I got quite excited this evening picking out the wines for tomorrow’s Master Chef dinner being prepared by Jay Huxley and attended to by a great group of work colleagues. I am so excited about the friendship, wine and food! All the ‘work’ selecting the wine line-up (in a post soon to come!) got me excited to have a nice drop of red while blogging tonight.
That nice red ended up being the 2007 McWilliams Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea Shiraz. WOW! What a wine! Having had glasses of the 2005 and 2006 Maurice O’Shea in the restaurant associated with McWilliams Mount Pleasant winery in the Hunter Valley, I had the impression that the Maurice O’Shea Shiraz was not worth the bottle price and was another over-priced red wine living on its previous reputation.
But one Sunday morning about 11 am having just finished breakfast in their restaurant (and complaining about how the Maurice O’Shea was overpriced!), Nick (who was the restaurant manager at the time) brought me a glass of red to try. It was magnificent! He then told me that it was the 2007 McWilliams Mount Pleasant Maurice O’Shea and was about to be released in the next few days. I bought four dozen on the spot. I then found out a few days later that Campbell Mattinson rated it as the best Shiraz that year (2010/11) in his great book, The Big Red Wine Book.
I have been laying it down in the cellar to develop over the last two years, but decided it was time to try one of the bottles. This wine is spectacular now, but will probably be even slightly better in a couple of years. Within minutes of decanting, it really opened up. It is smooth, perfectly balanced, with good tannins. It has very big, fresh fruit tasting of blackberries and chocolate liqueur. The hue is a vibrant, deep red, almost purple color.
The only problem now is figuring out the best time to drink this wine! I expect it will last a long, long time, but is so approachable now. I will probably have a bottle every three months until I can’t stand it any more and then make this my every day drinking wine until it is entirely consumed.
I bought a lot of the 2007 Hunter Valley Shiraz’, including the Tyrrell’s Vat 9, Tyrrell’s Stevens, the De Iuliis Limited Release Shiraz, the Meerea Park Alexander Munro, the Thomas Kiss, the Pokolbon Estate (made by Andrew Thomas), the Brokenwood Graveyard, the Tulloch Hector, the Glandore Hamish, the Tintilla Estate Patriarch, and about five more to be able to do a side-by-side comparison. They are all excellent, but the only one I think can compare to the Maurice O’Shea is the De Iuliis Limited Release Shiraz. I just need to do a comparison of those two wines, and do it soon!
I was hoping to save some of this great wine for one of my American friends who is coming to dinner tomorrow night, but I am afraid, I might just drink the entire bottle tonight. WOW! What a wine!
This is a mediocre wine that I was hoping would be better. I remember tasting and buying six of the highly rated 2007 Tintilla Estate Patriarch Syrah. That was a fine wine and listed among Campbell Mattinson’s best red wines that year. As part of buying some of the great 2007 Tintilla Estate Patriarch and also some of their very nice Sangiovese, we were offered four bottles of the 2005 Patriarch for free as part of a promotional offer.
The Syrah grape is the same as what I refer to as the Shiraz grape, but Tintilla Estate explicitly uses the label Patriach Syrah for its top-end Shiraz compared to the middle of the range Tintilla Estate Shiraz. Tintilla Estate uses this differentiation to refer to their very select Shiraz grapes. The 2005 vintage is the first for the Patriarch Syrah and the 2007 the second (and much improved) vintage.
I can see why they were giving it away for free two years ago. The wine is showing its age and does not have much life left. I will need to use the other three bottles quickly (which I was expecting and that is why I brought them out of the cellar). This wine is a little on the sweet side, tasting of over-ripe cherries and does not have much finish. It also has a bitter aftertaste which is not pleasant.
I was going to write another couple of blog posts, but thought it best to write when the taste is fresh in my mind (if not fresh in my mouth!). This is always a good idea. If you do not take notes immediately, you can start to run wine tasting memories together, and more recent smells or flavors can confuse your memory. My wife always carries a little notebook to write down tasting notes so we have them for later. Also make sure to date the entries as wine changes in taste over time.
I like Tintilla Estate as a winery. They make some of the finest Sangiovese in Australia and I am letting my 2007 Tintilla Estate Patriarch Syrah sit for a while to reach optimal drinking age. (2007 for The Hunter Valley was a very good year for Shiraz.) But I need to call it like I see it, and the 2005 vintage of the Patriarch is over the hill. I expect it was better 3- 4 years ago, but even then, I am pretty certain, it was not better than mediocre.
