"season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" may live up to its name

I can still see the 1970s TV advert in my mind’s eye:  dew spotted apples being harvested while the voiceover intoned “Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.  The advert was promoting the “exceedingly good cakes” of Mr Kipling, so my adolescent brain made a connection between the line of verse and writer, poet and patriot Rudyard Kipling.  Did I also think he made cakes in his spare time?

Of course you all knew that the poem is by Keats, the opening line of his ode “To Autumn” and makes no mention of apple slices, fondant fancies or any other favourite of the cake magnate.

This year Autumn may live up to Keats’ breathless description as we are experiencing what naturalists call a “mast year”, where trees and other plants produce a bumper crop of fruit and seeds.  What exactly causes a mast year is not fully understood, but I can certainly vouch for the utterly ridiculous amount of acorns being deposited by the oak trees in our back garden; and I have already made a batch of bramble jelly and look forward to a good few blackberry and apple crumbles before the season is out.  Why, even our useless Egremont russet and pathetic pear have produced a crop this year.  Clearly something is afoot out in nature.

If you spent any time in this country in the summers of 2012 and 2011, you will appreciate that winemakers in England and Wales had a thin time of it in the past couple of years.  Cool, damp, grey summers do not make for large crops of healthy grapes.  Indeed last year Nyetimber, one of the foremost makers of English sparkling wine, decided to give up on a bad job and made no wine at all in 2012.  Growers desperately need a good year:  with the abundance of Mother Nature apparent all around us, will they get one?

 

Healthy, ripening grapes this week

Signs are good, so far.  Growers are reporting a potentially large harvest of healthy, ripe grapes.  Nick Wenman of Albury Organic Vineyard was able to show me Seyval Blanc, Pinots Noir and Meunier and Chardonnay all looking healthy and plentiful this week.  At the other end of the country, Bob Lindo of Camel Valley in Cornwall, one of the country’s largest commercial vineyards, reports a large crop of clean healthy grapes.  Sybilla Tindale of High Clandon Estate confirmed that her vineyard is full of healthy fat bunches of grapes.  All looks set for success.

 

Nick Wenman of Albury Organic Vineyard

Yet, at latitudes this far north, grapes are nowhere near fully ripe now.  We really need more warmth and sun in order to ripen the grapes and turn a potential harvest into vats of fermenting must in the winery.  Grape harvests here are likely to be towards the end of October – despite that lovely summer weather, which allowed the grapes to catch up a week or so after the setbacks of the long, cold spring and early summer, ripening is still 1-2 weeks behind schedule.  So now, as Sybilla Tindale says, the challenge will be to ripen those bunches.

"Bougies" - heaters ready in the vineyard just in case

Here are some wines to enjoy, while we wait:

Theale Vineyard Blanc de Blancs 2007 – made by Laithwaite’s, sadly not commercially available

I know, what a wind up – sorry! However, in case you should come across a bottle of this or another vintage, let nothing come between it and you.  This is a classy glass of fizz in anyone’s book.  Made from 100% Chardonnay and with plenty of textbook bottle aged character:  the nose is pure McVitie’s Digestive biscuit, with a hint of strawberry shortcake.  This leads onto a many-layered palate of appley fruit, fine and complex.   If someone gave me this and told me it was vintage Champagne, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.

And what of Nick Wenman’s Albury Organic Vineyard?  The first commercial release of the estate’s sparkling wine is planned in time for Christmas 2014, so we have a while to wait to taste the fruits of his labour.  However, there should be (barring disaster in the next couple of weeks) some of his still wine, Silent Pool Rosé 2013 available from May 2014.  The entire vineyard is run organically, but Nick is also hoping to be able to produce a small proportion of biodynamic still rosé, an experiment that I would love to taste the results of.

High Clandon Queen’s Jubliee Cuvée 2008 - £29 from http://www.highclandon.co.uk

If you are big on sourcing locally then the sparkling wine from  this tiny property with just an acre of vines on a site facing north (and with fantastic views towards London), will be just up your street.  Owners Bruce and Sybilla Tindale are originally from South Africa and seemingly thought nothing of planting a vineyard in their grounds.  Their vineyard may be tiny but they’ve done things properly, studying wine-making at Plumpton College – and getting award-winning English winemaker Sam Linter (of Bolney Estate in Sussex) to make their wine.

The wine is a blend of the traditional three varieties used in Champagne:  Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.  The 2008, their first commercial release, spent nearly four years on the lees (ie ageing in the cellar post-fermentation), which is a key quality element for any traditional method sparkling wine.  The north-east facing site ensures marked citrus acidity in the wine, along with great length and persistence of flavour.

Sybilla is not a fan of the moniker “English sparkling wine” and favours Quintessence as a more evocative term which could be used instead.  Attempts have been made in the past to get winemakers to unite around names like Britagne (a non-starter if you ask me), but now that the Duchess of Cornwall herself has derided the term “English sparkling wine”, perhaps the time is ripe to make a change.

