17 minute read
the burning question
Former mafia man joins wine trade
Former mob boss Michael Franzese has released an eponymous range of wines produced in the foothills of Mount Ararat in Armenia.
Advertisement
Franzese was known as the “yuppie don” in the 1980s after rising to the rank of caporegime in the notorious Colombo crime family.
Fortune Magazine placed him at No 18 on its 50 Biggest Mafia Bosses list, and he gained a reputation as one of the mob’s biggest earners since Al Capone.
He is now a motivational speaker and author, living in California with his wife and seven children. He runs a mentorship site called The Inner Circle, and one of his mentees approached him with a plan to create a wine brand.
Decanter, July 27
The horror of a new wine shop
Deep Red Wine Merchant, an intimate wine bar and bottle shop, is coming to Avondale, Chicago, with an emphasis on minority vintners, and decorative winks and nods to horror movie fans.
A fan of horror movies since high school, owner Dave Thompson says his interior designer is planning to integrate horror references into the decor.
When it opens, Deep Red will be the latest entrant into a kind of horror alley in Avondale, just blocks away from deceptively colourful horror-themed coffee shop The Brewed. The neighbourhood is also home to the Insect Asylum, a taxidermy museum, and horror-friendly books and records shop Bucket O’ Blood.
“There’s a vibe here in Avondale,” says Thompson. “I can’t explain why, but I like it.”
Eater Chicago, July 26
?THE BURNING QUESTION
How did you cope with the record-breaking July heat?
�Heatwave? We love it. It makes people enjoy themselves by the seaside and have barbecues. It was only about 31-32˚C, so not too oppressive. Footfall was down but deliveries were up. It was uncomfortably hot to be walking around doing shopping, but our customers know they can ring us and we’ll deliver. I heard about people suspending deliveries and it beggared belief. We couldn’t do that. The delivery van’s got air conditioning, so it wasn’t a problem.”
Dean Pritchard Gwin Llyn Wines, Pwllheli
�There’s a weather station down the road and it recorded 38˚C. We have a temperaturecontrolled warehouse, so all the wine was fine. The shop has air con. Quite a few trade customers were closed and some private clients chose not to have wine sent out because they didn’t want it damaged in transit, but generally it was business as usual. A few inbound deliveries didn’t turn up because drivers were probably told not to work – but who can blame them?”
Hannah Boyes House of Townend, North Ferriby
�We closed for the day. We had a few staff on holiday and a tasting in the evening. If we’d kept the bar and the shop open it would have been a lot of running around in the heat for my partner, Matt, and me at eight months pregnant. We just thought we’d make our lives a bit easier. The tasting went ahead, hosted by Marta Vine. It was well attended apart from a couple of people whose buses were cancelled. People sat in the garden, drank Vinho Verde and had a great time.”
Kat Stead Brigitte Bordeaux, Nottingham
�My thermometer read 38.5˚C. We stayed open and we filled up the fridge with extra refreshing things like fizz and nice white wines. It was a quiet day footfall-wise [on Tuesday the 19th]. A lot of people didn’t bother coming out but we still had customers. One reason we stayed open was because we were prepping for a wine tasting event the following night. The only problem I had was going to Tesco for the cheese for the tasting as its fridges were closed down. I had to go to Waitrose instead. I think they have a better class of fridge there.” Tracy Markham H Champagne winner H
Steep Hill Wines, Lincoln
Champagne Gosset The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584
My failed attempt to copy Kopke
Kopke’s new 50 Year Old Tawny is a masterpiece of port blending, as Sarah McCleery can testify. She joins an audience of trade professionals to see if she can create her own version of Carlos Alves’s balanced and complex wine, and realises she should stick to the day job.
Kopke is imported by Hayward Bros. Visit haywardsbros.co.uk or call 020 7237 0576
The work of a port master blender is an art form. The job is to bring together wines of varying age, maturation process and even origin, to create a port that is consistent to the house style.
Kopke is the oldest port house, having been established in 1638. In 1828, C N Kopkë, great-great-grandson of the founder, Nicolau, sided with the Liberal Party during the civil war, and the company changed its name to C N Kopke in 1841.
