I was delighted to be invited to be a part of the Bodegas Castaño Delegation attending the annual Liberty Wines UK Grand Tasting, held at the excellent Kia Oval, home to Surrey County Cricket, towards the end of January 2015. What a super way to start a new year of wine events!
My role, apart from tasting as many of the top quality wines on show as I could, was to assist Bodegas Castaño’s Head Winemaker, Mariano, who has worked the vineyards of DO Yecla for 30 years! Whilst my Spanish is some distance from being fluent, my wine-Spanish isn’t bad at all and I was pressed into service as translator.
Liberty Wines have an international portfolio of wines whose prices range from the economic to the expensive, but wherever one buys within this spectrum, you can be assured of value for money.
Mariano was a man on a mission and I had to keep up with him! We tasted, first, many of the range of white wines available and there were lots of splendid examples from well known wine producing countries (Italy and France figure very strongly on the Liberty list as well as Australia and New Zealand) and also from countries whose wines one doesn’t find so easily here in Spain – USA, Austria and Canada are examples in this category.
So many different white wine grape varieties and perhaps for me it was the superb Burgundy Chardonnays along with the ‘perfect’, in Mariano’s word, Condrieu, using of course, Vioginer.
From reds we went onto rosé where we found some lovely examples, particularly from Australia, showing a variety of soft red fruit notes as well as demonstrating that one cannot call rosé wine, pink any longer! Such wines are now made in many different versions of pink, though there is at the moment a noticeable leaning towards the very pale Provence style.
I wonder if winemakers of Provence are pleased to be flattered in this way, or slightly worried about the competition! I think we can expect to see many of these Liberty Rosé Wines, of all hues, taking shelf space in the coming Spring and Summer!
And the reds? Well an amazing variety from so many countries. Favourites for me were those which had Syrah/Shiraz either in the blend or made as mono-varietal and two of these included a tiny percentage of Viognier, one French one Australian – both excellent.
Please see my article soon in the Costa News Group www.costa-news.com click Cork Talk for more information about this excellently organised and extremely tasty event!
