Ellen Wallace
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A rare vintage 1774 bottle of 87 cl of vin jaune from Arbois, France, near the Swiss border, sold for CHF46,000 Tuesday 15 May at Christie’s auction of fine wines in Geneva.
The winning bid was made via Internet to an unnamed European trade buyer, so it will be hard to wangle an invitation for the day the bottle is opened, assuming it isn’t just stored for another 100-200 years.
Just in case, here’s the per glass price: CHF5,287 for a one decilitre glass, something to keep in mind as the glass is raised.
Make that CHF529 per sip, if you work out 10 small sips to the deci. Here’s what you should get, according to Christie’s: “No label. Registered in the cellar book of Pierre Millet since 1774. Superb lightly ambered colour. Shrunk and fragile cork.” Also see my earlier article on this bottle.
I joined the bidders Tuesday in the lush auction room at Hotel des Bergues, but I didn’t carry a bidding card. There were only about 20 of us, with a bank of staff taking online and telephone bids.
I almost regretted my common sense in not picking up a card, as some of the wines were almost affordable. I briefly toyed with the idea of bidding on 15 lesser bottles of 1988 Bordeaux, with the group to be had for under CHF1,000, a steal compared to the winning bids my auction seat neighbour, an elegant blond gentleman, was paying for his numerous Château Lafite-Rothschilds.
Here’s what I would have bid on, thinking it was maybe in my budget: Château Pavie, vintage 1988 with levels of 8 base of neck and 1 top of shoulder. Château Cos d’Estournel, vintage 1988, three into neck and one base of neck. Château Ducru Beaucaillou, vintage 1988, 2 with levels base of neck.
The lot was estimated at CHF700-900. The level of the bottle matters when you’re calculating the price per sip. The condition of burgundies suffers less than Bordeaux wines from what is known as the change in “ullage”, or the space that isn’t filled (vindange in French) of a bottle over time.
My neighbour had a classier look than the retailers who also bid in Geneva to fill gaps in their store holdings. He was several levels upmarket from my fantasy budget.
"And it goes to ...", wine auctioneer Michael Ganne at Christie's 15 May
A quiet lift of his card and the first Lafite-Rothschild, vintage 1982, went his way. A bit tatty, with a torn label and top-shoulder, but he got a deal: CHF2,400 for the one bottle, when the pre-sale estimate was CHF2,800-3,400. Nice.
Then he went on a roll, first with 12 bottles of Mouton-Rothschild 1988 for CHF3,000, then Lafite-Rothschild 2002, 6 magnums for CHF6,500 and 12 bottles for CHF7,000. Another CHF19,000 on 12bottles and 6 magnums of the 2003. After that I lost track of what he was spending. I decided it was too much for one man’s cellar, so he is probably a buyer who resells to private and corporate customers who feel safe getting big-name wines from him.
The most impressive sale of the day was a lot of 1945 Mouton-Rothschild that went for 2.5 times its estimated value: CHF161,000 rather than the pre-sale starting figure of CHF65,000.
An alternative, if we’re looking for expensive sips, is the 1921 Château Y’quem that went for a mere CHF25,300 for 3 bottles, which makes a sip about half the price of that of the 1774 vin jaune. Two of the bottles were recorked at the chateau in 1989 and the other in 1992.
Here is just part of the description from Michael Broadbent in 2006:
“Very pronounced warm amber; bouquet of soft toasted demarara sugar and coffee; medium-sweet, dry finish. Glorious. Most recently, probably the best-ever.” He then describes its beautiful appearance and returns to the aromas: “Its bouquet both easy and, in truth, difficult to do justice to; the anticipated crème brulé, old apricots, honeyed, whiff of caramel and unplumbable depth medium-sweet, drying out a little after 85 years, gloriously rich, intense and persistent flavour, perfecct sustaining acidity and lingering aftertaste. Sheer perfection.”
I do hope someone opens it and enjoys it soon.
Note: Christie’s in 2010 published an account of a day in the life of Michael Ganne, wine auctioneer, inspecting the wine cellar of a connaisseur in canton Valais, great fun to read.
