1985 Dom Perignon

At some point during the mid-1980s, my father was given a gift of a bottle of 1985 Dom Perignon champagne. It's a beautiful green bottle and comes in its own cardboard display box, with a little pamphlet explaining (in English and French) all you'd need to know about this peach of a sparkler.

So in the 1980s, the bottle was given. And there it sat, in my father's basement. Through the end of the Reagan and Bush years. Through Clinton's two terms. Through the entire Bush spectacle. And finally, through the opening moves of the Obama administration. Why? Out of reluctance, I imagine, to drink what one has. To save rather than to savor, own rather than drink. This makes me think of the verb To Have. Its double-meaning couldn't be better expressed than in this desire to both have a wine stored safely in the basement, and to have it with friends. Is the fear that by having a wine one might feel had?

In any case, I imagine some time in the early '90s would have been an auspicious year for uncorking this fine wine. Unfortunately, 2010 has proved to be a few administrations too late.

Why? The wine was, after all, drinkable. The sparks still flew across the tongue, and one could even say that all that time had enriched the light champagne, added texture and depth. There were distinct flavors of burnt toast, caramel, honey, and soft wood. I've read tasting notes from vintage Dom Perignons, and often the descriptor is "sherry-like," which seems right. The color was gorgeous, a saturated ochre. It was mature and wise.

And yet, it wasn't very pleasing to drink. I had to draw on purely intellectual capacities to enjoy it, to tell myself that something here was special. In fact, it probably was special. But ripeness, in this case, is not all.

So, Caveat Imbiber: have your wine.

Italian Whites II

Wait a minute . . . how many Italian whites are there? I think I've stumbled into an enchanted wine forest. There are, I'm coming to learn, literally hundreds of white Italian grapes. Today I'm tasting four new ones: Pallagrello Bianco, Vermentino, Insolia, and Verdicchio. What are they? I have no idea. I guess I didn't realize how many varietals are grown and bottled and consumed besides the grapes of global fame--Riesling, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc. This seems especially like an Italian thing (though I recently noticed the Swiss have lots of mysterious white grapes too). Last week, I was most excited by the Greco. Come on and let's see about these new aspatsafumatos!

2005 Alois Pallagrello Bianco ($25)

The Alois is very good! Very full and rich, lots of body and flavor, but in no ways too succulent or overbearing. The nose is deep and soft and wooded, the mouthfeel fat and loose. Great tastes here, of tropical fruits, including maybe pineapple and banana (maybe that last one's a stretch). The finish is cool and slow, and the tastes linger and develop on the tongue. Bold wine, not for absentminded sipping.







2009 Toscona Vermentino "La Spinetta" ($23)

Much lighter than the Pallagrello, round and breathy, almost no detectable acidity. In fact, this wine is almost weirdly flat in the mouth, like a very still lake of water. Melony, curvacious. A hint of pine sap. Maybe even some kind of muted fantasty spice-rack spice, like powdered orange rind. The fumes sing up in the high parts of the nose, almost tickling them. Quite lovely, a perfect balance between fullness and light.





2007 Mulinea Insolia "Curatolo" ($15)

The Insolia grape can be found all around Italy, but if it's spelled "Insolia" rather than "Ansonica," you're drinking a Siclian wine. This is beautiful, greenish-yellow wine with herbaceousness and a certain summery heft. Tracy thinks it's a little on the sweet side, though I don't taste the sweetness, just a little extra girth, especially in contrast to these lighter wines. It's fresh and clean, and drinking it now it somehow seems like a hopeful wine. It has a pleasing acidity, and ends with a surprising rush of flavor on the front of the tongue.


2009 Fattoria Laila Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi ($12)

This Verdicchio is decent wine, though not quite as nice as the other three. It's on the clear side, and has a waft of "white wine smell"--that oafy, somewhat lugubrious tone of cheapy white. Still, it's not a bad everyday wine, light and inoffensive and quaffable.

Italian Whites I

I've noticed so many types of Italian white wine lately, and I've tried some that are fantastic. Last Thursday I tried three wines, all for $16--a Falanghina, a Vernaccia, and a Greco. (I tasted a Greco in South Carolina a few months ago and loved it, so I'd been searching one out.) It's probably a better idea to try varietals next to each other--a Falanghina with a Falanghina--but my local wine shop only has one of each varietal. They were:

2009 Campi Flegrei Falanghina ($16)

Crisp, light, apple and white fruit, wide in the mouth, a slow finish. A touch of milky strength, but a good deal of honest fruit flavor that softens it out.


2009 Vernaccia di San Gimignano La Lastra ($16)

This is the famous Tuscan white. It's incredibly bright and lithe, quick on the tongue and full of hard lemon. Glinting, machine-like, steely and nervous. So thin the flavor blots out a little.


2009 Ocone Greco ($16)

The clear favorite of the three (Tracy agrees). More depth, more color, more layers. There is citrus and honey and something like a bark lengthiness to it. More character than the Vernaccia or Falanghina.

More Italian whites to come . . .

