Exploring The World of Wines: tastingevent

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Wine World Taster of the year competition

Today was my first participation of the "Wine World Taster of the Year" event held in Antwerp (already for the 12th year apparently) which is the only concours for non-professionals in Belgium I've been told.

Reaching the semi-final was (too) easy as it only required answering a few multiple choice questions at home (i.e. close to Google :-) ).
The semi-final however was difficult and I only scored 6/10 for the theoretical part. The practical part required "guessing" the grape and country of origina of 5 different red wines that were all served one-by-one (i.e. no way of comparing). On this part I only scored 1/5.
Clearly I did not reach the final (only 6 out of the 40 contestants were selected), but it may not have been far of as a friend of mine had 7/10 theory and 2/10 on the practical test and was selected for the final (he was 5th in the end)

All in all I am quite happy to have joined the game as it was big fun and I really enjoyed the associated winetasting a lot (more about that one in following posts). I will probably join next year's event as well.

Bubbles wine tasting at work ...

Wow, can't believe it has been more than 3 weeks since I put something on this blog. Probably a little bit too busy with other things I guess.

Anyway, I am back and bring some backlog of wine info I definetely want to blog about in the near future. Let's start with something which is still fresh in my mind though: yesterday evening's Wine Club in the company I work for.

Readers of this blog will surely know that we have bi-monthly meetings where we taste some wines around a certain theme (in September it was Chili+Argentina). As the year is approaching the end it was again time to do a tasting of sparkling wines.

The presentation can be found below.

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.

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.

My most expensive taste (until now)

Friday evening we joined some friends at the winetasting at Puerta Del Sol wines in Deure. As usual most of the wines we already knew (as we visit them regularly).

Some (not so new) highlights are the Gran Brut Allier Cava (expensive for a cava, but due to the aging in wood a real feast) and the excellent Marti Fabra Vinyes Velles (many explicit but very good taninnes).

At the end of the tasting we were welcomed to a table with a few more exclusive wines ...
First of was the Genium Costers 2005 (>30Euro/bottle) which is really a very, very, very nice priorato wine, but unfortunately it shows in the price. The taste is quite exquisite with a lot of depth and each sip gives you another impression.
To top this Genium Costers (that I tasted before in the shop) the owner of the store decided to give something extra ... after going to the back for while he returned with one of the 5 remaining bottles of Ribas de Cabrera 2001 ...
This wine has a list price of 64Euro, which makes it the most expensive wine I've tasted to date (although I already know this record will be broken on the 8th of October, more about that later).
Is this wine worth its price ? I don't think so ... it was an excellent wine, probably even better than the Genium Costers, but I don't think I've reached the level of taste or aroma awareness that makes me appreciate the price. I will not say that I will never buy this kind of wines (maybe as investment, rather than for drinking ;-)), but for now I don't even consider it.

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 :-)

The Tannat grape

During the winetasting at Magnus Wijnen in Kontich where I tried out all mono-cepage wines I could find -- in order to practice for my Tastevin exam next month -- my eye was caught by a wine from Cotes De Gascogne that features the Tannat grape.

Image by Agrofilms via Flickr

As it was the first time I heared this name my curiosity spiked. Later on I searched the web to find more and learned that this grape is currently considered the national grape of Urugay (I didn't even know they made wine) and its origin is in the Basque area in france where the Madiran area is the AOC that is known for this grape.

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.

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.