this heaven gives me migraine

Weygandt tasting 1/29/2011: Domaine Alary

Another Saturday, another tasting. This time I flew solo and had time to people-watch, for better or for worse. Today we had the guy who wanted to brag about his huuuuuge cellar (I can't stand these guys. They are often wearing Hawaiian shirts and have cellarsfull of crappy overpriced Shiraz) even though he didn't know what was actually in it. He talked way too much, in any case.

Compare him to the other guy who came in, slammed through the wines in about five minutes, pegged every one of them pretty spot-on, and went on his way with a few bottles in hand. Quickdraw McGraw, I salute you, and hope you enjoy those wines.

Anyway, I am talking too much here, just as I spent too much time taking notes and being awkward at the tasting. Today the featured winery was Domaine Alary, where Denis Alary is tending to vines and making wine as his family has done for 11 generations (since 1692). Headquartered in Cairanne, Alary makes a bunch of Vin du Pays, Côte du Rhône, and Cote du Rhône Villages Cairanne wines. They are fairly solid examples of the region overall, from what I can tell.

2009 Domaine Alary VdP de la Principauté d'Orange La Grange Daniel Blanc ($15) - 100% Roussanne. A faint nose: nutty, waxy, floral/honeysuckle. Textbook Roussanne nose. Some fruit (apricot, peach) on the palate, but also very minerally. The finish has an almost-bitter quality, like bitter almond, which could be an extension of the apricot flavor since I always find apricots, especially dried ones, to have a kind of bitterness. Finish is also gum-tingling.

2008 Domaine Alary Cairanne La Font d'Estévenas Blanc ($22) - 90% Clairette, 10% Roussanne. Smells like a field: lots of straw/hay in the nose, with citrus fruit. Mineral and nectarine in the mouth, with bitter orange. I generally liked this a little more than the previous wine.

2009 Domaine Alary VdP de la Principauté d'Orange La Grange Daniel Rouge ($15) - 20% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 20% Cinsault, 20% Counoise, 20% Cabernet Sauvignon. Funk funk funk! Very funky nose. Fur? Game? Sweaty leather? All of those things? I couldn't decide. Once I got over the initial funk-in-the-face I noticed lots of herb/spice, garrigue, and cherry. Has a fair amount of fine-grained tannin from the getgo, and a nice peppery acid finish.

2008 Domaine Alary CdR La Gerbaude ($14) - 85% Grenache, 15% Syrah. A small amount of funk similar to the previous wine, but overall less funky/cleaner. Dark plum, cherry, licorice, clean leather in the nose. Pretty bitter cherry in the mouth along with delicious rocks. I liked this a lot, and didn't get the baby aspirin thing I got from it last week. It was freshly opened, which might explain the difference (last week's bottle had been open a few days).

2008 Domaine Alary Cairanne ($20) - 70% Grenache, 15% Syrah, 15% Carignane. Medicinal cherry nose... not quite cough syrup cherry but cherry with some menthol. A bit of clove and cigarette ash as well. Fruit right on the tip of the tongue, along with nice warm spices.... clove, cinnamon, nutmeg. Not much tannin on the clean finish.

2008 Domaine Alary Cairanne La Font d'Estévenas Rouge ($25) - 50% Grenache, 50% Syrah. Aged in neutral wood. Dense dark fruit featuring raspberry and blackberry, with some violet. Spicy finish... not tarry but kind of a plasticky spice (and I mean that in a nice way). Overall a delightful CdR.

Bonus wine:

Domaine des Soulanes VdP des Côtes Catalanes Roussillon "Kaya" Blanc ($20) - 60% Grenache Blanc, 20% Grenache Gris, 20% Carignane Blanc. Granite soil. Light nose of white peach and tropical fruit. Lots of tropical fruit at first in the mouth, then a gentle warm spice and white pepper finish. Nice acids, but there was a little odd Fruit Loop tang in the finish that kind of threw me off.

