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The Mark Smith Podcast

Mark Smith conversation.mp3

Mark starts by successfully ducking the 'spying' question by going on to compare the white wine weekend with other wine events he has attended. He then takes us through his approach to tasting wine and describes the difference between drinking for 'work' and drinking for pleasure.  We then discuss what has changed in the Tassie wine industry over the last 14 years and what the future holds for the industry.  We put him on the spot by seeing if he can tell the difference between a wine from the north of the state and one from the south.  Lastly to inject some much needed controversy we tackle the issue of what the hell is going on with the wording in wine bottle back labels.

Mark Smith - Wine writer and fellow 'punter'.

We started this site because we love wine but we also wanted to learn about web development, podcasting and the wine industry as a whole.  Everything we have done so far has been self taught, which is fine, but we have always been interested in finding out how the professionals operate (for a start, don't they always have a photo of the person? - Ed).  So when Neil Snare introduced PJ to Mark Smith at the recent Winesouth's White Wine Weekend  he leapt at the chance to talk to someone who has been reporting on the wine industry for 14 years.  Mark Smith writes for 'The Examiner' (Northern Tasmania's daily newspaper) as well as other publications and has covered all aspects of the Tassie wine industry.

Now you would think that given such an opportunity PJ would have started off with some deep and serious questions but no instead he accuses Mark of spying for northern Tasmanian vineyards.  Luckily Mark ignored him and talked about how people should come down to the white weekend instead. 

Sensibly PJ got serious and started asking about the things we really wanted to know like how the white wine weekend compared with other events Mark had attended.  He made the point that what really matters at any wine event is the quality of the featured wine so he regarded the white wine weekend "as a quality event".  He noted that Tasmanian events differ from the large wine events held on the mainland and overseas due to the fact that many of the participating vineyards are family owned business rather than large companies with their huge marketing budgets, which means there is a lack of supporting marketing material and information. 

We then moved on to finding out how a 'professional' approaches tasting at this type of event.  Interestingly his method mirrored that used by a number of punters.  They all started with the Sparkling wine, went through the Sauvignon Blancs, Rieslings and then on to wines like Chardonnay.  The main difference being that Mark makes a point of starting with the youngest wines in each variety, which is not something we had ever considered.  Our approach is to start at one end of the table and work your way to the other end trying everything, whether you like it or not, as you go (comprehensive but definitely not 'professional' - Ed) 

Wine writers drink wine for a living - think about that for a moment....  Suppressing our massive jealousy for a moment we asked whether there is a difference between 'work' drinking and 'fun' drinking.  Mark's response was that wine drunk for pleasure almost always involves food and often wines that don't score well when tasted in isolation will 'improve' when drunk with food.  

As an example, some people complained to us that a few of the wines had too much acid and yet Mark believes that it is the acid that makes a good food wine.  For the record Mark nominated Sauvignon Blanc and Rieslings as the best wines to drink for fun, drinking the rest just helped pay his mortgage.

As passionate as we are there is no substitute for experience and we wanted to hear Mark's views on the Tassie wine industry and particularly what he believed had changed over the last 14 years.  The major change he believes has been the increasing professionalism of the industry, which has come about by the move from the 'hobby vineyard' to a business approach as well as the increasing presence of large players like Hardys.  The impact of this can be seen from the fact that, as Mark said, the Tassie wine industry "punches above it's weight" and while it is only about 0.5% of the national crop it makes up about 15% of premium wines.  Mark wants to see more large players in the state as this will help to promote the industry more widely.  He lamented the fact that we make so many good wines but that they rarely make it outside the state in enough quantity to make a difference.

Talking about the industry led us to another topic and that related to the fact that a lot of Tassie wine is made by a small number of winemakers and we wondered if this made Tassie wine too 'similar'.  "You do see a remarkable similarity between wines as youngsters, particularly the whites, but after a few months in the bottle they start to show both regional and varietal characteristics".  Having said that he then went on to clearly describe those regional and varietal differences.  As we said there is no substitute for experience.

So far so good but we wouldn't be punters if we didn't take the opportunity to talk about some of our pet hates to a wine 'expert'.  For a long time we have thought that the wording on the back labels of wine bottles is more often about someone showing off their use of a thesaurus or their ability to over use flowery and arty language rather than letting 'punters' really know how the wine is going to taste.   Now was the time to find out if we were just crazy old cranks who are a heart beat away from eating out of garbage cans or whether we were on to something (please, please let it be the latter - Ed). 

We were more than a little relieved when Mark largely agreed with our views.  He commented that some back labels contained tasting notes that appeared to be aimed at a small section of wine consumers who frequented the 5 star end of town.  We nodded furiously in agreement when Mark pointed out that any tasting notes are a reflection of the wine when it is bottled and may not allow for how the wine will taste when it is actually drunk.  

He mentioned that in his writing he tries to avoid the use of 'intimidating' or obscure language as he believes that wine speaks for itself.  The ultimate test of a wine is what you think of it as you drink it and the best written tasting notes in the world won't change how a wine tastes.  Still, it does give all those marketing types something to do - left to roam the streets you just know they would cause trouble.

Mark comes across as a friendly and down to earth bloke and this wasn't quite what we expected from a 'professional' wine commentator.  We put this down to our ignorance rather than anything else but it was great to have a chance to talk to someone with his knowledge and experience.  As we said, we are in this to learn and we certainly learnt a lot from him. We live in the south of the state and so we shouldn't be plugging a northern newspaper but we think that on the odd occasion it would be all right to buy 'The Examiner' just to read Mark's column (great now everyone south of Ross hates us - Ed).

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