Ask the wine expert

As you can't take Oz with you for your wine tasting in France, why not ask him your wine questions before you go? Here are Oz's top ten questions (and answers!) to help you prepare you for your wine buying.

Q. Is wine good for you?
Q. What’s the most expensive wine in the world?
Q. What was your first taste of wine?
Q. What’s your favourite wine?
Q. Do you have to follow rules about what wine goes with what food?
Q. Can you make white wine out of black grapes?
Q. Can Champagne come from anywhere?
Q. Is Chardonnay a village in Australia?
Q. Does red wine have to be “laid down” before drinking?
Q. How do I tell if a wine is corked?

Q. Is wine good for you?
A. Well, it seems to be. Most modern studies reckon that red wine in particular lowers your cholesterol level and is good for your heart. Not too much wine, mind you! But a couple of glasses a day is a good idea - and as your old auntie used to say “a little bit of what you fancy does you good!"

Q. What’s the most expensive wine in the world?
A. It’s a French wine - of course - a 1787 Château Lafite from Bordeaux that once belonged to American President Thomas Jefferson. This guy from New York bought it and displayed it proudly under bright lights in a local museum. But he displayed it upright. The heat shrivelled the cork, which fell into the bottle. And the result? The world’s most expensive bottle of vinegar.

Q. What was your first taste of wine?
A. Well, I’m told I laid into the sherry a bit at my sister’s Christening. I was about 3 then. Later that summer we went for a picnic near St Neots in Cambridgeshire on the river Ouse. My brother fell into the weir, my dad leapt in to rescue him, my mum had hysterics - and I saw this bottle of damson wine my mum had made. No one was looking. So I drank it. My brother survived. I nearly didn’t. Other than that, the first identifiable bottles I tasted were Bull’s Blood from Hungary and Lutomer Riesling from Yugoslavia. And, of course, those endless watered down little tumblers of anonymous red that I was allowed a sip of during our summer camping holidays in France. Not an auspicious start, but good enough for me.

Q. What’s your favourite wine?
A. I don’t have one. Seriously, I don’t see wine simply as a flavour. I see it as part of the joys of being alive. So, what’s my favourite wine? Well, who am I with? Am I angry or sad? Am I in or out of love? Where am I? On a cliff top at Sorrento? In a lazy Normandy meadow just as the sun begins to fade in the sky? In a tiny bistro hidden in the Beaujolais Hills? Every time, a different state of mind, different people, different places - different wine.

Q. Should some wines only go with certain foods?
A. Not at all. Old wine and food rules were made in the days when most wines were pretty raw and tough and not only did they demand food, but their rough edges would jar with the wrong food. But modern wine is so much softer and fruitier that it can go with anything. Except something like oysters. They really do demand an ice-cold glass of Muscadet.

Q. Can you make white wine out of black grapes?
A. Yes, you can. Just think for a moment - when you buy black grapes in the greengrocer’s - bite one open - and what colour is the flesh and juice? It’s not red, it’s white! All the colouring matter is in the skin of the black grape. When you’re making red wine you ferment the juice and the skins together in a great big mush and over a period of a week or two, all the colour is leached out of the skins into the wine. If you want rosé wine, you just let the skins and juice stew together for a day or two. If you want white wine, they call it “blanc de noirs” - white from black - you press all the juice off the skins before fermenting, throw the skins away - and you’ll end up with white wine.

Q. Can Champagne come from anywhere?
A. Absolutely not. You can use the same grape varieties as Champagne - Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay; you can make the wine bubble in exactly the same way as Champagne. But you still can’t call your fizz Champagne unless it comes from one specific area north east of Paris called - Champagne. So why not visit and see what Champagne is like? The chief town of Reims is only 2 hours or so by car from Calais.

Q. Is Chardonnay a village in Australia?
A. You’d think so, wouldn’t you, because the words Chardonnay and Australia seem inextricably linked on so many wine labels. But Chardonnay is a white grape - the white grape of Burgundy - and it really only took off in Australia in the 1980s - since then, with wines like Rosemount and Bin 65, it’s become a global success. Oh, by the way, there is a village called Lindemans. It’s in Burgundy.

Q. Does red wine have to be “laid down” before drinking?
A. Absolutely not. In the old days most red wines were tough and raw to start with and really didn’t taste very nice for years, so you had to lay them down in a cellar so that the effects of time and air seeping through the cork could soften them. But winemaking nowadays is so much better that nearly all red wines are fruity enough, round enough and soft enough to drink straight away. But squirreling away bottles is fun - so do shove a few bottles under the stairs - Bordeaux, Loire and Rhône reds would be a good start.

Q. How do I tell if a wine is corked?
A. Well it doesn’t mean that there are bits of cork floating in the glass: that just means you opened the bottle a bit clumsily or you’ve got a “killer” corkscrew. No, cork taint means that the cork in the bottle was made from cork bark contaminated with mould - and you can tell it because the wine will smell and taste mouldy and stale. And you should send it back! It’s a major problem for the consumer, so don’t turn your nose up at plastic corks and screw tops. There’s some lovely wines lurking beneath them!

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