A German Brand Name Label

 



German wine labels are often notoriously difficult to deciper. There are village names, then either Einzellages (vineyard names) or Grosslages (a name to represent a group of similar vineyards). Occasionally there are independant vineyard names (Ortsteil, see the last entry) too. Here is however a name more like those from Italy - basically a brand name. OK, Gunderloch is as good as a brand name, but they have a this Riesling Kabinett which is sourced from their vineyard holding crossing the boundary of two neighbouring villages, so they cannot use a village name. They have more land from Nackenheimer Rothenberg, as they bottle higher Pradikats from that vineyard. The fruit for this Jean-Baptiste Kabinett also comes from the equally famous neighbouring vineyard, Niersteiner Pettenthal, so Herr Fritz Hasselbach told me.

2003 was the SARS year for us in Hong Kong, but in Europe they remembered it for one of the hottest heat waves in memory. The vines withered and the growers lobbied for the law to be changed to allow irrigation. Despite it being changed, some growers insisted on Nature's way, but Hasselbach decided his vines needed water. They remained green whilst their neighbours went varying shades of yellow in the pictures he showed me. The heat also meant that those vines with irrigation got very ripe indeed and although the wine is classed a Kabinett, the Oeschle level at harvest were well beyond the Auslese mark.

Hierarchy in the Vineyard

 

 

I wrote that Carl von Schubert kept cows to make fertilizers for his vineyards in the blog about BS. This is one of his wines. The Maximin Grunhaus estate (wholly owned by von Schubert) used to be part of a monastery, and the vineyards are named for the monastic hierarchy. This bottle is from the best part of the vineyard, which is on blue slate and whose wines are reserved for the abbot, hence Abtsberg. The next level down is Herrenberg on red slate, with wines for the monks. The rest of the vineyard is Bruderberg, for the brothers.

Maximin Grunhaus is one of the oldest vineyard in the region, being first mentioned in 966AD. It is also special in that it is in an independent part of a village (Ortsteil) and so the village name does not appear on the label. The vineyard is in the Ruwer village of Mertesdorf.

Mouton 1993

 



Mouton's famous artist wine labels are well known but not even its fame was able to rescue the above label from the US censors. The nude by Balthus failed to past the obscenities censors so the US shipments were provided with a blank label instead. So much for Americans being open-minded.

This however reminded me of a lecture when I was in medical school. Now there have been so many medical lectures, both during and since medical school, that it has to be very memorable to be recalled. The lecture was on breast cancer and the special reason that I remembered it was the amount of Rembrandts the professor showed in the talk. Now how did a Dutch Old Master get into a breast cancer talk? Because of the realistic nature of his painting. The Prof used the nudes to illustrate the signs in the late stages of breast cancer, noting that the model Saskia who was also the painter's wife, died of that same disease. I have been looking that up since and can confirm that Saski was indeed Rembrandt's wife, but she died soon after childbirth. His other lovers and models had not been recorded as dying from breast cancer, so how come there were enough signs in his paintings for the professor to teach us?

Vintage Port

 



Port vintages are declared by the shippers when they feel they can make a wine good enough for extended bottle aging for many years (say 15-20 years). The declaration is subsequently approved by the regulatory body after a sample of wine has been tested. Different port shippers may have different assessments of the years and one shipper may declare a vintage when most others do not. There are years when everyone agrees is a good vintage year, such as 1963, 1970 and 1977; whilst here are years when only one or two port house declared. Due to improved vine-growing and wine-making, it has been over 30 years since the last year in which no one has declared a vintage.

Vintage Ports are aged in barrel for a maximum of two and half years and then bottled. It is expected to need over 10 years of bottle aging, though the rule of thumb that a vintage wine of the same year as a baby is born can only be drunk at or after his 21st birthday is not necessarily true. Extended bottle of the wine causes a heavy deposit in the bottle when mature and vintage ports all benefit from decanting. The wine will retain its ruby colour and its fruit but will behave more like an unfortified wine once opened, hence they need to consumed over a day or two. There are two more types of vintage ports (as opposed to colheita tawnies); they will be dealt with in other tidbits.

