Shamelessly Quoting the Wine Advocate! I'm exhausted. I've spent the past five days cleaning up my apartment in preparation for major renovations. My wife, daughter and dog are in France. My son is in Italy. My parents are home and are ill. I'm depressed and despondant. The latest issue of Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate just arrived at our office. I"ve dropped everything and ordered tens of thousands of dollars in Bordeaux futures. From what I've read, this could be almost as big as 1982! I missed out on buying a coop apartment in Manhattan when the market was low and I missed out on the 1982s. I'm not going to be caught flat-footed yet again. There are also lots of reviews of Zinfandels, wines from Oregon, Best Value wines, New York State wines and White Burgundies. Of all those wines, the only ones I drink are White Burgundies, but it turned out that the coverage from Pierre-Antoine Rovani was only about the Mâconnais and Chablis. As a homeowner in the Mâconnais, I'm glad to see the region get such extensive coverage, even if it is three pages less than what New York State gets. Hopefully, this will help raise the property value of my home in Poil Rouge and compensate for my sluggard home ownership status in Manhattan. Even one of our estates is reviewed, the Domaine de Roally which is now owned by the Thevenet family of Clessé. Yes, it is a review of the 2003 Mâcon-Montbellet, a wine which is very hard to sell because every wiseacre in the wine industry knows that you should avoid any 2003 white like the plague. Mr. Rovani writes: The rich intense 2003 Mâcon-Montbellet explodes from the glass with sumptuous aromas of pears, apples, almonds and minerals. This outstanding effort is broad, suave, medium-bodied, silky-textured, and jam-packed with salty, honeyed minerals. Drink this highly expressive wine over the next three years. The wine also garners a lot of points for a Mâcon. As high as any other Mâcon and at half the price of the similarly pointed wines. You'll have to look up the point total in the Wine Advocate, because even though I'm shamelessly quoting their review here, I still have too much self-respect to mention point totals. Bear in mind, this is no Cult Cab or Australian Shiraz and there is a mathematical ceiling for the category to assure Marquis Phillips fans that this wine is not competitive with one of the Marquis' efforts. Like Mr. Rovani, I love this wine and find it atypical for a 2003. That is, there is none of the excess of the vintage, the low acidity and flabbiness that you find with so many Chardonnay's. There is also none of that high acidity produced by reacidification. I remember getting a call from Jean Manciat, a vigneron in Charnay, after the harvest, who had seen the Thevenet vineyards during the harvest. Manciat was astounded that there was a normal size harvest, as opposed to the reduced size around the Mâconnais, and by the health and vigor of the vine. Unlike everywhere else, these were not stressed vines. For Manciat, it was the most convincing argument he had ever seen for plowing and working the land and for only using natural products. Thevenet and Henri Goyard before him, have been working like this for decades, not simply for the past few years because it has become fashionable to work organically or biodynamically. These vineyards are historic treasures which are living organisms. The proof is in the bottle, year after year. We received a lovely note from Gauthier Thevenet after the harvest, explaining how things had worked out: The exceptional weather conditions and extreme drought of summer 2003 forced us into a very unusual harvest. We started our harvest at the end of August (late September is the usual time) by picking the grapes hanging on the southern side of the rows. These are the least protected from the sun and were at risk of drying out. Then, since rain was predicted by weather forecasts, we decided to take a break. Rain at the end of the growing season usually helps the grapes to reach optimum ripeness, and we still had to pick the bunches growing in the shade of their leaves. After the rain, we went back to harvesting by the middle of September. As we had done in August, we only picked in the morning to avoid the excessive heat of the day. We noticed that the regular plowing done for years prevented the vines from suffering from the lack of water through the season. As for the wines, they have kept their natural balance and we did not reacidify them. They look like wines with finesse and a good potential for long aging. All too often, when we speak about natural and real wines, we sound like dogmatists or purists. The 2003 Mâcon-Montbellet is vivid proof of why this style of work in the vineyards and the cellar makes all the difference in the world. I have to go back to cleaning my apartment. |
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