Served by my son at lunch between Christmas and New Year, this for many people is the wine of wines, hard to get, delicious to taste, living up to the mystique of its name, and making other New Zealand whites seem hard and aggressive in comparison.
Some of my friends went for no special reason to New Zealand for Christmas this year. If it was to drink Cloudy Bay, I can see why. Is it all it is made out to be? On this evidence yes, even if at times you may suspect it is over-hyped and deliberately kept in short supply. Light and silky, yet sumptuous, it matched to admiration the prawns, Parma ham, potato salad, cheese and the home-made chocolate truffle cake brought along for the lunch by my youngest daughter.
Amazon, I discovered the other day, was down to its last bottle, by no means overpriced at £21 and thus a great temptation to buy. But since a second bottle does not always seem quite so good as a first, we moved on the following day to a ridiculously cheap Tavel I had bought at Lidl’s. Pink wines are traditionally summer wines, but Tavel - once considered the best of all French pinks, though now somewhat neglected - has a bit of body and seemed to go fine with Christmas odds and ends.
A product of the Rhone, it is deeper in colour and richer in flavour than my favourite pale, astringent Provencal pink. It made a nice change, and I shall be going back for more.
30 December 2014
I had the good fortune to discover the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc more than 20 years ago when it cost about a quarter of its present price. On visits to Edinburgh I'd often have dinner with the late Nina Havergal at a very pleasant restaurant a little downhill from her home off Belleview. Cloudy Bay was our usual tipple. We loved its intense gooseberry aroma.
ReplyDeleteThese were the days when wine writer Jancis Robinson once dismissed most New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs as "cat's pee"!