Results tagged “California”

Last Friday, I invited some friends over to the house so that we could open two wines, drink them together, and talk for a while about the differences between the two.

I'll start with some background: both of these wines were Verdelho. Being a Californian (and not an Australian), Verdelho basically means absolutely nothing to me. If I hadn't had spent so much time in Australia, I likely wouldn't have been familiar with the grape at all: it has no role in my nation's cultural history (whereas it absolutely does in Australia's). The first Verdelho I ever drank was most likely something I encountered whilst on vacation in Western Australia in early 2002; they seemed to be legion, with most wineries having at least one on offer. (Capel Vale, perhaps? Dang it, I should have taken better notes.)

After nine months' travels throughout Australia, I eventually came to know Verdelho as a generically rockin' good time: you could count on it to taste good in a simple, pleasing manner without giving you all too much to think about, and that was just fine by me. After returning home to California, I'd occasionally see Australian Verdelho gathering dust in the "miscellaneous white wine" bin in a shop; I usually picked up a bottle, took it home, and drank it mindlessly. Thanks to a strong US dollar and the utter unfashionability of the wines, prices never hit double digits and I never grew tired of them.

As always, however, I digress. I'm here to talk about these two wines in particular: the 2009 Mollydooker The Violinist Verdelho and the 2009 Scholium Project Lost Slough Vineyards Naucratis. These are both straight varietal Verdelho from the same vintage year, albeit from opposite ends of the globe. Climactically, both wines are produced from similar geographic origins; McLaren Vale, in South Australia, is relatively warm with daily summer temperatures around 90 degrees, Clarksburg, in California, is warmer still with daily summer temperatures in the high 90s. (For you Australians, that would be 32 and 36 degrees C, respectively.) In short, nothing too dramatically different.

Soils, too, are probably not wildly different; the California wine is presumably grown on poor soil, and I imagine the Aussie wine isn't that different either. In short, probably not hugely different either.

The major difference, then, at least superficially, would be between the two wineries. One is a spinoff (or, rather, the logical next step arising from) a once phenomenally successful Australian-American wine import business that made its name during the Bush administration importing, well, hedonistic fruit bombs; Dan Philips (and Marquis-Philips, his joint venture with the Marquis family, who became Mollydooker) had the brilliant idea of critter wines on steroids: double or triple the price of cheap and cheerful Aussie imports, but with vastly superior label design, bi-national critters (google Roogle if you'd like), and delicious, high octane, pleasurable wines that seemed just the perfect thing to serve at a megachurch BBQ celebrating to invasion of Iraq.

I will pause here for a moment and apologize for the intrusion of the political in to a nominally aesthetically oriented wine blog: one of these wines was a press sample, and God knows the generosity of the winemakers should not be abused. However, if one of the objectives of shipping samples is to potentially result in interesting ways of thinking about the wine, then I suppose they're getting their money's worth, even if obliquely. These sorts of wines - high alcohol, usually Shiraz, occasionally lavishly yet softly oaked - seemed to have sprung up shortly after that Mission Accomplished banner did, and it seems no mere coincidence that The Grateful Palate, Dan Philips' importing business, ceased to exist shortly after President Obama took office and not too much longer before the cessation of combat operations in Iraq. In short, I am unfairly and hopefully amusingly positing that there is an odd synchronicity at work here between the go-go Bush years, filled with foreign policy adventuring beyond anyone's wildest dreams, and the heyday of massive, plush, jammy, hedonistic wines (at this point, I am imagining someone with a distinctly non-West Coast accent spitting them into a football helmet on YouTube, for some reason), an odd crosstalk where one informs the other, a mad rush of consumption and decadence leading... well, I'm still not sure, exactly, except for the wines, which always, always led to massive ibuprofen consumption the morning after.

Of course, again, I digress.

The other wine, the Californian one, was produced by a small winery founded by a one-time professor from a notoriously obscurantist liberal arts college where they (shudder) still teach Aristotle... in the original Greek, no less. Again curiously coincident with the disastrous economic meltdown of 2008, his wines slowly but surely came to prominence not through glowing Wine Advocate reviews, but rather through one-off New York Times articles and general Terroir (the wine bar) fandom; most reviews I'd read were faintly reminiscent of early Dooniana , filled with remarks along the lines of "I can't drink this, but I'm excited that it exists." Much in the mode of recent newcomers such as Field Recordings, Abe the winemaker traveled California, hunting down vineyards that might produce interesting wines; in this case, a wine from a grape no one's ever heard of (here, at least) from an area that's generally as well regarded as Redfern (amusingly, the small hamlet of Woodbridge, which gave its name to an ocean of crappy wine that helped bring the Mondavi family to its doom, isn't too far away to the south).

