Brooklynguy's Wine and Food Blog

A Trip Cut Short, a Red Wine from Chablis, and a lot to be Thankful for.

2009-11-25T10:55:00.000-05:00

About a year ago I went to France to meet my friends Peter and Tista. The plan was to spend a few days in Burgundy and then a few more in Champagne. My wife was 8 months pregnant with our second child. It was a bold move to go overseas at that point, but BrooklynLady was fine with it – she actually encouraged it, once our doctor cleared it. She was entirely healthy and not expected in any way to deliver early, so why should it be a problem? Off I went.

Several days into the trip, while still in Burgundy, my wife had contractions that were more real than the 'Braxton Hicks' contractions that typically happen a month or so before birth. I took the next flight home, and thankfully nothing happened – our daughter arrived a month later, as expected.

The night before I left Burgundy and returned to NYC, Peter, Tista, and I stayed up late talking and drinking Dujac Malconsorts and Clos de la Roche until something like 2:00 AM. The next morning Peter and Tista also left Burgundy, returning to their homes in Champagne. They stopped en route for lunch at one of Tista’s favorite restaurants in the Chablis area, a place called Le Soufflot in the village of Irancy. Although they were certainly as tired and probably as hungover as I was, Peter and Tista valiantly agreed to sample one of the local wines alongside their lunch. They drank a red wine from Irancy, a wine made by one of the finest producers in Chablis, Vincent Dauvissat.

A red wine from Chablis! What could that possibly taste like, I wondered. “Does it taste like Pinot Noir, or does it taste like Chablis,” I later asked Tista. “Both,” he said, “you’ll come back one day and drink it yourself.”

A month or so ago Tista was in New York representing Salon/Delamotte at a large tasting event. He came to my house for brunch one morning and he brought a gift with him, something he wanted me to have the opportunity to drink - a bottle of that same Dauvissat red wine from Irancy. As far as I know, the wine is not imported. I let it recover from its journey for about a month and drank it with BrooklynLady the other night, with the beautiful birthday dinner that she made for me - rosemary scented rack of lamb and butternut squash.

I thought it was much more about Chablis than about Pinot Noir. And yes, Irancy is not Chablis, it is 20 kilometers away, but the soils are similar. There was a seaweed, brothy, salt air, savory tone to the nose, and this carried through on the palate. There were little hints of dark fruit, but the fruit in this wine was really just a vehicle for the transmission of terroir. When drinking it on its own, there seemed to be a green edge to the tannins, something that has plagued many 2004 red wines. But this wine is from Chablis, not the Cote d’Or – should that hold true here? I really don’t know. With food, that green edge was gone. This was a challenging and very rewarding wine.

We thoroughly enjoyed this wine, as much for how good it was with our dinner as for what it represented to us: a reminder of the times just before and after our second daughter was born. Those were times of great anticipation and uncertainty, and also very wonderful times that a person is lucky to experience. I am lucky enough to have experienced them twice now - I have two truly amazing little daughters, and a very happy and healthy wife. And for those things above all else, I am thankful. Isn’t it nice that a savory little red wine, from an off vintage in Chablis, given to me by a good friend, can remind me of that?

Happy holidays to you and yours.

A Perfect Friday Night Dinner for One

2009-11-22T09:00:00.001-05:00

My wife, a clear-thinking woman in her mid 30's, somehow found herself going to see that new vampire movie on a recent Friday night. The one with the cute couple - British guy and American girl, all over the cover of People magazine. You know the movie I'm talking about.

When the wife goes out and I'm home alone with the two sleeping kids, I tend not to drink anything fancy. After all, one of the things that makes a wine great, is drinking with some one else and talking about it. But it can be a real pleasure to open a special bottle when I'm on my own, a wine that perhaps BrooklynLady doesn't enjoy as much as I do.

On this recent Friday night, as my wife watched cute and vicious teenage vampires do their thing, I warmed up the last of my French green lentil stew studded with baby white turnips, said turnips' tender greens, and bits of thick cut bacon. And I opened a bottle of wine that I was excited to hoard all for myself, the 2006 Jacques Puffeney Trousseau Cuvée les Bérangères, $30, Imported by Rosenthal Wine Merchant.

Actually, I opened it as BrooklynLady was getting dressed to go out, and I poured her a skimpy little glass. I asked her how she liked it as she put a clip in her hair - "Not so much," she said. "It tastes tomato-ey."

Perfect. This one is all mine, baby! And I don't get anything tomato-ey. I get a lot of warm dry soil, some sweet/tart red currant type of fruit, and something most definitely gamy. This is such a delicious wine, beautifully perfumed, perfectly balanced, but not at all polished - the tannins jut out a bit, the acid is the tiniest bit volatile, and there is a vivacious energy running through this wine. It was at its best after two hours in the decanter - intensely perfumed, but graceful and clear as a bell. It was perfect with my earthy lentil dish, providing a lot of lift.

It's things like this, this simple bowl of lentils with this vibrantly interesting wine, that remind me how staying home alone on a Friday night can delicious in its own way. Trust me - this wine is so much better than cute vampires.

By the Glass - Domestic Cheese Edition

2009-11-18T23:00:00.000-05:00

We've been delving further into domestic cheeses lately with some very good results, mostly. It continues to fascinate me, the challenge of pairing wine with cheese. In my opinion, which in this case is even less well informed than most of my other opinions, red wine is just too difficult to pair with cheese. They both tend to have such powerful aspirations, how can they avoid doing battle with one another? I find myself wanting to drink whites with cheese, the only question being whether or not the wine should have residual sugar. We've tried the cheeses I mention below several times, with various wines. Here are a few recent pairings that worked. Please feel free to chime in with any suggestions of your own.

Jasper Hill Farm Bayley Hazen Blue Cheese, paired with 2002 Domaine du Closel Savennières Moëlleux Les Coteaux, $28, Louis/Dressner Selections. Jasper Hill Farm might be the last great hope for artisanal cheese in Vermont. Mateo and Andy Kehler raise their own cows and make their own cheeses, but they also cellar small-batch cheeses made by other dairy farmers, including the famous Cabot's Cloth Bound Cheddar. Their Bayley Hazen Blue is a raw milk cheese that's aged for at least four months, and it is distinguished by its great balance. Not too salty, not too sweet, this cheese tastes of fresh butter, with herbs and roast nuts. It is crumbly and dense, not creamy like St. Agur. There are many wines that would be great with this cheese, but after one nibble, I knew that I wanted something sweet. The wines of the Savennières appellation are typically dry, but in 2002 the Domaine du Closel made a sweet wine. It was a great match, the herbal flavors of the wine enhancing the same flavors in the cheese. The rich, somewhat viscous texture of the wine enhancing the cheese's lean and sprightly characteristics. I've had this wine as an apértif in the past year, and it was far better with cheese than it was on its own.

Jasper Hill Constant Bliss, paired with 2007 Paul Pernot Bourgogne Blanc, $18, Jean-Marie de Champs Selections. This is a Chaource-style (in the Champagne region) cow's milk cheese. It is aged longer than Chaource cheeses (thank you, flavorful bacteria-averse FDA regulations), and the Jasper Hills folks say that it doesn't really resemble the cheeses of Chaource. This is delicious cheese, plain and simple. The best wine pairing I've found so far is the fabulously over-achieving everyday Bourgogne by Paul Pernot, which in the classic vintage of 2007 manages to be both lighthearted and serious. It shows hints of everything that makes white Burgundy wine so great - ripe fruit, delicate floral and stony aromas, and inner layers of texture that fade in and out.

Scholten Family Farms Weybridge, paired with 2007 Agnès et René Mosse Anjou Blanc, $18, Louis/Dressner Selections. This cheese is aged at the Cellars at Jasper Hill. It is a pasteurized cow's milk cheese with a bloomy rind, aged for 20-30 days. It quite sensibly ripens from the outside in, offering a lovely contrast between the creamy outer layer and the more chalky inner paste. I found the texture to be the most interesting thing about this cheese. The flavors are nice too, but more simple. The Mosse Anjou Blanc was nice here, its earthy and woolly notes adding complexity that I found the cheese to lack. Somehow, though, the wine showed almost no acidity when paired with the cheese. Strange...

Meadow Creek Dairy Grayson, paried with 2006 Pierre Frick Sylvaner Cuvée Classique, $13, Fruit of the Vines Imports. This is a raw milk washed rind cheese from the mountains of south-western Virginia, made somewhat in the style of the classic Italian Taleggio. Meadow Creek Dairy practices an earth-friendly form of cattle farming and cheese making. I have no data to back this up, but I hereby assert that Meadow Creek dairy is partially responsible for the fact that in the recent Presidential election, the great state of Virginia voted Democratic for the first time since 1964. In any case, this is delicious cheese. It is not a runny washed rind cheese, it retains its bouncy form even after several hours at room temperature. It is pungent, but not at all overpowering, with grassy and fruity flavors. Better to cut around the rind though, in my opinion, as it offers little to no flavor, and it adds an unpleasant brittle, waxy texture. Frick's bone-dry Sylvaner is great with this cheese. The floral aromas bookend the pungent, buttery cheese perfectly, and the almost startlingly dry wine accentuates the cheese's clean grassy flavors.

What to Eat and Drink when you Cannot Drink Wine

2009-11-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

Last week, for the first time in several years, I was really sick. I didn't have a drop of wine for five days. Sounds crazy, but it's true. Imagine not drinking wine for five whole days! You'd have to be in prison, or shipwrecked, or completely knocked out with the flu.

My cold was bad enough so that I didn't even miss wine, actually. But one must eat and drink, even when sick. So what does a guy like me think about ingesting when he's on the sick-wagon?

Phở. Chicken soup might be more traditional for us Americans, but when I'm sick I immediately think of Phở, the traditional beef noodle soup of Vietnam, and the most comforting food that I know of. It warms the body and soul, and if you garnish with the right amount of chili paste, it clears the sinuses too. My favorite bowl can be found at Cong Ly in Manhattan, at 124 Hester Street between Chrystie and Bowery. Great Phở is distinguished by the quality of the broth and the toppings. There is no better Phở broth in NYC than at Cong Ly, I assure you. There are many toppings to choose from, some better than others. When I'm sick, I just want the simplest version, Phở Tai, topped with thin slices of eye-of-round, a medley of herbs, charred onion slices, bean sprouts, and fresh lemon juice. Just look at that bowl in the picture above, as of yet untouched by my waiting chop sticks.

