Wine, people, place: Nicholas Belfrage’s and Jon Wyand’s Tuscany

Nicholas Belfrage MW, The Finest Wines of Tuscany and Central Italy.  A regional and village guide to the best wines and their producers, Fine Wine Editions, Aurum Press, London, 2009 

Nicholas Belfrage is a well-known figure on the English wine scene, a wine trader and author of the best general introduction to Italian wine.  An American, now based in Chianti Rùfina, he is particularly well placed to comment on Tuscany.  As he declares here, he set out to make his mark on the English wine scene, obsessed with Bordeaux, by specializing in then unfashionable Italy while establishing his credentials by getting his MW.  His subversive undermining of the stuffy English scene has been a conspicuous success.  He has been helped by the glamorous image of all things Italian (or rather, selected images of Italy), given new life since the 1990 World Cup.  But every page of this book makes you want to visit the places he writes about, to meet the people (including the winemakers whose pictures appear here) and to try the wines. 

Writing about wine is inherently difficult.  You can avoid the problem by focusing on all sorts of things, many of them interesting and helpful: the people, the land, agriculture, wine making, the science or even the wine market.  But none of these convey much about the wine itself.  Tasting notes are, well, literally dry, but often helpful and perhaps the best we can do.  Belfrage tackles the problem with  a good mix of people, land, wine craft and tasting notes.  But his key attribute is  enthusiasm, laced with a dry sense of humour.   His excellent two volume survey of Italy is now beginning to date (1999 and 2001) and perhaps suffered from a low budget – small page size, basic maps, no colour pictures.  In this new book all this is put to right.  He is hugely helped in his task by the photography of Jon Wyand.  (The photos in this post are Jon’s – thank you to him for providing them.) Although described as a specialist in wine photography – and the book has its share of trademark Tuscan landscapes – what really jumps off the page are the portraits of owners and wine makers.  So, off the page, come a host of Tuscan aristocrats, technical magicians, Tuscan and Italian sons (mainly) of the soil, English, French, Dutch and German émigrés and growers.  A few important women have also made their mark:  Emanuela Stucchi Prinetti, Rita Tua, Elisabetta Geppetti and even the Englishwoman, Charlotte Horton at Castello di Potentino (see picture). 

The heart of the book is the series of profiles of wine people and places, drawing no doubt on the magazine format of ‘The World of Fine Wine’.  There is no satisfactory English word to translate cantina – the place you make and store wine , but which stands for the whole enterprise.  ‘Cellar’ is too static, winery too technical, company too coldly commercial.  In these pages, you get a flavour of all these and more:  the people who give the work its character, the places that they own or where they work, the vineyards and micro-climates, the grape varieties they have chosen to work with, their wine-making and marketing philosophy.  The format also allows selective tasting notes, with, a rare treat in Italy, notes from tastings through a range of vintages. Biondi-Santi, the inventor of the style of Brunello, gets the most extensive treatment, with ten wines from 2004 back to 1891. 

The profiles of place and people are preceded by a fine introduction – history, soil types, grape varieties and winemaking.  Belfrage’s great value here is his detailed knowledge of current trends, experiments with clones of Sangiovese in the vineyard and blending in the cantina. 

Are there any downsides?  With high quality reproductions of Wyand’s excellent photographs, there was the temptation to make a great ‘coffee table’ book with large format pictures, but actually the smaller format is more practical and can be read.  Belfrage’s modest forays into Umbria, Le Marche and even southern Romagna make sense, even if they are only 10% of the book but it might have been better to stick to Tuscany, a big enough subject in its own right. 

The lists of ‘the best of the best’ are rightly kept to the very end – the Tuscan wine scene is so varied it would have been shame not to enjoy its diversity before the guilty pleasure of handing out the prizes.  Of course this could lead to hours of debate.  I was delighted to see that Poggio Le Scalette’s Il Carbonaione gets an honourable mention here in ‘Ten Great Sangioveses’ – we have just drunk a memorable bottle of the 2004 which we were given when we visited. There will always be differences of opinion – no Vecchie Terre di Montefili for example; and is the Rothschild-backed Rocca di Frassinello too new to make the cut for its elegant supertuscans? At least having ten categories makes this a less arbitrary exercise than most listings.  Let’s be honest, testing the lists would only make sense with an open bottle or two. 

And the best moment of all? – a really Italian moment when Belfrage nominates his own landlord, a relatively unsung if large scale family winery, Galiga e Vetrice, as outstanding, amid the rich and famous.  Any Italian will tell you that the food in my village, the wine in my local vineyard, is categorically the best.  This is not a exercise in evaluation but an axiom.   Belfrage has a reason of course, apart from keeping in with the neighbours: the wine is made in a traditional style that has virtually passed away.  No exotic consultants, French grape varieties,  temperature controlled stainless steel, micro-oxygenation or expensive new oak here. Rather, traditional grape varieties and wine-making, then just waiting for the wine to come around, as the wines are aged for indefinite periods in large, neutral casks or glass.  He tells us that at the time of writing the 1988 was still being held in bulk … and the current vintage of Vin Santo is 1992.   And guess what, one of the  named riservas is named Nicholas Belfrage MW Selection … But all this is not just a mutual admiration society.   It’s finding these complete one-offs – surrounded by highly competent modern wine-making in recognisable styles – that continues to make Tuscany irresistible.   You could call it terroir, but really it’s a distinctiveness which is comes from the combination of people and place, expressed in the glass – il mio paese. 