As a winery, Tintilla Estate is a beautiful one to visit and is located at 725 Hermitage Road, Pokolbin, NSW 2320. We first visited it during June, 2010 when the Hunter Valley Food and Wine month was in full swing. We had a most wonderful Italian buffet lunch and sampled a 10-year vertical of Sangiovese and Merlot-Sangiovese wines which was a real treat.
If you have any of the 2005 Tintilla Estate Patriarch Syrah, you better drink it quick or consider it as a cooking wine. Meanwhile, I will look forward to one of the 2007 Tintilla Estate Patriarch Syrah soon. Hopefully, I will have a much more favorable blog on that wine as I remember the tasting of it to be exceptional.
Several weeks ago, I starting writing on our ability to really be able to describe how wine tastes. I mentioned almost all of us would struggle doing that. First of all, wine comes from grapes and has different levels of sweetness and associated alcohol. Frankly, most wines tastes like ‘grapes’ to me!
It is pretty easy to determine if a wine tastes sweet versus dry. It is also relatively easy to determine if a wine is acidic versus softened or mellow. But a wine that tastes of “cherry, plum, lemon, grass” or even “cat’s pee!” How is that even possible as those types of ingredients are not really in the wine? Yet, some of those flavors may be coming through or influenced by the type of soil (with lots of limestone that the water is filtering through, for example), or other conditions in which the grapes are grown.
What we are really doing is transferring memories of our current tasting sensation to situations where we obviously did pick up on those flavors such as eating a cherry, drinking lemonade or chewing on grass. (I have never had anyone admit to me though that they have ever swirled cat’s pee in their mouth, but expect some people who have cats have smelled it and remember the sensation.)
Therefore, these tastes can become very real to many people. Others of us cannot distinguish any difference in flavor. (Which is why Gallo wine at $5 per bottle sells well enough!) However, since each of us has different tasting mechanisms and different abilities to remember and be able to accurately describe taste, it is still difficult to compare notes and agree on what wine tastes like. I have been enjoying wine greatly for a lifetime and can only occasionally do this well with regard to flavor. I can much better ascertain if a wine is dry, sweet or even sticky, and if a wine has well integrated tannins or not. But picking out flavors is more difficult for me.
So how do these flavors become apparent or real to us?
I use a simple lexicon when attempting to describe wines: one for white wines and one for reds. They are as follows:
White Wines:
Non-Citrus Fruit
Melon
Honeydew
Rockmelon
Kiwi
Apple
Passionfruit
Persimmon
Citrus
Lemon
Lime
Orange or Mandarin
Grapefruit
Sugar
Honey
Marlmarlade or Jammy (usually with Orange)
Buttery (often in very mature, softened Chardonnays)
Metallic (often in Riesling and in younger more acidic wines)
Metal
Kerosene or Battery Acid
Red Wines:
Berry
Blackberry
Boysenberry
Strawberry (usually sweeter and jammy)
Non-berry Fruit
Plum
Cherry
Cigar or Tobacco (smoky)
Leathery
And that’s pretty much it. The other characteristic I pick up in wine flavors is if it is ‘damp’ or earthy soil, and this is more often with red wine than white wine.
One may ask how is it that a wine could be considered enjoyable when it tastes metallic, smoky or leathery? Yet, many of us had had great memories and sensations with such flavors. A metallic taste (if not over-done) provides a crisp or sharp edge and smoky or leathery (remember that new car or briefcase!) on top of the other flavors you have in a red wine provides for a ‘multiple sensation’ experience.
I expect there are several well-founded and well-studied programs that help describe how wine tastes, but the above structure is about as good a job as I can do. Hopefully, it will help you get started and start to differentiate some of the nuances and different characteristics of the wines you drink.
For most of us, the answer is ‘no.’ Many of us enjoy wine just because it is alcoholic, and could not care less how it actually tastes. I am in the group of people who enjoy wine for the taste and the sensation of pleasure it provides from a lot of different perspectives – seeing it, swirling it, smelling it, the texture it provides against the inside of my cheeks being just a few of those sensations. However, I cannot do a decent job of describing how it tastes with regards to its flavor. There are people who can articulate most, if not all, characteristics of wine, and precisely define a multitude of flavors coming through. And, finally, there are the pure bullshitters who know that 95% of us don’t have a clue, so they take a chance and try to impress us that they know. I love catching those liars out!
The highest certification you can achieve for wine tasting is the International Master of Wine (MW). This distinction means, you not only can taste the different nuances in many different wines, but that you can describe those nuances in a consistent manner with other MWs when writing or speaking about the wine. It also means you can identify the characteristics and have a good chance of identifying what country, or region of the world the wine comes from, describe the influence of its particular terroir, and have a vast lexicon of terms to describe the wines flavors (including ‘”cat’s pee” for some Sauvignon Blancs!).
