WINE .. with David Bray
We haven’t seen a lot of chiantis lately. Forget the raffia-wrapped bottles; it’s a much more serious wine these days. For example, see Savignola Paolina Chianti Classico 2007 (pictured), which comes with a cracker reputation.
One American scribe wrote of the 2000 vintage as follows: “It’s exquisitely perfumed and the flavour impact is enormous. With its signature dustiness and dry cherry and berry flavours, this wine was designed to go with food. The 2000 is gorgeous. If Mozart made Chianti, it’d be Paolina.”
But back to the facts, as supplied by Australian distributor Euro-Concepts.
Savignola Paolina is a small winery in the heart of Chianti Classico. The owner Ludovica Fabbri and her husband took over the winery in 1998. Ludovica inherited it from her father who in turn had inherited it from his great aunt, a very determined little lady who never married and who ran the winery for more than 60 years with the help of one handyman.
Paolina was just 148cm tall but over the years her name became synonymous with that of the winery which had been Savignola since the late 18th century. The name was officially changed to Savignola Paolina.
Ludovica has brought in modern viticultural and winemaking techniques and built a new winery complex.
The wine in question is 85 per cent sangiovese, 15 colorino and malvasia nera.
It is ruby red, yields berry fruit and hints of spice. Medium bodied with a long, strong finish it would be a beaut match with typical tomato-based Italian dishes.
Sangiovese, a semi-classic grape grown in the Tuscany region, is used to make Chianti and other Tuscan red wines.
It is being enthusiastically used by used an increasing number of Australian winemakers. It is planted in several hundred Australian vineyards across the continent, from the Darling Downs to Margaret River.
The name seems to have come from sanguis jovis (Jupiter’s blood) and by Jove with any luck at all I should soon be able to tell you more.
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To BYO or not to bother. It’s a choice most of us have to make quite often, though these days it seems fewer restaurants are willing to let the customers supply their own bottles of wine and those that do tend to charge a hefty sum for what used to be corkage but is no, um, unscrewing.
The argument is that wine and other drinks contribute significantly to the profit made on your meal (as do dessert and coffee.) Decent quality glasses are not cheap, need to be washed and most of us would use two or three in the course of a meal.
Really serious wine people enjoy taking their treasured bottles to good restaurants. Some proprietors who do not normally accept this will make exceptions, particularly for a regular customer.
And there are few, a dwindling number, of places that happily advertise they accept BYO. They are to be treasured.
All of which leads me to intelligence from the United Kingdom concerning the recent formation of BYO Wine Club.
It’s a business, signing up wine-drinking members and “many of London's best restaurants” to offer customers “the privilege of bringing their own special bottles to accompany their meals for no or reasonable corkage fees’’.
Membership costs 75 pounds a year, some 50 restaurants were in the scheme at last count and there seem to be some interesting conditions applying – some places will charge “a modest corkage charge, typically £10 a bottle”, others none.
And it’s up to each restaurant to say what day of the week the deal will apply, whether it’s lunch or dinner and if there’s a minimum spend. Not quite what we have in mind, is it?
