Try this Wine

Try this Wine: Skin Contact Wine

Amber wine in the making at G.Wine in the Republic of Georgia

“Skin contact wine” is all the rage these days, owing in part the significant fan base overlap it shares with “natural wine,” and the coinciding of both “movements” with a wider industry return to winemaking basics motivated by a consumer base that is socially repulsed by the engineering of food and beverage.

Wow, what a sentence, right? It’s like I’m writing a social justice doctoral dissertation on both the past and the present. Though this is no dissertation and I’m not your most fervent social justice warrior, I do hold these judgments. As I’ve said in multiple posts, good wine is good wine regardless of how it is made, and it can be made many different ways. To construct protections for wine based on winemaking approaches is to create artificial borders between wine that is deemed good or bad, real or fake or manipulated. The distinction would be silly if it didn’t have impacts on people’s livelihoods.

Though I love many skin contact wines, the category is regrettably a major driver of this nonsense. The problem starts, as can easily be the case in wine, semantically, but it quickly (d)evolves into an issue of substance. The term “skin contact” refers to wine made by letting the skins and the juice spend time together during fermentation. However, rather than being something new, it is actually a process known as maceration that has been around for as long as wine has been made; it is nothing novel. If we must label skin contact wines in a distinctive way, we can more easily refer to them as “macerated wines,” which make more sense because the term has been around for much longer, is well-defined and more descriptive.

One reason we don’t call them macerated wines is because baked into the term “skin contact wine” is the understanding that the grapes are of a white variety. Though that distinction is often left out because it is used by people in the know, it remains necessary because many people are not in the know and leaving them behind is classic wine douchebaggery.

Though semantic, precision in wine language matters a great deal. I often cannot help myself by responding to people who tell me they like skin contact wine by asking them if they prefer cabernet sauvignon to merlot. Wine gets a bad reputation for being precise in ways people do not comprehend and thus reject, but wine lovers do ourselves an injustice when we are not specific enough. More responsible wine professionals make sure they use the full term, “skin contact white wine,” or some of its acceptable alternatives like “orange” or amber” wine, which reference the color of the final product, or “Ramato” if referring to a skin contact pinot grigio made in the historical winemaking style of Fruili, Italy. Though it often does not, this category of responsible wine pro needs to include the 28-year-old clerk at your favorite hipster wine shop, and the twat bar tender at your favorite hipster wine bar.

In this spirit, I want to suggest some macerated wines for Good Vitis’ readers to try. I should first acknowledge the huge oversight that is the exclusion from the list of an amber wine from the Republic of Georgia, the most famous skin contact white wine-making country these days, and likely the original source of the style. Avid Good Vitis readers will know that I am a huge fan of that country and its wine, and everyone should know that the absence of a Georgian amber wine from this list has everything to do with not having any handy. Nevertheless, the wines listed below are all great wines worth the effort of sourcing, and have the power of demonstration of the points made above. Try these wines because they’re good, fun, and will help you better understand and more accurately describe “skin contact wine.”

Traditional Skin Contact White Wine #1 : 2017 Yangarra Estate Roux Beaute Roussanne

How to refer to it: Skin contact or macerated white wine, or skin contact or macerated roussane.

Yangarra is a historic estate in Australia’s McLaren Vale wine region focused on producing Rhone varieties off its single estate vineyard, which was first planted in 1946. In 2001, the estate was purchased by Jackson Family Estates. A year prior, it took on then-new winemaker Peter Fraser. I got to meet Peter in 2019 and try a new series of high end Yangarra wines, this one among them, that use techniques different from the rest of the winery’s lineup.

Half of the grapes for the 2017 Roux Beaute Roussanne go through 193 days of maceration (skin contact) in large ceramic eggs, which allows more oxygen to interact with the wine than the traditional stainless steel fermentation vessel used for most white wine. The remaining 50% of the grapes went through fermentation in ceramic egg, though without skin contact. This approach, combined with the use of wild yeast, gives the wine more structural layers than it would otherwise have, and adds flavors and aromas impossible without maceration. Tasting note:

A slightly musty aroma gives way to peach, apple cider, nectarine, petrol and something I can only describe as “dank.” Though medium in body, it floods the mouth with juicy acid and ripe skin tannin, forming a glycerin sensation. Flavors include white peach, apricot, sour tangerine, orchid, white pepper and dandelion. 92 points: Value: C-.

Traditional Skin Contact White Wine #2: 2018 Two Vintners O.G.

How to refer to it: Skin contact or macerated white wine, skin contact or macerated gewürztraminer.

Two Vintners is a small producer in Washington State owned by winemaker Morgan Lee. Morgan makes wine for a number of labels, and his combined experience covers what I imagine is essentially the entire state’s geography and varietal offering. He is one of my favorite winemakers because his wine is exceptional, the prices overly competitive, he has a ton of fun doing it and his product is entirely bank-able; I don’t need to try his wine to know I’m safe buying it.

An early example of his fun-loving spirit was the creation of the O.G., a macerated gewürztraminer sourced from the Yakima Valley’s esteemed Olson Vineyard and named in a double reference to Orange Gewürztraminer and the Original Gangster. I believe the first vintage was 2012, which puts it on the cutting edge of this more recent skin contact trend. This 2018 vintage spent 55 days on its skins and was then aged in neutral barrel for 9 months. Tasting note:

The nose wafts a beautiful set of aromas including honeysuckle, orange blossom, orchid, gooseberry and raw cranberry. It is medium in weight on the palate with crispy acid and a smooth mouthfeel. The skin contact adds weight to an already structurally complex wine, while simultaneously bolstering the delicacy and florality of a profile that includes a slightly sweet and slightly salty combination of orange peel, vanilla, nectarine, red plum and gooseberry. This is yummy stuff. Give it an hour decant to help it blow off a slightly bitter edge. 92 points. Value: A.

Wouldn’t Have Put This In the Skin Contact Category Wine: 2019 L’Ecole No. 41 Alder Ridge Vineyard Rosé of Grenache

How to refer to it: rosé

Yes, rosé is skin contact wine. See why I think the moniker is silly? Rosé is what would be a full-blown red wine if the maceration lasted longer. That said, the best rosé starts in the vineyard where the grapes are treated differently than if it were intended for red wine to emphasize bright acid, lighter colored fruit and floral notes. This is intentional rosé. After thought rosé is made with grapes harvested for red wine, but for some reason are made into rosé. That route often produces flabby, out of balance wine that’s big in body and light in acid, which is exactly the opposite of what makes a good rosé. Either way, though, rosé is macerated wine.

L’Ecole No. 41 is one of Washington State’s original modern wineries and remains one of the industry’s standards today. This 2019 rosé is made from grenache harvested from the Alder Ridge Vineyard in the heart of the Horse Heaven Hills AVA, which gives it great pedigree. Alder Ridge is among the very best grenache sites in the state, its fruit finding its way into wines from other esteemed producers like Gramercy Cellars. This newly released 2019 is both substantive and refreshing, and a great one to stock up on for the coming summer. Tasting note:

Pours a beautiful light pink hew. Aromas waft from the glass, featuring strawberry, rose hip, watermelon, guava and lime sorbet. It’s medium bodied for a rosé and coats the mouth with juicy acid and a fair amount of weight. Sweet cherry and strawberry come through immediately, followed by hits of chili flake spice, tangerine and yellow peach. It’s an interesting and entertaining profile that offers a significant presence. 92 points. Value: A.

