The evocation of a wine pirouetting across the palate like a muscular male ballet dancer seemed somewhat incongruous at a wine event hosted by the plain-speaking Kiwis. But this purple prose was from no New Zealander - rather, it was one of the international Pinotphiles that made up more than half the delegates in attendance, the wine in question was from Burgundy, and the setting was a keynote session on The Human Element of Terroir'.
After a hard day of fomenting hatred, picking on ethnic minorities and misspelling tattoos, many a fascist - from Goebbels, to Allan Clarke, to Jean-Marie LePen - has liked nothing more than to relax with a glass of wine. Alas, for your average British fascist, so much wine is made by forriners, innit? So where's a good honest Ingerlish patriot wine drinker to turn? Step forward the BNP, whose website offers - alongside such exquisite and ethnically pure knick-knacks as a letter-opener in the shape of Excalibur and a set of German folk songs - a choice of BNP-branded British' wines.
Read more...Late last year, the Australian wine industry was abuzz with news that a genetically modified (GM) wine yeast had been approved for use in the United States. The yeast - a modified Saccharomyces cerevisiae with the glamorous name of ML01 - contains genes from another yeast and a malolactic bacterium, and performs both alcoholic and malolactic fermentations simultaneously. (Interestingly, the yeast was developed by a French company, Springer Oenologie, which rather deflates the argument that New World wine countries are the only bad guys churning out industrial techno-wines. But I digress)
Has Tim Atkin MW finally acquired a sense of humour and become a satirist? Surely he cannot have meant what he wrote, as quoted in Harpers (16 December 2005, p.10), that of the 10,000 wines he reckons to taste in a year, only 500 are worth a second look? What a crippling critical burden for a man to carry; one that would, if its claimant cared to reflect a moment longer and his editor to read what his wine correspondent has written, surely disqualify him from being a consumer wine writer of any value whatsoever - except, perhaps, to the editors of those fatuously hoity-toity mags
that clutter up Harley Street consultants' waiting rooms. Is it conceivable that 95% of Tim's tasting wines are not worth re-evaluation? If so, the matter begs several more questions that must nag at anyone who thinks about this for more than 30 seconds.
The White Queen, readers of Lewis Carroll will recall, told Alice she had the habit of believing six impossible things before breakfast. Roger Scruton seems to believe one impossible thing before he opens any bottle of wine. He writes, No screwtop can match the use, beauty and moral significance of a cork', and doubtless the more rational New Statesman reader who encountered the article wherein these sentiments were published last August went on his way without giving such pompous proclamations, however entertaining, any more heed.
I've just about finished reading the new wine books that filled my Christmas stocking, but once again it was a funny little book already in my possession, first published in 1954, that afforded me the most amusement over the holidays.
In his foreword to this, the third (1966) edition of C de Bosdari's Wines of the Cape, PO Sauer describes it as the first book on South African wines which will help our wine-drinkers to understand what they are drinking, how it is made and why it is good'. (It is also good for us, claims the author: Wine-drinkers, as a rule, are very healthy people, the sort of people who shamelessly turn up to bury their teetotal friends')
It is now possible to raise funds for The Wine & Spirit Trades' Benevolent Society (The Benevolent) simply by using its website.
The Benevolent has teamed up with ClickNow to provide a web-search facility that will benefit those who have worked in the drinks industry and need help.
When you search using The Benevolent search page, you receive results from leading search engines and help raise funds at the same time. By using The Benevolent search page - www.charityclicknow.com/partners/index.php?partnercode=wineandspirit - everyday, you could raise up to 50 a year.
Mike Campbell, chief executive of The Benevolent, said: The Benevolent web search works in the same way as any other search engine. The only difference is that, every time you do your normal search, The Benevolent will receive a donation from ClickNow. So the more you search, the more money we receive - at no cost to you and no cost to The Benevolent. So what are you waiting for?
