A golden wine in La Rioja

You know you´re in the sticks when you ask someone at the hotel desk where the nearest Internet cafe is, and she suggests going to the local library, which is on the second floor of the building containing the local tourist office and is only open in the afternoon, which in this case means from 5PM to 9PM. Such is life in Ezcaray, a small town in mountainous La Rioja that´s home to Echaurren, a hotel and restaurant run by the same family for five generations. I´m writing from one of the five computers in the library.

The wine list at Echaurren suggests the region´s isolation and its unaffected approach to wine. Most of the entries are local products that go for under €30, and there were several older reserve reds from CVNE, a respected producer in Haro, the center of the region´s wine trade, for €60. Virtually all of the whites are young with the notable exception of three from Lopez de Heredia, including the 1993 Vina Tondonia that I ordered to go with a salad of raw mushroom (in season now), arugala, and a few raw shrimp followed by hake with clams and a few mushrooms.

Lopez makes all of its wines to age, even its roses, which it generally releases about a decade after the grapes are harvested. The Tondonia blanco is a blend of 90% viura, also known as Macabeo, a grape grown primarily in La Rioja, the area near Barcelona where it´s used to make Cava, and Languedoc-Roussillon in southern France, as well as 10% Malvasia. The producer aged the wine in oak for six years, and the result after more than a decade in the bottle is delicious. Lopez´s whites have a sherry-like nose and taste that can be quite strong in the younger wines, which are still ten years old, but in this bottle had mellowed and receded to blend with honey and even floral smells on the nose. The wine was perfect with the mushrooms and shrimp, whose sweetness accentuated that trait in the wine, and went very well with the hake, where the clams brought out the acidic backbone in the wine which the mild fish smoothed over. MFWC drank only half of the bottle at dinner on Saturday, and the restaurant graciously saved the rest for Sunday lunch, a soup of chickpeas, clams and hake in a fish broth. The wine lost a fraction of its subtlety, but the nose was still entrancing and the soup accentuated the wine´s sherry-like elements - again, though, in an understated way, not like, say, the 2000 Lopez de Heredia Gravonia blanco, which was majestic when I had it last year, or, to be less affected, the Harvey´s Bristol Cream that your grandparents drank before dinner and you could smell three rooms away.

I´m headed to Lopez´s Haro winery tomorrow and will post on that later this week, but I should give a final shout-out to the folks at Echaurren, who run a fine hotel and restaurant in a gorgeous region.

Toasting the Redbirds, the Nuns, and the Club

The last Friday in October, I was headed down to Washington, D.C. to celebrate my niece’s fourth birthday. A St. Louis native, my brother-in-law was keenly focused on game seven of the World Series after witnessing the Cardinals’ miraculous comeback the evening before. I told him I would bring a wine worthy of the event. He suggested that some Anheuser-Busch might be a more appropriate beverage. I said I would take my chances with a 2006 Umbria Rosso San Valentino from Paolo Bea, a blend of Sagrantino, with Sangeovese and Montepulciano by one of the region’s great winemakers.  

The Italian regional wine authorities claimed that the wine was too light in color and slightly oxidized and refused to award it DOC (denomination de origine controllata) status, so the wine sold for about $30 in the States instead of the $60 it would otherwise have fetched. I loved the ounce I had at a tasting last September, bought a bottle, stuck it in my desk, and more than a year later nervously pulled it out, wrapped it in a tee-shirt and put it in my luggage before going to Penn Station to catch the train.

Not to worry. The Paolo Bea was delicious, earthy in a controlled way, very interesting to drink over the course of a three-hour baseball game despite my poor handling. (Six months in a dark desk drawer in a temperature-controlled office is probably fine; a year is not.) I probably killed some of the nose, but it remained intriguing to sniff and drink all the way to our bottle-ending toast to the Redbirds’ 6-2 win.

