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Off on Exciting French Buying Trip
Last year I bought a container of Overnoy. I also tried to buy two Loire Valley estates specializing in Overnoy/Plagolles style wines from Chenin. Happily, both went out of business before they could ship us the wine.Who knows what I'll find this year?
Stay posted here. I am armed with my Casio PocketPC, a modem, and plan to blog like crazy.
posted Sunday, January 28, 2001
Notitis
I'm sick of tasting notes. I get accused of wasting time and bandwidth by blogging. But I cannot imagine anything more useless than tasting notes.It colors like cassis.
It smells like cassis.
It attacks the frontal with cassis.
It mids the palate with cassis.
It lingers with cassis.
Wow!
Change cassis to whatever you like and you have the reductive, all-purpose tasting note. How to reduce a year of work in a vineyard to a trite text that tells nothing about nothing. And with hedonistic gobs of nothingness, lingering on and on.
If the New York Giants can play in New Jersey and the Cleveland Browns can play in Baltimore and call themselves the Ravens, then certainly we can come up something more imaginative and engaging.
posted Sunday, January 28, 2001
Cross-Posting Australian Shiraz
Speaking of industrial wines. I had to give a seminar in Chicago on Friday and ran to a supermarket to buy what I imagined would be an industrial wine to serve blind.
Wow! My first Lindemans Bin 50 Shiraz!
The Lindemans' winemaker wrote of this wine:
Colour: Deep plum with a crimson rim.
Nose: The bouquet shows an assortment of aromas including black pepper, nutmeg, ginger and raspberry cheesecake.
Palate: The attractive and enticing nature of the bouquet is duplicated on the palate, which is succulent, soft and mouth-watering. The wine features fruit flavours of blueberries and mulberries with spicy, slight black pepper characters. A smooth, velvet like tannin structure frames these characters
I actually agree, more or less, with the winemaker's comments. I especially agreed with the raspberry cheesecake descriptor, although it was certainly a particularly sweet rendition of that venerable recipe.
At the same time I found the bottle horrifying and repulsive. A Frankenstonian wine.
Does this say something about the limitation of the tasting note as descriptive medium?
This is a very popular wine that sells in vast quantities.
But is it wine?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Which Wine Will You Be Drinking During the Super Bowl?
I find it a barbaric sport and won't be watching.
The last football game I watched was the one where the Jets won the Super Bowl. The Mets won the world series that year, the Knicks won the NBA and man walked on the moon. With the exception of the guys walking on the moon, they were all New York teams. The so-called New York Giants have abandoned the Bronx for New Jersey. The Baltimore Ravens are in fact the Browns that abandoned Cleveland. There are no football teams in New York and the real Baltimore team is in Indiana, of all places.
This Super Bowl is a celebration of anti-terroir!
Maybe I'll watch and drink a Château St-Jean Cinq Cépages.
Someone poured one for me in Chicago. The one that was the Wine Spectator's wine of the year. It was like a tobasco sauce with some wine overtones. I can understand a wine with some tobasco overtones, but this was a new experience for me.
Speaking of the Giants, are Del Shofner and Y.A. Tittle still alive? Where are they?
I used to like Joe Namath. As a young man growing up in bucolic Queens, New York (one of New York City's famed outer boroughs), I used to sell hot dogs at Jet games. Broadway Joe and Howard Cosell would always give a little pre-game speech to all the hot-dog/soda vendors before Namath suited-up. In each speech, Namath would tell the assembled, pimpled teenagers how he had been up to 5 am with a stewardess he had picked-up at an East-Side Bar and doubted he would be able to play well.
posted on Friday, January 26, 2001
Muscadet Scandal Rocks Chicago
I've spent the past week in Detroit and Chicago. While Detroit has a normal wine market where retailers and civilians enjoy the delights of Melon de Bourgogne, there is no Muscadet to be found in Chicago! Frankly, I have no idea how to explain this situation, but there you are....
The only restaurant that seems to carry Muscadet is Shaws, which is renowned for its shellfish. This restaurant has two Muscadet, one cheap industrial one and a more expensive industrial one. Even if they want an average to decent Muscadet, there is really none to be found.
This bewildering situation is something I cannot explain. Please let me know by e-mail if you have any explanation.
On the other hand, the town is paradise for a Gruner Veltiner lover. One of the nation's top importers of Austrian wine, Vins Divino, is based in this town and is a full-scale distributor here. They have recently signed-on as the Chicago distributor for Therry Thiese, the excellent agent for German and Austrian wines. This should make Chicago the premier market for American lovers of the Wachau.
Chicago is also a great town for lovers of Marcel Lapierre's Morgon. While Kermit Lynch imports Lapierre's Morgons for the rest of the country, Lapierre is imported here by Barrique Wines. Lapierre has a close friend in Chicago, a French guy from the Maconnais who owns the admirable Le Bouchon and Sardine restaurants. These two bistros have always featured Marcel's Morgon and have created a word of mouth for the wine. They are everywhere and why not? The 1999 was delicious and the wine is much cheaper than it is in New York as it does not pass through Kermit Lynch.
In an odd development, Barrique Wines was bought last year by Vins Divino. This makes Vins Divino, undoubtedly, Chicago's biggest distributor of Gruner Veltiner and Unsulphured Beaujolais. Although rumor has it that Marcel Lapierre now lightly sulfurs his wines when they are sold on the export market. There were past stories of instability that gave the wine a checkered reputation. But when the wines are on, they have always been fabulous.
Even stranger, I was in a wine store named Shaffer's on Wednesday, a wine store in an unlikely place known as Skokie, and there in front of me was Marcel Lapierre himself, selling his Morgon to American merchants in the far-flung strip malls of American's heartland. Wow! I thought to myself. What's the likelihood of running into Marcel Lapierre, known throughout France as Le Marcel, along with one of his nephews who is starting a negociant business in the Maconnais/Beaujolais. Skokie is a lovely town, but it is not Macon.
I spent Thursday looking for FX Pichler at other Chicago retailers but did not see him. In all honestly, I'm not sure what Pichler looks like.
posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2001
Selling wine....
Is an exhausting and dangerous occupation. I'm back in the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Roseville, Michigan, having tasted 4 retailers on a dozen wines and after hosting a convival consumer dinner with the wine enthusiasts of Detroit. They are a very nice group.
Although my hotel television has HBO, I'm calling it a night.
By the way, the dinner was at a restaurant called Forté in Royal Oak. Avoid it like the plague if you're ever in these parts.
As usual, I'm selling enormous quantity of wines here. Thank goodness, our accountant says we need cash flow. She made a convincing argument, I thought.
posted on January 22, 2001
Count your blessings
Unlike you, dear reader, I am currently residing in a Holiday Inn located in Roseville, Michigan. I'm ostensibly here to sell wine, but some of my loved ones suspect foul play.
I dined last night with an area retailer who tried to impress me with a deeply flawed bottle of 98 Jaboulet La Chapelle. I matched the wine with a 93 Overnoy Poulsard, a wine which astonished everyone at the table. The retailer wants a state-wide exclusive.
I ask you, dear readers, what should I do?
Have to run. The Holiday Inn is about to run out of defrosted muffins. A complementary continental breakfast is part of the deal here. You also get free copy of USA Today!
posted on January 17, 2001