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I was lucky enough to be invited to Naked Wines’ latest tasting for customers at One, Alfred Place (a lovely venue) last night.
I had the chance to taste some of the existing South African range (Arabella, Bruwer Raats) but there were also many new producers showing off their ranges.
Photos to follow, and my simple scores below the jump.
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Naked Wines, the new online wine merchant I talked about here, is hosting an intriguing event on 11 March. In collaboration with the Australian Trade Commission and the Government of South Australia, the event will showcase independent winemakers’ wines to around 50 consumers (including me!) at Australia House on the Strand here in London.
The idea is for the customers to taste their way through the 50 selected wines, narrow them down to a shortlist of 5 and Naked Wines will buy A$100k of the shortlisted wines at the end of the day.
I’ve already been enjoying my purchases from Naked Wines and this looks like it will be a lot of fun. I’ll be ‘tweeting’ from the event if possible, and you can follow the proceedings online here.

I’ve recently signed up to a new wine venture called Naked Wines, from the founder of Virgin Wines and 17 former senior Virgin Wines staff. From the press release:

“Rowan Gormley, founder of Virgin Money, the Virgin One Account, Orgasmic Wines and Virgin Wines, launched www.nakedwines.com, on 1 December 2008, to be a ‘Facebook for Wine Lovers’.”

The site “lists 96 wines from 32 small producers, with the focus on up and coming wine regions (like Chile’s Bio-Bio Valley)” and “Customers can also become ‘Naked Wines Angels’, where the winemaker offers 6 bottles of wine for free to encourage the customer to try their wines (the customer paying UK duty and delivery of £15.85 for 6 bottles). The custumer gets 33% of their spend with that winemaker refunded if they agree to support them by pre-paying £5 a month towards their next case.”

The idea is to bring wine from the smaller lesser known growers and get it into the hands of (hopefully) eager British wine drinkers. The ‘Facebook’ part is done via friendly profiles of each grower (Bruwer Raats and his lovely Chenin Blanc [CT] is a favourite) and a ‘Wall’ which allows drinkers to post their comments, feedback and communicate with the grower.

There are a couple of novel features, the main one being their “Wine Angels“. This is a strategy by Naked Wines to build a relationship between the buyer and the maker, in the hope you will obviously continue to buy more of their wine, plus give them a more stable and predictable revenue stream. It’s an interesting idea, and I’ve already snapped up a mixed case in their January sale which includes some more of the delicious Chenin Blanc [CT] from Bruwer Raats.

All in all, it’s an interesting new venture and I look forward to seeing the quality of the wines in my mixed case.

After realising I have built up rather a large collection of wine, as dealt with here, I decided to host a rather informal wine-tasting evening in the flat on Saturday 13th December. Despite being the day after the rather late-night departmental Christmas party, people were feeling pretty chirpy and in the mood to sample the 12 wines I’d selected.
Sim, a law school friend and fellow trainee, was an absolute star and prepared canapes, including sausage rolls, bruschetta and spinach and ricotta snacks…
Here’s the wine list with some comments (usually the ‘blurb’ amended by me) on each one:

BUBBLY:
N.V. Valdobbiadene Prosecco di Valdobbiadene Ca’ Rosa (Italy, Veneto, Prosecco di Valdobbiadene)
A fizzy fruit bombshell. Light-weight and gently aromatic, with crisp, delicate fresh apple flavours.

WHITES:

2008 Crowded Hour Chardonnay Steve Grimley (Australia, McLaren Vale / Hunter Valley)
A subtly-gentle, lushly-fruited chardonnay with a nice touch of citrus for extra refreshment.

2008 Churchaven Chardonnay Chenin Viognier (South Africa, Coastal Region, Paarl, Wellington)
Made by a small, farmers co-operative using premium grapes grown high up on the sun-drenched slopes of Wellington, this top-class blend of Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Viognier is just the thing for adventurous wine drinkers looking to shun nondescript, so-so wines. Zippy, citrusy and ever so slightly apricot.

2008 De Martino Sauvignon Blanc 347 Vineyards (Chile, Central Valley, Maule Valley)
This is the Six Million Dollar Wine! It has been developed after 11 years of exhaustive and very expensive research into exactly the right place to plant each grape in Chile. 347 vineyard research plantations are what it took! Think of it as a kind of super-acceleration of the French process that took 400 years. What does it taste like? Like MTV have gone and pimped up a Sancerre.

