Ellen Wallace
Part 1 of a 3-part mini-guide for the Vinea wine fair
Reminder: Join me for a one-hour Introduction to Swiss wines and guided visit to Vinea, in cooperation with Vinea! Deadline is Wednesday night 29 August to sign up: details and registration on the GenevaLunch donations page; we will confirm your registration by return e-mail.
White wines for tasting at Vinea, the Swiss wines fair
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Faced with the happy option of sampling 1,500 wines by 150 producers from throughout Switzerland, where do you start? The best place is your brain: make sure you have understand some of the basics first.
The Vinea Swiss wines fair runs Friday 31 August and Saturday 1 September, the biggest outdoor wine event in the country and the best opportunity to really sample Swiss wines.
Here is a quick rundown on Swiss white wines, including some cliché-busters. I will follow this with information about reds, later today, then a post about other Swiss wines and a practical, how-to guide for Vinea, Thursday morning.
A nation of white wines? The cliché
Switzerland produces mainly white wines. Wrong! The famous Chasselas wine, called fendant in canton Valais, is served regularly as an aperitif wine, giving rise to the idea that white wine dominates. Red grapes cover 58 percent of Switzerland’s vineyards.
Switzerland’s place among world wines
The country has a little more than 14,000 hectares of grapes, only 0.2 percent of world production. It has a very good reputation among international wine specialists for its quality, and Swiss wines regularly appear among top winners at world wine competitions such as the Vinalies in Paris. White wines tend to perform particularly well.
How to read a Swiss white wine label
A Vaud Chasselas that doen't mention the grape: Cave Beetschen in Bursins
Two Petite Arvines, with the grape name very much in evidence, from canton Valais (G. Dorsaz, Fully, on the left, and Rouvinez, Sierre, on the right)
Swiss wines are traditionally mainly varietal, or single grape wines, and the labels often reflect this, with the name of the grape in evidence.
A major exception is Chasselas, so widely grown in its birthplace, canton Vaud, that you often find only the name of the village, the winery and the fantasy name, meaning one the winemaker selected.
The Chasselas from Cave Beetschen in Bursins, for example, shows the name given to the wine by its owners, Tradition, the name of the winery, and the village. The name gives you a clue as to what to expect, in this case a very good, classic style Chasselas from one of the best wine villages in the canton.
Geneva is home to a good variety of wines, including this Scheurebe from S. Dupraz, SYD winery in Soral
The fantasy name is usually given more prominence for blends, which are increasingly appearing in Swiss wineries’ lineups, as the Swiss become more proficient at blending.
The results of this are, for now, uneven. Some are excellent; others don’t quite make the mark.
Wineries are blending, not to get rid of their excess wines (a question I’ve been asked several times), but to offer consumers new wines that meet changing tastes.
New grapes have been introduced in recent years and these are being tested for blending, sometimes with very good success.
A good starting point is the winners of the “white blends” category in the national wine competition, the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse. The 2012 finalists were announced 22 August.
The main Swiss white varieties, partly a matter of region
Switzerland produces 160 grape varieties, an extraordinary number given the size of the national vineyard.
The explanation lies in the geography of the country, which varies hugely, from the open lakeside near Geneva to the remarkably steep banks of Lavaux at the other end of the lake, to the plains around Vully and the Alpine slopes of Valais and Ticino, not to mention the stretches along Lake Zurich and in the foothills of Graubuenden.
The six main grape-growiing regions each have distinctly different micro-climates. Ticino, for example, has areas in the north with some of the country’s heaviest rainfall and further south the vineyards are more like those of neighbouring Italy.
Climate changes are prompting growers to shift to new varieties; Switzerland has a great advantage over France, for example, in that the legislation allows them more flexibility in this area, although this will begin to change in France in 2013. Geneva is one of the regions that has benefited from this and if you’ve heard the old saw that Geneva’s wines are mediocre, ignore it – the canton suffered briefly in the 1970s and 80s, but it is coming back brilliantly, and its newer grape wines can be beautiful.
In order of their importance, by quantity of grapes grown
Chasselas (well over half), Mueller-Thurgau, Sylvaner, Pinot Gris, Petite Arvine, Sauvignon, Pinot Blanc, Savagnin and a number of others.
Chasselas is widely grown because it is an exceptional wine for reflecting its terroir, so don’t expect a floral Geneva Chasselas to smell or taste like a fruity mineral one from Vaud or one called fendant from Sierre, where one of its main roles is to help down a fine raclette cheese! And to put paid to the cliches, the top two Chasselas wines in 2012 are from Neuchatel and nearby Vully, both homes to many wonderful wines.
