Contents Introduction 9 Chapter 1
Swirl, sniff, slurp 11 Chapter 2
Wine waffle 25 Chapter 3
Decant or decadent 41 Chapter 4
This goes with that 55 Chapter 5
Let’s party 69
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Chapter 6
Buying, storing, collecting 79 Chapter 7
Keeping wine 99 Chapter 8
The bluffer’s guide 109 Chapter 9
The technical bit 123 Chapter 10
The world at a glance 145
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Chapter 1
Swirl, sniff, slurp
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Max Allen’s Wine Know How
Getting started The best glasses A good wine glass is your best drinking buddy: its shape and size can have a huge effect on how you enjoy the wine. Five things to bear in mind when buying glasses: 1. You get the most satisfying smells and flavours out of a wine glass with a tulip-shaped bowl, which concentrates the aromas wafting up from the wine towards your nose. 2. A glass with a long stem keeps your hands from warming the wine. 3. Clear, blemish-free glass allows you to fully appreciate the wine’s colour. 4. Fine, thin glass is more pleasant to drink from than chunky, thick glass.
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Swirl, sniff, slurp 5. Ideally, your glasses are sturdy enough to go in the dishwasher. If you do have to hand-wash, make sure the glasses are well rinsed and free of detergent before using them again. Look, you could go mad and buy all sorts of different-shaped glasses – there are even glasses designed for specific grape varieties, believe it or not – but you only really need three different shapes: glasses with big bowls for whites and reds; smaller bowl glasses for sweet and fortified wines; and tall, skinny flutes for keeping the bubbles in a glass of sparkling wine.
How to taste wine for maximum enjoyment 1. Pour Only pour until the glass is a third or a half full; you’re going to be doing some vigorous swirling in a second, and you don’t want to end up wearing the wine.
2. Swirl Swirl the wine around to look at its colour, and to release the wine’s delicious smells …
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The ‘legs’ myth If a wine has thick ‘tears’ – or ‘legs’ – running down the inside of the glass after you’ve swirled it, this is not necessarily an indication of quality. It simply means the wine is high in alcohol and/or sweetness.
3. Sniff … Now stick your nose in and sniff. Does it smell good to you? Smell like you want to drink it? (Wine nerds call the wine’s smell its ‘nose’.)
4. Slurp Now, take a sip of the wine, chew it around in your mouth for a couple of seconds, letting it reach every part of your tongue. Think about how sweet or tart it is at the front of your mouth; whether you can feel acidity, bitterness or grip on the sides of your tongue; how much it fills the mouth with flavour. And then, when you’ve swallowed, think about the aftertaste (called the
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Additives and preservatives Sulfur dioxide, a commonly used preservative – you also find it in dried fruit and juice – is added to almost every single bottle of wine you buy, to keep it stable and fresh after it leaves the winery. It’s added to your wine in tiny concentrations – a few dozen parts per million – and its presence is declared on every label (with the phrase ‘contains sulfites’ or ‘preservative 200 added’) because a very small proportion of sulfite-sensitive asthmatics can react badly to even a trace of it.
Processing aids (sounds nasty but isn’t) Winemakers also declare on their labels the use of processing aids that may be allergens for some people. Phrases such as ‘contains milk products’ or ‘egg fining agents’ may sound weird, but the use of these substances is both very traditional and, for most of us, completely harmless: egg whites and skim milk have been used by winemakers for centuries to clarify their wine (‘fining’ is another word for clarifying).
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Swirl, sniff, slurp
Preservative-free wine Good wine shops should stock at least one preservative-free wine, for those customers concerned about additives. But remember: because there’s no added preservative, you need to look after the wine more carefully. Think of preservative-free wine as you would cheese: keep it cool and consume it sooner rather than later.
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Buying, storing, collecting
How to broaden your wine-drinking horizons Make friends with your wine merchant You’ll be amazed how much in the way of information, jargon, inside gossip and – with luck – pre-arrival bargains you’ll pick up if you cultivate a bond with the people who sell you wine.
Get off your bum Visit a winery (or two or three). At cellar doors, you’ll (hopefully) learn how to taste wine for maximum enjoyment, and about how wines are made. Cellar doors are also great places to find discounted wines, reduced to clear, often on tasting before you buy.
Taste, taste, taste Go to as many in-store tastings and wine shows and events as possible – it’s where you’ll pick up some useful snippets and recommendations.
