this heaven gives me migraine

2005 Ridge Buchignani Ranch Carignane

Dug this out to have with some curry. Usually I am not a big fan of Carignane, although I am coming around... for some reason a lot of Carignanes have a back-of-the-tongue bitterness I don't like. This one didn't have that, and while I didn't love it, it was drinkable for the most part.

Composition: 100% Carignane.

Notes: Chewy, jammy raspberry nose with bramble and some dry leaves. Still a generous amount of sweet-seeming fruit in the glass, despite its couple of years in the cellar. Some warm spice at the end. A clove and anise finish, but not anything by way of tannins. Not much of the hard/bitter back of the throat thing I usually get from Carignanes, which was a nice surprise. Pretty simple overall: nothing complex, but pleasant enough. For me personally, I found it a little too extracted and jammy and the sweetness was a little much for my liking. That, however, didn't keep me from drinking it over the course of two nights. It held up well and was pretty much the same the second night.

Cost: $25/30

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.

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

2004 Williams Selyem Flax Vineyard Pinot Noir

Finding out about Williams Selyem has been the only good thing ever to come out of an in-flight magazine. Matt read about them and Davis Bynum when he was flying across the country back in 2000 or so, and since the wines were supposedly awesome and getting on a list to be allowed to even buy the wine was a new challenge (yes! a complicated way to spend money!), we got on the list. Yes, this is one of those places where you don't really ever see the wines except for restaurant wine lists and places that sell acquired cellars, because they don't sell in stores and only sell through the list. They let you know what your allocation is twice a year (it's based on how long you've been a member and how much you buy) and you can buy some or all of it as you choose. I think you get dropped if you don't buy anything for three releases, but don't quote me on that.

Anyway, about a year after signing up we got accepted to the list of people who can buy wine, as opposed to the list of people waiting to be on the list of people who can buy wine, and so we got our first bottles. And declared Williams Selyem to be the King of Pinot Noir (usually just "King Pinot") for at least California. Sorry, Etude! Their wines are consistently delicious and elegant and dangerously poundable.

Aside from burritos and the weather, the twice-yearly Williams Selyem pickups at the winery are one of the things about California that I miss most. I hear they have a fancy new facility that allows for tastings and pickups now, and probably have fancy real bathrooms and not fancyish (for porta-potties) porta-potties, so it's never going to be the same again as the old can-do setup they used to pull out for pickup days. I used to enjoy watching all the rich people with huge allocations dealing with these squalid conditions in order to pick up their cases and cases of wine. Me, I don't mind fancy porta-potties and can't ever really afford to buy my whole allocation, but I do what I can. They ship to DC so I've kept up with them, unlike some other wineries like Ridge.

Notes: Dark burgundy in the glass, with toast color at the rim... it's got a few years sitting around, although it's not truly old by any means. Big alcohol nose (after being open for a while that blew off), dark fruit, light earth, minerals, and warm spices. Loads of fruit in the mouth, concentrated, with a dry, intense, bittersweet chocolate cherry finish and tingly acids. Overall it is delicious and I wouldn't kick it out of bed, although I like some other WS offerings better. This has a lot of what I think of as dry spice, and the earth isn't that wet, dark, mushroomy earth that I love, but it is still quite lovely. It's 14.4 percent alcohol, but feels like more to me, probably because I am tired and you could knock me over with a feather right now, let alone a bottle of wine.

Cost: $54 when I bought it a few years ago in 2006.

Overall: B+

The night of wine disasters/2005 Scholium Project "Satrapies of the East"

So, I guess I am back, or trying to be. Here's the quick recap of why I have not been around:

1. I got pregnant, which puts a big old kibosh on the wine drinking, at least for the most part. I can't say I didn't have a little now and then but when I did have it I was too busy being amazed and wistful to take any notes.

2. I had a (very cute) baby, which puts a big old kibosh on thinking in any coherent manner, even though I have been carefully drinking wine (oh boy, some nights I wanted to slap a nipple on the wine bottle and just go to town) once we weren't nursing every two hours. Anyway, I was too tired to think straight. In fact, some days I am still too tired to think straight. So bear with me.

Anyway, it's almost my birthday, and for my birthday my husband paid to get my blog out of Typepad hock, something I have been sort of meaning to do but I felt like I needed to have a Plan of some sort to bother doing. In fact, I guess I needed to get the blog out of hock first, and then just, well, figure out whatever. I'm not sure what I will do, and if I will be so completist about every little thing I drink, since that can be a bummer (it's sometimes hard to enjoy a bottle when you have to spend an hour taking notes and researching things and writing about it) but I'll figure something out.

So. Last night, knowing all this, I decided to get out an interesting bottle I've been meaning to drink, but have been saving for some occasion. The occasion was that I got a notice from them that they have some new releases, and well, I could write about it here, while I try the bottle and decide what to order from them next. Perfect! I could figure out if I wanted to get more from the producer AND write about a crazy fabulous bottle of wine.

Not so much.

