a fine wine tasting archive
11 notes
Beronia began in 1973 as a project among friends from a Basque gastronomic society, named for the Iron Age people who lived along the Ebro before the Romans. Its Reserva from 2015 — a warm, generous Rioja year — opened at home on a summer night, six years on.
Pax Mahle named his second label for the breaks in the coastal hills that let the Pacific air in. This Chenin Blanc, at twelve and a half percent with a hand-lettered label, is the label's idea in its plainest form — a grape almost nobody in California was taking seriously, picked early and left alone.
Pierre-Yves Colin was the first of Marc Colin's children to leave, and the one whose wines came to define a style — big barrels, no stirring, wax over the cork. His regional Bourgogne, from a warm year, five weeks after his youngest brother's Chassagne.
Aux Reignots sits directly above La Romanée on thin, stony ground near the top of the Vosne slope — a premier cru that in most hands would be a grand cru. From the domaine that owns the monopole below it, in a hot year that suited the altitude.
The label says Meursault and nothing more. At this domaine that is enough to make the bottle harder to find than most grand crus — and in 2015, the son's hand was already visible in the glass.
A tertre is a mound. The estate sits on the highest gravel rise in Margaux, in a single unbroken piece facing south — and 2015 was the year the whole appellation, not just its famous names, got it right.
A month earlier the same wine had been drunk in its most difficult year. This was the other one — the hot, dry summer the Galatrona vineyard was planted for. A half bottle, at the end of a long evening.
Iscay means 'two' in Quechua — two grapes, two winemakers, two countries. The Argentine half is Trapiche's Daniel Pi; the other half came from Santa Barbara. The year they made it in, Mendoza spent the summer behaving like Bordeaux.
Every Sine Qua Non wine exists once — new name, new label, never repeated. The 2015 white, named for the French phrase for dusk, is a Chardonnay-Roussanne blend fermented 'as dirty as possible' and unlike anything else California makes.
A third of a hectare at the northern edge of Nuits-Saint-Georges, close enough to the Vosne border that the wine keeps getting described in terms of the other commune. Leased since 2006, and the only wine the domaine makes outside its home village.
A village Vosne-Romanée that sits directly under the family château, on old vines and heavy clay. Opened alongside a La Tâche and a vintage Krug, it had no business holding its own — and it held its own.