Aglianico del Vulture.  Perhaps the first Italian red to grab my attention when I attended Wine School a couple of years ago. 

The wine I tasted there, "Pipoli" has proven hard to track down regularly, so I've tried a few lesser Aglianicos along the way to try to find an Italian red other than Nero D'Avola that Mr Purple Teeth and I can get behind.  I  remained unsatisfied.
 
Yes, there are plenty of great Italian wines out there, but we like black fruit flavour and that's harder to find, in combination with affordable prices and decent quality.

Step in The Wine Society.  At £14.95 this Alvolo Aglianico 2008 won't be in my glass every night of the week, but it's my birthday this week, so I thought, when better to give it a try?

For the last couple of weeks, August has refused to give us summer. And perhaps because I've been spending several days a week in a cold dark wine cellar, it feels like autumn is already with us, and with it, the autumnal melancholy.

This wine suited that mood perfectly.  
At the first sip, I thought, "Heathcliff". 
It's dark and brooding like a stormy night on the moors. Cathy is calling.  
Heathcliff is silent.
This is a seriously dark wine.  Thick and opaque, even with a candle in front of it, it's dense. 
Strong and plentiful tannin is fine grained and velvety.  It's balanced by the acidity which provides a glimpse of sunlight behind those storm clouds. 

The back label (in Italian, so please forgive me if my translation isn't correct) mentions red fruit. I get black fruit - blackberry, maybe a hint of blueberry.  

At a push, I might find an overripe raspberry. Then I get spice and a hint of soft vanilla from the time in oak. Like a pleasing smile from our man on the moors.

Full bodied, hefty, almost chewy, this is a serious wine. It would have benefitted from being served with a meal, rather than with a laughter track from Mr Purple Teeth watching The Big Bang Theory.  Incongruous does not begin to describe it.

Vulture is an Italian area (and volcano, providing the right terroir) in the Basilicata region of southern Italy.  
Our association with the bird of prey, though, might also be apt.  

Serious and strong, if it were a creature, it might well be a vulture. It would have no qualms about picking clean your carcass.  

A party wine it's not.  

But like Heathcliff, the tortured romantic hero, this keeps me coming back for more.

I managed to save a glass.  

I was rewarded. 

Next day, the wine was even more appealing.  Heathcliff played by Johnny Depp, perhaps?  


It will benefit from patience. Pour and leave for at least an hour.  Decanting could also help, or aeration (see link below). It's not filtered, so if you can be bothered, decanting is likely preferable to remove any fine grained sediment.

This is not a wine for the faint-hearted, but if you like your wine big and bold, dark and stormy, you'll love this. 
I'll be back for more. Just like Cathy.

Cheers!

December 2013 may not be where you'd expect a blog written in August 2014 to begin, but begin there it does.
Despite being about 50 metres from London's shopping epicentre for most of the month, our Christmas shopping faltered and failed.  
Mr Purple Teeth hit upon an idea: Offer a Purple Teeth Tasting Party to our friends, meaning they get a present and we get to spend more time with them.  
It seemed like a good idea, but logistically, it was a bit of a challenge, so here we are, 8 months later, finally sampling some Bordeaux wines.

The original idea was for Mr Purple Teeth to pick 4 Bordeaux wines and for me to pick 4 different wines, blind taste them all and see what came up trumps.  But how to create a consistent theme?  At the very least, it needed not to be absolutely obvious which wines were which. I had no idea how wine educated some of the guests would be.

After some consideration, I decided to go for Bordeaux grape varieties (and blends) from other places, and to try to showcase some of the blending grapes in single varietals.  I also wanted to throw in some surprises.   A sparkling Rosé wine isn't exactly what springs to mind when you think of Bordeaux, and yet, that's exactly where we started as a light aperitif before the serious work began. In the end, I was surprised at just how many wines we had to taste. We sampled 15 wines in total, most from Bordeaux, thanks to Lidl providing me 4 sample bottles for review the week before the tasting. I was glad of the help.
I gave everyone note taking sheets, but didn't tell them what any of the wines were until after they'd be tasted.  Would people guess which ones hailed from arguably the world's most famous wine region?  Read on...

