tannic with high alcohol levels partly as a result of the roasted thick skinned berries . This tells me that maybe the contents will be a tad more bitter than normal, and maybe age even better.

Moving down still further 'Bordeaux Superieur' is emblazoned across the label above 'Appellation Bordeaux Superieur Controlee' in small italics. This means that the vines are selected in the 'general' Bordeaux region (Bordeaux is like a large complex jigsaw puzzle, each piece a wine making geographical area with its own characteristics) and tend to be older, higher quality and age well for longer than basic Bordeaux AOC wines. This ties in with the text on the back label describing the source sub-regions.

The second section of the front label states 'mis en bouteille au chateau' (bottled on the very same estate) and the makers name and address. It is 12.5% by vol and 750ml.
The back label also states that it is best drunk between four and five years old (my schoolboy French helping me out again) so I had best open it fairly soon.

I have only scraped the surface of the information this bottle is silently trying to impart, you can go into far more detail. For example reams have been written about the 2003 vintage and the effects of the climate on the wine.

I find tannic clarets are good with a meaty dinner, so I will roast a lamb and report back.

Methane Clouds

2009-07-13T22:42:00.016+01:00

My wine cellar (storage space under the stairs) has all but been converted into a loo. I am left with a fraction of the wine space, accessible from a cupboard door by the 'throne'.

The few bottles of wine I could store in there would have to endure a flatulent toxic atmosphere. They would also have to put up with warmth from a heated towel rail, and the vibrations from the big flush button on the cistern (all modern loos seem to give you a choice these days. I liked the simplicity of the 'one flush fits all', as there are way too many other decisions to make in life, mostly in fact made on the loo. The two buttons never come with a flush categorisation chart for clarity. It could be a bit like those naff pictures of dishes outside restaurants in dodgy holiday resorts).

A wine collection in my new WC would suffer the same incongruous ride as the Huygens space probe entering Titan's atmosphere, with its thick methane clouds.

Damp towels, a parky loo and a sign saying 'no number twos' are way more favourable than damaging my wine, but I am not the only one living in the house. I need a plan B for wine storage.

In the summer my garage is the 'cooler' in the film 'The Great Escape', you could fry an egg on the floor. In the winter the cobwebs freeze. I cannot afford to convert part of it to some swanky temperature and humidity controlled walk-in wine cellar.

As far as the kitchen goes, I find electric chilled wine cabinets really vulgar looking. They may be practical and gain respect from some visiting wine buffs, but they take away the organic beauty of the wine collection, and present it as a dull predictable amorphous mass of sealed plastic. Some of them look like coffins. You never know whether you are going to pull out a long dead relative or a nice claret. They are about as inspiring and predictable as a screw top plastic wine bottle.

All I want is to stumble upon a bottle covered in dust in my own deep imaginary cellar (candle in hand).

Caves rule in wine storage and have an interesting history. The Romans used to store their wine in catacombs (so they really had to be careful what they pulled out), and the French first used crayeres (old Roman limestone excavations for building material). Nowadays man-made caves built for storing wine are common place all over the world.

Caves are naturally perfect for the job. High humidity, low light, low vibration, and cool temperatures. In fact everything my WC is not.

The perfect temperature for storing wine is around 55 degrees F (13 degrees C), and that is a big ask in my house. To put that in perspective, in Great Britain 16 degrees C is the legal minimum working temperature for office type work, and 13 degrees is for work with some physical activity. So in my mind wine is recommended to exist 'on the edge', on the limit of human endurance. This tells me any living space in my house is not going to cut it.

Looking into this a bit more it would seem that wine at room temperature in the house (in a cool dark place) can be ok for a couple of years. If you want to get serious though, and store quality wines for decades, then 55 degrees F all the way. Varying temperatures promote different subtle changes in the wine, some good and some bad. This is why solid cellaring is so crucial to the outcome. Big temperature fluctuations are one of your worst enemies.

I class myself as a casual wine drinker, storing a small collection for dinner parties and the odd bottle for two to three years. Therefore I think the cupboard in the hall sounds a good bet for now.

