1st Class wine as classified in 1700

The Hungarians have the first classification system for vineyards in the world; they did it for Tokaji in 1700. This classification later grew into an appellation control system, with a wholesale classification of the vineyards in 1730, and vineyard censuses in 1765 and 1772. Vineyards were classified, according to soil, exposure to the sun and conditions for developing botrytis, into first second and third class wines. Of the first class sites, Mezes Maly and Szarvas are historically considered to be the greatest vieyards of Tokaji.

The wine above was produced in the St Thomas site and is a first class wine. The five puttonyos designation refers to the sweetness level which is at least 120g/L residual sugar. The Royal Tokaji Wine Company which produced the wine, was one of the pioneering foreign investment venture, co-founded by the British wine writer Hugh Johnson in 1989. Other first class sites include Disznoko, Hetszolo and Oremus.

Ygrec - the dry wine from Yquem

This is Ygrec, the dry white wine from Chateau Yquem. Ygrec (the French calls Y the Greek I) is only AOC Bordeaux because Sauternes is only a sweet wine appellation. First produced in 1959, the wine is the result of a decision to harvest some plots of Sauvignon Blanc early and overripe Semillon later on. This accounts for small quantities and irregular production, with only some 23 vintages since 1959. Whereas Yquem is dominated by botrytised Semillon, Ygrec is a half-half mix of the two grapes. After a light pressing, the juice is fermented and then aged on lees in oak barrels ( of which one third and new and the rest 2 year old barrels. Regular battonage throughout barrel aging adds complexity. Although the wine is classically off-dry, some vintages are fermented out.

BTW, there are other wines with a letter of the alphabet for name in Bordeaux. Some like Ygrec and dry wines from Sauternes estates, such as M de Malle, R de Rieussec and the new S from Suduiraut. All these are whites, but there was also a red wine produced by Chateau Labegorce-Zede (now reabsorbed by Ch Labegorce) Z de Zede. Although Labegorce-Zede is an estate in Margaux, Z de Zede is actually from a plot of land of the Bordeaux Superieur appelation.

Champagne the food wine?

Champagne is often thought of as the wine for celebrations, but have you thought about its suitability to match food? There is one very good reason for this and it has to do with the way the bubbly is made. The wine gets its bubbles from having a second fermentation in the bottle, then it is aged for 12-18 months on the dead yeasts, during which time the yeasts autolyse and release amino acids into the wine. The riddling and disgorgement comes later.

Now the food industry uses a flavour enhancer MSG to make foods a little more delicious but many would rather avoid the dreaded 3 letters (of its E-number) on the food label. There are many ways of adding MSG and similar substances to food without resort to the purified chemical (which we can make in our bodies). These include mushroom (as in mushroom ketchup), anchovies (think Worcestershire sauce) and partially hydrolysed yeast extract (anyone for Marmite or Vegemite). Now the aging process of champagne means that the wine has a certain level of these flavour enhancing amino acids in the glass. This is one reason why champagne can easily be matched with a large number of foods.

BTW, the original MSG from Japan is also a natural product, being extracted from salted kelp.

Dry Vintage Marsala

Mention Marsala and the first thing people think of is a sweet-ish wine for cooking. That is understandable given that Marsala wines (other than one or two specimens of the cooking variety) have been slowly and quietly disappearing off the face of this earth. The cooking wine is the variety most people encounter today.

But good drinking Marsala exists and this is one of them. There was a Peter's Wine Circle dinner last Friday, when we tasted wines from Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. Having failed to locate a sparkling wine from any of those islands, I thought of using this Marsala as an aperitif. My only problem was that I was unsure if it was dry or sweet. So I opened it and poured myself a very small taster - dry enough for aperitif.

A golden tea colour, the Marsala had a raisined nose with nutty notes. There were hints of raisined sweetness on entry followed by a rich oxidised nutty palate, with some acidity appearing on swallowing following on to the finish. The nutty note persists throughout to the long finish. Of course this is a particularly fine example from Florio, a well known exponent of this genre. Made from 100% Grillo from the 1998 vintage, this wine was aged 8 years in oak barrels. My willingness to explore the unfamiliar has paid off!

