Last week, I went to visit the rocky landscape of Moab, Utah, in pursuit of the state’s oldest wineries. This is not a podcast about this experience, though the winemaker for the vintage in this episode, Evan Lewandowski, is based out of Utah, and features the state on his fantastic labels.
Ruth Lewandowski Winery, named after the Book of Ruth from the Old Testament is a natural wine label that focuses upon minimum intervention in the cellar, and Evan tends to only use sulfites at the very end of fermentation. (Coming up soon will be a whole episode where we talk Natural Wines, so stay tuned). The operating philosophy of this winery is based on a cycle of death and redemption, both in physical and spiritual realms. After all, as Evan states: “Death is, indeed, the engine of life. Nothing that is alive today could be so without something having died first. This is the nature of our universe, of our planet, of our soils, plants, and ultimately you and I.”
With this philosophy in mind, I decided to take my bottle of the 2018 Dinos to Diamonds on vacation to Maryland with me last spring. The idea was to drink this bottle with my paleontologist friend John-Paul Hodnett, hopefully, to talk about deep ideas such as extinction, ecosystem rebirth, wine and deep time, and fossilization. Instead, this wine, a blend of 60% Sangiovese and 40% Merlot, proved to be a surprisingly perfect beach wine for the Calvert Cliffs. You won’t hear much philosophy and paleontology in this podcast (if you want that instead, go check out the episode JP did in the Paleo Nerds podcast), but what you will hear is him, his wife, and me enjoying a good bottle of a vaguely Super-Tuscan wine by a beach while we are taking a break hunting for fossil9 shark teeth. Cheers!
Yes, of course, I had a toy dinosaur on hand for these photos, why do you ask?
I get asked somewhat often, “What are tasting notes, really?” Or rather, to be honest, I get asked: “What am I supposed to be tasting, anyway?”
Well, when you get down to it, you taste what you taste. Sure, I can help, but really, wine is such a subjective thing that I generally hate to push what I think I’m tasting or smelling onto the drinker I’m with. This can also make tasting notes (and notes on the aromatic profiles of wine) seem somewhat arbitrary to the beginner. And that’s okay!
Basically, tasting notes refer to a wine taster’s (or, in some cases, a coffee taster’s!) testimony about the aroma, taste identification, acidity, structure, texture, and the balance of a wine, designed to allow the reader to get an idea of what the experience of imbibing that particular vintage is like. They can get as creative as you like, or as simple as you like. Often-times, such notes may seem like gibberish, but this Sommelier-speak has a code that isn’t as difficult to translate as beginners think. In short, what you taste, is what you taste.
These notes are NOT related to what is in the wine or how it was made, usually; these flavors are not added. The winemakers for this wine didn’t pour in pickle juice during fermentation, for example. In many cases, they aren’t even the same molecule, but they hit the receptors in the olfactory lobes of the brain in the same way as those flavors in food, drink, or spices do. Wine Folly has a great article on how to approach writing your own tasting notes which can be found here.
For this podcast discussing Tasting notes, Elizabeth Krecker and I decided to drink the 2014 Sémillon from Dirty and Rowdy Family Winery, based out of Napa Valley, though they source grapes from multiple vineyards across the state of California. This wine is a complex blend of two different styles of fermentation; one on the skins (a.k.a., Amber Wine) and another aged in concrete. Elizabeth and I loved the tasting notes that they used to describe their wines and thought it would be fun to explore what we tasted in this wine versus what the winemakers tasted. They’ve got a lot of fun wines, and I highly recommend them.
The 2014 Sémillon from Dirty and Rowdy Family Wines is not only our stepping stone into a discussion of what tasting notes are but also our first revisit of the California wine industry.
Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is probably the grape (and region) that is most associated with California wines to the average consumer and wine drinker. However, there is a LOT more to California wines than Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnays which have been buried in oak so much that they may as well be coffins. There are a lot of cool things going on in California Wine that aren’t really talked about, which is why the focus of this episode is the 2016 Pretty Young Thing Cabernet Pfeffer, from Winc. (They usually have some fun and interesting goodies available, so use that link if you want to join in the fun… it gets me some more wine, and gets you some too. For the record, they are not a sponsor.)
I chose the 2016 Pretty Young Thing Cab-Pfef for a couple of reasons. For one, it is a wine that can easily induce conversation on several topics, such as the winemaking technique of Carbonic Maceration, and the increasing popularity of “natural wines,” especially in vintages from California. (Just what counts as a “natural wine,” anyway? Which reminds me, I want to give a shout-out to my other new favorite wine podcast: Natural Disasters. I only found out these guys about after recording this episode. They’re hilarious folks, go and listen.) Gary and I also dabble with the great mystery surrounding Cabernet Pfeffer–namely, just what the hell IS Cabernet Pfeffer?
Also, this bottle was kind of a “Screw You” to the people who are demanding I review a California Cabernet for this podcast. Here you go. This is your California Cabernet. (You didn’t specify WHICH Cabernet, bitches.)
I acquired this bottle with my own cash from Winc.com, and while this bottle is long gone, there is another Cabernet Pfeffer there right now.
