Roussillon on the Rise

For all wine lovers, there are certain regions and appellations whose bottlings speak to us with a greater sense of clarity, a more intense sense of pleasure, than others. Personally, I have a number of them around the world, and yesterday I had the chance to spend several hours with approximately 20 different wines from one of my favorites: Roussillon.

Roussillon doesn’t yet have the fame that it absolutely deserves, but yesterday’s tasting and lunch with Export Manager Eric Aracil and the team from SOPEXA at New York’s Le Cirque, to kick-off the Roussillon Wine Council’s first American campaign--its full name is the Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Roussillon, or CIVR for short--demonstrated how important it is for more consumers to familiarize themselves with Roussillon and its utterly delicious wines.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be dedicating an entire post to my tasting notes from yesterday, but for now it will have to suffice to say that my overall impression of the wines was 100% positive. They are among the most expressive and food-friendly I’ve tasted lately, and the combination of a fabulously diverse range of terroirs, geology, and geography, as well as dedicated, passionate producers, means that each and every wine we tasted yesterday was intimately tied to a very specific piece of the earth.

From wildly refreshing rosé to crisp, white-fruit-and-licorice-scented whites to reds whose flavor profiles ran the gamut from briny all the way to densely fruited and reminiscent of Austrian sachertorte, and then on to sweet wines like Maury and Rivesaltes Ambré, both the range and quality of the wines was remarkable. And having the chance to taste them alongside the excellent food prepared by Le Cirque served to deepen my understanding of not just how wonderful the wines of Roussillon are on their own, but also how brilliantly they work at the table.

The wines of Roussillon, then, may not share the fame of some other parts France yet, but the quality and expressivity is there in abundance, and I have no doubt their recognition and market share will continue to grow. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Roussillon is on the rise, as this spectacular tasting and lunch showed.

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Decoding Barrel Tasting

En primeur is upon us: The season of tasting barrel samples of the next Bordeaux vintage has arrived, and with it all the hubbub that accompanies this first look at the juice itself.

Of course, tasting barrel samples is quite different from experiencing the real thing; an entirely different mindset and metric is brought to the task than it is for tasting the finished product. The question that most wine professionals are asked fairly regularly, then, is this: How do you do it? How do you know what you’re looking for at this early stage in the game?

Wine Spectator’s James Molesworth, who has taken over Bordeaux-tasting duties from the departed James Suckling, posted a fantastic blog yesterday morning that answers the question and sheds some much-needed light on an often mysterious process. As en primeur gears up, it’s a great guide to understanding what you’ll be reading in the coming weeks.

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The Beauty and Emotion of Cahors

My guess is that you won't be able to watch the video below, from GrapeRadio.com, without craving a dark red glass of wine and a hearty meal. We'll let the footage speak for itself: It's a beautiful homage to Cahors, the joys of the table, and that magical intersection of wine, food, and emotion. Enjoy.

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Cornas and the Cult of the Stinky Red

One of the big misperceptions about wine professionals is that we sit around every day ruminating over the differences between First Growth Bordeaux, Grand Cru Burgundy, and the like. And, of course, while that does happen once in a very rare while, and while those days are truly remarkable when they do come around, they are few and far between. And anyway, most of us who live and work with wine didn’t get into this business just for the legendary bottlings. Rather, there’s a sense of discovery that brightens up most of our days: The chance to taste something new, or from a place that doesn’t quite get the respect it deserves, is what really gets us going.

I bring this up because in The Wall Street Journal this past weekend, Jay McInerney devotes his column to a wine that, outside the circles of its most dedicated fans, has remained in the shadows for far too long: Cornas.

He writes: “As far as I can tell, Cornas hasn't really been fashionable since the era of Charlemagne. The wine critic Jancis Robinson once wrote a piece describing her failure to fall in love, or even in like, with Cornas...[It] has always been a rustic wine, with formidable tannins and, sometimes, a barnyard funk that suggested a lack of hygiene in the cellar. The first few examples I tasted made me wonder if the grapes had been stomped by someone with very stinky socks.”

