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Type: Dry rosé
Made with: Syrah and Grenache
Plays well with: Seafood, salmon, chicken, pork, it’s rose – anything goes!
This rosé is so spectacular that you can’t help feeling a little smug when folks who supposedly “know” sneer that they don’t drink rosé. Good. More for us.
Bone dry, it’s made up of sixty percent syrah and forty percent grenache with a scant .02 percent residual sugar. You won’t taste even the slightest hint of sweetness.
The salmon color is typical of a rosé from the French region of Provence. The nose is full of guava and watermelon – promising fruit but not sweet. The resulting mouthfeel is dry – very dry. The fruit is there in the middle palate, along with good acids and a modest alcohol which we remember being in the twelve and a half percent range.
Food is the only way to serve this wine. We think that, while it is a good gulper, the addition of a seafood salad, light chicken or pork dish simply prepared or a risotto full of spring or summer vegetables completes the wine and makes for a lovely meal experience that the San Francisco Chronicle wine judges could only wish for.
So why are we posting tasting notes on a single wine? Because we really liked it!
It’s Wednesday night – our dedicated mid-week break. It’s a tradition we started when we had a junior member in the house (who has since graduated from college, gotten a job and her own place and calls us voluntarily, not that we’re bragging). We made up a simple beef semi-stroganoff – semi because Anne couldn’t quite remember the recipe for a full-on traditional stroganoff and was too tired to look it up. Add some brown rice noodles, steamed broccoli, a basic green salad with herb vinaigrette.
Yowza! Seriously, the wine was the perfect coda. The meal would have been good without it or a lesser wine. But with the Twisted Oak Grenache, the meal sang. It popped. It did everything a good meal should do. Which you need in the middle of a long, hard, busy week.
The garnet color led to the traditional strawberry nose with hints of vanilla, earth and blueberry. The taste had some spice and just enough fruitiness. The acids cut through the richness of the sour cream of the stroganoff beautifully and still maintained a fruit profile. Add a nice finish (or coda) and you have one tasty glass of wine on its own. With a good meal, well, that’s the whole reason we do this wine thing.
You can check out this and other Twisted Oak wines out at their website, twistedoak.com. Please note that we consider owner Jeff Stai a friend of ours. Whether he considers us friends, he’s just twisted enough…
We’ve always loved Open That Bottle Night (which happens the last Saturday of February). And we’ve always loved Kenneth Volk’s wine – in fact, he was one of the first wineries we featured. So it seemed only natural this past Saturday to pick one of Volk’s that we have been sitting on for a while – his 2005 Negrette.
Never heard of negrette? According to Jancis Robinson’s site (scroll down), negrette is a “speciality of Fronton near Toulouse producing supple, perfumed, wine for early to medium-term drinking.“
So what did we prepare on this special occasion? A Coq au Vin with a marinade made with a lesser brand of cabernet. We flambed it and the whole nine yards. So how was the wine?
We opened it an hour before serving and we’re glad we did. The wine was ruby in color and had a delicate nose of earth, blackberry and a touch of oak that was a seasoning instead of a mask. By the time we poured and sat down, the wine had opened beautifully into a work of art. The wine was more about texture – balanced and silky, not bad for 14.4 percent alcohol. The fruit was still there and there were hints of licorice and blueberry towards the end. The acids were perfect with food and the finish was long.
We had purchased the 2005 vintage from the tasting room several years ago. The 2007 vintage is available now and tastes good. We want to get another bottle or two for cellaring. It’s that good and worth the wait.
Oh, and the chicken was pretty tasty, too.
Oh, man. Wine bloggers all over seem to be having all kinds of fun over a February 13 tweet from wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr. The tweet reads, “lots of top wine merchants are heavily discounting once very expensive Aussie shirazs..out of fashion among the anti-flavor wine elites, 10:05 AM Feb 13th via web.” Seriously, that’s the cut and paste we did from Parker’s Twitter page, twitter.com/robertmparkerjr, although you do have to scroll down and hit “more” to find it by now. Or you can just click on the date link above.
We laughed our backsides off when we heard about it. Robert M. Parker calling someone else (with a sneer no less) elitist? Say, Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. You know, it costs $99 a year to subscribe to his website <erobertparker.com>? His main publication, The Wine Advocate, is $75 per year, and in his defense, you do get a lot of issues (something like 80). Nonetheless, it’s hardly what anybody would call accessible. And populist is about the last word that springs to mind when you think of Parker.
