Inventing Wine – the history of wine debunked

Ancient amphorae in the wonderful wine museum at Domaine Gerovassiliou in Greece

I love history and part of the pleasure I take in wine comes from this interest. Anyone who has attended one of my courses or tastings – and if you haven’t you really are missing out on something - knows that to me wine is closely intertwined with history. It has always seemed to me that there is a cultural identity and rationale for all wines and wine styles. This is by definition stronger in Europe where wine making has been a part of the landscape for far longer than it has in new world regions.

A glimpse of how it was – Priorat 1997

For a long time though I have questioned whether we get it quite right and if these identities are as strong as we like to believe. In the wine world we take for granted that there is a continuum from the Ancients to now. Wine originated somewhere near Georgia, Transcaucasia, and spread from there to the Greeks and Romans who took the vine and wine making to other parts of the Mediterranean and, more importantly France.

But in truth I know how great the improvements in grape growing and wine making have been in my time in the trade. So, I wonder how true this continuum really is? I have suspected that wine in the past was very different from how it is today. I am certain it is riper, cleaner, fresher, fruitier and technically better than at any previous point in history and many developments have made it that way.

I certainly like the idea of being in touch with the ancients when I drink wine, that feeling of beeing at one remove from the Roman tending vines in Campania or the monks of Clos Vougeot when we drink a modern wine from those same slopes, but how true is it?

The sixteenth century wine press at Clos Vougeot, still in occasional use

I do wonder, given how recent many of the things are that we think of as traditional. Fish and chips and eating chocolate only appeared a few years before my grandfather was born while Indian food must have been entirely different before Portuguese sailors brought the chili to Asia and Italian cuisine must have been similarly unrecognisable before the tomato arrived in Europe. As for wine traditions, I am well aware that contrary to the dry examples we expect today, Entre-Deux-Mers and Savennières were sweet until the 1950s.

Recently I discovered a wonderful new book on the history of wine. It questions many things that marketeers want us to believe and constantly made me look at many aspects of wine afresh:

Inventing Wine: a new history of one of the world’s most ancient pleasures
by Paul Lukacs
Published by Norton at $28.95 / £20.00
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK.

Reading Paul Lukacs’s book has reinforced my suspicion that in reality there is very little link between wine as we know it and what was consumed in the past. Nowadays we choose wines for different reasons and we expect different things from them compared with wine drinkers of yesteryear.

Paul Lukacs points out that today’s well made wines in fact have very little in common with the rudimentary liquids our forbears drank. Central to this fascinating book is the realization that for most of history wine has not been drunk out of choice at all but nessecity. What’s more there has been little to chose between wines from individual places as they would all taste unpalatable to our modern palates. Indeed unless one was lucky enough to drink it very soon after harvest, all wine would have tasted sour and unpleasant throughout much of history. As Paul Lukacs says, wine was simply “a source of nourishment and inebriated escape.” Therefore it was not until quite recent times that wine came to be enjoyed for its taste, but for what else it could provide. Wine was mysterious, early man could not understand how it was made and so it was widely believed to have magical powers and to be a link to the gods, a view that persisted for thousands of years. What is more water was largely impure and dangerous to drink, so wine was the safer option, whatever it tasted like.

The evolution of the wine bottle was crucial to the development of wine as we know it today. Before wine could be bottled and sealed with a cork it was a race against time to finish the cask before the wine turned completely sour.These examples are at Domaine Gerovassiliou in Greece.

The mention of Pliny as being more a connoisseur of resin than the actual wine was a fascinating insight into how awful ancient wine must have tasted for the flavourings to be so important. Pliny’s writing about the characteristics of the different resins though did put me in mind of how we discuss oak today – and although it does other things, surely most oak is merely a flavouring for most modern wines?

Lukacs makes a pretty convincing argument that true modern wine as we understand it has only emerged from about 1660 onwards when Arnaud de Pontac began selling his wine as the product of a single estate. This wine was Château Haut-Brion and Samuel Pepys tasted it on Friday 10 April 1663, memorably recording in his diary; “drank a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.”

Another glimpse of the past, vino rancio ageing outside in demijohns, Castille 1997

It was only handful of wines though that could become such vins fins, as they needed to command a high price and be sold to consumers who were happy to pay that price. Most consumers had little or no choice about what they drank until many hundreds of years later when technology was finally applied to even the most ordinary wines – I well remember how basic Jumilla wines tasted during the 1970s and would not like to experience them again. Broadly speaking until quite recently, in historical terms, a high quality wine was one that had few or no defects. Only relatively recently did it come to be seen as one with “particularity and provenance” – the concept that came to define vins fins. It was these different characteristics – or particularity – that made some wines more famous and sought after than others.

