MW Students of the World Unite

I think it’s about time you organised a student revolt. One of the frustrations with the MW when I took it was that in the absence of anybody being confident about teaching  the “content” of the theory papers, the institute obsessed with “schema”.  This seems to have become worse. The dissertation in becoming a “proxy MA”, is in danger of testing methodological competence at the expense of commercial, viticultural and enological interest, in the same way that MAs only really exist to get you into good habits before you’re let loose on more meaningful research. The MW is not a proving ground for PHDs and Post-Docs, but it does rely upon a lot of hard work from examiners and mentors, and I just wonder what is in it for them if the dissertations and study yield such barren and piecemeal conclusions.  

 

 

Once a Master of Wine, always................

Bernard Schoffit was the first winemaker I chaperoned around London. Bernard turned out to be an an exemplary Alsacean: he looked like an athletic lover and, if needed, could wrestle a bear to the ground. He was a judo black belt, a force of nature, with an appetite to match; one night in Colmar, he ordered so much Vendange Tardive Pinot Gris and choucroute I woke up with moobs, and for a short while afterwards became completely intolerant of any kind of meat, fruit or vegetables.

Two months later, Bernard came to London.  We spent the day enthusiastically introducing his Domaine to journalists and restaurateurs, but every time I got a whiff of his Vendange Tardive Pinot Gris I came over all queasy, the potency of involuntary memory pinging me back to Colmar’s bloating pigfest. Bernard was sickening too. For ten hours he manfully struggled with our language whilst stubbornly refusing our hospitality and food. The aura of constant hunger and lust that surrounded him in the Vosges had become tarnished by his day in the City. Like Elliot when he found ET floundering in the drain, I felt an overwhelming need to get my fading guest “home”.

That evening, as an aperitif, I had lined-up a range of Australian wines for Bernard to taste. With its umlauts and spired-bottles, Alsace is a winemaking backwater, so I thought I’d give Bernard his first opportunity to try Clare Shiraz, Margaret River Cabernet and Hunter Semillon. We would then go for a curry, another novelty, as Colmar didn’t even have a kebab house, and lamb jalfrezi sounded mercifully pork and cabbage-free to me.

We drank some good wines: an old Magill Shiraz, Cullen Cabernet/Merlot, Tyrell’s Hunter “Riesling” and Grange. I waited for the epiphany, the shot of fruity L-DOPA that would free Bernard from all the volkgeist and chauvinisme that until that moment had “France” fulfilling every one of his vinous needs. But our tasting passed without acclaim or enthusiasm: “Fruit juice, not wine”, was his  withering appraisal. The ten year-old Grange got the highest accolade of the night: “Pas mal”. The curry didn’t fare any better. Perhaps Bernard was put-off by the novelty colours and the refracting film of cohesive-ghee that made tiny atolls out of his coral-dyed chicken; or maybe he thought that the dented stainless-steel dishes had once trafficked excised organs to the hospital furnaces. Either way, Bernard hardly touched his food. It was as if he was trying to protect his own rarefied sense of gewürz (spicy) from the thuggish assault of masala-sauce and the garnet meat of the kheema naan. The hot white towel could not have come soon enough: a steaming flag of surrender, hastily unfurled.

During the 1980s, the emergence of California, Australia and Chile as wine producing nations had flung open the doors of wine consumption, and I’d charged through. For me, France no longer owned “wine” in the same way it had done for previous generations.  For all Bernard’s dawn’til dusk encounters with vines, I felt that I was more open-minded and better informed than him. Alsace is, after all, geographically isolated from the rest of France. At the same time, Robert Parker seemed to be having similar sorts of arguments over his 100 point scoring system, which offered a degree of equivalence between regions and continents.

