2008Harvest

Tasting Notes

Cynthia — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:54:38 +0000

Monday, 8 March 2010

(Note: this is posted for two purposes: one is to buy me a little time to organise my notes from Essência do Vinho – there were several groups of wines that stood out for me, and I want to do some further background research on those before posting details. Second is in response to some feedback about my comments on wines, this is offered partially as a rumination on tasting generally and partially as an explanation of what I am and am not trying to do here.)

Why are you always so dim and vague about tasting notes, Cynthia? “Fruit and earth” to describe a wine’s flavour isn’t really helpful, is it?

Well… depends what you want.

This blog was begun on a bit of a lark for an audience of friends when I quit the City and ran away to Burgundy to work my first harvest. Since then the blog has become a rather more serious affair for me, not only because I have committed to pursuing a career in the wine trade myself, but because I learned that a broader network of wine enthusiasts and professionals had picked up on it, and were following it and giving me feedback.

Because of the broader audience I am more careful than ever to double check names, web links, facts, etc., occasionally working with the relevant folks to review my postings before they go up. But – I still am deliberately keeping this a very personal and idiosyncratic blog (strains of “It’s my party…”). I am not, and don’t want to be mistaken for (“fat chance” I hear you mutter) the sort of wine critic that makes or breaks sales of wines. If you are a stranger, think of me as simply an enthusiastic friend who wants to share with you something I think is wonderful and fascinating.

I have had WSET training to Advanced certificate level, I have attended other wine courses and I couldn’t number the tastings, tutored tastings and producer tasting dinners I attended in London the past 8 or 10 years before setting out on my travels last summer and ultimately re-settling here in Portugal. I worked behind the scenes at the International Wine Challenge last year and I’ve had the opportunity to attend press tastings and some of the big en-primeurs where I watched and eavesdropped on a few of The Big Names in wine buying and wine reviews as they worked rooms and bottles. So, I do have a sense of how the professional critics work. And bluntly, I ain’t up to that standard. Don’t know if I will ever grow up to be one, and honestly I’m not even sure if I would want to. They have my deepest respect (mostly).

In a way, I think I don’t want to take it THAT seriously. To me, wine is a pleasure, a real joy, and it is meant for sharing. I absolutely cannot drink alone – not for moral reasons, but because it simply breaks my heart not to be able to share and discuss a wonderful bottle with a like minded friend. The blog is an extension of that impulse.

Back to the matter of technical (or not) tasting notes. Over and over again I have found one person’s banana is another’s vanilla bean, or my cherry is your raspberry. Sensory perceptions can be intensely personal, shaped by what’s familiar to you – Proust and his madeleines. One example that comes to mind is violets. I often encountered the tasting note of violet applied to burgundian reds – which I adore and have tasted widely and never picked up on violet. I finally figured out why last spring when I spotted a clump of violets in my garden, and got down on my hands and knees and buried my nose in them. Violets to me meant a slightly powdery sweet grandmothery scent, something I think I must have learned from violet confectionary and violet eau de cologne or talc. Imagine my shock when I got my nose into that clump and discovered an incredibly earthy scent – floral, but so sensual and earthy as to be nearer civet than rose (and by the way, I picked some and smelled them again inside the house, after washing the mud off my hands, and they still smelled earthy). My immediate reaction to the violets was, I think, Nuits St. Georges. Like the time I sniffed the truffles on my plate and was struggling to identify the scent – wasn’t that a Cigliutti Barbaresco?

I think some people – the major critics apparently among them – have a good “absolute” sense of smell and can recall and identify scents cleanly, and parse out what’s in the blend – one scent doesn’t distract them from another. As if they have tapped into the Platonic eternal ideal Form of what a red currant scent is, un-swayed by memories of the scent of their mother’s garden when they were a child, where the currant bushes were surrounded by mint and bergamot perhaps. It’s a gift.

Coming back down to earth and the sensible world, my tasting notes are deliberately a little vague for these reasons: first, that detailed scent perception, certainly mine, is often intensely personal, and second, that this blog is meant only for friendly guidance – along the lines of “if you like broadly earthy tannic reds, then here’s one you may want to try if you get the chance…” If you want really detailed guidance to flavour notes, value for money and buying or investment advice, please refer to the big name professional critics’ pages.

Or best of all – find a good wine salesman whose preferences you share, and whose palate you trust. There were two firms I dealt with in London, and at both firms, though I knew and thoroughly respected everyone on the selling staff, I ended up working with just one person at each. When we talked over wines we both had drunk, and I realised we were perceiving and enjoying the same qualities and taste sensations in wine, I knew I could trust their recommendations on wines I had never tasted, and be certain of enjoying them. And it worked – I cannot remember the last time I bought a wine I really didn’t like. Also, rather amusingly, in the case of the smaller firm, I got to the point where I could recognise who had picked the wines for that night’s tasting – my salesman or one of his colleagues.

Sunday night as I was leaving Essência do Vinho, I wanted a glass of port to see me off for the night. Someone at the Heritage Wines table poured for me a glass of Romariz Colheita 1988. I tasted it, and then thought, I don’t want to rush this (he’d given me a generous measure) and asked, do you think they will let me walk out of here with a glass full of wine? He said, why not? Silly me, I’m in Portugal… so I wandered out and slowly wended my way up Rua das Flores towards São Bento metro station. The fresh cool air was a slight shock – I hadn’t appreciated just how stuffy and warm it was in the Palácio – and when I paused to sip my wine again, it had improved. Inside what hit my nose was the alcohol and something I think was glycerin, but outside in the fresh air it was more pleasant, some fruit and burnt honey began to come out. 1988 was a fairly rough year in the Douro, but being a bit rough myself at the end of a long night, we were well matched.

So one more factor in wine tasting – climatic conditions in the tasting venue. Maybe like Constable on his paintings, I should begin noting the wind direction and velocity in my notes?

Another of my photos from October visit to Pinhão – this one taken on the hills above Quinta de la Rosa, I think this would be Quinta da Foz land, looking roughly north by northwest. I don’t recall much of a breeze that day…

Portuguese Wines – Day One

Cynthia — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:58:39 +0000

4 March, 2010

Visited Essência do Vinho, a public wine tasting at the Palácio da Bolsa in Porto this evening. As I plan to visit for several evenings, I started gently, visiting some familiar wine makers but tasting wines I’d not yet tried.

First up was Cima de Cortes. See below, my entry in December, I first drank one of their wines whilst in Denmark. Had an interesting conversation with Hamilton Reis, one of the wine makers, about some of the more technical aspects of their viticulture and wine making. More about that another time, as I hope to visit and learn even more.

First I tasted the Chaminé Tinto 2009 – yes, 2009 – it has just been bottled. This is their entry level red, and is a wonderful exuberant fruity wine, no complex mineral or earth or animal notes, just good clean fruit fun. Tasting notes are so incredibly subjective, I try to avoid the name-that-fruit game, but I have to say I tasted blueberries – which I don’t think I’ve encountered in a wine before! The other thing that impressed me was that for such a cheap and cheerful wine it had a great pleasantly persistent full-mouth finish. To get price bearings, their on-line shop has this at a price that works out around €6.50 a bottle.

But then Hamilton pulled out another bottle from under the table, and asked if I liked Touriga Nacional. Yes indeed… for those not familiar, this grape is one of the foundations of Port wine in the north of Portugal, and it is not commonly grown in the south (Cima de Cortes is in the Alentejo, so think due east of Lisbon, give or take). It is known for providing the backbone to long lived ports – power, concentration, complexity, all that good stuff. I have never before had a wine made of 100% Touriga Nacional; this was the 2005. And yes, the wine was powerful, concentrated and complex, also very subtle which maybe is unexpected given the other qualities. The flavours for me were earth and floral – not sweet pretty cute floral, but dark earthy warm floral, think violets. It definitely made me crave steak. For price bearings – this one is at the other end of the spectrum, around €50 a bottle. And yes, for a treat to share with a friend I knew would “get it”, I would spend that money for this wine.

Side bar note – a couple weeks ago I bought one of their whites, the Chaminé Branco, intending it primarily for use in some soup. I opened it, had one sip, then got a phone call, so re-corked it straightaway, and by the time the call was over, I abandoned the soup making for the day. I think it was two days later I finally thought, oops… and went to work on the soup, and the bottle. First off, the flavours were undiminished from the first taste two days prior; granted I re-corked within minutes of opening, but I have known other (more expensive and pretentious) wines to not survive that. Like the tinto, this is an every day wine, cheap and cheerful and fruity and I remember thinking the flavours were surprisingly tropical – didn’t expect that. I just looked it up on their website – it contains Viognier and a little Semillon as well as Antão Vaz and Verdelho. I paid €4 on special for this. And, by the way, the majority of the wine went into a fennel soup, and I drank the last glassful with the soup, and both soup and food pairing were fabulous – and I think fennel is tough to match, I’ve had some really stunningly bad pairings!

Hamilton mentioned that Cortes de Cima were the first vinyard in Portugal with a website and selling their wine by internet – and it’s an excellent site, good blog and lots of technical notes re vintage conditions, wine making techniques, etc. http://cortesdecima.com/

Next, I visited Fonseca’s table – I’ve heard or read it said that this is what the other port shippers drink when they don’t need to be seen drinking their own brands. I tried the Quinta do Panescal 1998 – a single quinta port made when Fonseca do not declare a general vintage – and the Fonseca 10 year old tawny. Both were lovely wines, very elegant. Some people object to ports as being too heavy and cloying – I would suggest trying the Fonsecas before giving up.

Finally, I tasted some more Ramos Pinto wines – I did taste one port, the Lagrima, which is the sweetest style of port made. It is indeed very sweet, but this was a white port, so the flavours are more tropical and honey end of the scale – no deep dark flavours here – which I think makes it all a little easier to bear. I asked about food pairings, instant response was “ice cream” and then, after some thought, “maybe some fruit…” A bit like PX sherry.

But what I really wanted was to try more of their non-fortified wines. In my previous posting I mentioned the Quinta de Ervamoira – nearby is the Quinta dos Bons Ares, which is similarly quite level, but at a higher altitude and on a granite soil, not the usual Douro schist. Grapes from the two are blended to produce the Duas Quintas line of wines (more of which in a moment). First I tried a Bons Ares Tinto 2006 – which blends some Cabernet Sauvignon with Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca (but all from the one quinta). Handsome cranberry colour with very little rim fade. Very earthy nose, the palate very minerally as well as earthy, good acidity but it’s the tannins that come to the fore. I liked it very much. Note that the Bons Ares wines are only available for sale in Portugal (you’ll have to come visit me).

Next I tried two of the Collection wines – 2006 and 2007. These wines blend traditional port grapes (Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca as well as the unidentified “mixture” so typical of the older Douro vinyards) from Quinta de Ervamoira and Quinta do Bom Retiro which is in the Cima Corgo, south of Pinhão. In the 2006, both nose and palate were a balance of earth and fruit notes for me. In the 2007 the fruit comes forward, though my note says not lush juicy. Both have vivid tannins. And the 2006 has hands down the best label I’ve ever seen – the serpent twined around a rather coy and naked Eve, offering her a glass of wine rather than an apple.

Finally, Duas Quintas. I will back up and say I had the basic Duas Quintas Tinto a couple weeks ago at a friend’s housewarming, and it was a treat. He opened the bottle and we tried it, and his eyes lit up, I’m sure mine did too, but we agreed the wine was a bit cold, so he handed the bottle to me and I cuddled it for a good 15 minutes or more. When we tasted again (and again, and… ), it was much more expressive. Tonight at Essência I tried the Duas Quintas Reserva 2007, which has not yet been released. The first impression was the contrast to the Collection in terms of tannins – here they were much more integrated – I had to stop and really think, search in my mouth for a minute, but yes, good tannins, just wonderfully integrated. Again, earth and fruit on the palate, maybe spices in the mix. An incredibly elegant, supple wine, all the elements knit together seamlessly. But the fun thing was, I was given a bit of dark, rather bitter chocolate, and after that, the fruit suddenly leapt to the fore in my mouth. Fascinating.

As mentioned before, Ramos Pinto have an enchanting website, do take a look: http://www.ramospinto.pt

Of course I am unable to take pictures in the wine tasting, and this is not a great photo, but… I know ISO glasses are supposed to concentrate the aromas so you can get the nose better and all that, but I still think the Portuguese have the right idea – thinking back to the tastings I’ve had at quintas, they have always been in generous glasses, which rather says it all for me.

Yes, I’m still here…

Cynthia — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:31:47 +0000

19 February, 2010

For those concerned by my silence, please don’t be – I am settling in here in Gaia, it’s just quiet, practicing my Portuguese and not drinking much at all, and then not worth writing about.

With one fabulous exception which prompts this entry: last night I visited Vinilogia again, and had a glass of heaven on earth, I think – Ramos Pinto’s 10 year old Tawny Quinta de Ervamoira.

You may recall (or re-read below if you don’t!) that on my first visit to Vinilogia I wanted to try tawnies from each region of the Douro – Baixo, Cima and Superiore, but the third I had that day was sort of borderline Cima and Superiore. Subsequently Godfrey Spence (author of The Port Companion and free lance wine educator and writer) suggested this as one to try from the heart of the Douro Superiore. I never did get around to it, as I loathe drinking alone, and haven’t had company (hint hint anyone who wants to visit!).

Yesterday I called a friend from the school where I’ve had my Portuguese lessons, and dragged him to Vinilogia to try this port with me. Oh bliss. Beautiful tawny garnetty colour (not ideal lighting in there for appraising colour, but… ), very smooth palate, very rich concentrated deep dark marmelade and apricot, maybe a whiff of spice? And that wonderful quality which wood aging gives which just knits all the flavours together without clobbering you over the head with “OAK!!!” as can happen in younger dry wines. And the bartender gave us generous measures, bless…

After that, my friend voted we go to the IVDP and carry on tasting there. They always keep a half dozen bottles of port going, one of each type (white, ruby, reservas, tawnies of various ages, LBV, etc.), but every week a different variety and selection of producers. We opted for the tasting of four: a dry white, an LBV, and 10 and 20 year old tawnies.

I will be honest – I had not had much food that day, and that little was at 8:00 am; by late afternoon it only took that full glass of Quinta de Ervamoira to make me a bit dim and vague. I genuinely cannot recall much about these four wines except this: the dry white tasted like potato crisps (and I actually do remember the producer, but they will remain nameless), the LBV was Graham’s I think, post millenium and pleasant, and the two tawnies were nice but not a patch on the Quinta de Ervamoira for pleasure or complexity, not even the 20 year old.