To which lovers of this unique wine would reply: Yum. It’s a funky wine, to be sure, often speaking of bonfire, meat, and the cage of some sort of only moderately hygienic animal at the zoo. As disgusting as this sounds, however, it tends to take on a softer personality when paired with food that can provide a counterweight to it, allowing its often unexpectedly expressive fruit to show more clearly. Even on its own, however, Cornas is a wine that, when made well and with honesty, is one of the most idiosyncratic, terroir-specific in the world. Which, for me, at least, is what really gets me excited to get to work every morning.

As we here on the East Coast stare down the barrel of yet another cold, snowy week, this is the time for popping the corks of these winter-perfect reds.

[NB: I do have one correction to make to McInerney’s article: In the fourth paragraph, he says that Cornas, Côte Rôtie, and Hermitage all “make powerful red wines exclusively from the syrah grape.” This is incorrect: Only Cornas is required to be 100% syrah. Côte Rôtie is often blended with a bit of viognier, and Hermitage, though typically all syrah, is permitted to have a percentage of white grapes in the mix.]

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A History of Haut-Brion

With all the news and ongoing commentary about the ever-skyrocketing prices of First Growth Bordeaux, it’s easy to forget that these legendary wines are far different from most other luxury goods. Their history sees to that, and the fact that they’re not products that have been expressly created to appeal to a specific market sector but, rather, have grown over the centuries while maintaining a sense of consistency and recognizable style (while still evolving with the times) means that they constitute a category apart.

Bloomberg.com ran a fascinating story yesterday on the history of Chateau Haut-Brion, the great First Growth of Bordeaux’s Pessac-Leognan. And even if, as the article notes, “Haut-Brion has had an undisputed place among the top 10 or 20 most expensive wines in the world for the past 350 years...it [right now] tends to sell for less than rival top reds from the Medoc, Saint-Emilion and Pomerol,” it nonetheless is among the greatest wines on the planet, and a supremely expressive example of why certain terroirs are superior to others.

Its history, the article notes, goes back “more than 2,000 years ago, when a group of Bituriges Vivisci tribesmen scattered grape seeds a few miles west of the Gironde River. That gesture has burgeoned into a hyper-luxury, billion-dollar industry hinged on how the weather affects the 400,000 vines that annually turn out between 10,000 and 11,000 cases of Haut-Brion.”

That may seem like a lot of wine, but the demand for it means that it’s often difficult to find. Indeed, Jay McInerney, in his excellent book A Hedonist in the Cellar, notes that Haut-Brion is “the most aromatically distinctive and unmistakable of all the first growths...a mature Haut-Brion smells like a cigar box containing a Montecristo, a black truffle, and a hot brick, sitting on top of an old saddle. It’s as earthy and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you’ve had it you never forget it, and you never stop yearning for more.”

It may be priced out of the range of most mere mortals’ budgets (the second wine, Bahans Haut-Brion, is a great alternative), but its history is integral to the story not just of Bordeaux, but of wine itself.

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Bordeaux and the Pendulum's Swing

Like music and fashion and food, wine is subject to fads and trends that even its most passionate and devoted consumers easily fall victim to. The soft, Milli Vanilli pop of the early 1990s caused a backlash that led to grunge, which itself eventually opened the door to the swing music that was piped into martini and cigar bars all over the country. It’s the circle of life, or something like that.

It’s the same with wine: As soon as a particular style becomes too popular, too widely accessible or venerated or otherwise obsessed over by either the masses of middle-of-the-road consumers or elite collectors, it eventually, perhaps inevitably, experiences a backlash of some sort.

Jay McInerney’s column in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal deals with this phenomenon as it applies to Bordeaux, one of the great wine regions of the world that has, in recent years, experienced a bit of a PR problem as a result of both its reputation for being a bit on the staid side (I disagree strongly with this) and, at the highest levels, exorbitantly priced (on this point I have to agree).

