Double Decanted

Villa Antinori IGT Toscana 2007

2012-01-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

Sunday dinner service is a sharp rebuttal to whatever was said in church that morning about faith increasing as circumstances turn us more wretched. Do you remember what a pacifier tastes like? You do if you've worked in the NYC restaurant business for eighteen years, not superstar material but competent enough so that when you threaten to quit every year or two they stuff a meaningless tooth-marked promotion in your mouth.

We, me and one of the three waiters who should be arriving now, get to the restaurant just as the Empire State Building's shadow begins to cast its narrow opinion over Midtown East. What an indignity it is for the captain not to be trusted with front door keys. But the door is unlocked, which means Rolando is there. And there he is, wiping down the bar counter that will never be clean. In another time there might have been a full waitstaff still taking post-brunch service shots of anything together, but the owners gave up on brunch two years ago.

First seating is at 5:30. She asks for a Campari and soda and he says he wants a Gibson, attempting a tone of voice that dares Rafael to tell him we don't have cocktail onions.

Good going, old man. I watch from behind the Compaq 256-color monitor we still use to process card payments. Good going you decrepit f***. You made the drive from Nassau County to Manhattan in only forty years. You indomitable tycoon of middle management, the Jack Welch of showing up every day. Good practice for the graveyard, all you have to do there is show up every day. I notice suddenly that I'm hissing at myself, not Mr. Kohland. He's a good customer, here twice a month with Karen.

And like that the owner's wife has roosted on the corner of their table with her brittle Art Deco hospitality. For the lady, the same questions she gets every time about her nails and her kids and her grandkids. For the gentleman, some cliched flirtation to keep his arthritic ego limber. Oh, stop. Eventually she leaves, loudly telling Rafa to ensure the Kohlands' every need is met, and winking at me as she returns to her office where she'll shop online until she screws up her computer.

By 6:30 there are five tables and though I could hang back and let Rafa and Macedonio deal with all of them, I take the six-top at table 13 to pass some time. It looks like a family, or parts of two families. They tell me which pastas they want (one grunts for steak which is furious with gristle here, every time) and I start for the kitchen.

"And we'd like a bottle of the..." I turn around to the chipmunk-cheeked millenial, the scion of the blond-haired family, who is still speaking to me with his eyes and finger on the wine card. "...Antinori Chianti." The card lists Antinori Chianti Classico Peppoli 2008, but our distributor hasn't delivered this wine for five weeks because the owner called him a shyster on the phone.

This is going to work in the table's favor , because it forces me to bring them the only Antinori wine we have, IGT Toscana 2007. My money's on the kid not noticing, and if he does I can either go apologetic or intimidating. Either way, they're taking it. And they should anyway, because this is a better wine from a year when the sometimes-vindictive Tuscan terroir was in concert with the intentions of the growers and their winemaker frenemies.

Sangoviese, no other varietal in Tuscany or anywhere is so taffy-stretched between tradition and modernity. The crusty, oxidized sad clown tragedies in wicker fiaschi under filthy corks are losing shelf space to glistening, inflatable panders, microoxygenated, reverse-osmosised and Fren-choked into submission under surgically clean corks.

Sangiovese, ushered to the IGT gallows by thuggish Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah as the "contemporary market", the bloodthirsty rabble eager to see the lynching, jeers.

Not this one, though. This is a dignified, generous wine in spite of our best attempts to disgrace it with our smudged stemware and indifferent food. In this bottle, gentle Merlot and decisive Syrah lend Sangiovese the compassion and motivation it needs to be better. I will drink anything they don't finish straight from the bottle.

I show it to the young master at the most inconvenient angle I can manage. He looks at the label, nods at me, and then looks back to the label as I step back to pull the cork. He says nothing, but has noticed this is not the Peppoli. Bright boy. He says nothing. When you are twentysomething and tasked with ordering wine on behalf of your elders, you probably don't know what to do when the script breaks. As in lovemaking, when something goes wrong in wine service it can be better or at least intuitive to pretend it didn't.

These feedbags are out at a restaurant tonight, having the experience they wanted to pay for: Looking at a menu, the most autonomy they've had all day. Being "waited on", whatever that means. Saying to each other the things they think people say in restaurants, all the while darting their eyes around in hopes of seeing their plates approaching, descending. The plates remind me of UFOs; get ready for the probe I sometimes think as I deal the losing hands around the table.

This restaurant is going under, do they not realize it? The Antinoris were, still are, smarter than everyone in this room, going back to that moment near the beginning of last millenium when one of them happened upon the miracle of people paying you simply because you already had money. They became bankers, and then they made wine. Being rich was so easy. Giovanni di Piero Antinori must have hade a huge grin on his face that had nothing to do with winemaking as he turned the screw on his basket press every October.

It tapered off, the banking. By the time Carl Rothschild arrived in Naples with his French cigarettes and insatiable, anonymous grudges, it was already easy to borrow money in Italy without passing a coin to Antinori. So it goes, so it continues, as this dirty decade in New York City accumulates its declines and falls.

Two hours later I approach their table with the check in my back pocket. They had two more bottles of the IGT. The kid is drunk and halfway through a cognac that drew a glare from his father when he ordered it. No one else had a digestif. His acceptably overweight mother has tiramisu on her nose.

"Is there anything else?" I ask.

"Just the check," the kid says too loudly. I set it down in the middle of the table.

"You guys could get some bigger glasses. Rie-DELLS," he continues unprompted. He is drawing uneasy glances from everyone at the table now.

I smile in spite of myself. "You know, I think the glass is only there to keep your wine off the tablecloth," I say as I pour the last two ounces for his father. I wish the pour was full of tartrate crumbs to help make my point, but this is a modern wine.

Service ends, of course we lost money, and I am ready to split less than five minutes after the last table leaves. The owner is still back there with the keys. He owns the keys.

"Estamos chingando!" I say over my shoulder to Rolando as he unlocks his bike out front.

I turn onto Fifth Avenue and decide to skip the pokey R train and walk the mile home to Battery Park City, past the Zuccotti Park gypsies and the big hole. That bright boy and his Sangiovese, I say as loud as I want as I pass the Flatiron and light my one-hitter.

Sang is blood, Giove is Jupiter, and I strain my eyes as I turn my head upwards, looking for planets through the light pollution.

Jean-Marie Berthier Coteaux du Giennois 2010

2012-01-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

When your craigslist.fr 1995 Citroën breathes its last on the D951 near Le Clous and even though you have a France-ready Vodafone SIM card you don't have the first clue who to call to get you out of this, do one thing first: sit on the hood and watch the Loire river--murky and shallow here--pass by.

Even though it's silent, as rivers go, try to listen. Walk to the bank, put your hands in the water. Grab some mud and extrude it between your fingers. How long did it take for these particles to end up in your hands in this order? These centuries of limestone and granite, these underwater fiefdoms of tuffeau. Take all the time you need to realize there's no answer. When you're ready, go back to the car and deal with reality.

You're only a little screwed. Maybe you should have started in Orleans and followed the river to the ocean, rather than trundling upstream and away from civilization like this. But then you wouldn't have met that girl in Nantes, the one who looks like Anna Paquin and and sings Motown songs in the shower in her funny accent. Auréline. You stayed with her for three unplanned days of earthly delights that you'll remember on your deathbed--stop pretending you're so cool that you forgot her name.

As you walk the roadside, the jerry can you've optimistically brought along even though you definitely didn't just run out of gas clangs against your leg. The rhythm of it spells out a logic that would not fly in Math 103, but is so right it stings:

Citroën - Citron - Citrus - Lemon

The sun is beautiful and generous and you pray to it that you'll get ten more minutes alone with that butter-scented grad student who sold you the lemon in Bordeaux. You'll let him pick the Edith Piaf melody to which he can croon his plea for mercy.

An hour later you make it to Gien and just start drinking. They can tow the autocarcass if they want, they can roll it into the river for all you care. It's late afternoon, you have money to burn since you bought a cheap shit car, and alcohol is the only help you're going to get until tomorrow morning.

You're surprised not to be sick of white wine yet, not to have bolted for the voluptuous, pillowy epiphanies you came to expect from the reds and brandies that floated you through Southern France last week. These Loire whites are rigid, fierce, with the essence of cold stone and acidity like a wasp sting. In your mouth they dictate, not discuss. They are the opposite of what you thought you liked in wine.

So what is it that's kept you coming back to them, besides geography? When you were much younger you used to press a nine-volt battery to your tongue once, twice, again, holding it a little longer each time until the pain became unbearable. This is not exactly like that, but it's not exactly different either.

At the bar you are into your second plate of sardines and ready to knock down an entire bottle of something. You look at the carte des vins and take a guess towards the middle of the list--that's what you've been doing so far this trip and so far so good. You let yourself assume "Coteaux du Giennois" means it was delivered from the winery to the restaurant on foot.

The poker-faced bartender nods and you wonder if you just picked a tourist wine as he turns to the refrigerator. He uncorks the bottle, gives you a new glass and walks away.

You pour into the same glass you've been using. What comes out is pale, with a green aurora around the rim you're used to seeing after five days in the Loire Valley. It glows so radiantly, even in this dim brown room, is the glass plugged into a wall outlet?

Swirling and sniffing still makes you feel like an ass. Even after however many thousand wines, it's as though your pants drop to your ankles every time you go through the motion. But the dinner crowd hasn't arrived yet and the red-nosed old men down the bar pay you no attention as you expose yourself. And it's worth it this time for the face-slap of glistening, dewy grass and fruit that issues forth.

You sip and do the suck-through-the-teeth aeration that is another habit of occasional-at-best value. But for once the noise is not the obnoxious slurp of air disrupting wine, it's the fresh crunch of incisors penetrating an almost-ripe Anjou pear, ravenously, over and over. "Dry" seems--no, is--the wrong word for something this refreshing, but the overachieving little saccharomyces cerevisae cells did their job well, obliterating every memory of sugar. You eat an oily fish and take a much bigger drink.

The bottle empties quickly and your instinct is to get another, but it's 18h45 and maybe time for some rilletes de porc and red wine, something "imported" from Chinon. You turn the menu over in your hands, not really reading it, and then you catch yourself singing softly.

I 'eard it srruuu ze grape-vine.

You change your mind, pay l'addition and walk back towards the river.

Alcohol, Part 5: 21. Nxg7+ Kd8, 22. Qf6+! Nxf6, 23. Be7# 1-0

2011-12-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

The doors slide shut. You reach for the "Roof" button but the other passenger has already hit it. You caught a glimpse of Him when you got on and had a really crazy thought, but now He's standing a step behind you and you can't be sure.

Your eardrums squirm as the ground floor fades. He shuffles His feet and the thought you had before is back. Could it be? You work your peripheral vision like never before, straining, thinking, questioning, believing, until, in an incandescent pop of clarity and fear, it becomes true.

It's you and God alone in the elevator, and you have twenty seconds to make your pitch.

"I am..."

Whatever our individual faiths, our individual heresies, I think we organize our lives around welcoming or dreading some version of this moment--when, freed of distractions, we are called by whomever, ourselves maybe, to account for the things we've stood for, lived for, loved.

God, I love wine. As much as I used to care why, I don't anymore. I also really like beer, and I take comfort in imagining a "Single Malt Scotch" cell on budget.xls one day. Here, at "money", the snake begins to eat its tail and I wish I could turn to the pages of a Kerouac or a Burroughs

for guidance. Instead I just slump into the backseat of a cab in Williamsburg next to Rod Steiger and slur that I coulda been a contenda, I could have been sending my mouth to Speyside every night--not to mention curating a little cellar of Barbaresco, Meursault, Utopias, etc.--by now had I not shambled after this will-o-the-wisp, the credible delusion that lust for delicious beverages was the A / Ω of things to do with my life.

I did not foresee the afternoons lost gazing at labels on a shelf, too invested in the social contract to shoplift, taking sour solace in maybe knowing more about the wines than the people who would actually drink them. I did not consider what it was like to be the janitor at Disneyland, watching people have delirious fun all day on the Tower of Terror and then cleaning up their vomit.

An obvious thing has only lately revealed itself to me: If you know the pleasure of good and great wines and want to experience it a few zillion times, it is a sensible if not sacrosanct course of action to be wealthy first.

Otherwise it's too easy to end up the scrappy clerk with the "sommelier" cert taking potshots at the elites you serve, positive that since you can recite the 1855 Classification to the tune of any Kermit Lynch song, the Yquem those troglodyte McKinsey bros are drinking tonight and tomorrow night would much rather end up as your sugary piss than theirs. And anyway, you know a $38 sticky from the armpit of the Loire that's almost as good. You can't really afford that one either, but the point is you know about it!

Yes, there are impressive cheap bottles accessible to any first-world slacker, but they're not the ones that make us quit our old, secure jobs and go for it in a field with a spectacular record of financial failure at every level.

Yes, many beverage jobs include access to fun, hangover-bait "industry tastings" where you get four hours to pirouette around some cavernous convention center, spit a few times to keep up appearances, and try to distill valuable information from sales rep doggerel. But this is an inferior experience to pouring yourself a big glass of (Hermi/Meri)tage and knowing you can and will have another when it's gone.

YES, enough people stay afloat in the wine biz and a few even thrive, and even if the American Dream is ready for the taxidermist right about now I've still had way more unearned advantages than anyone deserves and it would be a panicked retreat worthy of the firing squad to bail on this, the effort I've put into and the knowledge I've taken out of three years in wine.

There are other caveats and other emptors to my proposition and I'm not going to flail around the room windmill punching after each one. I'll just beg your understanding or your best impression thereof about where I'm calling from, this queasy freeze-frame of realizing that amour fou for wine has put so much of it out of my reach.

So when I sort this out for reals and begin moving forward again, it will be with full understanding that the keys to the kingdom are pricey, and "passion" is not legal tender at the locksmith's.

It occurs to me that this post has nothing to do with alcohol. I suppose the "Alcohol Suite" concluded in Part 4 and this is more of a bookend to my July navel-gaze about why I got into the trade in the first place. But it dovetails with the alcohol question since I want to live long and prosper as much as the next Vulcan, and I've grown suspicious that being mad for wine and craft beer and the rest threatens both objectives.

Here's my last word on alcohol. I bet you, if I had learned myself some real science, I could describe the universe entirely in terms of the toxins that seem to be hidden or not-so-hidden everywhere. And watching how toxin-fear can become a ridiculous, consuming obsession for people makes alcohol seem less like the sweat dripping off the Grim Reaper's mustache and more like a dull, everyday Venom Lite for my dull, everyday everyday.

And I still have total faith that being the creator of a wine or maybe a beer that others like and unlike me would consistently buy, drink, consider, enjoy, praise--I'll take any two of these--would be all I needed on the day of reckoning. I'm not sure I can say the same about having consumed Barolo, Westvleteren 12, f***ing WHATEVER every day.

If it wasn't clear by now, I'm no Capablanca.

I haven't been anticipating the endgame square-for-square since 1. e4 and delighted in yanking the other chumps around the board to their inevitable doom. I've just been following one vital organ

somewhat at the expense of another

and been glad enough to make it to the next day without causing any forklift accidents.

When I look around and realize it's endgame, which may have already happened, I'll just remember that checkmate is a much more rare and satisfying conclusion than resignation, no matter which end of it you're on.

Alcohol, Part 4: ...And I Have A Drinking Problem

2011-12-04T19:03:00.001-08:00

"I got 'em, no worries," I say. 'Em are forty-five pounds of dirty dishes, and I'm on my feet before any of the other dinner guests can try to one-up my irritating helpfulness. With my empty, butter-streaked wineglass in hand, I slink to the scullery and begin filling the sink with water and detergent. While the mess submerges I find the cheap white wine that was opened for deglazing and pour myself an amount beyond any pretense of appreciation. I have been planning this moment since the wine on the table ran out just before the spitefully cognac-less dessert. It is warm and oxidized and tastes like victory.

At a DIY cocktail table at some reception, I prepare a gin and tonic for myself: Five large ice cubes, a jigger of Hendrick's, Schweppes to the top. Almost to the top. I glance to to nine, twelve and three o'clock, then add more gin until the meniscus wobbles. A little spills when I lift the glass but I don't care about that.

My friends and I are going to be late for that thing we're going to. One guy sits oblivious on the deck with his headphones too deep in his ears, another remains installed at his desk reloading Facebook, I'm on the couch swirling the dregs of beer three and ready to leave. From the bathroom, the girl practicing cartography on her face says she needs five, i.e. fifteen, more minutes. I smell opportunity, kill my last two gulps, and get another bottle. Of the same, just in case anyone else is counting. I check to be sure all my empties are in the recycling, buried, in case anyone else is counting. I drink fast. The volume of liquid I'm carrying will be a problem on the 40-minute drive (maybe it's a subway ride) but I don't care about that yet.

On a viscous summer night in New York City, maybe July, probably 2AM, I stumble purposefully down the street where I grew up. I'm returning from some bar during a mostly aimless summer that partitions totally aimless middle years of college. Twenty paces to the door, I find my keys among the receipts and pennies in my cargo pocket. I will soar up the twelve front steps, unlock, close, and lock the door in a single graceful pivot. The motion is beautiful in my mind, and it is too in reality until the key makes a grinding noise as it gets stuck in the lock. I jiggle it a bit too hard trying to free it, and the head snaps off in my hand. Now what? I sit down.

"How much did you have to drink tonight?" my girlfriend asks me. "Just a couple of beers," I lie through red teeth.

These moments were real, there were others like them, there are still. Out of consideration for the lives that have truly been run aground by drinking I will not say I'm an alcoholic--the same way I will not clap a Purple Heart winner on the shoulder, show him the ACE bandage on my tennis-weary wrist and say "I feel your pain, brother."

And yet, my wrist still hurts. Which is to say alcohol exists for me in that navel-gazing Sartre-misreading way that it doesn't for people who can enjoy a drink, or a drunk, as often as they care to and then just get on with things. It is a presence, there of course when I'm drinking, but also there when I'm not drinking: Reading Google News over my shoulder as I sleepwalk through cyberspace, leering at me from the far end of the pizza place, reeling me into the wine shop out of the upstream flow of pedestrians.

