I WAS at a tasting recently to catch up with what’s what at Tesco. Here are my highlights.

Folks do like to push the boat out a bit for Christmas dinner and bearing that in mind, I’ll be putting together a suggested selection of somewhat more upmarket wines for the groaning board from Tesco and other retailers later in the season. Having said that, the wines here would sit nicely on any dinner table.

Tesco finest Bisol Prosecco NV €15.19.
Yikes — I had to take a step backward from the forward effervescence of this Italian sparkler but as the mousse settles down, you discover a delicious light and refreshingly lemony fizz.

Tesco Cava Brut NV €9.99.
A simple smile-inducing party fizz made for Tesco by Codorníu, one of the giants of the Penedès region in north-Eastern Spain. The store’s  Reserva Cava made by Marques de Monistrol is a smokier and more serious sparkler but also a bargain at €11.69.

Tesco Soave Classico DOC 2008 €5.25.
I like this a lot, regardless of price. It’s a perfectly-formed soft white,  light and peachy enhanced by a pleasing smoky, breathy structure.

Tesco Finest Ken Forrester Chenin Blanc WO Stellenbosch €8.99.
Intense and complex, its golden colour hinting at the richness beyond the lovely spicy apples and pears, this is great value. Indeed, while it can be hard to assign a strict numerical quality-per-cent measure but I’m inclined to think this was the best value white in the tasting,

Spy Mountain Sauvignon Blanc Marlborough NZ €11.69.
Less urgently pungent than the splendidly assertive The Reach (€15.99), its upmarket Tesco shelfmate, this is nevertheless a wonderfully assertive , nettley sauv blanc. The name, by the way, refers to the US satellite listening base stations further down the valley, making it the only wine I know of that makes a wry reference to geopolitics. Irrelevant I know but kind-of cool.

St Hallett Poachers Blend, Barossa 2008 €10.49.
Steely sauv blanc and plump ripe semillon laced with riesling make for intriguing contrasts and cross-currents. Fantastic value for such a vibrant wine

Peter Lehmann Semillon Barossa 2005 €7.99.
Lehmann makes his second appearance here in a month, and with good reason: For the price of a stack-em-up ‘special purchase’ you’re getting a beautifully nuanced ripe, mature and elegant semillon.

Tesco Finest Provence Rosé.
Here’s a pink for people who like their red, an unabashed forward wine stuffed with dense red fruit flanked by deliciously funky spicy notes – out of the fridge. Fab. I’d suggest this needs a bit of air –  pour it into a jug a little while before you try it.

Cono Sur Reserva Pinot Noir 2007 €10.99.
As with Lehmann’s above, you’re left asking how do Cono Sur do this? A top-class, perfectly weighted pinot that’d give many a posh burgundy a run for its money — at a third of the price. The winemaker is the shockingly young Adolfo Hurtado. There was a time when pinot meant one of two places: Bourgogne and New Zealand. Working out of a low intervention and pretty impressively eco-friendly vineyard, Hurtado can take credit for adding the word “Chile” to that short list.

Cosme Palacio Rioja 2006 €12.99.
That price tag isn’t far off the everyday zone but you’re getting an elegant glossy black and slightly earthy tempranillo blend glistening darkly in your glass. Super.  I see  the man they love to hate, Michel Rolland, was involved in its making. If that flying consultant’s  intervention is the crucial factor behind the crisp, clean, darkly juicy red, the man should be congratulated rather than condemned.

Tesco Finest Chianti Classico Riserva DOCG 2005 €10.19.
Red wine is about more than robustness: studded with expressive juicy berries, this expressive juicy red firm and dry wine is as crisp and precise as starched linen. I like this a lot and think it’s great value.

Tesco Finest Vacqueras 2007 €7.99.
In food as in wine, contrast is king. Here, there’s a great interplay going on between the pointy spice, prickling acidity (and even some slightly liquoricy notes)  and the gorgeous plump red fruit. The price of this appellation (informally known as “just down the road from Chateauneuf-du-Pape”) has been shooting upward in recent times so this is a steal.