Fully convinced of Bea’s ability, I turned to another bottle that had lingered in my mind since July, one made by nuns in Lazio with the help of Bea’s son Giampiero that I ran across in a Berkeley, California wine store, Vintage Berkeley. The Coenobium Suore Cistercensi, a blend of 45% Trebbiano, 35% Malvasia, and 20% Verdicchio, has an appealing label that looks hand-written and features the logo of the Trappist monastery in Vitorchiano, which is in the province of Lazio about an hour north of Rome, and a relatively gentle $20 price tag.

Last week, 2B Sales asked me to pick up a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for her. From the Loire? Yes, from the Loire. I got to the wine store, thought about the Coenobium, and for entirely selfish reasons went with a 2009 bottle of that instead. I started to worry about 2B’s reaction when I got back to the office, since the Coenobium gets extended contact with the grape skins, which is unusual and certainly not like a Sauvignon from the Loire. A nip of the Coenobium last weekend set me at ease, though: gingerbread, maybe a little yeast, rich taste but reasonably light mouthfeel.

2B Sales loved it. Could barely stop drinking it, she said. Wanted two more bottles. Just hearing her talk about it convinced one of her brethren on the sales team to take a bottle. The chief took one. Big-Time Spender, ever suggestible, signed up. I took the seven bottles the store had left, which left me short a bottle for someone who wanted to take a few home for Thanksgiving, so I got him a white from the Jura, a Montbourgeau. (Speaking of whites from the Jura, the ’07 Gahier Chardonnay was a terrific bottle as well, its nutty character evident but restrained, with enough acid to balance the richness that can often be excessive in wines from the region.)

The seven Coenobiums were only a third of the orders for the last MFWC run before Thanksgiving. Given the boss’s enthusiastic endorsement of Bernard Baudry’s Chinons, which are made from Cabernet Franc, I picked up three of his entry-level (i.e., under $20) wines as well as yet another Loire red for the Boss himself and a variety of bottles for the rest of the crew, which welcomes a new member, the Pinot Grigio drinker who wants to branch out—call her PG Branch.

I selected a 2009 Beaujolais from Edmunds St. John in California for PG Branch on the theory that it’s a light, easy-drinking wine that will go well with turkey. Steve Edmunds has a California hippie affect, but he’s a meticulous wine-maker who favors the Rhone style, and a sniff of one of his 1996 Syrahs sent me into conniptions at a wine dinner in May 2010. PG Branch, welcome to the club, and a happy Thanksgiving to everyone else.

The next blog posts will come from La Rioja, where I’m headed on Tuesday.

What to buy for Mom

I began buying wine by the case because of the bad California Chardonnay that my mother - call her Madame Chard du Chêne -used to buy reflexively. There was always a bottle in the fridge when I came home, and it always tasted the same when I would (always, my sister would add pointedly) pour myself a glass: acrid, no nose, no subtlety, no nothing. One Christmas, I suggested to my mother than I buy her a mixed case of whites. She could put the receipt on the fridge, check the ones she liked, take the receipt back to the store, get them to pick the next case, and over time hone her palate. This seemed feasible, since my mother is an excellent cook and sensitive to what she eats.

The plan had mixed success. Among the cases I lugged back from the store on my visits back to Baltimore, she did discover some crisp whites that she liked. There was the Kris Pinot grigio from northern Italy, a Mantel Blanco Sauvignon blanc from Spain and some others, but when left to her own devices she pulled the oaky California chard off the shelf. The varietal wasn't a kind of white wine, or even a synonym for it. It was white wine in her mind, an no amount of remediation from her control-freak son has changed that.

Mme. Chard is not alone. One MFWC member will drink only California chards if she's drinking white. She's a customer of sorts, so I don't browbeat her, but I do wonder why she doesn't branch out. Others want to spend only $10 or $12 or a bottle, which with my thrifty streak I can appreciate. They get good, solid wines at that price, if nothing all that interesting, but they'll never cook a wine in their apartment or spend $30 on a so-so bottle. 