The big hoo-haw, of course, is that Parker is well-known for his preference for heavily fruit-forward wines. The anti-flavor part of his comments reflects the reality that subtler, more complex wines don’t tend to leap out of the glass the way he prefers. And a lot of folks love taking pot shots at him because he is incredibly influential.
What bothers us is his attitude that his taste is the only one that counts. If you don’t agree with him you are either anti-flavor or you don’t know anything about “good” wine. Feh. But on the other hand, we’re also bothered by people who like to shoot Parker down for his preference for strong, fruity wines. There’s far too much “my taste is better than your taste” elitism going on in the world of wine as it is.
It’s time to get over it. Seriously. There is a place in the world for fruit bombs – usually with barbecue or something spicy, such as Indian or Thai food. Or just to drink alone. In fact, that’s one of the reason we call such wines cocktail wines. They don’t generally go well with food, except for sweet and/or spicy, but they are quite nice for sipping on their own. But there is also a place for the subtler, more complex, rich-tasting wines that do go with food. There’s even a place for white zinfandel.
So, go ahead and share what you think about the whole issue? Do you think Parker’s influence is waning? Is it even an issue? The comment box is below.
A week or so ago, we noted that we’d lost a series of tasting notes. Talk about deep and profound annoyances! We were doing a fast clean up and things always turn missing when that happens. The good news is that we finally found the missing notes in a bag that had gotten kicked under a table.
So here are the tasting notes for the 2008 Consensio Sangiovese:
Type: Dry red
Made with: Sangiovese
Plays well with: Meat sauces, pizza, tomato dishes
It took a few minutes for the nose on the wine to happen. There was no fruit at first, then after a few minutes of exposure to the air, there was the fruit.And there was plenty of it in the mouth, too. But fortunately, it was offset by the tannins and acids, keeping the wine from being heavy or jammy as some sangioveses can be in California. And it was bone dry with no sweetness. It’s a good gulper on its own but if you want it at its best, have it with food, maybe that traditional bolognese (tomato meat) sauce on a big old heap of really long spaghetti. And you probably want to drink it young – meaning right now or in the next year or so. At least, we think so. Let us know whether you prefer younger or older reds and why.
Well, we’re back home and mostly recovered from checking out the 30-odd wineries present at the 2010 Paso Robles Rhone Rangers Experience, which happened this past Sunday.
It was a particularly good day for us. We caught up with some old friends, discovered a new-to-us boutique winery and that’s before we got to the event tasting!
The Rhone Rangers is a national education and advocacy group of about 200 wineries and other folks dedicated to educating the wine-buying public about wines made from the 22 varieties of grapes that come from France’s Rhone Valley. The principal grapes are syrah, grenache and mourvedre on the red side, with viognier, roussanne and marsanne on the white. The wine we Californians are producing do tend to heavier and fruitier than, say, a Chateauneuf du Pape (one of the major producing areas in the Rhone Valley, it’s pronounced shah-toe-nerf doo pop and means the Pope’s new castle).
But one of the things we’re getting excited about is that more and more wineries are working toward developing a food-friendly style that’s closer to the original French style. And we certainly saw that at Sunday’s event, put on by the Paso Robles chapter of the Rhone Rangers.
Imagine two rooms, with tables ringing the walls, and behind each table is someone from a winery pouring wine into your glass and trying to talk over the noise in the room and answer questions, while you’re trying to balance a wine glass, your notepad and pen, and… It’s a real blast.
We did get in on a press pass because these events are about selling wine and introducing people to some of the smaller wineries that are not as easily found on the magic maps. As for who we tasted, well, we’ll be posting those over the next few weeks. But if you want to check out the Rhone Rangers, click here for their website. And, no, we did not taste all the offerings, nor can we get to every event out there. Our livers would never forgive us.
Our friends at Twisted Oak Winery are at it again. They recently had their Take Your Rubber Chicken to Work Week competition. Fear not, you can still participate by voting for the finalists here, as long as you do it before Feb. 17
Alas, we couldn’t compete. As you can see, our rubber chicken Floyd misbehaved egregiously when he accompanied Michael to his day job with the City of Los Angeles Archives.
