8 Wine Myths Debunked with Jancis Robinson

he always pour so much hello i'm Jancis Robinson and I've been writing about wine for 54 years writing things like my latest book world atlas of wine a tradition I'm Richard Brendon and I'm a product designer so we're here at food fifty-two today and we are now going to talk about some common wine myths I had been designing cut crystal bar wear for a quite a few years and people were asking me to design a wine glass and really I realized I couldn't do that on my own I had to work with an expert because it wasn't a purely aesthetic exercise it had to be functionally perfect and when I asked everyone I knew in London who knew anything about wine everyone said that Jancis would be the best person to work with so I got in touch and we we had a coffee and I think within an hour maybe an hour and a half chance that had really explained to me actually we were only going to design one wine glass for every single type of wine she explained if we designed the perfect glass it would work for champagne port sherry red white you name it so here we have proof of the versatility of our beautiful glass all sorts of different wines and I'm sure if we were to taste these wines we would see that it was bringing out the best in each one because I've just never seen the point of having a different shape or size of glass for a white wine that white wine is every bit as interesting complex deserves the space as as a red wine and here we're just making life simple for everybody I think what's really struck a lot of my friends who have started using the glasses and they're not necessarily wine people but they said wow you know we've been putting champagne or sparkling wine in the glass and they can't believe the different it makes and some I mean those narrow glasses it's quite difficult to get the nose of the wine absolutely they said you know they've never actually you know enjoyed the aromas of a sparkling wine before because in you know flutes you just don't get any of that and you know likewise with port and sherry you usually their person these time little glasses and there's no room for the wine to to move one for the aromas to get out and you of course the whole point of this shape is you swirl the wine round to release the aroma so you've really got a sort of ideal shape for maximum pleasure which is what it's all about and and you know going back to the very first stages when we were talking about the design I remember you saying the opening needed to be as small as possible but still big enough that even a big nose big nose can fit inside so you know that's exactly what we did so everyone says you've got to drink white wine with fish red wine with meat but that's a lazy kind of generalization if you feel like drinking a red wine with with fish like this I'll be metal here you know there are all sorts of red wines that are just as good with fish as white wines like this this is a flurry which means it's a good quality Beaujolais and Beaujolais is is an awful lot like white wine in many ways and I think yeah that's just as crisp and refreshing as as a typical white wine and would go really well with with fish that you like have a little bit of acid with like such as there's a little bit of lemon yeah and then with your great big pork chop no problem at all to have a white wine I bet you you could have a mouthful of that a mouthful of the pork chop and so by you know I think people make far far too much fuss about food and wine pairings I mean suppose you do get a wine that doesn't go brilliantly with your food what's the worst that can happen you know yeah you just have a mouthful of water in between or maybe a mouthful of neutral bread or something like that and then carry on enjoying your your wine in your food separately absolutely yes [Music] now I would say the two most important factors in enjoying wine apart from having a decent liquid obviously like us I think we're agreed yeah but the other factor is temperature and you can really enhance the whole experience by serving your wine at a sort of temperature that's going to make it yours delicious make it tastes as delicious as possible and again that the common perception is chill white wines serve Reds at room temperature whatever that is but it's it's actually much more finely balanced than that and in essence the warmer something is the more you can taste so you don't want to chill whites too too much and with red wines there's nothing worse than it being too hot and our rooms nowadays are much much hotter than when that room temperature rule came up which was in the pen of Victorian days or something like that so you don't want Reds to be room temperature if they get too warm then the flavor just evaporates and it's the whole thing is kind of sludgy and soothly in fact the ideal serving temperatures of red and white are much closer together than you would think and an awful lot of Reds benefit from being lightly chilled because you can always easily make a wine a little bit warmer when you serve it just by popping it in your hand your hand will transfer transmits and to move but very difficult to get it down and you can even put your red wine into the stemless glass and a light bodied red wine like a Beaujolais like this flurry is an ideal candidate for Chile the more likely that your red wine is to go with fish the the more it will respond to being chilled but you wouldn't believe the number of times in a restaurant I have asked for an ice bucket for the red because they serve the Reds too and what temperatures are cellar about 55 okay yeah yeah and actually if you pull bottles straight out of the cellar a full-bodied white wine a white burgundy would be more or less at the right temperature and the red habit in your kitchen or whatever for half an hour would be perfect [Music] so there are two reasons to decant wine and one of them perhaps they look the more common is to aerate it to expose it to oxygen and kind of almost artificially aged it and that's something that a young wine really benefits from particularly a wine that you're gonna open maybe a year or two before it fully matures a lot of people think that you only need decant red wine but that is not the case in fact a young like burgundy really benefits from being exposed to lots of air and you see I'm kind of pouring it over the inside so that it's maximally exposed to oxygen and this is the bit that I absolutely love at home I'm always swishing this is a beautifully designed decanter for sociability you really whiz it around open it up to oxygen make it taste as though it's a year or two older than it actually is honestly red or white you will see some transformation and you can you can actually almost save money because you're you're serving a young wine that you've given extra age to but the other reason for decanting the wine is if it's really quite old and has developed sediment in the bottom of the bottle which is a very good