2007 Fattoria Sovestro Vernaccia di San Gimignano (Italy, Tuscany, San Gimignano, Vernaccia di San Gimignano)
Fresh, nutty, leafy on the nose – in fact textbook Verdicchio. Ditto the palate, which has a nutty roundness, crisp pear flavour and good, lemony acidity. Verdicchio isn’t a showy wine, but this has more to it than the average Pinot Grigio and it goes well with food, because it has substance, but no bullying flavours to put up a fight. This is an exciting alternative, if you’re bored stiff with Chardonnay or even Sauvignon Blanc – Vernaccia di San Gimignano is the grape handily enough, and it makes fresh wines of seldom paralleled perfume, with a really floral, zesty, dry palate of citrus fruit and almonds.

2007 Soaring Kite Viognier Riesling Steve Grimley (Australia, South Australia, Clare Valley / McLaren Vale)
Viognier and Riesling might sound like aromatic overload, but it works a treat here. The Eden Valley Riesling (just over a third of the blend) gives lime juice zing and acid backbone; the Adelaide Hills Viognier provides the stuffing, with classic apricot and peach flavours. It’s a wine that can handle spices, but nothing too hot. Elegant and restrained with heaps of fruity flavours; lush.

REDS:

2005 Landelia Malbec Single Vineyard Alto Agrelo (Argentina, Mendoza, Lujan de Cuyo)
This winery has had Paul Hobbs as a consultant, a man who achieved the dazzling feat of scoring a perfect 100 from Robert Parker for his wine. He is one of the world’s great winemakers and you can feel his touch in the Landelia. Argentina has NEVER been this good. This Malbec blows you away. It’s like a combination of New World punch and French sophistication in one bottle.

2007 Andrew McPherson Full Fifteen (Australia, Victoria, Central Victoria, Nagambie Lakes)
His brief for the Full Fifteen was to create a huge black spicy red that would be smooth and immensely drinkable. On its maiden vintage in 2003, it scooped three medals. This vintage is a mix of mainly Cabernet Sauvignon, Ruby Cabernet with a drop of Syrah, all deliciously ripe and improved by a touch of oak-ageing. A heady 15% too!

2003 Concha y Toro Cabernet Sauvignon The Wine Society’s Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon (Chile, Central Valley, Maipo Valley)
The climate and soil here produce a classic style of cabernet sauvignon with typical aromas of cedar and blackcurrants, combined with a sophisticated palate which balances power with elegance. All the wine has been aged in barriques, 225 litre oak barrels, for about eight months, which concentrates and develops the flavours, and softens the tannins, resulting in a fresh and intensely flavoured palate with a fine-boned structure.

DESSERT WINE:

2004 Château Doisy-Daëne (France, Bordeaux, Sauternais, Sauternes)
Predominantly Sémillon for a lemony flavour and waxy texture. Spiced up with 20% Sauvignon that adds a racy acidity and freshness, with a luscious, honeyed and elegant fruit that is balanced by a pretty botrytis character and great acidity, which gives finesse. Finely poised, graceful and delicate, never cloying, this wine is a splendid example of its genre.

The most popular white was the 2008 De Martino Sauvignon Blanc and the most popular red was the 2007 Andrew McPherson Full Fifteen. Most of these wines were bought through either Virgin Wines, Waitrose or HJB Wines. Each wine is linked to their entry in Cellartracker.

The Wine Curmudgeon: Wine terms: Vintage – Newly discovered Wine Curmudgeon makes a couple of very good points about buying wine based on vintage; for a large proportion of the wine you buy, the vintage simply doesn’t matter…large producers try to ensure their wine is consistent across vintages, so the question to ask is whether it is a good producer. WC sums it up:
“When does vintage matter? Generally, the more expensive the wine, the more important vintage is. It’s irrelevant in a $10 wine, may matter a bit in a $25 wine, and comes into play in wine that costs $50 or more. And how many of us drink $50 wine regularly?”

Dude, Where’s My 401K? – A genius idea, pay your $39 a bottle and on the purchase date the price is pegged to the Dow Jones Industrial Average…price never rised about £39 a bottle but could fall…”The wine will be bottled in August 2009. If the Dow goes down, you get
an economic stimulus check of $2 per bottle for every 100 point drop.
If it goes up, then your 401K is looking good and the maximum of $39 is
a steal for similar wines we produce that command $75+ at retail. Bull
or bear, you can’t lose.” From Vinography on Twitter.

