Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

Anniversary wines

Sky is the limit

We’ve had an important anniversary in the family, and it was time to bring some really big guns from the cellar. I’ve poured some of the oldest wines in my collection. You don’t drink a bottle from 1938 every weekend.

It was the sort of event that takes weeks if not months of planning. Browsing internet wine shops, enquiring for offers, searching for tasting notes. Pondering a dinner menu, thinking of food & wine matches. Planning a proper ‘trajectory’ for the event. Alternative scenarios, ‘B’ plans (old bottles are often faulty). In the end I’m happy with how smoothly it went. With some helping hands in the kitchen I managed to serve 12 courses with matching wines to a party of 10, steering clear of major disasters. And it all took short of 9 hours.

I’ll spare you a description of the food – reading about bisques, soufflés and chocolates on a blog always sounds a little over-indulgent and of little usefulness – and share a few tasting notes.

Domaine Vacheron Sancerre 2006
This wasn’t served to guests – it was the cook’s aperitif. It’s quite ripe for a Loire Sauvignon, with subdued acidity but an obvious mineral character. A classy wine, though not a monster of expression. But I prefer Vacheron’s clean style in a less ripe vintage.

Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill 1993
A gift from the maison that I’ve cellared since 2003. 1993 was a structured vintage, but never great and now largely overshadowed by the likes of 1996. Yet top cuvées from 1993 are now in top shape – this Churchill surely is. Outstanding from the first to the last drop (not that it lasted long). Fresh, unevolved, poised and mineral. There is some underlying sweetness of dosage but also good vinosity and juiciness. The flavour is very fused, and it’s difficult to give a detailed analysis: perhaps a bit of raspberry atop the more usual notes of brioche and vanilla. Still very young – this can go on for another decade or two. Brilliant wine.
We’ve also had some other champagnes including a crisp, engaging Brut Réserve Rosée (two years since dégorgement) from
Philipponnat, whom I find very much on the upswing of late.

Perrier-Jouët Blason de France 1959
I got this bottle from the
Barolo–Brunello shop in Germany. The level was a little low and there was some heavy sediment so I knew the risk (and the very amiable owner Stefan Töpler made it clear). Such old bottles are always a hazard. Here, the cork was completely loose and the wine awfully oxidised with no bubbles. Oh well.

Domdechant Hochheimer Domdechaney
Riesling Spätlese 1983

I visited this estate on the Main near Frankfurt in April 2005, and we’ve had a great conversation with owner Dr. Franz Werner Michel. At lunch, this 1983 was served, and enhanced by Michel’s engaging stories, it tasted as good as any mature Riesling ever did. Upon saying our goodbyes we were offered a bottle each of the same wine. As usually with precious wines, it was waiting in my cellar for an ‘occasion’. A very mature wine, with some storage problems perhaps (cork was completely soaked) showing in a musty, unclean nose, though underneath there is some good Firne [aged Riesling] character. Sweeter than expected on the palate, but there is also a greenness to the sweetness and acidity. This bottle showed a bit unremarkable but was surely short of perfectly stored.

Jean-Marc Brocard
Chablis Grand Cru Bougros 1998
As expected from the youngest wine of the afternoon, no problems whatsoever with this bottle. It was part of a mixed case of older vintages I bought at the estate last October. It’s only 35€ – a bargain for a grand cru of any age, let alone a decade old. When tasted in Chablis, it showed very good saline minerality but also quite some oak sweetness. Yet served with food (a saffron-flavoured poule à la crème), the oak disappeared almost completely. It was a lesson in real-life food & wine matching. Crisp, linear, mineral, statuesque almost, showing power and reserve. An excellent wine. Dregs retasted the day after were less exciting, less poised, built around the butter and vanilla I remembered from October. Not bad at all on a hedonistic level though.

Domaine Huët
Vouvray Le Haut-Lieu demi-sec 1961
I got this bottle a couple of years ago from the excellent
Bacchus Vinothek in Germany. The price seemed low (50€), and these Vouvrays are known for their ageing potential so I took the plunge. Looking at the intact label and the immaculate cork it’s clear this bottle was at best recorked (and likely refilled?), and at worst it’s not a 1961 at all. It’s an excellent aged Vouvray but it really tastes too young and dynamic to be 48 years old. The colour is also a bit suspect, with green tinges (unlikely in a wine of this age?) to a medium golden whole:

Aromatically it’s dominated by a taut, austere reductive character: not quite stinky but very herby and hayey, with a bit of richness that reminded me of an old Tokaj. On the palate it is very structured with mouth-puckering acidity effectively covering the sweetness, although the demi-sec character is quite pronounced for a wine of this alleged age. There’s also some alcohol (only 12% on the label). A big, structured wine that’s fairly immobile and could easily survive another decade. If you don’t need it to be a genuine 1961 it’s a very fine bottle for the money.