Becoming a MW requires a lot of study, practice and tasting. It is estimated that it costs about $200,000 in wine you are required to buy and taste to be able to pass the exams. Many MWs are naturally blessed and have ‘super-taster’ capabilities (25% – 40% more taste buds in their mouth than normal people), otherwise known as “cook’s palate.” But many are also just normal people, greatly dedicated to their craft and their passion.
There are less than 500 MWs in the world. I am certain that I will never become one. Heck, the cost of $200,000 to even attempt it is a road block for almost all of us. While I enjoy my wine greatly and enjoy writing and speaking about it and sharing experiences with others, I will just never put in that kind of dedication to achieve such a distinction.
I can describe how wine feels, if it is balanced, or if the tannins are fully integrated. I can also define if it has a long or short finish. But when it comes to defining flavor or taste, I have a limited ability of description. In my recent post on “Yatarnna Bin 144 – Penfolds White Grange,” I describe the flavor of the 2006 Yatarnna as “powerful lemon flavors and some peach and grass flavor.” The lemon was obvious to me for this wine, and ‘it seemed’ like a little bit of peach flavoring, or it could have been a bit of honeydew melon. I was not really sure. In the great book on Penfolds entitled “The Rewards of Patience,” a group of wine reviewing experts, including Halliday, Mattinson and Hooke describe this wine as “Flinty pear/lemon curd/white peach aromas and fine pronounced tangy acidity.” They tasted this wine four years before me, and I expect the wine changed markedly over time. For starters, the wine no longer has a tangy acidity. It has mellowed nicely. And was their ‘curd peach,’ my ‘grass?’
Surprisingly, I did pretty well on this wine, but could not describe accurately most other wines. And most of you who taste wine less than I do could not either. Most of us don’t even think about the flavor or other characteristics of the wine, yet we can still greatly enjoy a wine and are able to determine if it is a great, good, mediocre or bad wine. (To me, ‘mediocre’ is as bad as bad, so I won’t bother with ‘mediocre – life is too short!)
But I have over time developed a simple lexicon for trying to decipher and describe the flavor of the wine I am tasting. And it somewhat varies for red and white wines. There are some great books on wine tasting and some kits and flavor guides you can buy to help you along the way. However, there is no substitute for just trying a number of different wines next to each other and sharing and attempting to describe your experiences with friends. Another good way to learn more is to participate in winery tastings when they announce the new vintages. These are quite inexpensive and a great way to learn from the way the wine makers describe their wines. We have gotten 6 – 8 of us together to do this several times with great fun and success.
It may seem intimidating to do this around people you know are far more mature tasters than you are, but most wine lovers are delighted to enjoy and share a good bottle with you and derive great pleasure from assisting others learn and appreciate wine more. (And if they do, they fit my definition of a ‘wine enthusiast’, if they don’t, then the are ‘wine snobs!’)
We have two friends who are wine judges and are studying for their MW. We are going to their place for lunch this coming Sunday. We have done this about five times in the last three years and have had them over to our place a similar number of times. We have shared some great meals and great wines together. Initially I felt a little extra pressure to be sure I selected some great wines to enjoy, but as we got to know each other and enjoy each others company and shared interest in good wine, we quickly found ourselves in a very comfortable and safe environment to try some special wines, and discuss them with relative experts.
Do not be afraid to just mix it up and give it a go! I remember the first time my wife tried a Tannat (secondary red grape), her reaction was “Wow- I can’t describe it, but I love what it does to my mouth!” Needless to say, the wine maker was delighted by her response.
In Part 2, I will provide the simple lexicon I use to attempt to describe the flavor of both red and white wines, and hopefully provide some ideas on how you can describe wines also.
My taste in Chardonnay has certainly changed over the years. I used to drink and enjoy a fresh, crisp Chardonnay, and moving to Australia, I initially almost exclusively favored the Chardonnays from Margaret River (such as the Leeuwinn Estate Art Series and Pierro). However, after trying some of the Hunter Valley Chardonnays I was amazed at how good they were and right in my own backyard! The Two Rivers Chardonnay from the Upper Hunter is one of the best valued Chardonnays you can find. Tamburlaine makes a very nice organic Chardonnay, but it is really the aged Chardonnays from Tyrrells and Waverley Estate that I find the most amazing. Among the very best are the Tyrrell’s 2006 Vat 47 (and almost any other vintage of the Vat 47!) and the 2000 Waverley Estate Chardonnay.
