Italy - the sweet and the serious

One of the many things I love about Italian wines is that the most serious, ageworthy ones can rub along in close proximity with the fun, light and frivolous. UK wine lovers can have a tendency to revere the serious and to view anything sweet and fizzy as not worthy of their attention. Italian drinkers, it seems, have no such qualms. My summer holiday this year in Piedmont provided a wonderful example.

Piedmont is most famous for the twin (or at least sibling) regions of Barolo and Barbaresco either side of the picturesque town of Alba, famous for its truffle market. They produce big-boned, long lived red wines from the Nebbiolo grape which, as they age, can develop haunting aromas of English rose and tar, but with tannins which continue to exert a firm grip.

But a mere grape’s throw away, in villages around the small city of Asti, are Muscat vines which go to make Asti (Asti Spumante as was) and Moscato d’Asti.

Asti tout court is a fully sparkling wine with lowish alcohol, definite sweetness and a musky grapiness. It’s a completely valid style of wine, but the ones we tend to see in this country are made by the big producers and can be rather basic.

Moscato d’Asti is lightly sparkling, deeply fruity and sweet, but with alcohol of around just 4.5-5.5%, generally made on a more artisan scale and have more interest and character as a result.

They can be hard to find – not least because retailers tend not to put them on the shelf with other sparkling wines; and they come in standard bottles and corks, so don’t stand out amongst the still wines either. However, there are some to be found – independent merchants are a happy hunting ground for this kind of thing – and here are a few pointers to get you started. One final tip: you’ll notice these are all 2014 vintage and Moscato d’Asti is a prime example of a DYA (Drink Youngest Available) wine.

Contero Moscato d’Asti di Strevi 2014 - £12.95 from slurp.co.uk and independents

Elio Perrone Moscato d’Asti 2014 - £7.95 from The Wine Society

Vajra Moscato d’Asti 2014 - £13.99 – The Wine Reserve Cobham and other independents

Marco e Vittorio Adriano Moscato d’Asti 2014 - £9.75 (case price) The Good Wine Shop Esher

Piasa San Maurizio Moscato d’Asti 2014 - £11.50 – (case price) The Good Wine Shop Esher

Lamb and chocolate anyone?

This Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the days in the run up to Easter and with it the end of Lent. Some of you, no doubt, have been giving up something for Lent and are probably eagerly looking forward to gorging yourselves on whatever the forbidden fruit has been. I don’t seem to have the constitution for depriving myself of things I enjoy, so I haven’t joined in with any Lenten fasting – but I am ready and prepared to participate in the Easter feasting with gusto.

Lamb is a popular choice for Easter Sunday and the good news (for us, rather than for the lambs) is that it is a very wine-friendly meat.

If you’re eating the first of the spring lamb, such delicate and tender meat would go best with a lighter red such as a Pinot Noir or Gamay, or even a full-flavoured rosé such as a Spanish rosada.

I prefer the flavour of older lamb; and last year’s lambs, now known as hogget, may require more cooking, but offer more meaty flavour too. A trip to Rioja in May a couple of years ago provided more than ample evidence for the affinity of the region’s red wines with lamb. Having eaten more of the tasty little beasts in a few days there than I would normally do in months, I got the message: Rioja and lamb make a good match.

The other prime constituent of most of our Easters is of course chocolate. Wine and chocolate is not a natural combination you might think - and you’re probably right.  Chocolate is quite a challenge for any alcoholic drink, with its dense, rich sweetness, its sheer “sticks around in your mouth for ages”-ness.  Mostly I’d probably go for a cup of tea, or coffee, if I’m eating some chocolate.  But in the interests of research I have been looking around for wines that might just work.

Which leads me to the first issue – chocolate is such a broad term.  There’s a world of difference between your Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and your 70% cocoa solids plain chocolate; what might go with an airy, creamy milk chocolate mousse is probably not going to suit a dark chocolate roulade with raspberry coulis.  Chocolate itself has different characters – and, to add to the complexity, we love to use it in all manner of puddings, sweets, biscuits and to combine it with cream, nuts, fruit – you name it.

So chocolate and wine combinations have more to them than meets the eye.  Here are some suggestions, based on the type of chocolate you’re dealing with.

