Chardonnay remains a tale of two worlds.  One way to consider that proposition is by pondering the polarized old and new world style profiles.  But even setting continental divides aside, the two tales of Chardonnay remain conflicted inside the US.  I was reminded of this when the folks at Harvest PR & Marketing got in touch with me during their work on the inaugural release of Domaine Serene 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay.

We had a discussion based on, among a few other things, these questions:

1. Are you familiar with Domaine Serene?
2. How often do you drink Chardonnay, and for what occasion(s)?
3. What’s your experience with Willamette Valley Chardonnay (and/or Dijon clones), and how do you think it compares to Chardonnays of other regions?
4. How would you describe Chardonnay’s current reputation among your readers and consumers?

I am quite familiar with Domaine Serene’s outstanding Pinot Noir program, don’t drink Chardonnay nearly as much as I used to, and have little experience with the variety in Willamette.  Question #4 was an intriguing one and it gave away the PR and marketing challenge Domaine Serene confronted; what is Chardonnay’s reputation with readers and consumers?  In one Chardonnay tale reported on by the Wine Institute, it is “the most widely planted winegrape (95,271 acres) and ..the most popular wine in the U.S….with sales increases every year….28 percent of California’s table wine volume shipped to the U.S. market in 2010.” Face value, the consumer data is all green lights.

But in a separate Chardonnay tale, the once familiar ABC (anything but Chardonnay) tale, more selective consumers have said “no” to Chardonnay and searched for white wine substitues.  The truth to tale #2 is now better understood as the outcry for fruit-not butter and oak, and wines with balance and acidity to make you salivate and that taste good with food.  While I used to drink a lot more Chardonnay through the mid 90′s, I did get tired picking through a sea of imbalanced, heavily-oaked and caramel renditions in search of the pinpoint balance and fruit focus that makes Chardonnay a world class wine.  Still, so many of the younger wine drinkers (meaning under 40) I know resist Chardonnay, replaced by “hipper” Albarino, Pinot Grigio, Godello, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Gruner Veltliner, and a longer list of white varieties you can’t easily spell or pronounce.

Somewhat guilty myself, I moved around with my head down these past ten years, lured to the Loire Valley, Burgundy, Galicia, Lombardy,and elsewhere,…getting caught up in discovery and failing to check back in on American winemakers now paying homage to the more traditional Burgundian Chardonnay treatment that at least one significant piece of the market has been screaming for more of.  For sure, the vast US acreage planted to Chardonnay is supported by plenty of bulk gooey, oaky, buttery chardonnay being poured all over town, but not for the people I drink wine with.  I remember opening a delicious bottle of 2005 L’angevin Heintz Vineyard Chardonnay upon arrival at a wine tasting and watching in amazement as many said “no thank you” when they recognized the Chardonnay bottle shape.  That kind of formed bias continues to play out in restaurants and wine shops all around America.  But, is it possible that high end domestic winemaking has been running to catch up to the market and it’s still enough of a secret to keep a piece of the potential Chardonnay market sidelined?

I was curious and sympathetic to the Domaine Serene cause because I knew they were up against it if indeed they were going to rely on their Dijon clones to produce Chardonnays that the upper end of the market will stand up and notice.  In exchange for all my jabbering, Domaine Serene’e Allan Carter sent me a bottle of the 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay, blended from the Cote Sud (47%), Clos du Soleil (23%), Clos du Lune (16%) and Etoile (14%) to taste after just ten days in the bottle.  He sent it alongside their monumental, silky, gorgeous, herb tinged, fruit forward Evenstad Reserve Pinot Noir made in the great 2008 Oregon vintage, just as a matter of context and to demonstrate the abiding quality of the Chardonnay.

If there are more Wilamette, Oregon, or California Chardonnays produced in this style then I have been missing out on something important.  The 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay has a very light yellow hue, and at first a restrained lemon peel aromatic is all you get, followed by a feint touch of lees as the wine opens.  The wine goes on to provide a totally clean palate impression, with wet slate and resin aromas.  It offers a delicate impression while expressing pure Chardonnay fruit, with always present acidity that gets the juices flowing, but stops short of being overly edgy.  The wine’s purity, cleanliness,and absence of wood reminds me of austere Chablis.  The wine, in two words, is mind blowing.  All the PR babbling about natural wines, clonal legacies, first to plant, and Burgundian style aside, this Chardonnay demonstrates what it will take to regain the attention of the serious upper end of the informed wine market.  And with the freedom for winemakers to style and blend Chardonnay as they please, the landscape is wide open for a high end Chardonnay revival.

