Two Paddocks Central Otago Pinot Noir 2006

I’ve neglected New Zealand since I started writing, not for any reason in particular, but just because I haven’t had any of their wines at hand and hadn’t gone out of my way to pick up any.  In fact, I’ve been to New Zealand twice, and while only one trip was wine related, it is a lovely country, they produce some fantastic wines, and I was proud to put on a New Zealand jersey to support them when I watched one of their draws in South Africa a year and a half ago.  Their national team in football/soccer is the All Whites, as opposed to their rugby squad which is the All Blacks.  It was potentially awkward, being an All Whites supported in South Africa, but no harm came of it.

As to their wine, they’re a very fortunate country.  They’ve come to the international wine trade business relatively recently, but they’ve done well to establish themselves with good quality wines across the board, and as such brand New Zealand commands better prices than most countries in important markets such as the UK.  They made a certain style of Sauvignon Blanc fashionable, to the point that some Old World producers have made changes to their winemaking.  While they don’t get quite the same value per bottle they did a few years back, New World producers (and some Old) would love to be the next Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc.

So while New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc has certainly had an impressive rise on international markets to the point that I believe it’s not in decline, they haven’t quite had the same success with Pinot Noir.  It’s been a success, certainly, but more a success in establishing itself as a category and Central Otago as a region, rather than dominating a whole sector the way New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc did.

When I bought this bottle I was of two minds.  First, I wanted a Kiwi Pinot Noir where my notes would broadly be applicable to a wide range of their offerings.  On the other hand, I also wanted a wine I’d be happy to enjoy with a meal.  Two Paddocks is a well known New Zealand producer, and while it’s not exactly the most common wine on the shelves, this one ticks both boxes I was after.  This is a wine you can find around the world, and it is very typical of the Central Otago style.  It’s a step up from their Picnic Wines, but at roughly $40/bottle it’s not overly expensive.  The only thing that really would set it apart from what’s most readily available in this category is its age – as a 2006 it’s at least a couple of years older than the current release.

It’s a lovely wine – lots of sour cherry and herbs.  At five years old, it’s not so fruit forward that I immediately think New World, but when I look at the colour I can see that the age is the factor in the restraint, not the winemaking.  The herbs are quite savoury, and I look forward to tasting something like this next to a Pinot Noir from the Adelaide Hills to pick out the differences.  I know they have a different flavour profile, but it’s book learning and I would love to internalize it with some glasses in front of me.

Appearance

Clear and bright, medium-plus garnet, quick legs.

Nose

Clean, developing, with medium intensity of iodine, red cherry, herbs and cinnamon.

Palace

Dry, with medium intensity, medium fine tannins, medium-plus acidity, medium alcohol and medium-minus body.  Notes of black pepper, sour black cherry, herbs and a gamey character.  Medium-plus length and a spicy finish.

Conclusions

This is a very good quality wine – while not particularly intense, the flavour profile is very pleasing and complex across fruit, herb/spice and meat characters.  While the body is relatively light and the acidity relatively high, it works for a wine of this style.  While it’s showing its age of five years, I think there is more to come as fruit will give way to further secondary characters.  Can drink now, will improve over the next three years.

Guy Bossard Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine Cuvée Classique 2009

Tonight’s wine is something unlikely to ever appear as a sample in a blind tasting for the WSET Diploma Unit 3 Exam, but I saw it in a local shop and had to pick it up.  The wine is a Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine Cuvée Classique from Guy Bossard, 2009.  While it is a wine from a region that is covered internationally in wine education, and can in fact be found now and again in bottle shops and on wine lists, it’s a wine worth some description.

So Muscadet is a region, in the west end of the Loire Valley in France where the Loire River runs into the Atlantic Ocean.  Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine is itself a sort of subregion of greater Muscadet, and in particular it is the area where the rivers Sèvre and Maine meet before in turn joining the Loire.  It’s only “sort of” a subregion in that most of the wine from all of greater Muscadet is produced there, and it’s arguably the most interesting and best wine at that.  There are rolling hills of a diverse range of soils, from schist and gneiss to granite and sand.  The climate is maritime, temperate and damp, all due to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean to the west.