McVitie's Digestives. I cannot stop thinking about these things. Nothing more than round wheatmeal biscuits, but they taste so good. If they're bad for me, I can't figure out how from reading the ingredients. A good hot cuppa, a few of these, who wouldn't feel better? My daughters seem to like them too, and now they bum-rush me whenever they see the brightly colored package. But I don't see why I should share, I'm the one who is sick.

Good bread. Almondine bakery opened an outpost not too far from me and sells what I think is the best baguette in NYC. Crusty and a bit chewy on the outside, light and flavorful on the inside, irregular and lumpy, this is a beautiful thing. Eating one makes me understand the endurance and and ubiquity of the baguette - most are just terrible, but we keep buying them because we once had a great one, and we continue to search for that experience. In Brooklyn, here it is. More on the new Almondine spot soon.

Good reading. Dr. J's recent writings reminded me that I hadn't yet read Kermit Lynch's classic book, Adventures on the Wine Route. I tore through it during these five days and it was perfect - completely engaging but not terribly demanding, perfect for reading with a slight fever at 1:30 AM when you can't sleep. That sounds like a slight, and I don't mean it that way at all - this is a classic for a reason. The book is informative, inspiring, entertaining, and Lynch's passion is contagious. Kermit Lynch is definitely a pioneer. Do you remember when you first heard of Domaine Tempier? Of Charles Joguet? Of Vieux Télégraphe?

* * *

While I was sick I thought of many wines I wanted to drink, and the meals that I would enjoy with them. Yet what was the first wine I drank when I was able? A simple country wine, a Gamay from the Côte Roannaise, and it was delicious. I need to drink simple wine more often.

Corked Wine Etiquette - Poll Results and some Thoughts

2009-11-11T20:45:00.000-05:00

Here is the question I initially asked: You and several other guests are at some one's house for dinner. The host serves a wine that is corked. What do you do? I put up a poll on the left sidebar of the blog offering various ways of handling the situation. The choices were:

1) Immediately inform everyone that the wine is corked.
2) Wait until everyone has had a chance to taste the wine, then inform the group.
3) Wait until everyone has had a chance to taste the wine, hope that some one else informs the group, if no one does, inform the group yourself.
4) Don't say anything unless the host notices the wine is corked.
5) Hey - I'm not positive that I would notice it myself.

Many readers agreed with Alex (whose comment contains an amusingly off-color typo - whoops, should I not have informed?) and Jack who said that the answer to the question depends on who is hosting and on the situation, and that the telling should be done in a discrete manner. The general sentiment seemed to be that the wine-geek host can take the news, but "civilians" might not be able to.

But 102 of you responded to the poll, and the most popular response (35%) was #1 - immediately inform everyone that the wine is corked. That's far from a majority, of course. But it is quite different from the sentiment expressed in the comments. Perhaps those who picked this answer assumed that it is a wine-savvy group at dinner.

The 2nd most common (26%) answer was #3 - wait until everyone has had a chance to taste the wine, hope that some one else informs the group, if no one does, inform the group yourself. This is the one that I personally believe in almost all of the time. Although I respect it, I do not subscribe to the "never say that the wine is corked, no matter what" philosophy.

Once I was a dinner guest at a highly knowledgeable wine maker's house, along with two of my friends who are incredibly knowledgeable wine professionals. The wine maker and one of my companions are friends. We began the evening with a vintage Champagne that I very much enjoyed. We ate wonderful food that night, and drank many wonderful wines. After leaving the wine maker's house we were discussing the night's wines and both of my friends agreed that the vintage Champagne was mildly corked, mildly enough so that it was difficult to discern, but mildly corked. I remember feeling surprised that they hadn't brought this up while we were drinking the wine - I assumed that the wine maker would have also noticed, or at least would have been interested to hear this opinion. I would have loved to taste the wine again, to learn about what it was my friends had noticed.

Several times I have served wine to fellow wine lovers who waited for me to point out that the wine is corked or otherwise flawed. I appreciate that because it is such a polite way of handling it. But it makes me wonder...what if I hadn't noticed? Would they have said nothing? Would they allow me to remain ignorant about that wine? I sincerely hope not. How many times have I served flawed wine to wine-savvy guests who noticed, but said nothing? If the wine-savvy host doesn't notice a flaw, saying nothing seems like a shame to me. There are delicate ways to say things, and clearly this is a person who wants wine knowledge. Help them, for goodness sake!

By the way, I try to find a delicate manner of informing even the non wine-savvy host too, and whichever of their non wine-savvy guests appear interested. It's not the same thing as telling the host that the cake they baked is too salty, or that the spaghetti they made is overcooked. The host made those things, and it obviously would be unacceptably impolite to criticize the host's cooking. But the host didn't make this wine - they purchased it and are not responsible for the flaw. And "too salty" and "overcooked" are matters of opinion. Cork taint is tangible, much more like spoiled milk than like "too salty." Perhaps the host would appreciate learning how to recognize this flaw.

I appreciate the premium placed on politeness and deference to the host's feelings, and clearly the social rhythm of the evening should not be risked over corked wine. But I also think that excessive politeness inadvertently advances the sad idea that wine and wine knowledge are for only the privileged few among us. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but bear with me a minute. When you don't take the opportunity to teach someone that a wine is flawed, you help them stay ignorant. You allow them and their guests to eat stale bread without explaining what stale means, without suggesting a taste of fresh bread for the sake of comparison. Why allow people to think that a flawed wine is an accurate representation of the wine? Why not seize the moment and empower people to understand and recognize the flaw themselves? I'm talking about civilians and wine-geeks. I'm talking about myself. Everyone has something to learn. Just don't be a didactic wine snob when you're the one teaching, be respectful and be helpful. People are going to drink a lot of wine in their lifetime, and maybe you'll be the one who helps them understand what corked wine is, or how to discern the faintest whiff of TCA in an old bottle of Champagne.

Brooklyn Blind Tasting Panel #2 - Poulsard

2009-11-08T10:00:00.003-05:00

Jura wines are kind of obscure, outside of the wine-geek world. Finding them requires seeking them out, your local shoppe is unlikely to carry them. And because they are not wines of obvious and immediate pleasures, they take some time to get used to, a little patience even. This means they may never really catch on here in America, like foreign films or soccer, but that's fine with me. They tend to be small production wines, and they already have fans that show the same level of devotion you see at English football stadiums. Some of the wines are already very hard to find, and I don't need to be jousting elbows with every Tom, Dick, and Harry at the Overnoy/Houillon bin.

Obscure or not, lots of people seem to be talking about the Jura lately. Eric Asimov recently wrote about the wines in his column and on his blog, Guilhaume Gerard, a former partner at Terroir in San Francisco, and who blogs as The Wine Digger recently cleaned out the Houillon stock from French retailers, Alice Feiring just went to the Jura and wrote a bit about it on her blog, and even this Brooklynguy has written a few times about Jura wines. It seems as though Jura wines are the next hip thing.So it's good timing, then, that the Brooklyn Blind Tasting Panel's theme in its second meeting is Poulsard (or Ploussard if you are from Arbois), one of the red grapes of the Jura. Poulsard grapes are somewhat large, and the wines are typically very light in color, but they are intense in aroma and flavor. In general, I find their fruit character to include cranberry, pomegranate, and sometimes blood orange flavors. They often show gamy and woodsy flavors as well, veering into rusticity when things don't go well. In aroma and flavor, they are completely unlike other red wines. They are surprisingly tannic, and apparently they age very well, although I've never confirmed this for myself.

There are only 7 producers whose Poulsards are available in New York, as far as I can tell. Two of them were not included in this tasting - Ganevat's utterly delicious Poulsard is simply sold out, and Domaine de L'Octavin's Poulsard was also unavailable. I included everything else I could find - Overnoy/Houillon, Jacques Puffeney, Philippe Bornard, Domaine de la Tournelle, and Stéphane et Mireille Tissot. Bornard actually makes two Poulsards, so does Tournelle, but I included only one of each.

I was joined for this tasting by Levi Dalton, the much respected sommelier at the restaurant Convivio, Sophie Barrett, the Jura wine-buyer at Chambers Street Wines, and Clarke Boehling, who was the French Portfolio Manager at Michael Skurnik when I invited him, but who chose to complicate matters by taking a job at Rosenthal, the importer of Puffeney's wines. Although Clarke is a professional who will call it as he sees it, in an attempt to avoid even the slightest appearance of bias, I figured that we needed additional support from BrooklynLady, who also loves wine, and who is my wife.

I decanted the wines two hours before the tasting and kept them in cool water. We selected our two favorite wines, in order, identified the wine that we'd pick for long term cellaring, and also identified one outlier wine - a wine that is different from the others, if there should be one. Unlike the last time the Panel met, there was no clear winner this time. The wines changed tremendously in the glass, opening, closing, revealing hidden nuances, picking up or shedding weight and intensity. I personally didn't think that any of them showed all that well - could this have been a leaf or a root day? Here are the details:

2004 Domaine de la Tournelle Arbois Ploussard de Monteiller, $28, Jenny & François Selections, donated by Jenny & François for this tasting. During the tasting this wine received two 1st place votes and two 2nd place votes. Sophie loved the mature aromas and flavors of the wine, Clarke (and I hope he doesn't get fired for this) picked it 1st, calling it "subtle and elegant with a remarkable inner-mouth perfume." BrooklynLady liked it best during the tasting too. During dinner Levi proclaimed it to be "clearly the best of the wines." I was the one who didn't vote for it - during the tasting I found a weird quinine type minerality and something not entirely harmonious about the wine, but later as we ate, I thought that it was showing the best of all of the wines. Change, change, change.

2007 Philippe Bornard Ploussard Arbois Pupillin Point Barre, $30, Savio Soares Selections, donated by Savio Soares for this tasting. This wine received two 1st place votes and one 2nd place vote. Levi and I both had this as 1st choice during the tasting. I thought it clearly stood out above the rest - it was completely harmonious, subtly quite intense, and very beautiful. The nose was spicy with pomegranate fruit, very elegant, there was good acidity, and great length - the floral finish really lingered in my nostrils. The funny thing is, everyone agreed that this wine fell off over the course of the evening, and was perhaps overshadowed rather than enhanced by our dinner (biryani-style rice with beef, watermelon radishes, green salad).

