Award-winning bargains
Wednesday 30 June
French wine sales are suffering at the hands of the Australians, Californians, Italians and South Africans in the UK. To add insult to injury, English wines are beating them at their own game: the International Wine Challenge (IWC) has just announced Camel Valley’s 2008 Pinot Noir Brut has taken the sparkling rose trophy ahead of the Champenois. This is another kick in the teeth for the Champagne region, after poor sales in 2009.
What I like most about the competition is the value awards. As a tight northerner, the price of decent wines can make my eyes water. Finding a great wine under a tenner certainly improves my mood. And my dad, a Liverpudlian (an even more notoriously tight lot), will be making a special trip to the supermarket to fill up on bargains when he sees the results (although not to Waitrose, as they haven’t made it as far north as my hometown yet)
So, what are the stars I’ll be sending my dad out to buy:-
Oloroso Trophy winner: Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Oloroso 12 year old for a mere £6.49
La Différence Carignan 2009, France, £5.81, France, Tesco.
Moon Bridge Riesling 2009, Australia, £5.49, Marks & Spencer
Domaine Villargeau Sauvignon Blanc 2009, France, £9.99, Majestic Wine Warehouse
Falanghina Campania 2009, Italy £9.99, Laytons, Oddbins
Champagne: What have they got to hide?
Monday 21 June
What is it with Champagne houses being so secretive?
I was recently researching ferment temperatures and yeast selection (God, my life’s exciting) and asked a couple of Champagne houses if they could tell me. I added that the information would be purely for my MW studies and go no further then me, myself and I.
I managed to get the information on ferment temperatures from Veuve Clicquot’s winemaker but when asked his annual production, he said they ‘preferred to talk about quality not quantity’. What a cop out. It’s all about protecting the exclusivity of the product, I guess. Let’s face it, there’s an awful lot of Champagne made, yet they like to create an aura that there’s not enough to go around.
Similarly I put the request in to Laurent Perrier and was flatly refused. “Usually the wine making is not something our cellar master discusses preferring to focus on the end result,” the said.
What a load of cobblers. What do they think is going to happen? Someone’s going to steal their recipe? Hardly.
I had a moan to Ben Portet, winemaker at his father’s winery, Dominique Portet, in the Yarra Valley. Portet has done several vintages in Champagne and makes his own sparkling wines. He had had a similar experience but was more than willing to share his winemaking methods with me from the yeasts he uses (E118 Prise de Mousse, for all you geeks) to adding red wine at 400g/l of residual sugar in the liqueur de dosage at bottling for his sparkling rosé. If only the Champenois were so relaxed about revealing their methods. That’s big business for you. And it sucks.
World Cup dreams for Veuve Clicquot winemaker
Sunday 30 May
Rugby-loving winemakers are looking for an excuse to be in New Zealand for the 2011 World Cup. Francois Hautekeur, winemaker at Veuve Clicquot, is a French rugby nut and would love to be at the France vs. All Blacks match in September. So, if anyone at LVMH is reading, I think a reconnaissance mission to Clicquot’s New Zealand stablemate Cloudy Bay is in order.
Hautekeur was in Auckland last night running an ‘Art of Blending’ masterclass but he was a year too early for rugby’s flagship tournament.
Why the Art of Blending? At Veuve Cliquot, there are 850 tanks filled with potential wines that make up the final blend of its non-vintage yellow label. That’s a lot of tanks. We tried six samples and, quite frankly, that was enough to have you reaching for the Rennies thanks to the eyewatering acids.
This was the first time its base wines were available to taste in New Zealand. “It is rare that the base wines leave the winery,” admitted Hautekeur.
The idea of tasting base wines is to understand what a still Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier taste like before they are blended together and go through the secondary fermentation in bottle which creates the bubbles. The fermentation in bottle also adds an extra 1% alcohol, apparently. I hadn’t heard this one before but every day’s a school day.
So, what do they all bring? The Pinot Noir gives flesh and volume to a Champagne. The ‘09 example from Verzy was closed at the moment but had pear, citrus and stoney notes. But it’s all about the weight and texture it gives to the final blend, which is usually around 50-57% in the Yellow Label NV.
