Hard to know what to say about this, but Robert Mondavi died this morning, age 94. It's essentially impossible to sum up in a short space his contributions to California wine; safe to say he was one of the instrumental forces in bringing Napa Valley to the world stage in terms of its visibility and the quality of its wines; that his own wines, particularly his Reserve Cabernet, have been benchmarks of California Cabernet Sauvignon; and that he created one of the world's iconic wine brands. I still have a bottle of '91 Mondavi Reserve lurking around in my cellar somewhere—seems that this weekend would be the appropriate time to open it and raise a toast to him. If you have any Mondavi on your shelves, why not do the same? Legends don't come around that often.

Next time you can't find an interesting but small production wine in your local wine store, you might want to consider these remarks by Jack Goldenberg, Chairman of the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America at their 65th Annual Convention:

"The American consumer who’s complaining that he can’t get some obscure frou-frou wine produced and bottled by Croatian virgins is missing the point. The reason he even WANTS that bottle of wine is because of the incredible variety that is already on the shelves! And how did it get there? WE put it there!"

Well! Helpful clarification, there. Perhaps when I get emails from readers wondering why they can't find a specific wine, and can't order it directly from the winery, either, I'll just forward those words along.

Yikes.

So in the context of spending some time last week with the always erudite and engaging Michael Terrien, winemaker at Hanzell Vineyards, he felt it necessary to open up a few older vintages of Hanzell Chardonnay and Pinot Noir (undoubtedly because I shamelessly asked). If you're hanging on to older Hanzells, consider yourself in luck. Especially consider yourself so if you've got a stash of the 1998 Pinot, which pretty much blew me away. Here's why. We opened it in the evening—nice accompaniment to steak, btw—and it was both focused and luscious. I wasn't taking notes, because I decided I was tired of taking notes. Fine. Since we also opened a 1991 Hanzell Chardonnay (savory and spicy and still very much alive) and a 1984 Hanzell Pinot Noir (aromatics heading towards earth, dried cherries and twigs in a lovely way), along with a few other wines, we didn't finish the 1998. I cleverly deprived Mr. Terrien of the bottle. 

Then, because I'm of the "see if it takes a licking and keeps on ticking" school of wine testing, I stuck the remainder of the wine in the trunk of my car, and the next day drove it up Mt. Veeder Road and down the Oakville Grade (nice and windy—lots of aeration), headed back into Napa to have lunch at Ubuntu (fabulous all-veg food, and this is coming from a serious carnivore; I parked in the shade), then zoomed back to Yountville, where I parked the bottle on a countertop where I was staying until 7:00 PM, when I opened it to drink with a roast beef sandwich and potato chips.

Now, most older wines, you do that to them and they weep in pain and die. This Hanzell Pinot got better. My first reaction, after pouring a glass and sipping it, is unprintable in a family magazine (or on its website). Safe to say it was a violently profane expression of surprise. My second reaction was to think, well, maybe I better make notes after all. So: aroma of black cherry compote, brown sugar, black tea leaf, and orange skin; lasting flavors of fresh and dried wild raspberries and cherries, smoke, and more tea; and a velvety, fully resolved texture that still wasn't showing any signs of tiring or falling apart. A great wine.

Should I have drunk it with something more regal than a sandwich and some chips? I don't know, and don't really care. I suspect I could have drunk it with an old shoe and it would have been just as delicious.  

I'm just back from a week gallivanting (occasionally by helicopter) through the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, so while I get my notes together, here are a couple of mighty tasty cachaça cocktails created by my colleague Nick Fauchald. Both are ideal for that moment when the usual caiparinha just seems too darn familiar, or when you're feeling wildly inspired after reading my May story on Brazil and cachaça...

Obrigada
Makes 1 drink
8 red, seedless grapes
One-quarter lime
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Ice
2 ounces cachaça
Small bunch of grapes, for garnish
In a cocktail shaker, muddle the grapes and lime with the sugar. Fill the shaker with ice and add the cachaca. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a small bunch of grapes.

Agua de Marzo
Makes 1 drink
Ice
2 ounces cachaça
3/4 ounce St-Germain elderflower liqueur
1/2 ounce fresh lime juice
1/2 ounce fresh grapefruit juice
Grapefruit twist, for garnish
Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add the cachaça, St-Germain, lime juice and grapefruit juice. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a grapefruit twist.

 

The other day I went to a vertical tasting of Chateau Palmer, the Bordeaux third-growth that's generally considered the best wine of Margaux after Chateau Margaux itself. Bernard de Laâge de Meux, Palmer's communication director, was there to conduct the event, which mostly involved presenting the various wine journalists present with a series of foil-covered bottles and smiling with a kind of offhand Bordelais devilishness as we tried to guess which vintages we were tasting.

