Enjoy Life... With Some Good Wine!
My American cousins in Florida, enjoying life in the Italian spirit.
By the way, it was the cousin
on the left who suggested the addition of this page!
- Input Always Welcome
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Do you have any favourite wines or wine suppliers you would like to share here, or any comments or suggestions?
A Quick Guide to Wine
If you are already well into wine (in a general sense, I hasten to add!), please skip this bit!
If you need a quick introduction to grapes, wine types etc. then I recommend Laithwaite's Guide To Wines. Naturally it is trying to sell you wine as you go along, but the guide is none the worse for that.
Another good guide is The Wine Pages, which provide articles on choosing, tasting and enjoying wines, plus ideas of which wines go with which foods.
In the UK, the first £2.50 or so that you spend on a bottle of wine is buying nothing much except the glass, the cost of production and distribution and some revenue for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Don't expect much from the wine inside the bottle at this price, except maybe a cracking headache!
Between £2.50 and £5 the quality of the wine increases rapidly, and you can get some very nice wine as you approach the top end of this range, especially white wine and wine for everyday drinking. Between £5 and £10 the quality of the wine is still increasing, but not quite so rapidly. You can get a very decent wine of any type at the lower end of this range, and some very good wine indeed at the upper end.
As you climb above £10 (and we hardly ever do, unless it's for some very special occasion), then you are still getting better quality, but the law of diminishing returns has set in. You are also soon outside the region on which I have an advice to offer!
I have found that much the same advice applies in the USA also, translating the prices above at something like £1 = $1.70 (an exchange rate purely for the purposes of this guide).
In restaurants, "house wines" are the ones they sell most of and are often very good, and the markup in price relative to buying the same wine in a store is quite modest. For their other wines, a markup of about 100% in price is quite common. I don't object to this too much - they have to get their income from somewhere - but it's useful to know when thinking about the quality of wine to expect for the price.
You can get good wines a bit cheaper in continental Europe, but I don't have much experience buying wine there.
It used to be that France was the place for wine (the only place, from the French point of view), but the French got complacent and found themselves out-manoeuvred by improved wine growing techniques in Australia, New Zealand, Chile and the USA, among other places.
Luckily for them (and for us) the French swallowed their pride (to the extent of disguising some of their bottles with New World style labels) and are catching up again. (I love France and the French, by the way - don't get the wrong idea!)
Wine with screw top bottles, instead of corks, used to be a sign of plonk or cheap booze. Now it's almost the opposite. You will see more and more wine changing from corks to screw tops as time goes on.
Wine gets various official marks of quality, or "appellations", for example in Italy you have DOC and DOCG. You can find a good summary of all these appellations here. The flip side is that as soon as a bottle of wine has one of the higher appellations, you are paying something extra just for that fact. If you are buying from somewhere reputable, and you are looking at two bottles of the same price, one with an appellation and one without, you may find that the one without is of better quality!
Having said all this, you'll soon discover for yourself what you like and don't like - and that matters more than anything.
Good wine is not booze (although some sad people treat it that way), but it is alcoholic. (Non-alcoholic wine does exist, and may make a nice drink, but I don't drink enough of it to offer any advice!)
Wine with 11% alcohol by volume (alcohol content should be marked on the label) is relatively light. A good white wine is usually 12% or more.
Wine above 13% is quite strong - normally red wines, but white wines recently are increasingly in this category, due to growing conditions (and maybe also due to new techniques). Some strong white wines among our favourites taste deceptively light and you find yourself drinking an awful lot of it - watch out, is all I'm saying!
In many parts of continental Europe, parents introduce their children quite young to wine, just a small amount, often diluted with water. And guess what, these are the places where you don't find rowdy youngsters, smashed out of their minds, roaming the streets and making life a misery for others (and themselves, I suspect)!
A glass of red wine a day is generally acknowledged to be positively good for your heart, and the medical profession keeps discovering new reasons why all forms of wine, taken in moderation, have other health benefits. As with so many other things in life, "a little of what you fancy does you good". There is plenty of wine health advice out there.
One last suggestion: when drinking wine, drink at least twice as much plain (not sparkling) water as you go along, if you want to stop yourself being dehydrated. Wine that isn't sweet (it isn't sweet because almost all the sugar has been converted to alcohol) is often called "dry", and that seems to be the effect it has when you drink it!
Some Wines That We Like
These are just some of our family's personal preferences. For various reasons, I'm sure that this list will grow as time goes on!
My wife and I drink mostly white or rosé wines, with an occasional red.
White Wines
For white wines, we tend to go for crisp, dry wines with a slight "zing" to them.
The grape varieties we drink most often are Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Chenin Blanc, Cortese (from Gavi) or a mix of Sémillon and Chardonnay (but not pure Sémillon or pure Chardonnay).
Some of our favourite white wines are:
- Waitrose Touraine Sauvignon Blanc
(now relabelled "Champteloup Touraine Sauvignon Blanc") - A great wine from France. You can buy it in the Waitrose store at about £5 a bottle, sometimes on special offer for £1 less, or online. It's great
for drinking any time, and slips down very easily (too easily, sometimes!).
Note that Waitrose are now obtaining the same wine via a different supplier, hence the change of label.
- Ramírez de Velazco Torrontes
- Another great all-purpose drinking wine from Argentina, available from Laithwaites, at about £5 a bottle.
- Fetzer Chardonnay-Viognier
- A very nice Californian wine, which describes itself accurately as tasting of "peaches and apricots with a pinch of lime and mango". Great with white meats and delicately flavoured seafood. Available from Waitrose and other places. About £5.50 a bottle.
