Synchronicity

Hey all,

My friend Allison Vidug, who I've mentioned before, has also been taking the WSET course, just in a different place.  We've been writing about a lot of the same things!  Here's her fantastic Riesling article to enjoy.

She also covered The Other King, a free industry Cabernet Franc tasting that I hosted last weekend at Vineland Estates Winery.  I thought I should also post about it, since we all got into some great discussions while putting the variety under the scope.

Who Reigns in the Cellar?

As I've gotten more and more into wine and tried to evolve as a taster, it's been a pleasure to go to wineries and taste things from a couple of different vintages.  Some places offer back-vintage wines to taste, the ones with on-site restaurants usually have things that have been stored, but I do get a lot out of trying a lineup of things from the same producer.  When the selection is expanded to include the same vintages from other producers and then further out to completely different regions producing the same varietal, we can establish a clearer picture of the many expressions of the variety or style.  I'm working on building up a collection, but it's still fun to have to search a little bit for the older stuff.

This is what I tried to do with the The Other King, focusing on a variety that plays a supporting role in some of the world's most famous premium reds from Bordeaux.  Here, its crown bears some polish because we can do a different things with it: dry red, rosé, Icewine and late harvest.

I'm sure I've written about it before: we face issues with ripening fruit and overwintering vines, and Cabernet Franc is no exception.  It does have some edge in the second category, but in cool years we find ourselves extending hang time into November, hoping like hell that the sugars will climb to meet standards.  Or, we could make rosé wines.  Sadly, these aren't as popular as big reds.

I like looking at Cabernet Franc as a kind of time capsule for wineries and regions.  Because of its later ripening, wines can be so differently structured between years.  There's always something that points to the vineyard site and winemaking process, and it's also interesting to try and pick out Winemaker A's Cabernet Franc in a blind lineup.  You can tell how they update their technique as they experience more and more vintages at a place, as well.  

The variety prompts me to learn more about bottle aging as well.  Once you've completed the winery stage of élévage, all that's left to do is bottle it.  Winemakers entrust that wine to that bottle and closure, we are at the mercy of the glass and cork.  I'm not talking too much about alternative packaging here: as always different vessels serve different purposes.  I've seen plenty of successful wine aging under screwcap too.  Over time, the tannin structure will collapse, new levels of scent and flavour develop, and the only way to see what it's doing is to open that bottle, ending the process and finishing a spell to be cast on the senses.

Where is this wine going?  Everyone has different opinions on what to do with these wines, and predictions about the development, and that really comes with experience and tasting.  It's always exciting to see something evolve.  It's romantic to buy a few bottles from a time or place significant to you, and keep them during the days that you each change, and then meet back up at a single point. 

Synchronizing Assessment

Within the wine industry, you can choose from such a variety of jobs.  At an event, combining people that work in retail with people that work in production is always interesting; adding enthusiasts that work in other fields also adds to the mix.  If I could take each's perceptions of the wine and chart them, I would have additional dimensions of tasting the wine; it provides a 360-degree view of the glass (as long as it's not corked).  Where are my blind spots as a taster?  Where is my own focus, and why do I focus preferentially on these specific elements?  Now, what aspects did I not consider before discussion?  Extending a wine tasting experience outside of just your own perceptions is a very rewarding thing.  Wines should be made to promote discussion, and this helps facilitate the exchange and expansion of ideas.

We've talked a lot about "calibration" in WSET, too, seeing where our sensitivities lie as tasters and how we can write up tasting notes that are a little more standardized.  My medium acidity is someone else's medium-minus acidity; maybe I'm just more sensitive to it.  My perception of the alcohol in hot-climate reds is something that I usually find to be out of balance; to someone more familiar with the style this can seem perfectly integrated--in relation to the other elements.  There isn't an absolute "medium" tannin, but we can kind of get close to establishing one as we taste in a group and discuss where on the scale we each have placed a characteristic.

Here are some things that I jotted down while doing the blind lineup on Saturday.

