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The Many Faces of Semillon – Part 2: Museum-Released and Aged Semillons

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In my post entitled Overview of Australia’s Wine Regions – Part 3 where I described the Characteristics and Grapes of Australia’s Larger Wine Regions, I extol the unique and symbiotic relationship between The Hunter Valley and the Semillon grape.
 
Hunter Semillons are un-paralled anywhere in the world.  A multitude of Hunter wineries make great, great Semillons, in three styles which really relate to their age in the bottle and when they are released.  They are:

  • Crisp, new Semillons a year or two in the bottle
  • Semillons stored for 5 years before being released
  • “Museum” Semillons being bottled and stored 10 years before being released 

The discussion of young and medium-aged Semillons is covered in the previous post “The Many Faces of Semillon:  Part 1 – Young and Medium-Aged Semillons”.  In Part 2, we will now discuss the beauty of Museum-Released and Aged Semillons.

While I like my young and medium-aged Semillons, “museum-released” and aged (10 years or older) Semillons are in a class by themselves.  The older Semillons can still have a bit of acid, but have soften considerably, and developed a complexity and balance of tastes which is ethereal in experience.  The golden color, followed by nosing such a wine (I actually use Riedel Montrachet glasses instead of the Riedel Semillon / Riesling glassware for my truly aged Semillons.  See recent post on “What’s in a Glass?”) and flavors in your mouth provide one of life’s most precious pleasures!

I find an aged Semillon is best matched by scallops, either fried in butter, or made into a scallop boudin.  The food needs to have some richness to balance the richness of the aged Semillon.

My favorite three Museum Semillons are the 1999 Tyrrell’s Vat 1, the 1999 Meerea Park Alexander Munro, but top of the list is the 1990 Waverley Estate Semillon, their second vintage.  Unfortunately, there is no more to be found and I have only two bottles of the 1990 Waverley Estate left in my cellar.  However, the 1992 and 1996 Waverly Estate Semillons are magnificent also, and the 1998 and 2000 vintages are coming into their own.

I have done a tasting of the 1999 Tyrrell’s Vat 1, the 1999 Meerea Park Alexander Munro, and the 1999 Waverley Estate Semillons and it was difficult to pick a winner.  Each was truly outstanding in its own right.

A 10 – 20 year old Semillon can be truly magnificent.  The only problem is that there is some variability in the taste caused by difference in cork.  I had to pour a 1994 Waverley Estate down the drain because of a poor cork.  They have been good and always replaced a bad bottle for me, but is can still be a disappointment when you have had one great bottle and open a second one of the same vintage to find a small and discernible difference.  That is why I am a fan of moving from cork to screw-top.

As so often is the case when researching material for a post, I came across something already written which does a good job of describing what I wanted to say.  A review of the Semillon grape from Wine Knowledge is worth a read and entirely matches my view on Semillon.

I have not recommended any Semillons from regions other than the Hunter Valley.  There are certainly some great Semillons produced in Margaret River and the Barasso Valley, and certainly some magnificent Semillons produced in the Sauternes and Barsac regions in France, but my deeper knowledge and appreciation of Hunter Valley Semillons makes me favor the Semillons from that region over all others.  My only exception to that would be the great dessert wines made from Botrytis Semillon from Sauternes such as Chataeu D’Yquem.  (See my post on “Why I think Chauteau D’Yquem is the Best Wine in the World”, my most-viewed post of all time!)

The Many Faces of Semillon – Part 1: Young and Medium-Aged Semillons

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In my post entitled Overview of Australia’s Wine Regions – Part 3 where I described the Characteristics and Grapes of Australia’s Larger Wine Regions, I extol the unique and symbiotic relationship between The Hunter Valley and the Semillon grape.
 
Hunter Semillons are un-paralled anywhere in the world.  A multitude of Hunter wineries make great, great Semillons, in three styles which really relate to their age in the bottle and when they are released.  They are:

  • Crisp, new Semillons a year or two in the bottle
  • Semillons stored for 5 years before being released
  • “Museum” Semillons being bottled and stored 10 years before being released 

Because of the many different faces and tastes of Semillon, it has a multitude of uses.  It can be enjoyed on its own, with cheese and crackers, with Indian or Thai food, with eggs such as when serving an omelet or fritatta (one of the reasons I think of Semillon as the ultimate breakfast wine!), a Tandoori chicken pizza, or many other foods.  I also find when you need that 100 ml of white wine for cooking that Semillon fuses beautifully and enhances, but does not overpower the food with which it is blended.  My bride has a number of recipes in her great blog DAZ in the Kitchen where wine is required to cook the perfect meal.

