Saturday Extra

Ben Canaider's The Perfect Glass of Wine is a book about how the world of wine really works. It's an account of Canaider's world trip, as he attempts to find wine perfection in France and Italy, California, New Zealand and Australia's industrial wine heartland.

This week, Ben talks about his book, why he's skeptical of Penfold's Grange, why he doesn't like to see wines given marks and why he welcomes the revolution in pink wine.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Alan Saunders: We're going to begin by hitting the bottle, and 'The Perfect Glass of Wine' is a new book that describes itself as 'One man's search for heaven in a bottle'.

But if you're seeking heaven, is a bottle the right place to look for it? Well let's find out now, because we're joined by the author of the book, the wine writer Ben Canaider. Ben, welcome to Saturday Breakfast.

Ben Canaider: Thank you very much, Alan.

Alan Saunders: Now let's look at your approach to wine. You're not over-impressed by what I suppose we have to call Wine Icons, are you? Because you begin the book by being rude about Australia's flagship wine, Penfold's Grange.

Ben Canaider: I don't know if I'm rude about it. I certainly don't drink a lot of it myself. I've got a lot of criticism for Grange; I like the way that it has helped maybe lift the profile of wine in Australia, but it's done so in a very kind of stuffy and pretentious way. When a bottle of wine is compared in terms of its greatness to other cultural icons, such as being the Australian cricket captain, or being the Prime Minister, and that's the order, cricket captain, Prime Minister or Grange; and when a bottle of Grange is in the annual newspaper story about best investments along there with Sydney taxi plates, it ceases to be wine, it's becoming this commodity, and this icon. More importantly, it's not meant to be drunk any more, it's meant to be hoarded in cellars, and talked about. And that's what worries me about Grange.

Alan Saunders: And it's actually not made any more by a winemaker, it's made by a custodian.

Ben Canaider: Yes, it's a nice angle, isn't it, that one? It must be tricky for the person that has to carry that kind of load. When that happens to wine, the real problem is that people that might be interested in wine, might want to learn more about it. If they're told that Grange is the greatest Australian red wine, it therefore follows that the flavour of that wine is what good wine should be.

Alan Saunders: Well that's an interesting point, because one of the complaints frequently made about Australian wines (and the British philosopher, Roger Scruton, who's also a wine writer is one of the major complainants here) is that the taste is 'very forward, very fruity, it's a very alcoholic wine' and I wonder whether Grange can be blamed for this. I mean you mention for example, that the late Max Schubert, who died in 1994, who was the man who developed Grange, but was a heavy smoker, and there's a suggestion that he was developing a wine that could actually get past his tobacco-compromised palate.

Ben Canaider: Yes, there's a theory that's been going around the Australian wine industry for a while now, about people like Max Schubert, the stalwart of the Barossa Valley, Peter Lehman, another big smoker; it was a cheeky idea that these blokes made wines in this big, heavy, extracted, alcoholic, ripe, porty style, because that's the sort of stuff they liked to taste, maybe because of the smoking. You talked before about Roger Scruton getting stuck into Australian wine for this sort of style, wines that are more of a caricature. I've compared them in the past as being a bit like the character out of The Simpsons, you recognise that they're human, but they're not really, you know, they've got three fingers and stuff. Scruton only said, and he did it very well, he only said what a lot of other British wine writers have been saying for a while now. There's a bit of a backlash against this 'sunshine in a glass' angle. Maybe it's because when you do drink a lot, you start to tire of those loud, aggressive and full-on flavours, and Australian wine, in its export guise, is the easiest target.

Alan Saunders: This relates, doesn't it, to your view that the perfect wine is not necessarily a good wine, or a drinkable wine; that perfection is something aside from desirability or drinkability?

Ben Canaider: Yes, there's not one bottle, there's not one estate or one vineyard that is the perfect glass of wine. It is very much a situation, and this reflects the role that wine should play in your life if you drink wine anyway, it's part of the whole parcel, it's not the be-all and end-all. So indeed, I've had some fairly dodgy, pongy, rustic, character-filled, temporaneos in Spain that wouldn't get past Round 1 in an Australian wine show system, because they'd be deemed to be faulty. But at the time, in that place, with those foods, in the mood I was in, these wines were fantastic.

Alan Saunders: Well does this desire for perfection relate to the practice, which is pretty well universal now, of judging wines in competition, and the average punter who's at all interested in wine, learns about wines from a competition, or from the report of a competition, and sees how many points it's been awarded?

Ben Canaider: This notion of wine shows and Gold Medals or wines rated out of 100 points so people talk about a 99-point wine, a lot of people use Gold Medals and high 90s points as an indicator of quality. I guess it means that the wine is free of faults, but a 99 or a 100 point wine or a Gold Medal wine, or a trophy winning wine, these awards don't tell you anything about wine style. The Australian wine show system for instance, has always banged on about how it's an Agricultural Society thing, it's about improving the breed. But when you look at a lot of animal breeds and they way they've been improved through that breeding process, a lot of them are not really quite the same animals they used to be, and maybe that's not a good thing. If you're improving the breed and you've turned Australian red wine into this monster, than I don't reckon that's good for anyone.

