Richard Serra’s ‘Wake’ is an immersive experience- thoughtful and elegant- emerging from it, you spy Roy McMakin’s piece, ‘Love and Loss’- a piece of  lightweight pop-art with all the visual appeal of the golden arches on a stretch of interstate. Moving along, one bumps into Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Typewriter Eraser Scale X’ completely abstract to anyone under 30.

I was afraid that the juxtaposition of so many wildly divergent styles left me with more questions then answers-any one of these experienced on its own could in some way be definitive, together its a hot mess of conceptual misfires, the great diluted with the good and brought low by the very questionable. Moreover, its hard to figure out what, if any context the sculptures were made in, or to discern the artists intent.
This brings us to the grapes of Washington;
Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Pinot Gris, Rousanne, Muller Thurgau, Viognier, Muscat Ottonel, Orange Muscat, Aligote, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet franc, Merlot, Syrah, Petit Sirah, Petit Verdot, Malbec, Sangiovese, Touriga, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir, Grenache, Lemberger (Blue Franc), Barbera, Nebbiolo, Mouvedre, Zinfandel…….

In 1970, Washington State had only two wineries, both based on single, small vineyards producing white wines. Since then, Washington has become the second biggest wine producer in the states.

Driving from Seattle to Eastern Washington on 90, you go through the hi-tech hi-wealth belt created by Microsoft and the tech boom, into the Cascades. Its a journey that takes you into the hinterland quickly. Driving through the mountains, maybe you’ll stop in Roslyn for breakfast- its where Northern Exposure was filmed, and feels properly desolate. East of the mountains, you arrive at a landscape uninviting and bleak- the topography the only features; no trees or landmarks- featureless but for the scrub-covered rolling hills and moraine. As you go on, the feeling of desolation grows stronger, jarring coming from the Puget Sound to this in a mornings drive.

More eerie then beautiful- Eastern Washington looks like the moon.

This feeling of separation from civilization is compounded at many of the wineries- in tasting room after tasting room, there is a detachment from the greater wine world, and it shows.

On a recent visit to Rattlesnake Hills, an AVA just southeast of Yakima, The UnCorker visited vineyards and tasting rooms on a stretch of Highway 82 between Yakima and Prosser, where   there are dozens of wineries-

In the scheme of things, wine in Washington State is as new as the internet, and like it, unpredictable. At times this is frustrating and disappointing. Like a sculpture garden, context was lacking- That goes a long way to explaining the surfeit of grapes; there are no natives, so what will work is a matter of trial and error. This experimentation hasn’t made Washington’s wines easy to understand-

Winemakers in Washington wonder why their wineries are unheard of outside of Washington while displaying their dozens of labels. They all make several cuvees, low end to high, often with no varietals listed, but often with names from the prosaic, i.e. “Bistro Red”, to the confusing, “Purple Haze” to the just plain out of touch bizarre “Bung Dog Red”. Bonnair, the producer of Bung Dog blends malbec, pinot noir, cabernet franc and petit verdot in this bottling- its light and appetizing, spicy and soft, and if you drive to the winery, it will set you back about 8 bucks a bottle-
Bonnair also grows Touriga, and Tinta Çao and Tinta Madera, to make a port. At Portteus, another Rattlesnake Hills winery, the tasting room guy was trying to play himself a solo game of ping pong when we arrived, the only visitors of the day.
A look at the vineyards showed blocks of malbec next to pinot noir next to sangiovese next to zinfandel. Portteus makes some solid wines- a beautiful cabernet sauvignon, more Bordelaise then Napa, as well as a seemingly endless offering of varietal bottlings and blends- an overblown, soggy chardonnay, a cloying orange muscat-within one winery and to the next, grapes and styles vary crazily. We wondered, is this a region in creative ferment? Are they blindly groping forward? Is it too soon to tell?

