Dropping by on a winemaker's dinner

I went up to the Grill Room at the Club to arrange a dinner next week when I chanced upon a winemaker's dinner in the last stages of preparation. The featured estate was Chateau Haut-Bailly and the winemaker was there to present the wines. Although being on call (away from the hospital) and therefore cannot drink, I nevertheless had a chat with her about the estate and the wines. Although the second wine (and they have a third wine too) can come from designated plots of lesser terroirs or younger vines. they vinify all the plots separately and it is at the final assemblage that determines which batch goes to the grand vin, the second and the third wines.

Chateau Haut-Bailly does not grow any white grapes unlike many other estates in Pessac-Leognan. They however make a Cabernet Sauvignon rose from time to time in recent year. When the grapes are small, there is little juice and no rose is made. When however the grapes are large, making a saignee rose can improve the juice to skin ratio for the red wine and one gets the bonus of a rose too!

450 years of Taylor's Ports

I went to a tasting of some very old Taylor's Port this Monday. This was all to launch the 1863 Taylor's Single Harvest Port. The tasting started off with a short flight of indicated age tawnies - their 20 year old, 30 year old and >40 years old tawnies, which although normally appearing quite brown and tea coloured, looks distinctively pink hued against the older ports.

Apart from the 1863, whose launch was the object of the exercise, there was also the half century 1964 Single Harvest Port. The firm was anxious to emphasize that although they have a good store of these single harvest wood ports, they are only going to release wines at the half century stage. When I mentioned the name of Krohns, I found out that this port house, which sells quite a few colheitas, has now become part of the Taylor's group. There was another port which was there to complement the 1863, the Scion which actually came from the year 1855. This will certainly be the subject of another blog. When the ages of the ports are added up, one gets the venerable sum of 450 years!!

The wines from Tonino Lamborghini

Mention Lamborghini and most people think of sports cars, but if you say Lamborghini wines then there can be confusion. Both are intimately related to the maker of Lamborghini supercars, but they are rather different ventures. When Ferruccio lamborghini retired from car making in the 1974, he retired to a wine estate on the shores of Lake Trasimento and started making wines. That enterprise was taklen over by his daughterPatrizia when he died (and will become the subject of another blog).

I stumbled across the wines of Tonino Lamborghini at the last Wine Fair and recently tasted their dry Brachetto. This comes from the wine section of the designer accessories business of the elder son Tonino, which is divided into three series, all adorned with a special ceramic label on the bottle. There are 3 series of products - Sangue di Miura Super Italy: all DOCG wines (Anmarone, Barolo and Brunello); the Sangue di Miura with some IGTs and DOCs (this is the line of the dry Brachetto) and the Palazzo dei Vignoia which includes some very intriguing DOC blends.

A week of wine tasting and dinners

Today is the start of the 3 day wine trade exhibition Vinexpo and there are wine events all week and more. Apart from one day on which I cannot drink (as I am on call duty), I have got myself into wine tastings and dinners on all the other evenings of the weekdays. Apart from this, I will try and wangle my way into the main exhibition to have a look and taste (even though this will be in the little remaining time after work till the exhibition closes for the night).

The week went off to a good start, as I had been able to get into the Taylors 1863 Single Harvest pre-release tasting. This was remarkable not only for the 151 year old wine, but also for the half century 1964 as well as the Taylors Scion (which actually came from the year 1855). The introduction to these venerable old wines was a short flight of their 20yr, 30yr and 40yr old tawnies. Just adding up the ages of the wines tasted last night yielded the grand total of 450 yrs. Now that must be as good a start to any week of tasting as ever.

20th century Madeira tasting

I mentioned this wine dinner at which we were scheduled to taste 8 vintages of 20th century Madeiras right back to 1908 last week. I will make some general observations on these Madeiras and how they tasted. The 1908 will be the subject on a dedicated entry. The line up was (in increasing age) 1984, 1983, 1978, 1973, 1968, 1958, 1922 and finally 1908.

After going through the wines the first time, it was obvious that this was a very nuanced tasting, with all the wines being various shades of mahogany/brown/tea etc, with smoky, vine fruits/raisin notes and varying degrees of nuttiness to boot. These elements were held together with an astonishing amount of acidity, which although it can be quite dominant in one or two examples, nevertheless is never strident and manages to blend well with the rest of the elements to give support without putting anything out of joint. Given the similarity between say the 1984 and the 1908, some might wonder if it is worth the extra money for the older wine. I would venture to say this, it may be our inexperience that limited our ability to appreciate the difference between these grand old wines. I for one would love to be able to experience these old wines more so as to learn the subtle differences between them.

