Browse Author

thor iverson

Writer, educator, communicator, consultant. Wine, spirits, food, cocktails, dining, travel. Authoring a book on the sensorial theory of wine & cheese pairing.

Another isle of sky (California, pt. 2)

13 November 2005 – somewhere above Cupertino, California

Ridge – Despite a number of visits to the Lytton Springs offshoot, I’ve never been to the original. So with picnic supplies in tow, we (me, Theresa, Larry Stein and his young daughter Shira) wind our way up the mountain…which is, I have to say, a much less silly drive than I’ve been led to believe, though I suspect comparison with New Zealand has something to do with this…for a little lunch and a little tasting.

Lunch is first, with a nice spread (from a Whole Foods somewhere down in the valley) on a picnic table amidst gnarly old hilltop vines, sun and sky all around us. With it, we enjoy a library release from the nearby tasting room; this is a practice I wish more wineries would mimic.

Ridge 1995 Zinfandel York Creek (Spring Mountain) – Ripe apple and concentrated strawberry jam, still tannic and firm but with fruit that’s starting to “roast” (a personal descriptor I have for one specific quality of aged zin) and I suspect it’s about half as rich as it once was. Drink soonish, I’d say, though it won’t outlive the tannin.

During lunch, an amusing conversation takes place between Theresa and Shira, who are chatting about some boy Shira either does or doesn’t like:

Theresa: “If I were single again, I’d probably go for an older man.”

Shira: “Why?”

Theresa: “Maybe a richer man.”

Shira, thoughtfully: “True. True.”

I glance at Larry, amused at the look of growing panic in his eyes.

Back inside, a busy but uncrowded tasting room offers a slightly smaller selection that I’m used to vs. the Lytton Springs facility.

Ridge 2002 Lytton Springs (Dry Creek Valley) – 14.4%. Scotch and blackberry liqueur, with thick, massive waves of oak and density. Very long, and I’m used to young Ridge tasting woody, but what’s up with all the heat?

Ridge 2003 Geyserville (Sonoma County) – 14.6%. Big berry fruit (mostly cherry and blueberry), showing good, zingy acidity and moderately-strong tannin. A good, balanced wine.

Ridge 2003 Zinfandel Independence School (Sonoma County) – 15.4%. Papery and flat, with dried, dust-covered berry residue. No thanks.

Ridge 2001 “Late Picked” Zinfandel York Creek (Napa Valley) – 15.9%. Chocolate-covered cherries. This is starting to mellow a bit, though it’s still dominated by its off-dryness rather than its inherent qualities. At least here, the size makes sense, but it’s not showing much of interest at the moment.

Ridge 2003 Zinfandel Buchignani Ranch (Sonoma County) – 14%. Dried walnuts and light plum with shriveled berry skins. Balanced.

This is a somewhat dismaying tasting. I’m used to Ridge zins being big, and also being less than inviting in their oak-infused youth, but when their future seems to include a choice of Port or Sherry wood maturation, I get concerned.

Transitory traumas (New Zealand, pt. 11)

[plane]It’s the most stunning flight ever.

I’ve flown over the towering spires of the Alps. I’ve flown over deep blue equatorial ocean flecked with glinting white. I’ve flown over the jagged russet shading of the Grand Canyon. They’ve got nothing on this series of views: isolated, snow-capped Mt. Ruapehu rearing above a few drifting clouds, the girdled regularity of Mt. Egmont and its endless downflowing rivers, flowing white-capped turbulence on Cook Strait, the delicate golden tracery of Farewell Spit, and then the towering, rust-colored Kaikoura Range in disordered majesty, bordered by the relentless oscillation of the Pacific Ocean.

Theresa encourages me to get the camera and take a few pictures through the plane’s tiny window. But no, I don’t think I will. Some pictures are beyond the lens.

