Wandering the Village wine stores on a Friday night, one good, one bad

MFWC needed to restore a sense of equilibrium after walking out of Parm on Friday night. The meal was so good it reduced him to expletives: a slice of toasted garlic bread topped with salami and a shirred egg to start, then an utterly satisfying plate of slightly spicy sausage and sweet peppers with a side of ziti run under the broiler and topped with a scoop of fresh ricotta and to finish an ice cream cake of coconut, chocolate and almond. F'ing awesome seemed the most appropriate tribute to a meal meant to evoke traditional Italian-American cuisine, and that was exactly the tribute MFWC paid to the guys behind the bar.  

After heading up Mulberry and crossing Houston, MFWC decided to contemplate the meal and compose himself at Astor Wines, which has as deep a selection as any wine store in New York. Astor Wines has a selection of bottles from the Jura and the Loire in the same lightly refrigerated room where it keeps its reserve bottles, but it also has plenty to appeal to those who favor the the new world and classics from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

More importantly, the salespeople know the stock, or know someone who does. I asked one of them if the 2005 Chateau Montus, a robust Madiron from southwest France was ready to drink. He replied that it was a lot better than he thought it wouudl be when he tasted it but would improve with age. I asked another about a Beaujolais, and he directed me toward a colleague who discussed three Beaujolais in detail, recommended against buying a 1994 Savennieres that the store was offering for $35 or so after finding a few cases in storage, and for good measure threw in a few well-considered opinions about sparkling wines - buy the Huet sparking brut petillant 2005 and when in Germany keep an eye out for sparkling rieslings, which the Germans love so much that they keep it all for themselves.

Don't expect that kind of service - or any service, for that matter - at Union Square Wines a few blocks north, whose staff is so disinterested that they could be shipped straight to an Italian post office. Union Square's pricing is generally on the expensive side, but a few times a year they offer 30% discounts on mixed cases, events where the careful shopper can find some deals.

MFWC took up the challenge and was pleasantly surprised by the 2008 Niepoort Twisted for $12.60, a Botani Muscatel from Malaga for $12 and the Cos Frappato for $22, among others. A Gahier 2009 Trousseau for $24.49 may not have been a great deal (the $35 at which USW initially offered it was absurd), but it's probably not an easy wine to find. A few bottles of the 2000 Lopez de Heredia Rose helped round out the case, no thanks to the slugs behind the counter. USW is a very good wine store when it's running a sale. Otherwise, go elsewhere.         

Not bad for a fresh slap across the face

Last week, MFWC bought the Etz Austrian Gruner Veltliner at $14 for the liter (that's $11.50 for 750ml) for Samba. The label describes the wine as "a fresh slap across the face," which MFWC would not have thought was the best way to sell a product. The wine turned out to be lovely and refreshing, crisp with a light citrus nose, and more than fairly priced, but MWFC would bet that a lot of stores wouldn't stock a wine with such a label. If we’re lucky, the Etz Gruner will end up in discount bins across the city. 

The tasting game

The blind tasting is the classic test of an oenophile's expertise. The drinker swirls the wine in his glass, sniffs it intently, takes a swig and gargles it, gulps it down or spits it into a bucket, ponders, and then writes a few notes and perhaps a number on a pad. When the drinker describes his conclusions, the truth about both his taste and the beverage is revealed.

But what if it's all a fraud? Less dramatically, what if the components of sensory perception are so numerous and intimately related that the blind tasting is a pointless exercise for all but the most expert, or for those in the business who have to make decisions about what to put on their shelves or their wine lists? 

