2003 Βερβά Red

Early in the turn of the new century my village experienced sort of a renaissance as wine making became popular again. Many "weekend-residents", as they are known because they escape from Athens to the village during the weekend and holidays, bought land in prime wine growing areas, or added and replaced their vines--those that were fortunate to own grape vines. The first vintage was in 2003 and it was my first acquaintance with local wines since I left from Greece as a teenager. The wines were French varietals--blend of Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah--and initially light-bodied, typical of a young vineyard. It had a brilliant red garnet color and the blending of all three was an excellent combination of color, taste and body.

When I first tasted the 2003 Red from the Βερβά vineyards in 2004 it was a modest red wine, light bodied and lacking character. Over the years the wine improved a bit but still remained an uninteresting one. So I was very pleased when I tried it again in May 2010. While it remains a light body--both in appearance and taste--it is now very smooth and very well balanced. While it is lean, it is also lively and refreshing. It is very good with light mediterranean food. Its color remains a brilliant ruby and it should be good for another 3-4 years in a cellar. I give it 89 points.

There is a point that should not be missed here--for the neophytes in wine ageing. The improvement in this wine from 2004 to 2010 with proper preservation is remarkable. Although it hasn't become a great wine, mostly because of the age of the vines in 2003, it is now a good wine!

1986 Chevalier de Bayard, Emissary Selection

Rated 94 points by the Wine Cellar

This is the week for 1986 French wines--so it turns out. I posted a couple of days ago a review of a 1986 Marc Bredif Vouvray white--an excellent wine, by the way--and I thought it is only fair to continue with a 1986 red as well. It is a 1986 Chevalier de Bayard that I have been aging since 1987. I bought two cases back then and have been drinking them--very slowly--on special occasions. The wine isn't a great one by French standards. In other words, it doesn't have the impressive credentials of French wines. It is a Vin de Pays from the l'Herault region--a modest wine. I bought it because it satisfied my not very sophisticated taste at that time. It had improved a bit as it matured, but I had almost forgotten that I had it. A couple of weeks ago as I was updating my cellar inventory, I noticed it and I thought it's probably way passed its prime. Worried about being embarrassed in case it's a flop, my wife and I decided to have it all by ourselves one beautiful May evening in our front patio. What a wise decision! The wine turned out to be one of the best wines I have tasted so far.

The first thing I noticed was its color. It was a brilliant ruby with no traces of brown--meaning it has a few years left before it's past its prime. With 11% alcohol, early bottles were a bit thin--perhaps its main weakness. This one, however, had a considerably improved body--one of the chief benefits of ageing wines. This wine doesn't have a great nose--no fruits, no complex flavors. Its greatest strength was an incredible round and long taste with almost perfect balance. You simply don't want the taste to end. We were so impressed with it, we decided not to drink it all that evening. We enjoyed this rare find over the next two nights. Have three bottles left and will be reporting on them in the next few years--hope it continues to improve.

I had bought this wine back in 1987 around $15 per bottle. Don't know what might cost today, but it is well worth it, for my taste. I give it 94 points!

Marc Bredif: 1986 Vouvray--Grand Annee...

Age DOES matter!

Rated 94 points by the Wine Cellar

In a recent post it was mentioned that I had the opportunity to visit the wine cellar of Marc Bredif wines in Vouvray in the Loire Valley of France this past April. What an an extraordinary experience that was! In the 2 km cellar, Marc Bredic Vouvray wines are perhaps the oldest white wines still available. Most people believe that white wines peak between 5 and 10 years--and that may be true for most wines. But the Vouvray wines we saw and tasted disprove that myth and the reason may be the almost ideal conditions of the Marc Bredif cellar.

We tasted several of the Marc Bredif wines, but the 1986 Vouvray, Grand Annee white was one of the best whites I have ever tasted--perhaps the best. Brilliant light gold color, full body, with all the wonderful complex flavors a 24 years old wine brings. Great balance of sweetness and fruits. A very pleasant lingering after taste. A truly great wine. It was the first time for me to taste a quality wine at a winemaker's cellar and undoubtedly the proper preservation of the wine does make a difference. You never know how well the wines are preserved from the time they leave the winemaker till they reach the consumer half the way around the world...

