Extracts from Goldstone’s owner, John Cushing’s wine column in Shropshire Magazine. John wrote wine articles for the Shropshire Magazine every month for 5 years. Here are some of John’s favourites:-
Matching Bordeaux wines with Shropshire food
The matching of wine and food is in reality hedonistic but often viewed as debauched and has the potential for the sycophancy of the Emperors suit of much admired non-existent robes. Now that’s all the big words out of the way let’s see if we can debunk.
Wine consumption in the UK has grown massively over the last 20 odd years but we still don’t universally quite get it. You see in France, it is every bodies right to slurp a glass or two and comment on its suitability or not with whatever they are munching. Currently as only they can, a strike by the heavily armed riot police is threatened because the Health and Safety gang have mused that “maybe a glass of red with lunch before quelling a riot is perhaps not a good idea”
“Mon Dieu, dessus les pistols.”
And much to our amusement one for all and all for one they are on the barricades. I bet there isn’t a Bobbie’s canteen in Britain that cares that the combo of Tanners Sauternes with pear poached in red wine with honey comb and Roquefort is an arrest made in heaven. I can’t see it catching on in Shrewsbury nick.
But that combination is the ultimate demonstration of how wine and foods can interplay stunningly and be dismissed as daft in the same breath.
At Goldstone we were invited by the Comité Interprofessional du Vin de Bordeaux (CIVB) to host a dinner which matched examples of Bordeaux wines with a six course dinner and tasting led by Tanners Wines head of selling, Adrian Patterson. In wine making terms Bordeaux (left hand side of France about three quarters of the way down) is at the top of the tree cocking a snook at all other countries and regions in the world both in terms of quality, quantity and price. Rosé sales have grown as we aspire to Mediterranean living and Chateau Bel Air eased us in and showed off the Alfresco style of canapés with their multiplicity of flavours. The quail Scotch egg with peppery eggyness complimented the Strawberry scented wine extraordinarily (great, that’s summer barbecues sorted).
Fish likes lemon which clashes with wine.(Non, CRS restez a dejeuner) Meaty white Skate wing yanged with capers and yinged with cream needs a white to stand up to it without a poncing overlay of floral scenty stuff which you get from a lot of Sancerre and New Zealand Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. The Sauvignon from Trois Moulins stuck to its guns and did the work of the lemon and came alive despite its apparent dowdiness when on its bill. And that is the fuss because alone I thought “give it the Emperor, its invisible nonsense” but once in company the Bordeaux white blossomed and united a potentially ugly mob.
The task for the main course was to show off a couple of reasonably well aged reds. We chose a rack of lamb with rosemary crust on a white bean cassoulet with garden herb sauce. There are only so many flavour compounds in nature and essences of rosemary are a result of the Mediterranean climate as the vine. If a red can’t do justice for a decent sized pinkish rack of lamb then it should be served an Asbo.. The wine secret is no acid, do not handcuff with fresh mint sauce and the dish was lifted by a tiny shoot of Marjoram. ( Non Messieures,il n’y a pas un bang ).All these friends of the south do get on and release the best in each other. It is worth noting that by dinnertime the wine maker will have long since packed his bags and the serious work of the night went to Head chef Steve Blackshaw and his Brigade who ignited the wine with deftness at the stove and Adrian Patterson who soberly guided the dousing.
“They were the best years of our lives with lots of feasting and drinking but then the Bekaa was pure.”
The idyll ended with war and a mad escape from the property.
“Our mother had a white Volvo and we all jumped in and drove off. We were all crying. They caught our Alsatian called Tigra and we heard them shoot her”
That was back in 1983 in 1992 the brothers Sami and Ramzi returned to the Lebanon with $5000 and went in search of their family estate.
Lebanon is about the size of Wales with a series of mountains running its entire length called Mount Lebanon then it is into the Bekaa Valley on then to another range The Anti Lebanon Mountains and then you are in Syria. The Qurnat es Swada is 3083 metres high. The soil is mostly gravel on a limestone base and at about 1000 metres fairly frost free, there are about 300 days of sunshine with some periods of intense heat but the elevation keeps the average temperature to 25C.