I never would have been able to guess this was a US Chardonnay.  That’s my fault because I have not been keeping pace, going along and ignoring Chardonnay because of the wanderless and uninteresting style the varietal adopted as it was popularized and heavily planted.  Bravo Domaine Serene, you have turned my head and produced a Chardonnay of stunning beauty and grace, just like it’s supposed to be.

Note: The wines reviewed here were provided as complimentary press samples.  Information regarding availability, production, or pricing was not available at the time this was published.  The information will be added as it becomes available.

You don’t have to be a Rock Star to drink wine like one.  Rock Star Winos beguile fame, demagnetize paparazzi, leave crowd-free wakes, and sign no autographs.  Being a Rock Star Wino with the juice to indulge audiences in sensory, intellectual, and emotional celebration is unassuming and simple.   So, if you read Wine Rock Star- Part 1, my reflex to Dave McIntyre’s routine wino tips, you are now ready and equipped to take your show on the road with Part 2.

Without really knowing if any legitimate Rock Stars drink wine just like this, here are two performance formats that will deliver wine experiences even the most jaded wine enthusiasts would clamor over:

The Three Wine Comparison

Never serve one glass of wine at a time with dinner.  Rather, set out three identical glasses and compare the wines against each other.  Never pick just a white and a red wine.  Instead, pick three whites and three reds. Or, just three reds or whites or rosés.  Most importantly, make sure they are related to each other in some way and serve them side by side.

For example, serve three 2009 Russian River California pinot noirs next to each other with a single course.  Or, serve one 2008 syrah from the Rhone Valley’s Côte Rôtie, another 2008 syrah from California’s Paso Robles appellation, and the last from Australia’s Barossa Valley.  Alternatively, serve 2008, 2007, and 2006 O’Shaughnessy Howell Mountain Cabernet, as an example, side by side.  Or pour 1985, 1995, and 2005 Gruaud Larose from Bordeaux’s St. Julien appelallation.  Or maybe just three different Talley Vineyard 2009 pinot noirs; Rosemary’s, Rincon, and Estate.

Get the picture?  Serve them blind or open to your guests.  Be creative.  Reach out to your local wine monger for help…tell them what you want to do and ask for creative suggestions.  Most importantly, enjoy the comparisons, differences, distinctions, favorites, commonalities, styles, and most of all the simultaneous resonance of appreciation, education, indulgence, and group connection.  This performance qualifies you as a Wine Rock Star.

The Blind Tasting

It’s an advanced move, but intensely rewarding. I organize one each month as a labor of love and for the opportunity to comparatively taste wines I am curious to learn more about. Choose a theme…maybe 2007 Chateauneuf du Pape?  2008 Willamette Valley pinot noir? 2009 chenin blanc from Loire?  2009 white Burgundy vs. California Chardonnay?  Buy a dozen bottles (or 6 of each if you are comparing the same variety from two different regions). Or, buy 10 bottles of the main region and add in two distant relatives to see if they stand out (i.e. one 2009 red Burgundy and one 2009 German spätburgunder added to a flight of 2009 California pinot noir).  Then, remove all the foils and corks and put all of the bottles in paper bags, taped tightly around incognito necks so nobody can cheat.

Invite 12-15 of your closest friends.  Put white table cloths over one or two long tables.  Do this so you are able to see the color of the wines against a white backdrop.  Cut up some baguettes and put plates of bread on the table.  Get some big bowls or pitchers for dump buckets so everyone can pour out wines at the end of flights.  Print out names and prices of the wines so everyone knows what is inside the brown paper bags.  Give each taster a blank piece of paper and number it one to twelve, with twelve individual sections devoted to notes for every wine.

Set up six glasses for every taster.  Pick six random bottles from the group of twelve.  Mark each one by Sharpie with a number from one to six.  Pour wine number one for each taster in the left most glass, number two in the second from the left, and so on.  Once the six wines are poured, begin tasting.  Look at color for all six, then check aroma for all six, then taste all six.  Make some notes, rudimentary or exhaustive, and when everyone has finished tasting….compare your impressions with each other.  You will be amazed how much of a learning experience this is.  And, you just got to taste a half dozen amazing wines with good people.  Rinse and repeat with the second six wines.

