Dr Vino's wine blog

Chenin blanc is one of the world’s most underrated grapes. Beautifully multifaceted, it displays multiple forms: dry, off-dry, sweet and sparkling. It can tack on decades effortlessly. Here are a few more-or-less current releases that I have had recently (all on separate occasions) that are worth noting. (Search for these wines at retail.)

Domaine du Closel, La Jalousie, Savennieres, 2006. $18 I poured this wine with some apprehension at an event for 75 people recently. Would the gathered crowd “get” the wine? In fact, the color alone got them, as the golden wine appeared in their glasses. I polled them after tasting, and to my amazement, only two people disliked the wine–chenin blanc with such low negatives, it could run for office!

Domaine Laureau, Savennieres: Damien Laureau, aged 39, is not only the father of six children but also an up and coming star of the Savennieres appellation. Although he owns no vineyards in the appellation, he has long-term leases on two that he farms organically. I recently had the 2005 Les Genets bottling, which is aged for 18 months in vat. The wine is deliciously aromatic, layered, and complex on the palate and has the kind of lingering finish that tingles even your bones.

Domaine Aubuisieres, cuvée de silex, Vouvray, sec, 2008 $18: really a gorgeous example of chenin–and a good value too. Enticing aromas of honey and white flowers, delicious mouthfeel combining acidity and minerality in a wine with six grams of residual sugar, barely above the threshold of perception. Bernard Fouquet, somewhat controversially, bottles this wine under screw cap but my bottle was not showing any sign of reduction.

Francois Pinon, cuvée tradition, Vouuvray 2008. $17. Another great value Vouvray. I really liked the 2007s, so was a bit disappointed how closed and tightly minerally it was on day one. But on day two, the wine really opened up and was soaring. Although it’s not labeled as demi-sec, it is and has a superb texture. Also of note: Pinon’s sparkling Vouvray (now with a new label design) is a perennial excellent value at about $17.

Domaine Huet, Le Mont, Vouvray, sec, 2007 $22.50: This legendary estate recently changed distributors and I picked up some bottles of this wine for an amazing price. The wine is really packed with minerality, acidity, medium weight, has an excellent arc and shows very well today since it has yet to hunker down for the long haul in the cellar. I’m doing a dinner for 200 next month and have put this wine on the menu, paired with halibut.

Domaine Belliviere, Jasnières, 2006. Along the northern fringe of the Loire, starting about ten years ago, Eric and Christine Nicolas have helped revive winemaking in the tiny appellation of Jasnières and surroundings. They have planted some new vineyards and also own some with over 50 years of age. (The two wines tasted here come from the younger vineyards.) The long, fluted bottles of Belliviere may make you think Riesling. But this is chenin through and through. The 2006 “Les Rosiers” (about $29) bottling is a serious wine and that possesses quite a layered structure mainly of the honey on rocks variety. Consider decanting. The 2006 “L’Effraie” bottling comes from the nearby Coteaux de Loir appellation and is slightly more accessible at this stage–I had it with a homemade spinach pizza and it worked well.

If you were invited to a sumptuous dinner at your friend’s boss’ house and had to bring the bubbly, would you bring a grower champagne or a better-known label?

That was a question I confronted head-on last week. Grower champagnes are a great story, since the wines are made in limited quantities by those who grow the grapes, not the norm in the region. But in the glass, they can be off-putting to mainstream drinkers since a trend in grower champagnes is to have low or no dosage, a jigger sweetness added before bottling. This can make the wines unbalanced and searingly acidic–or electric, vital and food-friendly, depending on the wine and where your tastes fall on the hipster axis. Further, grower champagnes lack the widespread name recognition of some of the big labels so some hosts may discount the unknown. Not to be superficial…but champagne is among the most brand-centered of all wine categories.

Would this gathering of non-hipsters appreciate the merits of good grower champagne in the glass and not miss a well-known label? I thought yes, given that they were wine enthusiasts, but I also thought they could find out for themselves.

So I brought two Champagnes and poured them blind. In the grower corner, I poured the Vilmart Grand Cellier, a multivintage wine (but based on 2006), a blend of 70 percent chardonnay and 30 percent pinot noir, all organically farmed on the 26 acres. After some deliberation in the aisles of Astor Wines, I opted for the Vilmart since it has a small dosage and is barrel-aged, for a bit more richness, perhaps better for an aperitif and for going against a grande marque. I also poured the 1999 Moët & Chandon Millésime blanc, perhaps not the best comparison given the age discrepancy, but it I figured it to be a reasonable effort form the bigger name.