I can talk to it and it talks back, though it says the same thing every time. It goads me and motivates me and is the only thing besides gravity that can insult me anytime and be guaranteed forgiveness. It is the main structural unit for the second half of my day, the same way coffee is for the first.*

Once noon passes, the burden is on me to justify not drinking. I have to drive to work in an hour. I want to exercise today. I still feel sick from last night. These work often enough, but they don't work every time. Or they work once, maybe twice, but not three times. The 750ml of Westmalle in my fridge and the forever young bag-in-a-box of (quality!) Malbec in the pantry demand that I resubmit my proof every twenty minutes under cross-examination.

You know how if you repeat anything over and over again it starts to sound meaningless?

If I've held my ground until ~6PM, a stark feeling of mental and physical unease sets in--the photo-negative image of my 6AM caffeine craving.* A first drink doesn't buzz me at this point, it returns me to "Normal". If this isn't a dependency, is anything?

So it's a dependency, it's an alcohol dependency, it's my alcohol dependency. Not one worth an ABC after-school special, but still a surrender of control, even if it's over something that doesn't seem to matter much. It's a lesser demon, the red-headed stepchild of the Legion family--those Volvo-driving Rotarians who live in the loud mauve McMansion between the Molochs and the Pazuzus on Tartarus Lane.

Point being, I know many happy and functional, even successful, people who drink as much as I do or more. Looking around me, it's just one of several cluttered life-areas where it would behoove me to get my s**t together.

And yet. If this modest habit is distending my gut, scuttling my evening productivity, planting bombs in my organs, seeding concern in my loved ones, and lacerating my memory with moments of indelible shame (ask me about some of the things that didn't make the bullet list), confronting it would seem to be a do-it-now-or-pay-with-compound-interest later proposition.

Not to mention my excuses--avoid most spirits, eat blood-fortifying vegetables, jog 3x/week--fit a profile of deflection and delusion that probably applies to the real alcoholics. The iron fact is that it's not healthy. "Drinking", in all its intransitive vainglory, is not healthy. Letting it get Park Place and Boardwalk in my brain like I have is not healthy. So this all bottlenecks at: what price health?

I don't think you can make a strong case for not wanting to die if it means ignoring the way you want to live.

Alcohol, Part 3B: GABA GABA Hey!

2011-09-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

People who say they sleep well or--get this--better, after getting loaded are just messing with me, right? They're savoring that moment when my brow furrows and I'm actually considering that something so batshit absurd might be true.

That's all I can conclude when I go to bed drunk, then snap out of the three-hour oblivion that is my booby prize each time trembling, short of breath, delirious with thirst, heart beating Keith Moon fills.

In darkness it dawns on me that the party is over, more over than any party has ever been. My headache emerges, fearsomely brandishing its chitinous, venom-filled pincers before skewering my unprotected brain.

I groan to the bathroom (hopefully this is a familiar place where the route is memorized) and spit into the toilet. On good nights it's a copper-flavored loogie or two fresh from my sinuses. On bad nights it's the opening salvo of bile in a puking blitzkrieg. How impressive that the urge to do this supersedes my primal, cellular craving for WATER.

Drinking from a Dixie cup is every kind of inadequate in these situations, so I duck beneath the tap and slurp in all I can. The head rush as I come up is staggering. Face dripping, I go back to bed but certainly not back to sleep--my blood, organs, skin still tingle and thump with a screeching intensity somewhere between the effects of amphetamines and Lucky Charms.

Then the sonovabitch who lives between my ears starts his audit of the embarrassing stuff I said and did hours earlier and will never live down. To ensure I have enough wakey time to think about them over and over and over, he proceeds to belt out a spirited, off-key rendition of "Party in the USA" or "She Bangs" on infinite loop.

An hour or two later, maybe, I can shut the system back down until the alarm goes off and the process repeats when the sun is out.

What's that? Deal with your hangovers like a man? Take four aspirin with a big glass of STFU? Fair enough--a hangover probably never killed anyone, and if they rendered you legitimately infirm the economy of World #1 Alcohol Consumer Moldova would be doneski from the perpetual sick days taken by the work force.

But each one is a galaxy of pain, you will not take that from me. The five-alarm ones hurt worse--shorter, maybe, but worse--than anything up to and sometimes including the flu. So when I hear that you snooze like a thousand year-old glacier after drinking eleven glasses of whatever and wake up spry and ready for your employee of the month award, forgive me for being incredulous and/or punching a wall.

(Standard internet "I'm Not A Doctor" disclaimer goes here.)

Drinking enough to get drunk is certainly doing some curious things to the brain, and drinking enough to get hangover-sick is certainly doing some nasty things to the body. And--save that one guy who woke up hungover, said "I will never drink again" and actually meant it--the worst morning of your life since the last worst morning of your life never squelches the thirst for more of the euphoria that got you there.

Because it's a very persuasive euphoria, this. Due respect to Wordsworth, it's a more essential joy than contemplating all the silent lakes and elfin pinnaces in Europe. To specify, this is about the bliss that sets in after your second or third drink; the infant intoxication, when the stressful or bad or just effing normal day you were having gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, you roll the top down, crank up the anthem that just came on the radio, and claim the highway as yours.

By the fifth or sixth drink and maybe the first or second cigarette, it's not the same. Chances are you still feel "good", but that fresh, ripe apple you bit into before is starting to brown a little. So knock back a few more to try to get back to where you were, or at least freeze-frame where you are now, and keep going until you realize you're just chasing your losses. Which will probably happen around the time you're holding a Heineken 22 in your mysteriously scraped hand and berating the intercom at the White Castle drive-thru about how pedestrians have the same right to 3 AM Crave Cases as drivers do, elitist pricks. The apple is pockmarked with rot and swarming with ants.

I'm intrigued by the chemical game of chicken occurring in the nervous system as this snafu unfolds. If I've got it half-right or better (source), alcohol causes the release of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which makes you feel good and act stupid. Your brain knows this and responds by sending out the stimulant glutamate which partly counteracts the stumbling effects of the GABA and makes you less likely to remove yourself from the gene pool. When both chemicals are pumping at the same time, even though they're working against each other you feel groovy.

But the GABA flow always (?) tapers off and stops before the glutamate does, and without GABA (whose molecules I imagine look like smiley faces under a microscope), glutamate (molecules I imagine look like Gunnery Sgt. Hartman) makes you feel bad. Like, "I need another drink now to make this stop" bad. So you either a) close your tab and grit through the discomfort until the glutamate fades, or b) convince yourself it isn't a vicious cycle, that in fifteen minutes the laws of science go home for the evening, and have "one more" drink. Some have little or no trouble going with a), which is cool. Lots do.

Dramatization

Doctor, why are we wired to have these reactions to things like GABA? The evolutionary logic for glutamate is clear enough, but how does the capacity for getting buzzed perpetuate the species? Perhaps science can't explain everything and there's a higher power working here. You know that famous Ben Franklin quote "Sippin' on Coke and rum, I'm like 'So what, I'm drunk'"? Wait, it's "Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy". Probably another misquote like that "penny saved" nonsense, and regardless, it doesn't bring us to understanding. It brings us to church.

And if the pleasure of drinking does come from above, wouldn't you agree that the Man Upstairs played one hell of a mean joke on us with hangovers? But hangovers end, usually in hours, and that's the key to why we can laugh about them and do the whole thing over again and again until one day we own up--by choice or by diagnosis--to our mortality vis-a-vis getting wasted.

Imagine if every hangover lasted for a week. Maybe then it would seem like less than the perfect seasoning on your brunch omelet and more like a foreshadowing of worse things to come if you don't cut back on the euphoria. Give me the flu over that any day, with a side of home fries and a Bloody Mary, extra bloody.

Alcohol, Part 3A: Irrelevant Personal Anecdotes

2011-08-11T19:40:00.001-07:00

I became hooked on coffee at thirteen, at an ur-Starbucks called Ozzie's four addresses down the street from my high school. It was convenient and cheap and seemed cool. My kid dislike of bitter-tasting things was steadily worn down by 8 oz. slugs of milky, sugary hazelnut three or four or five times a week.

In time the coffee became blacker and stronger, the paper cups became taller, and breaks in the routine caused a strange new discomfort--like being too hot and too cold at the same time, or being ravenously hungry but still on the edge of vomiting. Until I had coffee each morning, two extremes I couldn't define and never knew I contained played unwinnable tug-of-war with my inner peace. Suddenly, nothing before noon was more important than making this go away.

I quit once, senior year of college. On the ground floor of the high-rise across from the identical high-rise where I lived was a Wawa (a marginally classier 7-Eleven, if you've never lived or had the 2AM munchies in the lower Northeast Corridor). There was never a good reason not to get coffee at Wawa. After four years in Pennsylvania, 20 oz. Dark Roasts were the pillars supporting my every day.

One Sunday morning, late morning, I staggered towards my fix, out the front door and into a pastel dream of April. The obligation to study or exercise or do anything but play Civilization III until it was time to call Papa John's in ten hours blew away with the cherry blossom petals. Climbing the concrete, gum-studded Wawa steps felt like floating on marshmallows, and the just-hung poster on the shop's front door may as well have had golden rays shooting from it in every direction:

NEW 24 OZ. COFFEES! TRY ONE TODAY!

The only thing that filled me with more joy than the fact of four more ounces was the implication that maybe one day there would be a quart.

I scurried back to my room with my giant coffee like the rat who scored the once-bitten soft pretzel off the sidewalk. After excitedly setting it and the Sunday New York Times on my desk, I took two steps towards the kitchen with vague ideas about pancakes.

The hollow *thunk* followed by pizzicato drizzling noises behind me froze my hand as it began to reach for the cupboard. I knew what had happened--there was only one possibility--but I didn't want to look. It's easy to underestimate the surface area 24 oz. of liquid can have when holding it in a narrow paper cup. Suffice it to say that it can cover the average desk with mayhem to spare.

The fat newspaper got the worst of it, perhaps saving it from its probable fate of getting tossed Monday morning with only two sections opened. The rest of the slick wended around my computer keyboard and six stacks of books, mostly paperbacks. Months later I would contritely hide the coffee-mottled ones at the bottom of a library donation box. Cascades of Dark Roast fell to the floor, one via the sides of my computer tower.

Three minutes, panic and paper towels, and it was under control. I had ruined books, a $5 periodical, and probably my computer keyboard (a laptop would have been fuuuuuucked). Also, I STILL NEEDED COFFEE. In search of pity I sank to the rug, against the bony metal frame of my dormitory cot-bed and rubbed my eyes.

This was a time in my young adulthood when I was desperate to find symbolism if not synecdoche in everything, whether or not I really understood either. Everything in sight melted away except that 24 oz. cup. If it had been shorter, with a stronger center of gravity, it wouldn't have tipped over... even if I had carelessly placed it down with one edge on the Sunday paper. The monster-sized cup was the coffee addiction that had grown unchecked, as I had watched like a parent thrilled that my 6'7" 15 year-old is a basketball miracle, but quietly hoping he stops sprouting while still someone's definition of "normal".

Wawa had staged a proper intervention. If this didn't end here and now, the next spill would be much worse. There, on the floor, I quit coffee.

I went back out and bought a box of green tea, with its eastern promises of immortality and clean teeth. For lack of a kettle, I boiled water in my supermarket-issue saucepan and tentatively poured it over the round teabag. The steaming infusion became pale yellow, yellow, stopping just short of pea-colored. I waited for it to become darker and more electric like strong coffee, stirring and pressing the bag with a spoon as it became more apparent that this is how green tea looks.

The flavor was bizarre: mild, smoky, gamey, inconclusive. Nothing like the Ceylon and Earl Grey I sipped every few months and were my only yardsticks for tea. According to the box it contained a trace of caffeine, but my body was going to have to take my eyes' word for it--as usual, it didn't.

I was miserable. Breakfast seemed pointless, and out the window I saw clouds bum-rushing the sun. "While you're at it," I thought as I took a second palate-scalding of the strange brew, "quit drinking alcohol too."

Alcohol, Part 2: How Many Pears Can You Eat In Two Hours?

2011-07-26T16:16:00.001-07:00

"There are people who write me off as an idiot, because how could I know what I'm talking about if I don't taste?"

-Tim Hanni MW, recovered alcoholic

Do you think anybody who strictly follows the medical establishment's guideline for healthy alcohol consumption--"up to one drink a day for women or two drinks a day for men"-- is a recognized expert in any part of the wine, beer, or spirits industries (accountants and other interchangeables excluded)? I don't. I don't think there's anyone who even comes close. The motives for deciding to spend your working life creating or promoting intoxicants are scarce in temperate souls.

Typically there's more to this than spreading the crunk gospel. Some amount of affection for the poison you peddle, and by "affection for" I mean "fascination with", and by "fascination" I mean "infatuation", is not really optional in this game. And when all that stands between you and the object of your infatuation is a screwcap, the next scene kinda writes itself.

If you sell wine, you need to be able to describe it at length. If you make beer, you need to know the styles you craft so intimately that you can accurately imagine your saliva tastes like any of them. If you write about single malt whisky for a living, your credibility is up peat creek if anyone ever out-nerds you in public. Book-learning is essential in all instances, but only as a compliment to tasting, endless tasting. If the nectar isn't coursing through your veins, you're wilted.

So you taste as much as possible. It's not a chore since you love it deeply. And you're in the business, so the next opportunity is probably in a few hours. And then there's that voice telling you that if you skip the tasting tonight, your colleagues and competitors will still go and have an edge, however small, over you tomorrow.

When your lofty desire for expertise, your animal desire for your next drink, and your professional survival instinct are singing in mellifluous harmony, you're getting drunk. Formal tastings aren't the only place where this happens. The same weakness is exploited at dinner parties where all nine of your oenophile friends bring at least one bottle, at craft brew meccas where the beer menus resemble phone books (remember phone books?) and everywhere else hangover fuel can pass itself off as a database that's both necessary and fun to assimilate.

Of course, everyone knows the solution to this dilemma: You spit. Just like you return all your library books a day early, and volunteer your weekends to clean the Steel Reserve cans and Coney Island whitefish from under the highway overpass. Yeah, some pros actually do spit everything at tastings and other feeding frenzies (and they're probably near the top of their field), but ask them if they've never left one and been nervous about driving home or glad they didn't have to. While you're at it, ask them for an itemized list of what they drank yesterday. Remember, one for women, two for men!

Spitting may or may not exclude something important from the tasting experience. To this wild guesser, it does. A quality common to every "great" wine I've had is a boom of intensity that only detonates at the back of my mouth, at the event horizon, the point where the swallow reflex is just beginning to kick in. Obviously I'm swallowing anyway, but if the crazy idea to spit Chambertin ever did hit me, I'm sure this goosebump-inducing crescendo would never leave the orchestra pit. Jancis Robinson would say I'm wrong, but come on, which one of us are you gonna believe???

Speaking of pretty English ladies, I wish it were easier to find Alice King's book High Sobriety here in the colonies because, if the blurbs and reviews are fair, it covers most of this ground with a lot more authority.

Ms. King was living the pipedream, getting paid a lot of money to drink exquisite wines and write about them. The ego-inflation alone could make one lightheaded, but that wasn't cutting it for AK-47 (not her real nickname as far as I know, just what I would call her if she were my friend). For her it was wine, more wine, lots more wine, lots more vodka.

The seeds of all-out alcoholism were of course sown in her from birth, but backstage access to the finest wines and the ever-present escape pod of "don't worry it's my job!" were effective fertilizer. Then, impressively (though I suppose there's nothing inherently impressive about doing what you have to do to stay alive), she called a cab and left the party.

As did Tim Hanni, one of the first two Americans to get the #1 recognition of wine omniscience, the Master of Wine. Here's a really interesting guy--a trained chef who fattened a ~~goose~~ pheasant in his college dorm closet so he could roast it in his toaster oven. He got into wine, got really good at it, got even better at being drunk. Finally he fell down the same fetid well Alice King did, and similarly clawed his way out.

The cool thing is: Not only is he still in the racket, he's one of the few people attacking the orthodoxy of what quality is in wine. And I don't mean he's part of the "CRUCIFYPARKERONACROSSOFNEWFRENCHOAK" rabble (who I can't believe anyone still takes seriously--where's the counter-backlash?). Instead, Mr. Hanni has compiled serious analysis of how our tasting organs work, and more importantly how they vary.

This has led to some nonconformist conclusions (maybe every wine can pair with asparagus, and maybe white zinfandel isn't the devil's magenta urine after all), that would be really hard to believe if they weren't asserted by someone who could recite more facts about wine in an hour than you or I could memorize in a year, and could probably eat a tube of toothpaste and still ace any blind tasting.

*Probably*.

There's no way around the fact that a drop of wine on Tim Hanni's tongue could ruin his life. So perhaps he has forgotten the intricate details of how wine tastes--I don't know for sure that his detractors (opening quote) are wrong. But they almost certainly are if they think his ability to spew some cliches about minerality and Bosc pears has any bearing on the unique work he's doing.

Those of us less motivated to think outside the box can continue to chase some version of the mastery Mr. Hanni won and then threw away. We will keep tasting. What other option is there?

A couple of years ago I would flip to a random Wine Spectator tasting note every Sunday and try to taste each named component in its actual form over the course of the week. This regimen had some happy results--the spike in fruit consumption helped my digestion, and I smoked a couple of great cigars. It also had some ignominious ones, the low point being when my landlord stopped by and caught me licking a cast-iron skillet (thanks Molesworth). What it didn't do was make me a much better taster. As this became clearer I desperately increased the volume of apples, lavender, rocks, etc. I shoveled across my sensory transom.

Protip: Eating forty figs in one afternoon is not the fast track to an MW.

The takeaway was that reference points are good to have, but only tasting wine can make you better at tasting wine. And I've accepted that tasting at every opportunity is compatible with doing right by your body in theory, but usually not in practice.

At some point on this blog I may have said something about the negative health effects of being a boozy glutton not mattering to me, but since this is the summer of backpedaling and reversals, throw that stick on the pile.

