Where have all the Flowers gone?
Where have the last five years gone? Click your fingers. Gone. March 21, 2006 Wine at Five opened its doors. Five years later we are, remarkably, still here. We are like this year’s winter. Sadly the last five years seem to have gone by much quicker than this winter. When is this white stuff going to stop? In the mountains, no problem, on the sidewalks – it’s a problem. Although check out our rather plush, new awning out front – one of the by-products? I don’t have to clear the snow away anymore!
Five years ago this was just a bit of fun – five years later it’s a big bit of fun. Who would have guessed that playing loud music and drinking wine every day could be like this? And of course, to mark this auspicious occasion what better than to announce the date of our Real 5th Anniversary Wine Tasting at the Wainwright House. We are going to do it on Friday, May 20th. It will be at the Wainwright House, it will be in the tent and Gary Stone will provide the ab/fab food as he has in the past five wine tastings.
Not many rule changes this year but the ones you need to know about now are:
Ticket price is $50.00 per ticket
There can be absolutely NO PARKING along the road. We are going to discuss with neighboring clubs if we can possibly borrow some parking space, and we will also hire two off-duty Rye Finest to help monitor parking – please don’t ask the officers to valet park your car, if you do you will have to ask them to retrieve it and with your breath smelling the way it will that’s probably not a good idea. On that subject, please, please have a designated driver – better yet, have your kid drop you off and pick you up – you know he/she isn’t going to be drinking – it’s illegal! Car Pool if you can.
Ticket sales will begin Monday March 28. No reservations without a credit card (i.e. purchases only); no cancellations; ticket purchases must be accompanied with a usable e-mail address. We will send each e-mail address updates of the event, and prior to the event we will e-mail copies of the wines and prices so you will have the chance to preview before the night. Tickets will be limited – last year we reached the limit within two weeks (I think we announced the date just before a school vacation). So please, if you do plan to attend, get your ticket orders in quickly.
Glasses up 6:30pm. We listened to some very constructive criticism after last year’s tasting and have made a few changes based on customer feed-back. We will reduce the number of tables to ten and reduce the number of wines to 10-12 wines per table. That’s still plenty of variety, but not so much that it becomes too daunting. Marina, Bruno and I will be doing our homework over the next few weeks so that the wines on each table will represent the best wines and the best values from each distributor. There will be more water stations. The food will be more dispersed – to avoid the crush that some people experienced last year when much of the food was centralized in one location.
Please also remember – and there’s no polite way of really saying this; this is a tasting event, please don’t ask the pourers to pour full glasses, they won’t and technically, they are not allowed to by law and their licenses would be put in jeopardy. Also please bear in mind that Wine at Five carries the cost of this event in its entirety, and it’s not cheap. We do it for many reasons, not least it’s our way of thanking all of our customers, it’s great PR but it’s also an opportunity for our customers to purchase their wines at wholesale cost plus a few dollars of profit margin. It’s your purchases that allow Wine at Five to make a modest profit – and I hear that Bruno wants a Porsche this year!
It’s going to be another great event – we have new importers who we are really excited about who will be pouring wines that are truly off-the-beaten track. This is not a Parker-Fest – there won’t be too many wines that have over-extracted fruit basket flavors washed down by high levels of ethanol! There will be plenty of Rosés, there will be plenty of ‘seasonal’ wines just right for late spring and summer and there will be plenty of wines that you have never heard of – that’s the exciting part.
So look at your diaries, if there is anything on May 20 scrub it out and put Wine At Five Wainwright House, 6:30 – reserve baby-sitter now.
Roberto Voerzio - doesn't he look like Robert Plant?
So that’s the news about the annual tasting, let’s take a look at the news during the past two weeks.
