this heaven gives me migraine

2003 Château la Colline "Côté Ouest" Bergerac Blanc

Region: Bergerac, France

Composition: 90% Sémillon, 10% Sauvignon Blanc

Background: Englishman and self-proclaimed Vinarchist and Terroirist Charles Martin founded Château de la Colline in 1994, and makes a small range of red and white wines. He learned his winemaking all over the globe: Napa Valley, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. He was the winemaker at Château de la Jaubertie before, as the Charles Neal website insists, he won La Colline in a drunken leg-wrestle. (There is quite a biography of Charles Martin to be found there, worth a read and a laugh.) Martin has brought some new ways of doing things to the Bergerac region, things like using argon to protect the wines, high-density plantings, and mechanical leaf plucking. Oh, those wacky Englishmen!

The Bergerac region is on the north-east edge of Bordeaux and the area grows similar grapes to Bordeaux; except, as people like to point out, without the snottiness and prices of Bordeaux. This wine is a standard dry white Bordeaux-style blend consisting of Sémillon and Sauvignon Blanc. Sémillon is usually somewhat rich and kind of oily and heavy in nature, and can be a little flabby and free of acids to handle the fruit, so the Sauvignon Blanc (which is a lot more acidic and grassier/greener) is added to fix that problem and give the wine a little more zing.

Notes: Golden straw yellow in the glass, with a nose of apricot, nectarine, and honey, along with some sweet clover which gives it a lovely aromatic lightness. More nectarine on the palate, along with some sweet citrus. The fruit is so full and rich it is almost bitter, if that makes sense. A fairly zippy finish with some nice acids along with a lingering finish of honey and mineral made this a pleasant wine to have with some asparagus in garlic-lemon cream and pasta, as we did. It's definitely a fuller-bodied white, but pretty nice and balanced nonetheless.

Cost: $10

Overall: B

2002 K Vintners "The Boy"

Region: Walla Walla, Washington, US

Composition: Tempranillo, Grenache, Syrah

Background: I have been away, drinking a lot of wine and not writing about it, so now I get to play catch-up. I am told that Charles Smith of K Vintners named this wine "The Boy" because he thought it was a funny and creepy name for a wine. You can say "Let's get "The Boy" out of the cellar" or "I thought "The Boy" was delightful in my mouth" or even "I feel like having "The Boy" tonight". Well, you can if you have the mind of a 12-year-old like I do.

Smith sources the fruit for this wine from some of the Cayuse vineyards, and puts it in a bottle with an amusingly blank label. The front is completely white with a small black hand lettered The Boy in the lower right side, and the back has a Serge Gainsbourg quote: "I'm the boy who can enjoy invisibility" (from the song "I'm the Boy", on Gainsbourg's 1984 album Love on the Beat).



Notes: This is almost jaw-droppingly perfect. It is ruby-black with pink edges, and has a Tempranillo nose full of hot dark strawberry, cherry and some tobacco leaf. As it opens up over the course of an hour or two, the slight rose undertones change to a more gravelly smell. In the mouth it has a lot of soft spice all over, along with more of the black and red fruit present in the nose, and a slight zip that leaves the tip of your tongue tingling. Well balanced acids hold up to the fruit but don't overwhelm, and the finish has some toasted oak and dried earth. There isn't much by the way of tannins but (especially as the wine sits out) there is a spicy minerality that is really goregous. Overall, it's a really fantastic wine, very round and lush but also restrained at the same time, and much more than I expected (and I was expecting something very interesting). And Smith proves that you can have fruit along with your structure when you do it right.

Cost: About $35-$40, but you probably can't find it any more. Try for the 2003 (which has some Mourvedre added to it).

Overall: A/A+

2003 Château d'Oupia "Les Hérétiques"

Region: Languedoc, France

Composition: Carignane, Syrah

Background: André Iché inherited an estate (complete with castle) in the Minervois region and spent years growing grapes and making wine, but sold the wine in bulk. Fifteen or so years ago, another winemaker was visiting and happened to try his wine, and convinced Iché to start bottling and selling it himself. He makes several AC Minervois wines, as well as this Vin de Pays l'Herault wine (it can't be AC Minervois because it is mostly Carignane, and AC Minervois won't allow more than 40 percent of the wine to consist of Carignane).

