PWC 90 Parker points dinner

We just had a wine dinner on the theme of all the wines having been given 90 points by Robert Parker and his wine appraisal team. We had 1 champagne, 2 Chardonnays, 7 reds of which two are Pinot Noirs and finally a Rieslaner Auslese for dessert. The backbone of the evening was provided by France with 1 champagne, 1 Chablis and 3 clarets, then 2 German wines, and one bottle each from Australia, Italy, Chile and California. As you can see, the evening covered a lot of ground, with a wide range of styles included.

Even within the same style, there was a good deal of variation. Of the five Cabernet-Merlot blends, the Tuscan example was more different than the others. It could be the Sangiovese in the blend, but pairing it with a prawn bisque might also have influenced our impression of the wine. (Pairing prawn bisque with a Bordeaux style red is a food matching which will be dealt with in another entry.) However, the Carruades de Lafite 1998 and the Pontet Canet 2004 did not show very well that night. Jim Barry The Cover Drive Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 on the other hand was performing quite nicely, thank you. Considering that the Ozzie wine (at around $200) was a quarter of the price of the Pontet and only 5% of the current market price (hugely inflated by speculation) of the Carruades, I'm sure you can guess which wine I'll buy again. In that way, wine dinners like these could be considered somewhat cost-effective!

A wine to match chocolate ...

Excuse the camera's auto-focus, which seemed to have targeted the background rather than the chief protagonist, but this wine (or any Australian Liqueur Muscat) is a good match for chocolate of any form: cake, dessert, ... even the richest chocolate truffle. Well, I found that out when I gave this suggestion a try. Actually I had already been trying something else, a fortified wine too, from France - a Maury. Both matched very well, but brought out different aspects of the chocolate creation. The Maury I was drinking then tended to emphasize the chocolaty notes of the dessert, making them more intense. The Australian Liqueur Muscat I was drinking highlighted any nutty notes present. Both were brilliant but different and what you choose might depend on whether you're in the mood for more chocolate or more nut.

Rutherglen is a wine-growing area in north east Victoria which is famous for, amongst other things, its fortified dessert wines and this Morris of Rutherglen Old Premium Liqueur Muscat is a well-known example. Made from late-harvested Brown Muscat, the grapes are hand picked, crushed and fermented on skins for 24 hours before pressing. It is then fortified and matured in large oak casks for a long time, before the best barrels are blended to give this wonderful dessert wine.

PS. Looking back over the entries, I realized I haven't really New World wine, so here is my first entry. It's not that I'm particularly biased against them, but I do seem to have so much fun exploring the curious ways of the Old World. BTW, can anyone illuminate me whether Indian wine is Old or New World wine?

Depardieu's Vin de Maroc

This is a bottle of Moroccan wine from Gerard Depardieu's portfolio. The award-winning French actor has owned vineyards since 1979 and has a joint venture with Bernard Magrez, owning tiny estates in regions such as Argentina, Bordeaux, Italy, Algeria and Morocco, planted with local grapes.Of Gerard Depardieu's wine, Guy Woodward, writing in Decanter, recommended the Anjou Blanc and Rouge from the Chateau de Tigne, Gerard Depardieu en Rousillon as well as the Passito de Pantelleria, Cuvee Gerard Depardieu from Sicily.

Depardieu said he did not put his name on the label until he teamed up with Magrez, but did not feel that his fame was used to market his wines. Several other celebrities including Francis Ford Coppola and Sir Cliff Richard have vineyards and the latter's wines from the Algarve have a certain following in the UK. As for the Niebaum-Coppola wines, that would need another day to explore. Hey, what of this Moroccan wine; made from Grenache and Syrah, it was an interesting drink.

The year of ....

Beers do not belong to a wine blog, nor do they carry the year of brewing, not normally. There must be a reason why this is posted here, and it has to do with its curiousness. If you have followed my blog so far, you'll agree that I have injected a fair bit of curiosity value into it. Yes this is a vintage dated beer, for the reason that the Trappist monks who brewed it suggest that you may care to age it. This is a rich complex beer which got more interesting after aging. I had a bottle of Chimay 2000 in 2006 and it was very yeasty, a bit like liquid bread overlaid onto the normal beer nuances.

