-
2005 Domaine Michel Lafarge Côte de Beaune Villages - France, Burgundy, Côte de Beaune, Côte de Beaune Villages (8/11/2015)
Holy crap, is this ever shut down. Surly, dark, tannic, concentrated. Like a wall of tannin and acid. Vigorous swirling reveals the occasional glimpse of promise - a hint of blackberry here, a hint of cherry there, was that violet? Something gamey? - but basically this is a glass of wine telling you to screw off and let it go back to sleep. Which I will, with my second bottle. I remember this young before it shut down and it was excellent. But for now, this dog bites. -
2014 Tissot (Bénédicte et Stéphane / André et Mireille) D.D. - France, Jura, Arbois (8/9/2015)
Oy. Everything wrong with natural wine. So much Acetaldehyde that it’s like I’m drinking cider. Touch of brett. Touch of secondary fermentation. Sour. Cloudy. From magnum. The somm said about half their bottles show like this and the others are nicer. Id rather not be the guinea pig for someone’s experiment with biological flaws. (80 pts.) -
2011 Au Bon Climat Chardonnay Nuits-Blanches au Bouge - USA, California, Central Coast, Santa Maria Valley (8/6/2015)
What a wild and weird wine. The notes on the winery website make this sound like some sort of Rombauerian-cougar juice:
“A combination of a rich, viscous texture with slight tropical fruit flavors backed by gentle toasty oak.”
Um, no.
This is the most structured CA chard I’ve ever had - perhaps the ONLY CA chard I’ve ever had that had the kind of chalky, tannic, back-palate extract that I associate with the better crus in Burgundy. It is worlds away from the simple, lemony, saline “Chablis-like” new-wave Chards; it is equally different - radically so - from a lush, tropical, oaky Chard, even the better examples.
There’s very little fruit showing here, and what fruit there is more appley than tropical - at most, there’s a mere hint of something riper here. There’s plenty of oak - fancy, classy, spicy/smoky oak - but it doesn’t come off as “oaky”, mostly because the wine is so structured, backward, concentrated, that the oak is oddly digested. The smokiness is amplified by a whiff of gunflint. And then the chalk - massive, lip-smacking extract, with a character that’s almost more like a red than a white; then lots and lots of acid that cuts the glycerin and also lengthens the wine and makes it formidably fierce. No butteriness, at least at this stage in its evolution - not even a whiff of diacetyl.
The closest analogs I’ve had to this aren’t from CA, they’re from Burgundy - maybe Maltroye Chassagne ‘Dent de Chien’? A grumpy Corton-Charlemagne that saw lots of new oak? This isn’t particularly delicious now if you’re not a masochist for surly, shut down Chard (which I happen to love, but my tolerance for that is very high) but I’m very tempted to age a few to see what comes out on the other end. Tons of wine for the $, obviously, in a world where good Bourgogne’s now go for the same price . . .