Thanks to a study conducted in Edinburgh and that has been widely reported (in the papers and by the BBC), it has emerged that the general public has great difficulty in recognising the difference between wines that cost £5 a bottle and wines that cost upwards of £20 a bottle. No, really? You’d be very hard pressed to find a wine merchant arguing that this study has proved definitively that it really isn’t worth spending much money on wine, that you should just go and raid the end of aisle offers at the nearest supermarket.
Clearly I would argue otherwise and the question in the title is one that I frequently get asked. More specifically it is to ask whether that bottle they see on a shelf is worth the money. Essentially it just depends. It depends on the wine itself, but it also depends on what type of wine the drinker is used to. My advice has always been to try every so often something just a little further up the pricing ladder than you’d have normally see what you think. So if you normally have wines at £5 then try something at £7-8 and so on.
A number of things could happen:
a) you could decide it tastes about the same
b) you could decide it is different and not in a good way
c) you decide it’s different and that you like it.
Clearly you should go back to your good old ways of drinking cheap wine if the outcome is the first two options, but if it’s (c), well, now we’re talking!
As you go up the price ranges, you find that the ratio of the cost of the liquid to the bottle price increases very quickly – for a £5 bottle of wine, the wine itself accounts for about £1 (duty, VAT, profit margins, transportation, packaging account for the rest). A £10 bottle of wine contains liquid that would have cost around £4 to produce. And so on, and so forth.
As a bottle of wine goes up through the price levels, we in the wine industry talk about three main things. How balanced a wine is (is the amount of acid, the fruit levels, the texture and body of the wine in harmony and in balance with no jarring notes?), the degree of intensity a wine has – the more intense, generally the better the wine – and we also consider the complexity of the wine. So a £5 wine will, generally speaking, be easy on the palate, not very complex, and of low intensity of aroma and flavour whereas a wine retailing for over £20 will have so much more going on. It therefore can’t be too surprising that people who drink £5 wines on a regular basis find less pleasure in the wine that’s 4 or 6 times the price. I believe it’s pretty obvious that they will prefer the other wine with more obvious fruit character and less whatever else is going on which could be anything from mushrooms to old leather to walnuts.

The article on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745) was not just looking at preference, but in whether there was any difference between a £5 bottle and a £20 bottle. In response to the article, I would essentially look at it in terms of history – winemakers have spent many hours of their time, not to mention financial resources, to make wine that is as good as possible. Certain areas of land are a great deal more valuable than others because of the far greater potential quality of the grapes and so, inevitably, the potential quality of the wine itself. This is nothing new – all over Europe there are classifications of vineyards that recognise a hierarchy of quality. This results in very different prices for wines from neighbouring plots of land, with prices for Grand Cru Burgundy many times the price of a village ‘lieu-dit’ (single vineyard but not premier or grand cru classification). Are we supposed to believe that this is all for show? Is the wine market an emperor’s new clothes deception on a massive scale? Clearly, I don’t think that is the case.
In short, I’ll keep on drinking good wine and encouraging everybody to do the same!

Well it’s been over a month and I thought I’d check in with a latest. I guess you could say I’ve been partially successful – eating better and drinking a little less but the whole gym thing hasn’t exactly been a runaway success; I’m still a member but haven’t been for a couple of (well, three) weeks.

Totally getting away from the whole healthy eating idea, I went for a curry recently with my fiancee and it occurred to me that it is one of the few meals that everyone seems to love that hasn’t been successfully matched with wine.

And then, just a couple of days later I was chatting and tasting some woes with a wine rep and apparently Chilean carmenere is a verygood match. So we then had a look at the Vina Tamaya wines from the north of Chile, in a region bordering the exceptionally dry Atacama Desert. Something of a tautology, but even for a desert it’s very dry – the vineyards get just 80mm of rain. It really should be too dry, but they have all of the meltwater from the Andes to work with and they can irrigate as they see fit; conditions that pretty much every Australian viticulturalist would give his left hand for!

