More news on WBW, plus a failed theme of my own called "When chard turns to sherry": Laroche Les Pierres 2002 and Alvear Carlos VII Montilla Moriles

Lenn Thompson's Wine Blogging Wednesday legacy continues to inspire. This month in particular, I've found that I've been posting multiple WBW entries, even though WBW comes but once a month.

With the latest WBW news, I'm certainly not stopping the flow of WBW posts now -- so March continues to be a month full of interesting WBW developments and I'm on a roll posting about them.

Lenn, who runs LennDevours, should be very proud of an announcement made yesterday that Gary Vaynerchuk is the next host of WBW 44 on April 2 (AKA the 33rd of March).

The theme set by Gary for WBW 44 is French Cabernet Franc, which in itself is fantastic, but it's so much more than that. Gary's Wine Library TV makes WBW 44 the first edition to be hosted by a video blog (or so I believe). Plus Gary is a force, on a totally different level than any other blogger (a testament to this is how many non-wino, non-blogging friends of mine have tried to point me to Gary's site over the years). Gary has obviously had crossover success. He's penetrated the genre of online wine criticism, branded his own unique take on wine talk, and reached out and touched the great unwashed, for lack of a better term. And, by the way, it's worth noting the influence he has. WBW 44 participants are supposed to link their blog's entry by using the comments attached to Gary's announcement, which was officially made in Episode 426 -- well, in less than one day, Episode 426 has already received 315 comments and the blogging event is still weeks away. Now that's some reach!

ENTER MY MISBEGOTTEN WINE THEME

Last Wednesday, I found myself reaching. Except unlike Gary, when I'm reaching, I'm usually over-reaching. Anyway, there I was, sitting around mid-month and bored. No sign of the next WBW, and WBW 43 was already over and successfully wrapped up.

I was desperate for some theme action.

So I walked into a wine shop and instantly created a theme for my purchase: Discounted wine. Yes, discounted wine. See the receipt pictured at right -- I not only saved $2.50 or 10% off a $25 bottle, I also saved 5 cents more as I brought my own reusable bag for my purchase. $2.55 in my pocket! Yay, discount wine theme!

Gentle reader, you do note the irony here.

Discounted wine is a dangerous topic and even more dangerous as a theme for a blogging event. How many of you have bought marked down bottles only to uncork them and find that there was good reason for their being priced to clear?

I was entirely optimistic at the time though.

Les Pierres means "the rocks" in French, plus since 2002 was such a great year for cold-climate French wine, I figured I was on solid ground with this find.

So I went ahead and rescued that last 2002 Chablis languishing on the shelf from among a bunch of 2004s. The 2002 had a stained label (see photo at left for its good side, photo below for its bad side).

More than that the 2002 sported a different cuvée name than the 04s (they were also marked down but christened "Saint-Martin," not "Les Pierres" as the 2002 was -- yet they all shared the same product code and that same alluring discounted price.)

In fact, I bought this wine before. I recall enjoying the 2002 Chablis from Domaine Laroche a couple of years ago. I even noted it here. It was not called "Les Pierres" at that time either, which now leads me to think that this discounted bottle was a mix-up. Perhaps a remainder from an old shipment destined for some other market where Laroche wanted a less saintly, more rock-solid image. Who knows whose hands touched it. Or didn't touch it as the case may be, leaving it to oxidize and taint in warm rooms hit by direct sunlight.

But to the consumer who sees the 10% promise attached around the neck of this bottle, only that stained label is apparent. And so the smart consumer buys it, thinking that it's what's inside that counts.

Well, here's what's inside...

Domaine Laroche "Les Pierres" Chablis 2002

Eyes: An intense amber colour.

Nose: Very oxidized, tragically so -- acrid, rotting vegetables.

Mouth: Piercing on the palate, beyond vinegary. This is fermented.

Stomach: Puke-inducing.

Michel Laroche, Chablis, France. 12.5%.

But all was not lost. The theme of my impromptu event was changing before my very eyes. Friends had a bottle of sherry to open, which was a serendipitous turn. It was a non-vintage Amontillado from the Montilla Moriles appellation from Andalusia region of Spain.

So we opened it to see whether our volatile Chablis was actually on its way to sherry glory. And maybe in that sense cut it some slack.

First, I should say that this Amontillado produced by Alvear is more on the Fino sherry side than Oloroso. Typically, Amontillados are in between the two -- darker than a Fino but lighter than an Oloroso -- but I thought this bottle was quite reminiscent of some Finos I've had. Dry and deftly penetrating. An aperitif-type drink to enjoy before the food arrives.

