Tasting Notes 9/16

It's been a long time, over a year since I've had anything to say in this blog. My job has changed a bit and I have both less and more time and opportunitites to taste wine, and usually very little time to actually reflect and try to capture my impressions outside of good and bad and great.
A lot of my entires in the coming months will be presented as my basic notes with only enough language added to make sentences here and there to try to capture why I was thinking what I was thinking. Not very interesting to anybody else, but a good reference for myself.
These are notes from a seated tasting, done in flights of 3. We tried to take our time and communicate our impressions. Here's my experience:

2007 Leitz Eins Zwei Dry Riesling
Decent – Slightly metallic and just barely sugary enough to be a bit cloying.

2007 Leitz Dragonstone Riesling
Sweeter, with more granny smith apple. The sugar is balanced with lively acidity.

2007 Leitz Rudesheimer Magdelenenkreuz Riesling Spatlese
Zippy. Good. Hard to pronounce (?).

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2007 Pierre Boniface Apremont Vin de Savoie
Stony and dry with an austere finish.

2006 Pierre Boniface Chignin Bergeron
(Rousanne) Noticeable barrel spice on the nose, with soil earthiness.

2007 Chateau de la Greffiere Saint-Veran
Low on acidity; mellow fruit with spice. Nicely refined.

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2007 Brewer-Clifton Chardonnay Santa Rita Hills
Vanilla and …sawdust? Some kind of dusty wood. Pineapple with a lot of alcohol heat. 14.9 % and not entirely masked well.

2006 Ramey Chardonnay Ritchie Vineyard
Spice and vanilla. Spiced dry apricot.

2006 Ramey Chardonnay Hyde Vineyard
Again overwhelmed in cooking spices, with even more outward spice. Anything but subtle.

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2007 Cade Sauvignon Blanc
Expected gooseberry and slight cat pee. Thin and light.

2007 Domaine des Aubuisieres B. Fouquet Vouvray les Girardieres
Musty nose with pear and noticeably low acidity.

2005 Domaine des Baumard Coteaux du Layon Cuvee le Paon
Nose is fat and fruity, forecasting the sweet honey and apricot. I’m not usually good at identifying mouthfeel, but this is quite noticeably heavy and thick.

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2006 Soter Pinot Noir Beacon Hill
SPICY and medicinal. Not fruit forward at all. Similar in style to that St. Nick pinot from France that I didn’t like, with a similar cinnamon dental floss quality, only lighter.

2006 DuMol Syrah Russian River Valley
Deep & Dark. Quite rich – plumy and peppery.

2006 Ramey Syrah Shanel Vineyard
Also deep & dark. Rich and stony.

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2006 Chateau Mourgues du Gres Les Galets Rouge
Herbs & garden spice. Dark and rich, tight and tannic.

2005 Domaine le Grands Bois Cotes du Rhone Cuvee Maximilian
All soil and mineral. Lots of tannin and a long tannic finish. Surprisingly austere for a Cotes du Rhone.

2006 Selection Laurence Feraud Cotes du Rhone Seguret
Juicy by comparison. Good fruit dimension and a little more balanced.

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2005 Domaine Saint-Damien Gigondas
The most austere of these next three. Spice and acidity, good tannin on end.

2005 Selection Laurence Feraud Gigondas
Jucier. Less mineral but still quite tannic.

2005 La Bastide-Blanche Bandol
More of the same. My palate is now overwhelmed by tannin. My lip is stuck to my teeth, and I have to stop and drink some water.

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2007 Cantina Valpantena Corvina Torre del Falasco
Thin with some bacon fat and a short finish.

2005 Fantino Rosso dei Dardi
(Barbera and Nebbiolo) I mentioned that this wine smells like port. A friend corrected me. I think my perception was shaped by the brown to tan color of the wine. It wasn’t too autumnal, but fruit was not the focus.

2003 Cantina Valpantena Amarone della Vaploicella Falasco
Decent. Not too heavy, like some Amarone, but also not as deep.

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2000 Monsanto Chianti Classico Reserva Il Poggio
First bottle suffered of very, very bad cork taint.
Second bottle was beautiful with a ruby dimension like classic sangiovese. It was suggested that it, too, was corked. I couldn’t detect it, but it was clean and pure by comparison.

2000 Monsanto Nemo
(Cabernet Sauvignon) Light for cabernet. Some spiciness, mellowed lift and a bit of tannin. I wonder about the aging this wine received in barrel.

