Wine News (43)
A great Sylvaner 2004
You don’t need to buy Grands Crus wines to enjoy something beautiful : we opened recently this simple Sylvaner 2004 by Bruno Schueller (Domaine Gerard Schueller), a lower cuvée and probably the most affordable of the estate. It was beautiful and if I remember we mostly finished the bottle right away (again, me drinking most of it I’m afraid). The turbid, unfiltered Sylvaner was charming and delicately floral, a reminder that when the winemaker is good and works naturally, you can choose a less glorious varietal or appellation of his wine range (if you can’t afford the upper or mid-level cuvées) and be delighted just the same...
This Sylvaner was lying n my wine fridge for years and made it without harm, it seems. I take the opportunity to praise my wine fridge, a big-size Frigidaire that I bought in Strasbourg in 1995, it’s still working fine, never had any maintenance on it and it remains so silent after all these years...No sponsoring here but if it fails one day, maybe they can provide another one ?...
A great picnic with wine lovers
This is something we're doing in summer in the Parc de Vincennes near Paris : we're a group of a dozen wine lovers who gather on the grass for a picnic, each bringing a dish and a wine. We bring blankets to sit on, salads, charcuterie, cakes, all sort of things and we just have fun. A relaxed way to spend a balmy evening casually under the trees with good, unexpected wines and diverse foods to go with. there's usually a sparkling to begin with but not always and we try to set up an order that suits the flight of wines, beginning with the whites usually of course. This time, Ophélie took part to our picnic, she is the journalist-trained young woman running the wine blog Miss Glouglou, which sports videos (like this one about spitting with elegance), interviews and various reports, with often a humoristic approach (read this 3-page story on her in French).
Whatever, she had brought this Oligocène 2005, Saint Jean du Barroux by Philippe Gimel. This comes from the Ventoux in the Southern Rhone. The wine got a long élevage, 18 months and the rest in bottles (since may 2007 !). This gastronomy wine was warmful and nicely spicy, and would have been perfect with a meat dish. It's a blend of mostly Grenache Noir, then Syrah, Carignan & Cinsault. See her post about the winemaker with a video interview. This wine costs 15 € (bought by 6 bottles) through the online retailer 1855.
The most outstanding wine during this party was probably the Marsannay from Domaine Fougeray, les Favières 1992, a wine with beautiful elegance and the maturity of an older Burgundy wine. Gerard, the guy with suspenders in the background brought this bottle with its simple blue label from his cellar.
Another fine wine was also from Burgundy : Domaine Jean Marc Bouley Volnay 1er Cru les Carelles 2009, this was also very refined and velvety. I didn't take notes and that's a pity. It was brought by Pierre Guigui, the wine director of Gault & Millau who was there too.
I had brought a Morgon 2010 by Georges Descombes, a fruity, unfiltered and SO2-free wine which had a good success in the party too.
Peter Falk passed away a few weeks ago and I learnt through Nonjatta, the must-visit website for Japanese-whisky lovers, that Falk too made many commercials for the Japanese whisky brand Suntory (he made also Toyota adds). I had somehow figured that Coppola (and his daughter) was an isolated case of Suntory fondness, but it seems that Suntory convinced many Hollywood actors to take part.
I’m not a fan of the Colombo films, which I find too black and white and predictable with all these rich and famous being showed as they fall for their crimes and plots, but watching Peter Falk as a Tory’s bartender soothing a woman is heartening...
Read the full post on Nonjatta with many other Japanese commercials by Peter Falk.
Kill a camel, earn cash...
I was half-joking when I wrote somewhere a few months or years ago that the CO2-obsessed folks were going to ask for the mass killing of cows one day in their scheme to impose their agenda on guilt-ridden humans. This day may not be as far as imagined, and the Financial Times run a story a few weeks ago titled Australia poised to allow camel cull. The crazy system of carbon credit banking has made Australia consider it might give companies or farmers the right to kill thousands of camels to compensate for their emissions. We're one notch away from the next target, guys : the cows. But before encouraging the massive culling of our cute cows, the carbon crowd might be tempted by the huge potential cash cow behind this issue : being generally big-government types, they will probably first find a way to levy taxes on every cow, with the excuse of course of financing world projects in countries they consider victims of richer countries.
