June 11, 2019

Wine Diary: Writer’s Block and the Paradox of Inspiration

I’ve been staring at a blank screen for nearly three weeks, trying to figure out how I want to talk about this wine. Writer’s block may be a tired cliché in television or movies, but that doesn’t make it any less real. I know from past experience there’s not an epiphany around the corner that’s going to make all my jumbled ideas fall in place. No, I have to work through this the hard way. It isn’t about some lack of inspiration, but crippling self-doubt, the unshakable belief that whatever I say is irrelevant and it’s only a matter of time before everyone sees me as the useless hack I really am. That’s not the kind of thing that gets fixed by some casual acquaintance unwittingly offering sage advice in the form of a new perspective, but rather self-reflection and the confrontation of uncomfortable truths. Sometimes you just have to step away, clear your head, sit back down at the keyboard, and try again. The grand irony here is we’re not talking about some would-be best seller, I’m just reviewing a wine.

One of the things I’ve learned in my short time blogging is that the act of generating content can be inconvenient. For example, if I buy a bottle of wine to bring home, I can’t just open it and start drinking. Oh, no! It must be documented for further musings on my website in the future. Sometimes the thought of setting up the lights and crawling around on the floor for half an hour to take photos is unappealing at best. Maybe you really aren’t into it that night, so you phone in the photos and take quick, vague, notes. Hell, maybe it was 11:30pm, and you just wanted to enjoy a glass of wine after work. Fast forward to four months later, when you’re trying to articulate your thoughts, and you suddenly discover that perpetually lazy past version of yourself has screwed you over yet again.

C’est la vie.

In the end, I suppose I could just skip this bottle. Take a pass and move on, hoping for better results in the future, but the truth is, I really enjoyed this one. I want to talk about it. I’ve been looking forward to it. So, let’s cut the shit; all the pissing and moaning, anxiety, self-doubt, the time I got embarrassed because someone saw me do something stupid, the time I said something that hurt someone’s feelings, the daily dissatisfaction I have with whatever aspect of my life, basically, all the mental clutter that is for some reason in the way, and brush it aside so we can focus on what’s important: the wine.

Back in February we were hosting multiple tastings, bored with our existing wine, list we wanted to bring it to life with an infusion of new ideas. This is one of the wines we were considering around that time. In the end, it didn’t make the cut, but it did provide me with the opportunity to sample my first Vermentino, a grape I was completely unfamiliar with. If you’ve anything I’ve ever written, you know I love Alsatian wines, and this new wine shares a lot of those same characteristics, crisp and mineral, with a high, palate-cleansing, acidity. It was like falling in love with someone who looks a lot like an ex, without all the messy emotional trauma that follows.

Sardegna is the second largest island in the Mediterranean, sitting just across the Tyrrhenian Sea from Italy. In reading about grapes it’s not uncommon to find references to Sardegna, or the neighboring French island of Corse, as both names frequently come up, especially around disputed claims of origin for particular grape varieties. This, however, is the first time I’ve had a wine from either place.

Olianas is a young winery, tracing their origins back to the beginning of the century. Their Vermintino di Sardegna 2017 had a lovely array of flavors, like lychee, bell pepper, wet stone, and honeysuckle. It was crisp and refreshing, the kind of bottle that mysteriously disappears before you’re ready to be finished with it. More than any of the other wines we sampled, this stuck in my memory. After one encounter, I swore I was going to explore this grape, and region, further. There will be a second bottle, and probably a third. In other words, if you’re planning to pick up one, you might as well buy two.

If there were any truth to the portrayal of writer’s block on film and television, this wine would be the cure, not the cause. We’re half way through the year, I’ve tried a lot of wine, and very few of those have managed to lodge themselves so firmly in my poor hack brain as this one. It is without a doubt, an inspiring wine, but inspiration doesn’t finish projects, it begins them.

Wine Diary
April 15, 2019

WSET Level 3 – Conclusions

I skipped writing a blog about day 5 to focus on studying and getting a full night a sleep before the test, if you’re following me on Facebook I made a couple of posts there. Day 6 was about food pairing and sparkling wine production, followed by an extended lunch, and then the test.

The test consisted of a blind tasting in which we made notes for two wines, 50 multiple choice questions, and “4 short answer questions,” which was really more like 16-20 short answer questions under 4 categories.

