Tag Archives: Wine tasting

My Mate Marmite

14 Tuesday May 2019

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Those of a certain vintage will recall the ad campaign, and rather like Marmite, you’ll either love it or hate it!

It’s that umami thing, a combination of salty, soy saucy, savoury, fermented, yeasty flavours that’s guaranteed to keep the mosquitos at bay!

All you diehard fans of industrially made Prosecco – that cheap n’ nasty sweet stuff, made from soap shavings and lemonade, so beloved of book clubs – need to stop reading now, as Casa Belfi’s Colfondo Vino Biologico is one fabulous, foaming, feisty, feral fizz.

This is real Prosecco, the kind the old folks of Treviso used to drink, and not to be found ‘on tap’ at the local pub!

‘Why is it cloudy’, I hear you ask? Well it’s a natural wine, made from 100% Glera, unfiltered, fined, clarified, or injected with Co2.

It’s not ferociously fizzy, just naturally so, the secondary fermentation occurs in the bottle, at Easter, before temperatures rise, so the yeasts remain to give it texture.

Shake it or invert it, like a snow globe, to agitate the sediment and release that texture and spice. It’s light bodied, a mere 11% alc, with notes of flowers, pears and freshly baked bread. If cloudy cider floats your boat then this is for you!

Local Hero

07 Tuesday May 2019

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When you read a lot of wine crit, – Yep that’s crit – you become overly familiar (and indeed bored) with some of the language used to describe it. Such as;  ‘fruit forward’, ‘easy drinking’ or, God forbid, my own bete noire ‘smooth’ or ‘generous’ even!

I have friends who are both generous and smooth, so a little context wouldn’t go amiss, along with some joy, unbridled passion, desperately needed emotion, and dare I say love.

So I’m going to give you some love, and show you the kind of wine that makes me as deliriously happy as Pharrell Williams.

I first came across the wines of Irouleguy as a young surfer mooching around the coast of South West France back in the fluorescent wet suited 80’s. The drive from Guethary to Mundaka wound its way through the vinelands of the Pays Basque, and you had to be stupid, blind, or both, to overlook its wines, as they were, and still are, some of the most exciting around.

Irouleguy numbers some nine communes dating back to the 11th century and is a sadly neglected area when it comes to both knowledge, and the subsequent promotion, of its wines and their route to market.

‘Peppery as the Welsh, proud as Lucifer, and combustible as his matches’ was Richard Ford’s pithy assessment of the Basques.

Flaming red is their colour, from their tiled roofs to their distinctive berets, piment d’espalette, and the majority of their wines made from Tannat and the two Cabernets. But what folks often overlook are the miniscule examples of white wine made in the region. There are only about half a dozen producers of these and the standard is off the clock!

Arretxea, from the Basque ‘arre’, meaning stone and ‘xea’, house, comes from a six hectare plot planted with Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Courbu – the principle grapes of Jurancon – on steep terraces with sustainable vineyard husbandry and biodynamics.

Hegoxuri is hand harvested, gets a forty hour maceration on skins, followed by partial fermentation in barrique, and has the kind of remarkable golden straw colour that would excite Rumplestiltskin. This leads into a nose of exotic fruits, peaches and honeysuckle, married with full, rich and heady flavours – redolent of great white Burgundy – and marked with an outstanding nervy acidity.

These local wines, for local people, are rare gems, and whilst you have to dig a little deeper down to afford them, are a true testament to the power of geography over greed. 

Topa!

Freisa Good

02 Thursday May 2019

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As a long term advocate of non-compliance, I love a wine that divides opinion!

Sure it’s got more than a heady whiff of the farmyard, but that never stopped anyone buying Musar.

Decanting is ‘de rig’,  for a good hour before drinking, and the longer you can leave it resting, at room temp, with a bit of oxygenation, the better. This not only reduces the feral, bosky, gamey aromas, but it’s important to remember that this wine has been sitting in bottle since 2003.


Freisa in all its chunky, funky glory is a rare beast.  Robust, earthy, tannic and unafraid to speak its mind. If you’re new to Freisa, it’s first mention in Piemonte occurs around 1799 – so catch up! Burton Anderson describes it as having a kind of sweet – acidic flavour, like lightly salted raspberries. But whatever you do, don’t confuse it with Pinot Noir – that’s just too predictable dahling!  This is Freisa di Chieri, seriously small berried (unlike Freisa Grossa) with bigger phenolics and a similar structure to Nebbiolo.

