Buy Smarter and Drink Better Wines

If people are happy with their lot then who am I, or indeed any of us, to comment or pass judgement on their choice of wine? I would much rather help one person who is interesting in expanding their wine experience rather than berating any one group into changing their own lifestyle choices.

I sometime find myself defending MY choices with regard to the wine I drink. Simple things can help: explaining that the actual value of the wine in a £5.00 bottle is about 35p helps contextualise the relationship between price and quality. Also by suggesting people TASTE rather than just DRINK a wine has been known to stimulate a real interest which, if encouraged, can run and run.

Someone once told me that when life gets too hectic tread lightly and feel the ground below your feet. Tasting rather than consuming has similar restorative powers.

For further goodies about these ideas see whats happening over at Wine Conversation who are working with The Wine Gang Live.


Finally, this post was originally drafted in response to this post by Jamie Goode.

You can't take it with you...

The WSET Advanced Course, or my 'drinking class' as some people disparagingly refer to it, is now in full swing. We are motoring nicely through the French wine landscape: Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Alsace have been and gone in a flurry of ever more confident tasting notes whilst the book-work grind of classifications, grape varieties and terroir rolls on late into the night. I am not, however, complaining. My solitary drinking is now a fundamental part of my revision. Every cloud...

During our Burgundy session Karen, our fantastic tutor, insisted that we tasted six wonderful wines including examples from Chablis, Meursualt, Nuit St George, and Morgon: a selection of wines which mirrors about 30% of my own collection. This led on to a brief discussion regarding keeping wine and drinking wine.

Wine is temporal. The wine in my cellar has a finite life and, no matter what I think, its beauty will fade. As you can imagine, for a wine geek like me that idea of taking the collection apart is heartbreaking. Watching the gaps in the racks getting bigger does concern me, but I am comforted knowing that the feelings of loss and guilt which follow me up the cellar steps as a cradle the last of the 2000 Pommard (the case bought after a boozy Christmas lunch at Chateaux Montreuil in 2003) will soon be superseded with the wave of calm relaxation which only a glass of top-class wine can bring to me. But to reduce the collection like this is immeasurably more satisfying than finishing a tasting note with the phrase 'past it' simply because I am more concerned with the wine collection rather than the wine itself.

As Karen said, "You can't take it with you".

DOMAINE GERARD CHAVY ET FILS PULIGNY MONTRACHET 2001

Provenance and price unknown. Available from Vininum at £34.00

After eight years in the bottle this white burgundy is now a clear deep gold wine. A clean and medium bouquet gives baked apples with liquorice hints but these are muted and lacking definition. Slightly off-dry with some acidity and no tannin, 13% alcohol, medium body and intensity adding a biscuity padding to the other flavours. Finishes with a long length and the warmth of the alcohol coming through. A good wine but most certainly past it. Shame I have another in the cellar, because it ain't going to get any better. This is what happens when you can't see the wine, only a collection of bottles.

VINCENT GIRARDIN "LES ENSEIGNERES" PULIGNY MONTRACHET 2002

Provenance and price unknown, and I can't find any more!

A clear and bright medium gold wine. Lovely fully developed clean nose, medium + intensity with apple pie, toasted almonds and vanilla notes. Ever so slightly off-dry with medium acidity and no tannins to speak of. The 13.5% alcohol together with its medium body brings caramel, smoke,and custard (!) to the underlying stewed fruit flavours. Finally a perfect length underlines the balance and complexity of this wine. A fabulous mature white burgundy currently right on the button.

40 cloves of garlic and a chicken

Keith Floyd died today and without a doubt he was a real inspiration to me. Watching Keith crashing about in the kitchen berating the camera man and clutching a glass of wine before plating up the most delicious looking Pork au Pourve served with a Côte-Rôtie was quiet an eye-opener when your sat in a small Yorkshire mining village at the hight of Thatcher's Britain.

Tonight's wine will be consumed in full and glorious tribute to Keith. Cheers and back to me Clive!

CHATEAU HAUT BAGES LIBERAL 1999

Price and provenance unknown but you'll find it at Everywine for £35

5ème Cru Classé Pauillac coming in at 12.5% with a real cork closer. Clear, deep and intense ruby-garnet colour darkening to brown at the rim. Christmas cake, spices and soft cedarwood tumble around the clean and pronounced nose. A dry wine with some acidity which combine with the handsome tannins and medium body to give a lovely mouthfeel. Now we find some silky fresh black fruit alongside the mellow dried and stewed fruit flavours. Altogether a mellow and complex wine with a length which goes on and on.

Glorious!

They seek him here

I've just read this post over at Andrew Barrow's excellent Spittoon blog and it seems to exemplify the thrust of Jamie Goode's post regarding the provenance of particular articles, blogs, tweets, and press releases.

I have become increasingly sensitive to the ubiquitous nature of media personalities such as messrs. Oliver, Ramsay et. al. Move aside James Brown, these boys really are the hardest working people in show business.

I don't have an issue with their obvious and hard won success, indeed such enterprise should be applauded and their books do have a home on my kitchen bookshelf, but I do take umbrage with their apparent shape-shifting abilities to be in two places at once.

I for one am not fooled - shape shifters don't do cooking.

MACON LA ROCHE-VINEUSE DOMAINE GONON 2007

The Wine Society £7.95 (tasted 23 January 2009)

White burgundy so it's a 100% chardonnay. 13.5% with a synthetic closer. Guess what, it's clear almost colourless with only the lightest lemon yellow tint. Clean medium nose shows citrus green fruit including grapefruit; so far so textbook. Dry with easy acid, no tannin because its never been near any oak, and a light body with apples and pears. "Crisp and refreshing and refreshing and crisp". Finished with a short and easy full-stop length.

