favourite wine

'What's your favourite wine?'

Not the best wine you've ever drunk, but your favourite. It's not as easy a question to answer. Or maybe I'm making it too complicated. Maybe you can answer it just fine and I'm over thinking it all. It wouldn't be the first time. For me, best wines are easy. I've got them categorised and everything, and can reel a list off counting by finger with very little effort. 

Favourite, to me, is different. A favourite wine is a bottle whose moment, or moments, pierce through the memory of palate, heart and mind. It may have been a revelation or a comfort, or both. It comes to be something that we consider defining as who to we are - not just wine, but food, music, art, movies, architecture. Often the story of how one particular thing becomes a favourite becomes one of the defining stories of our life. 

Again, maybe it's just me. It could be that I weigh down these moments with significance in hindsight, turning the odd moment into something far more than it has any right to be.

The first wine I tried from Freddie Mugnier was his 1997 Musigny. It was March 2003, and my flatmate at the time brought the bottle back from a trip to Beaujolais and Beaune. I cooked some lamb gigot chops from the farmer's market and decanted the bottle into my prized decanter (sadly broken a short time later). I didn't know anything about Mugnier and Musigny was almost as much a mystery. Andy paid €75 or something close to that for it, so we expected something good. What we got was something tremendous. The purity, elegance and precision of the wine blew me away. 

I spent the next seven months pestering the MD of our wine shop, demanding he find the importer and order vast quantities of every cuvée he could. It took awhile, but he did, and they stock those wines to this day. They're a bit pricier these days, sadly.

So that's my favourite wine. I love it. I wish I could afford to drink it more often.

Musigny 2000, JF Mugnier

Pale, translucent, rust with no orange. Bright to the core.

Bushels of cranberries, redcurrants, dried spice in bushes and some forest floor. Some cured, savoury notes come through with coaxing.

Bursting with crunchy, red, juicy fruit on the front side of the palate. It's no longer cranberries or redcurrants but cherries and cherry stones. There's a light dusting of cocoa that coats the cherries like leather. As it passes from the middle to the finish there's a soft heather note that slips into that perfumed, ephemeral dovetail.

*****

Tasted with good friends on Greyfriars, 7 November 2011

what do diamonds filter, anyway? (or how I learned to stop worrying and love Crystal Head Vodka even though I wouldn't pay for it)

Super-premium vodka is bullshit. It's important to get that out of the way right now - you're welcome to disagree with me, but you're wrong. As wrong as a creationist denying climate change whilst adding 2 and 2 and coming up with 7.

Grey Goose, Belvedere, Chopin, Absolut Level, Smirnoff Penka, Ciroc, Uluvka, Stolichnaya Elit, and that ridiculous mammoth tusk were all created to exploit society's ridiculous compulsion to spend more on something stupid in hopes of buying an 'image'. The idea that a liquid whose main purpose in the universe is to be as neutral and vapid as possible, and that the more neutral and vapid it is, the more exclusive and expensive it must become? That reminds me of a certain Hans Christian Andersen story. Hint: it's not The Little Mermaid.

If similar taste factors were used to appraise beer, Bud Light would be the most rare and expensive beer in the world, sold in zircon-studded cans individually wrapped in faux-felt adorned with a stitched print of the St Louis skyline. Think about that for a second. Have you stopped shuddering? Good.

Oh but they use the best ingredients…

Why? So that they can extract all trace elements of character and flavour from them? How important is your ultra amazing water source after 5-10 distillations? Is potato vodka better for when you get wasted and grab a bag of chips on the way home? Is it better to have a cider chaser with apple vodka?

It's all marketing, marketing without substance and marketing without substance is bullshit, pure and simple.

Which is why I fucking love the diamond-filtered, conspiracy-theoried, purified-by-aliens gibberish that is Crystal Head. Because in an ocean of grain-neutral, marketing-driven, multi-national, ridiculously packaged, over-priced, over-hyped bullshit, Crystal Head rises like a leviathan, out-purifying, out-packaging, out-bullshitting every single one of them. And who's doing this? Dan-Fucking-Aykroyd, that's who. Elwood Blues is selling snake oil; Mr Conehead has sewn a new pair of threads for the emperor. Big business marketing bullshit versus someone genuinely creative and surprise, surprise, the latter has a far more interesting line of fertiliser. They're selling image and he's selling a story. He's got my money.

