salt & old vines

Well, I'm back from France. Harvest was about as organised as it's ever been, which is extraordinary. It's looking to be a long ripening season for the reds, which is good. Sadly, it meant I only got to work on whites and rosés while I was out there. Not that I don't like making white and rosé, it's just that cleaning the press is more of a pain in the ass than cleaning the de-stemmer. 

Tasted quite a lot of very good juice and early ferments. Roussanne and Marsanne both looking to once again be exceptional this year. There's a bit more acidity than usual, which in that part of the world is a good thing. As always, I'm excited to see how the wines turn out. I wish I could have been there longer.

I'm heading back in November, to assemble the fermented wines. I've never been back for that part of things, so it should be exciting. Hoping there's enough good Carignan to assemble another Red Socks blend, but you never know. 

November will also be a research trip, for this new book that I'm writing. It should be close to finished by then. It's an exciting project. You see, it's a story about winemaking where the mountains meet the sea. The nice folks at Unbound will be publishing it. If you'd like to read it, I highly recommend supporting it here. You get your name in the book and quite a lot more. 

Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1985 (from half bottle)

Wine geeks should read widely. No two palates are identical and you should get as broad a view as possible when learning about wine and seeing how certain tasters react to certain wines. I read too much Parker when I started out. It was easy to do, as there were so many notes to read. But I thought that I was doing something wrong. I disagreed with him on a lot of wines and what did I know? 

Now, it's a different story. I don't tend to check specific notes on anything I taste, unless it's awful and I need to determine whether it's a fault or just a terrible wine. When looking for new things, I look to folks like Jamie Goode and Jancis for some guidance, but mostly winemakers and old friends; folks who get excited about new, brilliant wines.

In any case, I've had this a fair few times, and always liked it a lot more than Parker seemed to.

Showing its age in the colour - no amber, but some rusty ruby. Looking a touch Burgundian.

The nose is simply beautiful, though there's nothing simple about it. Floral and stone fruit notes with rounded herbs. Soft, elegant and balanced. I could smell this all day.

The palate started off a bit dumb - blind I doubted my call of a first growth from the nose. With time, it blossomed in the glass, becoming charming and ephemeral. It's faded somewhat from its glory days, but boasts elegance and balance that you don't find very often. It's a shame that it doesn't quite live up to the its aromatics - a little past its prime, but lovely nonetheless.

****

Tasted on Crawford Gardens, Summer 2010

Parker adopts 1000-point scale

In a move that has left the wine world reeling, renowned hedonist, critic and cyclist Robert M. Parker Jr. announced Sunday morning that he would be dispensing with his polarising 100-point scale and replacing it with a more comprehensive grading system.

"Wine is too nuanced, too complex, too vast a subject to trap within the confines of a mere hundred points" Parker explained while tucking into an enormous lobe of foie gras decorated with Maryland crab claws. As he washed it down with a La Mission Haut Brion '89, swilled from a Sommelier series Riedel tankard, he stared at the liquid for a moment and reflected. "For instance, this used to be a hundred point wine. Which is nice and everything, but now it's a thousand point wine - how f***ing cool is that?"

Wine merchants throughout the world have been left on tenterhooks, wondering what the new scores would be and how it would affect prices. One anonymous source based in Hong Kong suggested that an extra zero could be added to the price tag as well as the score. He salivated, rubbed his fingers together and gazed emptily into space as he made the remark.

The cynics and whiners in the trade, those who eschew the hundred point scale and find 19% table wines with obscene sugar levels and no acidity ungodly, were unsurprisingly non-plussed by the announcement. "I don't even know where to start. This is ridiculous," said one Phd-touting wine blogger. Another just laughed and cracked open a beer.

Producer reactions were a mixed bag. Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon gazed for a few moments at a perfectly cut piece of quartz and then returned to his crossword, muttering something about sleep. Michel Rolland bought an oak forest and winked at this journalist conspiratorially.

Bizarrely enough, some Twitter folks were most vocal in their outrage, claiming that Parker, by increasing his scale, had in fact stolen a precious character from their limited budget.

One journalist was mauled by a rottweiler, having mistakenly pestered Robert B. Parker, creator of the Spencer For Hire books, for a quote.

In the midst of all the furore, The Wine Advocate offices revealed that whilst the scale would be 1000 points, simply being a wine would immediately qualify for 950 points.

So there you go.

Happy April.