The world is better off for places like Barcelona.  Wines such as Anima Negra AN/2 from Majorca’s red callet grape and Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894 from Rioja’s white viura variety don’t make it onto just any wine list.  But at Barcelona Restaurant and Wine Bar, ten minutes off of I-84 in (of all places?) West Hartford’s suburban trendy Farmington Avenue retail district, they sit comfortably on a comprehensive Spanish wine list that rekindles memories of my two favorite Spanish lists in this country; Taberna de Haro in Boston and Casa Mono in New York City.

All three lists have something in common besides size and volume.  They hold pricey classic choices like Vega Sicilia, Pingus, and Clos Erasmus while featuring depth in less popular and remote wine growing regions like Bierzo, Majorca, and the Basque country. Wines of great elegance, food friendliness, and unique terroir hail from these hidden spots to challenge juicy modern garnachas, classic tempranillos, and racy monastrells. Great rewards hide beyond modern fruit driven values and classic producers for curious wine adventurers as hungry to learn as I am.  On a recent and lively Saturday evening of tapas indulgence at Barcelona, I was reminded one more time that zagging instead of zigging straight to the proven producers can pay large dividends. $110 at the restaurant bought these two magical bottles of wine. You can buy both at retail for $30 and $19 respectively

**** $30 2008 Bodegas Palacios Cosme Palacio Blanco 1894

The wine is a blend of primarily 95% viura, the most popular white variety in Rioja blancos, and then 5% malvasia. News to me, viura is the name used in Rioja for the macabeo variety, more commonly relied on in northern Spain for Cava production. I ordered this wine with memories of tasting my first white tempranillo at a Rioja tasting earlier this year.  In this case, the viura/malvasia blend showed a caramelized, lime, and honey nose with hints of toast and cotton candy to lure you in.  Most remarkably, the wine lands with amazing richness and contains an acidic linearity to provide structure and framework to the wine’s lusciousness. Cosme Palacio is co-fermented in barrel and aged in oak, but retains a bright fruit core that never yields to the wood.  This is an amazingly sexy wine because of its richness and tantalizing aromas, and its great structure gives enough balance to render it a classic choice.  I could linger over this wine all night, it’s that good.

***1/2 $19 2008 Anima Negra AN/2

I am a sucker for wines made on islands.  Call me silly, but I dream about the isolated terroir, surrounded by water, connected to no other spot. I think about the wines I have tasted from a small island off Sicily’s coast and how it is possible to imagine tasting the salt air, morning dew, and volcanic soils.  Or at least I thought I did.  So experimenting with this second wine from Majorca’s Anima Negra made from 65% callet, 20% mantonegre and fogoneu, and 15% syrah was an easy move.  The fruit is fermented in steel and then aged for a little over a year in French and American oak.  It’s a medium light ruby color, with rich and bright cherry aromas buffeted by wafts of tobacco.  The wine’s distinction comes in its weight; a softness without hard edge and a fruity lightness that appears to actually melt in your mouth. No major league forward ripeness and volume that you are accustomed to in big garnachas, just a pleasantly round and mellow mouthful of wine that is light on its feet and washes over your palate like it belongs there.  It’s a great food wine, and had enough acidity and brininess to stand up to the boldly spiced tapas that covered our table.  I am not sure I have ever tasted a wine just like it.  It has elements of gamay and pinot noir, but is not like either of them.  As the wine lingered in the glass, even some clove and cinnamon spice emerged.  It is a fascinatingly complex wine that just wants to please and accomodate your meal.  A killer value.

Wines like these keep me enthusiastic about wine discovery and realizing there is always something new just around the corner that I won’t ever believe I’ve never tried before.

Some wine is described to be authentic. I have been meaning to build a working definition of authenticity for my own clarification and finally managed to squash a prolonged streak of procrastination after discovering ($25 ****) Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades XX on Atlanta’s Local Three Kitchen & Bar wine list. This adjective that has blossomed into standard wine enthusiast fodder, bandied throughout critical wine circles with head-spinning frequency, will no longer be taken casually here.  Research turned up these words and phrases to collectively define authenticity:

•         devotion to genuineness
•         truthfulness of origins
•         true to one’s own personality
•         conforming to original character and attributes
•         adherence to originality
•         lack of falsehood

This urgency around authentic clarity was driven by the reappearance of Pleiades in my glass, a wine and winemaker emanating high beams of authenticity, unlike anything I have ever tasted from California before, and a vintage version different from any other wine we came across in the vertical Pleiades tasting we conducted last year.

Conversely, Local Three Kitchen & Bar fanned antithetical flames of authenticity, housed in a building complex called Piazza at Paces somewhere off I-75 in a nondescript Atlanta, GA neighborhood.  The southern/suburban/Italian center is designed with grand Roman thematics in mind, and the restaurant is located off a lobby of what appears to be an office building named Forum.  You can park your charriot in a brand new multi level parking lot that is just behind the Forum.  When you finally navigate the commercial office space and open the door to the restaurant, you spatially transition one more time into yet another farm to table, contemporary barn decor, pig-art dominated meat theme park.  It’s a restaurant du jour, paying attention to local, meats, and comfort foods that you have been served at twenty other places.  All the boxes are checked, some surprisingly good (brussel sprouts), but most renditions not as compelling as earlier versions (i.e. pork buns compared to Momofuku’s).

