What is TGV Meeting? It is the annual wine fair in Liguria of TigullioVino, with 90 winemakers, mostly italian, invited to participate on the basis of decisions of the tasting committee of this leading italian wine portal. What a concept : the wine must be good ! This means that you will find both very small vignerons as well as larger wine companies, with many different kinds of winemaking, but a common thread of very high quality.

( Bloggers Giampiero, Maria Grazia, Terry, Laura, Mirco )

This Meeting is also the occasion to meet the movers and shakers of the enoblogosphere. The day before I had already met Giampiero Nadali (AKA Aristide), Mirco Mariotti (alias Blog&Wine) who actually makes wine near Ferrara, and Terry Hughes (alias Mondosapore) who had just arrived from New York.

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by Martin Field

Corked wines are disgusting to drink. Less annoying, but common enough, are wines with bits of cork floating in them. Admittedly, cork crumbs are more a cosmetic than a taste problem but they’re very irritating when you find them in your glass.

My certifiable genius friend Kim, cast his beady mathematical eyes over a number of crumby wines. He observed that cork flotsam and jetsam appear most frequently when he uses a waiters knife to extract corks from older wines.

In the E-vine tasting lab he demonstrated, using a deluxe waiters knife on a 15-year-old bottle of wine, that just before the cork fully emerges from a bottle the waiters knife actually pushes the cork away from the perpendicular.

This leverage bends the wet end of the cork, and if the cork is unsound, causes it to break and shed crumbs. Consequently, small pieces of cork tend to stick in the bottle neck and fragments fall inside the bottle. These then have to be fished or filtered out. Or, chewed and swallowed.

To put it more simply: the structural integrity of a decomposing cork will be compromised as the waiters knife’s vectoring forces simultaneously compress and expand the wet end of the cork in opposite directions. Having lost the springiness of youth, the stressed cork will self-destruct.

Kim’s solution is to use an old-fashioned butterfly corkscrew when opening older wines. This type of corkscrew will extract the cork in a strictly vertical direction, avoiding destructive stresses and strains caused by sideways movement. He’s convinced me.

If you have a strong arm, a simple T-shaped corkscrew will also do the trick.

by Martin Field

I enjoyed a bottle of Laroche Petit Chablis 2004 ($28) the other night. A Chablis of a lesser appellation admittedly, but a lovely aperitif for all that. Not a fruity style but clean, acidic, minerally, without apparent oak and showing lip-smacking persistence. As I poured another glass I wondered why Australian winemakers don’t or can’t make something similar.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we can copy the inimitable Chablis but it is made from chardonnay and we have more than enough of that in Australia to experiment with. But what do we do with chardonnay? We make big, blowsy, buttery, oak-saturated, oily, soft, sweet, alcoholic, over the top wines, is what we do.

In the unrefined circles I move in, these styles are rarely seen on the dining table any more. Many people are sick of them and are more likely to pour sauvignon blanc, riesling, pinot gris or even viognier.

And as for cellaring Oz chardonnay, in my experience it’s a waste of time and space and money. Just lately I’ve opened a selection of aged (six years and more) premium bottles. Mostly, they’ve been disappointing. They lack acid; they display premature brownish hues and oxidative bouquets and are fat and flabby on the palate. Yet rieslings and semillons of similar age are inevitably youthful in appearance and a delight to drink.

Thinks: if I’m going to drink chardonnay, I’ll stick to just-released, unwooded styles, and Chablis – when I can afford it.

by Martin Field

I’ve occasionally been criticised by a tiny minority of readers for not taking wine seriously enough. For, as it were, too much taking of ze peez. In a spirit of détente, ecumenicalism and with good will to all, I henceforth vows to treat all wine matters with a level of appropriate gravitas. Here goes…

‘Let us have wine and women,* mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after’
That well-known clairvoyant Lord Byron wrote the above way back when. Today his words might well apply to the debate concerning the after-effects of environmental degradation and the no doubt related drought that continues to devastate Australia.

A handy barometer of Yarra Valley climate change is the unirrigated shiraz vine in our garden, which has shown signs of stress from water deprivation for the first time in 17 years. The leaves are wilted and browning at the edges; the grape bunches, while plentiful, bear sparse berries and while some show a youthful purple, many are green and scrawny.

Similarly, our tomato plants are dying, the lawn is brown and parched and our sinks are cluttered with buckets, in a foolhardy attempt to recycle greasy washing-up water.

My tastebuds have a brainwave
To cope with the water shortage, I racked my brains for a water substitute. It had to be cheap, non-toxic and with similar qualities to H2O. That is, tasteless, odourless and colourless. Then, while I was absentmindedly sipping such a liquid, my tastebuds had a brainwave (sort of like an organoleptic epiphany – to put it more simply). I’d drawn the magic potion from a four-litre cask (bag in a box) of white wine that a poverty-stricken friend had left, inadvertently, in our kitchen.

It met all the above criteria, and I thought, if Cleopatra could bathe in asses’ milk why should I not shower in cask wine? A wise move. The acid and alcohol have done wonders for my complexion, there is evidence of hair regrowth amidst my monk’s tonsure and people in the street stop to ask me where they can buy the fragrant aftershave I waft onto the breeze as I stroll along the boulevard.

Try it yourself and see. A word of warning though. When I used a bucket of the stuff to wash the car it made the paint bubble.

Bruno of Balmoral sent in this little gem.

Smouldering red dawn
frantic waves quench ash grey sand
like sparkling shiraz