In Conversation with Jancis Robinson

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
[Music] hi i'm michael fagan excuse all the technical hiccups but it must be the weather in toronto wouldn't be the same without it welcome to our first virtual event in advance of the annual george brown college chca wine symposium which will be held live in late june 2022 george brown college is located on the traditional territories of the mississaugas of the credit first nations and other indigenous peoples who have lived here over time for today's events participants are encouraged to use the chat room forum to share your thoughts and bring forward questions james pollock is managing the chat room today and will be reaching out to james throughout the discussion to hear what you have to say as we look forward to 2022 the wine industry is facing a host of challenges the pandemic climate change trade restrictions and changing consumers needs have all had a profound impact as trade professionals we all need to respond and find innovative ways to move forward and thrive today we're in conversation with chances robinson who is uniquely qualified to lead our wide-ranging discussion janus robinson is britain's preeminent wine writer and journalist she is the founder editor of the oxford companion to wine she co-authored with hugh johnson the world atlas of wine and is co-author of wine grapes the masterwork on wine grape varieties chances qualified as the master of wine in 1984 and in her distinguished career has won more awards than i can list since 2005 she's helped choose wines for her majesty queen elizabeth who presented her with an obe in 2003. chances travels worldwide to conduct wine events often for the global initiative room to read which supports literacy and girls education please join me now as we virtually and warmly welcome genesis robinson to toronto and to the center for hospitality and culinary arts chances welcome thank you very much michael you didn't mention what i spend most of my day doing writing about what do you do most of the day i feed the monster which is genesis robinson.com where we are crazy enough to publish two new articles every day and then i also have to write a weekly column for the financial times which goes for it's a it's an international paper so i'm used to writing for an international readership which is is quite fun and i i love the style you take in your writing and i applaud all that you've been doing with chances robinson.com and we're going to be we're going to be talking more about that uh in a minute but we we know your fingers are nimble we know you're on the keyboard all the time but tell us briefly how did you get started i wasn't brought up with wine um in my generation that was uncommon um but i was introduced to wine at oxford and had the seminal glass or bottle shared a bottle of chambol emirates 1959 and just realized how much realized how much stuff was in that glass you know and it was so much better than student plonk and it made you think but you realize there was history and geography and psychology and economics and just a heck of a lot worth studying so what appealed to me about wine was this combination of massive sensual pleasure with obviously a lot of intellectual stimulation as well but i didn't leave oxford saying okay i'll be a wine writer because way back then the subject of wine and food in which i was equally interested had zero social status and my peers would have thought i was mad to waste an oxford education on something as frivolous as wine but it was about three or four years later having lived in france for a year being surrounded by people for whom eating and drinking was very important that i was determined to go back to london and find a job in either wine or food and i was very lucky because i was offered assistant editorship of a wine trade magazine which set me on my way and i've been writing about wine now for for nearly 46 years i think it's terrible that is amazing it's to me someday we'll have to do a google search and just see how many words that has been over that length of time now now if you had not found such a prestigious career in wine what else might have you considered as a career i started off in travel because i i do love travel although um you know we all have to literally clip our wings a bit now thinking about the ramifications for the planet um and i was always really interested in food amazingly at the time i applied for the wine job first wine job i was thinking of there was a phenomenon then when young girls would cook for directors inevitably mail in their boardrooms in sort of particularly financial institutions in london and i think i was even considering that thank heavens that fate did not before me and there was a teacher at school who said uh she was very surprised i got into oxford and she thought really i should be a window dresser at one of london's better stores and my first my first article actually it was not about wine or food it was about fashion when i was 15 in the local paper well a lot of people say wine is fashion so you followed that friend right along yeah yeah and i certainly am responsible for the um entry in the oxford companion to wine on on fashion which is always quite fun to write i bet now now in 2003 uh her majesty awarded you an obe the order of the british empire what does that honor mean to you um we all keep it a little bit quieter about the british empire nowadays than we used to um it means a complete mystery to me you know you have to be proposed to get one of these honours and i still don't know who proposed me um but it came out of the blue and of course it was a massive honor just to feel that my work was recognized on on some sort of national scale and of course um it made my parents hugely proud you know it's one of those things where the odd person toys with refusing it because you know you don't agree with the government or whatever whatever but most people are swayed by the the effect that such an honor will have on their family and the chance to go to buckingham palace yeah it's pretty cool it's quite an honor and well deserved well deserved wow um let's talk a little bit about some of your writing and your books and i i know when i started uh my career in wine and that's back to the mid 70s when i started working in a retail store hugh johnson's book and yearbooks were some of the my must-haves and and as i continued in my career i made them available to all of my staff as a good as an excellent reference now the world atlas of wine is now in its eighth edition what what makes the eighth edition special the expanding world of wine so and which has to be recorded um and um you know we just we we desperately try to keep up with with i mean what's extraordinary is that the whole shape of the world of wine is changing and vineyards moving ever closer to the poles they can't get much closer to the south south pole but there are people planting new land in the patagonia um the new zealanders and the australians can't go any further um but you know northern europe um england has become a serious wine producer i never thought i'd see that in my lifetime and all sorts of um countries in northern europe are starting to produce really quite quite drinkable wine um and the challenge is being thrown up in southern europe and particularly north africa of course um and ever and and then the huge expansion in asia you know we have to the pages on china have to be updated a lot each time um i wonder whether we'll devote a page to india in the ninth edition it's quite possible yeah i mean the eighth is still a lot of old world but the new world areas and evolving areas are really showing through um i was pleased to see some more expansion on canada canada for instance one thing i should say about the eighth edition is that i can have i completely rewrote the introductory pages which are quite extensive and um you know really to take into account not just climate change but all sorts of technical and scientific advances and the greater understanding we have now of how vines and soil interact or all that kind of thing uh so that i think is one huge difference between the seventh and between the eighth and previous editions um but i it it always annoys me because people will say oh yeah i've got the world outlets of wine i've got the third edition and i know that you know it takes two solid years work of a huge team of people to update each edition so each one really is worth getting folks you know i lost track was it the early 70s was when the first edition came out and the industry has been nothing