Two Rhone blends and some unsolicited opinions

Two Rhone blends to accompany Neil’s excellent steak with Beaujolais reduction. It was supposed to be a Chianti reduction, but after half a bottle of the generic and tedious 2007 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau – which I might add that I only owned because I bought it for a blind tasting training session that never came to be – I insisted that it meet a fiery end by being burnt away in a dirty pan and poured over a dead cow. While we’re on the subject, I should settle the score on whether it is appropriate to use bad wine in sauces. Of course it is. People often cite the maxim “never cook with something you wouldn’t drink”. Rubbish. That maxim is as wrong as when Maitland said “equity acts in personam”. (For those of you who aren’t equity barristers, that means “very wrong”. As wrong as the UK’s decision to send Daz Sampson to Eurovision last year.) Cooking is the only use for bad wine. When I say “bad”, of course I do not mean “off”. Corked or oxidised wine should never be used in cooking. But mediocre/boring/cheap-but-not-faulty wines are best for cooking. You would be mad to use an expensive wine to cook a dish. It is as foolish and ostentatious as using a $100 bill to light a cigar, and nowhere near as hilarious. To think – on the one hand there are all these magazine articles and “Good Living” columns about precisely how many minutes to let your 11 year old fifth growths breathe, and where you can get bottle thermometers, and why you should spend hundreds of dollars on Riedel “Sommeliers” series crystal glasses and so forth, and then you turn to the recipe column and it says “take a bottle of 1982 Chateau Cos d’Estournel and add it to a jointed chicken and 4 cloves of garlic”. Madness!

Anyway, back to the Rhone blends that accompanied said repast, neither of which are from the Rhone Valley.

The 1999 Charles Melton Nine Popes (Barossa Valley) is flagship Australian in at least two respects. Being a grenache dominant blend, with shiraz and mourvedre in there too, it is obviously modelled on Chateauneuf du Pape, and indeed it is often cited for being the most “Rhonish” of Australian reds. Chateauneuf du Pape, of course, means “Pope’s New Castle” in French, not “Nine Popes Castle”, (“neuf” being often mistaken for “nine” and not “new”). Therein lies the first Australianism – complete misconstrual and/or disregard of tradition and history. Oh yes. Have you ever been to a “black-tie” dinner in Australia? They think it means “collared shirt, please”. Anyway, I shall put that to one side as I think it’s quite a nice name for a wine, despite its Catholic overtones – better than “Thrush Valley” or “Cockburn Ridge” or whatever the latest double entendre to find its way onto an Australian wine label is.

Now, the wine. It is excellent, of course. Not in the least bit Rhonish, but that is probably down to the FUCKLOADS OF AMERICAN OAK that bash you over the head the moment you stick your nose in the glass… Why oh why?? I am just so tired of Australian winemakers trying to emulate the old world in all the wrong ways. Australia used to be really excellent at making Shiraz/Cabernet blends until they realised that nobody else in the world made them. Then they tried to emulate the old world by blending shiraz with grenache etc and cabernet with merlot etc. That’s fine, except that shiraz and cabernet actually blend really well together and make a marvellous wine, and so to at least a small degree we have lost something iconic. (To be fair, there are still plenty of excellent shiraz/cabernet blends kicking around, like Penfold’s St Henri and Bin 389). Yet one thing that apparently few Australian winemakers have noticed is that THEY DON’T USE FUCKING AMERICAN OAK IN FRANCE! Yet do Australian winemakers abandon American Oak? Oh no… And so you have a sniff of Charles Melton Nine Popes and you get hit over the head with sweaty horses and bricks and must and crap that wouldn’t be there if they had use nice old French oak, and then only after that do you gain entry to an otherwise very beautifully integrated wine – coffee bean, sharp cherries, rounded Werther’s caramel, leather, beautiful integration, soft furry tannins. Lovely.

Next was the 2001 Chateau Camplazens (Coteaux du Languedoc), a gift from the lovely Greg whom we had invited to dinner. This wine simply has to be tasted to be believed. My God, it is savoury. Liquid meat. You could sluice this around a lion’s cage. Vegetarians should not go near it with a 10 foot barge pole. Heavy, raw, meat. Then once you get past that, you get to the dried meats. Peppery pastrami, salty bacon, and a thick palate. The wine had thrown a massive deposit, but I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it were pepper grounds added directly to the bottle. Massive.

In summary:

1. Don’t use expensive wine to cook with.
2. Australian winemakers, please stop using American oak.
3. I like meat and anything that exists as an homage to it, which I take savoury wines to be.

PS – Oxford thrashed Cambridge in varsity blind wine tasting yesterday, with my great mate Piers Barclay taking top taster and the Oxford captain, John Mead, not far behind in 3rd place on the individual scores. Congratulations to them, as well as Andras, Cici, George, Will and Charlie who made up the team. And please invite me back to do a few tastings before the international against France.