More Lebanese wine ...

On the 2nd evening in Beirut there was party sponsored by the seminar organization in a hip restaurant/bar (The Library) where we got some nice food, but unfortunately the wine wasn't too good and the entertainment was a bit too loud to allow easy talking.

We drank a Reserve de Couvent 2007 from Ksara Winery. Even though this wine won at least two silver medals this year I am afraid we drank it somewhat too young.

It anyhow contained too much acids and too little taninnes to really be enjoyed with the steak that was server for dinner.

Luckily the next day we had more luck as we went for dinner in The Exchange next to the hotel where we drank the delicious 2003 (sic!) Chateau Kefraya made by Kefraya winery. The acidity and tannins are in perfect balance with this wooded wine with a lot of alcohol (14.5%) that really came close to some not so cheap bordeaux wines that I drank a while ago.

This 2003 vintage was much better than the 2005 one we drank two days earlier. On the winelist they also posted a prestigious Le Comte de M by Kefraya which is the topwine, but as it was 3 times the price I did not select it.

Lebanese wine ...

For work I am currently in Beirut, Lebanon and of course we had to try the local food specialities with one of our hosts. Luckily for me this person had no problem with drinking alcohol (which is not evident in the Middle East) and thus asked whether we would like to try some of the Lebanese wines ... of course I could not resist.

He negotiated with the waiter about which bottle of wine (in arabic thus I didn't understand a word about what they were saying) and the ended up choosing a bottle of red Chateau Kefraya.

During dinner we also go some explanation about the geography of Lebanon (I did not know they had mountains upto 3700m high where you can even go skiing) and the famous Beqaa Valley.

After listening to all this (and enjoying the nice wine) I concluded that the climate of the valley, separated from the Mediterranean sea by some mountains and separated from the dessert by some other mountains make it somewhat comparable to Napa Valley in California)

The prohibition ended 76 years ago ...

According to this article the U.S. prohibition law was (finally) repealed after 13 years of hard times for the nascent US Wine industry.

Both articles mention interesting ways on how the wine industry did actually (partially) survive:

• legal production for personal use only (50 gallon per family per year, that is about 190l, which is about 250 bottles ... not sure we consume that much in a year)
• selling to church for use during ceremonies
• selling of bricks of concentrated grapes with a warning that should prevent people from accidentally making wine ... (cfr. article in Time Magazine)

I just love the ingenuity with which people always succeed in bypassing the law to make money ...

Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières red

Last week one of the colleagues asked me for a bottle of wine we tasted on the wine event on the Argentina and Chili at work as he was organizing a wine tasting for a few of his friends at home.

Unfortunately I was out of Trapiche's Broquel Malbec, but we settled for the other (affordable) winner of the evening, being Echeveria's Reserva Syrah/Carmenere.

What does all this have to do with this Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières of the title ? In fact I got that one in return for the Echeveria :-)

When I returned home that evening and showed the bottle there was no stopping us from trying it immediately. It was very good (but it required some food, in the form of some toast and tapenade that we always have in house) .

Some tasting notes:

Very nice deep colored, still looking quite young (purple-ish). The aroma was very special with the vanilla of the oak barrels very much present but at the same time some leather and some minerals were also fighting very hard to gain access to the nose.

With respect to taste there were still a whole lot of tannins (in fact a bit too much in the beginning), but thanks to the also strong acidity of the wine everything was in good balance.

A red D.O. Bierzo wine

At the same Sparkling Days at Mondovino, there were also a few of their wines for the holidays to be tasted.

Even though most of the wines they served I already know from various other tastings in the same shop we were this time happily surprised by the excellent Pittacum 6 messes en barrica 2005 from the Bierzo DO in Spain.

The most unique thing about this DO is that they don't make wines from the more traditional Tempranillo or Garnache grapes that are used throughout Spain, but rather from the Mencia grape which is believed to be related to the better known Cabarnet Franc (from which you hardly find any mono-cepage wines due to the heavy tannins).

Sparkling days at Mondovino

Yesterday and today were "Sparkling Days" at Mondovino here in Schoten were I live.

The name of the event was linked to the presence of Sergi Colet of Colet Cava, Penedes. Sergi presented all of the Cavas they they make in his bodega, some of which I (and other people like the sommelier of El Bulli restaurant) score very good. Especially the "A priori" Cava is very good according to us.

Today we also tasted the "Colet Assemblage which is a peculiar kind of Cava as it looks a little bit Rose, but is actually made like a regular white Cava (i.e. no maceration of the grapeskin with the wine). The reason that it is (in some years only) a rose Cava is that the Pinot Noir grapes get too little water in the mediteranean climate and dry into (almost) raisins. At that point in time the colour of the skin enters the inside of the grape.

Bubbles wine tasting at work ...

Wow, can't believe it has been more than 3 weeks since I put something on this blog. Probably a little bit too busy with other things I guess.

Anyway, I am back and bring some backlog of wine info I definetely want to blog about in the near future. Let's start with something which is still fresh in my mind though: yesterday evening's Wine Club in the company I work for.

Readers of this blog will surely know that we have bi-monthly meetings where we taste some wines around a certain theme (in September it was Chili+Argentina). As the year is approaching the end it was again time to do a tasting of sparkling wines.

The presentation can be found below.

Wine and tech ..

This evening while reading the BBC Tech News I bumped into this article about how satellite imagery is being used to improve English wines (sic!).

This was an eye-opening article: First of all I did not know at all that wine was being grown in the UK, and second I wouldn't have expected that satellite imagery would help to look at these tiny grapes, but science never stop apparently. Thus lets hope that indeed UK wines will indeed start to flourish (again?) due to this new application of technology.

