TEN GREEN

I was sceptical of Port as a beverage. It had always conjured images of an old boy’s club to me. Of Winston Churchill, of a colonial past that I didn’t want to represent me. But port is made in the Duoro valley in Portugal, and there are some seriously interesting red wines coming out of the region. It was about time I dug into its strange heritage and figure out why port has been so popular (chiefly with the British) for so many centuries. So I went to Porto.

As a long-time fan of Lisbon as a city break destination, Porto seemed like the perfect way to disguise a wine adventure as a weekend away. The city is marvellous - young, alive, but seeped in history. Balmy nights buzzed with nightlife; lazy days of foodie lunches. Whilst the vineyards are up the river in the valley, the city itself is where port wine ages, and the port houses that host the tasting rooms and aging barrels across the river from the main city make an imposing sight. Technically, this side of the river is a different city - Vila Nova de Gaia, but it doesn’t quite have same ring to it, so I can see why the name “port” caught on.

Terracota-roofed port houses on the top left of the picture, across the Douro river in Vila Nova de Gaia

What is port anyway? How is it made?

Port starts life as vines grown in the Douro valley. There are many, many grape varieties allowed in port production - and the ones grown and used depend on the producer - but typically 5 main grapes are used: Touriga Nacional, Touriga Francesa, Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo), Tinta Barroca, and Tinto Cão.

Once picked, the grapes go to a winery. They’re destemmed, and crushed by foot. Well, traditionally by foot. These days this stage might be done by machine built to mimic foot treading, as it’s known. After a few exhausting hours, some lovely juice and pulp has been extracted, and fermentation starts. The rich tannins and aromas of the grapes begin to emerge, and the sugars are turned in alcohol. But, unlike regular wine production, the fermentation isn’t allowed to complete itself. When the alcohol level is around 5%, brandy is added to fortify. The yeasts are killed off, and fermentation stops. This bit is important: because there were some sugars left before the fermentation completed, the wine will be sweet.

So we have a base port wine! Now it’s time for the aging. Port has to be aged for a minimum of 2 years, and there are a variety of methods that produce different styles of wine. The wine is transported up the river from the valley to the port houses by the coast.

Boats historically used to transport barrels.

Casks at Graham’s. The large barrels contained 2009 LBV, and the smaller ones contained all sorts of vintages - some from decades ago - destined for tawnies.

Types of port

Ruby

Ruby is will have been matured in stainless steel or concrete to avoid any oxidation. It will be bottled and sold as soon as possible, and is intended to be drunk young. Most lower price port available is a ruby style - rich, fruity and deep red.

Vintage port

A ‘vintage port’ will be a ruby, where the grapes came from a the same vintage, or year. Not every year is declared a vintage - only in exceptionally good years does this happen. And after bottling, it will be at its best after several years of aging in bottle.

LBV (late bottled vintage)

LBV is a fashionable (I think, for good reason) type of port. It’s a vintage port that’s been aged in barrels for a little longer. It will have developed a little more complex flavours, but retained its fruitiness.

Tawny

Tawny is aged port, and over the years the oxidation let in from barrels will have mellowed the colour from the deep red of ruby, to its distinctive brown/amber-ish colours, and will have given the wine a nutty character. Port houses blend these aged wines to create their own style. You’ll see “10 years”, “20 years”, “30 years” on the bottles.

Colheita (harvest)

This is the ‘vintage’ version of a tawny port, where the grapes come from a single harvest.

White port

White port?! Yup - it’s port made from white grapes. We don’t drink a lot of it in the UK, but it’s available and can be really tasty.

Tawny tasting at Graham’s

Tawny tasting at Graham’s

Vintage port tasting at Graham’s

How to drink it?

People usually think about port as a winter drink, to have with cheese after christmas dinner. Whilst that’s all well and good, I’d recommend trying port as a summer drink. Chill a ruby port, and serve as an aperitif. Or, do as the Portuguese do, and make a white port and tonic with mint sprigs.

Cheers to that.

This blog went quiet. In the meantime I’ve taken my WSET Level 3. I had intended to use this blog as a vessel for solidifying my new found knowledge. On the contrary, it did in the opposite. This will hopefully be less quiet going forward.

The course itself was an incredible shock to the system. 12 weeks of classes. I thought I had a grasp on wine, but all it did was highlight to me the inadequacies. Level 3 is subtitled Understanding Style and Quality. It goes into depth on the differing factors that contribute to a wine’s style: climactic & geographical features, viticulture techniques in the vineyard, harvest, winemaking processes, maturation, ageing & finally service. It teaches us to understand broadly, and then conditionally based on place and time. For example, I know why the same grape -  Chardonnay - tastes of zesty limes in Chablis (northern burgundy) but creamy melons not much farther south in Cotes de Beaune.

