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.

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.

Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines

wine video, white

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

Click on image to view larger

Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines

wine video, white

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

Click on image to view larger

Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines

wine video, white

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

Click on image to view larger

Wine tasting notes, Swiss white wines

wine video, white

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

Click on image to view larger

Beaujolais Nouveau, a marketing ploy that worked, turns 60 today

Beaujolais Nouveau 2011 in a shop south of Macon (photo ©2011 Roger Pring)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Sixty years ago you had to be in France to get a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau, the light Gamay with notes of strawberries and raspberries that hits the streets of France every year in November.

It was sold, in those good old days, on 15 November, starting in Paris, where the capital adopted with gusto the idea of the newly invented wine, or rather one dressed up and given a birthday and a name in 1951.

The wine was bottled only six to eight weeks after the harvest, which meant it had no tannins to speak of: it would therefore not age well but, as with the pretty young and uncomplicated girl it resembled, who cares about age when you can have fun now.

Leaving home and the pain of middle age

Beaujolas Nouveau in the 1970s became a marketing gimmick, with producers racing to Paris with the first bottles. Then Geneva area bars and cafés started to offer it about the same time that the fun caught on throughout Europe in the 1980s, moving to the US, then going global in the 1990s.

There is nothing new about Beaujolais Nouveau itself: Beaujolais vin de primeur wines have been sold since Beaujolais became an AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) in 1937, just as primeurs have been made in every wine region of the world since wine made its appearance. And before the primeurs the region had a post-harvest wine that was just a shade more fermented than grape juice or must.

Wine merchant Georges Duboeuf almost single-handedly developed the frenzy around the new wine, which initially had the advantage of bringing in some cash for producers at a point in the season where they wait for the wine to reach bottling stage so they can sell it.

The growth rate was phenomenal, with some 2 million bottles sold in the early 1950s, up to 238 million in 2010. In the late 1990s Beaujolais Nouveau almost became a victim of itself, with too much bad wine flooding the market.

The industry had a facelift, lost several kilos in the form of companies that went under, and now it appears to be enjoying its 60th birthday.

The good, the bad, and the fun of it all

Winemaker Nicolas Durand, Domaines des Bruyères in Saint Amour, proud of his 2011 Beaujolais Nouveau (photo ©2011 Roger Pring)

Every year the question comes up again: it’s fun for a day, but is it any good?

Answer: Part of the fun is asking the question, as it lets newbies talk about wine and wine snobs wax wise.

Mostly, it depends on whose bottle you buy. The market-dumpers are diminishing, so your chances of falling on a truly awful bottle are less than they were 10 years ago. And Beaujolais AOC, the real stuff that has to wait longer to be bottled, has improved markedly in recent years. Good Beaujolais producers make some beautiful wines.

The vin primeur version is lighter and as good or as bad as the products you’ll get from the same winery later.

Nicolas and Sandrine Durand from St Amour are delighted with their 2011 Beaujolais Nouveau, says Roger Pring from Beaujolais, who works with me as part of the Swiss Wine Guide English version team.

Durand, who was once a Paris-Dakar racer, says the early harvest this year was a bonus.

“We had a very dry June, which worried us, but then a very wet July, which was great for the vines. They ripened earlier and we harvested earlier, so the wine has had more time to mature before bottling.” For Durand, 2011 is a very good year, comparable to the great 2009 vintage, giving him three good years in a row after a disappointing 2008.

Roger agrees, saying Durand’s is an “excellent wine”, even better than another Beaujolais Nouveau he tried earlier.

Here are a few tidbits of Beaujolais trivia while you’re sipping your glass.

• The 2011 harvest was three weeks earlier than the 2010 one, making it one of the earliest on record: 24 August to 16 September this year.
• The late harvest is giving this year’s wine a deeper colour and powerful fruitiness, somewhere between red and black fruits, with less acidity than in 2010.
• Beaujolais, and the primeur is no exception, is made by pressing the grape bunches as a whole.
• The grapes are almost entirely harvested by hand, the only region in France where this is true (and if you see how low the vines are you’ll drink to the pickers’ health, particularly for their backs.
• There are two appellations, Beaujolais, with 72 villages in the south and east and half of it is bottled as Beaujolais Nouveau; Beaujolais Villages, with 38 communes and the steeper, hillier parts of the region.

