Madeira Barbeito Malvasia 1994 Colheita Cask 232c

The single cask series from Barbeito are some of the most extraordinary wines I've ever encountered. I still have one bottle left of the Cask 18a, which is one of the single best wines I've ever drunk. A good future would be one in which Barbeito released several more of these gems.

Honeyed brass.

Smoked hay dunked in toffee and pepper. Hot and somewhat steamy.

Orange peels roasted in a muscovado crust. Toffee and salted caramel, with cigar smoke and pipe leaf. The notes of most wines like this read the same, but they're not the same. This is juicy, piercing, intense and explosive, but rich and voluptuous all at the same time. I've never really considered dessert island wines before, but one of these casks would surely be one of them. Incredible stuff.

*****

Tasted at Naughton, 6 November 2011

 

Mugnier Chambolle-Musigny 2002

My love for these wines is well-documented. They form a valuable chunk of my cellar. I wish I could afford to drink them more often.

Quite young, beautifully translucent Burgundy.

Sweet nose of underbrush and confit strawberry. Pithy notes. Full and somewhat leathery. Hint of cocoa.

Feels incredible. Strawberry & cranberry laced suede and leather that drifts into silk and satin, then flutters along into a finish that leaves more feeling than flavour. Warm Burgundy, elegant and ephemeral. There are are wood spice and forest like notes as well, but the harmony of all somewhat obscures the individual notes.

*****

Tasted at Naughton, 6 November 2011

Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 1995

I've become more and more convinced that Champagne goes through a pronounced intermediate phase towards the end of its teenage years. The vibrancy of youth and the rich, toasty-ness of age meet for a time and mute each other. I don't really know the technical term for this or even the science behind it. But I know it when I taste it.

Bright gold. No brass or green.

Bready and savoury on the nose.

Sourdough and nameless citrus and fibrous fruit. Long-lovely, but more sensuous than flavourful. Spiced quince. Intense but under-developed. Needs a long time.

**(***)

Tasted at Naughton 6 November 2011

Tio Pepe

Given my love and devotion to the wines from Jerez, it's a bit of a surprise that I've never bothered to post a note for this benchmark Fino. About six years ago my mate Broomie and I toured the impressive Gonzalez Byass bodega. The scale was staggering. They never commented on just how many bottles they produced, but given the seemingly endless barrels in the solera, I imagine it's quite a lot. Yet the quality, regardless of scale, is extraordinary. This is a good thing. Tio Pepe is ubiquitous throughout the UK. It's nice to know that, theoretically at least, you're never too far from a decent glass of Fino. Sadly, far too many of the bars and restaurants that stock it leave it open too long, dooming it lose its freshness and zing to oxidation. Ah well.

Silver and bright with green highlights

Nose of hay, flint and sourdough bread with limes soaked in olive brine.

Imagine tearing a chunk of sourdough bread, squeezing lime juice onto it, dipping it in olive oil and then smearing it with green olive tapenade. This wine is like that. But then it finishes by crunching oyster shells with lemon peel. Benchmark fino.

*****

Tasted at Luvians Bottleshop, 1 November 2011

Aldo Conterno Barolo 2004

I bow to whimsy more than occasionally. Today that whimsy is a bottle of something I've been wanting to try for sometime, and a grey October Friday seemed the perfect time to do it. Autumn and Barolo go together like, well, like Autumn and red Burgundy - they are almost perfectly suited. That rusty, rustic crunch sits well with the falling leaves and slow-cooked stews of the season.

Stained-glass red - pale, rusty and bright.

Dusty nose with dried strawberries, raspberries and cranberries. It tugs at the nostrils and gets the mouth watering. There's hay and leather on the edges as well.

My goodness. Stunning palate that starts softly but quickly shrieks with juicy, crunchy, soured red berries - cranberries, raspberries and strawberries - all so juicy that you wince, squint and blink a bit. Then, beneath the juicy fruit, the dust, leather and tar-like tannins assert themselves, balancing that juiciness with a firm grip that goes from silk to suede to a prickly hint of sandpaper. Structure, charm, grip, fruit, earth, poise and balance, this pretty much has everything I wanted it to, and perhaps a bit more. Still incredibly youthful.

