In my October column on 50 of the classic wines of the world, I singled out Castello di Monsanto's renowned Il Poggio bottling as a defining example of Chianti. So it was good fortune, or weird coincidence, or something, that Monsanto's Laura Bianchi happened to swing through town today to do a short retrospective tasting of three decades of Il Poggio.

I'll give her the prefatory remark: "What's important is that the style of the wine does not change. We believe in what my father started forty years ago, and we always try to improve the quality but not change the style."

That seems to me a good approach, if you've got a wine in your portfolio that is as exemplary as Il Poggio. It comes from a single five-and-a-half hectare vineyard on the Monsanto property, and is a blend of 90% Sangiovese with roughly equal parts Colorino and Canaiolo, aged for 18 months in new and one-year-old French oak. And, as this tasting proved (yet again; I've tasted this wine a lot over the years) it ages beautifully.

We tasted five vintages—2004, 2003, 1997, 1982, and 1977—and all of them were in admirable shape, with the '04 and the '82 the standouts of the group. 1997 and 2003 were both hot years, and that showed in both wines' black cherry fruit (more dried black cherries in the '97, and shading to plum paste in the '03) and a dark-roast coffee character in the '97 as well. Yet, even in vintages like these, it's worth noting that superripe for Chianti would still be considered somewhat astringent and austere in, say, Napa or Barossa. That's one lovely thing about good Chianti—even from a hot year it retains a cracked-twig crispness to its tannins and general character that makes it a fantastic partner for food.

The '82 was vividly aromatic, full of floral, leather and black tea. In the mouth it showed game and truffle along with sweet dried raspberry and cherry, and, as it opened up, distinctly fresh mint notes. If you can find this anywhere, and it's been stored carefully, buy it. It's drinking beautifully, and should continue to do so for some time.

The '04 is the current release (it's the one I wrote up for my column) and it's a great vintage of this wine. Dark cherry and raspberry aromas with a slight caramel hint from oak, lightly gamy and intense, loads of black cherry fruit, tea leaf suggested both in the taste and in the tactile tannins, an alluring note of violets... It's young, but after about two hours open it was terrific, and if you're hunting for a top-notch Chianti to cellar for—well, pretty much as long as you'd want to cellar it—this is a great choice.

While researching a piece on the best wineries near beaches for a story that will appear in our October issue, I discovered that there is a die-hard community of surfing winemakers around the world, from Santa Barbara to Basque country. Perhaps the most serious of the bunch are the winemakers in South Africa’s Cape Winelands, including the guys over at Tokara, Beaumont and MAN Vintners. They all showed up for the 10th annual Vintners Surf Classic, held this past weekend. The two-day event attracted 40 to 50 surfers plus family and industry friends who came for the Champagne breakfast and post-contest barbecue. Contest organizer Miles Mossop, the winemaker at Tokara, e-mailed me the highlights, including the winners in the three different categories. I'm pushing for an international competition—pitting together surfing winemakers from around the world—for next year.

Juniors:
1st Gunter Schultz - Kleinood

Masters:
1st Johan Reyneke - Reyneke Wines

Veterans:
1st Anton Smal - Villiera

© 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.

A funny and characteristically sharp post by Alder Yarrow of Vinography about the assorted crackpots of the wine world called to mind the dinner I had just the other night with Ales Kristancic, the off-the-wall visionary behind the Slovenian winery Movia. (Yarrow mentions him as well.) The dinner was at the James Beard House, and the guest chef was Tony Mantuano of Chicago's Spiaggia—a terrific cook and also one of the most sane, even-tempered, likeable people I've ever run into in the chef world. He's a contrast, of course, to Ales, with whom I spent close to a week in Slovenia recently, and who's a ribald, intense, shaven-headed crazy man, albeit in the best possible way.

Kristancic is devoted to the idea of terroir, the expression of place through the vehicle of wine (in a sense), and his wines are remarkable. Once in a while they can be more remarkable than they are good, but mostly they're eye-opening both in terms of their quality and their idiosyncratic character. For instance, with Mantuano's wood-roasted diver scallop served with walnut pesto and lemon, Kristancic poured a pair of Ribolla Giallas, his 2006 Movia Rebula ($29, find this wine) and his 2006 Movia Lunar ($45, find this wine). The first was supple, full of stone-fruit notes, and silky in texture; the other, luminously orange, seemingly oxidized beyond repair, but, when tasted, fresh and intense, with an almost tannic tactile feel in the mouth, and bright apricot and pear notes. It's unusual stuff—because, as Ales told me, "It's just Ribolla and it's expression. What the juice wants to be. No more. We touch the wine one time—to put the wine in the barrel—and only one time more, the second time, when we decant the wine out of the barrel with a tube." So: native yeasts, natural fermentation, unfiltered, untouched, and if that weren't enough he buries the barrels 25 feet underground while the wine ages (the reason for that has something to do with the moon).

