Good Neighbours

Over the weekend, we had two sets of our neighbours over to celebrate our newly decorated sitting room. One had recommended the company who painted the room, the other is an artist from whom we bought a lovely painting to showcase in the room. We've been fortunate that they're such nice people - they're also adventurous drinkers so we thought we would serve them a bubbly that we like and that they might not have drunk, some Pelorus NV that we ordered through Ocado. One of the drinkers commented that while you could tell it was different from a champagne, it was a huge step-up from the kinds of cava you usually find in the UK and he had a hard time placing where the wine was from. For fun, we also opened the last bottle of Deutz that we had from our Majestic wine order. It was no comparison, the Pelorus was a much nicer New Zealand bubbly.

The best part was that I ordered enough of the Pelorus that we had some leftover to drink with our dinner the next evening, a very good match for our pork chops with mustard cream sauce!!

An Ah-ha Moment

Majestic wine is having a special on champagne and sparkling wine so I ordered a mixed case early last week. A friend of mine rates Deutz champagne so I thought I ordered two bottles of that. What I didn't realise until today is that there is a French champagne-maker named Deutz (which is probably what my friend was talking about) who lend their name/expertise to a sparkling wine-maker in New Zealand (which is what I bought). Ah-ha - so this explains why the wine didn't meet my expectations coming off of the recommendation from my friend!!

I bought the Deutz Marlborough Cuvee NV - a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier. We drank it on Friday with our dinner of chicken in mango sauce. As my husband said, the wine was substantial, not at all the light fruity wine that it's described as and definitely a wine that needs to be drunk with food rather than a sipping wine. The chardonnay characteristics in the wine really come through, which is good if you're a chardonnay fan, but I'm not. I found the finish of this wine far too heavy, tasting at first of oily nuts (thankfully without the oily mouth-feel) and then lingering as incredibly over-ripe pears. My husband was OK with it, but I didn't love it, and I'm going to have to think carefully about how I serve the second bottle. At least it had really good bubbles.

It will be interesting to compare it with a bottle of the French Deutz champagne if I can track one down...