Have blind ballots for first and second place, add up the votes, and determine the group’s favorite wine. Such fun.  Twelve great wines, sixteen wonderful people, untold enjoyment, connection, and new knowledge.  Rock Star or not, you have created a new stage for exaggerated wine appreciation for you and your friends.

I just finished reading Dave McIntyre’s recent piece in the Washington Post about ways to enjoy wine more in 2012.  He delivers a handful of useful, but ordinary suggestions for etching a couple more garden variety notches into your wine bedpost. Honestly, I was hoping for more.  Alas, a missed opportunity to share some geeky unknown rituals living at the edge of extreme rock star wine indulgence.

I was in a San Juan, Puerto Rico Salsa club last week and overheard somebody mention how the locals dance like rock stars.  I wished someone from the local Salsa mafia had dragged me onto that floor and showed me the right moves, similar to the way I hoped McIntryre would have slipped me a  rich, more cranked up idea or two for truly drinking wine like a rock star in 2012. While San Juan Salsa rooms are infectious happy places, joining the coordinated dancing masses can be entirely intimidating to uninitiated rookies like me, lacking experience, heels, tight black clothes, and built in Latin beats. But, if I was going to dance Salsa, I would want to experience it like the Puerto Rican rock stars do and not inside some vanilla mainland suburban dance studio.  Likewise, if I was considering trying my hand at serious wine indulgence for the first time, I’d hope to mimic some patterns of the most experienced wine connoisseurs. Here are some sensible and accessible ideas that I would have wanted somebody to share with me when I first yearned to start drinking more like a wine rock star:

Glassware:

my "ready service" glassware

Before thinking about anything else, get the right glassware.  Diving into serious wine appreciation without appropriate glassware is like starting an aquarium hobby with the fish and live coral before you have a tank to put them in.  It’s not dissimilar to hiring a Salsa band without a place for them to perform or for you to dance.  The wrong glassware will inarguably strip a potentially religious wine experience of all its excitement while the right glassware will showcase and enhance the wine’s virtues.  Also, you’ll need a bunch of it.  If you are starting out and motivated to try a few suggestions you will read about in Wine Rock Star-Part 2 next week, you will need at least six identical pieces of fine glassware per person (buy eight to accomodate breakage).

At the top end, if you are inclined to make the splurge, are Zalto wine glasses.  You can buy a set of eight Zalto Bordeaux style glasses at Winemonger for $488.00.  If that’s too rich, you can feel good about the Riedel Crystal Vinum Series Bordeaux glasses at less than half the price of Zalto, or $200 for eight glasses at Brown Derby.  Lastly, a fine budget conscious alternative are the Spiegelau Grande Bordeaux glasses. You can buy a full dozen for $100 at the Wine Enthusiast Catalog for $100.  Of course, there are multiple styles and shapes of all these lines, but if I could only own one shape it would be the Bordeaux glass.

Decanting Vessel:

If you’ve made it through the glassware hurdle and are still on track to some rock star wine fun, you will need something to decant old and young red wine into.  As a rule, old wines need to be taken off their sediment that sits at the bottom of the bottle after you have stood the wine up for a day or so, and young red wines want and can handle more vigorous decanting to make their flavors and aromas more immediately accessible.  There is a great new post by the Brooklynguy on serving old wines that offers lots of useful decanting information from really knowledgeable wine service experts.  I would read through it before attempting to open or decant an older bottle of wine.

I prefer very plain crystal pitchers; the kind you can buy for $10-$15 at your local discount home accessories store. I got hooked on this strategy nurturing my wine enthusiasm for more than a dozen years at 231 Ellsworth, a once fine eating establishment in San Mateo, California that the past owner of Pichon Lalande, Madame Lencquesaing, compared to Paris’ two Michelin star spots after leading a tasting dinner at the restaurant.  They look good on the table, are neither pretentious nor goofy looking, allow you to stick your whole face in the pitcher to get a good whiff, and are sturdy as well as simple to handle.  Here are my own two favorites that I use most often:

.

 Time To Drink a Bottle:

For me, it took one dinner and one good bottle of wine to turn my head twenty seven years ago.  Set up a dinner for you and the most special person in your life.  Don’t invite anyone else (more wine for the two of you!).  Prepare a high level meal that involves the food and style that you are most competent and comfortable preparing.  It needs to be special, should include either red meat, lighter meat, or fowl…..but most importantly you need to love the food.  If you can’t cook, call in a personal chef for the evening.  You want the food to rock.