But again: I digress. On to the tasting notes; these are courtesy of a group of six friends. Both wines were placed in the refrigerator Thursday night and removed about forty-five minutes before tasting; we were hoping for a happy medium between "cold and doesn't taste like anything" and "warm and tastes gross." Wines were served in two identical glasses (Spiegelau Authentis red wine); we drank slowly, talking about these for a good half hour, before finishing up for the evening.

• Both wines smell towards the sweet/syrupy end of the spectrum
• This wine... well, it doesn't quite smell like canned peaches because it doesn't have that tinned smell to it that California viognier does. It's kind of like viognier, but smoother, I guess.
• This almost has kind of a sugar cane factory, cut cane, simple syrup, pineapple effect here with not much spice, just a happy go lucky sugar factory really.
• It's a little bit floral to me, but hard to say exactly what I'm smelling here. There might be a slight amount of spiciness to it, almost a hint of black pepper... celery salt or perhaps something slightly green there? Really hard to say.
• Candied/salted spinach perhaps?
• Seems hot to me.
• Seems a much richer wine, more concentrated, perhaps even a bit of residual sugar here? Definitely very mouth filling, unctuous rich.. almost flabby. I think this might be going too far.
• This wine seems... whiter? More like white peach than yellow peach. Some minerality here, really a striking difference. Generally more "serious" and more northern Rhône than the other one; better acidity, tighter, just a tiny bit of astringency to it.
• Almost bitter, definite complexity on the finish, which lasts for quite a bit of time.
• This almost has a sort of quinine note, reminiscent of bitters, which it desperately needs to give it complexity and style.
• Strange to think these are the same grape from roughly similar climates; the simpler one has a deeper, richer yellow color, but the more complex one seems lighter, less imposing in the glass
  

There was, alas, one thing we all agreed on by the end of the evening: the one wine would have been just fine on its own, but it suffered by comparison with the other wine. It's funny how things go sometimes: often, in the midst of unbridled enjoyment, it's hard to imagine how an experience could possibly be better. I've personally bought both of these wines in the past - it was happy coincidence that I was given a bottle as a press sample - but having now had them simultaneously, I'm not sure I'd buy any more, especially considering that the pricing is roughly the same for the both of them.

What it boiled down for me was this: I know it's cliché to point this out, but every profoundly beautiful thing has to have a flaw - or at least something there that serves as a counterpoint, a foil, a dissonance to draw the beauty of the object in sharper, finer focus. The real reason I came away from this evening finding one wine profoundly beautiful and deeply satisfying was this: it showed restraint. Similarly high in alcohol, it seemed to have better acidity, more minerality, less residual sugar, but most of all that subtle, quinonic, bitter, savory edge that suddenly shifted it all into vibrant, ecstatic focus. You'd be hard pressed to expect more from a wine like this, especially at $20.

My advice to the other winemaker? Simple: The boom years are behind us. It's time to go beyond simple fruit ripeness, high alcohols, and straight-up appeal; it's time to find the subtle beauty that's probably always been there, time to experiment with phenolic aspects, time to consider the joys of Italianate bitter notes. I now know that there is Verdelho beyond the simple, fruity joys I've known from Australia from years; it's there if you want it. Go for it: if you do, I'll be there to buy it. And I'll even go out on a limb here and groundlessly speculate: the Americans that were buying your wines in the past were probably buying them using home equity loans on houses that have already been foreclosed. The days of reckless consumption of shiny pretty wines with high point scores seem to have gone missing over the last two years; instead, we're looking for subtlety, complexity, something with pain, something to match the anxiety and frustration we're all feeling in these, the empty, anguished dog years after the binge of the Oughts. Give us something we can relate to; your wines remind me too much of those years where we weren't thinking.

Look, I know I really shouldn't be saying this, but I'm sure we can all admit that we're innately predisposed to like certain wines and not others - and that before having ever even tasted them. The name alone of this wine makes me smile: as an old school music nerd, I've got plenty of CDs around that are, well, field recordings: right now, I'm listening to Keith Fullerton Whitman's Dartmouth Street Underpass just, you know, because.

The packaging of the wine is beautiful: beautiful typography, very fresh and clean, and the overall vibe is that of a winemaker who is content to get out of the way and let the wine be itself: fine by me. Heck, even the wine itself appears cloudy, unfiltered: if your idea of vinuous beauty is liquid that looks more like an agricultural product than lemon crush, then you're in excellent territory here.

Speaking of territory, it's always delightful to see lieux-dit on the label: there seems to be a growing trend of bottling wines with labels that emphasize where they're from and not "what they are" (in a varietal sense), and I think that's pretty awesome as well. The overall effect is undeniably kinda awesome; I would expect to see this on Terroir's wine list before the year's up... but of course only if the wine itself measures up.

