It’s July! Relax & Cool Your Reds
July’s Wine Club is Ready for Pick up!
July Indulgence—Wine Notes
For the Super Value 3 Pack this month, you have a perennial favorite with the Sasha Lachine’s 2020 Rosé, which is a classic French St. Tropez style—crisp and clean with a touch of citrus on the finish and loads of berry on the front. He works in a traditional style but speaks to a contemporary palate. For the white, I want something for this weekend’s afternoon celebrations, and the 2020 Jordan Feline’s Picpoul hits the spot. Ms. Claude Jourdan tends the vines and makes the wines at her family estate in the Picpoul area near Mèze on the Mediterranean coast, halfway between Marseille and the Spanish frontier. From the winery and vineyards you can see the oyster beds in the shallow Mediterranean a few hundred meters away. This domaine-bottled version is a big step up from the cooperatives in the area, since the Jourdan family takes great care to limit yields and create the best Picpoul you can buy. This wine has won many awards in France and abroad. Bright, citrusy, yet mouth-fillingly rich, this wine has a great finish. For the red, I went somewhere warm, Sicily, for a wine with impact of flavor, but a style that can handle a chill. The 2019 Bacaro Nero D’Avola is perfect for a wide variety of foods. On the nose, fruity aromas with hints of thyme and rosemary. On the palate, ripe blackberry fruits, prunes and a little note of licorice and pepper, with firm tannins and medium acidity. I served this one last week with linguine and clam sauce, chilled—of course!
Rounding out the Value boxes, you have three more wonderful wines to enjoy as you celebrate summer. I tried to find something really different for this month, to stretch your wine acumen. The first is the 2017 Massaya Blanc, which is a dry and savory white from Lebanon. The wine is ideally suited for grilled fish and lighter meats, but would also be wonderful with a fresh summer salad. It is a blend of Obeïdi, Rolle, Clairette, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay, handpicked on the foothills of Mount Lebanon about 5000 feet above sea level. The grapes are gently pressed and fermented in large wooden neutral barrels then bottled. The wines are well balanced between delicate aromatics and powerful flavor, both crisp and round, they are food flexible and sure to please all palates.
The two additional reds are quite unique from one another. First the 2018 Pasión is 100% Bobal from the Ladera Fuenteseca. The grapes for this wine are sourced from vineyards grown in a balanced, caring and sustainable ways. The vineyards’ soils are limestone rich and they are in a Mediterranean climate with warm days and cool nights in these 60 year-old vineyards. The grapes are hand harvested and collected in small crates at the end of October. On arriving at the cellars, the bunches are carefully sorted. The vinification is long and specially adapted, beginning with a pre-fermentation cold soak, followed by a short alcoholic fermentation at low temperatures. The wine then undergoes its malo-lactic fermentation in 100% new French oak barrels where it also ages for up to 6 months. All of this contributes to a wine that is powerful in flavor but still medium bodied. That new oak gives it a punch, but I love it! It is still fresh and has a fantastic touch of spice on the finish. The 2019 Andes Plateau Cabernet Sauvignon is fuller bodied and would be great with BBQ or grilled steaks! This organic cab comes to us from Chile, and is a welcomed addition to our affordable cabernets with big fruit and also good structure and tannins to balance it, you will want to grab a few of them for summer entertaining. Also organic, made sustainably and hand crafted, like all of our wines, the modest $20 price point will surprise you.
For our Select wines this month, you have some real treats in this box—and a few things that will round out your palate! To begin with the 2019 La Pianelle Rosato comes to us from the Piedmont and it will make your mouth water! It is darker in color, but don’t be fooled, that is just a reflection of skin contact. It is dry, it is flavorful with brambly fruit, and then it has a wonderful fruitiness that is balanced with a savory quality that invokes Parmesan Reggiano, for me. So, grab some prosciutto and pour a glass! (See the more detailed notes about the winery below.) For the summer, a dry Reisling is a great wine for fish, oysters, lobster, and I know you all fear it, so I am putting it in this box. Trust me, you do like green eggs and ham!!! The 2019 Guntrum Riesling Trocken is a dry, fruity, delicious wine with loads of stone fruit and bright zippy acidity that will refresh you and elevate a simple summer salad to new heights.
If you got the three pack you also received the 2019 Massaya Cap Est, a 50/50 blend of Grenache and Mouvèdre, handpicked on the hillside on the north-eastern slopes of Beqaa Valley at an altitude of 3500 feet above sea level, in the Pas Baalbeck area. This is a plateau where Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon Mountain ranges intersect, creating an arid, continental climate ideally suited for grape growing. The grapes are fermented and aged in barrel for nearly two years before bottling, which results in a textured supple wine with an elegant style and a bold flavor. Violets on the nose draw you in and the ripe berry fruit keeps you there for a long seductive dance. This one is ideally suited for food, but you can’t help enjoy it on its own.
