jbonne

many thanks for that, Craig. quite enjoyed it. can't tell you how jealous i am of the very notion of being able to do a vertical. the other day, i was reading one of those Barolo descriptions saying they're so tannic and big as to be undrinkable ... especially those made in the traditional style. that seems to sum up some of these wines, but i never felt Mascarello's was unapproachable, even if it needs years and years and years to mature. but maybe it's just me and my weird relationship to tannins.

maybe the Wash. state folks will pick up on the spit-cup idea one of these days. last year's Rangers event in Seattle was a madhouse, but on the upside, i discovered several wines i've since sung the praises of and written about. that said, i opted for Hospice this year. would love to hear more about the Edmunds St. John Robles Viejos. we grabbed a bottle of that last month down in Oakland.

Wine Geese. more on Wine Geese.

rather than extend this thread, thought i'd start a new one. wondering who else is feeling a bit glum about this weekend's news that Bartolo Mascarello, the recalcitrant patriarch of Barolo, passed away. i posted my own thoughtsyesterday and the NYT's Eric Asimov weighs in today. mostly i'm sad because we only got to meet Mascarello last October. we'd just stumbled upon a treasure trove of his '03 barbera while in California last month, and grabbed all we could carry. but mostly, it's unsettling because there are so few voices out there delivering the message he delivered: that wine's traditions are under assault. thoughts? memories?

the '03 O'Reilly was rather nice, if young. it's settled better than Peter Rossback's '03 Sineann, which needs some time to mellow out. '03 was a hot vintage, with big numbers and wines that, as you say, can be too big. we tried the '03 Patty Green last December and i actually went back and asked the bartender if he'd really poured me pinot, because it tasted like syrah. (this was in Walla Walla, after all.) he swore he had, so he poured himself a taste, looked at me and said, "i'll be damned!" that wine clocks in at 14 percent. on balance, i think the O'Reilly is an unbeatable deal.

braver than us. we were afraid to haul back foie from France, given that whole war on terror/general paranoia thing. plus the many bottles of wine in our luggage. so we left it there. we made one hotel clerk very, very happy, though.

another blog post on said topic.

chardonnay: if you're really sticking to the $10 thing, i'll toss in Drouhin's La Foret. riesling: Loosen's Saint M from the Pfalz is about 10 bucks. his entry-level "Dr. L" was just a few bucks more. in addition to those mentioned. syrah: Barnard Griffin from the Tri-Cities is a good varietal option on this side of the pond. i'm blanking on a good French option that's pure syrah and under $10 (and good). and as a public service ... viognier: Columbo's La Violette VDP is both affordable and a great example of varietal typicity. everyone who's ever made a big, oaky viognier should be forced to drink a case of this.

now i have my list of places not to eat in March. i'm with Tighe in that it's hard to get too excited about 25/$25 anymore, given that the venues are usually madhouses the entire month and the special meals more often than not don't do the regular menus full justice. the staffs are overworked and frazzled; the service suffers. with a couple exceptions, the meals i've had during 25/$25 in the past have been really bad examples of what these places can do. (unless they're sub-par on their regular menu, in which case it doesn't matter much.) Foodie-Girl -- if you can manage enjoyable meals during the promo, you've accomplished a feat. but if you really want to see these places in their best light, i'd wait and go on a regular night.

while i don't spend a lot of time drinking domestic merlot (just not my thing), have to agree there's a lot of good stuff coming out of WA. RR, if you liked L'Ecole, you might try and hunt down a bottle of Reininger (just down the road from L'Ecole), or the Walla Walla Vintners merlot and cuvee. also the Owen Sullivan, if there's any around. personally, i prefer the BSH, but the Ulysses and M are both merlot-based stunners. [edited to add specific wine names.]

added bonus: you can take one on an airplane and likely not be found out, while your average 750 and a Riedel flute tend not to win points with flight attendants. double added bonus: the deli in JFK's JetBlue terminal sells them.

