Archives for February, 2006
Biodynamics for the Rest of Us
In a previous post called Biodynamics for Dummies I linked to an article by St. Vini in which he lambasted the principles of biodynamics as laid out by Rudolph Steiner. I have since stumbled on wineanorak.com’s guide to Biodynamic Wine. Pertinent to the discussion at hand (on the legitimacy of biodynamics as a sicentific method) is part 8: Bringing together biodynamics and science.
[update] There’s another interesting article and discussion going on at The Caveman’s Wine Blog.
Castano Monastrell 2003 (B)
Monastrell is mourvedre, which is why I bought this wine. I once bought a Cline Ancient Vines Mourvedre at the grocery store and it blew me away. I’ve had it a few times since but I’ve never taken any notes.
I bought this one because it was cheap (less than $8 if I remember correctly) and 100% mourvedre. Since I’m always in learning mode I like to buy 100% varietals so that I can get to know individual grapes. The Cline was velvety smooth and close to full bodied. This is medium bodied and a bit rougher. It’s almost an opaque blackish purple and tastes very young. It tastes richer than it smells. It’s mildly fruity with an acidic, musty, blackberry flavor. Low tannins and a lingering bitter finish. It almost feels like I’m in a barn tasting wine right from the barrel. It has a raw sexiness like adolescent lovers necking in a hay loft. My god, I think I want some more.
40% of the grapes in this wine underwent carbonic maceration which is a technique used to bring wines quickly from harvest to bottling. Usually, wines are crushed and then fermented but with carbonic maceration whole grapes are left in the vat to ferment with those on the bottom being crushed by the weight of the grapes on top. It’s a technique that is used for Beaujolais nouveau (which basically means new wine from the Beaujolais region of France). Wines that undergo carbonic maceration, also referred to as “partial carbonic maceration,” are meant to be drunk young. I’m happy to oblige.
(I’ll have to compare the Cline and this sometime to identify the similarities which will help me learn the innate character of mourvedre.)
Kunde Estate Zinfandel 2001 (B)
For more than 100 years a family owned winery located in southeastern Sonoma County, Kunde Estate Winery and Vineyards has a mission to sustainable practices. This is from their web site:
Sustainable farming goes above and beyond the methods of organic farming, and focuses on sustainability as a long-term environmental goal of environment management, not a specific set of farming practices for a product. The three most common indicators that appear in definitions of sustainable agriculture are: environmentally sound, economically viable, and socially acceptable.
They’ve been added to my list of wineries to visit.
This wine is a wonderful blend of 92% Zinfandel, 4% Grenache, 3% Petite Sirah, and 1% Mourvedre. The benefits of the blended grapes is a softening of the typically strong, spicy and jammy California zin. The color is muted cherry red with a slight rusty brown overtone. The nose has traces of earth as does the taste. Unlike a lot of the Zinfandels I drink, this one is better with food than alone. I know a lot of people believe that all wine is meant to accompany food but I often drink wine as a cocktail before dinner (or after and certainly during). This didn’t really shine until I had my second glass with a dinnner of chicken sausage with roasted red peppers over sauteed radicchio and onions. A very well balanced and smooth wine I will buy again.
Seghesio Arneis 2002 (F)
Arneis, in Italian, means “little rascal” due to the difficulty of growing this grape.
I first tried this wine a couple weeks ago and liked it. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the vintage but it certainly wasn’t 2002. This bottle is so hot it’s almost undrinkable. The overwhelming nose and taste is grain alcohol. I didn’t take any notes on the first bottle but I seem to remember a nose of straw, apricot and honey with soft citrus flavors on the tongue. None of that is detectable here - just a lot of alcohol, acid and lemon.
dionysus declares
when humans first begin drinking wine, they sing like birds, then they have the courage of lions, but in the end they make asses of themselves
Open That Bottle Night
Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, who write the wine column for the Wall Street Journal (haven’t read it but heard it’s worth reading), have proclaimed the last Saturday in February to be Open That Bottle (you’ve been hanging on to) Night. I don’t know what I’m doing that night yet but I do have a few bottles I’ve been coveting for… oh some occasion, I’m sure.