The other reason I am using a beer label is that I want to emphasize the year on the label and wish the reader not to imply anything about the wine which was photographed - so if it is not a wine, you will have no associations! The year on a label may not mean the year of harvesting. Some fortified wines which are aged using the solera method actually put the year when they lay down the solera. But when say you buy a bottle of Madeira costing over a thousand dollars and it has a 19th century date, you would want to be careful and find out whether this is a vintage or a solera wine. But when it comes to Madeira, you also ought to know that even when the year is that in which in was grown, it can be either a vinatge or a colheita wine, but that is another story again.

The pharmacist's vineyard

There are many ways by which names came to be: one Chablis Grand Cru vineyard got its name from the abundance of frogs living nearby (les Grenouilles), whilst another in Hochheim was to commemorate the love of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert for their wines (Königin-Victoria-Berg). This vineyard in the Mittelmosel village of Trittenheim was so named because it used to belong to an apothecary. The vineyards of this part of the Mosel are very steep with a typical gradient of around 45 degree and originally the boundaries of the Apotheke vineyard are within these slopes, but later expansion brought in flatter and inferior land and the quality is not as exciting as before.

I remember meeting the owner of this winery many years ago when Gerhard Grans came to Hong Kong with Fritz Hasselbach of Gunderloch. He told me quite a lot about his various vineyard holdings in and around Trittenheim. I had just been reading a book about the German wine laws, I talked with the German vignerons about vineyards and ripeness classifications and greatly enjoyed that evening.

A Hong Kong wine

Some of you might have read in the Apple Daily that the wine served at President Obama's private dinner for President Hu came from a Napa vineyard owned by a Hong Kong entrepeneur - Hestan Chardonnay and Stephanie Merlot. The wine is available here in Hong Kong too.

Here however is another wine from a Hong Kong owned estate, this time is in Sainte-Foy Bordeaux. Whereas the Chengs who owned the Napa vineyard employed various winemakers, the wines from Chateau La Bourguette are made by one of the owners' daughters Beverley, who I had the chance to meet at a wine fair a few years ago. A couple of years or so back, Park n Shop featured both the ordinary cuvee as well as this wine in its Wine Fair promotion that is now becoming an annual fixture. I had already seen and tasted both wines and so got some for everyday drinking, something that this wine manages easily in its stride.

Of course everyone knows about the wine that is made from imported juice actually in Hong Kong, but that's another topic for another time.

Alcohol + Grape juice = ....

The three rows of bottles in the centre of the picture of a shelf in a shop in Lourdes show two of the best known of these fortified grape juice aperitifs - Pineau de Charantes and Floc de Gascogne. The one in the middle is red, whilst the other two are white. They are made from mixing local grape juice with Cognac and Armagnac brandies in their own appellations respectively, before laying down to mature in oak barrels. This is the ultimate limit on fortifying wines, as the grape juice does not even get the chance to ferment. As a result, none of the sugars in the juice is used and the resultant drink is much sweeter. Others make them too, such as in Champagne, which is called Ratafias. Some are left to mature for a long while; I saw someone advertising one of the 1962 vintage, but alas, I never got around to buying that.

BTW, the fortified grape juice is called a mistelle.

A still red from Champagne

Mention champagne and the image that is conjured up is that of a white bubbly, but hang on, the picture above is something completely opposite - a red wine from Champagne without bubbles. This wine (a Coteaux Champenois) is made from Pinot Noir from the Grand Cru village of Bouzy. Champagne villages are classified according to the quality of the grapes and rated according to a point scale up to 100%. Grand Cru villages are those with 100% and Premier Cru villages are rated 90-99%, others being given 80-89%. Sometimes the village gets a different score depending on the grape, but usually they are still in the same band. However, Chouilly is Grand Cru for Chardonnay and Premier Cru for Pinot Noir, whilst it is the reverse for Tours sur Marne. But enough of the Echelle des Crus for now.

Bouzy is the best village in Champagne for making red wine from Pinot Noir, and this is also used for rose champagne. The wine (from the 2000 vintage) was tasted at one of our wine dinners and it was like a light Burgundy - a star bright ruby with a strawberry perfume, and a fruity slightly tannic palate. Although this is a Grand Cru, I'm not sure that it will develop like its Burgundian equivalent with age, but nevertheless this was a good drink, regardless of its novelty value.

