Almost Great and Hideously Undrinkable

Almost Great and Hideously Undrinkable

Dinner in a fine Languedoc restaurant / wine shop I’ve been patronizing for well over a decade. My host was a winemaker friend who is a major supplier to them.

We each ordered only one dish (duck for me, steak for him). They comped some excellent octopus to start. The relatively young, relatively new manager / somm appeared with a white wine, which he announced was a natural Albariño from Catalonia.

What’s wrong with this picture?

A whole lot.

Hideously undrinkable first:

I asked him to double-check. It was a Xarello.

2018 Vinyes Singular Xarello - He poured. We recoiled. The color was used dishwater. The wine made me think of white grapes left to rot on the vine, alongside of crabapples that had fallen to the ground, been pissed on by a fox and sprayed by a civet, then the grapes and crabapples lovingly gathered and allowed to stew for a few months while fermentation and oxidation occurred simultaneously, with fermentation ahead by a nose. After pressing, the “wine” was bottled immediately lest the aromas of fox piss and civet spray dissipate. To call this undrinkable is monumentally inadequate. I forced myself to take a sip. I’m still alive. My friend told me I didn’t have to drink it (AFAIK he didn’t have a gun, so the question didn’t arise). In light of the politics, he said he would finish his glass. After one more sip, he surrendered with a look of polite agony. Rated square root of -1.
An imaginary number because I could not imagine a wine this bad. Certainly my worst wine of the decade, possibly of my life; I may have repressed memories of something worse, but I doubt it.


Red Live Redemption:

2007 Mas du Soleilla La Clape ‘Les Bartelles’ – Medium crimson color, aromas are fresh and powerful, I know nothing about this property, my first taste. Based on color and the peppery, black cherry aromas, I would guess that this is more Syrah than Grenache, probably with a Carignan component. Barely more secondary than primary, this is a testament to what Languedoc (as opposed to Roussillon) can accomplish. There was a panoply of flavors and textures, everything in excellent balance. The entry offers powerful, soft, balanced black fruit with more mineral than earth, but plenty of both. The wine expands nicely in the mid-palate, with a harmonious texture both piquant and round. The finish is long. This does not have the intensity of very great wine, but is extremely satisfying and subtle. Rated 94.5, probably mature but I would love to have a few bottles to try over the next five plus years, with at least a point of improvement possible.

Dan Kravitz

I like it, using the complex plane to score wines! Perhaps this explains grade inflation: at some point critics stopped reporting only the real part of the score and taking the magnitude. And thus now complex and real parts are added in qudrature . . . .

Maybe, that wine had been “recycled”.

Perhaps you don’t like xarel-lo? Or maybe it doesn’t travel well over the Pyrenees?

Great note for such as terrible wine!

Yikes!

Looking forward to seeing “Fox piss” and “civet spray” on the critic bingo thread.

Tasting note of the year. Went to a restaurant last year and endured a brace of similarly faulty, misconstrued wines.
Thanks for the laugh!!

Candidate for POY! The title alone earns special merit. Never heard of either, and on balance I suppose I should consider myself lucky. I will keep an eye out for the red though

I don’t understand why Somms continue to push natural wines when so many are so bad.

Because it means you are a hep cat, really with it on the scene, man. All the cool kids wear black and drink “natural” wines, riding scooters

I don’t understand why many push natural wines regardless of whether they are good or bad. There are so many good ones out there…

Nominee for TN of the decade.

Dan, that tasting note had me laughing multiple times. It’s gold, right up there with some of David Strange’s stuff. Thanks for posting!

Albarino, Xarello, same difference.

Not to say there aren’t respectable Catalan whites. Maybe it needed a little Macabeu and Parellada?

Must have been an off bottle…why not ask for a 2nd to make sure?

RT

Had too google this and found: Vinyes Singulars Xarel.lo was the first wine Ignasi produced, coming from a single vineyard planted in 1959 by his ancestors. The wine is aged on its lees for approximately five months.
For Vinyes Singulars, it’s a very special wine as it represents and expresses his homeland terroir.

http://www.indiewineries.com/spain/catalonia/vinyes-singular/vinyes-singular-xarel-lo/

Am I the only one who initially assumed Dan was describing a single wine in his title?
Regards,
Peter

I had to laugh. It was way beyond bad and merited a thoroughly detailed note.

OTOH, the Mas de Soleilla is incredibly good. AFAIK it’s not imported to this country, but I can’t bring it in. IMO I have a book full of excellent Roussillon and Languedoc wines, but they are not an easy thing to sell. My sales force has informed me that I will not be shot if I bring in anything else from these places… they will consign me to a death far slower and infinitely more painful. I try to treat them well. I try to pay them fairly. Their side of the bargain is having to sell wines that are excellent in quality and value, but are instantly devalued in the market because of where they come from.

I generally avoid ordering natural wines. I’ve probably had 50, of which maybe 5 were good, 15 just worth drinking, 29 below mediocre to undrinkable, and now this, which retires the category. We all know the term is not only undefined, but probably undefinable. As Mister Language Person, I can argue that all wines are natural, as long as they are made from fruit. I constantly hear how much they’ve improved and without having anything memorable, I know I’ve enjoyed a few glasses. But still, why should this word have become a synonym for ‘flawed’, and why, just when truly bad wine had become almost impossible to find, do we find a resurgence armored in this otherwise impeccably positive word?

to P L owet, my apologies. I can see how the thread title could be confusing… could be applied to, say, a an otherwise great wine that was badly corked. I remember a dinner in Virginia, where my host pulled the cork on a 1964 La Mission Haut Brion and instantly shouted to everybody to open every window in the house, rushed to the sink, poured it down the drain and kept the cold water running full blast for half an hour.

Beset regards,

Dan Kravitz