This got us thinking of all of the world’s emerging wine regions; if not tied to a tradition, indigenous cuisine or part of a diverse body of crops, what do these regions and their wines have to offer? The UnCorker doesn’t advocate for a narrow Old-World only approach to drinking, quite the contrary, but  the wine world is abuzz with natural, bio-dynamic, small-producer, slow food, organic, locavorism. Do these words have meaning for most wine drinkers? Are they significant as more then just advertising and marketing? Are they simply more walls put up between producer and consumer? Hip geeksterisms? Is wine an object invested with meaning and tradition, i.e. context, or something to be manipulated?  Would the French blend pinot noir with malbec? Quel Horror, no- would the Italians? Well, maybe- one of the oldest wine producing lands in the world is always mixing the old and new, experimenting and playing, breaking rules and bringing inspired new things into the world. Of course for the Italians its all tempered with the knowledge and experience of thousands of years. Forty years ago there were predictions of the death of Italian wine, based simply on the introduction of the barrique by Gaja-more or less universally accepted today. Now the Italians are growing tannat in Trentino and muller thurgau in Basilicata, and no one freaks out.

Eastern Washington is and always has been a land of mono-cropping; apples, pears, and hops- the lion’s share of the worlds hops are produced here- these are commodity crops into which grapes fit neatly. The winery most associated with Washington State is Columbia Crest, with a production of 1.7 million cases of wine a year, it could hardly be otherwise- yet this huge industrial producer also took Wine Spectators Wine of the Year Award with their 2005 Columbia Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. This is good and bad news for a wine region still trying to find itself. Will wineries try to emulate the success by making critic-pleasing muscular wines in an international style, or try to be different.

There seems to be a divide in wines and styles in Washington State, between those in Western Washington that buy their fruit from eastern growers and make their wine around Seattle and the town of Woodinville- many of these are the more well known wineries; Chaleur Estates, Owen Sullivan, and Andrew Will to name a few. These wines tend to be more in touch with the industry, making a handful of wines, mostly from Bordeaux grapes, and mostly red, these are big polished wines that get press and critical acclaim. The other side of this coin is wineries you’ve probably never heard of, scraping for the market and attention, but often seeming unawares of the greater wine world. Is that unawareness a bad thing though? Bonnair makes a lovely cabernet franc that is a dead-ringer for a perfect, modest Bourgeil or Chinon, all tomato leaf and tobacco, for 3 times the price, Owen Sullivan makes a Champoux Vineyard Cabernet Franc that is rich, muscular, and almost completely devoid of character, and is a lousy dinner companion besides.

Will they be defined by cabernet sauvignon, as the wine press seems to want them to be, or will it be a combination of things? Merlot and syrah are exceptional, semillion as well- So how to understand Washington State? Other regions are easy because we identify them with what they mostly do; when you think Argentina, malbec comes to mind, Oregon, easy,  pinots noir and gris, New Zealand is sauvignon blanc and pinot noir, Chile is the land of cheap cabernet sauvignon.

Washington State will, for sure, be a powerhouse in the wine world in the coming decades, what they produce, and how we think of them are yet to be determined.

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.

Welcome to the Ontario’s Niagara region – a thin isthmus between two great lakes about an hour and a half south of Toronto, extending down below the falls on both sides of the border. It’s kinda like the Florida of Canada, although the closest big city to these vineyards is the famously inclimate American city of Buffalo, New York – which is due south, just to put things into perspective. In wine circles, this region is best know for being home to Inniskillen, which is world renown for it’s ice wines. But word of the Pinot Noir grown here, particularly on the US side in the AVA called “Niagara Escarpment” is starting to leak. The truth is that Lake Ontario provides a semi-maritime effect and creates favorable growing conditions for the problem child, Pinot Noir. Some would say Burgundian conditions, but wine marketers have been known to spin those sorts of comparisons to death so hard to say how true that is. One thing we know for sure is that they don’t get the Lake Erie effect – which is responsible for the piles of snow whipping off the lake that have kept Buffalo from being a viticultural hotspot. It’s not clear where DA wines are sourcing their fruit – the website is pretty clear that things are inspired by “Dan’s Travels” – but apparently it’s in Ontario somewhere.

To say that Dan Ackroyd Wines is all over the place in terms of it’s product offering is no understatement. Umm.. have you seen the Crystal Head vodka he’s merchandising? Complete with a pirate mythology and mystical powers ascribed to the macabre packaging. This seems a strange counterpart to his award winning liquid gold, the Vidal Ice Wine. Then there’s Dan’s whole Sonoma County line, which is actually made by DeLoach. Is this whole effort a cynical attempt to license one man’s dopey comic aura and milk it for all it is worth? or is it really about the wine? That we’re not sure of, but it’s peaked our interest in Niagara pinot and now we can’t wait to get our hands on some of the bottles we’ve heard about such as those from Warm Lake Estate, in Lockport NY.