Ringbolt Cabernet sauvignon Margaret River 2007 12.49.
Sweet ripe fruit playing off a lovely savoury backbeat, an attractive and approachable version of the grape that makes you feel like telling Bordeaux to chillax a bit.

Tesco Finest Howcroft Estate Shiraz Limestone Coast 2008 €9.99.
Aussie shiraz isn’t only about bigness — what I enjoy most about this everyday shiraz is its elegance.

Boschendal Lanoy Cabernet sauvignon WO Coastal Region 2007 €10.99.
I’ve always loved Boschendal’s range, and this was no exception. I tasted this generous, plush and expressive inexpensive red alongside far dearer wines and still it held its own, its elegance and powers of  persuasion  shining through even after I’d tasted the superb Tim Adams Aberfeldy (€38).

I’M lying low for a week or so – have other fish to fry at the moment – but will be back posting fun and guff here before you can say trapstick. But I’m breaking radio silence to say I’m delighted to see the location chosen by the people behind The Good Wine Show for their publicity photo-shoot.

Billy Forrester (Bubble Brothers), Micheal Kane (Curious Wines) and Joe Karwig (Karwig Wines) launching The Good Wine Show at Cork Bonded Warehouse. Pic: Gerard Mcarthy

Many people are surprised to discover the ancient low-slung building lurking behind the Port of Cork sign (visible as you drive up from Tivoli, or indeed sail up the river Lee) is not only a working warehouse, but is the Cork Bonded Warehouse, as the peeling lettering along the side proclaims.  It’s one of the nodes through which all imported alcohol must pass, all under the watchful eye of the excise man when he’s not chasing poteen makers.

Of course alcohol made here in Ireland has to go into bond too. Which reminds me: If you’ve any interest in Ireland, history, society, strong drink or any of the above, would you ever please get a copy of The Whiskeys of Ireland by Peter Mulryan [€25, O'Brien Press]. If the book were a competent history and appreciation of uisce beatha (and it is) it’d be worth a look. But it’s also an informative and thoroughly entertaining romp down the centuries, stuffed with some startling yarns (especially ones involving the excise man) and one big tantalising what-if from the DeVelara era regarding US Prohibition and Whiskey Galore…

Here endeth the digression.

The Good Wine Show, presented by Bubble Brothers, Curious Wines and Karwig Wines, is on in a few weeks’ time. It promises to be a fantastic opportunity to enjoy in its own right or (my preference) to get to grips with a selection from the portfolios of three bloody good wine Cork-based importers/retailers.  Suit yourself but do get there. Don’t forget too that on the following week O’Donovan’s present their ninth Cork Wine Fair in the same venue, and again I’d urge anyone around Cork interested in wine to drop along.

The Good Wine Show
- Friday November 13 from 3pm to 8pm
- Saturday November 14 from 11am to 4pm
Clarion Hotel, Lapp’s Quay, Cork.
Tickets €15 from any of the three promoters or online.

The Cork Wine Fair
- Thursday November 19 from 4pm to 9pm
Clarion hotel, Lapp’s Quay, Cork
Tickets €15 from any O’Donovans Off Licence.
Proceeds to Friends of Marymount.

Cork-Barcelona exchange at An Crúibín

Pigs might fly at An Crúibín

Run by Paul Lewis and Frank O’Connell, the bar and restaurant occupy the space that used to be The Lobby on the corner of Anglesea Street and Union Quay in Cork city. I love the sensitive renovation of this beautiful bow-cornered building. I love the selection of wines at pretty reasonable prices, served by bottle or glass. And I love the food.

The classy grub served in the bar has provided me with the best bad reason not to climb the stairs to the restaurant. I’m a semi-regular there and, barring one unexceptional stuffed courgette, I’ve always found the food in the bar great value.

An Crúibín

From rustic plateens of the likes of patatas bravas or chick-peas through to more nuanced dishes like a beautiful, subtle seared tuna electrified by anchovies, or a bowl of lamb shanks, the food is delicious and satisfying. Plates licked clean. By the way, lest you don’t know, Crúibín (pronounced crew-bean) is the Irish for pig’s foot, a local indelicacy as featured in Bessie Smith’s song, Give me a crúibín and a bottle of beer.

