Confessions of a Wino

I used to buy a case or three of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc a year and always Jane Hunter featured in the centre. But zingy cat piss can only bring on so much excitement, and the last couple of years have seen almost zero feline urolagnia staining the Wino doorstep.

However, the grand old grape of Riesling, revered by so many winos, is also widely grown in Middle Earth. Mix an awesome winemaker with awesome materials and the mouth waters. The Ruby Murray came by moped from The Sharma in Heckmondwike. Jane Hunter is widely available. My bottle was delivered by the Wine Society for £11.95.

The wine is incredibly appley. Shut your eyes and you could be eating a crisp Royal Gala. A hint of flat champagne when first opened (too cold, straight from the fridge), it evolved as the apples warmed and added nutmeg, elderflower, and cream. It is an apple strudel in a glass. Definitely worth a try if you used to like Kiwi SB and you think Blue Nun was under-rated.

If you are at the intersection of wine and social media, then you were probably at EWBC 2010 in Vienna this October.

It’s a diverse and eclectic group of folk: Wine-makers, journalists, blog authors, wine educators, PR people, sponsors.  All have their own reasons for attending.  Mine are manifold but the two most important are to meet really interesting people and to learn about really interesting wines.

Partly due to my own ignorance, and partly due to the lack of wines available in the UK, Austria has been a bit of a blind spot for me. The best I could say of most Austrian wines is that they broke the spellchecker.  However, in a 3 day blitzkrieg of wine tastings I learnt that Austria has so much more to offer the world than Grüner Veltliner (not that ‘Gruvee’ itself is boring or ubiquitous).

I write this to capture a few favourites and, if I may, offer a few suggestions to the rare few amongst you with even less Austrian wine experience than me. These were some of the wines that torpedoed my subs…

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Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried.  The Riesling grape, to serious winos, is what Der Ring des Nibelungen is to opera buffs.  If you don’t understand it, appreciate it, enjoy it, you are a mere Muggle.  Muggles merely struggle to consume the enormous contents wondering what type of hash cakes the buffs eat for breakfast.

And like The Ring, the natural home of Riesling is the Federal Republic of Engineers.  But at the risk of you thinking I have Teutonic Plague, my favourite Rieslings have come from Australia so far.  Just don’t tell anyone, please.

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An open top “Tommy the tourist” bus in New York is indisputably the best place to learn about New York culture.  Well, if you believe the tour guides (and assuming that you tip them enough).  I learnt that if you want to eat cheaply in NYC there are two options:  McDonalds, or Restaurant Row on W46th St between 8th and 9th.

Bangkok House is not McDonalds, but it certainly isn’t expensive either.

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Most successful software is never the real deal until version 3.  This is the version that appeases the early, and even late majority, and therefore wins the market.  I have just downloaded the 3.0 operating system for my iPhone and it was worth the wait.

OS 2.0 had holes the size of moon craters.  If you own another brand I bet you can cut and paste.  I bet you can send multimedia messages.  I bet you can capture voice recording.  I bet you can remotely wipe your phone if it is stolen.  (OK this last one is fairly unique).  These yawning gaps have been filled in 3.0 and without having to download any more apps.  Need meteorite strike insurance?  There’s an app for that….

That having been said, the single greatest strength of the iPhone is that is has learnt, ironically from Microsoft, that to create a successful platform you have to create a community and allow them to expand your platform by building applications.  This happens much faster than you could ever build applications yourself so the usage of your platform spreads like wildfire.

Witness Steve Jobs who, a billion application downloads later, must be wondering if he will catch up Bill Gates in the software wealth stakes before the decade is out.

In honour, I was hoping to bring you a wine that tastes of apple, but this one is pure lemon.

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Last year I did a virtual world tour of Pinot Noirs.  I enjoyed it very much but after several barnyard runs, I decided I wanted to be unfaithful and try another grape.

On the basis of the majority opinion of serious wine commentators I chose Riesling, but I have not been quite as enthused as I was by the Brigitte Bardot of the grape world.

I tried comparing Riesling to the new mini – refined, exciting, reminiscent of the past, and better made by Germans.  But I would like to retract that statement and simultaneously upset many wine purists, because my experience says wines from the noble Riesling grape are better built by Australians.

Take Pauletts, Polish Hill River from Clare Valley.  I picked it up from Majestic at only £9.99 – cheaper than your average German.  Grapefruit, melon, a touch of marzipan and a sliver of ginger root.  Like many Rieslings, it goes superbly well with Thai food and, after all, Thailand is closer to Australia than Germany (I think).  So this logical reasoning is indisputable proof that criminals make better Riesling.  I’m sure Dr Spock would agree.

So maybe Riesling is the Ten Pound Pom of grapes:  Cheap, well travelled, classless, and ultimately better off in Australia.

Germans never use three letters when it is possible to craft a word from three k’s, four ch’s and at least two consecutive f’s.  W also features prominently.  Perhaps it was a German who extended the short form “world wide web” into the excessive and unnecessary “www”, possibly the only acronym with three times as many syllables as its original “long” form.

Perhaps it belies a Teutonic predilection for taking more time than is sensible in the name of quality, or detail at least, and if this applies to winemaking, this may explain some of the prices of German Rieslings I have seen recently.  And I bought most of mine before Sterling/Euro parity played havoc with my holiday plans.  I don’t suppose Angela Merkel would have welcomed me to her country anyway, given her views on Gordon Brown’s “world saving” economic initiatives.

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More from my latest virtual world tour – Riesling.  A grape I know little about, but grown up winos tell me is one of the most important in the wine world.  So I better start cramming.

And when I say cramming, I probably mean squeezing every last drop into my capacious gastrointestinal wine canal.

This wine is not like the German Rieslings I have tasted recently.  Quite dry and a touch of sherbet in the taste with possibly some peach and grapefruit.  Zingy and refreshing.  Hints of a NZ Sauvignon Blanc?

Whisper it in case the purists hear.  I find Aussie Rieslings rather good, and generally better priced than the statuesque Germans that have so far been cleansed by my kidneys.

I got this one from Virgin Wines at £7.07.

Invited over to Darryl and Jayne’s for a bit of Scouse spicy scram and a few bottles of wine, Darryl was not surprised to see me turn up with a couple of bottles of Riesling.

Our mutual mate, Tony, calls Riesling sugary shite but that is unsurprising from a man whose wine sophistication is measured by the fact that he thinks Beaujolais should be served at 25 degrees centigrade.

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I was kindly invited by the Queen’s Hotel to the Let’s Eat Leeds Leeds Restaurant Awards on 10 November, where I feel the awards counted on public or members’ votes were more representative of my views than those awards chosen by judges and “experts”.  But then again, I am probably a little out of touch with the Leeds scene and really ought to go out more often in this fine city.

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