Domaine Daniel-Etienne Defaix Chablis Grand Cru Les Blanchots 1997
Oxidised, very tired.
NR/100

Tyrrells Vat 1 Semillon 1999
So young! Appealing nose of lemon and quince. Structured palate with a great line of acid and very good length. Plenty of potential to improve and develop here.
92/100

Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin Village 2002
Quite “new world” in style with cherry and strawberries on the nose. The palate is on the thin side, with the flavour slightly dilute. Decent, drinkable, but uninspiring.
86/100

Ksara “Cuvee du Troisieme Millenaire” 2004
From Lebanon, made from Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Syrah. Interesting nose of Raspberry, herbs and spices, ceder, smoke and cherry. The palate is well structured and balanced, with medium intensity of flavour, a supple texture and good length. Will improve over the next 5 years.
89/100

Seppelt St Peters 2002
Spice, red berries, some vanilla and some hinted floral characters. Concentrated palate, quite bold and ripe without being overwhelming. Tannins are quite soft, I wonder if they’ll hold up. Good, but not nearly as good as a bottle a couple of years ago that was exceptional. Might just be in a bit of a awkward spot at the moment, I will leave the next bottle for 4-5 years before trying again.
89/100

Clonakilla Syrah 2006
Complex, bright nose of floral elements, five spice, chocolate and bacon fat aromas. The palate is charming and almost impossible not to love, great length and balance between oak, fruit and acid. World class and a brilliant wine.
95/100

Domenico Clerico Barolo Pajana 2001
Nose of tar, pine, roses and cherries. Required food to tame the tannin on the palate. The fruit on the palate is bold and serious without being too over the top. Very good now, but patience will be rewarded.
91/100

Dönnhoff Oberhäuser Brücke Riesling Auslese 2006
Honey and a touch of spice to the nose. The palate is not as sweet as I expected, quite refined, minerally and subtle. Tasty and easy to drink.
90/100

Inniskillin Vidal Sparkling Ice wine 2004
Unusual if nothing else! Peaches, nectarine, honey and pineapple aromas on the nose. The light spritz cut through the sweetness somewhat but it still finished sweet. I think I’d rather it without the bubbles but glad to have tried it.
88/100

Since everyone loved my review of the Fish Eye Merlot, I figured I’d give the Cab a shot.

Ringing in at 13.5% alcohol by volume, this cheap wine was an equal match to the FishEye Merlot. From Ripon, California, this wine lets the fruit speak for itself. Along with the dark plum taste, I also experienced a little pepper in the nose.

At only 8 dollars a bottle, I found this to be a great wine. I had mine with Spicy Montreal seasoning. Try it!

Rating: 7/10
Price: 7.99
Place of purchase: L&L Grocery
Vineyard Info:
FishEye Winery
Ripon, CA
www.fisheyewines.com

Just in time for Christmas, Sainsburys and Secret Sommelier have teamed up to produce a case of 12 Bordeaux with an accompanying podcast by Christopher Burr MW and Ewan Lacey.

Bordeaux, I think, can be the region most in need of explanation to the uninitiated, as its charms occasionally need to be coaxed out. In this world of immediacy, these wines lag behind in the crowd-pleasing stakes, especially when you venture down from the top drawer. But given a lead from someone knowledgeable, I think - unlike some wines which initially please but become repetitive and dull - they can become friends for life.

It would make a great present for someone and is a useful tool for a group of friends who don't go to a wine club but want to have fun with it at home.

Good for Sainsburys to seize the initiative and find quite an innovative approach to wine tasting. But why is the podcast an audio recording not a dvd? I haven't heard it yet but I would have thought there was quite a lot of opportunity for visuals here.

To make it even more appealing, they have included a prize draw to win a trip for two to the Bordeaux Wine School. That would be quite a fun trip, I imagine.

The case can be bought at www.sainsburys.co.uk/wine or buy the wines individually in-store. Many of these wines I have not tasted myself but I do know the "Taste the Difference" ones are very decent examples.

Thermomix makes making butter easy. But others have made it without a Thermomix.