Now, the serious side: how to drink it

Beaujolais Nouveau – not a sip of it before midnight; it should touch your lips only as you cross the line into the third Thursday of November. Drink it with just about any food and it works well, since it is a relatively light wine. Toast your friends or, as they often say in France raise a glass “to your lovers” (take care who you say this to, though).

Consume in moderation, don’t drive after drinking, and plan a date with the Real Stuff Beaujolais, now that you know 2011 is a very good year.

Background story, GenevaLunch visits two of Beaujolais’s best

Morgon, Beaujolais, France, where vines and tourists alike enjoy the soft contours, rolling hills

Côtes du Rhône rosé from Tavel

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – For background, see my article, “Switzerland’s splendid neighbour: Côtes du Rhône”. In October I tasted and discussed at length with winesellers and sommeliers and other journalists a sampling of wines from the Côtes du Rhône region.

Here are my notes on the whites and rosés (reds to follow). The first three wines are from the north, the last two from the southern part of the 200-km long Côtes du Rhône region.

The appellation is followed by the name of the bottle, vintage, winery name and the village:

white: Saint Péray, “Fleur de Crussol” 2009, winery Alain Voge in Cornas

From granite hills, vines over 60 years, 16 months in oak, 100% Marsanne, a wine that will age
Nose: very round, almost honey
Mouth: anise
Comment – love the nose, a very elegant and sophisticated wine but not for every taste
web site

white: Condrieu, “Invitare” 2010, winery Michel Chapoutier in Tain l’Hermitage

Viognier
Nose: the typical expected peach, but also with apricot, making it more interesting than some and with good minerality
Mouth: light, dry and long in mouth
Comment – A very fruity and gourmand character, expressive and exuberant although Chapoutier says this will go with time. A lovely, fresh wine.
web site

white: Hermitage, “Chant Alouette” 2008, winery Michel Chapoutier in Tain l’Hermitage

100% Marsanne, bottle is named after the terroir
Nose: honey, but second nose is interesting with richer notes of hazelnuts, butterscotch and caramel
Mouth: good complexity and fresh despite the notes of honey
Comment – A terroir wine that is distinctive and to my surprise when I looked up the technical notes on the web site, only one-third of the wine is oaked with the rest matures in vats. Chapoutier suggests serving it with foie gras,  crayfish,lobster or poultry in sauces, white meats, goat’s cheese, blue cheese, spicy dishes and curry. I would have to try it with the last two to be convinced, but the nose is rich enough to support these without the wine being heavy, so he mght be right.
web site

rosé: Tavel, “Prieuré de Montézargues” 2010, winery Prieuré de Montézargues in Tavel

Blend from very small yields of Grenache, Cinsault and Clairette
Nose: citrus, exotic fruits, light cherries
Mouth: refreshing, harmonious, rich yet dry, a great example of a Tavel, one of the classic rosés
Comment – after writing the above I came across this press review page of the wine and had to laugh because it is reviewed by several major wine writers or publications, and to read about the nose you would think it is four different wines. So trust your own judgement here and enjoy it. I like Hachette’s suggestion here of having it with white meat, as I think it deserves more than most charcuteries offer. More delicate salmon colour than some Tavels. Producer Guillaume Dugas has turned to bio, quite successfully if this is any sign.
web site

rosé: Tavel, “Dame Rousse” 2010, winery Domaine de la Mordorée in Tavel

Grenache is the main grape here, grown on sandy soil.
Nose: flowers, white fruits
Mouth: round and full-bodied, chewy, almost has the structure of a red
Comment – A much more vivid pink than some, a clue to its stronger character. It will accept aging better than most rosés
web site

2011 vintage: warm, deep cherry and plum notes await us after unusual year

Expect to hear more from these wine producers, whose marketing campaign is being backed by dynamic changes in the vineyards (posters displayed during a tasting session on Lake Geneva in October)

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Good news arrived from France Monday, that 2011 wines from the Rhone Valley, after initial tastings, show wonderful promise.

Grapes harvested at optimal ripeness are giving wines marked by fruitiness and warmth, with plum and deep cherry notes, verging on the over-ripe, according to the Inter-Rhône growers association.

The wines stand in strong contrast to the 2010 vintage and recall 2009, a very good year.