The main (solitary but AOC rules) grape grown is Melon de Bourgogne, which is also known as Muscadet.  Frankly, I think someone decided that wine studies would be too easy if everything made sense, and so we have a grape named after its region of origin (Burgundy) and while it’s not widely grown there, it’s also given the name of its new home. And of course it has to be a new name that’s pretty close to other, existing grape names, such as Muscadelle, the third white grape of Bordeaux, as well as Muscat which comes in a variety of colours and which picks up new named wherever it goes.  Some grapes are relatively sensible – Pinot comes in Blanc, Gris and Noir, as does Grenache.  Musca-whatever is just a bit annoying, particularly as I think they’re not related to one another in the slightest.

But getting back to Melon de Bourgogne, or Muscadet, it’s a white grape, and often smells/tastes of green apples, grass, and lemons.  It’s not one of the noble grapes, but that is a blog topic all its own.  For now I’ll leave it that it’s best produced and appreciated in its place of most recent origin, Muscadet.

As far as winemaking goes, I only tend to comment on it when a region does something special, and for Muscadet that would be sur lie ageing.  When you ferment grape juice into wine, yeast essentially consume sugars and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.  So what starts out as water and sugar turns into water and alcohol with gas released (oh and heat generated).  Fermentation can stop for lots of reasons, but two main reasons are that the yeast runs out of food (all sugar is gone, and therefore the wine is dry) or there is too much alcohol for the yeast to survive.  (I often describe alcohol as “yeast poo” when explaining fermentation and alcohol levels.)  Either way, typically when your ferment is done, you have dead yeast.  In the business, dead yeast cells are known as lees.

Usually, once the yeast is dead, you go through a procedure known as racking, which essentially removed wine from other things, in this case lees.  More generally, wine as it is being made is a messy substance, but if you let it sit for a while, some of the more messy elements tend to fall to the bottom of the container.  When you rack wine, you essentially drain as much of the more clear bit out of the container, leaving the gunk at the bottom.

However, the lees can add a character to the wine that is desirable under the right circumstances.  Champagne (and many other sparking wines) will undergo a second fermentation in the bottle, and will be aged with the lees from that fermentation (for a minimum of 18 months in the case of Champagne).  Ageing wine in the presence of lees can add body and creaminess, and people who would like to impress you will refer to it as autolytic character.  It can allow for greater ageing potential once bottled.

So just to pull together the last few paragraphs, with Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine it is often left to age on lees after fermentation.  What I didn’t explicitly mention is that that the term “sur lie” actually means.  This is unusual in that most wine is racked off lees sometime relatively soon after fermentation, but if you leave your wine in contact with lees it can give it some autolytic characters which can be desirable depending on the type of wine you’re making.

Having written all that, there may be something funny going on with this wine.  It does not use the term “sur lie” on the label.  A site which sells the wine mentions in its description that it is made in the “sur lie” style but that it cannot say so on the label.  AOC rules are apparently very specific for the use of the term, and so he could be leaving the wine on lees for longer or shorter than the approved time.  I want to say I can taste the lees influence, but I’m not an expert and I have only had other Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie a few times.

In any case, this is a good wine, and an interesting style not so often seen.  The apple flavours were what struck me, as well as the acidity.  It was paired this evening with some grilled swordfish, but I think it would have done better with some chilled shellfish like the last time I had a bottles in Nantes.

Appearance

Clear and bright, medium-minus gold, thin film instead of legs.

Nose

Clean, developing, medium-plus intensity of apples (green and yellow), as well as some sweet spice and a hint of nuttiness. Slight autolytic character.

Palate

Dry, high acidity, medium body, medium alcohol, medium-plus flavour intensity, with notes of apple, sour citrus, some nail varnish, and stony minerality.  Sour finish, with medium length.

