LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT IRISH WHISKEY

The Irish may or may not have invented whiskey (they spell it with an “e” as opposed to Scots and Canadians), but once you taste the best that the island has to offer today, you may believe they have created it.
Decades ago, Jameson, Bushmills, Paddy, and Tullamore Dew tasted light, smooth, “clean”, pleasant, but offered little on lingering aftertaste, as did Scotch whiskies.
In the 19th century, Irish distilleries exported huge quantities of pot still whiskey derived from both malted and unmalted barley.
By the late 29th century, there were only two distilleries left due to the Irish Rebellion, the Depression, and two World Wars, and the ”Troubles”.
Emigration dwindled the population, and hence affected consumption.
In those days, distilleries started using Coffey stills (columnar stills) and aged their whiskies for only a few months. Meanwhile, Scottish whisky merchants and distillers `discovered` blending, and how it changed flavour and texture, not to mention cost.
Irish did not blend as their whiskies could compete with Scotch on price anytime and anywhere.
Irish whiskey in general is not `peat` kilned. Only hot air is used, and distillers now use very large alembic stills.
These days, Connemara Distillery makes and markets a few `peated` Irish whiskies, but so far, it is the only establishment that does it.
In the 1930s, distilleries needed to reduce costs for low-end products. In order to cut costs, they started blending regular whiskies with grain distillates. This made them `tame` and insipid.
By the 1980s, taking a lesson from Scottish distilleries who had much success with their single malt whiskies aged in Sherry, Bourbon, Port, Bordeaux or Burgundy barrels, Irish distilleries started emphasising flavour, texture, smoothness and `character` in an attempt to cater to a more demanding market. Now they are experimenting with old recipes incorporating mixing barley with oats and rye, ageing longer, for some 12 years or longer.
There are now three distilleries in Ireland, of which two are owned by Pernod-Ricard from France and the other, which opened in 1987 with capital from local sources north of Dublin.
Irish whiskey is less “spicy”, and somewhat lighter than its Scottish counterpart.
The Vintages division of the LCBO frequently offers fine Irish whiskies.
Cask Strength Peated Single Malt 12 Years Old, at 60 per cent ABV,
Coonemara
18-Year-Old Limited Reserve, Jameson
Ten-Year-Old Single Malt, Bushmills
are some that are available from time to time.

PROFESSOR B’S WINE RECOMMENDATIONS

Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it.
Anonymous

White wines

The Three Pinots, NV, Pele Island Winery, Ontario,
$16.95

Pinot Grigio, 2024, Lumina, Italy,
$ 16.00

Albarino, 2024, La Vale Vineyard, Spain
$ 23.95

Red wines

Agiorgitiko, Thalia, Greece
$ 13.25

Reserva Tannat, 2023, Bodegas Garzón, Uruguay
$ 23.95

Vinum Pinot Noir, 2023, Radford Dale, South Africa
$ 23.`95

Drink red wines at 15 C

White wines 12 C

Sparkling wines 9 – 10 C

Rest wine bottles for three or four days after purchase.

MENCIA – SPAIN’S OTHER GREAT RED WINE GRAPE

Most wine enthusiasts know that tempranillo is Spain’s most popular and admired red grape, but very few know about mencia.

Mencía, a native of Spain and Portugal, captivates with its deep violet hues and aromatic intensity, reflecting its high anthocyanin content and terpenoid composition. If you like pinot noir, you are likely to appreciate the delicacy of mencía.

Mencía releases a floral bouquet intertwined with strawberry, raspberry, liquorice, black cherry sauce, and a hint of pomegranate.

On the palate, mencía wines surprise with a peppery burst, balanced by tart notes of sour cherry and red currant with high levels of acid. Tannins range from smooth and moderate to light yet noticeable. Depending on its region of origin, a mineral-like texture may be present, enhancing its peppery character.

VANCOUVER ISLAND WINES AND WINERIES

British Columbia is the second largest producer in Canada.
The mainland’s most important and largest region is around Okanagan Lake.
Vancouver Island now has 17 wineries that benefit from the long, cool growing season to produce a range of red, white and sparkling wines.
The mild climate works especially well for pinot noir and pinot gris.
Winemaking began on Vancouver Island as early as the 1920s, with fruit wine made from local berries—a tradition that endures today, with not only fruit wine but honey wine (mead) and still and sparkling wine from grapes made here. It was a provincial government research project in the 1980s, tasked with identifying grape varietals that could thrive in the maritime climate (such as many hardy hybrid grapes), that really fuelled the modern wine industry.
Most are boutique-sized estates with grapes grown and wine made on site, and among them are many family-run enterprises where you’ll find a welcoming clan member pouring your tasting. Some offer tours and tastings only seasonally; if you’re visiting outside the June to September period, check ahead to confirm hours.
Black Sage, Fort Berens, Rust Wine Co., Blue Grouse, Chronos and Unsworth are some of the wineries.
You can order their wines online as provincial wine shipping is legal.

CASK STRENGTH SCOTCH WHISKY

Blended, widely advertised and marketed whiskies are almost always bottled at 40 per cent ABV.

