The night almost backfired when Martin Still, owner of the Methuen Arms, realised the chef at the Talbot used to work for him and was doing a much better job in his new place of work, but fortunately the wine and food won him over.  And how couldn’t it when the highlights of the menu were veal carpaccio, asparagus with shaved fennel and ewe's curd and loin of venison with garlic mash and bone marrow?

Along with all the fantastic food, Enotria provided the following wines:

 Sartori Marani Bianco

Trimbach Cuvée Fredric Emile

Colterenzio La Foa Sauvignon Blanc

Vino Nobile Montepulicano Polizano                         

Mount Langhi Langhi Shiraz                                            

Morgenster Estate Red 2001

 All in all it turned out to be a very interesting and insightful way to get to know the regions customers better.  And with a regulars night on the cards, there will hopefully be many similar evenings to come.

“The sparkling wine section of this year’s Sommelier Wine Awards was one of the most hotly contested, with some very strong performances from individual houses. But what set Enotria apart was not just its medal count in the fizz category – though a Gold, four Silvers and five Bronze sparklers was an impressive haul – but the variety which it represented.

Gold for the UK’s Ridgeview was not unexpected given the producer’s record in this competition.  And as well as a Gold, there were four Silvers for three different Champagne producers (non vintage, vintage and rosé) and a range of Bronzes that included a Saumur, a Blanquette de Limoux and a sparkling Italian red.

It was a genuinely wide-ranging and stimulating effort for one of the UK’s biggest importers.”

 Our gold awards were certainly worthy winners. Domaine de Belle Mare ‘Les Granges de Felinés’ provided an exciting take on the increasingly fashionable Picpoul grape, Marani Bianco Veronese from Sartori represented our Italian wines and Clos La Roquète, Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc our French. Franck Massard's Humilitat Priorat deservedly picked up a gold for its expression of terroir, minerality and freshness and Ken Forrester's T Noble Late Harvest stood out as a winner along with Directors' Cut Shiraz from Heartland Wines and Ridgeview’s Grosvenor Blanc de Blancs.

For the full list of Enotria's Awards, click the link below:

Wine Sommelier Awards 2013

Our new Cannonball Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon from the Sonoma/Mendocino area of California  most definitely look the part with their quirky, bold packaging and they also display outstanding quality for the price-point, so my mission when I visited team Cannonball earlier this month was to uncover who and what Cannonball is all about.

So who is Cannonball?

Cannonball exists because of 2 founding partners – Yoav Gilat and Dennis Hill.  Visionary Yoav brims with more energy than a speeding hummingbird as he oversees the entire Cannonball operation. He brings 20 years of experience in consumer goods and beverages and fell in love with Sonoma and Mendocino when providing strategy/marketing to Blackstone Winery. Fed up with the over-priced, stuffy wine scene, Yoav made it his mission to produce a range of “serious wines that don’t take themselves too seriously”. I like it. He wants you to enjoy the expertly crafted wines whilst being transported back to a time when the only point in life was to have fun. “Dive in and share a splash”. This explains the concept behind the packaging and brand.

Dennis Hill, all modesty and ‘behind the scenes’, is Cannonball’s secret weapon, and one of Sonoma county’s most respected winemakers. Dennis says he was “born in the right place at the right time, just in time for the renaissance of winemaking in California!” He became infatuated with winemaking after accepting a harvest position at his landlord’s winery, Seghesio Family Winery in the early 70s, and has never looked back. With chemistry and oenology degrees under his belt he began making wine for various local family wineries including Seghesio, Alexander Valley Vineyards, Mill Creek, and later he became chief winemaker at the well-known Blackstone Winery. After many years at Blackstone Dennis began searching for a new challenge, and 7 years ago Cannonball was born. Dennis manages his family’s vineyards at the northern edge of the Russian River Valley near Healdsburg which provide grapes for the Cannonball wines. We visited one of his Chardonnay vineyards, “Adam and Eve,” where there was a notable cool breeze from the Pacific influence – perfect, he tells me, for producing racy Chardonnay grapes. The vineyard was immaculate and the healthy vines were just starting to form clusters.

