A Ruddy Chianti and An Animal Cot
25/01/2008
Chianti PFR, Radda in Chianti 2005
Or Chianti Public Finance Requirement as we call it. I used to labour under the misapprehension that this wine was called Chianti PDF - easy to send samples, just zip, e-mail and download the wine pressing the tab key. But I digress.
Come with me on a whimsical journey to Chianti-shire - even the Italians refer to it now by its jocular Brit moniker. Imagine you are sitting in a bar in a teeming Tuscan piazza or sprawling at your favourite table in your favourite alfresco hillside trat overlooking olive groves and cypress trees tinged purple by the setting sun. In front of you, on the chequered tablecloth, is a half-empty bottle of the casa vino rosso, Chianti from some unnamed local grower. You gaze rapturously at the pale crimson liquid winking at you from the glass and smell the spicy perfumes of the warm south cascading from your simple beaker and then you taste the burst of sweet cherries and raspberries backed up by refreshing astringency. The world seems good, pickled in lazy pleasure, and you yearn for this perfect moment, the miniature wine epiphany, to be captured and preserved in glorious techniflavour in an imprint on each and every one of your millions of taste buds. Back home, where the buffalo don’t roam and make superlative mozzarella, you head to your local wine shop to sate your urgent Tuscan thirst provoked by the glowing embers of holiday memories: you can still savour in your mind’s palate that fragrant waft of herbs, the pepper, dust and cherries, the draft of vintage that hath been cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth and all that Keatsian thang. What was that wine, that Chianti you discovered? Your hand hovers over the ranks of Classicos. £11.99? Really? Surely not! So you plump for the cheerfully simple bottle, pull the cork expectantly and discover that cheap Chianti in this country is an abomination, a fiasco, to coin a phrase, a wine so thin and coarse that it tastes as if all the fruit had been stripped away leaving only the unvarnished, still-squeaking pip-juice.
For years at Les Caves we had a Chianti normale on our list and the vintage stayed stubbornly 1999 over half a decade (maybe the winery had printed a huge batch of labels) but the wine, which had been quite fun in its youth, was visibly crumbling and developed in its dotage the appetising flavour of what I imagine as old brick slow-cooked in gravy browning. So we sought, and we sought, until we found - a jovial, unpretentious Chianti, a simple country wine of russet noes and honest kersey yeas.
The PFR is appropriately pale for a Sangiovese (the blood of Jove, indeed) exhibiting the pure and simple expression of the variety - sans Cab, Merlot & Syrah those bodybuilding grapes that lend, dare one day, a hollow richness to so many modern Tuscan blends. It has a clean groove, its delightful freshness etches flavours of red apple, sour cherries and raspberry leaf and, with an abv loitering in the cool 12.5% region, glassfuls can disappear down the gullet with alacrity.
Not that you care but I digested this fruitsome soother, lightly chilled, with a chicken liver pasta ragu, although I think it would be a more than fair partner for a mustard-slathered bavette steak sarnie.
26/01/2008
2005 Touraine “KO In Cot We Trust”
Hold the horse manure, ordure in court. Or even in cot for that matter. Puzelat’s reds are a journey into a mulching tangle of undergrowth. You won’t find any babies in Thierry’s Cot (I trow) but you may discover a veritable wilderness of yeasty madness for this is Malbec sauvage, sans filtration and sans sulphur.
Bacon fat, marmite and leather, smoked meat - this wine wears its guts for garters. Puzelat has, not unnaturally, been described as the “Pope of unsulphured wine”. Well, we’re glad he believes in the living Cot. Benedictus benedicat!
In Cot We Trust hails from the same whiffy stable of wine as Olivier Cousin’s Grolleau. When you taste it the metaphorical impression you receive is that the wine has escaped its surly bonds and is drunkenly staggering around the place happy to pick a fight with every wine you’ve tasted and every expectation that you hold. Most of the Malbec I’ve come to grips with, even the beefier specimens, have a ramrod up their backside; this version is soft, sweet and smoky with that smell of just-finished fermentation. It seems raw, unfinished, lacking in structure and yet at the same time is very moreish. Its strength is that it tastes so real; that may also be its weakness.
The only way of serving this wine is to put it in the fridge for an hour which helps to tone down some of the funkier elements. I loved the wine, but then I usually like wines that flirt with danger, are utterly natural and disregard the usual flavour conventions!
Blood and guts mingles with guts and blood - pitch this Cot at a civet of venison or hare or a game pie or some lamb’s sweetbreads. And stand well back…