Wine Review Wednesday: April 27th

It’s been a while since I’ve posted notes for Wine Review Wednesday, so we’re back today with a number of wines that have really hit their mark lately in my tastings.

Pali Chardonnay “Charm Acres” 2009, Sonoma Coast

Smells like apricot cream and brown butter, like pear and baking spices: Delicate and evocative at the same time. There’s also homemade caramel corn here, as well as baked pear and vanilla, all of which stretch out from the mid-palate through to the finish. Rich, very drinkable, and appealing. Nicely made.

Robert Mondavi Winery Fume Blanc “To Kalon Vineyard I Block,” Oakville

A vivid, beautiful rich gold color presages a nose of buttered popcorn with white grapefruit, cashews, peppermint, and cedar: This is a massively rich, aromatic style, yet still with its feet firmly rooted in the terroir and varietal. With air, flowers come out too, as well as dried pineapple, smoke, and charred earth. On the palate, this small-production white demonstrates amazing concentration without a heavy-handed texture; flavors of sweet citrus, papaya, sun-warmed hay, persimmon, and a touch of honey flash throughout. The oak sweetens it up, especially on the candy corn- and mango-tinged finish, but this is a wonderfully integrated whole with impeccable balance. This is that rare sauvignon blanc that’s easily age-able for another 5 - 6 years, but it’s almost too tempting to not pop open right now. Still, another year or two will really allow all the moving parts to come together even better than they already do. Delicious, soulful, and worth the effort to find it.

Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, Oakville

What a beautiful, glass-staining garnet color, even 6 years into its life. The nose shows lots of deep, dark currants, black cherries, licorice, birch bark, and a touch of bonfire. On the palate, this is a plush pleasure to drink, with that licorice, birch bark, smoke, black tea, and dark cherry coming through, and evolving to baseball glove leather, dried brown spices, and menthol on the nicely complicated finish. This is starting to take its turn to a more secondary expression of itself, and it’s wonderful for it. Still, I’d recommend holding it for another 2 - 3 years in order for it to really complete its evolution into a fully mature wine. Excellent.

Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve 2007, Napa Valley

Astounding from the first sniff. The nose is wildly expressive yet still gives a full impression of the structure it shows on the palate. It smells of some kind of mythical graphite cream, of crushed wild berries, currants, cedar, licorice, and cherry liqueur. On the palate, its structure for longevity is fully apparent--the tannins sweet and ripe--promising 20 years of life. Smoky plums, grilled berries and cherries, sappy fruit that’s perfectly balanced by acid: The fruit here is addictively sweet, but never devolves into caricature; it’s just exuberant and lush and detailed. On the finish, there’s an almost floral whiff, a beam of minerals running down the spine, these fleshed out with cherries. This is amazing, and nearly irresistible right now, though I’d drink it from 2013 - 2025. One of the best vintages of this wine I’ve tasted in recent memory.

Michael David Winery Old Vines Zinfandel “7 Deadly Zins” 2008, Lodi

A nose of smoky oak and cherry, coupled with licorice root and cream, lead to a palate of sweet vanilla-infused wild-berry creme brulee, lingering sweet spiciness, and wild summer berries flecked with a bit of thyme. Big and packing a punch, it’s a surprisingly lithe wine for all its power. Perfect for barbecue. This is another excellent value from this producer.

Tamas Estates Double Decker Red 2008, Central Coast

Pleasant juicy oak and ripe berry fruit define the nose here, and are softly complicated by big ripe strawberries and vanilla. The palate is consistent with the nose, featuring lots of sweet strawberries, a bit of boysenberry, milk chocolate, and vanilla. Straightforward, gulpable, and a nice wine for when you really just want something to drink. Light and pleasant.

Cecchi Bonizio Sangiovese di Maremma 2009, Toscana

Primary cherry, green olives, and oregano notes--a very nice table-wine style, and a classic expression of Italian sangiovese with its balance of fruit and earthier notes and its vague hint of flowers. The palate is as straightforward and pleasant as the nose, with fresh, food-friendly acid balancing out the ripe fruit (cherry, strawberry) and gentle, subtle wood notes. Fun, and perfect with pizza.

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Wine Review Wednesday: Umbria and Arnaldo Caprai

The wines of Umbria are too often overshadowed by their Tuscan neighbors. This, of course, is the case all over the wine world: Otherwise great regions and appellations are too often given short shrift because of the glamour and success of nearby ones that may be more familiar to consumers. Tuscany and Umbria provide a great example: Even wine novices are familiar with Brunello di Montalcino, Chianti, and Super Tuscans, but how many of them have ever heard of Montefalco, Orvieto, and Colli Martani?

Still, there are advantages to flying beneath the radar of popular wine consciousness: When consumers taste a wine they’ve never heard of before, they’re more likely to judge it on its own merits, without the interfering screen of preconceived notions that they bring to more familiar bottlings. None of us, for example, can really taste a Chianti without comparing it, on some level conscious or not, to every other Chianti we’ve ever enjoyed.

This is not the case with the wines we’re featuring this week for Wine Review Wednesday. They are likely to be unfamiliar to all but the most ardent students of Italian wine, yet their easy-to-love flavors, combined with their inimitably Italian character, make them perfect no matter what the occasion.

The Arnaldo Caprai “Grecante” Grechetto dei Colli Martani 2008, produced from 100% Grechetto, starts off with a gently waxy-nutty nose of apricots, walnuts, spice, and a hint of creaminess. All those more masculine notes, however, are lightened up by a beautiful whiff of flowers just in the background. The palate shows great texture, with almond milk, distinct minerality, spice, more apricot, a hint of un-sweet honey, and lemon and orange oil. It is thoroughly distinct, gulpable yet complex, and perfect for the warm weather right now.