In Christchurch, arriving later than we’d anticipated thanks to a delayed Auckland departure, we engage in the most unsecure of transfers – through a door, around a corner, and into an already-queued line of passengers, with nary a security camera or officer in sight – to our next flight. A thirty-three seat, double-propped needle in Air New Zealand blue and white sits on the tarmac, and Theresa immediately gets nervous; she doesn’t like small planes, she hates turbulence, and this flight promises an abundance of both. Amid the clatter and chaos of the care and feeding of an airplane, carts and hoses and identically-suited men swarming like workers ‘round a queen bee, we board the plane, passing our luggage – currently sunning itself atop an overstuffed baggage cart – along the way. We’ve paid $100 in “overweight” charges to get this already-irritating collection of clothing and wine onto the Waiheke Island ferry, onto an Airbus shuttle (as always, incredibly delayed and highly unreliable), and onto a small domestic jet. It’s amazing what the addition of a single case of wine can do to otherwise hassle-free travel, and my back still hurts from lugging the box across a busy Quay Street in Auckland.

The southward flight from Christchurch is bumpy and far less scenic than its predecessor, with the buffeting waves of the Pacific coastline petering out against low, rocky cliffs that only slightly elevate the farmland to their west. It seems we’ve barely ascended to a level cruising altitude when we make a slow, sweeping turn to the right and begin the seemingly endless westward descent to Dunedin’s remote airport, the enveloping hills turning green and lush and overrunning the last traces of farmland. A tiny, somewhat ill-designed terminal is packed with students returning from holiday (Dunedin is a major university town), and one by one they pull battered knapsacks and trunks from the conveyor belt and depart for re-acquaintance with friends (and, no doubt, re-acquaintance with hefty quantities of Speights). Eventually, we’re left with a dozen other forlorn-looking tourists and students, luggage-less.

(Continued here…)

Magnum, P.I. (California, pt. 1)

12 November 2005 – Los Altos, California

[pool at Sheraton]Sheraton San Jose – Actually in Milpitas, and way harder to get to from the San Jose airport than it should be, thanks to closed onramps and construction around the airport. It’s a good, solid business hotel with a lovely pool area, as “near to stuff” as anything can be in this sprawl.

Jeff & Lisa Cuppett’s house – We’re very close to fresh off the plane, so a low-key gathering chez Cuppett, with Jon Cook and Kira Maximovich (and the Cuppett’s sleepy progeny) in attendance, is just the thing. There’s crab “cakes” with remoulade, steaks on the grill, broccolini and blue cheese/bacon potatoes, but mostly there’s wine and conversation.

Christophe Pichon 2001 Condrieu (Rhône) – Pine needles, sweet white flowers, and floral spice with light, rindy bitterness on the finish. There’s good acidity, but this is generally a light-bodied and soft wine; not necessarily a criticism, though it’s not quite up to my other experiences with C. Pichon. It’s still one of the best available, however.

Bollinger 1992 Champagne Brut “Grande Année” (Champagne) – Very full-bodied (no surprise there), with biscuits, burnt peach skin and baked orange supported by big acid. I like it, but it’s either in an odd stage or not my favorite vintage Bolly, because I don’t love it.

mystery wine – From unlabeled magnum and from Thunder Mountain…that’s all we know at uncorking. The wine shows sweaty plum liqueur, strawberry eau de vie, and a soft, light-fruited but high-alcohol palate with low acid and little remaining tannin. Jon opines that it’s zin and either a ’93 or ’96, while Kira is certain that it’s a ’96 and that she knows the source. Bowing to their vastly superior experience, then, this is a Thunder Mountain 1996 Zinfandel Dusi Ranch (Paso Robles).

Freemark Abbey 1991 Cabernet Sauvignon Bosché (Napa Valley) – It’s my once-per-year positive tasting note on a Napa wine! Gorgeous, mixed powdery peppercorns with bright cherry and lovely tobacco notes. Balanced and structured (less tannin than acid at this point). I’ve had decidedly mixed experiences with Freemark Abbey – some horrible, some reasonably positive – but this is a really nice wine, and ready to go now (though it’s probably in no danger of immediate death, either).

Edmunds St. John 1994 Syrah Durell (Sonoma County) – Boozy and flat, with smoked leather and a heavy payload of tannin. Dead and hot. Something’s wrong here, and I don’t know that “closed” quite covers it.

Mud and melancholy (New Zealand, pt. 10)

[Marty thieving wine samples]Light petting

“Which turn is it?”

Sue consults her notes. “The one to the petting zoo.”

I press the brakes, glance in my rear-view mirror. “What?”

“The petting zoo. Look, there,” she points, “up that road.”

