Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

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.

Beringer Sparkling White Zinfandel

A few days back, I checked in on a discussion on The Wine Broad’s Board about good mass-production wines, including the issue of whether any such thing could possibly exist. I offered the Beringer Sparkling White Zin as one of my picks in this category, which helped prompt a rant about soulless wines from another commenter. All of which made me decide to chill another bottle and foist it on some unsuspecting friends.

Smashing Summer Chenins

Mention Chenin Blanc to any serious student of wine, and the response will be, “Oh, yes, Chenin Blanc, the great aromatic white wine of Vouvray and the Loire.” It’s an automatic reflex, regardless of how much Chenin Blanc (if any) the respondent has consumed lately. You might also get a mention that the same variety shows up in South Africa as Steen—or used to, before the South Africans started ripping it out to make room for more Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. And then there’s another segment of wine drinkers, probably less schooled, who remember California Chenin Blanc as a great, slightly sweet, entry-level, let’s-knock-back-some-wine favorite from 20 years ago, before they moved on to more “serious” beverages.

Chenin Blanc has all but disappeared from the California wine scene, ripped out most everywhere to make way for other vines. There are a handful of holdout wineries here and there, and a few growers in Clarksburg, up near Sacramento in the Delta, who continue to tend it as a regional specialty. So when Blind Muscat came across not just one but two excellent specimens of this wine in a single month, it was clearly cause for celebration.

Joseph Phelps 1996 Le Mistral

I acquired this particular bottle a few years back while I was a member of Phelps Preferred, the wine club for fans of the venerable Napa Valley producer. I joined in order to get my hands on an assured supply of the Phelps Rhône-style wines, which have always been especially toothsome. Everybody else was in the club to get first crack at the Insignia; once it started costing a fortune, I stopped being Preferred—and gave up my Insignia allocation just before that wine started routinely getting thousands of Parker points. Blind Muscat’s timing has always been impeccable.

For example, in waiting a decade to open the 1996 Mistral. There was filet mignon on the table, and a comforting potato gratin, and it was clearly the Mistral’s time. It was delicious, still full of fruit but overlaid with a patina of mature wine flavors—cedar, leather, tobacco, all those things you’d never put in your mouth otherwise.

Jost 2005 Bacharacher Hahn Riesling Kabinett

A great example of a contemporary German Riesling Kabinett—which means that it isn’t anything like your parents’ Kabinett at all. Global warming has already heated up the slopes along Germany’s wine rivers (the Bacharacher Hahn vineyard is in the stretch of the Rhine called the Mittelrhein) that fewer and fewer grapes come in at the traditionally low sugar levels classified as Kabinett; this one is surely at least in the Spätlese range, numbers-wise, maybe even an Auslese. Whatever: it’s delicious.

The endearing virtue of traditional Kabinette, besides low alcohol, is their charm: fragrant, delicate, inviting, downright cheerful. Jost’s 2005 is still plenty charming, and a delightfully modest 10% alcohol, but it also packs its own kind of punch. The wine gets your attention as soon as it zings the tip of the tongue, then explodes into a mouthful of refreshment. There are peaches and nectarines and even plum-skin flavors—another example of the Riesling grape’s unique ability among white varieties to deliver red fruit. Off-dry, great acid balance, high slurpiness factor. Pairs perfectly with warm weather, with or without food.

Don’t let another summer go by without a Jost Kabinett.

Price: about $20. Importer: Terry Thiese / Michael Skurnik. Alcohol: 10%. Points: Blind Muscat don’t give no stinking points.

Michaud 2003 Chalone Appellation Pinot Noir

These days, Chalone isn’t just a winery high up in the Pinnacles in Monterey County; it’s an official AVA, a distinct growing region named after that pioneering fine-wine effort but home to a handful of other, smaller wineries as well. Michael Michaud put in 15 years as Chalone’s winemaker, but eventually gave up under the weight of repeated corporate overhauls and struck out on his own in 1997 with ten acres of nearby land on which he grows Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sangiovese, Syrah and Pinot Noir.

Michaud’s whole line of wines are expertly made, varietally true, elegantly balanced and capable of evolving in the glass—what you get on the first sip is not all you get. This 2003 Pinot tastes like a Pinot, not a Syrah (the 13.9% alcohol helps); there’s fruit to burn, but it’s plums, not prunes. All the Pinot spice and silky mouthfeel you could ask for.

“Save the other bottle of this wine for when we have duck,” said my wife. Not that she and a friend visiting from Boston minded downing this one with smoked turkey and cheese grits.

Like any small, struggling producer, Michaud’s wines aren’t easy to find at your local wine warehouse. There’s a list of distributors and retailers on the Michaud website, from which you can also order multiple vintages of his wines directly.

Price: about $35. Alcohol: 13.9% Points: Plenty—Blind Muscat says you can dance to it.

Wine Review Philosophy

Even though Blind Muscat is intensely curious about bottles of wine he’s never tasted, he rarely finds published reviews and tasting notes very helpful in deciding whether he wants to lay out money for them or not. There are two principal problems.

First, the emphasis on laundry lists of fruit (and sometimes non-fruit) descriptors has limited value. Knowing that a particular wine tastes of blueberries is an interesting factoid, but not decisive: there are great blueberryish wines in the world, and god-awful ones. Would you rule a wine out simply because the taster mentions cassis, or order a case just because it is allegedly redolent of blackberries? Teasing such attributes out over dinner is great fun, but they’re not the main thing you want to know about a new bottle.

When tasters start claiming that they’ve picked up toasted oolong tea flavors, or the aromas of wild Assyrian brambleberries, head directly to the Silly Tasting Notes Generator for stress relief. (Random sample: “Historic almost broad-shouldered Pinot Gris. Throws out clay, zelous raisin and dainty pepper. Drink now through May.”)