Time to fill one’s drinking boots

Detained by all manner of proposal-juggling and generally drowning in a deep vat of administrone (sic) soup I have been rather neglecting my tasting notes. So here is a bevy or bevvy of beauties recently assayed.

Vin d’Oeillades, Domaine Thierry Navarre
I know your lady does not love her husband. / I am sure of that, and at her late being here / She gave strange oeillades and most speaking looks / To noble Edmond. — William Shakespeare, King Lear IV.iv

Any wine that barely judders the alcoholic richter scale sets my heart all of a flutter. An organic wine from an impossibly beautiful estate Languedoc from a grape variety that I have only just heard of and clocking in at 11.5% would have to be the rankest pair of pantaloons to garner my disapproval. As I surmised the Oeillade is the gnat’s spats.

As Thierry Navarre would say each wine and each year is a lesson in humility. He speaks of pleasure and emotion of trying a bottle of wine after a period of time and tasting the sense of place.

The Oeillades, however, is not to tarry over, but to surrender immediately to its simple charms. In fact, drink it yesterday. Another traditional variety of the Languedoc it is a close cousin to the Cinsault grape. This is a vrai wine of the country, limber, fresh, all in the fruit, all in the glancing moment, naturally vibrant. Definitely worth a second glance (or oeillade as we say in the Languedoc)

L’Echappee Belle, Le Bout du Monde

Edouard Laffitte acquired his experience vinifying at the Cave d’Estézargues before installing himself in small six hectare domaine in Lansac south of Maury and the Côtes du Roussillon Villages. The vineyards are situated between 150m and 400m on a terroir of schists and granites. The vines are cultivated organically without pesticides. Harvests are carried out by hand whilst vinification is as natural as possible with carbonic maceration at low temperature. The wines are neither filtered nor fined and taste fresh and gutsy at the same time.

L’Echappée Belle is composed of 55% Lledoner Pelut (a hairy old cousin of Grenache which sounds like a Welsh lamb kebab served with Indian rice), 40% Carignan et 5% Syrah, on a mainly schistous terroir which confers the freshness and dynamic fruitiness to the wine. The nose is elegant, exudes pretty aromas of black fruits with a suggestion of gaminess, a bonbon full of minerality with a crunchy, suave palate.

This is the kind of wine I love to drink. It has the rare quality of combining warmth with freshness, fruitiness with earthiness, smoothness with herbaceousness. That’s the sound of lips smacking all over Caves de Pyrene…

2009 La Luna, Vin de Pays de la Cote Vermeille, Bruno Duchene
Bruno Duchene, an energetic vigneron moved from the Loir-et-Cher to the Roussillon and is now based in Banyuls-sur-Mer. His vines are on the steep hills overlooking the sea and worked by horse and human. He works biodynamically and the red varieties are Grenache Noir and a little Carignan. La Luna is from several parcels of vines averaging 35-40 years old and undergoes a semi-carbonic maceration. Pigeage and remontage is according to the nature of vintage. The wine is full-bodied with warm strawberry and cherry cola aromas and confit fruits on the palate.

2009 Rioja Clarete, Bodegas Honorio Rubio
One tends to imagine Spanish pink wines to be frustrated reds and taste like strawberry slush puppies. Please to acquaint yourself with this delicate pearly-pink wine.

The vineyards surround the small town of Cordovín in La Rioja Alta 20km south of Haro, 30km south east of Logroño. This area is famous in northern Spain for making “El Clarete de Cordovín”, a light refreshing rosé style wine. The family Rubio-Villar owns a total of 37.1 acres (15 hectares) spread across the region of Cordovín in La Rioja and controls production of another 150.5 acres (50 hectares) owned by wine growers from whom the family have purchased grapes for many years.

The main red wine varietals are Tempranillo and Garnacha and the main clarete wine varietals are Viura and Garnacha.

The vineyard’s average age is 30 years. Soils are rich in clay and red sand at an altitude ranging from 580 to 650 metres. Annual rain fall is between 350 and 600 mm. Cordovín is widely known because of the unique style of Rioja wine produced in the region, the so called clarete. It is mistakenly classified by many as rosé. Clarete visually resembles rosé but the method of production is different.

Maceration is on the skins of both white and red grapes before the juice is drawn off and fermentation takes place. This process essentially creates a white wine with a pale pink colour.

The colour is very pretty and the wine is reassuringly bone dry, delicate and fresh with subtle red fruit flavours and a pleasant creaminess from lees ageing. A sort of Spanish equivalent to Provence pink it goes well locally with salt cod a la riojana, baked fish dishes, partridge escabeche, vegetables a la plancha, but would also be perfect with south-East Asian cuisine and seafood pasta.

