Not really. But I did learn quite a lot about Italian wine on Monday night from a guy who looked a bit like Jay Kay. It was his hat, mainly.
I was at a wine-tasting at the Institute of Directors, and the wine we were drinking (sorry, tasting) came from Piedemont, a tiny region in north west Italy. As an aside,the IoD is an incredibly beautiful building, and is worth a visit if you ever have the opportunity. Also, as it happens, their duck-egg blue walls are the exact same shade of duck-egg blue as my new kitchen wall. If the room we were in had been about a thousand times smaller, with significantly fewer portraits and there had been a damp patch in one corner of the ceiling I would have been convinced I was in my own kitchen.
The evening worked in the same way most of these things do; there were lots of tables around the room, all manned by wine producers and agents happy to chat about the wines, and we all wandered about, catalogue in one hand, wine glass in the other, trying the ones we fancied. Or, in some cases, making a bee-line for the least crowded table and then pretending to listen intelligently while necking whatever booze they had out on offer.
I started the evening evening as I meant to go on; taking small sips from each glass, writing perfectly legible notes in my catalogue, and generally feeling quite civilised and classy. I never spit (my Mum always taught me it's rude) but a few times I did pour the rest of the wine away after I'd tried a mouthful, which took huge willpower - pouring away perfectly good wine does not come naturally to me. I even tried out my very rusty Italian on a few of the stall-holders, who looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement and answered my clumsily constructed questions in perfect English.
As the night went on, sips became slurps, significantly less wine (read: "none") was poured away and my notes turned from neat, detailed descriptions into a blurry mass of exclamation marks, various numbers of ticks of assorted sizes, and other scrawls. These are all crucial elements of my masterful, self-designed, Wine Rating System.
The system, which has been finely honed over various wine shows and other events, is a little complicated, so let me break it down for you. First there are the ticks. When it comes to ticks, there is no upper limit on numbers, but size definitely matters; a wine I've given four little ticks to will be pretty good, but might be just as good as one with a great big tick next to it. Then again it might not. Sometimes the ticks are stars, which mean the same as ticks, except I use them more economically; mainly because they take longer to draw. Roughly, two middle-sized ticks mean the same thing as one star, I think, but it's not an exact science.
If a wine is really good I might circle it, or I might put more stars next to it, or maybe an arrow. Sometimes a smiley face, if I'm feeling artistic. Or I might forget to do any of those things.
Exclamation marks are generally good, although context needs to be taken into consideration, as I will illustrate shortly (such suspense!). Again, quantity is important; generally speaking, the more exclamation marks the better, but there's a catch; and the catch involves some slightly complicated maths. The impact of each extra exclamation marks becomes considerably less as the number of exclamation marks gets bigger. This is mainly because I have learnt, over time, the more exclamation marks I've used, the more likely they are to have been caused by my general level of excitement (read: "blood alcohol content") rather than the quality of the wine. There is probably a tipping point beyond which extra exclamation marks are actually the sign of the wine being worse not better, but I have never worked out what it is; my guess is around 4 to 5.
I'm not saying it's a foolproof system, and so this is where the little notes I write become handy; at the start of the evening they contain useful information like "toasty", "very chewy", "could be Chardonnay", or snippets of information passed on by the winemakers; "2007 good year for Barbera*"; "fruity because it's aimed at the American market" and so on. Later they get less specific but more decisive; I can always tell which stalls I went to last because my notes for those wines say things like "FAB!!!!" or "NOOOOO!!!!!" (That second example, by the way, is your classic case of exclamation marks being taken in context; here they mean I really, really, really never ought to drink this wine again.)
So what did I learn on Monday night, from the man who wasn't really from Jamiroquai? Well, after dissecting my notes, I realised the main thing I learnt about Italian wine is that I prefer Barbera to Borolo. I know this because I wrote that information down no less than four times, in various forms. My favourite version was this somewhat mathematical one:
" Borolo = tannins = not nice. Barbera = :-) "
(For non-wine-drinkers (if you are still here), tannins are things which make your mouth feel all disgusting and dry, which most wine snobs, and some people who are not wine snobs but just have really weird taste, think is a good thing.)
Also, I learnt some things about Italian grapes, some of which I hadn't heard of before. Namely:
1. Armeis, which is white wine, tastes a lot like Chardonnay.
2. Nascetta, also white wine, tastes a lot like Torrontes. (I only found out about Torrontes a couple of weeks ago but it is my new favourite Argentinian white wine. It tastes like flowers.)
3. Pelaverga Piccolo grapes are really rare; only 10 producers in the world grow them, apparently, which is completely inconvenient because the Pelaverga Piccolo wine I tried was magic in a glass. It's incredibly light, but still had a bit of substance to it, making it the solution to a problem I've been struggling with for years - finding the perfect red wine to drink during the summer which doesn't taste like fruity water. I know that in the grand scheme of things there are bigger problems in the world, but finally finding this wine and then discovering I will probably never be able to get hold of any because no-one grows the right grapes is annoying beyond belief.
4. Barolo wine is made from Nebbiolo grapes. It's the one you're meant to like the most from this region; I don't. I am such a wine rebel.
5. A surprising number of Moscats are a little bit fizzy. If you are having dinner in Piedemont and don't like bubbles in your dessert wine, go somewhere else for dessert.
6. There are two types of Dolcetto, Dolcetto d'Alba and Dolcetto di Dogliani, and these are completely different even though they are grown pretty close to each other. There's a friendly rivalry between the producers of each type; I am guessing it was no accident last night that they had been put on tables at very opposite ends of the room. Di dogliani is nicer than D'Alba, I think, but I didn't tell that to the man with the hat. He grew the wrong sort.
*Don't take my word on the Barbera; there is a very real chance I could have the year wrong. What I can say, with some certainty, is that there is a particular year which is particularly good for Barbera**, and it has something to do with the weather being really hot or really cold.
**Or maybe it was Barolo. I'm not sure.
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