Exactly right Saul. I have no knowledge of D&G’s techniques, but it’s not uncommon for producers to add CO2 to a wine before bottling to brighten it - I believe it’s carbonic acid - and to act as a preservative.
Well, Vincent…I’m pretty sure that D&G does not use CO2 additions to “freshen” their wines. They pretty non-interventionist.
Tom
I loved this wine. I typically do not enjoy Roussanne.
I resent the implication that beer doesn’t go well with food 
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The first I disagree with, the second qualifier I’ll agree with though. Having been to some orange wine dinners the distinctions are definitely still there. Unfortunately for purposes of food pairing you have to get used to completely different set of flavors.
Maybe “destroy” is too strong a word, Jay. Perhaps “overwhelm” would be more accurate.
I find that it’s true of both botrytis and heavy skin-contact.
I’ve lined up 3-4 Navarro TBA GWT & Riesling. To me, the heavy botrytis overwhelms any varietal character that I can identify. They do smell differently,
but danged if I can identify the GWT from the Riesling. Maybe TedBennett can…but I just don’t have the experience.
If you line up a SauvBlanc/Ribolla/Roussanne/Vermentino/GWT/PinotGris made w/ heavy skin-contact; I think the phenolic character would overwhelm any varietal character.
At least as I recognize it. True…they would smell/taste different. Alas…I’ve not done the experiment and I don’t have the experience here, either.
Tom
Assuming you mean their Late Harvest Cluster Select I’ve had many of those wines over the years (I love them) but never tried a side by side blind test. Sounds like an interesting experiment. I wouldn’t bet on my ability to correctly identify them but I’ll never know until I try.
Yup…them’s the ones. Some of the best BAs/TBAs made in Calif. I’ve done that experiment three times for different vintages and couldn’t, for the life of me, pick up anything
I could uniquely identify one from the other. They’re definitely different, but the botrytis seems to dominate everything.
Tom
According to most food/wine pairing threads on WB, “beer” (usually with no need to specify the type, apparently just any beer at all) is the optimal pairing with most foods. What wine to pair with Korean BBQ? Forget it, just drink beer. What wine to pair with Cantonese duck? Beer. What wine to pair with grilled Mexican meats? Beer. Vietnamese food? Beer.
So I guess it’s great that someone makes a wine now that tastes like beer. Maybe we can start drinking wine with food again. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I was trying to make the point that, not speaking about D&G wines, other producers do this and not uncommonly, even pretty low intervention producers. I don’t think even most wine geeks know that.
Their PetNat Chardonnay, Lily’s Cuvée is similar sounding, but required a decanter & a strainer as it had space junk sized sediment deposits (PetNat). It had a beer-ycidery feel, but was a pure clean lively Chard. I haven’t tried the Roussanne, but it sounds great.
Ugh. Most widely available beer is dreck, like 50-75 pts., and can really be a negative with food. Better, but trendy styled beers can be more extreme than this wine in question, making them very narrow what they would pair with. Some not so trendy, but traditionally-minded excellent beers are great and widely adaptable. Some (all?) of the foods listed above rather imply the sort of beer that would pair well. So, Tsingtao works broadly with Chinese food. Coors, with its used urinal cake quality, not so much.