Open for business.
After at least six months (and probably more) of delays, setbacks, postponements, setponements, and postbacks, K&L Wines finally opened their Hollywood branch this past weekend. Huzzah.
I’m a big fan of K&L. I like their selections, I like their prices, but more importantly I like the way they think about wine and the way they talk about wine. When K&L wholeheartedly recommends a wine, I can feel reasonably certain that it’s because they like the wine in the same way that I would like it – that is, as an expression of the grapes grown for the wine and the way that the land they were grown on affected them. Read Greg St. Clair’s thoughts about Brunello di Montalcino, for example, and you’ll understand that the wines he cares the most for are the wines that serve as windows to what the sangiovese grape truly is in Tuscany, not simply the wines that are seamless, international, fruit-driven efforts. The same goes for Clyde Beffa and the wines of Bordeaux, and a lot of the other senior K&L staff members think along the same lines as far as I can tell. K&L also has one of the best online presences in the wine selling community, with a comprehensive site, a fun blog, and detailed descriptions of a lot of their wines (although some of their notes are simply taken from the winemaker’s notes, but whatever).
So you can see why the prospect of K&L, which was usually a sort of bonus trip for me whenever I found myself in the Bay Area for a weekend with a little cash and some spare time, coming to LA was a pretty cool thing for me. And on Monday, J and I took a trip over to the new store – less than 10 minutes away in Hollywood traffic! – to see what’s what. First impression: it’s got a parking lot! Always a huge plus at the Sunset and Vine catastrophe. And it’s alarmingly close to my gym. I can see that going one of two ways: either I set up some system of pain and reward by working out and only then allowing myself to go grab a bottle, or I start out driving to the gym, but end up sneaking back into the house twenty minutes later with two bottles of Leoville-Poyferre stuffed under my shirt. “No hon, those are just my awesome abs that I’ve been working on since I go to the gym so often. Hey, where’s the bottle opener? I have to…uh…do something…over here…with the door closed. Don’t come in!”
Inside, it’s a bit smaller than I thought it would be. Not to say that it’s small, but the Wine House doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing its advantage of comprehensiveness. It’s a very big, open space, and at the moment it feels rather hollow – hopefully with time, it’ll have more of a lived-in vibe. They also look like they’re still in the process of stocking the aisles; you can see the empty spaces on the shelves in the photo. So far it looks like they’re going to have a considerable French wine selection (the biggest section of the store by far), a good number of Italian wines (not surprising considering that Greg St. Clair is running this newest location), and a decent helping of everything else. The staff was friendly, albeit a little harried as it seemed like there were still some kinks to be worked out with the cashier computers.
They’re offering tastings on a semi-regular basis on the weekends, which I’m looking forward to. In fact, next weekend features an Italian wine tasting with Greg St. Clair! Sweet.
I ended up getting a couple bottles of one wine that I’m very happy with, but unfortunately I can’t share it with you because one of them is a gift and that person will probably read this before they get the gift, so…sorry. In any case, however, if you’re in the LA area and you are feeling like you could use yet another wine store in your life – who couldn’t?! – give K&L a spin. It’s good times.
Burgundy tasting at Silverlake Wine.
J and I went to a Sunday tasting at Silverlake Wine this past weekend, and it was a lot of fun as usual. Silverlake Wine is one of our favorite haunts, and the Sunday tasting is their most ambitious tasting of the regular flights they do every week. We end up making it to about one of these per year; the time we went last year, the featured wines were small production Central Coast syrah. We ended up buying 2 of the 4 wines that day, I think, one for ourselves and one for a gift. Although at $20 per person and with wines usually north of $30 offered for tasting, the financial damage can pile up faster than you can say “Grand Cru Classe.”
This Sunday’s tasting was one I was really looking forward to because I knew the theme was Burgundy and Burgundian wines are my worst area of wine knowledge. Other than some vague ideas about pinot noir, chardonnay, and terroir, most of it is a blank slate for me. On top of that, most of these wines are so damn expensive, I can’t even buy a few to get a foot in the door to the room of knowing something. Since I can’t afford bottles, tastings are going to have to be the way I expand my Burgundy experience. Now is the time!
A quick and very rough primer for the curious on the levels of Burgundy wines:
- Grand Cru – I will never be able to afford these. Apparently they are good. This means very little to me, though.
- Premier Cru – These are also generally very expensive. Although I actually own a Premier Cru Burgundy, and it cost me less than the Village level wine I bought at this tasting. Interesting how that works.
- Village – From what I gather, wines produced at the Village level are given the name of that village’s best vineyard. They can be good to not-so-good.
