Maker's Table

Who Knew?

Jordan Vineyard and Winery
Chardonnay "Russian River Valley"
2008
13.5% ABV | Price: about $29*

Pale soft yellow, with a beautiful, fresh green apple nose. There is melon, too, and below all this a layer of beeswax or lanolin. It is a soft and unctuous aroma, like an overripe pear, like a box of wool, like butter. It is savory and grounding. The wine spent two months sur lie, subjected to regular bâtonnage, so perhaps what I'm getting here is simply the scent of umami. 

It tastes like spring flowers—Lily of the Valley, mostly, and daffodil—with great acidity above and measureless depths below. It is juicy and a little flinty, too, with brilliant grip and a lingering, minerally finish. It brightens me like sunlight, and wets me down like rain showers.  

I love this wine.

 

*I received this wine as a press sample.

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Moscato

Jacob's Creek
Moscato
2010
8.0% ABV | Price: about $9.00*

The wine is nearly colorless, though the blue-green bottle makes it look like summertime at the pool. A blend of juice from muscat of Alexandria and muscat blanc à petit grains, it offers typical moscato aromas of musk melon, peach, jasmine, pear, and tropical fruits. On the palate it delivers great acidity with lush tropical notes—particularly pineapple—plus green melon, citrus, and stone fruits. Just off-dry and lightly frizzante; the mouthfeel is a little coarse, but this texture is actually a nice counterpoint to the wine's floral sweetness.

A true bagatelle. Not a wine you want to think about too hard, and at $9 with 8% alcohol, you don't have to. Enjoy a glass outdoors by that sea-green pool, with Prosciutto-wrapped melon and an array of fresh cheeses. Then lick your fingers and dive in.

 

*I received this wine as a press sample.

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See Saw

See Saw Wine Company
See Saw Hunter Valley
2009
12.0% ABV | Price: about $11.50

A blend of 85% sémillon, 10% chardonnay, and 5% verdelho from Australia's Hunter Valley, a wine region about 150km north of Sidney. This wine is actually a pale straw gold (though pink when viewed through rose-colored tulips), with a very faintly floral, lightly citrusy nose. It's light-bodied on the palate and a bit briny, with some grassiness and pleasant acidity leading to a long, tart finish. 

Not a serious wine, but not a stupid wine, either. Meaning: no evidence of oak, not a fruit-bomb, and not very alcoholic. Not pricey. Good thing.

 

*I received this wine as a press sample.

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Scheurebe

Müller-Catoir
Haardt Scheurebe
2009
12.0% ABV | Price: about $29

Very pale clear gold, this Scheurebe at first offers a whiff of petrol and fresh pear. Once it warms it starts yielding tropical fruits—pineapple, passion fruit, a little oily citrus, and a hint of spring flowers, too, unless that's just what's in the air. On the palate the wine has great acidity and a salty, slatey backbone against which luscious guava and Asian pear and tropical fruit stand forward. There is layer upon layer of flavor, each yielding to the next in a delicate and felicitious interplay. The finish lingers long.

I visited Müller-Catoir on a recent trip to the Mosel, Pfalz, and Rheingau regions of Germany. During my group's scheduled tasting, I (somewhat ill-advisedly) engaged the winemaker in a debate about whether a keller could be considered part of a wine's terroir. The molds, yeasts, and flora of a cellar might influence the wine en route, I suggested, images of black cellar mold fresh in mind from our recent cellar tours. They help the wine be what it will become. (I was embolded a little when one of my colleagues, a winemaker, agreed with me.)

No, he said, terroir is the vineyard, tout court. Its influence ceases the moment the grape is harvested. After that, it's up to the winemaker to do as little as possible to the wine, to coax it forth and stay out of the way.

If he's right, then the slate soils of the Pfalz evidently do know what to do.

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Tea and Wine

In the day it’s black tea,
in the evening red wine.
It’s always something
because
this
isn’t quite right,
isn’t enough,
or quite what I wanted
to feel, I guess.

What is addiction?
What is a need, and what is a simple desire,
simply, to feel
something else,
to remove myself from
this
for a moment?
And what will it take
to get to the point
where I don’t want them
anymore?

But why am I so hard on myself,
anyway—
why do I berate myself
for enjoying these two
tannic things,
bitter and astringent,
that open my throat
and let me sing a little?

 

Originally published in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Vol. 11 (Winter 2011): 98. Permission to reprint this poem has been granted by the publisher.

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j.brix

j.brix
Rosé of Grenache "Uncontainable"
2010
13.0% ABV | Price: priceless

Our friends Emily and Jody Towe made this wine in their garage. This is only slightly more exotic than it sounds. Total production: 25 cases.

It's 100% grenache. The fruit comes from the Mesa section of the Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard, elevation 3,200 feet. The juice spent about five hours on the skins after destemming and before pressing, and then was barrel fermented in neutral French oak with native yeast. Primary fermentation lasted 21 days, and the wine also went through partial malolactic. Two weeks before bottling, in February 2011, it was racked, with sulfur added.