I am not sure that rock stars would exactly pick from these two wines for this special moment, but I would:

1985 Lynch Bages and 1989 Beaucastel

You can look back here and read what I wrote about the Lynch Bages.  It is a wine to revel in.  The 1989 Beaucastel is a perfect example of what a great producer can accomplish in a top regional vintage and how a patient collector can maximize its enjoyment.  Both of these wines are at the apex of their development and are ready to be fully appreciated.  The Beaucastel would be my first choice with its amazing elegance, texture, advanced aromatics, and sweet fruit flavors.  It is a mind blowing wine and could be the most enjoyable modern day Beaucastel I have ever experienced.  The 1985 Lynch Bages is by no means an also ran.  You can find a bottle of the 1989 Beaucastel for approximately $150-$200 here.  It is a steal compared to what you would pay in a restaurant for so many run of the mill wines.  You can click and source the 1985 Lynch Bages here, and it will cost you just about as much as the Beaucastel.

Follow Brooklyguy’s decanting suggestions.  Stick your nose in the pitcher and take a deep breath through your nose with your mouth wide open (open mouth allows for better aroma detection).  Pour two glasses about 1/4 full of wine.  Sit down to your meal, forget about everything else in your life except for your companion, the food, and oh yes…..that amazing wine.  You are now drinking like, and probably better than, a rock star.  Plus, if you are anything like me, this moment of indulgence, discovery, and personal connection just might set you on fire like a Jimi Hendrix guitar.

Come back next week for Wine Rock Star- Part 2 tips.

Two favorite wine writers recently teased at the distinction between sensual wine discovery and accumulated wine knowledge. Their words fanned a flame first kindled by my earliest wine crush back in the mid eighties. Not the press and juice kind of crush. I mean the ten-year-old-kiddie-kind-of-crush; when just the thought of that special “someone” lightens heads, warms chests, shortens breaths, stirs loins, and releases imaginations in delightful ways that never seemed plausible before. This style of sensual and intellectual pleasure requires absolutely no training yet is recognizable by anyone.  So guess what? Connecting with wine at the intensity levels of a 4th grade schoolyard crush requires as little training and knowledge.

Wine Knowledge

How is it that knowledge is not a prerequisite to understanding wine?  Organizing and participating in decades of regular, blind, peer group tastings makes it obvious to me that delicious wine can be picked out of blind lineups by beginner and expert wine tasters alike. Inexperienced palates are perfectly capable of discriminating between wines of the same grape, region, and vintage if they are poured side by side. New wine tasters are at ease identifying favorite and least favorite wines using unformed personal language to describe sensory detection to themselves, but are intimidated to verbalize their descriptions to others with more wine knowledge. Actually, their preferences are as interesting as any other taster’s choice; pure and unaffected by the presumptions of technical wine knowledge. Their interpretations are unadorned with catch phrases and buzzwords used, as required, by tasters with deeper wine education and knowledge.

Wine Expert in a Week? Really?

Committing time and energy to advanced wine education almost always relies on a sequence of loving wine before knowing wine. All the knowledge filling studious winos’ ammunition bunkers only comes after being smitten by a crush on wine.  And, the raw sensory and intellectual stimulus telling someone to prefer one wine over another is not something you learn in continuing wine education programs.

An excerpt from “The Taste of Wine: The Art and Science of Wine Appreciation” by Peynaud and Blouin further illustrates this point:

The transmission of a stimulus to the senses via our nervous system, and the response that our brain relays to our consciousness or motor centers, together create a continuous network of information and interpretation which is the very token of our existence: I sense therefore I am; our consciousness functions precisely because of the host of impressions which surround it.  It is also the means by which we understand our environment.  We live because of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Chauchard reminds us of the Latin adage: “What intelligence we have has its source in our senses”

In one of his recent Forbes.com columns, Jeff Lefevre calls it wisdom and differentiates that from wine knowledge by neatly saying, “…placing wine within a bigger context of the human experience making the enjoyment of wine not something that is reliant upon deep knowledge to appreciate, but rather as a beverage that can complement a life well lived.”  

Wine Crush

In a category of its own, “love” has its certain place alongside the many more structured elements defining a life well lived. Similarly, falling in love with wine is as central and separate a proposition to sensory identification and accumulated knowledge in a well lived life of wine. Addressing a group of wine writers this summer, Eric Asimov asserted “you need to own wine and drink bottles“ with meals to discover your love for wine. Simply tasting and educating yourself about it won’t do it.