The name of the wine, "Les Hérétiques", is in reference to the Cathars, who lived in the Languedoc and came into trouble with the Catholic church because they had differing beliefs: they believed in dualism, (a good god and a bad god), reincarnation, didn't believe in marriage, and thought the world was an evil place. They were mostly vegetarian, frowned upon procreation, and treated women as equals. They thought Jesus was a ghost since they did not believe that the good god could appear in any physical form (and thus tainted by sin).

The popularity and heresy of these beliefs was very disturbing to the Catholic church, but there was one belief that probably irked them more than any of the others: the Cathars didn't think they had to pay the Catholic church's tithes. So of course the church started a 40 year crusade (actually, a series of crusades, known collectively as the Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Wars) against these heretics and pretty much exterminated them by the middle of the 13th century. Now there is not much left: some ruins throughout southwest France, a regional dialect (the langue d'oc), and this wine, named for them.

Notes: Deep ruby purple in the glass. Nose of dust, minerals, and red and black berries with a hint of anise. Very dusty tannins all throughout the palate which slightly dry the mouth, with some spicy red fruit in the front and some toasty spice in the back. Nice acidity thoughout. Slightly harsh at the finish-- slightly rough-- but a decent bottle of wine for the price.

Cost: $8

Overall: B/B-

WBW9: Everything's coming up rosés

(Oh, come on, it is a slightly better play on words than "pretty in pink" or "in the pink".)

I am a little late re-announcing this, but Wine Blogging Wednesday next month, hosted by Sam at Becks & Posh, is all about the pink. By May 11, choose a rosé of some sort (your call, you can pick pretty much whatever you want, as long as it is a rosé), drink it, write about it, and let Sam know.

I am pretty excited about this since 1- I think rosés are underrated (both by me-- partly for the silly reason that I don't like pink-- and by the world at large, also for probably stupid reasons but I bet mostly because of something out there that rhymes with schmite whinfandel) and 2- I actually have a couple of rosés socked away that I have to drink this spring so this is a good excuse to get one out. And hope that since I did not buy these bottles with the express purpose of WBW, they will be clean, nice bottles with no problems or bad WBW voodoo on them, since we all know my WBW bottles are doomed. And now that I have said that, I can hear those corks creaking and the bottles combusting as we speak. Anyway, if all my rosés are not going the way of my vinegar baby right this moment, I have a chance of maybe doing some fancy pants comparison with more than one bottle. Alert the press!

2003 Folie à Deux "Menage à Trois" Red

Region: California, US

Composition: Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon

Background: This was an experiment of sorts, mostly because I keep hearing "it's good and cheap" about it. I am not normally a fan of corporate wineries, or cheesy wine names, or wineries who levy lawsuits against other wineries on some pretty lame circumstances, but, well, sometimes you have to try something you normally wouldn't. And when it is late at night and you are watching the kind of boring but still funny commentary track on the Sideways DVD and suddenly you want some wine but don't want to get out anything good because you won't be able to finish it and are going wine tasting the next day and will probably not want to drink the rest of the bottle after all that and are worried about the bottle going mostly to waste, this is the kind of thing you get out. And then sometimes you even finish it the next day anyway.

Folie a Deux makes two versions of this wine; the red, here, and a white (Chardonnay, Moscato, Chenin Blanc), along with a couple of other wines like Zinfandels and Cabernets. The winery, founded by two psychiatrists (hence the name) has been making wine since 1981 and was purchased by Trinchero Family Estates last June.

Notes: Dark purple in the glass with ruby-red highlights. It has a nose of currants, blackberries, and something I couldn't quite place....blueberry jam? There was a lot of raspberry in the mouth, with slight jammy spice at the finish, and very very soft tannins. Overall it was super soft and round and all about the fruit, though. If you like fruit, it's right up your alley. It's very drinkable, but not overly interesting or complex.

Cost: $10

Overall: B

WBW8 wrap up is posted

In record time! The roundup is posted here, and 26 wines were reviewed.

Thanks to Love Sicily for hosting!

2001 Gulfi Nero d'Avola Nerojbleo

This is my entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday number eight, which this month is all about Sicily, and hosted by Ron over at Love Sicily. The order of the day is to blog about a Sicilian red wine (I am trying to say Sicily as much as I can here).

