School has started again ...

If you would have asked me a few years ago if I would ever attend some kind of eveningclasses on a regular basis I would have laughed very hard. But last week marked a new era (for me at least) when I started with the first module of the wine courses organised by CVO at PIVA in Antwerp.

Probably there will be quite some redundancy in the first module due to the fact that I already completed the Tastevin Winecourse a few years ago, but as the total number of hours for this 2 year course is far higher I do expect to learn a lot more here. If nothing else I will at least learn another means to analyse and score wines which should allow me to combine the best of these methods into my own personal method of tasting wines.

Teacher of at least the first module is Michel Terlinck who has an immense knowledge about wines so no doubt there will be a lot to pick from his brain. 

Bumped into something new again ... "winetubes"

Today when browsing the Dutch wijnbloggers.nl blog I bumped into a post about wintubes which are an original way to package wines (and other beverages) for relational gifts or for tasting.

More information about how this works can be found on Winetubes.nl. Especially for tasting a few nice Sauternes or Bordeaux Grand Cru this could be good way to have access to them without having to buy whole bottles (although I haven't compared the price of a bottle to a price of a tube).

Foodinspiration about wine

Just a short post to point people to this month's foodinspiration magazine which is a "Liquid Special". It speaks about trends in horeca world linked to all liquid things. Of course wine could not be forgotten.

On wine front they mention, of course, the whole bio/natural wine movement which has not yet succeeded to convince me but they also reminded be about byow (Bring Your Own Wine) which is something I have heared of but had not been looking for in the neighebourhoud of Antwerp. I found this website that seems to try and bring this more to the attention but none of the restaurants mentioned there ring a bell to me. Suggestions are welcome ...

One of the non wine related trends are barrel aged cocktails which seems like a really nice thing to try as next to wine I happen to like a good cocktail now and then ... again if someone knows where to drink this around Antwerp I would really like to know.

Chill out with Begude @Mondovino

This afternoon we visited our favorite local wineshop Mondovino again as James Kinglake from Begude Wines was in the country to show off the latest vintages of his great wines. James personally attended to us in the store which is always fun and after have gone through the whole palette of Begude wines we even managed to convince the guys from Mondovino to open up a bottle of Verum Pinot Noir which is one of my favorite Pinot Noir wines of the moment.

Back to Begude: the "La Folie de Begude" (which you can hardly find on the website) was new for us and really good, especially when compared to Blanquette de Limoux which is the local bubly wine in the Limoux area where Begude is located. Our favorite is still the L'Etoile de Begude which remains amazingly good, especially when comparing the price to similar Burgundy Chardonnay, but the Terroir 11300 is also a very good wine (and even lower in price). We're also looking forward towards the up and coming L'Esprit Pinot Noir that is aged in barrique and will probably complement the Etoile perfectly.

James also brought some of the very complex wines that his resident wine maker Laurent Girault, is making completely independent in a privately owned vineyard. I really loved the red wine based on Grenache and 15 (sic!) other grapes.

In the end we only bought a few botles of Pinot Rosé (just in case the weather improves here in Belgium) but for sure we'll buy some more bottles of these wines when we visit Begude in the summer (only a 20 minutes drive from where we are staying :-) ).

For those who thought I stopped enjoying wine ...

Although I am not blogging a lot lately (understatemen of the year I guess) there is now a good reason to post something again in this blog: I just won the Wine World Taster Of  The Year 2012 Competition which was organised under sponsorship of Gault and Millau's Antwerp Wine Event.



For those that remember I tried this already two years ago (but did not even reach the final back then), but this time I am happy to say that I did not only make the final, but also won the competition which had a main theme my favorite wine country: Spain.

For the occassion this took place in 'de PIVA' which is Antwerp's most famous provincial highshool where a large number of chefs and sommeliers are studying on a daily basis.

Prize money was of the liquid kind and I have been told it is worth a fair amount of money, which I will probably never cash as I am too curious about how this expensive stuff tastes like.