Posts Tagged argentina

Wine for under £10 – Bonarda Sangiovese

Posted by Volker in wine on 11/08/2009

After last week’s special wine, this wine hardly made it into my recommendation list.

I am a big fan of South American, particular Argentinian wines, but Bonarda Sangiovese disappointed me a bit. The first taste was slightly cheap, sour tasting. After about half an hour the wine seemed to have breathed enough and it tasted very nicely, almost fruity.

bonarda sagniovese Waitrose sells this wine for £6.64 and possibly that is why I put the wine in my weekly column.

For a wine that costs less than £7 on a regular base and has a decent taste, it surely is worthwhile mentioning. Maybe not a wine you should have with nice food, nibbles whilst relaxing and reading a good book. But surely a wine you can have with friends, a good meal or with a BBQ. Nothing to impress though. Waitrose recommends this wine with pizza or tomato-based pasta dishes.

It is a well-made organic red made from equal amounts of the traditional Italian grape varieties Bonarda and Sangiovese. This might be the reason why I am not that keen on it. I haven’t yet found an Italian wine that strikes me as being irresistible. Either I have not tried enough or maybe they just don’t produce my taste.

Matthew Jukes, Daily Mail, 23 August 2008, reviews the wine as:
Crammed with smooth blackberry and cranberry notes, this is an exceptional summer red wine, which loves being cooled in an ice bucket. (2007 vintage)

Again, I am not a big fan of light wines, particularly if you are trying to cool them down. Common maybe for these grapes in the summer, just not my taste.

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Wine for under £10 – Gestos

Posted by Volker in personal, wine on 07/07/2009

Today I want to write about another wine for less than £10. Wine for under ten pounds is sometimes difficult to judge. Hence I want to introduce a few here to make you aware of the better ones out there.

Finca Flichman makes an excellent Shiraz from Argentina. Waitrose sells them for just under seven pounds and the special one I have is a 2007 Gestos Shiraz where 50% of the grapes are from 1,100 meters and the other 50% from 700 meters. So the blend is of Shiraz riped under the cold and bright climate which gives the wine freshness, structure and complexity. But the other half gives it colour, density and volume through a stormy and sunny environment.

Gestos Shiraz

With 13.5% alcohol it is a heavy wine but goes very well with strong cheese, like a lot of Mendoza wines. However, although the wine was aged in new American and French oak barrels the intensity of oak is very small. Might be because they only leave them in there for less than 6 months.

So overall, a heavy but still easy drinking wine. With a BBQ or meat dish it would be excellent but also on its own accompanied by some nice strong cheese. If you open the bottle, you are quite likely to finish it easily, so watch out ;-)

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