Ridgeback Viognier 2007

Apparently I haven't yet written about the superb Ridgeback Viognier 2007 that we bought last year at Artevino.

It is a mono-cepage viognier wine which is not that common outside the northern Cote de Rhone (although getting more and more well known around the world).

This wine is a heavy wine (14% alcohol is a lot for white wine), with a very roasty taste, but also the typical apricot-aroma that goes with the grape. It is somewhat dark yellow in color, but very intense. Yesterday we opened another bottle to try it with a Indian Curry dish, but that was not a very big success. This evening when we emptied the bottle while watching TV it tasted a lot better (not that it was bad yesterday :-))

A first try at "Vlaamse landwijn"

It's been about two weeks since I posted on this blog apparently. Time for some quick updates.

This weekend I finally tried my first Belgian Wines. It was not any of the 'Hagelandse'-wine which is probably most (in)-famous, but rather the more regular "Vlaamse landwijn" from 'Domein De Kluizen' near the city of Aalst (Herdersem to be precise).

The tasting was part of another old fashioned, but wonderful, tasting at Wijnen Van Durme in Merksem where they featured 2 dry whites, one sweet white and one red wine from De Kluizen. (and some very nice other wines too)

The red wine was a blend of Dornfelder and Zweigelt grapes and has quite some taninnes and spices in the taste, which made them quite good. I did not like any of the white wines ... although the sweet white wine was supposed to be very good and comparable to the German highest quality Trockenbeerenauslese, I prefer more Sauternes style white sweet wine.

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.

Cadlillac Wines ...

Some US readers of this blog that are not familiar with Bordeaux sweet wines may rather thing about the famous US Car Manufacturer, but I am talking here about the AOC Cadillac which is a small region in Bordeaux where they make excellent sweet wines. One of which I was able to enjoy last friday.

The Cadillac AOC is situated at the other side of the Garonne river than the better known (to me at least) AOC Sauternes and AOC Barsac.

Strangely enough there is a link between the car's name and the AOC's name: Antoine de la Mothe, who was born in the village of Cadillac, and went on to found the city of Detroit ...

Anyhow, back to the wine: the wine I drank was not from a famous chateau or anything, but it was already a 1999 vintage which is not too old, but the colour of the wine did show quite some evolution towards light orange already. The smell was quite peculiar and I cannot really name what aromas I did smell, but the taste was definetely different from the aroma.

A nice spring evening and some white wines

Today was a wonderful day here in Belgium and temperatures easily reached more than 23 degrees which caused also the evening to be quite warm.

After dinner (Mc Donalds with the kids, thus no wine involved), we decided to sit in the garden some more and open up a bottle of white wine.
We chose bottle of Castelo de Medina Verdejo, which is an excellent white wine from the Spanish Rueda DO. This is a wine with a lot of body and the necessary sours to support it, not as alcohol driven as some other Spanish wines (only 12.5 degrees alcohol).

After sipping our glasses for a while we got a visit from my parents in law, although they do like white wine they are more fan of classical French Sauvignon Blanc wines like Sancerre and the likes ... back to the cellar to get a bottle of Sancerre.

Unfortunately this first bottle (a bottle from Delhaize we once received as part of a gift from I don't remember who) had turned bad and basically had no taste at all in it anymore.

Back to the cellar again, this time to emerge with the last bottle of Domaine du Salvard - Cheverny 2006, which is an excellent alternative (although it is a blend Sauvignon Blanc / Chardonnay) to sometimes a lot more expensive Sancerre wines.

At the end of the evening we finished these two bottles and felt quite happy to have spent such a wonderful evening in the garden.

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.

Cellar cleanup part 1

On friday I started looking around in my cellar to find some room for the new wines that I bought the week before and bumped into some wines of which I was absolutely unsure if they were still drinkable or not.

One was a Cabarnet Sauvignon from Delhaize (the link points to the 2007 vintage), but I still had 1999 in the cellar. It actually did remarkably well considering its low price and old vintage. It wasn't exactly full bodied or anything but although the cork had clearly suffered a lot there was no oxidation and the wine hadn't evolved to tuile colour yet. In fact it only just started to loose its red colour it seemed.

Another one was untracable Merlot 2003 from Pays d'Oc, but this one I tasted only very briefly to notice that it had turned undrinkable due to oxidation. Colourwise this wine had about the same colour as the 1999 Cab Sav above which indicates that colour alone doesn't always allow to guess a vintage.

The last bottle we tried was a white Argentinian wine  also from Delhaize, but this time we had the 2002 vintage in stead of the 2008 that is currently on the shelves. I personally did not like it at all anymore as there was a very pronounced mineral taste that didn't fit me, but both my parents in law did enjoy it. 

Les goûts et les couleurs, ça ne se discute pas

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.