BFC #3 : Pink Wins, Pink Wins!

There's a new champion in the McDuff Food & Wine Trail Bubbledome!

A sweet and funky Vin du Bugey-Cerdon, Patrick Bottex, La Cueille, NV has smashed the Italian champion, Ferrari Brut, NV (see here and here for past results) in a unanimous decision.

Bugey, in Southeastern France (in the Ain Department, see map below), is 20 miles up the Rhone River from Lyon and about the same distance from the Swiss Border. Historically, it was under the rule of the House of Savoy for those of you keeping track of the holdings of Renaissance kings.

The rosé sparkling wine from there, called Vin du Bugey-Cerdon, is VDQS, Vin Délimité de Qualité Superieure, which is just below the highest rank for French wine, AOC, Appellation d’origine contrôlée, but above VDP, Vin de pays (country wine), and Vin de table. Think of these as weight classes for our fighters, with the heavyweights being AOC and the table wines as flyweights.

According to the VDQS rules, it is made from either all Gamay or a Gamay and Poulsard blend. It is usually pink. In my experience, brightly so. Playful, often tasting like raspberry soda or sparkling kool-aid. And usually on the light-side, alcohol-wise, 8%. Bugey-Cerdon is a great conversation piece for a hot summer afternoon. Though rarely does the memory of the wine survive the sunset.

This wine from Patrick Bottex maps to my preconceptions of Bugey-Cerdon, except in one important category. It's awesome.

It's imported by the crème de la crème of West Coast Francophile wine importers, Kermit Lynch. You really can't judge a wine by it's front label, but a Kermit Lynch imprint on the back label usually implies a reasonable level of excellence in the bottle.

Here's the results:

A full-fizz method ancestrale sparkler, this looks (and tastes a bit) like black cherry soda. It has a sweet, yeasty nose of Mirabelle plum and strawberries. In the mouth, it's sweet, but not cloyingly so. In fact, it feels more sweet than it actually is. Your first sip you almost can't believe the big, bright, honeyed black cherry and strawberry flavors, but before the delicate, faintly chalky finish has passed, you realize it's really not as big, or ripe, or sweet as you thought. You blink, taste it again, and realize that this bottle of giddy pinkness has remarkable structure. You might even call it cultured, approaching elegant. But before you get carried away, you remember it is what it is, which is something like liquified Jolly Rancher cherry candy with a fake Pirate map label. Let's say it's like a guy in a tuxedo, eating cotton candy at the county fair. Oh, and he's got an eye-patch too.

I've seen it a few places, but I bought this one at K&L Wines, $20.

(map of Ain, France by Marmelad used per the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. Don't borrow it without checking out how.)

Bubbledome #1: A Winner by Knockout!

One would expect the French to dominate these events. Champagne is, after all, the sparkling wine equivalent of the US Basketball Dream Team (Barcelona, not Athens). But our first champion in the Bubbledome hails from Italy. The non-vintage Ferrari Brut (no relation to the fancy cars) was the hands down winner against the 2005 Pétillant Naturel from Puzelat.

So it's a win for Italy out of the gate. But Giulio Ferrari was inspired by France. When he founded his winery in 1902, he actually planted cuttings originally from Champagne. He chose to put them in the nearly Alpen regions outside Trento (north of Verona) because the soil matched that of the famed French region.

Thierry Puzelat is a celebrated grower based in the Eastern stretches of the Loire Valley. He has a cult following amongst aficionados of "natural wines". (Lab note: there are subtle differences between "organic," a term for vegetables, "natural," which usually involves some form of organic farming and non-interventionist winemaking, and "biodynamic," which is kind of natural+plus. We will will try to illuminate the distinctions in a future report. And if anyone knows of a succinct explanation somewhere we'd love to know about it.). A writer who's tasting notes I always enjoy, Brooklynguy, recently wrote up several of Puzelat's wines with an enthusiasm that makes you want to drink them.

Puzelat's sparkler is made from Chenin Blanc in a méthode ancestrale, meaning the secondary fermentation (where the bubbles are produced) happens without liqueur de tirage (additional of sugar) or additional yeast. Fermentation, and therefore bubble production, simply stops when the yeast in the bottle is exhausted. Sparkling wines made in this manner are sometimes not so bubbly.

But this one had a fair amount of fizz. And an unexpected nose, faint hints of lanolin and Fuji apple and something strange and pleasant that I could only describe as caramelized rubber bands (and not at all like cork taint, promise). In the mouth, it falls fairly flat. Green apple (and you scoffed at our palate training exercise) with some faint mineral tones on the finish.

So the Puzelat wasn't bad, but it was out-classed by the Brut from Trento.

The Ferrari started out strong with a really interesting nose of doughy, buttery French toast and spiced apples. It continued to be impressive on the palate. Golden Delicious apple (again the palate training pays dividends!) with a lovely toffee undertone. Great acid balance and a sexy, if too brief, finish that was less chalk and maybe more like a white nougat. Hard to be precise because the delights of the finish are more about texture than flavor. Overall, this wine leaves a deep impression of Autumn with its buttery spices, crisp apples and falling leaves. I'm buying another bottle to drink in October.

This one could hold onto the champion's belt for a while.