I kind of decided to play it safe this time around, since the last two months I have had bad bottles (yes, even when I made multiple attempts to get something drinkable) and absolutely no luck getting a decent bottle to drink. So I played it a little safe with some Nero d'Avola, and I actually got two different bottles, which is good, because guess what-- my backup bottle was bad (the bottle seemed to have suffered some heat damage and the cork was pushed up from the bottle a bit, and that would have been fine, but it tasted pretty acrid). Originally I thought I could compare and contrast the two different bottles (from two different producers) of Nero d'Avola, but sadly, one is out of the running.

However, that means I actually had one reasonable bottle to drink! So away we go.

Region: Sicily, Italy

Composition: 100% Nero d'Avola

Background: Sicily, known mostly for Marsala, also grows a fair variety of grapes for light wines, ranging from Primitivo (Zinfandel) and Cabernet Sauvignon to Frappato and Perricone. Nero d'Avola, also known as Calabrese (and it is not from Calabria, but that name is probably one of those slightly-off-translation names that results from different languages colliding), is probably the most well-known non-fortified Sicilian wine. Up to the 1980's it was mostly used to boost lighter and weaker red wines, and production was decreasing until then, when it took on a new life, probably partly because winemakers figured out a few tricks (consisting mostly of keeping the grapes very cool post-picking and pre-pressing) that allowed them to make tasty but not over-the-top wines, rather than the heavy and overpowering wines that had come from the grape previously.

Gulfi is both old and new on the wine scene. The estate, located in the southeast corner of the island of Sicily, has existed for a while, but the grapes grown were sold to other producers. In 1996 Vito Catania decided to change all that, and started producing wines under the estate name (as well as olive oil). He uses an old and traditional method of wine growing that has been used in Sicily for 2,000 years but is going out of style now because it is hard to use equipment on the vines grown that particular way, and workers are hard to come by. So he's made some adjustments, and has imported a French mini-tractor onto the island to help with the work. In 2001 Gulfi produced about 8,500 cases of wine, so that tractor is working hard.

Notes: Deep burgundy purple, opaque in the center, almost black, so it's living up to its name--"Nero d'Avola" literally means "Black [grape] of Avola". It's tarry, with red and black fruit (blackberries and black cherry), bark, and earth on the nose. It's heavy in the mouth, almost unctuous (which seems like a pretentious thing to say, I know, but it has a placidity in the mouth that is elegant and thick and heavy at the same time, so what can I do). The tannins are soft and velvety and meld into the slightly spicy finish of medium length. Flavorwise, red fruit is present, mostly a soft cherry, and in the finish there is a hint of bitters (I had to think about that and actually go taste some bitters to make sure). I decanted it for about an hour and a half while I made dinner and we had it with pasta and roasted tomatoes and rapini, which was very nice. Tonight I had the final glass with a simple pizza I made (tomatoes/basil/cheese) and it held up nicely.

Cost: $18

Overall: B+/A-

You can't hide your lying wines

It was bound to happen, but prepare yourself, because here it comes... another push for "light" wine, except this time marketed as something women have to have, what with their busy lifestyles and the fact that "women don't always need that regular 14.5% alcohol-content wine". (You have to love the use of the word regular there, because women have special needs that are, I guess, irregular. I won't even get into the use of the word "need".)

Anyway, it's called White Lie, comes to you courtesy of Beringer Blass, and it has 97 calories and about 32 percent less alcohol per glass.

How can they make such a fantastical thing, something we have not seen since the 1980's? This is the funny part: they use what sounds like barely ripe grapes (rather than distilling the alcohol out or not fermenting to dryness or any of the other things they could do). Overall, it sounds like the wine they are going to be making is going to leave as bad a taste in my mouth as their cheesy "marketing to women" ploys. Supposedly this wine is not going to be a punishment for those on a diet, but I doubt that.

Sean Thackrey "Pleiades" XIII

Region: California, US

Composition: Syrah, Barbera, Zinfandel, Carignane, Pinot Noir, Mourvedre, Grenache

Background: I have always loved this wine, but this is the first time I sat down to deconstruct it and try to figure out what it is that I love about it. Pleiades is Sean Thackrey's sort of entry-level wine, his "kitchen sink" wine, as he calls it, because he throws just about everything and anything into it. It's also his largest-production wine, and he makes about 2,500 cases a year. Which is part of the reason I have had this wine enough to decide I love it, and not Thackrey's Orion or Andromeda, which are much harder to find (and the Andromeda is a new effort for him and only came out this year, so I would have to be very fast to have drunk a lot of it by now). Pleiades is the recipient of Thackrey's failed attempts to make other wines, and (as the recent SFGate article about Thackrey mentions), he puts these failures into his nonvintage Pleiades, which he calls a "disobedient wine":

"It pays no attention to winemaking rules," he says of Pleiades. "I use fruit that's incomplete. Some has good flavor and not much mouthfeel. Some has good mouthfeel and not much flavor."

