What's In A Name ?

Week Ending 03 April 2021

Happy Easter, Bonnes fêtes de Paques, may your chocolate and hot cross buns be plentiful and your company engaging and witty !

Our most recent Wine & Dine experience is up on both our Private Facebook page and in the Vault ( under Kate’s Kitchen - despite once again, not being IN Kate’s kitchen, and Kate having had absolutely zero to do with the preparation or execution of the food ! )

That said, the meal from La Rose Salon du The of salmon filet with a prawn and leek cream sauce and crispy thyme roasted potatoes was very very tasting and stood up very well to the wine that Wendy and I had chosen to showcase - an Auxerrois from Kuentz Bas in Alsace.

From previous missives, you all know I have had an ongoing love affair with Alsace since my early teens, so it was with great delight that we were able ( via Marcel Van Baalen & Sommelier For A Day ) to get a small stock delivered to the Minervois.

You also know I’m a bit of a sucker for the slightly left field, unknown, unloved and underappreciated grapes. Auxerrois is one such example. Until modern viticultural practice and improved technology in the winery became commonplace, this was a much maligned and overlooked varietal, often confused with Pinot Blanc, (DNA testing has subsequently proved no common parentage)  which often ended up in cremant ( due to it’s excellent acidity ) or in the barely heard of Edelzwicker or Gentil - an assemblage made in the heart of French varietal labeling - destined generally for domestic consumption. Dare I say it, but seldom making it past the boundaries of Alsace. Thank goodness seriously significant brands such as Hugel are now making Gentil ( and I’m equally grateful that I’ve got a couple of bottles of it )!

A quick note on the Auxerrois for those of you who haven’t or can’t watch the video (cough-just join the club, it’s worth it). I will of course put this into a formal tasting note in the Vault as well.

Medium Lemon, with a medium (+) intensity on the nose. Ripe lemon, yellow grapefruit pith, ripe yellow apples, Williams pears, honeysuckle, yellow peach and cantaloupe melon.

The wine is dry ( fruit ripeness DID make me double check that it wasn’t RS ) with medium (+) acidity, medium alcohol and medium (+) body. ALL the aromas checked out on the palate as well. No secondary, no tertiary. The wine has a medium (+) finish.

A Very Good Wine. Range of Primary fruit is wide ranging and clear, acidity is in balance with fruit concentration. The body and finish are both well supported by the clarity and ripeness of the fruit. My only concern would be that at times and without food, the wine did feel a little ‘hot’- ie marked alcohol.

There is the possibility to age this in the short to mid term ( up to 3 years or so ) as the acidity and alcohol are well within the range to support it. But the beauty of this wine is it’s fresh and lively fruit, cut with crystalline acidity. Riesling however, it is not. 

And so, to BEER !! We are <> this close to getting things underway for our collaborative effort with Andrew at Fox Hat Craft Brewery. 

And we are now looking for a NAME for the beer. Allow me, therefore to give you a little condensed history of how the mysteries of the universe converged to enable us to sign off in March 2021 for the making of a Marzen - which although we won’t start brewing in March ( for those of us non german speakers ) pleases me enormously with its universal symmetry...

Imagine in you will, Europe in the 1840s… Anton Dreher who inherited his father’s Klein- Schwechat brewery had spent his formative years touring the breweries of Europe ( tough job but somebody has to do it ), on, if you will, a grand apprentissage. On his travels, his path crosses with that of a certain Gabriel Sadlmayer - son of the owner of the Spaten Brewing Co.

They become good friends and continue their travel and beeriferous (new word, just made it up) journey together.

Whilst in England ( you KNEW England would be in this story somewhere, admit it ) these two young men ‘obtained’ - let’s just leave it at that, I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on industrial espionage.. The knowledge of how to hot air dry barley rather than roasting it.

Once back home, the two rejoin their respective family breweries and set about employing this new fangled technology. Dreher comes up with an amber Vienna Lager, whilst Sadlmayer is trialling a new way of kilning, and then combines his malt with a lager yeast and hey presto… the Marzen is born. So it appears that however much the Germans with their Munchen Marzen want to lay claim… yeah sorry, Austria got their first !

Now stay with me, because this is where the story goes completely bonkers…

Past World War I, the Austrian economy was shot, lager sales and the popularity waning… however !

When Napoleon III ( because you also knew the French were going to pop up in the saga) invaded Mexico ( seriously you can’t make this stuff up ) for refusing to pay interest to its European overlords ( I still can’t find out what the poor old Mexicans were paying interest on ), good old Napoleon III sets up Maximilian of the Austrian Royal family as a stooge leader. 

As you have probably worked out, none of this ends well for either Napoleon or poor old Max who end ups on the pointy end of a firing squad - BUT - what it does do in the 3 short years of Austrian influence in Mexico, is result in the arrival of European brewers including the highly unlikely sounding Santiago Graf ( did Disney write this story ??)

And that, my friends and dear readers is how Viennese Lager ended up as a Mexican speciality and is now known by the moniker Negra Modelo.

So, over to you - what are we going to call ours ? There’s a prize for the winning suggestion - Liquid of course !!