It's time to beware from an agenda which regards humans as the ennemy and pushes for global governance to impose its views on us, the rest of the world including the BRICS countries having better common sense and giving only lip service to it.
Read these lines and think twice : "All “removals” will be humane, the company says, with shooting done by “animal welfare trained and accredited marksmen”.
Kill a camel, earn cash, by the Huffington Post.
A volcanic wine from Kyushu
Miyakonojo winery, Kyushu
A few weeks before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, there has been a volcanic eruption at Shinmoe in Miyazaki Prefecture on Kyushu, which I found strange wasn't much making the news over here in Europe. A huge surface of the land around there including roads and communities was covered by several centimeters of grey ashes. I learnt recently that wine is being made near Shinmoe and this short TV report with a muzak background could be watched on MRT TV, a TV channel that we watch from time to time to get a shot of Japanese life. The Miyakonojo winery makes small volumes of wine, a red "Shinmoe" made from Cabernet and Muscat, and a white "Amenouzume" (page in Japanese) which is an ice wine made from Sauvignon and Delaware (map for the winery). The winery was started in 2010 with a 2-hectare vineyard with the production is 4000 bottles only, and this year they had to had some table grapes in the blend to complement an insufficient production. The last vintage came out 2 months later because of the eruption of the Shinmoe volcano. The founder of the winery is Masayuki Yamauchi, he harbored this dream for 8 years before realizing it. Look at this page in Japanese where he is shown explaining to students how this adventure unfolded.
Long life to this new winery !
Fierce resistance in Piedmont
Kudos the the Piedmont people who are resisting to the construction of the super-fast train tracks across their beautiful valleys. Over there, they call these fasts-train tracks TAV (google TAV Maddalena). The senseless building of separate tracks for TGVs, speed trains or whatever you call them, has disfigured many beautiful regions of France including ones planted with vineyards, for the sake of sparing time, and I don’t feel we have resisted like we could have, in France. May these Italians succeed to save their landscapes which are threatened in the name of the train connexion between Lyons and Turin (Torino-Lione in Italian).
www.notavtorino.org
Project map (institutional website)
A Rum from Panama
This was at an event around spirits and cocktails in Paris. I discovered this Panama Rum, Abuelo 7 years in barrels, a great rum to drink as such. Comes at a price : 37 € at the Cave des Martyrs, a caviste in Montmartre in Paris, the only one who sells it here I think. But that's almost worth the price I think : a strong but silky drink with a bourbon style. An you find this rum at more affordable prices elsewhere : costs 20 € in Germany and 24 £ in the UK. There should be ways to get it at the German price someday in France. I tasted an older Abuelo, 12 years if I remember, but the 7 years was definitely better.
[Video not available anymore]
A tasting course by Emile Peynaud
Video in French
This was light years before the media and the blogs made wine fashionable and mainstream (yes, even in France). This was in 1980, Bernard Pivot invited Emile Peynaud in his iconic TV literature show "Apostrophes", for his new book Le Goût du Vin. This was the occasion for a blind tasting of a wine brought by Pivot (Peynaud's interview begins at 3:30 and Peynaud's tasting at 7:00). Take it as a piece of History, Emile Peynaud describing this wine and explaining the words to an audience which was largely neophyte even in France.
The first couple of minutes (3:30 to be precise) is about the Russian-born American Alexis Lichine. Lichine says almost propheticly that the French are running the risk of being out-passed because they take their wine supremacy for granted. He says in substance that other regions of the world have been progressing and offering quality wines that can threaten the French sales.
Bernard Pivot himself wrote a nice book about wine : his Dictionnaire Amoureux du Vin is a blend of humorous French literature and vinous enjoyment...
Shvo : probably the best rosé of Israel
I brought back this bottle from my last trip but only had it with B. recently. This is a direct press made from Barbera grapes grown in the upper Galillee. It is made by Gaby Sadan and this winemaker has succeeded to make this well-balanced rosé, undoubtly a gastronomy wine which goes down well even if it's not light in alcohol. The man is trained in Burgundy and uses indigenous yeasts for his fermentations, with minimum intervention in the cellar. We had the wine for two consecutive dinners and the only down side I had was that this wine knocked me out after a couple of glasses. I don't know if it had to do with me or the bottle, got to try again one day. Otherwise, very good impression.
