the burning question

Bolney sells up to German wine giant

Henkell-Freixenet, the world’s biggest sparkling wine company, has acquired Bolney Wine Estate in Sussex.

The German sparkling wine giant owns Champagne, crémant, Cava, and Prosecco brands in more than 10 countries, together with UK-based distribution company Freixenet-Copestick. Sam Linter, Bolney’s managing director and head winemaker, will stay on as managing director. She declined to disclose the value of the sale.

Wine-searcher.com, January 17

Aberlour rarities stolen from Moray

Tens of thousands of pounds of whisky has been stolen from a distillery in Moray.

A number of whisky bottles were taken from the visitor shop at Aberlour Distillery between December 22 and January 5.

Police said the highly unique bottles would be “easily identifiable” as no other bottles from the batch have yet been sold.

STV News, January 27

South African wine booms in the UK

The UK, South Africa’s leading export market, saw a jump in exports of 20% by value during 2021, despite challenges caused by the pandemic.

The UK currently accounts for 25% of all exports by value and 12% in terms of volume.

The Drinks Business, January 20

?THE BURNING QUESTION

What kind of music do you play in your shop?

�I made a living as a DJ for over 20 years, so I feel music is incredibly important in setting the atmosphere in the shop. I play it through YouTube. You don’t want anything morose so I play stuff that’s light, jazzy. I may even whip out a bit of Stranglers. The Nightfly by Donald Fagen is a great album and I might also play Koop, who are a Swedish electro jazz outfit. Over Christmas I was playing UB40’s first album and one of my customers said how nice it was to listen to instead of bloody awful Christmas music!” Iain Smith H Champagne winner H

Smith’s Wines, Exeter

�Music plays a part in telling the story of who we are and what we do. We can’t always play our personal preferences, it has to be right for here. We put a playlist on Spotify and currently we are listening to lots of soul jazz during the day and then we move to Afrobeat at night. I think the best music is when customers don’t notice it – it just becomes part of everything.”

Alex Grahame SugarBird Wines, Aberdeen

�We create playlists on Spotify that go out every couple of weeks with our newsletter. These include songs that have been getting airtime in the shop. Whoever is running the shop has control over the stereo, with the caveat that nobody plays anything with too high a BPM or anything classical. We don’t always agree. My colleague has begged me to stop playing Meat Loaf recently after a week of hearing I Would Do Anything For Love in tribute to the great man.”

Oliver Dibben Gnarly Vines, Walthamstow, London

�We rarely move the dial from Radio Fip, to be honest. It’s a pretty eclectic mix, involving every genre you could possibly imagine. It can flip from Led Zeppelin or Tony Allen to Beethoven or Billy Bragg, then it’ll just weird you out with a bizarre cover of a James Bond song or something. It is very good wine shop music although, being French, it does go a bit too jazzy some afternoons.”

Richard Holloway The Stroud Wine Co, Stroud

Champagne Gosset The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584

. THE DRAYMAN .

The dark arts

Don’t get too fixated about the technical differences between stout and porter. Both styles are benefiting from endless new interpretations by innovative brewers

The US-based Beer Judge Certification Program released updated guidelines on beer styles at the very end of last year. This is a list of 34 identifiable families of beer, sub-divided into anything from two to 10 particular beer styles, each with a description of the typical ingredients, flavour profile and historical background. It aims to provide a benchmark for competition judges to assess whether particular beers match the style they purport to be.

Don’t worry, there isn’t going to be an exam at the end. But it is the place to go if any reader feels the urgent need to detect the subtle variations between American, Belgian, black, brown, red, rye, white, brut, hazy and double IPAs. As we were deep into dark beer season at the time they were published, it seemed a good hopping-on place to search for answers to one of the thorniest of thorny beer questions: the difference between a stout and a porter. It’s a question that has almost as many answers as there are beer experts and is wrapped up in 18th century brewing history, grain content and degrees of bitterness and sweetness. It’s quite the rabbit hole. The BJCP guidelines present as many questions as they answer, however, even creating new ones, including what is the difference between a porter and a porter, and between a stout and a stout? They identify four distinct types of porter (English, American, Baltic and pre-Prohibition) and eight shades of stout (American, imperial, foreign extra, oatmeal, sweet, Irish, Irish extra and tropical).

Perhaps the most important question should be, “is it time to stop worrying about the difference between porter and stout?”. To which I’d suggest the answer is: “Unless you’re judging an international beer competition, yes, it probably is.”

For, just like any other beer style or tributary thereof, there are great porters and mediocre ones, and amazing stouts and workaday ones. Being called one or the other doesn’t denote quality, just its place in beer’s history.

The beauty of both styles is their versatility, as the numerous subdivisions testify. Dark beers provide a robust enough backbone to carry the saltiness of oysters or the sweetness of dark fruit. Titanic Plum Porter is a leathery-rich, fruity beer worthy of the “modern classic” epithet. It’s become so iconic in beer-nerd world that Aldi launched a lookalike last year.

Fresh off the blocks is Vocation’s Honeycomb Chocolate Stout. It’s a lazy fall-back to describe a tipple as something in a glass (sunshine, Christmas, a vineyard etc) but this really is as close as you’re likely to encounter to a Crunchie in liquid form – decadent, warming, moreish.

More refined, with a bitter-sweet dark chocolate/liquorice thing going on is Thornbridge’s Cocoa Wonderland chocolate porter, which packs a punch at 6.8% abv, reinforcing the non-rule that porters are usually lighter in abv than stout, except when they aren’t.

These and many others have taken two closely-related classic dark beer palates and created exciting newness in what was pretty much a onebrand beer category two decades ago – not so much vive la difference as vive la similarité.