dry

No one in their right mind would open a 14.5 % wine on a hot summer evening, I know, but we had a chicken in a wonderful creamy tarragon sauce to take care of, we needed a heavy hitter, so I took a desperate gamble. It was a crazy plan, but it might just have worked...

In the nose, classic pinot blanc: honeydew melon, salted almonds, biscuit, a hint of dried herbs. In the mouth, think - and I've had time to think, tasting this on the second day - think melon again, artichokes, aloe skin cream. Now coat this mixture in white chocolate with salted pistachio pieces, and you have it - it's a meal, really.

Nice yellow colour and even nicer mineral in the nose; also notes of vegetable, citrus fruit and peach. The nose is not very intense, but quite pleasant. Pleasant is also a key word for my palate reaction to this wine. Mineral, a bit of candied peach with nice, almost creamy mineral and well integrated fresh acidity.

K & U have been having quite a winning streak in my cellar for the last couple of months, so I had high hopes for this argentinian malbec, a variety I felt pressured into trying by all the buzz about it - on this blog and elsewhere.

And a wonderful bottle it is:

Is this the first rosé review on this blog? I'm nervous...

Very pretty salmon-copper-colour. Much lighter than the really pink stuff, but far from the dull brownish-orange that you get in many german rosés.

So here I sit, listening to Billy Bragg and Wilco, waiting for a Riesling to reach drinking temperature, and I am really pleased with this French red. The winery, Domaine les Filles de Septembre, was named after the four daughters of wine makers Françoise and Roland Géraud. And Delphine is one of the four. If she is anything like this cuvée of Syrah and Carignan, she must be lovely indeed.

It has been quite a while since I tasted my last Wittmann. Wittmann, for those of you who have never heard the name, is a well-known winery from Rhine-Hesse that produces biodynamic wines. My dad loves Wittmann, especially their 'S class' wines, and I do fondly remember one Wittmann S I had a few years ago.

K&U is frothing at the mouth about this Mont Ventoux red made by a Norwegian from California - it's all very special, you understand...

At first, this tasted devastatingly like a cheap Cotes du Rhone - alcoholic, sweet, and fizzy. But oh, the wondrous change that comes over this wine, as it becomes drinkable after 10 minutes open, quite tasty after 30, and an iconic Southern Rhone wine after an hour: Thick raspberry jam, dried herbs, salty smoked bacon, and a mouthfeel that was pure and smooth, but at the same time viscous and fat. The high alcohol became unnoticeable, but hadn't gone away, as I found out this morning.

Still, a killer wine for those who like reds to chew on.

From the Loire valley comes this nicely named Cabernet Franc ("Day of thirst").
Nice colour for a start: dense, purple-tinged red. Nice smell, too: Sour cherries, some cassis. Bone dry, fresh, pure fruit in the mouth, reminds me of a lighter Bordeaux, but with none of the unpleasant greenness you can get there. This is fresh and nicely rustic, but ripe and with harmonic tannin. Two things I particularly like about this wine: No oak at all, and a kind of vegetable earthiness, like tasting a spade you've used to dig up vegetables.

Original, yet very easy to drink, this is a rare thing: a terroir summer wine. To me, this says "grilled vegetables" all over. Nicely chilled, I would even give it a go with grilled fish.

After all this recent writing about German wine guides, we go back to the revisit supermarket wine - only to get seriously confused. Really, this wine is probably the most confusing tasting experience in a long while.

Gewürztraminer is a grape that I mostly know in a French context (Alsace), also from Germany and perhaps Italy. So I was quite pleased to see a reasonably priced Traminer at Sainsburys yesterday - and it is from Cono Sur, who have in the past convinced me with their entry range wines.

This Riesling from yet another Mosel tributary, the Saar, has a very understated smell, in fact, apart from a little ripe grape and mineral hints, it has little smell at all.

The taste is all ripe fruit as well, "yellow" taste, sweet ripe grapes again, dried herbs, some honey, fairly concentrated. This is a very ripe and smooth style of Riesling, very well made I'm sure, and great for people who can't have too much acidity, but frankly, I was looking for something a bit livelier, and this seems prematurely aged somehow.

This is not a summer wine. Very likely the "boring"-ranking will seem very unfair once I've tried the second bottle of this on some chilly october day. But right now, it didn't work for me.