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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January 24, 2019

Wine Diary: Monsoon Valley White Blend 2009

Every article I’ve found on this winery starts with a headline that says something like, “Wine from Thailand? Has the World Gone Mad?!” Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much how all my blog entries start. It is a little shocking, Thailand isn’t a place we associate with fine wine. However, it’s pretty well established that grapes can be grown, and wine produced, almost anywhere, except Antarctica (for now…). So, I don’t think it’s the land, but the culture we’re having a hard time associating with wine. Which leads us to the question, why did Thailand, a country with no wine culture, suddenly decide to start making wine?

The answer lies with Thai billionaire businessman Chalerm Yoovidhya, the heir to the Red Bull fortune. According to the Monsoon Valley website, after studying abroad Yoovidhya not only wanted to create a wine culture in Thailand, but to defy the conventional wisdom that great wines could only be produced within latitudes of 30-50°. Planting vineyards at the 13th parallel North in his native country of Thailand required Yoovidhya to master not only tropical viticulture, but tropical monsoon viticulture. The vineyard was planted in the Hua Hun district of the Petchburi province in 2003, on the site of a former Asian elephant corral. This white blend is made from Malaga Blanc and Colombard.

This is actually the second time I’ve stumbled across this wine. I found it once several months before I had even considered starting a blog. Later I cursed myself for not taking photos of the bottle, because I didn’t know when I’d ever come across another. To my surprise, I found a second bottle at the same shop, I was certain somebody else would have picked it up, but I should have known better.

So, since I tried it twice, I have two completely different tasting notes for the same vintage in Vivino. The wine is between light and medium-bodied, with that honeyed fruit flavor I always want to associate with tropical fruit. There’s enough acid here to make the wine food friendly. Overall, I would say it was an enjoyable and balanced wine, though one I suspect was past its prime in both instances I’ve been exposed to it.

I’m pretty sure this is the only tropical climate wine I’ve ever tried, certainly the only one coming from a monsoon climate. It’s also the only wine I’ve tried from Thailand and my first exposure to these grapes. That’s a lot of firsts in one bottle. Reading up on the wine brought to light the difficulties in producing wines in a region that only has two seasons, rainy and dry. Also, I read a lot about climate classification systems while researching this and was surprised to see widely used climate classification models rejected in favor of those which are only applicable to more specific localized regions.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised, one of the classic conflicts I’ve noticed within the wine world is maintaining regional identity vs. broad appeal. It’s exactly what Yoovidhya is trying to do with Monsoon Valley, to make a wine that celebrates Thailand, but speaks to an audience beyond his home country. Wines like this have to compete with centuries of history and culture from Europe, as well as the more recently established New World regions. With climate change impacting how and where wine is produced, I sometimes wonder if producers like this will be given an edge in the global market or if the costs associated with adapting to a climate shift will be too much to bear.

We can’t know what the future will bring, which makes exploring wines like this all the more important to me. There’s won’t always be a second bottle waiting for you back at the store.

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Chateau Ducasse Bordeaux Graves Blanc white wine Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc
November 24, 2018

Wine Diary: Chateau Ducasse Graves Blanc 2016

The problem with having a little bit of knowledge is that it can give you the false impression you understand something that you really know nothing about. That’s the way it is for me and Bordeaux blanc, we sell one at work, Chateau Lamothe, and over the past couple of years I’ve tasted it frequently. It’s important to be able to describe what you’re selling in your own words and wine, especially blended wine, can change significantly from vintage to vintage. Recently, our buyer decided to shake the list up, removing the Chateau Lamothe Bordeaux Blanc and replacing it with Chateau Ducasse Graves blanc. Naturally, I had to try it.

Chateau Ducasse Bordeaux Graves Blanc white wine Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc

So, why do I say I really don’t know much about this style of wine? Well, let’s be real, this is the third white wine I’ve tried from France’s Bordeaux region. When dealing with the average consumer who may not even realize Bordeaux makes white wine, that limited amount of experience can carry weight, but having tried three wines hardly makes me an expert, even if it’s three more bottles than most of the country has tried.

With all that being said, I have mixed feelings about this wine. I want to be generous, because I think my expectation of what the wine should be was not a fair standard to hold it to. While I have limited experience with Bordeaux blanc, this is a Graves blanc, and while Graves is part of Bordeaux, it’s still its own region. The other thing to note is this blend is also different than the other wines I’ve tried, in this case Sémillon comprising the majority part (60%) as opposed to Sauvignon Blanc (40%). In other words, as it’s not fair to compare an apple to an orange, it may not be fair for me to compare a Sauvignon Blanc Bordeaux blend against a Graves Sémillon blend.

Chateau Ducasse Bordeaux Graves Blanc white wine Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc

So, what we have is a clean, crisp, white wine with a nice balance of body and acid, but with a lot more punch than the other Bordeaux blanc I have tried. Basic Bordeaux, both red and white, tend to be pretty balanced wines from my experience, but, once again, this isn’t a Bordeaux, it’s a Graves and the flavor was far more aggressive than I expected. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, I think most Americans would probably prefer an “in your face” style of wine as opposed to something more delicate.

When I initially posted this blog, I erroneously linked to a write up from Kermit Lynch about a winemaker named Hervé Dubourdieu. Unfortunately, Hervé has absolutely nothing to do with this winery. It wasn’t until I was updating map links that I noticed that the label from his Chateau Ducasse was different from the wine I was referencing. While this isn’t uncommon, especially with imported wine, I suspected I had made an error when I found multiple wineries whose name contained some variation of “Chateau Ducasse.” The correct website is for Chateau Beauregard Ducasse, which provides a lovely overview of the winery’s history and winemaking techniques. Apologies to the Perromat family and Hervé Dubourdieu for the error.

Chateau Ducasse Bordeaux Graves Blanc white wine Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc

After dancing around the point for five hundred words, I guess I should just come right out and say what I think: I didn’t like this wine. I think it’s well made, I think it’s what it’s supposed to be, I just didn’t care for it. There’s a big difference between not liking a wine and a wine being bad. One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed other whites from Bordeaux is because they tend to be more neutral in their flavor, whereas this one has a more dominating grapefruit character that I, personally, find unpleasant. While I have difficulty recommending this wine because I didn’t care for it, I also can’t fairly speak against it because of my own bias.

On a personal level, I’m happy to have my presumed knowledge of Bordeaux white challenged so completely. One of the most important things for a person to know is what they don’t know, and in this I realize I don’t know much of anything about Bordeaux blanc. It’s a good thing, because I know more now than I did before and when I have my next bottle, I’ll be more prepared.

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