Tapiz Extra Brut Malbec Rose

We've gotten a lot of tips on great wines though the years from customers and vendors alike but never before have we gotten a good tip from a truck driver.  The fellow had just dropped off my order when in the middle of some small talk he drops a bomb - Tapiz Sparkling Rose was selling like hotcakes.  His truck was loaded with the stuff.  Everyone was ordering it.  So while this wasn't an actual product endorsement, it struck me as something worth pursuing.

Tapiz Malbec and Cabernet have been staples here for at least twenty years.  They are as good as any in the twenty dollar range but until now we didn't know about the sparkler.  After consulting with the salesman we added that one to the set on the next order.

Tapiz means tapestry (of terroir & innovation.)  The winery is a modern state of the art operation located in the celebrated Uco Valley in central Mendoza, Argentina.  The vineyards are amongst the highest in the world at 4,600 feet altitude.  The winemaking team is led by Jean Claude Berrouet who for forty-four years made the wines at Chateau Petrus, the most expensive wine in the world.

Tapiz Extra Brut Malbec Rose is a 100% varietal methode champenoise sparkler.  The wine color is bright pink; the aromas and flavors feature fresh and fruity cherry and strawberry.  Uco Valley vineyards are known for their diurnal temperature swing that creates berries that are both ripe yet balanced between sugar and acidity.  This wine is fermented in stainless steel at a low temperature followed by eight to ten months aging on the lees.  The finished product is "full bodied and concentrated yet elegant and balanced."  

Angelini Veneto Pinot Noir

Angelini was recommended to us as an example of type that surpasses in quality what we have come to expect in everyday priced pinot, which isn't saying much since these things are pretty disappointing as a category.  As an Italian IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) wine, the juice is sourced from an expanded region and made in the international style but still, according to our research, maintains Veneto appellation characteristics.  This begs the question - What are the typical characteristics of Veneto Pinot Noir?  Try as we might we couldn't find them.  Which probably means they are just playing off the prestige of the Veneto appellation name.  

Veneto, in northeast Italy, has been called "the engine of the Italian wine industry."  As tastes have become more sophisticated in the modern era, it has grown in importance.  Not only is it home to Soave, Prosecco, Valpolicella and Amarone; it has also assumed a heightened role in the production of what California might call "fighting varietals," those everyday wines that are a step above bulk quality.  And that is what we think we have in Angelini...except that's not really fair to our most reliable vendor who, when he says something is good, it just IS.

There may be more to recommend this wine if we consider the long winemaking history of the region.  As we have said here many times, the pinot family of grapes has an unstable genome resulting in a history of vineyard mutations across Europe.  Currently there are fifty clones of Pinot Noir in Europe.  While origins for the grape geographically are uncertain, most ampelographers would put it around the middle of the continent.  Evidence shows this grape to have been around for a couple thousand years which probably means it found its way to Veneto a very long time ago.  Who would doubt the abilities of Italian winemakers with that kind of time to find the right clone and get the winemaking right?  

Pinot Noir is the great red grape of the world if you have an extra hundred dollars or so for that kind of quality.  Descriptors for any European Pinot Noir worth its salt should include finesse, elegance and complexity.  We believe Angelini may have those qualities.  Give it a try!

The Paradigm Shift

The question we pose today is this: When did the historic "nose-taste-finish" model for wine structure morph into the now common fruit forward style of today.  Relatedly, with the ancillary jamminess that so often attends to this style; when did that supercede finesse and sculpture in the body of a wine.  Am I too deep in the weeds?  Let's clear out some underbrush.

The historic model for most wine appreciators starts with the nose, the aroma of the wine.  So much of tasting is done at the beginning, before even getting the stuff into your mouth.  It's a foretelling of the entire experience.  Tasting the wine then reveals a fuller breadth of flavors you anticipated in the nose.  And just like even lighter wines must have some body, even simpler wines must show some breadth of flavors and they must be complementary.  Are you with me so far?  Those flavors that so enticed you at the beginning should unfold into something greater in the mouth and then continue into an extended pleasant finish.