This unequivocal attitude got me through the Master of Wine examination. Identifying 36 unknown wines requires that you ditch the aesthetic for the ascetic.   You can’t spend precious exam time atomically splitting Meursault and Puligny, and they don’t hand-out marks for genuflection no matter how good the Monte Bello tasted. I wanted “bankers”, easily recognisable wines: Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, Crozes-Hermitage and, if it came to it, Vendange Tardive Pinot Gris, as long as I got that wave of identifying nausea when I nosed the liquid. The only wine that fazed me in the exam was Cos d’Estournel 1990, which caused an inappropriate rush of excitement, the stirring of something deeply repressed, like those bewildering endocrinal pangs that must come to wild animals that are born in zoos. Five vintages of Cos correctly identified. The red wine paper was a triumph. Something in the genes my mum said; our pre-historic ancestors must have smelt terrible to each other, I thought.

There is an inevitable period of re-tox after the exam. I went to work in Champagne, off to the blurry world of blends and brands. It seemed an opt-out from all those choices the exam presented me with, but like a fervent Buddhist I found something enlightening in this singularity.

Blends are the nemesis of blind tasting. It’s hard enough remembering all those grape varieties, let alone their possible combinations, and in Champagne the mix of grape varieties, villages and years is endless. I was well practised in deciding between continents, so when I was given 10 Montagne de Reims vin clair to taste, my palate went numb. They were all Pinot Noir, and all from Champagne, two facts that together negated any contribution I could bring to the on-going blending discussion. In pursuit of the MW, I had visited New Zealand, Chile and Australia. I had offered unsolicited advice to Chilean winemakers, warning them of the dangers of reduction; and told one of New Zealand’s top Pinot Noir producers to replant his vineyards. Before I took the exam these put upon souls must have been sticking pins into “John” effigies, but the voodoo either didn’t work or veered into the examinee next to me whose glasses all smashed to the ground, spilling the Cos. By contrast, our cellar master rarely left Champagne. Verzenay, Oger and Bouzy marked the limits of his world. His authority was necessarily circumspect. We were both in the business of authenticating identity, except he was working with finger prints where I was making do with the Bumper Book of Flags.

When you bake bread you don’t want to overdo the eggs and butter, or else your baps might turn into scones. Similarly, the tirage is not a post-harvest potlatch into which you empty everything that’s in the cupboards. Like electro-magnetism, certain elements attract each other, whilst others repel. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this blending process is the fact that it’s a preamble to a second fermentation. In Bordeaux, blends between Merlot and Cabernet are pretty much stabilised before they go into bottle, whilst young Champagne is charged with yeast and sugar, primed for its next round of tumultuous reactions, and then crown-capped.

The prise de mousse brings amplification in character and style. Full-bodied wines will end-up lumbering, and blends that are tired at the outset will taste oxidised. Your starting point necessarily dictates the character of the finished wine. Get it right, and you boost the intensity and flavour of the wine, but not necessarily its vinosity.  

Studying these neglected facts of Champagne’s production closely, I came to realise that the region has a strong qualitative connection with the rest of France. In particular, there exist a range of minerally-salty flavours that not only dominate Champagne, but also underscore the wines of the Loire, Burgundy and the Haut Medoc. (Think of the difference between Badoit and tap water.) At times this seasoning can seem overdone, its bitter element can reinforce unripe phenolic characters, particularly when acids are high, but in the Grands Crus of Burgundy and the Crus Classes of Bordeaux this mineral element not only adds flavour, but it enhances and fortifies the other tastes of the wine too.

Two things came out of this appreciation: firstly, that the Echelle system pretty much measures the intensity of this mineral element, and relates it back to chalk; and secondly, that throughout my MW tastings this particular property, shared by some of France’s finest wines, had eluded me.  It needed a long and myopic encounter between me and Champagne to reveal itself. 

These thoughts take me back to Bernard, and the lack of appreciation he showed for the trousseau of Australian wines we tasted before the disastrous curry. Bernard was prejudiced precisely because his experience of global wine production was so limited. He judged the wines by what they lacked, whilst I was busily enthusing about what they had. One of the real challenges of the MW exam is to shed yourself of preconceptions. I often thought that the lack of regular exposure to Crus Classes and Grands Crus might disadvantage me in the exam, but it probably meant I was usefully impartial to what was in my glass, which is the prerequisite for success in blind tasting.

