What's it all about, Amarone?

Thank goodness for the onset of cold, dark evenings. At last we can get stuck into winter warmer red wines – and they don’t come in more comforting winter weight than Amarone della Valpolicella.

Valpolicella we all know, right? Light-bodied, soft and juicy wines that you might glug down with a bowl of pasta or a pizza. But Amarone? What’s that about?

The difference between Amarone and straight Valpolicella is all down to grape drying – a process that the winemakers in this part of the Veneto in north eastern Italy have known about and practised since at least the time of the Romans. In simple terms, winemakers pick their best grapes slightly earlier than the main harvest and then air dry them on racks for around three months before crushing and fermenting to make wine.

The grape varieties themselves can sound like a mouthful – including Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. An old wine teacher of mine suggested Cinderella and the two ugly sisters as a way of remembering the names – it's worked for me!

During the drying process the grapes will, of course, lose moisture – weighing around half what they did originally by the time comes to crush and ferment. With less water in the grapes, they are proportionally higher in sugar, which will be converted to alcohol during fermentation.

Amarone, then, is a high alcohol wine - legally the minimum level is 14%, but can exceed 16%. But some other things happen to the grapes during the drying process as well, which create massive concentration of aromas and flavours, as well as a great ability to age and to develop layers of complexity. With alcohol at these levels, this is not a “session wine”; it’s what the Italians call a “vino da meditazione”, a meditation wine to sip on its own.

These are wines that might start out smelling and tasting of sour cherries, dark chocolate and tobacco leaf, but develop in the glass, changing each time you take a sip, evolving and tempting you back again and again. As you might expect, these wines take to ageing like ducks to water and continue to grow in fascination and enjoyability over many years.

Not cheap to produce: that extra picking separate from the main harvest; the drying process itself; grapes that can be lost to rot and can't be used to make wine; the fact that dried grapes will naturally make less wine than freshly-picked grapes – they all mean that Amarone cannot be made as cheaply as normal wine.

But prices paid for grapes destined for Amarone have been dropping, while the amount of Amarone made has been steadily rising, leading to concerns that corners are being cut and quality levels are perhaps not always what they should be. A group of leading Amarone producers, the self-styled Amarone Families, is seeking to address these issues, imposing stricter quality measures in an effort to maintain the reputation – and high price – of Amarone della Valpolicella.

Last week they came to London to showcase their wines, focussing on the outstanding 2000 vintage. It's a mark of the wines' ageworthiness that many of these wines were still youthful and barely into their stride, even after nine years.

Amarone is not a cheap wine habit to take up, with prices starting at £20, but if you fancy an exploration of the style, there is no better place to head than The Vineyard in Dorking (http://www.wineunlimited.co.uk). John is an Amarone fanatic and stocks around twenty different ones at any one time, whereas most merchants will have one or two.

Amarone on the High Street
Amarone “Le Vigne” Ca' del Pipa 2004 - £25 at Majestic (Fine Wine section)
Dense, dark and truffley – great for game.

Amarone Classico Brigaldara 2006 - £34.99, £27.99 as part of a mixed case at Oddbins
One of the Amarone Families group, Brigaldara make wines in a modern style, ie using new French oak in addition to older, larger oak casks. Polished and powerful.

Amarone Allegrini 2004 - £45.95 from Imbibros near Godalming (http://www.imbibros.co.uk), £50 from Waitrose
One of the foremost modernists of the Amarone Families, Allegrini make wonderfully expressive wines – at a price.

Grapes are not the only fruit

It's wine, but not as we know it. The British Isles have a long tradition of making wines – just not the kind that is made from grapes. We probably all have memories of a relative who made dandelion or elderberry wine, which bubbled away in demi-johns in the airing cupboard, making intriguing noises and smells but not, alas, anything remotely drinkable when the moment came to try it.

