Champagne Papis Loveday Brut

I had this champagne at a party last night. Although the name of Papis Loveday is most dominant on the label and there is a corresponding website, a little more insight could also be gained by Googling the name of Pehu-Simonet. This champagne comes from the Grand Cru village of Verzenay and is made from 90% Pinot Noir and the rest Chardonnay. There is 30% reserve wine from the previous 2 years and 15% of the base wine is fermented in barrels. The base wine does not go through malolactic fermentation. The Pehu-Simonet estate, which this wine comes from, comprises mainly of Grand Cru vineyards with around 20% in Premier Cru sites, but since the winery only sells Grand Cru champagne, the fruit from these Premier Cru sites are sold off to the negoce.

The wine was a golden pale lemon with good streams of medium bubbles. The nose was a touch closed, with acid and slightly vegetal notes. There was an acid prickle going onto an acid palate, well supported by an acid backbone. There was initial disappointment with this wine but it turned out that the wine needed food to bring it out. It was much better with the abalone, which made it richer and more honeyed.

An interesting "banquet wine"

It was at the retirement party of a colleague at a restaurant that I came across the above wine being served for the Chinese banquet amongst a number of different red and white wines. First of all, Cotes de Marmandais is not a well known appellation and the choice by the restaurant could be because of value for money. This appellation just outside the area of Bordeaux gives rise to the second point of interest for me, namely the predominant grape used in the blend - Arbouriou. I had met this grape before at the Wine Fair some time ago, but could not be sure if I had come across it at the consumer level here in Hong Kong.

Arbouriou is a grape from South West France which is somewhat related to Malbec and Merlot. It is early ripening with low acidity and high tannins, producing deep coloured, tannic and spicy wines somewhat lacking in acidity. This together with a high vigour and copious cropping leads it to be used in lesser quality wines of that region. As for this wine, it was a deep ruby with a sweet metallic acid fruity nose. The palate was slightly sweet acid with a touch of fruit, leading to an acid tannic backbone.

KCCWS Chateau Beaucastel Dinner

We went to the KCCWS Chateau Beaucastel Wine Dinner over the weekend. Chateau Beaucastel is a well known estate in Chateauneuf du Papes, which uses all the 13 permitted grapes in its wines. (Since the change in AOC laws, which separate the gris and blanc varieties and increased the cepage count to 18, we will have to check if the wines now contain all eighteen varieties!!)

Six vintages were presented on the night spanning 20 years from 1988 to 2008, and these were 1988, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2006 and 2008.The dinner provided an opportunity to explore the evolution of a wine over the years, though (truth be said) even with the same estate, there are both vintage variations as well as the differences in the blend to try and bring out the best in any vintage.

Rothschild vs Rothschild in Chile

As can be seen from the picture, this was something I spotted in the supermarkets whilst scouting for some Chilean wines for a South America themed gathering for the doctors of my hospital, but as I had rearranged the bottles for this juxtaposition, please ignore the prices because the positions are wrong. Both the Rothschild families have extensive overseas holdings and Chile is one country in which they are both present. Apart from these premium level offerings, both also do more affordable entry level wines 

As I was trying to highlight the particularities of the different South American countries, I was more interested in their Carmenere then their Bordeaux lookalike blends, which do include very un-Bordeaux grapes such as Syrah in their blends. You may well ask - why not Mouton vs Lafite for the title? Showing my age, I refer to an Award Winning film (Kremer vs Kremer) which I saw whilst at university.

An impromptu tasting at lunch

We went to lunch with a friend at which he was bringing some wines. When my wife arrived, someone else had been tasting wines which they were thinking of importing and brought along the unfinished bottles for everyone to chip in with their comments. Levorato is based in Riviera del Brenta between Padua and Venice and produces a large variety of wines from Sicily to Veneto.

Four wines were tasted, a Pinot Grigio della Venezia, a Merlot from Veneto, a Nerod'Avola from Sicily and a Primitivo from Salento. All were IGT wines. The Pinot Grigio was fair, but the Merlot was nothing to write home about. Both the Nero d'Avola and Primitivo were well wooded with enough fruit and acid to make the wines fairly well balanced. Just goes to confirm that indigenous grapes are a good bet for less known wines and appellations.

Bags for blind tasting

When we had the Garnacha vs Tempranillo dinner, we did a blind tasting of the red wines, and the Grill Room staff put the wines in these bags, which belong to the KCC Wine Society. Now I had been rather busy these last couple of years or so and had only attended their dinners very intermittently and I had not seen these before and so I cannot tell for how long they have been using these bags. Blind tasting the wines had been something they have been doing right from the very beginning; I recall what might have been the inaugural dinner in 1998, and we blind tasted 6 clarets. Before these nice bags, I recall we used to wrap everything in aluminium foil, but these bag bring extra class to the proceedings.

Staiway to Heaven

No this has nothing to do with the 1970s Led Zeppelin song (for those who are old enough to remember it), this is about a Spanish winery, Scala Dei, whom some have nicknamed stairway to heaven  (Scala Dei is literally God's ladder in Latin). The winery can trace its origins back to the 12th century when Carthusian monks started growing vines here. The name of the monastery owes itself to a legend about a shepherd dreaming of angels coming down a ladder from the sky to the top of a tall pine tree here. A working monastery till the mid 19th century when Church properties were confiscated, the buildings have been reduced to ruins but the vineyards have passed down different families, who bottled the first Priorat wine in 1878 and presented it at the Paris World Fair. Wine making was modernized in the 1970s and the Cordoniu group acquired a part share in the 2000s.