Ridgeback Viognier 2007

Apparently I haven't yet written about the superb Ridgeback Viognier 2007 that we bought last year at Artevino.

It is a mono-cepage viognier wine which is not that common outside the northern Cote de Rhone (although getting more and more well known around the world).

This wine is a heavy wine (14% alcohol is a lot for white wine), with a very roasty taste, but also the typical apricot-aroma that goes with the grape. It is somewhat dark yellow in color, but very intense. Yesterday we opened another bottle to try it with a Indian Curry dish, but that was not a very big success. This evening when we emptied the bottle while watching TV it tasted a lot better (not that it was bad yesterday :-))

Some great wines at Van Durme this weekend ...

Next to the Vlaamse Landwijn (of which only the red one was good) that I discussed in the previous post there were also some other wines at the tasting of Wijnen Van Durme this weekend.

From the Cotes de Rhone there was a very nice Vacqueyras 2008 and an even better Gigondas 2007. The Vacqueyras was of course still too young, but it already had this very nice spicy taste.

From Burgundy there was a person from Henri de Villamont that brought 9 different wines with him, ranging from an 'awful' Bourgogne Passe-tout-grains (which is some kind of mixture of Pinot noir and Gamay from Beaujolais region) to a sublime 2005 Fixin 1er cru Clos du Chapitre.

The Bordeaux region was present with a a number of different Medoc, Graves and Saint-Emillion style wines. The best Bordeaux wines of the day were no doubt the excellent (and still affordable) Pomerol, 2005 Ch. La Fleur Saint Vincent and the Moulis, 2005 Ch. Dutruch Grand Poujeaux.

As the non-French wines (which is not the specialty of Van Durme to say the least), there was a very nice Sicilian Syrah, and also a very good and affordable Chilean Cabarnet-Merlot (Santa Carolina is the name, but I doubt it is linked the well known Santa Carolina bodega) that also had a lot of spices and very good taste.

A first try at "Vlaamse landwijn"

It's been about two weeks since I posted on this blog apparently. Time for some quick updates.

This weekend I finally tried my first Belgian Wines. It was not any of the 'Hagelandse'-wine which is probably most (in)-famous, but rather the more regular "Vlaamse landwijn" from 'Domein De Kluizen' near the city of Aalst (Herdersem to be precise).

The tasting was part of another old fashioned, but wonderful, tasting at Wijnen Van Durme in Merksem where they featured 2 dry whites, one sweet white and one red wine from De Kluizen. (and some very nice other wines too)

The red wine was a blend of Dornfelder and Zweigelt grapes and has quite some taninnes and spices in the taste, which made them quite good. I did not like any of the white wines ... although the sweet white wine was supposed to be very good and comparable to the German highest quality Trockenbeerenauslese, I prefer more Sauternes style white sweet wine.

Older wines ...

This evening we were looking for a wine to drink before the TV and decided to have the last remaining bottle of 1998 Condesa de Leganza Reserva (DO La Mancha) which was still in the cellar since a few years. Unfortunately it had turned bad ... the smell contained a lot of (expected) tertiary aromas like forest and fur, but the taste had some unidentified taste that I really did not appreciate at all (it reminded me somewhat of chicory, but it was not the same).

After emptying the bottle in the sink (pity, as we both remember that we liked this wine a lot a few years ago) we went back to the cellar to get another lonely bottle ... this time it was a 1999 Devil's Lair Cabarnet Sauvignon from the well known Margaret River region in Australia.
This one was still perfect ... also here a lot of tertiary aromas like old leather, but this time the taste really matched the nose and was really exquisite.

As interesting side note: this is probably one of the first wines that we bought at more than 10Euro a bottle (somewhere back in 2003 I guess). In fact we bought the cheaper Fifth Leg wine (a blend) from the same estate first, and after doubting somewhat we also bought six bottles of this Cab Sav. Unfortunately this wine was not for sale anymore the year after ...

Some fairtrade red wines ...

After the quite succesfull white fairtrade wine I drank last weekend, I wanted to try the red Malbec from the same cooperation, la Riojana.

Unfortunately I must say that we did not even finish our glasses as both me and my wife did not like this wine. The taste was far too fruity and sweer (for our taste). In fact we both thought it was more like some kind of softdrink than wine. Probably some people will find this wine very nice, but it is not our taste.

Persistent as we were we tried a second bottle of red fairtrade wine. This time an organic Pinotage (2008), from Stellar Organics.
Although this wine was somewhat more to our liking, it did not taste like the other pinotage wines, like the excellent Raka Pinotage, that we are used to and that has a lot more body than this soft, almost dull, red wine

In order to have at least one wine that we liked this evening we settled for the much better Reserva Malbec from the bodega Trivento in Mendoza (Argentina). This wine has much more body, an explicit vanilla aroma, but still enough fruit to be more than simply another oaked merlot wine. It is only 1 Euro more expensive than the Pinotage above, but it is not fairtrade.

More on Chateau Goubau

To come back to this Chateau Goubau. We tasted both of their red wines (2007 vintage) and both (the entry level La Source and and the more advanced Chateau Goubau) are wonderful to drink right now, but can both age a few years, and have quite some complexity in both aromas and taste. Both wines are aged in large wooden casks which brings them finesse, but not too much of wooden taste.
If you know the prices (7Euro and 10Euro respectively), this is almost too good to be true.

Talking to the owner at the winetasting of wineworld.be we learned some more about their vineyard and the appellation in general (which I don't remember drinking before, but that could be my memory misleading me ...)
Cotes de Castillon is next to the famous (and thus much more expensive) Saint-Emilion. In fact the city centre of Saint Emilion is only 10km from the vineyard, and the grounds that can still call their wine Saint Emillion are only 2km away (Which can be a lot in terroir difference though).

wineworld.be tasting (part 1)

This is a first post on an excellent winetasting of www.wineworld.be that we attended this afternoon in the Antwerp Hilton hotel.

