Well I’ve never been to Spain

But I really like the vino (who among you will catch this stupid song reference?).

I have a new thing with wine. I try to only buy stuff that is $10 or less a bottle. The vast majority of what I find in that range that’s good is Spanish (with one notable exception—Falesco Vitiano 2007, which is dynamite). The one I drink the most is Bodegas Ateca Garnacha De Fuego, which I get for only seven bucks. It’s nice fruit, with a lot of acidity, and goes great with food, a good house wine. The Bodegas Olivares Monastrell Altos de la Hoya (10 bucks, from the Tempranillo mourvedre grape) and Ludovicus Terra Alta (10 bucks from a blend of tempranillo, grenache, and syrah) are also excellent, definitely smoother and fruitier. I also really like Vinos de Arganza Bierzo la Mano Mencía Roble, in some ways the most interesting (for 8 bucks, from the crazy Mencia grape), but the store that has it is too far from my house so I’ve only had it a couple times.

Anyway, I don’t have too much to add about this, but you should try this wines if you’re also into paying less than 10 dollars a wine. Because they’re much better than other wine you can get for under $10.

One more alcohol note: that local rye I blogged about (McKenzie Rye Whiskey) is getting rave reviews (here; here) and I think it will go up in price (it’s around $40 now). So if you like that kind of thing, check it out. There was a bourbon I used to like—A. H. Hirsch—and now I can’t afford it. The McKenzie is the only other American whiskey I’ve had that I really liked. I’m seriously thinking of a buying case because I wish I’d bought a case of the Hirsch.

There probably isn’t too much point to this post, except that a few of you have emailed to say you like wine blogging and I’m tired of hearing about ginger and so on.

DougJ +5 or so

Update. If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Spirits in the night

I went to a New York State artisanal spirits tasting this afternoon. I know next to nothing about hard liquor, so I learned a lot about distillation. I still don’t understand the difference between the tails, and the head, and the heart, but at least now I understand why vodka gets distilled to 190 proof while eau de vie gets distilled to 140 (water is added to get them both down to 80-90 proof later).

The stand outs of the tasting, for me, were the apple vodka and apple jack from Harvest Spirits and plum eau de vie from Mazza Chautauqua. These are pretty tough to find, in general, but Harvest Spirits is at all the big NYC liquor stores (Astor, Sherry, etc.). It’s unique stuff—the vodka has a buttery taste up front and a definite but dry-and-light apple taste throughout.

Probably the most exciting part for me, though, was meeting the guy who writes Spirits Review, Chris Carlsson. I’ve been reading the site for months and was sold as soon as I read this review of Bluecoat Gin:

If I could I would replace my blood with this.

It’s a great site—as far as I can tell, it’s the best place to get honest information about hard liquor (I like F. Paul Pacult for bourbon, but not as much for other spirits).

It turns out Chris Carlsson lives right around the corner from me and I may try to bring him by here to answer all your liquor questions at some point.

Every picture tells a story

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, yes, Ann, the president is tired, but tomorrow he will be rested, and you will probably still be drunk. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Glenn Reynolds gets in on the act too.

In a world where conservative Senate leaders diagnose brain dead women via video, it is hardly surprising that conservative bloggers make foreign policy judgements via Flickr.

Update. Tbogg has some good pictures too.

Holiday sparkler

For many people, holidays involve lots of sparkling wine and lots of less-than-discerning relatives. But you’ve got to drink the same stuff they do, so you want something cheap and decent. I bought a case of Segura Viudas Brut Reserva (it’s a big family gathering on Friday) and just opened the first one. It’s really pretty good, not yeasty and complex like real champagne, but with nice fruit and acid and nothing offensive.

Only seven bucks and the best under ten dollar sparkler I’ve ever had.

I am not drinking merlot!

