Mrs Vandyke Price's Alsace
I discover a wonderful book and Gallo buyers clearly don't know their Pinot from their collective elbows. By Kate
On Friday afternoon I found myself on Portobello Road
A vague memory surfaced from the mid 1990s when I first entered the wine trade in this country - at a tasting somewhere, someone pointed out to me an elderly, frail looking lady who was being helped into the room. There was a noticeable frisson among the older members of the trade at her appearing. Several of the men seemed to stand up straighter.
“That,” someone whispered to me “Is Pamela Vandyke Price”.
Mrs Vandyke Price was the first high profile professional woman to write about wine in the UK
We have come a long way, Ms Vandyke Price.
She wrote almost 30 books on wine, one of which I was holding in my hands. It was number 553 of 600 editions which had been specially produced for the “Pursuit of Excellence” Festival of the International Wine & Food Society, published in September 1986. Above this information, in carefully flamboyant script, was her signature. And all this for a princely sum of £9.99! In mere seconds it was mine.
I started dipping into it as soon as I could, settling down with a cup of mint tea in one of the Moroccan café’s on Goldbourne Road Goldbourne Road She writes beautifully, with great chapters on the history of the region and the grape varieties. Both of these topics are standard in regional books, but they are not often as good as this is. I haven’t finished the book and almost certainly won’t ever have the time to read it cover to cover, but will dip in when I need certain bits of information.
Two very salient facts emerged from my first survey though . Firstly, this is a book suffused with a great love and respect for the wines of Alsace
It's as though the acquisition of knowledge and the appreciation of something is enhanced only by making a purchase.
The better books at least disguise their mercantile intent while the bad one’s don’t even pretend to be about any sort of enlightenment, they merely provide shopping lists of wines tasted and appreciated by the author. ( Or in the case of the recent Matt Skinner scandal, wine not actually tasted but recommended anyway).
Secondly, a single sentence in the chapter on fermentation, discussing the relative merits of stainless steel and enamel, leapt out at me:
“It is possible to keep such modern vessels scrupulously clean and free from any potential infection and, of course, steel is easier to maintain than wood, which requires the skill of the experienced cooper – tending to be a rarer and rarer person these days.”
What a lost world that conjures up! For the majority using wood today, the very idea of employing someone who specialises in maintaining barrels as they age, keeping them viable for a long, long time, is completely alien. If the wood is not spanking new, dousing the wine in layers of its own rich, sweet flavouring compounds, it is no good. The idea of old, well worn and perfectly maintained wood imprinting its subtle influence on the wine – as all fermentation vessels will – is one that only a relative handful of winemakers seem to pursue.
This, despite the fact that the idea of careful husbandry long maintaining equipment in perfect working order should be incredibly relevant now, dispelling the insane notion that a very expensive wooden barrel that took years to create is only worthwhile for one to three vintages. Complete madness.
So, when despair at the contemporary world of wine threatens to overwhelm me, I know what I need to do. Head for Goldbourne road to restore my spirits with mint tea and Ms Vandyke Price.
Their hugely successful 'Red Bicyclette' label made in France for the American Market (a very cheap Pinot Noir from the Languedoc region of France) was found not to contain Pinot Noir after all. This is not a huge surprise. Pinot Noir at $8 a bottle? Pretty unlikely.
Yet it is apparent that nobody in this esteemed corporation thought to question the improbability of a group of producers in the Languedoc
Do they?
Two very salient facts emerged from my first survey though .
It's as though the acquisition of knowledge and the appreciation of something is enhanced only by making a purchase.
The better books at least disguise their mercantile intent while the bad one’s don’t even pretend to be about any sort of enlightenment, they merely provide shopping lists of wines tasted and appreciated by the author. ( Or in the case of the recent Matt Skinner scandal, wine not actually tasted but recommended anyway).
“It is possible to keep such modern vessels scrupulously clean and free from any potential infection and, of course, steel is easier to maintain than wood, which requires the skill of the experienced cooper – tending to be a rarer and rarer person these days.”
This, despite the fact that the idea of careful husbandry long maintaining equipment in perfect working order should be incredibly relevant now, dispelling the insane notion that a very expensive wooden barrel that took years to create is only worthwhile for one to three vintages. Complete madness.
So, when despair at the contemporary world of wine threatens to overwhelm me, I know what I need to do. Head for Goldbourne road to restore my spirits with mint tea and Ms Vandyke Price.
