Even with all this heft, it is admittedly not going to be the last word on any region. In all, it has 300,000 words, 230 maps, 400+ pages and weighs almost five pounds. The tome has added new areas of coverage such as the Savoie and the Judean Hills. Jancis and her team do the heavy lifting now and this eighth edition has been fully revised. The book gained a new lease on life when Jancis Robinson became a co-author in the fifth edition. Lifetime, he said, the volume has sold more than 5 million copies. The market shouted a reply: by 1973, the book had sold 500,000 copies. So he had to impress upon the publisher how wine and maps were a natural fit. He said that back in 1970, the publisher was unsure if a book of wine maps would really fly. He and Jancis Robinson were in town to promote the new edition of the World Atlas of Wine. There is a fashion for early-picking, too – and in many wines from early picked fruit you will taste the harvesting decision more clearly than the variety (since the articulation of varietal character only arrives with ripeness).“Wine is geography in a glass,” Hugh Johnson said recently. Inexpensive, high-yielding varietals grown in marginal climates make varietal character still more tenuous, though one would hope that such wines weren’t served in an exam context. Note, though, that I keep having to write ‘ambitious’ or ‘serious’. The results are almost unbelievably different, and that difference reflects winemaking ideals as much as - indeed probably more than - terroir. I recently blind tasted a set of ambitious Australian Cabernets against Napa equivalents. Napa, by contrast, slugs it out in the low-acid vanguard with contemporary Bordeaux from ripe vintages like 2009. The key to spotting Pinot from Burgundy in a blind tasting compared to ambitious Pinot from, say, New Zealand is to look for tannic density.ĭitto for acid levels, with almost all Australian red wines having higher acid levels (again, contrary to popular belief) than serious wines made from similar varieties in Europe. The tannins of Malbec, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vary hugely depending on where they are grown, with anything serious from France’s Atlantic ambit (Bordeaux and Cahors) delivering a far chewier mouthful than anything grown in the Southern Hemisphere (with the possible exception of those Argentine Malbecs made by Bordelais winemakers). Much Garnacha is low in tannin – but the greatest French locations for Grenache are Châteauneuf, Gigondas and Roussillon, and the variety can be much more tannically prolific and texturally rich in those places than Australian Shiraz ever is. Viognier and Gewurztraminer, for example, do indeed tend to be aromatic, low-acid varieties when grown in Condrieu and Alsace, but when grown outside their European heartlands they can often be less aromatic and more acidic because winemakers and local drinkers want all white wines, regardless of starting variety, to be ‘crisp’ and ‘fresh’. The key difficulty with mind maps of this sort is that the character of a variety overwhelmingly depends on two things: where it is grown, and what the ambitions are of the person who is making the wine. On the white map, Torrontés is surely not one of the wine world’s most acidic whites (bring on Assyrtico, huddled inside its Santorini baskets), and I’ve never yet come across a Furmint that would be more aromatic than a Muscat. Reputationally, Petit Verdot may well belong where JC has it and that might perhaps be justified in the best vats of Petit Verdot at Pichon-Lalande or Léoville-Poyferré after a hot summer, but every time I taste a named Petit Verdot varietal (from Australia’s Riverland, for example, or Argentina’s Mendoza, or from Quinta da Romaneira in the Douro valley) it is much less tannic than any Piedmontese Nebbiolo and most Xynomavro, too. Because of depth of colour and general opulence of flavour, tasters often assume that Australian Shiraz must be tannic – but it isn’t, because the Australian palate doesn’t like tannin much, and Australian winemakers and critics prefer fine, ‘powdery’ tannins (the consequence of what Penfold’s Peter Gago calls ‘tannin fining’) to the fatter, grippier, fiercer tannins more typical of long-macerated European reds. JC and Tersina have Shiraz towards the top of the tannic spectrum, for example – but assuming that ‘Shiraz’ principally means Australian Shiraz, this is far from true.
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