sign of quality because it means it wasn't over filtered so on when it was made and this is the old wine decanter for pouring off the wine off the sediment and then protecting it from the ravages of oxygen with your beautifully designed stopper and is there a rule of thumb for how old red wine would be before you get a settlement does depend where it comes from but but probably maybe more than ten years you might want to decant certainly at 20 years we probably wanted and something I've noticed since launching the collection talking to people about accounting a lot of people seem very nervous about accounting and they think it's this mystery do you have any advice to those people well if you're pouring wine off sediment it's pretty important that you can see the sediment so it does help if you've got a strong light source behind the decanter when you're pouring the bottle into its and that can either be a torch or a candle or a flashlight you know yeah so is it true Jancis that all wine improves with age absolutely not that's one of those favorite myths in fact probably by volume well over 90% of all wine produced probably more at 9 to 5 actively goes downhill after a few months in bottle and it you know the cheap and cheerful wine is made to be drunk as soon as it's gets on a shelf and it's really only wine that you'd pay say over 30 40 dollars a bottle but actually improves in the bottle and what is it that gives a wine the potential to age and improve obviously the quality of the grapes in the first place and that it hasn't been stripped of everything before it was put in the bottle you know a lot of heavy filtration there's nothing left in there to do to actually develop wares and a good quality wine you've got lots and lots of tiny little compounds that are kind of all knitting together and some of them are precipitated which is what the sediment is okay in the bottom of [Music] so a lot of people get rather terrified by what I call the great tasting ritual in a restaurant so I'm gonna explain how it works so the waiter will bring over the bottle that you ordered and your job is just to check that it's exactly what you ordered I've noticed particularly vintages changed so you're gonna pour the weight is going to pour a little tasting sample great which is lovely and what I'm doing here is I'm checking for two things one that it smells clean you know it's not got some horrible moldy thing that's the result of a bad quality cool you could actually do that just by smelling it if you want to impress the song you're an insider Pro you might just smell it rather than taste it that's clear thank you and you're not checking to see whether you like it because the cork has been pulled and it's your decision to have chosen that particular one and what does corked wine smell like moldy cardboard okay the other thing though if you're going to taste it or you could feel it the other thing you're checking is the temperature and that's what I can do because if you decide it's too warm whether it's red or white you can ask quite legitimately for an ice bucket or some way of chilling the bottle and if you think it's it's too too cold you say please don't put this in an ice bucket just leave it on the table circle [Music] now one very popular newish category of wine is natural wine and the idea behind natural wine it which is not an official definition but the philosophy is that the wine producer adds as few additives in the cellar as possible and ideally makes the wine from vineyards that have been treated minimally with any pesticides herbicides all that kind of thing but of course the thing about natural ones because it's not defined anyone can say that they're making a natural way but a good clue is if as this wine on the back label it says a very low sulfur dioxide content in this case it's 20 milligrams per liter which is pretty low sulfur is a very natural preservative the Romans used it pretty much every fruit juice every dried fruit you've ever had has had some sulfites added to it to keep it fresh actually sulfur is a natural byproduct of fermentation so it's pretty much impossible to have zero sulfites but this 20 is low so there's natural wine and then there is organic which means that the farmer had given up on the agro chemicals which was so popular in the second half of the last century and they are using much more wholemeal methods more like their grandparents did I'll just pour this and see what it's like and then there's a nut now that looks as though it's it's a white wine that's been kept in contact with the skin so it's actually they call it an orange wine because for rather obvious reasons and I think you have there a biodynamic which is like a kind of advanced sort of [Laughter] biodynamic is a lot more demanding than organic vine growing you do things in sync with the cosmic calendar you do sort of things like add nettle tinctures buried in cow horns at each corner of the vineyard it sounds completely crazy but it does seem to result in some pretty good wines and biodynamically grown vines look different they look healthier and the soils are definitely healthier or should we see what women obviously the glass is perfect for both [Music] tangy very tangy and not because it's 10 years old it's actually not as chewy as some young orange lines that's not clear is it it's not clear not much filtration going on no what's it taste like doesn't taste as bad as it smells I should know that's a very natural soldier smell mm-hmm which some people absolutely love yeah and I I think it's good but that there are so many different ideas of wine ecology mm-hmm [Music] so you remember though that I was adamant that our glasses had to be dishwasher friendly because so many glasses get get broken when people are polishing them washing them by hand and because I'm lazy one of the biggest challenges actually is you know when I'm talking to you know people who pick up the glass they still think they ought to hand wash them they think it's such a beautiful light glass their default is it should be hand wash that safer but actually it's the exact opposite if you put these in the dishwasher they just don't get broken it's when people start and washing usually after a dinner party where they've maybe had a couple of glasses of wine and that the tap comes in contact with the glass and it is magically I love the look of them I love using them I love what they do - and for wine and I think we should be very proud of what we've done [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 111,372

Rating: 4.7048664 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, wine, wine tasting, wine tasting 101, wine myths, wine glass, wine temperature, wine temperature storage, wine types, how to serve wine, how to store wine, how to age wine, natural wine, organic wine, biodynamic wine, jancis robinson, jancis robinson wine course

Id: 9rBI40jIlnQ

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019