Wine of the Week, Johanneshof Pinot Gris

This wine is from the 2008 vintage and is on the coat tails of a very successful  2007. My usual problem with Pinot Gris does not enter the equation here. Rather than be flabby and sweet this wine is more linear with exact acid and very well balanced.

The wine displays nice tropical fruit and a bit of spice on the nose with a lusciously rich textural palate and held together with perfect acid balance. There are apricots and lemon peel with a small hint of rivers edge on the palate.

What I really like about this wine is its complexity. It has a beautifully fragrant aroma with a body to match. The ideal woman one may say! Wine Vault Rating (WVR) 90 points.

www.thewinevault.co.nz

New Zealand Pinot Noir Tasting

 

Not everything in wine tasting is good and glamorous. Sometimes one has to taste really bad wine, actually quite a lot of the time one is tasting really average wine!

Well this week was no exception with our Pinot Noir Tasting held here in Grey Lynn. There was a small line up of ten wines and some of which I was really looking to tasting again.

We started with Wines of Ara 'Resolute' and we were off to a very bad start. There wasn't anything subtle or delicate about this wine. It had lost its fruit and was all acid and oak that just look like Pinot Noir. OK it was their 2005 vintage and, from memory, I think it was their first vintage. I have tasted this wine before and it was acceptable. Now however, I will award this wine 85 points.

Maude Central Otago 2007 was next and this faired no better. There was obviously more fruit and complexity relative to the first glass but only just. It had a beautiful robe of ruby/crimson and on the nose there was spice and burnt cherries dominated by oak. The palate displayed that there was fruit but the overall impression was over ripe fruit and oak. 86 points.

Pisa Range Estate 2006, Wild Earth 2007, Wooing Tree 2007, Beetle Juice 2007 (second label from Wooing Tree), all scored 88 points.

The clear winner, which surprised me, was Cloudy Bay 2005. This wine was very refined on the nose with hints of ripe blackberries and star anise. The oak was evident but well managed and the fruit not over ripe nor green. The palate was layered with great texture and showed some good minerality. A quality example of New Zealand Pinot Noir after close to 4 years in the bottle. Who said NZ Pinot Cannot age gracefully? Well it was me!

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The 2009 Inaugural Luncheon Menu - with well paired wines

January 20th, 2009

Courtesy of The US Senate Inauguration Committee:

First Course:Seafood Stew
Wine: Duckhorn Vineyards, 2007 Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Valley

Second Course:A Brace of American Birds (pheasant and duck), served with Sour Cherry Chutney and Molasses Sweet Potatoes
Wine:Goldeneye, 2005 Pinot Noir, Anderson Valley

Third Course:Apple Cinnamon Sponge Cake and Sweet Cream Glacé
Wine:Korbel Natural Special Inaugural Cuvée, California Champagne

New Zealand Pinot Noir of the Day.

Today's Pinot Noir is Vavasour Marlborough Pinot Noir 2005. There are strong hints of black fruit, I get strong Black berry and hints of Raspberry with smooth French oak.
On the palate there are pencil shaving, very dark fruit with oak and fine grain tannins. The fruit is ripe but not overly sweet and well balanced with good acid levels and has a nice dry finish, giving it a few more years in the bottle yet.
2005 was a good year for Marlborough and this is definitely reflected in the wine. Vavasour Wines is located 24 km south of Blenheim, in the Awatere Valley in Marlborough and are considered pioneers in the Awatere valley.

WVR 17.5/20 RRP $35.99

Digg - The Wine Vaults Top 10 New Zealand Wines for 2008.

Merlot Wine Tasting

Well not exactly Merlot the grape variety more the restaurant. It is a beautiful little restaurant set in O'Connell Street, here in Auckland. With slightly shabby chic interior juxtaposed to the food and wine they serve. 

The wine list is good and the menu nice and compact so as to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. It is, as the name suggests, French inspired with a twist of pacific fusion.

Our first course was a glass of Fromm Riesling  2005 which was full of fruit layered with citrus and honey held together with acid and very zesty, a great aperitif and good choice.

Next we had a few bits of bread and olives with our Craggy Range Gimblett Gravels Chardonnay 2006. Full of butter and ripe citrus fruit with a stave of oak, it more than dominated the entries.

