You may have noticed the snow in the UK this week. Nearly all the front pages of today’s papers show a satellite image of the country looking, as most of them note, like the Isle of White. With the big freeze set to continue for another ten days or so (please go away before the 20th!), it should be the weather for big reds: Chateauneuf du Pape, Aussie Shiraz or a spicy number from the south of Italy.
Primrose Hill yesterday
As it happens, I have only tasted one wine this week – mainly the result of a stinking cold – and that was white. A bottle I picked up from a high street wine shop on the way to a BYO dinner on Tuesday. Depressingly, the wine was guilty of the biggest crime a drink can commit – it was boring.
There is an old saying that life is too short to drink bad wine. Aussie wine legend Len Evans was firm advocate of this philosophy arguing that if you drink a bad wine you have lost the opportunity to maximize your pleasure, it’s like “smashing a good bottle against the wall”. I tend to agree.
The guilty wine was an Alsace Pinot Blanc which I hoped would be a good match for some Vietnamese food at Mien Tay in Battersea (if you haven’t been and live within any sort of easy travelling distance of Clapham Junction then go, go, go!). Now Pinot Blanc may not be the most extroverted of grape varieties but at its best can be a lovely wine: fresh, nutty, appley and creamy with an uncanny ability to flatter a wide range of foods. In the first wine book I ever read Jancis Robinson called it the “please all” grape, although perhaps that was damning it with faint praise. Anyway, this particular one tasted of nothing and that is a disgrace when you are charging £10 a bottle.
It was a far cry from the last Pinot Blanc I tried just before Christmas: Rolly Gassmann’s 2004 Pinot Blanc. Rolly Gassmann’s style is particularly rich balancing residual sugar, acidity and weight of fruit to create wines that have a delicious texture and intensity. The 2004 is singing at the moment and was the star of a mini-horizontal that also included the 2006, 2007 and 2008.
With five years ageing it had developed some extra complexity and depth than its younger siblings. Despite not being oaked it had a creamy edge with notes of poached pears, lemons and spices. Moreover it has the sort of vibrancy, energy and excitement that makes you sit up and go “Wow”.
Rich but beautifully balance it would have been perfect with some of the Vietnamese food I ate on Tuesday (particularly the spiced, honeyed quail dish) but I am thinking that its true calling may be some roast pork. It costs a little bit more than the dud I took to Mien Tay (£2.77 more to be exact) but is several hundred times better.
Next week is a big one here at Bibendum. It kicks off with our Burgundy 2008 Tasting at RIBA on Tuesday and then it is full steam ahead to the Bibendum Times Annual Tasting on the 20th. Watch this space…
Tags: alsace, rolly gassmann, wine