This wine has been on my radar for more than a year. It's from one of my favourite regions in Spain; Rioja. Situated in the northern part of Spain, it's both the most well known area and the most traditional when it comes to winemaking. 
But things are changing, and young and fresh ideas are getting acknowledgement around the globe. The winemakers behind this bottle wanted to create something new, but still respect the history and the terroir. It's all about biodynamic and small scale production. Things that have a very good ring to it in 2021 😊
Artuke has 95% Tempranillo and since they don't use any oak, it gives you a nice chance to taste what this grape is all about. 
It's a lot of wine for the money and a versatile bottle when it comes to food. All we need in January. 

This year has been one to behold that’s for sure. Who would have thought we would be stuck inside for most of the year, quarantined form each other because of a damn virus? Now, with new vaccines on the horizon, we can slowly start to hope for a better 2021. But there was something good in 2020. We did drink a lot of wine! All of us, just check the sale numbers from Vinmonopolet … so we did end  up trying out some fine wines. These are the best wines we had this troublesome year. Here’s to putting 2020 away in the cellar and cheers to a new year!

​We will take the holidays of and be back in the beginning of January with our first recommendation of 2021! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Bodega Catena Paraje Altamira Malbec 2018 - 209kr 

Dark, cold, brilliant red color. 
Intriguing smell of spices, dark berries, chopped wood, some oak and forest.
Delicious taste of dark berries, beef spices and cherries. Well balanced acidity, smooth tannins and a long flavorful aftertaste.

With food
It’s a very versatile wine. Excellent for just enjoying a glass at the fireplace or hitting it up with some food.
As most Malbec wines, it pairs very well with grilled or pan fried beef. Classic bottle for a classic entrecôte meal. 
But will also be great with all the lean game dishes of the season. Or try it with a cheesy pizza or your favorite bolognese. ​

Fenocchio Barolo Bussia Sottana Riserva 2013 - 349,90 kr

Very, very good Barolo at a very reasonable price. It needed five hours to open up, but it is well worth the wait. Red berries, mushrooms and forrest floor on the nose. Great structure and minerality in the mouth. Good tannins that cleans the palate. Red berries, cherry and mushrooms in the mouth. Perfect with mushroom lasagne. ​

The wines from these high-altitude vineyards were by far the best we tasted in Mendoza. Both the Malbec’s, but perhaps mostly the Chardonnays showed an uniqueness and crispness that I don’t think I had tasted in a Chardonnay before. ​

Angelica Zapata Chardonnay 2017
250,30
An outstanding chardonnay from Catena Zapata. So fresh and fruity. Great acidity and minerality makes it so fresh and easy to drink. Lemon, lime and mint on the nose and that carries on to the mouth with some extra hints of butter and ripe apples. This should be great with the seasonal cod, Skrei, we have in Norway now. ​

This week we bring you a hearty bottle from South Africa. Full of life, rich in taste and guaranteed to warm frozen December souls.

Located only 70 km outside Cape Town, situated on a inland plateau 350 meters above the sea, we find the vineyards for our Chardonnay. 
Elgin Vintners is a collaboration between six excellent wine makers, producing under the same brand. They've got an exiting series of wines, ranging from Pinot Noir, Syrah, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, blends and more. But we've fallen in love with their tasty Chardonnay. It's stored in French oak and left for 10 months on the lees. This gives a wine packed with flavours which I've introduced to many of my Burgundy friends, with great success. 

The month of waiting is here, December, and what a strange one it is going to be. Waiting for a Christmas Holiday that will be one of the strangest in my lifetime that is for sure. But as with everything this Pandemic has thrown at us, we must cope and get through this as well. I’m sure Christmas will be a fine holiday, although an unusual one, and while we wait we can enjoy a good glass of wine or two.

​This weeks wine comes from beautiful Portugal and from a Norwegian living the wine dream there. Roar Aune, a tailor from Trondheim, and his wife Petra Lohman, a business economist from Germany, bought the farm Quinta das Mercês and since 2011 they have restructured an old vineyard and made it to what it is now: Dão wines in their unique Norwegian way.

