Bubbly!

Well, I'm back after traveling for the Christmas holiday, and what a lot of champagnes and sparkling wines have been tasted! I'm sorry to report that I wasn't able to take notes on some, but I managed to jot down or remember a little bit from 2 champagnes and 3 sparkling wines that I tasted over the course of a solid week of revelry. So here we go:

Duval-Leroy Brut: Was good, but not the most memorable. Dry, peaches? but not a lot of fruit, rounded flavor. This one was a little hard to remember because I drank it at about 11pm on Christmas Eve, and so had plenty of other things on my mind. :-)

Piper-Heidsieck cuvée Brut: Mmmm, tasty. Very crisp, lots of big bubbles. Apricots, bread dough, something herbal. Again, I spent more time enjoying it than analysing it, this one having been opened about an hour before Christmas dinner. We drank it as an aperitif for the whole family. The only complaint: there was only enough for everyone to have just one glass!

Ferrari Brut: To be honest, I don't remember a whole lot about this one either (and lost the notes I had on it), but I remember enough to tell you that it was darn good and thinking that I would buy some for myself if I found it at the price my mother got it for: $22, which was exceedingly reasonable for the quality of the wine. Sadly, I'm not sure how easy it will be, since the local wine shop had it for sale as an introductory promotional offer. It's always like that isn't it? They get you hooked and then they make you pay!

There was also an unfortunate incident with a sparkling rose that was sweet and had a strong smell of sulfur that drowned out anything else about the wine. It was like drinking a pink fart. I wish I could find the notes where I jotted down the name, so I won't ever make the mistake of buying it.

A very nice surprise, for a reasonable everyday wine price ($12), was the Gruet Methode Champenoise Brut. Green apples, sourdough bread, very bubbly with small bubbles. (The small bubbles in this one were an interesting comparison to the big bubbles in the Piper-Heidsieck.) I highly recommend this if you want a good sparkling wine without breaking your wallet's back. To be honest, I liked this one better than the Duval-Leroy, in spite of the modest price. The wine is from New Mexico, something I thought was kind of weird, but now I know better and will be keeping my eye out for more from the Gruet winery.

There was also a bottle of the infamous Gallo creation André, which my my ne'er do well college friends mixed with orange juice for mimosas, a perfect choice for such a raucous event. A little bit of peach schnapps in the mimosas put extra color in our cheeks. I have no idea how the wine itself actually tasted, but we had a hell of a lot of fun drinking it. (chuckle)

So there you have it, a rundown of the champagnes and sparkling wines of Christmas week. As you can tell, they ran the gamut. I'll admit, at the start of that week I wasn't much one for champagne or sparkling wines, but now that I've had more practice I've acquired a better appreciation and a genuine pleasure in drinking them.

Vocabulary

Okay, so I'm pretty new to all this (and in fact this blog is an effort to make myself learn in a structured manner.) One thing I do towards this goal is surf wine sites for the vocabulary to describe what I am tasting. The reason for this is complex, but I'll take a stab at explaining it.

So far, the best advice about tasting wine that I have heard is that being able to identify a smell has to happen before you can describe it. The funny thing about identifying smells though, is that it is easier to do when you have a long list of possible smells in your head. It's sort of like how answers are much easier come up with on a multiple choice test than on a test that makes you fill in a blank. By building a large wine-tasting vocabulary, a person makes tasting wine easier because examining a wine is more like multiple choice than fill-in-the-blank. This all sounded kind of silly to me until I tried it, and eureka, it really does work!

Anyway, all of this explanation is a lead-up to this lovely quote: "Cork-tease: someone who always talks about the wine he or she will open but never does."

A Little Bit of History

I'm pretty busy today, so I'm just going to post a nice link about wine history with some great photos, including one of the world's oldest container of wine. (Some residue remains inside the bottle!)

I'll catch up tonight!

Napoleonic Cavalry Officers - Party Animals

I've never seen this, though I hope to at some point. Champagne Sabers It strikes me as a completely brutal and lunatic way to open a bottle of champagne, but wow, I bet it's a helluva show.

One of my mother's presents this year is a bottle of Piper Heidsieck, and you can be sure we won't be hacking at it with butcher knives! (And I promise to attempt a report on the flavor, though I'll be risking my life if I bring a notepad to the Christmas dinner table.) On a related note, I've actually been to Reims, the city where Piper Heidsieck got its start, and the home of many fine champagne companies. The gothic cathedral there is every bit as stunning as its reputation.

Creme de Cassis - Black Currant Cordial

I'm drinking a cassis Lambic ale. Lambic is a Belgian-style ale, not exactly a beer in the way we usually think of it, usually done with a fruit. Cherry and raspberry are the flavors more commonly known in the United States. Lambics -at least the ones I've had- are light, sour , malty and often sweet. Cassis is the French word for black currants, and a Lambic beer gives off an intense aroma of the fruit it is made with. Tonight I am enveloped in the smell of black currants.

Cassis is a smell I associate with childhood and with France. My mother is a devotee of a drink called a "Kir," which is white wine with a bit of creme de cassis (black currant cordial) . There is also such a thing as a "Kir Royale," which is champagne or sparkling white wine with creme de cassis.The Kir was invented by a major of Dijon...

