7.5 winehiker points*

Every once in a while, we wine lovers find that promise does not deliver what expectation anticipates. You can read all the words that are written to describe a wine; most of us want to believe them enough to reach into our wallets if we are at all tantalized by the copywriter’s scribblings. But then you taste the wine, and you wonder if maybe you’ve had a head cold for a week.

Such was my experience with the 2001 Boundary, a Bordeaux blend from Te Awa Farms in the town of Hastings, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.

A case in point on the copywriting, from The New Zealand House of Wine:

“A delicious wine with melting tannin and complex layers of flavour. Intertwined aromas of fresh leather, dark cherry, bramble and plum on the nose. A supple, round attack opens to show layers of flavour on the palate, which reflect those of the nose. The tannins are now well integrated giving the wine depth and length.”

From Bottlenotes, from whom I purchased the wine:

“A high quality, high value New World Bordeaux blend. Smooth and lush with aromas of cedar, sweet tobacco, blackberry and a bit of spice. On the palate, the wine is quite smooth with moderate tannin, a bit of leather and dark berry fruit flavors.”

My own tasting notes:

“Medium garnet-colored Bordeaux blend, strong earthiness on nose, but with mild elusive fruit aromas and slight fragrance of wood and spice. Moderate balance aspects, with slight tartness, agreeable bitterness. Medium body, good mouthfeel, but heavily lacking in fruit flavor; very short finish.”

Hmmm…. I was not attacked by supple round plums, especially on my nose. Which New World are we talking about here? Were my defenses too solidified? I thought I should clear my throat, blow my nose, and try again. So I did, three more times over the course of the evening. Up until I tried this particular wine from Bottlenotes, I had been pretty pleased with their selections. Fortunately with Bottlenotes you can share your tasting notes with them so they can further tailor their selections to your palate. In fact they actually ask you to do so.

And I’ve been doing that. Perhaps not enough, truth be told. I guess we still have some tailoring to do.

At any rate, I tried this wine again after 45 minutes in the decanter, then again after 2 hours of opening. Still, after four hours, the 2001 Boundary tasted way way way too [insert your own invective here] earthy. You know, being a winehiker and all, I’m a big fan of earth. I like it beneath my feet. A lot, in fact.

I just don’t like it in my mouth. I think I’ll stay on this side of the Boundary for a while.

Usually the earthiness aspects of some wines dissipate within a short time of opening or decanting. Perhaps my problem is that I didn’t try this wine with roast lamb, roast beef, game, or grilled duck, as suggested by the well-meaning folks at Bottlenotes. Heck, Te Awa Farms even has its own restaurant, which is considered to be one of New Zealand’s top six dining establishments. Says something about the NZ palate, perchance. They must quite naturally be pairing their foods with (or is that to?) their wines.

So, I suppose I’m remiss for not suckling on a duckling for this one. Nevertheless, good food does not make bad wine better.

So sayeth I.

OK, so that’s my first stellar review of a not-so-stellar wine. There are bound to be more.

—————-
$30.00 at bottlenotes.com; priced at $22 elsewhere online. That is, if you really want to buy it after reading this post.

Disclosure: I am a member of bottlenotes.com’s Limited Addictions club; this wine arrived in their summer shipment and was purchased by me.

*Rated on the 20-point Davis scale using my Wine Scoring Sheet.

~winehiker

• Sustainable Links
  A list of websites promoting sustainability from Chef Stu Stein’s soon-to-be-open Terroir Restaurant & Wine Bar.
  (tags: sustainability sustainable food practices organic earth terroir portland wine bar winehiker winehiking californiawinehikes.com)

They could have been featured in ‘Mavericks at work’ (the book, not Marc Cuban’s team).
Creative cooking, a nice place and 40% off the Wine List on Monday nights. Who can ask for more?

read more | digg story

So here’s the deal: Da Coach of Da Super Bowl Bears, Mike Ditka, is releasing a new wine called “Kick Ass Red.” It’s a premium blend of Zinfandel and Syrah from the Parducci Winery in Mendocino, California and it will retail for about $49.

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• Blind Wine Tasting Notes: 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau
  Group tasting notes and analysis of six 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau wines.
  (tags: blind wine tasting notes 2006 beaujolais nouveau review winehiker winehiking http://www.californiawinehikes.com)

Editor’s Note, November 15th, 2008: If you’re searching for a review of Beaujolais Nouveau wines from the 2008 vintage and wound up here, I must admit that I haven’t yet reviewed the new vintage. But what I’d like to know is, Should I? Feel free to direct me one way or the other by leaving a comment.

