Earlier this week, I stopped by Arelquin Wine Merchants for a small but very impressive tasting of wines imported by Kermit Lynch. A few favourites:

Feipu dei Massaretti ‘08 Rossese - Liguria, Italy - $22
“Savory, spicy red native to the western Ligurian Riviera, most notably the town of Dolceacqua.” -Vino Italiano on the lesser known grape, Rossese. It was very light and, apparently characteristically, very spicy. Perfect red for the seafood and pesto centered cuisine of Liguria.

Hippolyte Reverdy ‘07 Sancerre Rouge (Pinot Noir) - Loire, France - $26
Cinnamon spice and orangy citrus characters come to mind. I still enjoy the novelty of tasting red Sancerre, which makes up less than 20% of production.

Marcel Lapierre ‘07 ‘Cuvee Lapierre’ - Morgon, Beaujolais, France - $42
Another wine I’ve been wanting to taste for a while. Made only in ripe vintages from old vines, the Cuvee Lapierre is built to be able to handle some age. Gorgeous fruit and a slight bump-up in depth from the straight Morgon label. I’m not convinced it’s worth twice the price, but maybe time could tell. More background on Lapierre here.

The most exciting for me was the Auguste Clape ‘08 St-Péray, Marsanne from the northern Rhône valley in France. Domaine Auguste Clape is known best for iconic and dense Syrah reds from the small village of Cornas. Auguste’s first vintage was 1949. Today work on the domaine’s 11 hectares/27 acres of vines has been taken over by the next two generations of the Clape family, Pierre and his son Olivier.

St-Péray is the southernmost appellation in the northern Rhône. The vineyard area is tiny, 62 hectares/153 acres, planted on steep granite and pebble soils. There are strictly two white varietals grown, Marsanne and Roussanne, used to make both still and, at continually fading levels, traditional method sparkling wine.

This wine is incredible. It asserts itself over every new world example of Marsanne or Roussanne I’ve tried. See, you don’t need to oak the shit out of these varietals! The purity of pear fruit with floral notes on the nose is awesome. The texture on the palate is beautiful - slightly viscous and minerally. Drink when possible. $38.

As always, please feel free to contribute any information, experience or tasting notes that you feel are relevant and check back next Sunday. See past Sunday posts here.

I’ve sat quietly on the sidelines reading others praise Thierry Puzelat’s Clos du Tue Boeuf 08 ‘Brin de Chèvre’ (particularly Guilhaume), from the Loire’s Touraine region. Made with natural methods from a grape which maybe ten other producers in the world cultivate, Menu Pineau. For more background, Wine Terroirs has a very in depth post on everything Thierry Puzelat.

We drank half the bottle with a late dinner. The remaining half sat in my fridge like a glowing beacon. Should i get up in the middle of the night and drink it? Maybe breakfast? How will it taste tomorrow? I was sure it would take more than a couple days to kill this wine. Intriguing as hell. While not for everyone, it borders on being esoteric, but should speak to those who enjoy the weird wonders of the Loire.

The nose is a bizarre blend of vegetable, floral and briny characters. Fresh cut flower stalks came immediately to mind. The palate is pure puckering lemon acidity and minerality. I can think of few wines more suited to accompany white fish. Check it out if you get the chance. $22 at Arelquin in San Franisco.

Le Brin de Chèvre is like this Beach House video in many ways. Or maybe it isn’t, but I enjoy them both.

A couple weeks back, The Atlantic pulled away from the noise of the Olympics to shine a little light on BC’s wine industry.

Read the whole thing here…

This post arrives amid the ongoing saga in New York State, where Governor David Paterson is supporting a bill to join thirty-five other states and legalize wine retail in supermarkets. Motivated by New York’s giant budgetary deficit, Paterson hopes to raise money through franchise fees, taxes, and an increase in wine sales (an estimated 20%). The Governor even intends to tax soft drinks. With our own glooming budgetary situation in British Columbia, is it inconceivable that Premier Campbell and the Liberals would set their sights on slackening the liquor licensing to include grocery stores? This isn’t a completely fair parallel, as unlike New York, our government’s major qualm about dealing out licenses to grocers would be then having to compete with the new licensees for sales. Surely BC’s Finance Minister is sitting in a dark room somewhere, mulling over the numbers, and envisioning how much money they could save by ridding their hands of the great government liquor monopoly.