partially -- but i ascribe minerality to a broad range of flavors, while "rocky" is something i only ascribe to red wines that have a minerality reminiscent of quartz, plus a certain dustiness. i don't think of it as something found in white wines.

if anyone'd like to see a good pic of the WD-50 noodles -- and some additional backstory on all this ... read here.

i was ranting about this again last night after our female host (extraordinary taste buds, even though she's wrong about screwcaps) was miffed by one of her male guests dismissing her taste in wine. i was not that male guest, btw. it's great to have more approachable ways to describe and contemplate wine. but much of this "wine for women" stuff is just pandering, shallow and sometimes downright offensive. it's a fine line between populist and trite.

i've actually used asphalt, sted tar, to describe an aroma. maybe it was tar mixed with stones. people also refuse to believe me when i say a wine tastes "rocky." i guess they never licked rocks when they were kids.

totally agree. as i was looking over some tasting notes i collected from my intrepid panel for a recent piece, i realized that my tasters -- friends and acquaintances at all levels of knowledge about wine -- were picking up different and sometimes contradictory tastes in the same bottle. one noted "chocolate covered cherries," while another got "vanilla, medicine," and a third got a "creamy" sensation but otherwise no nose at all. i got "thin fruit, a bit of tobacco on the side." were any of us right? wrong? crazy? possibly, on all three. but this is why i find that, like you, broad descriptions of the specific tastes -- the inner circle of the Davis aroma wheel, if you like -- can be as useful to the average reader as beelining for a specific taste or smell (unless that taste/smell is overwhelming). i don't happen to believe there's one sensation of "cherry" or "leather." these are colored by personal experience, memory and even geography. (how many of you could, blindfolded, detect a Bing cherry from a Lambert? cherry farmers excluded.) what's more important to me are descriptions of a wine's quality and structure. how big and how well integrated are tannins? what's the taste of the wine built around -- the fruit extraction, the acid, the tannin? is it integrated? does the taste of oak dominate? these are subjective too, as a movie review is subjective. but that's why i believe people come to trust certain reviewers' palates and follow their guidance. so what think: are specific aroma descriptors more important, or are the general terms that help describe why a wine is good or bad? [edited to add rhetorical question]

even i, the big defender of NY pizza, acknowledge that some isn't that great. it can be soggy and a bit bland. but comparatively, yeah, it rocks. (see Lago thread, &c.) mamster, how'd you end up at Koronet? that place sustained me for most of my college days. a day's calories in a single slice!!

cool! just for fun, i'll even snip from actual wine reviews. Enormously rich, with layers of black cherry ... Smoky. Powerful. (WS: Cayuse Syrah Walla Walla Valley Bionic Frog 2001)

i got the sense our server at West wouldn't have said any such thing if he hadn't detected that we wouldn't be fazed and knew the score. in fact, i gave him points for being able to detect that we wouldn't be much impressed by the usual patois. (i'm not dissing the usual patois, i'm just saying that not everyone needs that jive.) so i didn't mean it as criticism. in fact, he probably saved our whole experience by explaining the score. we heard him doing his usual spiel at the next table over, so we knew he wasn't just complaining to everyone who sat down. the Brix wine flights we tried were the B.C. whites and B.C. reds, plus the aforementioned barbera. i'm assuming they were all left open WAY too long, but i'd also deduct points for a wine bar serving anything that bad. i might've sent back one, but it seemed ludicrous to send back the whole flight. yes, i know it's difficult to serve this many wines and keep them all fresh. i still hate paying for bad wine. but now i'm curious about the food. sounds to me like an excellent policy. i wouldn't argue all restaurants should focus so much on repeat business, but in this case, why alienate your best customers to cater to a bunch of walk-ins who are odds-on likely to be seeking a good meal on the cheap? this is why i hate things like DOV/25 for $25 [seattle's version]/&c. they ruin things for regular patrons who just want a decent meal. incidentally, as a walk-in i've never flinched at being asked to wait for a few minutes at the bar. presuming, of course, the bar has something worth drinking.

