Bordeaux rising

Bordeaux is a gargantuan wine region, its annual production of 5.5 million hectolitres accounting for over a quarter of France’s total. It is home to some of the most famous, prestigious and highly-valued wines in the world – but these wines account for less than 5% of the total.

What of the other 95%? A good deal of it is rather thin, weedy red wine that is made and sold cheaply. In between these two extremes, however, are winemakers struggling to make a living by making the best wine they can from their vines, in the face of prices that are pegged back by those lowest common denominator wines. The stratospheric, to merely high, prices of the top wines may feel geographically close, yet they are out of reach for these producers.

Could white wine be a brighter future for Bordeaux’s “squeezed middle”? It might at least be part of it. While a dampish, maritime climate like Bordeaux’s can struggle to ripen red grapes each year, it poses less of a problem for faster ripening white varieties.

So, Sauvignon Blanc, Sancerre and even white Burgundy fans, pin back thy lugs, as what follows could be of interest to you.

Bordeaux’s whites are predominantly based on Sauvignon Blanc, sometimes with a little of that under-rated but quality variety, Semillon too. The part of Bordeaux known as Entre-Deux-Mers (literally “between two seas” though the seas in question are actually the Garonne and Dordogne rivers) nowadays produces rather too much so-so red wine, which accounts for much of the everyday Bordeaux  and Bordeaux Superieur that we see on supermarket shelves. But it is also still home to some white grapes, predominantly Sauvignon Blanc.

West of there, south of Bordeaux, the Graves area has long been famous for both its red and white wines. Since 1987, the northern part of Graves was sliced off to be known as Pessac-Léognan, which is now home to Bordeaux’s most prestigious dry white wines.

Calvet Réserve Sauvignon Blanc 2015 - £8.99 at Waitrose (down to £6.74 until 11 October)

This wine, along with Dourthe No 1 (£8.50 from The Wine Society), makes a great case for Bordeaux’s ability to make fresh, zippy and appealing – but not green or underripe – Sauvignon Blanc at a sensible price. Both these négociant winemakers will choose parcels of wine from across the region to contribute to their blend, in order to get the flavour profile they want. These light styles are perfect on their own or are made for lighter seafood dishes like mussels, oysters, simply served crab and delicate fish dishes. See also Marks & Spencer’s own Bordeaux Sauvignon Blanc 2015 (£8.50), sourced from Entre-Deux-Mers. It is understated enough not to fight with whatever’s on your plate, but delivers spritzy, lemon zest fruit and a nicely textured palate.

Laithwaite’s Sauvignon Blanc 2015 - £9.99 from Laithwaites

This wine is made from parcels of vines in the Entre-Deux-Mers and has the fresh, citrus flavour of the Calvet, but also a more delicate elderflower aroma and a touch of savoury, leesiness on the palate. This could stand up to more full flavoured dishes like roasted cod or possibly scallops.

Château Bouscaut Blanc 2009, Péssac-Léognan - £31 from The Wine Society

Here’s why the wines of Pessac-Léognan are so valued – they develop beautifully with age and deliver rich complexity combining lime acidity combined with toast and hay. This is a blend of 55% Sauvignon Blanc and 45% Semillon that has been fermented aged in oak barrels, contributing texture and an extra flavour dimension to the wine. As well as rich seafood dishes like shrimp and lobster, this would be knockout with Christmas dinner. This one is for you, white Burgundy lovers.

Summer wine survival kit - part 2

The Ray Mears of wine is back. Last time I gave some recommendations for rather posh rosés; now I turn my attention to white and red wines.

Refreshing whites

Even those of you who are resolutely red wine people must find yourselves drawn to something cold and crisp at this time of year. Here are some ideas to help you explore beyond Kiwi Sauvignon and Pinot Grigio.

Hofman Weisser Burgunder Trocken 2014 - £13.95 from slurp.co.uk

Sort of familiar, soft of not. It’s not quite Pinot Grigio, but its sister (brother?) grape Pinot Blanc and it’s from Germany not Italy. Not a showy wine, but with refreshing stone fruit it has the substance to stand up to food.

