Two colleagues from GENUSS wein.pur (one of the magazines for whom I write) are here tonight. It was a spontaneous thing and I didn’t have time to prepare an elaborate meal, so we started with grilled polenta with salsa fresca and mixed baby greens with plum infused balsamic vinaigrette. Then we had fettucini with crayfresh and peas in a sherry cream sauce.
I prepared a couple of wine to taste blind. The first two were white wines. The 2005Matassa blanc is a lend of Pinot Gris and Maccabeu from Rousillon. It is so increadibly mineral, it is like licking rocks. Maybe that doesn’t sound too good, but it was delicious. It’s a really wonderfully structured wine with a steely medium body and racy acid. Beside all the mineral flavors it also has floral and fruit components reminiscent of oleander, yellow currant and green mango. The other white couldn’t have been more different. It was a big bodied 2006 Chardonnay from Schloss Halbthurn in Burgenland. It had plenty of oak and was creamy. The acid was fairly mild due to the warm vintage, but it was still really well balanced. Each wine was good on its own in a very different way. We decided to try the two wines as a blend and mixed equal parts in a glass. We had expected the oaky Chardonnay to swallow up the Mattassa blanc. We were wrong. The Matassa mineral literally drown out that oak! Amazing! We decided that if someone doesn’t quite understand what minerals taste like in a wine— they should try the Matassa!