Pillar Box Red 2004 (B)
I’m not going to put up any significant tasting notes on this because it’s leftovers night and I drank it with a weird mix of pea soup (canned), chicken and apple sausage, some cold leftover pasta with tomato sauce (sans meatballs, alas) and some dark chocolate — too many conflicting flavors for reliable notes. I opened the bottle yesterday and was struck by it’s new world “fruit bomb” style. This is one of those wines that people love or hate. It’s been well rated by a few critics (87-90), won a few awards, and is despised by some people. I like it. It’s fruity, jammy and spicy but the overwhelming sensation is of a dense, thick, rich, candy-like wine but with a strong bitter finish. It’s a cab/shiraz/merlot blend from Australia and for $10 I’m definitely going to try it again. I’ve read a bunch of different tasting notes about this and the consensus is that it tastes better on the second day or after being decanted and breathing for a few hours. I’m on the second day but I kept it bottled up tight in the fridge overnight. I’m holding off on a grade for now and will revisit it sometime soon.
update… on a second tasting I give it a B
Wine Blogging Wednesday
On Wednesday, March 8, winefoolery will participate in it’s first Wine Blogging Wednesday. Lenn of Lenndevours started this event wherein wine bloggers from around the world participate in a virtual group tasting. Each month a different blog hosts the event, chooses the theme and posts a compilation of all the bloggers tasting notes. The theme for March, as chosen by Jathan of winexpression.com is “When in Rhone” which pleases me greatly as that’s one of my favorite appellations! The timing is a little off because I was planning on sampling a couple of Rhones this weekend but I guess I won’t mind searching out another new one in a few weeks.
Cecchi Chianti Classico 2003 (C+)
Nose: Earthy black currant and wet straw. Body: Light to medium and smooth. Taste: Only slightly fruity with acidic blackberry tea and mild mushroomy flavors. Medium to strong tannins with a moderate spicy finish.
Having started out with a strong preference for bold, fruity new world wines I am working on developing a finer appreciation of classic old world styles of wine. What better place to start than Chianti? My first impressions, noted above, were on an empty stomach and with no food accompanying the wine. I’ve got some buffalo meatballs in the oven and I’ll have another glass when I sit down with my pasta, tomato sauce and meatballs. Right now, I’m thinking C+. We’ll see if that changes with food…
[Later] Can I just say I make great buffalo meatballs? That was delicious. The wine hasn’t changed much. The nose seems a little more floral but that might result more from breathing a little while than from the food. The flavor remained somewhat mushroomy and the tannins have mellowed against the strong flavor of the meat. I’m going to leave it at C+. Nice.
Biodynamic Wine for Dummies
Years ago, when Fetzer first introduced it’s Bonterra line of organic wines I asked the fellow pouring in the tasting room why the word “organic” didn’t appear on the label. I assumed it would be a positive thing to do from a marketing perspective. He replied that in fact it would have been detrimental because the greater wine community wasn’t yet accepting of the legitimacy of organic farming methods as applied to winemaking. At that time (I think was 9 or 10 years ago but I’m just guessing) we couldn’t find any other winery in Sonoma County that was making organic wines. On a susbsequent trip we visited Topolos who had uppped the green ante a notch by proclaiming to use biodynamics. Knowing little about biodynamics beyond a vague representation of it as organics taken to an nth degree (not a claim made by Topolos) we were duly impressed.
On my most recent trip to Sonoma, a few months ago, we visited several wineries that were using organic methods to some degree or another but we didn’t have time to visit all that we had read about. While I can’t remember specifically where, it also seems like we have been seeing the word biodynamic start to appear in regards to winemaking. It seems our culture has changed to the point where these methods and terms are now considered positive enough for wine marketers to tout. But does it reflect progress in winemaking or merely the marketing of wine?
