huevos con vino

I wanted to look long and hard for an interesting wine made from a lesser-known varietal. A wine made from only one type of grape that, ideally, is hard to pronounce and comes from deep in the hills of Spain, or Greece, or maybe even Vermont. But then I scratched Vermont off my list because their wines seem to come from apples rather than grapes. So instead, I focused on Spain and went in search of a wine that was new to me and true to the spirit of Wine Blogging Wednesday #37: Go Native!

So I went native. Like, totally. Super native. Way out there. And I managed to pick a wine that, hopefully, nobody else chose too.

After consulting with Catherine at The Spanish Table, I picked a bottle of the 2005 Bodegas Viña Godeval Godello, made from 100% Godello grapes. You might wonder, “Godello?” Yes, Godello, pronounced “go-day-oh.” The Godello grape is a native of Galicia, the region of Spain where you find D.O. Rías Baixas, an appellation that is famous for its white wines. They speak Galego in Galicia and they drink Godello…confused? I was at first too. But then I found this decent overview of Galicia, including the wines of Galicia. It’s worth a read until you get to the part where they talk about “elaborating” white wines. And then I got confused again. Keep reading, it gets better.

The Romans enjoyed a good Godello wine, apparently; this green grape produces fragrant white wines that Catherine at TST described in terms of fir tree needles and honey. I like those two things well enough that I was sold on the Godello. Plus, it’s another check on my path to the Wine Century club! Sweet.

This particular Godello release comes from a winery built inside an historic monastery: San Miguel de Xagoaza. I love that name, it’s so evocative compared to, say, St. Francis. Nothing against St. Francis, of course. Bodegas Viña Godeval rebuilt this monastery, which sits in the Denominación de Origen (D.O.) of Valdeorras, a name that translates into “Valley of Gold” according to Wikipedia. Godello has been back in this area, grafted onto US rootstock this time, since the 1970s.

The Bodegas Viña Godeval Web site is fascinating. It’s worth reading each of the sections to see just how carefully they built this winery back up from the original monastery, apparently staying true to the original structures and retaining the original stones whenever possible. With 15-year-old Godello vines, this winery has over 40 acres of “filoxerico”-free vines now. Other winery products include a fascinating Anejo liqueur made from Godello grapes.

To the wine. Here are my thoughts on the 2005 Bodegas Viña Godeval Godello:

• Aroma: Woodsy and nutty, but also peachy and floral; a bit like a Viognier, but without as much perfume.
• Flavor: A little spicy, very woody on the palate with an almost pine tree flavor in the aftertaste, sort of like mild retsina.  Dry, somewhat acidic, not a whole lot going on here.
• General impression: Hmm…that’s one woody wine!

Overall, it’s…woody.  That’s about the best way I can put it.  But, on the upside, now I know what to drink when I want something with a lot of pine tree essence in it!

I really like Riesling.

As a kid growing up in Washington State with a German mother, I got to try Riesling once in a while, but I never cared for it too much.  It seemed too dry at the time, but that’s probably because I was too busy eating Tootsie Roll lollipops to consider any wine “sweet.”  So I didn’t give Riesling too much thought until a year or two ago.  And then I had a 1998 Riesling Spatlese in Helsinki that blew my mind. It was more like an Auslese, and it tasted insanely good with King flounder. That reminds me, I need to get back to that hotel again someday.

Anyway, I like Riesling now, so I am trying to learn a bit more about the varietal and its historic locations in Germany.  The place to start may well be the Mosel region, formerly known as the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region because of the Moselle River and its tributaries, the Saar and Ruwer. This region, as of August 1 2007, Auslese Riesling at European Vine Selections (EVS) recently. They had these smaller bottles on sale for $24, marked down from $40. Nice!  I wanted to give this sweet wine a try, and a half-bottle is a great way to do so.  Plus, at 40% off, why not?  I also knew that the 1998 vintage was great, but I didn’t know about the 1999 vintage when I was at EVS.  Later on, I found this vintage report, which attests to the interesting 1999 harvest and growing season.

Here are my notes on this wine:

• Aroma: Very faint bouquet of peach, honeycomb, and lemon; not much aroma to speak of, but the color of the wine is a promising golden yellow.
• Flavor: Strong minerality on the tip of the tongue, honey and apple as the minerals subside; sweet, smooth, I want more!
• General impression: Wow! Dynamite minerality, very smooth, delicious dessert-style Riesling. Extremely smooth and fairly sweet. Very nice.