But then about 3 years ago, I had my first Montrachet and have never looked (or snifted) back! It was a bottle of the 2007 La Belle Voisine Chassagne Montrachet and I picked up 18 bottles at $140 per bottle. It is quite easy to spend $1,000 for a bottle of Montrachet if you have both the money and the inclination. I don’t! However with the 2007 La Belle Voisine as the standard, I have tried a few Puligny Montrachets for about $75 per bottle and have been disappointed. Then while in the US last year, we bought a bottle of the 2008 Bouchard Peres & Fils Puligny Montrachet Grand Vin De Bourgogne. It was tremendous!
When we returned to Australia, I checked to see if we could get some of this great wine here, but found out we needed to order it from France, and there was no more 2008 to be had. However, since 2009 was. by all claims. a better vintage anyway in Puligny, we took a chance and bought a dozen for $75 per bottle. This bet paid off and the 2009 was even better than the 2008. And the other reason this bet paid off is that a year later, the bottle is selling for about $175!
This wine is rich and complexity with a bit of acid and sharpness to it balanced by the flavor of sweet honey. This is a truly outstanding wine! I expect this wine can cellar for another 3 – 5 years, but I will not find out as I do not have the discipline to let it sit that long! I am on my second bottle and will drink my third bottle a week from now when we have a reunion of my great project team from a previous assignment. But tonight we are finishing off the wine with some leftover beef strogonof.
And of course as you can see from the picture, this wine will be truly enjoyed in my Riedel Montrachet glass!
“Yes”, that’s correct – Lindemans’ spelled “Verdelhao” that way back in 1988. Most Verdelhos will not last more than several years in the cellar. But somehow we got our hands on two bottles of this great wine back in 2006, and had one in 2008 which I remember as being superb. This Verdelho was definitely built to last!
Our friends, Owen and Lucie, recently got engaged and we have been looking for a time to have a great meal together, which is far too infrequently, and our next meeting for dinner was scheduled for 1 September! But a class they were scheduled for over the weekend was canceled and we happen to be free which provided the opportunity to get together this last weekend, and we jumped at it.
They wanted to treat us to a meal at their house because we had recently given them a bread maker we were no longer using. Owen and Lucie are really nice people, great cooks and have a great palate for good wine. Therefore, it is always a pleasure to share a meal and wine with them and I put ‘extra’ effort into selecting wines we can drink together.
Owen really wanted to provide the wines that evening and we were going to just bring a bottle of the 1998 Pommeray Louise Champagne as a celebration of their recent engagement. This is one of the world’s best Champagnes and the celebration was worthy of such a fine wine. And I was glad to have an easy time of it, by selecting a great wine to match the celebration, not the meal – that would be Owen’s job that night!
However, Owen called me in the afternoon, and informed me that we would be having a very slightly seared tuna steak with guacamole and chili (which could be added in for taste) followed by a fried lightly battered flathead fish. He had some great reds picked out (which I will describe in another post as to how well they went with the tuna and flathead!), but wanted to start with a white for the cheese platter before the meal, and have an option of a white with the fish if we so wanted that choice instead of the reds.
I had to put on my thinking hat and see what I could come up with. It would have been very easy to pick out a good Sauvignon Blanc or Semillon / Sauvignon Blanc blend, but there is nothing special in either of those choices.
Fortunately, I came across my last bottle of the 1988 Lindemans Hunter Valley Verdelhao. I knew this would be a magnificent treat regardless of what food we matched it up with, assuming the bottle was still good. I had been keeping it stored for the last four years between 2 – 6 degrees Celsius and ready for drink instead of the normal 14 degree Celsius of my cellar. I believe this helped ‘save’ the wine as it maturation process would have slowed to a trickle. Also, knowing the cork was almost 25 years old, I found a back-up bottle (1999 Moss Wood Semillon) if needed, and brought along my Ah So cork screw. The Ah So cork screw is about the only way to get old cork out of an old bottle. It is designed to be able to get old and soggy corks out of the bottle, but you still need to be careful and use only a small amount of pressure when putting the Ah So around the cork. I have had several incidents where the cork has been pushed into the bottle when not careful.
As delicate as I tried to be, the cork broke half-way through. Fortunately the cork did not appear compromised, just weak and soggy. Then I had the issue of not being able to secure the bottom half of the cork without pushing it into the bottle. It was not my intent to filter or aerate the wine since the structure of a 25-year-old wine is fragile at best. However, at this point, we decided to do that with a slightly larger mesh which was able to remove any cork from the wine without causing too much damage to the little remaining structure. To stop the cork in the bottle from catching in the neck and slowing or stopping the flow of the wine when pouring, I used a chopstick to hold the cork away from the neck, a method that works really well if you ever find yourself in that situation.
