Jean Fisch

I have tasted one of them years ago (this has been going on for several years now), and moreale is winnig: the wines are really, really, crap.

Even in Italy, Pnt Grigio is the flavor of the month. Why? because it is like soft Pomerol: easy to understand, sophisticated enough for anybody to proud to be associated with it, and - I have to admit - pften quite a match with a lot of spicy, or non-spicy food. If somebody has the chance, please taste the Pinot Grigio from Specogna (in Friuli): this is done the old-fashioned way, i.e. with some maceration, and the wine really deserves its varietal denomination: the wine is gray in color. But very refined. Jean PS: For those wanting more to Pinot Grigio than its color, try the Gris from Vie de Romans, or the Villa Russiz and Russiz Superiore, both from Friuli. These wines match well with any Italian dish supposed to be enjoyed with white wine.

Super-Tuscan = any wine finishing with aia? More seriously, Super-Tuscan were describing the wines that back in the late 80's were made outside the DOC system. Basically Vino da Tavola. And that were priced above the DOC wines. They did indeed break with the traditional DOC wines wine-making hierarchy (basic, riserva) either by: - being made in barrique without 3 years of oak aging (as foreseen often then by the DOC's) - or, using grapes which were not allowed under the DOC. In the mean time, IGT's have captured many Vino da Tavola wines, some lost sheeps went even back home to the DOC stable (cf. Fonterutoli or Brolio) for the Sangio wines, so, as Craig mentioned, the notion of super-tuscan has become much more vague (still: it remains a commercially very effective weapon - say super-tuscan, and your mind is set on a wine costing north of $35!). In my head, Super-Tuscan has become a negative description that I associate with ultra-modern wine-making techniques: - pre-fermentation cold maceration to ensure a good color (and / or prefermentation grape drying on mats) - micro-oxygenation to highlight freshness - roto-fermentors and maximize extracts and de-structure the tannins (guess where roto-fermentors where first used: in Madiran...) - de-acidification to ensure drinkability when young (and high points with the juries!) - Powdered tannins to give the wine a sense of length it does not have naturally. Jean

I only had the regular stuff - the rest is too expensive for me. The style reminds me of fortified wines à la Moscatel de Setubal, more on the candied fruit / spices part of the spectrum. Very nice to enjoy on their own, but quite tough to match with food (the least bad match was with a tiramisu...).

Miani is as difficult here as anywhere else. I get mine through Germany, and this only erratically. As per the Vietti, the wine was fully mature as it showed already tertiary flavors. Nice ones BTW.

Yesterday evening. Nice evening. Good wine friends, good wheather, good food, and good wines. With the antipasto, we also had my last bottle of Ruggeri & C Prosecco Guistino B. 2001: still the same great pleasure and fun - it really opens the appettite for more. With a ruccola salad and prociutto crudo, we had another Walter Filiputti Venezia-Giulia Sauvignon 2000. Again an easy, food-cuddly wine that was neither too powerful nor too soft. Just right. And great value for EUR 8. But the evening's highlight was clearly a show-stopping Miani COF Merlot 1998. Absolutely stunning wine of great length, precision, and elegance. The nose was full of ripe dark fruits (not cooked), with this touch of metal and iron that I enjoy, flowers, etc. There is also this slight bite on the nose which makes you say: "oh-oh modern". But in the mouth, this is smooth, elegant, round, yet refined and long. This is miles away from such monsters as Avignonesi's Desiderio or Rampa di Fugnano's Gisele I had recently. This wine fills your mouth with a very precise set of flavors (and does not coat your tong with acid and bitter astrigency ...). This is obviously modern wine making, but if done this way it is for the best. A good well hung bottle of Vietti Barbaresco 1991 was ideal with Certosa cheese. The wine was very complex, but with the complexity well mastered by some straight gorgeous red fruit flavors. With strawberries and desert, we had an excellent bottle of Giovanni Dri COF Ramandolo 1999. The nose was a bit closed at first, but then gave way to flavors of honeyed almonds, dried fruit. The wine came over as not overly sweet, which was perfect with the desert. At EUR 13 the full bottle, this is my standard desert wine. Wine is made for food (except Mosel Riesling, which when good is made for drinking straight from the bottle).

If I may add, some top producers (notably J.J. Prüm, Egon Müller, Theo Haart, St-Urbanshof, Fritz Haag, Daniel Vollenweider) have a habit of bottling different qualities of the same wine (say a Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spätlese 2001) which are then priced differently. The only way to tell is by the last four numbers of the AP. Giving a tasting note of a J.J. Prüm's Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spätlese 2001 is the same as giving a tasting note on "some Clos de Vougeot from Château de la Tour, but I can't remember if it was the normal or the Vieille Vigne". There are three different bottlings of Prüm's above mentioned wine, coming from different plots within the vineyard, harvested at different moments, and meant to be different!

