Archive for the ‘Tasting notes’ Category
A star(t)ling Pinot Noir
Renowned for its Sauvignon Blancs, Sancerre is also the source of the Loire’s best Pinot Noirs.
Sancerre 2006, L’Étourneau, Domaine Fouassier ($29.75, La QV)
100% biodynamically farmed Pinot Noir from 25- to 45-year-old vines. Manually harvested, fermented with indigenous yeasts, aged in oak barrels for 12 months. Nose of beet and red berries but also surprising baked earth, leather and dried herbs. Pure, fluid, medium-bodied (13% ABV) yet substantial. Initial sweet fruit submarines under the fine, tight tannins, racy acidity and minerals, then partially resurfaces, adding berry and cola notes to the faintly sour and astringent, flinty finish. Delicious now but – as the tail-end revisited the next day implies – smoother, suaver, more Pinoty with another two to four years in the bottle.
Hat tip to wapiti for the find and the flinty.
Tami’s 2010 Grillo
A white grape variety indigenous to Sicily, Grillo is best known as the main component of Marsala. In recent years, it’s been made into table wines, often blends (frequently with Chardonnay). Tami, the négociant firm owned and operated by Arianna Occhipinti and friends, have gone the mono-varietal route and with good reason: their 2010 Grillo is a gem.
IGT Sicilia 2010, Grillo, Tami ($18.50, oenopole)
100% Grillo. Made from purchased organically farmed grapes, fermented with native yeasts, lightly filtered before bottling. Rich gold in the glass. Lemons, chalk and whiffs of hay and flowers on the nose, gaining some dusky spice as it warms and breathes. Quite dry. Round and a little weighty, though far from heavy. Soft-spoken fruit and just enough acidity to keep things fresh. Lingering, bitter-edged, mineral-tinged, come-back-for-another-sip finish. 12.5% ABV.
In Quebec, Tami wines are available on a private import basis and sell out within days of arrival (restaurateurs know a QPR winner when they see one). The shipment this bottle came from is long gone. Until the SAQ gets its head screwed on right and starts listing all three wines, if you want to feel the Tami love, you’ll have to keep checking the oenopole website.
A very dull virtue?
Impressed by the 2002 Équilibre opened to ring in the new year, I picked up a bottle of the same producer’s rosé to share with another champagne aficionado on an evening that began with dinner at KanBai and ended with a screening of the new DVD of Lully’s Atys. The restaurant impressed; the opera blew us away (lovers of the French baroque shouldn’t hesitate); the champagne…
Champagne Brut Rosé, Tolérance, Franck Pascal ($61.50, 11552839)
Medium salmon pink. Only a single stream of bubbles, albeit an active one, in each glass. Briochy and a bit farty on opening, segues to faint red berries and turned earth. Round texture. Soft nectarine with a butterscotchy bitter note emerging on the mid-palate. The fruit fades leaving a long, minerally finish. Improves – becomes more complex and better integrated, gains strawberry and anise flavours – as it warms and breathes. Clean, pure and enjoyable, though a little more depth and dazzle would be welcome.
Based on what I’ve been able to glean from the Web, this is essentially a blanc de noirs made from a 60-40 blend of organically farmed Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir with a dollop of Chardonnay, to which a little more than 5% of still red Coteaux Champenois is added. Fermented with native yeasts, bottled unfiltered and unfined.
Clos d’Albizzi’s 2010 Cassis
Besides being the French word for blackcurrant, Cassis is a fishing port on the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Bandol and an appellation d’origine contrôlée, three quarters of whose production is white. Most of the wine is consumed locally and little is exported.
Cassis 2010, Clos d’Albizzi ($18.10, 11095797)
Marsanne 30%, Clairette 40%, Ugni Blanc 30%. Vineyard practices include mechanical weed control and avoidance of synthetic insecticides and pesticides. The grapes are manually harvested and fermented with native yeasts. Undergoes malo. 12.5% abv.
Peach giving way to almond, acacia blossom and a hint of anise. Texture bordering on unctuous, kept fresh by the ephemeral fruitiness and brisk acidity. Initial quince and honey segue to minerals and a lingering sour bitterness. Ends on a briny note.
