739 replies to this topic

[Sneakeater]

So what is the boundary between this thread and the general wine thread?

Anyway -- last night, Les Carrétals, from Anne Gros and Jean-Paul Tollot, 2008, Minervois. This is a newish project from Anne Gros, the famous Vosne producer and Tollot of I think Tollot-Beaut?
They have 3 or 4 cuvées in the Minervois of which this is 100% Carignan from old vines etc etc.
Fabulous -- I am buying a case this morning. It has a lovely savoury character, with some herbs and smoke and tar, with good fruit, refined and quite cool but with real complexity. Just love it.

So this is one of those Famous Growers Go South wines that works?

Great to know!

[balex]

So what is the boundary between this thread and the general wine thread?

Anyway -- last night, Les Carrétals, from Anne Gros and Jean-Paul Tollot, 2008, Minervois. This is a newish project from Anne Gros, the famous Vosne producer and Tollot of I think Tollot-Beaut?
They have 3 or 4 cuvées in the Minervois of which this is 100% Carignan from old vines etc etc.
Fabulous -- I am buying a case this morning. It has a lovely savoury character, with some herbs and smoke and tar, with good fruit, refined and quite cool but with real complexity. Just love it.

So this is one of those Famous Growers Go South wines that works?

Great to know!

Yes, it really works! And quite civilized too, not brutally intense, quite refined.

[Sneakeater]

With leftover chicken, carrots-in-a-vinegary-sauce, string beans, and spinach-farfel kugel (must have been from a Seder).

2007 Becker Estate Pinot Noir

This seemed a pretty obvious pairing: all of the above with a German Pinot Noir. (This was the first year Becker identified its Pinot as "Pinot Noir" rather than "Spatburgunder" -- a decision to which I take great umbrage.) A thin, acidic, yet fruity style of Pinot Noir.

Probably I let this get a little too old. (There's a limit to how much a screwcap can age.) The fruit is beginning to fade -- and there aren't any secondary flavors developing to take its place. So the acidic thinness gets pushed more to the fore.

Not a struggle to drink. But not a tremendous pleasure, either.

ETA -- I should make clear that this is the "Estate" bottling -- their entry-level wine -- not one of their more expensive offerings (which I expect must age beautifully).

[Sneakeater]

Home from work, late, just wanting to gulp something.

We are now in the age of Aging Wines You Never Used To Think Could Age.

It started, I guess, with Beaujolais. When you think of it, though, there's no reason why the heavier Beaujolaises -- Morgons and Moulin a Vents -- wouldn't age. So fine.

Then, Muscadets. This was a leap of faith. It makes no sense whatsoever. But when you drank a few aged Muscadets -- the good ones -- it turned out this new idea was right. They do gain complexity, while retaining that sharp clean cut.

Now, aged roses.

My own individual problem is this. The roses that theoretically could age best are the deep, rich, complex ones. (Sperina's Piedmontese rose, say.) But those are the ones I gravitate toward, and drink up when they're young. The ones I age are the ones that inadvertantly get left somewhere in my storage units.

Like, for example, this 2009 Cal Demoura Qu'es Aquo. From somewhere in the Languedoc, featuring the typical South-of-France grapes. I'll bet this was great the year before last. Now, it was a little tired. And puckery.

Too bad I drank all the 2009 Sperina two summers ago.

[Sneakeater]

With takeout jerk pork from Christie's Jamaican Meat Patties.

2008 Bodegas Barballo Tinto Negramoll

Sometimes I come up with pairing ideas so good I'm proud of myself.

Jerk pork doesn't go with any wine. You should drink sorrel with it. But I wanted to.

So I thought of this Canary Island red. It's slightly petillant, flavor-forward but spicy and minerally (rocky, you'd almost say) rather than fruity (although there's a good deal of cherry in there).

Not a great wine -- but very good with jerk pork.

[balex]

La Soaze 2008 - Vin de France - Charlotte Battais

This is apparently quite rare -- a white Anjou wine, in a slightly oxidatif style from Chenin blanc;
slightly fizzy and cloudy when it was opened, and definitely a little off the beaten path, but very complex, a bit like a Savennieres by Joly but much better and much cheaper. Nice acidity and the 'flaws' are just perfectly in balance with the rest of the wine. I bought a bottle in Saumur in an excellent shop which in the unlikely event you are in that part of the Loire valley I highly recommend -- Aux saveurs de la tonnelle. About 20 euros IIRC.

[Sneakeater]

There's a stand at the Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Greenmarket that makes great Italian-style bread. They also make these round topped or stuffed breads (much too thick to be pizza). Tonight, I heated up one topped with mushroom, mozzarella, and maybe cilantro.

A perfect pairing:

2007 Nusserhof Elda

This is a wine from the Alto Adige made from the Schiava grape (I think it may also have a splash of Merlot -- fine with me, as I like the wine so much).

Alto Adige is yet another place in the world where wines are getting better than ever (although there are wines from here that in the 19th Century had a better reputation than Barolos -- no shit). I've had plenty of thin, undistinguished Schiavas. Now Heinrich Mayr's Nusserhof Elda (Mayr's wines are organic, probably biodynamic -- the whole 21st Century schtick) is supposed to be heavier and gamier than ordinary Schiavas, sure. But this isn't just better than other Schiavas I've had. It's in a whole different league. This is a wine I want to come back to.