Alcohol, Part 1: A Tiger Is Cuddly Once You Punch His Teeth Out

2011-07-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

Here are some tasting notes:

Fre Alcohol Removed Brut: Yellow-green with seltzery bubbles. Interesting green tea aromas turn into reductive burnt match after a few sniffs. Big yellow apple hit on the midpalate (this is all midpalate). Very low acid. Don't take "Brut" literally--this would probably be demi-sec if labeling rules applied.

Fre Alcohol Removed Chardonnay: Peach-heavy nose. Watery and off-dry, evokes the apple juice served at snack time in first grade.

Fre Alcohol Removed Merlot: Sweet-smelling with a little unfortunate vinyl. Juicy and a little sugary like the others. Decent acid balance. Mellow structure, not much in the way of tannins.

Inglenook "St. Regis" Alcohol Removed White Zinfandel: Hate to join the White Zin gang-tackle, but there isn't much to recommend this. If wine is bottled poetry like the famous Napa welcome sign says, this pink stuff is "There Once Was A Man From Nantucket..."

The contempt these products elicit from everyone who doesn't already drink them is thicker than trockenbeerenauslese.

To prestige hounds, it's for the peasants like every other wine available at Safeway. To would-be critics and somms, it's excruciating to acknowledge they even exist. Drink water, soda, methanol, anything else--just please stop pretending you're drinking wine. To pregaming woogirls who don't like carbs, what's the point, bitch?

Per my little bench trial, they are in fact not much fun to drink. But hey, at the $6-$7 price point nothing is kicking their tail too hard in measures of aroma and taste. Cheaply-fermented grape juice is cheaply-fermented grape juice, not much variance in any direction you wander.

The collateral damage would obviously be severe dragging finished La Tache through a reverse osmosis torture chamber until its alcohol is scourged away (doesn't that thought just ruin your day?). Fre, to understate the crap out of things, doesn't have as much to lose.

About the only thing it does have to lose is the portkey to drunk. And here's a black fly for ya, Alanis, to lose it is its reason for existing. It may or may not be fair to assume that non-alcoholic wines were born of an attempt to chisel an odd niche into the adult beverage market. Like, something for people who want to keep alcohol out of their bloodstream but are happy with anything that has the essential sweet/sour/bitter balance of wine. Or for whatever reason wish to be observed holding a goblet containing translucent red, yellow, or pink liquid.

Evidently the gambit worked since these are not new products and there has been plenty of time for them to join Crystal Pepsi and (real) Four Loko in the great recycling plant in the sky. The profit margin is intuitive enough: Schwag grapes bought at high volume, probably not chauffeured around the winery by sparkling new Waukesha pumps, very probably not punched down by hand 4x/day, certainly not luxuriating in fresh-off-the-boat Seguin-Moreau barriques for two years before finally cannonballing into the punch bowl.

Also, the cost of an RO or vacuum distillation or spinning cone setup has to be largely offset by the feel-good PR the makers can claim by having a gentle pony in their stable. Drug pushers? Us? And all that really matters is that people are buying them, though aside from myself twenty-four hours before breaking ground on this post, I'm not sure who they are. I do know a handful of disciplined folks who "don't drink", and they "don't drink" this stuff either.

Once again, the silent majority sticks it to the smartasses and gets their representation.

The contempt for non-alcoholic wines will continue to sizzle. And like most contempt, it accomplishes little except making the people spewing it look like dickheads. If there is an error sloshing around inside all these bottles, it's the attempt to bisect the pleasure of drinking wine into

Pleasure from aroma/flavor | Pleasure from alcohol

and then snap the wishbone. You can't pull these two things apart and not expect to taste the trauma. They're not the same, but in the fabric of wine their fibers are tangled together somewhere. Tugging until they separate leaves a ragged mess.

I don't blame producers like Ariel for trying to create NA wines that can run with the Clydesdales (because in winemaking anything is worth a try if you can afford it), but there's a point--that has probably already been reached--where they can't get any better. Seriously intending to take the alcohol out of wine and still have it taste amazing is like trying to rewrite DNA code with a fat crayon.

Texture, the underappreciated lug, is toothless and predictable without alcohol's oily velvet. And a little post-swallow heat on your breath does a lot to bind otherwise disjointed flavor elements in to the mystery we call "finish". On the molecular level, I'll bet the Barolo under my sink that at least a few other essential compounds get the Brundlefly treatment when their alcohol is yanked out.

And let's pretend for a second none of the above is true at all. Let's pretend Latour and Montrachet and Grange would taste exactly the same without alcohol. Or let's pretend there was the same profound enjoyment to be had and the same lifetime of curiosity to indulge drinking the different varieties of Snapple. Would wine occupy the place it does in our minds, in our mouths, in our economies, in our lives?

Ha!

All You Can Do Is Do What You Must

2011-07-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

If he hasn't yet already, your friend who's really into wine is waiting for his chance to cudgel you with the story of his Aha! moment starring the Aha! bottle or glass or sip that made him realize what shite he'd been drinking until fate intervened. Maybe? Probably? Circulate in wine-land long enough and you can count on hearing enough of these big bang theories to fill a Melchizedek.

So I'll spare you mine, also because telling it would require inventing some portions of history, which I don't feel qualified to do yet. Best I can do is recall the Philadelphia winter/spring of '05-'06 when, underemployed and relentlessly drunk, I found my semi-daily stops at the Pennsylvania Wine & Spirits Superstore on 12th and Chestnut becoming more about the hunt and less about the kill. Bypassing Carlo and the Captain to proceed down the pomp and circumstance of the baroquely lit wine bottle aisles were suddenly, inexplicably, the clearest part of my bleary days.

It was handy to have a new way of parrying accusations that I was, gasp, "drinking alone". No, I was pledging the noble frat of wine aficionadi, not to mention it complimented my early cooking efforts, generally Rube Goldberg interpretations of the Bisquick cookbook eaten alone in front of the sometimes-functional TV. Also on some level it was a last-ditch effort to distinguish myself. No other recent grads, as far as I knew, gave a toss about wine with any seriousness. If I was going to eat their dust in the race to success, why not drink something that would help me savor it?

Some bottles from this time linger in memory--a St. Francis Zinfandel that turned my brain to fire and then ash with its 16.5% ABV, a Le Strette Barbera D'Alba that was my first $20 lucky guess, a Felton Road Pinot Noir obscenely discounted by the PA Wine & Spirits monopoly.

It doesn't matter, my specific reactions, recollections, "tasting notes" concerning these, and as I bob rudderlessly into this summer I draw blanker and blanker blanks when questioning why my opinions on wines and Wine should matter to anyone, especially myself. To be offered blind trust from a friend seeking wine guidance, and then to actually earn it with some off-the-cuff wisdom is gratifying, satisfying, and every vanity in between. But it's getting hard to see how these little victories can support a ziggurat of hedonist values that demands you climb forever towards that endless spasm of pleasure at the top.

Eighteen months and two vocational false starts after deciding wine was IT, I was a sales grunt in a fancy NYC shop. I had the privilege of handling bottles worth $3K and up, handling the cold black AmEx cards used to purchase them, handling the first-growth egos of the cardholders. Tough work, with the true compensation being the 20-30 wines I got to taste and memorize weekly.

It wasn't enough. I craved absolute knowledge. I wanted to get closer and closer to wine itself until it clotted my pores and purpled my skin. Continuing to curate facts was well and good, but it was clear I'd never rest until I transcended the trivia and became it, a winemaker.

I recently finished working my fifth vintage in four countries in two and a half years. In the vineyard with shears, in the cellar with pumps, on the crushpad with bees and blood. I accomplished phase 1 of my mission, winning craftsmanship, intimacy with the juice, and chest-puffing war stories, all swaddled in the achy pride of manual labor.

Why, then, are my gumbooted feet again kicking pebbles at a crossroads? Other than the field's dismal $ prospects and the creeping realization that an enology degree--always a keynote of my "professional goals" spiel--is not likely to pay off for me at this point, there's no good reason not to continue this, right? I also swore to myself, the morning after accepting my first winery gig, that the twentysomething English Major waffling was over. Time to dig this and dig it deep. I would report to the cellar every day for the rest of forever, and love this work no matter how much I hated it.

This is now a meaningless memory. Which is not to say I hate or ever hated or could ever hate slugging it out in wineries--there's still nothing else I'd rather do, other than sit on my ass and hope my MacBook's chrome shell can deflect the reality of adulthood. But if this should all fall apart (or if it has already), it won't feel like a broken oath, just an earnest pep talk sparked and then immolated in an internet-scrambled head.

The real worm in this apple is how empty the "foodie" approach to life is beginning to seem. There's no harm in preferring what tastes good--way back when it was how you avoided swallowing things that would kill you. There's probably no harm in disposing of your disposable income at a quality-driven wine shop or restaurant. Something, though, is rotten in fetishizing bacon-wrapped everything and artisan whatever until you've out-gourmanded every other smug epicure in the greenmarket.

I'm disturbed by the possibility that this is the quiche in the sky I was grasping at when I traded a desk--er, salesman apron--for a forklift. No civilian would ever say their sensory skill or understanding of wine and its sister indulgences is superior to a winemaker's and expect to be taken seriously.

This was not completely lost on me at any point over the last three years. But no torture exists that would make me confess it was ever my objective. Wine was the intersection of my intellectual curiosity, my warmest, fuzziest feelings, and my desire to get really good at something. All I knew was that I wanted to shoot this magic bullet into the deepest wrinkles of my brain. If the worst case is true, if I was really motivated by arugula egotism when I junked my prior work experience and officially made college worthless by becoming a cellarhand, then the bastard snuck up on me quickly and quietly--a surgical strike worthy of SEAL Team Six.

Either way, this Jerry Maguire moment is what I get for staking my sense of purpose on the mirage of the good life, or at least a better one than yours. Whether or not it was my reason for anything, all the "lifestyle" twaddle in the glossy mags and cable food porn had me at hamachi. What would happen if I stopped caring about what I drank, or just stopped drinking? Not gonna happen at this point, but I struggle to name anything truly bad that would come from it.

I guess the ones who got it right are the men and women who do their productive jobs and attend to their families and only then seek pleasure where they may. And the great winemakers, the ones who shut out all the noise and let nature take its course.

I Don't Care If It Hurts, I Wanna Have Control

2010-07-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

In 2009, I made my first beer the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. It was a kit "Pale Ale" that sure-handedly delivered the Homebrewer's Epiphany, to wit, this shit ain't hard! From powders and syrups, fire and water, forty-odd bottles of malty, bitter quaff that no one would mistake for Sierra Nevada--in a good way or a bad way. Ten ales later the extract brewing process is automatic if not somnambulant, recipes make enough sense that I can twist them when they're begging for it, and the beers have gotten better.

There is more to do: kegging, lagering, all-grain, expansion. I just pitched my first yeast from a propagated starter. Contamination roulette, to hear it from the microbiologists. For three days a pair of loose-lidded growlers waited in my refrigerator, to the left a soggy carton of buttermilk, to the right a sourdough culture eager to make lactobacillic friends. When the moment arrived I sprayed grain alcohol on the vessels' mouths, ignited it, shook the bejeebus out of the yeast slurry, and let the wort have it.

Two weeks later it's fermented, conditioning, settling like a slo-mo snow globe. Nothing has gone wrong so all I can do is wait. Much of this is waiting. After a fury of labor when every thirty seconds dangles another chance to fuck up, I surrender the process to an army of millions. Get 'em, boys. At this point there are a hundred decisions I could have made differently--maybe better, definitely worse. But even if each was made with teutonic precision, what's to guarantee a nimble acetobacter won't slither into the fermenter just before I seal it?

The answer, obviously, is nothing. And nothing can guarantee the yeast I mail-ordered from Scottsdale last week will arrive alive. And nothing short of buying or building a mini-fridge will permanently put my mind at ease about the health of my homebrews during this infernal summer. Thinking about the beers between brewday and drinkday invariably leads to neg-head worrying, yet it somehow always works out (knock on cask). So it usually is with this sort of procedure that's theoretically delicate, but where nature seems to have your back.

I'll continue to do this because I want to imagine a beer and then drink it a month later exactly as it tasted in my mind. It never will, but by then I'll have forgotten enough of my initial vision that it won't matter. Assurance is knowing the gear was clean, the hops were fresh, the boil was strong, the vibes were good. If each brew session reveals the location of a new button I can or can't press, a new string I can or can't pull next time, I'm happy enough to follow in the dance for now. It's for that moment when the yeast is pitched and I decide to let cleanup wait a half-hour so I can drink one more from the last batch, leaving my footprints engraved on the kitchen floor in a sticky lacquer of wort.

Recent notables:

Paul Autard Chateauneuf-du-Pape "Juline" 2006: Grenache, Syrah, why bother with thirteen grapes when two will do? Purple and viscous with herby and tea-like aromas balancing huge red and black berries. Still some young tannins and finishes with the warmth you'd expect from a 15% Rhone bruiser.
Chateau Carbonnieux 1988: Acidity is at the forefront now for this one, having likely left its fruit in the Clinton years. Hay and dry grass emerge on the nose, with faint raspberry. Texturally on the toothless side, but there's still enough balance to make it worth drinking.
Sierra Nevada "Bigfoot" Barleywine Style Ale: Translucent copper-red color. Smells caramelly with pungent fruity notes. Intense hops lend a substantially bitter counterpoint to the residual sugar. Surprisingly food-friendly.

NZ5

2010-05-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

I didn't make it. With ~500 out of ~9,000 patient tonnes of fruit still hanging I split New Zealand, leaving the Cabernet Sauvignon--the perennial rear guard of vinifera harvests--to be someone else's privilege, someone else's problem. My reasons for leaving were legitimate enough, but in this life you either finish what you start or you don't. At a remote gate in the Auckland airport, I catalogued my sunburns and scabs and questioned if I still "worked the vintage". I personally managed the crushing of at least 2,500 tonnes, established dominance over a curmudgeonly 6" diameter must line, plunged fourteen tanks every morning with a pipe taller than any building in my neighborhood, and now appreciate the lye-on-the-hand scene in Fight Club better than you hopefully ever will. I worked 50, 60, 70-hour weeks.

Not being present at the end of vintage can't discount the entire experience, but there is a degree of ceremony to the whole thing--some splash an ounce of last year's wine onto the first grapes to be crushed, others (men) don't shave until the last pressed skin is out of the winery, most mark vintage's conclusion with some riff on overindulgence. Missing the end means something is missing--nothing crucial, but nothing insignificant. Like I piously bared my soul for fifty minutes of Mass before skipping out on the Benediction.

I know more about making wine as a result of working this vintage, which is all that matters. I know what Rohavin is. I know that a T-valve is very useful in a winery. I know grape presses larger than many New York apartments exist. I can only anticipate the next harvest and then the one after that, ever in search of experience.

Recent notables:

Sixpoint "Bengali Tiger" IPA: Seen-it-before bronze color. Aromas skew towards grain instead of fruit and obvious piney hop stuff, though the latter are there as well. Crisp and not too malt-sticky, opens with a serious snap of bitterness, with the hops gradually revealing themselves as the long finish takes shape. Solid example of style.
Ravenswood "Zen of Zin" Zinfandel 2007: Not a particularly chunky Zinfandel, sharper acidity than is typical. Distinguished blackberry, raspberry are nice but taste stifled. There might also be some spiciness in there trying to escape. Not much of that soul-warming Zin heat at the end. "No Wimpy Wines"? Careful, RWood. Could probably have benefited from decanting.

NZ4

2010-04-20T20:44:00.000-07:00

I watched a stewy must ooze up the inclines of the funnel-shaped hopper, seventy percent sure that it would trip the pump's automatic pressure switch before an embarrassing and costly overflow. I imagined I had personally selected the vineyard block, argued for its excellence to the check-writers, and finally declared it ready for picking on this date. The resulting wine would be a referendum on my instincts and ability as a winemaker. The level continued to rise and I wanted to switch the pump on manually, overriding the automatic sensor and interrupting the communication between the three separate machines performing the crush. Less than three inches to overflow now. My hand on the knob, my head turning to see who was watching. Beige foam reached the hopper rim and wobbled over the precipice just as a futuristic hum signaled the pump coming to life. A six-ounce trickle of magenta juice drizzled to the floor and then the must sank towards the hopper outlet, faster and faster, on its way to the fermenter tank as someone else's Malbec.

Recent notables:

Mountain View Zinfandel 2002: No, it's not from Lodi. It's from New Zealand and is the last thing I expected to find, much less find excellent, on the North Island. Dark but translucent the way a good Z should be, pleasant alcohol-heavy nose, all jam and spice and heat on the palate with some Pinot Noir-esque bright red fruit notes finishing con brio.

NZ3

2010-03-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

Harvest is late, held back by rain I never saw. Time to scrub and spray and imagine the winery alive--augers twisting, presses inflating, pumps grinding. Soggy grapes basking in late summer heat, rediscovering their balance. Botrytis tossed aside. I get nervous. It feels like the groggy ten minutes before taking a standardized test, settling in the hard chair, arranging my pencils.

Recent notables:

Trinity Hill "The Gimblett" 2007: Rich and soft, red berry flavors with darkness to spare. Chocolaty finish. Impeccable Merlot character and maybe the best red wine I've had in NZ so far.

NZ2

2010-02-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

Through the ozone hole, the sun's intensity is amazing. In a violent flash, a crusty pipe fitting finally gives in to a desperately torqued spanner. Two feral bite marks scar the worker's thumb, one pumping bright, thin blood across his palm and down his wrist, the other turning sickly black under the almost-broken skin. It's OK, despite an onlooker's concern. It has to be OK. Lift with your legs. Righty tighty.

It is a lot of juice and wine, a lot of value lost if the brain is in the wrong place at the wrong time. There will be little cuts and strains and caustic burns, but skin and ligaments regenerate faster than confidence.

Recent notables:

Allan Scott Wines Sauvignon Blanc 2008: Refreshing but still substantial mouthfeel. Great white-gold color without much green. Fruit over grass and herbs--melon, fig, pear. Excellent.
Gunn Estate Pinot Noir 2008: Very dark color suggests overconcentration, confirmed by the stewed aromas and gummy texture. There are some intriguing flavor elements here--jam and minerals--but in the end it's too graceless.
Monteith's Summer Ale: Ugh, the first loser from this otherwise great Kiwi brewery. Watery and dominated by a cola off-flavor.