When I walked in that morning I didn’t think I had a chance of passing. By the time it was over, I thought I might have passed. If I did, it won’t be with high marks. It’ll be 4 months before I know for sure. The tests have to be graded in England, to get them there they have to put them in a brief case and handcuff it to a secret agent’s hand, the only way for him to get a key is to deliver the case to a secluded English monastery, where it will be graded by holy virgins, and then mailed back to me. I’m assured all of these steps are necessary.

The tasting portion of the test has always been the part that gives me the most anxiety. I’m not confident in any system that pretends it can objectively measure subjective experiences. I was overthinking each tasting in class that morning and had concerns I would carry trend into the test.

The first wine was sweet, at first I thought it might be a Sauternes, but based on comments made by the instructor, I didn’t think that was possible they would select a dessert wine for the test. Under those circumstances, it had to be a late harvest Riesling, but I didn’t get some of the notes I always think I find in Riesling. The second was clearly a Cabernet Sauvignon with oak influence. I made my notes and was confident with what I had, it wasn’t necessary for me to identify each wine, but simply to make tasting notes about them and determine quality. I called both “very good,” noting they could benefit from aging.

The written test was straight-forward, I didn’t know everything, but I knew what I didn’t know. I had to guess on about 20/50 questions on the multiple choice, so I should pass that. The short answer section had one section on the Rhone, a region I am not terribly familiar with (their wines are often out of my budget). I answered to the best of my ability. If 55% is a passing grade, I think there’s a decent chance I passed. If I didn’t, there’s another test at the beginning of next year and I can reseat the test if I would like.

After class went to the bar and ordered a PBR. I was the second person to finish. As my classmates came out, some left immediately and some joined me at the bar. I learned the two wines were in fact a Sauternes and a Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon. My determinations will miss points on both glasses, not a guarantee of failure, but whether I pass or not will depend strongly on how I rated structure and flavor compared to the instructor. It seems everyone had been fooled by the Cab, and the Sauternes was a 50/50 split. One girl was so stressed she was dry heaving in the lobby. Some students were distraught that they had awarded a Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon high marks. I assured them all there’s no shame in enjoying Barefoot from time to time, as I sipped my from my can of PBR.

Regardless of whether I passed or failed the class, I think I’m done with WSET. I’m glad I took the class, it confronted me with a lot of things I had been curious about, but had not made the time to learn. If I were to take another class, that would be the reason, to take me out of my comfort zone. Moving forward, I’m very curious now about what research has been done on the neuroscience of tasting, what do we know objectively? I want to do some reading there, along with my regular reading on regions, grapes, etc.

As far as wines go, I have a greater familiarity with some of the regions that have been outside my budget for a while. I think I’m going to try to tackle some of those for the blog in the upcoming months. Also, from this post forward I’m going to change format a bit. I’ve been using the header “wine diary” for nearly every post, but moving forward I’m going to reserve that for bottles and experiences that have greater personal impact. I’ll continue making weekly wine posts, hopefully more than once a week, under a new heading. That’ll probably start this Wednesday… I’m sitting on a backlog of about 20 bottles I have photos and tastings notes on that need to be posted.

Also, I’m hoping to get into a vineyard for photos at some point this summer, maybe around Traverse City, Southern Illinois, or in Missouri.

I had a long debate about what wine I wanted to drink after the test, I thought about having Champagne and Popeye’s, or maybe just a bottle of retsina, but by the time I got home I really just wanted to get back to what I had been doing before the class started, so tonight I had a this Nomad Merlot from Aurelia Visinescu in Romania. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember this producer from my last blog on their Fetească Neagră.

I think this wine was maybe just past it’s prime, curiously this is older than the bottle I bought at the same store a year ago. The cork had stains running about half way up, based on that and the color, I’m thinking this has seen some oxidation, probably a bit more than it really needed. Even so, still quite drinkable.

This is their 2014, with flavors of red plum, raspberry, game, leather, and forest floor. It had mild tannin, with medium marks across the board for acid, body, intensity, and finish. I imagine this was a wine intended to be consumed young, so if you find a bottle, look for something more recent than I found or, better yet, just pick up that Fetească Neagră instead.

Wine Diary
April 11, 2019

Wine Diary: WSET Level 3 – Day 4

I’ve sat on this post for a couple of days. I needed some time to decompress, to just step away from it all. If I’m being honest, I didn’t I want to express the thoughts that were going through my mind.