Tyrrell’s Lost Block Semillon, Hunter Valley 2013 – around £12.49 from winedirect.co.uk and independents

This is in the same mould – a light (just 11%) wine that is all lemon/lime flavours and suited to drinking on its own, but with a surprising ability to stand up to vinaigrette-drenched salads.

Château Bel Air Perponcher Réserve, Bordeaux 2014 - £8.50 from The Wine Society

Sauvignon blanc fans, it’s time to get the white Bordeaux habit. This fruity, fresh and easy-drinking example is a blend of Sauvignon blanc, with some Semillon and a little Muscadelle that says “drink me”.

Lip-smacking reds

A summer wine’s first duty is to refresh – something that is easier for a chilled white or rosé to achieve. But reds can still find a place in the summer months.

Tesco Beaujolais 2014 - £4.49

Lightly-chilled (in fact I wouldn’t recommend letting this get up to room temperature) on a sunny day, you can’t ask for more for under a fiver. Plenty of juicy, crunchy fruit and a brush of tannin make this a great Gamay for a picnic. For a taste of more “serious” Beaujolais, seek out Domaine Lagneau Régnié, “Cuvée Gérard Vieilles Vignes” 2013 - £11.25 from Stone Vine & Sun.

Bradshaw Pinot Noir 2012 - £4 from Asda

This has to be one of the best wine bargains around, in fact I think it’s almost criminally underpriced. Behind the beautiful peacock Art Nouveau-style label is a Pinot Noir from Romania with, at this price, astoundingly good, fragrant, cherry fruit. Chill lightly and drink up! 

Think you know Australia? Think again

When Australian wines first burst into our collective consciousness, it was all about big bold flavours, oak and alcohol. More recently, however, Australia has been quietly producing more nuanced and sophisticated wines – structured and poised, yet full flavoured, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from cooler areas, for example.

And there’s more to the story: it seems those “sunshine in a glass” wines that slapped you round the chops with their bright fruit and hefty alcohol were something of a blip in Australia’s wine history. 

The Aussies had long been making more elegant, food friendly wines and you can still find them now, if you know where to look. Here are a couple of clues to get you started.

Hunter Valley Semillon

If you drink these wines at under 5 years old you’ll wonder why you bothered – lightly alcoholic lime juice sums it up. But give them time and these crisp, naturally low alcohol wines will thrill with notes of lime marmalade, even toast – and over time they will only increase in complexity, while maintaining their fresh acidity. Sauvignon Blanc eat your heart out.

Tyrrell’s Vat 1 Semillon is the daddy – Majestic list 2002/3 for £25 in selected stores; several independent merchants stock a variety of vintages for around £25-30.

Marsanne from Victoria

Tahbilk is the specialist with this white variety that originates in France’s Rhône Valley and they preside over the largest vineyard holding of Marsanne in the world.

Château Tahbilk, as it was then, was the first Australian white wine that I tasted on my very first wine appreciation course back in the 1990s, and what a shock it was to someone whose experience of Aussie white had hitherto been limited to Lindeman’s Chardonnay. Taut, only slightly fruity, definitely herbal – this is another white that ages beautifully.

Tahbilk Marsanne 2012 is £9.95 from The Wine Society and while you’re at it you can pick up a bottle of the 2008 for £11.95 to get an idea of how the wine develops. A range of independent merchants also stock various vintages from around £10.50 to the £13 mark.

Wine-ing in the great outdoors

Summer’s long and, currently, balmy evenings are here and it feels like you haven’t really made the most of them until you’ve enjoyed something cold and (in my book) alcoholic in the garden. We have even had the weather to eat comfortably outside of an evening, so I feel duty bound to offer some helpful hints for which wines to choose to fit the occasion.