but change so there is so much so much to cover i'm sure canada wasn't in the first edition and new zealand wasn't in the first edition you do you know that the very first professional wine tasting i went to was of ontario wines in 1976 and i met hugh johnson there in canada house in london wasn't the best wine tasting i ever went to ontario wines in 1976 but it taught me a great lesson because i was listening to all these much more established wine writers talking about the wines and describing them and realizing that how they described them was often completely different between the individual tasters and i think it gave me a confidence to just go my own way and follow what i really thought and that there was obviously no single right judgment on a wine and you know that's a very good observation because and the way you write you write with confidence and when we when i spend all of my career trying to encourage people to explore wine and the one thing that everybody needs is just that little bit of confidence to trust your own taste and i joke if i write that's what i love best about my job is i'm never wrong i'm just sharing my thought yes well that's true that's true um but um is i hope i'm not dogmatic i've always thought that um people should follow their own taste and if i can educate people sufficiently for them to make up their own minds that's i've done my job rather than inculcating them with my own prejudices or whatever let's go back just a sec you were talking about your first uh introduction to wines of canada back in the early 70s and certainly you've tried hundreds since then uh what are your thoughts of canadian wines today uh it's exciting the progress i've seen is certainly very exciting um and i it's maybe i don't know i haven't counted up whether we see more bc wines or more ontario wines but what a thrill to see wines coming from other provinces as well um and the the quality we certainly don't get any rubbish any bad canadian wine in the uk not worth shipping it um but i suppose you know it's been quite thrilling seeing some really nice chardonnays and pinots coming from ontario and and sparkling wines coming from sometimes even further east and i'm just about i picked up a friend of mine annika rowan um from okanagan she i actually saw her here last night and she handed over uh 13 i think bottles of bc wine hand-picked for me to to have a look at so it's too early for me to pronounce on them we'll check back in next week on that yeah no problem actually we're talking about wine canadian wines the 1970s one one of our uh participants today is tony asler and tony has a question i'll just throw it over to james and uh james you can bring that question forward uh thank you so much michael uh tony's question to jancis was uh in retrospect what is the book that you look back on with the most pleasure pleasure and this is supposed to be one of mine hmm i don't associate the big books that i'm i have written with pleasure um there they've been a hard slog um i suppose probably the the book that was the most fun to write was one um i associate with toronto actually it uh it was my professional memoir which is called confessions of a wine lover in the uk and tasting pleasure in the u.s i don't know which edition you have it came out in 1997 and it was a sort of autobiography of my life up to then but with an emphasis on on wine and it went into paperback and i remember doing a book signing in toronto it probably was a subsequent edition of the atlas or something and a young guy came up to me and waved a very very battered paperback copy of this book at me rather grudgingly and saying i've just backpacked round australia and this was the only book i had with me so i had to read it over and over again as though it was my fault but aren't you [Laughter] well that book launch was probably at the cookbook store in allison fryer who had the store is one of our participants uh one little store and i think it's much missed probably yeah yeah indeed now the eighth edition has um 230 unique detailed maps of the world's wine landscape tell us briefly how maps can help consumers learn more about wine in a particular wine region well wine is essentially geography in a bottle and i think it really does help your understanding if you can locate that particular point on the globe that the bottle in your hand is trying to express after all wine is one of very very few consumables that we can buy that you can look at you can know when it was produced you can know who produced it as a primary producer and you can know what's which spot on the globe was actually responsible for it uh so it's in a quite a privileged position and if you like maps as as i do um it really helps i think to see the topography to see how it relates to other producers or other vineyards um and we try to include as many geographical aspects as possible you know prevailing winds or what the climate's like and all that kind of thing which all have a as you know a huge bearing on how the wine is going to taste great and i i congratulate the people that have created the maps for it they've done a fantastic job they're a great great great reference point they are then i would love to say they're my creations but they're not um now now with the um with the new edition we're bringing talking about new areas and you know they're not everything makes it into the book how do you decide uh what gets into the next edition and is it at the expense of something that was in previous ones usually it's at the expense we have many preparatory meetings where we argue the toss about should this be added should that be left out the next edition and it's it's um some of it's buzz you know because it's an international book that goes into many different languages and editions um it has to be relevant throughout the world um so i suppose you know i'd have to say that um because canadian wine is not that much exported um canadian pages really have to fight for their um position and canadians have to buy lots of copies because that will that will justify a nice lot of space for for canadian wine um but for instance uh indian wine that i mentioned just now doesn't yet have its own coverage its own map because it's really exported even less than canadian wine so ideally the wines have to have some sort of international presence one of the things with the world of wine is continuing to expand new areas are coming up they've been there forever but they're gaining more attention in your opinion what are some up-and-coming regions that we should look for and if not look for think about visiting right well if we're allowed to visit um uh i don't know how well entrenched these the wines of these particular two countries are in canada perhaps quite well and i'm i'm out of date to even mention them but the two countries that we often mention to people who don't know all that much about wine are portugal and greece for the same reasons that they have this array of indigenous grape varieties with wonderful characters of their own um and i've did not succumb to the great uh cabernet and chardonnay chardonnayization of vineyards around the world um and and the quality and the price is really really interesting so those would be two and and very high standards of wine making south africa as well i think is wildly under appreciated in north america generally certainly in the us uh there's there's a sort of new wave of hugely ambitious wine producers there who are concentrating on old vines particularly chenin blanc which is the most planted grape variety in south africa uh and the the partly thanks to the dismal performance of the rand the prices are very good as well so those those spring to mind but you know thing is the most extraordinary thing is that quality improves pretty much every year except when nature gets in the way um everywhere i mean it's you know this there's a lot of talk about a golden age of wine and it it really is i mean people won't believe that when i started drinking wine as a student in the late 60s early 70s only one bottle in every three was even really drinkable they were so chock full of chemicals and um and nowadays you can and then there would be so many faults throughout the 70s and so many under ripe wines and that were really quite painful to drink um and but nowadays you can you know the only fault that i encounter in wine is um uh thanks to a poor cork and i haven't found that rate going down all that fast i have to say i mean just in the last week i've encountered two or three badly tca affected bottles so i don't think the problem solved by any means we're