You’ve got it, a fantastic place in which to grow vines and make wine.
Sami bought a Range Rover for practically nothing and just in case an AK 47 Assault rifle that sat in the footwell. On his way he stopped at roadside sandwich bar and was introduced to the buttie maker, Abu Fouad who happened to be a displaced farmer from the same village. He was loaded up with the AK 47 and off they shot to the find the land. The old farmer declared the land ideal for vines and was hired on the spot. An enterprise was born but with one or two practical issues. The bank would not accept the land as collateral, which was lawless, acted as home to the Syrian army, was a magnet for extremist groups, was regularly bombed by the Israeli air force and there was the squatters.
Not what I would call a fantastic place to make wine. Those issues meet the criterion of problems in my business lexicon.
The first wine was produced in 1996 but the clever bit was forming a partnership with three French producers including the Brunier family of Domaine de Vieux Telegraphe (The great Chateauneuf du Pape) and making a quality wine. After a few years experience they have got it sorted, on the red front there are three standards.
Massaya Classic that has ripe black berries on the nose with a warm intensity and spicy flavour, £7.80. The Massaya Selection2003 is a syrah based blend, very fine with subtle oak and is richly textured, £11.80. The Massaya Reserve which is Cabernet Sauvignon based intensely purple with gentle oak and powerful nose, rich ripe black fruit flavours and will age well.
On any basis this is quality wine but I suspect they need your support right now as yet another war is raged around them under the pretext of religion.
“Organic wines – much more than a food”
Over the last five or so years the wine shelves have developed a section given over to “wines made from organic grapes”. That’s a mouthful in itself and do I detect a note of marketing department careful word smithery? Wouldn’t straight forward Organic wine do?
You can grow grapes organically relatively easily because the vine needs to be under stress to produce the most flavoursome fruit. Fertilizer and pesticides encourage lots of leaf growth and big flavourless grapes. The grapes are only destined for the press, so a bit ugly and small is not an issue unlike the dessert grapes we eat. The vines will look a bit weedy but a bit of hoeing soon tidies. But it doesn’t matter what you do, grapes are prone to rotting at ripening as autumn dampness arrives, if this happens the whole lot is a write off. That means no organic grapes and a bankrupt vineyard. There is a pragmatic solution, growers are allowed to spray with copper sulphate to stop the rot. The other certainty is that the harvested grapes will contain wild yeasts which will ferment the juice in an uncontrolled way, this has to be stopped using Sulphur compounds. This has always been the case and while these are not complex modern untried chemicals they are still chemical intervention which is not what organic means. But it does explain the careful phrasing of the label designers. The sulphur stops oxidation and in theory keeps wine fresh but you can taste it as a flattish after taste and it does give you a head ache when drinking cheap white which has been liberally dosed.
The tendency is that larger producers have pursued organic wine because there seems to be a market for it based solely on that premise irrespective of real flavour and quality gain. They are on the shelves and you will have to pay an organic premium of about 50 pence per bottle.
Wine is a natural product and best quality is produced by being sympathetic through out its growth, harvest, fermentation and storage. And that is what many smaller producers have dedicated their lives too so that they have a distinct product that makes them stand out and achieve a premium price. The ancients would have developed a natural way of nurturing the vine which would have been based around farmyard muck, waste products such as animal horn and dried nettle leaves. They would have worked out the best time of day to work on the vines and have even involved the stars and the lunar cycle so that they would always prune under a new moon and so on. All the new industrial chemicals came along and these ancient methods were lost, great for industrial mass produced wine but not individuality. Some pretty hardnosed wine makers have redeveloped this system of biodynamic production and benefits appear in flavour and quality when you are drinking. In 1997 Domaine Leflaive held blind tastings of wine made from adjoining vines separated in cultivation by biodynamic or modern method. The next year all was converted which is testimony to commercial decision not lunacy. Biodynamic producers have considerably reduced their need to spray copper sulphate and they can harness the wild yeasts to ferment the wine so almost doing away with the need for sulphur. That’s how it should be. Look out for producers, Chapoutier, Leflaive and Sesti to start your exploration and you can buy under any phase of the moon.
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