New views, new wines

First, an old view. It won't do to be very sentimental, but I finally had a lilac bush blooming in my long-time-rented backyard, the day I moved out. Very tiny, no  more than a foot high. Long may it prosper.

When the men sighed and gathered up their padded ropes and straps and were paid and left -- this will sound horrible until you read the innocent details --- then it was time to put dishes in cabinets and arrange furniture. I had no idea, when one moves, how much time one spends standing around thinking where this or that should go. You also spend a lot of time walking back and forth from room to room, because no place is familiar and every thing is out of place. And like Lucia moving into Mallards, you are quite sure which boxes contain books and which contain linens, except it turns out they don't, and they all have to be rummaged through again. When everyone decides it's time to stop and rest, we open a nice bottle of wine.

2012 Yalumba shiraz/viognier (red and white together!) blend, juicy and respectable for $9.99.

Time, then, to get accustomed to new views. Third floor. We are positively in the branches of a magnolia tree. Nicholas hasn't slimmed down yet.

The settling in, and deciding swiftly, thinking "I can always change it" but you likely won't, which cabinets are most convenient for plates and which for cups, makes me feel a bit as if I am on vacation -- with the result that I am not sure I want to go anywhere else this summer for a real vacation, and be required to settle in there too. Luckily I am still supplied with a bottle of Fenn Valley, Michigan's "Cabaret" rose for patio sipping. Hands down it is the best rose I have ever tasted. I say that even while forthrightly acknowledging my pro-Michigan bias, both for its little summertime lakes and its wines. You want aromas of strawberries and cherry blossom, you want refreshing dryness and a healthy puckery acidity to go with all the season's grilled meats and fruit salads? Here you are.

Retail, at the Fenn Valley tasting room, about $13.

Then we opened another bottle of wine, after we had moved some more things and felt it was time to rest again. A friend had given me a housewarming present for just this purpose. "When you're all settled in for the day and everyone wants to relax," he said. It's a 2011 Domaine Louis Michel & Fils, Chablis Premier Cru, Montmain. In other words, it is a French chardonnay, given little oak treatment or none, from the Chablis region -- of Burgundy, tres drole! -- and of the highest legal quality, Premier Cru ("first growth"). One can call it creamy or steely or try to think up new fruit metaphors, or one can say, as I do to customers about French wine in general, that it seems to have an interior core that you almost eat. Withal the prime image in my mind as I contemplate this wine is of a calm and regal Grace Kelly in a plain mint-green satin gown. I think she did a publicity photo like that once. Retail, about $40.
 

A few weeks after the move came that gorgeous early June full moon. My balcony faces east.

Half the reason for the move was that I wanted to be closer to work, a ten-minute commute being so much nicer than a forty-minute one. And here is some of what I have been learning at work lately.

2013 Muga Rioja blanco. If you should tire a bit of your summertime chardonnays, pinot grigios, and sauvignon blancs, venture forth please into the world of Spanish white wines. French, too, of course, or why not Italian, or those nice little Portuguese vinho verdes? but this one happens to be a white Rioja. The best of them tend to have a lovely floral aroma plus, often, some of a chardonnay's luxurious mouthfeel without necessarily its weight or its vanilla-like effects.

Meanwhile I continue to study the set of "Mary's apartment" from the Mary Tyler Moore show, to understand how I may make my completely pristine place, new carpet and fresh paint and all, resemble hers. It's not that I want the beige velour couches with the decorative flaps hanging off the bottom and brushing the brown shag carpet (remember those flaps? when you got new couches they stuck up for a few days until gravity pulled them correctly down), and certainly it's not that I want the brown shag carpet. What I want is the look of homeyness, the look of someone's personality absolutely impressed on her surroundings. Study the scenes of her apartment closely, and then perhaps those of Ted Baxter's and then Murray and Marie's, and you'll see there was genius going on, I'm convinced of it, among the set decorators of the show. For "Mary" they were thinking young, single, not much money, a lot of friends: therefore, a lot of hand-me-downs and flea market finds, no one table or curio-armoire to match any other, and there are too many of them -- she wants exactly what she wants, there -- but she seems to have easy seating for twenty and (probably) her grandmother's old bizarre little cabinet nailed to the wall, along with one hip '70s art print and her famous initial "M."