Wine of the Day - Angelus

Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ.
Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.
Ave Maria ...
Ecce Ancilla Domini.
Fiat mihi secundum Verbum tuum.
Ave Maria ...
Et Verbum caro factum est.
Et habitavit in nobis.
Ave Maria ...

The Angelus is a devotional prayer about the Incarnation which is traditionally recited in churches three times a day: at 6 am, noon and 6 pm. The prayer is named for the opening word, Angelus, with the opening phrase telling of the Annunciation, which is the Feast celebrated by the Catholic Church today. The Angelus has been associated with the ringing of church bells (Angelus Bell) from the very beginning.

As for the Chateau, it is named after the vineyard in the centre of which is a patch of vines where the workers could hear the Angelus Bells ring simultaneously from three churches of the surrounding countryside: the Mazerat chapel (ie the chapel of the estate), the church of Saint-Martin de Mazerat and that of Saint-Emilion. This Premier Grand Cru Classe of St Emilion is highly regarded, with the above vintage (1994) awarded 93 Parker points. Dark ruby with a rich fruity nose, it was rich, fruity and spicy, with tannins appearing on swallowing to give structure to a long finish – I liked it!.

Another exotic wine bought on my travels

This Romanian wine from Dealul Mare was made from the Feteasca Neagra grape. The grape is an old Romanian and Moldovan variety from before the phylloxera plague and is widely used to make dry, semi-sweet or sweet wines with a deep ruby red colour and a blackcurrant flavour. The wines can be aged, making them richer and smoother.

Dealul Mare (literally “the big hill”) is an important, well sited and up to date area in the south eastern Carpathian foothills. Both local and international grapes are grown and vinified. Outside investment, including the French, ensure quality improvement. I didn’t know you’ve been to Romania, I hear you say. No I haven’t, I bought this wine in a shopping mall in Chaing-Mai! Now that’s surprising, isn’t it?

Liebfraumilch - a much abused name

I started my love affair with wine by drinking Liebfraumilch - everyone starts somewhere and according to her book, even someone like the famous Jancis Robinson started with Hirondelle, a brand name rose whose source is not stated. The wine in the picture is a real Libefraumilch, as the grower and merchant Valkenberg actually owns the vineyard surrounding the Church of Liebfrauenstift in Worms together with Langenbach. This wine from the original vineyard is also called Liebfrauenstift Kirchestuck. However, the name is more widely used than that.
German wine law states that it is a Qualitätswein (QbA) of pleasant character from Rheinhessen, Rheinpflaz, Nahe or Rheingau, of a blend dominated by Riesling, Sylvaner or Muller-Thurgau (>70%) and with 18-40g/L residual sugar. Most are medium sweet wines of moderate to low quality and even the original Liebfrauenstift Kirchestuck is not spectacular. Yet the introduction led me on to try the regional wines - Bereich Nierstein, Bereich Johannisberger ... , the the various Grosslage - Niersteiner Gutes Domtal etc, before seeking out the Kabinetts and Spatlese. Somehow I encountered a Chablis 1er Cru Beauroy, and that got me into dry white wines.

Swiss wine from Chasselas

This is the label of a wine I tasted in a meeting of the KCC Wine Society back in April 2001. It was thrown in as a joker in a Chardonnay tasting which included a Chevalier Montrachet Grand Cru 1977. Anyway, this is not a Chardonnay, but a Swiss white wine made from the Chasselas grape. Often grown for the table rather than for wine, Chasselas has a somewhat chequered reputation in France and in Germany, even though its German name Gutedel literally means good and noble. However, it is in Switzerland where this grape comes into its own, accounting for around one-third of its white wines, although the grape is being increasingly replaced.
Dezaley is the most well known village in the region of Lavaux on the north shore of Lake Geneva in the Swiss canton of Vaud. Recognized for its unique terroir since the 12^th century when the Cistercians started carving terraces in the steep slopes. Its vineyards mainly produce potent white wine using the Chasselas grape, which develops especially after aging. Dezaley together with its neighbour Calamin were the first to be awarded Grand Cru status in Switzerland. As for Chemin de Fer, I wonder if it's like a lieu-dit (vineyard name) a la Bourgogne.
Mind you, trying to surf the Web for the answer, I found out that the 200 CHF note has the image of the Dezaley vineyards (a UNESCO World Heritage site) on its back, to honour the French language Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (image on front), who hailed from Dezaley. He wrote the libretto (in French) for Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat ( A Soldier's Tale).

