Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Atelier Rides into the Sunset: 2007 Rockpile ZInfandel

These are tough times for wineries, and teh casualties are many. Usually the back story for a winery shutdown is either a sad tale of hard-working vintners crushed by inexorable market forces, or a schadenfreude-inviting chronicle of colossally bad judgment by self-important poseurs.

But every now and then, the demise of a wine label happens mostly for good reasons, and this is one of those stories.

2005 Quixote Winery Panza Grenache-Mourvedre

As a wine writer who has taken the vow of poverty central to our profession, I get to taste pricey wines only 1) when invited to a tasting (a great perk of the job), or 2) I never get to taste them at all. There are whole worlds of white Burgundies and and Trockenbeerenauslesen and single-vineyard Priorats that will never pass my lips. Once a year on my birthday, I let myself buy a wine with a dollar value matching my age, and I am definitely looking forward to March, 2011, when I get my $65 bottle -- and get onto Medicare.

Meanwhile, there is the kindness of neighbors.

2005 Dragon's Hollow Cabernet Sauvignon, He Lan Mountain Appellation, China

On a recent trip to Sacramento, I picked up, as usual, a few intriguing bottles of wine from Corti Brothers grocery, a cornucopia of delicious and exotic foodstuffs and potables from nearly everywhere in the galaxy. Darrell Corti has one of the most discriminating palates around, an astonishing mental storehouse of food and wine knowledge, and more opinions than are dreampt of in normal mortals.

One of the bottles I couldn't resist was a bargain-priced 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon from China. Chinese wine -- grape wine -- is barely visible on the US market so far, but just wait. When the People's government decided to give wine grapes a try several years back, they did it up in style, planting by some reports a million acres of grapes, just to see what worked where. Not your average test plot.

2007 Cooper Mountain Reserve Pinot Gris

Mouthfeel is a definite growth industry in the wine business, both for wineries and winemakers wanting their products to make a viscous impression and for the suppliers who have put dozens of products on the market designed to  do that very thing. Ten years ago, mouthfeel was an afterthought; now it's front and center--and on the sides and back of your mouth as well.

I will admit to being a mouthfeel man, and I'm especially fond of encountering good mouth in relatively delicate wines, whites like low-alcohol German Rieslings, for example. And so I was smitten a while back by a bottle of the Cooper Mountain 2007 20th Anniversary Reserve Pinot Gris from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. If ever a whole category of wine was mouthfeel-free, it has to be the tide of watery Pinot Grigio, imported and domestic, that has been sweeping the country lately. This is the same grape, and a tactile world apart.

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.