2005 Antinori Tignanello
I can tell this is good, but I’m again suffering tannin overload and can’t make out details.

After the tasting was over, a friend who has a lot of experience with wine told me a story about a Petrus vertical tasting he was able to sit though years ago. He had a terrible cold and stuffed nose, and could hardly taste anything. Still, he said he was able to predict which vintages would be named the better wines, just on mouthfeel. He said you don't have to be a supertaster to detect the qualities that make wine great.

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2005 Ernie Els Engelbrecht Els
Our tasting takes a sudden shift to the new world. This is much lighter with cocoa and for the first time, a focus on the fruit. Bright.

2003 Rust en Vrede Estate
More of that. Spice and cocoa from easy barrel aging, oak and fruit.

2006 Boekenhoutskloof Chocolate Block
Wow! on the nose. Not a classic, complex wine, but dimensional. If only they made rhubarb Jolly Ranchers, this is what they would taste like. Even a little underripe greenness in the fruit, or maybe plants like aloe or menthol. Lower acidity, peppery. Seems treated with a heavy hand.

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2006 Two Hands Shiraz Gnarly Dudes
Raspberries and fruit and fruit.

2006 Two Hands Shiraz Bella’s Garden
More of the same, with more spice and more fruit. I guess more intense.

2006 Two Hands Shiraz Lilly’s Garden
The most refined of these three. Fruit and…..vanilla?

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2005 Altamura Sangiovese
Deep for sangiovese. There is some cocoa in there along with the plum.

2005 Anderson’s Conn Valley Vineyards Eloge
Pepper and vegetal qualities suggest cabernet franc (25%!) Pepper includes green and black and there’s some barrel spice in there, too. Very good, but pricey.

2005 O’Shaughnessy Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain
Nice and balanced. Not understated, not huge.

Rosenblum Zinfandel Aparicio 2004

Rosenblum Zinfandel Aparicio Vineyard 2004

I mentioned this wine in passing, and have now had the chance to open a bottle on my own. In the last nine months or so, it seems to have lightened. Upon opening, it has an overwhelmingly alcoholic nose, which dominates the palate as well. There has to be some level of residual sugar; it actually comes across as a little sweet. It was probably served too warm and needed time to open.

So the cork went back into the bottle, and I tried again the next night, this time cooling it more before tasting. The alcohol is less noticeable, perhaps because of the time open or the cooler temperature. The nose shows a distinctly port-like heavy, raisiny sweetness, which may be misleading as the wine is surprisingly light in color, body, and fruit. The some of the sugarry sweetness has softened, allowing a faint deeper texture through. Some tannin and earthiness, but not enough to be a driving force in the wine.

Backroom Bordeaux

Imagine me in the back room of a wine store, wine glass in one hand and spit bucket in the other. I’m tasting through some thirty-odd Bordeaux wines as quickly as I can because, let’s face it, I really should get back to work. Vintages range from as recent as 2005 all the way back to 1998. Prices range from $250 (Mouton Rothschild’s Sesquicentennial 2003 vintage) to $8.99 (some generic Bordeaux Superior). Honestly, tasting through as many huge, tannic wines as I possibly can in five minutes pretty much blows my palate.

I really didn’t care for most of the dry whites – I suppose they seem musky or mushroomy. The sweet white Sauternes are quite appealing – one (what was the name?) is incredibly rich and pairs quite well with the almond cookies served. I am pleased to find that some of the more chemical aspects I had noticed at the last tasting I attended are much lesser or completely absent in these Sauternes.

Like I said, churning through all the different reds burned my mouth out and I wasn’t able to really focus on much of anything. I was surprised that, knowing what I do about the 2003 vintage, the Mouton was surprisingly light (or at least less extracted than I expected – it wasn’t really light – perhaps more balanced). Earth and leather dominates these wines, really huge flavors that I’m sure one comes to appreciate more with time (the future of my career more or less depends on it). The Sociando-Mallet 2000 is particularly overwhelmed by underripe green vegetal aspects, more than green pepper, it’s an aspect of the green pepper's vine itself – this is a flawed wine, but my boss says it has devolved. He says it was great when he had tried it about a year before, and expects it to improve again after some extended bottle aging. It didn't "breathe off," as is the often hopeful expectation of such a pronounced flaw.

The fruit tones aren’t absent, they’re masked. They’re harder to pull out from all the other elements, and they’re less (what’s the word - generic?) than some of the more accessible (predictable) wines that I’m accustomed to coming from California. It’s frustrating, because I know that I’m experiencing something great and yet I’m not prepared to appreciate it. Hopefully this type of resource isn’t too infrequent.

