The ‘09 Alicante Bouchet, like its predecessors, is a comfortable rose style completely uncontaminated by the presence of tannins, and as such I gathered up two bottles to take with us when we wandered across to a barbeque hosted by the Notorious Irish Scoffer. MacScoffenheimer had expressed a strong aversion to red wine, based on extreme illness after excessive consumption of cheap bulk red wine in the company of The Evil Vince.
Given the fact that the teinturier Alicante Bouchet is one of the very few red grapes where the juice is tinted rather than clear (red rather than white) it's possible to ferment a red wine without leaving the juice in contact with the skins (which is where the red in most red wines originates).
There were a couple of other factors that encouraged me to take two bottles. For a start at 9.5% alc/vol you can drink two bottles without going over the top. Not that I was ever going to be allowed to do that on my own. As a confirmed fan of the style Madam was always going to claim her share, and the light, fruity, non-tannic style means it goes down very well with almost everybody I've fed it to. Even the notoriously anti-wine Frockster has admitted that, yes, he could drink that, so it's one of those wines you can pretty confidently offer around.
Needless to say, it wasn't something that rocked The Scoffer's boat, though the other guests enjoyed it as I learned of the existence of Japanese comic books about wine drinking. Who'd have thunk? All in all, another reason why we keep a stock of Alicante Bouchet on hand.
Figuring the light red would go down a treat, I needed something in a full-bodied style to round things off and take us through the post-prandial conversation and ended up including a bottle of the 2008 Frugal Farmer, working on the principle that it was, again, a reasonably light style that had a nice link to the preceding Alicante Bouchet. Developed in recognition of a growing demand for fresh, lighter spicy red wines the wine solves the issue of what to do with tannin- and pigment-laden Alicante Bouchet skins by crushing Grenache and Mourvedre/Mataro (at Rockford it's Mataro) onto what may otherwise have been a wasted resource (hence the Frugal Farmer tag).
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