To complete the Select July wines, you also got a couple of chillable reds, to keep you cool, figuratively and literally. First the 2019 Arnaud Lambert Samur Red, Mazurique, this Cabernet Franc is my current house red. While this historical vineyard has been around for hundreds of years (and is a UNESCO World Heritage site), Arnaud does a modest size production on just 3.7 hectares of west facing vineyards, and does so with very traditional methods, maintaining quality and sustainability. This wine is so flexible, with blackberry and blue berry notes on the front, a touch of figginess, a refreshing light body that dances across my tongue. It is juicy! The aromatics give it a layer that is intoxicating before you even sip it. Yes, I love it, and it is so easy. Stock up on this value at just $25!
2019 Poblets del Montsant is a Syrah, Grenache, and Carignon blend from Catalonia, Spain, and I just adore this new addition to our inventory. I first enjoyed this wine with a friend over dinner at TSK (yes, I love them and all that they do!) and it was deliciously sipable on its own, highlighted the charred shoshito peppers perfectly, and handled the steak gracefully. This wine is so food flexible that I would be confident to open it with just about any meal. There is a finesse that I would attribute to the blending the do post fermentation, which allows the wine maker a little more control of the finish, as opposed to co ferment. Yes, there is a ripeness from the Catolonian heat, but the wine remains somewhat delicate and fruity.
If you can handle one more rockstar white, crack open the 2019 Goisot Aligote. Organic, and biodynamic farming from the baguette of Kimmeridgian and Portlandian limestone that stretches from Sancerre to Chablis, and Champagne. 15 to 50 year old vines are planted at a density of over 10,000 vines per hectare. Guilheum Goisot has now joined his parents as the fourth generation to work the vineyards by hand, and the family has staked their reputation on risky late harvests. His wine has a beautiful richness that comes from lees fermenting. That is the process in which one allows the natural yeast sediments to stay in the wine during fermentation, and it lends texture and flavor to wines. Aligote is a relatively unknown varietal from Burgundy, it is uniquely not Chardonnay, but an expression of Burgundy nonethless, and I think after this one, you will seek them out! I suggest you try this one with me favorite meal—roasted whole chicken and a green salad with a champagne vinaigrette, and yes, crusty bread!
The Collectors have a serious wine this month and the opportunity to try two vintages side by side. 2014 and 2016 Le Pianelle Bramaterra. We all know and love Barolo and Barbaresco, but the Piedmont has other wonderful and often overlooked DOCG’s, Bramaterra is just one of them. This wine rocks...full stop. For me, the ‘16 has more forward fruit, but is still tightly tannic, so lay it down and drink the 14 for now, which is showing beautifully right now. I enjoyed it after it had been opened for several hours, so decant it.
With Le Pianelle is the dream of an impassioned German businessman named Dieter Heuskel with great taste in wine and a particular love for Italian wine. His favorite wine types include Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and red Burgundy, and he set out to make a wine that would stand up to the best examples of those types, a wine with both elegance and power. He identified Northern Piedmont as an 'off the beaten track' place to do just that.
Northern Piedmont is the forgotten land of great wine. Up until the early 20th century, the small appellations in Northern Piedmont, an hour and a half north of the now famous Barolo zone, were some of the most famous wines in Italy, drunk by royalty and the rich. A combination of phylloxera and the two world wars caused a major change in industry in the area. The small towns were deserted for the textile industry booming in the bigger cities, and the once famous hills covered in grape vines and terraced vineyards are now covered in forests.
There are very few wineries remaining in the appellations of Northern Piedmont but the wines they produce are exciting and some of the most age-worthy wines in Italy. Now that the wines are being recognized by fine wine fans everywhere, there is a resurgence in interest in the area and small artisanal wineries are popping up every year. Even though the old abandoned vineyards are now nothing but untamed forest, it is not easy to buy land and plant vineyards. It took Dieter over 10 years to finalize the purchasing of tiny plots of land to make up his 4.5 hectares of vineyard because of the oddly large number of landowners he was purchasing from and the nearly impenetrable governmental red tape.
2010 was the first year of production for his Bramaterra and he knocked it out of the park. He makes wine with a very clear style, a wine with real clarity and focus. While it is unusual to make such great wine on your first try, it is not surprising in this instance because Dieter partnered up with well-respected winemaker Peter Dipoli from the Alto Adige and they hired the most talented winemaker in the region, the young Cristiano Garella, who single handedly brought the great Tenute Sella estate back to fame.
The appellation of Bramaterra is unique in the region because of the ancient porphyric (volcanic rock) soils, which lend a distinctive mineral character to the wine. All the areas of Northern Piedmont have a cooler, wetter climate than the Barolo area so even in particularly hot years, the wines are lower in alcohol and retain freshness and elegance on the palate. Like the neighboring historic appellation of Lessona, Bramaterra blends two indigenous grapes (Vespolina and Croatina) with the base wine made from Nebbiolo, producing an aromatically and structurally complex Nebbiolo blend.
In addition to the red Bramaterra, Le Pianelle makes a serious rose wine made mostly from Nebbiolo that is sure to excite fans of the best Provencal roses.