All posts tagged: chateau des hospitaliers

Mom-made Wines

May 8, 2009 Events, Wine

In honor of Mother’s Day tonight from 5-7pm in the Manhattan wine store and on Saturday May 9 from 5-7pm in the Brooklyn wine store, we will be celebrating by tasting three wines (a white, a red and a rose) all made by moms! Remember to bring your same-day receipt for over $10 purchase from Provisions to the wine store and get 5% off your wine purchase.

Chateau des Hospitaliers 2008 ($14)
Mme. Martin-Pierrat proves the old saying that the phrase “working mom” is redundant. She is involved in every aspect of winemaking at her family’s tiny 24 ha. estate in the Languedoc region of southern France and produces this lovely clean and fresh white with apple and peach aromas.

Rosi Schuster Blaufrankisch 2007 ($19.75)
When Rosi married her husband, Franz Schuster, they each owned their own vineyard in the Austrian countryside. They joined forces and began making classic Austrian wines. Recently the day-to-day wine-making has been handed off to their son Hannes, but Rosi’s passion, influence and taste is still felt in every wine they produce. This is a quintessential blaufrankisch, with dark red fruits and peppery spice.

Susana Balbo Crios Malbec Rose 2008 ($14)
The name says it all: Crios is “offspring” in Portuguese. The first female winemaker in Argentina dedicates these wines to her children. Her rose of Malbec is very dry and because it is made from the powerful Malbec grape, it has enough character to stand up to heartier foods.

Chateau des Hospitaliers

April 17, 2009 Events, Wine

On Sunday, April 19 from 12-7pm in both the Manhattan and Brooklyn wine stores we’ll be tasting inexpensive organic wines including Chateau des Hospitaliers Prestige Coteaux du Languedoc, a white from a producer we’ve carried since we opened that is back just in time after having run out earlier this year. Enjoy its lean peach and apple flavors with Graber olives or grilled trout stuffed with rosemary and lemon. For $14, it is hard to find something this satisfying. With summer coming, this is a ‘buy the case’ wine – our 15% case discount makes it only $11.90 a bottle.

The promotion of organic farming is all the rage in the marketing plans of wineries all over the world. They tout their organic practices in the brochures and on their labels. A noble and worthy endeavor for sure, but it sometimes comes off as just another marketing ploy. For Serge Martin-Pierrat and his wife at Chateau des Hospitaliers, farming naturally is just the way things are done. You won’t see it on their label. Or in a brochure. But for 20 years of farming apricots, peaches and grapes in the red clay of the Languedoc, the Martin-Pierrat family have not used chemicals in their vineyards. After all, their children play in the same vineyards where their grapes grow.

When Sara from the wine store visited the Martin-Pierrats years ago, they were building their winery. She remembers:

And when I say they I mean he was building it himself. It was all done with saving energy and using natural products in mind. The insulation was sheep’s wool, they used gravity to move the wine around and they took into consideration the windows and the positioning of the sun in order to maximize solar energy.

Sara, by the way, is enjoying her time on the west coast and says she frequently gets a shout out to Fort Greene when she wears her Greene Grape sweatshirt. Though no longer working in the wine business, she has continued her passion for the grape through a new website, vine-yl.com, which she describes as the love child of a wine geek and a record freak. Check it out!

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