As a visitor to the US, I always marveled at the novelty of buying alcohol at grocery and corner stores. Why can’t it be like this back home? I’d ponder. Even after I had moved to San Francisco five months ago, I was still overwhelmed by the idea, but it didn’t take long for the reality to sink in. While a reasonable place to grab an occasional six-pack, I’ve yet to see a corner store with a good wine selection or prices I don’t cringe at. One of my nearest mom and pop stores sells Santa Margarita Pinot Grigio for $37. Thirty-seven dollars. Those sir, are strip club markups.

Photo taken from biritemarket.com

While grocery stores tend to be better in the pocket gouging category, the selections are often dismal. The large chains, Safeway for example, need to keep consistent products stocked from store to store and as such, fill the shelves with industrially produced garbage. The best I’ve seen in San Francisco is Bi-Rite Market in the Mission. Clearly their wine buyer is putting a lot of thought into what goes on the shelf, which must be an awesome job, as there is only one store to stock. Whole Foods is another grocer that handles wine sales much better than the rest, but I still have mixed feelings. Although much of their value selection is mass produced table wine and their markups err towards the high side, they do stock some interesting labels including some bio and organic wines. It’s rarely difficult for me to find a bottle of wine to have with dinner. However, as Alice Feiring brings up in her post A Commercial Break: Whole Foods and Australia, wouldn’t it be great if Whole Foods handled the wine aisle with the same respect as the produce department? Bi-Rite and Whole Foods are both the exceptions.

When looking for a good bottle, I still have to make the trek to a specialty wine shop just as I would in Vancouver. The major difference being that on route here, I pass twenty stores where I could have gotten a bottle of Barefoot Pinot Grigio instead. So in the end, would being able to toss a bottle of wine into the cart while grocery shopping be any benefit to British Columbian wine lovers other than convenience? I would imagine not, except the added competition may encourage existing wine shops to reevaluate what they choose to sell, the ones that survive anyways. It would be interesting to see what kind of selections retailers like Urban Fare, Choices, and Whole Foods would build and whose task that would be. In New York, the public seems to be in favour of the proposed bill. How many established, privately owned wine shops will get killed off? Likely plenty.

My latest grocery store buy was from Whole Foods. The Naia ‘08 from Rueda DO, just northwest off the center of Spain and 100% Verdejo. Super fresh blend of tropical and citrus fruit on the nose… verging on being too candied, but the surprising kick of minerality on the palate made everything okay. Not bad at all and good value, even at Whole Food’s markups. $13.99.

The much-lauded and discussed Blood Into Wine (we talked about it here…) finally hits the big screen in Vancouver for a one-week run starting Friday at East Van’s Rio Theatre!  Show-times are on their site’s calendar and, once again, here’s the trailer:

Here’s what I tried yesterday:

1. Zippy  2. Floral  3. Boring

1. Off  2. Cabernet-ish  3. Sings!  4. Textbook

1. Gold  2. Inky  3. Peppered

Bierzo is yesterday’s news. Wine writers have been prophesizing its rise for over four years, but this past week marked the first instance that I understood what the noise was about.

A remote collection of valleys in the Northwestern Spanish province of León, Bierzo lies just above the northeast corner of the inset Portuguese rectangle. Close to 60 wineries produce from 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of planted vines on diverse soils (lots of slate and gravel) spanning 23 municipalities including the largest and picturesque town of Ponferrada.

Map credit to pour-favor.com

Admirably, Bierzo DO lawmakers have stuck behind their local grapes instead of allowing the indigenous to be replaced with the popular (Tempranillo, Garnacha, or Cariñena). Mencía is the main red grape, recently myth-busted by DNA testing as being a kin of Cab Franc, and Garnacha Tintorera, a dark fleshed grape also called Alicante. Bierzo law allows “experimental” grapes to make up less than 15% of the blend - Tempranillo, Merlot, and Cab Sauv. Although I still haven’t seen or tasted white Bierzo, the grapes are Doña Blanca, Godello, and Palomino, with experimentals Malvasía, Chardonnay, and Gewürztraminer. Lets keep those at 15%. Selfish, but I haven’t been yearning for new sources of Cabernet or Chardonnay anytime recently.

Like many ancient vineyard regions, Bierzo was first an agricultural and mining hub of the Romans and has been a Spanish recognized Denominación de Origen since 1989.

Image credit spittoon.biz

The prices are creeping up as word continues to get out and high profile producers continue to muddle around here. This isn’t the next well for cheap Spanish wine, but rather something more serious; the next Priorat or Ribera del Duero. Unlike these Spanish greats, Bierzo has something unique - the chance to prove itself with grapes no one else is growing.

