Three is the Magic Number

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The first Wine on Wednesday Worksheet!

Wine on Wednesday Number Three happened last week, and Vicky hosted.  This month, Vicky wanted us to put our money where our mouth was - or rather, guess the prices of the various wines and rank them in order of how much they were - as well as guessing the grape(s) and region!  No mean feat - but Vicky was very well prepared and gave us all little worksheets to fill in!  There was also a column on the worksheet headed "Alcohol".  Presumably, intended for us to guess the alcohol content of the wine.  Mine merely ended up with a tick in each box - because I was pretty certain (as the night went on) there was definitely alcohol in there!

Whites 1 & 2
The first white tasted like a saivignon - very green, apply and grassy, with a slighly buttery hint in the nose, and just a hint of zestiness to taste.  I initially went with the consensus that this was a New Zealand sauvignon - and guessed at about £7.99 a bottle.  As soon as I tried the second wine, though, I changed my mind.  The second was a classic New World sauvignon blanc; much headier lychee, tropical fruity nose and a sweeter but still crisp taste.  More boozy, too.  Clearly (I thought) this must be an Aussie wine, about £5.99 a bottle.  The first wine was much more refined, and therefore I changed my mind and plumped for it being French.  Here's what they actually were:

• White #1: Arnaud de Lassalle 2009/2010 Puilly-Fumé, Loire, France (Sauvignon Blanc 12.5%) - £12.34
• White #2: Brancot Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2010 Marlborough, New Zealand (Sauvignon Blanc 13%) - £6.15

So - not too far off!  Well, I was off on the pricing for the first wine more than the first - but I succesfully pegged the first wine was old world, and that it was more expensive than the first, which I was very proud of.  (Emma, first time to Wine on Wednesday, started to detect a slightly competitive, braggy streak... but I have no idea where she got that impression from!!)

Whites 3 & 4
The next two whites where fantastic.  The first of the pair was honey-smelling, but crisp and bitey minerally - chardonnay for sure (we guessed).  The second was oakier, more buttery honey smelling and a huge smooth delicious expensive taste.  I put #3 down as a £6.99, but really thought the second was something special, and put it down as £21.99.

• White #3 Pascal Bouchard 2010 Chablis, Burgundy, France (Chardonnay, 12.5%) £9.49
• White #4 Vincent Girardin Le Limozin 2009 Meursault, Burgundy, France (Chardonnay, 13%) £28.49

Not too shabby, again.  Should have been able to figure out the first wine as a Chablis, I thought - but its always much easier once you know.  And though I wasn't spot-on with the cost, was definitely in the right ballpark.

Reds 1 & 2
I'm not nearly as confident or experienced on my reds (getting my excuses in early, see!).  The first red was really good; a rich, treacly smell, and a sharp, acid, sour, tanniney taste.  Actually, on the nose, I did get a hit of the slight stinkiness I've now come to associate with "natural" wines - which I think Michael & Vicky also recognised.  But I was all over the place in terms of trying to guess what is was - maybe a beaujolais, a grenache, a pinot noir?  Probably French, but maybe Italian.  Price?  Hmmm, tastes pretty good, easily £10.99.  The second red was equally delicious, but totally different; spicey cloves and leather on the nose - but still smelled sweet - and it had a soft taste, leathery again, slightly sour acic after-taste.  Grenache?  Merlot?  Um, French (when in doubt, eh?).  And probably an £8.99 kind of wine.  OK, so here's what they actually were:

• Red #1: Chateau Musar 2003/2004 Bekaa Valley, Lebanon (Cabernet Sauvignon/Cinsault/Carignan, 14%) £18.04
• Red #2: La Rectorie 2009 Côtes du Ventoux, Rhône, France (Grancahe/Syrah, 14%) £4.74

Wow!  Lebanese?  Not a hope in hell of me guessing that - and I'd not heard of Cinsault or Carignan grapes before.  Chateau Musar has a bit of a cult following, apparently - and (cribbing from the notes Vicky provided) "based on Bordeaux grape varieties, with a very ripe fruit character, and complex leather, musk and dried fruit notes.  The very 'natural' fermentation techniques make it one of a kind."  OK, Über-compeitive mode kicks in when I realise that despite not having a clue about what this actually was - I definately recognised the "natural" wine stink!  That's got to count for something, right?  Right?  

I was really surprised that the second wine was less than a fiver.  I'd say this was extremely good value as I enjoyed it and would have spent more.  Why oh why is there not a Waitrose in Dalston yet?!?

Reds 3 & 4

The final pairing of the evening, and the first a big blackcurrant jammy sweet smelling Rioja.  Probably.  Well, definately something Spanish - and probably expensive, £18.99.  Done, filled my form in.  Next!  Ah, well, still dark fruit and rich and sweet, probably something French and at a guess, Bordeaux. £9.72 (a very precise, if slightly random, guess). Come on Vicky, what are these?!?  (I think its fair to say that I'd been enjoying drinking the previous wines as well as tasting them.  The final pair:

• Viña del Perdon 2000 Gran Reserva, Navarra, Spain (Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon/Graciano, 13.5%) £6.32
• Domaine Heresztyn Vieilles Vignes 2007/08 Gevrey-Chambertin, Burgundy, France (Pinot Noir, 13%) £24.69

Well, the Spanish wine was very typically Spanish - but I didn't get the grapes and I would have been over-paying!  Good to know that you can get a nice big wine like that at a very reasonable price.  And I still struggle to tell the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy (they both begin with a "B", no wonder!) so completely failed to spot either the grape, or that it was not a cheap wine by any means.

