Mouthing Off

© Ray Isle
Ziggy, the Wine Wonder Dog!

If you've read through our just-released June issue you may know that I spent some time a little while back engaged in a cork-taint sniff-off with a Labrador named Ziggy. A fun story to write—but I didn't get to run a picture of Ziggy along with it, so I'm rectifying that now. Cute, isn't she? And don't ever try to get a TCA-tainted barrel stave past her.

The other thing I didn't have room to write about in the story were the wines of Sojourn Cellars, a partnership between Craig Haserot, Ziggy's owner, and winemaker Erich Bradley. That's a shame, because they're well worth writing about. Sojourn makes a number of Pinot Noirs and Cabernets from various Sonoma vineyards, and is open for salon-style tastings (by appointment) in the small white house off the main square in Sonoma where I had my showdown with Ziggy.

The 2007 Sojourn Cellars Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir ($36) is a blend from four different vineyards, pale ruby in hue, with appealing sweet strawberry and cherry cola notes and a hint of rhubarb. It has an impressively silky mouthfeel, which jibes with Haserot's comment as I was tasting: "From a philosophical standpoint, we are hyper-focused on mouthfeel. It has to feel good before it tastes good. So we focus a lot on tannin management."

The 2007 Sojourn Cellars Windsor Oaks Vineyard Pinot Noir ($48) offered cooler fennel-herbal notes with dense, sweet berry fruit, a touch of candied raspberry, and smoky tannins on the end; lots of saturated flavor here.

My favorite of the Pinots, the 2007 Sojourn Cellars Sangiacomo Vineyard Pinot Noir ($48) has impressively sustained flavors of ripe wild raspberries and spice, a note of grapefruit peel in its acidity, and, overall, just exceptional balance and poise. The section of Sangiacomo that Haserot sources grapes from is, he says, "a nice cool spot right at the base of Sonoma Mountain, with a lot of marine influence; essentially the northern end of the Petaluma Gap."

Of the Cabernets, I thought the 2006 Home Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon ($39) was a steal for the quality it offers. The vineyard's called Home Ranch because it's essentially Haserot's backyard; the wine itself is luscious and rich, with mocha and black currant flavors and a touch of minty eucalyptus—a big, robust, embraceable Cabernet. Thinking about it makes me want to go out and grill a bunch of steaks right now.

On a different note, the 2005 Sojourn Cellars Mountain Terraces Cabernet Sauvignon ($75) is powerful and dark—much more a classic mountain-fruit Cabernet—with blackberry and black-currant fruit that's wrapped up in gripping but ripe tannins. The wine comes from the best seven barrels off Sojourn's Mountain Terraces vineyard; it's drinking very well now, and it should be drinking even better after four or five years in the cellar.

Sojourn's wines are available in some shops and at restaurants, but the production is fairly small, so they're easiest to find by getting in touch with the winery directly.

© Trapiche/Frederick Wildman
Finger-squeezing at Trapiche

Ever since a lunch last week, when I had the opportunity to taste a slew of single-vineyard Malbecs from Argentina's Trapiche winery, I've been trying to wrap my mind around something flabbergasting that I was told there. When we came to the last wine of the tasting, a luscious deep, dark, black cherry-flavored Malbec called Manos, Gustavo Arroyat, Trapiche's Export Manager, informed us that wine is called Manos because it's entirely handmade. Not only are the grapes hand-harvested, and the best bunches hand-selected and hand-sorted, but each and every grape is hand-pressed. Meaning, each grape is squeezed between a human finger and thumb to release its juices. Now, call me a cynic, but I've have had a hard time buying this. Foot-stomping grapes, sure, but finger-squeezing?

