The UnCorker

Weird Wine of The Week: Eric Chevalier’s Fie Gris

Can a wine made with the heirloom savignon blanc ancestor “Fie Gris” take on a world class Sancerre?  What would happen if you took one of uber-importer Kermit Lynch’s more off-the-wall discoveries and faced it off against a classic, famous appellation wine in the same price range?   Does it hold up?  Is there any compelling evidence that a wine-drinker - when given the choice - should choose to go weird?

Well, in general we think so.  That’s why we spend so much time flirting around the edges of what’s available in the US wine market - partly out of boredom, but also because there is a lot of value lurking off in the shadows.

Fie Gris vines were discovered in Tourraine and eslewhere in the southern Loire and are believed to be the ancestors - the pre-Phylloxera ancestors! - of savignon blanc.  This sounds so promising right from the get-go.   After all, it was Phylloxera that wiped out so many strains of heirloom grapes throughout Europe and forced growers onto mostly the same rootstocks and clone varieties.

The beauty of the Fie Gris is that it tastes really different.  You see  things like green pepper in people’s tasting notes - but it doesn’t always come across on the palate.   Especially in savignon blancs - which tend to have strong citrus flavors that obscure such subtleties. You may be a super-taster and be able to  identify the precise genus and species of each fruit, twig, nut, and stone that you are using as a tasting metaphor. You may have a normal palate but have trained yourselves - master sommellier style-  to identify and classify the wines - but let’s face it, tasting notes are often a stretch.   According to Jamie Goode’s excellent book “The Science of Wine”, most of us pick up about four flavors (max!) in anything we’re tasting, and if you count grapes as one of those, then that leaves you with three.  But then a wine comes along and you think - holy bejezzus.. now I get what these tiresome bastards mean when they say a wine tastes like [insert flowery tasting note reference here.]

Here’s a wine that  is really different and pronounced in a way that immediately hits your nose and palatte - strong green pepper and spice - think jalapeno, or tomatillo.  A decided lack of citrusy flavor, but with some other mysterious source of refreshing acidity.  This is what we want our Sancerre’s to be, really.    Vegetal, earthy - but incredibly light, spicy, and minerally.   And avoiding the grapefruit-style flavour profiles makes these fun and unusual flavor profiles so much easier to discover. What a perfect match for seafood this was.  Mario Batali has claimed that his secret is basically adding acid and spice to simple Italian dishes.  Well, this is a wine that does that very thing - which makes it a fantastic accompaniment to simple roasted or grilled fish.

Just to prove our point, we immediately opened a bottle of Lucien Crochet’s 2007 Sancerre, a major name producer which retailed at the exact same price point - $23 - to compare.     Tight, lean, and steely.   Compared to the Fie Gris, the aromatics were buried and calling flavor notes out was more an act of faith and imagination than sensory perception.   And Crochet is considered a bargain in Sancerre.   It only goes to show you that when in doubt, go weird.

Weird Wine of the Week: Dan Ackroyd 2007 Pinot Noir, Ontario

When you’re drinking the weird stuff and it happens to be of a classic varietal, it’s important to have benchmark bottles on which to rest your comparisons - ideally, consumed at the same time. But when it comes to Canadian Pinot Noir, it feels unfair to compare it to Old World (Burgundy, Loire, Germany), Warm Weather New World (California, Australia, Chile), or evenCool Weather New World (other parts of California, New Zealand, & Oregon). I mean, c’mon… it’s Canada. I guess we could have opened a bottle of something from New York State’s Finger Lakes region- the closest semi-major producing region of Pinot Noir - but, hey, why start now? So we didn’t compare it with anything. We just popped this sucker - which, yes, is produced at the eponymous winery of that Dan Ackroyd - and took a big, great white sniff and taste. Fresh delicous smelling fruit, loamy soft tannins, and decent extraction. On the palate, we’re missing some acidity which would have livened things up but overall this isn’t bad at all! And guess what - it’s $14 Canadian at the duty-free shop. For a varietal that we’ve almost completely sworn off if we encounter a bottle under $20 any more.

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A Contrast in Fiano- De Conciliis Goes Both Ways

The Gambero Rosso says Bruno De Conciliis is a “sort of modern samuri”- to be honest, we have no idea what they’re talking about, though his wines do kill.

In the remote Campanian region of  Cilento, it is sun-baked mountains and hills, ancient rock and soil, scrub and herbs grow wild and the ancient grapes, aglianico and fiano thrive. De Conciliis vineyards run down toward the Mediterrean- this rugged beauty is reflected in the wines.