That is the historic model.

To our understanding, two things happened to accelerate the change to the California forward fruit style.  In the mid 1980's Kendall-Jackson emerged as a major player in the industry with their off-dry style Chardonnay.  Before that there was White Zinfandel, of course.  We have a sweet tooth in this country and with KJ's success, wines in general became more forward and a little less dry.  

The other factor goes back much further in history.  We're talking about jug wines.  For most of American wine industry history it was jugs of off-dry muddy red and white plonk that was the norm for what wine was in America.  The better quality wine industry was always there, but always only in the background.  In the 1960's estate producers of better wines began to get a toehold and continued to grow in popularity but, in all honesty, it was probably around 1990 before the jug business waned.  But the style persisted, less structure and more fruity flavors.  

Now here's a factor number three: The old model was European in origin.  This is America.  European-style sauces, stews and soups require a wininess of longer flavors that wrap around the complexity of the sauces.  We're a hamburger and steak culture and we consume a lower fat diet in general than the Europeans do.  So in that light it makes sense that we want a fatter wine. 

Thermal Amplitude

We've written about thermal amplitude in the past.  It's basically the same thing as the diurnal shift, the difference in temperature between daytime and nighttime.  The greater the temperature difference, the better the fruit.  Today's post was prompted by seeing the thermal amplitude wording on the back label of Puramun's Co-Fermented Malbec/Petite Verdot blend.  

Puramun is a prestigious label from Pepe Gallante of the Valle de Uco of Mendoza, Argentina.  For this wine the two grape types are hand harvested and then fermented together, a process they think brings out more of the great Malbec character.  The wine then sees twelve months in oak.

Valle de Uco is a special place within the larger special place of Mendoza, one of the truly great wine venues of the world.  Mendoza is the huge plateau in the middle of Argentina that has received financial investment from many of the greatest international wine companies.  It is a high altitude, sandy soil environment that has never seen the phylloxera problem other wine regions have been plagued with because of those conditions.  Apparently the plant louse behind the problem doesn't care for high altitude sandy soils.

The subject of thermal amplitude was clearly explained in a blogpost by APU Winery: Daytime photosynthesis creates energy and stores carbohydrates (glucose) while at the same time plant respiration converts nutrients from the soil into energy for internal cellular activities.  At nighttime when less energy is needed respiration slows with the colder temperatures.  The leftover energy from the daytime activities is then directed to the fruit which develops rich intense flavors, color and acidity.  If the daytime heat is sufficient, the grapes ripen faster, developing darker fruit flavors and thicker skins for desirable tannins. 

And there you have it.

Diatom Chardonnay

"Diatomaceous earth," she says when I introduce her to the wine, clearly something that stuck with her from prior reading.  She followed with, "It has to do with soil that was previously part of a seabed."  And that is essentially correct.  More specifically it involves all kinds of dead fossilized algae (diatoms) of all shapes and sizes that have been accumulating in certain locations worldwide over the course of a hundred fifty million years.  That onset, if you're keeping score, was in the Jurassic Period.  Prior to that there was some kind of bacteria that didn't require light to exist.  It was effectively killed off by the algae leaving really no trace of what it might have been.

Algae was a gamechanger in the history of the planet because, if you recall your high school science classes, algae is a plant and what do plants do?  Photosynthesis.  They convert light energy into chemical energy.  And how much photosynthesis can a little algae do?  Living algae, which may account for half of all organic matter in the oceans, actually do twenty-five to fifty percent of all photosynthesis in the world.  To state the obvious, this is huge.

The layer of dead algae on the bottom of the oceans may be a half mile thick.  Because of the currents at work around the world, those dead diatoms work themselves up to our soils in certain locations around the world, one of them being in Santa Barbara, California where Diatom Vineyards exists.  The Santa Barbara diatomaceous earth is a siliceous sedimentary rock that crumbles into a powder that has proven useful in winemaking.  It is an abrasive, like pumice, with tiny pores that both filter and polish a wine that is poured through it.