The Standard Skin Contact Wine: 2017 Flora Springs Trilogy

The Trilogy is Flora Springs’ top of the line red wine blend, comprised in this vintage of 80% cabernet sauvignon, 17% petit verdot and 3% malbec. It is, by definition, a macerated, or skin contact, wine. In fact, it represents the standard macerated wine: red wine. Unless one says “skin contact white wine,” they can be reasonably assumed to mean the Flora Springs Trilogy.

And what a macerated wine it is. Flora Springs was founded in 1978, but its Napa Valley property was first planted with vineyards in the late 1800s so the terroir is for real (it has been replanted since). I’ve had several vintages of the Trilogy and they all deliver. Although it sells for not-so-cheap $85, it is reasonably priced within the context of its pedigree and competitors, and a good examples of a refined and elegant Napa red blend. Tasting note:

The potent nose offers scorched earth and graphite-infused blackberry, black plum, violet, kirsch and dark chocolate ganache. It is full bodied, balancing lush, smooth and broad tannin with juicy acidity. The balance is really on-point. Flavors include blackberry, coconut, (real) maraschino sauce, black pepper, teriyaki sauce and cigar tobacco. It has a strong core of wet earth minerality. This is nice now with an hour decant, but I imagine it’ll start hitting its stride in five years and drink nicely for the following five to ten. 93 points. Value: B.

The Reverse Skin Contact Wine: 2018 Maggy Hawk Emeades Vineyard White Pinot Noir

How to refer to it: white pinot noir, or non-skin contact red wine

This is a contrarian wine, the rare example of a wine made from red grapes that escapes maceration. This is pinot noir that comes out of the bottle looking like a completely white wine. Is your mind not blown? If it’s not, a smell and sip will surely get the job done. But like our macerated Flora Springs, let’s not get carried away with this one’s revelatory power: much of the best Champagne in the world includes or is made entirely from pinot noir and/or pinot meunier, but pours white as well. The absurdity of skin contact being considered something new or different continues to grow.

Maggy Hawk’s winemaker is Tony Rynders, whose distinguished career includes Oregon’s Domaine Serene, a winery that sued him after he left alleging he stole the trade secret of making white pinot noir. See supra regarding Champagne to get a sense of the absurdity of the lawsuit. Tony has consulted for Zena Crown, also in Oregon, which is one of Good Vitis’ favorite Willamette Valley wineries. And, he is the owner and winemaker of Tendril Cellars where he makes a white pinot noir as well. I’ve had what I believe to be all of Tony’s white pinot noirs, and they are my favorite wines he produces.

Perhaps counterintuitively, what makes white pinot noir fun is what can make any skin contact white wine fun: a grape you know presented completely differently from what you know. The 2018 Maggy Hawk does exactly that in a very appealing package. Tasting note:

The nose offers plush fruit-forward aromas of cherry juice, guava, passion fruit, slate, orange zest and white pepper. Full bodied with round, juicy acid that creates significant structure and weight, it offers flavors of cherry, pineapple, mango, sea mist and loads of sweet tangerine juice and donut peach. This unusual and high quality wine is very enjoyable and almost too easy to drink; drink too quickly and you’ll miss some of its depth. 93 points. Value: A.

Try this Wine: Killer $22 Pinot

It took real persistence to get this piece written. Not by me, but by Jesse Inman, who is one half of the sibling pair behind Lucky Rock Wine Company. First, he sent me their sauvignon blanc in July 2019, then their pinot noir a few months later. Except, it didn’t arrive, so he had to send another bottle. Then he had to pester me for, like, three months to get the interview scheduled. Finally, nine months after making first contact, we spoke. And the thing is, it’s not like the wine sucked and I didn’t know how to say “no.” I wrote this because, as the title of the post suggests, I want people to try this wine. It’s really good.

I’m neither a true snob nor judgment-free when it comes to wine, but somewhere between depending on the day. I’ll admit to huffing and puffing every time I see someone on Bachelor hold their wine glass by the bulb, yelling “BY THE STEM” at the television while my wife, who for the record agrees, rolls her eyes. And I’m often guilty of talking more about a wine that we’re sharing with friends that they care to hear, sometimes going on diatribes laced with nitpicks of the obviously wrong decision to do malo or the overly-judicious use of new oak on such a delicate grape.

That said, I also get great joy out of making the case against top of the line Bordeaux because the value proposition is garbage. And for the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around the people who rave about some of the most lofted California cult wines, which from my experience offer underwhelming sophistication and are often wildly out of balance (which is okay because they’re built in a way that the balance only gets worse with time).

I’m skipping ahead a bit in the interview with Jesse, but he peppered it with a two lines that explain the above paragraphs:

“Take your ascot off and drink our wine.”

“We’re hoping that [our] quality is good enough that people [who usually pay more] are willing to drink down to it price-wise, but also [people who don’t normally pay our price] drink up to it because it’s so good that it justifies them spending a bit more than usual.”

If the suspense is killing you, here it is: Lucky Rock pinot noir retails for $22, but to my palate it’s better than a lot of $30 and $40 pinots I’ve had. More on the wine later.

Lucky Rock is not trying to be your typical winery. Their Instagram profile describes themselves as “Wine, Tattoo, Food Truck,” and is filled with pictures of tattoos, their pick-axe (say it fast and it sounds like “kick ass”) logo and dudes in beards and trucker hats having fun. One post, featuring a (relatively) close up of the chest of a heavily tattooed woman wearing a Lucky Rock tank top, uses the line “Look! We’re a lifestyle brand that actually knows how to make wine?”

“Our whole model is no pretension and good wine at a good price,” Jesse told me. I’m in the middle of a book on the history of Ralph Lauren, the man and the company. Lauren has been very clear that he is not a fashion designer nor is he selling fashion. Rather, he explains, his clothes are about style within the context of a lifestyle that he wants the people who wear his clothes to experience. I had asked Jesse about their lifestyle approach because in the same way that Ralph Lauren ads are as much about the non-clothing elements of the visuals and language used, Lucky Rock seemed to be about a lifestyle package that includes wine as one of the many elements.

“You can’t just rely on brand [to make it in wine],” Jesse said. “Obviously we make wine, but the tattoo part [of the brand ID] is a parallel for modernizing the wine business. We cuss a lot, we’re covered in tattoos, we joke around, and that’s unusual for quality wine. My brother and I figured that if we’re going to put this amount of effort into it then we have to have fun and be authentic about who we are.”

“The food truck,” he continued, referencing the Instagram profile description, “is that great wine and food go together. But just because you’re eating great food doesn’t mean that you need a white table cloth. [There is a] correlation between food truck and Lucky Rock – French Laundry and Bond are synonymous the same way. We’re not trying to kid ourselves, we’re not Bond, not trying to be that, nor do you want to be. But we know that our wine goes with great food regardless of where the food comes from. There is really fantastic food coming out of trucks, just like we’re trying to make really fantastic wine that comes to you in an unpretentious way.”

I’ll be completely open about my own experience with Lucky Rock. I’d never heard of it until Jesse contacted me, and after looking at the website and Instagram I set myself up for disappointment. The sauvignon blanc was solid, maybe even good, but the pinot noir blew me away. The reality is that Lucky Rock is a legitimate winery that punches above its price point.

They’re able to do that because they take advantage of economies of scale built into their business model. They make a lot of wine for other brands, much of which comes from really good vineyards that are strategically chosen based on their ability to deliver high quality grapes at less than high-end Napa prices. Of the annual haul, a small amount is taken to produce Lucky Rock. By pooling the collective tonnage needs, they’re able to get grapes that a stand-alone winery could not afford to sell at $22 per bottle. Put another way, if they were buying these grapes just for Lucky Rock, the price point would be significantly higher.

