Fresh blog content from Alice can be found at the new The Feiring Line Natural Wine Newsletter site. Please update your RSS feeds!
To browse Alice's older content, you can continue browsing below.
The Dirty Guide to Wine is coming on June 13th! Curious? Take a look here, with Pascaline Lepeltier. Direction by Christy Frank, video and sound by Peter Zanger.
Oh, yeah, and that's me in the red hair, Alice. Available for Pre Order!
https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Guide-Wi...
Coming to you June 13th, but available for pre-order on Amazon!
Read Penelope Bass' full review on Imbibe.com
From the archives of The Feiring Line...the natural wine newsletter. It's a fantastic resource for what you should know and drink in the world of natural.
After tasting through quite a few 2015s from all over Burgundy I have to report it was a difficult vintage....for me. Other folks seemed to love it. But then I'm almost always showing up with a different take, like on the 2005 vintage. Praised by others, avoided by me.
Jean Claude Rateau early in the 2015 vintage
But while I still believe that you stick by your favorites year after year, this is the vintage to stick to who you know or listen to those you trust.
The snapshot was this: Hail was no stranger to the area and it heartbreakingly hit Chablis late in September, but spared most other spots. In general it was a very warm summer (check out the 15-16 degrees of ETOH in southern Burgundy, aka Beaujolais). Little rain meant very thick skins, meant more skin than juice. In addition, depending on picking time, many wines had relatively low pHs.
All of this was evidenced in in a blind tasting put together for me in Beaune by the BIVB. This was a great opportunity because I got to taste outside of my norm. In that assortment of 102 wines I was confronted by quite a few that seemed acidified and rough. I came away with a mouthful of tannin that was unusually harsh for the delicate grape, pinot.
Some typical descriptors from my scribbles? Orange juice, klutzy, rude, tarry--without charm, paint by numbers, weird oak juice, caramel finish. For the whites? Plenty of peach juice. White wines can be lovely though many seemed short.
And so those who handle the grapes as gently as possible, use full cluster (or at least a good bit), work more with infusion than extraction are the winners here. It's a short list but more will be coming. Producer picks for me so far include those of:
Alice et Olivier deMoor
Dominique Gruhier
Giles Ballorin
Jane et Sylvain
Sylvain Pataille
Claire Naudin
Domaine Lafarge
Chanterêves (extremely elegant)
Chandon de Briailles
Maison Harbor (look for La Justice)
Jean Claude Rateau
Dominique Derain
Pierre Fenals
Julien Altabar
Fred Cossard
Jane Eyre (Corton Reynards & Côtes de Nuits Village)
In this month's Feiring Line, the natural wine newsletter you'll want to read about rebirth of the real wines of Chile and how a plot to reforest has created havoc on the wine industry and the natural richness of the country.
For more on the issue of the land, you'll want to read Luis Gutiérrez reporting in ... yup... The Wine Advocate.
cranberry beans and aji
Back in January I visited Chile and the Secano Interior lands with dry farmed old vines and great history. The info is plunked into this April's issue of TFL, devoted to the campesinos making pipeños don't know what that is? Well, sign up and find out. But there were outtakes to my story and a summer dish of beans and beauty was one of them
During the stay I was treated to several homemade versions of a soup or a stew that was a staple, Porotos Granados. Delicious.
You'll see it everywhere. It's like the jonjoli of Georgia -- you can't have a meal or gathering without seeing it on the table. It's so welcoming with big sheets of sliced corn from a local variety that is as thick as a giants forearm. Beautiful sure but the taste is uncommonly intense for the simplicity of the ingredients.
One of the first I sampled was at an impromptu picnic in Roberto Henriquez's vineyard-- from extremely talented hands.
To the left is the chef, Felipe Macera. The right, the talented winemaker Marcelo Retamal.
Another soupish stew came to my bowl through Manuel Moraga's charming life partner, the flaming-haired Paola Marini, who kindly sent me this recipe.
The Joys of Processed Wine and Ignore the Snobs, Drink the Cheap, Delicious Wine was the two-titled opinion piece from writer Bianca Bosker. It appeared in last week’s New York Times. It didn’t strike a nerve but it did press buttons. “The story shouldn’t have been titled cheap wine, it should have been cheap shots,” wrote Vermont winemaker Deirdre Heekin.
I’m not sure those who reacted to the click-bait of it all were being fair. Any thinking person who read Bosker's conclusion (or the titles), would guess the writer was clearly out of her mind. But while I would have rather believed that explanation, I expect something else had to be going on.
For me the Op-Ed’s problems were elsewhere; credibility and believability. Or as the Times magazine cover suggests, "Is truth dead?" In that Times piece was a deep bait and switch that you would only know if you read the Bosker book. Which I did.
Photo grabbed from Marko Kovac's facebook page. I've no idea where he found it.
The Cork Dork--which reveals more about Bosker's ambition and competitive nature than any love for or knowledge of wine--energetically chronicles her journey towards the first certified level of the Master Sommelier exam.
This is more like running the Turkey Trot than the Boston Marathon, but through the study one should pick up some tips. However, being considered a pro or an expert does not come along with that first pin. I suppose this is why there are so many misleading and wrong statements in her essay such as "learning to savor the delicate aromas of aged Barolos from organic growers in Piedmont." That's a weird one? How old? This was one of the worst farmed areas for ages. Organic except for the very few is a rare thing.
Then there's, “I spent long days studying the farming practices that distinguish the Grand Crus of Burgundy.”
Farming practices do not separate the Grand from the Village, geology and micro-climate do. There’s a bunch of other stuff I can take on in the essay. While this might seem like small potatoes, it does makes me question her wine knowledge and grasp of the market. But what really confounded me was her flip from her book to a flop of a different conclusion in the Times.