Last night I was thrilled to be invited (many thanks GL – and many thanks to you Roberto – I hope to repay your amazing generosity in VinItaly in two weeks) to the Crabtree Kittle House to meet Roberto Voerzio. Glen put together an astonishingly good series of tasting plates that we paired with Roberto’s equally astonishing Barolos. Roberto is the maverick of the Piedmonte. Back in 1987 he left his father and brother and the family wine business to set out on his own and make radically different wine. Over the next 20 years he bought up tiny little parcels of vineyard plots – we are talking rows, not acreage; and over the years this quilt of vineyards has grown to become the most sought after vineyards in La Morra – the Pomerol of Piedmont, as one critic called it. Interestingly most of us have heard of Chateau Petrus, Chateau Yquem and Domaine Romanee Conti, but how many of us have heard of Robert Voerzio? Not many, and that’s the way Roberto likes it. His vines are pruned down to two bunches of Nebbiolo per plant, and having only a very small acreage of patchwork vineyards where each plant is ‘hand-fertilized’ using only organic fertilizer; green-pruned by hand twice, sometimes three times per season, hand harvested, hand sorted, hand made, hands down – his production, as you can imagine, is tiny. There’s not much point being globally known if the quantity of wine you can give to the world equals close to zero! We began the night tasting his Langhe Merlot 2007 – the diva of merlot – I asked him why merlot in the middle of Piedmonte – his English is not good but I understood from his Italian that when you drink Barolo every night, every year, it gets boring! So he wanted some merlot – so he planted it and it’s his baby! It was a marvelously concentrated wine but so subtle and so delicious – all black fruit and espresso. From merlot we moved on to his Barolos. OMG. We tasted his Brunate 2007 – Robert Parker’s opening comment says it all, “it’s likely to leave most tasters speechless. It is fabulous…totally seamless it is Barolo of the highest level. The richness and depth of fruit is almost obscene…”; we poured his Cerequio 2007 which to me explored the Yang if his Brunate was his Ying. More feminine, more floral, sweeter fruit and kind of like glossy dripping red lipstick that begs to be kissed. (Not on pain-killers this morning!). We opened his Barolo Rocche dell’Annunziata which I thought was his most restrained wine – I kept writing the note, needs cellaring, but then I kept finishing my glass and thinking, screw the cellaring just drink it and love it. And we drank his La Serra 2007 which for me was my favorite – everyone around the table had their own favorites but this was mine. It’s both Ying and Yang – powerfully muscular, but perfumed, fragrant, huge flavors wrapped around a rose petal – sort of Arnie Schwartzeneger wearing his wife’s Dolce Gabbana. I loved it. I won’t bore you with the 2001 Barolo that we tasted – quantity is non-existent and few, if any of us, could afford it – but just a tease…sensational!
The wines come at a ridiculous price – I hazard a guess that just the few bottles we poured last night rang up a few thousand – and that’s at wholesale! And in keeping with the cult status of Roberto’s wines and the fact that few people can ever buy them I’m not going to bastardize his wines by pricing them over the web – if anyone is interested in buying one, possibly two bottles please read the comments I have written about the wines on the website – and then either e-mail me or call me to discuss an allocation – I will tell you that the majority of the Barolos are priced in the $350-$500 per bottle range.
Do we have time for anymore? OK, very briefly, we brought back the new vintage, 2009 Arpud Sariacum Sancerre from Philippe Raimbault – still one of my favorites. Virginia Taunt Sauvignon (NZ) and Elizabeth Spencer Sauvignon (California) are both back; some of the rosés are beginning to arrive, of those with limited quantity we have the Raffault Chinon Rosé that is delicious, and another huge favorite the La Ferme Saint Pierre, Cuvee Juliette; we also have a ridiculously good, and insanely priced sauvignon blanc from New Zealand – Konrad Winery – check out a previous mention I made on the website – http://wineatfive.com/konrad-sauvignon-blanc-marlborough-valley-new-zealand/ ; we have a little bit of Picpoul left if the weekend warms up a bit; a bunch more cases of the Meurger Bourgogne Pinot Noir arrived, new vintage, old price ($23.00); a delicious spring-time red from southern France – Ste Eugenie Corbiere – really good juice for outdoor drinking. More of the Chateau de Puligny Montrachet chardonnay came in – not sure what the inventory is like on this wine and it does sell out very quickly; that came in with just six bottle of Gros’s Chambolle Musigny (divine stuff); a very good dry gewürztraminer from Alois Lageder’s Alto Adige vineyards; more of the crowd pleaser Van Ruiten Cabernet/Shiraz blend; and a bunch of other new wines that we tasted within the last few weeks and fell for. Come in this Saturday and see what’s new. In the meantime, sharpen the snow plows and think positive thoughts!
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