Earth's secret paradise: Our armchair world tour continues and this week's destination was Patagonia.  We visited Patagonia some years ago as part of a trip to Argentina. We stayed at the delightful Eolo Lodge and would recommend it to anyone looking to get away from it all and see some amazing scenery.  
Admittedly, during our 3 days, we only scratched the surface of this incredibly diverse region, so we accompanied our virtual date with some TV-based research. I recommend this 3 part series from the BBC which will help you get a feel for the place. 

Comahue Pinot Noir (2013) from Marks and Spencer accompanied our attempt at a local dish: venison with red wine sauce, mash and veg.  Patagonia is famous for lamb, but that's often cooked in a fire pit.  Not something that was open to us in the week leading up to Christmas (yes, this blog post is being published a little behind schedule).

Regular readers will know that Mr Purple Teeth is not the hugest fan of Pinot Noir, and on opening this one, I feared the worst.  It was relatively pale red, and light and bright rather than deep and dark.  It looked really appealing to me in my Riedel stemless Pinot Noir glasses. 

Marks and Spencer are proving a useful high street store for our virtual travel dates.  The range of countries covered is far greater than any of the other supermarkets, and all the wines we've had so far have been a hit with Mr Purple Teeth.  That's no mean feat.  He was quite happy with this one, and enjoyed it's smooth out feel and black cherry fruit expression. The wine matched really well with our venison dish. 

It had a good medium body and some fruits of the forest notes along with some spicy notes from it's French oak ageing. Relatively simple, it was nicely juicy, coming from some of Argentina's most southern vineyards.  
What marked this wine out was it's versatility. It was the week before Christmas and the house was full of cheese.  An impromptu dessert of vintage Cheddar, Gruyere, Epoisses and Gorgonzola Picante was served.  The wine paired successfully with all of these cheeses, many of which struggle with a lot of red wines.  
This will be it's main selling point when we're not armchair travelling and watching BBC documentaries on the region.

Rating: Buy Again.

​Cheers!

Where does the time go, at this time of year? With so much going, it can be hard to find time for each other.  So Mr Purple Teeth and I decided to start a new idea.  Virtual "armchair travel" dates.  We randomly pick a hemisphere, lat and longitude, and find somewhere on the map that's nearby and looks worthy of a "little trip".
For a wine-enthusiast, it was a lucky break to find our first location was Oregon USA.  
Oregon's food culture is simple: sustainable, local, seasonal, with a dash of Pacific Northwest game, and Asian fusion influences.  
As for the wine, the area is gaining a great reputation for quality Pinot Noir. And while the wine's are not exactly priced for midweek, nor available in a giant supermarket near you, it is getting easier to get hold of them. 

With an "Oregon-inspired" backdrop of music by Pink Martini, Elliot Smith, the Decemberists and Josh Garrells, we started with a little discussion of what we had found out about the area from our online studies, and were surprised to find that recreational cannabis use has been legalised.  We decided not to try to bring this element of Oregon life into our living room.  Instead, we started with a Pinot Gris, sourced at £13 from Marks and Spencer.
Boasting "Willamette Valley Grown" on the label, the grapes must have been vinified elsewhere.  Willamette is one of several AVA (American Viticultural Areas - a similar regulatory system to Europe's protected designations of origin, like DOC), in Oregon.  You might also look for Umpqua Valley, Walla Walla (which sounded more Australian to me), Rogue Valley or Columbia Gorge.  There are several others, but, Willamette is the one I've seen most of in the UK. 

I didn't investigate the provenance of the sea bass, but cooked in an Asian style with chilli and pak choi, it made an exotic but simple appetiser.  The wine's label had also indicated chilli and lime chicken as a suitable food partner along with Asian style cooking.  
Powerful enough to stand up to the robust flavours of the dish, the wine was a success.  I will certainly be buying it again.  

In a world where the decent independent wine merchants are disappearing from our high streets as fast at the butcher and the grocer, Marks and Spencer do seem to be offering something a little different from most of the supermarkets.  With a decent selection from less commercial regions, they make finding something a bit different, just a little easier for those of us who don't have a fantastic wine shop nearby.  Not everyone wants to stock up in bulk on-line. 

With the main course, I'd planned the Lemelson Six Vineyards Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2012. (£17 from The Wine Society, but currently out of stock).  This had been on the wine rack for some time.  I may have mentioned that getting Mr Purple Teeth to choose to open a Pinot Noir is a bit like getting me to choose a trip to the dentist.  It has to be done sometimes, but it's not often going to be top of the list...

