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Friday, June 02, 2006

Augustus

Interesting visit on Wednesday to Augustus, whose Chardonnay I've always sold here. I was curious to find out more about their Forum vinegar (famous for being used by Ferran Adrià, served at the Nobel prize dinners etc), and taste some of their reds. I particularly liked the Cabernet Franc, which I'll be looking to stock in the future. The 2004 had a nice balance of fruit and Cabernet Franc spiciness, and I'm always a sucker for something unusual - I can't think of any other 100% Cab Franc wine locally.

Plus although I sort of knew where it was, it's still surprising to find a Chardonnay that usually stands out for it's good acidity and citrus notes being grown so close to the sea. It's probably a couple of miles, but it feels like about a firm seven iron...

See for yourself on this link to Google earth. It's centred on the cellar, but zoom out to get a feel for how close it is to the sea.
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Monday, February 27, 2006

Great Mediterranean wine

A few months ago, I mentioned a cellar in Languedoc that's producing some wonderful wines, and I mentioned that "shortly" there'd be a website telling their story. Well, it's taken us a little bit longer than I'd planned: working with wineries is like that - suddenly the harvest gets in the way and you lose 3 months...

Anyway, the site has finally gone live. If you haven't heard of Domaine Lignères yet, you will soon. Their wines are already extraordinarily good, but what's in the cellar is frankly stunning. The site tells a great story - and permit me the flash animation on the homepage as it does actually tell the story of how they came up with their labels...

Check it out...
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Words...

Since the age of 18, I've been fortunate enough to pick up a few languages: Catalan and Spanish of course, plus the ability to communicate relatively well in Italian and French. Interestingly, I can talk fairly fluently about wine in all of them. (On the other hand it's harder to talk about the net - the terminology is too anglo-centric).

But every now and then you get tripped up by a word: this week it was coupage, the French word for a blend. Or at least that's what I thought.

Much of wine terminology stems from the French, so when a blend in Catalan is a cupatge, and whilst cupaje is used less in Spanish , (probably a Catalan usage rather than the correct term) I was quite surprised when coupage in French turned out to be a fairly derogatory term. It turns out that, yes, it is a blend, but when referring to the "recipe" of a fine wine, the correct term should be assemblage. Seeing as the Catalan word cupatge probably comes from cup (pronounced coop), the old underground tanks where grapes fermented, maybe it does carry more of a "chuck everything together" implication, than a carefully selected blend.

No confusion in Italian: they call it a taglio instead...
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Friday, January 27, 2006

Snow

View from my office window:


Doesn't happen very often down here. Fun when it does.
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Saturday, November 05, 2005

Banyuls


Fascinating drive around Banyuls vineyards last week. Vertiginous slopes miles up apparently dropping straight into the sea. Costers to compete with the nastiest in Priorat...
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