2008 Overnoy/Houillon Poulsard Arbois Pupillin, $36, Louis/Dressner Selections. This wine received one 1st place vote and one 2nd place vote. Even after two hours in a decanter, this wine still had an effervescent twang on the palate. I thought this might be because there is no sulfur used to protect the wine, and instead is bottled with plenty of carbon dioxide that can take a lot of time to work itself out. Clarke and Levi disagreed, suggesting that the delicacy of this wine requires the most careful of storage conditions, and that this bottle may not have been stored properly. Or that there may have been further fermentation in the bottle. Who knows? Sophie picked it 1st during the tasting, and I loved it too, picking it 2nd. It was more overtly fruity than the other wines, but I liked its depth and resonance. And this wine changed dramatically over the next few hours, picking up lots of intensity, and loosing all traces of carbon dioxide. By the end of the evening, everyone really liked it. This is one for the cellar, I would say.

2005 Jacques Puffeney Arbois Poulsard "M," $26, Neal Rosenthal Selections. This wine was a world apart from the others during the tasting, in a bad way. Oxidized, dried prunes, and lifeless. It received no votes. Levi thought it was simply undrinkable. When it was revealed to be this wine, I realized that it had to be a flawed bottle - what we had in the decanter was not representative of this wine. So I opened another bottle, which showed better, but still a shadow of what it was several months ago. Clarke (in an attempt to salvage his new job) blamed my decanter, the wine glass, the air in my apartment, the manner in which I held the bottle while pouring, and eventually, my karma for the wine's poor showing. In the end we guessed that it had entered a closed phase.

2006 Domaine Stéphane et Mireille Tissot Arbois Poulsard Vieilles Vignes, $18, Imported by Frederick Wildman & Sons. This wine was corked, sadly, and I did not have another bottle.

So there you have it. Tournelle showed very well in a lineup including Houillon and Puffeney, and everyone agreed it was a wine worth buying. Bornard showed well too. Houillon was delicious, but provoked more disagreement than the other wines. Puffeney's Poulsard is great too, regardless of how the 2005 showed on this night. These wines don't stand still, they change a lot in the glass. I don't always decant two hours in advance of drinking them, and the changes are even more stark that way - they can start out pretty funky.

Action Required - Please Take the Corked Wine Etiquette Poll on the left.

2009-11-06T10:42:00.004-05:00

I'm looking for your feedback on corked wine etiquette:

You and several other guests are at some one's house for dinner. The host serves a wine that is corked. What do you do?

Please use the poll on the left sidebar to give your answer. Poll closes on Wednesday of next week. I'll tell you why I'm asking after that. If you think I omitted something in the poll responses, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks!

Friday Night Bubbles - 2002 Diebolt-Vallois

2009-11-05T21:40:00.001-05:00

Last night, after a night of many a Poulsard with friends (more on that soon), I wanted to open a bottle of good Champagne to close out the evening. But what to open? My companions included a guy who until recently worked at Michael Skurnik wines, so nothing from Terry Theise. A woman who works at Chambers Street Wines, so nothing that they sell. And a prominent Sommelier at a great NYC restaurant, so nothing off his list. I decided to open a bottle of 2002 Diebolt-Vallois Champagne Brut Blanc de Blancs, $65, imported by Petit Pois Corp. Turns out that the Sommelier has the 1997 on his list. I did my best. I tried, okay? Why are you being so judgmental?

2002 was a great year in most of Champagne and the idea is to actually hold onto the wines to allow them to reach their true potential, not to drink them frivolously after many other bottles at the end of the evening. But I don't own any of the Diebolt-Vallois 1999's, which my good friend Peter Liem says is what we should be drinking now while we wait for the 02's and the '04's to develop. And I was in the company of people who deeply love and know wine - who better to drink this with? And I have one more bottle that I will use all of my powers to save for another 5 years. So I opened it, we drank it, and it was just excellent.

Even at the end of a night of many wines, it is immediately clear that this is a special drink. The nose is fresh and harmonious, the wine is quite full in body, silky in texture, the fruit is clean and ripe, the finish is chalky and refreshing. I loved the sheer class and elegance of this wine, its effortless depth, its resonant fragrance. What will happen with additional cellaring that could make this wine better than it is right now?

Although it is expensive in absolute terms, I now understand how huge of a bargain it is in relative terms - you can easily spend much more than this on many Champagnes that simply aren't as good.

More from the Dressner Tasting

2009-11-03T22:45:00.002-05:00

More thoughts and notes from the recent Dressner Portfolio Tasting:

The 2007 Domaine de la Pépière Granite de Clisson is here. I thought it was very tasty, although somewhat reserved in its expression. To be fair, this is not a wine that I can understand at a big tasting. It will be more expensive than the 2005 was, about $23, and I will happily buy it.

I loved the "entry-level" 2008 Muscadets by Luneau Papin, particularly the 2008 Luneau-Papin Clos des Allées, about $15. This typically racy and stony wine showed a bit more concentration and richness than I am used to, but in a good way. Lower yields perhaps?

All of the Larmandier-Bernier Champagnes showed very well. The 2004 Vieille Vigne de Cramant Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs, about $100 was well balanced and delicious, but my favorite on this day was the Terre de Vertus Brut Nature Blanc de Blancs Premier Cru, about $80 (based on 2006, but not a vintage wine). I thought this wine was simply fantastic, with pretty floral aromas layered atop the salty rocks. I want it.

I liked François Pinon's 2008's even more than I did the 2007's at this early stage. The 2008 Vouvray Cuvée Tradition, about $21, was sweet but well balanced and with good acidity, and the 2008 Vouvray Silex, about $26, was an awesome wine, very pure, with beautiful fruit, great structure and balance.

I think that I prefer François Chidaine's Montlouis wines to his Vouvrays. I'd love to test this little theory with many bottles, some friends, and dinner, but so far, I think I like the Montlouis wines better. They just seem more complete to me. The 2007 Chidaine Montlouis Clos du Breuil, about $30, a sec, or dry wine, is herbal and complex with woolly fruit. The 2007 Chidaine Montlouis Clos Habert, about $30, a demi-sec, or off-dry, and always a favorite of mine, was ripe and restrained and exuberant and about fruit and mineral and wool and soil. I loved it.

I really liked both of the Clos du Tue-Boeuf Pinot Noirs from Cheverny. Thierry Puzelat makes a load of different wines under his own label and also under this one, and it can be hard to keep track of what's what, but that's all part of the fun. The 2008 Clos du Tue-Boeuf Cheverny Gravotte, about $24, is 100% Pinot Noir from 30 year old wines on chalky soil. It smells of dried roses and is bright and elegant on the palate, with a definite chalky feel. The 2008 Clos du Tue-Boeuf Cheverny Caillère, about $28, is also 100% Pinot Noir from vines of about the same age, but from clay soils. The wine is darker and richer, very earthy and animale. Both are delicious wines, and very expressive of their place.

Many of you already know the late Baldo Cappellano's wines. I had never had one until this tasting. I appreciated all of them, but there are two that simply blew me away. The 2004 Cappellano Barolo Pie Franco (from un-grafted vines), about $165, is too absurdly brilliant of a wine to try to describe for you. A truly complete wine of incredible clarity, this left me speechless. And I also loved Cappellano's Barolo Chinato, about $100. The Cappellano family apparently was one of the first to produce this drink, a maceration of wine, quinine bark, and spices. There were five Chinatos poured, including a Roagna Barolo Chinato,and the Cappellano version was playing a whole different game. Floral and spicy, completely harmonious, and with a lingering sweet spicy quinine essence, this is an utterly delicious drink.

Tales from the Dressner Portfolio Tasting

2009-11-01T15:00:00.002-05:00

It was more like a festival - think Cannes, Burning Man, or Fashion Week, perhaps the G8 Summit. People came from all over the world to participate. Deals were struck, friends and enemies gained, and the powerful giant that is Louis/Dressner Selections showed the world that there is no such thing as a recession when it comes to the world of fine wine. At least two heads of state showed up - President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada enjoyed light conversation while tasting through the Clos Roche Blanche wines. P-Diddy made an appearance, as did Martha Stewart. Wine bloggers, writers, and wine bulletin-board junkies from as far away as San Francisco, North Carolina, and Wall Street made the pilgrimage to this, the Mecca of industry tastings.

Dressner did cut a few corners this year, for example by refusing to hire staff for the tables and thereby forcing wine makers from small villages scattered throughout the Loire Valley to travel all the way to NYC to pour the wines themselves. Speaking of the insatiable drive to maximize profits, I heard all sorts of juicy rumors, including this blockbuster, which I have not yet confirmed but is good enough to share anyway: Louis/Dressner, in what can only be described as a corporate attack, is attempting to buy controlling shares in Savio Soares Selections and Jenny & François Selections, thereby consolidating his control over the natural wine selecting industry. As a consumer, I hope this rumor proves false, as although I admire and respect Joe Dressner, even he cannot be trusted to wield such power generously.

I had a great time seeing everyone and being part of the spectacle. I tasted a load of wine, including new vintages from familiar producers and a few things that were brand new to me. I won't bore you with notes on everything I tasted, but here are some of the things that stood out for me:

I love the Saumur-Champignys from Domaine Filliatreau. The entry-level cuvée (I've seen it called Saumur-Champigny Cuvée Printemps, Chateau Fouquet, and simply, Fouquet) is an excellent wine that delivers the same quality as Bernard Baudry's entry level wine Les Granges, but in a different style. Filliatreau's is a lighter wine that emphasizes juicy freshness and fruit. The nose on the 2007 Fouquet, about $17, is very floral and the palate has an appetizing meatiness - it is delicious wine. If forced to choose, I would buy the 2008 Chateau Fouquet, with its bright nose of red fruit and a clean, energetic, and ripe palate. This is not complicated wine, nor does it seem to be a good candidate for the cellar, but it is perfect in its simplicity. And at about $17, it's money well spent. A few bucks more buys the 2008 La Grande Vignolle, price unknown but probably about $20, a wine made from old vines in the huge Grande Vignolle vineyard. This wine drinks well young but also does well with some bottle age. I loved the 2005, not as much the 2006, never saw the 2007, and now we have the 2008. I thought it was great, with a mineral imbued darkly fruited nose, very clean, and a deeply fruited palate with grainy texture and firm tannins that will support more than a few years in the cellar.