Quinta de Ervamoira has an interesting history and is quite unique: following on from considerable research into sites, production methods and grapes, Ramos Pinto bought this site in the 70’s, in the Douro Superior near Foz Côa, and planted it vertically and mostly in single variety vinyards – both decisions were extraordinary and controversial in the Douro at that time, where vinyards were traditionally planted in terraces running horizontally along the contours of the hills with a blend of grape varieties planted together. After considerable investment in land, research and planting, the entire property was threatened by submersion with the building of a new dam on the Douro. Miraculously, Paleolithic rock paintings were discovered nearby, and ultimately the dam project was cancelled to preserve the archeological site, and with it, Quinta de Ervamoira. The quinta has established an archeological musuem on site.

Do visit Ramos Pinto’s website, it is an absolute delight. http://www.ramospinto.pt

The company was founded in 1880 by Adriano Ramos Pinto who was first an artist, and the company continues the legacy of supporting the arts, using rather charming and risqué Belle Epoque images in their advertising and on some of their wine labels – my favourite being their Collection 2006 (a dry red wine), which features the serpent winding around a naked Eve and proferring her a glass of wine in lieu of an apple. They also have some of the most marvelously poetic and evocative but spot on tasting notes I’ve ever read.

No good recent or strictly relevant photos – really must go up river again soon – so here’s one from October. The train station at Pinhão has a series of panels of azulejos illustrating the harvest, this one showing cestos típicos – cestos being Portugese for pannier, the basket carried on the back.

Brief Update

Cynthia — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:25:51 +0000

Thursday, 31 December 2009

For those kind enough to express concern, yes, I am alive and well and settling into Porto, or more accurately, Gaia, where I now have a flat. But the throes of my language studies, job hunting and general settling-in would not make for fascinating reading, I imagine.

So my very flimsy excuse for writing now is a bottle of wine which has kept me company for three of the past four or five nights (I don’t drink much, what can I say?). Last May I visited Quinta do Casal Branco in the Ribatejo, just south of Almeirim, and wrote about it for the blog (you can find it again in the Portugal folder on left margin). They make quite a broad range of wines, I tasted only about a half dozen back in May. Earlier this week I needed some wine for cooking – and the cook decided she needed some too – and bought a bottle of their 2008 Quinta do Casal Branco, vinho regional Ribatejano Vinho Branco, which is a pure Fernão Pires. It did well in a reduction with a little white balsamic vinegar for a sautéed chicken breast, brussel sprouts and endive dish. Also did well washing down same – how many wines can withstand brussel sprouts, really? Very crisp semi-fruit semi-floral palate, and refreshing acidity. Can’t comment reliably on the colour as I am drinking from a pottery beaker I normally use for tea-drinking, not a wine glass (still awaiting word when, if ever, my things will arrive from England, thankfully I have had this beaker with me on all my travels since June).

Tonight I finished the last two glasses left in the bottle – the first glass washed down a pile of steamed veg over baked potato, cutting nicely through all the butter and parmesan, shame on me, and the second glass has gone even more nicely with a volume of Fernando Pessoa. Admittedly in English – though I will start trying to read some of it in Portuguese, will treat myself to a book next week. Food and wine are cheap here, so more money for books.

Slightly hokey still life – the wine, the book, the british pottery beaker, and a plate and bowl of Portuguese hand made pottery from Viana do Castelo, north of Porto. There is a strong tradition of pottery in this country, and several very distinct regional styles. I shall probably collect a bit of each over time, but this was the most appealing to me for every day staring-up-at-me-from-under-my-food table ware. And it was the most nearly local, which I felt was appropriate.

Happy New Year – Bom Ano Novo

In Which I Drink Some Port

Cynthia — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:26:57 +0000

Thursday, 26 November, 2009

Earlier in the week I wanted to buy a bottle of wine by way of thank you to someone who helped me with getting my tax number and introduced me to an estate agent here. I stumbled into what I mistook for a wine shop in Ribeira, and found instead the most wonderful little pub which offers only ports – over 200 available by the glass, and all strictly single quinta independent producer ports, none of the big shippers’ wines. I needed to be responsible that day, but today I had no obligations, so I returned.

I had glanced briefly at their menu, for lack of a better word, which described a number of tastings that could be arranged – a glass of each type of port, for example (white, tawny, ruby) or vertical tastings of vintages and colheitas, and so on. When I returned, I asked to try three ports, of the same style, but from each of the major regions: Baixa Corgo, Cima Corgo, and Douro Superior. I was curious if I could taste the differences in climate and terrain.

In a way, I didn’t taste what I wanted or expected to, but I certainly enjoyed the wines, they were wonderful. My mistake was twofold: first, I chose ten year old tawnies, which by nature are blends, so though all the wines blended in would be of the terroir, I imagine the aging would mask or change some qualities that might stand out in a single vintage wine. Second, not a mistake, but just a fact of life – there isn’t a quinta really deep in the Douro Superior – the nearest or most different from typical Cima Corgo was a quinta on the Rio Torto, which runs south from Pinhão. So, I may have to repeat this all with rubies to try out my idea of tasting climate and terrain (shame!).

Meanwhile, the wines I tasted were wonderful, and beautifully presented. The bartender gave a lot of thought to selecting the wines for me, offering two choices for my not-quite-Douro-Superior, and I chose the organic one. He then set out three glasses, with a glass of water to the right, and asked if I wanted almonds (warning me they were salted) or chocolates – I chose chocolates, and he set a small dish of bitter dark chocolates on the left. As he poured each wine, he set the bottle on the table behind the glass, and left it there so I could consult it as needed.

The line up was as follows, all ten year old tawnies:

Quinta das Lamelas, bottled 2009, 19.5%. This one is from near Lamego, which is about 15 km south of Regua. Beautiful warm golden tawny colour, slightly paler mid gold rim. The nose was heavenly, it simply SMELLED tawny, like a warm summer day, just too intense and complex to parse out individual scents. It was a pure fruit scent, I definitely did not spot the sort of secondary or tertiary scents like wood, smoke or leather. On the palate, I was more aware of sensations than flavours – it simply expanded in your mouth, had a wonderful backdraft, and wonderful acidity and length. When you are learning to taste wine, you are taught that a wine has good acidity when it makes your mouth water – if you open your mouth slightly and breath in through your mouth, the insides of your cheeks should salivate – that’s acidity. This was a truly mouthwatering wine – wonderful acidity. The only tasting note per se I have is very dark honey. I will also note that after two hours spent pondering and tasting all three wines in turn, I felt I could only finish up one glass and still walk home safely after dark – this is the one I chose to finish.

Quinta de Val da Figueira, bottled 2008, 20%. This one is from Pinhão, it’s actually the next quinta down river from Quinta de la Rosa, which I visited in October. Colour was deeper, darker, more opaque than the previous – it reminded me of a beautiful newly laid and varnished cherrywood floor I had once seen – so a deep red-tawny colour – with a quite narrow clear strawberry rim. Nose was warm orchard and stone fruit, dark honey and a whiff of smokiness. Palate – again fabulous acidity and length. I used to buy apricots that were dried without preservatives and so were much darker and gooier and chewier and far more flavourful than the “preservatived” ones that were still pale orangey and had a decidedly dry texture – this wine was definitely reminiscent of the former. Of the three wines, this one held up against the bitter dark chocolate best – the other two seemed to lighten up when contrasted with the chocolate, this one was in no way diminished by contrast with the chocolate. Later, on repeat tasting, a slight cedar-y aroma came up on the nose, which didn’t entirely please me (but that could just be bad memories of cleaning out the gerbil cage as a child).

Casal dos Jordões, bottled 2009, 20%, this is the one from down the Rio Torto valley, which runs southeast from near Pinhão. Colour similar to prior, deep opaque red-tawny, wider strawberry rim. Nose was initially the most delicate, had the most finesse of the three, later, my last whiff of the evening, it definitely rose out of the glass to meet me – which was a joy! Palate was most complex and concentrated, if the others brought to mind some fruits, this brought to mind the whole fruitcake – intense, melded fruit and spice flavours. Good acidity, but not as overt as the other two, ditto the finish. Overall, this one had more going on for flavour, but less going on for sensation in the mouth.

When I went back for a nose of all three in quick succession, there was a distinct crescendo of density and complexity.

All told, a really enjoyable two hours of wine. As it was late afternoon and no other customers at the time, the bartender and I were talking about the wines and wine making. One factoid that stands out in memory is that there are over 30,000 growers in the region, most of whom supply the big port shippers – and only 37 independent single quinta producers. Vino Logia (this pub) focuses on the ports from these 37 producers, both by the glass in the bar, and for sale by the bottle (so I wasn’t entirely off, it is a wine shop too…). Their website is in French and Portuguese, at http://www.lamaisondesporto.com/ and the pub is on the corner of the Rua do São João and Rua do Infante Dom Henrique, just above the Praça da Ribeira, on the Oporto waterfront.

Friday, 27 November, 2009

For a completely different experience, Friday morning I visited the IVDP – Instituto do Vinho do Douro e Porto. This is the governing body for the port trade and recently merged with another entity responsible for protecting and promoting the broader concerns of the Douro wine DOC.

Every wine that wishes to carry DOC status must be tested and approved by the IVDP – their stamp of approval is that white label secured under the seal of the cork with a specific number that can be traced back, if there are any concerns. Producers must submit samples of all their wines for testing shortly before bottling, and the IVDP also conducts random sampling, both at the producers’ and by buying bottles off the shelves from shops. All testing is conducted blind.

The first sort of testing consists of a great many terribly high tech scientific chemical analyses for sugar and alcohol content, levels of various chemicals, testing for contaminants or micro-organisms, etc. and you peer through a window at a terribly modern laboratory with all kinds of machines and test tubes and white coated scientists.

Then you go round the corner and you see testing done by good old fashioned tasting – although these scientists also are white coated, and the samples are still blind, what you see through the window is a man seated in a rather 90’s office cubicle, with a computer screen before him, a patch of natural white light in which to appraise colour, and a line up of 10 glasses of wine, each numbered. Their job is to confirm the good old fashioned way that the wine is, or tastes like, what it purports to be – e.g. a ten year old tawny, and that it does not taste “off” or faulty even if all the chemical analyses show it shouldn’t. Interestingly, in any given lineup, ten percent of the samples will be wines previously tested by that taster – a master taster reviews their findings for consistency, as a quality assurance review.

After this very brief tour you are offered a tasting of one wine from a selection of five or six possibilities, all from the big shippers. Only, I got lucky and got a double dip – since my first choice had only a thimbleful left in the bottle, my guide allowed me to taste a second one, and I got a proper serving with which to sit and watch a video tour of the Douro and some regional restaurants. It felt very decadent to be sitting there drinking port at 11:30 in the morning…

The first small sample was Fonseca Bin 27 Finest Reserve Ruby. From my very tiny sample it was a deep dark opaque garnet colour, with some precipitation of course from the end of the bottle. Flavour was the apotheosis of strawberry jam, pure and concentrated – and that was a very good thing. It’s possible an entire glass could become cloying – but I would be very willing to try it and see! I could think of a recipe for a chocolate cake that might go well with this, too…

My second proper serving was Sandeman’s Imperial Reserve Tawny. This came straight out of the fridge (first serving of the morning) and the nose was pretty whiffy – it seemed to be all secondary flavours of smoke and wood shavings, and no fruit. Later, having warmed it a bit in my hands, more fruit came up both on nose and palate. It was pleasant, but it probably suffered from the contrast, being consumed less than 24 hours after those three ten year old single quinta tawnies at Vino Logia. On the other hand, I did finish the glass whilst watching the food and travel videos, so it wasn’t bad stuff at all.

The website for the IVDP is in Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish, and there is quite a lot of information on there about the wines and the region generally, as well as the work and role of the IVDP. http://www.ivdp.pt

From Denmark to Portugal

Cynthia — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:58:58 +0000

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

… in one easy bottle.

My last night in Denmark we toasted my next move by drinking a bottle of Portuguese wine – made by a Danish wine maker based in the Alentejo. This was another terrific suggestion from Thomas at Vinoteket – Cortes de Cima 2006 Vinho Tinto, Vinho Regional Alentejo. This was a blend of Syrah, Aragonez (better known as Tempranillo in Spain) and Touriga Nacional (a classic Port grape – I’ve always loved Richard Mayson’s pithy description of it as “deep, dense and focused with cast-iron backbone”). This wine is aged two years, half that time in oak. Red and black fruit, some spice notes, nutmeg came to mind, and tannins that were not so chunky or chewy as in the wines I usually favour – I think the label description used the word velvety, I would go with that – and a very satisfying finish. The oak was not assertive, I think it just worked to meld the flavours a bit, no overt vanilla or any of that nonsense (now you know how I feel about oaky wines!). Wonderful wine, we had a flank steak that night, it was a great combination. This was 99 dkr, which is about £12.

The domaine has an incredibly rich and well-designed website, so I’m not even going to try to recapitulate – take a look, it’s interesting. Thomas recommended a visit to the domaine, he enjoyed it very much himself. Personally I’m fascinated by the concept of having a traditional Danish Christmas lunch in the heart of the Alentejo. http://cortesdecima.com/

Arrived Portugal the evening of the 19^th, spent a couple days in Lisbon, then came up to Oporto Sunday.

Have been busy trying to settle sheer logistics (getting a tax number, a bank account, an english-speaking estate agent and viewing some flats…), but of course first thing I had to walk out the Dom Luis I bridge, and admire the view… rather different from last July’s image.

Besides the autumnal mist, notice above and to the left of the Croft sign that massive five story edifice being constructed into and on the crest of the hill. That will be the Fladgate Partnership’s Yeatman Hotel and Spa, due to open in the coming year. Jamie Goode has written about it recently on his Wine Anorak site, and has some more detailed pictures and information: http://www.wineanorak.com/douro/yeatman.htm

The weekly wine tasting dinners, sponsored by a range of wine firms not just those in the Fladgate Partnership, sound wonderful, as well as the idea of a wine-related spa. Château Smith Haut Lafitte were, I think, the first to go into this, and certainly their Caudalie line of skin care products are excellent. Anyone who has been justifying their wine drinking by pointing to the high levels of anti-oxidants in wine will be pleased to know they do as much good topically applied as imbibed (so it’s not a total loss if you spill some on yourself!). Personally, I’d rather be treading the grapes to get my dose, and I hope my next harvest will be up in the Douro, otherwise I may have to settle for a treatment at the spa when it opens.

So much to look forward to, now I am settling here.

Danish Wine

Cynthia — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:26:21 +0000

Wednesday, 18 November, 1009

Shortly after arriving in Denmark I joined my friends at a wine tasting sponsored by the American Club in Copenhagen. Naturally it featured American wines (and some Chilean), which I refuse to discuss in detail, generally far too high alcohol scorching my mouth and burning off whatever undistinguished flavours the liquids may have possessed. But in the course of conversation I learned that there are in fact wines made in Denmark.

