Rosenthal Wines Tasting

I have been fortunate enough to be given a very cool opportunity. I will be putting together a wine list for a new restaurant out in Jamesport, NY at the Jedediah Hawkins Inn. The chef has a lengthy resume, starting with Le Cirque, youngest sous chef in the White House (Clinton), Little Nell in Aspen, Spruce in Chicago, Plumpjack winery, a few different Michelin rated place throughout Europe, and finally Executive Chef of the Herb Farm in Washington. He's also a James Beard award winner and has been a guest judge on Top Chef.

I'm taking this gig seriously.

The restaurant will be following suit with the Herb Farm, bringing farm to table meals, focusing on local agriculture and even going as far as growing their own herbs and vegetables from their own working gardens. So of course, local wines will be on the menu, which means Ive got my work cut out for me as I haven't tasted many Long Island wines. More on that in a separate post. I want to keep the list to smaller production, family owned and farmed wines. Organics and biodynamics a plus but not necessary. I want great, food friendly wines that you won't find at the restaurant next door. Wines that will attract the connoisseur but not scare away the casual drinker. Besides for my own company's wines, I wanted to look into the wines of Neil Rosenthal. So I called my old friend, Clarke Boehling, who recently went to work for them.

Clarke and I had a dialogue about things I was looking for. We came up with a nice list, met in his Carroll Gardens brownstone, and had a session. Here are my notes....

1) Bisson Prosecco N.V. (all 2008 fruit though) - A slight banana nose with a clean citrus zest. Bone-dry with a rich midpalate and pleasant finish. Complex for a prosecco and probably the best I have ever had.

2)Foreau Sparkling Vouvray NV - 100% Organic. 216 cases made Blocks Malo. Hazelnut overload! Holy Sh*t! So clean, and precise. Toasted hazelnuts on the nose and even lingering into the palate, and more pronounced than nutty notes I've had in champagnes.

3) Ferrando Erbaluce di Caluso 2008 - From northern Piedmont. Flint bubble gum candy pez type of thing going on here. Open for 3 days and still going strong. Round ripe fruit. I would have guessed it was from the alto adige if It were blind. 100% organic.

4)Lucien Crochet Sancerre "La Croix du Roy" 2007 - No notes.

5)Bisson Pigato - Jujubees and liquorice. A very rustic white. Pretty wine.

6)Jean Dauvissat Chablis AC "Saint Pierre" 2005 - Holy Sh*t! A mix of diarrhea and seashells! This IS an oyster.! Smoky, dirty, seashells, brine. pair this with raw oysters, they were made for each other. Rich, full, round chablis with great acid and mineral-packed finish. So diiiirty.

7)Domaine Rollin Pernard-Vergelesses 2005 - Getting a weird black fruit on the nose, almost black currants and blueberries. Very good. 24 months in barrel. 100% organic.

8)Mas Jullien 2006 - High altitude white from the Languedoc. Grenache Blanc, Carignon Blanc, Roussanne, Chenin Blanc, Clairette, Viognier. All vinified separately and blended. Waxy nose, bit of oxidation. This is the sh*t. Very Chablisienne, almost dauvissat-like with a seashell component. 100% organic.

9)Olek-Mery Chinon Blanc "Cuvee des Tireaux" 2005 - 100% Chenin Blanc. Barrel fermented and aged in 15% new wood. Filberts, graphite, smoke. Hazelnuts in the voubray times 1000. One funky white! Love it.

10)Grosjean "tourette" - Conralin, Fumin, Vien de Nus. All stainless steel.

11)Jean-Marc Morey Chassagen-Montrachet "Les Champs Gain" - Pierre Yves Colin's wife's father. 100% Organic.

12)Paolo Bea "Rosso de Veo" 2005 - 100% Sagrantino. Mint, eucalyptus, elegance of grand cru burgundy. Just one of my favorite producers ever. Such a pretty wine with a silent power.

So those are the notes I have. A very fun night with great wines. Some better than others, but all great. Some of the coolest whites I've ever tasted.

If you see a Rosenthal label on the back of any bottle, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it.

Oh B(e)aby!!!