Pink fizz isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Bordeaux, nor do Cabernet and Merlot spring to mind as the obvious pink fizz grapes, so I really had the guests stumped with the first wine of the evening, the Reserve de Sours (available from WineCellarClub.co.uk).  
A dry and delicate pink, guests rated it an average of 6/10, with wild guesses as to it's provenance from New World to Alsace.   Light and fruity, with a lot of acidity sums up the descriptions. It is made using the traditional method, and it's fair to say the ladies loved it, but the gents weren't fizz fans. 
I was surprised that the cork blew out, taking the cage with it, on one turn of the wire, yet the mousse itself was pretty delicate.  It's very dry, with hints of strawberry and raspberry. and a pleasant aperitif if you fancy something a bit out of the ordinary, and at half the price of most pink Champagnes.   This was just for fun, and there was no other fizz to compare it with.

Our next group of 3 started with the Catena Malbec. It was one of the few wines I'd drunk before the evening, and therefore somewhat of an insurance policy for me.  Malbec is a permitted variety in Bordeaux but I don't recall seeing it blended in any bottles I've looked at over the last several years.  Still, I felt it would be nice to sample something that wasn't "samey" during the evening but still hit the remit. 

Catena did not let me down.  This is one of my favourite wines, and it proved to be the favourite for the hostess too, who even guessed it was Argentine Malbec.  A coup for both of us.  Waitrose now have the 2012 in stock and I'm interested to try it to see how the different vintage is. The 2011 is a stunning wine for £12.99 with chocolate, spicy blackcurrant nose, and smooth but full bodied tannin, it's average score was aound 6 and most correctly guessed it was from the New World.  Catena has a very high "Robert Parker" rating with many vintages achieving over 90 points.  I gave it 9/10, but clearly I had a tough audience to please.  In fact, it was around now that one guest revealed they don't drink red wine!  Ouch.  This was going to be a long night.

The most expensive wine of the evening at £26, it shocked the guests that this one is part of Lidl's new French range, due to be released on 4th September.  

Some snootily claimed that a Lidl shopper wouldn't know how to spend £26 on a bottle.  Others felt a pound or 2 more could get you a better known (and arguably better) wine.  There was no denying the popularity of this one, though, and I was pleased that Lidl had kindly trusted me with the finest bottle in their new range.  Lidl are putting a lot of work into upping the quality (and average price) of their French range, and if it pays off, we'll all have more choice and value. (I will be blogging about  few more of their wines in the next few days, so stay tuned).

Smoky, plenty of ripe fruit, soft tannin and very drinkable, the Sociando Mallet from Haut Medoc is a blend of 3 grapes, with the majority being Cabernet.  Mr Purple Teeth stated, "Elegant, smoky, love it", and the average score was around 7.5  so, the higher priced wine scored well.  No-one actually guessed correctly that it was the highest priced wine, though.  

Heading back to South Africa, I selected the Meerlust as it's a blend including the 4 primary red grapes of Bordeaux, and 2011 was highly rated for this particular wine, since the premium wine of the estate, Rubicon, wasn't produced, meaning better fruit than normal made it into the mix.
Very strongly flavoured, drying tannin and red fruit character meant it wasn't as accessible as I'd normally expect a £10  New World red to be, but Mr Purple Teeth gave it the same score as the Sociando Mallet although he didn't love it as much, he assumed that being big and complex it was a Bordeaux wine. Again, a score of 7.5 making this a great value product from The Wine Society.  It would be interesting to compare lesser vintages.

Our final Bordeaux red of the evening was another Haut Medoc, this time from The Wine Society, and considerably cheaper than the Lidl wine at just £14.50.  I found it fuller bodied than the 2 other wines in this section, but was somewhat overwhelmed by the food we served throughout the tasting.  I had tried to avoid eating as much as possible, but by now it was 10pm, and even a professional needs to eat sometime.

I should probably add I'd also reduced the amount of spitting by this point, but I had become more stingy on the pouring after a glass of very expensive wine was poured away after a cursory sip.  

The average score of 6.5 was disappointing.  Mr Purple Teeth found it had a slight bitter aftertaste and was less complex than the other wines.  As he had chosen this one to represent Bordeaux, he might be kicking himself that Lidl and my New World wine beat him...  our second Lidl wine section winner!
 

