Browse Month

May 2012

Presto Crasto

Quinta do Crasto 2006 Late Bottled Vintage Porto (Douro) – I don’t drink much Port anymore. I started typing that I don’t know why, but that’s not really true: I do. I find the basic bottlings, the everyday stuff, so consistently flawed and disappointing that I’m rarely interested. Aged tawnies have a sweet spot – different from producer to producer – that I adore, but is always a fair bit more than I usually wish to spend. And vintage…well, I own some, but when I realized that my transformative Port experiences came with more age that I probably have left, my enthusiasm for the wait…let’s say it waned.

But this is where LBV is supposed to step in, right? There was, for a long while, the Quinta do Noval in this role, but that escalated enough that it became a commitment. There have been others, and at the moment there’s this. Let me start with the most damning criticism: this is what I think basic ruby Port should taste like, but almost never does. It’s a big mouthful of sweet berries, all sugar and little structure, with caramelizations and crystallizations taking a seat way, way in the back. Complexity? Zero. I enjoy it, and drink it faster than is probably wise – beware the ides of dubious neutral spirit cogener hangovers – as a result, which isn’t exactly a feature. But it, too, isn’t what I’d call “cheap”…not that Port can, inherently, be all that cheap. But in the universe of wines which satisfy the desire for a few sips of something sweet, perhaps with cigars in the men’s lounge of the Titanic, I fear that my storm no longer settles over this Port. (5/12)

Netzl logic

Netzl 2009 “Rubin Carnuntum” Zweigelt (Carnuntum) – I’m consistently surprised at how some Austrian zweigelts are pushed into acrobatics I’m not sure zweigelt was ever mean to perform. It’s a worldwide disease, though – taking the indigenous and trying to fluff it up for the bright lights of the big city – and while it’s dismaying, one can’t really fault the commercial aspirations behind the impulse. There’s a middle ground, though, in which the grape is laden with aspirations but is not subject to a foreign finishing school somewhere near Nevers, and this is an example of same. The drippy black aromatics retain a certain floral aspect, there’s acid to counter the intense (but far from rich) fruit, and the structure is otherwise neither abrasive nor intrusive, though it’s quite clearly there. It’s a wine that goes down fairly easily, for all its muscularity, but when it has finished its descent one realizes that not much of note happened along the way. (5/12)

Cusumano y mano

Cusumano 2009 Nero d’Avola (Sicily) – Perspiration fruit under black light, dark bluish-purple, with smoked walnuts in neon-like ultraviolet. Very straightforward wine that probably requires something that was very recently bloody, but good in that idiom. (5/12)

Pull it

Ravines 2010 Dry Riesling (Finger Lakes) – Starts clean, finishes jumbled. Direct apple mainlining becomes feathery, a sense of minerals bound to acidity turns alternately puckery and sweet. It’s not bad, but it tastes of effort. (5/12)

Oh Tempier, oh mores!

Tempier 1998 Marc de Provence (Provence) – France is rife – one might legitimately say littered – with distillates that almost no one knows. Of all the European spirits that have been aggressively, relentlessly exported, the micro-marcs are so far down the queue that there’s little hope of ever seeing them out-of-region.

And thus, one must drink them in situ. Or at least in restaurant. I have, I admit, a bit of a fetish for asking after such spirits, but it’s all too often the case that the obvious liquids are so obvious to my interlocutor that they don’t arise in conversation. And when they do, it’s often in the negative: “oh, that’s…rough” as the declination goes. I was turned away from spirits like this very one countless times, in hotel and restaurant bars.

I don’t brag to say that I’m no ordinary drinker; I’ve learned to like the chaos of the private distillation, and I don’t discredit those who would, looking after my well-being, try to dissuade me for cogenerative reasons. But – barring the next-morning hangover from a poorly-distilled spirit – I just don’t mind the weirdness that often results. And so there’s cajoling, and sometimes a measure of begging, but eventually the spirit arises. So to speak.

At Tempier, where I acquire this particular example, the problem isn’t existence – there’s a bottle of this prominently displayed in their foyer – so much as saleability. Where’s the capsule? What’s the price? Can we sell it? Which “vintage”? And so forth. No importer’s last-second demands have caused as much frenetic trauma as my request for a bottle of this spirit, while chez Tempier.

And, so? It’s…majestic. As would, admittedly, be expected from Tempier. Gravels and sands, rocks and earthquakes, bronzed plums and ambered figs. It’s breathtakingly great. (5/12)

He said, she Cèdres

Jaboulet 1995 Châteaneuf-du-Pape “Les Cèdres” (Rhône) – As each of what was once a fair stock of Jaboulets leaves my cellar, I breathe a sigh of relief. They just aren’t my style, which is my dodgy way of saying that I simply can’t understand the praise lavished on the wines by ostensibly right-thinking people. That they’re hard and chronically abused by their structure is almost a given, but the tumescence of an Hermitage is one thing, while a similar lack of yield in a Châteauneuf-du-Pape is quite another. There are, here, liquefied black peppercorns and what might, once, have been a presence that once, long ago, glimpsed a black and white painting of a blackberry from a few blocks away. Otherwise, all is dust and solidity, now eroded and crumbling but still architecturally sound. It is not, I hasten to say, a bad wine, and there’s certainly intellectual interest. But my enjoyment has dried up only somewhat more slowly than the wines. (5/12)

Eh

Trimbach 1998 Riesling “Cuvée Frédérique Émile” (Alsace) – Not decanted. There’s some friendly disagreement about this wine; I think it’s still closed, another taster – also quite familiar with the wine – thinks it’s tiring. (It’s not, for the concerned, suffering from premature oxidation.) It’s true that it’s not showing much other than a milky mineralistic texture and a restrained yet tense structure, but the duration of its persistence without weakening is what convinces me that it’s intact and progressing properly. (5/12)

Chaume E the way to go home

Baumard 2002 Quarts de Chaume (Loire) – Powerfully sweet, like liquid chenin candy, but with extra quartzage. Developing? Only in the notional sense; while this is far from as sweet as QdC can get, experience suggests that the wines are essentially immortal, or at least so on any human scale. It’s very, very good. Do I care that it may have been made with cryoextraction? (To be fair, I don’t know if this vintage was or not.) Yes, and indeed my enjoyment is proportionally tempered. (5/12)

Herbal teamaker

Varnelli Amaro “l’Erborista” (Marches) – While there are fernet-like mint and dark green herbal notes here, this liqueur’s heavier foot remains in a more traditionally amaro-esque camp. Which is, frankly, a ridiculous thing to say given the remarkable variation between amari, and in actuality this still manages a certain straddle, bringing caramelized everything (except caramel) into the equation, de-sugaring it, and then tossing in a blizzard of naturalia. If I’ve a quibble, it’s that the result then seemed gauzed, as if there’s an extra level the liquid isn’t being allowed to reach. But in its wake is elegance, and that’s OK too. (5/12)