Grogan - Red Wine

Ed Griffiths for getting the ball rolling; Jane OShea for the vision thing; Simon Davis for turning some words into a book; David Miller for making it happen; Federica Leonardis for helping him; Jonathan Ray for getting me started. And to Leslie, for putting up with it all (again) so gracefully.

In an auction at Christies Hong-Kong in November 2013 a dozen bottles of red wine fetched just under half-a-million US dollars. It may only be fermented grape juice, but nothing else we eat or drink attracts anything like the same passion, poetry and pride (as well as price) as red wine.

Its a moderately alcoholic beverage, the typical, drinkable bottle of which costs about half-an-hours average net pay. To have a chance of understanding why some people will spend the price of one hundred of those bottles on a single sip from one of the most jealously sought-after, wed better start at square one.

Why is red wine red? It seems like a given that red wine should be made from black grapes and white wine from white grapes until you consider that most Champagne is made from black grapes. Its the pigments in their skins that provide the colour but they dont have to come into play unless the winemaker wants them to and leaves them to macerate in the juice of the crushed grapes. If the juice and the skins are separated after just a few hours the result will be ros, and the longer theyre left, the darker the wine will be. At the far end of the scale, a bunch of partying Portuguese people treading grapes in a huge stone trough (called a lagar) will grind all those pigments into the juice and the result will be something inky-dark thatll end up as Port.

It is in no sense the case, however, that redder means better. Where on the red part of the spectrum the wine in your glass sits also depends on the grape variety and the place where its grown. As with all spectra, the lines are blurred and the lightest, pinkest reds (made from thin-skinned grapes like Pinot Noir, Gamay and Grenache, for example) are paler than the darkest ross. But that doesnt imply that they will lack power or depth of flavour. The style of a wine is the other major factor, to the extent that some of the biggest whites made like reds, with long maceration and ageing in oak casks can occasionally be mistaken for them in blindfold tastings. They just look white.

Wine of any colour is not just about grapes and places but about the winemakers who take those decisions about style. The best wine is made by people preferably those who (at some level or other) can call themselves farmers and not by the machines of agribusiness. Our average bottle of wine may be a drop from the ocean produced across hundreds of square miles of irrigated south-east Australian desert, where the grapes are grown, to all intents and purposes, hydroponically. It wont be unpleasant and it may represent very good, loss-leading value, but for wine with more character and complexity there is no doubt that smaller is better and smallest is best.

Those forty-thousand-dollar bottles came from a Burgundy vineyard a couple of hundred metres square that is owned by some very rich farmers but the principle is still the same the wine we want is something that somebody is proud to put their name on. Cloth-capped Cockneys used to borrow the word claret as slang for blood, and its true that while white wines appeal first to the head, reds speak to the heart and when they do, the talk is all about essence and intensity and life force.

WINEMAKING CAN BE SIMPLE. IN SOUTH LONDON, THE Urban Wine Company solicits contributions of random grapes from peoples gardens to make into Chteau Tooting the grey goo of wine. It can also be complex, such that budding winemakers the world over, having done their ten- or 15-year apprenticeship in a few cutting-edge wineries dotted about the globe, will set out to find a vineyard of their own and their shopping-list will be something like this (stick with me youve got to earn that first glass)...

They will know what sort of plot they want in terms of the soil type, the latitude, the altitude, the aspect, the slope, the hours of sunshine and the amount of rainfall it will get (or the amount of irrigation it will need). These factors will be related to the preferred conditions for the varieties of grapes they want to plant.

They will have plans for the density of planting of those vines, the control of the yield per acre through early pruning of bunches and for canopy management, i.e. cutting back the leaves to let the grapes feel enough of the sun. They will have plans for organic and maybe biodynamic methods of fertilization and pest control and they will expect to obsessively check ripeness in terms of must weight and the pH of the juice as they near the harvest.

The picking and sorting of the grapes will be done by hand, the crush will be carefully controlled (not too much its not fruit juice!), as will the temperature and duration of the maceration and fermentation and the choice of vessels in which they each take place. The induction (or prevention) of a secondary fermentation; the choice of oak or other materials and the presence or absence of the lees during ageing and the length of that process will have exercised them greatly and any blending of different batches to assemble the final wine will keep them busy.

They will have known from day one what the characteristics the style of the wine they are going to make will be and that it will be good, but the real, secret beauty of wine is that even they wont cant know exactly what it will taste like. Except that it wont taste like Chteau Tooting and to find out why thats the case, we need to go back to the basics.

The wine she drinks is made of grapes, said the Bard, and its a good idea to keep it that way. But its not just made from any old grapes; its specifically the several thousand or so varieties of vitis vinifera the clue is in the name. The rest are table grapes destined for the fruitbowl or for drying into sultanas and what-have-you.

Grapevines are admirable things and unfussy, to say the least. In fact, they thrive and produce their finest fruits in adversity, planted in poor soils in climates where they will struggle to achieve full ripeness. Regardless of variety, old vines make better wines than young ones; their deep root systems are their insurance policy against drought and they also suck up a wider variety of nutrients, which ultimately results in a more complex range of flavours.

Grapevines can live for several hundred years, although most have a productive life about as long as a human one. There are further parallels and I know Id rather get to grips with a 40-year-old of an unfashionable variety that knows its way around the block than mess around with a callow youth of the most on-trend variety they dont know theyre born. Vines have no insurance against the weather and achieving ripeness is more of a crapshoot in any given place in any given vintage. One thing is for sure, though good wine was never made from unripe grapes.

The variety of the vine is the biggest single influence on just how red a red wine is. Thin-skinned grapes, like Pinot Noir, Gamay and Grenache have less pigment and naturally produce lighter-coloured wines, while others Syrah, Malbec and Zinfandel spring to mind are predisposed to produce fuller, darker ones.