It is a thrill to be invited to take part in a masterclass that will allow us taste the newly launched 50 Year Old Tawny – a blend of aged wines described as a “window to the great single vintage ports”.
To boot we will get a glimpse of the work of the master blender, by trying to recreate it. We are given everything required for the job. Five individual wines to choose from, and a guidebook that explains the qualities of each.
There’s a measuring cylinder and a conical flask and an array of glassware to sample the various attempts. Most usefully, there’s also a bottle of the 50 Year Old Tawny itself.
Aromas move from green honey and caramel to toasted almond, orange and lime marmalade and then soaked prune, dark chocolate and fig notes too. The palate
The new launch has even more depth and sophistication than the 40 and 30 Year Old styles
is warm and generous and, importantly for me, brilliantly fresh. I understand that this brightness is very much the trademark of Kopke’s ports, and it makes the idea of exploring them further very attractive indeed.
So, armed with a clear taste of what I’m supposed to be creating, I commit to the task in hand.
Wine A is the youngest of the five and it feels as though it has little to offer when it comes to the complexity of the 50 Year Old. I think it might have a minor part to play.
Wine B has a little more character and breadth and there’s quite a lot of the citrus freshness that I found in the final blend. I also pick up a decent amount of caramel too. I feel this has to feature.
Wine C has honey and spice and is showing more roundness and some of the richer fruit notes. I am mindful of the advice we have been given about what stocks Kopke will hold of its older wines, and the volumes available for a final blend. It seems to me that as an older wine, but not one of the oldest, wine C is going to be a major player.
Wine D strikes me as being the spiciest, but I also find it the most volatile. It is very black-fruited and rich. I am not sure about this at all, but I can sense that it will add a lot of breadth and complexity in a blend. I should add that the pros describe wine
D as “fresh, with notes of caramel and chocolate”.
Last, but not least, is wine E. It is by far the most concentrated, with roasted coffee notes. Though quite intimidating on its own, you feel it is going to play an important role – albeit perhaps not the largest component.
So, here is where I end up. I pop 45% of wine C into my measuring cylinder and then 10% of wine B. I pop 20% each of D and E into my blend and finish off with 5% of wine A.
I am stupidly pleased that I seem to have pulled off a rather good replica of the wine’s mahogany colour. Despite giving my attempt a good swirl, it doesn’t have the inviting warmth of the real deal and it’s evidently not as complete. The palate is also pretty disjointed, and I am some way off the balanced complexity of Alves’ masterpiece.
Still, he’s a Portuguese gentleman and does the honour of tasting it kindly and telling me “it’s close”. Hmm.
It is clear that Carlos Alves’s job is secure. His years on internship at Kopke have given him an encyclopaedic knowledge of the wines.
Knowing them intimately, having tasted them over many years and tasted how they have aged, Alves is able to craft a blend that captures the character of the Port and sustains a consistent house style.
The success of the blend falls firmly at the feet of the master blender and their skills not just as a taster but in knowing how the different wines will come together for a taste of port magic. Alves must work with the Port treasures of the past to maintain Kopke’s heritage.
What does the Kopke 50 Year Old Tawny give you that the 40 Year Old and 30 Year Old do not? Well, the answer seems to be more sophistication and complexity, greater depth and a step closer to the more expensive single vintages.
Top: Carlos Alves, a former apprentice and now the master; Below: Sarah McCleery, happy to leave the heavy lifting to the professionals
A little light reading
David Williams considers his desert island wine books. True, it’s a category that’s far from lucrative for its authors and publishers. But there are titles out there that certainly enrich the reader
The request came in the form of an email, but its tone suggested spidery writing on headed notepaper. “Please excuse the intrusion and presumption”, it began sweetly.
“We (my wine club and I) are hoping to build a wine library, a pooled resource of no more than eight books (one for each member), and we thought you might be able to help us select the most appropriate, ‘essential’ titles: a kind of desert island wine books, if you like.”
Happy to help, I answered, thinking the task would require no more than a few minutes’ pondering, maybe a little googling.
Then I thought: has anyone ever selected a wine book for the actual Desert Island Discs?