Close Encounters

2009-07-08T11:33:00.017+01:00

Waitrose are going 'eco' and shipping wine from Chile in enormous plastic recyclable tanks.

A wine lake floating on the sea.

There are some downsides to this method, as in any decentralisation of a process. For example the equivalent 32,000 bottles of wine could be tainted if a tank is not properly cleaned. If the seals are not working properly the wine could be ruined by excess oxidation. But the obvious benefits seem to win the day .

They are even bottling it in the UK in 60 percent recycled glass bottles. The proof of the pudding is in the eating methinks.

I suppose the whole process just highlights the way the bulk food and drink industry works to provide for the 61 million UK residents. You feel like a battery farm animal with your nose in an automated feeding trough. Just squirt a bit more wine in, keep us happy pigs.

My own green contribution to wine transport is a little more modest and has been of late fairly hazardous.

I often cycle the six miles or so across fields to and from work, and the other day I popped a bottle of wine in a pannier to take home. Five minutes into the journey there was a loud bang and the heavens opened. Cambridgeshire is ironed to perfection. Not a wrinkle, lump or bump in sight.

I was very exposed.

If you have seen the film 'Independence Day', I felt I was about to be obliterated by a flash of light from large grey UFO like those people on top of a sky scraper. Lightning is much hotter than the surface of the sun, so I needed a plan to reduce my chances of being a roasted accompaniment for my wine (one in three million to be precise, although I challenge anyone to not translate that to about 1 in 2 when caught in the fury of nature).

Contrary to popular belief, rubber tyres are no protection from this sort of attack (Cars are safe due to the Faraday cage effect of the roof rather than the tyres...gosh I may be having a nosebleed).

I had heard of lightning conductors, so maybe a strategic placement of the bottle of wine with its foil cap would distract any strike. The wine taking a hit for the greater good. On second thoughts it would probably become a sort of stick grenade and do more damage than good. Vaporised grape juice, flaming alcohol and globules of molten glass, nice. For people that worry about travel shock and the precise temperature fluctuations that may damage wine, this would be a good example to note in your wine spotters diary as a point of no return.

The rain was now long steel rods drilling into the ground, and this combined with the thickening darkness added to the feeling of being enclosed in an iron maiden. So, I found a modest tree, taking my lead from some nearby cows, and against any lightning geeks advice. In my mind there were two benefits, one was the canopy rain protection, the other was that maybe a boiling electrified tree would steam me dry, although it would take more than a close encounter with the sun's surface to dry out my sodden shoes.

You are supposed to crouch down onto the balls of your feet in a storm, away from trees, water etc, but I stupidly had chosen self respect over looking like another wet turnip in the field.

Thunder is just the noise lightning makes (light travels faster than sound so you see the lightning way before hearing it), and five seconds between seeing a lightning strike and sound means it is about one mile distant.

Flash...one elephant, two elephants.....bang. Still to close.

Then sunshine appeared, signalling a break in proceedings. This is apparently where you are in most danger. Lightning can strike up to 10 miles from a storm, a bolt from the blue. I eventually arrived home with a bottle that may well have suffered minor travel shock from the bumpy farm track. I am not one to worry about this unless we are talking about quality or unfiltered wines with sediment. Purists say that any bottle agitation can change the complex distribution of the constituent parts of wine, and that some wines even with no sediment need a few hours, days or more to relax before drinking. In this case I was the one that needed to relax... with a glass of wine.

Do they make a Faraday cage for a bike? I will look into it.

Squidgy on the Inside

2009-07-02T09:36:00.007+01:00

Some major wine producers are starting to use plastic bottles.

There really is nothing new in wine plastic containers, as we have all on occasion transferred wine from a box bladder to our own. I am not the world's biggest fan of box wine or 'casks'. They do not pour in a gentle flow, the wine jets out with a vulgar gush with more enthusiasm than an emergency comfort stop at a motorway service station, creating an almost foamy head in the glass, and often the floor. Wine brutalised by the bladder.

While we think we appreciate the sizable positive environmental impact of lightweight easy to produce recyclable plastic wine containers, there are other factors to consider before we all turn into Von Hagens plastinated people simply because it is more convenient.

