A fairtrade white wine

This evening when my parents-in-law came by to say hello we drank a nice white wine on the terrace outside as aperitif.

It was an Oxfam's Torrontes - Sauvignon blanc wine that I got as a present a while back. I must say that I was happily surprised to find this wine to be this good.
Apparently this wine is made in La Riojana a cooperation of a few hundred farmers in the North-West of Argentina, but no reference is to be found on the website.


The Sauvignon Blanc's agrum flavour was very well hidden by the Torrontes grape that added more flowery aromas to the wine.

Apparently this Torrontes grape is as specific for Argentina as Malbec is these days although it originally came from the old world (like most grapes in South-America together with the Spanish priests that needed wines for their Catholic ceremonies)

Wine tasting on Chili and Argentina

Last week thursday it was my turn to organize a winetasting in the wineclub we started last year at the company I work. We meet once every two months and one of the people in the club prepares a tasting, using a certain theme.

This month was my turn and I chose red wine from Chili and Argentina as the theme as I like those wines a lot and have quite some of them in my cellar.

I did not focus too much in getting the best of the best wines, but rather I chose a number of very affordable wines that are easy to buy (in Belgium at least) and give good value for money. At the end of the presentation are the ranking scores that each attendee gave and the overall ranking.

As the most expensive wine was almost 3 times as expensive as the next one it (luckily) won as best wine of the evening, but the interesting part is the shared 2nd place ...

Below is the presentation (using some fancy google docs widget, hope that works, if not you can find the presentation here)

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.

Wines of Albert Frere sold at Sotheby's

Today there was an auction of the wines of Albert Frere at Sotheby's.

Judging from the estimated and going prices it seems that the crisis is not really hitting too hard on the wine-investors. For example lot 324 (12 bottles of Chateau Petrus 1989) were sold for 2 770.5 Euro per bottle !!!!

As the lot was for 12 bottles, the new owner payed about 33246 Euro for these 12 bottles.

Lot 27 is also nice to see: this is an imperial bottle of 6 liters Chateau Lafitte 2000 that is sold for 8 695Euro. I did not even know they made this big bottles in Bordeaux.

Back to reality: I have a cellar with about 250 bottles. 2 bottles of this Petrus would more than double the value of the complete cellar ...