Want more minerality in your wine? Somehow this bottle of bright, chalky, organic white Burgundy also trapped a piece of gravel in its glass base:
It looks like the wine should be fine…we’ll see.
APPEARANCE: Clear, light peach color with silver highlights, fine small bubble.
AROMAS: Delicate medium intense fig, red pear, vanilla powder, cardamon, whipping creme, crême fraiche, light cinnamon, slight bandaid.
PALATE: Dry, crisp medium plus acidity, seamless warm alcohol, medium minus alcohol, gentle, fine crisp pearl.
FLAVORS: intense, coating, yet sprightly red grapefruit, fig, fresh red pear, vanilla powder, cardamon, whipping creme, crême fraiche, a long light cinnamon and bitter almond finish.
VERDICT: Over eight years past harvest, Graham Beck’s 2011 rosé remains delightful, light on its feet, steely, yet delicate, complex, and dry. I could nit pick the bandaid, the oxidation, the fact it is best now.
Hi Internet. Too much time has passed us by. It turns out that toddlers and bloggers mix like oil and water. My apologies.
Time to scratch the itch and wrap up our Vancouver Island drinks tour with one last review. To recap: Canada is not the Mediterranean. Wine grapes struggle to reach ripeness in this cool, marginal climate. Yet Vancouver Island, oddly, shelters enough microclimates to encourage some to try their hand at wine-making. Results range from enamel-etching bubbly (read here), tart Chardonnay (read here), decent but pale Pinot Noir (read here), a fine Gamay (read here), a solid hybrid white (read here), to a mixed-bag winery that distills great gin and vermouth (read here),
Maybe we’re going about this all wrong. Let’s drop the grapes and give cold-hardy apples a chance. We roll from Victoria North into the rolling verdant farm hills of Saanich Peninsula. A gravel road bends up a cliff overlooking gleaming Cordova Channel. Short apple trees for hand picking lead up to the white, decked, cidery and tasting room. The view stops us.
Its name is Sea Cider: an Organic Certified ten acre farm with more than 1,300 trees of 50 heritage apple varieties. Kristen Jordan, a sixth generation farmer, bought and revolutionized the property in 2007 to make traditionally fermented artisan ciders. Today Sea Cider makes over 7,000 cases with distribution throughout B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Washington State, Illinois, and Oregon.
The tasting room feels airy and light.
We order both flights of everything and get to work.
Tanks and barrels awaiting harvest.
The PALATE feels dry, with medium acidity, but too hot (19.5% abv), too much spirit kills the acid too heady.AROMAS & FLAVORS range from light Castile soap, powdered anise and vanilla, to creme brûlée 19.5% abv.
Not a shabby view
With a decade under Kristen’s belt, Sea Cider deserves the awards and recognition she has garnered for it. The location is ideal, the patio view escapist, the staff is lovely and well-informed. Our toddler enjoyed roaming the orchard, sampling organic heritage apples (if a bit unripe). Sea Cider’s lineup is quite good, creative, and winkingly clever without annoying us.
We also found blackberries
Here’s my video recap (clearly, the toddler has made me a touch tired…)
Be good to your mother-in-law. You never know when she might share wines smuggled from the Balkans. After our New Year’s Eve Serbian bubbly (read here), today we try a serious red wine from Montenegro: a country sandwiched between the Adriatic Coast, inland Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia to its North, Albania and Kosovo to its South.
This wine’s producer, Plantaze, today makes 40 different wines, from 26 grape varieties, and four brandies totaling 17 million bottles. They are Montenegro’s biggest deal, wine-wise, but started humbly with a 1963 agricultural merger that planted an “infertile wasteland” (their words) of rocks and shallow soil around Skadar Lake:
Onto this infertile wasteland they planted today’s grape Vranac: a native related to Zinfandel, with thick black skin, that makes it rich in proanthocyanidols. Now, I am not a doctor (nor do I play one on tv), but these grape skin things might help fight cancer and heart disease. However, Plantaze winery runs wild with this. They branded today’s wine, “Pro Corde” (‘for heart’), its the only one their website mentions by name, and even put a heart beat on the dang label (and box, and tag #classy #legal?).
Until now, I had never tried Vranac (for shame!), nor knew Vranac was the grape until after tasting today (the shame of it all), so by dumb luck my ignorance makes this review a partially blind tasting.
APPEARANCE: A rich purple core, with a narrow, clear, bluish rim. Medium viscous wash and medium legs cascade the glass (Zin? Petite Sirah? Cabernet? Lambrusco?).
AROMAS: smell flinty, with caramel cubes, dark plum (maybe Merlot?), raspberry syrup and dried violets (maybe Zinfandel?), and mulling spices like dried orange peel and clove with medium intensity.
PALATE: again quite flinty and crunchy in texture, with medium plus tannins and acidity, a medium body, and a warm but blunt alcohol of 14% that burns to the finish. Get food!
FLAVORS: lead with a friendly fruity range of dried dark plum and raspberry syrup that turn to dried tobacco-laced oak, coals, and flint. The toasty barrel finish lasts a medium plus length
CONCLUSIONS: Plantaze’s Pro Corde Vranac 2013 (2013!) tastes taut, lean, and serious: like walking through a forest, which burned down last year, where now ripe wild berries have taken over. Each footfall snaps ashy twigs and smooshes black fruits. It is very good (4 of 5) but overly tannic and oaky. Thankfully, this wine has had five years to chill out. And after three days open, it mellows into a softer, friendlier wine, but still has oodles of tannic edge and acidity. I would love to see it ten years old.
To grape Vranac’s credit, the grape can show complexity. I thought it was a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zin, and something native. If you like Italian Primitivo, this will work. A few hours decanting, a few more years in bottle, and/or foods your Bordeaux or Brunello would like: peppercorn steak, most grilled animals, hard cheese, funky bries, mushroom rich pastas would all save your stained, dried palate.
The plus side about wines from the Balkans is that Plantaze’s Vranac red costs you $10 out there or around $16 stateside (if your can find it).
To your health then!
My resolution for 2019 is to hone this dull, rusted blade that is waywardwine.com That starts with a wine from the fringes: sparkling Serbian wine by Kovacevic (pronounced “Co vah cheh vich”…probably…). Everyone needs a mother in law to smuggle wine from across the world.
Kovacevic Winery began in 1895. Their Brut comes from Vojvodina, in the Srem region, from Fruska Gora vineyards (my poor spellcheck hates me right now).
Srem has a pleasant, moderate, continental climate, hemmed in by Croatia and its Adriatic coast. The grapes blend Chardonnay and something called “Ryan Riesling” (possible relation to Ryan Renolds?). Secondary fermentation happens in bottle like Champagne. That’s all their website says. Let us open it:
APPEARANCE: A clear, light pale straw yellow with an aggressive froth, retained white head, of medium-sized fizz.
AROMA: smell like a like wet warm straw, nutty and bready, with dried chamomile, dried mint, with medium intense candied pear and candied lemon peel.
PALATE: feels crisp, with tame residual sugar (12 grams?), green medium plus acidity, medium alcohol, and edgy sparkle.
FLAVORS: taste grassier and greener. Lemon juice, pith, and verbena lead the show but laced with a Splenda-like sweetness that lasts a medium length.
Kovacevic’s Brut is very good (4 of 5), clean, if a bit aged, overly fizzy and jangly. But for 1680,00 RSD (or $17.00 before import, tax, et cetera), their Brut works as a left-field New Year’s bubbly. Pair it with bries, sushi, white fish and other salty fair.
So, with that cheers and Happy New Year!
