Exploring The World of Wines: general

Showing posts with label general. Show all posts

A last(?) thing about Lebanese wines ...

In yesterday's wine world taster of the year competition there was one question about Lebanese wines hidden as a multiple choice in which it was questioned whether Chateau Musar was a winery in Cyprus, Israel or Lebanon.

As I have been in Beirut in December for work (see earliers posts here and here) and have been paying close attention to the winecards in the restaurants I went for dinner I was quite sure that this Chateau Musar was not Lebanese as I only recalled Chateau Kefraya and Chateau Ksara. Therefore I gambled on Cyprus in stead ... and was of course wrong.

Another thing that I will quickly forget ...

Blend your own wine, or copy a famous one ...

Today the wine-calender I got for Christmas pointed me to the Fusebox, which is kit that allows you to make your own blend of 6 (high quality ???) Napa Valley mono-cepage bottles in order to either create your own personal favorite or try to mimic one of the great but unaffordable famous wines like Chateau Petrus or whatever.

Their promotion video is nice to watch, but apparently the manual has been removed from their website (probably because it harmed their sales too much: this is where the real value is of course, the bare wines you can buy in any local wine store)

Unfortunately they do not ship outside US thus I will have to find an alternative if I ever want to try something like that myself (or if someone can bring it I'd be very grateful :-))

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 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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ?