A Great Wine

I want to be reasonable about this – there is such a huge demand for French wines these days that manufacturers are forced to extract every drop of commercial liquid out of the limited absolute supply. This is the same kind of thing that the producers of Chanel No 5 face – when it was first made and sold to the world, certainly much less than a hundred thousand litres per annum was manufactured; today, the total amount is in the millions of litres. There is no possibility that the same kinds of ingredients or the same process is used today to make what is sold as Chanel No 5 – as if it were really anything like the original. And that is to be unkind to the great success of the whole thing as an idea, as a brand, as, even – an ideology, really. At least an ideology of style anyway.

 

A French actress has been chosen

as the Bond 24 bond girl...

Champagne is authentic if it comes from Champagne and carries the required appellation stamp.

But if you want to know the truth, dosage is the secret of much of modern Champagnes. Most of the wines are not too old, are mostly just the de-stemmed flesh without the skins, and they get dosed with a Champagne syrup that has a great concentration of sugars and also, of flavours too.

And that again, is to be a touch unfair to the modern world. We spend our days differently to the mi’lords and mi’ladies of the original days of the Follies Begeres, who would gather around the outer vestibule of the Crazy Shepherdess’s, and drink Champagne. Today, we spend much of the day at a keyboard or keypad, drinking in a tide of electrons and digital meaning.

A hint of pencil shavings!

The other day, someone wandered around my own house looking for a pencil sharpener for a disgruntled child, and, thinking only about a pencil’s association to kids, I entirely forgot about my own collection of silver Faber-Castell sets...

And it was somewhat of a shock, when at last a sharpener was found and all of the adults suddenly noticed the charming redolent scent of pencil shavings!!  So quickly we forget what was once the commonplace.

Authenticity has its place and often it is decried as merely nostalgia – nostalgia being something to be criticised, apparently.

 

But let me say this, if you want to experience what a truly great Champagne once was really like, may I suggest something like a very modestly priced Australian, Red Label Wolf Blass Chardonnay Pinot Noir Sparkling Wine. You will not easily find a more elegant, refined, seamless, indeed quite stunning wine anywhere in today’s world, and not for any kinds of money. Wolf Blass makes a lot of wine, and of many styles. But not for nothing has this maker managed to take off second prize in the whole world against all comers in a blind Paris tasting several times in recent years. Not for nothing.