Thirteen years on from passing the MW, the once wide-open doors of the New World are now almost completely closed to me. Only Ridge slips through with any regularity. Like Bernard, I am hopelessly neurotic in my wine preferences, and France pretty much has the run of our house: Chablis and Champagne in the summer, and Chambolle  from autumn to spring. Once you start drinking wines from above 47 degrees north, you stop flying south for  the winter. It is difficult to imagine a wine exam that could be harder than the MW, the gradients at times seem impossibly steep, but like climbing any ladder, the real revelations come when you finally get to kick the rungs away.

 

 

Is this the problem with 2005 Red Burgundy?

Figure 1 Water deficits in mm: 2009vs2005vslongterm trend. Cote de Nuits

 
 

Below (Angleterroir? post) I drew attention to the water requirements of anisohydric grape varierties – pinot noir, syrah, merlot – and the fact that in non-irrigated regions they can be acutely sensitive to droughts, whereas isohydric vines – cabernet sauvignon, grenache  - can better regulate and maintain vine water status through control of leaf stomatal aperture.  We might extrapolate from this that in Bordeaux, cabernet has a greater overall affinity with the region's rapidly drying sand and shingle soils than does merlot, and (Angleterroir? post) this might account for the  synergy between merlot and the smectite clays of Petrus.

In 2005, Burgundy’s summer was very dry, though spring rainfall levels had been plentiful. Through July and August the difference between vine evapotranspiration and precipitation became acute, reaching levels that would ordinarily impair vine metabolic function and nutrient uptake (P at flowering; Mg/K/Ca between flowering and veraison). The vines that were best able to cope with this drought-regime would have been those that had access to a supplementary source of water. The proximity of limestone aquifers, and their capacity to capillary feed moisture into the overlying soils would have been hugely advantageous in the CdN's better Crus, whilst superficially rooted vineyards planted on deeper soils may have much been less tolerant of the anomylous climatic conditions.  

It will be interesting to follow the fortunes of the vintage, which when it came to market was highly acclaimed. It may well be that for the reasons outlined above, the wines turn out to far less consistent than was originally thought. 

 

 

Soil Moisture: Tixover Vineyard

This is the latest from the vineyard AG sensor. It shows the impact of the recent rain on soil moisture levels. We still need to calibrate it against soil moisture availability, because it is one of the truisms of soil hydrology that water capacity and availability are not the same. Late rainfall is an issue for UK vineyards because it relieves hydric stress precisely at the point when you need it to add impetus to ripening. 

 

Three Vinetrail Loire Whites

 

“Pineau d’Aunis” is not “Pinot d’Aunis”. Homonyms ain't what they used to be. I no longer confuse “new” with “knew”, but in accepting Richard Kelley MW’s invitation to taste Pineau d’Aunis, I muddled-up the novel with the familiar. Pinot d’Aunis sounded much more interesting.

“No! Pineau. P-I-N-E-A-U. Red chenin; it’s blended with Arbois to make a Rosé…in Cheverny; and they make a red wine out of it near Jasnières: Coteaux du Vendômois”

As Richard spoke, the river I thought I knew spilled free of its mapped basin, adding tributaries and vineyards as it surged. I had always thought that Robin Yapp had done a meticulous Victorian job cataloguing and collecting the complete genus of Loire chenin, but Richard’s obsession seemed as boundless as the new river he was describing.

Pineau d’Aunis has the flavour and bitterness of chicory, I soon learnt; and not much “red” colour.  It could easily be one of those wartime proxies; an ersatz “cabernet franc” to wash down the lard “butter” and margarine “chocolate”.  One of the wines we tasted was bio, which seemed a pointless hardship for the producer as it was the worst of the lot. Everything had been tried, but nothing so far seemed to be working. Pineau d’Aunis is a hateful glass of wine; that’s really all there is to say.