I don’t have a menu in front of me for a very good reason. Like a foodie raga it’s re-composed afresh every day depending on what’s what in the market and appears fleetingly chalked up on the blackboard from around 6.30pm. A wrinkled receipt tells me the dishes I enjoyed during my last lash at the place ranged from €7.50 to €13.50.

Compared with some mid-marked eateries, this could seem expensive. But in such places, the food is often an illusion, all curtain and no show. Do the math(s). Subtract the stack of cheap carbohydrate and discover you’re spending more at the “cheap” places.

Chef Paco Guzmán is cooking at An Crúibín. Picture: Vicens Gimenez

One day soon I’ll check out the Silk Purse restaurant, and I’m looking forward to it.

This weekend there’s an extra reason to consider popping upstairs.  As part of a “gastronomical food exchange”, Paco Guzmán — who runs the Santa Maria restaurant in El Born, Barcelona — will be cooking using Irish ingredients sourced from Cork markets on Saturday October 24 at 7.30pm.

It’s only €35 for Paco’s five-course taster menu and a glass of wine.

An Crúibín is open daily, pub hours.
The Silk Purse is open Thursday to Saturday from 7pm till late.

See the Crúibín / Silk Purse blog or phone 021 431 0071 for bookings and further details. ♦

[Discolosure: I am a former colleague of one of the proprietors, and related to one member of staff  croobeen cruibin crubeen ]

There’s a fundraising wine tasting on at Fenn’s Quay restaurant, Sheare’s St, Cork, on Tuesday October 20 at 7pm in aid of Cork Cheshire Home, featuring the wines of Springfield Estate  in Robertson, South Africa. Phone 021 4279527 or visit their website for more details.

HERE are some widely-held misapprehensions about wine and alcohol. Self-confessed buffs will greet most of them with a nod of recognition. Some of the points relate to general health issues but as ever, if you have any query about any aspect of your health, ask your doctor about it.

Screwcaps

A myth still persists in some quarters that poor, cheap wines are the only ones bottled under screwcaps and that a ‘proper’ cork is a sign of a good wine. Not so. As practically every dedicated wine fan knows by now, the twist-off cap is generally a better, more reliable way to seal a wine bottle. And each year, more and more wines on our shelves are bottled that way, led by upmarket wineries in New Zealand and Australia.

Corked wine

There’s a perception that if cork is partly broken, crumbling or damaged, the wine inside will be faulty. Not necessarily.

When we say a wine is ‘corked’ we mean it’s infected with a substance named 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). Produced by fungi, it is harmless, but spoils the wine experience (especially if you’re in the habit of enjoying an occasional sniff as well as a sip) with its off-putting, dank, wet cardboard, rising damp odour. It can infest barrels or even a whole winery. But, crucially, one of the places it flourishes best is within natural cork, hence the slightly confusing word ‘corked’.

The fault was one of the impulses that drove the wine industry to turn to screwcaps.

Alcohol content

There’s a perception that winemakers have been deliberately pumping more and more alcohol into wines in recent decades. Twenty years ago, practically every wine came in at 11.5% to 12.5%, while nowadays they commonly hit 13% and 14%. But in fact, underlying this upward trend is the set of interrelationships among three factors: sugar, alcohol and flavour.

The wine styles we favour nowadays are generally (1) full of ripe fruit flavour and (2) quite dry, as in low in sugar. As you know, the riper any fruit is, the more stuffed with sugar it will be. So grapes bursting with sweet juice are carted off to the winery (generally trailed by a cloud of wasps driven crack-addict crazy by that heady scent) only for most of that sugar to be fermented into lots and lots and lots of alcohol.

Winemakers all over the world have been seeking ways to make modern fruity wines without such a high payload of alcohol. However, it’s not an easy circle to square. Planting in cooler areas; harvesting grapes earlier, and using less efficient strains of yeast are among the key approaches to naturally reduce the sugar/alcohol content. These expedients could help restore the old 11% benchmark. Two wine countries – Germany and Portugal – are awash in good traditional wine styles with around 10% or 11% alcohol ABV. And semi-sweet styles, again particularly from Germany may have even less alcohol.