The Other King

Flight #1

Wine #1  2009 Pondview Rosé (Niagara)

Nose is clean, fresh strawberries open up to give strawberry-rhubarb pie notes with underlying floral qualities.  Clean, zippy acidity, florality and juiciness with lots of fresh mixed-berry flavours and a little added weight on the palate.  Finishes medium with jam and fruit tart flavours.

Wine #2  1995 Henry of Pelham Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

This was the only large-format bottle in the tasting at 1500 mL.

Nose is clean, with coffee ground and cedar aromas leading to cooked dark fruit, tea, BBQ spices, with the oak carrying through to the finish, medium length.  Tannins have softened, but structure remains clean.  Pretty much drinking at peak.  

Wine #3  2002 Vineland Estates Reserve Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

Nose is clean, plentiful raspberry and chocolate notes, cake spices, lots of oak-derived flavours, cocoa powder and nice dry tannins (skin tannins, aged).  Faint violet notes too.  Very pretty wine, this was one of my favourites from the lineup.

Flight #2

Wine #4  2007 Rafael Cabernet Franc (Long Island)

Nose is clean, vegetal aromas dominate (leafy).  Dried cranberry and oak dominate the palate.  Drying tannins (skin, stem and wood, young).  Finishes with the leafy aromatics revisited and tarragon.

Wine #5  2009 Domaine de Matabrune (Bourgueil)

Nose is clean.  Carbonic characters of candy apple/maraschino cherries.  Pleasing acidity and bright red currant fruit; this one's fun and approachable, very different varietal expression.  Finishes shorter, kind to the palate (washes away some excess tannins).  Acidity definitely "driving the bus", nice cleanser between wines.

Wine #6  2007 Henry of Pelham Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

Clean nose that is smoky and serious.  Oak spices dominate but blackberry fruit appears mid-palate to finish, vanilla and chocolate flavours, very drying tannin structure.  Wrestles with me now, certainly has aging potential.  Pleasing extract, focused ripeness and length.  I may have a bit of a lean to this wine anyway, but a lot of tasters tonight agreed that it also was a favourite.

Wine #7  2007 Vineland Estates Reserve Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

Clean nose with roasted tomato (ripe) and tarragon.  To me this wine has a lot of the hallmark Cabernet Franc herbaceousness, with nice spicy oak and appealing red bell pepper aromas.  Later: here we discussed the aspect of volatile acidity and how it lifts aromatics at some thresholds, while appearing as a fault at others.  This always varies between tasters.  I didn't find the volatility to be offensive in this case.

Flight #3

Wine #8  2005 Henry of Pelham Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

This one was faulted with cork taint; going to re-taste at the next event.

Wine #9  2008 Santa Margherita Cabernet Franc (Veneto)

Nose is clean.  Nice complexity here, fresh and fried fruit aromas both appearing, spicy, focused and intense.  Nice texture, tannins are smooth in spite of youth; there's a pleasing little burst of acidity right on the finish with a hint of florality.  Some coffee bean and whole white peppercorn coming around on the nose now, luscious raspberry fruit.  This one is delicious!  Later: This one had lots of fans, and is a hell of a steal at $13 a bottle.  I was really happy with how it showed.

Wine #10  2005 Vineland Estates Cabernet Franc (Niagara)

Nose is clean.  Chocolate, orange peel aromas and noticeable legs.  Chocolate cherry flavours, complex with fruit, oak and faintly animal scents and flavours (clean, leathery).  Nice mid-palate weight and the structure shows some potential for further holding.  It's smoky on the finish (on the longer side of medium); smoked meat aromas some out with some darker fruit.

Capping Off the Weekend

Of course, my weekend couldn't have been a complete Cabernet Franc overload without matching a fresh bottle of the 2005 Henry of Pelham Cabernet Franc to a gigantic stuffed red bell pepper, topped with bacon and dressed up with balsamic vinegar and cracked black pepper.  I can't wait to pour this one for those of you who attended Saturday, so I'll keep my tasting notes until then!