Sorry I haven't run my mouth in a little while. I'm lazy what can I say. Many good times have been had over the last 4 months but not many of them had that WINE like what I had the other day. I spent an evening on the Island with some good peeps from work and we did it right; grilled quail and pork, Champagne, Rhone verticals, Riesling, Cali Cab, Burg and a little J here plus some Lemoncello there. At any rate, about 2/3's of the way through the night this bottle came out, which I had happened to bring (naively I admit). It was a 2004 Paolo Bea Montefalco Rosso Reserva "Pipparello". Ba-Gong!!! That shit lit it up. I mean after many bottles preceeding it this wine still made everyone stand at attention. Youthful, elegant, hypocritical in all its glory. It had this crushed-powedered-red berry-licorice thing that really enveloped the palate. But what made it sing was this silver-lining-typed acidity and grace. I didnt' get much for oak flavor and I'd expect that's exactly what the guy is going for. It made me think that the wine just happened that way. O'natural, clean but in a pure way not in a 'we filtered the shit out of it' way. Like I said, it was meant to be that way. It reminded me of some of the new things that are coming from Puzelat. I guess hypocritical to me means balanced because it touched on many things; intensity but restrained, full yet very light on the palate, rich with extreme elegance. After some research I found out that it's a small estate in Umbria that has had a Bea in or around it since 1500; roughly 25 acres, it's a blend of 60% Sangiovese, 25% Montepulciano , 15% Sagrantino, sees a good amount of time in oak but nothing heavily new and everything is done by hand and fully organic. Just for posterity's sake, I took it out to dinner last Saturday as well. Nicholas Roberts Fine Foods in Norwalk is a pretty awesome place. It's right off of #1 on Main Street and just down the street from BJ Ryan's. I had this Filet Mignon with a lobster reduction sauce, wax beans and fingerling potatos. Perfect match. Filet was spot on, potatos held up their end of the bargain and who doesn't like wax beans? Good atmosphere, BYOB which is exactly why I went (well that and the food) and not far from home. If you haven't been there yet, you NEED to check it out. Great prices and really a diamond in the rough when it comes to food in Norwalk. The Paolo Bea ripped again. Somethings are just inevitable. Keep an eye out for this producer. I'm sure it is very small production. There are a few different wines produced and I'm looking forward to trying the Sagrantino. I guess it is their top wine.

The Birth of a Finger Lakes Riesling (Part 1)

The Cork Soakers is a blog about tasting and appreciating wine, but with this entry, I want to take a step back and look at the making of a wine and follow its progress all the way to a finished product that we can hopefully enjoy. Basically it’s just a long, convoluted way of making some alcohol so I can (in the words of my Uncle Russ) “go behind Kenny’s barn and get drunk”.



I have a small 16 vine planting of Riesling vines (clones 239, 9/110) on rootstock (3309, 101-14) on a southeastern slope of HONEOYE LOAM in the Finger Lakes AVA. We all know Riesling is king in the FLX, but my little vineyard sits on the smaller Owasco Lake and has a shorter growing season than what can be found on the bigger lakes. However, what the vineyard lacks in proximity to a larger lake, it makes up for in soil potential, as some of the best organic vegetables in the state are grown a stones throw away. The flavor concentration that comes out of Jim Shea’s gardens are second to none, but will that translate into grape flavor concentration or just too much vine vigor? Follow along to find out!

The Riesling vines are in their 3rd leaf, show a moderate amount of vigor despite the wet year and are currently carrying a small crop load. I might be lucky to end up with 40 lbs. of fruit (mature vines could yield 120 lbs or more) which should make about 15-20 bottles of finished wine. I don’t want to stress the youngsters by carrying too much fruit; I want them to spend most of their energy digging deep and sowing their wild roots.

This season so far has been spent positioning shoots upward through the catch wires in the VSP (vertical shoot positioning) training system and keeping the leaves and fruit clean from rot and disease. All the spays used are organic, but it’s been an ideal year for black rot, downy and powdery mildew, so I’ve had to stay on top of things. So far so good.

The clusters are small with smallish berries, but they have good exposure and an open canopy to keep things breezy and dry. The season has been cooler than normal and a bit wet, but we’re hoping for a rally, and so far August has warmed up and dried out. 2006 was another year that was wet and cool, and while FLX reds suffered, the aromatic whites excelled, so I’m hoping my 16 riesling vines can rise to the challenge. Verasion (when grapes change color from a nascent green to red or golden yellow) is still a month or so off, but my bird netting will be going up soon nonetheless, and I’ll keep spraying to fend off the rot. Until we see those grapes changing color, stay tuned for the next step in the birth of a FLX Riesling.

-Oscar the Grouch-

Give me Balance, or give me Garbage!

Something I’d like to talk about today as a virgin member of the legendary, esteemed, iconic and studly group o’dudes (and my little sis’ now and again) known in the blogosphere as The Cork Soakers (tip of the hat lads, or rather in my case, a garbage can lid) is balance in wine.