There have been recent attempts to produce low-alcohol wines, usually by making full strength wine and then mechanically or chemically removing that particular active ingredient. All of the ones I’ve tried are pretty poor and if you want to reduce the alcohol content you’re imbibing, you’d be better off with grape juice, or by adding water to your wine, or drinking less.

Mixing your drinks

We’ve all heard the warning: mixing the grape (wine, brandy, port, sherry) with the grain (beer, whiskey) will cause you terrible after-effects the following day. This is an attribution error of giant proportions. Hangovers are caused by alcohol.
The myth may be grounded in the circumstances the sufferer is most likely to consume both classes of drink – coincidentally involving lots of alcohol. “We went for a few drinks after work and then on to the restaurant where we had a few bottles of wine and a drop of Cognac with the coffee – oh yes and the waiter came round with flaming sambucas on the house and then we went back to the pub for more pints…”

Attributing the problem to the class of drink rather than the quantity of it is a self-deluding get-out clause.

And if I can’t appeal to your common sense, can I please appeal to your incredulity? Just suppose for a moment that each class, grape and grain, does have some magic ingredient which – even after they’ve been denatured by fermentation or distillation – cause people to feel ill when they meet. Well if that is so, please explain to me why the streets aren’t full of people staggering around groaning in pain caused by their breakfast muesli.
Certainly, loading up on a rich, superfluous overdose of nutrients could cause some queasiness, but in my view it’s likely to be infinitesimal compared to the after-effects of too much alcohol.

Wine is good for you
Wine is bad for you

These notions – along with variants such as ‘a glass of red wine a day is good for you’ – aren’t true and aren’t false. But they’re hopelessly, irredeemably useless. And anyone who gets Orwell’s point about the misleading power of the phrase “four legs good, two legs bad” should spot that.

Yet we keep seeing apparently plausible stories suggesting one or the other. It’s only when you take the long view and see all these stories in context that the absurdity emerges. Indeed one website is devoted entirely to aggregating stories in just one newspaper in the ‘X is good for you, Y is bad for you’ genre. Last time I checked, it listed 17 recent stories that wine prevents cancer and 18 that it causes it.

There are some specific health issues – alcoholism being merely the most obvious one – regarding wine that neither I nor any other blogger can help you with, and you really should talk to your doctor if you are in any doubt. But otherwise you should be fine with moderate consumption of alcohol, along with a good varied diet, a bit of exercise, a decent night’s sleep, the company of people who care about you, a good belly laugh, the respect of your peers, etc etc…

Where was I? Oh yes. Wine. There certainly seems to be some deliberate misreporting, compounded by media and blog parroting of the same ‘facts’ taken on trust.

In the yay-boo media, scientists are reduced to panto heroes or villains. They’ve either discovered some magic bullet that’ll help you live longer (yay!) or are foisting some new horror on us – such as mobile phone masts – that’ll kill us all stone dead (boo!).

Much of the problem is the small print, and our reluctance or inability to read it: Scientific research is phrased carefully, and stuffed with caveats and conditions. For instance, a study might demonstrate that a substance isolated from grape skins tends to have certain effects on a certain type of human cells in vitro.  And those effects, if replicated in the human body, could potentially have effects that are beneficial to a particular aspect of our metabolism. That is not saying the same thing as the half-page article headlined Study Shows Wine Protects Heart Health, illustrated by that stock shot of a woman tucking into an enormous glass of cabernet.

Population lifestyle studies suggesting that wine drinkers live longer are just as questionable. A brilliant piece of research reported in the British Medical Journal in 2006 demonstrated one way that studies of wine can be confounded by other factors. Researchers in Denmark got the co-operation of some 100 supermarkets and food shops which turned over the data from 3.5 million till receipts.
Trawling through them, they discovered that drinkers in their sample who bought wine (as opposed to other forms of alcohol) were more likely to buy fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, while those who brought other types of alcohol through the checkout were more likely to also buy snacks and fatty processed foods.

