How Moët, Lambrusco and rosé went from naff to nice
Once-derided wines are getting a new lease of life. What’s going on?
One sign of how much someone knows about wine is how they pronounce Moët. Insiders say “Mow-it” (“Mwet” in French) rather than “Mo-way”.
Since Moët & Chandon is the dominant force in the Champagne region, there are ample opportunities to get the name wrong. It is the biggest landowner, with 1,200ha of vineyards. It also dominates the champagne market.
Size rarely spells glamour. And the image of Moët over the years has been one of a mass-market crowd-pleaser, producing acceptable but un-thrilling wines that tend to be sweeter than most. Moët was rarely the choice of wine insiders.
But now it should be. The champagne industry’s flagship has undergone an impressive makeover. Today Moët’s Brut Impérial, the non-vintage blend that is made in almost unimaginable volumes, is a thoroughly respectable champagne, and much drier than it used to be.
Twenty years ago, the blend was sweetened with up to 13g-14g/l of sugar. When Benoît Gouez became chef de cave in 2005, he reduced the so-called dosage, a regular aspect of champagne production, to 11g/l, and since then it has been limited to no more than 9g/l, though has recently been as low as 7g/l.
The current blend of Brut Impérial is based on wines from 2015, deepened with reserve wines, mainly from 2013. The crucial champagne statistic is how long it spends ageing on the lees of the second fermentation in bottle.
This bottle age means complexity and integration. The legal minimum for non-vintage champagne is 12 months but for Brut Impérial this has been extended from 18-20 months to 24-32. There’s a further six months in bottle after the wine has been disgorged, when the lees are expelled.
Admittedly, the wine is the polar opposite to the stereotypical grower’s champagne, with its austerity and high acidity. This was perhaps the style Gouez had in mind when he commented recently, “We’re not obsessed by acidity. We want bright freshness with delicacy. Some people overreact to the evolution of grape ripeness and think consumers are looking for acid. But I’m sure that most champagne consumers don’t like excess acidity.”
The vintage-dated Moët Grand Vintage has also been spruced up. And these days, drinkers are deemed sufficiently well-informed to be given the date the wine was disgorged on the back label — information supplied on the labels of virtually all grower champagnes. This information is not given on Brut Impérial labels because Moët’s research suggests that too many consumers think it’s a “best before” date.
Moët champagne is by no means the only wine that has gone from naff to nice. Rosé, once dismissed as irredeemably frivolous, has become thoroughly respectable.
The giant category of Australian Chardonnays would be another candidate. It was not that long ago that we all looked down our noses at how oaky and overblown they were. But now, the typical Australian Chardonnay is a lean, clean, refreshing answer to white burgundy at a fraction of the price (see my recommendations below).
My theory as to how Australians manage to change direction so nimbly and cohesively is that the leading producers all confer regularly at the wine shows that are still so important to the Australian wine scene.
Lambrusco used to be synonymous with sweet mass-market froth of the worst sort. Now it’s a rather serious category, with a host of dry, gently sparkling reds seen as the connoisseur’s choice to accompany many Italian dishes, notably the pig-based products of Emilia-Romagna. UK specialist Italian importer Passione Vino lists six Lambruscos of real interest.
A little further north, in the Veneto, Soave and Valpolicella probably deserve a bit of an image upgrade too. The best producers — Agostini, Fattori, Gini, Inama and Pieropan in Soave and Allegrini, Corte Sant’Alda, Dal Forno, Quintarelli and Viviani in Valpolicella — make wines worthy of any cellar rather than cheap supermarket bottlings.
Prosecco’s an interesting one. For some wine drinkers, it represents sophistication. For others, prosecco is a clever, more youthful, better-priced alternative to champagne. It is now so ubiquitous, and made from such a massive region, that it can hardly claim precision, but fine prosecco does exist. I’m no big fan of mass-market prosecco — it tends to taste a bit too sweet for me — but thanks to the late Gianfranco Soldera of Case Basse in Montalcino, I have experienced top-quality prosecco, in the form of Casa Coste Piane’s from the prosecco heartland of Valdobbiadene — although even that is not my favourite fizz.
Cava definitely has an image problem, which is unfair since it’s harder to make cava — which has a very similar recipe to champagne — than it is to make prosecco in tank. Recognising this, producers of cava in the Catalan region of Penedès, which is where the sparkling-wine industry is based, are increasingly leaving the appellation. They are calling their sparkling wines something different from cava, such as Conca del Riu Anoia or Corpinnat, which means “born in the heart of Penedès”.
Like Moët, Harveys once dominated its sector, sherry. Although the fine-wine merchant Harveys of Bristol was hugely respected in the mid-20th century, Harveys Bristol Cream was far from the sherry aficionado’s choice, being deemed too sweet and mass market.