Read Daniel Rogov's description of this Shvo rosé 2009 and also his winery visit report.
See also this report from the US distributor.
US Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin
I was invited a few weeks ago in a tasting of Napa wines in Paris. The event took place in the US Embassy, and the Ambassador who sported a US-France flag pin on his jacket spent some time with his wife to taste at a few stands after his opening speech.
Here is a video featuring Ambassador Rivkin and his wife tasting and answering to a question of mine about what were his expectations regarding his visit at Vinexpo which was scheduled in the following days.
Here are a few wines that I liked here (didn’t taste everything) :
__ Signorello Estate (the stand where the Ambassador is filmed here) Padrone 2007. Red Bordeaux blend. Nice wine, if powerful. Costs about 56 USD.
__ Cain Vineyard & Winery, Cain Five 1998. Very nice wine, good length. Made with 5 varietals. 1998 was a tough year regarding the weather, they had to do lots of grape sorting.
__ Cain Vineyard & Winery, Cain Five 2007. The younger brother of the previous wine. Fresh nose, very nice and elegant.
__ Honig Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc 2010. I like the Sauvignon nose. Mouth : refined and with intensity, flower notes and honey. Balanced. Liked it. If I remember I told about this white to Christian Bourgeois upon whom I stumbled in this tasting but he didn’t like it. the other white that I tasted weren’t very nice, maybe it had to do with the fact that they were served too warm.
__ Roy Estate Proprietary Red Wine 2006. Nose going along with the mouth : a very nice wine with a price (110 USD).
__ Rubicon Rutherford 2007, red blend. Another very nice wine at 145 USD.
__ Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon 2007. Another nice wine with complexity.
About portion size and service...Haven’t you been confronted in a restaurant with a situation where you’ve chosen a wine on the menu which seemed both a good deal and an interesting choice, say [I’m speaking of a French typical restaurant] a bottle of Quincy or Muscadet at 16 €, and when you order your dishes and wine, you’re told bluntly that this wine is not available and the next wine in terms of cost is 26 €, notwithstanding the fact that it’s not a wine you’re sure is interesting at all. Isn’t there here some purposed omission from the restaurant owners not to refuel their cellar with a simple, desirable type of wine in order to sell their more expensive wines ? You may have decided to enter this restaurant at least in part because you saw this wine on the menu, and what we should do in this case is just stand up and leave, but we’re too afraid of looking stingy especially if we’re a group of friends, and the restaurant people might know that. If a restaurant does it to you regularly, just call Willian Foster (Michael Douglas), he’ll have ways to change this, like get any other bottle you choose for these 16 € that you were ready to pay...
Now, this is about size and gastronomy restaurants. I’m a simple guy and when I go in a restaurant, that’s in part to go out with friends, part to eat. Eat something good, but eat... And we’re getting used to be faced with tiny -if artisticly decorated dishes which tend to let me a bit dissatisfied even if there’s a partial compensation in the very refined quality of the ingredients and the cook’s talent behind them. I’m the one who silently protests sometimes (B. isn’t affected); even if I’m slim, real food goes with real size for me. I’m not pleading for supersizing the portions but there may be a middle ground, we may be happening to be willing to eat when we sit down at a restaurant table, we’re not just there to exercize the sharpness of our palate’s sensitivity. My humor at the table : that was a nice appetizer, waiter, but where’s our dish ?
This said, the picture at the top was shot at what is probably one of the best restaurants in Versailles, and a not very well-known one : Chez Stéphane, located 37 Bd de la République. Forget my rant about sizes, I just needed an easy illustration and one of the entrées fitted with my concern.
