Wine of the Week 6 – a great dry white wine & great value too

Trimbach vineyards in Ribeauvillé, courtesy of Maison Trimbach.

I presented a wine at a tasting last night that had all the criteria to be my wine of the week. It is delicious to drink, stunning quality and great value for money – what more could you ask for?

Well, for me nothing, but it will leave a great many people cold because this wine is a Riesling. Riesling – pronounced Reez-ling – is one of my absolute favourite grapes. It is a grape that, when it’s good, shows such diversity of styles and yet always maintains a purity and a minerality which makes the wines feel poised, fine and elegant.

Most UK consumers seem to resist the delights of Riesling because they think that they shouldn’t like it, just as they shouldn’t like Chardonnay anymore, because they now drink Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc. Many UK consumers assume that all Riesling is sweet and even when they taste a dry one often pull a face and pronounce it to be sweet. I find the resistance to Riesling in this country to be very odd, I love dry Riesling and I also love Riesling with some sweetness – what’s not to like about a wine with a little sweetness?

Anyway, my wine of the week is a dry Riesling from the wonderful French region of Alsace. Despite being in the north east of the country Alsace is one of the driest, warmest and sunniest spots in France and that is why they can produce fully ripe, dry Rieslings.

With the Vosges mountains, its half timbered houses and walled medieval villages it is also one of France’s most beautiful regions, although it’s Germanic culture does set it apart from the rest of the country. The people speak a Germanic language and much of the superb cuisine has a German slant to it. It is that Germanic culture that has given them both of their most important grape varieties – Riesling and Gewurztraminer.

2011 Trimbach Riesling
Maison Trimbach
Ribeauvillé
A.C. Alsace

Founded in 1626 Trimbach is one of the great old wine houses of Alsace and 12 generations on is still family run in the delightful town of Ribeauvillé. They produce a wide range of wines including all the famous Alsatian grapes, but are something of Riesling specialists as they produce two of the most iconic examples in their Riesling Clos Sainte Hune and Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Emile.

This example though is their most humble Riesling from their ‘classic’ range, but it is a splendid example of just how delicious Alsace Riesling can be.

This wine is bone dry with an elegant, stony and apply nose. The palate is wonderfully concentrated with some fresh and cooked apple notes, lemons and dry honey. It also has pure, fresh, clean acidity and minerality that keeps it lively, crisp and taut. The finish is refreshing, thrilling and long with some apple and pear skin succulence to it too.

This is a superb dry white wine that everyone should try as it is delicious and versatile. I would expect anyone who likes Sauvignon Blanc would enjoy it if they are open  index enough to give it a taste. It is wonderful as an aperitif, with fish or light meals and even with Thai cuisine – 89/100 points, it scores high marks for being such great value.

Available in the UK from The Wine Society for £10.95 per bottle and £11.99 per bottle from Majestic. Other UK stockists are available here.
US stockists are available here.

So, please do try this wine, it is a great dry white for summer that will go with all sorts of food, it’s salads and goat’s cheese as well as fish, white meat and spicy food. What’s more if you don’t finish the whole case, the high acidity ensures that it ages well too, so there’s no hurry to drink it all.

 

Sud de France – excitement & variety

The lovely Château Haut-Gléon in Corbières.

Recently I was invited to attend the Vinisud wine fair in Montpellier and had a great time sniffing out all sorts of wines from the south of France. The fair actually covers the whole of southern Europe, but I limited myself to France, otherwise I would still be there, sniffing away.

Foncalieu
I was the guest of the Foncalieu cooperative, which is an impressive outfit based in the Languedoc, but whose operations have spread to the Côtes de Gascogne and Côtes du Rhône.

Michel Bataille

Being an unreformed lefty – albeit of the Champagne variety – I have a soft spot for cooperatives and find many of them to be top notch wine producers and Foncalieu are one of the best. They have a smart and sophisticated wine range and I have long been an admirer of them because they are so good at what they do, both in producing good wines at good prices and in pushing the envelope. What’s more in keeping with the cooperative ethos, everyone seemed to be very nice and to be proud of what they do. The president of the company is the charming Michel Bataille – a great name for a former soldier I thought – and he was quite clear that the company’s mission was to serve the winegrowers, so to market their production efficiently, to defend their rural environment and to produce good wine. To these ends he said they really do need solidarity in all they do and seeing him shaking hands and chatting with the other growers in the co-op – Michel owns vineyards too – it really seemed that there was a genuine comaradarie here.

While in Montpellier I tasted my way through a good cross section of their wines and I was, as ever, impressed by the quality, the packaging, style and the breadth of vision – they offer an Albariño and a Sauvignon Gris for heavens sake – and yet still many UK consumers think the French don’t innovate!

Foncalieu produce a massive array of wines under many different labels, but the principal quality label is Le Versant. This is a stylishly packaged range of nicely made Vins de Pays / P.G.I.s in classic varietals that are classy enough to grace any table – we drank them with stunning food in a 3 star Michelin restaurant in Montpellier and a fine time was had by all.

