Richard Bost of Wine Educators International, gave us an interesting evening of Brazilian Wine. Did you know that Brazil is the 17th largest producer in the World? Doesn't sound too impressive until you find out that it produces more than New Zealand! Much of the wine is drunk in country, but with 190Million Brazilians, it does't go far - the average consumption per head is something like 2 litres per year.
Anyway, Brazil has started to export, and is going for the premium market. All the wines we tasted were £13 per bottle and up. We had 2 sparkling, 1 white, and 5 reds.
Richard gave a very informative talk, and the wines were quite decent, but there was a consensus view that the pricing was somewhat steep..
The sparkling wines - Cave Geiss Brut and Brut Rose at £15.99 each are probably comparable with other sparkling wines at the same price, but the white and the reds at £12.99 - £23.99 a bottle are probably going to be difficult to sell at those prices.
The wines can all be got from Symposium Wines (www.symposiumwines.com)
The 2 interesting wines were the single varietal Cabernet Franc (Casa Valduga Premium, 2007) and the Pizzato reserve Tannat 2005. Its very unusual to see Cab Franc on its own and the Tannat is also quite rare.