Fleurie and Fish

 



I had this interesting food and wine match over the recent Chinese New Year. I had always been under the impression that light reds, but particularly young cru Beaujolais are good general purpose red wines to have with a Chinese meal. What I had not realized was that sometimes the match can be wonderful.We were given a traditional food for the New Year, which was a salted dace (or mud carp). It was salted but not dried, so it was a little like a fresh fish which had been seasoned with salt for say a couple of hours. We had it fried, which is the usual way of having this fish. The Fleurie was light bodied, slightly sweet on the attack with fruitiness filling the palate. The fish had a sweetness of flesh complimented by its salting. What was amazing was how the wine brought out all those elements, making the fish tastier. It is true that the wine did not improve with the matching much, at least not as much as the fish, but the fish did not overwhelm it either. As the fish was like a fresh fish having the benefit of a sprinkling of salt for a couple of hours before frying, I guess this Fleurie would also be good with other fishes (be they pomfret, grouper or others) cooked in the same manner. I'll certainly give it a try next time.

Collecting Wine Labels

 



I couldn't remember when I started, but I have got into the habit of either collecting or photographing the label of every wine I had tried (unless I had already got a label of the same vintage already) as well as making tasting notes. Initially I used a Japanese product but the retailers stopped selling it and the importer refused to sell to me directly even on a volume basis. So now I improvise by ordering some strong transparent adhesive sheets and thin cards. Initially I bought the ring binders from the label suppliers, but they soon ran out of space. Then I used the binders for First Day Covers, but they fill up quite quickly as well. I used different coloured binders for different "sections" of my collection. The blue books are for Bordeaux , and although I played around with having them grouped as 1st, 2nd, 3rd... growths, I finally settled on group them by appellations. For the picture above, you can see if fact that the top and bottom halves are from different sections. I submitted this photo (which was not eventually published) to accompany my article on wine label collecting, which was published in the May 2005 issue of Wine Now, but that is a tidbit for another day.

A Phylloxera-resistant Greek

My wife and I were having dinner a deux in a French restaurant doing the French May promotion when I saw the sommelier bring this bottle to the next table and offer the customer a glass as something special. I spotted the Greek wine straight off and when the sommelier came to offer us the next wine (we were having the menu de degustation with wine matching) I made a comment about it. He offered us a glass each and true to his word, it was special and definitely more interesting than the white wines from Southwest France that had been on offer.

This wine from the volcanic island of Santorini was made from  100% Assyrtiko. Whether it is because of a genetic resistance or whether it is a matter of the volcanic soils, Assyrtiko are somewhat resistant to Phylloxera infection and hence are self-rooted. Golden yellow with a sweet fruity nose, extending to the palate overlaying it on top of a nice minerality, it has a nice acid backbone which runs through to a clean finish. Looking it up on the Web, it seemed to have met with a certain approval too: it was given 90 Parker points.

Pacherenc de Vic-Bilh

 



This is a bottle of wine I bought in Lourdes last May. This difficult to pronounce (and remember) appelation is actually the white counterpart of Madiran, all in the countryside around Lourdes in the Pyrenees foothills. My encounter with this appellation (after having read about it) was actually in Keio Department Store in Shinjuku, Tokyo (? late 2003). It was a half bottle from Chateau d'Aydie. I bought that and at some point or another consumed it at home.

I was completely surprised to find that it was one of the local wines on sale in the shops in Lourdes. As for this wine, I used it in a wine dinner the Society of Emergency Medicine asked me to organize last year. Golden yellow with a fragrant fruity nose, the palate was sweet with vegetal notes and acid, the latter extending into the finish. Someone then opened a bottle of old Noble One, which the Pacherenc cannot challenge. But it was a nice dessert wine nevertheless for people wanting something a little off the beaten track.