Plastic wine containers are permeable and let in oxygen over time, which makes them vastly inferior to glass (oxidization is mostly bad news for the delicate structures of wine). Tests show that seeping oxygen can adversely change the character of unopened boxed and 'PET' plastic bottled wine from roughly eight months onwards. This means limiting the naturally recommended window to drink wine even more. The wine has barely taken its first steps before it has to be released into the wild. Admittedly most wine in these sorts of containers is designed to be drunk straight away, but the forcibly shortened drinking window bothers me.

Nobody blinked when milk went plastic, but milk has a very short shelf life and is a very different beast. If you are an obsessive milk sniffer, then this is maybe a great transferable skill for plastic bottled wine, which will probably also have a sell by date stamped on it like the box wine.

These new layered plastic containers can have oxygen 'scavengers' in them. Unfortunately they only work for 12 months or so. As I am no scientist my mind thinks of 'PET plastic scavengers' and has a picture of some tiny bloated spikey creature with a pot belly, languishing in the dregs high on wine and O2.

Boxed wine is not hermetically sealed, contrary to popular belief, but once opened, if you are lucky most of the wine will expel without letting any oxygen into the bag. The last glass or so can be problematic, and often this is when you let the air in with a unpleasant ripple of belching (or maybe that is the replete oxygen scavenger being flatulent). The short term advantage of boxed wine is that once opened it can last for a long time (four weeks plus), whereas PET plastic bottles not only have a short shelf life, but also are as susceptible to air as their glass counterparts once opened.

Where does all this new packaging technology leave us?... In an world of ugly inconvenient convenience in my opinion.

With the slow removal of the permanence, authority and glamour of glass, wines may take on the appeal of a sort of boozy grape smoothie, chosen indifferently by hurried shoppers over a mango, kumquat and coconut juice.

The good news for glass lovers is that current plastic technology is not up to the job of keeping your treasure chest of Bordeaux safe for several years, so glass will be around for a long time to come.

Now back to the environmental impact. Yes plastic is lighter and therefore greener to transport, but that is not the whole story. Apparently unlike glass, plastic cannot be recycled over and over again because it degrades significantly in the recycling process. Therefore the ideal image you have in your head of your plastic bottle being turned into another one is just fantasy for now. More likely a bin bag. Producing and recycling plastic bottles also releases lots more toxic nasties than glass bottles.

Suddenly this new form of bottle seems even less appealing.

Perhaps plastic bottles are only good for the producers who can save on shipping and manufacturing costs.

I suppose to be thorough you need to work out the carbon (and other) emissions in manufacture, transport and recycling of glass bottles vs plastic taking into account the degradation of recycled plastic. Sounds too complex a job for me and my maths. Anyone?

Pounds, Shilling and Wine

2009-06-30T11:01:00.009+01:00

I recently had to find cheap wine in bulk for an event.

Where on earth do you start?

If you are just a normal casual wine drinker like me then your experience of different grape varieties, regions, vintages and producers will be a tiny thimble full in the bewildering, aggressively brand led choices out there.

You walk into the supermarket wine aisle and the walls become the Dan Brown cryptex, the wrong choice and you and your guests will end up wallowing in vinegar. Lots of eye catching labels draw your eye, known brands mesmerise you with familiarity and confidence. The Old World French wines sit there elegantly, tempting you with their labels that look more like a wedding invitation from the producer. The possibility of impressing your guests with a relatively unknown Burgundy excites you, until you see the price. Over to New World and you spot Oyster Bay and think it looks like a bargain, until you remember that you have confused it with Cloudy Bay, the brand that demands the big bucks. By this time your head is spinning. Not a wine expert in sight, just a lady who happily tells you that there is a two for one offer on loo rolls.

Exit.

Back home and onto the Internet. You first search for discounted wine in supermarkets, and have some success. Your search is 100% price driven and you have no idea what has forced this price down say from £7.99 to £4.99. Could it be the fact the wine is actually rubbish, or it is just past its best? Is it a blend of average wine tarted up with additives to create a dull predictable homogeneous year on year big brand taste?