Another Claret with Art Label

The first name that people will think of when talk revolves around art labels and Bordeaux is Mouton, but Siran has also been doing it for some time. (Of course there are other famous wines with art labels which change year by year, but we'll explore those in other wine tidbits.) Whereas Mouton only has labels painted, Siran has another artistic connection: from the late 18th Century till 1858 (when the current owners - the Miailhe family bought it), it belonged to the Count of Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, one of whose descendants, the diminutive Henri was an important French Post-Impressionist painter along with the likes of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gaugin.

Although it never had cru classe status, it was one of twelve candidates for promotion in a review of the 1855 classification in 1959. It was elevated from Cru Bourgeious to Cru Bourgouise Exceptionelle in 2003 but that classification was scrapped after a legal challenge. Since 1980 an art label has adorned the bottles every year. Those interested in looking up the labels from 1980 to 2004 can consult the following Web page: http://www.youcellar.com/en/wine-labels-from-siran.php

A Wine for St Joseph's Day

Tomorrow is the Feast of Saint Joseph, so I'll blog about the wines from the appelation of St Joseph in Northern Rhone. The appellation is named after the saint whose feast we celebrate tomorrow and it has an illustrious past. Originally known as Vin de Mauves, and also mentioned in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, the wine from St.-Joseph was a favourite in the French court of Louis XII (1498-1515) who owned a vineyard in St.-Joseph known as Clos de Tournon. In 1668 the first official record of vineyards in St. Joseph occur. The modern-day St.-Joseph begins its history around 1916, but it didn't gain its own AOC until 1956.

The wine in the picture comes from Pierre Gaillard who learnt his craft alongside Guigal as they created Guigal's La Turque, now a trophy Cote-Rotie wine worth thousands of dollars. Gaillard scraped together money and bought his first plot - Clos de Cuminaille (from which the above bottle came) in St Joseph in 1981. The land had a 30 degree slope to it, but he was able to carve out some terraces so he could use a tractor.  His first vintage in 1987 was from this granitic plot and it had now become his flagship wine. Gaillard skilfully employs oak to coax luxuriant and extremely seductive flavours, but flavours that never lose sight of the individuality of their originating terroirs.

Wine and Cheese

Cheese is often thought to be a good match with wine and here in Hong Kong, the assumption is that the wine in question is red. Indeed when I was in England, there were a number of wine and cheese parties both when I was a student and whilst a junior doctor. Are either or both of the assumptions correct? Clearly it is not exceptionally difficult if one tries to seek a specific cheese which will clash with a wine or two, but some cheese, especially the pungent ones, will obviously murder light or delicate wines. In this vein(pun intended), blue cheeses are notoriously difficult to match with many red wines.  Apart from the famous matches with sweet or fortified wines, most blue cheeses are probably best enjoyed by afficionados on their own. Converting a skeptic to its merits via wine matching is another matter, but that is another tidbit altogether.

The two cheeses on the shelves of a Neal's Yard branch in London are quite pungent but they make fairly good matches for a fair number of red wines. The wheels of Parmiggiano-Reggiano (or Parmesan) are supposed to be good with Amarone (as well as balsamic vinegar) but apart from being grated over pasta, I have found it to be versatile in matching a number of medium to full bodied red wines. With lesser Parmesans, the range of red wines is wider.

The ones on the bottom are actually cloth-bound wheels of artisanal farmhouse cheddar - these are from the Montgomery dairy, one of the best (and most expensive) Cheddars in the world. Clarets seem to get along happily with Montgomery cheddar; as for other wines, full bodied ones will be a better match. Lesser Cheddars are again more accommodating and tend to match a large number of red and white wines. What about white wines and cheeses? We'll leave that to another tidbit.

Riverina Botrytised Semillon

This was a memorable wine for me, firstly because I had never tasted anything like it, and secondly because it recalled a trip to Australia  in 1993, when I encountered this wine in the Small Winemakers' Centre in the Hunter Valley. It was my first visit to Australia and my sister, her family and I went on a coach trip to the Huinter Valley, about which I had known nothing. We had visited a winery or two but then we went to this wine tasting room hosted by the Small Winemakers' Centre.