Conclusions

This is a good quality wine – crisp with minerality and strong tart flavours, but also with creaminess and body.  The balance is slightly on the sour end of the spectrum, and the intensity of flavour is supported with high acidity, but that leaves the body and alcohol behind.  A longer length and milder sour notes might have pushed this up to a very good.  I think at two years old, this wine has potential for ageing, perhaps to improve over the next three years.

Henschke Henry's Seven Barossa 2008

Tonight I’m sampling a wine from a very important Australian producer, and while this isn’t the most famous wine from that producer, it is important and interesting nonetheless.

I have before me a bottle of Henschke Henry’s Seven Barossa 2008.  It’s a blend of Shiraz, Grenache, and Viognier.  As I mentioned when I wrote about the Domain Day wine a few weeks ago, the Barossa Valley is a bit of Australian holy ground, and best known for robust Shiraz.  It is also the home of some of the oldest vines in Australia, many of them Grenache bush vines, meaning vines not trained to wires.

If Barossa is holy ground, Henschke is Australian divinity.  A family run winery since 1868, it has had many generations working its vines and making wine over almost the last decade and a half.  (Note to self, mark the calendar to buy some 150th anniversary wines around 2018.)  The current generation consists of husband and wife Stephen (winemaker) and Prue (vigneron), as well as at least one Dachshund named Cassie.  They make a range of wines, red, white, and sparkling, with their winery based in Eden Valley, a cool subregion of Barossa.  The have vineyards in Eden Valley in Barossa and Lenswood in the Adelaide Hills, which gives them a range of grapes, with an emphasis on cooler climates.

Having hit on second wines yesterday, it’s worth talking a bit about Henschke in terms of icon wines.  So with the great houses of France, particularly Bourdeaux, there is the notion of grand vin which carries the house name, and possibly a second wine with a different but evocative name.  In Australia, this is turned on its head.  Henschke has an icon wine, Hill of Grace, but it represents a small fraction of its production.  It is a rare and beautiful wine which I’ve only tasted once, and while when it springs to mind when people mention Henschke, it is not what most people have tasted when they’ve had a bottle with a Henschke label on it.  Rather, most have had something like the Henry’s Seven in front of me.  And while Henschke has a range of wines, it doesn’t really touch the low end, in that while this might be one of their more affordable wines, it’s neither cheap nor cheaply made.

As I mentioned, this wine is a blend and sourced from the Barossa Valley, in particular Eden Valley.  The blend, Shiraz, Grenache and Viognier (with 2% Mourvèdre according to the tasting notes), conjures forth thoughts of the Rhône.  I’m not sure in which region it would be considered a traditional blend – in the Côte-Rôtie you certainly see Syrah co-fermented with a considerable whack of Viognier, but I tend to think of Grenache as more typical of the Southern Rhône (and Spain of course).  But I’m a student, so for all I know there is an AOC that has been doing SGV for years.  But Australia is not bound by French AOC rules, so while things like Syrah/Shiraz and Cabernet-Sauvignon blends are uncommon in France (except for one region I can’t remember right now) they can be commonplace in Australia.

So this wine – very nice.  Friends brought it when we hosted them for Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks back, and as we had already selected some wines to go with the turkey, we set this one aside.  I wish I had some of the Pomerol from last night to taste side by side, as this couldn’t be more different.  While it’s a similar age (this is roughly six months younger – that crazy hemisphere thing) it’s from a different planet.  I have a bias in favour of New World wines in general, and so when I was asked to describe how to pick an Australian Shiraz, I said that a taster should look up from their notes and clear their mind with a swig in the mouth.  If the first thing that comes to mind is “damn, this is delicious” then it’s an Australian Shiraz.

Seriously though, this is a much more fruit forward style.  Shiraz makes a much fuller wine, and while people speak of Grenache in France as being a lighter wine, in Barossa from old vines it is like a grape shotgun at point blank range.  The Viognier adds aromatics and apparently helps in colour fixing in co-fermentation.  In this case it certainly keeps up in terms of palate weight.  This is a delightful blend, with intensity and concentration, but without heavy handedness.

Appearance

Clear and bright, medium-plus ruby with quick, thick pale ruby legs.

