Pear and apple

Pear and apple upon the desk,
Eyeing each other, asking who’s next,
Pips quivering, quaking, shaking,
Stalks craning and warily straining
Towards the kitchens marble work top. 
The butter, the sugar and the baking dish.

Newbury Show

Every year when I was a child the second weekend of September would be set aside for visiting the Newbury Agricultural Show. 

I have so many memories, the crushed grass and mud scents of the food tents, the morass of people crammed into the craft areas, fast talking salesmen selling kitchen gadgets, tractors and cars, the country sports area with the horse shoeing competition, the twin huge poles for the pole climbing contest.

Tanks to climb on, helterskelters and fairground rides, show jumping in the main arena, the parade of the horse drawn carriages, their polished brass glinting in the early autumn sun, the prize winning livestock being led around the arena by a legion of white coated farmers, their proud smiles flitting from their animals to the crowd and back again while cameras clicked away. 

There was always fudge, in the early days it would be a little white bag of vanilla fudge, then later it became a pink and white striped bag of mixed flavours. I remember polystyrene containers of chips, salty sweet ketchup smeared over the top, halved avocados filled with prawn cocktail. Bacon rolls and hog roasts. Hiding under passing tents from the inevitable squalls of rain. Picking up bags of freebees, insurance company stickers, charity flags and once incongruously kiwi fruits that were being given out as a promotion.

Then I stopped going, university got in the way, then jobs, such is life.

So I was quite excited when the opportunity to go again arose. But the intervening years have been kind to me. I last went in 2002 and since then tumbled further and further into the world of food, the meat wagon has spoilt white van burgers, my friends pigs have ruined your average hog roast, and the prawn cocktail sellers have plain upped and left.

It was odd how similar the show felt, the layout has remained the same and the distribution of the stands hasn’t changed. There is still the slight sleaziness to the lower avenues, the large bar stands near to the fun fair and the guys hawking aloe vera creams and gels are where they always used to be. For the record the challenge is to find something they don’t think Aloe Vera can help you with, an amusing 15 minutes or so of chatter.

However it was quieter this year, as my Dad pointed out, times have been hard of late and £17 to go the the show, plus extras as the day goes on might start to look a bit surplus to needs at the moment. But it wasn’t the faint pall of calm that unsettled me, it was the quality of food available that was heart breaking. To be so close to such an array of wonderful looking livestock and only to be able to find the worst sort of mass produced burgers almost made me cry (thankfully there was lots of scrumpy for me to drown my sorrows in).

So after my eulogy to shows gone by I’m going to leave you with some nice pictures of animals, because, well I think they’re beautiful and looking at them all nearly made me consider rethinking my stance on turkeys, yep it was that moving.

Jansz and some rambling regarding Autolysis

This week I was lucky enough to catch up with Natalie Freyer, the head winemaker for Jansz Tasmania, now Nat has forgotten more than I’m likely to ever learn about Sparkling wines, but manages to wear it all with a delightfully no nonsense Australian down to earthiness.

Nat was over in the UK with some friends on holiday, so the bottle of 2002 late disgorged Jansz was a suitcase smuggle job. The rest of her day had been spent with the 9 year old niece of a friend, so a slight blow out was on the cards.

I’d brought along a little curio of a sparkling Gamay from Beaujolais. Made by Xavier and his sister at ….. My rationale for the choice was that they’re actually trying to do something serious with Sparkling Beaujolais, the bottle lists bottling date and date de degorgement, so you’ll know how long it’s been sur lees. 

Ageing wine sur lees, or leaving the wine on the discarded yeast lees for extended periods of time is a pretty common wine making procedure.

What the winemaker is relying on is the breakdown of the yeast cells after their death. This is known as autolysis, and the subsequent products the autolysate. When there is nothing left to break down the system is referred to as being autolysated.

Contained within the yeast cells, predominantly in the Vacuole, are a set of proteolytic enzymes which set to work as the cell dies. The breakdown of the yeast cell can be broken into two separate areas, the protein cell membrane and proteinaceaous intercellular components, then the carbohydrate cell wall.