Viticoltori De Conciliis is not afraid to take chances, and sometimes they fall short- their passito Ra!, first made of barbera, now mostly aglianico, was a very difficult wine to like or understand when they first started making it- tart and cooked, it hammered the palate and the senses into a strange sort of defeat. Mostly though, their risks pay dividends- producing fiano in two radically different ways showcases not just the beauty of Fiano in the right hands, the skills of the De Conciliis’s, but also provides us with a bit of a history lesson.

The Romans knew Fiano as Vitis Apiana, meaning the bees were all over it, prized for its pinenut hazelnut nuttiness, its fresh herbacousness, an intriguing smokiness, and its ability to retain a fresh, acidic profile in the heat of southern Italy.

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Weird Wine of the Week: 2004 Anima Negra ‘An’ Mallorca

Here we have a wine that has been so successful at clawing it’s way out of weirdness status, that it’s tempting to think of it as normal. We refer, of course, to the stellar reputation, wide (ish) distribution, abundant good press, and all around Parker-y goodness that rains down on the folks at Anima Negra. But people, let’s do a reality check here! First of all, the wine is from Mallorca - a now swank and touristy island off the coast of Spain where it’s easier to catch a glimpse of Catherine Zeta Jones than it is to find yourself a glass of truly great vino (at least that’s exported). Second of all, the wine is made almost exclusively from an heirloom, indigenous grape varietal that grows only on this surprisingly fertile rock out in the Balearic chain of islands -Callet - which is in itself, a pretty weird product of Mother Nature’s imagination. Thirdly, the winemaker manages to capture the one-off, outsized personality of this place in the bottle in a way that his Catalan neighbors on the mainland - even those in Priorat - are rightly jealous of. Oh, and did we mention that this stuff’s made by a trio of young bucks with a real commitment to naturalistic minimalism - something that is still rare in Spanish winemaking?

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Weird Wine(s) of the Week- 2007 Coenobium & Coenobium Rusticum Monastero Suoro Cistercensi

Coenobium is latin; in this sense it refers to communal monasticism, or cenobitic living. This blend of malvasia, grecchetto, verdicchio and trebbiano is an organically produced beauty from the Lazio hills, north of Rome, and qualifies as WWOW for a bunch of reasons.

The first and most obvious being the producers themselves; nuns- that’s right, sisters. Living cenobitically, as it were. Lives given over to prayer, worship and communal labor. Living modestly on the produce they can grow, or in this case, vinify.

If we UnCorker’s had a time machine(and what we wouldn’t give for that) we could go back to a time long ago when religious orders kept viticulture alive. As you’ve read in these pages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the dark ages, it was the church that kept all that the Roman’s had learned about viticulture alive. Today, we don’t think twice about drinking beer made by Belgian Trappists, but wine made by nuns- weird.

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Sokol Blosser Evolution No. 9 Oregon

Just where does lie the history of the mondo-blend? Evolution No. 9 uses nine different grapes. Of course, by building their wine’s brand around this fact it makes it feel like a gimmick. But is this sort of profligate blending an advantage or disadvantage? Is there any logic in it? And as a new breed of wine snob that fetishizes minimalism and naturalism, should we reward such blatant busy-dom with our precious wine-bucks?

First of all, before you go off thinking single varietal wines are somehow more restrained and artistically valid efforts, it should be stated up front that blending is indisputably a part of the winemakers craft. Even within a varietal, winemakers will vinify the cuvees from various vineyards or lots within a vineyard separately then blend these together to achieve a house style or preferred style. And this just touches the surface of the blender’s art. Free run juices are blended with pressed juices. Champagnes are bascially assemblages of all sorts of complicated blending. Even in scientific winemaking where de-alcoholization techniques are used, they will actually remove alcohol from just part of the original wine. Within that isolated part they will remove varying degrees of alcohol in separate batches, and then, based on pure sensory preference, will blend these back together until the desired tasting result is achieved. And blending has never been associated with a lack of quality. Penfold’s Grange, one of the world’s most expensive wines, is a multi-regional blend with grapes sourced as far as 300 miles apart. Let’s face it. Winemaking is a subjective art, and blending is the most expressive, personality driven bit of the whole process.

