Viewpoint

Malcolm Jolley: Four ideal wines for a hot summer day

Mediterranean winemakers are particularly good at making whites that beat the heat
Photo credit: Hidden Bench

I organize an informal wine club for a group of my friends and neighbours. It’s a buyers club. We pool our money together and buy a bunch of cases, mostly directly from importers or local producers. Then we split them up between us, so we get a bit of a sampler: two bottles each of six different wines. If we like something, then we can go buy more of it.

When choosing the wines, the objective is to arrive at an average cost of $25 a bottle, or $300 a case. If we were each to buy six cases of the wines, it would cost us $1,800. A wine bill of nearly two grand is a pretty big investment to sink for the purpose of trying to find a few everyday wines that are ready to drink. (Yes, I know: $25 is a bit steep for “every day”, but that’s the average cost, and post-COVID inflation has arrived at the wine world too.) We are spreading our risk as we expand our palates.

The club is also, of course, an extension of my day job as a wine writer and journalist. The difference between wine pros and amateurs is access; we just get put in front of a lot more wine, whether we’re sent samples to our homes or out at tastings, trade shows, and other events. It’s a chance to put my money where my mouth is when I find a good wine at a great price. The newsletter is also becoming a media channel of its own, and anyone who likes can follow along with what we’re buying at our website, mjwinebox.com

Because of holidays and recent changes in the way the Liquor Control Board of Ontario handles the kinds of wines at that price point, this month’s wine box was a bit late to be sourced and assembled. It didn’t drop, as the kids say, until the end of July. The members of the club are fortunate enough to all live in a leafy neighbourhood in the old city of Toronto, and we all have a backyard, a barbecue, and a table to sit down at outdoors. The challenge for the mid-summer selection was to find wines that might complement grilled foods eaten al fresco on a warm evening.

Finding the whites was easy enough: a crisp Bellone from Anzio in Lazio, to the southeast of Rome, and a surprisingly racy organic Chenin Blanc from the Languedoc in the Southwest of France. Mediterranean winemakers are particularly good at making whites that beat the heat; of necessity, I imagine. Those selections were really just about the quality-to-price ratio.

In the warm months, the club buys a rosé. As organizer and chief wine bore, this month I played the bully and imposed my predilection for fuller-bodied rosé in the style of Tavel, the appellation and town on the right bank of the Southern Rhône valley that’s famous for its deep coloured and structured rosé. I like all the rosés, but a lot of the pale ones these days see so little skin contact that they taste to me more like white wine, and I wanted some fruit to chew on.

The wine we bought was from Niagara, the 2021 Hidden Bench Nocturne Rosé, which is made by the old-fashioned saignée method, where a measure of wine is “bled” off of red wine must1“The combined juice, skins and seeds is known as must. Some winemakers cool the must for a day or two, a process called cold soaking, to extract color and flavor compounds from the skins before any alcohol is created.” https://www.winemag.com/2019/10/08/how-red-wine-is-made/ while it sits on its skins in the fermentation tank. The result, at least for this wine, is closer to a light red than a Pinot Grigio. Actually, the dominant grape in it is Grigio’s red cousin Pinot Noir. Bone dry, it’s big on red fruit notes: strawberry, cherry, and, in full cool climate character, cranberry. And it has just enough tannic structure to pull it through dinner, but not so much that one can’t enjoy the marinade on the BBQ chicken.

The American wine and drinks writer Jason Lewis recently published a post on his website, everydaydrinking.com, entitled “Are Food & Drink Pairings Ridiculous?”.2Are Food & Drink Pairings Ridiculous? https://www.everydaydrinking.com/p/food-and-drink-pairings-are-ridiculous Lewis convincingly proves they are, except when they’re not, concluding: “Pairings are no more bullshit than any other of life’s pleasures.” I hold this sentiment when it comes to drinking red wine in the summer heat.

It stands to reason that since many if not most of the world’s big, powerful red wines come from warm places like the Mediterranean Basin, South America, South Africa, Australia, and California, they ought to do just fine on a Dog Day. Indeed they do, and yet they’re also good at warming up the soul on a cold, dark January night.

My inclination is towards lighter reds on hot nights, and one of the reds we bought for the club is made from a grape that makes surprisingly refreshing, almost crisp, red wines from a very hot place. Frappato comes from Vittoria in the Southeast of Sicily, roughly sharing its latitude with the North African city of Tunis. It was traditionally grown as a blender, to lighten up heavier wines made from the better-known Her d’Avolo. It’s only in the last few decades that it’s come into its own.

The 2019 Frappato from the Vittoria outpost of the Planeta winery, which famously makes wine in every corner of the island, is a textbook example of a light, aromatic red. I like to serve it slightly chilled after half an hour or so in the fridge. I suppose, if the Nocturne rosé is an aperitif wine that can carry through to dinner, then the Planeta Frappato is a dinner wine that can be happily begun before it. There is good dark red fruit, but also a bit of white pepper and a floral aroma I associate with hibiscus; a lot going on in a very quaffable wine. One could do worse than pairing it with grilled lamb chops or a selection of garden vegetables.

The other two reds we selected, a “Super Tuscan” and a Chinon from the Loire Valley, will get their own treatment in upcoming columns, focused on different themes.

Websites for the people and things mentioned above, including the shameless plug for the one I publish when I am not writing for The Hub, are:

https://www.mjwinebox.com/

https://hiddenbench.com/

https://www.everydaydrinking.com/

https://planeta.it/

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