Ningxia-Bordeaux challenge in Beijing 14 December 2011 (photo: grapewallofchina.com)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Four Chinese wines did better than Bordeaux wines in a small blind tasting competition of 10 wines, in Beijing 14 December: shades of the Judgement of Paris competition in 1976 that shook French growers to their roots and put US wines on the world’s sommelier maps.

The Chinese wine market is widely expected to be the world’s largest in two decades, so anyone with a thirst for exporting wine to China trembles at the thought they might actually make fine wine in the Middle Kingdom.

China’s overall winemaking reputation has been pretty poor until now. There have been exceptions and the wines have certainly improved since I first tasted the only wine available in 1985, a rock-gut bottle of “Dynasty” that I drank in a fancy restaurant on the Bund in Shanghai. I’d been riding a bicycle through the Chinese countryside and drinking (good) beer for 10 weeks but after several years of living in France I longed for a glass of wine. To say that “Dynasty” didn’t do the trick is the kindest remark I can make. Note: it has improved over the years.

So is this blind tasting really significant? Yes, tiny though it was. It makes a statement that China is capable of producing good wines. More significantly, it focuses our attention on how different this emerging wine market really is from other wine markets, and it helps us sweep away some clichés about China and the purpose served by wine competitions and challenges that pit one group of wines against another.

Judgement of Beijing: the competition

Jim Boyce, one of the organizers, has been quick to point out that this is not, in fact, a remake of the Judgement of Paris, but the comparison is hard to resist.

AP carries a good overview of what happened this week. In essence, 10 judges, half of them Chinese and half French, tasted 10 wines, all 2008 or 2009, and the top wine was a Cabernet Sauvignon from Grace Vineyards in Ningxia.

Ningxia wine brings to mind – what? Not a lot, for most of us, but it is quickly establishing a reputation as a wine producing area, with a hefty French influence. Four of Ningxia’s five wines entered in the competition against the Bordeaux won out over their French counterparts. All the wines were priced at 200 to 400 yuan ($30-60).

The top five, with vineyard names in bold:

1. Grace Vineyard Chairman’s Reserve 2009 (priced at 488 yuan (US$77))
2. Silver Heights The Summit 2009 (416 yuan ($65))
3. Helan Qing Xue Jia Bei Lan Cabernet Dry Red 2009 (was 220 yuan ($34.50), now pending)
4. Grace Vineyard Deep Blue 2009 (288 yuan ($45))
5. Barons de Rothschild Collection Saga Medoc 2009 (350 yuan ($55))

The competition was organized jointly by Jim Boyce, the website TasteV, Beijing wine club Zun, and contributors to the Grape Wall of China blog. The judges are all reputable wine experts.

The results came on the heels of another China wine win, just “three months after the Ningxia-based winery Helan Qing Xue’s Jia Bei Lan Cabernet Dry Red 2009 won China’s first-ever “International Trophy” at the Decanter World Wine Awards,” Jing Daily points out.

The process

The competition appears to have been organized with credibility as a high priority. A group of journalists were witnesses to the preparation: bottles were shown, bagged for the blind tasting, and the wine poured before the judges sat down.

They were given 40 minutes, under the watchful eyes of the journalists, to rank the wines. They then discussed the wines for a few minutes before the final tallies were made known.

This is already a departure from many wine competitions. The task of the judges is normally to give individual marks to the wines. Once they are all marked or noted, on a scale of 1-20 or 1-100, for example, the organizers tally and make public the results. In some countries, and Italy comes to mind, the judges work entirely alone. In others, for example the Mondial du Pinot Noir or the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse, where I’ve been a judge, we work at small tables, not sharing our assessments, but if there is a problem we have the option to discuss it under the strict guidance of an appointed and experienced head of the table.

Our job isn’t for each of us to rank the wines, which you can do only with relatively small quantities of wine.

What it showed, what it didn’t

The web site The Grape Wall of China asked the judges to take their assessments one step further and give the wines “love” notes. “The judges had four options: love it, like it, don’t like it or hate it,” writes regular contributor/blog administrator Jim Boyce. The result makes telling reading and gives more insight than the rankings, a good reminder that appreciating wine is not an objective quantitative adventure but an emotional business as well.