I opted for the pork belly, because I cannot cook this at home. I was beautifully cooked and extremely well presented. The wine of choice was a Craggy Range Sophia 2006 with its well balanced black fruit and pencil shavings amongst a restrained use of oak. There are beautifully fine cocoa tannins with some earthy tones. This was a great choice for our pork belly, so thank you Andy.

Our next wine was just me getting a little tipsy but what the heck. We asked for the Felton Road Pinot Noir 2007 and were bitterly disappointed with a below average effort of a Central Otago wine. To say it was bad is going too far but it was not great. The fruit was over ripe and there was a lack of any earthiness and structure to this wine.

Felton Road winery has long been a 5 star winery, judged by Robert Parker Jnr., and one of only five here in New Zealand, so the expectations were high right from the start. The next wine was the Uncut Shiraz from Gemtree. This wine was much better than the Felton Road despite the fact that I had it down a Bannockburn Pinot Noir!

The food was great and the wines interesting. Thank you again Andy, although I did end up a little worst for wear and in trouble with the misses!

www.thewinevault.co.nz

Wine, a little less ordinary!

Wine, like life, gets increasingly complex with age (or should do if you are able to cellar them for long enough). The problem is though far too many of our wines are not cellared. Now this maybe a problem to some but to most cellaring is something that their wine merchant or winery should be doing for them.

To get the maximum pleasure from wine it should have a few years age on it before consumption but as we head into the era of immediacy  we care less and less about the length of time wine has been in the bottle.

Most of us have no idea what wines can be cellared and what wines should be drunk early. Well there are two sides to both stories and this is my side.

Wine should not be about whether or not you can drink it young or cellar it, but about representing the region and the season in which the grapes were grown. We do see little gems now and again of wines that truly  represent the region and grape typicity but they are few and far between.

The most obvious example of this is Rippon Pinot Noir 2005/6 and Prophets Rock Pinot Noir. They represent Central Otago where the landscape is beautiful and fragrant with ripe fruit and a minerality that goes all the way from front palate to back.

Other wines from Hawke's Bay, Martinborough, Waipara, and Gisborne sing the same song but rarely do they from Marlborough, especially the Sauvignon Blanc. This wine can be bland and sugary that displays nothing of the year let alone the terrior.

2008 was more dire than many of the other vintages and with winemakers adding acid and all sorts of other nasty chemicals to make the stereotypical Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc compounded my feelings towards this region.

Don't get me wrong as there are some beautifully balanced Sauvignon Blanc's on the market from 2008 but a majority are starting to taste very similar.
My choice of Sauvignon Blanc is from wineries such as Dog Point, Two Rivers, Walnut Block, and Discovery Point. Each and every wine they make varies sightly depending on the year. This is what wine making should be about as little intervention as possible to let the environment speak rather than the big industrial monsters that churn out the Cola of the wine world.

Hopefully you will all be able to taste the aforementioned wines and enjoy them as much as I did and make life a little less ordinary.

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Wines and Weddings

Almost symbiotic at these events, there is something great about wine chosen for weddings and the reasons behind the decisions.
Usually there is a cost limiting factor associated with wine buying for weddings but people should be more aware of their menu before deciding on their wines.

Last weekend I attended a great wedding, just outside Auckland, where all of the wines were from New Zealand and given the couples green credentials they were very fitting.

Two of the wines were organic/Biodynamic and, it has to be said, extremely palatable. The Pinot Noir from Richmond Plains 2007 from Nelson was New Zealand's first certified organic wine producer. It is definitely new world in style with sweet ripe fruit but light in colour which is not synonymous with New Zealand's Pinot noir efforts from Central Otago.

The Sauvignon Blanc for the affair was Two Rivers Convergence 2008 which is one of the better Sauvignon Blanc's to come out of Marlborough's dreadful 2008 vintage. This wine has all of the usual Marlborough characteristics but displays some nice minerality and texture that runs the course of the wine.

One of the highlights for me was to have Rippon vineyards Osteiner 2008 from Central Otago. It was nice and complex and searingly dry but lovely ripe fruit and when cold was a great glass of wine to accompany my dessert, which I have to say was beautiful.

It is always difficult to cater for everybody's taste when choosing wine and a menu to match but they did a great job at this wedding so I must say a big thank you to Charlie and Jacci for a great evenings entertainment.

We had the usual suspects as far a Champagne and Methode Traditionelle but they were less important and not worth mentioning.

www.thewinevault.co.nz

War and Wine, Try Before You Die!

