We all know wine can be an expensive business. The quality (or perceived quality) of a wine, it’s rarity and brand have all contributed to some wines demanding an exceptionally high price. However, a lucrative industry such as this one does attract attention from less scrupulous characters and encourages business and even countries to try some interesting things to protect their investments!
We obviously couldn’t try any illegal wines on the night but we did take some inspiration from some
of the wines we tried! Take, for example, our first wine: a Masottina Contrada Prosecco Superiore
from Veneto, just NW of Venice. This was a great Prosecco with a creamy, intense feeling in your
mouth yet is a really crisp wine that was a little like tasting liquid Golden Delicious apples! We heard
how Italy, in an attempt to protect their highly profitable cargo, tried to rename the Prosecco
grape to Glera and make it only possible to produce wine from this grape in Italy, much like
the Champagne region. Unfortunately they soon found out that several other countries had already
been growing Prosecco vines for some time and were promptly told that wouldn’t be acceptable.
If you have ever tried wine from Austria, then you may have seen a red and white striped cap on the
top, indicating that the wine has been tested for quality, This is a necessity given that, several years
ago, New York Times reported that the Austrians had added “antifreeze” to their bottles in an
attempt to sweeten wine during a poor harvest: they hadn’t (but had been up to no good adding
some compounds that would allow them to sell their wine)! The result was they had to throw away
several million litres of wine and the fallout was sufficient to cause sales of Austrian Riesling to
plummet overnight and it took them over 15 years to recover!
We heard many other stories about people who drilled through concrete walls to get to cellars
containing precious bottles of wine (just like a bank robbery), and a lady who ordered room
service in a high end French hotel late at night, so her boyfriend could steal the wine cellar keys and
get away with over £1.5m of wine!! Perhaps the scariest was when Romanee-Conti, a vineyard in
the French Burgundy region producing Pinot Noir that starts at around £1,800 per bottle, was sent a
detailed map of their vineyard, with a note saying that unless they paid 1 million EUROs, each vine
would be poisoned! The blackmailer was caught but it begs a question as to how you protect your
land!
The Upton wine club is about wine but it is about so much more. Each month, a large proportion of
the of 50+ members (mainly from the village), come together each month to learn a bit more
about wine but also to have a great social time! If you are interested come and give it a try, details
can be found on our website. The meeting will be held on 19th March at 8pm – we hope to see you
there!