Another great Portuguese red

Took RTL for a late afternoon walk along the Tarka trail, and on the way back had a quick look around the 'Cheers Bottle Shop' in a small arcade in Braunton. They have a few interesting wines, and one that really caught my eye was Alvaro Castro's Quinta de Saes Dao 2006. This is his least expensive wine (it was £8.29), but it's brilliant and massively overdelivers. The 2005 was superb, and if anything the 2006, which I tried with him last month at the winery, is even better. A definite repeat purchase, and a brilliant ambassador for Portuguese reds.

Quinta de Saes 2006 Dao, Portugal
Beautiful stuff. It's dark and intense with a lovely aromatic nose of dark cherries, raspberries and spice. Pure fruit dominates. The palate is concentrated with dense spicy structure and good acidity adding a savoury complexion to the bold, sweet, pure fruit. A vivid, expressive and rather primary wine of immense appeal. 90/100 (£8.29 Cheers Bottle Shop)

Duas Quintas - affordable Douro

Ramos Pinot's Duas Quintas has been around a while and predates many of the new wave reds from Portugal's Douro. The partner red, the Reserva, is usually up there with the best from the region; the much cheaper regular Duas Quintas, which I'm trying here, is usually reliable and affordable, if a little unspectacular.

Duas Quintas has had a bit of a face-lift. It boasts a new label, and the wine has changed a bit - much more modern and fruit forward, with nice purity. Is this the vintage, or a style change? I reckon this delivers (even at the slightly inflated Nicolas pricing) and is a good introduction to what the Douro is capable of, even in a less celebrated vintage.

Duas Quintas 2006 Douro, Portugal

Lovely vivid pure sweet raspberry and blackberry fruit dominates here, and it flirts with jamminess. The palate has nicely dense berryish fruit with an attractive spicy edge and some chocolatey richness. It's quite pure with nice balance between the primary fruit and some spicy tannins. 88/100 (Nicolas £9.15)

In Devon

We've swapped houses with my sister and brother-in-law for a week. They get to visit London but we get to have a fabulous north Devon break. It's an excellent arrangement, and their house, in Braunton, is a beautiful cottage in the centre of the old town. Another benefit is that our kids get a whole bunch of toys, new playstation games, DVDs and a trampoline too, courtesy of their cousins, to entertain them.

The only problem is the weather. Suddenly it's October when it's supposed to be August. It's chilly and wet. Despite this, we've had plenty of fun, spending almost all our time in Braunton Burrows, a remarkable system of sand dunes sitting behind Saunton Sands - it's an absolutely huge area that is also used for military training, so that means that younger son has fun collecting used blank bullets. The kids love it, as does RTL, who doesn't stop running around and finishes the day totally exhausted.

Yesterday we spent several hours there, lunching on sausages cooked on a one-use barbecue. Today we got rained on, but then the sun came out and it was glorious. It's great to be able to have a change of scene for a week - I can do a bit of work, and combine this with family time. Result.

wineanorak update

For the benefit of those who just read the blog, here's what I've put up on the main site recently:

• Biodynamics: my major series updated and revised, with new pictures and video content
• UK merchants page updated, 22 new additions
• The wines of Chile: part 1 of a new series
• Project Cabernet Franc: describing an initiative designed to improve the quality of Loire reds, with a protocol written by Sam Harrop and the Interloire technical people
• Sacred Hill: part 13 of my New Zealand series
• Interview with Bernard Hickin: winemaker with Jacob's Creek

carboNZero Riesling: what does it mean?

One of the bottles opened last night was a Grove Mill Riesling 2007 Marlborough, New Zealand. A very attractive, intense, piercing Riesling full of racy lime and grapefruit, with the high acid nicely countered by some residual sugar. A good buy at £8.99 from Threhser.

Prominently displayed on the label was the carboNZero logo, advertising that this wine was carbon neutral. But what exactly, in practical terms does this mean? And are we going to be seeing increasing numbers of wines sold on a green marketing ticket?

Grove Mill's website gives some more information. 'carboNZero' is managed by Landcare Research New Zealand. Grove Mill itself is a brand owned by the New Zealand Wine Company (NZWC), and they took three steps to achieve this certification. First they measured their carbon footprint. Then they tried to reduce it as much as possible. And the balance they offset. 'For NZWC we were able to purchase credits from a local carbon farmer, Ron Marriott, in the Marlborough Sounds', says the website. A 'carbon farmer'? I guess, if enough people are wanting to offset their emissions, then there's money to be made by planting trees on land you own.