The Vilmart was lithe with complex aromatics, good acidity (but not off-putting!) and a lovely arc. The Moët was more rich, round and certainly more mature and relied on weight than on subtlety. Everyone recognized them as quite different wines. More than one person in the group suggested they would be good for different occasions, such as with food or as an aperitif. I polled the group before revealing: four preferred the Vilmart while two preferred the Moët (with two not stating a preference). Everyone enjoyed the comparison. So maybe the moral of the story is to simply bring two bottles.

A couple of months ago, we had a discussion about what makes a great, independent wine shop. Here’s a bit more about one of excellent example of a neighborhood shop: Thirst Wine Merchants in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Michael Yarmark, born in New York, moved to San Francisco where he did a Masters in English literature at SF State. While living in the Bay Area, he met Emilia Valencia, who was working front-of-house at a restaurant. Together, they came to know the wines of Steve Edmunds who makes wines from Rhone varieties under the Edmunds St. John label in the East Bay. They eventually discovered the retail shop for the importer Kermit Lynch, which Michael describes as a turning point in their wine journey that led them to seek natural wines from independent winemakers.

Moving back to New York, Michael got a job as a sales manager for a book publisher while Emilia continued working in restaurants, including at Franny’s in Park Slope. Michael says that they liked shopping for wine at many of New York’s independent shops–and a handsome display of the corks they pulled while living in NYC attests to that diversity. Michael says, “it represents our thirst and our quest.” But they wanted something closer to their home in Fort Greene.

So in December 2006, they opened Thirst Wine Merchant. The 500 sq ft store stocks about 500 different wines, all with a natural bent, onto curved shelves made of biofiber (wheat) and sustainably harvested birch. The well-curated selection, strong in wines from the Loire, Burgundy and Italy, features many wines from Kermit Lynch as well as other importers and some domestic wines.

If you stop by the store, you’re likely to meet Michael or Emilia since they only have one full-time employee. When I stopped by last month, Michael was there and a $13 natural chardonnay from the Languedoc was being poured in the store. Prices are reasonable, especially with 5% off six bottles and 15% off case purchases. They also ship but don’t have inventory on their website. You can check it out in person or on my map of NYC wine shops.

Store info and photos after the jump: Read more…

SPIT: paying bills
A few years ago, the New Yorker profile of Gordon Ramsay let drop the nugget that wine was the real profit center at The London. Now, in what is a sign of different times, two New York wine distributors, Wineberry and VOS Selections, have sued Gordon Ramsay’s The London for about $40,000 each for wines sold to the restaurant. The new “F” word: finances? [NY Post but see also Grub Street for Jamie Oliver’s taunting of Gordon Ramsay.)

SPIT: red wine stain remover
Bruce Willis has also been sued over wine, in this instance, for returning a rug with red wine stains in it. Bruce, here are some suggestions for the next time: white wine, salt, Wine Away, hydrogen peroxide and dishsoap. Willis denies the spill happened while the rug was in his possession. [TMZ]

SIPPED: controversy down under
An Adelaide business paper publishes a scathing opinion column on the state of the Australian wine industry, using the lens of the National Wine Centre of Australia.

SIPPED: fashionista box wine
Vanity Fair discovers box wine. Will it soon be available for Gwenyth, Gordon & Co at The Waverly Inn?

SIPPED: new terms
Southern Wine & Spirits, the wholesaler with $8 billion in revenues according to Forbes, seeks to restructure $2 billion in debt.

All around the world tonight, members of the Wine Century Club will meet, give their secret handshakes, then raise glasses of Lacrima di Morro, Pedro Ximenez, Assyrtiko or other esoteric grapes in an annual, in-person tasting.

Formed five years ago by friend-of-the-blog Steve De Long and his wife Deborah, the club now counts 721 members who have made the quest. I qualified a few years ago. And I give out the sheet in my classes as a fun challenge to participants.

What exactly is the challenge? To drink wines made from the grapes of 100 grape varieties. It may sound easy at first but I have seen many people hit a wall around 70 varieties and then start scouring their cities for tastings of Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese wines (since all those countries have abundant grape varieties). Some members have gotten so into it that there are now doppel-centurions, a treble- and even a quadruple-centurion!

It’s a fun quest to get out of your wine rut, celebrate diversity, or just to learn more about wine. Check out the application materials here to get cracking tonight. There’s no cost to join and you even get a free certificate on qualification. I raise a glass of poulsard to those who give it a shot!

SPIT: extortion
In what seems to be a caper ripped from the pages of a Peter Mayle novel, a bumbling criminal tried to extort Domaine de la Romainée Conti for about $1.5 million by threatening to poison vines at the revered estate. [Telegraph]

SIPPED: good times?!?
The Silicon Valley Bank released their annual report on the California wine industry. It strikes a surprisingly optimistic tone: “We are forecasting improving conditions in the fine wine business. The trading-down trend will end this year.” But they caution that “Wineries selling sizable production above $50 will again find 2010-2011 a difficult time.”

