Like the Don says–in COVID-time we’ve been drinking wine more than we used to.
I had mentioned German wines on the other thread. Some recent favorites round our house have been the Envinate wines from Canary Islands/Spain. Really cool volcanic soil influences, always interesting.
Alpine nebbiolo from Arpepe - soft/mineral nebbiolo of great purity, incredible structure, completely different style from the more well-known Barbaresco/Barolo many of us know.
Muchada-Léclapart collab between Ale Muchada and cult champagne producer David Léclapart - amazing skin-contact palomino fino from Sanlucar. Not cheap or easy to get, but the wines are incredible.
I’m no expert but I can’t drink the standard tat that you get in most supermarkets, although you do pick up the odd good one now and again. I tend to go to Majestic and wander round aimlessly picking up stuff that I like the label of, my extensive research in this area has led me to the following discoveries:
”I was convinced there was a different type of drunkenness from each kind of wine.
That was the reason I got into Burgundy, because I noticed Aloxe-Corton in particular
made people laugh. Bordeaux is a bad drunk for me“ Brian Eno
great thread. if it wasnt for music and wine over the last 12 months, where would we be?
a mate has just set up a home delivery service. the USP is that he is a sommelier with excellent taste and excellent contacts, and he’ll find you stuff you’ll like, even if you dont actually know what you like. i think that makes sense
Used to have a very bad habit, but now we are covid skint it’s Aldi Cotes du Rhone for us, perfectly drinkable for £5.99 (was £5.49) till a few weeks ago, their Rasteau is great for £8.99. Gotta love Aldi.
Orange wine did def seem to be the summer tipple of last year. Very drinkable in summer. But seemed to be quite decisive, ie the old wine gang turned their nose up. To add i had one of the worst hangovers known to my adult life, drinking the stuff.
Over the summer, i ended up ordering from Low intervention. Which specialises in organic/natural wine. Would recommend using. A new one on me was Pet Nat, which ferments the wine in the bottle and carbonates it slightly.
That was a great session and one of the reasons we subscribed to Noble Rot. My wife jokes that at least something good has come out of Coldplay (soz Dan). Dujac is extraordinary, too bad that like much of Burgundy it’s basically billionaire juice now. The Keller GGs are amazing too but are also priced like GC burg. Luckily for the plebes they have their “von der fels” bottling which is affordable and still a peek behind the palace gates.
It’s like any hipster trend and there is this disturbing tendency towards ideological purity–ie “my wine is made without sulfur or whatever so it’s better/healthier etc”. Add to that the amorphous term “natural”–what does that even mean? De gustibus etc but not a few of the natty wines are flawed wines (to put it mildly) that paper over their issues with marketing, cute labels, and cod philosophy. Some are revelations. We love the wines of Christian Tschida. Enderle and Moll do a brilliant skin contact Muller-Thurgau. Chateau de Puy in Bordeaux has been making brilliant “natural” wines in the humble Côtes de Francs appellation for a long time. You can make great wine with natural yeasts and minimal additives and if the trend has moved the conversation in that direction than I’m all for it.