FWD newsletter - No. 12 (26/01/2001)

In this issue:

FWD newsletter is a fortnightly email devoted to fine wine and food. In the newsletter you will find previews of what's new at FineWineDiary.com, short articles on tastings and matters vinous, restaurant reviews, and items on the best (and occasionally the worst!) that the food and drink world has to offer. We hope you enjoy it.

Richard and Toby Bailey

Highlights (the best bottles from the last fortnight)
[Star ratings are out of five with potential indicated by the outline stars (bracketed if reading in text only format). Hence the Grange mentioned below is three stars for drinking now, but should become a four-star wine with time.]

See all the latest tasting notes at http://www.finewinediary.com/diary

1999 Burgundy (Toby)

I generally leave the sometimes unappealing task of tasting lots of young wine to those whose job it is, particularly because I am not a regular en primeur buyer. Young Burgundy is not hard work in quite the same way as Bordeaux though, and Justerini and Brooks have a rather good list of Burgundy growers and so I was pleased to be able to have a look at how they have done in 1999.

The consensus seems to be that 1999 is a fairly strong vintage, particularly for the reds. It was a large crop but if the wines were not spectacularly concentrated, then those I tasted were not dilute. For both whites and reds the wines were better than 1998 or 1997 and it seems natural to compare to 1996: the wines seem comparably fine and balanced to that excellent vintage, although at this stage I certainly wouldn't want to say that they are better. For reds, at least, I notice that Jancis Robinson has gone overboard in the Financial Times saying that they are "the most exciting I can remember tasting": this is some claim - she has tasted this vintage much more widely than I have but I am not sure 1999 is quite that good. Prices seem to have stayed fairly stable.

There are brief notes for about 25 whites and 35 reds in the diary, the reds at least are mainly cask samples. Here are my impressions of growers starting with the whites.  Prunier had a nice Auxey-Duresses Vieilles Vignes and I thought Prudhon's Puligny-Enseigneurs (210 pounds - all prices per case, duty and Vat included) was rather good value. Rollin's Pernand-Vergelesses is also a bargain (154 pounds) if you like, as I do, his restrained and ageworthy style. Dancer's Meursault and Chassagne were clean and modern but not notably exciting - I rather prefer Grivault's more traditional offerings. Both these looked a little lacking beside J-N. Gagnard's wines this year. I've sometimes found them a bit rustic in the past but these were lovely full-blooded but balanced wines - the Chenevottes excellent, the Caillerets better still, the Batard-Montrachet another step up again. You need a lot of disposable cash to afford Sauzet but his wines this year are lovely classic Puligny. The Batard-Montrachet here was "to die for" - and a distance ahead of Gagnard's very good effort. I tasted three Corton Charlemagnes too: Rollin's was top, Follin-Arbellet's respectable, Bruno Clair's OK.

Turning to the reds, Prudhon's St Aubin Les Frionnes (122 pounds) is a bargain and I particularly liked the concentrated, tannic wines made by de Suremain at Chateau de Monthelie. All three were good and reasonably priced, but I thought the Rully (140 pounds) and the Monthelie Sur La Velle (200 pounds) a bit better balanced than the straight Monthelie. Another bargain producer is Rollin whose excellent Ile de Vergelesses (204 pounds) will probably age very well like old vintages of this I have had. Coste-Caumartin has made some decent Pommards, but I got distracted by the excellent show from the ever under-rated Tollot-Beaut at the next table - all the wines were very good for their classification and price but the Savigny Lavieres (180 pounds) from old vines stood out for me as particularly good value.

D'Angerville's wines are almost unapproachably tannic. I don't have so much experience of this producer and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they will come round. They are not for undemanding early drinking however. Jancis Robinson listed Follin-Arbellet as a grower whose wines disappointed here this year - I was not familiar with the domaine and I was pleasantly surprised by some nicely balanced, not over-worked or over-oaked, elegant wines. The Aloxe-Corton premier crus Clos de Chapitre and Les Vercots (235 and 248 pounds) were attractive, the first more scented the second more ageworthy probably and the Corton and Corton-Bressandes (both 370) had real Grand Cru texture. I will be trying wines from this estate again. Bruno Clair's wines are sound, but wouldn't be my choice from this line-up. Chevillon on the other hand, whose wines I have sometimes found a little rustic, has made some splendid wines this year - my picks are the Nuits St George Les Cailles (290 pounds) and Les St-Georges (300 pounds). Finally, Ghislaine Barthod seems to have done well again - I liked the Chambolle-Musigny Les Fuees (365 pounds).

Full notes can be found at http://www.finewinediary.com/diary/index.shtml#w01jan122

Thoughts from a wine dinner (Richard)

The recent festive season allowed, of course, for a certain quite large amount of indulgence to take place. One of the highlights was a Christmas fine wine dinner with a group of friends. Such an occasion allows for no theme other than that the wines should be fine, but as it turned out, purely by coincidence, some interesting mini-themes emerged. We begun with two Champagnes from 1988, had a fascinating flight of four clarets, and also managed two Bordeaux wines from 1953 (albeit one a sweet white, and the other a red).

