Today we’re going to talk about red wines. So I have here a selection of some of the more popular grapes, some of the more well known grapes, and also a few of the more obscure ones. The first wine is a gamay from Beaujolais. Beaujolais is the southernmost region of Burgundy in France. Gamay is the grape here, which is which is a little bit different because Pinot Noir is the grape of all of the rest of Burgundy. Beaujolais gets a bad rap. There’s nouveau Beaujolais, which is great. It comes out right after the harvest. It’s meant to drink right away, but it’s not really meant for aging. May can be a really serious grape and it is an incredible value. So this is from one of the crew. There are ten crew of Beaujolais Crew in this case just means town. So CRU means different things in France. But in Beaujolais, CRU refers to one of the top ten best areas for growing Gamay. This is from the crew of Fleury, just known for being really light and elegant and refreshing. Very, very floral. So this is a great wine to pair with food and it’s especially great for if you don’t like white wine, this is a great wine to start off your meal. It’s light, it’s very elegant in body and it’s a really lovely, lighter styled wine.
Next, we have Pinot Noir from Burgundy. So this is a Camille Giroux. It’s a great producer, and they make a fair amount of wine that is distributed all over the United States. So you can usually get your hands on a bottle if you’re lucky. This is from the commune of Fresh Britain, which was Napoleon’s favorite red wine. He drank champagne and he drank wine from specifically the vineyard of Lush Summerton, which is the vineyard after which this town is named. Pinot Noir from Burgundy is a little bit different than Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley or from Central Otago or from anywhere else in the New World in Burgundy. It’s all about the soil. The soil is very important and this bottle is made from grapes grown on limestone soil in the famous town of Shepperton, which gives it structure, which gives it a great minerality. This bottle has a little bit of herbs, a little bit of cherry fruit. It’s lovely, it’s elegant, it’s great with a roast chicken, it’s graceful with great with a roasted pork loin. It’s great with so many things. Pinot Noir is an incredibly versatile wine and one of my absolute favorites in the entire world. Next, you have Pinot Noir from California, and I love to show these two as a point counterpoint because they’re so completely different. This is a bottle from Sonoma Coast, from the winery, literally. And this winemaker actually used to make wine in Burgundy, but still the fruit is really ripe. It’s sort of like ripe, almost, almost candied. It’s that ripe and that luscious. So this is great if you are if you want fruit, that’s that’s much more about fruit as opposed to minerals.
This is a great a great option. Next, we have Grenache from Australia. So the motherland of Grenache, it’s debatable. They think it’s from Spain where it’s known as Grenache. It’s also very, very popular in the southern Rhone. In France it’s the main grape of Chateauneuf du Pop and Grenache is a great wine to have in your in your quiver of wines because it is a very low tannin grape. So it has low tannins and low acid, which makes it really plush and juicy and lovely. This one is made from 100 year old vines in Barossa Valley where the the vines are really old and gnarly and they produce just a few bunches here and there that are really concentrated. It’s also an incredible value. I highly I love this wine. It’s great to drink on its own. It’s great to drink with food and it’s nice to know that this is a wine with no tannins and very, very low acidity. Next is sort of a counterpoint to that.
This is Sangiovese from Tuscany. This is a Rosso di Montalcino. That just means it’s like the little sister of Brunello di Montalcino, which is made from the same grape. It’s called Sangiovese Grosso. It just spends less time aging in oak and sometimes it’s from younger vines. But this is a thin skinned grape, so it’s quite elegant and floral. It also has that great fresh acidity, that sort of tomato skin. Note that sour cherry, those roasted herbs. It’s a really beautiful wine to pair with something like a tomato sauce on a pasta or even a plate of of cured meats and cheeses. This is really a classic wine it’s great to know about. And Rosso is a great wine to know about too, because it’s sort of like Mini Brunello for a fraction of the price. Next, we have Sarah. So Sarah is known for growing in the northern Rhone, in France. So for back in France, you have Burgundy. Here, you have Beaujolais at the southernmost region and the northern Rhone starts just south of Beaujolais. So Syrah is a grape that it has a thicker skin. It’s a denser wine. It actually doesn’t have more tannins, even though there’s a misperception that it does. Sometimes it is a wine that has great meaty qualities, especially from the northern Rhone. It tastes like smoked bacon and black pepper, almost a pastrami note.
This one is from the Russian River Valley in California, is a little bit riper than the Shiraz that you’d find in the northern Rhone, but it’s still going to have that black pepper spice, that dark berry fruit, blackberries and blueberries and dark skinned plums and a little bit of that smoked bacon fat. It’s a really delicious food wine, especially if you have a nice roasted piece of meat, a piece of steak, any kind of game. This is this is the wine. And finally, we have a malbec from Mendoza in Argentina. And normally you’ve probably heard or tried a lot of California cabernets from the Napa Valley. Such a classic, delicious, full bodied red wine. This is a great up and coming wine that is that is still an excellent value. Mendoza is the the only major wine region with vines that grow above 3000 feet. So these vines are really close to the sun. They get all that bright sunlight, but they also get this great cool nights from all that high altitude, which gives us lovely freshness to the wine. Also. Mendoza Argentina in general is still an up and coming wine country and wine region respectively, so you can get some amazing values here.
