There aren't many good comedy lines that you can use about wine, but I've always liked 'I drink as I dress, Chablis.' I remember the first time I went there, about twenty years ago; my wife and I were driving back from Italy and as evening fell we were passing Auxerre. I had a brainwave; 'let's spend the night in Chablis,' I said. Flushed with the brilliance of this idea I continued, 'and whatever we have to eat tonight, we'll have either a Premier Cru or a Grand Cru to accompany it.' Never did words land anyone in such trouble.
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You could argue that the discovery of the effect of yeast on grape juice was one of the mankind's most useful ones. Certainly wine has given a lot of people a lot of pleasure for thousands of years. But you could also argue that a more recent discovery has given wine-drinkers something rather special that wasn't available to the drinkers of old. That discovery was secondary fermentation in the bottle.
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Although I know it's just the conditioning effect of a lot of expensive advertising, I still think Champagne' when I think of the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. I'm inclined to make those New Year's celebrations last well into next week, so on the basis that you might be so inclined too, here's some ideas for budget bubbly.
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One of the greatest marketing coups in the history of the wine trade has been the branding of Champagne. From humble beginnings as a thin white wine, it was transformed into a sparkling wine and from there became one of the great branding exercises of all time. Today that branding is so omnipresent that if we want to describe the lifestyle of the rich and spoiled, we refer to a 'champagne lifestyle'.
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Somewhere in the dim recesses of pre-history there was a primal vine. It had a simple strategy for survival; to put its seeds into succulent thin-skinned fruits and then let every bird, reptile and mammal eat those fruits and scatter those seeds. Like first man, first vine hasn't yet been identified, but the common stock of Europe is the vitis vinifera, and in the Americas the vitis riparia.
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Doing anything only out of passion for one's art has an inherent nobility, especially when it's done in the teeth of adversity. In the world of wine Chateau Musar makes an excellent exemplar of this.
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A lot has been written over the years about the Irish flight to Bordeaux. Young bloods from aristocratic families that ended up leaving their names across the board of the drinks business: the negociants Bartons of Barton and Guestier, Richard Hennessy in Cognac, the Bartons of Langoa and Leoville and the Chateaux names like Lynch, Palmer, Kirwan, Boyd and O'Brien.
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Two things have been nagging at me ever since I discovered the delights of shopping in the Lidl supermarket in Arklow. It costs so much less than other supermarket chains that you can't help but wonder how big a margin the other multiples work on. Good and cheap olive oil, passata, tinned fish - but I digress, this column is about wine. So there it is on the wine shelves, Lambrusco Rose at 2.49 a bottle. Which brings me to the first of my unsolved mysteries.
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Chianti is probably Italy's best-known wine. There was a time, not so long ago, that the wicker-covered 'fiasco' was ubiquitous - every Italian restaurant put one on every table as a candle holder. As anyone who ever tried some of this can attest, the liquid in those bottles was a very variable thing.
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The first known vintage in Chile was that of Don Francisco Aguirre, who had planted his vineyard some 800 kilometres north of Santiago. The grapes, like most of those first arrivals in South America, almost certainly came from the Catholic church, through the hands of Father Francisco de Carabantes.
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In Ireland there are three main outlets for wine; restaurants, off-licences and supermarkets. Most people buy their wines in the second two of these outlets either by recognising a label that previously drank well, or by asking for help from whoever's behind the counter in the offy.
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Christmas is fast approaching, and soon there'll be that annual mad rush to buy presents accompanied by the dawning realisation that you really haven't a clue what you should be buying. I have friends that love wine, but buying them a wine that is exactly what they'd like isn't very easy.
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As we drove through the mediaeval town of Pons, past its fast-flowing rivers and statuary commemorating the pilgrims who travelled through here on the way to Santiago de Compostela, a road-sign with 'Cognac' on it made an appearance. We were getting close at last. We'd come to Cognac to see the process that produces the drink of that name and lunch was to be at Hennessy's headquarters on the banks of the Charente River.
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In the first article on Cognac I was talking about how Cognac is made from blending several eaux de vie together to produce a consistency of taste. The actual process of how this happens is a fascinating one and one, I discovered, that needs a very skilled palate.
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It happens occasionally to all wine-drinkers; you open a bottle and find the wine is 'corked'. It's an unmistakable taste, once you've encountered it, you'll know it the next time. It's a taste that has been variously described as woody or earthy. Wine that is 'corked' has an aroma that matches the taste - that same woodiness comes through in the bouquet.
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To decant or not to decant? This question is not a simple one. For good clarets it's common, for Burgundies it's rare and for vintage Port it's a necessity. Decanting accomplishes two things; it aerates a wine, and if the wine has thrown a sediment, it leaves the sediment in the bottle and you have bright, clear wine in the decanter.
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It's generally understood that you drink whites cold and reds warm, and broadly speaking that's true. Still, you can enjoy your wines much more if you take a closer look. It's essentially true that the colder you drink a wine the less of its flavours will be apparent.
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I often find myself championing the underdog, which for an Italian, who are prone to switch to winning sides whenever possible, is a rare thing. Possibly I've been too long outside the motherland. Even when it comes to wine I find myself championing causes in the same way that others might might swim against the current.
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The part of France that wine-lovers know as Bordeaux covers a large area of different countryside, different weather patterns, different soils and differently styled wines. The Medoc, to the north of Bordeaux city, is home to the famous parishes of the very grand clarets; Margaux, St. Estephe, St. Julien and Pauillac are all there. It's a long spit of land with the Atlantic to the west and the river Gironde to the east, running northwards from Bordeaux city. The city makes a convenient break, because almost all the area known as Graves is to the south of the city.
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Two days before writing this I was having dinner with a friend who has a fine cellar of wines. He decided that a 'vertical tasting', that's to say several vintages of the same wine, would be a really fun idea. After a while he emerged from his cellar carrying three bottles of Chateau Haut Brion, one of the great wines of Bordeaux and possibly the finest red of the Graves.
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Most of the time I'm writing about what's good about wine and trying to pick out wines that have a particular characteristic to delineate a point. But the fact is that wines aren't always good and it's worth having a look at why that should be.
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A long time ago in the history of making wine a simple discovery was made; cleanliness made for a better wine. In an old-fashioned cellar that's not easy to achieve; the wind blows particles, insects and airborne bacteria around and taints and infections are hard to avoid.
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Drink enough wine and you'll soon discover that wine is subject to faults that affect its taste. The most obvious of these are the bottle taint caused by a faulty cork and oxidisation which turns a white wine to an almost Madeira-like colour.
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Between grape and wine lies a process known as vinification. In its simplest form that's no more than allowing the natural yeasts on the skins of the grapes to digest the sugars within the grapes, what we call fermentation. The result is fermented grape juice, an alcoholic beverage known as wine.
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