Starting from the goal of making a very reasonably priced wine, a few other elements of the business plan are critical to success. They are about 60% wholesale having made the conscious choice to prioritize that over being direct-to-consumer, which lowers overhead. They have to be high volume, as well, because they are low margin. “We want to be different,” Jesse explained, “if we ever opened a traditional tasting room we’d be letting ourselves down. If anything, we might open a tap room featuring different wines and beers to pour alongside our stuff.”

It is also critical to making a high quality $22 pinot that they actually know what they’re doing. Jesse cut his teeth making high quality, more expensive wine at August Briggs Winery, where he got his start thanks to a close family connection and where he continues to make the wine today. While the Lucky Rock lifestyle is more warehouse than Napa Valley, the winemaking is as advanced as those who sell the high society lifestyle. Jesse has been making pinot noir “for my entire winemaking life. We’re taking the high end mentality and finding vineyards where we can apply that approach without going as expensive.”

Jesse and I talked tannins for a solid ten minutes because one of the more impressive aspects of the 2018 pinot was the quality and elegance of the structure. Often times, pinot under $30 falls flat and thin, but not Lucky Rock. He takes tannin structure seriously and has been trying various trade craft over the last several vintages to build a consistent profile. Close relationships with fruit growers, careful use of highly selective tannin additives and lots of experimentation with various barrel cooperages and treatments has led to three consecutive vintages now of positive refinement of the tannin structure. It sounds like he’s getting to a place where achieving consistency will keep the wine at a great place.

Here’s the thing: Lucky Rock’s lifestyle isn’t for everyone, though I do imagine that it is a major factor behind the label’s success thus far. What is for a wider audience, though, is the wine. Lucky Rock’s desire to capture customers based on the quality, whether it’s more or less expensive than you normally pay, delivers in the glass. Even if you aren’t into tattoos, food trucks or trucker hats, even if the label is a bit too aggressive for you, you need to try the wine because, and I feel confident saying this, you won’t find a better pinot noir for the price. And if you dig their vibe, all the better. Dive right in.

Here’s the tasting note on the 2018, which is currently for sale: The nose-filling aromas are dominated by bright cherry and raspberry, but also include subtle tar, rose petal and baking spice. The body is medium plus in weight with fine grained tannin and modest but well-integrated acid. This could age for another 1-2 years and do nicely, but it’s gulpable at the moment. Cherry and raspberry pop on the palate as well, and are bolstered by blood orange, lilac and something spicy. This punches well above its price point. 92 points. Value: A+.

Where to purchase:

Right now, help the brothers out and order direct. They’re offering a temporary COVID-inspired discount: 15% off 6 bottles with $6 shipping and 20% off 12 bottles with $12 shipping. Discount codes can be found here. They ship to a good chunk of the country.

If you’d rather find it locally, they have a retail finder here.

Try this Wine: 2015 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon

Welcome to 2020! Our first Try this Wine piece, posted back on July 1, 2018, featured one of our favorite white wines here at Good Vitis, Smith-Madrone’s Napa Valley riesling, which is produced entirely from the winery’s estate vineyards on Spring Mountain. Today, we’re writing about the winery’s 2015 estate cabernet sauvignon. Clearly, we have a bit of a fixation with the winery, and we think it’s for good reason; the wine is excellent and excellently priced.

Stu Smith, one of the three Smith family men working the property and making the wine, has many opinions. One of them is that riesling is a great grape for making wine. Another is that what he and other like-minded producers call “mountain wine” is superior to other wine. By “mountain wine,” Stu means wine made from grapes grown on mountain slopes.

The steeper slopes, elevation and orientation of mountain side vineyards offer particular perks that vineyards planted on flatter ground do not. I’ve written about this before in a piece on merlot. In brief, you get better drainage and more radiant energy than flat land vineyards, which drives flavor concentration and skin development while aiding ripening. While that’s too brief to do the argument justice, it’s not really the point of this post, and, plus, the proof is in the bottle. It’s one reason why you should try this wine; tasting is believing.

Smith-Madrone estate vines and the incredible views of Napa Valley from Spring Mountain

Smith-Madrone cabernet sauvignon is priced around $45-65 depending on where you find it, which means for the quality it’s an absolute steal in the Napa cabernet category. I’ve not had another Napa cabernet as good for less than $75, while many of the $100+ bottles don’t match its complexity or elegance.

I’ve been a fan of the 2014 vintage of the cabernet, which is still available on shelves. I tasted the 2015 for the first time about two weeks ago and was blown away. I reached out to Stu to talk about it briefly, and he described the 2015 as “a clean, pure expression of mountain cabernet.” I found it to be a substantive wine layered with complexity, but far from heavy or thick. The tannins are ever-present but refined and encourage the flavors rather than extinguish them, a productive feature not found in abundance in Napa. It offers immediate appeal with several hours of decanting and is really impressive on the second night.

This experience with the 2015 is a bit different from the 2014, which as Stu wanted to point out highlights the purpose of Smith-Madrone’s approach to making wine. “2014 was a relatively big vintage. 2015 was on the smaller side. Alcohol is on the low end, and it has good acidity and bright cabernet fruit. 2014 is a bit more lush, fuller, richer. They’re two different styles of wine, and in some ways they show together what we’re trying to do, which is to get the vintage into the glass of wine and not pound a round peg into a square hole. The reason we vintage date [our wines] is to celebrate the diversity of the vintage. It’s a real value to the consumer.”

I gave the 2014 vintage 92 points, which ain’t bad. The 2015, though, well:

Decanted this for an hour and as it revealed itself, it became the best vintage of this wine that I’ve had. The nose is a mountain slope of dark sweet cherry and strawberry, wet barky soil, Herbes de Provence, licorice, molasses, black olive and smoke. It is medium plus in weight with elegant and refined tannin and acute acid that combine to form a traditional Old World style structure. The flavors are layered and extended aging will reveal them all. Right now they include salty cherry, strawberry, plum and rhubarb fruit that cohabitate nicely with olive tapenade, black pepper, rose water and graphite. I’d sit on this for at least another five years and then enjoy through 2030. 94 points. Value: A.

This is a wine to try because of the quality, value and intrigue it offers as an elegant, Old World-style wine with a mountain slope twist that drinks well now and will drink well into the future.

Where to purchase:

You can buy direct from Smith-Madrone, where it is being sold for $52, and also from:

K&L Wine Merchants (online and around California)

Rye Brook Wine & Spirits (online and in Rye Brook, New York)

Wine.com (online)

Woods Wholesale Wine (online and in Grosse Point, Michigan)

Try this Wine: Contrasting Food & Wine Pairings

Pairing wine and food can be daunting, even for the well-trained. The most famous guidance, to match red wine with meat and white wine with seafood, actually turns out to be relatively true in theory but also misguided in reality. It’s too unscientific to be universal, and misses the critical factor that how something is seasoned and cooked is as, if not more, important than what it is before it’s cooked.

One of my favorite pairings is steak au poivre with a really well-aged dry or semi-dry riesling, which is a perfect example of why that famous guidance is misleading. In general, wine should be more acidic than the food. This is especially true when the food is fatty, like this steak example, because the acid helps our taste buds and digestion process the fat, allowing more flavors to be detectable while making the meal go down a bit easier. Also, white wine tends to provide more contrast to the food, any food, than does red wine, so if you want the wine to stand up to, and stand out from, the heavy steak, a white is better suited to do that.

This last point on contrasting versus complementary wine and food pairings is really the main point of this post. When people think about pairing food and wine, they often default to finding the complementary pairing. Not only is it easier, but it’s more natural – we tend to look for compatibility in nearly every aspect of life – and can be very satisfying if achieved.