Lurgashall Winery, in an intensely rural setting between Haslemere, Midhurst and Petworth, specializes in making wines and liqueurs from an array of fruits and vegetables, as well as mead from honey. They are trying to change our view of what are called country wines (to distinguish them from normal wines made from grapes). They are proud to point out that they use only fresh fruits and vegetables in their wines, with no artificial essences or ingredients – not all country wines are made in the same way it seems.

Mead is surely the most ancient alcoholic drink in the country, requiring only water and honey as ingredients. Our ancient forebears would have relied on the wild yeasts which surround us in the air; the winemaker at Lurgashall uses cultivated yeast, in order to be sure of a consistent finished product.

Lurgashall's owner is the slightly eccentric US-born Jerry Schooler, self-styled “lord of Lurgashall”. A background in industrial engineering is not perhaps the natural qualification for taking on a wine and mead business in the UK – but it must undoubtedly have come in handy when Jerry needed more buildings for the winery. Instead of building from scratch, Jerry found a Medieval barn in Billingshurst, which he then had dismantled, moved to Lurgashall and rebuilt on-site.

Eccentricity appart, Lurgashall will be celebrating its 25^th birthday next year, so Jerry must be doing something right.

As well as selling from the winery shop, Lurgashall make wines for a huge number of heritage institutions, from the National Trust to Chatsworth and Balmoral. The US is also an export market, along with Canada, Japan and Scandinavia. Americans, it seems, can't get enough of their Tower of London Mead.

What of the wines themselves? Grapes are, of course, fruits. There is no reason why, say, a blackberry should not make a palatable wine, as it has the same basic ingredients of sweet pulp with fruit acid and skins containing tannins. But silver birch sap? And rose petals?

I will not be abandoning my passion for more “normal” wines, in order to take up these charming oddities, but I have to say they do have a certain appeal. The Gooseberry Wine is reminiscent of sauvignon blanc, but why not just have a sauvignon blanc? It's not as if there is a shortage of the stuff. However, the more esoteric flavours give more interest, as long as you discard any notions of wines to go with food – other than the gooseberry, all the wines are essentially off-dry to really very sweet. These are wines to be drunk on their own, or even mixed with fizzy water or sparkling wine.

Their red Elderberry Wine and rosé Plum Wine I found most closely resembled grape wines, because they are relatively dry and have flavours and aromas that you could also find in mainstream wines.

For sheer weirdness I was drawn to the Silver Birch Wine – made from the sap of their own birch trees. It's nothing like a normal wine, but has an intriguing “woodiness” which I find hard to describe, but appealing nevertheless.

The frankly bonkers Rose Petal wine is a beautifully delicate pale pink to look at and smells and tastes of, well, rose petals. A little bit like drinking perfume, I wouldn't recommend it on its own, but with sparkling wine (not a posh one, please!) or in a gin and tonic? Mmmmm.

Of the meads, I favoured the Dry Mead and the Reserve Mead, which has had some barrel ageing to provide more depth of flavour. Mead is, by its nature, very sweet, so this is to be treated like a liqueur or a dessert wine, even the “dry” version.

The liqueurs are where the fruits themselves really get to sing. The Raspberry Liqueur is so full of fruit flavours it's practically like drinking alcoholic raspberry jam. For a real taste of tradition their Sloe Liqueur (they aren't allowed to call it Sloe Gin) has great depth of sour cherry sloe flavour with a cleansing kick of bitterness at the end – I found this the most grown-up of the liqueurs and one I would be happy to drink by the fire in the months to come.

Country wines are not about to knock regular wines off their pedestal, but they are fun – and we all need some of that.

Lurgashall Winery, near Petworth, www.lurgashall.co.uk

Country wines are all £7.50 for a 50cl bottle, the meads range from £7.50 to £9.45 for the Reserve Mead. Liqueurs cost from £9.95 to £11.45 for a 37.5cl bottle.

