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March 2008
Holding on too long
I’ve been opening some old wines recently, thanks to a going-away reminder.
When chef and restaurateur Dave Dame decided on Bisbee, Ariz, as his new home, we marked his going by opening a three-liter bottle of Beringer’s 1997 Estate Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.
The bottle was part of a fortuitous purchase seven or so years ago when the winery offered the limited big bottles for what now amounts to pocket change for a big-name California cab.
Big bottles age more slowly than the normal .750 ml size and we were anticipating something just at its peak.
It started a bit restrained, not at all like it was on release but after 30 minutes or so the nose opened up and more of the dark fruit and a bit of mint started showing on the palate.
But we all agreed that this wine was at its peak, or maybe even a little beyond.
Except for some notable exceptions (a traditional Barolo, for example), there’s danger in holding a wine too long. People wait and wait for the perfect occasion, forgetting a wine, like life itself, goes on.
That caused me to look through the rest of the oldies in my cellar. They aren’t ancient, only a few as old as 12-15 years, but most of them weren’t made for long-term aging.
Some of them have shown their age, brick-red around the edges and flat tasting.
Others, however, have been brilliant, with still-bright fruit and soft tannins and a complexity only age can bring.
I’m glad I didn’t wait.
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Lodi isn’t Bordeaux, you know
I was wandering around the French wine section in a liquor store in Steamboat Springs last week when one of the clerks, I guess he was a clerk, anyway, broke my reverie by asking. “So, you interested in wines?” Given that I was perusing some recent Bordeaux and had a 2003 Chateau Le Grande Clotte in my hand, I wasn’t too offended that he guessed correctly.
But then he said, “We’re tasting some wines from Lodi in the tasting room, a couple merlots and chardonnays.”
Bad guess on his part. That’s why I was in among the French stuff, because I wasn’t interested in something from Lodi, especially merlots and chardonnays since the area, smooshed between San Francisco and the Sierra Nevadas, is better-known for its old-vine zinfandels.
But maybe the old-vine zins don’t have any trouble selling while the younger stuff, the merlots and cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays, don’t get the press or recognition.
Some of those older zinfandel vines date from before the turn of the century — the other century — and it’s likely the Italian immigrants in the Grand Valley were buying train cars of Lodi zinfandel grapes to make their own wines.
Out of politeness and curiousity I tasted the Lodi merlots and chardonnays and while there was nothing overtly wrong with them, there was the expected big fruit and the heavy toast — slash — vanilla overpowered the grape itself.
It was nothing like the Bordeaux I wanted, so I spit and left. I hope he wasn’t too disappointed.
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State ‘wine guy’ featured on CPR
Steve Menke, the state’s new enologist, will be featured today on Colorado Matters, the Colorado Public Radio show, at 7 p.m. You can access the show here or listen tomorrow to an archived broadcast here.
Menke, aka “the Wine Guy” as he puts it, is working out of Colorado State University’s Orchard Mesa Research Station alongside state viticulturist Horst Caspari. The two will assist growers and winemakers in growing not only better grapes but market share, as well.
Menke officially is a CSU employee (he has a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wyoming) as an associate professor of enology (the study of wines). He said in an CSU interview that he was attracted to Colorado “by the kinds of wines produced here.”
“There is an unquantified taste that accompanies high-altitude (wine grape) growing,” Menke said in that interview. “I would like to investigate the mature flavor of a grape here at high altitude.”
Is there yet a word specifically for high-altitude terroir? Whatever it may be, Menke is sure to have plenty of opportunity, since Colorado boasts some of the world’s highest vineyards.
Menke also was featured last month in an article in The Denver Business Journal, which can be read here.
His position is funded jointly by CSU, the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board and the Rocky Mountain Association of Vintners and Viticulturists.
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In praise of austerity
In the most recent issue of Wine Spectator magazine, columnist Matt Kramer reported that at a recent tasting one guest described a wine as austere, saying, “And that’s not a good word in my book.”
Perhaps, mused Kramer, today’s wines taste (and are made) the way they do because austere is considered a pejorative.
So what’s wrong with austere?
I’m not sure I want a wine that tries to convince me in the first 30 seconds. I want it to wait for the right questions instead of shrilly throwing out guesses like a game show contestant.
What I mean is wine shouldn’t deceive us.
Why can’t a wine be austere and still be drinkable and lovely? Why should the wine demand to speak first, yelling at us of its massive nature while still in the glass?
I prefer instead a wine that gives us time to consider its complexity with the same deliberation you would give a beautiful sunset or ponder a relationship that went an unexpected direction.
Alice Feiring, whose name you read here occasionally, wrote about Kramer’s column and asserted, “We like austere! It might mean that the wine is an approachable 13% alcohol, maybe it didn’t have its tannins erased and just maybe it is interesting instead of NyQuil-esque.”
And New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov wrote a fascinating article that appeared last January in the International Herald Tribune about tasting some Barolos he termed both austere and sensuous.
“Call it intellectual if you want, but to me few wines go for the gut like Barolo,” Asomov wrote.
At a recent dinner party, a friend suggested that an older wine would be good “once it opened up.”
Funny, I thought, the wine is open, showing a calculated reticence typical of its mid-90s vintage and 13-percent alcohol (a well-received California cabernet sauvignon sadly no longer available).
Its age was showing a bit but the fruit and tannins were balanced and there was the barest whisper of oak. It was austere, and very good.
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