Cuvée des Anges Montlouis-sur-Loire AOC sparkling wine brut by traditional methods

 If you find Champagne too expensive and are bored with Prosecco and Cava and the Southern Hemisphere alternatives, then try this: Cuvée des Anges Montlouis sur Loire AC sparkling wine brut. This dry white sparkling wine is produced from Chenin Blanc grapes in the Montlouis sur Loire appellation near Tours in the Loire Valley. The limestone soils  and climate here are perfect for the growth of the Chenin Blanc grape.

The sparkling wine produced is refined with a medium body and it has a well balanced acidity with a taste of green fruits and lemon. The wine is dry and will clear your palate. It is best as an aperitif in my opinion, but would go down well with a dessert or even throughout a meal. I find it more refreshing than Prosecco and it does leave an unpleasant after taste, like some cheap sparkling wines do. It should not be compared with Champagne in either terms of taste or quality. It needs to be tasted and assessed in its own right. We bought it for about 7 Euros a bottle in France, and this means that is exceptional value for money when you compare taste and quality with cost. You can even buy it in the UK, so try it; I think you won't be disappointed.

https://www.vivino.com/GB/en/montlouis-cuvee-des-anges-brut/w/1420627

Florence and Pisa and food and Chianti

We went to Florence and Pisa recently to meet some friends from Australia. There were ten of us so it was difficult to find a good restaurant to accomodate us so we had to eat in cafés. I drank beer and we all ate pasta or pizza which gets boring. On our last day my wife and I went to Pisa on our own and found an excellent restaurant called " Il Capodaglio" in Via Del Carmina.The food wine and service here were excellent. I had a "summer soup" made of vegetables according to a local recipe.This soup can also be eaten hot in winter, in fact it is a soup for all seasons and delicious. I followed this with  a plate of mixed Tuscan meats with beans. My wife ate a seafood pasta, which was of course of much higher quality of that served up in the Florentine cafés. 

We washed the perfect food down with a bottle of  Leonardo da Vinci Capolavori Chianti Vergine Delle Rocce 2021. This wine went down so well with the meat dish and even with my wife's pasta. Of course it tasted of cherries and spice and identified well with the region and was the perfect wine to go with Tuscan food. When you travel it is best to stick with food and wine from the region, but of course Chianti and Italian food travels well;so you can eat good Italian food,anywhere in the world, if you can find the right  restaurant - even in Singapore.  

Our waitress, Beatrice, spoke English so well that I could not believe that she had never visited an English speaking country; her word order and use of adverbs was perfect. She spoke English better than some native speakers that I meet in restaurants and pubs. No doubt her Italian is perfect too. It was a pleasure to talk to her.

 You can buy our wine for about £16  a bottle in the UK so it represents very good value for money. The wine will also improve in the bottle. You cannot go wrong but it is probably best to go to Pisa and visit  " Il Capodaglio" to eat authentic Tuscan cooking with your Chianti.

https://www.xtrawine.com/uk/en/wines/leonardo-da-vinci-capolavori-chianti-vergine-delle-rocce-2019/p31675

https://ristoranteosteriailcapodaglio.it/

"Toxic Masculinity" Ugh?

 President Macron of France has been accused of "toxic masculinity ", by some of his french female political opponents, after a film of him knocking back a bottle of Corona beer in the Toulouse rugby players dressing room was broadcast on social media: Toulouse had just won the league. This accusation is of course complete nonsense.  My wife is French and assures me that she does not consider someone knocking back a bottle of beer as toxic masculinity. My wife does not go to boozy  hen parties  and neither of us would accuse a boozy hen party as being "toxic femininity". It's time for the accusations and personal comments to stop.

Apparently, President Macron likes a glass of wine and he often drinks one glass with his lunch and one glass in the evening with supper or dinner. Also he is reputed to be opposed to the health gimmick of dry January. I agree with him there, if you drink so much that you have to abstain for a month then it is probably better if you don't drink at all. It seems that Macron has a healthy attitude to wine drinking so why should he be criticised for enjoying a glass of wine with his meals or a beer with his Rugby winning mates.

I have never believed that wine drinking is good for your physical health but conversely I believe that drinking wine in moderation does not damage your health either. So three cheers for a glass of good Burgundy with your dinner.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20230619-toxic-masculinity-macron-criticised-for-downing-beer-with-rugby-champions

Wine and AI chatbots

 The other day, I asked an AI chatbot to write me an essay about the colour of Schrödinger's cat. I thought that it might have been ginger and white. The AI chatbot gave me a discourse on quantum mechanics and particle physics, without mentioning the cat or a cat experiment. All of the information was gleaned from the web citing Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr and the great Schrödinger himself etc. This is all very interesting from a scientific point of view but it did not answer the questions: what was the colour of the cat, did the cat exist at all and are we talking about the right Schrödinder? The chatbot really was brainless and could not see the point of the joke. AI has a long way to go.

There is no doubt that a chatbot could describe a vintage champagne, where it was produced and what it tastes like etc. All this information can be gleaned from the web and reproduced in a grammatically correct essay with all the conjunctions in the right place. What it cannot do is give you a personal opinion of the wine because a robot will never have tasted the wine for itself and experienced its flavour, and it cannot give you an indication of whether you will appreciate its quality or not. You have to be alive to really judge a wine for yourself and you cannot fully rely upon the opinion of others gleaned from hundreds of comments on the web.

All this is why I shall never resort to using chatbots to write about a wine or the wine industry, as for me that would be sacrilege. But buyer beware, there are plenty of intellectually lazy writers about.