White chocolate

White chocolate is hardly chocolate in some ways, as it contains no cocoa mass, just cocoa butter, vanilla and masses of sugar of course.  This makes it the lightest and sweetest type of chocolate which needs a light and sweet wine to match.

A fun option would be a Moscato d’Asti, from Piedmont in Italy.  It’s lightly sparkling, light in alcohol (only 5-6%) and definitely sweet.  Treat it as a guilty pleasure – it might be uncool, but its sweet, grapey, pear-tinged bubbles are a delight with white chocolate puddings (as well as fruit salads, incidentally).  The Wine Society lists Elio Perrone Moscato d’Asti 2013 at £7.50.  A less refined version is wine labelled “Asti” rather than “Moscato d’Asti” which you can pick up for between £5 and £10 more widely.

Milk chocolate and light chocolate puddings

If you’re planning on helping the children finish their supply of milk chocolate eggs, then you could do worse than try a glass of tawny port to go with it.

All port starts out life as a deep-coloured red wine, whose fermentation is stopped by the addition of grape spirit, leaving a fortified, naturally sweet wine as a result.  Ruby port, the regular stuff, is aged for a short time in barrel, then bottled while it is still deepest ruby and full of brambly fruit. 

The tawny version of port has a lighter, yes tawny, colour, brought about by long term ageing in barrel.  As the wine loses its deep colour, it takes on a more mellow, nutty character, making it a remarkably versatile drink, one that can stand up to milk chocolate and lighter chocolate puddings.

Look for an aged tawny, at least 10 years old:  the older the wine, the more mellow and complex it will be.  A good introduction to the style is Warre’s Otima 10 year old Tawny Port, around £13.50 for 50cl at Tesco, Waitrose and elsewhere.

An interesting twist on the tawny port style is Mavrodaphne of Patras; Kourtaki’s version is fairly widely available for at around £5-6. It’s made in the same way as port, but from the splendidly-named Mavrodaphne grape, native to Greece.  It has also been aged in casks, giving it that hallmark caramel flavour with a hint of spice.

Another option is Nuy Red Muskadel (£8.95 a bottle from The Wine Society), a fresh yet very sweet fortified dessert wine from South Africa, with the emphasis on red fruit with a hint of rose petal.

Dark chocolate and rich, dark chocolate puddings

These can be some of the most difficult things to pair with wine, because of their full-on flavours and richness.  You might come across some surprising matches, however.

You could echo the richness and slight bitterness of the food with a wine with similar traits.  Ruby port could work here, as could wines from Maury or Banyuls in the Southwest of France: another form of sweet, fortified red wine made in a similar way to port – who knew there were so many of these things around? – the young versions of these wines combine a bitter chocolate character with a trace of black fruit.  If this sounds like the pudding you’re eating, then give a Maury or Banyuls a go.  Waitrose have an own label Seriously Plummy Maury at £10.99 for a half bottle.

In all these matches I’m obeying the food and wine matching premise that the wine should be sweeter than the food that you’re eating.  Though I’m generally not a fan of rules when it comes to choosing wines, I do find wines that are less sweet than what I’m eating end up tasting overly dry and lacking in fruit.

However, it’s horses for courses (as the frozen lasagne manufacturer said to the food inspector) and people who baulk at the idea of any sweet wine might prefer to have a dry red with chocolate.  Again, it makes sense to look for wines which have plenty of ripe, dark fruit with a hint of chocolate flavour – full-on Zinfandels from California, for example.  I would also recommend an Amarone from Italy:  these wines are made from partly dried grapes, which give a full-bodied wine with masses of dark, ripe black cherry fruit and an edge of bitter chocolate.  Not a cheap option (£20 and up), but Phil Jones of The Vineyard in Dorking is a fan of the style and should be able to point you in the right direction.

If all that sounds a little overwhelming, remember it’s hard to beat the great British cuppa with anything sweet.

Fifty Shades...and other guilty pleasures

I don’t need to fill you in on the subject matter of the Fifty Shades series of novels I’m sure.  In any case I haven’t read any of them so, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I will not pretend that I have, even for the purposes of an almost entirely spurious wine-based pastiche of the guilty pleasure genre.

Sometimes I want to read something challenging, absorbing, demanding and densely written which will stay with me long after the book has been finished.  Other times I just want a page-turner to while away a few hours:  it will grip at the time but I’ll barely remember having read it in a few days.

