A Miscellany of Mature Red and White Wines

Diane and I are in the process of bringing home the wines that we have stored off-premises for many years. Just having those goodies nearby has prompted me to – shall we say? — look into them, just to see how they’re doing. So far I have been very happy with the results, so here is a kind of interim report on some of the cellar gems whose corks I’ve pulled recently.
.

Luis Pato Quinto do Moinho 2000
.

.
This is a big, big, big wine! Coffee and currants in the aroma were followed by a rush of semi-soft tannins, black currants, berries, and coffee in the mouth. This single-vineyard Baga feels strikingly larger than its modest 12.5% alcohol would indicate. It’s not hot, but mouth-filling and complex, with a lingering coffee/berry finish – in all, a fine, distinctive wine. It went nicely with a risotto of mushrooms, onions, and Spanish chorizo. The cheese course (Pont l’Eveque and Taleggio) brought up all the wine’s sweet fruit.

Vinified from 100% Baga, an indigenous Portuguese grape, and by one of Portugal’s most renowned winemakers, Luis Pato, it seems to have decades yet in front of it. It strikes me as a great wine in all respects, and markedly different in flavor and accent from Spanish, French, or Italian reds: A strong reminder that I must pay more attention to the wines of Portugal.
.

Col d’Orcia Brunello di Montalcino 2006
.

.
As its name implies, Col d’Orcia sits above the Orcia river, in the extreme southwest corner of the Brunello zone. Its 108 hectares of Sangiovese grosso vines consistently yield one of the best Brunellos of the zone, and this one is no exception. It opened with a rich, vinous, cherry-and-earth nose. On the palate it felt big but soft and tasted of black cherry and tar/tobacco, very deep, with a long finish.

This was an excellent wine, very elegant and balanced, as I’ve come to expect from Col d’Orcia. Its fruit was very rich, almost sweet, combining youthful zest with mature depth. Clearly, a wine to enjoy now and for at least the next ten years: Col d’Orcia just seems to go from strength to strength.
.

Sartori Amarone Corte Bra 2004
.

.
Sartori is a third-generation, family-run winery. Its vineyards are in the heart of the Valpolicella zone, and it handles its vines and grapes in a very traditional manner, resulting in Amarones of great character. This one had an almost-Port-like aroma, big with dried fruits. On the palate, it showed soft and velvety, with fully mature and deep fruit flavors. Concentrated black plums predominated, but different layers showed as it opened in the glass or followed a bite of braised duck or vegetable.

True to Amarone style, this was a huge wine, but well-mannered. As it grew and grew in the glass, I found my wine-speak failing me, and all I could think of to say was “What an incredibly winey wine!”  When I lose language, you know the wine is amazing.
.

Three great red wines. Now, I realize that August isn’t the ideal time to be writing about serious red wines. But as a concession to the season, I also opened some older bottles of white wine – including one you probably wouldn’t expect.
.

Fontana Candida Frascati Luna Mater 2012
.

.
This was lovely, fully live and fully mature: no primary fruit flavors, but plenty of mature ones — guava, spiced pear, mace, and more. It showed wonderful balance and smooth, mouth-filling flavor, plus a long, sapid, refreshingly acid finish of dried white fruits. As fine a mature white wine as one can imagine, it was delightful with olive bread and big cheeses.

Who knew Frascati was capable of this?  I at least should have: I’ve been preaching the gospel of the quality and longevity of Italian white wines for a long time, and I should have realized that the grapes that go into Frascati – Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia – undistinguished as those may seem to be, are just as capable of yielding top-flight, long-lived wines as any other Italian white grape, when they are selected and treated with respect and care. A bottle like this one is certainly proof of that.
.

Paumanok Minimalist Chenin Blanc 2014
.

.
I had wrongly listed this wine in my storage sheets as Paumanok’s basic Chenin Blanc 2019, and so, without looking very closely at the bottle, I chilled it and served it with a very simple meal – which it totally blew away. I hope this was just my ordinary befuddlement and not the first sign of senile dementia.

On behalf of the soundness of my senses, I can say that from the first sip I realized this was a special wine – as, at last, an attentive look at the label quickly confirmed. Paumanok Vineyard’s Minimalist wines are vinified from specially selected lots of grapes, often left a little longer on the vines to attain complete ripeness, and then handled minimally in the cellar so that in the bottle they show the grapes and the soil, not the winemaking.

This bottle was maturing beautifully but still quite fresh, with classic Chenin fruit, dry and chalky yet still floral and hinting variously of apple and especially pear: a wonderful wine from Long Island’s North Fork, which perfectly captures the essence of Chenin Blanc. I’d guess it has years of life still before it. In my opinion, with Chenin Blanc, Paumanok does as well as or better than any American winery on either coast. My erroneous listing betrayed me into an unexpected treat. Would that all my mistakes were so lucky.
.

Benanti Etna Bianco Superiore Pietra Marina 2012
.

.
Benanti is a leader in fine Etna wines. The family firm has been totally committed to quality production on Etna for decades now, from long before Etna became celebrated and fashionable. For many of those years, Benanti’s winemaker was the now universally acclaimed Salvo Foti, and he consistently drew the best from the fine properties that Benanti farmed.