Our final 2 wines left France behind.
The DiFranc had lain on my wine rack for over a year, a gift from DiBonis on my visit to Serbia last May.  It seemed like the ideal time to open it as Cabernet Franc is the parent grape of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and is also used in Bordeaux blends.  It's not one that many people drink as a single varietal when compared to Merlot or Cab Sauv.  Loire valley reds such as Chinon and Bourgeuil or Saumur-Champigny are a good place to start if you want to sample this varietal, and in the USA, Virginia is proving a successful home for the grape.

I remembered it as medium bodied and less green and herbaceous than expected indicating good ripe fruit.  This time around again, there was little in the way of green notes, but with age, the wine has developed good coffee overtones and even mocha.  The mocha flavours were even more prominent 2 days later when I went back to the vacuvin sealed bottle.  Delicious. 

This was a surprise hit with the crowd and it's reassured me that I've found a great winery here.  Mr Purple Teeth gave it a 9  and was sure it was a young, elegant Bordeaux with "rich, creamy, velvety vanilla". Tasting it again blind second time around, his velvety vanilla note was consistent, and he was disappointed to hear the bottle was finished.  The average score was just under 8, and it achieved 50% ratings of a 9 including one from our non-red-wine drinker! It's a hit.
My next mission for Purple Teeth is to try to find a way to import these wines to the UK and get them to a wider audience.  I hope that many of my readers would be tempted to try them and find them just as fascinating as everyone I've shown them to over the last year.

A random bottle picked up from who knows where that's been on my wine rack for a long time.  I decided to throw it in as a bonus bottle since it was Rolling Cabernet Merlot and we had nothing else from Australia.  My research led me to believe it would be fairly simple but I kept it till the end because I didn't want the ultimate wines going at the end in case the guests were by then, too tipsy to appreciate them.
Fruit forward and simple, it was pleasant, but the most striking thing was how different the label was to all the others.  Australian wine marketing could not be more different than the classic French style.  I also wanted to test whether or not our scores got higher towards the end as alcohol made us less discerning.  This wasn't to be for Rolling which achieved an average score of around 6 and was seen as boring, with a harsh finish.  Sorry, Australia. You lose.

Thanks again go to Lidl for the final wine of the evening.  This is a bargain basement Sauternes at £6.99 for a 50cl bottle.  It's not as lusciously sweet and botrytised as more complex and expensive examples but at this price, it's competing against wines like Muscat de Beaume de Venise and offers first time Sauternes drinkers a chance to experience a glimpse of what the region is famous for without the eye-watering price tag.

It was a really pleasant way to end the tasting, lightening and freshening our palates, and a perfect accompaniment to the Tarte au Citron our hosts had organised as the dessert.
Described as "summer in a glass", "Peach, apricot and nectarine with citrus glaze", "mango in a fruit salad", and an average score of 7.5, we didn't compare it to another sweet wine.


Needless to say, more food was served, more wine was poured, glasses were revisited, some opinions revised and a great time was had by all until around 3am.  There was even some wine left at the end of the evening.

Did Bordeaux win?  Who knows really?  Who cares even...  We found so many interesting and fun wines, and what was fascinating was people's reactions when they were told what they'd been drinking.  With 2 Porsche drivers in the company there was some good-natured dismay at having enjoyed Lidl wines, and a plan to seek out the nearest branch by another guest. The fact is, the wines from Lidl won 2 of the competitive sections of the evening.   Everyone felt somewhat perturbed at how little they knew.  

Guests noted that their reactions when blind tasting had challenged some of their perceptions about what they "knew" they liked.  I felt a little bit jealous that I didn't get to taste blind myself. I wonder if I'd have guessed any better than they did. And when serving the wine in the perfect Riedel glass later in the evening, perceptions improved all round.
 
Overall, a surprise top score for the wine from Serbia, some great results from Lidl, a couple of great value wines from Wine Cellar Club and Wine Society, proving you don't have to spend a fortune to enjoy great wine.  And it really is hard to please everyone.  Even the highest rated wine overall had one review of "boring".

