VINTAGE: 2000
APPELLATION: Yountville, Napa Valley
COMPOSITION: 100% Pinot Noir
WINEMAKING: Small hand punched lots aged 14 months in French Oak barrels (80% new).
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Wine guru Joshua Wesson redesigned the retailing of wine . when he opened his first Best Cellars store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, making things idiot proof, fun and affordable. The excitement has spread with stores in two Boston suburbs, the University Village section of Seattle, Washington D.C., and most recently in The Park Cities area of Dallas.
“The public needn’t be saddled with numerical scores, vineyard names, grape yields and barrel toast levels. The wine jargon can poison the simple pleasure,” contends Wesson. “After all, when you walk into a patisserie in Paris, you don’t have to know the history of France.”
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VINTAGE: 1999
APPELLATION: Napa Valley
COMPOSITION: 85% Cabernet Sauvignon and 15% Cabernet Franc.
WINEMAKING: Punch cap fermented in one ton bins. Each lot was separately aged in French oak barrels for twenty-six months. The wines were racked only once at blending, just prior to bottling. The wine is unfined.
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Barbecue, sometimes called “Q”, has a history as checkered as the tablecloths in most Q joints. Hand in hand – or should that be beer in hand – throughout that history, beer was near for two important reasons.
Beer just tastes good with luscious Q. It attenuates the heat of the meat. It glaciates the cook’s thirst from standing so near the hot coals. One of barbecue’s biggest competitive cookoffs is “Memphis in May” where, on the banks of the Mississippi River, Tom Lee Park fills with Q enthusiasts. A former finals judge, who prefers anonymity, says “one year I created my own judge’s category; What Does It Taste Like With Beer?” At least his judgement was sober.
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I recently met with him Jacques Disner, the cellar in Chamoson Polyte (Valais):
We turn first time in the winery where we tasted a lot of wines from the vintner chamosard, whether white or red. All are drawn to the tank. Jacques student almost all of his wines in stainless steel tanks. His chardonnay and Millennium are sweet for their high undergrowth.
White wines:
Pendant Chamoson 2009. Mineral beautiful expression in the nose but the palate fruity (apricot), fresh and fine, good length. A cracking which does not lack body.
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New Zealand started to produce very decent wine list, having at their disposal only 300 hectares of Riesling, at a time when some producers decided to make sweet wines from the grape harvest late fee. However, despite the cool climate of New Zealand, the first harvest (Riesling was introduced in the early 70′s) were more than satisfactory. Today Riesling from Marlborough, where this sort of takes the third place after the Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc is produced in two versions, dry and sweet, and shows a remarkable acidity, extract and subtlety, which can not be found on the other side of the Tasman Sea, Australia.
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