Clearly this wine is good stuff.  I don’t have any more of it, which might be fortunate because it’s hard to stop drinking this wine once you open the half-bottle….

Because my wife is out of town, and because I had a good year at work, I decided to treat myself to a nice bottle of wine. After a lengthy discussion with Scott at the Capitol Hill QFC, I settled on the 2003 Domaine la Soumade Rasteau Cuvée Confiance. The Cuvée Confiance is a kinder, gentler Rasteau offering; not quite as potent as the Fleur de Confiance, this Cuvée came highly recommended from Scott.

I had just used the last of my gift certificate at European Vine Selection (EVS), also on Capitol Hill, but I had also purchased some marinated lamb for dinner. And lamb calls for something rich and strong, something red, possibly something Australian. I almost lucked out with a bottle of Standish Relic Shiraz/Viognier, but the price turned out to be $96 rather than $26, so I passed. I used my EVS gift certificate on a 1998 Riesling Kabinett and a 1999 Riesling Auslese, so clearly I needed to get a Syrah somewhere else.

So I cut across the Hill and went to QFC because I know they have a great Australian wine section. In fact, they still have Paracombe Somerville Shiraz and ordinary Shiraz, but I wanted something new tonight. Also, I should mention that, in addition to the lamb, I finally took the plunge and bought a loaf of Essential Baking Pain du George, a round bread that is Parisian in style, massive in size, and incredibly delicious. This bread contains organic whole wheat flour, water, and sea salt. That’s it. I love it. There’s a potent sourdough-style flavor and aroma that really tastes great, plus the sort of consistency you would expect from a French-style whole wheat bread. Amazing. Plus, at $4 on sale, it was hard to ignore for the 5th time this month.
Back to the wine. Scott at QFC described the minerality and complexity of this wine at length, which is partly what sold me on the Rasteau rather than 10-15 other wines. I like the complex French style of GSM wines as opposed to, more often than not, the proverbial “fruit bomb” style you find with Australian wines. I also wanted a wine with a little more age than the 2005 and 2006 offerings available now, and the 2003 Cotes du Rhone vintage is supposed to be terrific. Time to find out for myself!
This southern Rhone wine features an 80% Grenache, 10% Syrah, 10% Mourvedre blend. At 14.5% this wine is certainly dense enough to handle roast lamb. I liked this pairing a hell of a lot; here are my notes:

• Aroma: Potent and intoxicating on the nose; sharp, spicy bouquet of smoke and bacon fat plus some raspberry, cassis, and black cherry.
• Flavor: Blackberry, blueberry, and faint raspberry mixed with roast meat, earth, underbrush, black pepper, and dark chocolate notes; more dry than fruity at first with decent acidity and mellow tannins for such a young French wine. Grew into a smooth, fruity yet dry red wine that is worth remembering.
• General impression: A very full, rich wine with a dry mouthfeel that has nice black fruit on the side plus a meaty aftertaste. Decanted for 30+ minutes first, which was important. 2 hours later, the bottle and decanter are empty! I must have liked this wine.

Overall, I strongly recommend this wine. Robert Parker gave it 92 points, so it must be good, right? Seriously, take it from me: After a few glasses of this wine, I’m not sure it’s 14.5% alcohol, but I am sure it tastes delicious. Lamb marinated in black pepper and garlic only enhances the enjoyment. For $30-$40/bottle, it’s worth the cost; watch out for the stronger older brother, the Fleur de Confiance, which costs about $80/bottle. The bottles look almost identical, so it’s an easy mistake to make if you head for the checkout line with the wrong wine. I grabbed the last bottle available at the Capitol Hill QFC in Seattle, so you may want to try elsewhere for your bottle of Rasteau Cuvée Confiance!