I'd like to say that I nailed them all, but I'd like to say that I live in a villa at Cap-Ferrat and drive a Ferrari, too. Instead I drive a '93 Volvo and live in Brooklyn. But at least I didn't make a sad fool of myself, which is always comforting. All of the wines were very good (not surprising) and some were great. My favorites (slightly more surprising) were two less well regarded vintages. First there was the 1998, which had a fragrant, lightly gamy aroma with a slight and strangely appealing band-aid-box note, a dense, tongue-coating texture, and graceful black currant and black cherry fruit. About this, M. de Laâge de Meux (I sort of love writing that name-makes me feel like Stendhal or something) said, "A vintage of Palmer takes about ten years to show its aromatic complexity," to which I say, "Yep, sure seems that way."

The second of my favorites-along with several other people at the table-was the 1991, which was particularly surprising given it was paired against the much more acclaimed 1990. The color had a ruddy, beginning-to-fade quality, the aroma was full of tobacco, gamy secondary notes, licorice, and berries; in the mouth it was supple, lovely, fully developed, with dried fruit and plum cake notes, sort of sweet and savory all at once. Really wonderful wine from a frost-damaged and rainy vintage, and all the more mysterious for that. There doesn't seem to be much of it around, but what there is seems to run about $120 a bottle-not cheap, but given 2005 Palmer futures are somewhere around $250 to $300, you know, the price tag doesn't seem so bad after all...

Interesting little story here from Agence France-Presse about eProvenance, a project started by Harvard professor Eric Vogt. Producers can use Vogt's tamper-proof seals, electronic tags and various other high-tech widgets to ensure a bottle's legitimacy, but what's more interesting is an electronic tracking device in each case that records temperature variations the wine is subjected to during shipping. Anyone who's ever been irked to find they've paid good money for bottle that was clearly heat-damaged during transit should be interested. (On a side note, the AFP story was sent to me by Drew Shotts at Garrison Confections—no surprise that a chocolatier would be interested in this sort of thing.)

As I wade through the scrawled notes from the last couple of weeks, I see I've missed a few wines worth mentioning. From the Frederick Wildman tasting a week or so ago, some appealing and impressive stuff (in addition to the two new wines from Jolivet that I already blogged about):

2006 Castello Monaci Salice Salentino ($10) Negro Amaro with 20% Malvasia Nera. Tasty, inviting Salice Salentino for a very good price—lots of strawberry, plum and pepper. The grilling months are approaching...

2006 Olivier Leflaive Bourgogne Blanc "Les Setilles" ($23) Almost always a good choice in basic Bourgogne Blanc, this cuvée comes from declassified Meursault and Puligny fruit. Light oak toast on the nose, and crisp, almost prickly apple & peach fruit. Simple, but charming. Getting a bit pricey, though. Regarding 2006, Patrick Leflaive says, "A very nice year for whites. The reds..." He ended with one of those Gallic shrugs.

2006 Re Manfredi Bianco della Basilicata Muller Thurgau/Traminer ($20) I don't know what these folks are doing growing Muller Thurgau and Traminer down in Basilicata, but as strange as that idea may be, based on this wine it's not a bad one. A sort of round, luscious, spicy variation on these northern Italian grapes. Pretty darn tasty, to get all technical about it.

2006 Nino Negri Ca'Brione ($34) An even stranger white: a blend of Incrocio Manzone, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and, to top it off, free-run Nebbiolo juice. Go figure. But it's a dense, viscous, fascinating wine, with citrus zest, red apple, melon, and a touch of wild berry, framed by some light oak spice. Some of the grapes are also dried for a few weeks before fermentation, apparently. Those crazy Lombardians! I love them.

2006 Château Fuissé Vieilles Vignes ($56) Says Antoine Vincent of Ch. Fuissé, "2006 was very round, and we had to pay attention to balance, not to have wines that were too fat. Which is why we used no battonage." Evidently a wise choice, because this certainly wasn't too fat; rather, it was focused and clean, with pretty green apple fruit and a touch of caramel, and a resinous note on the end sort of recalling the taste and texture of fresh-peeled apple skin. From 65 to 77 year old vines.

Nothing like tasting 15 or 20 wines and coming up with bupkus. A few Santa Cruz Mountain Pinots—yark. (A pity, too, because I had higher hopes for them.) Rap star Lil' Jon's new Little Jonathon Merlot from Monterey? Yikers. An intriguing Côtes du Luberon red? Hurg! If I wanted a glassful of pure brett, I'd buy a petri dish.*

Anyway. Two wines I did like were:

2007 La Vieille Ferme Côtes du Luberon White ($8) Not long on complexity, but this cheerful French white had a lot of very appealing pear and apple fruit and a touch of earthiness. Equal parts Grenache Blanc, Bourboulenc, and Ugni Blanc, with a touch of Roussanne. And no, the Luberon red that was so heinous was not these guys.