Wine of the week

Trenel Fleurie 2007, Beaujolais, France - £9.95 at The Wine Society

Beaujolais suffers an image problem, but this wine shows what proper Beaujolais can and should be. No confected, bubblegummy flavours here. This is pretty grown-up stuff with delicious, slightly musky, deeply fruity flavours, with a whisper of tannin and a touch of savouriness. Just the thing for this week, when you could have it lightly chilled while the sun shines, or have it at room temperature in the evening. Great for charcuterie, or a good old banger.

Chile set to rule the world?

Should we be worried about Chile?

It seems that,whatever Chileans turn their determined, competent hands to, they succeed. Luckily for us, they seem not to be set on world domination, content instead to bombard us with nothing more threatening than their delicious wines.

From small beginnings in the late eighties, Chile is now the fifth most popular source of wine for UK drinkers and they lead the world in terms of the proportion of wine that they export, compared to what they produce. What this tells us is that Chile's growth as a wine producer is not built on domestic consumption: their eyes have always been firmly focused on export markets and you would have to admit that they have succeeded.

Five or more years ago it was fair to say that Chile was fine as a source of straightforward, fruity, gluggable wines for under £5, but that they had a long way to go before they had anything serious to offer in the way of fine wine. Not any more.

At the recent Decanter World Wine Awards Chile (and Australia) were the top performing countries when it came to the ultimate accolades of International Trophies. “Chile's performance”, says Decanter Magazine “was notable for spanning the whole range – red and white, under and over £10.”

Over the last decade Chile's winemakers have worked tirelessly to improve their wines, to broaden the range of varieties they grow and to find the best places in their “paradise for winemakers” for each variety to perform at its best. Rather than following wine styles from other countries, Chile is developing its own unique styles of sauvignon blanc, of syrah and most of all of carmenère, fast becoming the signature grape of the country.

Now, in characteristically efficient and single-minded style, the Chilean wine industry is addressing issues of sustainability. They are doing this not just because consumers are starting to take an interest in it, but because it will give them a strategic advantage over other countries. They have identified that lack of sustainability will be a barrier to growth in years to come and something that simply must be addressed to ensure the continued success of their export-led wine industry.

If all this sounds as if accountants and management consultants are running the Chilean wine industry, rather than horny-handed honest toilers among the vines, then be reassured that the wines themselves are anything but dull. I had the opportunity to taste my way through fifty-odd Chilean wines which had all won either a Gold medal or a Trophy at recent international competitions.

Here are my favourites from the best of the best of Chile:

Errazuriz Single Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc 2008, Casablanca – Gold Medal at the International Wine Challenge
The Casablanca valley has built a reputation for high quality, relatively cool-climate wines with a balance of elegance and flavour. This is not in the New Zealand mould of pungent sauvignon with tropical fruit salad aromas and flavours – rather it's dry and satisfying with a more restrained grapefruit character making it a great food wine.
Taurus Wines of Bramley has the 2008 for £8.99; Majestic has the 2007 vintage for £9.99.


Cono Sur Reserva Riesling 2008, Bío Bío – Decanter World Wine Awards International and Regional Trophies for Riesling under £10
It's a cliché that everyone in the wine trade loves riesling, but that wine drinkers, at least in the UK, can't seem to get on with it. If you've yet to be seduced by riesling's lively, limey fruit then this user-friendly example is a great place to start. Bío Bío Valley is relatively recently-developed and one of the most southerly of Chile's wine regions. This being the southern hemisphere, the further south you go, the cooler (and wetter) it gets – so Bío Bío is a great source of cool-climate wines and Riesling has found a home here.
Tesco, £8.07


Errazuriz Wild Ferment Chardonnay 2007, Casablanca – Annual Wines of Chile Awards Gold medal and Trophy for Best Chardonnay
Just what is wild ferment I hear you ask? Not as exciting as it sounds perhaps, it refers to the fact that wild yeasts exist all around us and are capable of inducing alcoholic fermentation in grapes. Most New World winemakers prefer not to leave things to chance and will buy specific strains of commercially-available yeast in order to get the wine style they want. Wild yeasts are unpredictable, but can also give a broader range of aromas and flavours. This is youthful and lively-tasting, with juicy, nutty fruit and great length.
£10.50 from Stone Vine & Sun near Winchester (www.stonevine.co.uk)