Two experiences stood the test of time. The first was with a glass of Australian Chardonnay (Was it from Hunter? I didn't remember.) The bouquet was like cutting open a fresh juicy grapefruit, putting it under your nose and sniffing, no more but no less. You see, I had heard Jilly Goolden and Oz Clakre in the BBC Food and Drink show talk about the grapefruit nose of various New World Chardonnays when I was living in the UK, but only with this wine did I realize it wasn't either a case of the educated nose, or a good dose of imagination; I merely did not meet the right mind for me to find my eureka moment. So now that moment is forever etched into my memory, even if sometimes I'm inclined to overlook it.

The second was tasting a wonderful dessert wine like this. I had had some German Auslese before I think but this botrytised Semillon from Riverina (on the New South Wales border with Victoria ) was something else. Dark, honeyed and rich, it made a great impression; so much so that I immediately bought a bottle. I did not actually find an occasion to open it until 14 Jan 2001 (so says my note). By then, my second son was already a few days old. What did my notes say - tea coloured, honey +++ on nose, honeyed raisined palate with a long finish.

Single Quinta Vintage Port

This is another type of vintage port from Taylor's, a single quinta wine from their top vineyard - Quinta de Vargellas from the 1986 vintage. Most port is blended from the wines made from the fruit of many vineyards. All the Port vineyards in the Douro are classified by a system going back to the mid 18th century (well before the Bordeaux classification). This system shares some similarities with the Echelle des Cru mentioned in the entry about Bouzy Rouge, ensuring that the better quality sites planted with the best grapes get the highest prices. The system also set maximum yields, with the higher classified vineyards having a larger quota (of better grapes).
Normally vintage port, like champagne, is blended from a number of vineyards. When there is a good year which is uneven in the vineyards supplying a port house, they have an option of bottling the wine from a single vineyard separately and declaring a single quinta port. Often the single quinta port is from the flagship quinta of that company. In this instance, Taylor's flagship qunita is Qunita de Vargellas and is suppose to give a scent of violets to the Taylor vintage ports. Alas, my nose is not particularly sensitive to the smell of violets.

Constantia - the first New World superstar?

I mentioned in the entry about Tokaji Ezsencia that Constantia was one of the sweet wines beloved of the European aristocracy in the past. The label above is from the wine recreated by one of the two estates to emerge from the old Constantia holdings, Klein Constantia. (The other Groot Constantia also recently produced a modern version of the legendary wine, Grand Constantia). This is also my first blog about South African wines. Coming from an estate originally created in 1685 by the Governor of Cape Town and made from Muscat of Frontignan, it was appreciated by Frederick the Great as well as Napoleon, who ordered it from his exile in St Helena. However, with a combination of the removal of preferential tariffs as well as the double catastrophe of oidium (powdery mildew) and phylloxera, Constantia wine disappeared from the face of the earth.

Constantia however also left its mark in literature. Jane Austen mentioned it in Sense and Sensibility whilst Charles Dickens did so in his last (unfinished) novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In both instances, the characters in the novels remarked on the fortifying and supportive characteristic of the wine in times of disappointment of distress. 

Unfamiliar wine in a strange container

I bought this wine in a wine shop in Shanghai a few years ago. It was a fun shape and the contents were different to say the least. This was a red wine made from the Saperavi grape from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Of course, the leather exterior was not the real container for the wine; there was one of these aluminized wine bags inside with a tap (if my memory served me right).

Saperavi is an old Gerogian grape, possibly the oldest, dating back to 5000BC. It is a teinturier grape, in that unlike other red or black grapes with colourless juice, its juice is red. (Other teinturier grapes have lighter coloured juice, say pink.) Saperavi wines are reputedly long-lived, up to fifty years. Of course I never waited for anything like as long. It was a nice slightly rustic wine, which could have matured into something quite impressive, had I the patience to wait rather a few more years.

