Tuesday, July 1 2008
Canada Day Wined-Up
You know how hard it is to find a red maple leaf in July?
Happy Canada Day, the greatest day of the year. In addition to being the celebration of our nation, today has a lot of significance for us Canucks:
- 1796 - Britain ceded Detroit, Grand Portage, and Michilimackinac to the United States.
- 1867 - The British North America Act took effect, creating the Canadian Confederation; John A. Macdonald was sworn in as the first Canadian Prime Minister.
- 1873 - Prince Edward Island joined the Canadian Confederation.
- 1890 - Canada and Bermuda were linked by telegraph cable.
- 1960 - Treaty and registered aboriginal Canadians gained the right to vote.
- 1980 - O Canada became the national anthem of Canada.
And it's a happy birthday to Genevieve Bujold, Dan Ackroyd and Pamela Anderson. I've never met Ms. Bujold, but Ackroyd seems like a nice fella (and he's got his own Vineyard in the Niagara!) but Pammy Anderson is just about the nicest lady you'd ever want to meet--some day I have to blog about bottling wine with her.
But, there's no time for that now! I've been remiss in blogging about the wines I've been enjoying lately. Onward!
Aw, it's three weeks worth, and I had help, all right?
Starting from the far left, Menguante Garnacha, an unoaked Spanish red wine, made from 80 year-old Grenache vines. At 15 bucks, it's pretty good: raspberry/blueberry and hints of strawberry, well layered with berry fruit without being oppressively fruit-forward, it came off like a good Rhone red, without the attitude or the price. A definite buy-again. Great with lamb.
Next is Paul Mas Viognier. We had another bottle of Viognier the same night which was so bad I'm not bothering to review it, and instead poured it down the drain. The Paul Mas is everything the other bottle was not: delicate, rich, deceptively powerful, charmingly perfumed with apricots and peaches. It's a Languedoc (south of France, not far out of the Rhone) and for thirteen bucks it really delivered some good flavours.
Beside it, Gloria Ferrer Brut Rose Sparkling wine from California, which I brought back from Sonoma. Le sigh, it's spectacular. I've had three hundred dollar bottles of champagne that really sucked compared to the delicate berry notes and lusciously creamy bubbles of this baby. Dunno what it costs to civilians, even if you could get it here, but probably fifty or sixty bucks--and easily worth three times the price. Very good with strawberries!
Beside Ms. Ferrer's nectar is Fetzer's Valley Oaks Pinot Grigio. Solid, workmanlike wine, good pear/tropical fruit notes (papaya, interestingly enough) and a zippy lemon-lime acidity. I usually avoid most mass-market wine companies, but this was surprisingly yummo, and at fourteen bucks it's a great patio or light food wine.
Looming like a mountain of flavour over the Fetzer is a bottle of Burmeister Tawny Porto, from my recent trip to Portugal. If all sweet wine tasted this good, I'd be a diabetic, I think. It's all of heaven packed in a bottle, with surprising balance and freshness for a wine blended from wines up to 80 years old. It was so good with toasted walnuts and cambozola cheese we had to go get more nuts and cheese. Not sure what you'd pay here, probably $50 or so, but what a glorious slow-sipping wine! I spent half a day with Luis Seabros, Burmeister's winemaker supervising their new facility in the Douro.
Now for my next trick, I'll pull a Ruby out of a hat!
Luis is one fearsome winemaker. Lots of opinions, fiercely held and intelligently defended. I learned more about the state of Portuguese winemaking every ten minutes or so from him than I did in two weeks of research at home. He doesn't really need opinions though: his wine can speak all for itself.
Tall like a Prussian soldier next to the Burmeister is a bottle of Alsace Pffafenheim Pinot Gris. PG is a white clonal variant of Pinot Noir, has bronzey-pink berries and a lot of the berry character of Pinot Noir. Alsatians usually make their wine rock-dry, and this was an exception being almost a 'one' on the sweetness scale but it carried a tonne of fruit and the high alcohol drove that forward to a kind of spasm of intense fruity-tutti peach-pear-apple-honey, with a very unexpected turn--a creamy-vanilla almost oaky hit. We had it with a dish of sauteed chorizo, prawns peppers and asparagus over homemade pasta and it stood up well beside the quite spicy food. It would be great with smoked meat, gravlax, or a lot of salty cheeses.
Into the home stretch, Pedro Pergolas 2004 Old Vines Tempranillo. This Spanish wine is made from the same grape that the Portuguese call Tinto Roriz. This was a pretty concentrated and rich wine, with elements of berry fruit, herbaceousness, and an earthy-leathery minerality. Fortunately the oak was restrained, as the absolute fruit quality of Tempranillo is easily overwhelmed. Great with fresh-ground hamburgers with double-smoked bacon and applewood smoked cheddar.
Finally, there's a bottle of Ile de Bacchus Vin de Glace. It's from a teeny-tiny winery on L'Ile d'Orleans, across the river from Quebec City. It was great, although I thought the acid came in a bit late. But maybe that had something to do with the nearly endless length of peach and apricot laced with honey and spice notes. Yummo with a really good Triple Creme Brie.
Now, I think I'll go get a bottle of wine for dinner. Hmm, there's that bottle of Vinos Sin Ley Grenache/Shiraz . . .
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