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New World sparkling wine isn’t my happiest hunting ground. But this is really good: full flavoured, complex, intense. I can’t find any UK stockists, but I reckon it will come in about the same price as Pelorus, the sparkling wine from Cloudy Bay.
Huia Blanc de Blancs 2004 Marlborough, New Zealand
A sparkling Chardonnay with the base wine aged in used French oak. Deep yellow colour. Lovely complex, toasty nose with notes of nuts, honey and vanilla, as well as fresh citrus fruit and some richer apricot character. The palate is powerful, savoury and spicy with bold toasty notes alongside fresh citrus fruit. Robust, full flavoured, complex and satisfying for current drinking. 91/100 (UK agent Bibendum Wine)
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I have been drinking this young Margaret River Shiraz for the last couple of evenings, and it’s impressive. Normally, you’d associate this rather beautiful part of Western Australia with Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux varieties, but it can also do good things with Syrah/Shiraz. It’s ripe and sweetly fruited, but there’s also freshness, definition and restraint. It needs time to show its best, I reckon.
The splash of Viognier is evident, once you know it is there, lifting the aromatics a bit and adding some pretty, sweet fruit notes to the palate.
Voyager Estate Shiraz 2009 Margaret River, Australia
13.9% alcohol. Deep coloured. Sweet blackberry and black cherry fruit nose with a floral lift, and hints of clove and spice. The palate is dense and quite fresh with bright, pure fruit and fine, gravelly tannins. Seductive but well defined, straddling the new and old worlds in style. Sweet, ripe, approachable but fresh and with good potential for further development. 91/100 (£21.17 Justerini & Brooks; the 2008 is £15.95 from Wine Direct)
Ψ PSI
Named after the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet, this is a project by Peter Sisseck of Pingus fame, in collaboration with growers in Ribera del Duero, Spain. The idea is to form partnerships with custodians of old vine Tempranillo (known here as Tinto Fino), to encourage them to farm more sensitively, cultivating the biological element of their soils. The wine is made with little new oak influence, to harness more effectively the quality of the fruit. First vintage was 2007.
This is an understated wine by Spanish standards, and I think it has the potential to age beautifully.
Psi 2009 Ribera del Duero, Spain
13.5% alcohol. Stylish stuff. Fresh raspberry and plum fruit with mineral undertones, hints of gravel and tar, and really well integrated oak that doesn’t stick out at all. There’s good freshness and a lovely savoury dimension to the fruit. I think this will age beautifully. 92/100 (£23.39 Corney & Barrow)
I’ve really liked a lot of the 2011 Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs that I’ve tried. And here’s another good one. It’s from Brent Maris’ new venture in the Waihopai subdistrict of Marlborough, where the other big player is Ara.
The Ned Sauvignon Blanc 2011 Waihopai River, Marlborough, New Zealand
12% alcohol. Nice intensity here: bracing, fresh and lively with some herby, green pepper notes alongside sweet passion fruit and gooseberry characters. Lovely vibrant aromatics, too. Bright and pure, this is a really nice wine. 90/100 (£9.99 Waitrose, Majestic, but expect to see this promoted and pounce when it’s at £7.99 or £6.99)
Interesting to look at current circulation figures for the leading national newspapers in the UK:
Dailies
The Sun 2,751,219
Daily Mail 2,011,283
Daily Mirror 1,122,563
The Daily Telegraph 596,180
Daily Express 586,707
The Times 405,113
Financial Times 319,757
The Guardian 229,753
i 243,321
The Independent 117,084
Sunday papers
The Mail on Sunday 1,921,010
Sunday Mirror 1,753,202
The Sunday Times 967,975
The People 770,772
Daily Star Sunday 644,804
Sunday Express 607,894
The Sunday Telegraph 461,772
The Observer 264,321
Independent on Sunday 124,428
Pretty much all are down on what they were a few years back.
What’s the future for newspapers? The current model isn’t really working, because of the impact of digital media. The Internet has come from nowhere in a very short space of time, and it’s hardly surprising that the newspaper industry has taken some time to adjust to it.
So we have a situation where there is reduced demand for physical papers, there is reduced advertising revenue, and there are still the same number of players. The obvious conclusion is that there will be casualties, and that not all can survive. But if you are a newspaper owner, you don’t want to be one of those, and you’ll fight to make your paper profitable.
Printing and distrubuting physical copies of newspapers is really expensive. But going fully digital would be an admission of defeat, and would likely spell the end of your newspaper brand. It would lose too much brand equity.
In light of lower revenues, stripping out costs is essential, but if you strip out too much on the editorial side then you could also damage the brand if the quality of the paper’s content decreases.
From my perspective, the only route to long-term safety is brand extension, using the wide exposure of the newspaper to help create a media brand that involves more than just delivering news. News is cheap and people are saturated with it. Newspaper brands (some of them, at least) are powerful and have incredible visibility. Newspaper owners need to be smart enough to build these brands in sensible, creative ways to extend them beyond the now unprofitable activity of delivering news.
And finally, an interesting question. If you were a wine writer, which paper would you most like to have a column in? The one with the largest circulation? Maybe. Perhaps, though, you’d want to be in the paper with the largest circulation among people who might have an interest in reading about wine.
I was impressed by this. It’s a limited-production sparkling wine from a vineyard at the headquarters of Laithwaites, one of the UK’s most successful wine merchants, located in Theale, near Reading, Berkshire.
There are just 704 Chardonnay vines here, planted in 1998. The 2006 vintage, which I am tasting here, was harvested on October 3rd and made at Ridgeview Vineyard in Sussex.