Richard may not have identified the source of the Loire for me, but in Vendômois he had brought me to its nadir, the place where this giant vignoble finally bottoms-out. French wine production has a broad base, there is viticultural life below Muscadet and gros plant, it’s just we don’t very often get to taste it, unless you get lost south of Le Mans. Being at the foot of the pyramid is tough, but in France you either fit in or ship-out. If you find yourself at the bottom of life’s pile, La Répubique will normally find a way of aggrandising your useless job into a pensionable profession; whilst the reward for not planting pinot noir in the Vendômois was Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée status, granted in 2001. Authenticating the bad can sometimes accentuate the good. 

“Travelling” through life facing backwards” is a Chinese maxim, but it might equally well apply to France, where “the past” and “tradition” always seem to be plonked down squarely in front of you, so it’s a relief to come across wines from ambitious growers “who are challenging conventions and perceptions”; which is how the Muscadet of Domaine de la Quilla was introduced to me. The wine underlined the fact that Muscadet and Chardonnay are genetic twins whose personalities occasionally overlap. A long lunch had left me feeling like I'd been shoved into my lounge suit, a snugness duplicated by the la Quilla, which packed a lot of wine into the glass. Tasted blind, I would have guessed Chablis; it was voluminous, and lacking in that abrasive sea-air tang that ordinarily singles Muscadet out.  

The second wine I tried was Sauvignon de Tourraine “le Petiot” 2011, from Domaine Ricard. I’ve always drunk Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume, but as a single variety, sauvignon had to register success in the Southern Hemisphere before I began to appreciate wines from closer to home. On a rainy day “le Petiot” gave my mood a lift: a chlorophyll-loaded draught of spring that chased away the gloom. It had power, too, its character pressing out from within, as is the way with all the better wines from this latitude. Back in New Zealand, sauvignon’s simple pleasures are being increasingly overlooked, lost beneath the hubris of research and analysis; a postmodern wine blight, if you will.   All these people troubling themselves with what I want, when all I really care about is having a choice. The same might be said for la Quilla’s wine too. Isn’t Muscadet supposed to be an austere wine that needs the support of local shellfish and the Vendéen sunshine to show at its best? Versatility comes at a cost, starting with a loss of identity.

The last of Vinetrail’s Loire whites was the Montlouis-sur-Loire “Premier Rendez-Vous” 2010, from Lise and Betrand Jousset. I had drunk this wine before, at L’Enclume, with their eight course tasting menu.  L’Enclume’s food is consistently beautiful. Each plate is like a still life. There are elements of draughtsmanship in the presentation, neat rhomboids of fish and meat that you don’t really want to demolish. It is a treat for the senses, but perilous territory for wine. Jousset’s Montlouis was perfect; to the rich dishes it brought texture and a firm acidity, while its flavours of quince and barley didn’t overwhelm the Morecambe Bay cockles. If a course ever wanted for seasoning, there is a lick of saltiness from all the underlying limestone, though Simon Rogan’s food really needs no amendment.

I neglect the Loire, perhaps because my point of entry for most regions is through their red wines. Huge volumes of Loire cabernet franc sluice though Parisian wine bars, but I find the wines  a little back-to-front, just like that Chinese maxim: the flavours I want in the background are in the foreground, and all those tight tannins can cause the wines to finish before they ever get started.  Pineau d’Aunis did nothing to change my opinion of Loire reds, but I have decided to buy a TomTom, just in case I find myself lost near Vendômois, on the way to Montlouis-sur-Loire .

 

The River Cottage Canteen, Axminster

We shouldn’t be surprised that “The River Cottage Canteen” sounds a lot like the “The River Café Canteen”, the latter is one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s almae matres (Eton and St Peter’s College, Oxford being the others), though he left under a cloud after just eight months. Indicatively, eight months in a restaurant is about the time it takes to go from dishwashing to glass polishing, and these responsibilities might have hastened Hugh’s downfall. Perhaps, like Narcissus, he just became too obsessed with his own image isometrically projected onto the posh Riedel glassware, a big face on a small bowl; and maybe in these moments of studied reflection he and his employers simultaneously saw another future for Hugh, one that required him to leave the River Café with immediate effect.

