Confessions of a Wino

The venerable Austrian wine glass maker, Georg Riedel, has made a mistake. I know this to be a fact because I have just done a taste test on a bottle of 2001 Château Filhot that I’ve been saving for a while. Riedel recommends a 416/33, otherwise known as a Vinum Sauvignon Blanc (left) for the noble rotten wines of Sauternes. I’ve just received a brace of Rheingaus (right), or 416/1 to the librarians amongst you, as a present. So I thought I would do a taste comparison and, what a shock!

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Tall and tanned, and young and lovely was the girl from Ipanema.  But I’ve been getting more luck from the South of France recently.  Of sorts.  This young lady, for example, going by the seductive name of Château du Cèdre turned out to have a huge pair of bollocks.  More Manchester Pride than Brazilian carnival babe.

Rich, fruity, yet smooth and soapy.  It is a bit like drinking coffee from an earthenware pot whilst munching on a raspberry teabag.  But if you can stand the tannins, it is conclusive proof that you can build a wine sturdier than a tranny’s thong at only 13° ABV.  One in the eye for Mr Parker?

I would recommend following WART instructions and taking this down from room to cellar temperature, to avoid scalding your tongue.

Available from Costco at £11.73 – this feels like good value to me.

At only 10.5% alcohol and a mere 25cl bottle (a large glass of wine at most British pubs) this wine had to live up to a £11.44 price tag.  Yes, I know, only Costco could come up with this odd valuation.

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I am not the sort of person to waste money on a premium product unless I see real value.  Vintage Champagne is rarely, if ever, in my wine rack, but this is because I have never really thought it worth extra.  In January, I spotted a bottle of 1999 Bolly at only £58 and that included two free Riedel flutes.  At that price the value test was too tempting to miss, and maybe I reached a L’Oréal moment?

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Think of a long, lazy, boozy summer lunch in the south of France and you think of rosé.  Well I do.

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Tonight I am drinking Terrazas de los Andes Reserva Malbec 2006.  A very nice wine and worth every penny of the £8.50 I paid Costco for it.

This is one of the staples of the Gaucho Grill wine list, but when average wine markups in the UK are between 100 and 200% (i.e. double to three times the wholesale price) how come Gaucho thinks it can charge £37.50, a 341% uplift, and that is against the RETAIL price.  Is this a new British and Commonwealth record?

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In the race to taste the latest “holy grail” Bordeaux vintage, or “super-domaine” from Burgundy it’s easy to overlook other wine regions of France that can offer much better value.  For example Languedoc.

After experimenting with some Fitou several years ago I was left with the impression that wines from this most Mediterranean of French régions, were thick heavy, spicy and coarse.  Clearly this was because I was drinking the cheapest possible produce.  But then I tried a cracking 2003 Corbières that got my juices flowing, both in the brain and elsewhere…

This Château Vaugelas 2004 came from Costco at £6.75 plus VAT.  That is either £7.93 or £7.76 depending on whether you bought it before or after 1 December 2008.  I am proud to have made the marginal contribution of 17 pence to help my government sort out the banking crisis.

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To pass the time during my New Year detox, I have been hoovering up wine bargains to stock up for the year ahead and to get my taste buds flowering in anticipation.

Two bargains stand out from the crowd, one from Costco, one from the Wine Society.  One Champagne, the other red wine but from a relatively close starting point.

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The death of Robert Mondavi, in May of this year, caused a wine world reaction akin to the British mourning the death of Princess Diana, the 11th anniversary of which is today.

Credited with transforming the Californian wine industry, I wonder what this “colossus” of the wine world would have been like to meet.

I had a mad dream that I walked into Costco in Leeds and Mondavi was a guest wine guy for a day.  Admittedly this is a bizarre dream since I have never seen any sort of wine guy at the Leeds branch.  I hear tell of such wondrous myth in the stores of our transatlantic cousins, but here in the UK, Costco wine shoppers are left to their own devices.

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There was quite a reaction to my criticism of Costco recently.

Whilst I stand by my slight lack of confidence in Costco’s wine buyers, this does not stop me buying a few bottles every now and again, especially when I see something interesting.  This Oregon Pinot Noir, at £9.39, stared at me longingly, “I’m only a tenner” it whispered flirtatiously.  “You look bloody lovely!” I replied a decent number of decibels to the wrong side of audibility.  But a few queer glances from bemused fat folk do not deter me.  I picked the bottle up and took it home, reasoning that a US owned store ought to know a bit about US wine.

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