The Co-op Santa Helena Pinot Noir 2008, Casablanca – Decanter World Wine Awards International and Regional Trophies for Pinot Noir under £10
Pinot noir is another variety that likes things not too hot and seems to respond well to the cooling influence of the Pacific in the Casablanca Valley. This has great purity of fruit and is entirely unshowy for a New World pinot.
£7.99 from the Co-operative


Terra Andina Reserva Carmenère 2007, Rapel Valley – International Wine Challenge Gold Medal
Rescued from near-extinction in its native France, Carmenère has found a new home and great acclaim in Chile. This wine has the variety's hallmark aromas of bonfires and red fruits with good acidity to keep the fruit juicy. An impressive balance of power and restraint.
www.everywine.co.uk has the award-winning 2007 vintage for £100.09 for a case of 12 bottles. Chilean specialists www.qpwines.com list the 2006 vintage for £43.99 for six bottles, £86.95 for twelve.

Wine notes and queries

The world of wine can be mysterious and one that most of us, in our essentially non-winemaking country, are rather distanced from. We don't have the same deep cultural ties with wine that people who live in countries who make the stuff do. Yet we are increasingly a nation of wine drinkers and some are naturally curious about what they are drinking.

Do you have a burning question about wine that you've always wanted to find the answer to? I often find someone saying something like: “This is a really stupid question but...” There really are no silly questions when it comes to wine, so to start the ball rolling I've listed a couple of queries that crop up fairly frequently.

If you have a wine related query you can send it to me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/wineandwords. You can also keep track of my wine blog postings and general wine musings by following me on Twitter. Or if that's a little too new media for you, you can email me at heather@redwhiteandrose.co.uk. Don't be shy...ask away! You could find your question forms the basis of a future Surrey Advertiser column.

What's the difference between Pouilly Fumé and Pouilly-Fuissé?

Both these wines have a good level of recognition among British wine drinkers, but it wasn't until someone asked me this question that I realised there is ample room for confusing the two. They are also hard for English speakers to get their tongues round, which could lead to even more confusion. Pouilly Fumé is pronounced “Pou-ee foomay”; Pouilly-Fuissé, “Poo-ee fwee-say”.

Pouilly Fumé is the name for wines made from the sauvignon blanc grape around the small town of Pouilly-sur-Loire. It's bang next door to Sancerre and the wines are pretty similar – though Sancerre being much easier to say and to remember must account for at least some of its popularity in this country. Traditionally the wines of Pouilly Fumé tend to have more mineral and elegant characters compared with Sancerre's more overtly fruity and pungent flavours; though in practice you're more likely to find differences between producers than between the two neighbouring vineyard areas. Fumé, meaning smoked or smoky, is a reference to the smoky, gunflint character sometimes exhibited by the wines.

Pouilly-Fuissé, on the other hand, is the name of a vineyard area in the Mâconnais, in southern Burgundy. Pouilly and Fuissé are the names of two settlements where the grapes are grown. White wine in Burgundy essentially equals chardonnay and Pouilly-Fuissé wines carry the highest quality reputation in the Mâcon, so will often be given the traditional Burgundian oak barrel-ageing treatment. You might also see the names Pouilly-Vinzelles or Pouilly-Loché, which are neighbouring areas.

How is rosé wine made?

With our recent embrace of the pink stuff comes a natural curiosity about how it's made. Essentially there are three ways it can happen:

• Mixing a little red wine into white wine
  

It sounds like cheating and, for most winemakers in the EU at least, it is. In the rest of the world, however, it is quite permissible to make a pink wine by adding some red wine. European winemakers are, understandably, pretty sniffy about this way of making rosé wine – unless they are in the Champagne region, where they are allowed to make their pink Champagne in this way. If you see the words “rosé d'assemblage” on a Champagne bottle, it has been made by blending in some red wine. “Rosé de saignée” indicates a more traditional rosé-making method – see below.

