Tuesday, April 20 2010
Weekly Wined-Up Part 642: Fizz, Buzz and Burnt Loons
L to R: Carmen Merlot 2006, Bushmills 1608, Somking Loon Viognier 2005, Montes Alpha Chardonnay 2006 and Marques de Gelida Cava 2004 and 2005. It's been a slow monthI had a good conversation with an old friend today. In our discourse she mentioned that she really enjoyed reading my blog, except when I wrote 'all that wine stuff'. I'm oddly touched, but I'm repaying her kindness with a bunch of wine stuff. That's what friends are for.
I've gone back through my cellar and started digging out faltering bottles. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, I often don't have enough time to drink everything I would like, and this has lead to some bottles going over the hill and off the cliff when I wasn't looking. Dang, that's an issue.
See, I'm not religious or prone to magical thinking very much, but I do firmly believe that you have to, at some point, answer for your deeds in this life, and that has left me in alignment with an old Irish superstition, that when you die you show up at the gates to paradise, where you are met by two strong angels and a barrel. In the barrel is every drop of booze you wasted on earth, and the angels grab you and stuff you headfirst into the barrel, and if it's deep enough for you to drown, straight to perdition you go!
I'm doomed.
In any case, the salvage of the week is a bottle of 2006 Carmen Merlot from Chile. It was around eleven or twelve bucks when I bought it, a decent value. By now it was off-peak and and shed most of its ebullient fruit and cherries. This wasn't such a bad thing, as it allowed some fairly decent structure and a surprsing amount of minerality to poke through, things I'd missed on drinking it back in 2007.
Next showing isn't wine, but nectar: Bushmill's is the oldest licensed distillery in the world, having been granted a license in 1608. Most Irish whiskies are blended, meaning they use barley malt (like Scotch) but mix in other grains like rye, wheat and corn. This one is almost pure single-malt, aged in Spanish sherry casks. A pretty medium copper colour it has a nicely rounded mouthfeel and a medium body, with hints of salt in the aroma along with intense notes of toffee, molasses and chocolate and a vanilla/smoke/leather finish. It's pretty nice on the rocks, but I often use it in Irish coffee: most folks would think this sacrilege, but I think better quality spirits make a better-quality cocktail. The secret to a great Irish coffee is
- Great coffee, freshly brewed, freshly ground
- No sugar in the coffee. That just covers up the delicate notes of the whisky
- Healthy shot of good whisky. I use an ounce and a half in four ounces of coffee, but your mileage may vary.
- Perfectly whipped cream. Make it up to order, a little vanilla and a little sugar
- No sugar rim, no cherry. Please! It's a cocktail, not a sundae!
Ahem. Next up is a wine I was very anxious to try. I bought some the very first time we were formulating a new Viognier kit at Winexpert and we had a bunch of trial samples. Smoking Loon was one we rejected instantly, because the grapes seemed vastly over-ripe and flabby, and almost all of the structure came from an enormous and overwhelming hit of smokey, toasty oak. I was wondering if the intervention of five years of age would have mellowed the chewy woodsmoke flavour.
Nope.
Normally I don't review wines that I don't like--no point, and I hate to say something bad unless it's really funny and cruel as well. But this may well just be a stylistic thing: somebody is buying this wine because it's still on the shelves, still selling. I can only taste apricot jam, alcohol and HB pencil, but for every wood there is a termite, I guess, and I'm not the ultimate arbiter of taste. On the other hand, it might be really nice to marinate trout in, for the woodsmoke character.
Beside that is a treat: Montes Alpha Chardonnay 2006. Made from cool climate grapes out of the Casablanca Valley, it has a fresh nose, with hints of grass and asparagus, running to vivid citrus and white fruits, good acidity and toasty-nutty flavours, and despite a high alcohol content (14%), it has a crisp finish of with teeny hints of pineapple and mango. Definitely yum.
Finally two bottles of really tasty fizzywater round out the group. Marques de Gelida is a Spanish winery situated in the Penedes mountains, high up overlooking the Mediterranean. A blend of Macabeo (also known as Viura, extensively planted in the Rioja and a dynamite white for still wines) Xarel-lo, Parellada and Chardonnay, it's typical of really good Spanish Cava: clean, crisp, very fruity with citrus notes, cream, toast and a wee hint of cookies with a nicely balanced, almost 'taut' finish. The '05 was degfinitely superior to the '04: must have been a corker of a vintage.
Next week it's going to be all wine, all the time, with me at the winemakers conference, so I hope to have some good news to report on the drinks front there--and maybe a hint about beers, given that I'll be in the Pacific Northwest during Seattle Beer Week . . . you never know.
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