Along the coast past the vast sweeping hook of the bay then on to the flat plain at the foot of the ridge. Right at the crossroads down through the lush green, sun dappled valley, and upwards into the hard, bright light toward the bracken and heather covered moor, with its dolmen and bronze age barrows, home to a thousand faeries and ubiquitous sheep.
Left then, past the church and the cross with the old bell that says ‘Ora pro nobis Sancte Maria’. Past the castle on the hill, along the drangway until I’m home. Not my home, but a home that is deep in my blood and in my soul.
I know this mighty theatre, my footsole knows it for mine.
I am nearer the rising peewit’s call than the shiver of her own wing.
I ascend in the loud waves’ thunder, I am under the last of the nine.
In a hundred dramatic shapes I perish, in the last I live and sing.
Taliesin…. Vernon Watkins.
The old house stands empty, with its forlorn For Sale sign battered by the sea winds. It smells of damp, and my fathers stale tobacco. There are no voices now, no children running through its untended garden. Choose some wine will you son, dinner will be ready soon.
My mother is frail, like a small injured bird, and I can feel the bones in her back as I hug her. The dressings on her arms, from her most recent fall, need changing. I must phone the doctor.
Have you taken those pills? No. Why not they’ll help you. I don’t know which ones to take? I’ve told you a hundred times. I scold myself for my impatience. Be kind, she’s lost her husband of sixty years. She’s dressed for lunch, she looks forward to these outings like a child. I less so.
Let us stand, then in the interval of our wounding,
till the silence turn golden and love is a moment eternally overflowing.
Evening……R.S. Thomas.
My father smokes a pipe, it will come to kill him. A pipe is archaic, it’s not cool like a cigarette or opulent like a cigar. It takes dedication and generous pockets. The pouch, the cleaning, scraping and poking tools, the pipe itself, of which there may be more than one, plus matches – it’s best not to light a pipe with a lighter. The pipe demands a jacket, and some sturdy leather soled brogues to tap the bowl against to dislodge the spent tobacco. My father was often in corduroy or tweed and hated the summer months.’The seasons are all potential assassins’ as Alan Bennett said.
He’d light the pipe whilst driving, the car veering from side to side, pungent smoke billowing from its smouldering bowl and filling the car as I sat in the back with the dogs. I glance at his armchair – another thing I shall have to get rid of – and see him, deep in contemplation, blowing clouds of smoke before falling asleep clutching its warm bowl, and on waking would take a sip of his now cold tea. I realise how many hours I must have spent watching him, perhaps to better understand him, and when I finally thought I knew I realised I had no more questions to ask.
We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever….J.L. Carr.
My father has died, getting the year off to a pretty poor start. Cancer of the throat and mouth. I suppose it’s better than foot and mouth, and certainly much easier to explain. It was fast, mercifully for him but less so for me.
As his immune system shut down his skin started to fall off, turning him as scarlet as a dipsomaniac vicar asleep at a cricket match. Sleeping more and more, babbling incoherently and eating only soup – a dish my mother never learned to master despite its dazzling simplicity – leaving a house full of morphine and a hell of a lot to sort out.
The end inevitably came with a fall, easy to do with a tumbler of scotch in one hand and a pipe in the other. Unable to steady himself on any available surface he toppled and broke his pelvis. I sit with him in the hospital and talk with him despite the fact that he’s asleep, his breathing so shallow that I think he’s already gone, his profile a Venetian plague mask replete with enormous nose.
The rest as they say is history, although I miss the old bugger immensely and it doesn’t help that I see him every time I look in a mirror.
Old Griffiths the undertaker looks tanned as he walks before the hearse in his topper. He has a house in Tenerife, Robert says, I thought it might be Marbella, after the amount I’ve paid him – knowing he’s handled both my mother and aunt this year – perhaps handled isn’t the right word.
You look like your father, one of his decrepit friends says outside the church.
He lives on through you, says another as I wonder if I should contact an exorcist.
Despite the early March weather, I’m warm in my old Gieves and Hawkes suit, thankful that I had the funeral director dress my father in a robe, prior to closing the coffin lid. I guess I preferred the thought of him journeying to the afterlife dressed as Noel Coward rather than Maurice Chevalier.
Philip is taking charge of the service, a big hearty priest with a magnificent voice, disappointed not to be able to raise the roof due to my father’s aversion to hymns. We have readings instead, my three boys and I. Those were very nice Philip says, most people have something from the Lion King.
