In less than a week, the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta will turn into a little heaven for lovers of wine and good cheer. The Delicata Classic Wine Festival starts next Thursday and is held every evening until Sunday, August 7, 7pm until midnight.
While there’s absolutely no need for encyclopaedic wine knowledge to revel in the festival, a little bit of information can help you come across as a seasoned aficionado with an esteemed opinion and whose glass therefore deserves to be kept topped up.
However, memorising the 912 pages of The Oxford Companion to Wine in the next six days is probably going to be a near-impossible task. To the rescue comes this short bluffer’s guide to Delicata’s Classic Wine Festival, which will help you brush up on essential festival trivia in minutes.
I have penned down seven light-hearted, fun but little-known facts in the form of frivolous questions and answers that, when uttered with the utmost poise between a sniff and a sip, will bestow upon you an air of apparent erudition that dumbfounds any wine snob or anyone else crossing your trail around the wine stalls.
• Did you know that the festival is organised in celebration of the Maltese grape harvest? Actually, this year it coincides to the day with the crush since Chardonnay grapes were picked early this morning and pressed at the Delicata winery’s state-of-the-art fermentation hall and grape receiving bay which you can spot from the gardens’ balcony across the sea on the other side of the Grand Harbour.
• Isn’t it remarkable that the Grand Vin de Hauteville Viognier and a number of other wines on show simply didn’t exist at the time of the festival’s maiden edition in 2002? Sure enough, because most of the new vineyards were planted to international varieties in the late 1990s, it only started to bear enough quality fruit years later.
• Could it be any easier to taste all the wines in the proper order like a professional wine taster would? The free festival brochure and map lists all the stalls and their respective wines. The recommended order is: sparkling wines first, light white wines before fuller-flavoured ones, then the rosés followed by reds and, finally, the sweet and lush Casella Moscato.
• Whether from Malta or Gozo, Delicata wines have been well received by many wine critics, you know? In fact, his eminence Oz Clarke, whose first love is Bordeaux, attended the Delicata Wine Festival in Gozo a few years ago – and did Oz like the red, or what!
• Let me tell you about wine, shall I? Would you believe Malta only produces 0.06 per cent of the total wine production of France? And, Malta’s best wines can compete and beat them on their home turf like Delicata’s 2014 Gran Cavalier Merlot which won gold in Bourg.
• Have you heard that Delicata’s wine stewards work out and train their biceps brachii or their cork-pulling muscles? It’s just a rumour. Although, when opening a bottle with a corkscrew, one’s biceps first unscrew the cork (supination), then pull the cork out (flexion). Screwcaps of the Classic Collection and Frizzante bottles are less athletically challenging.
• Delicata Classic Wine Festival wine glasses are somewhat of a collector’s item. Missing editions of the series of glasses are hard to find. You could always try your luck on eBay and, of course, it’s never too late to start collecting.
The Delicata Classic Wine Festival kicks off in Valletta in six days’ time. Weeks later, on August 19, 20 and 21, this most popular of wine events will once again move to the heart of Gozo’s viticultural land, Nadur, in celebration of the end of the Maltese and Gozitan grape harvest.