Wine of the Week 46 – it’s Zinfandel, but not as most people imagine it

Zinfandel is a wonderful grape variety, that is pretty hard to pin down – in many different ways. What it actually is and where it comes from has taken a very long time to get straight. The grape is often regarded as America’s own grape, but if any vine can make that claim it is actually the wayward Norton. Of course Zinfandel made its reputation in California, but it was a long time coming. For much of its time there Zinfandel has been regarded as a very inferior grape indeed and it has only been in the last 20 years or so that it has received the attention that it deserves.

Zinfandel vines in the Napa Valley.

As far as we can tell, the grape that became Zinfandel was taken to the eastern United States from Europe in the 1820’s – long before the annexation of California. Records show that it was taken from the Austrian Imperial nursery in Vienna to Boston and was originally sold as a table grape in New England, but destiny called when cuttings were shipped to California to take advantage of the boom caused by the Gold Rush in 1849. That was all we knew until the 1990s when DNA testing discovered that Zinfandel was identical to the Primitivo that is widely used in Puglia, the heel of Italy.

Plavac Mali vines in the amazing Dingac vineyards on the Pelješac Peninsula near Dubrovnik in Croatia.

Further investigation and DNA work then discovered that Primitivo/Zinfandel were one of the parents of the Plavac Mali grape which is used on Croatia’s Dalmation coast. The other parent was Dobričić, an incredibly obscure Croatian grape that only grows on the Dalmatian island of Šolta. This find narrowed the search down and in 2001 a vine that matched Zinfandel’s DNA was discovered in a single vineyard in Kaštel Novi north west of Split on the Croatian coast. The vine was known as Crljenak Kaštelanski, or ‘the red grape of Kaštela’. In 2011 the researchers discovered another match, this time with a grape called Tribidrag which is also used on the Dalmatian coast. Crljenak Kaštelanski and Tribidrag are as alike as different clones of Pinot Noir, or Tempranillo and Tinto Fino, but  Tribidrag is the more common name, although not much of it is left, so it too is obscure. However, records show the name has been used since at least 1518 and what’s more, Primitivo derives from the Latin for early, while Tribidrag derives from the Croatian for early – they are both early ripening grapes.

Ok, so the roots of Zinfandel are sorted, but then we have the the worry as to exactly what sort of wine Zinfandel makes. Many UK consumers assume that Zinfandel primarily makes sweetish rosé, white Zinfandel, but most of the books and wine courses tell us that it makes high alcohol (15% and more), rich, dry, spicy red wines with rich dried fruit – prune and raisin – characters. That can certainly be true of the old vine Zinfandels that are produced in the hot Central Valley areas of Amador and Lodi, but there is another, totally different style of Zinfandel in California too.

This style comes from cooler production areas nearer the coast and is more elegant – by which I mean less powerful, less of a blunt instrument, instead it has delicate fruit characters, normally red – raspberry in fact – together with some freshness too. I recently tasted a delicious example, that is very good value for money, so I made it my Wine of the Week.

The wine regions of Sonoma – click map for a larger view.

 

2013 De Loach Heritage Reserve Zinfandel
De Loach Vineyards,
Russian River Valley, Sonoma
California
100% Zinfandel aged for a few months in American and Hungarian oak barrels. The grapes mainly come from De Loach’s own organic and biodynamically farmed vineyards, with some fruit from other, warmer areas of California. Sonoma’s Russian River Valley has a long slow even growing season that seems to coax real elegance out of Zinfandel, making the wines quite different from the usual take on the grape. The alcohol is a modest 13.5%.

The colour is a lovely deep, but bright ruby red, while the nose is scented and lifted, offering rich, intense raspberry together with black pepper, smoke and vanilla. The palate is medium-bodied, but is richly textured with rounded ripe fruit filling the mouth with flavour. Those flavours are raspberry and cracked pepper spice together with some cherry and blackberry too. While this is not the most complex Zinfandel in the world, the tannins are soft and velvety and while the fruit dominates from start to finish, making the wine juicy and soft, there is a lovely seam of freshness in the wine, that makes it deliciously drinkable too – 87/100 points.

Available in the UK for around £11 a bottle from Eclectic Tastes and Exel Wines, further stockist information is available from the UK distributor, Liberty Wines.
US stockist information is available here.

If your experience of Zinfandel makes you think they are all huge monsters with high alcohol, this gives a totally different take on the grape and is superb value for money too. A very food friendly wine, this is perfect with almost anything, from burgers, pastas and pizzas, to Sunday roasts and finer fare.