NZ1

2010-02-19T20:32:00.000-08:00

Updating this from Napier is going to be tricky because I'm limited to coin-op internet kiosks, which are expensive and usually block access to this site when they pick up the word "fisting" in this post. I'm starting work on Monday--not sure if fruit is coming in yet, so not sure if it's going to be a smooth or brutal transition to doin' it in a big winery. Stay focused, stay focused, stay focused. You are not afraid of the Merlot, the Merlot is afraid of you.

Recent Notables:

Kilkenny: Not exactly Guinness Lite, but a similar soft mouthfeel and subtle bitterness. Cream ales are OK by me if they usually taste like this.
Speight's Golden Lager: Somewhere between a crappy American adjunct-infested pilsner and the real thing from Deutschland, this is a good thirst-quencher but not worth the NZ$7 it costs in bars here.
Macs Sassy Red Ale: I don't get why this is billed as a bitter--it's vigorously but elegantly carbonated, very clear, and has intense aroma hopping reminiscent of good IPA's back home. This is probably my go-to beer for the next couple of months.

E noho rā

2010-02-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

Off to New Zealand for the next ten weeks, with no intention but to make excellent wines.

Recent notables:

Allegrini Valpolicella Classico 2007: At first taste, grandstanding sharp red cherry stuff almost suggests Sangiovese. Then an out-of-left-field peardrop note awkwardly evokes above-average Beaujolais. Ending on a vanilla plot twist worthy of M. Night, this McValpolicella has some typicity but ultimately takes too long making its point.
Hill of Content Shiraz 2005: Rich, coughdroppy black fruit quickly asserts alpha status over listless, dull acidity and tannins. Sawdusty oak cheers from the sidelines.
Allan Scott Wines Pinot Noir 2007: The slightly funky berry flavors that make this varietal interesting are well-represented here, but it was impossible to ignore the obvious bubbles quivering around the bowl of the glass and breaking for the surface every two seconds. This wine was fizzy. Maybe, hopefully, a one-in-a-thousand flawed bottle.
Homebrewed "Spin-Out" Stout: Multiple freak-outs over the health of this beer's fermentation have proved unwarranted. The end result is a dark, brooding, espressoesque brew that delivers great enjoyment week after bottling. Beneath a creamy tan head, six different hops counter the primally sweet, savory malt with a bitter jolt of electricity.

I Thirst

2010-01-31T19:36:00.000-08:00

Between November 2007 and October 2008 I tasted 1500 wines, give or take. Not a number that's gonna make Vaynerchuk weep with jealousy, but it puts in context the fact that claiming 200 more between October 2008 and now would be a stretch. I won't say that changes in my fortunes and circumstances this past year+ have made me more ignorant of wine writ large, just that my intake of the stuff has become way more... protectionist.

This is tough to deal with. I miss discovering my way through flights of this and verticals of that, knuckle-slapping my palate into obedience. As someone who does very little traveling, my window on foreign and wonderful terroirs is now opaque with grime. Selfishly, it stings knowing the wines I would have had access to last year are still out there, and other people are tasting them.

Worst is the plaintive wail of a goal abandoned. When I was doing loads of tasting, I thought I was finally going to get the autodidact thing right for once. I can blind-taste an apple and know what it is because I've eaten thousands of apples. It works the same for grenache, right? The more you taste it, the better you know it.

It occurs to me now how many times I've used that last sound byte--true as it may be--as a cheap excuse to get hammered. And to save this post from total dishonesty, I can't deny that my "new" "life" has fostered a far deeper understanding of a few varietals from root to glass. I appreciate the reminder that a shift in focus is rarely the same as failure, but I still miss the hell out of drinking Burgundy three times a week.

Recent notables:

Chateau Bel-Air 2007: The cheapest Bordeaux I could find--AOC Bordeaux, of course--came on strong with a tartish blast of vague fruit, revealed two glasses in to resemble grape soda. I found myself imagining a scrawny plot of merlot forced into fire-sale Bergerac soil, and dust clouds blowing across the vast obscurity of the Bas-Medoc. Hard to finish.
Groth Cabernet Sauvignon 2005: Dark stuff with decent wood tannins providing structure where the low acidity falls short. Incredibly intense berry flavors, but not a wine that's going to make CA believers out of old world snotties.
Indaba Shiraz 2008: Warm (at any serving temperature), sweet, a fruit bomb with a little gamey depth, this wine pushes all my buttons. Anyone who whines about "overripe" modern reds can just keep walking--they won't be missed.
Jam Jar Sweet Shiraz 2009: A polarizer, this. Though not as sticky as the av-er-idge Port, Jam Jar is heavy, sugary, and sure to freak out drinkers who aren't expecting this sort of thing. Priced for everyday consumption, it has varietal character and ultimately makes perfect sense--basically a marginally sweeter version of the Indaba Shiraz. Surprise! They're made by the same guy.
Southern Tier Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale: The only pumpkin ale I had in fall '09 I didn't want to spit out, i.e. the only one I had that prioritized pumpkin flavor over cinnamon/clove/allspice bullshit. The 7.9% ABV demands you sip slowly, which is the only way to get everything that's going on in this exemplary ale that would be great with or without the cucurbita.
Homebrewed "Easy Tiger" Kolsch: When I whip out another post a year from now, it will be about my odyssey into homebrewing. This one, that I've been drinking constantly for the past month, is IMHO a respectable stab at a German pilsner without the temperature-control capabilities necessary for lagering. Light body without sacrificing maltiness, complex hoppy finish?

Into The Black

2009-01-30T20:04:00.001-08:00

Until Wednesday, my only reaction to "Donn Reisen" would have been "Must we keep taking orthographical liberties with our first names?" I knew of Paul Draper, the winemaker and public face of Ridge, but the rest of the iceberg was underwater, out of sight.

Donn Reisen was the President--the top businessman, the irresistible evangelist, presumably the glue of the whole thing. I'll give the press the benefit of the doubt and presume that his death earlier this week was in fact a gun suicide. He was a sixty year-old man with glasses, groomed mustache, tucked-in shirt. Head of an A-list winery. A far cry from my generation's suicide icon, Kurt (Donald!) Cobain. But now their stories converge on the last page, the only one many will ever read.

This happens, this will always happen. Most are able, consciously or not, to stanch the flow of emotional sewage perpetually threatening to drown the brain and heart. A few aren't, and we remember them as some combination of cowardly, tragic, weak, beautiful, eternally damned. We want a few more minutes with them so we can wrap them in a furious hug before beating out their pain.

I still don't really get this one. Donn Reisen, you had the wine world by the grapes. When Monte Bello scored its latest 95+, were you in your office with the door locked and your palms pressed to your eyes? How often were you the guy in the room everyone recognized, wanted to meet, wanted to impress? I guess that gets old, like it did for Hemingway, Marilyn, Primo Levi, Ian Curtis, and all the others who couldn't even look on bright side of the sun. Still I, forty months out of college and adrift in the world but for my love of wine, would do anything to have your life. The visible part, at least.

To me, Ridge = Zinfandel. I haven't been in a right enough place at a right enough time to taste Monte Bello yet, but a Lytton Springs 2005 I had last year kicked doors open. Then the "Three Valleys" 2006, a Zin blend that looks insane on paper but alongside juicy red flesh and hearty vegetables is probably the best $15-$20 red wine on earth. Most recent was the Paso Robles 2006, which struck me as way too graceful to be 14.6%. All magnets for critical and consumer acclaim, and more importantly wonderful wines. How great must it feel to have any hand in their creation, let alone be the man responsible for guiding them to our glasses. It scares me shitless to know that there exists a darkness capable of overpowering this.

Donn Reisen could probably have Monte Bello with his lunch every day and swap untouchable bottles with the President of (insert cult winery) at will. Somehow he burned out, and the sad fact is that for most of us, he'll fade away as we hobble through our week towards another gloomy Sunday. Why do wine's celestial pleasures give life's gremlins the chance to catch up?

Recent notables:

Domaine Barry Cotes-du-Rhone 2006 - Translucent maroony purple. Nose might be more spice than fruit--particularly black pepper from, probably, Grenache. OK tannins and sharp acidity makes this an acceptable "food wine" (is that just a euphemism?), but it doesn't quite have the hedonistic gravitas that makes lots of CDRs such steals.
Marquee Wines "Classic GSM" (Australia) 2006 - The sugariest "dry" red wine I've ever had. And it's still 15%! Powerful stuff. I admit I was drinking it out of a plastic souvenir cup (think baseball game beers) which may have contributed a strange-but-not-gross bubblegummy aroma. Massive body without much in the way of tannins, and plenty of juicy berry fruit (what an embarrassment this would be without tons of fruit). Not bad for the price if you like HUGE, though I'll stick with Pillar Box Red until it breaks the $15 barrier.
Excelsior "Paddock" Shiraz 2007 - Inky with a floral/pine foresty nose, this is a balling example of how South Africa rolls when it comes to Shiraz. Lots of curranty fruit in the mouth, and impressive acid for a blockbuster wine. Excelsior is 3-for-3 on my scorecard, this one joining their great Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay as definite keepers.

The Last Bulwark

2009-01-29T09:08:00.001-08:00

If you like wine and you like the internets, you probably read Tom Wark's blog already.

If not, please start here. A kindred spirit.

Recent notables:

Loosen Bros. "Dr. L" Mosel Riesling 2007: Aha, the solution to the Willi Schaefer dilemma posed in the last notes. Cold steel with peachy typicity, near-perfect sugar/acid balance, all comfortably under $15.
Hogue Cellars Cabernet-Merlot 2004: Inky and viscous. Dark berries adorn a curvy profile with toasty caramel that will undoubtedly scare some away, but is just fine by me. Not much in the way of tannins, but in fairness it's four years old.

Fifteen Rounds With Apollo Greed, or, You've Gotta Be $$$$ing Kidding Me

2008-12-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

I.

"But surely, Emperor," said Ausonius, "Surely the Gods would better favor the munificence you would demonstrate bestowing this wealth upon your subjects. The aqueduct at Nemausus is near collapse. . ."

There was a small knife now in Caligula's left hand, absently stroking the skin of a green apple.

"My dear poet, I am. . . disappointed," he began, his eyes on a painting hanging from the far wall. "Disappointed that a Roman of your renowned good taste would stand opposed to the most magnificent feast the world has ever seen. Spices are already en route from Persia and Thracian bulls have arrived for slaughter." The poet sighed. "Ausonius, this will be the ultimate legacy of my glorious reign. I asked you here because I wish your own Burdigalian wines to accompany the celebration. You will pour them beside me, your own glory recorded for all eternity. But if this offends you. . . you are free to go."

"Caesar," said Ausonius. He was unsure how to continue. "Please hear my humblest apologies. I would never deign to question your divine wisdom. It will be the honor of my life to stand beside you on this wonderful night. I will send for my finest wines at once."

"Thank you, Ausonius." The emperor let some time pass. "You may go." Ausonius kissed his outstretched hand and left.

Caligula stabbed the apple. "He is never to speak before the Senate again. No poet is ever to again." White knuckles twisted the knife until the fruit's core cracked and split into three chunks. "Fanciful, idealistic hearts--incapable of understanding matters of state. How dare he attack my decisions about the welfare of Rome?" He turned to Macro, the centurion at his right.

"Shall I inform him of your displeasure, Caesar?" the soldier asked.

"Yes," hissed Caligula. "And Macro--" Macro paused, having started for the door.

"Bring back every drop of his blood."

II.

A storm descended on the afternoon of the feast. Two men died in the scramble to erect tents in the palace garden. Caligula sulked in his chambers all day, occasionally snapping orders for things he neither needed nor wanted. Late in the afternoon he told his head servant to cancel the event and send everyone away. Having survived the post longer than any of his predecessors, the old man knew better and simply nodded. He had a dram of morphine sent to the emperor and continued directing the chaos in the garden.

The storm continued into the evening, but by then Caligula was under the tents in full regalia and apparent good spirits. The meager attendance was lost on him as he drank prodigiously from a dark bottle labeled with ornate Gallic script and spoke loudly to no one in particular. Guests ate ravenously, moreso out of nervousness than than appetite. Macro carved the first bull at sunset, and the eighth three hours later.

Caligula, now hopelessly drunk, was haranguing a senator at the central table. The squat politician's gestures of agreement were punctuated by reflexive lurches backwards when the emperor spat or leaned into his face to underscore a point. Finally the senator, himself saturated with meat and drink, turned sideways and emptied his gullet into a shrub. The table howled at the percussive retches harmonizing with the damp cadence of vomit striking soil.

The emperor joined the laughter at first but was too intoxicated to experience joy. He looked indifferently around his feast until he seized Macro in a long, expressionless eye contact, then raised his bottle and drank; unctuous, deep red.

III.

Meanwhile, with the American Empire declining and falling around my ankles, I banished all dialogue from my brain and took the first sip of Chateau d'Yquem 1988.

So you're a dime-a-case wine nerd: You don't have a swinging dick cellar, but you do own a tulip-shaped tasting glass, you can find Yecla on a map, touching a real Cheval Blanc label excites you indiscreetly, and somewhere along the line you've swallowed a few drops of really exquisite juice. The prospect of drinking Yquem '88 is going to occupy your daydreams for weeks. And so it did for this dweeb after floating the notion of a potluck, a potpowerball, to eight fellow pilgrims.

"With your best bottles in one hand and your best Escoffier impression in the other, the whole will spill like glowing lava over the sum of its parts," said I. Or maybe it was "Bring it on!" One best bottle was the big Y, chanced into a friend's collection by a set of circumstances that don't matter here. Fourteen others showcased different faces of scarcity, and like flags on a mini-golf course served as guideposts for a 360-minute dinner that unfolded in shameproof degrees.

I haven't had much caviar outside of the orange measles speckling $4 California rolls at quickie sushi joints, so a tin of domestic (no profits for Putin/Ahmadinedingdong) sturgeon eggs destined for creme fraiche-schmeared blini was an exotically exemplary way to kick things off. And when the aroma of the ocean distilled to a concentrated essence hooks up with Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1990, you just feel like finding a revolution to grind beneath your ibexskin boot. Few things get my mojo working like champagne in its last years of bright yellow color. An old-souled eighteen, Grande Dame 1990 was brassy and rich with a fizz so profound it felt like The Brothers Karamazov tapped in morse code on the tongue.

As insurance against anticlimax, we opened the Yquem next. This is not a wine that invites food-pairing creativity from mortals. So it was seared foie gras on toasted brioche with balsamic and sherry vinegar reduction. A lump of Roquefort stood by on each plate as, hah!, a palate cleanser.

Monsieur Lur Saluces, what have you done? The laser acidity hit me first, even ahead of a sweetness that I doubt exists anywhere else on earth. I felt compelled to make mental tasting notes, knowing this would be my only chance for a long time to codify MY OWN IMPRESSION OF CHATEAU D'YQUEM. No dice, of course. I did picture the candied peel of an especially edenic orange after the third or fourth sip, but try as I might it was so overwhelming I just couldn't bend it like Broadbent. Whatever. Half the bottle was still there, waiting.

Ordurvs over, the idea was to have whites before reds. A silky pea and basil soup stropped the razor edges of F.X. Pichler Gruner Veltliner Federspiel "Klostersatz" 2006 and Helfrich Riesling Grand Cru "Steinklotz" 2005. Pichler is a freaking genius. Every time fate has thrown his wines my way, my definition of "intensity" has been stretched, strained, ripped to confetti. I love them all.

Diver scallops in an eloquent cantaloupe-mint sauce propped up fatter wines. First, the symmetrically balanced Rustenberg "Five Soldiers" Chardonnay 2006, the finest non-Burgundy chard I've had excluding Dan Goldfield's single vineyard Sonoma bulls-eye. Then, two Chenin Blancs--De Morgenzon 2006, a stately ambassador from the cultivar's adopted home, and Clos de la Coulee de Serrant 2004, Nicolas Joly's argument for Chenin's immortality.

A word on Coulee de Serrant--legendary as much for its quality as its winemaker's insistence that that the berries are only harvested under a waxing gibbous moon with tungsten carbide pruning shears soaked for exactly seven hours in a baptismal font (not exactly true), this incredible wine is a front-runner for the greatest white I've ever drunked. After decanting about 90 minutes before pouring, the cognac/Pale Ale color forecasted something very special:

Liquid pennies from heaven. Bracingly dry with a hazelnutty depth that one usually only encounters in things oxidized, this wine illuminates every centimeter of the palate like a pinball bleeping bonus lights as it hurtles downramp. More, please, forever.

Reds began with Argyle "Spirithouse" Pinot Noir 1999 and Pisoni Pinot Noir 1998. Duck confit, duh. Spirithouse packed more luscious fruit than I was expecting from a 1990s American pinot--maybe I assumed they were all veggie-flavored ersatz Burgundies back then. Wrong! An eerie yarn explaining the proprietary name lent a toasty campfire vibe. The Pisoni, then, was a visceral, "wow, this is really #*!%ing good" wine. I almost let the lamb and hen-of-the-woods mushroom ravioli I was tending disintegrate in the pot--couldn't keep my face out of the glass.

IV.

We also had:

Tenuta Dell'Ornellaia 2005
Bodegas Los Astrales Ribera del Duero 2005
Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 2004
Chateau Branaire-Ducru, St.-Julien, 1995
Witch Creek Winery Aglianico 2006
Sandeman Royal Corregidor Rich Oloroso Sherry

Sorry to go to digest form here, but I feel this account Thelma and Louising into the abyss of long-winded wine bullshit. Also, my senses were blurring at this point in the dinner. Getting sloshed with an Ornellaia coming down the pipe is dumb anywhere, but what the hell was I supposed to do--spit the Yquem? Or maybe just not have any delusions about the effect of eleven glasses of wine, and front-load the lineup with the best of the best. Or just cut the "lineup" down to size. Maybe dinners like this are bad idea. I don't have a job at the moment, and this was six hours I could have spent looking for one. Or doing anything other than simulating wealth that should be punishable by death these days (kidding, kidding, stop writing my name on that list, c'mon).