So I've learnt that either I'm much better at blind tasting whites, or I'm much better at blind tasting before I've had 4 glasses of white!  Either way...... a fun and informative night!

A bit of a stink....

Michael, Vicky & I went to the Bottle Apostle Natural Wines evening on the 14th of September.  The redoubtable Tom introduced us to the very broad concept of "natural wines" and what that term seems to cover in the industry; aspects of organic, low- or non-interventionist practices, biodynamic and sutainable viticulture.

Organic wine really only refers to the growing of the grapes and what is going on before the grapes get into the winery itself - but organic certification differs so widely across different wine-producing countries, that there are lot of very grey areas and it is difficult to know what is and isn't allowed for a wine to achieve that "organic" status.

Natural wine, then, is a much broader term, which has no legal meaning or certification - but is used to get a handle on what takes place in the winery.  A "natural" wine might be made with a minimum chemical or technological intervention; with low irrigation or low water; with a minimal of additives such as sugars, acidity adjusters, foreign yeasts, bacteria, or additives for colour, texture or minerality; minimal fining (use of coagulants such as egg whites or fish scales to remove haze from the wine) or filtering; no forced oxygenation; minimal or no added sulphur.  The key here is that so-called "natural" wine production is going to differ vastly from vineyard ot vineyard - so read up on the wine or producer and their statement of beliefs and processes.  Another key thing I took away is that caveats abound - "we make minimal  use of....."; "with the minimum of..." gives producers a lot of leeway to say that though they aspire towards organic or natural practices, if something goes a bit wrong, they'll probably resort to tried and tested interventionist methods rather than risk costly problems with their wine.  That assumes, though, that we're talking a decent-sized producer with ample resources who has made a conscious decision to go down the "natural" route.  Some smaller producers, are almost "natural" by default; such as the tiny productions of Luke Lambert in Yarra Valley, Australia, who makes wine in his garden shed, and for whom non-interventionism is a factor of minimal production costs and lack of industrial facilities.

The Daisy Steiner approach....

The other areas Tom touched on were "sustainable" practices such green, wild-life friendly approachs - which I think most people are familiar with these days (certainly anyone who listens to The Archers....); and "biodynamic" wines.  A biodynamic approach, among other things, uses prescribed calendars (such as phases of the moon) determining when to do certain things in the wine-making process.  Some producers are timing tastings with the "fruit day" of a particular grape.  There also seems to be a lot of burying things in other things and then digging them up later; bury take an animal's scull/intestine/hoof/bladder/rectal canal [delete as appropriate], and stuff it full of stinging nettles/faeces/barley/low-fat cream-cheese [as above], bury it, leave it a year, and then dig it up and add the contents of the scull to the soil.  At lot of this stems from the synthesis between science and mysticism that Daisy Rudoph Steiner devoted a lot of time to studying.

The wines themselves were.... a mixed bag.  My biggest takeway from the night is that some of the natural wines are REALLY stinky.  I mean, REALLY.  One of the wines we tried was Vin de Table Blanc "Valacabrieres" de Fantine NV Carole, Olivier & Corine Andrieu (13%: Terret: Languedoc) which uses no added sulphur in the production process.  From the look of it, it may as well have been decanted into a specimen  bottle as a caraffe - thick, cloudy and piss-coloured.  And it stank of manure.  Taste-wise, it was more like a cidre-deux than a wine - but interestingly after we'd been off and tasted some other wines, I was curious to try this one again and after about 30-40 minutes breathing time, the wine smelt more like stewed apples, and the taste was much more winey, still with a strong sweet appley taste but a hint of melons.

My favourite wine of the evening was Collioure "Folio" 2009 Coume del Mas (14%: Grenache Blanc: Roussillon) which was from a a non-mechanized producer where everything is done by hand or horse, which was a fantastic, intense white (though I didn't write down any probably tasting notes for this one, other than a big smiley face and a "Yum" to remind me to buy a bottle!).

Second favourite was Luke Lambert's Syrah 2009 Yarra Valley (13.5%: Australia) - as mentioned above, Lambert produces the wine in his back garden shed - the wine still had the hint of that stinkey manure smell which permeated 4 or 5 of the natural wines we tried, but was much more spicey and rich in its bouquet and was a gorgeous, rich, sweet wine.  He produces so little that his wines always sell out - but at £41 a bottle, I'm sure I could find an equally interesting and tasty non-natural wine at a much better price.

The final wine of real note was the Brunello di Montalcino 2004 Il Paradiso di Manfredi (13.5%: Sangiovese: Tuscany).  At a whopping £66 a bottle it was by far the most expensive of the "naturals" (they averaged about £20 a bottle), and is a biodynamically produced wine, fermented in concrete vats with no foreign yeast.  It had a stinky (again) nose mixed with tobacco, and a dark fruit, dry, earthy, leathery taste which was very pleasant.

My conclusion: a little intervention goes a long way (and is probably no bad thing!).