Wine of the Week 45 – an elegant and delicious Port

I love Port, as well as the unfortified wines of Portugal’s Douro region (do try this one here), and given how reluctant winter is to leave us this year, in the UK anyway, I thought this delicious Port that I discovered recently would be a lovely, warming Wine of the Week.

The beautiful terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley.

Port has long been dominated by the big brands, many of them still with British names, such as Grahams, Dows, Cockburns, Taylors etc., but that has been changing ever since 1986. Until that year, Port had to be taken from the vineyards in the Upper Douro Valley to the Port Lodges in Vila Nova de Gaia, near Porto, where the big Port houses are based. It was these companies who aged and shipped the wine rather than the grape growers. After 1986 though, the growers were allowed to age and ship their own wines direct from their estates or Quintas in the Upper Douro.

This means that more and more Port is now made by the growers on their own estates, which can only add to the romance of the product. It is also in keeping with the rest of the wine world, where it is very common to find estates that have been growing grapes for decades, or longer, who in recent years have stopped selling their grapes to the big local producer, or cooperative and instead have started making the wines for themselves.

Map of the Douro – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

This is exactly what happened with the Quinta do Infantado, which is a delightful family run Port estate near the lovely village of Pinhão in the heart of the Douro. The Roseira family have been in charge here for well over a century, but the Quinta actually dates back to 1816, when it was founded by the Portuguese Crown Prince, or Infante – hence Infantado. Of course, like all the other growers, the Roseiras, and the Infante before them, sold their grapes to the big names shippers until 1986 – which is presumably explains why the Port houses were called ‘shippers’ rather than producers, which was something I always found odd.

The beautiful tiled railway station in Pinhão.

The beautiful tiled railway station in Pinhão.

The Douro is a very beautiful, rugged, wild place with a very hot climate in the growing season. The land slopes dramatically down to the Douro River and so much of the landscape is terraced to allow for efficient agriculture and to stop soil erosion. The soil is schist, which is decayed slate, so everything makes this a hard landscape to work and ensures that pretty much everything still has to be done by hand – and sometimes by foot – just as it always has. Rather wonderfully at Quinta do Infantado they do still tread the grapes in the traditional manner – this gives a rapid extraction of colour in the shallow, stone fermentation tanks called a lagares.

Vineyards are everywhere you look in Pinhão.

Large wooden vats for ageing Port. These are at Quinta do Noval, which is near Quinta do Infantado.

2009 Quinta do Infantado LBV Port
Port
The blend is 30% Touriga Franca, 30% Touriga Nacional, 30% Tinta Roriz (Tempranillo) with 10% of other local grapes. The grapes are trodden and the finished Port is aged for around 4 years in large (25,000) wooden vats that are over 100 years old and so give no wood flavour to the wine, but do soften the tannins. The finished wine is not filtered or fined before bottling. An LBV, or Late Bottled Vintage, is technically a Reserve Ruby Port from a single vintage.

The colour is an enticing intense, vibrant, deep ruby.
The nose is lifted, scented and lively with rich black fruit notes of blackberry and black cherry, warming spice, liquorice, aniseed, clove, smoke and cedar. There is a floral prettiness there too, even a twist of orange peel.
The palate is sumptuous and fresh tasting with delicious sweet black fruit and lots of red fruit too – rich red plum and cherry, gentle sweet spice, some dry spice and a little smoky, fine grain tannin on the finish. This was also a pretty dry style of Port, not dry exactly, but drier than most.
This is joyous, vibrant and beautifully balanced with excellent integration between the fruit and the alcohol, indeed for a Port it carries its 19.5% alcohol very well indeed.
If more affordable Port tasted this fresh and juicy, I would drink more of it – 91/100.

I greatly enjoyed this with some Manchego and Gorgonzola cheese, but it also goes superbly with chocolate.

Available in the UK for around £15 a bottle from The Wine Reserve, Slurp, Eclectic Tastes, The Drink Shop, Little Big Wine, Exel Wines and the Fine Wine Company. Further stockist information is available from the UK distributor, Liberty Wines.
The US distributor is Louis/Dressner Selections / LDM WINES INC and more stockist information is available here.

Do try this if you get the chance, it is utterly delicious without being overly heavy or spirity either, Quinta do Infantado also produce a wide range of other Ports and table wines too. If I get the chance to taste them I will report back on what those are like too.

Rotgipfler – Austria’s Mystery Grape

Austria’s beautiful Thermenregion.

Whilst enjoying my tour of the beautiful Austrian wine lands the other week I was thrilled to discover a grape variety that was entirely new to me.

I relish discovering new wines and grape varieties as they provide me with the new experiences that expand my knowledge and keep my delight in wine alive. It saddens me that so many wine consumers seem to be happy with drinking a very narrow range of grape varieties and wine styles, so I see it as my duty to highlight wonderful more obscure wines.