To start with I have to prove that my nuanced view of price vs quality of French wines that I stated yesterday was correct: although most French wines are too expensive for what they are compared to new world wines today's tasting proved differently.

In this case the French Chateau Goubau (owned and worked on by a Belgian couple) had a superb price vs quality, while the Brazilian Salton Vinocola had too high prices for what they had to offer, although the Salton Lunae Branco Frisante was very good.

Wine tasting at Delhaize this morning

This morning I went shopping in Delhaize and was happily amused by the fact that there was a wine tasting event ongoing. I could, of course, not resist joining in and trying of few of the wines.

I tried the white Trio (Sauvignon Blanc), a Riesling not to remember, and the Sunrise Chardonnay (I already bought the Sunrise Carmenere last week). The Trio was the best ones of these whites (in my humble opinion).

After that we moved on to reds. I started with the Santa Digna Carmenere 2008, which showed a lot more body than the Sunrise Carmenere, but which also means it is not for everyone to enjoy easily (although I did). After that we jumped immediately to Torres's Celeste (DO Ribero del Duero) which was just perfect. It is a crianza wine (ie 12 months in oak), 100% tinto fino (aka tempranillo) and is just delicious, especially for its reduced price of 12.75Euro.

Like all crianza tempranillo wines you either like them or not as they have quite a specific taste. In this one the tannins are not too heavy (having been tempered by the oak), and there was still quite a lot of fruit left in the wine (2006 vintage). The alcohol level is quite high (14.5%), but it doesn't show in the aroma's nor the taste of the wine.

Less important, but still fun is that the bottle itself looks impressive as well, with a very nice label that has some stars on it.

After tasting this wonderful wine I was talking to the wine-specialist and we both agreed that Spain still has good price vs quality which is most of the times not true for France. To prove our point we tried a 20Euro bottle of Chateau Poujeuax 2001 (Moulis). This wine was not comparable to the Celeste in taste (also because it it already much older), and I actually did not like it at all.

A fairtrade white wine

This evening when my parents-in-law came by to say hello we drank a nice white wine on the terrace outside as aperitif.

It was an Oxfam's Torrontes - Sauvignon blanc wine that I got as a present a while back. I must say that I was happily surprised to find this wine to be this good.
Apparently this wine is made in La Riojana a cooperation of a few hundred farmers in the North-West of Argentina, but no reference is to be found on the website.


The Sauvignon Blanc's agrum flavour was very well hidden by the Torrontes grape that added more flowery aromas to the wine.

Apparently this Torrontes grape is as specific for Argentina as Malbec is these days although it originally came from the old world (like most grapes in South-America together with the Spanish priests that needed wines for their Catholic ceremonies)

Wine tasting on Chili and Argentina

Last week thursday it was my turn to organize a winetasting in the wineclub we started last year at the company I work. We meet once every two months and one of the people in the club prepares a tasting, using a certain theme.

This month was my turn and I chose red wine from Chili and Argentina as the theme as I like those wines a lot and have quite some of them in my cellar.

I did not focus too much in getting the best of the best wines, but rather I chose a number of very affordable wines that are easy to buy (in Belgium at least) and give good value for money. At the end of the presentation are the ranking scores that each attendee gave and the overall ranking.

As the most expensive wine was almost 3 times as expensive as the next one it (luckily) won as best wine of the evening, but the interesting part is the shared 2nd place ...

Below is the presentation (using some fancy google docs widget, hope that works, if not you can find the presentation here)

My most expensive taste (until now)

Friday evening we joined some friends at the winetasting at Puerta Del Sol wines in Deure. As usual most of the wines we already knew (as we visit them regularly).

Some (not so new) highlights are the Gran Brut Allier Cava (expensive for a cava, but due to the aging in wood a real feast) and the excellent Marti Fabra Vinyes Velles (many explicit but very good taninnes).

At the end of the tasting we were welcomed to a table with a few more exclusive wines ...
First of was the Genium Costers 2005 (>30Euro/bottle) which is really a very, very, very nice priorato wine, but unfortunately it shows in the price. The taste is quite exquisite with a lot of depth and each sip gives you another impression.
To top this Genium Costers (that I tasted before in the shop) the owner of the store decided to give something extra ... after going to the back for while he returned with one of the 5 remaining bottles of Ribas de Cabrera 2001 ...
This wine has a list price of 64Euro, which makes it the most expensive wine I've tasted to date (although I already know this record will be broken on the 8th of October, more about that later).
Is this wine worth its price ? I don't think so ... it was an excellent wine, probably even better than the Genium Costers, but I don't think I've reached the level of taste or aroma awareness that makes me appreciate the price. I will not say that I will never buy this kind of wines (maybe as investment, rather than for drinking ;-)), but for now I don't even consider it.

Wines of Albert Frere sold at Sotheby's

Today there was an auction of the wines of Albert Frere at Sotheby's.

Judging from the estimated and going prices it seems that the crisis is not really hitting too hard on the wine-investors. For example lot 324 (12 bottles of Chateau Petrus 1989) were sold for 2 770.5 Euro per bottle !!!!

As the lot was for 12 bottles, the new owner payed about 33246 Euro for these 12 bottles.

Lot 27 is also nice to see: this is an imperial bottle of 6 liters Chateau Lafitte 2000 that is sold for 8 695Euro. I did not even know they made this big bottles in Bordeaux.

Back to reality: I have a cellar with about 250 bottles. 2 bottles of this Petrus would more than double the value of the complete cellar ...