Canned Wine has all the allure of a tin of Baked Beans

 I like to think that I am an open minded fellow so I thought that I would taste some canned wine. Canned wine is a new development. The wine comes in 250 ml cans which are a third of standard 750 ml bottle. 

I went down the local supermarket and selected a wine which I knew quite well, Terre di Faiano Primitivo Organic Italian red from  Puglia, but in a bottle.

The price of the wine in a can was £3.79, but this has been temporarily discounted to £2.79, which meant that 750 ml would cost you £9.97. This compares to the cost of a glass-bottle of what appears to be the same wine at £9.99. 

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/groceries/beer_wine_and_spirits/wine/wine_in_a_can

However, what about  the taste of the wine? The canned wine is non-vintage, it tastes good but has nowhere near the concentration and complexity of the bottled  vintage wine.  My wife and I enjoyed the wine with some beef stew but we both agreed that the canned wine had nowhere near the quality of its bottled sister. Also, it was nowhere near the value for money.

Terre di Faiano Primitivo Organic Red from the bottle is one of my favourite wines; I often buy a bottle when I visit the supermarket and I agree fully with its description. It is easily worth £10 a bottle and I enjoy this wine more than some bottles of  pricier French and Italian wine. A recent vintage  will age for a few years more, but I am always tempted to drink it straight away.

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/terre-di-faiano-primitivo-organico-puglia/607989-348541-348542?msclkid=2a56ad2a225912e2a556ced6a102ca88&gclsrc=3p.ds

What are the advantages of tinned wine? For me there are few unless I am going on a rare picnic or more rarely travelling to a football match. At home, I am not going to drink wine from a tin or a can especially if it is of lower quality  and at the same price as bottled wine.

There are advantages for the wine producers who can now sell inferior wine dressed up in fancy branded bottles at higher prices.

For the supermarkets there are the advantages of lower transport and storage costs. They also benefit from selling less costly wine, for them, at higher prices to the consumer so it is a nice little earner.

The wine suppliers claim that tin cans are better for the environment, but probably most of the discarded tins end up in land fill.

I have nothing against tinned products and I often eat tinned baked beans with my breakfast at a local café and enjoy them.  I also enjoy a can of Guinness at  home but prefer to go to a pub and have a pint drawn from a barrel. 

Let's face it, drinking a classy vintage wine from the bottle, and sharing it with friends over a  meal cannot be beaten.  Tinned or canned wine has all the allure of baked beans and we must know its place.

Dry January again

 Once again we are being treated to nudge politics. The healthy living lobby is trying to get everyone to reduce their consumption of wine and other drinks by saying that it is worthwhile not to drink in January. I am not going to listen to this. If, I felt that I was drinking too much then I would not just give up for January, but I would give up entirely. I shall stick to my routine of not drinking at all for two consecutive days a week. Last Sunday at a dinner party I went "over the top" by drinking a whole bottle of wine. I did not wake up with a hangover, my skin had not gone pale and I did not have a bad conscience. Common sense now tells me to give my liver a rest and not to drink until my next dinner party which will be next Sunday. My wife will do this too without any prompting from me and we won't even discuss it. I believe that we have both got a healthy attitude to drinking and that we are not in danger of damaging our health or becoming alcoholics, neither of us drink and drive.

Of course there will always be problem drinkers even if alcohol was banned. I feel, however, that there is no reason to be accusatory to people who simply want to enjoy a glass of wine or two with their meal and their friends.

Chȃteau Ducru-Beaucaillou 2001red Bordeaux Deuxièmes Crus (Second Growth)

We had some guests around for duck stew and I thought I would open a decent bottle of wine to go with it; in their honour; Chȃteau Ducru-Beaucaillou produce some of my favourite red wines from St Julien in the Medoc. I carefully decanted the wine before they arrived. The wine was excellent even if it was not one of their best years and it cost me a pretty penny: to buy a bottle now will cost you well over 100 GBP.

The wine has its own particular taste but it represents the terroir very well. If you tasted it blind you would easily tell that it is a Bordeaux wine if nothing else, and you would also tell that it is superior to most wines from across the globe. Whether it is worth the price is debatable as you are almost certainly paying for the name and some of the better years of this wine are held as investments. The wine went down great with the duck and I enjoyed it enormously.

After finishing the duck and the Bordeaux I opened a bottle of Alain Mathias Epineuil 2018 from Bourgogne. This is one of my favourite wines which comes from the north of the region. The soil here is almost unique to France and is based on limestone marls. My wife and I can recognise the wines from this area when we taste them blind. This is not because we are great wine tasters but because we have drunk so many of these wine, and some of my wife's family come from the area. 

https://www.carteblanchewines.com/alainmathias

https://domainealainmathias.fr/nos-revendeurs/

For me the Epineuil is of similar quality to the Bordeaux which costs much much more owing to its reputation as an investment wine. The Bordeaux will keep longer and will develop further in the bottle.

The Epineuil is exceptional value for money and its quality is easily comparable with the best of wines.

Alan Mathias produces award winning wines.

I can't decide which red wines I prefer Bordeaux or Bourgogne and I suppose that it depends on my mood. One thing is certain you can still find high quality wines at reasonable prices  provided to do your research , use local knowledge and visit the wine producers to taste their products. This is true no matter which country you visit.

https://domainealainmathias.fr/nos-revendeurs/

As an apéritif we drank 2013 Marques de la Concordia 'MM' Gran Reserva Brut Nature Cava. At 11 pounds a bottle this dry sparkling wine from Catalonia is a pure star and can hold its on against many Champagne brands. 

https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/marquis+de+la+concordia+mm+grand+rsrv+brut+nature+catalonia+cava+spain/2013/uk