A few days ago I wrote about a white wine made from red Cabernet grapes. So I thought it would be interesting, for comparison, to try a white made from a new grape variety called…Cabernet Blanc.
Likely you didn’t know there was such a grape and nor did I till I turned up a few years back at this very progressive family estate near Beziers. I liked this wine immediately. I forget the details but this new variety is a creation of a bunch of wine boffins – Swiss, I think – who managed to encourage a new variety of Cabernet that came out with a white skin. I’m not a boffin so I just assume it’s like horticulturalists who cross this with that and manage to come up with a newly coloured tulip or something. I believe it involved crossing todays cab with much older more primitive vines. This had the additional benefit of giving the new variety great resistance to the diseases which plague today’s modern vines. So this wine comes from vines which have not needed any treatments. Which is both reassuring and economical.
I reckon this variety will become pretty important in the future which we all need to be sustainable, do we not?
But it’s the flavour that gets me coming back for more. There are elements of all the classic white varietals in this wine; Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, are in there, yet it’s a true original. I think I prefer this to the Albastrele Blanc de Cabernet I mentioned last week, but you may not agree.
Interesting, less-well-known wines, from strange places, (this is #6, you can read about the first here) and offer you all six as a mixed case. Come with me … Fly By Wine. No airport chaos.
