Wine by Marc Millon

Author:Marc Millon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Historic wines such as tokaji, produced from grapes grown in eastern Hungary, once graced the tables of emperors and tsars. Today, after recovery from the decades under state control, this historic dessert wine is once again reaching former glories.

Today Greece may almost be considered an emerging modern wine country. Yet among the things that still link the present-day country with its ancient past is a national taste for wines flavoured with pine resin. In antiquity, resin was used to line porous amphorae both to make such vessels watertight and to act as a preservative for the wine. The use of such an additive influenced the flavour and character of the wine. Today, white and rosé wines continue to be flavoured just so. This addition of pine resin lends a distinctive, sappy taste to the resulting retsina wines, loved by both locals and by tourists who have come to associate such resinated wines with the taste of summer holidays in Greece.

The Romans, we have seen, took the vine with them to virtually every land they conquered and colonized. Vine yards were planted extensively in Roman Britain some 2,000 years ago. If wine production ceased after the Romans left, Britain nonetheless maintained a long and illustrious history as a wine-drinking nation. Chaucer’s pilgrims drank wine en route to Canterbury and Shakespeare’s characters extolled the virtues of wine on numerous occasions.

In the last decades, England and Wales have emerged as serious wine-producing countries capable of producing wines with a character that distinctly reflects a unique cool-climate terroir. New vineyards are being planted at an exciting rate and the range of English and Welsh wines that is available is now greater than ever. The quantity will never be sufficient to slake a vast national thirst, yet, nonetheless, these wines now demand to be taken seriously. Outstanding sparkling wines are made from both hybrid grapes such as seyval blanc and V. vinifera varieties such as pinot noir and chardonnay. Such wines are now winning awards against the best in the world, even champagne. English still white and rosé wines can be attractive, capable of displaying a keen, fruity acidity and relatively low alcohol levels, in tune with today’s tastes as consumers eschew heavier, more alcoholic examples from elsewhere in the world. Even red wines are being produced, notably from pinot noir, among other grape varieties.

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