KEY:
Red Wine
White Wine
Sherry
Port
Madeira
Rose Wine
Dessert Wine
FRANCE
Apart from Italy, France makes more wine than any other country, and provides the benchmark for all wines to be judged upon. Due to France's varied climate and temperature, it has an advantage over other countries that it can supply wines of virtually every style. "The Rhone valley supplies deep, rich reds while the Loire is better known for pinks and whites of all degrees of sweetness and fizziness", and obviously we know what the Champagne region is famous for. The French also produce their own port called 'Banyuls', and their own sherry known as 'Vin jaune' (Robinson 1996: 156). French wine will usually be created to stand long term rather than to be drunk as soon as they are bottled, thus may take more effort to be appreciated. This is in complete contrast to New World wine. "The French themselves see wine as an important part of their heritage, but are drinking less and less of it. The generation which took a daily litre of rough red for granted is rapidly being replaced by one to whom quality is much more important than quantity (Ibid: 157)."
"Bordeaux is France's most important weapon in the wine war. This large, south western wine region, ruled by the English for 200 years in the Middle Ages, produces more AC wine than any other (Ibid: 158)." AC is France's quality designation system that protects producers from plagarism and guarantees authenticity (Ibid: 157).
Burgundy on the other hand, is synonymous with a land ruled by wealthy peasant owners and an unchanged landscape, harking back to the days when the Mediaeval Dukes of Burgundy ran the self-governing region. 'Burgundy' is known as 'Bourgogne' in French, and is a premier wine region.
According to Robinson (1996: 165), land in Burgundy is extremely valuable and rarely passes out of the family's hands, "...but is generally part of a complex inheritance system which requires all property to be shared between each child."
The Champagne region is an hour's drive east of Paris. The wine itself has become very special, now known as the wine of choice for celebrations and glamour. Champagne itself, is made from black grapes, and the most common champagne grape used is the Pinot Meunier grape due to it being the only variety that will ripen reliably throughout the region. There are 300 Champagne villages, but only 17 of these villages are allowed to be qualified as Grands Crus. The higher the quality of the champagne, the least pressed are the grapes (Ibid: 172). Non-vintage champagne is usually about three years old, while vintage is around 6+ years and can age well for a decade, made exclusively from a crop specifically from a certain year. Prestige or luxury cuvee refers to top of the range, vintage champagne, while Blanc de Blancs are chardonnay champagnes that can age well. Finally, Demi-sec means sweet, while Brut is dry, and Sec, slightly less dry (Ibid: 173).
Wines from the Loire region are usually quite crisp, and neglected by wine enthusiasts because of their high acidity (Ibid: 180), but Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume are well known wines and come from the upper Loire (Ibid: 181).
Alsace produces soft, smokey white wines. For some time, Alsace was Elsass, and was part of Germany. "The local surnames and tall green tapered bottles reflect this, along with the dominance of Riesling and the fragrant nature of many of the wines. But unlike in Germany, winemaking philosophy in Alsace is to ferment all of the grape sugar into alcohol, resulting in dry, full bodied wines (quite different in structure from Germany's lighter, sweeter counterparts)" (Ibid: 177).
Rhone, however, produces beefy, red wines designed for ageing. In Northern Rhone, some of the oldest vineyards in France lie on the mountainside, so steep that in some places, pulley systems must be used (Ibid: 185). Southern Rhone produces warm, rich reds from the Grenache grape (Ibid: 188) unlike the North, which mainly produces wine from the Syrah grape (Ibid: 185). Southern Rhone has the label of producing France's most alcoholic wines, 14% being the norm (Ibid: 188), and their wines in Robinson's (1996: 189) opinion are best drunk in cooler climates. Their most famous wine is one that many will have heard of - Chateauneuf-du-Pape (Ibid).
There are of course, many more wine producing regions in France, but I have picked just a few from her book that seemed particularly interesting.