I have no illusions that I will ever taste wines that are rated in the 95 to 100 points range. And to be frank, I am not sure I would be able to fully appreciate the greatness of such wines. For that reason, I will have to rate this one nearly the top of my scale--94 points which professional wine tasters might find a bit high...I regret that I didn't bring with me a few bottles. Once I return to the US in the fall, I will try to locate the 1986 Vouvray--and if I do, hope I can afford it...

Wine Ageing...

Enhance your Wine: Age it

While I had found a proper place for the wines, I was becoming acutely aware of how little I knew about them and decided to learn more. One of the new things I learned was that in addition to preservation, there is wine ageing too. You see, wines do age just like all living things. And this ageing produces all kinds of secondary flavors that enhance the taste of wine and make the wine lose its bite. Actually it was a bit embarrassing to find out that the ancient Greeks were much more aware of the importance of wine ageing than I was. “Given the vagaries of vinification, much Greek wine will not have lasted long, succumbing either to oxidation…or to spoilage due to inadequate storage, the risk of which was noted by Aristotle”. (The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson). Old wine was highly regarded by the Greeks so the process of ageing wines has been practiced since antiquity. Even the comic poets of ancient Greece had noted that men preferred old wine but young women… I wasn't about to break this practice.

Which wines you should age

Not all wines are created equal and not all wines improve with age. A good young wine aged properly will very probably become an even better one when it matures. A mediocre wine not only will not improve with age, it will almost certainly decline after several years. And then, there are wines--the vast majority of wines available in the market today--that are meant to be drank young. So, which wines do we choose to age? Well, before we can answer that question, we should understand a little more about what happens during the ageing process--of wines of course...

How to store and preserve your wines...

Storing wine in certain conditions will affect the way the wine ages, and depending on the length of storage time, it can improve it or ruin it. The key factors in storage are temperature, light and humidity. While warmer conditions accelerate the maturation--ageing--process, colder temperatures slow it down. Removing the solids from a young wine by heavy filtration also accelerates its ageing. If you buy wine more than a bottle or two at a time, you need to think of a proper place to store them. While having your wine close to your kitchen or dining room might be convenient, it's not really the best place for them, even if you have a wine rack. There are exposed to light and there are high and fluctuating temperatures in the vicinity of the kitchen. A closet in a northern exposure room--usually your coolest place in the house--might be a better alternative. That's, of course, assuming you don't have a basement. And always, even for short time, store the bottles horizontally and make sure the cork is wet, so that it doesn't dry out and allow in oxygen--yes, wines breath... Another problem with storing wine in the vicinity of the kitchen is the presence of strong smells, depending, of course, on the type of cooking you do. We love smells, especially of ethnic foods, but wines don't. Treat them with respect.

In my case, a wine rack built under the stairs of our house in Indiana as I was starting my wine collection served me well until I moved to Arizona where there are no basements and no cool places to store wine. Moreover, the number of wines had increased along with the commitment to preserve them as well as possible. I had to find something suitable and quickly. I was able to locate the supplier of EuroCave, self-contained wine cellars that recreate the natural cooling environment of a château wine cellar. I was thrilled with this discovery, as was not aware that such things existed, and rushed to buy one of their units that could hold about 250 bottles. It was like Christmas when the unit arrived! Finally the wines had their first proper home.

This is the story of my wine cellar.

The year was 1982 and we had just moved into a new house. I suffer from allergies and the house was surrounded by fields of wild flowers and all kinds of grasses. Not what I really needed…

One day a traveling salesman showed up at our front door holding a large black case. He politely asked if I would be interested in tasting some of the wines he was promoting. He assured me that they were very good and not available at liquor stores. Because of my allergies, I was always searching for wines that would not throw me in a sneezing spree. I invited him in and that started both my education and enjoyment of wines. Five of the six wines he was promoting were white German wines by Ferdinand Pieroth. One of my favorite was a Spatlese from the Nahe Valley in a beautiful sculptured blue bottle. To my delight, other than the superb taste of the wines, I noticed that I was not having any allergic reaction to them. And although I had not been a fan of German wines till that day, I ended up ordering six cases of the Ferdinand Pieroth wines. I have been a follower of Pieroth and German wines since then.

