Dona Dominga 2005 from Chile

THIS week's wine has a light golden colour and a pronounced perfumed bouquet of ripe fruit and flowers. On the palate there's a generous feel and tincture coming from the semillon, a flavour of lemon/peach and a note of honey in the background from the chardonnay.

With 13 per cent alcohol and lots of tropical fruit this is a full-bodied wine with just the right amount of acid. It's difficult to match this wine with food - cod and chips is as good as most meals, although when it's chilled it's very nice on its own.

The perfumed effect might be from the cold fermentation, which tends to give a slightly sweet, pineapple taste, or the fact that the blend consists of 30-year-old chardonnay vines and 80-year-old semillon vines.

The company - Casa Silva - specialises in wine from old vines. Some of theirs were planted in 1912. The grapes for this wine experienced cold maceration for eight hours before fermentation for 17 days in stainless tanks. The chardonnay went through a malolactic fermentation, a second fermentation to soften the wine, and was then matured in oak barrels before blending with the semillon.

The Silva vineyards are in the Colchagua valley between the Rapel and Curico valleys. These are all lateral valleys formed by snow melt from the Andes.

Colchagua produces some of Chile's liveliest syrah, carmenere and bordeaux blends. The vines are usually planted on steep hillsides away from the flat valley floor.

A good wine at a fair price - £4.99 from Oddbins.

24/01/06