In other Saumur-Champigny news, the 2005 Clos Rougeard wines were very impressive. I was worried that they would be inky black and impenetrable, but they weren't. The 2005 Le Clos was wide open and ready to go, crystal clear and with beautiful fruit. I loved the dried roses I was getting on the back of the nose, and the wine had such good depth and length. I would have a hard time keeping my hands off of this, if I owned any. But that's the problem - these wines get tougher and tougher to own every year. This wine is now about $65 here on the east coast. I'm not saying that it isn't worth the money, but it has definitely crossed into a different zone, price-wise. The 2005 Les Poyeux was more dense, darker, very rich, much earthier, and clearly needs lots of time. But it was also very beautiful, and at about $85, is probably worth the extra $20 if you are forced to pick one. Le Bourg was not shown. How I wish I was buying these wines 8 years ago when they cost something like $30 a piece!

I've had the 2007's from Bernard Baudry before, and I still think they're fantastic. The 2007 Cuvée Domaine is maybe the finest red wine that I know of at $18. 2007 Clos Guillot at about $30 is so graceful and elegant, but with such deep fruit. The vines are young but the wine feels wise and centered, and it has the tannins and intensity to age well. This was my first time tasting the 2007 Croix Boissée, about $35, and I liked it very much. It is deeply perfumed, and the palate is rich and complex. It confused me, though, how much I noticed the oxidative style of the wine - it hasn't been so clear to me in the past. Perhaps the 2007 shows it more pronouncedly, or perhaps I am getting better at noticing it. But the wood influence shows itself here, not in an oaky aroma or flavor, but in the way the oxidization that happens in barrels makes the wine stands apart from the others in the lineup. It is excellent wine, but I think I need to open a bottle at home and see what's what. I might be some one who now prefers Les Grézeaux, we'll have to see.

Okay, this post is too long already, so more Tales from the Dressner Portfolio Tasting will come soon.

An Apology, and a Few Other Things Too

2009-10-29T11:00:00.001-04:00

I'm Sorry:

I did a careless and irresponsible thing, and I want to say that I'm sorry. The Yankees were dominated in the first game of the world series last night. The other team's pitcher was brilliant, the Yanks' bullpen has become a liability, and they were simply outclassed. But none of this would have happened had I made a better beverage choice. I went to the same friend's house where I watched game 1 of the division series versus the Angels, when I brought beer. I had no beer to bring, so I brought wine. I figured that Bordeaux and California wines seemed to give the Yanks the lift they needed in the division series, so I brought the only such bottle I had in the house, a California Cabernet that I received as a sample called Josh. That's right, the wine was called Josh. It would have been more at home if it were spread on a piece of whole wheat toast. And this is exactly what did the Yanks in. Tonight I will drink what's good and right, and I hope that the Yanks and you will accept my apology. Will not happen again.

A Few Other Things Too:

The DBGB wine list is very good, no matter what the Times said.

Two weeks ago Sam Sifton, the new NY Times restaurant critic reviewed the new addition to the Daniel Bouloud empire, DBGB. Very positive in general, Sifton said this about the wine list: "Totally acceptable selection, but much better to experiment among the 23 beers on tap and large selection of bottled beers that have traveled here from Britain, from Brooklyn, from Germany, from France." I must emphatically disagree. The beer selection would please any beer lover, that's true. But to denigrate this wine list as merely "totally acceptable" is simply off base. There are plenty of inspired and interesting choices, many of them at very reasonable prices, and the wines were clearly selected to compliment the refined-rustic dishes of head cheese terrine, ham hock rillette, and sausages of all sorts. We had a 2006 Bornard Poulsard La Chamade for $54, Savio Soares Selections, and that's better than totally acceptable. Not that Daniel Bouloud needs my help in defense of his wine list, but this just makes me miss Frank Bruni, I guess.

Alternative Closures - the Bottle Cap?

I drank a bottle of 2006 Pierre Frick Gewurztraminer Rot Murlé, $22, Imported by Fruit of the Vines, the other night with a stew of French green lentils, carrots, and sausages. The wine was perhaps the driest Gewurz I've ever had, and it was delicious. But we were tired that night and made it through only half the bottle. Which is when I resented the bottle cap closure. I wanted to enjoy this wine the next day, so I dug up a Vino-Lok I saved and used that. The wine was even better the next day, what an amazing nose! But the bottle cap closure thing, I'm not sold on this. What do you think about this?

Been Doing Some Good Cooking Lately

Fall is here and my fishmonger has blackfish heads and racks for stock. I made my first fish soup of the season. I've been working on this dish for years, and I like to change it each time, trying out different flavor combinations. This time I went with less heat from dried chilis, less tomato, and more anise. I added fennel to the shallots for the aromatic base of the soup, and also a good glug of Pastis to help scrape the pot before the broth went in. Must say, pretty darn good. And the 2008 Domaine de la Pépière Clos des Briords, $16, Louis/Dressner Selections, was a great pairing.

I made a Biryani-style dish of rice baked with beef shank, loads of spinach and parsley, and spiced with dried chilis, ginger, and cardamom. So satisfying, and delicious with the 2007 Domaine des Huards Cour-Cheverny, $17, JD Headrick Imports. The oxidative style (my friend said there was an under-the-veil sense to the wine) and the herbal character, the richness of the fruit worked perfectly with this dish - a harmonious pairing. This is part of an ongoing effort to make interesting and delicious dishes involving copious amounts of spinach - I want my kids to want to eat spinach, and not through trickery, but because it tastes good. I want them to drink Cour-Cheverny too, when they're a little bit older.

What I Drink Makes the Yankees Win

2009-10-25T18:30:00.002-04:00

They say that one of the first signs of insanity is the belief that one can somehow influence completely random events. I will stand in exactly this spot with my feet angled at 45 degrees, and when the subway stops the doors will line up with my feet and I will get on first, and perhaps get a seat - that kind of thing.

Maybe I am going insane, but I like to think of it as healthy superstition. It's October, the time of baseball playoffs, and the Yankees are back in it. It is clear to me that my own beverage consumption while watching the games is impacting the results. If you can decipher the pattern, please feel free to indicate as much in the comments. I think I've got it figured out, but I will test my theory tonight during game 6. Here's what's happened so far:

Game 1 (Yankee Stadium) - I brought a 6-pack of Weihenstephan weiss bier, or wheat beer, to a friend's house. The beer is excellent - fruity, clean, thirst quenching, bitter and sweet at the same time. The Yanks play well, the Angels play poorly and make key errors, Yanks win.

Game 2 (Yankee Stadium) - I bring a bottle of Claux Delorme to another friend's house. We decant it, it's delicious. When it's gone we enjoy the previous night's leftovers - 2002 Stony Hill Chardonnay. The game goes into extra innings, and we drink a 375 ml of 2003 Suduiraut Sauternes. The Yanks dramatically tie the score in late innings during the Stony Hill, and win a thriller in the 13th inning.

Game 3 - (Anaheim) - I have the remnants of a cold, I stay home and listen to the game on the radio (we are prehistoric and do not have a television), I drink nothing. The Yanks waste a great pitching performance by Andy Pettitte and lose a game they could have won - key mistakes killed them.

Game 4 - (Anaheim) - I again bring a bottle of Claux Delorme, this time to a third friend's house. We begin by drinking his 2007 Pinon Vouvray Silex Noir leftovers, and then drink the Delorme, again, just delicious. The Yanks dominate the Angels, winning 10-1.

Game 5 - (Anaheim) - I go back to game 2 friend's house. Deetrane comes over too. I bring Delamotte Brut Rosé Champagne and we drink it as the Yanks quickly fall behind by 4 runs. My friend opens a 1995 Château Lafon-Rochet, from St. Estèphe. I'm skeptical of all things Bordeaux, but the nose is really lovely - very pure, which is not what I've come to expect. Bright red fruit on a cedar plank, vibrantly perfumed, really enticing. The palate is not as strong, a bit dilute in the middle and just not all that complicated, but at least it's not some spoofed up fruit bomb. Very drinkable and pleasing indeed. The Yanks stage a dramatic rally and take the lead in the 7th inning. The pennant is immanent. We finish the Lafon Rochet and Deetrane opens up a 2002 Panther Creek Pinot Noir Bednarik Vineyard. It's fine, but too much on the cherry cough syrup tip. The Yanks lose the lead, and then the game.

So what, I ask you, should I bring to my Bordeaux-loving friend's house tonight for the terribly important game 6? Suggestions welcome, although they will be Monday-morning -quarterback suggestions, as you'll probably read this Monday morning. Suggestions welcome anyway, and I'll let you know what we did tomorrow in the comments.

Friday Night Bubbles

2009-10-23T10:30:00.001-04:00

It's natural to overlook Champagne Delamotte, as its superstar sister Salon gets most of the attention. And like many whose siblings have attention-grabbing personalities, Delamotte wines are of the quiet type. They don't show particularly well at big tastings, at least in my experience, where the loudest wines draw the crowds. But as an apértif with friends or at the table, these wines are surprisingly lovely.

This post is in part a tribute to Peter Liem and his recently deceased blog Besotted Ramblings and Other Drivel. I don't know this for sure because we've never discussed it, but I imagine that Peter would like these wines, particularly the one I drank the other night, a gift from my friend Tista (who I met through Peter), the NV Delamotte Brut Rosé, about $55, Wilson Daniels Imports.

Peter would like this wine because it smells and tastes great. Period. It is not a super-cool skateboarding and mussy-haired hipster Champagne, it doesn't appear on the list at any of the hottest Paris bars, or at Terroir or Ten Bells. The wine maker did not grow the grapes or spray them with biodynamic treatments, and there are no former-bankers turned hippie horse farmers involved in any way with the production, importing, or distribution of this wine. Many of the wine cool-cats would say, then, that Delamotte Rosé isn't worth drinking, or at best would simply ignore it. And this is one of my favorite things about Peter Liem as a wine writer - he thinks about and writes about wine based on merits, not based on hipster caché. Some of the wines he loves are cool-cat wines, like Overnoy/Houillon, La Bota Sherries, and Vouette et Sorbée, but he also likes decidedly un-hip big house wines, négoce wines, and anything else that speaks to him. And if you don't think that's cool, that's your problem. I'll miss his blog very much, but there are other ways to follow Peter's wine writing, praise be.