An interesting match

This was a magnum of claret from the beautiful 2000 vintage I brought along to a KCC Wine Society Magnum Dinner. A nice claret from Listrac, I was going to pair it with beef and/or cheese, when my wife alerted me to an amazing new possibility. She is not as avid a reader of wine books as I and is thus less familiar with convention, but she can be adventurous in having a go at matching food and wine.

We were having a rich prawn or crayfish bisque, the type where you have a tomato base as well as a stock made from the shells. Richness also came with added cream and aromatic complexity is added with the brandy used either (or both) in flaming or as a later addition. I cannot locate my notes for the wine just now, but I remember that it was not particularly acidic either on the palate or in the finish, at least not in the Italian mold. Yet this wine can take the acidity of the tomato, the fishiness of the shellfish and the richness of the cream in its stride and complimented the soup. Maybe it was the ripeness of the tannins in the millenial vintage, but this was not accentuated by what is essentially a fish soup. Of course, it was also good with meat and cheese, but then that is no news.

Prawn bisque with claret is certainly something different and worth a try. I previously mentioned in the piece about the RP90 dinner, that the Italian Cabernet blend Crognolo did not go well with this soup. It could be the Italian style, or it could be the intrusion of  Sangiovese into the cepage. I'll keep to Cabernet Merlot blends next time.

Visiting wineries in Penedes

This is taken from the bridge linking the platforms at Villafranca de Penedes. The Torres winery used to be here, but now there are only administrative offices. The visitors centre is a few kilometers away in the countryside, actually within the Mas la Plana estate, which produced a Cabernet Sauvignon wine in 1970 that beat first growth clarets to win the 1979 Wine Olympiad. But that is another story for another tidbit.

If you have a day to spare whilst visiting Barcelona, it is worth making this trip. You can even be greedy and add an extra stop on the way back and visit the centre of Cava production, Sant Sadornia d'Anoia, but then you definitely need a whole day. Start the journey at Estacio Sants station in Barcelona and take the train to Villafranca de Penedes. The visit to Torres will require a taxi ride from the station. Having made your way back to the train station after visiting Torres, take the train back to Barcelona and get off at the next stop to visit the Cava wineries. In fact before you pull into the station, you'll see the Frexeinet winery, which comes right up to the railway line. I can't tell you much about Sant Sadurnia d'Anoia. We didn't start to visit Torres early enough and also spent too much time in the town of Villafranca itself and so missed the closing time for Frexeinet and the other Cava wineries.

A match for Xmas pudding

Hong Kong people tend to find Xmas pudding too sweet for their taste. There is however a way of making the traditional conclusion to the Xmas dinner somewhat more enjoyable - to match it with a sweeter and more complex wine such as port. This is the other eureka moment for food and wine matching, one that I mentioned in the entry about oysters and Chablis. It predated that incident by some 10 years, back to the time between Xmas and the New Year either 1987 or 1988.

I was a junior doctor in Wolverhampton and a couple, whom I have known as they met up many moons before, were also working and living nearby. We three were working at 3 different hospitals over Xmas and Boxing Day and so they invited me over for a belated celebration on the nearest Sunday. The local priest also came for dinner. For my part I brought along a bottle of 10-years-old Taylors Port and one of those individual pots of Stilton cheese. Pudding was after turkey but before cheese, when the priest suggested we crack open the port. To me, port with Xmas pudding was novel. It was also a revelation. The pudding was one of the "deluxe" versions with extra dried fruits and nuts. The rich sweetness of the the port cancelled out the heaviness of the pudding with the result that the flavours in both wine and pudding previously smothered by sugar came to the fore. The dried fruit and nutty notes in the wine echoed perfectly the same ingredients of the pudding and greatly enhanced the enjoyment of both. It also provided me with the rule of thumb now familiar to all afficionados of desserts and dessert wines that a pudding needs a sweeter wine.

As for port with Stilton, that was another eureka moment (not for me but for my wife) and it has to wait for another tidbit.

An Unforgettable Burgundy

My friend's generosity knew no bounds. There I was with my wife at a JJ Prum wine dinner organized by the Wine Now magazine in 2005. I noticed that there was a small group of wine lovers and they were enjoying some very special wines. My friend greeted me and offered me a glass of vintage Krug (cannot remember the year but older than this wine I think) and then a small glass of this Henri Jayer Echezeaux 1980.