Second Wines

Second wines are wines that are either made from lesser grapes or wines which had not made the final blend in some top wineries. This concept originated from the Bordeaux chateaux, but is not limited to them. Lesser grapes can result from many causes: the vines have been replanted and they are younger or the plot is of an inferior soil or aspect. It could be due to uneven flowering, fruit set or ripening. In order the protect the reputation of the grand vin, the lesser grapes are vinified and sold separately. Sometimes, even after initial sorting some barrels intended for the grand vin did not turn out to be up to standard, and so to ensure the quality of the grand vin, the substandard barrel is relegated to the second wine.

The obsessive may think that the presence of a second wine (imperfect but good nonetheless) can still have a negative impact on the wines of the estate. They choose to declassify any wine not up to their perfectionist standard and sell it off anonymously as generic wine of that appellation, or else they even discard it. Sometimes that could mean a whole vintage, so no wine of a poor vintage is released from that property. Examples of this practice include Petrus and Yquem.

Of course one can have a barrel or two of perfection when all the conditions are right. Then they can also be bottled separately as a super cuvee. Examples include Cuvee Madame of Ch Tirecule-la-Graviere (Monbazaillac) and L'Extragant of Ch Diosy-Daene (Barsac). That is the opposite of a second wine.

Beethovenhaus wine

This is the label of a bottle of Beethovenhaus wine I actually bought here in Hong Kong. The wine comes from a heurige (wine tavern which grows its own wine) where Beethoven stayed in 1817 when he worked on his famous Ninth Symphony (Choral Symphony), in which he set Schiller's Ode an die Freude in the final movement. Beethoven lived in dozens of house in Vienna for many years and all of these lay claim to being a former Beethoven residence. One is a bistro with an impressive beer menu (Beethovenhaus Bierteufl), whilst this tavern is still serving its own wines accompanied by typical Austrian bar food like it used to in Beethoven's time. I drank this wine a long time ago, and my impression was of a fairly ordinary white wine. Nevertheless, its provenance is interesting enough for me to have a taste of it. Who knows, maybe Beethoven had some of the same wine whilst he was staying in this tavern all those years ago!

Indian Cab-Shiraz with Rolland influence

Ever tried a wine from India? Well, this one was not from my travels; I've never been to India yet! Maybe in 2014, for a conference. This was tasted in Hong Kong, actually at Winpac 2003. I seemed to remember buying a bottle or two from Watsons maybe around that time, but now you can only find them exhibiting at the Hong Kong International Spirit and Wine Fair.

Grover Vineyards are situated south of Bangalore and as you can see from the picture, they benefit from the wisdom of the ubiquitous Michel Rolland from Bordeaux. I have not been able to dig out my notes for this wine, but I recall something not dissimilar to an Ozzie Cabernet Shiraz. Another big name from India is Indage and the Omar Khayyam sparkling wine is quite well known. I once saw it on the wine list of an Indian Restaurant here in Hong Kong, but alas it was not available by the time I asked about it. I finally tasted it at a more recent wine fair, but that is another entry for another day.

Oh sugar!

It may come as a surprise that sugar can be added in the process of making wines. With one notable exception, this is added before fermentation and contributes more to the alcohol level than the sweetness of the finished wine. That notable exception is champagne and the sugar used in dosage.

When champagne had been disgorged, the empty space left by the process is filled with the liqueur de dosage, a mixture of champagne base wine and basically sugar, like what you put in your tea. It can be as concentrated as 500g/L of sugar, which is exceedingly sweet. The amount of sugar added depends upon the final "sweetness" of the champagne, from Brut, through Demi-Sec to Doux. Most of the champagnes we see are Brut. Some make good Demi-Secs too, but I have yet to see, let alone taste a sample of Doux champagne! Sometimes they leave out the sugar altogether, giving the "Ultra Brut" or "Zero Dosage" champagnes. However, sugar is not only for sweetness, it is essential to post-disgorgement development of the wine!! Come to think of it, I have actually experienced the difference that various sugar levels make to what started off as essentially the same champagne, but that's for another day!

Bull Sxxt, or is it really Cowpat?

Now that got your attention, didn't it? Wait, this is no trick; I am really blogging about the excrement to emerge from the tail end of a dairy cow, which is used to make fertilizer for the vines. But first, let's get this gender thing out of the way. If we're talking cows, then it wouldn't be BS, would it but cowpat!

