Dr Vino's wine blog

Eyebrows arching, James Halliday spots an opening and intercepts the ball. He dribbles to the other end of the court, pulls up for a jumper right before the three point line, shoots, and scores! Orlando over the Lakers at the buzzer!

Okay, Halliday, the 71 year old former vintner and author of some fifty wine books, wasn’t really in the NBA finals. But a tasting last week in the Barossa Valley did showcase some of Australia’s most amazing wines of all time. By showcasing talent old and new, it was kind of like one of those sports questions about who would be better head-to-head, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar vs LeBron James or Hank Aaron vs A-Rod kind of thing. While the younger wines showed some flash, for me it was the seniors that stole the show. Read more…

The whole concept of Pinot under $20 is enough to make some Burghounds shudder. But it is a topic of recurring interest to everyone at the Dr. Vino World Headquarters with its high concentration of frugal pinotphiles.

I recently had the $19 Nicolas Potel 2006 Bourgogne rouge and found it a great value, lean, old world pinot. In previous vintages, I’ve enjoyed value Pinots from Austria (e.g. Stadlmann) and Italy’s alto Alto Adige region (e.g. Hofstatter) as well. And I’ve had some good new world Pinot under $20, such as the “H” Pinot Noir from Hamacher in Oregon. (search for these wines)

What about you? Have your say in our latest poll!

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I’m back from the fantastic Landmark Australia Tutorial. Above is a picture of (some of) the wines opened during the tremendous five days. Yes, it’s 249 bottles of wine on the wall!

Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be posting on and off some of highlights of the conference/event, sharing my new found knowledge. Really, I could post about each and every session since they were all so interesting and informative. But I’m not turning this into an Australian wine blog (though I do wonder why there isn’t one of those focusing on the lesser-known wines; it could even be called “beyond the fruit bomb”). If you’d like to have a similar experience applications are apparently now open for the Tutorial in 2010.

After the jump, check out the above lineup in motion as I walked down the line with the video rolling. Also, check out a complete list of wines, broken down by session. Read more…

One question that led me to Australia is whether Australian Riesling can age. The wine is almost always released within a year of harvest so the tendency is to drink it young when it can be very refreshing. Riesling from Australia tends to be dry and is almost always bottled under screwcap now.

The youngest Riesling I’ve tasted was a tank sample of the 2009 Jacob’s Creek Steingarten Riesling. The Steingarten vineyard was originally about 1000 vines planted in the 1960s at the top of Trial Hill, a windy spot on the edge of the Eden Valley. At the outset, it was a single vineyard wine of tiny production. But now although most of the vines come from an altitude of 500 meters, it makes no claim to be site specific; the Steingarten name is a brand. The tank sample was brimming with citrus intensity but not yet really formed as a wine. The 2005, by contrast, was in a very nice spot, exhibiting more muted lime and floral character. The 1998 was oddly phenolic and, while quite solid, not as rewarding today as the 2005. Read more…

Okay, these wines have little to do with each other besides being red and under $20. Oh, and they’re tasty and balanced. And suitable for throwing in your basement with 90 days’ worth of canned food. (canned beans: an impossible food-wine pairing?)

De Forville, Dolcetto d’Alba, 2006. (about $17; find this wine) I’m not always a huge fan of dolcetto, aka “the little sweet one” but, perhaps more aptly, “the little tannic one.” But this one really struck a chord with truffle and earthy notes and a good balance of acidity, fruit and tannin. Second day open, just as good, which is always a good sign. Importer Neal Rosenthal’s site has some more specs on this family producer; I picked up this bottle at Pasanella & Son.

Nicolas Potel, cuvee Gerard Potel, Bourgogne, 2006. (about $19; find this wine) Given that Potel is a leading negociant house in Burgundy and from several tastings of 2006 red Burgundies, I was optimistic that this wine would work out when I added it to my virtual shopping cart. It did. Dark fruit aromas, good acidity and tannins make this a standout in that rough-and-tumble category of pinot noir under $20.

Domaine Bernard Baudry, “Les Granges,” Chinon 2007. (about $17; find this wine) Bernard Baudry is one of my favorite Loire producers of red wine and offers consistently good values across the line. Even in 2007, a difficult year for some, was strong at Baudry. This “Les Granges” has good depth and succulence, which combine to make it a natural match for unadorned grilled meats–or even those cans of beans. This wine was also going strong on day two…On a related note, the Baudry 07 Clos Guillot bottling, alluring, fresh and vibrant with a great crack of pepper on the finish, bears mentioning. But since it costs $27, we’ll have to talk about that in another post.