However, what I want to suggest in this post is that successful contrasting wine and food pairings can be both more fun and more satisfying. Here is another example: there’s nothing better than a fried fish sandwich with a good bottle of trousseau to wash it down.

Source: someecards.com

Pre-planned pairings aside, sometimes you get lucky and stumble on a good pairing. One of my wife’s favorite games to play is getting through dinner and a glass of wine, and then asking if she can have (insert random snack) with another glass. It can drive me crazy, especially when it’s a special bottle of wine and she asks about a poorly fitting snack.

Earlier this week, I opened a bottle of 2015 Wind Gap Gap’s Crown chardonnay, a nice bottle from a now non-operational winery using grapes from a phenomenal vineyard. I had made a big salad topped with sautéed radishes, roasted acorn squash, tomatoes, apples and shrimp. The wine was a bit too acidic and lean for the salad, so the plan became to enjoy the wine after the meal was over.

When we finished the salad, Kayce began her game. She asked if the wine would go with Goldfish crackers. My instincts kicked in and I nearly defaulted to “no,” but I hesitated as I thought about it. “You know what, that might actually work.” She grabbed the Goldfish, and oh man, it was awesome. We had stumbled on to brilliance.

Let me show you what I mean by comparing the tasting notes of the wine pre and post Goldfish. Here’s a note on the aromas, which don’t change with the food, just to get it out of the way: a high-toned and slightly austere bouquet combining sharp lemon and lime zests, slate and crushed gravel, spring flower petals and honeysuckle.

Pre-Goldfish palate: barely medium-bodied with very crisp, slightly juicy acid that is quite long and precisely linear. Flavors include Meyer lemon, tangerine juice, slate minerality, Kaffir lime leaf and starfruit.

Now, here is the post-Goldfish palate: medium-plus in body with rounder, softer and buoyant acid that cuts through the cheese flavor nicely. The palate broadens, adding just a bit of sweetness and more acidic grip to the texture. It’s a more pleasant version of itself with the Goldfish pairing, and more enjoyable to drink.

I had so much fun with the pairing that I posted the above picture of the bottle with the Goldfish on Instagram and had a back-and-forth with friend and fellow wine blogger Isaac Baker of Terroirist.com. Isaac has done this kind of pairing before, and added that Goldfish go particularly well with Champagne. I’m curious to try that combination, and experiment with other cheesy crackers and bright white wines.

These unexpected wine-food combos that work because they contrast each other, rather than complement each other, are really satisfying because they are surprising and don’t hew to normal comfort zones. Try some contrasting wine-food pairings because no one should live their culinary lives according to what they already know. To provide some motivation, here are a few good places to start:

A sharp chardonnay with a cheesy cracker – look for wines that are lightly oaked or made in stainless or concrete. Quality producers in go-to regions make this easy. You can find these wines really anywhere in the world, but for short cuts check out Chablis, Oregon and the following spots in California: Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Sonoma.

Fried fish sandwich with trousseau – there isn’t a lot of trousseau out there, but from my experience those who make it do it in the traditional fashion (i.e. light to medium bodied with good acid and fine tannin), which is what you want for this. We had a 2017 Arnot-Roberts trousseau from the North Coast of California with our fried fish sandwiches last weekend, and the duo brought the house down with my in-laws. Traditionally most trousseau comes from the Jura region in France, but there are good producers of it elsewhere. For the record, we make our fried fish sandwiches with lightly breaded and pan-fried white fish (catfish, porgy and cod all work well), processed cheese, Portuguese rolls and a sauce made in equal parts of ketchup, whole grain mustard and mayonnaise. Don’t dare use real cheese, I promise you it isn’t nearly as good.

Fried chicken and Champagne (or other acidic sparkling wine) – this is one of those under-the-radar classic food pairings. The acid and bubbles cut through the fattiness and crispiness of the chicken beautifully and can help you put down that last drumstick you wouldn’t otherwise consider a smart move. The beauty of this pairing is you can be flexible with the chicken and the wine. For the chicken, even the KFCs and Bojangles deliver in very real ways. For the wine, you need good acid and bubbles. You can’t go wrong with Champagne, but Cremants from Burgundy, Loire and Jura work beautifully as well, as do some of the better sparkling wines made elsewhere.

Steak au Poivre and an aged dry or semi-dry riesling – this isn’t easy to pull off, but if done right the fattiness and pepper of the steak goes just perfectly with the acid and nuttiness of an aged riesling. For this, quality matters because cheap beef tastes bad and cheap riesling can’t reach the point of maturation needed. The cut of beef matters less than the quality and preparation, but for my money I go with hanger steak. On the wine side, go for trusted producers with at least ten years of age (15 or more is preferable) that have been properly stored the entire time. Don’t go sweeter than German’s Kabinett classification (maximum 188 grams of sugar per liter).

Potato chips and Champagne (optional: and caviar) – late night snack craving meets fine wine meets decadence. In an ideal world, I’d start every dinner party with a plate of potato chips topped with caviar and glasses of Champagne.

Dry sparkling wine with mac and cheese – this works best if the cheese is a soft and creamy variety.

Full bodied chardonnay and bacon – I’ve not tried this yet, but a friend of mine swears by it. I’m told it’s critical that the chardonnay be rich enough to stand up to the saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, which makes good sense. Just make sure not to lose chardonnay’s acid as it is key to handling the bacon’s fat.

Try This Wine: A $34 Rosé

Here are two things most people don’t buy: merlot, and rosé that costs $34. I’m going to try to convince you to do both, at the same time, with the 2018 Rosé of Merlot from Napa’s Rutherford Hill. Rutherford is one of the most respected merlot houses in the United States, and they graciously sent me six different merlots for my research on the variety and the upcoming merlot article I’m writing. Tucked among this half case was the rosé, like an oasis amongst the sand. I opened it with some friends and after polishing off the bottle in no time, knew it deserved a stand-alone piece.

Part of the reason I’ve been focused on merlot recently is that the variety has gotten a terribly unfair shake, and though its reputation has improved among aficionados, it hasn’t recovered in the mainstream consciousness despite the ratio of good and bad merlot in the market having flipped, in a positive sense, over the last decade or so. People are missing out on terribly good wine.

The problem, to certain extent, starts with the polarizing reaction to the word “merlot.” This knee jerk reflex often comes from one or both of two factors: what we associate mentally when we hear the word, and what we expect to taste when it is poured for us. If the mental association is off, it’s hard to get the taste right, and so it begins with what we say and think.

Terminology gives us words and creates thoughts, and in the wine business terminology is confusing and complicated, which is unfortunate because it is crucially important to connecting customers with wines that meet their preferences and standards. Americans have never been great about this, a great example being that in America in the early 1900s to even as late as the 1980s, “Chablis” meant white wine and “Burgundy” meant red wine for many people. Though wholly inaccurate and also illegal given the French laws governing the use of those names, it wasn’t baseless in the sense that Chablis, France, produced white wine and Burgundy, France produced red wine.

Though our wine parlance has come a long way since then, becoming substantially more specific and accurate, in the interim period merlot was commonly used as a generic reference to red wine as much as it was intended to refer to the specific variety, leading people to associate merlot with generic red wine. Merlot’s market saturation in the 1980s and 1990s, a conscious industry choice because it was cheap to mass produce, led to copious amounts of generic-tasting red wine made from the grape, which didn’t do many positive things for the variety’s reputation.

Now, though, thankfully and finally, it’s because of high quality, diligent and passionate producers like Rutherford Hill (and Duckhorn, and Mt. Brave, and Leonetti, and others) that merlot has a reputation specific to itself (at least among those paying attention), affording it a greater opportunity to shape what people think about it rather than the other way around.

