Confessions of a Wino

Sounding like a Vic Reeves’ Shooting Stars comedic expletive is not normally a criterion by which I evaluate whether to buy a wine, but somehow this just grabbed my attention on a recent visit to Majestic, Leeds.

South Africa is a bit of a blind spot in my wine rack and I occasionally have to remind myself that good wine comes from English speaking zones, as well and French and Spanish.

This wine is made from Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in proportions 42:32:26 and spends 10 months in French oak.

On opening there was faint Hydrogen Sulphide but this quickly dissipated and left a passable impression of a decent claret.  At first it smelt deep, moody and just a tad yeasty with a raspberry rush.  First sip was raspberry, violet, and vanilla.  Far from being spoilt, it was bright, fresh and almost as exciting as a freshly powdered slope (snow I mean, not cocaine).

Eranu or Uvavu?  Ugaba Stellenbosch 2006 is £11.99 at Majestic and this represents good value.  ERANU!

My good mate, Easto, came over for a barbecue at the weekend and brought a bottle he had stored for too many years (or so he thought).

Having recently bought into my two fundamental theories of life:
a) that wine should be drunk at the right temperature; and
b) that your best wine should be drunk and not left in your will,
he suggested I give this a quick blast in the fridge and get on with firing up the coals.

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Where did all the money go then?  In my quest to account for some of the missing credit crunch trillions, once believed to have been squirreled away by bankers, I spotted that £7 billion has been invested in the search for Higgs Boson – the clitoris of particle physics.

But last September, the Large Hadron Collider hit technical snags and some magnets over-heated bringing the search to a premature climax with helium gushing out all over the place.

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Quand j’ai écrit du Prince des vins (Marquis de Ségur) et ce vin ci, en Octobre 2007, je n’ai pas su qu’il y avait encore une bouteille dans mon moissonneuse-batteuse.  Je viens de le déguster.

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I’ve said in the past that if a rising tide floats all boats, then in good years like 2005, it must be worth rowing across to Analogy Island in one of the lesser bateaux of the Bordelais flotilla.

So I popped a few quid in the post to the Wine Society for a case of Côtes de Bordeaux 2005 and they sent me, amongst other bottles, some Château Martinat Côtes de Bourg.

It justified my argument.  There is some real shite sent down La Gironde in the name of fine claret but I think the enormous majority of wines are born of genuine fathers (and mothers….) who really care.

This is certainly the case with Martinat.  Whilst I do not know the winemaker (Stéphane Donze, since you ask), you only have to sip the wine to taste the parental devotion.

This kid is spicy, fruity, intelligent and rich – almost destined to grow up to be Stephen Fry’s replacement on QI.  The taste is peppery, plummy and with firmish tannins I found it a nice match for spicy pizza.

Mine was £9.95 from the Wine Society but unsurprisingly now sold out.  Shame because it is one of the best ten quid bottles I’ve tasted in a long while.

If you want to enter a declining market and make a meaningful dent then you better innovate.  Naked Wines is doing just that and gaining publicity by the jeroboam.

Rowan Gormley’s latest stunt was to hold a “crowd taste off” with AU$100,000 of Naked Wines purchase orders available to the winning wine makers.

The tasters were the 50 most active customers of Naked (fully clothed, I believe).  The winemakers were selected by The Government of South Australia and the Australian Trade Commission.  After rounds of tasting and price estimating, the final coup de théâtre was the winemakers themselves in a reverse auction to adjust their prices to see how much of the $100k they could take in orders.

I managed to get my paws on three of the winners that will be going on sale via the Naked Wines website in the next few weeks:

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As taste sensations go, there is little to beat a hunk of well seasoned Argentinian beef, chargrilled and accompanied by a glass of decent Malbec.  Chewing on the salty, aged and bloody meat causes a tingling in your gums as if a bovine mouthwash.   This then undergoes some kind of chemical reaction with the deep, moody, spicy wine that leaves you digesting the meal for a whole week.  Sharp pangs – taste reminders – keep haunting you like salivating ghosts of taste past that make you press your teeth together in muscle memory.

As Argentinian steakhouses go, The Gaucho Grill takes the biscuit.  Not only for great steaks with superb ghost potential, but also for awesome (by which I mean sky high) wine prices.  Markups of over 300% are commonplace.  That is four times the retail price and presumably they pay the importer much less!  Is there a venue which matches the steak quality and authenticity, but where the only fleecing is associated with an occasional lamb chop?

In Leeds, a place I dine all too rarely these days, River Plate has appeared on the site once known as the Calls Grill.  The menu looked pretty similar to Gaucho but, to be frank, the wine list looked cheap!

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As I stare at the bottle and write this, I have no idea how much the wine costs, nor how well reputed it is.  I have not read the label on the back and I have no record where I got it from (presumably a present then).

It is always interesting to attempt to not be swayed by a label, but given a Château Lafite 1787 and an Echo Falls Merlot in each other’s bottles would I notice?  I might rate the sickly lifestyle brand, with almost certainly the British & Commonwealth record for slowest and most annoying website ever, the best wine.  Maybe I am a Label Mabel.  A brand junkie.  Or just a marketing and packaging enthusiast?

My prejudices say this wine is cheap.  The colour is dark and much too purple.  The taste is jammy.  Specifically blackcurrant with a wipe of strawberry.  There is also something tangy and sharp.  But actually I quite like it.  At 13.5% not as blockbusting super-jammo as I feared.  Yes, quite tasty.  I think it would compare favourably to a £7.50 Chilean Cabernet.

So how much is it then?  Off to Google.  Tesco.com have it for £6.17 a bottle (in cases of 6).  That sounds fair.  Bit better than a cheapy, not in the same class as a 10 quider but drinkable with the right food – in this case Marmite on white toast is the perfect match.

Smoky, moody, deep, mysterious, bitter, fruity.  All adjectives that, I have been instructed to inform you in no uncertain terms, do not associate themselves readily with my wife.  At least not for 25 days of every month.

Just as well she didn’t visit the Virgin Wines website and pay £5.65 of her hard earned cash for this Adobe Cabernet.

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I have long argued that a rising tide floats all boats, but I forgot about the leaky ones which sink paying no regard to ebb or flow.

2005 was the tsunami of tidal years in Bordeaux and almost every wine I have tasted from that year has been superb.  So I was looking forward to receiving a case of Côtes de Bordeaux from the Wine Society which promised a tour of some less well known communes.

My first sample, Château Godard Bellevue 2005 Côtes de Francs, stood up to the “unknown” moniker.

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