葡萄酒|红酒|Jancis Robinson--ASC Fine Wines 圣皮尔精品葡萄酒

If you're looking for a hotel that pays a little more attention to wine than most, then this recently formed association may be a good starting point. The company say it was set up ‘in order to reunite wine hotels of high quality, where each member has to fulfil norms of service of quality, paying attention to each detail, architecture, decoration, etc.’ They started in Argentina and have expanded into Chile, Spain and France. Over the coming months they expect to branch out into Italy, South Africa and the United States.

The hotels that join the collection may be set in a vineyared but not necessarily – they may be distinguished by having a particularly good wine list or wine tasting/touring programmes and they are all in wine regions.

Wine Hotels Collection thus acts as a standard setter and international marketing tool for individual hotels in wine regions. The Collection’s website will eventually include a wine shop selling some of the wines on offer in the hotels, and there’s a wine spa and vinotherapy section.

Of the hotels listed below, the only one I have visited is Club Tapiz in Mendoza. I was there in December 2005, before this association existed in Chile, but already it was a charming little hotel with an excellent restaurant in a very attractive setting – generous, traditionally styled rooms in a single-storey building around a peaceful, unfussy courtyard. And good wine.

Current members of the Collection:

Posada Chañarmuyo (La Rioja, Argentina)
Viñas del Golf (San Rafael, Argentina)
Finca Adalgisa (Mendoza, Argentina)
Club Tapiz (Mendoza, Argentina)
Estancia Colomé (Salta, Argentina)
Viñas de Cafayate (Salta, Argentina)
Hotel Golf Peralada (Girona, Spain)
Hospederia del Vino (La Rioja, Spain)
Château Isabeau de Naujan (Girondes, France)
Tabonko Guest House (Maule, Chile)

Coming soon:

Haciendas de España (Spain)
Château Franc Mayne (France)
Villa Mangiacane Hotel (Italy)
Lares de Chacras (Argentina)
Huentala Vineyard Hotel (Argentina)

For more information and details of the hotels listed, visit www.winehotelscollection.com

Article contributed by Jancis Robinson and is sourced from http://www.jancisrobinson.com/

Wine Hotels Collection
Mar 4, 2009 3:39:52 PM

Quantities

A tricky one, this. Individuals' capacity for alcohol varies enormously, as you have doubtless observed yourself. No-one could possibly accuse a host who provided his or her guests with the equivalent of a bottle of wine a head over the course of an evening of meanness. And yet there are some occasions, a weekday lunch, for example, at which it would be extremely sophisticated to provide one stunning bottle (of champagne or white burgundy perhaps) for six people, allowing them each one generous glassful of luxury but minimizing the dangerous snooze factor of a bibulous lunch.

As a general rule, an average of between half and a bottle a head consumed over several hours at a table makes for a very jolly occasion. If there are many drivers in the party then total consumption should be much less. See member’s forum for a lively discussion of this.

Wine served without a meal is potentially much more potent, especially before lunch when most bodies contain little food to buffer alcohol's effect. A quarter of a bottle a head, or two small glasses, could well be enough if there is a significant proportion of abstainers in the group. However, for a long daytime reception such as a wedding it would be safer to allow half a bottle a head (and as much as a bottle for an all-evening event). If you’re placing a large order, most suppliers will allow sale or return.

Liquids and solids without alcohol

Like many hosts, I frequently overlook the non-alcoholic drinks in my concern to serve just the right wine(s). Try to serve as much water as wine at the table, and to provide a reasonably sophisticated non-alcoholic alternative at parties such as fizzy mineral water with fresh orange juice or a drop of elderflower syrup, or spiced tomato juice cocktails before lunch. The most delicious non alcoholic drink I can remember being served was at a book launch hosted by Arabella Boxer. She had prepared a concoction which included cucumber and strawberries for which the recipe is in her English food book that was really refreshing, aromatic and non-cloying.

It makes sense not to drink on an empty stomach. Serving something to eat cuts down quite dramatically on the intoxication rate of an alcoholic aperitif. Eating olives out of doors (the only time I encourage my children to throw stones) can seem just right, but they are distractingly mediterranean and a bit too strongly flavoured for a northern wine like champagne. Radishes, celery, pistachio nuts and quail's eggs are less intrusive, but most of these involve some potentially inconvenient detritus (although halves of quail's egg on a dollop of mayonnaise on toasted rounds of French bread are easy to eat and look glamorous). Little cheesy biscuits, such as the Dutch Roka brand or Fudges’ cheese straws, complement most wines, as do Italian breadsticks or grissini, even with proscuitto wound round them. I also love salted, sauteed almonds although they can leave fingers pretty greasy.