I found it especially illuminating that the word terroir, is actually a recent one, certainly less than a hundred years old and not the ancient term that I had always assumed. Which begs the question if the concept existed before the word and if so, how did they explain it?

What is more wine does not exist in isolation, so this book touches on social history generally. The urbanisation and secularisation of Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, beer, spirits, tea, coffee and chocolate and the industrial revolution all play their part in the story, as do more modern developments in wine making and globalisation.

A modern winery in Bordeaux 2012

This is no holiday book for the average consumer, you need to be interested and it leans towards an academic style – indeed I much preferred the content to the writing, but Paul Lukacs’s story of how fine wine – vin fins as opposed to vin ordinaries – slowly developed in various places from the seventeenth century onwards is a fascinating read. I certainly feel enriched and better informed for reading this book. It seems to have something new to say on every page and puts a great many things into context that have perhaps been falsely romanticised for too long.

Port and the Douro – perfect for Christmas

In my quest to tell you about some great wine books this Christmas I am currently reading the third edition of Port and the Douro by Richard Mayson. What better subject is there to read about at Christmas?

Richard Mayson

Port and the Douro
by Richard Mayson
with illustrations by Leo Duff
Published by Infinite Ideas at £30.00
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at around £27.00.

It is a sadness to me that I do not drink very much Port as I am very fond of the stuff and find it fascinating. I also regret the fact that as yet I still have not visited the Douro, although I hope to put that right very soon. In the meantime I will have to experience the region through Richard Mayson’s eyes and writing.

Luckily I am in capable hands. Richard clearly knows his subject and writes well in an authoritative and almost learned style.

Much to my surprise I greatly enjoyed the first section which gives a general history of Portugal as it relates to Port and the Douro, her wars, politics, culture and gastronomy – my only quibble would be the reference to Oliver Cromwell as a ‘Puritan’, which he certainly was not – but that aside I had learnt a great deal of interesting stuff by page 6.

Given the seeming long history of Port drinking and how closely it is associated with the British in our minds, I found it fascinating that Baltic and Hanseatic merchants actually got the trade going before we Brits arrived – even the Scots beat the English to it in the years before the Union.

I was also astonished by the fact that Port was a dry wine until well into the Eighteenth Century and had the English nickname of ‘black-strap‘. As this term is nowadays associated with molasses I had always understood it to be an archaic colloquial word for Royal Navy rum, but apparently it originally referred to Port.

The development of the wine bottle and of the style of Port we know today seem to go pretty much hand in hand and it seems that it was not really until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that Port as we know it appeared on the scene. The first recorded use of a Port house name – Croft – as a brand did not occur until 1810 and the practice was not commonplace for another eighty years or so – so only around the time my grandfather was born.

After all this wonderful background Richard settles down to inform us about the geography and geology of the region together with sections that detail the grape varieties that they use. There are maps too and profiles of all the estates marked on them.

The chapter that deals with how Port is made is endlessly interesting – the throw away line about the return to the use of lagares in the the 1990s, after they had been pretty much unused since the mid 1970s, and what that has meant for quality I found very illuminating. Surely it can be no coincidence that this overlaps with something of a Port renaissance.

The chapter on Port Types – referring to the wines rather than the people –  is endlessly fascinating fleshing out details on types of wine that I thought I knew and detailing odd little facts on the classifications and all the styles from Tawny to Rosé and Colheita to Vintage by way of White Port and Moscatel do Douro.

Vintage Port enjoys such fame that it deserves and receives a chapter to itself with vintage details going back to 1844. There is also a directory of Port producers and shippers, which I for one will find invaluable.

Add in sections that deal with the Douro’s table wines of the region, the storage and service of Port and what the future may hold for this great wine region, then I think Richard has done the Port proud and may well have produced the definitive book on the subject.

I have only seen an E book version and not the real thing, so have not felt it or flicked through it as I normally would and therefore have no idea if the book is has that undefinable lovely, tactile and pleasurable feeling that a good book should, but I did like the contents very much.

It is an excellent and beautifully illustrated book that covers Port and the Douro in depth and detail. It’s not a light read, but a serious volume for people who are genuinely interested in the subject and those who need a reference book on this fascinating subject.