Neither of the wine luminaries who I know have been on the programme had. Checking the archive, I found that Jancis Robinson (October 1996) chose George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hugh Johnson (May 1984) opted for The Complete Works of PG Wodehouse to complement their Shakespeare and Bible.
Both also had as their luxury a plentiful supply of wine (along with a pen and paper in Johnson’s case) suggesting that even wine writers would rather drink wine than read about it.
Then again, since I can’t imagine Robinson or Johnson having quite the size of ego that would permit them to choose one of their own books, it rather slimmed down the potential works they had to choose from. Between them, the duo is responsible for at least four stone-cold classics, all of them books I can imagine many wine lovers choosing were they ever to get the call to sit down with Lauren Laverne.
Collectively, Johnson’s World of Atlas of Wine (in its most recent editions a co-production with Robinson) and his lesser-known historical masterpiece, The Story of Wine; the Robinson-edited Oxford Companion to Wine; and Robinson’s co-authored (with Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz) Wine Grapes provide almost everything you might need from a wine book, especially since the rise of the internet has largely obviated the need for annual wine guides and other books based on necessarily ephemeral wine ratings.
Indeed, such is the definitive status of at least three of this quartet (The Story of Wine has only recently been republished by Academie du Vin), it’s been rather difficult for other serious wine reference works to get off the ground with publishers, or, in the rare moments when they do make it to publication, to find an audience.
And it’s not just reference works. It’s an open secret in wine publishing that most books only just about break even or make a loss, many barely make it to three-figures in sales, and that, as Jamie Goode, one of the more prolific (and successful) of wine book authors told me recently, “there’s no money in it – unless you’re Hugh or Jancis or Parker, you do it for the love of it and to raise your profile”.
Goode’s Wine Science would in fact be a candidate for number five on my list: a very readable
overview of all the technical nitty-gritty of winemaking and winegrowing that I’ve found immensely useful since the first edition came out in 2014. In a similar scientifically rigorous, detailed and readably informative vein, I’d also try to find a place in any wine library for Professor Jonathan Maltman’s exceptional, timely 2018 book Vineyards, Rocks and Soils: A Wine Lover’s Guide to Geology, which gently deflates many of the myths of this age of terroir and minerality.
For all the hand-wringing about the travails of modern wine publishing, it’s heartening to see books like Goode’s (the second edition was published last year) and Maltman’s emerging. It’s also worth remembering that this has always been a distinctly recherché genre, and that, after a period when the flow of new wine books slowed to a trickle, recent years have seen the sector enjoy something of a revival in the UK, at least in terms of new titles.
Two relatively new publishers are largely responsible for this minirenaissance. The first, Infinite Ideas, has taken on the Classic Wine Library Series first created in the 1960s at Faber & Faber, and then run into the ground by Mitchell Beazley in the 2000s. A series of regional guides written by acknowledged experts in the region, the books’ very specificity rather rules out any place in a limited, generalist Desert Island Discs selection, although I’ve been very impressed by the mix of accessible prose and scholarly information in the examples I’ve read, notably Anne Krebiehl’s Wines of Germany, Matt Walls’ Wines of the Rhône and Anthony Rose’s Fizz. The same is true of Jasper Morris’s vast, magnificent Inside Burgundy, published by Berry Bros & Rudd, and the eccentric, exhaustive, beautifully presented labour of love that is Ben Little’s self-published Pignolo.
The other publisher that has helped change the British wine-publishing landscape is Academie du Vin Library, which has a nice line in reprinting longlost classics of wine literature such as Maurice Healy’s enchanting survey of winemaking Europe written in 1940, and Edith Somerville and Martin Ross’s late Victorian jaunt through Bordeaux, In the Vine Country, as well as Johnson’s Story of Wine.
It’s also responsible for my favourite wine book of recent years, Drinking with the Valkyries, a thematically arranged compilation of journalistic pieces by the presiding poetic genius of contemporary wine writing, Andrew Jefford.
The breadth of Valkyries means it edges out a previous Jefford classic, The New France, for a place in the pick of eight books I made for my wine club correspondent.
