First Taste: 2005 Chateau de la Marechaude

I bought a bottle of Chateau de la Marechaude 2005 on my way home today to drink during the NBA Finals tonight; since none of my teams were playing tonight, I figured I could enjoy the wine without incident.

It’s ripe, potent, and young-smelling on the nose, and on the tongue there’s lots of cinnamon, brown sugar, and earth – sweeter than I expected. It really opens up and becomes something different – I don’t decant these – when it’s left to sit. Then, it remains earthy but the spice and sweetness give way to some fruit notes that weren’t there before. Interesting and pretty complex.

I really enjoyed this wine. It’s predominantly merlot and comes from the Lalande de Pomerol region of France, located Southwest just outside of the village of Pomerol, a much smaller region that produces longer-living, pricier, but similar wine.

Tonight, I tried to pair this wine with grilled chicken with jalapenos and shitake mushrooms, but that failboat wouldn’t get off the docks at all. Maybe I’ll try something easier, like pairing French fries with white wine, next time.

First Taste: 2005 Plume Bleue

Tonight saw me successfully file my taxes on time and also pick up an armful of wine from the wine shop on my corner, including a 2005 Grenache/Syrah blend that I would either drink in celebration (My returns are finally filed!) or despair (I can’t do this alone after all!)

The Plume Bleue 2005 Vin de Pays d’Oc is a red table wine from the south Rhone Valley, and is a pretty interesting wine – like when you bring a significant other out for the first time to meet friends and the consensus is “yeah, your friend is … interesting.”

Yeah, it’s not necessarily a good thing.

< minimalist prose >

I can smell the fruit before I even get close to the half-poured glass, and I don’t expect that’s a good thing. This wine is overpowering on the nose – it comes without a cork, and I’m always skeptical of wine without corks – so I figure it needs to breathe for a minute. And that’s what it does.

Not-necessarily-fresh berries, like the produce you’d find in a discount grocer, that’s what I smell.

Lift the glass but don’t drink: carry it into the kitchen and pour from smallish red wine glass to largish red wine glass. I’m not giving this one a chance to sit down. Smoke; tobacco. Earthy musk. Then it really opens up with springy minerals and young but ripe fruit. It’s thin and a bit sour; fresh but very dry.

This one is very complex on the lips but has little else to offer on its leave except lasting, impressive dryness. That’s its best trait. It’s already convoluted enough.

< /minimalist prose >

Even though this vino is half-and-half with Grenache and Syrah, it’s the former, with its quiet tannins and berry flavors, that I taste most. Because Grenache typically progresses sequentially from good year to not-so-good year, I have to assume that this bottle, a 2005, is from a less-impressive year. 2004 might have been better.

Not one of my favorites, but I’ll never regret trying a new wine.

Just a bit of housekeeping

I updated "Required Reading" with (gasp) actually-accurate links and more-relevant content. Removed some links too. You're dead to me, Dealbreaker.

Best Wine Party Theme: Everyone Brings Two Bottles!

There’s a still-growing and free website that connects reporters to PR professionals and, potentially, great sources that wouldn’t otherwise be found. (Sidebar: if you work in PR, you should sign up for the list and read the daily e-mails.)

Skimming through today’s queries, I read the first one I can recall that relates to wine.

"I'm looking for some ideas for stories on entertaining with wine. ... Do you have any stories about a party you threw -- or attended -- where wine played a role without being too stuffy about it?"

The best format for a wine party I’ve ever experienced wasn’t stuffy or terribly formal, but it did mimic the zenith of wine snobbery: the tasting.

A friend had about twenty or so people over to her apartment a couple of years ago; every person chose one wine to bring two bottles of. The host labeled each pair with a number and drinkers poured the wines of their choice, recording their favorite wine and two runners-up. (I should clarify: no, this doesn’t mean everyone drank 20 glasses of wine. Some people skipped some wines. An imperfect system, yes.)

When everyone was good and tipsy done drinking, the host tallied up the votes and awarded the remaining bottles to the winner. New York’s Gothamist.com has a better explanation of the party format.

