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.

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.

1. www.nieuwewereldwijnen.be in Sint Antonius Zoersel
2. www.puertadelsol.be in Deurne
3. www.magnuswijnen.be in Kontich
4. www.wijnenvandurme.be in Merksem

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.