And, frankly, being in a position to give Twisted Oak publicity, it’s really not fair if we enter. Too bad. We love owner Jeff Stai’s wines and his decidedly twisted outlook.
 Hey, Indy, where is this supposed to go?
First up, we want to congratulate Shaun Frohn on his recent award in the 2010 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Frohn is the owner and head winemaker for Consensio Cellars, out of Ventura County. His 2008 Tempranillo picked up a Double Gold Award in this prestigious competition and his 2008 Sangiovese won a Silver.
Gotta say, we agree with the judges. Frohn’s making some very tasty stuff.
What’s also interesting is how he’s doing it – via Camarillo Custom Crush Winery. We’ve known CCC owner John Daume for years. His Home Wine, Beer and Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills, California, has been the sponsor and home of the Cellarmasters home winemaking club to which we belong. Daume’s CCC venture is for folks who want to make the leap into professional wine making, but don’t have the space, time, etc. to open a full-fledged winery. The label owners buy the grapes and supervise to varying degrees the custom crush winemakers, then can sell their wines under the custom crush’s licenses – because, let’s face it, the byzantine bureaucracy involved in selling anything alcoholic in this country could befuddle even the French.
Frohn not only has his Consensio label out of CCC, he’s one of the winemakers there – and one of the best, in our humble… okay, not so humble opinion. Anne thinks he’s a cutie, too. He’s just young and enthusiastic with a great sense of humor and a generous spirit. In fact, a couple years ago, we were at the CCC setting up the Cellarmasters annual wine competition, when Frohn offered us the ultimate melange of wines. It’s what he called a hose blend, all the bits and drips leftover from a recent bottling. It was amazing stuff, really. Yet another reason why we don’t get folks who insist single grape wines are the best.
So congrats, again, Shawn. Keep up the good work.
Some months back, Anne spotted a post on one of her LinkedIn groups – someone was looking for a distributor here in the U.S. for some wines from Sardinia - the island off the west coast of Italy and south of Corsica. It seemed like kind of a perfect OddBallGrape situation – there just isn’t that much Sardinian wine available outside of Sardinia. So we checked in and bought a couple bottles from Nuovi Poderi Cantina – at least, that’s the name on both bottles.
The first, Taja, was a vermentino, a white grape that has a small following here in California. The label on the red Oje read cannonau – which Michael found out was actually the Sardinian name for grenache. Which isn’t that unusual. Many of the grapes used in making wine have different names in different parts of the world. Cannonau is grenache is garnacha… you get the idea.
Unfortunately, the experiment was a greater success than we thought because we can’t find Mike’s tasting notes to save our lives. The Oje definitely had the rich fruitiness of the grenache, while the Taja vermentino had good acids. Both, like most European wines, are made to go with food. We did something with shrimp for Taja and a nice red meat sauce and pasta with the Oje.
Neither are currently available in the U.S. yet – at least, as far as we know they aren’t. Anne did find one restaurant that had some Sardinian wines buried on its massive wine list, and freaked the sommelier because she’d actually heard about wine from Sardinia. So why bother writing about them?
Well, wine is about the experience, after all. And one of the great joys of wine is finding something truly rare. The next time you find something really off the beaten path, go ahead and try it. Google the name of the grape on your mobile device. Better yet, come back here and post about it. It’s only wine – and when you think about it, how many bad movies have you coughed up $15 (including popcorn) for without fussing about it? And a bad movie also takes two hours out of your life. At least, you can usually return a bad bottle of wine. Definitely turns the risk factor way down, don’t you think?
Type: Dry White
Made: In Calaveras County, California, With viognier grapes Plays well with: seafood, salads, mild cheeses
The 2007 Viognier from Irish Family comes with the expected florals in the nose – honeysuckle in this case. A grape of the Rhone region wines in France, viognier has an instantly recognizable nose of flowers like honeysuckle or citrus like tangerine peel and also honeyed. A little blended into syrah contributes aromatics to a traditional red wine in the Rhone from France. Viognier is a handy grape to have around.
There is a flinty minerality as well that wasn’t covered by oak because there wasn’t any oak added. Steel fermentation and neutral barrels (barrels that have already given up all their oak flavors) allowed the flavors to concentrate. Crisp acidity gives a cleansing of the palate that plays well with seafood, salads and cheeses.
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