Frecciarossa 2008 Provincia di Pavia Bianco Frizzante “Nai” (Lombardy) – Bright, almost (but not quite) brittle, bringing grass and clean greenness together with lemony citrus broth. Vivid, but only for a moment. Something’s missing here. Length? Breadth? Depth? Pick one. (6/10)
Browse Month
July 2010
My Galichets Friday
C&P Breton 2004 Bourgueil Les Galichets (Loire) – Green fruit…ripe but edged with herbs, stems, seeds, and skins…and dark, almost gritty soil. There are already mature notes floating about, and given the closure I wouldn’t hold the wine any longer anyway. (6/10)
C&P Breton 2004 Bourgueil Les Galichets (Loire) – Virtually identical to the previous bottle, with a bit more dark soil and intensity, plus more surviving structure. Despite this, the wine actually shows more maturity (in the form of tertiary spice/soil notes) than the previous. In any case, the advice to drink up holds. (6/10)
Wesley Krusher
Kanonkop 2008 “Kadette” (Stellenbosch) – I find Kanonkop’s wines quite impressive, especially their pinotage and Paul Sauer blend, but this is the outlier. It’s OK, but really no more than that. Big, big, big fruit, with that strappy, paint/varnish pinotage character – missing from their varietal bottling – on full display, and obliterating any appeal that might otherwise be lent by the other grapes in the blend. It’s not awful or anything, but I don’t really see the point to it, other than a way to slough off lesser product to preserve the quality of the upper-tier bottlings. (5/10)
Mb
Mt. Difficulty “Roaring Meg” 2008 Pinot Noir (Central Otago) – Second-label and cheaper Otago pinots are either surprisingly good or flawed in a regionally-representative way: too much weight and alcohol. Here, while there is some alcohol on display, it’s not because the wine is too weighty. On the contrary, it’s wan, tired, and uninteresting. It reminds me of one of those Eastern European pinots that used to show up in educational blind tastings a few decades ago, just to wrench the works (“betcha can’t guess that this is from Bulgaria, tee hee”) in that I while I understand how it got made, I don’t understand how it got purchased, shipped to foreign markets, and given valuable shelf space. (5/10)
A real groener
Neil Ellis 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Groenekloof) – Driven and slightly pushed sauvignon, which ramps up the mineral and green components alike. There’s nothing underripe about this wine, which tends more toward apple than herb, and so it can handle the escalation of volume. A very solid wine. (5/10)
Paul Simon came up with 50 more
JP Brun “FRV100” (Beaujolais) – “Aged” (by which, of course, I mean forgotten in the cellar) for about a year. My initial reaction is that the boisterous, bubbly fruit has faded a bit, but it’s marginal enough that I could easily be self-suggesting same. It’s still good. Good fun. (5/10)
Ernest Borgo
Borgo Scopeto 2000 “Borgonero” (Tuscany) – What once may have been deep-throated strawberry and blackberry fruit has been pushed, wrenched, and twisted into something laden with Botox and fakery. It’s recognizable as wine, but further precision would be problematic at best. (5/10)
Limpbach
Trimbach 2001 Riesling (Alsace) – Tiring. No…tired. (5/10)
Little book
Nera “La Novella” 2008 Terrazze Retiche di Sondrio Chiavennasca Bianco (Lombardy) – Sweet fruit and pretty flowers. Tra-la-la, tra-la-la. Also, green apple, walnut skins, and puppy dog tails. Fresh’n’fruity. Not the most interesting bottle of this I’ve had. Too giggly. (5/10)
Vidal information
Lakeview 2007 Vidal Icewine (Niagara Peninsula) – 200 ml. Powerfully sweet – I’m glad this bottle isn’t any bigger, frankly – with rhinestone minerality and some nice fruit skin/vegetal counterpoints. (5/10)