Obviously, last Wednesday was an epic day (as evidenced by the fact that it's taken me three days to blog about all of its goings on). The day began with New Zealand Riesling and Pinot Gris, shaded into Sauternes and then was pleasantly capped off with a tasting with Tuscan winemaker Duccio Corsini of Principe Corsini.

Corsini was a great surprise at the end of the long day. He's supremely laid back and a terrific storyteller. His account of his time as an exchange student in Utah during high school—in which he seemingly did nothing but ski—was quite funny. And his lineage, which includes a saint and a pope, provided good fodder, too. Not only were his wines good but he kept me entirely enthralled for well over an hour talking about his olive oil production, his picturesque properties in Tuscany and even his love for hunting wild boar at his Maremma estate. Another amazing thing he told me about was how he puts the olive pits from making his oil to good, sustainable use by burning them to heat his entire Chianti estate.

Now about those wines: Corsini's family has two properties in Tuscany. Le Corti, in Chianti Classico, produces Sangiovese-based wines, and the Marsiliana estate turns out reds blended from Bordeaux varieties Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. He also uses the Marsiliana property for testing out other varietals like Petit Verdot, which apparently does particularly well on the property, and Syrah, which Corsini said unfortunately produced bizarrely generic juice. A few highlights from our tasting:

2006 Le Corti Chianti Classio ($21, find this wine) This earthy, tart cherry-flavored Chianti is from Corsini's Le Corti Estate just outside Florence. The wine sees no oak, but rather is aged in cement and concrete.

2005 Cortevecchia Chianti Classico Reserva ($35, find this wine) Also from the Le Corti Estate, this Reserva bottling is smooth with silky tannins and juicy black cherry notes.

2004 Marsiliana ($54, find this wine) This blend comes from Corsini's estate in the coastal Maremma region of Tuscany. The wine is bold with spice and cassis flavors, but is mellowed by well-integrated oak.

This week, New York is overrun by fashion models, designers and those who have to be in-the-know for Fashion Week, with runway shows all over the city. Coincidentally (at least I don't think there's any connection, as winemakers aren't exactly known for being a fashion-savvy bunch), there has also been an invasion of wine-industry folk, from winemakers to importers to sommeliers to retailers from all over the place, all in town for tastings and dinners and other such events.

This has made for a very exciting, albeit hectic, time around here.

Yesterday, I was able to taste with producers from three different wine regions around the world without ever going below 43rd Street, above 46th Street or west of Sixth Avenue. It was a doozy of a day, but I tasted some wonderful wines—so many that I've decided to break the highlights into parts. I'll deliver them one at a time today, so stay tuned.

Part One

The day began at the office, tasting with Kiwi winemaker Dave Pearce from Grove Mill in Marlborough, who was fascinating to talk to because of his commitment to figuring out which grape varieties will maximize the potential of the region. His next experiment will be with some Grüner Veltliner that he planted a couple of years ago.

We tasted through a bunch of wine, but the standouts for me were his Riesling and Pinot Gris. I know that sounds a little odd, as New Zealand is best known for its Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, but these wines were particularly fascinating.

The 2007 Riesling (find this wine) had just a smidge of residual sugar that expertly balanced its zap of acidity and minerality. There's a bit of petrol aroma to the wine, which is matched by sweet citrus-think mandarin orange-flavors. I mentioned the wine's peppery character to Dave and he corrected me, saying that it was more raw ginger than anything else. He was spot on.

As for the 2006 Pinot Gris (find this wine), it was so rich and pear-filled that I can almost still taste it. Dave told me that he approaches Pinot Gris as if he were making red wine. "With Pinot Gris, it's all about the weight. It should have texture and be unctuous and weighty," he said. The wine was precisely that—with elegant viscosity and fullness, overflowing with fruit. Dave thought the wine was pitch-perfect with blue cheese. I look forward to that experiment.

Next stop, Sauternes!

Alberto Antonini is one of the world's most influential winemakers, consulting on wines everywhere from his native Italy to Uruguay, California and Portugal. I recently sat down with Alberto to taste through a selection of wines he's consulting on for Bodegas Nieto Senetiner in Argentina's Mendoza region. We had a fascinating conversation about the importance that he places on making each wine specific to the place it's from, rather than aiming for a broad international style. As winemakers become more international, this ongoing discussion of terroir will become increasingly interesting.

Philosophies aside, the Bodegas Nieto Senetiner wines are standouts, with gorgeous, concentrated flavors thanks to the grapes' growing conditions: very warm days and cool nights. Here's what we tasted.

2008 Reserva Torrontes ($11, find this wine) Argentina's top white, Torrontes, has inherent floral notes, but this bottling has a tremendous white-flower aroma of orange blossoms, jasmine and magnolia alongside bright citrus flavors. This is the perfect wine for these hot summer days. My mouth is watering right now just thinking about it.

