2005 Weingut August Ziegler Gimmeldinger Biengarten Riesling Auslese

In 2007, I took a trip with a couple friends to France. Among the regions we visited was Sauternes, home of the intensely complex, sweet golden wines that bear its name.They’re pretty amazing, but not something to kick back and suck down. They demand to be studied with your full attention, and I still end up feeling like I’m out of my depth.

Jen and I recently bought a Riesling, an August Ziegler 2005. If Sauternes is an aloof beauty, then this Riesling is its hot, fun sister.A lot of the same notes are there: honey, pineapple, and an edge of black tea, but I found it a lot less intimidating and more inviting than a Sauternes. Its texture was almost like a real good vanilla pound cake. Jen tasted honeysuckle. (She is from the South, so she knows what that means.) She also tasted peach and mango, which I couldn’t manage to pick up. It was great with a bowl of fruit—strawberries, plums, pears.And it was sweet, but a good sweet. I thought I imagined tasting crystals of sugar, until Jen pointed out that there were actually sugar crystals in the glass.
I think the bottle was about $30. Definitely a buy-again, for a hot summer night.

Ripasso Rivisited

Yesterday, Jen and I went to a tasting at Fine Wine Brokers in Lincoln Square. We surveyed the bottles the pourer had lined up on the table and noticed with some trepidation that the last bottle was a Villa Sonia ripasso, which we had a pretty unfavorable reaction to in the first couple posts on this blog.

But, we don’t let fear of disappointment stop us from drinking free splashes of wine, so we went ahead and tried it. I wondered if we’d have the same reaction to it.

To our surprise, it was fascinating. Jen pointed out that it tasted like the remains of a campfire. Damp, smoky, ashy—like you stepped out of your tent in the forest the morning after a night spent around the fire and took a huge breath of the doused aftermath.

I wondered if we’d just gotten a bad bottle the last time around. I made note of the year: 2007. The one we tried back in September was an ’06. Frankly, I don’t know enough to know if that’s a standard change from the same vineyard from one year to the next, but it sure underlines the mind-boggling variables that go into enjoying wine. We were willing to pass this wine by forever, but with a new, accidental glimpse, it might be worth buying again. (It might be awesome on a cool summer evening, outside.)

Anyway, we didn’t buy it just yet. But we did buy a bottle of bobal, a Spanish wine grape I’d never heard of before. Vega Tolosa 2007. The bottle says “Old Wines,” but I think it's supposed to say “Old Vines.”Jen said it tasted like a Madeira without the Madeira. Figgy, concentrated, and sweet, but without the weight or the eternal heavenliness. I sensed a nice sharp finish that kept it from being too fruity. We’re thinking of making some sort of Spanish pork product.

Vino-mation

This flick on FlowingData shows you in dizzying, cartoony detail how wine is made.

More Essential Wine Blogging Forthcoming, We Promise

h/t Married to the Sea.

A combination of busyness, laziness, and creative bankruptcy has kept this blog fallow for a long time, but know that we have not abandoned it. More to come.

The Best Wine Ever

"A succulent, deep and spicy blend of Granache and Syrah from the Southern Rhone Valley. A wine with new world texture and old world flavors - soft and slick on the palate with deep, foresty blackberry notes, bramble fruit and a finishing pepper kick."

This is the text of the handwritten note taped by bottles of 2006 Clos-du-Mont Olivet Montueil La Levade Cotes Du Rhone at Fine Wine Brokers in Lincoln Square. Notnits and I were browsing around after a tasting and discovered it. Pretty much every word on the little sheet (Foresty, Blackberry, Bramble, Pepper) declared You will love this. At around $15.00, it would have been silly to pass it by.

That night we picked up some chicken shawarma from Dawali down the street and ate on the back porch. Notnits opened up the Cotes du Rhone and we gave it a shot.

I think any one who eats Middle Eastern food on a regular basis (or knows anything about wine) would be horrified to learn that we paired this with the shawarma, but what we discovered delighted both of us.

