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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

Weird Wine of the Week: 2008 RiqueWihr Gewurztraminer, “The Scholium Project”

In the spirit of intellectual nourishment, sometimes we punish ourselves. We override those shallow, superficial messages from the senses - you know, those ones that say hey, brain! this tastes like ass . We have to do this, otherwise the palate we have as a 16 year old would determine the course of our gastronomical lives and Bartles & Jaymes would be routinely poured for wedding toasts. Other times, artists are the ones punishing us. Modern architects in the 1930’s designed hard, glaring rooms and insisted their clients not soften them with curtains and throw pillows. Buñuel made film snobs sit through razor blades slicing eyeballs to prove a narrow point about cinematic montage theory. Then there is Abe Schoener - a man of the vine who insists that we think about what we drink. He sets out with the explicit goal - stated on his website - of making one taste decay, decomposition, and transformation. This is followed by a secondary goal - that the wines should make one happy to be drinking them. How much of a wine aesthete you are will likely determine how contradictory you find those two objectives.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week: 2008 RiqueWihr Gewurztraminer, “The Scholium Project”…

Weird Wine of the Week- 2004 Coturri Zinfandel Frieberg Vineyards

At first glance, you might be thinking, “what in the world is weird about another Cali Zin?” After all, we know that California produces veritable oceans of the stuff- from the Central Valley to the Napa Valley.   Drank by the miners back in gold rush days, Zinfandel was in decline until the mid 1980’s when the ‘craze’ for ‘white’ zinfandel spread like a blight on the land. While its popularity declined, zinfandel properly vinified took off with cult producers like Turley demanding huge sums for its polished single vineyard zins.

Still to the question of why the Coturri zin is weird, which we wish it wasn’t- Oh God, how we wish it wasn’t weird at all. We at The UnCorker fervently hope to one day be able to consider this a delicious but un-weird wine- common even, which it certainly is not. Let us consider the ways. Its organic- and yes, lots of Cali wine is organic, but the Coturri folks put the O in organic. No SO2, no inoculation with sulfites, no yeast cultures, no use of concentrates to boost sweetness(yes, people do that all the time in California), no added water, acids, or other manipulation of the wine, all of which can be done in a wine deemed ‘organic’. The Coturri winery is a small production family run outfit- 3rd and 4th generation Coturri’s manage the vineyards, pick the grapes, and unlike just about everyone else, make the wine- no consultants, no lab technicians,  just farmers making wine.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week- 2004 Coturri Zinfandel Frieberg Vineyards…

Weird Wine of the Week-Breaky Bottom Sparkling Brut 2004 Cuvée Donna Elvira

We will admit right off that this is gratuitously weird; like we’re trying to be too clever by half, or ironic in that smug, annoying hip way that we thought our friend, recently returned from England was being when he gave us this bottle of Breaky Bottom(yep, Breaky Bottom) Sparkling Brut 2004 Cuvee Donna Elvira. So it sat on the desk at The UnCorker headquarters for awhile, until we realized we’d be crazy to not run to our first chance to drink English wine.

We poured and raised our glasses all toasting ‘Breaky Bottom’, and we were, well, fairly impressed; this was real methode champenoise wine- straw yellow, green highlights with apples, pears,  hazelnut and a yeasty finish. Not a fine Champagne, or Franciacortia- but lets face it, our expectations weren’t exactly high either. So maybe this piece shouldn’t be a WWOW, maybe it should be a Weird Wine Region piece. We decided to look into the British wine scene(at least as best we could, there are no English wines imported to the States) and it seems that in England, there is a confluence of events and trends that are rapidly changing the agriculture of Southern England.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week-Breaky Bottom Sparkling Brut 2004 Cuvée Donna Elvira…

Weird Wine of the Week: Primitivo Quiles 2002 Alicante Raspay Reserva Tinto ‘Brut’

Ok. We admit it. The UnCorker staff has maybe 20 years, combined, of serious wine snobbing under our belts - and most of that has been more or less on the cheap. So who are we to call one of the oldest wines in one of the oldest wine countries in the world, weird? Apparently a fancier version of this stuff called Fondillan was on the table of the Sun King himself, Louix XIV, paired with sponge cake. And given that this is a hearty, unfortified Valencian red, that’s a little weird - wouldn’t you say? C’mon, sponge cake? (ahem… just getting warmed up here). Dissecting the label is the first challenge. Primitivo Quiles is the name of the winery. Alicante is the name of the DO (There’s also a grape named Alicante which isn’t popular in it’s namesake DO.) Raspay is the name of the town. Tinto means “red.” (Ok that one was easy.) And ‘Brut’ (quotes are theirs) just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever in this context. We guess that they are just contrasting this to the sweeter, and more famous, Fondillan.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week: Primitivo Quiles 2002 Alicante Raspay Reserva Tinto ‘Brut’…

Weird Wine of the Week-2006 Re Manfredi Basilicata Bianco

Basilicata is an isolated and obscure region, second to only the Molise as the smallest in wine production in Italy. Known primarily, and only really recently for Aglianico del Vulture (the region’s only DOC wine), Basilicata doesn’t seem a likely place for a cutting edge weird wine- its like stumbling on haute cuisine in your grandmother’s kitchen- at first, it seems so unlikely, its suspicious- but when you try it, it makes delicious, perfect sense.

So, some mad genius at Re Manfredi looked around Mount Vulture and saw something maybe nobody else had even considered; that the potential for northern white grapes was huge, and that taking a chance might pay off. And why not? German grapes have thrived in the Alto Adige for centuries; the Adige valley is searingly hot during the day, but the nights, nice and cool. As you have read in these pages, the Aglianico in Basilicata is one of the latest harvested grapes in all of Italy- the slopes of Mt. Vulture have vineyards planted up to 800 meters, giving a huge temperature differential between day and night. Traditionally, what white grapes there are in Basilicata are the ubiquitous malvasia and moscato, dry and sweet, still and sparkling, and with the rare exception, uninspiring, and not much exported.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week-2006 Re Manfredi Basilicata Bianco…

Weird Wine of the Week-NV Bermejo Brut Nature

These are boom times for the Canary Islands, emigration to the U.S. and E.U. has slowed, meaning the depopulation of the archipelago has stopped, the government has started subsidizing the wine industry in an effort to move it forward, and has had a measure of success, and most importantly, Anthony Bourdain has visited with his show, No Reservations, making the world aware that the place exists, and that people live and work there.

Traditionally, viticulture in the Canary Islands was focused on sweet wines, often called Malmsey, for export; Shakespeare called it “an absolutely penetrating wine,” in Henry IV. Robert Louis Stevenson writes that “a little good canary will comfort me the heart of it.” The Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, drowned in a barrel of Malmsey in 1478. With modern tastes turning from sweet wines, vintners in the Canaries had mostly focused on crappy mediocre dry wines for the tourist trade, and almost none of their production was exported anywhere. The last decade has seen some big changes, modernization, and the number of denominated zones(do’s) making wine of real character. Lanzarote, the island farthest east is where our WWOW hails from. It is on the forefront of the Canaries wine revolution, and Bodegas los Bermejo is one leading the charge.

Continue reading Weird Wine of the Week-NV Bermejo Brut Nature…