 Finally, unlike Monty Waldin’s touring guide to the wines of Tuscany, this volume makes no attempt to include the good wines and the everyday  wines.  But as an introduction to the fine wines of Central Italy this is ottimo.  A glass of top Sangiovese anyone?

Talking about wine

Most people get by without a developed language about wine.  ‘I know what I like’ is a fairly common response, with a laugh or smile, which probably means, ‘let’s face it, people drink for the pleasure, for the taste, for mild (or more) intoxication ’.  The further implication is that talking about wine is for wine buffs, sales talk or just sheer pretension.  Then there is the fear of being cheated.  ‘All wine is really the same’ – being asked to pay twice or ten times as much for some bottles is just a con, the fancy words being the cover of the cunning sales person.  Wine is difficult to evaluate in an objective way and talking about it seems to require either extraordinary tasting skills or secret knowledge.   

Thus, the challenge is, can we talk about the smell and the taste of wine in a way that will mean something to others?   

This was part of the challenge that the academic linguist Adrienne Lehrer set herself back in the early 1970s.  Do ordinary wine drinkers have a vocabulary for wine and can they communicate with one another about the qualities of individual wines? What language do wine professionals use and are they any more successful at communicating than ordinary wine drinkers? 

Lehrer’s findings are fascinating.  She has now updated her book in a much expanded edition, Wine and Conversation (Oxford, 2nd edition, 2009). 

 

 

In her studies she found:

• contrary to what was thought, ordinary people have a rich vocabulary to draw on when they speak about what wine tastes like.  Most of their vocabulary was drawn from comparison with other fields (‘spicy’, ‘green apples’)
• professionals did better than ordinary drinkers in describing wines – whew, those wine exams were worth it!
• professionals did no better than ordinary drinkers in talking about wines in a way that others (even other professionals) could use.  Professionals were not significantly better in experiments in which person A tasted a wine and described it, person B tried to identify that wine from a series of wines on the basis of person A’s description.  This outcome is more difficult to evaluate:  it’s a frustration that more knowledge and experience of wine does not necessarily lead to better communication … but, on the other hand, the more you know, the more you will understand and benefit from others who talk about wine knowledgeably.
• The only exceptions to the previous finding were when a professional talked about a wine they had studied in real depth or if they were allowed to refer to colour and appearance.  Thus, real in depth knowledge and experience helps, and colour and appearance are much easier to communicate than aroma or taste.
• There is great potential for confusion over terms such as ‘dry’ or ‘sweet’ because there is no agreed scale for these terms. The same wine can be described as sweet or dry as the speakers have different presuppositions.
• Value judgements constantly affect drinkers’ descriptions of wine – after all, much of the time we talk about how much we do or don’t enjoy a particular wine, rather than trying to describe it.

Lehrer’s overall conclusion is heartening for those who are struggling to communicate about wine and think there is more to wine talk than sheer pretension or sales patter.  Her conclusion from her experiments was that communicating about wine via language is extremely difficult.  We have plenty of words for taste and smell, but each speaker and each hearer has a different set of educational and personal experiences against which they use and interpret those words. As a result miscommunication is rife. 

Let’s illustrate this from Angelo Gaja’s Super Tuscan Ca’ Marcanda 2005, the subject of the next post (see Two types of wine talk).   If I describe this wine as ABC – say, (A) powerful aromas of black fruit (especially blackcurrant) and  tobacco, (B) dense fruit, high acidity and young tannins in the mouth and (C ) great persistence – this will only convey something meaningful to if you and I are in broad agreement about what the sensations ABC are like.  And the likelihood of that is only quite high if we have both tasted Super Tuscans before and established some common terminology to talk about them.   The solution is obvious:  we need to taste plenty of bottles together and, while we still have our wits about us, agree on some terminology and its meaning. 

A few other comments on Lehrer’s book:

• this is a second edition of a book which first appeared in 1983.  It’s a shame that the tasting experiments with ordinary drinkers and with professionals, which are at the heart of the book, were not rerun for this new edition.  This might have thrown some light on the general level of wine education among ordinary drinkers.  And the wines used in the experiments have mercifully passed into history under legal challenge about wine names: Californian Chablis is a blast from the past!
• Lehrer is a linguist and the book is mainly a contribution to that subject.  That makes it a tough read for non-linguists. 
• In this pioneering study, Lehrer does not comment on the effect of culture on all this but presupposes it. All her tasters were Americans living in three cities with the trials being conducted separately in the three places.   In effect the subjects were presumed to share the same cultural experience.  We now know that tasters from different cultures use completely different comparators for describing wine, hardly surprisingly. 
• The author’s surveys of more recent, mainly American studies, in this field are very useful.  The important point is that the more recent studies confirm or are consistent with Lehrer’s original findings.
• The most important strand of the recent work reported is on the basic sense of taste and smell.  It is the case that some people can taste more than others and that some have a greater ability to taste or smell some substances but not others. 

Overall, Lehrer’s work repays attention. It’s not the easiest book in the world to read but it takes us forward in the tantalising business of trying to convey the smells and the tastes of wine in speech.