Ok, you still are here, so let me start. The other day we had the new year’s family reunion, well at least my wife’s family, at a restaurant in Sevilla. As usual, the wine list ended up in my hands. And here the frustration starts.

1. Press F1 for help

I just like to wander in wine lists. My wife always warns the people at the table that I’ll return to earth within half an hour. But I also need some help, so pretty please with sugar on top put a F1 button on your wine list and provide me with some useful information.

The wine list which got stuffed in my hands only contained the name of the winemaker, name of the wine, the region and a tasting note. Not a Word on the D.O. (“Denominación de Origin”), the grapes in the wine and the taste style.

I just like to know which grapes are blended into the wine and preferably a little word on how the wine is elevated. Is there any wood (barriques) used or is the wine only matured on inox cuves? In this way, I at least can get some kind of impression on how the wine would taste and with what kind of food I would match it.

2. Temperature

So I struggled myself a way through the wine list and finally came up with some alternatives. The first was a red wine from Rioja, Bodegas Beronia. Afterwards, I opted for a Reserva of Muga, but apparently this wine was sold out and the waiter suggested me something else. Well, I like surprises and I like to taste wines I do not know so what the heck, I told him that I would try his alternative.

Up came the bottle and the first sniffy sniff and whaaaam there was the alcohol attack. I consulted my inner thermometer and guessed it would be about 22-23 degrees Celsius. I quickly looked around and saw all the bottles nicely presented in the restaurant and nicely undergoing this temperature of 22 degrees Celsius. Conclusion, this wine was just served too hot, and that’s what pronounced the alcohol.

Ok, the wine had no faults so I nodded to the waiter that the wine was alright, but I was frustrated by this common mistake in restaurants. If you have a restaurant and are now reading this: DO NOT SERVE YOUR RED WINE TOO HOT, for the sake of Dionysus!! Think 16-17 degrees Celsius.

3. Sniff the wine

Finally we ended with another bottle of the same wine. Again a mistake that frustrates me. The waiter thinks it is the same wine so no sniffy sniff is needed. Wrong! Every time a new bottle is opened let the sniffer on duty do his job. Preferably take out a brand new glass and let the wine be sniffed. It can always happen that a wine has a fault.

Are you a restaurant and struggling with these problems, go and get’ya a problem solver, somebody like John “Yippie-kay-yay” McClane and do it preferably today…

As an aperitif we of course popped a bottle of Champagne, one of the few good aperitifs. As a side note, please get rid of all these sweet stuff as aperitif! Just think acidity! Okay, having said that we thus started of with Charpentier, a great champagne from the Vallée de la Marne and composed of ship loads of pinot meunier (about 70%). And oow yes, I just love loads of red grapes in my champagne, just makes it fuller, rounder, heavier. Actually you maybe are getting more a wine than champagne. And also this Réserve of Charpentier did the trick. Just lovely my dear.

This was followed by a magnum bottle Soave Classico of Prà, a gift of Graziano Prà himself. More specifically this was the Monte Grande harvest 2002. Montegrande is a specific cru or vineyard from which only the best grapes are destined to end up in the Monte Grande wine. Composed of the grapes garganega (pronounce: gar-GA-ne-ga) and trebbiano di soave, this wine just injects you with honey blossoms complemented with some stony minerality (just do the Garry Vaneyrchuck thing and sock some rocks and you’ll now what I’m referring to). This bottle, well the wine in it, has just aged wonderfully well.

By now, it was time for some serious work. We dynamited our way through the meat dishes with a superb selection of reds, starting with one of my favorite grapes, pinot noir. But no, not a French example, neither an American, nor a New-Zealandian. None of these, we went for a German one, Jean Stodden and his Recher Herrenberg Spätburgunder and for all I can say an outstanding one. This is just a text book pinot noir, tons of red fruit infused with earthiness and a drop of truffle aroma. Yammy stuff.

Then it was time to take a plain to la bella Italia. And we landed in Tuscany where we went for the confrontation with the leading example of the so-called Super-Tuscans: Tignanello. Harvest 1999 and Piero Antinori together with Giacomo Tachis did an outstanding job. Ooh boy was this a nice wine. I just dig sangiovese (the wine is actually made of the following grapes: 80% sangiovese, 15% cabernet sauvignon, 5% cabernet franc). Think sour cherry cream topped with dried tea leaves and a slice of mushrooms. All this just keeps on lingering in your nose. And in the mouth, aaaaaah, what a balance, a balance between the stiff tannins, the juicy acidity and the sweet roundness.

Finally we headed to France, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Our partner in crime was the Château La Nerthe 2003. Without any hesitation the best Château9 I drank last year! And the blend is just amazing, usual suspects such as syrah, grenache and mourvèdre are complemented with grapes that just sound outer space: cinsault, picpoul, counoise, etc.

And today, well today I just try to ignore my headache…

A tremendous New Year and have some great wines in 2008 (starting today)!

