'Contadino' 2014, Frank Cornellisen

Whenever we can, we take our little grill out to the woods. This sounds idyllic but the exercise is often fraught with problems that have nothing to do with bad weather — which is also a problem — ranging from the time A. threw my keys down a rubbish chute by accident and me and a friend had to lower him in to get them, to the time we thought we’d grabbed a pet nat, popped the crown and saw a cork. I biked home to get an opener while he started the grill, then sat out the sudden storm under a tree while I sat out the hour on the couch.

This time I had his keys.

But it doesn’t always go wrong and sometimes we even grill in summer. This was one of those beautiful July times last year and if you can never say never then you probably can’t say 'always' either, but Frank Cornelissen's Contadino will always remind me of summer grills gone right**. 

"Contadino" ’14 is your ticket to a different, very neon galaxy. To a place where blood orange glitter rains fall on mountain sage and dried carnations and you're inflatable raft floating fast down fiery flows of lemonade lava sipping icy fire water from a watermelon skin cooler through curly straws with an electric storm raging overhead. Equal parts glou glou as an ancient soul. 

Tasting notes:

Looks like jungle punch which, for the record, is always a turbid neon blood-orange colour. Smells like rhubarb left out in the sun and muddled raspberries. The sips start wild with not-quite-finished fermenting flavours and front-loaded acidity and a CO2 spritz on the lips before tuning in to sharply delineated morello cherries balanced by the high-tones of a herby, wild strawberry finish. Who says neon can’t be serious?

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"Contadino" 2014

Frank Cornellisen 

Field-blend of 85% Nerello Mascalese plus local varietals from his old-vine vineyards: Nerello Capuccio, Minella Nera, Alicante Bouschet, Minella Bianco

Mt. Etna north valley, Sicily 

Imported by Wilde Wijnen.

**Update: I stand corrected. The 2015 did not remind me of grilling. 

Ok I'm done now.

'Novello', Denny Baldin

There was a time, let's date it pre-natural wine, that my poison of choice was heavily sulphated warm blooded reds. ‘Meal in a glass’ wines, I called them. Wines you could chew on in a blizzard barefoot and you’d be so busy you’d be warm. 

Those days ended when I stopped drinking during the week. The clock would strike 16:59:59 on a Friday and, not feeling like alcoholic jam, I drank beer, that most unlikely gateway drug to Pinot Noir and the wines I drank next. Wines like this.

And the rest is history or at least uninteresting. 

Tasting notes:

“Novello” tastes like blackberry shaved ice with those fizzy crystals in humming with live-wire acidity or how your skin looks after a rave: tight and bright like a moon-lit midnight, balanced on a knife-edge between life and death. It’s volatile like an Alka-Seltzer on speed sucking on sour candy strings and shaking sparklers four at a time with salty fireworks exploding overhead.

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Novello (a blend of vintages but drunk July 2016)

Denny Baldin

Gamay

Fleurie, Beaujolais

In 2014 Denny wrote a rather zany natural wine manifesto called Super Natural Wine: the Black Revelation Cycle and is one of the initiators of Bojalien, a fringe salon in the Beaujolais for winemakers treated as aliens by the wine world. This year it was held at Romain des Grottes place, here it is in pictures.

High on acid | Tavkveri 2016

It’s July and we’re back in Georgia, the three of us sitting on steps very hot, talking about the cold. About how bare it was on the way to Pheasant's Tears in March and how in Kasbegi there’d been snow. But now the cicadas are burring in the sun grasses and the cold airport floor on which we’d slept our only hour in 30 is nothing more than a rumple in my corduroys and we wash our faces and go.

Vino Underground thank god hasn’t changed but it feels like we have: how instead of just a guess at what we’d like to drink, ours was now an educated one. We select six and tell Natia no tasting now, see you later, these are for while the sun is still on.

Tbilisi is also different. The stark streaming sunlight of March is softer, and the little produce hole-in-the-wall stalls that line the streets, fuller. Liberty Square (or Freedom Sq., it seems to go by both) is full of tourists making plans in languages you can understand, the Georgians now sitting on the steps they seemed always to be sweeping when it was spring. It’s humid. There are watermelons everywhere. We return to the steps under the tree full of what we assumed were cherries but which tomorrow we’d learn are cherry plums, not cherry-cherries, called Tkemali. The grasses are still burring and we have a drink.

The first and only other time we drank Mariam Iosebidze’s Tavkveri was in December in the snow, in New England. We’d asked the peeps at Chambers Street Wines ‘for something with volatile acidity', and they suggested two: Del Prete 'Torre Nova' 2015 and Mariam’s 2015 'Tavkveri' (notes). We took both. At the time, playing a board game on the floor in front of the wood stove waiting for dinner, I couldn’t make up my mind whether I found it too acidic; whether admitting I did would be to admit some sort of defeat. You have to understand: I drink vinegar dregs and eat kimchi drunk at night. You can no-sweat dress a wound or salad with my kombucha. This would have been a personal defeat.

In the end I sidestepped the issue entirely and concluded it would make more sense in a different setting, suggesting, ‘outside hot Georgian summer let’s say grilling’. Not knowing anything about Georgia whatsoever, this was a total cop-out. But it’s still nice to be right.