For the past three years I’ve thrown myself into learning about wine. WSET was part of that, a little feather I could tuck into my cap, as if to say, “Hey, I actually know what I’m talking about here.” I wanted to take it all the way, through level 3, through level 4, all the way to Master of Wines, if I could make it. For the past three years, my future, as far as I could envision it, was me following a path set by WSET. Like I said in the last blog, after this weekend I don’t think I care any more.

Don’t get me wrong; I still want to learn about wine, I’m no less inspired by it, but whatever course I take from here moving forward, I don’t want WSET to be a part of it. Regardless of if I pass or fail the test next weekend, I’ll take no pride or have no remorse in the outcome.

What does that change? Not much really. My plans for the future looked a bit like this:

  • Drink Wine
  • Pass Tests
  • ???
  • Profit

Whereas now, it looks more like this:

  • Drink Wine
  • Continue Blogging
  • ???
  • Profit

There’s a mix of emotions, but ultimately I feel untethered. I guess none of this should really come as a surprise, if you look at the wines I drink, the attitudes I’ve adopted, they don’t fall in line with conventional wisdom about wine.

My primary points of contention are: 1) Most people don’t cellar wine, so any system designed to determine quality using ageworthiness as a significant factor is irrelevant to the average consumer.* 2) You cannot accurately quantify what makes a wine pleasing, this is the same issue I have with shelf talkers that proudly display scores for a wine out of some magazine. 3) We each perceive wine differently; our tongues and brains are similar in construction, but not identical and we are therefore unable to objectively map sensory experiences for others. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous, at best.

To be fair, the “theory” component of the curriculum does a great job laying out how wine is made, various winemaking techniques, vineyard management systems, and features of specific wine regions across the globe. This is the stuff I want to learn, unfortunately it’s overshadowed by the tasting portion of the course.

On Sunday we spent 30-45 minutes of class debating color. My classmates were so frustrated by the process, they were asking the instructor to come sit in their seats and look at the wine from their perspective. At one point she announced she wasn’t going to talk about it any more.

After lunch I had a moment with the instructor and asked her, “What is the utility of blind tasting ?” I explained that I could see as helpful in removing the bias of the taster in some circumstances, and that I did see a benefit to tasting, but in a professional setting, as wine buyer for example, what is the benefit?

Her answer was, essentially, that blind tasting was an important skill to develop in order to pass blind tasting exams. She ended by challenging the integrity of myself and my employer. “You work for a cooking school, shouldn’t you want to know as much as you can about wine?”

It was a cheap Straw Man argument, I didn’t bite. One of the things I really love about working at the Chopping Block is that we take the mystery, the snobbery, the pretension out of cooking. I think we should treat wine the same way.

Here’s something definitely won’t be on my blind tasting exam, a Michigan Riesling. Two Rieslings in a week? I guess if this class has given me anything, it’s a rediscovered love of Riesling. This one is from Left Foot Charley, I reviewed a previous vintage before the website overhaul and remember it fondly.

I’ve heard great things about Michigan Rieslings and I’ve wanted to give them some attention for a while now. This wine is medium dry to medium sweet, but has enough acid to keep that extra sugar in balance. It opened up with that gasoline and lime odor that I love so much from Riesling, with palate notes like nectarine, sweet tart, wet stone, honeysuckle, and lime. There isn’t a ton of complexity to it, but was a welcome end to one of the first warm spring days of the year.

*I’ve thought about this quite a bit since the blog posted and my position has changed. I agree that most people are not cellaring wine, but I do not think you can have a conversation about fine wine without considering the age of what you’re drinking. Even for the average consumer who goes through the bottle within 24 hours of purchase, there is a value in making a determination of age. A 10 year old bottle of Bordeaux could be a great find in a wine shop, a 10 year old Beaujolais Nouveau… not so much.


Wine Diary
April 7, 2019

Wine Diary: WSET Level 3 – Day 3

After Day 1 I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing this course. Day 2 gave me some glimmer of hope. Today, after Day 3, I don’t know even know if I give a damn any more. I think a little backstory is in order.