Ellen Wallace
Clos de la George, Yvorne, Caves Hammel
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – I have nothing but praise for Vaud’s 11 new Premiers Grands Crus collection, the first in what promises to be a growing list of some of Switzreland’s finest wines. They were presented to the world Tuesday evening in Lausanne, first to the press, then in the more formal setting of the canton’s parliamentary chambers, with the opportunity for guests to sample them afterwards. To a one, these are beautiful wines.
First, a word of explanation: Switzerland’s appellation system underwent a significant revision that led to a new list of classifications in July 2011. The country’s 80 AOC wines indicate the region, with just two cantons, Neuchatel and Geneva, having more than 20 each Other cantons reduced the number of AOC regions so Vaud, for example, now has 7.
The AOC designation is useful for shoppers because it includes some quality criteria. But a region’s great wines, and Switzerland has many, traditionally gain their reputation by word of mouth. This worked in an older, more inward-looking Switzerland of the past, but today consumers expect standards that help them compare products. Groups of producers in a number of smaller regions have banded together to agree on Grand Cru standards and these, today, give us superb wines from Salgesch and Vétroz in Valais and Dézaley in Vaud, for example.
Now canton Vaud’s producers have taken this a step further and created standards and a system for awarding Premier Grand Cru status to top wines that qualify. The project has been 15 years in the making, working its way through a typically Swiss political labyrinth of multiple consultations at every level.
Five essential selection criteria are used:
Time and history are important
A domain’s history and know-how are key. These wines develop, with age, a harmonious texture, intense and persistent aromas that make them excellent wines for aging.
Demanding cultivation requirements
The first Premiers Grands Crus will be limited to wines from Chasselas, Pinot Noir and Gamay grapes. Integrated production or organic standards must be followed, with no more than 6,000 vines per hectare to encourage their roots to grow deep, giving the wines complexity as a result. Vines must be at least 7 years old and the yield is limited to 0.8 litres per square metre for Chasselas, 0.64l/m2 for the reds.
Harvesting by hand
This allows grapes to be picked at optimal maturity, through careful selection. Chasselas grapes must have a sugar level at least 75 œchslé, with 80 required for Gamay and 85 for Pinot Noir (Ed. note: I’ll be writing about this shortly for those who aren’t familiar with the œchslé system).
Very special terroir
The Premier Grand Cru label is a guarantee that the wine comes entirely from one terroir, and Vaud’s unusual new system of continually checking and verifying, every year (this isn’t done everywhere in Bordeaux and Burgundy, for example), ensures that cozy relations without regular checks don’t allow wines whose quality may slip to remain in the group. Vaud has a wonderful range of soils and the wines reflect these terroirs, particularly remarkable for the minerality they provide.
Consistently excellent wine over time
One fine bottle of wine does not a Premier Grand Cru make. Once a proposed wine is accepted by the Commission des Premiers Grands Crus for consideration, it must be tasted and vines visited for each vintage.
A note on the first wines selected
The first wines selected are all Chasselas whites, but the commission notes that several more wines are in the pipeline. My two personal favourites Tuesday evening were Clos de la George from Yvorne and its neighbour, L-Ovaille 1584, but the standard was so high that it is difficult to really cite favourites. What I liked best about the first is its beautiful nose of gunflint; if you have trouble recognizing this smell, here is a wine to learn by. I also found notes of cedar and apricot, making this a wine with a sharp nose that is very exciting. In mouth, almonds and dried fruits. This is a truly elegant wine.
L’Ovaille 1584 offers a rich mix for the nose, floral but with fruits and hazelnut. But it’s real joy is in mouth: rich yet mineral but with a finish that is extraordinarily long and complex, thanks to the time it spends in amphores.
These vines sit opposite the Dents du Midi peaks and soak up the sun from morning to night, clearly taking the best from nature.
A wine I didn’t have a chance to taste properly but which I enjoyed a sip of is the newcomer (not yet on the new web site), Domaine de Capitaine’s Agénor Parmelin, worth exploring further.
