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The Wine Merchants since 1802 |
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CHAMPAGNE-Opening & Bottle Sizes (and Bible classes)
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Background to WINE & GRAPE
A slow growing season is probably the most essential prerequesite for quality grape and wine production. Slow ripening is vital to producing complex and interesting wine, allowing time for the sun to provoke the grape into slowly producing the delicate flavours of the fruit and, in particular, the grape skins. This can of course be augmented by wood. This is in the wide majority oak and the best is invariably slow growing oak. That means that it is almost always French oak, which is both slow growing and relatively common and has, in consequence, narrow grain (unlike the broader grains of say, Russian or American oak) and imparts subtle flavours and finesse and has none of the brashness of the fast growing 'arriviste' character of American oak! Rather like English 'Golden Delicious' apples, which have an incomparably better flavour than the fast growing Italian or French examples of the same variety France is the home of the wine producing vine. Their grapes are generally poor to eat but fermented into wine their attributes of high acidity and tannin show that slow growing imparts wonderful additional depth of character. What is poor to eat is delicious to drink! The Anglo Saxon culture, which , wine wise , means largely Australia, North America or South Africa, started from a different premise. Why? Because our Commonwealth Cousins had been particularly used to providing fortified wines such as Sherry or Port replacements for the 'Old Country'. So grapes were always ripe to provide good fruit for these fortified wines in their traditional styles. When unfortified wine production was tried then quite naturally fruit was picked ripe - as it was in the Douro or Jerez. Really obviously fruity wines resulted and these were very easily appreciated by consumers - they had enough fruit to be drunk alone and enough alcohol to jump out of the glass. These wines were all the more easy to drink when some of the more prominent Australian companies introduced 'starter' (so called 'entry level') wines of appealing quality at very inexpensive prices. [To be continued] Copyright © 2005 Sainsbury Brothers.
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