Diploma of Wine Association in Ireland

I gather from a recent Wine Board of Ireland mailing that there are 255 WSET Diploma holders in our fair isle. It's a good number. I'm fairly sure that I'm number 2! No 1 was awarded in 1987. The Wine Board has asked us all whether we wouldn't mind paying a bit of hard cash to have a bit of a hook up and a celebratory 21st reunion.

I don't mind so long as its a nominal charge. But what's the real point of it all? This is the first comm I've had since I passed my exam 20 years ago! It's been a long and silent time. Why would anyone then put 255 of us into a room (that we've paid for) and say - talk to each other. It's not why I took the exam in the first place. I took it to improve myself and to develop the trade that I was a part of. 21 years later and the only thing the Wine Board can come up with is cheap night on the town.

About eighteen years ago a small bunch of us Dip WSET holders set up our own Association. There weren't many of us then! Our aim was to continue to build on the bank of knowledge we had recently gained; to keep in touch with new graduates; to keep in contact with course notes; to conduct Diploma standard tastings on a regular basis. The Wine Board closed us down because we were using a name that we were not entitled to!

Interestingly a small band of similarly minded grads a few years later set up tasting club called the Dipsos and there was no objection. What's in a name?

I can think of a number of companies who would be willing to sponsor our night out; I can think of a host of companies who would be willing to sponsor an on going and relevant Association. Wine Board however doesn't seem to 'get' this as being useful to itself! As if 'itself' is the point.

I was on the verge of opening a dialogue with the Wine Board as I dutifully replied with a couple of questions such as what exactly is the WBI CPD referred to in the email? The response was,

'Thanks for all the very helpful replies and my sincere apologies if I didn’t reply personally – over 140 emails went out and while I haven’t received responses from all I got loads more than expected. Out of 255 graduates I now have emails for 159 so nearly there.

I’m away for the next few days judging in Germany but will be in contact next week.

This is polite, if a bit of an auto reply, and I'm holding my breath. I just hope it isn't for another 20 years!

Slow Food Fast Wine

I have a genuine gra for both Febvre of Ireland and for the Slow Food Ireland. Febvre is a quality wine importer/distributor and gra (with an accent on the 'a' which I can't find here - pronounced graw) is Irish and can be taken to mean affection rather than the literal Love!

I have difficulty with the fact the Slow guys have given Febvre exclusive rights to be the only allowed drinks sponsor of the Slow Movement. This seems to me to be unfair to other companies who want to help out but is penal to wine companies who specialise in organic and biodynamic wines.

I say penal because they have aligned their total business with slow food principles of production. Febvre has not. In fact some of Febvre's list is so fast its a wonder the grapes made it to the winery before the wine was made at all!! There is nothing wrong with these wines or indeed the list. They're just not Slow.

Febvre represents many wine makers who espouse Slow principles. Laudable indeed but not worthy of being allowed to take over the branding of the Slow Food Ireland. That's akin to saying that Tesco is a Fair Trade Supermarket Chain! Every Little Helps I suppose but surely Febvre is supposed to be helping the Slow Food Movement and not the other way around.

Release the embargo I say. Allow the flood gates to open. Let the games begin and let any wine company who represents a slow wine producer be associated with Slow Food Ireland.

Superquinn for Anyone?

Reports in the newspapers suggest that Superquinn will most likely be sold off if a suitable buyer is found. I suppose there's one waiting in the wings already. It won't be an Irish buyer. What a shame.

I can remember when Superquinn decided to make a feature of its wine range. They employed Michael Donlon as their buyer. He came from their own ranks and astutely followed Fergal Quinn's peculiar born again with a smile mantra where suppliers were effectively forced to smile while they were asked to bend over. Happy, giggly times.

The wine range was forced into order just as the Irish began to drink the stuff. Quality was important and Donlon passed his WSET Diploma in the mid eighties at an opportune time. Direct and exclusive shipments were arranged when their competitors were still trying to work out what a super market actually was. Heady days.

Then it all went wrong. Fergal didn't seem to be making money any longer. The smile was thinned, wine department managers were offered redundancy and the wine range was weeded out. In less than a year two decades of knowledge, enthusiasm and trust were thrown out the window. A new gang bought the gaff and as they are 'Property Developers' everyone seems to thinks its alright, that they're only there for the short haul and that it'll be business as usual once a new buyer is found. Well no, that's not the way the wine department has gone in the recent past and it won't be good for it with a change over to UK ownership in the near future.