talking about new and emerging areas you were mentioning greece and and one of the challenges where what do you what do you see as the main challenges for some wine regions uh to you know to to reach globally to to to gain customers attention yeah greek greek is probably a good example because for me uh we were going over there in 2000 to do a documentary and i was so nervous my biggest challenge was the words being able to pronounce the great varieties they're great yeah and then there was a for a long time then the greeks didn't you used their own alphabet rather than our alphabet on the labels which was another um hindrance but they've got wise now and most of the labels uh we can understand our international markets can understand uh but you see but portugal and greece are interesting examples because they have something special to offer um it is very difficult for countries or regions that are just producing the range of the same grape varieties and the same styles to make their mark particularly since as more and more um people are making wine around the world that the market is just so competitive it's really really difficult to stand out so i suppose if you don't have an array of interesting indigenous grape varieties to sell um you have to do it through stories and through people and and engage people with the background to the wines i don't think it's enough just to say we've got a great cabernet or a great chardonnay i'm afraid not anymore it does it does need that story you're absolutely right and it needs the producers to travel i know i've been saying but or or to zoom or whatever but um you can't as a wine producer you can't just stay on your land and hope that the world's wine buyers are going to come to you you you've really got to work it's selling really hard leaking yeah and they really one of the other benefits for traveling is they get to see the sophistication of the market and that they're trying to penetrate and see firsthand the competition they're dealing with because the selection of wine is just it's it can be crazy confusing for consumers it can be overwhelming so you've got to understand that and also i think um it's very valuable for wine producers to meet up with other wine producers in other regions and maybe maybe absorb a few techniques or maybe see what they're doing wrong or or you know i know now that the burgundians almost invariably young ones go and do a an internship often in say new zealand or oregon somewhere else with a kind of reputation for pinot noir um they have fred that that forms friendships and sometimes they can have natural hazards um you know like sunburn or something which they can take advice from their newfound friends in in another region so it's it's all to the good if um to establish these communications things one of the things i've found over the years is all winemakers they're it's a family they all want everybody to succeed they're happy to share experiences and of course share each other's wine so that's so true but it wasn't always like that you know famous stories about the burgundian villages where a wine producer wouldn't even would wouldn't even acknowledge a neighbor and wouldn't send a visitor you know it would say no no i don't know where they are yeah so it's great it's much much better now better now across the globe many established areas are further dividing themselves into sub-regions and micro regions and does this help consumers or does it further complicate things it's an interesting question i think the timing of it is quite um crucial and areas regions which subdivide themselves too early um i think risk just complicating life i'm thinking of perhaps lodi in northern california subdivided itself really before putting the lodi name on on the international stage and even in ontario i think um maybe you did that did things just very slightly too early um ditto oregon um or willamette valley rather um you know just a few years not not not a lifetime too early when it's too early it begs the question is it marketing or is it for reality yeah you nee and to do it you need tasters to have a good chance of identifying blind which of those sub-regions they're tasting you know you don't just get it for geographical reasons yeah no there's got to be a differentiating factor in the glass as well i'm just going to we're going to take a second i'm going to uh reach back out to james who's got some more questions from the audience at this point james if if um if i could sneak in two uh two questions from uh uh uh uh participants in in uh in the uh the talk today um uh karen um has asking chances if she could describe a notable or singular experience and wine that changed her outlook towards wine i can't i can immediately think of of such an instance that my very first job was as a chambermaid in italy's most expensive hotel and i'd come from an england where wine was thought of as being something hugely exotic and and valuable and special and to be sort of venerated and but staff meals at this um i was paid incidentally four pounds an hour um at staff meals we were served the local wine as much as we liked and if we wanted water that was guaranteed suitable to drink we had to pay for it and that showed me that in certain societies wine was not this special um sort of snobby kind of um liquid it was as common as as a potato you know so that was that was one my other question or is from uh emily who's asking about specifically ontario wines commonly found in the uk market um which which wines are commonly found and in which stores that is a very difficult question i'm honestly scrolling trying to think tell you what now i'm i'm loath i don't want to lose you so what i would normally do is go to the tasting notes database of chances robinson.com and look to see which ontario wines we've tasted most recently um honestly i think you'd be you'd be very disappointed looking to see to try and find ontario wines in the uk they're very few and far between and please if there's somebody um who can't demanding that opinion please come on to the q a and and tell me what i've overlooked but um we get uh we have usually an annual winds of canada tasting in canada house where we all have a chance to enthuse over the best wines on show but as for the um the orders that result they are pretty thin and um far between few and far between um the lovely uh terry from selfridges you uh used to make sure that there was a good array of wines from his native british columbia um but he's unfortunately no longer with us and i don't know what's happened to the bc selection at selfridges so there'll probably be a handful in in stores like harrah's would probably have one or two because they have such an international um array of customers but just in a regular bottle shop i can't can't think of any names that you would be sure of finding i'm afraid i'm sorry but it's probably because of the prices and that's fair it's it's a challenge for everything even if you come and look at the wine stores here in the lcbo there's a lot of stuff that isn't here there's a lot of things that are but many areas are often unfortunately underrepresented yeah and as proud canadians you know we have i guess what we have to do is go on travel and visit those stores and buy it so that they can replenish the shelf so it makes good business sense let's talk about climate change for a minute um it's real and with any change there's good and bad uh more often we hear about the negative impacts of climate change rather than anything positive coming out of it why do you think that is because we're heading for disaster because the um you know the bad things are so bad um yeah i can put i often do put in an article it's great that um german wine german grapes all get ripe nowadays um and that you know england has a and canada are major beneficiaries of climate change but set that against the greater picture um that's pretty those are pretty minor benefits compared to what's coming coming at us at huge speed and of course i speak very aware of the cop 26 climate change conference in glasgow that starts on sunday i think we must all be very very aware of those of us who care about wine of our major contribution to carbon emissions which is the glass bottle and i believe i'm told that canada is one of the best or certainly ontario has one of the best recycling rates in the world um but we just we have to keep that up and um also fight against these ridiculous heavy bottles which at pure marketing they don't do anything for the wine uh and they're making a yet more contribute because it's not just the production of