“Does Bordeaux still matter?” McInerney asks. “This might seem like a foolish question given the fact that the 2009 futures campaign set new records for prices, or given that Asian buyers in general and the Chinese in particular have embraced the region's wines, especially the first growths, as if they had proven aphrodisiac qualities. Many younger sommeliers and enthusiasts think of Bordeaux as the IBM of the wine world—kind of a dinosaur. For wine buffs with an indie sensibility, Bordeaux is the equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster, more about money than about art. At one recent Acker Merrall & Condit auction, there was booing when the auctioneer announced an offering of Bordeaux.”

“Bordeaux bashing,” he continues, “has become a new form of wine snobbery. As someone whose first love was Bordeaux, I can't quite join the beat-down, and several recent close encounters have reignited my passion.”

McInerney goes on to catalogue a number of tastings he’s recently experienced that give him hope for the region, from the seemingly timeless beauty of older vintages to the up-and-coming producers from lesser-known parts of the region that are igniting a whole new generation’s sense of excitement about Bordeaux.

What interests me most about McInerney’s column is the fact that, finally, it perhaps implies a change in direction of the pendulum’s swing, and hopefully represents a new era of Bordeaux appreciation. Because despite the crazy prices commanded by so many of the top chateaux at auction, these are wines that have earned their reputation for greatness. With a bit of focus on other parts of the region, and producers that bottle wines at prices mere mortals can afford and justify, perhaps Bordeaux will experience the resurgence among all wine lovers that it so richly deserves.

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A Wine Book for Children

I returned from Spain this past weekend, and now, having finally caught up on my sleep and fending off the worst effects of jet-lag, I've begun the process of collating my photos, videos, and tasting notes, and will be posting them here throughout the coming weeks and months.

Today, however, I'd like to discuss France, where a recent report on Decanter.com notes that, last week, a French-language book called Vignes et Vins: Un Monde a Decouvrir (Vines and Wines: A World to Discover) was published to a fair amount of fanfare--both good and bad.

It aims, according to the report, to explain "the cycle of vine-growing and the cultural role that wine plays in France, and tells the story of wine from the Romans to the present day."

So far, there hasn't been too much in the way of protesting, but keep your eyes open: This is exactly the kind of book that should set the anti-alcohol crusaders off on their typical tizzies, and may well lead to the sort of national discussion that France seems to have been headed toward for a long time. Should be very interesting to follow.

In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed on this side of the Atlantic, too: "The publisher..." according to Decanter.com, "is also considering an English translation."

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Miraculously Old Champagne

There’s old wine, and then there’s old wine. Last week, a Finnish diving instructor discovered a cache of the latter in the Baltic Sea: 30 bottles of Clicquot Champagne that are believed to be from somewhere between 1782 and 1788. According to a report on the BBC’s web site, “The bottle - whose shape indicates it was produced in the 18th Century - has now been sent to France for analysis. If confirmed, it would be the oldest drinkable Champagne in the world.”

What makes this even more remarkable, however, is the fact that the wine is apparently still in good condition. The discoverer, Christian Ekstrom, opened one of the bottles on his way back to shore and, afterward, described it as “[f]antastic...It had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles."

There’s a lesson here: Great Champagne, though typically ready to drink upon release (specific vintage bottlings, like the Krug 1996, notwithstanding), often benefits from some time in the cellar. Personally, I always purchase multiple bottles of Champagne in order to follow its evolution through the years.

In response to this discovery, The Champagne Bureau sent out an email recommending the following steps to ensure that your precious bottles last. Their advice is below:

Aging – Although Champagne has already reached maturity by the time it is released, you can successfully store it for years in your own home. Make sure that your bottles are kept in a cool, dark place (like a shipwreck!).

