Plumpton College wine production course

I spent a very enjoyable and worthwhile day at Plumpton College on a 1 day wine production course on Monday. There were 15 Diploma students in total and I was surprised that only 4 were already in the wine trade with the balance doing it for fun, although one participant was hoping to get into the trade having gained the Diploma.

We spent the morning with the vineyard manager and the afternoon with the winemaker. I enjoyed the practical session in one of the Plumpton vineyards - they have 2 in locations close by the college - pruning vines. All the stuff I had read as part of Unit 2 about cane replacement or spur pruning and Guyot, Scott Henry and Geneva Double Curtain training methods came to life as the vineyard has a very wide range of training styles as an education source for the students. It helped that it was a bright and beautiful morning on the South Downs although we were reminded we would be out doing the pruning even if it was raining. If the work needs doing it has to get done whatever the weather does.

The session in the winery was fascinating. Instead of following the winemaking process in the classroom we were shown all the kit actually used - destemmer/crusher, press, fermentation tanks and so on. We also did some stability trials on the rose wine that is still in tank. Overnight trials had shown the wine had tartrates so we mixed in some bentonite to clarify it and talked about the other stability trials carried out in the laboratory.

We also tasted two of the Plumpton wines, The Dean Blush, a sparkling rose and The Apprentice made from dornfelder. This was merlot like in its softness with red fruits.

Despite having passed Unit 2 (with merit) I'm glad I spent the £120 cost of the workshop.

Vino Italiano - regional wines of Italy

I bought this book so I could take part in the first online Wine Book Club that's just been started but I'll be honest - my first impressions of this book weren't positive. However it's grown on me.

I read the bios of the authors but that didn't really help me much. I then looked up the index for a producer I had blogged about recently and couldn't find them. They are Le Vigne da Zamo. I eventually located them under "Le" which is like indexing an entry under "the". Not very helpful. But I thought maybe I was being a little picky and suffering from the fact this is a US authored book and I'm in the UK so have no prior knowledge of who these people are and their detailed understanding of one of the most complex wine countries in the world.

However as I said I've grown to like the book. I'm off to help at an event to do with Trentino wines next week so I settled down to read all about wines from this region in Northern Italy. I found the section concise and I like the fact that if all I want to read about are the sparklers there's a section on just that. If I want facts on grape varieties I can find them. Less helpful I think will be the specific wines given the fact I'm in the UK, but the general descriptions of the regional styles alongside are enormously helpful.

So I'll take back my negative first impressions and put this book on my bookshelf and, as I want to read up on a particular area, I'll get this off the bookshelf. And it's great value at £7.79.

Lunch and dinner

I've had two very pleasant meals recently.

We met up with a couple of good friends for Sunday lunch deep in the heart of the Sussex countryside at Gravetye Manor. This is the typical luxury English country house hotel with a fabulous setting, great atmosphere and wonderful food as you would expect from a restaurant that has one Michelin star. Wines drunk were an Alsace pinot gris and, with dessert, a black muscat from Quady Winery called Elysium. Only one word to describe it -- awesome!

Dinner later in the week with my son was in Dehesa in Soho in London which describes itself as a "charcuterie and tapas bar". A mix of Spanish and Italian and it got a good write up in the latest edition of Waitrose Food Illustrated. I ordered the wine because of the label, not because I though it attractive but because I didn't understand it! Pittacum Bierzo Mencia 2004 it said. Now I correctly guessed that Pittacum is the name of the wine (that was the easy bit) but I learend that Bierxo is an up and coming region of Spain and Mencia is the grape veriety. That's one of the things I love about wine - I'm constantly learning. BTW it was a lovely match to the the tapas dishes we had.

Unit 1 - another essay passed

The envelope with the assessment of my latest Diploma Unit 1 essay from the WSET was waiting for me when I got home last night. I passed (with merit) the essay on The Co-operative Movement. That's 2 essays done and 2 more to go, the next one on the The Crisis in the French Wine Industry is due in early April.

I had started my work on this essay quite early as I realised how little I knew about wine co-operatives and therefore how much I was going to have to rely on others. I found the people at the German Wine Co-operative Association the Deutschen Winzergenossenschaften extremely helpful. I approached them after reading how much German wine is produced by co-ops (around 30%).

I made a contact when I was helping out at the London Wine Show last year. The UK sales manager for Val d'Orbieu was also extremely helpful so this was the co-operative I featured in my essay.

The whole exercise was very educational and I summarised my key findings on one of my regular posts over at Wine Sediments. The bulk of the work on the next one is going to have to wait until the March 12th unit 4 and 5 exams are over however.