bottles that is adding to our carbon emissions it's the transport of them so any heavy bottles are going to emit even more carbon so if consumers can lobby producers and say we don't need a heavy bottle to make us buy your product please please save the planet and use lighter bottles on genesis romson.com we now if if we're able to we now weigh all bottles and precede our tasting notes with the weight of a full bottle so that we can call out the people who are using really heavy bottles and praise the people who are managing to get by with much lighter ones uh and yeah so one of the things with lighter bottles in ontario the lcbo they introduce new standards for models under certain price points they must be a lightweight glass and that's been adopted so that's another way of that's very good retailers stepping in that's a that's a very good move and and i think the lcbo played a big part in the recycling business haven't they um but i also but there's also the slight you know to say oh if it's a cheap wine it's got to be a light bottle that slightly reinforces the thought that good wine deserves a heavy bottle so um you know i think we just need to be very aware see james reaching out he's got some more questions there so i'll bring james back in for a minute thank you thank you so much let me um start here um sharon ranson asking how did you choose the ones for your daughter's recent wedding for both the lunch and the reception that's a very specific question um for the lunch it was um what we had in quantity in the cellar um because we there were about 40 people at the lunch and i didn't want anyone to go thirsty in fact i had to be stopped from adding six more bottles of champagne um and in the evening when our daughter was threatening to have you know more than 150 people there i knew that the cellar didn't contain enough wine suitable wine for them so i chose some favorites from the retailer here that guarantees a sale or return and i'm sad to say a heck of a lot of it went back because they're all you know average age about 30 and there were cocktails and beer also on offer and um they were very keen on the cocktails and the beer sadly and this is something which we need to address because for the first time in my long professional life in markets like canada us and uk total wine sales are actually decreasing for the first time in my professional life which is a danger which is something you know big i think it's because there's so much competition there are also a lot of people who are not wanting to drink at all um and you know we can't be complacent i i most of the people that i know in the wine world grew up with with um sales just guaranteed to increase every year and that's not happening anymore there's so many options for people today some are going back to beer it's spirits it's not alcoholic spirits cannabis there's there's so many of these alternatives yes hard sell sir yeah so we have to it we really have to be on guard and make wine attractive to them [Music] and and do you have any suggestions or tips to uh on bringing well i certainly think uh um there's no doubt that in general the um the market for natural wine and probably orange wine too is younger on average than the market for conventional wine and i think it's a great mistake if people in the conventional wine world just turn their back on natural and orange as being freakish um my personal hope i think it's great that everyone pretty much uh producing wine is using fewer and fewer inputs and that's particularly true but not exclusively of what's happening in the vineyard um so that conventional producers are getting more and more natural if you like and meanwhile natural wine i think they have the num the proportion of so-called natural wines that are good has been increasing rapidly so um people who just dismissed the whole category because the first three natural wines they tasted tasted like cider or hamster cages then you know that's that they're shutting off their nose to spite their face so i hope that in the end we won't actually use the term natural wine that all wine is becoming more and more natural um and um and the two kind of poles will get closer together and and i think being open to all sorts of these new beverages is is a good thing i mean um i i'm aware that now there are people making drinks from not just from grapes but may say grapes with apples or whatever um and i think you know we've got to embrace that it's it's no good just sort of standing on a sinking ship and it's not sinking drastically but but we have got to be aware that wine the sort of wine that maybe someone like me grew up with i think the day of of new consumers wanting to buy high scoring you know case getting an allocation of cases of a high scoring wine that's all way past you know and and not before time so we've got to make it exciting and interesting and we have to embrace the variety far too often we even uh wine enthusiasts they pick one style or one thing and that's all they drink and they're you know they're they're missing out on lots of opportunity these other beverages just have to find a place into our diet and uh the wine industry itself has to evolve and keep attracting do you do you think um speaking of that with and sort of linked to climate change with north america it has a newfound love for low alcohol wines and is that at odd with climate change with increasing uh warmer wine regions it is really isn't it and it's um i think i mean wine producers are very aware of it most of them and um i think this move towards organic as i understand it means that it's much easier for what vine growers to pick grapes a bit riper sorry a bit earlier but still have lots of flavor in there um and that's that's a help but they're they're really having to pull out all the stops to to produce lower alcohol wines that do actually have flavor when we talk about regions standing out on their own too there's more and more and partly with climate change as a response is looking at indigenous varieties might they be better at adapting to the change and to the local but uh can can you speak uh briefly about indigenous varieties uh the trend and uh how more popular they're becoming to allow regions to stand on their own yeah certainly well in the 90s it was really weird pretty much every wine producer in the world wanted to make just two sorts of wine one was a copy of red bordeaux and the other was a copy of white burgundy and you know all these indigenous varieties were pulled out and cabernet and merlot and chardonnay planted but we've seen a sea change and how this century and i think it goes hand in hand with heritage varieties of fruit and so forth and and lock of all you know only buying what's produced locally uh so in [Music] 2010 um together with my great colleague julia harding and jose vuimos who is a great geneticist we started work on a book which became wine grapes which in which we wanted to profile every single grape variety that produced wine commercially and we came the book emerged two years later as wine grapes again this is the uk jacket i think it's red in on your side of the atlantic as all wine books are um and we came up with 1 386 different varieties available in commercially available wine but such is the interest in indigenous varieties in any second edition which we'd really like to do um i'm sure we'd easily get to 1500. i mean people are rediscovering old vine varieties everywhere i don't think it's the case that just because a variety is nearly extinct it must produce good wine i think you've got to pick and choose and there are probably quite a lot of obscure varieties that are obscure for a very good reason the company torres i think has set a very good example based in catalonia they put ads in the local paper to say if you've got a vine that you don't recognize bring it to us and we'll try and identify it and they came up i think they came up with 30 previously unknown catalan grape varieties planted them microbinified them and then selected i think six that that seemed to be promising and making really interesting wine that's the way to do it i think that's a good strategy and it's going to pass back to james for a second to see bring in some other questions from our participants absolutely we've got we've got a ton a really interesting um question in in the chat came up um uh and it relates to what chances was talking about uh natural wines uh low alcohol wines and specifically what are your thoughts on current trends like low sugar low calorie low alcohol wines low alcohol wine seems a bit of a an oxymoron to me um go for or you