We cannot forget to mention italian Barolo, made entirely of the nebbiolo grape, still demands years in the cellar. In its youth, it is classically tannic and austere, but given time — often a decade or more — the tannins soften, releasing a gorgeous perfume and flavors often described as licorice, tar, truffles, violets and roses. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, a stylistic war ensued between traditionalists who sought to preserve time-honored methods for making Barolo and innovators who explored ways to make a softer, more approachable wine, sometimes at the cost of what made Barolo distinctive.
In the last 15 years, many producers have gravitated toward a middle ground, making wines in a range of styles that are still distinctively Barolo. Regardless of style, one thing is clear: Good Barolos still require many years of aging, at least to my taste. The 1996 vintage was a classic, and I still don’t think the best are ready, though the wines from softer years like 2000, or excellent, less austere years like 2001 and 2004, can already be enjoyed.
Yet most restaurants, unless they have exceptional wine lists and the wherewithal to invest for the long term, cannot wait years for a return on their Barolo investment. Often, today, you see Barolos five to seven years old on lists.
Among our sample we found few wines spoiled by the aromas and flavors of new oak, a signature of Barolo innovators who traded in the traditional large storage vessels made of Slavonian oak, which were reused year after year, for new barriques, small barrels of French oak. These barrels imparted aromas of coffee, chocolate and vanilla, along with the bitter flavors of oak tannins. Today many producers continue to use barriques, but they are smarter about it, using more older, neutral barrels that don’t inflict aromas and flavors on the wine.
Barolos are not cheap by any means, though not nearly as expensive as other benchmark wines like Bordeaux and Burgundy. Still, hype for the 2010 vintage seems sure to drive prices up. The wine panel operates with a cap of $100 a bottle, which eliminated some producers from consideration, while other top Barolos have not yet been released. So some of the greatest names, like Giacomo Conterno, Giuseppe Rinaldi, Giuseppe Mascarello, Cappellano and Bartolo Mascarello, were not in our tasting.
Nonetheless, we found many excellent wines, beginning with our No. 1 from Elio Altare, complex, structured, pure and nuanced. Mr. Altare has been foremost among the innovators in Barolo, often cited as a contrasting figure to the arch-traditionalist Bartolo Mascarello (the two producers were paradoxically good friends). But, even though our taste on the panel runs toward the traditionalists, we all loved this wine, which seemed classically shaped with no evidence of aromas or flavors from barriques.
Other names among our top 10 are better known to Barolo fans. The Vigna Margheria from Luigi Pira, No. 4, was tight and tannic, though with layers of flavor, while the Vigna Casa Matè from Elio Grasso, No. 5, showed great finesse and balance. The Grasso, $95, was the most expensive bottle in our tasting. The structured yet nuanced No. 6, Marcenasco from Renato Ratti, at $43, was our best value, not cheap yet a good deal for world-class, age-worthy wine. Other producers worth seeking out include Burlotto, Barale Fratelli, Brovia, Roagna, Luigi Einaudi and A.&G. Fantino.
In some ways, the greatness of Barolo and its sibling, Barbaresco, while long accepted, is only beginning to be understood. Partly, this is because clear and precise appellations, so integral to understanding Burgundy, are lacking for Barolo. It’s left to consumers to research and understand the differences among the various sub-zones. One new resource that will be a great help is Kerin O’Keefe’s authoritative “Barolo and Barbaresco: The King and Queen of Italian Wine,” just published by the University of California Press.
For consumers who cannot wait for these wines to come into their prime, there are alternatives. Nebbiolo d’Alba and Langhe Nebbiolo, produced in and around the Barolo and Barbaresco zones, will generally be accessible earlier. Northwestern Italy produces many other excellent nebbiolos that likewise won’t require as much aging. But for the true Barolo lover who will seek out these 2010s, I can only counsel patience.
So European settlers brought over Malbec from France and planted the vines here and they found that it actually grows better here. There are certain conditions that make Malbec more delicious in Argentina than in France. You can still get Malbec from France, but Argentina is really the place that’s making these beautiful Malbec, and they’ve really taken it into their own. They really adopted it and made it theirs. This is a wine that has a little bit less tannin than Cabernet, but still has beautiful structure, beautiful dark blue and black fruit, a lot of coffee and mocha notes, a little tiny bit of roasted herbs. So this is a great wine to go with all sorts of cuisine. Again, a steak, a burger, anything with red meat. And it’s really one of the great value wines of the world right now. Wine is fun. I hope you learn something. I hope you heard about a wine that you are going to go out and try and love. Wine is something you can meditate over and get all intellectual about, or you can just enjoy it and drink it and and call it a day.