Taking off.
We’re going up to the Bay Area this weekend, but I wanted to mention a few things before we leave, as I never know if/when I’ll get the chance to post up there.
There’s been quite a bit of talk today about the relative worth of the Zagat books, most of it stemming from the fact that a piece by SmartMoney (not available online) claimed that Zagat’s grades were inflated and that the ratings in the famous and ubiquitous Zagat guides that should serve as constants – i.e., chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory – in fact varied wildly according to location.
To the latter claim, I’ll offer the weak defense that two cooks, given no matter how rigorously identical a set of instructions, will invariably produce two different dishes. Put Nancy Silverton in one California Pizza Kitchen and Johnny Five in another, give them the exact same recipe, and you’ll get two different pizzas (one made with passion, the other with hilarious robot antics). I’m not saying that the variation can be entirely explained through differentiation in the kitchen, but other than wild hypotheses about sociological environment, I don’t know how much deeper you can get into that particular problem. To the former, I would say only that Zagat Los Angeles gives Enoteca Drago a 22 for food, while The Ivy gets a 23 and Panda Inn gets a 21(!). Which is another way of saying that if you really put any stock in the Zagat restaurant ratings, I’ve got a Thai joint I’d like to sell you.
Elsewhere, it seems like half my traffic comes here looking for info about Malm Cellars, so I’ll throw a bone to the lions and say that I tasted a glass of the 2005 Malm Cellars Cross Blend tonight. It was a good wine, a cab-syrah blend that was fruit-driven, yet with decent structure and medium tannins, so it might reward sitting in the cellar for a year or two. At $17, it was a decent price, although I think I would probably rather fork out the extra three bucks for a bottle of the Malm Pinot Noir. Or you could buy the 2005 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc at about the same price, and enjoy one of the best cab francs made in the US for a good value. The Lang & Reed has a wonderful mix of chocolate and raspberries coating a core of herbs and a tiny amount of mint that keep the wine from getting too fat. A sultry, complex wine that I really like. I often feel like cab franc is what malbec wishes it could be, but maybe I just haven’t had enough good malbec yet. I’ll probably regret those words soon enough.
In other news, K&L Wines Hollywood has yet to open. What the crap! Do they think I can wait forever?
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.
