Tag Archives: Rhone
Quick Tasting Note: Fauterie 07
As much as I love shopping locally for wine at places like Western Market or Elie Wine Company, the reality of life in Michigan is that our three-tier system and distributors often serve as a barrier to new things. In some respects, we have one of the most vibrant food retail scenes in the country — people elsewhere would be thrilled with our assortment of ethnic markets, our farmers’ markets, and our access to all sorts of ingredients within a few minutes drive time of any area of Detroit of the suburbs — but it’s like pulling teeth sometimes to get the best wines, beers, and spirits.
Tonight, I’m drinking a bottle I picked up at New York’s Chambers Street Wine: Domaine de Fauterie’s 2007 Saint Joseph from Les Combaud. Wines from this region have to be predominantly syrah, and that’s fairly evident here from the inky color. Despite the heavy looks, it has some lightness. Initially ripe and fruit forward, there’s a lot of bright acidity on the finish — a very currant-like flavor. The longer it sits, the more evident the tannins and a subtle campfire smoke flavor become. With a case discount, I paid $25 for this bottle, and it’s worth every penny. Delicious but packed with both power and nuance.
(13% abv. Imported by “USA Wine Imports,” a Jeffrey Alpert Selection, who’s also responsible for some delicious Jura wines I’ve had recently.)
Wednesday
Wednesdays aren’t for serious drinking. That’s what they tell me, anyhow.
Wednesdays are for watching forensic dramas. They’re for anxiously anticipating Friday. They’re for wanting to beat the crap out of an office mate. They’re for nervous breakdowns, early bedtimes, and doing laundry.
Wonderful, wonderful Wednesdays. Replete with routine.
Enter: a special bottle of wine. Most people pull out a special bottle of wine for a special occasion. But the power of a special bottle can elevate any occasion. That may appear trite and too full of wine snob whimsy for most, but to those who have had a revelatory moment or two with a glass of wine know what I’m talking about. A friend recently quoted the wine blog, Saignée, “Anyone who knows the initial experience of finding a wine that sticks with them knows the feeling of looking down into the glass in amazement that something could taste so good. The pleasure of the moment is impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced it.”
Looking down into the glass can be quite an event. It can be such an event, in fact, that it can make you throw aside your Wednesday laundry plans and clutch your wine stem for hours.
I’d be exagg
erating if I said tonight’s choice was such a rare, ethereal bottle as to qualify as one of my absolute most memorable wine moments. But it has nonetheless lent a bit of excitement to an otherwise indistinguishable Wednesday evening.
We opened a 1999 Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Chateau du Mourre du Tendre for no other reason than I happened to see it lying in a local wine shop and my wife likes Chateauneuf. How could I lose with an unfiltered wine from Peter Weygandt, a generally reputable importer?
Ripe with raspberries and piquant with peppercorn, the aroma gave me the false impression that this was at its peak. It didn’t take more than a sip to see that there was a ton of size and structure to this wine and that it’s got years ahead of it. If anything, I’d worry that the fruit may fade long before the massive tannins. Besides the bracing acid and fruit skin astringency, there’s a lot of earthy, fungal flavor riding underneath the sharper notes. My first thought when I first opened it was that the nose, palate, and red brick color seemed closer to the last Cote-Rotie and the last Cornas I consumed (two weeks and two months ago, respectively) than anything else.
I’m having fun sipping through this bottle. A lot of fun. And now I get to write about it. Who says Wednesdays are only for bad television and household chores? It may take some excess funds, some giving friends, or some good fortune, but repeatedly casting my nose into a glass of wine that’s elegant far beyond its massive size is about as good an evening as I can fathom.
Wonderful, wonderful Wednesdays indeed.
On the Road with Beer and Wine
I left my house this morning on what I thought was a search for myself and humanity in general but turned into a business trip and a stop at the Liquor Barn in Lexington, Kentucky. It seems we are always walking over bodies just to witness something new so I took a recent Oktoberfest discussion as opportunity to sample again a festbier I previously dismissed as average.
Paulaner Oktoberfest Marzen drinks fantastically easy. Charming aromas of baked bread and prune spread invite a sip of mellow, turning not crisp but complete. It is amber and malty and just as drinkable as my friends say.