Here now are the comparative notes...

Alvear Carlos VII Amontillado Montilla Moriles

Eyes: Slightly less opulent in colour but more viscous.

Nose: Oxidation but with great complexity -- nut purees, apricot confits, allspice and other stunning spicy notes.

Mouth: Wet bandages and almond shells, alcoholic but stylish and drying.

Stomach: Aperitif, ideal with dry-roasted nutmeats.

Córdoba, Andalucía, Espagne. 19%.

Conclusions! Old Chablis does not a sherry make; Caveat emptor, especially on older wines that are discounted.

How to wash the wine glasses you most cherish (One man's story of tough love turned ghastly)

Holy busted blind Riedels, Batman!


Hallowe'en won't be the same without my trusty pair of "trick or treat" stemless blind tasting glasses to raise my spirits.

Luckily I still have one glass left to drink with but as my friend Johanna, who brought these Riedels back from Austria for me, said: what's the point of tasting with only one blind tasting glass? You need at least two to generate intrigue. Just like you need more than one guest at a masquerade.



Even in shambles, my blind Riedel showed its beauty, its charm, its form and its function. No matter how I reconstructed the crime scene, this was one tough wine glass to read: The dark, nearly-black-but-kind-of-purplish glass masked its contents so well that's practically impossible to photograph the inside of its bowl, even with great lighting shining directly into it.

The black hole is such an apt metaphor for wine appreciation in my house.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Pose it and repose it as I may, the actual events leading up to my Riedel's demise confound me. I know fully well what happened but I have a hard time admitting it actually came to pass. The glass died in my own hands as a result of my own tough love -- harsh, abrasive and spotlessly clean.

Yes, I broke this glass washing it, something I hadn't done to a wine glass since my Spiegelau Spätburgunder glass bit the dust several years ago.

The problem is that washing stemware has a learning curve. Until you master it, you're on shaky ground. Once you master it, you're laughing. Laughing until stemless glasses come out and shake things up. Then you've got to rethink your whole approach.

HOW TO WASH YOUR FINE CRYSTAL (WITH STEMS ONLY)

The way I see it, stems are the easiest part of the glass to break yet the most integral part of the glass to prevent breakage, especially when washing up. Here's what I mean:

The trick when washing is to grasp the bowl of the glass with your two forefingers and your thumb. This way you do not to apply any direct or twisting pressure to the fragile stem. If you do, the image at left reveals the results (as you can see a wine glass with a snapped stem offers a unique opportunity to introduce a fancy candle snuffer/one heck of an expensive dust cover to you household, so it's not all bad).

But there's more! Grasping the bowl is sometimes not enough. Sudsy water can be slippery so I always hook my baby finger around the stem loosely. A good finger curl anchors the delicate process of washing (and drying too) and secures the glass should the bowl ever slip from your busy fingers and thumb.

Obviously, stemless glasses do not allow this. They lack this kind of forgiving component. Since there's no stem, more pressure ends up being applied to the bowl and rim to garner that same sense of kitchen-sink security, or in my case, my over-protective nature and...

Snap! Oh the irony!

Lesson 1: Don't smother the things you love so that the fear of losing them is what ultimately drives them away.

Lesson 2: [insert instructions on how to wash stemless glasses here]

Car F#@% Day!

Yesterday was Car Free Day (I call it Car F*** Day). Either way, it was observed in many places across the globe, but unfortunately, nowhere along my usual -- read: wine-errand-related -- cycling routes. These are the routes that I am mostly likely to take on a daily basis.

Which is exactly why I found the above poster that's been floating around the Internets so interesting. You may have seen it.

This strip of Lafayette in New York City is among my most travelled when I'm in Manhattan. That giant wine store you see situated prominently on the corner with the big red flag that reads Astor is the reason why I frequent this stretch. (I realize most people may not have recognized it but it was the first thing that caught my eye when I saw this scene -- I've got a wino-track mind.)

The next thing that comes to my mind -- most likely what the ad designers wanted to elicit in the mind of any cyclist who sees the poster -- is that this accident is actually me on my bike having been cut off by a car f***.

In my case, it happened like this: The car f*** would've thought that the yellow light meant I was about to stop and so the car f*** edged out, as they so annoyingly do before they get a green. In fact, I was not stopping. I was not even slowing down. I was moving fast because I was going to make this light in order to hurry back into Astor Wines & Spirits to take back some corked wine that I had just bought and opened at the NoHo Star BYO resto at the corner of Bleeker a couple of blocks down the street.

