Domaine Chanson, AC Chablis 2016
Pricing : On Sale at 23% Discount at €19.95 down from €25.95
Available : O’Brien’s Wines Shops nationwide
This is one of the best and most over delivering AC Chablis on the market. The Domaine Chanson are one of the oldest of the big Burgundy Houses, the have been making and selling wine for over 250 years.
The have therefore some of the best sets of contacts in the trade. This position of age and heritage in Burgundy always helps when you are trying to buy or source grapes for your wine. Demand for grapes very often far outstrips supply, just think about the presence of Chablis on every wine shop shelf and every restaurant wine list in Ireland, then multiply that by every country in Europe and then the globe.
Yet the vineyards of Chablis only extend to about 10 to 15 miles around the small village of Chablis itself.
This is where a little weighty charisma also comes in and that is what we get with Domaine Chanson because today it is owned by Champagne Bollinger and has been the subject of what can really only be described as lavish love-bombing with money by the Champagne house owner. It isn’t too surprising, the assets of Chanson in Burgundy include one of the most beautiful bastion castles, some prize vineyards and today, state of the art winemaking facilities.
I am drawn to Chablis because of its very brilliant and paradoxical combination of purity, directness and opulence. In the Grand Cru wines this can tend towards very quirky ideas of minerality, while many Premiere Cru can be brutally austere. This is a fine, well-made AC Chablis from cool, chalky soils, in this case at the extreme south of the village it overdelivers with a hint of typical wet wool, lean minerality, fine evolving, pleasure filled and complex finish.
VALSERRANO FINCA MONTEVIEJO, DO Rioja 2012
Pricing : around €45
Available : Whelehans Wines, Silver Tassie, Loughlinstown, County Dublin and good independent Off Licences and Wine Shops nationwide
The Rioja region was once one of the most famous and iconic names not just in Spanish wine but all wines. Today Spain is so keen to show that it has multiple wine regions from Ribera del Duero to Albarino filled Rias Baixas that its two oldest and most revered region have almost been overlooked, Sherry and Rioja.
The Rioja region is located in the very far north of Spain just over the border from France. It sits about an hour in from the coast, high up in the foothills of the Pyrenes and bordered to the west by the Sierra Cantabria mountains. It was by any definition reasonably high and isolated place.
One thing we know about wine regions is if they did not have a big navigable river in the past, one that Roman galleys could navigate to begin with, it usually did not succeed as a great wine source.
This is the case with Rioja, it is one of the first truly modern regions. It really came into being by a combination of the arrival of railway transport which allowed wines to be shipped to the coast and the decimation of Bordeaux’s vineyards by a widespread pest in the 1860s.
Seeking new places to grow vines, pioneers from Bordeaux arrived in Rioja and withteh railways in place persuaded, as here a local lord, the Marques do Solana to plant vineyards and make wine in the Grand Cru Bordeaux style, offering the chance of the great wealth and fame of Bordeaux.
The Marques planted on some of the best sites under Bordeaux expert direction and imported French oak fermenters, built a Bordeaux style cellar and age the wines in the Bordeaux manner.
This wine is made from 60 year old vines, hand picked, slow cool fermented, aged in the most expensive French oak barrels from the Vosges and Allier forest and bottle aged now six years. This is opulent wine making, plush with deep dark fruit, toasty creamy, almost vanilla like touches and a hefty, lingering finish, this is wine for a special occasion or great meal.