Ca' del Bosco

I had previously blogged about their wines, now is the time for an account of this winery. This now famous producer of sparkling wines could be traced back to the mid-1960s when the Zanella family first planted vineyards but the enterprise really took off towards the end of the next decade with Maurizio (who studied oenology in Burgundy)  devoting much time and energy into sparkling wine production and even employing a French chef de cave at the end of the 1970s. By the 1980s, Ca' del Bosco made still wines again (something that they started with in the early 1970s) and produced an number of notable wines. Now the company has both vintage and NV sparkling wines as well as still wines in its portfolio.

Mazzano Amarone from Masi

I got given a bottle of Mazzano Amarone from the Masi Winery recently. Now Masi produces a large variety of Amarones, Reciotos as well as Ripassos and just plain old Valpolicello, and Mazzano is one of the top wines, which they have grouped together as the Cantina Privata Boscaini. The only wine I have tasted of that collection is the Osar which is made from the Oseleta grape, an obscure local grape which is gaining popularity once again and appearing in more wines.

On the other hand, the Mazzano is much more conventional, with the usual cepage of Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara. The fruit comes from the cru of the same name, a terraces vineyard at 350-415m elevation in the district of Negrar in Valpolicello. Made from the best fruit of the vineyard in the best years, the grapes undergo over 4 months drying before fermentation in large Slavonian oak casks. The wine is the matures in a mix of 600L Alliers and Slavonian barrels for 3 years before bottling. Further bottle aging precedes release.

Weingut Kruger Rumpf

I recently blogged about a red Spatlese trocken from Weingut Kruger Rumpf. The winery can trace its history back to 1790 but it was only when Stefan Rumpf took over the estate in 1984, that the estate stopped selling off the juice in bulk and started making its own wines. Based in Munster, the estate also own a couple of other vineyards; Dorsheimer Burgberg and (in Rheinhessen) Binger Scharlachberg. The vineyards in Munster include 2 top sites, Pitterberg and Dautenpflanzer, both of which contain 50yr old Riesling vines.

Although Riesling constitute some 70% of their plantings, other varieties are also found on their estate including 10% each of Sylvaner and Pinot Blanc. Other varieties include Chardonnay, Scheurebe, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris as well as the normal and the early ripening types of Pinot Noir (this latter being Fruhburgunder in German and named as Pinot Madeleine in their English Website).

Surprise on the night of 20th century Boal Madeiras

The KCC Wine Society had a Vintage Madeira dinner last Friday which featured 8 vintages of Boal Madeira from d'Oliveira, all from the 20th century, from 1908 to 1984. I jumped at the chance when the event was announced, for though I have a 19th century Madeira myself, I had not found a worthy enough occasion to taste it. Tasting an antique (officially antiques are at least 100 yrs old) wine is definitely an occasion not to be missed.

The surprise was to make this evening an even more exceptional occasion. I had know that one of the members of the Wine Society owned a few bottles of 18th century Madeira. I had a vague idea that it was a 1795 Terrantez, When I saw him turn up bringing a bottle, I wondered if my wildest dream had come true. That it turned out to be. He generously brought one of his bottles of 1795 Terrantez from Vinhos Barbeito to share with the group that evening. Now it is rare enough to taste a 100-yr old wine, but an absolutely unique occasion for an ordinary amateur du vin to be able to taste a 2 century old wine. Not only that, Terrantez is actually a rare Madeira grape (though I also have a 1977 wine) which had nearly died out and had just been revived in the 1970s. This has turned out to be a KCCWS event that I would never forget!

A cooling wine pourer

Some wine gadgets are just that, but there are others which will lend a helping hand when you are wrong footed in the course of throwing a drinking function. Although I have not used it for long, I have this feeling that this might be helpful to those who are less than perfectly organized in their drinking habits and who might find themselves with a bottle which should have gone into the fridge say an hour ago to cool off.

This gadget which looks like a metal tube with a pouring spout at one end is not really a tube. One puts it into the freezing compartment to pre-cool it before use. Putting the object into a wine bottle will seal off the contents and inside it are holes which allow the wine to flow into the device, later to emerge from the middle of the "tube" properly cooled and ready for pouring. I tried it on a bottle of under-cooled Mosel Riesling and it worked well. However, I would not trust it to cool an entire bottle of white wine from scratch, if I had not started to cool it at least a fair bit. This is also useful if you had run out of ice bucket space in the middle of dinner. Leaving a white out of the bucket but with one of these in the bottle can let you carry on enjoying it whilst the next bottle can be cooled in the ice bucket to ready it for consumption.

