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 M. Parker, Jr., 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 in that library, 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.

Jakey Season

             The weather north of the border has begun to warm up. Yes, it can happen, although anyone who visited in 2024, the year of the summer that never was, may be surprised to hear that. With warmer temperatures, we enter ‘Jakey Season’.

Edinburgh

       I wish I could claim the credit for coining this term, but the first time I heard it was from a former manager. My English brethren are likely unaware of the meaning of the word jakey, so I have a definition from Dictionaries of the Scots Language for them. A jakey is ‘a slang word for a down-and-out, especially one who obviously drinks lots of jake [methylated spirits].’ I think this definition can be extended to include anyone with a substance abuse problem, and who’s not above stealing.

       Well, there are a lot of them up north, although it’s of course not a phenomenon limited to Scotland. I noticed an ample supply of jakeys on a couple of recent visits to London (I’ve been away from England for so long that I’m unfamiliar with the equivalent term.) And they do come out into society when the weather takes a turn for the better. Who knows how they fill their time in the long winters.

       I used to work on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, a street which didn’t have the finest reputation. It’s now probably less sketchy than it was, but no eyebrows would be raised if you were to inform someone that you’d run into a spot of bother there. It was here that I became very familiar with jakeys.

       I was generally very reluctant to leave our door open, for obvious reasons. One brilliant summer’s day, though, we took the risk. Within a short time, a tall and extremely thin man reeled into the shop like a zombie. He didn’t respond to my greeting – a bad sign - and walked straight over to the Italian section. He grabbed a bottle of wine, then bolted. My colleague gave chase, but the guy was, shockingly, as fast as a gazelle, even if his trousers did fall down as he was heading up the street.

       My eyes turned to the Italian section to see what the jakey had swiped. It was a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino! My mind promptly conjured up an image of him sitting on a bench in a dodgy park, or perhaps just sprawled out on the grass, swigging that excellent wine straight from the bottle. Talk about a waste.

       Readers would be wrong to assume that the jakey profession is restricted to men. There were a number of lasses with inglorious reputations in that part of the city. I recall another incident – again, on a fine summer’s day – when a female jakey zig-zagged through the open door. My alert level shot up like that of a twitchy cat. I told her I wouldn’t be able to sell her a drink as she was clearly intoxicated. Perhaps I approached the matter the wrong way, but I was trying to follow our legal obligations.

       She ignored me, took a bottle of rose, and held it out as if daring me to grab it. Twice I played her daft game, failing on both occasions to reach it. She backed out of the shop, opened the bottle, poured it all onto the pavement, then legged it.

  

       Alas, dealing with jakeys not only causes you to lose your faith in humanity, it also may result in you doubting the effectiveness of the boys in blue. One weekend, I noticed a couple of jakeys had crashed out side by side on a pallet next to the shop. Across the street was a restaurant, where families would sit outside. Remembering that drunk nuisances used to be dealt with swiftly, I reported them to the police. The officers who visited simply looked annoyed with me, and told me that there was no law against being drunk. A fine example for the children across the street then.

       So, that’s the meaning of Jakey Season. I’d think long and hard before leaving your door open.  

Wines of Austria

       The view from the rooftop terrace above the National Museum of Scotland is special. Within throwing distance to the west is Greyfriars Kirkyard, whose green lawns and sandy-coloured church stand out among the dark and gloomy buildings of the city’s Old Town. To the north, the famous castle sits on its rocky perch like a sentry, and you can make out tiny figures on the esplanade preparing to head through the dark arch and into its precincts.

          Towards the end of the year, I had the chance to enjoy this fine prospect thanks to my interest in Austrian wine. Before Covid, I had been to one previous masterclass in this splendid venue, when attendees were given the opportunity to taste thirty wines from Ribera del Duero. Twenty nine were full throttle reds, showcasing the tannic delights of Tinta del País. (A friend commented afterwards that he at last understood the meaning of the term palate fatigue.) A solitary rosado served as an exception. It reminded me of the time I went to a wine tasting in Gigondas, where the rosés seemed an afterthought, almost an embarrassment.

 

        No whites were available at either of those tastings, whereas they were very much the showstoppers at the Austrian wine event in Edinburgh. One of the best was a Riesling from the noted vineyard of Achleiten in Wachau (Domäne Wachau, Riesling Smaragd Ried Achleiten, 2021), where vines are planted on terraces above the River Danube. 

 

     Riesling is, perhaps surprisingly, a bit player in Austria, accounting for under five percent of the total vineyard area. It is reserved for stony soils which don’t suit Grüner Veltliner. As this Smaragd showed, however, it can be seriously good, and the best have the potential to last fifty years. I suggested to our host, a Master of Wine, that it had a late harvest character. She did not agree! According to her, it bore the hallmark apricot flavour of the Wachau and, upon retrying the wine, I had to acknowledge that she was absolutely right.

