Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Spanish Half Measures

I meant to review these two wines late last year, and then one thing after another happened, and then the holidays happened, and then here we are. The interesting angle is mainly the marketing concept (though the wines aren’t bad at all), and by now, the concept has presumably worked—or not—without any help from Blind Muscat.

The label created for this pair of wines is The Spanish Quarter, and the entries are a white blend of Chardonnay and Albariño and a red blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo. The wines were put together by the Codorniu Group. a huge Spanish wine combine, big in the Cava business as well as in still wines, owner of California’s Artesa (formerly Codorniu Napa), etc. These folks have a lot of good juice to work with, in this case coming from the Costers del Segre region, an up-and-coming area inland from Barcelona in Spain’s northeast.

Zaca Mesa Releases

Zaca Mesa has long been one of my favorite California producers. They've  concentrated on Rhone varieties, my weakness, since the 1970s; they have never seemed to be too full of themselves; they’re located in the Santa Ynez Valley part of the Santa Barbara wine country, not in the glare of the North Coast spotlight; and they generally make really nice wine. They’ve gone through a few changes of ownership and ambition, but are now on what seems like to me the right track, focused on estate-grown Rhone reds and whites.

So it was a happy day when the delivery fella brought me samples of three new Zaca releases: one stunner, one that may have seen better vintages, and one that suits an acquired taste—a taste which, fortunately, I have most certainly acquired. 

2006 Luca Laborde Double Select Syrah

This is a winery with a good story. Laura Catena, the daughter of pioneering Argentine winemaker Nicolas Catena, grew up in Buenos Aires, moved with the family to Berkeley, went to Harvard and medical school at Stanford and now practices medicine at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. For eight months out of the year, that is; in the other four, she oversees her own highly-regarded wine label in Mendoza, Argentina, named for her son, Luca.

Why I was hot to taste this wine is another good story: it’s because I have a relatively new (six months) grandson, also named Luca. And when he, his older sibs, and their parents came to visit last weekend—see, just like the Catenas, coming to Berkeley—it seemed the perfect time to crack open the 2006 Luca Syrah.

2006 Willowbrook Cellars Marin County Pinot Noir

Blind Muscat can report a recent, amazing wine experience: a high end California Pinot Noir that actually tastes like Pinot Noir.

This shouldn’t be newsworthy, but with the recent trend toward bombastic, Syrah-like Pinot from too many California producers, it is, and good news at that. The point of wines from this grape, even in the balmy New World, should be delicacy, sprightliness, verve, even a bit of provocation, and never brute force. It should overpower you with understatement. It’s supposed to be more of a Fiat Spider convertible than a muscle car.

2002 Post Scriptum de Chryseia Douro

In his last post, Blind Muscat surveyed the offerings at last week’s TAPAS tasting at Copia in Napa of domestic wines made from native Spanish and Portuguese grapes. And while he thought the wines were a lot of fun, he issued a warning—like anybody cares about Blind Muscat’s warnings—that producers trying to push their prices too high could be in some trouble, given the competition. And this bottle is why.

Two days after the tasting, I opened a bottle of the 2002 Post Scriptum for a couple friends over diner. And the dinner was not exactly the classic pairing from the Big Book of Portuguese Wine—it was a smoked turkey, a vinegar-based BBQ sauce, grilled sweet potatoes in a jalapeño-citrus glaze, and grits full of corn and goat cheese. The wine was a smash, at $20.

2006 Substance Columbia Valley “Me” Merlot

Today Blind Muscat has a wine to plug that goes against two major trends in the contemporary wine scene. First, it’s a wine with a cute concept behind it that is actually cute; and second, it’s a cute concept wine that’s pretty darn tasty.

The bottle in question is the Me Merlot from Wines of Substance in Walla Walla Washington. (I always want to say, “Walla Walla Washington Washington.”) The “Me” name could be taken as a sly commentary on the narcissism epidemic, but is in fact the winery’s chemical element-like abbreviation for Merlot, part of the “Periodic Table of Wines” from Washington State the label aspires to bottle. (Think “em ee,” not “me.”) The plan is produce affordable varietal wines from each of the 30 or so grapes currently grown in Washington, gradually filling in the periodic table.

Maybe it’s my inner geek speaking, but this strikes me as clever. 

2005 Coltibuono Chianti Classico

Once upon a time, before the Chardonnay craze, the Cabernet Sauvignon craze, the Merlot craze, and the current Pi9not Noir craze, there was Chianti. With or without the straw-covered fiasco packaging, it was everywhere, the wine most likely to be encountered and ordered on wine lists across the country. Besides being cheap (single digits for really good ones through the 1980s) and plentiful, Chianti was much-believed because it was so versatile at the table. It went with everything from sole to steak, soup to nuts. Medium body, modest alcohol, refreshing acidity, dry finish—and you could take the bottle home and stick a candle in it. Along with dry rosé and pre-steroidal Zinfandel, it was a perennial go-to wine.

Two or three wine revolutions later, the fanciest estate-grown, Riserva Chiantis are priced somewhere in the $30-$40 range, no longer everyday wine in my marginal tax bracket.

Shooting Star Black Bubbles Lake County Syrah

One of winemaker Jed Stele’s little jokes, and quite tasty at that. The Aussies have an entire market segment devoted to sparkling Shiraz, in styles from dry to sweet, some of them quite well-crafted bottles but most of it for quaffing. And a fine quaff it is, once you get past the initial shock of red wine with bubbles in it—not pink wine, not elegant Brut Rosé Champagne like you’d drink on Valentine’s Day, but good old red wine, except chilled and fizzy.

Old, Sweet Wine

Blind Muscat knows that the Big Buzz in old wine drinking is dry reds, Bordeaux in particular. I will confess that the few examples I have had of that genre have been less than thrilling, more necrophilic than hedonistic. But old sweet wines: now that’s the ticket. Pick the right one, and you’ll get more intensity than an old dry red, though perhaps less evanescence.

2001 Pietra Santa Cienega Valley Dolcetto

I mentioned Pietra Santa in a recent posting about San Benito County, one of the many lesser-known and over-producing wine regions in California. But I wanted to get back to one particular wine from these folks, a knockout value that has just gotten cheaper. You won’t find it on some nearby wine shop shelf, but you can still order it (depending on where you live) direct from the winery.

So why am I so worked up about this wine? California’s experience in recent years with growing Italian grape varieties has been a mess, full of false starts (the Atlas Peak Sangiovese fiasco) and unmet expectations (the tale of Montevina, the Cal-Ital subsidiary of the Trinchero family’s Sutter Home, which promised to blaze the way and ended up selling far more Zinfandel and Syrah). So when somebody gets it right, that’s cause for celebration.