VitiViniVino

Martin Field

Quotes

Power comes from the barrel of a gun - Mao Tse Tung

Power comes from the gun of a (beer) barrel - Wes Arnott

Winner with the mostest

Last night (9 August 2001) the Pepper Tree Wines Reserve Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2000, made by Pepper Tree Wines of Pokolbin, won the 2001 Jimmy Watson Memorial Trophy for the best one-year-old red at the Royal Melbourne Wine Show.

The JWT is the Australian award with the mostest - the most written about (often inaccurately), most coveted (by wine companies), most denigrated (by those who can't win it), most prestigious (to consumers), most controversial (it helps fill wine columns), and most valuable (to the winning company).

But it could only happen in Australia. A small Hunter Valley (New South Wales) winemaker makes a prize-winning wine from fruit grown at its Coonawarra (South Australia) vineyard some 1500 kilometres away. Imagine a Rhone winemaker trucking in grapes from Bordeaux to make a Bordeaux wine in the Rhone. Sacre Bleu! Though I am told that next year a well-known Coonawarra winemaker intends to win the trophy with a red made from Hunter valley fruit.

See all award results at the Wine Show site.

New reality TV show

Latest news, from a confidential e-mail that somehow landed on my PC: seems that a new reality TV show (working title 'Tookka Fookkas') was trialed by a local free to air TV station. Celebrity contestants (all overweight*) comprised three wine critics, two restaurant reviewers and one Generation Xer type chef (fifteen years old - but with a note from his mother). The pitch was that they would be incarcerated in the kitchen of a recently failed wine bar for two weeks. (*tautology)

Participants were to be videoed secretly, judged by a panel of McDonald's frequenters, and ultimately banished, one by one, from the bar. Elimination to be based on their in/ability to create edible menus from the ingredients, and the amount of weight (in kilograms) lost per person each week. At the end of two weeks the surviving member would receive an all expenses paid trip to Canberra. And a long lunch with the Prime Minister, who, according to the new Sex Discrimination Commissioner Prue Goward is '…one of the great Australian intellectuals.' Well quite a short lunch really - 15 minutes - but it would seem like a really long lunch. There would be a bonus prize (a butcher's rissole) for the first person to taste the cask wine.

Supplies included items left by the proprietors of the bar. In the pantry were two loaves of slightly stale supermarket white bread (sliced) and a jar of mouldy homemade tomato chutney (with a pretty pink and white checked cotton cloth on the lid). In the intermittently operating fridge were: a two litre cask of irrigation area riesling, five bottles of light beer, a plastic-wrapped lump of fermenting tofu, half an onion (unwrapped), one yellowing stalk of broccoli and a tub of low fat goat's cheese - a week beyond its use by date. There was an unlimited supply of cold tap water (chlorinated) and instant coffee (well, that's what the label alleged).

The only reading matter available consisted of a few tattered copies of A La Carte and La Vie en Cuisine, a Michelin Guide from 1944 and a Gideons' Bible (King James version). On the television was a permanent video loop of somebody famous demonstrating how to boil an egg, followed by somebody nearly as famous blending up a spread of salty black paste and margarine for the kiddies' sandwiches.

Unfortunately the show was cancelled before it got off the ground, due to two deciding factors. The first was that industry focus groups indicated that viewers in the target demographic had no interest whatsoever in the fate of the 'prisoners' - who were rudely referred to by one interviewee as 'a team of lard-bellied tossers.' The second was that none of the competitors lasted past lunchtime on the first day dress rehearsal. One of the restaurant critics is suing producers for post-traumatic stress claiming that if she'd known that the prize was a trip to Canberra she wouldn't have entered the wine bar in the first place.

Brilliant Blue - Innit?

In the Green (TV) Guide of the Melbourne Age, (9 August 2001) TV critic Ross Warneke mentions in passing the purchase of an Australian cask red (unnamed) that contains additives 133 and 264. He goes on to say that 133 is Brilliant Blue FCF, an ammonium salt - banned in a number of European countries, and that 264 is ammonium acetate (pdf file). I can find neither of these substances on the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation's website's list of approved additives and processing aids for wine.

A quick check at the local Dan Murphys failed to find a cask as described so I've asked the AWBC to advise me on the additives in question. Meanwhile a contact suggests that the cask in question is a 'wine product' not actually wine. Rather like the difference between fruit 'drink' and fruit juice - where different regulations apply. Developing… as Matt Drudge might say.

Feedback

"Martin, enjoy reading the column. But what exactly do you mean by a 'nose of open-vat fermentation' on the Guigal? And your top 10 is a bit too Country for mine. How about 'Little Ol' Wine Drinker Me' by Dean Martin. Cheers, Huon Hooke."

Huon, What exactly do you mean when you ask, 'What exactly do you mean?'? Since when have winewriters ever used the word exact in a sentence? Wine writing is an arcane pursuit with its own rituals and linguistic variations. The language of wine writing shares much in common with Minoan Linear Band proto-Aramaic in that it is equally difficult to decipher. But readers are not meant to comprehend our writings, merely to bring to them their own life experiences - in a sort of post-modernist de-constructionalist sense - as the semiotic theorists (terrorists?) might say.