I went to a fascinating wine tasting yesterday at the nearby New York Wine and Culinary Center. The wines were all Long Island merlots. I wasn’t expecting to like them all that much because (a) I don’t like New World merlot much in general and (b) I don’t like Long Island (a few Billy Joel songs notwithstanding). So I was surprised that…I loved the wines! They don’t taste like other New World merlot at all—to me, they tasted liked Bordeaux only much more herbal, a bit more acidic, and a bit less fruity and tannic. The wines were from the wineries that form the Merliance: seven wineries on Long Island that make merlot as their flagship wines. These are Wolffer, Clovis Point, Pellegrini, Raphael, Sherwood House, Castello di Borghese, and McCall.

Having never had these wines before, I wasn’t able to get a great sense of the differences between the different estates: vintage variation was more striking. The 2007 vintage was fantastic, the 2004, 2005, and 2006 vintages more variable (2005 has the best reputation, 2006 the worst, but I actually like 2006 the best of the three within this limited sample size). The vineyards are primarily in the North Fork of Long Island, though Wolffer is on the South Fork.

These wines, in general, are lower in alcohol than California bordeaux blends and also more food-friendly. They also have a fascinating spice/herbal quality that I’m embarrassed to describe for fear of sounding too much like Paul Giamatti, so I’ll just quote Appellation America (by subscription only, unfortunately):

“Heady violets, rich plum, huckleberry and Darjeeling tea aromas are accented by complex and exotic aromas of lemongrass, cilantro, ginseng, bay, Seville orange, and white pepper, which develop an amazing bouquet of cedar, sandalwood, and tobacco with age.” A bit much, ya think? Yet this complexity itself is the common thread of the region.

These wines aren’t cheap—most have suggested retail between $20 and $30, though I find them a bit cheaper at my local shop. But I think the 2007s, as good as they were, are an excellent deal. For purposes of comparison, I tasted a lot of red wines in Oregon last weekend and the only reds I liked better than the 2007 McCall and Wolffer were much pricier.

This tasting was a real revelation, one of the most surprising I’ve ever been to.

Booze blogging!

We’ve never tried blogging about booze, the hard stuff, the sauce, here before. So I’m going to give it a try.

First off, I don’t know much about hard alcohol. But I’ve been watching a lot of “Mad Men” and I’m fairly certain I will look more or less exactly like Roger Sterling when my hair turns white, so I decided to start drinking martinis a few months ago. I was heavily influenced by Fareed Zakaria’s piece on the subject, which recommends gin rather than vodka and wet rather than dry. I also use orange bitters (an excellent local product) in most of the ones I make, and olives in sum as well. I’ve been through three gins so far—Tanqueray, Plymouth, and Seneca Drums, made by Finger Lakes Distillers. I like Tanqueray a lot, respect the austerity of Plymouth (though I don’t like it that well), and am crazy for the Seneca Drums, which is made about 70 miles from where I live. It tastes a lot like Tanqueray only a bit more complex (there’s cardamom and some other spices in there as well as juniper) and smoother. Currently, I use the bitters and the olive in the Tanqueray and the Plymouth but just use a tiny bit of the olive brine (with no olive) in the Seneca Drums.

You guys seem like a martini-savvy crowd. What gins do you like? What vermouth? What proportion of gin-to-vermouth? Am I a philistine for adding both the orange bitters and the olive to my martini?

While I’m at it, what about the distillation process or the aging process makes something taste smooth? The Finger Lakes Distillery stuff all tastes smoother to me than larger distillers, but maybe that’s my imagination (though I don’t think it is). What would that be?

Update. I’m currently sipping Finger Lakes Distillers new rye, which is dangerously smooth. For Christmas, I usually give my uncles high-end bourbon, but the only I really like is the A. H. Hirsch, which is getting harder and harder to find. I can’t find any other bourbons that seem to get the same kind of crazy rave reviews that the Hirsch does, but some ryes do—specifically the Black Maple Hill and some of the special bottlings of Sazerac. Would a bourbon drinker like a rye? Are those kind of sweet or not? For whatever reason, this passage from All the King’s Men, the only really good book about politics I’ve ever read, really made me crave rye.