Does it? Thankfully yes. Beautifully textured, displaying golden yellow clouds in the manner of fresh cider, the wine smells of chalky gravel, fresh lemon zest, and neroli. It also smells very wine-like in a way few New World wines tend to: it's got a real edge of steely austerity to it as well, smelling less like primary fruit and more like a Serious Adult Beverage.

Texturally the wine tends towards medium weight, with not much haptic impact. Stylistically it reminds me more of oaked South African chenin blanc than it does of anything French - there's something in the texture that's reminiscent of lees - but there's no obvious oak here at all, so my guess is that it saw bâtonnage but no new oak.

The experience of a drink of this is exceptional at this price point. It begins with a calm, almost barley water-like note, backed by forceful acidity, before fattening out in the midpalate to be almost Meursault-like, with suggestions of hazelnut and cream, before slinking away into a soft, gentle, lengthy finish with an almost-bitter edge to it. It's a beautiful thing, lovely to drink, and I've replayed it a dozen times just now, marveling at the experience.

Best of all, I distinctly get the feeling that the winemaker's input here was indeed minimal: there's no obvious chicanery going on here, just good wine made from good grapes grown in a good place. I don't believe I've ever had an American chenin blanc this good before; here's hoping he's able to not only make more in the future, but that it finds the audience (and market) it so richly deserves.

After what's turning out to be a nearly endlessly delayed introduction to summertime - here it is, June already, and it's still cloudy, cool, and altogether disappointing - I suppose it's time to drink myself into summer, even if it's technically not quite here yet.

Richly spiced, with a shimmering overlay of nutmeg over pineapple, this pretty much does the trick, reminding me of an imaginary barbecue out back of the US embassy in Saigon shortly before the fall, or, rather, liberation of the city: there's a smoky haze in the air, with suggestion of tropical fruits, spices, and something damn near approaching decadence.

The taste of the wine makes a beautiful counterpart to what the nose suggests: instead of a fat, flabby, sugary wine, you're instead treated to an unctuous, mouth-filling wine with keenly balanced acidity, Yes, there is a hint of sugar - or is it alcohol? - which is entirely appropriate for the style, but it's miles away from simple, mindless muscat. The overall effect is not unlike doing something you shouldn't with someone you shouldn't be doing it with: you, serious wine drinker, are well aware of the societal repercussions of drinking muscat, but as soon as you taste this you really, really won't care. All you'll care about is making sure you get more out of the bottle than anyone else you're sharing it with.

How a Whitman we were always wanting, a hoping, an
America, that America ever an America to be,
never an America to sing about or to, but ever an
America to sing hopefully for
All we had was past America, and ourselves, the now America,
and O how we regarded that past!

- Gregory Corso, Elegiac Feelings American

To smell this wine, to pause, to reflect
Summer softness, spearmint gum softening
Pavement and boardwalk, salt water and taffy
Wintergreen neighbors and smokeless tobacco
Skål, then, faded circles in back pockets
Under the bleachers, awakening to summer
Dandelions abloom, horizons unfold

In this America I drive all night long
Reaching towards lovers, ribbons unfurl
Smoke in the distance, welcoming home
It's alright, alright, all of it's right

- Me, indulging my inner Beat (with my apologies)

In all seriousness, this is an enchanting wine. Ever so slightly green, the nose reminds me of a wintergreen-tinged relation to muscat, with a lovely, fresh, sweet, spearmint smell. There's also a very soft, gentle, warm effect that reminds me of summer evenings at home, sweet hay smells drifting in from the fields; together, it's an especially tranquil wine. Pleasantly tart, this is a fairly full-bodied wine, but with a fascinating penchant for rotating through widths as you drink, ranging from California to Galicia and back again, somehow. Dry, and yet with the suggestion of sweetness due to its size, it returns ever again to the same acidic backbone and finishes long, long, long with a wonderful hint of pears, green apples, and woodruff.

I bet this would be amazing with green papaya salad. For now, though, I'm happy to drink it on its own.
 

Somehow, a conversation over barbecue and Michelob last Saturday night turned to Temecula. Temecula (or, more properly, the Temecula Valley) is a wine region just up the road from my house here in San Diego - it's about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It's known for two things: casinos and wineries. Every time I drive past, I see at least one mini-coach filled with a good half-dozen party types doing the circuit of the local wineries, drinking, not tasting, and obviously enjoying themselves. Me, though, I've never been. I'm a native Northern Californian, which means I tend to be suspicious of any wine from the Southland (i.e. Southern California) - and no, Sideways country doesn't count as it's north of Los Angeles, you know - and the one time it was mentioned in wine school (in Washington state), Temecula was briefly noted as a success story, but only in terms of the hospitality industry (i.e. not as an actual wine producing area, just as a pleasant place with fake Tuscan villas making a living selling crap to daytrippers in mini-coaches).

