10
Sep
2015
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Wines of the Week: Aug. 24-30

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Everyday: I recently featured the Höpler Pannonia Red Blend in my semi-regular gig. It wasn’t until later Pannonicathat I discovered that the 2013 Pannonica White Blend ($12) is every bit as fabulous. An unusual blend (40 percent gruner veltliner, 35 percent chardonnay, 25 percent pinot blanc), this Austrian beauty is redolent of perfectly ripe pear, and does that lush/lean, fruit/mineral dance deftly. I can almost still taste this wine, so persistent is its nature. It’s roast pork season in our house (which is actually a 12-months-a-year deal), and this is a stellar wine for that, as well as winter squash and celery root. This wine’s harmony evoked the purity of the McGarrigle sisters, Kate and Anna.

Occasion: Few regions are producing as many downright stunning wines as Sicily. Exhibit A: any vintage of Pomice 2the Tenuta di Castellaro Bianco Pomice ($33), a juicy blend of carricante and malvasia delle Lipari. It’s a physical beauty, with vivid green hues, and leads with a combination of stone fruit and refreshing salinity. It can almost literally transport you to sunny Sicily, but has enough heft to be much more than a summer sipper. This beauty rocked with Tunisian chicken the other day and is a great fit for Mediterranean delights such as tapenade, tuna and caponata. The smooth, stirring work of Stephen Stills’ Manassas makes an ideal soundtrack.

10
Sep
2015
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Wines of the Week: Aug. 17-23

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Everyday: For me, torrontes is a lot like viognier. Sometimes its perfume-y aromas are too much, and even Tomerobleed over onto the palate. But when it’s made right, it’s sublime. The 2013 Bodega Vistalba Tomero Mendoza Torrontes ($14) offers up lovely white flowers on the nose (in just the right dose) and a melange of tasty fruit (peach, kiwi and more) on the palate. It’s uncommonly balanced for a torrontes, and quite persistent. Can’t wait to try to with some shrimp cocktail, ceviche or mussels with an Asian sauce. The warm, cool reggae of Gregory Isaacs would fit right in.

Occasion: I loves me some Sauternes but find the well-into-triple-digits price tag of SauternesChateau d’Yquem more than a little daunting. The Chateau Rieussec Sauternes checks in at a still-formidable $82, but man-oh-man is it stupendously delicious. Honey and super-ripe dates make for a flavor nirvana, and the underlying structure is almost bracing. Plus, it’s nigh onto endless. This might be best on its own, but it certainly would play well with fruity and/or sugary desserts. And one of the prettiest voices extant, that of Ms. Rosanne Cash.

10
Sep
2015
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Wines of the Week: Aug. 10-16

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Everyday: Is there a region in Spain that’s NOT producing really good wine at fair prices? Bula 2Best I can tell, the
answer is “not a chance.” The 2012 Celler Can Blau Bula Montsant ($12) is rich, robust and delicious, with a persistent, stout finish. A Rhone-ish red blend (40 percent each carignan and grenache, 20 percent syrah), it’s full-bodied and -flavored (blue and purple fruits) but smooth and silky on the palate. Yum. Try it with sausages, grilled meats, pizza and paella. In other words, anything hearty. And what could be more hearty an accompaniment than the down-home blues of Mr. McKinley Morganfield, a k a Muddy Waters?

Occasion: Eeny meeny miny moe. Catch a tiger … OK, I still can’t choose between two fabulous 2012 offerings from Schramsberg. SchramsbergThe Blanc de Noirs ($35) boasts brilliant fruit, great balance and a truly sensuous mouthfeel. The Brut Rose ($40) shows off a fabulous red-berry nose and palate, serious tastiness and marvelous acidity and length. If anybody is making better sparkling wines in California than these guys, I’d be surprised (and delighted). Cue up the usual endless litany of perfect accompaniments for bubbles: potato chips and popcorn, shrimp and sushi, fried or BBQ chicken. And the shimmeringly swell new album by Beach House.

3
Sep
2015
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Gleanings: 9-3-15

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I’m behind as usual, but still collecting nuggets worth sharing:

• As most of you know, I collect great (to me) wine-iferous quotes and disseminate them in groupings. This one on oak, from  PonsotMorey-Saint-Denis vigneron Laurent Ponsot (left), didn’t fit a particular category but includes one swell metaphor:

“New oak lets too much oxygen in and makes the wine age faster giving it less time in the bottle, so we prefer to use at least five-year-old barrels. Using new oak adds a flavor to the wine that is not natural, and I prefer that the wines taste more of the essence of the terroir. I don’t want to make a beverage made from grapes and oak. New-oak-aged wines are like a sumo wrestler, they are big, strong, superb and rounded in their youth, but they don’t last long and die very early … there are no sumo wrestlers alive over the age of 40; that tells you something of my analogy.”