So, I visited Vinoteket, the wine shop here in Gentofte, and asked. As one man was talking to me about Danish wines, his colleague overheard us and a moment later set down a bottle on the counter – apparently it was left over from a tasting the previous night. We tried a glass then and there (I do like this shop!), and it was very pleasant, not an aggressive wine, very soft, round. The producer is Skaersøgaard, who were the first Danish wine makers authorised once the EU permitted Denmark to produce wine in 2000. Their wines have won many awards – including their sparkling (we can’t call it champagne) wine which actually won a Silver Medal at the Effervescents du Monde competition in Dijon in 2008.

I asked him to order some of the white wine for me – if possible the one we tasted, or another one he suggested – and he warned me quantities are minute and he may or may not be able to source it. In the event, they ordered a case, received six bottles only, and I bought two, at 149 DKR, which is about £18 each. (NB – their sparkling wine goes for 395 DKR, or about £50). The description from the Skaersøgaard website ( http://dansk-vin.dk/index.php?cat=1&p=15&pos=5 ) is as follows:

Orion Classic 2008

Regional Hvidvin fra Jylland

Let sommervin lavet af druen Orion. Behagelig næse af hyld, citrus med fyldig indfriende smag. *****5 af 5 stjerner, Vinavisen 2009. Commended, International Wine Challenge, London 2009

Tør. 11% vol 0,75 l

Vejl. udsalgspris: 145 kr.

I think the wine is made purely from the Orion grape – which is a german cross of Optima (itself a cross derived from Riesling, Silvaner and Muller-Thurgau) and Villard Blanc (no longer allowed by AOC regulation, it used to be planted in Bordeaux and Languedoc-Roussillon). The Orion is bred for early maturity (which is true of both the grapes in the vinyard and the wines in the bottle) and disease resistance. I noticed it is also used a bit in English wines.

As best I can figure from on-line dictionaries, their tasting notes are elderflower (hyld) and citrus, and fullbodied (fyldig). I would agree with all of that. Pam made another lovely salmon dinner, this time with a sauce of chopped and reduced tomatoes and cream, and the wine was a nice companion.

So, if you have a chance… do try it, it was lovely.

More Friends, More Food, More Wine

Cynthia — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:20:04 +0000

Sunday, 08 November 2009

Am settled in Denmark for a few weeks visiting my oldest dearest friend since childhood, Pam, and her husband Chris. Two kids are at university, but one is still at home together with the two dogs.

Denmark is cold, damp, and very dark… you can actually feel how much shorter each day is than the prior – something like 15 minutes of light is lost every day. Shiver. Most days are overcast and at least occasionally drizzly, and the landscape is very autumnal – haven’t been able to take any good photos – or rather, I have, but they all look a bit bleak, even when there is good sunlight. And the photos the day it snow flurried are really discouraging – though sadly the snow didn’t show up in the photo, so no point posting those either!

Still, I like the landscape, and would like to see it in summer. My friends’ house is adjacent to a public park, a natural small lake and wetlands area surrounded by woods. There are dozens if not hundreds of waterfowl and seagulls (the seagulls make me a little homesick for Oporto, though the Danish ones aren’t sitting on my windowsill to screech, like the Portuguese gulls did!). Also quite a few blue heron – saw one roosting in a tree, which was a shock!

Pam and Chris have to do quite a lot of entertaining in conjunction with Chris’s work, so shortly after I arrived I was helping Pam prepare for a dinner party for eight. Pam is a brilliant cook, and generally one of the most hospitable people I know, she creates, or rather simply lives every day, in a wonderful ambience. Besides knowing Pam’s home where she grew up, and the family summer home in New Hampshire, her dorm room and post-university flat, I’ve seen the homes she has created for her own family in England, Italy, Switzerland, Morocco, Portugal and now Denmark (Bulgaria is the only one I missed in the past 13 years or so), and the minute I walk in it is home to me, too – I recognise so much of the furniture, books and tchatchkas accumulated over the course of a lifetime, half of which has been spent travelling – it’s an incredible visual history, and a wonderful familiar environment for family and friends, but also fascinating and welcoming for the near-strangers who are entertained each month in the course of business.

This dinner party was, I think, typical – guests were punctual, warmly welcomed by host and dogs (one gentle and curious if intimidatingly massive, the other small, noisy and cheerful [oops – that’s describing each of the two dogs, not meant to be describing Christopher in there !!]). Guests were immediately set at their ease with drinks and nibbles to hand, any necessary introductions smoothly made and conversation spontaneous, warm and easy – much of which I think is contributable to the ambience and setting. If the house were rigidly formal or impersonal or decorated more for show than family life, then it would be much harder for people to relax and open up so quickly. We had just enough time to get to know one another a bit over drinks in the living room before transitioning to the dinner table.

Food and wine: bald list to start…

With drinks in the living room: nuts and olives, spiced shrimp, parmesan garlic crackers and a wonderful brie baked with praline marmelade. Personally I could have made a meal of just the brie, and probably will do for myself one cold and dreary day, with a good book and some wine. The guests were offered drinks if they wished, or red or white wine – and I’ll talk about the wines in a minute.

First course was a tomato, shallot and goat’s cheese tart with a green salad and cranberry dressing, main course was salmon with a sauce of apples and cream served with asparagus and wild rice, and the pud was a marsala pot de crème with an almond cookie and mixed berries served alongside (currants, raspberries and blueberries), and marsala for those who wished to drink the wine with the pud. After dinner coffee and tea was served in the living room with chocolates.

Pam devises her own menus and does nearly all the cooking herself from scratch – e.g. she made her own spiced shrimp and parmesan garlic crackers, the marmelade on top of the brie was homemade from the citrus trees around their house in Lisbon last year – or maybe it dates from the citrus grove surrounding their Moroccan home a few years previously, can’t be sure. I do remember in Morocco a friend of theirs was an italian woman who harvested the lemons from their garden to make limoncello, then gave them a bottle, which was luscious.

The only food offered that she hadn’t prepared herself were the little chocolate dipped almond biscuits that accompanied the pot de crème (and they came fresh from the bakery in the village). Preparations can be a bit fraught at times, for instance she brought home what she thought was a piece of fresh horseradish to grate and use in the sauce over the salmon. After grating and tasting a bit, we concluded it wasn’t really horseradish (only been here two months – command of Danish does not yet extend to the word for horseradish!), so she rummaged through cupboards and freezer and improvised – I think she said there was ginger in there, I’m not sure what the final mixture was, but the dish turned out very well and was served forth graciously – no inkling at the table of kitchen dramas behind the scenes. Later she told the story on herself and brought out the packet of mystery veg to ask the Dane who was present what it was – he confirmed it was not horseradish, though I don’t think we ever found an english word to translate whatever it was.

The wines… before dinner, besides spirits or mixed drinks there were two wines available – a Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages Combe aux Jacques 2007 which was a very pleasant supple fruity wine, and a Chilean Chardonnay Reserva, Leyda Valley. Viña Leyda. The chardonnay was a nice clean wine – no fermentation in oak, and no malo-lactic fermentation permitted either, so it’s very fresh, citrussy without being too tart – there’s a touch of honey in there to keep it from being too sharp or aggressive. Both of these wines sell for about 50 dkr, which works out to around USD $10 or around GBP £6.50 or so – both good candidates for “house wine” for all the entertaining my friends do, as well as for their own routine drinking and cooking consumption.

To get a little perspective – my wine education to date has mostly been at the high end of the old world: a series of tutored tastings of the top burgundies in an intensive one village at a time format, italian feasts designed to showcase the barolos, barbarescos, valpolicellas and amarones of top makers, the only Spanish wine I know is Vega Sicilia (a producer dinner one night and a tutored tasting of their full range across several vintages another time), almost the only rieslings and gewurtztraminers I can recall by both name and taste are Zind Humbrecht (again from a producer dinner, as well as other random tastings), my real introduction to claret occurred when I tasted all seven of the legendary first growth clarets of a single vintage side by side in one night… you get the drift! Lucky me, but it means my palate memory and benchmarks are well beyond my means, so tasting and learning about the more modest end of the market is a bit of a revelation… If I sound wide eyed and astonished that I can really enjoy a wine at this price level, well… I still am! Frankly, I hope I never lose my sense of pleasure at finding a good wine at any price.

With dinner we had a lovely Alsatian riesling (so now I have a second one for my palate memory list), Domaines Schlumberger Riesling Les Princes Abbés 2006, which was quite dry – I’ve forgotten the numbers quoted to me, but it had half or less of the residual sugars of other rieslings I looked at. The dryness and citrus quality of the wine was a good foil to the rich sauce of sautéed apples and cream over excellent salmon. (Actually, I just googled the wine and found the domaine’s own website, and a really interesting tasting note – very technical – take a look: http://www.domaines-schlumberger.com/riesling-les-princes-abbes-2006,en-45023.html )

Pam is very lucky – and I have been too! – that she has an excellent wine shop in the village, Vinoteket. I have had occasion to work with all three of the sommeliers there to pick wines for Pam’s entertaining, and they have all been patient, knowledgeable and just plain fun to talk with. And they have all had a bottle handy for a tasting every time I’ve visited. Take a look at their website – even if it is in Danish and you can’t actually read most of it, the wines are universally comprehensible and they have a good and interesting range: http://www.vinoteket.dk

There is another dinner party tomorrow night, and we’ve chosen a very promising looking wine for that, also the gentlemen at Vinoteket have ordered some Danish wine for us to try, should arrive later in the week, so look for a report on that soon, too.

I do love travelling, and I’ve been so lucky on that score the past year or two, and boy I do love good food and wine… all of which would be not nearly so much fun without the wonderful people, old friends and new, every stop of the way. Despite some troubles the past year or more, I have been incredibly fortunate on this side of things.

Always try to conclude a posting with some evocative image… so after all, one landscape photo taken out in the woodlands / marshlands near by, very autumnal…

Very much a drives-you-back-to-the-fireside-with-a-glass-of-red-wine kind of image.

Friends, Food and Wine

Cynthia — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:51:34 +0100

Saturday, 24 October, 2009

All my things are packed and in storage, the house is up for rent, and Thursday the 22^nd I said farewell to England and headed to Belgium. In Bruges I met up with Paul, one of the trio of Belgians who had been staying in the gite at Domaine Anne Gros during the harvest, and Sharon, an australian woman in the wine trade who also stayed at the gite, whom I met only on the last day.

It being about 16:00, clearly a glass of wine was in order, and we found the tiny but charming Est Wijnbar (www.wijnbarest.be), climbed the near vertical stairway to the first floor and settled to review the wine list. Whilst Paul was rounding up three copies of the full list, I glanced at the short list of current recommendations posted on every table, and was very pleased to see Casal Branco’s rosé on their top pick list. (See my entry in May about the visit to the estate in the Ribatejo, north of Lisbon.)

In the event, we drank a Pfalz Riesling 1996 [details to follow] which was wonderful – a very lemon curd quality to me – very tangy and fresh and crisp, but with that slightly buttery unctiousness on the palate – the malo lactic clearly worked!

From there we wandered on through the twilit town, Paul giving us a bit of a scenic tour – and Bruges is astonishingly scenic, every inch of it charming and lovely. We wandered over bridges and canals, through parks, past churches, down cobbled streets past countless chocolate shops and finally to the B&B where they were staying – very charming (my hotel we will ignore – central and clean, but an utterly charmless business hotel, teddy bear on the pillow notwithstanding, ugh!). Sharon ran upstairs to fetch a bottle she had brought from Burgundy, and Paul borrowed glasses from the landlady (he had a corkscrew on him, wise man). We backtracked to a park with some stone tables and benches and laid out our spread – a baguette purchased in Bruges, two varieties of goat’s cheese I had bought in Portugal and carried home to England then brought on with me to Bruges, and Sharon’s bottle of Nuits St. Georges, Les Demodes, Domaine Jean Pierre Bony 2007 – she had stayed at the domaine before coming to Anne Gros’ and knew the wine maker well.

This particular vinyard, Les Demodes, is at the top of the hill, last one before the woods, and is the last Nuits St. Georges vinyard up there before you cross the line north into Vosne Romanée, just above Aux Malconsorts. The wine was excellent, maybe not possessed of the latent power to give it the long and complex life you would expect of a premier cru, but coming out of the villages part of the vinyard (the strip closest to the woods) it had wonderful balance and flavours, and did fine by me – warming me nicely, sitting there on a stone bench in a chilly park after dark in Bruges in October.

Food and wine finished we returned the glasses to the landlady, and Sharon turned in, but Paul and I carried on for dinner. We backtracked to a wine bar and restaurant we had passed earlier – through the windows I had seen an open fire on a raised hearth that I found irresistable. I think my body is in shock and denial, going from 30° and blazing sun on the beach or in the mountains of Portugal to cold and damp and dark and about 9° in Belgium in less than ten days.

After thawing out my hands in front of the fire, to the amusement of the other diners, Paul and I settled down to serious considerations. I entrusted the wine choice to him, as his knowledge of domaines and makers, particularly in Burgundy, is encyclopedic. We opted to share an entrecôte, his share blue, mine à point, and he ordered a Marsannay 2002, Domaine Phillipe Charlopin-Parizot. This wine is made from vines in the Montchenvoy climat, which is considered one of the finest lieux-dits of Marsannay. And it tasted it, stunning, I would never have imagined it came from Marsannay, would have guessed Nuits St. Georges. The steak was accompanied by jacket potatoes, wrapped in foil and roasted in the open fire. Noting that Paul had finished his, the host kindly offered seconds which were gratefully received and enjoyed. I’ve never known a restaurant offer seconds!

Thoroughly enjoyed wine, food and company all afternoon and evening long, and Paul and I were the last to leave this little restaurant. If you are in Bruges, find it – not only for the food and wine, but for the excuse to wander and enjoy the town, away from the main market place and all: Heer Halewyn, Walplein 10.

And then I slept off all of that, and started again on Friday… met up with Sharon and Paul in the morning, had a good wander along the Coupure canal, picking out dream properties for Paul to buy in Bruges, and then refreshed ourselves at a café where we could sit beside the canal basking in the sun, with chardonnay (Sharon), beer (Paul), and hot chocolate (me… what can I say, I don’t have a strong head for alcohol to begin with, and after five days of packing and cleaning, and near total food and sleep deprivation, I had to pace myself!). The waiter was visibly shocked by my order, but managed to find some hot cocoa.

We then met up with Christiaan and Martine, the couple who also stayed at Anne Gros’ gite in September, and had done some harvesting at Domaine Lucie et August Lignier in Morey St. Denis. We stopped at a tiny and very old (the oldest?) pub in Bruges for a glass of beer. I tried it, but it was too bitter for me. After that, we went on to lunch at Refter, Molenmeers 2 ( http://bistrorefter.com ).

Sharon and Paul took control of the wine list, Martine and Christiaan explained the menu to Sharon and me, and I just thoroughly enjoyed every minute and mouthful. I started with some croquettes made with tiny shrimp in a creamy sauce, and then had a perfect cod filet on a bed of snow peas, with whipped potatoes on the side – both dishes which I was told were very typically belgian. Paul started with the largest oysters I think I have ever seen.