While we could have been eating in Epcot Center’s Italy Pavilion housing a mediocre replica of a trendy themed American restaurant, Sean Thackrey and Pleiades XX came to authenticity’s rescue.  Dinner guests and wine became the focus of my experience.  The polarizing effect of a highly authentic wine showcasing the original attributes of its component parts, not dressed up to be anything it isn’t supposed to be, producing a drinking experience uniquely it’s own, and presenting a personality not shared with any other wine helped push away Local Three’s themed overtones.

The Marin county based iconic, idiosyncratic, and eccentric Sean Thackrey produces Pleiades without any adherence to style consistency year to year.  The blend is different each vintage, and possibly never totally represented on the label. According to this vintage’s label, Pleiades XX includes sangiovese, pinot noir, mourvedre, viognier, and syrah among others.  The appearance of the wine is on the lighter side, showing off the color characteristics associated with its sangiovese and pinot noir components.  You might be able to even see the hint of brown edge that lives at the edge of the glass of Pleiades XX at the right.

There’s a sweetness, almost candy apple quality to the aroma.  Earthy and leather notes are neatly tucked into the sweet nose.  Simply from the aromatics, it reminded me of Arianna Occhipinti’s southern Italian Frapatto since both wines offer floral sweetness, multi dimensional flavor profiles, great acidity, a lightness on their feet, and sweet/herbal/earthy changing aromatics.  Sage and thyme (maybe the mourvedre?) show up after the wine sits around in the glass for ten minutes.  The mouthfeel is like a graceful, medium rich pinot noir and it finishes with Burgundian like acidity.  Its a wine that juxtaposes styles and varieties to the drinker’s advantage.  It does all that for around $25 a bottle.  It could be one of the most interesting values in all of California.

In addition to my working definition of authentic wines, there is also Sean Thackrey’s Pleiades as a benchmark of authenticity.  And then there is Local Three Kitchen & Bar to prove authenticity is not required to be mostly presentable, sometimes yummy, occasionally attention-getting, and ordinarily unexciting.

Imagine the convenience of someone delivering two cases of one very perfect red wine to your front door every year at the start of the holiday season.  Not 100 point and $6,000 a case perfect, just perfectly versatile, delicious, and affordable red wine for all the usual and familiar holiday situations. Something to serve at oversubscribed holiday parties, a bottle you can be proud to wrap up as a last minute gift on your way to a friend’s house on Saturday night, a wine to uncork on a merry Tuesday night alone at home, or even something great to serve at your fancy holiday meals with friends or family.   If you put me to that task this year, I would grant you two cases of ($20 ***1/2) 2009 Chateau Puech-Haut Prestige.

When you ask your local wine merchant for the wine, he might tell you how Robert Parker fell all over himself after tasting this wine, spewing mid 90 point scores he usually reserves for top Chateauneuf du Pape selling at 3X to 4X the price.  But if you ask me, I would give you my own 3 reasons why a case or two of this Languedoc belongs in your cellar this December.

Delicious Versatile Wine

2009 Puech-Haut Prestige offers the best qualities of a Grenache dominant blend that marries significant Syrah componentry. It shows a deep garnet color, and gives the immediate impression of great volume and concentration on your palate. The deep Grenache fruit is unavoidably pure and rich, showcasing ripe black and red berry juice, while the Syrah integrates neatly inside the dense silk texture. Its rich mouthfeel is manageable, never becoming cloying or too heavy and balanced by great acidity that keeps the palate salivating despite the numbing richness.  There are floral, berry, and perfumed aromas that make you want to dive into the glass of wine.  The juice never touched wood, and the fact it was aged in concrete vessels contributes to the purity of the bold fruit flavor experience and its ability to work well both with food and alone.   It is impossible to drink this wine under any condition without succumbing to its remarkable satisfaction quotient.  With serious food the wine shows its elegance and in crowds, it’s satisfying in the most noticeable ways.  

Great Wine Gift

Besides its gustatory pleasures, the wine makes a good gift. It has credentials and a story.  First, it comes from a quaint French town in the southwest just outside Montpellier called Saint-Drézéry. The wine’s namesake means “hill” in honor of its foothills terroir. While it’s a decidedly modern chateau relying on modern wine making approaches with modern styled outcomes, the proprietor, Gerard Bru, has always employed blue chip consultants like Michelle Rolland, Claude Gros, and now Philippe Cambie. Bru used his spoils of industrial business success as a foundation to create Puech-Haut out of nothing, in a part of the Languedoc that showed promise but no history.

The wine comes in an extra heavy bottle, and adds to the impressiveness of its enjoyment and story.

Affordable Wine

I actually bought this wine for $17 on discount..  You can easily find the wine for $20, and if you cant, just click the wine-searcher link in the first paragraph. It’s another marvelous wine that Eric Solomon brings in under his European Importers label.  While I am unsure of the total production, its availability is a strong bet considering European Cellars is involved and from my personal experience.  While $20 might not feel like a value in the Languedoc, it most certainly is for a wine of this quality level.  It is a not only a wine to enjoy today, but something that will most definitely tolerate 10-20 year of aging.  Its hard to know how much better the drinking experience can get, but you can afford to make that gamble at $20 a throw.

2009 Chateau Puech-Haut Prestige is delicious, affordable, and gift worthy.  Three perfect reasons to buy a case for now, and another for later.