As you can sniff from the photograph below (which shows the Greenwich riverfront near the Royal Naval College), the week of the Decanter World Wine Awards (April 20th to 24th 2009) was an unusually beautiful, almost summery one in the UK.

Greenwich in April

This is my favourite institutional week of the year: a chance to get together with friends from all around the world, and the not-inconsiderable pleasure of four-and-a-half days of tasting in clement circumstances.

Matthew Stubbs MW and Liz Berry MWThe other pictures show my panel stalwarts Matthew Stubbs MW and Liz Berry MW in action, as well as the mischievous Poh T’iong from Singapore, the professorial Michel Bettane from France, Gérard Basset (the British wine trade’s answer to Hercule Poirot) and wise Stephen Brook. Good, too, to see Huon Hooke travelling north with me this year to co-chair the massive Australian panels. Huon had just visited the Jura. How about that for timing? Just as news broke that Australia’s Albariño was in fact
Savagnin ...

Can’t tell you anything about the wines, of course – all that is embargoed until the Awards edition in October. Indeed I don’t know what it was I tasted at this stage; only that we had a record entry this year on my panels (Languedoc-Roussillon and Regional France), as indeed had the competition overall. It is now bigger than the International Wine Challenge in terms of number of wines submitted.

What I can tell you is what the week made me think about overall, which is the ideal circumstances for wine tasting.

Poh T'iong Calm, first of all. Quiet. You are going to listen to what an inanimate liquid has to say to you. Few of them shout, and even their shouts are (like Munch’s ‘Scream’ of nature) silent. Many need teasing out. The best are always subtle, woven, intricate. They are going to unfold and express themselves intimately, inside you. You have to connect sensory apparatus with cerebral pathways, the memory bank and the written lexicon: a complicated action. The atmosphere for a perfect analytical wine tasting is very close to that of the perfect library: airy, spacious ... but above all quiet.

Social wine tasting is different. You can learn a lot from others, and conversational warmth is as restorative and nourishing as good food. The problem is that many tastings which should be analytical veer quickly off into social, with that pressing, full-bladder need to natter. (Even social wine tastings work best with an analytical phase: wine dissection surely takes place in a different part of the brain to verbal assembly.)

Why are these ideal conditions so hard to recreate? We are fundamentally ill at ease with silence. Aural wallpaper creeps across the sound surfaces which surround us. Even by choice: you see runners in the forest – in the forest! -- submitting to the tyranny of the little white earphones, blinkered from soundscapes every bit as beautiful as the sight of the ancestral trees themselves.

Yet silence, in a noisy world, should be balm. And can be companionable: it’s fun to set off with a bunch of mates, sleeves rolled, down into the mine where the glittering veins of aroma and flavour are hidden. The first to speak breaks the spell.

Michel BettaneThis tasting, anyway, is fundamentally quiet. There are panel discussions at the end of each flight, but the rooms are large enough, the tables widely spaced enough and the tasters discreet enough to avoid any unwelcome sound-shadows.

Ideal glasses, too: Riedel. We don’t do the washing-up.

Immaculate stewarding from redshirts, many of whom are vastly overqualified (research geneticists, nuclear physicists, that kind of thing – where does Decanter get them from?).

I can still remember the beauty and satisfaction of solving a mathematical problem correctly, even though it’s a long time since I’ve done it and my answers were rarely correct. Wine tasting is never exactly akin to that … yet in a tasting like this, where the main task is to find excellence within a speckled and heterogeneous mass, the analogy isn’t too far out. If we do get it right, it is thanks in large part to those clement circumstances.

Gérard Basset
Then it was back to an often rainy week in Adelaide and piles of assorted work. This included a seminar on Marketing Regionality for wine-business students at Adelaide University’s Waite campus, where my message was that the pursuit of the regional matters more than one might think and more than research might suggest. More of this message later.

The week ended with pale golden wine tasted on a cold, damp night up on the Hills. James Tilbrook organised a blind tasting on Friday night at his Lobethal winery of 20 of Australia’s top Chardonnays, mostly attended by local winemakers. My top-scoring wines (17 out of 20 or above) were Penfold’s 2005 Bin A (Adelaide Hills), Savaterre 2005 (Beechworth), Toolangi Reserve 2006 (Yarra) and Kooyong 2006 Faultline (Mornington Peninsula), just ahead of 2005 Yattarna (Adelaide Hills) and 2005 Giaconda (Beechworth).

Stephen BrookDivided regional spoils, then, though WA didn’t quite make it into the highest echelons and I found the austere wines from seriously cool climates a puzzle. Overall, though, it was a hugely enjoyable way to pass a dismal late-autumn evening – with a good crack at both analytical tasting work and shared social insights. Australian Chardonnay at the highest levels is now subtle and multi-faceted. Can we expect a trickledown?

Early tomorrow morning I’m off to the Barossa for a week. Highlights will follow.