The NV Delamotte Brut Rosé is a saignée wine. That's cool, isn't it? So is Vouette et Sorbée, so they have that in common. It is 80% Pinot Noir, the rest Chardonnay. It needs a half hour or so to open up, and then the fresh red berry aromas become quite vivid, the nose airy and fresh. It is elegant and balanced on the palate, without sacrificing the energetic exuberance of a good saignée. The fruit is ripe and there is a tender chalky and floral fragrance on the finish. We loved it, and I look forward to serving it blind the next time I am hosting a Champagne-loving uber-hipster.

First Braise

2009-10-20T19:00:00.001-04:00

Last week we had nasty, windy, rainy, bitingly cold weather in NYC. It inspired me to do some winter cooking, a delicious and very satisfying beef braise. For the very first braise of the season I like to keep things extremely simple. High quality beef and vegetables, wine and stock for the liquid, a low temperature oven for many hours, and that's it.

So I started with my favorite grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic free beef from Slope Farms, in this case, a couple of pounds of chuck roast.Trimmed, salted 24 hours in advance, brought to room temperature, and then browned. Then a lot of finely chopped onion, and a glug of white wine to loosen the browned bits on the bottom of the pot. The browned beef comes back, along with thick carrot rounds and an entire halved garlic clove, both from Maxwell's Farm in New Jersey. In goes a mixture of more white wine and stock, enough to come about three-quarters of the way up the sides of the beef. Once the liquid comes to a boil, I lowered the heat and added three whole cloves and about 6 black pepper corns, top the pot with moistened parchment paper and a tight-fitting cover. One whole Serrano pepper pricked a bit with a fork is wonderful too, but makes it too hard for my little daughters. Two hours at 275 degrees, remover the cover and the parchment paper and let it go another two hours. Add salt to taste, and that's it.

Many meals are possible here. I shread the cooked meat and use it in sauce for pasta (think Orchiette with brown butter, turnip greens, shredded braised beef and lemon zest). Flour tortillas, green chili sauce, avocado, limes, and shreds of this braised beef make a pretty good meal too.
On the night after the night of this first braise (the flavors improve in the fridge overnight), we enjoyed it in its most basic form - a hunk of braised beef, a few carrots, the strained braising liquid, a crusty baguette, and a green salad with a bright vinegary dressing. A beautiful bottle of Gonon Syrah from the hills outside of St Joseph, and I no longer fear winter.

Blind Tasting and Scoring 2004 White Burgundy

2009-10-17T20:00:00.000-04:00

A friend recently hosted his tasting group and invited me as a stand-in. They were blind tasting 2004 white Burgundies, a great theme in and of itself. A difficult year in most of Burgundy, particularly for red wines. How would the whites show five years on? But the group added a fascinating wrinkle to this tasting. In addition to writing notes about each wine, we would also assign each wine a point score using a version of the 100 point scale. The idea was to test the notion that wine can be numerically rated in a reliable and sensible manner when tasting many of them somewhat quickly. There were 7 of us participating, we each brought one wine, all of the wines were served blind. Would the "best" wines get the best scores? Or would our diverse palates and preferences lead to unpredictable or inconclusive results?

We first spent some time discussing how to rank the wines. We agreed on the following method: 96-100 is a wine that is the very best of its class, and therefore quite rare. 90-95 is a wine that is exceptional, worth seeking out and buying. 85-89 is a very good wine, 80-84 is a good wine, and 79 or below is not good. We agreed not to discuss during the tasting, and we got to work. I tasted in reverse order, and I'll share my notes before revealing the wines.

Wine 7) Creamy leesy lemon cake icing, smoky. This is super extracted and huge, not a style that I care for. But it's not bad wine, there is a mineral character, and it is actually somewhat balanced considering that it seems to be going mostly for power and muscle. Showy, not elegant, but well made, and within that style it is very good wine. I scored it an 88.

Wine 6) Mushroomy earth, smoky, very mineral, delicate citrus on the nose - a gorgeously expressive nose, airy and elegant. Great texture - ample and tactile, graceful. Purity, ripe fruit, great length, piercing flavors and acidity with a perfumed finish of herbs and flowers. This wine has great core intensity without being overly extracted or ripe. I thought it was beautiful and exceptional wine, something I wanted to seek out and buy. Not at the top of that category, but not at the bottom either, so I scored it a 92.

Wine 5) Nose is mute, perhaps some minerals are hiding somewhere in there. Kind of flat on the palate too. Certainly correct wine, some citrus, some minerals, austere, good balance. But unexciting. I got involved in conversation and sat there swirling this wine for a few minutes, and this is why this whole point thing is precarious, at best. What if the critic stops here and doesn't re-visit the wine, moving instead through the remaining 35 glasses that require tasting? Five minutes later this wine was beautiful and very expressive, with deliciously clean and pure notes of citrus, stones, and flowers. Great understated acidity, great balance, and a lovely lingering perfume, this is great wine, absolutely delicious, and with an elegant and understated character. I preferred Wine 6, but if money were not a factor I would eagerly buy this wine also. I scored it a 91.

Wine 4) Reductive nose that required serious aeration, and then there is a whole lot of oak. This is not an appealing nose to me. The palate is better, with some citrus and mineral flavors, but there is nothing complex about this wine and it is kind of thin in the mid-palate. It is perfectly good wine, but I found it hard to get by the nose. I scored it an 84.

Wine 3) Reduction on the nose, again lots of aeration needed, but then reveals a lovely and focused nose of minerals, very clean and pure, with ripe but delicate citrus fruit. Good balance, a soft and almost plush texture that is lifted by good acidity, lovely herbal notes on the finish. Excellent wine, worth seeking out and buying. Without the same intensity of Wines 6 and 5, and with a bit more fat, but excellent nonetheless. I scored it a 90.

Wine 2) I thought this was flawed. Not corked, but completely wrong. Heat damaged maybe? I got nothing but resin and rubber tires on the nose, some rotting leaves. And it tasted awful too. I wasn't sure how to score flawed wine, so I gave it a 79.

Wine 1) Reductive nose, took longer than seemed reasonable to blow off - I had almost given up. But it did blow off, and revealed elegant airy mineral and herbal aromas. An intense core of lemon on the palate, good length. This is very good wine, but it is not entirely harmonious, it seems kind of herky-jerky to me. I scored it an 88.

As we discussed the wines we realized pretty quickly that everyone has their own understanding of "exceptional" and "very good," and that some tasters are extreme in their scoring, others more even-handed. We decided to drop the highest and lowest scores when calculating the average, in order to do away with some of the random noise generated by very high or very low scores. Okay, now to reveal the wines and calculate the average scores:

Wine 7) - Hubert Lignier Fixin - 86.2 avg., 88 my score.
Wine 6) - Louis Carillon Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Champ-Canet - 92 avg., 92 my score
Wine 5) - Paul Pernot Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru Les Folatières - 87.8 avg., 91 my score
Wine 4) - Patrick Javillier Bourgogne Blanc Cuvée des Forgets - 88.4 avg., 84 my score
Wine 3) - Henri Prudhon Saint-Aubin 1er Cru le Sentier de Clou - 91.4 avg., 90 my score
Wine 2) - Génot-Boulanger Savigny-lès-Beaune - 82.2 avg., 79 my score
Wine 1) - Hubert Lignier St. Romain Sous le Château - 88.6 avg., 88 my score

Interesting results, I think. The wines showed very well overall, I would say. I was secretly gratified that my scores were in line with the relative nobility of the various terroir - I scored the Pulignys the highest, then the 1er Cru from Saint-Aubin, and so on, the Bourgogne lowest. Not that this should always be the case, but it felt right to me looking over the wines. It is also clear that subtle wines can be underrated in tastings like this - the Pernot wine is a good example. Also, to my astonishment, some people liked Wine 2! Half of us thought it was flawed, and some liked it, and that shows how fallible point scoring can be. If one critic is responsible for assigning a score, that person might like wines that I don't, or vice-versa.

I don't think our experiment broke any new ground, but it reminded me that the only way I find point scores useful is when I know and trust the scorer, and when I know the details about where our palates intersect and where they do not.

Tasting the Wines of Jaques Lassaigne

2009-10-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

The other day I was fortunate enough to meet Emmanuel Lassaigne, son of Jacques, and now the wine maker at Champagne Jacques Lassaigne. Jenny & François import these wines for the east coast, and they organized a tasting in a small and very comfortable setting that actually encouraged conversation, instead of merely offering a glass and a spit bucket. And converse we did - I spoke with Emmanuel for about an hour while tasting, and I learned a great deal about his wines.

The Lassaigne estate is located in Montgueux, a large chalky hill whose vineyards produce what many consider to be the finest Chardonnay grapes in the Aube. This place, known as the Montrachet of Champagne, is an island of Chardonnay in a sea of Pinot Noir. Lassaigne has parcels in several vineyards here, and also purchases grapes from vineyards farmed by growers whose work he admires and has some influence over - Lassaigne's farming is done completely naturally. Montgueux Chardonnay can be more fruit forward and bold than that of the Côte des Blancs, its southern exposure allows for this. Lassaigne's wines show this ripeness, this forward fruit, but they do so with class and restraint, and the wines are beautifully pure.

Lassaigne is not what I would call cult Champagne, like Selosse, but this is definitely Champagne for the Champagne lover. And not because the wines aren't accessible - they are highly drinkable and easy to love. But there just isn't a lot of wine made, and even the basic NV wine is not easy to find. People buy these wines because they are searching for them, they are "destination" wines. Some would call them "hipster" wines, and perhaps they're right. But they are utterly delicious, and so I don't care if hipsters or nerds drink them - I want to drink them too.

It was a great experience to taste these wines with Emmanuel the other day. Here are a few notes and comments, prices are (wide) estimates:

NV Les Vignes de Montgueux Brut Blanc de Blancs, $45. A blend of grapes from 8 parcels, this version is 72% 2006, the rest 2005. Lovely perfume, very chalky, graceful and long. Excellent wine. This wine sometimes shows vegetal aromas that I've heard described as white asparagus. There was none of that in this bottle. It felt ripe and rich at only 3 grams of dosage.