Thierry Allemand Cornas Chaillot 1996
A bin-end from Vienna’s Unger & Klein, sold at 32€ instead of the more usual 60€. Deepish colour especially at core, for the age. It starts fairly barnyardy and reduced on the nose but fortunately isn’t bretty, and with some proper airing this blows off, revealing a fairly engaging nose of crushed raspberries and good vinous depth. Some mild age on the palate but this is far from old. Palate on entry is also pleasant: vaguely varietal and peppery, but the progression is highly disappointing. Basically this just weakens and disappears on the palate. No structure whatsoever: modest acidity (though enough for freshness) and no tannins. There’s a beguiling purity about the whole thing and I can’t say it’s uninteresting but I wouldn’t pay the normal price for it. Perhaps the vintage’s lowly reputation in the northern Rhône is justified after all.

Cosimo Taurino Brindisi Riserva Patriglione 1975
This was another bin-end from a German shop, so obscure they didn’t even know how to price it. Eventually I got away with 35€. In its recent vintages it’s a southern Italian classic I very much enjoy, essentially a modified Salice Salentino (based on the Negroamaro grape) made with an amarone-like technique of drying the grapes to raisins. Fill level is quite and the cork is excellent (certainly recorked) but storage is an issue, as the wine is showing very aged. There’s a leathery, cooked-fruity, vinegary, almost maderised character that some of my diners disliked, though with a bit more experience in Apulian wines I find it fairly typical. This has aged on acidity (and some greenness) but lacks superior dimension or definition. On the other hand a Brindisi red at age 33 in this shape is surely not a bad achievement.

Giacomo Borgogno & Figli Barolo Riserva 1947
It’s another
Barolo–Brunello bottle from Stefan Töpler. I paid 149€ for it and whenever I can justify the expense again, I’ll be sure to order some more – an outstanding bottle of wine.
I have had numerous older Barolos from the house of Borgogno, including a fantastically refined 1958, an impressive, brooding 1961 and a gentler 1967. But all came from the producer’s cellar, and were all opened and checked for faults, then refilled with the same wine, recorked and relabelled. Basically you get a Borgogno guarantee that the wine is in good shape. This makes the producer’s prices (the 1961 was 105€ a year ago) even more of a ridiculous bargain.

This bottle was different in that it came from a private cellar and was not refurbished. I can’t tell you much about the cork as at my first attempt to pull it out (with a 2-blade opener instead of a corkscrew) it smoothly dived inside the bottle. But the wine was in fine condition and I must congratulate Mr. Töpler for his sourcing. It’s rare to find wines in such pristine shape even from the 1960s. A moderate amount (i.e., little for the age) of fine-ish sediment. The colour is not bad, surely quite evolved but actually a fairly poetic complex hue ranging from clean ruby at core to amaranth-orange:The one disappointing thing here is the nose. I usually enjoy Barolo as much for its fantastically floral, deep bouquet as for anything else, but here it’s a little lifeless, showing modest notes of raspberries, dominated by a green, briney, animal, damp-cellary, mildly over-the-hill character. But palate is very fresh and alive, with beguiling coffeed complexity. Very good length too. Perhaps not the ultimate Barolo experience (1961, with its remaining power, is more impressive) but very interesting for sure. Last sips at room temperature are really tannic (!), mineral, impressively long and so very much alive.
Kopke Porto Colheita 1938
A half-bottle that was distributed to journos who attended a presentation of old colheita ports from the
Sogevinus companies (a holding that was established in 2006 and regroups some of the most prestigious port brands: Barros, Burmester, Cálem and Kopke). No bottling date but likely to have been 2007, shortly before the event. Colour is a transparent brown-amber. For volatility and a salty, marmitey character this is close to a madeira in style. A vestige of pink fruit, crystallised sugar, minor saltiness underneath; not really nutty (unlike most of these old colheitas). Moderate sweetness, high acidity, good (but not extraordinary) length, this is a good example of an aged colheita but frankly unexceptional. The flavour is a bit low and there’s only reasonable complexity; this tastes like a mid-1970s colheita could (and not a greatly structured one at that). Perhaps just an inferior vintage here, as the 1937 was one of the stars of the said tasting.

