WINE TASTING

I sometimes wonder if we should not always accept without question facts that are presented to us as truths, no matter how convincingly the truth is presented. 

Yesterday I tried out a wine that I haven’t tasted before. Nothing too distinguished, or expensive, just a 100% Gamay that I bought from The Wine Society. Its label tells me that it is called ‘Gamay’ which is the grape variety, it is French and is ‘Un vin moderne, tres fruite et facile a boire’ (excuse the absence of accents – go on, you know where they should be); it makes no other claims and I find that most appealling. On drinking it I was struck by its fruity flavour, more than that, its raspberry flavour. It is not an overwhelming taste but one is definitely left with the faint taste of raspberry – and it is very pleasant.

This is when an earlier suspicion of mine came to the surface. It first came upon me years ago in the wine bar over the road from my office in Shaftesbury Avenue when I ordered a bottle of white wine from the Cote du Gascogne the label of which spoke of the wine’s distinct hint of grapefruit in the taste. The wine confirmed this. Grapefruit, no doubt! And then, in my mind’s eye, I saw a picture of a chateau-like building, with rows of vines in the foreground and there, going into the tradesman’s entrance, was a lorry carrying crates of … you guessed. I wonder … I thought.

So last night I wondered if the originality of this wine had perhaps been brought about by the maker quietly slipping a few punnets of raspberries into the vat.

The ‘truth’ that seems contradicted by this thought is never explicitly stated. Winemakers would never say anything like ‘We never add fruit to our wine’ but what they do is project an image of unchallengeable uprightness and respect for centuries of winemaking. They will admit to keeping wine in oak barrels and that does affect the taste, they will tell you that a certain variety of grape produces a distinctly ‘flinty’ taste because it is grown on flinty soil but they go no further. You wouldn’t dream of bringing up the subject of grapefruit, would you? So it’s an implicit truth that we must challenge if suspicions like this arise.

So now I am beginning to wonder about those other tastes that the real wine buffs tell us they can identify in a wine. ‘A hint of horse sweat?’, ‘A combination of watch-strap and beetroot ? (Hey, Gaston, can you see my watch anywhere around?),  ‘There’s a slightly metallic after taste’. (Hey, Gaston, can you see … )

It’s probably better not to pursue this. Wines do definitely have a huge range of tastes that seem to have little to do with the grape itself. And winemakers are upright people. So, let’s drop the subject.

But then my mind goes back to the eighties, when the Sunday Times Insight Team discovered that Austrian makers were adding antifreeze to their Reisling and Gewuzrtraminer and Liebfraumilch. Then the Italians got up to something similar. Then the French were revealed to have sold more Pinot Noir to the American Gallo company than they, the French, could ever have produced themselves … so it couldn’t have been Pinot Noir.

It’s all in the past and a little raspberry or grapefruit juice never hurt anyone did they? Or even a hint of watchstrap.