I read from the web that Carl von Schubert of the famous Maximin Grunhaus estate really kept cows for their dung. I suppose if you're obsessively organic, you'd want to make sure that the grass that the cows ate (the original material from which the dung was derived) was not crammed full of nasty chemicals, and the animals are not pumped full of hormones and antibiotics ... nothing but the most natural, for sure. So he kept his own cows and made sure they grazed on pristine pastures as well as being husbanded to his exacting standards. I wonder if he does a line in cheeses too. When I asked Marco Caprai about this at a dinner showcasing his wines from Montefalco, he replied that he did too. So this is no BS after all!!

The Pope's New Castle

Seven Popes lived in Avignon from 1309 to 1378. The second Pope to live there, John XXII, built the castle that gave the wine its name. He also drank the wine a lot and made improvement to it; during his time it was known as the "Vin du Pape". There are a lot of tidbits about this wine, such as it allowing 13 grapes in its cepage. This is in fact not unique, Cotes du Rhone from the south more or less share the same 13 grapes in its allowed cepage. You can go to Wikipedia or other websites to find the list of the 13 varieties.

My first contact with this wine was surprising in a non-vinous context. I was learning French at the Alliance Francais here in Hong Kong in the mid 1970s and there was mention of Camembert cheese in the lesson. The Frenchman who taught us (M. Montagu) said he would drink Chateauneuf-du-Pape with it. For some unknown reason this stuck in my head. After a vinous introduction consisting mainly of Liebfraumilch and the like, my sister and I tried some Cotes du Rhone, but we never liked it. Most probably this was due to be mediocre wines as well as not breathing the wines properly. Then I went up to a friend's parents in the early autumn of 1984 for my GP attachment as a medical student. One weekend, they had roast lamb and they opened a bottle of wine that the Sunday paper recommended. It was a Chateauneuf and I can still remember that with my first sip, two words formed in my mind - soft and big. That was all I can remember from all those years ago. I then realized what a joy Chateauneuf can be, and thus the wine has earned a special place in my heart.

BTW, can you see that in the crest in the middle of the logo, we have IOHA, NNES, PPXXII? This spells Johannes XXII, or the pope who did so much to make this wine known. (In old Latin, there is no J, only I, and in this context, the I becomes the modern J).

40 year old port

There are four types of "indicated-age ports" - 10, 20, 30 and 40 (or in some places more than 40) years old port. As you can clearly see on the label, they are cask matured, or to put it another way, they are tawny or wood ports.

Ports are aged in two ways: in glass bottles or in large wooden casks. The former are the vintage ports and the subject of another entry. What we are concerned with today are the tawny ports, so called because they are tea coloured. (Bottle aged ports are less "oxidised" and keep their red colour better, hence ruby ports).

There are different conventions for indicating age in alcoholic beverages. For spirits such as brandy and whisky, the age is that of the youngest component. However, for port, that is the "average" age of the blend. However the older the wine, the less there is (evaporation and consumption), hence the blend must rely on a large amount of wine around the age indicated. For the above wine, the base must be some 40 year old ports. To achieve this, the port houses will age some wine in barrels every year. Occasionally they will release some of these wine, but that is another story for another day.

Pour the pirate sherry

Pour, O pour the pirate sherry;

Fill, O fill the pirate glass;

And, to make us more than merry

Let the pirate bumper pass.

I hope the photographer doesn't mind me using this photo as the starting point for my wine tidbit: my little girl went to the OHK Opera School last summer and was one of the "daughters" for the performance. This is the opening chorus; the daughters enter much later in the first Act.

Back to the pirate sherry, I wonder if what Gilbert and Sullivan was referring to was the real thing, as opposed to the various fortified wines from elsewhere that was basking in the reflected glory of the "Sherry" name. Proper Sherry comes from a small delineated area near the port of Cadiz, where Sir Francis Drake singed the beard of the King of Spain. I wondered if he brought back any sherry to England then.

Sherry is a corruption of "Jerez" - the town after which the wine is named, and the delineated area of production is roughly bound by a triangle with Jerez de la Frontera, Puerto de Santa Maria and Sanlucar de Barrameda as the 3 apices. In the days before laws regulating origins of products, wine is shipped from nearby areas and sold as Sherry too. One of these areas is what is now the DO of Montilla-Morilles. Surprisingly, this connection is forever included in the formal classification of sherries by the term amontillado, originally meaning "in the style of Montilla"!

Pecorino ... oh , and please move the cheese!

