The Emperor of Wine

 

        Edinburgh Central Library is in the heart of the city’s Old Town, a tourist mecca. A stone’s throw from the entrance, visitors will see a mass of scaffolding, behind which a hotel has been hidden for years. It is an embarrassment to this once handsome capital city, but nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

        I went to the Central Library not to see this eyesore, but to read The Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence, by Robert Parker, the ‘Emperor of Wine’. The book was published a long time ago, in 1987, and is for reference only. It took me back to my student days, when I whiled away hours reading texts which were far less interesting.

        It may legitimately be asked why I bothered. Well, I wanted something to write about and I’m very keen on wines from the Rhône Valley. I was curious to discover what this legendary wine critic had to say about one of my favourite regions.

        I quickly discovered that Robert Parker was a really excellent writer. I don’t think I’d ever read that about him. He is still famous for having a profound influence on wine styles before the Millennium, owing to his preference for very ripe, full-bodied wines, but his talents as a writer seem to have been forgotten.  

        I found myself laughing at his turn of phrase in that silent room around the corner from Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Gigondas ‘seems to have as many dogs and cats as human inhabitants’, he wrote. Now of course a famous appellation, ‘Gigondas does not have a distinguished history’. Hence the fact that ‘all the growers and négociants seem to relish’ its previous incarnation as a ‘booster wine’ for red Burgundy.

        He was not a fan of the wine villages in the département of the Drôme in the southern Rhône, which he described as ‘one-horse towns’. As for Vinsobres, which is these days considered a source of some excellent red wines, its name ‘seems a contradiction in itself (“sober wine”)’. The eastern side of the river in the southern Rhône, an area of ‘sun-scorched, lazy hill towns’ and ‘spectacular vistas’, was ‘studded with…red-faced vignerons offering a free taste of their wines’.

        For someone with such a famous palate, I found some of Parker’s comments about grapes and wines puzzling. The white grape Bourboulenc, he wrote, ‘offers plenty of body’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. On the contrary, I thought it was more famous for having acidity, making it a rarity in the southern Rhône. I’d always believed that Grenache Blanc, another white grape, was rather neutral. ‘Deeply fruity’ was Parker’s assessment, however. As for the rosés of Gigondas, these were ‘light, vibrant, fresh, underrated’, in his view. Admittedly, my tasting experience is limited, but the ones I tried were flabby and alcoholic.

        Parker’s tasting notes were surprising, to say the least. One of the aromas of the white grape Roussanne was ‘coffee’, in his estimation. I did a double-take when I read that. Likewise, I raised my eyebrows when I saw that one of the ‘telltale aromas’ of the red grape Mourvèdre was ‘tree bark’. His assertion that the ‘best’ examples of Grenache had an aroma of ‘roasted peanuts’ also had me scratching my head. Either I haven’t tasted enough or Robert Parker had an eccentric palate.

        I didn’t read all of it, but I enjoyed Robert Parker’s book very much. I’d say that he was a far more gifted and entertaining writer than the vast majority of people writing about wine now. Nor was he afraid of acknowledging his limitations. ‘Frankly, I have no idea what this grape tastes like’, he wrote of Picpoul. Now that’s hard to imagine.

Mentor

 

          I like Australian wines a lot, which I believe makes me unfashionable. That doesn’t bother me in the least. In my youth, I guzzled Wolf Blass Yellow Label Cabernet Sauvignon with abandon. When I first lived in Tokyo, I regularly drank Yellow Tail Shiraz, with Japanese beer serving as a pleasant aperitif before the main event. Eventually I moved on to the really good stuff.

          One such wine was the Peter Lehmann Mentor Cabernet Sauvignon 2014, from the Barossa Valley. I hoovered up stock of it when I worked at Majestic Wine. I remember opening one of my last bottles the first time I had Covid. I couldn’t really taste it, and it could be argued that I squandered a fine bottle of wine, but it cheered me up enormously.

          I told Brett Schutz, the senior winemaker at Peter Lehmann Wines, about my enthusiasm for the 2014 Mentor when I had the good fortune to taste with him recently. This happy turn of events was occasioned by Peter Lehmann switching importer, from Liberty to Boutinot.

          Like the other wines in the Peter Lehmann Masters Collection, the Mentor Cabernet Sauvignon 2021 matured for five years before release, Well, almost. I sampled it in September, so you work that out. The Cabernet fruit comes mostly from the north of the Barossa Valley and the wine had more of a menthol, eucalyptus tinge than I remembered in the 2014. (I was told that, contrary to my assumptions, the eucalyptus flavour is more common in the Barossa Valley than in Coonawarra.)

          I asked Brett Schutz if eight years after the vintage was the ideal time to drink the Mentor, for I had gone through Majestic’s stock of the 2014 like a wrecking ball in 2022, and it was hard to believe it could have improved beyond that point in time. He said that he thought the wine would have been even better a couple of years later. I made a solemn vow to refrain from drinking the 2021 until the 2030s. Given that I’ve never succeeded in holding on to a bottle for longer than 18 months, however, it’s reasonable to doubt my resolve.

          There are two whites in the Masters Collection, the Wigan Riesling and the Margaret Semillon. Apparently, Semillon was a big seller for Peter Lehmann a few decades ago, before it was eclipsed by the ‘Savalanche’ from New Zealand. The Margaret Semillon 2017 is ‘still quite tight’, in the words of Brett Schutz. It does indeed have an awful lot of acidity. I asked when it would hit its sweet spot, and the answer was 15 to 20 years after the harvest, or ‘crush’, as I think they say in Australia. The wine ‘requires significant time (and patience)’, or so I read on the Peter Lehmann website. No kidding.

          The Wigan Riesling I sampled was from 2018, a high acid vintage. The fruit was grown in the Eden Valley, which is next to the Barossa Valley and a prime source of Riesling. According to Brett Schutz, the Wigan reaches its peak about ten years after the harvest. He said that it doesn’t retain its structure as well as the Semillon, so it isn’t as long-lived.

          ‘Is the writing on the wall for Australian Shiraz?’ asked The Drinks Business in January. If so, it’s further proof that our civilisation is in a downward spiral. The Peter Lehmann Stonewell Shiraz is the winery’s flagship. The average age of the vines used for the wine is around fifty years, and some of the fruit is from vines planted in 1893. The ageing potential of the wine is considerable: Brett Schutz said the 2010 and 2012 still need time. It was very interesting tasting the 2018 alongside the Masters Collection Eight Songs Shiraz 2021, for I detected a significant difference in tannins. The tannins from the Stonewell were far more evident on my front teeth, despite it being three years older. Even so, the Eight Songs Shiraz should last for 20 years.

          I went to the Barossa Valley once, on a minibus tour. We visited four wineries, none of which I remember. One of them may have been Peter Lehmann, but maybe not. My main recollection is not of the estates, but of my fellow tourists: they were all Brits. I suppose Australian wine was a lot more trendy back in the day.