A dry Brachetto

We picked up this bottle of what we thought was an Italian rose at the end of last year's Wine Fair. To be honest we thought the wine was a white one, as there was a white wine in the same bottle there (that must be their Vermentino BIO). Anyway the back label said Vigna delle Rose, so we thought rose and chilled it. We opened it for one of those improvised meals with a mix of seafood, sushi, satays etc. the other day. It was a deep rose red (like one of those old-fashioned red roses), with a sweet orangey fruity grapey nose. The palate was off dry with the same ornagey grapey fruity notes, supported by orangey acid backbone.

Looking up the wine on the web, I found that this offering from Tonino Lamborghini was actually a red/rose wine fermented dry from Brachetto grapes. That explains the orangey grapey fruit. We had it completely at the wrong temperautre, as it was supposed to be served as a red wine. That would explain the acid forwardness, but probably would not affect the body, which was quite light however one looks at it. On the other hand, chilling it probably muted tannins (which is not particularly abundant with this grape normally anyway), and may explain why it did not clash with a number of seafoods that night. Some did make it metallic though!

A red spatlese trocken from Kruger Rumpf

I had a Spatlese trocken red wine from Kruger Rumpf the other day at a Chinese style celebration dinner. Initially looking at the label (without looking at the colour of the contents) I thought it was one of those white blends (cf Liebfraumilch) but it turned out to be a red, presumably from Pinot Noir or its Precoce version. I wondered about the storage conditions for the wine, because it did show signs of tiredness even though it was only 7 years old. A ruby garnet colour, the nose was sweet fruity with a hint of wood. The palate was sweet acid and plummy rather than berry, with the plumminess extending onto the acid backbone which was giving good support.

The wines of Ca' del Bosco

I first met the sparklers of Ca' del Bosco at an Italian wine dinner many years ago, though by then I had already read about them. If my memory serves me right, the wine I had that night was a Brut Zero wine, which I still remembered as quite nice. Since then I had tasted some of their other wines, including their entry level sparkler, their still Chardonnay and perhaps some more, as the Club carried a number of their wines. So the recent tasting at a high end supermarket of their Curtefranca Bianco last month was the latest in my encounters with the wines of this estate, an establishment which has garnered critical acclaim all over the world.

Chateau Hanson from Inner Mongolia

There was this article about Chateau Hanson from Inner Mongolia in decanter.com on May 1. Now this is one of those off-beat estates that I met in last year's Wine Fair. I blogged about the Cabernet gernischt with which they make some of their wines, as well as their Rimage de Cabernet gernischt, which the Decanter article compared to Mas Amiel, whilst I described it as a port like fortified. I arrived at their booth at the end of the Fair and they were anxious to give away their wares for interested parties to taste. I got a bottle each of three vintages of their Cabernet gernischt (not sure if they were all consecutive), of which i had already tasted two. This should make a interesting diversion in any dinner feautring wines of the PRC.

Franciacortia and Curtefranca

I blogged about the still white wine from Ca' del Bosco recently. The area of the Province of Brescia from which the wine came was known to Virgil and Pliny the Elder and records date back to the mid 13th century. The name of Franciacortia was much more recent, having been coined in 1957 for the name of a wine. With the rise of sparkling wine production in the area, Franciacortia became the first DOC (granted 1967) to specify the traditional method of production and this together with the elimination of Pinot Grigio from the cepage resulted in the promotion of the area to DOCG status in 1995. (The grapes for Franciacortia DOCgG are Chardonnay, Pinot Nero and Pinot Bianco.)

However, the DOCG was only for sparkling wines, and the still wines remained in the renamed DOC of Terra di Franciacortia, and later (to avoid confusion) Curtefranca. Curtefranca whites are made from Chardonnay and Pinot Bianca, whilst the reds are made from Cabernet Franc or Suavignon, Merlot with a small amount of Nebbiolo and Barbera.

Wine - bringing us back closer to agriculture

In the West, most ordinary people in the city have lost their connection with the agricultural sector which supplies them with food. The apparent disbelief of some in discovering that meat comes from dead animals is a case in point, a less likely scenario in this city because of the widespread sight of slaughtered beasts or at least of recognizable parts in the markets. Yet however much one disconnects the food we eat to the agriculture industry that produces it, an in depth interest in wine brings us back to an interest in things that affects the growth of crop plants and the abundance of their produce - a somewhat roundabout way of reconnecting back to nature.

Natural disasters have a difference significance when one reads of it in the news. I remembered reading in the South China Morning Post about a particularly nasty hailstorm in northern Burgundy, which took a heavy toll in the Chablis region in 1998 and decided perhaps this was one year to avoid. Come harvest, the rest of the weather for the growing season for Chablis was not bad, so the grapes that survived made fair to good wines for drinking, but not for long term keeping!!