Nowadays, Harveys doesn’t even have its own bodega in Jerez, but there are some tip-top sherries available under the Harveys name, based on particularly venerable soleras. Most are labelled VORS (for Very Old and Rare Sherry) and are at least 30 years old, yet retail in the UK at about £30 a half-litre. Extreme bargains indeed. Compare and contrast with the cost of a fine 30-year-old bordeaux or burgundy.
It’s becoming more difficult to think of wines that are beyond the pale, so keen are producers to up their game, fortunately for us.
Some fine Australian Chardonnays
Bindi
BK
Cape Mentelle
Coldstream Hills
Cullen
Curly Flat
De Bortoli
Fraser Gallop
Giaconda
Giant Steps
Hardys, Eileen Hardy
Kooyong
Leeuwin Estate, Art Series
Marchand & Burch
McHenry Hohnen, Calgardup
Oakridge
Ocean Eight
Paringa
Penfolds, Yattarna
Pierro
A Rodda
Shaw + Smith, M3
Sorrenberg
Tapanappa, Tiers
Tolpuddle
Vasse Felix
A History of the Bible — in the beginning was the word
Its teachings have shaped the west but is scripture the ‘gospel truth’?
“Nothing beats the Bible — not even The Art of the Deal.” Donald Trump may not be renowned for his piety, but he can recognise a winner when he sees it. The most-read, most-published, most-translated book of all time, the Bible is believed by millions around the world to have been directly inspired by God.
Even non-believers find its influence impossible to escape. As the central document of western culture, its impact is one that has reverberated to the ends of the earth.
The history of the Bible, however, is a notoriously complex one to trace. Only in the 13th century did the Latin word biblia come to signify a single book. Prior to that, in Greek as well as Latin, it had always been a plural: “books”. This was hardly surprising.
The Bible is an anthology, a collection of texts written in various periods, by various authors, with various aims. In the 2nd century AD, when Christian intellectuals first began to promote a fixed canon of scripture, they were attempting something new. What texts constituted the true guides to God’s purposes?
Some Christians claimed that only a select number of texts deriving from the first generation of the Church provided an adequate testament; but most, citing books inherited from the Jews, insisted that there was also an “Old Testament”. This latter opinion was the one that, by the end of the 2nd century, prevailed.
Christians joined Jews in seeing themselves as heirs to the great inheritance of Hebrew scripture. This is why the story of the Bible, the foundational document of the modern west, reaches back ultimately to the myths and folk memories of the ancient Near East.
Who better to guide us through the labyrinth, then, than a former professor of the interpretation of holy scripture at Oxford university? John Barton’s expertise in the Bible, and in the Old Testament in particular, has been manifest over the decades in a series of books that combine learning with humanity, and admiration for its moral insights with an alertness to the disarray that can so often characterise its study.
A History of the Bible may be written for a less academic audience than his previous works, but Barton remains the scholar that he ever was. The fact that he is also a Church of England priest does not prevent him from repeatedly acknowledging the limits of what can be known about the Bible. “There is probably not a single episode in the history of Israel as told by the Old Testament,” he warns, “on which modern scholars are in agreement.”
The Gospels, too, he freely admits, “remain an enigma, and those who revere them should be aware of how much we do not know about their composition”. Phrases such as “a series of guesses” and “hypotheses intricate to the point of self-defeat” stud his pages. Rare is the common assumption about the Bible that Barton fails to render problematic.
Between apologists for Christianity and atheists contemptuous of its claims, between those resolved to substantiate the claims of scripture and those no less anxious to tear them down, he steers a middle course. This via media has long been a specialisation of the Church of England, of course, and Barton’s book is an achievement in the finest tradition of Anglicanism: learned, mild-mannered and quietly anxious about the challenges of reconciling scepticism with faith.
Yet its undoubted excellence as a textual history of the Bible does not come without cost. Nuance can sometimes seem muscle-bound with detail; a concern to balance the competing demands of scholarship and accessibility can on occasion leave it caught between two stools.
While A History of the Bible is certainly a readable book, it is rarely a thrilling one. Moderate in its opinions, it is also moderate in its style.
As a great teacher himself, Barton has a natural sympathy for those who, over the centuries, have studied and mediated the Bible as a literary artefact: the scribes and rabbis and church fathers and philosophes.
A history of the Bible, though, cannot just be a history of intellectuals. Its impact is immeasurable precisely because it was felt by soldiers as well as by scholars, and by down-and-outs as well as by dons. It is a book that has, over the millennia, inspired revolts and grandiose schemes of revolution and wars and pogroms and expeditions to distant continents.
Of these convulsions Barton gives us too little notion. It is not “on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” that the Bible has been written most indelibly. There is no need to have read it, nor even to know anything about it, to be stamped by it. Today, as for the past millennium, to live in the west is to be shaped inescapably by its influence — bigly.
A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths, by John Barton, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 640 pages