The Irish palate is discernibly if subtly different to its UK counterpart. We never took to HP sauce as they did and our pork sausages and traditional breakfast are just very different beasts to anything found over the pond. It would be a boring world if we were the same as they are anyway! We don't seem to take to residual sugars as much as the UK palate does and in general we like a traditional structure to our less expensive wines while in the UK they just seem to like any old thing. I'm not saying we are better but I am saying we are different.

Seeing as we only started drinking wine as a nation a long time after the UK then I have to conclude that our trade has done a fine job of ploughing its own furrow rather than be enslaved to a British model. As we have seen Superquinn played a major part in this development. So it would be a genuine shame to see it all undone in the end by selling their wine shelves to another UK multiple.

We have the cheap end well looked after by the Germans. We have the UK style well serviced by Tesco and Marks and Sparks. Quality and a whole lot more is driven by Dunnes Stores while Super Valu/Centra seem keen to give us boring bulk. Whoever comes along should give us what's often missing - excitement and individuality. Now I know why Superquinn suppliers were bending over with a smile! It was an exciting and a very personal trade. They will be missed by a trade striving for uniqueness but ultimately giving in to homogeneity and internationalism. What will that do for our palate I wonder?

Supermarket Wine - Fact or Fiction?

It's not too long since I was happy that the Irish supermarkets served up drivel and called it wine. The really great thing was that they didn't know the difference between a good 'un and a bad 'un. Long may it continue I intoned. At the time I was an independent retailer!

There used to be value in tastings called the Supermarket Dozen or some such title. It was actually possible to define a sector of the trade as being 'supermarket' rather than being 'the wine trade'. God, I hope we weren't just being pompous-git snobs! No. I don't think so. There was some real and true 'piss in the bottle' being served up by the trolley load.

A lot of this was being distributed rather than being imported directly. A mere twenty years ago the distributor margin on wine was a lot higher than the retailers one was. A good wine store might have hoped to take maybe 17% off the shelf. The Supers were happy with 15%! So, we had distributors bringing in plonk from Italy, Spain and France, taking a margin in the high twenties telling our major retailers that this was as good as it got.

Things changed. Times changed. Wines changed.

First out of the bag was good and dependable wine from Chile and Australia. Second was that these were being branded; they were price competitive and sold according to the varietal they were made from. For the super markets this was a bit like finding satsumas in the off season. It was as novel as fresh bananas all the year round. Not only that but they could import their own! Yes. They were free to explore the margin disparity.

Today all of our multiple retailers import a selection of the wine they sell. They extract at least 25% off the shelf on special and upwards of 35% otherwise! Distributor margins are now in the teens. Odd as it sounds I believe the trade is healthier than ever.

A good example of this was a Dunne's Store press tasting last week. They were announcing a major Bordeaux campaign for late summer. The wines were very impressive, well chosen and very well priced. They had their heavyweights and suits there to impress us with their level of commitment and knowledge. In short they are now the full package. They are making tons of dosh out of wine and long may it continue. After all there would appear to be a linear relationship between the amount of money they are making and their ability to lower prices!! In the meantime they have finally understood (mind you I have my doubts with some of the second label out of Nugan through SuperValu!) what constitutes good and well chosen wine. It's easy to do this out of Chile. But out of Bordeaux!?

So, is there really a 'Supermarket Dozen' in Ireland any longer? I don't think so. We increased our wine importing last year by a healthy 7.2% and the supermarkets sold about 70% of the 9million cases brought in. It's as good a sector as any of the others now.

Let's go with the 'Cheapest Dozen' in the future or maybe the 'Super Selection' because the days are long gone when the Supermarket Dozen gave us all a good old bellylaugh and we asked ourselves will they ever catch on, at all, at all?

They have and they're here to stay.

Colour in Wine: Stimulant and Depressant

I want to keep posting this month. This is a reworked piece which I originally wrote for http://www.bookit.ie/ It's a restaurant booking site here in Ireland. Every month they allow me to write a short piece on whatever comes in to my head! Brave them. Lucky me!

We are surrounded by colour. We are influenced by colour. It affects us emotionally; it can be a stimulant and a depressant; it can lead to love, greed or luck. We buy cars based on colour, we design houses around colourful ideas and we choose our partners based on inbuilt colour preconceptions. But when it comes to wine we are still locked into believing that there are only three colours involved – Red, White and Rosé! Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Colour for wine comes from the skin of the grape. All grape skins have some colour. Winemakers choose how much, if any at all, they want to extract into the finished wine. So called ‘white’ grapes very often contain quite lot of colour pigment and may even be noticeably spotty after they have ripened. Their ‘red’ equivalents vary from light pink all the way through to deep purple.