The bottle of 1985 Lynches Bages that I first tasted in a blind tasting was a completely different wine experience than drinking the same wine with my wife over a relaxed anniversary dinner at Mirabelle, a once (have not been there since 1990, but it still operates) romantic temple of serious french cuisine in St. James, Long Island. The Lynches Bages was more layered, delicate, nuanced, and complex with excellent food and company.  The experience also cemented my developing fascination for the ways wine feeds human connection.  The links between my love for my dinner partner and crush on the wine naturally weaved themselves into a blanket of sensory delight.

Stephanie Ortigue, assistant professor of psychology and adjunct assistant professor of neurology at Syracuse University, published an important study called “The Neuroimaging of Love,” which touches on the sensory intake that leads to love creation in intellectual areas of the brain and also the heart:

…the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.

The study establishes that it only takes 1/5th of a second to fall in love when two potential mates establish sensory exchange. Various regions of the brain begin processing past experiences alongside immediate sensory intake to either create butterflies in the stomach or an empty feeling in less than a second. Ortigue asserts her study “…reinforces the fact that love is more than a basic emotion. Love also involves cognition.”

Is this combination of sensory and intellectual processing the same with wine?  If it sounds like it is, then isn’t it entirely possible to fall in love with the right wine and have that crush launch a lifetime of wine pursuit in the very same way two loving mates organize a life of personal commitment to one another?

Beauty and Crush

Commitment is serious business and crushes evaporate as fast as they start.  As we mature in life it’s easier to see that nuance, character, presence, challenge, and intellectual stimulation are as, if not more, important to a lifetime of love than surface level physical beauty.  For this reason, my wine cellar has a certain style of wine that I bought in the 80′s and early 90′s that I won’t buy anymore.  Fifteen years into my life of wine enjoyment I found wines what teased my intellect, challenged my palate, and invigorated my food.  That style combination stole my mind and heart.  And it wasn’t the big, fat, fruit forward, sex bomb style of wine I was previously consumed with.  I guess it’s never too late to grow up.

In a recent open letter of advice to “wine newbies”, the Wine Spectator’s Matt Kramer drew a distinction between wines that can provide “life satisfaction” and those that simply offer “pleasure”.  In it, he leaned on E. E. Cummings who raised the bar by writing, “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question,” suggesting the real trick to discovering a lifetime of wine enjoyment is to find your own “beautiful questions.” Kramer went on to explain that a life of wine satisfaction:

“…depends upon recognizing what you’re really seeking… I was in Napa Valley and was tasting a Cabernet that is, by most estimations, a lovely wine. And it was a lovely wine: dense, fragrant, irresistibly supple and oh-so pleasing. A lot of people like it…Yet I’ve never cared overly for the wine… Here we come to the “beautiful question” part. Whenever you taste a wine that goes beyond the ordinary (dull wines allow only the dullest demands), you’ve got to go beyond the usual techno-talk about tannins or acidity or oakiness. If those are your “more beautiful questions” I promise you that you’ll never really “get into” wine.

So what was my problem with this perfectly fine Napa Cabernet? It had no “edge.” Really good and, especially, great wines, for me anyway, have an “edge.” It’s a certain something that not only fascinates, but challenges. This Napa Cabernet offered no challenge. It only offered—dare I say it?—pleasure.

It’s okay, just like in life, to fall in love with the most beautiful and alluring surface characteristics that produce pleasurable gulps of wine.  It proves we don’t require knowledge for wine to produce its visceral swoons of delight and human connection.  At some point, though, finding lasting beauty requires, as Matt Kramer suggests, asking the “more beautiful questions” that eventually define lifetimes of intellectual and emotional reward through wine.  And from there, the knowledge will easily flow.

We kicked off our Boston blind tasting group’s 2011 season comparing a dozen chenin blancs mostly from the Loire Valley.  A fascination with blind tasting connects all the way back with my earliest attempts to learn about wine twenty five years ago. There is no easier way for for me to identify the unique characteristics of any single wine besides tasting it in direct comparison to a bunch of its vintage, appellation, and varietal cousins. I was brimming with excitement thinking how some of my favorite chenin blanc producers would show in broad company.  Just like the advantages of viewing twin siblings side by side to pinpoint physical distinctions, the same is true with wines produced from related conditions, timing, variety, and place. But, can critical blind tasting also inform gustatory enjoyment? Just when you think it very well can, a chenin blanc tasting like this rolls along to obliterate the connection beween blind tasting results and what’s best to drink with dinner.