The more you learn about wine, the more you learnt you don’t know. It’s like moving forwards into a previously out-of-focus scene. You now understand the new surroundings but it’s brought an even wider out-of-focus part into view. Learning about wine is perpetually broadening your known unknowns. I learnt early on not to put off the reading. You can’t cram all the intricacies of the wine world.

Throughout the course I did get to taste some exquisite wine. Delicately complex truffle-snuffling Burgundies, Rieslings as sharp-and-sweet as the gods, Tokaijs in their velveteen elegance. And the sparkling wine night was topped off nicely with a 2004 Pol Roger. My tasting note reads: “cider apples + creme brulée”. I didn’t spit that one.

The course is examined in three parts: multiple choice paper, written exam and the dreaded blind tasting exam. The latter was dreaded because early on I’d flunked my practise blind tasting. In the event itself I was overjoyed to have some vague confidence that I’d not completely cocked that one up. 

By the time I’d got to the end of the written paper, the confidence had gone. The previous questions went ok, but the final question was on Madeira wine. Oh, Bacchus! Not a clue. I gave it by best clueless stab and hoped there might be a point or two in there. 

I was convinced I’d failed. It takes several weeks to receive your marks, and my despondence kept me from writing here. I was preparing & revising for resits in anticipation, drowning my sorrows in wine and revelling in not writing tasting notes, like a rebel. Not long ago my results came in. All I was hoping for was a pass.

Well, I passed with Merit. Thank the heavens, not a fail! Not a pass! But, oh. Thump. Also not a Distinction. It’s wrong to say I was disappointed. I was overjoyed, WOW! Pass with Merit! But..oh..hmm… it is such a shame that I missed out on the higher mark. My tip, dear reader: never skip revision of the obscure wines or spirits. Even if you’re unlikely to drink them, they might just save your life one day. Damn you, Madeira.

WSET, I miss you. But I’m not emotionally ready for Level 4 just yet…

Awesome line up in wine class tonight. From Oregon Pinot, through Napa Cab, to Barossa GSM. 🍇➡️🍷 pic.twitter.com/y6lY0ScUyB

— Amy Zima (@amyzima) June 17, 2015

When you lay out the theory, it looks like a no-brainer. The Southern bit of England, Kent & Sussex, where most vineyards flourish is a mere 90 miles North of champagne. It also shares the same chalky, porous soil profile. But the one difference: the weather. In England we are wetter and colder, increasing the risk of under-ripening and washout seasons (see Nyetimber 2012).

This may have been the reason that until more recent years, English vineyards placed their bets on grapes like Seyval Blanc, Bacchus, Müller-Thurgau and Madeleine x Angevine 7672 (our very own unique grape). These are grapes that can withstand the somewhat lack of sunshine: naturally higher sugar content means they’re able to ripen more easily in cooler climate.

However, in the last decade global warming has brought with it warmer summers, meaning additional varieties can do well. And thus the triumvirate could flourish: Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir. The holy trinity of Champagne. 

Sparkling wine can be made from any grapes, but these 3 are the controlled base of a Champagne, and a tried and tested perfect balance. At the moment 45% of all plantings in England are these 3 grapes, and there are estimates that this will rise to 75% as vineyards are planted faster than you can say Indian Summer.

But can they compete? Lots of people think so. The quality wines are up there, and have won bling tastings to testify that. The vineyards du jour for English sparklers are Ridgeview, Nyetimber, Chapel Down & Denbies, whom I wrote about visiting in the summer. They’ve all made huge investments in sparkling wine as the future of English viticulture.

I had the pleasure of trying a bottle of Chapel Down this week - their 2007 Pinot Reserve - a Pinot Noir & Pinot Meunier blend. In truth, I’m glad it was missing its Chardonnay. Chardonnay tends to be an acidic grape and would have been a tad too much here. 5 years on the lees, i.e. bottle fermenting with yeast, usually gives Champagne a fuller, toastier characteristic. I must admit I was searching for more of it from this bottle. It was there, but not enough for my taste. Otherwise, this was an utterly solid Champagne (sorry, English sparkling wine). And wonderfully delicate to drink, its own paradigm of sparkling. £17.50 and worth it. You’ll see a few of them cropping up in wine shops.