We tried three different bottles of wine – first Rey Santo Rueda by Javier Sanz 2008 – was very good, cut through and complemented the creamy croquettes for me. See his website for more detailed tasting notes: http://www.jsviticultor.com/index.php?producto=1573528&section=catalogo&pagina=producto&idioma=en

Second wine was from the Loire, Reuilly Clos des Messieurs 2007 Domaine Lafond, which was generally agreed to be the star of the three choices. So much so I don’t seem to have made any notes about the third wine, actually, and I can’t even recall what region it came from. It was white…

From there, we staggered across the street to a lovely hotel and restaurant and out onto their terrace alongside the canal for coffee and sunshine. Five happy well fed wine lovers: Christiaan, Sharon and Paul standing, Martine and Cynthia seated.

Martine and Christiaan had to return home, to the south of Belgium, to rescue children from school or something, I admit I went back to my hotel to sleep off this meal, and I think Sharon and Paul went on to another pub or wine bar.

At 20:00 Sharon and Paul and I re-convened for another fabulous meal at Den Dyver, Dijver 5 ( http://www.dijver.be ). This restaurant is known especially for making and pairing all its foods with regional Belgian beers – luckily for me, they also will pair each course with a wine, as I really cannot bear beer (I’m sorry Paul! I tried!).

The most fascinating taste sensation of the evening for me was the aperitif – imagine a kir royale, but instead of cassis they used a liqueur made from hops, called Fleur de Bière. Being from Kent, which was always the heart of the hops growing, drying and marketing in England, I couldn’t resist trying it. The liqueur did not noticeably change the colour of the champagne – and I was hard put to it to describe the flavour. Sharon and Paul tried it and both instantly said quinine. I’ve never had a G&T so I would never have spotted that. This aperitif was lovely, I recommend you try it if you get the chance. I was a little afraid the liqueur might have that bitterness that puts me off beer, but it does not. We were told the liqueur is only available commercially, within the restaurant trade, but the maitre d’ kindly gave us the information to try to source it, as Paul has many contacts in the trade. With any luck, some day you may be able to try it chez moi.

There followed another fabulous meal. I did things a little backwards, and started with a game paté which was excellent and also rather beautifully presented – one large finger of paté was atop a puddle of fig conserve and in turn topped with a finger of wholemeal nut bread, and set at an angle to that was another finger of bread topped with the paté. This was served with a Las Niñas Syrah, a chilean wine from the Colchugua Valley, I’m afraid I didn’t catch the vintage. Very supple, black and dark red fruit, slightly compotey, and muted spice notes, it almost felt like a merlot. For me it was too soft to really work with the paté, I would have liked something more tannic and assertive, but it was a pleasant wine, and I did enjoy it. I looked up the wine on the internet, and the domaine is an interesting one, have a look: http://www.vinalasninas.cl/

The next course was fish, a perfectly cooked very tender bit of brill, some roasted whole new potatoes, and some excellent fennel and snow peas. Alongside the food was a stripe of a tomato coulis which was made with a belgian beer, and gave it a flavour like the rouille used in bouillabaise – that very savory orangey brown sauce of garlic, saffron, olive oil and cayenne. Really lovely. The wine was Verdicchio di Matelica La Monacesca, from Fattoria la Monacesca in the Marche, again I missed the vintage. Very good with the fish, and Sharon enjoyed it as her aperitif, and I think Paul enjoyed it when we let him have a sip of ours…

We were too full to have a third course, just sat there finishing all the various glasses of wine and beer on our table… and then staggered home to our respective lodgings.

Many thanks to all of you who made my stay in Bruges so wonderful, but especially to Paul, for being such a marvellous guide to all things belgian, wine and food related, and for letting me nick his photos to use in this blog entry!

Closing image – Bruges by night, standing on a bridge over canal.

Pinhão Day 2

Cynthia — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:37:26 +0100

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

Another gloriously sunny day, warm but not quite as hot as yesterday, a good breeze helped to keep things a little more comfortable than yesterday.

Had the tour of the wine making process at Quinta de la Rosa, beginning at the stone lagares (wading pools) where the grapes are trodden (after sorting and de-stalking). These are also fitted with a mechanism for doing the remontage – imagine a steel bar across the width of the lagares on tracks so it can be drawn and positioned over either of three lagares. The bar is rigged to draw up the wine into the bar and spray it back down over the cap, forcing the cap back down a bit to extract more colour and tannins. After the wine has fermented partially (leaving a lot of natural sugars), the aguardente (a grape brandy of 70% alcohol) is blended with the must in the lagar to arrest the fermentation – hence the combination of high sugar content but also high alcohol levels of ports. Then the whole lot is tranferred to stainless steel tanks for final pressing, and then the wine is run off into a variety of oak barrels (small like the burgundians), pipes (barrels of typically 550 litres, used for tawnies and potential vintage ports) and balseiros (immense standing barrels to hold 40,000 to 100,000 litres – used for rubies, typically) in the armazem (cave or store room) downstairs.

Two things about Quinta de la Rosa – one is, as an independent quinta, they age all their ports in the Douro, at the quinta – no tankers trucking it all down to Gaia in the spring after harvest like Taylor’s et al. Thinking about our access to the lagares and then going down a ladder into the armazem, it must be built into the hill on three sides, if not totally underground – so cooler conditions than many who age wines in the Douro above ground. Second, perched in between the immense pipes were a half dozen smaller casks. You may have bought a case of name brand port to put down for your child or godchild the year it’s born – the Berqvists MAKE a designated lot of port with the name and birth year of the grandchild painted in beautiful calligraphy on the cask end, which will rest in the armazem till time to bottle. How wonderful.

Another type of container for aging the port are balões – there were none at Quinta de la Rosa but I spotted a nice pair as I was walking through Pinhão:

These concrete tanks are also known as mamas, ginas or lollabrigidas. I’m sure you can see why… who said the Portuguese don’t have a sense of humour?

After the tour of the wine making process, I had another wander round some vinyards – this time the ones nearest the house, Vale Grande, for starters. The pruning and training of the vines is exquisite:

At first glance it looks as if one vine is trained all along the lower wire. In fact, from each vine trunk one cane is bent to the right and tied down along the lower wire – and the cane is cut just abutting the next vine. From these canes, pairs of shoots are trained up between the upper wires in overlapping V formations.

Here is a more detailed shot:

Hopefully you can see what I am talking about. It really is meticulously done, and beautiful to behold.

And, of course… my trip would not be complete without…

The cutest little tractors you ever did see. I mean tiny – that one with the little red wagon behind it would fit inside the cab of a french tractor. These things are necessarily miniature here, as they are designed to work in between rows of vines, and keep a low centre of gravity, which is much safer on these steep hills than the very high vine-straddling french models. The tractors are used for ploughing and spraying only, all pruning and harvesting are done by hand – and that is true throughout the Douro. The landscape just doesn’t permit any alternative.

To the left is a miniature bulldozer – for sculpting and maintaining the taludes (the angled banks between vine plateaus) and doubtless access roads too. Yesterday I was thinking that vinyard maintenance here is a sort of triathlon – not only are there the actual vines to maintain all year round, but the landscaping and road and drainage works must also need year round attention.

I went for a walk into Pinhão, then across the bridge and along the south shore of the river, opposite Quinta de la Rosa. From the bridge I got a good photo of the area where I was walking yesterday:

In the centre you can just about see two white buildings – the one on the right says Calem – another port shipper (see Turista entry from July). The Calem family used to own Quinta de Foz, which basically is that hillside vinyard. On top of the middle shoulder of hill above those buildings you might just barely be able to make out another house against the trees behind – Casa Vedeal – which is part of Quinta de Foz. Yesterday I walked up past the two small white buildings and then zig zagged up that hill along the patamares, walking back and forth from south-facing to east- to north-facing sides (the right-hand folds of hill in this picture) all the way up to Casa Vedeal. And back down again. The very first picture posted on yesterday’s blog was taken from most of the way up that hill, looking south to the opposite bank of the river.

When I got to the south bank myself this afternoon, I had a marvellous view of Quinta de la Rosa:

Above the two long red roofs you see the line of six windows with black shutters – that’s the guest house – my room was the third window (actually french door) from the right. To the left of the roofs are two small houses that are let to larger groups. Under the roofs are the lagares and presses, and below them are the cellars where the wines are stored, which extend under the two guest houses as well.

The family’s own house is a bit further downriver, to the left of the buildings above:

The beautifully trained vines described above are from the patamares just below the house. If I am understanding the information sheet in my room correctly, that vinyard above the house, tucked into the fold of the hill, is the Vale do Inferno, and was planted by the great grandfather of the present generation owner before the First World War.

Still further down river are some wonderful and very steep socalcos:

Looking at the hills all day, and at the photos again this evening, I keep thinking of the challenges of managing the harvest from the different microclimates. Because of the height of the hills, you get very different conditions from top to bottom, due to sheer altitude (up to 450 metres at Q de la R). Then there’s the fact a single row of vines can wrap around a hillside from south facing over the river (think about the mists rising from the river in the autumns, and the varying degrees of effect from bottom to top of the vinyards above) to east facing to north facing (differing degrees of sun all around the curve of the hill, effects of proximity to the facing hillsides). And then the fact that most vinyards are a mixture of grape varieties – so each vine reacting differently, according to the inherent qualities of the variety – greater susceptibility to heat, to damp, etc. etc. Look at the folds of hills and the shadows cast (hours of sunlight on any given vines), just in the photo above, or the first photo posted yesterday. Mind boggling.

Going back to the first photo of the quinta, the left most tall skinny pine marks the eastern end of a long, narrow slightly curved pool built into one of the patamares – where I had a lovely swim to cool off after all the walking, and then dozed in the sun on a long deck chair. Bliss.

Farewell Pinhão

Wednesday, 14 October 2009

Was up and out and walking to the train station this morning at 7:00 am – still deep blue night skies but only two planets showing and the crescent moon on its back above the hill opposite my window. As I walked, I could hear fish jumping in the river and a rooster crowing from somewhere above Pinhão.

Coming back in the train, paying closer attention to landscape – you can definitely see the change from the Cima Corgo to the Baixa Corgo – in the Cima Corgo around Pinhão it is visibly drier, rockier, and the plants besides vines and low scrub are really only olive and pine trees. Once past Corvelinhas, the village that more or less marks the dividing line between the two, though you are still in hills, it all feels much more green, there is a lot more land that is simply forest – a mixture of deciduous and conifer. Much more fertile – the visible effects of the generally higher rainfall in that area. Fascinating. This photo taken Monday from the train when we first came down to the Douro, so Baixa Corgo – I think if you compare this to all the other photos of the area around Pinhão you can see what I mean.

As with my first visit to Burgundy, things I have read about and understood intellectually now made visible make so much more sense to me. It’s like connecting the dots – seeing all these things I’ve been told affect the flavour and quality of the wine, now I can really comprehend the connections. When I drink the wine now, I picture the landscape.

At the train station in Pinhão are wonderful azulejos – the tile panels painted with a variety of scenes, mostly to do with the harvest, and inside there is a little museum like display of photos and texts about the vinyards and history of the region. I copied down this wonderful quote – Miguel Torga is the nom de plume for a 20^th century portuguese writer of poetry, short stories and a diary. He died in 1995, no date was indicated on the placard with this quote. I think this is wonderfully apt.

Diario III

Pinhão, September 25^th. Impossible to imagine a more beautiful thing in the world than the Valley of Pinhão when the first autumn colours visit the place. The people take a look from the top and seem not to be on earth anymore.

They lean forward over a precipice of colours and, deep down, see two rivers which still their thirst with one another. But there has never been dropped a line about this, no legend embedding such splendour, never ever a poet travelled through with his lyre.

Another Change of Scene

Cynthia — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:05:39 +0100

Monday, 12 October 2009

Guess where I am at last?

In Pinhão. I took the train from Oporto, which wound north, then east, then back south to the Douro, then east right along the river to Regua, then on to Pinhão. Absolutely spectacular journey, recommend it highly.

A little Douro geography lesson for those who aren’t familiar… wish I had a map to patch in here, will work on that.

From Oporto to Regua, as the crow flies (NOT as the river winds) is roughly 43 miles, to Pinhão about 55, to Pocinho about 80 miles. The vinyard district for grapes for port (and increasingly for unfortified Douro wines as well) begins about 38 miles from Oporto, the eastern side of a mountain range called Serra do Marão. From there to Pocinho there are three distinct regions, first the Baixo Corgo, then the Cima Corgo, then the Douro Superior. Baixo and Cima mean lower and upper, or below and above, the Corgo River. Strictly the Cima Corgo begins a bit further east than the point where the Corgo River comes into the Douro at Regua.

The difference in regions is primarily climate and to a lesser degree terrain, which of course hugely affects the grapes and therefore the style of wine that can be made.

The Baixo Corgo is in the shadow of the Serra do Marão, so it is the coolest and wettest area, and very fertile. As you continue east the rainfall drops pretty dramatically (weather systems typically work from west to east, off the Atlantic) and the land is progressively both drier and stonier (less fertile). If you are familiar with the climate descriptions used to describe wine regions, then the Baixo Corgo has almost an Atlantic climate (wet, mild, not too dramatic fluctuations in temperature either winter to summer or even day to night), the Cima Corgo has a Continental / Mediterranean climate (hot summers and days, cold winters and nights, less rainfall generally), and the Douro Superior is the eastern end, up to the border with Spain, and has a more extreme Continental climate, with drought a serious problem; also sheer access was a problem until the past twenty or thirty years.

Which translates in wine style terms to: Baixo Corgo is high volume, lower intensity of flavour – good for creating a lighter, simpler style of wine or for blending and balancing more intense grapes from elsewhere; think Ruby and basic Tawnies. Cima Corgo is greater intensity and complexity of flavour – the heart of the region, all the major producers have properties here – think of your top end rubies, aged tawnies, your vintage and LBVs (late bottled vintage). The climate of the Douro Superior is of course the most stressful – which creates the most powerful intensity of flavour, but in small quantities, so again, think of your vintage and LBV ports, and blending into your premium tawnies.

Pinhão is the heart of the Cima Corgo. Now you know where I am and why.

Arrived about noon, had lunch and some sleep (almost no sleep in Oporto the past couple nights between traffic, howling dogs and my own thoughts once the other things woke me up in the middle of the night), and then set out to explore.

I am staying at Quinta de la Rosa, about 2 km walk west from Pinhão train station, on the north bank of the Douro. Very charming accomodation, do stay there if you can; it’s right on the river. From the Quinta I basically started walking uphill to the north (well more towards the sky than towards the north it seemed).

