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
May 11, 2019

Review: Domaine Boyar Traminer 2014

A couple years ago a friend asked if I would do a wine tasting in her apartment while her father was visiting. He was both a history buff and a lover of wine, so we agreed to make the theme of the tasting Ancient Wines. She gave me a budget and I did some reading to figure out what to serve. Finding ancient grapes still in use today was harder than I thought it was going to be, so instead I focused on old winemaking techniques and regions that have a long history of wine production.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a bad lineup, especially for someone as new to wine as I was, but I couldn’t help being surprised at how young so many of the wine grapes we use are. I mean, wine is prehistoric and is prominent feature in many of our earliest writings, we’ve been drinking the stuff for thousands of years and yet most of the grapes we use are from the past 200 years or so. We have no truly ancient grapes I’m aware of, the oldest varieties I’ve encountered usually date back to the middle ages. The oldest wine grape I was able to produce for the tasting was Riesling, which dates back to 1435. Still old, but hardly ancient.

This was probably the catalyst for my obsession with obscure grapes, the desire to find something truly ancient; I wanted to know what the Greeks and Romans from antiquity were drinking. Ever since I did this tasting, I’ve gone further and further down the rabbit hole of wine and every time I see a grape or region that has historical significance, I take notice. That’s how I stumbled across Traminer.

The earliest reference of this grape dates is back to 1242, making it among the oldest grapes we still have today. It’s directly related to Pinot, another very old grape, though we don’t know which is the parent and which is the child in this relationship. Traminer is also a parent to Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, and a host of other grapes. Over the years it has fallen out of favor, though most wine drinkers have encountered a more fashionable mutation of Traminer, Gewürztraminer.

I was genuinely surprised when I found this bottle sitting on the shelf at Binny’s, in that weird section of the store next to the kosher wines and sweet reds from Eastern Europe. After visiting the producer’s website, it made more sense.

Domaine Boyar was established after the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria. I love history, it’s that crucial component that gives wine a sense of romance. A winery rising from the ashes, the turbulence and strife, of a failed bureaucracy, like a phoenix? We were off to a good start, but the next lines ruined it all, they began talking about “key markets,” their “portfolios,” and other corporate bullshit. That’s when I sensed something, a presence I’ve not felt since…

Domaine Boyar is in bed with Constellation Brands. For those unfamiliar them, Constellation is a beverage giant responsible for a significant percentage of shit I don’t want to drink, Kim Crawford, Meiomi, Mondavi, Woodbridge, to name a few. It’s sort of like finding out that nice girl you just met moonlights for Emperor Palpatine. “Yeah, I started working on the Death Star while I was in college, and after I began my career I really missed the excitement of millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror and then being silenced, so now I pick up a couple shifts on the weekends. They’re like family.”

Look, I don’t want to sound pretentious. If you enjoy one of these brands, please continue, I would never want to take that away from someone. Wine is a very confusing, and often frustrating, topic. Companies like Constellation make it much easier for the average consumer to navigate.

I’m generally not a fan of how they do business. They are the charging corporate bull of Wall Street set loose in a China shop. Like any large company, their actions have far reaching consequences I often find distasteful, but at the end of the day it’s their lack of romance I really have a problem with.

Beautiful pictures of rolling vineyard hills set against corporate doublespeak about global markets and a long list of awards I’ve never heard of is about as sexy as pillow talk via a PowerPoint presentation. Sometimes you can wander so far into the echo chamber of business that you forget why people are buying what you sell, why you wanted to sell it in the first place.

All that being said, let’s be real, what were the chances of me finding a wine made from this grape in Chicago without Constellation? I can’t complain too much in this instance.

So, how was it? The wine had tropical flavors of lychee and pineapple, with hints of grapefruit. It was the kind of wine best enjoyed with shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, preferably with your feet propped up on something while sitting in the shade. If there was ever a wine that needed a tiny umbrella, this would be it. Was it complex? Not really. Sometimes that’s important for me when I’m having a wine, it wasn’t this time. Instead, it was refreshing, likable, and easy to drink. The evening was better after I opened the bottle than it was before. In the end, that’s what matters.

Review
April 24, 2019

Review: Vina Belje Graševina 2016

I walked into Augusta Food and Wine with the intention of buying a bottle of wine, instead I walked out with two. It seems like that’s what always happens to me when I shop there, not that I’m complaining. In this case I couldn’t pass on this bottle of Graševina from Croatia.

What do I know about Graševina? Nothing, I’d never even heard of it, but I’ve had some solid success with Croatian wines, mostly from the Dalmatian Coast. This bottles comes to us from Podunavlje, a river basin of the Danube on the border of Serbia and Croatia. It’s as far from the Dalmatian Coast as you can be in Croatia.

The producer, Vina Belje, trace their history back to 1697, when Prince Eugene of Savoy was awarded the land and developed it into an agricultural estate, though records indicate wine has been produced here since the 3rd century CE.

In Jancis Robinson’s book on grapes, a significant portion of the entry on Graševina deals with how it is frequently confused with Riesling. Although DNA testing reveals there is no relationship between the two grapes, Graševina is frequently named as some variation of Riesling in wine producing regions throughout Europe. Having tried it, I can kind of understand why.