Or as Hegel once put it, inimitably and somewhat more succinctly, whilst sipping a small snifter of Imperial Tokay Essence: 'This superficial way of educing from particularity, and the equally superficial form of universality into which the sense element is merely taken up, without the sense element having in itself become a universal - this description of things is not as yet a process effected in the object itself. The process really takes place solely in the function of describing. The object as it is described has consequently lost interest, when one object is being described another must be taken in hand and ever sought, so as not to put a stop to the process of description.'

What I think I was alluding to was an oxidative nose of secondary fruit character that I didn't particularly care for.

Yes, Dean Martin certainly had his day 'When the moon hits your eye like an old pizza pie...' comes to mind. And what about Jerry (Lee) Lewis's version of 'Drinkin' Wine Spo-De-O-De'. (Does anyone know what that means?)

"Martin, Thanks for sending me your newsletter. I always enjoy your comments on the state of the art, made without commercial fear or favour and you really do hit the spot, eg. the Burge tasting. Best wishes, Paddy Kendler. PS. Last week I purchased some cheese [brand name deleted - Martin] labelled 'Parmesan' and 'authentically Italian' but later discovered it was made in New Zealand. Apart from the deceptive front label, I wondered whether we Australasians ought to be using European cheese names at all. If we have been dragged into maturity re abandoning Champagne and Burgundy et al on wine labels, we should be growing up on the cheese front too!"

Damn right! Paddy - but all those Oztralasian makers of wannabe Brie, Camembert, Cheddar, Gruyere, Parmesan, Swiss, Emmenthal, Edam etc. are going to whine before the laws are changed. Still I reckon your analogy with the controversy over wine nomenclature is apt - maybe we ought to approach Professor Fels of the ACCC asking if there is a case to be mounted against this apparent mis-labelling. It probably comes under the country of origin regulations or the passing-off provisions of the Trade Practices Act. Do you remember a year or so back that milk producers were trying to stop soy producers from calling their products 'milk'? They'd obviously never heard of the milk of human kindness, Bristol Cream Sherry and peanut butter.

"Martin, Re 'I was left with the impression that the younger wine writers thought the Oz wines showed too much ripe fruit! Fruit that many European winemakers would die for (but that's just me).'

"I recall that Hugh Johnson said something similar to this decades ago. Check with Len Evans. It was written somewhere. He was talking about the old and original (when it still had a big, bold stripe) Baileys Hermitage from NE Victoria. He said, from memory, "Some purists criticise these wines for being too big, alcoholic, extracted and porty, but if a wine like this was made in Hermitage they would be declaring it the vintage of the century." Ironic that that style, which we all moved away from in shock-horror (towards cooler and more elegant climes) is now back with a vengeance and fetching stratospheric prices in America. Go figure. Brian Miller."

"Martin, Just a short note to let you know I reckon the newsletters are terrific - you make my internet wine surfing a breeze. Thanks and keep it up.

Cheers! Stuart Gregor."

"Martin, Thank you for sending me your news letter, I have never seen it before and today I have three at once to read (7, 8 and 9). It's good and I'm enjoying it. You take out a lot of the crap spoken about wine. Keep up the good work. If you are able to send the earlier editions I would like to read them

I once used Zantac (do you have any other medical tips?) but found it was not strong enough. I now use Losec. Have never had a hangover in my life, but it might have something to do with the fact that I have never drunk to excess. If you doubt me watch me next time we lunch. Harry Heidelberg."

Surfing the vintnernet

Growers rally outside SA winery - ABC

Victorian winemaker the country's best - ABC

Wine labels mislead drinkers over alcohol - Sunday Times

French wine industry 'facing crisis' - BBC

Remy Cointreau to sell Blue Pyrenees Estate - Financial Review (subscription required)

Coffee from civet faeces - The Independent via Financial Times

Links

Wines Beers and Spirits of the Net: Dean Tudor's comprehensive list of world booze links

Bookfinder: Book meta-searcher - especially good for rare and out of print wine and food books

Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation: List of Australian Wine Regulations

The Planet: World music for netsurfing and wine drinking - 10 programs on-line anytime from ABC Radio National

Wine in French: "Boire GM" at La plančte-vin

Wine 101 at Winepros.org

E-mail: Martin Field with comments, requests for back issues or to subscribe or unsubscribe. Contributors' letters, tips, gossip, rumours and short articles are welcome. No payment will be entered into.

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An occasional commentary on the world of trivia, wine and alcohol distributed free of charge to wine enthusiasts, wine media and the food and drinks industry. Letters and input welcome - no payment entered into. Freelancer Martin Field has written about wine since 1978. See past Articles in the Alsop Review. Permission to quote is freely given as long as acknowledgment is made. No responsibility is taken for the content of linked sites. Copyright ©Martin Field 2001. Melbourne, Australia.

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Martin Field