Chilling – We recommend keeping the bottle cool, ideally between 45-50 degrees. When you are ready to enjoy it, serve the Champagne well-chilled. A Champagne bottle usually reaches its ideal temperature after twenty minutes in a bucket filled with ice and water.

Opening – Start by cutting the foil and undoing the wire cage, with the bottle pointed away from your face. Always hold the cork in one hand and gently twist the bottle with the other. You will feel the cork easing out.

The right time to drink Champagne – It’s always the right time to enjoy Champagne. Real Champagne only comes from Champagne, France!

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Wine Review Wednesday (on Thursday): A 2005 Beaujolais Cru

They say--whoever they are--that good old Gamay eventually turns to something resembling decent Pinot. I’ve only experienced this phenomenon once or twice before, which made the bottle of Georges Duboeuf Régnié 2005 such a charming surprise. The color is the first indication that it’s a fully mature wine, the center of the juice a deep, rich brown with reddish-orange hints at the rim. On the nose, it’s all caramel, toffee, dried violets, mushrooms, and, unexpectedly, dried apricots. These brown notes follow through to the palate, which is further complicated by dried cherries, cedar, and smoke. And while this ’05 is at the far end of its evolution--drink now or forever hold your peace--and though the mid-palate is starting to fall apart a touch, it is a delicious, thought-provoking wine in its own right, and a great example of how well good Gamay can age.

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Pinot Crisis; or, the Symbolic Weight of Wine

The AFP news agency reported earlier this week that “A French court on Wednesday handed out suspended jail terms and hefty fines to 12 wine industry figures for selling millions of bottles of fake Pinot Noir to US wine giant E&J Gallo.

“The defendants, including executives from wine estates, cooperatives, a broker, wine merchant Ducasse and conglomerate Sieur d'Arques, were convicted of selling 18 million bottles...of falsely labelled wine.”

The report continues: “The wine was sold under Gallo's popular "Red Bicyclette" Pinot Noir label, though made from far less expensive grape varieties.”

Aside from the obvious--and quite serious--problems that this scandal poses for the French wine industry in general and the far more fragile one of the Languedoc in particular, a larger issue is at stake here, at least as far as consumers and American wine culture go.

The problem, it seems, is one of perception (or, rather, the lack of it), and the self-branding role that wine plays for so many consumers. After all, the report says that “the defendants were accused of substituting wine made from less expensive local grape varieties for the Pinot Noir, which is popular on the American market.” So here is my question: Pinot Noir possesses one of the most recognizable aromatic and flavor profiles in the wine world; it is, I’d argue, easier to pick out a Pinot than most of the other grape varieties that are consumed in such overwhelming volume. So how did this not come to light earlier if the juice was not what it was purported to be?

And therein lies the contradiction, the logical disconnect that I cannot seem to wrap my mind around. If Pinot Noir is, as the report says, “popular on the American market,” but Gallo was able to sell what amounted to a falsely labeled Pinot substitute, then do most people really know or pay attention to what they’re drinking beyond assessing whether they like the wine in their glass or not?

In other words: Do most Pinot fans really like the flavors, aromas, and textures of their supposed favorite grape variety, or are they simply responding to the idea of Pinot, to its overwhelming popularity and the what literature professors might call its symbolic weight. After all--and as the film Sideways showed--there is still a vast difference, in terms of perception, between casual wine drinkers saying that they like Pinot best as opposed to highlighting their affections for, say, Merlot. The former has, for some reason, taken on a certain caché of sophistication, whereas the latter, despite its dominant presence in some of the greatest wines in the world (Chateau Petrus, Le Pin, etc.), remains sadly weighed down by too many unfortunately insipid bottlings from California in the last third of the 20th century.

So while this crisis of mistaken grape identity certainly poses a number of very serious problems in terms of commerce and politics, the one that disturbs me most is the cultural issue that it highlights. Why, after all these years, is wine still considered such a potent marker of cultural aspiration and self-branding, and so often utilized as such with little or no regard for what theoretically should be its determining characteristic: The quality of the juice in the bottle.