In fact, several other posts on this blog and others about wine in China make it clear that some of the most popular measures of wine success come from challenges of wines that involve different groups of judges, from high-level professionals in one challenge to consumers in another.

China is a very young wine market and the most pressing needs are to educate wine consumers and to find out what they like. Wine challenges that invite consumers to take part seem to be a good way to learn their tastes.

Boyce argues that the challenge was fair to the French wines, despite some criticism that these were not equal groups of wine, that the French wines suffer from a 48 percent tax. Chinese wines value-added and other taxes come to about 20 percent. But these are wines that consumers want to see compared because they are similar in price, he points out.

China’s native wines

China has eight wine regions, all of them studied by the government and designated as appropriate – enough sunshine, precipitation and the right soils.

The Helan mountains in Ningxia are northwest of China’s populated eastern areas.

Beaujolais Nouveau, a marketing ploy that worked, turns 60 today

Beaujolais Nouveau 2011 in a shop south of Macon (photo ©2011 Roger Pring)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Sixty years ago you had to be in France to get a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau, the light Gamay with notes of strawberries and raspberries that hits the streets of France every year in November.

It was sold, in those good old days, on 15 November, starting in Paris, where the capital adopted with gusto the idea of the newly invented wine, or rather one dressed up and given a birthday and a name in 1951.

The wine was bottled only six to eight weeks after the harvest, which meant it had no tannins to speak of: it would therefore not age well but, as with the pretty young and uncomplicated girl it resembled, who cares about age when you can have fun now.

Leaving home and the pain of middle age

Beaujolas Nouveau in the 1970s became a marketing gimmick, with producers racing to Paris with the first bottles. Then Geneva area bars and cafés started to offer it about the same time that the fun caught on throughout Europe in the 1980s, moving to the US, then going global in the 1990s.

There is nothing new about Beaujolais Nouveau itself: Beaujolais vin de primeur wines have been sold since Beaujolais became an AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) in 1937, just as primeurs have been made in every wine region of the world since wine made its appearance. And before the primeurs the region had a post-harvest wine that was just a shade more fermented than grape juice or must.

Wine merchant Georges Duboeuf almost single-handedly developed the frenzy around the new wine, which initially had the advantage of bringing in some cash for producers at a point in the season where they wait for the wine to reach bottling stage so they can sell it.

The growth rate was phenomenal, with some 2 million bottles sold in the early 1950s, up to 238 million in 2010. In the late 1990s Beaujolais Nouveau almost became a victim of itself, with too much bad wine flooding the market.

The industry had a facelift, lost several kilos in the form of companies that went under, and now it appears to be enjoying its 60th birthday.

The good, the bad, and the fun of it all

Winemaker Nicolas Durand, Domaines des Bruyères in Saint Amour, proud of his 2011 Beaujolais Nouveau (photo ©2011 Roger Pring)

Every year the question comes up again: it’s fun for a day, but is it any good?

Answer: Part of the fun is asking the question, as it lets newbies talk about wine and wine snobs wax wise.

Mostly, it depends on whose bottle you buy. The market-dumpers are diminishing, so your chances of falling on a truly awful bottle are less than they were 10 years ago. And Beaujolais AOC, the real stuff that has to wait longer to be bottled, has improved markedly in recent years. Good Beaujolais producers make some beautiful wines.

The vin primeur version is lighter and as good or as bad as the products you’ll get from the same winery later.

Nicolas and Sandrine Durand from St Amour are delighted with their 2011 Beaujolais Nouveau, says Roger Pring from Beaujolais, who works with me as part of the Swiss Wine Guide English version team.

Durand, who was once a Paris-Dakar racer, says the early harvest this year was a bonus.

“We had a very dry June, which worried us, but then a very wet July, which was great for the vines. They ripened earlier and we harvested earlier, so the wine has had more time to mature before bottling.” For Durand, 2011 is a very good year, comparable to the great 2009 vintage, giving him three good years in a row after a disappointing 2008.

