A 200 year old bottle of Chateau Yquem has just sold for £75,000! I did not know, until now, that white wine can be kept for 200 years and be drinkable at the end of them. It appears that the very good sweet ones can.
The other story concerned a small Australian Australian wine producer who had 1/3rd of his annual production (462 cases) dropped from a fork lift truck and smashed! The financial loss, luckily covered by insurance, was around £650,000. A witness said it looked like a battlefield but smelt a lot better!
www.harpers.co.uk/news/news-headlines/10846-australian-winery-loses-p650k-of-wine-in-forklift-blunder.html
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Now if I had 500 cases of distinctly iffy (sorry) Wine, and it was well insured, the odd $1000 to a trusty fork lift driver would be a pretty good investment..........
Last edited by: pmh on Tue 26 Jul 11 at 14:43
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>> A stonking 15% ABV. I can feel the headache already.
Presumably though you'd be buying it for more than the alcohol content, given you can get 14.5% stuff from the local supermarket for well under a tenner. In fact for that price I would expect it to cure a headache :)
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lovely black bottle - `Velvet label printed on foil - individual velvet bag! - $185.00 a bottle!!!
makes for expensive garbage when the wine has gone! or are you supposed to keep them as showcase souvenirs? - that lot goes against good taste in my book!
I`ll stick to Vino del Hovel - everyone seems to like it!
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Call me a philistine if you like, but wine has become far too stong in alcohol in recent years. To my mind it should be between 10 and 12% by volume, not the 13, 14, 15% we see in almost every bottle available in supermarkets.
I enjoy stuff like Don Simon white wine which comes in 1 litre cardboard cartons, and costs a pound a litre at 11%. Wish it was available in supermarkets here, but no. It's all comedy named, sickly Australian stuff like "Goats Do Roam" or "Chat en Oeuf" or other such marketing malarkey.
There's too much snobbery, marketing and fluff around the stuff. It's just flaming wine, sell it to me cheaply please.
Bah, and very much humbug.
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You wouldn't like Belgium much then Alanovic, They have 15% beer there!
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Oh aye, I like the occasional Leffe. But two's enough. I enjoy sticking away a bottle of wine in an evening though, I just wish it wasn't so strong sometimes. Really enjoyed swilling the lower ABV stuff in Spain this summer.
Last edited by: Alanović on Tue 26 Jul 11 at 16:41
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I wonder how much Margarine would cost if the person who wrote the description for the wine >>
About This Wine:
Dark black violet in colour, this wine has an intensely spiced nose with fruit aromas of fresh raspberry, plum and blueberry with an edge of tar, mocha and blackberry jam extending the complexity. The palate shows amazing purity of fruit with delicate flavours, fine oak tannins and creamy oak. Simply unique it has the ability to coat your entire mouth with the softest of textures yet unleashes such an intense and amazing array of fruit, completely rich and voluptuous with undeniably elegant. A wine that truly deserves its name, coating your tongue like a Velvet Glove.
To honour the beauty and individuality of our Velvet Glove Shiraz, we seal it in a unique bottle, apply a real velvet label printed in silver foil, and then place the bottle in a gorgeous velvet bag embroidered with silver thread. It’s our labour of love to provide you with a joyful experience from beginning to end. <<
got the sack and was snapped up by Kraft!!!
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There's one born every minute. As true today as it's ever been.
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This winespeak gobbledegook doesn't help me at any level. I experiment and find a vineyard and grape that I like and buy it and drink it.
A few months ago there was a series of programmes on tv, concerning food, taste and E numbers. A group of these wine folk were assembled and given, without knowing it, white wine which had been coloured red with food dye, and asked to comment.
Lots of gargling and breathing and spitting ensued, followed by lots of red wine type comments about tobacco, chocolate, leather, rich berries etc. In another programme it was demonstrated that most people could not tell the difference between brandy and whisky, when they drank it, if their noses were clipped like a scuba diver.
Find what you like, buy, drink and enjoy and perhaps share!
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>> In another programme it was demonstrated that
>> most people could not tell the difference between brandy and whisky, when they drank it,
>> if their noses were clipped like a scuba diver.
