3d Wines Saumur-Champigny 2009 Domaine de la Cune

Domaine de la Cune was one of the first vineyards to become a member of 3D wines. 3D wines offer consumers the prospect of renting rows of wines at the member vineyards. The vine share scheme allows participants to visit their vineyard, meet the producer and buy cases of the wine at discount prices. I am not a participant myself but have tasted 3D wines from several of their vineyards and I am impressed with the results. I have also been to tastings organised by them.

The "3 Jeans" Saumur-Champigny 2009 is an excellent wine which is produced from the Cabernet Franc grape which is well suited to the Loire Valley climate. It has a concentrated plum and red fruit flavour with a touch of spice and the structure of the wine will enable you to keep it for several years longer. It shows regional character which is also the hallmark of a good wine. My wine was a gift but on the open market I estimate that it would cost you around £11 a bottle.

I was also given a bottle of Domaine de la Cune Crémant de Loire Brut Non -vintage. This wine is also of high quality and compares favourably with its competitors from Burgundy. Crémant de Loire is produced primarily from the Chenin Blanc grape variety. It is not as elegant as Champagne but goes down well at a party. I estimate that the retail price of this wine is also around £11 pounds a bottle. It is well worth trying but please do not regard it as a substitute to Champagne.

3D wines is well worth considering if you like making frequent trips to France to taste wine.

Château Beychevelle 2002 Bordeaux red

Château Beychevelle is one of my favourite wines. I do not get to drink it very often because it is so expensive. A friend of mine gave me this bottle several years ago and I kept it to drink at a later date with him and his wife. We drank this wine with Cumberland roast beef which was cooked rare and in the French tradition.

In the 1855 Bordeaux classification this wine was awarded quatrième cru or fourth growth status but its quality deserves a higher rating in my opinion. It is superb wine which benefits from the terroir of its Saint Julien situation. The climate, weather and soil are perfect for the agriculture of the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes which make up the majority of the blend for the wine. The terroir and vineyard techniques coupled with superb wine making produce one of the world's finest wines.

2002 was not a particularly renowned year amongst professional buyers but it did produce a good vintage especially in the Medoc. My friend's wife , who is French, could not guess where the wine was from; she thought that it might be from Cahors! That was quite a tribute. She could not believe, however, how concentrated the wine was. So it was no surprise when I told her where the wine was really from. The concentration of good flavours is an indication of quality. So is the length of time that the wine's flavour remains on the tongue after swallowing or spitting it out. When I wrote a tasting note upon opening the wine and decanting it, its taste remained on my palate for a good five minutes. When we drank the wine in large glasses as opposed to a tasting glass I was hit by the concentration and complexity of flavours that only a top class wine can deliver.

This wine costs over fifty pounds a bottle on the retail market. Is it worth it? I often debate with myself about this and come up with conflicting answers. This wine does not taste significantly better than other examples of good quality wine from the Medoc but costing a lot less. However, it does not taste significantly worse than "investment" type Bordeaux reds wines costing much much more. Its quality is almost the same as the top Bordeaux cru and it will probably keep for just as long and improve in the bottle as well as its more renowned cousins. If, like me, you cannot afford to drink the very top cru very often, or if at all, then it is worth buying this wine and from this vintage to get a feel of what you are missing. The top cru are very costly not because of their elevated quality but because of their rarity value. On these grounds the wine is worth buying. The other superb wines from St Julien include: Châteaux Gruaud Larose, Lagrange, Leoville Barton, Leoville Las Cases, Talbot and Ducru Beaucaillou. If you cannot afford their first wines you will not be disappointed by the second wines. It is very difficult for red wines from other parts of the world to compete with this wine and this is another good reason to try it.


Here is my tasting note.

Château Beychevelle 2002 tasted on 11 March 2012

Appearance: Clear deep ruby turning garnet colour. Tears.

The nose: Clean smelling with complex aromas of red fruits, cedar and tobacco box with a slightly smokey aroma. Mature enough to drink now but it will develop further.

On the palate: A medium plus body, high in ripening tannins, medium acidity and dry. Very concentrated and complex flavours of red fruits , plums, prunes and spices. There was also a flavour of tobacco boxes. There were hints of savoury and smokey flavours. Well balanced and integrated. Exceptionally long length.

Other observations and conclusions: This wine is of exceptional quality and will merit keeping for longer. It is very expensive to buy but probably worth the price to find out what a highly quality wine should taste like.

Turning Leaf Pinot Noir 2009

I liked this Californian Pinot Noir from Gallo. It was fruity with a medium to full body with soft ripe tannins. It does not compete with red burgundy, which is usually 100 percent Pinot Noir, for elegance or complexity. It went very well with roast chicken. I get a feeling that this wine is blended from wines from a number of vineyards but this does not detract from its quality. It is half the price of the English wine, Regent Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard - Red, which I drank recently but twice the quality: so what chance has English wine got to compete? American wine also has extra tax to contend with. I don't think that climate change will assist the English wine making industry for many years to come, especially when it comes to red wine making.

Ochagavia Silvestre 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon Chilean Red

I drank this wine in the Parlour restaurant at Canary Wharf with a business colleague. I was very impressed with its fruit character and the wine was well balanced and not overwhelmed by oak. It went down well with a Hamburger. You can buy this wine for about 13 pounds a bottle on the retail market and at just over 20 pounds in the restaurant it represented good value for money. This wine can compete on equal terms with French, Spanish, Italian and Californian wine. I recommend it for drinking with red meats and I am sure that it will improve with a few years of bottle ageing. It really should go down as a complement to food rather than swigging it back at a wine bar.

The restaurant was so so; the food and service were quite good and the waiters were polite. And they do not address you as "guys" which is egregious as far as I am concerned. The only problem with the restaurant is that the tables are too close to one another so it is not the place to go if you dabble in insider trading. Though, it is OK for a trade of Chilean red.

Regent Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard - Red

I bought this wine at a farmers market in Tunbridge Wells UK in 2010. It is a non-vintage wine so I suppose it is blended from more than one year. It is produced from organic grapes grown by organic standards. I kept it for opening on a special occasion, so I opened it when I had some American visitors to give them a taste of England. I was disappointed with wine and decided not to serve it to them. The reason why I was disappointed was the wine tasted very ordinary; it was light to medium bodied and I could just about taste some fruit character. It cost 15 pounds for the bottle at a discount. I would not expect a non vintage wine of this character to improve very much in the bottle. It was not bad wine but it could not hold a candle to a good Bordeaux or Rioja costing less. This is the problem with English wine for in the main it is so expensive compared to its competitors. I am sure that the vine growers and winemakers adhere to the highest standards but they cannot account for the British climate and weather which still does not favour red wine production even in the South of England.

In its place, I opened a bottle of La Croix de Beaucaillou 2006, the second wine of Château Beaucaillou. This wine cost 23 pounds at Majestic and the jump in quality was far more than the price difference. It showed all of the characteristic of a good Bordeaux red from St Julien and is not far short of the quality of the first wine. I could have kept it for another five years and it would have improved further.

The next day we opened a bottle of Denbies Flint Valley non vintage white wine. This wine was an improvement as it had hints of spice, gooseberries and minerals. It is produced from the Reichensteiner and Seyval Blanc grape varieties which suit a cooler climate. It tasted like an English white wine and it was light and refreshing so it had regional character. At 7 to 8 pounds a bottle it is quite expensive and in France I can buy much better quality white wines for this money.

It is a shame that English wine producers can not benefit in any way from the economies of scale. They will always be hard pressed to compete.