Archives for January, 2007
Carina Cellars Viognier 2003 (B)
This was the most popular white wine served at Ms. OhSoMuch’s birthday party even among self-proclaimed “not white wine” drinkers. Of course, that is one of the claims made about viognier in general — that it’s a white wine for red wine lovers. This one is full-bodied and rich. It has a golden mead color and tastes of honey-sweetened oak, pine straw and tangy orange creamsicle. I’d give it a plus but the alcohol, at 13.7%, is a little too prominent — but only just so. It’s a fine wine and well worth what I paid for it but I don’t remember what that was nor where I bought it.
Pretty lame tasting note, I agree, but these are mostly for me. The only reason I grade wines is so that I can have a quick reference to go to when I’m considering buying something I may have tasted but don’t remember too well.
I might as well also mention why posts are light lately. On Xmas eve, Mrs. Dink had an emergency appendectomy. On New Year’s eve we found out that there was a carcinoid tumor in the lymph tissue surrounding the appendix. She’ll be undergoing further surgery early tomorrow morning — a right hemicolectomy (removal of a portion of the colon). We’re expecting it to be routine and successful but we’ve been a little pre-occupied of late. Wine is high on the list of things I appreciate in life but it sometimes has to take a back seat to more important concerns. When this is behind us, I’ll be sure to open something special and blog about it.
This Wine is Trouble: Adelaida Schoolhouse “Recess Red” 2003 (A)
What would your reaction be to a wine that listed on it’s label the following composition: 46% Zinfandel, 19% Primitivo, 15% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Barbera, 4% Counnoisse, 3% Tintacao, 3% Grenache Noir??
Run for your life?
Laugh at the preposterousness?
Be curious and want to try it? That would be me and I hope I can get some more before it’s no longer available. The Adelaida web site is sold out but I bought mine locally here in Atlanta and I ain’t gonna tell you where. The thing is, it’s really an interesting blend of all of the above and I can’t imagine how they pulled it off. I know the top four varietals well enough to at least fool myself into thinking I can detect a little of each. The color (garnett), body, (medium-light), and aroma (confused but mostly like a fruity zin) are all nice and pleasant but not nearly as deep and seductive as the tastes. You got your sweet, fruity, vanilla and licorice zinfandel/primitivo on top, over layers of spicy, blackberry, green vegetable cabernet and nicely acidic and velvety smooth barbera. I don’t know the others well enough, and they are used in small quantities, so I can’t say exactly what they add other than complexity and depth. The texture is silky smooth, the wood present but not overbearing and the tannins linger mildly on the tongue.
The problem with this wine, and the reason I call it “trouble” in the title, is that it’s so complex, so interesting, that I just keep pouring — in spite of not wanting to drink much tonight — for one more chance to decipher it’s code. Retails for about $13.
As a P.S. I want to add that this is yet another very fine value from Paso Robles. I am *so* looking forward to our trip there in May!
Wise Words from Kermit Lynch
A tip o’ the wine glass to St. Vini for the link to this oh-too-brief interview with Kermit Lynch. Vini calls Lynch out about saying he can “literally taste… the changes in mineral content of the soil” but he also highlights a couple other choice quotes. My favorite was this other one:
WE: What would you say to the wine lovers who are thinking about taking a wine class or studying?KL: Save your money and take a trip to France, Italy or Germany. Get in to some cellars. When you do, ask the fella who took you down there what the acidity level of his wine is. He’ll look at you like you were crazy. You learn whether you like that glass or not. That’s all there is.
WBW #29: Beauchatel Bergerac 2002 (C-)
The word “biodynamic” is second only to “terroir” in it’s ability to inspire diarheaic diatribes and heated debates. I don’t have a lot to say about either except that I love the wines from the first biodynamic winery I visited (Topolos, which is no more, alas, but I’m happy to have several bottles in the cellar). I’ll admit to being drawn to organic and biodynamic wineries and wines but I don’t expect them to be intrinsically better than any other wine. I like to support anyone who is exploring sustainable farming (and business) methods (not to suggest that one must be organic or biodynamic in order to be sustainable). I used to think that organic winemakers were risk takers and pioneers and therefore more likely to be artisans or high craftsmen but that’s probably outmoded thinking (and possibly naive even in it’s day). We’ve come a long way from the time I visited Fetzer’s tasting room and, when I asked why they didn’t include the word “organic” on their Bonterra wine labels, was told that the concept was too unpopular and would hurt sales! Now it’s among the largest visible words on some of their ads.
The first important quality I look for in a wine (and who doesn’t?) is how it tastes rather than how it was made. Next in importance is price — I have to be able to afford it in order to be able to drink it — and once I’ve narrowed the field with those two criteria I enjoy exploring and learning about wine-making methods and winemakers in general. Of course, choosing an unknown wine for WBW (or any other occasion) requires a willingness to try something I might not like which pretty much shoots the above rationale to smithereens.