Thanks for reading!  Cheers,

Melissa

Totally Lives on Red Peppers

Requiescat in pace

Dear food processor:

I was careless.  I'm sorry.  You left this world too soon.

--Melissa

Some more information:  It fell off my freezer because of a thin layer of water and my slopey apartment floor.  The container's handle shattered into tiny pieces, simultaneously breaking my heart and laying out a destructive field of plastic shrapnel with a taste for the vulnerable skin of fresh, pink-bottomed feet.  My new hand blender has a blade + processor container, but it's just not the same.  We had so many good times pulverizing things together (mostly white beans with olive oil and asiago cheese). 

So, here's to my Black & Decker countertop food mulcher.  May you turn many things into delicious paste in the appliance afterlife.

Love,

LabGirl with Beetle Hair

My Love-Hate Relationships

Hey everyone,

In class on Tuesday, we tasted through what I lovingly refer to as the "unpronounceables," wines from Germany, Austria, Hungary and Greece.

These ones usually send wine consumers running back into the warm, comfortable arms of California Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz from Australia--but they're missing out.  Very tentative acceptance has been occuring for wines like Gruner Veltliner and Xinomavro outside of the connoisseur circles, but sometimes wines are still a tough sell if you can't even say the name properly.  Gewurztraminer still hasn't really gained momentum because of that, no matter how they've been matched up with trendy Thai and Vietnamese dishes touted in magazines--and these rarely even breathe a word about its versatility with cheeses in the case of medium-alcohol examples.

The thing is, these wines are usually quite stellar examples of that mysterious concept of terroir, the loosely translated French term for "sense of place," which in southern Ontario we equate with steely, minerally whites that show off that limestone-bedrock-derived flavour profile.  I can see how tasting gravel in the glass may not be winning too many folks over, either.

A Word on Varieties 

The world of wine has seen so many viticultural innovations over the years that we can plant almost anything almost anywhere.  In 1985, plenty of vinifera were still being summarily executed each winter by Mother Nature, and Syrah (Shiraz) was incredibly bad at surviving more than five years.  Sadly, it still struggles in the more brutal winters.  As with anything agricultural, we just had to see what worked, and where.  It cost us a lot of money in the region.   Growers were forced to replant and rely on crop insurance in poor years.  We tried to take a competitive stance in the $12 and under price category with Baco Noir, Vidal, Marechal Foch, and Seyval Blanc, but we admittedly didn't initially know how to make these well either.  Most of our issues came down to cropping level--how much fruit we left to ripen on the vine--and also winemaking techniques.  Few wanted to spend the money on these varieties even if they could--they were acidic, one dimensional and structurally fell apart over just a few years.  That isn't something that you want to happen in a wine that sells slowly.

Just as it's kind of hard to define "traditional Canadian cuisine," it's also hard to call one particular grape variety our own.  We in Niagara still don't really want to take ownership for Baco Noir, it has a recovering reputation that still attracts sneers from even the most "open-minded" wine consumers.

We do make some varieties consistently well, however, and the top white is certainly Riesling.  It ages well, can handle the cold, and does not need to hang in the field for a long time to accumulate sugar.  It makes gorgeous wine in every style--sparkling, Icewine, late harvest, dry and off-dry table wines--I've tasted some that were older than me, and still alive and kicking in bottle.

While I can parade around all day with my Niagara Riesling banner, I have to say that German Rieslings express something which I can only refer to as terroir maturity--these vines have been in the ground for a long time, and those vineyard sites tell stories that span generations.  German wineries have been crafting Riesling at its best for hundreds of years--the first documented usage of the grape occuring there in the 1400s.  The winemakers know their site, their soil; these wines have layers and dimensions that one may not expect to be found in an aromatic white.

