Salon

This is Salon, one of those few champagnes that goes completely against the grain of what everyone else does in that region. Champagne is a blended wine par excellence, across different villages, with a mix of the three grapes, and usually sold as a non-vintage wine, across the years. Salon, on the other hand, is single grape (Chardonnay), single village (Le Mesnil sur Oger) and only available as vintage wines. Salon grew famous in the 1920s and 1930s as the house champagne of the famous Paris restaurant Maxim's. Sure, it's not the only champagne that's so. The others include Bollinger Vieille Vigne Francais, and the two single vineyard wines from Krug - Clos de Mesnil and Clos d'Ambonnay. It's in fine company indeed.

Germany - home of grape crossings?

I took this picture at the duty free shop at Bali International Airport. These three offerings from Louis Guntrum are all Pradikatswein made from German grape crossings of the early 20th century. On the left we have a Huxelrebe Spatlese, a Bacchus Kabinett in the middle and an Ortega Auslese on the right. I just noticed that the Ortega is from a Doktor vineyard, in Dexheim rather than Bernkastel. It is not visible at the resolution of the blog, but that Doktor wine is also different in that it is a 2009 wine bearing an APNr with 09 as its last 2 digits. That means it was officially tested in 2009, quite a feat for an auslese of the 2009 vintage!

Back to the grapes! Huxelrebe was created by Dr Scheu in 1927 and is a high yeilding early ripening grape. It can reach Auslese levels easily and with controlled yields can high quality sweet wines with muscat-like aromas. Bacchus is a Sylvaner x Riesling cross interbred with Muller-Thurgau created in 1933. It is an early ripening grape with high must weights, but tends to low acidity. The wines have exuberant flavours if allowed to ripen fully, but become more like Sauvignon Blanc in style in England where the cooler climate results in lower yeilds with higher acidity. Ortega was created in 1948 from crossing Muller-Thurgau and Siegerrebe and is also used as a table grape. It ripens early with higher must weights and can give wines with peach and Muscat aromas. All three are also grown in England.

Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz

I thought I took a picture of the Graveyard vineyard when I visited the Hunter Valley in 2005, but I can't seem to locate it, so the picture of a bottle of the product will have to do in its stead. This is the top Hunter Valley Shiraz, being promoted from Outstanding to Exceptional (top tier) in the latest Langton's classification.

First planted in 1968, the vineyard got its name from the plans of the town of Pokolbin of 1882 as the plot was earmarked as the Cemetery Block. That never came to pass and the plot was bought by Brokenwood initially to plant Cabernet Sauvignon (some old bottles are around) but the vineyard really achieved its full potential and international fame as the exponent of Hunter Valley Shiraz.

 

My problem with Ch Lynch Bages

Chateau Lynch Bages is a fifth growth claret with a popular following. Its current performance is well above the average in the lower two growths and some would gladly consider the wine a second growth. My wife and I have a big problem with it. We enjoy it very much when we know that we're drinking the wine, but when it comes to blind tasting, we consistently put it in the last three places of our preference (usually between 6 to12 wines tasted).

Sometimes blind tasting is not as objective and fair as one might think. When you know the wine, you can open the bottle for it to breathe its optimum time for maximum enjoyment. Yet in blind tasting, all bottles are opened at more or less the same time, so that by the time it is tasted, some wines would have breathed optimally, but there would be others that would be under- or over- breathed.

Recently, I did rate Lynch Bages in my top three; was it that the wine was optimally breathed, or have my tastebuds resolved my differences with this chateau?

The ultimate grape juice!

This is the most expensive grape juice I have ever bought - at around $10 per ml! This is a bottle of Tokaji Eszensia from Stanza, and it is not vintage dated. I bought it in 2004 and at the time, I think there was information on the Internet, which gave the vintage as 1996. In the previous entry about Eszensia, I wrote that these celestial elixirs are very low in alcohol, so low that the winemakers protested they could not consistently exceed a proposed minimum of 5% alcohol. Peter Vinding-Diers, who made this offering, took the low alcohol idea to its ultimate conclusion and released this non-alcoholic version in 100 ml bottles with its own little light blue cardboard carton.

Wine, spa and cosmetics

Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte is owned by a husband and wife pair of French skiers, who met in their country's Olympic team. They bought the Chateau in 1990 after pursuing very successful business careers. The classified estate produces both red and white wines as is quite usual for wineries in Graves, but what sets them apart is what they do with some of the waste materials from wine growing and wine-making. I had already blogged about the distillation of grappa from the pomace, but here the materials used include grape pips as well as other parts of the vine.

First of all there is Les Sources de Caudalie, a luxury hotel situated inside the wine estate with a vinotherapy spa, using the extracts from grape and vine. These extracts were stabilized with some help from the Bordeaux Faculty of Pharmacy to create the Caudalie line of cosmetics and anti-aging products. Although one can only enjoy the delights of vinotherapy spa at their hotel, both the wines as well as the Caudalie cosmetics are readily available here in Hong Kong.

BTW, a caudalie is a measure of the length of time the aftertaste of a wine lingers on after swallowing.

Chateau Musar from the strategic Bekaa Valley

Chateau Musar is the most famous winery of Lebanon and it is situated in the Bekaa Valley where a number of Lebanese wineries are located. Unfortunately it is also of great military strategic importance, since whoever controls it has a straight downhill run to the Lebanese capital Beirut. I first got to hear of the Bekaa Valley on the news when I was studying in London. There was tension and war in the 1980s and I remember reports of tank and artillery bombardment of that valley. So imagine my surprise when I found that wine was made there and almost continuously even during the years of active warfare in the region. The wine is made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignan and Cinsault. There is a second wine, Hochar Pere et Fils. A white wine is made from Obaideh and Merwah.