could just go for german um you know which has been making low alcohol wine forever although admittedly the lowest alcohol ones have quite a lot of sugar in them so presumably aren't low low calorie um i do i don't i'm not sure about a sort of um industrial wine producer devising a um a formula for low alcohol wine i suspect it's not going to have much flavor but i think more sensible is to head for regions that naturally produce low alcohol wine and of their own character like musketeer for instance is generally about 12 isn't it um i mentioned german um i mean you have to head for somewhere that's that's not baking hot um but apparently um this year the 2021 harvest has been so that this growing season in europe in many areas has been so cool and and cloudy that they've they've gone back to chapterization you know adding sugar to the fermentation vat which is a sign of the sign of an exceptional year exceptionally cool um and perhaps the most sensible producers won't resort to adding sugar because and they'll they will actually just produce lower alcohol wines which may well find a ready market let's talk about uh you know wine and demystifying it has do you think the industry is being successful in making wine less intimidating i think so um and actually one of the um one of the drivers i think which often pooh-poohed by the wine establishment is the emergence of these celebrity wines you know we think to ourselves does kylie minogue really know how to make wine or whatever um but you know they bring people in um and you know some of those wines aren't bad at all so i i'm all for them actually and um whole you know if a baseball star is going to be making their own champagne great i mean that's really good for the for the whole market i think i think there comes a time that's how we have to look at it sometimes it's a more casual approach it's fashion it's celebrity and it's making uh it's making it more approachable yeah i mean i'm less enthusiastic about that brand that sells itself as clean wine sort of implying that everything else is dirty you know there's a lot of mealy-mouthed sales talk in that i think but no just a celebrity bringing you know being enthusiastic about wine particularly a younger one i think that's great let's uh talk a little bit about uh packaging we taught we were talking earlier about heavy glass lighter glass and things like that and for many consumers our participant list today is the demographics are wide so what about screwed caps or bag in a box is this something people should avoid or is there anything of quality absolutely not no no no no there are a lot of um wine producers very very quality conscious who deaf who choose to use a screw cap because they know that what the consumer will get out of the bottle is what they put into it and i as i said earlier i just it's so frustrating to open a cork stoppered bottle and find the wine is completely ruined because the of cork tank um so no i i very much respect wine producers who choose screw caps on a quality basis rather than because they're cheaper um and i i know there is an argument that court forests play a greater part in sustainability than um screwcap manufacturing um bag in box saves a lot of you know the glass bottles are so heavy um and as and it is complex the whole recycling and materials is all very very complex issues and too detailed for me to go into here but i think the quality of wine and bag in boxes got better and better which is great and it really makes it makes sense and in a restaurant setting as well you know big big boxes or kegs that and refillables that's all makes huge sense to me it's convenient and it's practical and and cans you know cans for picnics and and all the rest i'm i'm all for alternatives to glass bottles in the right circumstances i i'm not suggesting that you know first growth bordeaux should hurl itself into anything other than a a glass bottle but um i think it's horses for courses really and there are so many wines which are packaged in bottles that really don't need to be and also alternate packaging is gives room for making it more friendly and other occasions rather than the dinner table and also i mean thinking about new people coming into wine and younger people 75 centiliters is quite a lot you know um unless you're sharing a bottle with quite a lot of friends that's a big it's also a big financial commitment so any any way of selling wine in smaller units that people can can afford more easily i think is going to do the wine market a lot of good um let's talk old world new world um is it getting is it getting harder to identify the essential differences between the world wines and new red wines yeah no i'm just writing an article at the moment about a a wonderful wine consultant who has clients all over the world alberto and tanoni antonini and he points out he's he was raving about the geology of of australia the soils in australia and saying you know geology doesn't know the difference doesn't know where old world starts and new world ends you know um it's all it is just one world and now that we are as we've said earlier we're exchanging information and and and aims and techniques as much as we are um no i mean there are some differences but um nothing like say back in the 80s where we got very very hung up on the difference between the old and the new world stuff instead that south african wines you know are a good bridge of old world and new world styles um do you think south africa is getting the respect it deserves not on your side of the atlantic um when we we don't want you all to fall in love with south africa because then the prices are going to go up but i do feel sorry for the producers because they've had life so difficult recently i mean the government keeps putting total bans on they're pretty anti the wine industry and um and you know the pandemic has been used as an excuse to stifle sales and there was one stage i think when they weren't even allowed to export so they're really under the cost there let's talk about happier things uh this study and wine appreciation is a journey and journeys are often more interesting when you have that trusted advisor for consumers uh looking to get more information you know what recommended resources might you have for them of course there's genesisrobinson.com exactly you're playing into my hands here there is there's a huge section there called learn which is all free and in fact i think but one in three of the articles we publish are free as well so i'm not touting for memberships and i'm just saying there's a free resource there um but we are lucky aren't we there are so many things particularly online that are free i mean a lot of the um regional websites are very informative and we have a list of the one sort of approved ones there you know a list of regions and what their best generic website is um but you know if if someone says to me i i really like wine and i want to learn more about it i should say well go to clancystronz.com or buy one of my books particularly perhaps my tiny little um 24-hour wine expert which is a tiny tiny book um which came out of my 24 year old daughter at one stage deciding to write a guide to wine for her friends and she did all the research and then took up a job at vogue so but i didn't like to waste all her work so i turned it into my book um but um i actually don't say any of those things i say find a local wine merchant and establish a relationship with them tell them which wines you have enjoyed so far and it's in their interests to guide you to something similar but better perhaps um and you know really keep feeding you because human contact can't be beaten i mean i you know i know i produce books and videos and things like that but to actually be able to ask questions and get responses and and go and tell them well actually i quite like that wine but it was a bit too sweet for me or whatever it is in their interest to keep you happy and there's nothing that wine professionals like more than talking about wine and they love responsive customers and if the first you know if you live in a city and the first person doesn't work out then try somewhere else but i think that that leads you on that's a good point we we like talking about wine we and we like guiding people along and it's uh i guess what i keep trying to encourage consumers is don't be afraid to ask we all ask questions i bet you even ask questions if you're out in a restaurant you see a wine list you're talking to the psalm would you engage in conversation yes i think i ask more questions of the sommelier than practically any other