However, there are most definitely locals who absolutely swear by the quality of the local wines. One of them (an ex-coworker) was nice enough to give me a bottle of wine from Palumbo Family Vineyards a couple of years back, and here it is in front of me. The packaging is lovely and the cork extra long: it looks exactly what a moderately expensive wine should look like. But what's the wine like?

First of all, it's inky black with a very slightly watery rim. The smell, well, it quite frankly reminds me of vanilla ice cream with a trace of dill pickle. There are definite notes of dusty cocoa, baker's chocolate, roasted coffee, and espresso: it smells like someone went a little bit overboard with the char here, but then again heavily oaked wines are of course usually highly palatable to Americans. Even so, I find it disappointing because I don't smell fruit, minerals, earth, or for that matter anything other than wood here. Hrm.

The wine, once drunk, is deeply unpleasant. Imagine if you will a new brand of Lipton Cup-a-Soup called "Consommé du Parker" - this consists of nothing other than tannin extracts with a peel-off sticker that says "90+" on the package. Now, dump that in a bottle of uneventful grape juice. Shake slightly - not enough to truly distribute the tannin - et voilá, you've got a bottle of Tre Fratelli. A mouthful of this is as unpleasant as drinking a bottle of Yoo-Hoo you forgot to shake: the initial sweet fruit attack is quickly displaced by a sensory nightmare of tiny bits of particulate matter that quickly turn into harsh, grating tannins that cover your teeth like a cheap rug. The fruit flavor, such as it is - it's a simple, boring red-fruit aquarelle - is quickly overshadowed by the mouthfeel, and there's no finish, no line, absolutely nothing to recommend this wine at all.

In short, this is strictly amateur hour. I'm sure the people that make it are lovely people, and I'm sure that their tasting room is a lovely place to visit, but this isn't as good as even the cheapest Jacobs Creek wine I've tasted. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

I'm an unabashed fan of Ridge wines, rarely having experienced a disappointing example. Ridge introduced me to the joys of Zinfandel with its Geyserville label, and continues to provide beautiful Californian wine experiences each time I am lucky enough to taste its wines. Sometimes, one connects with a particular producer's approach beyond all reason; if I overpraise Ridge wines, understand this is as much an emotional response to context and company as to the wines themselves. 

One of the many pleasures of a visit from my excellent co-author and his partner is I invariably end up with a wine or twelve from the USA. It seems most locally available wines from the States are very expensive, especially compared to their price back home, so I don't often indulge. Hence, most opportunities I've had to drink good American wine have been courtesy of Chris and Dan.

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?

Lovely inky black in the glass, this wine promises to be a good one, if only by the winery's reputation and the fact that nearly half of their entire production is this wine. Pouring it into the glass, I was a little bit surprised that it seemed a bit watery, but the label tells me that this is only 13.5% abv, which seems odd given the place it came from - I've had a lot of Paso Robles zinfandel that contains a guaranteed hangover in every bottle - but then again the Agent for Change cab I had from Paso was also held to these relatively low alcohol levels.

Anyhow! There's a very fresh, simple smell to this wine, tinged with an edge of coconut-fruity-banana that seems to promise a good time. (I ordered this through the mail, but I almost imagine this being packaged in a plain brown wrapper at a liquor store - there's just something risqué about it.) The oak on the nose seems a bit raw; it's more reminiscent of bourbon than Bordeaux.

Somewhat voluptuously overwrought at first, my initial impression is of a blowsy, gone-to-seed wine - it's all very louche in a Plato's Retreat kind of way. Yes, there's enough acidity here to stop the wine from being completely flabby, but it strikes me as a little bit harsh and not particularly well integrated. Flavors, such as they are, seem to be stuck in a high-pitched giggle more appropriately found in strawberry fruit leather; that being said, the wine does display some complexity after aeration, but it's all a lot like listening to the Bee Gees: yes, the singing is good, but it's all disconcertingly way high up there. I'd ordinarily prefer some bass to counterbalance all the treble, but I'm not getting it much here. Tannins are present, but they seem clunky and somehow flown in from another wine entirely; there's almost a hard Loire edge to them, but only just.

All in all, drinking this wine is rather like Cubist art: all very well and good if you're in the mood for it, but sometimes you just want to look at something pretty. This is not a bad wine; there is quality here, but I'll be damned if I can puzzle it all back together right now. Ultimately, this is probably best drunk with steak: it's got a sort of sweetness that is initially pleasing, but on its own it just doesn't work.

It looks like I have Jancis Robinson to thank for one more thing: the third edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine has turned out to be not only an invaluable reference but also heavy enough to serve as a flat surface to park my wine while lounging on the sofa, MacBook at hand, to blog.

My first, fleeting impression was of dried sugared pineapple, but that quickly dissipated in favor of something not unlike popcorn flavored jellybeans. In short, it smells strangely buttery, salty, mineral, sweet, tropical, nutty, and flowery all at the same time - overwhelming, almost, but of course charming as well.