But the real question is “Which age Semillon goes best with what type of food?”  With sharp cheeses such as a Blue Cheese or a Gorgonzola (which my bride uses when making a prawn Risotto and is outstanding!) demands a newer and crisper, more acidic Semillon.  I personally would almost always rather drink an aged or Museum-released Semillon.  However, with a sharp cheese and when a bit of acid is required, you should try a younger Semillon.  I have found two younger Semillons that in my opinion stand out (the rest are just not that interesting yet).  They are the Andrew Thomas Braemore Semillon and the Tyrrell’s Johnno Semillon.

Andrew Thomas is one of finest wine makers in the Hunter Valley, if not one of the finest in the world.  And he is a really nice guy also!  I have had the pleasure of sitting next to him at a degustation affair with matching wines a few years back, and others have told me how pleasurable he was to meet and talk to when watching sport in a bar!  A great guy making great wine!

I have been surprised to to learn after buying some excellent Shiraz’ such as the 1998 Tyrrell’s Vat 9 Shiraz and the 2007 Pokolbin Estate Shiraz, that Andrew was the wine maker for both of those wines.  But that is a topic for another post.  Back to Semillon.

I have had the 2009 Braemore and it is brilliant.  Crisp, a touch of acid and a bit of lemon flavor.  Many young Semillons taste flat to me, but the 2009 Braemore is ripe with flavor.

The Tyrrells’ Johnno is the other young Semillon I enjoy.  I have had the 2010 and 2011 vintages and both are exceptional.  It is a bit more edgy and acidic than the Braemore in my opinion, even though Tyrrell’s positions it as a smoother type of Semillon.  However, it is a most enjoyable drink when you need to pick a Semillon right from the bottle shop.

I really start to enjoy my Semillons though when they have 5 or more years in the bottle.  They become less acidic (even thought many still have a lot of acid and a lot of life in them yet!) and more complex.  Both the Thomas Braemore and the Tyrrell’s Johnno Semillons are worth keeping in the bottle for a few years if you have the discipline and patience!

There are almost too many good Hunter Valley Semillons to mention here, but for me, the top class includes the Tyrrels Vat 1 (especially the 2005 vintage), The Meerea Park Alexander Munro and Meerea Park Teracotta Semillons (anywhere from the 2004 – 2006 vintages), The 2005 Brokenwood ILR (I was fortunate to pick up the last 9 bottles at the cellar door a little while back), the 2004 Lindemans Semillon and the 2004 Thomas Braemore.  I am sure I have left some great wines off this list, but I can attest the wines I mentioned within are truly outstanding medium-aged Semillons.

These “medium-aged” Semillons go really well with egg dishes.  I had about a third of a bottle of the 2004 Meerea Park Teracotta left over one Sunday morning and heated up some leftover quiche for a late breakfast at about 11 am and a glass of the Semillon to go with it.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven!  Since I rarely drink in the morning, my bride and I now look for reasons to make egg dishes (such as a Salmon Fritatta or Quiche Lorraine) so we have the excuse to drink a medium-aged Semillon with dinner!  I also like my medium-aged Semillons with Indian and Thai food.

As so often is the case when researching material for a post, I came across something already written which does a good job of describing what I wanted to say.  A review of the Semillon grape from Wine Knowledge is worth a read and entirely matches my view on Semillon.

I have not recommended any Semillons from regions other than the Hunter Valley.  There are certainly some great Semillons produced in Margaret River and the Barasso Valley, and certainly some magnificent Semillons produced in the Sauternes and Barsac regions in France, but my deeper knowledge and appreciation of Hunter Valley Semillons makes me favor the Semillons from that region over all others.  My only exception to that would be the great dessert wines made from Botrytis Semillon from Sauternes such as Chataeu D’Yquem.  (See my post on “Why I think Chauteau D’Yquem is the Best Wine in the World”, my most-viewed post of all time!)

White wine with beef? You bet!

