How do you hedge that?

No, I have not taken up answering horticultural queries.  This was a question posed by a merchant banker recently when I explained the risks involved in making great dessert wines such as Sauternes.

Wine growers in Sauternes, Tokaji in Hungary, Bonnezeaux and Vouvray in the Loire Valley, or indeed anywhere where the sweet wines depend on the development of botrytis cinerea (or noble rot) in order to attain their signature intensity and complexity, have an anxious time of it each harvest time.  Ideal conditions for noble rot combine morning mist with warm, sunny afternoons in the weeks leading up to harvest.

Filaments of botrytis cinerea fungus pierce thin-skinned grapes, such as Semillon and Chenin Blanc, resulting in loss of moisture from inside the grape, thereby increasing the concentration of sugar and acids, relative to the water content – but the same is true for grapes left to shrivel on the vine.  What makes noble rot so special is that it also leads to chemical changes within the grape which, rather than spoiling the flavour and making it taste mouldy, lead to the development of an array of additional flavours ranging from barley sugar to marmalade.     

In order for the beneficial effects to happen, botrytis cinerea  needs to affect ripe, healthy grapes.  Unripe or damaged grapes will go on instead to develop regular bunch rot, which will only spoil, rather than enhance flavours.  And healthy grapes can also be affected by bunch rot, rather than the noble kind.  While a small percentage of rotten berries in white wine will not affect the flavour (as I witnessed this September in Muscadet), because the grapes are immediately pressed and only the juice is fermented.  Any amount of rot (noble or not) in red wine can spell disaster for the wine, as the entire berry, mouldy skin and all, is required in the fermentation tank and the resulting wine is at risk of developing off-flavours and being undrinkable.

Almost as bad as the wrong kind of rot, is no noble rot.  Winemakers cannot legislate for noble rot and are subject to the weather delivering the goods at the right time in the ripening cycle.  If it doesn’t arrive in the vines, producers can make a late harvest dessert wine, or demi-sec style wine, but these will never have the complexity and age-worthiness of nobly rotten wines.

So, the right kind of rot pitches up at the right time, now you need to pick the grapes – sometimes individual bunches, sometimes individual berries affected by rot are picked.  Either way, several pickings or “tries” are needed to gather the grapes, adding to the expense of the process.

Since the grapes will have lost a great deal of moisture, yields will be incredibly low.  Whereas a grape vine might produce a single bottle of good quality dry wine (or perhaps 2-3 bottles of mass market wine), it will produce just a single glass of highly concentrated dessert wine. 

Finally, the winemaking is hardly a doddle.  Imagine trying to extract juice from a raisin and you begin to see the difficulty in pressing nobly rotten grapes.  The small amount of resulting juice is so high in sugar that fermentation is slow and can stop readily – a problem known as stuck fermentation.

Given all the trouble that goes into making them (if they can be made at all), these wines are really woefully underpriced and underappreciated.  It’s a wonder anyone carries on doing it – how do you hedge that indeed?  Perhaps the only logical answer is, "By having already made a fortune as a merchant banker."

When everything goes right – some recommended wines where botrytis plays a part:

The FMC Chenin Blanc 2011 - £24.50 from Great Western Wine, also available via independent merchants

This is not a dessert wine, but late harvesting of the grapes and inclusion of some botrytised Chenin Blanc berries makes for a rich, complex, off-dry style of wine.  Fermented using natural yeasts in new French oak barrels and left on the lees for 12 months, this has flavours of apple, quince, a hint of honey and hay that begins with a rich hit of ripe fruit, but finishes clean with piercing acidity.

Château Climens

2013 is unlikely to go down as a great vintage for red Bordeaux wines, but their loss could be Sauternes’ gain.  The warm and humid weather which arrived in late September provided ideal conditions for the rapid spread of botrytis, inimical to red wine quality and forcing many growers to pick red grapes earlier than they would have liked.  But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and makers of sweet wines in the region were treated to an early and rapid spread of noble rot among their vines.  2013 could be a Sauternes vintage to watch out for when it arrives on the market in a couple of years’ time.

If money were no object Château d’Yquem would be my everyday Sauternes.  However, back in the real world, my favourite Sauternes is Château Climens – technically it’s from Barsac, the region adjoining Sauternes, but growers there are entitled to use the better known name of Sauternes.  Owner Bérénice Lurton manages to produce wines that are intensely sweet, yet beautifully drinkable, with elegant, smoky complexity.  While you wait for the 2013 to arrive, you can pick up a half bottle of the 2010 for around £70.

Château de Fesles Bonnezeaux 2010

Fesles is one of the most highly regarded producers in Bonnezeaux,  in the Anjou region of the Loire.  Early morning mist rising from the Layon river in late summer can create the ideal conditions for the development of noble rot, as it did here in 2010.  This is lusciously sweet with huge concentration and a feeling of stoniness as well as flavours of stone fruit.  It will age beautifully.  This vintage seems to be hard to find in the UK, but other botrytis vintages can be found, including the 1999, £26.96 for a 50cl bottle from Vintner’s Selection.  About half the grapes were affected by botrytis, the rest were late harvest, shrivelled berries.  It has a heady nose of honey, toast and quince, with luscious baked fruit on the palate.