​At 14.2%, and with a very full body and richer, darker colour than many French or New World Pinots, I was hopeful that it would pass the test.  I have noted that Mr Purple Teeth likes a full body (lucky for me, eh?!).
Produced organically, from a blend of lots vinified separately from 6 single vineyard sites, this has all the Oregon tick-boxes covered. ​


Like the Pinot Gris, this had a powerful nose, with the bouquet leaping from the glass at the first pour.  Wild strawberry and an almost Rioja-like vanilla from American oak were very pronounced.  
Following through, a great sensory mouth-feel from fine-grained, smooth tannins, juicy acidity and that full body, at last, a Pinot Noir that had the potential for Mr Purple Teeth to enjoy it.  How would it pair with the dish I had planned?

I had decided to cook some local British venison steaks, with seasonal flower sprouts as my nod to Oregon cuisine.  With a preference for redcurrant or fruity, or even chocolate sauces with my venison, I was concerned that these may overpower a nice Pinot Noir.  
So, continuing the fusion theme, I opted for a hint of sweetness with a Teriyaki sauce with sesame.  While this is hardly "Fat Duck" level creativity, for someone who claims not to cook, I was quite impressed with this.
The sweetness was great with the iron-rich game and greens, and the umami from the soy played nicely with the wine. It was a gamble that paid off.  The greens too, played their part, and didn't clash.  
(I also enjoyed the wine with a strong cheddar the night after our "day-trip to Oregon").

While it won't replace Gevrey-Chambertin as Mr Purple Teeth's Pinot of choice, he enjoyed it. He also said that this was the best venison he'd had in a long time - including from several very good restaurants.     While it may have been the Pinots talking, I'm taking that.

Oregon's wines and food culture inspired us both, and the idea of "virtual" travel will be something we continue with while we save up enough for our next "trip of a lifetime".
Oregon wine country is well established for oenotourism, and while not as well known as Napa or Sonoma, I hope that I'll one day be able to visit it for real.  We finished off the evening by getting a further insight into Oregon culture with an episode of Portlandia (see below).  £30 for wine might seem a lot for a Wednesday night, but compared with a couple of substandard glasses down the local, or a transatlantic flight, I think we got a bargain. 

I'd love to hear about any Oregon wines you've tried, or indeed, if you've already visited.  We are also open to suggestion for food, wine and culture for our next "virtual date" location.  The latitude and longitude picked found us somewhere just off Argentina's Patagonia.  Suggestions welcome...

Cheers!

I've had "Bull's Blood of Eger" several times before (Egri Bikavér), and indeed, I've been lucky enough to try several Hungarian wines. I was given this bottle in Budapest, by a Hungarian friend, back in January, with the comment, "it's nothing fancy".
Looking at the label, and with the warning, I didn't expect this to be particularly special.

It's a funny name for a wine, "Bull's Blood". The wine was given the name due to a widespread belief that bull's blood was indeed a secret ingredient in the wine, giving the strength to defeat the invading Ottoman Turks back in 1522. In 1997, Hungary's first Districtus Hungaricus Controllatus - DHC was created (similar to the French Appellation d'Origine Controllée (AOC) for Eger and it's bull's blood wines.
​It's a dignified and historic wine.  However, I was unable to find out anything specific about this particular bottle except that it was vintage 2012. Usually Kardaka and/or Kekfrankos make up a big part of most Bikavér wines, but there was no blend information on the label - my Hungarian skills left me not even knowing what the brand/who the winemaker was. 

What I could figure out was that it was a decent bottle. A beautiful smooth texture, medium to full bodied, with a lot of ripe tannin, smokey dark fruit flavours, a hint of violet and a lot of spice coming from oak.  It tasted a lot better that I had given it credit for based on the label. I'd pictured a hasty 5€ purchase, that was perhaps okay for a Monday night wine.  I'd fallen into the trap of judging a book by its cover, a wine by it's label.  Many of us, with little else to go on, will choose our wine hastily because we "like the look" of it.  And getting the branding right to appeal to the market is an art.  I've seen some hilarious mistakes, or is it genius - you decide. See below.  I'd love to hear about your wine successes and failures based on "buying on the label".

In a world where grape varieties are becoming short hand for brands, is tough to communicate about wines like this. Consistency is another challenge with so many varietals to choose from.  But there are big brand blends out there, and  blending based on vintage and local conditions, is a long understood tradition in many top quality areas, like Bordeaux. 

While Bull's Blood was once a huge success in the UK it's actually not that easy to get hold of now, outside of specialist retailers such as the Hungarian Wine Society and the Hungarian Wine House.  In fact, even specialist wine merchants often only have the delicious sweet Tokaji wines in stock, while supermarkets may not even have that. 