I've been jealously guarding my bottle, which the couple left on my desk during their recent pilgrimage to Bonny Doon Vineyard. I was regrettably not present to greet them that day, although Randall was, and I suspect he was the main point of their exercise anyway. I claimed my prize on my next trip out to California, then swaddled it in bunting (okay, laundry) for its trip back home on the plane. It has reposed on my rack for three weeks while New England decided whether it would ever turn its attentions toward spring. But today there was sun, and so at last I chilled this bottle down and pulled the cork.

It is bright salmon pink—not quite as vocal as the photo shows, but close—with a rosy catch and sungold highlights. Unfiltered and unfined, it throws a sediment of crystals and lees. The nose is faintly appley but is truly all grenache, with clean and very pure grenache fruit aromas. On the palate the wine is bone dry but with a slightly sweet finish, and the net affect is a little floral, like rose petals. But the wine also has great astringency and body, and there's a savoryness to it, although our chers garagistes did not confess to engaging in any bâtonnage.

If it were not so precious, I would call it "quaffable." But I'm savoring it instead, and looking forward to next year.

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El Greco

Feudi di San Gregorio
Greco di Tufo
2008
13.0% ABV | Price: about $20

Deep gold with faint hints of stone fruit and citrus, plus a fresh salty aroma that reminds me of the sea on a breezy afternoon. It's briny on the palate, too, and medium-bodied, with a languorous, slightly sweet finish.

The Greco di Tufo DOC is an area in Campagna east of Naples where the wines are made primarily from the greco grape, imported originally from—you guessed it—Greece. This wine is 100% greco, and it's a mouthful of minerals and sea. It would be ideal with shellfish, squid, or saltwater fish. Tonight we're having it with pizza, but I doubt any napolitani would object.

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Daughters of the Revolution

Channing Daughters
Sculpture Garden
2007
12.7% ABV | Price: about $30*

This wine is 88% merlot and 12% blaufränkisch, from a winery in the Hamptons of Long Island. Only 348 cases were made. My dear friend and confrère éternel Rémy Charest handed it to me the last time we met. I confessed to having never before had a Long Island red. This would be my virgin flight.

Held against the light, the wine is a nearly pearlescent suspension of fruit plus earth. Swirled in the glass, it gives bright, plummy, cherry aromas underpinned by a black toastiness that's slightly savory. Medium-bodied in the mouth, it delivers juicy acidity, more red fruits, and black currant with a layer of spicy black pepper. The finish is long and faintly vegetal.

This is an elegant and balanced wine with an earthy, slightly funky catch in the middle. If you'd handed me a glass blind and asked me to place it, I'd have been utterly flummoxed. It does not have the gravitas and savory minerality of Bordeaux, nor does it have the heft and cleavage of California Merlot. It is not like Blaufränkisch, though it's not unlike some of the German reds I've tasted. It's lean and savory and a little wild tasting like some native North American wines. But it's clearly not native, either.

It's not Old World, and not wholly New. It's from here: New York State. My mind is open.

 

*I received this wine as a gift.

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Sancerrious

Franck et Jean-Francois Bailly
Sancerre "Cuvée Chavignol"
2007
13.0% ABV | Price: about $25*

Red Sancerre is made exclusively, in accordance with France's AC laws, with pinot noir grapes. This one is fine-boned and intense. Pale garnet with a faint peach cast at the rim, when swirled it gives off slightly earthy, smoky aromas with undertones of black plums. Brightly acidic with great minerality and a slightly spicy cut, it finishes lean. After a few minutes in the glass, it opens the windows and brushes out its hair. But it's a restrained wine; its dressing gown stays on.

It is also resoundingly a food wine. I paired it with an aged french goat cheese, a Bûcheron with a white rind, both born of the same soil, nearly. The wine married effortlessly with the chalky, gaminess of the cheese, and a sip after a bite was like spring after winter: clean, bright, cleansing.

My ancestors hail from the Loire. I'll have to visit soon.

 

*I received this wine as a press sample.

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Caliberico

Urbanite Cellars
Verdelho "Caliberico"
2009
12.2% ABV | Price: about $15*

The wine is a very pale gold and brilliantly clear with a faint green cast. It offers slightly briny aromas of pineapple, yuzu, and stone fruit, especially apricot. The flavors deliver what the nose promises, with more tropical fruits and stone fruit, plus a citrusy finish that's very clean feeling. It's lush and expansive yet also manages to be bracing, bone dry, and mercifully low alcohol for all this fruit.

More New World than Old, as if the grape's genetics, its native expression, has been somehow amplified by the sheer Californianess of Lodi. I'm finding it quite lovely in this particular bottle, in this particular glass.

 

*I received this wine as a press sample. That's my cat Rhubarb in the distance. She's not much of a wine aficionado. She prefers tuna juice.

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