What did I take home? A bottle of the La Font d'Estévenas Rouge. I already had a bottle of the La Grange Daniel Rouge at home, which I picked up semi-randomly a while ago. We will see how that funk fares in the home environment! I would have taken a bottle of La Gerbaude, too, but they were sold out. I liked it better today than I did when I had it last week. I also picked up a cheap Sangiovese (Mona Terre di Chieti IGT), and l'ortolan (from last week's tasting), since I want to try it again and I was spent all week fretting about not getting a bottle.

Randomly, this week I can celebrate getting the wine coffin's contents back into Excel. I hate Excel but I hate all the online cellar tracking options more. The notebook with numbered slots and pencil (so I could erase and rewrite) was working okay for general insertion and removal of wine, but didn't allow me to see what I had overall without standing there pulling bottles out. I've synced it through Dropbox to my phone so I can be a real nerd and stand down there with my phone, looking for things. Yep, nerdy. If only I could also edit my spreadsheet with the phone!

2008 Domaine la Bastide "Les Genêts"

Picked this up at Weygandt and opened it since I had seen it the day before when I was there, thought to myself "I had that and I can't remember if I liked it or not... should I grab another bottle? oh well" before moving on. Then I got home and realized I didn't remember if I liked it or not because I had not drunk it yet. Duh. So I drank it. I enjoyed it, generally... I'd get another bottle, but now they are out!

Composition: 100% Syrah.

Notes: Dark purple in the glass. Plum, coffee, chewy-something (gamey?) undertone with rock/mineral. Robust, spicy, lots of dark fruit, not much tannin (gum tingling but not mouth drying), but loads of spice. A mineral finish with a delicate candied violet tucked in there.

2008 Familia Zuccardi Vida Organica Torrontés

This is over the hill: my fault. It's not undrinkable, but it's not the way Torrontés usually is or should be, either. It's not as light as the ones I have had in the past, at least. It's kind of blowsy.

I'm not sure where I got it... Whole Foods, maybe? When I found it I first assumed it was a recent purchase since usually I don't have a lot of white wine lingering around (we end up cracking open cheap whites for cooking and then they are history), but it's the 2008 vintage, and the 2009s are out, and, uh, the 2010s, so this is old news. You can't expect much from cheap wine, and I guess I need to start keeping notes on what's in the white wine fridge.

Composition: 100% Torrontés.

Notes: Golden yellow in the glass, it has a fleshy nose of straw, peaches, nectarines, honey, and white flowers. In the mouth, it presents golden apple, some stone fruit, and more honey. It has reasonable acid and some white pepper and almond on the finish, but I'm pretty sure this is meant to be a lighter, younger, less honeyed wine.

Cost: No idea! Less than $10, I'm pretty sure.

Weygandt tasting Saturday 1/22/2011: Fausse Piste

Finally made it to the Saturday tasting over at Weygandt. Hopefully I can do this on a more regular basis... it was really nice. I was not sure about it since it was focused on a single producer, and I miss my old K&L tastings that spanned a bunch of producers, but beggars can't be choosers.

That said, it was a very good tasting. Even if I am rusty. We got to try some wines other than the featured wines that day, and we found some good stuff!

The tasting featured newcomer Fausse Piste winery... the winemaker, 27-year-old Jesse Skiles, is the chef at Owen Roe Winery and somehow fell into the winemaking opportunity a few years back. He's creating very (very!) small batches of Rhone-style wine, doing it the "natural" way: little intervention, native yeast, minimal use of new oak, and avoiding fining and filtration as much as he can.

The wines were pretty beautiful, I have to say. They all had a clarity and purity that I think you get when you have good fruit, let it do its thing, and don't put a lot of heavy oak on it. The Syrah was especially gorgeous.