Roger agrees, saying Durand’s is an “excellent wine”, even better than another Beaujolais Nouveau he tried earlier.

Here are a few tidbits of Beaujolais trivia while you’re sipping your glass.

• The 2011 harvest was three weeks earlier than the 2010 one, making it one of the earliest on record: 24 August to 16 September this year.
• The late harvest is giving this year’s wine a deeper colour and powerful fruitiness, somewhere between red and black fruits, with less acidity than in 2010.
• Beaujolais, and the primeur is no exception, is made by pressing the grape bunches as a whole.
• The grapes are almost entirely harvested by hand, the only region in France where this is true (and if you see how low the vines are you’ll drink to the pickers’ health, particularly for their backs.
• There are two appellations, Beaujolais, with 72 villages in the south and east and half of it is bottled as Beaujolais Nouveau; Beaujolais Villages, with 38 communes and the steeper, hillier parts of the region.

Now, the serious side: how to drink it

Beaujolais Nouveau – not a sip of it before midnight; it should touch your lips only as you cross the line into the third Thursday of November. Drink it with just about any food and it works well, since it is a relatively light wine. Toast your friends or, as they often say in France raise a glass “to your lovers” (take care who you say this to, though).

Consume in moderation, don’t drive after drinking, and plan a date with the Real Stuff Beaujolais, now that you know 2011 is a very good year.

Background story, GenevaLunch visits two of Beaujolais’s best

Morgon, Beaujolais, France, where vines and tourists alike enjoy the soft contours, rolling hills

Spinach juice, more than meets the eye, or even a human nose

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – This is almost as bad as getting an e-mail saying you’ve lost your job. Those of us who thoroughly enjoy tasting and judging wines at international competitions were in for a shock this morning when the Swiss government’s federal research station at Waedenswil announced dire news.

The electronic nose it’s been testing, called SMart Nose, is giving positive results.

They tried to tell us gently by using the somewhat off-putting example of spinach juice (you read that right), pointing out that consumers won’t buy something unfamiliar or strange-smelling to them, so industry must use “noses”, professionals with a good sense of smell who use precise sensorial analyses, to determine what works and what doesn’t.

The idea is to help development new products while also checking on existing products.

The food industry, with large-scale production, spends a good deal of money using human noses for this work.

SMart Nose, for now limited to spinach juice and the like

But the research station has been using the new SMart Nose, developed by Swiss company VOCScan AG, to test spinach juice. The idea behind the tests is that spinach has a number of nutritious qualities and should be used in fruit juice, but first its positive smell elements need to be identified. And this the SMart Nose was able to do remarkably well, just like a well-trained human nose.

In theory, then, verifying the technical aspects of a fine bottle of Pinot Noir and qualifying these, as well as being able to describe the nose, could be done by a machine.

Out the window with excellent descriptions from writers such as Wine Anorak: “Wonderfully intense nose of cherries, herbs and dark chocolate” or “Intense nose showing vibrant cherry fruit with rich savoury herbal undertones; quite complex” for two New Zeland wines.

But wait, it looks like SMart Nose is still in the early days of his training, so maybe we’ll all just get early retirement offers. Waedenswil ends by noting that “each sample provides a kind of digital print. Statistical methods then make it possible to create groups of samples with similar aromatic profiles. To validate the method, these groups of samaple are then compared to the results of sensory tests done by flesh and blood tasters”

A traditional nose, still at work on wine

Meanwhile, wine continues to offer us much more than just a great nose.

There’s the appearance, its visual aspects, and the palate, not to mention the harder to quantify business of pleasure and conviviality. And the story behind each bottle, and the glory of the vines in November.

To your very good health, and to ours, the wine writers, still hard at work.

Will our children thank us for drinking red wine?

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – It is a heartening week in the research news corner, as seen from Canada. Researchers in Lausanne have measured the long-term metabolism in humans of lycopene, found in tomatoes, and coupled with recent research from the UK we now know it can do wonders for the skin.