There were other wines with the dinner, of course, and, this being Ales, other bars to go to after the dinner. When I bowed out of the festivities sometime past midnight, he was drinking gin-and-tonics and talking about heading to a Bulgarian dance club. I didn't even know there were Bulgarian dance clubs in New York. 

Of course, that's last minute for some people. For me, I think skating close to the gift-giving edge of disaster adds spice to life. Especially when it involves fighting through mobs of other time-challenged shoppers. Hey—hands off that bottle of Viognier, pal, or I'll show you Christmas season! 

For the more demure, or else the more unwilling to leave their homes, though, you could do worse than to give a donation in your giftee's name to Changing the Present, which consolidates various worthy charities into a web-based gift-giving structure (more or less). It's pertinent here because of their affiliation of Roots of Peace, a charity that clears war-torn regions of landmines and replaces them with grapevines. Tax-deductible and honorable, I'd say.

On the other hand, there's an abundance of new wine- and/or spirits-related books out there, some of which are worth a panicked trip to your local book emporium (or to Amazon, though you'll be paying some hefty shipping charges at this point if you want it there by Dec. 24).

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It was a pleasantly sunny afternoon when the gun went off to start the annual barco rabelo regatta on the Douro this past Sunday (we're going to be bouncing around in time a bit with these Portugal entries; bear with). I'd abandoned my usual journalistic neutrality and was rooting for the Sandeman boat, largely because I was on it. 

In way of background, rabelos are the shallow-bottomed, keel-less boats once used to transport port casks down the Douro to Vila Nova de Gaia, the sister city to Oporto and home of the major port shipping companies. Back in the days that people actually used these boats—which are steered by a single long oar poking into the water from the stern, and feature a large square-rigged sail—the things were treacherous, since they were piled full of full port casks (heavy) and were sailed down the Douro before it was dammed (full of rapids) and had no stabilizing keel. Ours, on the other hand, were lightly loaded with empty casks and sailed on the Douro at the mouth of the river; entirely different proposition, which is to say that to become a fatality statistic in the annual regatta would take a lot of doing.

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Resveratrol? Old hat. Now, according to this University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine press release, it's been determined that red wine (as well as various other fruits and vegetables) contains the anthocyanidin C-3-R—that's cyanidin-3-rutinoside to you completists out there—which in turn has been determined to kill off leukemia cells while leaving healthy cells intact. At least in laboratory tests. 

Now, what I determined this weekend, at a dinner that my friend Tara Q. Thomas of Wine & Spirits had for Bert and Gertrud Salomon of Salomon Undhof, is that the 1990 Noel Verset Cornas—in addition to being a gamey, gorgeously drinking, wild-beast-dragged-from-its-lair, epitome-of-Cornas sort of wine—will actually make you younger. I drank two glasses, and felt at least two months of weariness drop away. Unfortunately, it's hard to find. But isn't that the classic problem with the Fountain of Youth? 

Out for dinner with a trio of Spanish winemakers last night at Tia Pol—a meal that started late, and then went on way too late, with all three winemakers winding up outside on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, smoking cigarettes and drinking sake from the Izakaya bar next door. Of course, this is the sort of thing that happens when you hang out with Spanish winemakers.

However, before the sake-drinking and cigarette-smoking, we did manage to taste some pretty terrific wines, among them the extremely impressive Albariños being made by Gerardo Mendez at Do Ferreiro. Mendez makes three wines: a basic Albariño; Cepas Vellas, an ancient vine bottling (importer Andre Tamers of De Maison Selections claims that they're over 200 years old, which sounds unimaginable to me, but I have no real reason to doubt him); and Rebisaca, a blend of Treixadura and Albariño. Mendez does everything I like with Albariño—aging on lees in tank, organic viticulture, indigenous yeasts—and avoids the one thing I really don't like with this grape, which is oak.

The result is wines like the 2006 Do Ferreiro Albariño ($22, but not released yet), a model of the form: citrus peel and chalky mineral aromas, then bright, vivid green apple and citrus fruit with an almost smoky undertone; the 2005 Do Ferreiro Albariño ($22) which, coming from a warmer vintage, reveals more pineapple fruit notes (though not the hideous canned pineapple fruit you sometimes get in overripe Chardonnay) and has a denser texture; and the 2005 Do Ferreiro Cepas Vellas ($35), appropriately more complex, with saturated green apple and citrus fruit notes, and a kind of mineral-briny lime-candy finish.

If you like Albariño (and you should), keep a watch out for the 2006 wines. Mendez, who looks oddly like the writer Milan Kundera, remarked of the vintage, "I don't have any comparison for this year. It's like a flower—extraordinarily delicate. A great year."