Though the expense was modest--the bottles I contributed were bought in better times, and the tab for ground lamb shank, a few ounces of foie gras, and flowers for the table wasn't crippling--an evening like this leaves a disorienting reference point for pleasure. This isn't the venue to dissect the morality of indulgence, but suffice it to say I indulge all the damn time. Regardless of whether spiking the luxury mainline like the above-described garden of gustatory delights is inherently OK, fact is that doing it makes licking Mammon's boots after every quotidian "do I really need this -----?" dilemma that much easier. I can live with this, uneasily.

Now, the experience of drinking Yquem and Grande Dame and Coulee de Serrant and Ornellaia is surely worth something from the appreciation side. The clueless conclusion would be that once the universe's only Premier Cru Superieur weaves its spell on the nervous system, no Barsac will ever be man--er, wine enough to satisfy the lucky drinker. I think not. Possibilities can only open when a grape/region/whatever's ultimate potential is in the sensory trophy case. Certain bottles of garbage will be more quickly identified, as will undervalued lovelies that you always liked but never realized tasted almost like Yquem! Another happy result is a generally more perceptive palate. After surviving the beautiful ordeal of the indescribable--yes, they are indescribable, sorry Suckling--aromas and flavors in wines like these, the simpler characteristics of more earthbound bottles are easier to pin down and name.

V.

Did you hear about the Park Avenue tax lawyer who volunteered at the soup kitchen and poured one of his Lafite 1959s into the minestrone? No, I just made that up. Shut up about the recession. We'll review the meaning of living within our means, then live the hell out of the whole thing.

The dinner guests were long gone, and I had been cleaning for three hours. It was 4 AM, my fingertips were shriveled by bleach, and I had manslaughtered two Riedels and a big Pyrex. Atop the begging-for-mercy dishwasher was a sweaty half-glass of Yquem. I shot it like a double Jameson and flicked off the light.

Ebrius occurrit quoties tibi, vinum
Non nimium, dicis, sed bibit ille malum.

Recent notables:

Red Hook Long Hammer IPA - Well here's everything great about IPAs--perfumy, ass-kicking bitter hops, a little seamlessly-integrated sugar. Not exactly "extreme" but very intense. Though as a Brooklynite, I think the Red Hook Brewery (Portsmouth, NH) should have to relocate or change its name.
Red Tail Lager - Two things going for it, going all the way--it's one of the finest beers (the finest, IMH,H,O) to cost typically under $8 per six-pack, and it's a really delicious, complex lager. I don't find many of the latter. Singed orange color, big barley taste, refreshing concise finish. I'm stocking up for the summer already.
Willi Schaefer Riesling Kabinett Mosel Graacher Domprobst 2007 - Beguiling perfume of peaches and lime, initially chalky in the mouth with citrus stuffing that falls halfway between lime and grapefruit. Enough residual sugar to put it safely in the "off-dry" basket. This is great stuff--if it were half the price I'd drink it three times a week.
Chateau La Vielle Cure 2005 - It's Joe Calzaghe's cocked right hand--just leading you around the ring for now, not quite ready to make your head spin. One senses tightly wound nuggets of really delicious fruit not asserting themselves at the moment over strong acidity and tannins. Still a great Bordeaux value, this is one worth laying down and having next year. (Note: LVC's second wine '05 is kickin', right now.)
Chateau Clarke 2004 -Drinking this made me realize, with some melancholy, that 2004 was a long time ago. This is drinking great. When I worked in a wine shop a year ago I operated under the assumption that '04 Bordeaux wasn't "ready". Maybe true for Leoville-Barton, but not this Rothschild outpost in Listrac, which combines soft, giving Merlot touchstones (blackberry, stewed raspberry, licorice) with a stout graphitey backbone that proves (to me, at least) that the left bank is still keeping it real.
Caol Ila Islay Single Malt Scotch 12 Yr. - A mellow Islay that spares us the hyper-assertive smoke of Laphroaig or Ardbeg. Nice, plush (tropical?) fruit aromas add a welcome dimension to the nose.
Highland Park Orkney Single Malt Scotch 18 Yr. - Much has been written about this whisky, sometimes with an extra jigger of hyperbole. That aside, it is hedonistic and very good. I don't think I've had a better single malt. Glenmorangie Nectar d'Or is close, but an unambiguous silver medalist. This has a layer of flavor that is easy to understand if you can picture the difference between brown butter and regular melted butter. And a very long finish. Towers above M********s that are far more expensive.

No Subject

2008-12-13T15:08:00.001-08:00

Reader, please invest five minutes in this article.

Then, forgive this new, back-dated post.

Cheers.

Recent notables:

Ipswich IPA - Classic amber color, fantastically bitter without being too floral or fruity. For real puritans only.
Chateau Verdu 2005 - Apparently the only way to make bad wine in Bordeaux in 2005 was to urinate in each barrique. Another cheap, obscure gem, this time from a St.-Emilion satellite. Black cherry and espresso aromas set up the rich, spicy, pruny palate presence. Finish is impressive for a wine that most of us can probably afford.

King of Kings

2008-10-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

"Beer has regained a comfortable margin over wine when U.S. drinkers are asked to name which alcoholic beverage they most often drink. In recent years, wine had narrowed the gap, including pulling slightly ahead in 2005 (though not by a significant margin), but for the first time since 2002, beer enjoys a better-than-double-digit advantage over wine. " -Gallup.com

Statistics? Polls? Gallup? Pshaw. The wine vs. beer narrative has been fairly consistent in post-Atkins America, with the gentle dignitary of the good life gaining ever-so-righteously on its bloaty, vomit and violence-inducing malted nemesis. How far the noble barley spritzer has fallen since "Beer Street and Gin Lane", the best publicity it ever had.

But now, if we believe the statistic, the trend wanes. We do believe the statistic. Even with all the rocks one can throw at Gallup's methodology (right, President Kerry ?), it's going to take more than a fad diet and Sideways for wine to knock beer to the mat in this country. And with hard times already squeezing us, $11.99 is probably better spent on a reliably delicious and relatively long-lasting 6 of Dogfish Head than a reedy Corbieres or a sticky Jumilla.

I can live with this. Beer is nearly as interesting as wine, and so long as the 42% of drinkers who prefer beer are preferring good beer, whiny oenofascists can suck a cork. What a good time it is to love beer in America, sea to shining sea dotted with craft breweries turning out big, rich pilsners, lagers, stouts, etc. that can square off with anything trickling out of Europe.

Though I cut my teeth (literally, one time) on gut-rotting bullet 40s, early encounters with the locally abundant Brooklyn Lager etched a love for dark, bold, bitter flavors into my palate. I recall eleventh grade, clandestinely double-fisting Brooklyn IPA's at a Christmas party full of indecipherable grown-ups. So floral and sticky and cold, I wanted to cram a stent down my gullet and let the hoppy cataract cascade down forever. As evil French archaeologists might say, I grew up with this.

Now technically grown up, beer is a primary source of pleasure and fascination for me and remains the preferred aperitif at potentially overlong dinners. Despite promoting neither the fizzy/acidic appetite stimulation of Champagne nor the drunk munchies of martinis, a gently overflowing pint glass with a 1.5" foamy head perfectly bridges the gap between cocktails and dinner rolls. Or maybe it satisfies The Preppy Handbook's purpose for social drinking (giving your hands something to do) better than a fleeting glass of wine.

Or maybe it's time to get to the damn point, which is: I have now tasted Utopias--the most elusive, legendary, mystical, brew of all save a cultish outlier or two.

What is there to blurt about a "beer" that has double the alcohol of a strong wine, costs as much as Lynch-Bages and is illegal in twelve states? How about. . .O M G. Nothing, not Warre's 1963, not Delamain Tres Venerable, nothing could have prepared me for the warm, flat, viscous, and mind-explodingly delicious sensations of Jim Koch's apotheosis. What's that flavor? Maple syrup. They brew it with maple syrup. And so much else is intertwined in its cereally ether that I make no excuses for confusing almonds and apricots or conflating vanilla and violets. Or for breaking out a stopwatch and timing the 73-second finish. Pancakes are unworthy.

If beer's continued supremacy in the American liver means more brewers aspiring to the standard of Utopias, botrytis on anyone who complains about wine playing Martin Prince to beer's Jimbo Jones. I will always come out swinging when haters impugn American viticulture, but I embrace the fact that hops and barley own a big wedge of our fermented future.

Recent notables:

Domino de Eguren "Codice" VDLT Castilla 2006 - Medium-bodied not-too-oaky Tempranillo has few assertive flavors and good structure, making it a solid choice for pairing with leftovers (or for Sangria). I'm also a fan of this domaine's dirt-cheap "Protocolo".
Urban "Uco" Torrontes 2006 - Crisp but round, this typical (in a good way) wine from Salta, Argentina matches food-friendly acidity with notes of pear and white flowers. Holds up well after being open for a day, an increasing plus as the economy swirls down the commode.
Louis Jadot Moulin à Vent Château des Jacques "Clos de Rochegres" 2005 - It's hard not to feel like a sucker dropping $40 on a Beaujolais, but this Pommard-esque colossus pulverizes such reservations with the first whiff of its dark cherry, rosepetal, and vanilla cologne. Substantial tannins have no trouble handling red meat, and probably provide the stuffing for 10 years of cellaring. Had me wondering how Pinot would behave in Beaujolais terroir.
Duvel Belgian Ale - The glass matters. I hate to admit it, but this outstanding beer loses its fruity, bready nuance in a pint glass. The hoppy spine and velvety mouthfeel are still there, but the aromas have already dispersed too much by the time the glass reaches your face. Invest in something bowl-shaped if you're going to drink this.

Let's Do This

2008-09-19T00:45:00.000-07:00

(Insert boilerplate apology for infrequent updates.)

I'm leaving for Europe. I'll be back in a month. There will be saignée.

A wine I had a while back and still remember:

Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc 2007: Sharp and intoxicating nose of toast and orange peel. Bewildering-in-a-good-way flavors of wildflowers and Xmas tree crisscross the palate and follow through to the rich, high-acid finish. No wonder everyone is looking for this.

Hysterical Blindness

2008-09-07T22:29:00.000-07:00

Bordeaux makes me sick. Wines of Bordeaux, that is. That are. Argh! Not from flavor (still reliably incredible), C₂H₆O content (still relatively low), or price tag (still frequently absurd), but rather the vertigo I suffer teetering cruciform on the edge of a Riedel top-heavy with Girondin ambrosia.

It's not the wine itself, but the notion of Bordeaux that sandbags the drinking experience with an obligation to make it count, to make it definitive. The thought that all wine strives for Bordeaux's brand recognition and--generally speaking--sensory impact spins the head. The pressure is felt in all four corners of the tongue, and discipline in tasting is uprooted. Eventually the inner ear stops making promises. Sick!

A function of inexperience, bien sur. The last time Emile Peynaud had any such problem he was probably wearing culottes. I cling to a dopey confidence that enough drinking will obliterate all such "notions" and each palate-glazing of Bordeaux (and Burgundy, Rioja, Carneros Pinot, etc.) will one day be nothing more than what it is.

This understood, I was happy to confront six veiled bottles of BDX on a hazy t-shirt Sunday near the end of the summer. Blind tasting. I've described my aspirations and frustrations spinning the wheel in this spooky art, but doing it with Bordeaux has a distinctly game-seven feel. What would prove mastery of craft better than arranging each piece of La Conseillante 2000's sensory 411 into the checkmate of identification?

I brought a Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte 2003, motivated by Decanter's piece on the Cathiards' run of accomplished vintages this decade. After wrapping the bottle in shimmering polyethylene, I sliced the capsule to reveal a cork luxuriant with pale blue mold. God damn it. No equivocating about a corked bottle's educational benefits could cast this as anything other than a heartbreaking waste. The first glasses of a deep purple sludge were already circulating, so I muttered a warning that there was a dud in the chamber and started nosing.

1. Anderson's Conn Valley Vineyards "Right Bank" (Napa), 2005

"Pomerol... I'd have to say it's a Pomerol." I pierced the swollen silence, intent on drawing first blood. At that moment I felt confident in my assertion. The wine was sweet, silky, low acid, and lacking the operatic thunder of Cabernet Sauvignon. I have tasted maybe ten Pomerols in my life, but am well-versed in reviews and stereotypes. It had not occurred to me that there are wineries in California that make a declared effort to replicate Bordeaux cuvees. A noble whiff.

2. Chateau Grand-Puy-Lacoste (Pauillac), 1998

Curranty, medium-bodied, cheese-loving acidity pinned the wine's origin to the east bank of the great estuary. Tilting the glass revealed a brick crayon dissolving into a mist. "This has to be at least four years old," I offered. "It's not rich enough to be an '03, so I've gotta go with '04". Wines from the .com boom were outside my thinking-box at that moment. No magic number exists for when a claret emerges from sour adolescence, but I would have assumed that after ten years an above-average Grand-Puy-Lacoste would be ready for a command performance. This one sulked in the corner. To get it right I would have needed to taste a mellow depth that the 1998 probably needs three more years in bottle to show. I've since had an "Aha!" moment with a Phelan-Segur 1993 that I think will head off this sort of mistake in the future.

3. Chateau Gloria (G-L-O-R-I-A, err... St. Julien), 2005

My notes from this are sparse, but I remember this struck me as too soft and fruity to peg as either St. Julien or 2005. Somewhere in my ensuing litany about St.-Emilion and supplelicious tannin was a kernel of accuracy about the wine being an overperforming fifth-growth or unclassified gem--it was quite excellent. Having had more oh-fives since this evening, and marveling each time at their accessibility, I get it now.

4. Chateau Smith-Haut-Lafitte (Pessac-Leognan) 2003

In the pourer's hand I saw the foully familiar blue capsule poking out from the bag and prepared to dance with the wet dog. But on the nose, something was amiss, namely the vile mildew odor of the cork. It smelled like...great red Bordeaux. It tasted like... sweet, generous, vanilla-saturated fruit that lacquers the midpalate and lights up the back. It was a non-disaster on par with Y2K. I'm especially grateful for this lesson that a dirty cork is meaningless, since without it I may have dumped out an unforgettable 1999 Maison Leroy Bourgogne Rouge that had the same superficial grossness.

5. Clos de L'Oratoire (St.-Emilion), 2001

No lie, we was a little drunk by now. I still marvel at pro tasters plowing through hundreds of wines in a session, even without intentional swallowing. Beyond the slurred blackberry/licorice flavors I perceived some feisty tannin, leading me to believe this '01 was three years younger--the same pothole I fell into with the Lacoste. These suckers are built to last!

6. Miles Mossop Wines "Max" (South Africa), 2004

At this point you could have given me Wild Irish Rose and told me it was Gerard Perse's latest 97-pointer. If I remember correctly, the blind-taster consensus was either "I don't know" or "blahghaghaghah". Perhaps the end of the line was the best time to encounter a spy from Stellenbosch, a Cabernet-dominated wine rounded out by 22% each Merlot and Petit Verdot (that's a lot of Petit Verdot!) After much gnashing of teeth, I suggested that it did not smell or taste like a Bordeaux. The aroma was particularly floral (the PV, methinks), and the cab giveaways in the flavor profile were underscored by gamey and chocolatey things that made Max stick out like modesty in a Jay McInerney essay.

Sorry to arrive at such a tired old saw, but a Bordeaux blend from another hemisphere is going to taste worlds different from the stuff that got President Jefferson drunk. Mr. Mossop, is, of course, aiming to make his own unique wine, and succeeding admirably. But Max and all other wines that blend Cabernets, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec, etc. will always ferment under the long shadow of "Bordeaux"--an increasingly meaningful and meaningless word that may refer to a port city, a vine-infested suburb, a blending recipe, or an unrealistic ideal. Which one, I reckon, depends on how blind you are.

Recent notables:

A. Clape Cornas 2001 - Purple color, with a very floral and blackberry-scented nose. Indisputably delicious, but is holding something back right now. Wish I could afford to lay some down.
M. Chapoutier Cotes-du-Rhone "Belleruche" 2006 - Full-bodied and exploding with fruit, this is a boffo value for under $10. Firm tannins guarantee success with any hearty meat or vegetable preparations.
Yalumba Viognier 2007 - Well, I don't expect much throwing the dice on budget viognier. Chateau-Grillet it ain't, but if you like simple, less-oaked whites made from inherently rich grapes, give it a go. Smells kind of like the inside of an apple pie before it's cooked, and has substantial acid. I'd probably prefer similarly-priced Chardonnay.
Chateau Ste. Michelle Columbia Valley Riesling 2007 - Eh. I struggle with the idea of "everyday" Riesling. This is nicely off-dry with the required acidity, but the lime/apple fruit makes its point too quickly, and there are no indications that this has the potential to develop petroleum-flavored perfection over time.

Waiting For The Barbera-ians

2008-08-31T22:49:00.000-07:00

The bottle cuts a curious figure on the table--stately and somehow blacker than a red wine container has any place being, Sicilian ruminant cartooned across the face in crisp relief. It's Fairview's "The Goat Father", a wine that I reasonably expected to be terrible based on the fact that it's affordable, from South Africa (bear with me here), and attempts to blend Shiraz, Cab Sauvignon, Merlot, Barbera, Primitivo, and other cultivars that you need a faithful hound's nose to discern.

But it was good! Sexy, translucent color, spicy nose redolent of red berries, and dueling bright/earthy flavors that land halfway between Piemonte and Paarl (technically Cameroon, but whatever). The wine is a keeper. A head-scratcher, but a keeper nonetheless. I remain intrigued by the willingness of South African winemakers to try anything, whether doing this sort of mad-scientist blending, making dirt-cheap viognier, or going the distance with a home-spliced grape.

From this Thunderdome of vinification I've found that you're as likely to get a consummately delicious wine as a disorienting sensory experience more akin to eating meat than drinking juice. The latter can be a particular hazard in "value" South African wines, where some truly bizarre flavors lurk.