Intriguing and, in its way, delicious but a food wine more than an apertif wine. Worked well enough with a garlic- and anchovy-scented sauté of rapinni and scallops. Would be a natural for Provençal seafood dishes including, of course, bouillabaisse.
Double blind
This evening the friendly wine advisors at my regular SAQ outlet were offering small, double blind tastes of a wine – the leftovers of a bottle they’d opened for a staff tasting earlier in the day – to geeks they thought might be interested. Apparently I fall into that category. With the glass came a series of questions: (1) Is it New World or Old? (2) What country is it from? (3) What grape varieties are involved? (4) How much does a bottle cost?
My tasting note (from memory): Dark, nearly opaque maroon. Nose of red and purple fruit, a little spice and a good dose of oak. Quite rich and round on the palate, though not heavy, with good acidity, ripe tannins, supple fruit and noticeable but not overwhelming oak. A bitter note appears on the longish finish.
I was at the store about ten minutes before closing and had wines to pick up for tomorrow’s tasting, so I didn’t have time for extended reflection. My answers: (1) Because it was fruit- and oak-driven but not gallumphing, either a New World wine made in an Old World style or an Old World wine made in a New World style. (2) Italy, maybe the Veneto, due to the medium weight and that lingering bitterness. (3) No idea. Merlot? Bonarda? (4) Guessing high because of the oak treatment, around $30. (The advisors said several others had guessed Italian and almost everyone had pegged it as costing $25 to $30.)
The wine? Double Barrel 2009, Carone Wines ($55.00, 11506630), a blend of Cabernet Severnyi (92%) and Sangiovese (8%) grown in Quebec’s Lanaudière region. The wine’s name refers to the oak regime: 12 months in new American oak barrels followed by four months in new French oak barrels. Cabernet Severnyi (aka Cabernet Severny) is a Russian-developed red grape variety that, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine, “was created by pollination of a hybrid of Galan × Vitis amurensis with a pollen mixture of other hybrid forms involving both the European vine species Vitis vinifera and the famously cold-hardy Mongolian vine species Vitis amurensis.” According to the wine’s data sheet, the grapes are manually harvested as late as possible, sorted and crushed, then cold-soaked for 24 hours. Fermentation is at controlled temperatures and uses Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast “isolated from the Montalcino region of Tuscany, Italy.” The fermented must is given prolonged maceration on the skins.
I’d actually noticed the wine on the shelf a few days earlier when scouring the outlet for wines for the tasting. I’d rolled my eyes at the massive bottle, the corny name (and in English – talk about adding insult to injury), the implied oak regime and the price, and guessed it would be undrinkable. Well, I was wrong. It’s still pretentiously and unecologically packaged, badly named and oakier than I like, but undrinkable it’s not. And if I and others valuated it at about half its MSRP, only the market will say whether it’s overpriced. Certainly it’s rare (only 1,000 bottles made) and unique (Quebec-grown Sangiovese?!). While I’d never buy a bottle for myself, if the theme of tomorrow’s tasting weren’t affordable wines, a bottle would probably have made its way into the lineup.
Ribiera’s 2010 Causse Toujours
IGP Pays de l’Hérault 2010, “Causse Toujours”, Domaine Ribiera ($23.30, 12 bottles/case, La QV)
IGP? Indication géographique protégée, the French version of the Europe-wide term replacing the national vin de pays. As of the 2009 vintage, VDPs are no more. See Jamie Goode’s article for the back story.
This particular IGP is 40% Grenache, 40% Cinsault and 20% Syrah, all from organically farmed, ten-year-old vines. Manually harvested. Fermented with indigenous yeasts. Destemmed, pumped over, racked and returned (délestage). Aged eight months in vats and demi-muids. No sulphur added, so should be stored at 15ºC (60ºF) or under.
Fragrant nose: black plum and grape, sun-baked earth, sweet spice, dried herbs and flowers (peony?). Supple, medium weight, texture verging on velvety. Rich, pure dark fruit with high-toned kirsch and deeper gamey notes. Sinewy tannins. The sweet fruit fades on the finish, leaving inky minerals, bitter herbs and a light, tooth-coating astringency. The high alcohol (14.5% abv) is felt, not tasted. A more conventional wine than, say, Clos Mathélisse’s Exorde (which Pichon also makes) but loveable for its purity, fluid savour and appealing combination of lightness and intensity.