“You know, I’ve driven this road a dozen times, and I’ve never noticed that.”

We turn. A few forlorn animals – mostly sheep, and where can one possibly find those in New Zealand? – stare balefully at us from behind a short fence. They don’t look particularly eager to be petted…but given a total absence of potential petters, there doesn’t seem to be much danger of that. Nor of ticket-taking, or indeed of any two-legged habitation whatsoever. So are these just a bunch of animals in a pen? “Hey, come pet them if you want!”

The sheep provide no answer, though they do continue to stare.

An end to summer

Most visitors to Waiheke Island’s Mudbrick will not set foot or wheel anywhere near a petting zoo. That’s because they’ll be at the winery’s eponymous restaurant, highly-regarded among Waiheke’s limited dining options, which is situated quite close to the Matiatia ferry wharf. Instead, we’re amongst tree-lined vineyards somewhere not too far from Stonyridge, still with Sue & Neil Courtney in tow, in a clean, functional winery completely removed from the touristed byways of the island. We’re joined by Nick Jones, co-owner of the property, and a youngish chap (yet another!) named Marty, who turns out to be the winemaker, and we’re here to taste some wine.

Nick wears a light blue “Playboy 50” t-shirt with studied insouciance, while Marty attends to the actual business of tasting. They’re relaxed, jovial, and inclined more towards humor than serious wine talk, which is just fine with us after a long day of wine visits. We thus skip the preliminaries and get right to tasting, with our quartet interjecting the occasional question into the casual levity.

(Continued here…)

A passage to insight (New Zealand, pt. 9)

[David Evans Gander]A wrinkle in vine

“How do you go back to the place where everything changed…?” I asked, once, and from that question a travelogue was born. The “place” I had in mind was Milford Sound, on which much more can and will be written many narratives hence, but certainly other interpretations are possible. Here’s one:

“Hello?”

David Evans Gander pokes his head around a doorway. He’s casual in working shorts and shirt, knee-deep in one of those endless tasks that consume every morning, afternoon, and night of a winemaker’s existence. “Just a moment.”

We wait. It’s dark and cool inside, strangely silent outside.

A half-dozen moments later, he re-emerges with bottles in hand, ducks behind the counter of the now-closed winery café (really more of a pizzeria, to the apparent delight of most visitors) to retrieve some glasses, and groups us around a picnic-like table.

“So…how was Stony Batter?”

Rock is their forté

My first day in New Zealand was a bit of a blur. Not so much from jet lag as travel lag, a sense-dulling miasma of displacement and the nasty, filmy feeling of twelve hours of recycled airplane air battling the onrush of a world of new experiences and sensations. Among those sensations was a marvelous little wine – just a glass – shared with Theresa and Sue Courtney at Nourish. I’d spent the morning at Goldwater and Stonyridge, tasting a lot of wines that were – whether better or worse than I’d expected – familiar. But here, at this terrific little bistro, was a glass of sun-filled viognier that rose above all my expectations, especially for this highly cranky grape. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Passage Rock 2001 Viognier (Waiheke Island) – One of the rarest of wine discoveries, a delicious viognier from somewhere other than Condrieu. Not that it tastes like Condrieu. There’s the requisite midpalate fatness, but it’s braced on both sides with excellent acidity and a lovely floral delicacy. Best of all, there’s no alcoholic heat.

Passage Rock. Few wineries I’ve not visited hold a special place in my heart, and none whereat I’ve tasted only one wine. And yet, there was something about that deliciously brief taste of viognier…well, if I ever got back to Waiheke Island, I vowed to visit. To see what it was all about, to get at the heart of the matter…no, I must admit, my aim was more personal: to try to recapture and relive that memory.

Sue talks about our morning while Evans Gander pours the wine and I study our surroundings. Passage Rock would be, in the absence of Stony Batter, the most remote of Waiheke Island’s wineries, and the facilities obviously represent a sort of haphazard expansion; needs-based, rather than designed. And while the vines fanning out from the main buildings replicate a descent to the sea found at our morning visit, it’s a gentler, slower, shallower descent to a much more distant shore. Which only adds to the feeling of isolation.

Soon enough, however, the first wines are in front of us and we’ve work to do.

