Spa Wine

Sometimes you want a big wine, a wine that' s bold and brash and practically a meal in itself with chewy tannins and lots of body. But sometimes you want something light, lean, and fresh. I call these "spa wines," wines that seem to refresh you and clear the cobwebs out of your palate as much as a day at the spa. I often find myself drawn to this kind of wine after a long day at work, or if I've been drinking too many brawny reds and eating too much steak.

A wine that certainly qualifies as a "spa wine" in my book is the 2005 Domaine de la Fruitière Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie Cuvée Petit M. ($8.95, Chronicle Wine Cellar; available elsewhere for between $8 and $10) This wine had delicate fresh lime and mineral aromas, which conjured up images of citrus trees and walks on the beach. When you sipped the wine, it had light and lean lime, grapefruit, and stone flavors. This muscadet was lithe and supple like a yoga class, not heavy and muscular. This was not a terribly complex muscadet, but is was delicious, and at under $10 it certainly represented very good QPR.

With such a light wine, I certainly didn't want to weigh it down with heavy or rich food. This wine screams out for shellfish or fish. While it is a brilliant pairing for something as light and lean as it is, it could handle something a bit more decadent, too. We had it with an Asian salmon rice bowl with lots of lime and some tangy cucumbers and it was lovely. But the last bit of the wine was just as good with a decadent Nigella Lawson shrimp and mango curry with coconut milk. This is in her new book, Nigella Express, which is due out next week (Oct. 30) here in the US. I scored a copy in England last month, and can testify that the curry recipe is worth the price of the book. Not precisely spa food, with all that coconut milk, but awfully good nonetheless.

Wine and Your PDA: A Price Revolution?

Have you ever been in a restaurant and looked up a wine's retail price on your PDA before deciding which bottle you'll be having with dinner? Dan Berger saw a diner do just that, according to an interesting article that appeared in last week's Napa Valley Register. (photo from Ian Britton's FreeFoto.com)

I've never done this, nor have I ever seen it done, but I can imagine that it is going to happen with greater frequency now that everyone's running out and getting each new Apple contraption available. The question is, will restaurant markups shrink now that consumers can easily check on how much the wine would cost around the corner at Joe's Wine Shop? And will they choose differently based on consumer reviews on sites like CellarTracker and Snooth?

And what about Joe's Wine Shop? Now that buyers can stand in the aisle and check to see if they can find the wine at Joe's for less somewhere else (read: giant chain store), will we end up with greater homogeneity in wine prices? More importantly, will we end up with fewer small retailers, since they will find it more difficult to compete with the box and chain stores?

I'd like to hear what people think about this trend. Do you routinely use your PDA or phone to check wine prices when you're out in restaurants or stores? If not, would you like to someday be able to do just that? What do you think the upside and the downside of this is for winemakers, retailers, and consumers?

Red, White, and Tasty All Over

If you think there is something weird about blending red and white wine, think again. As I've mentioned before on GWU$20, I love the mixture of shiraz or syrah and viognier that produces wines that have all of syrah's spiciness, but with floral aromas and a silky quality. And I'm not the only one to like wines that are red, white, and tasty all over. Gary Vaynerchuk is a big fan, too, and you can watch him tasting a few shiraz-viognier wines over at Wine Library TV.

The 2002 Maxwell Four Roads Shiraz-Grenache-Viognier was a lovely example of what makes these red-white blends so appealing. ($14.95, Chronicle Wine Cellar; between $18 and $25 from other merchants) Maxwell Vineyards is a family-owned and operated vineyard in the McLaren Vale region of Australia that was started in 1979. They are well known for being the largest producer of mead--fermented honey wine--in the Southern Hemisphere. But they make excellent grape wine, too, as this bottle proves. (picture of 2003 bottle for reference; the 2002 label does not have the grenache mentioned on the label but it is in the wine nonetheless)

When you open this wine you might be taken aback by the smell of apricots along with spicy red fruit. But you'll find that the flavors are more familiar to red wine lovers, and are based on the varietal characteristics of shiraz and grenache: blackberry, red raspberry, and peppery spice. All of these flavors are wrapped up in a silky package, with the viognier bringing not only enticing apricot aromas but a nice lift to the wine when you hold it in your mouth. The flavors weren't hugely persistent, as they are with many Australian shirazes, but the wine is so bright and lively that I found it irresistible nonetheless. Very good QPR at under $15, and even if you have to pay more I suspect you will agree. What to have with your red-white wine? Thai beef curry, a spicy beef stir-fry, or even a bowl of chili would be perfect.

I should note that some of Maxwell's Four Roads from the 2002 vintage were bottled under Stelvin closures and some under cork; my bottle was under a cork. If anyone has has the screw-top bottle, I would be interested to know if you found the viognier even more apparent in either the aromas or flavors. But under screw top or cork, I think you will really enjoy this tasty and affordable red wine from Down Under.

Weekend Wine Shopping: WBW Made Me Do It!

Wine Blogging Wednesday. It's good news and it's bad news. Good news because we learn a lot about wine. Bad news because, once we learn about it, we want to drink it.

So this weekend's wine shopping is dedicated to helping you find the wines to either feed the need for Portuguese vino that was caused by reading all those fabulous tasting notes that Ryan and Gabriella drew together from WBW #38, or to feed the need for Burgundy wines in preparation for Neil the Brooklynguy's WBW #39 in November.