I didn’t know shit about wine when I moved to Chicago. Back home I frequently hosted friends and small dinner parties, so I always kept a couple bottles of wine stocked in my bar. My wine of choice was River Boat Red, a local, semi-sweet, compost pile of a wine primarily blended from Concord, the jelly grape. I understood nothing of oxidation and assumed that, like spirits, wine could survive indefinitely once opened… my poor house guests.

Missouri, though home to the country’s oldest AVA, doesn’t have a dominant wine culture, things are different in Chicago. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a wine town, but there is certainly a thriving culture. People here took the time to help me understand wine and they approached it in a way I was able to wrap my mind around. Three years later I’m in the middle of a fairly serious certification class and writing this blog.

While I would never claim to know everything, I still very much consider myself a novice in the wine world, I have learned a lot in the past couple of years, and in the process I’ve developed some strong opinions. Sometimes these opinions are challenged and I have to reassess my position, but other times I feel as though the conclusions I’ve drawn are justified. I guess, the trick is to embrace that Socratic ideal that the only thing I can be certain I know is that I don’t know anything.

In the short time I have been pursuing an active interest in wine the one idea I have never been able to get behind is that taste, or how we experience taste, is objective or quantifiable. One of the reasons I was drawn to WSET over other certifying bodies, is because I felt their curriculum was based more in fact, ergo science, and less in the nebulous art of bullshit. My faith is shaken after today.

I think I may try to expand on this in a future blog, but, in brief, the WSET 3 approach to tasting wine has the student look at five categories of factors: appearance, aroma, palate, quality, and aging potential. Within each of these factors there are multiple points of further examination. For example, in appearance we are to gauge both color and intensity of color, which seems fine on the surface, however there was significant debate today on whether one wine we were looking at was “Lemon” or “Lemon-Green.”

While myself, and several of my classmates, were unconvinced of there being any green in the color of this particular glass, the instructor insisted it was so. She attempted to mitigate criticism by acknowledging that such points are subjective, that the light based on where we were sitting was a factor that would create discrepancy, and that this topic is frequently debated, although she did nothing to clarify how we were to make such distinctions on the test, which, essentially, attempts to quantify the color of wine. In other words, if I happen to gauge my glass in beam of sunlight coming through the window and she determines her in the glow of a GE bulb, we have different answers and mine will be wrong.

That’s the first category. We had the same issue, and debate in class, with each subsequent category. The tasting notes, in particular, terrify me on the test. To try to make this easier, WSET provides a key with terms to be used for tasting. However, the instructor is working outside of the key. So, if I taste a wine and use only terms found in the key and she makes tasting notes including things off the key, I lose points where our notes don’t overlap. I can’t help but feel I’m playing Blackjack against someone using an Uno deck. “Oh, you think you got 21, well guess what? Draw four, bitch!”At one point today we tasted a Malbec that several people in the class rated as “Very Good,” which is quite a high marking. The instructor only marked it as “Good” and this opened up a lot of debate on how we are supposed to determine quality. She said we have to grade it in the context of all other wines and, to elaborate, said “We can’t call a $17 Malbec ‘very good,’ because that’s like saying it’s on the same level as Premier Cru Burgundy.”

That’s the point where I wanted to flip the table over and just yell, “fuck yooooouuuuu!” We’re told price doesn’t equal quality, we’re told that quality is determined by structure, intensity, flavor complexity, etc. but even when a wine achieves those points, it’s not quality because it’s not fucking Premier Cru Burgundy? Why does Argentina even bother making wine?

Look, if these wines can’t be objectively measured with consistency, I have to question the integrity of any system that would try to profit off the idea that opposite is true. The Emperor’s not wearing any fucking clothes.

You know what else isn’t Premier Cru Burgundy? This Riesling I bought. Nearly every German Riesling I’ve had has been from Mosel, but this bottle of Georg Albrecht Schneider Niersteiner Riesling comes to us from Rheinhessen. I bought it because I wanted something that wasn’t from Mosel and the guy on the label looked crazy with that scythe in one hand and those souls in other, although, upon reflection, that might be wheat or something that isn’t souls… they’re probably souls.

This was super dry, with flavors of lime, flint, wet stone, and honeysuckle. For all those people who don’t like Riesling because it’s “too sweet,” this is the wine for you. HIGH acid, super refreshing, decent complexity. It may not be Premier Cru Burgundy, but it’s what I wanted to drink tonight and I’m happy. At the end of the day, isn’t that what should matter?