- Torres Viña Esmeralda
- A beautifully fragrant, versatile wine from the Penedès wine-making region of Catalonia in Northeast Spain, about £7 a bottle. For where to buy it, see the bottom left hand corner of the linked page.
- Karri Oak Estate Semillon Sauvignon Blanc 2006
- A very nice fresh wine with a taste of passionfruit, pineapple and hints of lime - good on its own or with seafood. About £7 a bottle.
If we are out in an Italian restaurant, our favourite white wine from their list will often turn out to be a Gavi di Gavi. If it's a really good one, the restaurant may charge something over £20 for it... ouch! But if your meal for two people is costing several times that, then believe me, it's worth it.
The best white wine I can remember having in a restaurant was an Australian wine (not a Chardonnay) with the label Wildflower Ridge. All I can tell you is that the wine lived up perfectly to its label's image. If, like me, you want to try to track it down, you could start here.Sparkling Wines & Rosé Wines
I lump these two together because for us these two categories often come to the same thing!
Rosé wines seem to have gained greatly in quality and popularity over the last few years. We hardly ever used to drink rosé wines; now, they are among our favourites. We tend to go for the dry-ish ones.
(If you are interested in knowing how rosé wines are made and how they are changing, look here).
For sparkling wines, we avoid Champagne, because you are paying for the name rather than the drink, and choose one of many good alternatives.
A sparkling wine that it is made properly will still be fizzy the morning after you drink it, without a cork or bung, whereas a wine pumped with carbon dioxide won't.
Having said that, should you open a bottle of sparkling wine and have any of it left to keep, you can get a nifty clip-on top that will preserve the fizz even better (for still wine, a vacuum plug keeps the wine fresh for many days, but such a plug won't work with a fizzy wine).
Some of our favourite wines in this category (rosé and/or sparkling) are:
- La Prima Scelta Merlot 2006, Venezie IGT
- A lovely crisp, fresh rosé wine, obtainable from Laithwaites. Around £6 a bottle.
- Grand Gaillard Merlot Cabernet 2006, Bergerac AOC
- Another very nice rosé, obtainable from Laithwaites. It only missed our family's top rating by a whisker, but it won a gold medal in Paris, which I am sure most people would regard as more important! Around £6 a bottle.
- Parra Alta 2006 Mendoza
- A beautiful rosé made with Shiraz, Malbec and Merlot grapes, obtainable from Laithwaites. Strong (14%), but you wouldn't know it without looking at the label - it goes down extremely easily. Around £6 a bottle.
- Laithwaites Rosé Bordeaux 2006 AOC
- One of our favourite wines, made from Merlot grapes. Around £7 a bottle.
- Fetzer Valley Oaks Syrah Rosé 2005 California, USA
- A dark cherry-coloured wine made from Syrah (Shiraz) grapes, with strawberry and raspberry flavours but still dry-ish, and quite strong at 13.5%. Very easy to drink, like most of these wines!
- Available from Waitrose and other places, about £6 a bottle, less with special offers.
- (Note that the wines above are listed approximately in order of increasing depth of colour and "weight".)
- Tommasi Chiaretto Bardolino Classico 2006
- A very nice, dry rosé wine (described under Wines... Basic Range... here) which is served (among other places) at one of the best pub restaurants in England, The Black Horse (near Bedford, Luton and Hitchin).
- PS Pétillant de Syrah
- A gently sparkling rosé obtainable from Laithwaites. Price varies according to special offers, around £7 to £8. One of our absolute favourites.
- Albinea Canali Rosato del Veneto NV
- A very nice, cheaper runner-up to the previous wine, also obtainable from Laithwaites. Around £5 a bottle.
- Montana Lindauer Special Select Brut, New Zealand
- This is one of our top favourite alternatives to Champagne, available from Waitrose and other places. We keep it for special occasions or when we especially need cheering up. It costs in the region of £9 to £10, but there are times (like Christmas, but other times of year also) when it appears on special offer - if you see one of those offers, take full advantage!
Wines That Go Well With Pasta
This is a separate category, simply because it's a combination we use so often!
For whites, we often drink any of our all-purpose white wines, or wines from Orvieto or Soave. For reds, we like wines made with the Sangiovese or Montepulciano grapes. My sister, the Italy expert, says that if you can find a Montepulciano (grape) from Montepulciano (place) this is a "Montepulciano di Montepulciano", and you should go for it! The bad news is, the Italians like it so much that they kind of hide it from everyone else...
If you are looking for a wine that goes with pasta (or goes with anything else) then a good place to look is The Wine Pages - articles on choosing, tasting and enjoying wines, plus ideas of which wines go with which foods.Red Wines
Red wines that go with pasta (which are the kind we drink most often) are covered in the previous section.
For other reds, our personal preference is often for wines made from Shiraz or Merlot grapes, and these will often be from Australia, New Zealand or the USA - but there are plenty of other good sources.
Here's the start of a list of some of our favourite wines in this category:
- Finca Muñoz Family Reserve 2005
- A smooth, velvety red, great with rich meat dishes or barbecues. Described accurately as "Unusually dark, old-vine colour with ripe aromas of bramble and plum followed by richly textured damson, black cherry and raspberry flavours and a smooth, sweet-oaky finish."
- Available from Laithwaites and elsewhere, about £6.50 per bottle - in my opinion this is great value for this quality of wine.
- You will find more information and places to buy it here.
- Torres Sangre de Toro (Bull's Blood)
- A soft red wine with rich aromas from the Penedès wine-making region of Catalonia in Northeast Spain, very nice with roast dishes, about £9 a bottle. For where to buy it, see the bottom left hand corner of the linked page.