NV Cuvée Le Cotet Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs, $70. Le Cotet is a vineyard planted by Jacques Lassaigne between 1964 and 1967. There are only about 10 centimeters of topsoil over the chalk, and it is east-facing, and therefore the fruit is perhaps not as prominent a feature of this wine. Le Cotet is a curious wine in its final composition. It is a single vineyard wine, but it contains wines from several vintages, wines that are vinified differently. This bottle is about 90% from 2006, with 80% of that vinified in tank and 20% vinified in used Burgundy barrels. About 10% of the final blend is 2004 and 2002, but from bottles that are disgorged for this blend. An interesting mix, to say the least. I loved all of the wines on this day, but this was the one I wanted to bring home with me. The nose is delicate and focused, pure rocky citrus fruit, lean and elegant. The palate has a great core of energetic salty velvety ripe fruit, and feels perfectly balanced. I didn't read the label and assumed that this wine was dosed relatively highly - I guessed 8 grams. In fact there are only 2 grams per liter, not that 2 is better or worse than 8 obviously, but it shows how great the vineyard work is here, how perfectly ripe the fruit is. By the way, Lassaigne uses a code that is etched on the side of the bottle to indicate the year that his wines are bottled and disgorged. So 070409 means bottled in 2007 (hence the 2006 base year) and disgorged in April of 2009. It's worth examining the code when buying, because these are wines that change from year to year, unlike a lot of Champagne.

2002 Brut Nature Blanc de Blancs, $90. Emmanuel makes a vintage wine every year, "even if only a few bottles for my education," he says. He made a 2003, for example and he says that he got rid of it too soon, thinking it would fall off quickly. He learned that the minerality and the terroir is coming back, something that he says "happens when producers work the soil carefully instead of using traditional methods. The difference between good producers and others is very big in a year like 2003, less so in a year like 2004," he went on to say. The 2002 was completely different from the other wines, another style entirely. Although I like that think that I am improving as a taster, there is no way if tasting blind that I would have said this is made by the same producer who made the other wines. 25% of this wine comes from Le Cotet vineyard, the rest is from purchased grapes from 55 year old vines, and all of the wine is vinified in tank. But this is a big, rich, incredibly vinous nose, a bit backward now. Smooth as silk on the palate, very full and fleshy, but seems a bit unstructured to me, the acidity a bit muted. Perhaps these things are buried under the youthful fruit right now, and will emerge with time. The finish is long with lots of chalk and lemon zest. The nose becomes more articulate with air, although the palate remains a puzzle to me. Emmanuel says to hold this for another few years, that makes perfect sense to me - five at a minimum, I'd say.

NV La Colline Inspirée Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs, only in magnum, $150. This wine is vinified entirely in barrel. This version is based almost entirely on 2005, and comes from old vines from three different vineyards. This was an interesting wine - yes there is wood influence, but I found the nose to be more floral than any of the other wines. Emmanuel says that is due to the vintage, the precocious 2005. The palate needs time to harmonize, but shows a lot of promise, and not a lot of wood. The acidity was again a bit muted, but I am inclined to believe that it is simply buried somewhere - this is a very young wine.

These wines are what the Champagne cognoscenti, the hippest, the nerdiest, and everyone in between are drinking in Paris, Japan, and Norway. Aren't we just as discerning here in the USA? I hope you retailers out there will stock these wines so I can buy them and drink them.

Wine and Cheese - Le Welsche and Gewurztraminer

2009-10-12T11:00:00.001-04:00

I'm one of those weirdos who likes Gewurztraminer. It's true, so many of the wines are very bad - sweet and unbalanced, too viscous, devoid of subtlety, crude. But there are good versions out there, and they get lost in the shadow of badness. I understand Gewurztraminer, like Muscat, the way they relate to the other white Alsace grapes. In general, Gewurztraminer and Muscat make aromatic wines, whereas Riesling and Sylvaner are more mineral, and Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc are more about fresh fruit. None of these general descriptors indicates anything specific about sweetness. Alsace producers make dry, off-dry, and sweet wines from all of these grapes, yet the average Gewurztraminer seems to be too sweet.

Aromatic doesn't have to mean sweet, though, and my favorite Gewurztraminer wines are dry, or at least they don't seem sweet because they are balanced by good acidity. Truth be told, I haven't found many that fit this description, but those I've found, I love: Dirler's and Binner's particularly. I haven't tried Boxler's, but I bet it's very good too. The other day I found another one, by a producer I'd never heard of, Helfrich. Full disclosure- this wine, along with several other Helfrich wines, was sent to me as a sample by a firm representing Underdog Wine Merchants in California.

A friend came over the other night and after dinner we served an Alsace cheese called Le Welsche, a washed rind cow's milk cheese in the Munster family. This particular cheese is washed with Marc de Gewurztraminer. I always thought Marc was a kind of Brandy, but it isn't (thank you ChampagneGuide.net blog) Marc, like Grappa, is a distillation made from leftover grape skins, stems, and seeds (called pomace), Gewurztraminer pomace in this case.
We unwrapped the cheese a solid two hours before eating to let it air out and come to room temperature. It is not a runny cheese like Epoisses, but is is soft and easy to spread - we went with thin slices of a seven-grain loaf. Le Welsche is not on the stinkiest end of the washed rind cheese spectrum, but it has a pungency that harmonizes well with its grassy sweet cream.

The pairing was great, and that's probably why it's a classic. The 2005 Helfrich Stenklotz Grand Cru Gewurztraminer, about $23, Imported by Underdog Wine Merchants, is a great wine, and a great value. Steinklotz means "stony block," and Helfrich's plot is calcareous bedrock covered in about 8 inches of loamy topsoil. This mineral character really comes through in the wine. The nose shows pure springwater and rock, and also classic aromas of exotic fruit and spice, but it is an elegant expression, not some sort of opulent explosion. The minerals continue on the palate, which comes across as dry, although there are 21 grams/liter of residual sugar here. That's well into demi-sec territory by Loire Chenin standards, and like the best examples of demi-sec Vouvray, the sweetness here is balanced by superb acidity. This wine is defined by its balance - it feels completely unadorned. It is only 13% alcohol, it is highly aromatic, especially on the finish, but it isn't sweet. It is full in body, but not viscous, it is very pure and almost cutting in its minerality, and the whole package is seamless. I would eagerly buy this wine, and probably lay down a few bottles too, but it is not available right now in NYC. A simple web search reveals that it is available in California, Colorado, and New York state, and it's probably available in other markets too. I still haven't sprung for the good version of wine location software.

Wine of the Week - Jean Foillard Morgon

2009-10-08T18:00:00.000-04:00

If I were putting together a Noah's Ark of wine, Jean Foillard's Morgons would represent the Beaujolais species. There are many lovable Beaujolais wines, but I love these the most. And it's funny, becauseFoillard's wines are not, in my experience, all that lovable upon opening. They can be a little gassy at first, also showing some reductive aromas until the wine meets up with some oxygen. But when aFoillard Morgon opens up, it can be a very beautiful thing. The fruit is joyous and lovely - this is true of most good Beaujolais wines. These are complex and well balanced wines too. But the things that definesFoillard's wines for me is the way they combine such incredible clarity with such rich intensity.

Morgon is considered by many to offer the greatest potential of the 10 Beaujolais Crus. The Côte de Py is the most renown site in Morgon. It is a large hill with soils of schist and granite, an extinct volcano actually, as I learned from Bert's post on Wine Terroirs. Foillard has plots on the Côte de Py, and also in another Morgon vineyard called Corcelette, a plot with sandy soil, as I learned from Peter Liem's post (the comments explain this). I don't know the age of Foillard's vines in Côte de Py, but his vines in Corcelette are about 80 years old. The Côte de Py is pretty easy to find in NYC each year, Corcelette is more difficult. Both wines are delicious young, but they have a reputation for aging particularly well.

A friend came for brunch last weekend and one of the wines we drank was the 2007 Corcelette. And if you have a problem with the fact that we opened several bottles with brunch, I really just don't know what to tell you. We didn't finish what we opened, but when you have the chance to drink wine with a fellow wine lover, why not explore a few bottles together? We both loved the Corcelette, and he wasn't around later that evening when the wine hit a crescendo. It was so good that I felt compelled to open the 2007 Côte de Py later in the week, just to see how it would compare. It was also fantastic, but in a different way. The wines are quite obviously sisters, but they offer a different expression of Morgon Gamay.

The fruit is vibrant in the 2007 Foillard Morgon Corcelette, $29, imported by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant. The acidity is vibrant too, and the wine feels tactile in the mouth - crunchy almost. This is cooling and floral raspberry fruit, smooth and velvety, and there is a gorgeous fragrance on the finish. After several hours open, this wine was remarkable in its old vines intensity - the nose just builds and builds and builds, and the pure fragrance of slightly herbal ripe fruit fills every crevice in the mouth after swallowing. Such a beautiful wine! I'd rather spend my money on this than Bourgogne rouge.

The 2007 Foillard Morgon Côte de Py, also $29, wears its structure more overtly, its deep cherry fruit corralled by iron and rock. The fruit is spicier and more mineral infused than the Corcelette, meatier. The texture here is also velvety smooth, but even after a few hours the structure is still as prominent as is the fruit. This wine is more steak and potatoes, and the Corcelette is more warm raspberry pie. I suspect that the Côte de Py, although delicious now, will be more harmonious in a few years.

Fruits of the Tasting Season

2009-10-06T19:10:00.001-04:00

Fall is tasting season in New York. This year it has been a bit more subdued than usual, perhaps because no one has any money. But still, there have been plenty of trade tastings to attend. I went to almost none of them. Some, like Jenny & François, I wanted to attend but missed because of work conflicts. Some I skipped because I went in years past, and couldn't muster up the gumption to fight the crowds for a loud and jostly ounce, even if it is Dujac Morey St Denis. But I made a point of going to a couple of tastings that I'd never before attended. This is one of my favorite ways to discover producers and wines - to try something new.

This year, for example, I went to the Willette Wines portfolio tasting. Liz Willette has a small but interesting group of producers, and she works with Becky and Peter Wasserman, so she must be a good person. At this tasting I drank some great wines that were completely new to me, wines that I will happily buy if I see them in stores.