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“Never” you say!  White wine with fish and red wine with beef is the convention.  Let’s turn the table!

Recently, I wrote a blog on how well a good Pinot Noir goes with a dense gamy fish life swordfish.  This is a perfect example of a red wine matching well with fish.  Another great example is matching a big, buttery Chardonnay with beef stroganoff.  For a great recipe for beef stroganoff, see DAZ in the Kitchen, a wonderful blog on food written by my wife, Deanna Lang.

My wife’s beef stroganoff is very rich and creamy.  The mushrooms are cooked in butter and the gravy is very rich.  The richness and creaminess of the gravy, mushrooms and fettuccine noodles almost demand a similar style white wine like a big, buttery Chardonnay.  There are several choices for this including a decent aged Montrachet, an aged big, rich Hunter Valley Chardonnay such as the Alexander Munro Chardonnay from Meerea Park, or the aged Chardonnay from Waverly Estate, or a Chardonnay from Margaret River such as the Leeuwin Estate Art Series or one from Pierro.

But one of the classics is the Penfolds Yattarna, otherwise known as “White Grange.”  We had the 2006 vintage with the beef stroganoff.  This is such an easy drinking wine, we often wonder where it went.  Sometimes we think it must have evaporated!  My wife claims that the sign of a good wine is that it goes down so easy that she can not believe having drunk all of it when it is gone!

The point is “rich and creamy” gravy and “rich and creamy” white wine go very well together.  The gravy and noodles contributed more to the overall taste of the meal than the beef (mildly seasoned) did.

Therefore, while it is generally a good and safe rule to match “white wine with fish” and “red wine with beef”, you are missing out on a great combination if you are not willing to try to match the more subtle flavors and textures involved.  Next time you have a heavy, rich, creamy gravy made from mushrooms cooked in butter, try a big, rich Chardonnay.

BTW, never drink a Montrachet before its time – it is absolutely sinful – but then again, don’t wait too long or you will be pouring good money down the drain – literally!  But then if you are buying Montrachet, I expect you are careful about this and know what time frame in which to drink the wine.

What wine with Pizza?

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This is always a tough question since there are so many different ingredients that can go into pizza.  We have gone from buying pizza to making our own, which is quite easy and allows us to create exactly the taste we want.  It also means we have a healthier pizza.  Some times we make the base and other times we buy it, but that choice has no effect on our choice of wine.

We alway use a tomato sauce / paste to cover the base, and almost always a spicier sausage such as pepperoni or the spicy home-made Italian sausage our great friend, Ric and his family make annually (so glad to have a private stash of that sausage – it is magnificent for a pizza topping!).  We also tend to put a lot of garlic and chili on our pizza.  Therefore, a Hunter Valley (spicy, pepper flavored) Shiraz is always a good choice.  However, something a little lighter such as a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Italian Chianti (made from the Sangiovese grape) is always a safe choice to bring out the flavors of the pizza.

Interestingly enough, some white wines will also go well with pizza, since a number of white wines match well with the various cheeses used.  And if you are using chicken, pineapple, or something similar for toppings, a white becomes even a better choice.  I would recommend a crisp (2 or 3 years in the bottle, before it smooths in taste and texture) Semillon to match up well with cheese, but overall believe a Gewürztraminer, or Riesling would be best.  If it is plainer tasting pizza, a Pinot Grigio would be good.  A Gewürztraminer works well with a lot of different spices such as with Indian food or Thai food, so it will work well with a well seasoned pizza also!

It is rare that I would recommend seven different types of grapes as being a good match for a food, but that says a lot about the diversity of pizza!  Then there is always Merlot, but I rarely drink Merlot if given almost any other choice.

And if this is all too difficult, then grab a beer or two!  But overall, it is usually a Shiraz or a Chianti for me.  The only question is – “which one”?

BTW, I am making the pizza tonight and Deanna, who writes the blog, DAZ in the Kitchen, will be creating a post soon with the pizza recipe we use.

Educating your wine palate and taste buds using potato chips

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I have a number of friends who will drink any wine with any food and the combination does not seem to matter to them, but then many of them are drinking for the alcohol effect, not the taste.  Any many other friends know and can appreciate the basic and simple rule of ‘white wine with fish, red wine with meat’.  However, there are a number of nuances the make a food eating and wine drinking experience even more pleasurable.  There are certainly wide variances between the taste of different white grapes such as Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and so on.  The same goes for various red grapes.