(Continued here…)

Sheep attack! (New Zealand, pt. 8)

[Stony Batter bottles]Flocking together

A large, flightless mass akin to a colorful heirloom chicken scuttles across the yard, pausing every few feet to investigate a potentially edible morsel. Cliff and I emerge from our apartments at the same time to watch, which only serves to increase the velocity of its scampering and nibbling.

“It’s a weka, I reckon,” opines Cliff.

…

Swans, geese, ducks and gulls congregate in multiracial harmony on a beach that adjoins the Matiatia ferry wharf. Neither begging food from passersby nor twitching in fear from same, they bask in the sun, preening and squalling as the ferry noisily chugs, groans, and squeaks into its berth. Our guests have arrived.

…

A not-so-stealthy and rather ridiculous-looking black, blue, and white bird with a vivid orange beak and grossly un-proportionate legs stumbles around the roadside, occasionally veering onto our already too-narrow road. Were there ever need for a visual link between the bird and the dinosaur, this sight would settle all doubts. We slow down, then swerve as best we can to miss it, but it seems not-at-all put out by the cloud of dust that now encompasses it. Neil Courtney, concise as ever, answers my unspoken query: “pukeko.”

New Zealand is for the birds

Stony dancer

It’s a sunny, hot day on Waiheke Island, though cooling ocean breezes keep the temperature just a shade short of uncomfortable. We’ve picked up Auckland-area wine writer Sue Courtney and her husband Neil for a day of wine tasting, a reversal of our usual arrangement (in which they cart us around mainland wine regions), and definitely some sort of payback for Sue’s guidance on our previous visit. That is, assuming the Americans’ driving on remote gravel roads through the wilds of Waiheke doesn’t give them both premature heart attacks. I do note that Sue’s breath seems a little quicker than usual, though Neil is his usual stoic self.

Sue’s arranged for us to start our day with a tour at the reclusive and remote Stony Batter winery, and it’s impossible to turn down the opportunity. Built on the massive expanse of an historic reserve better known for its old gun emplacements and tunnels, Stony Batter is less a winery than a all-encompassing agricultural project that covers a rather large percentage of the northeastern quadrant of the island, a project unlike any other on Waiheke. The owner, apparently an unimaginably wealthy gent, has an obvious desire for privacy (the entrance to the reserve is blocked by a forbidding gate, though through apparent negotiation hikers are once more allowed on the property as long as they don’t touch, look at, smell or otherwise offend the vines), but has equally obviously spared no expense in covering the area with a crazy-quilt of experimental vineyards.

(Continued here…)

Boston Wine Expo notes pt. 3 — Portugal

Tasting notes from the Boston Wine Expo. Because of the rather large number of notes, the usual supplemental material has been eliminated; contact me if you have specific questions about a wine. Also, please keep in mind that this was a large, crowded tasting at which a certain efficiency was a necessity; these are notes based on short takes (except where noted), and not necessarily the ideal conditions in which to render definitive judgments.

Part 3 – Portugal

White

Quintas de Melgaço “Terra Antica” 2004 Vinho Verde (Portugal) – Crisp lime and green apple. Very pure.

Castelo Branco “Quinta da Murta” 2004 Bucelas (Portugal) – Gorgeous, full-fruited green apple.

Quinta do Serrado “Solar” 2004 Vinho Verde Alvarinho (Portugal) – Creamy lemon and apple; smooth to the point of being sticky.

Herdade Grande 2004 Alentejano (Portugal) – Mercaptans and fizzy, ripe apple. Crisp and long, this eventually gets better despite the skunk.

Red

Quinta do Alorna 2003 Ribatejano (Portugal) – Chewy peanut butter overwhelmed by dense, wood-like tannins (though I don’t know that this wine has actually seen any wood).

Quinta da Cortezia “Vinha Concha” 2003 Estremadura (Portugal) – Sour cherry and plum. The acid is low, but otherwise this at least makes a nod in the direction of balance.

CA do Sanguinhal “Peninsula” 2003 Estremadura (Portugal) – Sulfur on the nose; thick, purple and fruity with mildly green tannin on the palate.

CA do Sanguinhal “Quinta de S. Francisco” 2001 Óbidos (Portugal) – Hard blueberry skin and strawberry seed; tough but good in its angry way.

