Mouthing Off

Having just finished a column on unoaked Chardonnay (which will be out in our May issue), it's been refreshing to turn around and taste some very good California Chardonnays that do use oak. After all, oak is hardly a black-and-white question—like butter, or salt, it can be used to fantastic effect or to dismal effect, depending on the skill and the sensibility of the chef, or winemaker.

The 2007 Shafer Red Shoulder Ranch Chardonnay ($48, find this wine), for instance, is impeccably balanced—a full-bodied white with lemon and mandarin orange notes, zingy acidity, a hint of caramel (that'd be the wood) and a long, focused, refreshing finish. It gets no malolactic fermentation, and is made in 50% new oak barrels, 25% old oak, and 25% stainless steel barrels. Doug Shafer told me as we were tasting it that he'd pulled back on the oak in this wine starting in 2005, because he got tired of his Chardonnays falling apart after a few years. If this vintage is characteristic of his new style for Red Shoulder, I'm all for it. Note that this vintage was just released, so the link above goes to stores that stock the 2006; one would hope they'll end up bringing in the '07 as well.

I also recently tasted three new wines from a less well known but superb California Chardonnay producers, Varner. Bob and Jim Varner farm a chunk of vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation, oddly enough not too far above the retirement community where my grandmother used to live (oddly for me, at least). I'm a fan of their Foxglove line of affordable wines, which I think offer some of the best wine deals in the market. Their higher end offerings under their own name are terrific, too. (Note that these are not going to be released for another six weeks or so; contact the winery if you're interested.) The 2007 Varner Amphitheater Chardonnay ($38, find this wine) comes from a two-acre block of own-rooted, 28-year-old vines and is aged in 30% new French oak on its lees until bottling. It shows aromatic notes of honeysuckle, oak spice and lemon, and flavors of lemon and pear with a graceful, minerally finish. The 2007 Varner Home Block Chardonnay ($40, find this wine), also own-rooted, is more tightly coiled right now, with kind of clockspring tension to its acidity and structure. The aroma leans more toward apple and a touch of apricot with similar oak spice, the flavors towards apple, pear, vanilla and spice. Finally, the 2007 Varner Bee Block Chardonnay ($40, find this wine) is the most luscious of the three of these, more open and expansive right now. From a three and a half acre block that Jim Varner says is always the last to ripen, and that always gives the ripest fruit, it's a lovely, creamy Chardonnay that has an almost Carneros-like lemon curd note, rich lemony fruit with notes of marzipan and honey, and a firm line of acidity that lifts it right up. At the moment it's my favorite of the three.

If you want no-holds-barred, embrace-you-and-smooch-you Chardonnay that actually manages to be balanced, too, though, head for the 2006 Newton Vineyard Unfiltered Chardonnay ($60, find this wine). This is a real guilty-pleasure white, with creamy peach and apricot aromas, a full-bodied, luscious texture, and juicy apricot, red apple, caramel and vanilla flavors. At the same time, it has great acidity and what felt like a light touch of tannin on the end, which keeps the whole package from being blob-like. The wine only sees 30% new oak—albeit with 16 months in barrel and weekly lees stirring—so the oak doesn't dominate, which is part of its appeal. I normally don't have much use for this style of wine, but this is the sort of Chardonnay that could make me eat those words... 

Maybe it's the odd juxtaposition of snow and the beginning of Spring, but somehow the idea of an off-dry (lightly sweet) white wine seems like the ideal thing today. Maybe it's the thought that if Spring were actually acting like Spring is supposed to, I might be able to sit on a porch and sip one with some prosciutto & melon, instead of staring out a window at snowflakes. Regardless, here are three that caught my attention lately:

2007 Grove Mill Riesling ($17, find this wine) As often seems to be the case with New Zealand Rieslings, a little sweetness seems only to intensify and focus the flavors of lime zest and pear in this wine; it's got a nice floral note on the nose, too. 

2008 Ca’ del Solo Muscat ($20, find this wine) Randall Grahm's Ca’ del Solo wines come from his estate vineyard in Monterey County, which is farmed biodynamically (and is mostly composed of Chualar and Danville Sandy Clay Loams, if you want to really geek out about it). This vintage of his Muscat is wildly aromatic, all spice-gumdrop, melon and tangerine, and manages to be full-bodied in texture without actually being particularly heavy or high in alcohol (it's 12.5%). Moreover, it's made from Moscato Giallo—an semi-obscure muscat clone from Italy's Alto Adige—with 12% Loureiro, an even more obscure Portuguese white variety typically used in Vinho Verde. Regardless, it's a mighty tasty wine that sure makes me wish it were summer...

2007 Abbazia di Novacella Gewürztraminer ($25, find this wine) I tasted this a few months back when I was zooming through the Alto Adige on my way to Slovenia for a story, and it's stuck in my mind ever since. Intensely spicy, with a kind of spiced bosc pear character and lots of flavor, this comes off slightly sweeter than it actually is. The winemaker told me that there's only three grams per liter of sugar here, and that the perceived sweetness is mostly glycerin; he also told me that it was grown on calcareous soil, though the importer's website says, contrarily, "gravely sand of moronic origin." What sand of moronic origin might be I don't know, but I sort of love it. 

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?