• The saignée method
  

This is becoming a more widespread. Red grapes ultimately destined to make red wine are held in a vat; some of the light red juice coloured by the crushed grapes is allowed to run out; fermenting this light red juice results in a pink wine. The reason for its popularity amongst winemakers is that they can then go on to make a red wine from the remaining grapes, as well as the rosé: two wines from a single batch of grapes – you can see the attraction.

• "Pressurage direct"

The most traditional way to make rosé wine and, purists would argue, the best, is the “pressurage direct” or direct pressing method, used by winemakers in Provence, for example. Unlike the rest of the world, here they take pink wine very seriously and view rosés made by any other method as inherently inferior. The winemaker selects red grapes for rosé wine which are then crushed and then left for a brief period in the vat, giving the final wine a delicate, paler pink hue and, arguably, a more refined flavour than the saignée method.

There must be other things that you've been intrigued or confused by: why does Champagne cost so much more than Cava? Why does red wine give me a hangover when white wine doesn't? Why don't most French wines tell you which grape variety the wine is made from?

To get your question answered, go to http://twitter.com/wineandwords and ask away.

Wine of the week

Sainsbury's Taste the Difference PX, £6.49 for 50cl
A sweet, treacly sherry may not seem like the obvious wine for high summer (oh please). But I can tell you this is the one drink that was just right for a damp camping trip in Shropshire last week. Sitting outside when it's not really warm enough is what British summers are all about and rather than clasping a cold glass of rosé and pretending it's fun, embrace the charms of this unctuous and ludicrously underpriced liquid. It's all figs, prunes and raisins and will warm anyone's cockles. If by any chance it is actually hot, you can always pour it over your ice cream...mmm.

Are UK wine drinkers spooked by odd-looking bottles?

On the face of it, Alsace is a pretty straightforward wine region. Wines are labelled with the name of the grape variety, à la New World, making it easy for non-French drinkers to gauge what they’re choosing. To keep things simple, it’s pretty much all about white wines – they do make some red from pinot noir but, to be fair, the reds are never going to set the world on fire. The style of wines from Alsace is fresh, fruity and dry, or almost dry – in other words, easy-going, and particularly good for drinking with the spicy foods of South and East Asia that we love so much in this country. Alsace itself is an almost impossibly pretty region in Eastern France, owing more to Germany than France for its architectural and cultural traditions and with lower rainfall and more hours of sunshine than you would think by just looking at a map. Why then, don’t we drink more Alsace wines in this country?

For one thing, that proximity to Germany (and it used to be more than proximity: Alsace and neighbouring Lorraine were annexed to Germany from 1870 to 1919) has brought not just cute gingerbread villages, but a tradition of using the Germanic “flute” wine bottle. Any combination of Germany and wine is commercially toxic in the UK: if it looks German, we tend to steer clear.

Why we should face our demons and embrace German wines is something for another column, but Alsace has become unfairly embroiled in our rejection of what we deem to be cheap and nasty sweet wines. I’d go so far as to say that a substantial minority of the UK population does not realise that Alsace is French and not German. We Brits don’t tend to holiday there, so it lacks the high profile and instant recognition of, say, the Loire.

If you’d like to indulge in some aversion therapy to overcome your fear of tall, thin wine bottles and try some Alsace wines, where should you start?

