Tuesday, June 10 2008
Weekly Wined-Up
Why are the bottles always empty in all of my pictures? Because few bottles stay full in my presence. . .
A busy week has passed: a class on Winemaking Excellence 101 on Monday, a video editing session on Tuesday and now Wednesday shows up and all my regular work is waiting for me. Fortunately, there's always time for a glass of wine.
From the far lest is a bottle of 2007 Golf Du Lion Domaine Le Pive Rosé from Southern France. It's a blend of Grenache, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, it showed a lot of strawberries, tart red currants and raspberries. The finish was crisp so the fruit didn't cloy. It was around fifteen bucks. If it were a proper price, like six or seven, I'd buy ten cases and drink it all summer on my patio. Not that it is a bad value at $15, but I just spent time in Europe, where wines like these cost less than a bottle of water in a restaurant, and I can't shake the notion that I'm somehow being overcharged--do you think I should make my own?
Next to that is a 2006 Torres Vina Esmerelda, from the Penedes in Spain. It's a blend of Gewürztraminer and Moscatel. It's pretty intense: the floral notes come on like a poke in the snoot, and there's lychee, rose petals, and grapey-grape all over the place in the nose. It also shows a wee hint of tannin, something not uncommon in Muscat-type wines. If it had just a hair more acidity it would have been a complete knock-out, but as it is, it's an excellent patio wine. I paid about fourteen bucks.
Third up was a wine I snagged in a hurry: I had guests dropping by, I was roasting a chicken and I needed a cold bottle right away. The cold beer and wine store in my neighbourhood offered up Hardy's Stamp Series Reisling/Traminer. From the vast ocean of wine coming out of South Australia, it's a light-to-medium white. They don't let the grapes over-ripen, so it still has some structure and acidity (a tough job when growing cool climate grapes like these in the baking-oven climate of Oz). It's off-dry (I think it's listed as a 1 by the BCLDB, but that's baloney: it's a pretty solid 2) but not to worry because the acid is firm enough to keep it refreshing, and it pairs really well with herbed chicken--would be perfect with spicy foods as well, with nice floral notes and a hint of apple/peach on the finish. At around ten bucks, it's a pretty decent value.
Finally, I was doing a wine component tasting this week, where I pit sample solutions of acid, tannin, oak, alcohol and sugar against an oaky red and an aromatic white. The point of the exercise is to teach people the role that various flavour components play in each wine. It's actually kind of fun. But I couldn't get the usual white I use so I went for the 2006 Babich Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough in New Zealand (yep, Winexpert does make a might nice New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, but I can't legally use consumer-produced wine for tastings--it all has to come from the government store.)
It's generic New Zealand with those classic red grapefruit/gooseberry/citrus notes happening, and it's pretty tuned-up. The acid must be around 8.5-9 grams per litre, the alcohol is 13% (I think this is a lie, and it's closer to 14%) and while it's sold as a zero on the sweetness scale, it's much closer to a 2: one sip of the wine versus the sugar solution confirms that pretty quickly. At $19 I felt like I'd been mugged by a Kiwi bird.
I've pretty much stopped drinking commercial NZ Sauvignon Blanc, partly because of the winemaking style (I prefer a drier, less alcoholic table wine in most circumstances) and partly because of the deceptiveness of their positioning. Sell it as an off-dry, for goodness sakes, or quit making alcoholic lemonade in your winery. I think my real problem is that I get absolutely full of this wine after a single glass. I can't drink any more because my palate rebels and my stomach clenches--not conducive to repeat consumption, lemme tell ya.
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