Images from Hooked on Houses blog

As for Ted, his place is exactly what it should be. Like him, it's sleek, silly, and grotesque. Combinations of big colored balls swirl descending from the ceiling on steel sticks, to masquerade as art; pictures of Ted's face, and a lot of matching chrome-edged surfaces, beam out from everywhere. If this reminds you of where you live, you have interior decor problems. And even Murray and Marie Slaughter's home is exactly right for them. One carefully chic oversized metal wall sculpture, and a lot of carefully crowded, soft brown sofas make a background of just some wealth, some warmth, and some slightly too careful, middle aged sophistication.

I have so far watched only five or six episodes, none earlier than the fifth season. YouTube must have already caught up with whoever pirate-uploaded any of the first four, and shut them down just as they did all the divine Joan Hickson Miss Marple programs. Anyway from what I can see, Mary Richards and her friends and co workers still, in the mid 1970s, don't drink much wine. Lou Grant keeps scotch in his desk drawer and Mary gets her boyfriend "a drink." At her parties -- and really, who everlastingly wants to socialize with her coworkers? -- she drinks a glass of orange juice which I am sure is meant to be a screwdriver. If I hear mention of a grape varietal or a region of Europe, I will let you know.

2012 Jacob's Creek Reserve chardonnay

This, my fatheads, is a souvenir from the days when At First Glass was moderately well known, well enough known at least to earn sample offerings from wineries' public relations firms. The Jacob's Creek reserve was very good; my fatheads know that I rarely do tasting notes or winemaker biographies, since wine always shows notes of peach and lychee, and every maker has passion, integrity, and respect for the land. I do stories instead. Somewhere in one of his great books Hugh Johnson himself said that was a better approach anyway. 

Sometimes I prefer just the notes to stories. If I jot -- "glorious summer. Picnic; laughter. Deer -- herons -- tern -- gulls -- swallows -- ducks -- pipers. World chaos. Strange giant snapdragon in a ghetto backyard," would that be enough for you to form a story of your own? 

By the way, the strange giant snapdragon in the ghetto backyard was actually a young catalpa tree. My friend who fishes was much struck when I told him I had looked it up and learned that. He said he knew of these trees as a source for the "catalpa worm," excellent as bait. Wikipedia confirms him: "The tree is the sole source of food for the catalpa sphinx moth (Ceratomia catalpae), the leaves being eaten by the caterpillars. When caterpillars are numerous, infested trees may be completely defoliated. Defoliated catalpas produce new leaves readily, but with multiple generations occurring, new foliage may be consumed by subsequent broods. Severe defoliation over several consecutive years can cause death of trees. Because the caterpillars are an excellent live bait for fishing, some dedicated anglers plant catalpa mini-orchards for their own private source of "catawba-worms", particularly in the Southern states."

My, my. It's a big world out there. 

The noble grapes: syrah/shiraz

We may as well begin, more's the pity, with the lovely legend that is apparently not true.

Syrah, the grape, is so named because it came originally from Shiraz, in Persia. The vine was brought back from the Near East by a Crusader in the thirteenth century, one Gaspard de Sterimberg. He became a hermit and lived in a hut on a hillside in the Rhone valley in France, where syrah grows at its best. In fact syrah's most famous (and deeply expensive) wine is called L'Hermitage, after the recluse's home.

Sigh. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wouldn't it be positively delicious if it turned out all this is true? It's possible, you know. Even though it seems we are forever learning that the grand things of the past really didn't happen, still each new cohort of professional historians has to earn its various Ph.Ds doing something. More often than not it seems they earn them by disproving whatever the previous cohort said, no matter what it was. Each generation gets to be brave, and call it "revisionism."