Once a wine ceases to be drinkable and have a beverage-like quality, if it's an extract or a concentrate, then it's not wine.

Alan Saunders: Well is there a problem here with the competitions, in that a wine makes it in a competition, is precisely the sort of wine that you might be happy with, if all you're doing is taking a sip and then spitting it out. But it's not something, as you say, that you want to drink a whole bottle of.

Ben Canaider: No, not at all. In fact it takes a long time as well. Often this stuff comes out of the bottle like sauce. When you think of those market research nights, I don't know if any of the listeners have ever been to one, but a whole lot of people get put in a room and there's often a one-way mirror and the market research is carried out and they're all exposed to these products, or asked questions, and often the results are based around the 'loudest liar' principle. And wine shows are a bit like that. There are super noses and super palates that can stand the rigors of such tasting, but 100-120 wines a day for three or four days in a row; I've got a chapter in the book about judging the judges, and how these chemo-sensory abilities of your average human, even with training and experience, there's massive pitfalls and there are problems and there are recovery times needed, certain flavours and smells are accentuated, some are missed altogether, a huge big monsterish wine, these wines that we make, they're the only ones that stand out, they're the 'loudest liar'. That doesn't make them true or it doesn't make them drinkable.

Alan Saunders: I think you haven't suffered in a sensory sense, unless you've been to a commercial blue cheese tasting. Twenty supermarket blue cheeses in a row is particularly disgusting.

Ben Canaider: You're still on the cheese circuit, are you, Alan?

Alan Saunders: Not any more. When it comes to competitions, what strikes me is that you mention that in Australian wine competitions, though they're officially judged out of 20, every wine tends to get at least 14 out of 20, just for showing up. And you remarked that this is what most Australian schoolchildren get for their English essays. And I've heard it suggested that all systems of wine judging that depend on giving awards, and that includes the very influential American systems, have a lot to do with the school exams of the countries in which they originate.

Ben Canaider: That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it, yes. The Americans like their 100-point system, they've taken from the Europeans. The guy that I guess champions it over there is a fellow called Robert Parker. He's the guy that a lot of the more pure wine lovers see as the bad guy, because he likes giving 99-points to these bottles of port masquerading as dry table wine.

Alan Saunders: You're not kind about wine critics. You suggest that they're in bed with wine producers. I wonder whether they're alone in that though, because people who write about cars, for example, very, very seldom give bad reviews to a new automobile. So is it a peculiarity of the wine reviewing business?

Ben Canaider: Look, I think I should leap in here and defend motor writers, people that review car. I think if I was flying business class to some beautiful schloss in Germany to test drive the latest series 91-million BMW, I'd probably have fond memories of that car, too. I guess what I'm railing against when it comes to wine critics, is well it's part of the culture they find themselves in within the media. It's the culture of recommendation. When was the last time you read a bad review of a bottle of wine? It's all good news. Fine, you know, there's so much good wine around there's no need to waste any time reviewing the bad ones; that's one argument. Then again, when wine critics get together, all they do is go on about how awful such-and-such is. It just seems it can never be made public.

Alan Saunders: Are there national characteristics that play here? Are there marked differences between American, British, Australian wine writers?

Ben Canaider: Without a doubt. The British feel pretty happy about it all because they like to think they invented the whole game. And in a point, they did. It was a country that couldn't make its own wine, and yet there was a lucrative trade with Europe, the Italians, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and many of the English trade practices with these wine-making countries led to the development of some of the classic wine styles. Port, for instance, is a mistake; it just came about because the English had to fortify this table wine getting it back to London. Ditto champagne. They'd take champagne back to London, yet it would re-ferment, and they had to sell it, and people got a taste for this stuff with bubbles in it. So there's an argument going around that it was an Englishman who invented champagne.

Alan Saunders: Not Dom Perignon.

Ben Canaider: Not Dom. He was working on ways to try and stop the secondary fermentation; if Dom Perignon had been even cleverer than he was, champagne might not exist. So that the English see themselves as maybe owning it; the Italians are pretty serious about it, as are the French, but French wine critics don't seem to be as - they're not the maniacs, the determined maniacs that a lot of other American and Australian reviewers are. And I think the Australians and the Americans probably share more similarities than not.

Alan Saunders: Well how should wine be talked about? You quote the late Auberon Waugh, who said that wine writing should be camped up. And I remember very early in my career interviewing him, and he said precisely that, that you should talk about 'a cheeky little wine' or something like that. Is that the way you want to go, do you think we should be camping it up?