The Clos-du-Mont was dark and plummy purple - it's the kind of liquid you can barely see light through. But it wasn't too thick when I swished it around in my mouth. All the notes were there, bramble, forest and pepper.

When we tasted it with the Shawarma, I was pleased to find that the tastes didn't clash at all. In fact, they paired very well; the nutmeg-or maybe cinnamon-enhanced the earthy overtones in the wine and the tahini and cucumbers pulled out some of the lighter minerality. (When I say minerality, I mean this: imagine licking a rock.)

I know very little about Old World vs. New World wines, except where they come from. My experience with both is difficult to describe. Drinking New World wines (North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), is very pleasurable and fun. A Chilean Syrah is great to drink with some red meat or barbeque. I find that I'm more interested in drinking the wines than I am ruminating over intricacies of tasting notes.

When I drink Old World wines (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria), my experience is far more three dimensional. I'm transported. These vines are old, and they announce their maturity with every sip, swirl or smell. I tend to launch right over the moon about a particular hint of leather or dry mesa. "WOW. It's like I'm in somebody's kitchen!" or "This tastes like a flowery meadow at dusk." Once the initial image explodes in my head, I take it apart and decipher what elements of the flavor bring flowers or simmering sauce to mind. Old World wines offer a depth and nuance that can go on for days.

In my childhood home, (up on top of Allen Mountain in the Appalachians of Western North Carolina), we had a playroom. This Playroom was damp, cavernous and suffered consistent water leakage. When it rained, the room was practically vaporous. It was mostly underground, with a small window looking out just at the earth-line into the woods behind our house. The Playroom was a creepy place; wet walls, the smell of mildew, Earth, and soaked bark. But we played there all the time.

I tasted the Playroom in the Mont Olivet. The old dank flavor, the fragrance of the rotting woods behind the house, the weird feelings of childhood fear and comfort, imagination. All this poured from the bottle in the chill of a late summer night, eating shawarma.

We've purchased it several times since and I can't recommend it enough. I will say that I'm not sure your experience will be as transcendent as mine. I'm positive of it - it's sort of unfair to assert that you will re-experience the magic of childhood when you drink this. So, on the short sell...it's a good wine (with a good price) that I happen to love.

Wine Away Is Magic

-j-j- and I went to La Creperie recently, a little French place in Lakeview. We were in a bit of a hurry to catch a movie (Fantastic Mr. Fox) across the street, so we each ordered a glass of wine, and I waited at our table while she darted across the street to purchase our tickets.

While she was gone, the waiter arrived with two glasses of red. As he approached the table and brought my glass in for its landing, I had a brief thought flicker across my mind: What if he spills that on me? That thought was immediately dismissed: He is a professional waiter.

One second later, like a snapshot, I saw the glass tilted toward me, its contents a tiny vertical wall of crimson liquid. Well whaddaya know, I thought, and in an instant the entire glass was on my lap, soaking my jeans.

The kid was staggeringly apologetic, and he didn’t do it on purpose, and I didn’t want to be the Indignant Asshole Customer or make him feel worse than he already did. On the other hand, what the hell, man? I stifled my anger and frustration. How convincingly, I’m not sure.

-j-j- returned to find me stone-faced with a dishtowel on my crotch, and she quickly put together what had happened. I retreated to the restroom and sopped up what I could, then slipped the towel into the leg of my pants to form a barrier between me and my wet jeans.

All our wine was comped. I eventually settled down. The kid never stopped apologizing. But now I had to sit through the movie with wet pants and my worries about whether the jeans would ever be wearable again.

My mom gave me a bottle of Wine Away for Christmas several years ago, in the wake of a massive spill on a new pair of khakis I’d suffered earlier that year. For a long time, I had no need for it, so it sat untouched in the closet with my laundry detergent. Then some time later, I dropped a bottle of wine and the ensuing crash spattered a few drops on a sweatshirt. Cursing the whole time, I took the sweatshirt and the Wine Away to the Laundromat. With absolutely no optimism, I spritzed the potion on the stain.

