Hasty Tastings

Please forgive me for my plain laziness. It's been really hard to get back into the momentum of writing again. There's still a pile of clean laundry eagerly waiting to be folded, I have knick knacks strewn all over the dining table and the stove has been untouched. Almost feeling like a useless housewife, I went for my usual Monday dance class last week hoping to release some endorphins.

Both the ballet and Odissi classes clearly did that. Not realising that that night was the Mooncake Festival/ Lantern/ Full Moon night, Ramli was in high spirits as he reminded me that it was an auspicious night. How lucky was I that this lucky night fell on a Monday? I got to dance Pallavan under the stars and my insides got all tingly again. God, I've missed dancing so much.

So I shall continue to ride this lucky wave and start blogging properly!

Last year, hubby and I took a trip to India to attend a very close friend's wedding. Her wedding started the ball rolling! I was fortunate to also celebrate my birthday surrounded by people I hold dear to my heart. This year, I was also lucky and managed to simultaneously celebrate my birthday during our honeymoon.

As I mentioned, the first place we headed to on the very day we arrived was Bordeaux. I've always wanted to visit a vineyard and pluck grapes right off the vines and eat it, learn how wine is made (remember how in black and white movies there are always women stepping on grapes in a huge wooden tub?), bottled, and most importantly drunk! We began our tasting journey with a visit to the Wine Museum. Here were learnt that the people behind the marketing strategy of these Burgundy wines were indeed the Irish.

We learned the history of why this area was called the Port de la Lune (Port of the Moon) and also got to play with different apparatus that help cork a bottle. This visit was indeed useful for the wine tour we had the next day. A lot of the information we read about the day before all came screaming back when our animated guide, Axel, repeated the history of Bordeaux wines, how it's made, how the terroir (soil) makes its taste so unique and what makes a good wine.

We decided to go with the Chateau D'Arsac visit rather than the Sauterrne tour because the Sauterrne tour only had white wine tastings, we were also told that these wines are very sweet. So we went for the next available thing which was the chateau of winemaker, Phillippe Raoux.

I'm so glad we got to go on this tour because it was intimate (max. 6 persons) and we got to see some modern art. Look at how abstract the sculptures are...the house has a crooked iron rod sticking out of it for heaven's sake! Every art piece has a small story to tell, I leave it to you to find out what the stories are by visiting the Chateau for yourself...

As you can tell, the soil that the grapes grow on is rather gravelly, so what happens is that sunlight reflects off the gravel onto the grapes, which gives you smaller but sweeter fruits. The leaves are also pruned by hand so that the grapes can be fully exposed to the sun (different part of france, different climate, different pruning methods as well, different soil, different tasting grapes, different tasting wines). Experienced sommeliers can tell how good the wine will be that year from just tasting the grapes off the vine.

So what happens is that the grapes are plucked off the vines and crushed and de-stemmed to make grape juice, the juice is then filled into these large, open (to let the carbon dioxide out) metal vats and remain here for some time to ferment. It's then transferred to another sealed vat where the yeast and sugar is added and the mixture is given more time to ferment. Only after these steps will the wine be put into toasted oak barrels and allowed to mature into full fledged wine.

Chateau D'Arsac also invites guest sommeliers to come over and create special wines to add to their winemaker's collection. Most of the time, juice from different grapes are added, the percentage of the mixture is determined by the sommelier. 

Margaux is one out of 4 estates to be achieve premier cru (1st growth) status in Bordeaux.

Art, art, everywhere!

The tour comes with yummy lunch!

The most interesting thing we did on the tour was a test to determine our "wine sign". We were made to do 6 blind tastings (red & white) and rate how much we like the wine with a remote control. We were also asked about the kind of smells we like and also whether we prefer sweet of savoury food. At the end of the test, our results were tabulated and based on our score we were given our wine sign. Each tasting we did involved looking at the colour and clarity of the wine, determining the alcohol content of the wine, smelling the wine and of course tasting the wine. I ended up with the muscular sign, which meant that I like wines with high alcoholic content and strong after taste. 

 Amsterdam

I must say that if you ever get a chance to visit Amsterdam, you must do the Heineken experience. Filled with quirky pop art deco and interactive experiences I couldn't help but click away. These poster cards you see us posing in were so fun to do! You pull out different slides with different backgrounds, there were boxes you could stand on and click!