Along with the excitement of discovering these wonderful wines came the challenge of “where do I store all these wines?”, and, more importantly, “how do I do so, without downgrading their quality?” Till that time, I had never bought more than 2-3 bottles at a time, and I had not really paid a premium price for wines–didn’t have the cash and couldn’t distinguish low priced wines from expensive ones. Now suddenly, I was confronted with the challenge of having a large quantity, medium to high-priced wines in need of a proper home.

The solution to my dilemma wasn’t very far. Under the stairs leading to the half-basement of the house there was an underutilized space where I built my first wine storage area. There in a cool and dark environment I could store horizontally most of my wines. I was happy to have found a decent home for the wines, but also excited about this new found hobby. I would go down the stairs and look at the bottles in their rows and columns and dream of having a real wine cellar some day…

The wine rack under the stairs served me well until I moved to Arizona where there are no basements and no cool places to store wine. In the meantime, my collection of wines had increased along with the commitment to preserve them as well as possible. I had to find something suitable and quickly. I was able to locate the supplier of EuroCave, self-contained wine cellars that recreate the natural cooling environment of a château wine cellar. I was thrilled with this discovery, as was not aware that such things existed, and rushed to buy one of their units that could hold about 250 bottles. It was like Christmas when the unit arrived!

While I had found a proper place for the wines, I was becoming acutely aware of how little I knew about wines. I decided to learn more and one of the new things I learned was that in addition to preservation, there is wine ageing too. You see, wines do age just like all living things. And this aging produces all kinds of secondary flavors that enhance the taste of wine and make the wine lose its bite. “Given the vagaries of vinification, much Greek wine will not have lasted long, succumbing either to oxidation…or to spoilage due to inadequate storage, the risk of which was noted by Aristotle”. (The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson). Old wine was highly regarded by the Greeks so the process of ageing wines has been practiced since antiquity. The comic poets of ancient Greece had noted that men preferred old wine but young women… I was not about to break this practice.

As I continued my enjoyment of and learning about wine, I realized that having the EuroCave wine cellar was some type of a transformational event for me. What started as a solution to storing and protecting wines from spoilage, evolved into a new science and experience that was destined to become my life’s passion.

For the second time since I started my wine collection, I was faced with the dilemma of what to do with my wines. I had accepted a position overseas in what I considered at the time would be a two-years assignment. I lived in Boston at the time and my wines and their EuroCave home had made their first cross-country journey from Arizona. Had barely settled there and couldn't even think about another move...

On top of the usual headaches associated with major moves, I learned that the customs duty for bringing the wines into Egypt was a staggering 5,000%-yes, five thousand percent. That made it cost prohibitive to take them along. I couldn't even consider the option of selling them. I was attached to them and some of them were aging beautifully. Had to find another option.

My boss and good friend Ed offered to keep them at his home in Boston for a while, but I needed something long-term as my two-year assignment was turning out to be much longer than originally planned. So, the wines and EuroCave started their travel again. First, to a storage facility and eventually to a much farther destination--my village in Greece. I came to realize at some point that no matter where I would end up living, I would always have a connection with my birthplace. That was a timely and wise decision and destined to be the conduit that brought me to this blog and this story.

Shipping my wines and the EuroCave cellar to my village in Greece was made possible with the completion of a home we built on an ancestral land located a mile and a half outside the town. It was something that culminated a decade's extraordinarily wonderful rediscoveries. After living in the US for 27 years, I was now working and living in Alexandria, Egypt--a mere 40 minutes flight from Athens. My father was still alive and was eager to see him and spent as much time as possible with him for the little time I was fearing he had left in this life. I was going to make up for lots of lost time...Every chance I had--long weekends and every holiday--I would come to my village. It was like a very tired and thirsty man had reached an oasis after being lost in the desert...

Other than spending most of my time with my father and sister and her family, I would walk out in the neighborhood where I grew up and wonder in the village's two squares (platias). I would stop in the village's bakery--being operated by the same family since 1908--and receive my usual fresh baked bread, free of course since the propriator who still remembered me as the young 10 years old boy wouldn't have any other way...It was the warmest and most wonderful feeling I had felt for a very long time. I was again 10 years old and I had come home. Finally, the circle that had taken me to three continents had closed...but the story continues...