Don’t Tell Jen

I bought five freaking bottles of wine today.You can tell her about the toilet paper.
I headed to Fine Wine Brokers for my weekly free buzz. Jen was elsewhere, so I was on my own.

The second bottle on the tasting was a rosé. Happily, rosés are not the awful, melted-lollipop atrocities they’ve gained a reputation for being. They can be more complex and less cloying that their worst examples, and they vary from sweet and dark to light and crisp. They pair well with everything, even roadside pizza in France.Pictured: Tom, pizza, rosé, France.
This wine, a blend of cinsault and syrah grapes from Domaine Sainte-Eugénie in Corbières, was a refreshing splash on the tongue. I said to the pourer, “It might just be the color, but I get a bit of watermelon on the finish.”

He replied, “Yeah, maybe. I get strawberry.”

Dammit! Why do I always taste the wrong thing?!

To save face, I obviously had to buy a bottle. Chicago will eventually get muggy (though today feels like a warm day in November), and this will go down like cold liquid happiness.

The next wine was from Domaine Gachot-Monot, a pinot noir with some bite that will cling beautifully to some salmon.I plan to do a lot of this over the summer.
Then I found Scott and thanked him for a recommendation he made earlier in the week. (On Thursday, Jen and I were going to have a hunk of Humboldt Fog cheese for dinner [shut up, we’re allowed], and Jen read that it would pair well with a sauvignon blanc. I stopped by FWB and asked Scott for a recommendation, and he produced a 2007 SlipStream from Western Australia. It went perfectly—nice and grassy and clean.) Today, I told him how much we enjoyed the wine, and he essentially said, “You like grassy? You should try this!”

He showed me a 2008 Sancerre from Eric Louis.

I didn’t want to anger the gods of wine recommendation, so I bought it.

Okay, so I managed to leave FWB with a mere three bottles. Then I made the mistake of stopping into The Chopping Block, where they’re selling off their old stock of wine at 20% off to make room for the new stock.

The two women behind the counter, probably noticing that I was already carrying three bottles of wine, spotted their mark and swarmed me mercilessly. “What sort of wines do you like?” asked one. “Well, with the summer coming, I’m probably going to be into some dry, crisp whites.”

She pointed to a Gavi from Stefano Farina and said it was strong and dry and not to everyone’s taste. That sounded like a challenge. It was also the last bottle. Done. Hand it over.

I also mentioned that I liked bold, spicy reds. She directed me to a Frédéric Magnien pinot noir. At this point, I was like “Why not. Here’s my credit card.”

Jen and I are pretty good at finishing off bottles of wine. But I think I buy them even faster. At this rate, we’ll never run completely out.

2007 Béchar Fiano di Avellino

I am very excited about this.

Yesterday, Jen and I popped into Fine Wine Brokers in Lincoln Square for their weekly tasting. A worker (I believe his name is Scott) who has come to recognize us greeted us with, "I think we have a surprise for you in the next room."

My first thought was, I bet they got more of the 2007 Béchar Fiano di Avellino that Jen and I love so much!

This was quickly followed by, Nonsense. That wine is long gone. I bought the last bottle in existence several months ago, and I am guarding it jealously because it will never be seen again.

We went into the tasting room, and there it was: the wine we had fetishized for so long, the third wine along the table.

I discovered it at a tasting at FWB over a year ago--a unique, fragrant, mouth-filling cake of a wine. It pairs beautifully with food, particularly a Greek pasta dish I enjoy making called linguine avgolemono--noodles, green beans, and artichokes in a lemon cream sauce. But according to Scott, it wasn't to everyone's taste. I bought it there a couple of times, and the final bottle sat there week after week until I finally snatched it up. I promised him that if he ever re-stocked it I would buy it.

If the wine was unpopular in the past, it seemed to be more beloved yesterday afternoon. The small crowd was very complimentary toward it, and I watched a woman snatch one of the three bottles from the sampling table. I picked one up as casually as I could, but make no mistake: I would have thrown punches to make sure I got one.

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.