When I turned the ignition key at 7:30 a.m. Brazilian post-punk rushed horizontal from the speakers. A gaping hole in Eight Mile Road jarred my teeth soft. There are holes everywhere. There’s a hole in the fabric of space and time, a hole in the fabric of my sock, a hole where your soul ought to be. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole in my apple and holes dug by laughing children in the sandbox of their providence. I avoided the holes into Ohio.
I passed irrigation channels lined with the autumn bloom of white, lavender and gold. I passed cattle marked for slaughter and rows of corn stalks brown and dry in the wind. I stopped in Toledo for a downtempo compilation from Swank Recordings out of Vegas. Psapp’s Rear Moth has the distinction of being the only tune I have ever heard that makes use of a squeaky toy as serious instrumental accompaniment. A good soundtrack helps to melt away the concrete. Other artists somehow arranged piano keys and drumbeats into my feelings.
The Liquor Barn calls itself a complete party stop. It was there I also bought my dinner of a four ounce package of Capriole fresh, chived goat cheese, a small baguette, black Cerignola olives and Marcona almonds. These goodies paired well with the beer but even better with a bottle of Domaine la Montagnette Cotes du Rhone.
The tangy cheese, the crusty bread, the salty olives, the nuts, the cherry reduction of the wine, round and bursting, the herbed stones, it all made me want to be with myself but I already was. I think the wine is sensuous in the same way that a girl’s soft flesh dripping ocean saltwater and the smell of palmetto is. It makes me want to dress up in fineries and spend an evening with my beloved, which surprises me because I always thought I was only romantic in theory.
Before I arrived in Lexington I passed Florence, Kentucky where I spent the summer of ’98 playing bar tricks on transient airline attendants and drinking Long Island iced teas with a bartender named Rusty. I know it from the water tower that exclaims, “Florence, Y’all!”.
Eric Texier Côtes du Rhône 2004
I have some extra time today so I choose to cross northeastern Kentucky from Lexington to Kokomo, Indiana on a two-laner. This is the way to see the country, white-knuckled on narrow, twisting roads carved out of thick mountains. Past fields of yellowed broadleaf tobacco plants and houses partially constructed of shipping pallets. In downtown Frankfort I think I almost see white haired legislators drinking bourbon, neat, on the porch of the Capitol House. But then I see the Capitol house doesn’t have a porch.
Just before Pleasureville, Kentucky, I fall behind a man in a red pickup truck. He has an electric cattle prod resting on a gun rack in his rear window. I hope he is a farmer. The road straightens out and I’m in Indiana, then in my hotel room trying to open a bottle of 2004 Eric Texier Côtes du Rhône with a Mazda ignition key.
I travel enough to know better than to expect I can easily find a restaurant with a wine list worth ordering from or a retail establishment without end caps crowded with Yellowtail. Anyway, after a full day staring down broken white lines, who wants to drive around an unfamiliar city studying a map while simultaneously avoiding red-faced commuters?
I make my road trips prepared (with wine, at least, if not a corkscrew). I go stocked, anticipating long days and lonely nights. If I happen upon a quality restaurant or shop, or I have the will to seek one out, then my only problem is bringing back home a good bottle of wine. Plus, it gives me something to anticipate for the evening, something more than a strange hotel room, Sports Center and double Priority Club points.
I think about dinner. What easily found food will go with a wine that, after breaking through a haze of lavender, is redolent of black cherry, chocolate cake, spiced oatmeal cookies and a river bank tossed with wet driftwood?
My first thought is Jägerschnitzel and Kartoffelklässe but that’s just me being silly with myself. I’d be lucky to find good Chinese takeout in middle Indiana. A toasted Italian submarine sandwich might do the trick. A plate of barbeque would be better.
I think of going to the grocery store and getting a jar of cured olives, a hunk of goat cheese and a loaf of bread. How could that classic combination not pair well with the cherry skin and stones flavor of the Texier? All the sugar is illusory in the nose and we’re left drinking some herbed cherry jam substituting alcohol for sweetness. These are the good kinds of problems.
I end up eating out. A decent cornmeal coated catfish filet washed down with Boston Lager. Convenient sustenance for the body. My soul would have to be taken care of at the hotel. But the problem of opening the bottle without a corkscrew still remains. I punch the key down into the synthetic cork as far as I can until the cork starts slipping into the bottle. I give the key a quick tug and cry out when the cork pops clean. I feel like a wine drinker, at last.