When you see a wine company making a fuss on their label about their environmental credentials, it's easy to feel a bit cynical about their motivations. But the NZWC are doing this properly, and it's good to see that there's some substance behing the marketing talk.

The new Spain: Ochoa Graciano & Garnacha

Spanish reds are changing. For the better. In the past, you could bet your salary that most reds above a certain price point would have spent too long in the wrong sort of oak (American), and as a result would be washed out and reeking of vanilla and coconut. There was a bit of a renaissance a few years back, and then you could bet that the more ambitious wines would be overextracted, a little over-ripe, very sweet, and with loads of French oak. Now, however, Spanish winemakers are realizing that with their fantastic resources of warm, sunny climates and old vines, they can make wines with wonderful fruit presence that doesn't need all that much oak to enhance them. The result is increasingly impressive, commercially astute wines like this one from Navarra producer Ochoa. If more producers do what Ochoa are doing, then Australia and California are in for one hell of a beating.

Ochoa Graciano & Garnacha 2005 Navarra, Spain
A beautiful, fruit-forward red wine made with Grenache combined with the highly regarded but now rare Rioja grape Graciano. Deep coloured, the dominant feature here is vibrant, juicy, sweet raspberry and dark cherry fruit with very little oak impact and a spicy, tangy finish. This is a stylish, modern red wine of real appeal, for current drinking (it's sealed with a purple coloured synthetic cork). 89/100 (£7.99 Taurus Wines, Christopher Piper, Bentley's, Arthur Rackhams)

Mike Rigby: a tribute

A couple of weeks ago I heard the very sad news of the death of Mike Rigby, a good friend from a while back who I'd not been in touch with for ages. Mike, who lived alone, had been dead for a while when he was found in his flat, and his cause of death is still unknown. He was responsible for introducing me to wine, and so I thought it was appropriate to post my own, personal tribute to him here.

When I first met Mike, he was a vicar at a CofE church in Wallington, Surrey. I was aged 18, had just finished my 'A' levels, and was on a young person's 'houseparty' organized by an Anglican youth organization, held in the lovely settings of Milton Abbey School in Dorset. Mike was one of the leaders. These houseparties were great fun; coming from the background of a boys' school, to be able to spend a week with 120 other kids half of whom were female was a wonderful opportunity, and one that I made the most of.

The following year I attended the same houseparty, this time as a 'helper' (I was now at university), and Mike introduced me to a remarkable group of young people from his own church. We got on so well that I spent a good deal of time in Wallington over the next few years, and several members of this group are still very good friends. One is my wife!

In my weekend trips to Wallington I saw quite a bit of Mike. He was incredibly intelligent (one of the smartest people I've met) and insightful, yet at the same time quiet, reserved and almost self-contained. He loved truthfulness, and absolutely hated any form of control. He inspired great loyalty in his friends, but also a perplexingly intense hostility in his enemies - and, sadly, he made quite a few of these in the congregation at Wallington, which eventually led to him leaving the Anglican church to go and work on the pictures desk at the Sunday Telegraph.

In 1992 I completed my PhD and moved down to Wallington, and I needed somewhere to stay. I was engaged to be married to Fiona, but the wedding date was some months away. Unexpectedly, Mike offered me a room in his flat, so from October until the following May I moved in with him. Mike was an incredibly tidy, ordered person; I was somewhere close to the opposite, but there was never a moment's tension (I kept my mess to my room). It was during this time that Mike introduced me to wine. [It wasn't enough that he'd introduced me to the group of people who were to form my closest friendships - and in this process Fiona - he also introduced me to what was to become my career.]

Each Sunday evening a few of us would gather in Mike's flat, and he'd usually have an interesting bottle or two that he'd open. His interest in wine dated back to his time at Oxford, but he wore his knowledge very lightly, and didn't have any pretensions; nonetheless, he had a cultured, eclectic palate - and in the Wine House, a local merchant run buy a guy called Morvin Rodker, there was a good source of interesting bottles for us to experiment with.