Perhaps because it's a hard wine to understand with so much possible variation, perhaps because of the success of New World wines since the 1980s, perhaps it was just seen as too 1970s.  
It's a pity as its a wine with great character, a cool back story and at a reasonable price point.
If you do see Bull's Blood, make sure it's Eger (Egri) to get the authentic experience.  Fans of spicy, dry reds should enjoy it. Why not visit Budapest and try some there?
​
Cheers! Egészségedre!  (As they say in Hungary - it sounds a little like eggysheggydray) 

PS - I'd love to hear your good and bad experiences of buying wine based on the label - feel free to email me, or contact me via my Facebook or Twitter. 

It's perhaps unusual for a wine blogger who spends most of the their time extolling the virtues of particular wines to remind us to drink sensibly.  At this time of year, though, it's important to remind ourselves, that we might be overdoing it. 
Excess calories from wine are probably the reason I can't get into my party dresses this year, despite having swum 50 miles for charity in the last 13 weeks.   Worried: You'll find a calorie calculator here which will give you an idea of the impact of your tipple on your waistline and on your health.  
For me at Purple Teeth, my goal is to help people drink better.  That could mean drinking less.  Certainly since I've been working in the wine business more and in Customer Experience Consultancy less, I've had to drink less.  Counter-intuitive perhaps, but as I've learned more about wine, my tastes have become rather more expensive than my income allows.  So I drink better, but less.  
Wine is a luxury good that's relatively recently been commoditised to be part of every day life.  And while there's no denying the pleasure of a lovely glass of wine with a good meal, too much of what we're drinking is not the best quality.
Clue: if you're buying wine at £5-6ish a bottle, the value of the wine is most likely less than the value of the glass bottle it comes in.  

Remember too, that each unit takes one hour to clear your system, and that hour starts AFTER you stop drinking.  So, if you finish up a nice bottle of Shiraz at 11pm and head out to drive to work at 7.30am, you may well be over the legal alcohol limit. 
While 125ml glasses are available, they're certainly no longer the standard serving in much of the UK. At the lower end of the market, offers such as "buy 2 large glasses, get the rest of the bottle free" prevail, and pricing generally points the customer to buy the larger glass.  
At this time of year, it can be particularly hard to maintain the NHS guidelines of 2 alcohol free days per week. During the party season in particular, cutting back on our favourite tipples can be a challenge.  
​

Shop Local: Consider our very own ENGLISH Wine industry.  We make a wide variety of wonderfully refreshing and aromatic wines right here, which are very often much lower in alcohol than counterparts from further afield.  

Many English sparkling wines are lower in alcohol than their European counterparts, and the still whites start at about 10% abv.
One of my particular favourites of 2015 was the Bolney Estate Pinot Gris. At just 11%, it's quite a bit lighter than it's Alsatian counterpart at 13%, but no less intriguing.  
Switch from Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc to a local Bacchus wine, or a local white blend and you'll save anything from 0.5% to 2% alcohol, while still having a terrific tipple.  Not to mention that you'll have saved around 11,000 miles of transporting the bottle.  And you'll have done your bit for wine biodiversity, and our local economy.

Think sweeter:  Slightly sweeter styles of wine, e.g. off-dry Rieslings or Portuguese Vinho Verde tend to be a good bit lower in alcohol, with some even below 10%. I'm not a fan of Zinfandel blush wines myself, but they can be as low as 8.5% alcohol, a far cry from their red brothers and sisters, which weigh in at 15% or more. Be careful to check the wine is naturally off-dry and not a fortified wine style, which can be even more alcoholic.

Disappointed! This wine could have been so much more, but it had a bit of a fault. That is, a bit of secondary fermentation in the bottle giving in unpleasant spritz to the wine.

Tannat is the signature grape of Uruguay and also of Madiran in France. It's also renowned as having one of the highest levels of reservatrol - the compound that's making headlines for red wine's health benefits. I was keen to try it.

This example from Argentina is a bottle that's been on my wine rack for around a year - the last time I bought anything from Naked Wines. It's no longer in stock.
Pity, I'd love to have tasted a non-faulty bottle. Deep purple berry flavours, freshness, smooth but hefty tannin - it's everything Mr Purple Teeth loves with his Tuesday night cheeseboard. But. It's faulty.
There's a lot more faulty wine out there than we appreciate. I found a number during the IWC associate judging I did a couple of weeks ago. Many of these faults go unrecognised by us punters. We just drink the wine and say it's no good. We shouldn't! Facts can be avoided and should be reported.
Meanwhile, I'll be looking for a Tannat from Madiran or Uruguay to find out exactly how good it can be. Tasting beyond the fault, this could have been amazing. Let me know if you had one!
Cheers