 

        While I drink more red than white wine, my preference is beginning to swing the other way. I was therefore excited to try a Gemischter Satz at the masterclass (Christ, Bisamberg Wiener Gemischter Satz, 2023), for I don’t think I’d ever had this Viennese specialty before. A field blend comprising many grapes, the aroma brought to mind a chewing gum I used to have on holiday in the south of France when I was a boy (my father would only go on holiday in France). I think it was the peach variety, but I could well be wrong, given that several decades have elapsed since then. At any rate, the wine was genuinely full-bodied and delicious. 

 

        Needless to say, the heavy hitter of Austrian wine is Grüner Veltliner, which occupies about a third of the country’s vineyard area. We tasted three of those and one, made from grapes grown in the Kremstal, whose loess soils are particularly well-suited to the grape, was spectacular (Wess, Krems 'Alte Reben' Grüner Veltliner, 2022). It was made using old vines (‘alte reben’), some of which were planted over 100 years ago.

 

   There was also a lovely oak-aged Sauvignon Blanc (Neumeister, Vulkanland Steiermark Sauvignon Blanc, Grosse STK Ried Moarfeitl, 2017) from the southern region of Styria, the ‘green heart of Austria’, according to the MW. Here grapes are grown at altitude and the climate is marginal; it gave the lie to the claim that Sauvignon is not suitable for ageing. 

 

        The one sparkling wine we sampled, a dry pet-nat from a producer in Burgenland on the Hungarian border (Pittnauer, 'Pitt Nat' Blanc, 2022), proved controversial. My friend and colleague was of the view that it smelled ‘like industrial waste’, and he considered the palate to be only ‘marginally better’. The Master of Wine felt it had a ‘yeasty, earthy’ character. I agreed that it was very aromatic, but in a good way!

 

This event was truly memorable, and it was a pity that the total attendance amounted to a mere seven people. My colleague left with nine free bottles of really good wine, despite informing our hosts that he felt the country still suffered from an image problem with British wine drinkers, owing to the antifreeze scandal in the 1980s. Still, as he put it, people appreciate honesty! 

Published in The Wine Merchant, February 2025.

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The Real Mary King's Close

The room is small, dark and dingy and smells of earth, damp and dust. It’s hardly surprising, when you consider that I had to walk down 38 steps to get here. On the floor in the corner there’s a bucket for doing one’s business. ‘It was emptied twice a day when the bells of St Giles [the nearby church on the Royal Mile] rang’, remarks our guide.  

Centuries ago, some Edinburgh folk lived in this cramped dwelling in the heart of the city’s Old Town. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, the upper storeys of the building and those around it were lopped off, with the remainder serving as foundations for the new City Chambers. Now tour groups like mine wander through this dim subterranean world of vaulted rooms and low doorways. 

Our guide is a chambermaid called Agnes. (Actually, she’s an actor playing Agnes). A white cloth keeps her hair in place, and she sports a shabby throw and a white apron round her waist. She has a broad Scots accent. ‘Watch your step and mind your heeds’, she says repeatedly. On one occasion she tells us to avoid the nails sticking out of the walls, and I wonder how long it will be before some busybody shuts the place down. 

Agnes takes us through a cowshed with a very uneven, cobbled floor, and a room containing plague victims, all the while offering glimpses into seventeenth century life. ‘Nobody drank the water – it was dangerous – so we were all a little bit drunk most of the time’, she quips. We hear noises evocative of medieval Edinburgh: a man’s dying scream, an unseen woman shouting ‘gardyloo’ as she hurls a bucket of excrement out the window, and cows mooing. 

Agnes plays up the supernatural angle, telling us that ‘We are in supposedly some of the most haunted rooms in Scotland’. Apparently, a Japanese psychic called Aki visited in the nineties, and claimed to have felt the presence of a sad girl. She returned with a doll, a gesture which apparently relieved the gloom, and now a great drift of toys rests against one of the walls.  Evidently, none of my group knew about this tradition beforehand, for nobody leaves such a token. 

We descend more stairs to the close, or street, Agnes cautioning us in her Scots patois to ‘dinnae use’ the handrail. It’s pretty dark in the close, of course, and steep and narrow; maybe two metres across. Everything’s relative, though, for our guide points out that it was once much a ‘sought-after’ address ‘because it was so wide’. Washing hangs above our heads between the buildings on either side, which rise three or four storeys before dead-ending at the base of the City Chambers. It’s a remarkable place. 

We stand outside a door on the close, which Agnes pushes open in virtual slow-motion. The creaking sound is practically deafening in this echo chamber. Inside is a hall of wooden floorboards caked in dust, walls treated with arsenic to prevent mould and a naked light bulb, which provides a modicum of brightness. ‘No one is allowed in here’, Agnes remarks. At the end of the passage is a ‘thunderbox’, an improvement on the bucket seen earlier. The residents were forced to leave in 1897 as it was illegal to dwell underground. 

It took me fourteen years to get round to visiting The Real Mary King’s Close. Still, it’s better late than never.