For background on Domaine Ribiera, see the Languedoc Wine blog.
A grower champagne to toast the new year
The holiday selection of “affordable” champagnes at the SAQ took a quantum leap forward this year. (Champagne is arguably the world’s most overpriced wine, and affordable is here defined as bottles under $80.) Along with long-lost friends (Ayala, for example) and unexpected delights (Billecart-Salmon’s Brut Réserve in half bottles) came an impressive list of grower champagnes from producers like Larmandier-Bernier, Égly-Ouriet, E. Barnaut and Pascal Doquet, not to mention Pierre Gimonnet. A wine that appeared to slip under most local reviewers’ radar is made by Franck Pascal, a young vigneron with 4 hectares of vines in the Marne valley. On taking over the vineyard, Pascal converted to organic practices. The estate has been certified biodynamic since 2008.
Champagne 2002, Brut, Cuvée Prestige, “Équilibre”, Franck Pascal ($65.50, 11552871)
33% Pinot Meunier, 34% Pinot Noir, 33% Chardonnay. Fermented with indigenous yeasts, dosed with organic cane sugar (4.5 g/l). Pale gold with a faint green cast, lazy bead and tiny bubbles – very attractive in a flute. Expressive nose of brioche and lees with hints of lemon, minerals, hay and barley sugar. Rich yet lithe in the mouth: the winey roundness is countered by a minerally acidic bite and persistent bitter undertow, lifted by the soft effervescence. Oxidizing pear and sour apple and a suggestion of vanilla give way to a long, creamy/quartzy finish. Elegant enough to serve as an aperitif, vibrant enough to serve with food. A compelling wine that punches above its weight.
Pascal’s Tolérance champagne rosé (a two-vintage blend of Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir with a dollop of Chardonnay) is also available at the SAQ.
MWG sixth anniversary tasting: report
December 8, 2011, was the Mo’ Wine Group’s sixth anniversary. We celebrated on the following day because it was a Friday and the evening risked being a long one. Hewing to tradition, the tasting featured several bubblies and some silliness.
A QUEBEC SPARKLER
Bubulle 2009, Méthode traditionnelle, Les Pervenches ($30.00, La QV)
Consistent with the bottle sampled earlier in the day. This was served double-blind to the group, with no information provided about origin, composition or cost. Everyone liked it. No one guessed it was made in Quebec and most pegged its price as being in the $30 to $40 range. (Buy again? Definitely.)
FOUR POL ROGERS
Champagne, Brut, Pure, Extra Cuvée de Réserve, Pol Roger ($67.00, 11043487)
1/3 each Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. Undosed. Clean, pure, elegant: brioche, minerals, hint of lemon. Fine bead. Bone dry. Crisp fruit fades fast though a pleasing sourness and minerals linger. Enjoyable on its own but simple-seeming in retrospect. (Buy again? Probably not when it’s pushing $70.)
Champagne 2000, Brut, Extra Cuvée de Réserve, Pol Roger ($88.50, 10663123)
60% Pinot Noir, 40% Chardonnay. Initial funkiness blew off leaving a classic champagne nose of browning apple, minerals, white meat, toast and eventually sesame. Pure fruit with a honeyed, oxidized note. Relatively high residual sugar, though far from sweet or even off-dry. Long, bready finish with a lingering sourness. Though I found myself longing for a little more complexity and depth, this generous and delicious wine was popular with many around the table. If I ever open another bottle, it’ll be to serve with something rich, like foie gras au torchon or sweetbreads in cream. (Buy again? Maybe.)
Champagne 2000, Brut, Blanc de Blancs, Extra Cuvée de Réserve, Pol Roger ($94.75, 10663166)
100% Chardonnay, of course. A hint of rubber recedes leaving a refined nose of brioche, lemon and sour apple. Pure and clean, light and buoyant, multifaceted: a crystalline complexity. White-fruity on the attack, dry and minerally on the long finish. Elegance in a glass. In my mind’s palate, I kept “tasting” this for days after the event. (Buy again? If I’m feeling flush, yes.)