What do we have here? Fruit, to start with. Cherries and berries and rhubarb, too. Then, some licorice. After that, we move to the forest floor. I've read this being compared to Pinot Noirs, and that description tells you why. The only problem is, it doesn't taste like a Pinot Noir, at least not to me. (The licorice tells the tale.) It's not as round. It's not even like a German Pinot Noir. It's more like a (much) less thin Jura red -- but with some porky, spicy (but very light) Syrah notes thrown in. A perfect compromise, really. And it's good chilled, too. I don't know why this isn't a huge popular favorite.

It's certainly a huge popular favorite in my apartment tonight.

[Wilfrid]

I bought a loaf the size of a suitcase from V&V in Woodside on Saturday. It looked reasonable when it was sitting on the shelf, then once I ordered it I had to pretend it was what I really wanted.

[Sneakeater]

With a very messy ragu of superannuated spring onion, garlic scapes, fennel, sweet red pepper, mixed mushrooms, and fantastic Brooklyn Larder pork-and-fennel sausage (is it made by Franny's, I wonder?) over bucatini (the real point being that the remainder of that ragu is going to get better over the next few days):

2007 Collequanto

This is a wine I've been impressing dining companions with for years by ordering it at restaurants. So reasonably priced (under $20 retail, if I remember right) but so nice.

I've been saving my bottle at home. A good point about it was the acid that made it go well with food -- but I thought it might be even nicer when a few years of bottle age smoothed the acid down a little.

Tonight's bottle was like buttah.

Don't get me wrong: this is no Big Deal Wine. But with a modest pork-and-stuff ragu, it was wonderful.

This wine, from the Marche, is made from the Vernaccia Nera grape (or, as it's called in the Marche, Vernaccia di Serrapetrona). Who knew, before this wine began being marketed in New York a few years ago, that there was such a thing as Vernaccia Nera? Someone must know this, but I don't even know if it's even related to the famous Tuscan white grape. They don't taste anything alike -- but then, neither do Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. (Obviously, all I had to do was reach for Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion to learn that they are unrelated: "vernaccia" simply means "vernacular", in the sense of "indigenous".)

Interestingly, the general flavor profile is kind of like last night's wine, the Nusserhof Elda: fruit (cherries, mainly), then some leather (absent from last night's), then a hit of licorice, then we sweep the forest floor for a very short while (unlike last night's extended exploration), and then lots and lots of pepper -- with less of a porkslap in the background than last night. All of which makes this agreeable wine sound more complex than it is. All those flavors are there -- but more as passing fancies than as deep taste experiences. Certainly this wine doesn't last. It's a quaffer, for God's sake.

Last night's Nusserhof Elda was deeper and more distinctive. But even so, I enjoyed this greatly -- even more with some bottle age than the younger versions I've been drinking with pleasure in restaurants over the last few years.

[Sneakeater]

This wine is also interesting in that it's yet another one of those Obscure Italian Wines That Are Vaguely Like Rhones But Not Really. I don't mean the Sardinian Connonau, which is just Grenache anyway. But the Sardinian Monica: that's a perfect example.

[Sneakeater]

like a Savennieres by Joly but much better

Balex: ummmmmmmmmmm.

What don't you like about Joly's Savennieres exactly?

[SLBunge]

Pago De Tharsys Cava Brut Rosado 2008. Nice summer wine. Some ripe red fruit but not juicy. I think it was around $15.

[Sneakeater]

Day 2 of the ragu (it's amazing how some things improve immensely just from spending a day sitting around inside the refrigerator).

Italy isn't the only country where they eat pork sausage and mushrooms (OK, maybe not fennel, though). Indeed, there's a country that borders on the region where Sunday night's wine came from:

2004 Braunstein Leithaberg Red

75% Blaufrankisch, 25% Zweigelt

When I started sipping this on its own, waiting for the overenthusiastically reheated ragu to cool, I thought I surely let it sit too long in the storage unit. It was thin. It was bitter. It was all acid.

Then, I had some with the food.

The wine came alive. It jumped into life.

By now, the fruit has melted into the minerals. With food, a nice minerally tangy red. More rocky and spicy than fruity. With food, an interesting bunch of flavors.

Probably should have opened this a few years ago. But with food, this was nice indeed.

[Wilfrid]

Day 2 of the ragu (it's amazing how some things improve immensely just from spending a day sitting around inside the refrigerator).

Worth a try, maybe.

[Sneakeater]

When I began to think about what to pair with another one of those Greenmarket Topped Breads -- this one mainly with onions and mozzarella -- I brightened when I realized it would be:

2008 G. Berlioz Chignin

How do I love this Savoyard wine? Let's count: acidity, fruit, like a Sauvignon Blanc but even crisper and more interesting.

I love this wine.

I loved it on release a few years ago. I held one bottle back for shits and giggles, to see what would happen. I was happy to realize that tonight would be the night.

In a perfect world I'd have a bottle of the 2011 alongside, to compare. In a perfect world, I could drink both. In our imperfect world, one bottle a meal is enough.

I can't say this got a lot better. Maybe the acid is a little friendlier, maybe the fruit has taken on a pleasant appley tinge that wasn't so noticeable before, when lemon predominated. And, OTOH, maybe it's a shade less tinglingly vibrant.

Maybe I have no the fuck idea whether it's better or worse. But I still loved it. That's all.