LIQUID INVESTMENTS
MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Fear of greenness leads to impatience with time’s passage
There’s a fine line between just ripe enough and a little too green
Wine fashions change over the years: once acceptable flavour profiles no longer appeal in some markets — or at least in some price categories. Chief among these is the "dusty," "green" or "herbal" notes typical of cabernet (sauvignon and franc), but also present in several other varieties from cooler climates. There’s a fine line between just ripe enough and a little too green. Perfectly harvested shiraz from the Northern Rhone is peppery; under-ripe fruit yields wine which is always chewy and herbal. Factors affecting what is acceptable in a wine change for several reasons. One is the pursuit of instant gratification: the old style clarets evolved slowly, kept fresh but also held back by the herbaceous, dusty notes in the young wines. Edmund Penning Rowsell, writing about Bordeaux in the late 1960s, remarked that when the 1928s emerged as very hard wines, those who believed in them compared them to the famous 1870s. Even then, he observed, "there was not now the same inclination to...
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