Côtes-du-Rhône Villages x 2

Côtes-du-Rhône Villages. What does it mean? It means only that a Village wine has been designated a rung higher than a regular old Côtes-du-Rhône. Côtes-du-Rhône Villages are slightly more expensive and, it seems so far, significantly more personable than your average Côtes-du-Rhône. This wine is predominantly made from the crushed felt juice of Grenache, though also includes Syrah and Mourvedre and, potentially, a few other lesser known varietals in small quantities. Tonight we tried two, both quite good:

2007 Domaine la Soumade Rasteau Côtes-du-Rhône Villages ($23)
2006 Domaine Richaud Cairanne Côtes-du-Rhône Villages ($23)

Rasteau
Have you ever met someone who seemed nice and friendly and easygoing at first, but then you go out and have a few drinks and--WHAM!--they're all up in your business? But in a good way? That's Rasteau. Big fruity nose, easy and deep layers of over-ripe flesh and lushy flavor but with that Grenachey structure. I keep picturing purple, overdue plums. But then, in the finish, a little cactus-prickle creeps over the tongue. Especially on the sides, where the wine hovers for a moment before fading out. This is 14.5%, so the BIGness is no surprise. All that alcohol adds to the luster. This wine was made for a meat sauce.

Cairanne
First thoughts? Hamburger. Blood, maybe thinned out, after all, by 5 milligrams of Coumadin. The Richaud flares up more quickly than the Domaine de Soumade. It's antsier, more nervous. The sparkle is nice, though, and the wine has a kind of light inside it that is refreshing after the intensity of the Rasteau. Still, as it airs out in the glass an overtone of bitterness makes itself heard. Not much, really, but the wine doesn't sail along so easily if you pay close attention. I guess this may simply be a more tannic wine, with a little more natural bite. Good, but not quite the experience Rasteau offered so easily.

South African Pinot

I just cracked open a bottle of a fantastic Pinot Noir from South Africa. Tracy gave it to me for Christmas, and the bottle was so beautiful and heavy I stored it away like a big old rock, thinking I'd keep it for quite a long time. But then, a few days ago, I received a piece of particularly good news and wanted to celebrate. So I dug out the bottle and drew the cork.

2008 Hamilton Russell Vineyards Hemel-En-Aarde Valley ($42)

The color is classic Pinot, brilliant and clear with lots of room for the light to get in. The aroma is rich, with tons of loam and even some sweet stuff, like red ripe cherries. Very earthy and vegetal and woody. One thing I love about this wine is the way it stabilizes on the tongue, and moves very little. There are no swells of flavor that come and go. Rather, the wine enters the mouth fully formed and just pauses there, more composed than you are, until you decide to swallow it at last. Afterward, for a few moments, there's an echo that reverberates in the palate and eventually singes off. This is simply fantastic, special wine. I can't say I've really had better Pinot Noir than this in my life . . .

Côtes du Rhône x 3

I love Côtes du Rhône. Here are three affordable bottles. Why affordable? There are different classifications of Côtes du Rhône, including Côtes du Rhône, Côtes du Rhône Villages, Côtes du Rhône Villages with an actual village name included (e.g., Sablet), and then the  Côtes du Rhône Cru wines, like Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Gigondas and Hermitage. Tonight we're drinking humble old  Côtes du Rhône.

2007 Pont du Rhone Clerget Terroirs ($12)

This is plonk, pure and simple. It's thin, as a wine based on Grenache shouldn't be. It's a little bitter and sour and reeks of cheap oak. Flavors hardly come through, except expired cherry cough syrup. I wonder if this bottle roasted in the hold of a supertanker or spent too much time in a semi, boiling in its own sauce on the way from Mount Vernon to Smith Street, Brooklyn.

2009 Domaine Barry   Côtes du Rhône ($12)


Soft and light, balanced with fruit and acid. Flavors of blackberry, mostly, and a peppery sparkle. Long smooth finish, very nice wine. I notice the nose is packed and dynamic in a way the wine itself isn't in the mouth.



2007 Yves Cheron Côtes du Rhône "Les Dentelles" ($12)
The best of the lot, no question. Fuller in body, suppler of taste, plush and clean. Ripe, organic. Very even in the mouth, stopping where it began. Lots of dark fruits, berries and plums.

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.