Oh do explain, I quite like a bit of clarity
Operagirl is the forums premiere food/supermarket snob.
We stumbled across Los Vascos (Argentina) at Coop a few months ago. I think it's around 10 CHF, sometimes less if on sale. It was quite delicious. They have a white and two reds I believe - none have disappointed yet.
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For CHF 3.20 you get the Royal Kadir, a relatively heavy but quite delicious, dry but fruity Tunisian red wine. While I admit that it is not competing with a top class Médoc, it simply is excellent.
Funny you say that. Whenever we try a European wine, my wife always makes the comment that it's like someone has emptied half the bottle and topped it up with water [compared to the wine we're used to from Australia].
She does like her reds big and beefy though.
Mr Kadie just had a 2007 El Miracle Tempranillo and Shiraz for CHF9.90 from Coop. He's looking very pleased with himself! He says its quite delicious: fruity and full-bodied
Thanks for all the help.. I think I'm going to print the whole thread and take it with me to the stores.
Speaking of supermarket snobbery, I just picked up yet another 8 CHF bottle of local (Morges) plonk that tastes like shoe polish. Coop needs to sack their wine-buyer. (Ping: Operagirl)
I over the years sampled many Australian wines. They indeed are good but such a difference is simply unreal. So that you either are extremely prejudiced or simply take bad choices. You have to be aware of the fact that similar names do not mean similar products. So that if you buy a French wine with a similar name to what your wife knew from home you may be wrong. Australian wines generally are closer to Chianti, Primitivo, Montepulciano from Italy or Penedes and Rioja from Spain or wines from Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel.
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Just look at the distance to the Equator. Melbourne and Brisbane are about in the range of Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Athens and Beirut
For some reason, I have decided to be patriotic to Switzerland and if possible, particularly to canton Ticino.
I am no connoisseur of wine at all.
I am not sure if the Swiss realise that so much wine is grown in Ticino as I seem to see so much of the Swiss-French stuff being sold in the supermarkets.
In Ticino it is the Merlot grape.
http://www.wine.ch/page14e.htm
I have been drinking my local wine from Castel San Pietro and it is costing mr CHF 2.80 for a 1ltr Bottle.
It is so drinkable. I mean by this that there is no after taste perhaps not kept in Oak Barrels. A lot of English opt for white wine because they have not had good drinkable red wine perhaps.
I was mostly joking.
I'd say it's equal parts bad luck (getting bad ones) and simply not knowing the names/styles of European wines (not getting the style of wine expected).
With that said, for probably the last 5 - maybe even 10 - years, it's been damn near impossible to get a bad wine back home. Even the bargain bin $5/bottle stuff is drinkable. Personally I rarely spend more than maybe $15-$20 on a bottle back home because past experience[0] has indicated anything "better" is wasted on me. This has not been true for me in Europe (Switzerland/France/Germany/Italy), where I've had quite a few that I had trouble drinking - and believe me, it's not often I have trouble drinking.
[0] A mate of mine used to work for a wine distributor, so I got to sample a lot of (apparently) very good and very expensive wines through him. I'm afraid I couldn't really tell the difference once the value got over about $20 or so a bottle.
I agree. The best $5 values are almost always Napa Valley cabernet and they are seldom so bad that they need pouring down the sink. The same cannot be said for 6CHF wines here.
In my experience in the UK, it depends what you are going to eat it with and accounts for an even distribution over white and red.
The big supermarkets seem to have a massive range of wines compared to here (probably due to space issues).
Occasionally I find a nice wine at Coop but then the bottle goes out and I forget what it was. Friends of ours always steamed off the label of a good bottle of wine they found and stuck it to the kitchen wall. In the end the entire wall was covered with labels from fabulous wines they had found and looked like quirky wallpaper.
Think our landlord might have something to say if we tried that in our kitchen but keeping a scrapbook seems a bit err... tragic.
I agree this is a very good wine it is called Sangre De Toro, also Oscarsmum if you love this there is an even better version called Gran Sangre De Toro really yummy slightly dearer but worth every penny. Cheers and enjoy!
Another vote for the ladybird Pinot...
You can be sure that all Swiss know that so much wine is grown in Ticino. While it is better by average than the ones from the Valais/Wallis, the wines from Vaud/Waadt, Geneva, Neuchâtel/Neuenburg, Aargau, Zurich, St.Gallen (Rheintal) and Graubünden are generally rather better. The biggest problem for the Ticinese winegrowers however is the Veneto as the Merlot di Veneto tends to be heavier and fruitier than those from Ticino. The Ticino winegrowers in my view ought to enrich their variety by some heavier stuff like the Argentinian Malbec, or sorts from the Mediterranean. They should work out well in the climate and terrain of the Ticino. Opposed to have things mixed ? The Müller-Thurgau (or Riesling-Sylvaner as it is in Switzerland) is the result of Ing. Müller in the wine-research-centre in Wädenswil experimenting with wine-sorts. One mixed plant was particularily good, but when sending out samples he by error mixed up the names. The wine has nothing to do with Sylvaner, but nevertheless became a success. Müller-Thurgau is among the leading white wines in Germany for instance. And if you look to countries like Spain or Malta, you can see how sorts are mixed on purpose.
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Reminds me of my visit to San Francisco in 1976. I from a neighbour in our house had got the address of his brother in SFO and so I went to a visit. The man, a retired former butcher, with origins in Wallis/Valais, was a wine-expert and wine-lover. And then gave me a very small glass, and gave me several Californian wines to taste, and explained to me what the European equivalent was. Amazingly, the names completely differed but not the taste. The best white in the world however is the Californian Chardonnay. Unequalled, not least as the procedure they use, is prohibited in most other countries. The only wine I ever had to down the sink, not because of "Zapfe" but due to its quality, was a wine from Moldova I got in Moscow. It got down in the Hotel Rossya and was replaced by an excellent bottle from Georgia (not US-GA). A wine I clearly detest is Zinfandel, which is just like some Mosel-wines rather syrup-like. But tastes differ, and many people adore both of these syrups.
So you're saying that the Zinfandel/Primitivo grape varietal doesn't make good wine, no matter what?
I really dislike wines with even a small percent of Zinfandel. I generally like all Primitivo though
UC Davis did a genetic study and confirmed that zinfandel is primitivo; They aren't cousins as is commonly thought. I think the significant differences in the finished products accentuate old vs new world winemaking. Zin is also a labor-intensive grape to harvest properly. That might also account for some of the variation.
I'll also add that all zin under $10 is a disaster, probably due to the aforementioned labor involvement. The grape bunches ripen unevenly and it takes a lot of fiddling to get only the grapes which are ready. I'd speculate that corners are cut on the low-priced stuff. Under $10, Italian primitivo seems to pull ahead although it's still not great. Both become pretty good and much more consistent at $14 or so.