SA do Casal de Tonda “Quinta dos Grilos” 2004 Dão (Portugal) – Black leather and blackberry with ripe tannin and nice balance.

Herdade Grande 2002 Alentejano (Portugal) – Gorgeous plum and black cherry over black earth-flecked morels. Lovely and structured with a long finish. Terrific.

Bastos Estremox “Dona Maria” 2003 Alentejano (Portugal) – Spicy and almost pétillant. Fades and thins quickly to plastic on the finish.

Vinhos Douro Superior “Castello d’Alba” 2003 Douro “Reserva” (Portugal) – Solid, purple and grapey with oddly stewed tannins and slight greenness (manifesting as thyme). The acid’s a bit high and not entirely integrated, either.

Erdade de Malhada “Casa de Santa Vitoria” 2003 Alentejano (Portugal) – I’m not confident that I’ve correctly transcribed the name of this winery. Fruity blueberry and some cotton candy smoothed by a vanilla sheen. Good, if a bit tannic.

Quinta Nova da Nosa Senhora do Carmo “Casa Burmester” 2002 Douro “Reserva” (Portugal) – Earthy porcini, black cherry and chocolate with excellent balance and structure. A more modernistic style than many of the previous wines, but quite good.

Caves do Salgueiral 2003 Douro Andreza (Portugal) – Coconut and soupy, overripe fruit with hard tannin.

Sweet

Gould-Campbell 2000 Porto (Douro) – Dark cherry and sweet walnut spice. Beautiful. Perhaps too beautiful.

d’Oliveiras Madeira Doce (Portugal) – Mildly oxidized celery and other assorted yet weird vegetative aromas. There’s good palate balance, but I don’t much care for what’s being balanced.

d’Oliveiras Madeira 10 Anos (Portugal) – A touch spritzy, with spice and loads of baked carmel apples. Complex and long, with the usual great acidity.

d’Oliveiras Madeira 15 Anos (Portugal) – Dusty spiced cedar with more body but also more wood than the 10-year, showing roasted walnuts, roasted pecans and fresh cashews with a zippy, long finish.

Burmester “Jockey Club” Porto “Reserva” (Douro) – Faded and gummy sweetness with fake-tasting Juicy Fruit™ flavors. No good.

Burmester 20 Year Tawny Porto (Douro) – Very spicy banana. Long, sweet and simple, but tasty.

Burmeister 1985 Colheita Porto (Douro) – The usual mélange of baking spices with slightly papery oxidativeness; balanced and fine but not superior.

Burmester “Sotto Voce” Porto “Reserva” (Douro) – Sticky blueberry and plum with cherry residue. Overly syrupy.

Burmester 2000 Vintage Porto (Douro) – Very fruity, showing blackberry and black cherry. There’s excellent sweetness and fruit presence, but it lacks structure. The finish is long and quite sweet.

La terre parle

Edmunds St. John 2000 Syrah (California) – A bit truculent at first, relaxing to mere surliness, then finally…perhaps most of all after 24 hours of air…showing its inner colors of leathery blackberry skins, hints of smoked meat, and a thick, solid structure. This is aging nicely, if perhaps a bit slower than I’d anticipated, and appears to be willing to be held for a few more years at least.

I was surprised to see a bottle of this hiding amongst ostensibly longer-aging syrahs during a recent cellar reorganization, and immediately moved it to the “drink now” rack. I needn’t have panicked. What Steve does better than just about any California wine maker is pick grapes with the inherent balance for gentle, Old World-style aging and then nurse them – rather than doctor them – from crush to bottling. It’s not the only path to success in California, and winemakers can certainly do excellent work in bigger, riper idioms without falling victim to the excesses of their brethren, but Steve’s wines have a special presence all their own, and age in a way unlike – and, sadly, all-too-frequently superior to – any other California wine. For this, an inexpensive blended syrah, to age in this particular fashion would be an achievement in the Rhône, a miracle elsewhere, but for Steve is merely another step along the path. Alcohol: 13.7%. Closure: cork. Web: http://www.edmundsstjohn.com/.

Leydier “Domaine de Durban” 2002 Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise (Rhône) – From 375 ml. Sweet crystals of apple, lemon, tangerine and melon, full of shattered quartz-like minerality and slashing needles of glass. Absolutely the most striking muscat there is in this region. Simply majestic.

