huevos con vino

I got a note today from Bokisch Vineyards; apparently all 4 of their red wines won awards at this year’s San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.  Of course, the results were announced about 5 weeks ago, but I’m just catching up now.  Sad.

Anyway, I was excited to see that Jessie’s Grove also bagged four medals, including a Gold medal for their Carignane (in the “Rhone: Other Varietals and Blends” category).  As I’ve said in this blog, Jessie’s Grove is a terrific winery and I’m excited to try some of their other releases.  I really do need to try the Bokisch Garnacha, though: That wine also won gold in the same category as the Jessie’s Grove Carignane.

The top red of the competition (in the sweepstakes, anyway) was the Patz & Hall 2004 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.  This same wine won the top award two years ago as well.  Interestingly, Patz & Hall list four different Pinot Noirs for sale on their Web site; of the four, the Sonoma Coast release is the least expensive.  Yikes.  I want to try all four of their Pinot Noirs at this point!  The Wine Advocate reviews of their 2003 Pinot Noirs seem to bear out this cost differential, although it’s scary to imagine that, presumably, the least impressive of these four Pinot Noirs won the entire SF Chronicle sweepstakes.  However, for my money the Domaine Drouhin Laurène is an unbeatable Pinot Noir.  I can’t wait to see how the Radio-Coteau “La Neblina” stacks up against it.

Finally, I would love to get my hands on a bottle of the De La Montanya Pinot Noir, the Tina’s Vineyard variety…only 74 cases and it won best in class for Pinot Noir over $30/bottle.  Right now it’s $38/bottle through the winery, but that’s a little expensive for me unfortunately (especially after getting some of the aforementioned Radio-Coteau).  Even more impressive is the insanely low quantity of Tempranillo (73 cases), Petite Sirah (63 cases), and Late Harvest Viognier (49 cases)…although the 2003 Chardonnay takes the cake with only 22 cases produced.  That’s pretty darn limited.  I want some!

As I’ve described in this blog, I went on an Eastern Washington winery tour in August 2005.  One of the tasting rooms we visited was the one for Cowan Vineyards, which at the time was still in a strip mall next door to Kestrel’s gorgeous winery.  The best wine at Cowan was their Cabernet Franc Barrel Select, a wine that the label describes as “Estate Bottled Cabernet Franc Yakima Valley Barrel Select.”  That’s a mouthful, much like the wine itself…lots of red fruit and a nice essence of the barrel wood itself.  It’s a nice wine.

Unfortunately (and this is why I opened my bottle now), I think the bottle got a bit cooked while sitting in a car for a couple of hours in the triple-digit heat of Eastern WA in August.  Yuck.  The finish is a bit acidic and overall the wine tastes just a bit off, but it’s not the fault of Cowan at all.  It’s my own damn fault. 

When I sampled the wine at the tasting room, I was impressed…and I hadn’t even discovered the formidable Paracombe Cab Franc yet so I didn’t realize how much I liked that particular varietal.  The guy who was pouring the wines (he was the CPA for the winery) claimed they discovered that the wine improved after being open for a couple of days.  I was a little surprised by that statement, but I guess it’s time to give it a try.  I decanted half the wine and left the other half to stand in the bottle.

For $18 per bottle, I think this wine is a decent deal, especially if you are looking for a good wine to pair with food…and if you want to shock everyone and show them a wine they’ve probably never seen or heard of before, even in Washington State.  Interestingly, the wine bottle is the first one without a punt that I’ve seen in quite a while.  It’s a little strange; somehow, the lack of a punt makes the wine seem…cheaper.  It’s a silly observation, though, and you’ll quickly forget it once you drink some of this Cab Franc. 

POSTSCRIPT: I’ll be darned, that CPA was right!  After opening the wine yesterday evening, I waited about 24 hours and then had a glass with some marlin, green beans, and ciabatta bread.  It was terrific!  Well worth the $18, and it clearly hadn’t suffered too much from the summer heat.  Wow…it tasted delicious with food.  So, I guess leaving this wine out for a day or two is a good idea.