The skin of the grape also contains tannins which give the finished wine dryness and a tough texture. It doesn’t stop there! Just below the skin there is an area which contains the ‘twin sisters’ of the final bouquet – the ethers and the esters.

If a wine maker doesn’t want any colour at all he takes the skins off the grapes before he ferments the juice. He might want to maximise the bouquet elements and so might allow the grapes to stay with their skins for a few hours. He’ll do this at a low temperature so that fermentation doesn’t start and to minimise the tannic effect – no one wants their white wines to have a tough dry texture! Sometimes you will find wines that have been left too long ‘soaking’ on their skins. They smell like Hubba Bubba chewing gum and have a tight dry finish!!

Unless Champagne is labelled Blanc de Blancs it will have been made from a blend of two red grape – Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir, and one white grape Chardonnay. These grapes are picked by hand, as opposed to a machine, to keep their skins intact and to avoid colour bleeding into the grape must. The Champenoise crush their grapes in basket presses which are carefully controlled to squeeze out juice without releasing colour. It’s a tremendous skill and a fabulous sight.

As white wine ages it ‘takes on colour’. It’s a process called maderisation and makes the wine go a shade or two deeper. If a white wine is in poor condition it might age prematurely and take on this same aged hue. When white wines are aged in oak they can take on a colour but the yellowing associated with oak ageing is on the whole associated with cheap short-cuts where oak chips have been used rather than whole barrels.

Some white wines will have a distinct green tinge when they are young. This usually indicates a cool climate of origin or indeed may indicate certain grape types such as Riesling. As they age they tend to lose this youthful greenness. Other whites may been made into dessert styles with a lot of residual and unfermented sugars left in them. Depending on how generous these sugars are they may display a golden hue right into their centres. As they grow older the maderised effect is stronger in wines like these.

When a wine maker sets out to make a red wine he needs to determine how much colour he wants from the grape as opposed to how much tannin the finished product can handle. It can be quite a balancing act. In traditional Barolo wines from Piedmont in the North of Italy they used to extract so much tannin that they needed to age the wines for up to twenty years in giant wooden barrels called ‘bottes’ just to get the wine into a drinkable state. In the meantime a lot of the original colour dropped out!

If the grape skin is allowed to bleed colour into the ferment for a few hours only, and is then taken off the grape, very little colour will end up in the finished wine. This is how rosé styles are made. Some grapes however have a lot of colour in their skins and some have very little. Some have a lot of tannin while others are destitute of the same. A good wine maker will make all of this work to his advantage. It allows him to produce wine true to the grape and the region it came from. Thus Cabernet Sauvignon with its tough and well coloured skin may show vibrant opaque purple in its youth and venerable brick red as it ages. Pinot Noir on the other hand will be lighter in colour and softer in its tannins.

Red wines ‘drop’ colour as they age. Perversely the colour pigment combines with the tannins and spiral downwards as the deposit! It makes sense then that white wines seldom throw a deposit, some red wines do throw one while others don’t. It’s all to do with colour!

Don’t rush into the bouquet and palate of a wine without taking time to note its colour. It’s a good indication of the health, vigour and age of the wine. It often gives us a clue to the path travelled thus far by the wine - where it comes from and how it was made. Colour can give us an idea of how competent the wine maker is and at its extreme it can show us where the wine will travel to next in its ageing wanderings.

Colour in wine is romantic and sensual. It guides us into the heart and the history of a bunch of grapes, a whole bunch of people and endless depths of ripening and passionate commitment to your enjoyment.

Marathon du Medoc

In four weeks time Kieran Towey, Bren Smith and myself will run the Marathon du Medoc. The idea came to us at a tasting I gave to Kieran's Silver Granite Wine Club last Christmas. It seemed like a good idea at the time!

Bren is a runner. In fact I think he's one of those who should possibly be avoided unless you are uber fit, young and bursting with energy! It's the sort of thing my memories are made of. It's the sort of thing I hadn't really considered last Christmas.

The race is run along a twisting collection of lanes and avenues through Pauillac. It actually touches at least fifty different vineyards and runs through many of them. There are tasting tables set up for the runners (optional!) and along the route there are countless opportunities to taste every form of local produce from oysters to croissants. Well, so I'm told and so I'm hoping.

Our two chosen charities, The Diabetes Federation of Ireland and DAFA (Direct Aid for Africa) have been well supported thus far by the Irish wine trade. We are very pleased.

I will write up the race and its association/relevance to the wine trade of Bordeaux in a couple of press columns I have lined up.

But are we runners? Well Kieran and I are happy to use the time honoured phrase we are competing to complete. I expect Bren will post a time! Mind you completion must be achieved within a six and half hour window.