To drink one Spanish pink wine, as Lady Bracknell might have animadverted, might be mildly injurious to one’s health, but to tackle two in two days, is surely improvident in the extreme, however, the fleeting summer made it absolutely necessary to suck down a bottle of Txacoli Rosado. This is the sort of wine that barely touches the sides of the mouth.

1998 Barbaresco Paje Riserva, Luca Roagna
Luca Roagna is a kind of intellectual traditionalist.  Whilst his wines require patience they are rewarding if you are looking for the most delicious expression of great Nebbiolo. Aromatically, they are redolent of rose petals (a very Nebbish characteristic) as well as tobacco leaf, mushroom, buffed old wood, crisp red berries and leather, the flavours held together a ramrod straight seam of spiced minerality shooting down the length of the tongue to the back of the mouth where it lingers for a long time.

As Kate Thal writes so perceptively in her blog:” It is not just the complexity and the astounding elegance, how every aspect fits so perfectly with another aspect, nothing superfluous or out of place.”
The 1998, whilst it may be said to be more feminine that its Barolo confrere, yields to no man or woman. It is bold and twinkling like Becky Sharp with the backbone and authority (and delicate restraint) of an Austen heroine. Not sure that is the best analogy but go with me.

Arbois Savagnin, Caveau de Bacchus, Lucien Aviet
Lucien Aviet (aka Bacchus) may make some of the best Trousseaus in Arbois, but, like all Jura growers, Savagnin runs through his veins. This is that irresistible combination of salt, sherry and uncompromising minerality. The great Savagnins have a tad more fruit than the full-blown vins jaunes. Aviet’s displays aromas of bruised apple and apple skin, buttercups, fino and warm fenugreek seeds moving into a bright crunchy long palate which combines bristling apple and lemon acidity with smoked hazelnuts and fine minerality. The wine surges back with a reminder of that nuttiness and slaking lemon freshness.

Also drank and adored
Malvasia secco Frizzante, Camillo Donati
I make no apologies for requoting my first ever tasting note for the next two wines. The Malvasia secco is one of those sparklers where spring flowers are entwined with autumn windfall. Malvasia, from northern Italy, usually reminds me of orange blossom honey over drooping orchard fruits coated with sweet spice and pepper. Amber and hazy to a fault (lava lamp alert), wafting aromas of tangerine and musk mixed with pollen, Donati’s Malvasia wine prickles, skitters and scythes across the palate unveiling the texture of bleached apricot skins and the sensation of warm peach, as well as delicate impressions of sweet grass, jasmine and tea-rose - all teased along with breezy orange citrus. The finish is ale and hearty, refreshing to the last hoppy drop. As the bottle is consumed – and it will be consumed – the wine mellows to a jaunty, twinkling grapiness or maybe it is just so darned drinkable that the edges only appear to soften. The sedimentary final glass crowns the naturalness of the wine; more often than not a thick orange powder has precipitated and these coagulated lees glow like a phosphorescent paste (nature’s portion indeed).

Dinavolo Bianco
The Dinavolo shares the former wine’s left field status. Just because it is odd doesn’t mean that it isn’t delicious. After calibrating your palate to this style of wine it is amazing how your regular non skin-contact wines can seem somewhat pallid.

Imagine perfect peaches left on a window sill in the late summer sun and smelling their skins as they warm up and reveal their fleshy, textural, plumptious treasures. Initial flavours suggest ripe apricots as well as cider apples and red pears; the wine is clean and vinous with a good yeasty bite, warm fruitskins, beeswax, dry cinnamon, oatmeal and apple acidity to complete the wine. Amazingly youthful and not just alive, but actually living. Dinavolo reminds me of so many things – real bread baking the oven, a ripe wash-rind cheese oozing flavour, cloudy apple juice with all the good bits floating in.  As we were drinking this I was thinking that we were fortunate that our mentalities and palates hadn’t become pasteurised by over-exposure to correctly manufactured wines. Or perhaps we just got bored with meretricious crap.

Melon de Bourgogne, Domaine de la Cadette
Melon de Bourgogne is the same grape that you find in Muscadet. This is one of the only examples left in Burgundy.

The vines are 20 years old on average. The geology here is quite unusual as while the granite Morvan massif was coming into being it forced limestone strata up to the surface. Most of the vineyards are located on the most ancient strata, the Bajocian, or upper and lower Bathonian limestone and others on Liassic marlstone. The intention is to make honest and authentic wines which reflect the distinctive character of their region and the climate of a particular year.  Viticulture is entirely organic.

The Montanets do not resort to so-called “modern” artificial means in their wine making process in order to achieve this goal. Naturally enough, they hand-pick their grapes and the wine is produced using traditional skills. Very little sulphur is used in the winemaking process.

Pale lemon-yellow colour, bright, clean nose, zingy palate reminiscent of lime-zest and oyster shell and just a hint of ginger and white pepper from the yeast lees. Oysters and smoked fish, beware; this wine has your number and is coming to get you.