A “ghostly” and “insane” dinner

I enjoyed another wine tasting menu while in Jerome, Arizona, and I also want to share with you the wines I drank with a nearly splendid meal I had at The Asylum, the restaurant in the Jerome Grand Hotel (which allegedly is haunted!).

When I saw that The Asylum had a tasting menu, I knew I had to try it. You may select four wines from their tasting menu for a reasonable price of $10. It’s a great opportunity to try new varietals as well as new producers.

My first choice was the Schwartzbock Grüner Veltliner 2009. This was a light, fresh, juicy and crisp Austrian wine, one of my favorite varietals. I loved this one.

The next one was a Spanish blend that was 60 percent Verdejo, 25 percent Viura and 15 percent Sauvignon Blanc. The Con Class Rueda 2009 was full of orchard fruit on the nose and had a clean mineral taste with a bit of lemon. It finished like a cool mountain stream lined with Colorado columbine. It was, indeed, a delightful wine.

Moving on to reds, I tasted the Los Lobos Malbec 2009, a very interesting wine from Mendoza that was spicy on the nose with a hint of cassis. Yet despite that intriguing aroma, the wine was very subtle on the pallet without much tannin. The finish was smooth and nice. All the flavors were very interesting and I couldn’t quite nail them down, but I know that this is a wine that I would enjoy a bottle of.

My final wine of the flight was the Villa Pozzi Nero d’Avola 2009 from Sicily. I’ve been disappointed by these wines in the past, but this one redeemed all its brethren. It had a rich, blackberry nose heavy with fruit, but not off-putting. It was delicious, juicy with plum and cherry with a tight, dry finish. You don’t taste the tannin until the finish, which leads me to think that this has some closet time potential. This was very good, certainly the best Nero d’Avola I’ve had after a string of disappointments. In fact, I ordered a full glass of this to enjoy with my entree, their delicious grilled Achiote rubbed pork tenderloin, prepared perfectly.

The previous night I had dinner at The Asylum as well, they had so many good wines! I began that evening with the Indaba 2010 Chenin Blanc from the Western Cape, South Africa. I haven’t had much success with South African wines, but this was a nice find. It was smooth and delicate like an excellent Chenin Blanc, ripe with apple, pear, and even a bit of pepper on the finish.

My dinner was a Rocky Point shrimp scampi with tomato Beurre Blanc and shredded Parmesan brown rice. With this I had the Zolo 2010 Torrontes from Mendoza. The Torrontes had a really nice bite with my appetizer, a delicious butternut squash soup that was divine! By the way, if you visit the restaurant’s website, you can find the recipe! The wine was also quite good with the entrée, although the shrimp was a tad overcooked.

All in all, the wines found at The Asylum were delicious and the variety inspiring.

A deliciously complex Albariño

I’m a relatively new convert to Albariño, a deliciously crisp and vibrant white varietal from northwest Spain, and this has been a great year to try this wonderful wine.

Recently I shared a bottle of the Burgáns 2010 Albariño with my friend Curt at Glenn’s Diner here in Chicago. This was a deliciously beguiling wine! Yes, it was fresh and vibrant, but it had a very blossomy nose like a fruit orchard. I suggested to Curt it was orange blossom. The wine tasted juicy like baked apple without the sweetness, but definitely with a spiced back end. That was the beguiling part – what was that spice? It was so familiar, but I just couldn’t name it. The best I could come up with was cardamom with a hint of snake fruit – a delicious and somewhat spicy fruit I had once in Bali. And there was blood orange.

Whatever the tastes were, the wine was delicious! We split a Cobb salad as an opener and the wine was great with it. And it was well suited with both our entrees, although I didn’t think the sauce with my seared sea scallops was the right style. Despite that, it was a great wine and meal.

This is a wine I have no qualms with scoring a 9 using my scale at the left.

A wine bar weekend

On Saturday a new friend of mine and I went to a wine bar in Lincoln Park and sampled two of their flights, one white and the other red. My friend, Andrew, wanted to learn more about wine and the wine bar was a perfect solution.

D.O.C. Wine Bar has many locations throughout Chicagoland, and like many wine bars, offers you the opportunity to sample flights of similar wines so you can get an idea of what a region offers or what a varietal offers. It’s a great way for neophytes to learn about varietals and regions, as well as learn the techniques to discern flavor differences and test your pallet. For more experienced wine drinkers, these wine bars can present opportunities with their various flights to sample new wines you may be unaware of, as well as give you opportunities to sample varietals that you might normally not purchase.

The abbreviation D.O.C. in Italian is for Denominazione di Origine Controllata, and is the equivalent to France’s Appelation D’Origine Contrôlee. It reflects a wine region’s denomination designation, and for the DOC, this is defined by the geographic area of production and specifies the varietals that may be used for wine making in order to earn that designation. This board also controls the minimum alcohol content in the wine, the maximum allowable yield with the grapes, and specifications for aging.

For our tastings, Andrew and I started off with three wines in the “Euro trash” flight, a curiously named trio of varietals that I am aware of, but haven’t much experience drinking. I tapped my notes into my iPhone as we drank, and below is what I chronicled.