I hope that the next time I write about English wine, I can do so without using Champagne as a frame of reference. English wine is more than deserving. It’s hip, but it’s good enough stand the test. Chin chin.

A poster for Tattinger, the chic in sparkling.

It’s here. Autumn, its sombre reds and crisp bright breaths klaxoning in my favourite time of year. The weather turns, the scarves are dusted off, and our focus shifts to comfort. I doth declare the best possible autumn and winter activity is curling up on the sofa, preferably with a fire and some impossibly thick socks, and tucking into a bottle of spicy, hearty red wine. 

If you are looking for spice-spiration, a fine place to start is with the region famed for raffia bottles and plump Sangiovese grapes: the hallowed region of Chianti, Italy. Not very long ago I went on holiday to Tuscany, imbibing myself with Chianti along the way. It was a good trip.

As autumn draws its bracing self into London, I thought of how Chianti is a perfect full-bodied wine for this weather, and was reminded of a moment I stumbled upon completely accidentally during that trip a few weeks ago. We’d been driving windy roads through the most picturesque hillside villages of Chianti when we passed a village. Somewhat serendipitously, there hung across the town square a banner: “Vino al Vino: Wine Festival”. Of course we parked up immediately and went to see what was going on.

Vino al Vino is held every year in the village of Panzano in Chianti. The local producers gather to offer festival-goers tastings of their wine. A beautifully hot Tuscan day, silky Chianti and a throng of wine drinkers around a town-square fountain.

There was an impossibly diverse set of flavours and excitements dancing on my tongue which come from such a small area around the village. I had my favourites, but this is just to serve as a reminder of why wine is so exciting and so challenging: When you think you know what a certain kind of wine is going to give you, you’ll always be surprised. There are intricacies waiting in every bottle of wine. It’s as unpredictable as London’s weather.

2014 has taken its place in my personal wine annals as the year I participated in my first wine harvest. The noble sport of Vendanges, as the French would say. It was a sweat-inducing treat of an activity and I’m so glad I got to be a part of it.

A fortnight ago we spent a blissful week on a farm in the Tuscany countryside. I shall blog more about the new-found wonders of Chianti and Tuscan wine in general after this trip. But first, I can’t help but to tell you about the harvest.

We stayed on a self-sufficient smallholding, down a precarious dirt track which our hired Fiat 500 protested it would give up on at any moment. Mountainous is the word, yet the reward of the word is a verdant valley, bursting with wild-ness. The owner of the farm (named Podere de la Vigne, for quiet irony) is a characterful long-haired Californian named Jim who is clearly smarter than the rest of us as he’s moved to this place. Upon arrival Jim gifts us with a bottle of his home-made 2011 Trebbiano. He’s not a fan of white wine, he says, but he’s crazy because this is a delicious wine. As characterful as Jim himself. We drink it crisply cold on our terrace as the balmy heat of dusk closes in and the cicadas start to sing down into the valley dotted with ripe vines.

“Tomorrow we’ll start harvesting”, Jim tells us. “If you can help, there’ll be a glass of wine in it”. Who could say no?

I’ve heard on the grapevine (ouch, sorry, couldn’t resist) that it’s best to harvest first thing in the morning but in this part of the world you’re not going to see anyone rising early. Still, we begin before the sun hits its highest, which is very early considering this is a holiday.

This summer’s not looking particularly stellar for Italian wine producers. It’s been a wet spring and summer across the country normally taking the award for the world’s largest wine producer. Wet might seem favourable, but in the wine growing world it means it’s been damp damp damp - an adjective that is the playground of rot.

We cut the bunch from the vines, and toss them into our buckets whole. Today we are picking Sangiovese, the famous red grape of Tuscany with its bold, rich jamminess. Sadly, Jim’s Sangiovese hasn’t escaped the perils of rot. A lot of our bunches have several dried-out grapes which we meticulously pick and toss away - so we are only keeping the good grapes of the family.

After several hours picking all across the property, we help Jim with the de-stemming. We’ve decamped to the shed. A mechanical press takes the bunches whole and removes the stalks, which if unripe can give an unpleasant bitterness to the wine. Not every wine is made this way - often the stalks are left on during part of the fermentation to give more tannin to the wine. The gorgeous smell filling the shed as we crush and squish and save bugs from a boozy death is indescribable. It’s woozy, heavenly and so so fruitful. Finally, after 8 barrels of grapes have been de-stemmed, we measure out the sulphites which are added to kill the bacteria.

