TN: Sierra Car Crash tasting at Grapes

(I’m sure others will chime in who were there,but I like to get my notes out early, so I can’t second guess myself)

So I rarely have lunch away from desk, but today was too good to pass up. Daniel Posner at Grapes in N. White Plains invited me to join a group of geeks for lunch and a blind tasting, with the only knowledge that it would include the 2005 Sierra Carche. If anyone isn’t familiar with this story, this was a “brand” wine that got a very high score from Dr Jay Miller at WA, and subsequently has led to some major disappointment among a lot (though not all) buyers. There has been some controversy and confusion re lot numbers, production figures, and what the wine actually is.

Lunch was hamburgers for appetizers and steak for main course, a real guy lunch (there was potato salad, vegetables, and cheese too). Lineup was 14 wines (a 15th, the 2005 Pico Madama, was corked). Daniel knew the lineup, but had employees blind the bottles, so single blind for him, for the rest of us it was double blind (though we knew there was at least one 2005 Sierra Carche). About a dozen foks attended, some ITB, a couple consumers who had bought SC, and a few interested observer winegeeks.

As a disclaimer, I don’t drink much Spanish wine except some Rioja, so maybe not the best judge.

Flight One - Not an auspicious start

#1 Menthol, slightly weedy, tired. Not good. C-

#2 Grenachey, jammy/hot B-/C+

#3 Porty slightly lifted nose , alcoholic, heavy in mouth but thin flavors C

Ugly flight

Flight Two

#4 Light, cherry fruit, a touch of frizzante at first, some people really hated, I thought a simple quaffer but not awful B-/C+

#5 Horrible nose, VA meets turpentine meets weedy greenness, really terrible, Kenney (who has had Sierra Carche a number of times) says “this is it!” D/F

#6 Ripe, jammy, dark red fruit, sweeter than my preferred style but at least not flawed. B-

Some talk of stoning Dan and raiding the store downstairs for something to drink

Flight Three

#7 Green , some VA/shoe polish, not quite as bad as 5, but similar nose makes us think we found a second Sierra Carche. D

#8 Jammy, sweet, rich, low low acid, a charred oak component. Not my style, but at least not flawed. Actually a bit of a relieft after #5 & 7 B-/B

#9 Muted fruit, a little burnt rubber, I come around to agreeing it’s corked.
NR

We’re beginning to resemble the villagers in Frankenstein, luckily the upstairs of Grapes is devoid of torches.

Flight Four
#10 A bit of black fruit, a little brett, but comparatively straightforward and not flawed by my standards. C+/B+

#11 OK, I thought #5 was bad, till I tasted this. Burnt rubber and sewagey brett. Horrible wine, we tried to one-up each other with descriptors. “tires leaving skid marks as the car slides off road into the waste pond at the pig farm” was my contribution (Tyler informed me the wastepond is called the “lagoon”, I’ll use that next time). Fatally flawed wine. F

#12 Red berries, a bit plain but clean, one of my faves of the lunch (admittedly a bit of faint praise). It’s a rare tasting where “it’s clean” is one of the top superlatives of the event. B

Flight Five

#13 Red fruit, very sweet, but some balancing acids, one of the best of the day (again, faint praise). I thought this or maybe #12 was an 01 Embruix I expected to be in lineup. B/B-

#14 Hot, disjointed, off nose (I think Adam nails it with"rotting hay." ) C-

Thank God, it’s over!

Then we sent in our votes for top 3 faves, and Howard totalled while Daniel unveiled.

#1 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114)
#2 2005 Espectacle (Monsant) - Dan says $150
#3 2004 Pico Madama
#4 The Pepper Pot (South Africa) missed vintage, $14
#5 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114)
#6 2005 Pasanau (El Vell Coster) Priorat
#7 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8114)
#8 2005 Mollydooker Carnival of Love
#9 2007 Resalso (Ribera del Duero)
#10 2007 A1 Mouvedre $12
#11 2007 Panarroz (Jumilla)
#12 2008 Oriol (Emporda) $12
#13 2001 Clos Fonta (Priorat)
#14 2005 Sierra Carche (lot 8113)

Vote totals
#2 1 1st Place Vote
#6 1 1st Place Vote, 1 2nd Place Vote, 2 Third Place Votes
#8 4 1st Place Votes, 6 2nd Place Votes, 1 Third Place Votes
#12 4 1st Place Votes, 2 2nd Place Vote, 3 Third Place Votes
#13 2 1st Place Votes, 3 2nd Place Vote, 6 Third Place Votes

OK, so #11 wasn’t Sierra Carche (this was a terrible bottle, but a couple of people who know the Panarroz said bottle wasn’t representative).

I’m surprised that Carnival of Love was one of my top wines, but it was a relief to have something that seemed to be what the winemaker intended.

