this heaven gives me migraine

2003 Boekenhoutskloof "The Chocolate Block"

Notes: I talked about this wine once before, briefly, but had the chance to have a bottle with dinner when we were just back in DC for a while. This wine is one of Mark Kent's babies, and as far as I am concerned he is The Man for South African wine. Boekenhoutskloof is his main label, but he also makes wine under second label Porcupine Ridge (even though I understand that Porcupine Ridge actually makes up the bulk of production).

I have to admit, I originally thought Mark Kent was The Man because I thought this wine involved the strange and disturbing Pinotage, and I thought anyone who could make Pinotage taste this good was a genius. Alas, the wine contains no Pinotage: just 44% Syrah, 21% Cabernet Sauvignon, 17% Grenache Noir, 12% Cinsault, and 6% Viognier, so consider it Rhone-ish with some Cabernet tossed in there. But I still give Kent points for making a clean wine that doesn't have that intense super-gamey-liquid-smoke-and-dirt core that a lot of South African reds have. Well, a lot of South African reds I have encountered, at least. Only 81 cases were made, so I guess I should get on it if I want to find some more.

We had this with dinner (a simple pasta dish and garlic bread) and it was generally a crowd-pleaser-- not too strange in any way, and very user-friendly. It greets you with a cherry-raspberry-barky nose that has a floral overlay thanks to the Viognier. The Syrah adds some iodine and earth in the nose for interest. In the mouth, Cabernet is at the forefront, with a blackberry-currant flavor and instant tannin/dryness. Then a sharper leatheriness takes over and the whole thing wraps up a meaty finish with some peppery spice. Finally, it leaves you with (true to its name, or perhaps I was influenced by the name) with the lingering flavor of mocha. The wine isn't exactly high-acid but has a nice gum-tingling tannic astringency in the finish that makes up for it. It is also interesting since you can almost pick out the components and tell which grape is responsible for each one, yet all the components are blended into one harmonious wine. This is very much in the spirit of Southern Rhone.

Cost: $25

Overall: A-/B+

2002 Sean Thackrey "Sirius"

Notes: I drank a fair amount of wine over the holiday (2002 Cakebread Chardonnay, 2003 Robert Sinskey Los Carneros Pinot Noir, and a Sean Thackrey Pleiades) but took no notes on them because I was holidaying. They were very delicious, though, I can assure you of that. And on the last day of the year, well, let's go off on a big note and talk about something I have been remiss in posting until now. Here is a nice little love letter to a bottle of wine to end the year.

My love letter is to Sean Thackrey's Sirius, which is his Petite Sirah, and the grapes come from Eaglepoint Ranch in Mendocino. I love Thackrey's stuff but mostly hoard it, and drink the Pleiades (which is nothing to sneeze at) as much as I can. I finally decided it was time to break into a bottle of something fancier. Thackrey's wines are a little crazy, and it seems you either like the crazy or you don't (I fall on the "like" side) and this one was even more wacky and complex than the Pleiades. It was the first red wine I've ever had that had a distinctive mustard aroma, and even though that sounds crazy and wrong, it worked for this wine.

In the glass, the wine is a dark purple, almost black, with purplish red edges. When agitated, it has that yellow mustard smell in the nose, and when it sits around quietly that mustard morphs into gardenia and jasmine (I know! It makes no sense! But it is true!) with a lindenlike candy smell. Under all the mustard and flower there is a solid line of black fruit (berries, plums) with a little bit of nut/vanilla creaminess. The wine assaults your mouth with a wave of concentrated blackberry/blueberry flavor beginning right at the forefront of the tongue, and this rolls around smoothly to the finish, which has some peppery spice and drying tannins. The finish leaves you with an echo of the floral in the nose, and is very good. This is a monster of a wine that has a massive amount of fruit in it, but the acids are well-balanced and there is a lot going on to keep it from being a baked fruit bomb. I would have been interested to see how this fared after a day or so (I will make a resolution right now to spend 24 hours with a bottle of Thackrey wine in 2006 and watch it change) but I have to say it was so tasty we made quick work of it over the course of the evening. Maybe next time....

Cost: $45

Overall: Could it be anything but an A? Nope. Please send five cases immediately.

