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.