Frontline Wine: A Warning to Restaurant Goers

We’ve seen a glut of new world-y, samey-samey wines from Old World wine producing countries being offered to us recently. You taste these things and don’t know what country they’ve come from. Regional/national characteristics have been lost to over-extraction (stirring for concentration), too much time in contact with oak or just plain bad corner-cutting viticulture. You can’t even tell what variety it is sometimes. They are muscular, shiny and taste like you’ve smeared a thick layer of jam over a good meal if you open them at dinner. Most are useful only for frictionless delivery of alcohol to the gut.

Restaurants are the biggest culprits for stocking these things. The problem is distributors know ignorant restaurant wine-buyers with a penchant for fruit will snap them up because of their sugariness (and still look as though they know what they’re doing when the owner eats there). How many times have you gone to a restaurant in this country to see thick, gloopy Spanish old vine Grenaches from trendy named vineyards make up the numbers in a Savvy & Pinot Gris smeared child’s-play winelist? Nothing makes me think a list is more piss-poor-pretentious than seeing a small corner of European must-haves like Chablis and Sancerre amongst a shit-shower of overpriced, two dimensional fruit juices from the antipodes.

In Wellington, it would take you a year to eat in every restaurant in the CBD, yet you could visit those with a decent winelist in one day. $40 for a glass of Laurent Perrier (that’s Bourgogne Blanc at Puligny Montrachet prices)? Palliser Estate Riesling with your $149 degustation menu? You’d need to be thick in the head to pay those prices; it shows real ignorance and a lack of respect for the customer on the part of the restaurant too. If you’re paying three times the price of a bottle to drink it in a restaurant, the least you can expect is to have the ‘sommelier/glass washer/bullshitter’ provide you with something that will actually enhance the meal you’re eating (not just a wine bought by the restaurant to please the corporate bigwigs they’ve unashamedly climbed into bed with).

Chefs leave the kitchen to trek for days to find fresh lint from some tropical monkey’s bellybutton to create the perfect garnish for their new dish…then the knuckle-dragging ‘sommelier' serves it with Villa Maria Savvy…a text-book-produced, formulaic wine from the very bottom drawer of shameful New Zealand exports. You may as well be drinking Dr Pepper with the dish.

If you still think under-twenty-dollar New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc actually has a food match outside of raw lemon, you probably have the tastebuds of a cider-drinking 15 year old teenage girl. Ok…I’ve found a few exceptions…but generally speaking: it’s too fruity for food. It dominates everything you put in front of it. If you want to get pissed, go for it. But don’t pretend you’re having a glass of Savvy to compliment your scallops. You’re drinking it because it slides down your throat as fast as the bullshit that passes it on the way up as you wax lyrical about all the summer fruits you can taste.

Food wines don’t flash up immediately as knock-out ‘I-want-to-buy-that’ styles. They are textural, complex wines that are usually quite dry and a little difficult when you try them on their own. Match them to the right dish (usually the local dishes where they’re produced) and a multitude of previously hidden subtleties appear. You will also notice the balance and texture hold firm against the food and the acidity and minerality flickers around the food tastes on your tongue like a naked flame. You can match fish to white wine and 80% of the time it’ll work beautifully, but a precise wine match like aged Alsacian Pinot Gris with a touch of oily sweetness and a baked salmon fillet with asparagus is the wine-world equivalent of having Maria Sharapova cook you breakfast in her underpants.

Stick to the basic principles of tasting. Don’t waiver. Don’t let people tell you what’s good (especially theatrical ‘sommeliers’ placed high on a pedestal of lies by sales-driven corporate representatives). Balance, depth, texture, acidity, length. Look for the structure in every wine you taste and the benefit of these so called difficult wines will reveal themselves to you.

If you see Oyster Bay, Montana Sauvignon Blanc or Villa Maria on a menu…don’t stand for it. Walk out. The restaurant is tied in with a corporate face sucker and doesn’t know or care about which wines match their foods. If they’re there, you can sure as hell bet the rest of the wine list ain’t goin’ be a masterclass in winemaking. What is the point of New Zealand kitchens serving fresh, wild food when the floor staff are matching it with crap, unnatural laboratory-produced wines?

Try

Dirler Belzbrunnen Riesling 2008 (Alsace, France)

Steely dry, intense, weighty Riesling that cuts through the fat in pork like a Stanley knife (or better yet, a . It’ll hold up beautifully to very strong tasting foods like Chorizo and taste great as a refreshing summer aperitif.

$58

Ino Malagousia (Peloponnese Mountains, Greece)

A grape variety that the yanks can’t get enough of at the moment; this is to my knowledge the first (decent) example of Malagousia to reach NZ. Tropical mouth-watering lushness, a crisp keel of acidity and layered, limey complexity that’ll knock any narrow mindedness towards Greek wine right out of you.

$25

Wright’s Rose 2010 Gisborne

Finally…a certified organic kiwi wine that’s world class…and it’s not what you’d have expected. This rose is one of the outstanding kiwi wines I’ve tried this year. It has real flavour and depth, the fruit is restrained and not overpowering whilst the oak is just…(W)right (ahem). So many roses in New Zealand are an afterthought, tasting closer to dentist’s mouth rinse than a complex food specialist wine. This is really something worth seeking out as it’s in a different class to everything else out there. Congratulations!

$26

Leoville Poyferre 1985 (St Julien)

Voluptuous, still plenty of flavoursome silky tannins, intense, much fineness across the entire palate culminating in a piercing backbone of incredible delicacy and beauty. The texture has a soft milky ebb to it, the savoury complexity and aromatic notes are beautifully integrated into the soft, restrained fruit.

$$$$$!

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