Avast ye scurvy Costermongers!

I've never been much persuaded by the fruit-salad approach to wine descriptions. I sometimes like to taste fruit alongside the wine it's compared to, just to see what's what (For example, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which is often said to taste of passionfruit, lacks a certain earthy, leafmold character I find in the fruit itself).

The wine I tried today only made me more suspicious of those wine critics who one might take for moonlighting greengrocers.

Selvanova 'Vigne del Sasso' Aglianico ('06, under cork) is a fresh herby and fruity red, with a touch of ripe sweetness and nicely mellow tannins. Loads of fruit (cherries and currants and rhubarb, is what I wrote), tasty, an excellent 4+.

But look at this. The Decanter list of Ten Best Wines from Oddbins says, "blackberry and plum flavours". So does that mean cherries and currants and rhubarb and blackberry and plum? Or do you have to shake you head and just backtrack to plain old fruity?

I don't know, but I do urge you to dig out some fruit next time you find the flavour of it in a wine, just to see for yourself how similar and different they are.

Indefinable Pleasure

The best, most enjoyable wine experiences, say I, are the ineffable ones. The tasting where your notes are non-existent, or contradictory, or mainly consist of splash marks, but you have an urgent memory of a delicious, complicated something which makes you grin as you recall it.

So it is with the Verget Saint-Véran 'Terroirs de Davayé' 06. There are better white Burgundies, but Verget has long been a favourite producer of mine. The ambiguous number I arbitrarily attached to my notes(4++(-5?))summarises the battle between objective analysis and hedonistic pleasure. Plainly described, this is a medium bodied dry Chardonnay with some oaky character. Huh. Babblingly described, it's a back and forth, constantly evolving range of flavours, from white flowers to smoke to cooked grains to almonds to hazelnuts to brazil nuts to cashews to varnish to sharp metal.

Sharp metal. I don't know what I meant when I wrote that. But I know I liked it a good deal.

Sweet Wine Wednesday #5

After our Rieslingfest last time, we opted for a mixed bag - very mixed, as it turned out; we finished the evening with a curious basil flavoured sweet white wine called Longo Maï!, which did indeed, as promised, go very well with Crème Brulée.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Tonight's ampeloleptic treat, courtesy of the Tall Guy, was a blend of Merwah and Obaideh, but it might as well have been Viura, so much did the Château Musar White 01 resemble an old Rioja. I certainly don't recognise it from the description the Musar website gives, but nevertheless it was lovely. Mushroom soup and buttered toast on the nose, accompanied by a hard acrid note, led onto a palate of surpassing concentration, refreshing, light bodied and distinctly salty. A very fine 4+.

TN: Terra Andina Altos Carmenère / Carignan 07

As I may have mentioned before, Carignan is nectar to me, so I was excited to see this bottle. The Terra Andina Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc have gone down well with customers, and I rather rate them myself. High expectations then.

The first thing that hits your nostrils is intense blackcurrant, so much so that one is looking for Cabernet on the label, but then comes a herbaceous note, not the green-ness so common in Chilean wine, but rather some savoury herbs. The palate is intense, concentrated and very acid, and finishes slightly sticky.

After twenty-four hours of ventilation, the acidity has calmed down somewhat. Now there is a delicious aroma of coffee cake, and the metallic or bloody element which was there has strengthened. Add in notes of green tea and smoke, and you have a delightful and complex wine. It is definitely too young, except perhaps as a half-time refreshment for rugby players, if you see what I mean, but the rest of us can buy three, put two away for a couple of years, open the other and then drink it the day after tomorrow. Yum. Terra Andina 'Altos' Carmenère / Carignan 07: excellent (rugby players), very very good (the rest of us), 3++-4.

Tea! And Fruit! But Mainly Tea!

And I don't particularly mean that the wine smells tannic. Rather it has the fragrance of tea, some sort of dark leafiness. Then there is some more leafiness, of the tobacco sort, and then interestingly, braised red cabbage, and then finally a bit of smoke.

By contrast the palate has lots of bright fruit, and indeed it isn't all that tannic. It's fresh and medium bodied (viz, that means light for a Malbec), and really rather tasty.

My good friend TallAsAVan, Malbecista Supremo, observes that Malbec always says blue fruit to him, which I don't find. What I do often find is fishy. I've never even seen one, but that sort of dried fish called Bombay Duck (Why is it called Bombay Duck? It's been around too long to blame the name on Google Translate. Perhaps it's another case of Your Finger You Fool?) often pops into my head on tasting the bigger, more full bodied kinds of Malbec.

So it is an interesting change to find this lighter example of the grape. Well done chaps.

(Whoops – the details: Viu Manent Malbec 2007, Colchagua Valley, Chile, 14%, £7 from Oddbins. really rather tasty = 3++)

Sweet Wine Wednesday #4

Another SWW, another new flavour. This time it was dill (the herb, not the dog), found in a very lively eighteen-year old Riesling from the Pfalz region of Germany, the delicious (delicious = 5, before I forget) Dr Bürklin-Wolf Wachenheimer Rechbächel Riesling Auslese '90. But dill was only one of the flavours. There was a ton-load of buttery goodness, another herbaceous note which I think was nettles, definite popcorn, and a wee bit of rubber.

All that was just the nose. The taste was intense lime-lemon meringue pie, and then a tiny hit of mushrooms at the tail end. An absolutely delicious wine, and well worth keeping for decades yet, I would guess.

Blanc, Sec, and Foursquare

Hugh Johnson uses the term 'Plain Wine' in describing Gaillac in his 1983 Companion to Wine. I don't supppose he meant to compliment the wine, but here I am drinking a Gaillac Blanc Sec and finding that Plain Wine sums it up very well, and that plain wine suits me very nicely please-and-thank-you.

Lions Lamartine Gaillac Blanc Sec 07 is made with Mauzac and Loin de l'Oeil, grape varieties found in no other part of the world. Mauzac is said to impart a flavour of apple peel, but instead I find a strong taste of honey in this old-fashioned wine. It's very, very refreshing, (very very refreshing = 3+),but in a style which is a thousand miles away from Kiwi Sauv Blanc refreshing.

Update : After I decided I liked Johnson's term 'plain wine', I found another wine that falls into the category. Le Monache Bianco is a Cortese / Sauvignon Blanc / Chardonnay blend made by Michele Chiarlo in Monferrato, in Piemonte, Italia. On tastings, people find it uninteresting, but with certain foods it sings. Less fashionable, but nonetheless a useful style of wine, long may it continue.