Pietra Marina is one of the most important of those. 800 meters up the eastern slope of Etna, planted entirely to Carricante, the indigenous white grape of the volcanic zone, Pietra Marina’s grapes yield juice of delicious concentration, capable of long life and steady maturation. This exemplary bottle was just plain lovely, mineral and fresh and bracing. It started with a beautiful aroma of dried pears and little hints of apricot. That followed through on the palate with some apple joining the fruit chorus, all buttressed by a tingling minerality, and all held in a wonderful balance of fruit and acid. For all the richness of its flavors, it was a restrained wine, not at all aggressive or assertive, but completely welcoming. I kept thinking as I drank it that I would really like to taste it alongside a grilled fresh porcini cap – hard to find here in New York, but maybe worth the flight to Sicily for.

Just for the record: Pietra Marina is capable of much greater aging than this 11-year-old. I’ve been lucky enough, during several visits to Benanti, to taste 20- and 23-year-olds that were totally fresh and live and as lovely as this bottle. Great terroir, great variety, great care, and great talent: it all makes a very great wine.

Read Full Post »

On the Fourth of July, We Drank America Great

This year’s Fourth of July frolic made a bit of a challenge for me. I’m happy to say that I – and the wine resources of the USA – rose to it.

Diane’s blog has already recounted the saga of the all-American dinner that we put together for the good friends who guided us around Venice. My role in the festivities was to arrange wines to match with those dishes: not a simple task, especially for one whose palate and whose cellar (I use the word loosely) run more in the direction of Europe than toward the great continent that lies just across the Hudson. That’s right: I don’t even live in continental United States, so you can see the depth of the challenge.

What solved the problem for me and made our Fourth of July drinking great was, once I realized it, quite simple: immigration. Just about every single wine grape in the United States is an immigrant, naturalized against the native plagues of this continent by being grafted onto the roots of indigenous American varieties. And many of the people who convert those once-foreign grapes into American wine are immigrants too, first- and second-generation citizens adapting an Old World skill set to American circumstances, producing wines with discernible European ancestries and unmistakable American accents. Is that a fable for our times?  You tell me.
.

We started with a wine that is a Champagne in everything but name: Gruet Brut, a lovely sparkler made in New Mexico (yes!) from the traditional Champagne varieties – Chardonnay, Pinot noir, Pinot meunier – by the traditional méthode champenoise. Gruet is a family-owned and -operated winery, founded in 1983 by the late Gilbert Gruet, whose family made Champagne in his native France. The original vineyard (it has since been joined by two others, all now run by Gilbert’s son and daughter) lay over 4,000 feet up in the windy hills near Elephant Butte Reservoir.

All the Gruet wines show the classic Champagne characteristics, so this is the wine to use if you want to have some fun with a know-it-all friend. The one we drank with hors d’oeuvres launched our evening perfectly – cool, brisk, elegant, and refreshing on a warm and humid July Fourth evening. The thing that will really astound your know-it-all friend is that all the Gruet sparklers, even their brilliant Blanc de Noirs, retail for about $20.
.

With a delicious and almost stultifyingly rich Crabmeat Maison, we drank a wine a bit more local (and not from mainland America either), the 2016 Minimalist Chenin blanc from Paumanok Vineyards, on Long Island’s North Fork. Also founded in 1983, and family-owned by Ursula and Charles Massoud, Paumanok specializes in several French varieties. Long Island has no hills to speak of, but it does have breezes from both ocean and sound, and those, combined with dense plantings of 1,100 to 1,400 vines per acre, give Paumanok’s wines all the concentration and character they need.

For my palate, its greatest successes are two Loire valley varieties, the red Cabernet franc and the white Chenin blanc. In France, the latter grape makes Vouvray and the great Savennières, which the chalky minerality of Paumanok’s Minimalist Chenin suggests to me. This is a lovely wine – made, alas, in limited quantities – that worked wonderfully with the crabmeat, its complex leanness playing beautifully against the sweetness of the crab.
.

With our lordly rib roast and profusion of farm-fresh salads, we turned to the west coast and Ridge Vineyards, perched 2,300 feet up in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. By American winemaking standards, Ridge is practically an old-timer:  It got started in the 1960s, and from 1969 onwards, for more than 40 years, its winemaker was the masterly Paul Draper, a genius of what Ridge now proudly calls “pre-industrial winemaking.”

Ridge is famous for its great Monte Bello Cabernet, but what it does with Zinfandel and other less regarded varieties is equally remarkable. Our 2010 Petite sirah (actually probably Durif, a variety now not much grown in California and almost entirely neglected in its native France) showed amazing complexity and subtlety, with many different elements emerging from its basso profundo of bitter chocolate to mesh with the varying flavors of our main course.
.

With four very distinctive cheeses, we drank a 2010 Ridge Geyserville – a blended wine named for its vineyard because no one of its several varieties is present in sufficient quantity to justify a varietal name under California law. This lovely bottle contained 64% Zinfandel, 20% Carignane, 12% Petite sirah, 2% Alicante Bouschet, and 2% Mataro (as Mourvèdre is commonly called in California).

This was a big wine – 14.3% alcohol – but nevertheless supple and elegant. It played wonderfully with the cheeses, which differed widely in texture, flavor, and intensity, adapting itself quite comfortably to each. I’ve always loved Ridge’s Zinfandels, and I prefer to drink them at around ten years of age. This gorgeous example was a perfect illustration of why.

Zinfandel has become so established in California that many people think of it as a native American grape. This capstone wine of our Fourth of July feast is a perfect example of an Old World variety (it’s closely related to Italian Primitivo and allied Croatian and Slovenian grapes) transformed into a classic New World wine. Happy Fourth of July indeed! Thomas Jefferson would have enthusiastically approved.

Read Full Post »