Written with Giorgio de Maria Fun Wines
And
all
at
once,
summer
collapsed
into
Autumn
- Oscar Wilde*
Autumn happened swiftly, almost violently. One day we were sweltering down by the river, with a cold wine bobbing nearby, the next it was blankets and firewood. It’s always a very special time to be driving around the small towns in southern France (and I imagine most established wine-growing regions in Europe); the quiet vineyards suddenly abuzz with activity, armies of workers moving up and down their lines, tractors rumbling through the streets trailing the perfume of crushed grapes, a cloud of boozy perfume that lingers over everything.
The grapes have now all been removed from their leafy canopies. It was early in XXX, rainy in YYY and windswept in CCC. Meanwhile, in the world of wine, food and the people that tell those stories:
Words:
This month “anti-trad wine writer” Hannah Crosbie caught my eye via this article in Punch, as it appears she has caught the eye of many. “… my new hot take for the autumn,” Hannah says, “is that the wine industry cannot complain about young people not buying wine when they’re not selling it to young people. Which sounds obvious, but it’s not really a thing.” I admit that I have read none of her work, but was pulled in by her thoughts on trad wine writers, the “very upper class, upper middle class. People who speak in a certain way, which is not [the person] the consumer recognizes …”
The past year or two writing this missive has shown that there is quite a bit of good wine writing being done, and yet her comments made me wonder at what’s going on in the mainstream. There are plenty of places that still make me feel stupid when I ask for help in making a choice. I had a wonderful girlfriend to stay a few months back who is working for a left-wing thinktank in Oz. One of their big focuses is figuring out how we can help change the perspective of the community (in relation to finance) by changing the people who are telling it. Namely this is removing the old white guys from telling us how to run the economy and see if that changes the way we do indeed run the economy. I wonder if there aren’t some parallels there?
According to this article in the NYTimes, this is not the case for natural wines:
“It was never an organized movement but rather a diverse group of like-minded producers spreading globally from France. They all made very different sorts of wines but shared a distaste for authority and the priorities of a commercial culture. This has a particular appeal for the youngest generation of wine drinkers.” It is a fair point when you take on board Hannah’s thoughts on the same – that the formal knowledge and rights and wrongs of traditional wine drinking can be a bit of a turn off.
Aaron Ayscough had a bit to say about this in his Droplets newsletter this week. As always, it was a little bitter sweet: “I suspect many youthful natural wine fans of today will, in a few years, find themselves gravitating towards conventional wines, since the latter tend to better validate the incentive structures of consumerist society, and often prove more crowd-pleasing in office party settings. (A similar dynamic is perceptible in Paris nowadays, even among people I count as friends.) But actual natural wine will probably continue to exert a lasting appeal on young people, whose job it is, after all, to question the systems of their forebears.” There’s a little in there about the Riffault case too, if that’s of interest.
Restaurants:
Greg Malouf sadly passed away this month, his heart giving out at 62. Incredibly it was his third heart. Lebanese-Australian Malouf had a penchant for food - and later the kitchen - from a young age. He was too scared to tell his parents, so he instead ran away from home. He was not to be perturbed, not by them, not by heart bypass at 21, a subsequent heart transplant, or even when the second heart stopped cooperating ten years later and he needed a third. As his mother is quoted him saying “If I don’t go back to the kitchen I may as well be dead.”
He had a greater mission, which was to bring his heritage and background into the kitchen. His early days were spent at some of Melbourne’s finest: Stephanie’s, Two Faces, Mietta’s and Fanny’s (what a resume!). He later went on to run O’Connells, a pub in South Melbourne. As was the way with a number of chefs starting out in the 90s, the pub served as trojan horse to the creativity of the chef – allowing them to cook with the financial support of an establishment propped up by alcohol sales. By the time he opened the much acclaimed Momo’s – a restaurant that changed the way Middle Eastern food was perceived across Australia – the food writers were ready and people jumped on his modern takes of this eclectic cuisine. It could be argued that it was his influence that helped Melbourne cement its place as the centre of Middle Eastern food culture in Australia.
Perhaps more than his restaurants (those mentioned above, alongside second renditions and other versions around the world), I think it was the books he wrote with his ex-wife Lucy that had the most profound impact. Their books opened up a culinary world that had been closed. As David Thompson was to Thai, Malouf was to the Middle East. We were so lucky to have his brilliance and true dedication to the craft.
You can watch him on a couple of old eps of Food Lovers (start at 10 mins) and Food Safari, or go open one of his books you have up on your shelves and read for yourself.
Other things you might want to be reading include Ben Shewry’s Uses for Obsession. I’m yet to get there, but the controversial take out that keeps being mentioned in the papers is his questioning the validity of the hats and stars and ranking system for restaurants. I’ll have more for next month.
Producers:
Our intrepid wine merchant spent a few days in the shadows of Etna this past month. We’ve travelled a bit together and I can confirm that GDM chases volcanoes in the way others chase rainbows (or waterfalls).
This month we thought we would look at the way that magestic volcano influences the work of two of Giorgio’s producers: Alice Bonaccorsi and La Ripresa. What we were hoping to see how this incredibly powerful volcano can impact their wines and how their differing backgrounds can in turn impact the vines planted on that volcano.
What do you think Etna contributes to your wines?
La Ripresa: “Mount Etna is above all an enormous mountain, so big that clouds come to attach themselevs to her. Her influence is multiple:
- the altitude (my vines are located between 850 and 980m), which contributes to the freshness and balance of my wines;
- the microclimatic effect, which limits the maritime influence and amplifies the breeze from the Nebrodi;
- the incredible mineral richness of the volcanic soils which allows viticulture without chemical inputs and contributes to the complexity of my wines;
- the magnetic power of a volcano in almost permanent eruption which of course has its influence on all the living and which inspires me daily.
Alice: “Etna, in addition to influencing the characteristics of the soil with its mineral components and profoundly shaping the land with its diverse exposures, represents the very soul of Valcerasa's wines. They encapsulate the energy, elegance, and power of the Volcano.”
What does your background contribute to your wine making?
Alice: “My education has certainly enriched my skills, but it was the passion for this field, passed down from my father, that gave me the decisive push. He made wine for pleasure and involved me in every aspect of the process. Today, after 27 harvests, after many successes but also many mistakes, I can say that what I have achieved is the dream of my life.”
La Ripresa: “Tenty years of winemaking in Burgundy counts for a lot in my approach to the cellar. A certain form of minimalist classicism that relies more on the intrinsic quality of the grapes and the rendering of the expression of the terroirs rather than on experimentation in the winery. A form of assumed pragmatism that allows me to calmly approach the vagaries of winemaking, without too much stress.”
And how do these two ideas come together in the bottle?
Alice: “My wines perfectly reflect what I have described: they are a fusion of deep passion, a realized dream, and the extraordinary elegance, richness, and power of the land from which they come.”
La Ripresa: “I want my wines to be the most accurate expression of their place of origin: wines of altitude, legible, fresh and for which the gesture of the winemaker fades away in favor of the sensation of the place. No extraction too far, no inputs during vinification and ageing.”
(Je souhaite que mes vins soient l’expression la plus juste de leur lieu d’origine : des vins d’altitude, lisibles, frais et pour lesquels, le geste du vigneron s’efface au profit de la sensation du lieu. Pas d’extraction trop poussées, pas d’intrant pendant la vinification et l’élevage.)
* (This quote is attributed to Oscar Wilde, but they have “fall” in place of autumn, and yet no-one seems to know the source. As Oscar was Irish, I’m taking the liberty of giving it an upgrade to “autumn”.)