A New Year's Eve 10-Year Split

So my New Year's resolution is clearly not about more frequent or timely posts. The month is almost half gone and I'm just getting to this.

With apologies for my lack of punctuality -- about which I hope to have more to say in the near future, but it's a hard topic to tackle because it twists on the one hand on an existential crisis, but rises, on the other hand, on a tide of hedonism... but I digress.

To ring in the New Year, we sent the junior staff home early so we wouldn't have to share and with several senior researchers in attendance, we conducted a very satisfying old/new comparative experiment. We opened two bottles of Pierre Gimonnet & Fils's Special Club Champagne. A 1999 alongside an oenotheque (if it's appropriate to borrow the term. Given I'm borrowing it from a Grand Marque house, I'm sure it's not -- after all these are the people who have sued mustard producers and dog owners to stop them from using the term Champagne) release from 1989. The ten-year split seemed an appropriate way to end the decade (or start it depending on your level of mathematical training).

Pierre Gimonnet & Fils is a medium-sized (25 hectares) winery based in the village of Cuis but with vineyards in Chouilly, Cramant and Oger (a tiny parcel). They grow Chardonnay exclusively. At the forefront of the grower champagne movement (pretend with me that there is such a thing), the winery has the distinction of always being the first entry in Terry Theise Catalog.

The Special Club, or more accurately, the Club Tresors de Champagne, is a sort of casual consortium of small Champagne producers established in 1971 as an early antidote to the Grand Houses of High Fashion & Hip Hop Champagne. The rules are simple and straightforward, to be a member you have to grow your own fruit. Didier Gimonnet, the vigneron in charge of Pierre Gimonnet & Fils, presides as president of the Club. In theory, the Special Club bottling represents a member's top wine. In the case of Gimonnet, it is definitely so. A blend of old-vine fruit from Chouilly, really old-vine fruit from Cramant (80+ years) and the best of the house's Cuis parcels.

The 1999 was brilliant. Fresh and energetic with bright, mandarine acidity. It was enormously linear and deeply mineral, so much so that I was sure you could smell chalk on the nose, along with brioche and almond paste. As the hours counted down to midnight (or 9:30 which was when I went to bed), this got better and better. Until it didn't. Right as the clock stuck twelve (poetic license), I poured yet another glass of this. I got a nose full of sulfury burnt match. No idea where it came from, and by the next morning it was gone. One of the weirdest things... as my eldest child would say... ever!

Without any weirdness at all, the 1989 was just flat out astonishing. It made the very good 99 look like something I might have picked up at the local Piggly Wiggly. It took almost 3 hours to fully open, but then the nose offered up layered and slightly oxidized aromas of nuts, pain perdue, honey and stewed apples. In the mouth, it was elegantly structured and precise. The acidity on the attack was still youthfully vibrant. Mid-palate there was a big, creamy and honeyed malo component, like creme brulee extract might taste. The finish was a lingering mix of chalk and hazelnut that tolled like an ancient but familiar echo of the younger bottle.

Obviously, dialing back the flowery prose also failed to make the list of resolutions.

Happy New Year!

EVOLUTION 3.5: Better Late Than Never

The combination of my summer illness and the protracted negotiations regarding our TARP repayment has delayed the next installment in the Lab's EVOLUTION series. We're overdue to taste the next red.

Some of you may remember that the last time we drank one of the reds from our long duration experiment, 2001 Confuron-Cotetidot Vosne-Romanée, we drank it alongside an older vintage, a bottle from 1988. This time we thought we'd go the other way -- mostly because I happened to find a 2005 at a wineshop in town.

I'll admit, I'm a little nervous about this bottle. The last one seemed to be giving up the ghost (or at least the fruit).

Stay tuned.

Evolution 2.5: With An Old Twist

It's time to check back in on our case of Burgundy, and just to mix it up we thought we'd combine the ongoing Evolution Experiment with our Old/New program.

So alongside the next installment of the 2001 Confuron-Cotetidot Vosne-Romanée, we are also tasting a 1988 vintage of the same.

For the 2001, this seems like a quite different wine than the one we tasted six months ago. The nose is still fresh and bright -- cherries, cinnamon and perfumed sandalwood. But the fruit on the palate (plums and currants) is beginning to give way to leathery secondary flavors and peppery spice. What's most interesting about this is that you can almost taste the architecture. It's as if the fleshy middle has faded away, so you can now sense the bones of the wine. You taste the acidity but you can't pin down its specifics; the mocha on the finish is more of a sensation than a flavor. This is a ghost's wine.

The 1988, meanwhile, drank like an old, familiar friend. The nose is musty sandalwood, stewed fruit, mushrooms and graphite. But the palate caught me completely off-guard, it is dominated by still bright fruit. There are other flavors hinted: river stones, white pepper and a coppery note on the finish, but the fruit still shines above the rest.

The fading fruit on the 2001 leaves me a little worried the 2001 isn't going to make it to the Evolution finish. But I suppose the '88 offers some cause for optimism.

Guess we'll see.

What a Difference a Day Makes!

After tasting the two Domaine aux Moines, Savennières Roches-aux-Moines we put the corks back in and left them in the Lab fridge. Someone (me) had opened a bottle of Champagne, so we moved on.

But the next day, after breakfast, I went into the Lab to finish some year-end expenses. I noticed the two bottles and thought I'd check in, see how they were doing.

WOW!

Today, the 1994 is a completely different wine. It's even a different color. Last night, it was a pale, straw yellow. Today it has oxidized into a rich, golden hue. It now presents a sweetly honeyed nose of apple peel and pear fruit, with some citrus pith, oyster shell and even a hint of botrytis. In the mouth, the youthful, racy acidity (lime) of yesterday, is joined by ripe anjou pear. Where did that fruit come from? Yesterday I thought this was interesting. Today I find it exceptional.