MFWC has stuck his tongue into the blind tasting waters twice in the last month thanks to invitations from a former co-worker - call him the Scholar of Private Equity (SPE), a generous, genial man whose great passion is wine. He collects it, reads about it, structures many of his vacations around it, and bases much of his social life around it. Had Nicholson Baker seen SPE's apartment, Baker might have written "Wine Bottles as Furniture" instead of, or in addition to, his 1995 New Yorker piece "Books as Furniture." SPE fell in love with wine as a college student at Berkeley in the 1970s, when college students could still conceive of shopping at Kermit Lynch's shop in that academic Shangri-La, and has continued to deepen his knowledge. Tasting groups are one way SPE continues to learn about wine. When he moved to New York from San Francisco in the mid-1990s, he immediately set about joining one, and it was a descendant of this group that MFWC joined for two recent monthly tastings, one of 2006 Brunellos, the other of 2009 red burgundies.

SPE's group is impressively sociable. The ten or so guests talk and munch on bread and the occasional nibble of cured meat or cheese as they sniff and taste. SPE noted that the group once displayed a much more puritanical discipline, though the focus remains firmly on the eight wines featured at each tasting. The bottles are opened a few hours before the event to breathe, and tasters record the appearance, aroma, taste and finish of each 55ml sample before ranking the wines in order of preference from one to eight. The scores are tallied and the wines taken out of their paper bags in reverse order from worst (highest cumulative score) to best.     

MFWC had some confidence in his ability to distinguish among the wines, though that confidence dissipated as he moved from wine to wine and discovered that his initial impressions changed. That's a fundamental sign of a good wine, of course, but it's disconcerting when you're confronted with eight of them that must be evaluated in relation to one another. And since on both nights the wines were from the same location and vintage, they naturally showed only modest variation. MFWC begged off ranking the Brunellos, which even the veterans said were a hopeless muddle, but took up the challenge with the Burgundies, where his rankings bore a reasonably close resemblance to the cumulative group rankings - a product of dumb luck, MFWC would hasten to add.

The best of burgs to the palate of both MFWC and the group as a whole was a $55 wine from the producer Simon Bize in Savigny-les-Beaune, a small town in Burgundy's Cote d'Or. MFWC liked it, but he wouldn't have paid $55 for it or, honestly, suspected it sold for $55 had he not been told. It's possible, though, that MWFC would have enjoyed the wine a lot more had it been the only wine on the table and he been able to focus on it over the course of a meal.         

Critics of blind tastings say they deprive drinkers of that prolonged exposure and lead them to favor wines with bold flavors and higher alcohol levels. Despite my ambivalence about the value of blind tastings, I wouldn't agree. They expose even neophytes to the subtle differences among wines and the varying ways that different people respond to them. Counterintuitively, they may force drinkers to recognize the limits of their palates and thus push them away from more expensive wines. And they inspire serious thought about wine - including the thought that such musing has its own limits.     

That's Poligny with an "o," the one in the Jura

Last week's post departed from Puligny-Montrachet in Burgundy. This week we move an hour east of Puligny-Montrachet to Poligny, a town of about 4300 people in the Jura that's most famous as the capital of Comte, a nutty cows' milk cheese very close to Gruyere. Poligny is also the home of Ludwig and Nathalie Bindernagel, who in recent years have become darlings of the biodynamic wine crowd here and in France. I went to a tasting of Bindernagel wines on Friday and was most impressed by their 2008 Cremant de Jura, a sparkling wine made entirely from pinot noir, which along with Poulsard and Trousseau is one of the three red grapes grown in the Jura. Much as I love the Jura whites, I usually find the reds a little expensive for what they are - light, delicate, pleasant wines often priced around $25. You can get a lot of Loire red for that money. The Bindernagels also run a reasonably priced B&B in Poligny (http://jardinsurglantine.natidees.com/accueil) where Nathalie reputedly sets a most impressive table at gentle prices. 