It is an open and acknowledged bias of mine to prefer strong minerality to overt fruit. Leydier’s wines are so mineral-driven – the red Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Beaumes-de-Venise even more than this – that it’s virtually predestined that I would love them. This, a lightly-fortified sweet muscat, is made from gorgeous vineyards on the sweeping hillsides above the Dentelles de Montmirail, at a winery with one of the more frightening approaches in southern France (which, on our visit, probably wouldn’t have been quite so frightening had a truck not been barreling towards us from the other side of a land bridge). Nonetheless, the views are worth any moment of terror, and the wines even more so. Alcohol: 15%. Closure: cork. Importer: Kermit Lynch.

Winery B72564 “by Michel Rolland” 2003 Clos de los Siete (Mendoza) – Full-bodied and full-fruited in the anonymous New World style, with all the grapes having their say: chewy, dark and tannic fruit from the malbec, cassis and structure from the cabernet sauvignon, fruity lushness from the merlot, and smoked leather notions from the syrah. The equal partner here is oak, expressing itself in vanilla, chocolate, toast and butterscotch forms. It’s a massive, heavy, thoroughly placeless wine with no apparent flaws, and will undoubtedly be very popular. For those who don’t exist on this style, however, it will be at its most pleasurable at first sip, and then quickly decline to relentless monotony.

40% malbec, 20% merlot, 20% cabernet sauvignon, 20% syrah. I think, based on my preferences, that most people would expect me to hate this wine. I don’t. It has its place, and will please a lot of people. The familiar and obvious objection (so obvious that this is the second time I’ve made it) – that it could be from anywhere – is, I think, a correct one, but that in itself doesn’t invalidate the wine. To those who would argue that this wine is superior to most of the often raw and harsh vinous products of Argentina, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but would instead pose this question: since it is plainly apparent that this sort of wine can indeed be made anywhere given sufficient funding, workable grape sources and enough knowledge in the cellar, wouldn’t the most important differentiator to the otherwise-indifferent consumer be price? Wouldn’t the first goal – the only goal – be to find this wine at its cheapest? Maybe that’s Argentina’s role here, and maybe it’s not (though with Michel Rolland attached, I doubt this will ever contend for the bottom of the pricing barrel), but I suspect that “we can make drinkable New World-style wine more cheaply than anyone else” is not a title on which Argentinean viticulture wishes to permanently hang its hat. In any case, the Aussies will be mightily miffed at the competition for their crown. Alcohol: 14.5%. Closure: cork. Importer: Dourthe. Web: http://www.monteviejo.com/.

Roussel & Barrouillet “Clos Roche Blanche” 2003 Touraine Sauvignon (Loire) – Fairly classic riper sauvignon blanc characteristics (melon, overripe gooseberry, sweaty tropicality verging on pineapple alongside more typical grass and tart citrus aromas) with the Touraine chalk, though the latter is muted under the wine’s overall weight; a substantial gain in heft over previous vintages that I’m not sure works entirely to the wine’s benefit.

This is a wine that’s usually much more marked by its site than by its varietal composition. In hot 2003, the grape asserts itself in a not-unpleasant way, though it is certainly still incapable of muting the Touraine signature. Where things go wrong, as noted above, is that the form of the wine is off-kilter as a result; there’s certainly “more,” but there’s no counter-balancing structure (mostly, this would need acid). All that said, there’s little that’s unpleasant here, and one could happily drink this while waiting for better vintages to round into form. Alcohol: 13%. Organic. Closure: cork. Importer: Louis/Dressner & LDM.

Whites only (New Zealand, pt. 7)

Ask not what your winery can do for you…

The aquamarine rippling of the Hauraki Gulf throws shadows and highlights onto the trees below us. A breeze gently ruffles the leaves, then stills, freshening the quiet air but leaving nothing but memory in its wake. I hold up my glass of sauvignon blanc, which shines bright and clear in the sunlight, and take a deep, luxurious sniff. All is right with the world.

Though not quite as much is right with the wines.

We’re on the patio at Kennedy Point, looking down a rather precipitous cliff to the ocean, and working through a tasting conducted by a friendly young Californian. But after the sauvignon blanc, I’m afraid it’s all as downhill as the below-patio slope.