Have you had Godmé Champagne? I had heard of it, but never tasted, and I was very impressed. The Godmé estate is located in Verzenay, the Grand Cru village in the Pinot Noir belt of the Montagne de Reims. Another small but excellent producer is there too - Lallement. Anyway, I liked these wines because they had such clean and pure flavors, and a great elegant intensity.

The NV Godmé Brut Réserve 1er Cru should sell for about $50, and I thought it was excellent. The nose is airy and fresh with lovely floral aromas - my notes say chamomile. Not a profound wine, but very well textured and open, and the finish has orange peel notes that are very pretty. The NV Godmé Brut Tradition Blanc de Noirs should sell for about $55 was a much more serious wine, full of dark furry fruit and black tea, very wound up and tense. I liked it but would need to drink it at home to get a better sense. The NV Godmé Brut Rosé, about $60, is somewhat shy, but that's fine - aerate a bit and it shows a beautiful perfume of peaches and spice, raspberries and chalky soil. It is a serious wine that is also quite joyous.

The other wines that floored me were the Camille Giroud Burgundies. I always thought of Camille Giroud as old-men-in-tweed-blazers Burgundy. But the family sold in 2001 to a group that included a bunch of investment bankers from Goldman Sachs (!). Becky Wasserman is involved as a manager of some sort, and the young buck David Croix is the head wine maker. I must say, the 2006's were delicious. My particular favorites were the two "low level" wines, the 2006 Camille Giroud Bourgogne Rouge, about $26 and the 2006 Camille Giroud Aloxe-Corton 1er Cru Les Guérets, about $37. Of course the Volnay Taillepieds was very good, and so was Pommard Epenots, but those are much more expensive, and they weren't as easy to understand at this tasting.

The Bourgogne Rouge was enticing and delicious, meaty and floral, like a Volnay. And whaddaya know, that's where some of the parcels are. Good balance, absolutely tasty and satisfying, a great Bourgogne. And this is coming from a person who has issues with Bourgogne Rouge. But the gem of the portfolio, QPR-wise anyway, is the Aloxe-Corton. It is a wine that is unmistakably of its place - masculine, the tannins tough, the fruit deep and dark, a brooding earthy pungency already starting to show. But like all good versions of wine from this place, this wine also has a gentle side. It is refined and well balanced, and I found the overall package to be incredibly sophisticated. I would eagerly buy this wine, and I'm sure it would cellar well but I bet I would drink mine rather quickly, fall coming on and all.

Zuzu Ramen - Ramen Comes to Brooklyn

2009-10-04T21:00:00.001-04:00

It took me quite a while to try ZuZu Ramen. And I love ramen, really and truly. There are two things that kept me away all this time. First of all, it's not Japanese. The place is owned by the people who own Sheep Station, an Australian-themed joint a block away. Okay, the head chef is Japanese, but he comes from illustrious French kitchens like Jean Georges. I don't know...I would feel equally strange going to eat sushi at a place owned by an Armenian couple, or to have Doro Wat at an Italian restaurant. It's possible that the food is going to be great, but as long as I'm in NYC, it seems as though there are more more reliable options for authentic food.

The second thing that scared me is the menu. There are four ramen dishes at ZuZu, and two of them are fusion dishes, heavily borrowing from Thai cuisine. That's not a big deal, I guess, as long as there is a traditional ramen dish on the menu, which there is, the "ZuZu Ramen." But what kind of ramen is that, exactly - is this shoyu (soy sauce) ramen or shio (salt) ramen? The menu doesn't say. The whole thing didn't seem kosher to me, so I never went - it's just too easy to hop on the subway and go to any of my favorite Manhattan ramen temples.

BrooklynLady and I finally went to ZuZu Ramen, and I've been back twice since then. But here's the thing - there is literally only one thing on the menu that I will eat there, the house signature "ZuZu Ramen." The curly noodles are perfectly springy, there is deeply flavored broth that I don't think falls neatly into either the shoyu or the shio camp - it may instead be some sort of a paste that is mixed with dashi broth. The toppings are very nice too - lovely bamboo shoots, a single piece of crisp baby bok choy, scallions, a slow-cooked egg that runs happily into the broth, the obligatory sheet of nori (seaweed), and one very long, fatty, and completely satisfying slice of charshu (roast pork). This is a very good bowl of ramen, and the fact that it happens so close to my house is a great thing. There is really only one problem I can think of with this bowl - the price. It costs $14. That's Ippudo pricing, but this is not Ippudo.

The rest of the food is just not so great. The "Tasty Morsels" are not very tasty. Pork buns a la David Chang taste more of smokey char than of sweet-porky-scallion-cucumber harmony, and pork dumplings just aren't porky enough and the wrappers have no flavor and a cardboard-like texture. But these dishes are tame anyway, they're not what gets you in the door. The adventure at ZuZu comes in the form of Green Curry-Miso Ramen and Hot and Sour Ramen with Shrimp. And neither or them work, even when suspending my purist's view of what ramen should be.

We found Green Curry-Miso ramen to be unpalatable, and I love green curry, my favorite of the Thai curries. The broth here is simply overwhelming, though, the noodles and toppings cannot compete with the chili-lemongrass-kafir lime leaf intensity. It's war in a bowl, and it's just no fun. Hot and Sour Ramen is better, the broth more mellow, although it is definitely hot and sour, like Tom Yum soup in a Thai place. The problem here is the toppings - there are lots of small, tasteless, stringy, totally cheap shrimp. Save them, and give me one nice prawn, the way there is one slice of really nice charshu in the ZuZu ramen. There are also some little halved cherry tomatoes and big basil leaves, neither of which elevate the dish.

Sounds like I hate the place, but I don't. I would go there happily, but for ZuZu Ramen only, and as a neighborhood option, not as a first choice for ramen.

Wine of the Week - Claux Delorme Valençay

2009-10-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

Here is a bottle that represents a lot of what I love about wine from the Loire Valley. It is absolutely delicious and easy to drink, although there is some complexity here too, it is robust and flavorful, but it compliments instead of overwhelms your dinner, and it has a definite sense of place, or terroir. And it is inexpensive, too - under $20.

I'm not saying things are perfect in the Loire Valley when it comes to wine, far from it. For example. this wine used to be called Clos Delorme (as you'll see on the label in the photo), but importer JD Headrick said "the name recently changed from Clos Delorme to Claux Delorme because the French wine mafia determined that they didn't own a "real" clos and made them change the name." They clearly have their bureaucratic issues, too.

Claux Delorme proprietors Albane and Bertrand Michin run an eestate called La Tour Saint Martin in Menetou-Salon, a neighbor of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. They bought a small amount of hillside land in Valençay, an obscure AOC to all but the most ardent of Loire Valley wine geeks, and they grow a variety of grapes that all go into one red wine. As in Cheverny, red wines from Valençay contain several grapes, typically some blend of Gamay, Pinot Noir, Malbec, Cabernet Franc.

Each time I drink this wine, the thing that impresses me most is the skill in blending. The 2006 vintage is 40% Gamay, 30% Malbec, 20% Cabernet Franc, and 10% Pinot Noir. It is seamless wine - nothing sticks out, but the influence of each grape is clear. Importer JD Headrick said, "I take great pleasure in trying to identify the component parts. On a good day I can find it….the dark density that the Côt brings….the spiciness of the Pinot…the juicy "drink me" quality of the Gamay….and the earthy structure that the Cabernet Franc brings to the table."

2006 Albane & Bertrand Minchin Le Clos Delorme Valençay, $18, JD Headrick Selections. Dark purple to the core - looks like it's going to be one of those overly extracted, too intense wines, but it's nowhere close. A nose full of musky, meaty, dark black fruit, with a rich loamy soil character. Very energetic on the nose, and with some exposure to air there is a lovely core of fragrant violets. Completely smooth on the palate, finely grained tannins, fantastic acidity, very meaty and ample in the mouth, and perfectly balanced - the alcohol is a mere 12.5%. Again, with some air, the finish is quite long and takes on a nice smokey character.

I would love to drink this with duck breast and confit, with any kind of pâte or charcuterie, alongside pasta with Brussels sprouts and bacon, or with a juicy hamburger. It would be pretty hard to go wrong pairing this wine - it might even do well with the famous goat cheese of Valençay (Valençay is the only place in France to have AOC status for both wine and cheese). The wine is great on its own, too. If I owned a restaurant or wine bar this would be on the list so fast, it would make your head spin.

By the Glass - Oregon Pinot Edtion

2009-09-30T11:15:00.003-04:00

I bought a lot of Oregon Pinot when I rediscovered wine about 6 years ago. My red wine palate has changed since then, moved away from overt fruit and concentration and towards transparency and intensity. I still love Pinot, but moreso the wines of Burgundy, Cheverny in the Loire Valley, or the Jura.

Are there Oregon Pinots that I enjoy today? Yes, but the key for me is to drink them without comparing them to Burgundy, to accept them as fruit-driven wines and to enjoy them as such. Am I going to buy these wines today? No, but that's because my tastes have changed, not because they are bad wines. Within a new-world framework, I think Oregon is making some excellent wines.

BrooklynLady and I hosted our wine group this month and we used this occasion to drink a load of Oregon Pinot. I also drank a few Oregon Pinots with my old pal Deetrane this month, and so all of the sudden I have a decent sample of Oregon wine notes to share with you. Here is what I found, in the approximate order of my preference:

2002 Panther Creek Pinot Noir White Rose Vineyard, $35. Courtesy of Deetrane, my favorite of the bunch, and by a wide margin. White Rose is high up in the hills and is cool at night, so the grapes should theoretically have good acidity. I've had wines from White Rose before and they've been overly extracted, but not this one. This wine was dried rose petal red, translucent to the core, with lovely ripe red fruit and floral aromas. Well balanced and with an intense core of red fruit, this was delicious wine.

2004 Brick House Pinot Noir Cuvée du Tonnelier, $45. Started off strangely - salty umami notes, something like balsa wood, kind of medicinal, perhaps not entirely clean. But I came back to it two hours later and it was much better, with bright red fruit, good acidity, length, and intensity. Clearly this wine needs time in the bottle, as it wasn't pretty at first. Made with organic grapes, for you hippies out there.

