Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, dry
Grape variety: blend of Petite Arvine, Amigne and Humagne Blanche
Winery: Provins
Location: Sion, Valais
Price at the winery: CHF39.00
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, dry
Grape variety: Petite Arvine
Winery: Provins
Location: Sion, Valais
Price at the winery: CHF33.90
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, dry
Grape variety: Gewuertztraminer
Winery: Les caves de La Béroche
Location: St-Aubin-Sauges, Neuchatel
Price at the winery: CHF16.30
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, sweet
Grape variety: Pinot Gris, vine-dried, 2008
Winery: Les Celliers du Chablais
Location: Aigle
Price at the winery: CHF29 for 37.5cl and CHF57 for 75cl
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Fine Port with Stilton and Downton Abbey
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The BBC has just answered the questions we who watch Downton Abbey have been asking – where and what exactly is the real thing? It turns out to be a Highclere Castle, which has a real butler and real residents
But the “rose-tinted” Victorian world and drama we love to watch unfolding before us are a little different from daily life there in the 21st century.
Pay a visit to the BBC’s story about it, and Highclere Castle’s own web page, which makes for gripping reading, before you turn back to the show itself.
And for that, assuming you are watching it after dinner, you really must have a fine glass of Port and a bit of Stilton, the classic and still perfect marriage. Port is Portugal’s pride and joy, but the country has much to thank the English for, when it comes to making this rich wine known to the world.
More on that later. For now, before I turn on the TV, let me raise a glass to that bygone era, where those who could afford to drink it knew a few things about their wine.
The Port: a 10-year-old Quinta de Val da Figueira port, made by artisan Alfredo Cálem Holzer, a deep rich and elegantly velvety wine that is enhanced by the sharpness of the British cheese. They’ve been doing this for 250 years, so it’s possible that a bottle was or will yet be served at Downton Abbey.
The Stilton: a fine little gift pot of it, not too-too blue, creamy and perfect on crackers, mmmmm.
Ellen Wallace
Ningxia-Bordeaux challenge in Beijing 14 December 2011 (photo: grapewallofchina.com)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Four Chinese wines did better than Bordeaux wines in a small blind tasting competition of 10 wines, in Beijing 14 December: shades of the Judgement of Paris competition in 1976 that shook French growers to their roots and put US wines on the world’s sommelier maps.
The Chinese wine market is widely expected to be the world’s largest in two decades, so anyone with a thirst for exporting wine to China trembles at the thought they might actually make fine wine in the Middle Kingdom.
China’s overall winemaking reputation has been pretty poor until now. There have been exceptions and the wines have certainly improved since I first tasted the only wine available in 1985, a rock-gut bottle of “Dynasty” that I drank in a fancy restaurant on the Bund in Shanghai. I’d been riding a bicycle through the Chinese countryside and drinking (good) beer for 10 weeks but after several years of living in France I longed for a glass of wine. To say that “Dynasty” didn’t do the trick is the kindest remark I can make. Note: it has improved over the years.
So is this blind tasting really significant? Yes, tiny though it was. It makes a statement that China is capable of producing good wines. More significantly, it focuses our attention on how different this emerging wine market really is from other wine markets, and it helps us sweep away some clichés about China and the purpose served by wine competitions and challenges that pit one group of wines against another.
Judgement of Beijing: the competition
Jim Boyce, one of the organizers, has been quick to point out that this is not, in fact, a remake of the Judgement of Paris, but the comparison is hard to resist.
AP carries a good overview of what happened this week. In essence, 10 judges, half of them Chinese and half French, tasted 10 wines, all 2008 or 2009, and the top wine was a Cabernet Sauvignon from Grace Vineyards in Ningxia.
Ningxia wine brings to mind – what? Not a lot, for most of us, but it is quickly establishing a reputation as a wine producing area, with a hefty French influence. Four of Ningxia’s five wines entered in the competition against the Bordeaux won out over their French counterparts. All the wines were priced at 200 to 400 yuan ($30-60).