 

For the Love of Cheeses – a lovely guide to buying Cheese & Wine in London

Doctor Samuel Johnson famously said; ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’

As a Londoner I think he got it spot on, it is a great city, vibrant colourful and teeming with life and it has got better and better over the forty odd years that I have known it. The things to see and do have improved, as have the shops and especially the food. There are restaurants the equal of anywhere, casual cafés that remain little local secrets and gastro-temples with world-wide reputations. There are wine shops, food shops and delicatessens that keep Londoners supplied with good things to eat and drink. Some of them are famous to all of us, while others remain known only to the people who live in the part of London that it serves. That is the thing about London you see, it doesn’t really have just one centre, but is in reality a group of villages joined together and lots of enjoyment can be had exploring these mislaid corners of the UK’s capital.

So, if you are a foodie, how on earth do you keep track of all the best places in London to buy your wine and cheese? Other than heading off to the well known Harrods Food Hall, John Lewis’s Food Hall, Borough Market or Whole Food Market in South Kensington it isn’t always easy.

Well, now you can relax as help has arrived. Recently I have been telling you about some rather lovely books about wine and food that I think will make great presents for Christmas and here is another:

The London Cheese and Wine Guide
Published by Allegra at £11.95
Also available from Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at between £9.10 and £11.95.

Even if you don’t want to buy any of the things they mention this is a beautiful little book whose contents cannot help but make your mouth water. The publishers claim that it is the ‘definitive guide to the best places for cheese and wine in London‘ and to me that is a very exciting prospect indeed. I love wine shops, book shops, food shops and cheese shops. Time spent rooting around in any of those is never time wasted and I have certainly become aware that London is home to more and more cheese merchants of late, I have just not known where many of them were. Now I can just flick through this guide, drool over the photographs and head off to wherever they recommended.

Even if you never use it to buy anything it is a lovely book to own, if you like cheese and wine that is. It is beautifully designed and feels strangely tactile and satisfying to hold while the photographs get me salivating every time I dip in.

The book is more of a guide for reference than one to read, although I have whiled away a few happy hours with it, and it is well laid out and easy to navigate your way around.

The first section deals with cheese, including how artisan cheese is made, followed by a chapter listing London’s best specialist cheese shops. They are each given a page with opening hours and contact details together with the owner’s name, an idea of how many cheeses they stock. There is a pricing index too as for each shop we are given an idea of the price they charge for Brie de Meaux, Mature Cheddar, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Stilton.

It isn’t only cheese that goes with wine though, so the next chapter covers London’s best delicatessens in exactly the same way. Then just when you think the possibilities for buying artisan cheese must surely be exhausted you reach a section on London’s food markets. This brief chapter outlines the cheese specialists at Borough Market while a market directory and cheese trader grid tell you who sells good cheese in every London market.

We have now arrived at the mid-point of the book and it moves on to wine. An excellent chapter gives specialist wine merchants similar treatment to the cheese shops, some of them are pretty well known, but many are tucked away and might not have sprung to mind before. Then just to give even more food for thought, this is followed by a really exciting chapter on London wine bars and one on restaurants who offer a particularly good selection of cheese and wine.

Then just when you are feeling utterly stuffed they provide a section on the correct way to taste cheese and how to pair cheese with wine – which is a lot more difficult than most people imagine.

Any Londoner, or visitor armed with this book, will now be able to track down all these wonderful, but tucked away, little cheese and wine shops as well as the perfect places to enjoy cheese and wine together.

It’s not a big book, but it is bursting with  lovely things and will give you, or the person you give it to, a great deal of pleasure.

Photographs by kind permission of Allegra.

A Feast of a Book

With Christmas coming I am telling you about some wonderful books that would make superb gifts for others or even a sneaky treat for yourself.

Recently I wrote about an excellent guide to the wines of Bordeaux and now I would like to recommend something altogether more sumptuous.

I am especially fond of Asian food, to my mind the cuisines of the Far East are some of the most exciting and mouthwatering of all. I find it almost impossible to resist the vibrant colours, fragrant aromas and exotic tastes of Asian food whether from Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka or the Indian sub-continent. And yet as a wine lover I often find it very hard to find a wine that goes with such food. It is so very easy to limit myself to a narrow range of wines and styles that I know work with Asian food, that I could well miss many more exciting combinations and experiences.