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Rosés from Provence: Perfect for the Holidays

Rosé, now that it has finally broken through the American wine-drinking consciousness as a serious option for serious consumers--it’s no longer seen in the same light as sweet, simple white zinfandel, thank goodness--has one more hurdle left to surmount: The perception that it is strictly a warm-weather treat.

Fans of rosé know very well that it is one of the great treats of the spring and summer; indeed, the arrival of the new vintage each year symbolizes the coming change in season as well as a sunny forecast by the TV weatherman. And, yes, there are few moments as charming and as evocative as nibbling on, say, a salade niçoise at a sidewalk cafe table while a glass of rosé gently sweats before you.

But to limit your rosé consumption strictly to the warm-weather months is to miss out on one of the top pleasures of the wine world the rest of the year.

Here, then, I’d like to make a suggestion: That you consider rosé right now, in the dead of winter. It may go against common practice, sure, but lots of worthwhile things do.

Right now, as the days are just about as short as they’ll be until next winter, we all could use a little sunshine. And few things provide it in such abundance as a bright glass of rosé. The fruit, the acid, the quaffability: It’s all there, and perfectly appropriate for the season in exactly the opposite way that rich reds are.

Then there’s the food-pairing part. For this gluttonous time of year--with fried potato latkes for Hanukkah and hearty hams for Christmas and who-knows-what-abominable-combinations on New Years Eve--my money is with rosé and Champagne in the pairing department. Few wines offer the same level of versatility at the table as these two.

Great rosé is made all over the world, from Europe to South America to the United States and beyond. Exploring examples from all of these places is bound to be a rewarding and delicious endeavor. Still, though, rosé finds its ancestral homeland of sorts--and one of its greatest expressions--in Provence.

I recently had the opportunity to taste a number of excellent examples from that famed French countryside, and was blown away by the range and quality of them. What really amazed me, though, was the ability of many of them to last (and, indeed, evolve) well beyond the point at which they are traditionally “supposed to be consumed.” In fact, it’s a good idea to look for successive vintages of Provençal rosés: Tasting a young one alongside a bottle that’s slightly more mature is educational in the most delicious way possible. And the slightly older ones, with their more pronounced earth and spice notes, provide a whole added layer of complexity with which to pair heartier holiday-season foods. That kind of versatility is awfully hard to beat.

Here are my tasting notes for a handful of standout rosés from Provence. Keep in mind, though, that this list is far from exhaustive, and that there are all kinds of rosé treasures out there right now, just waiting to be plucked from shelves.

Chateau du Rouët Coeur Esterelle Rosé 2008 - The color here is a beautiful light salmon that’s almost autumnal in hue. Hints of flowers and underbrush on the nose lead to flavors of red berry fruit, spice, and something just the slightest bit herbal. The fact that some of the fruit has fallen away at this point is actually a benefit, as the underlying complexity really has the chance to shine through. Excellent.

Rimauresq Selections Rosé Classique Cru Classé 2008 and 2007 - Fresh, springlike aromas and a burst of peach precede a palate more concentrated and slightly more powerful than the Coeur Esterelle. This 2008 tastes of peppercorn, spice, and garrigue, and shows more linearity than the previous one. The 2007, on the other hand, gives evidence of its extra bottle-age in its more amber-toned color, as well as in the mushroom and dried fruits and flowers of the nose. The palate of the 2007 is far creamier than the 2008, with unexpected hints of caramel and chocolate, all of it lifted by excellent acidity.

Rimauresq Selections Petit Rimauresq Rosé 2008 - Summertime notes of watermelon jump from the glass, buttressed by rhubarb and a creamy sense of richness that make this appropriate for the heartier dishes of the holiday season, or, really, with nothing else at all--just a glass and a half-hour to savor it.

