March 27, 2020

ROGER GOULART Gran Reserva Brut Cava 2011

(Penedès, Spain) $20

Cavas (Spanish sparkling wines made by the Champagne method of second fermentation in bottles) are not all alike. Not even close. There are the huge commercial producers whose sparklers are a bit bland and rubbery. Then, from small estates, there are top quality cavas that are fresh and lively and have a deep yeastiness from long aging on the lees. Roger Goulart’s Gran Reserva is one of those. The wine spent 36 months on the lees (and yet it costs a mere $20!). Lovely, floral, and citrusy, it’s also wonderfully creamy. While this is delicious on its own, I’ll look the other way if you make a mimosa or a kir with it. (12% abv)

90 points KM

Available at Stirling Fine Wine

Port—by law—can only be blended, aged, and bottled at shippers’ warehouses, called “lodges” in Oporto.

Answer: False.

For most of its history, Port was matured in the lodges by law—a system that effectively insured that the big Port shippers monopolized the trade and that small growers were excluded from creating their own brands. That changed in 1986, and today Port can be, and often is, aged, bottled, and shipped directly from the farm estate (called in Portuguese a quinta). Today there are more than 100,000 vineyard properties in Portugal’s Douro Valley, the region from which all Port comes. These are owned by the shippers themselves, as well as the region’s roughly forty thousand growers, each of whom owns, on average, no more than a scant acre of vines.

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ROGER GOULART Gran Reserva Brut Cava 2011

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