CANING LABELS
Names are compressed histories. Everyone’s walking around with a history of his or her culture and character. They are a set of codes, which tell us what we share, and what’s different about us. They’re filled with complexity and meaning.
Alan Berliner
You are in a shop, perhaps a local shop run by local people, looking at the precious wines on the shelves. You wish to purchase a bottle to take to a dinner party being given by some friends who fancy themselves quite the wine experts. Or perhaps it’s Christmas, the tinsel is in your tonsils and you’re full of existential holly, after all if the turkey isn’t cooked your goose certainly will be, and with only a bottle of measly vin scrouge warming its butt near the radiator, the spirits are hardly likely to be festive. Unfortunately, you have forgotten your Hugh Johnson pocket guide and the shop assistant is not exactly full of gorm. How do you decipher the information on the labels and tell what’s rot and what’s not?
Firstly, you have to know your own mind. Here are the (rather crude) categories you need to examine before even start thinking about buying your bottle. Are you looking for a: -
1. Red, white, rose, sparkling wine
2. Dry, medium, sweet wine
3. Light-, medium - full-bodied wine
4. What price am I willing to pay?
Subsidiary categories might include country or region and grape variety or blend, something to stand up to food or something simply to quaff.
Rows and rows of bottles - what to do? Here are a few simple pointers. Firstly, ignore the shape of the bottle except the dumpy bottle with the word Hock on it. Hock is the instruction. In the unlikely event of seeing another dumpy bottle with the legend Chateau-Chalon, check your credit rating before buying. Might also be a Vinho Verde but the mere fact it got here is reason enough to avoid it. Slim flute shapes may well be from Germany or Alsace (the two are not the same despite their propinquity), but also Muscadet, Picpoul, Italy or Spain. Note the proliferation of extravagant heavy glass bottles with deep punts and serious fonts on the labels. The straight bottle with the military bearing is the Bordeaux shape used throughout the world for wines from the Cabernet and Merlot grapes and Sauvignon in the whites. The sloping shoulders belong to Burgundy: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and to Loire and the Rhone. All of the above is true except in the cases where it is not.
Does the quality or design of the label tell you anything? Most certainly not. Wines from Gascony usually have the most hideous labels and that includes the top producers. Italian producers have perfected the postage stamp label for cheap and expensive wines alike to suggest a boutiquey uniqueness. Minimalism is seen an attractive trait. Labels with abstract or original artwork have panache. But the person who is spending so much time worrying about the design of his bottles may not be devoting enough attention to what’s inside them. Photographs are vulgar as are prosaic pictures of the winery especially if the winery looks like a factory. Others romanticize furiously. Some of the greatest wines have either unassuming or downright unprepossessing labels. Some branded wines from New Zealand and Chile are well packaged.
What’s in a name? Beware of baptismal bluff. The number of wines in Bordeaux called Chateau La Tour (de la Plume de Ma Tante) is designed to confuse you into believing that they are poor relations who have earned the right to touch the hem of a great first growth. Jocularity is also a no-no as are names that are meant to be easy to remember: so lock up the Blue Nun in the Black Tower.
Each country in the world has its own system of classification laid down according to rules, rules often willingly broken by the growers themselves who do not like to be regimented. Some of the rules are thoroughly abstruse and for the greater enjoyment of bureaucrats than anything else. Recently, Chateau Valandraud, one of the most expensive wines in Bordeaux, was refused its appellation controllee, when it was found they had been using plastic sheeting to protect the roots of the vines against rain. Mas de Daumas Gassac, the soi-disant Lafite of the Languedoc, and Domaine de Trevallon, respectively, are mere vins de pays.
Appellation Contro-versial or What’s Up D.O.C.
Wine Designation - There is no universal wine law and in each country laws are changed for a variety of reasons, sometimes because they are unenforceable, on other occasions to improve the image of the wines from a country by firming up the procedures of quality control. Legal requirements only inform you about objective criteria. The designated area of wine production is protected by elaborate laws which are either ignored or are irrelevant, consistent only in their inconsistency. I would contend that the spectrum for what is labelled as “wine” is too broad to provide a useful designation. If we can create a classification that distinguishes “quality wine” from “wine” then we will cure some of the anomalies.
Geographical Reference allows us to pinpoint the origin of the grapes. Produce of South East Australia, for instance, means that the grapes were picked somewhere in an area the combined size of France and Germany and driven a thousand kilometres to a factory for processing. The more precise the reference, the better i.e. Barossa Valley. On a quality wine from the USA, for instance you would look for the AVA (American Viticultural Area) such as Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley which would entail that 85% of the grapes would be harvested from vineyards in that particular wine region. In France we may look for vineyard names or, where applicable, cru status. Each region has its own byzantine rules.
Alcoholic Strength is stated as a percentage followed by % vol. The lower the number, the less alcoholic the wine, but this is in no way a reflection of quality. The great Rieslings of the Mosel rarely get above 10% and it is their delicacy and ethereal quality that is most prized. If you see a wine above 13.5% it is likely to be very full-bodied. Whether it is balanced, wherein the alcohol is in proportion to the fruit, is something that cannot be assessed until tasted. Certain wines have a minimum alcoholic strength.