The Return of the Queen

Bow before the Polish strawberry

As the strawberry season is drawing to a close here in Poland it’s time for a bit of proselytism. Of course you’re all aware that the best strawberries in the world are Polish. If you aren’t and you’ve catered on mass-produced Spanish stuff so far, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Poland is a strawberry empire, currently the 6th largest producer in the world and 2nd in the EU (after Spain). A large part of the production is processed into jam and other preserves and there’s a high chance your Bonne Maman confiture includes more than a fair share of Polish fruit.

But the major excitement is with the dessert strawberries. Starting with the second decade of May through about the current period in July you can buy fresh strawberries absolutely everywhere, from green markets to improvised stalls on the high street. They’re also ridiculously cheap (this year’s rate was 0.60€ / kg) and really, really delicious.

There are several factors that make Polish strawberries such a feat. They are predominantly grown by small and smallish farmers, avoiding the large-scale industrial conditions that they see in Spain (Poland and Spain together produce more than 60% of Europe’s crop). They are usually grown directly in the ground (industrial fruit is usually grown on plastic foilage or even more sophisticated devices such as high-trellised plastic tubes). I’ll be far from saying much of Polish strawberry is organically grown but they surely see less pest control and more rudimentary fertilisation than the mass-produced stuff. They’re also universally sold on the day of picking (or the morning after an evening harvest). Unlike Spanish or Chilean strawberries that keep for a week in the refrigerator, it’s best to eat them on the day.


Polish strawberries are usually moderate in sweetness and have quite a crisp taste, especially early in the season. I usually enjoy the very first weeks best: that semi-sweet, crisp, subdued flavour is very refreshing. The intensity and depth of flavour is unmatched by any strawberry I’ve tried in Europe. They’re almost finished for this year, but when you’re planning your June holidays next year, you now know where to come: to Poland for strawberry tourism!

It’s also interesting to look at strawberries as a companion to various wines. When you serve them with sugar and Chantilly or in a tart, you’re restricted to fairly sweet dessert wines, but eaten on their own in the glory of their unadulterated natural flavour, there’s a broader range of possible pairings. Here I opened four different wines to have a look at strawberries and wine matching.



Gunderloch Riesling Kabinett Jean-Baptiste 2006
This is a semi-sweet (almost semi-dry really), juicy, balanced, mineral Riesling from Germany. It’s low in alcohol and light on its feet, and finishes dryish-bitterish through its mineral charge (and perhaps a touch of noble rot / botrytis). With May strawberries, the sweetness level is just fine but the wine lacks a bit of flavour and presence. It’s more convincing towards the finish when the intensity grows, but there’s a clash between the fresh crisp fruitiness of the strawberry and the above-mentioned bitterish edge in the Riesling. In short I was a bit disappointed by this match. Perhaps better if the Riesling is younger and fruitier.

Adami Prosecco di Valdobbiadene Dry Vigneto Giardino 2006
A light, joyously frothy Italian fizz with a fair bit of residual sugar (‘dry’ is, in fact, a semi-sweet version). Notes of caster sugar and vanilla should be a natural match for strawberries. Yet the wine’s sweetness comes across as insufficient. Plus I’m not really convinced by the bubbles here: strawberries and fizz are an all-time classic for many people but for me, the slight coarseness and bitterness bubbles create on the palate tend to mask the natural fruit flavours. This was tried with not very sweet strawberries early in the season, and if you take sweeter fruit, it can be even more of a problem. It’s not a bad match all in all, but lacks sparkle to my tastes.

Tenuta Langasco Piemonte Brachetto 2007
This is a sparkling sweet red from Piedmont (similar to the Quagliano I reviewed here). 6.5% alcohol and really, really fruity. Its bouquet is dominated by strawberries (there are also cherries and flowers), so it’s a fairly natural match. But as in the Prosecco above, the wine would need a bit more sweetness, plus there’s a slight red-winey bitterish-tannic edge that again creates a mild clash.

Disznókő Tokaji Szamorodni Édes 2000
A sweet Tokaj made of botrytised and overripe grapes harvested together, this is by far the sweetest wine in this flight (around 80g residual sugar I think). This older vintage is now showing in top form. Very typical nose of raisins, apricots, smoke and spice; fruit-driven on palate with moderate brown-sugar botrytis on end; finishes dryish and bitterish, inviting another glass. With strawberries, this is a good match if you follow the classic rule of serving a wine sweeter than its dessert. The delicate not-too-sweet strawberry flesh is slightly overpowered by the wine, plus there is no denying the contradiction between fresh fruit and botrytis that I observed in the Riesling above. Yet on a purely sensual level this works really quite well.