Wine tasters believe that the Sauvignon Blanc grape is the easiest to determine in a blind tasting and stands out as being the most different and distinguishable from other grapes.  And it is a classic to go with fish, making it a safe bet for most fish.  However, for a gamy, more solid fish such as swordfish, I find a good Pinot Noir is a perfect match, especially if the swordfish has a bit of light salsa or tomato sauce with it.  Therefore, people may look at what you are eating and drinking and believe you have made the ultimate wine / food matching mistake in pairing a red wine with fish, but I can assure you that this is a most pleasant pairing!

The sauce (and amount) and the method of cooking (broiled, roasted, BBQ, steamed, etc.) also has a big impact on what wine goes best with a particular food.  Even the difference between different styled wines from the same grape can make a huge difference.  And the aging of the wine changes the wine greatly over time, so it is important to select the wine close to the optimal time for drinking it.  You may find a white wine more acidic when young and more buttery and smooth when older.

While this may seem like a lot of effort to understand and rightly match food and wine, it really does make a great difference.  Even if you do not understand it, you will usually recognize it and notice the difference in how good the food and wine tasted (even if you cannot describe it).

However, what I really want to focus on today is much easier to appreciate.  A good first step to educating your palate is to just try different foods and taste them with your eyes closed and focus on what the flavor is telling you.  Try to pick out how dry or sweet the food is, is it acidic?, or bitter and so on.  This makes you more aware of the common taste characteristics of food.

Tonight I was a bit hungry, but it was a while until dinner, and my wife had an open bag of sour cream and chive potato chips.  I had just poured a glass of a Cabernet Sauvignon.  I grabbed a handful of the sour cream and chive potato chips, ate them and then took a sip of wine.  I thought the flavours would be competing against each other and it would be a horrible match, but it worked far better than I thought.

Then I poured a glass of a Sauvignon Blanc / Semillon blend (I had both bottles open from a day or two before) and tried it with the sour cream and chives potato chips also.  I would have expected this to be a better combination, but found out that was not the case as the Sauvignon Blanc / Semillon blend was a bit acidic, and did not work well with the sour cream taste.  Then I opened a few more bags of different potato chips and tried them with both wines.

Why do I suggest potato chips for this?  Because it is a lot cheaper to open a few bags of potato chips than it is to used real honey-glazed ham, chicken, etc.  Of course, you could always go the sliced meat route for another lesson.

By trying several different wines with several different flavors of potato chips, you can quickly educate your palate and zone in on grape and food flavor combinations you like and don’t like  I will not tell you my findings of the various combinations of grapes to potato chip flavors to let you focus better and really learn more by tasting than reading.  I would also suggest you do this in the company of friends and discuss your findings.  You will be amazed at how quickly you will learn to identify tastes and combinations that work or not.  And talking about it while doing the tasting is a great way to learn (and socialize!).

When doing this, I would suggest using Kettle or Red Rock brand potato chips as they tend to have more intense flavors than other brands, and also have a wide variety of flavors including sweet chili, peri peri chicken, caramelized onion, honey coated, etc.  These wide contrasts can help you quickly zone in on categories of combinations that work – or don’t!

Let me know what combinations of flavors and wine grapes work for you!  I am anxious to hear your feedback.

My first wine at HUX @ Nortons

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We once again had a fabulous meal at HUX @ Nortons.  Jay Huxley had recently returned from his trip to Las Vegas and was rearing to cook.  We had a special treat tonight of a blue-fin tuna belly starter and my wife and a friend had the Smooth Dory fish for mains while myself and the others had the Porterhouse Steak.  Usually it is just Deanna and me, and Deanna always gets a lemon, lime and bitters to drink and I always get a beer, either a Heineken or a James Boag’s Premium Lite.  However, since there were 5 of us tonight, we also got a bottle of wine – our first wine ever at HUX!

I was pleased to find they had a few decent bottles to choose from in addition to a decent selection by the glass.  For those of us having the steak, we narrowed the choice down to either a bottle of the 2006 Penfolds Bin 128 Shiraz or the 2008 Penfolds Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon.  Either would have been ‘ok’ with the Porterhouse, but Jay applies some nice seasoning and also makes a tremendous side of Potato Salad to go with the steak, so we opted for the Shiraz.  Since Jay’s food is so good, it demands a very decent to great bottle of wine.

