2001 Schloss Saarstein Serriger Schloss Saarsteiner Riesling Spätlese- Germany, Mosel Saar Ruwer (4/14/2011)
Very similar impressions to dzop below (same bottle). This was okay, but merely okay. Suprisingly darkish gold color. Served too warm at first, where it tasted a bit oxidized and very flabby. So we put it on ice for 15 minutes and it was much better, but still nothing special. Slightly sweet, some nice lemony fruit, a bit of petrol, but lacking great purity or intensity of flavor. (85 pts.)
2001 Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey- France, Bordeaux, Sauternais, Sauternes (4/14/2011)
While this was had plenty of depth and power, with apricot, honey, and lots of botrytis, it was terribly out of balance, waaay too sweet and lacking in acid, to the point where for me it was cloying and not very pleasant. Of course you expect Sauternes from a good year to be very sweet, but without the acidity it’s too much. (85 pts.)
2008 Rhys Alesia Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast- USA, California, Sonoma County, Sonoma Coast (4/14/2011)
Slow-oxed for 3-4 hours, then drank over 3. This did not show very well. At first this seemed like a decent new-world sonoma pinot with some nice ripe black cherry fruit and good weight to the fruit. But with continued air, the fruit got sweeter and sweeter, until it tasted like the filling to a cherry/raspberry pie, and then later tasted like maraschino cherries. Too sweet for me. Then the fruit dropped out almost entirely and left behind a green, vegetal, stalky structure that reminded me a bit of an 04 red burg and was not very pleasant. With some time maybe the structure will soften/integrate? I’m not sure though there’s the depth of fruit here to carry it with age. (85 pts.)
2001 Trimbach Riesling Cuvée Frédéric Emile- France, Alsace, Ribeauvillé, Alsace AOC (4/14/2011)
I think I liked this quite a bit more than anyone else did. Slow-oxed for about an hour or so, than drank over the course of 3 hours. Wonderfully complex nose. The most prominent fruit aromas were lime and kiwi, but I also noticed lemon, honeydew, pear, and maybe green apple, plus lots of other weird stuff – a bit of clove, some freshly cut grass, lots of rocks. On the palate this is a bit austere and dominated by the acid structure, but there is great intensity to the lime/lemon/kiwi fruit, with loads of minerality. There’s an almost powdery texture here, I think the term is dry extract? Great length on the finish. Wonderful with food. I like it now, but I could only see this getting better with more age as the acid softens a bit. (91 pts.)
As it shows on CT, I agreed with you pretty much across the board, Corey, with the exception of being a little higher on the Sauternes and a little lower on the CFE, which I thought was a tad dilute compared to what I remembered my last 2 bottles of CFE tasting like. (I remember being bowled over by how mineral and intense they were - but those were several years ago, when I was a baby when it came to wine.)
Couldn’t get over how mediocre the Alesia was. Did you notice that other than the CFE, which is a “difficult” wine, the Alesia was the one that none of the non-wine-geeks touched? It wasn’t even tasty in a basic way. I can see why Rhys gave up the non-estate line, if the two Alesia bottles I’ve had (one meh, one affirmatively not good) are any indication.
I know that “maybe you had an off bottle” is an overused band-aid on boards like this for when people disagree about wines, but I looked on CT, and out of 104 notes, your two (from the same bottle) were the only substantially negative ones. So . . . maybe you had an off bottle?
Who knows. I looked and I have three of these, probably not to be opened for a couple of years, so I’ll hope for the best.
Chris, of course it’s possible. But the provenance was good (bought direct from the winery) and it didn’t taste flawed in any recognizable way (corked/oxidized/etc.)
David, I did notice that nobody was really interested in the Alesia. But nobody was much interested in the Sauternes either, which is a bad sign for a sweet wine. The CFE was predictably unpopular, I probably drank half the bottle myself. The spatlese probably would have won the popular vote.
I actually thought the Alesia was pretty good for the first 20-30 minutes or so when we started drinking it, before it started to get overly candied. A very odd (d)evolution.
My theory about the Sauternes was that everyone was so stuffed from the duck that people had just raised the white flag and wouldn’t have drunk it if it was Yquem. I thought it wasn’t great (and it shoulda been) but was good enough to warrant some attention.
I have a theory about this - I’ve noticed that wines that are mailing-list wines and wines where the winemaker or owner participates on the boards tend to have a much lower standard deviation of ratings than other wines of equivalent quality on CT. My guess is that you’re observing the phenomenon that when people have a emotional or financial investment in something, there’s a subconscious tendency to alter perceptions to ‘fit’ with their investment. Its the phenomenon that leads to significant home field advantages in penalties/fouls in refereed sports - the subconscious desire to please the crowd, even in trained professionals, shows up as a pretty big effect. I would bet anything that if all the Rhys (or Cabot, or Rivers-Marie, or etc…) tastings were done either (a) double-blind or (b) by people who weren’t on the list and/or didn’t participate in the boards, the average rating might not change but you’d see a lot more variance in scoring. I think that its basically impossible for a wine of any quality to have such uniformly high scores given what we know about the heterogeneity of taste perception among different drinkers unless there’s some psychology coming into play.
There’s still some of the lafaurie left in my fridge. I’ll give it another try when I get home.
David, in addition to your point about the heterogeneity of taste perception, I wonder if it isn’t unusual for a wine (esp. pinot, which is notoriously variable and finicky) to show that consistently.
OTOH, one would expect small production/mailing-list wines to show less score variation, because the sample of tasters self-selects for people predisposed to like the wine. For the most part, people aren’t just wandering into the corner shop and deciding to give it a whirl, they have to do some work to get it, and they’re only going to bother if there’s a good chance they’re going to like it. Of course, that also plays into your point about potential confirmation bias.
The lafaurie was significantly better tonight. The acid at the corners of my tongue is there just enough now to balance it out. The fruit has some subsided maybe just a tad? It has an almost woolly texture and a nice finish. I still don’t understand the crazy high critics’ scores (Parker 96?!), but this is now a nice drink.
I totally agree with you on that. Tasting notes in general on CT are self-selecting, but even more so for the all or mostly mailing list wines, and then even more so for one with such a passionate following as Rhys. Still, with 102 other notes and nobody having experienced what both of you separately did from that one bottle, I did wonder if maybe it was just an off bottle (knowing, of course, that the “off bottle” explanation is much overused to explain away what is more often just people’s different tastes and likes).
We’ll never know. Anyways, good notes and good discussion.
Just to update this discussion, I opened another bottle of the Alesia last night and it was waaay better than the first one. Didn’t fall apart like the first one did. Almost like they were completely different wines. Very strange. Note below:
2008 Rhys Alesia Pinot Noir Sonoma Coast- USA, California, Sonoma County, Sonoma Coast (5/24/2011)
Miles better than my previous bottle. Dark reddish/purple color. Still very primary aromatically, with good depth to the pretty dark red cherries and pomegranate. On the palate this has good concentration but it’s just a touch heavy perhaps. There’s a spicy biting edge to the tannin that’s a little offputting at this point. With air the acid becomes more pronounced. Good fruit finish. This is decent stuff but not great. It should probably improve with more time as the biting tannin softens. (88 pts.)