Conclusions? If you’re serving strawberries alongside biscuits or sponge cakes, a weighty sweet wine like the Tokaj I tried is a good all-rounder. For a luxurious apéritif, sweetish fizz is OK, provided it’s really fruity and intense. A Spätlese or light Auslese-styled Riesling is also a great idea, and this can be extended to other grapes such as Muscat or Pinot Gris. An intensely fruit semi-dry rosé could also work.

Hans Lang Hattenheimer Hassel Riesling Spätlese 2003

The power of stereotype
I’ve already blogged on the 2003 vintage for European white wines (here and here). Expected to have a 2003-free cellar by now, but there’s always the lone bottle lurking here and there where I least expect it. I discovered a half-dozen on the German Spätlese shelf. For German sweet wines, it was actually a fairly good vintage, beating records of ripeness throughout the country as grapes dried on the vine during that torrid summer without the usual help of botrytis.

This Hattenheimer Hassel Riesling Spätlese 2003 from the overperforming estate of Hans Lang is a case in point. The colour is fairly young (what vinous practice likes to describe as ‘plate gold’), and there’s really not a hint of evolution save for a minor note of brown sugar caramel. The nose is explosive, spicy, very Rieslingey, and really engaging. The palate offers the same register with an extra splash of lemony pithiness; it’s really mouth-watering. There is not a lot of concentration, in fact a bit of the wateriness I consider a hallmark of classic German Riesling. This is arguable, but I prefer a Spätlese to taste of Spätlese and not downgraded Auslese (as seems to be the ubiquitous fashion throughout Germany). This lemony acidity has preserved the wine, and remaining bottles (I have none) could easily live to see their 15th anniversaries.

This was a fine performance by a wine style you’d expect to age well even in 2003. But I recently opened Lang’s 2003 Hattenheimer Wisselbrunnen Riesling Erste Lage. This grand cru level wine only has 10.5g of residual sugar (and 13.5% alc.). In ripe and overripe vintages these late-harvested dry Rieslings are usually the first to surrender to alcohol and fatness. Not here. An admirably poised and zesty 2003 with little alcohol and, again, almost no evolution. Primary fruit is a bit down, leaving a healthy amount of punchy minerality. Tastes dry and actually quite fresh. Not an immensely complex or deep wine but could continue ageing in search of these characteristics.

I was really surprised by the excellent showing of these two wines and enquired the owner Mrs. Gabriele Lang about the vintage. She says that in the central Rheingau around Hattenheim, loess soils dominate (as opposed to the more usual slate). The very rainy 2002/2003 winter helped build considerable water reserved, which the loess soils then released on the stressed vines during that tropical summer. Mrs. Lang considers 2003 one of the top vintages for this part of the region. This explains why these two bottles were so delicious, and shows the limitation of ‘vintage overviews’ that are the wine press’ workhorse.

Love and hate in Alsace

Is Alsace the best wine region in the world, as the Alsatians claim?

The wines of Giovanni Panizzi


Another box of samples. 9 bottles from the stellar estate of
Giovanni Panizzi in San Gimignano, Tuscany. I’ve followed Panizzi’s progress since my first trips to Tuscany in 1999, and today place him at the very top of this interesting appellation.
The local speciality here is the white Vernaccia grape, made into a dry wine that’s classified as DOCG Vernaccia di San Gimignano. Vernaccia shares some characteristics with Orvieto (see here for a recent post): a structured white wine with good minerality and ageing potential, it has a bit more acidity and substance than Orvieto while usually avoiding the latter’s 14% alc. Vernaccia, especially when aged, can resemble a good Chablis, to the astonishment of the unprepared.
This series of recent releases showed Panizzi in excellent shape. The Vernaccia di San Gimignano 2007 is a model of its appellation with vibrant citrus over sea salt and limestone; a more mouth-watering and stomach-waking white I cannot imagine. The shortly oak-aged Vernaccia Vigna Santa Margherita 2008 is head and shoulders above past editions of this label (which I’d found a little clumsy): oak adding a half-layer of peach richness without obliterating the tense salinity of the straight Vernaccia. The Vernaccia Riserva 2003 is a very serious bottle indeed, though I discourage you from opening it too soon: wait for the Chablisian echoes of Jurassic oysters and clams to unravel in a decade’s time, when the honeyed-toasted bready barrique melts away. Good drinking pleasure but mixed thoughts about Il Bianco di Gianni 2004, a somewhat predictable Vernaccia-Chardonnay-oak blend that lacks originality and shows how substantially Panizzi’s handling of oak has improved in four years: where the Santa Margherita was allusive this is a bit too sewn-wood-drying.