Cellier Saint Sidoine Cuvée Entre Coeur Rosé Coste Brulade 2008 - Classic pink color and a nose so quiet it almost whispers give little indication of how complex this wine really is. It tastes of marzipan and sesame paste with brioche, wild strawberries, and spice, all of it balanced and subtle and calling out for food to enjoy alongside it.

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2009 Riesling, and The Origins of French Wine

As a bit of a follow-up to the Mosel Riesling tasting video from last week, a brief report on the 2009 harvest. Decenter.com is reporting that “Germany's 2009 vintage will be as fine as the excellent 2007 – but with less wine, vintners say.”

The piece continued, “Ideal weather in the summer and early autumn means quality will be very high but yields will be down because of uneven flowering in June…Helmut Dönnhoff of the Dönnhoff estate in the Nahe region said 2009 would be ‘another great vintage, on par with 2007,’ potential alcohol between 12.5% and 13.5%.”

This is good news for the ever-growing number of German Riesling fans, as it marks yet another in an already exceptional string of good years. (Take a look at the vintage chart on Robert Parker’s web site: Germany’s major wine regions, according to his assessment, have not had less-than-stellar vintages since 2000.) This just seems to reinforce the fact that German Riesling provides one of the most reliable, affordable, and food-friendly wine experiences available today.

Moving further West in Europe and on a more academic note, British newspaper The Telegraph is reporting that, contrary to popular belief, it was likely the Greeks who brought winemaking to France, and not the Romans or Etruscans.

The article notes, “The original makers of Côtes-du-Rhône are said to have descended from Greek explorers who settled in southern France about 2500 years ago, [the report] claimed.”

It continued: “The study, by Prof Paul Cartledge, suggested the world's biggest wine industry might never have developed had it not been for a ‘band of pioneering Greek explorers’ who settled in southern France around 600 BC.”

And while this may not have any real impact on your experience of whatever wine you pour into your glass tonight with dinner, it is yet another reminder of our ancient ties to the beverage. Really, every time you take a sip, you’re re-enacting a ritual that has gone on for thousands of years. No matter how you look at it, that’s an amazing thing.

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News from Bordeaux

Harvest season is here. Two weeks ago, while I was in Champagne, vineyard workers were busy picking grapes, and winemakers had their hands full crushing the fruit. Now, Decanter.com reports, it’s Château Latour’s turn down in Bordeaux. One of the grandest of the First Growths, Latour began harvesting Merlot a couple of weeks ago, with an eye toward picking its Cabernet Sauvignon sometime around October 5th.

Below is a video that was posted on Decanter’s web site; that’s Penelope Godefroy speaking, Latour’s Quality and Research & Development Manager. Scenes like this are unfolding all over Bordeaux right now. Let’s just hope the weather holds.

On another Bordeaux note, Château Brane-Cantenac, which readers here know I’m very fond of, has a new label. Fans of the great Second Growth will notice that, starting with the 2007 vintage, the label is just a bit cleaner, with some of the information that had previously been on the front label now relegated to the back one. But it’s still the same general idea, with crisp black lettering set against the famous brushed-gold background. And the capsule, once red, is now black.

Below is a photo of the new label. For my tasting notes on other vintages of Château Brane-Cantenac, click here.

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An Afternoon at Champagne Jacquesson

We’ve been visiting a wide range of producers the past several days, from grands maisons like Pommery to smaller—but also stellar—grower-producers like Larmandier Bernier.

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon and evening at Champagne Jacquesson, whose philosophy is very different when it comes to their non-vintage bottlings: Rather than have a “house style,” they instead rely on the most recent vintage as the backbone of their newest release, each of which is given a number and built to reflect the best possible fruit that they have above all else. (We tasted Cuvee No. 732, for example, which is built on the 2004 vintage, and the Cuvee No. 733, which relies heavily on the 2005. And their vintage 2000 bottling is an absolute stunner.) They also do a number of single-vineyard bottlings, which were all excellent. I’ll post tasting notes here in the coming weeks.

