An AC Wednesday morning

Nothing like some shouting, terrific harmony and overall weirdness to get you through hump day.



Scroll down, I was up late posting a few new things last night, including notes from the Dressner tasting (probably need to edit for name and vintage accuracy for a few wines). If you were on here looking for new stuff since last Friday, thanks for dealing with the lack of activity over the past few days everyone.

2006 Thevenet Morgon Vieilles Vignes, or Bringin' some flavor to Palo Alto

I recently had the pleasure of breaking bread at the house of good friends of one of my co-workers. Not to go into too many details, the food was very good, the hosts really generous and incredibly hospitable (and not to mention outstanding cooks), and the wines very Napa-centric. This had everything to do with a popular wine blogger who had some samples to taste and decided to bring them out to share with company. After discussing the dinner with my co-worker Jeff, I fully expected a table full of big, jammy wine-like beverages, and so I thought a nice cru Beaujolais would both add contrast and provide something for me to drink with dinner. From the selection of steak (yes, it was a comparative steak tasting, true food geek stuff here) to the epoisse, marcellin, gran cru, and other cheeses, the Morgon worked terrifically. It's got the structure and density to work with beef, but the acidity, savor, dryness and finesse to beautifully go with even the stinkiest of ripe cheeses. Between a crowd of 11 drinkers, Thevenet's Morgon and a mag of '97 Labegorce Margaux (a delicious wine brought by Jeff) were the only reds to be emptied. Who knew that such good taste existed in Palo Alto?

Notes from Dressner Tasting last week

Mr. Joe Dressner (?)

Now this was my kind of trade tasting. Held in the kitchen of Dressner's west coast rep's Castro home, with a manageable amount of wines to taste through and a friendly group of like-minded wine people. Thanks to Mr. Dressner and Shawn Mead for putting this tasting together.

2007 Lemasson Gama Sutra VdT

100% tasty gamay. This Puzelat protege clearly knows what he's doing.

2007 Lemasson Cheville de Fer

Cot. Deeper and more intense nose. Tangy mixed berries over a very smooth, elegant texture. Less earthy than the wine above, and a bit more heft. Delicious young cot - tasty now but will surely gain complexity over time.

2007 Cascina Tavign Grignolino d'Asti

Excellent. Pure cherry essence with wonderful acidity and loads of freshness. Grignolino as good as this is way too easy to drink (not necessarily a bad thing).

2006 Noussan Torrette Val d'Aoste

Mixed berry and dark fruit skins. Good flavors and focus here. Reasonably bright for a Torrette, which can sometimes be a bit darker and slightly chewier.

2005 Gioia de Colle Primitivo

My notes read simply, "Berry. Dusty cocoa. Best primitivo I've had." Ceri Smith, proprietor of the terrific San Francisco Italian wine shop Biondivino, shared my sentiments, saying that it was primitivo she actually liked. Couldn't agree more.

2005 Gioia Antello del Murge

More intense and brambly. Interesting. A touch more earthy complexity as well.

Massa Vecchia VdT Rosso (vintage?)

I have heard a lot about this wine. Maybe I'm just not ready for it; perhaps it's too 'challenging.' Regardless, I found the aromas to be very heady and intense. Macerated cherries on the palate, a touch of CO2, and the sans soufre/minimal sulphur nutty aftertaste I seem to be picking up with increasing frequency in some natural wines.

2006 Malescondo Rosso di Montalcino

Very intense, earthy, tangy red fruit. Some tuscan savor as well. Quite good.

2005 Malescondo Chianti Classico

More intense flavors. Darker fruits and fruit skins. Slightly raisinated nose and more assertive tannins, but all balanced and truly delicious.

Back to the French wines...

2007 Puzelat Tesnieres (Pineau d'Aunis)

Classic white pepper and wild strawberry nose, leading to vivid blue and purple fruit flavors. A true original, and very fine.

2007 Tue Bouef Cheverny

Light, earthy gamay. Tasty and decidedly thirst quenching bistro style wine.

2006 Descombes Brouilly
This is serious cru beaujolais; don't let the Brouilly cru designation fool you. Intense raspberry and blackberry on the nose lead to a palate of of lively mixed fruit, with great intensity and unique savor.

2006 Descombes Morgon
Damn, this is good. A good bit more tightly wound than the Brouilly and in want of long decanting or opening a night before consumption. Even better, stash it away for several years. Very dense, explosive berries, but as I mentioned, decidedly stern. It's not showing close to everything it's got to offer.

2007 La Guillaume Monpertuis

'Poopy red berries,' on the nose, according to my notes. Light, dilute, and perhaps too sans soufre-y for my taste.