I can’t remember which wine won, but I do remember one of the runners-up was a remarkably cheap bottle which we started calling “the spoiler.”



[Unfortunate photo from that party]

The benefits of this format:

Variety of wines outside the host’s control
Incentive for partygoers to bring their fave bottles
Drinkers will argue about which wine is best, and it will be funny

I’ve found a few very nice bottles since then – my wine for that party, a 2004 Malbec that received fairly high marks at a local wine store, was roundly dismissed by everyone who drank it, and I’m looking for some redemption.

Chilling Red Wine = A Great Thing to Do

I infuriate friends by insisting on chilling red wines. I realise that this is dangerous – a good cabernet sauvignon, for example, friends have told me, needs to be warm. But I hate most of those wine’s anyways.

I’m not about to go and let a silly thing like alcohol fumes ruin a good wine’s complexities; chilling reds for 20 minutes seems to solve this problem. I also feel like a good red wine, slightly chilled, opens up better when it’s removed from the fridge and let sit at room temperature.

Mind you, I’m not trying to make popsicles or anything. My rationale, aside from simply liking the wine better when it’s chilled, is that it’s easier to let it warm after you’ve opened it. So those who don’t like the practice can warm the glass with their palms, swirl the wine, or do whatever … while I get the first taste and dibs on declaring it good or bad.

I’m not alone, apparently. Slate.com wine columnist Mike Steinberger likes his reds chilled; I had the pleasure of living in Paris during one particularly warm summer, and, like Steinberger, witnessed restaurants serving chilled reds to thirsty locals. I’m going to take his lead and stock up on wines from Beaujolais and the Loire Valley for the summer.

And given that I’ve bothered friends with this practice throughout the winter, I’ll certainly continue with it into the warm months. Now if everyone would just stop sniffing their corks, all would be right with the wine world.

First Taste: Clos des Moines clos des Trois Croix 2005

This post might will definitely reinforce the contention that I have little idea what I’m writing about, given that I don’t have any background in wine aside from drinking a glass or three of red whenever it’s at all possible. I’ll start by revealing that Robert Parker liked the Clos des Moines clos des Trois Croix 2005 vintage, scoring it an 89 on his scale.

I have this in common with Parker: I too love the 2005 Bordeaux vintage, or at least what I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing thus far. But I was less impressed than was he with this one.

The wine started off with notes of caramel and butter. From there, it moved to light flowers and herbs, with few tannic qualities. Its leave was airy, fresh, and reminded me of springtime.

It’s remarkably smooth and reasonably dry, but here’s where it fails: it’s nothing close to challenging or remarkable. It’s too innocent and as spotless as an OCD neat freak with stainless steel appliances. Now where’d I put my Windex!

Alright, sure, I’m maybe being overly harsh. But my favorite wines feature an immediate, noticeable flaw that one can grow to enjoy. This one had none of that.

First Taste: Tour de Goupin 2005 Bordeaux

Tonight’s semi-regular poker game saw me play three separate four-of-a-kind hands. ‘Nuff said, really – the odds of having that hand on a given deal is about one-quarter of one percent. Three in one evening is just senseless.

I was less lucky, though, with the wine I opened and sipped from through the game: a 2005 Bordeaux from Tour de Goupin, a small winery near Castillon. It’s a fine Bordeaux in its own right – primarily a Merlot/Cab Sav blend – but I handicap everything I’m drinking nowadays from that vintage against the Château la Rose Tour Blanche I found in January. Just as I’ll probably expect to have quads at least once next time I play poker.

On the nose, this wine was fragrant and light-smelling with raspberries. It started too sweet for my tastes, then moved toward an assortment of fruits, notably cranberry and plum. This one’s light and not awfully complex.

The leave was more interesting: licorice, raisins, and a bit of chocolate.

This wine is organic, which I would assume means made from grapes grown with no pesticides or chemical treatment. Not a bad bottle, but certainly no winner.