Wine Definitions

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Posted by Keith Levenberg
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Worst Bubble Ever
June 25, 2011
Superman stood for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Sometimes, they leave you some bland chardonnay
In a bottle that’s labeled Grand Cru Montrachet.

In fact, the number tells you more than Parker himself will tell you, because the accompanying tasting note will invariably make the wine sound as exciting and engaging as any number of uncontroversially classic wines; it’s only the obscenely high rating and the track record of the man bestowing it that signals that this is a wine to be avoided by all people of good taste.

An economic cycle in which greed for supranormal returns results in the inflation of asset prices far above their intrinsic value and which is recognized always to end in a panic and crash unless the asset is wine.

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Posted by Keith Levenberg
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Beaujolais 2009 Est Arrivée
December 17, 2010
Everybody is talking about 2009 Beaujolais.

The wine sold like hotcakes.

The system’s incognizance of functional and other qualitative differences among wines leads many people to condemn the scales as misleadingly univariate and to oppose the use of points altogether.

There is a direct analogy between those artists who learned to draw from comics rather than from life and the contemporary oenologists who model their wines after other highly rated wines rather than fashioning wine for the function it serves in life—spreading joy around a table.

The phrase “soil-to-glass transfer” coined by Rhône wine writer John Livingstone-Learmonth was apropos.

These included two cases of 2003 Bordeaux, a vintage which got everybody excited at the time as its unprecedentedly hot weather fueled speculation that the wines would end up super-ripe, rich, and exotic, but in fact the opposite proved true as it was so hot—“How hot was it?”—it was so hot that the grapevines threw their hands up in exasperation at the labor of having to ripen at all, and the wines ended up green, hard, and tannic.

The grape variety used in Burgundy for the production of sherry.

This is a sui generis expression of the grape, almost more comparable at this point in its life to a wine like Domaine de la Pépière’s Muscadet Clos des Briords than any riesling in my frame of reference.

The best examples of Reignots, which in my experience have originated from Domaine Robert Arnoux, Dominique Laurent, and Bouchard Père et Fils (before Bouchard’s rights reverted back to the Liger-Belair family—whose rendition in theory should also rank among the best but thus far has struck me as too primary to judge), have a powerful inner density to them in the fashion of Richebourg which I often find myself describing, for lack of any better word, as sheer torque.

One such tactic which has yielded impressive results for me over the years has probably occurred to anyone who has ever studied any maps of Burgundy, which reveal a number of affordable or even downright obscure vineyards nestled up against some of the most illustrious grand crus.

I enjoyed a simply stunning Vouette & Sorbée Champagne Blanc d’Argile there, which happened to be on the blackboard, and some Burgundies from Philippe Pacalet, which were not.

There was also a basic Cabernet Sauvignon, which I had never paid much attention to because the higher-end bottlings were already plenty affordable.

It was packed with rich, succulent fruit that eventually became mellowed by a stony mineral base that made the wine feel like a mouthful of liquified limestone.

Indeed, today’s premier cru Les Gaudichots are firmly structured wines and I can’t recall any examples—even a bottle this year from the weak 1992 vintage at age 19—that didn’t put up a barrier of burly tannin seeming to need more time to resolve.

For example, every now and then you taste a wine that is so transcendentally amazing that it’s like a novel you don’t want to end; you want to share it with everyone you know and to have a bottle at your disposal whenever you want to relive the experience.

Despite its deeper complexion, it features the same fierce acidic cut as its stablemate, but it’s the rockiness that lingers on the palate.

They’re the group one might pejoratively call the point-chasers.

There was also a basic Cabernet Sauvignon, which I had never paid much attention to because the higher-end bottlings were already plenty affordable.

Yet the wine from that day that lingered in my memory most saliently was from the Finger Lakes region in western New York, the Ravines Wine Cellars 2007 Dry Riesling.

Bordeaux, n.

What’s worse, because young riesling is so viscerally delicious, the wines destined for Mott’s apple juice decrepitude don’t necessarily taste any different on release from the wines that will maintain their glory.

With their intense dry-aged taste they reminded me of Peter Luger’s steaks—even better, actually, because the cooking at Luger doesn’t remotely compare, and the wine list at Luger is an unsubtle encouragement to order beer.

Then came the Enlightenment and its concomitant obsession with the classification of absolutely everything.

The Bordealais think the cash-flush Chinese will pay the unprecedentedly high prices they are asking.

I wish we could convince the consumer to accept a fizzy wine with all its perfume intact.”

You could drink well for years if you were limited to what you could grab off the shelves, but most of the interesting stuff is in the cellar, fetched via a contraption that’s not exactly a dumbwaiter but not quite an elevator, either, and you have to know the wine to ask for it.

The steaks are dry-aged for six weeks or more, cut thick, and seared perfectly black-and-blue.

Some were definitively bound for exile with no chance whatsoever of executive clemency; their very presence in my cellar stood as an affront to my pride and aspirations to good taste.

Chauvet also criticized modern consumers for insisting on their wines’ being clear in color and stripped of sediment and carbon dioxide:
“I don’t know how we got to this point, judging a wine by its limpidity.

Being made according to accepted standards of commercial merchantability and having no evident flaws other than the inability to deliver pleasure or satisfaction of any kind.

It had all the fruit of a ripe New World pinot with none of the fat, treacly glycerine, or the alcoholic sting.

What’s so striking about it is how effortlessly it manages to achieve this sense of balance and proportion.

It had started to develop some interesting gamey flavors, but for whatever reason seemed to me the least pinor noir-like of any of the wines in the lineup and too reminiscent of generic, ordinary red wine.

The group included Peter Liem of ChampagneGuide.net, Joe Salamone of Crush Wine & Spirits, Dan Melia of Mosel Wine Merchant, and assorted other industry insiders in addition to the two of us amateur scribes.

The condensed version of the story, as related in greater detail in Allen Meadows’ book on Vosne-Romanée, The Pearl of the Côte, is that DRC won the right to sell its Gaudichots as La Tâche in 1932, which resulted in its holdings given the official appellation of La Tâche ou Les Gaudichots when the appellations were codified under the official Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée law of 1936.

Château Mouton-Rothschild 2009 garnered a nearly-as-impressive 96-98+ score from Parker despite his noting that “the index of tannins, the highest ever measured, [is] a whopping 20% higher than the next highest vintage.”

So I might respectfully disagree with Kermit Lynch when he says that “Beaujolais should not be a civilized society lady; it is the one-night stand of wines.”

It is possible for a warthog to do this.

√ Chardonnay, n.

The pioneers such as Dr. Konstantin Frank and Hermann J. Wiemer had proven that making high-quality wines out of classic European vitis vinifera varieties was possible in the Finger Lakes.

It was difficult for me to choose a favorite among the David Leclapart 2008 Trépail, René Geoffroy 2004 Cumières, and Larmandier-Bernier 2002 Vertus.

Suddenly all those puzzling emails I had been getting from Danish email addresses with non-sequitur queries about the drinking windows and other arcana about Renaissance’s wines made sense.

Things were so much better when the wines used for this purpose were California cabernets in the Napa Valley “cult” wine genre that I had no interest in drinking.

The same story happens again and again, whether it’s about tulips, dot-com stocks, real estate, comic books, or wine.

Of or having qualities which inspire a taster to hold a glass of wine to the light to assess its depth of color, swirl the glass to take note of the multiplicity of aromatic compounds, partake a measured sip constrained by the wine’s dense concentration, gurgle air into the mouth, expectorate the wine into a sink or bucket, and assign the wine a quantum of points no fewer than 96, presumably so called because of the obvious similarity of such routines to the hedonistic lifestyle of an...