MICHAEL GREEN’S WINE NOTES #212

Private wine-tasting celebrated Christmas with extravagant tasting.

Our private wine-tasting group celebrated Christmas with an extravagant tasting of champagne and Cap Classique, hosted by Joan Seebregts at her home.

Champagne is, of course, the most famous wine in the world and this designation may only be used for wines from the Champagne region of France. Many other countries make excellent sparkling wines, but they may not be called champagne, not on the label, anyway.

In South Africa the term Cap Classique is used for wines that are made by the traditional champagne method of a second fermentation in the bottle, slow repeated turning of the bottle by hand to move sediment to the neck, and swift uncorking and recorking to remove the sediment and add a small quantity of sugar and alcohol syrup rather delectably called the dosage.

All this takes time and skill, hence the high prices of champagne-style wines. What you get at the end is the most subtle, invigorating and memorable of all wines, a kind of vinous equivalent of a fine diamond.

Joan’s tasting drew many excited plaudits from the participants, and rightly so, considering that the prices of the wines ranged from about R125 a bottle to more than R500. We tasted nine wines, with the concomitant danger of palate fatigue towards the end.

The tasting was, as usual, blind, and most of the tasters correctly identified four or five of the wines. The scoring was predictably high, and when the scores were totted up the best value by far seemed to be an excellent French champagne from Woolworths.

Top marks went to one of the lesser known French names, Billecart-Salmon. This is a pale gold wine with a slight apple aroma and flavours of apple, peach, pear and citrus. It has a long lingering aftertaste. Price is generally more than R500 a bottle.

Second place went to the better known Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, a blend of pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier, an elegant wine with complex flavours. Eight million bottles of this wine are sold every year, and you can buy it in Durban for about R400 a bottle for the non-vintage version or R575 for the 2002 vintage.

Third was the world’s best-selling champagne, Moet et Chandon Brut Imperial, pinot noir, chardonnay and pinot meunier. This is a pale yellow colour with shades of green. The flavours and aromas include apples, citrus, nectarine and nuts. Price in Durban is about R360 for the non-vintage. Incidentally, the Moet in the name is pronounced mow-ett, not mow-ee.

Fourth place went to the wine that seems to me to be the best value of the lot: a Woolworths special import, the first-rate Comtesse Alexia French champagne, which sells at about R200 a bottle.

There was very little difference in most of the scores for all nine wines. The most expensive wine tasted was Ayala Millesime. Ayala is not well known in South Africa. It is a 150-year-old champagne house that was bought recently by Bollinger, a much more familiar name. The composition of this wine is 80 percent pinot noir and 20 percent chardonnay. The wine has aromas of honey, toast and nuts, fruity, quite intense but not heavy.

The South African wines tasted included two rather rare items: Silverthorn The Green Man Blanc de Blancs, from a cellar at Roberson established in 1998, 100 percent chardonnay, price about R150; and High Constantia Clos Andre, chardonnay and pinot noir, very dry, austere, elegant, about R175.

Other Cape wines tasted were the much admired Graham Beck Brut Blanc de Blancs (about R150) and the equally respected Villiera Monro Brut, about R125. – Michael Green