Past the roses and under the arches to the international wines tasting session at the exquisite 1908 Chateau Mercie
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Right: Swiss wine is mostly drunk inside Switzerland. Wrong: it’s local stuff that can’t compete internationally and anyway, it’s too expensive.
A wine tasting session offered to journalists covering the Vinea Swiss wine fair Sunday 4 September in Sierre showed good Swiss wines out-performing or equaling fine wines from other countries.
To the surprise of many, the Swiss wines were generally less expensive.
Swiss wine journalists (this includes me, despite my foreign background), whose mantra has been for some time that good Swiss wines are excellent value, felt vindicated, one commented afterwards. Now to convince consumers that when you’re splashing out for a fine wine, think Swiss.
The tasting session of international grape variety wines was hosted by Vinea for 18 journalists, most of whom are wine writers.
Twelve of them are from neighbouring Swiss countries, including France, Belgium and Germany. The purpose, said Vinea president Francois Murisier, who had selected the Swiss wines, was to simply see how Swiss international wines fared when tasted alongside comparable quality wines from major producing countries.
Swiss are famous for native grape wines, but what about their ability to make international grape wines?
Wine tasting: glasses ready for the wine, buckets for what we spit out
Switzerland has a very good reputation for its native grape variety wines, but how well, he asked, would wines made from grapes such as Syrah or Chardonnay, grown worldwide, do?
Murisier selected the Swiss wines from gold medal winners at various wine competitions. Two professionals, without knowing what wines Murisier had chosen, selected wines from other countries that had won at least 90 points out of 100 in international wine competitions.
All of the wines cost at least CHF20 and all were under CHF80, to avoid cheap or very costly wines that could skewer the results.
The cheapest was CHF23.50 and the most expensive CHF75.00. Most were in the range of CHF28-35.
If you’ve been buying the old cliché that Swiss wines can’t hold a candle to good European or New World wines and that Swiss wines are more expensive than those from neighbouring countries, this is the time to change your thinking.
Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and Syrah from around the world
We tasted four Chardonnays and four Sauvignon Blancs for the whites, followed by four Merlots and four Syrahs for the reds.
We knew that two out of each group were Swiss and our job was to a) guess what country they were from and b) give them points on a 20-point scale, with 15 as good and 20 as excellent.
The results
Robert Taramarcaz, left, in a theatre production in August 2009 at his winery: top Chasselas producer
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Stefan Gysel from Hallau, canton Schaffhausen, age 32, has been named the Swiss Winemaker of the Year as part of the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse. A record 2,117 wines were entered, a 15 percent increase over 2008 for Switzerland’s main and only independent national wine competition. This is the third year of the competition, which evolved from an earlier national awards programme.
Two other top awards were given, the Vinissimo prize, which went to Alain Gerber of Hauteville, canton Neuchatel, for his Prélude 2007 in the category “wine with residual sugar” and the Swiss Bio prize to Reynald Permelin from Domaine de la Capitaine in Begnins, canton Vaud, for his Johanniter 2008 in the category “other single-grape white wines.”
Gold winners in the 11 categories of wines are:
Merlot wines from Ticino, Switzerland
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The first-ever Mondial du Merlot, a global wine competition organized in southern Switzerland, has just awarded gold medals to the top 19 Merlot wines from the 278 entered, from 24 countries. Merlot is one of the most widely grown grapes in the world. “I discovered wines with profoundly different characters, all of them very interesting,” said Rodrigo Banto of Chile, one of the judges.