There is no hint whatsoever of the 14.5% alcohol.

Fantastic stuff.

*****

Tasted at Shorehead 14 October 2011

Chateau Margaux 1990 from Imperial (600cl)

Fortune smiled upon me this morning when a restauranteur friend of mine invited me around to taste the remains of something remarkable. It's important to resist the 'awe' factor of such wines - to not let their reputation and price precede them and potentially cloud your judgement. As a self-confessed Bordeaux cynic, my guard was up, but it's difficult not to be intimidated/impressed by a six litre bottle worth somewhere in the region of £8,000. Especially from such a legendary estate.

I should note that this had been opened and decanted the night before, though seemed none the worse for it.

Mature colour, but no amber - red rust and deep leather.

Quite a lot going on here. Cedar, licorice, saddles and Christmas spice. Glazed game, compote blueberries and currants - both red & black. Sugar-coated dust, pipe leaf tobacco and candied violets. All this on the nose and it's all intense, pervading and powerful. It's also quite addictive - I keep shoving my face in the glass.

Still young. Piercing, fresh, juicy berries - cherries, raspberries, with real crunch to them. Bright, vibrant and incredibly focused. The grip and tannins begin to take hold mid palate, at first softly, like suede or velvet, though growing more assertive by the finish, which is dark, tight and suggests a very, very long future ahead. Beautifully layered.

*****

Tasted at The Seafood Restaurant, St Andrews, 4 October 2011

Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou 1970

One of the first big tastings organised by the Naughton Dining Club (oft-referred to wine-swilling gang of trade and ex-trade mates) was a vertical of Ducru dating back to 1955. If memory serves, and subsequent tastings are any indication, the 1966 was the wine of the evening. But we all loved the 1970 as well. In those days, and up through to the 90s, Ducru provided the poise and elegance of St Julien. Nowadays it tends towards the bigger style of claret, which is a shame. As such, revisiting old Ducru is not something that needs to be forced upon me. I'll sip willingly.

Mature, but not old, and classic claret tones at 41 years.

Soft nose, with bunches of tangy berries - the dried ones you find in a good muesli, and hints of cloves on the edges.

This is almost aperitif claret. Sadly ill-suited to the lamb shanks. Perhaps the acidity of the tomato in the sauce is cutting into it a bit. Tasted away from the food, it's delicious. Supple and textured, it's not quite as big and vibrant as the La Chapelle, nor as poised as the Barolo, but sits somewhere between the two. Is it a touch too old? Nah. I'd keep drinking it over the next five years or so. Perhaps longer.

****

Tasted 20 August 2011 at Shorehead.

Jaboulet Hermitage 'La Chapelle' 1972

The search for good wines from our birth year is almost and endless task for those in the wine trade. I'm a 1976 baby myself, so Champagne and Germany have yielded the best results. A friend in the trade was born in 1972 and has searched for years in vain for a decent wine from that year. His most recent acquisition was this, and it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Rusty red edges, but quite dark blueberry compote at the core.

The nose is meaty, savoury with cocoa-laced stone fruits - plums - and a whiff of stewed blueberry.

That savoury, meatiness follows through on to the palate mostly with a nice, mature saddle leather mouthfeel that guides cocoa and confit blueberry on the mid-palate. There's still a nice, rich vibrancy to this. The fruit is youthful while the texture and mouthfeel enjoy the luxury of maturity. Nice depth, too. Fantastic - possibly wine of the night (though I do love the Barolo).

*****

Tasted 20 August 2011 at Shorehead

already routine

My alarm sings the marimba at 530 in the morning and I fiddle about trying to turn it off. I avoid 'snooze'. The snooze button is not allowed during harvest.