The Bindernagel wines were overshadowed by an unforgettable nip of vin jaune from Chateau-Chalon, the village where the best wines of that type are made. Vin jaune is made from savagnin (a different varietal than sauvignon blanc) that's aged in casks that aren't filled to the top with the fermented grape juice, which allows a veil of yeast to form on the surface of the wine. Sherry is made in a similar way, and vin jaune has that same nutty taste and smell. Vin jaune from Chateau-Chalon must age for six years and three months before bottling, with most of that time spent in the casks. The wine can age for decades more in its distinctive, squat bottles that hold 62cl rather than the standard 75cl.

Said nip of vin jaune was the 2003 Macle, which had an entrancing nose that incorporated sweet, rich, creamy and walnut notes and varied in intensity. Wines made from savagnin can often be unremittingly heavy and nutty, but this one bobbed and weaved with elegance. One taster suggested pairing with with scallops and bacon, which seemed an inspired suggestion, perhaps to be followed by a chicken in cream sauce or the Jura specialty chicken with vin jaune and then some Comte. This is a wine to be consumed over the course of a three-hour meal, or even over several days; the importer pouring the wines hid the vin jaune toward the end of the tasting because she was taking it to Restaurant Daniel three days later. 

Chateau-Chalon is expensive stuff given the length of time required to produce it, but frugal drinkers can search out the regular wines of Macle and Berthet-Bondet, two of the appellation's best producers.   

   

Pigskins in Burgundy, or What's a white burgundy worth?

When MFWC saw a Puligny-Montrachet in the bargain bin in September for $20, he fell on it like an NFL special teams player recovering a fumble in a playoff game. One of the most exalted names in the French region of Burgundy, Montrachet is a vineyard with such cachet that several neighboring villages, Puligny among them, have attached its name to their own to increase the marketability of their wines. This P-M was a 2009 Olivier Leflaive that usually retails for $45 to $50. That's modest pricing by the standards of white burgundy, which for centuries has been the world's preeminent white, with prices to match. Winemakers around the world have tried to reach those august levels by planting Chardonnay, the grape from which the best white burgundies are made. (The reds, of course, are of Pinot Noir.) The pricing means that wine drinkers with modest budgets don't drink a lot of good white burgundy, hence MFWC's responding to the P-M as if it were a pigskin. (Pigskins and Burgundy aren't as far apart as you might think; Ma Cuisine in Beaune, a beloved restaurant in the heart of Burgundy, serves a small dish of pork rinds at the beginning of a meal.)

One way around this fiscal dilemma is to drink wines from Chablis, a town in the northernmost parts of Burgundy famous for producing whites often described as "steely," or "austere." In part because most Americans associate Chablis with the bad white wine they drank in the 1970s and 1980s, much of which did not in fact come from Chablis, or even from France, wines from Chablis tend to be underpriced relative to those from elsewhere in Burgundy. That's not true for the product of Raveneau, a Chablis producer championed by Kermit Lynch, who began promoting the wines in the 1970s and is now able to impose such a mark-up when importing them that young vintages often cost more in a New York wine store than they do on some restaurant lists in France. Lynch's praise of the wines in his book sparked something of an obsession in MFWC, who ordered a 2000 Raveneau at a restaurant in Paris a year ago for €130 and quite enjoyed the delicacy of the wine, which smelled and tasted a little of honey but also had a solid backbone of acid.

At home Raveneau is off the table, though tastes of the wines of fellow Chablisiens Olivier et Alive de Moor and Patrick Piuze have lingered in MFWC's mind. The de Moor Aligote, which is delicious with oysters, can be had for under $20, though de Moor's higher-end bottles go for around $40 and Piuze's are a little more - again, cheap for Burgundy, if not for MFWC. Another possibility for those craving relatively affordable Chardonnay is to search out lesser-known blanc de blancs, or sparkling wines made entirely from that grape. After touring the Bekeley wine stores a few weeks ago, MFWC met some friends for dinner in Oakland and enjoyed a bottle of Diebolt Vallois Cramant 2005, a yeasty, creamy wine that went very well with food and can be had for $40 at Sherry-Lehman in New York.