The Pecorino we are concerned with here is the grape and not the cheese. Pecorino (pecora = sheep) is not only the name of a number of Italian cheeses made from sheep's milk (of which Pecorino Romano is the best known) but also an early ripening white grape grown mainly in Central Italy. I bought this from (of all places) Marks and Spencers. Many would not imagine this chain store to be a place of vinous discovery, but for me they hold a special place in my heart. After all, it was over 20 years ago that my sister bought from them (in London) a bottle of Chablis 1er Cru Beauroy, the first dry white wine I grew to love. (You see, I started drinking wine with Liebfraumilch and the likes of Bereich Johannisberg and Niersteiner Gutes Domtal.)

Well there is another connection with my earlier experience too. The Pecorino turned out to be a dry minerally white with acidity aplenty, which is not unlike a Chablis 1er Cru in a softer focus. Nowadays, Chablis has tended to become softer, fruitier and occasionally even with a hint of wood, all of which de-emphasizes its original typicity. Yet there are times when the food and especially the mood calls for less piercing acidity and austerity (of the Chablis of old), without sacrificing the crisp minerality. I think Pecorino could be a good alternative!

Carmen's tipple

Près des remparts de Séville

chez mon ami Lillas Pastia,

j'irai danser la seguedille

et boire du Manzanilla,

j'irai chez mon ami Lillas Pastia

There are 2 famous arias in Act one for Carmen, the first is the famous Habanera, and the passage above comes from the beginning of the second aria. Carmen was telling Don Jose how she would like to have a good time - by going to the tavern owned by her friend Lillas Pastia, dancing the Seguidilla and having a glass or two of Manzanilla.

Manzanilla is a sherry matured in the sea port of Sanlucar de Barrameda, which gives a salty tang to the finished wine. I recall my first encounter with a half bottle of Manzanilla in Forest Hill, South London. It was the late 1980s and Sainsbury had just introduced a line of fine dry sherries in half bottles. I took a sip and it was a fine fino-type aperitif .... till I swallowed it. Wow, I smelt the tang of salt on the sea breeze, except that I was nowhere near the sea! Now I felt cheated if that experience wasn't replicated by the manzanilla I'm drinking. (Then again, my flat is by the sea now.) I haven't tried this particular wine, but I'm sure it's a fine example of its genre. Now what did Carmen have for nibbles? Tapas, I presume, but that's for a food blog!

English Wines

I wonder how many of you have tasted wines from England. YES, English wines! Some of my wine friends have done so in my wine dinners. There was a Bacchus from Chapel Down (same winery as the pink fizz in the picture) as well as a Nyetimber sparkler. Well, I couldn't buy that much wine and lug it all back from England last July, so I just took a picture, so maybe I can show someone later. So now you have it. (I did bring back a bottle of pink fizz from Ridgeview and another bottle of ordinary fizz from Camel Valley.)

Berry Brothers have a number of English wines in its UK website and I think I will have a look and see what I can buy. Then there will be a dinner featuring English wines organized by Peter's Wine Circle.

The local wine of Lourdes

I went to Lourdes to attend a Catholic Medical Congress last May. Of course, as lover of good food and wine, I would not let the opportunity of finding out about the local fare slip by. What was most surprising was that I had actually tasted wines grown from the countryside around Lourdes without me realising it at all!

That map was hanging at the back of a shop selling local food and wine in Lourdes. I had been to Lourdes twice before, in 1981 and 1988. I had bought some Jurancon (the sweet version) in one or both times without realising that the wines were from nearby Pau. A few years back, I had found a bottle of sweet Pacherenc in Tokyo, bought and even drank it. I had also tried Madiran in one of my wine gatherings. So that's where they all came from. What about a wine dinner for my Catholic doctors featuring these wines? Now that's a thought!

Tidbits about wine, vines ... and all things vinous

Various wine friends have asked me if I have a blog; I have answered that I'm not really the blogging type. Yet recently I began to reconsider. I am starting to contribute to a much more serious blog and I have also been impressed about a Facebook friend's effort in putting up a blog entry with a photo every day last year. So I thought I might just take the plunge and try my hand at something light-hearted, yet close to my heart - wine.

I generally have the car radio tuned to RTHK Radio Four whilst commuting and they have a daily segment called Art Tidbits about all sorts of news and features about music and the performing arts. I was directed to a Facebook Page which has a collection of pictures with expanded captions explaining about the wines, grapes .... etc illustrated in the picture. Now I have an idea for a blog.