Most interesting among the whites, in a way, was the Vernaccia Evoè 2006. Made in a historical style with a long two-month maceration of skins in oper wooden vat, this wine follows the modern ‘fashion’ of macerated whites without going over the top. The typical bouquet shows notes of ground pepper, apple skins, citrus with really good minerality (not an easy thing to obtain in this style), while the palate is broad, rich, bold, nicely fruity too (stone fruits), although the balance is a little controversial: acidity is low (again, a common characteristic of skin-contact whites) and there is what I identify as residual sugar. Alcohol is moderate (13.5%). A very engaging and not too expensive (16€) bottle that confirms Panizzi’s position at the forefront of Vernaccia today.

Panizzi also belongs to the premier producers of red wine in this predominantly white-wine district. In the past San Gimignano has limited itself to quaffable Sangiovese da tavola and made no claims to steal the show to its neighbour, Chianti (Colli Senesi in this case). In 2006 red wine pressure was acknowledged through the establishment of the DOC San Gimignano Rosso, even though many wines remain classified as IGT (as e.g. the very delicious Campore from the Casale Falchini estate). Panizzi has both: the Vertunno 2005 is a Sangiovese-driven DOC that’s full of rustic Tuscan charm, crying for a wild boar pappardelle. Rubente 2005 is a neat IGT Cabernet Sauvignon with very modern winemaking, exuding confidence in the cellar if in the end not different from all those warm-climate Cabernets around. The top red Folgóre 2003 mixes the two in a way: Cabernet and Merlot add lead-pencilly tannins and plushness while Sangiovese lends (some) freshness and Tuscan character; add lavish oak and five years of age and you get a kind of Pauillac-ised Brunello. Although it’s from a hot vintage that was notoriously difficult to balance in Tuscany, this bottle can easily age another 5 years. The style of the reds is modern and rich and while they lack the intellectual interest of the whites here, it’s really very solid winemaking.
For the pink-inclined there is also the well-made and serious Ceraso Rosa 2008.

62 grands crus (3 on video)

Well, almost. Let’s say 62 grand cru level wines that were poured during a morning and afternoon session at Robert Mielżyński’s annual Grand Cru event. As leisurely as it sounds (and looks: we taste outdoors on the lawn – made difficult this year by tropical temperatures and humidity here in Poland) it is one of the Polish season’s high points.

Getting ready for grands crus.
As noted above, tasting circumstances were short of perfect and the more serious red wines suffered. Nonetheless it was exciting to get a snapshot of new and old(ish) vintages, and some valid confirmations. Mielżyński’s catalogue is strong on Bordeaux and the event has traditionally centered around an en primeur tasting of the latest vintage. I consider tasting months-old Bordeaux pure nonsense, and it was no consolation that the wines were a few months older (and importantly, final blends) here compared to the April trade tastings in Bordeaux that generate the plethora of Parker & Co. points. Anyway Phélan-Ségur 2008 was nicely curranty but curiously untannic, centered around what seems to be a major 2008 characteristic: fresh, zesty acidity. The best from Domaine de Chevalier was not its overoaked vanilla-scented 2008 but the following spell of honesty: On ne fait plus du raisin, on est sur le marché des bijoux. The nicest 2008 came from Kirwan, juicy, crisp and full of a rarely seen nervosité. But it was so much more exciting to taste the older vintages: Domaine de Chevalier 2001 suave, generous and with quality tannins; Phélan-Ségur 1996 evolved, animal and so satisfying for its bourgeois peerage; Kirwan 1998 (pre-Rolland by the way) balanced to the millimetre, very Cabernetish with a lot of reserve; and last not least, Palmer 2003 oozing luxe and a quality of oak you find in maybe five or six wines on this planet. Hmmm, I nearly got excited with Bordeaux.

Alberto Cordero di Montezemolo talks to Polish vintner Katarzyna Niemyjska.