Met my first grapes very shortly:

I was told Quinta de la Rosa started their harvest in mid-August and finished about three weeks ago, so these must have been unripe at harvest time and left behind. So I had no compunction about tasting them – wonderfully intensely sweet and flavourful. These were about the size of blueberries and the bunch was not very tightly packed – all the bunches I saw were quite loose, not like most pinot noir at all. Pips and skin made a higher percentage of the mouthful than the flesh, but if you are willing to chew a bit, the pips and skin are good to eat too, very flavourful. Often with pinot noir I found the pips almost jawbreaking and gave up and spat them out, or if I did chew through them, found them a bit bitter. I have to say, I sampled a fair few grapes today, and all of them were thoroughly edible, though some were less intensely flavoured than this first lot. No idea re varieties. Tomorrow I will attend the tour and tasting at 11:00 am, and hopefully learn more. [Learned that this vinyard is a mix of varieties, so still can’t be sure.]

All of this area is mountainous – what you see in that first photo is what I am surrounded by here. The vines are planted on terraces, called patamares. For centuries pre-phylloxera, the terraces were built with dry stone retaining walls, as much as anything as a way to use up all the stone excavated to create the flat terraces, and there were only a couple rows of vines per terrace – one, two, maybe three at most.

That is actually part of the view from the window of my room, to the hillside opposite. You can see the wonderful old stone walls, and the vinyards, and olive trees as well.

When the vinyards all had to be torn out and re-planted post phylloxera the cost of labour had risen somewhat since prior centuries, so other methods were adopted. First they made broader terraces, called socalcos, of 10 or 20 rows of vines on an incline between retaining walls, like these on the right side:

By the mid 20^th century labour costs had risen further, so stone walls were out of the question, and they returned to the narrow and flat patamares, with two rows of vines, but built atop steeply angled banks (taludes), not walls – god bless bulldozers. Erosion can be a problem, as can weed control but… beats building miles of stone walls.

Another nice view of a talude:

Which brings me to schist. You want stoney soil for your grapes? This is stone heaven. Schist is a generic term for any sort of rock that forms (and breaks up) in layers (think about mica) – here it is clay based, and quite acidic. And wandering around, it is mostly rock underfoot, there is some clay dust, and I saw one or two patches of slimey very clay silt-ey mud on the roads, but most of all, it’s rock. And a good thing about rock in any vinyard is heat retention and reflection back up to the grapes, aiding ripening and minimising the impact of temperature swings from day to night.

More schist under the vines. But look carefully – see to the left of the wooden post a dark blue triangular bit? That is the broken stump of a blue schist post – another piece of it is lying just to the right of the foot of the vine. This type of schist is very very hard, and is most common at the far eastern end of the Douro. I saw hundreds of these stone posts throughout the vinyards, though as they break they are being replaced with wood.

Here, an intact blue schist post, and alongside it a vine which was cut down, and a new spur trained up from the stump – string was taped to the stump and then tied up to the first wire of the trellis, and the cane trained up along the string till it was long enough to be caught in the trellis wires. Beyond, a nice eyeful of patamares.

Here, baby vines probably only a year or two old – notice the deep depressions dug out around them, called caldeiras. These collect and channel water down to the roots of the young vines as they become established. Given the dry climate, new vines are watered by hand during the first few years to give them a fighting chance until their roots are deep, broad and strong enough to find sufficient water for themselves.

And when they grow up to be big and strong…

In another year or so like the first vine on the left, and after that, in about 20 years’ time, like the next one along the row. The vines here are trained much higher than in Burgundy – three rows of wires here, the bottom wire is below my hip, the middle around my second rib counting up from the waist, and the top wire around my shoulder or even chin in some cases (I’m 5’6” or 1.65 m). Versus in Burgundy, generally two rows of wires, first around knee height and the upper wire was under my armpit – I could lean over the top and cut on the other side of a row if necessary.

Finally, a view from halfway up this hill, looking north by east towards Pinhão on the banks of the river. Those are vine wires across the middle of the photo by the way, not cable car cables!

Complete Change of Scene

Cynthia — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:48:20 +0100

Sunday, 11 October 2009

After a day in Lisbon and three in Oporto, and still no leads on job front, betook myself to the beach today – Vila do Conde, north of Oporto on the Atlantic coast. And in case you can’t tell from the picture – around 30 degrees and cloudlessly sunny. So glad I packed the bikini, even if the business attire was all a waste of space in the pack…

Just a thought…

Cynthia — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:44:53 +0100

Wednesday, 30 September 2009

If you’ve enjoyed the blog… if you’re in the wine trade… and perhaps looking to hire! I would love to hear from you – click on the hyperlink on my name above and send me an e-mail.

I am looking for employment in the wine trade, for preference in Portugal or France. My greatest interest is the viticulture, but I have a range of skills from a business background which would be applicable in the office, in tourism, you name it.

Next week I go to Portugal for 9 days, to perform reconnaissance on my chances of employment in Oporto, and whilst there I hope to get up to Pinhão and finally see some of these legendary quintas and vinyards for myself.

Meanwhile, to tide us all over till then, another picture from last July in Gaia… love the sense of the height of the hill from here. Wouldn’t it be nice to walk up that hill every day to work? Sigh…

Harvest Postscript

Cynthia — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:19:51 +0100

Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Collected my pay from Anne Saturday night, and later sat staring at the euros and finding it hard to connect the dosh with the work. Somehow the friendships formed during the harvest and the memories of events both in and out of the vinyards are a far more real and tangible reward to me than the pile of euro notes in my hands.

One note, I hope comes to the attention of the right person: in reviewing the blog statistics the other night I found I was getting referrals from Mark Squires’ chat page on erobertparker. To the gentleman who kindly posted the link to my blog and referred folks here – thank you! I am not a subscriber, so was unable to email you through that site to let you know, but that was very kindly done, thank you.

Back in Old Blighty now, have already met up with Simone again at a tasting in London yesterday, and will resume trying to find permanent employment in the wine trade. I imagine the blog will be quiet for a little while here, till I have work – or a bottle of wine! – worth recording.

I will close this little chapter with a random but pretty image – last Thursday when Paul and I went over to Morey St. Denis to meet his friends at Domaine Lucie et August Lignier, we drove on a little chemin along the top of the hill. This view would be from the top of Les Rouges I think, and the Chateau du Clos de Vougeot would be just offstage left. Notice grapes not yet harvested. Love the heat/humidity haze over the distance and the sense of hillside running down. And the thought of all those lovely hectares (and by extension, hectolitres!) of pinot noir…

Harvest Day Six

Cynthia — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:08:55 +0100

Saturday, 19 September, 2009

Rained overnight, and then started showering again as we went up to the Haute Côtes de Nuits vinyards, over near Concoeur. The plateau up there dead level and an area of mixed production – vines, all the currants and raspberries and strawberries for Fruirouge, and some other fields that were ploughed up at the moment but I think are used for cereals.

We harvested like madmen in that rain, and when it stopped after about an hour, you could distinctly hear the slowdown of secateur snipping. Again mud and weeds clinging in massive quantities to our boots – we were issued parkas and wellies before we left the domaine. But as yesterday, it all lifted and cleared and by lunch time the sun was out and we were down to only essential layers when we finished up after lunch.

I asked whether the rain the past few days would affect the grapes much, and was told no – it had been dry enough long enough over the season and at this stage the grapes were ripe enough that the showers the past few nights and odd shower during the day would make no difference to the quality of the harvest.

And just as last year, suddenly we were all done, that was it, and I felt utterly bereft. There is still the Haute Côtes Blanc Cuvée Marine to get in, but that won’t be ready for another week – Anne expects to harvest it next weekend, the 26^th or so, but I cannot stay for that.

Soggy but slowly drying coupeurs on the haute côtes mid morning:

Harvest Day Five

Cynthia — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:45:39 +0100

Friday, 18 September, 2009

Jan van Roekel joined us today at Domaine Anne Gros and did a day’s harvesting; I know he will spend the weekend at Domaine David Clarke in Morey St. Denis, do look at his site for his photos and more on his perception of the harvest across the region: http://www.burgoholic.com

We resumed harvesting today after four days off, beginning with the Bourgogne Blanc, a small parcel to the east of the N74 and railway lines. Overcast but mild, there had been rain overnight but the ground was firm, and we got the grapes harvested in good time, just two hours I think, pausing only to wave to the commuters in the trains passing by.

Then to the Chambolle Musigny, Combe d’Orveau. I’ve drunk this wine several times this week, and it is lovely, it may be my favourite of hers. Beautiful vinyard in the tail end of the combe, the entire parcel from this break back to the end is hers, just over one hectare.

You can see there was still some high fog and overcast (about 10:15 I think), but that all burned off by mid day, and after lunch it was really very warm and blazing sun, so much so that after an hour or two I felt a little sick and dizzy and switched teams to harvest in the shadow that was beginning to creep down the southwest side of the combe. Also the ground here was softer and muddier, and with all the herbage underfoot, you found yourself with a kilo of mud and weeds clinging to each boot… slows you down a bit! Grapes in good condition, some pourriture but again nothing like last year, and that whiff of that lovely smokey scent occasionally, also thyme.

There was noticeably more insect life here – I suppose with the patch of grass in front and the woods all around, also Anne letting things grow between vines, it’s a cosy ecosystem for the little darlings. After lunch I sat with a friend leaning against the wall of the domaine in the sun, and we were discussing this, when he said, “as a matter of fact…” and reached to pull an insect out of my hair. I noticed one on his collar. He spotted another tangled in my plait… all I could think of was the National Geographic specials of the baboons in Africa picking fleas off one another!! Later in the afternoon I startled the crew with a small shriek and begged the man in the next allée to harvest the grapes for me from his side – my side of one entire vine was blanketed with a cobweb and there was a seriously huge ugly translucent yellowey white spider in the middle. He laughed till he saw the spider himself, and then cut the grapes as quickly as he could and from as great a distance as possible! I really cannot bear spiders…

Jan and I and the three Belgian guests from the gite all had dinner together at Chez Guy in Gevrey Chambertin. Excellent meal and service, wonderful company and good wines. At least two of the men had escargots for their starters and said they were the best they’d had yet, and I had a lovely composed salad of lightly cooked mini vegetables with generous shavings of summer truffles. The truffles were so fragrant, and in an odd reversal, I was trying to place the nose of the truffles amongst some wines I had had, possibly mature Mascarello nebbiolos, a Cigliutti barbaresco, or some Lisini pre-phylloxera wines I once tasted (interestingly no french wine came to mind).

We had three wines with dinner, the first bottle 2006 Bourgogne from Bachelet, and the second 2002 Gevrey-Chambertim from Serafin, both excellent, real pleasures. After that, I said I couldn’t possibly have more, I had to wake up and harvest the next day, and shook my head when the sommelier offered a fresh third glass. I didn’t hear what they ordered, and when the bottle was placed on the table, it was turned so I could see only the first letter C of the name – but I recognised the script instantly – Domaine Georges Roumier’s Chambolle Musigny 2006 – and begged the sommelier to bring me that fresh glass after all… of course we were drinking it too young, but as always with Christophe Roumier’s wines, a sensual and complex mouthful. Bliss… I took the cork home for souvenir (though I did NOT sleep with it under my pillow as my friends expected! But only because I was afraid of losing it). Nice end to the day.

Harvest 4 Days after Day 4

Cynthia — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:10:38 +0100

Thursday, 17 September, 2009

[late postings – apologies – power issues with british laptop versus french electricity, now resolved!]

Yesterday had a pleasant surprise – Jan van Roekel called and stopped in for lunch, he has been visiting various vinyards, working at some. All indications from his many sources are that the harvest is a good one. Elodie came in while we were chatting, and said Anne is very pleased as well – probably less than 2% of the grapes from her own vinyards were discarded from the sorting tables, so little pourriture, and so wonderfully ripe. The harvest was compared to 2005, maybe better.

Rained over night a bit, morning foggy, walked into Nuits St. Georges to fetch gougères for breakfast, a bit eerie wandering through the vines, could only see maybe a kilometre ahead around 8:00 AM – name that vinyard if you can!!

On the way back it had lifted a bit and I could see about 3 km by 9:00. It did finally lift altogether and turn into a warm if hazy sunny day by noon or so.

Don’t think I have mentioned, but staying in Anne’s gite are a trio of Belgians on holiday. Well, semi-holiday. Christian and Martine have done a couple days’ harvesting work at Domaine Lucie et August Lignier in Morey St. Denis, and today Paul and I drove up to see them at lunch time – Kellen Lignier had finished her harvest that day, and extended the invitation to the celebratory lunch to Paul, whom she knows from previous domaine visits, and Paul kindly brought me along too.

Celebrations in full swing, Kellen decked in a fabulous vine wreath on her head and huge smile, she is very pleased with her harvest.

After visiting her cellars under Castel de Tres Girard all four of us went up to Gevrey Chambertin and took a walk up along Clos St. Jacques, which had been harvested as far as I could see. Then along the top of the hill, and down through the vinyards to the road through the combe, Les Verroilles was not yet harvested. Driving back, could see some vendangeurs in Mazis Chambertin and elsewhere, the harvesting seems to be spread over a longer period of time this year versus last, you see a few teams each day dotted around the hillsides.

View from the top of Clos St. Jacques down to Gevrey, around 15:00 in the afternoon, you can almost feel that warm hazy sun.

Harvest 3 Days After Day Four

Cynthia — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:23:49 +0100

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Anne has split her harvesting as some of the grapes were not yet ripe. Still to go, probably starting this Friday, are the Haute Côtes de Nuits rouge et blanc, a little Bourgogne Blanc and the Chambolle Musigny Combe d’Orveau. She is very kindly allowing me to continue to lodge here so I can resume work for this second tranche.

Monday Simone and I walked into Nuits St. Georges for groceries, then spent the day catching up on our respective blogs; yesterday I walked up to Chambolle Musigny where I had hoped to find work for these off days, but no luck, the vigneron for whom I wanted to work said he had a complete team and didn’t need any more. Rats. Simone made a wonderful soup for dinner and we consoled ourselves with a bottle of rather nice Santenay 1er cru Beaurepaire 2006 Domaine Chanzy (Bouzeron, Sâone et Loire) – they make both white and red from this vinyard, we had the red.

By the way – conditions update – Monday was cool but sunny, Tuesday was cold and overcast, and late afternoon, perhaps 16:00, there were some light showers, not even that, call it the odd dribble. Today, so far (almost noon) it’s distinctly milder and started overcast but is getting brighter.

This morning, Simone took off to visit Oporto and the Douro (I am insanely jealous), and I walked around to the cuverie. As I came around the back of the building, the pong of fermentation was overwhelming and not terribly inviting. They have to leave the big garage doors either end of the building open about six inches over night otherwise the buildup of CO2 would probably kill you on contact when you walked in in the morning. During the day while they work, one door is pretty fully opened for both light and air.

I found them doing the first of two daily remontages. As the wine ferments the skins and pips and stems rise to the top of the vat, creating a cap; remontage is the act of pumping the liquid wine from underneath back up and over the cap, thereby re-combining the two a bit. The more time the skins etc. spend submerged, the greater the extraction of colour and flavours into the wine.

