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Fine Wine is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

1270 and Esprit de Fleurs by Frapin
Since 1270, the Frapin family have produced Cognac on their domain in the Grand Champagne region in France. Since 2002 Frapin has also become known for their perfume. The 1270 Eau de Parfum bears its long past in its name with all that it implies: complexity, richness, depth and weight. Spraying a little on a handkerchief or on one’s skin offers different styles and evolutions. White cotton cloth gives off the fruity (candied orange), balsamic (cocoa, tonka), spicy and lovely floral (vine flowers, everlasting flowers, linden) tones of this perfume. Thus, the beautiful complexity strides in harmony. On the skin, however, it rather too quickly obtains the scent of tobacco and black coffee, which become darker as the middle notes of pepper and spice and base notes of wood appear to the surface.

Citrus green Esprit de Fleurs features a dry mix of bergamot, grapefruit and tangerine as top notes and very strong scent of jasmine followed by a slightly bitter basil and other middle notes of pepper and berries. The base notes are vanilla, cedar and vetiver. The citrus elements disappear in about thirty minutes leaving cedar.
Available at Les Senteurs, London. GBP90/100ml.

Sauvignonne, Le Boise and Botrytis by Ginestet
Ginestet, an historic company too, with more than one hundred years behind it, not only laid foundation to the Bordeaux Wine Council but now also to three fragrances that carry aromas of major wines in Bordeaux – a dry white wine, a Sauternes and a red wine. Can there be a wilder dream for a winemaker or a perfumier for that matter? As a result of an inspired meeting between the Managing Director of Ginestet and a perfumier of the Florescence perfume company in Grâce (France), a fresh Sauvignonne, sweet Botrytis and woody Le Boise were launched in 2002. Molecules that define the typical bouqets of Bordeaux wines were identified in a labaratory and transformed into eau de toilette.

Sauvignonne is an aromatic citrus fragrance for women. It features white peach, grapefruit and boxtree notes. It leaves a cool, somewhat masculine impression that would work perfectly well in a business meeting, but not on a first date. A scent that becomes cooler and pleasantly more intensive if it has been in contact with water.

Le Boise, for men, comes in a red wine bottle which is a lovely interior design detail to find in a bathroom or hallway. It has the equal power to attract and repell. Two drops would destroy your personal scent circle – a circle outside of which no one should be aware of your fragrance. According to the Fragrance Foundation it is at arm’s length from the body. Le Boise is powerful, masculine fragrance with strong sandalwood notes, which turn to wood underscored with spicy pepper and vanilla notes.

Botrytis is an oriental vanilla fragrance for women and has a golden colour. It immediately features sweet (honey) vanilla with a slight hint of fresh white flowers which after some 15 minutes turns into the scent of gingerbread topped with vanilla. Botrytis lasts several hours.
Ginestet perfums cost about 55€. For more information visit www.ginestet.fr.

Fleur de Vigne by Caudalie
Fleur de Vigne Fragrance by Caudalie is very fresh and energizing, whilst being feminine and sexy, yet discreet and pleasant – criteria which are rare to discover in just one fragrance. Their formula includes top notes of grape blossoms with a blend of citrus – lemon, grapefruit, mandarin, bergamot and orange. The scent of small fragile vine blossoms are skillfuly recreated from white rose, pink pepper and watermelon. Middle notes of blackcurrant buds and green maté which materialise in about 20 minutes after application and a base of sandalwood and cedar. The Fleur de Vigne line includes body lotion, shower gel and a soon-to-be-launched Gentle Conditioning Shampoo.
The fragrance is available at Space NK and Caudalie.com. £30.00 / 100ml and £21.00 / 50ml.

Tauleto Wine Fragrance by Cesari
Tauleto Wine Fragrance comes from the Umberto Cesari winery located near Bologna. Originally the vision of Guliana Cesari, who wanted to transform the aromatic bouquet of their Sangiovese Tauleto wine into perfume, has materialized into a fruity, flowery fragrance that despite it’ s complexity can be worn and reapplied all day and night without being obtrusive. Top notes of grape, orange and mandarin evaporate rapidly, leaving middle notes of magnolia, violet and a light touch of bulgarian rose on the base of liquorice, musk and humus. The scent lingers for about an hour. A matt glass rectangular bottle of Tauleto Wine Fragrance comes in a silky violet sack packed in a wood case. The Tauleto Wine Fragrance line includes shower gel, body lotion, massage oil.

Wine Fragrance costs 80€/100ml. For more information visit http://www.tauletowinefragrance.com

Divine Perfumes is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

A tasting at La Conseillante during the 'primeurs'

Wine tasting is an art not a science and as such the results will not have the same empirical support as, say, a chemical analysis of a wine’s constituents. Moreover, a truly great wine provides the taster with a profound emotional experience which is hard to quantify. But a cursory glance at wine magazines, wine assessment sites and merchants’ wine lists frequently reveals a two or three digit number (a score) which may push a prospective purchaser into buying a particular wine. Europeans tend to prefer scores based on a twenty-point scale, whereas their American counterparts prefer a hundred point system – why a country which still uses Fahrenheit, whose cars have milometers and where weight is determined in pounds, uses what is effectively a decimal system makes not a little sense. Most of these scores are taken at face value and widely promulgated as if they are the last word on a particular subject, the international standard which may be transported to any timezone and proudly affixed to a wine’s description as if it has the same value as the level of alcohol in the bottle. The small print which should accompany all such assessments is conveniently forgotten, as indeed are the actual notes which accompany the digits.

