Am I a wino?

[Brighton TID]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

 

[glasfryn]

you have to stand in a shop doorway at night pissing yourself to be in that club

 

[TheMajor]

Yes.

 

[Ulloa's Soul Patch]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

Who drinks cat piss?

 

[Brighton TID]

you have to stand in a shop doorway at night pissing yourself to be in that club

Never pissed myself in a shop doorway, but have certainly pissed in many a shop doorway

 

[half time scores]

I have been told that white wino's are an endangered species

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Only because they are all very red in the face

 

[el punal]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

Where do you live - I'll join you!

 

[Petunia]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

Agree on Chardonnay, but ditch Blue Nun:thumbdown:

Chablis is the best in my book

 

[HalifaxSeagull]

Agree on Chardonnay, but ditch Blue Nun:thumbdown:

Chablis is the best in my book

Isn't Chablis mainly made from Chardonnay?

 

[Goldstone1976]

Isn't Chablis mainly made from Chardonnay?

Not just "mainly". Chablis is always 100% Chardonnay....

 

[RowleyBirkinQ.C(deceased)]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

Yep, I'm with you on all of those, but I love beer just as much but it has to be export strength.
If its wet, DRINK IT!

 

[Seagull on the wing]

I have been told that white wino's are an endangered species

Yo !...Lays on back...kicks legs in the air and guffaws loudly......

 

[greyseagull]

I love the stuff, red, white, rose, fizzy, merlot, champagne, cava, shiraz, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Blue Nun, cheap, expensive (>£5).
Chardonnay, however, I find tastes like cat's piss.
I possibly even prefer wine to beer.
I almost cannot eat a meal without a glass of the grapey stuff.
Does this make me a wino?

On Monday I walked to Waitrose on my lunch break, bought one of those small bottles of red wine and drank it out of a mug in the office in the afternoon. I do a lot of writing for work and felt this would add a bit of clarity and creativity to my mind. It did. I think I'm like Da Vinci or Sherlock Holmes - only better. And sexier.

 

[Razzoo]

No, Wino's tend to drink Cheap spirits, Sherry, Strong cheap cider (Frosty Jack's etc.) Super strength lager. When you start on that lot daily, you're in trouble.

 

[Petunia]

Not just "mainly". Chablis is always 100% Chardonnay....

Wow, didn't realise that so I googled it. Are you sitting comfortably.......

"I remember one evening a few years back when I was working as a sommelier. I was asked to recommend a white wine to a table of four, to accompany their starters. They had ordered lobster-stuffed ravioli and some raw oysters, and I suggested a chardonnay.
“I detest chardonnay,” decried one of the women at the table.
“How about Chablis?” suggested her husband as he leafed through the wine list.
“That’s a good idea,” she responded. “I love Chablis.”

I agreed wholeheartedly with her husband’s choice, but it wasn’t until they were walking out of the restaurant that I told her privately that Chablis is made with chardonnay. I don’t blame her for not making the connection. Compared with the vast majority of chardonnays, Chablis is a radically different wine.

I recently spent five days walking from cellar to cellar, tasting wines and talking with winemakers in Chablis, a northern outpost of Burgundy. Invited by the Bureau interprofessionnel des vins de Bourgogne (BIVB), my goal was to answer a simple question: What makes Chablis so different?

And the answer? In typical Burgundian fashion, there is both an easy and an extremely complex response, especially when you try to understand what makes one Chablis different from the next. So let’s start with the easy one:

Chablis is a sleepy little village of 2,500 people that has given its name to a region in the northernmost part of Burgundy. The 5,200 hectares of vineyards (52 square kilometres) are planted on the hillsides and valleys on either side of the river Le Serein. Depending on where these vineyards are situated, the wines are labelled as either Petit Chablis, Chablis, Chablis Premier Cru or Chablis Grand Cru. I’ll get into what all these mean next week.

The only grape they grow is chardonnay, and along with Champagne, which is just to the north, it is the combination of their cool, northerly climate and their unique soils that give the chardonnay grape its “Chablisienne” aromatics and texture.

And how does it drink? A typical Chablis has relatively high acidities, so they are very refreshing. They are relatively low in alcohol, rarely passing 13 per cent. The fruit is always subtle, and never really pronounced. But when there, it ranges from lemon to peach and pear to, on rare occasions, nectarine, mango and other exotic notes. There is little or no oak flavour in the wines, so none of that vanilla, caramel, toast and spice that you find in the vast majority of chardonnays.

