Tuesday, 8 June 2010
2009 Alicante Bouchet 2009 White Frontignac 2008 Frugal Farmer
A glance at the Wine Purchases spreadsheet reveals we've had two deliveries from Rockford that failed to produce an entry since the previous posting. The first of those comprising half a dozen '09 Alicante Bouchet, and three each of the '09 White Frontignac and the '08 Frugal Farmer, was a December restock of fridge-friendly goodies to see us through the summer festive drinking season and a Southport excursion, and for various reasons the initial samplings of each wine failed to produce a written comment.
After a bottle or two has gone (and, no, I'm not talking in one session) you tend to forget that you still need to put something together for the web site. Short term memory loss, and all that.
There isn't, on the other hand (and I'm noticing this more and more as I go through the wine writing motions, too much new that you can say about wines that have etched themselves into a position where they're an automatic inclusion in a regular reorder, which is the case with the '09 Alicante Bouchet and White Frontignac.
They're both wines I want on hand in the wine rack and chilled down in the fridge and when I run out a reorder is an inevitable consequence of the dearth of two regular staples.
As a firm fan of the spicy end of the flavour spectrum, I eat plenty of curry and chlli-laden dishes, and the sweetness lurking in the White Frontignac makes it an almost ideal style when something along those lines hits the table (as does the Pfeiffer The Carson Gewurztraminer) so I’m always going to be looking at having a bottle or six around the place. As with the others I’ve tried, 2009 White Frontignac ($15.50) goes down a treat in such circumstances, a touch of sweetness there, sure, but nothing approaching the cloying sugar levels you tend to find in sweet wines at the budget end of the spectrum (and yes, Crouchen Riesling, I’m looking right at you).
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.