Full Pour

It wasn't too long ago that Central Otago Pinot invariably came with an elevated price tag. One of the surprises, then, of our visit to the region a year or so ago was the range of reasonably priced wines on offer. Indeed, from an accessibility perspective the region seemed to have come of age, with plenty of wines available at all price points.

Interesting going back to a wine two years or so later on in its evolution; I last drank this in November 2007, and here we are again. This time around, the nose offers up a very spare emptiness, almost the idea of wine without characteristics. It's an oddly Zen effect: a wine that is so quiet that concentrating on it leaves me very quiet indeed. There are notes of refrigerated butter, dried leaves, and wax paper on the nose; in the mouth, it's surprisingly rich and full-bodied, with the expected shocking acidity having very much subsided over the last eight years or so in the bottle. On the finish, you get a 3D suggestion of Meyer lemon tart, all lemon rind and fresh pastry, before it slowly fades out.

Again, absolutely lovely stuff here, and it doesn't seem to have changed much over the last two years... and that's a good thing because I think I still have a few more bottles. If all of the Australian rieslings I bought six years ago last this long under Stelvin, I'll be very happy indeed as there's no way I can drink most of them before they're a quarter-century old.

I'm jealous that Chris was able to visit this winery on his recent trip to Chile. Fortunately for me, the local distributor is a colleague of mine, and it was this connection that led to being able to taste Undurraga's premium wine, the Altazor. 

If there were ever a shining example of a vin d'effort, this wine is likely it. Unfathomably black in the glass, this wine smells damn good in exactly the same way that breast implants look good: you can't help but like it, even if you recognize that those tell-tale half-grapefruits aren't even remotely, you know, human. The color of this wine is straight up sci-fi, the color reminiscent of an inky black, otherworldly, viscous ooze that looks like it's about to do something nasty to Tasha Yar. The nose is moderately complex, with suggestions of Asian spices in a forgotten cedar box that someone's stashed in amongst strawberries mixed with rising dough; yes, it's very Cabernet after a fashion, but entirely without the green, leafy notes that so often add interest. At times, though, it reminds me of a shoeshine stand in a dusty Delta town not too far away from Napa; at other times, it tends towards stewed prunes and pencil shavings. You have to admit, though, that this wine is incredible value for what it is: with all of this going on, I'd expect the price tag to be twice as much.

The progression of the wine is simultaneously surprising and trite. Wonderfully balanced the initial impression (fleeting, mind you!) is of a vapid California cabernet, quickly resolving into something much more interesting, with sneaky acidity firming up against a billowing cloud of smoky red fruit, which suddenly vaporizes into an entirely delicious, savory, dark expression of Cabernet that - although it doesn't really seem particularly Californian, or particularly anywhere in particular at all - is admittedly entirely fabulous. It smooths out on the finish even further, transmogrifying into something that damn near approaches pure pleasure, going on for an age, suggesting nothing more than raspberry liqueur, baker's chocolate, and perhaps star anise. Tannins make themselves known, yes - who snuck in and put socks on all my teeth? - but they're fully ripe and in their right place here.

To sum up, this is for my money a home run, no questions asked. Sure, there's no real sense of place or any strange, haunting beauty here, but honestly: do we always, always have to care? Surely it's sometimes enough to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the contents of a shrink-wrapped magazine or bottle of well-crafted wine? Isn't it?

Seems I had a similar reaction to last year's model. I thought it terribly spicy, perhaps more so than usual, yet here I am with the 2008, inhaling a veritable pepper grinder of aroma. Perhaps it's a function of youth; I confess to having drunk more of this wine with a few years' age on it than at release. Whatever, it's nice to be surprised year after year. 

Without wanting to suggest this wine is all about its 15.4% abv, smelling it reminded me of something a very clever fellow said to me the other day. And I paraphrase: alcohol can have its own smell, and it may, perhaps, be legitimate to enjoy a sweet tingle of ethanol as much as any other aroma. Food for thought, and a challenge to the reflexive position often taken that perceptible alcohol is a fault. 

Tension is an underexplored dimension of wine that, in some respects, goes against the grain of conventional aesthetics. Balance, harmony and elegance are all buzzwords of significant currency, dictating a serene, classical conception of beauty that, I'll admit, often holds a lot of appeal for me.

This one's certainly got me thinking. I was quite partial to Flaxman's 2007 Stranger, largely because of its luxurious flavour profile and mouthfeel. This, by contrast, is an entirely different beast. For starters, it is made from estate grapes hailing from a dry grown vineyard at the top of the Barossa Ranges (so says the back label). Very Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush, not Emily Brontë). More meaningfully, it is quite distinct, stylistically, from its cheaper sibling. 

Or: the art of the perfect quaffing wine.

Curious wine, this one. Without quite knowing why, I was anticipating a boring, commercial style and, insofar as this wine avoids insulting levels of residual sugar, I was pleasantly surprised.  But I'm still scratching my head in terms of what this wine is.