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P.S. I’m Not Sure What To Think of You

Petite Sirah is a wine, that at least in California, is particularly difficult to make generalizations about - and that’s not only because folks can’t agree how to spell it. Part of this confusion is due to the immense variety within the vineyards themselves. A lot of California Petite Sirah bottlings are a “field blend” (aka a crap shoot of mixed grape varieties growing together). This mostly has to do with the history of this grape in the state. It’s been there a long time, planted in the 18th century by Italian immigrants, who didn’t always know exactly what they were planting. Compounding the confusion is the fact that the term was thrown around loosely to describe a variety of Syrah-like grapes in the region until 1997, when DNA testing proved that most of it really was the unloved (in France anyways) grape called Durif. But since many Petite Sirah plantings in California pre-date this knowledge, the wines carrying this grape’s name on the label can be a bit of a hodgepodge.

(Photo of Petite Syrah grapes in veraison by pixelish)

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A Manly Rosé: Parés Baltà Ros De Pacs

One of the tiredest arguments in all of winedom is that drinking rosé is nothing to be embarrassed about anymore.   But let’s face it - unless you’re standing on a petanque court with a bunch of Provencal pensioners- it’s not really something dudes order when they are out amongst themselves.  After all, the stuff’s pink.  And that’s all we need to say.  Therefore, those of us who lack total confidence in our ability to project manliness are drawn towards the dark and cranberry-tinted- the more extracted, medium weight entries of the genre.   These look a little less effete in the glass to the casual observer.  And if it tastes strong and bites back a little on the finish so much the better.  Nothing wrong with a little burn going down to compensate for the summery breeziness of the whole thing.

The king of manly Rosés in our opinion is Tavel AOC.   King Philip IV drank the stuff on horseback and declared it the only wine worth drinking - and this from a somber Spaniard who is on record for only laughing in public three times in his entire life.  Tavel can be a full-bodied monster that stands up to aging.  Known for candied aromas but often having surprising gravitas, Tavel’s masculinity is evident in it’s color and intensity of flavor.   But unlike a lot of ham-fisted new world attempts at big rosé - a contradiction in terms that denies what is nice about pink wine in the first place - it maintains it’s lightness, it’s minerality, and it’s refreshing acidity.  For the most part we agree with BTYH that the best rose’s come from France, but if we have a soft spot for dark, macerated asskickers it’s because it appeals to the dude in us (at least, those of us at the UnCorker who are dudes.)

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Failla Syrah Que

Under cute, festive titles sometimes lurk ambitious wines. Look at the Australians, for chrissakes, who have made a culture out of serious wine people competing for the dorkiest name possible to slap onto a label. The Que Syrah vineyard is in the northerly reaches of the Sonoma coast area - and is one of the cooler climate Syrah vineyards in all of California. Intrigued by top Syrah maker Failla’s success with this vineyard in the past, and noticing that they were no longer releasing wines made from this particular source of fruit, we decided to seek out where it was available now - which turns out to be Boheme Wines, who currently has a 2005 Que Syrah Vineyard Syrah in release.

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Niebaum Coppola Claret Commemorative Label 2006

Oh, how we’re looking forward to getting our hands on Coppola’s fun-sounding new Encyclopedia label - geared at educating younger drinkers in world varietals - with the nifty edutainment website and test-tube bottle design only sweetening the deal for us. Did we mention the uber-convenience of handling distribution through retailers such as Seven-11 and Walgreens? After all, it’s a lot of trouble to go out and find and understand such off-the-beaten-path varietals as  Tempranillo and Torrontes by drinking the actual indigenous wines on which their reputations were built - so we’re glad Francis and his people are making things easy for us. After all, the Godfather I, II, and, ok-even III, let us experience Mafia life without actually putting ourselves at risk of catching a stray bullet. But, alas, these wines are not yet available in the state of New York, so in the meantime we’re forced to stray up-label and drink Coppola’s “Diamond Collection” series of wines - including the best-selling of these, the Niebaum Coppola Claret - which is as good of $19 bottle that powerhouse marketing efforts are likely to ever land in front of you. We won’t bother to review it when Benito has done such a nice job here.

Our real question is - where is the commemorative label version of this wine? It somehow made it’s way into Snooth.com - where it sits unadorned with tasting notes or availability information and unrated. And we know Snooth wouldn’t clutter up the Internet with less-than-useful wine ratings, so we’re intrigued. Is Snooth posting phantom wines, or is this some inside California cognescenti thing that only a few Hollywood A-listers know about? And is it really a two-headed monster like the photo implies - sort of like a Diamond Collection version of conjoined twins? We love Coppola - and we especially love it when the guy commemorates. So if anyone knows where we can find this wine - please let us know. Of course, maybe it’s still in oak barrels somewhere, ahead of it’s release, and the publicists are just getting a jump on things. Either way, we wait with baited breath.