Viva la Sweet.

I had the pleasure of attending a lengthy tasting this afternoon featuring wines from the AXA Millésimes – a branch of an insurance company fond of finer wines as well as portfolio diversity. This tasting was a challenge, as similar to a certain port tasting, I faced the danger of developing diabetes from all the sugar. Here are my notes with minimal editing.

Disznókő Dry Furmint 2005
Dry Hungarian
Understated – some mineral, faint fruit. Moderately acidic. Sugarless – more floral/aromatic – no sugar. Not great.

Chateau Pibran 2003
Pauillac – 70% Merlot / 30% Cabernet Sauvignon
Nose – spicy, underripe berries. Low on tannin, possibly thin body. Needs to cellar? Great finish, exploding spice, although short. Tannins not supported.

Chateau Pichon Baron 2002
Pauillac – 65% Cabernet / 35% Merlot
Bigger nose. Spice/Earth – much larger wine (still lighter than expected), more tannic, long finish. The fruit is low in the mix – “finesse.” –

Chateau Pichon Baron 2003
[wine omitted from tasting for lack of availability]

Castelnau de Suduiraut 2001
Nose – honey/nectar/sour tartar sauce (or mayonnaise?) – developing to fingernail polish. Quite sweet, oily feel. Acidity is present but overwhelmed. Mellow pear/honey.

Chateau de Suduiraut 2003
Lighter on nose and palate (less chemical). Less weight, less sugar. Acidity is more forward.

Chateau de Suduiraut 2000
Crystals. Subtle/sweet. Even less chemical. Balanced with a tiny spice (balanced acidity). 30% new oak.

Disznókő 6 putts 2000
Tokaji
Lighter. Brighter fruit, honey (sugar?) Fresh – no oak. Flower petal in fruit and sweeter melon – apricot. Well grounded finish. Aging on lees adds structure.

Noval 10 year old Tawny
Brown. Carmel/molasses. Aged style, fruit is quite subtle, (light) molasses style brown sugar.

Noval 2000
Very dark, bzg nose of “red wine” – large, fruit, spice, bit’o’sugar. Plenty of sediment. Maybe too rich.

Like I said, I felt like I was going to get diabetes from all this sugar. The Bordeaux were somewhat unsatisfying, too light in body for their larger tannins and noticeable oakey spice, almost as if they were unsupported and unbalanced. All three vintages of the Sauternes had a chemical quality that certainly was not alcohol, though nobody else in the room seemed to scrunch up their noses as I did. I even checked the nose on a friend’s glass, to be sure whatever it was wasn’t soap residue in my glass. Aside from the chemical odor, the wine was good, though perhaps a bit thick.

The Tokaji was a welcome change, a little more structured and fresh though it didn’t have the same qualities of, well, quality. The two ports were extremes – the tawny had almost no real richness to speak of aside from brown sugar (though that sounds too harsh, I really did like it) and the 2000 vintage was (I’m assuming) in a ‘dead period’ – too much body with very little sweetness. The good qualities of port were eclipsed by too much standard red wine flavor.

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Before heading to the tasting, I managed to try some Austrian wines – a white blend (good), a gruner veltliner (very good), a strange red (not so good), and a fantastic Austrian ice wine, which frankly, I much preferred over the sweeter wines I would go on to taste later in the afternoon.

Which makes me think. I surely wouldn’t have remarked on these Austrian wines (not blogwise, anyway) had I not taken the time to mention this other tasting. I haven’t posted in almost three months, but I taste wines several times a week. While this is mainly a problem of short-term memory and of lacking the opportunity for taking notes, it’s also a function of language and my own self-criticism. What is there to say about all these wines? They’re all really variations on a theme, balancing different chemical influences, varietal characteristics, and regional tendencies to make something unique beyond the infinite yet finite limitations of the English language, even after the expansion of the language in the form of ‘wine talk’ as well as the systematic stealing of other languages’ words (No word in English means terroir? How about using the word ‘terroir’?). The compensation for this real lack of descriptors can often turn into overly poetic descriptions – but in my case, of wines that don’t quite inspire poetry.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t have a lot to say because in choosing among the options of systematic repetition, poetic hyperbole and silence, I tend to lean toward silence.

Gnarly

Gnarly Head Zinfandel 2005

Very easy to drink with lots of fruit and a little tannin and acidity - but not much. This is training wheels wine, or perhaps it's everyday wine. I mean, it isn't life changing, but it's something to enjoy with dinner tonight.

