Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières red

Last week one of the colleagues asked me for a bottle of wine we tasted on the wine event on the Argentina and Chili at work as he was organizing a wine tasting for a few of his friends at home.

Unfortunately I was out of Trapiche's Broquel Malbec, but we settled for the other (affordable) winner of the evening, being Echeveria's Reserva Syrah/Carmenere.

What does all this have to do with this Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières of the title ? In fact I got that one in return for the Echeveria :-)

When I returned home that evening and showed the bottle there was no stopping us from trying it immediately. It was very good (but it required some food, in the form of some toast and tapenade that we always have in house) .

Some tasting notes:

Very nice deep colored, still looking quite young (purple-ish). The aroma was very special with the vanilla of the oak barrels very much present but at the same time some leather and some minerals were also fighting very hard to gain access to the nose.

With respect to taste there were still a whole lot of tannins (in fact a bit too much in the beginning), but thanks to the also strong acidity of the wine everything was in good balance.

A red D.O. Bierzo wine

At the same Sparkling Days at Mondovino, there were also a few of their wines for the holidays to be tasted.

Even though most of the wines they served I already know from various other tastings in the same shop we were this time happily surprised by the excellent Pittacum 6 messes en barrica 2005 from the Bierzo DO in Spain.

The most unique thing about this DO is that they don't make wines from the more traditional Tempranillo or Garnache grapes that are used throughout Spain, but rather from the Mencia grape which is believed to be related to the better known Cabarnet Franc (from which you hardly find any mono-cepage wines due to the heavy tannins).

Sparkling days at Mondovino

Yesterday and today were "Sparkling Days" at Mondovino here in Schoten were I live.

The name of the event was linked to the presence of Sergi Colet of Colet Cava, Penedes. Sergi presented all of the Cavas they they make in his bodega, some of which I (and other people like the sommelier of El Bulli restaurant) score very good. Especially the "A priori" Cava is very good according to us.

Today we also tasted the "Colet Assemblage which is a peculiar kind of Cava as it looks a little bit Rose, but is actually made like a regular white Cava (i.e. no maceration of the grapeskin with the wine). The reason that it is (in some years only) a rose Cava is that the Pinot Noir grapes get too little water in the mediteranean climate and dry into (almost) raisins. At that point in time the colour of the skin enters the inside of the grape.

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.