What that really tells us is something we may have guessed – for a host of reasons, people buying into home cooking tend to choose wine. That in turn may suggest why wine-drinking seems to be related to longevity.  While I certainly don’t see takeaways or snack foods as some sort of lethal poison, I do believe home cooking with fresh ingredients to be positive contributors to wellbeing – as well perhaps as suggesting an enhanced home life. And maybe that is where long life,  health and happiness can be found.

Thing is, unlike a bottle of wine, you can’t buy that lifestyle off the shelf for €8. And similarly, the Danish report doesn’t easily fit in to the yay-boo media template of a good story and so was barely mentioned in the mass media. Certainty sells, not subtlety.

‘Contains sulphites’

Sulphites (or sulfites, the American spelling) are naturally-occurring compounds which have been used as a preservative in wine – as well as other foods such as blue cheese and dried fruit – for hundreds of years. You can take it that all wines, including those made from organically-grown grapes, contain sulphites. Oh, and your body naturally produces sulphites. They’re a group of natural, non-toxic compounds.

A small proportion of the population who suffer from asthma may have an adverse reaction to sulphites in the diet, but most of us seem to suffer no ill effects.

It may be technically possible to produce wines that don’t contain sulphites – but they would be tremendously unstable and would perhaps more closely resemble vinegar. Put it this way – I’ve yet to hear of even one sulphite-free wine on the market. And millions of people are drinking wine every day around the world with no problem.

The alarm is caused in part by the warning on wine bottles which screams CONTAINS SULPHITES just like that, in capitals. Given that, surely, anyone with a sulphite intolerance will know that wine always contains the stuff, I believe it’s as helpful as a warning that a tin of tomatoes CONTAINS TOMATOES.

I used to think that the warning should be scrapped entirely. A compromise could entail a requirement for wine producers to label the sulphite content as an average parts per million (ppm) at time of production. There would be understandable industry resistance to such a solution. Unlike, say, soft drinks or prepared meals, wine changes from year to year: the testing and printing costs could be prohibitive, especially to smaller producers. But either solution would be preferable to the current one which generally only serves to frighten people.

Organic wine

Some people believe that wines made from organically-grown grapes taste better, are better for you, and won’t give you a hangover. And yet – having met quite a few organic winemakers and people who sell their wines – I’ve yet to hear one of them make any of these claims.

I am emotionally drawn to organics, and am particularly persuaded by issues of sustainability, and by the notion of producers wresting power from companies that market agricultural inputs. We owe the organic movement a great deal of credit for its key role in putting food quality up the agenda in recent decades. However, I’ve yet to see any evidence of health benefits due to organic production methods.

There’s an ever-growing range of wines on the market approved by one of the various organisations certifying produce as being organic or biodynamic. In its wake comes an even larger slew of wines from producers practicing minimal intervention techniques such as ‘lutte raisonné’, many of which are organic-in-all-but-name. But by not seeking such certification are entitled to use legal insecticides and pesticides.

To the last and most easily demolished point, hangovers. Alcohol is the component that causes hangovers. So a wine made from organically-grown grapes will cause a hangover every bit as powerful as the non-organic type: Falling from an oak tree will not hurt any less than falling from a breeze-block wall. ♦

It’s hardly surprising that a psychoactive, potentially addictive and highly profitable substance should trail a whole slew of mythology in its wake.

IN today’s Irish Examiner I’m putting a coin in the trolley and taking a wander past the wine shelves of Marks & Spencer.

Once upon a time, M&S had a reputation as the Chile of retailing: safe but boring. But that’s all changed now.

Matt Gant, winemaker at St Hallett in the Barossa

For a few years now, the chain’s wine-buying team has been working with quality winemakers on the ground, effectively designing one-offs for Marks, a process led by winemaker Gerd Stepp who grew up in the trade in Pfalz. Nowadays you can find some pretty classy wines from many highly-regarded wineries on their shelves — for instance Clairault Estate in Western Australia and St Hallet in the Barossa, to take but two Australian examples.

