Blissful Rain

I was so excited that it rained yesterday - not just because my garden so desperately needed it, but because I have had builders working on the outside of the house and even though they're incredibly considerate, it was wonderful to have the house to myself yesterday when they stopped work because of the weather. I was able to get into my kitchen and cook a proper dinner - turkey meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Yummy.

We accompanied it with one of my favourite cavas, 1+1=3 Brut Rose Seleccion from the Champagne Warehouse. The colour of this wine still amazes me, it is just so beautiful. The wine was great with the food, too, its fruity flavour but incredible dryness perfectly offsetting the creaminess of the potatoes and the herbs in the meatloaf. I need to buy more of this wine, it will be great to have on-hand all summer.

Biddenden Tasting

I went to a winemaker dinner for Biddenden Vineyards last night at a restaurant in the Clapham/Battersea area called Artisan & Vine. While I've been to winemaker's dinners before, it was my first at this particular venue. The evening was fantastic - the food and wine matching were excellent, and the hosts - both from the restaurant and the vineyard - were both charming and informative. They're doing more events throughout the year, including some day trips out to some of the English vineyards, and I'm hoping to go to another dinner in August.

But the reason why I'm blogging is that we started the evening with a sparkling wine from Biddenden, their Quality Pink Sparkling Wine 2007. This wine is 100% gamay grapes, something a little different for a sparkler. It was good - a lovely, deep rose colour with a strong aroma of strawberries. I was worried that the wine might be too sweet for me, but the strawberry flavour was balanced with just a touch of grapefruit, making it a perfect sipper. It had enough bubbles, too, plentiful on pouring and tapering off to a steady fizz toward the end of the glass. I was pleased with this wine, but don't think it quite deserves its £20 price tag - I've had equally good cavas and proseccos in the £10-15 range, which is where I would have priced this wine.

Sour Grapes

We drank a bottle of Camel Valley's 2006 Pinot Noir Brut sparkling wine this weekend. This blanc de noir was excellent, with a tart grape flavour followed by a Bramley apple finish. It had great balance, lots of crisp flavours without any bitterness and lots of fruit without too much sweetness. The bubbles were great, too!

I have to say that I'm getting more and more impressed with this maker every time I drink their wine.

Not My Thing

When I made my last order at Green & Blue, I added a few things to the case that I wouldn't ordinarily order, just to stretch my boundaries. We drank one of them last night, a 2006 Petillant Naturel from Thierry Puzelat. This is a Loire valley sparkling wine made from a grape I had never heard of before, menu pineau. The 'naturel' in the name indicates that the maker uses very low amounts of sulphur in the wine-making process. It is also a low dosage wine.

I wish I could say I loved it, but I didn't. The amber-coloured liquid had a dense, apple and honey flavour, more like a cider than a wine. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with that, but it's not really what I want in a sparkling wine. It also had just a touch of stinky socks on the finish, I wasn't sure I liked that, but it was fleeting. What really disappointed the most were the bubbles. The wine is, at best, effervescent on pouring, and the bubbles quickly disappeared altogether, leaving just the heavy flavour behind. While this was interesting to try once, it really wasn't my thing. But since it was only around £15 for the bottle, I didn't break the bank with my experiment.

Back to France

Last night, my husband cooked pasta for me for dinner, which was a great treat. We decided to open the bottle on the 'champagne shelf' to go with it - Bereche et Fils Brut Reserve, which I had acquired from Green & Blue. This wine is a balanced mix of the traditional champagne grapes, chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier, but does not undergo malolactic fermentation like most champagnes.

We had high hopes for this wine, as we've drunk champagnes from this maker before. We weren't disappointed. The champagne smelled of uncooked bread dough and tasted slightly of this at the start. The finish was long and lovely - crisp, juicy grapefruit. The bubbles were teeny-tiny, but there were lots of them and they lasted. My husband commented that it was nice to "drink French again" as this champagne was such a different experience to the Italian and Spanish wines we had in the past two days - much cleaner, more balanced, yeastier, weightier. We loved it!

Bereche et Fils say on their website that this is their 'signature' champagne and I can see why. That said, I'm now keen to track down a bottle of their zero dosage Extra Brut Reserve...

