June 21st, 2008
What’s in Wine Girl’s Glass?
This wine is the perfect pairing for a pulled pork sandwich. For a wine of its kind, it’s unusually dark in the glass — probably due to its hailing from an extra good, warm vintage in its somewhat northerly locale. Blue-black-red color, with aromas of sour cherry suckers, strawberry compote, and tell-tale green pepper. This is not a sipping wine. It is a food wine. Here, as in all great pairings, the food and the wine tease out hidden characteristics in each other and make them sing. First, the wine’s knife-like acidity cuts right through the sweetness of the barbeque sauce. Then, red and black stone fruit come through, with spice, roasted red pepper, and a certain appealing meatiness. Tight as a drum, but with a certain heft once it gets to wash down a bite of sandwich. Best of all, only $7 by the glass.
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“A rosé? I’ve never heard of that.”
Setting: Stylish steakhouse in Napa, California.
The first thing you notice about this wine is its aroma. Even as the wine is poured, and even if it’s not decanted, you can catch a whiff of what’s to come when you get to immerse your nose in the glass: a fresh bouquet of charred wood, tar, violets, pepper, and the alluring perfume of cherry liqueur. Sometimes called the Burgundy of its particular region, this type of wine has a reputation for combining depth with “feminine” finesse. This example is no exception. Its beautiful nose is followed by a brick red color of medium opacity. On the palate, you’re struck by the wine’s exceptional balance — it’s got a clean, velvety mouthfeel that’s held together by ripe, soft tannins and a perfect, delicious wash of acidity. Intense cherry flavors come touched with coffee and cocoa notes. Somewhere there’s something distantly smoky and herbal, like basil on a BBQ. Quintessentially a food wine, this bottle was the perfect mate to a bowl of penne with a red sauce flavored by lamb sausage and chard. By law, this wine spends five years in new and neutral oak and then bottles before release. So although we drank it “young,” it was from a great, ripe, vintage, and we had no problem approaching it and getting a warm, sumptuous welcome. 
A light golden-hued, ever so slightly green liquid is in my glass. If a color could be lively, this one would be — the wine looks like it’s about to rush forward with energy and flavor. Green apples and honeysuckle on the nose, but the real attraction of this wine is the way it tastes and feels in your mouth. It’s got everything a girl could ask for: a certain richness and even a tiny bit of creaminess balanced out by cleansing, fresh acidity. Both flesh and backbone in perfect proportion. Apple, pear, and some interesting, pleasing burnt-earthiness on the midpalate, and then orange peel and citrusy stuff on a long, clean, finish. Definitely a food wine. White fish, prawns, crayfish, and scallops would all go great with this, made (by the way) from a grape native to a region shared by two major winemaking countries, bordering the bounty of an ancient sea.
This deep, dark red wine tastes really expensive. But it’s not. Thanks to its semi-obscure Iberian birthplace — how about that for a hint? — this old-school red delivers the quality of an old-vine, well-aged, and perfectly oaked Northern Italian Barolo or Barbaresco, but at $9.99 at about a tenth of the price. It’s got a rich nose of black fruits, tar, earth, and some crushed violet, plus a lush, soft mouthfeel with loads of blackberry liqueur, chocolate, and more of those freshly-laid blacktop notes. Good finish. Some sediment in my last glassful. Definitely a low-tech wine that’s had many years in cask and bottle before release, like a Rioja riserva, only more densely-packed with fruit. It’s got a tiny bit of rusticity to it, too, that tells me we’re not dealing with a well-known “international” grape variety like cabernet, merlot, even termpranillo. 
I ordered the lamb; she had the duck breast, grilled and sliced. I was going to go for the Chateauneuf du Pape, a red from France that would have been the perfect mate for that duck. But my dining companion wanted something big, lush, and local. Plus, it was my birthday dinner and I was in line for something Aquarian: independent, deep, and contrarian. So we went for it: a dark, almost black liquid came pouring out into my glass for the first taste, and the bowl filled up with the scent of blackberries, earth, and a tell-tale, tiny bit of kerosene. Yes, this was a New World version of this varietal, jam packed with black fruit, grilled meat, chocolate notes, and some spice. But it had an Old-World ability to develop over the evening: as we sat, ate, and talked, first the wine buttoned up and showed more structure, including broad shoulders and a muscular frame. Then it relaxed again, letting spill all those gorgeous berry, ripe plum, olive, and bacon fat flavors. What a delicious ride. What could it have been? 
This deeply garnet-colored beauty — is that a touch of black? — is introduced by a distinctly smoky aroma mixed with loads of black fruit. But the smoke turns out to be a mixed signal; I thought it meant we were dealing with a wine that had spent some time in oak, but no, it turns out that the toasty aromas are natural to one of the grapes in the blend that make up this wine. This alluring aroma is followed by a velvety mouthfeel with great black, red, and dried cherry flavors, black licorice, and a definite richness for what is undeniably a medium-bodied wine. Then, we have a bracing, cleansing wash of acidity (”no matter what, this is still a food wine,” I said) and a good, solid, bittersweet finish with returning notes of roasted cherries and a touch of almond. Hint: I tried this wine in my Italian wines class — but what could it be? 
A beautiful, vibrant gold color with a tinge of green invites all tasters fed up (drunk up?) with over-oaked, mass-produced California chardonnay. It’s followed by a delicate bouquet of apples, peaches and honeysuckle. Medium-bodied but deep, with a core of fresh, ripe apple and pear flavors — perhaps a little blood orange — perfectly draped over a good acid backbone that keeps the flavors vivid and in focus. But the stand-out element of this unusual white is its minerality, a wet granite-like taste that washes over the sides of the tongue before you swallow. In an Old World version of this grape, you might get a hint of almond and a slightly waxy texture. This white could stand up to canard à l’orange, but really calls out for a hearty winter soup like pumpkin or cauliflower-cheddar. 
I decanted this bruiser for an hour before we drank it, but it could have taken even more. The color is dark purple, almost black, all the way up to the edges. Swirling aromas of violets, olive tapenade, and notes of fresh tar spill forth from the glass, followed by a medium-to-full bodied, teeth-staining liquid, sleek but powerful, well-made but appealingly rustic, with flavors of black cherry liqueur, black fig, dates, and notes of burnt cinnamon toast, diesel, and peaty earth. Clearly built for cult fanatics with very cold cellars, this wine has a few years’ ageing behind it, but betrays its youth by being slightly closed, still; this wine tastes like no other wine, and I can sense there’s a lot more complexity hiding somewhere. We drank it with a special Italian feast on Christmas Eve, and I especially enjoyed it with picoline and Moroccan olives. A thick, smoky rabbit ragu would have been perfect, too.