It’s understandably easy to be consumed by this tsunami of bleeding edge, fringe wine discovery and turn a cheek to the venerable.  Back in the mid-eighties, when I was first smitten by fine wine, cellar aged top vintage Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Cabernet, and Port were the alluring “cool” treats wine enthusiasts bantered about inside their haughty vinous social circles.  Now names like Donkey & Goat and Arianna Occhipinti, regions like Bierzo and Santorini, and experimental aging vessels like amphora instead of wood and steel dominate the chatter.  Most likely, you won’t find too much ’82 Bordeaux, ’89 Chateauneuf du Pape, ’74 California Cabernet, ’85 Burgundy, nor ’63 Port in the cellars of budding modern day winos.

Prohibitive price escalation for top wines in great vintages dampened hopes for drinking age worthy wine from historic wine regions and has changed the cultural fabric of US wine enthusiasm

But there is hope and a path to incorporating the intense rewards of nursing wine to maturity in a damp dark cellar without breaking the bank.  If you read the label closely, you’ll notice Domaine Marcoux, from France’s southern Rhone Valley village of Chateauneuf du Pape, has been making wine since the 1300′s.  Really, there’s town records when the village was just referred to as Chateauneuf, before Pope Clement V and succeeding Popes in the 1300′s hung their zucchettos in Avignon and lent the the papal reference to Chateauneuf.  In my brain, which is at its best processing simple thoughts, 700 years of experience with active vineyard production probably has something good to offer.

Around 1998 I picked up some ***** 1995 Domain Marcoux, not their premium Vieilles Vignes bottling, just the Chateauneuf du Pape comprised of 80% Grenache and the rest Mourvedre, Syrah and Cinsault.  I paid $15 on sale off an $18 regular price.  I opened one bottle and laid the rest away until this week when I thought it was time to revisit the wine.  Frankly speaking, the wine is perfect.  100 points, 98 points, 95 points….who knows.  But the wine is now perfect.  It smacks of regality, classicism, and greatness.  Amidst an onslaught of new great wines I have been trying over the last six months, it sits as the finest wine I have tasted this year.  It is living proof that there is no need to buy several hundred dollar Cote Rotie, Bordeaux, or anything of the sort in order to experience the ultimate reward when venerability combines with patience.  The wine is now in complete balance, purity in black cherry fruit, secondary aromatics dancing with the fresh berry, outstanding acidity that kept the wine exhilarating, and tamed tannins that were overwhelming in the late nineties.  I could have drank a magnum by myself, I never wanted the experience to end. This beautiful wine has more life ahead, maybe 5-20 years, who knows, but right now it is drinking perfect.

To further demonstrate the lesson, you can find 1995 Domaine Marcoux on the market today for between $160 and $235.  Honestly, it is worth the money, but why pay it?  Today’s wine culture has more than 80% of acquired wine consumed within 48 hours after purchase.  There are wines on the market today for $15-$25 that come from the Rhone Valley, Bordeaux, Languedoc, etc. that have the history to prove they will age like champs.  I wonder how much of our national culture that increasingly smacks of impatience is getting in the way of thinking forward 20 years when it comes to wine enthusiasm, investing small money today for magical moments later in life?  Laying wines like Domaine Marcoux down is a personal fixation, not a crusade, so let’s move on.

But if it was a crusade, then I would make this one more point.  If you want to drink perfect $200 valued wine with bagels and cream cheese on Sundays at 11am like my friend Rich Auffrey and I did, then you will want to adopt my fixation.

There was a time in French history that Burgundy and Jura were joined at the hips.  Only 72 miles separates Malamboz, Brignot’s Jura base, and Saint-Romain, the source of his Pinot Noir.  Just a bit over 100 miles separates Brignot from Gamay, sourced in Beaujolais from Morgon to Chiroubles. Until now, the Jura’s Sherry-like Vin Jaune and proximity to Switzerland compared with Beaujolais’ and Burgundy’s respectively successful traditions with Gamay and Pinot Noir offered unscalable walls of separation between the vinous regions.  But then, evidently, Brignot’s own local Jura vineyards failed and he set out to conquer the divides.

It is fair to say that Brignot is part of a hidden natural wine cognoscenti; small winemakers experimenting in wineries and garages with uber-natural approaches to coaxing the essence of fruity goodness from wine grapes.  I wonder how many winemakers there are right now going undiscovered with their tiny experimental productions and disconnect from world markets?  Brignot took the unconventional route, bringing non-Jura varieties back  home to play with, that is now making enough noise so the right sellers and buyers can’t fully escape it.

