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Tasting wine on the move
I'm just back from a few days of wine tasting in France; not this time on a no-frills airline but via that much more relaxing Eurostar from the remodelled St Pancras station.
Given that we had a 7.30am kick-off, there were no pre-departure visits to Europe's longest champagne bar.
Instead, we took our own and opened our first bottle at somewhere around eight o'clock in the morning.
For the next few hours we worked our way through the wines of Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy. All this accompanied with some fine rillettes, delicious jambon, pâté and cheese.
Fellow passengers were invited to join in and the eight-hour journey seemed to whizz by. We arrived fresh and ready to get to work.
"You all look pretty bright," said our smiley host. "Ah yes," we replied "we've just come dégustation class!"
Stories such as these do little, I suspect, to promote the image of hard-working wine-trade professionals. But, as much as it's all fantastic fun, it's always hard work. Tasting wine isn't about drinking; it's about evaluation and assessment.
When I'm invited to speak at wine tastings I often find myself saying that being a good wine-taster is like being a good detective.
To get to the right conclusion you need to take into account all the evidence that is presented before you.
The actual tasting of the wine is the third stage of the process. In the first instance it's all about what you can see.
Several of the tastings I took part in were done blind'. What this means is that we have either no, or only a little information, about the wines we are going to be tasting.
One such tasting was a flight of five identical wines from different vintages. Our job was to decide which vintage was which.
Assessing the colour was pivotal to getting the job done. We knew that 2003 had been a hot, ripe vintage and one wine in the line-up looked like being the likely candidate. It had by far the deepest colour.
Older reds tend to be less blue/purple and have moved towards ruby, even garnet. The closer to garnet, the more likely it is to be older.
Taking this into account it was almost possible to guess the vintages on appearance alone.
The aromas that a wine gives off are just as important. Each grape has its own flavour profile and the treatment the wine has received in the winery will often become most obvious on the nose.
Pinot noir - the grape that we were focusing on - is famous for its red berry and cherry qualities. As it ages it can sometimes develop mushroom notes and gamey flavours.
A wine that has spent time being either fermented or aged in oak can have spicy, buttery, creamy or smoky aromas.
The more information I gathered, the closer I came to declaring my thoughts.
When finally it's time to taste, it's all (hopefully!) about confirming what you've seen and what you've smelt.
Were those wines that seemed particularly oaky on the nose the ones that were perhaps still too young to have settled down and become better integrated?
Did those that had appeared more mature with their garnet hues and gamey aromas show the same development on the palate?
Piece by piece I gathered together my evidence and I made my guesses public. For once, I came up trumps and managed to score a remarkable five from five.
I say remarkable because, despite making this sound like a piece of cake, blind tasting is notoriously difficult. I could write a dozen articles or more confessing my cringe-worthy errors.
The point remains, though, that tasting is a tricky business that requires a lot of thought and no small amount of effort on the part of the taster.
I have nowhere near the level of skill of some of those that I worked and travelled with. I think that's why I have to work so hard at it and why I'm so tired today.
Or maybe the reason I'm so totally exhausted is because the dégustation car' was once again open for business on the way home yesterday and this time we were doing what it is that all of us love to do best; less tasting and more drinking!
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11:40am Thursday 27th March 2008
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