2001 Chehalem Stoller Vineyard Pinot Noir

Region: Willamette Valley, Oregon, US

Composition: 100% Pinot Noir

Background: I remember that my friend Dan first touted Chehalem wines to me, years ago. He'd had a chance to taste some of them while working at Asia Nora, and tipped me off that they were worth investigation. Because of this, I always think of Dan when I drink Chehalem wines. I've had a smattering of their Pinot Noirs and also their Pinot Gris, and I have had some very long days at work lately, so when I got home tonight I decided to open this up while I made a fig/arugula/goat cheese pizza. I am glad I did. I am also glad I liked it, since (and I don't know if it was me or the wines or both, I suspect both) when I was at Family Winemakers on Sunday I had a streak of Pinots that screamed OAK to me, and not much else, and I couldnt deal with it. But more on that when I write up Family Winemakers.

Aside from the aforementioned oak issues, I have always liked Pinot Noir. It's the first red grape I fell in love with, which isn't surprising since for a few years I thought reds didn't agree with me (one night of a migraine made me superstitious) and only drank white wines. It's a friendly way for white wine drinkers to learn about reds, since it isn't normally monstrous or tannic.

The land on which this particular Pinot was grown is possibly the only connection in the world (and here you werer never even looking for one, were you?) between Pinot Noir and turkeys (live ones, not Thanksgiving turkeys), since it used to be a turkey farm. The folks who own it, the Stollers, are co-owners of Chehalem. The land has other vines planted on it, but the 90 acres of Pinot dominate. 820 cases of this wine were made.

Notes: Burgundy with a paler brownish pink rim. A prickly (if a smell can have a shape), earthy nose full of black and red fruit, with dark chewy earth and mushroom, bramble, and herb. In the mouth it is round and lush with soft tobacco spice, mocha, and cherry, and has more warm spice than tannin on the finish. The acid is very fine and the finish lingers in a pleasant way. Overall, I think it is a very nice example of an Oregon Pinot Noir... slightly dark and earthy, but friendly and delicious.

Cost: $30, but I paid about half that on sale

Overall: I have to say A-, because I wouldn't mind having a case or two of this around.

2002 York Creek Vineyards Tempranillo

Region: Sonoma County, California, US

Composition: 100% Tempranillo

Background: Today is, in essence, the first birthday of Wine Blogging Wednesday, and for this one year anniversary, Lenn challenged us to find (and drink) wine from the closest winery to our house. This took some consideration... did I want to go by closest winery office, vineyard, tasting room, winemaking facility or something completely different? I ended up, after some debate, going with winemaking facility since that seemed most honest to me. I had a feeling I knew where the closest place that actually made wine would be, but I did some Googling to make sure there wasn't anything sneaky that was closer, and then I was good to go.

Fritz Maytag is famous for a lot of things, but York Creek Vineyards is probably not at the top of that list unless you are a wine lover. His family is the family to bring you not only Maytag washing machines, but also Maytag Blue cheese (not that he has ever had much to do with those personally). He is the man behind Anchor Brewing Company (makers of fine beer, rye whiskey, and gin) and singlehandedly brought the microbrew to power in the United States. Or at least made "microbrew" a household word. He is also quietly making wine (and making olive oil even more quietly than that), something I heard about years ago, but never got around to investigating. Which is stupid since I live less than a mile from Anchor Brewing and York Creek Vineyards.

Maytag got involved in the booze business in the mid 1960's, when he was a grad student at Stanford. He was a fan of the local Anchor Steam beer, and when he heard in 1965 that the company was in trouble and about to go under, he bought half of it for a few thousand dollars. Three years later, he bought the other half, even though he knew nothing about brewing beer, and had to figure it out as he went along. The company limped along until 1971, when he launched a reformulated Anchor Steam beer, which became an immediate hit and was so popular Maytag couldn't keep up with demand by the mid 70s.

About the same time he bought Anchor Steam, Maytag (along with his ex-roommate and friend, Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards) tried to set up an effort to improve Chilean wine and agriculture, but that failed (even though Chilean winemaking is in full force now and it seems that they were just ahead of their time). Maytag also bought 700 acres of land closer to home, near York Creek between Napa and Sonoma, and planted vineyards on about 100 of those acres. For years he sold the grapes grown on the land to other wineries (such as Ridge), but he always secretly harbored a desire to make his own wine.

So he started to do just that in the early 1990s (with the help of Cathy Corison of Corison Winery), first using equipment and space where he could get it, then building a little winery of his own in 2000. He started out making only three wines, and, while he makes more than those three different wines now, he makes only small lots and is very much about the process of winemaking, learning about the individual grapes, and experimentation. This Tempranillo is grown for the winery's Port project (something I would also like to get my hands on) and is one of the wines Maytag says he made "just to see".

