Warming to the sweeter side of life

Climate change, dessert wines and what to eat with them

From The Weekender, 12 July 2008

‘Climate change’ sounds so much more anodyne than ‘global warming’. The former implies an entirely natural course of events while the latter is not merely a description, it’s more of a diagnosis.

Sometimes the ‘change’ part of ‘climate change’ is exactly that: it is a reflection of a different weather pattern, one in which conditions may not, on average, be much warmer, but the knock-on effect is little short of dramatic.

Mouton Rothschild put out a document after the cool and very wet 2007 vintage showing that the year was no colder and no wetter than the average for the period 1962 to 2007. It was a pretty neat example of the “lies, damned lies, and statistics” school of argument. It did have the grace to show the monthly rainfall graphically that would leave no one in any doubt about the effect on the water table of the precipitations which occurred in the months leading up to the vintage.

What it didn’t make clear is that the cutoff date of 1962 allowed them to include, for averaging purposes, the desperate trio of 1963, 1965 and 1968 (among the worst harvests on record) and to leave out the legendary 1961 (a drought year which would probably have tipped the scales). They selected a period which showed cooler than average temperatures and wetter than average annual rainfall information. From this it is easy to conclude that 2007 in Bordeaux will need some healthy massaging of the facts if its appeal is to begin to correlate to its futures pricing.

However, the weather pattern — ever inconsistent in who it rewards and who it penalises — provided the sweet-wine producers with most of its beneficence. The 2007 Sauternes (the region’s most famous dessert wine appellation) are palpably better than the reds, even though they are harvested later and so at greater risk of late summer rain. This is mainly because what saved the red wine crop — a dry, warm period at the very end of the ripening season — lasted longer than merely the red fruit vintage and delivered some truly sumptuous white wines.

This is not the first time this has happened since the turn of the millennium; in fact, Bordeaux’s sweet-wine producers have pretty much enjoyed the great weather of the superb red-wine vintages and had the additional advantage of perfect conditions for their noble late harvest whites.

Climate change — rather than global warming — has delivered a series of Indian summers which have come to the rescue of the red-wine estates and graced the white-wine producers with a crop of wines unrivalled by anything in recent memory.

Bordeaux has not been the only beneficiary of Europe’s longer, drier autumns. Germany, whose dessert wines have long been rarities salvaged from the end of sometimes quite patchy summers, is also enjoying something of a sweet-wine bonanza. In fact, it may be that in the case of Germany, global warming has brought too much of a good thing. While German Riesling has moved on since the era when its arch-exponents thought the only way to make it saleable was to force it into a zero-sugar format, the market still expects the standard cuvées to be reasonably dry — these days something of a challenge.

The question that arises is whether this should be all that important. At one level we know better how to marry dry wine with food (and how to drink more of it as a result). However, if a wine is in balance, so the sugar is not cloying, it doesn’t really taste sweet and it is almost certainly more versatile when it comes to food-and-flavour marriages.

Perhaps, given that climate change or global warming (whatever you wish to call the phenomenon) appears to be giving us more of the great, sweet wines which were once among the rarest of vinous treasures, we ought to make more of an effort to drink them.

Happily, sweeter wines in SA have been less than saleable as the sophisticated wine market has decided that drier is better; accordingly they offer great value. The standard Nederburg Special Late Harvest, for example, sells for around R40 a bottle and it is spectacularly good at the price. There is also the Thelema Rhine Riesling Late Harvest, and Special Late Harvests from Fairview, Bon Courage and Bergsig. What to serve them with is more of a challenge.

I am involved in arranging a function in Hong Kong later this year where one of the meals will be served only with the wines of Yquem, of which there is a drier version (the Ygrec), as well as a dessert wine.  The chefs from Nobu restaurant at the InterContinental Hong Kong are trying to design something using new Japanese cuisine as their inspiration. Even the more conventional dishes suggest some useful combinations: the savoury notes of seaweed and soya, finely sliced fish, noodle, tempura, even shabu-shabu and sukiyaki. Since we’re no longer a beef-and-two-veg-with-potatoes nation, we should give our sweeter wines another chance