A Current Taste for Champagne
Champagne served in Coupette glasses
By Emily Harman
It is really exciting that we live in a transient time, the everyday person on the street is more open to experiencing the new and happy to move away from but also return back to tradition. Champagne is classic wine choice for most, it conjures up feelings of celebration and occasion and for over 200 years it has been received as a very special wine that is associated with grandeur, festivity and extravagance. The Champagne flute is almost as notorious and since the 1930s, it has been common practice for a long time to see the two together.
But what is happening in Champagne today? Over the last decade especially ,Champagne has had a bit of a shake down. There are now a healthy sized handful of conscientious growers - who are looking after their vines and the soil they grow in. Their tiny parcels of vines are being farmed organically and even biodynamically in some cases. Working this way can be dismissed by larger producers in the region who claim, this is impossible in such a marginal climate, where growers are constantly battling with the climate.
These growers work on a small scale, Vincent Laval (Champagne Georges Laval), works his 3 hectares of vine by hand and horse throughout the year. All his wines are made by hand in the cellar, with bottles being riddled by hand also. Vincent and other like minded producers are picking their grapes when they are ripe so the base wine for their Champagne is full of character and a lot more flavour. Further to this, less dosage is added so the expression of the wine is really tasted. These Champagnes offer complexity and unique personality.
The Grand Marques are still striving to achieve excellence through their brand styles and still remain with a strong foothold with the world of Champagne, producers such as Krug, Ruinart, Pol Roger and Salon are still highly respected and well received on the global market.
What else is changing? Along with the new revolution of 'Growers Champagne' that has spiked the interest of many wine professionals and enthusiasts, the vessel in which we serve our fizz is something that has been slowly evolving. Many cocktail bars there has been a push back to using the Coupette glass for both cocktails and Champagne, this is something that has spread to a number of restaurants. In the Sommelier world, we have long moved away from the Coupette and now the flute. What has taken their place?
The standard white wine glass from well respected glass manufacturers such as Riedel and Zalto has stepped in the Champagne flutes shoes. With the understanding that many of the wines from Champagne offer a complexity of aroma and flavour that is simply lost in the shape of most flutes. A white wine glass is considered more suitable than a red wine glass, due to the fact that the wider width of a red glass means that a larger surface area would result in a faster loss of carbonation!
Being served your favourite glass of bubbles in a wine glass can be a surprise, but purely for the enjoyment of flavour - it's well worth a try!
Searchers of Purity and Lovers of Fine Burgundy
by Emily Harman
In so many conversations with other wine folk over the past twelve months, there is an increasing concern for the future of Burgundy – mother nature has dealt some unscrupulous hands for the Burgundian Vigneron. There have been successive vintages yielding smaller and smaller crops (that’s not to say that the quality has also faltered!) due to various reasons but mostly the weather! The prices are increasing at such a rate that many many of our favourite producers are moving further and further from all our grasps. Is the fate of these coveted bottles that they will be hidden away from our unsatisfied palates and locked away into the darkest corners around the world?
What happens next for the Burgundy lover? What will we ever be able to drink once we can no longer reach our favourite parcels of the Cote d’Or? As Oscar Wilde said ‘One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards’ – and true to those words, there is a winning alternative that I would like to share with you.
Picking Wild Strawberries with Julien Labet
When it comes to Burgundy I look for energy, purity, freshness and expression of both place and varietal. The vineyards of Burgundy are a patchwork quilt with each part offering its own personality. This makes it so easy for any lover of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to attempt to unravel all the distinct differences -and expression from each little piece of the Burgundian puzzle.
As with Burgundy, Jura offers a plethora of mineral rich soils, the ace of the pack being the blue and grey Limestone Marl that protrudes through the surface of vineyards in the highly prized Chateau Chalon. Further to this, Jura has remained untouched by the Global market trends, to such an extent that the humble and warm growers rarely saw a visitor from outside of Jura (let alone France!), before the last decade. Years upon years of tradition are soaked into the culture and the winemaking styles. Tradition and culture is something I have always felt also contributes to the terroir of wine, the Sherry culture in Jerez is a great example of this.