Icono wine (by Sideral)

We've been drinking this Icono 2002 wine bought at Delhaize last yearlast friday and as I am preparing a talk about Chilenian wines I tried to dive a big deeper into the background of this wine.

When buying the wine we did recognize this Sideral as a wine that we already bought at Mondovino a few years back, although this is a completely different ballgame at about 3x the price of this Icono.

Apparently the company that produces these wines, Viña Altaïr (originally Vina Totihue), is a joint venture between Vina San Pedro and Chateau Dassault (a Grand Cru Classe in Saint Emillion).

Their website only mentions the Sideral wine and an apparently even better (Parker score at least) Altair wine that I haven't seen in Belgium yet. If anyone can explain me what this Icono wine actually is or where I can find more information, drop me a note. (Chances are that it is specially made for Delhaize though)

So far for the background, when drinking this wine you'll see it starts to show some age (2002 is already 7 years ago), both in the colour and the smell (some forest wood and jammy). But the small of cassis (from the Cabernet Sauvignon no doubt) is really still spectacular (and nice).
Qua taste it is a typical wine that we like and drink most often: high alcohol, full taste, some tannines, etc.

Chateau Cantenac - Saint Emilion Grand Cru

Today we opened a bottle of Chateau Cantenac which is classified as a Saint Emilion Grand Cru. This wine was part of a set of 6 bottles that we got when we were 10 years married and was in fact the start of a real wine cellar in our basement.

At the time this 'Grand Cru' was seen as a real sign of superb quality, but having done some reading on the classification system in Saint Emilion I now know that Grand Cru is not that special, Grand Cru Classe is what starts getting special attention in wine circles.

Having said all that: the 2002 vintage (or millisime as they call it in France) is, although not classified as such between the super years of 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005 still really good: Very soft taninnes and still containing a lot of fruit with enough body to fit with the excellent porc roast we cooked up.

S de Siran

Last week when visiting some friends they showed me their collection of 'special' wines that they kept for special occasions. One of the bottles was the "S de Siran 1998" which we drank that same evening.

The "S de Siran" is the 2nd wine of the Chateau Siran estate in the Margaux region of Bordeaux.

According to the website this 2nd wine is best enjoyed between 5 and 7 years after the vintage year, and indeed the wine was maybe a little bit over the top, but it was still highly enjoyable.
There was quite some sediment in the bottle, but luckily it stuck to the bottle and was not floating around in the wine.

Think wine is expensive in Sweden ?

Do you think wine is expensive in Sweden ? Think again ...

Last week we visited our family that lives near Göteborg for the next 2.5 years. When visiting the system bolaget in Mölnlycke we bought a bottle of 2008 Casillero del Diablo Carmenere which cost us 70 SEK. In Delhaize in Belgium this wine is 6.99€, which is 0,13€ more expensive at the time of checking :-)

About the wine: this is an excellent example of where a commericial wine from a big bodega in Chili, Concha y Toro in this case, can give very good quality for a very reasonable price. This was a full bodied wine with the necessary taninnes and enough sourness to be well balanced, which is quite an achievement considering the Carmenere grape and the fact that wine is only 1 year old (maybe two when considering the fact that Chili is in the other hemisphere)

Renwood 2005 Old Vine Zinfandel

This evening (after dinner when the kids were in bed) we opened a bottle of 2005 Old Vine Zinfandel that we bought at Nieuwe Wereld Wijnen during a wine tasting in Sint Antion

Image of Renwood Winery via Snooth

us-Zoersel last april.

We don't regularly drink any Zinfandel wine, as I have probably been mistaken Zinfandel for meaning cheap and not often very good (the most recent/decent zinfandel I drank before is probably the - non comparable - Gallo Family Zinfandel), but this Renwood one is really good.
I recall that Renwood also has some wines that are even older, but those bottles were too expensive to appreciate the difference with this Old Vine bottle.

As you can see on the site it is apparently made of mostly old vines of at least 45 years old. I am not entirely sure what this does to a wine (according to Wikipedia it makes the fruit more concentrated which could indeed be true), but I sure like the result.

The colour of the wine is a deep intens red that does not really show its age yet. Qua taste it has a perfect mix of body, taninnes and sourness (we would score this +0,5,+0,5,+0,5 in the Tastevin Confrerie I would think). Even though the alcohol percentage is very high (15%), it is not present in the taste which makes this a very drinkable wine: enjoy it when you can.

Champage trip 11-12 Aug 2009

We had a wonderful two day trip to the Champagne region in France in order to (re-)fill the cellar with some of the better bubbles.

This google map shows where the good spots are, including some basic comments. I will post more information about some of these houses in further blog post, but for those people that already leave in the following days (yes I know who you are), you can already find some inspiration here.

Wine courses

For those that want an entry level course in wines: the guys from SoWine that started my intrest in wines are planning another set of 5 eveningcourses on wines in Schoten.

Unfortunately the courses are on monday evenings, thus I will not be able to attend, but if the course is the same quality than the short version that I attened at the Sint Michiel Open Leer Centrum in 2007 it will be a good, no nonse introduction of the how to start appreciating wines and especially how not to fall victim to too much details that someone told me about after attending the wine course at Piva in Antwerp.

Having said all the above, I am still very happy with the course from tastevin that I finished last year, but I will stay on the lookout for new courses to attend in the coming months/years.

Wine auctions ...

Another day, another thing to learn ...

I learned from a cousin of my wife about Veiling Sylvies a place where one can bid online for monthly wine auctions. He even managed to buy a number of bottles of Kasteel Withof, the fancy 1-michelin-star-awarded restaurant that seized business a few weeks ago.

Although the concept of an auction of wine that you didn't even taste is kind of strange to me (as I hardly buy any wine that I haven't tasted myself) it is possible to do some really nice bargains it seems.