Well, express doubt, and ye shall receive. In response to my queries came the above photo. For obvious reasons, there's not much Manos around—only about 500 cases—and at $90 it's definitely pricey, but the inaugural 2004 vintage has loads of juicy black fruit and an elegant structure. It's a perfect match for barbecue, especially the sweet-glazed Kansas City Spareribs from Blue Smoke that I had with it that day. — Megan D. Krigbaum

I stopped by briefly this afternoon at a tasting of the new 2007 Vintage Ports (here's a lengthy report from Jancis Robinson on the vintage) from some of the major houses, and walked away very impressed. Based on this group, the '07s are more precise and fragrant than I recall the 2003s being; not as lusciously ripe (no surprise—it was a much cooler growing season through the entire summer, though it ended on ideally warm days in September) but more complex and graceful; and with a refined, powerful, spicy tannic grip on the finish of almost all the wines. I'll blog more about the vintage when I taste a few more examples—the wines won't be out for quite a while—but the two at the top of the heap today, for me, were the compellingly floral, layered, powerful Quinta do Vesuvio and the plush, black-currant-and-chocolate Croft. 

This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend Taste Washington, an extravaganza of Washington State wines put on in a few places around the country every year. I was at the mothership incarnation of the thing, in Seattle, a mighty cool town (like you need me to tell you). For me, festivities started off with a seminar I led, in which three of our former F&W Best New Chefs—Johnathan Sundstrom of Lark, Jason Wilson of Crush, and Ethan Stowell of Union (and Tavolàta, How to Cook a Wolf, and the new Anchovies & Olives)—chose some of their favorite Washington wines to pair with recipes made with some of their favorite Washington foodstuffs. 

I left it to the chefs to do most of the talking, meanwhile enjoying the heck out of the pairings they'd come up with. First up, Ethan Stowell produced a local mussels-fennel-citrus salad—details forthcoming, as I was too busy moderating to take notes—to go with the 2007 Mark Ryan Klipsun Vineyard Viognier ($29) from Red Mountain. Along with the other Viogniers I tasted throughout the weekend, it made a strong case for Washington as an impressive source for New World Viogniers that can balance the grape's natural lushness against a good spine of acidity.

Wilson, next up, brought an intensely luscious stinging nettle vichyssoise with grilled shigoku oysters—I'm going to see if he'd be game to run the recipe for this here, because it was pretty insanely delicious—to go along with a 2007 O’Shea Scarborough Klipsun Vignoble Semillon ($20), also from the Klipsun Vineyard on Red Mountain. It was a sort of oddball but appealing wine whose floral-herbal notes went strangely well with the chlorophyll-herby taste of the nettles.

Finally, Sundstrom paired his pork rillettes with fleur de sel butter—no sadness there—with a dry Riesling from the Lake Chelan region (headed toward an AVA designation later this year, apparently). The wine, the 2006 Vin du Lac Lehm Dry Riesling ($45), was flinty and focused, its crisp acidity and green apple fruit an ideal foil to the rillettes' porky richness. The ultra-local butter, by the way, came from a two-cow dairy on Vashon Island, whose young proprietor cooks a couple of days a week at Lark. 

I'll mention a few other highlights from the event in my next blog, along with the red wines that we poured at the seminar just for the fun of it, but this was a mighty nice way to start the weekend. 

I'm on my way to World of Pinot Noir-yes, there really is such a thing-and so hope to return next week with a bushelful of worthwhile Pinot recommendations. In the meantime here's a roundup of entertaining wine reading. Over at Slate, Mike Steinberger (who writes for F&W now and then) weighs in on America's obsession with red wine being good for us; up in Toronto, they're pondering the fact that apparently more than 1,000 U.S. wineries are expected to change ownership by 2018 or so; Tom Wark at Fermentation has announced the winners of the American Wine Blog Awards; and France's Minister of Health wants to muzzle wine writers (says Lebanon's The Daily Star, by way of Agence Presse France).

I, for one, know that I would look very funny trying to sip wine while wearing a muzzle.

