Before I get to global news, a couple of exciting bits from our team: Recently Walter Speller, JancisRobinson.com’s Italy editor, chatted with Hugo Brooks on The Premier Cru podcast about his path to becoming a wine writer, as well as Brunello 2020. You can also listen to me chat with Matthew Weiss on The Wine Centric Show, where we touch on everything from wine and health to farming and the changing face of wine journalism.
Meanwhile, Julia, Jancis and Tam have been hard at work filling our tasting notes database with notes on the hundreds of 2023 burgundies shown during London’s Burgundy Week. And we have rereleased another episode of Vintners’ Tales on YouTube, this one on the late Michael Broadbent. Broadbent was a prolific writer and published over a dozen books, the most popular being Michael Broadbent’s Wine Tasting and The Great Vintage Wine Book. Most of his professional career was spent at Christie’s, creating their specialised wine department and launching wine auctions. Our team has managed to locate more Vintners’ Tales interviews, so we’ll continue our re-release project through February. If you or anyone you know has access to the 1998 episodes featuring Howard Ripley or Arabella Woodrow MW, please email [email protected] – we’re hoping someone may have recorded them on VHS.
On to the news!
LA wildfires – how to help the hospitality sector
While there are no vineyards in the burn zone, the LA wildfires have affected wine professionals, restaurants and wine shops. The fires have been burning since 7 January and have killed 27 people, destroyed 12,000 structures and prompted evacuations for 200,000 people. If you are looking for ways to help, Food & Wine magazine is keeping an updated list of hospitality relief organisations and GoFundMes for restaurants and hospitality professionals seeking help.
Dueling US alcohol and health reports
The Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD), a US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) committee, published a draft report of its alcohol intake and health study on 14 January. Posted on stopalcoholabuse.gov, the report states, ‘Among the U.S. population, the risk of dying from alcohol use begins at low levels of average use. Higher levels of alcohol consumption are linked with progressively higher mortality risk. Depending on the level of use, men are at a similar risk of health harms from alcohol use compared to women. In the United States, males and females have a 1 in 1000 risk of dying from alcohol use if they consume more than 7 drinks per week. This risk increases to 1 in 100 if they consume more than 9 drinks per week.’
This report directly contradicts the NASEM report commissioned by US Congress and published on 17 December, which found with moderate certainty that moderate alcohol consumption (one drink a day for women and two for men) lowered all-cause mortality. The NASEM report was authored by 14 scientists aided by nine researchers and three consultants from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. It was peer-reviewed by another 12 scientists. In contrast, the ICCPUD report was authored by six individuals, two of whom belonged to the 2023 Canadian research team that proposed changing Canada’s low-risk drinking guidelines but ultimately failed to do so because medical researchers and scientists found they had used faulty methodology and used their own research to make recommendations.
The ICCPUD report pulls only from observational studies rather than utilising data from randomised controlled trials. The report states, ‘We also modelled the total alcohol-specific mortality at different levels of consumption based on all alcohol-related conditions.’ They included infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, HIV and coronavirus among ‘alcohol-attributable health conditions’ in addition to a variety of cancers, cardiovascular diseases, neurological diseases such as epilepsy, and injuries. They claim to use ‘condition-specific relative risk (RR) curves to estimate the burden of disease attributable to alcohol use’ but nowhere in the report did I find a relative risk curve or a breakdown of the level of relation between moderate alcohol consumption and each condition. The report later states, ‘These risks can then be combined to estimate the risk for total alcohol-specific mortality.’
I don’t know if this ICCPUD report is written to be deliberately confusing or just poorly written but the report is in stark contrast to the clearly reported scientific methodology described in the NASEM report. HHS and USDA will open a comment period for the public to submit written feedback on both the NASEM and ICCPUD reports later this month. These comments will help to decide what research is used in writing the dietary guidelines for Americans. I strongly urge you to read both the ICCPUD and NASEM reports and to submit comments.
Orange wines gain official attention in Italy’s Collio
Decanter reports that in early December, at a meeting of the Consorzio Vini Collio, 72% of winegrowers in Collio DOC voted to include an ‘orange wine’ category in the appellation’s production rules. The category will be called vino da uve macerate. The technical details are still being finalised but some regulations have already been agreed upon: the minimum time on skins will be seven days, the maximum volatile acidity will be the same as red wines at 1.2 g/l acetic acid, and a Pantone scale – a standardised way of indicating wine colour – will be established. The Pantone scale will enable producers to print a graphic representation on their label indicating where on the colour scale for orange wine their wine sits (similar to Alsace’s sweetness scale). These changes still need to be approved by the Italian Ministry and European Commission which the consortium expects to take about a year.
One of Australia’s largest wine companies goes sustainable
On 17 January, Winetitles reported that Casella Family Brands (CFB) – famous for Yellow Tail – had achieved vineyard certification with Sustainable Winegrowing Australia. The certification is administered by the Australian Wine Research Institute and based on global best practices.
Given that SWA’s requirements do not disallow the use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides including glyphosate, this may not seem so impressive. On the other hand, CFB was responsible for 12% of Australia’s total grape crush last year so it’s great that everything is being documented and looked after to the level guaranteed by SWA.
Alsace’s 2024 harvest challenge
On 9 January the French publication Vitisphere reported that incidences of grapevine trunk disease – including esca, Botryosphaeria and eutypa – in Alsace increased by 4% in 2024. The increase is thought to be a result of particularly wet weather conditions in 2024.
RIP Dr Anita Oberholster
Dr Anita Oberholster, an oenology professor in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, died on 11 January at the age of 50. Oberholster, who was from South Africa, worked in her home country and in Australia before moving to California, where she joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2011. In 2020, when fires hit the west coast of the US, she spearheaded a collaboration with the California Department of Food and Agriculture to conduct commercial analyses of wine and grape samples as well as sharing her unpublished but validated testing method to detect the seven compounds that were used to indicate smoke exposure in grapes and wine. As a winery intern in 2020 I sat in on webinars with her as she patiently explained best practices for testing for smoke taint and procuring lab analysis. She was the rare academic who took as much pleasure in the slow work of explaining how to use her research as she did in actually conducting the research. I think I speak for most of the West Coast in saying that I’ll miss her.
That’s all for this episode of the wine news. If you enjoy this newscast and would like to see it continue, please subscribe to JancisRobinson.com. And if you have breaking news in your area, please email [email protected].
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