Here’s the deal: The Op-Ed was a condensed version of one of her book's chapters entitled, Quality Control. In that chapter she discusses wine additives and the way marketing team can shape a wine.
The essay oddly reads as if she were on a Treasury press junket. I don’t know whether she was or not, but one understands that she drank and liked Treasury's Kool-Aid. There she was, tasting the wines after a certain natural wine bashing and then she drops this bomb;
These maligned bottles have a place. The time has come to learn to love unnatural wines.”
Honest opinion here: Treasury and others of their ilk should run and grab this concept for a press release. It’s perfectly transparent. Its message? “So what if we load up wines with process and additives? We make wines of pleasure.”
So in the Times she says processed wines are great.
In her book when at the same big table tasting yeasted, chipped, mega-purpled, reverse-osmosed, acidified, enzymed, Velcorined wines, she seems to have had a very different experience.
They reminded me of blueberry smoothies with a shot of vodka and Hershey's syrup stirred in. But I was trying to keep an open mind. Price is a spice, I reminded myself, and don’t be such a snob. Truth be told, I didn't want to finish them. There was nothing new that revealed itself after the second sip.
In the memoir she couldn’t drink the wines.
In the essay she embraced them.
Okay. Fess up. Which one is it? And what would prompt the author to so drastically change her opinion from book to post. In the age of press manipulation, the whole situation left me uncomfortable, and that the Times printed it, took her seriously was part of it.
Eric Asimov recently wrote a fabulous column, wine is food. Bravo. Absolutely. Fresh orange juice or concentrate? Fresh strawberry or artificial flavor. Genetically modified tomatoes or a syrupy, black acidic one. Wine from grapes or from 60+ additives. Which one do you want to drink? The answer seems is self-evident. To paraphrase Aubert de Villaine, “Do I have to prove that the sun rises?”
To most of us who take wine and food seriously, wines of pleasure are not concocted grape beverages from ground that I wouldn’t want to walk on let alone eat from. What gives pleasure is deliciousness from great winemakers who can work soils responsibly and give the grapevine an unadorned and unspoofed voice.
If this piece that would land on April Fool’s Day I would have gotten it. But it didn’t. But frankly, any writer who confesses, as she has, to have a weakness for old champagne --which is a game only the well-heeled can play-- comes off as someone sipping out of her coupe and saying let them drink cake, or rather Layer Cake.
"Extraordinary," said Decanter. "Best vintage since 2010," said Forbes. Tim Atkin was a little more subdued, "a very good to great vintage for reds." But, Janicis Robinson went further, "Seriously impressive," she wrote.
If you read about Burgundy you know that there's a gushing about the vintage 2015.
I have a history of being odd man out. I don't know why I see the world differently, it could be a curse, but I do.
I loved the tannic 1998. I loved 2006. I found the weird vintages of 2007 (difficult and rot plagued) and 2011 particularly charming.
And as far as the famed 2005? Jancis Robinson wrote. "In general all the wines are charming, truly succulent and they faithfully express their origins. Can one ask for more?" Alan Meadows had proclaimed it, "One of the great Burgundy vintages of this century for Pinot Noir," but for me? Not so much. Not at release and not ten years on.
I have no idea why my colleagues gushed about it. But in politics and vintages are controversial, even if from our vantage points the truth seems obvious. For myself, I can add it to the incredibly difficult (for me and my wine glass) 2003 and 2009 vintage. It was confounding to me how this could have been acclaimed. Yet, unlike the '03 and '09, '05 still hasn't budged. It reminds me of one of these melons that arrive in the market that go from unripe to rotten. I know, that's harsh. I'm not saying they're rotten, but they just don't yield. And I am afraid that when and if they finally loosen their seams, they'll die before they live.
So, why? 2005 was also a very solar vintage. And solar in Burgundy, when that's all you get, makes for the kind of wine that is the opposite of the kind of nuance we want when we go to this hallowed strip of the Cote d'Or. I remember in June of 2005, meeting with Philippe Pacalet. Now, he's not a vigneron but as we went to taste in his cellar he voiced his fears. "The sun, it's too much for the vines," he said. He was mostly correct.
Those who worked the vineyard in both '05 and '15 as if they were in a cloudy, cool vintage... failed. Those who worked by rote: leaf-pullings, fruit dropping, over hedging, extraction and destemming made, to me, charmless wines. In vintages like that stem inclusion and/or whole cluster--with a few exceptions--seemed to help the wines. It's like putting on a hat for shade.
As I hinted, even ten-years on, I was still contemplating the vintage when confronted with over 100 examples to taste.
I thought, now's the time I will understand. Out of those 100 only a handful pleased me, and more reds than whites. They were from both Beaune and the Nuits. The sun didn't cause sun-stroke in the wines. I found complexity and a depth.Where the great majority--from very well-considered estates-- so many others were stunted by the tannin-- not the structure--these had a window open and vibrancy. Certainly not a vintage light on its feet, but I felt the best of the vintage, had the sun, sure, the tannins were unapologetic, sure, but instead of the opaque, there was the transparency I look for in my Burgundy.
Who were they?
de Montille, Mugnier, Lafarge, Dujac, Berthaud, D'Arlot, Chandon de Briailles, Rousseau, Jérôme Galeyrand, a little wine from Epineuil, from Dominique Gruhier. For the whites? Roulot was a standout as was Bonneau du Martray.
Here are some of the survivors....
And here you go.
So now we're at 2015?
Superb? Meh.
As a vintage? Difficult.
Some great wines of pleasure? Without a doubt.
Who and how? Stay tuned-- coming to The Feiring Line soon. Subscribe!