There are a few websites which delve into the statistical world of scores for wines and one, in particular, is worth a moment’s perusal in order to penetrate the sheer depth of information available. At its most basic level there are the lists of scores from a host of different critics organised on an historical basis from the 2003 vintage and onwards. These will be updated with the new flood of critics’ pronouncement for the latest vintage (2008) in due course, so you may wish to bookmark them for further review. Here one can see at one glance see all the ‘scores’ derived from the most celebrated wine commentators – perhaps your favourite is among them? The columns can be conveniently sorted in a myriad ways to extract the most useful information. An interesting trend is the disparity between the scores from the European and American critics whilst allowing for the problems of converting the various scales.

One of the most convenient sortings to perform is that of sorting by high score according to your favourite critic. One might observe that the highest scoring wines are not necessarily the most expensive, especially in difficult years. It is also interesting to observe the familiar names of châteaux which some critics may seem to champion. Use of these kinds of statistics can be helpful in making purchase choices if one is confused by the wines and at the prices at which they are offered.

Bertrand Le Guern’s website tracks critics scores as if he were compiling the statistics for the Baseball League. This is a very comprehensive presentation of critics’ scores and, to some extent, their underlying influence through the prices that are finally charged for the wine in question. A very interesting chart, for example, is the average price of wines compared to the score it received in the vintages 2003-2007. This makes it very clear that there is a very strong correlation between wines which scored over 90 in the various vintages and the prices that were charged. This was particularly true for the 2005 vintage, much less so for 2003 and 2004. The correlation is also high for 2007, a campaign which largely failed in Britain.

There are other fascinating charts such as his presentation of average prices for the different appellations in Bordeaux. Pomerol and Pauillac showing their relative strengths when compared to other regions, an indication perhaps where to buy from too. Mr Le Guern is particularly strong when it comes to analysing prices. He makes useful comparisons between the price of a wine and the score it has received from the critics in his database. From this one can determine whether a wine is good value or not. He provides tables which show an estimated price based on a complicated statistical formula with the actual price and the highs and lows for the wine. All of these tables, provide some useful checks to those prices you might see in the marketplace – assuming you have the time to look through all of them.

Another particularly interesting table is where he lists the scores given to wines by critics from particular countries. Sorting the scores by country shows just how highly the US critics score the wines compared to their European counterparts and how much lower, in general, UK critics score the wines, with some notable exceptions where certain wines obviously appeal more to the British palate. Perhaps most useful to the consumer are Le Guern’s comparisons to the issue price of the wines at the time of the ‘primeurs’ (prix de sortie) and those which can be found in the supermarkets in France during their annual wine promotion festival in the autumn. Helpful, because he also gives the name of the supermarket when the wine could be bought. As if this wasn’t already enough he produces charts for all the wines showing their price evolution over a number of years, as many as ten years in some cases. If you’re concerned about whether some critics may prefer some wines over others than the website produces another set of tables which calculates the coeffficients of preference. An interesting, but not particularly scientific excursion. The rationale behind this ‘coefficient’ was to demonstrate one way or another whether there was a case to answer against an American critic that he ‘preferred’ the wines of a well-known consultant in Bordeaux. This provided some proof that he didn’t. On the contrary, a French wine commentator was amused to see how he himself apparently rated the wines of Michel Rolland higher and higher each year. Something he had not realised until now.

The comparisons of wines through scores are really only valid on the specific occasions when the wines are tasted. It’s therefore no good taking the score of a particular wine for 2008, say, and comparing it to the 2007, or even 2005. The prices of the wine will have a greater propensity to reflect the truth of the matter. Frequently scores are taken out of context and their use can be very misleading.

Scores are helpful because they provide some assessment of the quality of the wines during, for example, a primeur campaign, but they shouldn’t be taken on their own and should always be used in conjunction with the note which describes the wine. After all, no one is buying a score, but they are buying the estate, varietal, style, taste and even colour of the wine. As obvious as this may seem it is largely forgotten There are also other factors to consider which include a domain’s reputation and the general views on the vintage.

Statistics and scores taken from http://bleguern.fr (note: no www.)

Scores – sense or nonsense? is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

www.finewinepress.com (you are already here) reproduces articles generated by the team which are of interest to wine enthusiasts.

www.finewinejournal.com is for the wine connoisseur and investor in wines.

www.wineviator.com is our education site.

www.wineindustryreport.com assembles news from around the world for people who work in the wine trade.

www.blogauvin.com publishes articles of a more light-hearted nature about wine.

www.fine-wine-shop.com is our shop where we sell some relevant accessories

Fine Wine web portal is a post from: Fine Wine Journal

The only drawback to cocktails is the library of drinks required to ensure you can produce a diverse list according to the occasion and this may put off many people from making them at home. But once the basic mixers are acquired then they will serve for a long time since cocktails don’t demand large quantities of any one alcoholic ingredient. Certainly, cocktails made at home will be generally better than those drunk in most of the bars around the world. They are easy to make and ready to be adapted to your preferences. In keeping with the theme of this web site many of the cocktails listed below have some wine addition and they are, of course, mostly all pink – or at least shades of pink.

Pink cocktails based on wine and Champagne is a post from: Fine Wine Journal