St. Vini over at The Zinquisition has an interesting post about Biodynamics with an emphasis on how it may or may not relate to viniculture. It’s sort of in the form of a book review but really it’s an excoriation of the whole of Biodynamic philosphy. Here’s an excerpt…
That there was some winemaking system ever laid down by Steiner is laughable - everything which is passed off as BioD winemaking is based on inference and individual interpretation of Steiner. This contributes to the lack of a consistent outcome when applying BioD to wine - there is no clear set of directives ever laid out. It shouldn’t be a big surprise then that there are so many different interpretations about what BioD really is and what it encompasses; Steiner’s self-contradiction and ambiguous teachings allow that one person could say it supported “X” and the next could say it prohibited “X” on most points. It’s plain that Steiner just didn’t know the answers and speculated wildly, or was deliberately equivocating to try to please everyone. And the dogma which is used to support the overall theme is obviously why the biodynamic theory is viewed as religion by most outsiders: it requires blind faith in the lunatic ramblings of Steiner…
As of this writing no comments have been attached to his post but I hope some appear. It could get lively.
Kingfish White Shiraz 2004 (C-)
Pink and cheap. The following phrase comes to mind, “Be afraid, be very afraid.” I was but I did it anyway.
I was traumatized years ago when an old girlfriend send me out for a bottle wine with no instructions. She literally said, “just get anything.” I knew absolutely nothing about wine at the time. I was mainly a beer drinker. Feeling certain that I was unqualified for the task I asked her to at least tell me if she preferred red or white. She said she liked both. It was after hours and she knew that I was going to the 7 Eleven because the wine store wasn’t open. Did she forget that I was a Libra? Not knowing whether to get red or white, and pragmatic guy that I am, didn’t it occur to her that I might come back with something… pink? I don’t remember the wine - just the color and the tone of her voice when she expressed her incredulity at my ignorance. I don’t think I got laid for a week.
I didn’t drink pink wine again for years. Until I went to Sonoma County. I think it was an Alderbrook carignane ros� that opened my eyes to the fact that pink was a perfectly legitimate color for a good wine. I’ve since had many wonderful (some not so) ros� wines, most of them dry as a bone, which I prefer to sweet. Still, I often feel some trepidation when faced with an unfamilar pink wine, especially if it costs less than $10.
All this does nothing to explain why I bought this very cheap bottle of pink wine. I don’t like the name, the artwork on label or the puerile story about “mythical King Fish” on the back of it. The only thing I want to read about on a wine label is the wine or it’s makers. The bottle looks gimmicky, cheap and I’m sure the wine was created to appeal to the ignorant masses. Maybe that’s it - maybe I was feeling nostalgic for the good old days with an abusive girlfriend. Nah. There’s actually a logical rationale: I like shiraz, I have come to like ros�, I’m always looking for the exception to the rule, and it was so cheap I wouldn’t hesitate to pour it in the sink if it sucked. It doesn’t exactly suck but it’s not as bad as I feared.
As with some other ros�’s I can’t smell much in the glass. There’s virtually no nose to speak of (either that or I need to trim my nose hairs). It tastes of cranberries and roses and it has a nice silky texture. By itself too sweet for me but I suspect it would be suitable to accompany some spicy indian vindaloo.
The Perfect Wine Glass
I’ve got a minor glass fetish so I can appreciate using distinctive
glasses for different types of beverages and I’ve got a few wine
glasses in my cabinets. I’m familiar with and understand the reasons
why sparkling wine glasses (flutes) are different from red wine
glasses (big bowls for burgundy, tulip for bordeaux) which are
different from white wine glasses (usually between a flute and a red
wine glass). I know that choosing the right wine glass can
literally enhance the taste of a wine and I do enjoy sticking my nose
in a big bowl of a hearty red and whiffing away. But that’s never
going to stop me from using my favorite every day glass for almost
any kind of wine: the European Wine Glass from Crate and Barrel. They’re only about $2 apiece and you can buy them in boxes of six. I used to buy these kinds of glasses at thrift stores but at this price I stocked up.
Clay Station Old Vine Zinfandel 2004 (C)
This is one of those wines I almost prefer just sticking my nose in a big glass and whiffing. The nose is big, jammy and spicy with overtones of berry and plum. There’s a lot of oak in the flavor but also much of what I like about zinfandel: berry, cherry, bittersweet chocolate and a little pepper. It was full bodied, had noticeable tannins and a smooth texture. I want to like it but something about it was unsettling - it was almost too much of a good thing. A little overbearing and too sweet. I’ll try it again but next time I hope I have another good zin on hand to compare it too.