It was a year that could have been a disaster, as in Switzerland: “a summery spring, a spring-like summer and a perfect autumn”, the group notes. I’ll wait until winter to taste them, when they are closer to what we’ll find on our tables, but when I recently tasted a series of these wines, including several 2010s, I liked a good number of them.

A long ribbon of vineyards running from south of Lyons to Avignon

Côtes du Rhône, literally the “banks of the Rhone”, is a beautiful wine area, the continuation of a broad ribbon of vineyards that starts in Switzerland’s upper Valais region, threading its way through the length of Valais, Vaud and finally Geneva before reaching France.

(article continues below)

Lavaux and Lake Geneva, Europe's largest lake, created by the great river that starts as a trickle from the Rhone glacier high in the Alps in Valais; the lake empties out near Geneva and the river heads south, creating a mix of conditions for France's famous and varied Rhone Valley wines. Producers from the Côtes du Rhone wines region in France, in October, presented their wines during a boat trip on the lake, a handshake with fellow winemakers to their north.

Swiss wines and their great neighbours, the wines of France’s Côtes du Rhône region, have some  similarities but the differences underscore the reasons for variety in wines, which in the end is what keeps us all so interested in the stuff.

The Rhone river is the first clue, for even in Switzerland the wines to which it gives birth vary hugely, wines that express their terroir particularly well, from the Petite Arvines and Cornalins of Valais to Vaud’s Chasselas and Geneva’s Gamays.

The start of the Côtes du Rhône wine region is Vienne, just south of Lyons, 180 km from Geneva via the autoroute. It ends far south, in Avignon, near the Mediterranean, running through 171 communes and six administrative departments: Ardèche, Drôme, Gard, Loire, Rhône and Vaucluse.

Weekend wine discovery trips from the Lake Geneva region are easy

It  provides some beautiful wines, such as the much-touted Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie and Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines. It is also home to many very good to good wines at moderate prices. They are available in Swiss shops and, for those who long to combine wine-tasting and a weekend jaunt, not too far from home, the Côte du Rhone region is perfect, a short drive to a region where wine tourism is booming. The Vins-Rhone web site is a good starting point; I’ll be doing some touring there in coming weeks and will write more on this aspect of discovering the wines.

Where to begin: the grapes, the geography

Michel Chapoutier

Côtes du Rhône wines have suffered somewhat on world markets in recent years by the growth in New World wines. They don’t have the sexiness of Bordeaux wines with exotic prices nor do most have the noble titles of many Burgundies. The size and number of appellations can be daunting and, as elsewhere, the wines range from the mediocre to the great.

Red wines dominate here, 91 percent of the production, but there are some fine whites and roses, not to be overlooked if you’re on a discovery trip.

Getting a handle on these wines isn’t always easy for consumers outside France, but it’s worth the trouble, and the region itself is working hard to make it easier for us, with some success. One statistic that backs up the promising changes seen in the vineyards is that 16 percent of the region’s winemakers are under age 35, a figure well above the national average in France.

Two main varieties, many blends

To start, think of just two main grape varieties, Grenache and Syrah, although a third, Mourvèdre, is also considered a main variety. The region is the cradle of Syrah, which has become known as an international variety, probably the 7th most widely grown grape in the world.

Several other varieties are grown as secondary grapes, mainly to contribute to blends made with these two: 22 varieties officially, but many of them in small quantities. Michel Chapoutier, one of the region’s best-known winemakers, noted for his passion for terroir-strong wines, says “Why just three grapes, when the Swiss have so many? Like a chef, a good oenologist can cook up wonderful blends! Growers here have long planted the grape varieties they know grow best.”

Chapoutier points out that growers learned from the diseases that struck the vineyards in the 18th century and a later over-use of fertilizers. “If we have a good bacteriology of the soil we can have just as much complexity in our wine offerings as with many grape varieties.”

Lavaux harvest; the same river feeds the two regions, but they are home to different grape varieties

Chapoutier was speaking to a group of sommeliers, wine wholesalers and retailers, and journalists during a day out on Lake Geneva to taste Côtes du Rhône wines (my tasting notes will follow this article).

It was an invitation too good to turn down, since one of the first labels I discovered and explored in France when I moved there from the US several years ago was Côtes du Rhône Villages.