A little France vs. California match-up for the weekend, for no good reason other than that the wines were in our tasting room, they were good, and writing about them seemed like the thing to do. So nice to have one's purpose in life be so clear, right?

From California, the 2006 Clos LaChance Estate Grenache ($30) has a striking scent of violets and wild berries—really intense aromatics that give way to juicy blackberry fruit and a little black pepper on the finish. 

Then, heading down the coast, there's the 2007 Jorian Hill BEEspoke ($45), an oddball name for a potent and stylishly made 50/50 blend of Grenache and Syrah from a newish winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. It suggested smoky purple berries with a hint of wild game in the nose, then ripe, dense, berry-driven fruit with what I wrote down as a "lasting boowangy end." I have no idea what the heck I meant, though it still seems like the right thing to have written.(NB, the wine is not shown on the website, but I imagine if you called up they'd tell you how to find it.)

From France, that other country, I came across two affordable and impressive southern French reds. The 2007 Domaine de Cascavel In Fine Rouge ($14), a blend of 90% Grenache and 10% Syrah from the Côtes du Ventoux, has the classic wild herb scent of garrigue, with blackberry and cocoa notes and a juicy but firm texture.

Then, also from the Côtes du Ventoux, I was impressed by the 2007 Mas du Fadan Rouge ($13), black-purple in hue, with dusty pepper and floral notes, and a fleshy, low-acid structure that somehow still held together all of its dark, plummy fruit. It comes from a small vineyard
naturally fertilized by goats, and the property's name, fadan, means someone who has been touched by the fairies or lost their mind. Happens to me all the time.

Wells Guthrie at Copain is primarily known for his impressive single-vineyard Pinot Noirs and Syrahs, most of which are quite small production and, while not crazily expensive, not exactly cheap either. For a while he made a series of affordable wines under the Saison des Vin label, but as he told me today, that mostly just confused people—they didn't know whether the wines were from Copain or not, who was making them, or what they were, exactly. So he's renamed his affordable line Copain "Tous Ensemble," and narrowed it into a set of three regionally designated varietal wines. I tasted them today, and they pretty much blew me away in terms of quality for price (this may be partly because he uses some of the fruit from his single-vineyard sources in the cuvées).

The 2007 Copain Viognier Tous Ensemble Mendocino ($20) is fermented entirely in stainless steel, which shows in its bright, crisp, lightly minerally fruit and almost prickly (in a good way) end. It smells of just-ripe nectarines, and, like all three of these, is made from organically grown grapes.

Then there's the 2007 Copain Tous Ensemble Pinot Noir Anderson Valley ($30), which I thought was remarkably good—tasting it blind, you'd assume this was a single-vineyard bottling at about $20 more a bottle. It has a sweetly floral, raspberry-strawberry aroma; lithe yet saturated fruit (again, ripe raspberry/strawberry in character) that really fills the mouth, a hint of rhubarb and a citrusy tang on the end. 

Finally, the 2007 Copain Tous Ensemble Syrah Mendocino ($20) offers balanced but substantial mocha-plum-blackberry flavors, a nose that suggests smoked meat and fragrant berries, and a grippy but appealing tannic finish. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a better $20 wine for a good steak that I've had recently. 

These wines aren't wildly limited, but they aren't in huge supply either. Probably the best way to track them down is to contact the winery, though wine-searcher.com is always a good option as well. I was also impressed (as usual) with Guthrie's single-vineyard wines, but I'll keep them for a later post; better to start the weekend with a few good bargains.

Not long ago I was in New Zealand, and got a chance to visit a number of winemakers in the Martinborough region. Martinborough has a simple problem—it sounds a lot like Marlborough, the much larger and more well-known region on the South Island that provides the template for New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Consequently people get them confused.

So, a quick Martinborough primer. It's on the North Island, though it's the southernmost wine region on that island. Various wines are produced there, but the region's strength is Pinot Noir; along with Central Otago, it's one of the best Pinot zones in the country. And it's tiny, less than three percent of New Zealand's total wine growing area.