I should have brought a pocket Vinturi along to do an immediate decant.  The wine needed a few minutes to breathe, but opened up after a bit.  Pouring it through the Vinturi would have made the wine more immediately accessible, but it was certainly drinkable enough and an enjoyable drop to have with the Porterhouse.

What did surprise me though was that there were about a dozen different wines available by the glass and a few decent choices of both reds and whites.  Plus they had a few premium bottles of reds with some age on them.  This impressed me.  I had usually just bought beer while eating at HUX, but will now consider wine by the glass or a bottle if there are a few of us who want wine.

And in a future column, I will be matching a Norton’s Hotel wine selection with each main on the HUX menu.  Stay tuned for that coming soon.

What wine to drink with olio spaghetti with garlic and prawns

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One of my wife’s famous dishes is her olio spaghetti with garlic and prawns.  The dish is relatively easy to make, and outstanding as a starter or main.  Tonight we are having her Garlic Prawns with Spaghetti as a main with a side salad.

On its own, we would have considered drinking a Riesling, but felt a better match with the food was a 2010 Pierro  LTC.  For those of you who do not know of Pierro, it is a great winery in Margaret River.  They make a wonderful Chardonnay and a wonderful Sauvignon Blanc among other great wines.

The Pierro LTC (which interestingly enough stands for ‘Little Touch of Chardonnay’) is a 75% Sauvignon Blanc and 25% Semillon blend.  The Semillon adds some structure and lasting power to the Sauvignon Blanc, but this is still a wine you want to drink while it is fresh and not more than a couple of years old.  It is a good wine to go with all sorts of fish and seafood.  We will only drink half the bottle tonight and I will use the rest to go with the entree for lunch I plan to have this Thursday at Fish on the Rocks before getting into the 2009 Bouchard Pere & Fils Puligny Montrachet to go with either lobster or the Moreton Bay Bugs.

The real question of what wine goes best with this dish depends on how much garlic you put into it.  With less garlic (and the prawn being more prominent), the Peirro LTC is a great match.  However, tonight we put a lot of garlic into the dish – about 10 gloves for two servings!  We love our garlic, and loved the food tonight, but it ended up being a little over-powering for the wine.  Next time we put this much garlic into it, we will use a Riesling instead as it ‘compares to’ or balances the wine with the food better.

With less garlic, the Pierro LTC matches the dish best, but with more garlic, you need a more powerful wine and I think a Riesling would be a better choice.

What wine to drink with Shepard’s Pie tonight?

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First of all, my wife makes a mean Shepard’s Pie, and I am providing the recipe for you here from her great food blog, DAZ in the Kitchen.  She publishes a lot of great recipes for food and article on food lifestyle.  Her meals are a joy to me because (1) they taste good and nourish me in their own right, and (2) provide me an excuse to pick out a nice bottle of wine to go with dinner!  My friends who have had her Shepard’s Pie love it and fight over ‘take home’ if there is any leftover.

While there are a number of secondary red grapes (see my post on Malbec as an example and what constitutes a ‘secondary’ grape) that may match well with Shepard’s Pie, I only focused on considering a Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Pinot Noir.  Merlot could have also been a good choice, but I never really think of Merlot, plus I like to have a glass of the wine we are having with dinner beforehand (I am drinking it as I write this!), and would rarely consider drinking a glass of Merlot on its own, when there are so many other great wines from better grapes (at least in my opinion) to choose from.

The main ingredient in Shepard’s Pie is lamb mince and that means a decent Pinot Noir could match up well.  However, a good Pinot Noir is so refined and elegant, and Shepard’s Pie has a lot of other ingredients in it such as bay leaves, Worcestershire sauce, tomato paste, and a lot more.  A good Pinot Noir deserves to be matched with lamb shanks or some other lamb dish other than as mince.

The same is true of Shiraz.  It deserves to be matched with a large slab of beef, well seasoned of course, but with the structure and thickness of the beef intact.  This left a Cabernet Sauvignon as a splendid choice.  But then there was the question of ‘which’ Cabernet Sauvignon?