Altogether now ….Freisa Good, Freisa Good..

Llum’s Yum

01 Wednesday May 2019

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Don’t you just love it when you come across a wine that not only exceeds expectations, but positively confounds them.

Just as I was prepping my palate for a full body massage, and more fat than lean, it rocks up linear, with vibrant, yet delicate, fruit, tons of creamy complexity, an intense, and totally unexpected minerality, cut through with a rapier-like grapefruit acidity.. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of pep and brio, with more than a whiff of the Southern Rhone, but hardly the norm for a white made in the brutal summer heat of the Roussillon.

Le Roc des Anges – I’ll let you work that one out – sits in the village of Montner in the Agly valley, Pyrénées-Orientales, on the northern, exposed, side – and this is the key – of Força Réal mountain. This is tough country, dry and windy with notoriously poor soil, composed of old rotten schists – we all know a few of those!

All vineyard practices are traditional – other than some leaf thinning and essential pruning the ethos is strictly non-interventionist. Majorie (Gallet) describes the wine as a work in progress – but I think she’s being modest.

Simplicity and authenticity are her watchwords. A traditional press is used, vinification is in concrete – with the shape of the tanks, and the level of the fill, determining the gentle extraction – with maturation in concrete – which enhances the aromatic purity and freshness of the wine – and wood (for about 10% of the elevage) in the form of one-to-three year old barrels.

‘Llum’ (meaning light in Catalan) is a blend of Grenache Gris 90% and Maccabeu 10% from 70 to 100 year old vines and is slow to release the full extent of its beauty, only doing so as it warms and broadens in the glass.

Far and away my white wine of the summer – Llum’s Yum!

Granato Foradori

30 Tuesday Apr 2019

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As you exit the narrow Salerno Gorge, a wide valley covered in vineyards and fruit trees opens near San Michele all Adige, this is the Campo Rotaliano home of the Teroldego grape.

The land has seen tribes and rulers come and go, Romans, Celts, Longobards, Francs, Tyroleans, Austrians, Bavarians and Italians, one of whom Nicolo da Povo was the first to mention Teroldego by name in 1383.

I know it’s just another grape you’ve never heard of, but you should take note as it has the potential to compete with the great wine grapes of Bordeaux. 

Cultivation of the grape is quite small, with around 400 hectares under vine of which about 75% is DOC. 

Elizabetta Foradori began exploring the grapes diversity back in 1985 and has thus far uncovered around 15 different biotypes which she uses for replanting. These form the qualitative backbone of her wines. Ensuring a vineyards diversity is the best guarantee of obtaining great results as you can propagate by massal selection – using field cuttings from your best vines – as opposed to clonal selection where you buy in clones from elsewhere.

The wines she makes are some of my favourite Italian reds, and if I ever feel a little down in the dumps, they serve as a restorative elixir causing my sense of humour to return, and a sweet little smile of satisfaction spreads across my ugly mug. 

Granato, Vigneti delle Dolomiti Rosso IGT, to give it its full title, is a noble beast. Deep, almost shy at first, it opens to give smells of wild berries, roasted hazelnuts, baked bread, tar and a herby eucalyptus quality that makes you feel you have just brushed up against the vine rows. The grapes are vinified separately and blended to achieve balance and concentration after long ageing in old wood. It is a dignified wine, pure and intense, changing in the glass each time you nose, and from sip to sip. Soft yet penetrating, the sweet fruit balanced with a supporting acidity that weaves its way through the wine like the wind in the mountains.

Romantic or what? You won’t get that kind of wordsmithery in the Sunday Papers.

‘A Walk On The Wild Side’

26 Friday Apr 2019

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The wine market is a dangerous place to be right now, especially when 99% of products are imported and reliant on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the currencies from whence they come. If you lob a grenade on the value of those key currencies, you have to adapt quickly.

Do you offset the collapse of sterling, continuous inflationary rises and duty, by buying cheaper plonk, or do you accept that you have to drink less but better.

