Browse Month

January 2012

Retort

Ellicottville Brewing Company Winter Witte (New York) – By-the-numbers white ale, with a little bit of prettified orange blossom going on in the background. Nice enough. (12/11)

Au, chroisk!

Auchroisk “Battlehill” 10 Year Scotch (Scotland) – Single-malt just doesn’t get any more innocuous than this. (12/11)

That Ommegang of mine

Ommegang “Aphrodite” Belgian-Style Ale (New York) – Fermented with grains of paradise, though I can’t say that I notice anything peppery about it. Mostly it’s just big, weighty, built to impress, but for all that effort sort of pointless and formless. In that it’s like most of Ommegang’s ales, which are routinely disappointing for my palate. (12/11)

Empty nest

Kiruchi “Hitachino Nest” White Ale (Japan) – Beautiful, soft, elegant, and as fully-integrated as any white ale of my memory. The tendency when drinking non-blind like this is, of course, to be moved to say things like “the sort of white ale a Japanese brewery would make, everything just so” without knowing if that’s the same reaction one would have if drinking blind, and yet…well, it is exactly that. (12/11)

Throne of Belœil

Dupont “La Bière de Belœil” Ale (Belgium) – Vibrant and sour. Not as puckery as, say, Cantillon, but more aggressive than a red ale, and with layers of metal, spice, and density to offset the acidic bite. There’s a bit of yeasty stench, but it’s well-restrained. Really quite impressive. (12/11)

Women on top

Sobon Estate 2008 Zinfandel Cougar Hill (Amador County) – 14.9%. It doesn’t <i>taste</i> like Cakebread. Well, jokes aside, it’s a richly-fruited zin about halfway in the jelly/syrup stage (which means that there’s still some pine-forested linkage to its expected regional character) with a lot of tannin and what seems to be a fair dollop of oak as well. This in unquestionably designed with cellaring in mind, and while it’s a bit denser than I think would be ideal for its future balance, age it should. (12/11)

Susanna or Sergei?

Sobon Estate 2008 Zinfandel Lubenko (Fiddletown) – 15.2%. Thick, resinous, and skin-dominated zin slathered in oak (not egregiously so for zin, which handles new wood pretty well, but it’s hard to miss). There’s a lot of pine needle here, which I love in zins from this area, but the wine itself is more than a bit of a slog. Maybe time will help, but I suspect it will always be a little over-structured. (11/11)

Peter & Mary think not

Sobon Estate 2008 Zinfandel Paul’s “Rezerve” (Amador County) – 15.1%. Full of effort and strain, but here – unless in the “regular” reserve bottling from the same vintage – it all works. Better fruit concentration from better-sited or older vines? Maybe. The difference lies in the notion that all the effort is in support of a purpose, rather than just that of the effort itself. Dark, nearly-but-not-quite syrupy berries, seedless jam, chocolate, bark, soil, pine bark. Long, peppery, and worthy of some cellar experimentation. (11/11)

The first Italian

Sobon Estate 2009 Primitivo “Rezerve” (Amador County) – 15.3%. The alcohol really sticks out here, as does the wood, and I think it’s because zinfandel’s non-acculturated cousin puts its acidity in a different place…“over there” rather than swimming amidst…and this exposes the wine’s other elements to accusations of imbalance. But it’s not really imbalanced (though I would, personally, prefer a little less of everything <i>except</i> that acidity), it’s just fairly incoherent. Maybe time will resolve this, maybe not, but I will say that despite the range of berries being those one would generally expect from Amador zinfandel, the structural differences do rather pointedly call back to an Old World idea of composition. Whether that’s something inherent to the grape, the particular process by which this wine was made, or merely the power of suggestion working on this taster I can’t say for sure. (11/11)