Here's Dennis talking to us about the philosophy behind Cannonball:

Who needs a winery anyway!

A different set-up: The winemaking facility for Cannonball is called “Rack and Riddle”. Dennis and Yoav decided to produce the wines at the Rack and Riddle facility in Hopland just outside Healdsburg in Mendocino county - a state of the art facility, and Dennis with his 37 years of winemaking experience has never been happier: “I feel really fortunate to be able to make wines here with all the latest technology and systems a winemaker could dream of. It makes my life easy, success is assured and I know I have the tools to make the best possible wine.”

What about the wines?

 Chardonnay 2010 Sonoma County

Fruit comes mainly from two areas, Carneros in the Southern Sonoma Valley not far from the north area of the San Francisco bay, very mild, cool climate in the summer time and also from Dennis’s vineyards in the Russian River Valley which gets its cooling effect directly from the Pacific Ocean. This vineyard is situated in the northern end of the Russian River Valley - a little more protected from intense fog, but still with lingering fog in summertime mornings, grapes ripen fairly slowly, one of the later whites to be harvested in Southern Sonoma County. Getting nice melon and tropical fruit. They do a blend of partly barrel fermented with malolactic and partly stainless steel (50/50) which gives a much wider spectrum of flavours from that vanilla, buttery, nutty character from the barrel fermentation to the bright citrus, tropical fruit and floral character from the stainless steel that preserves the natural fruit flavours of the grape must. Those are later blended into a final blend displaying a complex range of flavours. Barrel fermentation, aside from the buttery note adds a great silky texture in the finish that gives the wine a long and flavourful finish. 

Cabernet Sauvignon 2009 California

The 2009 was an exceptional vintage in California says Dennis. The fruit for the 09 is predominantly from Mendocino County with a small portion of fruit from Napa and Dry Creek where it ripened completely and very easily displaying great concentration of dark fruit. Half of the blend spent nine months in French Oak, while the other 50% spent eleven months in American Oak. After barrel-ageing it becomes more complex and chocolaty, showing spiced red apple and blueberry fruit. The key characteristics to the Cannonball Cabernet is that it’s not astringent, it’s really smooth in texture and in Dennis words: “it’s big enough to have with a grilled steak, smooth enough you could enjoy a glass by itself.” The wine is drinking beautifully right now and we see it lasting several more years.

 Posted by Harriet

The Ivy Club seemed an apt location for the Drinks Business Green Awards 2013.  Well, it was when my impression of the Ivy was a restaurant covered in ivy. I soon realised however, that my normal office attire put me well into the “under-dressed” category as we proceeded up the swanky glass staircase and got ourselves lost in the depths of the stained glass-clad club before locating the top floor bar where the Awards were being presented.  

Giles and Ryan enjoying Yealands Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2011

Yealands, our top sustainable producer, had been nominated for two awards (The Drinks Business Green Award – Green Company of the Year and the Drinks Business Sustainability Award).  Thus I found myself at the Ivy Club with Giles James, Yealands’ Business Development Manager, and Ryan Hanson, River Cottage’s Front of House Manager (both pictured below) awaiting the results with perhaps not enough apprehension...

 Yealands’ awards list is already rather extensive including “Producers of the World’s best Sauvignon Blanc” from IWC (International Wine Challenge) and winner of the International Green Awards 2012 so without getting too confident, we were crossing fingers for perhaps one of the two nominations.  Nevertheless, as the awards rolled out, it became clear that we had been pipped to the post for both the nominations firstly by Miguel Torres for Green Company of the Year and then by Esporão for the Sustainability Award.