Most surprising of all?  We went out to dinner the next night and ordered another Bordeaux wine!
Cheers!

Last weekend, I attended a 50th birthday party. A multi generational affair, there were cocktails & prosecco. In fact I provided some of the cocktails. 

We also greatly enjoyed a wine from the "outside of the box" collection I bought recently. 
(I featured other wines from this selection in a recent blog.) 
(Join for free membership of Wine Cellar club here to access these wines.)

At £10.66, those who tasted it guessed it at nearer £20. I won't pretend to be able to review it in any depth, after all, it did follow some serious cocktail action - but if you like Spanish wine, this is a great wine to add to your basket. It's got enough Tempranillo to be familiar to Rioja drinkers but enough other stuff going on to make it appealing to anyone who likes a hefty red that's full of body and punch, yet easy drinking and velvety. 

It's a blend of 40% Tempranillo, 30% Cabernet Sauvignon and 30% Syrah with 8 months in French and American oak, a bit less time in oak than a Crianza. On the other hand, as it's a 2009 there's considerable bottle age, adding complexity. 
The Finca de Don Quijote appealed to me, as an avid reader, and it comes from Tierra de Castilla,  located in the  region of Castile La Mancha.  If you've know a book lover who loves Cervantes' man from La Mancha, potentially the world's first ever novel, this could make a good gift for them.

As for those cocktails...

I took the Chocolatini to new heights with addition of Stolichnaya salted caramel vodka to Godiva chocolate liqueur, as well as absolut vanilla & a coffee liqueur. Sadly I spilled most of the shaker. Not my finest moment.  

Being completely sober at the time just unpacking what I'd brought,  this was especially devastating (not to mention messy).

The surviving creation was a citrus delight of absolut citron, Grand Marnier & Limoncello with fresh lemon & lime juice and topped off with Prosecco.

Definitely not one for the designated driver! 
Delicious though.  It somewhat eased my pain at being, once again, "the spillage idiot".

I came home to an empty house afterwards, but carried on "social drinking."

How?

Well, amazing as it seems, I'd gathered a group of "virtual" friends across the United States and Canada, none of whom I'd ever met before for an online wine tasting! It all started off as a random idea of mine on the app Happier.

Reverse Wine Snob (one of America's most influential wine bloggers - yes he actually gets paid to do this!) recently featured a bottle of 14 Hands Hot to Trot Red Blend, which I recognised from my "outside the box" collection. He gave the Washington State wine a bulk buy rating. It seemed a good enough reason for me to propose it. 

It's cheaper and more widely available in the USA than here, and some 10 or so people went out to buy a bottle so that we could share a "real" experience "virtually".

Is this the future for people who don't want to drink alone? Could be!
I suddenly felt very responsible. Would they like it?

At 9pm UK, 1pm Seattle, 4pm Washington DC a bunch of us tweeted and shared "happy moments" discussing the wine. What was interesting over the course of "Happier Happy Hour was how the wine developed & how others tasting notes inspired us to find new flavours in the wine. A blend of Merlot, Cabernet, Syrah & Mourvedre, among others, there was a lot going on.I found it quite different than anticipated with almost sweet, mocha, cocoa notes along with bramble and deep prune/plum richness, next to  toasted spices like nutmeg clove and cinnamon. Even at £12.78 (more than twice the average bottle spend in the UK), it's a Wine Cellar Club best seller & it's easy to see why. There's some complexity yet easy drinking appeal.

One happier found this tasted of Christmas and it may even become the wine for the "difficult to match" Thanksgiving dinner. 

Most agreed the wine benefitted from being open and poured for at least 30 minutes before drinking.

Are you a social drinker?

Fancy joining the revolution?

It was quite a task juggling a laptop, an iPhone & a Riedel tasting glass full of wine with a Twitter account, Facebook page & the Happier app, but it was worth it for an hour of connection with wine fans half way round the globe.  A new and unique wine experience that didn't cost the earth.

We finished up the weekend with some rather more traditional social drinking.  A glass or two with Mr Purple Teeth in the back garden on Sunday evening. We opened the Kamptal region of GrüVee (Grüner Veltliner) from the "outside the box" collection. 