Shepard’s Pie is a very pedestrian dish.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love it and drinking wine with it, but it has a lot of different good, yet cheap flavors involved in its creation.  (In fact, I always like to have some leftovers because once Shepard’s Pie sits for 24 hours, the flavors co-mingle so beautifully and I love it even more the next day!)  That means an aged or too refined a Cabernet Sauvignon would overwhelm (or possibly even embarrass) the Shepard’s Pie.  Therefore, I need to find a decent, yet pedestrian Cabernet Sauvignon also to compliment the Pie.

My choice was the 2002 Stonefields Vineyards from Wrattonbully, a region in South Australia, south of Adelaide and just west of the Victorian border.  Wrattonbully is known for its great Cabernet Sauvignons.  This is a $25 bottle of wine, nicely aged with a bit of complexity, but most importantly it is evenly matched with the Shepard’s Pie and will not overwhelm it.

While I have had better (and much more expensive!) Cabernet Sauvignon wines, this one is very good for the money and also matchings very well with lamb mince infused with the variety of flavor the rest of the Shepard’s Pie provides.

I must admit though, now as I write this that while I would not match up a 100% Merlot with Shepard’s Pie, the thought of a Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot blend could be a very good match, and I think I will marry the Shepard’s Pie with a Cabernet Sauvignon / Merlot blend the next time to see how it goes.

I am looking forward to dinner and wine once again this evening and will let you know how the combination works in the near future.

Wine Snob versus Wine Enthusiast – which one are you?

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I must admit that I have a true avocation for wine.  I enjoy wine on its own, with food, and to share with friends.  I also enjoy reading about wine and learning more about how it’s made, where it is best made, how to buy and store it, and how to drink it.

Over time, I have developed a deeper appreciation for the exquisite and multi-dimensional nature of wine and it has become an important part of my life, but no more important than my faith, my job, my friends, my passion for reading on a wide variety of topics, and a general zest for life overall.  I have been able to achieve a deeper experience and understanding of the wines I drink, and that has enhanced some of my other experiences.  For example, we are having a chicken and mushroom risotto for dinner tonight.  My wife makes a really good risotto (you can view the chopped-up chicken and mushrooms below)!

With the chicken, Parmesan cheese and mushrooms, I knew I wanted a rich, aged chardonnay to go with it.  I selected my last bottle of the 2003 Saddler’s Creek Reserve Chardonnay. (Look at the beautiful golden color of a perfectly aged white wine!)  I did so because I have had a few bottles previously and felt it would pair beautifully with a chicken and mushroom risotto, and I also knew the bottle should be drunk in the next few years and I did not want to wait too long or it might go off.  Fortunately the wine was perfect and I am drinking some as I write this posting.  We paid $10 per bottle for the wine as Saddler’s was trying to clear older inventory and we bought the last 8 bottles they had.  But it drinks like a $130 bottle of Penfolds Yattarna or a decent Montrachet.  This turned out to be one of the best buys of my life!

As you can tell, I put a bit of thought into buying the wine in the first place and also when to drink it and what food to drink it with. Some people would claim “I take my wine too seriously, so I must be a wine snob”, but I hardly think that is the case.  To me it is a natural passion or avocation as I mentioned, much like others have a passion for working out or art or literature.  Because I have developed a bit of knowledge over the years, it has become much easier to select a good (and good valued) wine to go with an everyday dinner.  And I put more thought into the wines that match up with dinners when we host our “Single’s and Strays” dinner parties, have friends over, or a special birthday or anniversary.  (BTW, all birthdays and anniversaries are special!)  But then, most of those events become special occasions and lifetime memories.  Does that make me a wine snob?  I don’t think so.

