This wine has a very structured bouquet. At first you can feel a strong smell of minerals, paint, sage. Wait a while and you will see hints of asphalt and some black berry emerge from behind. Wait some more and it will turn in caramel and the hay. Wait even more and it will finally turn into tobacco. Taste is a little bitter, strong, with good balance between acidity and tannin and a sapid tail. Surprisingly, it disappears relatively quickly. Refreshing.

]]> http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/12/11/baba-fortana-mattarelli/feed/ 0 http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/18/henri-abele-brut/ http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/18/henri-abele-brut/#comments Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:13:32 +0000 simone http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/18/henri-abele-brut/ Althougth not very known, Henri Abelé is one of the best champagne houses in Reims, France. This champagne, made with Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay, has a beautiful golden color, with hints green, and a great perlage. You can feel elegant scents of flowers and crisp, and a dry pleasant taste, particularly appropriate as aperitif.

I had a chance to taste it in Reims, chez Lousie, a greate crêperie in the city centre. Champagne and crêpes work very well together.

Unfortunately, finding this bottle in Italy is quite hard.

]]> http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/09/18/henri-abele-brut/feed/ 0 http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/07/09/visit-to-chianti/ http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/07/09/visit-to-chianti/#comments Sun, 09 Jul 2006 20:56:09 +0000 simone http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/07/09/visit-to-chianti/

This morning me and Anshul left Firenze for a trip to Chianti. He wanted to visit a winery, so I headed myself to Greve. We stopped there looking for some information and to visit a famous wine shop. The tourist info office was closed on sundays and while we were leaving, Jessica, Kate and Lauren, three cute canadian girls, stopped us asking for info and how to get to some wineries. These undergrad students were backpacking around Europe and felt a little lost because they had reached Greve from Firenze on a bus but on sundays almost everything was closed. “We have no car, can we come with you?”

Of course, we’ve been happy to say yes. We wandered a bit in the countryside before stopping to Fattoria Montagliari, a nice place just on the road that leads to Panzano where we’ve had a nice lunch, visited the vineyard and tasted their Chianti Classico (which by the way is not bad at all). This time I’ve played the expert, explaining the winemaking process to Anshul and the girls. After that, we continued on the road to Siena and visited Piazza del Campo, just to take a look. It’s been a lot of fun, expecially because of the nice company with the girls. Who would have ever said we were gonna meet three Canadians lost in the middle of Chianti today?

You know, wine is just grapevine juice where fermentation transformed sugar into alcool. Water, alcool and tartaric acid. This is all you need to synthetize something that’s technically 99.99% wine. The problem is, if you try tasting this fake wine you quickly discover it’s ugly, has no aroma and feels completely uninteresting. This is because the last 0.01% is what makes a wine great: hundreds of aromatic chemicals. And this is the only part you should care for. When drinking wine you should mentally remove alcool and tartaric acid from your mouth and focus on the remainder. Well, if you drink very cheap wines it’s likely there’s nothing to focus on. But don’t worry, for just a few euros per bottle you can drink decent wines with a bouquet to care for. OK, let’s say you bought a decent bottle. How can you discover what’s great in that wine? There are 3 different aspects to consider: how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes.

Vision is the simplest aspect, cause we are used to watch at things and describe what we see. Of all our senses, vision is the one we use the most and, by the way, we developed a scientific and simple model to decompose colours into three basic components so that any colour is easily described by RGB coordinates.

Olfaction is the hardest part, cause there are thousands of basic odors out there. With our nose we have been provided with a wonderful probe, able to discover a lot of chemicals even in concentrations of few parts per million. The problem is that

1. we use it rarely
2. it’s hard to distinguish between them when they’re together, and
3. we don’t know the name of each chemical we recognized.

Nobody would ever say “hey, this thing smells like methyl cinnamate“, except maybe for people with a degree in organic chemistry. People are more likely to say “hey, this thing smells like strawberries”. It’s just a way to communicate our perception so that others we’ll be able to associate to their previous experience.

Most of the time we understand some odor and we immediatly know we already experienced it somewhere in the past, but we’re unable to tell what it was. This is because normally we don’t put conscious attention to our nose.  We feel odors at the subconscious level and quickly forget them.  While studying to become a sommelier, one of the most important things I’ve learnt is to smell everything and memorize scents, so to be able to recognize them later.

Taste is tricky, because we can smell from inside the mouth (the rear of the nose cavity) and most flavour perceptions are actually odors. Our tounge is able to detect just four basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness but on top of this we can feel the touch of food, such as fatness, dryness or temperature.

I hope now you understand how many variables there are in a single glass of wine, why wines can be so different and how people can get so excited when tasting wine. Now go drink some!

Lamole di Lamole Chianti Classico is produced in Lamole, a tiny village nested into Chianti, south of Greve. It’s made mainly with classic Sangiovese grapevine, but using the specific clone selected in Lamole 3 decades ago. Has a deep and clean ruby red color. Smells of berries, cherry, spices. Feels full with good persistence, scents of wood and jam. It’s perfect with roasted beef or meatballs. You can drink a bottle and still feel you want more. I’ve had a chance to visit the winery and it’s amazing, definitely a must see. And a must taste, of course

]]> http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/06/25/lamole-di-lamole/feed/ 1 http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/06/10/im-a-sommelier/ http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/06/10/im-a-sommelier/#comments Sat, 10 Jun 2006 20:01:17 +0000 simone http://www.mostly-useless.com/blog/2006/06/10/im-a-sommelier/

In the last few months I studied wine tasting and today – after 3 exams – I’ve been officially sanctioned as a full blown sommelier! No, I’m not gonna make sommelier my profession, so this diploma will be mostly useless, but then again… The graduation ceremony has been to Colle Bereto, a wonderful winery farm in Radda in Chianti, at the very center of Chianti Classico, 550m over the sea. It’s amazing this winery dates back to the 11th century! They let us visit the vineyard, the cellar and explained all the wine making process down to the details. Then they gave us a diploma and taste vin. Finally, we’ve had lunch while tasting their great wines: Chianti Classico Colle Bereto, Cénno and Tocco. Fabio, who became sommelier as well, documented everything. Now I think I can get drunk and still insist it was for a serious purpose!