Well, help is at hand. Two friends of mine, Patricia Guy and Edwin Soon have got together and created a beautiful book that deals with this very subject:

Patricia Guy & Edwin Soon researching their book

Wine With Asian Food: New Frontiers in Taste
By Patricia Guy and Edwin Soon
Published by Tide-Mark at $24.95
Also available from Amazon.com as well as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones in the UK at around £20.99

Partnering Asian food with wine can be tricky and this book starts with an excellent analysis of why. In Europe we often drink wines from a country with food in the style of that country – drinking local with local often works well, Red Burgundy with Boeuf Bourguignon, Sancerre with goat’s cheese or Chianti with a rich pasta ragu. Expanding on the problem Patricia and Edwin tell us that with most Asian meals ‘several dishes are served at the same time and are shared by everyone present‘. This of course is different from the European tradition where there is one dominant dish and means that ‘the wine chosen for such a meal has to be versatile‘.

The other main difference with Asian food, although this is creeping more and more into what we eat over here too, is that the defining characteristic of the meal is not what is cooked, but how it is cooked. As Patricia and Edwin point out, ‘the true flavour of the dish may be determined by the cooking method, the sauce, the use of seasonings or the blending of ingredients. Indeed it may result from combination of any of these elements’.

In a perfect world, as the book points out, ‘when you combine wine with food, you are seeking a balance between these two elements‘. I know from personal experience that for many people this involves simply drinking and eating things that they like. For others, like me, it is a more agonised process of considering the nuances and hoping for a perfect combination.

I can be pretty good at putting food and wine together and achieve some superb matches, but I am the first to point out that this is often as a consequence of inspired guess-work as much as anything else and that is why I am so taken with this book. The authors really have put in a lot of serious experimentation and taken the luck out of the process. There are even experiments that the reader can do. So, in the comfort of their own home they can really get to grips with how wines and food interact and what works with what.

In order to makes sense of the food they have ignored the arbitrary political boundaries and instead studied the flavours in Asian foods to create a sort of sensory map or grid. This divides food up into five basic flavours: Fresh and Herbal, Savoury and Rich, Mild and Spicy and Light Smoky, Spicy & Smoky and Fiery and Sweet.

Similarly, by thinking about flavours, textures and weights of wines they came up with a classification to divide wine into seven categories: 1 – Crisp Juicy Whites and Dry Aromatic Wine, 2 – Juicy Whites, Medium rosés and Light Reds, 3 – Woody Whites and Soft-Tannin Reds, 4 – Light to Medium-Sweet Wines, 5 – Richly Sweet Wines, 6 – Red Wines with Chewy Tannin and 7 – Nutty and Rich Fortified Wines.

These classifications or categorisations are expanded and explained and then the bulk of the book takes the reader through a marvellous array of recipes together with a range of wine recommendations with each one. These are given in a very general way for the experienced food and wine matcher and in a much more specific manner to allow the beginner to get to grips with the system.

The whole book reads well and is clearly the culmination of a great deal of work, by which I mean eating and drinking. It looks lovely and is so richly illustrated with photographs of enticing dishes, bottles and vineyard scenes that reading it is nearly as good as travelling around Asia and experiencing the cuisine. Be warned though, there are lots of recipes together with tempting photographs of the finished dishes, so reading this book can seriously make you hungry.

Bordeaux Wine Guide – a user friendly reference book

Like many people who enjoy wine I’m a real hedonist. I like the good and sensual stuff of all types. Wine of course figures very high on the list – it’s how I make my living after all. Food is pretty important too though – in fact I hardly ever eat anything else. Like wine the love of food incorporates so much about culture, travel and history that enjoying different food helps make sense of the world and makes other people interesting rather than alarming – I often wonder what people who don’t like food actually do when they travel – answers on a postcard please.

If I can’t actually have some wine and food or travel somewhere interesting, then the next best thing is to read about it, so I love books. As a consequence I own a lot of books about exotic places, books about food and books about wine. I need a lot of wine books too as I constantly have to look things up and check facts and I don’t like to just rely on Wikipedia!

With Christmas coming I thought it might be nice to tell you about some books that I am enjoying and that all you other hedonists out there might find useful, either for your own pleasure or as gifts for others.

By the way if you were planning on giving me anything, please remember that I already have these!