If you would like to suggest a new, more snappy name for English sparkling wine, please get in touch with me, heather@redwhiteandrose.co.uk.  It could be the start of something big.

In the meantime, it’s fingers crossed for fine, warm and dry weather for the next few weeks, so that in due course we can taste the sweet rewards of our mast year.

Do wine and music mix?

If you tune in to Classic fm on a Sunday afternoon between now and Christmas your ears will be massaged by the unmistakeable and mellifluous tones of Simon Callow (he of Four Weddings fame) as he embarks on a musical travelogue. The plummy voiced actor and writer (I specify, lest there be any confusion with the high-waisted trouser wearing creator of X Factor, Simon Cowell) plays a selection of classical music tunes, focusing on a particular part of the world each week.

Thanks for the tip, you're thinking, but what, prey, is the connection with wine? At points along his musical journey, Simon Callow makes mention of a suitable glass of wine to have to hand as you listen to the music. Laithwaite's, the wine merchant, is the sponsor of the programme, dubbed Tasting Notes, and listeners can order a taste-along case of wines mentioned in the programme.

Last week listeners travelled, virtually, through Hungary and enjoyed some of the best known pieces of music to emerge from that country, with a recommendation of a glass of a Laithwaite's Hungarian Pinot Grigio to accompany them. In the second half of the program Simon moved on to a tour of Spain, a glass of Navarra rosé in hand.

The thinking behind the show's format is that listening to an appropriate piece of music can enhance the experience of drinking a particular glass of wine – and a glass of wine can certainly enhance one's listening pleasure. What of the science of it? Well, there isn't any really, but there is no arguing with music's ability to alter our consciousness; to heighten the senses. I know that certain songs have the ability to transport me to a certain time and place from my past. And if drinking wine isn't in some way altering our consciousness, then we must be doing it wrong.

Classical music and wine is all very well, but what if you're a bit more low brow and popular culture in your tastes? I have to confess to being something of a classical music numpty; my collection comprising the predictable mixture of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Mozart's Requiem and a couple of operas.

Listening to Classic fm this week, however, has inspired me to try out my version of music and wine matching, but based on my own musical tastes.

There are myriad theories about how to match wines with food: from matching the flavours and “weight” of the dishes you are eating with your wine selection, to using the wine instead to create a contrast and to somehow “cut through” the food flavours, and many more in between. I've taken inspiration from this clearly unscientific approach to come up with my own wine and music matches.

If you are listening to Coldplay (and I understand that some people do) and wish to embrace the idea of matching the feel of the music to the wine, then you might pair the banal ubiquity of Chris Martin and his merry men with a corresponding wine. And nothing says banal ubiquity in wine terms like Pinot Grigio. However, the two together sound like a recipe for narcolepsy, so it might be safer instead to choose a wine that will act as an antidote to the whale music and go for something bracing, zesty and full of life – a bone dry Clare Valley Riesling from Australia springs to mind.

Drinking anything with a sparkle, but most especially Champagne, betokens celebration. But sometimes you don't have anything to celebrate particularly, but fancy the Champagne anyway. For such an occasion, the jaunty nihilism of The Smiths' “There is a light that never goes out” feels right:

If a double-decker bus crashes into us,

to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.

Or if the thought of a violent death, even when accompanied by so much jolly, jangly guitar, is too much of a downer, then a more conventional music choice might be Badly Drawn Boy's up-beat “All Possibilities”.

Is there a style of music that harmonises naturally with red wines, which are surely what most of us crave at this dark and cold time of the year? For me the rich velvet tones of Nina Simone suggest a glass of something red and robust. Nina spent her final years in the south of France, so a drop of complex, rich and powerful Châteauneuf-du-Pape would be a fitting candidate.

There are of course, many songs which mention wine and drinking which suggest an obvious link between music and wine. Popular though singing about drinking may be, it is not without its pitfalls. Joni Mitchell's boast that:

I could drink a case of you

And still be on my feet

on her classic album, Blue, would surely fall foul nowadays of sensible drinking guidelines. Perhaps she should have gone on to specify that she meant a case of alcohol free beer. Likewise the popular Cockney sing-along “Roll out the barrel” might need to be modified along the lines of:

Roll out the barrel

We'll have a barrel of fun.

Roll out the barrel

We've got the blues on the run.

Just 2 units for women

And 3-4 for the men.

No binge drinking from the barrel

For the gang's all here.

And Ricky Martin, in Livin' la Vida Loca describes the song's temptress thus:

She never drinks the water and makes you order French Champagne.

French Champagne? Does he not know that the body charged with protecting the Champagne name spends many Euros every year to ensure we only ever apply it to sparkling wine made in the approved method within the designated Champagne region in France? Ricky, you may be an expert on Latin-tinged pop, but when it comes to understanding the French Appellation Contrôlée system, you have A LOT to learn.

Simon Callow's Tasting Notes programme runs until 23^rd December on Sunday afternoons from 3-5pm.