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Domaine du Vieux Pressoir Saumur Puy Notre Dame, Loire, France 2015 (£23, redsquirrelwine.com) A change within the season means a change in pink wine fashion: away with the chunky, the wealthy, the highly effective; in with the elegant, the aromatic, the refreshing. No wine fashion suits the latter transient higher than the pink wines of the Loire, particularly these constructed from the more and more modern (everywhere in the world) cabernet franc grape selection. In a clutch of appellations resembling Chinon, Bourgueil, and Saumur-Champigny, cabernet franc produces wines that mix a springtime sappiness and leafiness with currants and berries on a textural spectrum that runs from just-ripe and crunchy to supple and advantageous. For an energisingly vibrant instance that’s happiest exhibiting off its just-on-the-right-side-of-tart summer season pudding flavours after a half hour or so within the fridge, strive Waitrose’s Les Nivières Saumur Rouge 2018 (£9.99). For one thing slightly extra Bordeaux-esque, refined and mellow, but nonetheless with an underlying pulse of Loire River liveliness, the Vieux Pressoir could be very sensible certainly.
Antinori Prunotto Langhe Nebbiolo Occhetti, Italy 2018 (£20.65, vinvm.co.uk) Is the northwestern Italian grape selection nebbiolo able to making summer season reds? Not, by and huge, when it’s getting used within the nice pink wines of Piedmont, Barolo and Barbaresco, each of which may pack a good quantity of alcoholic and tannic punch of their deceptively pale ruby body, alongside the range’s trademark tar and roses perfume and its solid of fruit from the pink finish of the spectrum. These are wines that I affiliate extra with autumn, particularly the older bottles which could add truffly notes, smoke and savouriness to their enchanting combine. In Piedmont itself, the summer season wine par excellence is historically a calming down bottle of the black cherry juiciness of Dolcetto, such because the fantastically cherry-skin satiny Cantina del Pino Dolcetto d’Alba 2017 (£15.88, laywheeler.com). However most of the area’s producers additionally make a nebbiolo in a youthful brisker fashion, through which perfumed raspberry pink fruit is to the fore, and the tannic grip is significantly much less agency, resembling in Prunotto’s polished instance.
Dominio do Bibei Lalama Purple Ribeira Sacra, Spain 2016 (from £22.75, thegoodwineshop.co.uk; vincognito.co.uk) Spanish pink wine was as soon as simply caricatured as heavy and oaky or each. Up to now couple of a long time, nevertheless, wines of a significantly brighter, nippier, brisker persuasion have been cropping up everywhere in the nation. A lot of my favourites are constructed from mencía, a spread that shares sufficient similarities in floral-edged contemporary currant perfume and brightness with cabernet franc to have had growers believing they may be one and the identical. Ampelographers (aka grape scientists) could have since disproved that concept. However mencía wines, notably these from my favorite area for the range – the spectacularly steep granite and slate slopes of Ribeira Sacra in inland Galicia – fulfill an identical thirst to the French selection in wines such because the vividly pink fruit juicy Guimaro Mencía 2019 (£13.98, vinatis.co.uk) and the hauntingly stunning Dominio do Bibei Lalama, which provides 10% of different uncommon native grape varieties to the combination in a wine resonant with graphite minerals and racy raspberry.
Comply with David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
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