Rutherford Hill

Merlot not only makes a complete and complex wine on its own, but it fulfills two really critical additional roles: a blending work horse and a savior for many a cabernet sauvignon. Many of the best red wines, whether labeled as a single variety or a blend, significantly and uniquely benefit from merlot’s participation. Even if you don’t buy wines labeled as merlot, you likely get your fair share of it if you’re drinking other reds. Where it doesn’t show up very often, though, is on the label of rosé. And if the 2018 Rosé of Merlot from Rutherford Hill is any indication, that’s a real shame.

In the same way that merlot can be a complete and complex red wine, it can be a complete and complex rosé as well. Rutherford’s winemaker, Marisa Taylor, walked me through the winemaking process, which begins by a goal of making an intentional rosé. It’s unsurprising that the start of any good rosé’s story begins with the winemaker’s intent to make rosé. Many wineries produce their rosé with the leftover wine from their red wine production, which is the first step in making bad rosé. The reason for this comes down to acid and sugar. Red wine is served best by less acid and more sugar in its grapes that rosé, so the point of grape maturation is important for both. Ideally, a rosé comes from grapes harvested earlier than grapes harvested for red wine, when acid is higher and sugar is lower.

Marisa Taylor (second from the left)

Like they do in the rosé mecca of Provence, a region known for pale-colored rosé with bright acid, juicy red fruit flavors and floral aromas, Marisa harvests the grapes for this wine on the early side, at night when the temperature is cool, and puts them straight into the press where they receive a very gentle pressing (on par with Champagne-level pressure) so as not to extract too much color or tannin. This is the ideal genesis story for many who love rosé wine.

The block where the grapes come from was specifically chosen to make a special rosé because of Marisa’s association of drinking rosé by the water while relaxing with family and friends on vacation. She honed in on this specific block because it is boarded on two-and-a-half sides by a pond and blankets a rise in the terrain, a setting that she described as very peaceful. The grapes from it are known to produce wonderful aromatics as well, a key component of a compelling rosé.

The concept and execution pays off. The wine manages to offer both a substantive and complex profile and the refreshing brightness and juiciness of a stellar rosé. This is likely every bit as rewarding and compelling as your favorite $34 white or red wine. Try this wine because substantive rosés are rare in availability and especially good, and because it’s a great way to experience an unfairly stereotyped grape.

Tasting note: This has a wonderful nose that combines the richness of merlot with the spryness of a rosé. Aromas of strawberry, cherry concentrate, candied fennel, sweet vanilla and Sprite lemon-lime. It’s on the fuller side of the rosé spectrum in terms of body, but is balanced brilliantly with bright acid that adds welcomed tension to the mouthfeel. The flavors hit on strawberry nectar, lime mint sorbet, chalk minerality and celery seed, and form a wonderfully layered palate. Among the most complex and complete rosés I’ve had, it’s a stunner equipped to handle a heavy meal if you can wait long enough for the meal to be made. I’d love this with mushroom risotto. 92 points. Value: A.

Where to buy:

Simple: direct from the winery. It’s available in-person and online.

Try This Wine: Captûre Tradition Sauvignon Blanc

Note: Several of these pictures were lifted straight from Captûre winemaker Sam Teakle’s Instagram, which is a great IG follow.

It happens to the best of us: you think you don’t like X, and then you have an X, and it’s really good, and you kick yourself for being close minded. I didn’t like mushrooms growing up, but something happened in college (not what you’re thinking) and I turned the corner. I’m sure everyone has a story like that. For years, I hated sauvignon blanc unless it was blended with semillon and aged in oak for a bit. Then, in 2017, I got to try Ehlers Estate’s sauvignon blanc from Napa and, poof, epiphany moment. Eat crow, Menenberg.

Since then, I’ve been more open to sauvignon blanc, which is to say, I’ve tried many more, and been disappointed a great many times. I’ve had a few compelling ones from Sancerre, but the next great sauvignon blanc came by way of the New Zealand project Loveblock by Erica and Kim Crawford. This was the sauvignon blanc that captured (no pun intended) me intellectually: it was tremendously interesting and very tasty. It represents a new, exciting and wholly welcomed rendition of New Zealand sauvignon blanc after an overwhelming wave of green and lean stuff from the Kiwis. Eat crow, Menenberg.

A Captûre vineyard

That said, the best sauvignon blanc I’ve had to date is an even more recent revelation to me: the 2017 Captûre Wines Sauvignon Blanc Tradition. Captûre was founded in 2008 in California’s Mayacamus Mountains, and includes some of the most remote and high-elevation vineyards in California. In 2015, Australian Sam Teakle took over winemaking responsibilities. Earlier this year, Kayce and I had the chance to have dinner with Sam and taste his wines along with our friend Ryan O’Hara of The Fermented Fruit.

Sam came in to dinner star struck over a recent chance encounter with the Australian womens hockey team. Though it took a glass or two of wine, and many laughs, to move on from this airport run-in to politics to a good number of other entertaining conversations, we eventually and reluctantly got down to wine business. We talked tannins, Napa viniculture, oak programs and a good number of other items.

We tasted one of his sauvignon blancs, but quickly moved on to the stellar red blends and cabernets, which use fruit from high elevation and often steep vineyards and are made with traditional winemaking methods and a light touch. I found them to be elegant and refined and are wines I’d be happy to have in my cellar for a decade or two. Sam had a good deal to say about them, but when he asked me at the end if I wanted to revisit any of them, I found myself wanting to go back to the sauvignon blanc. Eat crow, Menenberg.

Captûre’s Tradition sauvignon blanc, like the Loveblock I had tasted a few months earlier, offered more substance, weight and depth than I had been accustomed to finding in the variety. I had always thought of sauvignon blanc as a lean, citrusy and acidicly- sharp wine that was simple and even sometimes unpleasantly bitter. The Captûre Tradition proves all this wrong – it proves the haters wrong – at an incredibly reasonable price of $25. It will over-deliver as a pop-and-pour summer white wine, and sufficient seriousness and complexity to be decanted for an hour and enjoyed over the course of an evening. Try this wine for an incredibly refreshing AND substantive white wine.

Picture Credit: wine-searcher.com

Tasting note: This has a wonderful, rich nose of pineapple, green apples, flint shavings, green mango and green pepper corns. It’s full bodied for a sauvignon blanc, with precise and slightly gritty acid that plumps up the juiciness of the fruit, which comes by way of apricot, lemon curd, sweet mango and just a slight kick of blood orange. It maintains great salinity to balance the sweet fruit, and finishes with wet slate, marjoram and white pepper. The mouthfeel on this is spectacular, with a round plumpness and lean, slightly twitchy acid finding harmony with each other. A very impressive wine. 94 points. Value: A+.

Where to buy

The most obvious place to get this wine is direct from the winery itself, which ships. The current vintage available on the website is the 2018. The 2017 can still be found at a few places courtesy of wine-searcher.com.

Berkley, CA: Solano Cellars

Minneapolis area, MN: Ace Wine, Spirits & Beer

Nationally: Wine.com

You can find the 2016, which I’m sure is still singing beautifully, here:

Los Angeles, CA: Mission Wine & Spirits

Chester, NJ: Shop-Rite

Clark, NJ: Wine Anthology

Metuchen, NJ: Wine Chateau

Bronx, NY: Skyview Wine & Spirits

New York, NY: Sherry-Lehmann

Try this Wine: Good Memories Juice

I’ve mentioned many times on this blog that I love aged wine. The really good stuff transforms into something beyond its constituent parts, taking on flavors and aromas of complicated dishes rather than mere ingredients – Christmas spiced-poached pear with caramel sauce, for example, rather than simply pear or even yellow pear. And the structure becomes otherworldly as the years, or decades, smooth the edges and melt each part into a single, glorious sensation.