Whisky is distilled out at 65 – 70 ABV and cask-aged for at least two years, most of them for four to five years, during which the alcohol content diminishes by two to two-and-a-half per cent in the first few years, depending on the humidity of the cellar or storage area.

Whiskies aged for eight years cost considerably more than those aged for three to four years. This is due to volume loss and tied-up capital.

More and more small Scottish distilleries are now marketing cask strength products, which means the strength is as the whisky comes out of the barrel. It may be as low as 43 per cent and as high as 56.1 ABV.

The older the whisky, the lower the alcohol content.

Cask strength whiskies offer intensity, more authentic flavours, contain little or no caramel for additional colour and uniformity, and ought to be enjoyed from a snifter and savoured. 

BEER AND UV DON’T MIX

German beer gardens in Munich serve beer in steins (earthenware mugs of 500 ml or 1 litre) to keep it as fresh as the first sip.

If you expose it to the sun’s rays, your fresh pleasure will quickly turn sour, or worse… This interaction can make your beer absolutely undrinkable.

After a spring and early summer that left a taste of autumn, here we are finally under the sun and the heat. With this summer weather window, you jump at the chance to invite your friends to drink a beer on the terrace. While you are savouring its precious rays, your lager is changing.

Ultraviolet rays and beer don’t mix: they completely transform its taste. And if that sunbathing goes on for a long time, you may even turn your eyes away at the next sip. You thought a lukewarm beer was the height of disgust? You are not at the end of your troubles. Beer is made up of four main ingredients: water; malt, a sprouted cereal that gives it its inimitable flavour (most often barley); yeasts, essential for alcoholic fermentation; and hops, the famous flower bud that completes its bouquet. It is the latter that ensures the balance of the beverage by giving it its refreshing bitterness. The problem is that hops do not like the sun. When ultraviolet rays penetrate the liquid, an undesirable chemical reaction occurs.

Some molecules in hops – acids called isohumulones – degrade and recombine into 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol. A barbaric name that scientists describe more simply and more eloquently as “stinky thiol”. And for good reason, it shares the same aromatic compound as the pestilential liquid secreted… by skunks. It is “the smelliest molecule known”, summarise brewers. A smell of rotten eggs, of pipes? No, the bar terrace is not located above a manhole; it’s your nose that is a little too close to your pint of lager. Next time, reserve a place in the shade or ask for a stein of lager.

PROFESSOR B’S WINE RECOMMENDATIONS

Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it.

Anonymous

White wines

The Three Pinots, NV, Pele Island Winery, Ontario,
$16.95

Pinot Grigio, 2024, Lumina, Italy,

$ 16.00

Albarino, 2024, La Vale Vineyard, Spain
$ 23.95

Red wines

Agiorgitiko, Thalia, Greece

$ 13.25

Reserva Tannat, 2023, Bodegas Garzon, Uruguay

$ 23.95

Vinum Pinot Noir, 2023, Radford Dale, South Africa
$ 23.`95

Drink red wines at 15 C

White wines 12 C

Sparkling wines 9 – 10 C

Rest wine bottles for three or four days after purchase

LE CLOS DE JORDANNE – ONE OF ONTARIO’S OUTSTANDING WINERIES

Located in southern Ontario, the Niagara Peninsula shares similar soils and cool climate growing conditions with the French region of Burgundy.

It was in February 2000 when the name Le Clos Jordanne was first mentioned: the result of an exciting collaboration between Boisset La Famille des Grands Vins from Nuits-St-Georges, France, and Ontario-based Arterra Wines Canada. These two major wine producers from opposite sides of the Atlantic signed a joint venture agreement to develop a vineyard in the Niagara Peninsula, united by the shared aim of producing spectacular wines.

Located in southern Ontario, the Niagara Peninsula offers winemakers the potential to craft high-quality wines in a diversity of styles. Notably, the region shares similar soils and cool climate growing conditions with the French region of Burgundy.

Viticulturists were brought in from France to join their counterparts in the Niagara Region, combining Old and New World expertise to find the perfect location for the project.

Le Clos Jordanne has since grown from a fledgling group of vineyards to an exclusive and prestigious winery. In 2003, Thomas Bachelder was installed as the domaine’s founding winemaker, and the first vintage of Le Clos Jordanne was unveiled (with its commercial launch to international markets following in 2007).

From the very outset, Le Clos Jordanne has focused on producing ultra-premium wines made from Burgundy’s classic grape varieties – namely, pinot noir and chardonnay.

In May 2009, Le Clos Jordanne captured its own moment of fame on the international wine scene, following the ‘Judgement of Montreal’ tasting. Its results brought global attention to the Niagara Peninsula and Le Clos Jordanne’s wines.

Taking inspiration from the iconic ‘Judgment of Paris’ in 1976, organisers set up a blind tasting of 16 red and 14 white wines, primarily from France and California, with a panel of 10 wine writers and experts.

Among the whites, Le Clos Jordanne’s 2005 Claystone Terrace Chardonnay, a wine that was included in the tasting unbeknownst to the panel, stood out from the rest, capturing the top spot for Chardonnay.

