However, I am such a slacker that it’s taken me a month to get around to writing the followup to the initial post about the wine tasting I lead for Trish’s co-workers.
In the initial post we talked about the whites that were in the tasting, and now I’ll talk a bit about the reds.
So, as I mentioned last time, we ended the whites on the Caceres white Rioja. It seemed logical, therefore, to lead into the reds with a Rioja. That way the comparison between the white and the red could be made, to see how the regional style created some common characteristics, even with the different grape varieties and skin contact levels. We picked Heredad De Aduna as a producer, and went with their “Young” (“Juven”) wine. The particular vintage we had was composed of 100% Tempranillo, although I see they’ve since dropped that to 90% and added some Viura.
As an illustration of traditional style, this was a flop, since it was very much a ‘modern’ Rioja, with a more fruit-focused presentation and not the strong oak that one might expect. However, that’s not to say it was a bad wine–it was quite decent, a straight ahead, fragrant red with medium body and decent depth. Indeed, it made me think “This is what a Barolo would taste like if it were made with Tempranillo”.
Most of the people at the tasting had no familiarity with Tempranillo, so that exposure was a bonus. The little wine facts I tossed out (“Tempranillo is an early-ripening grape, in fact, ‘tempranillo’ literally means ‘early'”), as well as my stories of the battle raging between the vintners who support the traditional style and the forces of monoculture, were snapped up; I imagine they got worked into a lot of dinner conversations over the last month.
The second red was one that was pretty heavily recommended by the sommelier at the merchant where we got most of our wines: the “Little James Basket Press” from Chateau de St. Cosme. (I can’t seem to find a link for the vineyard, but a quick Google will find you some reviews, etc.)
This is a French wine, from a producer in the Southern Rhone. Some people were surprised to see a French wine in our tasting of things ‘outside the mainstream’, but the Southern Rhone has only been a recognized area since the 70s, and the wine is 100% grenache, both of which make this a wine that is outside most people’s experience.
We had been lead to expect a “richly fruity” wine with “loads of black cherry and blackberry”, but frankly this one just let us down. This may be slightly our fault, since this wine should likely have preceded the Rioja–but given the descriptions we had seen we placed it as the second red–but even with that taken into account this wine was a bit of a disappointment.
Our third red was the one I liked the most of the wines we tasted that night. I’m always a little sad when it turns out the wine I really like at a tasting is the most expensive one–it’s actually pretty uncommon.
The wine was 100% Sangiovese, another variety that people are less familiar with than most, and it had a great name: ‘Genius Loci‘ from Castellani Burchino in Tuscany (I failed Google again here). I used the name as an excuse to go off on a whole thing about the concept of terroir, but apparently I managed to keep people’s attention while doing so.
I was really impressed with this wine: it’s a soft red with just a little bit of oak, and some red fruit–raspberry or currant or something, and a hint of spice. Both currant and spiciness are commonly found in Sangiovese wines. It didn’t have any of the fungal character that is also relatively common in the Sangiovese.
This would be an outstanding wine with a pesto & pasta dish.
While we were all enjoying this I went off on another digression about how Sangiovese is not a noble grape–a discussion that was essentially a lift from an article on About. I very much wanted to make the point that Sangiovese is a grape that can produce a very broad spectrum of results, from the quite poor to the excellent, even more so than most varieties.
I was leaning on that point because after the third red, we brought out the “mystery wine”. All the people at the tasting knew was that it was a wine made with the same grape variety, and in the same country, as one of the reds we had tasted.
Of course, the mystery wine was an Italian Sangiovese, in this case from Lungarotti in Umbria. (The fact that it was an Umbrian winery gave us another ‘off the mainstream’ point, and Lungarotti are essentially the people who started wine in Umbria in the 1960s.)
Of the 16 people at the tasting, only one of them identified the Lungarotti as being ann Italian Sangiovese. Most people thought the wine was another French Grenache, with a few on Spanish Rioja.
The Lungarotti might be a perfectly servicable table wine, but tasted beside the Burchino, it really shows poorly–I’ve had wines that were a lot worse, but the Genius Loci is such a good example of the potential of Sangiovese that the Lungarotti suffers greatly by the comparison.
And that was the tasting. After the mystery wine, ports were brought out from people’s personal stock, as well as a bottle of high end grappa, and things get a little hazy…