By 630 we're at Coume del Mas, rinsing and assembling the press and loading the first comports (big plastic tubs holding about 50kg worth of grapes). It's a small bag-press, so it only takes about 18 comports. We don't talk much at this point. We've said bonjour and possibly ça va and that's about it. Yesterday's wine will be racked from cool tank into barrels in the cool room (cool, huh?) while we fill the press. Apart from a few barrels of fermenting Syrah, it's only white at the moment, with the wines that will be Folio, c'est pas de Pipeau and Catala just starting their ferments. Grenache Gris, Roussanne and Vermentino all bubbling away.

Once the press is loaded I grab a lift from Coume del Mas in Cosprons to Mas Cristine in Argeles. If all's going to plan, we get to Argeles about 730. Mas Cristine requires more strategy when getting equipment together, as our corner of the ancient co-op is cramped and a bit inhospitable. We move the press outside in order to save space. This is a larger beast than the one at Coume del Mas, and can take - with coaxing - about 35 comports. More often than not, there is wine to rack from tank to tank, and at the moment we've a Roussanne ferment to cool down in the mornings. The first grapes come in about 830. Thus far we've had Grenache Gris, Muscat, Roussanne and Macabeu for whites and a small amount of Syrah and Grenache Noir for rosé.

The standard press cycle takes about three hours, during which we clean, rack and sort out all the tanks and barrels for the grapes yet to come. Quite a lot of winemaking is being ready and quite a lot of being ready in winemaking is being clean. Scrubbing the caps for tanks, the tartaric residue off of stainless steel and epoxy vats, it's all part of the harvest.

As the press clangs and howls through its various pressures and in between all the cleaning, racking and tidying, we taste the juice. We usually switch vessel about 1000mBars, separating the lighter press juice from the harder. The juice from the first presses tends to be fruitier, more elegant, while the later presses boast more phenolics and secondary flavours. In most cases they will ferment and mature independently until the blend is decided late autumn.

Some days, we'll do two full presses, others one. Over lunch we'll chat about the odd variations in grape maturity throughout the vines. The odd cool spell and bizarre humidity levels have led to uneven ripening. Some of the best fruit won't be ready for a month, meaning the much talked about early harvest may also be one of the latest harvests in recent memory, with some reds not being picked until October. The last three years in the Roussillon, most of the ferments had finished by then.

At Mas Cristine, there is usually beer when the shift ends. It's cold and never quite big enough.

Home by 7ish. In bed around 10. The same again in the morning. I'm enjoying it while I can, as when the reds come in it will start to get busy.

Fontannafredda Barolo 1961

Sitting on the outskirts of Banyuls, typing up tasting notes from last week, staring out at the steep-terraced vineyards and wondering what the future holds. The immediate future is easy: there are grapes by the millions to turn into wine. The distant future, not so much. Even October is a mystery. I hope, though, that someday a wine I had a hand in turns out as lovely as this in 50 years' time.

Rusty red but no brown.

Stoned, dried plums and strawberries on the nose with dust, hay and a zingy marmalade tang.

Soft, old and classy on the palate. Arguably a touch simple, but elegant and really gorgeous with roast lamb shanks. In spite of the softness, there's still a welcome and firm grip to the tannins whilst that dry fruit ripens up and lifts with the food, still showing off some proper juiciness. Charming.

****

Tasted 20 August 2011 at Shorehead.

Some notes on winemaking (or how not to hurt yourself too badly while working vintage)

I am by no means a winemaking expert. I wouldn't even say I was at an intermediate level - more an enthusiastic and curious beginner with three years' experience. Along the way I've picked up a few nuggets of knowledge that may help the aspiring young vigneron out. They're numbered in no particular order.

1. There is nothing cuddly in a winery. The tanks are steel, oak, epoxy or concrete. The hoses are reinforced and have stainless steel at each end. The bottles are glass. The pallets splinter. Pretty much everything is heavy or sharp or hard. Some things are all of those. Be careful.

2. If you forget rule one and do hurt yourself, don't bitch. Don't stop if you're in the middle of something. Everyone's hurt themselves. Everyone is bleeding or just scabbed over, with bruises forming and bumps rising. Anything short of a broken bone, lost limb or death can wait. Just try not to bleed into the wine and when there's a pause, find a bandaid.