But the most important quality of a Chablis, and what dominates and defines the region’s wines, is “minerality.”

While “minerality” and where it comes from might be a matter of discussion, if you have tasted a Chablis, that’s what it is in its most obvious incarnation. I describe it as both an odour and a taste that gives you a sensation of “rockiness.” I tend to compare the taste or smell to such things as wet stones, graphite, slate, lead pencils, well water or gun flint, just to name a few.

Not just any rock

Ask any Chablis winemaker and they will tell you that the soil is responsible for the signature minerality in their wines. Unlike further south in Burgundy, where there are myriad soil types, in Chablis there are two worth noting — Kimmeridgean and Portlandian.

Kimmeridgean is a particular type of limestone that gets its name from a village in coastal England called Kimmeridge. The rocks were formed about 150 million years ago when both southern England and northern France were a seabed. The majority of the sea creatures that were dying and collecting on the bottom of that sea were tiny oysters called Exogyra virgula.

As you walk the vineyards, you can easily find rocks laced with these fossils. This type of soil, where the fossil-rich limestone is mixed with varying amounts of clay, is found nowhere else in the world.

The other soil type is Portlandian, which is also a limestone, but was formed much later and as a result of glacier deposits. This soil, with bigger, white blocks of stone and rocks, is higher in calcium but has much less clay and fossils.

This is the first distinction between the different types of Chablis. The vines planted in Kimmeridgean soil is where you find Chablis, as well as Premier and Grand Cru. Wines made with grapes growing in Portlandian soils are labelled Petit Chablis. The difference in taste? Petit Chablis shows much less minerality, is lighter and much less complex.

The new cool role model

Chablis has a continental climate, which means that summer days can be hot, evenings cool and the winters quite cold. During the spring, there is a constant battle with frost. The most recent “frost year” was 2012, when some vineyards lost 30 per cent of their potential fruit. As an aside, the rest of the year was near-perfect and 2012 has the makings of an incredible vintage.

Chablis is on the limit of where chardonnay can ripen successfully, so much so that vineyards require some degree of southern exposure to assure enough sunlight and heat to properly ripen their grapes. But even in the best vineyards, it is rare that the grapes get even close to being overripe, which is largely the battle facing the majority of chardonnay-producing regions worldwide.

And this is probably why that woman at the table I was serving said she “detested chardonnay,” yet loved Chablis. She was revolting against what has been the dominant style of the grape — very ripe and powerful fruit, creamy textures because of low acidities and heavy doses of oak-driven flavours.

I would tell her today that the pendulum has swung. The days of heavy, overly rich chardonnays have passed. As many consumers start looking for leaner white wines, with lower alcohols yet still with great complexity, the style that more and more chardonnay winemakers are looking to emulate is Chablis.

But in my extensive travels, I have yet to encounter a single place where the wines have come close to reproducing that same mineral “drive,” combined with the elegance, depth and age-ability of Chablis.

And there you have it

 

[swiss tony]

Very informative sir!! Cheers!

 

[gnjd_85]

I’m a wine professional working with ‘high end’ sort of stuff. Full time lurker on here and only ever seem to post when people say something about wine every now and then…

My comment here is that a massive percentage of the finest white wines in the world are made with Chardonnay. The problem is that people can sell the cheap ones so easily as the grape is such a ‘brand’ that it’s easy to knock out cheap stuff that is awful but will still sell nicely.

Champagne and Bordeaux both have a similar problem, lots of the greatest things you can drink and stunning stuff in the sort of £30-£100 range but a lot of pretty underwhelming stuff below that in my opinion.

Chardonnay starts a little lower but I think you struggle to get a good one for less than a tenner, after that it can start to get exciting.

 

[Guinness Boy]

Comparing a good Chablis with your average over oaked, too high alcohol content crappy new world brand Chardonnay is like comparing Vicente with Colin Hawkins.

 

[Titanic]

Wow, didn't realise that so I googled it. Are you sitting comfortably.......

"I remember one evening a few years back when I was working as a sommelier. I was asked to recommend a white wine to a table of four, to accompany their starters. They had ordered lobster-stuffed ravioli and some raw oysters, and I suggested a chardonnay.
“I detest chardonnay,” decried one of the women at the table.
“How about Chablis?” suggested her husband as he leafed through the wine list.
“That’s a good idea,” she responded. “I love Chablis.”

I agreed wholeheartedly with her husband’s choice, but it wasn’t until they were walking out of the restaurant that I told her privately that Chablis is made with chardonnay. I don’t blame her for not making the connection. Compared with the vast majority of chardonnays, Chablis is a radically different wine.