(Randomly, the label reminds me of the Anchor Brewing Christmas label (also tree-themed) and the 24 trees represented are each varieties of tree found on the York Creek property.)

Notes: This is one intense wine. It's a thick burgundy-black in the glass with a slightly pink rim. The nose is filled with cocoa and tobacco leaves, along with spice and red berry. It's smooth, generous, and mouthfilling, with good acids, a lot of black fruit, and a spicy, smoky finish. There's more spice than tannin in the mouth on the finish. I like it a lot, but I do have a thing for Tempranillo. This is a nice example; inky but kind of friendly.

Cost: $21

Overall: A/A-

2004 Rosé de Calon

Region: St. Estèphe, Bordeaux, France

Composition: Either 100% Cabernet Sauvignon or approximately 55% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot, 15% Cabernet Franc, depending who you believe (I would tend to believe the latter)

Background: Château Calon-Ségur is in St. Estèphe, and just happens to be the northernmost Cru Classé (3ème Cru) in the Haut-Médoc region of Bordeaux. It sits at the heart of what used to be the Calon estate, an estate that once took up most of the St. Estèphe commune. In the early 1700s Nicolas-Alexandre, Marquis de Ségur, became owner of Calon (and Lafite and Latour and Mouton, for that matter) when his father died. He supposedly once said "I make wine at Lafite and Latour but my heart is at Calon" and because of that, the Calon-Ségur wines have a heart on the label (except for this rosé which has no heart for some reason; maybe they thought pink+heart=too much, or perhaps it got lesser treatment since it is a humble rosé and maybe a newcomer to the Calon-Ségur lineup).

The sprawling Calon estate has been chopped up into smaller parcels over time, spawning such other estates as Phelan-Ségur. Madame Denise Gasqueton now owns the existing 123 acres and makes about 20,000 cases of wine a year from the land. She took over in 1995 after her husband Philippe died (this is not a usual occurrence, from what I understand; most wives are unprepared or uninterested and sell instead of continuing the business), first surprising people with her determination and shrewd business sense, and then releasing a 1995 vintage that kicked ass and took names. She's continued to make a lot of solid wines that are not ridiculously priced like a lot of Left Bank wines.

Wines from St. Estèphe can be very intense, rough, and tannic due to the clay and granite soils and usually need a good amount of cellaring to come into their own, so this rosé is your chance to get a Calon-Ségur that you will be able to drink before the next decade!

Notes: This is a chameleon pink... it looks deep pink in the glass, from far away, almost strawberry, but when you tilt the glass it turns pale and becomes a much lighter dusky rose. The nose is forthcoming, offering cranberry and strawberry, and in the mouth it is very dry and full of steely strawberry, the steeliness something the nose hints at but doesn't let you know for sure. It's very intense, acidic, and dry, and a good example of what a rosé can (should) be. I think I want some more, and I can't wait to have it with our yellow cherry tomatoes, garlic, romano beans, and basil over some pasta because it is very hot and I can't bear to cook anything else.

The acid on this is high... I don't mind it on the palate but I have noticed that I feel certain high-acid wines in my chest (similar to the way you feel alcohol warming you, but it is not as pleasant) and I can't drink a lot of it all at once, or I have to be careful to temper it with food. This is one of those wines for me, which is sad because I would like to sit around and drink it all day.

Cost: $12

Overall: A-

2001 Penner-Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir

Region: Willamette Valley, Oregon, US

Composition: 100% Pinot Noir

Background: Tonight we have the second in the mystery lot of discount wines (mostly Pinot Noir from Oregon) I picked up the other day, the same lot that handed me the somewhat unlucky St. Innocent the other night. This time I fared better. This wine is definitely somewhat evolved, but still very tasty.

Penner-Ash is located in Newberg, Oregon, and it looks like they just opened a new sustainable (good for them) gravity flow (who isn't doing that these days?) winery last May, situated at one of their vineyards. They focus on Pinot Noir and Syrah, and dabbled in Viognier last year, releasing it this year. Lynn Penner-Ash is the winemaker, and worked at Stag's Leap in Napa before moving to Oregon, where she made wine at at Rex Hill before buying some land and releasing her first vintage of Pinot Noir (the 1998, and only 124 cases of it) under the Penner-Ash label in 2000. By the time she released this 2001, which is a blend of several vineyards (whereas their other Pinots are single-vineyard offerings), she had upped the ante somewhat, and was making a lot more wine-- 831 cases of this were made.