Earlier this week, someone presented me with a Mme. Chard challenge. This person's mother is older and likes what the woman thinks are terrible wines that are made even worse because Mom takes several days to get through them. Mom's palate is, apparently, shot. A three-liter box of wine is the perfect solution for Mom. She presumably has enough self-indulgence by age 78 not to overindulge merely because she's got the equivalent of four bottles of wine in the fridge. The box wine will stay good for weeks, and it will be drinkable. If the daughter wants something good when she comes over, she should bring it herself. By the mid-2000s, according to the Encyclopedia of Wine, almost a quarter of the wine sold in the U.S. came form a box, and for good reason. It's functional, environmentally friendly, cheap, and apparently tastes at least OK. I suggested that the person go to Astor Wines, a great store that does a lot of volume and has a reasonable selection of box wines. For those of you in Jersey, I would imagine Wine Library would be even better, since they do enormous volume. 

I though of my box wine recommendation on my trip to the store the next day. A new customer - call her Samba after her preferred foot gear - likes to get a red and a white for about $12 each. I saw a $12 liter of Yellow & Blue Mendoza Torrontes, an Argentine white grape descended from Muscat and Criolla chica in box-like packaging, and I didn't hesitate to pick it up for Samba, who seems like an easy-going wine drinker. Why shouldn't she get another 250 ml in lighter packaging for the same price as a $12 bottle that would have been decent but no better? I also got Samba an $11 Cotes du Rhone that another co-worker favored last winter. The co-worker warned that the CdR doesn't keep well after being opened. Few wines do. The ones Mme. Chard du Chêne buys certainly don't. But wines in boxes have less exposure to oxygen and last a lot longer than those in bottles.

This brings us back to Mme Chard, who now drinks a range of whites from dry Riesling to Assyrtico, a Greek grape that makes a crisp white. She's always liked sherry, and so the oxidized Jura whites I bring home from time to time work well for her. Wine has become a low-cost, low-stress (stress-reducing, even) mother-son activity for her. Would she be just as happy drinking wine out of a box, and could she do that more cheaply than buying Hahn Chardonnay at $12 a bottle from the overpriced liquor store a mile from her house? Absolutely.

Underpriced or underwhelming? A 21-year-old wine for $19

MFWC (okay, Marcus) is a sucker for affordable wines with bottle age on the theory that they're generally underpriced. Take, for example, the Lopez de Heredia rose, which generally ages in oak for several years, is released about a decade after the grapes are harvested and generally retails for under $25. The winemaker cares enough to defer the return on his investment for many years, and he's not making a massive profit. That's a good sign. The tradeoff is that the wine probably isn't wildly popular, or the winemaker would be charging a lot more for it. You can get modestly priced Riojas or wines from the southwest of France that are a decade old; go to Bordeaux, and it's a different story.

So MFWC couldn't resist a Mosel riesling from 1990, the Kestener Paulinsberg Spatlese from Gunther Steinmetz. Spatlese is made form grapes that are picked late in the season and so have more sugar, which leads to sweeter wines capable of long aging. Presumably Steinmetz cares about his wine, but in this case he just wanted to get something, anything, for it, because over the last few decades, or depending on whom you read several decades, German drinkers have turned away from wines they perceive as sweet, as explained in this blog post and response:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/2011/10/sweet_german_rieslings_can_american_fans_revive_this_increasingl.html
AND
http://winediarist.com/the-fate-of-sweet-german-rieslings-and-a-reply-from-david-schildknecht/

2B sales was looking for a bottle to go with salmon, and when I asked about the Steinmetz, the salesman suggested it would work with a salmon prepared with dill and lemon. I also picked up a bottle to take to my sister's this weekend, and my brother-in-law channeled the Germans with his response: too sweet, tastes like the apple juice he gives to his kids, no finish. I'm going to stick up for my wine, though. I found the nose consistently interesting if not overly complex, with some citrus, maybe a little lavendar, that riesling smell that eludes definition but is often labeled as petrol (a turn-off, another MFWC member reminded me), all of which shifted as I sniffed. I thought the acidity and the sugar were in balance and didn't find the wine too sweet, but that's the great divide about rieslings from the Mosel. A beverage that leaves one man lusting for a pairing of boudin blanc with mustard leaves another shuddering at the thought of filling sippy cups with apple juice.