That list is completed by two American books that, like Jefford’s work, are as much concerned with delivering literary pleasure as they are in the imparting of vinous knowledge.
American importer Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route is a rollicking French wine-country picaresque first published in 1990, while Lynch’s soulful modern-day equivalent Terry Theise’s gently philosophical vinous memoir Reading Between the Vines (2010) is as good as anything I’ve read on the lifealtering joy of wine.
JASON YAPP
have any partiality. We know there is going to be scarcity but, strangely, retail markets tend not to react until a shortage is manifest. So we are currently in the weird pendulum swing of benefiting from the historic prices before the new reality bites.
Unfiltered If you love Condrieu, buy it now, because prices are only heading in one direction
Viognier is an interesting but capricious grape as it is both difficult to grow and to vinify.
This prompts the question: why bother with it? To which the answer is: because it yields wines that are inimitable.
Its spiritual homeland is in Condrieu, in the northern Rhône valley, where it is thought to have been introduced by ancient Greek traffickers in the third century AD. Today there are 209 hectares under vine spread across seven communes planted in steep south and south east- facing terraces on soils rich in alluvial deposits, granite, mica, sand, clay and limestone.
At the nadir of Condrieu, in the mid1950s, after the ravages of phylloxera, two world wars and the Wall Street crash, there were fewer than 12 hectares under vine in the entire world (including the monopole, satellite appéllation of Château-Grillet) and Viognier almost became extinct. Fortunately, a handful of dedicated vignerons, led by the grape’s staunchest advocate, Georges Vernay, kept the flame alive and gradually terraces were replanted. More young winemakers were encouraged into the fold, and an international following started to develop.
This coincided with official (and illicit) exports of vine cuttings that helped establish vineyard holdings in the south of France and the new world. Today, Viognier is a widely planted, and rightly revered, grape variety.
It does not yield inexpensive wines, so has few admirers in the bargain-hunting community. It can take seven years to establish viable rootstock, roughly twice as long as either Chardonnay or Sauvignon, but wines made with it enjoy an incredibly loyal following among enlightened aficionados.
The permitted yield in Condrieu is currently 41 hectolitres per hectare. The average yield is reputedly 37 hectolitres, but the yield in the frost-ravaged 2021 vintage came in at just eight. We can therefore predict, with some certainty, price increases and a shortfall in availability.
Prices will inevitably increase. That is partially due to inflation but also because costs of everything are rising – glass, cardboard, fuel, labour, printing – never mind the grapes. Interestingly, these price increases have not fully impacted at the time of writing. So the message is, buy Viognier now if it is a grape to which you Viognier makes wines with beautiful, ethereal scents that don’t resemble the bouquet of any other grape variety. Putting that into adjectives is not easy, but I have often tried to do so over a 30-year career, so will do so once again. Honeysuckle and acacia flowers both frequently appear in tasting notes, as do peaches, apricots and white stone fruit. Viognier has quite a rich, mouth-filling texture, but strangely often has a much drier finish that its aromas encourage one to anticipate.
Good Viognier has finesse and elegance in equal measure, and it can drink very well with or without food. Opinions vary as to what the best food accompaniment to Condrieu is, but many purists argue that quenelles de brochet au salpicon de homard (pike perch dumpling in a lobster sauce) is the crème de la crème. They also maintain that Domaine Georges Vernay’s Coteau de Vernon is the top wine in the appéllation. Both are normally available at the Beau Rivage hotel and restaurant which overlooks the Rhône in the middle of the town of Condrieu. I have had the privilege of enjoying that combination in situ, and if it isn’t the pinnacle of perfection it can’t be far off it.
Opinions differ as to how much bottle age Viognier benefits from. Many oenophiles enjoy Condrieu with five or more years’ maturity, when it develops nuttier nuances and a deeper colour. Personally, I find it hard to resist its youthful fruit, so favour drinking it within two or three years of bottling.
So my parting advice is, treat yourself: you know you’re worth it. Yes, it will be expensive, but think of the bragging rights – and the memories that can’t be taken away from you.
Reggio Emilia Jason Yapp is director of Yapp Bros in Mere, Wiltshire