There may be some 96 point Sierra Carches out there, but these four were sub-80 in my mental conversion

I may not be much of a judge of Spanish wines, and not the biggest fan of grenache etc, but even folks better disposed towards those wines seemed to be in agreement that the Sierra Carches were all terrible, and I didn’t hear one person say “I’d buy this” about any of the wines. I could see maybe #12.

I can’t say it was my favorite lineup, but the good news was since I was driving and going back to work I had no trouble spitting!

Fun time, nice group, good food, “interesting” wines, good to see some old acquaintances and meet some new people.


Grade disclaimer: I’m a very easy grader, basically A is an excellent wine, B a good wine, C mediocre. Anything below C means I wouldn’t drink at a party where it was only choice. Furthermore, I offer no promises of objectivity, accuracy, and certainly not of consistency.

Funniest notes I’ve read in a while. I was laughing out loud at #11.

Sorry I couldn’t make the event.
Sounds like it was fun.
Great notes.

Thanks

Very entertaining read but glad that I wasn’t in the panel. Not much left to be said about whether SC is a 90+ point wine after this. Nail in the coffin until it resurrects under a different name.

Thanks.

Thanks! Great notes. I have had good luck with the Panarroz before but I haven’t tried one since the 05 vintage. We sold tons of the '04. It is a Dan Kravitz Selections wine, and, in general, I like his picks.

The best part of the luncheon was the Kenney & Manzi show next to me! I almost spit wine out on several occasions, which come to think of it would not have been a bad idea with some of the atrocities. I’ll post my notes later, but I too had the Carnival of Love (formerly known as “The Carnival of Crap” by me) as my #1 wine, but after tasting those Sierra Carches I think I might have given 90pts to turpentine.

Very generous afternoon Dan, thanks a lot. I had a great time and learned a lot.

Are you kidding? Did you read the notes? I feel sorry for the attendees.

These are Kenney type wines. He didn’t like them?

Many, many thanks to Dan for sponsoring this exploration of the undrinkable and for manning the barbeque, and to all the participants who sacrificed their palates in the interests of oenology (assuming this was wine). Robert Kenney, who brought the Sierra Carche problem to light, deserves a special mention, too, for joining us and recounting how he’s methodically worked his way through 18 bottles of the stuff (hereinafter “SC”). (Sure you want to keep telling people that, Robert?)

It was fascinating in a morbid sort of way. The SCs were indeed awful, but each bottle was awful in a subtly different way. Some were more porty, some had more of a pine antisceptic note. But there were a couple of common strands that allowed the group to pick them out for the most part.

For starters, they oozed VA. I make my own vinegar, so I’m not usually too sensitive to VA, but I’m sure you could clean your copper pots with these.

The other signature could be summed up in my note “underripe and overripe at the same time” – no small feat. They were also brutally tannic and fruit-free.

I’d love to know what a winemaker would say about these. We never did hear about those lab tests in Barcelona, did we? Aside from the VA, I don’t know that these were technically flawed. I think they may just be overripe, overextracted and wildly out of balance.

My scores for the four SC bottles were 50, 60, 60 and a whopping 74 for one (on the 50-100 point scale). The only wines that came close to being as bad were the Pico Madama, made by the same winery for the same marketing/importing firms (it also wreaked of VA), and another Jumilla. (I’ll spare you my thoughts on Jumilla.)

There were a few pleasant wines, including a 2006 Espectacle from ancient vines in Montsant (96 Jay Miller points; 86 John Morris points), but I lost interest in that when the $150 price tag was revealed. I liked the 2005 Pasanau Priorat, too, though it had a zin-like fruit to it and someone guessed it was a Toro. Sorry – it was $70 but goes for $120 at Grapes now that it has garnered 97 Jay Miller points (cf. 86 John Morris points).

Perhaps this fact sums up the experience best: Two of my four favorite wines were a slightly corked $15 Resalso Ribera del Duero and a Mollydooker Carnival of Love ringer (it is what it is, it tasted like an Aussie shiraz, and it was more potable than the other Mollydookers I’ve had).

Nonetheless, it was by far the most entertaining wine event of my year.