I was inspired. I fondly remember one of the wines Mike showed us - the 1991 Brokenwood Graveyard Hermitage - which was to become my first multiple bottle purchase (3 at £13 each). I also remember Gonzalez Byas Matusalem sherry, and a birthday gift of a 1987 Warres Quinta da Cavadinha. I also recall sharing a 1982 Leoville Barton with this group, which was probably my first exposure to serious Bordeaux.

Fiona and I largely lost touch with Mike when we moved from Wallington to Twickenham in the mid-1990s. He came over to see us once; I also met him for lunch in Canary Wharf on one occasion. I wish we'd seen more of him. I guess we owe him a lot.

A pair from Maycas del Limari

Concha y Toro, Chile's largest wine company by far, is on fire at the moment. They're making seriously good wines in large volumes. Perhaps their most interesting venture is the Maycas del Limari wines, from a cool climate region in the far north of the country that is emerging as a promising place to grow vines. This affordable pair of wines impress.

Maycas del Limari Sauvignon Blanc Reserva 2007 Limari Valley, Chile
Super-fresh, this is a bright Sauvignon with a nose showing gooseberry, grapefruit and green pepper. The palate is crisp and fruity with vivid fruit and a hint of greenness that comes across as almost spicy. A beautifully expressive, lean, concentrated Sauvignon that's quite extreme but works really well. Think Awatere Valley with even more edginess. 90/100 (£8.99 Tesco)

Maycas del Limari Syrah Reserva 2007 Limari Valley, Chile
Amazingly deep colour. Beautiful nose of sweet brooding blackberry and raspberry jam with complex spicy notes and lovely purity. On the palate there's a hint of rubbery greenness, which along with the pure blackcurrant fruit which makes it taste a bit Chilean, but there are also warm spicy notes. It's a ripe, fruity wine of broad appeal, and overdelivers for its price point. 90/100 (£8.99 Oddbins, Tesco)

Serious Alentejo wine

Alentejo producer Malhadinha Nova is a relative newcomer, but from the start their wines have received a hugely positive response from the press. This is my first chance to look at their top wine, Marias da Malhadinha, and I'm really impressed. It's certainly a ripe, warm climate wine with plenty of oak influence, but it works. A serious effort. There's a slight discrepancy between the technical fiche and the back label concerning the grape varieties - I'll assume the former is correct (the latter misses out the Alicante Bouschet component).

Marias da Malhadinha 2004 Vinho Regional Alentejo
A blend of 40% Aragonês, 25% Alicante Bouschet, 15% Cabernet, 10% Syrah and 10% Touriga Nacional, aged for 26 months in new French oak. This is an intensely concentrated red with a sweet nose of ripe blackberry and plum fruit with complex spicy notes. The palate is dense and sweetly fruited with spiciness and smooth but firm tannins. This generous red wine is ripe but not jammy, and there's lovely balance between the sweet fruit and the more savoury, spicy elements. Massively intense and multilayered, this should age really well, and in terms of style it's similar to a high-end new-wave Rioja. 94/100 (08/08)

Vintage time at Achaval Ferrer winery, Mendoza, Argentina - a short film

Here's a short film from my visit to Argentina in March. It's vintage time at one of Mendoza's leading boutique producers, Achaval Ferrer. We get to see the press, the winery (where wine is being racked and returned) and then a small segment of the tasting with Santiago Achaval.

Vilafonte: the C and the M

Two wines tasted tonight. It's the 'C' and 'M' pair from high-end South African venture Vilafonte. This is a joint project between Mike Ratcliffe, Phil Freese and Zelma Long, aimed partly (I suspect) at the US market, which so far has been quite resistant to South African wine.

You can read more about the project at Vilafonte's excellent website, which also includes some video content. To supplement my tasting notes here, I'm also embedding into this post Zelma's own tasting comments on the two wines (she's in charge of winemaking at Vilafonte).

I think the wines are very good, and will likely age well. But at the prices they command (ranging from £25 at agwines.com to £28 at winedirect.co.uk to £43 at Handford), I have to be honest and say that I have some slight misgivings about the lack of fruit purity they are currently showing at this early stage in their evolution. I'd have expected young wines like these to be much more fruit-forward and linear in their early life; instead, these are both showing quite a few secondary spicy, earthy and even subtly medicinal notes. I hope that I will be proved wrong and that in a decade's time they will have evolved into something beautiful and complex. Currently, they leave me a little confused.





