So many wines!

Welcome to the Bibendum Wineshop which is located at the ground floor of MLD Building (next to Café Georg), Banilad. A direct wine importer and distributor, Bibendum Wines Philippines (www.bibendumwines.com) is managed by Hans Joerg Eulenhoefer, Margaret Richards Taylor and Mikel Perdices with a mission to satisfy the desires of wine enthusiasts in the Visayas and Mindanao with quality wines from around the globe.

They now carry about 344 brands of wine with half coming from France, a third from USA and the rest from Argentina, Australia, Italy, Chile, Italy and New Zealand. Maybe a decade from now, wines from China (in 2010, it was the 5th top wine producer in the world) will make its appearance here but quality wines will never be produced from the Philippines.

Reason is that wine grapes grow best in temperate regions, 30 to 50 degrees latitude in the north and 30 to 40 degrees latitude in the south. Cebu did grow grapes, the table variety in the 70s and there were attempts to produce a beverage with alcohol. To simulate aging in oak barrels, they even added oak chips during the fermentation in the glass containers. Instead of a successful vineyard, it became a shopping mall.

This is the reason why many Cebuanos including myself grew in the culture of tuba, beer, rum, gin and whiskey, but never wine, because it simply was not available. In fact until age 30, I was so illiterate about wines that I could not distinguish which was wine and which had turned into vinegar!

It was only when I joined the Chaine des Rotisseurs that my palate began to be educated and understood the first rule on taste. Your taste buds are always right and if you like it sweet and you prefer a wine with higher sugar content, no wine expert can say you are wrong. My preference then was white wines because I simply do not like the bitter taste of tannins. Red wines are fermented with the grape skin and red grape varieties have higher tannin content.

Over time, my palate became more tolerant to tannins, indeed a slow process with constant sampling, but necessary to better appreciate the culture of red wines. I had also a handicap then because travel opportunities to western countries were rare. I began reading about wines and one wine was described as having the taste of gooseberry and I can never relate to it until the time I tasted a real gooseberry!

Today, wines from many parts of the globe are available in a single store like the Bibendum Wineshop and select guests were invited to its launching. We had a wonderful time wine tasting and some were dispensed using the Enomatic Wine Serving System.

Finger foods like the Pesto Chicken Sun Dried Tomato Crostini, Fish Finger with Lemon Garlic Sauce, Fried Spring Roll with Sweet Chili Sauce and the Mini Hams and Cheese Muffins were nice accompaniments to the wine tasting, though the crowd’s favorite was the Crab Cakes, all supplied by Café Georg. A new entry to my wine vocabulary is the Première Bulle, a first-rate sparkling wine, sold exclusively by Bibendum.

After all these years of wine education, your favorite columnist has come to the conclusion that his favorite wines are no longer within reach of his budget!