Not Ungrafted

Regular readers know I'm quietly, diligently working on my Ungrafted Manifesto.

As I get little time away from my many responsibilities at the Lab, it is taking a little while longer to complete than I originally expected. And let's not kid ourselves. Manifestos are not that easy to write.

As part of my research, I recently happened upon some photographs of "grafting" -- which is not "ungrafting" but related. These photos were shot by Vincent Dancer at the Domaine Thomas Morey in Chassagne-Montrachet.

I love Vincent Dancer's wines. He makes stunning Burgundy. White, in particular. But I'm a real fan of his often haunting photography.

The rest of the grafting images are here.

The whole photo blog is here.

Look What the Trojan Horse Dragged In

We've started a new quest at the Lab. We are on a obsessive mission to drink wine made from ungrafted vines. What started innocently as a historical thought-experiment about pre-phylloxera wines has swelled into a relentless search for the Ungrafted Grail. Careful readers will have noted the occasional hints in this direction. A full-fledged Ungrafted Manifesto is forthcoming.

Thus far, our search has yielded a number of triumphs, and we will describe those in a later report. But I couldn't resist a special mention of a recent discovery.

Gaia Wines, Thalassitis, Santorini, 2007. Thalassitis is made from the Assyrtiko grape native to the Greek isle of Santorini. Gaia (say: yeah-ha) grows theirs in a vineyard of ungrafted vines more than 70 years old. A Greek wine-making tradition goes back to 4000 years. The Cult of Dionysus, that Minoan import that flourished as a Grecian Mystery Cult, might represent the world's first assemblage of wine wankers. More recently, BFC aficionados will remember the brief reign of a Greek sparkler in the Bubbledome.

I wasn't sure what to expect from a grape I've never before tasted. Assyrti who? But I wasn't expecting the smell of brand new Firestone tires. In the mouth, it's bright, energetic citric acids (lime and tangerine), rubber (I swear you can taste it, but probably just the strong olfactory suggestion) and a core of creamy apple fruit. Burnt match on the finish. Weird descriptors, I acknowledge (the petrol-y smells might result from the black, rubber stopper Gaia uses). But I find this fascinating and delicious. The mouthfeel is amazing. Like I would imagine a dollop of liquid mercury might feel (before it killed you). Or like a weird, funky blend of Riesling, Sauvingnon Blanc and Silver Surfer Spit.

(trojan horse: A project by Scott Kildall & Victoria Scott. Rights are protected under a Creative Commons license. Do not reproduce without attribution. The artists have no affiliation with the Rational Denial Lab. For more info see www.nomatter.org.)

No Resolve

I'm not big on resolutions. They seem so small and trivial compared to other things you can declare, like... Independence. I'd rather spend my time on manifestos and social contracts.

That said, I do want to highlight a few things we'd like to get around to doing during the Lab's 2009 Research Calendar.

1. We hope to finally get our, old/new mini-vertical program off the ground; where we taste the same wine from two different vintages, side by side. We have "Ten Splits" to indicate two wines separated by a decade; "Wide-gaps" when one wine is really old and the other really young. There's "Tight-knits" when the vintages are just a few years apart. And "Three-fers" where we have a vertical featuring more than two wines. I think this sort of thing can be very educational, but mostly we do it because it's fun to name the pairs.

2. We thought it would be interesting to recreate the Lab's inaugural experiment but this time with a rigorous control in place. We'll pit the crazy-funky and long lingering wines of Nicolas Joly against a wine that doesn't come with instructions "to decant vigorously" and drink after several days standing on the counter. Which leaves a lot of wines to consider as the control.

3. And of course we'll continue our tireless search for dirt, weigh in on topics we know almost nothing about, train our palates, and extend our pointless investigation into time travel, voyaging to ancient Rome, fin de siècle France, mid-century Paris, amongst other fanciful destinations.

And just maybe, we might even get around to that manifesto about ungrafted wines we keep threatening to write.


(image: © Janpietruszka | Dreamstime.com)