Here's the Thermomix way.

This is the salad we had for lunch today. Remember this salad from 2006?  It looks the same but there are slight differences.   The 2006 salad contained smoked salmon and telegraph cucumber. Fast forward to 2008 and I've used  lebanese cucumber with  feta cheese, both thinly sliced by mandoline and topped with smoked ocean trout.

There is no recipe. Just layer thinly sliced cucumber, then feta, top with smoked ocean trout, slivers of red onion, drizzle with olive oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, a few leaves of flat leave parsley, sprinkle of salt and a grinding of pepper.

Bryan insists I tell you he considers it the best salad he has eaten in his entire life.

Love is in the air this month.  For those of you looking for a way to dress up your Valentine?s Day, consider the object of your affection ?the one with the sparkling personality? as your inspiration.

Accordingly, pop open the sparkling wines and celebrate.

If Valentine?s Day is not your thing, there are plenty of other reasons to celebrate with bubbly this month, from Presidents? Day to any other day of the week, which ends in ?y.? Why? Because sparkling wines add a touch of festivity to any occasion and they taste too good to wait for a special event. And, even though you may not have a fondness for this Hallmark holiday, you always have your love of wines to keep you warm.

Sparkling wines, of which Champagne is most well-known, capitalize on harnessing the CO2 created during the fermentation process to provide the fizz we all know and love. This capture takes place during a secondary fermentation, which is coupled with allowing the spent yeasts to remain in the bottle throughout the ageing period. The yeasts impart the bready/toasty aromas and flavors that are characteristic of sparkling wines.

There are several ways to make a wine sparkle, the simplest, cheapest and short-lived being the injection method (aka pompe bicyclette), which injects CO2 into the wine. These man-made bubbles tend to be large and coarse on the palate.

Conversely, the traditional method, based upon Methode Champagnoise, provides a longer-lasting, smaller bead, which has more finesse in its mouthfeel. These traits stem from the labor-intensive process which includes an initial blending of still wines (assemblage) that is then bottled and capped, along with a yeast and sugar mixture (tirage), to facilitate a secondary fermentation. The wines are then left to age on the spent yeasts for a period of time as set by the appellation (in Champagne, this is a minimum of 15 months for non-vintage wines, while Cavas are generally aged for 9 months).

The sediment left behind must then be carefully shifted from the base of the bottle to the neck in a process known as riddling. The bottles are gently tilted and turned throughout a period of several weeks, forcing the sediment down into the mouth of the bottle. The necks are then immersed into a cold, briny solution, thereby freezing the sediment. The caps are removed and the frozen sediment is thrust out of the bottle and discarded (disgorgement). The remaining wine is topped off with a blend of wine and sugar/must (liqueur d?expedition), which impacts the resulting dryness or sweetness of the finished sparkling wine. The final step is the insertion of the cork, which is much denser that those used for still wines given that sparkling wines can be under up to 6 atmospheres of pressure (be careful where you point that thing).

A similar process is used in the transfer method whereby the steps above remain the same with the exception that the sediment is removed in bulk and the wine is then filtered and bottled. Such wines will note that they have been fermented in the bottle, whereas the wines in the previous method are labeled as having been fermented in this bottle. An additional method involves the use of a tank in which the entire secondary fermentation, ageing and disgorgement takes place. While this is of course a much less expensive process than the other two, it is frequently used to produce wines that have a distinct freshness to them such as Astis from the Piedmont region in Italy.

The Champagne region in France has done a good job in marketing itself as a luxury product and this joined with increasing demand, limited supply and expensive processes has pushed up the price on these wines. Vintage sparklers (those produced entirely from grapes grown in a particularly great year) and prestige marquees (i.e. Crystal, Dom Perignon) command even higher prices. However, many sparkling wines from other regions in France (such as Burgundy and the Loire Valley) as well as well-made American, Italian (Asti and Prosecco), Germany (Sekt) and Spain (Cava) can offer the consumer a wonderful experience without the hefty price tag.