2006 Ca de Nocci Sottbosco Ca de Roci
Emilia Romagna sparkler. 50% lambrusco grasparossa, 30% lambrusco maestri, 20% malbo gentile. Dark. Tastes like a sparkling Loire cot might taste if they made such a wine (maybe someone out there does?) Nice gripping tannins on finish. This wine makes me hungry for hearty Italian cuisine, of the regionally authentic, homestyle variety that is probably best pursued in Italy (but of course).
Long time, no new content...THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE! So despite my strong dislike for writing long posts with a bunch of random tasting notes, here is one such entry below. Occasionally, unique wines do merit my putting down the most boring, gray area prone, self indulgent of all prose known to man, wine tasting notes. Hope you enjoy reading.

Massa Vecchia Bia
Another wine that I don't enjoy. If I've lost points with the geeky Italophiles out there, that's just too bad. I apparently don't think dig these Massa Vecchia wines that much. The red was more enjoyable than this one, which had a weird, Brett and wild yeast geuze style savor to it. The Cantillon geuze of sparkling wines. I'd give you more info but the Dressner website links to the Ca de Nocci above when I drag my mouse over the Massa Vecchia link.

OK, whew...this took a good while to get up here. Busy at work, tired at home, and thus the delay in getting these up. Good wines, though, take a while to learn how to make. And so it follows that their descriptions sometimes take a while to post. Anyway, hope you enjoyed reading, and that you might find something new and exciting to try if some of these are available in a shop near you.

Two very different days of tasting wine - USA and ARGENTINA; FRANCE and ITALY

On Tuesday, I tasted around 50 wines at work. I thought 10 of them tasted ok. Two of them I might buy with my own money. It was a day spent tasting mainly California wines, with about ten Argentinean wines as well, so I guess I'm not surprised that I disliked most of the wines. I've noticed that many of my colleagues who sell wine retail and in restaurants, especially the under 40 year-old set (though not by any means limited to these folks) overwhelmingly prefer European wines to Californian, Washington, Oregon and other new world regions. Furthermore, most wine drinkers I talk to who have been drinking wine for a while often tell me that they gradually have grown to prefer European wines to their new world counterparts. That does not bode particularly well for new world wine regions, don't you think? Especially if more people continue selling what they actually like and think is good, not what they think their customers will think is good.

Of the 50 wines I tasted, there were six by Paul Hobbs, each of them truly awful, and unimaginable with any sort of food. What's up with Americans' unsatiable thirst for these crappy wines? Subject for a future post, perhaps.

One of the two wines that I really liked was the 2006 Unti Petit Freres (90% Grenache, Syrah) which tasted of dark fruit, fully dry, and unmarred by overripeness or new oak. No surprises here given that, if memory serves, they ferment with indigenous yeast in tank, with aging in used oak foudres The other one was a Pinot Noir from Hirsch's Bohan Dillon vineyard in the Sonoma coast. While CA pinot is generally not my tipple of choice, this wine was bright and lively, crunchy red fruits with good acidity and even a touch of minerality.

Now on to a different day of tasting, the day before this one, on my day off. It was a small Dressner tasting, basically a line-up of wines that are not represented by our CA distributor and are available direct from Mr. Dressner in New York. Of the 19 wines, I really liked 14, a markedly higher percentage than the day of tasting mentioned above. Granted, Joe Dressner has a pretty mean palate and imports good stuff, but I think you can readily see the contrast between these two days of tasting. Chances are, if you are reading this then you know what I'm saying and find yourself feeling similarly inclined, but I welcome any and all contrarians to state their wine preferences.

More detailed notes to come on the Dressner wines.

David Simon, creator of 'The Wire,' interviewed on Forum

Besides having some of the catchiest theme music in the talk show radio business, Michael Krasny's Forum has an amazing array of guests and diversity of topics discussed. Unfortunately, if a program interests me, I can usually only catch part of it before I head into work. Fortunately, I was interested enough in hearing this interview to check out it out online, and listen to it while I unwind, work on a wine entry for this blog, and ponder dinner options. Enjoy.

Jamaica, Jamaica

This is not a post on Kymani Marley’s 2006 summer smash, ‘Jamrock,’ nor does it have anything to do with the tiny Carribean island or its popular cultural export, reggae. I would simply like to pay tribute to one of my favorite summertime drinks, the refreshing Mexican chilled hibiscus tea, Jamaica (prounced ‘ha-MY-kuh). K&L’s resident Michoacaner, Jorge Valencia, makes a terrific Jamaica and has been sure to keep our Fridge stocked for the past few weeks. Nothing like fresh, tangy hibiscus tea for a mid-afternoon pick me up. Thanks, Jorge.

The DFA Cool Kids Indie Disco Invasion, featuring Holy Ghost!

As far as what the young dudes and ladies are listening, I am usually woefully out of touch. However, as with many others I occasionally find myself on the proverbial nuts of DFA. I first heard this delicious Holy Ghost! track on CALX, UC Berkeley's radio station. It was the instrumental version, and I was moved. It made me think of electro/funk music from over 25 years ago, which I suppose is why I liked it so much.