Everyone is dressed in their best bombazine black – funerals are their only invitations these days – and there’s free food and drink. I bump into the local MP in the gents – we both wash our hands before shaking – who speaks highly of my late father. He spoke highly of you too, I say in return, lying through my teeth which I hope are free of vol au vents.
The hotel is full of familiar faces from childhood, uncles, aunts – people I called uncles and aunts who were not related – yeomen, yokels, rotarians and freemasons, members of my fathers club, and the choir who will have been mortally wounded by their inability to sing.
David has my boys cornered and is regaling them with his poetry. I had considered him for the eulogy but services are around forty five minutes in duration and he would be just warming up by then. I must rescue my boys.
He’s so like his father, Alice says. It’s almost as if he’s standing here now, and I wish he were, rather than me.
The VOR drives us home, decanting our boys at the railway station for their journey back to different parts of London, we kiss them and thank them for coming.
I stay up late, still in my suit, raising a glass to my father with his own scotch. I guess people aren’t dead if you don’t want them to be.
Hot weather finds me craving a cold, pale, white that smells gently of pears, grapefruit and white flowers, not aggressively aromatic, but cut through with the kind of razor sharp, refreshing citrus acidity and salty minerality that makes you salivate.
Chablis? I hear you say. Sort of ‘esque’ but considerably cheaper at around £13 retail.
Rueda is the only white wine DO in Castilla y Leon, and its fennelly freshness comes from a distinctly chilly climate and the austere gravelly soils of the high plateau, where most of the vines for the indigenous Verdejo grape – not to be confused with the Verdelho of Portugal – originate.
Angel Rodriguez Vidal only makes one wine, and this is it! Martinsancho has been in his family since 1784 and his almost single handed resurrection of Verdejo was recognized by King Juan Carlos of Spain. Unlike most of Rueda, his vines are bush trained, rather than wire trained, which keep yields very low, with just a few bunches per vine, giving intense flavour as well as precluding mechanical harvesting. Unusually for Spain, the cellars are deep underground, goose-pimply cold and the wine spends a considerable time on its lees.
The label’s a bit dull I grant you – a funky one would help silence any non believers – but its what’s inside that counts and with only around 2000 bottles per vintage you don’t want everyone getting their grubby little mitts on it!
Stone and orchard fruits, a touch of fennel, herbs and rhubarb, a Chablis-esque pebble sucking dryness and punchy acidity of vivacious purity.
As my wife said, in one of her less eloquent moments, “This beats the c**p out of Oyster Bay”!
Those of a certain vintage will recall the ad campaign, andrather like Marmite, you’ll either love it or hate it!
It’s that umami thing, a combination of salty, soy saucy, savoury, fermented, yeasty flavours that’s guaranteed to keep the mosquitos at bay!
All you diehard fans of industrially made Prosecco – that cheap n’ nasty sweet stuff, made from soap shavings and lemonade, so beloved of book clubs – need to stop reading now, as Casa Belfi’s Colfondo Vino Biologico is one fabulous, foaming, feisty, feral fizz.
This is real Prosecco, the kind the old folks of Treviso used to drink, and not to be found ‘on tap’ at the local pub!
‘Why is it cloudy’, I hear you ask? Well it’s a natural wine, made from 100% Glera, unfiltered, fined, clarified, or injected with Co2.
It’s not ferociously fizzy, just naturally so, the secondary fermentation occurs in the bottle, at Easter, before temperatures rise, so the yeasts remain to give it texture.
Shake it or invert it, like a snow globe, to agitate the sediment and release that texture and spice. It’s light bodied, a mere 11% alc, with notes of flowers, pears and freshly baked bread. If cloudy cider floats your boat then this is for you!
‘Come in cats and check your hats, I mean this joint is jumpin’….
A rare, recent, glimpse of spring sunshine finds me groping for a glass of something sunny, and Patrick Sullivan’s ‘Jumpin Juice’ gets the roof rocking’ and the neighbours knockin’.
Guaranteed to lift the most jaded of spirits, and awaken those blue winter palates deadened by too much Malbec!
Raspberries, mulberries, a bunch of blackberries and a fistful of cherries. Whole bunch fermented, neither brand nor bland, it’s the kind of cloudy, savoury and vibrantly beautiful giggle juice that Jean de Florette would have guzzled on his endless trips to the cistern, and although this is a wine of Victoria’s Yarra Valley, it dances to the tambourin of Provence.
Pinot Noir, with a dash of Pinot Gris, picked and blended at the same time then fermented with natural yeasts – they drop their singular personalities and meld into a true vin de soif – unfined and barely filtered, light in colour and body, tense, nervy, minerally, oozing with juicy fruit and best lightly chilled, this is just ridiculously easy to drink.