We also tasted a few odd bottles that were open, and I found a delightful Blaufrankisch. Fun to say and to drink! Anyway, the wines:

2009 Fausse Piste Yakima Valley Viognier "découvertes" ($22) - 100% Viognier. Very subtle, great acidity, with a nice slight bitter almond bite in the finish. A superfloral nose filled with honeysuckle and peaches, with a lot of fruit (golden apples, stone fruit) in the mouth. This hasn't undergone malolactic fermentation, so the acid at the finish comes through fairly strong and clean. Very nice overall, and definitely on the lighter and more subtle side for a US Viognier. (163 cases made)

2009 Fausse Piste Columbia Valley Roussanne "l'ortolan" ($36) - 100% Roussanne. Creamy-soft nose with hazelnut and pears, along with some deep spice. Saline acidity in the mouth, and a nut-and-cream-filled finish. I loved this a lot, even though while we were having it I learned about the French tradition of eating l'ortolan, something I sadly can never un-learn. (Look it up: it's gross, and there is apparently a video you can watch too, but I can't bring myself to watch it. Poor little birds). (19 cases made: there are only about 200 bottles of this out there in the world. That is crazy.)

2009 Fausse Piste Columbia Valley Syrah "ce lieu après" ($36) - 93% Syrah, 7% Viognier. Loads of clear, pure fruit on the nose. Not jammy fruit, not stewed fruit, just fresh plum and blackberry with pepper and cinnamon. Gorgeous in the mouth and not the fruit bomb you might expect. Sure, it has a good amount of dark fruit in there (echoing the clean fruit you can smell), and there isn't a lot of the tar you get with Syrah (just a bit on the finish) but it is a strong wine with good acid and a nice peppery finish. Built like a brick shithouse. (96 cases made)

Bonus wines: these had been opened on Thursday so they'd had a day or two open.

2007 Uwe Schiefer Eisenberg Blaufrankisch ($23) - This was one of those wines that pretty much does it for me. It had the weird meatiness, the sour cherry on the nose and the palate, a subtle smoky thing going on... wow. It smelled like cherry cough syrup, meat, and fur. And I mean that in a nice way. There was a smooth cherry mouthfeel with a bit of smoke, soft tannins that were hardly tannins at all, and a sour cherry finish with some lovely acid. Delicious.

2008 Domaine Alary La Gerbaude ($15) - A crazy nose... fruit leather, licorice, and a weird sweet hint of baby aspirin/medicine at the tail end. Not much fruit in the mouth: rocks, acid, fine tannins (probably partly due to the bottle being open a day).

2007 Domaine la Bastide Blanche Bandol Rouge ($27) - Floral nose with lavender/violets. Cherry in the mouth, what I think of as "Italian" tannins (kind of like the iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove), slightly tarry finish.

What did I go home carrying? I went a little crazy. A bottle of the Fausse Piste "ce lieu après", a different Schiefer Blaufrankisch (the 2008 Konigsberg) that sounded even more delightful than the one I tried, the 2009 Domaine Alary La Grange Daniel (to check it out), the 2007 Font Sarade Vacqueyras (to check out), and a bottle of the 2007 Clos Martinet Menut, which I had a few months ago and it is fantastic, like getting punched in the face, and I need to write it up properly. If I could have bought a case of the Clos Martinet alone, I would have!

2009 Leese-Fitch Cabernet Sauvignon

Ahhh, a cheap California Cab. Well, (technically) mostly-Cab. Cheap 86% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Syrah, 5% Tempranillo, 2% Alicante Bouchet, 2% Petite Sirah.

How I love these. I hardly ever bother with expensive or even mid-priced Cabs since I like the cheap ones so much. Honestly, I don't drink a ton of California Cabernet anyway, but am appreciating it more and more when I do. Even the cheap stuff.

Matt picked this up for me when he was killing time before a Nerd Night (meeting of engineer-types) out in Chaos (Virginia) and I don't know how much he paid for it, but I suspect less than $15, maybe less than $10. It's vivid purple, and smells like macerated berries and dark cherries with a woody component, like cedar. In the mouth it's got a lot of concentrated dark fruit along with some light tannins and a hint of green grass on the finish. The green isn't unpleasant or jarring to me, even though the lingering aftertaste is on the mocha spectrum. It's an easydrinking wine. User-friendly, even the opening of such (it looks like wax, but is cut plastic so you unwrap the base up to the "cork" which pulls out).

We had it with some pasta in gorgonzola cremificato with spinach and it was very nice.

