The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine and your wedding

It's your wedding -- pick the wine you want.

This is the time of year when brides-to-be start planning for next spring’s weddings. And, since one of the most common questions that the Wine Curmudgeon gets from blog readers is about choosing wine for weddings, why not a post with just such advice?

Even better, I brought in two other experts – wedding planner Linda Alpert of suburban Chicago’s Affairs with Linda, and my old pal Mr. Sommelier, who has been doing this sort of thing even longer than I have been writing about wine. And, yes, that is a nom de plume, since Mr. S. has a day job and his bosses might not appreciate this gig.

Our wedding wine wisdom is after the jump:

Mark West and the revolution in pinot noir

This is the wine that helped changed pinot noir in the U.S., both in how it tasted and how it was sold. As such, it probably deserves some sort of lengthy academic treatise and recognition for those accomplishments -- good and bad. Instead, Constellation Brands, one of the world's biggest wine companies, just bought it, and who knows what’s going to happen next?

Before the current version of Mark West debuted in 2001, drinkable pinot noir cost at least $20 and came from Burgundy in France, Oregon, and parts of California no one knew much about. Most of the rest of the world’s pinot wasn’t very pleasant – harsh and unripe, even on its best days. That’s because pinot is not only difficult to grow, but difficult to make. Those who grew it in un-pinot places or who made it without having Zen-like pinot skills almost always failed.

Mark West’s great accomplishment had three parts: Making a quality wine, making it cheaply enough so it cost $10, and making so much of it that it could be sold in grocery stores. The irony is that, to do this, Mark West had to make pinot noir that didn't taste like pinot noir had always tasted. More, after the jump:

The Chicken Cordon Blues

Sometimes, we need a little perspective about this wine thing. And who better to provide it than the late and much missed Steve Goodman? Yes, we argue and bellyache and complain, but it could be a whole lot worse. Right, Shorty?

The video is courtesy of ode2ronald on YouTube, and Goodman gets it exactly correct: “When I first met you baby, you fed me on chicken and wine. …” And, yes, sadly, some of us used to dress that way.

 

Wine of the week: Little James' Basket Press NV

This bottle could well be the future of the much-troubled French wine business. If so, the future may not be as dire as so many fear.

The Little James ($12, purchased) is a red blend made by Chateau de Saint-Cosme, a 450-year-old Rhone producer whose offerings include several $100, high-score wines. It’s not exactly like Silver Oak or Screaming Eagle doing a $12 wine, but it’s close enough.

How do they do it? By mixing current vintage wine with older wine, which is less expensive than using all current vintage juice. This version of the Little James is about half from 2011, and the rest comes from wine as old as the 1999 vintage.

Why do they do it? Because the French wine market, save for the most expensive wines, has been slowly vanishing for the past two decades. There are dozens of reasons, but the main one is that the rest of the world makes cheap wine just as well, if not better, than the French, and their unsold wine sits on store shelves or in warehouse vats until it’s thrown out.

The Little James is part of the attempt to recapture that market. It’s 100 percent grenache, a sturdy Rhone grape, and it smells and tastes of the Rhone. There is barnyard and bacon fat on the nose, and earthy, black fruit that gives way to a darkish finish. All in all, it’s an impressive effort that would pair with pizza, roast chicken, and almost anything with roasted mushrooms. It’s certainly not what I expected given the cutesy label and name (and a tip o’ the Curmudgeon’s fedora to Eddie Eakin at Dallas’ Veritas, who told me about this).

One caveat: Prices for the Little James are all over the place; I’ve seen it for as little as $10, and as much as $17. At $17, it’s not that great a value, and I suspect those retailers are trying to capitalize on St. Cosme’s reputation.