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I suppose you could spring for the usual rosé Champagne or box of fancy chocolates, but why not a bottle of Burgundy instead? I can't think of any good reason. Also, I was at the Frederick Wildman Burgundy portfolio dinner at WD-50 the other night, where I was filled with poppin-fresh Burgundy info (also with chef Wylie Dufresne's rather odd squab with butternut-squash noodles and cream soda gelée).

If the love of your life likes white, one option is to ditch him or her and find someone who likes red; another, possibly less traumatic, would be to pick up a bottle of the 2005 Domaine Christian Moreau Valmur Grand Cru Chablis ($70), which is spot-on in its Chablisiennity: a wine with volume but no oppressive weight, the wet cobbles/chalk scent characteristic of some (good) wines of the region, and crisp, mouthfilling fruit. Also mighty darn nice was the focused, intense Château Génot-Boulanger Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru La Garenne ($55), a whole lot of words to name a wine that tasted so pure it seemed to rise past words entirely.

If your friend/spouse/alien controller likes red, well then, you're already living the good life, but for a modest outlay you can make them happy with something like the 2005 Potel-Aviron Moulin-à-Vent Cuvée Exceptionelle ($27), all fragrant black raspberry and liveliness, and yet another argument towards investigating the sadly underrated world of cru Beaujolais. If you're feeling a tad more flush, on the other hand, the 2006 Domaine Humbert Frères Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Poissenot ($125) was for me the wine of the night, a very pretty G-C that you'd almost want to take on a date instead of drink, except that it's a bottle of wine and that would be conversationally depressing as the night wore on. Instead, pour yourself (or your best pal) some and enjoy its complex layers of licorice, smoke, wild berry and crisp tannin. It went pretty fabulously with the Wagyu skirt steak Dufresne cooked up. I wish I could say the same for the peanut butter "pasta" (that's right) he served with the steak, but then everybody knows that peanut butter pasta doesn't go with Burgundy. Right?

Oh, you know, why not? Just because every single media outlet in America is probably doing a Superbowl-tie-in story right now doesn't mean I shouldn't, too, right? Anyway, I was going to write about the following five wines regardless; they'd be dandy for a Superbowl get-together, but they'd be equally good if you were sitting on a sandy beach, or heading over to a friend's for dinner, or making venison chili over a camp stove in a shed outside Durango, Colorado. Why you'd want to do that last one, I have no idea, but at least you'd be drinking good wine while you did.

2007 Fournier Sauvignon Blanc ($12) This Loire Sauvignon Blanc, from vineyards in the Touraine and Anjou regions, comes across like a good Sancerre for about half the price—it's grassy and zesty, with lemon and gooseberry flavors and a spicy finish.  

2007 Ajello Majus Bianco ($14) A blend of the local Sicilian varieties Grillo and Cataratto. This is all midsummer Sicilian sun: smoky pineapple notes and full-bodied texture. The Ajellos have grown grapes in Sicily since 1860, and while they still sell the majority of what they grow, they reserve the best lots for their own wines.

2006 Feudi di San Marzano Sud Negroamaro Puglia ($12) Sweet, rich blackberry fruit wrapped up in spicy tannins—that’s pretty much the story with this easygoing Southern Italian red. It isn't exactly a brainy wine; more just lush and simple and inviting.

2007 Domaine Jean Bousquet Malbec ($13) Jean Bousquet started off making wine in southern France in the 1970s, but in 1997 he moved to Argentina's Tupungato Valley, evidently so he could make wines like this one: generous, black, full of ripe raspberry fruit.  

2006 LiVeli Orion Salento Primitivo ($15) This is a Puglian wine produced by a Tuscan family (the owners of Avignonesi). Powerful and earthy, it seems as though it might have been siphoned out of the ground rather than fermented in a tank, which in my book is a good thing.