Álvaro Palacios is a big name in Spain and especially in Priorat. Teaming with his nephew Ricardo Pérez, they’ve been staking claims here since 1999. Keep an eye out for his Pétalos label. Another name known for quality, Dominio de Tares, became established as recently as 2000 and is now one of the bigger producers in town.

The Dominio de Tares ‘05 Cepas Viejas (Old Vines) comes from 60 year old bush-trained Mencía vines and is fermented and aged for 9 months in both American and French oak.

This wine is a beautiful marriage between fresh vibrant berry fruit and an earthy funk - hay and barns (what I consider to be an attractive stroke of bret). Graphite and some sweet American oak aromas. Medium weight, a belt of dusty tannin, and great complexities that evolve on your palate and in your glass. Ahhh! I now see. Delicious stuff.

Seek it out. Marquis in Vancity is where I found this bottle for $35. Oddly, it’s showing up in the BCLDB for $60. Maybe a different label? Other Bierzos offered by the BCLDB, including the Pétalos here.

Vaynerchuk on Bierzo

As always, please feel free to contribute any information, experience or tasting notes that you feel are relevant and check back next Sunday. Read past Sunday posts here.

My good pal Jeff Curry came by Salt yesterday with Fabian Olaiz, the Export Manager of Prado Rey wines from Ribera del Duero, Spain.  He had a satchel full of fun, from zippy whites to rich, deep reds and it was a great opportunity to revisit a couple things I’d tried before and dive into some new stuff.

First, a little bit about Prado Rey:

Prado Rey own the biggest vineyard (1285 acres) of the Ribera del Douro D.O. just north of Madrid.  Using solar power widely in their gravity-flow winery, Prado Rey also use all aspects of their farmland which also has 800 cattle along with sheep, corn, beets, alfalfa, potatoes, sunflowers and more.

Here’s a crazy tour of their facilities:

The Wines:

Prado Rey 2008 Verdejo

From 50-year-old vines and coming in around 20 bucks, there were honeydew and watermelon notes on the nose with a ton of super-bright lime, cranberry and tart lemon candy zippiness on the palate that went on and on and on.  A bit of that slate-y wet rock thing as well.  Dry, juicy, delicious.

Incidentally, Spell-Check is mad at me for using the word zippiness, and would rather I say nippiness, happiness, sappiness or peppiness.  Whatever.

Prado Rey 2009 Verdejo

New vintage, and we’ve gone from synthetic cork to Stelvin closure.

This one’s violently different, much more feminine with lavender and lychee on the nose into delicate mango, passionfruit and pomegranate on the palate.  Again, 20 bucks, but I prefer the intensity of the ‘08 for it’s typicity, if nothing else.

Prado Rey 3 Barricas 2007 Verdejo

Around $35, this one has a hint of French oak to it and comes from 100-year-old bush vines.  Reminiscent of a fresh key lime pie cooling on the window sill of a quaint farmhouse in the country, the grapes were macerated on the skins for-

Fuck everything, THIS STUFF’S AMAZING!!!  NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM!!

Prado Rey ‘Elite’ 2006 Tinta Fina

A great $45 value that has the density, layers and characters like vintage Dickens.  Single estate Tinta Fina, it’s a little mushroomy, wild and fungal on the nose, but the palate - OH, the palate!  That ‘forest floor’ thing is definitely going on here,  with black cherry, cloves, fresh ground pepper, kalamata olives, cocoa, currants and the tiniest speck of fresh basil. Anything from wood-oven pizza to game to steak, or even on its own.  Run, don’t walk.

Prado Rey’s wines are quite widely available in Vancouver, at Everything Wine, Kits Wine Cellar, Liberty and more.

Unfortunately, the 3 Barricas 2007 Verdejo isn’t available yet.  But bug Jeff, he’ll make it happen for you.

On Tuesday, the B.C. Finance Minister dropped his recession-shaped budget as British Columbians scrambled to stay clear. What at first appeared to be a slight reduction in wine prices (because of everyone’s favourite new tax, the HST!), will actually be made up for by tacking a few extra percent to the province’s 117% wine markup. There may however, be a very small price break for anyone buying local wine.

I’m going step aside and pass the details on to those who know what they’re talking about:

Wineries May Pay for Budget Shortfall - from Wines & Vines

BC’s Budget - Effects on Wine Industry - from Mark Hicken at Winelaw.ca