So I haul out the bottle. The 2005 Scholium Project "Satrapies of the East". The Scholium Project is the baby of one Abe Schoener, and this was somewhat of a popular curiosity out in California a few years ago. I picked up two bottles when I was out there about 3 years ago... we drank the white a while back, and it was okay but not overly memorable, which I thought odd given the fact that this guy is a renegade of sorts. I liked him in theory since he was kind of self-taught and his wine was very polarizing... people either loved it or hated it. It sounded to me as though he was following in the footsteps of Sean Thackrey (what are you doing, Sean Thackrey? Not making wine, I can tell. Come back, we miss you!!!) in that he did things "all wrong" and still ended up with some interesting stuff.

Needless to say, I had some high hopes for this bottle, even though the other bottle was not all that unusual. This was a RED! It would be DIFFERENT!

Satrapies of the East is a red blend, and the first blended wine for The Scholium Project. All the wines used were wines that couldn't merit their own release. It's a roughly half-and-half Cabernet Sauvignon/Syrah blend, with some Merlot and Petite Sirah thrown in.

Sounds good, but the problem was, the minute I poured it, it was all acetone on the nose. Really intense acetone. I tried to get past it, and noted some raspberry/perfumey quality under the acetone, along with some black cherry Kool-Aid. I drank a little, and it was like a smack in the face (at least the first sip was)... not much fruit to speak of, save some sour cherry, and a lot of spice. Also a lot of acid and oak (hence the spice).

So here's the deal. Acetone is a fault. So we couldn't really drink the bottle. We tried, but it was just not happening. The wine would smell decent if you let it sit undisturbed (and you could get some more of the perfume/real aromas and understand what the intent possibly was), but the acetone would leap out the minute you swirled or tipped the glass. I'm not sure if I got a bum bottle or part of a bum batch (and with acetone I would think it would affect all the wine in the lot, but I see some reviews elsewhere online that indicate the wine was drinkable: I do not understand this) but it sucked. It's of course all part of the joy of wine- sometimes you get a bad bottle- but it makes me a little leery about trying more wines from The Scholium Project. Even if I love their wine descriptions and approach. We will see.

Our bartender friend next door came over because we were all "come try our fabulous wine" and he brought some wine, too. After this bottle we had:

- a decanted box wine I can't remember the name of, but it smelled like coffee beans and had a strange fishy finish, ick
- I also opened a bottle of the 2001 Bonny Doon Barbera/Nebbiolo and it tasted like Bovril. A lot of the old Bonny Doon wines taste like gravy to me, and I can't drink them, and this was no exception

Luckily for him said friend didn't go far for this spectacle. He also brought a bottle of the 2006 Vina Robles Red4, a Syrah/Tannat/Touriga/Tannat, and that saved us. It was a little rough around the edges and not very elegant, but it was flaw-free and I was happy to drink it given what we'd been through.

Next up: I BS my way into a Loire tasting! Nothing like some trial by fire to get things interesting!

Sokol Blosser "Meditrina" II

Notes: This was actually sent to me (hooray for free wine) and it was exciting because I like its white-grape sister, Evolution 9, which is fun to drink. So this is an interesting wine to check out, especially since I didn't know it existed. This is the second release of the blend (indeed, you can know that by the tiny "II" on the label), and this year it is 48% Pinot Noir (most from the Sokol Blosser vineyards in Oregon), 39% Syrah (from Lodi in California and Columbia Valley in Washington), and 13% Zinfandel (also from Lodi).

It's very bright ruby in the glass and it looks young and fun. Nose of chlorine swimming pool, blackberry, and black cherry. As it warms up, you get more of the Pinot Noir in the nose: an earthy black cherry smell. There is a snap of CO2 when it first hits the tongue, which chills out once it sits out for a while, and then Zinfandel dominates the mid-palate with a sweet spice and fruit, and the Syrah dominates the backend, with a tarry black lingering finish. Nice acid, lots of fruit, some pepperiness and astringency at the finish, not much tannin.

It's totally a fun and easy-drinking red... not challenging, not strange, not anything but spice and fruit and, well, okay, a little chlorine swimming pool (which isn't a fault in this instance, I don't think, even though it could be: it's just something I picked up, which seems to have turned into Pinot Noir funk and spice once a little air got to it). It's also got a cute label even though I kind of hate myself for even thinking that, let alone saying it here. The snappiness on the tongue is slight and even though I don't love that in a red wine (I like it in whites) it wasn't overbearing or horrible.

I should probably give this a B+, but, like everything else in my life right now, I find that I am vaguely dissatisfied about wine. I am not even sure what it is I am looking for, but everything seems to fall short. I guess right now my glass is half-empty. But this was at least a tasty half-glass of something.

Cost: $18

Overall: B/B+

2003 Ridge Lytton Estate Late Harvest Zinfandel

Notes: This is something odd for me, a bottle of Ridge and I have no idea from where it came. Either this was a semidrunken purchase at the winery at some point or one of my ATP shipments (which, upon further investigation, it is). I probably should have let it age another year or two before drinking it. Oh, hindsight. But it was a Friday night after a long week of walking specs and filing bugs and sometimes you want something ridiculous and fruity that doesn't go at all with the pizza you end up eating for dinner and well, it just happens. I am a little tired of opening funky/corked/somehow bad French regional wines and this was a promise of something clean and simple and drinkable.