Nope, but i can interpret the smells in my glass -- or rather what MWs and others gamely like to call "organoleptics." Sometimes a scent jumps out at you, like the strawberry in many a decent glass of pinot noir or the briney note in lots of syrahs. Sometimes it's truly elusive, and I think the ticking-off of fruits can often be no more than a matter of subjective interpretation. And some people truly do have the nasal equivalent of photographic memories, able to immediately know what, say, fig -- or more a Platonic notion of "fig-ness" -- should taste like. If we really wanted to certify these tastes, we could test the wine and see if all the various flavor compounds can be detected within. But I don't usually consider (or write) descriptions to be necessarily literal, I interpret them as impressions of a taster thought he or she could detect at the time, and his or her impression ("slightly risqué") of the wine's stature and definition. To that end, adjectives like "jammy" or "brambly" have more meaning to me, as they help me know a wine's character when compared to its varietal typicity. (In other words, how close does it taste to my ideal of what a "syrah" should taste like?) I think one reason that the advice to taste, taste and taste some more is so good is that it takes a long time to know what a grape from a specific location really should taste like. Ultimately, I view these as little snippets of poetry -- or maybe as a sort of wine haiku. Has the blurb offered me an objective description of what's in the glass? Probably not, and even if it did, who's to say my bottle will taste exactly like the review bottle? Has it given me effective insight into how the wine tastes, and what I'm likely to experience in the glass? An effective blurb will do that. But I should note that I'm constantly revising my stance on this.

quite. we were up in YVR last weekend and after scrambling around for reservation options, we ended up with a two-top at West for 930p Saturday. (apologies to Neil, we had only one dinner and i've got a a backlog.) having come across the border pretty much to eat and shop down in Richmond, we had NO IDEA that DOV was happening until we sat down at and couldn't find the elaborate tasting menus we'd reviewed online prior to getting in the car and driving four hours north. when we inquired, we were told about DOV, that West's normal tasting menus were suspended (i asked if this was standard practice across the city, and was told it was -- is that true?) but that since we'd travelled all the way from Seattle, they'd be happy to accomodate us any way they could. in the end, the $35 menu actually looked pretty darn good, so we asked to order off that menu and have one additional dish, chef's discretion, added prior to our main courses. the extra dishes ended up being picture-perfect (the yellowtail and the foie gras, both off the regular menu) as did the rest of the food. our server seemed distracted when we first sat down. but after we spent five minutes with him haggling over wine options, he came back, apologized, explained the DOV insanity (having presumably realized we knew our way around a restaurant meal) and that he was being asked to turn each table three times a night -- we were his last turn -- quipped that he'd been juggling too many orders for Coke and water for the past couple weeks and was just sort of dazed at having real patrons order real beverages. that's when he told us to stay as long as we liked, to relax and that the kitchen would accomodate whatever we wanted. foodwise and servicewise, it was a very pleasant experience. our only quibble was with the wine list, which seemed pricey for the options. we assumed this was a combination of (a) venue/mark-up, (b) the curse of bad, ubiquitous California wine, and © those crazy wine taxes y'all have up north. after an uncharitably candid description of the available BC pinot noirs on the list, we ended up with a Sumac Ridge Steller's Jay brut, which sort of worked but left us mostly dreaming of Oregon. we supplemented with additional glasses along the way, though. and i give them enormous credit for having pineau des Charentes as an apertif. we were happily surprised that despite showing up 30 minutes early, we were seated 10 minutes later. this may be the upside of the reservation problem Neil describes. (it's still inconceivable to me that people could so abuse reservations. if i'm 20 minutes late, i'm usually wearing my own hairshirt by the time i appear at the door.) my takeaways, based on our Seattle equivalent to DOV, were: (1) DOV really should be a weeknight thing, as suggested above. (2) ditching the regular menus, while a very reasonable notion, seems to penalize diners who'd like to spend lots of cash for an extravagant weekend meal. this isn't done in Seattle, and thank goodness -- since even great restaurants' promo menus here are usually sub-par. (3) do these promos really help drive return business? i would imagine they must to a modest degree, but i kept wondering if some regular patrons felt put out by the whole thing. we also had a curious time at Brix, though we only drank at the bar, no food. of seven wines we tasted, maybe two were even drinkable; the rest were flawed either by bad winemaking or by being oxidized. for a wine bar, we wondered, aren't they taking better care of their bottle stock? we figured the bottles had been opened for at least six hours, maybe more. (all but one we ordered were BC wines, btw. and the Italian barbera was almost vinegary.) takeaway lesson: we're marking on our calendars when DOV is next year, and we will NOT be making any impromptu visits.