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Never drink the same wine twice Make an effort to step out of your comfort zone: try grape varieties you’ve never heard of, from regions you don’t know; try wines from all around the world. And the next time you’re shopping and you reach for your favourite bottle, be adventurous and try the wine to the left instead. You might not like it – but you might also discover a new favourite.
All that glitters … Little gold wine show medal stickers on bottles; star ratings in magazine wine columns; scores in wine-buying guides … there are dozens of ways of evaluating wine. How do they work and are they really of any use to you, the consumer?
Medals At wine shows, judges taste many wines alongside each other and give them scores that equate to medals and trophies. Looking for awarded wines on the shop shelf is a fairly good way of discovering quality – but there are pitfalls.
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The problems with wine shows and medals • Some judges and critics favour bigger,
showier wines at the expense of the more delicate and subtle styles; as a result, the highly awarded/top-scoring wines can be the ones you would least like to drink with food.
• Many trophies and medals are awarded
to unfinished wines – wines taken directly from the barrel, for example – and these can taste different to the wine under the same label that ends up in your glass.
• Even if a wine has won a medal, while you can be safe that the wine is at least well-made, that’s no guarantee you will like it.
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Chapter 7
Keeping wine
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Max Allen’s Wine Know How Why keep wine? Why not just drink it as soon as you get it home from the shop? Because, over time, the flavour compounds, the acid and alcohol interact in the bottle to form new, more complex, satisfying flavours. You can’t keep wine just anywhere, though. The enemies of wine – particularly bottles sealed with a cork – are excessive heat (which cooks the wine) and big daily temperature swings, which make the cork shrink, allowing air in and eventually turning the wine to vinegar. That’s why a wooden wine rack on top of the fridge (which, let’s face it, is where a lot of us store our bottles) is not the best spot – and a cool, dark place like a cellar is. ‘Cellaring’ doesn’t only apply to expensive bottles that need to be kept for a decade. As little as six months rest in a cool, dark place can make even cheap reds and whites more mellow, more interesting. Short-term cellaring, or maintaining a wine pantry (see below) is really simple: just lay the bottles, in a box, on their side so the corks stay moist, somewhere away from too much heat or temperature fluctuations – for instance, in a cupboard or under the bed.
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The wine pantry Here are some good wines to always have on hand for whenever friends pop in. These styles will cover all tastes and eventualities, and none will suffer from just hanging around in a cool dark place; indeed, most will even benefit from short-term (six months) cellaring, and develop some more interesting flavours: • inexpensive sparkling white wine – because there’s always something to celebrate • riesling and sauvignon blanc – aromatic unwooded whites for Friday night fish and chips in summer • chardonnay – because everybody likes chardonnay • pink wines – for hot days and pizza • sparkling red – for Chinese takeaway • young, easy-drinking reds like shiraz and merlot – for barbecues • a couple of posh, expensive bottles – in case you need a last-minute present or you just feel indulgent • some port, muscat and sherry – for cool winter evenings.
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Saving for a rainy day … If you want to keep wine for a longer time to appreciate the complex, satisfying, savoury flavours that develop with bottle age, you will need to be a bit more serious about creating the best cellaring conditions. In which case, it makes sense to try and meet as many of the following criteria as possible:
1. Stable temperature If the temperature fluctuates too rapidly from day to night, from week to week, the corks can shrink, the bottles can leak and air can get in. You’ll need a maximum/minimum thermometer for keeping track of the temperature.
2. Cool temperature The cooler the storage space, the more slowly the wine matures. Between 12 and 15 degrees Celsius is ideal. Up to 20 degrees Celsius is okay – but keep wine at higher than 20 degrees for any length of time and the flavours can develop too rapidly and the wine can taste ‘cooked’. Keep the storage space cool in summer by using an air conditioner if you have to.
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Keeping wine 3. Humidity If the air is too dry, corks can dry out and shrink, bottles can leak and air can get in. Too humid, and the labels and corks can get mouldy. The ideal humidity is around 75 per cent. If you are using an air conditioner, you may have to humidify the air by keeping a bucket of water in the storage space.
4. Keep bottles lying down Once again, if bottles are left standing for too long, the corks can dry out, shrink and ‌ well, you know the rest. Lying bottles on their sides helps keep the corks moist. If the wines are screwcapped or crown-sealed, this is not an issue, so they can be kept standing up if you want.
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