Examples of French Wine:
+ Bordeaux = Chateau tour de Calens (£17.90 at The Wine Shop)
+ Burgundy = Louis Jadot Clos des Chenes, Volnay Premier Cru (£42.50 at The Wine Shop), Pierre Vessigaud Pouilly-Fuisse Vieilles Vignes (£29.50 at The Wine Shop)
+ Alsace = Cave de Turkheim Reserve Gewürztraminer (£12 at The Wine Shop)
+ Rhone = Domaine Chante Cigale Chateauneuf-du-Pape (£26.50 at The Wine Shop), Jean-Luc Colombo, Cotes-du-Rhone Le Vent (£9.90 at The Wine Shop)
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+ Chablis = Chablis Bouchot-Ludot (£14.50 at The Wine Shop)
+ Champagne = Piper-Heidsieck Rose (£24 at The Wine Shop), Perrier Jouet NV (£31 at The Wine Shop), Louis Roederer NV (£38.50 at The Wine Shop), Tattinger Vintage Brut (£50 at The Wine Shop), Laurent-Perrier Rose (£50 at The Wine Shop), Veuve Cliquot Vintage Brut (£60 at The Wine Shop), Bollinger Grande Annee Vintage Brut (£75 at The Wine Shop), Pommery 1998 Cuvee Louise Vintage Brut (£117 at The Wine Shop), Dom Perignon Vintage 2003 (£120 at The Wine Shop), Louis Roederer Crystal Brut (£159 at The Wine Shop)
When thinking of Italian wines, you must think of Italy as a group of regions than one, big, wine producing country. The South tends to produce "...heady, often sweet, ferments..." while the North produces "...delicate subalpine essences..." (Ibid: 206).
North West Italy's wine tends to produce wines that are a close resemblance to Burgundy, the region itself situated just over the Alps from France. "Wines here have traditionally, as throughout Italy, been matured in large, old Slovenian oak oval casks, but the importance of French barriques has recently caused a stir and some revision of wine styles..." (Ibid: 208-209).
Tuscany is particularly singled out from central Italy (Ibid: 214) because it is known for its dedicated winemakers and land of the smallholders. Tuscany is known as 'Toscana' to the Italians. "The relentlessly undulating landscape and its temperate climate make it ideal for producing red wines with the same sort of digestible weight (about 12 to 13 per cent alcohol) and ageing potential as red bordeaux. But the wines' flavours are very different from their French counterparts. The Sangiovese vine is king here and the quality of wine it yields depends heavily on the exposure and altitude at which it is planted." Chianti is made here and is usually created from the Sangiovese grape, and then lightened with a white grape such as Trebbiano. If you buy a wine with just the label, 'Chianti', on it, expect a basic red. Instead, find a label that describes where the Chianti comes from, such as 'Chianti Colli Aretini', the best quality being 'Chianti Classico' (Ibid: 216).
Out of the many places Robinson (1996: 221) lists under the heading 'Southern Italy and Islands', I decided to choose Sicily, purely based on the place I'd like to visit at some point. I knew a girl from there, and being her hometown, she spoke very highly of it, but it only made me want to visit it more, as she described the beauty of the place and the oranges. The choice I made to include Sicily is indeed a fine one, when Robinson (1996: 221) herself says that Sicily fascinates those of the modern wine world, as well as those of the ancient. Sicily is known to produce dessert wine [another reason I am keen to go, I adore dessert wine!!!], and "this large island, not far from the African coast, regularly produces as much wine as Australia, Chile and Bulgaria put together - yet exports remarkedly little under its own flag." It grows more white grapes than red and a famous wine from this island is Marsala. "Sicily's temperatures make it ideal for dessert wine production and the island has a long history of making noble, rich Muscat" (Ibid).
Examples of Italian wine:
+ Sicily = La Ferla Nero d'Avola (£8.50 at The Wine Shop), Planeta Chardonnay (£24.50 at The Wine Shop), Ca'di Ponti Shiraz (£6.80 at The Wine Shop), Volpetto Chianti Reserva (£10.90 at The Wine Shop), Aglianco Della Starza Gold Label (£12.90 at The Wine Shop), Marsala Wine Superiore DOC Garibaldi Dolce (£19.15 at Gourmet-Eataly)
SPAIN
Spain has more land devoted to vines than any other country, and is well known for their sherry (Ibid: 222). Spain is fond of using American oak for their barrels, "(e)ver since the colonisation of the Americas there has been a lively import trade in American oak, which has been used extensively in Spanish wine cellars for extended maturation of both reds and whites. This often resulted in red wines that were relatively light in colour and marked by a vanillin-sweet overlay..." (Ibid: 224).
"Rioja, in north east Spain, was for long Spain's only high-profile wine region, but in the 1980s it lost many friends by overpricing and underperforming...Rioja has traditionally been American oak's most expressive ambassador. The wine is made from a blend of Tempranillo and Garnacha (Grenache) grapes aged for a considerable number of years in the sweet, vanilla-scented warmth of small American oak barrels...Rioja's fortune was made in the late nineteenth century when Bordeaux wine producers, devastated by the twin scourges of mildew and phylloxera, brought their techniques over the Pyrenees" (Ibid: 225).