I became a member of my first wine club recently.  I joined the DDO Direct club, which is the 500-person (limited, don’t you know) direct mailing club for Domaine Drouhin.  As I’ve posted here before, Domaine Drouhin is my reigning favorite winery.  Apparently, their Web site is due for an overhaul and re-release on March 1st, so we’ll see what it looks like with a fresh coat of paint, so to speak.

Anyway, for their 2003 vintage Domaine Drouhin bottled about 8,900 cases of their Pinot Noir Classique (now known as the Willamette Valley Pinot Noir).  I received my 3 bottles on Tuesday; with shipping, they cost $40 each, which is the standard winery price for that wine.  Not a bargain, but that’s fine with me since being a DDO Direct member means I’ll receive 3 bottles of the Louise release in May.  Hot damn!

The Domaine Drouhin Louise release is incredibly limited…it is, in fact, limited only to DDO Direct members.  So there are 500 lucky bastards running around out there, me included, who get an allocation of Louise each year.  I can’t wait to taste this wine: The Classique is terrific, the Laurène is significantly better, so the Louise should be really outstanding.

Now, I think there is a bit of a rivalry between Archery Summit and Domaine Drouhin.  Even though these two wineries are neighbors, and they do share a lot of events and whatnot, I think Archery Summit tries to one-up Domaine Drouhin in a few areas.  Here are a couple of examples:

• Domaine Drouhin tastings cost $10, I believe; Archery Summit charges $20
• Domaine Drouhin has 3 Pinot Noir releases each year: Willamette Valley ($40 list), Laurène ($60 list) and Louise (unavailable to the public); Archery Summit currently has their Premier Cuvée ($37 list), their Red Hills Estate and Arcus Estate ($75 each), and their Estate ($150 list)
• Domaine Drouhin has a four-tiered gravity flow system that allows the juice to seep naturally out of the skins; Archery Summit has, I believe, a five-tiered gravity flow system
• Domaine Drouhin has a great view; Archery Summit has caves carved from the living volcanic rock

I see a bit of a friendly rivalry in these observations, but maybe that’s just me.  I do think Domaine Drouhin is smart not to offer their Louise for sale.  Any winery can sell their wines at exorbitant prices, such as the $150 asking price for Archery Summit Estate Pinot Noir (yes, it’s great, but $150?).  But it takes a special winery to produce a wine that you can’t even buy!  Now that’s exclusive.  I’m happy to be in the club…my snobbery grows larger by the day.  *)

As I’ve been blogging about wine rating systems and whatnot, I’ve also been thinking about the pointlessness of many textual wine reviews.  I mean, really, why do we need a score and a sentence or two?  Why not just a score telling us how that wine stacks up against similar wines made from the same grape varietals?  Or why bother with the score when you can just describe the wine in words?

Well, one problem with textual descriptions is the subjectivity of each reviewer.  Mike over at the Shiraz blog has an interesting post on the subject of palate uniformity and the calibration of your palate to that of a wine critic.  Actually, I guess it’s a series of posts on palate uniformity and the calibration of your palate to that of a wine critic.  These posts relate strongly to the subjectivity of personal taste.

Mike also points to the sort of study that I love (albeit a bit different from my idea of a single person tasting the same wine repeatedly): Tom Cannavan conducted a study in 2001 of a specific wine tasted and rated by many different people…and again in 2004 he conducted the same study with a different wine.

I think the idea of palate uniformity is interesting for a few reasons. First, I think one of the problems with writing a wine review is that pro reviewers feel the need to branch out and get creative.  You can only use fruit names so many times before every wine you review starts to sound the same (”raspberry,” “cherry,” and “blackberry” and their variants seem to be the most common fruit flavors).  So I think many reviewers take some artistic liberties with the things they smell and taste in a glass of wine.  I remember seeing “wet chalkboard” as a flavor description.  I could vaguely imagine a wine that smells like a wet chalkboard, but a wine that tastes like a wet chalkboard implies, in my opinion, that the reviewer has licked a wet chalkboard.  Was there chalk on the board, or was it clean when the licking occurred?  I wonder…because the answer might determine whether I want to buy that particular wine.