God. It's bad enough interrupting dinner because you've got to make a wine run. Last thing you need is a car f*** getting in your face. This is why you need to wear a helmet.

At least I am a master at bike-spill recovery and injury-avoidance. And at least that corked bottle I was carrying in my knapsack put a hole in the car's windshield.

Wine stigmata

I drink a lot of wine. Friends have talked about slowing down.

It's important to look at your consumption from a strictly medical perspective, and I do, every once and while. I'm not sure my intake is what I really need to be concerned with.



I get these tiny lacerations on my hands from recorking wine. I recork wine more than most, I guess.

I remember I started hand-recorking in order to take spoiled wine back to point of purchase. Of course, these days I could easily go get a device like the Rabbit to do this -- I have friends who installed a fancy mechanism on their kitchen wall. But I stick to old habits. So whether it's wine which is tainted, oxidized, or simply off, I immediately recork the bottle with its contents.

I just shove the cork back down. Sometimes you need a good angle. A cork that has a strong and firm edge can help -- you go at it about 10 degrees from perpendicular with a little twist. But sometimes it's not that easy. The bottle opening can seem to be impossibly tight or the cork can look like it's bloated to twice the size it was before it was disengorged. Sometimes you need to work at it.

LIKE CORKED BATTER, I CHOKE UP ON IT

But anyway, the first time I put a cork all the way back into a spoiled bottle and returned it, the wine store employee I returned it to was alarmed. He either found it seriously fishy or miraculous that I recorked the bottle myself (I don't think he cared about the condition of the wine). He asked: Do you have a wine bottling system at your house? Is this some sort of illicit wine-returning operation is what he implied.

It's not like I'm putting capsules back on the tops (though I have managed some nice homemade versions of that too). But how did you get the original cork back in? I told him. It's not that hard. And it's worth it. It prevents spillage when returning a bottle of wine for thing. I couldn't understand why I was considered suspect for being a good customer.



Here's a mark on my right hand. Both left and right hands are equally useful in recorking wine.

Aside from properly sending back spoiled bottles, you need to recork unused wine well (and store it in cool conditions) if you want to enjoy it another day. This is an even more important reason for recorking. See this post for helpful information on the benefits and rewards of doing things right. Since starting this blog, I've been recorking wine more and more for very reason of optimal storage, though I do still encounter about the same amount of bad bottles to return. So I've noticed these marks on my hands more and more.

The next photograph shows both my hands on a night when the recorkings were numerous (and with less yielding corks than usual). I took this photo with my chin.

Advance TV exclusive on last year's Champagne controversy!

   
The Jay-Z Cristal feud from last summer gets rehashed on tomorrow's episode of 30 Rock. You heard here first. And I got the news from, of all places, my rabbit-eared 15-inch television set, which aired, for some strange reason, this episode called "The Source Awards" tonight, February 28. I pick up local Canadian stations instead of actual NBC affiliates, which plan to show it tomorrow, March 1, during the network's usual Thursday line-up.

It's so rare that little old me gets an early scoop on anything wine-related that this naturally had me running off to blog as the credits began to roll. And so now, almost a full 24 hours before its American airing, I'm posting a spoiler. Yay! Spoiler!

Of course the sitcom's treatment is hardly news. It just satirizes the situation that Cristal-less Jay-Z created when he used a formidable boycott effort to stand up to a certain Champagne house's distain. Louis Roederer, which owns the Cristal brand, had insinuated that the image of their product was being hijacked through repeated use in hip hop videos.

This is a comedic springboard for 30 Rock. It introduces 10,000 cases of Donaghy Estates sparkling wine which immediately turns out to be severely undrinkable. Jack Donaghy, the likable big boss character played by Alec Baldwin, is in possession of the Long Island cuvées and obviously wants to unload the stuff. As luck would have it, hip hop showbiz personality Tracy Morgan seems to appreciate the wretched wine, downing it amid looks of shock and disbelief from those around him. So it isn't long until Donaghy Estates starts an ambitious marketing drive targeting the urban African American demographic. But hip-hop b-boy Tracy is the only brother who can stomach it. Mayhem ensues; guns go off. Racial tensions, rather than wine gone bad, become the crux of the wine debacle.

Which is exactly why this news item originally made headlines. It was about race, not about spoiled wine, or spoiling yourself with $600 wine, as the case may be.