But it was all forgettable compared to the Douro wines of Cristiano van Zeller of Quinta do Vale Dona Maria. I’ve never tasted an unbalanced wine here but the recent vintages have picked up even more depth and concentration (courtesy of old vineyards but also a more precise extraction than before, I guess). Even the 13€ red VZ is an utterly serious wine with plenty of substance and terroir definition; if I had an estate in the Douro I’d really be happy to have this as my grand vin. 2006 is rocking now but 2007 promises even better; it’ll be a truly memorable vintage. The flagship Quinta do Vale Dona Maria 2006 is thick as ink and very structured but already hints at superb balance of black fruits and minerals; it’s more convincing today than the 2007 which I’ve found a little atypical, more Mediterranean, low-acid, almost Grenachey than usually here. (But it was tasted under the 30C midday sun). The limited-production CV 2007 is a more seriously extracted beast of a red, but this too has gained depth and personality in the last vintage or two (not that it ever lacked either). These are ridiculously affordable wines that have never failed me, and to get them you don’t need to fight the en primeur battles with brokers from Moscow and Shanghai.

Here’s Cristiano van Zeller explaining the 2007 vintage for you:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/QJOiQ2_oB18&hl=pl&fs=1&rel=0&border=1

Having recently blogged on the Dobogó estate in Tokaj I’d only briefly mention yet another excellent dry Furmint from winemaker Attila Domokos: the newly introduced single-vineyard Szerelmi 2007 finds that elusive middle way of upper bracket Furmint; it’s rich but botrytis-free and not overripe, oaky but the use of second-year 400-liter barrels gives it a real sense of balance. Also an exciting mini-vertical of the Aszú 6 Puttonyos with a spicy, evolved but delightfully fresh 2003 (Domokos’ first vintage – now that’s really impressive), a perfumed, airy, against-the-odds 2005 and a truly stunning 100% Furmint 2004, clean as a whistle and invigoratingly citrusy, in a vintage when few makers had any grapes good enough to make a 6P.

In this weather, it’s perhaps little wonder oak-free crisp Rieslings performed best. Theresa Breuer of the Weingut Breuer was showing a range of bone-dry and mineral-deep Rheingau wines including the 2007 Berg Rottland that blew my mind last time; this time it was Berg Schlossberg that stole the show with a very subtle 2007 and a slowly maturing, beurre noir-flavoured 2002. Again, it’s difficult to think of a more reliable and honestly-priced estate than Breuer. Theresa speaks about the Berg Schlossberg bottling:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/TNC2BTvekR8&hl=pl&fs=1&rel=0&border=1

Another brilliant Riesling collection was presented by Roman Niewodniczanski of the Weingut Van Volxem in Saar. Saar is a microregion on the south-western outskirts of the Moselle, that in the last dozen decades has produced some spectacular sweet and sweetish wines courtesy of such vintners as Egon Müller and Zilliken. In 2000 Niewodniczanski revived a historical estate and set upon making quite a different style of wines: ripe, broad, concentrated, mineral, dry and dryish instead of sweet and far less zingy-acidic than before (mirroring, he claims, Saar wines as made in the 19th century when they belonged to the world’s most expensive). It’s a style that has been performed successfully elsewhere in Germany by estates such as Heymann-Löwenstein in the Lower Moselle, or Peter Jakob Kühn in the Rheingau. The stylistic agenda is controversial but qualitatively Van Volxem has been an obvious, and huge, success. We sampled through some young wines – 2008s are still in their infant stage (some unfiltered and very yeasty) but the Saar Riesling 2008 is already showing the impressive cruising speed this winery has reached in less than a decade, while the newly introduced Goldberg 2008 is certain to become one heck of a superconcentrated, almost brothy piece of mineral Riesling. The Saar Riesling 2007 is singing today. The highlight, however, was a series of aged magnums Roman brought for the sake of education and sensual delight. Bonjour mineralité with the Altenberg Alte Reben 2004 from 80–100-year-old vines, showing that unmistakeable salt & pepper signature of the Saar; a different balance with the sweetish Gottesfuss Alte Reben 2005 (16g of residual sugar), a broader, almost Pinot Gris-styled wine but not without balance and tension; fantastic drinkability and brilliant mineral zest with the Wiltinger Braunfels 2001: the most modest of these crus (and perhaps vintages too) and yet the most satisfying wine of the day.

