Archives for March, 2008
How We Feel About Tourists in Key West
A Wine Blog Post
At dinner last night (a seaside Italian restaurant in Key West) I was ordering for the table which included the broadest range of wine experience possible — all under the level of serious oenophile, including myself. We had a couple of Francophiles, some hard core New World Cally Fruit Bomb (NWCFB) addicts, a few who hardly drink wine at all, and one fool. From a broadly limited selection (I’ll let you figure that out) I ordered one classic New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc (NZSB), a meek Albariño, a mass market Chianti Classico and a respectable Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. Maybe I should have ordered only Italian wines at an Italian restaurant but I’m not like that.
The first thing the waiter did was arrive with a tray of white and red style glasses and proceeded to ask who was drinking white and who red. I told him to forget it and just distribute the glasses randomly. He graciously did so and then opened the NZSB. After I gave it an upward turned thumb he started to go around the table asking who was starting with it. I stopped him and suggested he just open all four bottles and place them randomly on the table (admittedly after I tasted for spoil). I even rejected the offering of a bucket of ice for the whites. I then sat back and watched what happened.
The Cab was quickly passed back and forth and emptied first. Then the Sauvignon Blanc. Then the Albarinõ. The Chianti was still full near the end of the meal and I asked one of our local hosts if we would be allowed to take it home. He told me to wait a few more minutes, which I did and the Chianti bottle was soon empty. (I initially expected that we would order more wine and was curious to see which wines would be requested but four bottles ended up being just enough.)
No-one considered pairing appropriateness, at least not out loud, choosing instead to simply drink whichever bottle they liked most. Some at the table only drank from one bottle until it was gone. Some stuck with white and some red. A couple of us drank some of each and one poor soul sat with a mostly empty glass because nothing pleased her (she also knew some of her current favorites were waiting at home).
That’s it. No mention of wineries. No rituals. No tasting notes. No food pairing reports. No criticism. Just a simple observation of how wine drinking can occur. Sure, there was a little context but isn’t there always?
WBW Re Ducks
I dropped out of the WBW thing for a while, partly due to some themes I wasn’t excited about but mostly due to having moved twice in the past three months and otherwise had my life turned so upside down that I haven’t been blogging much at all — though that’s obvious from the look of this page.
April is still pretty far away (in wine drinking years) but it’s theme is one that will bring me back into the fold: Old World Cabernet Franc.
I can’t help myself
Warning: Non-Wine Content Ahead
I love this.
Seghesio Arneis 2006
Ché idiot! I actually blamed the corkscrew for being too dull to pierce the plastic wrap over the cork (there’s probably a name for that) but after the second corkscrew couldn’t pierce it I realized I was trying to slice through the aluminum cap. And it’s not like I haven’t opened a bunch of screw caps before.
I didn’t take any notes, including the vintage, the first time I tried this wine but I liked it. The second bottle, a 2002, sucked. Oddly, I forgot the second taste and remembered the first so I bought a couple bottles of the 2006 the other day. It’s very nice and interesting. It’s much paler than I remember — almost clear! A bitter nose of white pepper with tastes of white peach, nutty pear and melon and prosciutto — honestly, that last one is the best descriptor I can think of. Not that it would go with Prosciutto con il Melone but that it tastes like it. It’s delicately sweet and appropriate as an apéritif.
Four thumbs up (Mrs. Dink shares my enthusiasm).
$15, Tower
update - 03-11 - Two days later, the wine doesn’t hold up. The meaning of the grape name, “little rascal,” purportedly is due to the difficulty of growing this grape but I have to wonder if it might also be referencing a grape that doesn’t age well. The flavors are now being intimidated by the high alcohol (14.3 or 14.5 % (my aging eyes can’t be sure)). It was sealed up tight and refrigerated but still degraded quickly. Note to self: buy it again if you like but drink it quickly.
Marietta Old Vine Red, Lot Number 45, NV
I wish I had kept a more exhaustive inventory of wines and tasting notes over the last several years because my preferences have changed drastically. I started drinking wine approximately 25 years ago with mostly decent, inexpensive French and Italian reds. I can remember returning to my first “loft” living space (a converted (by me) print shop in an abandoned commercial building in the heart of downtown Oakland, Ca — nowadays “loft” means luxury apartment or townhome, which is bullshit but whaddaya gonna do?) with a bottle of Pinot Noir and a baguette from the deli that constituted dinner. I was in my mid-20’s and felt sophisticated and urbanly hip.
Shit, shit, shit! I just realized I finished the wine before I wrote any tasting notes! Balls! Now what can I say about the wine? Oh well, and before you jump to the conclusion that I’m such a drunk I drank a whole bottle in the time it took to write one simple paragraph, let me say that I was only drinking one last glass that was left in the bottle from a few days ago.
I was very happy drinking cheap French and Italian reds for a couple years until I got a job as a waiter with a caterer that worked in Napa County. That was when I discovered California wines for real. It was long enough ago that the Cally wines weren’t the Welch’s Grape Jelly Fruit Bombs that they became in the 90’s but it was the beginning of a period where I ignored wines from anywhere East of Fresno.
OK, for the purposes of this post it’s time to cut to the chase. Short version: I started with decent Old World style wines. Moved to decent New World wines a couple years later. At the turn of the century I became enamored, like a newly pubescent pre-teen, with the bold and fruity charms of the Cally Fruit Bomb. Currently, I’m in a phase of re-discovering and appreciating European style wines of a more restrained character. I’ve been craving and enjoying subtler wines, of which this is not an example. Call it slipping or merely nostalgia for a less cultured time of my life but I sometimes still can’t stop myself from drinking something that appropriately belongs in my jelly jar wine glasses.
Marietta Old Vine Red, Lot Number 45 is a fun, sweet, simple, over-ripened but not too hot, wine that would do well being poured at a 60’s era soda fountain for kids who are just getting started with wine. I remember what that felt like and maybe it’s just the beginnings of a middle-aged yearning for lost youth but tonight, that would be me.
$14, Tower
Rothera Winter 2007
What would you do in your spare time if you were a scientist in Antarctica? (Wine blog relevance comes in at the 2:00 minute mark.)