Many wine buffs the world over participated last week in a yearly ritual — tasting newly-arrived 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau wines. Since the long-ago origins of this tradition in France’s Beaujolais region, a sudden fever tends to mark the third Thursday in November. That fever struck here in the navel of the California wine country, too, as six local tasters, each with varying degrees of wine tasting experience, brought their selected wares — one bottle each — to my home to be swirled, sniffed, sipped, and scored.

Most experienced wine tasters will tell you that there’s more to the fanfare about Beaujolais Nouveau than there is to the wine. I’ve described it before as being not much more than Kool-Aid with an acid infusion — a once-a-year ritual and a prelude to drinking finer wine.

Nevertheless, there was quite a disparity last Friday evening in our results for six of this year’s labels; as you’ll see below, two clear favorites emerged. In the course of my shopping research, I had played a hunch, thinking that my selection of a Nouveau from the distinguished Beaujolais-Villages subappellation might stack the deck against the selections of the other five tasters in my party. As you’ll see from the results, where a wine is made doesn’t necessarily guarantee its quality. But I wouldn’t know until the final unveiling of our cloth-shrouded bottles.

Paired with our Beaujolais Nouveaux were whole wheat breads, crudites, and three cow’s milk cheeses: a soft, almost butterlike Explorateur from France with an easy spreadability; a Jean Grogne, an earthy and slightly bitter French triple-creme cheese; and a moderately sharp, medium-bodied Wisconsin Gruyere.

Among our assembled company was Valerie S., whom you see wearing a beret in the accompanying photo, and donning the proud colors of her native France. It was Valerie who brought the crudites, fancifully adorning them with two well-recognized French symbols: L’Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. And thanks to Ginny G. (that’s her seated in front), who served a delicious piping-hot post-tasting quiche.

About the wines

The wines listed in the Group Ranking table below are ranked top-down, most favorite to least favorite. In the left column is the actual group score for each wine using my Wine Scoring Sheet, which is based on the 20-point Davis scale. Each 2006 vintage wine is listed by label and is followed by the wine’s appellation, its heat (alcohol content) and the price (US$) per 750ml bottle. All wines were purchased where linked but not necessarily available currently nor purchasable online; if no direct link to the wine itself is present in the Group Ranking table, purchase information is not available.

Below the group ranking, I’ve employed the scoring sheet to tabulate my own scores for each individual wine.

Group Ranking

Winehiker’s Scoring

Analysis
As I host my tastings, I often suggest to my panel of tasters that they should consider the merits of each wine as it compares to the other wines on the table, and not against previous tasting experience. This caveat is especially true when tasting Beaujolais Nouveaux, since these wines can hardly compare, quality-wise, to nearly any other wine. One could conceivably rate all BN wines very low compared to a powerhouse Cabernet or even a young, fruity table wine. As it is, you’ll note that I generally tend to qualify my remarks somewhat when describing BNs — they’re just not great wines. But they’re not really meant to be.

With these notions in mind, and as you can see from my Winehiker’s Scoring table, none of these wines scored very highly, but none scored too low, either, with the exception of the group’s extreme non-favorite, the Mommesin, which had not much more going for it than its cranberry color.

The fairly narrow spread in my scoring of the top five wines reflected the groups’. That being said, our aggregate scoring easily helped to identify two distinct group favorites. It was clear that we collectively agreed about the qualities of these six labels.

But let’s break it down. Five of these wines were rather restrained upon judging aroma; only the Henry Fessy seemed to offer any real sense of fruitiness right out of the bottle. There was a slight barnyard aspect to the Piron that foretold its prominence, and a minute fragment of leather in the nose of the Louis Tete. None of these wines, however, appeared to open into stronger fragrances as the evening wore on.

If you’ve experimented with BNs previously, you can imagine how their tartness can affect the overall balance of the wines. With the exception of the Mommesin, which was entirely flabby, all were highly acidic. No small surprise there; strong acidity is an expectation with Beaujolais Nouveau.

However, I felt that at least one of these six should offer some smidgen of sweetness, however slight, to go along with the other characteristic of a BN — its fruitiness. We didn’t really find these wines to be appropriately sweet; I subsequently gave moderate to low scores across the board on this attribute. All wines scored reasonably well on the final balance aspect, astringency. Of the six wines, the wine that I felt had the best overall balance was the du Boeuf.

If nothing else can be said about Beaujolais Nouveau, it is a food wine and not a wine you drink for the sake of drinking it. That much was evident early on in our judging. By the time we had worked our way down to scoring our wines on body and taste, we were already reaching for the bread and cheese — anything to clear the acids from our palates. But if any could be considered to have an appropriate texture for drinking, it would be the Piron and the Bouchard Ain which, with their nearly-on-target balance aspects and delightfully fruity flavors, are two good bets. The highest scorer on body and taste, to my mind, was the ubiquitous du Boeuf.

