I is for Interlude

Now, I am not a slavish acolyte of Robert Parker (unlike most of the wine merchants in Singapore) nor am I in the habit the extolling the virtues of the highest rated (by Parker) bottle of wine in my wine fridge (which would be vulgar).

What I am though is a complete idiot when it comes to a bargain and I would only shop twice a year in London (Christmas and summer sales - there are friends of mine in London whom I see only at Selfridges during the sales), cut coupons from newspapers if I had the time and drive 10 miles to save 20 cents. You know what I mean.

What I like even more than a bargain is to buy something at what I thought was the normal price and then come home to find I’d bought a complete bargain. A few months ago, I went over to Enoch’s (see my earlier blog) and we had an excellent bottle of Kilikanoon Oracle Shiraz 2001 which I enjoyed and which was rated 95 points by Parker.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to go in to work on a public holiday and bumped into a similarly unfortunate colleague. He told me one of the wine shops in the mall downstairs was having a relocation sale and while he had no space in his fridge, he thought I should go have a look. I did and bought a few bottles of Mclaren Vale cabernet sauvignon (as well as something else which I will mention later) at a small discount but spotted a single bottle of Kilikanoon Oracle Shiraz 2002 left on a shelf.

Now as you well know I am not a big fan of Australian Shiraz and if you believe James Halliday, 2002 in general was not as good a year for Australian wines compared with the previous year. Still the bottle was going at a 15% discount and you know me and bargain. Off the shelf it went and out came the credit card.

I was surfing the Net yesterday to have a quick look at something else I bought at the sale (a cheap Australian Shiraz from Brokenwood, not the Graveyard but the 2001 South Australian varietal blend - I know, I know, I don’t like Australian Shiraz but it was a sale and I was being stupid) before taking it with me to dinner.

Imagine when I read this about my other purchase:

“Equally profound is the 2001 Shiraz Oracle (95 points), one of the flagship wines of Kilikanoon. From low yielding 40-year-old vines, produced in open top fermenters, and aged 24 months in 50% new French oak casks, there are 1000 cases of this spectacular Shiraz. A dense purple color is accompanied by a sumptuous perfume of crème de cassis, blackberry liqueur, scorched earth, smoke, graphite, and espresso. There is tremendous density, remarkable full-bodied power, good underlying acidity, and a big, fleshy full-throttle finish with fine acidity as well as sweet tannin. While still young, it should age for 10-15 years. Amazingly, the 2002 Shiraz Oracle (96 points) is slightly better. Boasting extraordinary intensity to its graceful, blackberry, coffee and roasted meat characteristics, this unctuously-textured, seamlessly built, massive Shiraz possesses terrific purity, a multi-layered texture, and a long, heady finish. The alcohol, level must be between 14-15%. The tannin is covered by considerable glycerin, so this wine can be drunk now, and will keep for 12-16+ years.”

How do I feel about having 96 point wine in my fridge? Certainly it is a bit of a jump - I think I have a couple of 90 pointers which are the next highest rated wines in there, including a single bottle of Antinori Tignanello 2000. And I am quite sure the Oracle 2002 will not be the bottle of wine that I would most look forward to drinking - I can think of at least half a dozen bottles in there I would probably classify as “more eagerly awaited”.

Like the Michele Chiarlo Barbaresco 1997, the Masi Recioloto 1998, the Bricco dell’Ucellone 2002, the aforementioned Tignanello or even the half a dozen bottles of La Mora Barolo 1998 which I bought cheap and intend to age for a long time before drinking.

Still Parker is Parker and a 96 pointer is a 96 point wine, after all. At 15% discount, which works out at S$55 (about £18), I would buy a wine like that again and again. And again. Every day.

I is for Italy

I have always been fascinated by the literal in Islamic art, architecture and design. The Koran says you cannot have an image of a living thing so you plaster the insides of your gilded domes with birds and beasts which do not exist in nature. In the same way, the Koran says there are four rivers flowing out of Paradise, one each of water, wine, milk and honey. So Islamic garden designers endow their gardens with four fountains to express this idea.

I know which fountain I want to drink out of.

Which is a rather tortured way of getting to the four “founts” of Italian winemaking. Piemonte in the North, Tuscany in the centre, Veneto in the East and well, bits of the South in, er, the South. But first, as they say in the Eucharistic Mass, a summary of the law.

Italian wine laws, like all Italian laws, do not make sense. The average European country has about 15,00 laws to carry the average European citizen from cradle to grave. Italy has 150,000 laws - because they don’t repeal any laws. Go figure.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the Italians thought it would be a good idea to copy the French wine laws. So they created the Denominazione di Origine Controllata or DOC classification which, surprise surprise, was based on the French AOC or Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée system. What the Italians did not realise was that the AOC system was designed to further protect the status and therefore the prices of the well-established system of viticulture in the walled chateaux of Bordeaux and the cloistered clos of Burgundy.

By way of historical comparison, when Colonel Palmer (as he then was) bought the Chateau d’Gasq in 1814, Italian winemaking was a bunch of peasants running around stomping on grapes. In 1855, when the canny growers in the Medoc pressed and succeeded in getting their wines classified into crus or growths, Italian winemaking was a bunch of peasants running around stomping on grapes. In 1930, when the French introduced their AOC system, you know the drill by now. Suffice it to say, that between 1930 and the late 1950’s when the Italians brought out their DOC, things had not changed very much.

The DOC system, like the AOC, is based on geography. In Italy, this had two profound consequences, if you mixed your grapes from outside your area, your wines could not be DOC. Perversely, wines from single small holdings were, by definition, DOC regardless of quality. The Italians quickly tried to address the latter problem by introducing an upper tier called the Denominazione di Origine Controllata et Garantita or DOCG which supposedly came with some guarantee of a certain degree of quality.

This still failed to address the first and somewhat more serious problem. By not complying with the DOC or DOCG rules, some of Italy’s best wines were relegated to Vina da Tavola or VDT status. So at the beginning of the 1970’s, in keeping with spirit of reconciliation evidenced by the Second Vatican Council, the Italians drew on their tax laws and came up with a fudge. They invented a new qualification called the Indicazione Geografica Tipica or IGT which roughly translates into “wine indicative of a typical region” and which roughly corresponds to France's Vin de Pays category. Fudge, fudge.

Finally, in 1992, the DOC and DOCG classifications were relaxed in an attempt to bring the Super Tuscans (see my earlier blog) which contained non-indigenous grape varieties (horrors) such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot within the fold of the upper tier. This has not been a resounding success. Just remember this simple axiom - DOCG is not a guarantee of quality.

Well, so much for the law (nay, but we uphold the law). I noticed I have not mentioned a single indigenous grape variety, nor a single producer much less a single vintage or the time I was bouncing off each of the fountains on the Via delle Quattro Fontana (but that’s another story).

Tough, you’ll just have to wait for the next update.