Champagne 1999, Brut, Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, Pol Roger ($208.25, 00892166)
Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Impossibly layered and complex nose: apple, lemon, brioche, minerals and so much more. Soft yet persistent effervescence. Smooth and rich from start to finish. Pure fruit. Just enough sweetness to round the acidity. Breadth, depth, length and any other dimension you might name. Nothing exaggerated, everything in place. A beautiful and complete wine. (Buy again? I should be so lucky.)
This was the first time the MWG tasted a flight of champagnes from a single producer. The wines were served double-blind and at least a couple of tasters detected a family resemblance between the two 2000s (I was impressed because I don’t think I would have). The resident champagne freak later declared it the most intellectual flight in the group’s history.
RED BURGS: TWO BY TWO, OLD AND NEW
Aloxe-Corton 1er cru 1996, Les Vercots, Tollot-Beaut & Fils ($48 in 1999)
Textbook red Burgundy nose: red berries, forest floor and beet along with a hint of alcohol. Silky texture. Fine balance between fruit and acid. Initially tight tannins quickly relaxed and smoothed out. Pure and lovely. Drink now. (Buy again? Moot now but I’m glad I did.)
Gevrey-Chambertin 2009, Sérafin Père & Fils ($65.25, 11472484)
Persimmon and cinnamon with hints of cola and red berries. Smooth on entry but falls flat: a little heavy on the fruit, a little light on the acidity. Plump tannins. Totally dry. Lingering oak flavours. Am not convinced it’s passing through a phase. (Buy again? No.)
Aloxe-Corton 1er cru 2009, Les Vercots, Tollot-Beaut & Fils ($61.50, 11473575)
Red berries, ground beef, milk chocolate, minerals. Tight tannins notwithstanding, the fruit is dominating structure for now. Still, it comes across as better balanced, more complete than the 2009 Sérafin. Good finish. (Buy again? Probably not.)
Gevrey-Chambertin 1996, Sérafin Père & Fils ($48.75 in 1999)
Initial stink giving way to a dark-fruited nose with ferny notes. Rich fruit, tight acid. Tertiary flavours (leather, old wood, leaf mould). Fair length. Pleasant but could be deeper. Drink now. (Buy again? Moot but it wasn’t up to my expectations.)
At a tasting earlier this year, Oliver Guyot told us he considered the somewhat snubbed 2008 a classic red Burgundy vintage and the much touted 2009 vintage over-hyped and full of atypical, fruit-forward wines not built for the long haul. Can’t say the 2008s and 2009s I’ve tasted to date have me thinking he’s wrong.
FOUR COUNTRIES, FOUR BIG REDS
Marilyn Merlot 2006, Napa Valley, Marilyn Wines ($26.80, 11341767)
85% Merlot, 15% Cabernet Sauvignon. 13.9% abv. Closed nose. Hints of graphite, red fruit. Medium- to full-bodied but fluid and balanced with ripe tannins and an acid bite. Fruity but not heavy. Short on follow-through. Began cracking up after an hour or so in the glass. (Buy again? Only as a gag gift, albeit a drinkable one.) ***Flipper alert: this wine is retailing for US$75 on the Marilyn Wines website.***
VDP des Bouches-du-Rhône 2007, Domaine de Trévallon ($66.25, 00728162)
50% Cabernet Sauvignon, 50% Syrah. 13% abv (hard to believe) [Edit: That’s the percentage according to SAQ.com but it’s probably for the 2006; I checked the label at a store today and it says 14%.]. Assault-by-strawberry-jam nose with a little dusty wood thrown in. Primary and monolithic. Palate so dominated by sweet fruit that it’s easy to miss the underlying structure. Long but not very appealing. Hardly budged during the two hours it was in my glass. The tail-end of the bottle showed a little better the next day: the strawberry no longer centre stage, some garrigue, cassis, ink and tobacco beginning to emerge, the acid and tannins more present. But still. (Buy again? No.)
Brunello di Montalcino 2005, Etichetta Bianca (“White Label”), Casanova di Neri ($55.75, 10961323)
100% Brunello (aka Sangiovese Grosso). 14.5% abv (not hard to believe). In 2005, this low-end bottling contains the fruit that would have gone into the high-end Cerretalto bottling, had one been made. (The 2004 Cerretalto retails for $229 at the SAQ.) Terra cotta, cherry, foliage, oak and a hint of minerals. Dense, sweet fruit. Enough acidity and tannins to save it from galumphingness but not enough to endow it with the brightness and drying finish that are the hallmarks of the best Sangioveses. Indeed, it doesn’t taste particularly Italian. Lingers long but ultimately cloys. May improve with age but, for now, it’s as unappetizing as a fruit-bomb Shiraz, a wine you wouldn’t want to serve with anything but a grilled steak, and even then… (Buy again? Nope.)