You cave in out of frustration and order one bottle to try with friends. Half of them say it is ok, some screw up their faces in disgust, and others just want to drink any free solution containing some alcohol. You then discover that the supermarket can only provide half of the required amount of the stuff.

Back online.

Relying on Internet reviews of bottles of wine is a bit of a lottery. The rise of 'shilling' is partly to blame. Don't panic, the 'economic downturn' (we are apparently past the crunchy bit now) is not resurrecting old money, despite the fact we cannot even make our new money properly (the current faulty 20p coins with no dates). To shill is to pretend to be a genuine customer, but really be in the back pocket of the seller. It is hard to trust wine reviews, unless you can be sure of the authenticity due to a little research around the reviewer. There is no eBay style review of reviewers. No centralised aggregate trustworthiness system. Obviously there are lots of great shill free sites (try saying that after a few glasses..) and the rich tapestry of some of the established wine blogs are a very good bet (although I am bound to say that). Maybe someone should invent a shill free certified stamp or something, as much good as that will do.

So where to next....I suppose it is time to bother some of your friends again and ask for their ideas, assuming that they are not covertly working for some shady wine pyramid selling scheme.

You get some good recommendations like 'we had this wine at our wedding and it was perfect'. The problem is that they may well have been married a couple of years ago, and that wine is long gone, well certainly the vintage, maybe not the brand. They may well have driven to an obscure vineyard in the depths of France and spent £3.00 per bottle, ending up with a superb wine, a one off. You also want to be original, an Indiana Jones in the world of wine, flexing your deep Sunday supplement wine knowledge with your guests, feeling innovative and cavalier.

Off to a wine shop.

Immediately you are seduced by the smell of the wooden wine racks and the intimate feel of the place. All the prices are hand written and there is a little bio on each bottle, a touching and helpful life story. The shop keeper has a great knowledge of wine and guides you to a batch of he has been trying to shift for a long time...stop...now I am now being way too cynical. The wine shop is a great bet. You can develop a trusting relationship with the owner/manager and hopefully find a good bottle. You then go online and try to find it cheaper, which of course you do.

Poor independent wine shop.

Unfortunately you find a double bluff type shill review saying the wine is terrible. More confusion sets in.

In reality, after reading guides online to choosing cheap wine, the information seems to instantly evaporate on application. You need to put a considerable amount of work in if you are to go it alone.

Some pointers like these work for some and not others -

Try to buy wine produced from a more defined area and maybe not so popular general region (research required)

Check how old the wine is (lots of cheaper wine is designed to be drunk young)

Look for unusual grape varietals and blends (for example some of the Italian varietals are excellent and good value)

Try to spot the quality cheaper New World bargains (some say it is better wine for your money than Old World wine in the budget bracket)

Make sure the bottle and label are impressive, attractive and/or intelligently understated , as visual perceptions can dramatically influence taste.

Ask for a bulk discount and see where you end up (no-brainer)

Try the wine over a couple of evenings, with and without food (preferably similar food to the event).

Do a blind tasting of several possibilities with friends

and so on.....

What did I end up doing? I went for an unusual New World blend of grapes on the advice of a wine merchant I trusted that brought the price down, along with a bulk discount. I did a blind tasting with friends and it came out on top.

note - If you are worried about Champagne then read this post I wrote recently. In a nutshell cheap can be excellent. Even try Prosecco (an Italian dry sparkling wine) as an alternative.

Rudolf's Bio

2009-06-23T21:02:00.013+01:00

I am still, like many, struggling with the word 'organic'. Branded to mainstream attention by major food retailers as a healthy, ethical, bourgeois choice, it seems to mean a spectacular confusion of manured tomatoes, happy chickens and celebrity chefs.

If you are finding that concept difficult to get your head around try 'biodynamics', invented by Rudolf Steiner, the phrase coined by his humble followers. It predates most of the organic movement and is wacky stuff.

What came first the organic chicken or the biodynamic egg?