Date Night - May '11

Last night was date night and my husband and I went to a recently opened Italian restaurant in Dulwich. The food and service were very good, but the wine list was only OK. So we returned home and opened a bottle of sparkling wine that he had brought back from a trip he took to Brescia earlier in the month - Cavalleri 2005 Collezione Grandi Cru Franciacorte.

I learned something new last night - that not all sparkling wines from Italy are called 'prosecco'. In the Brescia area, the sparkling wines are called 'franciacorte' and there are rules about how they're made and the grapes they contain that make them different from prosecco (i.e. they can't contain pinot grigio grapes). This wine was 100% chardonnay, a blanc de blancs.

Having never tried a franciacorte before, I didn't know what to expect. The wine surprised me right from the start, with a strong yeasty smell emanating from the bottle, followed by the scent of light olive oil. The olive theme carried through in the flavour, with the wine tasting slightly of fresh-off-the-tree green olives followed by a citrus-clean finish. On first pouring the bubbles were fantastic, too, although they did not persist through the end of the glass. Despite this, I would drink this wine again, it was very good.

That Was Cava?

We drank an interesting cava yesterday - the Brut Nature from 1+1=3, which I got from the Champagne Warehouse. We've had this before and really liked it with food because of the complexity of its flavour. I didn't really get as much of a chance to appreciate it last time, though, because we had guests and I was concentrating on cooking. This time, I got to focus on and properly admire the cava - starting with its goat cheese scent, a grassy, creamy, slightly smoky aroma. This carried through into the flavour with the creaminess balanced by a grapefruit acidity. This cava wasn't like the sterotypical cava, it was much fuller and more challenging to the palate. I still think it's not a light sipper, definitely a 'go-with-food' wine.

I'm Not Stupid

I was in the Chiswick area earlier in the week with our friend who has been visiting. Since we were in the neighbourhood, we stopped in to see what Lea & Sandeman had in stock, as they usually have a good selection for decent prices. The salesman was not content to let us browse, though. When I told him I was 'just looking' at his selection of sparkling wines, he pressed me for what I was interested in. Not seeing any on the shelf, I asked if they had any sparkling red wines. The response I got was pretty unbelieveable - the salesman said that they didn't have anything like a sparkling shiraz, but most of the champagnes were made with red wine grapes and why didn't a try something like a 100% pinot noir champagne or a rose prosecco? Hello! These are not even close to a sparkling red wine!!

I had to leave the store at that point because I don't like being treated like an idiot. If he really, really wanted to sell me something, he should have asked what I wanted the sparkling red for and then pointed me to some suitable options. I expect better service from Lea & Sandeman, and just hope this guy was simply having an off-day yesterday.

Newbie

A friend is staying with us who is curious about champagne but doesn't often drink it. He had never tried anything from Billecart-Salmon and was keen to, so we arranged a nice dinner for him with a bottle of their Brut Reserve, one of my favourites. So that he could compare it with something of similarly high quality, we also opened a bottle of Inflorescence which was highly-rated among the group at my last BYOBB.

It was an interesting comparison. Having tried a little of each champagne, my friend decided that the Billecart-Salmon should be served with dinner since it had a crisper, cleaner style that would complement rather than compete with the lemon-caper chicken and cauliflower risotto that we made. We served the Inflorescence afterward, so that the deep, apple-orchard flavour could be appreciated on its own. Both champagnes were wonderful and, as usual, had lots of bubbles. It was a treat to drink them both in one night!

End of the Weekend

Part of me was sad to see the end of the holiday weekend, but part of me was glad it was coming to a close because my husband was away in Italy with friends for the 4 days. I was excited for him to come home and put a bottle of prosecco - Vignarosa Amorino Brut Rosato from the Champagne Warehouse - in the fridge thinking he might want something Italian and bubbly as a nightcap. We sipped glasses as he recounted the adventures from the weekend. While I was sorry to have missed the trip, it sounded like they all had a great time. And I enjoyed the bubbles with his stories, marvelling again at how this prosecco is such a great balance of berry fruits and crisp dry-ness.

I'm also very excited because my husband arrived home bearing gifts from himself and from our friends, some new proseccos to try!! So very thoughtful of them!