The good ones, though, are wowwww. Are we looking at a gawky McDonald's All-American suffering its last bout of growing pains? Count a yes vote here. The not-so-invisible hand of U.S. taste seems to have wreaked its confusion in the early noughties and now, tasting South African wines, one senses that it's starting to marry a fierce individualism with the opulent delectability inherent in its terroir.

Having had nearly two decades to sweat out the economic poison of the apartheid regime, innovation has nowhere left to hide in the wine world's erstwhile palate of darkness. Proof is in one taste of Rudi Schultz's "suck on this, Hunter Valley" 2005 Syrah which is as mind-blowingly good as the villians in Lethal Weapon 2 were bad. Or, in Brampton's $11 "I killed the Yellow Tail kangaroo" wine from the same grape . (Preceding proprietary names not real.)

Give it 5-10 years, but I'm betting the ruthless inventiveness of South Africa will push it past its wine-producing fraternal twin Australia in the price-quality ratio of its product. Inklings of this are evident, as it just came up huge at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Gelukwensing!

Recent notables:

Chateau Pavie-Macquin 2003: Deep red color, not quite inky-purple. Rich nose of spice, ripe raspberry, stone, and violet. Soft tannins but substantial acid for a reputed fatso blockbuster. End result is a major black cherry-ish intensity that finishes forever.
Domaine J. Chartron Puligny-Montrachet "Clos du Cailleret" 2005: Glistening gold intoduces typically luxurious nose of red apple, pear, and a curious note of slate. A low-acid Puligny that's almost more a cocktail wine, albeit a supremely delicious one. Could probably use some time in bottle.
Clos Apalta 2004: Dark color that barely disperses, even at the rim. Has Rolland written all over it with sweet vanilla, blackberry, and crushed rock aromas. Velvety texture with notes of mocha and licorice on the finish. Decanting is valuable here.
Damn it, there are so many others and I just haven't been doing this enough.

Sense For Sale

2008-08-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

"I'm stupid rich, got r*tarded money

I'm special ed, I got special bread" ~G-Unit

As the only legitimate partnership of luxury and drugs, wine offers endless opportunities for financial idiocy. To their credit, 50 and Tony Yayo never dropped 80% of their weekly income on a bottle of '98 Margaux. Still, there is no shortage of "special bread" changing hands in the booze game. The consumoisseurs who know how much better Serralunga Barolo ages in a bowlegged garcon wine rack and how nothing carbonates your johnson like a skankified bottle of Piper-Heidsieck will always have a gaping hole in which to jettison their cash.

I wonder if I've suckled the bait myself by purchasing the red wine edition of Le Nez du Vin, a kit promising to hone your all-important olfactories via twelve vials of concentrated scents--cassis, raspberry, licorice, violet, etc. There is some accompanying literature more akin to a pamphlet than a book. The whole thing is expensive enough that the price per milliliter of the liquid essences is on par with an above-average vintage of Mouton.

I've been "seriously" into wine for lo these past two years, and I guess I've grown impatient with the development of my sensory apparatus. Between publicly misidentifying Cabernet as Chianti more than once and regularly scourging myself with Jay McInerney's boasts of his blind-tasting mojo, I yank corks and crack Stelvins every day in fear that I'm doing more wanton consuming than wise considering.

Jean Lenoir, assuming he exists/existed, had me in mind when he created his product. Me and everyone else tortured by our inability to parse the fury of white noise that roars in our brains every time we nose a glass: Black Cherry? Truffle? Red Cherry? Chocolate? Strawbecznxcj,dncksdvkn... Ability to confidently name these elements and arrange them into a tidy profile of the wine's character is the men-from-boys divider of intelligent drinking. The names themselves are fraught with complications, but they're the only train running if we're to get as far away from "it just smells like wine" as possible.

Sold. To all of us dreading mediocrity in wine appreciation, Le Nez du Vin represents a blast of buckshot for the wolf at the door. If RMPJr is willing to insure his schnozzle for a cellar-temperature million, I can part with a the cost of a top Meursault to make every red wine I drink from now on more. . . sensible.

Most importantly, I've had it for two weeks and it's working. I can remember what cassis smells like, and the differences between white and green peppercorns. I'm recalling the scent of blackberry right now--something I could never do before getting these neat little bottles, even though I've always scarfed blackberries by the handful. Unraveling these olfactory threads with a bullish glass of Madiran hoofing the dust in front of you is another story, but it's an incomprehensible one if you can't place the scents to begin with.

I believe this was a good investment, and I'll probably get the white wine counterpart when I run out of guesses about the ethereal aromas in my next bottleful of bub.

Recent notables:

Stone "Ruination" IPA - Alluring dark amber color. Aromas not as floral as many IPA's. Intense--not f'ing around with the bitterness. For serious IPA addicts only.
Chateau Rouget 2001 - Brooding low-acid Pomerol has developed rich, mellow red fruit flavors with an edge of earth. Velvety and easy to drink. The finish is pure smoke on the water and I guess you could describe the color as... Deep Purple? Hah!
Excelsior Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 - Opulent and full with dark berry/plum flavors and a sticky kiss of residual sugar. Great value for anyone who likes porty reds.
Concha y Toro "Casillero del Diablo" 2006 - Restrained without being wimpy, featuring peppery spice and earth flavors framing black black cherries. The bookend to the Excelsior on the "Great cabs for under $8" shelf.
Mitolo "Jester" Shiraz 2006 - Not as syrupy as some other Parker darlings, but with supposedly 20% dried grapes used in the blend, this doesn't lack for weight. No over-the top flavors--instead, smoke, blueberry, etc. converse civilly in a well-balanced Shiraz.
Salomon Finniss River Shiraz 1998 - Bet you don't have this in your cellar. I was worried that it would be a dead dog, but its core of tarry fruit hasn't gone anywhere. Age has brought out some bonus acidity and what I'm going to guess they call "terroir". The pale maroon halo around a deep center color may be the most memorable thing here.
Domaine de Blanes Muscat Sec 2007 - If you will, glance at the prior post about whites I can't stand. I wish every "refreshing" wine tasted like this tropical, honeysuckle-drenched beauty. Still bone dry, great acidity, and crisp as H20.
Mas de Daumas Gassac Rouge 2006 - Not the reputed "Latour of the Languedoc", but a serious red nonetheless. Cassis, dark cherry, and loamy earth rides in on chewy tannins and takes an impressively long time to quit your mouth. Supposedly ages forever--anyone know where to find an old bottle?
Chateau Pibarnon 2004 - Clear aroma of... Prosciutto? Won't find that in Le Nez du Vin, but it's unmistakable on the Pibarnon nose. I'd heard cautionary tales about these Bandol bruisers, but this is more elegant and less gamey than your typical Monastrell or Mourvedre-heavy Rhone.

Doloroso

2008-08-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

It's August and I'm tired of scrawny, sour white wines being canonized as "refreshing", "light", "crisp", "pure", etc. by sniveling Parker-bashers who hate America(n wines) on principle and think oak is a four-letter word.

Deep breath.

Spain is responsible for lots of these insipid enamel solvents, with Italy and Portugal trailing at spitting distance. These countries also make some good or great whites (Spain and Italy at least--that anyone seriously enjoys Vinho Verde blows my mind), but if the distribution in stores and on wine lists is to be believed, they trade primarily in nasty juice. Even Alice Feiring, an enemy of the state on multiple levels, recently called out Albarino for being a waste of yeast.

I wasn't drinking when the buttery, low-acid, pineapple-and-cream style of New World Chardonnay was at its apogee and I imagine it got pretty frustrating, as did the gauche attempts to beef up Sauvignon Blanc with barriques. But as is the wont of backlashes, the "ABC" movement outlasted its usefulness.

Not every white has to be thick and rich, but it seems that being the opposite is an automatic virtue nowadays--especially once May rolls around and columnists herald the arrival of Summer Wine Season, when locusts play Chopin and everyone with a dribble of taste is epoxied to their deck (because they all have decks) quaffing buoyant goblets of helium-light grapeade.

Look, just because the trees have leaves doesn't mean that indulgent Chardonnays, Viogniers, and reds have to be in hibernation until Election Day. (Likewise, woe unto anyone who's never slurped a snow-chilled bottle of Gavi fireside with Pecorino and almonds.) Using summer as a selling point for horrid wine shouldn't be as easy as it apparently is. When the mercury surges, there is no shortage of beers and cocktails that do a much more flavorful and heartburn-free job of cooling the soul than (virtually) any $8 Muscadet or white Rioja Crianza.

Or just try this: drink 2-4 generous glasses of Albarino, Txakoli, Pinot Grigio, Fiano di Avellino, or whatever else the cognoscenti are touting as this year's "perfect summer refresher". Pass out, then wake up and chew a big handful of Tostitos. While the nerves under your molars re-enact Marathon Man, ponder whether or not the romantic ideal of summer is really Hondarrabi grapes trembling as they await their destiny beneath a leathery Basque foot.

Recent notables:

Trimbach Riesling "Cuvee Frederic Emile" 2002 - Fermented bone-dry to 12.5%, this silky, massive-bodied wookie from Alsace is starting to deepen in color to a dark gold and develop tantalizing rubber and petrol aromas. A snap of acidity without sugar to balance makes pairing this with typical Riesling foils tricky, but oh man is it worth it.
Chateau Brisson 2005 - Against my contrarian will, I'm getting very excited about BDX '05, particularly since stunners like this are available for under $20. Amazing grip and typical but ultra-pure and delicious cassis, cedar, and mineral notes.
Guitian Godello "Sobre Lias" 2006 - Sweet stone fruit perfume continues on the palate as peach, lemon, and cinnamon(?) flavors. Good structure and just a suggestion of tannin. Great Spanish white.
Rustenberg "John X. Merriman" 2005 - A curious South African Bordeaux-5 blend lent exceptional gravitas by 13% divided amongst Petit Verdot, Cab Franc, and Malbec. A year or two might soften some rough edges, but there's good stuff here now.
Egly-Ouriet Brut Tradition NV - Arrestingly deep brass color forecasts the full, nutty body. A pleasant sour raspberry flavor (likely from the 75% Pinot Noir) duets (duels?) with yeast notes aplenty. Substantial.

Ed. Note 8/13: Eric Asimov is a fine columnist and an even better blogger. But his 8/13 column: ugh!

Businessmen, They Drink My Oaky Cab-Merlot Blend

2008-07-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

I've gotta have this. I will even invest in a slowly rotating pedestal for displaying it:

Though the Streisand and KISS editions are hard to resist, nothing says "supple tannins" like an etched caricature of Mick Jagger's mouth.

I wonder, non-judgmentally, who really buys these things. Surely they're in highest demand around Christmastime, when Bill Wyman's divorce lawyer's clients need reminders of how good they've been all year. And the corporate logo ones probably make nice briefcase-stuffers at Caligulesque i-bank holiday parties. The right wine to the right person is the most meaningful of gifts, but vitis vinifera's true strength come December is that it's the best impersonal gift imaginable. To the recipient, it offers a cozy, inoffensive obviousness--you know 50+ other people got the exact same thing from the deep-pocketed master of etiquette who sent it, likely with the same typed message. But that's fine because you either a) like wine, in which case you'll enjoy evaluating the contents, b) are indifferent to wine, in which case you'll enjoy getting drunk from the contents, or c) don't drink, in which case you have a re-gifting trump card.

Do these rock bottles ever twist'n'shout their way into distinguished private collections? I'm guessing not, though I welcome evidence to the contrary. The liquid inside is produced by Miramonte. I've never had any of their wines, which appear to be middle-class SoCal fruities, but assuming the Syrah with the gold-tongued Stones icon is the same as the one advertised on the Miramonte site, you're paying a fancy restaurant markup (nearly 3x) to get Mick's kisser on the bottle. Only the truest fan, sure the wine will transubstantiate into Keef's dope-saturated blood once it crosses the threshold of his teeth, would personally invest in this supreme piece of kitsch.

But what a pleasant surprise as the centerpiece of an anonymous gift basket on your desk one sleety morning during the endless corporate goodwill season when, to understate the matter, you can't always get what you want.

Recent notables:

Domaine de L'Ameillaud Vin de Pays Vaucluse 2006 - Basso profundo flavors of dark berries, pepper, and smoldering tobacco make this Grenache-heavy Vin de Pays an incredible value for under $10. Buy buy buy!!
Domaine Guy Roulot Bourgogne Blanc 2006 - Apparent wood influence of slightly burnt sugar on the nose. Spicy apple flavors and nice acidity equal a good ambassador of an underrated white Burgundy vintage.
Miner Pinot Noir 2000 - Elder statesman. Tantalizing wet leaf/forest floor nose totally falls apart five minutes after pouring. Stewed strawberry and rhubarb fruit flavors survive a little better, but this offers a difficult paradox--a cerebral, complex wine that must be guzzled.
Louis Michel Chablis 2006 - Pale with green hue. O.G. Chablis--green apple is the only obvious fruit flavor. No pear, melon, toast, etc. Major acidity. Gains depth as it gets a little warmer.
Silverado Merlot 2003 - Very mellow with the only remaining tannins coming from the bigtime French oak. I didn't perceive the cocoa you're supposed to take for granted in Napa Merlot, but there was vanilla a-plenty and juicy blackberry that was delicious with blue-collar Brooklyn pizza. Time for these great wines to get their reputation back.
Cos D'Estournel 1995 - A baller Bordeaux that distinguishes itself with browbeating black and white pepper flavors supporting incredibly pure and concentrated cigar box, blackberry, and cassis. I opened this a bit too early--over two hours before pouring, and so there was more oxygen than I would have ideally liked in the composition. But no biggie--a defining experience.
Bollinger R.D. 1996 - Oh wow, oh wow. A Champagne that would make you sit down if you weren't already. One of those wines that hits you so hard and so completely that the specific flavors (candied apple, Christmas spice, yeast) are trivial.
Louis Latour Corton-Grancey 1999 - Grand Cru all the way--imagine eating a black cherry the size of a plum. Characteristic Cote de Beaune Pinot heaviness might overwhelm in the second glass, but the elegance imparted by nine years of age counters that hazard. I'd love to try this again in 2013.

Cos D'Elena

2008-07-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

I own a lot more Chateau Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon than a person in my income bracket should. I haven't purchased it all, but suffice to say I haven't stolen any of it. It is such a good wine. If I had more experience with high-end California reds I could say something like: "Admirable old-world restraint distinguishes this aristocratic Cabernet amidst a sea of cloying Napa syrup". But that would be an especially putrid strain of bullshit, and I also happen to love that cloying syrup.

I digress. Montelena just became the first in a not-unlikely succession of top American wineries pursued by foreign buyers with fistfuls of muscle-bound currency. In this case, the suitor was Montelena's oenological frat brother Cos D'Estournel. The Prats clan has combined a keen business acumen and a Midas winemaking touch to build quite a little empire over the years, but acquiring Montelena makes a particularly strong statement vis-a-vis the Paris Tasting (in theaters soon!).

Undoubtedly James Laube knows Montelena a lot better than I do, but I can't contort my palate around his gloom'n'doom post about California red wine, capped by the assertion that Montelena's "quality has lagged" lately. Having tasted the '04, '03, '97, '89, and '88 vintages of Estate in the past month, I think it's doing just fine.

Better, even. Whether the purple-black intensity of a younger vintage or the brick-brown finesse of a Bush/Quayle harvest, I see no yawning gulf between Montelena's quality today and the ideal of a perfect red wine. Versatility? Try their decidedly un-jammy Estate Zinfandel or, if you can find it, the rich, crisp Riesling. I can only imagine Mike Grgich's flag-waving 1973 Chardonnay, but I'll be goddamned if the current release, a sparingly oaked, zero-malo iconoclast is much inferior.

Laube writes somewhat dismissively that Montelena "still has fans who admire its sturdy, distinctive, ageworthy style, but most of them are old-guard collectors". The implication is that the winery is ossifying into a crusty memory that won't spark any nostalgia--let alone interest--in young turk collectors. Well now. As long as Estate is racking up consistent mid-90s from Parker, I don't think it's headed for any clearence racks. First-hand observation bears this out.

And though some seething Montelena-sucks missives from WS commentors make me doubt my frame of reference a little more, I still side with Parker. If the winery's cellars are still infested with TCA, that's a serious issue that needs addressing and I trust the new management to do so--their track record of improving the wineries they acquire is solid. But I have a good feeling Jean-Guillaume Prats, Michel Reybier, et al. won't feel the need to overhaul the Montelena portfolio or the style of the wines.

Why? Because they know that premium, historic terroir like Montelena's doesn't respond well to meddling. They're even smarter wine guys than they are businessmen, which is why I look so forward to opening one of the crown jewels of my modest collection--a Cos D'Estournel 1995--tonight.

Recent notables:

Captain Lawrence "Liquid Gold" Ale - Looks like Budweiser, tastes like what Budweiser might taste like if you reduced it over high heat for 10 minutes. Huge malt attack with some interesting woody, violety flavors on the midpalate. Profoundly bitter finish.

Lagunitas "Censored" Copper Ale - Spicy, round, slightly doughy character keeps this brawny ale eminently gulpable. The comforting color of a 10 year-old penny. Just edges the Capt. Lawrence as the best new beer I've had in the past 3 months.

Magic Hat "Lucky Kat" IPA - Nice floral hoppyness on the attack, disappoints just a little on a finish that could support more bitterness.

Ardbeg 10 Year Single Malt Scotch - Not the peat beast it's reputed to be (less so than Laphroaig 10). Definitely some heavy smoke, plus dashes of sugar and brine. OK.

La Sacrisite de la Vieille Cure 2005 - The eagle has landed! Finally a non-Petit Chateau bottle of 2005 Bordeaux. A little tight now, but not especially tannic and fantastic balance. I suspect the blackberry, mocha, and mellow currant flavors would be clearer with decanting. Given the reasonable price, I'd like to lay a few of these down.

Wine!

2008-07-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

To be fair and balanced, my California jaunt involved more than stepping on a landmine at The French Laundry. One, my sister got married and I inherited sole responsibility of keeping the family name alive. Two, I did a 36-hour tour of Napa and Sonoma where my cup ranneth over with all the juice I could gargle.

