Vega Sicilia wine tasting

Last night I had the privilege of attending a tasting in Seville of wines made by the fabled winery Vega Sicilia. Vega Sicilia is Spain's answer to a first-growth Bordeaux, with its older vintages fetching very high prices at auction. The tasting took place in the Casino de la Exposición which is attached to the Lope de Vega theatre; a beautiful setting for a wine tasting, as can be seen in the photo below, taken prior to the start of the event.


The tasting was attended by over 200 people, a record for a tasting of Vega Sicilia wines. It was led by Xavier Ausás who is the winemaker and technical director of Vega Sicilia. The tasting was organised by Tierra Nuestra, a wine company that I worked for before setting up A Question of Taste. I was waiting at the door with my brother-in-law to go into the tasting, when José Luis Becerra who runs Tierra Nuestra came out and asked us if we could help pouring wine. So, we spent half an hour working before the tasting started!
The Vega Sicilia group actually comprises 4 wineries: Vega Sicilia, Alión and Pintia in Spain,and Oremus Tokaj in Hungary. We started the tasting with a dry white wine from the Tokaj area, Mandolás 2006. The nose had opulent tropical fruit, floral and mineral notes. On the palate it showed high acidity and was slightly austere with some weight. The fruit showed through with honeyed and toasted notes.
We then went on to tasting two wines from the winery Pintia, situated in the Toro region in the province of Zamora. The principal grape variety is Tinto de Toro, a local variant of Tempranillo. Due to the hot summers, the grape has a thicker skin than in say Rioja. The first wine, Pintia 2007, has not been released yet. It was black cherry in colour with a very plummy nose with mineral and toasted aromas. On the palate it was still very tannic and somewhat astringent, but with great fruit. I think the wine will be excellent in a few years. We then tasted Pintia 2001, the first commercially available vintage. I found this wine to be a little rustic. It showed dark fruit, well-integrated oak and a mineral quality something like hot stones. On the palate the tannins were very much alive.
Two vintages of Alión were next in line. Alión is Vega Sicilia's second winery in the Ribera del Duero region. The first commercial vintage was from 2001. We tasted the 2006 and 2001.
Alión 2006, which is still not on the market, had a nose of blackberry and cranberry fruit with evident lactic notes. The wine was medium-bodied and quite subdued with a lot more time in bottle needed . The Alión 2001 was much more evolved as you would expect. Fruit and well-integrated toasted oak with a slight farmyardy aroma (not unpleasant). A very elegant wine on the palate with fruit, tannins and acidity well-integrated. Very persistent pure fruit on the finish.


Xavier Aúsas, seen in the photo above, then went on to present 9 vintages of Valbuena. I tasted the Valbuena 2005 and Valbuena 2004 side by side. The 2005 is a more forward wine with butterscotch and herby notes on the nose as well as plenty of fruit. The tannins are already rounding off in contrast to the 2004 which was a more austere wine. It will need more time to come round but will be a great wine as will the 2005. The Valbuena 2003 gave me the impression of a wine made in a hot year, being very Mediterranean in style with plenty of herby aromas and very ripe fruit. I was impressed with the fine oak shown on the nose of the Valbuena 2002 . The palate revealed high acidity with well-integrated tanins and good fruit.
It was then on to a very elegant Valbuena 2001 which showed a very deep nose of sweet fruit and fine oak. On the palate a very seductive wine with great balance. The Valbuena 2000 was much less opulent than the previous wine but not at all austere with a long finish.
The Valbuena 1999 was a much fuller style of wine with plenty of fruit on the nose and on the palate. Very well-integrated tanins and a very persistent finish. The Valbuena 1998 had a complex nose of tobacco, leather, spice and excellent ripe fruit. Another wine with a very seductive palate. For the last of the Valbuenas we went back another fifteen years. The Valbuena 1983 was a completely different animal to all the previous wines. On the nose aromas of freshly ground coffee hit me straight away together with earthy notes and hints of old sherry. Good fruit on the plate as well as toasted aromas and distinct notes of mushroom.
To finish the tasting we travelled back in time another 30 years! The Vega Sicilia Unico 1953 was a light brick red colour with a very wide evolved rim (see the wine in one of the glasses in the photo below). The nose gave me forest floor aromas together with notes of old sherry and brandy. On the palate the wine still had very good acidity with noticeable fruit and a certain dusty quality. The wine has lost a lot of flesh over the years but is still holding up well. A fifty-six year wine was a great way to end a fantastic wine tasting.