WBW #29 is hosted by Fork and Bottle, whose site includes a wealth of information about Biodynamic wine — it’s too bad it doesn’t display properly for this Mac OS X user making it hard to read.
[Update - After a concerned (and prompt!) email from Jack about my trouble viewing the site I went back with the intention of taking a screen shot that would demonstrate the problem (it had to do with overlapping type — a problem which occurred on several visits) but everything is displaying just fine this morning. Either Jack has a crack web designer who was able to quickly identify and fix the problem or it may have been a font problem on my end.]
The wine I chose for this month’s return to the frenzy, Beauchatel Bergerac, is made from 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Franc. Sounds like a nice trio to me. Red wines from Bergerac in Southwest France (not far from Bordeaux geographically but nowhere near it’s reputation), are supposed to be aromatic and acidic and are best when young (2-4 years). I could find very little information about the region online apart from this page at Terroir-France.
Finally getting to the point with a Tasting Note: The lovely nose of raisins, ripe dark fruit, chocolate and tar and the dark brick color suggest a brawny heavyweight, even reminding me of an Italian Valpolicella or Amarone. No such luck once tasted but this is still a decent wine. It tastes much lighter than expected, like slightly mentholated maraschino cherries from a tin can — but in a not bad way. It costs $9 at Whole Paycheck so you can probably buy it elsewhere for $6 (if you can find it).
Never Mind — I made the above notes while tasting the wine before dinner with some water crackers. I just finished dinner of roasted potatoes, onions, lima beans and chicken sausage and this wine completely failed to match up. It tasted thin and weak so I downgraded from a plus to a minus.
Voodoo Unleashed at Zinquisition.com
For an explanation of the picture at right you’ll have to visit Zinquisition.com
A Different Perspective
Someone posted a comment this morning that first looked like spam but was in fact a legitimate link request from a German wine site, Wein-Plus.com. I’m all for link exchanges (and would be happy to field more requests for same) but I won’t link to a site without first spending a little time checking it out. Wein-Plus comes in two flavors, German and English, but it looks like the English side is just getting started. There’s a wealth of information on the German side but barely a few deutschmarks worth of articles on the English (there’s a little more in the way of wine news than original content). The advertising is google text-based, which, unfortunately, I cannot block at this time but it’s on topic and less offensive than those on google’s own site.
This is a fairly decent attempt at wine web 2.0 and possibly worth registering if you have a penchant for German and other European wines. Further, if you read German it might even be worth coughing up the 19.50 Euros for a VIP subscription, although I can’t tell what extras you will get.
The reason the site mentions a full post instead of simply a link is due primarily to a single article that I really enjoyed but also because of a couple minutes of fun I had with their pronounciation guide. It’s word and phrase list is short to the point of being near useless but it was amusing. I haven’t the slightest idea why the English terms include “a day’s work,” “a fiftyfifty mixture of wine and soda or mineral water,” and “Babylonia” just for starters, but it was fun to click and hear them spoken by a haughty British Mum.
The article, Some Thoughts on Wine in the Golden State, by Christopher Silliman, offers an interesting and informed perspective on California (although someone should tell him that Prohibition was a tad more than 50 years ago). Some choice quotes:
VinoVenue is a mechanical wine bar in San Francisco. You buy a debit card for a dollar amount and insert it in a slot and the machine dispenses one-ounce of wine from the bottle of your choice. Like senior citizens in the casinos of Atlantic City pumping their Social Security checks into the slot machines, here the wine buff can enjoy a corresponding experience.
That was merely an amusing picture but these observations about the latest California wine fad are refreshing and strike a chord with me:
In California there is a preachy quality with those practicing biodynamics. I get the impression that they have found the key that unlocks the mysteries of nature. They bury a cow’s horn filled with quartz, and at a different time of the year, one filled with manure to make their soil preparations. They use no chemicals and recycle everything. This is how a biodynamic winemaker in Sonoma County described it to me: “You’re working with the invisible life sources that are real out there, and you’re putting the spirit in the bottle.†This was prior to showing me the new four million dollar, 28,000 square foot cave dug into the side of a mountain in Sonoma County. “Consumers are looking for connections,“ he said. How could one regret the minor confusions that might arise from such noble impulses?
and with this I couldn’t agree more:
I tasted many extraordinary wines on this trip, but to ask for a decent wine that is priced below twenty dollars, is akin to panhandling. The trend in Napa is a kind of eco-capitalism where each wine producer tries to outdo the other on how much more they love the earth than the next guy, and how much over a hundred dollars a bottle they can get for their wine. This is probably necessary to pay the mortgage and architect’s fees for the new public displays of architectural affluence complete with beautiful gardens and landscaping.
and this:
Of course in California the touchy issue of terroir arises. It seems everyone wants a piece of it. However, no one could seem to agree on a definition for the French concept at the conference, Terroir 2006: A Dialogue Between Earth Scientists and Winemakers held in March in California. We see the word used often as in this example from an essay on the Napa Valley by wine writer Gerald Boyd. “Understanding what makes certain grapes grow better in one terroir and not another is as essential to understanding a wine as knowing an author’s background is to understanding the central core of a novel.†When I asked a plant pathologist at the University of California at Davis if a grapevine could indeed pick up flavor components from geologically diverse soils (i.e. limestone, clay, slate etc.) as many wine writers assume and proponents of variations of the French idea proclaim, she said in a matter of fact way, “No, it’s all bullshit.â€
With articles like that, I’ll not only add the link to my site but I’ll return when I’m in the mood for European perspective on wine.