That makes sense, because the mouth is limited in what it can 'taste' - all the subtlety is in the nose.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taste#Basic_tastes
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>>a series of programmes on tv,<<
Saw something very similar! - six wines, five very expensive and one really "cheapo" were taken on a tray out into a shopping mall, people asked to "find" the cheapo, only three! out of one-hundred succeeded! - obviously we only drink wine in this country for the "snob" value - not because we enjoy all the finest subtleties of the vine!
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'MMmmm... I'm getting FRUIT... hints of LEATHER... a bit of MUSK...'
... as the wine pseud doing a week in the village stocks bravely said when being showered with ripe tomatoes, old shoes and items of unwashed underwear by jeering hordes of swag-bellied beer-scoffers...
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Yes, we really miss Don Simon red & white vino in the 1 litre tetrapak at, IIRC, around 0.98 €
We used it extensively in cooking and have been struggling to find a cheap replacement in the UK. Currently we are using Sainsbury's red & white Spanish cheapo stuff, but it's £2.99 a 75cl bottle.
Mierda!
Any suggestions for a more sensible priced alternative, folks?
It doesn't have to be super-dooper for every- day cooking (in Bol sauce for instance, or chicken stoo)
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Chateau del Hovel - i`ve a wardrobe full of it!!
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In UK £1.60 goes on excise duty, 65p on VAT and 11p on the Common Customs Tariff so your £2.99 bottle has less than 70p "worth" of wine in it.
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If you take bottling transportation and profit into account it's more like 5p's worth
Last edited by: CGNorwich on Wed 27 Jul 11 at 10:03
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Its possible folks, take the three quid wine I blurted on about a week or two back. AT that price it was nectar.
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>>Call me a philistine if you like, but wine has become far too strong in alcohol in recent years. To my mind it should be between 10 and 12% by volume, not the 13, 14, 15% we see in almost every bottle available in supermarkets.<<
+1
That's because wine is bought by people who know/understand nothing about it. 12.5% is more than enough. Not that I'm an expert - but I know some people who are.
In some parts of France anything below 11 per cent or above 13 per cent is not called wine by the locals.
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Never bother to check when buying, but a quick inventory of the Zero wine cellar, reveals all to be between 12 - 13%
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That's because you drink old world wines which tend to less less alcoholic. It's usually the alcoholic ribena style that hales from Australia and California that tends to be around 14.5% to 16%. What makes it worse is that most wines understate the alcoholic content.
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...In some parts of France anything below 11 per cent or above 13 per cent is not called wine by the locals...
I read somewhere that a properly made wine will naturally come out in the strength range Mike quotes.
So anything much stronger or much weaker should be regarded with suspicion, whatever the price.
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Amerone is a wine from the North of Italy, made form the same grape as Valpolicella. However, I believe they leave the grapes on the vine until they wither, which concentrates the sugar content, resulting in a much higher alcohol content, up to 14.5% - my favourite wine.
The unfortunate result is that the reduced yield increases the cost - £20 in the supermarket as opposed to £6 for a good Valpolicella - and £40 in a restaurant.
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Amarone, actually, but yes.
15% is just silly. It's the sort of wine one sniffs and feels the headache coming on already.
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Yes finger fumble,
Yes, silly,
and yes, headache, but wonderful....
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>>and yes, headache, but wonderful....
No.
On Tuesday night we (two of us) abnormally enjoyed a bottle of champagne and a particularly nice bottle of claret from the mid 90s - no particular reason BTW. No headaches.
With the wine in the OP the headache would have started half way down the red. Not necessary.
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Just popped in to a Tesco Express to get some lunch and a bottle of wine for tonight.
Spotted a "British" red wine (in that it's made in Britain from imported grape juice) called Silver Point Bay for £3.43 a bottle, alc 8% by volume .
I expect it'll be rank, but I was prepared to give it a go, so I bought one. Back on the PC I Googled it, and apparently it's supposed to be for women. Well, I guess that's who they're marketing it at, but really. Wine is wine, isn't it?
I shall report back.
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I was right. It was rank. I threw half the bottle's contents down the drain.
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...cheaper than caustic soda!
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But probably more caustic! I hope not. You say rank - was it corked or just a nasty taste? I can't say I'd have had high expectations of wine made in UK from imported grape juice.
Do any of you recall a vile sherry, made in UK, and called QC (I think). Also Piat d'Or sometimes known as p*** a Dog and no longer sold here. I hope!