Genofranco Nero d'Avola 2004

Pictured is the 2003; I simply could not handle the 2003 when I first tried it. Being even more inexperienced back then than I am now, I insisted that the bottle had gone bad. Now, comparing the 2004 to the '03, I'm convinced that the whole variatal is this way.

The nose on this wine is odd; it comes across like red wine, but with something additional. Not spicy, perhaps salty if one can even smell salt. Reminiscient of ham. Alcohol is very present, especially once the wine is sipped. The 13.5% alcohol content isn't supported by much fruit, and the warmth is noticeable as an alcohol intensity rises up the palate and into the nose. There's an herbacious spice along with leather or maybe tobacco. Austere is a good word. Lots of tannins, and rich, understated blackberries under all that.

It's not for the casual consumer. This is an interesting wine, not entirely pleasurable on it's own, but it has an intensity worth experiencing. Pair with equally intense foods - balsalmic vinegar with oily bruschetta, fatty, rich meats, eggplant with anise-heavy marinara. Quite a value for the usual $10 price tag, if you're looking to experience something interesting.

The Crossings Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 2004

The Crossings Sauvignon Blanc 2004

At first this wine was too cold, which can be deadly to flavor. After warming, it seemed to me to have softened a bit since the last time I've had this, which was about a year ago. What used to be lots of bright, fresh grass and bold citrus has softened to a more generic white wine flavor. The wine, of course, was fine in its youth, but has since spent too much time in a cardboard box in some warehouse somewhere. Two lessons: 1) Drink your white wines, especially your New Zealand sauvignon blancs, as soon as you can, and 2) the Stelvin Enclosure system (read: screw cap) works fine, allowing the wine to age without oxidizing.

Bootleg Puglia

Maybe I just got a bad bottle, but this sucks. It smells and tastes like a cleaning agent (with some softer fruit underneath!). There are billions of tiny sediment particles floating around but not settling, making decanting a futile affair.

Most of the reviews I've seen on it are pretty positive, though. I must have gotten a bad bottle. A really bad bottle.

Here's a varietal breakdown, just so I remember:

25% Primitivo
25% Negroamaro
25% Montepulciano
25% Uva di Troia

Spain and Canada

Pares Balta Blanc de Paes

Spain; 2004

A strange but not unpleasant wine. This white is soft and even more perfumey than the Las Brisas was, with just a little softer stonefruit. Not much complexity, just a nice, pleasant softness that manages to be very easy to drink without a trace of sweetness.

The grapes:

23% Macabeo
46% Parellada
31% Xarello

Moosehead Canadian Lager

Why am I even reviewing this? It's a classic. Pretty basic lager, without too much hoppy flavor or anything too bitter, basically without much character. Still, it finishes really clean. And it's totally easy to drink. I'd much rather be slamming these than Bud or Miller or any of that. And it's relatively cheap. Drink it out of the bottle.

What have we had lately?

Some wines I've had in recent months, plus a couple beers:

Turley Zinfandel Juvenile 2004

Amazingly rich complexity. Deep berry fruit and cocoa as rich as dark chocolate. Actually enjoyed it with chocolate. Almost like unfortified port. Total winner.

Lily Sonoma Pinot Noir 2005

Softer berry fruit like strawberries and light, fresh cherries. Opens up as it sits. A decent amount of complexity with less intensity. Very nice.

Menage a Trois Red 2004

It is what it is. A fun party wine and a cute joke to tell the next day. Easy to drink, lots of soft fruit. Not quite soda or jelly, but almost.

Las Brisas Spanish White 2005

A beautifully soft and floral white. A total steal at six or seven bucks. Light and aromatic, floral with the faintest hint of stonefruit. Crisp but short finish. I could drink this all day.

Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2006

Again, this is what it is. Not the best of the Beaujolais Nouveau that I sampled in 2006, but decent nonetheless. The usual nouveau flavors. You get tired of this wine as you drink it. Next time, I'll have it over ice.

O'Fallon Chocolate Cherry Beer

Strange, fun, and not bad. A beer that actually strives to taste like chocolate covered cherries. There's lots of chocolate, and a sort of fruity sweet cherry which is lost in all the chocolate. Much less dark than I expected, and just a little too sweet.

Hoegaarden

Add this one to my list of favorite wheat beers. A Belgian white, this is softer on the spice but still very rich in flavor. A tiny touch of sweetness and some other, more clean flavor that I can't quite put my finger on - sort of like the crispness of soap, only not in a bad way. This will be in my bar rotation, if only I can find bars that have it on tap.