So how is a bottle of wine going to educate me about this particular type of parentage? In short it is probably not. Studying an inanimate bottle is a hybrid game of charades and hide and seek. Lets see..organic is three syllables, biodynamic is five, already it is going to be a struggle. The English language is melting into 'text speak', so the long words and ever shorter attention spans are a really bad combination when it comes to getting a message across.

Where was I...oh yes what is this biothingamajig?

There was a news story very recently about how the moon cycles affect the taste of wine, and that pretty much sums up biodynamics. But do not laugh too much because major brands like Tesco and Marks and Spencer are said to be taking this biodynamic loony (sorry lunar) calendar seriously and only let their wine critics taste on the 'good' days. The calendar was produced by a German great grandmother called Maria Thun (or was it Thumb, related to Tom..you couldn't make this stuff up, could you?)

In all seriousness biodynamics has major benefits to the local environment as everything is pesticide free. Wines may well have interesting characteristics due to the rather eccentric 'organic' (here we go again, the 'o' word has slipped in when I do not really understand it) soil preparations like..

preparation 505 - 'Oak bark fermented in the skull of a domestic animal'

or

preparation 506 - 'Dandelion flowers fermented in cow mesentery'.

I suppose, through the eyes of a biodynamic wine producer, the vines seem like acupuncture needles in the back of a rather large elephant which has been regularly massaged with essential oils. Sceptics may say this creates either a placebo effect or genuinely better wine simply due to the extra care taken, rather than the hocus pocus.

Tenders of these challenging viticulutural eco-pockets are truly passionate about the land so I really do not care how weird and wonderful this all is, anything that environmentally friendly is good in my spell book.

Low On Juice

2009-06-18T14:36:00.005+01:00

My phone is on it last legs. It only vibrates now, too lethargic and cynical to ring. It has seen the rise of the iPhone and has just given up I think, slowly developing an inferiority complex.

This means I am going to have to probably bite a chunk out of the Apple, and spend all my hard earned cash on an iPhone contract. Then I can be on the Internet wherever I am, sending tweets with one of the iPhone's rich application set.....that is until the battery gives out. I am told the Swiss Army Knife of phones is demanding on juice....

Like running a tank in the desert on tracks made of ice.

My current phone will be smugly awaiting for me to discover this, and knows I will probably be back. In truth, I just like the look and feel of the iPhone. The rest is irrelevant (sort of).

There are some wine apps for the iPhone which interest me. These are designed to help you source and choose wines.....sounds good doesn't it? I will let you know when I finally take the plunge.

Snooth have just released on of these apps which I aim to road test.

There are mixed reviews of some wine apps out there, and ultimately I get the impression that one app will not really be a good replacement for asking a member of staff in a good wine shop, but a complementary tool all the same.

Do not vacuum out your brains just yet and plug the iPhone into the void.

The choice of wine is ever more bewildering, probably not enough time on the iPhone's fragile life cycle to cope with the possibilities. I am sure that by the time I had typed in 'Gewurztraminer' to the slightly awkward touch screen keyboard (clearly engineered for The Borrowers' tiny hands) it would be too late and way too frustrating. Combine that with the inevitable half full mobile broadband Britain and you have a nightmare.

My method is more to avoid wines I have bought, drunk and hated. The 'horse has already bolted' approach. You can only really know what you like by trying the stuff. After all....

'One man's meat is another man's poison'

Boiled Aphids

2009-06-09T15:34:00.006+01:00

I have a small herb garden. I am not very green fingered, but am very proud of the modest crop. My mint is particularly vivacious right now, and I thought I would put it to good use by making my own mint tea, and try to impress some visitors.

All you need to do is to pick a few fresh leaves, rinse them, bruise them a bit and put them into a pot with some boiling water. After drinking the tea I noticed some brown bits in the bottom of my cup. If it was packet tea I could put it down to tea 'dust', but this was obviously not the case. Looking more carefully I soon realised that they were lots of poor minute aphids that had been boiled alive.

'At least it was quick', was my first reaction.

I kept quiet about this infestation and hoped it went unnoticed. So plentiful were they, that I am sure if I had turned my cup upside down a passing clairvoyant could have performed an aphid reading.