Of course, each generation can't rightly be revisionist without proof of its new contentions, and the proof is always in the written record. In the case of syrah, the problem with the legend -- the mucky old "mere reality," as Oz Clarke puts it -- is that the words shiraz and Hermitage, in reference to this grape and its wines, do not appear in historical records until long after the Crusades and long after the thirteenth century. (Anyway, what would Crusaders have been doing in Persia? Much too far east, surely. The Levant was about as far as they got.) It seems syrah was simply indigenous to the northern Rhone, that French Huguenots emigrating to South Africa in the seventeenth century took it with them, and then for some reason called it shiraz after planting it upon their arrival there. And the wine made from syrah in the northern Rhone valley was not called "Hermitage" or "Ermitage," in writing on paper, until the sixteenth century. That's what matters -- when do we see the words on paper? We tend to forget the first lesson of the subject of history, learned with luck in first or second grade. Pre-history means history before writing; it's the writing down of things that proves they ever existed. As the great Jacques Barzun says, history is not, for instance, a traveling display of dishes from the Titanic come to a big-city museum. History is "an event and a document." Your grocery store receipt, stamped with all those prices for wine and the place and date, is a primary source.

Anyway, for our purposes time has gone by and though we may never know why these words were chosen to go together, still now syrah, shiraz, and Hermitage link. The grape produces heavy, thick, "burly," fruity, "manly" wines, wines that, at their best, should age ten years or so in the bottle before being drunk. As is true of vinifera anywhere, climate and yield have their effect. The relatively cooler weather of the Rhone valley produces less lushly ripe grapes, and therefore syrahs of more acidity and less, shall we say, fruit-bombiness than are to be had under the blazing suns of South Africa, Australia (thither did South African immigrants bring their "shiraz"), and California. Heavy pruning is especially necessary for syrah, so that the few grapes left on the vines get all those nutrients and all that flavor.

There are a few technical details to file away in the memory. Syrah is the only red grape permitted in famed Hermitage, just as it is the only red grape of those wines called Cote Rotie, another (let us not forget the European style of naming wines for places) very small district of the northern Rhone. Strangely, a trace of white grapes, either marsanne, roussanne, or viognier, are allowed in both. There are also fully white Hermitages. There is no white Cote Rotie.

Further south along the Rhone, syrah is itself a blending grape, used to give power to the (red) grenache, mourvedre, and cinsault making up all those romantically named and even more romantically-spelled wines -- Chateauneuf du Pape, Gigondas, Vacqueyras and, what you are more likely to find in your local liquor store, Cotes-du-Rhone and Cotes-du-Rhone Villages.

In buying an Australian shiraz, the names you are ideally looking for are Penfolds Grange (winery), or Barossa Valley or McLaren Vale (places). For South African shiraz, you are looking for the name Stellenbosch. And no wine book discusses syrah/shiraz without mentioning the "Rhone Rangers" of California, a "loose-knit" group of ambitious young winemakers who got interested in syrah in the 1980s. Names like Joseph Phelps and Bonny Doon both rate a mention in books, and are likely to show up on liquor store shelves.

And how does it all taste? My past notes on Syrahs/shirazes I Have Known range from toast-jelly-hot-plum (Terra, Barossa Valley, Thorne Clarke Wines 2004) to tart-chocolate-raspberry (Barefoot Cellars, California 2005) to strong-leather-smoke (The Gorge, Hunter Valley, David Hook 2004) to vegetal-bare feet-Chinese food (Au, Barossa Valley, Aussie Vineyards 2004). None of these examples had aged for ten years. Obviously none, I am sorry to say, were French. The writers I have read seem to agree that the syrahs they have known put them in mind of leather, meat, smoke, and above all black pepper; but then Jancis Robinson also says burnt pencils, so I would hazard a guess that neither I with my small sampling nor none of us can be too far off in any case. The pepper flavors, especially, seem to be there for a reason, a chemical reason. Last summer, Harold McGee in his Curious Cook column wrote of the discovery of the chemical rotundone in shiraz grapes, rotundone being also present -- being, in fact, the most important aromatic -- in peppercorns. People who can smell rotundone (some of us can't) are able to detect it "at the level of parts per billion," McGee says, making it noticeable indeed. Too much of it gives flavors going beyond pepper and entering the realm of burnt rubber and Band-aids. Not easy to pair with dinner, whether a Rhone feast of garlic or a California vegan platter or, who knows, a bowl of hermit's gruel.