I've decided that I'm in love with a clone. Specifically, the Rued clone of Chardonnay (yes, that's what it's come to). It's a selection that originally came from a vineyard Warren Dutton planted in Sonoma's Green Valley in 1969, and to my mind it produces some of California's most compelling Chardonnays. A case in point is the 2006 Dutton Goldfield Rued Vineyard Chardonnay ($45, find this wine), which combines spiced pear and tangerine-lime notes in a way that gives it both lusciousness and vibrancy, a kind of savory leesiness that adds depth, and a touch of bitter (in an appealing way) spice on the end. It's impressive Chardonnay, worth the price.

(On a side note, when I went to the Dutton Goldfield site to check my recollection of the Rued clone's origins, I noticed that Dan Goldfield also describes the wine with the words "spiced pear" and "tangerine," among others. This happens less often than one might think; in fact, it's a worthwhile wine-education exercise to line up several different wine critics' descriptions of the same wine side-by-side and take a look at how completely different they are, then taste the wine yourself and see who you agree with.)

I also recently tasted the 2007 Hirsch Vineyards Sonoma Coast Chardonnay ($50, find this wine), a more minerally take on Chardonnay that leans more toward stone-fruits like peach and nectarine than pear and ends on a creamy spice note. Hirsch is justifiably known as one of California's greatest Pinot Noir vineyards, and there are only four acres of Chardonnay on the property, yet the little that's produced—about 500 cases—is very, very good. A portion of this wine was fermented in stainless steel, a portion in oak (mostly old), and a final portion, oddly enough, in glass containers. It's got that far Sonoma Coast precision and focus, yet is luscious enough to be inviting at the same time.

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. 

I've been wading through an ocean of affordable wine for our April issue, and while I'm reserving a good chunk of the best wines for the magazine itself, here are a few that I thought deserved mention now.

2007 Domaine Lafage Côté Est ($11, find this wine or its importer) When I was at the Wine Market Council meeting I blogged about recently, some of the Nielsen statistics showed that a large majority of American wine buyers tend to think of French wines as terrible values. Everyone should recalibrate by running out and buying this wine. Lightly spicy, with a kind of fresh talcum/floral character on the nose, it's loaded with rich apple/stone fruit flavor, completely luscious but not heavy at all, and ends on peppery herb notes. From the Vin de Pays des Côtes Catalanes, it's 60% Grenache Blanc & Gris, 30% Chardonnay, and 10% Marsanne, aged in stainless steel.

2007 Tieffenbrunner Alto Adige Pinot Bianco ($14, find this wine or its importer) I had this while traveling in the Alto Adige, had it again recently while standing in front of my stove at home, and both times was impressed by what it offers for the price: crisp apple fruit, a touch of that Pinot Blanc-lanolin-shading-to-cheese rind scent on the nose (a nice thing, though it doesn't exactly sound so great), subtle minerality on the finish. Not a wine that draws a lot of attention to itself, but a great wine for everyday drinking.

2006 Cono Sur Visión Gewurztraminer ($15, find this wine or its importer) Gewurztraminer can be overwhelming—as wonderful as a producer like Zind-Humbrecht's wines can be, they're so rich that it sometimes feels like heavy work just getting through a glass. Cono Sur's affordable bottling doesn't hold a candle to ZH in terms of complexity, but it's a surprisingly bright, lively version of Gewurz (the cool Pacific winds in the Casablanca Valley probably help) with melon, spice, and some lime-citrus notes. 

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.

Here's an interesting news story from AFP that I meant to post a little ways back. It discusses how worldwide demand for wine is apt to keep increasing despite the economic doldrums we're all in, largely thanks to the rapidly growing Russian and Chinese markets.

This follows on the heels (the somewhat rapidly receding heels, as it was a couple of weeks ago) of a Wine Market Council presentation I went to on consumer wine trends, where among other things I learned that wine was actually up last year, somewhere around 3.8% for the  thirteen weeks through December 15, and up 4.8% over the 52 weeks preceding that date. Not exactly boom times, but this was a substantially better performance than most of the other categories that Nielsen tracks (though not flour and dry vegetables/grains, which were up about 35% each—lots of people staying home to cook these days).

Anyway, unsurprisingly, the parts of the wine world that are growing fastest at the moment are the under-$10 realm (the $0-$2.99 segment is booming, though I'm not sure exactly what wines besides Two-Buck Chuck live in that world). The over-$20 zone? Hm. Not so good.

There were other hot-not notes to the presentation—Argentina? Hot. France? Not. Pinot Noir? Hot. Syrah/Shiraz? Not. I also learned that—and this is just in the channels that Nielsen surveys, which leaves out a lot of small, boutiquey wine shops—there are 13,698 different wines floating around out there on store shelves. 

So here's one of those 13,698 that I liked when I tasted it recently: the 2007 Gai'a Nótios White ($13, find this wine). Yes, it's Greek, but don't worry—if you haven't explored Greek wines recently, you should, because particularly for fans of crisp, focused, seafood-friendly whites, Greece has become a terrific resource. This bottle, a 50/50 blend of Moscofilero and Roditis, smells of spiced stone fruits and shows lots of lemon-lime citrus backed up by mouthwatering acidity. It would be great with this recipe for shrimp saganaki, created by my pal Grace Parisi in the F&W test kitchen.