An early-morning drive to Calistoga--a pastoral oasis after the Hamptons-esque vibe of 29 as it cleaves Rutherford and St. Helena--ended at Chateau Montele na. As Odette Kahn's vengeful spirit hissed at us from the rafters, we tasted eight wines beginning with a crackling, powerful Potter Valley Riesling and ending with a 1989 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon that, blindfolded, I would have pegged as a high-end St. Julien. Roaming the grounds was therapeutic, notwithstanding a faceoff with a three-legged turtle (below).

We ditched the car in St. Helena and continued south on bicycles. I hate bicycles. My knees and neck were wretched after 800 meters. The pickup trucks screaming past inches from my left elbow got progressively older and rattlier as we approached the next merciful stop. At Hall, we sipped brooding, chocolaty cabs with a Frank Gehry skeleton looming in the background. I thought of the Atlantic Yards and reflexively spit on the ground.

On the road again, a familiar sign came into view beyond some protruding train tracks: Provenance, a new-ish Rutherford winery that I had encountered months ago at a tasting conducted by its winemaker Tom Rinaldi. This was not on the itinerary. I hollered at my friends, far ahead of me at this point, to please stop. The opposing wind slapped my voice back into my face as they pulled further away.

Now how's this for fate: Just past the far corner of the vineyard, the speed demon so indifferent to my floundering yelped and swerved off the road towards the tracks. The chain had detached from the gears of his bike. With an earnest effort to hide my schadenfreude, I pulled up next to him and gently suggested we walk back to Provenance to catch "our" breath.

Between nosings of a lush, unabashedly American Sauvignon Blanc, I identified myself to the pourer and asked if Tom was by any chance around. Affirmative. Tall, bearded, and emanating an intelligence as laid-back as vast, he is the quintessential California wine dude. I would have been stoked with a simple "nice to see you again", so when he blindsided us with a comprehensive tour of the fermenting, aging, and bottling facilities--holy shit! The thrill of staring into a huge box containing maybe 10,000 corks was eclipsed only by the Wonka-esque bottle assembly line full of sound (metal clanks, hydraulic whooshes) and fury (corks slammed into openings, labels smacked on faces). And, just to verify that he is in fact Batman, Tom fixed the crippled bike and sent us on our way.

To Quintessa. Even the eye candy on the Silverado Trail can't prepare you for how incredible this estate is. First off, 280 acres--this is COLOSSAL compared to neighboring wineries. The structure itself is a sprawling crescent embedded into an east-facing hillside. Guzzling my third complimentary split of Voss in the cathedral-like reception area, I was reminded of Cameron Frye's house: "It's very beautiful and very cold, and you're not allowed to touch anything". You can touch stuff at Quintessa, but it's the kind of place where a drop of water reverberates for ten seconds.

Underground, narrow candlelit corridors jutted spoke-like from a central fountain. Barrels everywhere. How nice to sniff the same wood (below) that may or may not have been selected by M. Michel Rolland (whom I consider a genius, more on that later). Our tasting was the 2005 Red alongside young, unblended lots of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was an instructive exercise in the craft of blending--tasting the pure cab made it possible to imagine exactly how the blend would taste without it. Ending with posh canapes prepared onsite, the Quintessa experience was an appropriately bling-bling farewell to Napa. I'm never getting on a bike again.

Eighteen hours later we were lost in Sebastopol, desperately searching for the Gravenstein Highway so as not to be any later than we already were to Dutton-Gol dfield. Sonoma (below) has a very different vibe from Napa, with more clunky old farm equipment than BMW's in the scenery. There are even redwoods and a townie or two hundred. W instantly formulated plans to move there by 2012.

Dan Goldfield, alongside whom I've had the privilege of pouring, is to me the potions master of the Russian River Valley. He keeps his non-Zin wines under 14.0%, achieving Burgundian finesse without sacrificing American muscle. His Rued Vineyard Chardonnay 2005 is the best American white I've ever had. The wizard was gone from his workshop that morning, but his colleagues treated us to A LOT of barrel samples, including embryonic single-vineyard wines that I'd never encountered on the east coast. Couldn't bear to spit.

Our last NoCal stop was Iron Horse. I'd always known it primarily as a bubble factory, and was caught off guard by an array of impressive dry red wines, particularly the T-Bar-T Bdx-3 2004. Robot name aside, it's a toothsome, dense Cab/Cab/Petit Verdot cuvee made from young vine Alexander Valley grapes. It has a refreshing old-world austerity and pulls off the cigar-box-full-of-fresh-mud Bordeaux thing with style. Of the sparklers, the pointy, complex Wedding Cuvee 2005 beats the creamy, opulent Russian Cuvee 2003 by a nose, and you can tell the poor pourers are so tired of having to repeat the Gorbachev anecdote to every visiting bumpkin.

That did it for "wine country", though I'll quickly mention a couple of fortuitous Cal-Ital discoveries during the long drive south: Witch Creek Winery's jammy, meaty Aglianico (Mexican-grown fruit!) was booming when the winemaker pulled a dram of the '07 from barrel, so I'm interested to see how a the '06 I bought will be after a year (or two, if I can bear the suspense). And I left a pit stop in Paso Robles with a bottle of Pianetta Sangiovese 2005. Kool-aid for grownups--that's the only way I can describe the intensity of the cherry flavors in the best treatment of this varietal I've ever tasted from outside The Boot.

I'm left with rumblings that I'd like to be a winemaker one day, though completing the prerequisites to apply to Davis would take at least two years. What's neat, however, is that with average price of Napa land hovering around a hundred grand per acre, California's status as the only US destination for an interesting winemaking career is going to be on the ropes by the time I'd theoretically be graduating from an academic program. I guess it is already, what with it raining great juice in Oregon, Washington, and New York every year. But they'll eventually be Napa-fied to some extent, and I'll optimistically posit that the next wave of scrappy winemakers will find a way to wrest magic from the terroir in Virginia, Texas, The Carolinas, Pennsylvania... Raise a Kluge to that happy thought.

P.S. In case you hadn't heard, California is ON FIRE. Here's what it looks like driving past Santa Barbara just before sunset.

The silver flecks are ash reflecting the camera flash. Guess what the "clouds" are. Ultra-premium Sonoma winery Hanzell had a near miss the day before we were in that area. How many vintages will pass before at least one major vineyard gets speed-raisinated by a roaring inferno? I'd wager you can count them on one peace sign.

Recent notables:

Nicolas Feuillate Palmes d'Or 1997 - I've never been a huge fan of the Feuillate style (see earlier post about the champagnes I dig), but this prestige cuvee carries itself with a voluptuous dignity. It's light, no doubt, but there's a creamy, bready intimation towards the back that keeps it level and swallowable. A long and satisfying finish elevates it to memorable.

Taittinger Prelude NV - Fine mousse. Lemony with considerably more body than the delicious Brut Francaise. Toasted nut notes and lots of flowers define the midpalate and finish. Accompanying berries and whipped cream, goddamn.

Conundrum 2006 - I guess I can't be surprised that this boastfully off-dry California heavy is a love-it-or-hate-it wine, but for my money there's nothing better with sharp cheeses. Five odd-couple white varietals play very nicely together in this bottle, generating tropical and floral flavors coated in oaky vanilla.

Food

2008-07-06T17:44:00.000-07:00

"I am looking for a restaurant, can you help me?

It exists quietly sixty-plus miles from any major city, on a dark street where people live all year. You walk into the hard-to-find and unassumingly blue front door and are met by an unknown friend who's been expecting you without a blink of impatience. She asks you to wait five minutes on a luxuriously familiar sofa where the chef's own cookbook, obscene in its temptation, opens itself in your hands.

Then you're at a large table--all the restaurant's tables are large--with your companion, and it feels like you're in the house you've always wanted to live in for the rest of your life. A server appears and speaks to you in a high baritone that you know is a performance but such a perfect one that you forgive it immediately. You glance at the menu but there isn't much choice--you're there to eat what the chef wants to cook for you that night. Trust is the mother sauce.

A few words and that server is gone, but another soon materializes in his place. This isn't a restaurant where a single wage slave is lashed to your table all night. Here, a gently buzzing hive cooperates as suavely as the zeroes and ones in the guts of an iPhone to get you what you want, when you want it, and nothing more.

There is a wine list, over a hundred pages long. Its nectars range from geeked-out gems like Pacific Northwest Gewurztraminer to the baller blockin' five-figure extremes of DRC 2005. Nothing is cheap, but everything is purposeful--as it must be when the same dinner is served to a hundred people, each of whose different noses and tongues need a specific wine to carry the food to their personal euphoria triggers.

And, the food: Nominally French/New American, but truly the borders-be-damned Esperanto of culinary transcendence. Flavors you're surprised you can comprehend wait like a cocked Mayweather right and punch your lights out the instant you dare to swallow. Every conceivable texture is conjured fearlessly: creamy, crunchy, tingling, liquid, chewy, popping, ambrosially slimy. Spread over nine (de facto eleven) courses, the array of stimuli suggests nothing less than infinity. It is a selfish and thoroughly unproductive achievement of man to create a restaurant this good. Please help me find it."

"Well, pilgrim, you stand under the Golden Gate Bridge, point your nose to the North Star, and stop when the locals correct your pronunciation of 'Yountville'."

The name of this restaurant is, of course, The French Laundry, and I would like to relate a recent evening spent in its care. Not because I want to trumpet my ability to get the reservation (you just need an account on opentable.com, two months' notice, and a talent for left-clicking) and to foot the bill (you just need a black AmEx or a low financial IQ--guess which one applies here), but because I left 6640 Washington Street way past midnight with a bulging doggy bag of perspective on indulgence, gastric wellness, and why I bother making my mouth available as a port of entry.

Paeans to Thomas Keller's virtuosity come easy, so I had ample time to get excited about experiencing his food, then become cynical and lower my expectations, and finally get excited again. In the week before leaving home, I read M.F.K. Fisher's "The Standing and the Waiting" three times on the subway, sure that her lyrical account of a near-perfect meal would put me in the proper frame of mind for "the best restaurant in the Americas".

Then I was there, and the "Pinces de Homard Pochees Au Beurre Doux" with Morels, English Peas, Garden Herb Salad, and "Mousseline Americane" were in front of me, and I felt very sick. I swallowed a salty half-teaspoon of saliva to stem the reverse peristalsis that was threatening to propel courses one through four across the tablecloth. It did not pair well with the Rebholz "Kastanienbusch Birkweiler" Grosses Gewachs Riesling Spatlese 2004. Perpendicular, W's rapture was apparent as her second piece of lobster dissolved in her mouth. I ran my fork's rightmost tine through a blot of pea puree and drew a little hook.

Suddenly I was sweating and asked if I could remove my jacket. The server mumbled that it was against policy before graciously consenting. An oncoming burp promised temporary stomach relief, treacherously arriving as a searing acid bath for my esophagus. I'd heard of these ultra-rarified restaurants occasionally doubling as vomitoria, but it was a much funnier notion on a sheet of newsprint than in my gullet as I stared down a savory, glistening "Pressee" of Four Story Hill Farm "Poularde" with Hobbs' Applewood-Smoked Bacon, Arrowleaf Spinach, Sunchokes and Royal Blenheim Apricot.

I was suffering this way because I had eaten too much--way too much--the previous day, and drunk just enough to compound the torment. For breakfast in San Francisco, black bean cakes, eggs, and cornbread at Dottie's True Blue Cafe. Mid-morning, a sourdough loaf from B oudin Bakery on the Fisherman's Wharf. Late lunch at Swan's Oyster Depot--dense clam chowder, six icy Blue Points, and a huge hill of crab salad accompanied by Muscadet and Anchor Steam. An aperitif bottle of Artesa Pinot Noir 2005 upon arriving at the Best Western in Napa. Very late dinner at Mustard's Grill beginning with Far Niente Chardonnay 2005, Perrier-Jouet NV, and small plates galore, continuing with rich Sonoma rabbit and a killer Willamette Valley Pinot 2006 called Antica Terra. Zero physical activity all day.

I probably would have gotten away with all this if I had held off on the banana cheesecake, key lime pie, and Prager Port-style Petite Sirah at Mustard's, but I didn't, and crumpled into bed around 1AM with a spinning head and distended belly. I woke up at 3 and never got back to sleep. Nothing had been digested. I was dehydrated and it hurt to move. I thought of Bruce Bogtrotter in Roald Dahl's Matilda, a zaftig child forced to eat a gigantic chocolate cake by an evil schoolmarm. For two hours I writhed, hoping no one else was awake. Finally, I made the death row walk to the toilet and vomited prolifically.

The pain faded as the sun rose, but any thought of consuming food met with severe physiological punishment. I steeled myself for a day of wine tasting and managed to swallow some canned pineapple and grapes at Denny's, while burying the prospect of dinner at The French Laundry as deeply as my brain stem allowed. Nothing budged over the next twelve hours. As we traveled I envisioned my body as a porno-addled hard drive, infested with free radicals and chemical imbalances.

Back to the evening, my despair peaked when I realized that the second bottle of wine I had ordered, a Robert Groffier Chambolle-Musigny "Les Sentiers" 1995, would be on the table soon and there was no way I'd be able to finish it. I faintly beckoned the sommelier and explained my plight. He returned with a half bottle of Gros Frere et Soeur Grands Echezeaux 2005 and transferred it to a Riedel "Duck" Decanter. Seeing this was comforting. And tasting the wine--the most intense, lilting Pinot Noir I've ever encountered--was temporary anesthesia.

Not a miracle cure, but I caught my breath. Then, like when the Yellow Submarine triumphantly returns to Pepperland at the Fab Four's most desperate moment, our initial server descended and asked if we were ready for the next course. I handed him my half-finished "Poularde" and our eyes met with understanding. The Elysian Fields Farm "Selle D'Agneau Rotie Entiere" with Panisse, Globe Artichokes, "Piperade", and Spring Garlic Jus came next and W accepted a third of mine. She was happy, which was wonderful.

Minutes later, watching a local cow cheese being quenelled tableside over Yellow Corn "Financier", Caramelized Fig, Mache, and Black Truffle Coulis, I knew I was out of the woods. My GI tract was free of acid and inching towards equilibrium, I had a half-glass left of gorgeous grand cru Burgundy, and the remaining two courses brandished relatively few animal proteins. I smiled weakly (see right) and passed on coffee.

The bill arrived on a charming laundry ticket: One thousand sixty-one dollars and thirty-four cents. To reveal the cost of this four-hour hallucination certainly breaches etiquette, but it's necessary to understand my final impression of the night. There was no sense of wastefulness, and only a twinge of anticlimax. What followed me home down Route 29 as the witching hour approached was a conviction that my approach to dining--and more broadly, nourishment and consumption--needed adjustment.

Food has been a cerebral pleasure of mine since 2005, when I tossed my pothead Munchos-and-salsa jones onto the junk heap alongside my DiGiorno-and-YooHoo high school meanderings. Day to day now I don't demand haute cuisine that costs a month's rent--I just want food that sits on my spork minimally altered from its natural state, free of artificial chemicals, and capable of telling me something interesting. This affords me a sense of wellness without compromising my unwavering love of fat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol (which, if need be, I am perfectly willing to let kill me a decade or two early).

My lesson from a tumble in The French Laundry is that the food one consumes is an ongoing and interconnected narrative--once it's done keeping you alive, it sets to work coloring your perception of your next bite, your next meal, your next restaurant choice. If you, the author, value a good story over a good sentence, you need to consider how today's Wyoming burger will flavor tomorrow's gravlax. I didn't. It's so easy to deface the big picture when Sonoma rabbit and banana cheesecake tease you from a menu page, but you pay in the end--well over $1,061.34.

The only objective complaints--and they really don't matter--involve Keller's two alliterative vices: Quenelles (at least three, they got boring) and quotation marks (count 'em--seventeen pairs on the menu). But everything he prepared was delicious--the finest ingredients on earth handled minimally in the most innovative and perfect proportions imaginable. The setting is beautiful without ever intimidating. And a trip to the restroom is so much more satisfying knowing that Tom Cruise and Heidi Klum occupied the same commode days earlier. Nothing about this evening gives me reason to begrudge The French Laundry's place at the pinnacle of American eateries.

And yet it lands at the bottom of my twenty most pleasurable dining experiences. I'm reminded of (and confounded by) an analogous 24 hours in Philadelphia when I followed a Yuengling bender with four Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast, cheesesteak at D'Alessandro's for lunch, and then the ten-course degustazione at Vetri, which was top three without question.

It's hard to grapple with the Orwellian truth that we are mobile food bags, and I frustrated myself trying as I lay voluntarily awake that night. Comfort came when I remembered that "The Standing and the Waiting" ends with madame in tears.

Today's damage:

Domaine de Lagrezette "Zette" Malbec 2003: Perfume of dried fruits and clove gets you ready for brawny raisin and tobacco flavors. Gains some acidity and depth after being open and re-sealed for a day. Take that, Argentina!

R Wines, "Boarding Pass" Shiraz 2005: No mistaking this 15.7% bigfoot, though the finish is impressively non-boozy. Smoky attack and nice blueberry syrup midpalate.

Domaine A. et J-P Colinot, Irancy "Les Mazelots", 2005: A black sheep from Burgundy, this 90% Pinot Noir / 10% Cesar (Julius should have kept it) is sharp and austere with scant varietal typicity. Nice for the novelty, but not for enjoyment.

Chateau de Rully, Rully "La Pucelle" 1er Cru, 2005: Fat, almost California-style oak jumps out first, but closer examination reveals a basket of Cote Chalonnaise fruit: Green apple, barely ripe pear, a little lime. Toes the new world-old world line well.

The City By the Crappy Airport

2008-06-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Scribbling this now because the pay-internet kiosk in the San Francisco airport has a 10-minute minimum use time. I'm stranded here for at least two hours. Rewards for patience to include tours/tastings at Chateau Montelena, Quintessa (hopefully), Dutton-Goldfield, and several more, plus dinner at The French Laundry. Unfortunately American Airlines won't be paying. Valhalla I am coming!

Today's damage:

Fish Eye Shiraz 2004- My constant air travel companion. Tastes like bacon!