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It was in a screw top bottle, so not corked.
It tasted nasty to my palate - it was too "grape juicy" if that makes sense. No body at all.
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I think you mean VP which made a range of British Sherries when you could still call it that.
Piat D'Or is a perfectly acceptable French table wine which I believe is still available. The only problem with it being that it is expensive for what it is as, are most heavily promoted branded wines.
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I was called to fix some kit in VP in Kingston. While I was there a huge tanker of concentrated grape juice arrived, and they opened a manhole in the yard to pour it in. The stuff was very viscous and had to be watered down to be turned into "british wine"
Of course there is British wine, Denby of Dorking make a fine wine called "surrey gold" from British grapes grown on the North Downs hillsides, which has the same climate and soil as the Champagne area.
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I think they call that English wine to differentiate it from the stuff made form imported grape juice.
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you are of course correct.
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>> Piat D'Or is a perfectly acceptable French table wine which I believe is still available.
>> The only problem with it being that it is expensive for what it is as,
>> are most heavily promoted branded wines.
No it is not perfectly acceptable. It arose from a market research programme that discovered that people liked wine that tasted like slightly sweet white wine, but had been coloured red. They therefore set out to create a monster of a wine. A multi-headed hydra if you like.
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Nicole likes Matheus Rose. You dont drink it with your wine hat on, but sufficiently chilled, its a pleasant enough slightly fizzy drink and not too sweet. Goes down well on hot afternoons and a barbie.
Last edited by: Zero on Mon 1 Aug 11 at 17:47
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Did you make a lamp out of the bottle? - that was the craze in the seventies. You could buy special adaptors in Woolworths to convert your favourite wine bottle into a lamp.
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I think at one time we had the "Ronco bottle and glass cutter"
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Sounds like a bit of myth to me . The last bottle of Piat d'Or i had was a perfectly drinkable Merlot from the Languedoc like this one.
www.everywine.co.uk/wine.store/Products/Piat-d-Or-Merlot-Vin-de-Pays-d-Oc-200986/Show.html
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Wasnt there some kind of step change in 2001? I know the "le" was dropped.
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>> No it is not perfectly acceptable.
Mapmaker is surely right. It isn't a problem of quality, it's a problem of the wine taste of the great unwashed. No branded wine advertised on TV is likely to be much good.
I am amazed too that Alanovic even thought it was worth trying an 8% wine 'made here from imported grape juice'. Made me shudder even to think of such a concoction. Remember VP? Wincarnis? And wasn't Phyllosan alleged to be wine? 'Vino Sacramento old boy. Just as good as sherry, pleasantly sweet...' Bruddy Herr!
Accidentally bought a bottle of Kosher champagne once in Paris. It was disgusting and the Frogs at dinner giggled at me for it. Most embarrassing. My only taste ever of Israeli wine was equally offputtting. Drunkenness is frowned on in Jewish culture but a lot of the Jews I know don't mind a drink at all. And they wouldn't drink that carp.
Algeria whose state religion disapproves totally of alcohol (although all the Prophet really said was that people shouldn't pray when drunk) used to make very good and rather strong wine of all three main colours. But I wonder what sort of state the industry there is in these days. I suspect it has been running down slowly ever since the French left 50 years ago.
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Some great wine from the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. No 1 is Chateau Musar and their cheaper wine is Gaston Hochar (I think). Musar is about about £18 a bottle depending on the year/vintage.
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>> great wine from the Bekaa valley in Lebanon.
I'm not enough of an oenophile to have sampled many of those but they certainly do make great wine there. Probably been doing it for 4,000 years too. Wine came from the Middle East in the first place. Did I read that they still have pre-phylloxera grape strains there?
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I think you could make quite an attractive table lamp out of the sort of decorated 3, 5 or 10 litre box that my 'house' Oc Merlot comes in. I might give it a go - it will be conversation piece when we host our association of the village well annual meeting later this month.
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It is possible that they may have bearing in mind they are so far from the main European vineyards.
"The grape phylloxera came close to destroying the wine industry of France after its accidental introduction in about 1860; grafting of susceptible European vines onto resistant North American root stock saved the European vineyards."
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Expensive Wine - 2 stories - Mapmaker
