It pays to drink a cool bottle of red wine and a cold bottle of white wine. Otherwise, even the best reds would taste acrid (the Filipino word “mapakla” says it best), while the best whites would taste sour or acidic if not chilled properly.
Instead of leaving them at room temperature, red wines are best chilled at 18 degrees centigrade. White wines could be chilled up to six degrees centigrade.
“The simplest way of checking the wine is by holding the bottle,” said Randy Uson, brand development manager of Moët Hennessy Asia Pacific. “If the bottle of red wine is cool, then that’s okay. If the bottle of white wine is cold, then it’s good.”
People in temperate countries could drink red wine straight out of the wine cellar because room temperatures there could easily dip to 18 degrees centigrade. Even an air-conditioned room in Manila is still warm by comparison.
Interesting facts
“If the bottle of red is warm, don’t drink it because the taste of alcohol would be too strong or mapakla,” he said. “If that same bottle is too cold, you also won’t be able to appreciate it, as red wine’s flavors tend to close when too cold.”
Constant cool temperatures should be maintained even during the wines’ shipment and storage. That’s why the biggest wine companies ship their products in temperature-controlled
containers. They also expect their distributors to keep the wines cool.
“Constant exposure to warm temperature could permanently damage the taste and quality of most wines,” said Uson. “And that could also ruin a wine company’s reputation.”
As a growing number of Filipinos become regular wine drinkers, Uson shared a number of interesting and useful facts on how to best enjoy wine during a recent dinner hosted by restaurateur Elbert Cuenca at the Riedel Room, the new private venue of Elbert’s Steak Room in Makati City.
“We are still a work in progress, but this place is now open for private parties consisting of groups of up to 16,” said Cuenca. “Bacchus, which supplies most of our wines, also distributes Riedel wine glasses locally. They came here and said they wanted to make it into a Riedel room. So far, there are only three Riedel rooms in the world, and ours happens to be the third.”
In honor of special guest Diego Urra, brand ambassador and assistant winemaker of Chile-based Lapostolle wines, Cuenca and younger brother Adrian Cuenca, the restaurant’s chef, paired items on the special dinner menu with four of the winery’s leading wines: Casa sauvignon blanc, Cuvee Alexandre chardonnay, Casa merlot and Clos Apalta, Lapostolle’s prized and multi-awarded red wine based on carmenere.
Award-winning vintage
People are willing to pay as much as $3,000 for a bottle of Clos Apalta’s vintage ’05, said Urra. The same multi-awarded vintage was responsible for putting not only Lapostolle, but also the whole of South America, on the wine map.
“Chile first became known for producing good value wines some 15 to 20 years ago,” said Urra. “Over the years, we grew in that category in terms of volume and quality. All those years, Chilean winemakers were also actively promoting abroad.”
Now that everybody knows where Chile is and its reputation for producing some of the world’s best wines, the challenge for new world winemakers like Urra is to convince people that Chileans can produce fine wines that are “10 times cheaper” than those produced in Bordeaux.
Moët Hennessy has been marketing Lapostolle’s wines globally for close to six years now. The family-owned company, which prides itself of its French heritage, operates several vineyards and wineries in a number of valleys in the Chilean wine region, a fairly narrow strip of land that spans the coast up to the foot of the Andes mountains.
Diverse conditions and topography—cold near the coastal plain and warmer by the Andes—allow Lapostolle to produce a variety of grapes that are suitable ingredients for its various wine offerings. Lapostolle is also one of the few wine companies in Chile that practice organic and biodynamic farming.
More aromatic
Apart from avoiding the use of chemicals, Lapostolle doesn’t use genetically modified organisms. Instead of machines, it relies on manual labor to pick grapes mostly at night when temperatures are cooler and fruits are more “relaxed.”
“Grapes are fresher and more aromatic when harvested at night, and those qualities have an effect on taste,” said Uson. “And since people and not machines pick the grapes, they can discard rejects immediately. It costs more money to hire people, but it ultimately helps ensure quality.”
In Urra’s book, the old rule of drinking whites with fish and reds with meat continues to evolve. It’s okay, for instance, to drink white wine with beef carpaccio as long as the wine is on the “oaky” side.
“There are still useful rules out there, which you could find in books and on the Internet,” he said. “But consumers have had to deal with so many conflicting rules in the past that they ended up more confused. Worse, some ended up not knowing anything. We have to keep things simple by allowing people to discover certain things for themselves.”
Chardonnay, for instance, could pair well with a range of dishes other than fish and appetizers. It would all depend not only on the place where the chardonnay is produced, but also on the type of chardonnay, which ranges from oaky to creamy, light and fresh.
“Even if all of us make wines within a certain region, the results would still be different,” he said. “The final product would depend on our respective ideas and tastes.”
French roots
Urra’s efforts to educate people aren’t limited to consumers. He also regularly meets with chefs to discuss the best Lapostolle wines to pair with their dishes.
“If the main dish, for example, is pepper-crusted beef, I would advise them not to make the dish too peppery if they’re going to pair it with, say, cabernet sauvignon and Clos Apalta,” he said. “I certainly won’t pair it with a sauvignon blanc since the dish’s spicy flavor would completely overpower the wine.”
The family behind Lapostolle wineries began producing wines in Chile in 1994, but it traces its roots much earlier in France. In fact, it still owns several vineyards in the French Cognac region where Gran Marnier cognac is produced.
Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle, the woman behind Lapostolle, named one of the house’s wines Cuvee Alexandre in honor of her great grandfather Alexandre Marnier, creator of Gran Marnier.
“To sum up our unique position in the industry, Lapostolle describes itself as Chilean by birth, but French by style,” said Urra.