Avoid the Trap

Wine buying is full of traps for the unwary.  Take Pouilly Fumé and Pouilly Fuissé for example.  Easy to confuse but two very different wines, one a Loire Sauvignon, the other a Chardonnay from Burgundy.  Or, how about Chinon and Chenin: a French wine region and a white grape variety respectively.  Talking about grape varieties, the same one can have different names depending on where it is growing – Syrah/Shiraz is just one of many examples of that.  And even wines with the same name can taste very differently to one another; the familiar Côtes du Rhône can come from a vast area of vineyards and producers can blend from more than 20 grape varieties depending on their preference – so, if you find one you like, stay with it, others may not be to your taste!

But perhaps the prize for the biggest trap of all goes to Montepulciano.  The same name is both a red grape variety, grown mainly in Eastern Italy (you may know the easy drinking fruity red Montepulciano d’Abruzzo) and a village in Tuscany which, just to add to the confusion, uses an entirely different grape for its famous wine.  The austere and ageworthy red Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is made from the Sangiovese variety, beloved of devotees to Chianti. 

The village of Montepulciano also makes a 2^nd, more approachable (and significantly cheaper!) red wine, also using Sangiovese and we opened a bottle recently.  Duca di Saragnano’s Rosso di Montepulciano (DBM Wines, £11.99) is deeply coloured with berry fruits and spice on the nose.  The palate is quite intense and rich with flavours more reminiscent of dried fruits and sweet spices leading to a long, dry finish.  The well-integrated tannins of the 2021 vintage indicate drinking now or in the next year or so, rather than a wine for keeping.  Interestingly, the label suggested pairing with roasted white meats – we decided on braised lamb shanks instead, which my wife and I think worked really well.

So, next time you see ‘Montepulciano’, look very carefully at the other words on the label – it’s one of the easiest traps to fall into and if you buy the wrong one, you’ll open a very different wine to the one you were expecting.

Curry and…..?

How do you match a wine with the assertive spicy flavours of a curry?  Many would say, ‘don’t bother, have a beer instead’.  But what if, like my wife and I, you don’t enjoy beer?  Do you just stick to water?  In reality, it depends; there are countless different variations of the dish – not surprising when my dictionary says that the word ‘curry’ derives from an old Tamil word meaning ‘sauce’.  How many different sauces are there?  It must run into the thousands.  So, rather than dismissing the idea of wine with a curry, it’s important to check what flavours are in the particular dish and see if you can match them.

A good friend (and her cat!) invited us to dinner recently and told us that she would be cooking Prawn Rendang, a dish from Indonesia or Malaysia.  I had an idea that it was a sort of curry but didn’t know any more than that, nor which wine I might take to accompany it.  I checked some recipes; typically, the ingredients would include coconut milk, chillis, garlic, ginger, turmeric, lemon grass, tamarind paste and sugar.  The ginger, lemon grass and tamarind are all quite fragrant and, with our friend’s assurance that she would be gentle with the chillis (hot chilli flavours are definitely wine killers!), I decided to look for a white wine with some aromatic qualities to it. 

A Riesling, especially one from Australia, or a Torrontes from Argentina, perhaps?  In the end, I settled on Kuhlmann-Platz’s Gewurztraminer from France’s Alsace region (Majestic Wines, £10.99 if bought as part of their ‘mix 6’ deal).  Quite full-bodied but cool and fresh with tropical flavours of melon, mango and lychee and peppery hints.  It seemed to work well with the dish, reflecting the deliciously aromatic flavours and sitting nicely alongside its restrained heat.

Wines made from the gewurztraminer grape variety are quite distinctive and some of the more floral, perfumed examples wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste but more elegant bottles such as this can be very attractive and solve the question of what to drink with mildly spicy curries.

Not Just Sauvignon

New Zealand has emerged onto the world wine scene over the past 2 decades thanks, mainly, to their success with one grape: Sauvignon Blanc.  But look more closely and you’ll realise that the country is far from a one trick pony. They are producing some fantastic Pinot Noir in a range of styles – try examples from Marlborough, Martinborough and Central Otago and you can hardly fail to notice the different characteristics each region brings to its wines.  And then there’s some delightful Chardonnays – see my blog from January 2023, ‘Can I tempt ABCs?’ for a great place to start exploring New Zealand’s take on that variety.

And there are some surprises, too, like elegant Syrah (aka Shiraz) – you might not expect New Zealand to be warm enough to ripen that but, in a few places, it is.  There’s also vibrant Riesling, aromatic, spicy Grūner Veltliner (I blogged about that, too, last year) and, perhaps the ‘other’ variety that, in my opinion, shows most promise: Pinot Gris.

Nothing like the thin, bland Pinot Grigios you often find (Gris and Grigio are one and the same), the bottle from the Kumeu River Estate, north of Auckland, was delightfully rich and mouth-filling, though not in any way cloying.  Quite pale in colour with a lovely apricot nose and a palate with floral hints, grapefruit, tinned pineapple, tangy spice and excellent length.  Perhaps the one downside was slightly too prominent alcohol – although the label said 13.5%, it tasted more; my wife (who often remarks on high alcohol wines) complaining of a burn on the end palate.  Despite New Zealand being considered a cool climate wine country, Auckland sits at latitude 37°, the same as southern Spain in the northern hemisphere, so is perfectly able to harvest fully ripe grapes including, as I already mentioned, Syrah.

So, a wine about as far different from New Zealand’s signature Sauvignon Blanc as it’s possible to be.  Perhaps not an ideal aperitif but a good match for, say, poultry in a creamy sauce or even a mildly spiced curry.  Available from DBM Wines of Bristol, £16.49.

Tasting the Camino

Another week, another tasting!  This one focussed on one of the most unusual and interesting themes I have encountered in the many years I have been attending tastings: the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  The Camino is the network of ancient pilgrims’ routes to the shrine of Saint James in Compostela in North West Spain.  The tasting, ably hosted by Raz from Corks of Cotham, featured some of the wines that present day pilgrims, who number more than 200,000 a year, might find along their way.

Over the centuries, many pilgrims will have travelled through France, crossed the Pyrenees and found themselves in the Basque region of Spain and that’s where our tasting began.  Gaintza’s Txakolina (£19 – all wines mentioned are available from Corks) is a dry, delicate, saline white and, as Raz suggested, one of the few wines that pairs well with olives.  Our ‘journey’ continued away from the coast into the Rioja region where we tasted Inedito Turrax (£22), a rich, full-flavoured white made from 2 rare native grape varieties, and Marques de Zearra (£16), a proper traditional oaky red which had benefitted from 18 months in American barriques and clearly will still be drinking well several years from now.

Moving closer to our destination – Compostela is in Galicia – we tasted another white, the deliciously floral Noelia Albariño (£22), one of my favourite wines of the night – a view not shared by our table-mates! – and a pair of very different reds. 

The first, Peixe da Estrada (£23) was my joint winner of the evening; fresh and quite light-bodied with lovely red fruits and herbs while the other, Mauricio Lorca’s Viña Peon (£20) was more extracted with intense smoky dark fruits, a style reflecting, perhaps, the Malbecs familiar to the Argentinian winemaker.  This was another wine that split opinions among those present at the tasting.  The wine world would be a worse place if we all liked the same!

An altogether fascinating and most enjoyable tasting – and all without leaving our seats in Bristol!