Oysters and Chablis

 



It was one of two eureka moments for me in food and wine matching. We had just moved into the flat after having bought and renovated it in the spring of 1997. The stuff was still in boxes, being slowly unpacked. We got to know one of the local restaurants and its new owner, who treated us to some American jumbo oysters one day. I brought along a bottle of Albert Pic Chablis Premier Cru to wash it down.

Previously, my wife and I had already tried the combination of Brokenwood Semillon with Sydney rock oysters (+ cocktail sauce) and found it pleasing. The Chablis did not go down well at first. I suppose he had been used to Blue Nun and the likes as far as white wines go, and the acidic dry minerally Chablis just didn't cut any ice. I just went ahead and tried my oyster. Having cut myself a morsel, I accompanied it into my mouth with a generous sip of the wine. Wow, what a revelation! The fishiness of the oyster cancelled the acidity of the wine and revealed a fruitiness I had hitherto never associated with the steely (nearly austere) minerality of Chablis. Likewise, the wine's acidity revealed a sweetness of the oyster flesh which was masked by its briny fishy flavours. This was a classic case of 1+1>2; I would even say this interaction between the food and wine was fireworks. The restauranteur tried and agreed. It opened up a whole new perspective on dry wnite wines for him.

PS. The array of the oysters above was from a Peter's Wine Circle oyster wine dinner in 2006, some 9 years after this eureka moment.

Hugh Johnson 1985

 



I recently found this when going through some old things I brought back from England. I'm sure many of you are all familiar with Hugh Johnson's Pocket Wine Book, though not many would have been following him for as long. Now I have to confess that I do not buy a copy every year, as the contents don't change enough from year to year to "subscribe" annually, but recently I've been buying every 2 to 3 years to keep up with developments.

The 1985 version is rather thin compared with the current 2011 offering - 184 as opposed to the present 320 pages + endpapers. (The introduction mentioned that the very first edition in 1977 had only 144 pages.) Fewer countries and wineries were covered, though if you have a penchance for the unusual, the section on English wines was a full 2 pages rather than the single page it is now. The sections on grape varieties and food and wine matching were already present in the 1985 edition, as was the recommendations of wine to drink for the year.

BTW, the RRP was GBP4.95 then as opposed to the GBP10.99 twenty five years later.

Wine of the Day - St Amour

 



St Amour is one of the ten crus of Beaujolais, being grown in the area surrounding the village of St Amour Bellevue. The village was named after a Roman soldier who having escaped death in Switzerland, converted to Christianity and founded a monastery in the area. He was later canonised as St Amour. The most northerly of the ten crus, Pinot Noir is sometimes allowed in the wines (till 2015). There are 11 lieu-dits (vineyard names in Burgundy) which can be added to the label.

Of course, a place like St Amour Bellevue has its attractions on Valentine's Day. It seems that the village has now organized for couples to renew their wedding vows in a programme which includes a ceremony at the town hall, a concert in the church, a celebratory reception and a candlelit dinner. There is also another St Amour in Jura, which has a film festival around Valentine’s Day.

An International Standard for tasting

 



The glass on the right is the tasting glass that comes with the entrance ticket to the Hong Kong Wine Fair; the one on the left is an ISO tasting glass. Yes, there is an ISO standard for a wine tasting glass - ISO 3591:1977, which states that "the tasting glass consists of a cup (an "elongated egg") supported by a stem resting on a base. The opening of the cup is narrower than the convex part so as to concentrate the bouquet." Specifications and dimensions were given for versions with capacities of 120 (for sherry), 210, 300, or 410 mls. It should be made of transparent glass, no color, and it will be made of “half-crystal”, that is having a percentage of lead of about 9%.

All this is designed to present the wine in a standard manner to the taster, but not necessarily the best one. Other glasses may accentuate the most desirable characteristics of a certain wine in a pleasing manner, so that maximum enjoyment may result from using that particular glass design. Sometimes the ISO glass actually worsens things for a wine. The most glaring example is with sparkling wine, because it releases the bubbles too quickly.