Nose

Clean and developing with medium-plus intensity and sweet spice, fresh raspberries, blackberries, and a bit of liquorice.

Palate

Dry (though the fruit is so fresh and sweet, I had to think twice), medium acidity, medium soft tannins, medium-plus body, medium-plus alcohol, medium-plus flavour intensity, with strong blackberry, raspberry, liquorice, sweet spice, and a bit of old oak.  Medium-plus length with some plums on the finish.

Conclusions

This is a very good wine – intense across the board, and so balanced with medium-plus being the norm for the scores.  The acidity is not quite up to the rest of the scores, but it does not put the wine out of balance.  The complexity is only in its infancy, in that I expect it to be more rounded with some cellaring.  I think this wine will improve over the next five years at least.

Le Carillon de Rouget Pomerol 2008

Tonight we opened up a bottle of wine we had sent to back from our most recent trip to France, Le Carillon de Rouget Pomerol 2008. It was not a château we visited, but rather a recommendation from a manager in a wine shop as we put together a mixed case that would give us a range of wines to cover our Bourdeaux studies.

So first, Pomerol. It’s in Bordeaux, which of course is in France, and this is not the first wine I’ve covered from that general area. I tasted a wine from Saint-Julien, Connétable de Talbot 2008 a couple of weeks back. Saint-Julien as I said is in the Left Bank, and as such a Cabernet Sauvignon dominated blend. Pomerol, on the other hand, is on the other bank, the Right Bank. It is an area where Merlot dominates blends, with Cabernet Franc being a junior partner, and other varieties often not being present at all. Pomerol has no formal classification system, unlike the long established 1855 classification on the Left Bank. However, some wineries there has such well established reputations that they are valued at least as highly as first growths, among them Château Pétrus and Château Le Pin.

This wine is the second wine from Château Rouget, as the wine two weeks ago was from Château Talbot, but I didn’t really explain what a second wine was. In Bordeaux, as well as some other places, a château will have their grand vin which will carry their name. So if you speak of the wine Château Margaux, no one would ever ask “which one?” in exactly the opposite way that if you were to speak of Penfolds, you would need to be more specific as they produce many wines and none of them is an eponymously named flagship. (Penfolds flagship wine is Grange, for the record.) However, if you are a grand château you will have a large number of wines made every vintage that may go into your blend and from year to year they might vary in quality. Some young vines may not produce up to the high standards of your château’s grand vin. Or perhaps the vintage was tragic with not enough ripeness. For a number of reasons, many châteaux have found it useful to produce a second wine – one that is clearly from their château but which has a reputation separate from their grand vin. The amount produced will vary from year to year, and in particularly challenging years, some châteaux may not produce a grand vin at all. Second wines will typically have their own name to set them apart from the grand vin, and can often represent an opportunity to get a sense of a great château at a fraction of the cost of their grand vin. So while the best fruit/wines will go into the grand vins, and they will in turn receive the best treatment as far as winemaking and oak, second wines are still identified with a château and so are more second sons than orphans.

I can’t say very much about Château Rouget in particular, other than that their plantings are 85% Merlot and 15% Cabernet Franc, though the exact blend in this vintage of their second wine is not clear. Their website features Michel Rolland prominently, but he is worth at least a posting all on his own. Curiously, on the entry for Château Rouget, Wikipedia suggests that their second wine is known as Clocher de Rouget, but on their entry for Second wine they name it as Vieux Château des Templiers, neither of which match the bottle in front of me. Just to be clear, I am but a student of wine, and so anyone trying to rely on this blog for accurate data will be disappointed from time to time. Even so, I’m annoyed I can’t pin this down.

Regardless of whatever it actually is (and I will keep researching), it’s very nice. It’s young and while the fruit is strong and forward, I would not call it fruity. It has a certain spiciness that’s very pleasant, and the alcohol is warming in a way that’s quite comforting on a cool evening.

Appearance

Clear and bright, opaque purple with only the smallest water rim. Quick thick legs.