Article contributed by Jancis Robinson and is sourced from http://www.jancisrobinson.com/

Entertaining with wine - part one
Mar 4, 2009 3:38:31 PM

In Part One, we looked at how much wine, water, and non-alcoholic drink to provide. Here are some specific suggestions as to what sort of wine to serve at which sort of gathering.

Pre-Meal Drinks Party

Wine (plus a non-alcoholic alternative) is much easier to serve than lots of different mixed drinks. People with carpets tend to prefer to serve white wine, and it is true that many, possibly most, reds are too full-bodied and tannic to be at their best without food. Sparkling wine seems special, but can go to the head very quickly, which may be a problem, or not. A good champagne can be the greatest treat of all, but perfectly well-made, more economical alternatives can be found from Saumur, Limoux, Alsace, California, New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and England (a cool, or cooled, climate is vital). Still white wines that fit the bill of being light enough but not too acid to drink without food include many not-too-expensive examples from Alsace; dry, Kabinett and Spätlese wines from Germany (Mosel especially); light Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, Chablis and unoaked examples from the southern hemisphere; well made Pinot Blanc/Bianco and Pinot Gris/Grigio which combine the softness of Pinot with an appetising tang and fresh, lively Verdejo and Albariño from Spain.

All-Evening Informal Party

The wines listed above could certainly be served all evening, but after a while your guests may start to crave something more substantial. Red wines that can happily be sipped at with no substantial food to break their fall on the palate tend to be light bodied and low in tannin, such as Beaujolais and other Gamays; red Loire and other Cabernet Franc wines; simpler Merlots; young Pinot Noir (except for most red burgundy); the new generation of juicy young reds from Spain and Portugal; Dolcetto; and of course practically any rosé can fit the bill here, particularly those from Spain, which have a fuller, drier taste, nearer to red than white. And if you really are fonder of your carpets than of humouring your guests, you could always switch to a fuller-bodied, oaked white such as a Chardonnay or Semillon when you start to serve the food.

Extended Lunch Party

A similar range of wines as for an evening party could be served here, but in smaller quantities perhaps. Warmer weather may require the addition of some examples from the following section.

Wine To Watch Football (Or Other Games) With

Well if it’s Man U, it has to be red, it seems. Fairly bold so as to provide some anaesthetic against defeat, and slightly syrupy so lubricate the throat. Australian Shiraz fits the bill perfectly.

Outdoor Wines

It is usually a waste to serve too fine a wine out of doors, especially in hot weather when the bouquet is lost all too easily to the sun and breeze. Barbecued food, however, calls for its own brand of earthy, robust flavours and, perhaps not too surprisingly, hot climate wines come into their own here, including wines from Australia, the southern Rhône, dry rosés and reds from Provence, practically anything produced on the shores of the Mediterranean, Argentine Malbec, or California Zinfandel.

Before A Meal

Any of the wines suggested for a pre-meal drinks party make fine aperitifs, as drinks designed to stimulate the appetite are called. The classic aperitif is dry sherry, perhaps too strong and too misunderstood to serve to the uninitiated, but it is one of the wine world's great, undervalued treasures. In warm weather a freshly opened, chilled, bottle of Fino or Manzanilla can give even more concentrated pleasure than a fine white wine (and is the perfect foil for green olives, sweet and juicy jamon serrano and salted almonds) while a dry nutty Amontillado is the perfect antidote to cold weather and an incipient cold. Sercial Madeira can also be beguilingly tingly and a real wake-up call in a glass.

Dinner Party

I usually serve an aperitif (see above), one or two (related) first course wines, usually two and sometimes even three different main course wines (moving from lighter to fuller bodied and from young to old), one of which may continue with the cheese but more often (especially since my recent wine and cheese experiments), we move on to a sweet white wine, or strong and sweet wine such as port at the end. But then I want to show off, and this is wildly in excess of what is necessary or even sensible, which is probably an aperitif, a white and a red (to cater for those who just can't handle one or other colour). All I would say in my defence is that you learn so much more when comparing similar wines than when drinking them in isolation.

After A Meal

To my mind and palate, sweet wines taste much more delicious drunk on their own (or with cheese) than they do with most sweet food. Any reasonably sweet wine can be delicious after a meal, and those with a fair degree of acidity such as Germans, Austrians, Loire or Jurançon can refresh as well. This is also the time to serve sweet fortified wines (port, sherry, madeira, marsala, malaga, liqueur muscat, southern French and indeed all rich Muscats et al) as well as wine in its strongest, i e distilled, form: cognac, armagnac and other brandies. The spirit that finds most favour with wine fanatics other than brandy is Chartreuse which, like wine but unlike any other spirit, has an uncanny way of developing in the bottle.

