Wine Fact #4 - Temperature matters

Its too cold. Its too hot. Its too windy. Its too cold. Its too sunny. Yes, as you can see I am from Melbourne. One day its 32°C and the next its 15°C with rain coming in sideways; a temperate split personality you might say. This is typical of Melbourne. Something that is also typical is our wines are served either too cold, as in Riesling or Champagne, or too warm as in Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz. This my friends is a wine fact!

How many times have you been to a restaurant and have ordered, say a viognier, and have the waiter present the bottle for taste only to be met with an ice-cream headache instead of ginger or apricots. Most fridges these days are set between 2-4°C because of safety concerns with milk. This may be fine for milk, but it aint fine for viognier, or champagne, or chardonnay or anything wine for that matter. Same to goes with reds. Beaujolais is seen as a red wine – no arguments here. Problem is Beaujolais is best served slightly chilled, so therefore should be stored in an appropriate wine fridge. Same with Madeira. Just cos it’s a fortified doesn’t mean it should be drunk at 25°C – a temperature that a lot of people know as room temperature, which is true. Thing is, room temperature and wine temperature are two vastly different subjects. The average ‘room temp’ for whites is about 8-9°C and red about 15-17°C, not 4°C or 25°C, and that’s a wine fact!

Temp C
36.8° Body temperature
25° Laboratory room temperature
19° Vintage Port
18° Bordeaux, Shiraz
17° Cabernet Franc, Red Burgundy
16° Pinot Noir, Rioja
15° Chianti
14° NV Port/Tawny, Madeira*
13°
12° Rosé, Beaujolais
11° Viognier, Sauternes/Botrytis wine
10°
9° Chardonnay
8° Riesling/Bordeaux Blanc
7° Champagne
6° Ice Wine
5°
4°
3°
2° Fridge Temp
1°
0° Water freezes
-18° Freezer Temp

*Madeira can also be served slightly chilled

Wine fact #3: Retsina

“You there! Drawn onwards through this stretch of Hell, tell me you know me. Say so, if so you can. You! Made as man before myself unmade.’
And I replied: ‘The awful pain you feel perhaps has cancelled from your memory. Till now, it seems, I’ve never ever seen you....
Dante Alighieri, canto 6 40-46, Inferno



You may think that this is about extreme, but I do not. It all really started back in 2002 and it was my first trip to Wagga for Res School at Charles Sturt University where I had just started Wine/Vit science. And one of the first units involved wine evaluation with Malcolm Allen. The usual stuff was looked at; pH, alcohol, clarity of wine, baumé and other fascinating wine tid-bits. Then he gave us some Retsina or Ρετσίν in Greek. Gosh it was awful. I’m not sure what the lesson was, but whatever it was the message was duly noted; Retsina is to be avoided. To this day I have not, and doubt if I ever will, had good Retsina. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it...
“Its unique flavor is said to have originated from the practice of sealing wine vessels…”
Unique flavour indeed. You’d think that they would have got it right after 2000 years wouldn’t you?

So then, Retsina is not a nice wine, and that’s a wine fact!

Wine Fact #2 - It's not broken glass!

Many years ago when I was working in an un-named three hat restaurant in Melbourne, I was confronted during service with what can only be described as one hysterical woman who single handedly brought service to a screeching halt! The problem you ask, and I quote, “Ohh my GGGGOOOODDD!! (God not good people) There are smashed shards of glass in my wine. Ohhhh GGGOOODDD, someone call an ambulance!!!”

A good 15 minutes later said woman had composed herself and had sheepishly decided not to sue ‘the pants’ off of said restaurant. What were initially thought to be shards of glass were merely soluble crystals of Potassium Bitartrate, or KOCO(CHOH)2COOH for all you science geeks out there. From here I’ll let Mr. Rankine take over from 'Making Good Wine',





“When the wine is cooled the solubility limit of potassium bitartrate is exceeded and some comes out of solution as a crystalline deposit. When this happens to white wine in the bottle the deposit is unsightly and may be mistaken by the uninitiated for broken glass .... Potassium bitartrate is present in the grapes, partially precipitates as argols during fermentation because of its low solubility in alcohol, and is present in the young wine as a saturated or even a super-saturated solution in excess of its normal solubility.”

The crystals are usually present on the under-side of corks and sometimes will settle at the bottom of the wine bottle.

So there you go. Doesn’t exactly say it’s not going to kill you, but when Rankine refers to it as “unsightly”, well “Sex in the City 2” was unsightly but that didn’t kill anyone – no-one we know of anyway. And that’s a wine fact.

Wine Fact #1 - Shiraz or Syrah?

Be it pocket vintage guides, portable argon sprays or downloadable apps to your iPhone or Blackberry, wine and wine talk is everywhere – a true Planet of the Grapes you may say. And with all of this wine talk comes wine lingo – MLF, oxygenation, reverse osmosis and on and on and on! There is so much to know about the little grape that makes fermented juice that can fetch upwards of $50K.

So what I propose to do is borrow the ‘wine fact’ concept derived by James May in “Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure” and now and then share something that I may know and you may not; some may be true, some may be a little true. And without further adieu here is my first Wine Fact!

Q: Where does the word ‘Syrah’ come from?
A: We all know that Syrah and Shiraz are effectively the one grape, this much is known. But why use different words? A long, long time ago in a place called Persia there was this town called Shiraz where they had this grapevine that magically produced a red drink that made everything and everyone seem ridgy-didge! One day some people came walking down the Silk Road and suggested that they might take some of the grapevine back to their neck of the woods – Europe – and try and do it justice. So off they travelled back up the Silk Road and boarded a ship in a Byzantine port and headed off with Poseidon’s blessing. Soon they came across some land and decided to dock for a while in the port, and the port was called Siracusa on the island of Sicily.


So long story short, the name syrah comes from the port city of Siracusa, the first city in Western Europe to propagate the Shiraz vitis vinifera – they just added an ‘h’ for posterity.

And that,as James May would say, is a wine fact!