The 2016 Pretty Young Thing Cabernet Pfeffer is a lovely introduction in this podcast to the Natural Wine phenomenon… and it’s freaking delicious.
A few days ago, I did an online tasting with Snooth, focusing on the wines from Murietta’s Well, which is located in the Livermore AVA in California. It was my first experience doing an online wine tasting; the center point was the winemaker, Robbie Meyer, on video chat talking about his wines while we all sipped along and inquired about the processes and ideas behind each wine–something I enjoy doing rather often with local winemakers over on podcasts at The Arizona Wine Monk wherever possible–the main difference was in the distance, and tasting with a group of others was particularly fun.
All the wines from Murietta’s well are small lot (though larger lots than anyone in Arizona, by and large), and wild-fermented, which is fascinating. Wild fermentation can be difficult to do well, after all, as wild yeasts can be a bit… Well, cantankerous to deal with, to say the least. Overall, these wines had a more Old World feel to them than most wines I’ve encountered from California. Here are the wines we tasted, and some thoughts I had about each. The next podcast episode will load in another six days–we will stick to the every tenth-day cycle which has worked so far. (There won’t be any Riesling to miss it, so stay tuned.)
Here is their 2017 Sauvignon Blanc which was fermented in neutral oak; resulting in something very like a Sancerre. This was nothing like the over-bearing oak bombs I usually encounter with California Sauvignon Blanc. Notes of pear, apple, gooseberry, and apricot intermingled with crisp minerality and high acidity.
Next up was The Whip (2016), a blend of 33% Sauvignon Blanc, 29% Semillon, 21% Chardonnay, 12% Orange Muscat, and 10% Viognier. This was a well-balanced white blend that really struck me as quite sophisticated and versatile. What was particularly interesting for me was that I could pick out the role of each grape in this blend, which is always a fun exercise. The Viognier provided the strong apricot character, the Sauvignon Blanc provided most of the skeletal structure, while the Semillon provided the heavier body to this blend, and so on. I honestly wanted to pair this wine with Pad Thai, which is odd to me because I normally don’t want to pair white wines with this sort of body with such spicy food. (I also think it could work well with enchiladas, but that’s just me.)
Third up for the tasting was their 2016 Dry Rosé. This was a well-structured, high acidity savorfest blend of 42% Grenache (farmed specifically for rosé), 39% Counoise, and 19% Mourvèdre. Watermelon/Cotton Candy notes imparted by the Counoise were especially prominent,. intermingling with the bright strawberry notes imparted via the Grenache. Overall, this wine was evocative of some of the heftier rosé blends from Provence or Bandol. This wine was probably tied for second out of all the wines. I really do wish more winemakers played with Counoise. I would serve this wine as it is–no food needed–it is a great summer sipper.
The rosé was tied with The Spur (2015) for second place in the tasting as far as I was concerned. This was a blend of 48% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Petite Sirah, 18% Merlot, 8% Petit Verdot, and 6% Cabernet Franc. Livermore Valley is apparently well-known for Petit Sirah, which adds in a dimension of place, according to Robbie Meyer. Apparently, it is pretty common in the Livermore Valley to blend in a bit of Petit Sirah into otherwise “Bordeaux-Style” blends there. (This aspect made me think of how often in my homeland of Arizona, we add in Petit Sirah to our GSM-style blends for color and tannins.) The 2015 vintage of The Spur (named, of course, for a part of the grapevine) was savory, fruity, and well-balanced, with an elegant scaffold of tannins. Nothing was over the top here on this vintage, which again struck me as unusual for most California “Bordeaux-style” blends which usually require me to decant extensively to enjoy them in any form. This elegance will lend this wine to being paired with a wide variety of foods–I ended up pairing the rest of this bottle with a crockpot pork roast with root veggies and green chili and it worked fantastically.
My favorite wine of all the Murietta’s Well vintages was the 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon, which was a pre-release preview. Now, I normally do not like California Cabernet at all; I find them generally to be too brusque, masculine, and inelegant. I usually find that I either need to decant wines of this sort for three hours, or smoke a cigar with them, to peel back the insane use of oak that seems to be the de jure style. I am convinced that many winemakers in Californa use this insane level of oak to hide flaws that are resulting from potentially shoddy winemaking, or to hide an otherwise unexciting vintage. Now, that being said, the 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon from Murietta’s Well was completely the opposite of that. I was amazed by this wine. This was an elegant, balanced, well-structured and sophisticated vintage–sort of like a well-dressed professor in tweed. Notes of olives and Connecticut shade-grown tobacco wrapper intermingled in this wine with earth, vanilla, cassis, and blackberry, alongside hints of lighter fruits such as plum and raspberry. It is, I think, a wine well suited for a New York strip steak and a nice cigar like an Ashton Symmetry. I was deeply impressed by this wine and was sad when I finished it off. If I didn’t already have all of my wines lined up for the California episodes of this podcast, I would have used this bottle in a heartbeat. It is everything that a California Cabernet Sauvignon *should* be.
Make America Grape Again Podcast 