A couple of comments about German wines: QmP means wines with certain level of sugar ripeness (the required levels for Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese , etc. vary by region) and do limit the things one can do during fermentation (no chaptalization, only sweetening via sussreserve, etc.). QmP wines are technically not required to indicate Trocken or Halb-Trocken if they do not exceed the required RS levels (these are set by law, and are slightly different by regions). But all producers i know indicate their QmP wines as Trocken or Halb-Trocken when this is the case. SO there shouldn't really be a problem. The "problem" is with the non QmP wines: here it is not necessary to indicate the whether it is a trocken or sweet. And the trick of looking at the degree of alc., knowing the wine maker, etc. helps. Side comment: Yes Eiswein has also a sugar level requirement - it is essentially the same as that for BA in the region (and of course varies per region). Before the law of 1971, Eiswein was just a designation (totally free, non defined, etc.) of the fact that some wines have seen some ice. You could have Eiswein Auslese, Eiswein Feinste Auslese, Beerenauslese and even Eiswein Trockenbeerenauslese!

Don't forget the reds from the Loire.

My whites for the Summer: Italian: - Lison Pramaggiore & Piave whites (say Braghina and Ornella Molon) - Friuli of course (Roncùs, Venica & Venica, Vie de Romans, Ronco del Gelso, Castelvecchio, ...) - Alto Adige (St. Michael-Eppan Schulthauser Pinot Bianco, Lageder Gewurz am Sand, Tiefenbrunner Müller-Thurgau Feldmarschall, Nössing Kerner, ...) - Soave & al (Sassaia from La Biancara) French: - Muscadet (lots of good producers) - Southern France (nothing beats for me the Clairette de Bellegarde by Mas Carlot - EUR 3!) German: - QbA by Maximin Grünhaus - Kabinett by W. Schaefer, Egon Müller, J.J. Prüm, Selbach-Oster, Dönnhoff, and the other usual suspects!) Austrian: - Wachau Federspiel (Jamek) This of course for a start

And Speck! Above all Speck. My preference is with a Speckknödel Suppe.

I am a BIG, BIG drinker (and appreciator of course) of German wines. I've been seeing several producers recently for annual order of joints, and they all tell me that the selling has never been as brisk as this year. For the first time, Schaefer was sold out before he released his wines. Dönnhoff is also selling out rapidly although no official list has yet been mailed to the ex-cellar customers. Besides the fact of course that German winemakers are starting to use the usuall trick of the trade (buy now, very rare), the demand increase seems to be focused on the US market (and some UK dealers - but who essentially are middle men for the US). Is there a trend towards German Riesling outside the US frenzy? Jean Fisch

Chère Madame Robinson, Friends, knowing my little weakness for the evil bottle, ask me regularly to organise tastings. And I see it time and time again. They go “wow, this is as much fun as one can have with one’s clothes on” when tasting wine technology miracles such as Vitiano from Falesco and go “Ah yes interesting … Thanks for having brought this bottle along Jean” (my friends are too well educated to even hint at my daft taste) when tasting wines more classical wines such as those from Soianello, Ruffino Riserva Oro, etc. Maybe 1 out of ten prefer the classically styled wines, and this in the country that basically “invented” Pomerol, Belgium! (that’s what they teach us in school). Why this success of the modern wines? My prime suspect is the trend towards spicy / flavorful food, where classical wines often drawn in the noise. Guilty and charged? or are there accomplices? If so which ones? Thanks in advance, Jean Fisch

Tell me more of this purge? it sounds really interesting!

I need to call Jancis "John, Paul George and Ringo"?

The Parker style would be defined as a very dense, extracted wine with very dark color and significant new oak flavors. Usually the alcohol levels are quite high and the tannins very soft. Often wines made in this way lose the taste of the area when they are made. It is generally referred to as the 'international style' because it often difficult to tell where they were made by just tasting them. Bordeaux changed course with the 1982 vintage which naturally produced a super rich style of wine. It is also this vintage that made Robert Parker. He championed these wines as the best vintage of the century and they were a huge commercial success in the United States. The producers made so much money they could not resist. Not to stray too far off subject but has burgundy for the most part resented RP because he focuses on fat, meaty reds (drc style) and provides lower scores for those producers that go for a much more lighter, delicate and complex style? If I remember correctly, somebody at an US University did a regression analysis, and found out that PArker's points are perfectly correlated with the price of a Bordeaux, but un-correlated with that in Burgundy. Put simply: the buyers of Burgundy do not follow the Parker points.