Personally, I don’t think that good wine is expensive, not because I’m rich, but when a couple of cappuccinos cost six quid and a pint of craft ale almost the same, expecting a naturally made, labour intensive, product like wine to cost just a few pence more is living in ‘La La Land’ – to quote a popular movie.

If I’m being forced to pay more for my wine, I don’t want that extra money to go on a factory made brand, I want to drink something distinctly different and jolly hard to get.

Let’s – in the words of the late, great Lou Reed – take a walk on the wild side.

Marcillac is a tiny, obscure, appellation near Clairvaux in Aveyron, north of Rodez,comprising some eight growers making wines exclusively from the Mansois grape, otherwise known as Fer Servadou.

For almost a thousand years vineyards were the base of the regions economy until they were devastated by phylloxera in the 1860’s. 

The style and, more importantly, the philosophy of the wines are closely connected with the area. Violet tinted, brilliantly fresh reds packed with redcurrant fruit, and an underlying, almost medicinal quality. The medieval citizens of Rodez used to drink Marcillac for their health because it was preferable to the local water.

Peirafi is Jean Luc Matha’s special cuvee based on rigorous selection of old vines fermented in open tanks then aged in well seasoned foudres for 20 months. It’s a big mouthful of forest fruits, spices and an almost mineral acidity, angular and refreshing with a sort of haunting earthiness.

Jean Luc says ‘I love working with the vine up on the hill. And just before I come down, I like to watch the sunset and see how the colours change….I breath and listen to the sounds around me…I am in the midst of nature and feel completely content. The earth, the vine, the frost, the rain and the sun. That, for me, is the beauty of winemaking.’
 
Now, that’s got to be worth more than a couple of coffees!

‘Cos, I Love You’ – reprise

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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It’s a gloriously sunny, Easter Day and I’m walking the dog and thinking of what to open with Sunday lunch. There’s a leg of lamb, slowly roasting, on a bed of potatoes with enough garlic to keep the vampires at bay and it requires something good, honest and earthy – with some lively zip n’ grip – and due to the numbers involved, I’m going to need more than a few bottles!

Less than thirty years ago, the vineyards south east of the province of Ragusa, around the town of Vittoria in Sicily, were in dire need of some of Joan Armatrading’s love and affection. In a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline, they had fallen victim to controversial wine laws – still enforced today – which resulted in buyers rejecting the more delicate wines in favour of over mature fruit to add weight to their blends.

These wines would still be unheard of today, were it not for the efforts of individuals like, Giusto Occipinti.

On a shoestring budget, he and two friends began to vinify grapes from their parents and neighbours’ vineyards, buying in used French barrels, in which to age their wines. By the late 1980’s they had started to invest in new oak barriques inspired by the wines of California’s Napa Valley.

But guess what? The resulting wines just didn’t taste authentic. Realising that you sometimes have to go backwards to go forwards they started to re-taste some of their earliest bottlings and were shocked at the difference.

The wines, aged in old oak, were earthy and herbaceous, with a fresh acidity unmarked by the vanilla polish of new oak. By the mid 90’s, when everyone else was investing heavily in new oak, Giusti and his friends were ditching theirs and moving from cement to amphora in the search to reveal the purest expression of their vines

Cos do not use selected yeast strains and have never used chemicals in their vineyards ‘Our goal is to make wines that express our great terroir, not to impress wine critics’.

Don’t expect big or robust wines from Cos, these are delicate, sometimes ethereal wines. Sharp, spiky, edgy, mineraly, ripe but not overripe, rich but not over-extracted. Pretty wines in a nutshell. Fresh, lively, floral and aromatic – even the reds have a distinctly flinty note. They sit lightly on the palate, vibrant and earthy, the antithesis of the much overused term ‘smooth’ – the wine equivalent of ‘tasty’.

Nero di Lupo is 100% unfiltered Nero d’Avola. Fermented in cement vats and aged for 24 months in tank and bottle, full of rich, earthy, leathery fruit flavours, a touch of spice and a rasp of the great outdoors.

That’s Sunday sorted. Spread the love.



‘Greece Is The Word’

24 Wednesday Apr 2019

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Retsina aside Greek wine has never been, nor ever will be, mainstream.