This 25 year old burgundy was a limpid light garnet slightly turning a brick tint at the edges, but it has this wonderful fruity orange flower bouquet that carried on forever. There was also a hint of meatiness, more evident on the palate, which made my wife sum up the palate and nose as spare ribs with orange sauce!! Yet all these elements were refined, restrained and elegant. It was a memorable experience.

When I got home and looked up the wine, I was shocked to learn how much money I needed to part with to repeat the experience. I knew the wine would be expensive, but wow! From a price comparison website, I found that the wine cost nearly $30,000 (HKD) a bottle, so my little glass would probably have been a couple of thousand dollars at market value. Thank you again, my friend!

A special food and wine moment

This is a picture taken during a wine dinner I organized for the Kowloon Cricket Club Wine Society in April 2005. The chef is pouring the sauce from the bottle which had been filled with the wine we were matching with the dish. The wine was La Spinetta Pin IGT, a Nebbiolo Barbera blend. The dish was oxtail braised in wine. They had obtained fresh oxtails (skin on) and braised it in some red wine. When I gave them an extra bottle of the wine we were drinking, he finished off the cooking with it. He took some of the sauce, poured it back into the bottle and came round the table serving us.

Now I don't know about you, but my normal encounters with ox skin is usually more utilitarian, as leather in belts, shoes, ... etc. Indeed, I had not even thought that ox skin can be eaten. The braising made the oxtail skin wonderfully tender and gelatinous, not unlike the ox tendon we find in Cantonese cuisine. Of course, the special wine in the sauce lifted the dish from the brilliant to the sublime.

Now this was such a hit that people requested that I repeat it again, on other occasions. Well, I did ask the Chef for a reprise, but not until a 2009, when we had it in a wine dinner I organized for the doctors association of my hospital. We used an entry level Barolo for both pot and glass, but the results were still as superb.

Ozzie Orange Muscat

This Brown Brothers Orange Muscat and Flora is a nice dessert wine from Victoria, Australia. Orange muscat is self explanatory, but Flora needs a bit more elaboration. Flora was produced in California from crossing Semillon and Gewurztraminer and gives wines of fragrance and body with an acidic backbone.

This is a delightful wine to go with a nice fruity dessert. I have memories of some nice dessert matches with this wine. Once I bought this wine and specially baked some apples stuffed with raisins, butter and demerara sugar to finish off a meal. I also recollect baking a heart-shaped apple pastry and pairing it with this wine for our first Valentine meal after we got married.

 A nice wine with many sweet memories!

Bottles and Magnums of Champagne

A magnum is a double-sized bottle and the other champagne bottle sizes are not always the same as the ones for still wine, so what? Like still wines, a magnum has a smaller wine-air interface than a bottle in comparison with the large amount of wine it contains and therefore it ages slower and usually that gives a more “elegant” result. But that's not all.

Champagne gets its fizz from a second fermentation in the bottle in which it is eventually sold, but this actually only happens in the above two bottle sizes. Everything else is transferred from either a bottle or a magnum, be it halves or the gigantic nebuchadnezzar (holds 20 bottles). Now that makes champagne in bottles and magnums the best format to choose for your enjoyment.

A French Wine to Match Chocolate

I mentioned in the entry about Ozzie Liqueur Muscat that I encountered a French wine which is also a good match for chocolate too. This is a picture of the label- a bold brash purple exclamation mark! Maury is one of the vin doux natural appellations of South West France. It is a fortified Grenache sweet wine, very similar to Banyuls. I had this wine in December 2000 and I took down these notes: wonderful with chocolate truffle cake, very good with Baci di Dama (hazelnut macaroons filled with chocolate cream), fresher & fruitier than port (presumably in combination with chocolate cake).

I had forgotten the comparison with port, only remembering that with the Ozzie Muscat which brought out the nuttiness of the hazelnut macaroons. As you may have noticed, only fortified wines seem to have the oomph to stand up to chocolate, but that is not the only choice. With strong chocolate desserts, wines with bold flavours and strong personalities are needed, but with a light mousse, some would pair it with something like Asti. This is not something that I'm used to, but I'll give it a try and describe it in another entry.