Like something out of a movie, the wine stain vanished before my eyes, and all that remained was an acrid scent of burnt oranges.

While I watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, my mind kept returning to my depleted stash of Wine Away. Would it work on denim? Was there a danger of letting the stain set for hours before using it? Did I have enough left for the size of the stain?

I got home and spritzed like my life depended on it. I had barely enough left to cover the wine stain, and that’s including when I unscrewed the cap and shook every last drop onto my jeans. The denim was dark and damp, so it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the stain was disappearing.

I washed in cold water and drip dried.

Success.
Before.After.

So I hereby throw my support and endorsement behind Wine Away red wine stain remover.

Dievole Chianti Classico Dieulele Riserva 2001

I went to Italy in the summer of 2006. While there, my friends and I hit a wine museum in Siena, where I bought my dad a bottle that was personally recommended by the guy behind the counter.(I wrote about the trip in detail here.)

The bottle was a 2001 Dievole Chianti Classico, the “Dieulele Riserva.” It’s a beautiful bottle. I gave it to Dad for Father’s Day.

Wine Spectator had this to say about it: “This is beautiful and balanced with berry, vanilla and milk chocolate aromas and flavors. Full-bodied, soft and round with a long finish. Drink now. 375 cases made.”

“Drink now” is a little worrisome, since the review was written in 2005.

• • •

Not long ago, -j-j- had an idea that we should head over to my parents’ place and cook lasagna for them. The recipe: A butternut squash and spicy sausage lasagna I learned how to make at the Chopping Block back in 2003.

We arrived at my parents’ place, and to my surprise, my dad brought out the Dievole. I didn’t know he was going to do it, but hey, Italian wine and Italian cuisine. What would be a better time?

So Jen and I began creating.
Jen made some bruschetta…
…and I hunched my back and set into the lasagna…
The finished lasagna was pretty good if I may say so, much better than the only other time I tried to make it. (By the way, I bought the spicy sausage at Panozzo’s Italian Market in the South Loop. Go there—it’s a wonderful place with Italian meats, cheeses, groceries, wine and pre-made dishes.)
We opened the wine. It was excellent—very dark and inky, and sweet without being cloying. And it had a bit of a kick to it. I wish I could remember more—this was almost two months ago, and I didn’t take notes. Hopefully, Jen will remember more and chime in. Jen?

As for whether it went with the lasagna, I have to reluctantly say it didn’t, really. The sweetness kind of fought with the lasagna’s sweetness, and the spiciness of the wine was intensified by the spiciness of the sausage. They weren’t bad together, but they did come into conflict a little.

I was able to enjoy both by consuming them separately. I drank some water and let a little time pass between each bite of the lasagna and each sip of the wine. But I am thrilled that my dad remembered the bottle and deemed this a special enough occasion to open it.

• • •

I have noticed that nice bottle of wine is an intimidating possession. When I bring home a bottle that might be a little more expensive than I normally buy, or one that was a gift from someone, or one that I bought after having really enjoyed it in a tasting, I become reluctant to open it. I have to wait for the right moment, or serve it with the right food, so it sits forever, off-limits.

There was a story on NPR of a community that holds a party every year where people bring in the bottles they’ve been sitting on and open them up. The thinking is, “If you’re waiting for a special occasion, fine: here’s your special occasion. Open those bottles.”

The moral of “Toy Story 2” comes into play here. Toys are meant to be played with.

It’s Christmas Eve. I fully expect to be on the receiving end of a bottle or two. I still have the Riesling my brother gave me last Christmas, and the Riesling he gave me the year before that. (To be fair, the 2007 gift was specifically meant to cellar for several years. I believe Matt referred to it as a “cornerstone” wine.)

I almost have to make specific trips to buy wine that doesn’t mean a lot to me, just so I have something to drink.

So maybe the Dievole wasn’t perfect with the lasagna. But there’s no way to know that without cracking open the bottle.

And in hindsight, they look pretty good together.