September has arrived, summer has packed up, and I am wearing a cardigan.
That tells you everything you need to know.
This is the point in the year where I start getting properly excited about red wine again. The rosé starts disappearing, the lighter whites get pushed slightly further back in the fridge, and suddenly a big glass of red sounds exactly right.
Ideally by a fire.
I do not actually have a fire, so Netflix fireplace will have to do.
A couple of weeks ago I tried the Bread & Butter Chardonnay and somebody messaged me asking whether I had tried the reds.
I hadn’t.
So I picked up two of them: the Bread & Butter Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Sauvignon.
Same producer. Same part of the world. Completely different wines.
Which makes them quite fun to taste side by side.
These two are nowhere near each other
If you are trying to get your head around different styles of red wine, these are actually a really useful pair.
Pinot Noir sits on the lighter side.
Think red cherries, raspberries, softer tannins, more freshness. It is usually the sort of red that you can chill slightly as well. Ten or fifteen minutes in the fridge can make it feel even brighter.
Cabernet Sauvignon is going in the other direction.
Darker fruit, more body, more tannin, usually more structure. This is where you start thinking blackcurrants, spice, oak and a nice bit of steak.
So before I had even tasted them, I had a fairly good idea what should happen.
Whether Bread & Butter actually delivered that was another question.
Even the bottles give you a clue
This is something people do not always notice.
The Pinot comes in that more slender, gently sloping bottle shape.
The Cabernet has much broader shoulders.
That does not guarantee what is inside, obviously, but traditionally those bottle shapes are associated with different wine styles.
Then pour them into glasses and the difference becomes even more obvious.
The Pinot is much lighter in colour.
The Cabernet is properly darker.
If you want to see this for yourself, put the glass over a white piece of paper and look straight down through the wine.
With a lighter red, you will normally be able to see the stem fairly clearly.
Move across to the Cabernet and everything gets much darker.
You have not even tasted anything yet and the wine is already giving you clues.
A very easy trick for tasting red wine
When people start talking about all the different fruits they can smell in red wine, it can get ridiculous quite quickly.
Keep it simple.
Ask yourself one thing first.
Are you getting red fruit or black fruit?
Red fruit could be strawberry, raspberry or red cherry.
Black fruit could be blackberry, blackcurrant or blueberry.
If you genuinely cannot decide, say plum.
Plum sits nicely in the middle and has saved many a wine tasting.
Bread & Butter Pinot Noir
I started with the Pinot because it is the lighter of the two.
Straight away I was getting red cherry.
Nothing particularly heavy or dark going on.
Then tasting it, it was exactly where I expected it to be.
Light, fresh, nice acidity, very gentle tannins.
When I talk about tannins, I mean that drying feeling you can sometimes get around your gums and teeth with red wine.
There really was not much of that here.
It is just an easy, juicy red.
I would absolutely put this in the fridge for ten or fifteen minutes before drinking it. Not freezing cold, obviously, but just enough to freshen it up slightly.
If we get one of those random sunny autumn afternoons, this would be lovely.
Then the Cabernet Sauvignon
Completely different.
The colour is darker, the wine feels heavier in the glass, and the aromas immediately move away from red fruit.
I got loads more blackcurrant here.
Then some vanilla and a little spice coming through, which tells you there has been oak involved somewhere along the line.
Tasting it, I thought this was really good.
It is medium to full-bodied rather than some enormous monster Cabernet, and the tannins are definitely there, but they are not ripping your mouth apart.
There is much more structure than the Pinot though.
You notice that straight away.
This is the one I would want with a steak.
I could also see it working really well with roast chicken or turkey, which probably means I am already mentally moving towards Christmas.
It is September.
Calm down.
Which one is better?
That is probably the wrong question.
They are doing completely different things.
The Pinot is lighter, fresher and more red-fruited.
The Cabernet is darker, richer and more structured.
That is why I actually think buying both is quite a good little experiment if you are trying to understand red wine.
Pour them next to each other and you do not need a textbook explanation of body, tannin or fruit character.
You can see it.
You can smell it.
Then you taste them and it all suddenly makes sense.
That is much more useful than somebody giving you a twenty-minute lecture about grape varieties.
Are Bread & Butter reds worth the money?
I paid somewhere around £14 to £16 a bottle.
At that price, I think both are good.
One thing I was slightly worried about beforehand was sweetness.
Some cheaper Californian wines can leave quite a bit of residual sugar because it makes them immediately soft and easy to drink.
That is not necessarily a terrible thing, but personally I do not want every Californian wine tasting like somebody has added a spoonful of sugar to it.
I did not get that feeling from either of these.
They taste like proper examples of the styles they are trying to be.
The Pinot tastes like Pinot.
The Cabernet tastes like Cabernet.
Sounds obvious.
You would be surprised how often that does not happen.
Which one would I buy?
Watching the video back, I apparently made my decision without thinking too hard about it.
The Cabernet.
That is probably because of the time of year more than anything else.
If this were May and the sun was out, I might have gone Pinot.
But it is getting colder, the evenings are drawing in, and apparently I am already pretending there is a fire in my living room.
Give me the Cabernet.
If you want to see the two wines side by side and watch me taste them properly, have a look at the video below. And if you have tried either of the Bread & Butter reds, let me know which one you would pick. Pinot or Cab?
