Malcolm Gluck is best known as the wine critic behind the UK’s “Superplonk” a guide to the cheaper wines on the market. Now he’s in the process of re-inventing himself as a broader wine commentator, with a special interest in debunking certain “myths” (as he puts it) and, in Malcolm Gluck’s Brave New World, celebrating the New World wines of Australia, California, New Zealand and South Africa.
What of other new areas in the wine world like South America? They don’t fit into a very curious theory he espouses – that it is in English-speaking countries that true innovation occurs. “People who speak English … are … like the language itself, open to ideas… and sceptical of hard and fast rules.” Which is clearly an illogical proposition at best, at worst outright xenophobic. Continue reading ‘Malcolm Gluck’s Brave New World’
24.com recently ran a very complimentary review of Bowl in the new Adderley Hotel downtown. Lunch there today told a somewhat different story.
The food is not without interest, but it’s clumsy. The sushi platter stumbled on poor glutinous sweet rice, while the mains lacked flavour. I had some (very average) butternut ravioli which was supposed to be “tossed” in okra which there was no sign of, my brother did better with some (tender) pork on an Asian noodle nest. This noodle swirl added little taste to the dish, but the pork was great and meltingly tender. Dessert, an alleged whisky creme brulee (’scuse the missing accents), was poor, more a custard pie.
The service was good but strangely coy, as if I was complimenting them on their fabulous breasts. The wine list is a triumph, however, of simplicity and good picks, at reasonable mark-ups.
Busy reading Hugh Johnson’s A Life Uncorked and it has so far sparked two thoughts. The first is that it remains a challenge to write about wine or wine-life without sounding like a prat, which he strays into (between entertaining rambles through wine country) when he lists famous-wines-I-have-drunk (and-who-with). Very clubby.
The second and more positive is a sudden urge to drink more chablis – Johnson evokes a stony refreshness in a gradually revealing wine that appeals to my sense of good stuff. For this reason I look forward to a launch I’m attending on Thursday of the “new” L’Avenir, now under the ownership of Chablis-maestro Michel Laroche.
I did drink some chablis last week at the surreal and bling-laden launch of Haskell vineyards, but a fuller report on this coming soon. In the meanwhile, if you are in the mood to debate the ethics of wine journalism, its subjectivity and the use of critics, check this out (thanks to Pieter de Waal for pointing me there).
Last week had me singing for my supper again as a presenter of wine at a food and wine evening. Ideally, you know what the food is going to taste like through a preceding session with the chef, but this is not always possible – and to be honest not all chefs seem to think it necessary, overly-confident of their powers against the capricious nature of wine.
Problem is when the food doesn’t go with the wine… and you are standing there caught between telling it like it is and turning it into a chance to discuss the principles of matching; or pretending everything is just swell – in fact the most perfect match ever, (which is regrettably what you hear at most of these affairs).
Food and wine matching is something of a parlour game, a pastime of our BBC Food age. “Eat what you like and drink by the same rule” is a principle to ward off the anti-snob brigade. At the same time there are better and worse pairings, and when you are asked to present a table you assume that the people want to know a bit more about this pastime, and you engage – turning it into a chance to bring wine to life in its most ideal setting, the social table.
So this time the food and wine were, after all, well matched, and I could be truthful without having to choose my words diplomatically.
As I moved through the rows of shiraz, clipping bunches and lugging the crates about on a wintry Sunday, I had ample time to have a close look at the variety and individuality of the grapes that end up as wine. All the fancy bottles and pretty or not labels, and all the variation that wine offers begins with plants in a row, dangling perfect and not so perfect bunches of grapes.
Luddite is only one wine, a shiraz. It is a powerful wine, but at the same time it remains pure-fruited and balanced – and above all inviting the next mouthful. Walking through the rows of grapes in 2007 that will be released as wine in 2009, it’s amazing to see the variation in the quantity and state of the bunches: from the ends of the rows where the wind eats at them, to the sheltered middle, to the patches where the soil offers more or less nurture. Continue reading ‘Harvest at Luddite’
Five hours of my day spent picking grapes today – one of the few day that I “honestly” get involved in the wine business, in the strange way that we seem to value physical labour above all else in our society.
Five hours picking grapes is a good workout, another way to look at it. It allows you to have the lamb and Luddite shiraz by the tumbler afterwards with a sense of great satisfaction. It was Niels and Penny Verburg’s shiraz that we picked, in weather that was more European than South African, cool, with intermittent showers.
What you see up close are the details that seem to mean a great deal, but often swept up in the cliches of wine marketing. The slope of the hill and the way the grapes look different here, on this end, than they do on the other. The ends, with their wind-bitten paucity of bunches, and the middle, where the bunches hang resplendent. The bottom of the block, planted to another clone, where the bunches are thicker even, though the leaves are light on the plant. The families picking together.
And what I like, even though any talk of vintage and place-specific wines is washed away in the everyday and over-used banalities that producers use: that the block is unirrigated, so the vines have to react to the season as natural plants do, unaided by a refreshing drenching. The old fashioned way.
But then again, it is Luddite Syrah.
In a recent post I talked about a fish course on the menu that involved a fish that is on the endangered list. A reader then alerted me to this site where the fish populations are discussed and you can get specific info about certain species on the database.
In conversation with people involved in marine work, it seems that fish stocks are generally very threatened and there’s the feeling that the next generation may not know the fillets of “line fish” that we enjoy, and only eat farmed fish. We should also be eating more of the small and quickly reproducing species (like sardine and anchovy) instead of those fish higher on the food chain. The current rage for sushi, for example, must be sending tuna to an early exit from the oceans.
There used to be a cookbook locally called “Free from the Sea” – but the sea is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Last week I ate at a restaurant called Momo that’s in my guide and has changed owners, so needed updating. It has stayed the same in look and the menu is also unchanged, upon enquiring, it turns out that the chef has stayed on.
As a Belgian toned place, steak and frites appears on the menu and a number of tables ordered it – as did I. Never mind that the specifically skinny nature of a frite was unknown to the establishment (more importantly the fries weren’t great), it was the nature of the slab of unidentified protein on my plate that was the most disconcerting.
Uniform in shape, a block with a strip of fat, this “220g sirloin” had a slightly scorched, ruddy brown look with no griddle marks. In texture it was spongy, and though very tender, it didn’t have any discernable meat fibre. It tasted a little like kassler, with hints of chemical smoke. It was clearly awful, our dogs had to be cajoled to eat the bulk of it.
Any help? My guess is that this is bulk imported beef that has been chemically tenderised and water injected, probably packaged to perfect grammage.
The judges of the 2007 FNB Private Clients Wine Magazine Chenin Blanc Challenge (or FNBPCWMCBC) encountered an interesting dilemma. The dilemma was born out of the fact that, of the 125 entries, there were so many good wines that the final eight had to be separated into winners and near winners by the judges scoring these from one to eight in order of personal preference. Continue reading ‘Chenin Shake-down’
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