I've registered for the site and will surely have a look when the next auction catalog is presented.

Intermezzo - a nice red Burgundy

Yesterday evening we had a very fine dinner in restaurant het pomphuis, which has a very extensive wine list with wines from all over the world ranging from relatively cheap bottles at 25€ upto a bottle of 1995 millésime (degorged in 2006) champagne
Moët et Chandon for the price of 590€ a bottle ...

Anyway, we didn't have any wine during dinner as we had decided upfront that we would open a really good bottle from our own cellar after dinner. We came home and decided to open up a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet from the Cote de Beaune region in Burgundy.
It was the 2007 vintage bottled by Henri de Villamont.

I don't normally drink Burgundy wines a lot as they are often too expensive for what they really are, but I bought this bottle a while ago during a tasting at Wijnen Van Durme in april. It was still a hefty >20Euro price, but we do think it was worth it ...

After opening the bottle the first thing we notices was the exceptional intense colour that was already really red without hints of purple which is quite strange for a 2007 vintage I though. Next to that the aroma was amazingly fresh, containing lots of red berries and a slight hint of vanilla and other spices.
Taste wise it was very soft, with maybe a tad too much sour.

Back from rose country ...

Hello there, I just returned from two weeks of very relaxing holiday in the country of the Rose ... the French VAR region, in the middle of the Cote de Provence AOC where we stayed for two week in a wonderful house with pool that we rented.

Of course we drank a lot wines (also white and red) and I will surely blog about some of the highlights in the coming days and weeks. Quantity wise we probably had most of the dirt cheap rose en vrac that we buy at the local Les Caves Du Commandeur store in Salernes.
This rose en vrac only costs about 1.4€ (per liter), but as there are no packaging costs (bring your own container ...) it can compete with roses that maybe cost 4€ (per 0,75l) in the supermarket.

Egri Bikavér (bull's blood wine)

My mother went to Hungary, and guess what she brought me as a present ... some Hungarian wine: two bottles of 2006 Egri Bikavér from Ostorosbor producer. I just received them thus did not open them yet, but you can expect a small note on the taste as soon as I tried it.

This wine region has its own AOC (or DHC, Districtus Hungaricus Controllatus, as they call it locally) that is quite liberal though (at least 3 out of 10 grape varieties are allowed to be used).
This reminds me of Chateuneuf-du-pape that also allows (too?) many varieties to be blended to make the taste more or less predictable.

This particular bottle doesn't seem to be a cuvee of any sort (it was bought in the local supermarket of the place she visited), thus I don't know what to expect. It seems to be a rather unusual(for my limited view on wines that is) blend of Zweigelt, Cabernet and Kékfrankos (aka Blaufränkisch). This means it will actuallybe more like an Austrian wine with some French Cabernet thrown in for making is special.

It doesn't seem to have the more traditional Kadarka grape in it, but the Kékfrankos makes it a typical more modern Egri Bikavér that I will (hopefully :-)) enjoy when the time is right.

Thi

Kekfrankos aka Blaufrankisch

Black South African wines: M'Hudi

Do you recognize the feeling that something that you just learned about keeps coming back in various forms even though you did not notice anything of it before you initially heard about it ?

I've had this with M'hudi wines from South Africa. Not only did I see a BBC documentary about Wine: The Future that featured them (I watched this on the plane when flying to Singapore with KLM), but last week they were also linked (indirectly) from the Daily Sip newsletter.
(Other mentions of this documentary on a blog of the competition :-) )

In the documentary two South African winemakers were depicted, one white farmer that already had a big estate and was not trying to do some good by learning the black people of the town to appreciate wine. And the other farmer was a black professor that threw everything overboard to start the M'Hudi winery together with his family. His fist commercial success was by selling some Sauvignon Blanc wine to Marks and Spencer in the UK, and the documentary ended where the purchaser did agree to buy more of the same, but still didn't like the Pinotage blend of M'Hudi although the winemaker was most proud of that one. When I checked the website today they still don't sell the M'Hudi Pinotage either ...

Yes !

I made it. I am not officialy a 'wine taster' according to the people of tastevin winecourse.

The examination wasn't easy. I did not expect to get that many questions about different French AOC, but according to the answers that were reviewed after handing in the papers I do think I scored quite ok, defintely more than 50%.

The 4 red wines were quite easy to guess the grape, thus that was not a problem at all.

The white wine tasting was somewhat of a gamble though as although I correctly filled in that we had a riesling 2007, it was more a guess than really knowing it for sure.

Anyway, I do feel that I will need a followup course, even if only for the whites :-)

I will anyhow be invited for the montly confrerie evenings starting next year October, thus this will not be the end of this blog ...

Back in Belgium ...

I've returned to Belgium since friday morning, only to leave for a weekend in the Belgian Ardennes for the celebration of my parents in law 40th anniversary.

It was just a weekend with the kids, thus not too much fine wine, but a very good barbeque and some South-African Merlot did the trick just as good. We drank the fine Arniston Bay Merlot that has an extraordinary amount of spices and really reminds me (and apparently some other people on the web as well) a lot about Pinotage wine.

You can buy it fairly cheap at Delhaize in Belgium and it is in fact the red house wine at my parents in law.

posting from Singapore ...

As I had the chance to go to Singapore for my job I of course need to tell you somewhat more about the experience of wines in outside of Belgium.

We, i.e. my colleague and I, started of with Crozes-Hermitage (northern part of the Rhone valley, thus Shiraz) half-bottle of wine (37.5cl) in the restaurant "The Brasserie" in the Lounge2 of Schiphol airport accompanies with a nice steak with truffle-sauce.

In the plane there was some 'cheap' red wine in small bottles (10cl I believe) that accompanied the dinner that was server at 11pm.