- Bourgogne – This is the only stuff you will regularly see below $30, and sometimes not even then.
On this brisk day, Silverlake was pouring five wines, starting with an Adami Prosecco Brut as an aperitif. This was nice – not the best Prosecco I’ve had, not the worst. Hard to work up much feeling about it one way or the other, although I do like Prosecco and was glad to have a glass of it.
First up for the main event was the Domaine Raymond Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne Blanc 2005. As George, SLW co-owner, explained it, this wine would normally be a Village wine, designated “Meursault,” except that the owners decided to bring in some dirt to fill in a depression in the vineyard. Oops. There’s the penalty flag…let’s see what the AOC referees have to say: “Illegal enological formation. Fifteen yard penalty, remains fourth cru.” There goes your Village ranking. This was a really interesting wine, though. The nose recalled the exact scent of crusty white bread and artisanal butter. And I mean EXACTLY. It was a trip. On the palate, it offered more bread, although not as much as the nose did, along with a little minerality and some fruit notes – pear, etc. Not much of a finish on this one. A good wine. The bread on the nose was a serious trip. For $31, though – not quite enough “dough” for our dough. Oy. Sorry about that one.
Next up was the 2003 Domaine Ferret Pouilly Fuisse Les Vernays. Domaine Ferret has apparently been overseen through the years by a long line of female vignerons. Cool. This wine was showing a lot of oak – old French oak, if I can be allowed to hazard a guess – but the oakiness came through in more of a rustic, interesting manner than just bread notes. Certainly a rich wine, richer than the first; it had more of a fruit element than the Dupont-Fahn, too, and generally seemed like a more complex and complete wine. This one, unfortunately, was north of $40, and I wasn’t quite enough in love with it to pick it out, so…
The 2004 Domaine Michel Gros Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits – the domaine of one of the three siblings in the legendary Gros family of Burgundy – was third, and wow did it have a unique nose. Earth. Wet earth. Forest floor? More like a bog. A peat bog. A swamp, even. Okay, maybe not a swamp, but it was impossible not to think of some place wet, green, and mossy when you stuck your nose in the glass. Something that almost smelled like driftwood, except not as salty. Maybe this was a slightly off bottle…hard to say. (That’s the problem with tastings like this – no time to sit around and wait for the wine to evolve in the glass.) If you kept at it, you could also pick up a little chocolate in the bouquet as well. On the palate, this wine buzzed with acidity. There was fruit there; a tight core of raspberry with some cherry notes and some smoke – but this is a wine that needs a couple years at least to tone itself down before it can be properly evaluated.
The last wine of the tasting was the 2004 Jayer-Gilles Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits. Stick your nose in the glass and wow – that is terrific stuff. This is what I’ve been looking for from the nose of a Burgundian pinot – a perfect balance of earth and fruit. I’m sure there are better examples from Cotes de Nuits and other places, but this is the best I’ve tried. It’s evocative of loam and mushrooms, and at the same time is round and sweet with raspberry and cherry. On the palate, it shows some similarities to the Michel Gros in that it has a good deal of acidity, but at the same time there’s more fruit than in the Gros, making me think that this might be a better bet down the road. Cherries, chocolate, and some spice, followed by a nice finish. I felt like this wine was clearly the best of the flight, and despite the fact that it was the most expensive wine of the day…I bought a bottle.
Yeah, it was expensive – almost $50. Way more than I am usually willing to part with for any bottle. I probably spent too much, but I feel like this wine was what I was hoping to find when I went to this Burgundy tasting, and I feel like it’s only going to get better in the short term. It seems like a good food wine, and since it’s pinot it’s more flexible around a menu than, say, a Mollydooker Shiraz. I’m sure that for my Burgundy dollar, I could have spent my money in a number of different ways that would have provided more bang for my buck, but I liked this wine. So I got it.
So dipping a toe into the Burgundy waters was not too bad. Now all I need to do is find that box of money…
UPDATE: looks like S. Irene Virbila has made the Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne blanc that we tasted here the LA Times’ Wine of the Week. No mention of the bread, though. Whatever. Did she go to the tasting? Were we possibly in the same room at the same time? Perish the thought.
I am often wrong.
No less than three stunning wine-related things happened to me last night.
- I was recommended a cheap bottle of California chardonnay at a wine store that I trust.
- I bought it.
- J and I enjoyed it.
The world was never the same!