Among my highlights tomorrow are two fantastic deep expressive shirazes from St Hallet made by Matt Gant, who’s pictured above.  St Hallett is quite a small operation and while they appear on some restaurant wine lists, their wines are relatively hard to come by in shops here in Ireland (imported by Gilbey’s, they’re well worth looking out for). So it’s great to see M&S making some of them more readily available. Yum.  ♦

Vera Lynn and Charles Stewart Parnell

MY first post linking to online radio is all about history — a brilliant series tied in with a book about Irish political trials, and a short standalone journey into an icon of popular culture.

The last shall be first because you only have until until Monday October 19 to hear it. Even though it’s presented by the estimable Ian Hislop, I wasn’t exactly excited at the prospect of BBC Radio 4’s Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover which I presumed would be no more than a mildly diverting bit of WWII quaintness.  But it turns out to be a fascinating story of plagiarism, propaganda and politics. And birdwatching. Spoiler alert: Like me, you may find some aspects of the programme pretty startling, and prefer to enjoy discovering them by listening rather than reading on here.

Made famous by Vera Lynn, The White Cliffs of Dover has a peculiar history.

Hislop starts the programme from the clifftop near Dover asking a local ornithologist to point out the bluebirds. The answer — that there aren’t any there, and never have been — kicks off a search for the real roots of the song. It turns out that it’s as American as bluebirds and was a Glen Miller hit before Vera Lynn got her hands on it. But its parentage is even more interesting than its birth.

It seems pretty clear that lyricist Nat Burton lifted the title, the aspiration and the Anglophile thrust from The White Cliffs, the now forgotten but then bestselling verse novel by mathematician and poet Alice Duer Miller.

But Burton and composer Walter Kent *cough* borrowed from a source even more iconic than their own composition, lifting lyrical keywords, and even the opening few bars (albeit offset a little) from Somewhere Over the Rainbow. You can demonstrate this if you want – get an accomplice to start singing the White Cliffs of Dover song and join in with [your rendition of] Somewhere Over The Rainbow on the word ‘blue’. And there’s lots more packed into the half hour show.

While the TV on BBC iPlayer is restricted to the UK, all its radio channels are available worldwide for a week after broadcast. It’s worth a trawl for all sorts. For me, it’s all about documentaries and other non-fiction, some of the comedy and Craig Charles’ excellent funk and soul show on Radio 6.

Charles Stewart Parnell

THE second programme I’m recommending is even more stuffed with fascinating incident and detail.  Accompanying the book of the same name, Conspiracy: Irish Political Trials under the Union is a four-part RTÉ series dealing with some of the most significant cases in Irish legal history between 1801 and 1922.

The series delves into the trials and tribunals of Robert Emmet, Daniel O’Connell and (from next Sunday) the courts martial after the Easter Rising of 1916. The only one I’ve heard so far is the one where Phoebe and Chandler about Charles Stewart Parnell and the 1889 tribunal investigating the attempt to defame him and other reformers by forged letters in The Times linking them to violence. With no apparent effort, Myles Dungan leads a panel of historians through a thorough explanation of the story and its background. Featuring reenactments from the Times commission hearings, including the dramatic unmasking of the forger Piggott, it’s a great hour’s radio.  I’ve pluck’d them from the very aether downloaded the rest of the series as podcasts and am  looking forward to hearing them.  I won’t bother reposting about them here though, as I think you get the idea.    ♦

CONGRATULATIONS to Michael Kane and Curious Wines which has just won the prize for Best Ecommerce Site at the Irish Web Awards 2009.  It’s a great achievement for the site, the online presence of the wine warehouse of that name in Bandon, Co Cork. You’ll find a guide to buying wine online, including links to Curious and other recommended Irish retail wine sites here.

Curious Wines website

When I first discovered it, the site worked so perfectly that I ended up poking it with a sharp stick, trying to find faults. But faults there were none. (This is akin to looking for faulty wines at Portuguese wine tastings which I invariably do, to no avail. But that’s another story). Comprehensive information and clean, fast-loading pages sold me on the virtues of the site. But, crucially, they sell a very good range including some smashing value bottles. Plus they put the effort into running tastings — indeed they’re one of the three retailers co-hosting the Good Wine Show next month. More about that anon.

