For March, we took a look at some exceptional wines but the principal focus was on looking at what has changed throughout the years…and when it comes to wine, the impact of what we are drinking, where we are getting it from and how it has been made really has changed over the years! We discussed a lot but a few examples of what we covered from the evening are below.
Prosecco, as a really good example, was not a drink we may even have heard of when the wine club started nearly 20 years ago. Back then, in the UK approximately 200,000 bottles per year were being purchased. Prosecco, was the name of the grape, not just the region and it could be made anywhere in Italy. It took a few “suggestive” adverts staring Paris Hilton and the ever-increasing popularity of the sparkling wine, for the Italians to name the actual grape, Glera and make the Prosecco region a DOCG classification (quality controlled region that defines how the wine is made and restricts it from general production). Net result, over 120,000,000 bottles are sold in the UK today!
When it comes to specific wine styles, some of us will be old enough to remember having a “Hock” or a Liebfraumilch with our Sunday lunches back in the 70’s and 80’s. Hock was the brand we gave in the UK for German sweet tasking wines, typically from the Rhine region, which typically were Riesling. Back then, we described wines with their bottle or region….a Claret, Burgundy, Blue Nun etc….often these were generic blends but now we are much more specific, using wine varietals to define what we like….. a Viognier, Malbec, Pinot Noir etc! Blue Nun was marketed as something you can drink “right through the meal”, making it very versatile and available to us all! We have all become a bit more educated on the wine varieties over the years, even if we didn’t realise it! No more “Hock” but Riesling has gone on to become a very popular grape we often ask for in restaurants.
The fact we are producing as much wine as we do in Europe, is in no small part down to the vines in the New World region of North America! How? Well, it’s down to a small insect called Phylloxera. This small insect loves grape vines and whilst it was first identified in the US back in the early 19th century, it soon spread due to keen botanists in Victorian England bringing samples of plants back as they visited North America. The vines from these offshore regions became resistant to the bug but in Europe it wiped out the vast majority of vines in a very short period of time. The bug lives on and nearly all the wine you will get from Europe will have come from vines grafted on to North American root stock to prevent the bug from decimating the grapes and literally stopping production!