The Le Versant range.

I was similarly impressed by their deliciously drinkable Domaine Cambos wines from Côtes de Gascogne. This is only a vin de pays / I.G.P. region but it is a wonderfully reliable source of modern French white wines, try some the next time you are wondering what to drink. Their 2013 Domaine Cambos Colombard-Sauvignon blend would keep any Sauvignon drinker happy, mind you so would the more richly textured and fruity 2013 Domaine Cambos Gros Manseng.

I also enjoyed their attractive 2011 Château Saint Angel from the obscure Cabardès appellation, which is in the Montagne Noir near Carcasonne and is one of the very few places in France that traditionally blends Aquitaine (Merlot and Cabernet) and Mediterranean (Syrah) grape varieties.

Click here for UK stockists of Le Versant wines.
Click here for UK stockists of Le Versant wines.

Map of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, click for a larger view.

Château Haut-Gléon
A real highlight for me was discovering Château Haut-Gléon, which although owned by Foncalieu is run entirely separately. This is an estate in Corbières which is apparently pretty well known on the continent, but has very little exposure in the UK and so was completely new to me. I cannot imagine why it isn’t more widely sold over here as the wines are very fine indeed.

I met the director – or directrice as her card says – Karine Meyer at a group dinner one night and got to taste some of her wines and to hear something about the Château. I was pretty excited by them so went to their stand the next day to taste my way through the entire range and my first impressions were confirmed.

Situated some 20 km north of Perpignan, near the sea, in the enticingly named Vallée du Paradis, in Durban-Corbières – one of the 11 terroirs of the Corbières appellation – Haut-Gléon has a long history going back to Roman times. The estate has certainly been making wine since the seventeenth century, but its high reputation for quality only dates since the 1990s when the Duhamel family bought the property and restored it after decades of decline. Foncalieu bought the estate in 2012 and plan to develop it as a wine tourism destination, while maintaining the high quality of the wines produced there.

The distinctive Haut-Gléon bottle.

These are very good wines, full of character and style. The estate enjoys a cool micro-climate which enables them to make elegant examples of red Corbières and to craft excellent whites and rosés too. They round it all off by presenting the wines in a unique and stylish heavy bottle, which gives the wines good recognition.

They make 2 ranges, Domaine de Haut-Gléon, which are  labelled as Vin de Pays de la Vallé du Paradis, not Corbières, but are very good indeed. The main label though is Château Haut-Gléon itself and these A.C. Corbières wines are a little more serious and fine.

As you might expect though, it is the red wines that are the most famous, I tasted the 2009 and 2008 and both were very fine blends of old vine Syrah, Grenache and Carignan indeed with a lovely supple palate, a juicy mix of red and black fruit and judicious use of balancing oak enhancing the delicate spicy quality.

The Château Haut-Gléon rosé is excellent too, this Syrah and Grenache blend is brimming over with fresh cherry and strawberry fruit, with a touch of creamy ripeness on the palate. For me though the big surprise was the superb Château Haut-Gléon white, which was quite delicious. It is an exciting blend of Roussanne, Grenache Blanc and Marsanne aged for 6 months in new oak barrels.

These are really good wines, far superior than most people would expect from the Corbières region whose general reputation is one of offering good value for money rather than finesse. Do try them if you can, you won’t regret it.

Cathagène
Rather excitingly I was also able to try my first ever examples of Cathagène, which is a speciality mistelle or liqueur wine specific to the Corbières region and is a bit like Pineau de Charente, Ratafia de Champagne, Macvin or Floc de Armagnac. Basically it is grape juice from the estate fortified with brandy made from the grapes grown on the estate. Cathagène can be white or red and I greatly enjoyed the examples made by Château Haut-Gléon. The white is a blend of Marsanne and Muscat, while the red is pure Syrah. Both would be splendid after dinner drinks or served with lightish desserts. The white would be perfect with homemade biscuits (a bit of sophisticated dunking beckons perhaps?) while I think the red would be lovely with a black forest roulade.

I was going to write about some more of the exciting things I found in Montpellier, but will leave those for another day, so make sure you come back soon.

Wine of the Week 5 – fine organic red from the Douro

The beautiful terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley.

My wine of the week this time is a wine that I have mentioned before in a piece about Portugal’s Douro region. I drank a bottle the other day and was once again struck by how good it was. It was so classy, so delicious and such great value for money that I simply could not resist making it my wine of the week.

It is made by the Symington family who own many superb estates in the beautiful Douro Valley as well as Port houses such as Graham, Dow, Cockburns and Warre. For the last 15 years or so they have branched out from being purely a Port producer to becoming one of Portugal’s best winemakers too and this wine is a superb calling card for them. If you have never tasted a really good Portuguese wine, or just want something good at a great price, then give it a go, it could well be your wine of the week too:

The Douro in Porto.