Sabrina Dent designed the site and great kudos are due to her for it. I discovered on her site that she is married to John Handelaar, who is behind Kildare Street, which won the award for the Best New Web Application or Service. Kildare Street is a magnificent voluntary project that’s offering accessible, transparent, searchable information about what your politicians are up to. Essentially, the site is doing some of the work our state should be doing, and which we should be demanding as a matter of course.

Respect due all round. ♦

[First things first. I've recently discovered The Evening Hérault, a thoroughly enjoyable blog from the perspective of a Gael who splits time between Ireland and Languedoc. Managing to be humorous and informative, the blog is, in the author's words "about anything from les taxes and les taxis, to le rugby and le Ryanair, pétanque and Irish road bowling."  Love it.]

ANYONE fancy a drop of red wine? How about a cabérnet sauvinhon merlaud?  Or would you prefer to drink pink and enjoy a lightly chilled rosat instead?

You’ll occasionally see such unfamiliar spellings for familiar terms on wine labels from Languedoc in southern France — for instance on The Wine Buff’s range from Mas du Novi (aka Saint Jean du Noviciat).

Wine regions of Languedoc

That strange spelling is in fact Occitan, a minority language closely related to Catalan which is spoken — and being revived by activists — along a great arc stretching from north-eastern Spain across the French Mediterranean and  into northern Italy.

The vast French Languedoc wine region within that area is the world’s biggest vineyard. It has a long history (along with a matching, unenviable reputation) of producing vast volumes of poor, undistinguished wine. But that’s been changing rapidly. The ubiquitous Vins de Pays d’Oc category is now so synonymous with good value and generally inexpensive wines that you’d be forgiven for thinking that wine in that VdeP class is only made in Languedoc — whereas in fact it can be made all over France.

And as ever, things are even more complex than they first appear: the Languedoc region is also studded with diverse appellations for all sorts of wine styles — whites, reds, sparkling, and dessert wines. And the names of those wines may bear no reference whatever to Oc or Languedoc (see map).

The Occitan cross crops up all over the region

Destination wine

Ryanair flies into several airports in and around the Languedoc. Here are wineries you might consider visiting near each of three of them.

Montpellier

Little more than a short walk from the luggage carousel, Château de Flaugergues is situated in La Méjanelle, one of the named Côteaux du Languedoc. Henri and Brigitte de Colbert’s operation is like Bordeaux-sur-Med, a posh chateau whose wines are firmly rooted in the Languedoc tradition. Their top-class grenache, syrah, mourvèdre and carignan  began to be noticed when they started getting 90+ scores in Decanter. Visit the house, take part in a wine tasting and wander round the gardens where vines rub shoulders with citrus groves. www.flaugergues.com

Carcassone

One of the excellent reasons to fly into Carcassone is Château de Pennautier. Part of the Longreil empire, it produces a great range of wines in the intriguing Cabardès appellation, which uniquely permits the blending of grapes traditionally associated with both Bordeaux (cabernet sauvignon and merlot) and the Mediterranean / Rhone areas.

Beziers

Laurent Miquel and his Irish-born wife Neasa make wine at Chateau Cazal Viel just up the road from the airport. Operating from its home appellation of St Chinian, Cazal Viel provides a fantastic example of the blend of tradition and innovation that has helped change the face of the region: super syrah and viognier, recently joined by punchy varietal sauvignon blanc.

Airports in Languedoc

NOffLA Gold Star symbol.

TODAY in The Irish Examiner I’m taking a look at what’s what in the Gold Star Awards. That’s the collective name given to 15 wines selected through a process of blind tastings and now available in about 350 independent off-licences nationwide — the  members of the National Off-Licence Association (NOffLA) which organises the scheme.