I'll keep you posted. I'll leave out the busted knees and injuries bits. After all who cares? It's all about the wine and the fun and the people. I look on it as a facet of the trade that few explore where a whole bunch of people have been coming together for a very long time and using wine as an international tool of communication. Sure, commerce comes first, especially out of Bordeaux, but the message has been long delivered that unless we actually meet and talk and chat over a bottle of wine it becomes a fairly pointless drink.

This September 8,500 of us will run towards the finishing line where the craic won't necessarily be in winning an achievement medal but will be in receiving the bottle of wine!

Gold Stars for IDL - Noffla Irish Wine Show 2008 - IDL Takeover

An amazing result this year. Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard scooped eight out of the fifteen Gold Star NOFFLA Awards (National Off Licence Association)!!!

In Kieran Tobin's (IDL Pernod Ricard) acceptance speech he made the point that "this wasn't a takeover of NOFFLA". Well it's as close as you'll get to a take over of the Christmas Shelves as NOFFLA members (about 350) are expected to support all of the prize winning wines.

Wine awards can be dangerous toys to play with. They don't always achieve the desired or indeed expected outcome. In the case of the Gold Star Awards they are supposed to highlight an impressive depth of quality across price points on the Independents shelves. By association, other shelves, such as the multiple grocers', are not supposed to look so good. This year we have a multinational who supports the multiples to the hilt taking control of the Independents' awards! Great stuff indeed. How did it happen?

Well, for a start it was clearly an honest competition. But what does that mean? The judging panel was composed of NOFFLA members who are either members of the Champagne Academy - (you get into this by selling lots of Champagne and then being nominated by your buddies in the trade); WSET Higher Certificate (It's a good qualification but generally not recognised as being sufficient to be a show judge of wines); and the WSET Diploma - excellent qualification but seriously deficient as a tasting qualification after the event as there are no follow up courses offered or available. So a Diploma holder can go fifteen years without tasting a wine blind but be invited to judge in this competition).

So far there is nothing wrong with the panel make up. Indeed We are not saying there is anything at all wrong with the result of the competition either. It's just we are trying to understand the result. In previous years the results were varied across different importing portfolios - I don't think the Academy or the Higher Cert were sufficient to allow you to judge in previous years. I may be wrong. I'll check it out.

Honesty and objectivity are two very different beasts. The former does not require experience! In wine judging the latter demands it. Put two hundred non professionals into a room and ask them to blind taste and judge the wines submitted to this years Gold Star Awards and I bet you the result will be as it came out. Put a bunch of professional wine judges into the same room and they will come up with a different and more balanced result.

IDL is a very professional bunch of people. They are bright enough to know, and would appear to have cottoned on to the fact that, you enter wines into this competition that you reckon will win rather than those that you either think should or those that you would like to win.

In his acceptance speech Kieran Tobin thanked his staff for putting so much time and effort into choosing the wine for the competition. Well done to IDL for giving them the time. He also mentioned that this was "good day out". Indeed it was.

Winning Wine was the impressive and predictable Domaine Long-Depaquit Chablis AC 2007

Here's my own favourite of the wines given a prize It's drinking beautifully.

List of prize winners:

OLD WORLD WHITE
Under €8
La Lanterne Sauvignon Blanc-Viognier 2007
Galvins Wines & Spirits

Under €14
Chateau Rauzan-Despagne 2007
Searsons Wine Merchants

Under €20
Domaine Long-Depaquit Chablis AC 2007
“Overall Award Winner” and “WINE OF THE YEAR 2008”
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard


OLD WORLD RED
Under €8
Fortant Merlot 2006
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

Under €14
Viña Herminia Crianza 2004
Galvins Wines & Spirits
Under €20
Campo Viejo Gran Reserva 2001
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

NEW WORLD WHITE

Under €8
Frontera Sauvignon Blanc 2007
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

Under €14

Jacob’s Creek Reserve Riesling 2007
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

Under €20
Montana Reserve Sauvignon Blanc 2007
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

NEW WORLD RED
Under €8
Frontera Cabernet Sauvignon 2007
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

Under €14
Babich Pinot Noir 2007
Ampersand

Under €20
George Wyndham Shiraz 2005
“RED WINE OF THE YEAR 2008”
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

ROSé
Under €15
Chateau Rauzan-Despagne 2007
Searsons Wine Merchants

CHAMPAGNE/SPARKLING WINE
Under €25
Codorníu Raventos NV
Barry Fitzwilliam Maxxium
Under €50
Champagne Louis Roederer Brut Premier NV
Searsons Wine Merchants