Wine blog
My tasting notes of fine wines I have enjoyed.
Gris, Pays d’Oc 2024. Les Pluviers.
Gris is a variation of French Rosé wine that’s popular in the South: it’s much lighter and usually fresher, not sweet and needs to be drunk young. It’s not a sin to add an ice cube to chill your glass of gris. The principal varietal grown in the Languedoc is Grenache Gris but there are also Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Gris etc.
This bottle, labelled Pays d’Oc 2024, that I brought back from a supplier in Marseille, has the typical pale colour, a fresh nose of the smaller red fruits with a slightly acid after-taste that’s refreshing on a hot summer day. We enjoyed my personal import with Terry’s copious Salade de Chèvre chaude in his garden in Preston Park, Brighton, now luxuriant with growth and flowers that are reminders of the Mediterranean and the sub-tropics.
Nicolas Feuillatte: Grande Réserve, Brut
Celebration champagne for my birthday treat in Terry’s garden in Preston Park, Brighton. Nicolas Feuillatte have several reserves, this one “Grande Réserve Brut”, we bought in France and is labelled only in French. It’s a particularly fizzy assemblage of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir as well as the classic champagne varietal Meunier. We found it poured with a pale colour; it tasted refined, mild with flavours of vanilla, maybe melon and just a hint of the sharpness of star-fruit. A pleasant and long after-taste.
Comparing three bottles of fizz for our Easter entertainment; all are made by the additional fermentation method, equivalent to the méthode champenoise.
i Filari is a light red wine from Langhe, a village in the hills above the River Pô to the east of the more famous wine village of Barolo. The name of the Nebbiolo varietal translates literally to “from the clouds” and indeed those hills are often swathed in mist out of the summer season, though rarely affected by frost. So i Filari is wine from the clouds.
Opening the bottle of i Filari, the cork is branded with Barbanera Vini SRL, one of the large wine conglomerates based in Asti. An immediate aroma of red cherries, even without pouring the wine.
Vinha da Urze (2023) - Douro DOC
Casa Agricola Aboredo Madeira SA. Almendra Portugal.
I chose this Urze red wine of the 2023 vintage to accompany a beef filet Tournedos at a steak restaurant in Funchal (Madeira) which works with a farm in the Portugese Azores. Douro DOC is one of Portugal’s premier wine classifications, this assemblage combines the strength and finesse of the two most common varietals of Touriga along with the Portuguese version of the ubiquitous Iberian varietal, Tempranillo. The ageing in oak would be expected to soften the wine but marks it down from being in the top league of Douro wines.