Anyway, it was pleasant company while watching bad movies. Well, a bad movie (hello, Red Eye).

And, since it was an ATP wine, that means I have another one socked away in storage so I can wait a while and have that when it is a little more evolved and I can do it up properly with a cheese plate, the way it should be had.

Deep ruby in the glass, purple red. The nose jumps out at you; bramble, hot blackberry and strawberry, with some toasty wood mixed in there. Slightly hot, alcoholic nose which isn't a surprise considering it is late picked (some of the grapes were almost 32 brix when picked and the wine itself is 16.1% alcohol). Mouthwateringly fruity when it hits the palate, full of raspberry. Clear raspberry with a somewhat minty/eucalyptus finish. Slight tannins and dryness, but not much, and the finish is mostly dominated by a vanilla flavor (the wine was aged in 20 percent new American oak, which explains that). The wine has 2.6 grams/liter of residual sugar, so the finish is definitely on the sweeter side even though it isn't overly syrupy or desserty.

Cost: $26

Overall: 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 Uvaggio di Giacomo "Il Gufo"

Notes: Jim Moore makes wines under this label and, as Italian sounding as the label is, it just means "the blends of James" in Italian, and he uses Italian grapes, but he is in Napa Valley in California (he previously worked at Mondavi and Bonny Doon). I picked this wine up because I had his Il Gufo rosato at RAP last summer and liked it a lot. ("Il Gufo" is Italian for "owl", and, as you can see, there is an owl on the label.) 758 cases of this were made, and, as is fairly common with Barbera, it is a blend of only 90 percent Barbera with 10 percent Nebbiolo tossed in, something I think you can tell mostly in the finish.

Ruby red in the glass, pretty youthful-looking with a slightly pink rim. The nose is very woody and smells of tobacco, spice, and loads of black fruit, along with hot summer bramble and a little raspberry. It's slightly hot on the nose. In the mouth it's very fruit-forward, with lots of jammy blackberry and black plum, followed by a slightly woody finish that has a trace element of blunted bitterness. It leaves your gums tingling and your mouth watering (gotta love those acids!), and sticks around for a nice long time. It's not an overly complex or fancy wine, but is fun. This would be great if you were having pasta or pizza or even hanging out and grilling burgers.

Cost: about ten bucks

Overall: B. It's not complex, but tasty and fun, and I would keep a case of something like this around for guilt-free drinking.

2004 Bonny Doon Grignolino d'Asti

Oh, what to say. I haven't been drinking much. Why? For once, I am not sick.

We are presently buying a house. A first house. A house 3,000 miles away. A house in need of a lot of work. Needless to say, this has been taking up a lot of my free time and meager mental powers, and when I am not thinking about all that, any drinking I have been doing has been of the stress-release and drink-to-forget variety and I haven't necessarily been doing anything other than going "yum" and drinking. I have been going through periods of sleeping 4-5 hours a night, waking up at 5 AM, and have been even losing weight because of the immense worry that has, even though I have been eating normally, done something to me (I imagine that being actually awake for about 19/20 hours a day has something to do with that). Right now I'm interested in cork mostly in plank form, to put down on the kitchen floor. And I am worrying/investigating things like "how to move a wine collection across the country (safely) without going broke in the process". You know, fun things like that.

Anyway, wine of the immediate and drinking sort. I have some things to write about later, but right now, at the last minute, I am attempting to at least participate in this lovely Wine Blogging Wednesday number 16, hosted by Derrick of An Obsession with Food. This month the challenge is to see whether the pretty outside means tasty inside, and find a wine with a good label.

Even though my first thought was Ridge, because they have fantastic labels (simple, text based, and dating back to the 1960's) I chose this wine because it has a Gary Taxali label, and I love me some Gary Taxali. This is a slightly more sedate label than some others he has done for Bonny Doon, but it is great nonetheless. Even if I am not sure what exactly it is. I am a sucker for a good label, even though I am under no illusions that it actually indicates good wine is inside. I have had some really bad wine in nicely labeled bottles, and some really good wine in dreadfully labeled bottles, so it goes both ways.

The wine itself is a Grignolino d'Asti, from Piemonte in Italy (this is one of Bonny Doon's wines made from European grapes), and the name of the grape variety is supposedly derived from the fact that the grape is one with many pips. It's a light but vibrant clear ruby in the glass, with a paler orangish edge. It was pretty funky directly out of the bottle, with a medicinal smell of old Band-Aids (not as bad as you might think), but as it sits it is getting softer, and now has an aroma of old chair leather, thyme, and violets. It's much bigger and more full-bodied than you would expect from the color-- robust with a good amount of drying tannins and nice acidity. There is a clear thread of cherry red fruit woven though the tannins and the expected leathery/iodine overtones, and overall it is very pleasant, although not overly complex. It's a funny combination of refreshing and tannic.

I have had some really bad Bonny Doon wines with great labels (like the Freisa), but happily, this one is nice and I will be glad to drink the whole thing later on. Later on, while I am learn more about cork flooring and homeowners insurance.

Cost: I think it was around $15 or $20

Overall: B