As a wine lover, it always hurts when my friends claim not to like wine.  Funnily enough, whenever I introduce them to sweet wine, they seem to change their opinion.  If you've never tried dessert wine, why not slip one into your next wine shopping basket.  You could be missing out on something glorious.

Sweet dessert wines aren't for everyone, and perhaps they're not for every night.  But there are some moments when they are simply unbeatable. 

Lurking in my fridge for several months, last weekend was finally the right time to open the half bottle of Andrew Quady's Californian Elysium Black Muscat.  When better to open a wine that you drank at your wedding, which features a love heart on the label, than on Valetine's weekend?

Mr Purple Teeth and I first discovered the Black Muscat grape while on a trip to Sonoma around 10 years ago.  It was love at first sip.  It's rich, deep red colour and highly perfumed, aromatic flavours are just as heavenly as the name Elysium suggests.  There's a hint of rose and some lychee fruit and of course some lovely red fruit.  I often pair it with chocolate desserts, traditionally difficult to match with wine, but it can also work well with blue cheese, or raspberry/strawberry tarts, pavlovas or even just poured on some vanilla ice cream. 
Frankly speaking, I often use dessert wine instead of dessert, though this time, I didn't go for the low calorie option.
Instead I paired with the exceptionally decadent Gü puddings' Gü-zillionaires Shortcake.  Oh My!  Perhaps not the best possible match due to the caramel flavours, but two delightful sweet treats side by side can't fail to please the sugar addict in me.  And that pudding needs to be banned now to prevent my dentist becoming a millionaire.

One of the things I love about this sort of wine is that (if you have the willpower) it will keep in the fridge for a few days.  I used a vacuum pump, and was still able to enjoy this on day 5 after opening.  I'm not going to claim this as a diet tip, but if you can't resist a sweet treat in the evening, and a little glass of wine, perhaps just rationing yourself to a small glass of this will kill 2 birds with the one stone.
Elysium is fortunately available a bit more widely these days.  We had real difficulty sourcing it for our wedding, all those years ago. Prices differ greatly from £9.59 at StrictlyWine.co.uk (£6.99 shipping fee applies unless you're order is more than £225), to £12.41 via Amazon plus over £8 shipping. If you're a Londoner you can pop into Fortnum and Mason and pick it up for £12.50.  It pays to shop around! Wherever you buy it, I really hope you'll be tempted to give this wine a try some time.  You'll find it on menus in many fine dining restaurants too.
One of my less romantic wedding memories, where we served this with a hot chocolate fondant, is the collection of glasses of this lined up in front of the supposed non-wine-drinker in attendance.  I think she polished off a full bottle.  Now that's a recommendation you can trust.

Cheers!

The Valentine's weekend is not a time I'd normally choose to be filled with a cold.  Snotty hankies and violent coughing fits are hardly romantic.  

Enforced "confined to barracks" time, however, can have it's advantages, such as working your way through the more pronounced wines on the wine rack, which will cut through the seriously diminished sense of smell and pack a punch on the taste buds nonetheless.  Our Chinese take-away on Friday 14th didn't exactly light any gastronomic fires, but it was a great pairing with a delicious bottle of Bruno Sorg Alsace Gewurztraminer. I last drank this back in August, interestingly, also the last time I featured some Pinot Noir heavy hitters...  the 2011 was almost sweet but full, rich, honeyed and packed with all the usual lychee and rose flavours that pair so well with exotic foods.  Sadly both the Wine Society and Tanners have sold out of this £11.50 delight, so we'll have to wait for a new release, or hope that the one remaining bottle of Gewurz in my fridge hand carried from Alsace with match up to this level of finesse.  The Sorg family have been making wine in Alsace since the 18th century so they know how to bring out the succulent fruit and spice in these varietals which thrive on the hillsides around Eguisheim.  If you get a chance to try it, make sure you take it. 

Understated packaging tells us that the tradition of setting aside the harvest's best 20 barrels started almost 20 years ago at the Casablanca Valley Vineyards of Cono Sur, one of Chile's most awarded wineries.
Having spent a week working with International Wine Challenge last year, I was also swayed by the fact that this wine had achieved gold medal status. It also won the Chilean Pinot Noir and Chilean Red trophy as well as being nominated as one of the best reds in the challenge.  This wine had some seriously high expectations riding on it.

Given the choice, Mr Purple Teeth will never choose Pinot Noir.  So I love slipping some into his tasting glass when he's unawares...  

He's spent many years in the "anything but PN" camp, yet lately he's mellowed, perhaps because I've chosen less light Alsace and Burgundian examples and gone for the heavy hitters from the new world.  

Tonight, I selected 4 bottles from the wine rack and asked him to pick a number between 1 and 4.  He could have been enjoying a mature Ridge Zinfandel, a Californian Syrah, or a £35 bottle of Australian Shiraz right now. Instead, lucky number 3 meant that a Chilean Pinot Noir appeared in his glass.  

