DRY CORKS AND BREATHING TIME
Dry corks and breathing time
What happens when you order a bottle of white wine in a restaurant?
All too frequently, particularly in second-rate eateries in the UK, a room-temperature bottle is brought to the table and an ice bucket is produced for the cooling process, with the obvious disadvantages which accompanies this procedure. In better restaurants, and certainly throughout Spain – however humble the establishment – there seems to be limitless cold storage for wines, and any bottle you care to order will be instantly served at the correct temperature.
This is a far cry from the days when refrigerators were the exception rather than the rule in this country. The nearest most restaurants got was a sort of insulated box with a compartment for a large block of ice. The boy from the local ice factory would make his rounds every day with a handcart loaded with as many elongated blocks of ice as he could manage.
Actually the system worked surprisingly well, but, of course, the cold storage space was limited. This also explains why every Spanish town of any size had an ice factory. Marbella’s was closed many years ago, and left in a state of abandon until a mammoth block of apartments recently started to sprout from the site.
More years ago than I care to remember I had a friend in El Puerto de Santa María who was the owner of the town’s ice factory, a highly respected person in the town, and apparently not someone to be crossed.After all, how could anyone survive through an Andalucian summer without the ability to refrigerate food and drink?
Its is a strange fact of vinous life that the public prefers to drink white wine, dry sherry and champagne at a lower temperatures than the producers actually recommend. If you read the promotional material or the back-labels of the bottle, the ‘ideal temperature’ for drinking is about 8º for dry sherry and cava, and 6º for most white wine. The majority of us tend to drink our dry white wine considerably colder than this.
These thoughts were coming to mind the other day as we lunched in the La Marina restaurant in La Línea. After the usual hectic morning on the Rock, five of us were relaxing over a late lunch in what used to be a fairly run-of-the-mill restaurant, but which has improved considerably of late. First off, we ordered an Enate Chardonnay, just to get in the mood, but when the wine was served, it was flat and insipid – barely drinkable. We decided that we had merely been unlucky but were not prepared to take another chance, so the next bottle was a Sanz Rueda. Same thing. Thin and lacking in anything which could be called body.
By this time the wine drinkers around the table were getting concerned. Every sort of reason for the two wines not coming up to scratch were flung back and forth, from the wrong serving temperature to a too-warm cellar. Then the lone lady in the party had the bright idea of ordering a flagship wine from a major producer, to use as a benchmark for the others. Well, the Torres Gran Viña Sol Chardonnay was as listless as all the others.
It was only when the wine waiter left half the cork in the bottle did we belatedly see the light. The cork was dry and crumbling. Inspection of the other two corks revealed the same; they were also dry. Clearly the white wines – and probably the reds also – at La Marina are stored standing up! The corks dry out and air enters the wine, doing its nasty work to destroy the flavours which nature, with a bit of help from the lab boys, has put there.
Protest was useless. The head waiter insisted –against all the evidence – that the wines were stored as they should be. The moral is, always inspect the cork if the wine is not up to the mark.
As a result of this enlightening experience, we decided to put to the test the theory about wine needing to breathe before serving. On a recent OCI radio programme both Jonathan Firth ( Master of Wine) and I we agreed that the value of decanting wines and opening them hours before serving is overrated. Unquestionably some old wines do improve by being oxygenated, and there is a school of thought which holds that young reds do too, but a recent study by a US university showed that very few people could actually tell the difference.
Scene II. Restaurante La Judería, in central Marbella, one of the best small family-run establishments in the town, with a brisk lunchtime trade mainly from Spanish business people. Three identical bottles of Marqués de Griñon 1994 Rioja were up for tasting. One bottle had been decanted two hours previously, another opened an hour before, and the third was opened just before the tasting commenced. The tasters – members of the public rather than wine experts – obviously had no idea which was which.
I had never made this comparison before, and the results were fascinating!
Most notable was the difference between the wines, and if they had been presented with their labels covered, many people would not have realised they came from identical bottles. The decanted wine was the least appreciated, and indeed it was a bit like the unfortunate whites at La Marina, flat, not much nose, and even less body.
The 1-hour bottle was good, but started to flag after another half-hour, but the clear favourite was the just-opened bottle. To be fair several people stated they were unable to tell the difference between the three, but on their own admission these were mostly beer-drinkers or carton-winos.
Try this test sometime at home, and you will be surprised. It might also give you something to think about the next time the wine waiter asks you if you want him to open the bottle early so it can ‘breathe’.