The strangest thing about this bottle is the very deep punt. If you believed that punt depth determines the price of a wine, this wine would be very expensive indeed. I could almost jam my fingers up to my knuckle into the punt, which prompted a spate of bad punning in the house, and I spent a long time trying to get a picture of it, the results of which you can see on the right. I finally measured it and it was almost three inches deep! That is just strange, and it does make the bottle very fat compared to normal bottles with their puny punts. I guess it is another way to stand out from all those other silly Burgundy bottles on the shelf.

Notes: Medium ruby in the glass, this has a nose of smoky meat, leaves, sweet earth, and some black cherry. It's medium-weight in the mouth with some cherry, earth, and cinnamon/allspice. There's also some slight burnt toast and coffee (just like breakfast!), but not too much. The finish is soft, with little tannin but some nice lingering warm spices and a very very faint cherry cough drop flavor that is lasts a good long time (unlike a wine I had last week which was overpoweringly cherry cough drop flavored). Overall it is very plush and lush and full; hedonistic.

I could put these notes into WSET lingo, which kind of takes the joy out of things but is very thorough and makes me consider things I don't always remember to consider. Perhaps I should do this more often:

Appearance

Clarity clear
Intensity deep
Color garnet
Other core much darker than pale pinkish rim

Nose

Condition clean
Intensity pronounced
Development developing/aged
Aroma characteristics cherry, smoke, tobacco, meat, earth

Palate

Sweetness dry
Acidity low-medium
Tannin low
Body light-medium
Intensity medium-pronounced
Bubbles none
Flavor characteristics cherry, earth, cinnamon, allspice
Alcohol level medium
Length long

Conclusions

Quality good
Maturity ready to drink
Value category high-priced

Cost: $20 (originally $45)

Overall: A-

1998 Rocche dei Manzoni "Bricco Manzoni"

Region: Piemonte, Italy

Composition: 80% Nebbiolo, 20% Barbera

Background: 1976 might have been a good year for the Sex Pistols, but it was a bad year for Barolo. In the Langhe hills of Barolo, Valentino Miglorini wondered what to do with all of his so-so Nebbiolo grapes, grapes not good enough to be made into Barolo. Valentino and his wife Jolanda had only come to the region two years earlier, and he wasn't about to be bound by tradition. He decided to combine the highly acidic and tannic Nebbiolo with the less tannic but still lively Barbera grapes he had around, and put the resulting wine in some new French oak barrels. A year later, "Bricco Manzoni" was born. Originally, the wine only garnered the status of vino da tavola, since the blend was not something that fell within the Barolo DOC, but blends from the area eventually gained the DOC status of Langhe (Langhe Rosso and Langhe Bianco). (And I wonder why, since the same idea in Tuscany, the one that is responsible for Super-Tuscans, still gets only IGT status, which is a level below DOC, but who am I to argue with Italian wine law.)

Rocche dei Manzoni produces 40,000 bottles of Bricco Manzoni a year, which is a lot, especially when you consider that they only make about 50,000 bottles of their four Barolos a year!

Notes: Ruby red in the glass, with browinish-pink edges, you can tell this wine has a little tiny bit of age to it. The nose is decidedly Italian to me, and has a lot of dusty bell pepper, black cherry, and old books and parchment. The mouth has some fleeting dark cherry that is quickly overwhelmed by soft fuzzy tannins, which in turn wrap around a slight spicy peppery bite. The finish is nicely acid and astringent, filled with earth and dust, and lasts for a good length of time, although for some reason I found myself expecting it to hang around even longer. It was slightly tightly wound, and could probably benefit from an hour or so in a decanter, or even another year or two in the cellar, but was pleasant nonetheless.

Cost: $30

Overall: A-

2004 Etude Rosé

Region: Carneros, California, US

Composition: 100% Pinot Noir

Background: Yet another notch in my Pinot Noir/Rosé belt. Of the rosés I have had in recent months, this is my favorite, my weirdness about Etude notwithstanding. I am continuing to try others, partly because this one is pricey for a rosé and hard to get, and partly because, well, what is life without experimentation? I still love it. I can tell I love it because I tend to hoard it and when occasions come up, I debate if they are worth the Etude Rosé. I can't hoard it too long, though, because then I would have old rosé and that could be ugly.

Tony Soter made this wine before, but stopped production about a decade ago. The masses have been clamoring for its return (or he thought it was worth revisiting) and he's making it again- this 2004 version was a trial run of 600 cases. I hear he sold them all, and quickly. Bacar (watch out, silly flash intensive site with a possibly outdated menu/wine list) has this on their glass menu right now, for anyone wanting to try it without serious commitment. It looks like K&L also has a few bottles left.

