12/31/2005

Sparkling wine tasting

Tradition demands a bottle of sparkling wine on New Year’s Eve. My wife loves Champagne, and we thought this was a good chance to get together with friends and taste sparkling wines from around the world.

Champagne originated in the Champagne region about 90 miles NE of Paris. Because of the northern latitude it is a cold and difficult place to raise grapes. Karen MacNeil writes in The Wine Bible that in the fall the cold temperatures cause the yeast to go dormant, and in the spring as the bottles warm the yeast begins fermenting once again, creating the gas that forms the “tiny bubbles.”

French Champagne is a blend of many different still wines from the district and usually contains chardonnay, pinot poir, and pinot meunier grapes. After blending the wines, the winemaker adds sugar yeast and a small amount of wine then caps the bottle. This forms the secondary fermentation and creates the bubbles.

Sparkling wine, made in this traditional style, is now made around the world. We tasted 5 bottles from the US, Spain, New Zealand, and Australia. The assignment was that each couple bring a “brut” sparkling wine priced under $20. Finally, we pulled out a bottle of French Champagne.

We specified “Brut” wines, which indicates a dry style. “Extra dry” wine is (inexplicably) slightly sweeter than Brut. In inexpensive sparkling wine, our personal taste prefers the “Brut,” as cheap “Extra Dry” wine is just asking for a hangover. Explore these styles with some appropriate caution.

Our companions who joined us are all close and longtime friends. We’ve all had sparkling wine many times before, but none of us had tasted them in a goup before. While we are all very interested in wines, none of us is an expert. These ratings reflect our personal evaluations using the wine score sheet. Unlike previous tastings, this was not a blind taste test.

Here are the results:

#1 Gruet Brut, NV, 12% alcohol, $16, methode Champenoise. Produced by Gruet Winery, Aluquerque, NM (www.gruetwinery.com). This wine was the hands down favorite of the wines we scored, with the best flavor and good balance. The label notes that it is made with 75% Chardonnay and 25% Pinot Noir grapes. We rated it 89/100.

#2 Lindauer Brut, 12% alcohol, $16.50, methode traditionnelle. Produced by Montana Wines in Aukland, New Zealand. Another blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, this wine was a close second, and scored highly in balance, clarity and finish. We rated it 86/100 points.

#3 Seaview Brut, 12.5% alcohol, $11, Seaview Winery, Victoria, Australia (www.seaviewwines.com). The bottle did not list the grapes or how it was made. Seaview had a nice bright tawny color but was otherwise undistinguished. Most of us found it a bit too sweet. The collected tasters rated it 81/100 points.

#4 Gloria Ferrer Sonoma Brut, 12.5% alcohol, $15, methode Champenoise. Produced by Freixenet Sonoma Caves in Sonoma, California and made with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. This wine tasted ranked lowest in color, astringency and taste, and we rated it 81/100 points.

#5 Freixenet Brut, 11.5% alcohol, $11.50 (but on sale for around $9) methode traditionnelle. Produced by Freixenet in Spain, this wine by chance was the wedding wine for all four couples at the tasting. This was a sparkler we wanted to like: it had good memories for all of us, was attractively priced, and was reliable. Unfortunately, when compared against the others it faired the worst. We scored it lowest in aroma, balance, texture, and overall quality. Several tasters commented on a chemical aftertaste, like acetic acid, and it seemed thin. What a disappointment. We rated it 73/100.

After the previous wines were tasted, we opened a surprise bottle of Perrier Jouet, Grand Brut, 12% alcohol, $25, Perrier-Jouet, France. This wine was clearly the best of all. It had that faint yeast taste. The bubbles were finer and the streams longer, and even when we were tired it was a commanding glass of wine. Possibly in the spirit of bowing to an original Champagne, or possibly because we were too tired to rate the wine, we simply enjoyed it and discussed relative value in sparkling wines.

We enjoyed the wine tasting, and I learned something about various sparkling wines. It is too bad about the Freixenet wine. I feel like an old friend has been been shown to be defective. I suppose I will still drink it, but the next time I’ll be thinking about that French Champagne.

Next posting – How to host a wine tasting at your home.

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