If wine is so interesting, how come wine writing’s so dull?
Ok, obviously not all of it, but let’s just say that I have a vested interest and wading through the majority of it fills me with trepidation rather than excitement.
To give it some context, wine tasting notes are generally written by people who have been through the wine education system. By this I mean a programme or qualification endorsed by a governing body connected to the wine trade, and while they may know an awful lot about wine it doesn’t necessarily mean they have any experience of writing outside their field – there are exceptions of course.
Wine writing is like any other form of writing. Just because anyone can pick up a pen, or tap on a keyboard, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they should. It’s true that many people have a book in them, but it may be a bad book.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There’s some really good stuff out there but it’s usually hidden behind a paywall – where those who are perceived to do it well dispense their wisdom, from on high, and when not travelling the globe writing reports are feted at trade tastings (by an assortment of winemakers, agents and sales reps) and escorted to specially constructed, gilded thrones, carefully placed near power sockets, to apportion their scores. Which brings me neatly onto the scoring system.
For the uninitiated, wine scoring was initially out of twenty points (Broadbent, Robinson et al) moving swiftly to the American model ( Parker) where wines are scored out of one hundred points. In the latter (universally adopted) system, the majority of wines tasted rarely drops below eighty points, which roughly equates to the original system of twenty. Get my drift? Good, I love you and award you 95 points!
But what about those wines that don’t make the grade? Well, these are then whipped into whirlpools – in an ever desperate attempt to fill them with enough oxygen to reveal some form of discerning characteristic – so that a score may be apportioned, a medal awarded, and a market found.
This is where your writer earns their crust and it’s a tough market. Wine hacks are paid per word, and in these post internet times the income stream has gone from a torrent to a trickle. Money is paid by the highest bidder, which is why five out of every six recommendations, to spend your hard earned cash, promotes the major multiples or large producers. Consequently, tasting notes are often geared to a common denominator of taste, and indeed price. The results are often predictably anodyne – neither expressing real opinions nor provoking thought – after all you don’t get your free wine trips that way. In addition, the majority of readers may have little (or no) interest in anything but the narrow band of products the writers endorse – so you get what you get.
‘Anyone who has had the good fortune of opening a bottle of Côtes du Rhône will find them generous, smooth and a joy to taste. They embody the warm sunshine that floods the region in summer’…Will Lyons ‘The Sunday Times’.
My apologies to Will, as he’s a good writer, but it’s extremely hard to come up with interesting and informative comment in the few column inches available between the recipes and the horoscopes.
So what’s the alternative?
‘Deep yellow straw colour with golden highlights and high viscosity may point to a sweet wine. Presence of botrytis evident, with no rot, indicating selective and possibly manual harvesting point to a wine of high quality. The well balanced fruit, sugar and acidity together with well integrated new (French oak) point to a wine from the old, rather than the new world. Strong primary fruit aromas of stone and citrus together with clean botrytis, marked acidity and high residual sugar, plus slow fermentation, leads to France/Sauternes. Excellent quality, well balanced, still youthful with flavours not yet fully integrated indicate that the wine is around 5 years old and will last at least another 10 years or more’.…blah, blah, blah.
That’s my nerdy note (blind) for Ch Climens96 under exam conditions. Quite correct (apart from confusing Sauternes with Barsac) but boring!
As David Sedaris once said ‘Faced with an exciting question, science tends to provide the dullest answer’.
Let’s try a more romantic ‘writerly’ approach;
The contents of the bottle in his hand was a product of a history as unique and complex as that of a nation, or a man. In it’s colour, aroma and taste, it would certainly express the idiosyncratic geology and prevailing climate of its home terrain. But in addition, it would express all the natural phenomena of its vintage. In a sip, it would evoke the timing of that winter’s thaw, the extent of that summer’s rain, and the frequency of clouds. Yes, a bottle of wine was the ultimate distillation of time and place; a poetic expression of individuality itself….Amor Towles ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’
Ah that’s better! Lovely, lyrical, and evocative, but it doesn’t exactly describe what’s in the glass.
So we all agree that we need a happy medium. Not too techie, but erring on the journalistic side, that’s impressionistic and tells a story, but brief enough for today’s online attention span of two minutes – which may be a minute too far for most wines. Then we have to level the playing field further, or dumb down, to eliminate the aesthetic snobbery attached to wine, as there’s a general assumption that if you write interestingly about wine you are somehow being elitist – because most people don’t think wine is that interesting.
Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle between the exciting (often confined to specialist publications) and the tedious (general) – a sort of wine equivalent of smart casual. I know what you’re thinking, all that romantic stuff’s easy when discussing a fine Burgundy or a stately Bordeaux but what do you do if faced with a wine that smells like the inside of a hamster cage, or worse, nothing at all!
Do we tell the harsh, unvarnished truth? Like hell we do – because that’s someone’s wine and it needs to get sold, and they’re picking up the tab! So we’re left scratching around for adjectives and soundbites to describe boring wines – which poses a cultural question.
Is wine writing dull because the vast majority of wine is and is a cheap wine as good as an expensive wine if that’s all we’re prepared to pay for?
Macchiona is the kind of wine that stops you in your blind tasting tracks and asks ‘WTF is that’?
For a moment let’s forget the analytics, debates about quality, merits and demerits, and boring old points scoring, and just accept that this is what wine can, and should, be all about.
Subtle, heady, complex, hard to pin down, a combination of smells and tastes that make you think you are somewhere, when you are not, transporting you to a time and a place where you momentarily want to remain forever.
Half the group thought we were in Bordeaux, others correctly thought Italy, but all agreed we had somehow died and gone to heaven!
La Stoppa is an ancient estate in Piacenza, Emilia Romagna, originally planted over a century ago and owned by the Pantaleoni family since 1973. Vine stock is old and indigenous with naturally low yields from poor soils.
Rare as hen’s teeth, Macchiona is a blend of Bonarda and Barbera, matured for 12 months in Slavonian oak barrels, gorgeous, meaty and a bit raunchy with aromas of wild berries, herbs, bunches of fennel and a savoury-sour cherry finish – Bordeaux indeed!
I’m here for a winetasting. Set up by a friend in a crusty old gent’s club to presumably add some context and gravitas to the wines on show. ‘You’ll love it’, I recall him saying, ‘It’s right up your street’ – thankfully he didn’t say alley. It’s true, I generally enjoy listening to old relics of the wine trade banging on about Claret, as what they often lack in knowledge they make up for in amusing anecdotes. But this one is different, and I silently curse my (soon to be former) friend while absentmindedly gazing at a clumsily executed seascape and wait for the florid, farm-fresh, magenta faced, red-trousered windbag to stop talking.
As this appears not to be anytime soon, I smile, to feign interest, and settle back into the coma inducing embrace of a faux leather chair, fingering my glass of ‘not so good ordinary claret’ fighting the unripe, unresolved tannins (akin to licking the floor of a long abandoned outhouse) my disappointment growing as I’m told the wines are available in large format bottles and come with their own presentation box – presumably to die in.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the wines of Bordeaux – just not these, and while the windbag extols their, non existent, virtues to his captive, comatose, audience I look for a plant pot to pour mine into, although sympathy for the plant prevents me. Dumbstruck by the bombast and troubling certainty with which Tristram Shandy’s Uncle speaks, I am secretly in awe of his Farage-esque absolutism and the kind of extreme self-confidence that leaves no room for doubt, nor brooks interruption.
I overlook his use of the words ‘pedigree’ and ‘breeding’ and even his positive spin on Brexit, but when he moves on to the subject of Natural Wine and manages to dismiss an entire movement – something previously done by Jonathan Ray (in an interview with Jason Yapp, who, rather surprisingly, failed to ask him to qualify such a sweeping assessment) and Bruce Palling in the Spectator – my hackles rise, particularly as he outlines his, ill informed, views on organic and biodynamic practices whilst eagerly extolling the merits of the appallingly adjusted and astringent plonk he’s peddling.
Now I must admit to disliking the term ‘natural wine’ as it implies that other wines are unnatural, and is probably an insufficient way to describe a complex ideology that includes organic and biodynamic viticulture, minimal handling and intervention, fining and filtration and extremely radical, yet differing, views on the use of sulphur dioxide.
Contextually, the movement began as a counterpoint to the fruit bomb driven behemoths beloved of Robert Parker, seeking a return to something more artisanal, both in the vineyard and the winery, with the ultimate goal being to make wine with no other ingredient than the grapes themselves.
Obviously this requires some firm ground rules: no factory farming, all vineyards must be organic or biodynamic and hand harvested only – machine harvesting however sophisticated damages the vines and compromises cropping – use of indigenous or natural yeasts, no culture corrections, no enzymes, additives, acidity regulation, no additional sugar (to increase alcohol), tannin, sulphur addition no higher than 7mmg/l, no fining, no filtration and absolutely no heavy manipulation such as; reverse osmosis, cryoextraction, spinning cone, centrifuging, rapid finishing or ultraviolet C irradiation – bet you didn’t know all that stuff went on did you?