Intrinsically, your argument can be resumed as follows: jug wines will be perceived by the wast majority of people as being less appreciated than Petrus. Hence saying that the one is better than the other has statistical relevance. I'll say yes, at that level of "granularity". However, scores as we are talking here are essentially used to value wines of a certain minimal quality level and is therefore essentially used within the 80-100pts, or 15-20 pts. To use your decription, within this range, taste differences render the absolute statistical relevance of individual scores really doubful without an understanding of the guy's taste. Let me take the example of Bordeaux: Pavie 2001 got a 94-96 from Parker, it only got a 15/20 from Robinson. One is raving about this "new frontier of Bordeaux wine", the other is "appaled by the caricatural wine". The same huge differences exist for other so-called garage wines. Also, Parker systematically smashes medium-weight wines such as La Tour Haut Brion in the 90's (87-88 points) whereas others are giving these wines 19/20 (i.e. 95 points). Finally, take Burgundy and look at the differences in rating between Rovani and Coates or Burghound. These differences are driven by differences in taste - Rovani preferring bigger wines with strong colors, Coates and Burghound giving high scores to lighter wines which play more on their aromatics. We are therefore not talking about "exceptions", but about two of the major wine regions in the world. So all in all, yes, taste is the key factor to differentiate a 80-100 pts wines, and without an understanding of the "taste" of the guy writing, the scores are useless. Because "I like this" vs. "I don't like this" has become a too big factor in the score. Side comment - if taste was not such an important factor, then why are some journals using pannels? NB - I am against pannels, because the spread of taste is so wide, that basically all wines end up somewhere in the middle. Also, one has no control on how the pannels are set up (i.e. who likes his wines packed and stacked, and who prefers them lighter). I regularly organise tastings with knowledgeable and less knowledgable wine lovers. There are usually two camps (roughly speaking and making a big stereotyping here): - the lovers of the big dramatic wines, who value extraction and immediate impact more than length and finale. Usually, these guys like new world, new oak, low acidity, Cabernet, Chardonnay, Southern Italy, Southern Rhone (etc.) - The lovers of aroma and fruit, looking for balance and elegance. The power is secundary. These wine lovers usually prefer Pinot Noir, high acidity, no new oak, Loire, Nebbiolo, Mosel, etc. Anybody recognizing this sort of trend?

Let me reply in the same way as you did: bullshit! Since when are there rules to taste? This sounds very, very pretentious, don't you think so? The best example is provided by the current rage within the wine trade and the wine profession about the so-called modern Bordeaux. Wines like Marojallia, Clos Badon, etc. get raving reviews by a certain press (incluidng PArker), but get a disastrous review by another part of the press. Which one is right? That's why I think Janics Robinson quite rightly criticises the scoring system. If you want to analyse it further, there are different approaches to scoring: - None (one just says in aboslute - I like it, or I didn't like it, or something in between) - Relative to peers: this is the principle chosen by for instance la RVF or Decanter: Wines get stars / scores in relationship to what other similar winemakers have achieved in that region. In other word, even in 1984, some Bordeaux wines may have gotten maximal scores if they have made a good wine. This scale is really producer-centric: it sort of underlines the good performance of a winemaker. - Absolute scoring (à la PArker / WS / etc.). The reason people like it is that it makes comparisons between vintages and offers customers absolute relationships: a 90 pts wine from the 1990 vintage is better than a 89 points from the 1988 vintage). But it all remains in the eyes of the taster. To think (what I often hear) that a taster can take abstraction to his preferences and recognize the greatness of wines "intrinsically" is simply not happening. TO take an example: Parker gives low scores to wines which are not extracted, and Jancis Robinson gives low scores to wines which only live from the current extraction.

Ooops - correct re. Cime!

Fortunately, the notion of Super-White is not (yet) associated with de-acidification, barrique aging, and high levels of dry extract. Although The Ronco del Gnemiz Sauvignon Etichetta Nera is a step in the direction. BTW - there are two Sauvignon and two Chardonnay at Vie de Romans? which ones did you have? Also, there are two Sauvignon Blanc made by Venica & Venica - a regular one and a single vineyard called Ronco delle Cime.

Claude, I have put my hands on some Drouhin-Laroze Chambertin CdB 87 and this is still very nice.

No. Friuli sucks. Really. Reds and whites. Go and publicize something else. Like Nero d'Avola. Everybody likes Nero d'Avola. And you can also have a Chardonnay from Sicily. Usually harvested in July and probably bottled in August if it wasn't for the oak aging process. See, you could be sipping the 2003 vintage already in early September, beating all the Primeur wines, and without have to go as low as having to drink antipodean wines. But please leave Friuli alone. Prices are already bad enough. And I hate competition for my favorite wines. So you must have dreamt your tasting note of the Sacrisassi Rosso. Jean PS: Nice board. Until my first post (cf. Groucho Marx)