The top five, with vineyard names in bold:
1. Grace Vineyard Chairman’s Reserve 2009 (priced at 488 yuan (US$77))
2. Silver Heights The Summit 2009 (416 yuan ($65))
3. Helan Qing Xue Jia Bei Lan Cabernet Dry Red 2009 (was 220 yuan ($34.50), now pending)
4. Grace Vineyard Deep Blue 2009 (288 yuan ($45))
5. Barons de Rothschild Collection Saga Medoc 2009 (350 yuan ($55))
The competition was organized jointly by Jim Boyce, the website TasteV, Beijing wine club Zun, and contributors to the Grape Wall of China blog. The judges are all reputable wine experts.
The results came on the heels of another China wine win, just “three months after the Ningxia-based winery Helan Qing Xue’s Jia Bei Lan Cabernet Dry Red 2009 won China’s first-ever “International Trophy” at the Decanter World Wine Awards,” Jing Daily points out.
The process
The competition appears to have been organized with credibility as a high priority. A group of journalists were witnesses to the preparation: bottles were shown, bagged for the blind tasting, and the wine poured before the judges sat down.
They were given 40 minutes, under the watchful eyes of the journalists, to rank the wines. They then discussed the wines for a few minutes before the final tallies were made known.
This is already a departure from many wine competitions. The task of the judges is normally to give individual marks to the wines. Once they are all marked or noted, on a scale of 1-20 or 1-100, for example, the organizers tally and make public the results. In some countries, and Italy comes to mind, the judges work entirely alone. In others, for example the Mondial du Pinot Noir or the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse, where I’ve been a judge, we work at small tables, not sharing our assessments, but if there is a problem we have the option to discuss it under the strict guidance of an appointed and experienced head of the table.
Our job isn’t for each of us to rank the wines, which you can do only with relatively small quantities of wine.
What it showed, what it didn’t
The web site The Grape Wall of China asked the judges to take their assessments one step further and give the wines “love” notes. “The judges had four options: love it, like it, don’t like it or hate it,” writes regular contributor/blog administrator Jim Boyce. The result makes telling reading and gives more insight than the rankings, a good reminder that appreciating wine is not an objective quantitative adventure but an emotional business as well.
In fact, several other posts on this blog and others about wine in China make it clear that some of the most popular measures of wine success come from challenges of wines that involve different groups of judges, from high-level professionals in one challenge to consumers in another.
China is a very young wine market and the most pressing needs are to educate wine consumers and to find out what they like. Wine challenges that invite consumers to take part seem to be a good way to learn their tastes.
Boyce argues that the challenge was fair to the French wines, despite some criticism that these were not equal groups of wine, that the French wines suffer from a 48 percent tax. Chinese wines value-added and other taxes come to about 20 percent. But these are wines that consumers want to see compared because they are similar in price, he points out.
China’s native wines
China has eight wine regions, all of them studied by the government and designated as appropriate – enough sunshine, precipitation and the right soils.
The Helan mountains in Ningxia are northwest of China’s populated eastern areas.
Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, medium-dry
Grape variety: Amigne, 2010
Winery: Maurice Gay SA
Location: Chamoson, canton Valais
Price at the winery: CHF18
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
White wine, dry
Grape variety: Viognier
Winery: Philippe Bovet
Location: Givrins, La Côte, canton Vaud
Price at the winery: CHF26
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
white wine, fruity, rich
Grape variety: Viognier
Winery: Cave des Rois
Location: Villeneuve, canton Vaud
Price at the winery: CHF18
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin
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Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines
white sparkling wine, Brut
Grape variety: Chardonnay
Winery: Philippe Bovet
Location: Givrins, La Côte, canton Vaud
Price at the winery: CHF25
View this wine reviewed in French by Laurent Probst and in German by Gabriel Tinguely
Complete list of GenevaLunch Swiss wine videos, produced by RomanDuVin