​They have several wines in the Vinmonopolet now and all at a very affordable price. For this weeks wine we recommend the Tinto, but do try the others as well as they are well worth the price!

Aune Lohmann Tinto 2016 - 159,90 kr
​​Blueberries, black currant, Christmas spices and toffee on the nose. At first your hit by the acidity in the mouth. It cleans the pallet right away. Some tannins as well. Tart blueberries and cherry is the flavours that dominate. Very good value for money this and a good wine with foods like grilled lamb.

Bodega Catena Zapata is one of my absolute favorite producers. The Argentinian wine family makes the undoubtedly best wines in South America. No questions asked. 
They specialize in wines made from high altitude vineyards and Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grapes dominate their world.

If you wanna check out their flagship wines, search for «Nicolas Catena Zapata», «Argentino Malbec» and «White Bones/White Stones». 

While Catena produces these world class bottles, they also have a range of wines who delivers extremely high in the price/quality category. And our wine of the week is a new star here.

Paraje Altamira Malbec 2018 is a single vineyard wine, from the Altamira vineyard. It consists of 80% sand, 10% Clay and 10% Silt.
Ticking in at just 209kr, this is an enormous amount of quality wine at the price. It’s spicy, fruity, well structured, has soft tannins and will go excellent to many autumn and winter dishes. What more do you need?

​It is that time of the year, the new wine has arrived. And with that, I’m sorry to say, so to has any sense of normality and focus on quality from wine lovers, wine writers and wine connoisseurs. 

​Of all the hypes in the wine world none are as stupid as the Beaujolaise Nouveau. This rush to get the first vintage ready is just pain wrong, and the vintners know it. But it is a straight line to fast money, and, well, I can’t really fault people who want to earn a fast buck. But I’ve travelled to Beaujolais and talked to the wine makers there. Many of them see the Nouveau as a burden that has taken alle the focus away of the quality that the Gamay grape and the Beaujolaise region as a whole can produce. And having tasted wines made from Gamay that have been given the chance to rest, it is so clear that they are right. To drink these Nouveau-wines is just wrong, for all reasons. Wine can’t be made in such a short time. Wine, as a product needs time to develop and become what it can and should be!
So, as a personal protest to the hype, we are recommending the total opposite today. Well, maybe not the total opposite, that would be a white wine with age from the new world, but we could’t find that at the vinmonopolet. So we ended up with a 26 year old Bordeaux in stead!

Chateau Bel-Air Lagrave is a Cru Borgeois and the Cru Bourgeois classification lists some of the châteaux from the Médoc that were not included in the 1855 Classification of Crus Classés, or Classed Growths. Notionally, Cru Bourgeois is a level below Cru Classé, but still of high quality. The Seguin-Bacquey family have owned this nine-hectare Moulis property for over 150 years. The vineyard is planted with 60% cabernet sauvignon, 35% merlot and 5% petit verdot. The wine spends 18-20 months in oak, between 35% and 50% of which is new. 

Ch. Bel-Air Lagrave 1994 – 399,90 kr
The first ting you notice is the scent of a pencil that has just been sharpened! It brings back memories of school. I addition there is cedar three, cigar box, leather and red pepper. In the mouth you right away notice the total lack of tannins! In stead there are a lot of secondary flavours. Red peppers dominate, with cigar and smoked ham as well. There is good acidity to help balance the wine, but some tannins would be nice. But it is a wine that surprises and pleases. So much better than the unfinished wines being released right now.

November is upon us and Halloween has come and gone, days grow shorter and shorter and sometimes the sky graces us with a beautiful sunset offset by leafless threes making for spooky shadow play. On these evenings we often pour something red in our wine glass, but for those who goes searching, there can be found gold in Vinmonopolet’s shelves. This week we have wondered to the ancient Greek shores.

​Greece isn’t the first country you think of when you think of quality wines. Often the only Greek wines we have had or cheap wines found at restaurants. But lately there has been a small revolution in Greece and the rise in quality has been great. It makes for some new and interesting acquaintances, and this week we welcome the grape Malagouzia to our collection. This grapes was virtually extinct until it was found again in the 1970’s and has been revived to what we now can get. And it is a great grape!