First they force down through the cap a big cylinder, perforated at the bottom end to let the wine into the cylinder – this creates a source of wine to be pumped back over the top which will be free of skins and gunge that might bung up the pump and hoses.

Then they get the hoses organised – one drawing clear wine out of the cylinder, another pouring it back over the top of the cap. This runs for about 20 minutes.

Alternatively, one performs pigeage – this is manually pushing the cap down back under the wine. I asked Pascal why choose one or the other, he said the pigeage is done on very small vats, like this one, which holds Vosne Romanée. Here’s what the cap looked like before we – actually I – began the pigeage. That broom stick has a sort of inverted colander on the end, better picture shortly. Pascal made one pass, then handed it to me, and as I began he cautioned me, “Doucement, doucement” – gently, gently.

By the way, that vertical grey pipe cylinder – again, that’s put in temporarily so they can draw out a sample of the wine sans pips and skins and all to perform their chemical analysis. Pascal let me taste the Echézeaux, Bourgogne Rouge, Richebourg and Vosne Romanée. Less than a week old and the wines are still quite sugary and sweet like a child’s fruit drink, and the colour is a slightly cloudy but very decidedly pink, like a dark cyclamen, but already you can distinctly taste the wine character – more pronounced fruit character in the Richebourg and Bourgogne Rouge, and fruit plus earth, herb or spice in varying degrees in each the Echézeaux and Vosne Romanée. The Echézeaux was the first thing we harvested, so this was day six in vat, and it was the darkest nearly-red and least sweet (though still no sensation of alcohol), as you would expect, whereas the Vosne Romanée and Richebourg were really bright pink and sugary, as they have had only about 3 days. The first part of the Vosne was harvested the first day, and is in the blue vat, but the Vosne that was harvested Sunday is being fermented separately, in the little stainless steel vat pictured here.

When you hold your hand over the cap, you can feel the heat rising, it’s very warm. Elodie and Pascal added carbon ice (dry ice) to cool it down. Here’s Elodie dropping in a bit of ice and Pascal pushing it down under the cap.

As the ice melts in and reacts, not only do you get smoke pouring out, but you can distinctly hear the sound of simmering, and see the surface of the smoke on the vat burbling up. Real Macbeth three witches’ scene stuff. Stand back!

When it has simmered down a bit, Pascal opened up a hole in the cap (all I could think of was ice fishing!) and the carbon ice bubbled up again one more time. Better shot of the pigeage instrument here, too. You can tell how much it has cooled (not in the photo but in life!) – whereas before I could feel the heat with my hand six inches above the cap, after the carbon ice was added, I had to hold my hand much closer, maybe two inches, to feel any warmth. Also the side of the tank was icy cold where the smoke had poured down.

The photo may look blurry, it’s not, that’s the haze of lingering carbon ice smoke.

Anne’s lineup of vats, from left to right, the three big stainless steel are the Savigny, Nuits St. Georges (the two negoçiant wines) (both 38), then her Echézeaux (??), then the blue vats are Chambolle Musigny (50), Haute Côtes de Nuits (50) (both empty at the moment), then two vats for the Bourgogne Rouge (50 & 45), the one behind the ladder is the Richebourg (37), then out of sight continuing to the right are the Vosne Romanée (24), Clos Vougeot (50) and Chambolle Musigny (50) (empty), and that little round vat in front of me is the rest of the Vosne Romanée (9).

The numbers after each wine name are the capacity, in hectolitres, of the vat – but not necessarily how much wine will come out of it, of course.

So, doing a little maths here… a hectolitre is 100 litres. Taking the Richebourg as an example – 37 HL capacity, let’s call it 35 (can’t recall right now how full it really is). So 3500 litres makes 4600 750 ml bottles, which would be about 380 cases (I am rounding a bit). You know not all of that goes into the market, Anne holds some back for her own cellar, and of course that starting 35 hl fill of the vat would include the cap which ultimately gets left behind, so actually you are getting less than 35 hl of liquid wine, really… so ratchet all those numbers down. You get the drift. Tiny quantities. Anne has something between 6 and 7 hectares of vinyards, total.

Yesterday as I was wandering around the vinyards and Nuits St. Georges, I saw a number of vans coming in decorated with flowers and tooting their horns – they had finished their harvests. And I am hearing more of that outside the domaine this morning as I write.

Also yesterday I heard from Jan Van Roekel, the dutchman who writes the Burgoholic website ( http://www.burgoholic.com ), who had spent the day harvesting David Clarke’s Vosne Romanée. He said David won’t harvest the rest of his wines until the weekend.

During my wanderings, I did see someone harvesting mechanically in Nuits St. Georges, but I did not have my camera on me. Last year I had seen a mechanical harvester parked in a shed in Concoeur (the tiny village near the Haute Côtes de Nuits vinyards), and it basically has conveyor belts of combs between the tires which rake up the bunches off the vines and dump them in a bin. I will keep an eye out for another one. Simone and I did find a tractor out in the vinyards when we were walking one evening, and I took a peek to see if it was a harvester, but no, just a normal tractor, randomly left parked in the vines.

Harvest Day Four

Cynthia — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:04:20 +0100

Sunday, 13 September, 2009

Cool slightly cloudy morning which cleared off and warmed up wonderfully. Working with a small team (7, 8 or 9 depending who was counting!!) who all knew one another well by now, was really very pleasant.

In this vinyard, as in some others, there were a few odd vines, which being ripe were harvested and thrown in with the pinot noir. In this case, three lovely bunches of chardonnay.

We finished the Richebourg, a bit on the lower ground and then the entire upper parcel. As we were walking back to the cars, Pascal pointed out Lalou Bize-Leroy’s vines in Richebourg.

I hope you can see – the vines are not pruned off across the top, but rather wrapped round in big spirals. Lalou Bize-Leroy was one of the earliest proponents of bio-dynamic methods in Burgundy. I have had her St. Vivant, and my notes have it triple starred as my favourite of that night’s tasting of a range of Vosne Romanée wines. We also passed by the domaine Romanée-Conti’s parcel of Richebourg, and the vines are incredibly old, huge things, someone said close to 100 years old, some of them.

Before leaving Richebourg, we took a (most of the) team photo:

Most importantly, the front row is comprised of Jean-Luc, Elodie and Anne Gros.

From there to Vosne-Romanée Les Barreaux to finish the last of that parcel.

Adjacent to Anne’s parcel are some vines that are thoroughly neglected; apparently whoever owns them decided hard drinking was easier than hard work and the parcel has just gone to wrack and ruin. There were a few evil looking grapes, but it was a heartbreaking sight. We were trying to figure out whether amongst us we could raise the money to buy it and set it to rights. Lottery winnings in four countries ought to just about suffice.

We finished up the Vosne-Romanée and headed back to the domaine. When we got there, we found Anne and Patrick at work on the sorting table, and deliveries of grapes being made. This year, for the first time, Anne will make two wines as a negoçiant, and these were the Nuits St. Georges village grapes being delivered and sorted. They were arriving in small tea crates which Pascal and Jean-Luc were tipping out onto the table by hand, so they could be very carefully sorted. Sadly, there was a lot of pourriture and unripe grapes that had to be weeded out to meet Anne’s standards.

As the work had to be completed before we sat down to lunch – you can’t stop and start – we all pitched in to do what we could to help. On the sorting table in the photo below are Anne, a woman whose name I don’t know, and the backs of Simone and Patrick. Madame Gros is using a sort of window washing squidgy to make sure the grapes that drop down from the de-stemmer get onto the little conveyor belt to take them up into the vat, and Anne’s youngest daughter, Marine (perhaps about 8 to 10 years old), is busy stamping down the stems and discarded grapes to make more room in a vat which will later on be emptied on a compost heap somewhere. Off stage are other folks, emptying bins of reject grapes and stems from the sorting table and de-stemmer into Marine’s vat, tipping tea crates full of grapes into the sorting table, washing the emptied tea crates, etc. etc.

In the view below Elodie is standing ready to clear down stems from that chute into the bin. The two stainless steel vats on the left are the new ones – I’d seen them standing outside the day I arrived – for the negoçiant wines. The one in progress is the Nuits St. Georges, as I said, and the left hand one will be used for a Savigny (due to arrive Monday). The right hand vat contains Anne’s Echézeaux, and then you can just glimpse the first of her concrete vats, painted that bright blue, containing (or about to contain) all her other wines.

When the sorting was completed and all grapes in the vat, all the equipment was washed down and made ready for the next batches of grapes to be sorted – the last of the Richebourg and Vosne Romanée – after lunch.

And then we had quite a lunch!! To celebrate the conclusion of the first part of the harvest work, we started with a NV Cremant de Bourgogne Vitteault Alberti – excellent – nice delicate citrus and yeast notes and lovely persistent but delicate petillance. Then – from slightly hazy memory – we had 2007 Haute Cotes de Nuits Blanc Cuvée Marine (very rich dense orchard fruit, a little citrus, dry of course, nice lingering finish) we had some of the bourgogne rouge 2007, and I think there were bottles of 2007 Clos Vougeot. What does stand out in memory is the 1995 (yes really! That I DO remember clearly) Vosne Romanée [earlier reported as Clos Vougeot, guess I didn't remember so clearly, a friend corrected me!) and 1999 Chambolle Musigny Combe d’Orveau. Oh sublime… The Vosne Romanée all earth, stone, herbs blended in with the ripe fruit and the Chambolle just wonderful dense spice, fruit and smoke. The pain all went away again…

Anne decanted the Vosne Romanée, and the Chambolle Musigny was served from its bottle. At dinner (roughly five or six hours later I’m guessing), when we finished the two older vintages, the Vosne had opened a bit further but was by no means falling over, and the Chambolle was holding rock steady.

Final image to sum up the day and in fact the whole four days of harvest work :

Harvest Day Three

Cynthia — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:41:45 +0100

Saturday, 12 September, 2009

How lucky can a girl get? Very …

Yes, Cynthia on a tractor. And better still… all those grapes? Richebourg.

[this has turned out rather a long posting – get tea now]

The morning began with getting in the last of the Bourgogne Rouge. Little new to say there, except for one slightly off piste observation.

Some at least of my audience will be familiar with a film called Bienvenue Chez les Ch’tis (huge thank you to the friend who gave me the DVD). The rest of you should watch it if you can, it’s a stitch even if you don’t understand a word of the french, as I can attest after three viewings. Ch’tis are kind of like Geordies, or Glaswegians – they are the folks who live up north and talk very strangely and unintelligibly. The story is essentially, man from Marseilles (deep and sunny south of France) is told he has been transferred to strange, frightening, foreign and cold north of France, the area around Calais and Lille. After a very rocky start, he enjoys it all despite himself, and is gutted to leave after two years to return to Marseilles. A lot of the humour in the film has to do with word play – how things are pronounced by the Ch’tis versus the usual french, and misunderstandings that arise, and this southerner learning to speak and comprehend the local dialect.

The reason I bring this up is that amongst our gang this year we had un vrai Ch’ti. As best I can describe it, the Ch’tis gargle their french like mouthwash. The guy naturally took a lot of teasing, but he gave as good as he got, and the banter (and just the sound of his voice) was hugely entertaining as we slogged through all those bloody great fat grapes for the Bourgogne Rouge.

As we were finishing up that vinyard, I did get one good classic shot of the pannier in action. At one point I asked how much those things weigh, filled, and the answer was about 65 kilos – rather more than I do. I declined the offer of playing pannier for the day. For those unfamiliar from last year’s blog, the coupeurs cut the grapes and dump them in big garden type buckets which are periodically emptied into the pannier – the giant bucket carried on the back of the man who is also called pannier, when you holler out to him to come round so you can empty your bucket into his, and he can them dump his bucket onto the sorting table. (See last year’s blog in the folder on left for details about sorting the grapes.)

Better things were in store, however… namely, Clos Vougeot and Richebourg. We spent the latter half of the morning and early afternoon in Clos Vougeot and later afternoon in Richebourg.

We harvested the bourgogne rouge in cloud cover, but the sun came out when we went to Clos Vougeot (wouldn’t you?), and as those vines run east-west, you have the sun warming the eastern side of you as you work, it’s really quite nice.

Bucket full of Clos Vougeot – we punters were guessing a full bucket like this might make three or four bottles of wine, that seems high to me, I must check with Anne or Pascal. Note also the soil – dry, loose, stoney. Or put another way, earth, mineral…

You may recall my allusions to Pinot Beurot (Day One of this harvest and my 11 July Conditions entry) – well, I met them again in Clos Vougeot and this time had a camera handy. Gorgeous colour, really glowing peachy rosey mauvey apricotty…

Another thing in this picture – see the far right cluster, some grapes look sort of collapsed balloon like? That is what pourriture does – a sort of mould. If you trim out those sad little things with the tip of your secateurs, you will find some grey gungey mould around the central stem underneath these poor darlings. And yes, the odd vine’s worth of Pinot Beurot or Chardonnay grapes does get blended in with all the Pinot Noir in the wines.

From there to Richebourg. Anne’s parcel is either side of a low retaining wall – the westernmost vines are a few feet higher at the low end and are on a slope rising to the west, the ones east of the wall are on flat land. This photo taken looking south, so east is to your left. Also, fyi, it was taken Sunday morning about 8:15, hence the sunlight from the east. See how the allée in front of me takes a zig to the left? That’s where the retaining wall is. I know this looks as if it is all a bit of a rise, but if I had a wider angle you would see the more pronounced rise on the right hand side.

Last year I remembered thinking the grapes were different on the two parcels but by the time I wrote in the evening I was too tired to remember what that difference was. Basically: age. The vines on the upper parcel are very old, 50 years or more, mostly, though Anne has had to grub up and replace selected vines (one of my April postings has a photo of a baby vine). The grapes, broadly generalising now, are smaller on the older vines – more intensity of flavour.

Lower Richebourg:

Upper Richebourg:

I’m not sure the photos make it clear enough, but the lower Richebourg bunches are denser and heavier and very tightly packed, the upper ones more loosely packed of smaller grapes. You can also see the soil is more fertile – more ground cover grows there, especially in some of the upper section, which in my mind connects with the more fruit, less earth / mineral taste versus the Clos Vougeot.

In all the harvesting, when you think you can’t bend over one more time, it helps hugely to be able to recall the flavour of the wine you drank last night, and focus on that instead of your back.

Today we got I think most of the lower parcel done, so will need to revisit tomorrow. At the end of the day, Anne announced that she needed only a small team on Sunday to finish up the Richebourg and the Vosne Romanée, only a few hours’ work, so she did not need the big team assembled today (we were up around 25 or more, I think, several new folks arrived and one or two gone). Those of us staying at the Domaine of course volunteered to work, and I think only one contractor was needed to make up the numbers.