Before the tasting and dinner, though, proprietor Jean-Hervé Chiquet showed us around the property, and, as has been the case everywhere this week, the grapes were coming in and being crushed. Check out the videos below for a look.

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Harvesting Grapes in Champagne

I arrived in France yesterday morning, and within three hours of my plane touching down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I was in Champagne. The experience has been spectacular, from the wine itself (amazing bottles both young and old) to the food (rich and wonderful and perfectly paired with the wine) to the winemakers (friendly, gracious, and supremely giving of their time and knowldege). As much as I loved Champagne before I came here, I find myself even more impressed now that I'm walking around the region and speaking with the people responsible for it.

I just returned from a spectacular visit and dinner at Pommery after spending an amazing morning and afternoon at Champagne Leclerc Briant. This great domaine was harvesting and crushing Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier today from their Premier Cru, biodynamic Les Chevres Pierreuses vineyard in Cumieres.

They are reporting that 2009 is an excellent harvest, with very high-quality fruit and cooperative weather. The grapes that I've seen (and picked a few of today) are just gorgeous. Check out the video below for a look at how great Champagne starts its journey to the bottle, and keep stopping back for more details from my time here.

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Heading to Champagne!

Tomorrow evening, I’ll be flying to France. This time I’m heading over there on a press trip to experience Champagne at harvest time. Over the course of five days, I’ll be visiting Champagne houses (Pommery and Jacquesson among them), tasting the wines, picking a few grapes, and experiencing the wines with specifically prepared dishes at lunches and dinners.

And just like my earlier trips to Bordeaux and Austria, I’ll be blogging about it from there, taking tasting notes, and shooting plenty of videos to post here when I return the following week.

So keep checking back for updates—next week should be very interesting, indeed.

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News from the World of Wine

Bloomberg.com, in an interesting news item, reports that “France will return to being the world’s leading wine producer this year after losing its customary number-one spot to Italy, an Italian study said.”

The article continues, “France will produce 48.1 million hectoliters of wine in 2009 compared with 46.5 million by Italy and 39.9 million by Spain, according to a study published [earlier this week] by the Milan-based Italian Wines Union and state-run agricultural institute ISMEA.” Click here for the full article.

And in the new issue of the Quarterly Review of Wines, Serena Sutcliffe reports on the ever-improving state of the wines of Greece. She writes that “The innovations and improvements have been startling and these growers and oenologists have been fired with enthusiasm for modernization while respecting Greece’s formidable wine history.” And, indeed, if you can get past the difficulty in pronouncing some of the more challenging grape names (Moschofilero, Xinomavro), you’ll be rewarded with some truly remarkable wines. The full text of the article is available here.

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Chateau Lafite 1975

This is the second installment in what will be a continuing series of reviews of Chateau Lafite throughout the years. My last tasting note was for the 1966 and is available here. This one, though, focuses on the 1975, which is one of the most unexpectedly profound wines I’ve ever tasted. Its shows a sweet, floral nose leading the way to a dried-fruit and –flower mid-palate tinged with fresh raspberries, leather, and earth. You can feel this wine all the way down the tongue, its cinnamon and clove notes lingering for what seems like an eternity. This 1975 exhibits the perfect balance between freshness and bottle-age characteristics, and is nearly impossible to stop smelling and sipping.

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Chateau Haut Brion 1990

Great First Growths are always a reminder of what, exactly, makes these legendary wines so special, and what has allowed them to keep their hallowed place in the wine pantheon for such an extraordinarily long period of time. Indeed, my experience has been that they typically—with very rare exceptions—exceed expectations in less-than-stellar vintages and achieve something close to the sublime in the best years.