Daytime Drinking

I may be a killjoy, but low alcohol wine seems the crucial element in a bottle to be sprung open for sipping between meals. My good friend the Mosel comes into its own here, as does Italy's panoply of lightly fizzing Moscato, the wrongly reviled Asti included. Buying an example other than the cheapest is the key to enjoyable grapey froth instead of a headache.

Article contributed by Jancis Robinson and is sourced from http://www.jancisrobinson.com/

Entertaining with wine - part two
Jan 8, 2009 5:16:17 PM

Before wrestling with the cork or other stopper, the wine drinker encounters another illogical barrier to wine enjoyment, the often impenetrable foil or capsule that covers the cork. An increasing number of wine bottles are allowed on to the market without this addition, once useful for protecting against cork weevils but now largely cosmetic, except for bottles kept in a wine rack where foils can be useful for identification. Professionals try to cut the foil in a straight line round the bottleneck a few millimetres below the rim so that wine doesn't come into contact with the foil when it is poured. (The wine won't taste any different if you rip the entire foil off, as is sometimes inevitable, but it deprives you of one of the wine's distinguishing marks.) A sharp knife and a steady hand can achieve a neatly cut foil, but a specially designed foil cutter does it with much less effort. Some particularly sharp foil cutters can even help with those few bottlenecks still dipped in wax or covered with particularly thick plastic, although sometimes very thick wax has to be painstakingly, and messily, chipped off with a sharp knife and chisel.

Once the foil has been removed, you have to hope that a corkscrew will do the rest. Aim the screw down the centre of the cork. It can help to stand the bottle on a flat surface, holding it steady, while inserting the screw, and to jam it between your knees while pulling (so to speak). As with modern business, leverage is all. Synthetic corks can be particularly intractable. More on the relative merits of different corkscrews later.

If the cork crumbles under the impact of the corkscrew but won't come out, try inserting a corkscrew with a long narrow screw at an angle and/or into a different part of the cork. If that won't work, as with any intractable cork, you could try inserting the two-prongs of a butler's friend type corkscrew down either side of the cork and pulling it out, or you may have to simply push the cork into the bottle using, for example, the handle of a wooden spoon (a little more wood contact won't harm the wine). Do this as gently as possible and avoid wearing white if the wine is red, as pushing the cork can cause quite a splash.

Because the remains of the cork tend to float and block the bottleneck, and provided the wine is not some terribly fragile ancient liquid whose precious bouquet may be lost after a few minutes' exposure to air, it is worth continuing to push the cork remains down with your stick-like instrument while pouring the wine into a jug. You can then pour the wine, through a fine mesh strainer, or a clean, preferably inert, funnel lined with a clean coffee filter or muslin if necessary, into a clean bottle or decanter. Another possible ploy which requires some cunning is to warm (and therefore expand) the bottleneck without warming the cork. A cloth soaked in boiling water can be held round the bottleneck using an oven glove. If none of these ploys work, and it is feasible, take the bottle back to where you bought it and complain. (This is just one of the reasons why it can be a good idea to keep more wine in the house than you expect to consume.)

All this fuss is avoided of course if the bottle has a screwcap. Generally these come off very easily with a firm twist, though it helps to hold on to the lower half of the screwcap. Very occasionally an entire screwcap will spin round the bottleneck and the upper part shows no inclination part from the lower half. Fiddling about with sharp knives in an attempt to overcome this can be dangerous and my advice would be to take the bottle back to the store.

Opening a bottle of sparkling wine

One eye doctor in the champagne town of Epernay treats up to 20 people a year who have been injured by wayward corks. The pressure in a bottle of sparkling wine is about three times that in the tyre of a large truck so champagne corks must be eased out of the bottleneck with enormous care. Untwist the wire muzzle and keep a thumb over the top of the cork. Point the bottle away from you and away from anyone else or any precious object, at an angle to increase the surface area of the wine and decrease the pressure in the wine. Twist the bottle off the cork rather than vice versa, all the while holding the cork into the bottleneck with the thumb so that it is eased out with gentle sigh rather than a potentially dangerous explosion. Pour the wine carefully several times into each glass (allowing time for the mousse to subside), possibly taking a lesson from a barmaid by holding the glass at an angle to control the foam.

Article contributed by Jancis Robinson and is sourced from http://www.jancisrobinson.com/

How to open a wine bottle
Jan 8, 2009 5:14:53 PM

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