Betrayed, or, The Jeroboam's Story

2008-06-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

Hyphen and all, Billecart-Salmon stokes white whale obsession in champagne hunters. At least that's the view from my perch, where I tangle with frustrated BS-seekers weekly. So I was excited to snag a 375ml of nonvintage brut reserve on Monday and see if the liquid inside is really worth threats of physical violence.

Well. Let's admit that it was hardly the first bottle opened that night, and I drank it from a technically inappropriate glass. Throw in the speculation that Champagne generally tastes worse in smaller bottles and maybe I wasn't coming at it from the best angle. Or maybe I'm just making excuses. The disappointment threatened by the scrunched-up nose was verified by the second and third austere sips. The wine was grapefruity, thin, and abrasive, and the mousse disappeared quickly (perhaps the glass's fault).

So there I sat, out $24 and too tipsy to pay attention to The Last King of Scotland, suckered again by a veblen good. In fairness, BS is of a style that I typically don't prefer--the Champagnes I enjoy most taste like raw wads of bread dough studded with ripe green apple slices. But some others, notably Henriot, do the super-crisp, borderline briny thing with palpably better results. They taste as though the sharp citrus flavors and electric acidity were totally intended by the maitre de chai, whereas in Billecart-Salmon they seem unfortunately accidental.

Having only had it once (under less than ideal circumstances to boot), I'm not going to assert that this champagne should be dumped down the piss-pot followed by those who adore it. And, I did pick up some interesting amaretto and malted milkball aromas on continued nosings. AND, there's always the niggling possibility that it was a skunked bottle. In the end though, I can't escape the feeling that I was betrayed by a fizzy drink--putting me in the same seasick boat as the poor chumps who got hypodermics in their Pepsi. And only I am escaped alone to tell thee.

Other recent notables:

Domaine de Baumard Quarts de Chaume 2004 - Light lemon color. Floral and apricot aromas introduce a not-too-syrupy sweet wine. Youthful (for something that can last decades) acidity is probably masking some of the botrytised goodness right now.
Belle Pente Pinot Noir 2006 - Very light color. Lots of rhubarby fruit plays nicely against sharp acid and gamey earthiness.
Tiara Carmenere 2006 - Soft, easy-drinking Chilean red honestly presents an overlooked varietal with typical dark fruit surrounded by innuendos of green pepper and chocolate.
Vina Aquitania Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 - A seriously undervalued Chilean Cab that's much better-balanced than the menthol explosion on the nose suggests. Curiously, it's joined by some tobacco notes on the finish, but this is much classier than a pack of Newps.
Kim Crawford Pinot Gris 2005 - A true Pinot Gris (i.e. not Grigio) with a peachy nose leading into round, waxy flavors and pronounced floral stuff on the back palate.
Villa Maria Sauvignon Blanc "Taylor's Pass" 2007 - Very mellow for a Marlborough SB with atypical orange peel aromas and round, creamy apricot/cinnamon flavors coupled with surprisingly low acidity. The distinctiveness of this lush New Zealand white is worth the price of admission.
Castello Tricerchi Brunello di Montalcino 2003 - Approachable now, with lots of vanilla and superdark cherry making the massive body manageable. Who cares what they put in it, it's delicious.

Bogus Brunello

2008-06-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

I'm late to commenting on the Bru-haha roiling lately in Montalcino, and Brunello is a wine with which I have admittedly little experience (something I plan to remedy once my damn economic stimulus check comes in), but let's get a few things out of the way: The Italian appellation system is a hobbling pony, and despite the good things that have come from the IGT designation, a toxic brew of questionable promotions and stubborn insistence on tradition continues to hamstring the potentially best and most versatile wine-producing nation in the world.

If you play by the rules, your Brunello will contain nothing but the Sangiovese clone called Brunello. Put in anything else and you're looking at six years in the pokey. Compare this to California, where you can varietally-label your cuvee as long as it's 75% said varietal, and name the legally-defined region as long as you're using 85% indigenous fruit--the rest can be anything under the sun. Or to Bordeaux, where Bacchus help you if you make anything even approaching a single-varietal wine and your name isn't Moueix. Burgundy is a notable exception to this universal, intelligent acceptance of red wine blending, and I presume that's because no noble red grape other than Pinot Noir can thrive at such a chilly extreme (and because Pinot-Tannat-Mourvedre blends never really caught on).

So once again, Italy shoots itself in the piede with its overambitious notions of "purity". That the brilliant Montalcino oenologists have to risk screwing themselves financially to experiment with even 10% of varietals that have a track record of deliciousness in the Tuscan terroir is stultifying. The market will ensure lazily made wines get what's coming to them--give me an electrifying Brunello (90%) / Merlot (6%) /Cab Franc (4%) for $50 and my walletful of wet noodle dollars is forever open.

Today's damage:
(Plus yesterday)

Hogue Fume Blanc 2005 - This had been opened two days earlier and so had a certain bitterness that wasn't totally out of place with the wine's natural grapefruit and mineral flavors. Pleasing yellow color may be due to the 25% Semillon in the blend. I plan to drink gallons of this over the course of the summer.
Liberty School Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 - A steal from the Central Coast--viscous cassis and plum flavor lead off, finished off by spicy cloves on the back palate. Doesn't overwhelm white meat, but its teeth gnash for a B.A. Barracus-level food challenge.
Bee's Knees Sauvignon Blanc 2007 - Lush, suggestively floral nose, but don't call it cat pee. Not much depth, but a high-toned acidity integrates well with typical NZ flavors of grass, lime, and an edge of peach.
Georges Duboeuf Fleurie 2006 - A fragile, light-bodied wine that was perceptibly sour after less than an hour of being open. Also too warm, though lilting pear and banana flavors still squiggled through.
Rusden "Bakery Hill" Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 - Expecting a blueberry-menthol Slush Puppie led to disappointment--this is a restrained (13.0%) Barossa Cab that offers sharp acidity and earthiness while plum/prune and raisin flavors take a backseat.
Highland Park 12 Year Single Malt Scotch - Still my favorite non-Islay whisky, with a round, toasty presence punctured on the finish by a tart spike. Best with a quarter-teaspoon of water swirled in.

P.S. Look back two posts, then read this Joel Stein column (published almost a week later).

No Dark Sarcasm

2008-06-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Bobbing and weaving amongst the hordes of smooth talkers in the wine and spirits game are 158 who hold the title of Master Sommelier. Supposedly demonstrating an iron grasp of theory, service, and velvet-glove customer intimidation, the MS is the highest stateside distinction in the thick and disorganized pile of beverage education certificates.

Tomorrow I'm gonna get mines--not an MS, but an acceptable clink of the glass for 24 Tuesday mornings spent getting semi-drunk, taking patchy notes, and somehow absorbing at least 65% of what there is to know about every major wine-producing region in the world. Passing is a foregone conclusion, though admittedly I had hoped to be throwing a no-hitter at this point. As it stands, the minutiae of Germany, Southern Italy, and Tokaji may have gotten the better of me for now.

This is just the beginning, though; a first step in the struggle for mastery. One day I'd like to have an MS, MW, or whatever else proves I can float like a buttery chardonnay and sting like a beerenauslese.

Today's damage:

Newcastle Brown Ale - Body is closer to medium than suggested by the deep copper color and British Bulldog logo. Coffee and faint stone fruit fill out the palate but quit in a disappointingly thin finish.
Robert Mondavi Napa Valley Chardonnay 2005 - A self-conscious attempt not to be an overwrought California white is a moderate success. Crisp, rustic acidity pairs well with cheese and hors d'oeuvres but I was hoping for a little more toast and fruit. Here's to the old master.
Atalayas de Golban Ribiera del Duero 2004 - Kirsch and plums get it on with spicy vanilla in a round, balanced, and delicious Duero.
Glenmorangie Nectar D'Or Single Malt Scotch (Sauternes cask) - Doesn't taste like Sauternes, but I guess I was an idiot for expecting it would. Not alcoholic-smelling. Very elegant, especially on the honeyed finish.

Wet Stone Salad

2008-06-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

I promise this is the only time Paul Giamatti will ever appear on this blog (until someone makes a wine called "Pig Vomit").

"There is a problem when these people list all these flavours and aromas they think they have detected. It then gets on to the label of the bottle and what you are looking at appears to be a recipe for fruit salad." -Hugh Johnson

When cornered in social situations, you can always reclaim some personal space by describing your sensory reactions to whatever you're drinking. Some will humor you with mumbled agreements or half-assed nosings of their own cocktail, but most will just slink away. Immediately you are identified as a pinky-extending, Sideways-DVD-owning, swirl-and-spit blowhard best left to wallow alone in your oenological onanism.

Such is the nature of "tasting notes", the beating heart that makes alcohol enjoyment possible on a level beyond guzzling, and/or the festering sore that assures those who dare to use them will always be, to many, hideous. Case in point, the satirical (I think) tasting room scene in the aforementioned film when Miles closes his eyes, covers his ear, and rattles off an increasingly absurd list of the aromas in his glass, ending in "nutty Edam cheese". For a moment there, he's not the good guy. No way, we think. Passion fruit? Asparagus? Why can't wine just taste like wine?

Hmph. Wine does, or at least should, taste like wine--no argument there. But there needs to be a language for describing the differences between wines; otherwise restaurants and retailers could save everyone time by dividing their selections into approximately four categories: "red/good", "white/good", "red/bad", and "white/bad". To the recreational consumer, an honest and plain-spoken assessment of a wine's texture, balance, and concentration can be invaluable.

Hearing, on the other hand, that a wine smells like "vitamins" and tastes like "new saddle leather" is unlikely to help. Ultra-specific descriptors like these are primarily handy for masochists who enjoy walking the tightrope of blind tasting, since all kinds of trivia about a wine's origin can indeed be deduced from certain giveaway aromas and flavors. But if you already know what the wine is, luxuriating in "fruit salad" nouns and adjectives is just a stupid game--EXCEPT if it clarifies and makes more permanent your memory of what you drank. Recording the particulars of what you smell and taste for this purpose will presumably equip you to make better choices about what you and those who trust you drink in the future. Just don't think they'll impress anyone.

And because why not, let's take a shot at the wine press's least mobile target--Robert M. Parker, Jr.--for proliferating such blabbery tasting notes. Any Parker review from the last fifteen years is perilously likely to contain something like "wet stone", "spice box", "liquid minerals" (WTF), "violets", "crushed rocks" "road tar" (an admittedly vivid smell), and sometimes a vaguer cop-out like "dark fruits" or "dried flowers". I don't own a spice box--I just use a shelf. Where does that leave me in trying to imagine the opulent 2002 Pavie?

Parker wasn't the first to ever liken good chardonnay to pears, but just like insipid 80's guitar shredding is Eddie Van Halen's fault no matter how much of a genius he is, I blame first Parker's popularity for all the people who think the extent of your wine expertise is proportional to the logorrhea of your tasting notes. For proof, just look at wine writing pre-RP and post-RP. Hugh Johnson must be mad enough to crush rocks with his bare hands.

Buttery warm-climate chards often naturally contain diacetyl, a compound also used to flavor margarine. So I still wonder about whether a wine universally agreed to smell like blackberries really DOES have any molecular similarity to blackberries. I wouldn't be surprised if it did, but I would be if the same were true of wines garnering comparisons to road tar and vitamins. Flintstones cuvee? Bottoms up.

Today's damage:
(Plus yesterday)

Newton Vineyard "Red Label" Chardonnay 2005 - Deep straw color. Juicy tropical aromas wash over rich buttered toast. Just enough acidity to qualify it as wine. Tastes big, but not as big as the 15.5% wrecking ball it is. Probably interchangable with big Cabs in food-pairing applications.
Vina Aquitania "Sol de Sol" Chardonnay 2006 - A trickster--smells like a California behemoth, but is a nimble, steely bantamweight on the palate with lemon, green apple, and spice leading into a minerally finish. Clever.
Ken Forrester Petit Pinotage 2007 - Oak-free is trendy right now, but this is the wrong wine to throw under that bandwagon. Without oak's woody roundness, this is all coarse angularity propping up an ersatz savory smoke character. The bright purple color makes it all the more awkward. I understand this is a cheapo, but I'm losing faith in Pinotage.
Powers Merlot 2005 - A few years in bottle have done this inexpensive WA Merlot good, dulling the color a little and imparting an old world earthiness. Pronounced cooked fruit and menthol flavors come off gracefully. Almost impressive.
Yuengling Traditional Lager - Evergreen college quaff still satisfies where most mass-produced American beers don't. Light brown color introduces a tasty bitterness that unfortunately quits by the time it reaches your throat. Refreshing light-medium body means even beer wimps have no excuse for not liking it.
Lieb Family Cellars Pinot Blanc 2006 - Bright yellow color. Almost off-dry with a viscous mouthfeel and faint but perceptible sweetness. Herbs and lemon syrup define this very well-balanced North Fork white.

Hope I Die Of Alcohol Poisoning Before I Get Old From Resveratrol Deficiency

2008-06-05T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've been pronouncing it wrong for months--Resveratrol, the phytoalexin found in grape skins that's been turning rats into triatheletes, has tumbled adolescently from my lips as "uhh.. reservatrol" more times than I'll ever admit. Still, it has always been the straightest arrow in my quiver when summoned to defend my red wine habit against relative teetotalers. Purported benefits are cancer defense, increased athletic prowess, and reduced harm from scarfing fat.

Cheers to Nicholas Wade's article in yesterday's New York Times for setting my pronunciation straight and also for proffering a few more encouraging non-conclusions about why the compound may or may not prolong the lifespans of animals below us on the food chain. Cue nightmares of government scientists bottle-feeding La Tâche to rhesus monkeys with YOUR TAX DOLLARS.

The concept of red wine as vital elixir has existed between fact and stumbling delusion for a while, and is undoubtedly responsible for at least a few hundred thousand cases of middle and upper-middle class alcoholism. As if the miracle of your head feeling balloon-light and boulder-heavy at the same time didn't already encourage (or force) you to pour the third glass, then finish the bottle, then stare lasciviously at the Macallan on the shelf, the thought of a life-extending tonic coursing through your capillaries makes willpower just a little pathetic.

But try telling that to the well-heeled oenophile who wants to educate himself by tasting Jaboulet La Chappelle next to Henschke Mt. Edelstone and insists leaving either bottle open overnight would be wasteful. Or more realistically, the young couple who follow after-work cocktails with a utilitarian 750ml accompanying their Wednesday evening takeout. Recall the genteel shitstorm that blew through the UK last year when the government railed against "hazardous drinking" among the affluent, with "hazardous" defined as intractably as one "large" glass of wine a day for men, and even less for women.

I will unscientifically conclude that four half-full Riedels every 24 hours will probably kill a person faster than they save him. Beyond that, I would love some straight answers that might help myself and others form consistent habits that balance the happy, fuzzy feelings of booze, the mysterious health benefits trumpeted on the front page of the Paper of Record, and the headaches, sinus-embedded snotwads, and weekday morning dry and not-so-dry heaves that follow too much of a very good thing.

Today's damage:

Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale - Molasses color doesn't lie--supremely mouthfilling coffee, chocolate, and caramel flavors that are powerful but never overbearing. Elegantly malty.
Moet & Chandon White Star NV - Luminous straw color with medium mousse. Tart aroma with a little ginger spice. On the palate, perceptible sweetness frames pear and green apple notes. Vanilla aura characterizes decently long finish. Probably best enjoyed shaken furiously and sprayed into Michael Jordan's face after a three-peat.

O-post One

2008-06-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

This begins a blog about drinking, self-control, nostril topography, hangover hospice, but mostly wine. I'm 25, I have a wobbly foothold in the adult beverage industry, and I should probably spit more. The majority of my peers are in law and finance.

I'm trying this for two reasons: To focus some vague notions I have about the current state of wine, beer, and spirit consumption, and to force some personal accountability in considering what I drink and recording my impressions. I think I thought I could also use this humble e-platform to initiate some dialogue about the aforementioned, but seriously, folks. As Mel Gibson said in The Patriot (right before shooting some imperialist redcoat bastards), "Aim small, miss small".

Today's damage:

Miller Lite - Fizzy, yellow, almost flavorless but for a pleasant cereal note on the blink-and-you-missed-it finish.
Samuel Adams Boston Lager - Satisfying brown color with solid floral and caramel flavors, though not as powerful as the giant pile of hops they trot out in their TV commercials would lead one to believe. Still the gold standard in bars with crappy beer selections.
Lagunitas IPA - Full-on flower bouquet aroma made interesting by a funky, almost citrus pungency. Profoundly bitter and finishes forever. Hop addiction is probably a phase, but for now I love this shit.
Ommegang White Ale - Tart with pronounced clove flavor. A taste that's worth the trouble to acquire.
Lindeman's Kriek Lambic Cherry Beer - 100% fruit explosion--cherries everywhere with a curious hint of raspberry. This is supposedly a leading Lambic, but I'm not sure I'd ID this as beer if you blindfolded me.
Grey Goose Vodka - Unfortunate vanilla character distorts its purity.
Tanqueray London Dry Gin - Just a little coarse, but huge juniper flavors and a subtle citrus finish keep this a martini staple.
Brugal White Label Rum - Flowers and vanilla again, without much except alcohol on the finish. Respectable blanco.
Gosling's Black Seal Rum - Dark and heavy with forceful but not overbearing banana aroma. Xmas spices coat the palate with minimal alcoholic heat. Delicious sipping rum.
Don Julio Anejo Tequila - Herbaceous and appealingly dusty nose raises expectations for a disappointingly vacant flavor profile. Best in cocktails.
Sherry-Lehmann Maison Rouge - Bottle opened last night and held up well. Grapey notes suggest carbonic maceration and perhaps Gamay. Not much depth but no major flaws.
Sipavola Nero d'Avola/Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 - Dark, raisiny fruit flavors are backed by sufficient acid and tannin to stand up to food. Heavy, long-finishing style suggests a baby Amarone. Very substantial and well-balanced for a sub-$10 wine. Will drink again.
Laubade Bas-Armagnac X.O. - Deep orange color introduces interesting roasted aromas. Rustic alcoholic heat was a nice foil for strawberry ice cream.