I highly recommend trying a Kir if you haven't. And there are plenty of other things to do with that bottle of blackcurrant cordial!

I haven't made it, but this looks darn tasty: Flourless Chocolate Cassis Cake with Creme Anglaise.

This cheesecake recipe with creme de cassis, white chocolate and almond extract also looks delectable.

Wine and The Constitution

Here are two articles about an upcoming Supreme Court decision involving the sale of wine directly to the consumer across state borders.

Quick outline of the situation from the producer and consumer perspectives

Article about the Supreme Court hearing the arguments

Yes, this is incredibly silly. Humanity never ceases to find inane excuses for protectionism, and regulating other people's lives. Since this issue involves both execrable inclinations, I have little hope for a sensible outcome.

British Binge Drinking Crackdown

I fear we have exported our nanny state to the United Kingdom. There's going to be a crackdown on British drinkers this Christmas and New Year's Eve. Crackdown story here

I'm not arguing with this sentiment, from Richard Carborn, quoted in the article, "The message is stark and simple: if you brawl in the street, urinate in a doorway or are sick in the curb, you could be slapped with an 80-pound fine."

But I will argue with the branding of so-called binge-drinking as being pathological behavior by definition. (From the article "A public health definition of binge-drinking is the consumption of at least five standard-sized alcoholic drinks on one occasion." I will add that that definition is 4 drinks for women.) Let's be serious here: most drinkers have at some point had 4 or 5 drinks on one occasion without committing socially unacceptable behavior like getting into fistfights. Haven't we all gone to an afternoon backyard barbecue that stretched on into the night, and found that the end of the day brought a tally of 4 or 5 or even 6 beers? If you've been there for 8 hours, it's not that big a deal. No, certainly it's not something you want to do every day, but it is both possible and common for people to drink that much without being antisocial or unhealthy.

No, Not the Briar Patch!

They call this a diet, I call it heaven....

"The Polymeal diet proposed in the study comprises fish, eaten four times a week; wine, amounting to 15 centilitres a day; dark chocolate (100g a day); fruit and vegetables (400g a day); garlic (2.7g a day) and almonds (68g a day)."

"Using a computer model of the American adult population, they calculated the risk of heart disease would fall by 76 per cent, women would live five years longer on average and the life expectancy for men would rise by 6.6 years compared to those who did not follow the diet."

From: A Recipe for Long Life (AFP)

Invitation to People Who Would Like to Post Here

Well, this blog was conceived of as a community blog, and I've gotten some great feedback from people here and over at LJ who would like to participate. Great!

I'm keeping the ability to post members-only just to keep the lid on spammers and other nasty internet phenomena, not because I want to discourage people from posting. The more the merrier!

For right now, I can't make other people members unless I'm willing to give them my havoc password, which I'm sorry to say, I just can't share. BUT! There is a solution for that, which is to create a havoc account for the sole purpose of posting to this blog, and then that password can be freely shared among all members. It's going to be a few days (and possible more with Christmas coming up) before I can do that though.

Right now, the super-simple solution to the posting issue is to just e-mail any post you would like to make to viticulture a/t gmail d/o/t com. I'll just copy-paste it right into the blog. So, if you can send an e-mail, you can post to this blog. I look forward to hearing from you all!

Black Swan South East Australian Merlot 2003

Not too sweet, lots of tannin, peppery, cherries and blackberries. Hint of caramel smell. Medium body. The wine on its own is good, but I had it with a tortellini (dark meat chicken with lemon filling and black pepper pasta) in a jar of garden vegetable (basil, zucchini, etc. very light) marinara sauce (Barilla Vegetariana – great sauce). Boy that tortellini had lots of lemon flavor! That combined with the tomato-sauce made a very tangy, zingy and brassy flavor, with the chicken filling in the tortellini and a bunch of parmesan on top rounding it out and giving it some bottom. It was really good with the Black Swan Merlot, the merlot was big enough to stand up to all that, the tannins really helped out and made a nice contrast with the acidity of the meal, the spicy pepper from the wine went great with the food, and the food (I think especially the lemon) really brought out the deep purple-black cherry-berry fruit in the wine. A very boisterous combo, loved it.

<>Drinking it the next day, at a cooler temperature, I note that it is smoother (the tannins are a lot calmer) and most of the spice is in the finish. Today I’m having it with smoked, salted almonds (if you haven’t tried them, you should – Blue Diamond Smokehouse Almonds.)

Rex Goliath Central Coast Pinot Noir 2002

The Rex Goliath web site has this charming quote, attributed to an anonymous winemaker, about pinot noirs: "Drinking a fine Pinot Noir... is like the baby Jesus sliding down the back of your gullet in velvet pantaloons."

I just drank the last sip of this bottle with deep regret, so I think I'll have to get another.

Vanilla. Prunes. Raisins. Milk chocolate. Figs. A bit of acrid sharpness (in a pleasant way, as a nice counterbalance to the smoothness of many of the other flavors). Nice mouthfeel, medium-bodied syrupy. A little mint in the finish.

This wine comforted me while it held my attention. Great all by itself.