More on Chateau Goubau

To come back to this Chateau Goubau. We tasted both of their red wines (2007 vintage) and both (the entry level La Source and and the more advanced Chateau Goubau) are wonderful to drink right now, but can both age a few years, and have quite some complexity in both aromas and taste. Both wines are aged in large wooden casks which brings them finesse, but not too much of wooden taste.
If you know the prices (7Euro and 10Euro respectively), this is almost too good to be true.

Talking to the owner at the winetasting of wineworld.be we learned some more about their vineyard and the appellation in general (which I don't remember drinking before, but that could be my memory misleading me ...)
Cotes de Castillon is next to the famous (and thus much more expensive) Saint-Emilion. In fact the city centre of Saint Emilion is only 10km from the vineyard, and the grounds that can still call their wine Saint Emillion are only 2km away (Which can be a lot in terroir difference though).

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.

Wine tasting at Delhaize this morning

This morning I went shopping in Delhaize and was happily amused by the fact that there was a wine tasting event ongoing. I could, of course, not resist joining in and trying of few of the wines.

I tried the white Trio (Sauvignon Blanc), a Riesling not to remember, and the Sunrise Chardonnay (I already bought the Sunrise Carmenere last week). The Trio was the best ones of these whites (in my humble opinion).

After that we moved on to reds. I started with the Santa Digna Carmenere 2008, which showed a lot more body than the Sunrise Carmenere, but which also means it is not for everyone to enjoy easily (although I did). After that we jumped immediately to Torres's Celeste (DO Ribero del Duero) which was just perfect. It is a crianza wine (ie 12 months in oak), 100% tinto fino (aka tempranillo) and is just delicious, especially for its reduced price of 12.75Euro.

Like all crianza tempranillo wines you either like them or not as they have quite a specific taste. In this one the tannins are not too heavy (having been tempered by the oak), and there was still quite a lot of fruit left in the wine (2006 vintage). The alcohol level is quite high (14.5%), but it doesn't show in the aroma's nor the taste of the wine.

Less important, but still fun is that the bottle itself looks impressive as well, with a very nice label that has some stars on it.

After tasting this wonderful wine I was talking to the wine-specialist and we both agreed that Spain still has good price vs quality which is most of the times not true for France. To prove our point we tried a 20Euro bottle of Chateau Poujeuax 2001 (Moulis). This wine was not comparable to the Celeste in taste (also because it it already much older), and I actually did not like it at all.

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)