The word ‘selected’ considerably underplays Mark’s generosity when he presented seven spectacular sweet wines to the Club at St Cross on 22 November.

For Mark, wines are under an imperative duty to be interesting. If they’re not, he’s not. In the case of sweet wines that means he’s always looking for good natural acidity so that the wines are not just ‘sweet’ but offer the possibility of refreshment. For our tasting he also wanted to show how these wines age. As he said, everyone knows what a young Sauternes tastes like – and he feels that in their middle years many sweet wines are uninteresting - but once they have thirty or forty years age? Well, we’ll come to that later…

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This was a double celebration: Mark’s 50 years in the wine trade, and his and our first face to face tasting since the troubles began.

Wine has been made in Austria – mainly in the eastern regions bordering Hungary and Slovenia – since well before Roman times but until recently it was mostly consumed domestically or exported to Germany. The rest of the world took little or no notice until the ‘antifreeze’ scandal of 1985 made Austria briefly notorious when a few merchants (not growers it should be said) were caught using diethylene glycol in the bottling of sweet wines destined for the cheap end of the German market.

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Mark Savage returned to the Club in March 2018 to present a tasting of the wines of the pioneer Oregon viticulturalist, David Lett. Lett founded the Eyrie Vineyard in 1965, which is now run by his son Jason. Mark has been closely involved with the vineyard and the Lett family for forty years, and indeed on David’s death persuaded Jason to ‘keep the faith’ and to ensure he embraced his father’s traditional methods, which indeed he has.

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A masterclass in the art of ‘marginal ripening’ - and not trying to be important Mark Savage MW’s visit to the Oxford Wine Club was remarkable and revelatory. Though a surprising number of members – nearly half – had previously been to Oregon, I ... read more