Unlike its tongue-snapping tartness, finish is not typically a characteristic associated with Beaujolais Nouveau, and our scoring reflected it. The two noteworthy wines in this aspect, for me, were the Bouchard Ain and the du Boeuf. The Piron edges out the du Boeuf in the final group score, however, because of its consistency on all aspects relative to the five others.

Conclusions and Recommendations
One cannot lay claim to fine winemaking skills for this quickly made and rather pedestrian wine; its overall character implies its drinkability now as a celebrated ritual (if one can indeed call it drinkable) rather than a wine one boasts about after cellaring. But then, nobody should choose to cellar this type of wine. In fact, as I selected the Dominique Piron at Beltramo’s in Menlo Park, I was amused upon spying a basket of 2005 Nouveaus, many of them “giveaway” priced at $1.99. For that price, I might consider bathing in it as the Japanese do.

If you would shop for just any wine, don’t buy a Beaujolais Nouveau when you can buy something better. But if you want to find out what all the hoopla is about — and I recommend you do at some point in your tasting experience, if for no other reason than to establish a somewhat crude baseline — then take your pick from the top three BNs listed in the Group Ranking table above, and you’ll get a sense of what a truly young wine can be like. These wines were, after all, just grapes on a vine only a few short weeks ago.

~winehiker

• A Thanksgiving Day assault
  A handful of the South Bay Hiking Elite met before dawn for a Thanksgiving Day climb up the steep and windswept slopes of Fremont’s Mission Peak.
  (tags: Thanksgiving Day 2006 Mission Peak hike hiking blog winehiker winehiking californiawinehikes.com)

A handful of the South Bay Hiking Elite, as Tom Mangan dubs them, met before dawn this morning to climb the steep and windswept slopes of Mission Peak, which crowns the hills east of Fremont, California. I would have been there with that crew, laboring up that @#$&! hill, if I hadn’t woken up coughing, assaulted by some sort of scurrilous *$&%#!! bug.

Ah, ’tis the season for health-zapping peskies, and I s’pose I’m duly taking my turn.

Some kind of hiking blogger I am. I guess I’m not nearly so elite as I want to be. But I didn’t feel like sharing my malady with the hardy hillclimbing lot (nor with my mother at Thanksgiving dinner this evening), so I stayed snug and cozy under a wad of blankets while the Intrepid Elite walked tall in the morning twilight.

Dawn atop Mission Peak, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Photo courtesy of Two Heel Drive.

Maybe “walked” isn’t the right word. Nobody just “walks” up Mission Peak. Well, except perhaps for that young feller John Fedak. But I’ll let Tom tell the story in yet another of his trademark photoessays.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

~winehiker

• Getting Naked with 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau, and more
  Referencing a post about the tradition of Beaujolais Nouveau plus a review of two of this year’s labels, Georges DuBeouf and Joseph Drouhin.
  (tags: 2006 Beaujolais Nouveau wine naked vine blogger californiawinehikes.com winehiker winehiking witiculture)

A little less than 72 hours ago, the Wine Spectator announced its 2006 Top 100 List. Since then, prices have fluctuated for some of the list’s top ten wines, though not all of them. Most of these wines are still available as of this writing, though possibly in limited supply; two are not available online or from the winery. (However, you might get lucky if you know which restaurants still serve them.)

In the following list, the WS$ column shows the price listed in Monday’s announcement for each of the Top 10 winning wines. The Avg. $ column shows today’s average price based on a search of the inventory on winezap.com and wine-searcher.com.

Some of the price differences are staggering, others are negligible. Assuming demand is proportional to placement on the win list relative to all 100 wines on the list, then scarcity of supply may be the driving factor behind the current price.

Conclusion: by the time you read this, you probably won’t be able to find any of these wines, with the possible exception of auction houses such as winebid.com (see their current auction on the Casanova di Neri, for instance); no doubt prices will be higher there if there’s any inventory at all. Then again, if you’ve got your own inventory and want to dump some or all of it, you might just fetch a nice return on your investment here.

Gee, could that be the reasoning behind the judging of 13,500 wines?

*From the Kosta Browne website: Since our production is limited, we currently have a wait list, which is sorted chronologically by the person’s date of registration. As quality allows, we intend to increase production levels so that we can offer introductory allocations to those on our wait list in the order of wait list placement. We plan to announce our next Mailing List offering (our 2005 Appellation Wines) on February 6, 2007.

**From the Kongsgaard website: The wines are sold through an online mailing list offering in June of each year for shipment in October, and in fine restaurants around the world.

~winehiker