That evening at dinner was interesting. One of the vendangeurs is a woman named Simone, a brasilian woman now living in London. After several years experience as a catering manager she won an award which gave her a sum of money to use to further her education and experience. She has chosen to change gears and work as a sommelier, and has used her prize money to make a tour of California wine estates, to work the harvest here, and later this week she will go on to Oporto and visit the Douro. When she returns to London she will be a sommelier at La Gavroche for some months, and then begin work at Michel Roux junior’s planned new restaurant in Parliament Square. Her blog can be viewed at: http://www.caterersearch.com/tabletalk/blogs/simone/default.aspx

Another of the vendangeurs is a young man who is attending the Lycée Viticole in Beaune – a four year course in viticulture, and he is doing his work experience with Anne for the first two years of his course (and is just beginning his second year). He also plans to be a sommelier; when he finishes in Beaune he hopes to attend a sommelier school for one year.

He is french, and speaks only a little english, Simone is brazilian, and in addition to her native portuguese speaks fluent english, italian and spanish. At dinner he twigged that she was a sommelier, and apparently decided she couldn’t possibly be, as she was neither a man nor french, and decided to ask some questions clearly intended to test her and put her on the spot. Bad mistake. Another french guest at the house and I translated between the two of them… From memory I think he started by asking what were the burgundian grape types. Simone rattled them right off, by region, for all of Burgundy, not just the Côte d’Or. He raised his eyebrows, but carried on, asking about a particular domaine – she knew the domaine, and named their wines and grape varieties. At that point she struck back and began asking him questions, starting with inviting him to name the grapes of Champagne. He couldn’t get beyond chardonnay and pinot noir… she informed him of all five varietals (pinot noir, chardonnay, pinot meunier, pinot blanc and arbane). We tried asking him about Chilean wines… he completely ignored that question, never even attempted a response. He fired off a few more which Simone handled with ease. At that point others at the table were like, Simone, how long have you been doing this? She said you have to know these things for the WSET Advanced exam, this is the kind of question they ask you, and besides I want to know these things if I am going to be a sommelier. She also described the meal and the wine choices she made for her competition. She finally threw the frenchman an easy one – what is the most planted grape in Bordeaux? He coloured up and made some facetious remark, but wouldn’t answer. She kindly advised him it was merlot.

I’m going to get ahead of myself on timeline to finish this story. The next day (strictly speaking, tomorrow morning from this posting) we were harvesting the last of the Richebourg when Pascal held up a bunch of grapes and asked the poor guy aren’t these merlot? Someone said no, gamay, someone else said no, sauvignon blanc, someone else said no, gewurtztraminer. I suggested tempranillo, Pascal misunderstood me and said, c’est ça!! Topinambour!!! (that’s it – jerusalem artichoke!!)

That poor kid will never forget merlot for the rest of his life. He’s young, he’ll live, but hopefully he will learn a) never underestimate a woman and b) he has a lot to learn. Pascal summed it up when he told someone at breakfast, boy, she really wiped her nose with him last night.

Parting shot of the day – and some happy coupeurs at the end of the bourgogne rouge. From left to right, Jean-François (Belgium), Simone (Brasil via London), and myself (England).

Harvest Day Two

Cynthia — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:29:35 +0100

Friday, 11 September, 2009

Day began cool and overcast but sun was coming through before lunch, and after lunch we abandoned all but essential layers. It’s getting so I can’t quite tell what’s sun tan, what’s dirt and what’s bruising on my forearms.

As we headed out, I thought it felt quieter this year – at 8:00 am you hear the roar of tractors and vans as they head out of the domains, and there are lots of people wandering around at lunch time, but whereas last year, with such a late harvest, everyone seemed to be harvesting at once, this year it seems the viticulteurs are picking and choosing their times a bit. It may be that we are starting on a Thursday, it’s not quite so busy during the week, it may pick up with the weekend.

We did the bourgogne rouge today – there are four different parcels I think, we split up at one point, I personally was in three of them, I think the other team went off to harvest the fourth.

Behold bourgogne rouge grapes – big fat blowsy oversexed things:

This lot, in the first vinyard of the morning, were very tightly packed bunches, often wrapped around the wires or the vines, which made it a challenge to cut and detach without mangling. Every time I puncture a grape and feel the juice trickling down my arm, I wonder how many euros worth of wine I just wasted.

Long day. At the end of it, Elodie and Patrick on the sorting table:

Postscript

Well I don’t know about you but I thought that was rather a dull entry – couldn’t think of anything else to say though, probably sheer exhaustion. After writing that I went down to dinner, and it all changed.

I will spare you a detailed account of the late night at the pool tables of Dijon, except to say the Brazilian and French duo unfortunately took two out of three from the Belgian and English team, despite some rather stunning shots.

But best of all, Patrick came in for dinner with two bottles in his hand, bless…

2007 Richebourg and 2007 Clos Vougeot… how lucky can a girl get? Both stunning wines, the Richebourg the more purely silky fruit event, though for me I do get a bit of clovey peppery note in the tannin after glow, whilst the Clos Vougeot is much more the expression of terroir, more earth and mineral and spice notes blended with the fruit in the palate. Both just beautiful and inspiring to a knackered vendangeur.

From left to right, Brasil, England, Belgium, France.

Harvest Day One

Cynthia — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:12:02 +0100

Thursday, 10 September 2009

This may be a slightly wobbly posting, as I learned a new taste sensation this evening. I am again staying in the “dortoire de luxe” chez Domaine Anne Gros – and one of the real treats is Madame Gros’ cooking – not only every day for lunch with all the vendangeurs, but at night, for dinner, with the other guests lodging here (two others, now, but expect three more tomorrow). Witness tonight’s dinner: a puréed soupe légumes (all from her own garden), which is served with a good dollop or two of crème fraiche and a scattering of grated gruyere, then home made paté with a salade (all lettuces and herbs from her garden), then cheese, then crepes fresh made (a foot-deep stack of them) which could be filled with a variety of confitures, all home made. Oh, and some gateau cassis, home made, left over from lunch.

But what’s really done me in is something known as a Nikita, as it seems Kruschev rather favoured it when he visited France, namely, a glass of cheap and cheerful red wine with a good slug of cassis. I was doubtful too, but it’s good. Madame keeps box wines for serving with lunch and dinner, the one at the moment is vin de pays de l’Aude, something or other Ulysse, a merlot. Cassis is one of the Burgundian specialties, look for the one from Nuits St. Georges, or in a pinch from Dijon.

I had two. After a hard day’s work. And I am no longer feeling pain. Bliss.

The crew is a little different this year – many of the family and friends are not here, but will be over the weekend, so we have only 20 folks, most of them 20 years old plus or minus, who came through Manpower or similar agencies. Chatting with them I gather unemployment is as big a problem here as in England right now. But Guillaume is here again, who is relentlessly cheerful and talkative and keeps us all in spirits.

Weather perfect – warm, sunny but enough cloud to keep it from getting too uncomfortable.

We began with the Echézeaux, same as last year. The grapes are very ripe and healthy, hardly any pourriture, not like last year when it was bad, but it’s been a dry summer, I suppose that has helped. And best of all, every now and again I have caught a whiff of that lovely smokey scent which sometimes turns up in the nose and palate of the wines.

Got that all done mid afternoon then began the Vosne Romanée lieu dit Les Barreaux – this is the vinyard which is sloped steeply upward to the south, good stoney soil. The grape clusters are particularly small – small grapes, small clusters, often multi-clusters from a single stem, hell to harvest (locating, then cutting then extricating all those itty bits without knocking off or crushing grapes). Also met my first Pinot Beurot grape – you may recall I encountered this in wine form at Mischief and Mayhem (see Conditions, 11 June). I had left some clusters behind on a vine because they were still quite rosey and translucent – which for Pinot Noir would mean deeply underripe. Someone called me on it, and we asked Elodie, who said they were Pinot Beurot (the Burgundian for Pinot Gris), and to harvest them.

We didn’t quite finish it, I heard Pascal say that when it was done tomorrow we were going to start on the Bourgogne Rouge. Both vinyards today had been recently ploughed, I think, the ground quite soft and fluffy underfoot – barring the rocks, of course, and the odd thistle. You would think harvesting uphill might be easier – not SO far to bend over – but no. It helps immensely if you remember to pull in your abs before you bend over, or at least when you remember after, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to keep your abs tight when bent double. Try it – get up out of that chair and try it. Something about bending over nose to knees makes you want to puff out your abs, but the back is helped a lot if you can keep them tight.

Between that effort (semi-successful) and a lot of stretches my darling osteo taught me (stretch hamstrings three different ways, then stretch the bum – yes you can!), I’m not too uncomfortable tonight. See how I feel in the morning.

I did not take the camera into the vinyards today – last year I could tuck it inside my shirt, above my waistband, and it was safe, but this year I’ve lost too much weight, it would just fall down the leg of my jeans. But I did take some photos back at the domaine, after we were through, and Pascal and Elodie and Jean-Luc were cleaning up.

And you know I cannot resist a handsome tractor… That’s Pascal, by the way. (J'adore un beau tracteur. Et ça c'est Pascal.)

Hurrah!!

Cynthia — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:46:42 +0100

One bit of miraculous good luck at last - I am able to extricate myself from affairs in England for at least a little while and go back to Vosne Romanée to work the harvest chez Domaine Anne Gros again. She expects to begin picking next Thursday, 10 September.

I will again keep a blog, but assuming all is like last year, I may not be able to post it until I return (or can sneak off to Nuits St. Georges or somewhere to an internet café).

Meanwhile, Anne has made some updates to her website, including, most helpfully, a geneological bit - if, like me, you were confused about all the various Gros domaines (lots of cousins) - this is a huge help. Also a good table of the drinkability of her wines going back to 1988, and lots of other more general information about the domaine, viticulture, etc. http://www.anne-gros.com/

If you want to keep an eye on the meteo in Vosne Romanée click here This weather site is excellent, I've even found it highly reliable for UK and Portugal weather reports too (better than the Met certainly!!)

I know I have posted this photo before, I took it last September as I walked down from Gevrey to Vosne the day before last year's harvest, but it is a favourite image - the road to Vosne Romanée winding through the vinyards. That would be Les Musigny and Les Petits Musigny on the immediate left on the hill above the monastery and of course the Clos de Vougeot enclosed by the wall beyond it. Then the road is flanked by, on the left, Les Grands Échezeaux (that squarish parcel behind the round blob of tree just beyond the foot of the hill), Les Treux and Les Suchots, and on the right, Les Échezaux, Les Loachausses, Les Cruots and Les Suchots. Where the main white road seems to end, is Romanée St. Vivant, and to the right of it, probably mostly hidden by the nearby trees, is Richebourg. Sigh... mentally tasting some of them again as I type.

Why on earth…

Cynthia — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:19:29 +0100

… are you doing this, Cynthia?

How many times have I been asked this?

My knee jerk reaction is to want to ask, have you ever tasted the wines? But I have to bite my tongue… because no, maybe they haven’t, and even if they have, they may not respond to them as I do, so they still wouldn’t get it. Heck, I’m utterly indifferent to Latour.

So, why, or how, did I get so interested in wine?

I grew up oblivious, in fact wine was rather a joke in my family, witness the six packs of tinned beaujolais for cooking on the boat – no, I am not kidding. When I was going off to university my mother came over all domestic and started spouting cooking and housekeeping tips – including the advice that if I needed wine for cooking, I should buy Gallo: it came in a gallon jug with a screw top and would keep for ever, and it was cheap enough to use for cooking, but not so bad you couldn’t drink it if you had to. After that, needless to day, I wasn’t remotely interested in wine, didn’t even become aware of the alternatives, till I came to England. Then I had the great good luck to fall into friendship with three great gourmands at work – and at lunch time they would drag me off with them down the pub, where we would drink something like vinegar whilst they swapped stories of cooking, good meals, good wines… I was fascinated. I was also dying to try some of these things they were talking about, but which we certainly weren’t drinking at lunch time!

The first major turning point was this: in 1998 I had the great good luck to go to Buenos Aires several times on businesss. A colleague asked me to bring back a bottle of malbec for him – I cannot remember the winemaker, alas. One night, out at dinner alone at a marvellous parillo called La Caballeriza, I ordered a steak and decided to try some malbec, to find out what my friend was on about. I vividly remember I ordered the steak medium-well done, and it arrived decidedly rare. I looked at it and thought about saying something, but decided the chef probably knew better than I did, and to say nothing. Wise girl. The combination of perfectly au point steak, a roasted sweet potato, and this incredible earthy spicy tannic malbec… I don’t even know how to describe the impact. So rich, complex, and sensual. I was enchanted, and that meal was the first experience that absolutely determined me to learn more about wine, both how it was made, and what else was out there.

As it happened, whilst at Berry Bros to buy some champagne for millennium celebrations I picked up a brochure about their just-launched wine school and tastings. The first session was sold out, but I managed to get in on the one in spring 2000. After the introductory course I took a marvellous course focussing just on Bordeaux and Burgundy, then the WSET Intermediate Certificate course, and after that began regularly attending tastings and dinners. For me, the focus quickly narrowed to Burgundies and Italian wines, and it is the play of food and wine together which most fascinates me. Very often the dinners will focus on the wines of a single domaine and the wine maker will attend and talk through the wines, their approach to the wine making and the unique qualities of their terroir.

As I am often the odd unaccompanied woman at these events, I have frequently been seated beside the host from BBR and therefore near the wine maker as well, so I could listen to the more informal conversations, not just the stand up routines between courses about the specific wines being served. I remember distinctly one early dinner, listening to this and rather wistfully thinking, these people are so passionate about what they do, they cared so much. I thought about all my years in the financial industry, and all the people I had ever worked with, and could not recall even once, any of us, ever being so passionately interested in our work. What a waste of a huge percentage of a lifetime, to not be passionate about what you do for a living.

Over the next few years I had many good wines and dinners, and I will write more about some of them another time – for now, just the life-changers. That malbec and steak in Argentina was one, this is the other:

In November 2007 I attended a dinner hosted by Jasper Morris of BBR and Christophe Roumier, the wine maker from Domaine Georges Roumier in Chambolle Musigny. I know we had his one very rare white wine with the starter, but honestly I have no memory of it, shame on me, but true. What I do remember vividly is the steady crescendo over the meal of extraordinary reds: first his Chambolle-Musigny and Morey St. Denis Clos de la Bussière 1^er Cru side by side, both 2002, and with the next course we had two of his Ruchottes Chambertin Grand Crus, the 1999 and 1995.

I have a decent taste memory, and will usually recognise that I have had a wine before, but I have a perfectly rotten memory for names of wines, vinyards and vintages, shame. Some months after this dinner I was given a glass of red wine and asked to name the Côtes de Nuits village from which it came. I tasted that wine and knew instantly it was Christophe Roumier’s. I had not had that exact wine before – it was a different vintage of the Clos de la Bussière – but I instantly recognised the winemaking. Quite simply his wines have a sensuality like no others – they are just more liquid, more caressing in both flavour and texture than any other wines I have ever encountered. Each of his wines has a tension between elegance and power, the precise balance between the two being one of the identifiers of the wine.