Is there a better way to start a fine wine dinner than with fine Champagne? I think not. Laurent Perrier Grand Siecle 1988 was as good as one could reasonably wish for - delicate, yet full. Unfortunately for it, but not for us, it was followed by an even greater fizz from the same vintage: Krug Clos de Mesnil - a wine with real breadth and finesse. Both these Champagnes are in need of further time in bottle to approach their best. The Champagnes were followed by some top Alsace wines (Riesling from Zind-Humbrecht and Pinot Gris from Schlumberger - see highlights section above) and a disappointing white Rhone, Beaucastel 1995 Rousanne Vielles Vignes. (Why does white Rhone so often under perform against reputation? Wines from Chapoutier, Chave, Jaboulet and Beaucastel have all disappointed in the last couple of years.)

The four clarets were from 1986, 1982, 1961 and 1953 (how many of these were proclaimed at the time as "the vintage of the century" I wonder). The Pichon Lalande 1986 was not the gushingly extrovert wine I had ten years or so back  - in fact it was much more what might be expected from the vintage - a closed, surprisingly tannic wine which needs time. Similarly the 1982 Leoville Las Cases was not showing as fully as a wine with such a reputation should. However, other 1982s such as Gruaud Larose have of recent times gone through bad patches (when some have lost faith in them) before blossoming again, and I suspect that further age will show the Las Cases in all its glory.

Age, however, has done too much for Lynch Bages 1961. A great vintage, but this wine on this showing is on the way down - not destined for the graceful maturity of the fine 1953 Latour. Whether these two Pauillacs differing approach to old age is a function of the property or the vintage I am not sure (I have just been to a Chateau Margaux tasting - report in the next newsletter - where the 1953 was in decline). The Latour's contempory, the 1953 Chateau Rieussec (you spend ages waiting for a 53, then three come along at once) was dressed in the nutty amber of old age and hadn't lasted quite as well as its red friend - I think I would have enjoyed it more ten years' back.  Perhaps it was feeling old, as indeed I was, in the presence of the great and youthful Taylor's 1963 - a wine for which time has slowed right down.

Full notes at http://www.finewinediary.com/diary/index.shtml#w01jan137

Book Review - Real Wine by Patrick Matthews, published by Mitchell Beazley 2000 (Toby)

By "real wine" I think the author means much the same as I do: hand-crafted wine of character expressing a particular terroir and vintage, as opposed to industrially produced wine made to a price point, heavily manipulated and following international fashion.  He discusses a whole range of issues related to this distinction, basing a lot of it on the struggle of a few determined winemakers in California to make "real wine" and their interactions with the top growers in France.

The start of the book could be read as a defence of the idea of terroir: do you really need special soils to grow fine wine or, as some New World technocrats have suggested is the emphasis on location just an Old World marketing ploy?  What evidence is there that minerals in the soil find their way into the wine?  On this and every question the author seems to have talked to, or at least researched the views of, a lot of the very best winemakers and authorities on soil and climate on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a lengthy and readable discussion on vines and clones (a subject that I had thought was beyond making interest to somebody like me who enjoys drinking wine far more than reading about it) and the virtues of the traditional techniques that lead to a varied population in the vineyard rather than a monoculture. There's a lot on modern winemaking tools: ion-exchange machines and spinning cones which seem to be able to take a wine to pieces and reassemble it with a bit less of this or a bit more of that, and some tricks of the trade like intentionally adding tiny quantities of brettanomyces for added complexity.

Cooperage gets extended discussion too, with interesting asides such as whether the traditional feeling that Meursault is bready but Puligny toasty might not be to do with terroir but a difference between softening staves in steam or in a flame.

I could go on, but I expect you get the idea. This is a well-written romp through a lot of issues relating to fine wine enlivened by many little stories such as the "well-respected" outfit in Australia that was apparently making "Rhine Riesling" from a mixture of Shiraz and Thompson's Seedless, and a splendid quote from Kermit Lynch comparing alcoholic oaky wines to women with breast implants.  I felt some of the issues could do with a bit more hard fact: for instance, there is a lot on organic and biodynamic agriculture and Matthews notes that it has been claimed that non-organic farming of vines involves particularly heavy agrochemical usage.  Another authority is quoted contradicting this and a couple of fairly relevant statistics are given (539 people suffered acute poisoning in Califormia vineyards between 1991 and 1996 for instance) and we are reminded about stories of children spraying in Chilean vineyards with no protective clothing, but I don't think he gives as much hard information on all this as he might.  Despite those minor misgivings, a good read, although it probably helped that I am so much in sympathy with the author's viewpoint.

Life's too short . . . smoked mackerel melt

Toby recently came across the following dish on a menu: "Smoked mackerel and prawns with spring onions in a creamy cheese melt". If anyone can envisage how this could possibly be appetising, then please let us know.

We welcome reader's contributions to "Life's too short" (contact details below).

We would also like to thank those who wrote in enquiring where they might obtain the Riedel Champagne Straw mentioned in the last issue.

Don't forget to visit www.FineWineDiary.com for regular tasting note updates.

Coming soon: a report on a Chateau Margaux tasting with Corinne Mentzelopoulos

Contact details

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FWD newsletter is written and edited by Richard and Toby Bailey.