To the London Wine Trade Fair for two days last week. Faced with the possibility of tasting almost anything and meeting almost anyone, what’s the strategy?

Aimless wandering is best avoided, since the Fair drifts by in a succession of 10-minute chats with old acquaintances: socially enjoyable, but professionally useless. A determined stride and temporary tunnel vision is the best way to move down the channels and gulleys which separate each island stand.

Spreading the word

In recent years, largely because ExCel (a vastly superior location to Olympia) offers an entire gallery of meeting rooms and lecture rooms, the ‘seminar option’ has blossomed: an excellent way to learn rather than just taste. There were at least half-a-dozen seminars I would like to have attended; one that I booked but couldn’t get into (the seminar “theatre” in the main hall was just too tempting a venue for the fatigued to flop down into); and one that I tutored – on the wines of South West France and its hidden treasure of grape varieties. I won’t resume this here (though the full text is available on request to anyone who wants – just ask).

Preparing the seminar gave me a chance to do some extensive tasting in one of my favourite regions: a real pleasure. Perhaps the wine which surprised me the most was the Fronton: 2006 Coste Rouge, from Château la Colombière (an estate I visited some years ago, but recently converted to biodynamics). This wine was pure Négrette … which I had always assumed gave a kind of South Western (i.e. polyphenolically rich) equivalent of Beaujolais, ideal for cool quaffing but bumping its head on the quality ceiling fairly swiftly. This was much more serious than that, with stunning aromas quite unlike anything else: cracked spice, incense, jasmine and almond. A wonderfully textured palate, too, with those same perfumes enrobing the delicious, damsony fruit, and all the energy and life that one seems to find in biodynamic wines.

Other great wines in the tasting included the wonderfully pure and vivacious 2005 Le Cèdre from Château de Cèdre in Cahors (Pascal Verhaeghe reckons 2005 is the best vintage there since 1990), the 2001 La Tyre from Alain Brumont in Madiran, the 2004 Réserve Eliézer from Château de Saurs in Gaillac (red Gaillacs are hugely improved over the last decade), a funky Marcillac from Jean-Luc Matha (the 2004 Cuvée Pèirafi – despite the funkiness, it had keen adherents when we took votes at the end) and the beautifully subtle white 2006 Le Faite from St Mont. No need to tell you the producer of that wine, of course: Producteurs Plaimont authors 98% of the appellation’s wines, making St Mont the equivalent, in a way, of Château Grillet or Coulée de Serrant. It does a great job, and is a model of how the co-operative movement can still play a valuable role and compete with the best individual producers even in the C21.

Rolland in Bulgaria

What else did I taste during those two days? I caught up with the 2007 debut release of Tapanappa’s Foggy Hill Pinot Noir, grown in a far corner of the Fleurieu Peninsula, just 8km from the roar of the Great Southern Ocean: typically Croser in its purity, length and restraint, with crunchily attractive cherry and redcurrant fruit and refreshing, drinkable balance. I look forward to the deepening of flavour which the years to come will bring.

What else? Oh yes: the 2006 Marama Sauvignon Blanc from Seresin in New Zealand’s Marlborough. At last: a wine from this grape and this region which sets off in an entirely new direction (biodynamic, wild yeast ferment, with barrel-fermentation + 15 months with 25% new wood): creamy, supple and composed on the nose, more pear than gooseberry, and an intriguing synthesis of pure, crystalline orchard fruits on the palate with more cream and wonderfully flavour-saturated acidity. Despite its 14.5% alcohol, there was no heat or burn; it was amply drinkable.

I caught up with Bulgarian friends at a ‘New Wines from Bulgaria’ tasting. Terra Tangra, Katarzyna and Enira are all steadily improving (the Enira ‘BV’ is probably the best yet, its 25% Petit Verdot content adding delicious pepper to the violets and chocolate from the Merlot, Cabernet and Syrah). New to me, though, were the wines Michel Rolland consults for at Castra Rubra (Telish). It seems to me that Rolland is doing a typically thoughtful and sensitive job: the 2007 Via Diagonolis, for example, had all the lazy Thracian warmth you could want – but its subtleties were appealing, too (brambles, earth and stone aromatically, with a little spice shading the gentle fruits on the palate). Beautifully judged, blended and composed (with 5% Mavrud and 5% Rubin to balance the 30% Cabernet Sauvignon and 60% Merlot). Rubin, by the way, is a Nebbiolo-Syrah cross achieved in Bulgaria in the 40s. Castra Rubra’s 2007 Pendar brought 45% Cabernet Sauvignon together with 55% Rubin: vinification was obviously carried out with a light touch, and the blend worked well: super-soft textures with light, lifted perfumes. These wines should be in the UK.

I tasted much on the Romania stand as preparation work for a trip I will make there in July: more on this blog in due course.

Not much time for spirits … but I did taste one great Armagnac: the 25-year-old from Delord. My own measure for great brandies works on a scale of perfume as much as flavour, and this was layered with perfumes from top to bottom. No fire, no bite, no violence: smoke-soft, and almost as invasive. The perfect way to end the Fair.

The glass villain

Most of Thursday was spent with the Waitrose wine-buying team as they gave their in-store wine advisors a seminar and tasting day with the focus on green initiatives and considerations in wine. I gave a scene-setting speech which will be (in edited form) the next entry on this blog, but there were other contributions, too – including from Bertie Eden of Château Maris (I liked Bertie’s definition of fertilizing as ‘giving back’) and a very interesting one from Jean-Pierre Grange of Boisset about wine packaging.

