Text by James Carys
Images courtesy of the InterContinental Resort, Jimbaran
Bali has its fair share of cooking schools and culinary classes extraordinaire but what we are really missing is some schooling on the art of wine appreciation. Step up new Food and Beverage Director for The InterContinental, John Rees and, on a flying visit from Beijing, wine expert Dan Siebers to school us island folk in the first Wine Master Class to be held in Bali.
Personally I’m glad that Dan decides to start with the basics of Appreciating wine rather than charging into great detail about Vineyards, soil types, tannins and suchlike. In fact the first stage of the class was simply entitled ‘how to drink wine’ and immediately broke down any barriers that people might normally associate with wanting to develop knowledge about wine.
‘How to drink wine’ can, we were taught, be broken down into three easy steps:
Look – the color of the wine can give you an idea of the age, the grape type and even the climate in which the wine made. With the whites we were looking for a slightly darker body and Reds, it was explained, should get lighter with time and orange around the edges.
Smell – the human nose can recognize and differentiate between 4000 unique scents whilst our tongues can Distinguished only 5 flavors, meaning that the second step in the process, the smell of the wine is perhaps the most informative.
Apparently it is a common mistake to draw breaths from the bottom of the glass as sniffing the bottom of the glass only presents the strong Flavors such as the alcohol content. Swirl the glass holding the stem, take a long deep breath and hang the glass on the tip of your nose to appreciate the full bouquet of the wine.
Drink – the final (and most logical next) step is to sample some of the wines – pretty simple really.
We were instructed to identify three different Flavors in each of the eight wines we were presented with during the blind tasting and set to work quickly on a mixture of Old World wines (referring to the classic wine making regions of Europe) and a sample of New World counterparts (from Latin America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand).
The first two were both sparkling wines from Moet products – a glass of the classic Moet Champagne and an Australian Green Point (also owned by Moet Chandon). Both use the same production techniques to produce sparkling wines but the Green Point came in at half the price of its more famous cousin Champagne.
The question was, is Champagne worth the price? The unanimous answer from the class, based solely on taste was that the price to quality ratio could be justified in the case of Moet, but anything further scale up the cost should be questioned, especially in Bali where consumers are paying up to 381% tax surcharges on luxury wines.
The biggest discovery of the day (pens at the ready) was the Chilean ‘Frontera’ Chardonnay from the winery Concha Y Toro, one of Chile’s oldest and most respected family businesses. The Chilean winery has excelled itself over the last ten years in producing quality, good value wines and the winery Concha Y Toro are certainly making a Vast number of ‘hidden gems’.
As we compare and contrast the differences in premium wines and the more inexpensive varieties, and explains that the smaller Wineries are not prohibited as the bigger producers are. The smaller, family run producers can blend varieties of grapes in a much more creative manner than the corporate Wineries thus Discovering new creations that can quickly be passed onto the consumer, one simply has to be Adventurous in the pursuit of new and exciting wines.
The afternoon stretched into early evening and Bella Singaraja was the location for the ‘Fine Wines from the North of Italy “dinner, hosted by Dan and attended by a large number of folk involved in the food and beverage industry in Bali.
The dinner celebrated the close of the Wine & Dine Festival 2008 staged by the InterContinental Resort (Jimbaran Bay, T: 0361 701 888) and we hope to see many more similar events staged by John and his team throughout the year including more wine classes to support members of the hospitality industry in Bali.