2007 Reserva Bonarda ($30, find this wine) Alberto told me that Bonarda has a particularly long growing season and needs lots of sunlight. Extra time on the vine gives this soft, rustic red its spicy black fruit.

2007 Reserva Malbec ($11, find this wine) Alberto ferments this juicy, cherry-scented Malbec in concrete tanks, because he thinks it gives the wine fuller flavor.

2006 Don Nicanor Malbec ($17, find this wine) This deeply colored Malbec is loaded with black cherry and blackberry, plus a refreshing menthol note that keeps it from overloading the palate.

2005 Cadus Malbec ($45, find this wine) This single-vineyard Malbec is surprisingly fresh, even though it's also quite structured. It's long and elegant with pretty, spiced-cherry flavors.

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

 

 

People have come to think of Long Island for good Merlot and perhaps to a lesser extent, Cabernet Franc. Sauvignon Blanc is also getting a bit of buzz. In new wine regions, producers and wine writers love to proclaim the new hot grape variety every few years, but in truth, it takes many generations to truly find what works best. After visiting Shinn Estate Vineyards on the North Fork of Long Island this weekend, I'd like to submit another potential for the future king of the region’s grapes: Malbec.

Far from a climate like Argentina, you say? Absolutely correct. But not so far from that of the Loire Valley and Bordeaux, where Malbec grows quite successfully as a minor grape variety. It’s no surprise that 2007 vintage—Shinn’s first for Malbec—was successful: It was a banner year for Long Island with a nearly perfect, very dry growing season. It resulted in a rather plush wine with the scent of violets and blue/black fruit.

Was 2007 a fluke? After tasting a barrel sample of Malbec from 2008—a more typical LI vintage—I think not. The wine was leaner, with lots of bright acidity, but it was still floral with lovely fruit. Plus, it had an appealing meaty quality, as many good Malbecs do. It reminded me of versions made in the Loire Valley, where the grape is known as Côt.

In all honesty, Malbec will probably never reign on Long Island the way Merlot does. Co-owner and vineyard manager Barbara Shinn has to devote more than twice as many labor hours to Malbec compared to other grape varieties—it needs all that love and care to ripen properly. That extra labor doesn't come cheaply: Shinn will be selling the small amount of Malbec they made in 500ml bottles for $35 upon release this fall, but the wine is delicious nonetheless.

Chris Ringland, the star Australian winemaker whose eponymous and much acclaimed Chris Ringland Shiraz sells for a modest (ahem) $600 or so a bottle, stopped by the office the other day to pour a few of his substantially less pricey wines. (In the interests of full disclosure: they're made in partnership with Dan Philips of Grateful Palate, who is an F&W Contributing Editor.)

Anyway, the wine that particularly struck me was from the amusingly named Chateau Chateau project, which will focus on single-vineyard Grenache from Australia. "Grenache really is a warm climate analogue to Pinot Noir," Ringland said, specifically referring to this grape's ability to express tremendous flavor without necessarily being color-saturated; but I think also in regard to Grenache's gift for expressing vineyard site character as well (I warned you there might be some wine geekery in this entry...).

He also noted that, in Australia at least, Grenache grown on lighter and sandier soil tends to be more perfumed and spicy, whereas on red-brown, more clay-dominated soil "it's more red berry getting into chocolate."

The latter was certainly true in the 2006 Chateau Chateau Magic Window Marananga Grenache (about $65, find this wine), which comes from a more clay-heavy vineyard in the Marananga area of the Barossa. Translucently ruby-hued, it had fragrant cherry, coffee and sassafras notes, and smoky, dark cherry fruit that ended on mocha. 

On the other hand, and though it doesn't have a darn thing to do with Grenache, if you're interested in experiencing Ringland's winemaking at a much more modest price point, you could do worse than to pick up a bottle of the 2008 Darby & Joan Cabernet Sauvignon ($9, find this wine). It had appealing black currant and tea leaf notes, soft tannins, and no intrusive oak. Of course, no oak was used to make it, so that would account for the lack thereof. Said Ringland regarding 2008 in Australia, by the way, "It was an extremely good vintage, even though there's word around that it was a climatic disaster. I think we'll see that it wasn't what people were expecting..."

Over on Mouthing Off, I've just posted about why Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger's new book, Au Revoir to All That, is required reading for anyone who cares about food, wine or France (as an added bonus, it's well-written enough to qualify as fun summer reading, too.) The abridged version: Steinberger compiles devastating details on, among other obstacles, France's crippling appelation system, to show why we're looking, well, anywhere but France for culinary innovation. But he also offers a few glimmers of hope. In honor of Bastille Day, after the jump, Steinberger offers a cheat sheet on four maverick French winemakers worth watching.