um customer because i'm not embarrassed i'm you know i'm confident in what i know and i jolly well know what i don't know so if i see something that doesn't resonate with me i'll interrogate them like mad and they love that because that's as long as they're not rushed off their feet i mean that's what they like talking about i think there's a very strong parallel between we mentioned the um cookbook store uh between bookshops and wine shops and they tend to be staffed by enthusiasts and you know you'd often go into a bookshop and say oh i i love the works of alice and lurie or whatever what else can you recommend that might be similar it's just the same kind of operation in a wine store that's a good analogy a good analogy and people are interested in learning and um has educate wine education kept up with the demand and you know how do we how do we reach customers you can go to classes you can do things online tourism wine tours or just generally visiting wine producers is a great thing to do if you know the pandemic allows um there's one major way in which i think wine education has not kept up with demand and that's vocabulary tasting vocabulary now that um there are so many consumers wine consumers who are not in europe or not in an anglophone society and you know there's a big gap here for instance often new zealand say we know blanca is described as tasting of gooseberries and apparently you know no one in china knows where the gooseberry is that's just sort of one of many many examples so there are people working on this and i know the wine and spirit education trust which is the biggest global educator has a kind of task force trying to um fill this gap but um i think that that can be a problem and the way the the words we use to describe wine tend to be um specific to a particular culture but now we have myriad cultures interested in wine very good observation uh what about online learning i understand that you're you're involved in a project um yeah yes yes um uh the bbc the british broadcasting corporation is attempting to give masterclass a run for its money with a series of online courses and have asked me to present the one about about wine which is quite interesting distilling all that information into that format that's great fun but i've done quite a lot of television and filming in my time so it's not um uh you know it doesn't fill me with you know i i i'm quite comfortable doing it it's a lot of work it's a whole different it's a whole different communication chat yeah yeah yeah we had a very successful video series that uh that's on youtube uh at the lcbo um and you know some of those episodes are getting a million and a half views right people that they love to see they love to read but they bring it to life for them visually in a you know where you're touching on food and culture and wine and that really draws their attention yeah as as many consumers start to get more interested in wine by by default many of them start collected can you can you share any tips or strategies for somebody that's going to think about starting to collect wines yeah i think the collecting habit is waning personally um i think younger wine drinkers are more interested in pick and mix and trying something and then trying something else and then trying something else rather than amassing a permanent collection and i don't know what your wine storage facilities are like in in canada but certainly in the uk where we have some really good quality storage it's all cold and damp and underground and all the rest it's expensive you know people think when they're buying a wine young like on primer bordeaux they think that what they pay is is it but it's not they have to take into account each year's storage charges um yeah um and also you know with professional storage it's a lot more difficult just to pick one bottle up there and one bottle there you know you more or less have to take it out in case one case at a time what is the the general habit in canada for wine storage people store at home but there have been a few uh entrepreneurs that have opened up wine cellars and taken a club approach to it that's that's quite successful and uh and is starting to expand because storing at home you you do have to um be quite careful you have to make sure that it's cool enough don't you and you know your summers can be quite hot that's right thankfully yes but you know that probably means you've got you've got to invest in some refrigeration too unless you happen to have an underground seller thank evansville underground coolness yeah exactly now one of the big parts about wine and wine appreciation is tasting and one of the biggest challenges is describing what you're tasting and developing that memory uh can you can you share any any any tips for to help guide people as they undertake that i wish um i think it does help to attach words to sensations and uh even if they're quite inaccurate there's something to hang that sensation on so for instance you know those of us who are professionals when we smell gewurztraminer we say oh that's spicy that smell and it's not actually like any particular spice what we mean is that smells like verstromina and gewurz means spiced and you know we're sort of using the word not literally but as a as a prompt and it doesn't unless you're you've really got to uh write very accurate tasting notes say for an exam or if you're a wine writer or something it doesn't matter too much what your your prompt words are just as long as you use them consistently um you know cedar with with red mature red bordeaux well it probably isn't actually smelling that much like cedar but it does sort of hook a trigger exactly exactly um so writing things down actually probably does help and i think the key thing is just writing yeah writing something down to start yourself that gives you a point of reference yeah yeah it's but it's it's an experience thing um on the other hand i often find that newcomers to wine come up with much better descriptions because you know i've used all my descriptors you know hundreds of times over but they'll come up with something really fresh um that that perhaps a more seasoned taster would never have thought of um do you think people drink enough white wine no white wine get a bad rap yeah definitely um there was a a very interesting map that i tweeted today but actually it was only of europe i'm afraid that one of our importers who specializes in organic minds vintage roots come up with and they they came up with a map of europe with each country colored according to their favorite color of wine and it was mostly red um austria was white um i think poland was white um not many whites but they claim um the uk is is pink i do know we drink a lot of pink i wasn't aware that it was the number one favorite but anyway um but no i don't think we i think we we don't take white wine seriously enough because lots of white wines age just as well as as red wines i did an interesting tasting once demonstrating that mosul riesling lasted at least as long as red bordeaux and and also white wine is delicious and it's more versatile it goes with more foods than red wine um and and it's very um lovely aperitif too so no i'm very pro white wine you need all colors yes i'm going to reach out to james for a few more questions from our uh from our guests right um here's a good question that relates to uh recent uh discussion around white wines and versatility with food um miriam's asking about uh pairing tips specifically for spicy and or umami laden foods very savory styles of food how do you um find uh pairings are with the complexity of vinegar like balsamic glazes or reductions um or sweeter sauces like uh barbecue or pulled pork what what are your sort of thoughts on on pairing with those elements yeah i'm afraid i'm horribly libertarian when it comes to um food pairing um and i always think well if the wine if it doesn't work just have a mouthful of water or bread and you know in between um but i do think with with spicy foods quite sort of big swedish reds go pretty well um i think way back there was in britain anyway there was this fashion for pairing uh spicy food with gewurztraminer because of that word spice it didn't necessarily work all that well um i was just reading a tasting note now actually that i'd written last week on an amarone and i think you sell it amarone is hugely popular in canada isn't it and this was a particularly good amarone and and with that with some sweetness and and and it did have some spiciness and i actually wrote in my tasting note i can't wait to try a wine like this the next time