Eight Songs; Su'Skol

Pretty names, aren't they?

2002 Peter Lehmann Eight Songs shiraz, Barossa Valley, Australia
Sometimes a wine will put funny ideas into your head. This shiraz first called to mind words like satiny -- blackberry -- finishing acidity -- soft, lush, and then it made me think: "a great actor departs the stage."

What an odd image for wine, and how odd that it should leap into words without my struggling over it. I suppose the combination came to me because this very good wine had a good-tasting but somewhat lean and faded strength and stature, no longer resembling what a fresh-from-the-harvest shiraz can be -- nearly black with prunes and chocolate, brawny with tannin, and fiery with alcohol.
(Retail, about $35 to $55 if you can still find the 2002 vintage. Wine Searcher lists the 2007 vintage as averaging about $16.)

As for the pretty name, "Eight Songs," it has a convoluted etymology. According to the back of the label and other sources, it refers to a set of paintings by Australian artist Rod Schubert, privately owned by Peter Lehmann and hanging on the walls of his The Cellar Door. The paintings' theme is based on a sort of mini-mini one-man operetta about King George III originally composed and produced in the late 1960s (Eight Songs for a Mad King), a work in turn based on the fact that the king once used a mechanical organ, which played eight songs, to try and train wild birds to sing.

Peter Lehmann, I'm told, is the Robert Mondavi of Australia. That is certainly a less convoluted image to remember him by.

2007 Hess chardonnay Su'Skol vineyard, Napa Valley

Sound; banana-pineapple -- acid/hardness smoothed in vanilla oak.  "Entry-level serious wine for the newbie ready to move up" (according to the sales rep.). The pretty name, Su'Skol, was given to the vineyard to honor the indigenous Su'Skol people of that area of Napa, who "used the site as a meeting place and valued the nearby sources of fish and game." This christening is evidently fairly recent; wine drinkers at CellarTracker can remember when the chardonnay was just Hess. Retail, about $20.

The reason why one salesman could pigeonhole Peter Lehmann for me, plus let me in on the secret of a chardonnay designed to be "entry-level serious," is because both wines belong to one portfolio, that of Hess family. It's a good-sized portfolio. It also includes Glen Carlou wines from South Africa, Argentina's Colome, and California's Artezin (they produce Mendocino County and Sonoma County zinfandels) and Sequana (they make single vineyard Russian River pinot noirs -- in other words, the labels of these will say, "(1) Sequana, (2) Sundawg Ridge Vineyard (or "Dutton Ranch" or "Sarmento Vineyard"), (3) Green Valley of Russian River Valley (4) pinot noir"). Incidentally, the Russian River valley is in Sonoma County.

I can't help being fascinated by the way winemakers at once boast what they do, and yet sometimes wish to cloak what they do. I ask myself when and why, or when not and why not. For a long time I've entertained ambitious plans to make a flow chart of the California wine industry, so that I can begin to understand exactly where Gallo leaves off and everything else begins -- which just might be essentially the whole story. "All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," as the poet (Keats?) said. I thought I could practice my plan with Hess Collection, as it seems small and manageable, and yet reaches out and puts its stamp on things all over the world that you must work a bit to identify. 

But what a fool I was to imagine any such flow chart could be simple to produce. Take Hess, for instance. That smiling, healthy, golden-aged couple in the publicity materials, he with his black cowboy hat and she with her draped orange scarf, simply glow with arugula-fed West Coast sunshine, and with the joy of living the life they want making great wine, expanding the business -- even to the point of owning the Robert Mondavi of Australia -- and opening art galleries and things. More power to them. Have you guessed by now that the family are Swiss, made beer and then bottled water for more than a century in Bern, and only bought land in Napa in the late 1970s? Good guess. But it means that in sheer California seniority, Gallo outranks them by far. And now how do I start any of my flow charts, even the simple ones?

2005 Izway Bruce Barossa Valley shiraz

Busy afternoon. Busy salesman, new product. Tiny, tiny plastic cup. "Older vintage. 91 points. You could sell it for $30 or $40. New vintage retails for $80. We just picked it up."

