Mouthing Off

Starting this time of year through the fall, New York City's eternally crowded scenester restaurant, Balthazar, goes through something like a billion cases of Sancerre a week. This minerally French Sauvignon Blanc is intensely refreshing on a hot day, but thanks to its popularity, good, cheap Sancerre is a rarity. So I was thrilled to find another, equally satisfying Sauvignon Blanc from France's Loire Valley: the gulpable 2008 Domaine du Salvard Cheverny ($15). It's got that telltale Sauvignon grassiness along with ripe yet tart apple flavors. There's a slight richness (thanks to the touch of Chardonnay in the blend) along with plenty of snappy acidity and clean minerality. In other words, tough wine not to like... — Kristin R. Donnelly

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. 

So I was on the Today Show this morning, telling Hoda & Kathie Lee some of my go-to springtime wines. Check out the video here if you're interested!

Domestic Viognier—actually, make that Viognier in general—is often a disappointing grape variety, partly because when it's good, it's so seductive. Good Viognier has a floral silkiness, a kind of summertime peach ripeness and not-quite-oily texture, controlled by just the right touch of acidity, that makes it pretty irresistible (albeit in a slightly decadent way). Bad Viognier, on the other hand, is like Pamela Anderson turned into wine.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad Viognier out there. If Pinot Noir is the heartbreak grape, Viognier is the bad-date grape: You take one sip, think in that sinking, bad-date way, "oy—another loser!" and then sit there, stuck for the next hour or two with the rest of the bottle. But all is not lost.

Here are a few Viogniers I've tasted recently that are actually pretty darn good. It's enough to restore your faith in the whole silly process.

2008 Yalumba Eden Valley Viognier ($18) The soft, silky texture of this wine holds a lot of savory spice notes as well as ripe white peach fruit (note: this will be released in six weeks or so). Yalumba was the first Australian winery to commercially plant Viognier, by the by, and Robert Hill Smith of Yalumba was by our office the other day, which was convenient timing for this blog entry. About Viognier he says, "It's a naturally opulent fruit style, so the challenge is constraining it a bit."

2007 Novelty Hill Viognier ($22) Washington winemaker Mike Januik splits his time between Novelty Hill and his own Januik label, producing impressive wines for both. The Novelty Hill wines mostly come from the winery's Stillwater Creek vineyard in Columbia Valley; this Viognier is fragrant with spice-gumdrop, beeswax and melon notes, and keeps its abundantly juicy, melon fruit bound up with appealing acidity.

2007 K Vintners Viognier ($27) From a single vineyard, made with native yeast fermentation and neutral barrels, this reminds me of good Condrieu as much as any New World Viognier I've had recently. It's fragrant and lightly honeyed and just a flat-out sexy wine. "Winner winner chicken dinner," as the K Vintners website rightly says.

2006 Kunin Wines Stolpman Vineyard Viognier ($28) Creamy and substantial, with lots of peach and lemon curd, this has a voluptuous character that walks close to being too much but pulls back just in time. I liked it despite my typical inclinations toward lean, mineral, sharp-tempered whites. It's sourced from the Stolpman Vineyard (which also makes a terrific Roussanne called L'Avion under its own label).

As always, one good way to track down these wines is wine-searcher.com.

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... 

When I was in Los Angeles recently, I had the good fortune to stumble upon what should be my favorite new winebar (it was sort of directed stumbling, in truth; Minneapolis Star-Tribune food critic Rick Nelson's uncle is the chef, and he sent me toward it). In fact, the only thing keeping it from being my favorite place for a quick glass of vino is that it's about 2,400 miles from my apartment. But that aside, Lou is a nifty little place located in an unlikely corner of a strip shopping center on Vine just north of Melrose, adjacent to a laundromat and about seventy feet from a Thai massage joint. It's relatively unmarked—even though there's a sign saying Lou, I kept thinking I wasn't in the right place—but once you step inside you're in an appealingly low-lit nook full of appealingly low-key-yet-hip Angelenos, most of them holding glasses of wine and noshing on cheese, charcuterie and larger dishes (Chorizo with black lentils, garlic confit and fried egg, for instance) off the menu, under a chalk drawing on the wall of a pig holding a glass of wine.

Lou focuses on small-production, organic/biodynamic/post-organic (whatever post-organic means) wines, thirty of which are available by the glass at any given time, and is "unabashedly Eurocentric," as the website says. If you're into that sort of thing, you'll recognize or at least be intrigued by offerings like the 2006 Guy Breton Morgon for $14 a glass, 2007 Clos Roche Blanche Sauvignon Blanc for $8 a glass, or Huber & Bleger Crémant d'Alsace Rosé NV for $10 a glass...though it may well be that those choices have changed since I was there. Regardless, I still think they're providing plates of "pig candy," which is essentially candied artisanal bacon, for five bucks. Candied pork? Uh-huh. I'm in.

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. 

Alvaro Palacios is everywhere these days—even in the movies! Well, sort of. The undisputed star of modern Spanish winemaking appears in F&W’s April issue at a party in Manhattan’s new City Winery. Then, when I was watching the recently released DVD of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I saw that Allen thanked Palacios in the credits. (I almost missed it, distracted as I was by thoughts of how I might come back in another life as the stunning Penélope Cruz). This makes sense: It seemed that every character in every scene was holding, swishing or sipping a glass of wine. As it turns out, the film’s producers, who are Catalan, approached Palacios about using his wines. He obliged. Palacios’s bottlings, especially those from the Priorat region in Catalonia, are some of Spain’s finest. His Finca Dofí (a Grenache- and Cabernet-based blend) and his Les Terrasses (which combines Carignane and Grenache with a touch of Cabernet and Syrah) are both featured prominently in the film. He also supplied wines from Bierzo, in northwest Spain, as well as a couple of Riojas. In return for all of this fabulous vino, which I can only imagine the actors savored (and for which Palacios supposedly received no payment), he was invited to attend the Spanish premier. Who got the better deal?

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.