Sunday drive to St Nesbit

Sunday lived up to its name and we set the air conditioning to windows down on the drive through the Clevedon countryside.

The object of the day trip was a vertical tasting of St Nesbit (that since I had my sober driver along would hopefully end as a horizontal). To spice up proceedings I decided to assume the identity of Warren D'Affitness, a mechanic from Sandringham who would become increasingly boisterous as he sampled more wines.

Puriri Hills was closed so we went to Twilight on the advice of a smattering of road signs. Joy Peart at the cellar door was friendly and alarmingly frank and her corgi Johnny is built for comfort not for speed.

Her wines of note are a merlot-dominant Bordeaux blend called Sunset with nice grippy tannins and well-integrated oak (Warren, true to form, got notes of burnt rubber and leather upholstery); and an oaked pinot gris which impresses for its novelty rather than its quality – the oak shouts over the pinot gris and what it has to say is rather coarse. We eventually bought a chenin blanc we hadn't tasted on Joy's say so and headed for Whitford.

We made an unscheduled stop at Turanga Creek when Warren saw the cellar door at the last minute and pulled up the handbrake. The Turanga wines were excellent too, especially the Late Harvest Viognier, which finally answers the question of where babies come from. Warren was starting to get into his work now and enquired about the various horsepowers and gear ratios of the vineyard tractors before acquiescing to his driver's narrowing eyes.

Next it was off to the holy grail of South Auckland wine, St Nesbit in Karaka. This vineyard is not open to the public, but as Sam, the owner's son, takes his car to Warren's garage, we were able to score an invite. Tony Molloy grows a mixture of merlot, cab franc, cab sauv and petit verdot to make his cult wine. The reason we were here was because we'd heard the 07, 08 and 09 vintages were outrageously outstanding to put it mildly. And that they were. The 07 is due for bottling this weekend but the American Oak barrels had worked their magic. Even Warren was impressed, saying it was like "a Ferrari 348 GTS crossed with a Rolls Royce." None of us had tasted either of those vehicles so we had to resort to standing there grinning with wine-stained teeth.

The St Nesbit 2002 is available now from Glengarry, Accent on Wine or online.

Reviewing wine properly – throw the cork away

The great American food critic AJ Liebling wrote in his memoir Between Meals, "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down." Damn right. Sipping, swirling and spitting may have its place in wine shows, but around here, it can fuck right off.

There will be no blind tasting on this blog! I'll spit the odd sample at formal tastings only to ensure I get invited back but most reviews and recommendations you find will be based on a bottle of wine with dinner, or at least a couple of glasses.

It's my commitment to you to throw away the cork on as many bottles as possible, because I know if you love wine like me – you'll be trying to do the same.

Of course, Liebling died at 59 riddled with gout from his years of excessive eating and drinking. Guess I'd better just subscribe to the David Brent mantra: "Live fast, die old."

Let me see you shake it...

If your wine is just a cheap drop to wash down your charred rump steak, is there any point waiting for it to breathe? Can aeration really make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

Most experts would say ‘probably not’ and would also weigh any potential taste improvement against the ridicule you’d face if your mates saw you earnestly waiting for your cheap cooking wine to breathe.

But as it turns out, there might be a point to doing it after all and I might have discovered a technique that gives you all the benefits without making you look like a pretentious pillock.

I owe this trick to our family friend Frank, who is a wine distributor in South Africa. He’s a gentle giant of a man with an extensive wine knowledge – knowledge enough, at least, to know the wine he peddles is mostly mass-produced battery acid.

Frank was round for dinner recently when Dad whipped out a bargain-basement red and started pouring, unaware that he was insulting my mother’s cooking with every tilt of his wrist.

After he’d poured one glass, Frank, who can spot a cheap red at fifty paces, asked Dad to hand him the bottle. Frank put the cap back on and started to violently shake the bottle like a victorious Formula 1 driver. “Right,” he said, handing it back to Dad. “Now try it.”

My glass was the next to be poured and a mass of bubbles tumbled into the glass. Frank explained it was a technique called ‘Hyper-oxidisation.’ The idea is to rapidly expose the wine to oxygen, which has the same effect as letting it breathe, but in a fraction of the time. Pouring out a glass is necessary to give the remaining wine room to move.

I tasted it and was pleasantly surprised. It seemed smoother and better balanced than I’d imagined. A comparative sip from the first glass confirmed it – the wine had benefited from its vigorous shake up, even if it did look a little disheveled in the glass.

So while this is only really based on fairly amateur science and I wouldn’t recommend shaking up your dinner host’s prize bottle of Chambertin, it might be worth a try next time you buy a bottle of wine and your first sip reveals you’ve made an error of judgment.