Prices, what to expect to pay
Another cliché that could usefully die is that Swiss wines are expensive. If you’re looking for a CHF2-5 bottle, true, you’ll have trouble finding it. But there are plenty of wines at CHF7-10 that, compared to wines in neighbouring countries, are very good value for money. I just spent three weeks in the US and compared the price range; Swiss wines are priced on a par, matching quality. Good wines in Switzerland, expect to pay CHF12-25. Very fine wines, CHF28 on up, and they are reliably good.
Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Chasselas
White wine, dry
Grape variety, Chasselas
Winery: Cave de la Madeleine
Location: Vétroz, canton Valais
Price at the winery: CHF16.00
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
Click on image to view larger
Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes, Chasselas
White wine, dry
Grape variety, Chasselas
Winery: Giroud Vins
Location: Sion, canton Valais
Price at the winery: CHF14.30
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
Click on image to view larger
Ellen Wallace
Wine tasting notes
White wine, dry
Grape variety, Chasselas
Winery: Cave Jean-René Germanier
Location: Vétroz, canton Valais
Price at the winery: CHF16.00
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
Click on image to view larger
Ellen Wallace
Cornalin and Syrah from Cave de la Madeleine, Vetroz, Valais
Update 21:30 I’ve started tweeting wineries + 1 type of wine for each, some of my top picks among the Swiss wines at Arvinis, in addition to the California and selected Swiss tasting notes I’ve already posted here. It’s always hard to decide which ones are worth a stop and once there, what wines to taste. I hope that sharing my shopping list of good Swiss winemakers and a personal favourite among their wines will simplify the hard work of tasting in Morges!
Consider signing on as a GenevaLunch follower on Twitter or getting the rss feed. I’ll be posting about 20 10 (enough!) of these in total by Saturday night.
I haven’t noted which are white or red, dry or sweet, so in order of tasting, try this: whites – Chasselas, Fendant (same grape, just Valais), Ermitage, Johannisberg, then reds – Pinot Noir, blends, then sweet whites – Amigne (ask what the bees signify), Malvoisie late harvest.
Santé!
Ellen Wallace
150 years of Bonvin wine: they know how to make wonderful Fendants
What a pleasant surprise to discover that one of the special offers at the Coop is a wine that enchanted me last July – and that it’s just as good in winter as in summer.
The Bonvins are a large clan in Valais and not surprisingly, many of them do indeed make good wine. In this case we’re talking about the Charles Bonvin et fils in Sion, who in 2008 have been celebrating their 150th anniversary.
Their Fendant Sans Culotte would be remarkable if for no other reason than its name. I created a bit of a stir when I visited the Bonvins last summer by asking how it got its name. I would translate it as “without underpants,” although you could probably find a more elegant translation (no breeches?). No one seemed to know and the possibilities were stirred around without an answer surfacing.
How do you give a wine such a name and not jot down the reason in the history book? But then, last week I wrote that no one remembers who exactly called the first computer mouse a mouse, probably because no one thought the name would be around a billion mice later.
Sans Culotte is a Fendant just the way I like them: sharp and very slightly bubbly, with a wonderful nose of flowers and mineral that brings to mind the gravelly terraces in the heart of Valais wine country where these grapes grow.
Visually, the wine's pale gold spun into the rich orange of winter clementines
There are strong and wonderfully pleasant notes of citrus fruits, particularly grapefruit. I found it hard to keep my nose out of the glass.
This is a delicately pale gold wine, but it does a fine job of reflecting the world around it, in my case the first good clementines of the season, a bowl of them cheering the evening room when dark comes too soon outside.
It’s the perfect bottle to serve with a flourish when guests come by, an excellent classic Swiss white. And it is a classic, made here since before the railroad arrived in Valais. The Bonvins pride themselves on having the oldest wine commerce in the canton. Charles-Marie Bonvin registered his company in 1858 and played a key role in the development of the canton’s wine industry in its early days.
I thoroughly enjoyed the wine last week with a beautifully steamed fish, but it has enough character to be drunk with other, more flavourful foods and it is very good with cheese with a touch of sharpness, well-aged slivers of cellar-dried raclette, for example.
Sans Culotte fendant, Bonvin, Sion: above Sion
Enjoy it now – it’s a wine happily drunk young. But make sure you have another bottle in the summer, on a warm sunny day. Here’s how you do it: take a hike along the bisse de Clavau walk and stop at La Guérite de Brûlefer, a large hut and balcony among the vines, overlooking the Rhone. Food and wine are on offer, from simple snacks to heartier fare. One hot day, one cool glass of Sans Culotte and a spectacular view: it doesn’t get much better than this. Unless you have a second glass, of course.
Worth viewing, the family’s online photo exhibit, with images from the 19th century.