Nose

Clean, developing, and medium-plus intensity of black fruit (plums, cherry, currants) and sweet spice, along with hints of tobacco.

Palate

Dry, medium acidity, medium-plus fine tannins, medium-plus alcohol, medium body, medium-plus flavour intensity, with notes of plum, black cherries, cranberry, blackberry, and a bit of meat/blood. Medium-plus length with a spicy finish.

Conclusions

This is a very good quality wine – intense in flavour, and starting to develop complexity of flavours. It is well balanced in its weightiness, with only the body and acidity being slightly less than they could be. The length is nice, particularly with the spice on the finish. While I’m certainly enjoying this wine now, I think it is still very young and will benefit from another 5 years of cellaring during which time I would expect more tobacco and perhaps some chocolate to emerge.

The Furst Pinot Blanc Alsace 2010

On Monday during our tasting with our local MW, he threw us a curve ball with a slightly sweet Pinot Blanc from Alsace.  Fair enough, as it’s a “Light Wine of the World” (which is the official title of this section, Unit 3 of the WSET Diploma) but it was one of those wines about which you’re much more likely to read than to ever encounter in a tasting.  Pinot Blanc itself is well known enough as a grape, but neither as popular as it’s siblings, Pinot Noir or Pinot Gris/Grigio, nor as commonly found as a varietal wine.  It’s also not very widely planted outside of France.

Likewise, Alsace is a fine region, well regarded throughout the world for a certainly style of wine made from a handful of classic grape, and likewise a distinctively elegant bottle style which is used around the world for Riesling.  Even in Alsace though, Pinot Blanc is not generally considered “noble” and is permitted in only a few of the Vendage Tardive, Sélection de Grains Nobles, and Grand Crus.

So essentially, for the purposes of study, I am fully prepare to consider a Pinot Blanc from Alsace (or anywhere really) as a curiosity that is not worthy of further study because there are so many other things I really need to commit to memory prior to the exam.

Then today at lunch, on the wine list was a Pinot Blanc from Alsace by the glass.  Great.  Of course I had to have a glass, and here is my write up.

The wine is “The Furst…” Pinot Blanc from Alsace, 2010.  Unfortunately, I can’t link to a producer because they don’t seem to be online anywhere.  Secondary sources suggest the wine is from the AOC Alsace Kayersberg, and the name is a shortening of Furstenum, which is in the general vicinity of Kientzheim/Sigolsheim in the Haut-Rhin.  (I’m not sure any of that helps.)

So, about the wine.  It is without faults, though without distinction.  Part of it is my fault, in that this is not a variety with which I have great familiarity, and therefore I’m not able to judge typicity.

Typicity is my new favourite word, and it means essentially that something is a good example of whatever it is supposed to be, and in the land of the WSET Diploma Exam, that is a good thing.  As a winemaker, you may or may not strive for it.  It may be your decision to strike out in your own direction and in doing so strive for something unique.  As a student though, I appreciate typicity because it gives me a fighting chances of being able to figure out what something is when served blind.

So I can’t really say if this tasted how an Alsatian Pinot Blanc is supposed to taste, but here’s now it did taste – crisp, citrusy (in particular of pink grapefruit), with lots of mediums across the board.  Not overly complex or intense, but well made.

Appearance

Clear and bright, pale lemon colour and slow thick legs.

Nose

Clean and youthful, with medium intensity of lemon, grapefruit, and white flower.  I think I should have been able to pick up pear and stone fruit, but I didn’t.

Palate

Dry, with medium acidity, no tannins, medium-minus alcohol, medium-minus body, medium-plus flavour intensity of lemon, grapefruit, sour candy and some grapey/Muscat notes.  It had medium length with a slightly sour finish.

Conclusion

This is a good quality wine, and while the flavour is a bit stronger and out of balance with the body and the alcohol level, the intensity on the palate (if not the nose) was pleasant.  The flavours were relatively one dimensional, and the length was average, but it was without faults and very easy drinking.  While the wine was youthful, it is not made in a style to age, so I would drink this wine within the year.