fine wine
‘A Sauvignon Blanc with a smell of cut grass and gooseberries is almost certainly from New Zealand’
Given that recognising the grape variety gives you no
clue as to where the wine came from, the only other clue available is the style of the wine. Suppose you recognise a Chardonnay wine, and it has a flinty, min- eral flavour with a dry finish and an almost gunsmoke aroma, you can reasonably guess a Chablis. If you recognise a Tempranillo grape with a lot of vanilla oak, it’s a fair bet that you’re drinking a Rioja. A Sauvignon Blanc with a smell of cut grass and gooseberries is almost certainly from New Zealand. These are exam- ples of where there’s a regional style, a kind of mutu- ally agreed consensus by the local wine-makers of what the wines of the region should taste like.
Regional style It isn’t a requirement under the wine laws to keep to a regional style; the laws apply to what grapes may be used, how they're pruned, the maximum yield per hectare and how long the wine should be aged before bottling. The wine-maker is at liberty to make the wine as he or she sees fit. I can remember blind-tasting a soft, fruity white wine and guessing a southern French Marsanne. It turned out to be labelled Chablis and couldn’t have been further from the generally accepted style of Chablis. Obviously a region’s micro-climate will have a big say
in the final wine, but there’s another variable in the wine-maker’s armoury that’s not so often spoken about, and that’s the yeast that’s used for fermenta- tion. Traditionally grapes were fermented with the naturally occurring yeasts that form a bloom on the grapes’ skins. Leaving the choice of yeasts to nature is a bit of a lottery – you could get yeasts that give pleas- ant flavours to the wine, or you could get varieties of yeasts like brettanomyces which give a really unpleas- ant taste to the fermented wine. Modern wine-makers don’t leave this to chance. They
sterilise the grapes to kill off the wild yeasts, then intro- duce a cultured yeast of their choice. The choice of which cultured yeast a wine-maker uses has a huge effect on the final wine. The intense grassy flavour of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc wines is entirely due to the yeasts that they use. It occurs to me that it would be a useful exercise to
try wines that are completely typical, that is, true to type.
80 Irish Director Spring 2011
Here are three great wines that fit that ‘true to type’ description:
Astrolabe Sauvignon Blanc, available from O’Briens, €15.99
A good example of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is Astrolabe, a well-made wine that is typical of the New Zealand style. Fresh, crisp and clean tasting, it’s the classic Antipodean Sauvignon Blanc.
Cono Sur Pinot Noir, available from
DrinkStore.ie, €9.99
Pinot Noir is a grape that makes some wonderful wines, especially in Burgundy. These are expen- sive wines, but there is an alternative. The Chilean wine-maker Adolfo Hurtado has made Pinot Noir his speciality in the Cono Sur vine- yard. This is an entry-level Pinot Noir, but it’s worth spending a little extra for the Reserva, or if money is no object, the 40 Barrels version.
Marqués de Murrieta Reserva, available from
Booze.ie, €21.50
Many wines in the northern Spain regions Rioja, Navarra, Cigales and Ribera del Duero are made from the Tempranillo grape. In the Rioja, the wine is aged in American oak, which gives a Rioja its distinctive flavours of oak and vanilla. The Marqués de Murrieta is a real classic, true to type and an excellent wine.
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