 In the end, we decided not to be too disheartened by the results.  Our competitors were worthy; working on a smaller scale can often throw up greater challenges in becoming entirely sustainable and their effort was well worth the awards.  Yealands, carbon neutral from day one of its existence, has helped pave the way for green wineries worldwide so it’s only right that those who now follow in their footsteps deserve some of the credit.

 The whole experience drew me to the conclusion that the phrase “It’s not the winning, but the taking part that counts” is perhaps at its most relevant when it comes to being green.  So I walked all the way to Victoria instead of getting a taxi.

And so it is that there exist vineyards up to 1,000 metres up the slopes of this vast volcano which are planted with ungrafted vines, some over 100 years old.

Planeta, in their quest to understand and reflect all the different terroirs that this island has to offer, bought and planted around 16 hectares of Carricante (Etna's great white wine grape) and Nerello Mascalese (its red counterpart) a few years ago.  Last year opened their new winery on the slopes, Feudo di Mezzo. Whilst the winery was under construction, they came across this incredible vineyard of old Nerello vines (above). Some are certainly over 80 years old, a few are clearly ungrafted (so pre-Phylloxera).

As if standing in this amazing, beautiful vineyard wasn't enough, whilst we were there, the mighty volcano began erupting. Although the craters from which the explosions come are about 5 miles from this vineyard, the sight of huge columns of ash being blasted into the air is still quite awe-inspiring.

As Etna continued to rumble like a distant thunderstorm, we checked in at the local wine bar, 'Ox', and asked the owner if he was worried. He laughed; "this is normal. we'd be worried if these small eruptions didn't happen, then we'd have something like Vesuvius on our hands!"

Gary, Chiara and Martin

This week was artichoke week in Sicily (what, you mean you didn’t know? Ed) where Mandrarossa’s head chef Bonetta dell’Oglio rounded up an elite brigade of Sicilian ladies from Menfi to teach people how to cook seasonal produce.
Enotria got in on the action and invited some of our top Mandrarossa customers to send their chefs out from the UK to share their knowledge and to learn with “le signore della brigata”. Anyone who’s been lucky enough to visit Sicily will tell you that the local traditional cooking is some of the best food you will ever eat, so the visitors were pretty excited to be there.

Martin Henley, Head Chef from Cedar Court Grand in York, Chiara Massone, from Aberdeen restaurant Rustico, and Gary Bell from Enotria stalwarts Salvo’s were all put to work in the very rustic kitchen at Mandrarossa’s cookery school.
Lunch in the Sicilian sunshine was a very happy affair and the UK team didn’t let the side down, faithfully following the local recipes. They didn’t have much time to pause though, as they were on cookery duties for Settesoli head honchos in the evening too!
The cookery school is one of the ways in which Mandrarossa demonstrate that their company is all about the community which it such a big part of – some 70% of Menfi families are involved in some way with the winery. There is no better way to appreciate what Mandrarossa stands for than with a delicious plate of home prepared Sicilian food - and a glass of something cool and refreshing from the winery!

For full details on the wine go here.

Enotria will be offering Cannonball’s flagship wines: Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Harriet, our California buyer, says:

“California is trendy right now; we see an opportunity in gastro pubs and groups where the US sense of style is a perfect fit. There is huge quality in the region. Cannonball appealed to us with their clear direction, very upbeat, eye catching labels, and of course the wines which varietally are bang on the
money.”

Yoav Gilat, Cannonball CEO, says:

“We waited to enter the U.K. market until we found the perfect partner that understood our brand and philosophy. Cannonball speaks to a new generation of wine consumers  those wanting to explore their own tastes and discover what is appealing to them, not necessarily drink what their grandparents were drinking. In the past, California wines have been misrepresented in the U.K with inexpensive, mass-produced, non-descript wines. I believe this market is primed to dive in to the luscious California style of Cannonball and experience a fresh SPLASH!"

Cannonball will be pouring their wines and meeting folk at the Enotria Annual Tasting, discover, on February 26th.

For more information on cannonball please visit www.drinkcannonball.com