Wine can’t do this when it’s young. Tannin needs time to smooth out and integrate, that’s why we sometimes refer to tannin “integration.” Acid magically “mellows.” Flavors fascinatingly “develop.” Wine needs time to mature and evolve, not unlike we do as humans. Sure, all the bits are there when a wine is first bottled to become something great, but many bottles need years and years to improve, just like us.

Some wine doesn’t get better with age, because it’s made to be its best right away. It’s big and it’s bold, or it’s enjoyable in a simple way that time destroys. I’m not sure there’s a great human parallel to this, perhaps a student athlete who flames or burns out before their chance to go professional comes along could be comparable. For the purpose of this Try this Wine post, though, this type of wine doesn’t qualify.

Count me as someone who appreciates the wisdom of elders who have something important to share from their life’s experiences. Maybe that’s why I appreciate the story that older wine tells, a story it needed a lifetime to develop.

I recently undertook an unintentional experiment with aged wine when I bought a 2004 Delille Doyenne Syrah from Winebid.com, an online auction website. As I was removing the foil to pop the cork, it dawned on me that in 2004 I turned 21 years of age and could buy good wine for the first time.

Mean Girls was released in 2004

A whole host of memories flooded my mind from that great and transformative year in my life. That was the year I became a college senior, and I was living with one of my closest friends, dating someone who remains a close friend and entering my first real year of retirement from serious competitive cycling. Everyone – and I mean everyone – was learning the words to Usher’s “Yeah.” And because I could finally buy alcohol from stores, it was the de facto first year of my self-guided path to wine snobbery.

Delille Cellars was my gateway. Founded in 1992, Delille has been one of Washington State’s wine industry staples since. Robert Parker once pronounced Delille “The LaFite Rothschild of Washington State.” It helped to pioneer the Bordeaux-style red (and white) blend in the state, and also makes very good wine from Rhone varieties under the Doyenne label. The fruit comes from vineyards that are among Washington’s very best, the oak program is serious and well-resourced, and the winemaking talent is champion-level.

I was introduced to Delille before my 21^st birthday by a neighbor who gifted me a bottle of their Harrison Hill blend, which became my favorite wine for the next decade or so. I joined their wine club before I could responsibly afford it, and before I realized how getting a case each year of wine that demands serious aging can lead to storage nightmares. Yet I looked forward to each shipment as it meant growing a collection that mattered to me.

Delille and Doyenne wines are built for serious aging, and Harrison Hill is among their wines that require the most aging to reach their peak. I’m still sitting on Harrison Hill and other wines from the 2008 vintage that I received while in the club that won’t be opened for at least another two or three years. When I saw a bottle of 2004 Doyenne Syrah on Winebid.com a few months ago, I pounced on it because it was a chance to jump the line on aging wine myself and drink a properly-aged Delille now.

As I mentioned earlier, only after getting the wine did I realize its significance. It added an incredible amount to the experience. The wine was good, which was to be expected, but it was better because of the significance of the vintage and producer in my life and wine story. It was essentially experiencing my history from a perspective that was not my own, but complimentary to it; not from a personal point of view, but from a wine’s point of view. In 2004, although I didn’t know it to the extent that I do now, what happened in the creation of the Doyenne that year was part of my wine creation story.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest that people try to find a wine that is now nearly impossible to acquire (though if you can, it’s worth getting). My recommendation is to find a wine from a producer and vintage that both mean something special to you. Relive the memory, but from a different angle, through some combination of a place or winemaker and a year when something special happened in your journey.

Tasting note: The nose is just the other side of vibrant, but beautiful in its refinement and subtleties: signature Red Mountain graphite minerality, crushed cherry and strawberry, violet and crushed rock. This is a saturating medium bodied wine with integrated bright acidity and smooth and refined tannin. The structure strikes a brilliant balance between forgettable and dominant. It offers flavors of texturally-driven graphite minerals, brambly red and purple and black fruits, loads of currant, kirsch, black pepper and licorice. It’s probably two or three years past it’s prime, but it’s still damn good. DeLille really does hit another level with significant age. 94 points. Value: A+.

Where to buy:

Ha! Like I’d know what wine was right for you… Here are some means for finding that special bottle:

First, check out online wine auction websites. The one I use is winebid.com, which is an online auction site with auctions that begin on Monday and end Sunday evening. The inventory is refreshed weekly. The website, which is easy to use, is currently selling more than 8,000 wines with opening bids from $7.99 to $16,995 (a 1.5 liter 2005 d’Yquem), which is all to say, there’s something for everyone. Other online auctioneers include Sokolin, K&L, Spectrum, Sothebys and others.

Second, there’s always wine-searcher.com, which allows you to search for specific wines. Make sure you have the search settings appropriately set for your needs (e.g. the checkbox that includes stores that will ship to your state if checked).

Third, there are retailers who specialize in finding rare and old wines. Zachy’s (which also runs auctions) and Rare Wine Co. are two well-known stores with national reputations. If you live in a major wine market, chance are you have at least one or two retailers who provide bespoke services for tracking something down.

Forth, go direct and contact the winery, they might have something that fits the need.

Try this Wine: Amazing Spring Whites

Spring in the vineyard. Credit: Christoph Wurst (unaltered).

Spring is here, and if you live in a climate like ours’ in Washington, DC, you know that it unfortunately will not last long. I see the humidity on the horizon. Though we’re a winter white wine house (we drink a lot of white when the temperature drops), this is the season of transition for most people when they go from red to white wine. Rosé is often the transition wine, and I’m sure your local wine store is stocked deep with it.

Sometimes there’s no better pairing than a warm spring Sunday afternoon and a magnum of rosé, I’ll admit, but other times nothing beats an acid-driven full-bodied white wine. A really good one is going to offer more complexity that most any rosé, and when you want a more serious spring wine, that’s when whites out-perform rosé. The heat of spring isn’t so strong as to prevent enjoyment of a wine with some barrel aging, so you can go that route if you like, nor is it too hot for a wine with substantive depth.

The profile of white that I’m suggesting – some weight, multiple layers of flavor, thick acid – is also more versatile food-wise than many other wines. This is to say, it can hold its own with grilled vegetables, chicken, turkey and fish as well as red-fruited wines like pinot noir, trousseau, gamay, cabernet franc and zinfandel. Just because you’re going to a friend’s grill-out doesn’t mean you should avoid white wine.

I’m sharing four wines that I’ve had recently that blew me away for one reason or another. Three are from California, two of which I tasted in-person at the wineries in March. The forth is from Australia. All represent above-average values despite costing between $30 and $50 each. Some are easier to find than others, but all are worth seeking out.

The first is Carlisle Winery’s Sonoma Mountain Steiner Vineyard Grüner Veltliner 2017. A friend in the California wine business suggested I visit Carlisle on my most recent trip, and it did not disappoint. Known predominantly for complex and age-worthy zinfandels, I was blown away by the two white wines we tasted, this grüner and a field blend from a small little vineyard they split with Arnot-Roberts called Compagni Portis. I could’ve listed either or both here, but I went with the grüner solely because I have better notes on it.

The Steiner Vineyard has less than two acres of grüner, so there isn’t much of this wine. It’s almost as if the small amount of vines somehow inspire a similarly concentrated wine. It is produced in all stainless steel, and does not go through malolactic fermentation. The wonderful nose hews close to varietal typicity with stone fruit, vanilla, a cornucopia of citrus zests and white pepper. The palate is full bodied, plush and nervous. Flavors are similar to the nose, with pronounced white pepper and peach. The flint-infused acid provides a robust backbone. 92 points. Value: B+.

