The Independent Palate
Part 2 - Buying and cellaring wine

Selling Wine 1:
Prestige Prices

The French have a great advantage when it comes to marketing - history. Centuries of supplying wine to the world has established their 'brand names' and the price of these brands. First Growth Clarets like Chteau Latour are a recognised commodity with a known price. This is not the case in Australia where only a few wines have reached this hallowed position, Grange Hermitage being the best known.

It should be pointed out that this status is a guarantee of price not of quality. The most famous estate in Burgundy, The Domaine de la RomanÈe Conti (DRC), achieves prices far higher than any other producer but it certainly doesn't make the best wines in Burgundy - far from it! They pick very late, chapitalize heavily and use excessive oak. It is a very distinctive style, but it has nothing to do with the wine they are making in Burgundy today. Since this was written in June 1990, the DRC has lightened its style but, though the wines are now recognisable as Burgundy, they are still inferior to the wines of many growers that sell for a fraction of the price that the DRC commands.

Even if a wine is undeniably great there are still anomalies. The American Guru, Robert Parker rated both 1982 Chateau PÈtrus and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild as 100 out of 100, the PÈtrus was selling in Melbourne in 1987 for $700 per bottle, the Mouton for about half that. How does one justify this disparity. Scarcity comes the cry (4,000 cases per year as against 22,500 cases), perhaps is the answer. It could be that fashion decides price as it creates scarcity - after all burgundies of the same quality but a much lower price, come from much smaller parcels than PÈtrus.

In his book Wine Snobbery Andrew Barr talks about added value. He maintains that Champagne is a fairly ordinary wine with a price out all proportion to its quality, but he says it is still cheap as it confers on the purchaser the added value of partaking in a 'Champagne Lifestyle'. I guess that at $150 per glass PÈtrus does much the same thing - after all, there is none left on the shelves.

Selling Wine 2: Line-ups

In Australia we depend upon the wine shows via the press to tell us what to buy. Even if the show ring is an easier place to judge livestock than wine, a tremendous amount of blind faith is placed on 'gold medals'.

It is inconceivable that you would find Chateau Latour, or for that matter Grange Hermitage, entered in a competition - there is no way they could afford to lose. The wines that are entered are those that don't sell easily under their own name. Given that most new wines from the New World need a commercial boost from their industry peers (the judges in the various shows are mostly drawn from the industry in one way or another) how effective are they in selecting fine wine?

Firstly it must be said that the show circuit is the major reason for the marked improvement in our wine-making over the last decade or two. With a line up of a couple of hundred wines those with obvious faults don't even get tasted. However being a carping critic I would like to suggest that it has also resulted in dull, conformist wines.

Robert Parker, rates the Burgundies of Jean-Marie Ponsot very highly and amongst them his Clos de la Roche 1986. It is a fabulous wine but it could never win a medal. Fantastic fruit made and aged in murky old wood, the piquant mixture walks a tightrope between the sublime and rather smelly disaster.

When I mentioned my disquiet about line-ups to the wine maker and wine judge, James Halliday, a few years ago he stoutly defended them but he offered the information that if you change the position of the wines in a line-up then you also effect the results. In other words the same person tasting the same wines but in a different order would probably arrive at a different opinion of the respective wine's qualities.

Smelling, tasting and spitting out dozens, or even hundreds, of vigorous young wines, as you would judging, or in an industry tasting, in no way duplicates the experience of sitting down to dinner with a few close friends and a highly valued, prize winning, bottle.

In a line-up the flavours that impinge upon the wine are those of other wines. At dinner it is the tastes of food. I am absolutely convinced that certain types of wines look good in line-ups and some shine with food and that they are clearly distinct types of wine - full, rich and voluptuous for the line-up, piquant and elegant for food.

A Drink in Time Saves Wine

The wine trade has a vested interest in selling more wine than you can drink. So they have hit on the excellent ploy of suggesting that you shouldn't drink the stuff but instead, lay it down in a cool dark place for a decade or so. Clearly you can cellar much more wine than you can drink, and if the wine was a mistake then the passing of the years lessens the pain - and the blame.

There are two problems with cellaring. The first is that as you drink more your palate changes. It is not just that you move from sweet to dry wines (and then back again) but that your taste in red wines becomes increasingly refined. You tend to look more for elegance than brute strength. Inevitably we all finish up with cases of wine that we feel we should drink but don't ever quite get around to.

Secondly it is important to realise that not all wines improve with age, many in fact become worse. The faults become more obvious with every passing year. As wines are being made to drink earlier these days there is no longer the need to look to your grand children's cellar, just your own.

It is a cursed problem this one of cellaring and when to drink - its always too soon or too late and either way you feel guilt. Of course, if by some miracle, it is just the right moment to gulp it down, you can always say reproachfully, as a friend did, surveying the almost empty bottle of wine that Mietta had recommended, "Its good now but you wouldn't want to keep it". Wine buffs have to feel that if its right, then its wrong.

Wine is a living thing and dies if it is badly cellared, and in our climate it hard to cellar wine properly. Eighteen degrees Celsius is getting too hot, ideally it should be stored at around 12 degrees Celsius. You can air condition, but lack of humidity and air movement from the fan causes problems. The very best storage is underground where it is cool, the temperature variation is gradual, it is dark and the humidity is high enough to stop the corks drying out.

If you can't duplicate those conditions don't even think of long term cellaring. Drink up within two or three years.

Provenance

If it is hard for you to cellar wine then it is also difficult for the industry. Some wholesalers have air conditioned warehouses, which is as close to perfect as the industry comes, but others store their wine in large sheds with equally large temperature variations. After a, hopefully, brief stint here it is sold to a retailer on whose shelves the wine may also suffer from heat, light and vibration. It would be interesting to know how long wines are kept in those conditions. The betting is that the older and more expensive the bottle the longer it has been exposed to the light and bustle of a retailers' shelves. You should probably query a wine's history before you buy - the antique trade call it provenance.

This may all seem obsessive nonsense but if you are buying wine on the basis of its reputation then you must make sure that the bottle you are purchasing is as it should be. There's an old wine saying "there are no great vintages, only great bottles", in other words condition is more important than reputation.

Auctions are thought of as a way to buy rare and old wines and so they might be but they are also the best obligation free way of off-loading problems. In the present economic climate there could well be some bargains around, as both private hoarders and the trade feel the pinch, but in normal times the reasons that one sells at auction are, at best because your palate has out-grown the wine, and at worst, because it has a problem.

It is a risky business you should taste carefully before you buy.