Dew drops on roses and whiskers on kittens? These are a few of my favourite (sweet) things

As well as drinking more and, generally, better wines than we do for the rest of the year, Christmas is also traditionally a time when, for reasons best known to ourselves, we decide that a bottle of some luridly-coloured liqueur will be just the thing to make the festive season go with a swing.

Oh the bottles of fluorescent green Midori or sickly Chartreuse that must be languishing at the back of cupboards since someone last touched them, sometime in the 1980s. Only undiscriminating underage drinkers or last gasp partygoers searching for the final drop of alcohol in the house at 5am would surely submit to them now.  Or am I tarring you all with the brush of my own experiences?

While the word liqueur can be used to cover a multitude of sickly sweet sins, there are drinks that can be sugary without being saccharine.

Vedrenne’s Supercassis Crème de Cassis (£8.50 from Waitrose for a 50cl bottle)

This is what Ribena really ought to taste like.  Bursting with true blackcurrant aromas and with a lusciously sweet palate of lingering fruit flavours, it’s the liqueur drinker’s liqueur.  Crème de cassis is traditionally used to perk up a very ordinary dry white wine, to make Kir – or Kir Royale if you are using sparkling wine.  A little cassis goes a long way and just a dribble should give you enough blackcurrant flavour to balance out the dryness and acidity of the wine.  Too much and you will end up with wine-flavoured squash.

If you ever come across a bottle of Crème de Cassis’ sister liqueur, Crème de Mûre, made from blackberries, then snap it up.  The more musky aromas make for an intriguing twist on Kir.  And incidentally both these liqueurs make great flavourings for anyone trying their hand at homemade chocolate truffles this Christmas – but make sure the kids keep their mits off them!

Port and Sherry

There are some things that I will never be old enough for:  shopping in Country Casuals or seriously considering a cruise holiday spring to mind.  Drinking these styles of fortified wines seems to be something we only adopt in our later years.  The average age of the UK Sherry or Port drinker remains stubbornly high, but I’ve been an out and proud fan of them for many years.

Gonzalez Byass Matusalem Oloroso Dulce – around £18 for a half bottle from Waitrose, Majestic, selected Tesco’s and various independents

Dry sherries are having a bit of a moment, to use frightful mediaspeak.  The sweet ones, though, are unfairly viewed as practically toxic and fit only for the cooking, or unfavoured relatives. 

I urge you to surrender to the unctuous charms of this fine example of lusciously sweet Oloroso.  This spicy, treacly, umami-rich mouthful is the essence of Christmas, in a glass.

For eleven and a half months of the year, nary a drop of Port passes our lips.  But, come the latter half of December, we go mad for the stuff.  Christmas isn’t Christmas without a bottle of Port in the house.

The biggest selling style in the UK is the most basic, ruby Port – though the Port producers tend to dress them up with names like Special Reserve.  This is fine for a quick snifter, or wicked (in more ways than one) in mulled wine, but for something to linger over I’d recommend searching out a Tawny Port.

Tawnies spend more of their life in barrel than other kinds of Port and, as a result, lose that dense purple colour and take on shades of mahogany and chestnut brown.  The flavours change too:  nuts, spices and preserved fruit come to the fore.  The most readily available style is 10 year old, which is an average age of the wines in the blend.

Taylor’s 10 Year Old Tawny – widely available from £22 a bottle

Taylor’s could be regarded as the most conservative Port house, as they alone among the Port shippers have held out against the trend of making still table wines from the famous Port-producing vineyards in Portugal’s Douro Valley.  They prefer to stick to what they know and do best and this 10 year old is a great advertisement for the style. 

Aromas of spice, glacé and morello cherry greet you, with nuts joining the party on the palate.  The preserved fruit flavours last in the mouth, with the alcohol (it is fortified, so 20%) providing mellow warmth.

Warre’s Otima 10 Year Old Tawny – widely available, but currently £10 for a 50cl bottle in Waitrose

This is a complete contrast in packaging and approach: a tall, clear glass bottle and an encouragement to serve it chilled – even over ice.

Serving it cool lessens the sense of sweetness and makes it a refreshing after dinner choice.

Wine-based drinks

I am, I admit, generally rather sniffy about ready mixed drinks involving wine.  Whoever thought up the idea of selling ready mixed Buck’s Fizz had clearly decided this was more profitable than their previous business peddling snake oil.  Come on people!  It’s cheap fizzy wine and orange juice, mixed – how hard can it be, even sleep deprived and hungover on Christmas morning?  A bottle of cheap Cava and really good orange juice are easy to find and infinitely more delicious than the sickly sweet ready mixed supermarket stuff that I’ve tried.  And don’t go kidding yourself that pre-mixed versions constitute one of your five a day either.