Between the breakdown of the membranes and cellular wall there are a host of different compounds produced. Nitrogenous compounds from the protein breakdown work as nutrients for still living yeast cells and are very important in helping malo-lactic bacteria later on. The polysaccharides from the cell wall  end up as B1->3-glucans and mannoproteins. There is some evidence that the mannoproteins are related to the development of extra finesse and persistence of mousse.

The added mouth feel and aromatics that develop with ageing on lees is particularly important with the traditional sparkling wine styles (sekt and prosecco excluded) as they are made from non-aromatic varietals that are often harvested quite unripe (10 to 11 degrees is quite common for their still wines.

Xavier in his Granit Sparkling Gamay is looking to use this as much as possible to flesh out what is by its nature a very angular and difficult wine, there is the obvious shadow of cherry fruit and minerality that defines a good Beaujolais, but the 9 months of on lees ageing has softened this and added an accessibility to the palette. I’m told that their goal is to release everything at 24 months of ageing on lees, but as it’s a new project they’ve been releasing some bottles early.

We followed the Granit with Nat’s top wine, 2002 LD Jansz, the wine had been disgorged (taken off its lees) about 9 months ago, so that’s close to 9 years of ageing and increasing in complexity.

One of the most interesting things about ageing sparkling wines on their lees is that the dead yeast c ells provide a measure of protection from the oxidative ravages of time, meaning that you get a wine that has the added complexity of age, but without some of the slightly obscurative sherried like notes that often would be expected of a similar length of normal bottle ageing. I’m told that in time the freshness fades and the wine rapidly returns to a condition similar that of a bottle aged normally for the same length of time, but I have no personal experience of this.

The Jansz 02 LD was stunning, almost Sauternes like in its richness, with some tropical fruit notes vying with the lush yeastiness and subdued sparkle. Once again I was forced to concede that Nat’s making some truly excellent wines on the Tasmanian hill sides, they’re not Champagnes, but  knowing what she thinks of the bulk of Champenois fruit I’m certain that she’d never want people to make that mistake.

Regional stereotypes and the origin of the concept of Terroir

Terroir is an old concept in France, however it hasn’t always had quite the meaning to which we now ascribe it.

In its early usage it referred to merely the soil of an area of the country, by the 13^thcentury it was being used to refer to more specifically physical properties of areas of the land, the soils properties, it’s drainage, fertility etc.

By the 1700’s its usage had come to include a sense of the soul of the person who had tended the land. Remember this is wholly in keeping with Christian teaching regarding property and work in that a person puts his god given energy into working the land, and in turn derives a portion of ownership of said land or crafted item.

During the 1800’s it was common practice in France to link the health and vitality of a person to the land in which they lived, the food upon which they ate and the work that they undertook. Thus people identified themselves with their regions and felt no qualms attributing negative qualities to ‘foreign’ regions of the country.

Wine and food were divine products of the French genius and only through their consumption and celebration could the French truly express to their full potential.

Where this story starts to become interesting is in how the small vignerons started to use it to they advantage.

After the French revolution the large monastic estates were sold off to the public, this wasn’t quite as much of an egalitarian land redistribution as could have been hoped, as the new aristocracy of those who had prospered under the revolution promptly bought up many of the large estates. They then commenced to make large scale wines with the blended fruit.

It was the smaller vigneron who merely had his patch of land who had the most to gain from asserting the primacy of his patch. By tirelessly working his land, he gave himself the opportunity to compete, at least qualitatively with the larger growers and nouvelle aristocracy.

Until the point where individual plots of land were more than just smaller sections of a larger estate, the vignerons were essentially interchangeable. The rise of terroir changed all this, albeit only for the lucky few.

What is McDonalds actually implied that Ronald had invented the Burger?

1821: A French Monk in the region of Champagne was looking to improve upon the standing of the Catholic Church in the region. His name was Dom Grossart, he wrote to the deputy mayor of the town of Ay, stating that, ‘as you know Monsiour…… it was the celebrated Dom Perignon….. who found the secret of making white sparkling wine’

This is the first record of Dom Perignon’s existence, anything that may have been recorded as to his presence or otherwise at the monastery was destroyed when the monastery was sacked during the revolution. Sacked with good reason as well, it seems that they didn’t regard their lay peasantry with quite the same grace or regard as their monastic brothers. The peasantry around Hautvilliers was reputed to be ‘more wretched and poor than anywhere else’.