Over the course of the last year, I have been fortunate enough to taste a number of these wines, all of which have been or will be documented here. (My tasting notes for the 2001 Haut Brion are linked up here.) This past Monday night, I added to this list with a bottle of Chateau Haut Brion 1990 that I enjoyed with my friends Scot “Zippy” Ziskind and his wife Marci. (Ziskind, as I’ve written here before, is one of the country’s foremost wine cellaring experts, owner of ZipCo Environmental Services, Inc. and My Cellar wine storage facility, and a great collector and lover of wine in general and Bordeaux and Port in particular.)

The 1990 was at a lovely, evocative, exciting place in its evolution, utterly delicious right now and still capable of maturing for another 5 – 10 years before hitting its plateau. It showed notes of crushed blackberries, leather, hints of cigar tobacco, scorched earth, minerals, and plenty of mushrooms. It was, as the majority of great wines are, an inimitable evocation of a specific place in the world, a particular patch of the earth from which it’s derived. And just like Lafite always tastes like Lafite, Margaux like Margaux, and so on, so, too, did this Haut Brion.

Jay McInerney, in his wonderfully entertaining and sneakily informative book A Hedonist in the Cellar, recounts the time he was able, under enormous pressure in front of a group of people, to guess—blind—that the wine in the glass before him was a 1982 Chateau Haut Brion. He explains how he did it:

“I knew my hostess drank First-Growth Bordeaux, and I knew she knew her vintages. But I was very lucky that the wine was Haut-Brion—the most aromatically distinctive of all the First Growths; as the great diarist and bad speller Samuel Pepys put it, in the first brand-name reference to a wine in English literature, ‘Ho-Bryan... hath a good and most perticular taste that I never met with before.’

“To be more specific, a mature Haut-Brion smells like a cigar box containing a Montecristo, a black truffle, a hot brick and an old saddle. It's as earthy and complex as a Shakespearean sonnet. Once you've had it you never forget it, and you never stop yearning for more.”

True to form and expressive of the vintage, this one fit perfectly in that mold, and, enjoyed with friends at a great restaurant (the excellent Bistro La Minette in Philadelphia), contributed to a fantastic evening.

As for the 1890 Madeira we enjoyed with dessert—more on that next week…

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Two Great Wines from Chateau Brane-Cantenac

Chateau Brane-Cantenac, the great Second Growth in Margaux, has always been one of my favorite wines of the region for both its gorgeous typical flavor profile and its affordability when you consider both where it’s from and how much pure pleasure it delivers.

I had the chance to visit the chateau this past May during the Wine School’s annual trip, which this year was to Bordeaux. We tasted a number of wines, including several vintages of both the Brane-Cantenac and the chateau’s second wine, Baron de Brane. I was, as expected, very impressed with the wines and fascinated to see the differences between the vintages.

I’ll be posting video of the chateau and vineyards next week, but today I want to focus on two wines from generally less-lauded vintages, the 2004 and 2006, which, as is so often the case, prove that bottlings produced immediately prior to or following a classic year, though often overlooked, can really demand a lot of respect on their own, if only they’re given the chance.

The 2004 Brane-Cantenac leads off with an elegant, gently smoky nose of great finesse and a delicate sense of perfume. A French-toast note anchors it, with a hint of boysenberry singing up top. The palate, perhaps surprisingly for the vintage, is a touch exotic, though the fresh acid, grilled pepper, and licorice keep it anchored and lead to a mouthwatering finish spiked with a lovely herbal note, cherry, spicy cedar, and more licorice.

The 2006, on the other hand, is more dramatic at first, with aromas of flowers, leather, smoke, and wild strawberries. If they ever bottle this wine as a perfume, I’m buying a case of it for my wife—the nose is just amazing. The structure of the palate is really impressive and lasts through the finish, promising 10-20 years of evolution in the cellar. Cedar, sandalwood, grilled graphite, and cassis sing on through, as well as notes of caramel and hoisin sauce. It’s difficult to resist, but I’d hold off on popping it open for another five years, when it should be drinking even better than it is right now. What a truly great wine.

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