The palate is much more restrained than the aromatics; it tastes much more French than Californian, with firm structure and a mouthfeel reminiscent of beeswax. The finish is lovely, with hints of wildflower and length to spare; acidity is present, not unsettling; color is elegantly pale (think Tilda Swinton, perhaps).

If this wine were French, it'd cost a hundred bucks; this wine isn't, and I'm thinking I should lay some down for a good, long time. Just as Tahbilk marsanne lasts decades, I suspect this one would as well.

There's a state historic park here in California that covers an old town by the name of Columbia. It's up in gold rush country a couple hours east of San Francisco, up in the foothills where prospectors first struck gold right around the middle of the 18th century. One of the things I most remember about Columbia - other than having first drunk sherry there long before it was legal for me to have done so - was Nelson's Columbia Candy Kitchen, which was undeniably awesome when I was a wee pup. As I remember it - and this may well have nothing to do with the place as it actually exists - it was a large, cavernous place with wooden floors and a heavy smell in the air of sweet things: candy apples, candy buttons, horehound, taffy, oddball things you don't see much these days. It smelled of grandmotherly hard candies, of cherries there only to hind the medicine hiding behind the surface. It smelled of abandoned paperboard suitcases, starched shirt collars, and residue scraped off of antimacassars. In short, it smelled... adult.

Similarly, this Ridge wine crosses over from simple cherry-candy over to liniment and unguents only to pause for a second and then head right back over to bright cherry-berry fruit. There's just a hint of a fresh-coconut note there as well, injecting humor into it all; this could pass for a Trader Vic's concoction even though I doubt it'd taste better in a Tiki mug.

It's a beautiful deep-black crimson; again, it looks like something of another time, less like wine than tonic. There's also a mesmerizing note of Christmas pudding, of dates and brandy and spice. One sip, though, and you're transported into something far more outré than imagined: this wine is frickin' huge, simultaneously fruity, bracing, lush, and yet strangely well within balance, relatively high alcohol and extract notwithstanding. Definitely porty to an extent, the wine drinks relatively straightforwardly until the finish, which is something like prune salt-water taffy (think richly fruited and yet not as sweet as it smells) and lasts for what seems nearly an eternity. All the while, there's enough tannin here to ground it ever so lightly; at times, it seems like the acidity's just a wee bit out of balance but that's a minor quibble. This wine succeeds where so many others fail: it's rich, complex, affordable, and also very much typical of a place (in this case, the Dry Creek Valley). Yes, California is well known for Napa cabernet sauvignon, but it's wines like this that I think are our real strength: there are plenty of places that grow good cabernet, but only a handful where Zinfandel shines so beautifully as it does here.

Lovely, sweet, fruit-cake rich, with warm cocoa notes and candied fruit peel on the nose, this smells very much like a good, standard quality Paso zin; somehow, however, the alcohol has gone missing alone the way, resulting in a hole in the nose where the painful alcohol hit should've been, replaced instead by a label declaring this is only 13.5% abv, making me wonder if someone's hiding a spinning cone around here or what...

Still, what a love nose. Very soft and plush, it reminds me of  cru Beaujolais mixed with Angostura bitters, with slight hard earthy edges pushed up against the sweet red fruits. The palate doesn't disappoint either, with simple, cheery red fruits 'n berries served up on a nicely toasty background. Still, though, it seems to lack some of the weight I'd normally associate with zinfandel - or, rather, with higher alcohol levels. It all finishes relatively simply, and it seems like there's something missing there too - either acidity or alcohol - but still: it's a minor complaint.

On the whole, this is good stuff - especially if you're not a fan of one-glass-and-you're-blotto California monster zinfandel. Most of what makes them good is still here, but you could actually consider finishing the bottle with your partner on a school night without worrying about the morning after.

Bonus marketing spin: a portion of the sales price of every bottle goes to non-profit organizations of some kind. I'm cynical enough not to particularly care about that - I mean, if I honestly cared, I'd just write a check to the Avon Foundation and go buy a cheap bottle of wine - but honestly, why not? You're probably not going to find a better Zin for this money, so you might as well go for it.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Continuing along the lines of yesterday's wine, this is another 'high-end' wine that appears to be primarily stocked by supermarkets. Again, good friends brought this bottle over to share with a pizza, but we wound up drinking something else entirely, so here I am sitting at home enjoying this one on my own for a change.

Optically less severe than the Gallo, this wine looks something like dark coffee with a reddish tint. It's got very obvious legs as well, which (to me) promises a rockin' good time; all I need to do is find some barbecue or pizza and I suspect I'd be set. The nose is vaguely woody but ultimately dumb; it's like candy floss/cotton candy in a walk-in, wood paneled closet. Not bad, but again not really wine (at least not to me).