• Near the beginning of his thoughtful and accessible journey through his life at the movies, “Keepers,” Richard Schickel explains why the book shies away from negativity about many movies he surely loathed. “Life is too short,” he says, “to dwell heavily on their many sins. That’s for another book that I won’t be writing.” And that’s exactly why I don’t write much about crummy wines.

Nun• Heard a groaner of a joke at the Wine Bloggers Conference: “A nun comes into the office of the mother superior and whispers, ‘Mother Superior, we, uh, we have discovered a case of syphilis.’ ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I was getting tired of the Chablis.’ ”

• Also heard a great quote, new to me at least. Will Fernandez, winner of the Best New Blog Award for Vintage 2014, was asked the best advice he ever heard for bloggers and pulled out this chestnut from Julia Child: “Serve it to them anyway. They’ll never know the difference.”

30
Aug
2015
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Straight from the vintners’ mouths: Wine-ish wisdom

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Who would know better how to talk about our favorite beverage than the people who grow and make it? To wit:

Ziraldo“It’s too bad Dr. Zweigelt’s name wasn’t Dr. Pinot Noir.” — Canadian winemaker Donald Ziraldo (left) on why he was ripping out a zweigelt vineyard

“Wine is music from the vineyard.” — Marilyn Clark, Sarah’s Vineyard

“There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.” — Baron Phillippe de Rothschild

“Some wine flavors are like an amoeba. A perfect wine would be a circle, i.e. in balance.” — Warren Winarski, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars

“One bottle of Spätlese goes perfectly with one lobster.” — Raimund Prüm, S.A. Prüm

“When grapes are grown on the edge of where they will ripen, you are in the right place.” — Adam Tolmach, Ojai Vineyards

Thackrey“If you ask a winemaker the right way to make cabernet sauvignon, and he says, ‘Well, you pick it at 24.3 brix and de-stem 100 percent, ferment on the skin for eight days, let the cabernet reach a max temperature of 83.2 degrees, blah blah blah’—that’s just craziness, right? That approach is to winemaking what in-flight meals are to food. — Sean Thackrey (left)

26
Aug
2015
0

Linkin’ logs: 8-26-15

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Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of fermented grape juice, this is the Wild World of Wine:

Gnarly• The Russkies are doing that Russky thing, making mad with questionable motives in banning some Cali wines.

• I try hard to fight it, but remain a list-oholic. So I was plenty intrigued by a compilation of America’s 101 best wineries, especially since one of those voting was my new pal, the wonderful blogger Elizabeth Schneider.

• The big hoo-ha out California way in recent days has been the ejection of some ladies, most of them Brownblack, from the Napa Wine Train, apparently for laughing too much. The hashtag #laughingwhileblack is on fire. And the incident spawned a great blog post on black-owned wineries worth a visit. BTW, I cannot recommend the Brown Estate zins highly enough.

• On the one hand, there’s no room in my cellar for any wine, period. On the other hand, looks like I’ll need to make space for some 2014 Oregon pinot noirs. Blessedly, I have at least a few months to clear out a few slots.

• Finally, a sign I wish I had written:

 

Wine Sign

15
Aug
2015
0

The cloak of anonymity

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The progenitors of these saying are not known, but that does not make them any less viable:

• *Wine is the discoverer of secrets.” — American proverb

Snowy Bill & Sandy• “[The perfect wine is like the perfect wife [left, my way better half] — it looks nice and is nice, natural, wholesome, yet not assertive; gracious and dependable, but never monotonous.” — Anonymous

• “Wine carries no rudder.” — Latin proverb

• “A man, fallen on hard times, sold his art collection but kept his wine cellar. When asked why he did not sell his wine, he said, ‘A man can live without art, but not without culture.’ ” — Anonymous

• “Who taught you to eat bread fit for gods, and drink wine of the kings.” — Anonymous, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” 2000 BC

13
Aug
2015
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Linkin’ logs: 8-13-15

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Don’t know much about chemistry or geography, to paraphrase the old song. Fortunately, others in the Interweb world do:

• My list of wine regions to target for visits morphs regularly, and grows even as I mark off some of them (I’m in New York’s Madeirasplendid Finger Lakes area as we speak.) Near the top of it is Madeira, and my friends Ryan and Gabriella Opaz beautifully illuminate why.

• Speaking of the Finger Lakes, Wine Folly has its standard looky and informative examination of said region.

• Here’s some encouraging news for, well, most wineries but also those of us who don’t think there’s much good wine under $10. Consumers might be figuring that out.

• A not-so-golden oldie: Seeing what might be the world’s oldest bottle of wine is guaranteed not to make you thirsty.

• I’m old enough to do Throwback Thursday stuff every week, but I usually refrain. Can’t resist sharing this, though:

TBT Wine

 

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