10% Alcohol

My connection to wines like this, Matteo and Kerri at the Wine Bottega in the North End of Boston, slip these products into my orders on a regular basis.  It’s a demonstration of the value in supporting great wine sellers like them.  This time, Matteo insisted I try the full set of Brignot’s Gamay and Burgundy wines he was able to secure from Zev Rovine. Truth be told, I have never tasted Gamay nor Pinot Noir quite like it.  While I am still spinning from sheer pleasure, I wonder if these wines could ever establish mass appeal.  They are so very different, offering Pinot Noir with exquisite crispy citric character and wild gamey Gamay (gamey gamay…repeating to reiterate this is not a typo), from the way palates have been trained to appreciate these varieties.  The wines are for open minds, willing to get closer to what happens to the fruit with carbonic maceration when you ferment and age full cluster Gamay with stems and really do nothing else to help it along.  For those willing to transcend the divide between wine making establishment and the natural cognoscenti, it is possible to embrace a kaleidoscope of flavor, aromatics, and texture that occur when you let the fruit just become what it intended to be in the hands of simple winemakers.

At the time of writing, I have only tasted the Envol de la Fille (Flight of the daughter) Gamay and the Sun Of A Beach Pinot Noir.  I want to drink lots more of both.

$35 **** Envol de la Fille, Gamay, Morgon, Beaujolais

Wild animal and truffle aromatics that stay pronounced while you nurse the bottle throughout the evening.  Rich black cherry fruit dominates, but in a very light style.  The delicate nature of the wine in your mouth is in direct juxtaposition with the bold fruit core and the heavy duty aromas that you might expect from stinky Burgundy or saddle leather southern Rhones.  A monumental new expression of Gamay for me.

$ ***1/2 Sun of a Beach, Pinot Noir, Saint Romain, Burgundy

The wine is ONLY 10% alcohol.  Drink up! It smells like a cross between sweet pink grapefruit, strawberry sucking candy, and earth.  The wine is light and bright, like a really watered down version of grape jello, and has a bit of murkiness to it.    There is caressing acidity that neatly aligns with the fruit.  The finish is pure pink grapefruit and citrus.  I had a funny thought about a baking analog drinking this wine.  I thought if most Burgundy is a chocolate brownie, then this is the macaroon version.  That may not make a lot of sense to you now, but try the wine and see if it fits.

These wines, never intended to be made in Jura, are magical.  But beware; if you were raised on California Cabernet or big Syrahs and that’s what wine means to you, these could be strange enough to your palate that they will defy what you ever knew about wine.  But hey, what’s so bad about that in a magical life of continual wine discovery and learning?

More Reading:  Great post from Sophie’s Glass on visit with Brignot and Wrap up on Paris tasting including Brignot

We had a discussion based on, among a few other things, these questions:

1. Are you familiar with Domaine Serene?
2. How often do you drink Chardonnay, and for what occasion(s)?
3. What’s your experience with Willamette Valley Chardonnay (and/or Dijon clones), and how do you think it compares to Chardonnays of other regions?
4. How would you describe Chardonnay’s current reputation among your readers and consumers?

I am quite familiar with Domaine Serene’s outstanding Pinot Noir program, don’t drink Chardonnay nearly as much as I used to, and have little experience with the variety in Willamette.  Question #4 was an intriguing one and it gave away the PR and marketing challenge Domaine Serene confronted; what is Chardonnay’s reputation with readers and consumers?  In one Chardonnay tale reported on by the Wine Institute, it is “the most widely planted winegrape (95,271 acres) and ..the most popular wine in the U.S….with sales increases every year….28 percent of California’s table wine volume shipped to the U.S. market in 2010.” Face value, the consumer data is all green lights.

But in a separate Chardonnay tale, the once familiar ABC (anything but Chardonnay) tale, more selective consumers have said “no” to Chardonnay and searched for white wine substitues.  The truth to tale #2 is now better understood as the outcry for fruit-not butter and oak, and wines with balance and acidity to make you salivate and that taste good with food.  While I used to drink a lot more Chardonnay through the mid 90′s, I did get tired picking through a sea of imbalanced, heavily-oaked and caramel renditions in search of the pinpoint balance and fruit focus that makes Chardonnay a world class wine.  Still, so many of the younger wine drinkers (meaning under 40) I know resist Chardonnay, replaced by “hipper” Albarino, Pinot Grigio, Godello, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Gruner Veltliner, and a longer list of white varieties you can’t easily spell or pronounce.

