Recent Drinks Of Note
Martini & Rossi Prosecco IGT, Italy
When I covered Champagne in my wine class, one of my students asked why you don’t see crown caps — the toothed metal hats you see on beer bottles — on sparkling wine. (You do, incidentally, if you visit a Champagne cellar. The bubble-causing secondary fermentation happens in bottle, and Champagne producers put crown caps on the bottles during the riddling process that collects the spent yeast cells in the neck.) Another student theorized that the pressure in a sealed Champagne bottle — 88 pounds per square inch, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine — might make crown caps a risky venture. A slight flick of your bottle opener, he suggested, and the vented pressure might send the sharp metal disc flying through the air like a tiny throwing star.
I didn’t have a better answer, so when Martini & Rossi offered to send me a bottle of their Prosecco, sealed with a crown cap, a week before my class on Italy, I jumped at the chance to pour it for my students. How dangerous was popping the top? Not very: The wine lacked the voluptuous foam of a sparkling wine, showing instead a light fizz and leaving the class’s larger question unanswered. My students described the simple taste as “Martinell’s apple cider,” and we agreed that it would be a pleasant enough picnic wine. This is not a Prosecco di Valdobbiadene, the ne plus ultra of this simple sparkler, but a Prosecco IGT, which means — as I hope my students can now explain — that either it’s made from grapes from a wider area, or the winemaking varied from what the Valdobbiadene rules require. ($11, I think)
2007 Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau, France
Similarly, I couldn’t resist getting a press sample of Beaujolais Nouveau to pour in class on the day it released. We had covered the Beaujolais region, at the southern end of Burgundy, two weeks earlier, but I had focused on Cru Beaujolais, wine from the villages that act as subregions within Beaujolais: Morgon, Fleurie, Moulin-le-Vent, and so forth. Georges DuBoeuf singlehandedly transformed Nouveau from a quaffing wine meant to celebrate a successful harvest into a media event that dominates wine stores in the third week of November. He has given publicity to the region, but at the cost of associating it with a mediocre, industrial wine made from high-yield vines. My students quickly picked up the telltale aromas of fried banana that dominate DuBoeuf’s Nouveau, and some tried to figure out why anyone cares anything about this wine. (They enjoyed the better Beaujolais I poured earlier.) ($8-$10)
2004 Lassègue, Saint-Émilion Grand Cru, Bordeaux, France
This is a surprisingly floral and light Bordeaux, but it packs a lot of complexity into the glass. I picked up barbecued beef and bread aromas alongside the bell pepper I get off of most Bordeaux, and I kept writing down new flavors as I continued to taste the wine: mushrooms, plums, dark berry, smoke, and a splash of milk chocolate on the finish. Light tannins and mild acidity make this a wine to serve with light, lean meat dishes: The tongue and tail terrine from The River Cottage Meat Book comes to mind, as do brisket, beef sausage, and rabbit stew. ($50, sent to me as a sample)
2006 Pattiana Sauvignon Blanc, Mendocino, California
This wine divides my loyalties: I want to encourage you to support biodynamic wineries, where the grapes are raised in a holistic fashion. But biodynamic farming is more laborious than industrial farming, thus adding expense to the wine. Can I encourage you to pay $18 for this wine, which is at heart a straightforward Sauvignon Blanc, when it probably costs more because the winery isn’t relying on industrial cost-cutting techniques? The wine is delicious — refreshing grassy aromas and searing acidity mixed with light peach and guava aromas — but not very complex. I would encourage you to buy more expensive grass-fed beef and produce from careful growers, but there you’re getting extra flavor for your extra money. I love this wine for what it is, but I wish it were a little cheaper. ($18, sent to me as a sample)
- 2006 Movia "gredic" Tocai Friuliano, Brda, Slovenia
Friuli, just to be clear, sits at the northeastern edge of Italy. The region surrounds the ancient city of Trieste, which balances on the tip-top of the Adriatic Sea. In the 1960s, Mario Schiopetto, whose name is about as Italian as you can find, imported...
- 2004 Parducci "true Grit" Petite Sirah, Mendocino, California
If you don’t read many other food and wine blogs, you may have forgotten about Wine Blogging Wednesday, the monthly, Internet-wide tasting event. I typically forget about the event until I see everyone else’s posts, at which point it’s...
- Wine Gadgets The World Needs
Lore Sjöberg, who often writes humorous pieces for Wired, has put his satirical pen to paper and pondered the wine gadgets missing from the world. An automatic wine twirler? A tooth-mounted flavor sensor? A temporal acceleration device to age your...
- Ucb Wine Studies: Fundamentals I Outline
I haven’t mentioned my upcoming UCB Extension wine class in a while, but today I made the final course outline. It seemed like a good time to remind any Bay Areans about the class, which starts on October 11 and gives an overview of the wines of...
- Beaujolais Nouveau
Tomorrow, the third Thursday of November, wine drinkers will celebrate or deride the release of Beaujolais Nouveau, simple wines meant to be drunk young, ideally from a carafe in a Parisian or Lyonnais bistro. Beaujolais Nouveau has a place in the world,...