As it turns out, some teasers of "The Source Awards" are available online. But they are only snippets and not the juicy parts when hip hop culture and haut Frenchiness clash. In fact, in the YouTube clip below you can only see a hint of the bottle of bubbly on Liz Lemon's desk (Liz Lemon is played by series creator Tina Fey, ex-SNL) and in another shot Jack Donaghy cradles a flute. The joke in this segment doesn't involve wine or rap though. It's about Condoleeza Rice and a surname that makes an unfortunate racial pun.

It's a very funny show, even if this isn't the best episode I've seen. Its witty handling of the Cristal to-do is definitely worth checking out. If you're not Canadian and have to wait for it, you can still catch it, but not until 9:30 pm ET. Instead of fretting about the U.S. lag, read up on the whole wine dispute from last summer, also courtesy of NBC.

A Consumer Guide: Once bitten by the Asian ladybug, but not shy

You win some, you lose some. I'm sure the winemaker has often thought these words. In the world of wine there is always a gamble. So much of viniculture depends on Mother Nature, unpredictable for the most part and not interested in the future cuvée we've all got in mind. But I would suggest that win some/lose some doesn't end with producers. I'm of course thinking of the wine consumer here. Why? Because I'm one (and apparently a selfish one at that). But also because of the following factors:

Exhibit A: Corks. Typically, cellar dwellers and wine collectors see natural cork, the most prevalent wine stopper around, as risky business because it is susceptible to a certain kind of mould. This can turn wine storage into a game of Russian roulette. When cork breaks down like this, the ageing wine takes on undesirable corkiness in taste and smell. In the case of old expensive bottles, it's like an aces-high poker hand has suddenly lost its nerve. Poof! A fine investment becomes money thrown away. Pity there's no agreement you signed with the cork farmer when you purchased the product. So you lose that one, and pray that the rest in the cellar won't be as unlucky.

Exhibit B: Mother Nature, back for more. Even when the vintner has decoded the climate and conditions to produce a successful vintage, Mother Nature can still come back to haunt you. That wine, finished though perhaps still waiting for its drinking peak, continues to play victim to acts of God like the flood that swamps your basement wine cellar or the heat wave that busts your air conditioner. A bottle that is cellared amid poor surroundings will not develop as it should. Havoc will reign. For instance, heat will age a wine in unnatural, unsubtle ways. Sometimes this can eventually spoil the contents of the bottle. But if you keep your head about you this one is very much yours to win.

Exhibit C: Your own mind. Doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo [Twilight Zone theme music] ... doo-doo-doo-doo. The Asian ladybug infestation of 2001 in Niagara should be grouped with the worries of the vintner: its taint forces wineries to pull affected wine from store shelves. But the fact is the taint situation is not very black and white -- the degree of contamination floats across a wide range of grey, so unfortunately, it's still very much out there to haunt you. How to deal with it? Clearly the onus has often been put on the consumer to seek out replacement for wine they deem damaged by the insect. The problem is that so many wine buyers, though certain that their wine does not taste right, are not confident enough to return wine to the point of purchase. At the end of many an evening, drinkers may have suffered through the green potato flavours of a tainted wine when they could've gotten their money's worth instead. Use your head.

So you win some, you lose some. On Saturday night, a winning night, we were treated to Penfolds Bin 407 Cabernet Sauvignon. It was a 1991 and had a tragic past. By any guess, it could've rightly been ruined based on its storage history. But it was fantastic. The cork had not failed either. The world was a just place. We were treated. Tremendously fruity and rich aromas emanating from the decanter; the epitome of structure and balance as we sipped this 15-year-old wine from the glass.

However luck was a ladybug last night. The bottle was the Hillebrand Showcase Glenlake Vineyard 2001, a gift I had been looking forward to opening. Alas, it was from the year of the infestation, and being a Cab Franc varietal, even more fallible. I detected the taint immediately but only arrived at the judgment that the wine was ruined a glass or two later. It's a fine line. Some have considered this release "marred", others have claimed it is a naturally occurring flavour compound. Tony Aspler went on record saying that if this bottle was from a botched batch then the signs would be irrefutable. He was satisfied. Konrad Ebjich was definitely not, giving it only one star out of five. It was toward Konrad I was leaning. This was drinkable but off-putting -- a resin of unsophisticated bitterness hinted at in each taste. Not satisfying, especially considering it's $40 a bottle. So I won't be shy about taking it back.