When arriving at Singapore after a flight with much turbulence (and thus little sleep), we went with all colleagues that arrived from several parts of the world to Riverside point to have a nice dinner at a Thai restaurant. I had the honour to select the white wine. Altough I wanted to go for a German (sweet) Gewurtrzaminer to handle the spicy food, they did not have any of that.

In stead I picked an Alsace blend of Riesling and Pinot Gris which was not too bad and stood up quite well to the onslauht of spicy food, but unforuntately this was the last bottle they stocked.

As second bottle of white wine we had a decent Riesling from New Zealand which was good, some what sour but still quite fruity.

Tomorrow is another day, with probably more dining and wining, thus keep posted ...

EC is getting smart about rose wine

As announce in this previous article on the blog there were plans of the Eurpean Commission to allow blending of white and red wines to create roses.

Luckily they decided yesterday that it was a bad idea anyway and the proposal was cancelled.

Thanks to all who signed the petition.

Cadlillac Wines ...

Some US readers of this blog that are not familiar with Bordeaux sweet wines may rather thing about the famous US Car Manufacturer, but I am talking here about the AOC Cadillac which is a small region in Bordeaux where they make excellent sweet wines. One of which I was able to enjoy last friday.

The Cadillac AOC is situated at the other side of the Garonne river than the better known (to me at least) AOC Sauternes and AOC Barsac.

Strangely enough there is a link between the car's name and the AOC's name: Antoine de la Mothe, who was born in the village of Cadillac, and went on to found the city of Detroit ...

Anyhow, back to the wine: the wine I drank was not from a famous chateau or anything, but it was already a 1999 vintage which is not too old, but the colour of the wine did show quite some evolution towards light orange already. The smell was quite peculiar and I cannot really name what aromas I did smell, but the taste was definetely different from the aroma.

Training the recognition of wine aromas

Far and beyond recognizing aromas in wines is one of the most difficult things to do (at least for me personally). Sometimes it helps to smell the pure product that is described (like lime, lemon, etc), but in some cases the aromas are not that easy to recognize according to me.

Today I bumped into a technique that looks very promising for learning this aroma recognition in the userguide on www.winearomawheel.com.

I have no connection with these guys at all, I just bumped onto their site after bumping on an explanation of the German Wine Classification system which pointed to a winearomawheel applicable to German wines.

It goes something like this: take a bottle of cheap wine (with little finesse and aromas) and add some artificial aromas in different glasses. After a few hours try to recognize the different aromas that you added in each glassm when in doubt compare with a glass of unchanged cheap wine.

I haven't tried this yet, but I sure am planning to as seems like a simply but elegant way to do so.

A nice spring evening and some white wines

Today was a wonderful day here in Belgium and temperatures easily reached more than 23 degrees which caused also the evening to be quite warm.

After dinner (Mc Donalds with the kids, thus no wine involved), we decided to sit in the garden some more and open up a bottle of white wine.
We chose bottle of Castelo de Medina Verdejo, which is an excellent white wine from the Spanish Rueda DO. This is a wine with a lot of body and the necessary sours to support it, not as alcohol driven as some other Spanish wines (only 12.5 degrees alcohol).

After sipping our glasses for a while we got a visit from my parents in law, although they do like white wine they are more fan of classical French Sauvignon Blanc wines like Sancerre and the likes ... back to the cellar to get a bottle of Sancerre.

Unfortunately this first bottle (a bottle from Delhaize we once received as part of a gift from I don't remember who) had turned bad and basically had no taste at all in it anymore.

Back to the cellar again, this time to emerge with the last bottle of Domaine du Salvard - Cheverny 2006, which is an excellent alternative (although it is a blend Sauvignon Blanc / Chardonnay) to sometimes a lot more expensive Sancerre wines.

At the end of the evening we finished these two bottles and felt quite happy to have spent such a wonderful evening in the garden.

Rose wine is NOT a blend of white and red wine

There is a lot of fuss currently in the European wineworld for plans that the European Commision has to allow rose wine to be made by blending/mixing white and red wine in stead of the traditional way of making roses that simply uses a short maceration time to achieve the rose result.

There is a petition (that I signed as well) that tries to prevent this from happening. We'll see if it will help, but it is sure worth a try.

It is interesting to look at the background of this proposal. The EC uses the fact that the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (O.I.V) already allows for blending of red and white wines to create rose and that this practice is use alot in newer wine countries.

As the process of blending is easier than making a real rose, the result is a cheaper wine and European roses cannot compete anymore. This in itself would be a more or less noble goal ...

But according to some comments that I heared on the Belgian radio there is in fact a huge overproduction of (low quality) wines in the EC and currently all this overproduction is distilled into industrial alcohol ... subsidized by the EC ...

The reasoning of the reported was that allowing blending on red and white to create cheap rose would lessen the overproduction (as more is sold) and thus cost the EC less in subsidies.

I don't know what to believe in this matter, but as usual there will be some truth in either point of view.

A taste of Portugal

A few weeks ago we bought a few bottles of Portugese red wine at the salesweekend of ArteVino. 

I am talking about Vinha da Carrica Reserva  from the Douro Superior region made by the VDS (Vinhos Douro Superior) Vinhos winemaker.

It it made of local grapes the Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franc and Tinta Roriz (aka Tempranillo) which are 3 out of the top-6 of 48 allowed grapes to make Port.

The wine itself does not really taste like Port, more somewhat Bordeaux-like with its heavy aromas of plum and blackberry.

Anyway, it is another nice example of how Portugese wines don't have to fall behind in the brave new wine world in which we live in these days.

Monte Lindo Malbec/Merlot

On saturday I went to Mondovino to buy one of their promotion wines (MoDa, more on that later) and to prepare for a wine-tasting session on Chili and Argentina that I will be hosting in my company's wine club somewhere in june (more on all that later as well probably).

