I was kind of surprised to see that I haven’t made a post since before Christmas. Of course the holiday takes a bit of a toll on my available time. But what has been eating up all my free bandwidth is that my work at Fabbioli Cellars is starting to take me in new and exciting directions. You see,  Doug (as in Doug Fabbioli the owner of Fabbioli Cellars) is attempting to put together a school of sorts focusing on helping people start small businesses of an agricultural nature and I’m being tasked to develop some of the course material for this school.

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The chateau that we were staying at was approximately one and a half hours from the Rhone wine region and it was one of our major goals while were were in France to get there. However, wine is made just about everywhere in France and we figured that we should sample the local fare before heading out to the more well known places.

The region that the chateau is located in is called Savoie (pronounced sah-vwah by the locals) and upon the advice of the Equestrian Queen, we headed up to the little village of Chignin (shin- yin) in search of local wine.

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For those of you that haven’t been to Europe before, you should know that most flights consist of an overnight journey. You leave here some time late afternoon, say 5:58 PM, and you arrive at a destination like Geneva, Switzerland at something like 7:02 AM. And it is still dark outside. This of course meant that even in spite of copious amounts of drinking on the plane, was unable to get more than slight fits and starts of sleep. That meant that our first day in France required us to push on through with minimal sleep.

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The Petit Verdot grape is one of the grapes that has been found to be very prolific here in Virginia. Much like the Cabernet Franc grape, it grows exceptionally well here although, much like its cousin, it also grows somewhat differently here in Virginia than it does in its native France.

You see, the Petit Verdot grape is one of the five noble red grapes from the Bordeaux region of France. For those wondering, the other four are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Malbec. There is a sixth red grape, Carménère, which is allowed to be grown in the Bordeaux region, however to my knowledge, there is only one winery, Château Clerc Milon which is a fifth growth Bordeaux (the classification of wineries in Bordeaux is a topic for another day) currently growing it.

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Every day at the SWE Conference our lunch was sponsored by someone, usually a wine marketing bureau. One of the days lunches was sponsored by the Wines of South Africa. I had worked with these folks when they were pouring wine here at a DC Wine expo during the spring and I was introduced to some spectacular wines so I was pretty excited to see them at the conference. One of the wines that was available during our lunch was the Mulderbosch Cabernet Sauvignon Rosé.

This excited me for two reasons. First, during the summer, I tend to drink a fair bit of rosé wine. I find them crisp and refreshing and I thoroughly enjoy them both as a sipper and along with food. The second reason I was excited was because I had recently reviewed this wine and hadn’t had a chance to post my review here and I knew that it was a really nice wine.

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I know that I have been a bit slack in the past couple of months in producing posts and reviews. Frankly, it has been quite a busy time for me. I’ve took some time and catch up on things around the house (of which I’m still woefully behind) and begin marching forward on some other things. I finally got the results of my WSET Advanced Class (Level 3) back in which I passed with distinction (that’s a technical term that means a 85 or above). I’ve developed an adanced class on wine tasting for presentation at the winery and finally, last week a colleague and myself drove Alyssa (my Corvette for those that don’t know) up to Providence for the Society of Wine Educators annual conference.

These events always charge me up and get me very excited about my work in the field I’m in and this one was no exception. In fact, my colleague and I are in the process of putting together a proposal to do a presentation during next year’s conference. We’ll see how that turns out but as of right now I have a good feeling about things.

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I have been working for a while on developing classes in exploring various varietals and styles of wine. I’ve been using my co-workers as guinea pigs to work out the kinks in these classes. The first one I offered to them back in May and it was simply an introductory class on how to taste wine. I felt that this was a good place to start simply because too many people don’t know how to go about approaching a glass of wine to break it down. It also gave all of those attending future classes a common place from which to begin our explorations.

The second class was one that I offered this past Saturday and I entitled it the World of Chardonnay. This may have been a a bit of overstating things as covering all of the different styles of Chardonnay out there in just six wines is quite ambitious. However, this was an introductory class so I felt that giving them exposure to six distinctly different styles of Chardonnay (eight if you count the oaked and unoaked versions that we make) would be enough to give them a good feel for the grape and give them a basis from which to slot our wines into the hierarchy of Chardonnay wines.

What follows below is a listing of the wines we tasted plus some of our impressions and thoughts about them.

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The Viognier grape is one that I am relatively familiar with because we work with it at the vineyard. It is known for being from the Condrieu region of the Rhone Valley of France, however, it is believed that the Romans brought the grape there and that it may have originated in Dalmatia. Regardless of its origins, it is a grape that due to its ability to bud even after a frost and its loose clusters that allow plenty of air circulation, has become a fixture in the Virginia wine industry. So much so that in May 2011 the Virginia Wine Board announced a plan “…to pursue a marketing plan that will include the designation of Viognier as Virginia’s signature grape for national branding purposes.” Clearly, the Viognier grape is coming of age in the state of Virginia.

However, today we are not talking about Virginia, but of Chile.

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To give you an idea of how hard it is to identify a wine blind, let me provide this anecdote as evidence. Last Monday, the lovely Ms Cocktail and I finally succumbed to peer pressure and went to what is affectionately known as “bottles” at a place called Clyde’s Willow Creek Farm. Now Clyde’s is a very nice chain of restaurants in the DC area and “bottles” refers to the special they run on Mondays which is half priced bottles of wine.

They have a rather extensive wine list at Clyde’s and I had conveniently forgotten my reading glasses (not only am I getting old, but Lasik surgery guaranteed that I would need them) so it was up to Ms Cocktail to peruse the wine list and provide some suggestions. What she came up with was the Venta Morales Tempranillo 2009.

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There are many of you that haven't heard of the Pinotage grape before. It is not one of the major international varieties, but it is a grape whose heritage does stem from these varieties even though it calls South Africa its home. That's because the Pinotage grape is a variety that was bred in South Africa in 1925 and it is a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsault. During that time, the Cinsault grape was known by the name Hermitage, hence the mushing together of the two names to begat Pinotage.

It should be noted that this grape is a true viticultural cross and not a hybrid. A cross is a blending of two grapes from within a single species such as Vitis vinifera which is the species that both Pinot Noir and Cinsault belong to. A hybrid is when grapes from two separate species are crossed to produce something with traits of both such as the Norton grape which is a hybrid of Vitis vinifera and Vitis aestavalis.

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