The taste of wine gets slightly bitter on my palate when I see war continually on the news. For a while the news was full of 'The Economic Crisis' now it is a 'Humanitarian Crisis'. All of this makes the wine, a luxury commodity, taste slightly unbalanced.

What I do admire about wine though is it is cross gender, cross religion, cross race, and has no boundaries that it cannot conquer.
It can be appreciated by everyone and quite often is.

Wine will always be appreciated no matter what is happening in the world. It could be the last day on the planet and people would say "I'll just drink this Petrus 1983 love before we all die".

Well Here are some New Zealand Wines to 'Try Before You Die'.
My first wine to taste would be Alana Estate 'Le Coup' 2006. This wine elevated Alana Estate from just another producer making Pinot Noir in Martinborough to superstar status.

The 'La Coup' is very feminine in its quality with gorgeous texture on the palate, which is lacking in most New Zealand Pinot Noirs. There are hints of ripe red fruit, a hint of compost and forest floor and great sweetness from ripe fruit, rather than added sugar, and you are left with a dry aftertaste which compliments this wine.

Alana Estate have made a wine that they should be proud of and will continue to age gracefully for another 10 years+.

The second wine of choice would be Gibbston Valley Reserve Pinot Noir 1998. I tasted this wine a while ago and it was sensational. Everything this wine had to offer was on full display that evening. It was Floral and funky without being too much of a drama queen. The balance was perfect and the use of oak was a real pleasure to taste.
The fruit was ripe and there was enough acid left in this wine to carry it even further.

If you can get your hands on any of these wines and put them away fro a while (who knows) maybe not that long. Even better get a friend to buy them and you taste it with them.

So Try before you Die!

The Wine Vault New Zealand Pinot Noir of the Year 2008.

After many public and private tasting's, and much thought and deliberation, The Wine Vault has finally decided on a winner for last years New Zealand Pinot Noir of the Year Award.

The panel at The Wine Vault tasted 100 great wines from Martinborough, Central Otago, Hawke's Bay, Marlborough, and the Waipara.

Wines such as Prophets Rock, Crater Rim, Fromm, Ata Rangi, and Alana Estate were tasted. This was serious competition for the overall winner.

Rippon Pinot Noir 2006 was chosen  for its superior structure and balance with great depth of character. There were hints of forest floor , almost mushroom, hidden behind red fruit and light Cocoa tannin.

The light colour of it's robe was a delight to see and the thought of a New Zealand Pinot Noir not being over extracted excited us greatly. The wine was textural with good minerality and light tannin and nice and dry, unlike many of the sweet Bannockburn Central Otago Pinot Noirs that make it onto the market.

The downside to this wine is the price. At $59 it is not for the masses and in these current economic conditions I am not sure whether much will be sold.

Rippon as a winery and vineyard adhere to Biodynamic/Organic principles (another plus for a great winery) and I am sure that adds some complexity to the wine and gives it great balance.

We at The Wine Vault would like to congratulate Rippon for making great wine across the range and especially this Pinot Noir.

Domaine les Teyssonnières Cuvee Alexandre

  This wine was of the 2003 vintage and tasted exactly like the season. It was quite complex with Blackberries, deep dark fruit and pepper and spice on the nose.

The palate was thick of black fruit and brambles with a spicy backbone that had a good long finish. There was definitely a jammy component to the wine and this slightly marred it for me.

The wine was exactly as I remember 2003 with bright sunshine and quite hot. The alcohol was 14.5 which is quite high for my palate but average for new world wine. The Grenache was very sweet and the fruit very ripe, this was all held together by the Syrah with its spicy character and good tannin structure.

Gigondas is in the heart of the southern Côtes du Rhône area at the foot of the "Dentelles de Montmirail" mountains. Cuvée Alexandre represents 1 hectare of selected grapes from very old vineyards on Domaine les Teyssonnieres.

The 13 varieties of Domaine les Teyssonnieres, with 80 % Grenache are beautifully balanced and there is no heavy use of oak.
Picking is carried out by hand and the grapes are sorted in the vineyard and at the winery and the bunches are not destemmed before Tank maceration at 20 to 30°C for 20 days and blending of the different varieties before tank fermentation.
The wine is made solely with the free-run or first juice.

The wine is racked several times after malolactic fermentation and matured in large oak tanks for a year. It is bottle-aged for a year before sale.

RRP.  $45.99 WVR 16.5/20