The River Café’s loss was Channel 4’s gain. There have been nine series of The River Cottage, which in terms of broadcast hours and screen time puts Hugh right-up there with the likes of Rodney and Del Boy. Better still, for Hugh, are all the spin-offs that come from the series: a stack of books, two Canteens and a cookery school. Nobody seriously wanted to follow the Trotters into Nelson Mandela House, but we all want a piece of Hugh and his living, breathing larder. Just like one of those battery hens that Hugh is always trying to save, The River Cottage just keeps on laying.

The success of the BBC’s Pot Black was put down to the advent of colour TV, when the snooker balls finally broke-free from all the black and white camouflage. Likewise, the nine series of The River Cottage have coincided with the arrival of bigger, surround-sound versions of the sitting-room TV. Over nine years, Hugh’s image has become engorged by plasma, his veg impossibly green, and the instruction to boycott the value-aisles sounds like a personalised message to me and our dog, Roly. Because The River Cottage isn’t just family viewing with the foul-mouthed gags of the celebrity guests edited out along with the Dorset rain and fog: as with all the campaigning, it crosses the species divide.

My wife’s interest in River Cottage isn’t the same as the dog’s and mine. She loves the japes, the guests, the “vintage” affectation, and the forager camping it up in the hedgerows. She seemed saddened by Hugh’s recent haircut; maybe she just wanted to run her hands through those draping curls that in HD resembled a pair of dagged spaniels’ ears.  If Hugh wanted someone for Elope to River Cottage she would be there with Roly, who seems fixated by the story of the piglets; after hours of viewing and repeats his feeble dog mind has pieced together a chronology of events that runs like a children’s rhyme, weeners-pigman-knackerman-pork. Together, on the sofa, as man and dog, we have become obsessed with the crisp, marmaladey rinds of “Spice” and “Baby” that appear from Hugh’s antique Aga; the mouth-watering golden sunset of fat at the end of the hour-long River Cottage day.

The Axminster Canteen lies on the East Devon border, but most importantly it provided me with an opportunity to play the top predator at the head of River Cottage’s televised food chain. John Updike, once asked the question “Why does Nature demand so much fucking?” and after nine series of The River Cottage and the incessant comings and goings of the pigman and the slaughterman I have realised that it’s not Nature but people like me who are driving this crazed treadmill of bestial sex and mortality. From the very start, Hugh may have been developing a well-reasoned argument for improving animal welfare, but from my side of the television screen, the amber vision of all that crackling had begun to possess me. Axminster was destined to be an epic encounter between me and the three little pigs. Waiting at the table, I conjured-up the movements of the slaughterman, urging him through the gates of River Cottage, and then parking him up, over by the sty.

Endlessly repeated episodes of The River Cottage had brought me to this point. I looked around the restaurant: there was no Hugh, and no sign of the Chef whose whiskers seem forever stuck in that scratchy stage. Perhaps they were at Tesco, or the new Dorchester Poundland; another campaign, with Hugh foisting himself like the Ancient Mariner on Axminster’s shoppers as they sleepwalked their way towards the brutalised BOGOF carcasses. The shame was that if they had been at the Canteen, then surely they wouldn’t have allowed my food to come out as it did. Long roasting should bring a sepia tint to a haunch, but this pig’s fat had been braised into a mottled, pale ghost of my expectations; whilst the veg appeared as blanched and colourless as the snooker balls on those old black and white TVs.

I suspect the latest series of The River Cottage will be much like the old one. When I think of West Dorset now, I don’t think of Hugh’s husbandry, or the personable forager; instead, I think of deep space, and whorls of stars spiralling towards an abysmal fate. Just as black holes drag everything into themselves, distorting time and space, so The River Cottage sucks everything in, before filtering and spitting it out the other side.  I feel like I’m being fed something Hugh has already chewed-over in attempt to make it seem more palatable, like baby food, only it tastes like that pulped gruel they served me at Axminster. Daft professions, old utensils, the Citroen 2CV, yurts, jam-making, things out of their time and place, all mashed together, whilst the world beyond of Vauxhalls, bad jobs and Hugh’s wife seems strangely absent.