​This weeks wine comes from the Amyndeon plateau north in Greece from the producer Alpha Estates. It was founded in 1997 by the experienced viticulturist Makis Mavridis and chemist-oenologist Angelos Iatridis, who, after years of experience in various locations of Greece, chose the Amyndeon region to create his own wine. Respect to nature, combined with high quality and deeply eco-friendly growing practices and the typicity of the produced wines are possible with the implementation of mild, sustainable integrated viticulture and winemaking practices, based on the most recent international standards.

Malagouzia Single Vineyard Turtles 2019 – 211,90 kr
​
A first for me. Very good Greek wine. At first it gave me hints of a Sancerre but after a few minutes there were more dept to this wine. On the nose, gooseberry and freshly cut grass. It feels quite weighted in the mouth. Honey, oranges, clementine in the mouth. Good acidity to balance the wine. Very long and very smooth. 

This is a crowd pleaser in so many ways. Wonderful, tingling flavours, easy to drink and excellent priced. It even features a label possible to remember. Our wine pick of the week comes from California, USA. 

Zinfandel was among the first wine grapes I really enjoyed as I started with wine, years back. It presented likeable features for beginners such as sweetness, spiciness and high alcohol. Yup, these were key things for me as I got started. Much the same as Amarone wines, which I also loved.
Well as I expanded my wine horizon both Amarone and Zinfandel fell off the charts. 
But over the last couple of years I've noticed that good things are happening to my early favourite; the Zinfandel grape. Excellent winemakers have been working on taming this wild grape, but keeping what its gret at - fruit and spice! Another issue has been getting the alcohol down to more reasonable levels. 

And among those who've managed this is Hobo Wine Company. A modern wine company focused on good things such as high quality production and sustainable farming.

It's even a versatile food pairing wine, working excellent with both vegetarian dishes as well as beef or pork dishes.

This bottle could be your new everyday favourite.

Our wine of the week takes us to the far north west corner of Spain, to Galicia. This spectacular part of the country consists of beautiful beaches, steep and high mountains and wast plains. It's blessed with an oceanic climate, with rainy winters and spring, and quite dry summers.

Dominio do Bibei is run by Javier Dominguez and was founded back in 1999. It's considered one of the absolute top in the region and produces quality wines from these dramatic vineyards.

The grapes for LaLama are hand harvested in these steep hills, situated 300-700 meters above sea level. The vines are between 18-100 years old and the grape mix is 90% Mencia, 3% Garnacha, 3% Brancellao and 2% Mouraton. The wine is stored 13 months in French oak, 7 months in 45hl casks and 16 months in bottle before release.
​It's a fantastic wine both for drinking on its own, but also super versatile with food.

This is a brilliant example of the new style of wines coming out of Spain these days.

​We’re coming upon November and the famous “new wines” from Beaujolais will be dropped. If you have followed this blog for a while you will know our scepticism towards this hype. Wines just aren’t ready after a month of vinification and they are never at the full and best potential. And when you taste the other wines from the Beaujolais vintners the question becomes: why doesn’t everyone just make wine like this weeks wine!

​They make great reds in Beaujolais, but don’t forget the whites! The Chardonnay grape reigns supreme among the white grapes here and the result can be magical. Like the white from Yohan Lardy. -The young wine maker started his estate with 2 ha of old vines - planted in 1911 and 1950 - on the heights of the Moulin a Vent appellation in the prestigious plot called "Les Michelons". Here The soil is very thin, meagre, with pink granite crumble rich on iron mineral "manganese". For his white wines Vines are planted near the Cru Fleurie, on a clay and silty soil.

​The grapes are handpicked and he vinifies his wines with only native yeasts without sulfites. The wines are aged for at least 10 months in Burgundy barrels in order to get the best balance between fruit and acidity.

Yohan Lardy Beaujolais-Villages Blanc les Bruyères 2019 - 186,40 kr
​
The first ting that strikes you is the great and clean fruit that you smell right away. Fine citrus fruits, with hints of hazelnuts and ripe, yellow apples. In the mouth great minerality and good acidity to give balance. Very good to drink now and just enjoy!