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Newsletter No. 20: 24th October
2005
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The world has an odd atmosphere as we delve deeper
into autumn 2005. Avian flu stalks the planet like a
malevolent secretary bird, ready to pick off the
susceptible, like so many small and crunchy denizens
of the African veldt. Already it has reached as far
as UK quarantine. To mark the occasion, my nose has
started streaming with my first cold for over a year.
Thank goodness our favourite London tasting of the
year has been and gone!
Hurricanes cause pandemonium in the US and Caribbean.
Al Qu’aeda is probably calling it divine
retribution.
I saw a red admiral butterfly yesterday in our
garden: 23rd October. Some sort of record? Probably
not, but it seemed very late for the boldly-marked
fellow to be out and about.
Good vintages are coming along more and more
frequently. If the news is to be believed, several of
the classic appellations of Europe have experienced
great harvests following another exceptionally hot
and dry growing season.
Champagne houses have been buying up land in the
South Downs in England. I am tempted to see how much
of Pewsey Vale I can snap up. With all that chalk, I
could be producing an English Cristal in a decade or
so and supplying the rap music fraternity with
expensive fizz, change my name to Pop Diddy and
retire…
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In this issue….
» 2003 Bordeaux
(what, again?!)
» 2003 Port (and
Wine of the Week)
» Client
Zone
» What is a
Food Wine?
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2003 Bordeaux (what,
again?!?)
It used to be called Vilar Floral Hall and, for the
last few years, has been the location of the Union
des Grands Crus tasting in London, the purpose of
which is to give the UK's wine merchants and
journalists an opportunity to have a look at the
recently bottled Bordeaux vintage, in this case 2003.
The name was recently abbreviated and is now back to
plain old Floral Hall, Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden, London, England, Europe, The World etc.
Vilar, an American financier, has been dropped from
the team. Having pledged £10,000,000 in
funding, he could only come up with £4,000,000.
I mean…what a tight wad. Hardly surprising
they showed him the door.
In any event, this year there was a particularly
acute air of excitement about an event that is, in
any case, an eagerly awaited annual happening. We
were gathering to re-examine wines that had polarised
opinion as never before; a vintage that was entirely
without precedent; a harvest that producers had been
permitted, by law, to acidify (shock horror!). There
were, quite clearly, answers required and the
questions were legion. Here's just a taster:
·
Would non-acidified wines be chronically lacking in
freshness?
·
Would the wines have any chance of ageing?
·
Would hugely concentrated levels of fruit and
elevated levels of tannin in some way make up for
measly degrees of acidity?
·
Are the wines we liked in Bordeaux more than a
year-and-a-half ago the same wines we like now?
·
Are they even claret??
The Floral Hall is an impressive space and tends
towards the warm, as it has an ornate, arching glass
roof. With 200 flapping, swirling, chattering wine
trade individuals housed therein, it was no time for
jacket and tie, I can tell you. So…books out,
heads down, take up your glass and walk, or, rather,
elbow your way around the various appellations in a 4
hour work-out for the taste-buds and the ultimate
test of stamina.
The result? In general, I was more than reassured.
Since bottling, these wines (like the burgundies we
have tasted, incidentally) have firmed up, gaining in
focus and definition. Acidity is, of course low-ish,
but there is no lack of grip in the best of them. Not
only are the best - and there are many very, very
good wines in the vintage - intense and age-worthy,
they are also very indicative of their origins. The
exaggerated heat of 2003 appears to have forced the
roots of the vines to suck hungrily at the vineyard
soil, any moisture found saturated with the local
minerals, the minerals in turn finding their way into
our glasses.
A Few Generalisations about the Vintage:
·
The further north one travels in the Médoc,
the more focussed and pure become the wines
·
The best of these wines are going to keep like the
dickens
·
There are exceptionally fine wines on both banks
There were many highlights of the tasting. To mention
just a couple of wines that, for me, stood out, I
found Figeac and Pontet-Canet to be superb. The
former was rammed full of the kind of natural
intensity that one finds elsewhere in, say, a she-Pit
Bull protecting her pups from the nice man from the
dog pound. This is being slightly unfair, as the wine
is actually far from being aggressive. What it is is
a pent-up ball of tannin-wrapped fruit. It is like
Gothic architecture. The Pontet-Canet is notable for
its purity and (get this!) elegance. It's still
architecture. It's just more rococo.
N.B. Remarkably, we still have a couple of case of
the Figeac remaining at £348 in bond a dozen
bottles, which I think (given that claret is now
notoriously bad value) is a pittance for a wine this
good. We have a few other '03s remaining, too. Do go
to the bin end list at our website if you'd like to
find out which, or contact me if you would like an
up-to-date tasting note of the wines you've bought.
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2003 Port (and Wine of the
Week)
I thought port sales from this offering had been kind
of slow. Mentioning this to several colleagues in the
trade, it appears that everyone's been experiencing a
similar phenomenon and the reason for this slight
dearth of interest (everyone sold a great deal more
2000 vintage port than they have '03, despite the
fact that 2003 is a markedly superior vintage) has
been the cause of some speculation.
The main explanation proffered has been that this
style of wine - sweet and fortified - is falling yet
further from fashion. Sweet wines in general are not
top of the pops, but add that extra slug of
morning-after headache (the 5 or 6 degrees of extra
alcohol afforded by the process of fortification) and
one gets something that doesn't sit comfortably with
the current vogue for low-cal, fat-free, mineral
water-addicted, no-added-anything living. Quel
dommage, the Portuguese might say, if having an
especially polyglot moment.