Over the following half a decade, mentions of Dom Perignon and his miraculous discovery multiply. Reaching a point by the 1860’s where it was a semi accepted fact. Hautvilliers was rebuilt and people were shown around, what they were now being told was the original cellar and press that Dom Perignon had used.

Nearly 200 years of repetition has given the story a sheen of truthfulness. This isn’t quite the same as it being true though.

My question is; If the good folk at Moet & Chandon (LVMH) who market Dom Perignon, and fill their marketing literature with stories of Dom Perignon’s genius are aware of his fictional status. Then are they guilty of false advertising?

Putting it in another way, we are no longer allowed to make spurious health claims when we sell products, though to be truthful  many people still do, so why is it that bogus historical origin stories are accepted without much question.

I might as well start claiming that Ronald McDonald invented the beef burger, or that the earth was created in 6 days…. though, thinking about it, maybe that’s why we’re so forgiving of these lies. Constant repetition has robbed them of their ante natal maliciousness and furnished them with a patina of tradition and sheen of glossy romanticism.

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In response to several comments, I'm going to be returning to these pages, so I will be putting up the tumblr posts back here..

Open letter to the Guardian

Dear Editor

Please can we discuss wine?

At present the coverage that your paper devotes to wine and drink pales in the anaemic slightly bulimic self-hating shadow of your exemplary food coverage.

With the formation of the creative locus that is the Word of Mouth blog space the Guardian has placed itself firmly at the forefront of the extremely fruitful movement that is food writing in Britain at the moment.

By comparison the coverage given to wine and beverage related journalism is curiously (willfully?) sparse to non-existent.

Whilst I appreciate that this can be attributed to a more general malaise in the field of wine related print journalism. I still can’t help but cringe when I see how sparse the space given to Fiona Beckett is every Saturday.

If this wasn’t quite enough, there is the issue of the wine related articles that receive main billing, either on the front page of the print edition or on the opening page of the website. It seems that it is here that underlying prejudices come to the fore.

In the last few months the articles that have caught my (admittedly slightly limited, I read the paper on line every day and buy it about 3 times a week) attention as being promoted by the editorship have been quite saddening.

Malcolm Gluck’s recent diatribe against English wines was one such example. I understand that you were once at the forefront of supermarket recommendations with his Super Plonk column, but times have changed. His piece came loaded with half with slander and half with unattributed quotes from ‘New Zealand wine making friends’ who tried growing Pinot Noir only to reckon it was only good for vinegar. This might pass muster in investigative journalism as protection of a source, but in wine writing it comes across as hearsay. That, the rest of the article was bare faced self-promotion of his tired brand of ‘wine radical’ almost slipped by such was the saddening sight of his despairing attempts to remain relevant as an anti-critic.

We move to the highly placed reportage of the Edinburgh university study that demonstrated how a limited sample of people preferred the taste of one or other cheap wine over another less cheap wine.

The Guardian newspaper employs the services of the esteemed Dr Ben Goldacre (for which I am most grateful). It is this sort of uncritical parroting of jumped to conclusions that are unsupported by the evidence that I expect to see him eviscerating, though not usually in the Guardian’s own coverage.

Finally, and most recently, there was a fluff piece on the recovery of the global market for cork that read like a barely edited PR mailshot from Amorim. I’m sure you’ll agree that the hard work the moderator had to do on the comments was testament to at least some latent desire for wine related reporting that matches the high standard set elsewhere in the paper.

I’ve long wondered whether the refusal to engage with wine and drink issues in a serious fashion was born out of the papers leftist values, which, I am proud to share.

I feel that a renewed focus on wine is not necessarily in conflict with these, as, save for the richest and most prestigious of appellations, wine is one of the few products were it is incredibly easy to track the path of one’s money right back to the end producer. Who, in many cases are still to be found with hands dirty from their own vineyards. However, in the absence of a guide of where to find these wines, we are left with an increasingly homogenized market selection of major corporations’ offerings.

I am certain that it wouldn’t be too far from the paper’s current editorial remit to increase the scope of the Word of Mouth blog space to include a few of the younger wine blogger and wine writers to contribute to what is already the preeminent space for discussion of food in the UK media.

Yours Sincerely

Donald Edwards

p.s Hoping for the best.