Another group in Canada are seeing that rats given Resveratrol, the substance that has given red wine a good name in recent years, don’t pass diabetes on to the next generation.

Lycopene has long been known to have antioxidant qualities and tomatoes are one of the rare sources of it, in useful quantities. It is quickly absorbed into the skin, where it can play a useful role in protecting against ultraviolet rays, and it can still be found six weeks later, AB Ross and his team at the Nestle Research Center near Lausanne say (full story, Toronto Sun/QMI agency).

The Toronto Star also carries an article about research in Alberta that shows Resveratrol, found in red wine pigments, could be useful in fighting diabetes. The antioxydant, which came to fame in the 1980s when research showed it could help stave off cancer, has another preventive role in rats. Lab rats genetically susceptible to developing diabetes and that are fed the compound do not develop abdominal fat, which is linked to diabetes.

This still leaves a lot of questions. Do the offspring need Resveratrol frequently? Daily? A short, quick dose in infancy? And when the research moves on to humans, will we find that a glass a day keeps the diabetes away, or if we drink it regularly will our children benefit?

Meanwhile, the garden tomatoes are ripening and at least we can keep our skin looking bright and young while we ponder the impact of red wine on our health.

Cheers! Here’s to the Alberta research team carrying on with its research, and to the rest of us just carrying on carrying on with red wines while we wait for the outcome.

May our children bless us for it.

Mondial du Pinot Noir 2011 in Sierre

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I’m just about recovered from the three days of intensive work 19-21 August as a judge at the international wine competition in Sierre, the Mondial du Pinot Noir.

We tasted and noted 1,314 wines from 21 countries around the world; we were 50 judges from 30 countries who worked for three mornings judging about 45 wines each day, during three hours.

One of 12 top world competitions

The competition is organized by the Vinea Association, which either runs or handles the technical side of a number of international competitions, and I can only say the team behind it deserves a big cheer for impeccable organization. This is one of 12 international Vinofed world competitions that have the double patronage of the OIV (international vines and wine organization, based in Paris) and the UIOE, the international oenologists union.

We worked at tables of five, with each of us noting the wines using computers; when the clock time is up the table president announces the average note and if we have very different notes or a wine is close to, but not quite at the score for a medal, we have a brief discussion to try to come to an agreement.

The system works remarkably well, and most of the time the judges’ notes are surprisingly close.

When they are not, the discussions can be lively, are always interesting, and the wine benefits from a closer, second tasting.

All the Pinot family members show up

Most of the wines are Pinot Noirs, but for the past three years the competition has included other Pinots, with Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc: Pinot Noir 65% and a special category “Pinot Noir world champion” 10.5%, still rosé wines 7.8%, Pinot Gris 7.2%, Pinot Blanc 3.8% and under 1% for the categories of sparkling white, sparkling rosé, and sweet/dessert wines.

Read more…

A resident of Stofland Township fixes the roof of his home (photo, ©2011 Marcus Bleasdale/VII for Human Rights Watch)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – South African vineyards and fruit farms are accused in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) of abusing their workers who, it says, are some of the worst-paid workers in the country.

Ripe with Abuse: Human Rights Conditions in South Africa’s Fruit and Wine Industries,” was published Tuesday 23 August by HRW.

The head of Wines of South Africa (Wosa), Su Birch, reacted to the report, saying in a Wosa statement that it is biased: “She said the 96-page report, purporting to accurately document conditions on farms, had used a questionable basis for the selection of many of the respondents interviewed in the study, while interviews with workers had not been independently verified and nor had employer reaction to allegations been sought. As a result, it was extremely difficult to respond to specific allegations highlighted by the study.”

The report, she added, “disingeneously plays down the significance of the wine industry`s substantial direct and indirect contribution to improving working conditions through organisations such as the Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association (WIETA), and Fairtrade. It also makes scant mention of empowerment initiatives. With positive examples of the progress made in redressing past wrongs rendered virtually inaccessible to all but the most serious readers, the report negates the work of those who should be allowed to stand out as role models to their peers.”

The report, HRW says in its press release, “documents conditions that include on-site housing that is unfit for living, exposure to pesticides without proper safety equipment, lack of access to toilets or drinking water while working” and they are often prevented from forming unions.