3. Making wine hungover is something you only need to do once to learn it is the worst fucking thing in the world. Remember: self-inflicted wounds deserve and receive no sympathy.

4. Drink a lot of water.

5. You don't have to be a morning person, but you have to function in the morning, regardless of how miserable and grumpy you are. Everyone around you wanted an extra hour or two in bed and none of them got it.

6. There is no 'are we there yet?' attitude, there is only 'what can I do next?' attitude.

7. If there's coffee, drink it. You'll need it.

8. If there's wine at lunch (and there will be in France), take it easy and match it with water.

9. Try, if you can, to get a bit of breakfast.

10. If someone else is lazy, it's not your job to call them out. Their laziness will reveal itself. Focus on what you're doing.

11. Always double-check the valves. Wasting wine is a terrible, terrible thing.

12. Do your job and be helpful.

13. Learning what not to do is every bit as important as learning what to do.

14. When in doubt, ask. It's better to be annoying than to do something wrong.

15. Nobody likes a smart ass. That's applicable well beyond winemaking.

16. Don't stick your hand in the de-stemmer.

17. Make sure you know where the emergency stop button is on every bit of equipment you use. It's usually big and red.

18. Make sure everything is clean at the end of the day. If you half-ass whatever you're cleaning, you can fuck it up for everyone.

19. Don't fuck it up for everyone.

20. Have fun.

Chateau de Beaucastel Blanc Vielles Vignes 1996

I've been reading what a pain in the ass Roussanne is recently, how winemakers in the Rhône are grubbing it up and replacing it with the more robust and, arguably, less elegant Marsanne. I don't know if this is endemic, or just something wine writers feel they need to gripe about, as there isn't always very much to chat about in the wine world, and new subject matter is always at a premium (see the constant stream of 'next big varietal'  chat in the wine press - it's pretty dire stuff). The Perrin brothers make this Roussanne and have no intention, as far as I'm aware, of replacing it with Marsanne. That's for the best, as I feel this cuvée is by far the finest wine they make.

The beginnings of brass in with the gold and some green highlights. Still bright in its maturity.

Nutty on the nose, with bread-y star fruit and quince. With air comes honeycomb.

Honeycomb textured mouthfeel - waxy with honey smeared over toast, layers of quince and glazed peaches. There's some orange flower water there as well. As it opens up there's greater harmony, the individual notes fusing into something greater than its parts. That toastiness loses its burnt edges. Really superb stuff.

*****

Tasted 20 August 2011 at Shorehead

a sense of scale

A bottle of wine is a small thing.

I remember working in a wine shop in the lead up to the Christmas rush, waiting with trepidation for pallet after pallet of wines, whiskies and assorted other festive liquids. A fully loaded pallet is, or should be, 56 cases. If the cases are 6-packs, then it's 112 cases per pallet. It was a small shop. It still is, actually, and the sight of two pallets waiting to be brought into its tight confines in short time could ruin an otherwise cheery morning. It often seemed an insurmountable task. A pallet was pretty much the largest measure of quantity we used. Occasionally there would be chat of shipping a whole container (which holds several pallets), but those chats were rare and inevitably ended with a shrug and a 'nah'.

When I worked as a sommelier, pallets of wine were rare and impractical. We received only two in my 14 months at the restaurant, of wine we shipped directly from France. It took some planning to clear room in the cellar, with various nooks and crannies excavated to stash a 6-pack here and there.

The last 3 vintages I've worked in France, I've grown accustomed to the scale and volume of the wine we make. 50 and 60 hectolitre tanks are filled over the course of a day or two of emptying comports full of grapes into the de-stemmer, which leads to the pump, which leads to the tank. Remontage through fermentation, racking, daily density samples and tastings meant that those tanks were not idle once filled. We continue to interact with them throughout vinification. I grasped their size and dimensions within the boundaries of winemaking.

At the end of a day's work we'd often open a bottle of a previous vintage and maybe comment on how this year would be different. Would it be better? I understood, intellectually, that the liquid in the tank would someday be the liquid in the bottle. It's such an obvious thing, and yet there was a level of comprehension that was missing; a blank spot between the tank and the bottle.