I was certainly excited to find when pouring the wine into the decanter that it had a rich, golden hue to it, without any indication of a brownish or other “off” color which means the wine is past its best drinking period. And once I brought the decanter to my nose, I knew we had struck “liquid gold!”
Starting off the evening with this bottle of wine set the stage for everything that followed – it was a magnificent evening and meal overall. The wine was huge and robust with great flavors of mandarin and tangerine, and a texture which seemed to float over the tongue. Just holding the wine in my mouth was a thrill, experiencing everything the wine had to offer.
I have drunk a lot of wine in my time, but this would have to be in my Top 3 white wines ever along with the 1971 Chateau D’Yquem and the 1991 Lindemans Sauvignon Blanc.
The first answer is “Probably more than you are paying for it!” However, there is such a glut of good wine on the market, and far too many grapes being produced that the cost of a good bottle of wine is relatively inexpensive. Of course, now that the Chinese are becoming significantly more prosperous in this – the “Year of the Dragon”, and believe they have or are acquiring a taste for good wine, they are buying up the very top end of the market which will certainly push up prices for that segment.
The Chinese are also buying up a lot of wineries and parcels of land that produce grapes around the world and more wine will find its way to China over the next several years. This will reduce the global glut somewhat. But by looking around, you should still be able to buy very good wine for under $10 per bottle and even cheaper.
The average bottle of wine in my cellar is around $40 – $50 per bottle, but then I have some truly great wines in my cellar, and many of them have 10 – 20 years of aging built into them so I have a large stock of great wines which are drinkable today. Yet, I also have a large number of outstanding wines I paid less than $20 per bottle for. I have very few wines I paid over $100 per bottle, as I find it is just not worth it except for very special occasions to drink a bottle of wine that expensive. You just do not need to.
Blake Stevens, in his recently published book (which I have reviewed) “Still Stupid at Sixty” has a Chapter entitled “Don’t Overindulge in Passions”. The point of the chapter is that we can get carried away with our passions and really overspend because we want to treat ourselves to the very best. He believes that for most things that can be purchased, for the very, very best (measured as being 100% of possible capabilities and quality – assuming you can actually measure these traits at all!), you are paying 10 time more than if you accepted an alternative that was at 99% and that still costs 10 times what the alternative at 95% of capability and quality would cost. He says this applies to jewelry, stereo systems, and wine among other things. It is easy to spend $1,000 for a bottle of wine and for that price, it better not just be excellent, but it should also be rare and have collectible value. But I can find wines for $100 per bottle that almost all people would say was as good or better than the bottle that cost $1,000. And I could buy bottles of wine for $10 that many if not most people thought was as good or nearly as good as the bottle for $100 or even $1,000. I think this is true and it is why I have very few bottles anywhere close to $1,000 per bottle (Only two which were used for my wife’s 40th birthday party!). Do not overspend on wine! I believe for most people, they do not need to spend over $20 per bottle and there are a number of annual reviews by wine critics that recommend the best buys you can get for under $20 per bottle. This is a very safe way to buy wine that you know will not disappoint when you open a bottle or bring one to a party.
Two years ago, we did a tasting comparing wines that were made half of the Shiraz grape and half of the Cabernet Sauvignon grape. We tasted a line-up of Penfolds Bin 389 with vintages from 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 and a Wolf Blass Grey Label from 1996. The Penfolds Bin 389 would have fetched $35 – $50 when they were sold and more now. The Wolf Blass Grey Label was bought for $16 per bottle (I am so glad I bought 3 dozen of those, but I only have one bottle left!). However, the group of very discerning wine palettes that evening pick the Wolf Blass as the best wine, even though it cost half or even a third of what the Penfolds Bin 389 vintages cost.
An American friend of mine who had been living in Australia for two years at the time had dinner out with my wife and me and another colleague visiting form the US. I brought two bottles – one white and one red – to the Indian BYOB restaurant we were eating at. After finishing both bottles and still having a decent amount of food to eat, my American friend who had been in Australia for two years and I went to the bottle shop next door to get another couple of bottles. I asked him if he had any favorites he wanted to drink and his response was “Steve, when I arrived in Sydney two years ago, I decided to pay about $30 per bottle and I thought the wine was really good, so then I backed off to about $25 – $28 per bottle and still thought it was really good and then backed off to about $20 per bottle and it was still really good. I am now down to about $8 per bottle and still think it is really good! Therefore, you pick something out you like!”
Like I said – and especially in Australia – you can get some really good wine for under $10 per bottle.
