“Waiter, a glass of your cheapest wine please!” So quipped a Canadian journalist friend of mine as we sat down to a tasting. It is not that he suffers from plebeian tastes or dislikes fine wine, it’s that the previous evening we agreed we both frequently preferred a producer’s cheaper wines.
All over the winemaking world there is a standard recipe for creating a fine wine. First you cut your yields in the vineyard to increase concentration of flavours. Then harvest very ripe grapes and macerate them for a lengthy period on their skins to extract more flavour and tannins. After that, you either ferment and/or age them in new oak barrels. The result should be a smooth wine, rich in flavour, relatively high in alcohol and with a pronounced flavour of oak.
You can see why producers make these wines. They tend to be an easy-sell and you can charge more for them. In fact you need to get more money, as production costs are higher. These wines often show well in blind tastings and some wine critics give them high scores and award them trophies.
The problem is that many of these wines are barely drinkable. There are those who like a full-flavoured wine, but I find that after a few sips, they tend to pall and you certainly don’t want a second glass. The best examples do have a superficial attraction, but frequently the wines are badly made. Then you are faced with a fairly brutal, clumsy over-oaked, over-extracted wine that tries to hide inferior fruit behind a sheen of cheap oak.
Increasingly, I find the entry-level wines from a number of regions preferable to the top end wines. This doesn’t always go down too well with suppliers, who have gone to a great deal of effort and expense to create a masterpiece. But if you are lucky, you will discover a wine with a purity of fruit, drinkability and a refreshing quality that makes you want to drink more. They also cost a lot less.
White wines tend to suffer less from being overworked. In recent years, many producers have pulled back on the amount of oak they use. In fact, it can be difficult to find a classic rich, oaky Chardonnay from Australia. I almost miss them at times.
For red wines, you can include much of the New World, Spain and most of the classic regions of France and Italy, such as Chianti Classico, Bordeaux and Burgundy. I find Spain the worst offender; the size of your criadera (or oak room) is seen as a testament to how serious you are. I have tasted so many Riojas ruined by excess oak and sometimes alcohol too.
Cheap Rioja Reserva tends to be the worst offender, a horrible combination of astringent wine and cheap oak. I prefer good Rioja Joven that has barely been near an oak barrel; it tends to be lighter in alcohol, around 12.5 per cent, and have lovely pure cherry fruits. The one disadvantage is that all of these wines tend to be made from the inferior fruit of a harvest. Occasionally you come across a wine where the best grapes have been used to make a less extracted style. It takes a bit of nerve on the part of the producer but the results can be sensational.
The four wines below have all been made in a less interventionist style. You may not consider them cheap, but they are certainly less expensive than some of their counterparts. The Chardonnay, from one of the best Beaujolais producers, is an exercise in restraint. It is unoaked and instead relies solely on the quality of the precise and utterly delicious pure fruit. I have been a fan of Château Bellevue La Foret in Fronton in southwest France for many years. It is now owned by Irishman Phillip Grant. All of the wines are good, including the ethereal summery rosé, but the basic red is a light, very French and very moreish, inexpensive wine. The La Stoppa is one of the best natural wines I have come across.
I love the clean freshness of the Barbera grape; too often producers slather it with new oak. This delicious blend of Barbera and Bonarda would make for great summer drinking. Producers in Ribera del Duero often have that Spanish love of oak and big wines. The Quinta Milú below is a welcome change; you hardly notice the oak (six months in French and Spanish barrels) among the lovely fresh dark fruits.