2009 Domaine les Grands Bois "Cuvee les Trois Soeurs"

This was picked up in an attempt to de-Californify the wine cellar. Problem is, I can't buy them as fast as I drink them. Anyway, it's a new producer for me (and "Grands Bois" makes me giggle since I am reading Skippy Dies right now and it is making my fourteen-year-old-boy mind even worse).

Their website tells me the owners are Mireille Besnardeau, the daughter/niece of the original owners, and her husband Marc, who was a maître d'hôtel and now is master of the vineyard. While the vineyards go back to the 1920s, they took over in 1994, and soon after established some vineyards in Cairanne and Rasteau, planting some Syrah and Mourvedre as well. The Syrah shows up in this wine. The wine is, I am guessing, named for their three daughters: Philippine, Gabrielle and Eloïse.

Notes: Bright blue-red color, with a rich nose of blueberry and blackberry fruit. Some herbs in the nose too... thyme and garrigue. Loads of dark fruit and herbs in the mouth, with a spicy finish and a bit of tar, courtesy the Syrah. There is persistent fruit/acid post and some softer tannins. Overall, pretty nice: approachable, but not overly fruity or simplistic.

Composition: 65% Grenache, 15% Syrah, and 20% Carignane.

Cost: $13

NV René Collard Carte d'Or/2008 Peay Pomarium

We had these back-to-back one night. I've been meaning to drink the Carte d'Or for a while now, since from what I understand Collard lets this stuff sit in his basement and then releases it when he sees fit, and apparently his basement is magical and the Champagne is delicious when recently released, but it might not fare well out in the wild. Um, so five years later, I get around to it. I had a few bottles back in 2005/2006, so it's been a while.

The Pomarium was a bottle-of-Champagne-fueled decision (there were three of us so I wasn't totally crazy at that point) based on me realizing I have a lot of wine but not from many different producers. Stupid wine clubs: my diamond shoes are too tight.

Anyway, I have only basic notes on these, and two haiku, but I wanted to note things here since I actually referred to my old Carte d'Or review when we were talking about it (we were trying to figure out how old it actually was) and hey, my notes were actually useful. The haiku is because I am trying to figure out some short-form wine reviews. Haiku? Twitter? Is Twitter the haiku of modern times? Is there a longer-than-haiku poetry form I can take up for reviews, since haiku are a little too restrictive? Things to consider.

So:

NV René Collard Carte d'Or - ($40) (100% Pinot Meunier) (my old notes from 2006 here:

Again, grapes from the 1992 vintage, so this is about 20 years old. It's definitely "old Champagne" at this point... it still has some qualities it had back in '06, but the sherrylike nuttiness is way more prevalent. Dark golden, with the oxidized sherry nose taking over from the earthy mushroom of the Pinot Meunier. You either like old Champagne or you don't, and 1/3 of our party was definitely in the "not much love" camp. I liked it fine, but really wished we'd had some french fries for it. Even Ore-Ida oven fries, which I will be procuring for such an emergency. To sum up:

Not vintage but old
Grapes from nineteen-ninety-two
Golden sherry-shroom

2008 Peay Pomarium - ($50) 100% Pinot Noir. I wanted and expected to love this. I love Peay, I love Pinot, what could the problem be? The problem could be too much oak. I often have this problem with CA Pinot Noir. At first I smelled it and thought, yum, delightful, but as it sat out and we drank it, the oak got more noticeable and it was just too much for me. Maybe we drank it too early and should have waited the 2/3 years they recommend, but I'd think that 2/3 years in the fruit would be even less noticeable than it was. This is the problem with wine... you have to have multiple bottles of everything. Anyway, on the nose it had red berries, mocha, forest floor, and cigar spice, and in the mouth there was some amount of berry and dark cherry, but again, the oaky/cigar/smoke took over and persisted. A little too much oak for me, at least the night we had it. For the money, I can find Pinots I like a lot more... the Williams Selyem offering from the Peay Vineyards is more up my alley (at least the ones I've had in the past have been delightful). (Peay, I still like you...I have a Roussanne/Marsanne I am looking forward to.)

Fancy Cal Pinot
Too much money for too much
oak over cherry