Vilafonte series m 2005 Paarl, South Africa
A blend of 52% Merlot, 17% Malbec and 31% Cabernet Sauvignon, weighing in at 14.5% alcohol. This has a dark fruits nose with a smooth, spicy, earthy edge and some hints of medicine and old libraries. The palate is earthy with smooth tannins and a long savoury finish. This is an interesting wine: it's not about primary fruit, but rather spicy and earthy notes dominate. Quite stylish with good ageing potential. 89/100

Vilafonte series c 2005 Paarl, South Africa
66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 6% Cabernet Franc, 22% Merlot and 6% Malbec. This is the more structured and dense of the Vilafonte wines, and I prefer it. The sophisticated, complex nose shows blackcurrant fruit with a herby, spicy, earthy sort of personality. The palate is strongly savoury with spice, earth and medicinal hints to the dense, structured fruit. A bold, savoury, tannic wine with a good future ahead of it. 91/100

NWR: USPGA

Just watching the closing holes of the USPGA (for the non-golfers, this is one of the top four tournaments in golf known as the 'majors'), courtesy of Sky TV's website.

A remarkable nail-biting finish is in store. Of course, I am embarrassed by my interest in golf, but I do enjoy it. I took older son to the range yesterday and had a lot of fun, hitting the ball really well. I really *must* play more golf.

Another corked wine: the lenticels?

Another corked wine tonight (not that I'm getting many these days). I looked at the cork - once again, it had angry looking lenticels. I'm beginning to thing that the lenticels are the source of the problem with corks: where they run across the face of the cork, does this increase the chance of cork taint? Interestingly, this tainted wine had some mustiness, but also some sweek oaky notes (even though this was an unoaked rose).

A beautiful Coteaux du Loir

Tonight's wine is a beautiful, natural Loire red from the Coteaux du Loir appellation. It is made by Christian and Nathalie Chaussard from the Pineau d'Aunis grape variety, with no sulfur dioxide added during the winemaking process save for a little at bottling.

You just have to love any winegrower who can label their capsule with the slogan 'vigneron non-conforme'.

Nathalie et Christian Chaussard Les Longues Vignes 2005 Coteaux du Loir
Slightly chilled, this is a beautifully aromatic red wine with a peppery, spicy edge to the pure, sweet cherry fruit on the nose. The palate is smooth and pure but with a distinctly savoury, earthy, spicy finish. Complex and alive, with lovely freshness. A hauntingly beautiful light red wine. 92/100 (Les Caves de Pyrene)

Mallorca, the final installment

Back home from Mallorca tonight after a brilliant ending to the holiday, spending two nights and three days in the wonderful C'an Calco hotel in Moscari. We even managed some winery visits, popping over to Macia Batle and Jose L. Ferrer.

The former was a really impressive operation with a very modern winery and some good wines: we showed up and were offered a self-guided tour of the winery and then a free tasting of anything we were interested in. The second also impressed with its wines, although doing a proper tasting wasn't so straightforward.

The only way they seemed to work was for visitors to buy a glass of each wine for E1.50 or E2.50 for the more expensive ones. They didn't seem to cater for the possibility of someone just wanting to taste a small measure of each. In the end, I persuaded them to let me on the promise that I actually buy something. It was encouraging that both wineries seem to be making some really good wines.

A fantastic hotel in a beautiful spot

Mallorca update. We grew depressed by the chav-special seaside resort we were located in and so we moved to a new place on the north coast. It turned out to be a beautiful 4-star hotel, but alas slap bang in the middle of more of the same - an over-developed resort with lots of English pubs and restaurants boasting that they had English chefs and owners. So we moved agin, this time inland to a beautiful village, Moscari, set in rolling hills and totally undeveloped.

The hotel we are in is utterly beautiful: a tastefully renovated old building with a fantastic restaurant and a couple of pools. It's quiet, tranquil and soothing. We are happy again. Last night we had a fantastic four course meal washed down with a couple of bottles of Macia Batle Blanc de Blancs 2007, which is a really nice, full flavoured white.

In Mallorca

Barely have I got off the plane from Oregon, and I'm getting on to another one. This time it's a last-minute family holiday to Mallorca. We've done this a bit differently, though - we swapped our elder son for our good friends' younger daughter, who is the same age (and gets on well with) our younger son. We think this will work better than taking our two boys together. Past experiences with family holidays have not been great.