The average wine consumer has no idea what it means for a wine to be organic. And when it comes to Biodynamic wines, most wine drinkers have never even heard of them. But that doesn't matter, because an increasing number of the most sought-after, expensive wines in the world are biodynamically produced, which means that biodynamics is one of the most significant modern trends in global winemaking.

The only problem (for those who care) is that biodynamic winemaking involves a maddening, paradoxical mixture of scientifically sound farming practices and utterly ridiculous new-age mysticism. If you want to know just how kooky it can get, you might be interested in a recent feature on biodynamic wine in SF Weekly, which dives into detail on the cow skulls stuffed with oak bark left in a hole; the red deer bladders filled with yarrow flowers buried in compost piles; the proscriptions to burn insects in the vineyards only during certain proper planetary alignment; and the claims that the moon should determine when you put your wine into new barrels.

Of course, if you actually believe in biodynamics, you now hate my guts along with Joe Eskenazi, the author of the aforementioned article which is entitled Voodoo on the Vine.

Joe's angle on biodynamic winemaking will draw criticism for focusing only on the strangest parts of an elaborate farming and winemaking methodology. His (and my) detractors would be justified in complaining at the sensationalism of a few practices, and a few predilections of the methods inventor, while many, even most biodynamic winemaking principles are the same as good old organic farming.

But that is precisely the problem. Most biodynamic farming principles make sense because they are the same as scientifically grounded organic farming (e.g. don't use pesticides; let the sheep take care of the weeds and fertilize the soil; etc.). But then the whole system is undermined by the use of, and rationalization for, special preparations and actions that are not only bizarre in their conception, but explained by the worst kind of pseudo-scientific quasi-religious gobbledygook that you could possible imagine.

You can't imagine how angry this makes me. You see, I love biodynamic wine. Some of my favorite wines in the world; some of the best wines I have ever tasted in my life; some of the wineries that seem to consistently make some of the highest quality wines I have ever experienced are produced biodynamically, and I don't believe this is a coincidence.

This is what Joe Eskenazi did not include in his article, perhaps because he's not fully immersed in the world of wine. While he rightfully points out, with the appropriate level of cynicism, the fact that some wine producers are moving to make biodynamic wine because they think it will sell better, there are many more producers who have been making wine biodynamically for years, even decades without ever telling anyone about it, least of all the people who buy their wine. These winemakers are some of the smartest, most talented folks in the wine industry. The only reason they would possibly be producing wine biodynamically (which Eskenazi's article points out is much more labor, time, and cost intensive than any other farming method) must be that they believe they make better wine that way.

There are two types of people in the world. Those who believe that while science is not perfect, it is the most powerful interpretation that we have found of the world around us, and those who believe that there are better explanations for what we observe in the natural world than science can provide. I am very much a member of the first group. There's a lot we don't know about the world yet, and there are a lot of really interesting interpretations about how things work, but the scientific method produces the most reliable interpretations of what is real and what is true that I know of. I (and pretty much everyone in a first world nation, whether they know it or not) trust my life to that fact nearly every moment of every single day.

And that belief I hold is precisely the source of my unending frustration with biodynamic wine. I think it's good stuff. But I know it's not good for the reasons that the people who make it, and the people who tell them how to make it, say it is. The claims of the philosophy that underlies biodynamic wine growing, and the specific explanations for various prescriptions of the farming and winemaking process are just plain wrong. They can be proved wrong, in some cases simply with a calculator, but in all cases by rigorous scientific enquiry.

Which is why I keep hoping that someone will come up with Biodynamics Lite™: a kinder, gentler form of biodynamic winemaking that throws out all the bullshit, and sticks to the things that science tells us will actually work.

I plan on continuing to drink more and more biodynamic wine, and encourage everyone who loves wine to do so as well. I just hope there is a day when I don't have to roll my eyes a little every time I see the word on a wine label, or bite my fist as a winemaker proudly tells me that the reason I love his wine is due to the fact that he completely avoided the dueling vortices when he mixed his preparation of ground up quartz crystals.

Read the full article in SF Weekly.

My friend Jack at Fork & Bottle has the most complete list of biodynamic wine producers that I know of.