Oz gets strongly stroppy over ABV in wines

Three cheers for Oz Clarke, Britain’s most popular wine writer, who pulls no punches in relation to wines that are simply too strong for their own good in his latest Pocket Wine Book 2008.
He describes as ‘dead fruit’ the tendency, taken to absurd lengths, for winemaking gurus to push ‘hang time’ – the amount of time that perfectly ripe fruit continues to sit on the vine when it should have
been picked.
And he adjures producers to “… show me your basic wine, not your smarty-pants Icons and Reserve Selections”.
Oz Clarke is clear: “I don’t want to taste the amount of complicated technique and financial investment that has gone into the wine”
And there’s one final clarity: “Appetising bitterness is a crucial part of red wine’s appeal; acidity is crucial in wines of every colour for the way it refreshes your palate and improves your appreciation of food”.
This completely revised and updated edition for 2008 is the perfect book to have on hand when your customers are in your shop mooching out for the best buys in wine this Christmas.
It contains over 7,500 wines, grape varieties, wine regions and producers within its covers – and it’s one I’ll certainly be keeping in the jaloppy alongside my NOffLA Guide to the Gold Star Award-Winning Wines of 2007.

 

What is it about the restless innovator?

By: Pat Nolan, Editor, Drinks Industry Ireland

The restless innovator is not content with making a fortune in one walk of life but has to go on and start all over again in another. Through gritted-teeth perseverence and by gripping that learning curve ever more tightly when failure comes around the first few times, the restless innovator goes on to make a thorough success of the second choice of career too. Makes ya sick!

And so it is with a number of winemakers in the Bordeaux region where fate appears to have plucked them from the vine in one walk of life to introduce them instead into the wonders of wine-making, imbuing them with a seemingly restless vigour and passion for making good wine – and with considerable skill and attention to detail to boot.

Martin Krajewski represents just such a person. He bought Chateau de Sours 10 years ago after a life in the City of London. Martin commenced a major upgrade of the winery with the purchase of new vineyards and the restoration of the Chateau and its grounds, replete with striking art gallery and equally striking underground cavern.
Having overcome many difficulties in getting the vineyard at Chateau de Sours up to

 

Cassidy’s celebrate an almost exact 30th

When Cassidy Wines booked into the Westbury Hotel, Dublin, to celebrate its 30th anniversary with a dinner for its suppliers and its guests, the company could hardly have timed it better. The booking date turned out to be very nearly true to the exact day that the company was incorporated in May 1977.
A portfolio tasting had already taken place earlier in the afternoon which witnessed 20 principals flying in from as far afield as Chile to show their wines. At the dinner later that evening, Cassidy Wines Managing Director Niel Cassidy told the 100 guests who’d arrived to break bread with the company that it had been Niels father Kevin who started off the whole thing when he began importing wine from Italy. This followed Kevin’s picking up on dark mutterings that there was no decent Italian wine in Ireland back then.

 

Silver lining to an Ozzie storm cloud

Between severe frost and the well-publicised Australian drought, the Ozzie wine glut may have found an Australian answer to an Australian problem this year, thus applying the silver drought lining to the oversupply cloud.
Estimates put the Australian harvest down by a fifth from 1.9 million tonnes to around 1.6 million tonnes (if not lower) in 2007.
But the extreme Australian weather is likely to have provided a much bigger cloud than had been expected. And it’s a storm cloud at that. The effects of droughts and frosts are not merely confined to the year in question (presuming that they only occur as a one off, increasingly unlikely in this globally warming environment) but the ramifications can extend into the following few years.
Certainly the last 12 months will have put it up to the ‘critter creek’ labels when it comes to survival but with a few exceptions, this is a matter for the multiples – and they are unlikely to be losing any sleep over it.

 

Screw this or put a Cork in it…

Contentious reports that one in 50 bottles of wine sealed by screwcap could be destroyed by sulphidisation uncorked the stelvin debate once again at the annual New Zealand wine fair in London this year.
The UK-based International Wine Challenge event stated that it had tested a considerable number of wines from around the world and had found that around two per cent of wines sealed by screwcap had been so affected.
And so the whole cork/stelvin debate kicked-off once more, “Yabba yabba yabba….”.
With 90 per cent of New Zealand’s wines being opened by the turn of the screwcap, such New World suppliers have everything to gain and everything to lose in this debate. NZ is being joined if not partnered by its ‘neighbour’ Australia as the Jacob’s Creek label plans to sell all its wares under screwcap this year in the UK.