I discussed this with some other wine aficionados and we felt that a wine snob had the following characteristics:

Wine Snob

  • They bragged about the excellent wines they had, but never found the opportunity to share the wine with friends or to give a bottle to a friend
  • They want to have you admit to them having a superior knowledge of wine over you – they are as uninterested in sharing their knowledge as they are their wines – they just want to ‘show off’.
  • They talk a great deal about how much they have paid for expensive wines, and seem to only drink expensive wines

Whereas a wine enthusiast, we felt, had the following characteristics:

Wine Enthusiast

  • They are happy to share wine, either by contributing a bottle, or by asking all who share to chip in for a special bottle of wine, or by setting some rules to have each person bring a bottle according to the rules established
  • They listen to others and want to learn and also share their knowledge and are excited to help others develop an appreciation of wine and mature as a wine drinker and possibly collector
  • They get as much and even greater pleasure out of finding a ‘cheap’ but great wine and would rather drink that than an expensive bottle of wine

We have two friends who are studying to become international Masters of Wine (MW).  An international MW costs about $200,000 to buy, taste and compare wines to develop an internationally acclaimed palate and ability to compare and describe wines to others.  (There are only about 475 MWs globally!)  They are also professional wine judges (in addition to their full-time jobs), but in no way are they wine snobs.  They get great excitement over finding a Canberra (ACT, Australia)  Sangiovese for $20 per bottle and a Marsanne for $15 which they have introduced us to.  A wine snob would not even try a wine from Canberra, yet alone a wine under $20.  We have had a 9-hour lunch at their house (he is French, she is Australian – what can I say?) and we bring over wines we really want to share with them and they pick out wines they really want to share and introduce to us.  These wine may be in the $10 – $20 per bottle range or they may be $40 – $60 per bottle, but it does not matter – what matters is sharing our wine, our knowledge and our friendship with each other.

I therefore, prefer to call myself a ‘wine enthusiast’, not a ‘wine snob’.  How about you?

Wyndham Estate Wine and Chocolate Masterclass

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Yesterday, Deanna and I ventured out to partake in one of the many events during the June Hunter Valley Wine and Food Festival.  We visited Wyndham Estate winery just past Branxton, NSW.  As I mentioned in my blog, ‘Wine Tasting Technology Perspective’, I met a ‘friend’ on FaceBook who shared a common interest in wine plus a particular interest in the Tyrrell’s Vat 1 Semillon as he was a rep for Tyrrell’s at the time.  He now works at Wyndham Estate and posted about their Wine & Chocolate matching Masterclass, so we decided to attend.  Another good example of business being conducted via Web 2.0!

The class had 4 wines (all by Wyndham Estate) which were a Bin 333 Pinot Noir, a Shiraz / Grenache blend (the Grenache really came out, especially with the Raspberry-infused chocolate), a Bin 555 Sparkling Shiraz, and a Rutherglen Muscat.  The chocolates where a Raspberry-infused dark chocolate, a Belgian chocolate, and an Orange-infused chocolate.  Not every combination worked well as you might be able to imagine, but some were really a treat!

The Pinot was fine with the Raspberry-infused chocolate and the Grenache from the Shiraz / Grenache blend really picked up the flavors from the Raspberry-infused chocolate even more.  I personally did not like the Sparkling Shiraz with any of the ‘infused’ chocolates as there was just too much chaos going on in my mouth, but several others in the class liked it.  The Muscat with the Orange-infused chocolate worked extremely well together also.

Both Deanna and I were really interested in what may go well with a Chile-infused chocolate and Cameron Davies, our instructor for the day, had the answer – a big, robust Shiraz!  Wyndham Estate has a great Shiraz, called Black Cluster which is made from 40 year old vines.  We had the 2007 (current vintage) and it was a great wine and good value at $60 per bottle.  And the spice and pepper of the Black Cluster really brought out the chili in the chocolate and the chili really brought out the spice in the Shiraz – it was a wonderful and full-on experience.  Deanna blurted out that “it was like having an explosion in my mouth”!  For me, I will remain a bit more refrained and repeat – ‘it was a wonderful and full-on experience’!

A lot of people have learned a bit (and some a lot) about matching food and wine, and it does, in many cases, truly enhance the dining experience in my opinion.  I also like matching wine and cheese and while any good wine will go with any good cheese, there are combinations that really work much better than others.  The same is true for wine and chocolate.

When we have a 3 – 4 course dinner party, we often start with a Sparkling Shiraz on arrival for drinks until we sit down and get into the first course and the first matching wine.  However, I learned yesterday that a Sparkling Shiraz can go well with chocolate and think it would do very nicely as an alternative to a more traditional desert wine to match up with heavy (or mud) chocolate cake or chocolate truffles to finish a meal.  That is one of the lessons I learned yesterday.  Thanks Cameron for the Masterclass!