Strele 2009 Soave, Vento, Italy: Light nose, orchard fruit, apple, peach, a very light flavor, not too sweet, very fresh and crisp, juicy.

Reventos 2009 Muscat/Macabeo, Penedes, Spain: Nose more rustic, longer finish, more herbal, fruit gradually exposed, a curious, almost medicinal flavor, not unpleasant.

Chateau Moncontour 2009, Chenin Blanc, Vouvray, Loire Valley, France: Light, fresh nose, juicy, spicy apple, light finish, best of the three.

Andrew and I both agreed we thought it interesting how the three wines were ordered. The Soave presented juicy and delicious orchard fruit followed next by the Muscat, which was decidedly more herbal and even a bit suppressed. Andrew didn’t care much for it, but I thought it good, though very different from the first. And then the Chablis placed itself right in the middle, having both the light juiciness of the orchard fruit, but still presenting complexity and mineral qualities.

We thought, then, that the ordering was deliberate, so when we ordered a Pinot Noir flight next, we anticipated a similar progression. Before tasting, I explained to Andrew why Pinot Noir can be so beguiling, how difficult it is to grow and how delicate it is to craft into good wine. Nebbiolo is also like this, which is why red Burgundy and Barolos can be such huge disappointments at times: both tend to be expensive, and both varietals are very similar in character. So when Burgundy or Barolo is made well, these wines are extraordinary. But when made poorly, they can be enormous duds.

Nieto 2010 Pinot Noir, Mendoza, Argentina: Can’t peg the nose, the smell is familiar, but can’t name it. A very young wine, thin, watery, no finish. Color a beautiful transparent ruby.

Block Nine 2009, Pinot Noir, California: Light berry nose, bit of spice, tannin noticeable, longer finish, a hint of cinnamon. Tasty, but nothing special.

Vincent Sauvestre 2008, Pinot Noir, Burgundy, France: Nothing on the nose, literally sans smell, bright fruit, but again diluted.

With this flight, we experienced the ephemeral quality that is Pinot Noir. All three wines were generally disappointments in my book, although I must say it was curious to see a Pinot Noir from the Mendoza region of Argentina. If I hadn’t of done this, I wouldn’t have known about the fact there are growers dabbling with Pinot Noir in Argentina.

Repeat visits to wine bars like this are a good idea because the tasting flights do change periodically, so there will be something of interest. And the bottle selection can be relatively deep, although rather expensive, particularly for the higher end wines. For example, D.O.C. has a Chassagne-Montrachet that goes for $116 a bottle, and a Chateuneuf-du-Pape that goes for more than $300.

All in all a delightful experience and one that shall be repeated.

Are there similar wine bars in your area? Tell me about them and your experiences by leaving a comment. What new wine have you discovered through similar tasting flights?

Bodegas Montecillo Albariño

Another very tasty and inexpensive Albariño from the Rias Baixas region of Spain. While this 2008 from Bodegas Montecillo received only faint accolades from Wine Spectator, which rated it with a mere 81, I found this wine to be quite nice, especially for $10 a bottle. I did not detect a taste of bubble gum on the finish, which WS had.

It smelled fresh of green apple, just a hint of grapefruit with some delicate floral scents. The taste was opulent, fleshy, filled with the same green apple as well as pear and nectarine. There was a subtle spice to it as well. This was all built on a mineral back of river stones, round and smooth.

It was definitely an easy drinker, one I would not hesitate to buy again. I rate it with a 7.5 on my scale to the left.

Albarino - A new discovery

First, I want to apologize for the dearth of new posts. My personal laptop died on me, the motherboard fried because of a shorted connection with the external power cord. Silly me, I tripped over the cord one day, which broke the internal connection just enough to not completely sever it. As a result, the partial connection sparked over time and killed the motherboard.

Anyway, I have found an alternative setup to catch up on my posts while I continue shopping for a new laptop. So don’t be surprised if you see a flurry of new posts here over the next week. It’s not that I’ve drank all these wines in just a few sittings! Rather, I’m just catching up with the wines that I’ve enjoyed over the past month.

As you may recall, I’ve been on a search for the perfect summer white, with the idea of purchasing an entire case. However, my search has been so enjoyable that rather than purchase a case of a single wine, I instead bought a mixed case. It’s just way too much fun trying out all these different wines!

And one new discovery I made was in trying a Spanish white from the region Rias Baixas. It’s an Albarino, a varietal that I admittedly had never tried. The one I sample was a bit pricy at $17, but this Dom Bardo 2007 was really quite nice. Wine Spectator wasn’t very impressed with it, scoring it with a 79. But I thought it was a very nice introduction for me to this varietal.

The wine had a light straw color and a lively nose that was fresh and clean. It reminded a little of Chardonnay, but not those heavily oaked California excuses for wine, nor something too creamy and peachy. Rather, it tended more toward a classic Burgundy style of Chardonnay with just a snap of the liveliness you would expect from a Sauvignon Blanc. The finish was strong and refreshing. One thing I noticed with this wine is that you don’t want to serve it too cold. It really gains character as it warms up a bit.

Given the fact this wine was $17, I’ll rate it with a 6.5: I might buy it again if I see it on sale. But it certainly was a positive introduction for me to this Spanish white called Albarino.