This may, ironically, be a good thing, as there isn’t much of it to go around.

An adventurous few may be vaguely familiar with the Assyrtiko of Santorini, but I’ll bet my Byzantine Bouzouki you’ve never heard of the Robola of Cephalonia. 

The Sclavos family’s Vino di Sasso (wine from the stone) is 100% organic, hand harvested, Robola, from ungrafted vine stock, on precarious limestone scree, from the slopes of Kefalonia’s Black Mountain (Ainos). 
Biodynamic methods have been employed for the last 20 years and the vineyard is accredited by the DIO.
Vinification is with indigenous yeasts, and maturation is for one year in Allier oak barrels. The wines are bottled without filtration, or fining, and no sulphur is added, except in wetter vintages (and even then, only in very small quantities).

So, what’s it taste like?

Well, it’s got plenty of ooomph– which belies it’s 12.5% alcohol – and a broad, creamy, malo mouthfeel that’s cut through with a fresh, spritzy, flintiness. There’s also the kind of herby, scrubby, garrigue-like feel – together with a smidge of pepper – that reminds you of good white Rhone, together with a bitter almond finish redolent of Italy’s Ribolla Gialla – which (despite the odd assertion) is no genetic relation.

As Frankie Valli would say …. ‘Greece is the Word’

‘Take Me Away’

22 Monday Apr 2019

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Emmenez Moi Au Bout de Terret

Named after a Charles Aznavour song and roughly translated as ‘Take me along’ or Take me away – to a place in the sun, where one can escape, and forget, the misery of life’ – this ethereal, and nervy, little white from Clos de Gravillas certainly does that!

You can expect the unexpected here, as this is very different from the everyday white wines of Minervois. It’s a lean, green, linear limestone machine, made from organically grown Terret Bourret grapes grown on blindingly white rock from a single hectare plot – Yep that’s one hectare – and aged for eleven months in large Austrian barrels. It’s as fresh as new mown hay, or a new May morn, and picked between the first and third weeks of September.

Gravillas means ‘gravel’ – in the local patois – and the plateau that the Clos du Gravillas occupies has been used – to grow grapes – for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Situated about 300 metres above sea level on slopes beneath the Montagne Noire the vineyards catch the cool evening breezes, allowing the grapes to retain a bright, zippy acidity. The high summer temperatures add the necessary alcoholic oomph to balance that acidity, and create the structural depth and maximum ripeness, concentration and intensity required to make this an unforgettably glorious wine.  


Mad About Malbec

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

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OK, who’s willing to admit that when they order ‘Pinot’ they mean Grigio – rather than Noir – and when they cry ‘More Sauvignon please waiter’ they expect it to come from New Zealand – rather than its home in the Loire – and every fool knows that Malbec can only come from Argentina!

Once upon a time, when ‘Hector was a pup’, Malbec came from France, and primarily from Cahors, where it’s known as Cot or Auxerrois – not such romantic names I grant you.

It has a long and glorious history, once considered superior to Bordeaux, and exported throughout Europe and Russia as early as the 13th century.

So what went wrong?  Well, first came the protectionist measures inflicted on the Haut Pays by the canny merchants of Bordeaux to promote their own wines. The slight disruption of the Hundred Years War, devastation by phylloxera, and increased market access – due to the railways – to the cheaper wines of the Languedoc.

Isolated and poor – there was little in the Lot – they were still struggling well into the mid 1990’s, and as the only appellation in the South West where both Cabernets are persona non grata, it was searching for an identity somewhere between teeth tingling tannic twig juice, for the old folk, and jammy pap for the modern consumer.

Good vinestock, old clones, low yields, barrel maturation and attention to detail, have ensured that some wines have retained the wisdom of the ages.

Classic Cahors should be inky, rather than black, with a dash of medicinal iodine and jam packed with deep, late summer fruit. Expect touches of fig and liquorice, a lash of spice and tar, and a smattering of herby pepperiness. It’s subtle rather than powerful, classy and understated with a touch of astringency and a lingering acidity to cope with the confit and cassoulet!

I’ll be the first to admit that World Malbec Day is a fiendishly clever marketing ploy to promote the wines of Argentina – but why not buck the trend and go crazy for Cot!