But this means we have to brave travelling with a budget airline at the busiest time of year. We flew RyanAir from Stansted, and endured a 45 minute queue at check-in, then a queue for security, then a queue to get on the plane, then a queue at the other end for our hire car (45 minutes more). After all this hassle, we find ourselves dropped into that special corner of hell - a Mediterranean holiday resort. I'd forgotten how soul destroyingly ugly and naff they are. We'd booked the hotel we are staying in for a number of reasons, one of which was that it advertised WiFi internet access (for me) and Satellite TV (for the kids) in each room. This turned out to be a lie.

But, fortunately, we have a car, and have discovered a stunningly beautiful beach 15 minutes away, where we spent today. And I've found a 4 star hotel in town with a nice lobby and wireless internet for 1 Euro per hour. So things are looking up. Oh yes, this is supposed to be a wine blog. Last night Fiona and I shared a nice bottle of Masia Batle's Blanc de Blancs 2007, a fresh, full flavoured white.

A good wine from Mallorca

My first wine from the holiday isle of Mallorca (which we, as kids, used to pronounce Majorca with the 'j'). For a ripe, warm climate wine weighing in at 14.5%, this is pretty good. And, all being well, I should be in Mallorca by the time you read this for a short break with the family.

Macia Batle Crianza 2005 Binnisalem, Mallorca, Spain
Sweet, seductive ripe fruity nose with some savoury, spicy, tarry notes. Quite sophisticated in a warm, ripe style. The palate is sweetly fruited but has bold, earthy, spicy notes, too. Nicely savoury, finishing long and earthy. A complex wine that should evolve nicely for the next three years or so. 90/100 (£10.99 Noel Young, The Vineyard Dorking, Thomas Panton, Corks of Cotham)

Remarkable Spanish sweetie from Malaga

Jorge Ordonez, a well known importer of Spanish wines, hails from the southern Spanish town of Malaga. Malaga used to be well known as a region producing sweet wines, but of late has fallen from grace. But the region is undergoing a small revival: flying winemaker Telmo Rodriguez has made some lovely wines here, and there's also this beauty, the result of a collaboration between Ordonez and the late Alois Kracher from Austria. Unlike traditional Malaga, which was sweet and raisiny, this is brilliantly bright and delicate.

Jorge Ordonez & Co Malaga Seleccion Especial 2006
Made from Moscatel grapes dried on the vine. Light yellow in colour, this has a beautifully fresh aromatic nose of citrus oil, grapes and mandarins. The palate is super sweet and quite viscous, but with lovely bright spicy orange fruit and good acid providing a perfect counterpoint. Deliciously fresh, and quite complex for a young wine, this is tremendously easy to drink. 92/100 (£12.99 per half, Indigo Wines, Lay & Wheeler, The Vineking)

Jet lag

Had a very comfortable journey back from Portland, but despite that I'm still feeling a bit weird today. However, I did manage to sleep through last night, albeit with some periods of mild wakefulness. You can't cheat your body clock.

The thing about jet lag is that our bodies have rhythms. Quite a few of them. There's the 24 hour circadian rhythm, which then governs all these sub-rhythms. For example, hormones - the chemical messengers that coordinate many of the body's functions - are released in a pulsatile fashion. The information they contain is not just in their concentration, but also in the temporal information conveyed by the timing patterns of their release.

When we cross time zones the result is that this carefully coordinated timing is jumbled up. So not only do we sleep strangely, we also feel a bit weird. The circadian clock that regulates much of this rhythmic activity needs to be re-entrained, and so the best way to achieve this is to fit in with the new time zone as much as possible. Light is the main cue for entrainment, but food and excercise also work. The worst thing to do is take a nap or go to bed really early, because then the clock takes longer to re-set. [You can also take melatonin, but for this to work, the timings need to be pretty spot on, and combined with suitable light cues. Melatonin is available over-the-counter in the USA, but not the UK.]

Having said this, I recently met a scientist visiting New Zealand who, because he was there only a few days, didn't want to re-entrain his clock. The poor guy was trying not to fit into the new time zone, and was being extra careful not to expose himself to daylight. To me this seems a bit nuts. You don't often get to visit New Zealand from the UK, and even if it is just for a few days, you can't have much of a love for life if you hide yourself indoors with the curtains drawn.