A wine with a taste of spring

It's springtime in the Rockies, no matter what the calendar says. Ski season began in December with a blast of snow across the state but the rest of this winter never lived up to the promise of last year when most ski resorts were reporting record snow falls. We spent Thursday skiing Telluride, where the weather was decidedly undecided on whether it was winter or spring. A little snow, a little sun, a little wind, more snow, more sun, more wind, etc.. The temperature never got warm enough to soften the snow but the coverage was great and the skiing equally so. All that means is the Ides of March have brought more snow to the mountains while white blossoms already have appeared on my apricot tree, which also means those blossoms are likely to be wiped out by a late frost. I'll be picking apricots from someone else's tree again this summer. That early advent of spring weather has us thinking of spring and summer wines and particularly Sauvignon Blancs. These easy to like whites wines have caught our late-winter fancy and when the Hostess and I stopped for dinner at Cazwella's in Montrose (the Web site is www.cazwellas.com but I can't get the link to work) on the way home from Telluride, we chose a Plum Creek Winery 2005 Colorado Sauvignon Blanc, with its bright citrus and hints of lemon, fig and melon and reasonably priced at $23 (about $11 retail). We've been sampling Sauvignon Blancs for a couple of weeks, starting with a 2008 Kim Crawford Marlborough Sauvingon Blanc the Hostess snapped up ($12.99) on a whim and a great whim it proved to be. This is a lush Sauvignon Blanc, with lots of citrus (mostly grapefruit with lemon and lime and what New Zealanders call gooseberry), high acidity and what I consider a pure version of a New Zealand-type Sauvignon Blanc. As a comparison, we opened a Casillero del Diablo 2008 Sauvignon Blanc from the Chilean winery Concha y Toro and imported by Banfi Vintners. The interesting story behind the name Casillero del Diablo, which means Cellar of the Devil, is explained on the Concha y Toro Web site. Their Sauvignon Blanc, however, needs little introduction. Crisp and clean, lots of lemon grass, melon and a bit of white peach, this affordable ($9) wine from Chile's Central Valley (the historic farming area south of Santiago between the Andes and the Coastal Range) was a delight to drink with a light dinner. Somehow Gracie Slick the black cat managed to hold still long enough to pose next to the bottle. There are some delightful Sauvignon Blancs coming out of California, where the wine sometimes is known as Fumé Blanc, a term invented in 1968 by Robert Mondavi when he introduced a dry version (dry for California, anyway) of Sauvignon Blanc. As the story goes, Mondavi's company borrowed Fumé Blanc from the French Loire wine Pouilly-Fumé (say pwee foo-may) which at the time was enjoying some success in the U.S. Mondavi never patented or copyrighted the name so it became an accepted identifier for American-made Sauvignon Blancs. We'll talk more about some French and California Sauvignon Blancs next time. More information on Sauvignon Blanc wines may be found here.