Wine Diary
April 1, 2019

Wine Diary: WSET Level 3 – Day 2

I’m writing this the morning after class. We’ve hit that time in Chicago where it’s cold enough to need a jacket if you’re outside and standing still, like if you’re waiting for a bus or a train, but warm enough that you start sweating if you’re walking to or from the bus or the train while wearing a jacket. I began to feel a bit motion sick on the way home from class, even in just tasting wine you’re still consuming a small amount of alcohol. Add that to the warm train, with it’s lurching, jerky, movements, with the heat running, and the afternoon sun pouring through the window. By the time I got to my stop I was absolutely nauseous. I walked in the door, ate a sandwich and went to sleep.

Day 2 was a lot better. The focus was on the wines of France, which is never going to make for a bad day. We began with white wines from Alsace, moving into Burgundy, the Loire, Bordeaux, and the finally into the Rhone.

To know wine is to know France, you can’t escape it. There are places in the world that have been producing wine longer, but few countries could make any credible argument for doing it as well. They are the prototype against which all other wines are compared.

At times I can be quite hard on France. They are such a force in the wine world that they overshadow many of the smaller wine producing countries. Sometimes it’s overwhelming and you just think enough is enough. It’s like watching a Hollywood movie set in LA, you just want to grab the producer and scream, “There are other places in the world, get over yourself!”

At the end of the day, they’re still consistently producing a better product than anywhere else in the world and everyone else is trying to emulate their success.

This was much easier to wrap my mind around than the content of Day 1, sure there’s a still a lot to process. I can speak somewhat knowledgeably about French wine, but there are over 300 French AOC designations. I’ll be expected to know 1/4 to 1/3 of that for the final test in this class. Not simple by name, but where it is in terms of geography, what grapes are dominant there, and what styles of wine they produce. That’s heavy stuff and it’s not limited to France, we’ll be covering Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, etc. While those other countries many not be quite as complex, there’s a still a lot to know and memorize.

To try to become more familiar with French wine and the noble grape varieties, I picked up this Vin de Pays from Binny’s on Saturday when I bought the Cabernet Sauvignon. I wanted to do a comparative tasting between the noble red grapes, of course as I learned yesterday, my cab was a blend, so I’m not sure I’ll get what I want out of this particular exercise.

This Syrah comes from Domaine Yves Cuiilleron in the Northern Rhone, and, as I mentioned before, is a Vin de Pays, or “country wine.” The grapes utilized here are not the best of the harvest and the standards of production are not as rigorous as they would be in an AOC wine. However, it’s still a class above Vin de Table, or table wine.

Despite the lesser designation, I was quite happy with this wine:

Color: Clear, deep purple.

Aroma: Medium (-) intensity, blackberry, blueberry, forest floor, earth, barnyard, leather.

Palate: Dry, medium acidity, fine medium (+) tannin, medium alcohol, medium body, and medium intensity. Jammy, blackberry, black currant, black plum, “Boo Berry,” leather, and wet leaves. Medium (+) finish.

Quality: Very good, the tertiary flavors were not dominant, but still present. I think it could benefit from a short amount of ageing, but the low acidity makes me cautious about letting it sit for more than a couple of years.

Winemaking process: I didn’t pick up on any flavors or aromoas that would signal oak. Also, the color still is quite purple, which leads me to think it has seen limited oxygen contact, so I believe this would have only sat in inert vessels, probably stainless steel. Any speculation beyond that will require further study on my part, but I’ll take a stab at it.

The alcohol on this was comes in at 12.5% abv, which, while still classified as medium, is quite low. This suggests a cooler climate, which is consistent with the Northern Rhone. The best sites here would be on Southern facing hills, as a Vin de Pays, these grapes probably would have been from the base of the hills, or land between them, and more likely machine harvested than pulled by hand… oh my god, I need to read a lot more.

Day 3 is coming up this Saturday, I will probably make one or two updates between now and then, as I’m studying and comparing wines. If my nose isn’t in a glass, it needs to be in a book.

I wonder if the instructor would accept “Boo Berry” as a tasting note on the exam…

Wine Diary
March 31, 2019

Wine Diary: WSET Level 3 – Day 1

I’m home from the first day of class for my next level of WSET certification. The course is 6 classes, running on Saturday and Sunday, 8 hours a day, for 3 weeks. The test, scheduled at the end of the final Sunday, comes in 2 parts 1) blind tasting and 2) theory, in the form of multiple choice and short answer. I’ve met more than one person who passed the tasting and failed the theory portions of the test. I’m honestly nervous about both parts.