It has emerged that a fair amount of what the Chileans thought was Merlot has now been identified as Carmenere – a grape variety that takes a good month longer to ripen fully. This may well be the reason why quite a few of the Chilean Merlots I’ve drunk in my days at uni were on the green, vegetal side of things. In the Limari Valley, with such low rainfall, they are under no pressure to pick the grapes. Normally the vintage has to be brought in before the rain falls in earnest in the Autumn, so risking rot and the dilution of the concentration of the grapes on the vine. The fruit in the Limari Valley can therefore be given all of the time it needs to ripen fully and develop with smooth tannins and great concentration.

Well we’ve nearly gone through what I consider the worst month of the year, when many things happen:

-you realise you’ve been far too generous with the presents you’ve bought and have almost managed to bankrupt yourself. Or maybe it was going out and having a seriously good time with friends… but it’s also the time when lots of New Year Resolutions get made and then progressively broken. Here are just a few personal ones:
- join a new gym and go 3 times a week
- playing 5-a-side footy once a week
- a temporary ban on cakes and biscuits between meals (which proved to be partially successful – well a temporary ban was achieved, but in much the same way as I could say a temporary ban on breathing was achieved: I managed, through serious willpower, to hold my breath for 3 minutes. The confectionery embargo lasted a little longer – I blame the leftover mince pies)
and, the deepest cut of all:
- no ‘social’ consumption of alcohol – only professional drinking allowed. The definition of ‘professional’ may have been stretched a little…
As the new year begins, there is an opportunity to reflect and consider certain practices and habits that could be altered slightly. The above may well have been a little ambitious (certainly when viewed alongside the lifestyle of 2010!) but with small adjustments come overall improvements. It is too easy to fail to hit the heady heights of the famous ‘Resolutions’ and then give up on them and return to old ways, but should instead try to keep the general theme and reset the goals. So the gym has remained, but now I try to just get regular exercise and eat a bit more healthily.
I’ll return to this in a couple of months and we’ll see where I’m up to…
Wishing you the best of luck with your own attempts at self improvement!
Happy 2011!

Last night I hosted an event for 50 people in Warrington in conjunction with www.outoftheoffice.com. They were split up into 6 teams and we tasted our way through 6 different wines with an introduction on each of them by yours truly, followed by a quiz. The final question of the quiz was whether one volunteer per table could come to the front of the room to taste one wine blind (that we had tasted previously that evening) and see if they could identify which one it was.

The winning table were then given a bottle of wine each amongst cries of ‘fix’ and ‘cheats’ and lots of banter between the teams when the scores were announced.

The event lasted for about an hour and a half and everybody seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves as well as learning a little more about wine.

I managed to get myself to Evuna in Deansgate and had some very tasty tapas.

The way the promotion actually works is that the two choices you have are as follows:

Menu 1

4 Tapas and 4 tastes of wine £22.50

Menu 2

8 Tapas and 8 tastes of wine £32.50

If/ when you go (and I think you should!) then you should definitely go for menu 2. Definitely.

The tapas were excellent – I particularly enjoyed the chilli and pepper steak. The wines are all chosen for you, it’s a preselected list which includes Rioja of a variety of ages, from Crianza 2006, Reserve 2005 to Gran Reserva 2002. Unfortunately the food and drink parts of each menu are viewed differently: the tastes of each wine are per person but the tapas are to be shared, so for £45 (not including service) two people receive 4 tastes of wine each but 4 tapas to share.

The dishes are served in pairs, with two dishes put in the middle of the table and two wines poured with a brief, informative description of the wines and then we were left to it until we were ready for the next two.

I arrived fairly hungry and left absolutely starving! I did point point out to the manager before we left that 4 tapas between 2 people was a very small portion and that £45 for 2 tapas and 240ml of wine each was somewat on the steep side!! I think they could have made it clear that it was just 4 tapas between 2 people.

The wines are all from Campo Viejo and it is an interesting exercise to taste wine from one estate at a variety of different quality levels and ages. Campo Viejo is one of the larger companies in Spain and so I was fairly ambivalent to sampling their wines, but have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I’m unsure about their retail cost, but they’re worth a taste.