The quality of the Le Clos Jordanne portfolio continues to be recognised annually, with its wines being awarded 90+ scores by some of the biggest wine experts in the world and medals at the world’s biggest wine shows, including several Silver medals at the Decanter World Wine Awards. The brand is also expanding its winemaking horizons. Last year, Le Clos Jordanne launched its first-ever sparkling: Cremant de Jordanne, a Blanc de Noirs sourced from block #5 of the Le Clos Jordanne vineyard.

More significantly, a new chapter started for Le Clos Jordanne in 2023 when it opened the doors to its new home and first estate winery – Domaine Le Clos Jordanne, which is nestled in the heart of the Beamsville Bench, in Niagara. This move allowed the brand to acquire new premium vineyard parcels in Beamsville,

Clos de Jordanne wines are available from the L C B O and direct from the winery

PRICE BIAS – TASTE WINE BLIND

People always believe that if something is expensive, it is automatically better or tastes better than something less expensive.

I have seen people presented the same wine and told one costs five dollars and the other costs 10. In 99 per cent of cases, people claimed the $ 10.00 wine tasted better.

When the brain drinks with the wallet is labelled price bias.

In 2008, researchers from Stanford and Caltech scanned the brains of 20 people while they tasted the same wine, only to believe that some cost $5, others $45. Result? The pleasure zones were more active for the supposedly more expensive wines, even if they were the same.

Some don’t drink a wine; they drink a reputation. They are label drinkers. An 1855 classified Bordeaux legend may sell for 450 euros a bottle. Not necessarily for the taste, but for what it represents. And in the worst case, they drink it unopened, pretending to keep it for a good opportunity. But from experience, good luck to whoever deserves it one day. This assumed snobbery is not just a cliché: according to an Oxford study, 80 per cent of non-expert consumers believe that price is a quality criterion, even before the origin or the grape variety. You might think that only neophytes let themselves be trapped. But sometimes it also happens to professionals.

Let’s continue with the astonishing syndrome of the 14 euro wine, which is worth eight euros. This is the paradox of wine: paying a lot can improve your pleasure, but paying a medium price can spoil it.

Finally, serious wine drinkers and most wine writers taste blind. Because in this kind of competition, hierarchies collapse. In 2011, a French study showed that wines priced less than €10 obtained the same or even better scores than Grands Crus Classés when the tasters did not know their identity, but these people were simply wine drinkers and not professionals. Wine professionals, who taste hundreds of wines every year, and sometimes thousands, can be occasionally fooled, but very rarely. Their palates are honed, and they approach tasting as an exercise in the ability to expertly evaluate the wine in neutral settings. Their reputation and success depend on their ability to discern quality versus price and value.

Taste can be influenced by the environment and occasion.

Over many years, I have had the privilege to taste thousands of wines along with other wine writers, and I can confirm equivocally that our numerical evaluations rarely varied by more than three or four points on a 100-point scale

SARDINIA – AN ANCIENT WINE ISLAND

Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Pisans, Genoese, Aragonese, Spanish, and only in the eighteenth century did it pass to the House of Savoy and become Italian.

Every one of the occupiers left something behind, and a surprising amount of it is in the vineyard. The Aragonese brought grape varieties and techniques still in use today. Byzantine monks planted vines around their monasteries. The Phoenicians were traders before they were anything else. Then hit phylloxera. Sardinia had around 80,000 hectares of vineyard before; today it has roughly 27,000. The recovery, when it came, went in the wrong direction: quantity over quality, dark alcoholic reds shipped off to strengthen other regions’ wine. That only really turned around in the last thirty years, which is why Sardinian wine is interesting now.

Cannonau is the island’s most planted red and its most famous. It is genetically Grenache, imported by the Spanish.

Carignano is Carignan, most likely brought by the Phoenicians. Almost all of it grows in the Sulcis, in the southwest, where it tolerates salt-laden sea wind better than most vines. The soil there is sandy, and phylloxera cannot travel through sand, which is why a good deal of Sulcis Carignano still grows un-grafted, the way vines in Europe grew before 1863.

Carignano del Sulcis may be the most underrated red on the island.

Monica may have arrived with Spanish monks in the eleventh century; in parts of the island it is still called Monica di Spagna.

White grapes

Vermentino is the island’s signature white and holds Sardinia’s only DOCG, Vermentino di Gallura, in the granite country of the northeast. The granite is the whole point; it gives the wine a saline, mineral edge and the almond note the Gallurese are rightly proud of. There is also a late harvest style, richer and gold-toned.

Nuragus is one of the oldest white varieties, probably Phoenician, and for a long time the most planted.

Semidano was traditionally blended in to soften Nuragus, then largely abandoned after phylloxera. Torbato belongs to the wider Malvasia family and arrived with Spanish rule.

Vernaccia di Oristano was the island’s first DOC, in 1971.

Malvasia di Bosa is made the same way as Vernaccia, under its own veil of yeast

. Malvasia takes its name from Monemvasia, the Greek port that shipped the wine around the Mediterranean.

Moscato, the Romans called vitis apiana, the vine of the bees, because the bees got there first. The sparkling wines are worth trying.

Some Sardinian wines are occasionally available at the LCBO.