The list of Premiers Grands Crus in the first selection, 8 May 2012
- Château de Chardonn, Chardonne
- Château Châtagneréaz, Mont-sur-Rolle
- Domaine de Autecou, Mont-sur-Rolle
- Domaine des Cordelière, Mont-sur-Rolle
- Château de Mon, Mont-sur-Rolle
- Domaine de Fische, Bougy-Villars
- Clos du Châtelar, Villeneuve
- Clos de la George, Yvorne
- L’Ovaille 158, Yvorne
- L’Ovaill, Yvorne
Ellen Wallace
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Valais wines took 15 medals, 10 percent of the total, at the Syrah du Monde competition at Château d’Ampuis, France. One gold medal went to the Gregor Kuonen winery in Salgesch/Salquenen and silver medals went to 14 other wines, with 11 wineries given medals. Of the 445 wines entered, 149 were given gold, silver or bronze medals. The countries of origin for the top 10 wines (actually 14 because of ties), based on the number of points: South Africa, Australia, France, Chile and Portugal.
All but four of the wines are oaked. The winners and their wines:
| Valais AOC Sélection J’François Kuonen 2010 GREGOR KUONEN – CAVEAU DE SALQUENEN Mr KUONEN François Web Site | |
  | Syrah du Valais “Classique” 2009 |
|  BarrelValais AOC – Tonneliers Syrah 2010 |
| Barrel Syrah du Valais “Madame de” 2010 |
| Barrel Martigny AOC Syrah – Les Serpentines 2009 |
| Barrel Valais AOC “Collection F” Syrah 2009 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Syrah Elevé en Barriques 2010 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Grandmaître Syrah 2011 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Grandmaître Syrah 2010 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Syrah Réserve 2009 |
| Valais AOC Les Larmes d’Héraclès Syrah 2011 |
| Valais AOC Primus Classicus Syrah 2011 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Syrah Fût de Chêne 2010 |
| Barrel Valais AOC Clos Combe d’Uvrier 2009 |
| Valais AOC Syrah 2011 |
Ellen Wallace
There's much in a name, when it comes to wine, and Swiss AOCs are now protected within the European Union, without having to include the origin
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Current Swiss regulations governing names of wines and spirits are now covered by the bilateral treaty with the European Union. Amendments to annexes 7 and 8, which list all legal names for products in the two categories, were revised with effect from 4 May.
The main change, but it is a significant one, is that a name is now protected whether or not its location of origin is mentioned.
Bern offers the example of what would in the past have required registration as Damassine d’Ajoie but which under the new rules may be registered simply in the list of spirits, annex 8, as Damassine, which provides broader protection.
Switzerland recently revamped its list of protected AOC (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée) wines and the new list of 80 products is now included in the annex 7 list of European wines. These include the new regional designations such as Lavaux and La Côte.
The two parties signed the agreement 3 May and it entered into force the next day.
The news comes just as canton Vaud, after 15 years of discussion, including two years of preparation, unveiled its first Premiers Grands Crus wines Tuesday evening 8 May, to media and then to Vaud legislators and officials.
Complete list of European wines, Annex 8 of the Swiss-EU agricultural agreement (pdf), with Swiss list at the end
Ellen Wallace
Bigger harvest, good quality, lower consumption – stocks rise
Geneva wineries open day, 2011: a crowd-pleaser
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss drank slightly less wine in 2011, with consumption down by 2.3 percent to 2.72 billion hectolitres, a reverse after 2010′s increase of 3.2 percent.
Consumption has remained relatively stable overall, fluctuating between 2.07 and 2.86 for the past 10 years. But the population has been growing, which explains a gradual fall in per capita consumption.
Foreign wines continue to dominate the market, with Swiss wines representing 37 percent of wine consumed. Italy is the biggest supplier, followed by France and Spain, with 37, 23 and 21 percent respectively of imported wine.
Italian, French and US wine sales were all lower than the previous year.
French, Italian and US wine sales down
Consumers drank less Swiss, but also less foreign wine, and imports of red wine were down, although there was a very small increase in imports of white wines, figures published 19 April by the Federal Office of Agriculture (Ofag) show.