Moreover, if you like Albariño (and you will, or else—got it, pal?), put some of it away. Cellar it. It seems like a bright, direct white to be drunk soon after release, and it is; but it also ages surprisingly well. I discovered that while tasting old vintages of Pazo de Señorans in Galicia a few years ago, and rediscovered it last night while tasting the 2001 Do Ferreiro Cepas Vellas, which had an extraordinary bouquet of petrol, lime zest, pineapple and honeysuckle, profound minerality, citrus fruit that wasn't fading in the least, and a lingering honeysuckle note (from botrytis, which is present in the '05 as well, though it's imperceptible as yet). Mendel said of the wine, "When you compare the '01 and '05 you see how long a life that '05 has ahead of it. In two years the '05 will start being ready to drink."

It's worth adding that the pleasure of tasting these wines was undoubtedly heightened by the just absurdly good food at Tia Pol. For the Albariños, this particularly meant an earthy carpaccio of king oyster mushrooms in a citrus vinaigrette with chopped almonds, and sweet, tender langoustines that if I'd been eating them blindfolded would have made me swear I was in Spain (as it turns out, Alex Raij, the chef, buys them directly from a guy in Spain). They aren't like langoustines you get here—they're what langoustines you get here would be in their dreams, that is if langoustines dream. Nor are they cheap. But they're worth every peseta.

We moved on to reds after that, and to a cochinillo (roast suckling pig) whose salty, cracker-crisp skin would be envied by any self-respecting Segovian chef; the meat was tender enough, too, to pass the classic test of being able to be cut apart with the edge of a plate. Co-owner Mani Dawes tells me the cochinillo is usually a Wednesday-night special. I say that if that's the case, then I've got my Wednesday nights planned out for the next five years.

Bizarrely enough, given my recent post about the new Snake River AVA, it turns out that my colleague, Emily Kaiser, happened to have a couple of cases of Idaho wines sitting here in her office, waiting to be tasted (in anticipation of an upcoming trip to research Idaho's food culture, or somesuch). The god of wine works in mysterious ways, I say. 

We opened them up this morning and tasted through them. While I can't say that Idaho is the new Napa Valley, I will say that if someone asked me to place bets on Idaho's wine future, I'd put my money on Syrah. Most of the Bordeaux varieties we tasted were odd, and the lone Chardonnay was scary (yet more proof that there should be an international moratorium on Chardonnay planting—enough with the oceans of wretched Chardonnay, already!). But I thought that the 2004 Koenig Vineyard Cuvée Amelia Syrah ($50), though whacked with an overabundance of charry oak, had good peppery Syrah fruit—a dark, smoked blackberry character. The 2003 Hells Canyon Idaho Reserve Syrah ($50) had a harsh oaky note as well, but also really charming berry notes tucked away underneath. But fifty bucks each? For fifty bucks you can run out and buy a bottle of Clusel-Roch Côte Rôtie, which, I'm sad to say, would just plain step on either one of these wines. 

Anyway, in my opinion—and since this is a blog, there ain't nothing but my opinion going on around here—at least some of the vineyards in Idaho are growing quite good Syrah, unsurprisingly reminiscent of some of the better eastern Washington Syrahs. The winemaking isn't up to the quality of the grapes, but that's less of a problem than the reverse. Winemaking you can learn; you can't teach a vineyard how to be anything other than what it is. 

And I will give kudos to Hell's Canyon for being the only winery I can think of willing to put a black and white photo of dead deer flopped across the hood of a 1930's automobile on one of its wine labels: the appropriately named Deer Slayer Syrah. I'd like to say it's a really meaty red, but...

KRISTV, a news station in Corpus Christi, TX, has reported on a growing conflict between ranchers and grape growers near the town of Driftwood, in the Texas Hill Country. Seems the ranchers are fond of zapping their grazing land at the end of the season with the disquietingly named herbicide 2,4-D. This 2,4-D—apparently the most widely used herbicide worldwide—isn't particularly harmful...um...except that the EPA points out that it can, er, cause nervous system damage after short-term exposure above the maximum contaminant level, at least in drinking water. 

They haven't tested it in wine.

Anyway, the burgeoning wine business in the area is all hetted up because the 2,4-D might blow over on the wind and kill the vines (it's good at killing broad-leaf weeds and woody plants). They seem to be less worried about it killing the drinkers of the wines made from the vines, but hey, maybe I'm just a paranoid guy.

It occurs to me that a good, old-fashioned range war might be just the thing to get a little more publicity for Texas wines. Speaking as a native Texan myself.  

I'll add that, while I haven't been to any of the wineries right around Driftwood, both Sister Creek Vineyards and Flat Creek Estate are making a range of good wines (I'm particularly fond of Flat Creek's luscious Supertexan Sangiovese, and not just for its clever name). And if you're in the area, you'd be nuts not to stop off and have dinner at Café 909 in Marble Falls. I wrote in the magazine a while back about how absurdly delicious I thought chef Mark Schmidt's Frozen Pistachio Parfait was when I went there last year; what I didn't have room to add in that little feature was how good the rest of his food is, too.