Or you can luck out with a look in the bargain bin. Unable to resist temptation, MFWC opened the '09 Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet on Friday and thought it made for a damn good two hours of drinking after the cat pee aroma burned off within about fifteen minutes of opening. "Cat pee" is probably even more revolting than "barnyard" to any human with a nose, but it does accurately describe the sharp hit of acidity that can come from white burgundy. More pleasant were the fennel, vanilla, cream soda and even faint Coca-Cola (but better) aromas that followed, though the wine's smell often resisted description despite its considerable appeal. This wine would be perfect with roast chicken with rosemary and mashed potatoes with butter and cream, French comfort food at its finest.

So back to the question presented, as they call it in Legal Writing classes. Was the Leflaive worth it? At $20, unquestionably. The normal retain price seems fair to me as well, since the Leflaive seems on the order of Piuze and de Moor and Diebolt if less haunting than the Lopez de Heredia about which I wrote a few months ago, though I'm as deeply in the tank for Heredia as then-Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser was for the 1992 Super Bowl champion Washington Redskins. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/redskins/history/timeline/wagon/wagnfrnt.htm) But I don't think I got any more enjoyment out of a Raveneau than I did out of the few ounces of a Piuze wine I tasted this summer. Three times as much? Certainly not, though I would certainly love to see how Raveneau goes with the chitlins at Ma Cuisine.               







 

 

Boozing in Berkeley

Berkeley, Ca. is one of the best dining destinations in the U.S. Alice Waters' restaurant Chez Panisse is still going strong more than 40 years after she founded it. Across the street, the Cheese Board offers delicious, freshly made pizza at $2.50 a slice, though only in one variety per day. Near the Cal campus, Ippuku grills every part of its free-range chickens - I found the heart particularly memorable when I ate there last summer - and for the adventurous, or perhaps foolish, offers a raw chicken dish whose surprisingly appealing texture suggests the quality of the birds with which Ippuku is working: http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-10-03/food/24108371_1_japan-strong-flavor-free-e-editions And MFWC makes daily pilgrimages to Ici on College Avenue for candied blood orange ice cream and other such frozen delights.

The options for wine buyers are just as good. Berkeley is most famous as the home of Kermit Lynch, who began importing wines from France in the early 1970s as Waters was launching Chez Panisse. Just as Waters led a movement toward a cuisine based on fresh ingredients rather than intricate preparations, Lynch became a leading importer by championing traditional wines made in what he viewed as an authentic way rather than those designed for an American audience that prefers high alcohol and big flavors - in other words, many of the wines made in Napa Valley. (See "One cagey romantic," Oct. 10.)  The Lynch label on the back of a bottle is always a good sign, but his store next to Waters's bakery Cafe Fannie in Berkeley does not offer a lot of choices for budget wine buyers. Lynch focuses almost exclusively on France and Italy, and his reputation is such that he can easily move cases of expensive wine.

The thrifty wine buyer will do better by going to Vintage Berkeley, which has stores on College Ave. across the street from Ici (they let you bring ice cream into the shop) and on Vine St., around the corner from Chez Panisse and the Cheese Board. VB focusses on wines between $10 and $20 with a few edging over that figure and a small reserve section in their College Ave. store. On the way to meet a group of people who gathered to watch the 49ers game last week (MWFC believes in adapting to the local culture when he travels even though he's rooting for Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, T-Sizzle and the rest of the Ravens to get to Indianapolis), MFWC picked up a 2009 Douro Twisted for $16.50 made by Niepoort, the Portuguese winemakers most famous for their ports. (http://www.niepoort-vinhos.com/en/ports/) It turns out that Niepoort makes a number of other wines, including the Twisted, a robust red that smells of barnyard, tobacco and chocolate with a little fruit and is made from the same varietals that go into port. It's tasty stuff that gives the drinker a sense of the flavors that go into port without clubbing him over the head.

