Wine blog
My tasting notes of fine wines I have enjoyed.
My friend Mike brought round this bottle of fine 2004 claret last night which we definitely enjoyed with our dinner of roast lamb. Great to enjoy a bottle from Chåteau Léoville Barton again. The classic, 2ième Grand Cru, vintage was one of my Father’s favourites. We visited the vineyard in the Sixties, I remember flying kites with my Father in a stiff breeze over the Garonne estuary near the village of St. Julien. I guess he had been negotiating an order for Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Single domaine red wine from Savoie, another personal import from my trips to Haute-Savoie in June. There are two Domaine du Vieux Pressoir, this the Savoie one gets good listings for its white wines. Their Mondeuse 2022 showed a fine cherry red colour but unfortunately the wine in our bottle had gone off, tasting sour and looking cloudy. The plastic cork had looked intact and the bottles of other wines I’d carried back from this trip have been good so I hadn’t kept it badly. This doesn’t happen as often as it used to as vinification methods have improved even with the small producers, but it’s always disappointing.
We continued our apéro (strolghino with olives) and then smoked haddock paté salad with a bottle of screw-top Beaujolais Supérieur from a UK supermarket.
Classic Vin de Savoie, a personal import and souvenir from my recent trip to Chamonix and Mont Blanc. Château de Ripaille is located on the southern shore of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) at Thonon-les-Bains, not far from Evian-les-Bains, famous for the bottled water.
Read more: Château de Ripaille (Savoie) with Cumbrian rainbow trout
Two chateau-bottled clarets from the early years of this millennium but tasting quite different. Here are our notes from enjoying them both.
Read more: Ch. Puy-Blanquet 2001 & Ch. Peyraud 2000 at Easter 2023
Two wines we’ve enjoyed this weekend along with Terry’s excellent cooking.
