Displaying items by tag: Balance

Summary: 

Every drop of wine we ever drink is the product of observation, intervention and craftsmanship.  Without intervention, every wine would be oxidising and turning to vinegar; without craftsmanship, every wine would be rough and unpalatable.  Advances in craftsmanship have brought us the extraordinary beauty and diversity we are all familiar with and that we celebrate in today’s wine world.

What have been the key winemaking advances of the last two decades, and what changes and challenges await in a world of rapid and unprecedented climate change? Among the many topics, our expert panel hopes to touch on are: 

• Dramatic advances in the sorting and handling of harvested fruit
• The deepening understanding of balance in wine (acidity, alcohol, other elements)
• Changing attitudes to the role of oak in élevage, and the increasing use of large wooden vessels, of well-seasoned oak, of concrete and of earthenware vessels
• The role of oxygen in fermentation and ageing processes (micro-oxygenation through to controlled oxidation)
• Skin-contact white wines (orange or amber wines, or qvevri-made white wines)
• The deepening understanding of tannins, especially in red wines, and the extraordinary advances in textural sophistication of red wines in certain regions
• The meaning and application of “non-interventionism” as a means to achieving vineyard or terroir expression
• ‘Precision’ and ‘purity’ as the new aesthetic desiderata for wine, replacing those such as ‘power’, ‘opulence’ and ‘generosity’
• The role of (primary) fruit flavours in wine
• Warm and hot vintages: responses in vineyard and winery
• Redefining varietal styles and regional styles for a changing world

Host and Panelists: 

Wine Scholar Guild Academic Advisor Andrew Jefford, speaking from France, will be bringing together a panel of key thinkers, writers and winemakers in four countries to talk through these and other issues. 

Fiona Morrison MW is a writer, winemaker and wine merchant based in both Bordeaux (where with her husband Jacques Thienpont she manages Ch Le Pin, L’If and Le Hêtre) and in Belgium, where she manages the family Thienpont négociant business; she obtained her MW in 1994. 

St Helena-based Rosemary Cakebread owns and makes the wines for the much-admired Gallica; she is a former winemaker and consulting winemaker for Spottswoode. 

Consultant and writer Pedro Ballesteros MW is a qualified agronomical engineer and holds a Masters degree in viticulture and oenology, as well as having obtained his MW in 2010.  A polymath and polyglot (working in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Italian), Pedro is based in Brussels where he formerly worked for the European Union. 

Tuscany-based Alberto Antonini was cited by Decanter magazine in 2015 as one of the five most influential winemaking consultants in the world.  After training in Tuscany, Bordeaux and in Napa and working for Frescobaldi and Col D’Orcia, Alberto now consults in Italy, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, California, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Armenia, Russia, Israel and Australia. 

Summary:

Did you enjoy reading our Great Debate blog on Ripeness and Balance with Andrew Jefford and Julia Harding MW?

In this written article, Andrew and Julia tackle the finer points of ripeness and balance in wine. Their back-and-forth covers a lot of ground: how to decipher balance on the palate, the differences between tasting wine and drinking wine, putting the value of alcohol levels into context and the role climate change is playing in defining our sense of taste.

In this episode of WSG Live, we are following up on their written debate with the two great minds in wine. 

Presenters:

Julia Harding

passed the Master of Wine exams at the first attempt in 2004 and was top student in her year. By training a linguist and a book editor, she has happily combined her first life in publishing with her second life in wine. She has collaborated with Jancis Robinson for over 15 years, editing and writing for JancisRobinson. com, and on several major wine reference books. Julia is co-author of Wine Grapes (2012) and map editor of the World Atlas of Wine (2019). She was co-editor with Jancis of the fourth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine and has taken on the role of lead editor for the fifth edition (2023). Julia lives in London, tastes and travels as widely as she can, and keeps fit and sane thanks to bootcamp in the park, rain or shine, and yoga.

Andrew Jefford

is the Academic Advisor to the Wine Scholar Guild, and has been writing about wine since 1988, notably for The Evening Standard and The Financial Times, among other UK newspapers. He has columns in every edition of Decanter Magazine and World of Fine Wine magazine and is co-chair of the Decanter World Wine Awards. His books include The New France, Whisky Island and Andrew Jeffords Wine Course.

Read "The Great Debate" Full Article Here.

Few, if any, moments in wine are more dramatic than when a producer decides it is time to pick fruit. Whether they rely upon a Brix reading, a visual cue from the grape seeds, or the finely tuned instrument of their own palate, making the call to harvest a plot of grapes is a decision fraught with consequence. Get it exactly right and you can have a legendary vintage. Get it wrong, and nothing that follows from the vine to the winery to the bottle can make up for an ill-timed harvest.

“Ripeness is balance at its apogee,” notes Julia Harding, a Master of Wine, wine critic, contributor to JancisRobinson.com, and the co-author of the often-referenced book Wine Grapes. Yet given the frequency with which “ripeness” and “balance” are used as terms in wine discussion, it is worth our time to take a step back and try to find a consensus on what they actually are (or even, if they are the same thing), and the ramifications this may hold for our sensory perception. 

As we discovered, defining where that apogee of balance lies can be exceedingly difficult. Balance “resists codification,” says wine writer and Wine Scholar Guild Academic Advisor Andrew Jefford. “It varies culturally; it varies by individual; it varies by region and by variety.”

For our latest Great Debate, Andrew Jefford and Julia Harding tackle the finer points of ripeness and balance in wine. Their back-and-forth covers a lot of ground: how to decipher balance on the palate, the differences between tasting wine and drinking a wine, putting the value of alcohol levels into context, the role climate change is playing in defining our sense of taste, and even the dangers of allowing one’s intellect to override the sensual response. All of it, Jefford suggests, is in a quest for, what he calls, “resonance.”

While we may not have arrived at any convenient new truisms, in the end, wine’s remarkable ability to reveal the harmony of nature is — at least for now — something we can all agree on.