I was ready to move on from dirt-cheap and very strong North African wines proposed by my student friends, the kind that left you with purple lips (blessedly, a short phase in my wine-drinking career).

A French friend suggested that Côtes du Rhône Villages wines, a step up from plain ordinary Côtes du Rhônes, was a good entry into the confusing world of appellations and French wine labels.

Côtes du Rhône reds, warm and rich

Before trying to understand the appellation system, however, take a look at the geography of the Rhone Valley.

In the north, the river is still reeling from its heady rush through the rocky Alps, and granite is a feature of this landscape, very old rock fractured by the Alps, with a soil that holds various minerals. The vines are mainly on the right bank as the river heads south, with the notable exceptions of Hermitage and Croze-Hermitage, where pebbly soil is a feature that adds interest to the granite base.

Further south, the landscape and the soil change significantly. It’s softer here, pebbly soil gives way to sandier soils with loess (windblown sediment) deposited in part by the Mediterranean mistral winds. The mistral, the result of different pressure systems between the north, next to the Alps, and the south, near the sea, can be violent, but growers here appreciate the positive impact it has on their vines.

And in between is a wealth of varied pebbly dry soils that shift as the rivers turns and winds its way south.

From north to south, this is a land of marked seasons: heavy rainfall the gives way to high amounts of sunlight and very warm temperatures.

Appellations, nothing to be afraid of!

The labelling, or appellation system for the region’s wines has three main categories, starting with the top quality regions. Grape yields vary from 46 hectolitres per hectare in the regional appellation to 42 and 42 for Villages and named villages.

• Appellations locales, which covers 18 crus, including the most famous wines of the region
• Côtes du Rhône Villages, wines from 95 communes and within this group 17 have geographic designations that can be mentioned on the label; the region’s web site in English, which offers a handy guide to appellation system, refers to them as “named villages“
• Appellation Regionale Côtes du Rhône, covers wines from 171 communes.

Côtes du Rhône wines offer myriad options for matching wine and food

Tasting notes from a series of whites, rosés and reds from the Côtes du Rhône:

the whites, rosés

 Coming next: the reds

Luscious rose wines from the Côtes du Rhône, a minority worth trying

Spinach juice, more than meets the eye, or even a human nose

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – This is almost as bad as getting an e-mail saying you’ve lost your job. Those of us who thoroughly enjoy tasting and judging wines at international competitions were in for a shock this morning when the Swiss government’s federal research station at Waedenswil announced dire news.

The electronic nose it’s been testing, called SMart Nose, is giving positive results.

They tried to tell us gently by using the somewhat off-putting example of spinach juice (you read that right), pointing out that consumers won’t buy something unfamiliar or strange-smelling to them, so industry must use “noses”, professionals with a good sense of smell who use precise sensorial analyses, to determine what works and what doesn’t.

The idea is to help development new products while also checking on existing products.

The food industry, with large-scale production, spends a good deal of money using human noses for this work.

SMart Nose, for now limited to spinach juice and the like

But the research station has been using the new SMart Nose, developed by Swiss company VOCScan AG, to test spinach juice. The idea behind the tests is that spinach has a number of nutritious qualities and should be used in fruit juice, but first its positive smell elements need to be identified. And this the SMart Nose was able to do remarkably well, just like a well-trained human nose.

In theory, then, verifying the technical aspects of a fine bottle of Pinot Noir and qualifying these, as well as being able to describe the nose, could be done by a machine.

Out the window with excellent descriptions from writers such as Wine Anorak: “Wonderfully intense nose of cherries, herbs and dark chocolate” or “Intense nose showing vibrant cherry fruit with rich savoury herbal undertones; quite complex” for two New Zeland wines.

But wait, it looks like SMart Nose is still in the early days of his training, so maybe we’ll all just get early retirement offers. Waedenswil ends by noting that “each sample provides a kind of digital print. Statistical methods then make it possible to create groups of samples with similar aromatic profiles. To validate the method, these groups of samaple are then compared to the results of sensory tests done by flesh and blood tasters”

A traditional nose, still at work on wine

Meanwhile, wine continues to offer us much more than just a great nose.

There’s the appearance, its visual aspects, and the palate, not to mention the harder to quantify business of pleasure and conviviality. And the story behind each bottle, and the glory of the vines in November.

To your very good health, and to ours, the wine writers, still hard at work.