We hear about balance a lot, but it’s worth covering again and again ad nauseam until we get it through our thick skulls that it’s really important in wine. Hey, I’m a Libra, I care about balance; it’s in my astrological genes. I’m also an amateur wine grower/maker, so I’m discovering these things first hand as I plod my way through the knowledge of the craft. Side note: I can’t help but tell this joke; it’s funny, and it proves that I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old. “How do you know that diarrhea is hereditary? How, you ask?...It runs in your jeans.”

OK, back to the seriousness of balance (see, I’ve just proved some of the points I’m about to make about balance. Seriousness weighed against frivolity makes for a kind of balance. So does some stupidity mixed in with a dabble of brilliance…in my case make that a smidgen).

We all can recognize when we’ve had a wine that’s out of balance. Maybe it’s too much of the oak buzz saw ripping your face off in a Cali Cab or Chard until you reek of sawdust and you feel like they should compress you into a tiny pellet and toss you in a pellet stove so you can be carbon neutral and feel good about yourself again, or maybe it’s the acid bath in an unripe white or red wine that’s pinching your face to a pin prick of a shriveled visage like in the Apple Photobooth app.. Whatever the case, we know it, or rather feel it when we get an unbalance in wine. It causes a disturbance in the Force. It’s not good, and despite all the olfactory evidence we need to pass on such wines, sometime they score big with the wine press, real big. Parker and Spectator plant big wet kisses and dry hump the legs of some of these out of whack wines. At the recent Theise tasting in NY (which I had the honor of attending; both drinking and pouring ((I hope I done you proud Heidi Schrock!))), I tasted a certain 10 year old Spanish cult wine that scored a whopping 99 by Parker and tasted only of new French and American oak! I didn’t spit the wine mind you, it was probably $30 for a 2 oz. pour, but hell, all I could think of was, wow, this is a decade old, and all I notice right off the bat was oak! It was very silky and had some nice fruit, but that didn’t right the scales. They hung way slanted from the wood (I just said hung and wood in the same sentence).

So we can recognize a wine as out of balance when one flavor or component really sticks out and dominates, that’s the easy part. That wine becomes one dimensional (maybe we even like that dimension, but if it’s not tempered with another component, it sings off key). But here’s the opposite side: Say you are a young budding winemaker and you want to make balanced wine. With your carefully schooled vintner skills you craft a safe and squeaky clean wine with all the proper analysis checked and re-checked; your steel stainless and temp controlled and purged of all offending O2; your oak new with world class provenance, and all the wine risks banished to the nether regions of your floor drain. “What’s possibly wrong with that?” you say. Balance in winemaking is more than shooting down the anally straight and narrow path between the double solid yellow lines of a 2 lane road. You can certainly make a good wine doing that(maybe a great one), but it’s probably going to be a bit boring. These are the ho-hum wines, drunk one minute, forgotten the next second. Every wine starts to taste a little bit like every other wine of the same varietal, or even across varietals! A Chard sans oak tastes like a Sauv. Blanc, and your Gruvie tastes like a Riesling, and the reds all taste like fruit salad. Give me a double dose of over the counter acetaminophen and let me die in my sleep! Come on people, I thought we were passionate about this stuff!!! Balance is a much wider path than squeaky clean wine making, particularly balanced and beautiful wines, but certainly not as wide as the point whore wines of the world would have you believe. If you like oak, use oak, but please don’t drop $1200 bones on a new French oak barrel and then bury me under a pile of friggin’ sawdust! Use it judiciously, and let the fruit, the acidity and the minerals have their saw as well. They have a voice too, you know, and they speak of balance. Wine makers can bob a bit back and forth across the middle of the road of balance using all the tools in the tool box, but they can’t go too crazy and get all schizophrenic on my ass! I have a garbage can lid, and I will hit you!

All the wines of the world can be beautiful, but they should be made carefully and allowed to speak of place and time (terroir if you will, all wines have it, it’s how it’s shown). Even some of the wine “faults” like volatile acidity and brett have their place in wine (at threshold levels they can lift aromas), but don’t feed me vinegar or drag me through the bottom of the pigsty, ‘cause my little bro fell into that shit as a kid, and I’m not going to let that happen again! We’re looking for balance, but we’re also looking for memorable. After all, isn’t that what sticks with us the most, those beautiful, balanced, nuanced wines that makes us stop and think, wow, I like drinking wine, and this is a special moment. Now I’m going to drink a little bit more, and where was that partner of mine?