Tasted.

Ooh. Good, good, good. A younger shiraz' stand-up-and-walk-down-your-throat tannic stiffness has softened into a gently spiced, gently rich little fruitbowl. Sweet, yes, but fruitbombs are my friends. 

If you can find it -- these people are so boutique they don't even maintain a website -- well, --- ooh.

A little more about Izway Wines, here.

A VIP tasting of rubrum lilies

May I record impressions of a trade tasting attended a whole year ago? You see, I had feared I really hadn't a clue what I was about, so when I came home, I tucked my notes away and slowly forgot the experience. What business had I, anyway, to muck about with wines actually approaching the $400 price point? Especially when five of the twelve on offer tasted, to me, like rubrum lilies? All this took place last March. Yet I open a notebook now, and out falls the brochure with my scribbles. "Lilies. Lilies. Rubrum lilies."

That part of the afternoon was perfectly ridiculous. Everyone agrees wine tasting is subjective, everyone agrees that what you think you taste can be influenced by all sorts of things -- what you ate half an hour ago, what you know about the cost of the wine, what the person next to you says about it. But really. The fact of a single bloom of rubrum lily in a vase on the wall, nodding over my lunch table and smelling narcotically delicious while I ate, should not have affected the taste of the wines I then tried an hour later in a room on another floor of the building. Unless rubrums shoot out some sort of pollen or other property that clings for hours to anything in the vicinity, particularly the interior of any nearby average human nose and its attached, average human olfactory bulb.

For the lovely fragrance wafted around me, sweet, inescapable, tropical, wafting up from much too many goblets of tremblingly expensive red liquids. The event was a "Winemakers on Tour" tasting of Beringer Private Reserve, Chateau St. Jean, and Penfolds Grange, and it was held in the fine old Union Club in downtown Chicago. All the trembling red liquids were heavy duty, serious-to-legendary cabernets and shirazes and blends thereof. The very attractive, tanned and toothy, nattily be-suited California blonde who hosted the affair invited us all, in her welcoming remarks, to close our eyes and jointly, lovingly remember "the very first time we ever spent a hundred dollars on a bottle of wine." That didn't take me long.

My notes follow, in all their (pick one) unadorned honesty, charm, stunning neophyte perspicacity, or ghastliness, depending on what you know.

Beringer Private Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

• 1989  banana peel -- rubrum lily -- brownish ruby -- high acid, high tannin -- cool -- silky then ... caramel, port, elegance, dates
• 1992  similar -- paler florals -- green pepper -- heavier -- more tannin (no fruit in either)
• 2001  deeper purple garnet color -- rubrum lily -- high tannin 
• 2005  vanilla flowers -- tannin -- caramel -- fruit still there 
• 2006  scentless -- cola -- vanilla -- tannin -- chewy

(From the files: Beringer's history goes back to the 1870s, when Jacob Beringer first worked for Charles Krug; today its winemaker is Laurie Hook, its winemaster emeritus, Ed Sbragia.)

Chateau St. Jean Sonoma Cinq Cépages Cabernet Sauvignon 

• 1996 green pepper -- flowers -- syrupy look -- black -- fleshy -- tannin
• 2001 medicine -- lilies -- fruit! -- chewy -- less acid 
• 2003 earth -- lilies -- acid -- (tight)
• 2006 vanilla -- fruit -- acid -- tannin

Sometimes these guided tastings move along so fast that you scarcely have time to try to savor what's in the glasses. Your hasty notes seem increasingly to fall from the pen of a blinking but earnest Captain Obvious ("fruit, acid, tannin").

(For Chateau St. Jean, think more contemporary history: 1970s, Sonoma. The winemaker is Margo Van Staaveren.)

Last came the big dog.

