The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine review: Heinrich Red 2005

My guess is that most people not only have not had an Austrian wine, but aren’t aware there are Austrian wines. (And no, grüner veltliner, the Austrian white wine that is the darling of sommeliers and chic wine retailers doesn’t count, since most of us aren’t sommeliers or chic retailers.)

So I was quite excited about the Red (about $10), made with two quite obscure grapes – zweigelt and blaufrankisch – in an even more obscure wine region – the Neusiedlersee Hügelland in eastern Austria south of Vienna. What more could the Wine Curmudgeon ask for?

And this is a wonderful wine, in all sorts of ways. It’s simple yet quite fascinating, with an earthy, almost roast meat flavor, soft tannins, balanced acidity, and lots of cherry fruit. In other words, it tastes nothing like most of the red wines we’re taught to drink. In this, it’s another example of what can be done by winemakers who stick to what the grapes give them and not what the magazines tell them to make. In keeping with this theme, the Web site is quite eccentric. You’ll need to point and click on what look to be blank pages to make it work, but it will.

This is a wine for summer barbecue, sausages, potato salad, baked beans, and cole slaw. Or, as the weather cools, use it for stews and peasant style soups. Highly recommended, with the caveat that it may be difficult to find.

Technorati Tags: Austrian wine,wine reviews,red wine,Heinrich Red,cheap wine,$10 wine,inexpensive wine

Wine of the week: Don Miguel Gascón Malbec 2008

One of the Wine Curmudgeon’s seemingly endless searches is for a great $10 malbec. There just aren’t that many -- but there are quite a few quality wines that check in at a bit more than $10.

One of them is the Gascon (about $13). It’s a good example of a malbec (the Argentine red wine that has made huge inroads in the U.S. in the past several years) that isn’t as simple as my favorite cheap malbec, the Yellow + Blue. It has some chops, including a more defined fruit character (think blackberry) and more interesting tannins. It still isn’t especially subtle, but it’s not supposed to be. Think of it as California merlot’s more interesting, Spanish-accented cousin.

And, like all malbec, the Gascon is incredibly food friendly, pairing with everything from barbecue and burgers to spaghetti and tomato sauce to roast chicken.

Technorati Tags: wine reviews,wine of the week,Don Miguel Gascon Malbec,malbec,red wine,Argentine wine

Winebits 87: Virginia tops California, wine as art, oak-free chardonnay

• Virginia 1, California 0: Richard Leahy analyzes the stunning verdict from Decanter’s Michael Broadbent, the eminent English critic. This is must reading, since it will probably be ignored by most of the U.S. wine media. Broadbent gave "four stars-plus" ratings to two wines from Barboursville Vineyards, panned California, and compared a Barboursville wine to the finest white Rhone.

• Exploring the arts through wine: Wine is a great theme for bringing together all sorts of interesting and beautiful things, reports Bill Daley in the Chicago Tribune. Chicago’s Art Institute is holding what museum officials say is the first time a major art museum has done this. Among the exhibits: A 2,500-year-old Greek wine jug adorned with renderings of the maenads, female followers of the god of wine, to a 2007 work, "Leonardo's Last Supper," made by Chicago-based artist Brigitte Riesebrodt out of recycled wine barrel staves still smelling of the grape.

• Oak-free chardonnay comes of age:  Or so says the inestimable Robert Whitley: “What the ‘oak-free’ chardonnay movement needed was a courageous example of unoaked chardonnay made from exceptional grapes sourced from top-notch vineyards. Courage would be necessary, lest the temptation to use the barrel on glorious chardonnay grapes might prove too much for the mere mortal winemaker to overcome.” And, reports,he found some.

Technorati Tags: regional wine,art and wine,Art Institute,oak free chardonnay

Wine review: Castello Monaci Maru 2006

One of the problems with Italian wines these days is that the Italians are so eager to crack the U.S. market that are developing wines to appeal to the U.S. palate. Which means, of course, that they don’t taste very Italian.

Note to Italian wine producers: If the Wine Curmudgeon wants to drink wine that tastes like U.S. wine, he’ll drink wine made in the U.S.

Hence my relief – no, my joy – when I tasted the Maru (about $10). This is Italian wine in all its glory – cheap, quality stuff made with a grape (negroamaro) that most people have never heard of from a region (Salento) that is equally as unknown. It’s dark, earthy, and plummy, with low alcohol (13 percent), trademark Italian acid, and without many tannins to get in the way. This cries out for food -- sausages, ragus, roast pork and the like. Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2010 $10 Hall of Fame. Availability may be limited (the only reason I got to taste it is that a Dallas restaurateur didn’t use his sample), but don’t let that stop you.

Technorati Tags: red wine,Italian wine,Castello Monaci Maru,wine reviews,$10 wine,cheap wine,inexpensive wine

Should you invite VinoForDinner.com over for dinner?

The Wine Curmudgeon gets scads of news releases, so it really takes something different to get my attention. And this one did, for a Web site called VinoForDinner.com: “Vinofordinner.com will soon eclipse over 250,000 food and wine pairings enabling both web and iPhone application users to effectively choose wines under 30 dollars per bottle with ease.”

We’ll ignore that the sentence ain’t all that well constructed and that the Wine Curmudgeon has insisted, for years, that anyone can drink whatever wine they want with dinner.

What got my attention is that this concept, no matter how noble in purpose, seems to be nothing more than the usual sort of wine industry effort to give wine drinkers not what they need, but what the industry thinks they should have. More, after the jump:

American sangiovese: Better than ever

Sangiovese is the only Italian red wine grape most Americans know, and even then we don’t know it by its name. Instead, we know it as Chianti, which is the region where the best-known sangiovese is produced. (And those of us of a certain age will always remember Chianti for the wicker basket on the bottle, which meant hip and trendy way back when.)

So it’s probably not surprising to find out that American sangiovese has, over the years, been mostly ordinary. There were a couple of producers whose wine was OK, but the grape never caught on here.

That has changed dramatically over the past decade, and it’s not because American winemakers are trying to knock off sangiovese like a badly-made dress. Rather, it’s because they understand the grape and its relationship with terroir in a way they hadn’t before. We don’t have to make sangiovese that tastes like Chianti. We can make it to taste like sangivoese from California -- or even Texas or Arizona.

What’s going on and why it’s good news for wine drinkers, after the jump:

Wine of the week: Brancott Sauvignon Blanc 2008

Ah, to be able to walk into almost wine or liquor store in the United States, plunk down $10 (more or less), and get a quality bottle of wine every time.

That’s what you get with the Brancott. Is it the best $10 wine you can find? Nope (which is not a criticism, but a testament to how much good $10 wine is available). But you can find it, and these days that’s saying something. The Brancott is in almost a dozen major retailers in the Dallas area, which is a good sign for availability elsewhere given how stingy Dallas retailers are about shelf space.

So what makes the Brancott worthwhile? It’s a solid New Zealand sauvignon blanc, made in the classic style. That means citrus and grapefruit in front (though not as over the top as some), an OK tropical-ish middle, and a long mineral finish.

Drink this chilled during the summer, pair it with the usual sauvignon blanc suspects (shellfish, most anything with garlic and olive oil), and be glad you didn’t have to drive around town looking for a bottle of wine.

Technorati Tags: wine reviews,wine of the week,sauvignon blanc,New Zealand wine,Brancott,white wine