Or, he would, if I ever felt like spending £50 on a bottle of vodka.

the new wine rant

Things are changing. This blog is one of those things. In the next month or so there will be a move away from Blogger, a re-design and an increase in content.

I started this blog in 2005 as a means of chronicling the wines I encountered along the way. There was no plan, no goal and, as it is plain to see, no set schedule. I guess it was in part a vanity project. I drink nice wines. People who care about nice wines like to tell other people who care about nice wines what they drink. It's a vanity that forms the foundation of most wine writing. I could easily go on infrequently informing my minuscule readership what I've been drinking, complete with my little smart arse rants, for as long as I draw breath and stroke keys.

But that seems lazy to me. My curiosity has grown.

Wine isn't just what's in the bottle, and wine bottles are not the only bottles I'm interested in. The scope here is broadening and with all the tumult and antics of the booze trade, there's little critical commentary or perspective kicking about. The trade press is saturated with barely disguised press releases and sycophantic back-patting. In-fighting grows on issues such as natural wine, craft beer, en primeur campaigns and the Asian market and there are few people that point out how hilarious it all is. I want to be that guy, and I want this blog to be that place - a place with insight, humour, a dash of iconoclastic criticism and a healthy dose of 'are you fucking kidding me?'. The wine and booze world needs more of that.

I should point out that this will take the blog further from any use as a 'consumer' resource. I don't care about the average wine consumer drinks. The average wine consumer doesn't care about what I drink either, so in that sense we're even. I'm sure this smacks of terrible wine snobbery but the truth is that focussing on the average wine consumer means dumbing down, over-explanation and, worst of all, drinking supermarket wines.

Instead of the average wine consumer, I'm looking for the informed and curious wine drinker. So pull up a glass; give it a swirl and a sniff. Don't worry if you spill some - it happens to the best of us.

Fine Wine & Einstein (or Bordeaux as it relates to quantum physics & the Theory of Relativity)

I should preface this piece with the warning that I am not an expert in physics. I'm probably not even a novice. My expertise in metaphors is a touch dubious to boot.

The idea for this post first came as a reaction to the recent explosion of fine wine on the Asian market, primarily the wines of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. Fortunately, Sarah Abbott MW penned a level-headed, insightful piece that is so good that I don't have to deal with matters of culture or geography, as she's covered it better than I ever could. Instead, I'm going to concentrate a bit more on the abstract.

In order to understand quantum physics and its implications, one has to accept the existence of light as both a particle and a wave. In order to understand how fine wine works, one has to accept that it is both an agricultural product and... something else. What is that? I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I'll have figured it out by the time I've finished writing this rant. Perhaps that something else is not a constant. It's possible that it changes, or is changing.

When I first started in the wine trade, in 2001, the average trade price for a case of Lafite 1982 hovered at just over £4,000. Berry Bros sold it in their Heathrow Terminal 3 shop at just under £500 per bottle. It was cheaper than the Latour '82. Last month, at an auction in Hong Kong, a case of 1982 Lafite sold for £84,289. That's more than double the market value of that vintage prior to the auction.

The passage of time is relative to the speed at which you are travelling. The faster you go, the slower time gets. This has been proven to fractions of a second at speeds we would consider normal, though it only becomes noticeable when travelling very, very fast - approaching the speed of light. The speed of light is constant, moving at 186,000 miles per second.

Wine is grape juice. The grapes are harvested, the juice's sugars are converted to alcohol by hungry yeast and naturally occurring sulphides (with some added ones) prevent it all from turning to vinegar. Sometimes it's put in steel, sometimes it's put in wood, sometimes it's put in epoxy and sometimes it's put in concrete. There's a nutter/genius on the Italian side of the Slovenian border that puts it in clay amphorae. That whole process is incredibly hard work but the concept and goal is quite simple: make palateable, boozy grape juice. A month ago, nine litres of that juice sold for £84,289.