In terms of quality comparable to Burgundy, it is also worth noting that some of France’s oldest Chardonnay vines belong to Jura, this is due to the fact that there was never enough money in this region to pull up old vines and replant with more productive clones - meaning many of the wines deliver a good level of intensity. Alongside this there are many growers such as Jean-Francois Ganevat and Julien Labet bottling up to and over 30 different cuvees – many showing different vineyards and different sites within particular vineyards – and better yet these vineyards often have different growers producing wine from the same site too. Sound familiar?
The climate is cooler here, so much so that in some vintages it can be a struggle for the grapes to ripen fully. Due to this, Jura wines offer relatively low alcohol levels, healthy acidity and oak is rarely new or dominant – this produces wines that are ethereal and pure. The use of sulphur, filtration and fining is at a minimum too. The winemaking style does fluctuate between heavily oxidative styles (that lean close to the style of a dry Sherry), to ‘topped up’ styles that bring a clear expression of fruit, the latter offer all the expression of site as well as the minerality and power you would expect from Burgundy but for around half the price.
Whilst the wines from Burgundy are irreplaceable and there will always be that part of our hearts that yearns for them. Next time you consider ordering your glass of Premier Cru, why not consider a bottle from Jura as it is likely to be selling for the same price. Given the choice, I know which hand I would be playing…
Arbois, Jura
VinaLupa
Thoughts and thinking
A Corked Martini by Emily Harman
For anyone who enjoys a glass of wine, a ‘corked; wine is something rather unpleasant and for wine lovers and professionals - it is the plague. Many spoilt bottles have angrily been poured down the sink at home and rejected at the table of a restaurant.
Corked - what does this mean? Most people know the term but there is a misapprehension about what it actually means. Cork taint is one of the most common faults in wine, leaving the contents of the bottle smelling musty and most commonly of ‘wet cardboard’ aromas, rendering that glass or bottle undrinkable and subject for return.
Cork Taint comes from a chemical compound known as Trichloroanisole or TCA. TCA is produced when naturally occurring airborne fungi and bacteria are introduced with chlorinated phenolic compounds - these chlorophenols can come from impurities found in wood preservatives and pesticides but also in some other processes involve chlorine such as bleaching, washing to sterilise different items. In the case of wine, this is due to the washing of corks in chlorinated water for hygiene.
After seven years of working with wine and the tasting of thousands of bottles each year - the wretched smell of TCA is forever ingrained in my flavour memory. So you can imagine my dismay when I ordered my gin martini with a twist and it smells of that signature musty cardboard corked note! An initial thought that the bottle of gin was corked was soon eliminated - the bartender made me another martini from the same bottles, but this time it was perfect. The only alteration being a new twist of lemon. Can a lemon be corked? I began to look into the journey of the lemon from tree to cocktail.
At many citrus fruit orchards - once the citrus has been picked, it is transported to the packinghouse and placed onto a conveyer belt outside or inside which transports it to be cleaned and packed.
The fruit is either conveyed under sprays of chlorinated water or in other packinghouses the fruit is dumped into a bath of water - again often these wet dumps are often chlorinated.
Photo by Simon Conigliaro
This is done to destroy any spores that could contaminate the fruit handling equipment and prevent the spread of these. The extensive use of chlorine in the sanitation of citrus packinghouses means that the occasional lemon can be found with TCA on its skin.
More surprisingly than a corked lemon - turning our favourite cocktails corked, is that this remains almost completely unknown to the bartenders of the world. But as with a corked bottle of wine there is not much that can be done with the skin of any these lemons or any other ‘corked’ citrus.
It may be worth smelling the skin of any citrus fruit intended for the glass of any loyal martini drinker.