And that’s just scratching the surface of an industry that regularly uses; tartaric and citric acid, potassium sorbate, gum arabic, carboxymethyl cellulose (to prevent crystals forming) dimethyl dicarbonate (to kill microbes) a dash of megapurple (to increase colour and boost mouthfeel), activated charcoal, potassium ferrocyanide, copper sulphate, pectolytic enzymes, bentonite clay and a soupcon of polyvinylpolypyrrolidone! Now these may not be as dangerous as climate change denial or driving at 30mph in a 20mph zone, but they may go some way to explaining that hangover!
However, if your goal is to take wine back to the Stone Age then you are not going to please all of the people all of the time. I admit to not liking all natural wines. Some are quite frankly volatile, full of brettanomyces, brown as Victorian furniture and, even in youth, smell like a teenagers bedroom, or an old aquarium, and taste like licking the outside of a wet canvas tent. When they are good they are very very good and when they are bad they are horrid.
A word of advice though before you open up Pandora’s box. Do not judge natural wines against other wines, judge them against others of their type and always on their own terms. In a world of, increasingly, bland homogeneity they make a refreshing change for people with open minds.
Which brings me back to Mein Host whose mind could only be opened by invasive surgery. ‘Right, that’s stumps’, he says, ‘Lovely to chat’ – although he hadn’t – and makes his way into the evening to await the arrival of his sedan chair.
When you read a lot of wine crit, – Yep that’s crit – you become overly familiar (and indeed bored) with some of the language used to describe it. Such as; ‘fruit forward’, ‘easy drinking’ or, God forbid, my own bete noire‘smooth’ or ‘generous’ even!
I have friends who are both generous and smooth, so a little context wouldn’t go amiss, along with some joy, unbridled passion, desperately needed emotion, and dare I say love.
So I’m going to give you some love, and show you the kind of wine that makes me as deliriously happy as Pharrell Williams.
I first came across the wines of Irouleguy as a young surfer mooching around the coast of South West France back in the fluorescent wet suited 80’s. The drive from Guethary to Mundaka wound its way through the vinelands of the Pays Basque, and you had to be stupid, blind, or both, to overlook its wines, as they were, and still are, some of the most exciting around.
Irouleguy numbers some nine communes dating back to the 11th century and is a sadly neglected area when it comes to both knowledge, and the subsequent promotion, of its wines and their route to market.
‘Peppery as the Welsh, proud as Lucifer, and combustible as his matches’ was Richard Ford’s pithy assessment of the Basques.
Flaming red is their colour, from their tiled roofs to their distinctive berets, piment d’espalette, and the majority of their wines made from Tannat and the two Cabernets. But what folks often overlook are the miniscule examples of white wine made in the region. There are only about half a dozen producers of these and the standard is off the clock!
Arretxea, from the Basque ‘arre’, meaning stone and ‘xea’, house, comes from a six hectare plot planted with Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Courbu – the principle grapes of Jurancon – on steep terraces with sustainable vineyard husbandry and biodynamics.
Hegoxuri is hand harvested, gets a forty hour maceration on skins, followed by partial fermentation in barrique, and has the kind of remarkable golden straw colour that would excite Rumplestiltskin. This leads into a nose of exotic fruits, peaches and honeysuckle, married with full, rich and heady flavours – redolent of great white Burgundy – and marked with an outstanding nervy acidity.
These local wines, for local people, are rare gems, and whilst you have to dig a little deeper down to afford them, are a true testament to the power of geography over greed.
As a long term advocate of non-compliance, I love a wine that divides opinion!
Sure it’s got more than a heady whiff of the farmyard, but that never stopped anyone buying Musar.
Decanting is ‘de rig’, for a good hour before drinking, and the longer you can leave it resting, at room temp, with a bit of oxygenation, the better. This not only reduces the feral, bosky, gamey aromas, but it’s important to remember that this wine has been sitting in bottle since 2003.
Freisa in all its chunky, funky glory is a rare beast. Robust, earthy, tannic and unafraid to speak its mind. If you’re new to Freisa, it’s first mention in Piemonte occurs around 1799 – so catch up! Burton Anderson describes it as having a kind of sweet – acidic flavour, like lightly salted raspberries. But whatever you do, don’t confuse it with Pinot Noir – that’s just too predictable dahling! This is Freisa di Chieri, seriously small berried (unlike Freisa Grossa) with bigger phenolics and a similar structure to Nebbiolo.
thesprezzaturist 