Penfolds Grange (Shiraz)

• 1994 rubrum -- thick, sauce-like -- maple, honey -- spice -- chewy -- then, softer 
• 1998 scentless -- a little medicine -- starch -- intense texture -- thick -- a little harsh in throat -- chewy -- hot 
• 2004 tannin -- tight -- big -- funky -- pool-like -- cola -- chewy -- retail $400 -- "partial fermentation in oak = quick balance, approachability"  -- cola

(Penfolds Grange, predominantly shiraz, was first made in 1951 by Max Schubert of Penfolds. Up until the 1990 vintage, the wine was called Penfolds Grange Hermitage, Hermitage being an Australian synonym for shiraz, which in turn is the grape of France's famed Hermitage AC in the northern Rhône.)
 
Anyone with any years in the trade will be horrified at a Penfolds Grange being described as funky and pool-like. What was I trying to express? Mustiness, soapiness, chemical-ness, mildew? Was something wrong with my wineglass perhaps, or was I simply off my nut? We may as well note that Penfolds' website advises that a Grange is not to be drunk until it has aged fifteen to twenty years. Perhaps that was it. As to general perceptions, only a little earlier in the hour my worries there had been somewhat assuaged when I heard a man behind me question the winemakers about the distinct impression of green pepper in the 1996 Chateau St. Jean, above. Glancing at my notes as he talked, I saw that I had scribbled down that very same impression myself. Huzzah! Vindication, and lilies be damned.

And as to the scent and taste of cola, present in more than one of these samples: that was a first for me. Cola is such a nice rich taste, but I wonder if the winemakers would be cheered to know they had achieved that flavor profile through their work. Incidentally, the woman who answered the green pepper question said that certainly she didn't strive for green pepper in her wines, but if there is a little of it, it's not a flaw.

In the end, after lapping our way through twelve monster reds -- surely we can agree, they were that -- we must ask, what foods do we then eat with the monsters? I believe it was our beloved curmudgeon Willie Gluckstern who once snarkily suggested only "a plate of bear meat" could do battle with the volcanic, pie syrup reds that are top-notch New World winemakers' pride and joy. Perhaps we would eat nothing. A recent survey reported in the Napa Valley Register tells us that most enthusiastic wine buffs don't drink wine with meals, and the younger the drinker, the more likely she is -- in this survey, 54% of wine consumers are women -- to treat wine as a sweet, high alcohol cocktail rather than as a thrilling accompaniment to food. In any case before doing any menu planning around these, you may want to consider your budget. I forgot to come clean about all the prices.

Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, retail, from $115 to $300 a bottle depending on vintage. 

Chateau St. Jean Cinq Cépages Cabernet Sauvignon, retail, about $75. 

Penfolds Grange, retail, $245 (the 1999 vintage, at my local big wine warehouse); other vintages, online, from $400 to $600.

 Technically, not a rubrum but a stargazer lily -- but we understand each other.

2008 Two Hands shiraz "Angels' Share"

...mmmmm
soft, satiny, ripe baked mature black fruit 
ends with enough acidity to please the grown-ups
luscious, sweet

Unfiltered -- note the crud (I mean, skins and things) at the bottom of the glass.

Wonderful.

Two Hands Wines, S. Australia

Retail, about $25.

Grand Barossa, grand (Victorian) sentence

After this, you may have a glass of wine.

December, 1845. "...and he ventures to indulge the hope that this long trespass upon your Majesty's much occupied time may find a sufficient apology in the deep anxiety which he feels that his regret at being compelled not only to retire from your Majesty's service, but also to take a step which he is aware may have had some influence on the course finally adopted by Sir Robert Peel, may not be still farther increased by the apprehension of having, in the performance of a most painful duty, incurred your Majesty's displeasure. [Lord] Stanley."

I dare you to figure this out. And this is only the second half of the sentence; there was a semicolon, and more before. Hint: after about ten readings, you may begin to see that it all hangs on his regret increasing.

Now for your wine. Queen Victoria would have called it hock, and recognized the tapered hock bottle, although its having come from Australia would have surprised her. We call it riesling  And we like it very much.

Retail, about $14

2006 Chateau Tanunda Noble Baron shiraz

Splendid. On a cold winter's day it will warm you up no end.

More on Chateau Tanunda, Barossa Valley, Australia, here. You may recall we met the 2008 vintage earlier in 2012. Retail, about $45.