On Valentine’s Day, when you get two Wine Bloggers together, I guess you are going to have some wines during dinner. As I stated in my last post Oliver and Nina joined my Bride and me at our home for dinner and we each brought out a red wine for the dinner. The funny thing is that we each pulled a red wine, that we thought would be totally enjoyed by the other and they both were from the Pinot Noir varietal.

I guess that I tend to write a few articles about Pinot Noir wines, as I really enjoy them. I used to enjoy them from Burgundy until they became a bit dear, and now I have really started to enjoy them from the Monterey area of California. Oliver pays attention to my ramblings and he brought a Pinot Noir from Germany, which makes total sense. He brought a bottle of Weingut Ludger Veit Vinum Monticellum Spatburgunder Auslese Trocken 2007 from the Mosel. Spatburgunder is the German name for Pinot Noir and this was a late harvest for this vineyard. This label listed the wine as gutsabfulling, which is another way of stating estate grown. This wine comes from the Mosel, which back in the day was referred to as Mosel-Saar-Ruwer until 2007; and the Mosel is the third largest in terms of production of wine in Germany. Also on the label was the term “barrique” which I will presume to mean that there was one barrel produced and if one uses the Burgundy method of bottle production, there were 304 bottles produced or roughly twenty-five cases of wine. I found this wine to be supple and spicy, and rather sexy for a Pinot Noir.

I on the other hand had reached into my cellar and got a bottle of Pinotage wine for Oliver, as I know that both he and Nina enjoy this famous signature varietal from the Republic of South Africa, and they had toured and tasted at some estates on their last vacation there. Pinotage is a cross between two varietals Pinot Noir and Hermitage, also known as Cinsault; while it was once only found in South Africa it is now being grown elsewhere as well. I was really looking forward to serving Oliver and Nina this bottle of wine, as I found it to be very full bodied with a great balance on the tannins. I have talked about this wine before as I was serving Moreson Pinotage 2012 from Franschoek and Oliver said that his travels did not include a visit there. This wine had a much larger production as there were forty barrels of it produced. I was watching Oliver as he did his initial tasting of the wine, and he really seemed to savor it, and that made me very happy.