The Arnaldo Caprai “Anima Umbra” 2007, a blend of 80% Sangiovese and 20% Canaiolo, is also an excellent option for the summer, and exceptionally food-friendly, too. Berry, plum, and subtle leather aromas lead to a light- to medium-bodied palate bursting with juicy, chewy berry and cherry fruit, ample liveliness, and just enough spice on the finish to make this a dream match for everything from pizza to pasta to light meats.

So while the wines of Umbria may be less familiar to most consumers, they are more than worth the effort to find and taste. After all, when wines are as food-friendly, fun, and downright interesting as these, you’d be foolish to miss out on the chance to drink them. They’re exactly the sort of wines that bring a real sense of texture and discovery to your wine life.

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Luce 2000, and the Benefits of Half-Bottles

Back in 2006, I picked up a handful of 375’s of Luce 2000 and have been drinking them at a rate of about one a year. What interested me most about the wine was not only its background (the Frescobaldi-Mondavi partnership) or its provenance and blend (Merlot and Sangiovese from Montalcino) or even its vintage (good but not generally considered to be great). Rather, it was the fact that these particular bottles that I bought were sold in so-called ‘splits,’ 375-ml halves that I knew would age more quickly than their standard-issue, 750-ml siblings, and light-years faster than their magnum big brothers.

Of course, because of the accelerated aging that half-bottles facilitate, they have, in general, been looked down upon. Consider this entry under ‘Bottle Sizes’ in the 3rd edition of ‘The Oxford Companion to Wine’:

“Half-bottles...are believed to hasten wine aging, partly because they contain more oxygen per centiliter of wine since the bottle neck and ullage are the same as for a full bottle. Most wine bottlers have viewed halves and other bottles smaller than the standard bottle as an unwelcome inconvenience...but there continues to be strong demand for half-bottles, particularly in restaurants.”

Now, I’m not about to argue against the many benefits of a magnum--or even, for that matter, a 750--that has had an extended, leisurely period of in-bottle maturation. But the fact that my half-bottles of Luce would evolve more quickly was exactly what drew me to them in the first place: Sometimes, you just want to drink a couple of glasses of mature wine without waiting forever for the juice to reach that stage, and without the pressure of having to finish an entire bottle in one go. (Older wine, after all, may not survive the long overnight slog through to the next day if you fail to finish it all in the first go-round.)

So that’s why I purchased the Luce in splits. And this past Sunday night, after a weekend spent shoveling out from the nearly two feet of snow we got here in Philly, I was in the mood for a treat. Which meant opening my second-to-last bottle of the 2000.

I’m glad I did, because it has finally reached the end of its life-cycle. Out of the bottle, it smelled of cherry and something almost salty, but these soon evolved into more clearly defined scents of dark cherry, leather, tobacco, balsamic, black bean sauce, and graham cracker. The palate, still powerful but devoid of most of its fruit at this point, coated the tongue with dusty tannins and flavors of olive, cocoa powder, black tea, cigar, and the merest intimation of cherry. There was still plenty of fresh acid there, and a surprisingly lively finish that flashed with mint and eucalyptus, but this wine, at this point and from a half-bottle, was all about its maturity and the expression of the final stage of its evolution.

Well, it was about that and something else, too: The benefits of a half-bottle. We finished it in a single sitting, without the stress of having to worry about its survival to the next day. Let the bottlers turn their noses up at 375’s--I’m a fan, and a believer in them, too.

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Big New House: Time to Celebrate!

This is a big weekend for WineChateau.com as it marks the Grand Opening of the new, stunning 10,000-square-foot store in Piscataway, New Jersey. And, in true WineChateau.com fashion, this gorgeous location is about so much more than just the amazing selection of wine. Because the space itself will allow the team to offer you not only the same legendary service you’ve come to expect both in-person and online, but also a brand new shopping experience.

I’ll be writing more about the new store and the Grand Opening next week, but for now, take a look at the review below. I thought that today would be an appropriate day for it, simply because of its name—Big House wine, big new house for WineChateau.com. What could be better?

Big House Pink 2008
While the blend here is certainly unusual, the wine itself is nothing short of charming. Syrah, Charbono, Grenache, Tannat, Zinfandel, Barbera, Tempranillo, and Sangiovese come together to create a harmonious, spicy, raspberry- and watermelon-scented California rosé. Flavors range from the expected (peppercorn, dried Mediterranean herbs) to the surprising (cooked rice, caramel). All of it, though, works beautifully. And while it may be getting a bit late in the season to think about rosé as much as you did back in July, this mouth-filling beauty has enough richness and structure to work perfectly throughout the year.

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BelnerO: The New Wine from Castello Banfi

Yesterday, I had the privilege of tasting BelnerO 2005, the new wine from famed Tuscan producer Castello Banfi, at a lunch at the Sub-Zero showroom in Manhattan that was hosted by Christina Mariani-May, Co-CEO of Banfi. It was a wonderful way to showcase the wine, as those of us in attendance were able to both sample it on its own and enjoy it alongside food that had been specifically prepared to pair well with it...

The wine itself is the result of extensive research into both Sangiovese (which is the dominant grape variety in the wine, spruced up with a touch of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot) and the terroir of the Castello Banfi estate. The result of all that labor--beautifully documented in Banfi's new book, "The Pursuit of Excellence"--is a wine that has both the potential to age as well as the ability to enhance a meal right now.

On the nose, I found aromas of leather and cherry, along with a solid note of cracked black pepper. The wine's presence on the palate, though, is what really won me over, its silky tannins and perfectly calibrated acid framing the darker cherries, cedar, and flowers beautifully. I've always been a big fan of Castello Banfi's wines, particularly their various Super Tuscans and Brunello di Montalcinos, and the BelnerO is a stellar addition to their already exceptional line-up of offerings.

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