If you have a serious rather than a passing interest in green matters, here are a few striking facts and figures from Jean-Pierre’s presentation.

Glass emerged as the villain of the piece. It is, in fact, the most energy-inefficient packaging any of us can purchase, since 50% of the total package weight of a bottle of wine is waste, and glass requires a lot of energy to make it in the first place (450 litres of oil for one tonne of glass, making a mere 2,000 bottles). The UK off-trade alone sells 800 million glass bottles a year (or 471,000 tonnes of glass), and even with all the bottle banks lurking in supermarket car parks, we still only manage to recycle half of that total; the rest gets landfilled. Turning recycled glass back into usable new glass is another very energy intensive process.

Plastic PET bottles are, in fact, far more environmentally desirable: only 7% of the total weight of the purchased package is waste, and PET requires just 35 litres of oil to make one tonne, and that tonne makes no fewer than 35,000 recyclable bottles. The result is a much smaller carbon footprint.

Tetrapaks are also far more environmentally friendly than glass.

There are three problems with both. One is shelf-life: both have higher oxygen transmission rates than glass does. Tetrapaks struggle to better 12 months, and PET bottles with oxygen scavangers inside (since oxygen can be transmitted through PET) manage 15-18 months. Fine for most wines, of course, but not yet for any wine which might need to be stored.

The second is that both units look, to the shopper, much smaller than the equivalent glass bottle (a side effect of their raw-material efficiency).

And the third is that they look and feel ‘unworthy’ of wine. At present; I’m sure that will change in future.

It was also very interesting to hear Justin Howard-Sneyd MW, the wine department head and perhaps the most widely admired individual supermarket buyer in Britain, give his overview of current market conditions. Customers are complaining about wine costs soaring as they are about all price rises, of course, but it’s particularly difficult for Waitrose because it sells more French wine than other supermarkets (35% compared to 15% for competitors); indeed over 50% of the Waitrose range is bought in euros, so the currently lacerating exchange rate with the pound is hurting. Duty has risen unusually steeply recently (+14p in the last budget) – and glass costs are up by 15-20% in part because of steeply rising energy costs, but also because of “consolidation” in the industry – always a catastrophe for the consumer, whether that industry be wine-book publishing, brewing, pub ownership … Harvest problems and droughts mean that there is less wine slopping about looking for a throat: it’s a seller’s market. (This accounted for unusual cheerfulness among the Romanians I met. Finally we need them enough to overcome our prejudices!)

Justin also re-iterated the Waitrose policy of

• no half-price promotions
• no buy-one-get-one-free offers
• no below-cost selling

all of which have been amply indulged in by its competitors recently, hence the way in which anti-alcohol sentiment has moved swiftly up the social agenda in Britain over the last few years.

The first ever “half price wine” was put on sale in 2000, in part as a way of draining some of the millennium-frenzy overstocks. Now promotions dominate wine sales in British supermarkets to a wholly irrational extent. Even Waitrose has to run promotions — and they account for 30-40% of sales. Rumour has it that they account for 75-78% of sales in Tesco. It has also led to the manipulative creation of wines only ever destined to be “promoted” – like Hardy’s Crest, over 90% of which is sold “on promotion”. As I have written in Decanter columns and elsewhere (see the blog entry for February 10th 2008), the consumer is being (willingly) gulled, and wine suppliers exploited. Such a situation is only possible because 80% of wine retailing in Britain, like 80% of wine production in Australia, is now clutched by five or six gigantic hands. Consumers, throw off your chains: buy small-producer wines from specialist importers and merchants.

All the goss

Actually, I’m the wrong person for this, since rumours usually only reach me when they are tired and old and in need of a rest home.

I did bump into scam-buster Jim Budd, who confirmed what I had already suspected: that not all the advertisers in the recent ‘Wine Investment Supplement’ published by the Financial Times (to which I contributed a piece about Burgundy and Investment) were necessarily those whom the writers might wish to recommend to their readers. Caveat emptor, as always.

It was also good to chance across Dermot Sugrue, the former winemaker at Nyetimber, who updated me with what sounds like an exceptionally exciting sparkling-wine project he’s guiding on the South Downs for the Goring family, which owns the 6,500-acre Wiston Estate. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier have been planted, and a winery is being built. At last: a serious, well-funded effort to join the pioneering work of Breaky Bottom on South Downs chalk.

I had dinner at Le Café Anglais on Thursday night: Rowley Leigh’s venture close to Queensway and Bayswater tube stations. The large, upstairs room is prettiness personified yet, despite its size, noise levels are happily lower than at Kensington Place. The food was outstanding: solid, classic, generous, unfussy, gratifying. (I kept thinking of Bill Baker, and hearing him say: “Bloody good. Real food.” Bill would have loved it.) Courgette fritters, smoked eel, roast hake, dishes of slithery spinach, Queen of Puddings (which looks like a one-dish arms race). There was some serious roasting going on, too. I was there with the publishing team of Ryland, Peters & Small to meet the relevant section book buyers from Hatchards, Borders and Foyles and introduce them to the forthcoming Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course (more on this is due course) and we had lots of fun blind-tasting a few bottles from Rowley’s list. I wish I lived just down the Moscow Road and could pop in three times a week.