Three books have caught my fancy of late and I will tell you all about them, but am starting with the one that is purely about wine:

Chris Kissack, aka the Wine Doctor, relaxing with something other than Bordeaux

Pocket Guide to the Wines of Bordeaux
by Chris Kissack
Published by MagBooks at £6.99
Also available from Amazon and on Kindle

I know Chris and like him too, he writes an amazingly fine and encyclopaedic wine website called The Wine Doctor, which I find a very useful resource. Well this is the more portable spin-off – no battery life, wifi or 3G signal required either, just a pocket. Actually my only quibble is with the size of this book, exactly how big are your pockets Chris? At 21 cm X 14.8 cm it doesn’t fit any of mine, but hey I’ll stick it in a bag – or perhaps a Christmas stocking.

Chris does write about other wine regions, but his great speciality is Bordeaux and as it is the largest fine wine region earth and the home of fine wine I can understand why. Just like his website, this book is a labour of love and it shows. Chris is steeped in the wines of Bordeaux (quite literally sometimes) he loves them with a passion so strong you cannot help but be swept along, what’s more he has an incredible eye for detail, so this book is full to bursting with useful information and the odd unexpected nugget. For instance I was unaware that the great Château Haut-Brion have 2 hectares of non-permitted grapes including Pinot Noir and Sangiovese.

In the main I would regard this as a book to refer to rather than sit down and read and I can imagine that it could become an indispensable work of reference for anyone who wants to get serious about the region. The contents are attractive and well laid out with clearly marked sections that have in depth, yet easily digested, chunks on all the topics you need for a working knowledge of the region or for buying Bordeaux wines – whether for drinking pleasure or investment.

Amongst the many good things in here is a detailed look at the vintages from 2003 to 2011 and brief notes on the rest back to 1990. There are profiles and histories of the Premier Cru Classé Châteaux, Chris’s personal selection of the top Bordeaux Châteaux for reds and the great sweet wines of Sauternes as well as his top tips for good value.

As if all that isn’t enough there are sections on how they grow the grapes and make the wines as well as chapters that give you sneaky little insights into all the appellations of the region and the various classifications, from the 1855 (official) to the 2011 (unofficial) along with Graves, St Émilion, Sauternes and Cru Bourgeois.

I had better stop heaping praise on Chris before his head totally explodes, but this is an excellent reference book and I intend to keep my copy handy. It contains pretty much anything you need to make your Bordeaux buying and drinking a less haphazard experience and is a perfect gift for those just starting to get into wine – especially Bordeaux.

I will tell you all about another couple of books very soon, so keep coming back.

The Story of St Estèphe

One of the complaints I have of most wine books is that they are mainly for reference rather than reading. Of course I have a large library of wine books for when I need to look things up, but sometimes I think how nice it would be to just sit down and read a book about wine that rattles along at the pace of a novel.

David Copp in full wine writer regalia on our trip to New York’s Finger Lakes

There are not many such books, but my friend David Copp has recently added a splendid example to my meagre collection. David is no mean writer and he has three other excellent volumes to his name, Hungary: Its Fine wines and Winemakers, Tokaj: A Companion for the Bibulous Traveller and Australian Wine Walkabout: Notes From Visits To Australian Fine Wine Makers  they are all available on Amazon and I recommend them to you.

Wine & Fiction

Most wine books are reference books, I own loads and use them all the time, but sometimes I just want to read a book about wine. Sadly most of them do not work that way. The number of wine books that I have been able to sit down and read, as I would a novel, have been few and far between.

It is out of print and my copy is long gone, but I remember Hugh Johnson’s first book – still his best in my opinion – ‘Wine’ with great affection and seem to remember reading it at a single sitting.

Jancis Robinson’s ‘Confessions of a Wine Lover‘ was a good read, as was ‘Wine & War‘ which dealt with the the German treatment of France’s wine industry during the occupation.

Patricia Atkinson’s ‘The Ripening Sun‘ was a lovely read that made me want to run away and create a vineyard of my own.

I also enjoyed ‘Phylloxera‘ and learned a great deal from it, but these are rare instances of books about wine that are not primarily for reference.

I would like more of these please, if any publishers are reading this, and more travel writing about wine regions and culture while we are about it – feel free to tell us about any that you know and love.

However, I am always surprised by how little fiction there is set around the world of wine – I cannot think of many such books at all. I once read a dreadful murder mystery set in a Port Lodge – the name escapes me sorry. I suppose that some of the books by Joanne Harris might count, but I have not tried them.