The surprise comes when you actually drink some of this: it's bright and acidic, with pretty firm tannins supporting it all. However, it does seem like something's been kinda fucked with here: the acidity doesn't seem right for a wine this sweet (acidification?), and the tannins seem flown in from somewhere else entirely; It's all kind of disjointed and jarring, and after it all quiets down, you're left with a sense of jammy sweetness and some lingering acidity at the back of your throat. Not really my idea of a good time: if you're going to go for happy fun time party wines, might as well find yourself a Chris Ringland cheapie, I reckon. Over time, it all gets slightly better, but still: if you're spending this much money, there have got to be better options. $8 Aussie cab is more fun, and $18 Loire reds are more interesting, to name a couple of other options at random.

All in all, this reminds me of an interesting experience I had many years ago at a Bay Area winery. An old friend (and my then-current boss) was winemaker there, and he went through a lot of work to save some wines that hadn't turned out quite right the first time around. Using every trick he learned at UC Davis, he was able to deliver something drinkable - but only if you didn't think about it too much. If you did, you began to realize that Mother Nature could never have produce what you were drinking, which made for a surreal experience.

This wine is the equivalent of bad techno.

PS. As an aside, this has been a hell of week for cork taint: both a bottle of Dolium Malbec 2002 (which I brought back from the winery, even) and a bottle of the Olivier Guyot Marsannay Favieres Vielles Vignes 2005 were dead on arrival. Grrr. Thankfully, however, Ed at The Wine Exchange cheerfully refunded my $15 for the Marsannay - now that's good customer service. :)

I'll be the first to say that this wine isn't pretty. Holding up to the light, it's murky - it looks like river dregs, Delta muck, sediment. It all looks either very unsettled or in the process of disintegrating. Still, can't say that I remember what this wine was like when it was young, so who cares, right?

Right off the bat, the first thing I notice about the nose is that oddball candy-coated playtime of a nose that I associated with Bonny Doon's experiments with micro-oxygenation from ten or so years back. There's a strange, fruity, children's-candy effect that I never particularly cared for; I prefer my mataro earthier, not fruitier. Once you get past it, though, there's a lightly roasted/smoked coffee effect that's intriguing, parried by a sort-of wild strawberry ostrich jerky effect. Curious.

Relatively light-bodied at first, the wine quickly turns spicy in the mouth, tasting of candied orange peel and slab smoked bacon. Even if it seems light at first, solid tannins make themselves known soon enough, grounding it all in a heavy-handed, gripping manner perhaps better suited to the Detroit police. There's a rich sweetness to the fruit yet, though, which rides above it all, lending it an air of deeply unserious seriousness that really doesn't help pull it all together.

To me, this wine tastes like the sort of thing a middle-aged winemaker would make: they've had some career success, sure, and the cognoscenti are familiar with the brand, but instead of doubling down and recommitting to better wines, middle-aged boredom has set in and now you're playing around with shiny new toys instead of soberly paying attention to what you're doing. I'm not disappointed by this wine - I think it's decidedly unique and I'm glad it exists - and yet it seems that it's a failure of sorts - a failure to pay attention to what Nature gave you and making that wine instead of whipping our your lab kit and making a wine that could only have been made technologically. What you get is interesting, sure, but it seems alienated from itself (alas, my attention span for Marxist theory was woefully short at university, so I can't spin this out into a class critique of a wine that was forced to be something it wasn't, alienating it from its true nature in the process).

With more air, there's a dark smoky fatigue here that suggests the wine is reaching its end of life (later rather than soon, I suspect). I'm enjoying it with pasta and red sauce; the meat of the wine is amplified by the meatballs and vice versa. If you've got this, drink it up now.

"What is the point of Carignane?"

That's how I was originally going to begin this review. However, I then remembered that I'd already written about this wine a few months ago - and frankly, why revisit it? I said it was naff, right? A historical curiosity, nothing special, purple and childish?

I am however in the habit of listening to my elders, to people that know far, far better than I; last week, I was reading through Randall Grahm's tweets and noticed that he had this to say about carignane:

Carignane is the quintessential Ugly Duckling grape, maybe the best thing grown in CA. [link]

With that in mind, I'll try to approach this wine differently this time around. So what does this wine smell like? Mineral? "Rocks and raspberries?" To me, yes, I suppose, but paying closer attention yields smells of expensively tanned leather. Leaning in further, it's more suggestive of very mild beef jerky with something like lavender-infused caramelized sugar, a strange mix of the meaty and the floral, dusty leather bindings in a gentleman's library with delicate French confections.