It was his Bonnes Mares 1988 served with the cheese course of that dinner on 30^th November 2007 that changed my life once and for all. I remember tasting it, setting the glass down and then and there deciding to revive my French, go to Burgundy to see these vinyards, and to work the harvest the following year. I simply had to know where this came from and how it was made. And in 2008 I did those things, and my blog tells most of the odyssey since then.

In the foreground is Les Ruchots, but in the middle distance, between the walls and with the house at the southern end, is the vinyard of Clos de la Bussière, which is a Roumier premier cru monopole. Taken in September 2008. (Footnote - this is Morey St. Denis, so the foreground vinyard is not the source for the Ruchottes-Chambertin.)

Turista

Cynthia — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:30:15 +0100

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

Have spent a few days wandering both Oporto and Gaia. I think I mentioned that the last photo of the lodges in Gaia was taken from the top level of the Luis I bridge – you can get a feeling for how high up it is. Well, there is also a lower level to the bridge at waterfront level, where the cars pass over (trams above, pedestrians on both). Climbing up and down that hill on both sides is good exercise, let me tell you! Next to the bridge there is an old stone stairway on the Oporto side, which turns into a steep street for the final stretch upwards, on the Gaia side you can walk down through the neighbourhood in a series of stairways and switchback cobbled streets. As I was walking down that today, I got a nice photo of the roofs as I was coming down – right up there with walls I think for textural interest.

On Sunday a very dear friend met me in Oporto and took me for a wonderful lunch at Barão de Fladgate, the restaurant at Taylor’s lodge, near the top of the hill. The Portuguese take their lunch as seriously as the French, maybe more so – figure three hours in Portugal rather than two in France. We arrived about 13:00 or so, and didn’t leave till after 16:00. The restaurant closes at 15:00 but they didn’t say a word, just let us finish our repast and our conversation, and when we finally did leave we found security kindly waiting to let us out at the gates!

We had a white port, Taylor’s Chip Dry, for aperitif, which was good – the taste was something between sherry and port – had the bone dryness and yeasty toasty notes of a dry fino, but also the intense-sweet-dried-fruit flavours that you think of when you think of port. Fascinating. With our main course (we both had fish) we had the white Falcoaria, the top wine from Casal Branco (the estate I visited in May), which is made from 100% Fernão Pires grapes, and cut through the richness of the fish nicely. For dessert we had strawberries in one bowl and melted chocolate in another… heaven. The ruby port served at the end of the meal was lovely with the chocolate, but the white port actually complemented it surprisingly well too, I liked the combination. Ruby port was also delicious with bare fingertips dipped in chocolate, by the way, when I ran out of strawberries and white port.

Today I stopped at the Taylor’s lodge and was ushered in to join a tour that was in progress, but missed most of it, which was a shame. Of course at the lodges all you really see are the massive storage vats (any where from 20,000 – 100,00 litres) used for the ruby ports in one room and the 550 litre barrels (pipes) for the wines to be blended into tawnies in another. Interesting factoid: about 8 million litres of port in their lodges at any given time. All oak, made in Portugal of french, portuguese or spanish oak.

Taylor’s website is a good one, lots of detailed information about the production processes and the vinyards, full vintage lists, food matching notes for all their wines, and some stunning photographs of the vinyards:

http://www.taylor.pt

Wandered back down the hill and along the waterfront, stopped to look at Sandeman’s, which is on the main street along the river front… if you thought you had trouble with flooding, check the records on their door post: assuming for a moment that man is 6 foot tall, that would make the overall door, including the grilled section above, close to 18 feet overall. Reading from the top, the dates for the Chieras (Floods) are

23/12/1909; 03/01/1962; 28/12/1860; alongside the middle lintel is 02/02/1825, below that it says Chieras/Floods again, and the date 21/02/1966; next is 20/01/1853; 23/12/1989; 01/03/1978; the next level was reached on two dates, 09/01/1996 and 07/02/1979; and at the bottom 06/01/2001.

Thursday, 30 July 2009

Return to Gaia this morning and visited another port lodge, this one Calem, right on the waterfront. Had a full proper tour there, which was interesting – they have a nice little museum which explains how the port is made, with good photos of the harvest and the incredible terraced landscape of the vinyards, and maps of the Douro and its tributaries – and at the foot of the mural was a load of schist – the stone-slabby soil which characterises the vinyards. Then through to the lodges, the immense vats of ruby port, then the smaller pipes where the various wines are held for blending into the 10, 20, 30 and 40 year tawnies. Interesting that the large vats are used for 50 or 60 years, the smaller pipes potentially as long (if the wine is being held for a 40 year tawny), and after Calem’s is through with them, they are sold to a whisky distiller to use for their whiskies. Then a tasting of a white port and a riserva tawny, both pleasant enough going down but a little more of an alcoholic burn to the finish than I would have liked. Both young wines for prompt drinking, of course, they don’t waste the vintage or older things on the tourists, and I don’t blame them.

One last pretty touristy picture: sitting on the Gaia waterfront, looking at the barcos rabelos – the boats traditionally used to bring the barrels of wine down river from the vinyards to the lodges in March after the harvest. Now I gather steel tanker trucks are more the order of the day, but there is still a festival in June to mark the occasion when the boats are all out on the river. They have a square rigged sail, with a spar across the top of the sail and the lower corners managed by lines either side, as the sail billows out over the barrels of wine carried on the forward half of the boat. The waterfront opposite is Ribeira, the oldest bit of Oporto, and you can see the upper reach of the Luis I bridge making landfall there at the top right.

Travels With My Backpack

Cynthia — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:45:48 +0100

Friday, 24 July 2009

Left Beaune on the 16^th and went to Lyon. Good choice. It was the heart of the silk weaving industry for centuries, so there was a marvellous textile museum to keep me amused on a very rainy Friday. [Look for more on this in the Misc. Topics folder now posted] Nothing wine related to report – shame on me, I never did drink any Rhone or Beaujolais, the only proper meal I had was at an Italian restaurant less than two blocks from the hotel, that was about as far as I could stagger, I was so tired and hungry. Good choice – half dozen lovely tiny pan fried escallopes of veal and some wonderful artichoke stuffed ravioli, washed down with an anonymous italian earthy red, which was bliss. Well, the dessert was pretty blissful too – a layer of red and black currants concealed beneath a good dollop of zabaglione, all of which had been run under the grill. No the zabaglione did not liquify, it got slightly browned and crisped a bit, which is hard to imagine I know, but it worked, trust me.

Lyon is lovely, I recommend it – mini Paris but much more charming, I think. Parts of the town are near vertical – streets turn into long stairways – but it is worth it, both for the views and the exercise and sheer charm and fascination.

Then on to Bordeaux, which disappointed me, I have to say. So much so about three hours after my arrival Monday I tried to change my ticket to leave the next night, and couldn’t, all trains were booked, so I guess everyone else had the same idea. Again, nothing wine related to report, except a sighting from the train of a mind bogglingly prairie-like expanse of vines in Pomerol or Lalande. I made the best of it for two more days, and escaped Wednesday.

Had an interesting journey to Oporto via train. Departing Bordeaux about 19:00, arriving Irun (just over the line into Spain) around 22:00, where we had to go through a security checkpoint (heaving the backpack off and then back on again, ugh, have some fabulous bruises to remember Irun by), and then on to a truly antiquated train to go rattling across Spain and Portugal overnight, the kind with a corridor alongside enclosed compartments with two banquettes of seats. I was wandering the corridor trying to find my seat when an elderly portuguese man leaned out of one compartment and took my ticket, then took my hand and dragged me in to show me my seat number, 25. Fascinatingly, my seat number 25 was in a room with 12, 14 (which was numbered directly above an armrest, ouch!) and 16, then 25, 27 (armrest again) and 31. Yup, 31.

My companion turned out to be a bit of a character, and bless him he really did his best to converse with me, in Portuguese. I whipped out my phrase book and did my best in return, and you know, we did ok. When he realised I was English he grabbed me for a kiss on each cheek and crowed Ronaldo! Manchester United! Well, yes, but isn’t he with Real Madrid now? Didn’t matter. It seems he (my companion, not Ronaldo) was just returning from Liverpool via Geneva, Frankfurt and possibly the Czech Republic as well, not sure if I got that Czech bit straight. Not bad for a man on the cusp of 74. His luggage consisted of two supermarket carrier bags and a bottle of red wine.

We finally dropped off to sleep only to be blown off our banquettes by the arrival of the ticket checkers around midnight, ringing a hand bell and turning the lights on, in case the bell didn’t suffice to wake us. Got almost no sleep – just as I would drowse off, either the train would come to a literally screeching halt at some station, or it would hit a rough patch and start juddering so violently, my poor face would start bouncing against the seat like a jack hammer – also an effective means of waking someone up. One good thing – so old a train had proper windows that could be opened, which was lovely, thoroughly enjoyed the cool night air after such a hideously hot few days in Bordeaux. Till the rain started pouring in, and we had to close it. Luckily that didn’t last long, and by the time I woke again slightly suffocating we’d cleared the rain and could open the window again.

Somewhere around 5:00 AM and Salamanca I gave up any effort to sleep, and it was light enough to see the landscape a bit, on through Cuidad Rodrigo and finally across the border into Vilar Formosa – I knew I was in Portugal from the gorgeous tiled panels on the train station. My companion was also awake by then, and he resumed his efforts to get me speaking Portuguese, made me repeat the names of all the stations as we stopped, and telling me a bit about them – I remember Santa Comba Dão, which is where Salazar is buried, in a big mausoleum. He would point out crops and tell me what they were in portuguese, then ask me the english word.

The landscape was fascinating – from Salamanca and well into Portugal it was pretty desolate, uninhabited rather craggy rolling hills and scruffy undergrowth, which implies some growth over too, but there wasn’t. So many ruins of buildings and walls, I was trying to remember my history (some of it via Georgette Heyer!) of the Peninsular War, and wondering if the ruins dated from that time. At some point it changed and we were in a countryside of really rich land and deep combes, there was a beautiful river and lake, possibly dammed, not sure. There were thick forests – some of them were eucalyptus, which we could smell – and then agricultural land. That’s when I saw my first vinhas – vinyards. Most were back yard affairs, vines going mad untrimmed, often with olive trees interspersed, or with maize grown alongside. I did see one stretch of very well ordered and trained and pruned vines on a hillside. We were passing through Guarda and Coimbra districts, so well south of the Douro, I don’t know if this is a region known for its wine… must start learning.

At Coimbra my companion saw me off, wished me Adeus. He was staying on the train all the way down to Lisbon, which was his home. I told him I was hoping to work the harvest in the Ribatejo, near Santarém (about 40 miles northeast of Lisbon), and he approved of that – thought Santarém was a nice city – unlike Oporto! He didn’t seem to think much of Oporto, but then if he was a native of Lisbon he wouldn’t, I suppose.

From Coimbra to Oporto on another train, staggered off the train into the metro, found my hotel, and shed the pack to go for a walk round. Found the Luis I bridge over the Douro and got my first sight of the famous port lodges in Vila Nova de Gaia across the river.

My first and most outstanding taste of Port was on the occasion of getting my permanent visa to remain in England, in March 2001.

One of my friends had been a professional chef, so I asked if he would be willing to lend his talents to creating a wine tasting dinner by way of celebration and thank you to all my gourmand friends who had helped me get through those first four years in England, and sparked my interest in wine. He agreed – he was thrilled to have the opportunity to make something besides tunafish casseroles for two small boys – and I stumbled into Berry Brothers and Rudd one Saturday morning with a rough menu plan and ideas of what taste sensations I wanted to accompany each course, but no clue what wines would deliver those sensations. The man who helped me for two very patient hours that morning has remained one of my (only two) favourite wine merchants, even after leaving BBR for Genesis Wines, and became a dear friend.

The dinner was marvellous, I found the menus and placecards when I was clearing the house in May – and kept them. Menu from memory, wine details from a list I have on my computer, luckily:

Killed time before dinner with champagne, as you do. Louis Roederer Brut, 1990.

Starter of roasted fennel and red pepper, with a dry Alsatian Riesling, Cuvée Frédéric Emile, Trimbach 1995. Had the last bottle left over of this in November 2008, with a Thanksgiving turkey and all the trimmings, and it was stunning, still.

Fish course, I think it was bass, accompanied by a Chassagne-Montrachet, Ruchottes, Domaine Ramonet 1997. My first taste of white burgundy, and it stopped all of us in our tracks – there was a moment’s appreciative silence when we all took our first sip of that one.

Main course was a pan roasted fillet of beef, and boy was it perfect – nicely charred on the outside (never wash your cast iron fry pan) and au point inside. To wash it down, Côte Rôtie, La Mordorée, M. Chapoutier, 1995. Another really successful pairing.

The dessert was my one culinary contribution – an intense chocolate mousse. The wine remit was for a “really in yer face ozzie shiraz red fruit bomb.” Elderton Cabernet Sauvignon – Shiraz – Merlot 1994 delivered that with a vengeance – pure red and black raspberry juice, dry with a kick of acidity and tannins to cut through and wash down that thick dense black chocolate mousse, better than a typical sweet dessert wine would have done. Very successful. Subsequently I tried the 1995 with another intense chocolate dessert, and it didn’t work so well – the 1995 was a more complex wine with more flavours going on than just the raspberries, and it didn’t cut the chocolate as cleanly as the 1994 had done. Fascinating.

Finally… on to the cheese course. I had laid in a half dozen different bottles of things, which personally I never drank. Reason? One of my guests brought a gift – a bottle of 1963 Warre Port, which he had had the prescience to buy on release back in the sixties for tuppence.

I had never had port before. This was a revelation. I had not drunk very much at all during the meal – a modest glass with each course – so I had capacity, well, thought I had anyway – by the time this was opened. I was enchanted. I imbibed freely. Two memories stand out – well, one memory and a telling photo. The memory is of waking up the following morning with the taste of that port still clear and clean and gorgeous in my mouth – talk about a finish!

The photo is of me, leaning longingly across the arm of a friend who is monopolizing the cheese plate, and you can read his lips, clearly something like “get a grip, woman!” I’m sure I was begging for more stilton to wash down more port. Sadly, I do not have an electronic copy to share with you, but it’s one I keep in the photo album I carry with me on all my travels – including this adventure, it’s in my backpack even now.

To the friend who brought that bottle along: thank you from the bottom of my heart. Over the years I have often remembered that drink, that meal, and that friend very kindly. What a gift! Not just the bottle that night, but the love of port for ever after.

So, in homage to that evening and bottle, just a very few hours after arrival in Oporto, I found my way out the bridge Luiz I across the Douro and took this photo. Hopefully you can see, dead centre, just about two lodges below that high rise on the horizon …