On further inspection my mint plant was indeed hiding an expanding colony of aphids, cosily tucked under the leaves and very difficult to wash off. You would need a scanning electron microscope to spot them, and a vicious dentists tool to dislodge them.

I have not made mint tea since.

Have you ever thought about all the bugs in the wine making process that escape prevention and cleaning methods, and end up being crushed with the grapes? Grape vines attract aphids, which in turn attract beautiful ladybirds who delight in feasting on them. This normally would be a good thing, but when you have a bumper aphid year, the quantity ladybirds becomes a real problem.

Ladybirds, despite their rather elegant appearance harbour a very nasty chemical, that in tiny quantities can completely change the character of a wine. This is normally used as their defense mechanism, and when there are too many crushed ladybirds in wine it can cause a condition known as 'ladybird taint'. I am told it is sort of green vegetable aroma. I unsurprisingly have not actually eaten a ladybird, or crept up behind one to scare it enough for it to produce this chemical, so if you are an open mouthed cyclist and have had the inevitable misfortune of gathering one, please let me know what they taste like.

If this idea of jus de ladybird in some wines bothers you, then there is a choice. Scientists have worked out that wine cartons sealed with an aluminium layer actively reduce the taint, a major trade off being that wine keeps less well in cartons (it is more susceptible to oxidization, which I wrote about here).

For me, I would rather put one thousand ladybirds in my Magimix and mix the resulting juice with my wine than drink from a vulgar wine carton. Naturally I would give them the option to 'fly away home' before attempting this heinous act of mass extermination.

Anyone for Home Secretary?

2009-06-05T16:32:00.003+01:00

Extraordinary times. It feels like we have no government, a childish game of musical chairs is taking place, with the press as the games master and everyone else sitting in the amphitheatre with thumbs mostly down.

I can barely reach for my glass to discover another politician has been fed to the lions.

The Freedom of Information Act to MPs expenses was a bit like opening that witch's bottle recently discovered on a building site in Greenwich. It was mostly full of brimstone, urine and nails, need I say more.

Witch bottles have a strong connection with wine as they are Bellarmines, which were originally stoneware wine flagons from the Rhineland. Apparently these days witch bottles are a little bit more sophisticated containing rosemary, pins and needles and red wine. Reminds me of a big red I drank the other day....great material for my tasting chart.

Prehistoric Vienetta

2009-06-01T11:08:00.019+01:00

It has been incredibly hot the last few days which has meant lots of barbeques. Friends are more likely to bring white wine or rose which often needs to be chilled quickly, or else you will find ice cubes floating in your wine, a terrible state of affairs.

Like most of my friends, for a super fast chill I have been putting wine bottles into the frozen wastelands of my freezer amongst the prehistoric Vienetta, frozen peas, vodka and not forgetting the bolognese mix that I thought I would use a week or so later, about 10 years ago. I normally have to find an ice axe and crampons before attempting this.

As you can see my freezer has a serious short term memory problem and the wine usually ends up as a real alcopop, discovered at the next party when more friends arrive with more bottles to chill. If you are interested in how temperature affects alcohol read my old post here .

The freezer is wholly inadequate and does not seem to do the job quickly enough. I have recently discovered that the best way to cool wine in just 20 minutes or so is to submerge the bottle in a bucket of water with ice, and add a couple of spoons of rock salt. Hey presto perfectly chilled wine. Those beautiful reassuring drops of condensation form on the side of your glass, like the wine is doing all the sweating for you under the heat of the sun, and every sip imparts flavour while cooling you from within.

At this point you may well wonder why there was a need to add salt to the bucket of ice and water. Doesn't it just lower the freezing temperature of water (as in road treatment in the winter) and not actually decrease the temperature of the solution? Well the salt does actually have the effect of reducing the temperature. It lowers the water's freezing point and the ice starts to melt. The energy to melt the ice has to come from somewhere, and it is supplied by the heat in the surrounding water solution, hence a temperature reduction. Old fashioned ice cream makers used to work in this way, and you can in theory achieve temperatures down to -21 degrees C.