On Thursday and Friday last week, that blank spot was filled in with great detail. The bottling truck arrived and in spite of the occasional  technical difficulty the bottling line was set up. It was modular, with lots of bright stainless steel and more moving parts than seemed practical. Filters, pumps, conveyors, front labels, back labels, bottles, boxes, corks, caps, etc. all present in staggering quantities. A bottle of wine is a small thing, perfectly formed for its task, yet the number of things that go into that, to give that impression and provide that perfect form, is daunting. For me it was, anyway. Our job was to bottle around 15,000 litres - we needed to clear space in the tanks for this year's harvest.

My station on the line was boxes. I had to unfold cases and lay them on the line for my partner to fill with six bottles, then lay down the divider atop those so that the last six bottles could be placed on top of the divider. My partner then folded the case shut and pushed it through for it to be sealed, coded and loaded onto a pallet. We switched places for the last tank, with me handling the bottles. None of this occurred at a leisurely pace. We packed three cases a minute, thus filling a whole pallet in less than twenty minutes. Before my very eyes the tanks I knew only in and of themselves were emptying into bottles and the scale took me aback. Just one of those 60 hecto tanks equalled 8,000 bottles of wine. That's almost 12 pallets worth. Mas Cristine is not a huge winery. A 15,000 litre bottling line in the Roussillon is at best small-to-medium in terms of volume. And yet for this former wine merchant, the one who would sigh in exasperation when a delivery driver showed up outside the shop with two pallets, to bottle and box over twenty pallets worth of wine in the space of a day and a half seemed extraordinary.

After that last day of bottling we went home and, as usual, cracked open a bottle of something. I brushed the label with my thumb and traced the seam of the glass up to the foil cap. The cork removed, I rolled it over in my fingers and squeezed it, feeling it give slightly. I nosed my glass, looked again at the label and thought that a bottle of wine is a small thing.

Vintage 2011

I'm writing this from the luxurious surroundings of the departure lounge at Prestwick International Airport. The wine list is atrocious. Even the Duty Free here is a wasteland of industrial muck. I might have to order a pint to drown my sorrow at this state of affairs. The good news is that I won't be here for much longer. My flight leaves for Spain in a little over an hour. From there, it's just a quick bus ride over the foothills of the Pyrenees and I'll be back in the Roussillon for the 2011 vintage at Mas Cristine, Coume del Mas and Consolation. I'll be working the harvest for five weeks. From all accounts, it's going to be a big one. The vines I saw in July were laden with grapes, which is ace as '09 and '10 were a touch on the small side. If all goes to plan, I'll be blogging the wine-making process as much as possible over the next month and a bit. As usual, the wine-y stuff will be here and various less wine-y adventures will be at my other blog over here.

Right, I'm off for a quick pint.

Clos Pons Costers del Segre

I've not scored these simply because that's how I noted them at the time. This is a range sent to a friend of mine at the request of another friend of mine without the knowledge of the first friend. So when they arrived, no one had any idea what they were. As far as I know, they are unrepresented in the UK. That may have been why they were sent.

Sisquella 2010

Garnacha Blanca & Moscatel

White flowers, petals & peaches - touch of Flint.

Fat & waxy on the palate. Fleshy and a bit fibrous, with that White fruit giving way to orange flower water and then orange peel for a bit of bite and grip on the finish. Bright, summery stuff.

Roc Nu 2008

Baked red fruits, warm forest and summer fields. Bit of hay and earth.

Palate is soft, briary with a polished woodspice to it. No hard edges until the end, where a bit of a dirty bite reveals itself.

Alges 2009

Quite jammy red and dark fruit on the nose. Pulpy.

Lots of bright, dark fruit on the palate. More restrained secondaries- simpler but more pure and less dirty than the Roc Nu.