The return of wine blogging

I just returned from a fascinating wine tasting held at the New York Wine and Culinary Center (in Canandaigua, NY). It was an all cabernet franc tasting—21 different cab francs, 17 from the Finger Lakes (all from the 2007 vintage), three from the Loire region of France, and one from Long Island.

Cabernet franc is one of the most interesting and under-appreciated wine grapes, IMHO. The most famous cab franc-based wine in the world is Cheval Blanc (two-thirds cab franc, one-third merlot) from St. Emilion. Miles is seen drinking a 1961 Cheval at a fast food restaurant at the end of Sideways; the 1947 Cheval regularly shows up in “best wines of the 20th century” lists. More frequently, cab franc is produced in a somewhat more humble style in the Loire region (Chinon, Bourgueil); these wines are usually, but not always, a big lighter. Cab franc is also grown in the Finger Lakes, where it is the region’s most successful red wine varietal by most accounts.

Flavorwise, cab franc is similar to cab sauvignon but with more of a distinctive vegetal note—mint, pepper, mocha, chocolate. The fruit tends to be a bit less dark than on a cab sauvignon (raspberry rather than currant) and the body is usually lighter than a cab sauvignon. It’s also a bit more food friendly than cabernet sauvignon.

Today’s tasting went almost exactly as I thought it would. My favorite producers are Daminai, Shalestone, and Ravines, and I ended up scoring those the highest (it was a blind tasting), along with an interesting no-oak cab franc, called T23 (I don’t know where this name comes from), from Lamoreaux Landing. Unfortunately, Shalestone and Damiani are next-to-impossible to find, unless you visit the tasting froom. Lamoreaux Landing and Ravines are a bit easier to find—some shops in New York City should carry them and they may be available elsewhere. The Lamoreaux Landing T23 in particular is only $15 and would appeal to people who like lighter red wines, like typical pinot noirs. It has lovely raspberry fruit and a nice spicy component. It would go well with just about anything except shellfish (on one end of the spectrum) or beef or lamb (on the other). I recommend checking it out if you ever see it at a store. If you ever seen any of the others, I recommend those as well. They are a bit more expensive, but the Shalestone and Damiani in particular are big, rich, chocolatey wines that should be real crowd-pleasers.

I also learned about a great wine science blog that I’ll be talking about more later.

Update. If you’re not in the mood to discuss wine, could you tell me where I can find the Shatner Palin video now that it’s down off YouTube?

Wine blogging: the Napa Valley of Canada

I drive from Rochester to Toronto, Waterloo, and Hamilton fairly regular and I find myself astounded by how many wineries there are in the Niagara region. However, I’ve never had a wine from there that I liked that much. The rieslings, sauvignon blancs, chards, and ice wines (usually either vidal or riesling) are fine, but not, in my opinion, as good as their counterparts at the best Finger Lakes wineries.

So I was astounded, at a Rhone Valley varietal wine tasting I went to last week, to taste a syrah from the area that was a dead ringer for Cornas (a famously big rustic wine fro the same area as Cote-Rotie and Hermitage in the northern Rhone area of France): funky, gamey, meaty, perhaps a little less fruit and alcohol than a Cornas but could easily have been a Cornas from a less ripe year.

Here’s the wine: Peninsula Ridge Syrah Reserve 2006, Niagara Peninsula. I don’t think the notes on their web page are all that accurate, but, let’s face it, “elegant mocha” sells a lot better than “gamey funk”. It’s $30, which may seem like a lot for a syrah from Canada, but it’s worth it: I’m going to pick some up next time I drive through. It wasn’t just my uneducated palate that found it so fascinating—I tasted it with winemakers from two of the East Coast’s best wineries (Lamoreaux Landing and Sheldrake), among others.

I thought this would be a fun and crazy way to begin wine blogging.


Update. I just discovered that my localish Air American affiliate has a wine talk show on once a week. Who says liberals aren’t elitist? I detest all talk radio normally, but I may give it a try.