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.

The 2007 Donnaluna has green apples and pears, white peaches and key lime on the nose- a fresh soft Fiano made in an utterly modern fashion. A blend from several vineyards, the grapes are picked early in the morning, given a very short maceration and fermented in temperature controlled stainless steel.

The 2004 Antece is an entirely different animal; left on its skins for a long maceration, then on its lees in huge old oak tuns, this wine is made as their ancestors(antice, thus the name) made it- rich with a funky, earthy honeyness and a rich viscosity- generous and broad on the palate with lots of baking spice. If the Donnaluna is for grilled calamari and salads, this guy can take grilled bluefish, sardines, fishy fish- though certainly there’s some overlap.  Give me a fritto misto, i’ll love either of these wines – the Donnaluna giving some cleanliless to the fry, the Antece living in accordance with the richness of the fish and shellfish.

De Conciliis makes yet another Fiano, their future wine, Perella.  Their oldest vineyards go into this modern bottling, tiny in production, barrel fermented and aged in barrique, we’ve not seen this wine in the states and are not likely to any time soon.

Producers like De Conciliis are few and far between, taking risks and making wines with no seeming care to their ease of ‘branding’, description and marketing- making wine in many styles effortlessly.  It’s the kind of producer that wows you with the breadth, seriousness and the playfulness of their production, that is willing to miss on occasion, and is to be watched vintage after vintage.

There are only two viticultural appellations on the island of Mallorca, D.O. Binissalem Mallorca and D.O. Plà (Pla i Levant), and AN is not in either one of them. This winery was started on a shoestring in 1994, when Cabernet Savignon was in fashion amongst the Priorat set (and Priorat was where winemaker Francesc Grimalt cut his teeth). Callet grapes were easy to find and cheap on the island, but it took courage to think about using them. The winemakers wanted old vines and something expressive of the local terroir, however, so they were determined to work with it. Long cultivated throughout Mallorca, Callet took a back seat to it’s more stately indigineous counterpart, Manto Negro. It’s a problematic grape to vinify, with it’s weak color, low acidity and sugar. Coaxing an extracted flavor-bomb out of this stuff is no small feat. And since most Callet vines are left to reproduce sexually on Majorca, not clonally (which is weird enough in this day and age) there are 1000s of strains of the grape – making the winemakers job that much more difficult. There wasn’t a whole lot of knowledge of the varietal in oenological circles when these guys started – and they’ve done a lot of experimenting with long macerations and extended exposure to oxygen. In fact, this very bottle went back into the cement tanks after it’s time in barriques for two months prior to bottling. They had been gradually upping the percentage of the Callet used in their wines until 1999, when they managed to pull off a 100% Callet. (The 2004 is 95% Callet- buttressed with 5% Manto Negro and Fogoneu.)

Since the days of the vagabonding Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, Mallorcan wines have been compared to those of Italy rather than Spain. The analogy holds – this is like something excellent from you might find by a careful Italian winemaker working with indiginous grapes, such as Sicily’s Arianna Occhipinti. The wine is medium weight, and the light that filters through it betrays the potent concentration of flavor. Lifted, bright red fruit qualities on the nose. Lingering finish with vanilla, wild spicy notes. Firm acidity combined with integrated tannins means this lively, finessed wine pairs with almost anything. It’s $45 to go for the full weirdness of the AN (with it’s high percentage of Callet), but you can drink the excellent AN/2 – which is blended with a substantial amount of Syrah but still feels wild and unique – for about half of that.

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.

Another weird bit; viticulturally, at least until very recently, Lazio was considered a backwater- Frascati and Est! Est! Est! dominate the landscape. Overcropped, carelessly made oceans of the stuff guzzled in the trattorias of Rome. And why not? The biggest market in Italy is just down the road, willing to drink just about anything, so long as its cheap, which didn’t give producers much of an incentive to make quality, characterful wines.

That’s been changing with the likes of Sergio Mottura, Casale del Giglio and Colle Picchioni, but these are big time players- trying to wipe the tarnish off of Lazio’s image, make names for their estates, and make money- not so the Suore Cistercensi, whose production is relatively tiny, and who keep a decidedly low profile. Very weird indeed in this day and age.