I knew already that I absolutely want to let people taste the excellent Trapiche Broquel Malbec (slow link) that we have enjoyed already numerous times since a few years. The guy in the shop also recommended a cheaper, probably more accessible for people that aren't big fans of wood-matured wine that I could try. The Alta Vista Finca Monte Lindo Malbec/Merlot blend (the Alta Vista bodega doesn't show the wine on their website, strange).

As it was for the better cause of learning my colleagues to enjoy the greatness of Argentinian wine I decided to buy two bottles and give it a go, even without tasting, which is not something I typically adventure anymore these days.

Anyhow  my wife and I opened the bottle on Sunday evening to enjoy it with a fresh bowl of Chile con Carne and although we initially thought it was a bit of a dissapointment (lightly coloured, lots of alcohol in the aroma, etc.) the bottle didn't survive the evening ...

Conclusion: I do think this is indeed a good wine for its price (about 7€)  to be drank with all kinds of food by all kinds of people.

I will keep you informed about what the colleagues think of it.

Le Nez du Vin

Apparently Le Nez du Vin has released new aromakits last april. I do know that these things exists, but I had no clue about how extensive these collections are. The biggest single collection has 54 different aromas, but even that does not include a few specific smells that are grouped in additional kits.

They even have a collection of 12 (twelve) different kinds of oak casks that would allows you to identify in which oak (French, American, etc.) the wine you are tasting has matured.

I am personally far from able to do so as my nose seems to need quite some time to remember all the aromas that wine can have, but I sure would like to get such a larger or specific aromakit as a present :-)

A multilingual wine tasting method

Today I bumped into the Wine & Spirit Education Trust which is an originally UK based organization that offers wine tasting educations all over the world, including in Belgium. I can imagine that their primary target for the education is rather professionals in stead of amateurs as they have different levels of education (from Foundation (level 1) to Honours (level 5)). But I might consider a level 2 course one of the coming years.

They have developed a tasting method they called WSET (tm) (wow, impressive) that allows people to systematically analyse a wine.

What especially caught my eye however is that their Level 2 (Intermediate) tasting sheet is freely available in multiple languages (e.g. English, Dutch, ...) which is very interesting for the next time we organize a wine tasting event where I work (there is almost always some people that doesn't speak Dutch natively).

The sheets basically contain the same elements as those that are used in the tastevin-wijncursus that I attend this year, although that one is in Dutch only..

What is it with these guru's ?

I've read with great intrest that there are actually more people than just myself that don't think that one man can determine whether a wine is good or excellent. 1WineDude mentions on his blogpost about some strange quotes from Robert Parker that basically put himself on a piedestal and implies that the rest of wine loving world doesn't know what they are talking about.

I sometimes notice the same behaviour in peoples behaviour in other areas where some people get the status of guru and basically thinks they are the sole source of truth. (think Bernard Madoff just to name one)

This of course doesn't mean that I am not influenced with the scores that are given by Mr. Parker, but I am not rich/snobish enough to just follow this guru and taste only wines that get >90 points.

TONG Magazine ?

When reading the news section on www.winetasting.be I bumped into the launch of a new glossy magazine about wine called Tong. The first issue is about Sauvignon Blanc all over the world which really seems to be an interesting read judging from the preview on the site.
Unfortunately the price of 28€ is really over the top I think. I rather buy a few nice bottles of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and taste this myself.

Please leave a comment in case you did buy the magazine and tell us what you think of it.

Cellar cleanup part 1

On friday I started looking around in my cellar to find some room for the new wines that I bought the week before and bumped into some wines of which I was absolutely unsure if they were still drinkable or not.

One was a Cabarnet Sauvignon from Delhaize (the link points to the 2007 vintage), but I still had 1999 in the cellar. It actually did remarkably well considering its low price and old vintage. It wasn't exactly full bodied or anything but although the cork had clearly suffered a lot there was no oxidation and the wine hadn't evolved to tuile colour yet. In fact it only just started to loose its red colour it seemed.

Another one was untracable Merlot 2003 from Pays d'Oc, but this one I tasted only very briefly to notice that it had turned undrinkable due to oxidation. Colourwise this wine had about the same colour as the 1999 Cab Sav above which indicates that colour alone doesn't always allow to guess a vintage.

The last bottle we tried was a white Argentinian wine  also from Delhaize, but this time we had the 2002 vintage in stead of the 2008 that is currently on the shelves. I personally did not like it at all anymore as there was a very pronounced mineral taste that didn't fit me, but both my parents in law did enjoy it. 

Les goûts et les couleurs, ça ne se discute pas

Is Pinotage's popularity going down ?

According to some people in the wine course I am attending the usage of Pinotage is slowly but surely declining (due to the sometimes harsh taste ...). This seems like a pity to me as have already tasted a few excellent South African Pinotage based wines in the last couple of months.

If anyone has information about the evolution of Pinotage growing I would be interested in receiving your comments.

I have a few bottles of the Raka Pinotage wine in my cellar and I really like the spicy taste of it, other excellent Pinotage wine is the Allee Bleue Pinotage that I tasted last weekend (but didn't buy as the cellar is overflowing ...).
We also tasted an excellent set of Pinotage wines when our colleague from South Africa visited our company wine club last year.

On wikipedia I learned that Pinotage is now also being grown outside South Africa, but unfortunately I haven't found any to taste and compare yet. Looking further on the web for more information I quickly bumped into an article at The Pinotage Club posted a few weeks ago that indicates that the first commercial Pinotage wine was only made in 1959, this seems very recent considering that the grape was already crafted 30 years before that, but this story is confirmed in multiple other sources thus I guess it is true :-)

The Tannat grape

During the winetasting at Magnus Wijnen in Kontich where I tried out all mono-cepage wines I could find -- in order to practice for my Tastevin exam next month -- my eye was caught by a wine from Cotes De Gascogne that features the Tannat grape.