Tasted at Luvians Bottleshop 28/6/2011

Dedicato a Walter Cabernet Franc 2005 Poggio al Tesoro

Sometimes, quite often in fact, I wonder why some Super-Tuscans exist. I don't question their inherent quality. Off the top of my head I can reel off 20 or so wines I feel are genuinely fantastic. But too often I'm finding they taste of two things - what they're made of and how they're made. That's fine for entry level, varietal wines. But wines at the higher end should express so much more than that - there should be a nuanced sense of where they come from - and so many of these Super-Tuscans fail to do that. Technically they are excellent, but quite a few of them lack soul.

I've never met a wine named Walter, by the way.

Just beginning to show some age on the edges.

Sweetened spearmint and blueberries on the nose.

The palate is like having a paintbrush loaded with dark fruit, tobacco leaf, dust and compote swiped across your tongue and then shoved in your mouth. Not in a bad way. This is delicious, but a little too perfect. It could be from anywhere, and I find that a little unnerving.

****

27/06/2011

Blaufränkisch Burgenland 2009 Moric

The first time I tried this wine was at SITT 2011. There were many fantastic wines tried that day, though this stood out. I'm not overly familiar with Blaufränkisch, and novelty combined with quality is one of the holy grails of, not just building a good wine list, but really enjoying wine and broadening the palate. This is their entry level offering - some of their cuvées can be quite pricey, but based on this introduction I reckon they're probably worth it.

Violet edges but quite dark at the core.

Ripe cherry and strawberry wrapped in a dusty cloak.

It starts floral, violet-y, then those bunches of crunchy, juicy red cherries  come bursting through followed by dark, gripping backwards dusty saddle leather, squid ink and then a sour tang of more cherries. Reminds me a touch of Bierzo. Love the contrast between the brightness of the fruit and the darkness of the secondaries. Also never heavy. Powerful but light. Brilliant wine.

****(*)

22/6/2011

Fonseca 1983

Tired port is one of the sadder things in fine wine, up there with prematurely oxidized white Burgundy and sherry's continued lack of respect.

Quite faded, but still purple shades.

Oops. Snorted it by accident. Weird. Light strawberries soaked with vodka and plum schnapps.

Hot, very spirity and sadly unbalanced. Shame.

*

Tasted at Shorehead 20/6/2011

Vin Santo Vertical

Not going to lie: I'm a big Vin Santo fan. I'm also a big Isole e Olena fan. This wine is a lot more expensive than it used to be, but so's petrol and a pound of beef. All things being equal, sometimes I'd rather spend a little more and enjoy a little more.

Splitting hairs between these two wines bothered me. They're both good. I'd be happy with either of them at the end of a meal.

Isole e Olena Vin Santo del Chianti Classico 1998

Biscotti and salted caramel nose. Peanuts and toffee.

Bursts with dried figs and nuts - toasted and roasted, but perhaps a bit short.

Isole e Olena Vin Santo del Chianti Classico 1999

Deeper, richer and sweeter than the 98. Sexier. Rich. Dripping with caramel cashews, biscotti, toffee. Very rich. Delicious. Possibly heart attack inducing.

Both **** - *****

Tasted at Shorehead 20/6/2011

Inniskillin Sparkling Icewine 2002

It is a source of endless amusement that this wine even exists. In fact, there's quite a lot of Canadian sparkling ice wine kicking about. I remember an old friend and colleague once joking that everything tastes better with bubbles. 'Oh sure, '82 Lafite is great, but give me '82 Lafite through a soda stream and then you'll have a fucking wine' was his common refrain. I only think he was half joking.

Apparently, Inniskillin use the Charmat method to carbonate, meaning a secondary fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks before bottling. I have absolutely no idea how that is chemically possible. Inducing secondary fermentation with residual sugar levels between 180 and 320 grams per litre is quite a feat. But these guys managed it, and have been doing so for a fair few years now. The results are deliriously fun but stupidly expensive.

Polished brass with lazy bubbles..

This is just silly. It's utterly delicious, and quite good with the tart. But it's still silly. I suppose any wine that leaves you giggling like an idiot is quite good. Not worth £55 a half bottle good, but good.

****

Tasted at Shorehead 20/6/2011