From what everyone tells me, the tasting portion isn’t so bad, but when I’m comparing my notes to the rest of the class I always feel like I’m off the mark. The way it works is you first check the wine’s color, looking for age or defect. Next you smell the wine, noting intensity and characteristics of the aroma to determine wine’s stage of development. From there you taste, looking for sweetness, acidity, body, tannin, alcohol, flavor intensity and characteristics, noting primary, secondary, and tertiary flavors, and measure how long the finish is. From all of that you determine the quality of the wine and if it’s better to drink it now or let it age.

All of that is pretty similar to the WSET 2, but now there’s another layer of complexity where I’m supposed to determine winemaking processes, like whether oak or inert vessels were used, which doesn’t seem so hard, or whether the grapes were hand or machine harvested, which feels like I might as well be consulting the bones or movement of stars across the night sky; I can’t help but feel that part of this is just speculation and I’ve having a hell of a time wrapping my mind around it.

I’m not handling it well. Even when my tasting notes are somewhat accurate (compared to the instructor), I know I’m stabbing in the dark with some of my descriptions, so it’s a hollow win. By mid-afternoon I was going through some pretty serious palate fatigue, and started getting really frustrated, angry even. At one point they set two tastings in front of us and asked for notes, I had barely started on the second glass when they called time. Even when I am getting somewhat complete notes, I’m struggling to connect the processes.

Maybe things will be better tomorrow, but I left feeling pretty defeated today and I’m already wondering how much it will cost to reseat the test later.

I stopped off for a bottle of wine on the way home, to get some practice making notes and, honestly, because I felt like I wanted a drink. It was easier to go through the tasting guide here in apartment, so I know part of the issue I’m having is anxiety.

Usually I go into a wine shop looking for something I’ve never tried, but today I wanted to get something familiar. For the next three weeks I really need to be focusing on dominant grapes from well-known regions. It’s unlikely I’ll going to be tested on Fetească Neagră or wines from the He Lan Mountain region of China, so for tonight I went with a classic, California Cabernet Sauvignon. This particular wine comes from Francicsan and was suggested by the friendly staff at Binny’s.

This comes to us from Napa County, not to be mistaken for Napa Valley, and is actually a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, and Petit Verdot. Not quite what I was looking for, but a nice wine nonetheless. So, since I’ve been sitting in a classroom all day, I’ll try to write this as a WSET 3 tasting note for the sake of practice and to try to give a frame of reference.

Color: Clear, deep ruby.

Aroma: Clean, medium (-) intensity, black currant, black cherry, and clove. Still developing character.

Palate: Dry, high acid, high tannin, high alcohol, full-bodied, medium(+) intensity, black cherry, black currant, toast, clove, oak, vegetal, ginger. Long finish. Very good quality. Can enjoy now, but has aging potential.

Winemaking notes: oak vessel, machine harvest, warm region, I also speculated that there may be some whole clusters used in the fermentation process based on how fruit forward the wine is. This is a section I definitely need to improve on. As the class continues I will probably be making more frequent updates in order to practice this new method for tasting notes, and to document my thoughts as I go.

I’ll try to write another update tomorrow after class. By Monday I’m going to be ready to go back to work, just to get away from all this test anxiety and stress. Who knew drinking wine could be this hard?

Featured Wine Diary
March 21, 2019

Wine Diary: Chasing Harvest Douro DOC 2013


My goal for this early stage of the website’s development has been to generate content. With each new post I want to add, not just another blog, but additional information in both my Wine Guide and World Map. Further down the road I hope to expand the guide to include more information on regions, and maybe even things like winemaking, cooperage, trellising, etc.

At the moment there are a couple of significant omissions on my World Map, specifically I need to review wines from California, Chile, New Zealand, and Portugal. I hope to have all of these, as well as more neglected winemaking countries like Montenegro, Israel, Hungary, Moldova covered within my first fifty Wine Diary posts. As I shop for wines to review I keep an eye out for bottles from these areas, as well as unfamiliar grapes, or just wines that seem out of the ordinary.

