It was show time at the house and I was set for my third virtual wine tasting courtesy of snooth.com. I had my laptop fired up at the end of the dining room table and I had six glasses lined up, in front of each bottle of wine. I opened the red wines almost three hours early, and the white wines were opened about an hour before the show and I had cheese and crackers and water on the side; I also took initial tasting notes on each wine, as I kind of learned something new from each tasting. The main host for the evening was Leslie Sbrocco, and she is an award-winning author, speaker, wine consultant and television series host. Her first book was Wine for Women: A Guide to Buying, Pairing and Sharing Wine won the Georges Duboeuf Best Wine Book of the Year award. Her second book is The Simple and Savvy Wine Guide and she is working on her third book Adventures of a Thirsty Girl. She was also seen as the host of the PBS restaurant review series Check Please! She has won a James Beard award, three Taste Awards and three Emmy awards in the span of ten seasons. The event was going to be interesting and stellar.
The first wine of the evening was Acquiesce Winery Ingenue Lodi 2018, and this wine will official debut in July of this year, so it was an honor for all of the tasters to be included. Sue and Rodney Tipton have a very unique reputation in Lodi and in the wine community as a whole. They only grow and bottle white wines, plus one bone dry Rosé and they use no barrels, only Stainless Steel; all of the aging of the wine occurs in the bottle. The estate is ten and a half acres and all of the wine is estate grown. The winery opens in March and usually closes in November, because all of the wine is sold out by then. This wine is so new, it hasn’t been posted on their website, but through the magic of the Internet, I was able to find out about Acquiesce Ingenue. Thirty-five percent of this wine is Grenache Blanc, which is also known as Vermentino or Rolle, depending if you are in the Languedoc or Provence, and this grape is known for its floral and lemon citrus notes. Thirty-five percent of this blend is Clairette Blanch which is seen mostly in the Rhone and the Languedoc, and is known as the “light one” because it has low acidity and can oxidize quickly and it evokes citrus and stone fruit notes. Twenty percent of this wine is Bourboulenc and is usually found blending with other grapes in the Languedoc, Provence and the Rhone and it is known for its citrus tones and for smoke and spice flavors as well. Ten percent of the blend was Picpoul Blanc, which literally means “stings the lips,” because of its acidity and is famed in the Languedoc-Roussilon for its herbal and citrus notes. These four varietals blended expertly together created a beautifully nuanced, complex layers of citrus, spice and a mouth-watering acidity that was extremely refreshing. My Bride who did not have access to my notes had opined that this must be a Viognier blend, as she loves the floral tones of that grape, and she was a bit disappointed that it was not one of the grapes, but she was enthusiastic about the wine, throughout the evening.
The second wine of the evening was also a white and it was an m2 Wines Vermentino Mokelumne River-Lodi 2018. The m2 Wines is a very low-key winery, even on their web site as they state that they create small-lot, artisanal wines that express the character of the vineyards that they source and the nuance of the fruit. As I mentioned earlier Vermentino as it is known in the Languedoc is known for its floral and lemon citrus notes. The Mokelumne River is a sub-region AVA and covers the southwest portion of the Lodi AVA, including the town of Lodi. This region is also the first area to be known to be planted with grapes about 120 years ago. The soil is a sandy loam which is free draining and causes the vines to forego foliage and concentrate on the berries for self-preservation and that makes the grapes concentrated in color and sugar. I found this wine to have a good floral nose, stone fruit, spice and some mineral terroir in the aftertaste. I could do this wine with or without food, but with good friends. This wine just barely was released in time to be sent out for this tasting, so it was extremely fresh. There were two-hundred-fifty cases produced, so even with a varietal that is not as well known here in the States, once tasted, I don’t think this wine will last long at the winery.
I will mention the first and the last wine of the tasting now, instead of proceeding in a more orderly fashion as I did that afternoon. In 1993, just three years after the world saw that Communism and Socialism did not work in the former Soviet Hungarian Republic, the Alvarez family that had bought Vega-Sicilia founded Tokaji-Oremus, but respecting the time-honored traditions of the district. The region known as Tokaj is actually twenty-seven municipalities and land, but Tokaj is the major city of the area. The history of Oremus goes back to 1620 and they are credited with making the first Aszu wine as well. When I was first learning about wine, I had always wanted to try all the versions of Tokaji wines, but back then it was the Cold War and the Communists ran a monopoly on the wines of all of the countries that they ruled by the jackboot and intimidation. Rumor has it that Pepsi Cola was an un-official conduit for wines and spirits behind the Iron Curtain for years, keeping the United States in Stolichnaya and Monimpex Tokaji. While there are a couple of different varietals that are grown in this region, the main one is Furmint. Furmint produces a highly acidic juice that when nurtured can develop into one of the longest-lived wines known.
We started with a glass of Oremus Furmint Mandolas Tokaji Dry 2014, a curious wine that has become popular in this century, because it is a dry wine. This wine is named for the vineyard that the grapes come from and it is only planted with Furmint. This is a golden grape that buds late and because of a peculiar trait has one of the potentially longest growing cycles and is very labor intensive. The grapes are delicately pressed and the fermentation process can take eight to ten days and then the wine is aged in small oak barrels, which is the traditional way. Even though this is a dry white wine, and can be enjoyed immediately, it can be aged for about ten years. The wine delivered a curious blend of floral and smoke and was full flavored with a good finish. After four red wines we enjoyed a glass of Oremus Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos 2006. Now here is where the Furmint grape and the wine known as Tokaji are most celebrated. Tokaji Aszu can only be found when Mother Nature allows the elements of weather to be ideal to create an Aszu vintage. The berries swollen due to the humidity split and the “Botrytis cinérea” establishes in its skin and creates the noble rot. This procedure has been going on for hundreds of years. The special grapes with the noble rot are collected in special baskets which are known as Puttonyos, and the number of these special baskets are then added to the already crushed grapes. I have quoted this passage from Oremus to explain the next step “The fermentation of the Aszú must is a slow process that can sometimes last up to two months. It is then put into wood barrels and is left in a protected wine press, waiting for the fermentation to stop by itself. We then add a little Eszencia, which has been collected drop by drop from the Aszú berries. We thus symbolically return its soul, which is embodied in the Eszencia.” The wine is left to age for two to three years and then it is aged in the bottle for an additional year, before it is released. This wine is a blend of several varietals of which the lion’s share is the Furmint. There is also the Harslevelu which adds mildness and floral notes, the Sarga Muskotaly (Yellow Muscat) with its distinctive nose, the Zeta which lends robustness to the blend. They are also traditionalists and are growing some varietals that were prior to the phylloxera blight and that is the Koverszolo and the Goher, but both are in limited areas. There were 23,400 bottles produced of this wine and it could be cellared for forty years. This was just a big wine, it was floral, chewy, robust with enough terroir to please the fussiest taster, with a nice smooth lingering finish and even a bit of pepper at the end to lure one into another taste. And now I can think of the wines that were in between.
The Wine Raconteur 