Straw-green in color, with a cantaloupe rind nose, the wine was light-bodied, with high acid, flavors of green bell pepper, melon, cantaloupe, and dill. To me, it seemed an exceptionally food friendly wine that is unfairly overlooked and underappreciated, just like Riesling.

In the future I’ll have to pay more attention when I’m shopping white wines from Eastern Europe, that bottle of “Rizling” I’m passing by may in fact be Graševina, not that I’d mind in either case, but while I’ve had Riesling from Transylvania, I didn’t even know what Graševina was.

Review
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
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
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.

Featured Wine Diary
February 6, 2019

Wine Diary: Schlosskellerei Gobelsburg Kamptal Riesling 2017

Most of my exposure to Riesling has been in wines from Germany and Alsace, two regions that are often viewed as the benchmark for how well that grape can perform. However, Riesling is grown across the world and I don’t want to be dismissive of how other countries are using it to craft wines. I’ve had some success with Riesling wines from Romania and the Finger Lakes of New York, but I seem to have skipped over another major Riesling stronghold in Austria. Well, we’ve just started carrying one at work, so now seems like a good time to check out Austrian Riesling.

This wine comes to us from Schloss Gobelsburg in NE Austria, part of the Kamptal wine region. The winery is built on the site of an 11th century castle, which was destroyed during the 15th century and replaced with a Renaissance manor. If I understand the history, it now belongs to a monastery, and is being leased by the current operators, who have been running the winery since the 90’s.

The winery has adopted a low-tech, hands-off, rustic approach to winemaking that embraces traditional practices. They produce three series of labels. Bottles in this series are part of the Schlosskellerei Gobelsburg brand, which represents, “the historical fundament of the winery.” This particular wine is produced from young vines, which they claim will represent the character of the grape more than the vineyard.

As for the wine, it had a very nice complexity, demonstrating a range fruit that started out as vaguely citrus and evolved into a pineapple flavor. Also, I found something I could only associate with tomato vine or, at least, how I’ve always imagined tomato vine would taste. I’m not usually one to embrace bizarre tasting notes, but I had distinct memories of standing in my parent’s garden, surrounded by the “green” smell. That’s not something I experience often, so it’s hard to disregard that, even if it is the kind of tasting note no one else may understand.

What I didn’t find was the characteristic petrol, or gasoline, odor that I was always told to look for in Riesling. I’ve always heard it’s more present in older wines, but I’ve found it in young bottles before. It makes me wonder if that character is less common in Austrian Riesling. As far as fruit set, most of the German Riesling I’ve tasted has a lime flavor, usually on the back end, that my mind latches onto. That was also absent here. The other major difference for me was how dry the wine was, drier than any German Riesling I’ve ever had.

I’ve always wondered how Austrian Riesling would compare to German, but I don’t think I expected so much difference as I found, which is pretty cool. The scope of how I understand Riesling can be expressed in wine has broadened significantly after one bottle. Once again, this is the advantage in trying new things. I don’t know when I’ll get back around to try another Austrian Rielsing, but I’m looking forward to that day.

Wine Diary
January 30, 2019

Wine Diary: Lagar de Besada Albariño 2017


In a lot of ways, Albariño feels like the girl next door in an 80’s coming of age movie; I know it’s a perfectly good wine, but for some reason my attention always goes to the more popular, perhaps prettier, wines. You know, the ones on the cheerleading squad. Basically, what I’m trying to say is Albariño is like Susan Ursitti in Teen Wolf and we should all stop being big jerks and start being nicer to it.

This bottle comes to us from Lagar de Besada in the Rías Baixas region of Spain and is made from 100% Albariño. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve noticed a lot of winery websites are poorly utilized with meager content. The website for this producer provides only the most basic information, and there’s a strong language barrier, so I wasn’t able to learn as I would like. Though I did notice they refer to this wine as “a safe bet,” which makes my earlier comparison to Susan Ursitti seem that much less appropriate. Comparing their write-ups and pricing on this wine to their other labels, it seems clear that this is their entry level Albariño .

Despite the limited information provided on their own site, I was able to find a profile of the winery on the Rias Baixas Wines website, which paints them as a small, but proud wine producer with a passion for making great Albariño wines.

Featuring a tropical kiwi flavor and a light body, this wine is aggressively acidic. My tasting notes actually compare it to Shock Tarts, which now means this blog has more nostalgic references to my childhood than any previous entry.

Compared to other grapes, my exposure to Albariño is pretty limited, in fact I’ve had exactly 3 bottles. I was only half joking with that Teen Wolf reference at the beginning; the only reason I don’t drink more Albariño is because I’m always looking for something new. As it stands, I try one every time we start carrying a new label at work. Guess where this one came from.

To me, this seems like a perfect wine for nice a seafood dinner. If you’re on a date, this will serve as a more exotic choice than Sauvignon Blanc. I would be reluctant to have it on it’s own due to it’s high acidity, but every person has their own threshold for that kind of thing. If you get a chance to try it, leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Wine Diary
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.

Wine Diary