Careful readers of the MFWC blog have seen this story of shifting fashions at least twice before, in the changing French attitude toward Beaujolais that Kermit Lynch lamented and in the decline of Maderia consumption in the U.S. after 1815. Tastes in wine change, sometimes quite rapidly, for a host of reasons that may be difficult to untangle.

Steinmetz may have misjudged his audience with the 1990 Spatlese, but whoever he is, he knows that if you give people a full liter of booze for $15, they will think they're getting 250ml for free and snap it up. Thus I bought two liters of Steinmetz's, one for the harried mommy (HM) and the other for steady quaffer of lighter whites (SQLW).

We probably won't be getting the coffee connoisseur any riesling given his horror of drinking white wine, but CC grooved on the Vid Sur, a Negramoll Tinto that he pronounced powerful but interesting, a response enthusiastic enough that I bought bottles for Big Green and a relatively new MFWC member who's been drafting on the Spanish explorations of CC, Mr. M. and others. CC let his palate rest this week, while Mr. M celebrated a new job with a 2009 Pares Balta Mas Petit, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Penedes, an hour west of Barcelona on the Catalan coast. It's an appropriate venue from which to choose a celebratory beverage, since Penedes is one of the primary sources of Cava, the Spanish sparkling wine.

The Boss-man went back to the 2005 Raffault Les Picasses cabernet franc. As the weather gets colder, maybe he'll head back to the Cotes du Rhone, where he happily lingered for several months last winter.

   

Wine and the single drinker

One of Madeira's great strengths is its indestructibility. It flourished in the brutal conditions of a transatlantic crossing, after which questions of storage proved virtually irrelevant. There is no need to put it in a cool place, or lay it on its side, or drink it all in one sitting. These traits made it ideal not only for the 18th century Virginia aristocrats but for 21st century drinkers who can't or don't want to down 750ml at one sitting.

Jura wines have some of the same traits, as I learned at a tasting yesterday evening when Savignans and chardonnays that had been open for a week were poured. Because of their exposure to oxygen during the production process, the Puffeneys and Montborgeaus tasted fine after a week in an open bottle, as would sherry. A Sauvignon blanc would be wickedly acidic by then. This raises a key question for the MFWC given its number of members who drink a bottle over several days: which wines lend themselves to such consumption? The answers I've received to that question over the years have had a disturbingly low accuracy rate, but perhaps the club has the critical mass can bring some precision to the issue.         

Welcome to the Wine Islands

Since his first taste of the Pedralonga '07, a wine that's made it onto the MFWC's faves list as sure as a catchy song from Glee is downloaded onto iPods everywhere, the Coffee Connoisseur has been searching for a Spanish red that he likes as much. The man is a walking geography lesson. We've tried Galicia, Cigales, even the region near Madrid, and nothing has captured CC's palate. This week, the Spanish guru at Chamber St. recommended a red from La Palma in the Canary Islands, the Vid Sur 2009 Tinto. The Canaries are a string of islands off the coast of Morocco in the Atlantic, and the grape is Tinto Negramoll, one of the primary varietals used for Madeira wine, which is made on the eponymous islands 250 miles north of the Canaries.

Madeira was the preferred source of wines in colonial America, since it was a convenient layover point on the shipping routes from Europe to America and the wine produced there improved on the journey. That's an exceptionally unusual trait, since excessive heat (temperatures in shipholds could reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which would cook most wine to oblivion) and motion tend to harm wine, but those influences were so beneficial to Maderia that American customers often demanded that the wine be shipped to India and back to improve its flavor. Those with a taste for history can macerate themselves in David Hancock's 2009 tome Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Taste, an excellent case study of the interaction among merchants, producers and consumers of wine and its commercial aspects.

The product of CC's Vid Sur recalls the production of those legendary beverages in at least one way: Juan Mattias Torrez Perez, the producer, imposes no temperature control on his wines during their fermentation. La Palma is also known for its sweet wines made from Malvasia, another one of the primary grapes grown in Madeira.

