Nasik

Wine grapes, generally speaking, grow in two bands around the Earth between 30 and 50 degrees North or South of the equator. Anywhere outside of these bands is either too hot or too cold. At least, that's the common wisdom. It is certainly mostly true, but our voyage of discovery this week leads us to challenge that wisdom.

Nasik is not a grape variety, but a city in the Indian state of Maharashtra and it lies a mere 20 degrees North of the equator and that puts it below the Tropic of Cancer. So no grapes here, M'Lud. How then is it that here we have:

Week N (2014) Jewel of Nasik Sauvignon Blanc. M&S £7.00

It seems that Nasik (or Nashik, as it can also be spelled), the 'wine capital of India' has 74 wineries of which 36 are said to be 'world class' (the criteria are not specified). It is a city where, aside from the obvious hi-tech industries, fruit and veg make up a good portion of the ctiy's economy, so the climate must be amenable.

It is not a region you would call cool climate, with an average monthly low temperature if 17 degrees and an average monthly high of 30, but with the monsoon there is no shortage of rainfall at 690mm which is well over the required minimum. In fact it is rather too much at that time of year and harvest must be delayed until January to avoid the crop being spolied and bloated.

M&S have teamed up with Sula Vineyards, who started growing wine grapes (table grapes had been grown for many years) in the 1990s after a Silicon Valley engineer, Rajeev Samant, realised that the climate of his family estate had much in common with parts of Spain, Australia and California, to produce three wines aimed at the UK market. The red is a Tempranillo, the Rose a Zinfandel and this white is Sauvignon Blanc. Sula also produce several other varieties in total volumes well into the millions of litres from three sites totalling 1,800 acres.Who knew?


This wine is very pale and almost colourless, with some pale lemon yellow notes. It has very obvious Sauvignon Blanc flavours of gooseberry / elderflower (according to your preference) but is very simple. It has good acidity that went rather well with the salmon and prawn curry.

It won't replace any number of New Zealand SBs which are usually available for the same price, but it was interesting to try an Indian wine with sufficiently pleasing, if unspectacular results, that I expect the other two varieties in the range will get their turn in due course.

Just to throw in a vaguely interesting and almost associated fact, according to the Hindu epic legend of Lord Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, Nasik got its name from an episode in which his brother cut off a woman's nose. I don't know why he did, but in Sanskrit the word for nose is 'Nasika' and it was picked because of that. 

Malbec

What I didn't know about Argentina until recently is exactly how big a country it is. I knew it was famous for the Tango, for gauchos and beef, but I didn't know that in the space of two weeks, if you are prepared to take six internal flights, you can see glaciers and condors at one end of the country and enormous waterfalls in sub-tropical jungles with Toucans, monkeys and even humming birds at the other.

I did know that in between the two there are a great number of vineyards and wineries producing a variety of wines from a variety of grapes. I didn't expect, but did enjoy some Pinot Noir from northern Patagonia whereas I did expect and also enjoyed the Malbecs of Mendoza, the signature wines of Argentina.

The One and I visited two wineries in the Lujan de Cuyo sub-region of Mendoza which sits a short drive to the East of the Andean foothills and to the South of the city itself. The first was very hi-tech and shiny producing good, if fairly uninspiring wines but the second much more appealing and where I found:

Week M (2014) Clos De Chacras, Gran Estirpe 2010. AR$ 261 (~£19.49) from the cellar door.

Clos de Chacras is a family run winery with an interesting history. The family originated in the Italian speaking parts of Switzerland and in 1883 Bautista Geronimo Gargantini moved to Argentina where he stated making a living as a livestock trader and meat marketeer. He was sufficiently successful that he raised enough capital to enter the wine trade, with subsequent generations following on, including his son who in 1948 made the first traditional method sparkling wine in Argentina.

Some time later the winery was sold, only to be reacquired by the founder's great-granddaughter  and her husband in 1987. They re-established and modernised production from 2003 and now produce a range of eight wines.

The Gran Estirpe is their top range of two wines. One is a blend of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merolt, but this is 100% Malbec and made from grapes grown in another but distinct nearby sub-region: Maipu.

It packs quite a punch, having 14.5% abv as this is a hot continental region and the grapes have plenty of sunshine to help them fully ripen and produce lots of sugar which then gets fermented to generate this high alcohol level.