The next wine comes from Chimney Rock, a historic winery located in the Stags Leap district of Napa Valley. Established by a couple from South Africa in 1989, they built the gorgeous winery in the Cape Dutch-style architecture. The estate is known almost exclusively for its cabernet sauvignon and cabernet-based red blends, and has built a strong wine club following on that reputation. These wines have elegance woven into them, but for me their signature is more about robust tannin structure that for my palate needs a good ten-plus years post vintage to sufficiently soften.

My tasting there was bookended by a rosé on the front end and a white wine on the tail end. The rosé, made of cabernet franc, was spectacular. Really, one of the best rosés I’ve had in recent memory. It has substance and some weight, two qualities I think are too often shunned to our detriment when it comes to rosé. That said, I’m equally excited to share their one and only white wine, a blend of sauvignon blanc and sauvignon gris called Elevage Blanc, because I might have liked it even more than the rosé. It offers incredible smoothness in personality and feel. With a deft full body, it boasts loads of stone and tropical fruits, spicy zest, marzipan, slate and flint minerality and a smoky finish. If you tend to find sauvignon blanc too bitter and cutting, this is one that may change your mind. 93 points. Value: A-.

The final California wine comes from the prolific Copain Winery. It was founded in 1999 in the Russian River Valley, but it sources fruit from cool climate vineyards in Mendicino County, Anderson Valley and Sonoma. To give you some idea of why I call it prolific, the website currently lists 40 different wines for sale, including chardonnay, pinot noir, syrah and rosé. I happen to know they also make trousseau. Copain represents incredible value, especially with their chardonnay.

Until I was sent a selection of recent and current release samples last year, I had been entirely spoiled in my Copain experience by having only well-aged wine from this estate. Copain makes age worthy wine as they produce wines with good acid and elegance, traits required to age well. In 2018 I had a 2010 Brousseau Vineyard chardonnay from them and loved it so much that when another of the same bottle showed up on Winebid earlier this year, I snatched it up. I imagine we’ll drink it before the summer is over. Most of their syrahs from the 00’s are drinking phenomenally right now. As I tasted my way through the younger samples, it became evident to me that I preferred age on their wines.

One of the few exceptions to this is their Les Voisins chardonnay, of which I had the 2015. It was drinking gorgeously. The nose is just wonderful and engaging with rich honeyed cantaloupe, honeysuckle, lemon zest, crushed gravel, lemon curd and daffodil. It’s slightly on the heavy side of medium bodied. The level of polish on the structure elevates this to elegant status, and the slight streak of acid that runs through it keeps it interesting from first to last sip. The flavors are multifaceted: honeysuckle, peach, fresh apricot, honey dew and sweet lemon curd. It finishes on a wonderful green apple note and a textual sensation and flavor that conjures licking a slate slab. A fantastic wine. 94 points. Value: A.

For our last wine, we go to Australia and the Yangarra Estate in the McLaren Vale region, which focuses exclusively on southern Rhone Valley varieties. I had the pleasure of meeting Yangarra’s winemaker, Peter Fraser, to taste a new line of top-end wines, including the $72 Roux Beauté Roussanne and Ovitelli Grenache, $140 High Sands Grenache and $105 Ironheart Shiraz. I’m not sure what I enjoyed more, talking with Peter or tasting these wines, but both made for a wonderful evening. Peter is one of the more detail-oriented winemakers I’ve met. I’ve tasted other wines priced like these with their respective winemakers, but few have made impressions like the one Chris did that justifies the price of their wine. The amount of effort and thought he puts into his craft is evident in his wines, but you don’t have to spend top dollar to experience it, either.

Yangarra makes an Estate Roussanne for less than half the price of the Roux Beauté. I tasted the 2016. On first sip, it didn’t impress because it needed oxygen. With several hours of decanting, it began to reveal itself as a dynamic wine capable of putting on complexity and intrigue with more air or age. That is a clear sign of quality and precise attention to detail. The nose wafts lean aromas of sweet dandelion, mild Meyer lemon, tangerine peel and under ripe mango. It’s medium weight on the palate, with balanced and crisp acid that forms a nicely textured backbone. The flavors are just beginning to define themselves, and there is enough nuttiness already to suggest a really cool evolution over the following five-ish years, if not longer. Fresh almond, lean lemon, tart mango and pineapple, unsweetened vanilla, salty minerality and bitter greens form the basis of the flavor profile. Tasty now, it will develop complexity and a more dynamic structure as it ages. 90 points. Value: B-.

Each of these four wines are wonderful in their own ways, though none of them very similar to the others except for their ability to handle spring’s weather, parties and food. On those fronts, they are remarkably adept. Try these wines because the season calls for them.

Where to buy

Normally, I list half a dozen or so places where one can find a Try this Wine featured bottle, but with four I’m going to hyperlink directly to their respective winery-direct pages and wine-searcher.com links where you can search by state, zip code and/or ability to ship to your state.

Carlisle Gruner Veltliner winery direct and wine-searcher.com.

Chimney Rock Elevage Blanc winery direct and wine-searcher.com.

Copain Les Voisins Chardonnay winery direct and wine-searcher.com.

Yangarra Estate Roussane winery direct and wine-searcher.com.

Try this Wine: Make Merlot Great Again

Credit: giphy.com

“I am not drinking any fucking merlot!” That’s a line shouted by a character named Miles, played by Paul Giamatti, in the exceptional Hollywood movie Sideways, a movie which came out around the time merlot sales began to tank in America. Because merlot bashing was a persistent storyline throughout the movie, many people believe it was responsible for merlot’s commercial failings.

While the movie condemned merlot, it promoted pinot noir in a parallel storyline. “Why are you so into pinot? It’s like a thing with you,” Miles’ love interest asked him mid-movie. He responded with a long, thoughtful answer that ends with “it’s flavors are the most haunting and brilliant, thrilling and subtle…” Sideways also came out around the time that pinot noir sales began to sky rocket.

“Merlot sales had nothing to do with Sideways,” winemaker Chris Carpenter told me not that long ago. Among many great wines like Lokoya and Cardinale that he makes, Chris makes some of the very best merlot. “It had everything to do with a lot of bad merlot being made at the time, and an over-investment in bad merlot vineyards by the industry in the decade or so leading up to Sideways.”

Chris and I were discussing merlot for an upcoming Good Vitis piece on the variety. The first (and only) wine I’ve made myself, from scratch, was a merlot. My mom’s go-to wine when I lived at home was merlot. And it’s a key contributor to many of my favorite red blends. Though it’s never been my favorite variety on its own, I do think that it gets an unfortunate shake these days and I wanted to understand why. Hence the upcoming piece focused on merlot.

Adam Lee, who I’ve written about in these pages before, has been producing pinot noir in California for decades, and I asked him what he thought of the Sideways theory. “I don’t buy it, but I’m not sure why,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he saw parallels to what happened to merlot before Sideways and what happened to pinot noir after Sideways. “It’s true that a lot of bad merlot was being made in the 90s, so when Sideways came out there was a lot to hate about merlot,” he said.

“When Sideways came out, the current pinot releases were 2003 and 2004, both bad vintages in my opinion. They were very warm and we had big, ripe wines that were out of character. People who were supposed to like merlot because it was being made big and ripe, and hadn’t had pinot before, went nuts for the 03’s and 04’s, and in the subsequent years many wineries mainstreamed that big, jammy style, and it’s still around.”