It’s essentially a marketing promotion intended to give those hundreds of disparate retailers a national profile and a united, comprehensible offering for wine fans. You could think of this as the indie offies joining two big power blocks — the big wine brands in one corner, and the big multiples and symbol groups in the other — in a sort of winey Mexican stand-off. The full list is of course available on the NoffLA site or in the instore brochures. Of the 15 I thought these hereunder stood out…

Old World White — Under €8 B&G Fleur de Vigne Ugni Blanc Colombard 2007 Vin de Pays des Côtes de Gascogne
Old World White — Under €14 Cave de St Dezery Viognier 2007 Vin de Pays d’Oc France
New World White Under €14 Wakefield Estate Clare Valley Riesling 2008, South Australia
Old World Red Under €8 Canti Negroamaro Zinfandel 2008, Puglia Italy
Old World Red — Under €14 Campo Viejo Reserva 2005, Rioja Spain
New World Red — Under €14 Secreto Carménère 2008 Colchagua Valley Chile
New World Red — Under €20 Montes Alpha Merlot 2006, Colchagua Valley Chile

Nominees and winners lined up at the NOffLA tasting

Down the years I’ve often been delighted by the Gold Star selections. There have been lots of cracking wines among them, often lesser-known styles that really do deserve more exposure. This year’s stars are no exception.

B+G Fleur de Vigne Ugni Blanc Colombard

Consider for instance the ugni blanc colombard blend style from  the south west of France. It’s a fantastic light lemony style that I think will appeal to white wine lovers; it’s as cheap as chips and the south west of France is awash in it. There are far too few examples of this friendly house wine blend coming into this country, the most recent addition being a smashing one at Curious Wines. So say hello and welcome to your nearest off-licence the winner of the NOffLA Old World White — Under €8 category, the B&G Fleur de Vigne Ugni Blanc Colombard 2007 Vin de Pays des Côtes de Gascogne.

See today’s Irish Examiner for my magnificent seven – the best of the Gold Star wines.

Unsurprisingly, Mackenway Wines scored wins for three of its wines, two of which are further honoured as red and white wine of the year respectively. I say unsurprisingly because they have a great track record in the awards. It’s yet again a tribute to the collective palates of small indigenous independent company and they deserve great credit for it. But there’s more. A quick tasting through all of Mackenway’s nominated wines – suggested to me that practically all of the Gold Star collection could have been drawn from their portfolio.

I must say though I’m puzzled by what I see as a missed opportunity in the sparkling wine category. I’d have skipped over all three nominees in favour of one of the growing crowd of slightly off-dry, light, basic NV Champagne-style sparklers. It should’ve been a cinch to find a cracking sparkler well within the category price threshold – a whopping €25.

The winner (Pere Ventura Cava Rosat Semi Sec) and one of the nominees (Beringer Sparkling Rosé) are entirely legitimate sweet and simple pink fizz. But there are degrees of simplicity and sweetness, and I think either of these will leave most wine fans cold.

The third bubbly nominee (Yellowtail Bubbles) is an even more puzzling choice. To me it seems to have an intrusive candy character, the closest aromatic metaphor I can come up with harks back to school days – Golf Ball bubble gum. The Yellowtail range is certainly popular, one of the biggest brands in the world, especially the US. I just don’t get it.

I suspect the reason for the rather unusual selection lies not in the blind tasting selection process, but in limitations imposed by the way the 600+ candidate wines are considered. Crucially, they are submitted by importers rather than being selected. Eliminate big brands (such as Jacob’s Creek) symbol group exclusives (for instance Nugan Estate available only through Musgrave SuperValu Centra) and the tasters may have ended up with a very limited selection to choose from.

While the Pere Ventura will find favour with fans of blush, its presence on this “best-of” type list may hinder the flowering of our appreciation of good value sparkling wines: Someone who knows NV Champagne and picks up a bottle of this to pinch back their budget may identify it with the emerging international sparkling wine tradition – and end up dismissing it forever as an unsatisfying frivolity. More is the shame if that happens.

I did find something interesting going on in the Champagne category though. Normally the C-word barely detains my interest as it’s just too dear. But I think the tasting crew hit the nail on the head in the Champagnes Under €50 category with Mumm Cordon Rouge NV. I find it hard to recommend it because of the price. And coincidentally, I recently posted here about Mumm’s remarkable campaign of advertising, sponsorship and product placement.  But its relative subtle breathy oaty quality, when set against the somewhat less accessible Moet and Feuillatte, may make it popular among people who can (and want to) spend that kind of cash.

John? Rody? Your table awaits.  ♦