Natural Selection

How do we choose which wines we buy? Does the answer lie deep in our evolutionary history? Short answer – probably not. Long answer…

Right from the moment our mother bounces us on her knee, we're taught not to judge a book by its cover. It’s a sound piece of advice aimed at stopping mummy’s little treasure growing into a nasty little bigot – but the truth about prejudgment is that, judiciously applied, it’s actually very helpful.

In our early days on the savannah, if we saw a lion, we assumed he would attempt to deploy his sharp teeth and claws towards making us his lunch. Such prejudice would be frowned upon these days because it's a leophobic stereotype – but nevertheless it was a useful assessment for our ongoing survival. If we were smart, we quickly and quietly made like a southpaw and left.

Our judgments in the wine store are similar – we make choices based on past experiences. While the consequences of a poor wine selection may be less dire than failing to appreciate the intentions of the aforementioned carnivore, the point is our prejudices steer us towards certain types of wine and away from others, quite often to our detriment.

Vinously speaking, we’ve all had our happy successes and spectacular failures. Depending on whether our experience was good or bad, the whole grape varietal is then coloured by it. Maybe our thoughts go something like this…"Hmmm, let’s see… beef tonight…cab sauv? No, too harsh… and it stains my teeth….merlot? A bit bland, plus there’s that movie Sideways that says it’s rubbish…pinot noir? Can be a bit watery but usually a pretty safe bet…shiraz…My favourite – chocolate and raspberry jam…"

The conversation differs for all of us, but even an experienced wine buyer has only a more sophisticated version of this internal monologue. If this little pep talk helps you decide your varietal, how do you proceed once that’s nailed down?

Unless you’re in the 99th percentile of wine drinkers who regularly read wine reviews and can separate wine by region and sub-region, you only really have the label to go on. Oh, and those spurious little trophy stickers – which I will distrust until I see the gold medal for Appallingly Integrated Oak that the Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay must have won.

So what, apart from the bare essentials like name and origin, can we tell from the label?

What if you’re faced with 5 similar bottles of similar price, none of which you’ve tried or heard of? If you’re anything like I was starting out, you’ll probably go for the one with the prettiest packaging or funniest name. But as I found out, buying off the label is caveat emptor, because it’s mostly just good old-fashioned branding.

Retail psychology is a complex field, flooded with buzzwords like ‘perceived self-image,’ but here’s my take on what the winemaker is trying to make you think about their wine, based on the label design. But be warned, even when you know these tricks, it’s hard not to fall victim to them. It’s battered wine drinker syndrome – we always want to see the best in wines.

The first category of label I’ll call the French chateau label. This is white and clean with a hand-drawn, old-fashioned house or building on it. It has a classical cursive script or an upper-case serif font. It’s designed to look like a Margaux or at least convey a sense of being an established name. Considering we didn’t have much of a wine industry at all until the 1970s, this insinuation is dubious for all but a few New Zealand producers. Though the building might have been there for ages I guess...

The opposite of this Franco-fraudulence is what I call the parochial Kiwi label, which usually features a fern somewhere and a liberal application of garish colours. This label represents the perky New World upstart, trading off our country’s youthful exuberance to try and corner the everyday drinkers that don’t want to be seen taking wine too seriously. The good news is it’s cheap; the bad news is its often only one step removed from the goon bag.

Then there are the landscape labels, like Palliser Estate and Wither Hills. These labels try to sell you a sense of place and purity. These still have a sense of nationalism about them, but they’re a step up from the parochial ones. I secretly suspect the parched slopes of Wither Hills are meant to make you thirsty too. These landscape labels are very common in New Zealand and some are excellent examples.

The next level of perceived quality is the ‘just writing’ label that mostly occupies the super-premium market in the Southern Hemisphere. In the style of Penfolds Grange and others, the theory is that the ‘just writing’ wine’s reputation should speak for itself and need no visual aids to persuade you. Te Mata Estate is a good example of the hierarchy of labels: they use landscape labels on their everyday $20 Woodthorpe range and then switch to the ‘just writing’ labels on their Elston and Cape Crest whites and their flagship Bullnose and Coleraine reds to suit the inflated price tags. In fairness to Te Mata, their wines are rather good, but I’m on a roll now so fairness is out the window.

Another thing you’ll notice is that wines usually employ colour schemes that tell you something about the depth of the wine. Red wines are especially fond of this, as the colour of the wine is not always evident looking at the bottle. The colours used often roughly reflect the colour of the wine: pinot noirs usually go for a maroon colour scheme (by no coincidence also called burgundy), while shiraz usually has a deep purple in there somewhere. This is actually quite helpful as it helps you to spot it on the shelf.

So while a pretty label is not a guaranteed reflection of the quality of its contents, if you do pick out a dud, at least you can always put a candle in it and put it on the mantle as a monument to your unwavering superficiality.