MFWC went back the next day to pick up a few more bottles, including the Occhipinti SP68 2009 white for $22. The wine is a blend of Albanello, a centuries-old Sicilian grape used primarily for blending and almost never encountered in the U.S., and zibibbo, a local name for Muscat that dervies from the Arabic zabib, "dried grape" and is also used to make a wine similar to Marsala in which the grapes are dried and then pressed. Sadly, MFWC came down with a stomach bug that prevented him from sampling the Occhipinti, though the description on the Prune website is appealing: http://prunewine.blogspot.com/2011/04/2009-occhipinti-sp68-bianco.html

After picking up the Douro Twisted, MFWC headed to Paul Marcus Wines (no relation to the blogger). PMW is in a small marketplace across the street from the Rockridge BART and ranges broadly in geography and price. Here wine geeks will find Lopez de Heredia, Occhipinti, Jura wines, and rieslings; casual buyers will have a reasonable selection of affordable wines; and the cellaring classes can ask about a reserve list that has some remarkable values from both California and Europe.   
   

Occhipinti, part II, and quaffing Malbec in the Bronx

The 2009 SP68 Occhipinti Frappato/Nero d’Avola entranced me from the first sip I took at a late lunch on a Friday afternoon at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. I bought it for 2B Sales in September, for 1B Sales last month (1B sits next to 2B and orders a bottle at a time), and for a new club member this past week, a gregarious security guard at the front desk of my building who has relatives in Marsala, Sicily and whose sister owns a house there.

My enthusiasm extended to wines from COS (the O is for Arianna Occhipinti’s uncle Guisto – the only firm basis for my interest), a producer based in Vittoria, a town near the southeast corner of Sicily. 1B Sales liked the SP68, and this week I picked her up a COS 2010 Frappato/Nero d’Avola blend aged in clay anphorae, the vessels in which wine was stored and transported in the ancient Mediterranean. A few other Sicilian producers use amphorae, is reputedly a little nervier and edgier than wines aged in oak. COS may feel more comfortable with the material because it ferments and ages its other wines in concrete rather than oak. (http://www.cosvittoria.it/english/vini_pithos.htm)

I cracked open Occhipinti’s 2008 Frappato last night with the MOME, who said he needed a few drinks to get him through a late shift at the Park Slope Food Coop, a relic of the neighborhood’s hippie past. Frappato gets little respect; the Oxford Companion to Wine gives it four lines in which the book dismisses it as a blending grape that should add “fruit and freshness to the more powerful Nero d’Avola.” 

Occhipinti did a lot better than that. The first glass of her 2008 Frappato smelled and tasted of tannins and spice in a balanced, very attractive way, and twenty minutes in the refrigerator brought out some cherry, which was also controlled. The store recommended serving this with cured ventresca, or tuna belly, which sadly was not to be found in Park Slope, but pizza and some Middle Eastern vegetarian food with a little chili pepper worked well. This wine like the 2009 SP68 left an impression of freshness and liveliness.  

Johnny Bronx isn’t about to put tuna guts into his belly. He likes a good steak grilled rare and a robust red wine to match. JB also wants that robust red to be affordable, which means he likes Malbecs from Argentina. He purchased a few of them in December and wanted two more this week, but the store was out, and MFWC returned with another affordable Malbec, the 2009 Terra Rosa.

Malbec is a French grape that may be used in red Bordeaux along with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Carménère. But it fell out of favor in Bordeaux, where plantings fell by 70% between 1970 and 2000. It’s still predominant in Cahors, a town about 150 miles east of Bordeaux, but it’s now most closely associated in the American wine drinker’s mind with Argentina, where it’s become the dominant red grape and one commonly used in single-varietal wines. Another erstwhile MFWC member was quite fond of Cuma’s $12 Malbec. Judging by the Wine Library website (WL is the largest wine story in the country), it’s hard to spend more than $30 on an Argentine Malbec, which is just fine with Johnny Bronx.