One of the first things I was taught when I entered the wine trade was the qualitative difference between wines in certain price ranges. A £4 wine's goal was to be quaffable and inoffensive; a £15 wine should be complex, but not distracting; a good one should taste like it ought to cost £10 more and suggest that it would benefit from ageing. Once you enter the domain of proper fine wine, be it First Growth, top flight Californian, Grand Cru Burgundy or Barolo, there needs to be lift, that ephemeral and immediately noticeable mark on the nose and palate that suggests, even in the poorer vintages, something that was made to be better. Was it worth the money? Hopefully. If it deserved its rating, its place in the wine hierarchy, then yes. How do you know? How can you honestly assess such things? There's really only one way - to taste from the bottom up. Everything from £4 to £40 and from £40 to £400 (at the time, you could get Petrus at that price) and, if everything lived up to expectations, you would begin to understand. Of course, trophy wines were given their due beyond perhaps their actual empirical quality difference out of deference, but they still had to be among the best. Appreciation and understanding of those differences - outside or in spite of personal preference - is one of the most important qualities a wine merchant or sommelier  can possess.

The first Lafite I ever tried was the 1997. I tried it on April 30th 2002 and it was extraordinary to me at the time. The memory is a fond one, though I've since tried finer wines, including better vintages of Lafite. It retailed at £120 per bottle, though I believe Oddbins Fine Wine had it on offer at £80. This was the aftermath of an over-hyped en-primeur campaign. The current trade price for Lafite 1997 is about £500-600 per bottle, and rising. Having tasted it again recently I can categorically state that it isn't worth anywhere near that amount, regardless of prestige.

That case of Lafite '82 did not sell as a case of wine. As it approached the speed of light - or £84,289 - it ceased to be wine and existed briefly as something far greater than the sum of its parts. Taking one of the twelve bottles away would reduce its value by far more than just one twelfth (or £7,024.08). Similarly, the simple wooden box those bottles were sealed in counted disproportionately towards its merit. Glass bottles, encased in wood, filled with wine. Twelve of around a quarter of a million produced. Curiously, as soon as it was purchased, it became less valuable. A great deal of its value was its provenance - coming straight from the Chateau's cellars. Now it has a new owner, and as such is no longer of such sparkling pedigree.

A few days after the Southeby's auction there was a second auction in Hong Kong, where a bid of $13,000 won six bottles of Lafite '82. Circumstances were different - the wines were not of the same provenance. I assume they were genuine, but they weren't ex-cellars. At the time of writing, the average market price for a bottle in perfect condition from a reputable merchant in the UK is somewhere around £3,500. That's about £300 more than before the Southeby's auction.

I asked a friend in the trade what he thought of the auction and his immediate response was enthusiasm. He thought it was brilliant for both the trade and wine in general. I'm less convinced. If was simply an aberration in the market - a one off explosion that has settled - then that's that and the price will rise steadily but perhaps less violently. But I don't see that as the direction the trade is heading. Merchants and wineries are both hyping vintages beyond reason, trying to make every top wine, to some extent, as necessary to own as Lafite 82 (or Petrus 90, or Palmer 61, etc.). It's a distasteful, self-fulfilling practice that leaves wine behind. They may as well be selling internet stocks or real estate. And where does that leave us? The wine-bloggers, the wine writers and those whose interests are focused more on the liquid in the bottle rather than the hype surrounding it. For whom there are no quantum mechanics; just appearance, nose, palate, finish and most of all, enjoyment. We react with initial incredulity, then seem to shrug it off. Like the loud drunk at a dinner party, we hope that it will go away or at least just lower the volume a little. I don't think that's going to happen. I think there will continue to be outbursts; that more and more fine wines will move further and faster beyond what they were made to be. And in the midst of that all, we've should remember two things that get lost more frequently than they should:

It's only wine. And it doesn't last forever.