It has been matured for 18 months in a mixture of first use French and American oak barrels, which we were shown as we were guided round the winery. Each barrel was marked not only with the type of oak, but the flavour characteristics each barrel could be expected to provide to the finished wine, such as 'complex', 'intense', or 'sweet'. Wines from these barrels are blended together to give the final result the winemaker is wanting and then bottled and released for sale after a further period of maturation in the bottle.

The deep ruby colour and obvious legs give a clue as to what to expect a little later. The nose is appealing, with black fruits and vanilla leading the charge. The mouthfeel is full and soft with well integrated tannins and gentle acidity. It is slightly warming, but full of fruit, and has a long finish where the oak and fruit gradually disappear together.

This bottle survived four flights in my suitcase and I am very happy that it did. The wine is sadly unavailable in the UK so it may be some time before I get to taste it again and I am less happy about that!

Lugana

At the Southern end of Lake Garda, just near the borders of the two Italian regions of Lombardia and Veneto, lies the town of Lugana. It is a reportedly beautiful area which attracts many visitors and is the centre of a small 'DOC' wine region devoted to the production of quality white wines,

The grape concerned is known as Turbiana or, alternatively, Trebbiano di Lugana which sounds like it should be the same as other Trebbianos grown in other parts of Italy. But this is Italy and we should not be surprised that there is no connection!

Week L (2014) Ca' Lojera, Lugana DOC 2013. Vinoteca Farringdon. £15.95

I will cut to the chase. I liked this very much. It had good lively aromas of citrus fruits and sweet melon which follow through into the palate. It is full bodied and smoothly refreshing. There is something of a fruit salad about it and I would say either nectarines or clementines are in the finish. The 13% abv is well integrated with the fruit and there is juicy acidity.

Lugana is a small area of around 1,300ha from which is produced ~12 million bottles annually, and that sounds a lot until you consider that Bordeaux knocks out about 800 million in the same time.

It is upsetting that in reading about this wine I came across a campaign using the hashtag #SaveLugana, because there is a scheme proposing to build a high speed railway right through the middle of the region. The original plan, hatched some twenty years ago, was to build a line to connect Lisbon to Kiev, but now appears to be limited to connecting Venice to Milan. Either way, if it goes ahead it will destroy up to one third of this area.

The area is already under consideration as a potential UNESCO world heritage site and those dependent on the local tourist industry are hoping this will add weight to the campaign. The campaigners believe that the proposed route need be shifted as little as 400 metres to use the existing line between Brescia and Verona, for a nine km stretch to avoid the possible destruction, but add four minutes to the improved journey time.

Why do I care? Well, partly that having just discovered this wine which I like I am disappointed to have stumbled upon a challenge to its future success, but more because it is a parallel to what is proposed should happen to the Chilterns to enable those desperate to get out of Birmingham and into London (or vice versa, which is even more puzzling) to do so with insufficient time to enjoy a decent breakfast which is, after all, one of the more compelling reasons to travel by train.

There are sensitive alternatives available to solve the problem of more quickly moving the people in A to B and the people in B to A (see Douglas Adams on the futility of by-passes; the same logic applies) and any of those should be selected in both of these cases, however, perhaps if all of the people in such a tearing hurry stopped off on the banks of Lake Garda and enjoyed both the view and a glass of wine they might find that there are better ways to live and we call all leave things as they are.

The petition to register support unfortunately closed on 27th November, but use of the #SaveLugana may still draw attention.

Kalecik Karasi

Three K's for the price of one leads me back to Turkey for this week's wine. I say 'back' as if I am a frequent visitor, but in fact I have been there only once and that was nearly four decades ago when my parents were generous enough to fund my second trip outside the UK, the first having been a day trip across the channel to Calais. The second trip, which included my 16th birthday, was described to my parents as an educational cruise and in many ways it was. There were around two thousand teenagers visiting six countries in the Eastern Mediterranean over the course of two weeks, on a ship that was later used as a floating hospital during the Falklands conflict, and calling into the last but one port of Antalya about 150 miles South West of where this week's wine was made. There were no vineyard tours on that trip but I am not sure I would have appreciated the idea at the time in any case.

Week K (2014) Anfora, Trio, 2012. M&S £8.00.