Etude has been around since about 1982, and is Soter's original effort to make wine, hence the name "Etude" (French for "study"). The focus is Pinot Noir, but Soter also makes a couple of other wines under the label. In 2001, Beringer Blass bought Etude, which Soter says allowed him to expand and improve the winery without going into debt/taking on partners. This move probably also allowed Soter to focus more on his other label, Soter Vineyards, located up in Oregon, and explore his interest in sparkling wine as well as continue his work with Pinot Noir.

Notes: This may possibly be the girliest wine in existence, and I mean that in a good way. It's a very feminine wine... elegant and refined and soft. In the glass it is a clear salmon pink with some orangey glints, and the nose is goregous... all honeysuckle and strawberries with honey and rose. In the mouth it is full of berry fruit, mostly strawberry and cherry, and has a soft finish full of more berry and rose. There is some acid in the finish, but not a ton, and it is silky and pillowy and the flavor lingers for a long time. I think part of the reason I like it so much is that everything is so well-integrated and balanced that it is a pleasure to drink. If you could drink a glass of silk and soft velvet, this would be it. It has a ton of fruit in it, but is not sweet or cloying.

Cost: $18

Overall: A

2001 Celler de Capçanes "Cabrida"

Region: Montsant, Spain

Composition: 100% Grenache

Background: After a hard day of wine tasting at Hospice du Rhône last Saturday, we took a little break and then ended up at Villa Creek for dinner. It seemed like everyone else at the tasting also ended up at Villa Creek, so we ended up eating at the bar. Even though we were very Rhôned-out, we chanced a bottle of wine with our salads and butternut squash enchiladas (which were really good, and I imagine Villa Creek is one of if not the most interesting place to eat in Paso Robles). This bottle won because it wasn't Syrah (I was pretty tired of Syrah at that point, and hadn't actually tasted much Grenache during the day) and it was some fancypants bottle that was part of a lot auctioned off at Hospice earlier and we figured when in Rhône... (har). There were 20 cases made especially for Hospice, which I believe indicates that the wine for those cases was bottled in a special bottle with the HdR logo marked in the glass and then auctioned off, and Villa Creek won the auction. I think we got the last bottle, and they were out of most of their several auction-won wines (and possibly their other wine, considering the festivities had been going on for days at that point, and the HdR crowd loves Villa Creek).

As for the wine itself, the area around Capçanes (right next to Priorat) has been growing wine grapes for a while, since before the phylloxera louse wiped out most of the vines in the 19th century. Few of the vineyards were replanted after that (those that were replanted were mostly Grenache), and some of those vines are still around today, making wine like this.

In 1933, five families making wine in the area formed a co-operative, the Cooperativa de Capçanes, and they now make wine from over 600-plus acres, and bottle it under the Celler de Capçanes label. (And are probably too busy making good wine to make that website anything other than a splash page, but that's okay with me. Just warning you in case you go there looking for info.) They have made improvements to their facility in the last few years, renovating a lot of the rudimentary setup that has been in use since the early 1900s. Back in the 1990's they gained some fame for making a decent kosher wine for the Jewish community in Barcelona, and went on to earn DO Montsant in 2002. This wine is their top of the line Grenache, made from the post-phylloxera-planted 100 year old vines, and is actually a blend of Garnacha del Pais and Garnacha Peluda. The wine spent 16 months in new French oak, and 4,800 bottles were made.

Notes: It was kind of dim in the restaurant, but this is a dark, inky, blue-purple with a pink edge. The nose is all cookies and spices with some sugared leather and crushed granite, and when first opened, I thought the nose was a little soft and closed (this is probably a little young to drink right now, albeit still tasty). It's very refined and elegant, with bright but not overwhelming acids and velvety tannins, and there is a lot of soft spice (but not cloying) throughout... spice like cinnamon and nutmeg. The finsh goes on and on and is all about the rocks-- minerals and more gravel. Some air did it good, and even though we were only able to get through half the bottle that night, it started to expand a little in the hour or two we spent with it. We stuffed it in the car overnight (I didn't want to waste it, and it was cool enough that it was fine and better there than inside with us) and hauled it home in a cooler on ice the next day, since it was hot, and that night it was a little more open and just as delicious, if not more so.

Cost: $60 at the restaurant, which actually seems to be close to the going rate for the stuff (I am finding from about $50 to about $75 online).

Overall: A

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+