Sainsbury’s Williams Pear Fizz - £3.99

Like all zealots, there had to come a moment when my belief that pre-mixed drinks are evil stuff would be challenged.  Despite myself, I was won over by this spooky-sounding “aromatised wine cocktail”.  This mixture of Chenin Blanc wine and Williams pear juice is fun, sweet, fizzy, bursting with really pear-y pear fruit and is just 4% alcohol.  How can you resist?

Next time – normal service will be resumed and I’ll get back to recommending wines for the festive period.

Fifty Shades...and other guilty pleasures

I don’t need to fill you in on the subject matter of the Fifty Shades series of novels I’m sure.  In any case I haven’t read any of them so, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I will not pretend that I have, even for the purposes of an almost entirely spurious wine-based pastiche of the guilty pleasure genre.

Sometimes I want to read something challenging, absorbing, demanding and densely written which will stay with me long after the book has been finished.  Other times I just want a page-turner to while away a few hours:  it will grip at the time but I’ll barely remember having read it in a few days.

When choosing what to eat, sometimes I will relish the prospect of spending time in the kitchen, lavishing attention on what I hope will be a delicious result.  At other times, a takeaway curry will do nicely thank you.

I think you get the drift here. 

Drinking wine should always be a sensory pleasure, but sometimes it is also an involving, almost intellectual exercise.  I have enjoyed some of Bordeaux’s finest wines, and at their very best they can offer an almost transcendent drinking experience.  But equally they can have an austerity that requires attention and appreciation from the drinker.  What I’m saying is that I do have to be in the mood to appreciate them.

When I don’t want to make that effort, what do I reach for?  What is my wine equivalent of a few pages of Fifty Shades?

Sweet and bubbly

Liking sweet wines does feel like an intellectual failing – these are wines for the novice and the young; a childish appetite that should have been lost along the way to becoming a fully functioning adult.  Sweet AND bubbly – well, I can practically feel the noses being looked down.

Moscato

I am not alone in my love for moscato, as it has become the fastest growing wine style in the US.  Sweet, fizzy, sometimes even pink to boot, it is the most unreconstructed of guilty pleasures.

Asti, in Italy, produces sparkling Asti by the lakeful (or, more accurately, tankful).  It used to be called Asti Spumante (meaning sparkling) but the spumante has now been dropped.  If Beverly of Abigail’s Party were going to offer you something fizzy, it would surely have been this.

Regular Asti, with its sweet, fizzy grapiness is great for sloshing onto a fruit salad, but it does have a slightly more well-groomed, but still fun-loving cousin in Moscato d’Asti.

Moscato d’Asti is usually made by smaller producers, in a rather more artisan way.  It is still sweet and fizzy; in fact it is often higher in sugar than regular Asti, though it doesn’t taste it.  It is more lightly sparkling and has wonderful aromas and flavours of ripe pear.  Allied to low alcohol, this is a great wine for rounding off a lunch party – with or without fruit salad.

Recommended moscatos (moscati for sticklers)

Moscato d’Asti 2011, Elio Perrone - £6.50 from The Wine Society

Just 5% alcohol means this is barely wine, but it has plenty of grapey, aromatic fruit to satisfy a sweet toothed wine lover.

Innocent Bystander Pink Moscato 2011/12 – around £6.50-6.99 for a 37.5ml bottle from slurp.co.uk, Guildford Wine Company

Not content with being sweet and fizzy, this adds being pink to its list of crimes against good taste.  A half-bottle with a beer bottle style crown cap it may be, but you won’t find many men propping up the bar with this in their hand.  No matter, they will miss out on the hints of rose petal and red fruit that burst out of this perfect picnic fizz.

Blanquette de Limoux

By the time the Champenois documented their method for making sparkling wines in the late 1600s, the locals of Limoux down in the Languedoc had been making wines with fizz for over a century.  Unfortunately they didn’t get a patent lawyer onto the case and it is Champagne that has become the global brand, rather than Blanquette de Limoux.

Most Blanquette de Limoux is dry, but there is a small production of sweet Blanquette de Limoux Méthode Ancestrale.  This “ancestrale” method involves a second fermentation in the bottle, like Champagne.  Unlike Champagne, some sweetness remains and the alcohol is lower.

Blanquette de Limoux Méthode Ancestrale NV - £9.50 from The Wine Society

The Mauzac grape used to make this has a real appley tang, making this taste like superior Appletiser for grown ups.  It may only be 6.5% alcohol, but probably best to keep an eye on the kids with this super quaffable stuff around.

Brachetto

Brachetto is not half of an Italian cross-dressing comedy duo, but the name of a grape.  This is a step further towards a red wine from the Pink Moscato above, but it is still light, frothy and sweet, with strawberry flavours.  I’ve recommended a fairly pricey and relatively serious (for the style) Brachetto here, but look out for cheaper versions too.

Contero Brachetto d’Acqui 2011 - £15.99 from Virgin Wines

Red fruits, rose petals and only 5.5% alcohol make this a fun fizz on its own, but you could try it with one of those pretty French patisserie glazed strawberry tarts or even as a foil to things chocolatey.

Just as man (or woman) cannot live by bread alone, or indeed read only the most edifying of literature, sometimes a little of what you fancy….well, you know the rest.