There’s always news, but it seems like there’s been a lot lately. Even a news junkie like me needs to take breaks between doomscrolling1Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online. and flipping between windows on my laptop filled with the latest horror and anxieties.
At times, I am glad to have glass of wine with me to get through the evening news on television. (Though we’ll keep to coffee for the morning paper.)
One way to avoid news-fuelled depression is to get to work. Part of my work is to scan the wine news, which is, generally speaking, an altogether more pleasant experience. Most of the time, the worst it gets is that I realize I have been scooped by a colleague on a subject I thought was idiosyncratically unique.
If someone else decides to write about Viogner, the same week I was planning to, then the story idea will need to wait a few weeks, so as not to invite accusations of plagiarism. Not that there isn’t a lot of borrowing in this field, anyway. It’s more a case of professional courtesy.
Like sections of a newspaper, or different pages on a website, wine news comes in various categories. Most “as it happens” wine news, is really trade or business news. Wineries get bought and sold. Winemakers quit one job for another. Someone who made a lot of money doing something else has decided to lose some of it by starting a winery.
Sometimes the trade news is really more like community news. Making wine is still largely a family business, so it’s often more than an obituary when a matriarch or patriarch of renown house dies. Likewise, it’s not unusual to find a profile of a young winemaker, sometimes still in their twenties, who’s taken the reins in the cellar.
Lately, more and more wine news is environmental catastrophe news. Fires in the Okanagan, floods in Central Italy, an early frost in Burgundy. Wine is made on the littoral between temperate and tropical climate zones and weather is consequential enough to be newsworthy. This year French wine production will overtake Italy for the first time in a long time because of lousy weather east of the Maritime Alps.
Other environmental news include specific campaigns, like the one get rid of unnecessarily heavy bottles. They require more energy to ship, but studies show consumers equate a big heavy bottle with a pricier wine.
News might also be about “sustainable practices,” like a big winery going organic, or a new kind of certification and labeling system. Or more esoteric ones, like the establishment of an online registry of old vines around the world.
There’s crime news too. Fake wine news usually means exactly that. There is almost always some story out there about wine fraud. It’s a pretty easy crime to switch a label, and the luxury wine business is run on scarcity and demand. And with the astronomic price of genuine fine wine, there are more and more reported heists of the stuff. (Come on Hollywood, give us a wine heist movie.).
These crimes might be fuelled by aspirational lifestyle wine news. Who wouldn’t want to go to a tasting of five decades worth of one of the most famous “Super Tuscans” in a palazzo in Venice? Or sympathizes with the Australian investor who is selling off his large collection of Domaine Romanée-Conti, because he thinks it would be “unethical” to drink it at tens of thousands of dollars a bottle?
Wine news also comes in mainstream and independent channels, including the increasingly ubiquitous Substack platform, which allows for more in-depth reporting. In truth, most of the people who write for the former also write for the latter. And I suspect we read each other in all formats as much as we can.
In any event, here is some wine news that you can use, if you choose. It’s come straight from the field, and it’s about a bottle of wine I found at my local shop that tells a story in itself.
From Western Sicily, the Caruso & Minini label is a two decades old collaboration between winemaker Stefano Caruso and his daughters, Giovanna and Rosanna, and Mario Minini a wine marketer and packager from Lombardy with projects across Italy. The company and their wines are succinct expression of the shift towards fine wines in Sicily since the 1990s.
The 2021 Caruso & Minini Naturalmente Bio Catarratto is a $20 odd dollar wine ($21.95 in Ontario) that drinks like something twice the price. Bio is short for biologica, meaning organic, and Catarratto is the name of the indigenous Sicilian white wine grape from which it’s made. Catarratto competes with Sangiovese as Italy’s most planted grape, but has had a less noble reputation until recently.
Catarratto was the mainstay of Marsala, the sweet fortified wine for which Sicily was best known until growers began making their own fine wines. There’s a lot of it planted in Sicily, but until winemakers got serious about making fine wine with it in the last 20 years, not a lot of interesting things being done with it, as demand for Marsala waned.
The international (French) grape analogue to Catarratto might be Chardonnay, which is able to either express its terroir like a chameleon, or express the technique of its maker in the cellar, or both. The 2021 Caruso & Minini Catarratto is a three part quaffer. First, a bouquet of white flowers on the nose. Second, a solid wash of fruit over the palate, with stone fruits and citrus notes (peach and mandarin), balanced by a refreshing twang of acidity. Then, a touch of honeysuckle sweetness on the finish. It’s a good ride, and decidedly moreish.
A popular clone of Catarratto is called Lucido, meaning shining, or illuminating. Perhaps there’s as much to learn in the glass as there is in the news. Or perhaps, like every good wine, it just helps to digest it.