I recently spent five days walking from cellar to cellar, tasting wines and talking with winemakers in Chablis, a northern outpost of Burgundy. Invited by the Bureau interprofessionnel des vins de Bourgogne (BIVB), my goal was to answer a simple question: What makes Chablis so different?

And the answer? In typical Burgundian fashion, there is both an easy and an extremely complex response, especially when you try to understand what makes one Chablis different from the next. So let’s start with the easy one:

Chablis is a sleepy little village of 2,500 people that has given its name to a region in the northernmost part of Burgundy. The 5,200 hectares of vineyards (52 square kilometres) are planted on the hillsides and valleys on either side of the river Le Serein. Depending on where these vineyards are situated, the wines are labelled as either Petit Chablis, Chablis, Chablis Premier Cru or Chablis Grand Cru. I’ll get into what all these mean next week.

The only grape they grow is chardonnay, and along with Champagne, which is just to the north, it is the combination of their cool, northerly climate and their unique soils that give the chardonnay grape its “Chablisienne” aromatics and texture.

And how does it drink? A typical Chablis has relatively high acidities, so they are very refreshing. They are relatively low in alcohol, rarely passing 13 per cent. The fruit is always subtle, and never really pronounced. But when there, it ranges from lemon to peach and pear to, on rare occasions, nectarine, mango and other exotic notes. There is little or no oak flavour in the wines, so none of that vanilla, caramel, toast and spice that you find in the vast majority of chardonnays.

But the most important quality of a Chablis, and what dominates and defines the region’s wines, is “minerality.”

While “minerality” and where it comes from might be a matter of discussion, if you have tasted a Chablis, that’s what it is in its most obvious incarnation. I describe it as both an odour and a taste that gives you a sensation of “rockiness.” I tend to compare the taste or smell to such things as wet stones, graphite, slate, lead pencils, well water or gun flint, just to name a few.

Not just any rock

Ask any Chablis winemaker and they will tell you that the soil is responsible for the signature minerality in their wines. Unlike further south in Burgundy, where there are myriad soil types, in Chablis there are two worth noting — Kimmeridgean and Portlandian.

Kimmeridgean is a particular type of limestone that gets its name from a village in coastal England called Kimmeridge. The rocks were formed about 150 million years ago when both southern England and northern France were a seabed. The majority of the sea creatures that were dying and collecting on the bottom of that sea were tiny oysters called Exogyra virgula.

As you walk the vineyards, you can easily find rocks laced with these fossils. This type of soil, where the fossil-rich limestone is mixed with varying amounts of clay, is found nowhere else in the world.

The other soil type is Portlandian, which is also a limestone, but was formed much later and as a result of glacier deposits. This soil, with bigger, white blocks of stone and rocks, is higher in calcium but has much less clay and fossils.

This is the first distinction between the different types of Chablis. The vines planted in Kimmeridgean soil is where you find Chablis, as well as Premier and Grand Cru. Wines made with grapes growing in Portlandian soils are labelled Petit Chablis. The difference in taste? Petit Chablis shows much less minerality, is lighter and much less complex.

The new cool role model

Chablis has a continental climate, which means that summer days can be hot, evenings cool and the winters quite cold. During the spring, there is a constant battle with frost. The most recent “frost year” was 2012, when some vineyards lost 30 per cent of their potential fruit. As an aside, the rest of the year was near-perfect and 2012 has the makings of an incredible vintage.

Chablis is on the limit of where chardonnay can ripen successfully, so much so that vineyards require some degree of southern exposure to assure enough sunlight and heat to properly ripen their grapes. But even in the best vineyards, it is rare that the grapes get even close to being overripe, which is largely the battle facing the majority of chardonnay-producing regions worldwide.

And this is probably why that woman at the table I was serving said she “detested chardonnay,” yet loved Chablis. She was revolting against what has been the dominant style of the grape — very ripe and powerful fruit, creamy textures because of low acidities and heavy doses of oak-driven flavours.

I would tell her today that the pendulum has swung. The days of heavy, overly rich chardonnays have passed. As many consumers start looking for leaner white wines, with lower alcohols yet still with great complexity, the style that more and more chardonnay winemakers are looking to emulate is Chablis.

But in my extensive travels, I have yet to encounter a single place where the wines have come close to reproducing that same mineral “drive,” combined with the elegance, depth and age-ability of Chablis.

And there you have it

Oh come on Pet.... you can't leave us hanging on until next week!