These are catch-up notes on a few wines drunk with friends over the past few months.
Dinner with some neighbors:
2008 Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc Viognier California. The bouquet of this wine is strong and immediate, with a lot of things swirling around--including vibrant aromas of white peach, pear, gooseberry, cateloupe and wet chalk paste. In the mouth, the acidity and tingly nervosity are such that the mouth actually waters for another sip. Flavors of green grapes, green melon, and gooseberry are bright and tangy with acidic depth, but the longer one stays with this the more it demonstrates additional concentrated fruit character. Especially with its hint of watermelon on the finish, this seems like a great summertime wine option.
2002 i Clivi Colli Orientali del Friuli Galea di Ferdinando Zanusso. I wish I had checked my tasting notebook before I picked this up on close-out. I had tried it before at a store tasting and not enjoyed it much—preferring by a good amount the 1999 version (which I did buy back then). Anyway, the nose here features a hard and tough shell of green herbal elements hiding a center of only occasionally-glimpsed but more engaging notes like wet chalk, cantaloupe, watermelon rind and lemongrass. It is a bit of a disconnect on the palate, where it is round and viscous, with lots of body and creamy character. There are lots of woody spices, too, but the big problem is a very notable aluminum or flat metallic bit that keeps popping up with regularity. It finishes very dry but manages only decent length there. Overall, I was hoping for more, but should have known better.
2007 Georg Mumelter St. Magdalaner Classico Griesbauerhof Alto Adige. This wine is a pale, thin garnet color and features a cool, crisp, taut nose of gravel, cranberry and crisp leaves. It is light-bodied, and feels rather transparent to the soil, featuring minerality in abundance to go with flavors of cranberry, fresh uncrushed berries and soft wood smoke. It feels cool, crisp and stony, with a narrow but refreshing cut of fruit and acidity. This is a light, refreshing food wine with a distinctly mineral-driven personality that seems true to its place.
Dinner with a good friend in Miami
2003 Dominio de Atauta Ribera del Duero San Juan. This was a real treat to drink with a good friend of mine, sitting outside at a nice steakhouse in Miami one night a while back. He had just picked up the bottle from a restaurateur friend of his in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I was unfamiliar with the story of the producer, but it is worth doing some reading about it. In short, the wines are made in a higher, cooler, more Eastern part of Ribera and are produced from long-forgotten ancient Tempranillo vines from the Atauta area. This is one of the rare single-vineyard wines, much of which I think makes it to said restaurant in the other San Juan. In any event, this is a very young wine in need of a vigorous decant. Aromatically, it displays a fascinating mix of rich plum skins, star anise, nutmeg and sweet creosote. It is clear that in time this mélange will only gain in complexity and nuance, but it is still rather compelling today. In the mouth, despite the decant, it is showing its unfined and unfiltered qualities—with a good deal of sediment floating around. More importantly, the wine is quite good. It has a sort of airy coolness and cut to it, but yet shows a massive depth of flavor. It features tastes of earthy dark fruit and intense and distinctive minerality that I simply can’t convey. Really, this tastes totally unique and distinctive in my experience—perhaps a reflection of its unique tiny terroir. In any event, it is also quite tannic at this early stage of evolution. It is also full-bodied and solidly-structured beneath the airier qualities. This wine really needs 5 to 10 years and cellaring and should last long beyond that.
Hanging out with my friend Andy at my house
2000 Chateau Belgrave Haut-Medoc. Served from 375ml. This is a very dark, opaque, black-tinged wine in color. It sends our very nice waves of aromas like saddle leather, spiced cherries, nettles, mace, brown tobacco leaf, roasted coffee grounds, creosote, spiced blackberries, and fruitcake. It shows a nice aromatic layering, for sure, but after a while in the glass it actually starts to contract and simplify a bit, rather than expand upon this nasal footprint. In any event, it is a chewy-textured wine on the palate, with a decided rustic quality all the way through. It is very dark-fruited, with loads of fudgy tannins framing flavors of black currants, coffee, black cherry, herbs, lemon peel and dark Belgian chocolate. It feels more fuzzy and chunky than in any way elegant. It is showing some grainy oak, especially on the finish, but it also has a redeeming squirt of sneaky citrus acidity that comes in at the very end to provide greater overall freshness to the wine. For the price, this is a great QPR, with a lovely bouquet early on, but enough toughness on the palate to suggest a need for additional cellar time, even in half-bottles.
1973 Chateau Pape Clement Pessac-Leognan. Andy bought 11 bottles of this at the Skinner auction and I agreed to ‘take a few off his hands’. As we got together to divvy up bottles from other lots, he was gracious enough to pop this bottle for us to get a taste. Peter C. kindly opened another bottle several nights later, too, but this bottle was clearly the better of those two. First off, the bouquet of the wine is lightly perfumed with lilac, pine, raspberries, spicy aged leather, and distinctively strong notes of dusty ash (as with some ashy cheese rinds) and jalapeno pepper. It feels airy and feathery, but intense, and it gains in depth and weight as it sits out over a few hours’ time. Really nice! In the mouth, it features some slightly sour but lively and still somewhat bright red fruits such as cranberries, sour cherries, strawberries, red currants and lemony citrus to go along with pine notes and ashy jalapeno again. It is full of life and has decent structure hanging on, but is definitely on the lighter, elegant side of things. No tannins are noticeable, though perhaps they pop up just a bit on the finish as the wine begins to stretch out its legs. It is really easy to drink and indeed the bottle was gone before I even knew it (and nary a hangover the next morning).
-Michael