i have an indian meal that's one sort of spice of course i mean the huge array of spices and then this whole thai array um which probably do go better with with white wines aromatic white wines and chinese food kind of forget it because you you're going to have you know 100 different flavors and textures on the table at the same time um what was the other one umami um sherry perhaps lovely fino or manzania sherry um and as for vinegar i don't think vinegar is the enemy of wine that we once thought it was i love vinegary foods i think perhaps because i love wine and i appreciate that acidity um and that acidity when you when you're putting it with food it can soften things out it can level out a wine so that it can bring together a balance yeah yeah so uh um and you know there are so many salad type dishes and savory dishes with sort of balsamic reductions and things around at the moment i think we just have to be quite um non-conservative and an experiment a bit i'm sorry not to but i'm i'm pretty anti being too prescriptive really and i think that the whole i'm afraid i think the whole um uh subject of pairing well i hugely admire people who do come up with what they reckon are the ideal pairings i would never over emphasize it because i think it makes people rather insecure they think oh i better not have drink this wine with that food because it's not the perfect combination um you know it is a bit intimidating i think to over emphasize perfect pairings much as i love um my friend evan goldstein's book of the same name and uh and admire all the work of francois chartier um on his um you know special scientific pairings thank you you sum it up nicely on your website there's a quote that i that i liked and when it came to wine and food and it was the most important rule about wine and food is matching is that there are no rules you can drink any wine with any food even red wine with fish the world will continue to revolve anyone who thinks the worst of you for serving the wrong wine is stuffy prejudiced and probably ill-informed [Laughter] and it's true you should drink some things are better with others but i think drink what you like yeah i mean after a certain time and experience i think we have little computers in our heads that we don't know about that we if we know we're going to eat such and such a thing that tastes like so and so we it kind of hones in on the food that's a wine that's likely to go with it on the basis of past experience and and one line that when it comes to food that i i think um doesn't get enough respect is sparkling ones because it's not just for the occasion it's not for a celebration it is a food wine and uh we did a tasting one time we went to a japanese restaurant in toronto and brought in a case of prosecco and we opened the whole we ordered the whole menu just to see how prosecco went with food and it was delicious with everything but sea urchin wow well see yeah very particular flavor isn't it yeah yeah and you you can live life quite happily without ever eating sea urchin yeah it was fun prosecco is is uh it's leading a worldwide trend to sparkling wine it's casual it's fun it's easy to drink it's inexpensive can other sparkling wines ride this wave how can they get on board carver's missed the boat hasn't it for complex reasons um and and there aren't many other sparkling wines that are as inexpensive apart from kaaba as prosecco um i always love being able to find a good sparkling wine that's not too expensive i'm a bit of a fan of creme and azura um they're not heavy they're very they're light and they're very well made um and not expensive now the pandemic is leaving the wine industry damaged in its wake and the wine business has suffered chances could you elaborate on the impact of the pandemic and how the wine industry continues to be effective there's been pluses and minuses haven't there i mean the poor old hospitality industry i i know well because our son has three restaurants in london and he's he's pivoted so hard he's been pirouetting uh doing all sorts of different things and come out of it absolutely fine thanks a lot of hard work but the poor people who work in the industry who suddenly found themselves without a job and and so many of them have not come back so creating massive problems um [Music] uh but a lot of the online retailers have done did very well during lockdown didn't they um you know certainly in in the uk there was a just a huge move to online ordering and the the companies that were nimble really did actually benefit and i think and then of course there's the aspect that there was nothing for people to spend their money on for for all that time and certainly the restaurants here are absolutely buzzing and wine merchants say they're buzzing with people buying fine wine i think some people have who could afford it have been moving up the scale a bit you know they've been thinking well if i'm not allowed to go out i'm going to treat myself to something you know wine that's slightly better than i i used to drink so um the you know as i say it hasn't all been bad for wine certainly it changed my life hugely wasn't allowed to travel to wine regions there were no professional wine tastings so instead of me going to the wine the wine came to me and that actually had the advantage of me being able to spend a little bit longer on individual wines than fighting my way through the hordes at a professional wine tasting so again that wasn't all all bad um it meant opening a heck of a lot of bottles but and your recycling bin yeah um what other yeah i don't i don't know how we're going to reconfigure our travel plans you know i i'll i'll feel more guilty about flying certainly than than i used to and hugh johnson and i went to germany the other day by train and came back by train that was quite interesting it probably took about one hour longer each way than flying would have done in total now in the uk and across europe are you starting to see um because trade tastings or anything with large gatherings were just not happening are we are we seeing that uh rebounding yeah um the the london very active um wine tasting calendar i'd say is perhaps at um looking in my diary probably it's about at 75 percent usual norm what we call normal now um but you know we have we're very worried about cobit rates here in the uk and um you know i i'm increasingly wary of i'm a big fan of public transport but at the moment i'm wary and warier of it um you know as as cases go up so and some people organizing tastings are being very good and um you know checking everybody going in with their temperature and and some of them are sit-down tastings where you'll be served by masked pores but some tastings are back to the old scrum you know what has um disappeared for which is good um we no longer seem to be sharing spittoons we're issued with a paper cup and whoever gives it to you puts your initials on the paper cup so there's less interchange of liquid and air and all the rest um but it i feel we're in a transitional phase definitely it's a brave it's a whole new world we have to get brave and rethink everything [Music] let's um let's talk about wine writing and wine scores or a point system is it needed and does it really tell the true story well i see scores as a necessary evil um i don't you know i certainly don't think wine can be summed up in by a number it's def and i think all of us who who write tasting notes would urge people to read the notes read the words rather than just follow the numbers and i also tend to find that readers attach too much significance to the numbers and um but if it's uh it's a sort of wine that's like on primer that in a vintage that everybody wants people don't have a lot of time they want to pounce on the best wines i can see that the scores are useful to them um and i suppose it does focus the mind of the writer that it will remind you just how much you admired the wine or not having to assign a number to it um but it's i can't say i i like scores no i i i kind of like your scoring system you know it's it's out of 20 rather than the 100 and it's practical and hun out of 100 those scores out of 100 tend to be a little uh imply perhaps too much precision and you may have noticed we we are on the basis that wines getting better every year we are we've left a bit of headroom for the wines to continue to get better every year so for us 18 out of 20 is a very high score we do have quite a few 20s and 19s but 18 is the sort of to aim for i know and so when all wine is 20 better than it is today we'll be okay we'll we've still got somewhere to go now you know i i