Uncorked: why we’re so in love with wine
The secrets behind our growing obsession
JUSTIN HOY is in the kitchen of his Stirling home reminiscing about the greatest bottle of wine he ever drank. It was a bottle of South African sparkling wine by the vintner Graham Beck. The wine was good, but it wasn’t special
– it was the occasion that made the wine great.
It was 20 years ago, and Hoy’s wife Mary had just given birth to their first baby Emily. The couple were living in South Africa, working in the wine business, and after their daughter’s christening, Justin and Mary journeyed into the bush and drank the sparkling Beck amid one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth with their newborn baby beside them.
“It was probably not the best sparkling wine in the world, but for that occasion it was perfect,” says Hoy, pictured inset. That’s what wine does, it underscores the events in life that matter. Mary laughs and says he is making them sound like terrible parents, drinking in the wild with their baby.
Hoy hates the expression “wine expert” but like it or not that’s what he is, one of Scotland’s best connoisseurs. Spend an hour in his company and you’ll learn more about wine than you could from a decade of experimenting as an amateur wine buff on your own.
As National Wine Week comes to an end today, Hoy is singing the praises of wine and the role it plays in human culture and society. Wine has been with us for at least 8,000 years – the earliest archaeological record of winemaking is dated to about 6,000BC in Armenia. Wine writer Aaron Pott says there is a theory, though, that wine is much older – that wine began when some ancient human “chanced upon some wild vines in late fall, their bunches well past ripe, rotten and slightly fuzzy with a blush of mould”. They would have tasted the sticky juice and become euphoric – and so wine quickly became part of religion as it seemed to connect us to the gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans deified wine in the rites of Dionysius and Bacchus – and it remains embedded in our culture today.
“Wine is so important in society as we use it as the major part of any celebration,” Hoy says. “Humans are incredibly gregarious, we love celebrating and will find any reason to be together whether it’s a birth, christening, marriage, finishing school – we find reasons to have a celebration, and the major part of that celebration is when we’re toasting whoever it is that’s getting married or winning a race.
“Take that same idea across to a dinner party. It doesn’t matter how many people are coming, when they cross your doorstep you’ll give them a beer or a gin and tonic, but that’s not why you invited them – the reason you invited them is that part of the evening when you’re all sitting around the table focused on each other and having a good time and the food comes out and you’ll notice all the other drinks go out the window and are replaced by wine – wine becomes the centre of the table.
“We change to wine as that is the celebratory part of the evening. That’s the importance of wine, it’s all about the occasion. It’s how we celebrate.”
Hoy has spent his life in the wine trade. Born in England, he married a Scot and the pair went to South Africa to run a vineyard. He later moved back to Scotland, where he now runs the Glasgow Wine School.
The secret to wine’s beloved role in human life is its connection to food and social interaction. Sure, says Hoy, you can drink it to “get p*****”, but there’s much more to wine than that – unlike other drinks that exist primarily to get you drunk. Food is at the heart of every culture on Earth, and wine elevates food. Wine is completely natural, like the best food – it’s just grape juice, yeast and sunshine. In wine, it’s the acidity and the tannins – the chemicals extracted from the grape skin that dry the mouth – which, when matched with a simple plate of food, can create something sublime. Other alcoholic drinks don’t have the same type of acidity that’s found in white wine or the tannins in red wine.
“Acidity is a really good palate cleanser if you are eating fatty food,” says Hoy. “One of the most magical food and wine pairings is champagne and fish and chips.”
The oily fish and chips coat the inside of the mouth, and that deadens taste buds leaving the brain bored with what’s being eaten, he explains. A sip of acidic champagne washes the mouth clean and the palate is ready to experience the taste of fish and chips all over again.
With tannins it’s all about the interaction with salt – think of a hearty stew or a bowl of spaghetti bolognese, a lot of the flavour comes from the salt in the food. “Salt suppresses the perception of tannins,” Hoy says, “and once it does that it gives the impression of the wine being more fruity. One of the things we know works really well is a nice big steak with an Argentinian Malbec [a red] – it’s
The more flavour you have in your food, the more flavour you should have in your wine. The wine you are drinking must always be sweeter than the food you are eating
become one of the great things in life. Malbec has a very high tannin level and when we cook steaks there’s salt in the cooking process, so put them together and suddenly the wine becomes this juicy drink.” Hoy’s tip for matching food and wine is simple: “The more flavour you have in your food, the more flavour you should have in your wine.”
He gives the example of a dinner of smoked fish with a cream sauce. “The sauce is where your fattiness will come through, so you will need a bit of acidity in your wine. If you tried to match a Sauvignon Blanc the flavours of the dish would overpower the wine as it doesn’t have a huge amount of flavour necessarily. But if you changed that Sauvignon Blanc into a nice wooded Chardonnay the wine will stand up to the food and still have the acidity.”
With something like a green salad, though, a wooded Chardonnay would kill the delicate summery taste, but a Sauvignon Blanc is probably perfect. The worst food and wine matching, says Hoy, is red wine with dessert. The clash of sugar and tannin is frankly disgusting – so what you need is a dessert wine, something like a Sauterne. “The wine you are drinking must always be sweeter than the food you are eating,” says Hoy.
He wants to remove all the snobbery from wine. Getting the right drink to go with the right food shouldn’t be the domain of the middle classes – it’s about taste, not money, and we all have taste. Of course, many wines aren’t cheap, but over the years low-cost wines have filled supermarkets and a half decent red or white can be picked up for the same price as a six-pack of beer if you know what you are looking for, and what food will go with it.
Jay McInerney, the acclaimed American novelist and wine writer, says having less money will make you a more astute wine drinker as you are “forced to make choices and sacrifices that can only sharpen” discrimination and appreciation. “Starting at the top, one will miss out on the climb,” he says.
McInerney makes discovering wine sound like a mysterious journey, and indeed there is something deeply mysterious about wine. The film Sideways is adored by wine drinkers because it’s a tragi-comic love story wrapped in homage to the vineyard. In the film, one of characters, Maya, has a speech in which she talks about wine as if it’s almost human. “I like to think about the life of wine,” she says, “how it’s a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think