Tuesday 29 October 2013

Everyday Drinkers (10)


Number 10 already! I didn't realise I drank so much wine.

This one is a real bargain at £3.99, and is from Sicily, yet again. It's a Vino Rosso Terre Siciliane IGT, a blend of Nerello Mascalese and Nero d'Avola.

What, another Sicilian? Is this the Mafia or something? No, just good value wine.

A delightfully dark wine, packing only 12% ABV despite the dark clothes, it is ideal for drinking every day, preferably with food. Handles tomatoes, cheeses, and pretty much anything else.

It is available from a well-known retailer (yes, Tesco) and produced, or at least bottled, by the Caviro Cooperative (supposedly the largest in Italy).

It has fruit on the nose and on the palate (black cherries mostly) and is well-balanced.

An eminently acceptable wine for the price. Those Sicilian wine producers can certainly deliver drinkable good value.



Tuesday 22 October 2013

What religion is your wine?


By way of an introduction I will remind you of  the joke about the paramilitary traffic checkpoint in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The masked and armed individual doing the checking asked one motorist "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?" to which he received the reply "Neither, I'm Jewish", before asking "Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?".

You may ask what has religion got to do with wine? A lot in fact.

There are many references to wine in the Old and New Testaments. Noah planted a vineyard. We have all heard of Cana, where Jesus changed the water into wine.

One of the bases of Catholicism is the belief that the celebration of the Eucharist involves the operation of transubstantiation - the changing of wine into the Blood of the Saviour. The wine, which to all intents and purposes remains wine, represents the Blood and becomes it.

Wine is omnipresent, and rightly so. Viticulture and wine making are at the heart of civilisation, much like weaving, animal husbandry, horticulture etc.

Jean-Robert Pitte (in Le désir du vin à la conquête du monde and Bordeaux Bourgogne les passions rivales) describes the influence of wine in Antiquity and the great divide that is at the heart of the French wine scene - the Burgundy-Bordeaux rivalry.

This opposition is partly religious, the Protestant influence being felt in Bordeaux via the influence of northern European merchants and settlers whereas Burgundy is more Catholic in outlook with some of its great wines and traditions closely linked to church properties or monastic traditions.

There is also a profound cultural divide: the Bordelais are perceived as more reserved in their dealings and in appearance often resemble English gentlemen farmers or aristocrats, whereas the Burgundians have a reputation for being peasants at heart and also much more hedonistic in their view of wine and what it is for.

Even the bottles containing the wines of the regions get in on the act: the straight-sided bordeaux bottle versus the more rounded, perhaps even feminine, burgundy bottle.

Does all this show in the wines of these regions?

Perhaps it does: it requires years of ageing before a quality Bordeaux is approachable. This wait is akin to the abstinence and forbearance at the heart of some Protestant doctrines where success is the result of hard work and sacrifice and God's will; the immediacy of a Bourgogne passetoutgrains
might be lost on the château owner. The burgundian tradition of the drinking song and the long gourmet and gourmand meal would seem intolerable to the frequenter of dinner parties in the Médoc.

So perhaps wine does have a religious identity of sorts.

In any case it tells a story about itself and its origins both geographical and botanical, but also about the people who made it.

This is at the heart of what makes us love wine; it brings its cultural identity with it onto our dining tables and encourages us to find out more.  And it can even change your life.