Somewhat guilty myself, I moved around with my head down these past ten years, lured to the Loire Valley, Burgundy, Galicia, Lombardy,and elsewhere,…getting caught up in discovery and failing to check back in on American winemakers now paying homage to the more traditional Burgundian Chardonnay treatment that at least one significant piece of the market has been screaming for more of.  For sure, the vast US acreage planted to Chardonnay is supported by plenty of bulk gooey, oaky, buttery chardonnay being poured all over town, but not for the people I drink wine with.  I remember opening a delicious bottle of 2005 L’angevin Heintz Vineyard Chardonnay upon arrival at a wine tasting and watching in amazement as many said “no thank you” when they recognized the Chardonnay bottle shape.  That kind of formed bias continues to play out in restaurants and wine shops all around America.  But, is it possible that high end domestic winemaking has been running to catch up to the market and it’s still enough of a secret to keep a piece of the potential Chardonnay market sidelined?

I was curious and sympathetic to the Domaine Serene cause because I knew they were up against it if indeed they were going to rely on their Dijon clones to produce Chardonnays that the upper end of the market will stand up and notice.  In exchange for all my jabbering, Domaine Serene’e Allan Carter sent me a bottle of the 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay, blended from the Cote Sud (47%), Clos du Soleil (23%), Clos du Lune (16%) and Etoile (14%) to taste after just ten days in the bottle.  He sent it alongside their monumental, silky, gorgeous, herb tinged, fruit forward Evenstad Reserve Pinot Noir made in the great 2008 Oregon vintage, just as a matter of context and to demonstrate the abiding quality of the Chardonnay.

If there are more Wilamette, Oregon, or California Chardonnays produced in this style then I have been missing out on something important.  The 2010 Evenstad Reserve Chardonnay has a very light yellow hue, and at first a restrained lemon peel aromatic is all you get, followed by a feint touch of lees as the wine opens.  The wine goes on to provide a totally clean palate impression, with wet slate and resin aromas.  It offers a delicate impression while expressing pure Chardonnay fruit, with always present acidity that gets the juices flowing, but stops short of being overly edgy.  The wine’s purity, cleanliness,and absence of wood reminds me of austere Chablis.  The wine, in two words, is mind blowing.  All the PR babbling about natural wines, clonal legacies, first to plant, and Burgundian style aside, this Chardonnay demonstrates what it will take to regain the attention of the serious upper end of the informed wine market.  And with the freedom for winemakers to style and blend Chardonnay as they please, the landscape is wide open for a high end Chardonnay revival.

I never would have been able to guess this was a US Chardonnay.  That’s my fault because I have not been keeping pace, going along and ignoring Chardonnay because of the wanderless and uninteresting style the varietal adopted as it was popularized and heavily planted.  Bravo Domaine Serene, you have turned my head and produced a Chardonnay of stunning beauty and grace, just like it’s supposed to be.

Note: The wines reviewed here were provided as complimentary press samples.  Information regarding availability, production, or pricing was not available at the time this was published.  The information will be added as it becomes available.

Great Bordeaux vintages used to be easy to deal with.  Buy the top wines in the best years and lay them away for 10, 20, 50, or 75 years.  That was a no-brainer strategy when first growths like Latour, Haut Brion, and Margaux sold for $50-$75 and second growths like Pichon Lalande cost less than $400 a dozen. Today, the average release price on wine-searcher for one bottle of 2009 Chateau Margaux is $1,352.  Without adjusting purchase patterns, it would be easy to spend $20,000 in every strong vintage on a half dozen cases for the cellar.  Since Bordeaux lives very near the top of the wine food chain in my world, creative acquisition strategies would need to replace shopping lists laden with venerable chateaus.  In the fall of 2011, Neal Martin of the Wine Advocate wrote this after tasting through more than 100 2009 Cru Bourgeois:

…for all those disenfranchised Bordeaux-lovers who vowed never to buy Claret again after facing escalating prices. I would urge you to consider some of the rich pickings to be found. These are wines that are a fraction of the price of the top names, these are wines that are physically available and these are wines that at best, give the Grand Cru Classé a damn good run for their money….They combine Bordeaux classicism with the ripe fruit that the 2009 vintage bestowed, the textures are often silky smooth and many display wonderful delineation, precision and purity on the finish.

Thinking about the glory in Bordeaux, it is impossible to escape the discussion of aging and balance; tannin for structure and its supporting role in aging, fruit for its terroir driven purity and charm, and acidity for the liveliness it gives to the fruit.  While some great vintages showcase riper fruit like 1990 and others more backward tannic cloaked wines like 1986, the best of the best vintages are about impeccable balance. I’ve concluded it’s that balance, along with the natural gifts of the Bordeaux growing region, that allows these wines to age into the gracefully elegant old claret that makes aging Bordeaux a worthwhile endeavor.  We discovered that very signature balance associated with the greatest Bordeaux years in the twelve bottles of humble 2009s we examined next to each other, blind.  If one consistent difference between the greatest chateau and these just might be length of time to maturity, the best of the wines we tasted should deliver magical silky drinking in 10-20 years.

