The colour of Red and Rosé wine comes from the skin of the grapes. When you crush a white grape, keep the grape juice, discard the skins and allow the alcoholic fermentation to take place, you end up with a white wine.

If you crush red grapes and discard the skins, the juice is also clear so you will get a white wine from these grapes. However, if you leave the red skins in the mix during fermentation, then the colour leaches out of the skins and by the time all of the sugar has been fermented into alcohol (say 14 - 20 days), you get a full red wine.

If you take the skins out before the fermentation has finished, say after 24-36 hours, you will end up with a pale rosé like Domaine Tour Trencavel (above left). Or you can leave the skins for longer, say 48-72 hours and you will get a much deeper rosé like Ch. d’Or et de Gueules Trassegum (above right).

Both are excellent and best served chilled.

Of the eight varieties Grenache is the most widely planted with over 60% of all vineyards plantings. Then we have Syrah, Mourvedre and Cinsault, followed by the lesser used Counoise, Vaccarese, Muscardin and Terret Noir.

So when you want to find a Pope’s Newcastle Wine look-alike at more affordale prices, then you need to look for a Grenache-dominated red from the area, with all the same attributes but not the price of Chateauneuf. Where is this leading?

Chateau d’Or et de Gueules’ Castel Nou 2008 is made 100% from Grenache.

They have world-renowned names like Barolo, Amarone and Chianti all of which, as in every other country, have great examples and awful examples. Many Italian reds are disappointingly light and wishy-washy due to over-production but when they really concentrate the grapes and allow the resultant wines to show their true colours, then they can be wonderful. There’s a real parallel with the South of france here.

Whites, too, such as Soave, Pinot Grigio, Trebbiano seem mainly to produce watery, bland beverages but conversely, find a Grechetto with lovely soft creamy flavours and you won’t look back

Sparkling wines require a higher level of acidity (Don’t ask me why, I’m not a Chemist) so the best Sparkling wines come from cooler climate areas where the grapes don’t ripen so much. Think about picking an unripe apple from a tree and biting into that sharp acidity. As fruit ripens fully the acid level goes down.

Champagne is at the northern limit in France where the grapes will not ripen enough to produce good wine but enough to make great Sparkling Wine. It’s the same in England (or Wales or Scotland for that matter).

So it should come as no surprise that the English climate can produce some great Bubbly and my view is that  Nyetimber is the best of these. It’s winning lots of awards so plenty of people think likewise.

My view is that we should drink good wine from whereever it comes from and shun bad wine from wherever it comes from, but if we have a chance to help the Balance of Payments deficit and drink super quality Bubbly at the same time, then it’s Win/Win.

This handy gadget (the domestic application of modern winery best-practice) is in constant use chez-Hughes so I was able to enjoy them all in perfect condition over the following couple of weeks, but the star performer was the Dolcetto d’Alba. I had a glass a day for 5 days and it just got better each day.

The PP preserves the wine in whatever its condition is when you squirt it so I guess that means by day 5 it was the equivalent of having been opened an hour or so, or maybe decanted.

Peter’s is taking the subject of Premium Chilean Syrahs and as part of his research he invited a number of Wine Trade Luminaries (self included) to blind taste 25 such wines and to give our results.

25 Premium Chilean Syrahs

Christophe Bousquet

I went to Vinisud with, amongst other things, the aim of getting to the bottom of sulphur allergy in wine. Several friends, customers, family members have complained of this, so I went to find out.

My destination was Christophe Bousquet at Ch. Pech Redon because his ’Les Cades’ Cuvee which we ship is produced from organically grown grapes and made with minimum intervention. His immediate reaction was that it’s unlikely to be a sulphur allergy as most foodstuffs contain sulphur at varying levels, so you’d be allergic to almost any food.

Les Cades grapes are hand-picked, hand-loaded into small bins and taken to the fermentation tanks without the addition of any sulphur - not  in the vineyard and not during fermentation. Often SO2 is added at both these stages to avoid oxidation and to stop any rogue yeasts or bacteria getting into the wine. If your grapes are healthy and your winery spotless, then you don’t need SO2.

He adds a smidge of SO2 to the wine in October to stop malo-lactic fermentation, but that’s it. The wine is neither fined nor filtered, just left to settle naturally before bottling, so what you drink is as natural as it gets.

Pech Redon Les Cades has about as little SO2 as any wine and Christophe is proud of that and how clean his wines are, but he does not think people who react badly to certain red wines are reacting to the Sulphur.

So, no answers here, but will keep asking.

www.pech-redon.fr

So I lost a day’s tasting but the experience was worthwhile and I do have some great new wines lined up to ship.

All I had to do was taste and eat, Diane, on the other hand was non-stop hosting and caught here finding a new bottle to open, but always with a smile no matter how tired she may be.

Good job I did because as a result I hope to show you some of their wines on our list before long. Their wines come from the Cotes de Thongue (no Thong jokes please - The Thongue is the river running by their Domaine near Pézenas.
Just time for a quick coffee and brushing of blackened teeth before seeing Stéphane Védeau.

We took his Cotes du Rhone Villages 2006 just before Christmas and soon sold out. Now was a chance to taste the follow on vintage from the stellar 2007 harvest. No disappointment here, and also the white 2009 which I had not tasted before was excellent. We ended with a little taste of his 2007 Chateauneuf du Pape which was awarded 96/100 by Robert Parker in US. I may be able to get 12 out of him, and even at 35 quid (no symbol for pound sterling on a french keyboard either!) q bottle I’ll be holding back 6 bottles for myself.