John's Wine of the Month...Bagey-Cerdon "La Cueille"

John Boerner Wine Expert! 

The good thing about writing this Wine blog is that I can call on people I consider real experts, and our neighbor and good friend John Boerner is a wine expert. John has amazing good taste in wine and a really great palate. Luckily John has agreed to write about a different wine each month for our wine Blog. John will try to keep his "Wine of the Month" in a price range  that can be easily purchased and enjoyed by everyone. Below is John's first wine which I am sure you will enjoy. It also goes very well with next week's Blog on  Rosés, which are truly great wines for our Texas weather! I am really looking forward to John's picks each month and I am sure you will also. 


Cheers


Harold 


PS: John is also a great grill master! 

Why not wine, it get's you there slower.....

 Bagey-Cerdon "La Cueille"

I do not regularly drink sparkling wines.  I do appreciate them as a before dinner aperitif, recently having a fairly dry champagne paired with a wonderfully crafted cheese cracker at a friend's dinner party. Or, a champagne toast at the New Year or a wedding is always in order. However, Talya and I have a new favorites that we are regularly including in the wine rack, Bagey-Cerdon "La Cueille". (Do not ask me how to pronounce it.)

We were introduced to this rose sparkler at one of Veritas' Sunday evening Chef Tastings.  This particular dinner featured Thai cuisine.  An interesting tidbit of information that we learned that evening that I had not considered before was that pairing wine with Eastern food is somewhat new.  Wine has been paired with Western food for centuries in Europe, so over the years chefs, restaurants, and even sometimes we novices have gotten the general rule what works with steaks, fish, and even pizza and burgers.  When I have had wine with Oriental food before, I always went with the general rule of selecting a somewhat sweet riesling, knowing that the sweetness often made a nice twist to the food's spiciness (I like my Thai food nuclear hot!!)

Our first course was a spicy street sausage, and true to form with some assistance from Brooks, one of Veritas' co-owners, we went with a Riesling, though this selection (a Chateau D'Orschwihr Riesling Bollen Berg 2006) was from France, and was decidedly less sweet and drier than its German cousins.

It was the second course, a salad featuring baby shrimp with tasty lime undertones that we discovered the Bugey-Cerdon. Brooks suggested this one, and it definitely was out of my comfort zone, but decided why not, and rolled with the pick.  This wine is primarily a Gamay, though it also has a bit of a local grape, Poulsard.  Our group immediately fell in love with this rose hued, lightly sweet sparkling wine.  It balanced the acidity of our dish wonderfully.

I returned to Veritas a few days later and added a few bottles to our wine rack. We have taken to drinking it generally by itself.  It has a low alcohol content (8%), so it is easily consumed. To me it tastes like strawberry, with a raspberry undertone.  A side note to this wine, it is not made méthode champenoise, but by what is thought to be by an earlier, more rare method, méthode ancestrale. We recently shared a bottle with Debbie and Kevin Rogers on our porch swing to celebrate Debbie's birthday.

The wine can be purchased at Veritas for $24.99.

For those of you who want more information, the following is an excerpt from the web:

   John's Wine of the Month

Bugey is one of the best-kept secrets of France. As a geographical crossroads between the Savoie, the Jura, Burgundy, and the Rhône, it is one of the few regions where one can see both palm trees and snow within eyeshot. It is adjacent to the Savoie on its western side, located in between Lyon, Grenoble, and Geneva. The wines of Bugey were first cultivated here by the Romans and were later resuscitated by the medieval monks. Still, the region had to wait until 2009 before receiving its own A.O.C. status. Today, Cerdon is considered one of three crus within the appellation of Bugey, and the only one whose entire production consists of sparkling wine.


In La Cueille, one of seven high-altitude hamlets surrounding the historic medieval town of Ponsin, Patrick and Catherine Bottex are farming the limestone slopes above the Ain River. They have been working five hectares of land since 1991 and produce only a small quantity of their beautiful, intriguing sparkling wine. As a former part of the Duchy of Burgundy, it stands to reason that several Burgundian grape varietals have found a home here—not the least of which is Gamay. The Bottex’s blend consists of ninety percent Gamay and ten percent of the native Poulsard. They bottle this low-alcohol wine using the méthode ancestrale, a rare technique that experts believe predates the méthode champenoise. The wine first goes through a primary fermentation in cuve, but is then bottled before all of the residual sugar has converted to alcohol. After going through a secondary fermentation in the bottle for at least two months, the wine is ready—Champagne’s dosage is not permitted! The resulting wine is delightfully refreshing with bright fruit, a beautiful rosé hue, and a touch of sweetness

John & Talya Boerner

Cheers!

John 

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