Oxidative wines are an essential wine tasting reference point. Too much oxygen during winemaking (or bottle aging) and a wine becomes oxidized, a flaw; just enough and it is oxidative, a sort of nutty character that people generally love or hate. In my multi-week wine classes, I always try to pour one, usually a sherry, just to provide the distinctive tasting experience. Since we’ve been talking about reductive wines and screw caps recently, the other side of the coin (barrel?) should receive a little love here too. And why not a vin jaune from the Jura?

Located about half way between Dijon and Geneva, the pocket-sized region of the Jura makes some of France’s most distinctive wines. At a recent trade tasting, I sampled a few of the wines from Domaine Berthet-Bondet, a winery founded by Jean Berthet Bondet on the relatively New World time frame of 1985. The Cotes de Jura Chardonnay 2006 is matured in neutral oak barrels and has a vein of minerality so rich it would out Chablis out of business if the world craved minerally chardonnay.

But the piece de resistance was the 2000 vin jaune (a type of “vin de voile” ) from the micro-appellation of Chateau-Chalon. Made entirely from the Savignan grape, the wine is matured for six or seven years in small neutral barrels, which are intentionally not filled all the way nor replenished (as barrels usually are to replace the “angels’ share” that evaporates). This creates further exchange with oxygen. But a film of beneficial yeast forms on the surface to moderate the oxygen exchange and prevent it from heading on a crash course to becoming vinegar. The aging happens in a well-ventilated room so there are wide temperature fluctuations through out the long aging. A complex wine emerges from the process, with aromas of walnuts, dried apricots, daisies. The nutty finish lingers for hours. Really. Truly a wine of contemplation. The oxidative process girds the wine for decades or centuries in the cellar.

Unfortunately, the wine sells for north of $100 for a 62cl bottle (find this wine). Their Cotes de Jura Tradtion 2003 provides the oxidative wine character, but at a fraction of the price (about $22; find this wine). I’d try both with Comté cheese.

Now if only we could come up with a sexier term than “oxidative”!

I’m in an undisclosed location where rum is cheaper than Yellow Tail.

We have the good fortune of being on a family vacation in the tropics. But what’s a wine lover to drink?

If you’ve read my book, A Year of Wine, you’ll know that I’m a fan of pairing wine with context, which includes the food, the mood, and the people. So if you’re on sun-drenched vacation, it’s easy to insert any wine, be it fetid or feted, and you’re bound for a great time since the setting is ideal, right? Perhaps. But this trip, I brought my own to make sure we had a good pairing.

Seeing some space in one of our bags, I threw in three wines from the Loire: two bottles of Muscadet and a bottle of Gamay. Low in alcohol, with refreshing acidity, and all under $15, I thought they would do the trick nicely when we grew tired of umbrella drinks and beer. (You can tell I am a wine geek since I was probably the only one bringing alcohol to the islands as opposed to returning with bottles–although I don’t rule that out.) I put them in a three-bottle wine shipper and they were still refreshingly cool to the touch when I unpacked. So I kept them that way by putting them all in the fridge on arrival.

The real stand out was the Domaine de la Pepiere, Clos des Briords, 2007 (about $15; find this wine), a superb wine in its own right that I’ve mentioned before. Throw in a sunset, 80 degrees, grilled fish, family and you really have a perfect wine moment. I rate it 100 points.

What’s one of your 100 point wine moments?

Ulli Stein has made a forbidden wine for decades. The Mosel winemaker still makes the wine, but it’s now allowed by law. In fact, he’s the only person in Germany with the right to make it.

The wine in question is a so-called vin de paille, or straw wine, made in miniature quantities. This sweet wine has its origins in the Jura, the Alpine region of France, and gets its name from the straw mats that the grapes are dried upon for months after harvest and before a long fermentation (Stein said his takes 12 months). Germany has many sweet wines, of course, but the sweetest wine of all, the Trockenbeerenauslese, gets its sweetness from the distinctive botrytis rot.

The lanky, hirsute Stein told me yesterday that covertly made his vin de paille for decades and labeled it as a Trockenbeerenauslese, as you can see in the picture. But he wanted to make it legally and brought the issue to a German judge, who turned down his request based on the 1971 German wine law, which claimed that grapes in the vin de paille were not fresh enough. Stein appealed. The next court turned him down. Eventually he appealed to the European courts and won the right to make vin de paille from the 2007 vintage. He added the court granted him the exclusive right in Germany to make vin de paille.

The 2003 that I tasted is a lovely, rich dessert wine. If I were a judge, I wouldn’t ban it.

As to the other Rieslings in his portfolio, they are all very good and interesting. But the standout for me was the Stein Bremmer Calmont Riesling Spatlese Trocken 2007. The delicate, slight sweetness (7.5 grams of residual sugar–all natural) embraces a vital core of acidity and minerality. Very nice.