Drinking some at last allows me to experience the full complexity of what's on offer; yes, it can be drunk as a "quaffing" or "bistro" wine (as the back label suggests) - it's rich, full, grapey, alcoholic, all of those good things you want with your steak frites on a Friday night - but is there more? Well, yes. It's just speaking a language that doesn't come naturally to me. There's a softness that suggests the wine's peaking in terms of its development; tannins are fully resolved and it's an ethereal kiss, a sly glance from someone attractive who's just walking out of the ballroom. Is there real minerality? Well, it's not as in your face as a Loire red, but yes, listen carefully and you'll sense it, speaking quietly as the Sonoma hills in Indian summer do. Although there's that suggestion of sweetness on the nose, there isn't really any in the wine; the roundness is from ripe fruit, yes, but it's not porty, not overwrought. More than anything else, though, there's a sense that it's too easy to ignore this as something ordinary, something simple, something unexceptional... and much like that quiet girl in the back of the class who you didn't notice at first, time spent with her, oblivious to questioning looks from your classmate, might just turn into something beautiful.

Buy this, drink it, repeat until you get it. That's the point of carignane.

Reading between the lines on the beautifully designed label, it would appear that this is another attempt at selling cleanskins (i.e. wines sold not by the wineries that made them, but by third parties that resell them under the own labels) in the USA. Although K&L have been doing this for years under the Kalinda label, and although the Cameron Hughes label has been around for a couple of years, I have yet to see anyone selling wines cheaply. Instead, what you generally get is relatively high end wines at relatively high prices - this, it seems to me, is a mite perverse in what's generally acknowledged as pretty crappy economic times. After all, a California pink wine at $10 is still relatively expensive considering that this wine was displayed near $7.50 wines from Argentina, $5 wines from Australia, and of course our very own white zinfandels at $3.

So how's the wine?

First off, the color is entrancing. It's a wonderful, dark pink that's similar to pomegranate juice.  It's not quite so dark that it could be mistaken for a thin red Burgundy, but just barely. The nose is medicinal, shot through with camphor, cotton candy, roasted corn, and a fair whack of spicy black pepper.

Tasting at first of nothing but fresh wild strawberries, it's unsettlingly like a gourmand perfume aimed at teen-aged girls. That passes quickly, though, calming down into rhubarb-ridden cream shot through with subtle spicy notes; the texture is fairly serious for a pink wine, with a sort of supporting tannic note that gives it a certain gravitas. There's a brief uptick in acidity on the finish, giving it a much needed freshness, and yet the finish does go on for a while, restating the themes of the wine - pepper, strawberry, rhubarb - with a steely repetition of serious, serious, serious.

This could be the closest pink wine to a red wine that I've ever experienced; it's an interesting style to say the least. Whether or not it'll work for you isn't something I can guess, but I can say that you're getting a hell of a lot of wine for your money here. Yes, I still wish we had a cleanskins industry of Australia scale, but as long as we have wines like this available for not-outrageous prices, I'm more than satisfied with what we've got.

I haven't had a glass of this wine in a decade; it still has one of my favorite labels in the state (a fire-breathing bear), but I rarely shop at the places where you'd ordinarily see this (either Costco or dining-experience-style restaurants). Having a look at the bottle just now, it sure looks like the brand has gone walkabout over the last ten years: the address on the back is Woodbridge, which seems wrong; this was originally a R. H. Phillips wine, and the last time I remember researching them, they'd just completed an IPO and were (alongside Mondavi) one of the few California wineries that was publicly held.

It looks like Constellation Brands now owns R. H. Phillips; strangely, Toasted Head seems to have been divorced from that brand entirely and is now a brand of its own. They own Mondavi now as well, and I'm guessing they're now making this stuff in bulk out of the old Mondavi facilities in Woodbridge, hence the address change on the back of the bottle. So, finally, what we have here is a case of a small family winery having done well in the 90's - and wound up as a virtual label with no real sense of place in the '00s. Strange.

So how is the wine? The nose is agreeably simple, smelling largely of cashew, white peach, and a little bit of banana. Fat and a little unwieldy in the mouth, it heads towards a bananas Foster finish with just a hint of oak propping it all up like a vinuous underwire bra. That being said, it isn't really perceptibly sweet, which is good, and it does taste good enough to finish the bottle. I suppose what this is is your basic, standard-quality California chardonnay with buttery, oaky fruit and no distracting flavors (read: subtlety or nuance) to get in the way of your enjoyment. To be honest, this is strikes me as a cut-rate Kendall-Jackson Vintners Reserve chardonnay: if you like that, you'll like this just as well - and not only is the bottle more beautiful, it'll cost you a few dollars less. This really is exceptional value.

It's Friday evening, and I already finished a bottle of their La severita di Bruto with friends, insisting that I wasn't going to be blogging anything this evening - but one smell of this and yeah, well, I lied.