-Oscar the Grouch-

Gimme Some Sugar, Ninja

After the Theise tasting a bunch of us went out to Terroir wine bar in the E. Vill. Pretty sweet joint. The list stands up to the name. Focusing on the wine and the earth they came from. Where vines dig deep to pull out whatever they can from their rocky, mineral ridden soils. Where hot days follow cool nights. Where fruit is picked when it tastes ripe, not when the refractometer says 28 brix. Where points don't matter. Where balance is key. Where the wines truly taste like the soils they came from and the varietal that they are, not the really expensive Oak that's been shoved down their throat.

We had a few beers and some eats (Victory Prima Pils and Paninis, yo). The list is extensive and had some lookers on it. Raph (Big Bird's big bro) is a Riesling whore and had expressed a bunch of times how he had never had an old Reisling. "Yo Raph, a 92 on the list for $60, wassup??" yep, a 92 Schmitt-Wagner Longuicher Maximiner Kabinett. I thought, "that oughtta be great." Schmitt- Wagner rocks the 100+ year old vines (pretty rare these days, you know diseases, Phylloxera and all that), its 17 years old, a great producer, what could be bad? I didnt know much about the vintage. Fine, it's freaking German Riesling and a Terry Theise Selection to boot. But i thought, "it is a Kabinett." I certainly am not Riesling guru or anything, but I know that to go the distance you need good residual sugar. I know that when i read Terry's catalogs a ton of the Kabinetts he tastes he says can age for a looong time. Odds were not against us on this one, so I order it. The bottle comes and I am expecting something with some darker color and oxidative characteristics. Not a chance, dude. This baby was fresh as a baby's bottom. Bright gold, almost white. Smelled of tart granny smith apples and citrus fruits. Not a petrol flavor to be found. "What the H.??!!", I thought. A 17 year old Reisling that smells like its no older than an 07? I felt bad. I wanted Raph to experience that old, unctuous, petrol, gasoline jammy jam that you get from the oldies. Not this time. The palate was tight as a nun's poonawatta, yo. High acids had taken control of this baby and the fruit had dissipated. it was sorta out of whack. I mean, it was good, but not what I was expecting. And for that reason it was disappointing. Plus, it needed food! and we were all out of it. Despite it's lack of secondary characterisitcs and it being a but too austere for my liking, it was GOOD wine. The Acid actually PRESERVED the wine.

Which brings me to my point: POUR SOME SUGAR ON THAT BITCH. Yes, Riesling NEEDS sugar. It just works. It's a grape that is naturally high in acid. It needs that jelly with that peanut butter. I'm not saying to put some lumps in after you pour a glass, as the winery should take care of this for you. I'm saying don't front like you hate sweet wines, because you don't. Do you hate cake? Do you hate ice cream? Do you hate a starburst? Do you hate a jolly Rancher? Do you like Coca-Cola? Im sure you answered yes to most, if not all of those. They are all sweet. So, its in liquid form. But once you get that beautiful tart acid matched up with the nice, fat, sweet fruit. You've got yourself a nice little drinky drink. Throw some slate rocks in there and your tongue is going to be coated with the coolest of sensations and flavors. Have you ever dumped a pack of pop rocks on your tongue? Have you ever dipped your finger in some fun dip? Yeah you have. This is what a German Riesling with a minerality that you could cut with your diamond saw, an acid that will make your moth water for more, the ripe fruits you could put in a welch's bottle and the perfect amount of residual sugar to bring it all together will do to you. Oh, and throw some alcohol in with that shizz and you're good to go.

So the Schmitt-Wagner would have been off the charts if it was a Spatlese or an Auslese I think. I'm sorry Raph, I'm working on getting something with some age on it so we can get that unctuous petrol thing that you've gotta try. Come wedding time I think the mission will be accomplished.

Bert

Nothing spectacular but..............

So tonight Abby Cadabby made me a very delicious dinner. It was crab meat, mushrooms, tomatoes and basil over some simple shell pasta. Little bits of onion and garlic with some heavy cream and S & P. Quite simple but very satisfying. I've realized that simple and relatively light allows for more flavors to shine in their respective ways. Sort of like the way good, lean, white wines highlight every different aspect of itself. Fruit, acidity, minerality, body and flat out electricity. That's probably why we had a white wine with dinner. You don't have to follow any rules when pairing in my book but eventually you'll find a few axioms. Big, red and tannic does not go with what we had.