Chris and Adam are two of many who I’m talking with for research on the merlot piece, so more on that in the future. In the lead up to that article, though, I want to suggest that people take another swing at merlot because it’s a great grape. One of the ironically hilarious nuggets of Sideways is that the pinnacle wine for Miles is Cheval Blanc, a wine from Saint Emilion in Bordeaux that is a predominantly merlot blend and among the most highly respected and sought-after wines in the world. The 2016 vintage, which retails for around $750 per bottle and received lavish praise from all the big critics, is 59.5% merlot.

The fact is that some of the most esteemed wines in the world have substantial portions of merlot in them, while many winemakers rely on merlot to make their best cabernet sauvignon. Though far more popular than merlot, cabernet sauvignon makes a less complete wine than merlot on its own. If not grown exceptionally well, cabernet feels like a donut in your mouth: substantial around the sides with a hole in the middle. Merlot fills that hole, and brings some nice flavors to the party as well. If I’m given the choice between a 100% cabernet and 100% merlot of equal caliber, I’m going with the merlot every time.

If I can motivate a few people to give merlot another try, then I’m going big with my pick: I want to suggest a bottle made by Chris Carpenter at the Mt. Brave Winery in California, which uses fruit from Mt. Veeder, a particularly great mountain site to grow red Bordeaux varieties.

Mt. Brave’s vineyards on Mt. Veeder. Credit: Mt. Brave Wines

The 2015 Mt. Brave Merlot isn’t cheap at its $80 retail price, but it is worth it. You can find it for as low as $65 on wine-searcher.com (scroll to the bottom for some options). It is a substantial wine with layer upon layer of complexity. Give it a good two to three hours in the decanter now and it’ll sing for the following two days. This makes it contemplative wine as well, meaning that if you can nurse small pours over a long time and think about what you’re smelling and tasting throughout, then you’ll go through an intellectual exercise that demonstrates why wine can be magical: it’s a performance art just like ballet or an orchestra. It moves, it sings and it dances. Try this wine because merlot can be great, and this one is.

Tasting note:

What a killer, earthy and penetrating nose: sour cherry, strawberry, mesquite charcoal, bitter cocoa, sawdust and emulsified dandelion. It’s full bodied in a way that fills the palate, but the acid is juicy and alive and prevents the wine from settling and becoming cloying. The tannins are fine and focused. The fruit is beautifully layered, with muddled cherry, mountain strawberry and boysenberry that go for ages, and are followed by ground espresso and cocoa beans and graphite. The tail end of the flavor profile features tanned leather, tobacco leaf and a small dose of menthol. This does very well with a couple of hours in the decanter, but I imagine it can go through tremendous evolution over a decade or so. 94 points, value: B+.

Where it buy:

You can order it winery direct here for $80. Check out wine-searcher.com for where to find it in your area, including stores that will ship to you. Below are a few shops around the country that carry it.

Fort Lauderdale, FL: Your Wine Cellars

Chicago, IL: Flickinger Wines

Greater Boston, MA: Wollaston Wine & Spirits

Wayne, NJ: Gary’s Wine & Marketplace

Bend, OR: RHC Selections

Nashville, TN: Cana Wine Company

Try this Wine: Cava from Vilarnau

The corks and closures of two very nice bottles of Cava from Vilarnau

When I was 22 years old, I went to Barcelona for 3 months to study Spanish. I had recently graduate college and worked on a political campaign that exhausted me, and the idea of going somewhere new for a while was exciting. While I was already into wine at that age, it wasn’t a passion or fixation like it has become. And so unfortunately, I didn’t take advantage of my close proximity while in Barcelona to the various nearby wine regions, the most well-known of which are Catalunya, Priorat and Montsant, to visit them.

That didn’t stop me, however, from drinking wine while I was there. My favorite bar, which unfortunately no longer exists, was called El Bigoté (the mustache). The bar, just one big, open room, had no tables or chairs, though it had a 6-inch-wide bar that wrapped around roughly half of the walls. For a small number of euros, you were able to purchase a big plate of a single type of fried tapa and a bottle of Cava, white or rosé, your choice. Cava is a sparkling wine made in Penedès, a wine region to Barcelona’s south. They didn’t sell the tapas or Cava separately, you had to get an order of each together.

Penedés. Credit: winetraveler.com

We spent many a night at El Bigoté, and that is where my head still often goes when I think of sparkling wine even though I drink remarkably little Cava these days. Though I will always be drawn to Champagne, my go-to has become crémant, which is a term now used generally for sparkling wine that comes from places in France that aren’t Champagne. The Burgundy and Loire regions are where my favorite crémant is made.

Part of the reason I drink so little Cava is that it is hard to find good Cava on the shelves of grocery stores and most wine merchants. This is why I was excited when I was offered the two wines I’m about to introduce as samples. I’ll never turn down an opportunity to try Cava in the hopes of it stirring some great memories from El Bigoté. That said, when they arrived and I saw how they are labeled, I got a pit in my stomach and thought, ‘another two bottles of Cava that play to the party crowd aren’t likely to be very good.’

The Gaudí-inspired labels. Credit: aboutmygeneration.com

I’ve since tried the wine. I still don’t like the labels because they suggest that the wine is made for parties (even though they are inspired by Barcelona’s own Antoni Gaudí), for passively chugging alcohol while dancing in the club on New Year’s Eve, music thumping away. But I like the wine. It’s serious, it’s seriously good, and I think it’s great wine to recommend for someone who wants to try good Cava, or any type of sparkling wine, without spending a lot of money.

Vilarnau describes itself as “a small, artisan and cutting-edge cava winery [near] Barcelona.” The Vilarnau family was Spanish nobility in the 12^th Century, and settled in Penedés. While Cava was made long before 1949 on the property, that’s when it was first labeled and marketed. In 1982 the González Bypass family of wines bought the label, and a new winery was built in 2005. Such a long history in the region does help explain why they are a producer of serious and thoughtful Cava. If you can get by the packaging (which didn’t photograph well enough to be featured in this post), or can find the regularly labeled bottle, the wine is worth trying.

The non-vintage Vilarnau Brut Reserva retails for $14.99 and is comprised of 50% macebeo, 35% parallada and 15% xarel.lo grapes. The nose is quite a lovely tropical and floral show featuring honeyed papaya, honeysuckle, straw, yellow peach and sweet lees. It is full bodied and very spritzy, which shows off well a tasteful amount of sweetness. Meyer lemon curd, marzipan and green apple are accentuated by a peppery spice. 90 points, value A.

The non-vintage Vilarnau Brut Reserva Rosé has an engaging nose that is quite ripe and mineral driven with raspberry, lavender, cider and lees. Also full bodied, the palate has a nice balance between creaminess, slight sweetness and crisp, round acid. Flavors are a wild mix of kiwi, watermelon, strawberry, lime, slate minerality and white pepper. 91 points, value A.

Where to buy:

The Gaudí edition may no longer be on shelves (if you’re lucky), but these places are listing availability of the standard labeled bottles.

Brut Reserva:

Sacramento, CA: The Wine Consultant

Colorado Springs, CO: Downtown Fine Spirits & Wine

Springfield, IL: The Corkscrew

New York, NY: Sherry-Lehmann

Harrisburg, PA: PA Liquor Control Board

Dallas, TX: Pogo’s Wine

Brut Reserva Rosé:

Westport, CT: International Wine Shop

Newton, MA: Marty’s

Hopkins, MN: Ace Wine, Spirits & Beer

New York, NY: 67 Wine & Spirits

Hilton Head, SC: Rollers Spirits, Wine & Cheese

Good Vitis

Good Vitis

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