2011 Altano Quinta do Ataide Organic
D.O. Douro, Portugal
This blend of organically grown Tinta Barroca, Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz and Touriga Franca grapes was sourced from the Symington family’s Assares vineyard which was certified organic in 2006. The wine was cold fermented in stainless steel tanks and aged in second fill French oak for 10 months.
This offers great concentration and depth and wonderfully vibrant fruit together with a touch of spice and a slatey minerality, it gives lots of pleasure and is sinfully drinkable. This is stunning quality for its price and should be more popular – 90/100 points because of the great value.

Available in the UK from Waitrose & Fareham Wine Cellar @ £9.99 per bottle, more UK stockist information is available from Fells, the distributor.
Available in the US from Curtis Liquors, more US stockist information is available from Vineyard Brands, the distributor.

Wine of the week 4 – Zalze Sangiovese

Beautiful vineyards at the Kleine Zalze Estate, South Africa.

Finding the unexpected in wine is always such a delight for me that I can get really quite excited, especially when the wine involved is a total bargain as well.

I love Kleine Zalze. It’s a beautiful estate in South Africa’s Stellenbosch region and not only is it wonderful to visit – they have a superb restaurant – but they make some fabulous wines too, including some of the very best Pinotages that I have ever tasted.

Everything they do smacks of quality from their inexpensive Cellar Selection range to their stunning Family Reserve wines – do try the Sauvignon Blanc from this range, it is very different and very fine. The presiding genius is winemaker Johan Joubert who is a lovely, engaging chap whose passion is infectious and even makes the technical stuff and science of wine seem very interesting indeed.

Johan Joubert, chief winemaker at Kleine Zalze and Zalze.

It always seems to me that they never sit on their laurels at Kleine Zalze and this was borne out at a wonderful tasting and dinner that Johan hosted in London recently. All the wines were very good, but however good the other wines were, and they really were, for fun, generosity of fruit, drinkability and sheer value for money, my standout wine was:

2013 Zalze Sangiovese
W.O. Stellenbosch, South Africa
South African Sangiovese was a new one for me, but if they can all be as good as this then it really should catch on and be more widely grown. The Sangiovese grape has only been in the county for ten years apparently, but these results are impressive.

The nose is rich with red fruit, floral aromas and spice, while the palate is attractively soft and juicy with fresh herbs, bright plum fruit, morello cherries, rich raspberry and smooth tannins. All in all this wine is a lovely, easy drinking fruit-packed wine, but it does not fall into the normal fruit-bomb trap of being simple and cloying, there is freshness, balance and a smack of complexity here, a lovely wine – 89/100 points, it earns high marks for being such great value for money.

The equally good 2012 vintage is available in the UK from the Co-op at £7.99 per bottle.

Wine of the Week 3 – Domaine des Tourelles White

The sign at Domaine des Tourelles.

My recent trip to Lebanon was a wonderful experience that I enjoyed for its own sake and for the wines and wineries that I came across. I tasted a large number of  really good wines and met lots of people passionate about Lebanese wines – and I have now joined their ranks. There is a lot to like about Lebanon, both as a country and as a wine producer. None of the wines that I tasted were less than palatable and a large proportion of them were really very good indeed.

So, my wine of the week this week is a white wine that I really enjoyed, that is superb quality and represents stunning value for money to0. I will be writing more about the estate soon, so will just tell you about the wine today:

Domaine des Tourelles.

2012 Domaine des Tourelles white
Jdita, Chtaura
Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
This estate in bustling Chtaura is right on the main road through the town, yet manages to be a haven of tranquility. It’s such a beautiful and restful spot that as soon as you enter the gates you leave the noise and the traffic behind, even though it is just yards away. It is an old estate, the oldest secular wine producer in Lebanon, having been created by Jura-born Frenchman François-Eugène Brun in 1868. Nowadays it is owned and run by the delightful Faouzi Issa who is a an extremely fine winemaker who believes in non-interventionist winemaking and who crafts a very fine range of wines.

Map of Lebanon including the wine regions – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

This dry white is an enticing, aromatic and accomplished blend of 60% Viognier, 33% Chardonnay and 7% Muscat. Faouzi only uses wild yeasts and does everything as traditionally as he can, but for this white he eschews his beloved concreter tanks for a cold fermentation in stainless steel. The result is a first rate wine that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The nose is lifted, aromatic and very attractive with herbs, cracked white pepper, fresh mango and honey in abundance, with some creamy ripe notes too. The palate is mouth-coating textured and succulent, creamy with a touch of peach skin mouthfeel all balanced by good acidity and some taut minerality keeping it fresh, vibrant and fine. This wine just kept getting better and better in the glass too. Seriously impressive stuff, lovely with a whole range of foods from crisps to haute cuisine, the aromatic quality would make it good with pieces, while the texture and acidity would partner creamy sauces very well too and it would also be lovely with something like a piece of sea-bass – 91/100 points, marked high for being such great value.

Do try this wine if you can it is very good and very enjoyable too, everyone I showed it to really liked it.

Available in the UK for around £10.00 per bottle from Slurp, N.D.John more stockist information is available from the Domaine des Tourelles’s UK distributor, Boutinot.