Like their middle-age forebears, the sisters make their wine organically, without fining or filtering. Giampiero Bea(Paolo’s son) has been the viticulturist responsible for production, so its easy to see the influence of Neal Rosenthal, the wines importer/distributor in this. An early and influential supporter of natural, traditional winemaking, Rosenthal introduced Bea’s wine to America, and the Bea style is evident in Coenobium, and even more so in Coenobium Rusticum. A good long soak with the skins gives this wine a complex personality; a rich perfume of honeysuckle, green apples, custard apples, apple cider and orange blossom give way to a rich golden wine that looks more like something commonly seen out of Friuli these days. Mineral driven, it is surprisingly clean on the palate-

The Rusticum is the same blend of grapes from the same vineyards, but in this case Giampiero Bea convinced the sisters to give a small batch an even more extended soak, and boy is this reminescent of Bea’s famous Santa Chiara- more orange then gold, rich scents of apples again(close your eyes, you’re in a beautiful orchard on a warm fall day) big and almost musky on the palate, this is the opposite of how even Roman’s have considered the state of viticulture in Lazio.

Another piece of weirdness- you can pick up a botlle of Coenobium for around $20, cuz the sisters, they’re not in this for the fame of money.

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.

But we quote for you the following passage, from the book, Winemaking by Vine, Harkness, & Linton. “There are, of course, blends that are monuments to various egoist expressions. Often these motives are not shared by consumers and so such wines may find difficulty in the marketplace.” The ego part may be true, but lack of marketplace success is definately not the case. Consumers seem to love the big blend, and marketers really have something to sink their teeth into here. Châteauneuf-du-Pape, notorious for cramming up to 14 grapes into a single blend but still somehow mostly being and tasting like their Southern Rhone neighbors have long commanded a ridiculous premium – mostly due to the success with which they are marketed as complex blends. Conundrum, the best-selling patron of the mondo-blend trend in America, claims publicly to surpass the scope of single varietal wines. Well, touché to you, we say. Sokol Blosser winemaker Russ Rosner has been quoted as saying the no.9 is “like mixing nine different colours of paint and trying to end up with a rainbow instead of muddy brown.” He wants us to know he’s up for the challenge.

In the end, what’s in the bottle isn’t magical beyond words. In fact, the wine tastes predominantly like Oregon Pinot Gris – and believe us, that’s a very,very good thing. Add to this a lusher, tropical quality on the front palate that is likely provided by Reisling or Gewürztraminer in the blend and you have a nice refreshing tasting wine with cool climate, Oregon gravitas on the backend. (Note: for some reason we’re having trouble finding exactly what the 9 grapes are. In the spirit of the mystery blend, the winery’s website is virtually information-free.) We like this bottle, a heck of a lot more than the Conundrum, and fortunately the savvy marketability of this wine hasn’t commanded too much of a premium in terms of cost at $18.

(Photo of Petite Syrah grapes in veraison by pixelish)

The grab-bag vineyard is not unusual in California. Old vine Zinfandel vineyards are notorious for having all sorts of grapes that are not Zinfandel in them – including, of course, Durif. Petite Sirahs have their following. They can be inky, charismatic monsters. And just like with Zinfandel, old mystery vineyards can make some killer wines. But ultimately, we find Petite Syrah bottlings hard to characterize and have had some bad luck here. It’s not a surprise, as there are a wide variety of producers and styles – just like with most varietals. But the varietal has a perfumy quality and tannic structure that makes it a challenge to bring in with anything approximating finesse. Here’s three at a range of price points that we had recently to try to sort out our opinion on the matter.

Stags Leap Winery 2006 Petite Syrah ($36)

Stags’ Leap Winery is legendary for taking P.S. to it’s dark, delicious limits – and is justifiably one of the more expensive expressions of the varietal on the market at almost $40 retail price. In fact, they are considered the first to have tackled this grape in a high-end wine – their success with it dating back to the 1970s. It does beg the question of exactly what they are doing, and how varietally correct the end product is. In the 2005, the 86% “Petite Syrah” part is a field blend, partly from their own 70 year old vineyard and partly sourced from other growers, so only god knows what’s in this thing (ok. maybe the winemaker’s got a decent idea.) But if that uncertainty wasn’t enough, it’s also blended with 14% Rhone varietals such as Syrah, Grenach, and Viognier so in a lot of ways this wine is it’s own animal, and arguably is not exactly staking it’s reputation on Durif, the humble grape. Like a lot of stately Cali brands with big followings, the goal of the blending is consistency… which, of course, they achieve. And with such extracted, inky goodness the grapes undoubtedly reach high phenolic ripeness on the vine, which means alcohol reduction or ultrafiltration may be a part of “post-production” to consistently achieve this kind of refined consistency (but, alas, we’ll never know as wineries won’t admit this.) Very deep, rich, and full of secondary aromas. Balanced but with the tannins to lay down for a few years before it’s peak.

