Ice wine from a Nottinghamshire freezer, India Pale Ale from Shotover and the richest ever Oxford Dry from the Bothy Vineyard…
Just a few of the star turns at the Club’s April tasting to complement a simple yet beautifully cooked and presented menu of local food at the Brookes Restaurant. The event – excellently organised by Matt Todd and Tim Cadel – attracted around 50 members. If you missed it, you missed a treat.
We were welcomed with a glass or two of Gusborne Brut Reserve 2007. Tom Jones co-founder of Sparkling English Wines, introducing the wine, told us how his company now represented 26 smaller scale producers of English Sparkling Wines. Their website (http://www.sparklingenglishwine.com/) has an online shop and members were offered a 10% discount.
Gusborne Estate (http://www.gusbourne.com/) now has 20 ha under vine on clay / loam soils dedicated to the classic champagne grapes. The estate is on the south-facing escarpment of the ancient Kentish coastline and Andrew Weeber and his family run it to the highest standards. The wines have had very good press from Jancis Robinson and Tim Atkin and the reception from members endorsed this praise. The 2007 Reserve has spent 36 months on the lees and has a tasty hint of brioche to counterbalance the citric / appley freshness. With more ageing this yeasty character will increase but – as ever – the conflicting demands of cash flow and maturity have to be held in balance. As Tom pointed out, almost all the English sparkling wines are vintage wines with individuality and character whereas the champagne competition at the same price is typically NV wines with the somewhat homogenised character that NV implies.
The first course was English asparagus – a creamy soup, a pair of spears with a fine smoked ham and a salad. Accompanying was Richard and Sian Liwicki’s excellent Oxford Dry. 2011 was a tricky year across the South East but Bothy escaped relatively lightly and a glorious Indian summer more than made up for a poor fruit set and a ‘write-off’ summer. The result was a superb crop of ripe and disease free grapes (Huxelrebe, Solaris, Findling and Perle). Many of the members present had worked in the vineyard over the year and Richard – the man with a wine-making ‘hobby gone mad’ and a day job to hold down – thanked them and others for all their efforts. The reward for the Bothy was this rich and complex wine. In the glass it has palest lemon hue shading to true water white at the rim with a subtle greengage, lime and lime leaf fragrance and a surprisingly rich and powerful mouthfeel – aided by 13% alcohol, the highest ever recorded for the Oxford Dry. Not surprisingly, it’s much sought after by restaurateurs who find it tough to match asparagus with most wines. The Bothy Shop opens on Friday 27 April (for details see http://www.bothyvineyard.co.uk/) and it’s well worth getting down there to buy some of this wine at a remarkable price of £8.50 a bottle.
After the delights of asparagus we moved to slow-cooked Cotswold lamb with new potatoes and pea shoots. To accompany this, Matt and Tim had chosen Bolney Estate’s Lychgate Red 2009.Stuart Barford of the Estate introduced this blend of Rondo and Dornfelder which had a Loire Valley like freshness and fragrance, though some felt it might have benefited from another year or so in bottle. Rodney Pratt and his children Mike and Sam (she’s the winemaker) have grown the property from a 3 acre hobby vineyard to 39 acres – the 6th largest in the UK.
Bolney Estate (http://www.bolneywineestate.co.uk) see themselves as red wine specialists – with Pinot Noir as the star – but have a range of wines including sparkling reds and a Rondo / Dornfelder rosé. The state is just north of Brighton (close to the A23) and by all accounts does excellent barbecues, cream teas and other visitor delights. Tim suggested we hire a club charabanc and head on down...
Dessert was a Millets Farm rhubarb and orange trifle served with an extraordinary dessert wine – North Star vintage 2006 from the Eglantine Vineyard in Nottinghamshire (http://eglantinevineyard.co.uk). Richard Liwicki introduced the wine – in the absence of Tony Skuriat, who has run the vineyard for over 30 years. North Star is made by cryo-extraction of Madeleine Angevine grapes … a fancy way of saying ice wine from the freezer! They can’t call it icewine but as a dessert wine it’s won gold medals in top international competitions. Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon in California has used the same technique but in Tony’s hands it has produced a remarkable liquid with pineapple, dried apricot, tangerine peel, rhubarb and ginger on the nose and a butterscotch note in the mouth. Both residual sweetness (at 170 gsm) and acidity are high so there’s no sense of cloying in a long and complex finish. It’s £20 for a 37.5 cl bottle from the website but much more in the shops.
Lastly came the cheese course – and a break from tradition! We had beer to finish off the meal. But not just any beer. This was the green-hopped India Pale Ale from Ed and Pip Murray’s Shotover Brewery in Horspath (http://www.shotoverbrewing.com/). Ed explained how this beer is a faithful re-creation of an historic beer that changed the face of brewing. It was made for export to India and high levels of hopping were used to ensure it remained fresh despite the 3-4 month sea journey, the high temperatures and the constant motion of the ship. It was the first successful pale beer – as distinct from the browner, blacker stouts and porters that had been the 18th century beers of choice. It led to the Pilsner lager tradition and ultimately to the lagers of the current day (Boo! Hiss!). However, this Shotover India IPA is ‘massively’ hopped with Oxford Hops (Fuggles) giving a rich bitter taste that complemented the cheese. As Ed explained, Shotover Brewery is a craft brewery selling mainly to local pubs and from the brewery door. They hadn’t, he said, ‘set out to make beers that everyone would like’ but the reception here was very positive.
Shakespeare’s celebration of ‘this sceptre isle’ ended the evening but not before Tim Cadel had thanked all the presenters and the superb Brookes restaurant team (http://restaurant.business.brookes.ac.uk) for their time, their effort and their contribution to an excellent evening.