Vertically Speaking - CDP Rhone Tasting across 23 Years

Woke up this morning to get some coffee and found these three soldiers standing sentinel over my auto coffee maker! Proud boys they are.




They represent the remains of an impromptu vertical tasting of CDPs or Chateauneuf de Papes, the southern Rhone Rangers from France and home to bad boy Popes during the Middle Ages.

It was not our intention to run the vertical last night, it just happened. A friend of ours and condo neighbor, Susan R., was coming home from a biz trip to Floridia (my name for that land) and texted us that she was going to get back on time this time and would we be up for wine this evening. But of course I said and commented that I was planning on opening something awesome. Didn't know at the time what it would be, other than freaking awesome.

So when I rustled around in the wine cave, I saw the 2007 Domaine La Milliere's sitting there and since I had a few and had not yet tasted them, I thought that would be a good wine to start on - as much as the ought seven's are probably too young, I still wanted to see what they were doing.

And it was great. The 07 was a bit tight to start, but after some decanting and swirling in the glass it opened up nicely and reminded us why we love CDPs. La Milliere was packed with lush dark berry aromas, rich deep purple blackberry flavors and a long intense but smooth finish. Tannins were mild but the complexity, flavors, and deepness said it was still wantin more time in the bottle to age to perfection. Thus I shall ignore the next few bottles of this wine for a few more years.

While we worked on finishing the La Milliere, Susan decided to rummage in her basement room to pull a bottle of ought five Paul Autard CDP, and wow o wow what a wine that turned out to be. A rich stinky (classic French) nose greeted our nostrils with a wine that was clearly aging very nicely. The color was a much lighter burgundy with yellowing rims, suggestive of near perfection in a wine. The Autard tasted like heaven and reminded us even more of why we do this. It was so smooth and silky with clean fruit flavors and seemingly endless finish - characters of a wine that make you not want to swallow it as it will then be gone.

Not be done for the night, and since we were clearly on a roll, I went back to the cave (huh, closet in reality but who would know) and found a bottle of the classic and almost always considered CDPs top producer, a bottle of Chateau de Beaucastel - ding ding ding! And a 1989 at that.

The cork was all crusted and gnarly with dirt and grime like it was sitting in a real cave for decades. I pulled the cork out with ease and was rewarded with a Stank like you cannot believe. (Stank© by the way is my term and is a very good thing to us wine nutballs). This wine when poured was super light in color with wickedly aged yellow rims but the aroma was intense and rich of a dank musty mushroomy loamy earth - ok, sounds bad but seriously it is good - to us anyways. It was equally light on the mouth but still painfully delicious with lighter berry and cherry flavors. Clearly great, but obviously past its prime, but not by much, a few years at most. So if you have any 89s, I suggest you organize and excuse and drink till done.

With that we finished our vertically-oriented evening and repasted with dark chocolate from Burdick's Chocolate in Back Bay washed down with some Michele Chiarlo Moscato d'Asti. Just fine and evening over!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad; spelling and gramma errors all mine as I did not bother to review before posting (not enough coffee yet). Hope you will enjoy and not give me too hard a time.

Location:Boston,United States

Yes I Need Some New Posts - Argh.

Good morning blog world. With the posting of a wine rant of mine on Pocket Blonde's Blog, it became obvious to me that I have not posted in my own blogosphere in awhile. I will need to rectify that. Soon. Be patient, while we sniff around for things to rant about.



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Yet Another Corked Wine

Well we came across our 5th corked wine this past week, after having
tasted wine from 87 different bottles this time; an amount that is more consistent with our long-term averages. As we reported before, we are now counting both total bottles of wine we tasted and the number of bottles that had corks as opposed to screw caps.


So for this count we ran through 87 total bottles of which 68 had corks as opposed to screw caps. The year's averages for this detailed counting (from our last 3 corked wines) is a corked wine every 52 bottles of wine (of any kind, type, or bottle covering/corking) and a corked wine for every 39 bottles of wine that use a cork.

If I go back farther when we were only counting just the total number of bottles before we hit a corked wine without worrying about whether they were screw caps or not, then the average is a corked wine every 71 bottles.

All in all, still a heck of a lot better than the 1 in 24 many pundits like to report on.

And lastly what wine was it this time? Another Spanish wine - the 3rd this year. So we have 3 Spanish wines corked, 1 Italian, and 1 Burgundy.

What's you experience?