When choosing what to eat, sometimes I will relish the prospect of spending time in the kitchen, lavishing attention on what I hope will be a delicious result.  At other times, a takeaway curry will do nicely thank you.

I think you get the drift here. 

Drinking wine should always be a sensory pleasure, but sometimes it is also an involving, almost intellectual exercise.  I have enjoyed some of Bordeaux’s finest wines, and at their very best they can offer an almost transcendent drinking experience.  But equally they can have an austerity that requires attention and appreciation from the drinker.  What I’m saying is that I do have to be in the mood to appreciate them.

When I don’t want to make that effort, what do I reach for?  What is my wine equivalent of a few pages of Fifty Shades?

Sweet and bubbly

Liking sweet wines does feel like an intellectual failing – these are wines for the novice and the young; a childish appetite that should have been lost along the way to becoming a fully functioning adult.  Sweet AND bubbly – well, I can practically feel the noses being looked down.

Moscato

I am not alone in my love for moscato, as it has become the fastest growing wine style in the US.  Sweet, fizzy, sometimes even pink to boot, it is the most unreconstructed of guilty pleasures.

Asti, in Italy, produces sparkling Asti by the lakeful (or, more accurately, tankful).  It used to be called Asti Spumante (meaning sparkling) but the spumante has now been dropped.  If Beverly of Abigail’s Party were going to offer you something fizzy, it would surely have been this.

Regular Asti, with its sweet, fizzy grapiness is great for sloshing onto a fruit salad, but it does have a slightly more well-groomed, but still fun-loving cousin in Moscato d’Asti.

Moscato d’Asti is usually made by smaller producers, in a rather more artisan way.  It is still sweet and fizzy; in fact it is often higher in sugar than regular Asti, though it doesn’t taste it.  It is more lightly sparkling and has wonderful aromas and flavours of ripe pear.  Allied to low alcohol, this is a great wine for rounding off a lunch party – with or without fruit salad.

Recommended moscatos (moscati for sticklers)

Moscato d’Asti 2011, Elio Perrone - £6.50 from The Wine Society

Just 5% alcohol means this is barely wine, but it has plenty of grapey, aromatic fruit to satisfy a sweet toothed wine lover.

Innocent Bystander Pink Moscato 2011/12 – around £6.50-6.99 for a 37.5ml bottle from slurp.co.uk, Guildford Wine Company

Not content with being sweet and fizzy, this adds being pink to its list of crimes against good taste.  A half-bottle with a beer bottle style crown cap it may be, but you won’t find many men propping up the bar with this in their hand.  No matter, they will miss out on the hints of rose petal and red fruit that burst out of this perfect picnic fizz.

Blanquette de Limoux

By the time the Champenois documented their method for making sparkling wines in the late 1600s, the locals of Limoux down in the Languedoc had been making wines with fizz for over a century.  Unfortunately they didn’t get a patent lawyer onto the case and it is Champagne that has become the global brand, rather than Blanquette de Limoux.

Most Blanquette de Limoux is dry, but there is a small production of sweet Blanquette de Limoux Méthode Ancestrale.  This “ancestrale” method involves a second fermentation in the bottle, like Champagne.  Unlike Champagne, some sweetness remains and the alcohol is lower.

Blanquette de Limoux Méthode Ancestrale NV - £9.50 from The Wine Society

The Mauzac grape used to make this has a real appley tang, making this taste like superior Appletiser for grown ups.  It may only be 6.5% alcohol, but probably best to keep an eye on the kids with this super quaffable stuff around.

Brachetto

Brachetto is not half of an Italian cross-dressing comedy duo, but the name of a grape.  This is a step further towards a red wine from the Pink Moscato above, but it is still light, frothy and sweet, with strawberry flavours.  I’ve recommended a fairly pricey and relatively serious (for the style) Brachetto here, but look out for cheaper versions too.

Contero Brachetto d’Acqui 2011 - £15.99 from Virgin Wines

Red fruits, rose petals and only 5.5% alcohol make this a fun fizz on its own, but you could try it with one of those pretty French patisserie glazed strawberry tarts or even as a foil to things chocolatey.

Just as man (or woman) cannot live by bread alone, or indeed read only the most edifying of literature, sometimes a little of what you fancy….well, you know the rest.