This wine smells of tinned litchi fruit that someone is eating in the middle of a peat smoke fire on the beach. Seriously. I don't know what to make of it; I've never had a wine that smelled like this before. It smells like someone is dredging rose petals through a smoky sludge of decaying leaves and tar. It smells like someone banging chalky erasers against each other in the middle of dusty warehouse of discarded library books. It smells like ground basalt stirred into a solution of sea water and orange flower water. In short, it smells kind of awesome.

In the mouth, it gets even stranger. It tastes slightly oxidized, yet fresh, with all kinds of outré notes ranging from off-brand cling peaches to orange blossom honey from Provence to smoked horse meat to, I don't know, bruised rambutan mixed with gravel. In short, it's all over the map, delightfully so. The finish lasts for ages, it's wonderfully rich and fat in the mouth, and opens up a weirdly panoramic vista of fresh air and sunlight.

Yeah, it's weird, but this wine is both sui generis and a real keeper.
 
By the way, the La severita di Bruto?  Also very good if not as much of a look-at-me-I'm-crazy showstopper of a wine. That being said, it's probably the best sauvignon blanc I've had from California; yes, the finish is a bit hot, but it works well with the peppery aspects of the wine, and the aromatics are in a class of their own - kind of like high end Marlborough sauvignon minus the pneumatic passionfruit aromas + some of the mineral aspects of Sancerre in one big, goofy package. Recommended.

The marketing materials suggested that this wine would greet 2010 "in fine fashion," so how is it doing in 2009? I never did try it when originally shipped to wine club members many years ago, but here it is now, after two interstate moves; I'm tired of schlepping it around and now it's time to slug it back.

Immediately after opening the bottle, the smell of this stuff managed to overwhelm the homemade tamales I bought from a door-to-door vendor and has for dinner earlier tonight: this stuff is pungent. Boys and girls, the word of the day is Sauerkirschen: this smells like sour cherries, Moravian I suppose, or whatever those large, cheap glass jars contained back when the USSR still existed and you could buy them cheaply at any American grocery store. Whoa. Really strong, bright, dark, sour cherries. There's also a hint of something that reminds me of freshly polished shoes: a light leathery note with the sharp tang of shoeshine polish. Pretty cool.

What this wine taste like? Again, strong, sour cherries with only the faintest hints of darker flavors. There's also a rather strange, herbal note here that is something like off-brand spearmint mouthwash; that sounds worse than it is, I know, but it's very distinctive and not something I've encountered before. All of this is tightly grasped by still present, still somewhat hoary tannin, which at first was so unpleasant I considered throwing it out - but over time, it does loosen up enough to get past. Overall, the mouthfeel is pretty strange; it's like a tug-of-war between not-yet-resolved tannins taking place in the shallow end of a pool. The color of this wine is dark and foreboding, yet it all seems fairly medium-bodied in the mouth, which is I suppose normal for a mature wine like this.

All in all, I really don't know what to make of this wine. Is it too old? Probably not. Was it better young? Who knows? Is the overall disorienting mouthfeel a relic of Bonny Doon's then-obsessions with spinning cones, microbullage, and other weird winemaker tricks? I'm thinking yes; there's something just not right about this wine, something getting in the way of the direct transmission from Mother Earth. I get the feeling that if Randall Grahm had made this ten years later it would be OK - but as it is, I imagine that he'd be recherching an awful lot of temps perdu if he were to open this puppy now.

To paraphrase Stephen Malkmus: A for effort, B for delivery.

One smell of this and whoa, you're in California. This doesn't come across anywhere near as lean and means as Burgundy or Oregon: instead, you're in distinctly warmer territory here. I can't quite put that smell into words, but sometimes you smell a pinot and it just isn't delicate; there's a hint of varnish hovering over the full, red fruitiness.

There's a distinct earthiness or sappiness here as well, though, so it isn't all shiny happy berries, which is a relief. There seems to be a dark, bitter chocolate note there as well, so I'm guessing this stuff has seen a fair whack of oak at some point.

In the mouth, though, the wine is surprising: nimble and light on its feet, avoiding any sense of stewed fruit or overripeness. The flavor profile isn't at all what I was expecting, tending towards the fairly sour with a fleshy midpalate, tasting largely of dusty leather, pipe tobacco, and sour raspberry jam. The finish is slightly overly acidic for my liking, but of course all that means is that you'd best drink this one with charcuterie; by itself, it seems just a bit incomplete, but it does offer up a wide range of flavors ranging from standard Pinot all the way through to earthy sap.

For my money, this isn't really a match for Oregon pinot or Burgundy - it's just a bit too big and top-heavy in some way - but it's a very fine example of Sonoma pinot noir and easily holds its own with some of the classic, e.g. Gary Farrell. Price-wise it's fairly priced, too, which is unusual for this part of the state. Oddly enough the wine it reminds me most of is Bass Philips, albeit in kind of a cartoony way - this isn't anywhere near the wine that is, but it has a similar fullness of profile, I reckon.