Everyone loves a top 10 (or Top 100 if you’re Channel 4), so here they are:

Top 10 Tips for Outdoor Summer Drinking

1.       Complexity and subtlety are the first casualties of outdoor drinking (along with any sense of moderation some might say), so now is not the time to uncork the treasured bottle of white Burgundy or fine claret that you’ve been squirreling away for a special occasion.

2.       Go for simple, bold aromas and flavours that can stand up to being drunk outside.

3.       At lunchtime, keep it light – both in terms of the wine style and alcohol level.  Prosecco fits the bill on both counts, as does Vinho Verde and dry Semillon from Australia. 

4.        Will you be dressing for dinner? If a vinaigrette dressing features on the menu, you’ll find rosé will stand up well to the combination of sharpness and oiliness. White wines can often end up sharp tasting and short of fruit when paired with a dressed salad; the tannins in red wine can react badly with it and make for a horrible combination. Rosé drinkers are spoilt for choice nowadays, but a classic match for a classic salade niçoise would be an elegantly pale, dry and savoury Provence rosé. If the dressing is lemon and/or lime dominant, I would go for a dry Riesling (try Austrian or Australian), or again a dry Semillon from Australia.  

5.       Barbecues, our default setting when eating outdoors, are the enemy of anything understated – you need to think big and bold.  Aussie Shiraz springs to mind, but think also of the savoury spice of a good Côtes du Rhône, or the pronounced smokiness of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or a Chilean Carmenère.

6.       White wine drinkers have plenty to choose from too. I might sometimes deplore Kiwi Sauvignon, and its ilk, for its lack of finesse and downright “slap you round the chops” pungency – but it’s a blessing here. For a change you could also look for wines made from Viognier (weighty, peachy fruit) or Grenache Blanc (weighty, herbal/spicy flavours).

7.       If fridge space is tight, or you’re just in a hurry to cool things down, an ice bucket (or just a bucket) with ice AND water is the quickest way to chill drinks. Please don’t plonk an ice cube straight into a glass of wine – or not into mine anyway.

8.       Think about chilling red wine – on a hot day, red wine at room temperature can seem a bit soupy and unrefreshing. Chilling won’t suit all red wines – but what’s the worst that can happen? You can always just let it warm back up again. Reds that work well chilled need to have plenty of fruit and not much tannin – think Beaujolais or New World Pinot Noir.

9.       If guests arrive hot and thirsty, it would be both kind and sensible to offer something low in alcohol – or even non-alcoholic as an initial thirst quencher, rather than have them plunge straight into a glass of 14% alchohol red wine on arrival. I’m planning on unleashing my Aperol Spritz on guests this weekend, (3 parts Prosecco, 2 parts Aperol, 1 part soda water) which I reckon should be under 10% alcohol. I have it on good authority that non-drinkers (and designated drivers) now find elderflower cordial a bit meh, so try and find something new to tempt them. Try a lemonade punch – strong tea, lemon juice and sugar, topped up at the last minute with ginger ale and mint sprigs. You can of course also add rum.

10.   Finally, a word of warning: beware Pimm’s. It’s so inoccuous-tasting that you forget you’re drinking something alcoholic and it can slip down all too easily in the sun. All that fruit floating around in it does not, I’m afraid, cancel out the alcohol.

New Year - new you?

It’s a media mantra at this time of year – a diet and exercise regime to create a whole new person out of that lump of lard that has spent the best part of two weeks either parked in front of the TV or eating – or both at the same time.

Yet just a few short weeks ago those same newspapers and magazines were bombarding us with images of decadent desserts and indulgent Christmas treats to gorge ourselves on over the festive period. This invitation to fatten ourselves up like the livers of foie gras geese followed close on the heels of exhortations to get ourselves thin enough to sparkle in our Christmas party gear.

But now the pendulum has swung back again and we are made to feel guilty for giving into the temptation of all those high-fat treats washed down with a glass or three of wine. Now the talk is all about denial and detox so that we can release that fitter, svelter, younger version of ourselves that we have been doing our best to disguise in a fat suit in recent weeks. Before we know it we’ll be measuring the circumference of our thighs with a fatuous smile on our faces as the weight drops off.