There is of course the ultimate taster for blind tasting, a completely black and opaque glass, which denies the taster the benefit of evaluating its appearance. But that is another tidbit for another day!

Doctor Wine

 



This is a bottle of the famous Doctor wine from the Mosel village of Bernkastel. One of the most famous wines of the Mosel, the story was that in the 14th century Prince-Bishop Boemund II of Trier was cured from a very serious (some versions say terminal) illness overnight after consuming two bottles of the wines of the vineyard; hence both the wine and the vineyard from which it came, were named Doctor. Apparently there are also other vineyards named Doctor (or Doktor, the German spelling), but the one from Bernkastel is the best known.

Bernkasteler Doktor was originally owned by 3 families, but now ownership has increased to a total of 6 families. Dr Thanish (the winery from which the above bottle came) is one of the original three. That estate has been divided in the 1980s and the two resultant wineries are still comparable in the quality of their wines.

Colheita ports - a sort of vintage tawny

 



When I wrote about 40 year old ports, I mentioned that port houses will need to keep back some wine to be aged in oak barrels each year. They will need to be marked with the year of production as this will be needed in the blending process for the indicated age tawnies. But these are not vintage ports; those are aged in bottle after a couple of years in barrels. Instead of using the English word vintage (which only really means the grape harvest), the Portuguese word colheita (also meaning harvest) is used instead. These undergo barrel ageing with a more oxidative character, which will show as a certain nuttiness on both nose and palate. Hence colheita ports are a sort of year dated tawny port.

The word colheita is also used to denote a different type of Madeira from the ordinary vintage wines, but that again is another story.

A sweet Cabernet from Romania

 



Cabernet Sauvignon is not immediately associated with sweet wines but this is a bit of a curiosity, a sweet wine made from nobly-rotten Cabernet from the Romanian town of Murfatlar by the Black Sea. The town has a microclimate which favours botrytis growth, that is only second to the one of Cotnari also in Romania. Apart from botrytised Cabernet Sauvignon, I have also tasted botrytised Chardonnay from the same locality. Having been imported by the German negociants Pieroth, the Edelbeerenlese designation presumably meant that its was made from selected noble berries. The official Romanian grade is of CIB, which is the equivalent of Beerenauslesen from the German Pradikat classification.

This Cabernet dessert wine does not show the varietal characteristics of blackcurrant fruit but possessed the luscious characteristics of a botrytised wine instead. Not sweet enough for the likes of a heavy onslaught of chocolate, it is nevertheless a good dessert wine and its novelty value earned a place in my list of special wines.

VORS 30 years Sherry

 



Most people's idea of sherry is a dark sweet fortified wine, which is deservedly out of fashion these days. Yet there has been a quite revolution in sherry which many are unaware of. First the spreading knowledge about the dry sherries one sees in sherry country itself, and the introduction of a couple of legal classes of product at the top end of the quality scale (Yes, they're expensive too, but still good value for money).

VOS are for wines over 20 years old and VORS are for those over 30 years old. The above example may not necessarily have been classed VORS, but is a fine example of a sweet oloroso. Dark, sweet and cramming with dried fruits on nose and palate, spilling over to an interesting long finish, this has oodles of complexity and is a million miles away from the likes of Harvey's Bristol Cream. For the price of a middle ranking Cru Classe claret, you would agree this represents more bang per buck than the red wine from Bordeaux.

Triage

 



Chateau d'Yquem is the most famous sweet wine of France. It was even praised by Thomas Jefferson when he was basically the American Ambassidor to France, before he became America's 3rd President. He bought some 1787 d'Yquem for the White House and the 1784 bottles which were auctioned by Christie's 25 years ago are the subject of controversy and a court case.