Ben Canaider: It all depends I guess, on your approach to wine, whether you're a person who's interested in hoarding it and putting it in cellars in anticipating if it will one day be the perfect drink. If you like talking about the scores it gets, and when it will be ready; if you like buying those wine guides that have the cellaring potentials listed in them, if you're into that, then maybe you're in to numbers, and you're in to owning wine. If your interest in wine is perhaps using the other side of your brain, camping up the writing about it, yes, we need more than that. I think that a lot of wine writers in Australia write the stuff for other wine writers in mind, and they all have to prove how they know all the wine secrets. One of these blokes, he started his own wine journal, and it was ticking along OK, but he was sort of struggling to get it really moving and get a bigger readership, and so he bit the bullet in a very practical way and started using the 100-point system. As soon as he did that, everything's just taken off, because that suddenly appeals to people that want to know scores. As Hugh Johnson has said, scores are simpler than words, and they help to sell things.

Alan Saunders: Yes, they want scores, they don't want adjectives.

Ben Canaider: I'd like to see more Australian wine writers, well they know all the winespeak, so I'd like them try to write better. That would actually help the democratic process of wine drinking in this country. Roger Scruton, you read him for the little bits of information that sneak through. It's not textbook wine-writing, and that's what I like about it. So yes, it should be camped up.

Alan Saunders: Yes, I love the bit where Scruton talks about drinking a wine with some pork from his pig, and his pig is called (his late pig) is called Singer, after Peter Singer the animal rights writer.

Let's look at your likes and dislikes. You seem very keen on rose. Now in your honour, I had a glass of rose last night; it was an Australian rose, it was from the premium label of a notable Australian winery, and I didn't like it at all. It was more alcoholic than I'd expected, and it was really quite acidic. What is it that you like about rose?

Ben Canaider: I like the way it's the third way. Rose is that thing, it's got a little bit of the tannic gruffness of red, but it's got that weight and body and acidity of white wine. Talking about the one you drank last night, rose sales in this country, as they have in the UK, have just boomed over the last few years. One theory behind it is that the kids getting into rose now, are too young to remember Mateus.

Alan Saunders: The great Portuguese con job.

Ben Canaider: Yes, absolutely. Yes, brilliant stuff. And they're too young to remember that, but when they were little, they remember Mum and her de facto drinking bottles of chardonnay or something, that's the last thing they want to drink. So this is rose's new market. But the big companies are getting into it, and they're tricking a few of them up. There's a lot of cynical rose around at the minute. And that explains the high alcohol, that explains the acidification, because a lot of them are also very sweet, designed to appeal to the most common denominator, which is pretty insulting to the drinkers of Australia.

Alan Saunders: Yes, indeed. Well I have to say that the last thing I drank last night was indeed chardonnay. It was an industrial, not to say industrial strength chardonnay, for which I have a guilty enthusiasm, but you've really got it in for chardonnay, haven't you?

Ben Canaider: Not really. When it's called chablis I think it's fantastic, and I like the 'less is more' approach. We need to make a better quality wine, not just more of it, or we don't need to make more wine that tastes more, and this is the problem still with a lot of chardonnay we have here. All those little triggers and tricks used to make people remember what they're drinking, high alcohol, over-ripeness, and lots of oak barrel use, once again it's insulting to the drinker.

Alan Saunders: You quote the American modernist writer Gertrude Stein. She was born in Oakland, California, and she said that her problem with Oakland is that there's no there, there. You want a wine to have a there, there. What does that mean to you?

Ben Canaider: It's the connection with the land, with the place. I think the idea of a winemaker pursuing the flavours of a particular grape that he thinks or she thinks suits that site, and letting those flavours express themselves in the most pure and unadorned way, you're really setting yourself up then for maybe having a bit of a glimpse at some form of perfection in that resultant wine.

Alan Saunders: But it's not perfection in a glass, it's perfection in a rather wider picture?

Ben Canaider: Yes.

Alan Saunders: Just finally Ben, you've been quite sceptical about the world of wine and about the world of wine judging and wine reviewing in this book. Have you burnt your bridges? Are you going to be going on to reviewing cars next?

Ben Canaider: Germany, here I come. Yes, I was wondering the other day if the invitations are going to dry up, Alan, but this is not my fault, this is what I've witnessed for the last five years through the sort of strange, increasingly shrunken prison that's my brain. And there's plenty of good news about the wine industry, and I'd be delighted to read books more about that. But this is my take on it.

Alan Saunders: Well if you want to read Ben Canaider's take on wine, the book is called 'The Perfect Glass of Wine - How one man searched the world for heaven in a bottle'. It's published by Knopf. And I've been talking to the author, Ben Canaider. Ben, thank you very much for joining us.

Ben Canaider: Thank you, Alan.

Guests

Ben Canaider

Publication

Title: The Perfect Glass of Wine: How one man searched the world for heaven in a bottle
Author : Ben Canaider
Publisher: Knopf
Price: $32.95