My mother loves Cava, so I definitely thought to include this wine in the North-East regions of Spain. Cava itself, is not a region, but is the Spanish version of champagne. The majority of cava comes from the Penedes region. It produces the sparkling wine by the traditional method and "(t)he Spaniards buy so much Cava that the larger Cava houses Cordorniu and Freixenet have managed to finance their own sparkling wineries in California" (Ibid: 229).
The major centre of Spain's white wine production is in the North West of Spain (Ibid: 230).
As noted above, Spain is known for their sherry. Great sherry is complicated to make and thus replicating good quality sherry is the same as trying to plagiarise a good champagne. Sherry is made from the Palomino grape. "The sherry region, the only one that is allowed to use the word sherry in Europe [sherry from other places have to call them 'Fortified wines'], is one of the hottest fine wine regions in the world, just a short distance from the coast of North Africa in the south of Spain's most southern province, Andalucia" (Ibid: 233).
Examples of Spanish Wine:
Bornos Verdejo (£10.50 at The Wine Shop)
Cayet del Pino Palo Cort Viejisimo (£25.90 at The Wine Shop)
PORTUGAL
Portugal is the home of port and madeira. Douro is an extremely dry place and is responsible for port and cork (Ibid: 236). Robinson (1996: 240) asserts that although other countries make port-like wines, nowhere can produce such fantastic port as Douro. "Ever since the late seventeenth century when British merchants scoured friendly Portugal for goods that would replace heavily taxed items from France, the commercial end of the port wine trade has been in predominately British hands, which has made for an even more delicate relationship between growers and bottlers than in most wine regions...The aim of the port producer is to make a wine that is deeply coloured and sweet as possible. To preserve the grapes' natural sweetness, spirit is added at quite an early point in the fermentation process to stun the yeasts, which means that the colour and tannin must be extracted as fast as possible. The Douro valley is one of the very few wine regions where foot treading is still practised..." (Ibid). A ruby port is young, bottled after two or three years in bulk, but you can get rubies that have been bottled after 4-6 years, and will carry the label LBV [late bottled vintage]. Tawny port is ruby mixed with white port, but an aged tawny is a port that has gained its colour from being aged for 10 to over 40 years (Ibid: 241).
"Madeira is a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic..." and is also a long-lived, tangy, fortified wine. It is actually the worlds lost longest-living wine and is high in alcohol. It is baked during production which gives it its almost immortality, being able to be left opened for months on end. Much madeira is only good for cooking with due to replacement of the good grapes for easy-to-grow grapes, thus, if you want to drink the stuff, look for madeira made from Sercial, Verdelho, Bual or Malvasia (Ibid).
Examples of Portuguese Wine:
Quinta do Crasto Douro Reserva (£22.50 at The Wine Shop)
Casal Mendes Vinho Verde (£7 at The Wine Shop)
Krohn Porto Ambassador Ruby (£11 at The Wine Shop, a personal favourite of mine)
Krohn 20 year old Tawny (£30 at The Wine Shop)
Madeira d'Oliveiras Colheita 1990 Malvasia Sweet (£64 at The Wine Shop)
Blandy's 10 year old sweet Malmsey (£18.90 at The Wine Shop)
THE BRITISH ISLES
Wine grown in either Wales or England is known as 'English Wine', and English vineyards cover around 2500 acres of southern England and Wales, the Gulf stream giving the grapes their lifeblood. "Wine has been produced in the British Isles for centuries, but the modern English wine industry dates only from the 1950s...Because of England's cool climate, only early ripening vine varieties stand a chance of reliably producing a crop. The most planted varieties are therefore Muller-Thurgau and the hybrid Seyval Blanc. The German crossing Reichensteiner is also quite widely planted but there is an enormous variety of white and some red wine varieties otherwise...Almost all grape musts have to rely on added sugar to produce wines with a decent alcoholic strength...and the natural grape acidity is usually notable. Such wines can make excellent bases for sparkling wines and there have been some truly refreshing dry whites which can even stand up to some barrel ageing. A little wine is also made from vines grown in warmer parts of Ireland." British wine, on the other hand, is not good stuff and is made from reconstituted grape concentrate imported from places such as Cyprus or Spain, the stuff they wouldn't even drink. They're very cheap but not something you want to take to a dinner party (Ibid: 305).