Sorry to have missed this. Slave to the grind…

This is a great thread. I love Dan Posner and his passion for both the integrity in wine making and in critic wine reporting.
I am one of the lucky ones that actually tasted the Sierra Crash.
I bought 3 admittedly because of the $29.00 tariff for a highly rated wine. To my credit it was only a case filler for some 05 Bordeaux futures I purchased from WL. I really never has any expectation that it was a mid 90 point wine.
It was horrific. It was so bad that instead of opening a second bottle as I normally would to assure myself that the first was not flawed, I gifted the remaining two to women with whom I am friendly when they had reached a level of intoxication that I doubted they could tell the difference.
I also had the " pleasure" of tasting the 05 Pico Madama in Napa with the Beserker crew. If your bottle was truly corked, then all I can say is you were lucky. I would have preferred a corked wine to the dreck I tasted.
Last, I notice that you also “loved” the 2007 Panarroz (Jumilla). I received a donation of 3 cases of that lovely wine along with Eric Solomon’s Garnacha that spurred great debate in a similar way as Sierra Carche last year at my Culinary Festival for our Sunday Brunch. I rarely would be critical of any wine or wine company or distributor that gave any wine to a charity especially mine. These wines were not anywhere near drinkable. The reason I state this is that the WA loved both. The WA never changed the scores of either after many complaints from its subscribers. Yet both were below swill.
In conclusion, I take heat here because I am not in love with people that have nothing better to do than blast our country because it is not run their way.
Dan Posner has taken heat for demanding integrity. [worship.gif] This tasting supports Dan, his mission and the absolute failure of the critics over there. Great job guinea pigs. [thumbs-up.gif]

This bodes well for whoever wines the lunch with Posner prize in the donation drive…
[whistle.gif]

Huh? [scratch.gif]

Who loved it? Not Dale or me! That was the only other wine I gave 50 points. Someone described it accurately as smelling like “rotted bubblegum.”

What did Miller give that? I don’t think Dan told us.

I put the word “loved” in quotes because of the vivid and wretched tasting notes you both gave. The 07 was not rated. The 05 was given an 88.

Now I understand RMP’s infamous quote that only makers of swill do not want him to review their wines. Those who make wine below swill are eager to have him do so. [rofl.gif]

Thanks for the entertaining notes Dale. Wish I could have been there but my wife decided to destroy my day for a new baby car seat!

I ventured out for my first get together with some wine geeks, and was looking forward to some great posner selections, even though we had to agree to put some Sierra Carche in our mouths again. What it turned out to be was a laughathon, with some food and a big dump bucket.

I kept waiting for Ashton Kutcher to come out and hug me and tell me “You just got Punk’d”

I have to admit, those were THE worst lineup of wines I have EVER tasted. And I have been tortured with way too many of Kenney’s “Wait till you taste this one from my man Dr. Big Jay.”

With that, I am afraid I healed a bit too quickly, and DID attend this one. I would have rather had a few more weeks of healing, and missed this massacre.

#1 A bit candyish on the nose. But other than that, thin, insipid and hot. 28 pts My note thought “SC”, but the candy nose made me think it was some gem that Posner carries. 2005 Sierra Carche

#2 I thought this decent, a bit thin also, but something I could actually drink, if I had to. “A low level CDR?” 2005 Espectacle - Monsant

#3 Tannic and thin, not much fruit and no finish. “possible bordeaux?” 2004 Pico Madama


Flight Two

#4 I agree with Dale, that it was light, with some cherryish fruit. Drinkable, but forgetable. “Chianti?” The Pepper Pot

#5 This was so horrible, that it could only be the SC. VA big time. What a terrible nose. I do not remember the SCs that I had being THIS bad. Mine were more in the 55-60 pt range:) 22 pts tops 2005 Sierra Carche

#6 I also thought this was fairly rich and jammy. Had sweet tannins, and was decent to nice. “Aussie?” Pasanau - El Vell Coster


Flight Three

#7 Another FOR SURE CR. Disgusting nose, hard to put in mouth, easy to spit. “SC” 23 pts 2005 Sierra Carche

#8 Big sweet fruit, full bodied, jammy and fun. “Cali syrah?” Mollydooker COL

#9 corked? Resalso

Flight Four

#10 A basically sound wine. Unremarkable, decent wine. "QPR Spanish? 2007 A1 Mouvedre

#11 A terrible wine that was again, either a SC or another Posner gem he was trying to sell us on. “SC” 2007 Panarroz

#12 Sweet, fairly balanced, blueberries, smooth “Higher level spanish” Oriol - Emporda

Flight Five

#13 By this time I wasn’t able to tell much, other than that it was a decent bottle, and a winner compared to most of the shit we had to put up with. Clos Fonta

#14 either poster has put in many bottles of SC, or he is in bed with Miller. Disgusting 23 pts “SC” 2005 Sierra Carche

Nice meeting all of you, and thanks to Dan for putting up all of the wines and supplying the foods. As bad as the wines were (mostly), it was well done and makes a point very plainly.

NOW I see how jay rated the SC 96 pts…four bottles, add em up = 96pts. Easy stuff, this wine rating for WA.

As far as wines, it can only get better!!

If you knew how bad the wines would be, you would buy her a new car to go along with that seat.

No doubt Steve. I would have enjoyed the company a lot more than the wines, I am sure.