Exploring The World of Wines: April 2009

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.

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 ?