OK, not really. But hey, that’s a big deal for us. It might be a stretch to say that we’re card-carrying members of the ABC (Anything But Chardonnay) collective – we’ve been known to sneakily enjoy glasses of white Burgundy at Lou – but we’ve certainly attended more than our share of meetings, put it that way. California chardonnay has never really appealed to either of us. And not just us; it seems like the wine world is positively teeming with those who are brave enough to join the angry mob in denouncing the dreaded Cal chardonnay. “Over-oaked.” “Manipulated.” “Buttery.” “Too toasty.” “Fat.” “Quotidian.” “Swill for the proletariat.” Okay, I made those last two up. But you know the drill.
And you know what? I agree with a lot of it. California chardonnay is not something I can say I’ve enjoyed on very many occasions at all. Other than the fact that it’s usually cold, which makes it refreshing to some degree, and that it is quite wine-like, there is very little I can think of to recommend the stuff I’ve had in the past. Maybe I haven’t had the right wines…but more often than not, the right wines tend be rather expensive. Most importantly, Cal chardonnay never seems to have that sense of place that really attracts me to wine – the individuality that makes you wonder what the conditions of soil, climate, and vineyard must be to create this specific range of sensory experiences in your mouth. That thing that makes you think about the wine. Chardonnay – not so much for the thinking.
So I’m standing there at Colorado Wine Company, which I’m finding myself in more and more these days, and the guy in the store is showing me this bottle of chard – 2005 207 Chardonnay, from the north coast of California, to be specific. After pulling it off the shelf, he quickly informs me that it’s a nontraditional Cal chard – “minimal oak,” he says. “Not too buttery – a nice clean white.” I love how much explaining wine stores have to do these days for having chardonnay on their shelves. It’s like bringing your friend with an NRA membership to a DNC luncheon. “No, he’s cool. He’s from Wyoming, everyone’s in the NRA there.”
Well, I thought to myself, am I going to be the jerk who tells this guy – who clearly likes and believes in this wine – that we don’t drink chardonnay? Don’t I firmly believe that challenging one’s established tastes in food and wine is one of the most rewarding things one can do for one’s self? Can I really not take a swig of my own medicine?
So what the hell. I got it.
Miracle of miracles, what’s this? It was good! It was a simple, but very charming little bottle of wine. Straw gold in the glass. On the nose, it was sweet but not too sweet – maybe some roasted fruit, something with a little depth. There was a little butteriness on first taste, but certainly nothing that hurt the fruit, which was very present in the form of citrus and maybe some peach. A little vanilla. Enough acidity to keep it honest. Not much of a finish, but enough of one to notice and move on. We had it with a roasted garlic and red pepper risotto I whipped up, and it went very well. When I told J what she was drinking, her face alone was worth the $8 (!) I paid for it.
The whole experience got me thinking about Cal chardonnay as I knew it. Why are so few of them like this one was? God knows there’s enough cheapo chardonnay out there. Not one that I’ve had is nearly as good as this one. This is supposed to be the golden age of winemaking. Vintners all over the state are looking at new and interesting ways to make good, affordable wines. Go to a good wine store and you’ll see quality California riesling, gewurztraminer, chenin blanc, viognier, and pinot grigio. Can’t chardonnay fall in there somewhere? Or has it really been there all along and I’ve just made massive errors in selecting the wines to bring home?
Maybe it’s a little of both. Chardonnay as a grape isn’t terribly fashionable these days among “serious” wine drinkers, even if it’s still the most popular white wine in the country. Maybe that’s the reason it’s not fashionable. But in that 207 Chardonnay, I saw what California wine could be right now – that is, able to compete with the affordable wines from Europe and South America in providing something to think about in a glass – and it made me a little sad that I haven’t felt that way more often.
It made me think about some of the things that folks in the wine blogosphere have said recently about Californian versus European cheap wine – Eric Asimov, Fredric Koeppel, even James Suckling, whose blog is behind the fearsome Wine Spectator wall and therefore unlinkable. Generous guys they have over there at the Spec. Anyway, the point is that a lot of folks feel like California has really been left behind by the rest of the winemaking world when it comes to everyday, affordable wine. And I tend to agree. While there are certainly cheap wines that I enjoy from California that I will/would buy on a regular basis (McManis and Sandoval Cab, Rosenblum Vintner’s Cuvee Zin), most of them aren’t the most flexible food wines in the world. As a rule, they tend to be fatter and sweeter than European everyday wines, which really limits their uses on our dinner table. And as much as I can enjoy a wine like the 2005 Dry Creek Chenin Blanc, if it’s going up against my boy the Domaine du Salvard Cheverny, well, that’s what we call a losing battle.