know consumers love wines but wine buyers and in wine shops and stuff should they be buying on points or buying on quality do they do they lose their independence by just by using one of those strategies for purchasing i mean professional wine buyers yes yeah now one of the sad things i've witnessed in my professional life is wine merchants abdicating responsibility and not making their own selections but just going by by numbers and i think it's worse on your side of the atlantic than on ours um but even some in the fine wine market certainly we've got masses of fine wine traders here you know who are selling cases of bordeaux and stuff they tend they all pretty much always um include the points in their sales pitch which is a shame i think um but you know if i were a wine merchant with my own store i would want to be selling things that personally i could get behind and could tell the stories of and perhaps things which i could say i found this and you know you won't find this anywhere else or you know um so i admire the wine retailers who do their own thing rather than just slavishly following points uh let's talk about wine pricing do you have any strategies for finding value in wine pricing at all price points or is there a point where it's just uh the values may not be there i've certainly noted i mean wine prices here anyway have been zooming up over the last two years maybe more there's the brexit factor there's the supply chain factor um there's small vintages frosts and so on um i'm always very very keen on value i i i try we have a thing we we add to our tasting notes either gv for good value or vgb very good value or occasionally vvgb and um whenever i do know the price i try to highlight when i think something is a good buy and we have a wine of the week every friday and generally they're things which we think are underpriced whatever category they're in um and i do think there are far too many wines i don't i've never thought that there's a direct correlation between quality and price and there are a heck of a lot of wines that are priced highly because of a marketing strategy or you know um somebody just thinks their wine is marvelous but there's no there's no proof of that um i think there are an awful lot of overpriced lines yeah when you think about what wine i mean wine is not expensive to produce at the beginning of the um the eighth the world apps of wine we have a table which um shows all the costs that go into actually i think it's in the bordeaux section nowadays because it's about bordeaux and it's the yeah the uh what it costs to make bordeaux and total costs per bottle of even a top second growth bordeaux are i think it's in euros yeah 16 euros a bottle which is when you think they're selling for you know three sometimes four figure sums now there's a lot of profit margin in there let's reach out to james again to uh get a couple other comments and questions from our participants very good thanks i've got a ton of questions here and and trying to work through these in order and we've only got five minutes left too there we go so um your recommended drinking windows sometimes it's different than other critics how do you determine your recommendation on a drinking window for a wine it's just what i think um i certainly don't check compare them with other critics uh i don't compare anything with other critics because that way madness lies um it's just based on my opinion and tasting the wine looking if it's red at the tannin and the fruit balance and on past experience to a certain extent can you share your perspective on diversity in the wine industry in the uk um i'm glad someone asked that funnily enough uh the reason i got to go out is for a meeting with my colleague max janjo we've set up a website called bainwine professionals.co.uk to try and celebrate non-white participants in the uk wine industry um and i'm i'm also very closely involved with these golden vines scholarships which have been giving wine professionals of color a massive awards uk we've got a way to go we're way behind the us in terms of the participation in the wine industry of people of color um we're working on it uh the spirit sector is better than we are um which is rather shameful um if we're going to inclusion rather than diversity life has got better for women in the wine business in my time um i've never experienced prejudice but then i'm a parasite on the industry i'm not actually in it i've never sold wine i'm not really in the trade uh but i do see more and more women getting positions of power in in the uk but i'm i'm still horrified by some tales that i hear of particularly in the hospitality business uh harassment and so forth uh so i've just been very lucky to escape all that i've been very lucky full stop actually or period as you would probably say you've had an amazing career you've been very fortunate well i'm very very like i have worked very hard but i i've been in the right place at the right time just as as wine was taking off in the uk so what's next for janus robinson um we i recently sold dancesrobinson.com to an american digital company that has 15 other um websites including the one for saber the food magazine so we're just getting because i i realized i needed to have a secure future for the team um and i also wanted more marketing and tech expertise than we are good at so at the moment that happened at the end of august so we're in a kind of um a phase where we're all getting to know each other and and integrating now so that's quite exciting um i'm responsible the lead editor ship of the oxford companion to wine has switched to julia harding who is a very ably assisted by tara q thomas of wine and spirits magazine and i'm responsible for just 10 updating just 10 of the entries including fashion um so i might in my horribly overcrowded schedule i've got to make time to um complete uh the updates of those 10 and then there's the the online wine course um we've married off the children um so they'll do for now yeah you've had an amazing career you've had a profound impact on the world uh the wine industry and it's been long lasting and profound very kind it's amazing what does that mean for you personally do you ever take a step back and say wow or really no not really the the children uh keep my feet very firmly on the ground they don't really you know believe that i do anything worthwhile um uh so funnily enough i had a an email um yesterday was it from um uh a student at cornell um who'd fixed up a who knew me picked up a zoom with some fellow students and he said he'd been in a a wine tasting room in napa and he'd heard it was a young couple and heard one of them say to the other gensis says blah blah blah blah blah and the other one said and janice's is always right and he said do you do you feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of being right and and i i don't feel overwhelmed because i just say what i think and believe and and and i just find it hugely flattering that there is there does seem to be a sort of family of people wine lovers around the world who perhaps know me through my books or whatever else i've done um and and who you know feel positively about me and and would welcome you know it's nice to be in the old days when one could travel around the world you could generally find you know someone who knew who you were and and felt positively about you this has been wonderful i want to thank you for your time we've covered a lot of ground yeah and it's been both enlightening and enjoyable oh thank you i want to thank george brown college and the center for the hospitality and culinary arts james i want to thank you for moderating the chat room and speaking on behalf of the participants i want to thank our viewers for their time their engaging questions and comments and finally chances thank you you've given us a lot to think about and much to look forward to in the world of wine it's with fingers crossed that i hope the world returns to a new normal that offers safe international travel a return to group tastings and educational events our symposium is planned for late june 2022 and chances we would welcome the opportunity to have you present in person lead a tasting and continue the dialogue thank you very much thank you [Music]
Info
Channel: The Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts at George Brown College
Views: 1,532
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords:
Id: V7qLN48svBY
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 86min 34sec (5194 seconds)
Published: Thu Oct 28 2021
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.