Examples of Wines from the British Isles:
+ England
Bolney Cuvée Noir Brut (£21.00 at Great English Wines), Chapel Down Rosé Brut (£23.95 at Great English Wines), Biddenden Ortega (£9.95 at Great English Wines), Brightwell Vineyard Bacchus 2009 (£9.99 at Great English Wines), Biddenden Dornfelder (£10.15 at Great English Wines), Three Choirs Late Harvest 2011 (£11.50 at Great English Wines)
Glyndwr Black Label Vintage Sparkling White 2010 (£19.90 at Glyndwr Vineyard)
GERMANY, AUSTRIA & SWITZERLAND
Germany produces mostly light, long-living wines (Ibid: 244), while Austria produces dry rieslings and sweet wines. Although Austria apparently does some great wines, they have a dark past. In 1985, "...some Austrian wine merchants tried to give extra body to certain wines by adding a harmless but illegal substance, most unfortunately also an ingredient in antifreeze. As a result of this national disgrace, Austria now probably has the world's strictest wine regulations...Austria has the only capital city in the world in which wine-growing, as well as wine drinking, is seriously important" (Ibid: 252).
Switzerland is interesting in that it produces concentrated reds that come from three very different cultures [France, Germany and Italy], as well as fragrant whites. "Swiss wines taste quite unlike those of Germany and Austria...because Swiss winemakers routinely encourage the second, softening malolactic fermentation...They also increase most of their wines' final alcohol content quite considerably by adding sugar to the fermentation vat..." (Ibid: 254).
Examples of German, Austrian and Swiss Wines:
+ Germany
Urziger Wurzgarten Riesling Spatlese (£14.50 at The Wine Shop), Von Winning Riesling (£16.50 at The Wine Shop)
Rabl Gruner Veltliner Eiswein Dessert (£37.50 at The Wine Shop), Gruner Veltliner 2009 Winzer Krems (£9.50 at The Wine Shop)
+ Switzerland
Cornalin du Valais AOC (£14.52 at Switzerland Wine)
CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE
Hungary produces fiery whites. Originally, Hungarian wine was based on quantity, not quality, as it was seen to supplied based on long economic plans, a commodity like grain or potatoes, rather than a luxury. This has somewhat changed today. Kadarka is Hungary's signature red grape (Ibid: 256). Tokay/ Tokaj is a famous Hungary wine and is made from rotten grapes since 1650 (Ibid: 257).
In Robinson's (1996: 258) book, she doesn't give a fond opinion of Bulgaria, saying that it produces cheap international varietals, however Bulgaria's blackcurrant flavoured Cabernet Sauvignon is quite successful (Ibid: 259).
However, Romania also has been given a harsh opinion of being seriously underdeveloped, but it has potential. Romania is a wine-drinking country, but it suffers from shortages of materials and equipment such as bottling equipment and refrigeration that are needed for wine-making (Ibid: 260).
Examples of Hungarian and Romanian Wine:
+ Hungary
Nyakas Sauvignon Blanc (£11.99 at Hungarian Wine Society, however you must buy a half case of wine from here), Bock Hárslevelű (£12.99 at Hungarian Wine Society)
The House Pinot Noir 2012 (£5.49 at Laithwaites), Paris Street Pinot Grigio 2012 (£7.49 at Laithwaites)
MEDITERRANEAN COUNTRIES
The Greek wine industry is extremely ancient, and some of the vine varieties grown there today may be the same that the ancient Greeks once drunk for themselves. The Malvasia vine owes its name from the corruption of the Greek port name 'Monemvasia'. "Many Greek varieties are extinct or nearly so but the aromatic white Malagousia has been rescued, as has Lagorthi, and Crete's Vilana (Ibid: 262).
Cyprus produces a dark, raisiny dessert wine known as Commandaria (Ibid: 263).
Examples of Greek and Cypriot Wines:
+ Greece
2009 Voyatzis Cabernet Franc Tsapournakos (£10.62 at House of Wine), Biblia Hora Ovilos White 2009 (£14.98 at The Oak Tree Wine Cellar)
+ Cyprus
Hadjiantonas Cabernet & Shiraz 2006 (£13.41 at The Oak Tree Wine Cellar),
Kyperounda Chardonnay 2010 (£9.88 at The Oak Tree Wine Cellar)"When Europeans colonised the North American continent one of their first botanical discoveries was its rich diversity of indigenous vines. Botanists have identified more than 20 different species of vine native to north eastern America", it seems however that this distinct vines were too different from what Europeans knew, and nowadays, American wines still tend to be made from the known, easy-to-sell variety vines (Ibid: 264).