Here’s Roman Niewodniczanski summarising his winery project in the Saar:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/UCxcgoliA1M&hl=pl&fs=1&rel=0&border=1

Henry Natter Sancerre 2006

Proven wrong
This bottle was part of a box sent by the producer for my book in January 2008. I didn’t like this 2006 Sancerre very much back then. It was inexpressive and underwhelming. My notes read: Mineral but rather indistinctive and ungiving on the nose, suffering from reduction. … Palate rather ordinary, with a hint of buttery softness of the ripe vintage, medium length, a mineral finish, but at no moment is there a hint of excitement or real personality. This needs more concentration. … Utterly forgettable. The one wine I liked from the box was the Rosé 2006 (not a great recommendation for a Sancerre producer, I reckon).

Well, I must admit I was wrong, and underestimated this 2006. Maybe because it was too young? Opened today, this is not complex or deep but really very satisfying. What used to be reduction is now a crystal-clear minerality, and the palate has filled out. Restrained, balanced, with moderate but sufficient acidity (exactly where it should be in a ripe vintage like 2006). No hard edges, this is showing at its best with delicate foods where the mineral backbone serves as architectural (I’m almost tempted to write, institutional) support. Somehow this bottle embodies the classicism of good French wine: it is oh-so-unshowy but leaves you deeply satisfied after you’ve emptied the bottle in 40 minutes. The world needs more wines like this.

Polish Vintners’ Convention

A nascent industry
The medieval royal castle at Niepołomice near Cracow hosted the 4th Polish Vintners’ Convention. Organised since 2006 by the Polish Vine and Wine Institute and the WINO Magazine, this annual event gathers Polish wine producers for a weekend of tastings, seminars and discussion.

All these people are Polish vignerons.

Polish grape wine is not available for purchase anywhere in the world and as such has a limited relevance to my dear readers, but judging by the number of visits forwarded by a ‘Polish wine’ Google search or similar, the curiosity is surely there. The subject is beyond the scope of this blog entry and I’ll be publishing a Polish wine primer on my main website soon; what follows is a summary.

You’ll be forgiven for not thinking of Poland as a wine country, as for the last centuries production was minimal and no permanent wine-producing tradition was established. The small vineyards around Zielona Góra (developed when this region belonged to Germany before 1945) and in Podolia bore wine almost exclusively for local consumption. All this changed in the last decade. With global warming, a growing wine market, and Homo sapiens’ incurable atavistic attraction towards growing grapes, Poland suddenly became a wine producing-country on a growing scale. When EU accession was negotiated Poland was included in ‘zone A’ countries with no cap set for future vineyard plantings. Today, we have more than 500 hectares, and this figure is growing by 15% every year.

Poland lies at the northern geographical limit for vine growing but with mean temperatures increasing in the last two decades and winters far less severe than they used to be, viticulture is now viable in a large part of the country. Naturally, vineyards are concentrated in the south with Subcarpathia, Lesser Poland and Lower Silesia each having around 25% of Poland’s acreage, but vineyards have been established as far north as Mazuria and Słupsk.

One of Poland’’s northernmost vineyard: Wiktor Bruszewski’s
Kolonia Rusek. © Winnica Kolonia Rusek.
There are about 500 vintners in Poland, operating on less than 1 hectare of vines on average (and often on less than .5 ha). The state of the industry can best be described as ‘experimental’. Most of the plantings are post-2000, and a very wide array of grape varieties are being tried at the moment. Around 90% of the acreage is planted with hybrids: cultivars that are crossings between Vitis vinifera (the vine species used to produce wine in the overwhelming majority of cases) and other Vitis species that have almost no qualitative interest but disease and frost resistance. The resulting hybrids can be grown in climates where vinifera has substantial difficulties. Most of these varieties will be totally obscure to the casual wine drinker but readers from England or Canada might be familiar with white Seyval Blanc or red Rondo and Regent. There are also some specialist hybrids developed in Poland and other Central European countries, such as Bianca, Aurora, Hibernal and Sibera. Wine made from these grapes is usually of poor quality with distinctive aromatics often described as ‘foxy’, high acids, low body and structure, but they offer the advantage of yielding even in the poorest vintages and surviving even the harshest (well, almost) winter. With good viticulture and winemaking decent everyday wines can be obtained.

Vitis vinifera proper is and will in the foreseeable future remain a minority in Polish vineyards but is responsible for a good part of the better wines. Only the warmest terroirs can be successful, such as Lower Silesia and Zielona Góra where there is a pre-war tradition of vinifera plantings and even some recently recovered old local clones. Red grapes include Dornfelder, Zweigelt, Pinot Noir, Frühburgunder and even pockets of Cabernet Sauvignon, while among white varieties we have Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc (the former with some potential), Riesling (perhaps some good wines in the future), Müller-Thurgau, Sauvignon and Grüner Veltliner. Stylistically these wines are similar to Saxony or England, though far less consistent.