Well, I didn’t make it to the Marqués de Riscal winery…but I ended up at another Frank Gehry building: the Guggenheim at Bilbao. And what a astonishing building this is. Definitely worth a trip to Bilbao.

On the wine side I do not have to report much. We went to El Rogelio, a little restaurant mentioned with a bib gourmand in the Guide Michelin. Lovely food but they need to do something about the poisonous green paint that is used to cover their walls. I ordered an albariño of Bodegas Martin Códax. Plain simple and satisfying wine. Nevertheless, I was disappointed by the small range of white wines on the wine list. Being close to Rioja, it are the reds that get all the attention on the list.

However in a city where fish (merluza (=hake), bacalao (=cod)) is the specialty, you would hope for a more extensive list of white wines. Better next time.

Have a nice wine with fish today!
Bart

Maybe you did not noticed yet, but also wine makers (certainly the big ones) tend to have great building projects. This is a project from the Bodegas Herederos del Marqués de Riscal, located at Rioja, Spain.

This project houses the company’s offices, wine museum, tasting rooms, conference rooms and a luxury hotel with 14 distinct rooms. The architect on duty is the incredible Frank Gehry, known from the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao. Oh boy, did I wish I had the money to order a house from him :-).

Have a nice wine in a nice building today!
Bart

• A dropdead gorgeous Barolo (Brezza, Bruno Giacosa, Cavalotto, Marcarini, Vajra, Vietti, Vigna Rionda di Massolino, …) or Barbaresco (Ca’del Baio, Produttore del Barbaresco, …) or Langhe Nebbiolo or Roero Superiore, well all nebbiolo wines

• Some exceptional Super Tuscans (think about Sassicaia and the like; and ow, the Rosso Toscana of Fossacolle with his huge amount of petit verdot, mm mm; and Tenuta di Trinoro, such an ugly labels but such a concentrated greatness in your glass.)

• A well-made South-African Bordeaux blend (Meerlust Rubicon, De Toren Fusion V, etc.)

• An outstanding Chianti (Ruffino’s Riserva Ducale Oro and Casale dello Sparviero 2004, what an outstanding year for Chianti, …)

• And, of course, a traditional Brunello (Fossacolle is a great example)

• And those once in a lifetime Bourgognes (yes, red and white: Comtes Lafon, Comte de Vogüé, Thibault Legier-Belair Clos Vougeot, …)

• The astonishing white wines of Nicolas Joly (France - Loire)

• A bit aged Condrieu

• And those jumping-out-of-the-crowd bottles: Hewitson’s mourvèdre, Passopisciaro (a 100% nerello mascalese cultivated on the slopes of the Etna vulcano, huge wow factor), L’Oustal Blanc, Maestoso, etc.

• And… (still learning, still appreciating)

Have a divine wine today!
Bart

PS Feel free to share your divine wines in the comments.

Father standing at the door of his wine cellar addresses his son:

“With any luck my son, none of this will be yours.”

(Taken from Nicolaas Klei, “Over de tong”)

And, that is how it should be. Wine bottles are for drinking not collecting, at least in my opinion. So open these great bottles for a bunch of friends (who can appreciate it).

And how do you know they can appreciate it…well, if they put coca-cola in their wine they surely can’t!

Share a nice bottle of wine today!
Bart

Learning to appreciate

Another comparison can be made with classic music. As a little child I hated it. When my parents turned on some classic stuff it was the time to run of yelling to my room. Now I love it. I enjoy an evening out at the opera and had some really divine moments over there! If you have seen “La Traviata” live in one or another Italian opera I guess you would understand what I’m talking about.

Again, just the same with wine. You need to learn appreciate it, and maybe you need also some age, some (live) experience. And maybe the sooner you start with wine the sooner you can appreciate the difficult (read DIVINE) wines.

Appreciation and education

Learning to appreciate is of course closely linked with education. In order to be able to appreciate, you need to learn, to understand how a wine is made, how it obtains its complexity. And to train…yes to train your nose, your taste.

I’m heavy pro some kind of “sniffing and tasting” course at school. It is one of our senses we do not learn to use. If you don’t believe me, do the test: just try to catch some smells blind, very difficult thing to do.

So one tip on how to appreciate DIVINE wines: sniff, taste and sniff, taste and sniff, taste and… You can try to sniff a lot of things, just go to your local market and sniff the flowers, the food or step in your garden and sniff the trees, the leaves, the grass, … You will notice that after a while your nose gets trained and you will pick up far more easier smells (yeah, also the bad ones ;-)).

The moment

And divinity is also very largely dependent on the moment. Something that proceeds from God or a god doesn’t come 24/7.

So there are this special moments when every puzzle piece fits in and when you drink some great wine at such moments, you will remember. The crazy thing is that such wines could also be very simple wines. Thus, the exception to my rule that divine wines need to be expensive.

I still remember a trip with school to Rome where we drank an Est!, Est!!, Est!!! di Montefiascone, actually a quite simple wine, but with a lot of college boys combined with an incredible time in Italy, this turned out just as such a memorable moment.