This is an interesting weekend for me. It’s the first time since mid-2004 that I’ve been alone in my own apartment; my wife went to visit her family and there was no way I could take another week off so soon after our East Coast vacation trip. So while she’s gone I am trying to indulge in everything she finds less interesting than I do. For example, I watched John Carpenter’s The Thing tonight for the 12th time and made up a new drink. It’s 50% lemonade, 50% iced tea, and 10% Scotch. It would be an Arnold Palmer without the Scotch, so I decided to call this drink the “John Daly.”  But then I found out that they already named another drink after John Daly, so I guess any old rummy golfer’s name would do. Maybe the “Bob Hope” is a good compromise since the drink tastes a little funny.

Anyway, one of the things I try to do on my own is visit wine stores. I do enjoy visiting wine stores with my wife, but I have a way of spending 60-90 minutes inside a good wine store, feeling guilty the entire time as my wife waits patiently at first, then impatiently, then in the car with the engine running. I believe I did that to her on our honeymoon. Hopefully she decides to return from her parents’ house next week.

Since I had a gift certificate to spend, I wanted to give the Pike and Western Wine Shop in Seattle a serious look. I had been in once before, but not for any proper length of time, and that was with my vaguely patient wife. So today I went back and spent about 20 minutes poking around the small store. I quickly noticed that this store is both friendly and snobby. I’d say the clientèle makes the store snobby in this case as the staff were helpful but several other patrons nearly body-checked me into the Italian wines on a few occasions. That would have been costly.

Or perhaps not. The store didn’t exactly have a massive selection of wine, although what they did have appeared to be carefully selected, reasonably priced for the most part, and representative of France, Italy, and the Northwest US. I did find a couple of Radio-Coteau bottles ($50+) and the 2005 Hirsch Pinot Noir release ($60). Ouch. I decided to come back another time with my $50 gift certificate.

I strolled down the hill to The Spanish Table, one of my new favorite wine stores in Seattle. Their focus is Spain, Portugal, and a bit of Chile and Argentina, and their resident wine expert knows her stuff. She’s a little intimidating because of her tremendous command of regional Spanish and Portugese wines, and because she knows how to pronounce everything she sells. I took French and Italian, but never Spanish or Portugese, so varietals such as Xarello scare the heck out of me, phonetically speaking. But with Catherine’s help, I picked out a great wine for WBW #37, which is just around the corner.

As I walked back up the steep Pike Place hill toward my car, I saw something a bit strange. Now, I am not a parent, but a frequent topic of conversation between my wife and I is the parenting quality on display in and around Seattle. I can summarize it in two words: It sucks. People in this region make horrible parents, or at least the people I see with children routinely reflect their inadequate levels of common sense and ability to think of their children as children rather than miniature adults. I guess these parents would be better suited to the Victorian era, when children were perceived as adults and did factory work that adults were too large to do.  Seattle parents tend to be older and more educated than the parents I see elsewhere in the world.  Maybe that’s why Seattle parents try to reason patiently with their 2-year-old children at the grocery store in the checkout line right in front of me every time I’m buying two things and trying to get home to cook dinner.
But I digress.

As I walked back up the hill, I noticed a kid in a stroller next to a parked car. It was an odd sight because, hey, how the heck did that kid get himself into his stroller next to a car without an adult? At least, that was my first thought since I didn’t see any adults around. My second thought was, “So this is how kids get kidnapped.” It was pathetic: The car was a Volvo and the owner had his back to his year-old son, who had a scared look on his face as he sat in a stroller that was pointed down a steeply-sloping sidewalk. In fact, I would think about the son’s face again later, but with a slightly changed perspective.

I kept walking. I noticed the little kid, the late-model Volvo sedan, and the back of a man who was on the street side of the car with the passenger door open. He seemed to be busy with something. Just as I passed the car, the father said something:

“No butterfly cookie!”

My ears perked up a bit. No butterfly cookie? What the hell does that mean?

And then I heard another kid, slightly older, probably about 3 years old at the most. He was clearly pissed off. He said to his father:

“Daddy, you’re stupid.”

Nice one. I know a few kids like that, very charming. Also, they’re 3 YEARS OLD, so that’s the sort of thing you’d expect a tired, probably hungry, overstimulated little boy to say. Right? I would expect that. But this is where things got good.

The father quickly stammered his reply:

“No, YOU’RE STUPID. If you weren’t being so obnoxious to me right now, you’d get to have your butterfly cookie. But now you don’t get one! NO BUTTERFLY COOKIE! THAT’S ALL!”