Read more…

Barbara Meier during a break in the judging at Cervim, mountain and "heroic" wines competition in Courmayeur Italy, in July 2011

Update Monday 22 August  ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – It’s with a very heavy heart that I write of the death of Barbara Meier-Dittus, age 47, the former editor of Vinum, European wine magazine based in Zurich. She was murdered Thursday night by her former companion Rui A, 43, a Portuguese chef and owner of the Pagoda Restaurant in Baden Zurzach, who then killed himself.

The deaths took place at her apartment in Baden, canton Aargau. Her three daughters, under age 20, were asleep in the apartment but were awakened by the shots, and they found the bodies.

Aargau police say they had been phoned in the past for domestic violence; the pair had been a couple for several years, but had recently split up.

We all imagine that such “crimes of passion” happen only to people we don’t know, to people who are not in charge of their lives. We don’t think domestic violence will take the lives of women who are smart and savvy, with successful careers. Barbara was very much in charge of her life, or so it appeared to those (and we are many) of us who knew and admired her professionally.

I’ve just spent three days as a judge at the Mondial du Pinot Noir wine competition in Sierre, Valais, to which Barbara had been invited, as a wine taster par excellence. She had declined, saying she wanted to spend more time with her children this summer.

Sunday morning the 50-plus wine experts stood for a minute of silence, for our lost colleague, but she was never far from the minds of the many who knew her, throughout the weekend.

The three girls, in their teens and early twenties, were awakened by the gunshots after midnight and discovered their mother’s body on the veranda of their apartment, according to Blick, which mentions that Barbara was recently known as a writer of a Coop wine column. The daughters are being provided with counseling and care by Aargau police.

Barbara Meier doing what she loved best, talking with an up-and-coming Val d'Aosta winemaker, Didier Gerbelle, in July: Barbara, always keen to know more, asked about his family's history

Barbara was far more than just a wine writer and editor: her knowledge of wine was rich and deep, she had a real passion for sharing her knowledge and she was excited about a number of upcoming projects.

I for one saw her as a fine example of what women can contribute to the wine industry. In addition to her very good understanding of wines, she was chic and elegant at all times, well spoken and she spoke several languages. She trained as a sommelier in France and she frequently served as a judge at international wine competitions.

About a month ago I spent a day with Barbara exploring a couple vineyards in Italy on the fringes of the Cervim European mountain wines) competition in Val d’Aosta, where we were both judges. We had ample opportunity driving around in her car to discuss wine, her resignation from Vinum, her future projects and the balance between motherhood and a professional life. I was particularly struck by her enthusiasm for teaching women more about wine, and for courses she was planning to organize. She talked about working as a wine magazine editor, but also about leaving in order to have time and energy to do more creative work.

We visited a beautiful vineyard in Val d’Aosta and talked at length with the energetic young winemaker whose products we both admired enormously. Her comments on his wines were so astute that I appreciated the day as time spent with a master.

What a great loss she is, to more people than she could ever have realized. My heart goes out to her daughters: may they know all their lives that she would never have chosen to leave them.

Yves Paquier, wine taster par excellence, and Wine Tourist of the Year 2011

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Yves Paquier is a name well known in Switzerland to students of wine at hotel schools, the university at Changins near Nyon and sommeliers or others expanding their knowledge to include Swiss wines, many of whom he has taught over the years. Paquier has just been acknowledged for his significant contribution to a rapidly growing field, wine tourism in Europe.

Winetourisminfrance, France’s magazine devoted to the field, created the award in 2009 to recognize those who have contributed significantly to the development of wine and tourism, in particular who has ” drawn attention to the rich vine and wine cultural heritage: the landscapes, geology, historical sites and cultural events, wines and their cultures, the men and women who work the vines.”