Only do this if you’re doing the 8 tapas and 8 samples menu. If you go for the menu 2, then you’re getting 4 tapas portions and about 2/3 of a bottle  to yourself for £32.50 – a pretty good deal when you consider you’re getting a taste of 8 different (and of decent standard too) wines. Including in the eight are a glass of cava, some white wine and some rose, so it is pretty varied.

So… all in all I had a bit of a disappointing time, but I really didn’t need to (wish I’d gone for the 2nd option. Curses.) – just remember that all of this suffering is so that you don’t have to!

Let me know how you get on, if you decide to give it a go.

Normally just the word ‘concept’ in this context makes me feel a mixture of apprehension and nausea, but read on…

If you’re anything like me in a restaurant, then you decide what sort of wine you fancy drinking before deciding what sort of food you’re going to have (depending on the diversity and quality of the list).

The folks at Evuna obviously saw me coming, because they have developed a new dining concept (I know, I know) where you choose your wine and then put your faith in the clever people at Evuna to choose your tapas for you which they feel would best complement the wine.

The menu is called the Viva el Vino menu and seems pretty well priced at £20 for four tapas and four samples of wine each, or £30 for eight tapas and eight samples of wine each. The samples are 60ml each and so it’s effectively one large (some might say very large) glass of wine for the £20 option, but you get to try 4 different wines.

Exciting, eh? I’m hoping to go very soon – keep your eyes peeled for the review!

Their details, should you feel inspired to go are:
Evuna restaurant
277-279 Deansgate
Manchester
M3 4EW
Tel: 0161 819 2752
www.evuna.com

Some of the most asked questions at wine tastings for fine wines in particular is ‘when should I drink this?’ and ‘when will this be at its best?’. Unfortunately, this is somewhat subjective. I know this sounds like a total cop-out, but it depends on what you like your wine to taste like. Red Burgundy (Pinot Noir) is a great example of this: when young it exhibits lots of primary flavours, which are flavours from the grape itself, so red and black fruits. There will also be some secondary flavours and aromas which are as a result of the wine-making process, the most obvious being all of those associated with oak – cedar, toastiness etc. As the wine ages it develops ‘tertiary’ flavours and aromas and these are the mushroomy, vegetable characters.

Personally, I like my Pinot to have lots of ripe red fruits and so I’d be inclined to drink them earlier rather than later. Some people complain that too many wines are drunk too early, before they’ve had a chance to develop, but at least the wine will be able to develop in the glass and the opened bottle over the course of the evening. And it’s so disappointing/frustrating/annoying to have kept a wine for years and then find that you’ve kept it for too long and all that’s left is a dried out leathery farmyardy glass of liquid with just a vague memory of what fruit character it once had. So exercise caution when looking over drinking dates as proffered by various people in the trade and if you should buy a case of something good, open your first bottle at the earliest date advised. This will give you a pretty good idea of when you would like to drink it, rather than someone else.

The port companies were faced with a tough decision this year as they had one of the best vintages over the last 100 years on their hands, but the global economy was, well, unless you’ve been living in a cave without a wireless connection then you don’t need telling. Anyway, the Symingon family said at the time, they couldn’t declare the vintage and they couldn’t not declare the vintage. Although they probably used more elegant language.

Each port shipper has to make a decision with each vintage whether to declare the vintage. Around 3 times a decade a vintage is declared although not necessarily universally among all of the companies. 2007 is of such high quality that it had to be universally declared. It will be right up there with the likes of 1970, 1977, 1994 and 2003 – if you have a child or godchild born in 2007 then this will be a seriously easy decision. There is no better present to give them and they will be able to enjoy (depending on how much they get and how thirsty they become) the phenomenal wines over the decades well into their middle age.

My Dad was kind enough to give me some vintage Taylor’s and though he is no longer around, he is certainly in my thoughts whenever we have one of those bottles. A great gift for posterity. I am delighted to say that Martin-Bird Wines is stocking the ports created by the Symington family and they are available in 6 bottle cases. More details to follow tomorrow, but the Graham’s is priced at  £200 for 6 bottles in bond and so once they are released duty and VAT will be payable which means the bottle price will be around £40. Payment is taken with the in bond price now and then duty and VAT to get the wine at the end of the year.