This week I get to scratch Portugal off that list. Although their wine is amazing, it’s often overshadowed by wines from neighboring countries on store shelves. In fact, for being a well-established Old World wine country, it’s surprising how little I find from Portugal. The majority of what I see are fortified wines, both Port and Madeira come from Portugal and are staples in any well-stocked wine store, but the country’s dry red and white wines are often overlooked. I found this bottle at Gene’s Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square and decided to pick it up.

Chasing Harvest is produced by traveling winemakers Michael and Jennifer Kush from Chicago. In cooperation with Quinta da Costa vineyard in the Douro region of Portugal, they have put together this blend of Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz (Tempranillo), and Touriga Franca for thirsty consumers like you and me.

I feel like I spend a lot of time attacking vineyard and winemaker websites for frustrating design and a general lack of information. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to mention that the Chasing Harvest site is refreshingly simple and straight forward, it provided all of the information I was looking for in a short, concise, and user-friendly way.

Speaking of refreshing, they also make a damn good wine. Chasing Harvest Douro DOC 2013 had a nice blackberry/ black cherry flavor, well-balanced acid and tannin, with notes of fig and dried fruit that brought complexity to the blend. This was a wine that seemed to evolve as I drank it, a bottle to sit and explore, perfect for conversation with friends, or to have with a hearty stew or Sunday roast. If you find a bottle consider yourself fortunate (or you go to one of these stores on the list Chasing Harvest provides).

Wine Diary
March 15, 2019

Wine Diary: Zestrea Mufatlar Muscat Ottonel 2015

This is another wine I’m revisiting from before the website redesign. In case I didn’t drive the point about Romanian wine home with my last blog, allow me to summarize my feelings: for the price, these wines are so good it should be criminal. Sure, it looks like they stole the label design from your grandmother’s dining room wallpaper, but that’s not why you’re buying it. I started drinking Romanian wine because it was cheap and not Two-Buck Chuck; I wanted something that wasn’t mass produced and had a sense of character, I hoped wine from lesser known wine producing regions might give me what I was looking for. So far, I haven’t been disappointed.

My usual sources don’t have a lot of information about Romanian wine regions, but as far as I can tell this wine comes from the district of Murfarlar in the region of Dobrogea, SE Romania. In this case, Murfatlar is the name of both the winery that produces the wine and the wine district it was produced in. That would be like having a Bordeaux from Bordeaux Winery, this is the kind of thing that makes wine so confusing sometimes.

Murfatlar, the winery, is largest producer in the area and their Zestrea label is probably the Romanian wine I have encountered the most on store shelves, it’s also the least expensive wine I’ve found from that region, usually $4-6 per bottle. According to their website, the winery’s location between the Danube and the Black Sea provides geographical barriers that protect it from the cold experienced further north and allows them to produce a wide variety of grapes. Indeed, I was surprised to discover exactly how much wine they produce, of their fourteen lines of wine I have only ever encountered two: Zestrea and Trei Hectare.

The website has a decent amount of information on the winery and wines they produce. It has a standard layout, which makes it easy to navigate compared to the past few winery websites I’ve visited, but, like the label, the design seems antiquated, and what’s with that music? A mashup of harp, drums, and piano, it’s somehow soothing and jarring at the same time. This is the only winery website I’ve ever visited with music.

The wine had a good balance of acidity and grapefruit flavors with notes of honey. It’s well-structured, but unremarkable. However, for this price this is a great find. This would be a great choice for a casual weeknight dinner, or really any situation where the wine isn’t intended to be the centerpiece.

If you’re looking to check out Romanian, or Murfatlar, wine, I wouldn’t steer you toward this Muscat Ottonel as a first choice. My primary reason for buying this particular wine was because it’s an uncommon grape and I always see that as a learning experience. I’ve had much better luck with the Fetească grapes and think they usually do a great job demonstrating what Romanian wine is capable of achieving. If you’ve had a chance to try this or any of the others, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Wine Diary
March 7, 2019

Wine Diary: Valdespino Isabela Cream Sherry NV

“You should’ve been gone!”

…

Somehow I was able to restrain myself from making Steve Perry references in my last Sherry blog, no such luck this time. What do I know about Sherry (other than how I made you feel)? Not much. Within a couple of days of picking up my WSET 3 study material I realized I had lost nearly everything I learned about fortified wine from the previous course. To be fair, the fortified wine section of that material was tacked on at the end with scotch and rum tastings on the same day we were scheduled to take the test, it wasn’t ideal conditions to learn with so much anxiety focused on the end of the class.