If you’re into dining in Versailles, you may have noticed that this town hasn’t the restaurants its historic status desserves, most restaurants and crêperies around the Place du Marché serving ordinary food with no research, if relatively affordable. This one is located out of the beaten path but it’s largely worth the detour. Fresh products, excellent meat and Corsican charcuterie, and if this entrée was indeed minimalist in size, the Côte d’Agneau ordered by B. was not only excellent but gorgeous in size (she couldn’t finish and I helped her). Just one critic, the wine list could be improved in my opinion to pair the genuine and permanent effort on the cuisine. We tried a Corsican red pictured on right with my entrée of Corsican charcuterie (pic on left). I also discovered an excellent mineral water from Corsica, Orezza (pic), with the type of saline minerality that I love in water.
Speaking of service, availability of dishes (instead of bottles] on the menu, or sizes, I jump on the opportunity to serve you these highly-pleasurable extracts, first the one from Falling Down (on the left) where the neocon in me feels empathy with the way Michael Douglas confronts our daily miseries. Then watch the one from Five Easy Pieces (on right) with the young rebel Jack Nicholson. I actually rarely go eat hamburgers, except the ones found in family coffee shops in the U.S. (which I love : they’re both often excellent and well-sized...) but the point here applies to many situations in the retail sector where picture and reality collide...
Sing & drink in open-air theater
This was a few weeks ago in the Southern Loire, comedians replay 18th-century scenes in deep France, with the peasantry noisingly letting itself go after hard work, including by drinking wine. This unsophisticated show was a good way to think about how daily life was really in those times. I think that in spite of the Catholic religion shaping people views and ways, there was a lot of secular fun of all sorts, including wine consumption, wine being then made by every farmer.
A vibrant red color
Just a picture to show that the magic is still there between Claude Courtois' Nacarat and us. I bought a 6-bottle case of it at the estate the other day and couldn't resist to open one after a few days of laying down for the bottle to recover from the motorbike trip. This was a lovely drink, vibrant, alive with its grenadine candy aromas and so light that we finished the bottle this same evening. I don't know how Claude Courtois makes this wine as he doesn't want to elaborate, but there's certainly a lot of talent and inspiration in his winemaking.
Cave de Bissey
Here is a coop in Burgundy which is offering good deals on a wide range of wines. It is located in Bissey sous Cruchaud, in the same area of South Burgundy than another more wellknown coop, the Coopérative de Buxy. This one is named Cave de Bissey and it makes wine from grapes of participating growers of the Mercurey/Côte Chelonnaise region. Founded in 1928, it is one of the first Burgundy coops, and the first in the Côte Chalonnaise where it is located. It is said to have remained human-sized and I’m willing to beleive that. They have since recently a modern wine tasting room and shop but not long ago it was still a very sober and artisanal retail shop. We dropped there recently and tasted just a few wines. The tasting of all the wines including the sparkling is free of charge and it helps to make your choice.
I tasted a Bourgogne Aligoté 2009, priced 5,8 €, a Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise Blanc 2009 at 6,5 € and a red Bourgogne Cuvée Prestige Côte Chalonnaise 2007 at 7,4 €, plus an excellent sparkling, a Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Noirs at 7,6 €. I bought a mixed case and B. bought some too. I didn’t taste more of their production (I’m swallowing a bit each time and I was driving) but I’m confident the other wines are interesting. Here are the prices for their other wines :
Whites :
Bourgogne Aligoté 2009 5,8 €
Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise Blanc 2009 6,5 €
Bouzeron 2009 7 €
Montagny 1er cru 2009 8,65 €
Mercurey Blanc 2008 9,1 €
Givry Blanc 2009 9,2 €
Rully 2009 9,35 €
Montagny 1er cru “Les Pidances” 2009 9,9 €
Reds :
Bourgogne Passetoutgrain 2008 5,6 €
Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise Rouge Pinot Noir 2008 6,3 €
Bourgogne Côte Chalonnaise Cuvée Prestige 2007 7,4 €
Givry Rouge 2009 9,6 €
Mercurey Rouge 2009 9,3 €
Mercurey Les Eriglats 2009 9,9 €
Rosé :
Bourgogne Rosé 2010 5,6 €
Sparklings :
Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc Brut 7,1 €
Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Blancs 8,1 €
Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Noirs 7,6 €
Crémant de Bourgogne Rosé Brut 7,3 € http://www.bourgogne-blanc-rouge.com/