A solid if unspectacular expression of Bandol. This blend of 70% Mourvedre, Grenache, and Cinsault features compact but plentiful aromas of red plum, tobacco leaf, freshly turned earth, and nuances of chocolate and vanilla. But the background gamy note gives away its origin.
Bright early-appearing acidity and firm, peppery tannins give the wine a taut, sinewy presentation. A conspicuous seam of juicy, ripe fruit moves and stirs in its prison bound tightly by the persistent acidity and swelling tannins, which dampens the fruit expression.
The wine is medium bodied but its evolution has no volatility or hints and feints. Concise, confident but grim and resolute, it moves as a monolith, each element relentless but unchanging like a stalled looming seawall in a storm.
The medium length finish is hard but not grippy and cries out for roasted leg of lamb accompanied by some simple, blues-based rock from the Black Keys
This is one gorgeous wine from the lovely amber color with gold highlights to the olfactory orgy of red apple and apricot highlighted by orange zest, lavender, and juniper. But the irresistible, seamless beauty on the palate is the show stopper.
This is a skin-contact white wine with a rich but stunningly delicate palate. A refreshing tart thin top layer rests on a spacious yet weightless layer of minerality—transparent like spring water but ethereal, “the beauty of morning, silent and bare” to quote Wordsworth.
Refined, elegant tannins enter early, gently framing the thick yet diaphanous midsection. The wine executes a slow dance, the mineral layer passing from limpidity to stone to chalk as it is gradually enveloped and absorbed into the wine’s structure leaving a fragile wisp of fruit to persist through the long, sinuous finish.
Airy, delicate, and dreamy, this wine yearns for nothing. It is complete in itself.
I visited this winery when in Slovenia for a brief tour. It sits just across the border from Italy’s Friuli region. Simcic makes some of the most expressive wines I have tasted.
This wine needs the finest in dreampop for it’s accompaniment, Mohave 3’s Love Songs on the Radio.
Technical Notes: The grapes are macerated for 6 days in 3,000 liter conical oak barrels, the fermentation uses native yeasts. The spends 12 months on the lees in those barrels and then 6 months in 500 liter oak barrels.
Refosco is a lesser-known red grape in a predominately white wine region of Northeastern Italy. It’s another of Italy’s rustic reds with high acidity.Although I have had some good Refosco, this one is hard to love. But there is redemption
The nose is stinky—plum and rosemary but mostly barnyard. It’s not complex enough to be interesting. It just stinks.
On the palate, sour acidity squeezes the thin layer of red berry fruit. Yet, despite the high acidity, there is not much life. The wine just sits there, meager and forlorn, waiting for the slowly spreading tannins to give it some heft.
So where is the redemption?
You have to wait patiently while the other elements have their say, but gradually you come to see that this wine is about texture. The tannins are present early—thick and bristly like a coarse cushion they glide with rough hewn dignity refusing to grip or lash out. The tannins exude restraint.
Don’t get me wrong. There are no folds to nestle in and no liquid sorcery. It is rustic to its core, but there is something to be said for noble grit.
What little fruit power there is fades leaving a sour/bitter profile on the finish. With all its limitations, this is a one-trick pony, but noble grit it is a neat trick
The brittle, fuzzy guitars and layered vocals of Tom Petty’s Mary Jane’s Last Dance captured the texture of this wine.
A skin contact, natural white wine with a pretty amber hue, but that pretty hue is deceptive. This is very challenging wine. On the criteria of intensity and complexity it’s very good. But tongues of flaming acidity render the unsuspecting taster defenseless and debilitated.
The nose is complex and intense, yet anything but harmonious—an odd but intriguing marriage of orange peel and apricot with prominent dill pickle tempered by a bit of honey.
The palate attacks relentlessly. The fruit is bone dry and blocky, the rush of midpalate acidity, a high octane explosion of raw energy enveloping the fruit power early, with no middle ground between the brazenly tart high notes and the coarse, sandy texture of the tannins, a cut glass conversation-that continues through the long finish.
Every dimension of this wine is rough hewn yet its power and intensity are impressive. This is not for sipping. And not for the timid. The only way to tame this wine is with a plate of hummus with which it pairs quite nicely, the staunch acidity bringing out the fresh lemon notes of the mezze.
Aggressive and demonic, there is a gothic ornateness to this wine, gilded but hard edged, detached, and scornful. It pairs only with music with ecstatic, edgy high frequencies like Holly Herndon’s blend of human and machine voices on Alienation.
Technical Notes: From grapes grown in the Macedonian hillsides, macerated on the skins for three weeks, unfined, unfiltered, with no added sulfur. Roditis is a versatile grape and part of the blend used to make Retsina.
Score: 88 (Points for complexity and personality; demerits for lack of balance)
If you think you know what Sauvignon Blanc tastes like, think again. From one of the pioneers of creative winemaking, Abe Schooner was a philosophy professor before a bite from the wine bug persuaded him to put away the grade book.
This is an unusual flavor profile–tropical pineapple wrapped in menthol with dried apricot (I would guess from some creative use of oxidation)
On the palate, citrus notes emerge on a complex body. Up front the wine is round and full with a bit of sweetness but weightless and almost ethereal. It acquires viscosity just as the midpalate stiffens and develops this strange feeling of force becoming a sinewy animal seeing nature ferocious in it. As the minerality becomes penumbral it swallows the fruit power producing a micro-thin thread of minerality that insinuates a small jolt of electricity into every nook and cranny of this everlasting finish. Darting, oscillating, prickly, giving in to every niggling urge, is it soft or angular, smooth or rough? It’s all of those things.
Anguished, but rebellious and confrontational, grimly holding on to the light, a wine for our times and Radiohead’s 2 +2=5.
Technical Notes: From Sonoma Mountain grapes, cool maceration for 48 hours.
Replica made a big media splash when it launched in 2015. Their pitch was to take well-known, over-priced wines like Rombauer Chardonnay, Meiomi, or The Prisoner, and use sophisticated lab technology to determine the wine’s chemistry. That analysis get’s converted to traditional wine descriptors with the help of expert wine tasters. They then use generic wines made from a variety of vineyard sites, along with traditional blending and aging techniques, to replicate the target wine and sell it at a fraction of the cost. In theory, great wines can be reverse engineered.
So does it work?
Yes and no. Retrofit is supposed to be a knock-off of the Rombauer Carneros Chardonnay, one of the most popular premium Chardonnay’s on the market that sells for around $40. Rombauer is loved for its buttered popcorn aroma and lush, full bodied mouthfeel.
The Retrofit had a pleasant scent of tangerine with the butter prominent but not oppressive. The nose is quite showy, simple but loud and with good clarity.
In the mouth, it is full bodied, creamy with grapefruit hints, but not overly hefty. The obvious sweetness was balanced with crisp acidity. The wine is not merely smooth. Movement and variation is very slow to develop but at the back of the midpalate it compresses and then expands with a quick blast of sandy textures and a mineral halo that gradually becomes angular as it pushes through the finish ending on a bitter note.
Cheerful, ingratiating, and erotic, it’s everything you want in a date when you’re 19, except the bitter finish.
To enjoy this wine you have to like the style—sweet, buttery, and bombastic. But within that style it’s a well made wine—quite entertaining. However, it isn’t Rombauer. It is not as complex on the nose. Neither is it quite as plump, juicy, or “smooth”, as the general public likes to say. But it’s a good facsimile. In the $15-$20 price range, if you’re a fan of Rombauer but short of cash it’s a good choice. Especially paired with Steely Dan’s Hey 19.
As to the future of knock-off wine, talk to me when you’ve got a 2005 La Tâche for $50.
Refosco is family of grapes indigenous to Northeastern Italy and Slovenia. Refosco dal Peduncolo (which means Refosco with the red stems) is the most highly regarded of the family making intensely earthy wines with high acidity.
The enticing Scarbolo has great depth with many aromatic worlds to explore. Blackberry, wet leaves and twigs, white pepper, and cigar box starting to show from the age, shade off into a background of hints and feints, suggestions of subterranean incense that never shows itself.
In the mouth, soft plum with coffee and dark spice sets the tone, turning sinewy and moving slowly but inexorably toward the upper register with refined tannins filling in a dense but quiet background. Those top layers of acidity and minerality persist through the finish becoming increasingly dominant as the wine grows lean despite the rich fruit.