While it’s not something I drink often, I do enjoy Sherry. For me it, and most fortified wine, is something is I associate with dessert. I know there are dry Sherries out there, I just haven’t encountered them. So, I picked up several splits at Binny’s to help prepare myself for the upcoming course. At the same time, I went ahead and grabbed this bottle we sell at the Chopping Block.

Isabela Cream Sherry is a blend of Palomino Fino and Pedro Ximénez from the Jerez DO in Andalucia, Spain. Once again, my winemaking notes here are a a bit sparse. Neither the producer, importer, or distributor make any reference to the growing conditions of the grapes, which, to be totally fair, may be the norm for Sherry. Like I said in the beginning, I really don’t know anything about it. I did find multiple references that stated part of the blend was drawn from a 15 year old solera, beyond that I don’t have much.

The best resource I found for information was a website called Sherry Notes, which is an awesome site for learning more about all things Sherry. Of all the sites I visited, they had the most comprehensive review, and a great profile on the producer. As I work my way through the bottles I purchased I’ll be coming back here to try to learn more.

With this style of wine it should be no surprise that it was full-bodied and sweet. It has a creamy texture with fig and cherry flavors. For me, this is the perfect wine to have with a nice brownie or piece of fudge for dessert. Of course, you can also just dunk your Oreos in it.

In many ways I feel like Sherry is this whole new level of the wine experience that I have yet to understand. I can’t help but think about some of my earliest experiences with wine, struggling to figure out how to articulate my thoughts in a new language, to express sensations I had only vaguely acknowledged before. Part of me is excited to find such a vast topic to explore, but another part of me is genuinely intimidated by how much I don’t yet understand.

Wine Diary
February 27, 2019

Wine Diary: Domaine Gérard Metz Harmony 2015

Alsace is one of my favorite wine regions and has been since I first got into wine. In fact, Alsace may be one of the reasons I developed such a strong interest in wine. It’s one of the first things I look for when I walk into any shop and, frequently, it’s what I’m walking out with. That’s kind of what happened here. I was Augusta Food and Wine in Lincoln Square, purchasing a Croatian wine, when this bottle caught my eye. It’s unusual for me to pick up more than one bottle at a time, but when it comes to certain regions, I’m always trying to experience and learn more. Plus, it looked like a fun label to photograph.

If you do any amount of reading about Alsace you will quickly be confronted with the word “Edzelwicker,” which translates to “Noble Blend.” Despite the lofty sounding definition, it’s an informal term used to describe any blended white wine from that region. Although this wine is not labeled as such, it was tagged as this by Augusta on the shelf. Actually, the note commented that this style of blend is what is commonly referred to as “Edzelwicker.” Other than crémant, I really haven’t had many blends from Alsace, so I was intrigued and wanted to learn more.

Harmony is a blend of Silvaner, Pinot Blanc, Muscat, and Riesling. The producer’s website is, unfortunately, antiquated and, although it works as intended most of the time, it was unable to load the page devoted to this particular wine, instead giving me a loading screen of dubious integrity. After five minutes of, ” Page en cours de préparation,” I knew the page was never truly going to be prepared and moved on.

The importer’s website does list this label alongside one of the shortest blurbs I’ve ever seen. Seriously, my tasting note in Vivino was longer than their write-up. It’s also worth noting that the information I’ve gathered is for the 2014 vintage, they have no notes for this current blend, leaving me to assume the information is the same. However, from previous experience, blends like this tend to vary from year to year depending on the harvest.

From what I can gather, this is a more casual drinking wine from G. Metz. Food friendly, with a good amount of acid, lemon, and stone fruit flavors. Harmony seems to be perfect name for this wine, because it is superbly balanced. There was an interesting note in the aroma, a smell I thought was best described as “oily,” which sounds unpleasant, but wasn’t. While I didn’t find the wine to be terribly complex, it would be a great choice for a casual wine to have with dinner or share with friends.

I started this blog because I wanted to learn more about wine, bottles like this can be frustrating with so little information available online. Even the small amount of information I was able to find seems outdated and potentially inaccurate. In these moments it’s easy to let this frustration get the better of you, but that’s when you have to remember what the wine is for, close the laptop, and just enjoy the glass.

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