One's impression is that the shunning of port (that
most English of drinks) has been less of a crash and
more of a gentle slide that's been taking place for
decades. In fact, figures show that there has been
the whiff of a renaissance in recent times. Sales of
port in the UK, including the fine stuff up the
vintage end, have been rising in a slightly
non-committal sort of way for a while now. So what's
turned the tap in the off direction for the '03s? All
reviews have been positive; it's clear that there's
nothing wrong with the wines themselves.
I have started to wonder whether collectors are a
little '03-ed out. I get the impression that many
consider that there's only a finite amount of room in
their portfolios for the product of any one vintage
and with '03, there was a great deal in which to be
interested: Bordeaux (see above), the Rhône
Valley and Burgundy (despite some unnecessary caveats
from certain sceptics who think that Pinot can't take
the heat) have been the centre of attention. To be
approached once again by one's wine merchant and
requested to hand over a small pile of the folding
stuff for the product of yet another region that's
hit a high note in the vintage might suggest that a
superfluity of egg has been added to the crème
anglaise.
In an attempt to whet a few appetites and create a
final small flurry of interest in the offering, let's
move seamlessly into the Wine of the Week:
12th October saw us at the Bath Spa Hotel for a
tasting and presentation given by Paul and Johnny
Symington. For those not "in the know", the Symington
family between them own or control the port houses of
Quarles Harris, Gould Campbell, Smith Woodhouse,
Quinta do Vesuvio, Warre, Dow and Graham. There's
safety (and quality, believe me) in numbers.
Over the course of the tasting, we swooshed our way
through the following samples: 1963 Dow; 1966 Warre;
1970 Graham; 1977 Smith Woodhouse; 1980 Dow; 1983
Graham; 1985 Warre; 1995 Vesuvio' 1996 Quinta de
Malvedos (Graham), and 1998 Quinta Senhora da Ribeira
(Dow). We both spat. Some didn't. Those that didn't
can evidently handle being pre-prandially plastered.
We drank the following baby at the end of lunch:
1934 Warre
This is fully mahogany with the faintest olive light
at the rim and a very slightly pinkish cast.
The nose is old and mellow and (obviously) fully
mature. I scented dried fruits and peel: raisins and
prunes (notes of Pedro Ximenez, perhaps). There was
an aroma I fancifully described as baked walnut
liqueur, along with a touch of molasses and something
I noted as "cereal".
The palate is still concentrated and full of
intensity and intent. In fact, this bristles with
intensity. There are woody, walnut flavours. The
finish is quite dry. There is still vigorous grip and
the finish coats the mouth, all ending up fresh and
mineral and quite delicious.
If you have a stash of this wine, be in no hurry to
drink it up. But do try a bottle from time to time.
You'll find it most rewarding.
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Client Zone
It's a question I have asked elsewhere before, but
what is the point in collecting stuff? Bertie
Wooster's Uncle Tom collected cow creamers and, when
Bertie wasn't nicking them, enjoyed displaying them
around the house.
With some notable exceptions, a collection of wine is
not made to display. Its atmospheric requirements in
terms of humidity, light levels etc. preclude one
from showing off one's senior bottles on the
mantelpiece above the inglenook fireplace. The
pleasure of wine is, of course, in the drinking. But
are there other pleasures to be gained from the
collection itself? I would argue that there most
certainly are.
Wooster's Uncle enjoyed looking at his antique
creamers, of course. But they also fired his
interest, creating a desire for knowledge of the
things, encouraging him to "study the form", as he
may very well have put it. It is likewise with wine
and Bowes Wine has now made it a great deal easier
for its clients to enjoy their collections of wine,
giving the option to "display" their portfolios on
the internet. Not very P.G. Wodehouse, I know, but I
am sure that Jeeves would have approved.
If you have yet to register for access, the process
is very simple and more or less instantaneous:
-
go to
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click on Request a password
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wait for your random password to be emailed to the
address you specify
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then log on with your email address and your new
password
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once into your Client Zone, you can change the
password to something more memorable.
It's the next best thing to descending into one's own
cellar and cuddling the bottles themselves. For the
ease of combining business with pleasure, one's
statement of account is available from the same
source.
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What is a
food wine?
This is something of a dilemma with us here at Bowes
Wine. You see, when sourcing wine for our drinking
list, we really want to be pleasing all the people
all the time and, as we all know, this is seldom
possible.
Increasingly, I get the impression that what wine
drinkers really want is a "catch all" sort of a wine,
the main requisite being that it can be uncorked and
consumed with pleasure "any time, any place, any
where".
We show our drinking wines at tastings and amongst
them will always be an example or two of what is
traditionally known as a "food wine". In these
situations, wines like this don't sell themselves.
Next to those wines made to be aperitifs or party
wines, food wines look too cerebral, too much like
hard work.
The ultimate embodiment of a food wine is Lambrusco,
the proper, DOC examples of which are lean, austere,
bitingly dry and acidic when consumed without food,
but with a meal, especially the sort of meals one
finds served up in their region of origin (i.e.
Emilia-Romagna, home of the Bolognaise sauce) become
rich and succulent (as well as probably assisting in
the breaking down of animal fats that may have built
up over the course of the meal.
This is an age in which cheap sweets are common,
flavours are being standardised and we're all looking
for instant gratification. Maybe the era of the food
wine is coming to a close and we'll all be drinking
soft, virtually-tannin free, low acidity wines
forever more. I, for one, hope not.
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