Winebits 238: Wine scores, grape names, wine blogging

• The best description of wine scores ever: From The Italian Wine Guy, who has written perhaps the most telling indictment of scores: The wine magazines, he writes, "push high scores like meth dealers," so even knowledgeable wine drinkers get bamboozled. Which sends shudders through the Wine Curmudgeon when he thinks what happens to less knowledgeable wine drinkers. The occasion for all this? The Italian Wine Guy recently tasted a 15.1 percent California chardonnay mostly because it got such high scores: "Within minutes I was repulsed by the imbalance of the wine. ...[T]he wine tasted like iodine and rubber. I poured it out and moved on." Glad I wasn't there for that one.

• Name that grape: Really. Researchers at Cornell University have developed a couple of new wine grapes, and they need a name for them, says Todd Trzaskos at New York Cork Report. The grapes are now known as NY76.0844.24, a cold hardy white that compares to gewürztraminer and muscat. NY95.0301.01 is a disease-resistant red with "moderate body, good structure, and blueberry on the palate." How about Wine Curmudgeon White and Red, given my fondness for these kinds of grapes? You can send your suggestions to Bruce Reisch at Cornell by July 27.

• Wine blogging dissected: The HoseMaster of Wine, whose acerbic posts make me seem like I’m high on life, pretty much nails wine blogging: "I wish someone had warned me about this stuff before I started typing. It would have saved me a lot of grief, heartache and hate mail." The secret to wine blogging success? Write about wine blogging, and you’ll get gazillions of hits. Which strikes me as utterly and completely true (so of course I'm mentioning it here).

Even the Germans know who to call about sweet red wine

The Wine Curmudgeon, of course. There I am, on page 20 of the current issue of Meininger’s Wine Business International, a German-based trade magazine, quoted in a story discussing the popularity of sweet red wines. And how do we know this is a big deal? Because the magazine costs €20 – about US$25. I don’t waste my time being quoted in those cheap $5 and $10 magazines.

It’s an interesting story, though not quite as thorough as the piece I wrote for Beverage Media. It gives credit for the sweet wine movement in the U.S. to the regional wine business, and specifically to Texas’ Llano Estacado. I don’t know that Llano is the only regional winery that had something to do with this (St. James in Missouri, Oliver in Indiana and Duplin in North Carolina, among many others, come to mind), but it’s intriguing that a European publication recognizes the role of the regional business.

More, after the jump:

Expensive wine 41: Francois Raquillet Mercurey La Brigadiere 2005

The Big Guy was on the phone. “I’ve got a wine you need to try.” Given The Big Guy’s fondness for white Burgundy, the Wine Curmudgeon’s guilty pleasure, who was I to argue with him?

Though, when he brought the bottle over,  it didn’t look promising, The wine was a closeout, stuffed on a back shelf in one of Dallas’ local chain stores. It looked like it had seen better days – worn label, lots of dust – but The Big Guy and I are nothing if not brave.

I broke out the glasses, and poured. We sipped. We sipped some more. And then, at more or less the same time, we smiled that goofy wine drinker’s smile that means we had found something very nice.

The wine was a François Raquillet Mercurey La Brigadière 2005 ($30, purchased – thanks, Big Guy) and don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it. Neither did the three wine people I asked – the woman who knows more about wine than anyone I know, the master sommelier, and the guy studying to be a master sommelier.

Which made the Raquillet that much more fun. It’s a white wine from Mercurey, a part of Burgundy better known for its reds, and how it ended up on a store shelf in Dallas is a mystery. Our best guess, as we drank the bottle, is that someone ordered a case and never picked it up, so the wine sat on the shelf for five years until The Big Guy came along.

The Raquillet had classy green apple fruit, as well as a spicy, white pepper sort of thing going on. It was a bit richer than I expected (probably from oak aging), and had a long, subtle finish with some limestone. It was more sophisticated than Chablis, which it sort of resembled. But it was unique and a wonderful wine.

And a wonderful value, assuming you can find it. I know you can’t in Dallas, because The Big Guy went back and bought the four or five bottles that were left. In this, I’m breaking one of the blog’s rules, which is not to review wines people can’t buy. But I’m doing it because the wine’s story is as good as the wine.