This was only the beginning of the winemaking process for Jim, of course. Up next will be the pressing, then fermentation, then bottling and then finally the waiting. Jim makes only enough wine for him and his wife to drink themselves for the rest of the year, which makes taking part in this process quite special indeed. It was a wonderfully wholesome day - picking grapes under the Tuscan sun.

And the best part? The sweet, rewarding nectar of a glass of Jim’s homemade Trebbiano after the harvest was complete. Not like anything I’d ever tasted nor will ever taste again.

Looking pretty chuffed with my bunches.

English wine. It’s a thing. And it’s not nationalist either: “British wine” is something different. British wine got there first. It’s the stuff of imported-concentrated-grape-juice nightmares. Ship in some concentrate, ferment and bottle it on British soil, and you can name your tipple ‘British wine’. All rather homebrew.

Now, English wine, on the other hand, is wine grown and made on British soil. It sounds like a novelty - how can we make wine?! - but I assure you that England and Wales have climate, soil, temperature, and skill on our side when it comes to making wine.

Let me explain. Most wine in the UK does best on a stretch of the South Coast through Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. This part of the world has chalky, porous soil for absorbing and storing moisture and heat. It is also on a latitude of just over 50 degrees North. Both these characteristics are shared with one of the most venerated winemaking regions of the world: Champagne.

So English wine sounds like it has a lot going for it, right? This weekend I went to find out for myself. In the plump green county of Surrey, Denbies vineyard is a star at 265 acres of vines. It’s contained within a geological bowl in the shadow of Box Hill. And it’s a piece of cake to get to from London.

After arriving, we take a jeep tour of the vineyard, through the vines, the woods, and the panoramas of the surrounding hills. The guide speaks animatedly about the estate, the owner, how it was founded. He touches briefly on the grapes planted and the soil type, which is appreciated. However - it cannot help being a novelty, for tourists. Something quaint, something “different”. That’s ok; we have a wine industry, which is frankly amazing in itself.

The wine? Despite the extremely unfortunate lack of a tasting room reducing us to feeling like we we’d emerged into a National Trust cafe, we managed to find some wine to try. Not having a tasting room is a poor move on their part, as we would have bought more if we didn’t have to pay full cafe price for a glass so full it actually spilt over the side a little.

I tried their crispest offering, 'Flint Valley’. Dry and citrus as promised, a bit nondescript, but refreshing and almost waterlike-clear in the glass nonetheless. Every bit as crisp as a cool-climate English wine promises to be. However, this pales in comparison to their sparkling wine made from this same still wine. The absolutely delicious toastiness given to the wine during the sparkling wine-making process transformed this dull offering into an English wine party directly in the mouth. Top notch second fermentation in the bottle, guys. 

What was fantastic about this wine, compared to their more highly acclaimed sparkling (which is made from the same Chardonnay/Pinot Noir/Pinot Meunier combo that makes up most Champagne) is that it had its own style. It used a Seyval Blanc, Reichensteiner & Müller-Thurgau blend, which has to make it one of the most indie wines out there. Gorgeous.

I’m so very happy to see the passion of wine being planted, grown, and fermented here in the UK. So little of it is produced that so little (if any) will be exported. It’s our own slice of grapey heaven to keep for our own. Chin chin.

Some Pinot Noir looking remarkably unripe.

If you’re anything like me, when you think of rosé you think of boozed up BBQs and the thing your grandma moved onto in Wetherspoons when blue nun spritzers were over. Even the name is pretentious. Rosé. Red, White and Rosé. Not Pink, because that would be so gauche.

I admit until recently I felt the same. The White Zinfandel Californians of this world have been so successful at what they do that we mere mortals in the UK think of that style of wine when we think about rosé. All sweet and easy drinking and perfectly fine blahness. There’s nothing wrong with a bottle of Blossom Hill rosé at a BBQ - it’s popular for a reason. But recently I was fortunate enough to try a Provençal rosé, and it’s so much better for summer drinking than a sticky White Zin. Unbelievably so.

There is subtley and regionality to rosé. It’s made from red grapes but - as the colour in red wine comes from the skins - during the winemaking process the juice is only left with the skins for a short amount of time. Instead of a deep sensual red, we get a modest blushing pink. Think of it like Eau de Parfum’s strength to Eau de Toilette’s subtlety.

Half of the wine made in Provence at the moment is rosé, becuase they have lovely conditions for it. It’s dry, but full of fruit like strawberries, a brilliant balance of things happening in your mouth.  