2007 Slipstream Sauvignon Blanc
100% Sauvy from the Pemberton region of Western Australia. This fruit, and also the winemaker, come from the Pannell family; longtime Francophiles that happen to live in Australia. They grow some serious Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc in this quite obscure region. The first sniff makes you think Kiwi Sauvy and you're probably right considering it originates roughly along the same line of latitude that Marlborough lies but with further inspection it says something else. The something else is in the philosophy of the Pannells. There is a certain restraint and depth to this that speaks more to the Sancerre region of France. Don't get me wrong, it IS ripe but in the context of Southern Hemisphere Sauvy its minerality, maturity (maybe not the correct term but I like it) and expression are a bit more sophisticated than the Monkey Bay's of the world. That UP IN YOUR FACE aroma that is so unmistakably Kiwi is a more of a coaxing aroma that introduces flint and something savory. The gooseberry in your typical Kiwi rings more of a ripe jalapeno pepper. More minerals with a clean finish. Just because a finish lasts long doesn't mean it's good. There is just something wrong with the long finish of a New Zealand Sauvy that makes me think that all of those cultured yeasts that people boast about that 'enhance' many wines of the world, are actually some sort of HGH Oeno-drug. Like body builders up on stage with their shitty fake tan's, shaved anus' and over-exaggerated muscle. There's just something wrong. Long story short, there's something that says integrity in this wine and it wasn't bad with dinner.

-Ernest-

The Outcome...

I did it!  I infused rum with perfectly browned butter.  And wow was it good!  I picked up a bottle of Duche de Longuville sparkling apple cider (4% alcohol and off-dry)  as a substitute for the "poire" cider they used at Tailor, added a splash to the rum with a few dried cloves, some ice, and shook that baby up.  Ive got to say, it was pretty damn close to "The Crumble."  The nose had that unctuous, nutty, butterscotch creme brulee thing that i obsess over.  It's addicting.  I dont even want to drink it, I just want to seriously breath it in with every single breath. 

After my olfactory orgy, i poured Big Bird a glass of the sparkling cider, pretty confident that I was about to blow her mind.  She loves her brother's homemade sparkling cider so I was pretty sure this would also impress, and i'd get some brownie points to boot.  Well, it did.  So much that she ordered me to buy 4 more bottles, called her mom to tell her about it, and asked me if she could blog about it.  

So without further adue, I introduce to you a blog about cider, in the words of Big bird.  Enjoy!

"In Lieu of Pretentiousness" by Big Bird

"Hey all, it’s me, Big Bird, Bert’s Bed Buddy.  So I’m no wine connoisseur and admittedly not well versed in all this but it’s ubiquitous in my life these days.  I can’t get up in the morning without having a hang over, tripping over one of Bert’s magnums or having to fight for space in the kitchen with the hundreds of bottles of alcohol from Bert’s collection… but… I’m pretty lucky and pretty spoiled.   I already had a Barolo this week (one of my favorites but “it was too young,” and I didn’t like it as well as that Silvio Grasso dude man’s Barolo) plus I had about 4 other bottles but I don’t really remember what they were…

 

So, I come from the country in Upstate NY.  I was raised on goat’s milk, homemade bread, vegetable gardens and orchards was where all our food was produced, eaten in the summer and canned or frozen for the winter, so I’m definitely someone who can appreciate the good that comes from your hands in the dirt and the toil in what I like to call “artistry” of gardening.  With the new culinary movement of “back to the land” and in this economic climate not only is it more acceptable and “hip” to be as my parents were/are but I’ll bet the farm it’s going to become part of the norm.  Bert’s already churning his own butter, it happens.

Anyways Duche de Longueville Antoinette Dry French Sparkling Cider.  You heard it here from the Bird, the connoisseur of the farm, this sparkling cider is amazing.  Bert handed me a glass last night and it blew me away.  I don’t even know if he told me what he was handing me but my first impression was “this shit is good”.  It tasted like something my grandmother would have made.  I started feeling my day dream come on and imagined sitting at a picnic table lined with French checkered fabric with the warm wind blowing through my feathers and my family passing the hearty comfort food around while the little birds are singing and the there are no cares in the world.  I have no mumbo jumbo talk to discuss this wine with you all other than the aroma was that of rotten fruit but lets be realists here, shouldn’t rotten fruit smell like rotten fruit?  However, it wasn’t a particularly bad smell, it was natural.  I like natural.  And the taste was nothing more than pleasant, simple yet refined and very delicate.  I also liked the fact that it’s naturally produced carbonation wasn’t overpowering, sometimes it almost hurts, I’m not yet sure if I like that! Shit, my 87 year old Grandma could drink this for breakfast and frankly, probably should…I looked it up on that google thing and it read that it’s an “artisanal” cider from a 50 year old distillery in Normandy, France. Sweet!

 Ok… here’s the kicker... It’s about $10.  These are hard times and a penny saved is a penny earned.  Not only can I afford to drink this on my budget but Bert might not be embarrassed that I like such a simple thing… It aint bad!  Check it!"

Until next time...

-Bert