"Tangy", he would say, "tongue tingling." But otherwise he wanted to chill.
See my June blog post for more on this food friendly Austrian grape variety.

It was classic GrüVee for me, with one slight difference. I could swear i detected a hint of banana when I ate some saltine crackers with it. 

But then when you look at my Saturday, it'd be no surprise if my taste buds were playing a trick on me!

Cheers!

I may have mentioned in previous blogs that Cabernet Sauvignon is probably Mr Purple Teeth's favourite varietal.  He likes the hefty tannin and fuller body of left bank Bordeaux wines.  Disappointingly for him, this style isn't top of my personal wine list. 

Although I can appreciate the great quality in these wines, I don't really have the patience to wait long enough for them to develop.  You either pay a small fortune for someone else to have held onto them for years (see the 1970s wine I got him for Christmas here), or you have to try to store them. 

In our little apartment with an already over-flowing wine rack, that isn't always easy from a space perspective.  Not to mention, temperature control is an issue, when your wine rack is in the kitchen.

I do try to be a good wine wife though.  So for Christmas I also bought him an Arlewood Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 which comes from the Margaret River region in Western Australia.  
Australia's Cabernet Icon is the Coonawarra region, but the Margaret River area has quickly gained an international reputation for high class Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay since the first commercial plantings around 1967.

Arlewood Estate was established in 1988 in the Willyabrup Valley of the Margaret River and with a combination of the right vineyard site, drive and passion is now pushing for a spot in the upper echelon wineries of the region.

The present itself was  a bit of a happy accident.  We paid a Sunday lunchtime visit to Berner's Tavern with some good friends back in early December.  We'd drunk the Arlewood Shiraz, a lucky pick on my part.  We all loved it.  
I was all for ordering a second bottle, but at £50 a pop our friends were hyperventilating...  
Still, they'd enjoyed it greatly when they hadn't seen the price tag.  
I set about scouring London for a retail bottle to pop in with the Christmas treats, but to no avail.  And then I came upon the Cabernet Sauvignon in Amathus on Wardour Street.  At somewhere between £20-30 a bottle, it was a risk, but a calculated one.

For no real reason but Wine Wednesday (Mr Purple Teeth and I both having abandoned separate plans for the evening), I prompted him to pop the cork on this one.  
Unsure what to expect, I hoped for the best.

The pronounced bouquet almost leapt from the bottle, and I exhaled.  I'd made a good choice.  

For me, there was high tannin, yet it was smooth and well integrated, without some of the gripping dryness that so often features in 100% Cabernet Sauvignon wines.  Well-structured, with elegance, power and finesse, there was great balance of silky tannin, mouthwatering acidity, 14.5% alcohol and complex layers of flavour.  Ripe cassis and rich, over-ripe plum notes, along with good oak and bottle aging giving touches of mocha, chocolate, leather and "cigar box".  (That's wine speak for tobacco, spice and leather combined).
With a long finish and a really full-on flavour, it was a wine for sipping and savouring.  I'm sure it would have benefitted from a juicy steak.  That wasn't part of the evening plan though, so we had to make do with Cornish Cruncher Vintage Cheddar from M&S.  This really brought out the savoury and mineral notes in the wine without dulling the dark fruits.

Mr Purple Teeth instantly declared it, " Bloody Lovely".  As he dove into his glass with a Cheshire Cat like grin on his face, it was hard to get much more description out of him.  

Aside from a rather bizarre reference to floor polish (which I think related to the silky tannin structure and slight waxy viscosity in the body), I could only get a few words out of him.

Blackcurrant

Complex

Bags going on

Huge wine 


He definitely liked it. The less he says the more he loves the wine. He enters a little bubble of vinous heaven. and emerges after the last drop has been sipped from his Riedel glass.  

"You've made a great choice for your career change," he said, later.  I think he's enjoying being secondarily educated by my quest to keep learning and experiencing new wines.  

There's just the matter of me earning enough to pay for all this delicious stuff, now.  

On that note, if you'd like help selecting a case or a bottle for a special gift, or would like to offer a Purple Teeth fun and educational Tasting Party to your friends, family or work colleagues, please do get in touch.

Cheers!