Well structured and popular with the ladies - a bit like Boyzone.

Wine fact: MACON LA ROCHE-VINEUSE is also the appellation of this Macon-Villages white burgundy, along with 42 other villages with the right to their own appellation. Thank you Jancis!

Got any snout?

I have bought a pipe and in doing so fulfilled a long standing ambition.

I did smoke cigarettes: Malboro Red and/or Gitanes were my weapon of choice (but never at the same time). I also smoked Embassy No.5 but they are the smoke of satan. I stopped smoking shortly after arriving at University. The relationship between drinking and smoking became far more passionate after I arrived at that distinguished seat of learning Leicester Polytechnic. My drinking became rapacious and with it my smoking. Something had to go - and it was 18 Marlboro in the canal much to the disgust of my Imperial Tobacco sponsored housemates.

Cigars are a different matter - I love cigars. My weapon of choice is a Cohiba Siglo IV and they have been with me at some of the happiest times of my life: weddings, graduations, holidays, Christmas, reunions, those rare moments of business successes. A cigar helps to magnify the feeling of smug sell-satisfaction which often accompanies these events. Thing is, you need a good two hours to really wallow your way through a cigar and it is increasing difficult to ring-fence sufficient time. So my attention turned to pipe smoking.

My extensive market research has revealed that no-one is actually smokes a pipe any more. The pipe-smokers I have known are all dead (due to old age rather than smoking related illnesses now that I think about it) so instruction and encouragement has been rather thin on the ground. The internet is an obvious source and YouTube has been a particularly successful hunting ground. The local specialist tobacconist was most informative, which I suspect is due to his surprise at seeing his customer base actually increasing. Anyway, I got the pipe, tobacco, pipe tool, Swan Vesta and got stuck into the smoking with the enthusiasm of a laboratory beagle.

I can now often be seen watering the garden in the pouring rain sucking like a Las Vegas whore working time-and-half on my pipe. Like I said, another ambition ticked off the list.

MAN VINTNERS CELLAR SELECT PINOTAGE 2007

Lindley Fine Wine £7.99 (tasted 9 February 2009)

100% pinotage from the Cape region. 14% with a screw-cap closure.

Clear and clean: deep ruby-red and a good barbecue nose. Its dry with some little acidity touching the obvious high tannins. Full bodied building on the smoky nose to give tobacco and black cherry, all singed with burnt-rubber. Its got a strong length with 'something' in the tail. The overt structure comes from the young oak and could exploit the acidity to mature in the bottle and develop some more complexity.

Still a good wine though.

How do you do yours?

In order to maintain some credibility to my claim to be part of the wine-blogging fraternity it helps to have something to blog about which is actually wine related, and so my wine notes have become a common feature in our house.

Being a student of the WSET my tasting notes do tend to follow a set format: Appearance, Nose, Palate, Conclusion and I can dash one off rather quickly. However, should I loose my way there is a rather nifty tasting check-list in the course pack which also hangs around the kitchen. The one draw-back to this approach is that my notes do tend to be rather formulaic; no doubt you've noticed.

Due to this rather speedy method of taking notes I tend to record them on whatever is to hand at the time: bank statements, envelopes, tax bills, daughter's artwork. "Look daddy, it's you...", "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just pass me that crayon before I loose the original thought that this chablis is flint dry."

After a short period the collection of scrap paper starts to look just that - a collection of scrap paper and it begins to take over. But they do, eventually, make their way from the top of the bread-bin and into the study where they are securely corralled with a bull-dog clip until I get round to writing them up in my tasting book.

You have a tasting book don't you? Colour coded, indexed, cross-referenced, and in chronological order by tasting date.

Wine is my friend.

CHATEAU TOUR ST BONNET 2002

Latitude Wine £10.99 (tasted 26.ii-'09)

A 'Grand Vin du Bordeaux' Medoc claret at 12.5% with a cork closer and a fabulous deep red brick tinted colour. Clean medium nose showing jammy black fruits and oaky vanilla. Obviously dry with no acid, the good tannins present more fruit than one would expect from the nose: Cadbury's Fruit and Nut (a bar slightly warm and bought from the motorway service station to be exact) yet it has a surprising light body. My bottle did throw quite a heavy sediment so I would probably decant the next one as it also definitely opened up in the glass and bottle.

A decent enough wine to start any 'Claret Thursday'.

Just as an aside, according the The Oxford Companion to Wine, "the term 'Grand Vin' is often used to indicate the main wine of the Chateau, no matter how grand or humble the wine or the chateau." Thank you Jancis! So what we have here is a Bordeaux AC from the Medoc.

Do you know your Alsace from your elbow?

I subscribe to about a dozen RSS feeds, all from wine blogs which I particularly enjoy. International, eclectic, passionate and witty and occasionally slightly bonkers they encourage me to keep this thing going. But it must be a summer sun thing because there has been an invasion of Riesling (invasion being the correct collective noun for Alsatian wines) into my Bookmarks Bar. A quick survey throws up:

Jamie Goode, two, three

Full Pour and more

Wines Under $20

Wannabe Wannabe Wino

They're all at it! Has there been an eastern France love-in I've not been invited to? Not for the first time I've been left off such party lists I'll have you know. Who knows or indeed cares: here's my shout.

RUPPERTSBERGER RIESLING KABINETT 2007

The Wine Society (tasted 18 April 209)

10.5% with a natural cork. A clear and flashing bright pale gold wine that dances into the glass. A classic petrol-mineral Reisling nose together with ripe apples and honey. Its off-dry, acidic, and no tannins, nice body before the good length with the palette matching the nose.

This is the text book definition of an Alsace Riesling. Highly recommended.