What is it about Chateauneuf-du-Pape?

I have no idea, but last night Tracy, Marci, and I tasted a truly fantastic bottle of Chateauneuf, plus a less impressive Cotes du Rhone for comparison. The wines were:

2007 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape ($90)
2008 Domaine Monpertuis Cotes du Rhone ($15)

Chateauneuf is an appelation that allows for 13 grape varieties, and "classic" wines from this region, like the Beaucastel, sometimes plant and use all of them. In this wine, the wine's Website explains, the two main grapes here are Mourvedre (about 30%, giving tannins and structure) and Grenache (30%, offering the softer, rounder parts). There is also Syrah (10%), Muscardin (5%), and Vaccarese (5%), all offering some kind of color, spiciness, or whatever. They add a small amount of Cinsault, usually included to develop the nose, and seven other varietals, in very small quantities, that make up Chateauneufs.

This means, too, that this Chateau has in its fields, growing all together like a happy family, all 13 grapes. They're all sucking water and nutrients from the same soil, and getting pretty much the same sun. Then, they're harvested and fermented separately (many undergoing malolactic fermentation for that milkiness), and then blended together before being held another year prior to bottling.

In any case, this is a most delicious example of this kind of wine. Very full in the mouth and luscious. The tastes aren't really as distinct as you might think. For me, at least, there are not a ton of individual flavor notes popping out; rather, the wine settles in and kind of relaxes. It is a pleasure engine made of soft parts. It's calm. Really beautiful wine, happy and radiant.

The Monpertuis, for contrast, is from the same general area, and made of some of the same grapes, though by no means all--I think this wine is mostly Grenache and Mourvedre, with a little Syrah thrown in. It's fine wine, but in contrast very thin and pale. The metaphor most effective here is a spatial one--where the Beaucastel had depth and dimension, the Monpertuis was flat and lean. Where the Beaucastel opened up and expanded in the mouth as it paused there before being swallowed, the Monpertuis nervously rocketed through, lithe and unchanged.

In a way, it's good to know that significant price differences do in fact make some kind of aesthetic sense. Still, I'm somewhat off-put by the knowledge that to get this kind of placid brilliance from a wine one might need to spend so much. Still, it's got to be worth it, sometimes, to just taste this kind of thing.

One Fine Chenin Blanc

Chenin Blanc is a grape most people associate with Vouvray, great white wine from the Loire Valley, near to where the more globally popular Sancerre is produced. Chenin Blanc is an extremely versatile grape, and can be turned easily into dessert wine, Champagne-style sparklers, and light and crisp deliciousness. Tonight, Thursday Night Tasting sampled just one excellent and truly unique bottle of Chenin Blanc:

2009 Chateau Soucherie Cuvée les Rangs de Long, Anjou Blanc ($18)

That elaborate labeling really just indicates the wine producer (Chateau Soucherie), the "line" of wines from which this bottle comes (Cuvée les Rangs de Long), and the appelation (Anjou Blanc). There's also a little motto on the label--"Vendanges a la main"--which means "picked by hand."

The most noticeable quality to this wine is the intense floral—no perfumey nose. It's a soft aroma, full and light at the same time. It smells of something I can’t name, but that's so distinct, like a wildflower (I looked at some online descriptions of Chenin Blanc and a flavor called "white flower" was listed). Tracy says this wine smells like a French woman (in a good way). I also get clear citrus tastes, though just a drop. There wine is crisp and healthily acidic, and when I drink it I keep picturing the skin of the grape itself.

The other really noticeable thing about this wine is the color, which is quite lucid and sparkly. There's a kind of yellowy clearness that some wine has that I love, and it's rare. This looks a lot like a wine I had recently but didn't blog about, a Cassis, though that wine had much less delicacy of aroma and flavor than the Anjou Blanc.

Finally, though this wine drinks light and easy, it's a full 13%. This surprised me when I checked the alcohol content. 

Coming up soon on Thursday Night Tasting: killer rosés . . .

Rioja after Dachau

Thursday Night Tasting is currently on the road, in Munich, Germany. Tracy and I have just returned from Dachau, which is a few minutes by train from the center of the city. We saw the enormous central yard, where prisoners were forced to stand as punishment for a missing person at roll call, sometimes dying on the spot. We saw the camp's two crematoriums and the rebuilt barracks with their triple-stacked bunks. We saw the showers where prisoners were beaten with leather whips and the showers where they were to be gassed.

What does this have to do with Rioja? Nothing. But now, after a trip back on the S-Bahn, where we split a bar of chocolate and hazelnuts, I'm drinking a glass of it. We bought two bottles of Rioja, a red and a rosé at the supermarket about an hour ago. The small shops here close at 7:00pm, so if you don't get to the bakery, the wine store, or the pharmacy during the day your only real option is the supermarket. I'm drinking the red:

2008 Viñadel Asador Rioja (3 Euro)

It's OK. Lots of wine in Germany is sold at supermarkets, and it's surprisingly cheap. Some of it looks too iffy to consider or the blends are too weird, like Chardonnay-Riesling. In any case, this wine is light and thin, though with that kind of ferrous, almost metallic twang that gives it something half pleasing and half irritating. It's got wood notes but it's not oaky. It's not acidic but it I feel little needles on the tip of my tongue. Uncomplicated, simple, and really nice to have here at the kitchen table in our quiet neighborhood.

