The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine of the week: Little James' Basket Press NV

Here’s a challenge to the California wine business, and especially those who think the Wine Curmudgeon is too hard on it. Use your incredible resources and talent to make a wine like this – a non-vintage red – instead of the buckets and buckets of boring, fruit-juice grocery stone plonk that you do make.

Because this French effort is not just a great cheap wine, but a great wine. As the guy at the store said to me when I bought it: “This may be the best bottle we have,” and his store has bottles that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars.

The point is not that California can’t make a wine as interesting and delicious as the Little James ($10, purchased, 13.5%). Regardless of anything else, California is probably the world’s pre-eminent wine region – the best weather, the best winemakers, the most money to spend. Rather, it’s that it has spent so much effort training consumers to buy wine with the name of the grape and a vintage on the label that it can’t conceive of anything else. If it doesn’t say Merlot 2012, no one knows what to do.

But they should. The Little James comes from a top-notch Rhone producer that mixes wine made with old grapes and wine made from current vintage fruit. The result is a $10 Hall of Fame wine: Classic Rhone barnyard aromas, red grenache fruit, some spiciness, and more tannin and acid than I expected -- a rough, though not unpleasant, peasant finish that speaks to a more traditional style of winemaking. A food wine for barbecue and burgers; highly recommended.

Wine of the week: Domaine de Cabasse Les Deux Anges 2009

Rhone wines remain a mystery to most American wine drinkers, and not just because they have very French names and are often difficult to find on store shelves. It’s also because they’re made with grapes that aren’t cabernet sauvignon and merlot; for most of us, that difference is enough so we’ll buy something else.

Case in point is the Deux Anges ($10, purchased, 13.5%). It’s made with grenache, syrah, and carignan, and the name – along with the almost Baroque-like angels on the label – is enough to turn off any U.S. consumer who expects to see a cute animal or marketing-driven name.

The wine itself, like so much cheap wine from the Rhone, is a revelation. It’s accessible, yet still tastes like the Rhone -- juicy red fruit from the grenache, lots of peppery spiciness, noticeable tannins, and a bit of a finish. But it isn't too rough, which is often the case with this style of wine – call it rustic, the kind of wine someone in a Van Gogh painting would drink. How often can you say that about California merlot?

It’s a grilled meat or cheese kind of wine; highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2014 $10 Hall of Fame.

Wine of the week: Il Poggio Rubicone 2011

The official name of this wine is actually a lot longer -- Il Poggio dei Vigneti Sangiovese di Romagna Rubicone – which is one of the contradictions that makes the Rubicone interesting. An old-fashioned name, yes, but a modern and professional wine.

Increasingly, there are two kinds of Italian sangiovese – the traditional, which I like but which don’t seem much in favor with the Winestream Media, and what I call the post-modern – Italian in label only. I did a tasting a couple of years ago where we paired a high-point Tuscan red made with sangiovese and a Texas sangiovese. Not only did the latter taste more like traditional Italian sangiovese, but the people at the tasting preferred the high-point Tuscan, which tasted like it came from Paso Robles. Maybe the Italian Wine Guy can explain this to me.

The Rubicone ($12, purchased, 12%) combines the best of both styles. There is a lot of juicy cherry fruit and top-notch winemaking, but also more traditional Italian sangiovese characteristics like bright acid and earthiness. It will please those of us who don’t want the traditional styles to go away, but also don’t want the flaws and off-flavors those wines sometimes had, as well as people who need gobs of fruit in their wine.

Wine of the week: Brennan Vineyards Buffalo Roam 2010

One of the greatest wines in the history of Texas was the 2006 Brennan syrah (and the 2007 wasn’t bad, either). I have waxed poetic about both, and the 2006 helped form the tweet that launched the local wine movement in 2009: “Texas wines aren’t s---.”

Unfortunately, Brennan no longer makes syrah. But it does make a red Rhone-style blend, the Buffalo Roam ($18, sample, 12.9%).

Yes, the wine isn’t $10 or $12 and availability is limited, two things I rarely do for the wine of the week. But this week, with the fifth annual Drink Local Wine conference just a couple of days away, I wanted to use this wine to show how far local wine has come – not just in Texas, but in much of the U.S.