Well with only 0.2% of Austria’s plantings, Rotgipfler is pretty obscure. It seems that once upon a time the grape was grown further afield with historical mentions of it in Würrtemberg, Baden and Alsace, but now is only known in Thermenregion to the south of Vienna. As far as I can make out it is indigenous to Thermenregion too, but some evidence suggests that it might have originated in Styria further south.

Austria’s wine regions – click for a larger view.

What we can be certain of though is that it was created by a spontaneous crossing between Traminer and Roter Veltliner. This might well lead you to imagine that it is related to Austria’s great Grüner Veltliner, especially as Gru-Vee used to be called Weißgipfler / Weissgipfler.

Actually it would appear that there there is no link at all between Grüner Veltliner and Roter Veltliner and just the one parent in common for Grüner Veltliner and Rotgipfler.

Rotgipfler, again despite its name, is a white grape. The rot – red in German – part of its name comes from the red shoots, or the red leaf tips or even leaf veins the plant has at harvest time. Reports vary as to which of these is the actual reason for the red name.

Reading about Rotgipfler sine I got back I am somewhat surprised by the lack of respect it seems to have. Jancis Robinson is pretty damning when she calls it ‘ponderous’ in my ancient copy of Vines, Grapes and Vines, whilst she describes it as ‘the marginally less noble of the two white wine grapes’ (associated with Thermenregion).

Personally that is not how I found it, perhaps things have moved on? I also have no time for the concept of ‘noble’ grapes anymore – after all I was taught that Sauvignon Blanc and Tempranillo were not noble!

Historically Rotgipfler is most famously used as one half of the blend in the local Thermenregion speciality wine of Gumpoldskirchen. The other half is the equally obscure Zierfandler and the wine originates in the beautiful village of Gumpoldskirchen – I have yet to taste one, but am looking at a bottle of it on my desk as I write this and will let you know what it’s like soon. 

The beautiful Church in Gumpoldskirchen with Johanneshof Reinisch vineyards all around.

I was able to taste some wonderful examples of Zierfandler though and would highly recommend trying one of those- the one from Johanneshof Reinisch was delicious as was Biegler’s and the wonderfully exotic and mandarin-like 1969 Zierfandler from the local co-operative.

Interestingly Zierfandler may be the inadvertent origin of the Zinfandel name as both grapes originate in Croatia and a linguistic mix up may have occurred over the grape’s name.

Hannes Reinisch, winemaker
at Johanneshof Reinisch.

2012 Johanneshof Reinisch Rotgipfler
Thermenregion
Austria
This impressive estate has been organic since 2004, but will only be certified so from the 2013 harvest onwards.
The wine has an enticing pale peach skin colour and is wonderfully aromatic and scented without being over the top in any way. There are delicate peach skin and honey notes together with pear and the merest hint of red fruits and spice.
The palate is quite textured and creamy, it is fermented using wild yeasts in stainless steel tank and in large neutral wooden vats, which do not give wood flavour, but can enrich the mouthfeel. This will be further enhanced by the 4 months on the lees. It is medium bodied with a nice feeling of weight, but not heavy. The succulence dominates while a clean cut of apricot and citrus acidity cleans it off and makes it refreshing. There is also a lovely taut seam of something mineral flowing right through it to the long finish. This is delicious, beautifully made and very drinkable and is very user friendly being delicious with almost any food – even spicy – or on its own – 90/100 points.

Available in the UK from Eclectic Tastes and through Astrum Wine Cellars.
Available in the US through Circo Vino.

Foudres at Johanneshof Reinisch.

The beautiful cellar at Johanneshof Reinisch.

Heinrich Hartl 111

2012 Heinrich Hartl Rotgipfler
Thermenregion
Austria
Heinrich comes from a long line of vignerons and is a terrific winemaker and although I did not taste this in Austria I have had it since – I did try his superb Saint Laurent though and can highly recommend that richly fruity and Burgundy-like wine.

Again the nose is scented and exotic with pear, some light asian spice and honey. The palate is quite creamy – 5 months on the lees here – and peppery with a dash of ginger and cleansing acidity giving a citrus twist and yes it still has that minerality that makes the wine more complex, taut and fine. Another delicious food friendly wine with a delicate touch of the exotic about it – 90/100 points.

Available in the UK from Merry Widows  and through Waitrose Direct.
Check here for availability in other countries.

I really have come to like Rotgipfler very much indeed. It seems to be delicious and very drinkable and to go perfectly with all manner of foods – or none. I really think it is a grape variety that many of you would enjoy very much if you get the chance to try it, so keep a look out and do give Rotgipfler a go if you can.