More about Iberian ham, olive oil and cheese

Since last writing on this blog I have been very busy, running lots of our one-day tours, organising cooking classes with chef Willy Moya, and taking people on tapas tours around Seville. I have also spent 4 days with someone from a British production company who are probably going to make a 6-part series on Spanish cuisine which will be presented by a famous chef. The person I was with was making a recce visit to do some filming, so that an initial presentation of possible content can be made before serious research goes ahead.
We started by filming in some of the best tapas bars in Seville on a very busy Saturday night with me talking about what we were eating and about the whole idea of tapas in general. The next morning we set off up into the mountains to the north-west of Seville to visit a man who breeds Iberian pigs and makes fantastic acorn-fed Iberian ham, as well as all the other cured meat products. We toured around different parts of the farm, seeing pigs of different ages. In one area, as we stood under a holm oak tree we could hear the plop of acorns as they fell on the ground; the acorn-eating season for the pigs was just starting! Below, are a few photos I took. The first shows an oak tree that is full of acorns, the second some free-range Iberian pigs rooting around for acorns.



As well as looking at the world of the Iberian pig and having a great lunch at a restaurant in the town of Aracena, a usual haunt of mine, we visited my favourite olive oil producer just outside the town of Beas, in the province of Huelva. The olive oil, made by a perfectionist in small quantities, comes from 5 varieties of olive: Arbequina, Hojiblanca, Picual, Manzanilla and Picudo. The olives are processed at the optimum time for producing high-quality oil with an incredible attention to detail and absolute cleanliness. A rigourous selection of olives is made before processing to ensure only the healthiest olives are used. The result is a complex olive oil with an amazing aroma and taste that puts it on the same level as very fine wine.
On the last day of filming we went to visit a producer of the cheese known as Queso or Torta de la Serena. The area where the cheese is produced is located in the south-eastern part of the province of Badajoz in the region of Extremadura. I wrote something about this cheese and its cousin Torta del Casar earlier this year. The cheese is made from the unpasteurised milk of Merino sheep that are milked twice a day giving around just 300ml of milk per ewe! As I mentioned in my entry earlier this year the coagulating agent for the milk comes from the flower of a thistle. To be precise, what is used are the dried stamens of the cardoon (Cynara cardunculus). They are steeped in water and then removed after being squeezed. It is the liquid that is then added to the milk to curdle it. The curd that separates from the whey goes into muslin bags that are put into moulds and left on shelving, open end facing down to allow for liquid to drain off. After a few hours the cheese is taken out of the mould and turned around. This process can be seen in the photo below. The cheese is left for a few more hours before being


salted and put into the curing rooms where each cheese will spend around 2 months. In the photo below you can see cheeses that are curing on wooden shelving, something that is normally prohibited. What you normally see is plastic or metallic shelving for purposes of hygiene. If this was the case with the Queso or Torta de la Serena, the cheese would become a hard cheese. The bacteria that stops the cheese from going hard only does its work when the cheeses on on wood! This is absolutely amazing. Some of the cheeses are more liquid and are known as Torta de la Serena, whilst others are firmer but still spreadable. These are known as Queso de la Serena.

Grape harvest in the Ronda area

It's been over two months since I last added anything to this blog, which is very bad. I will try and be more frequent in my writing in the future.
Recently I have been to the Ronda area quite a few times with clients, visiting some of the great boutique wineries there. It's harvest time at the moment and so it's a great time for visits. Seeing everything happening makes it much easier to explain the wine making process. The grape varieties grown in the area include: Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Petit Verdot and Pinot Noir. In the wineries that I visit the Tempranillo, Merlot, Syrah and Pinot Noir have been picked and are going through cold maceration, alcoholic fermentation, post maceration or malolactic fermentation. Alcohol levels will be quite high this year due to August being hotter than normal.
In the photo below Syrah grapes are passing along a selection table where unripe, squashed and dried out grapes are removed along with any leaves. The grapes then pass through a de-stemming machine before being pumped into pre-cooled fermentation vats where they will be kept in cold maceration before allowing the temperature to rise, when selected yeasts will be added and fermentation starts.


When fermentation finishes, along with any period of post-maceration, the wine is drained off and stored in a separate tank. The remaining skins are then gently pressed to obtain press wine. If the pressure applied is too high, bitter tannins from the pips will also be extracted, something that nobody wants. Below are some photos of the grape skins and the pressing process.



To finish, I have included a photo of a wine tasting at one of the Ronda wineries taken three days ago with a fantastic group of people from Canada. I did a great tapas tour with the same group last Saturday. In one of the bars, a temple to the best acorn-fed Iberian ham, one of the group, Jennifer, ended up cutting ham for us and doing it very well! But, as they say, that is another story.

Roda 1 Tasting

On Monday of last week (June 29th) I had the privilege of attending a superb vertical wine tasting in which all the Roda 1 wines that have been released on the market were tasted. Roda 1 has established itself over the last decade or so as one of the top Rioja wines and this was a fantastic opportunity to compare different vintages and to see how the wines were developing. As many of the wines are no longer available for purchase, except from private collectors, this was a unique experience. The tasting took place in a building called Naves de Barranco, built in the latter part of the 19th century as a fish market. It is now used principally for exhibitions organised by the local tourist board and there is definitely no smell of fish!