I first tried KK, as it is known for ease of pronunciation, at the London International Wine Fair in 2010 and I don't think I have tasted it again since.

Coming from Western Turkey in the Region of Denizli the grapes for this wine grow high on a continental limestone plateau where the combination of daytime heat and cooler nights suits the various grapes grown here.

Trio is, unsurprisingly, a blend of three varieties: Shiraz and Kalecik Karasi contributing 40% each, with Cabernet Sauvignon providing the remaining 20%.

As such it is a combination of the local speciality and two widely traveled international varieties that crop up everywhere and has characteristics that reflect the blend.

It is a medium intensity red wine, easy to drink but better with a meal than without (I know this because I sampled the first glass or so whilst cooking the lunch that accompanied the rest) and is a good every day red.

It has the blackcurrant flavours from both the Cabernet and Shiraz, a slightly spicy note, which I assume is the Shiraz, and moderate smooth tannins which the bottle notes claim are typical of KK.

It is another of those 'medium everything' wines, except for the alcohol of 13.5% but this doesn't really make itself felt. It is not expensive and not disappointing but won't make it to the mental list of crowd pleasers that I rely on when entertaining.

The front label has a little square golden icon at the top and centre bearing the name Pamukkale. This is a town in the region famous for hot springs and white walled hills that give the town its name. Pamukkale means 'cotton castle' because the spring waters are rich in calcium and a beautiful sedimentary rock, travertine, has built up over countless years to provide a landscape that has led to the area being listed as a world heritage site. The wine may not be sufficient reason to visit on its own, but I'd be happy to drink it there if I was ever fortunate enough to visit, even if this time I had to pay my own way,

Jurancon Sec

This week I have been reminded that there is some truth in the saying 'less is more'. I have always been quite drawn to the concept since spending some of my working life as a data analyst in a team of the same. Many people hear the term data analyst and assume it means something similar to 'statistician', and it may do in some cases, but not mine. I was the type of data analyst who spent far longer than is healthy thinking about the nature of things and how best they should be represented in computer systems. My conceptual heroes were William of Ockham, famous for his razor which he used to dispense with unnecessary logical complexity, and Plato, who would have been pleased I am sure, as at the time I viewed my work as being a twentieth century realisation of his theory of forms. Now I think I was overpaid for being a pretentious waste of space and that the collective noun for data analysts is definitely 'a surplus'.

The reminder this week comes not from ontological debate but from reading that of the two varieties of the Manseng grape, Gros Manseng is considered the lesser,whilst Petit Manseng the greater. The little one is famous for its use in the production of sweet wines of some reknown, but the Gros version more often used in dry wines.

Week J (2014) Lapeyre, Jurancon Sec. 2012. No.2 Pound Street. £13.

Made with 100% Gros Manseng this is a highly flavoured dry white wine from South West France, about 300m up in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

It is the kind of wine that makes its presence felt as soon as the cork is pulled from the bottle and the aromas whizz up the nostrils. It is deeply coloured golden lemon yellow and aromas and colour both being strong are in balance.

I was initially quite taken aback by the intensity of the flavours, having over the last year encountered so many white wines that fall into the 'crisp green apples' category. This one is more knock-ya-head-off-with-a-grapefruit, backed up by some herbaceous notes and what I think might be minerality. I say think because I have read much in the recent wine press about whether 'minerality' is a meaningful wine descriptor or not, but most contributors appear to agree that a wine that has a suggestion of wet stones somewhere in its profile fits the bill. I think this does.

It is full bodied, but only 12% abv and has some oak character. Given the intensity of all of its characteristics it is no surprise that it has a long finish, with the citrus tones lasting longest.

The maker Jean-Bernard Larrieu is the third generation of the family to manage the vineyard bought by his grandfather in 1920. The business involved cattle and strawberries for many years and in 1985 the winery was built. Over the next few years the winery became the focus and the last of the strawberries were picked in 1988 and three years later the cattle business ended. They now have 17ha of vines, farmed organically, and all of the work from vineyard to bottle is undertaken by the family-based team and there is co-operation with other small producers in the locality, so there is much to be admired in their overall approach.

It is, perhaps, not a wine that is going to appeal to everyone and, in truth, I am unlikely to buy it again, but it is good to find a white wine that is so distinctive and different from any that I have tasted before.