Canada produces Ice wines which are sweet to the taste and produced from lightly pressed frozen grapes (Ibid: 277), Germany also has ice wines, known as Eiswein (Ibid: 244).
Chile has done well at the end of the 19th century when much of the world's wine was crippled by mildew and phylloxera, whereas they had plenty of healthy wine. Back then, the Chilean wine industry was owned by only 10 families, but in the early 1990s, the return of democracy fuelled economic growth. The old ways began to wane, the evergreen beech vats replaced with modern US and French oak barrels (Ibid: 278).
"Chile dominates South American wine exports but Argentina makes almost five times as much wine, and (like the USA) regularly produces more wine than any other country other than France, Italy, Spain and the ex-Soviet Union...The distinguishing feature of Argentine wine has been the extraordinarily high yields, with reliably sun-ripened grapes literally pumped full of melted Andean snow via irrigation channels constructed in the nineteenth century. Since the late 1980s vines have begun to be planted in cooler areas deliberately to prolong the ripening process, and trained carefully on wires for maximum quality of the resulting fruit" (Ibid: 282).
Examples of Wines from the Americas:
+USA
Ravenswood Lodi Zinfandel (£11.50 at The Wine Shop), Apothic Red (£12.50 at The Wine Shop)
Peller Icewine Riesling 2007 (£39.00 at Great Western Wine)
+ Chile
Casillero del Diablo (£6.90 at The Wine Shop), Maycas del Lamari (£13.40 at The Wine Shop), Anakena Alwa (£21.90 at The Wine Shop), La Paz Merlot (£7.50 at The Wine Shop)
+ Argentina
Santa Ana Sauvignon Blanc (£8.50 at The Wine Shop), Septima Noche Pinot Noir (£16.50 at The Wine Shop)
AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND & SOUTH AFRICA
Australia is usually seen as the cutting-edge wine producers of the New World. "Their wine industry is not fundamentally distinguished by history (Australia was one of the vines's later conquests), and certainly not by geography (Australian wine producers are congenital truckers of grapes and blenders of wines), but by its philosophy. 'Can do' perhaps best sums up the Australian attitude to wine production" (Ibid: 284). "Most of Australia's vines grow where summers are cool enough to allow some flavour to build up in the grapes before they are so embarrassingly high in sugar that they must be picked lest acids plummet to uncorrectable levels. (Most Australian wines will have some acidification, acid deliberately added...). Nearly half of all vines grow in the state of South Australia, a third in the state of Victoria and most of the rest in New South Wales" (Ibid:285).
New Zealand make crisp, fruity, acidic wines but only make a fraction of 1% of the world's wine.
"Wine has been made on the Cape of Good Hope since the mid-seventeenth century, which means that South Africa has a much longer, unbroken history of winemaking than either Australia or California" (Ibid: 300). South Africa mainly uses the Chenin Blanc grape. "Only about 15 per cent of the country's vineyard is planted with red wine grapes, of which the national speciality is a 1920s Cape crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut called Pinotage" (Ibid: 301).
Examples of Australian, New Zealand and South African Wines:
+ Australia
Peter Lehmann Margaret Semillon (£16.20 at The Wine Shop), Mr. Smith Shiraz (£12.60 at The Wine Shop)
Southern Lights Sauvignon Blanc (£13.50 at The Wine Shop)
+ South Africa
Painted Wolf Lekanyane (£11.50 at The Wine Shop), Parrotfish Cab/Merlot (£7.60 at The Wine Shop)
ASIA
"China has a burgeoning wine industry, aimed chiefly at its growing tourist trade. A small sector of it in the far west is effectively an extension of Kazakhstan, but most of its vineyards are on the eastern coast, where large foreign companies are planting Western grape varieties as well as local specialities. The great majority of Chinese grape wine is light, white, crisp and just off fry."
Japanese wine is commercially sophisticated and Japan's humid climate yields healthy grapes.
India is said to create sparkling wine that is very close to champagne, sold under the name 'Omar Khayyam' (Ibid: 305).
[NOTE: Not interested in wine for yourself? Or are you tired of drinking alone? Maybe get a bottle of wine for your cat. That's right! Japan makes wine for your cats. Hilarious, yes, but I am tempted to buy some for my two. Read the article here]
If you wish to purchase the book, you can find it on Amazon, click here to buy!
Bibliography
Robinson, J. (1996). Jancis Robinson's Wine Course. The Book People Ltd: Surrey
