sstar&let (2008-11-16)
Gwoli kompletności zacytuję za Financial Timesfragmenty dotyczące uwag Pontaliera z Margaux i Vergelegena z Am. Poł.:
For a view from the other side of the Atlantic, I asked Paul Pontallier, who not only directs Château Margaux and the making of its elegant wines but has also been one of Bordeaux University’s most respected authorities on oak. For good measure, he also makes wine in Chile, South Africa and elsewhere. He identified the problem of tannin maturity: “Grapes in most New World wine regions, and often in Spain as well, ripen very differently from how they do in Bordeaux; they accumulate a lot of sugar quickly and lose acidity before tannins get a chance to ripen well. This is actually why people – for good reason – harvest late and make wines over 14.5 per cent or 15 per cent alcohol. The problem is that high alcohol reinforces the dryness of tannins, so that the remedy can prove worse than the problem. And low acidity obliges them to add tartaric acid, which also reinforces the dryness of the tannins.”
And finally, a southern hemisphere view. The most admired winemaker in South Africa, André van Rensburg of Vergelegen, was in London last week so I asked him whether he had also come across sandpaper reds. He smiled broadly. “When you find these wines, you can be sure the winemaker is trying to look for no grape tannin, just oak tannin. You can bet your last pound the wine was all matured in very tight grain, new French oak and because there are no grape tannins involved in the maturation process, you have wood tannin only, and that leads to this sensation. I cannot believe that these wines are going to mature beyond five to eight years because they were made from grapes that went beyond physiological ripeness. With grapes, after greenness comes ripeness, then overripeness, and then dead fruit. I think a lot of those wines are made from borderline dead fruit.”
If so, it would seem that there is no shortage of sandpaper beyond the grave.
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