2007 Foxglove Chardonnay ($12) Bob Varner of Varner Wines has been making this unoaked, second-label Chardonnay for several years now, and each vintage it impresses me with its balance, crisp apricot-melon fruit and ebullient aroma. It's not everywhere in the country, but it's in most major markets, and there's enough of it to go around.

*About brett, before various friends of mine who are more on the green/natural/funky wine front take me out back and force me to eat spelt or something. I don't mind a certain amount of brett, particularly in some wines; no brett, no ’89 Beaucastel, after all. But there's a difference between funky and foul, just as there's a difference between indulging your inner-Euro-ness & skipping the deodorant versus not bathing for six months.

There's a minor brouhaha going on in the wine-blogging and wine-writing worlds about English wine critic Jancis Robinson's statement reported earlier this week by Decanter that wine critics "must always remember that we are parasites on the business of winemaking." For my part, the only thing I find surprising about the statement is that a critic said it; overall, critics are often seen as parasites, especially by the industries they criticize, so the appearance of the word really shouldn't surprise anyone in the business of being a critic. Shocking! Me? How could you say such a thing! I feel faint. I think I'll have to sit down.

I'd go out on a relatively stable limb and parse Robinson's comments as follows: "winemakers are the actual artists here, and the wine itself is the crucial thing, so let's not forget that." I'm guessing that's more what she meant than, "we critics are vitality-sapping, largely unsavory creatures having a fine time living off the wine industry," which seems to be how a number of people are interpreting it. I'd also argue that even if you take wine criticism as parasitical in the word's most familiar and generally negative context, you're oversimplifying wine. Sure, wine can be a wonderful, transcendent liquid that approaches or reaches the level of art, that subsumes thousands of years of history, culture, science, and what have you, wrapping the whole thing up nicely and sealing it in a bottle with a cork (yep, you heard right). But wine's also a business. Winemaking is part of that business. As soon as a winemaker decides that he is going to sell the wine he's made, well, hi-ho, welcome to capitalism. Is the critic a parasite on winemaking, or a useful symbiote with the consumer, picking off the nits and biting flies of advertising, marketing, pretty labels and general b.s. that accompany selling darn near anything?

But back to Jancis. Wine, I think, operates with a wonderfully uneasy balance between romance and pragmatism, far more than most other products that you can buy in a store. At one extreme, people describe wine's qualities with a fervid passion that usually marks religious zealots or high-school sophomores. At the other end, wine gets you drunk. (Yadda yadda, wine lovers don't drink because of the alcohol; yes, of course, but also let's be realistic—humans didn't come up with alcoholic beverages because they wanted nuances of stone fruit and white pepper.) Robinson's statement, rather than critical, is romantic and idealistic, if you ask me. Whether that's a good thing is another question.

There was an amusing rant by Alder Yarrow of Vinography a couple of days ago about how much he hates wine decanters, which I have to admit isn't something I'd given a lot of thought to before. (Note: he doesn't hate decanting wine, just wine decanters.) But it brought to mind a recent tasting put on by Riedel that I went to. The purpose was to highlight their multitudinous Pinot Noir-specific glassware options, but I thought that the most compelling part of the whole thing was a new line of entirely impractical (Alder would really hate these), but really quite beautiful wine decanters. Take, for instance, this one, the Swan ($395). With its twenty-six-inch-long slender crystal neck, I'm guessing that it would last about three minutes before being smashed to smithereens in my house. There was also this one, the Paloma ($395), about which I can only say one should definitely practice before using it. I witnessed one of the pourers at the event look quite startled when she tipped it forward too rapidly, and it launched a jet-like stream of red wine directly at some poor woman's blouse. But the decanter looked beautiful even as an inadvertent weapon.

But, you know, beauty comes at a price.

Alder goes on to point out the legitimate difficulty of washing wine decanters (Maximilian Riedel simply said, "pour hot water through it," when I asked him about how on earth one washed the swan—odd how much "washing the swan" sounds like a euphemism for something inappropriate but in fact is not). Alder then shows a picture of his favorite decanter, which is pretty much your classic glass pitcher. Me, I'm particularly fond of my own makeshift (sort of) decanter, which is this nifty pitcher from Simon Pearce, which my brother gave to my wife and I as a wedding present. (Unfortunately, it seems to have shrunk since we acquired it, as it now only holds 24 ounces—but hey, that last ounce in the bottle was full of sediment anyway).

Perhaps some kind of wine aeration vessel smackdown is in order: in the near corner, Alder Yarrow, wielding the stone bat of pragmatism; in the other, Max Riedel, armed with the glittering knives of beauty. Boo-yah!