colYEAYta

My father brought this along to share these holidays...After thoroughly enjoying the complexity and length on this puppy (at least a minute on the palate, moving through fruit to that gorgeous nutty subtlety that colheitas possess), my father the heathen then proceeded to declare the superiority of a tawny produced in Oz by Yalumba called Galway Pipe. Now, Galway is pleasant, drinkable, a nice simple finish to an occasion, a nonvintage with 12-15 years on it...but cannot hold a candle to a colheita.
I should step back, however, before I get into the beauties of colheitas and explain a bit about tawnies. Tawny ports go "tawny" and develop their nuttiness as a result of extended aging in oak barrels and oxidative exposure. They are nonvintage, a blend of years to maintain the house flavour; Reserve has been aged at least 7 years in oak, but other options are 10, 20, 30 or 40 year olds. And then, THEN, one has colheitas, tawny ports produced from a single vintage. These are rather special, rather particular, rather beautiful. A definitive 92.

REAL passionfruit

I have been privileged over the past few days to partake of a minute vertical of Cloudy Bay's most recent Sauvignon Blancs, 2006 and 2007. And man are they different. 2006 is all about the fruit, very forward tropicals with an emphasis on passionfruit and lemon accompanying the gooseberries. 2007 was more tight, less forward fruity, as might be expected, but with a lingering, fuller palate - passionfruit was still present on the nose, accompanied by increased citrus and notes of granny smith apples. Both are built to last. Scores? 2006 = 88; 2007 = 90.
Cloudy Bay is one of the premier New Zealand wine producers, established in 1985. They are located on the South Island, in the cool climate Marlborough region - which has itself gained world-wide repute for sauvignon blanc. Cloudy Bay not only produces the lovely complex wines I just reviewed, but also creates a very interesting oaked Sauvignon (Te Koko), a Chardonnay, a Pinot Noir, a Riesling, and a sparkling (Pelorus). Their wines are a tad pricey, but are most definitely worth every cent.
Now, throughout this decadence of New Zealand splendour, while the family was gathered together to celebrate the holidays, my brother went on a bit of a diatribe about the fact that REAL passionfruit is a scent that is simply not appreciated outside the Antipodes these days - and that many are so accustomed to the fake passionfruit smells one encounters in, for example, yogurt flavours, that we have lost touch with the beauty of true passionfruit odors. He also went on to assert that the passionfruit nose on Cloudy Bay was indeed of a TRUE and not a fake passionfruit nature. Now, after some research, RM has some interesting chemical facts to share with you, gentle readers, regarding...stay tuned!

Loving the Belgian in my life

30% wheat, 70% malt. Now, although I love this beer (cherry champagne, basically), Lindemans do cheat in calling this beer a "Lambic kriek" - it's too much of a girlie sweet alcopop and sugar has definitively been added.Lambic beer is created via spontaneous fermentation, meaning that fermentation is activated by wild yeasts and bacteria native to Brussels (the Senne Valley), and this process gives it a dry, sour taste. Once fermentation is started, the beer is siphoned into old oak port, sherry or even wine casks. Lambic Kriek then has sour cherries added to it post-fermentation - these, with pits intact, are left in for a number of months and cause further fermentation due to their inherent sugar content. The final product contains no residual sugar, so possesses a cherry aroma but no sweetness on the palate.
However, Lindemanns does something a bit different - instead of lambic they use oud bruin ("old brown" or Flanders brown) as a base, which goes through two fermentations and results in a beer with a sweet and sour palate, and to this they add a cherry syrup to achieve the alcopop smell and taste .
And Raving Maenad LOVES it. 85 points.

Casa Lapostolle was founded in Chile in 1994 by the great grand-daughter of the creator of Grand Marnier, and has established a reputation for producing some of Chile's finest wines. Their premier brand is Clos Apalta, but the Classic and Cuvee Alexandre quite nice as well. The Classic 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon was produced under relatively dry and cool conditions in the Rapel Valley, with a hot summer ripening period which allowed the grapes to catch up on their ripening to produce a lovely low yielding harvest. Half the grapes saw French oak and half saw stainless steel, which would explain the lovely blueberry and strawberry fruit present on the nose and palate. Cedar and black pepper is accompanied by hints of smoke, violets and truffles, but the wine is still quite young, and the tannins rather stringy - would be better to lay down for a few, as the acid/tannic backbone is there and the fruit can only open out with time. Wine Spectator gave 85, Wine Enthusiast gave 89. Raving Maenad gives it an 80, if only because it retails at a reasonable $17.99, at least in Crested Butte Colorado. Palate could be much better balanced and more rounded/full - but definitely a food wine, and would go very nicely with some thick juicy steak or lamb roast.