Gawd help us, are we really such mindless hamsters on a wheel, that we respond automatically to whatever stimulus is put in front of us?

And am I really going to peddle wine, those cocktails of empty calories and evil alcohol, at this time of year? Hell yes, January is bad enough without depriving yourself of the occasional glass of something.

The Drinkaware website is full of useful, if rather downbeat, information on alcohol and its effects, including the number of calories contained in a glass of wine. Their statistics are based on a 250ml glass of wine, ie a third of a bottle. This amount of wine containing 13% alcohol provides 200 calories and constitutes 3.3 units of alcohol. And no matter how fruity the wine, it does nothing towards your five a day.

I would like to make a couple of modest suggestions based on this information. First of all, 250ml is a lot of wine to have in a glass. You might think, just one glass is fine, but at 3.3 units of alcohol that is already in excess of the recommended drinking guidelines for a woman (which is no more than 2-3 units a day). Whether those guidelines have any scientific validity and whether there is any such thing as a “safe” level of alcohol intake are hotly debated questions  - which I do not intend to debate.

Here is a small illustration of what 125ml and 250ml look like in the glasses I generally drink from at home. What immediately strikes me (other than the fact that my wine has gone blue), is that the bigger measure doesn’t look anything like twice the amount in the other glass.

If you tend to pour something closer to the glass on the right, it might be a good idea to measure 125ml in a measuring jug and see what that looks like in your own wine glasses, so that you can get in to the habit of smaller measures. You can still have your glass of wine, but you’re not blowing more than 3 units in one go – and your calorie intake is kept down too. A 125ml glass of Champagne (almost always 12% alcohol) constitutes a single unit of alcohol and a more reasonable 86 calories (the equivalent of a chocolate digestive biscuit the helpful bods at Drinkaware inform me).

Lower calorie and lower alcohol wine options

I’m a full fat milk kinda person and instinctively shrink from anything that is a light or low fat version of the real thing. I would always rather choose a small amount of what I really like, rather than lots of something that doesn’t quite hit the spot. So if I were to be counting the calories in my wine, that 125ml of Champagne looks good to me.

However, there are also a number of wines who advertise their lower alcohol and lower than average calories. Generally they are made from grapes are picked earlier than usual, so sugar levels start out  lower than in fully ripe grapes. Many of the finished wines also have quite a bit of residual sugar, ie not added, but sugar that was already present in the grape juice and which remains after fermentation.

Bella Sauvignon Blanc 2011 - £9.99 from Taurus Wines (Bramley)

A lower (9.5%) alcohol version of one of this country’s favourite wine styles – Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. I have actually tasted this wine and it slips down easily with bags of fruit, juicy acidity and is definitely off-dry. All fair enough, but don’t go looking for complexity with this kind of wine. 90 calories for 148mls.

Jacob’s Creek Cool Harvest – RRP £8

Jacob’s Creek have a range of wines including a Sauvignon Blanc and a Shiraz rosé with alcohol levels of 9.5-10.5% and clocking in at 100 calories per 120mls.

If your tastes are more on the bone dry side, then make friends with Australian Semillon. Most famously grown in the Hunter Valley, Semillon makes for intensely limey, crisp and bone dry wines with modest alcohol levels.  Young wines are incredibly fresh palate-sharpeners, but Semillon also ages beautifully, developing toasty, lime marmalade flavours with more time in bottle. Try Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Hunter Valley Aged Semillon as an example, which has 10.2% alcohol and 114 calories per 125ml glass.

And don’t worry if counting calories and units is getting you down, the media pendulum will soon swing back again as we head towards Valentine’s Day, accompanied as it is by a tsunami of chocolate and pink fizz.  Come April and Easter means more chocolate…. closely followed by the anticipation of summer and a raft of regimes to get your body bikini-ready. Back to our wheels, hamsters.

2011 review: my best bits

If you're feverishly searching for last minute Christmas wine recommendations – and you really are cutting it fine – then please have a look at my previous two posts on this blog.