Second, I think it would be tricky to find a reviewer with whom my palate matches closely enough that I can trust him/her to be correct most of the time.  I don’t have the money to spend on even one or two bottles of $30-$100 wine, so if one critic I trust rates a bottle at 95 points and another trustworthy critic rates the same bottle at 87 points.  This is the problem: If you associate your palate too closely with one reviewer, you may miss a whole bunch of wines that the particular reviewer dislikes because, for example, he hates southern Australia and loves Napa.  Or something similar.  So why would I want to make some other reviewer’s biases my own?

Third, from the perspective of aesthetic philosophy, uniformity of palate is about as likely as uniformity of appreciate for, say, Jackson Pollock or Led Zeppelin.  Plus, tastes change over time, both for an individual and for a culture.  So my palate might match closely with Robert Parker today, but next week I might prefer another reviewer’s personal taste.  It’s the same with art: Ingres was big in his day until the Impressionists took over, and then he became a didactic old misanthrope.  Same with Pat Boone.  But then not everyone liked Ingres or Boone to begin with.

Finally, I read a lot of comments on blogs that declare the uniqueness of individual palates.  I’m not sure about that…I think there are many similarities between people’s palates.  The difference occurs in taste preference, not in what we taste, at least among novices.  Some people like the dark plum flavors of Torbreck’s Woodcutter Shiraz.  Some don’t.  But is it uniformity of palate if those two people both taste the same dark plum flavor?  Hard to say….

I checked out Wines: Their Sensory Evaluation (Amerine and Roessler, 1976) from the Chemistry Library (!) at the University of Washington. This book is not only a fascinating primer on how to enjoy and taste wines, it also has a tremendous set of empirical wine rating systems in Part II - Statistical Procedures. Hot damn.

A quick side note: I went into the Vino 100 store in Bellevue, WA yesterday. I was excited to see how they arrange their wines; they have a group of tasters who decide how fruity/dry in flavor and how light/full in body each wine is compared to every other wine in the store. They call this tool their Wine Barometer™ and I think it’s a little pretentious to have the ™ in there, but still it seems like a smart marketing ploy…and I like how this Wine Barometer allows the store to avoid relying on external numeric ratings.

Anyway, the Amerine and Roessler book is absolutely riveting for someone like me. I love the prose style of these two scientists: “Between the frankly yeasty and the obviously mercaptan there is a range of odors that resemble each other” (36). I had never thought of anything as “obviously mercaptan” before I read this book, but now I think I’ll suddenly find many thing to smell “obviously mercaptan.” It sounds so…serious.

I am up to page 38 right now, but I’m looking forward to the discussion of rating systems and whatnot that comes in Part II. For example, it warms my heart to see that my instinctive wish for a smaller number of possible points and an ordinal scale has been fulfilled (121). More interesting, though, is the Davis score card (123), where aroma and bouquet are granted up to 4 points out of the 20 total possible points.  Flavor only gets 2 points in this system; indeed, of the 10 scoring categories, 9 of them are worth up to 2 points or simply 1 point. Only aroma/bouquet gets more possible points, but that makes sense since much of what we think of as “flavor” is actually an olfactory experience that coincides with eating or drinking something.

Better still is the idea I had in an earlier comment about a golf-style scoring system where the best wines get the lowest scores. The Office International de la Vigne et du Vin Score Card (127) sets the perfect wine at a score of zero, with multiplying factors for characteristics such as odor intensity and taste quality. Interesting.

So, this book appears to be quite interesting but also quite dated (the most recent publication date is 1983) given the tremendous changes in the wine industry since the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, I look forward to reading their discussion of rating systems.