by David Gaier
As I write this I’m sipping a glass of Pine Ridge’s lovely 2009 Chenin Blanc/Viognier, which as IHOP might say is rutti tutti fresh and fruity. But make no mistake, this piece is about Champagne.In October I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chantal Bregeon-Gonet, who with her brother Pierre Gonet run the Champagne House Philippe Gonet. This house specializes in Blanc de Blancs made entirely from Chardonnay, and their annual production is only about 200,000 bottles or about 17,000 cases.That may sound like a lot of wine, but to give you a reference point, one of the “Grand Marques” – Moet et Chandon – produces about 26 million bottles, or 2.7 million cases each year. You probably already know and have tasted wines from one of these big producers – other names include Veu...
by Tom Lewis
I recently went to a blind tasting and, like most people there, performed fairly badly.We tried a number of IWC-medal-winning wines and were then invited to hazard guesses at grape variety, country, age, alcohol content and price.With a winning score on the night of below 50%, this was no easy test, but I started to wonder why I had failed so miserably and what I was missing. It occurred to me that wine reviewing and blind tasting use exactly opposite skills, albeit they are based on a common starting point.First the commonalities; both activities involve tasting and assessing wine - that's about it ! Once that has been done, the blind taster and the reviewer go in completely different directions.The blind taster's challenge is to guess certain specific facts about the wine without the ben...
by Tom Lewis
Cheese, like wine, is an artisan product - largely hand-made, a living, breathing product that matures and changes over time, each example being ever-so-slightly different from the next and respondings minutely to processes and storage conditions.If you want to see what could happen in the world of mass homogenisation of wine under a fiver in a few years' time, just look at a row of pre-packed, industrially-made cheeses on your local budget supermarket shelf for the potential consequences.In the UK, at least, cheese has gone the way of chicken and salmon - a once expensive and flavoursome delicacy, it is now frequently a mass-market, mass-produced product whose only role is to provide bulk, but not flavour, to a meal.But it was not always the case - in the days before refrigeration, cheese...
by Tom Lewis
I have been a fan of Austrian Riesling for as long as I can remember; it was more or less the first wine I really decided I liked - ripe, aromatic and mouthfilling yet minerally and bracingly dry.Over time, I have also grown to love Chardonnay's more studied and technical complexity, but I immediately took to Riesling's thrillingly racy, slatey, minerally food-friendliness.Unfortunately, not many places do Riesling as well as (or at least in the same full-and-ripe-but-dry style as) Austria, and German examples are typically lighter, gentler and have a hint (sometimes more) of residual sugar.That is not always the case, however, and on a driving holiday in the Mosel a while ago, I found some excellent examples from Kirchengut Wolf.This Klein Riesling is in much the same style as the Wolf wi...
by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I used to travel to Vienna regularly on business - it's a wonderful city, not that easy to live in as a foreigner, but great to visit.It's also where I learnt about how wonderful Austrian wines are - even if very few people are aware of it. I have written elsewhere about the recently history of Austrian wine-making, the glycol scandal of the mid-'80s and subsequent clean-up of the industry and shift towards a fully-dry style.Austrian wines are now some of the best in the world and quite unique - the Wachau produces Rieslings that are full and ripe, yet crisp, minerally and completely dry from the likes of Prager and Knoll; in Styria, Tement and Polz cultivate more aromatic varieties, such as Sauvignon Blanc, that are fully ripe yet piercingly dry, due in part to the long g...
by Tom Lewis
It was a day to mark in the CWB household which called for something out of the ordinary - central Cambridge is a beautiful place and a regular feature on the tourist circuit, but rather as a result of this, the quality of restaurants in the centre of town is not generally that great.However, in recent years, the city has smartened its act up a little and with ever more London commuters living in and around the city, demand for decent restaurants has increased.A few years ago, hoardings went up in front of a row of late-Victorian townhouses on Trumpington Street just opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum. What emerged shortly afterwards was Cambridge's newest sophisticated bistro and luxury hotel, the Hotel Du Vin.Hotel Du Vin is an upmarket chain of 14 hotels (at present) owned by the Massey Pa...
by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Vienna - present-day Austria's capital and the historic imperial city of various empires (Austrian, Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian). It's a beautiful place and at the time was undergoing something of a quiet, steady revolution, and transforming itself from a sleepy, time-warped, patrician capital into a vibrant and sophisticated city.It was the type of place where amongst the imposing Gothic cathedrals and sprawling Imperial palaces of old Vienna, you would find sophisticated wine bars and fusion restaurants of new Vienna; a great place to try Austrian wines which have improved dramatically since the anti-freeze scandal of 1980s.Austria is in almost every sense wedged between Germany and Italy - it has a Germanic thoroughness, precision and obsession...
by Tom Lewis
A few years ago, I lived and worked in Vienna - present-day Austria's capital and the historic imperial city of various empires (Austrian, Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian). It's a beautiful place and at the time was undergoing something of a quiet, steady revolution, and transforming itself from a sleepy, time-warped, patrician capital into a vibrant and sophisticated city.It was the type of place where amongst the imposing Gothic cathedrals and sprawling Imperial palaces of old Vienna, you would find sophisticated wine bars and fusion restaurants of new Vienna; a great place to try Austrian wines which have improved dramatically since the anti-freeze scandal of 1980s.Austria is in almost every sense wedged between Germany and Italy - it has a Germanic thoroughness, precision and obsession...
by Tom Lewis
A while ago, I went wine-buying in the Mosel Valley and was very impressed with a clutch of wines I bought there, so I was keen to visit the Wines of Germany stand at the recent Fine Wine Fair in Chelsea in London.Generally, for Germanic whites I tend to look either to Austria (for historic reasons - I used to live there) or Alsace, so whilst the grape varieties of Germany are familiar to me, I am less aware of the nuances and regional variations.Riesling is the white grape most associated with Germany - it originated in the Rhine region and is considered highly "terroir-expressive", that is highly influenced by and expressive of where it is grown.To me, Riesling is the great white grape variety - when made well (and dry) it is crisp, thrilling, slatey and minerally with honeyed undertones...
by Tom Lewis
It was an evening of firsts for me - I have had quite a bit of Mosel wine before, firstly on a driving and wine-buying holiday and more recently a tasting at the London Fine Wine Fair. However, I had never previously tried sparkling Riesling or German Cab, or had a German Pinot Noir that I really liked.The Cambridge Food and Wine Society is on something of a run of having producers come and present their wines, as GianPaolo Paglia presented his wines from Poggio Argentiera earlier this year.Hans-Peter Scholtes of Weingut Scholtes comes from a wine-making family going back 300 years and runs a genuinely family business making a range of wines from 6ha of vineyards in Minheim in the Mosel.The Mosel valley is a bucolic stretch of meandering river with steep terraces on either side; the river ...
