Room to breathe

An ode to slow wines and difficult people

One of the things commonly said about wine competitions is that they are in the pocket of Big Wine, usually by the kind of people who comment beneath articles. Whenever some large brand wins a trophy at the IWC (International Wine Challenge) or Decanter World Wine Awards, there’s muttering along the lines of, ‘well, we all know why Big Wine Chardonnay won, don’t we? Ker-ching!’

I know a lot of people who judge wine, many of whom are incredibly indiscrete, so it seems unlikely that if all trophies were paid for it wouldn’t get out. Though the fact that I have never been asked to judge a major competition is a bit suspect, don’t you think?¹

Nevertheless, I am sceptical about competitions as a marker of quality. That’s not just because the best or most in-demand wines don’t enter competitions, what would be the point, but also because I don’t think it’s possible to assess a wine in a couple of minutes. I need at least half an hour with a wine, ideally with some food. Actually make that three days because wine can change drastically with exposure to oxygen.

That’s where the idea that you should let wine breath comes from - though pulling the cork out and leaving it for two hours on the mantelpiece won’t really do anything. You need to give the wine a really good airing either by decanting or just by drinking a small glass and leaving the rest of the bottle for a while. Not everyone agrees, however, Jane McQuitty wrote in The Times a few years ago:

Decanting all white wines and the majority of red wines is a waste of time. . . Air is the enemy of wine and decanting exposes it to air air unnecessarily, because the minute you pull the cork the deterioration and oxidation process starts.

With the very cheapest wines or the very oldest this is true. Budget whites in particular can deteriorate alarmingly after opening. But almost all high quality young wines benefit from a bit of oxygen, it helps them bring themselves out of their shell. I’ll decant pretty much anything except sparkling and very old wine.

As with the people, the best wines are often those that aren’t immediately appealing. They might seem a bit spiky at first but give them time and you might find hidden depths. Or they might just be cantankerous old sods who are best avoided. But back to wine…

Slow wines but not difficult people

I’ll give you a few examples of wines I’ve tasted recently that were slow to come around. I was sent a bottle from one of my favourite still wine producers in England, Oastbook in East Sussex. 

It was their White Pinot Noir 2023 so this is a red grape pressed gently so that none of the colour from the skin gets into the juice. Initially it tasted lean and a bit hard, but over two days it evolved into something that reminded me little of a Hunter Semillon from Australia. I think it’ll age beautifully but if I’d tasted this at tasting of dozens of wines, I would have overlooked it. Now maybe some wine judges can assess all that when they’ve got 100 wines to taste in a morning but not many.

Winemaking duties at Oastbook are shared between husband and wife team Nick and American Brewer (sporting labcoats above). He explained that if you expose the grapes to oxygen during the wine making process, they actually brown the grape juice for some of their wines, it makes the resulting wine more resistant to oxygen. He said it was “counter-intuitive. It’s like a vaccination.” Obviously you have to be careful, you don’t want to take it too far, it’s high risk winemaking, but wines made in this way tend to have an extraordinary freshness which lasts and last. Compare that with a supermarket whites whose exuberance can fade very quickly. 

It is amazing how some wines can just last and last even with air contact. A couple of weeks ago I attended/ gatecrashed a vineyard party in Wiltshire at Domaine Hugo - I’m friends with Hugo Stewart’s son-in-law Tariq Goddard, a novelist and publisher. One of the wines that Stewart brought out was a bottle of grenache gris 2019 from his old vineyard Le Clos Perdu in Corbieres. He said it had been open a week and yet it was still fresh and vital with that remarkable texture I mentioned in an earlier post. I had brought a bottle of Viña Cubillo 2013 (the entry level wine from top Rioja producer Lopez de Heredia) as a present for Tariq. On opening someone commented how it tasted like oaky vinegar… to begin with… but three hours later it was a veritable symphony of ripe fruit and tobacco. 

I could go on with examples. I once drank a bottle Chateau Musar blanc over a week, it started off grassy and boring and ended up tasting like a dry Sauternes. My advice is if you don't’ like a wine, decant it, or better still, put it in the fridge overnight and try it again the next day, and the next… 

There should be a competition for slow wines. It would take a long time, the results would be inconclusive and it’s unlikely to be a money spinner but it would be a lot of fun to judge. I wonder if someone at Big Wine might want to get behind it.

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