2007

I really appreciate how a good sommelier can make an excellent dinner even more memorable. At a previous (and dare I say excellent) dining experience at Tom Aikens the sommelier recommended Rémy Gresser's Brandhof Muscat with fish.

While searching for a UK source for this wine I learned that I am apparently gifted with a special understanding of this kind of wine (or perhaps wine in general), as the wine merchant wrote to me: "The Muscat is essentially a restaurant wine, very few people understand dry Muscat, like you."

Light, clean colour. Just seconds after the cork comes out of the bottle, your nose tells you that this (dry) wine is a little different from the sweet Haarts. The mineral is more steely, focused, with light melon, fresh acidity, less herbs than usual.

Cherry red, with a purple edge

Smells vaguely of sour cherries and green wood, a little unpleasant funky, sweaty component as well.

Cherries again in the mouth, plums maybe, some sweetness, but also bitterness and a rough edge of tannin. Somehow, the fruit doesn't quite come through.

This has been one of our pasta wines for a few years, and it has done okay, but it doesn't deserve unwavering loyalty: Hard to believe there are no fresher, more focused Italian reds for under 5 €.

A good food companion, this wine combines flinty mineral and green apple with a little hay, spice and nut. A nice dosage of acidity adds to the freshness but also introduces some bitter notes to this otherwise nicely balanced wine. Very pleasant with food (asparagus and fish in our case).

This wine brought great enjoyment to our modest kitchen table - and made me feel vaguely stupid for rambling on about wines five times as expensive with as many adjectives.

Here, three will be enough: fresh, clean, appetizing.

3,75 € for one litre of nice Riesling - beat that, if you can.

Looks quite fizzy, lots of small bubbles, greenish colour. Fresh in the nose. Everything about this wine is very fruity at first, almost like an exotic fruit explosion. Also, it seemed to me somewhat unbalanced at first, going through various stages in a short time, sometimes emphasizing fresh lemony acidity, a little mineral, then suddenly grapefruit.

However, after two hours or so, everything settles down, the mineral gets stronger, the rest of the flavours order themselves around it and a nice and orderly German fashion.

Still very young, but quite nice after two+ hours with air. Especially for the price!

If to me some of the recent 2006 wines were like an acid handgranade, this Riesling here is the 80mm shell. Dry, edgy, green apple with a hint of nut. And a clearly defined core of steely acidity with just enough fruit flavours decorated around it to give you a proper punch.