98 YEARS OLD AND STILL GRIPING ABOUT GRAPES...

THE most intriguing headline I have come across so far this year was in The Northern Virginia Daily of March 26 which informed us: “Virginia’s wine industry in need of grapes”.

Wondering how they had managed to build up a wine industry without realising that they needed grapes, I rang up a contact at the Department of Viticulture at the University of Southern North Virginia and asked how they suddenly noticed they were missing a vital ingredient.

“Gee, Mr Beachcomber,” he drawled, “We just wish you’d told us earlier.”

“It never occurred to me,” I admitted. “Grapes are, after all, the third most mentioned fruit in the Bible, after figs and olives. I rather assumed your Department of Bible- Thumping would have passed on the fact that one needs them to make wine. While we’re on the subject, though, may I query a figure in the same newspaper piece which said that ‘ the state harvested 8,039 grapes in 2014’. Is that right? That’s only 22 grapes a day. No wonder you’re running short.”

“That should have read, ‘ 8,039 tons of grapes’,” he said.

“Does that mean,” I asked, “that your average grape weighs a ton?”

“We do things big here in Southern North Virginia,” he said and hung up.

Oddly enough, just after reading about Virginia’s grapelessness, I had an opportunity to learn more about grapes at the Moët Academy which has been running at London’s OXO Tower for the past couple of weeks.

In front of a grapevine brought over from France and stretching the length of the room, a pleasant and very knowledgeable chap from Moët & Chandon told us that all you need to make a decent Champagne is 200 days of rain a year, an average temperature of 10.8C, a soil composed of 75 per cent chalk to aid irrigation and 1,200 hectares of vines kept just over a metre tall.

Then you ferment the grape juice for a few years to make wine, then blend your wines, and add yeast for a secondary fermentation of 4- 6 weeks to create the bubbles.

It all seemed simple enough, except when he got down to the details of the blending and told us that each bottle of Moët is made from 100 different wines, which set off a stream of calculations in my mind. I’m told that it takes about 700 grapes to make a bottle of wine. If Virginia really did harvest only 8,039 grapes last year, that’s not even enough for a crate.

Furthermore, since a bottle holds about six glasses of wine, that means it takes 117 grapes to make each glass or 1.17 grapes of each of the 100 varieties of wine used to blend the Champagne.

Quite how they manage to slice off exactly 0.17 of a grape for each glassful, and what they do with the remaining 0.83 of a grape is quite beyond me, but I suppose the Virginian wine industry doesn’t have to worry about that, not having any grapes of their own.

The Moet Academy runs until April 24. Details: uk. moet. com. No grapes were trodden in writing this column.