We tasted 13 different wines, comprising all the vintages from 1992 to 2005, with the exception of 2003 when Roda 1 was not made. The winemaker and director of Bodegas Roda, Agustín Santolaya, gave a superb presentation before he left everyone alone to taste the different vintages. After about 45 minutes he then commented on each of the different years and asked all the participants to name their three favourite wines.
For me there was only one vintage that I didn't really like and that was 1992, which for me seemed rather dried out. All the rest had plenty of dark fruit and good tannic structure, which was sometimes a little austere as with the 1994. 1997 considered a lesser vintage in the Rioja produced a wine which was Burgundian in style and much appreciated by everyone. The 2003 in contrast, produced in a very hot year, was Mediterranean in style with notes of wild herbs and balsamic aromas.




Unsurprisingly, the most voted wines came from vintages which had been declared as excellent in the Rioja, that is to say 1994, 1995, 2001, 2004 and 2005. Almost everyone's favourite wine was the 2001. This for me was the star of the tasting. The nose was complex and elegant. almost ethereal. In the mouth the acidity, fruit and tannins were all in perfect balance with a long and again very elegant finish. This is not a massive muscular wine that impresses for the first five minutes but a wine that evolves in the glass and that when the bottle is finished you crave for more. My second-choice wine was the 1995, which I have tasted quite a few times, the last one being in the winery a few years ago. This was very polished with silk-like tannins and probably has quite a few more years to go before it starts to decline. My third wine was a difficult choice between the 2004 and 2005. Both these wines need a few more years before they are at their peak. I found the 2004 a bit more closed on the nose and the tannins of the 2005 more rounded.
I plumped for the 2005, but both wines will be fantastic.




After we finished the wine tasting we tasted one of the extra virgin olive oils that are made by Roda, but from Catalonia and not from the Rioja region. The olive oil called Dauro, is made from three kinds of olives; Arbequina, Hojiblanca and the Greek variety Koroneiki. On the nose the olive oil has an incredible complexity of aromas which include tomato leaf, apple, artichoke, freshly cut grass, grated lemon peel etc. On the palate it is not at all aggressive with just a slight piquancy at the back of the throat. I have used this olive oil many times and is for me one of the top three or four olive oils in Spain.

Some more photos

I took a few photos on a trip with some clients to Jerez last week. In the first photo we are about to start a wine, brandy and sherry vinegar tasting in the first winery that we visited



The second photo below was at a boutique winery where we were shown around by the owner.



On Saunday (June 7th) I led a group of 21 Belguims on an Iberian ham tour. The following are some photos taken at the ham-curing factory that we visited. They have over 1 million hams hanging in their cellars! They also have quite a lot of smoking rooms for their chorizo.

New photos at last!

As promised in my last blog entry, I am going to add some recent photographs of tours that I have run. Last Friday (May 15th) I ran an olive oil tour to the Sierra of Grazalema, so above you can see my clients tasting some high quality extra virigin olive oils, Below the first photo is a view through a window at the olive oil mill and in the second goats are being cleared from the road!



Well, on Monday of this week (May 18th) I ran an evening tapas tour in Seville for a group fo 10 people from the UK. Three members of the group had been on a tapas tour with me last October and liked it so much that they wanted to repeat the experience with their partners and friends. Below is a photo in one of the bars that I often take people to.


On Tuesday (May 19th) I took some Australian clients on a wine tour in the Ronda aea. Below, is a photo of them with winemaker Rodrigo in the vineyard.


The final photograph is of a wine tasting lunch held yesterday (May 20th) at El Rinconcillo (est. 1670) with a group of clients from California. In the photo we are on the 4th course, pairing an amontillado with an excellent sheep's milk cheese


I hope to be adding photos of other tours soon.

Very busy (thankfully!)

My promise to write more entries in this blog have not been kept. This comes of having had too much work in April and the start of this month! Since writing last I have run all of the one days tours we offer at least once, with some being run four or five times. I have also done numerous tapas tours, several wine tastings and we've had quite a few cooking classes too.
I get to meet lots of winemakers, olive oil producers, ham producers, restaurant owners and so on, and they all have a similar story at the moment. The downturn in the economy is having a big effect on their businesses. There is quite a bit of pessimism around, tinged with the hope that things will turn around later this year. I hope so for all their sakes and for everyone else who is going through a bad patch.
Well, my wife gave me a new digital camera as a birthday present a few weeks ago; the old one stopped focusing properly. I will, therefore, be adding some photos to my blog entries. This, hopefully, will give people a better idea of the activities that we run.