Chardonnays, Californian and French

The end of the semester + the beginning of summer = hard to log in Thursday night tastings. But they've been good recently, focusing on Chardonnays from the United States and France.

The wines were:

American
2007 Chalone Vineyard Monterey County Chardonnay ($20)
2007 Bedell Cellars Reserve Chardonnay ($35)

White Burgundies
2003 Beaue Gréves Domaine Jean-Marc Morey 1er Cru ($35)
2006 Auxey-Duresses "Les Hautes" Jean-Marc Vincent ($48)

The two American Chardonnays are instructively different versions of American style Chardonnay. In general, New World Chardonnays, and especially American Chards, are big yellow honeypots. One reason Chardonnay is so "big" here is the way it's vinified, which is, often, with lots of malolactic fermentation and long seasoning in new oak barrels. Malolactic fermentation is a process that turns the bitter malic acid present in grape must into lactic acid--the kind found in milk and butter. All that lactic acid is what gives Chardonnay that round buttery body. New oak, of course, adds flavors of vanilla and toast and (obviously) oak. A book could be written on the use of new oak in modern wine making. In any case, many U.S. Chardonnays are heavily oaked and malolactically fermented, and for that reason they have gained a reputation as big and bold--or obvious and tacky, depending on one's tastes.

What's interesting here is that the two Chardonnays are made differently: the Chalone is a big American without a lot of oak, and the Bedell is a big American with tons of oak. Both are produced with lots of malo. How do I know? Drinking them side by side can tell a lot.

Chalone is one of the west coast's most famous labels. Chalone's Chardonnay came in third in the famous Judgment of Paris, a 1976 wine tasting in France that established California wines on the global stage (George M. Taber's 2005 book Judgment of Paris tells the story in 336 pages). This bottle of 2007 was voted one of the top 100 wines of the year by Wine Spectator last year. Chalone Vineyard was also an early proponent of malolactic fermentation and brought Burgundian winemaking techniques to California wines back in the Ford and Carter years. The soil is said to be rich in granite and limestone, mimicking the terroir of places like Chablis. In short, this is a storied American wine. So unlike a Chablis, though, the wine is Americanly strong: rich and creamy with a depth of flavor (vanilla, pears, honey, flowers) and a muted nose. Barely any oak. While there is a lot happening in the glass, for my taste, this wine is simply too plush.

Bedell Cellars is not in California, where the great American Chardonnays are produced. Where is it? The North Fork of Long Island, never thought of as a true wine destination. Tracy and I took a trip there a few months ago and, at the tasting, got very enthusiastic about their pricey but boldly delicious Reserve Chardonnay. Tastings are not always the best indicators of how much you'll like a wine when you actually get home. You're out at a beautiful vineyard enjoying yourself and suddenly everything is delicious. This wine isn't bad in any way--it's really quite good--though it's ripe with oak and fruit and vanilla. I noticed that the colder it got, the more I liked it--which is perhaps a way of saying that I didn't like the lushness, as coldness keeps body and flavor in check. But tasting this next to the Chalone, it seemed that these two wines stood as good examples of American Chardonnay, milky and oaky and rich. The oak really pops out in the Bedell when tasted next to the Chalone, which restrains its wood flavors considerably.

The white Burgundies are dramatically different. In fact, the difference is not only great between the wines, but the actual styles of taste are of two separate characteristics altogether. That is, white Burgundy tastes like white Burgundy and American Chardonnay tastes like American Chardonnay. There are obviously exceptions to this, but in this case the differences between regions--and their similarity--was striking. The Beaue Gréves is a real 1er cru Burgundy wine, with layers of flavor and that depth and impressive range of flavor that these wines are famous for. It was full of bright toasty flavors, almost like a crispy piece of country bread. I also tasted that vegetal robustness many Burgundies display. This wine is rich and full, though without the more syrupy and dense mouthfeel of the Chalone and Bedell wines. The Auxey-Duresses was similar the the Beaue Gréves, though had a detectable whiff of forest mushroom along with all the other tastes. Beautiful, happy wines. One thing about great Burgundies is the color, which sparkles and glimmers, light and wry and rich and full at the same time.

Interestingly, these two white Burgundies are purveyed by two of the best-known American importers of French wine, Neal Rosenthal (Beaue Gréves) and Kermit Lynch (Auxey-Duresses). Both these importers ship their wines in cold storage to preserve the right cellar temperature during trans-Atlantic voyages. This is actually crucial to imported wines, which may sit in a ship's hold for weeks. Imagine wine headed to California, shipped through the Panama Canal, baking in the wicked Panamanian heat. Cold shipping adds a few cents to each bottle, but it most definitely worth it.