Without telling him anything about the wine, I simply poured and served.

Luckily, Mr Purple Teeth agreed with the pundits.  "This is a seriously nice wine", he said before I revealed the varietal.  While I found much of the signature strawberry flavours I expect from a PN, Mr Purple Teeth felt there were deeper fruits present.  This is a good thing since the slightest hint of strawberry usually leads him to pull an awful face, make a bleurgh sound and leaves me wondering what to open just for him while I polish off the whole bottle.  
Red fruits may not win his favour, but I enjoy a good Pinot Noir, and this is a seriously good one.  The body leads to a velvety mouthfeel, acidity is well balanced, and the tannins are so well integrated that you almost have to go looking for them.  They are there, though, and this wine will probably develop more smokey and leathery flavours if you, unlike me, have the patience to keep it for a year or two.  Asked for a final comment, he declared, "Gutted that the bottle's empty".  I don't think he's ever given a higher accolade to a Pinot Noir!  Those wine gurus at IWC must know what they are talking about.

Chile is producing some amazing value wines right now, and this one is no exception.  A Burgundy of this quality might be at least £10 more.  If you want to find out what makes a Gold Medal winner worth it's accolade, you could do a lot worse than to pick this one out.  I'm now, more than ever, looking forward to becoming an associate judge on the last day of the International Wine Challenge next time around.


Cheers!

I've been traveling for a few weeks, and Russia wasn't exactly fruitful with to wines to review.  I tasted some impressive vodka and some fruit liqueurs from Finland made of northern delights like cloudberry and lingonberry. Since they're not on sale here in the UK, they're only of passing interest to my readers. So arriving home, I craved a decent wine.  
I'm still awaiting a case or two that I'm owed from different sources, so I didn't want to buy too much.  The perfect opportunity to stop by a (not local enough) local establishment to pick up an interesting bottle.  Admittedly, I've not been in Marlow much lately, having spent all of December based in central London. And with the recent flooding, this seems unlikely to change.  I now have one less reason to visit.  
Alfred the Grape is no more.
This cute little store with over 1000 wines in stock had been open since November 2010 but closed suddenly in the run up to Christmas.  I didn't know.  I'll admit that I didn't shop there on a weekly business but I will miss it.  Whenever I was looking for something interesting, or a wine gift, it was the first place I would look.  So where does this leave us?  On Marlow's Spittal Street, we are left with Sainsbury's, Waitrose and M&S.  There are still a couple of chain wine stores around the town, but for how long...

Sadly, it's not just a local issue. We were once a nation of shopkeepers, but with positive businesses with great service like this one closing, I fear that choice is dead, and homogenisation is the way forward for our UK high streets.  It's not new for wine shops to suffer (think Oddbins which closed a third of it's remaining stores in 2011), and the independent of-licence is far from the only loser to the supermarkets. Every time I walk down my local high street there are more and more shops with the shutters down. But with increasing tax hits in every budget, the gross sales of wine in the UK have declined over 5% from their 2008 level, according to the International Wine and Spirits Research statistics to a little over 143 million (12 bottle) cases in 2012 and this has been accompanied by an increasing likelihood for us to disguise our booze spending by popping a bottle or two into the trolley with our weekly shop.

Nine in 10 of the bottles of wine we drink in the UK are bought from the major supermarket chains, and 60% of those are on discount.  We've therefore been trained to buy wine only when it's deemed "a bargain", and those retailers who offer consistent and fair pricing miss out. Naked Wines create a similar online model by their inflated regular pricing encouraging us to deposit our cash with them on a monthly basis to receive "Angel Pricing", which to my way of thinking is only what the wines would sell for elsewhere.  Majestic too, regularly offer discounts such as buy 2 save 1/3 offer taking place right now, though remember you have to buy 6 bottles minimum. Can it be right that we are so easily manipulated?  If it means we no longer understand the value of a bottle of wine, and what it takes to produce a decent wine, we risk sacrificing taste for branded "bargains".  Of course, this blog has featured many a supermarket stunner, but if you're a regular reader, you probably enjoy something more than the odd bottle of Blossom Hill or Echo Falls.

By all means, use the supermarket special offers to experiment with new regions and grape varieties. But remember that if it's for sale in every Tesco/Sainsbury's/Asda across the country, this is most likely a bulk produced wine, which may lack complexity.  I encourage you to use independent wine stores where you can still find them.  In fact, I hope to be offering some wine for sale myself in the very near future, and I hope you'll come and buy some.  I'll be sticking to tasting events and online sales for now.  The High Street just has too much tumbleweed blowing down it these days.

I'd love to hear your views.  How and where do you buy your wine?  If you buy online, what's missing from the experience for you?  If you've never bought online, why not?  What encourages you to try new things?  And of course, is there are wine you'd like to learn about here, or one you think I should be reviewing for my readers?
Join the discussion!