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Location:Writing from Boston, MA

Little Evidence for a Renewed Recession (or Double-Dip)

It seems to me that the only people making hay about a possible double-dip or renewed recession are the media mongers, pundits, and politicians - or people trying to scare someone into doing something.  In looking at the real economic data, not just unemployment figures, there is a boat-load of good news.  Alas the real reason we don't here about it - Its good news and you know how the media does not like to post "good news."

First we need to remind ourselves that a recession is generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.  Also, as I read today and garnered from Bloomberg, consumer spending in the US accounts for 2/3rds of the GDP - that's 67%.  So for the GDP to have two successive losses, we need to see sudden and disastrous drops in retail sales, among other parameters that are not recorded in consumer spending.

So let's look at the latest evidence:

1. Retail sales for August and July were both about 8% greater this year than last year!  Wow, now that's not a sign of a recession.  We'll have to see what September's figures look like.
2. Ah, but car sales in September were a million car sales stronger than expected - some 13 million (annualized).  No signs of a recession there.
3. Rail traffic (i.e., shipment of goods) is hitting all-time highs in the US.
4. Value of all construction in the US increased by 1.4% in August over July and was greater than August a year ago.  The figures indicate a steady increase in construction spending throughout the year, not just in August.
5. The GDP grew 1.3% for the 2nd quarter of 2011 vs. only 0.4% in the first quarter.  That means it is going up, not down.
6. Leading Indicators remain up for August and July - data for September not yet out.
7. The American Staffing Association just reported that its tracking of temporary and contract employment rose 0.06%, maintaining the ASA Staffing Index at a value of 90. At a current index value of 90, U.S. staffing employment has risen 4.3% over the past 13 weeks, and at 90, is the first time that high this year.  The index is about back to mid-2008 levels.  While full-time permanent jobs are still not growing super fast, companies are still employing more people.  Its a start.

And these are just a few of the economic data that show that positive signs.  Ok, ok, I know that any of these can turn probably on a dime, but a lot has to happen especially given the momentum that has been gaining these past couple of years.  Now, should Europe tank - well, all bets are off.

Oh No --- A Corked Wine!

So we hit the wall last night and had a bottle of wine that was corked and the count was well below previous averages - bottle no. 54. Usually we had been hitting a corked wine in the 60-100 bottle count range, so this is a sad day. But alas we started anew right away - like falling off a horse and getting back on again.


So the stats on this count were 54 bottles down, the last being corked. Of those 54 bottles, 37 were bottles with a cork as a means of capping while the rest were screw caps. Now you say, wait - a screw cap can never be corked and this is true. So why am I counting them as part of this anal retentive behavior? Because I want to know at what point among my wine drinking and wine tasting can I expect to come across a tainted bottle without having to pay attention to whether a bottle has a cork or screw cap. If you are out and about and stop in somewhere for a glass of wine you might not even see the bottle and won't know if it is a screw cap or not. So the idea here is to give you the sense of how many bottles of wine you might go before hitting the tainted wall.

This time bottle no. 54 was a Spanish Bierzo wine, 2008 vintage. I'll say no more as I don't want to cast dispersion on the actual name of the wine or its maker, as the corked nature of a wine is independent of the wine itself or the maker. In fact this Bierzo was the middle bottle of 3 we tasted, so the new count started with the same wine that was had corked and this bottle was fabulous.



So we have now completed 3 rounds of bottle counts to a corked wine and here is what we have for stats:

#1 - 100 bottles to a corked wine
#2 - 120 bottles
#3 - 54 bottles
average - 91 bottles till corking!

Unfortunately in my first two bottle counts I did not distinguish screw caps from corks, so we will have to wait to the next count to start looking at those stats. Till the next corked bottle! May it be a long long time from now.

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New Bottle Count to the Next Corked Bottle

Hadn't posted my previous results of late on how many bottles of wine will you drink from before you hit that next corked bottle. I have been running between 60 and 100 bottles thus far, and so I begin anew on my latest count. This time I plan to distinguish between bottles with a cork versus those with a twist off cap. This is sort of important, but its like random sampling - from all the wines you drink, after how many different bottles of any kind of capping will you experience a corked bottle of wine. With so many wined now being capped by a metal-based twist off cap, your chances of experiencing a corked wine has gone down dramatically - a Good Thing for sure.


So for my new count we are at 8 bottles of which 5 had corks and 3 had twist off caps. I'll represent this as 8/5. Now its off to the weekend and many bottles ahoy!


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Word Clould for the Blog Posts Thus Far

Guess I talk most about Wine, hmmm need to expand my horizons and try and use some interesting and weird words in all future posts to see if I get them up the scale.

You can do your own at http://www.wordle.net/.