2004 Belle Pente Pinot Noir Murto Vineyard, $35. If I had to pick one Oregon Pinot to buy every year, it would be this one. The vines are old, the vineyard is farmed cleanly (organic and using some biodynamic principals, I believe), and the wine maker seems to be going for balance and elegance, over extraction. And at $35, I don't feel like I'm getting ripped off. This was not the best bottle I've had of this wine, but it was quite good, with floral and citrus infused red fruit aromas, and a light and graceful texture.

2002 St. Innocent Pinot Noir Seven Springs Vineyard, $35. I'm not sure where this wine is in its evolution, but it probably will be better in a few years than it was on this evening. The nose is about dark fruit and it isn't revealing all that much, even after a few hours open. The fruit feels mature on the palate, stewed cherries, the tannins have begun to melt into the wine. Pleasant wine, but int he end, not all that interesting.

2005 Adelsheim Pinot Noir Ribbon Springs Vineyard, $44. BrooklynLady and I visited Adelsheim back in the winter of '05, when the grapes for this wine were just a twinkle in the vine's eyes. We have a soft spot for Adelsheim, but as the years go by I find myself less interested in the wines. They are well made, but they are so much about fruit, kind of one-note-wonders. This wine did have lovely ripe red fruit, very clean, and there was a nice herbal note. But that's really all I can say. About a quarter of the bottle was left out overnight, uncorked, and when I tasted it the next afternoon there was more focus and intensity, but still not a lot of complexity. Very good wine, but not the style of Pinot that I'm interested in these days.

2005 Adelsheim Pinot Noir Elizabeth's Reserve, $44. This is a blend of grapes from Adelsheim's various vineyards, and it has Oregon's prettiest wine label, I think. This wine has great fruit, others in the group liked it very much in that way, but the oak is very prominent too. There just isn't a lot else going on, so it's hard to get excited.

2005 St Innocent Pinot Noir Justice Vineyard, $35. I liked this better a few years ago when it was first released. Now it's a bit muddy, with coffee and other wood elements obscuring the fruit. I drank this with Deetrane alongside another St Innocent 2005, and it is amazing how the two wines from two different vineyards showed almost exacltly the same. We fooled around, tasting each other blind on the wines, and I could identify Justice based on its slightly lighter texture, but the aromas and flavors of both wines were pretty much dominated by wood.

2005 St Innocent Pinot Noir Shea Vineyard, $39. This raw material in this wine doesn't seem to be able to absorb the wood treatment. Although I liked the 04, Shea just isn't my favorite St Innocent wine. If I drink St Innocent now, I prefer Anden or Seven Springs, both of which are no longer made.

2005 Thomas Pinot Noir, $45. This is a cultish producer who makes tiny amounts of wine, that's basically impossible to find outside of the Wilamette Valley in Oregon. We loved the 2002 and I brought a few of these home with me from Portland a year ago. I will tell you now that everyone on CellarTracker loves this wine, and that John Thomas has a great reputation as a wine maker, so take the following with a grain of salt. This wine was just no good. The alcohol on the nose was overwhelming, the fruit was candied, and the wine was utterly simple. Even those in the group whose palates are far more forgiving than my own regarding new world wines, even they didn't enjoy this wine.

A New Kind of Wine Marketing

2009-09-27T21:20:00.002-04:00

JD Headrick has done an interesting thing to help us get to know the people who make the wines he imports, and the places they come from. He created a channel on YouTube and uploaded home made videos. We can watch as he interviews wine makers, wanders through their vines and cellars, eats with them, listens to their stories.

Never more than a few minutes long, these videos are really a lot of fun. One learns, of course, about his wine makers and their wines, but also about the Loire Valley and wine making in general. Perhaps my favorite thing about watching, though, is the little glimpses they offer of this section of French life.

My favorites so far include:

Eating Oysters with Thierry Michon - this guy LOVES shellfish.
Lunch at Domaine du Viking - think of this as an X-rated movie starring fabulous cuts of pork and beef.
La Noblaie - a Walk Through the Vines - see Veraison in action.
1947 St Nicholas de Bourgueil Blanc with Frederic Mabileau - he opens a wine his grandfather made over 50 years ago.
There are Rocks in my Muscadet - check out the vines growing on a massive wall of granite.

Take a peek and see what you think. Sure beats reading a shelf-talker.

Wine of the Week - 2008 Clos des Briords

2009-09-24T11:40:00.000-04:00

I heard a story that I liked recently about Frédéric Mugnier, who makes some of the finest red wine in the world: he was asked what he drinks when he drinks white wine. Without hesitation he said "Muscadet." It tickles me that this guy whose wines sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle, drinks $15 Muscadet.

There are many people who say that Muscadet is the world's finest value in white wine. I am definitely one of those people. And Marc Ollivier at Domaine de la Pépière makes what I think is the finest value within Muscadet, his Clos des Briords. The vines in Briords are over 70 years old and the soil is particularly good - the resulting wine has everything you would expect in top quality Muscadet, but is richer and more powerful. Typically the wine takes a year or so to reveal itself, and is renown for its longevity. People drink these wines at 30 years old, something I have never done, but I hear they are fantastic. More information about Marc Ollivier and the Clos des Briords is available on the Dressner Selections site.

2008 Domaine de la Pépière Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie Clos des Briords, $16, Louis/Dressner Selections. It can be hard to tell what's going on with young Clos des Briords. The acidity can be searing, the fruit and the rocky mineral all tangled up, the aromas and flavors rather fierce. I remember loving the 2005 almost immediately upon release because it was so open and expressive. Perhaps the ripeness of a vintage like that one allows for more pleasure in young Briords. I thought the 2007 was delicious at first too but it was also very angular and sharp, needing time in the cellar find its inner harmony.

I'm pretty sure that 2008 was a difficult vintage in Muscadet and yields were way down. Perhaps that's why the 2008 even now shows such beautiful concentration, such great depth. The 2008 is absurdly delicious right now, tightly wound, but with gorgeous citrus and black licorice aromas, creamy and smokey undertones, and loads of rocky mineral character. It is fresh and pure on the palate with soaring acids and the echo of seashells on the finish. This is a wine that seems to be stripped of everything unecessary, only the essential parts are here, and it is beautiful. My favorite Briords since 2004, although they certainly are all very good. We drank this without the standard seafood accompaniments - just quaffed it as an aperitif, and it was great. Later on in the evening I took a bite of pizza and found that I had essentially no enamel left on my teeth, but it was worth it. Although this is entirely drinkable now, especially if opened a couple hours in advance, it seems clear that this is a wine that will improve with cellar time, an I will test this theory out myself, I assure you.

Convoluted Thoughts on Cellaring Wine

2009-09-22T18:05:00.001-04:00

You know what I realized the other day? I have never purchased a bottle of wine, cellared it for long enough so that one would consider it "ready" to drink, and then drunk the wine. I simply haven't been collecting wine long enough. The mature wine I drink is purchased way after release, or comes to me via generous friends, over meals we share.

I recently drank a glorious bottle of 1995 Chandon de Briailles Corton-Clos du Roi, a bottle I purchased in December of 2008 while in Beaune. Let's see, by the summer of 1995 I had been out of college for two years. I spent the first year waiting tables at a French restaurant in Manhattan, and the second year as a middle school science teacher at a South Bronx public school. I wasn't buying Grand Cru Burgundy on my pathetic teacher's salary. I never tasted this wine young, and then decided that I would age it about 14 years before drinking the next bottle. I bought it and hoped for the best, and this time, that's exactly what I got.

In the first half of 2009, I drank a bunch of Muscadet and decided to age Marc Ollivier's 2007 Clos des Briords and Jo Landron's 2007 Fief du Breil, and the 2002 Luneau Papin Clos des Noelles Excelsior. I'm hoping to wait 10 years before trying the next bottles. I made the decision to cellar those bottles because I drank them, and other Muscadets, and given my constraints regarding space and money, I felt that these would be the most rewarding to cellar. With wines that cost $16-$22, I can afford to drink them young and figure out for myself what I want to do.

The other day I purchased a bottle of 2006 Chandon de Briailles Corton-Maréchaudes on sale for $66. That's well into splurge territory for me, something that happens infrequently. And I have never tasted this wine, nor have I tasted any wine from Maréchaudes, not that I can remember. But I bought it with complete confidence based on the producer, and on the larger place - Corton. I assumed when buying it that I would cellar it for about 12 years.

Is that weird, to invest 12 years in a wine that I've never before tasted? Maybe not. I've had several mature Corton wines, and they develop beautiful complexity with time. Why would this wine from this fantastic and old-school producer be any different? After all, I just drank the 1995 a few weeks ago and it was utterly gorgeous, with fresh ripe fruit that crackled with minerals, and a pungently animale undercurrent. I want my 2006 to become like that wine, the 1995. If I wait 12 years that will surely be the case, no? I wish I could afford to drink this young, to get a better sense of its potential.

I tend to jump on the "cellar-your-wine" bandwagon, blindly assuming that my splurge wines must improve if I cellar them. And hopefully they will, but who knows what will happen when the cork is eventually pulled - not every wine that is supposed to age well actually does. Some people say that we fetish-ize the aging of wine, and that the point is lost somewhere - we do it just for the sake of doing it, without any real sense of what we're trying to achieve.

At a recent industry tasting I had the chance to taste the 2006 Chandon de Briailles Corton-Bressandes. It was unmistakably and immutably delicious, even at this crowded and loud event where it is not possible to really understand a wine. It is all about fruit at this stage, but it is elegant and deeply pitched, with a dense and concentrated feeling yet not at all heavy. Surprisingly, the harsh young tannic structure that I expected was not present. I would quite happily drink this wine now, and some people would say I'd be committing a crime in doing so. Perhaps they're right - perhaps the full character of this great wine needs a decade plus in a cold cellar in order to express itself.

But isn't a bird in hand worth two in the bush? In this particular case, I know what I'm trying to achieve by cellaring my 2006 Maréchaudes. But since I never drank the 1995 young (or any of the other Corton I've been lucky enough to drink), I don't have a sense of what the beginning should be like. In other words, I know what the end should be like, but I'm not sure about the beginning. And now that I am ready to create my own beginnings, I'm not on entirely steady ground.