After I had my bottle of Portuguese white, I knew I wanted to taste more Portuguese wine. So I clicked over to domaine547, my favorite armchair wine store, and bought one of the new "wine blogger packs." This is a new idea at domaine547, where wine bloggers select a few wines that they think that their readers would like to try. The first pack was put together by Catavino's own Ryan and Gabriella, and included three carefully selected Portuguese wine. The price? $50. The Catavino Pack contained a zesty 2006 Famega Vinho Verde; a hearty 2003 Esporao Trincadeira; and a 2003 Bacalhoa Touriga So. Opening the box was a bit like opening a present--there was a great information sheet (which included the recipe for a perfect food pairing for the Trincadeira!) and a little gift (a much snazzier foil cutter than the one I presently own). I'm happy to have my three bottles of Portuguese wine, and to have reduced the sizable carbon footprint I planted on LA in the past few weeks trying to find wine for WBW #38! Are you going to someone's house for Thanksgiving? This would be a great "send ahead" hostess gift! I'd sure be happy to have this arrive at my house before the guests, and I might even save a bottle for you to drink with me.

With WBW #39 looming, and Turkey Day on the horizon, I headed to Chronicle Wine Cellar to see if I could find some burgundy that would fit Neil's brief. I'm in a comfortable rut drinking my Girardin second labels, but Neil suggested I try something else and happily Chronicle has a great selection of white burgundies right now. I scored a 2004 Domaine Larochette-Manciat Pouilly-Vinzelles Les Longeays ($15.95). They also had a Pouilly-Fuisse from this maker for under $20, a Girardin Rully for $24.95, and some other scrumptious looking white burgundies from the Cote de Beaune. When I was there Elizabeth was also packing some Portuguese reds (go figure...), including the 2004 Symington Altano made with Tinta Roriz and Tourgia Franca grapes ($6.95). They still have bottles of affordable and tasty Cono Sur wines on the shelves, too. Jerry Hall of Winewaves likes these Chilean pinots, so they're worth a try considering they are under $10 at Chronicle.

We're entering into the part of the calendar that I call "The Crazies." Beat the crowds and calm the hysteria by getting a few nice bottles into your house now. With these bottles safely in my possession, I can think about sipping Trincadeira Halloween night, and finding a good chicken dish to have with that Pouilly-Vinzelles.

Wine Identity Theft: When One Wine Drinks Like Another

Here at GWU$20 I use varietal characteristics to evaluate wine. I want my cabs to taste like cabs, and my chardonnay to taste like chardonnay. Drinking a wine that says it's one thing on the bottle, and then tastes like something else, seems like wine identity theft. It can also make it impossible to evaluate the wine's quality-to-price ratio on a consistent basis. The market price for cabernet and gamay are different; so if I have a cab that drinks like a gamay, and paid $18 for it--well, I am not happy. If I wanted gamay, I'd buy it for $13 and enjoy every drop. I've had a run of wines that were made from one grape, but drank like wines made from another. Is it wine identity theft, or is something more complicated going on?

The first was a 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Grenache ($15 from most merchants) that came from the cool Anderson Valley in Mendocino County. This smelled exactly like grenache, but it tasted like a gamay wine from the Beaujolais. Aromas of herbs, plums, and blackberries started things off, which are some of the aromas I associate with grenache, along with a floral note. The flavors were much lighter, however, with strawberry at the core of its flavors, and some mineral freshness as well. I really liked this wine because it was a nice, light red. But if you pick a bottle up at the wine store, I'd recommend treating it as you would a beaujolais, not a French grenache.

The second wine that seemed like a victim of identity theft was the 2006 Claudia Springs Pinot Gris Klindt Vineyard ($17). Pinot Gris is known for its apple and lemon flavors, and I always associate the wine with crispness and a bit of round vanilla from the time that it sees in oak. This wine was pale straw in color, and had very muted aromas of apples, apricots, and cream. Apricot and apple dominated the flavors, and as you swallowed the last drops you tasted even more butter and cream. This was a pinot gris that would appeal to chardonnay lovers. It may be that the juice underwent malolactic fermentation which is not common for pinot gris. This would account for the creaminess in the flavors and aromas, but I couldn't find out for sure if this was the case or not.

My third case of wine identity theft was the 2005 Cline Vineyards Ancient Vines Zinfandel (between $11 and $20). A bright ruby-red zinfandel, this had lots of herbal aromas up front and not much fruit. Flavors of herbs and minerals put the blackberry fruit flavors that were present as well into a secondary role in this wine. It had a tangy, herbal finish that reminded me of a cabernet franc. We didn't drink the whole bottle the first day, and it actually seemed a little more fruity and peppery, and therefore more characteristic of the varietal, on the second day. This made me wonder if the wine needed some more time in the bottle to really shine.

While these wines were hard to evaluate from a QPR standpoint, I enjoyed drinking each of them--as long as I covered up the label! There was nothing wrong or flawed with the wines. I was just surprised at the way that they tasted.

But there may be reasons for the flavors that these wines exhibited. The grenache was grown in an unusual place: the relatively cold climate of the Anderson Valley. Grenache is most often associated with the south of France. Perhaps that accounted in part for its Beaujolais-like qualities? The second wine may have gone through an unusual fermentation process for the grape, which made it creamier than most pinot gris. And the zinfandel might have been too young to really strut its stuff.

Before you call out the wine police for your next case of wine identity theft, consider the unique growing, winemaking, and aging needs of your wine. Varietal characteristics are an important part of the story--but they aren't the whole story. And sometimes a wine identity thief can be a pleasant surprise.