While CC has been wandering all over Spanish wine country, the Boss is staying focused on the Loire reds with the 2009 Baudry Chinon from the plot Les Grezeaux, "a unique parcel of gravel over a bed of clay, sand and limestone at the base of the Coteaux du Sonnay, just west of Cravant." This is reputedly one of the best wines to come from the Loire in this vintage, and it's easily under $30. That right there should lure some of you to the Loire. Thirty bucks won't get you a lot in Bordeaux, Burgundy, or even the hillier part of the Rhone (long story short, hills are good for grapes, the steeper the better), but it gets you a great bottle from a place where for centuries they've been growing grapes in a serious way for seriously rich people like the ones who built all those castles to which tourists flock. Try one of the Olga Raffault Cabernet francs if you're a skeptic while we wait to hear back from the boss on the Baudry Grezeaux.

The rest of the club was fairly tame this week. I fulfilled a request for a Pinit Grigio with a Falaghina, an Italian white grape grown on the coast of Campania north of Naples since Roman times, and after buying more bottles of Broadside Cabernet Sauvignon than I can count, for variety's sake I shifted to the Ex Libris Cab, which is made from grapes grown in a variety of Washington state vineyards. 

A detour on the Spanish wine route

The club's cry for Spanish wines has me wandering all over New York. Last week, the Coffee Connoisseur and Mr. Marathon had the entry-level 2010 Garancha from Bernabeleva, a vintner in Navaherreros about an hour and a half west of Madrid. Both CC and Mr. M enjoyed it and asked for another Spanish red. I obliged with a tempranillo, the 2008 Lezcano-Lacalle Maudes Crianza from Cigales, which is about 150 miles northwest of Madrid and which a new club member - call her LRB for lover of big reds - very much liked. She also had a Conde de Hervias Rioja Joven the previous week, another tempranillo. (Joven means "young" in Spanish, and such wines see little or no aging, while crianza must age for at least six months in barrels and two years total.)

Garancha, or Grenache, is famous for its fruitiness, but the 2009 Bernabeleva tino I tasted was woodsy and earthy, a product of vines planted in sandy soil that sits on granite, I was told. CC dislikes fruit bombs intensely, so I'd guess that his bottle had the same basic profile. I don't know how he feels about freshness, though, so maybe he should try the joven as a test.

My search for Spanish wines that the gang might like also led me to Tinto Fino, a shop on 1st Ave. in the East Village. I wasn't expecting much when they poured an Albarino, a white grape with which I associated the citrus flavors of Sauvignon blanc. But the Abadia San Campio from Rias Baixas in Galicia was a different, higher-class animal, with a floral nose reminiscent of Muscat and a delicate taste that nonetheless had more backbone than the nose led me to expect. I asked the guy pouring the tastings if my impression had been formed by drinking too many crummy Albarinos made for U.S. palates. Apparently, it had. There's also Despana Vinos y Mas in SoHo for the Spain gang, and several of the salespeople at Chamber St. Wines are serious fans and buyers of Spanish wines, so CC, LBR, Mr. M will be able to familiarize themselves with Spanish wine geography in the months ahead.

I was on my way from the office to Chamber St. to taste more Spanish wines (Marcus Wines: We spit so you can taste) when I happened upon a tasting at Frankly Wines from the Jura in northeastern France (Jura as in Jurassic). My obsession with Jura wines could fill many posts, but for now the reader need only know that the region is most famous for the Savagnin grape (not a misspelling), from which vin jaune, or "yellow wine" is made. Like sherry, vin jaune is fermented and aged in oak barrels under a veil of yeast (voile in French, flor in Spanish), as are Savagnins that aren't subjected to the long aging needed to produce vin jaune. Frankly Wines offered pours from several bottles by Jacques Puffeney, a classic Jura producer, as well as some from the younger vintner who lives across the street from Puffeney, Michael Gahier.

The Puffeney '09 Savagnin was nutty and intense, perfect for the classic pairing with nuts and Comte cheese, but the Gahier was suaver, more subtle, and led me to think his Chardonnay might be a deal at $20.