Weekly Re’Wine’der – Sept 9, 2010
Life is good. 
The rug rats have gone back to their playpens; the older adolescents have re-crossed state lines and are happily studying hard, such important subjects as how to split the social acne with Facebook and how to market a mocking bird’s tweet via Twitter. Life is good. All over America moms are replacing their creamy coffees with creamy chardonnays, and once again the bottle of wine can appear, without threat of childish taunts at the lunch table and pre-dinner, during dinner and maybe even after dinner. I love this time of year – not that I have any rug rats (mine’s a senior at college), but because the season heralds the end of hot and humid and open windows invite cool breezes and thoughts of richer wines. Not that we need go full hog into the syrup but we can look at some earthier Sangiovese and maybe take a stroll through the wines of Southern Rhone. We have been doing just that these last few days and I have to admit, the quality of the wines we are tasting right now is about as good as it’s been for a very long time. It’s possible that winemakers around the world are beginning to see the light and are doing what they can to reduce the levels of alcohol in their wines, or maybe it’s because we have finally convinced our distributors that our interests are not in the overly saturated slush bucket wines that have household names.
I’ll give you an example: yesterday morning we were introduced to a bevy of big bad boys from Washington. Called the ‘Sleight of Hand’ winery these wines are made by the magician, Trey Busch. Sleight of Hand refers to a line from a song from his favorite band – Pearl Jam. Yes, a wine-maker who digs 90s grunge! Trey begun making wines with Eric Dunham, one of the founding fathers of great Walla Walla wines but a few years ago he wanted to do his own thing and so with financing from Jerry and Sandy Solomon Sleight of Hand was born. When we first saw the lineup of wines there were inward groans – the bottles are big, they weigh heavy, the labels are big, colorful, impressive and yell ‘watch out’; but then the tasting began – Life is good. First up was the 2009 Riesling called the ‘Magician’ – a blend of 60/40 Gewurztraminer and Riesling this wine is crisp! Deliciously off-dry with flavors that combine a smorgasbord of pear fruit, Bosc, Anjou, Seckel and Bartlett – stainless steel fermented with a whopping 12.7% alcohol – start picking up on my sarcasm here. Second in line was the Spellbinder, a blend of everything – 42% cabernet franc, 21% cabernet sauvignon, 14% syrah, 12% merlot and 11% sangiovese. Aged in neutral French oak the wine is brimming with earthy black fruit and just begs to be drunk while watching the steaks sizzle on the BBQ. In Australia this wine would hit you with a 16% government warning, but from Trey it’s a mere 13.5% alcohol. Kind of leaves you wondering whether the guys in suits at the steakhouses really know what they are talking about – yea this is a huge wine, love this, have another glass of ethanol call the doc tomorrow. Following swiftly on the heels of Spellbinder we began tasting Trey’s homage to one of his favorite wines – Cheval Blanc, ‘The Archimage’ blends 54% merlot with 46% cabernet franc. Looking at it ooze out of the bottle one could pretend to be a boy in the steakhouse, and the alcohol content would let you hold your head up high – it comes in at 14.4%. But then the discerning wine revelers will realize that wow, this stuff has acid ink all over it! The balance between acid and alcohol is, IMHO, the Holy Grail of wine-making. This wine reached the Grail and took it. There may be 14.4% alcohol on the label but the wine has such an up-front juiciness that you get no hint of heat. Its bright, light, exotic and enticing, but sadly there are less than 300 cases in the whole wide world, and I don’t know yet how many we will be getting.
What this example illustrates is that when a wine-maker trully balances out his wines you can still drink the high octane stuff but what you taste isn’t alcohol it’s the life-blood of what went into the bottle. As long-time readers know, I have an aversion to all the wine critics, especially those that rate wines using the 100 point system. There predilection is usually wines that are over-extracted, over-saturated, over-alcoholic and over-priced. I was therefore surprised to see that 2 or 3 of these magazines actually rated these wines correctly – all over 90. Personally I rated them all between 1,976,000-1,976,023.
Visit my web site and click on Cellar Specials to read more about the wines and to see what allocation we have and at what price – remember, none of these wines are “over” anything. Go to http://wineatfive.com/?cat=12
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