Wines

Chardonnay Project

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Chardonnay Grapes
photo by Pete Markham

This year I’m lucky enough to be participating in a couple of excellent wine programs. The one which has already started is Working with Wine, run by Negociants Australia. The first Adelaide session was run on Thursday 19 April and focussed on the white wines of the Côte d’Or in Burgundy, France.

These wines are made (predominantly) from Chardonnay and, after a very fun day tasting 20 great Chardonnays, I commented on Facebook how ace Chardonnay is.* I’m always surprised by the things on Facebook that elicit the most comments … and this was one of them. People seem to have some pretty strong thoughts on Chardonnay: the nay-sayers (to whom I say you just haven’t tried the right wines), the people who love oak influence and the people who don’t like oak and the people who find that Chardonnay doesn’t represent good value for money. One telling comment was that for $15 you could buy a reliably good bottle of Sauvignon Blanc but Chardonnay was too much of a hit-or-miss proposition.

I actually feel that this last comment is a fair call: Chardonnay can be grown successfully in a variety of climates and handled in many different ways, meaning that the finished products are stylistically very different. If you only like one style of Chardonnay then I can see how often you can be disappointed.

So, to try and help out the Chardonnay drinkers of Adelaide (or even Australia) I’m going to try different Chardonnays at the $15-20 price point and report back. I’ll do this until I get fed up with drinking Chardonnay and/or find some other little project.

I’ll post the first wine tomorrow (Saturday) so … stay tuned!

* Note, the session could have looked at almost any grape variety under the sun and I would have come away saying that …

Cork Wine Cafe

- Alex 1 Comment

NOTE THAT CORK IS NOW CLOSED

date of visit: Saturday 3 March 2012

Our dinner reservation was quite late (8:30pm) so it would have been plain rude NOT to go somewhere for a drink first. Cork Wine Café has been on my radar for a while – plenty of people I follow on twitter seem to be semi-regulars there and even my parents have been.

It is one of those awesome little hole in the wall style bars. There are a few tables outside (no use in our case, as it was chucking it down) and even fewer (I think) inside. But one was free and we ducked in and nabbed our spot.

Cork is pretty trendy but not so trendy we were put off. It’s all dim lighting and dark furniture with a long bar behind which sits a really impressive array of wines. The wine list isn’t arranged by varietals (you know – “Riesling”, “Sauvignon Blanc”) it’s arranged by wine styles, so if you fancy a “textural white” you know where to go. Initially I was really sceptical about this but I stopped my huffing and puffing for long enough to read the menu (sorry, wine list) and then I just got really excited.

Cork has loads of wine by the glass and the bar also offers tasting flights – if you simply cannot choose just one “textural white” then try three (in tasting measures) for a single price.

Which is what I should have done. But I was overexcited about the presence of a Picpoul de Pinet on the wine list (a grape variety from southern France which I’m pretty sure I haven’t tried before) and a grower Champagne. I was bouncing around in my seat trying to decide between the two (the price did it in the end – the Champers, at $20 a glass, was twice the price of the Picpoul). Andy’s choice of a Trumer Pils (from Austria) was a lot less traumatic.

I’m not going to write about the Picpoul (I thought it was fab) because this is a bar review. And that is what Cork is – a bar. Apparently if you turn up expecting it to be a dessert café you may get a slightly chilly reception. That was certainly not our experience – service was friendly and my parents report that the staff are knowledgeable.

As it’s a bar, there’s some very limited tapas style food available. As we were heading out for dinner, we didn’t try anything. But I’m more than happy to go back, have a glass of something interesting and sample some food.

And you know what? It won’t matter if the food is dire, because you go to Cork to drink.

Wines of Sicily

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photo by Alister Robertson

I’ve been lucky enough to attend two interesting, but very different, wine tastings recently.

The first of these was held at The Manse and organised by Alessandro Ragazzo, The Manse’s sommelier, and Sommeliers Australia.

The session focussed on the wines of Sicily (the island which is the football to Italy’s boot!). Italy is a happy hunting ground if you’re after the weird and the wonderful in terms of wine. Allegedly the country is home to over 1000 different wine producing grape varieties – so I was confident it wasn’t going to be an afternoon of Chardonnay or Shiraz.

Alessandro had put together 3 flights of 4 different wines: the white and red brackets were followed by a dessert wine and Marsala bracket. We also had a comprehensive handout which covered the history of wine in Sicily, with a few maps and plenty of interesting facts. For example, Sicily is about a third the size of Tasmania and yet annually produces 5 million hL of wine. Australia’s entire output is 11 million hL annually.*

Of the whites my favourite was the Benanti Pietramarina DOC Etna 2007 which is made from Carricante. I happen to have Tom Stevenson’s The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia sitting next to me and apparently the Etna DOC is the same wine on which the Cyclops got drunk (thanks to Ulysses). Stevenson is somewhat dismissive of the whites: “… a soft but bland dry white” although the Pietramarina is worthy of individual note. My own notes indicate that while the nose wasn’t massively pronounced there were some herbal notes, anise and fennel, while the palate was less herbal but showed rich, ripe citrus fruit with a good seam of acidity. I was undecided if it was marmalade-y or preserved lemon.

Unfortunately (for me), it looks like this wine retails for around $100 a bottle.

I won’t talk about the reds too much (if you’re interested, you can read about the Duca Enrico Duca di Salaparuta 1996). I was struck by how they all really felt as though they needed food. Of the four, the COS Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG 2009 struck me as being the most approachable with a good balance of acidity and tannins and a spicy, red cherry palate.

The dessert wines and Marsala bracket I found really interesting. Like (I suspect) most people, I don’t drink very much sweet wine and I drink even less fortified wine so I love the opportunity to try something new. We started with a Benanti Passito di Pantelleria. It was a 2005 and the bit of age showed in the glass: the wine was really quite amber in colour. The wine’s aroma was dominated by dried apricots with other dried fruits thrown in for good measure. The palate matched this and was suitably pronounced with pelnty of dried apricot, sultana, fig, honey and almost a note of maple syrup.

The concentrated flavours in Passito come about because the grapes are left to dry out before crushing. Traditionally, they’re left on straw mats in the sun. Pantelleria is a small volcanic island off the south west coast of Sicily. And the wine is made from the Muscat of Alexandria grape. Got that straight?

We wrapped up with two Marsalas from Vito Curatolo – a Superiore Secco and a Superiore Riserva. Marsala is made in a manner similar to Sherry and the mass production of the wine is actually thanks to a late eighteenth century Englishman, John Woodhouse, who thought the wine would be popular in England and began large scale production and export. Marsala has something of a poor reputation – which, on the basis of the two wines we tried, is rather undeserved.

The Superiore (aged for a minimum of 2 years) was very Christmas cakey, with plenty of coffee, coffee and cream and a nutty finish. The Superiore Riserva (aged for a minimum of 4 years) was a lot more savoury, with some Fino Sherry like characteristics and plenty of nuts, but none of the coffee.

I won’t be rushing out and buying up all the stocks of Marsala in Adelaide – for me, it will be an acquired taste. However, I think it’s a shame that it doesn’t have a higher profile and that there isn’t more of an opportunity for consumers to try good quality examples.

This was a great tasting: things moved at a good pace, it was well organised and (most importantly!) the wines were all really interesting. Apparently Alessandro hopes to run some more sessions like this in future – I’m looking forward to them already!

* This is taken from my notes and I haven’t independently verified it so please feel free to correct me!