SPIT: non-wine resveratrol
GlaxoSmithKline paid $720 million for a start-up company that was developing a “red wine pill,” or a concentrated dose of resveratrol developed by the red-wine hater David Sinclair. Reuters reports that clinical trials of SRT501 have been suspended because of “unexpected safety events.” Back to red wine for all your resveratrol needs? Just don’t end up like the guy with the mouse from the NYer.

SPIT: flattery
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but we wine enthusiasts are not amused by a Greenpoint (Brooklyn) coffee shop charging $12 a cup, which even led the Post to compare it to a glass of wine. Note: it’s not really like a glass of wine unless you can send it back if it’s corked.

SIPPED: wine keggers
The SF Chronicle reports on the continued rise of keg wines. Quotage from Matt Licklider of Lioco: “Fine wine isn’t the exclusive domain of bottles anymore.”

The euro hit $1.28 this morning, down from $1.51 in December. Does the lower euro mean that European wines are likely to get cheaper on store shelves soon?

While European travel will definitely be cheaper today than it was six months ago, wine importing doesn’t always work like that. (As a backgrounder, I examined wine and currency hedging when the dollar was headed the other way a few years ago.)

I tweeted about today’s currency situation and importer Jon-David Headrick replied in two tweets, at first joking, “This is our big chance to raise Cour-Cheverny prices by 30%!” (Cour-Cheverny is a tiny Loire appellation making wines from the obscure romorantin grape variety.) He elaborated: “Prices should fall unless importers have made the time-honored “when the euro falls you can raise prices” deals with producers…”

For a longer reaction, I put the question to Victor Owen Schwartz of VOS Selections who has been importing and distributing European wines–including Greek wines–for 23 years.

Yes it is low today but you know it doesn’t make sense to price one’s wines on the lowest spot rate of the day; what happens when it shoots up, do we just raise the prices? the market would love that! The level of volatility in the euro has been terrible, it’s a moving target. As you say, it has been over 1.50 in the not so distant past so if I am buying wines today and paying in 60 days or so, where will the euro be then? All that being said, with everything that is going on in Europe, starting with Greece, I believe that the basic metric of the euro assumption of importers will be decreasing. Now will that translate into lower prices on the shelf? My sense is that the wholesale trade will use the extra margin to make better buying opportunities for their retail and by-the-glass customers (volume deals) but not necessarily lower their prices. In these cases from what I have seen, some restaurants and retailers pass on the savings, some keep it. Don’t forget that #1, we are coming off of some rather lean years and #2, we are all selling less expensive wines so we need to make money somewhere.

As to the Greek situation, he said that “the impetus for exporting will only be that much more important.”

Hit the comments with your thoughts on the situation, especially if you are in the wine trade.

Vin de table lies at the bottom of the administrative heap in France: it’s derided, dirt cheap and sold in supermarkets by the flagon.

Paradoxically, however, producers who dare to do something different are all-too-often ending up in this undifferentiated tier. (I detail more of the shortcomings of the appellation process in my book, Wine Politics.) Although quality producers in Italy make wine outside of the DOC system, the French have clung with surprisingly fervor to the AOC system as relatively few have left, in large part fearing the stigma of vin de table.

Chateau Palmer, the “super second” classified growth from Margaux, does not appear to fit the profile of one to buck the system. But that’s what they’ve done with their “XIXth Century historical wine.” Apparently, blending syrah from the Northern Rhone with Bordeaux was fairly common in the pre-appellation controllée era, particularly in weaker vintages, to result in a wine that had been “Hermitagé,” so-called after the celebrated region that produces fine syrah.

To make the Historical wine, winemaker Thomas Duroux blends barrels that were otherwise destined for Chateau Palmer with no more than twenty percent syrah from “friendly” (but unspecified) sources in Hermitage, Cote Rotie, and Cornas. Although it has been produced only in 2004, 2006, and 2007, the label legally can’t state a vintage as a vin de table, so instead they rely on the microscopic font of the lot number, 20.06 in the one I tasted last week. The wine is nothing like shiraz, cabernet, merlot blends of Australia, but it’s not really very Margaux either since it is fuller and richer and showing more of the syrah character now. Of the 250 – 300 cases made, the chateau is holding back 50 cases for a minimum ten years to see if the wine changes back to show more of the Margaux character. Priced the same as Chateau Palmer ex-cellars, this isn’t your typical vin de table.