Scanning my notes I noticed repetitive indications of good acidity, manageable tannins, and sweet berry fruit. A friend with one of the finest Bordeaux knowledge banks and tasting acumen despite having grown up in the Languedoc, Jacques, compared these wines to the best of the 2008 vintage; “balanced and nicely rounded….food wines”.  Jacques suggested that the wines would be at their peak in 12-15 years.  The one thing the entire group of 17 seemed to agree on is that the best of the wines we tasted were severe values, and a viable path to filling a piece of the cellar as homage to the ’09 vintage.  For my part, I will be buying the top five wines by the case and laying them away for at least ten years.  Here are some of the highlight wines of the evening:

$31 **** 2009 La Vieille Cure, Fronsac

The evening’s second place wine, and my own favorite wine of the tasting.  The color was the blackest and most opaque of all, with exotic aromas of soy sauce and Szechuan peppercorns, big, ripe, and a lengthy memorable finish.

$24 **** 2009 Chateau Boutisse, St. Emilion

My second favorite wine, but not voted on nor favored by the rest of the group.  Light in color with mocha and tobacco leaf on the nose, the wine combined rich ripe kirsch fruit flavor with a solid finish.  It boasts class and elegance now.

$24 ***1/2 2009 Chateau Bernadotte, Haut Medoc

This was the group’s favorite wine of the night.  I liked the wine, a beautiful perfumed nose, char, rasberry fruit, and excellent acid and tannin levels.

$29 *** Vrai Canon Bouche, Fronsac

While the wine won third place on point votes, it was a highly contested wine with half the group heralding it and the other half stingy in their praise.  I liked the wine for its strength in the mid palate, its richness, and massive mouthfeel.

The only two wines in the group that did not figure into anyone’s recommendations were the Roc and Bouscat Cadus.

How can something as virtual as a blog offer any similarities to the iron clad parent/child relationship?  If you consider 76 million Tamagotchis (that three buttoned, key-chained, screen of a virtual pet that took Japan by storm in 1996) were sold in less than four years, then dancing between virtual and real worlds is anything but unprecedented. Still, it took three years to make this uncanny connection between parenting and blogging.

There are definitely a few important differences between raising children and authoring WineZag.  For one, the blog doesn’t require $500K in college tuitions.  Blogs don’t graduate from diapers to cars either. Also, no health insurance…just the occasional back-up. Finally, at some point in their teens or early twenties, children move on to take care of their own needs independently.  The distinctions between parenting and blogging end here though, replaced by the unavoidable and requisite devotion required to do either one well.

25 Points of Comparability in Wine Blogging and Parenting

• You think and worry about them every day, multiple times
• Progress is keenly monitored for each.  Web analytics, height, weight, report cards, peer group influence, etc.
• You care about who they associate with- links, follows, friends
• Each is injected with your values and vision as they develop their own personalities; they become a vivid reflection of you
• Both require your feeding; words, wisdom, or food.
• You translate your personal learning and experiences for both
• You share travel with them, always taking them with you and seeing things anew through their eyes
• Their schedules, no matter how much they conflict with your own, take precedence
• No matter how tired you are, there is a reserve of energy and focus you can draw on at any time for either
• You make mistakes with both that you don’t realize until later in life.  I wish I could be the perfect parent or blogger, but I am not.
• They talk back to you and you might not like hearing what they have to say; blogs through comments and children, well, they just speak their minds.
• Both provide intense pleasure and are sources of personal accomplishment
• They will or won’t develop authority over time based on how well you did your job
• Both will eventually have Facebook and Twitter identities; another level of worry about who they hang out with
• They require curfews-if you are staying up too late at night with either of them, it will eventually get in the way of your day job
• You are embarrassingly proud of any recognition or awards given by peers or authoritative bodies in their worlds
• Just when you think you’ve got them on the right track, new challenges and hurdles arise
• Both are marathons, not sprints
• Eventually you realize both are thankless jobs, yet you never question either
• It takes a good nine months from the time you start thinking and planning the process until they are live and require your care
• Once you take the plunge, there is no turning back
• The bond that connects you with each is unexplainable to anyone that has not experienced it for themselves
• You can dress them up to look handsome and presentable, but unless they are educated and rich in personal values they won’t get very far in life
• You feel intense guilt and failure when you ignore them for unnatural periods of time
• Eventually you reach the point where you could not imagine life without them

Thanks for everything WineZag, Alex, and Matt.  You have given back so much.  Love you all!