Wines made from Roussanne grapes of Victoria
Discover the best wines made with Roussanne as a single variety or as a blend of Victoria.
Roussane is a white grape variety, planted on an area of more than 700 ha. Originally from Montélimar, it is also found in Savoie, Languedoc and Roussillon, and grows very well in calcareous, poor, stony soil. It prefers to be pruned short. Roussane is also called fromenteau, barbin or bergeron. The young leaves are bubbled with fine down. When adult, they become thicker. It flowers in June and matures in mid-September. The grapes are cylindrical in shape, the berries are small and turn red when ripe, and the wine produced from pure Roussane is of extraordinary quality. It has a delicate aroma reminiscent of coffee, honeysuckle, iris and peony. The taste of this wine improves with age. It is part of the blend of the appellations Vin-de-Savoie, Côtes-du-Vallée du Rhône or Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Victoria is a relatively small but important Australian wine state. Located in the Southeastern corner of the continent, with a generally cool, ocean-influenced Climate, Victorian wine is remarkably diverse, producing all sorts of wines and styles in different climates. In all, the state covers almost 250,000 square kilometres (over 90,000 square miles) of land (almost the same Size as the US state of Texas), well under a quarter the size of its western neighbour, South Australia, and less than a third the size of New South Wales to the North. As such, Victoria's size - and to some extent, the state's viticultural history - can defy generalization.
At a national committee meeting held on Thursday 8th September, members of the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) voted unanimously to ratify the change to the appellation guidelines to allow white wines into AP Gigondas. A working group of growers and négociants has been pursuing the amendment for 11 years. The amendment states that white Gigondas must contain a minimum 70% Clairette. Other permitted varieties include Bourboulenc, Clairette Rose, Grenache Gris, Grenache Blan ...
Martin Crozier-Cook is wine manager at Jeroboams food and wine store in Holland Park, west London. Jeroboams was voted Outstanding Retailer of the Year in the 2022 Decanter Retailer Awards Christmas time is when things get crazy – we all know this from our own experience of shopping in December. It brings out all sorts of behaviour in people. I help manage the Jeroboams store in leafy Holland Park, and I can tell you that a smile and a good sense of humour are absolutely necessary in making it t ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...