whin.es weekly

This week was our Christmas big taste at the wine shop...

The basic setup for the weekend is open 30 different wines and get people tasting, talking and mainly...buying. My job for the weekend was to be on the tasting counter talking up and discussing wine. I had to wade my way through the wasters and strays, pick out the serious customers and try to convince them that their opinion of one or more of the wines was that they loved it and that they wanted to buy 12 (or more). Which to my credit, I did brilliantly. Everyone has a wine they'll quite happily fall in love with and if you get them to try enough, then you'll generally strike gold somewhere along the line.

We picked an excellent range of wines to contrast and compare over the weekend, and we picked wines to play against other. So, in amangst the 30 wines we had open, were three Argentinian malbecs and three different Bordeaux reds (the winter call for white wine is low so we had mostly reds open...)

My general tack with a sales based tasting is to start somewhere comfortable and get them to try a wine they will generally like first. So it's "Red or white?" or "What style of wine do you normally like?" and "Can I recommend one I've got open?". One chap that I spoke to was great, and highlighted something I really like about wine. Learning.

His initial line was "I'm fairly new to wine, and would just really like to try a few new wines and learn a little". Brilliant, not a sales pitch for once, but the opportunity to pass on some knowledge. I knew he was looking to buy eventually, so didn't need to try. We started somewhere simple, a straight up chardonnay. I really enjoyed passing on bits and bobs, and letting him taste his way through some wines. We skipped to a Marlborough sauvignon, a muscat, a Chablis, a torrontes and an Australian chardonnay/viognier. All different but the chap started to get a bit baffled but really liked the chrdonnay/viognier and the torrontes. (Torrontes is the only indigenous Argentinian white grape, really floral and pretty in taste and aroma). We did have a brief skim of the reds, but he was obviously realising that he had a lot to learn, so had a quick try of the three Bordeaux reds.

As a general rule, Bordeaux reds are a blend of three grapes. Cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc. Depending on the appellation and the winemaker depends on the dominiant grape, either merlot or cabernet sauvignon. We had a 2009 (amazingly complex for such a young wine, drink in 2014) and a 2005 (a little thin and more fruit based than I'd expect for a 2005, drink in 2011) both merlot based and a 1999 Haut-Medoc (gloriously earthy and mellow, drink now!). The guy was impressed with and interested in the differences between such a complicated and famous region. He'd really only scraped the surface, but bought a bunch of the wines and went on his way.

The contrast between the malbecs is a pretty intereting one too. Malbec is an old, old grape. Previously heavily grown in France, but there's hardly any planted there anymore. However, Argentina has taken the grape as its own and really ran with it. They seem to squeeze out lots of different styles of wine from this one grape, which is a testament to the dedication and passion of the Argentinian producers. The three we had open were El Dominnio, Mendoza, 2009, a juicy fruits wine, bright purple and easily drinkable and a great match for a light gamey dish and would definitely go well with a christmas roast turkey. The second was another 2009, Casa Marguery. This is a much more full bodied wine, with depth and oak and more tannins. The third wine was a 2007, the Eral Bravo, (which, in Spanish, is a name of a breed of fighting bull... Wowzers!) this wine really does its name justice, it's big and scary, with a lot of big fruit, it has been oaked for 13 months and that earthy wood and toast come right through. Such a variance between the fruit driven style and the powerful oaky style, but all essentially the same region and grape. Cool huh? Not like Bordeaux, based on differing blends, just simply different winemaking styles.

Now, the good thing about working in wine shop, means that on a weekend where we were giving out tasters of 30 different wines is... You're going to have a little bit of wine left over. It's not like we can sell it now...so I managed to take home 3 half empty bottles of red and 2 half empty bottles of white (whoo!). Being the good son I am, I gave the whites to my mummy. I gave her a Chilean sauvignon blanc and an excellent (half empty) bottle of Chablis. I'm good. I left some tasting notes scrawled on the bottles in black pen so my mum knew what to expect. The note for the Sauvignon read "lively, young and fresh..." and the Chablis read "mineraly, dry and crisp". I left them in them fridge and got comments back from my mum the next day (what a wonderful way to research a wine, write some notes on the bottle and wait for the review to come to you). Well, my mum believes that she doesn't normally like dry, dry wines and I stand by the fact that she hadn't tried enough good wines (spend some money everyone, you get what you pay for). It turns out that she enjoyed the flinty Chablis much more than she though she would, but at the end of the day she still preferred the younger and livelier sauvignon blanc.

Anyway, I spent the last few days polishing off the wines I kept for myself...a New Zealand pinot noir, a Portuguese trincadeira and the 2009 Bordeaux I mentioned earlier (it was open anyway!!). All are reviewed in the sparkly new (and brilliantly named) 'reviews' section. Go take a look.

That's it for now, you can check out my website http://whin.es and follow me on twitter @whinesblog. You can also come and see me in-store at the Adnams Cellar & Kitchen Store in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Should you wish.