Given the changes evident in the '94, it's perhaps worth noting that these wines come from a 33 hectare sub-section (lieudit) of the Savennières AOC, called Roche aux Moines. In this region, biodynamic apostle-in-chief, Nicolas Joly, also grows grapes. We've written about Joly before and his claims that his wines are better on the fifth day.

So maybe this will continue to improve into next week? I wonder if the tenure of these wines has something to do with the dirt of the Savennières? Might explain why both Napoleon and Robert Parker have championed this Loire Valley appellation.

The 2004, meanwhile, hasn't evolved at all.

Go figure.

A Decade 'Tween

A "ten-split" vertical tasting of Domaine aux Moines Savennières Roches-aux-Moines. One from the 1994 vintage; one from 2004.

As I mentioned before, my prior experience with this wine left me a little skeptical.

I'm happy to now report that the previous, "warm quartz" bottle was flawed, probably cooked. These wines do tend toward mineral-laden austerity, but tasting them both made clear that my prior tasting was a damaged wine.

I poured these blind to several from the Lab staff. None were able to identify the older wine. I would have failed the test as well as the 1994 is lean and energetic, with racy acid (lime) dominating the finish. The 2004, meanwhile, is rich with mature pear fruit and quince, with some oxidized notes and a waxy, structured mouthfeel. It was easy to mistake youth for age, and vice-versa.

The aromas of the two wines were practically identical. A muted nose of pear with beeswax and clover. This last, grassy element was slightly more pronounced in the older wine. And both need a full hour in the glass to reveal much of anything at all. The two wines shared a nearly overwhelming minerality. If you could bake away the fruit, you would, I think, be left with the warm quartz taste of the Domaine aux Moines terroir.

Drinking these two wines, side by side, was a much more interesting introduction than a single bottle -- even one without flaws -- could have provided. Each offered a context for the other. And the two together yielded a few clues about the vineyard where they both originated.

We originally conceived of these vertical tastings as a reward for our hard-working staff, or at least as something to do for those scientists with no social lives who are hanging around at the Lab on Friday nights. But our inaugural tasting suggests there is real experimental value in doing this. This is another approach to dirt searching, and certainly an interesting way to investigate the effects of time.

One for Alvin Lee

When I was in high school, some older kid I worshiped for no reason other than he was older gave me a cassette tape with Alvin Lee's Woodstock performance on it. It was a rendition of "I'm Going Home" that seemed to go on for hours. It was one of those not uncommon moments in 1960's music where a performer loses their mind on stage. Whatever I was supposed to appreciate about the track passed me by. I didn't get it.

And that's apropos of our inaugural Old/New mini-Vertical Tasting. Because we're tasting two wines from the Loire Valley's Domaine aux Moines, and I'm not sure I get these wines either. They can be austere to the point of hard to drink. I've seen them described as "ungiving and a little challenging." Alder Yarrow, wondered whether they might be "too racy" and suggested their austerity "never reaches the point of unpleasant." Winning praise indeed.

At some point after high school, someone whose wine knowledge I worship told me I should try them. So I did. And I found them like licking warm quartz (I grew up in the Arizona desert and you make some odd choices as a kid).

So why then return to the quartzy wines of the Domaine aux Moines, you might be wondering? Well, Monique and Tessa Laroche, the mother and daughter team who run the winery and make the wines, have an odd habit of holding back wines and releasing them for sale when they've reached maturity. How they can afford to do this when their total annual production is but 2500 cases is anyone's guess. But it allowed the Lab to procure a 1994 and a 2004 of the Savennières Roches-aux-Moines. So our first mini-vertical has a full decade between bottles, a "ten-split."

By the way, for those of you under 50, Alvin Lee's band was called Ten Years After. So the reference is also a clever chronological pun.

A Tale of Two Corks

A Postscript to the last Report.

We were impressed by Tarlant's ungrafted Vigne d'Antan we opened the other day, so much so that we decided to open another one last night at the Lab.

Sure, this is a wine to get involved with. It's complex. It's big. More like White Burgundy from Puligny-Montrachet. It has that ungrafted hallmark of pitch-perfect integration, intense core and site-specific precision. There are many reasons to open another bottle.

But we opened this one mostly because we thought there would be opportunity for some cool, time-lapse photography. The bottle we opened previously was disgorged in December, 2004. The second bottle was disgorged a year ago tomorrow.

At the Lab, we often source Champagne at auction. With non-vintage champagnes, it's often difficult, if not impossible, to know their age. One of the few clues is "cork behavior". Older corks do not expand. Young corks expand quickly. And wines that are in between young and old (disgorged more than a year ago, but less than say... three, four years ago) sometimes expand, but slowly.

We noticed the cork from the older bottle never expanded, retaining it's compressed mushroom shape. We thought the younger bottle might expand over 10-15 minutes and give us an opportunity to chronicle the transformation.

No such luck. The cork screamed out of the bottle as soon as the cage was removed, expanding to its current fatness (that is the technical term, by the way) almost immediately. We missed our photo-journalistic opportunity. But we drank the Champagne anyway.

The younger cousin is delicious, though far less mineral in character than the prior bottle. It has a lees-y nose with faint pear fruit, biscuit and some notes of oak. The attack is citric acid that emerges as distinctly lemon as the golden apple flavor evolves mid-palate. There's an almost tannic bite before a long, lingering chalky finish.

It has an adolescent, nervy energy that would likely benefit from some cellar maturity. Maybe in a year or so we can capture the cork swell on camera...

Ironically, we opened a bottle of Bollinger Special Cuvee last night as well. That cork did expand slowly over a 10 to 15 minutes period, but at that point we were half in the bag from other experiments and no one remembered to take the pictures.