Points that are in advantage of the above theory are of course that I didn’t had any wine education yet!

There are some moments I just can remember because of the great feeling of that moment combined with an incredible wine.

Conclusion

For me, the aspects that influence the divinity of wine are thus the following:

And because of these aspects, I often end up with a wine that is in the higher price range. What can I do about it? I’m just a product of my education…

Some last tip for you wine lovers. If you start with wine and you desire to beef up your wine cellar, do not, I repeat, do not buy too many of the first wines you love, you will see that your taste will change, that you will (learn to) appreciate other (read more complex) wines. And that a great moment isn’t easy to repeat…even with that same great wine!

And on that bombshell….I’ll go to my cellar and get me a divine wine.

Bart

Part 1 can be found here.

And to take the road to clearness, the first step is a definition. So let’s take a look at the definition of divine.

Divine - a definition

A definition taken from the Webster dictionary.

Divine:
1 a : of, relating to, or proceeding directly from God or a god b : being a deity c : directed to a deity
2 a : supremely good : superb b : heavenly, godlike

So we are talking about superb, heavenly wines. I would guess this excludes your daily plonk. So it has to be something special, something godlike!

Divine = expensive?

So, do you have to open your wallet a lot for divinity? Ooooh yes! At least for me.

For this person a divine wine is in general expensive (around 15 to 20 EUR and often a lot more, but of course there are exceptions).

Be aware, the divine=expensive equation has not always been so (oh no) and can be explained (oh yes).

Education

Liking wines is also a bit understanding wines. Let’s compare it to your school period. When starting secondary school at 6 years, I guess you could write and read just a little bit. Well that’s why we have all those years at school, isn’t. If one would have dropped in your hands a book of Milan Kundera or Umberto Eco, you surely would not be able to appreciate it at that age (let stand to read it ;-)). Harry Potter, maybe.

Nowadays I -at least- can enjoy Milan Kundera a lot (this is a divine writer to me) and I enjoy a lot Harry Potter (which are great page turners, hey no divinity here, but a lot of pleasure).

Just the same with wines. You start off with Harry Potter wines, juicy, easy (to understand) wines and you work you’re way through to Milan Kundera wines, complex of an unseen elegance, difficult type of wines. And yes it is an education!

So it took me a couple (lot) of years to find my way to the complexity of e.g. a Barolo wine. Ooh so divine. And as most of us, I started of with a simple juicy wine, such as a Pays D’Oc merlot or …(just fill in). Maybe at that moment these were divine wines, but now they are no longer divine. Hey these type of wines can be pleasing and sometimes very pleasing. And it makes me smile when I find a wine in the “below 6 EUR category” that is great. Price quality ratio is important…but for GODLIKE wines, I score my stuff in the higher price ranges.

Part 2 can be found here!
If you want to become thirsty, just take a look at my never complete list of divine wines.

In Sevilla in a wine bar close to the Jardines Murillo, Vineria San Telmo:

* Bodegas Castaño, Hécula Semi Crianza, DO Yecla (100% monastrell)

Big smile on my face. I have never heard of this winery, but as always when there is the ability to taste wine by the glass, I go for this option and try several glasses. I dig the monastrell grape, better know as mourvèdre in other parts of the world.

Additionally, a little search on the web indicated that the 1999 scored 90/100 points by Parker. Quite exceptional for a wine below 10 EUR. I have to admit that I didn’t note the harvest year (hey, I was on a holiday remember :-)).

* Dominio de Tares Bultos DO Bierzo (Léon) (100% mencía)

At Knokke-Heist (the Belgian coast) I had also some nice examples:

* Vietti, DOCG Barolo Lazzarito 2000 (Serralunga d’Alba) (Italy)

Most Barolos put a huge grin on my face (also this one). One of the top producers of Castiglione Faletto, the beating heart of the Barolo zone.

* Dea-Rivalta Prosecco di Valdobbiadene Brut (Italy)

This one I import myself, but it is just such great price-quality bubbles that I needed to mention it :-).

* Agustinos, Carmenère Reserve 2005, Rapel Valley Chili

Carmenère was originally planted in the Bordeaux region but its importance is today very small at Bordeaux. However, in Chili it has grown out to a great monovarietal. Try some of these!

Purchased at Bacchus (Knokke) in a price range below 10 EUR.

* Lustau, Manzanilla Papirusa Sherry Solera Reserva, Sanlucár de Barrameda (Spain)

I just love sherry and this is super stuff. Purchased at Bacchus (Knokke) for about 14 EUR.

If you want to read about some teeth grinning wines I tasted in Italy, then click this post: Barolo in Serralunga d’Alba

So, now go out and get yourself a wine that puts a smile on your face!

Bart

So kudos to My Wine Education for coming up with this great subject.

The round up of WBW#35 can be found here.

I want to mention one blog, Château Brys. A fellow Belgian blogger with whom I got into contact thanks to WBW. He had set his eye upon a wine from Telmo Rodriguez, a passionate driving wine maker.

Have a nice Spanish wine today!
bart