Chardonnay provides “backbone”. What does this mean? It’s not as fleshy as Pinot Noir and gives a cleansing citrus note on the tongue. We tried the 09 Chardonnay from the village of Cramant and it smelled of chalk, lemons and white flowers. It was feminine with a lovely long finish. An older Chardonnay base wine from 2000 was lean and minerally with white stoned fruit and butterscotch.
The Pinot Meunier is “hyper aromatic”, full of fruit from pineapple and pear drops to red cherry and stoned fruit. It lacks length, however and is usually a minor part of the blend.
More on Champagne in my next blog.
Lower alcohol survey provides few surprises
Thursday 27 May
I’ve been researching lower alcohol wines lately and it just so happens, Wine Intelligence has too.
The UK wine trade is really trying to look responsible at the moment and a raft of new ‘lower alcohol’ wines were launched at the recent London International Wine Fair.
But it’s not clear whether the consumer actually wants lower alcohol wines. So, we might have some more white elephant wines gathering dust on the shelves. Alternatively, if the products are available, it may create demand. Let’s face it, before iphones were launched, we didn’t have a burning need for them either.
Happily for those wineries launching a lower alcohol wine this month, it seems that consumer acceptance of wines under 11% is on the rise, according to Wine Intelligence research in partnership with the WSTA.
The percentage of consumers who say they ‘may buy’ wine below 9% (on a scale of 1 to 5,‘may buy’ was 3) has increased from 47% to 54% since the survey was last conducted in April 2007. No massive change there then,
Younger drinkers also increased their acceptance of lower alcohol wines with 66% claiming they may buy wine below 9%, compared with just 51% in 2007.
‘May buy’ and ‘Would definitely buy’ are quite different, however.
Surprise, surprise, wines between 11 and 14% abv remain the preferred wines with regular UK wine drinkers. Well, strike me down. I’m worried that we are blowing this low alcohol thing out of proportion.
I’ll very happily drink a 9% Mosel wine or 5.5% Moscato d’Asti (particularly Vigna Vecchia’s Ca’ da Gal Moscato at Terroir in London) any day of the week but I’m struggling to find a decent wine that has had its alcohol level reduced by human intervention ( i.e. reverse osmosis/spinning cone). Thus far, the early harvest attempts aren’t much better either. There’s a reason why people don’t pick early and we should remember that.
Sparkling solution to Sauvignon surplus
Thursday 21 January
Sparkling Sauvignon Blanc was the fizz of choice for many Kiwis this Christmas and following Montana’s UK launch at the recent New Zealand annual wine trade tasting, it is probably coming to a shelf near you.
Of course, it’s smart marketing. Still Sauvignon sales are booming with exports up 37% last year and no sign of that stopping: the latest figures from retailer Majestic show Oyster Bay was its biggest seller at Christmas. Sparkling is a natural brand extension and you can’t blame them for it. It doesn’t taste that bad - if you like those green pea and capsicum flavours combined with bubbles. I won’t be buying it but the supermarkets have been piling it high and putting it on offer at NZD $8.99 (£4-ish). Consumers have lapped it up.
It’s also a genius way to empty the tanks and mop up some of that oversupply that is still hanging round like a bad smell. Many think the supply-demand situation will be back in balance within 12-18 months and if you can sell off excess stock by putting a few bubbles in it, why wouldn’t you?
I’ll be interested to see how it gets on in the UK. Montana is the biggest selling brand by volume in the UK (Nielsen, MAT 03/10/09) so it has plenty of traction with consumers but is up against a hell of a lot more competition in the sparkling market: Cava, Aussie sparklers, Prosecco, and great Champagne deals. Will it hit the right price point and suit the UK consumers’ palate or is this a step too far?
Another extension of Sauvignon comes from Southbank Estate – with its rosé Sauvignon Blanc. I rolled my eyes when I saw an advert for it recently but that’s probably because I’m a cynical journalist. The Italians are doing the same with Pinot Grigio and having plenty of success with it so why can’t the Kiwis do it with their most successful grape variety?