Because there are hundreds of wines like this in the 47 states that aren’t California, Washington, and Oregon:

• It’s professionally made, without the flaws and off-flavors that were all too common in regional wine a decade ago.

• It reflects Texas terroir and a Texas style of winemaking – lower alcohol, earthy, spicy, less fruity and, above all, balanced. In this, it tastes like a Rhone-style wine that was made in Texas, not a California-style wine made with Rhone grapes that could come from anywhere, including the Rhone.

• It uses grapes suited to Texas, mourvedre and syrah, and not grapes grown in Texas because consumers have heard of them.

How impressive is this wine? So much so that I don’t even mind the name.

Wine of the week: El Coto Rioja Crianza 2008

The Wine Curmudgeon has been tasting a lot of post-modern Spanish wine lately, the kind made to appeal to the American palate and the Winestream Media. That means they have as much as 1 1/2 points more alcohol and lots of sweet red fruit. The wines are sound (my new favorite wine term), but just don’t taste particularly Spanish. There’s nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand what’s going on.

The El Coto ($11, purchased, 12.5%) , on the other hand, will never be confused with one of those wines. It’s about as Spanish as they come –  red wine from the Rioja region made with tempranillo, a very funky, classic mushroom/forest floor aroma, and a fair of amount of oak on the finish that shows up as vanilla. And don’t worry about it being an older current vintage, since that’s not unusual for Rioja.

What makes this wine even more enjoyable is that it’s not old-fashioned in technique. There is lots and lots of bright cherry fruit, all in balance and all quite pleasant. And, since it’s Rioja, it will pair with everything from roast chicken to meatier fish to grilled beef to Spanish cheese.

If this isn’t quite a $10 Hall of Fame wine, it’s a reminder that old-fashioned doesn’t always mean out of date.

Expensive wine 48: J Vineyards Pinot Noir 2011

Winemakers like to talk about “difficult” vintages, where the weather was too cold or too dry or too something. We tend to forget, given modern winemaking technology and California’s usually perfect weather, how much of wine involves farming and depends on things that the winemaker can’t control.

I mention this because J winemaker Melissa Stackhouse had one of those too something harvests in 2011. There has been a lot of Winestream Media chatter about how difficult that harvest was (cooler and wetter than normal), most of which isn’t relevant to those of us who are trying to decide if we should spend $37 for a bottle of wine.

In the case of this pinot noir (sample, 14.3%), the answer is yes. Stackhouse turned difficult to her advantage, producing a wine that is much more interesting than the over-ripe, over-alcoholic examples that are the current favorites. It’s not an insult to say that this pinot noir tastes like pinot noir: raspberry fruit, some black pepper and smokiness, and a little oak on the back -- but also the restraint that separates pinot noir from other red wines. I was particularly impressed with the wine’s balance, something sadly lacking in post-modern California pinot noir, regardless of price. It’s both a food wine (lamb, of course, but also roasted pork) and something to sip and enjoy.

The caveat: There are only 7,000 cases, less than half of normal. Chalk it up to the difficult vintage, which reduced grape yield. No doubt it will be gone quickly.

Wine of the week: La Fiera Primitivo 2011

One of the questions we got during our Savor Dallas wine event last week was about price: Is there really all that much good $10 wine?

Several people, knowing the Wine Curmudgeon’s reason for being, chuckled. I was actually quite restrained, since I was in public and did not not want to embarrass myself or the other people on the panel. Throwing things and jumping up and down tends to do that.

In fact, I spoke barely at all, and when I did it was to recommend the La Fiera ($8, purchased, 13%), an Italian red that is everything a cheap wine should be – varietally correct and indicative of its place, all the while treating the consumer with respect.

Primitivo may or may not be zinfandel; I’ve tasted some that had nothing in common, and some, like this, that show that the grapes are related. Look for some black pepper on the nose and more dark red fruit than I expected (zinfandel characteristics). This is not a perfect wine – the vanilla on the back was annoying and the wine would have benefitted from less oak or chips or whatever. But it cost $8 – how much more could I want?

Drink this with takeout pizza, any Italian-American dinner, or even hamburgers on the grill. I just hope the people at the panel take my advice.