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.