When I say "ageability," I'm not joking--mid-priced German Rieslings that have had 7 or 8 years of age still retain fresh, bright citrus characters ranging from fresh lime juice to confit lemon peel to grapefruit rind.  All forms of tree fruit: quince, Granny Smith and Golden Delcious apple, Bartlett and Bosc pear, clingstone peach; again ranging from peel and flesh flavours to baked, poached, caramelized flavours.  There's more mysterious aromatics too: gunflint, honeycomb, candlewax, petroleum, lamp oil or kerosene, latex.  You can see almost anything in a glass of Riesling, it's an entire world. The well-made ones will play with you: in the first sniff citrus may dominate; five minutes later it's a pretty, floral, honeyed creature; a couple minutes after that, wet gravel and apples.  It's hard to talk over a wine like this: it draws contemplation (of course no two are created equal--and that's the best part).

I would like to talk about Austria in another post, because I need to taste some more Gruner Veltliner, the main white variety.  This is one of my favourite aromatic whites, and luckily it's recently become fashionable, so we'll finally be getting more examples in the LCBO (...maybe...?).

A Little Love-Hate 

There is one part of the class that I had an issue with, and that was when we got to Greece.  I did a lot of reading on the wine-producing areas of the country before class, and since it was last up we didn't really get a chance to talk about it very much.  I did get a lot of valuable information from the instructor, but I was pretty disappointed by the red that we tried, a variety called Xinomavro.

Characteristic of hot-climate reds is high alcohol due to high sugar accumulation in the berry.  There's lots of sunshine, and as sugars load, acids can in turn drop quickly.  This one had luckily retained the acidity, but oh man, did that booze ever burn.  The fruit I found there wasn't plush, and lively; it was dried and straining even from the background.  I tasted asphalt, cigarettes, and smoked meat.  I didn't have a very good impression of it.  I've tried some really neat Greek wines, and an aromatic white called Assyrtiko is also reportedly a fantastic terroir grape, but the Xinomavro just wasn't doing it for me.

Part of our tasting note is a comment on the development of the wine, starting with its current state and finishing with a note on where we think it's going.  The question is, if that fruit flavour is already in this dried-out stage, where can it go?  I didn't know, and my enthusiasm for what was in glass had kind of burned out.  Part of the notes that I took in class read, "long elevage in barrel and bottle," which means that the wine had some oxidation and likely a lot of oak contact before it reached critical me, and it showed in the flavour characteristics.  I still can't rule this out as a failure by any means, just because the winemaking style doesn't fit in with my own approach, or those that I've worked with.  It's extremely rare for me to actually dislike a wine style, and instead of tossing the hot climate reds off the ledge, I should be stepping up to them and getting to know where they've come from--then I think I can see where they may be headed. 

I may take a few reds to cellar and assess them over a few years in order to get to the bottom of it--the only thing I could see carrying this one any further in the cellar would have been the acid.  Would the alcohol dominate even more as it aged?  Everything I that know about aging reds could not paint me a picture for this wine's future--admittedly, I haven't tasted tons of aged reds, and those I have tried have been almost entirely older Bordeaux and Niagara Cabernets.  So, I graded it harshly.  My instructor was really forgiving towards me for that, but pointed out that he thought it was interesting because it wasn't just a big fat fruit bomb, or entirely predictable in the terms of a cool climate frame of reference for aging, which I've taken to heart.

I think I can certainly get behind these ideas, and it does give me ambition towards discovering my blind spots as a taster.  I'm here to learn about this as much as I can, and part of that is taking the plunge into the great unknown bottles, even if I don't "get it" at first.  I used to hate Sauvignon Blanc too, and I didn't even "get" that wine until I actually made it under the instruction of a winemaker from South Africa--a place where this variety appears in the upper echelons of quality and popularity.

My encouragement for all of you, then, is to take a wine; a region, variety or style that turns you off, and try to understand what may be going on behind the bottle.  There may be a discovery lurking beneath that cork, so don't write it off right away.

Slainte!

Melissa

Explorer of Worlds of Wine