i had a decent double espresso, with an ample head of crema, at Monkey Royale a few weeks ago while briefly stranded in NYC. and second the Mud truck (though i find their storefront is focused less on espresso drinks and more on mugs). on balance, though, i agree with the NYC problem. a stark reminder of how good i've got it in SEA. call it snobby, but i find an espresso without proper crema to be inexcusable. the crema should be a key signal of proper grinding and a quality pull. i seem to be in the minority view on this, though. have never really enjoyed the results from Illy pods. but then, i'm used to watching the beans being ground before my eyes.

i'll mostly just second/third/fourth the praise for Gabe. he is smart, funny and engaging, all things i haven't often found in culinary instruction. (i was most recently at the same cassoulet class as little miss foodie and Della, and Mr. Toast, i'll see you folks at foie gras. i've also taken charcuterie -- not the most recent one, but the one Anita was at. an amazing class. i've since filled my freezer with pork butt and the sausages made therefrom. and several other classes as well.) my one caveat, somewhat discussed above, is that you should keep a close eye on what the evening's tasks at hand will be, choose what you want to be responsible for, and dive for it. in cassoulet, it was final prep for the cassoulet and making the liquid for it. (plus making salad, which i was assigned.) otherwise, it can be too easy to end up chopping lots of onions for mirepoix. ok, yes, we all need to be prep cooks sometimes, but i found i missed some hands-on opportunities unless i was aggressive in scrambling for them. also agree with Anita about the one bad egg thing, though i have a suspicion who that might have been. but CC is a terrific resource, and one i'm very thankful for. one other note: if you're feeling menschlike, bring a bottle of wine to share with class. i think i brought two to cassoulet. not sure whether i'll dredge up Sauternes for foie gras, but i'm thinkin' about it ...

totally agree about *buying* on vintage, but i actually think there's some utility to vintage charts when it comes to *not* buying on vintage. i wouldn't touch an '02 Piedmontese, for example, without having tasted it first or finding a really reliable review. there are some beautiful wines in the mix, but chances are you'll get a dud, especially if you're bargain-hunting. this has happened to us a couple times on the '02s, including a declassified Langhe nebbiolo from a producer i really respect that was so acidic and nasty, i quickly poured it down the drain. and i'll drink almost any wine i open. if you're hunting a specific wine you trust from a bad vintage, there's probably good values to be found. but blind buying, even by producer, can be a disaster. the Telegramme was a good example of that. we figured the Telegraphe folks couldn't disappoint us that badly. and they're skilled enough to have rescued what they could from subpar grapes. but i bet there's lots of folks out there grabbing it off the shelves because they figure it's a cheap backdoor to CdP. so very wrong.

at first i thought, "what's up with Sauternes-style wines in Vancouver?" since we were at West last weekend, doing the foie gras thing. then i realized that part of the thread was two years old. >> check out some Monbazillac. seconded. or thirded. or whatever we're up to now. mamster, if you're still drinking this stuff, you're welcome to come over and have a glass of Monbazillac one of these days ...