What has this got to do with triage? Well, Sauternes gets its luscious sweetness from the concentrating effects of botrytis infection in the form of noble rot (Fr pourriture noble). Unfortunately, the infection is never uniform so that some grapes/bunches get to the perfect degree of infection, whilst others have just started. In any case, infection is also affected by the microclimate of the plants and so the development of the botrytis varies even if the grapes all got infected intially at the same time.

To get your perfect wine, you need to go out to the vineyards and select the optimally infected grapes for harvest. After going through it once, you wait a day or two and then then repeat the process. Each time is called a trie and the whole harvest can take many tries. The 1989 vintage pictured above was harvested in a total of 5 tries. This process of repeated going through the vineyards to harvest selected grapes is called triage successif. So triage was originally about wine harvesting and not battlefield casualties nor emergency medicine!

The Essence of it all

 



This is a bottle of the famous Ezsencia from Tokaji, the King of Wines and Wine of Kings. From the mid 18th to the early 19th century, three sweet wines were the rage amongst the royalty and aristocracy of Europe - Chateau d'Yquem from Sauternes, Constantia from South Africa and Ezsencia from Tokaj in Hungary. Unlike the former two which are specific wines, there are many makers of Ezsencia, it being the fermented free-run juice from the botrytised grapes used for making Tokaji Aszu wines.

As you can imagine from the description above, such juice is very scarce. It is also very high in sugar, making it very difficult to ferment. The final alcoholic strength is only a few percent. When there was a change in the law to require Ezsencia to have a minimum alcohol of around 5%, the vignerons were up in arms because this is often not achieved. As for low alcohol strength, there is even one which has no alcohol, but that is for another entry. Another problem is that it is also not so easy to stabilize so that it does not start fermenting again without resort to sterile filtration or some sort of chemical inhibitor.

Oremus is a winery, but it is also a grape (now renamed Zeta) as well as a first class vineyard in Tokaj. (It is also "Let us pray" in Latin; I wonder how many prayers were needed for producing this wonder wine!)

An ungrafted Rioja

 



The Phylloxera vine louse came to Europe from America and wreaked havoc on the wine industry. The solution was to graft the European vines onto American root stock, which were resistent to the devastating effects of its infestation. However there are some place in Europe, where the combination of soil, climate, geography etc, just didn't suit the insect. In these areas there is simply no need for grafting and the wines can just grow on its own roots. Some of these are very famous wines, such as Bollinger Vielle Vignes Champagne and Quinta du Noval Nacional Port, with an elevated price to match. However, there are other less well-known places which also did not suit Phylloxera, and where self-rooted wines can also be produced. One such place is a certain area in rioja where this wine was produced. Whether ungrafted vines produce better wines is  an unsettled question, but you can always seek out a bottle of something like this and experience ungrafted wine without paying an arm and a leg.

Old Beaujolais

 

This ia a bottle of Morgon 2001, which we had last December. Many people only know Beaujolais Nouveau, but there is much more to Beaujolais than just the new wine. Apart from the new wine, there is plain Beaujolais above which is Beaujolais-Villages. At the top of the ladder are the ten Cru Beaujolais. Whilst one might treat Beaujolais and Beaujolais-Villages to a light chill, the heavier crus should be served like a Burgundy (at cellar temperature).

Morgon and Moulin-a-Vent are two of the most age worthy examples of the Crus, and they can benefit from a few years in the cellar. Nine years is getting towards the outer limits of aging and this example is showing a limpid pale garnet colour indicating age. It has a slightly sweet berry acid nose to which age has added the secondary notes of stewed fruits. Fruit was less obvious on the palate which has more pronounced wood notes, and all of this is held together with acidity which has kept the wine going until now. This is a wine which is not yet over the hill, but one might not want to keep it much longer for fear it might start fading soon. On the other hand, this Morgon is from the Cote du Puy hillside which produces more powerful wines capable of aging. We'll have to wait and see.

BTW, I mentioned Moulin-a-Vent which can give rise to confusion, as there is a chateau in Moulis (Bordeaux) of the same name. That though is for another tidbit.