Game to get learn French Wine AOCs ...

This afternoon I  bumped into a great game that can really help to learn about French AOCs and where the different cities in this AOC are located on a French map.

Apparently there are plenty of games that go for much more detail for different wine regions like this game about Champagne or this one about Beaujolais.

I wish there were games like this for wine regions around the world that would really be fun to play and learn in the mean time.

Modern science making wines less typical ??

Although many people in the wine trade are doing their best to make clean and natural wines it is sometimes good that science comes to the rescue and gives winemakers the tools to do what they want to do: make wines that are fun to drink.

It was Wim Van Leuven (La Buena Vida) who mentioned, in a masterclass on Spanish wines in the wine course I am doing this year, that not everything is as natural as it seems though. In quite some cases there are quite some manipulations done by the winemaker in order to make wines that can please people.

Searching for "Produits Oenologique" in Google brings up a whole slew of products that can help in turning basically any grapejuice into a more or less decent wine, and in the process of doing so it is very well possible to give certain characteristics to this wine for which a winemaker that does not use these kind of tools may need to go through a lot of trouble.

What to think of products that promote themselves with sentences like "Yeast for fresh white wines, showing complexity and elegance with strong revelation of citrus notes like grapefruit. Produces wines of an intense freshness and great aromatic sharpness" or "Instantaneously dissolving (IDP) ellagic and proanthocyanidic tannin preparation based on grape tanins.
> To refresh white and rosé wine (against oxydation, atypical aging, light reduction).
> To bring volume and length.
> To help eliminate reductive odours." ?

Seemingly the grape quality/variety is not that important anymore if products like the above exist to make any grape smell like grapefruit and other products reduce the typical reductive odours that are so typical of certain wines (Syrah from the the northern Rhone comes to mind).

Having said all of the above it is of course clear that I also like my wines fresh and juicy and full-bodied and in most cases I may not even want to know how this result was obtained ...

Started using Vivino

Since I read about the iOS/Android app Vivino I have started using it a few weeks ago. Since then I scanned about 54 wines and I must say that I am impressed by the hitrate of this app as it usually finds the correct wine on the first try.

I would also like to congratulate the team behind it as they are keeping a close eye on things that fail their scanning engine: two times (A very old Australian Syrah and a unknown French wine ) the wine was unknown by the database but the day after it was actually recognized properly and I got informed with a mail that they had updates their database based on my scan. Nice service :)

Just found a great (French) comic that explains the vinification of red wine. While not containing anything new it is actually great to see how the IFV is trying to educate more and more people.

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.

Egg shaped fermentation tanks ...

It has been a while, but today I learned about something that I considered worth posting about.

I read about egg shaped concrete fermentation tanks used to produce wine which apparently make sure that due to their shape the fermentation is much more complete due to the fluid dynamics of the system.

Marchesi Alfieri La Tota

We received a bottle of Marchesi Alfieri La Tota wine from friends a while ago and drank it yesterday with a Lasagna we cooked for ourselves: It was wonderful !!!

Very nice dark color, not too much acids (which is a typical problem for a lot of Italian wines IMHO), some spices that remain on the tongue after drinkin.

Reality TV and wine ...

Although I am not a fan of reality TV as such this one seems quite interesting (related to wine ;-))

YouTube - winemakerstv's Channel

Chardonnay is not only a grape ...

Low and behold, when browsing the web to find to details about the Chardonnay grape I bumped into an article on Wikipedia that pointed to a village in the Burgundy area called ... chardonnay.

Wow, has it been that long ...

Looking from the state of this blog it seems that I have stopped exploring, but fortunately this is not the case ...

Due to professional reasons I did take less time to write about my explorations, but I do plan to catch up with logging on the interesting stuff that I did find out.

For starters I'd like to share the wine route that we did during summer in the Loire Valley. Even though the trip we did was actually far too long for cramming it into 4 days, it was very nice trip none the less.

Especially the combination with some of the (in)famous chateaus (not wine related) of the Loire valley made this a very interesting trip.

Merlot wine tasting

It has been a while already, but I noticed that I haven't yet posted the slides of the Merlot wine tasting evening that I organized for my companies wine club in January.

As the next wine evening is coming up end of this month (about US wines this time) I better publish this one here and now ...

Here are the slides (slideshow provided by Google Docs)

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 ...

Tasmanian Bubbles ...

At the wine event in Antwerp's Crown Plaza Hotel (aka het Crest Hotel) today there was a table of Kreglingner Wine Estate, were they serves excellent methode tradicionel from their Tasmanian vineyards.
As Tasmania is quite close to Antarctica they have quite chilly environment there which makes the region comparable to the Champagne areas in France. The terroir is quite different though, but that doesn't make the wines less good. Apparently also some Champagne estates are now buying land in Tasmania, although I cannot really find proof of this on the web.

Even the grapes were traditional in these wines (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir). They really make excellent wines: their Ninth Island Sparkling is super for an entry level wine (although they are also quite expensive as for 15€ I can find a real Champagne as well). The millisime sparkling wines (sold under the brand Kreglinger itself) is also very good and is really a wine I could drink during a full (light) dinner. It has both acids and body that make it an excellent choice.
I drank the 2002 wine although the website only mentions the 1999.

Another small nice to know fact about Tasmania: apparently the rain is so fresh and unpolluted that they even bottle it ... the guy really showed me some bottles labeled Tasmanian Rainwater.

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.

Another French oddity ...

After almost one month without posting on this blog here is something I just found out:

I was browsing around wikipedia and bumped into the quite recent AOC Saint-Bris which is a village near the Chablis AOC but that makes white wines from Sauvignon Blanc grapes.

In all courses or books I have read on Burgundy I always learned that there is only Chardonnay and Alligote being used for white wine, but Saint-Bris is apparently the exception to all this.

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 :-))