Apart from the harsh climate, Polish wine still suffers from a very rudimentary winemaking technology and lack of experience. Only a few producers have transcended the ‘home-made wine’ stage to produce any quantity of technically correct, stable, drinkable wine. Many vintners are happy to make wine as an extra attraction on their agrotouristical farms. It will take a decade or two before substantial investment and education bring the general level of the wines up. In any case, at the time of writing only two of the 500 estimated wineries have officially released wine for sale: there is a cornucopia of insane sanitary and tax regulations that make it virtually impossible for a small agricultural estate to comply with the requirements and obtain permission for sale. Consequently there is no chance to see any wines exported in the near future. (And there would be no reason as the quantity is small enough to be entirely consumed by patriotic locals).

Winemaker Piotr Stopczyński (formerly at Diamond Oaks in California) in the vineyards of the Jaworek estate near Wrocław. © Tomasz Wałków.

During the 4th Polish Vintners Convention, we tasted over 70 wines from nearly 40 estates. The difficult 2008 vintage (very rainy autumn) influenced the quality heavily, and many wines suffered from dilution and unripeness, adding to the usual technical defaults such as overchaptalisation, oversulphuring, oxidation and instability at bottling. There were highlights, however, and for future reference you might want to remember such names as Winnica Płochockich (winnica = vineyard) with their good range of whites (including the delicious Seyval Blanc) and a recently introduced Zweigelt, and Winnica Pańska Góra with perhaps Poland’s most interesting terroir to date (bare limestone rock) and some exciting unchaptalised whites led by the Hanna blend. I’ll have more recommendations in the Polish wine primer on the main website soon. For the time being, some Polish wine label art appears below.

Two Pieropan Soaves

I’ve already expressed – obliquely – my sympathy for Soave, perhaps Northern Italy’s most widely known white wine appellation. ‘Widely known’ is an euphemism to describe the rock-bottom image Soave has earned (together with other Italian zones such as Chianti) through decades of catering for cheap pizzerias around the world. It was, in a way, the original Pinot Grigio.

There’s still a lot of bad wine made under that name (drive from Verona to Vicenza and you’ll see hundreds of hectares under vine on the flat fertile clays by the railway line). Yet to dismiss Soave altogether would be a grave mistake. In fact, I consider it one of Italy’s leading appellations. This is thanks to some inherently great terroirs (predominantly volcanic tuff) and a generation of hard-working vintners that have elevated the DOC to its deserved glory: Suavia, Tamellini, Prà, Gini, Inama.

And then there is Leonildo Pieropan, Soave’s patriarch making brilliant wines since the 1970s. His Calvarino and La Rocca crus (the latter the first Soave to age in new French oak) are benchmarks for Italian white wine. It’s always intersting to try the old man’s new vintages, so I was happy to pull the corks from the two following bottles.

The Soave Classico 2007 is, in short, a relative disappointment. It shows a vague Soave typicity of raw apple, diluted lemony crispness, and nominal reductive minerality, but it’s really a simple and unassuming creature. Same on the palate, juicy with no special length or depth. It remains a reliable wine, at least European-poised and refreshing and terroir-driven, but I just expect more fireworks from the name Pieropan on the label. It’s consistent with the latest vintages of this bottling: I think some new vineyards were introduced and the production increased, and perhaps this drop in stature and structure is inevitable until these new plantings grow older.

The Soave Classico Calvarino 2006, on the other hand, shows Pieropan in excellent shape. It drinks very well over three days and shows a real sense of place. Not overwhelmingly intense but has a strong mineral and acidic backbone that does wonders with food. Quite saline and active – this is real minerality, perhaps at the expensive of fruit which is much in the background (apple). Contrary to my expectations and despite coming from a warm, low-acid vintage this is everything but flabby. That’s clearly thanks to a 30% of the Trebbiano di Soave grape (the rest is Soave’s flagship grape, Gargànega), long despised for its low ripeness and aroma but now back in favour for the strong acidity (not to say greenness, as in this case) and minerality it lends to Soave wines. And it also lowers the alcohol – this wine is only 12.5%. An excellent bottle that needs a year or two more before peaking.