I was excited to organize this tasting because of my love affair with chenin blanc’s multiplicity of sweet to dry profiles, alluring textures, and characteristic acidity.  While I envisioned showcasing a tight scope of wines from one vintage or appellation, I ended up pulling together a wider range of chenin to include favorite producers like Rougeard and Chidaine, controversies like Joly and Testalonga, and curiosities like Angeli and Belliviere.  Hints at residual sugars in some, and appellation variability from Savennieres to Montlouis and Jasnieres made this tasting less of a comparative dissection of hard-to-tell-apart wines and more of a chance to cast a ballot for a favorite chenin style.  Complicating matters further, just in case you preferred an oxidized, nutty, oily styled wine with dinner, a citrus filled chenin with hard working acidity just might demote your favorite dinner chenin to the bottom of the list.  When this happens, I try to overcome creeping insecurities by remembering I drink only one wine at a time in the context of food at dinner, but an onslaught of wines in the context of each other at blind tastings.  The differences are profound enough to discourage, or at least temper, transferring blind tasting knowledge to the dinner table.

The group selected 2009 Belliviere Premices from the upper Loire appellation of Jasnieres as its favorite.  It is a first hint at how these wines would show off next to each other.  The Belliviere was the first of many chenins with sweet fruit aromatics and residual sugars to capture the attention of the group.  This particular wine presented aromas reminding me of bubble gum to go along with its steely profile and peach and passion fruit flavors.  A very sexy wine with lots going on to capture your attention. I liked it as well, but never considered it for my top three wines in either flight. 2008 Aubuisieres Les Giradieres garnered the second most votes for its overly expressive nose of crisp apples, grapefruit, and tangerine neatly complemented by resins and a borderline large dose of residual sugar.  It all hangs together to create a riveting glass of wine.  It was also my second favorite wine of the evening.

Two wines tied for third place and one of them is a complete puzzle to me.  The 2008 Chidaine Les Argiles from Vouvray was lightest in color, showed some decent slate character, but was completely restrained, light on aromatic expressiveness, and just the least impressive wine in the first flight of six.  Others loved it and that’s the beauty of group tastings and personal style preferences.  I had this wine with dinner before and was disappointed; especially since Chidaine is a favorite producer.  Thankfully, the Clos Habert showed extremely well in this tasting.  Still, the Les Argiles is the only wine the group favored and that I shied away from.  I managed to protect my self esteem on the strength of its lackluster impression.  The other wine that tied for third place was my favorite of the night; 2009 Huet Clos du Bourg (Sec) from Vouvray.  Back in April Eric Asimov wrote about a similar Chenin tasting and this Huet Sec was his group’s favorite wine of the twenty tasted.  It’s a pretty wine, with lemon, apple, and steel on the nose.  Everything is in great balance, including the touch of residual sugar tamed by the strength of the wine’s acidity even though the bottle is labeled “sec”.

So here’s the rub.  Wines I have swooned over with dinners including the sole South African wine 2009 Testalonga El Bandito (the obvious new world wine) from Swartland, 2005 Joly Coulee De Serrant and 2005 Closel Clos du Papillion from Savannieres showed poorly in comparison to fresher, more citric, floral, and brightly fruited wines. The Clos Rougeard “Breze” is from my favorite cabernet franc producer in the world, and it just did not show well with its darker color, creme caramel and baked apple aromas, and flabbier finish than all others.  The wines that won smelled like “ladies of the night” next to the oxidative, mealy apple, looser constructions of these other great wines.  Joly can push chenin to controversial limits, Testalonga’s Craig Hawkins is experimenting with whole fruit fermentation and making chenin as you would make red wine, and the Joly and Closel both have a few years on these other wines.  But the fact of the matter is that I enjoyed, no-loved, these other wines on separate occasions with dinner.  Yet if I relied on the results of this tasting I would have never drank them with a meal and would have missed those exciting and rewarding moments.

The winners of blind tastings seem to be just that.  Transferring that new knowledge to the dinner table is dicey business. So, just drink and experiment with the wines you want to try with dinner.  How much simpler can wine appreciation get?