Varieties
Uniquely amongst French wine regions, Alsace has a tradition of putting the name of the grape variety on the label, which makes life so much simpler for the novice. Here are the major varieties you’ll encounter:

Pinot blanc:- The workhorse grape of the region, it is the most widely-planted variety, producing soft, round and fruity wines.
Pinot gris:- The name suggests a relation to pinot blanc (and pinot noir for that matter) and indeed it is part of the same family. Pinot gris produces wines with more defined fruit and perfume than pinot gris, often with a hint of richness and some spice. Pinot gris is our old friend pinot grigio, the UK’s favourite wine –but the best Alsace versions offer infinitely more character than the bland, mass-produced ones from Italy.
Gewurztraminer:- the most aromatic of Alsace varieties, frequently reminding tasters of rose petals, Turkish Delight or lychee. It has the richness and spice of pinot gris and, with age, develops a smoky complexity. A fantastic match for soft, smelly cheeses.
Riesling: - most growers in the region consider Riesling to be the king of grapes, the one which allows them to demonstrate the influence of that very French notion: terroir. Always with a backbone of acidity, it can show a great range of aromas and flavours from fruity and floral to stony and mineral – no really.


Where to buy Alsace wines
You’ll come across odd bottles of Alsace wines in almost any good wine shop and Waitrose have the best range of Alsace wines on the High Street. But, with a region like this, if you want to do more than dip your toe in, it pays to go to a specialist.

The Wine Society (www.thewinesociety.com) is the UK’s oldest wine mail order outfit and run along non-profit making lines as a co-operative making it undisputably a “good thing”. It also has a particularly strong Alsace selection; they were voted Alsace Specialist Merchant of the Year in the 2008 International Wine Challenge. Here are some of my favourites from their mouthwatering list:

Gewurztraminer Tradition 2007 Cave de Turckheim - £7.95
This is made by arguably the region’s best co-op and represents a gentle introduction to the variety with good weight of aromatic fruit and some spice. Waitrose list the, probably almost identical, Cave de Turkheim Gewurztraminer 2007 for £8.09.

Riesling Tradition 2007 Kuentz-Bas - £8.95
This is dry - just (4 grams per litre of residual sugar for those who like to know that kind of thing), but with a lovely floral nose and more citrussy palate and of course crisp acidity. One to try with Asian food that’s not too spicy or sweet.

Riesling Domaine Frédéric Mochel, 2005 - £12.50
To see what the fuss over Alsace Riesling is all about, you really need to drink a wine four or five years old, and here’s your chance. This Riesling is bone dry, in what Frédéric Mochel calls the Protestant style of wine – by which he means dry, linear and pure. With age, hints of petrol (in a good way) add to the tropical fruit. If this gives you a taste for more mature Riesling, the Society also list Mochel’s Grand Cru Altenberg de Bergbieten 2002 at £14.95, which is a super-charged version of the straight Riesling, with even more of those delicious exotic but elegant flavours.

Gewurztraminer, Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, 2007 - £14.95
If the notion of a Protestant wine has intrigued you, here is what you might logically call a Catholic wine. Olivier Humbrecht is, arguably, the most gifted and important winemaker in Alsace. The former scientist and first ever Frenchman to become a Master of Wine, has embraced the notion of natural wine-making. His dazzling skills have blazed a trail for organic and biodynamic wines which other growers have since followed, but it’s Domaine Zind-Humbrecht that created the model. If you want to know how a wine can smell and taste of where it’s from, rather than just of the grapes from which it’s made, then you can have no better illustration than the wines of Zind-Humbrecht. All his wines are worth trying – and be warned that prices only go upwards from here. A hands-off, non-interventionist approach means it’s hard to generalise about the wines: dryness levels vary by wine and by year, for example. This wine has a sense of richness rather than sweetness and fantastic concentration. Waitrose have Zind-Humbrecht Riesling Heimbourg 2006 for £20 and Zind, a blend of varieties with great character, for £14.99.

Pinot Gris Hugel Jubilée 2007 - £22
A steep price, though Hugel does make cheaper versions of their varietal wines, under the Tradition rather than Jubilée label which sell for around £12-14. If you want to know what sets Alsace pinot gris apart from Italian pinot grigio, then it pays to splash out. The Hugel family are practically wine-making royalty in Alsace, dating back to 1639. We’re back in the Protestant wine mould here: while there’s richness and concentration in Hugel’s wines, there is also purity and dry restraint which make them extremely food friendly.