2006 Vinum PETs Petite Sirah ($14)

The next two wines both source their fruit from Clarskburg – a hot, central valley location that’s far from the rarified air of Napa & Stag’s Leap. The PETs is a potent, extracted $14 bottling, we can see how this one might stand out at a blind tasting (which is how wines like this get their 90pt ratings from Wine Spectator, Parker, et. al). It’s full and lush, with fresh smelling boysenberry fruit characteristics and a dark, loamy zin-like quality. The grapes come from a veteran grower, Ken Wilson. The winemaker-owners, Chris Condos and Richard Bruno, have day jobs at bigger wineries, so this is somthing of a botique operation. French oak fiends, these guys, and it shows up in less than subtle ways. We’d guess the bottle we had was heavy on the eugenol – a flavor compound from oak which imparts a strong clove-like flavor. The finish is flowery and bit peppery – thick with these apple-pie spices. The more we drink, however, the more these homey, perfumy qualities get under the skin. Maybe just not our style – same reason we get antsy after five minutes at the Crate and Barrell.

2007 Bogle Petite Sirah ($10-$12)

A workhorse and a well known bargain in widely available, inexpensive California wine, Bogle sort of kicks butt for the price – even though we hate to say it. The Petite Syrah is balanced with mature and integrated tannins – and a powerful nose of black fruits and buttered popcorn.  It’s pretty – but not all Martha Stuarty like the PETs. It’s jammy and flowery in a way that’s typical of this varietal – but in less extracted way – built on a leathery, earthy base of tasty tannins and laced with an acidic tartness that provides surprising balance. A crowd-pleaser but less of a fruit bomb than one would expect. Bogle wines in general, and the Petite Syrah in particular, are not the most intellectually stimulating efforts but they are so rock solid and cheap that they represent astounding value. Buy this stuff by the case (your discount will bring it down to an even lower price) and make it your house “glass” pour. One thing we really like wines like this for is cocktail hour – before or after dinner – as the flavor is nice on it’s own and it’s easy to drink without food to balance the acid or tannins.

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.)

That brings us to one of our favorite $10 summer treats – the Parés Baltà Ros De Pacs.   Spain, and in particular Rioja, is on the forefront of serious rosés, and if you have $30 with which to go pink you can try one of the undisputedly macho offerings from Vina Todonia or Lopez de Heredia.   But if you want to pound a few glasses out by the grill head to this modernized producer from Penedès.  An intense cranberry color promises something floral and sweet on the nose – and then it hits you with a blast of salty, off-dry, minerality on the palate.   It’s made with Merlot and Cabernet Savignon, put through a natural gravity press.  The fermentation is stopped short so that some residual sugar and a fresh quality from the must is retained.  Did we mention this is certified organic? Delicate, this is not.  Girly-men, beware.

The winemaker at Failla, Ehrin Jordan, has serious pedigree. He is one of the key forces behind Turley – a cult zin maker. Failla is the family winery, sourcing fruit from a wide variety of sources and is particularly acclaimed for northern Rhone style results achieved from the Syrah varietal. The 2006 Failla Phoenix Ridge Syrah topped the Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100 list in 2008(the full list can be downloaded here). Jordan is a master fruit-sourcer. In Jordan’s hands, the Syrah from the Que vineyard is compared to Crozes-Hermitage, Cornas, Cote-Rotie, and Saint Joseph, the four most famous French regions for this varietal. True or not, this is wine-geek-speak for saying the stuff rocks. The fruit flavors trend towards the red side of the spectrum – ripe cherries and rasberries. Expect wild, gamy, herb-like subtleties with flinty minerality and earthy notes such as black olives. The wine is noted for a consistent balance between a fleshy, lush introduction to the palate with a dry, spicy, and slightly acidic grip that makes the finish surprising. In Boheme’s hands – under winemaker Kurt Beitler – the results are similarly wonderful to our great relief. The same flinty, gamey quality, integrated tannins, and balanced acidity. Que Syrah, Syrah indeed.