London International Wine & Spirit Fair

I spent the day at the LIWSF at Excel in London on Tuesday. I've never been to it before and it's so big that I was glad that I had planned my day. First stop was to hear the results of the International Wine Challenge and meet up with the people I had worked with there. The results can be found here.

Most of my day however was spent visiting the stands that featured fortifieds as I have my WSET Diploma exam in 2 weeks. The lady on the Madeira producers stand was very helpful and I got a chance to taste through the various styles. I also tried out a Commandaria from Cyprus and Muscat of Samos and Mavrodaphne of Patras from Greece, three wines I would never normally have had the opportunity to try. The chap on the Gonzalez Byass stand was extremely helpful and educational, giving me a tutored tasting of all the sherry styles they do. This had tied in well with the previous evening when four of us had tasted our way through 9 sherries, 5 madeira and 7 ports in a bid to educate our palates. I ended up the day however trying my hand at tasting 100 roses on a special stand where the award winning wines were grouped by price. A refreshing way to end an educational and informative day.

Salice Salentino

I had a lovely wine last night - with sausages from the local butcher and baked potatoes. It was from my friends at The Secret Cellar in Tunbridge Wells, a 2001 riserva Salice Salentino. Now I've always been a bit confused by the name when I've seen these wines. Is it the name of a village, district, a quality measure or maybe even some obscure grape?

It turns out according to my wine "bible" the Oxford Companion to Wine, that it's a DOC for reds mainly made from the Negroamaro grape. Salento is actually a district in Puglia which is the heel of Italy. So I guess the name is a bit like a Chianti in that it's the name of a wine, a DOC and also a district.

This wine is a ruby red with orange highlights. Although the aroma is not that strong it's gorgeous in the mouth. Sweet blackberries and plums and although very dry, the soft tannins give it a nice smooth silky mouthfeel. It has a touch of herbs to it and great concentration. It has a satisfyingly long finish too. Having just driven 100 miles down the M1 and round the M25, it was a real pleasure to relax with something so good and such a good bargain at £7.99.

Duo Mythique syrah & grenache

I opened a bottle of Duo Mythique 2006 which is a VdP from the Languedoc last night. I was hoping it was going to be strong enough to go with a mild chicken curry which in a way it was. It was all jammy fruit with little acidity, almost like Ribena, so because of that it wasn't overpowered by the food.

Today it's quite different. Gone is the jamminess to be replaced by mild black fruit. Strange.

Local wine merchants

I'm lucky living in Tunbridge Wells when it comes to buying wine. There's an Oddbins, the excellent Secret Cellar (who have managed to get a mention in the local Today glossy this month) and Waitrose not far away in Tonbridge whose wines I rate. One place I always mean to visit however is Five Reasons wine who get a mention on UKWinesOnline. Think I'll treat this mention as a spur for me to go and visit them.

Mock exam on fortified wines

I sat my mock exam on fortified wines today. This was as preparation for my WSET Diploma exam in June. In 30 minutes I had to write a paragraph each on the production of vintage port, rutherglen muscat and sercial madeira. The submission will be marked in the next three weeks so I'll get it back before my exam.

The one I struggled to write much on was Rutherglen muscats. Since submitting my entry I've found a very good web site which succinctly covers these wonderful wines in enough detail. Wish I'd seen it before now.

Pinot noir a plenty

Pinot noir seems to be prevalent this weekend. Jancis Robinson writes about them in her weekly FT column, Jamie Goode samples three in his blog and I opened two to have with lamb shanks.

My two were very different. The first a 2006 Blason de Bourgogne was truly awful. My wife was the first to comment on how it tasted almost sparkling in her mouth. In their rush to bottle maybe the fermentation hadn't finished and it was continuing in the bottle? The other was a 2005 Cable Bay from Marlborough in NZ. It was silky, fruity and all a good pinot should be. I'm not a huge fan of some of the pinot noirs that have that vegetative aroma but this one from the Southern Hemisphere was all ripe strawberry and blackberry fruit.

Maybe the weather subtly influenced all this pinot activity?

Storing wine

I've accumulated quite a lot of wine recently and decided it's time to sort and store it properly rather than using lots of cardboard boxes. Coincidentally I've been listening to a couple of podcasts of the UK Wine Show from Thirty Fifty.

The first covered spiral cellars built in a bespoke manner beneath your house. The second covered wine cabinets for use in the house. I spoke with Tim Atkin MW the Observer's wine correspondent (he was a judge at the International Wine Challenge I was helping at) recently as he has been having a spiral cellar built to store his wine collection. It sounds wonderful but a little out of my league. As a result I've gone for a couple of cheapies from Homebase, £19.99 for a 56 bottle rack two of which will cater for most of my collection given I store the important stuff under the stairs in a couple of ordinary wine racks. The only challenge with these racks is they are self assembly which in itself is not difficult just downright fiddly.

Tasting port

In my preparation for the Diploma Unit 6 fortifieds exam I've been able to taste and compare a number of tawny ports. I've compared Graham's 20 year old, a 20 year old from Ferreira, Calem's 40 year old and the piece de resistance was a Kopke colheita from 1957 bottled this year.

Tasting like this has taught me a couple of valuable things. One is to look at the label properly and read up about it. I had no idea what a colheita was nor why the label said 1957 rather than giving the usual age designation of 10, 20 or 40 years. Secondly tasting them alongside each other sharpens your tasting skills. You would have thought the 2 20 year olds would be almost identical and they are but close examination shows the Ferreira has a touch of marzipan/almonds which the Taylors doesn't have. I'm sure had I only tasted the one I may not have noticed.

Moral of the story here is to try where possible and compare similar wines. I've just been reading Jancis Robinson's Wine Tasting Workbook and she makes exactly the same point especially when it comes to tasting red bordeaux. Either try several years from one chateaux or several chateaux across the appellations from the same year she says. It's great advice.

Finished

I've just finished my 7 week stint at the International Wine Challenge - and it's almost finished me! It has been a physically demanding job and the whole team of 15 to 20 wine enthusiast staff have been on the go all day and every day with the occasional weekend and bank holiday also included. With over 40,000 bottles there has been a lot to shift around.

However it has all been worth it. I've met some very nice people and tasted a lot of very good wine as staff have been able to taste any of the open bottles at the end of each day. Part of the payment has also been in cases of wine so my job for later today is to look through what I got given on Friday.

I'll certainly help out again next year.

Tutored tastings

As mentioned previously I've been working behind the scenes at the International Wine Challenge. It's a very well organised and run event and when you look at the pedigree of the judges you can see why it is such a prestigious event. (It is also exhausting for the staff which is why my postings have been so infrequent since I started on the event 6 weeks ago!)

I've been fortunate to have had three "tutored tastings" over the past 2 weeks when the judging has been taking place. One was from a judge who overheard my comment that I had never tasted Pedro Ximenes before. He insisted I join his table and taste my way through 4 PX. Considering I had never tasted one in my life I could see that one of the four was vastly different in colour and texture. Needless to say this was not typical of PX so was voted out. The others were very special however and I can't wait to try one at home over ice cream as a real treat.

The second tasting was of Madeira, in this case a 1937 and a 1920 Bual. All I can say is wow! These were exceptionally drinkable and it's hard to believe that any drink over 80 years old could taste so fresh.

Last but not least was an opportunity to taste a vertical of a major champagne producers vintages. They went as far back as 1979 and although it took me a while to get used to the style - they all had a mushroomy aroma which is typical - I felt privileged to have taken part.

More from the IWC later when I have some time to do another post.