The Wine Curmudgeon

Wine of the week: Trivento Malbec Reserve 2012

The Wine Curmudgeon does not drink much malbec, other than to taste it so I can write write that I don’t drink much malbec. The vast majority of the malbec we buy (and we buy wineries and wineries of it, with malbec sales up almost 50 percent in 2011) is full of sweet fruit and without balance, the dreaded cherry cough syrup style of wine.

The Trivento ($11, sample, 14%) isn’t one of those wines. It’s a surprisingly solid Argentine malbec that outshines most of the other $10 versions that are on store shelves. Yes, there is lots of blueberry fruit aroma and flavor, the hallmark of cheap Argentine malbec and all that most of the other wines offer.

But the Trivento also has a fine, grippy back end, and that was the surprise: Nicely done tannins and even some acid balancing all that fruit and letting you know that this is a red wine made to taste like a red wine. That’s a rare treat.

Also surprising: The wine needs food, which is something that most of the others don’t. Serve it with beef, as the Argentines would,  or even roast chicken.

Wine of the week: Hedges CMS Red 2011

Hedges has made terrific $10 wines for as long as the Wine Curmudgeon has been championing the cheap wine cause, and this version of its trademark red blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and syrah is no exception.

There are many reasons to recommend the 2011 ($14, sample, 13.5%), the 25th vintage of this label: The distinctive Washington state fruit-forward style (cherry and black cherry), which speaks to respect for the grapes and not consumer focus groups; surprising balance for wine that offers this much fruit, so that it actually has tannins and acid to offset the former; and the price, which will be at least a couple of dollars less than $14 at most retailers.

This is a food wine, a little heavier than past vintages. This doesn’t mean it’s better or worse – just different, and there is nothing wrong with that. Serve it at summer cookouts, burgers and the like, all of which will play nicely with the wine’s fruity style. Grilled sausages, perhaps?

Finally, a note about the label, which is about as anti-cute as possible: Hedges has made a concerted effort to be different over the past several years, and that included forming a group to eliminate wine scores. The label, with its flourishes and faux fleur de lis, is part of that. I’m not sure I like it, but I appreciate the difference.

Expensive wine 52: d'Arenberg The Dead Arm Shiraz 2008

That the best news for the Australian wine business in the past couple of years is the decline in the value of the Aussie dollar says everything anyone needs to know about the struggles the wine industry is enduring Down Under.

There are too many grapes, too many indifferently made cheap wines, and too many expensive wines made in the Parkerized style that is no longer popular.

Having said that, I’ve tasted several Australian wines in the past year that demonstrate that not everyone is at a loss about what to do next. Yalumba’s $10 wines are everything that most of the rest of the country’s $10 wines aren’t.

And The Dead Arm ($65, sample, 14.5%), like most of d’Arenberg’s products, does the same thing for expensive wine. It’s dark and interesting, with earthiness and spiciness up front and layers and layers and layers of black fruit flavors after that. It’s not so much that it’s well made; it should be for this price. The stunner is that it’s a value at $65, an absolutely amazing and complex wine that tastes of Australia ande the McLaren Vale region, but isn’t over-ripe or over-alcoholic.

Highly recommended. Drink now, or buy to age for a couple of years or even longer. It should become rounder and more integrated and that much more fun to drink. What more can we want from a wine?

Wine of the week: Cono Sur Bicicleta Pinot Noir 2012

The Cono Sur was the first wine we tasted during our pinot noir extravaganza this month, and it didn’t do much for me. I thought it was more like the Beaujolais I drank in the 1980s than pinot noir.

Two dozen pinot noirs later, I changed my mind.

It impressed me so much, in fact , that the Cono Sur ($9, sample, 13.5%) overcame my pre-disposition against Chilean pinot noir, which is often overpriced, poorly made, or both, and cute labels, a rant that regular visitors have read many times. What changed my mind was the aroma, earthy and spicy, and the taste, cherry fruit that wasn’t too fruity, and surprisingly soft, pinot-like tannins.

Does this wine taste like red Burgundy or top-notch Oregon? Of course not. It doesn’t even taste like Mark West or its knockoffs, the fruity, low-acid, red wines that have revolutionized pinot nor and made it affordable and accessible.

Instead, it’s an excellent example of how to make a wine taste like its varietal at this price, using carbonic maceration instead of traditional fermentation (which explains my confusion with Beaujolais, where carbonic maceration is common).

One warning: The Cono Sur, thanks to its screwcap, takes a while to open up. That’s one reason why it didn’t impress me when I first tasted it. But give it 15 or 20 minutes, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2014 $10 Hall of Fame.

Barefoot wine review 2013

This year, the Wine Curmudgeon picked two Barefoot award winners to review – the pink moscato, which earned a double gold this month at a prestigious California competition, and the merlot, which got a gold at the 2011 Critics Challenge (the 2013 version of which I judged over the weekend).

My impressions? Both were sound, not flawed, provided value, and were much more impressive than the pinot noir and sauvignon blanc in the 2012 Barefoot review.

More, after the jump:

26 bottles of pinot noir on the wall, 26 bottles. ...

These are the dead soldiers from yesterday’s under-$15 pinot noir tasting, undertaken at the behest of Beverage Media for an upcoming article (and I still have a half dozen or so to taste). I’ll link to the story when it runs later this summer and offer my thoughts; several of the wines will also show up on the blog in reviews.

Surprisingly, given the Wine Curmudgeon’s less than happy experience with a similar sweet red wine tasting, all but a handful of the pinots were professional and sound. A half dozen or so were much better than that, and even those that didn’t taste like pinot noir were at least drinkable red wine blends.

A tip ‘o the Curmudgeon’s fedora to the legendary Diane Teitelbaum, who tasted the wines with me and made many funny comments along the way.

 

Expensive wine 51: Stags' Leap Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2010

One of the the things that California winemakers rarely have to worry about is weather. It’s almost always ideal for growing grapes, and is one reason why the technical quality of California wine is the best in the world. Never a flaw, never a missed beat.

That wasn’t the case in 2010, which was unusually cool and even wet. This meant that winemakers couldn’t let the fruit stay on the vine until it ripened and then ripened some more, the process that helps produce the telltale richness and fruitiness that expensive California wine is famous for.

Some winemakers made up the difference with their bag of tricks; I’ve tasted reds and even whites with high alcohol and extracted fruit from the 2010 vintage, which wasn’t supposed to happen. But we need to get those scores, don’t we?

And then there are wines like the Stag’s Leap ($53, sample, 13.9%), which tastes like one would expect given the weather: less fruity and less rich (though, in keeping with the winery’s style, still reasonable alcohol levels). It smells like typical Napa Valley cabernet, fruity and spicy, but it doesn’t taste like it. The black fruit is subdued and the tannins are  subtle and stay well in the back. The wine lacks a red Bordeaux’s earthiness, but tasting this blind might confuse more than one person.

This is red meat wine for Father’s Day -- and especially for dads who don’t judge wine before they taste it or expect all pricey California reds to taste the same every time. Vintage difference is not necessarily a bad thing.

More about Father’s Day wine:
• Father's Day wine 2013
• Father's Day wine 2012
• Expensive wine 44: Patricia Green Yamhill County Pinot Noir 2010