Image by Agrofilms via Flickr

As it was the first time I heared this name my curiosity spiked. Later on I searched the web to find more and learned that this grape is currently considered the national grape of Urugay (I didn't even know they made wine) and its origin is in the Basque area in france where the Madiran area is the AOC that is known for this grape.

Wikipedia incomplete ...

When looking up some information about the Tannat grape that I tasted this afternoon I ended up surfing around on wikipedia and bumped into their list of wine producing regions. To my astonishment Belgium was not even mentioned ... 

I quickly added a the Hagelandse Wijn in a new section on Belgium. Hopefully someone will understand the hint and start filling in the rest. I would do it myself, but can currently not find the time to do so. Maybe one day ...

Wijnen Van Durme winetasting april 2009

This morning we went to Wijnen Van Durme in Merksem as we had gotten an invitation for a winetasting. To be honest we did not expect too much as this is quite an old fashioned shop that doesn't look very inviting and focusses mostly on French wines.

To our surprise we had however the most wonderful tasting of this weekend, tasting wonderful white wines (from an excellent Chardonnay-Viognier blend from Pays d'Oc to some wonderful, and very affordable Bourgognes).

After this excellent selection of white wines we started the reds with some not to great wines, but soon we ended up in really great Bordaux and Bourgogne wines. 

As usual the Bourgogne was expensive, but all in all still very affordable and much cheaper than expected.

Puerta Del Sol winetasting April 2009

A small note on the tasting at Puerta Del Sol this afternoon.

We skipped the Cava as we still have quite a lot of bubbles in the cellar from previous shopping sprees ...

Starting with the white wines it was interesting to see that most of the white wines were now vintage 2008. Personally I did not like any one in particular today although we tasted at least 7 different ones. It is a pity to see that a wine that was excellent in another vintage couldn't really reach the same quality in the current vintage. A good example of this is the Puig Ventos Blanco 2007, that is far from the excellent 2006. Another example is the Blanco Seco (Chardonay + Muscat) from Bodegas Javier Asensio which was really good (fruity with an excellent nose) in 2007 vintage, but could not really convince us today in the new 2008 vintage.

After the whites whines we also drank quite a special Spanish rose wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon (also from Bodegas Javier Asensio) which was a nice change from the typical Grenache rose wines that you see in a lot of places. It had a nice deep color and quite a long finish for a rose wine.

Onto the red wines: here Spain really proved itself to still being king of the better but still afordable red wines. The Binassalem-Mallorca DO really has some beautiful wines if you can find them. Especially the Oliver Moragues (both 2005 and 2006) is well worth the money.

A nice birthday party with a lot of wine

Yesterday we had a birthday party for a few family members at the same time. We had a nice BBQ and, of course, there was wine ... 

We started of with a nice bottle of rose champagne, and although I am normally not really a fan of rose champagne, this one was really quite good (we got it ourselves in the champagne region a few months back).  The website of the producer is currently down, but you should be able to find it here eventually.

During dinner we drank the excellent Dignus 2004 wine of Bodegas Viña Magaña. It really is an excellent and smooth wine with a perfect balance of taninnes, sourness and body. For the guru affectiados: it got 89 points from Parker which is really good considering the price of this wine.

After dinner there was again the need for some champagne as a pregnancy was unexpedly announced. This time we drank a bottle of Brut Carte d'Or from the excellent Veuve Olivier champange house in Trelou Sur Marne.

To finish the evening we drank a very nice Shiraz from South Africa, but unfortunately I forgot to write down additional information.

The start of an extraordinary weekend ...

Yes the weekend sometimes does start on thursday evening ...

Especially when there are 4 winetasting events in 4 different stores around the area where I live.

1. www.nieuwewereldwijnen.be in Sint Antonius Zoersel
2. www.puertadelsol.be in Deurne
3. www.magnuswijnen.be in Kontich
4. www.wijnenvandurme.be in Merksem

On top of that I will be hosting a wine tasting event at my house for a few family member that live in Sweden, but are visiting us for the weekend.

I will be writing shortly about all the wines we have tasted during this weekend, but it will take a few days to digest all of this, thus keep on reading this blog.

Preview:

When writing this post we (i.e. my wife and myself) have already visited www.nieuwewereldwijnen.be which was a nice experience with a lot of original wines. Red was (according to us) much better than white today.

Why this blog ... the FAQ ...

Hello world ... some of you readers may know who I am and will therefore understand why I started a Blog on wines, but for those that do not know me (yet), let me try to explain using a FAQ like view on this ...

Q: Why on earth another blog about wines ?

A: Because the earth is so full of wines that there are never enough blogs to describe all of them

Q: Why a blog ?

A: Because I feel like writing down stuff about all the interesting things I learn about the world of wine. I also tend to forget how and when I learn certain aspects about wines, I would like to keep track of my evolving knowledge of wine and look back at this in a number of years from now.

Q: Why not a wiki ?

A: The world is full of crazy people, wikis are great stuff, but as this is about my personal exploration of the world of wine I like to control the content of this blog myself.

Q: Why start only in april 2009 ?

A: Because it is only turning into an intersting hobby in the last couple of months

Q: Why in English while you speak Flemish ?

A: Because I don't want to limit the audience to only Flemish and Dutch readers. English is the international language I know best and it will allow me to keep more people up-to-date.

Q: Why enable AdSense ?

A: If all goes well, I may earn a few bucks while we all learn about wines. What is the big deal ?