Monday, 31 August 2009
Thank You Mr Grosset
Anyone whose drinking habits resemble mine has reason to thank Jeffrey Grosset.
For a start there’s the small matter of what goes into a container labelled Riesling. Only a few years back tyou found bottles and casks in your bottle shop identified as Claret, Burgundy, Chablis or Moselle, all perfectly acceptable terms in Europe where you had an interrelation between the label descriptor, grape variety and geographic place of origin.
In Australia those terms became generic tags to apply to wine styles that, in most cases, bore next-to-no resemblance to their European counterparts.
Under pressure from the European Union such descriptors have gradually disappeared. We’re into the last round right now as Tokay becomes Topaque and Sherry becomes Apera. Along the way there was, apparently, a push to allow Riesling to be allowed as a generic descriptor rather than a varietal label. Not something that you’d be keen on if you were a producer of quality wine in the Clare Valley.
Jeffrey Grosset was one of the leaders in the (to quote Mr Halliday) long and ultimately successful battle to prevent the use of ‘riesling’ on flagons and bottles as a generic description.
Well done, sir.
That habit of using Riesling to describe a dry or semi-dry white wine that’s not as sweet as moselle is going to take a bit of killing off, though. A couple of years we hosted a little gathering to test-drive Hughesy’s Trivia Night questions for the year, and I offered a couple of the participants a glass of riesling for starters.
No thanks, came the reply. We don’t like Riesling.
Yes, Hughesy retorted. Maybe you don’t but try this one anyway.
This one was a Paulett Polish Hill River under screwcap. It only took a sip for the objections to disappear.
Mind you, while those perceptions are being killed off prices for premium Riesling strike me as very reasonable indeed. The fact that you can buy stellar examples of the Clare or Watervale take on the variety for under twenty dollars never ceases to amaze me.
Then there’s the matter of the screwcap enclosure you’ll find on your bottle of Australian Riesling (most of them, anyway).
They were already debating the pros and cons of screwcaps when I was becoming interested in wine in the seventies, and we were standing in the tasting room at Bimbadgen in the Hunter at the end of 2005 when we were told that before too long virtually every wine produced in Australia would be coming out under screwcap.
But, Madam remarked, there’s something romantic about uncorking a bottle.
The response was devastating.
There’s nothing romantic about wine that’s gone off because of the cork (or words to that effect).
The key decision that swung the issue was the decision by around fifteen of Clare’s premium Riesling producers to make the change. Put like that it doesn’t seem that remarkable. You’d guess the decision was made, everyone switched and everything was hunky-dory.
Apparently it wasn’t as simple as that.
I mightn’t have all the details right, but the story goes like this.
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