Diatom is the best California Chardonnay we have tasted in quite a while.  It is unoaked with no malolactic fermentation yet tastes rich.  Winemaker Greg Brewer uses low yield, perfectly ripe fruit from Santa Maria Valley to make this wine.  The nose features "fresh melon, key lime, and celery (!)"; the palate has "herbs and zesty citrus fruit."  Most critics scores Diatom Chardonnay in the mid-nineties.

A Couple of Noteworthy Italians

From the Val di Noto in southeast Sicily comes the Morellito Cala Ianco (white grapes), a 90% Grillo/10% Catarotto blend that may be too good for its salad and seafood intentions.  This organic wonder follows its zesty/nutty nose with nuances of apricot, herbs, salinity, lemon and tangerine on the palate.  The management of this property says there is freshness and tension in this chalky textured, acid-driven effort.  Again from the winery owner comes this chestnut: "It's like diving into the ocean on a hot day."

Fonterenza's Pettirosso contrasts with Cala Ianco in every way.  Obviously, it's red wine.  It also has a pedigree, being from the Mt. Amiata neighborhood of Tuscany, although you wouldn't know it from the sparse bottle label.  The grapes here are Sangiovese and Ciliegiolo, again, if not great types, certainly more highly regarded than Sicillian Grillo.  And the marketing effort for this one is different.  Much more text is devoted to the making of this organic effort than to any colorful adjectives for the finished product.

Pettirosso is Sangiovese-based so it marries well with typical Italian pasta dishes.  Reviews available to us say "black cherries, brown spice, balsam herbs and cocoa."  Someone else said "wild berries with violet florals."  We like that.  It says the wine is complex and the sum of all the company winemaking analytics tells us this is a serious example of its type. 

Sicily

This reminds me of the time we intended to compare and contrast Zinfandel wines made from grapes grown at different latitudes.  In our mind's eye we assumed northern California was a higher latitude than southern Italy.  It isn't.  They are pretty much the same latitude so our tasting of examples from both places morphed into a contrast of wine cultures.  Based on wine styles our conclusion was: California makes cocktail wines; Europe makes drier dinner wines.

Sicily is an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea so to our way of thinking, it must be small.  Islands are small, right?  Wrong again.  This island contains twenty-three DOCs (wine appellations) and one DOCG, a guaranteed highest quality level appellation.  The island itself is a DOC, making it Italy's largest wine appellation. 

Six thousand years ago Greek traders introduced the first vines to Sicilian soil.  Three thousand years ago they brought their winemaking skills and technology to the island and the Sicilian wine industry was born.  As "the Crossroads of the Mediterranean," that industry flourished.

So not only is Sicily huge with a very long winemaking history, it is also very diverse in its winemaking culture.  Twenty-four percent of Sicily is mountainous allowing for Sicily to reflect the same gamut of climates the mainland has.  The Val Demone in the northeast side of Sicily is home to the finest wines of Sicily.  That is where Mount Etna reigns as the highest peak in Italy with vineyards inhabiting elevations up to 4,000 feet.  The red wines made from the Nero Mascalese grape are comparable to Barolo.  The Bianco from the Caricante grape has a Riesling-like character.

The most well known wine of Sicily is Marsala and it is sourced from the Val di Mazara on the west side of the island.  The Val di Noto is on the southeast side and it provides our store shelves with Sicily's most popular red, Nero d'Avola.  Catarratto is the most widely planted white grape but most of it is destined for Marsala.  Grillo and Inzolia are the most popular white table wine grapes.  In all, Sicily offers sixty-five native grape varieties.

Now you know what an incredible place Sicily is in the wine industry.  We have to stop this too-large undertaking at some point but not before this last tidbit: Being an arid island, Sicilian vineyards benefit from breezes that cool vineyards and prevent mildew and rot from getting started so there is a disproportionately large amount of organic farming going on there.