Laithwaites Theale Vineyard Blanc de Blancs 2006 England
12% alcohol. Super stuff. Fresh with nice acidity but also a lovely rounded character and some toasty richness. Good purity here. Blind, I’d have been heading straight to Champagne here. A really stylish wine. 90/100 (£22.99 Laithwaites)
Costero Syrah 2008 from Vina Leyda, in the Leyda Valley. Bright, vivid, peppery. Sweet fruit, but not too sweet. Some notes of olive. Black cherry and blackberry fruit, with a hint of Chileanness, but not too much.
It was a bargain at £6.99 on multibuy from Majestic a year ago. I wish I had bought more, because this is the sort of wine Chile should be making more of. The freshness and definition, allied with the savoury, slightly meaty characters make it incredibly drinkable and versatile, with a hint of seriousness.
Alas, too many Chilean reds show sweet fruit and little else, save for that slightly rubbery Chilean character that makes them easy to spot in blind tastings. That Vina Leyda can make an inexpensive wine like this with such character gives me great hope. It’s a cooler-climate region, and I think this is where many of the more interesting Chilean wines are coming from at the moment.
I’d love to see more. Chile does commercial so well, it probably doesn’t have to bother too much with making more serious wines, but the potential is there.
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I’m enjoying this wine. It’s superbly polished and sleek, with a seductive personality, fusing lush, ripe ‘New World’ fruit with the freshness and definition of the ‘Old World’. It’s not the most complex wine ever, but it is incredibly drinkable. It’s the ideal wine for serving to a broad spectrum of drinkers. There’s enough interest here for the wine geek to enjoy it, and it’s so smooth and friendly that the average punter could really get on with it. And it has this broad appeal without being spoofy.
And a note about Hawkes Bay. It should definitely be without the apostrophe, in my opinion. Makes life easier for everyone.
Kaituna Hills Reserve Cabernet Merlot 2010 Hawkes Bay, New Zealand
Sweet, ripe, pure blackberry and blackcurrant fruit. Very smooth and seductive with smooth texture and fine-grained tannins. Yet it avoids being sweet and spoofy. Stylish and accessible, this is a real crowd pleaser. Impressive winemaking. 88/100 (£9.49 Marks & Spencer)
Really like this.
It’s a Portuguese red wine from the Bairrada region, made by one of the top producers in this area, Casa de Saima. Now they’re known as traditionalists – defenders of the Baga grape, which is what the region’s top reds are made from. This, however, is quite a modern-styled wine, with some Merlot and Touriga Nacional blended in.
But it’s not ‘bad modern’. While there’s lovely ripe fruit, there’s also a more serious edge to this wine. It was foot-trodden and fermented in lagares with indigenous yeasts, before being aged in large, old oak: so it’s pretty natural. I really like it, and especially at the price I paid for it (IIRC £8.50 from The Wine Society; alas they no longer have any).
Casa de Saima Colheita 2008 Beiras, Portugal
13.5% alcohol. Baga with some Touriga Nacional and Merlot. Very fruit driven. Fine, intense, spicy berry fruits nose with some attractive gravelly savoury notes. The palate is savoury and spicy with some tannic grip and sweet berry and cherry fruits. Fresh and vibrant with a hint of mintiness. Straddles the modern and traditional divide very well. 91/100 (£9.99 Fareham Wine Cellar; UK agent Raymond Reynolds)
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Carrying on from last week’s blog post on whether or not terroir is relevant, I want to address another question that has been the focus of some twitter debate: are people actually interested in wine at all?
One forcefully put viewpoint is that people aren’t, and that this is particularly the case in the UK. The evidence cited? The fact that wine columns have been cut from national newspapers, and that the only remaining consumer wine magazine in the UK doesn’t have many subscribers.
I disagree. Many people out there find wine really interesting. Of course, they are not the majority by any means. Isn’t it daft to expect any subject to be a majority interest? [With perhaps just a few exceptions - Premiership football? The X-factor? Hollywood blockbusters?]
It may just be a minority with an interest in wine, but is still a significant number of people. There are many who like to drink wine, and who are interested in learning and experimentation. Some of them even like to read about wine, but this tends to be just the keenest of the category experts. Though it is a small slice of the population, it’s a big enough group to keep me in work.
What about the evidence of the disappearing columns?
First, this doesn’t reflect the fact a lack of interest about wine as much as it reflects the fact that newspapers get very little advertising revenue from wine companies. Newspapers assign space in their lifestyle sections in rough proportion to who is advertising. The editorial copy in these sections is advertiser bait. Adverts bring in the bulk of newspaper revenue. Wine is a low margin business and its production and sale is highly distributed, with a bewildering number of companies involved. This means there isn’t a lot of wine-related advertising spend.
Second, the sorts of people who like to read about wine are the category experts. Many wine columns are (admirably) aimed quite broadly at non-involved wine consumers. But these people simply don’t like reading about wine. At this level, there’s relatively little you can say about wine, and it’s incredibly difficult to capture the taste of wine in words that mean anything to anyone other than serious wine geeks.
Category experts therefore tend to find wine columns deeply unsatisfying; the same can be said for most consumer wine magazines, whose attempts to appeal to a broad church mean that they often lack the depth and interest to hold the attention of the very people who would bother reading them in the first place.
I should also add that it’s a mistake to confuse lack of interest in reading about wine with lack of interest in wine. Lots of people love to experience wine when they are given the opportunity to taste the stuff, and discuss it in a fun setting. There are probably lots of people who, given the chance, would become category experts/involved consumers if they were able to experience wine. But until you have been given the chance to experience wine, words about wine won’t have much meaning, will they?
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About  This is the blog of wine journalist Jamie Goode, online since 2001. Feel free to nose around; your comments are welcomed.
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