My mid week drinks...

After a hard day of laying out line posts for the last 2.5 acres of trellis, there is nothing like coming home to a great bottle of wine. But its mid week and hard to justify opening a bottle of good Pinot Noir. I think that is going to be a lot easier two or three years down the road when our label is out in some volume. When I say volume, believe me it is a relative term. I am talking about when we produce close to a thousand cases. Our initial vintage, out in May, will be only 140 cases. As good as the wine is, I don't think I will be drinking a lot of it. I have to sell it. It is going to break my heart. You are always in love with your first wine, but even more so when it delivers all the promise of the piece of land you have worked on for 5 years. The wine will be the 2004 Pinot Noir. I just tasted the 2005 which is in the barrel. Not drinking much of the 120 cases we will have of that wine will break my heart even more. It is the light at the end of the farming tunnel on this very difficult site called Lenne Estate.

I won't be able to afford my own wine on a daily basis for some time, so I look for wines that make me happy on a Wednesday. Thankfully, many seem to exist and remind me how my palate is ever changing. The inexpensive wines I used to drink five and six years ago bore me to death now. I am talking about the usual suspects, reasonably priced Australian wines and well made, single dimensional wines from California.  They were all warm, full bodied with some fruit and easy tannins. Today I can do a half a glass of them before I lose interest.

Instead I have turned to Spanish wines. Right now I think they represent the best value on the market for holding my interest. I recently mentioned a wine from Jamilla(Bodegas Luzon) as being one of the top values I have found in wine this year. After a case discount I ended up paying a little over six dollars a bottle. This week I bought a wine I have had before from a  previous vintage:
Bodegas Castano 2003 Hecula. Parker gave this wine an 90 and I knew exactly from that score, what the wine would be like. I could go on and on about how this wine could get an 90 and an Oregon Pinot from a good producer and vintage could get the same score. I could talk about how you would never think twice about this wine...unless you were writing a blog...and how the Pinot would take you through its layers of flavor and pop into your mind a week later. But why belabor the point. It was a Parker 90 and it delivered on the promise of what I expected from a 90 point Parker wine that was ten dollars.

The Castano Hecula is Monastrell(Mouvedre) and though in American Oak, which can normally ruin a wine for me, the barrels must have been neutral. There is no pitchy notes in the wine at all and the fruit is effusive though the wine isn't all that complex. Castano also makes a seven dollar version, the 2004 Castono Monastrell, which has been fermented using carbonic maceration(25%) and spends little time in oak. It is perfectly acceptable plonk for a wine professional though I didn't quite get the 89 Parker points. It may be a little more like their web site, flashy and fun to visit once, but would get annoying on repeat visits....we will see.Bodegas Castano

As good as the Spanish reds are, I still drink a little white wine before dinner and am about to bite my tongue with my next recommendation: the 2005 St. Michelle Riesling. I tried the 2004 version which I liked better, but the 2005 is nearly the same. I am not referring to the Erioca, which is a stylish wine that I have had in several blind tastings, I am talking about the six dollar Columbia Valley Riesling. I can only imagine how much of this wine is produced by Chateau St. Michelle and you have to be impressed with the wine making. I think this type of wine making rarely gets the streamers and confetti. Normally we reserve that for wines that come from great vineyards. In reality it should be the other way around. A winemaker that works with a great vineyard just has to make sure he or she doesn't screw it up. Here, the winemaker has to bring a fair amounts of different sites together and come up with a blend that works.

This is a wine that I sense the wine making and many wines like that are easy to dislike. But to their credit, they made it work. I don't know that you could ask more from a six dollar bottle of Riesling than you get from this. It is simple, quaffable, with good fresh fruit in the nose and a beautiful floral note. Okay, maybe it has been acidulated or something else accounts for the slight roughness on the finish, but I continue to quaff away.  This wine is built for Wednesday and Thai food and made me realize, how lucky we are to have such a simple pleasure of Thai food and Riesling, for so little money and even that mega producers get it right sometimes.

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