In the caring sharing spirit of Christmas, I offer here just one nugget that could save your bacon. If you seek the perfect wine match for Christmas pudding, then look no further than Moscatel de Valencia, a ridiculously under-priced dessert wine from Spain. Its luscious sweetness with an orange marmelade edge makes the pudding sing. Sainsburys' version is just £3.98 a bottle. If you're quick you might just make it...

This column is devoted to a review of the best bits of 2011. Here, in no particular order, are my personal highlights of the year:

• Tasting top class Aussie Rieslings courtesy of Jacob's Creek at “wine workshop and kitchen” 28-50 in London. The 2005 Steingarten Riesling was the highlight, but Jacob's Creek Riesling Reserve 2010 was pretty delicious too: fresh and lively (and limey), floral but dry – a great palate cleanser.
  
  
• A Bollinger Grande Année masterclass, with chef de cave Mathieu Kaufmann, where I learned that I have expensive tastes when it comes to Champagne. Bollinger Grande Année Rose 1996 was my favourite, if you're reading this, Santa. Completely beguiling, luxurious stuff which, sadly, I can't afford.
  
  
• Marcelo Retamel, Chilean winemaker (at the family-owned De Martino winery) and Iron Maiden fan, describing his return from the Dark Side of wine-making. Tasting the first vintage (another 1996) of his single vineyard Carmenère was a delicious reminder of how good wine can be when allowed to mature without the added glitz of selected yeasts, new oak and other winemaking frippery. Look out for the 2010 vintage of the Alto de Piedras Carmenère when it arrives at the Wine Society, which marks his return to the more natural style of winemaking that characterised that first vintage back in 1996. 
   
• I can't honestly remember what the exact bottle was, but drinking fizz in spring sunshine at our Royal Wedding street party felt both modern and traditional at the same time.
  
  
• Meeting Chester Osborn, legendary Australian winemaker at d'Arenberg and infamous wearer of loud shirts, and his collection of wine-themed fluffy toys at a wine “speed tasting”. His Money Spider Roussanne 2009 was one of my favourites at the whistle-stop tasting.
  
  
  
  
  
• Tasting Tio Pepe “en rama” at Bar Pepito in King's Cross (a must for sherry lovers) and then seeing how well it stood up to their excellent range of tapas. The summer weather may have been a let-down, but that day was a true taste of the Mediterranean. “En rama” is a special, full-flavoured, unfiltered bottling of Tio Pepe that sells out (mostly to those in the know in the wine trade) almost as soon as it hits these shores. The classic Tio Pepe, however, is widely available for around a tenner.
  
  
• Getting to grips with the new face of Portugal's Vinho Verde at a fascinating tasting this summer. I learned that Vinho Verde is not green and doesn't have to be redolent of soluble aspirin – and it can also be red! 
   
• Buying an exotic-looking liqueur in France over the summer, only to find it was none other than that British Christmas stalwart, sloe gin. Equally nice served cold in the summer, I can helpfully tell you.
  
  
• Spending three footsore days working at the London wine trade's annual fair in May – but my reward was to be responsible for encouraging visitors to taste a great selection of interesting, individual and delicious wines from Southwest France.
  
  
  
• The taste of Graham's Malvedos 1958 single quinta port – still looking and tasting good at 50!
  
  
• Tasting Zind-Humbrecht's Rangen de Thann Clos-Saint-Urbain Gewurztraminer 2009 at the first dedicated biodynamic wine tasting in London in November. Olivier Humbrecht (Master of Wine and PhD) has managed to create a perfect marriage of grape variety to terroir making for an unforgettable wine experience.
  
  
  
  
  
• Seeing how Hunter Valley Semillon ages (well, it turns out) courtesy of a vertical tasting of Neil McGuigan's Bin 9000 Semillons back to 1997.
  
  
  
  
  
• Drinking nothing but Champagne for 3 days (OK and some water) during my first study tour of the region.

Life could be worse! Wishing you a suitably merry time over the next couple of weeks. See you all in 2012.