The Swiss in 2011 drank a total of 2.72 billion hectolitres of wine. (1 hectolitre = 100 litres and is the standard international wine sales measurement)
Swiss drink about 40 bottles of wine a year per inhabitant
The most recent per capita figures are from a 2009 Ofag report that showed overall Swiss alcohol consumption gradually falling, from about 11 to just under 8.5 litres of pure alcohol a year between 1989 and 2008.
Figures for wine per inhabitant fell during those 19 years, from just under 6 litres of pure alcohol to just over 4 litres. This is equal to about 400 units of alcohol, per year. A bottle of wine has anywhere from about 8 to 12 units of alcohol so the figures represent very roughly 40 bottles of wine a year per inhabitant.
Stocks rising: less wine drunk, harvest up
New plantings of Merlot were up 20 percent in 2011; Merlot shown here was part of a testing session at Vinea in Sierre, 2011
Stocks rose by the end of last year, thanks to a combination of lower sales and a good year, with a harvest 8.6 percent higher than in 2010.
“Favorable meteorological conditions, in particular the warm and dry spring and an exceptional autumn, had a positive impact on the quality and the volume of Swiss wines, in the end,” the Ofag report states.
Red grape varieties accounted for 58 percent of vines in 2011, white 42 percent. The three main grape varieties were Pinot Noir, Chasselas and Gamay.
They lost ground, however, to Merlot, up 20 percent, the Swiss grape Gamaret, up 9 percent and Chardonnay, up 4 percent.
Ellen Wallace
Vin Jaune, a master’s palette for the palate
1774 Vin Jaune from Arbois, est. price at 15 May auction: CHF40-50,000
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Eight generations of the Vercel family in Arbois, France, across the Jura mountains, have held onto a 1774 bottle of the region’s famed Vin Jaune, storing it in the family’s vaulted underground cellar.
Now the 87-centilitre bottle, with its typical Burgundian rounded belly and long neck, goes up for auction in Geneva 15 May.
The official site for Jura wines notes that the oldest Vin Jaune tasted in recent memory was a 1774.
It also points out that only a few older bottles are the exception to the Clavelin rule: Vin Jaune bottles hold 62cl because this is the amount of wine left after the unusual winemaking process reaches the bottling stage. The special bottle which holds this today is called the Clavelin.
Vin Jaune is famous for the extraordinarily complex range of aromas it develops as it ages.
There is nothing subtle about it and newcomers to wine generally find it hard-going, although for connoisseurs this is one of the heights of the art of making wine.
Its unusual maturing process is responsible for giving it such a deep, rich set of notes.
Once the wine’s slow fermentation is finished, it must be kept a minimum of six years and three months in oak barrels that are not topped up, as most wines are.
The wine is mostly protected from oxidization and contact with the air by a thin veil (the voile) of yeasts that forms on the surface.
What the buyer can expect from his 1774 Vin Jaune
Christie’s, which is hosting the auction at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues, enthuses about its truly well-aged wine:
“One of the bottles from the same batch was tasted in 1994 by 24 professionals at Château Pécauld in Arbois, and was declared as ‘excellent’. The golden-amber coloured nectar, with flavours of nuts, spices, curry, cinnamon, vanilla and dried fruits, was awarded 9.4/10 points. Made to last centuries when of good quality, and nicknamed ‘the wine of kings and the king of wines’, this extraordinary bottle of Vin Jaune is probably the oldest unfortified example of what is to be still an astounding wine.”
It is the most expensive single bottle at the auction, with an estimated price of CHF40-50,000. But wine buffs with deep pockets will have other options at the sale, expected to bring in CHF2 million, including: a batch of Mouton-Rothschild from 1945 (estimate CHF65,000-85,000), a 12-bottle lot of La Tâche 1959 (estimate: CHF40,000-60,000), and an “incredible collection comprised of 338 bottles and 43 Magnums of vintage Château Latour wines”.
Ellen Wallace
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.
Ellen Wallace
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
Ellen Wallace
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.
Ellen Wallace
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.