Rioja Gran Reserva 2004, Prado Enea, Bodegas Muga ($50.25, 11169670)
80% Tempranillo, 20% Garnacha, Mazuelo and Graciano. 14% abv. Closed nose. Next day: plum, black cherry, hints of leather, dried herbs and quartz, a bit vaporous. Balanced if a bit fruit-forward (cherry/black cherry). Glycerine-like texture. Not bone dry. Tannic astringency surges on the finish. Not particularly deep, at least at this stage. Needs time to transform into, let’s hope, a medium-bodied perfumy charmer. (Buy again? Maybe.)
A surprising and disappointing flight, as I had high expectations for the three European wines, all icons of one sort or another, and thought the Californian Merlot might have people gagging. Instead, the Merlot was far and away the most popular wine, a perfectly drinkable if anonymous red. Shockingly, anonymity was a characteristic of all these wines. The three Europeans didn’t offer up much in the way of varietal specifics and (the Muga excepted to some extent) tasted heavy, sweet, short on acid, high in alcohol, internationalized, geared to a Maryland-based wine reviewer’s palate. The Trévallon, a wine I’ve long been a fan of, was especially unfortunate: smelling and tasting of little but overripe fruit, sugar and alcohol. I was sure it had to be the Californian. Maybe all it needs is ten or 20 years in the bottle, but neither I nor anybody else at the tasting would be willing to take a chance.
The tasting done, the table was piled with an assortment of edibles, highlights of which were an outstanding venison and foie gras pâté en croûte from Boucherie de Paris and the Colli Trevigiani IGT 2007, Verduzzo, Villa di Maser ($23.50, Sublime vins & spiritueux), a powerful yet food-friendly white (bordering on bronze) that went especially well with the various cheeses.
The Rodney Dangerfield of wines
If there’s a wine that doesn’t get the respect it deserves, it’s Muscadet – not surprising given the boatloads of thin, flavourless crap floating around. But in the hands of a master like Guy Bossard, the Muscadet grape’s principal vice, its neutrality, becomes a virtue, the perfect vehicle for expressing terroir. Enlightened farming, low yields, native yeasts, no pumping (gravity feed), non-interventionist winemaking, a low sulphur régime and, of course, a terroir worth expressing make all the difference.
Muscadet-Sèvre et Maine 2009, Expression de Granit, Domaine de l’Écu ($20.70, 10282873)
100% Muscadet (aka Melon de Bourgogne). The domaine has been organic since 1975, began converting to biodynamic practices in 1992 and is now Demeter-certified.
Lemon, green apple peel, chalk and, yes, some granite (or is it gun flint?). Rich texture and a hint of sugar on the attack. Wax and white-fruit flavours. Citrusy acid kicks in on the mid-palate and persists through the long, vaporous finish. Lingering notes of minerals, lemon oil and pine needles. A beauty that will only improve with time in the cellar (up to ten years). 12% abv.
A bargain blanc de blancs
After oenopole’s Aurélia and Alexis encountered this wine in Paris, they set out in search of the producer. It’s easy to see why: a grower champagne and a textbook blanc de blancs, made from organically farmed grapes and sold for a song – what’s not to like?
It is, in fact, the next-to-cheapest champagne – and the least expensive blanc de blancs – at the SAQ. Based in Vertus, in the south of the region, Doquet grows all the grapes that go into his wines. His 15-hectare estate has been certified organic since 2008.
Champagne, Brut, Blanc de Blancs, Pascal Doquet ($44.75, 11528046)
Pale straw with greenish glints. Appealing nose of apple and citrus with hints of chalk and brioche. Crisp and elegant in the mouth, remarkable more for its texture than its depth: on the lighter side of medium-bodied, very dry with a caressing effervescence. Clean minerally finish. A deluxe aperitif but substantial enough to serve with, say, freshwater fish or even sushi. I’m stocking up for the holidays.
Brett happens 