I wonder if California chardonnay is at a sort of crossroads. I wonder if the cutting-edge winemakers are going to abandon it in increasing numbers, leaving the varietal only to those who will pay anything for a glass of perfect Aubert or Kongsgaard, and those who would gladly pick up a bottle of blush if the chardonnay space on the grocery store shelf was empty. I wonder if chardonnay will ever bottom out like merlot is right now, and if that would be fair or not. It’ll probably never happen, but the warning signs are there: increasing global competition, rising local prices, intriguing alternatives beginning to appear in mainstream areas, indifference among the cognoscenti. It’ll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
In the meantime, I’ve got to see if there’s any other cheap chards I’ve been missing out on.
Tasting notes: wines from Du Vin Fine Wines.
J and I took a recent trip north to the Bay for a bridal shower. As I was not allowed to participate – curse the heavens! – I decided to get a little editing work done during the day. After a bit of this, my wandering mind got the best of me and I found myself walking into the small wine shop on Santa Clara avenue, (relatively) recently opened, called Du Vin Fine Wines.
Now, most of you will know that I lived in Alameda for a long, long time. Because of that, I have certain ideas about how Alameda goes about its business – in short, not very quickly. If I go to a store, I expect to see certain things that real Alamedans expect, because businesspeople are generally savvy about understanding things like this in a generally fuddy-duddy community like Alameda. So if I walk into a new wine shop in Alameda, I expect it to go about its business in specific ways – ways that don’t rock the boat. Not that this is a terrible thing, mind you – Farmstead Cheese and Wine in the Alameda Marketplace is a real non-boat-rocker of a wine store, but it still has a lot of great bottles, many of which I’ve tried and can recommend wholeheartedly.
So you can imagine my shock when (as if you haven’t already guessed this and have been waiting impatiently for me to arrive where you’re standing) Du Vin turns out to be a crazy little wine store, the likes of which I have pretty much never seen in California. OK, it’s got some run-of-the-mill wine store stuff – Lynch Bages, Silver Oak, Duckhorn, JC Cellars. All good names, of course. On top of that are some names I’ve seen in stores that put an emphasis on boutique wines, like Sean Thackeray, Neyer, and Roger Perrin. Hm. Shelves dedicated to wines from South Africa and New Zealand. Not bad. THEN you get to the back of the store, and that’s where they proceed to blow your mind. Just read the tops of the shelves: Greece. Turkey. Slovenia. Croatia. Hungary. Hungary makes wine??? OK, what do I buy?
Since we already had a full rack of everyday wines in our kitchen, I only made two purchases. But they were both interesting and worth mentioning.
The 2005 Tselepos Moschofilero “Mantinia” is a dry white made from the moschofilero grape, an indigenous grape to Greece that grows on the Mantinia plateau in north Arcadia. The grape often compared to Gewurztraminer, which makes the fact that the Du Vin clerk compared this wine to a Traminer no surprise. In the glass, it is pale straw-gold in color, a little lighter than chardonnay. The nose is nice and friendly, with some notes of honeysuckle and peaches. On the palate, you can see where the the Traminer comparisons come in, as there are strands of pear and lychee on the palate. It’s lacking some of that richness you get from the better Alsatian Traminer, though, and it ends on a bit of a grapey note. Still, it’s a nice wine and at $16, not a bad investment if not the greatest one either.
The red I bought without recommendation, since the clerk hadn’t tried and and couldn’t speak for it. But I had to get something from Croatia, so I picked up the 2004 Dingac Plavac Peljesac for about $12. According to my books, the grape in this wine – Plavac Mali – can be used to make very big, tannic wines, but this wine was far from that – it seemed more like a cross between gamay and pinot noir to me. In the glass, it was red/violet, fading away at the rim. One of the palest reds I’ve seen in a young wine. The nose was…odd. Is this the “wet dog” people refer to? More like “wet cow at the goulash farm.” Unique…but I’m not sure I like it. On the palate, this wine went through several stages. At first it was just a mushroomy flavor on the back of the palate, but as time went on it developed some tart fruit, like gooseberries maybe, and after a few hours, some cocoa as well. By that point I really came around on this wine, but it certainly took its time getting there. Good acidity, but not much of a finish – this isn’t really a wine built for storage, I think, but it was a fun bottle and I’d certainly consider picking up more, although I don’t know what I’d eat with it. We had salmon with this wine and it didn’t quite work out with the funky. Maybe next time.
Of course, I write all of this only to find out that Derrick Schneider over at An Obsession with Food put the Dingac in his “Wines of Germany and Eastern Europe” class, and Purple Liquid has already blogged about it. Oh well. It was a weekend for the bride, after all, and I guess I’ll have to play the bridesmaid on this one, too.