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Friday evening found me hanging out at the Lower East Side wine bar Ten Bells with a couple of friends who were in from Paris and with the wines of Chablis producers, Alice and Olivier de Moor. This pair has been making wine together in Chablis since 1994, striving to makes wine in the most hands-off way possible by using organic grapes, pneumatic presses to squeeze the grapes, gravity to move juice from one phase of winemaking to the next and without the addition of sulfur. Strangely enough, we didn't try any of their Chablis, but ordered three of their other wines, which led to an impromptu investigation into what else they can do. Each was dramatically different from the next, but all had clean, driven acidity and graceful balance, as might be expected from people who are experts at Chablis. Here was the line up:

2006 Alice & Olivier de Moor Bourgogne Aligoté ($23; find this wine)
In Burgundy, the grape variety Aligoté is often overshadowed by Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but this wine, with its ripe green-apple zip and stony minerality, shows that it has some potential of its own.

2006 Alice & Olivier de Moor Bourgogne Chitry ($25; find this wine)
The de Moor's Bourgogne Chitry comes from a region just beyond the Chablis appellation. This chardonnay is long and streamlined with delicate sweet citrus fruit and peppery baking-spice notes.

2007 Alice & Olivier de Moor Sauvignon de Saint-Bris ($22; find this wine)
This region to the southwest of Chablis produces old-vine sauvignon blanc that tends to be much fuller and more lush than in other regions like the Loire. This vintage from the de Moors keeps giving and giving bright candied lemon flavors with intriguing salinity.

These all were nice accompaniments to the garlicky baby eel salad, thick brandade, salty boquerones, and grilled octopus and potato salad that we had with them, making for not only a study in de Moor wines, but in all things seafood, as well.

So, I don't know where I've been, exactly, but there are something like 2,700,240,000 of those new 2006 nickels in circulation, the ones with Th. Jefferson facing forward and staring at you with spooky space-alien eyes , and I hadn't seen one until today. I swear, it seems like every time I turn around our goverment has done something else to freak me out.

I calmed down by contemplating my meeting the other day with Jean-Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss. Jean-Michel falls into the wise old elf school of French winemaking  (as opposed to the taciturn philosopher school or the passionate wild-haired youth school). He's cheerful and twinkly, while at the same time inclined to saying things like, "The concept of terroir is the concept of profundity."

To which I say, certainmente! (He also said, "What's superficial is just Hollywood. The trailer—sex and suicide—not the substance of the film." So, terroir is the essence, not the flash, oui? And now that I have exhausted all the non-profane French I know, we'll call it quits with the pseudo-clever exclamations.) Deiss had a number of intriguing things to say, in fact. He believes that terroir is a concept that was invented as cultivation of vines spread to northern Europe; in Mediterranean, sunny climates, he says, grapes grow easily and the personality of the wine is the personality of the grape. In the north, on the other hand, the personality of the grape is muted and the personality of the place is able to find expression. He also feels that root depth is absolutely critical if a wine is going to express terroir at all, and says that the vine roots in his Marbourg vineyard—which produces a wine that practically spits terroir in your face, like a vinous cobra—go down more than sixty meters. "Every plant has the fantasy that it will grow to the sun," I quoted him as saying the other day; the context for this is his additional statement that if you foil that urge, the plant instead propels its roots deep into the earth.

Believe Jean-Michel if you like (this northern/southern divide intrigues me, I have to say), but whatever you believe, the man is making terrific wines. The 2005 Marcel Deiss Pinot Blanc Bergheim suggests ripe peaches and apricots, with a dense, earthy texture and crisp, almost tannic note on the end.

Stepping up to two of his premier cru wines, you've got a test-case for non-believers in terroir. The 2004 Marcel Deiss Engelgarden Premier Cru has a smoky, savory aroma with a hint of diesel, and dense, complex, powerfully mineral flavors—there's appley fruit, but the primary sensation is of stones and earth, and tremendous length. On the other hand, there's the 2004 Marcel Deiss Grasberg Premier Cru. Much more fruit forward (and sweeter—44 grams per liter of sugar compared to 21), it's round and a mix of stone fruit and tropical notes, lush where the other wine is forbidding. But the two wines are made from the same grape varieties (Riesling and Pinot Gris, primarily, with some Gewurz in Grasberg and some Muscat in Engelgarten), with the same winemaking technique, from vineyards only 300 meters apart. Engelgarten, though, is cooler and planted on gravelly soil, while Grasberg is on limestone below calcarous/iron-based soils. And so they end up radically different wines.

I'm out the door, so the Mambourg Grand Cru will have to wait until tomorrow, as will Jean-Michel's theory of salivation as a test of wine quality. Can't wait, can you? 

Jean-Michel Deiss, of Domaine Marcel Deiss: "Every plant has the fantasy that it will grow to the sun."