He stuttered a bit as he delivered his rebuttal while his son sobbed in the back seat. The father was clearly angry about something; there was no other adult with him, so perhaps he was angry about having to take both kids while his goddamned wife got a facial at the spa again, where she seems to spend all of her time and HIS money lately, in case he hadn’t noticed, and meanwhile he has to wrangle these two annoying little brats all over town, buying them shit and being the responsible one while that bitch gets her stupid nails done!

At least, that’s what I assume he was thinking as I quickened my pace up the hill.

Now, I understand that people have bad days. I know that we all get stressed out and upset over petty things. But holy hell, when you start calling your 3-year-old son “stupid” that forcefully, in public, while your 1-year-old son sits in a stroller pointing downhill…well, perhaps you should stop for a moment and consider the responsibility you have to your family. I get the same feeling every time I eat at a restaurant and I see two parents not talking to one another as they drink their third margaritas while their young children get into trouble all over the joint without any sort of parental attention or reprimand. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. Perhaps I’m simply getting old. Or, perhaps, I’m not really aware just how difficult it is to raise children. Maybe kids really do drive you to drink. Maybe kids really are stupid and deserve to be called out as such by their parents. Then again, maybe not.

I don’t really know what to think about the whole situation with this specific family. I do know why the younger child looked so alarmed as I approached on my way up the hill. Kids pick up on so many nuances in their parents’ behavior, speech, and moods, and they take it hard when parents get angry. Luckily, many kids are pretty resilient and they grow up to be nice, happy people despite childhoods spent defending themselves from inadequate parents. But no kid deserves to be called “stupid” by his own father, particularly at such a young age.

Now I know why, from time to time when I enter a wine store, some of the patrons seem like royal assholes. It’s because they are assholes, even to their own children. That’s just sad.

I guess even parents need a butterfly cookie sometimes.

On gently sloping hillsides, dusted with early morning fog and tinged with effervescent dew, rest a handful of artisans who enjoy nothing more than to caress and serenade the world’s most exclusive grape vines. Surrounded by a blast of autumnal colors and verdant stripes of pasture, these vines require supreme attention to yield their elusive nectar. But before this sybaritic elixir can be created by our Nobel Prize-winning winemaker, the grapes themselves must first be carried unblemished to the winery on the backs of tiny peasant women born and raised in an extinct province of Burkina Faso, women who were only brought to the United States in 1963 on an immigration technicality. There is no finer workforce in the world.

Once the precious cargo has reached the winery doors, the grapes are gently crushed with platinum, an inert metal, before being sluiced in a very gentle way into a 27-tier, gravity-fed, ermine-lined system of golden tubes.  These tubes lead to the diamond-encrusted, 120% French Oak barrels hand-toasted by none other than the former President of France and renowned cooper, Francois Mitterand, shortly before his death in 1996. This “late” period of Mitterand’s work is considered his finest.

After no less than 47 years in these barrels, the wine is nearly complete. A final blessing is spoken over every barrel prior to bottling, rendering the wine both kosher and suitable for Catholic church services in every state except New York. The bottles are taken from the incomparable Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, where geological pressure formed them naturally over the course of 800 million years and where they grew in such conditions as to create deep punts that extend from the base of each bottle to just 5 millimeters below the neck. Labels are printed using 50% post-consumer waste and 50% recycled illuminated manuscripts. The cork used to seal each bottle comes from the tomb of Cleopatra, who was mummified inside a cork sarcophagus and who was buried with enough beeswax to enclose just 15,000 cases of our wine. Should you so desire, Jeroboams and Nebuchadnezzars are available for an additional shipping fee, packaging fee, handling fee, insurance fee, and a “fee” fee that is actually a fee for incurring so many lesser fees.

Once this wine touches your lips, hits your tongue, makes its way past your uvula and into your stomach, you will experience a sensual and aesthetic pleasure rivaled only by those brave souls who have complete a pilgrimage to Cythera, or who have tried our late-harvest Riesling. Our “second-pressing” wine is actually made from the excrement of those lucky tasters who drink our estate-bottled reserve wine. Please sign up for our mailing list and be sure to join our wine club, which features a new wage garnishment clause that our top customers will appreciate as a way to insult those lesser customers who cannot afford to remain in the club after the first shipment.