Vintage Year - At least 85% of the wine should be harvested from the year of the vintage stated on the label. Generally, the cheaper the wine the younger you want to drink it. Wine, as yet, does not have a best-by date on the bottle, but certain wines are best consumed within 9-12 months of bottling. White grape varieties such as Sauvignon, Colombard, Marsanne, Pinot Blanc and Viognier should be drunk in their first bloom. Other grapes respond well to a period of ageing: Riesling and Chenin, for example. The bigger, more expensive Chardonnays may keep even longer. However, there are always exceptions. With red wines there are even more variables. How do you know a vintage is good? You don’t, and, in a way, the question is irrelevant. Even a good grower can make a pig’s ear out of a great vintage. The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Name and Address of Producer
Wine can be made by a small individual grower or by a negociant who buys grapes from lots of growers and blends them to a house style, or by a negociant who has vineyards himself. Vast companies, corporations or cooperatives who create different labels for different styles and quality of wines, can make wine. Anyone who makes wine can be a traditionalist, an innovator or a revolutionary. My advice would be to beware negociant wines and in this I include people like Chapoutier, Guigal and Jadot. Demand for wine creates a dilemma: to maintain quality you would have to put prices up which would then price the product out of market share. Alternatively, you can cast around for further supplies of grapes from growers to bottle under the same label. And because the demand exceeds the supply of quality grapes, the product becomes inferior, but nobody cares because the name of the negociant has been already established as a brand.
Unfortunately, unless you are a walking compendium of information about wine producers, you won’t know who’s who and what’s what. There is no substitute for a little advance research.
Varietal Information
The naming of the grape is considered an important marketing tool in that the grape becomes the object of brand recognition. In France, Italy, Spain and Portugal wines are generally named after a village or region (there are exceptions, of course) with rules governing which grapes are permitted. There is a creeping “varietalisation” at the cheaper end in parts of Burgundy to test the commercial water: Bourgogne Chardonnay/Bourgogne Pinot Noir, even Macon Chardonnay, but other than the Vin de Pays and Alsace wines, grape varieties are rarely seen on the bottle. Aristocratic wines from France, Italy, Spain and Grange and Dominus have price tags that seem to function as labels in themselves. Even comparatively recent creations like Sena from Chile prefer not to announce their varietal credentials as if to boast that they are beyond such meagre classifications. There is a limited amount of information one can absorb. Merely knowing the grape variety is not enough. To get an inkling how it will taste you will need to know whether the wine is oaked or unoaked, how dry it is, what sort of body it has.
Gratuitous Government Interference
Usually a reminder tagged on to the back of the bottle from an American Surgeon General not to operate heavy machinery such as corkscrews while imbibing.
Huffing and Puffing
The back label, seen on cheaper wines, contains background information on serving suggestions, temperature, a tasting note and often a food recommendation. Note and ignore the use of superlatives e.g. “made from the ripest grapes grown in the optimum conditions in Wogga Wogga”. This roughly translates as “this wine comes from the ferociously hot arid region of Wogga-Wogga where the sugar levels in the grapes get so high that we are forced to acidify just to make it palatable”. You may also get the wine-maker’s notes extolling the wonders of the vintage (usually of the decade) the beauty of the location of the vines and so forth. As for imaginative pairing with food all white wines apparently, by the way, go with chicken, fish, seafood and salads or make a very pleasant aperitif. On cheap wines such furbelows are fair enough, on expensive wines they are facile. The tasting note is a quick advert - they are not going to say the wine is bad, are they?
Organic Designations
Groucho Marx said that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him for a member, equally, many growers who are serious practitioners of organic wine-making, refuse to be codified by the governing body. The classification is fairly vague: many growers in France happen not to use pesticides or herbicides, but wouldn’t call themselves organic; others are so enamoured of the philosophy of organics and biodynamics that they refuse classification because they believe that the rules for inclusion are too slack.
AND FINALLY
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Batard-Montrachet!
Decide how much you wish to spend and forget the expectation engendered by a fancy label. Discovering a terrific wine under a fiver has a cachet in wine circles. Unoaked New World wines provide stunning value, and, because they are not sheathed in their customary vanilla overcoats, are quite difficult to identify in a blind tasting. Best buys might include Syrah, Malbec and Tempranillo from Argentina; Carmenere and Merlot from Chile; a red from the Baga grape from Portugal; a Salice Salentino or Rosso Conero from Italy; a gutsy Gaillac red; a Semillon from Bergerac or Australia; a Chardonnay from the Languedoc.
I Can’t Believe It’s Batard-Montrachet!
Just because you’ve forked out a minor fortune for a bottle does not guarantee its quality - nor possibly even its provenance. A recent scandal in Burgundy - just another incident in a catalogue of shame - revealed that all sorts of nasties were being labelled as 1er cru wine. This, it has to be said, is the exception rather than the rule. Other factors critical to quality of taste are the conditions in which the wine has been stored. Sometimes reputable wines can simply under-perform; I’ve had more than my fair share of poor bottles of Lafite, Latour and Mouton-Rothschild.
There is an argument that, in the interest of transparency, labels should be made more informative. It would certainly benefit the consumer. But the label is no guarantee of quality and I would argue that screeds of information on a bottle would obfuscate rather than clarify. We have become a country a label-readers instead of using our experiences, our knowledge and our memories to make discerning decisions. If you buy passively, you deserve to make mistakes. So read the papers, buy a reference book. Go to a reputable wine merchant. Have an idea what you’re looking for - it saves time and disappointment.