I’ve recently started spending a lot more time buying, sorting and researching wine. This is partly in preparation for the ‘party season’ but also I’ve caught ‘the bug’; I’ve been to a number of wine tastings recently (Virgin Wines, Bibendum, The Wine Show) and have ended up buying various mixed cases of my favourites.
I’ve reached the point where I have circa 120 bottles; some for drinking now, some to be kept for special occasions and about 20 which could do with about 2-6 years of cellaring. My physical organisation and storage of these wines is fairly haphazard, the wines for laying down sit in a wine rack in a cool room in the flat, whites for immediate drinking are in the fridge, bottles sealed with a cork are in various cool cupboards in makeshift racks, while the rest are still in their cases until I find more rack space.
Dealing with 10-15 bottles at any one time was fairly straightforward and I had been using Corkd, a great little Web 2.0 site (now owned by Gary Vaynerchuk, the wine/vlogging fanatic) that allowed me to write brief reviews, keep a track of what I paid for them and so on…but it’s shortcomings were quickly exposed once I reached 40-50 bottles. So the hunt began for a new solution…

There are many new sites promising to bring Web 2.0 to the wine world, LogABottle, Winelog.Net and OpenBottles to name just a few. However, I wasn’t looking for fancy graphics, smooth contours and tagging this time, just:

Having read a number of reviews of other cellar management sites & services, I decided on CellarTracker. In terms of pure functionality, CellarTracker is head and shoulders above the other online offerings with an extremely large and active community.
The site is designed and run by one man, an ex-Microsoft programmer with a love of wine by the handy name of Eric LeVine
.

Here is a full list of features, taken from the site:

Cellar Inventory Management

* Report and search by producer, vintage, varietal, drinkability, etc.
* Purchase price and valuation data (locale settable)
* Consumption history
* Barcode support
* Restaurant-quality printed wine lists
* Per-bottle location & bin tracking
* Personal tasting notes
* Uploadable label images
* Wish lists and shopping lists
* Track pending deliveries (a.k.a futures)
* Premium feature: Automatic valuation of your cellar (read more)
* Express import tools for existing spreadsheets (read more)

Tasting Notes

* Record your own notes
* Group a series of notes into tasting events
* Read community tasting notes
* See what others say about wine in your cellar
* Automated integration with Stephen Tanzer’s IWC (for co-subscribers)
* Store other professional reviews and scores (in compliance with copyright)
* Community bulletin board

The import process was relatively smooth and involved sending a formatted spreadsheet to Eric who imported it and prompted me to map each wine to either an existing database entry or create a new wine. From then on, I’ve diligently added each purchase, ‘accepted delivery’ when the case has arrived and have started to record proper (but still rather amateur) tasting notes.

There’s a great Getting Started page on the CellarTracker wiki if you’re interested, plus I am able to expose the data on my wine cellar to the web via RSS and have added two pages to this site, my Wine Cellar (using the WP plugin Winex which is a little temperamental on my installation) and my Tasting Notes.

Finally, to view my cellar on the CellarTracker site, click here!

Champagne put to the test: Taking the fizz out of bubbly
“In a blind test that has thrilled the marketing departments of the
major retailers and perturbed at least one of the grande marques, six
wine experts gave a resounding vote of support to some of the less
glamorous bottles.”

Top 10 Best Buys

1 Sainsbury’s Taste the difference Vintage 2000 Premier Cru Champagne

2 Somerfield Prince William Premier Cru Champagne NV

3 Pierre Gimonnet & Fils 1er Cru ‘Gastronome’ – Oddbins

4 Lanson Black Label NV – Tescp

5= Radcliffes de Brissar Champagne NV – Threshers/Wine Rack

5= Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin NV – Tesco

7 Tesco Premier Cru Champagne Brut NV

8= Champagne Les Pionniers NV – Co-op

8= Oudinot Cuvee Brut NV – M&S

10 Waitrose Champagne 1999

The Wine Gang is a fantastic new(ish) wine review site, a collaboration between 5 top wine critics. They review wines on sale in supermarkets and wine merchants across the UK, issuing a set of notes each month. I’ve already used them to guide my purchases at Marks & Spencers this afternoon, making the most of the M&S 20% discounts. Subscription is £19.99 per year.

I can highly recommend CellarTracker if you have a reasonable collection of wine…not only are most well-known wines in the database already but the reviews are very useful, as are the ‘drinking windows’.