Whatever he is up to, it seems to work, and his ability to blend the grapes into something interesting and cohesive is a success. It's a circus of wine, and you can practically detect each of the varietals in it... the spiciness of the Zinfandel and Syrah, the softness of the Pinot Noir and Grenache, the backbone the Carignane and Malbec give it, and the acid of the Barbera. It's not the most elegant wine, perhaps, and it is probably too over the top for some, but I think it is interesting and fun and is enjoyable to drink.

Notes: This is a rich purplish-ruby in the glass, and has a nose so strong it practically jumps out at you-- you can smell it across the table. It's filled with dark rich fruit, bramble, eucalyptus, and some pine resin and sweet mint (a minty smell that isn't really green). On the palate it is fruit-driven with a ton of black raspberry, blackberry, and plum, along with a pleasant but not overwhelming amount of warm spices like white pepper, black pepper, and nutmeg. The finish is slightly leathery with a little bit of raisin (which makes sense here since Thackrey often uses the passito method, in his own way, of course, when he makes wine). The wine has a good acidity to match the fruit, and very soft tannins... you get more spice than tannin on this. As it got more air it became more earthy and leathery in nature, with the fruit taking more of a back seat, and it would be interesting to revisit this one with a decanter and see what happens over time (I will have to try that in the future, since I have some stashed away at home). The finish is medium long, and overall the wine went well with an Indian-style pizza we were having (the spice of the pizza went well with the spice in the wine).

Cost: $15-$18 (good luck finding it... Wine Searcher might score you some, and I know the San Francisco Wine Trading Company had some last time I went by, but that was months ago. Weimax gets it in on occasion, and right now the restaurant Geranium has the Pleiades as well as some of Thackrey's other wines on the wine list).

Overall: A

2003 Raptor Ridge Yamhill County Cuvée

Region: Yamhill County (County appellation overlapping Willamette Valley, Yamhill-Carlton District, and McMinnville AVAs), Oregon, US

Composition: 100% Pinot Noir

Background: This was an impulse buy when I was picking up groceries the other day. It didn't work out in the end, which makes me sad-- I wanted to like it since the winery sounds like a nice place to be. It is named Raptor Ridge because they happily share the land with a bunch of raptors (sharp-shinned and red-tailed hawks, owls, and kestrels), which is not only cool but also probably helps with the pest situation, if they ever have one. They age in French oak and rack "in synchrony of the dark of the moon", and who doesn't love that? Besides the grapes grown on their own 27 acres, they also source grapes from eight other vineyards throughout Oregon.

This is their entry-level Pinot, a blend that is sourced/blended from grapes from seven vineyards (you can see the exact makeup with their pie graph. It's 14.2 percent alcohol, and seems like it should be a respectable Oregon Pinot, although probably not as interesting as some of their single-vineyard offerings.

Notes: Fairly clear blue-red in the glass with pink shading at the rim. It looks young (which it is). The nose is slightly hot with very faint rose/geranium, red cherries, and some slight tobacco. There is a lot of acid in the mouth, and it feels slightly out of balance-- it's a lot of acid and oak and (soft) tannin (more of an astringency than anything) and it overpowers the fruit that is there (mostly a sour cherry flavor). My tongue/throat actually tingles once I swallow it. It's still tight and could use some time in the bottle to sort itself out, although I can't really get a good idea of what it will be like in a year or two. I had it mostly by itself since I didn't even have dinner (dinner of, uh, losers) last night, but had a little cheese and bread with it to see if that would help at all. It did, but only a little. I then even gave the wine some time to calm down (in the bottle, and also in the glass because I had a very bad decanter mishap and my backup is doing vinegar duty, so I couldn't decant) and it still didn't unwind. I will try it again tonight and see if anything new has come about.

Cost: $16

Overall: C