4 simple ingredients make 1 awesome beer.
Water, Barley, Hops & Heineken A Team.

 Remember these few things when you are served a Heineken beer:

1) There should be a good head of foam because this keeps your beer cool and delays it from getting flat.

2) If you are served with a clean beer glass, you will see rings of foam around the glass. The number of rings are the number of sips you've taken from your glass.

3) Hold your glass to the light and peek at the layer of foam from the bottom. See those tiny bubbles? That shows you how much fizz the beer has!

Last but not least, don't go to your beer, let the beer come to you. This ensures that you are drinking the beer and not the foam (which is the most bitter part). The longer you have the foam in your beer, the longer your beer stays fresh!

Not to mention these ultra cool seats that show old Heineken ads dating way back to 1945!
Warning! Long wait...

I Heart Heineken!

Champagne

We spent our last few days of our trip in Paris and made a quick dash to Reims. Hubby wanted to go to Epernay, which housed Moet & Chandon but we didn't have enough time. Reims was just as wonderful a place to visit anyway. A little town with many Champagne houses and cafes was such a refreshing change to Paris's subway. Being a Friday, Veuve Cliquot was full so we made our way to Tattinger first. It was a very informative tour and I learned how Champagne was made.

Champagne, used to be known as the Devil's Wine, is made by a combination of 3 types of grapes. I initially thought that only green grapes were used for making champagne but I learned that pinot noir grapes are also used. What gives the wine the colour is in actual fact their skin. On a separate note, Rose wines are white wines mixed with a small percentage of red wine. So the three grapes that are used for Champagne are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. The percentage of grapes that makes a champagne really depends on the quality of the grapes in that particular harvest. In order not to damage the grapes or stain the grape juice, the grapes are all picked by hand and the grape juice is made at the vineyard itself because travelling with all those grapes is not the best thing to do if you want your juice colourless.

The grape juice is then placed in different vats based on the type of grape and the cru (estate) it comes from. Like the red wine they are left to ferment in the vat and sugar and yeast is only added when they are bottled. The yeast is removed by a process called disgorgement, where the liquid is frozen at the neck of the bottle (that's what the riddling rack is for, so the yeast sediment collects at the neck), the bottle is opened, the ice block containing the yeast sediment pops out from the pressure in the bottle and then the bottle is topped up with more wine and sugar for the final fermentation process. The amount of sugar added will result in brut (dry), sec (sweet), demi sec (moderately sweet), which is displayed on the label.

At Mumm & Co, oak barrels were used before but this was expensive to make and maintain, as it had to cleaned to ensure that no other flavours would taint the purity of champagne, plus the oak flavour from the barrel is not necessary for champagne so they moved onto ceramic vats, tiled on the inside and eventually to steel vats.

These are the tiled ceramic vats, which I sat in just because I could!

These are the steel vats that are used currently. But champagne makers like Krug, still use oak barrels till today.

 The Tattinger cellars were beautiful because they used to be used by the monks from the St. Nicaise Church, which has now been destroyed.You'd find random staircases that lead up to nowhere, and statues as well.

Even till today, bottles are riddled by hand because some bottles can't fit into the machines. I was told that an experienced riddler can do over 20,000-30,000 bottles a day!

See the yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle?

At the end of the Mumm & Co tour, we were given 2 tastings each of the different types of champagne they had. We started off with the normal cordon rouge brut (back in the day, actual red ribbons were tied around the bottles), moved on to a 2002 vintage (Mumm only creates a vintage champagne if the harvest is good that particular year), then a grand cru and ended with the brut rose. I must say, I enjoyed the grand cru the most because of its oaky finish and it was very smooth to drink. Grand cru means that the grapes that were used to make the champagne came from a vineyard renowned for its wine production.

A grand cru bottle has a brown ribbon around it.

As you'd drink a glass of wine, drinking champagne requires the same techniques. See (colour, clarity and of course, bubbles!), smell and drink. I also found out that only Champagne comes from Champagne, so that is an accreditation in itself. There really isn't a bad champagne I was told, it all depends on what tickles your taste buds.

Phew! That was a long post, so there you have it. All the tastings summarised in one post.

To many more posts to come!

Chin, chin!