Paquier was cited for his numerous recent activities:

• creating AEFO, the European Association for Wine Tourism Training, in 2009, to provide more training and consulting help in the field of wine tourism
• involvement in creating La Voie des Sens BAM (Bière-Apples–Morges train), a tourist train to discover the region’s products, in the area between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva
• developing, in 2010, La Route des Vins du Mont Blanc, a wine and culture project designed to put a spotlight on the historical, cultural and heritage value of the vineyards of Bugey, Savoie, Jura, Valais, Vaud, Geneva and Neuchatel, and the Val d’Aosta.

The award was given in July at the Balma Venitia winery in Beaumes de Venitia, between the Dentelles de Montmirail and Mount Ventoux in France.

Winetourisminfrance says of Paquier that he “is an exceptional wine taster. In 1994 he won the prestigious Chapeau Noir, given to the winning wine taster at the celebrated Concours des Millésimes du Jean-Louis, and his services are much in demand by major wine competitions. He is also the driving force and the technical director behind the Concours des Sept Ceps, a wine competition that brings together wines from the seven regions around Europe’s highest mountain, the Mont Blanc: Bugey, Savoie, Jura, Valais, Vaud, Geneva and Neuchatel, and the Val d’Aosta.”

Yves Paquier lives in Saint Prex, in the heart of the La Côte wine region in canton Vaud.

Note: Yves was my first white wine tasting professor, at Changins, and he has proved since to be a wonderful source of information about the wider world of wine as well as a rich teacher of how to appreciate the more narrowly focused but rich world to be found in a fine glass of wine.

Sexual hormone (pheromones) diffuser in a Swiss vineyard

BERN, SWITZERLAND – The headline from Bern, “25 years of sexual confusion in Switzerland” is a clear winner for waking up editors, but those in the world of wine will be less surprised than others: sexual confusion aimed at grapevine pests has significantly reduced the use of chemical insecticides.

The sexual confusion method used by wine grape and other fruit growers to fight their main ravagers was put into use in 1986 and today it’s used by nearly 60 percent of grape growers and more than 50 percent of other growers, in particular berry and orchard farmers, to good effect.

Switzerland has become the world leader for using this method to fight fruit pests, in terms of the percentage of planted surface area that employs it.

The principle behind it is simple: large quantities of pheromone, the female sexual hormone of the pests, is diffused throughout the fruit-growing area, and the males, overwhelmed by the presence everywhere of this naturally produced hormone, fail to find and fertilize the females. The number of ravagers is, as a result, greatly reduced.

The method is precisely targeted at specific pests so remains completely inoffensive to other creatures and plants.

The efficacity of nematode pheromones diffusion, bottom, has been greater than that of insecticides, top, at keeping down the grapevine pest population

The federal research station, Agroscope Changins-Wädenswil ACW, reports that the method has proved efficient after 25 years, with vineyards that diffuse nematode (a grapevine worm) pheromones having a far smaller number of the pests than vineyards that use chemical insecticides. Nematodes have become increasingly resistant to insecticides.

The hormonal pest-fighting approach initially ran into some difficulties because the system was relatively expensive and there were problems installing it, but over time the cost has gone down and the system has been simplified. Today, walking through grapevines in Vaud and Valais in particular, you can quickly spot the small containers at the ends of vines. The federal research station says it is now working on biodegradable products that will be yet cheaper and easy to set up.

French-speaking Switzerland’s vineyards, the largest wine grape growing area in the country, has virtually entirely converted to the sexual confusion method.

Sula Wineries Raza Shiraz won silver at the 2010 Mondial du Syrah

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Geneva Festival, which runs until 14 August, is giving Lake Geneva residents and visitors a rare opportunity to sample Indian wines.

The Indian Tourism and Development Corporation’s campaign, “Great Mélange-the Incredible India Journey”  includes the Maharashtra and Karnataka wine regions, with wines from 9 Indian wineries available at the Wines of India stand erected by the Indian Grape Processing Board.

The red, white, rosé and sparkling wines available are from Sula, Four Seasons, York, Mercury, Vintage Wines, Fratelli Vallone, Zampa and Grover cellars.

India’s wines are likely to gain more attention on the world stage with the country recently becoming the 45th member nation in the OIV, the international wine organization whose members are countries, reports the Indian Wine Academy.