(Continued here…)

How dry I’m not

Bisson 2004 Prosecco dei Colli Trevigiani (Veneto) – Bone-dry, perhaps excessively so, with a powdery, misty texture and the bitterness of citrus rinds. Severe. I almost like it, but in the end I think this would be improved with just a hint of residual sugar.

Prosecco can be good, bad or indifferent, but in its most everyday form (the kind that arrives in unlabeled bottles on Venetian tables, for example) it is rarely without a dollop of softening sweetness. It’s one of prosecco’s great appeals. Bone-dry prosecco, for reasons that aren’t clear to me but that are almost certainly related to the inherent characteristics of the grape, is a bit of a high-wire act, and the result can easily cross the austerity line and end up in the realm of severity. That is, to an extent, what’s happened here. That’s not to denigrate the wine’s essential nature, which is fine in its idiom, but I’m just not convinced that bone-dry prosecco is often the best expression of the grape. Alcohol: 11%. Closure: cork. Importer: Rosenthal.

Donaldson Family “Main Divide” 2002 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough/Canterbury) – What one wants from a Kiwi sauvignon: gooseberry, some herbs, the hint but not the bite of capsicum, riper melon notes (but not overripe into the tropical range), in a clean, balanced package. Nicely done.

90% sauvignon blanc from Marlborough, 10% sémillon from Canterbury. The sauvignon for this wine is not consistently sourced, but the wine is fairly consistently made in a style that is both approachable and resists the modern New Zealand trend towards sauvignon blanc with obvious residual sugar, yet also avoids the traditional problems of the underripe, pyrazine-laden wine that, for better or worse, made Marlborough famous. Alcohol: 13%. Closure: cork. Importer: Meadowbank/Empson. Web: http://www.maindivide.com/.

[Redfield]West County Cider Redfield (Northern Berkshires) – Strong, dark and ripe apple with a slight tannic bite, good acidity, and a faint sparkle. The structure gives this persistence and wipes away the sticky residue that sometimes lingers from everyday cider. Vivid and intense.

Well-made varietal cider is as interesting as varietal wine – why should it be any different? – so it’s exciting to taste this version, from a getting-rarer variety that adds a bracing touch of skin bitterness to what is already a dark, intense cider. The producer softens it a bit with just a grace note of sugar and leaves a bit of residual (and natural) sparkle, which makes this one of the more fascinating ciders I’ve tasted in quite some time…not made by Eric Bordelet, that is. Alcohol: 5.3%. Closure: cork. Web: http://www.westcountycider.com/.

Clergot “Château Courtiade” 2002 Bergerac Sec (Southwest France) – Striking, showing earthy melon, ultra-ripe apple and white grape aromas with touches of sweaty gooseberry and a pulsating mineral underbelly. Long and delicious, this is a rather stunning wine for its price.

50% sauvignon blanc, 50% sémillon. Way, way back in the dim vestiges of memory, I recall a Bergerac opening my mind to entirely new horizons of taste in my first, tentative explorations of wine. But given the wine’s general absence on the local market, I’m not surprised it took me this long to come back to the region. If this bottle is any indication, the next absence will be brief. Alcohol: 12%. Closure: cork. Importer: Grand Vintage/Nadine & Allan.

Peillot 2003 Bugey Mondeuse (Ain) – Unsurprisingly lush vs. other vintages, but showing balance and poised fullness throughout, with aromatically floral red fruit still on the vine, traceries of lavender jam, and a silky, smooth finish. It’s atypical, perhaps, but it’s far too good to worry about atypicity.

Were it not for the yeoman efforts of crank individualist importers like Joe Dressner, I doubt I’d be particularly familiar with this grape (apparently more regularly a blending partner for gamay than a solo star). Mondeuse is one of those relentlessly rustic varieties that always has some lack vs. the modern vision of a “complete wine” (a vision I don’t share, by the way), but I’d be surprised if anyone could much object to the 2003 version of this wine. Yes, it lacks the delicate yet mildly abrasive qualities of the wine in more authentic years, but it’s just so purely delicious in this guise, how could anyone except the stubbornly closed-minded resist its charms? Alcohol: 12%. Closure: cork. Importer: Louis/Dressner/LDM.