Wein-Plus Magazine - Some Thoughts on Wine in the Golden State
Melka CJ Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (A)
I didn’t plan on following the Three Buck Cockie post with a note about a $45 wine but that’s the way the wine dribbles.
This wine is fabulous. I didn’t give it a plus because it needs to age. I bought four bottles (based solely on the recommendation of a friend) and didn’t mean to open one this soon but Mrs. Dink brought home some aged NY strips and so I had an excuse to crack one open.
I couldn’t resist tasting it immediately and almost did a double-take at the deep blackish purple color. The nose was rich and earthy with aromas of chocolate, licorice and peat moss but it was a bit rough in the mouth. The texture was overwhelming — heavy, viscous and chalky. The roof of my mouth was almost sore afterwards from the heavy tannins. This is a wine that not only needs to breathe but also needs to age. Fortunately, it still was a fabulous accompaniment to the aged steak an hour later. The taste sensations include any berry you can think of as well as the usual “big earthy red” descriptors: plum, currant, cherry, chocolate, coffee, licorice, oak, smoke, vanilla, leather, tar, etc. This is a huge wine and not at all too much so.
As an information addict I’m thrilled to be able to find out that this wine is a blend of 93% cabernet sauvignon and 7% cab franc. By law, any American wine that claims to be cabernet sauvignon can have up to 20% of other varietals blended in so there’s often no way to know what the exact blend of a wine is unless the winery chooses to disclose the information. As a long time label reader, I appreciate being given as much information as possible about what goes into what I consume. I like knowing all the elements that may come into play in the enjoyment of any ingestible substance, be it food or drink.
Some related links:
Cult Cabs, an article about the winemaker, Philippe Melka.
and another
and another
If you like big cabs, you should buy this wine.
Cockapoo Ridge Shiraz, 2004, (F)
No big jingoes here. I must have been mad as a cut snake to have bought this ’cause I’m not usually such a tightarse that I’d buy a 3 buck cockie. Oh well, can’t say that I been dudded given the cost and I’m certainly not gonna spit the dummy over it. One taste of this rat shit excuse for a wine and I didn’t dilly dally — this puppy went right down the drain. I would have poured it down the dunny but I couldn’t find a good place to set the laptop to snap the picky. Imagine you took some fresh squeezed concord grape juice, watered it down, stuck it in a tin canteen and buried it in a huge pile of cow shit for a week or two.
$3 at Whole Paycheck (not a typo).
Popping Corn and Champagne: Laurent-Perrier Ultra Brut (A+)
New Year’s eve. Without getting into the details, the missus and I have been experiencing a melancholy holiday season. I grabbed what I thought would be four funny movies, made some popcorn (lightly salted and dusted with finely powdered brewer’s yeast) and popped open a bottle of Laurent-Perrier Ultra Brut Champagne.
The first movie we watched was Clerks II, which got a 63% rating from RottenTomatoes.com. (Hey — there’s an idea! Why not a Rotten Grapes web site collecting tasting notes from all over and averaging out the ratings?!? Wine Web 2.0! Somebody run with it, please.) Clerks II was hysterically funny at times but it was also a tad uncomfortable sitting through scenes of explicitly descriptive (but not actually seen) inter-species erotica (gay donkey bestiality) with the son and his girlfriend. No matter how progressive and open-minded, I’m not sure parents and offspring, even adult ones, ought to witness together scenes of donkey blow-jobs or listen to discussions about whether or not it’s kosher to go “ass to mouth” with one’s sex partner (of either gender). Unfortunately, we didn’t drink while watching this one because we had finished a bottle of Walter Hansell Cahill Lane Vineyards Pinot Noir with dinner and weren’t ready to open the champagne yet (no link or note on the pinot yet except that it was mighty fine — I’ll say more after my next tasting).
The champagne came after the kids were in bed and we popped the corn and put in Shopgirl, in which Steve Martin plays and acts an uninspired and mildly lascivious West Coast Woody Allen. Creepy. Movie, that is. The champagne was fabulous and the popcorn fresh and perfectly popped (large, crisp kernels). I first read about matching the two in Jay MacInerny’s book, Bachus and Me. It seemed an odd suggestion but he was right. The champagne, with the tiniest of bubbles, was dry as a desert stone, very slightly bitter, just floral enough, extremely well balanced, and a perfect match for the popcorn. Doubt it not. If you’re skeptical, just try it and see. It was a delightful discovery, especially because I so rarely drink champagne and this will allow me more opportunity to do so since popcorn is one of my favorite night-time snacks.