Saturday, December 22, 2012

IN THE PINK


We had a Deutz Marlborough Rose yesterday. This is Her Indoor's current favourite. Well the style is anyway as I'm sure that Krug Rose or Pol Roger Rose would be more to her liking but who the hell can afford that on a regular basis.

She 'discovered' the Deutz Rose at what was her favourite wine bar, the Crowne Plaza in Albert Street. She used to work in a building over the road and would occasionally meet friends there for a glass. The wine list is pretty good there and it's nice to see that they list a quality wine like the Deutz by-the-glass.

We are always on the lookout for this when it is specialled in supermarkets (not very often) but when it came down to $24.99 recently (down from about $45) we snaffled as many as we could afford.

There are quite a lot of good quality New Zealand methode traditionelle wines on the market now and ever increasing numbers of other sparklings see link here:   DRINKING STARS

It seems that winemakers are keen to move through as much wine as possible and will blend and carbonate anything. Look out for sparkling pinot noir, viognier, cabernet sauvignon, and even gewurtztraminer in the future. Yes, it will be a travesty but we already have the ridiculous sparkling sauvignon blancs and pinot gris in the market.

What I've noticed recently is a whole lot of sparkling roses. This is a good thing if made well and even better if made in the methode traditionelle (like champagne) way.



Te Hana, Sileni, Akarua, Toi Toi, Soljans, West Brook., Pelorus, Quartz Reef, Brancott Estate are just some of the labels out of dozens of new offerings I've seen.

With luck, and as I said with good winemaking  this style of wine will continue to please.
Still Rose has consistently been a disappointment. Amongst the many (too many) offerings there are only a few that are worth buying and drinking with most having a confectionery character that becomes cloying after a couple of mouthfuls. Bubbles certainly help to keep the wine fresh and deter the cloying character and bottle-fermented (methode traditionelle) manufacture provides a yeasty and leesy complexity that gives the wine 'guts'.

The Deutz Rose was the 2006 vintage. I'm not sure if this is the latest vintage release but certainly we only purchased it recently.
It had a nice (not artificial) salmon-pink colour. There were mouth-watering freshly baked bread aromas along with hints of strawberry and cherry. The flavour was full and leesy. Bloody good.

3 comments:

My Spurt said...

Plenty of food for thought here! Well, I guess I am a thinking kind of guy.

Richard (of RBB) said...

The Curmudgeon gets spam replies when he posts. He's incredible!

THE WINE GUY said...

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