If I’m down on Hugh it’s because I was disappointed with his food, yet at home I am the only dissenter. My wife, daughters and dog still enjoy the show, and a happy family is as important to me as happy pigs and chickens are to Hugh. After nine years the wheels had come off the Trotters' Reliant Robin, yet the River Cottage keeps on rolling along. Being good at something requires dedication. Hugh spent eight months trying to be a chef, and eight years making TV programmes. The continuing popularity and re-commissioning of his show underlines the fact he is rather good at the latter. Just make sure you don’t confuse the River Cottage Canteen with the fabulous River Café Canteen, or think Hugh is a great chef, because he isn’t.   

 

The Gurnard's Head, Zennor

 

Among the more elaborate theories of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, is the idea of Thalassal Trend, the desire to return to a sea-state, manifested through dreams of becoming a fish. I invariably forget my dreams, but as a Pisces I’m jealous of anybody who nightly shoals and spawns with a thousand like-minded neurotics while I snore and dribble my way into the void.

If Ferenczi was still with us, I am sure he could convince me in a completely plausible way that I, too, harbour a fantasy of returning to a sea-state. Who knows, he might even get me into the water. As a child the best journeys always ended in the sea, where now they finish at the beach or, better still, a cliff. I want the scent of tide; the percussive smash and clawing of waves; the luminosity - but I also want to be dry. Dry and warm. Nowadays, the sea must seduce me from a distance.

A love of the ocean is an affair of the heart and mind, and nowhere is this desire better fulfilled than at the Gurnard’s Head Hotel. The Cornish roads whittle down to single tracks the moment you cross the county-line, and past St Ives, these meandering lanes, like Swinburne’s weariest river, eventually “wind somewhere safe to sea”.  A mile west of Zennor and you come to the Hotel, and beyond that, to the north, the Gurnard’s Head proper, an obstinate lava promontory, humped leviathan-like within the swell.

Painted across the Hotel’s roof in big letters is THE GURNARD’S HEAD; - a sign would blow over, or be ripped away by gales. The weather forecast for Zennor is The Shipping Forecast. Few trees grow here, and there’s a year-round khaki scorch to the grass. The first time I stayed it hailed on me in the car park, but when I visited this June the platinum sun rolled uninterrupted through the blue space of day.

Head Chef, Bruce Rennie, trained with Martin Wishart in Edinburgh, but his food is altogether more primal. There is no rendering of the familiar into novel, unrecognisable forms; instead, Bruce has perfected the more important skills of seasoning and cooking à point. Calves liver and lamb shank were nourishing and full of flavour, and if I hadn’t been worried about appearing greedy I would have immediately re-ordered Dover Sole served with capers and fennel.

The wine list is an affirmation of proprietor Charles Inkin’s taste. The worst wine lists are those that lamely offer you the world in the hope that you will see something you’ll recognise; the best scream “This is what we like, and you will like it too!”  I had my first taste of Fichet’s brilliant Hautes-Côtes de Beaune at the Gurnard’s, and was blind tasted on an interesting Slovenian wine that I couldn’t remember the name of the next morning.  The red wines are also strung together by Charles’ passion, rather than by region or country. Burgundy and Bordeaux seem to become deeper, darker versions of themselves when served on these Cornish cliff tops, and the Ridge Monte Bello I opened one night  appeared to add extra muscle mass to its already well-developed form.

In a few weeks I will get down to the Gurnard’s Head again, just in time for the equinoctial gales. If Cornwall is a kingdom, then Zennor is a fiefdom within it. I haven’t been anywhere else that makes this Island feel so much like an island. I will arrive for lunch, but lowering skies or a change in the tide has a habit of turning lunch into dinner there. I shall, as the Gurnard's Head brochure advises, “Eat, drink, sleep”, and maybe, just this once, dream briny, monocular, fishy thoughts.