The best place to start with summer drinking is a rosé from Provence as I had. There are some decent ones in the supermarket at the moment. Drink it with something you’ve put as much garlic into as humanly possible. Any gorgeous Mediterranean thing you can rustle up - garlic, olive oil, rosemary, olives.  The wine will be dry as a bone and you’ll thank the gods of wine for it.

Sometimes when you think you’ve got something figured out, it can surprise you in deliciously thirst-quenching ways. Like a dry, pleasant rosé straight from the Lavender fields of Provence.

A bottle of rosé walks into a bar. Someone drinks it and smiles.

For the best of the lavender, visit at harvest time (Guy Edwardes/Sunday Times)

Beaujolais, Beaujolais! It is the wine whose name rolls of the tongue like that of a French enlightenment poet, but which conjures thoughts of the bargain bin. Beaujolais, our light fruity-wine producing sub-region of Burgundy, has suffered in reputation over the years. And this is a real shame.

Last week I ate in a very nice industrial-chic restaurant in East London (as is my want). It had been a gorgeously hot day. The obvious choice for our food selections in this moment (I had salad!) is a light bodied red, and so I plump for the Beaujolais.

The waiter, for all his good intentions, furrows his brow and asks me, “Are you sure?”

“Yes”, I reply, perplexed, “unless there’s something wrong with it?" 

"No”, he answers, “but it’s Beaujolais…
would you like it chilled? I really wouldn’t recommend you have it chilled”.

In the 80s and 90s there was a trend for Beaujolais Nouveau. This is wine released to the market as early as possible - sometimes only weeks after harvest. It is not a heavy wine, certainly not complex, it’s designed to be drunk young, and it’s cheap. Winning combo, right? Everyone went mental for this stuff and the region started churning it out to feed the demanding masses.

Except this winning combo and mass-market churn of course led to poor-quality wine. The point came where Beaujolais became the by-word for shitty wine, sneered at. But that was then, and this is now.

Beaujolais is a controlled-origin region of Burgundy, which means it produces a wine of character and style unique to that region. The quality that originally gave Beaujolais this status never went away, it was just eclipsed and tarnished by the crap stuff. If you look, and you won’t have to look very far, you’ll find some exceptional Beaujolais.

The Gamay grape used for this wine is fruity, thin-skinned, and reminds me often of strawberries. It can make some divine wines, some of my complete faves. A wine doesn’t always have to knock you out with a punch - in the same way that sometimes we just want to spoon.

The Beaujolais we drank at the restaurant was gorgeous, a soft little lick, and certainly a million miles away from something I’d pick up in the bargain bin. Try some £7+ stuff with a summer salad. You can even chill it, and it’ll still taste great, even in spite of snobby waiters.

Continuing the post about my WSET Level 2, I just wanna say before I start that I found out a couple of days ago that I passed with distinction! Whoot! I’m really grateful that I studied hard to achieve that result because it was during an unbelievably hectic time in the ol’ personal life, but also because I’m a very competitive person so would have been heartbroken if I’d achieved anything less than distinction.

Thank you to Ian who ran the course at the East London Wine School. They have a bunch of short courses and tastings as well as the accredited course I took. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Just to recap, I explained in the previous post that we’d looked at different grapes and their characteristics, and different regions and their styles of wine - and how climate/altitude/etc affects both of these things. These 3 verticals filled the majority of the curriculum, but we also studied/tasted sparkling wine, fortified wine, and spirits.

I’m going to be writing a few posts imparting some of my newly acquired knowledge, but the highlights from the sparkling/spirits day were definitely the protected method of production for sherry, and the affect differing production styles has on sparkling wine.

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To end the post today I’m just gonna share this gorgeous bottle I had last weekend with you. It was the first wine bottle I’d ever had which had a beer-bottle top instead of a cork. It’s 100% Cabernet Franc, which is unusual and exciting, as Cab Franc is mostly blended - famously as part of the Bordeaux blend.

The smell  of this Italian beauty was overwhelmingly farmyard manure, which usually indicates there’s something pretty yeasty going on in a wine (Brettanomyces if you wanna get technical). It can sometimes be a fault, sometimes an improver, and sometimes the side of the fence you sit on depends on your own preferences.

Because those aromas when I first took a sniff were borderline not ok, I let the wine do its thing, let it open up a bit more. Then I tasted it dear reader. It was like a punch and a cuddle at the same time. It was all silky cherries like Audrey Hepburn on a farm. Unlike Cabernet Sauvignon of a similar age, I didn’t have a bunch of tannins assaulting my mouth. It was soft, carressing. And went darn well with the pizza. Viva Italia, Viva Cabernet Franc.