Yes, a terrible subject, but it’s a bit late. I received my entire 2006 Sea Smoke allocation tonight! The photos are provided below. I received 4 bottles of Southing and 1 bottle each of Botella and Ten. Awesome. I look forward to cracking open the Southing bottles at my friend’s bachelor party in a few weeks…should be delicious.
So, the photos:
I really want to try the Ten and Botella bottlings…and the Southing. I want to try them all!
I went to a high school friend’s wedding last night. They were serving McManis wines, of which I know almost nothing. I tried the 2004 Syrah and it was actually pretty good…almost like a Merlot, though, instead of a Syrah.
They were also serving some Scuttlebutt and Snipes Mountain beers, which were excellent choices, as well as a couple of white wines (including a Penfolds white). Sadly, none of the options could push me closer to my Wine Century club membership, but that’s to be expected at a wedding.
We went in and did a wedding dinner tasting yesterday. Of course, when you do such a thing, you need some wine to go with all the excellent food! Here’s a glimpse at what we narrowed our list down to prior to the tasting:
As you can see, we ate a lot of food. To go with all this terrific stuff, we had a Heitz Chardonnay. This wine wound up being totally boring and not really as much of a match for these foods as I had hoped. One of our friends asked, “This isn’t the wine you plan to serve at your wedding, is it?” Ouch.
The wine captain at the Sorrento did let me try something else, though: Three Rivers MC2. It’s a Washington wine, a blend of Merlot (50%), Cabernet Franc (45%), and Cabernet Sauvignon (5%). I can’t find any info about it on the winery’s Web site, oddly enough. A lot of their wines cost about $39/bottle, but the MC2 is more like $12. It was good, a bit young yet with some tannins and acid at first, but then it settled down and turned into a nice, drinkable wine.
For my wedding, though, I’m hoping to have Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir. It’s all a question of how much the Sorrento wants to charge me to have wine, though. I might go instead with Domaine d’Aupilhac or Chateau Lascombes as they could be cheaper, if that’s even possible. I’m not sure I get how the pricing works at the Sorrento, but then I plan to charge my guests for the wine since we’re buying their dinner…seems fair to me!
Years ago, about the time I turned 21, I got into wine through a traditional route: sweet wines, particularly dessert wines. At the time, one of my favorite wines was the Bonny Doon Framboise, which was extremely good without being too sweet. It was more like a mouthful of ripe raspberries and sugar.
Over the past several years, however, this wine has grown increasingly cloying and less like raspberries than liquid sugar. While it is true that my tastes have changed, I still like the same beers now…Lagunitas IPA is still the same beer, for example, as in 1998. So when I purchased a bottle of Framboise tonight to share with my friends, all of us agreed that it needed ice and soda water just to make it palatable. That’s a little distressing, I’d say…I wonder why exactly this wine is tending so far toward the sugar and so far away from a simple raspberry flavor. Oh well.
I also picked up a bottle of McCrea Late Harvest Roussanne, which I am excited to try. I think I’ll wait for a specific dessert or some special after-dinner occasion, though, or else I’ll end up wasting this wine entirely.
My fiance, two close friends, and I went out for good cheap Mexican food tonight, followed by insanely good ice cream. Eventually, we headed to Central Market in Shoreline (just north of Seattle) where I made two amazing wine discoveries (they have a great wine department there):
Yes, that’s right: 2000 Paracombe Cabernet Franc! The very same wine that, when I asked about it at Pete’s several months ago, seemingly materialized out of a mystery warehouse somewhere in Washington State. The strange thing is that 2004 is the current vineyard release for Paracombe Cabernet Franc, while 2003 is the current US importer release. The year 2000 release happened 3 years ago or more, but every once in a while some of these wines pop up when you least expect it.
They had 3 bottles available; I bought 1 because, hey, it’s $27/bottle and I just spent a lot on Sea Smoke. I got a bottle because I wanted to give it a good home, but also because they made about 300 cases of this wine and I thought it had sold out months ago. So strange, this wine business.
As it turned out, my friends had a Pinotage in Europe that they really liked, so when we got home we cracked open the Southern Right. Vinography has a terrific article on the 2002 vintage of this wine. Apparently the Pinotage grape is a cross between Pinot Noir and Cinsaut (aka Hermitage); hence, “Pinotage.” Chalk up another wine varietal on my Wine Cenury completist spreadsheet.
In the glass, the wine was an inky purple color, very rich and deep. A nice color. The aroma was, at first, very charred and woody, almost like a good mezcal. I like that. Eventually the char (which reminded me of Jessie’s Grove Carignane) turned to sour cherry and red currant, and the aroma drifted between a rose-like aroma and a woodsy, heady sort of thing. I could smell this wine for hours…it was so dynamic and multi-textured.
From a taste perspective, this Pinotage is dry, it’s got some tannic and acidic bite, but it’s nice…it’s like a Pinot Noir (earthy, red fruit), a Carignane (smoky, charred wood), and an Aussie Shiraz (with those roasted meat flavors) all at once. Very interesting. It needed some time in the glass to develop, though; at first it was imbalanced and too woody, but it smoothed out quickly and tasted good to me.
My fiance didn’t care for it, but my other friends liked it! At $20 a bottle, it’s something of a novelty as that’s a little too much money for an everydar red, but a little too cheap for a special red (like a Domaine Drouhin). For less money, I’d just get a Jessie’s Grove Carignane or some such Lodi wine…but then I wouldn’t be helping to save the Southern right whales, now would I?
POSTSCRIPT: After a day in a decanter, the Southern Right Pinotage is much smoother and better balanced. I love it today. I guess it just needed time to settle down and breathe!