So my Vienetta, while old, is not so useless after all and has locked within a deep understanding of this process in every ice crystal of its being.

Remember that most white wines should be served between 7 and 10 degrees C, so do not get carried away, or you may as well be drinking very cold water, the subtle aromas of the wine lost in the chill.

Frozen Dog Turd

2009-05-29T14:26:00.005+01:00

I am enjoying a glass of red wine with some pate on toast. Sounds a simple snack, but recent news studies tell me there are hidden depths to all of this.

The way I hold my glass has now been attributed to a personality type. A Dr Glenn Wilson studied at 500 drinkers and decided that you should fit into one of eight glass grasping personality profiles.

There does not seem to be a 'blogger' personality type. That would be me, 'attempting to drink and type at the same time, spilling most of my wine into the keyboard'. If my prose gets fruity I normally blame it on the raised alcohol level of my keyboard.

Moving onto the pate, a report has appeared that claims us humans cannot distinguish pate from dog food. In the blind taste tests, although the participants disliked the dog food more than the other offerings, they could not pick it out as dog food. The fact that dog food came out worst in taste is enough for me to say it was identified.

The ground up sinews and bones of some poor chicken say, is vastly different to the chicken livers delicately mixed with herbs, onions and butter that I am eating.

I will probably venture into the freezer and have some chocolate ice cream later, or could it be frozen dog turd? Yet another pointless scientific experiment in the 'offaling'.

A Lung Full of Air

2009-05-28T13:19:00.011+01:00

I run into this really annoying problem with the elaborate recycling regime in Cambridgeshire.

I normally collect all of my wine bottles and pop them into a green plastic box ready for collection. Unfortunately this box is extremely hazardous.

The dregs from the bottles ultimately run and gather into putrid oxidized pools at the bottom of the box. A sort of dark rose that could happily burn a hole through several floors if spilt, much like the blood from the film Alien. This is a perfect, if not slightly extreme example of the poor fate of an open bottle of wine if left too long before consuming.

Moving this box ready for collection is a nightmare. The evil liquid invariably finds its way out of engineered holes and all over my trousers (I am sure the box designers are still chuckling about this 'feature'). I arrive back in the house looking and smelling like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The fantastic speed of the action of oxygen on wine is both excellent and really frustrating. Initially it shakes hands with the wine, and is perfectly charming, even improving the taste of some wines for a short while. Then, just when you least expect it, nasty things start happening and you eventually end up with vin aigre which is old French for 'sour wine' and hence the word vinegar.

This presents more issues for me as I rarely get more that three quarters of my way through a bottle in the working week, when it becomes unpalatable (after maybe two to three days depending on the wine). This happens due to multiple bottles being opened to complement my evening meal.

This is where I wished half bottles were a solution. But they are really not. They age in their cute 375ml bottles at breakneck speed due to the ratio of oxygen to wine, so when opened a half bottle will often taste different to its larger counterpart containing exactly the same wine. In a nutshell they carry unpredictably volatile contents, exacerbated greatly when opened. They are also very hard to get hold of, difficult to store and quite frankly give the impression of a distinct lack of a full commitment to wine, a slightly dull, cautious approach.

They look like they belong in a large dolls house, not on the dining room table.

The normal 750ml bottle has so much allure and romance. For example it is said that until the 1600s all bottles were hand blown, and the standard size we have today was dictated by the glass blowers breath, a lung full of air. Who am I to argue with that.

On the other hand I often buy sweet wine in half bottles which will seemingly keep until the sun turns into a red giant (no, nothing whatsoever to do with GM sweetcorn) in about 5 billion years, and boils off the bottle, and indeed us too.

So are there good solutions for keeping bottles drinkable after opening? I spoke briefly about one contraption back in 2006 here . But there are other ways, like squirting inert gas into the bottle and replacing the cork (sounds a real palaver).

Maybe I could just talk to my bottles, and then the hot air (CO2) will gradually replace the oxygen inside.....but I am sure tedium of my monologue may well turn the wine sour anyway.