I read with dismay your report on Jancis Robinson MW's letter to Harpers (16 December, p.7) concerning the plethora of Burgundy tastings at the beginning of January. At a time when France needs all the vinous friends she can get, this kind of thoughtless planning is not helpful. It would appear that the crux of the problem is that some UK importers are completely ignoring that great and efficient institution The Wine Trade Diary (free to all users!), or they are using it with pointlessly short notice. I declared' our (daytime) Bouchard Pre & Fils tasting on 11 January to the Diary on 10 August 2005, and John Armit registered his (evening) tasting (also due to take place on 11 January) on 27 October 2005 - still plenty of notice and no clash with our event.
A couple of years ago we dedicated our January column to some statistics relating to Italian wine production. It seems to have been well received, so we thought we'd do a similar thing this year - perhaps less in the form of a list than last time. The data have been supplied by Assoenologi, the Association of Italian Oenologists.
Producing Champagne is an expensive business; not only are the grapes the world's most expensive, but the minimum ageing requirements place considerable financial stress on a producer's cash flow. Just ask Franois-Xavier Mora, who has suffered the humiliation of seeing two bidders walk away from Lanson, forcing him to reconsider an offer he had already rejected.
I was somewhat confused by Giles Fallowfield's Fizz Fights' article in Harpers (25 November). Allow me to put the record straight concerning Jacquart's strategy.
The seven-month auction of Spirit Group is over. Punch Taverns has become Britain's largest pub owner by taking over its rival for 2.7bn. But that is not the end of the affair - far from it. Punch wants to offload up to 1,000 of the pubs that it has just bought because they do not fit its investment criteria. The company is undertaking a review of its newly enlarged 10,000-pub estate.
In your piece titled Christmas sparkling price war begins' (Harpers, 25 November, p.3), you attribute empty shelves in one Sainsbury's branch to the success of one of their promotions. If my local branch (in the O2 Centre, Finchley Road, London NW3) is anything by which to judge, it is more likely to be lack of stock. They have had no Sainsbury's own-brand gin for more than two weeks. Moreover, neither they nor the Sainsbury's Customer Careline can tell me when they will have any.
And Sainsbury's own-brand gin has not been on promotion.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Bedford (retired)
London
After reading his animated riposte to my letter, I am literally quaking in my boots waiting for Malcolm Gluck to batter down my door! Nevertheless, I am going to summon up enough courage to issue a reply
When Blavod Extreme Spirits was listed on the Alternative Investment Market in early 2004, following the merger of UK-based Blavod with Extreme Beverage of the US, the shares stood at 38p. Since then, investors may have needed a strong shot of black vodka as they watched their shares slump to 16.5p in midsummer. But, as with many a young, rapidly expanding company, the market for the shares had become less buoyant once the initial launch story was played out and the nitty-gritty of running the company meant that the flow of news slowed. In the past few weeks that process has been reversed as Blavod unveiled joint-venture expansion plans, a marketing drive and US sponsorship, and results showing it is making positive inroads in its chosen markets.
I was briefly distracted from the long-running soap opera featuring Constellation and Vincor (is it over yet?) by the news that most of the grape growers of Sonoma County, a premium coastal California wine-growing region, had joined hands with commercial agricultural interests and global chemical companies to help vote down a moratorium on the use or sale of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Sonoma - thereby shooting themselves rather inelegantly in the foot, if not some more vital body part.
Well done on the new New Zealand column (Harpers, 18 November); it's about time that we got our own spot on Harpers top shelf.
Takeovers and flotations have been a feature of the London stock market this year. The economics are simple. Interests rates are comparatively low and seem set to remain so, but company profitability has been rising. Cash-rich groups are therefore attracted to the cheapness of buying profitable assets and cash flow rather than investing in organic development. And while institutions flush with cash are seeking an income-generating home, the conditions are right for deals and restructuring.
A recent trip to Montalcino brought us into contact with two of the main players in the Brunello game: Castello Banfi and Case Basse. They may share the same denomination and even the same initials, but these two could not be more different from one another.
This is a somewhat belated response to the three letters (Harpers, 4 November) protesting - yelping, screaming, spitting, indeed - at my article about Rick Stein's views on French wine (Harpers, 21 October), but I hope it is not so tardy that the subject has cooled.