port pour vous

I did promise and simply did not deliver. So will do so now. The Duoro, Portugal - they make what might be termed "traditional" wine there as well, and quite nice stuff too. However, what they're really famous for is the fortified stuff, the stuff you finish a proper dining experience off with pre-cigars and brandy, the stuff that can match and caress both stilton and chocolate with grace, the beautiful, complex and sure-to- get-you-more-drunk-than-you-think-you-are port.
This lovely, a simple non-vintage, is quite impressive, given what I paid for it - a mere 5 pounds. Definitive dark chocolate with hints of coffee and leather, counterbalance gorgeous thirst-quenching blackberry and plum fruit. Shouldn't be too surprised, Dow's is a reputable house, been around for centuries...since 1798, to be precise. They know their stuff. Red port wine is usually made from a combination of grapes, including Tinta Barroca, Tinta Cao, Tempranillo, Touriga Francesa and Touriga Nacional (white port is also made and usually ingested as an aperitif). The port featured right now, here, would be classified as a "ruby port", and is not meant to be aged but drunk forthwith :).
To produce port wine, one must start out in the same manner as with "traditional" wine production, by encouraging the grape juice to begin to ferment via addition of yeast that converts the sugar in the grape to alcohol. The difference in port wine production is that the winemaker only allows the fermentation process to convert HALF of the sugar in the juice - she/he then stops fermentation by adding clear brandy of proof 150, which kills off the yeast. Thus there is residual sugar left in the wine, which gives the final product its sweet taste, but the wine also contains a hefty amount of alcohol, so will get one soused (trashed) rather more rapidly than a "traditional".
After drinking port, one usually finds a red rim around one's lips - not the most attractive phenomenon - and a lovely purple fuzzy coating on one's tongue. Both of these consequences of indulgence are produced by the tannins contained in the wine - tannins are highly coloured compounds, more on this next time - and that very special fuzzy coat that would deter even the most devoted lover from tonguing one, at least in the oral region, is a neat little chemical composite coagulation of wine tannins and one's salivary proteins. Such a coating is observable with the drinking of any tannic wine, but is more pronounced with port, possible due to the additional sugars present. The best way to get rid of such nastiness and encourage kisses is to immediately follow consumption with the highly acidic beverage called champagne - works like a dream to clean up the tannin, as the acid dissolves the coagulates, making them water soluble and hence immediately removable. Happiness - sheer indulgence is to definitively be followed by further, and both go screamingly well with cheese! :*

warm beer

I now understand the need for warm beer in the uk - being an american, I had not quite gotten it before. I had not exposed myself before to the fierce winter winds (which pierce straight through the flesh to the depths of your marrows, despite being neither all that intense nor all that cold) and then followed such exposure with a nice warm bitter sipped beside an almost fireplace in a cozy british pub. Adnams bitter shall remain forever the perfect accompaniment to smoked salmon and horseradish after a blustery day.
More entertainingly, however, is the slip made in today's BBC recording of the Carols Service at King's College, Cambridge. Although the audience had to stay around post-service for the choir to rerecord the Choir singing various beautiful latinate carols (and the audience singing "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen", I still don't know where we messed up the first time), the BBC apparently did not seem bothered about the following misreading of John Betjeman's "Christmas" (final stanza, oo the irony! the bold bit is where he messed up):

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That Man was God in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Should read: "God was Man" - there were many sober faces, but far more hilarious were all the old dons poking each other and giggling.

Be ready for a port review tomorrow.

Post-Thanksgiving Weekend

Can officially declare that Burgundy and pheasant do NOT go well together...need something a bit grippier to deal with the bird's gaminess, am thinking a bordeaux would have been a better call. Regardless, CAN officially say that champers and smoked salmon does work, as does Xmas pud and Pedro X. And highland whiskey aged in PX casks is even better. Plus, it does help a girl sleep.

However, got distracted by more important things, like http://www.foodpairing.be/ and http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2007/11/herv_this.php and http://sifter.org/~aglisi/. What fun, eclecticism!

Flavanols

So what ARE antioxidants? Most reports in the general media will tell you that they're good for you, found in a number of key plant produced consumables (every other week there's a new kind of berry we should be eating more of), prevent cardiac arrest, keep cancer away, are GOOD THINGS to eat and drink.

This is why it is good to have a glass of wine a day, especially red wine, so the "experts" say.

But what exactly ARE they?? What do they LOOK like, especially the beneficial ones? Are there any that aren't beneficial, and where are they found? What exactly do they do, once they're in our bodies, to prevent us from getting heart attacks, cancer, etc.?

This I will tell you, NOBODY KNOWS.

"They" are trying, supposedly to find out...but then, what would you do, handed a grant proposal to fund research into "wine chemistry"? Would you not laugh, make some comment about "obvious alcoholics", and fund some much more "promising" research into a synthetic antiobesity drug or erectile dysfunction (remember, Viagra was originally intended for cardiac treatments, opening up blood flow to specific tissues and having unintended effects upon fortunate clinical trials volunteers)? What if we actually discovered that the aphrodisiacal effects both red wine and chocolate have upon women is based purely on the specific (and DIFFERENT) flavanoids (the wider class of compounds to which flavanols belong) that each respectively contain?

Just a thought. There WILL be more on this, as there IS research that is being done and which NEEDS to be better, and more accurately, reported.

November 22 - An Early Thanksgiving

Finished this puppy off last night, a lovely Barbera with a nice rump steak and Italian-style veg. Now Barbera (best known type is Barbera d'Asti, others are Barbera del Monferrato and Barbera d'Alba which rarely leave Italy) is one of the most widely-planted grapes in Italy, and is a very high-yielding little bugger, so usually when one purchases, especially at a lower price point (under 10 quid), one does not expect too much. However, this one delivered, and had the backbone to last me a week once opened as well. Cherries with a light vanilla and a definitive caramel toastiness; more acid than tannin. Typically aged in large barrels of Slovenian oak, but the trend recently has been to use small French; the black late-harvesting grape likes warmish climes, but grown in northwestern Italy mostly, under same conditions as Nebbiolo, so go figure. 13.5%, this beauty from the province of Alessandria (the "d'Asti" bit) is grown in a 40 hectare vineyard up in the hills of Alice Bel Colle with other worthies like Nebbiolo, Moscato and Dolcetto.