Feral and grim, quietly macabre, with spooky, high theatrics, a good match for Radiohead’s Paranoid Android.
Technical Notes: Aged in French oak barrels of varying sizes for 2 years.
It seems each time I sample a dry Muscat I remind myself I should drink more dry Muscat. There are few varietals more aromatically expressive although it can get a bit too perfumed at times. Muscat is actually a family of grapes, with many varieties, and is usually made into a sweeter wine, some lovely, some insipid. So it’s often overlooked as a dry wine.
If you’re going to drink dry Muscat, no one does it better than the Alsatians and the iconic Zind Humbrecht.
The palate is rich and concentrated with the characteristic “grapey” flavor highlighted by lemon. It’s rose on the nose with a focused scent of ripe apricot.
The wine’s journey in the mouth sets it apart. A round, rich greeting of ample fruit features a contrasting top layer of stony minerality, but this lush ensemble is slowly disrupted by textured dry extract creeping under the floorboards like a hungry cat. The result is an active but elegant oscillation between layers that keeps you entertained through the long, crenulated, finish which takes a fetching delicate but slightly bitter turn at the end.
Amiable but with plenty of brio punctuated with periods of passion, grace, and delicacy, Dreams by the Cranberries makes it resonate.
Technical Notes: from mostly Muscat a petite grains harvested from the Herrenweg vineyard on the valley floor, planted in the 1950’s
White Bordeaux seems like an afterthought in the wine world since it hails from a region better known for its reds. It lacks the popularity of Chardonnay or the cachet Riesling enjoys among professionals. But the blending of Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon (with occasionally a touch of Muscadelle) is a righteous match. The Semillon gives the wine weight and warmth, properties that Sauvignon Blanc usually lacks. And they sell most of them for a reasonable price.
A faint scent of fresh asparagus blended with lemon scent and white flowers makes an attractive fragrance, simple but unusual enough to hold your attention.
Up front the wine quickly launches a crisp crescendo of swelling acidity but emerging midpalate creaminess reigns it in giving the wine shape and tension. Scintillating, bristly textures from ample dry extract begets a mild tremor in the joints, an unexpected frisson from an everyday wine. The fruit power fades too quickly so the finish is tart and thin, but this is a modest yet thoroughly pleasing summer drink. Great value.
Understated, warm-hearted but a bit naughty, shyly sensual. Which pairs perfectly with the shyly sensual Wonder by Natalie Merchant.
Notes: Petite Sirène is made by the winemaking team at the highly regarded Chateau Giscours. The blend is 60% Sauvignon Blanc, 40% Semillon
In the dogged pursuit of science, I picked up this bottle to test Zinfandel’s long standing reputation as a wine ideal for serving with barbecue—in this case Kansas City style Burnt Ends. It’s reputation survives intact.
This is an ordinary, uninspiring wine but it has three characteristics that make it a match for barbecue sauce—a mouthful of peppery spice, scintillating acidity, and high alcohol which oddly enough the brain seems to interpret as sweet.
Abundant aromas of ripe strawberry, cinnamon, cardamom, and lots of pepper are appealing although marred by a bit of heat from the alcohol.
In the mouth it’s medium bodied, smooth, and polished with the slick sheen of sweet alcohol. Ample acidity makes the wine feel buoyant but it isn’t dynamic and the fruit power fades too soon on the finish. The tannins are peppery but shy and the finish closes with an odd sour candy note.
But the wine comes alive with food. The sweet alcohol and sharp acidity gave it the intensity to stand up to the sweet, spicy, hot, vinegary barbecue sauce. It was thoroughly enjoyable with the meal which is all you can ask from a $13 wine.
It presents as slick, stylish, and detached but the top note intensity resonates with the falsetto voices in the slick, stylish but detached Electric Feel by MGMT.
A solid if unspectacular expression of Bandol. This blend of 70% Mourvedre, Grenache, and Cinsault features compact but plentiful aromas of red plum, tobacco leaf, freshly turned earth, and nuances of chocolate and vanilla. But the background gamy note gives away its origin.