Tasting notes:

Fruit punch pink in your glass shimmering with sea clam on the surface bubbles. Smells like pickled hibiscus. The 16 is more rounded than the 15, starting river pebble rolling smooth to then tighten out towards a flinty edge, like running your tongue from the flat head along the edge of an arrowhead (if you think this sounds sharp, the 15 had a body like a battle axe). In the taste department you’re knee-deep in a silty cranberry bog (or while we're here, raw Tkemali) with an ocean breeze blowing hints of a wild Georgian beast your way, the beast, no doubt, with a beautiful woven blanket over its hairy back. There's also a wisp of a gun just gone off. A super-soaker thirst quencher and as much as I hate it when supermarket wine labels say it, would work with anything blackened off a hot coal grill.

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"Tavkveri" 2016
Mariam Iosebidze
Tavkveri
Kartli, Georgia

Picking Tkemali

'Commendatore' 2015, Domaine de l'Octavin

This is summer time blended then bottled. Flip flops flopping-flipping, blender-blitzed lemonade sipping ice cubes clinking shaded under straw hat or wind waving breezy tree. It’s raspberry picking backs bending searching through the prickly green and berry fatness-feeling and eating overloaded slice of peach pie thick crust with your hands paper plate, peaches dropping. Dripping ice pops, watermelon, tomatoes sticky down your chin and summer evening crickets cricketing fields rippling, corn — then marshmallows — grilling.

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"Commendatore" 2015

Domaine de l'Octavin

Trosseau

Arbois, Jura

Buy from Clavelin.

More Jura drinkings.

'Groll n'Roll' 2015 by Babass rules

It’s March. This means you’ve had about one month to stick to your New Year resolution(s) adjusted for the time it takes to actually start acting with any resolution as well as the time it takes for that resolve to die, bringing us up, as I said, to March. Christians know all about this so invented lent*, and I know all about it because I know that I think I started the year with three, have forgotten two and don’t practice the third. So I’m starting again.

I hereby resolve to give wine more time before I drink it. So it opens. Coughs up the courage to sing. Fuck just singing; let’s make it DANCE hips swinging hair down low to the ground change the track half way through no fade and everyone’s going whaat and dude, what the fuck man but then they’re laughing and grooving and smiling and everything’s back to ok.

Because seriously, it’s too often that I go OH this is getting interesting 'round about the time it’s also getting finished due to the mathematical rules that apply to two people drinking one bottle of wine and by now it’s your last glass and it’s also your best glass and now it’s gone and that’s sad — I get that — but let’s just for a moment come out of the body, open our minds, and try to imagine what life would be where every glass was at its best and by this I mean just ready and you thinking about 15, ok, 10, minutes ahead of the time you know you’re absolutely going to be too thirsty to live.

Tasting notes:

Resolution inspired by drinking Sebastian Dervieux's (so, Babass') "Groll n’Roll" on a roll (so, two): a Grolleau which, when open, smells like dew on grass and violets and reminds you of that micro bubble, fig, wet grass and laurel flavoured, dark-hue kombucha you buy every weekend at the organic-or-die market from the guy with the golden beard and his old Russian kvass cart mainly because you heard it's good for you but to your friends you say it's because you’re hooked on that deep earth / tea / smokey incense kick sensation and how taking a sip takes you back to before you lived in California and somewhere with bramble hedgerows and seasons and the smell of leaves crunching underfoot and blackberry picking blue stained fingernails and somehow, also, watermelon: big sugary bites over the grass spit out the pits and talking about pits, what about DATES or maybe prunes, dry wrinkled withered heads and sticky condensed deep-sweet. (But which, when closed, tastes like green strawberry tops). 

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"Groll n'Roll" 2015

Les Vignes de Babass

Grolleau

St Lambert du Lattay, Loire

*I know, I know, 'not'.

Baptiste Cousin "Marie Rose" 2015

Even on a root day drinking Baptiste Cousin’s wines makes me feel like it’s my birthday. They’re d i s c o wines: fun, foot  l o o s e and fancy free, skip the Kool-Aid and Acid Test these juice b.o.m.b.s best drunk out of cups bikinied or, better: not actually in a bikini because let’s face it; push comes to shove and most people feel better not worrying about what’s wiggling but in XXL shirts and their geography teacher's hiking socks. But you get the vibe I’m going for.

Baptiste works in the Loire and makes this wine with the native Grolleau which is great news as far as someone who pretty much only drinks neon strawberry wines cold from the fridge is concerned. Other good news is he works without sulphites, works with horses like his outlaw dad from whom he bought his vines, has dreads / is handsome and makes a SUPER FUN Grolleau Gris pét nat called "Puppet Nat" that I can personally attest to being perfect to celebrate the first time you’ve skated on natural ice slash ever really skated. And so you see, bikini not always necessary.

Tasting notes: 

Pale rose petal rosé pink in your glass on your eyes but there's also something rosy in the mouth zone too. Like the herby, woody bowls of potpourri mom puts on the window sills to collect dust, or how those raw liquorice bars with pandas on them that look better for you but are still liquorice bars smell. But in a good way. Anyway, by now you’re on your third, fourth sip n' golly gone and changed your mind sir, because why no, sir, this isn’t as ABC a wine as you first thought, sir. It’s light, sure, juicy, sure, but there's nuance and layering and texture and gravity and it coats your tongue like velcro or at any rate a Bourgogne. In a good way. **

** and this was on a root day.

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Baptiste Cousin
"Marie Rose" 2015

Grolleau Gris

Martigné-Briand, Loire

If you like the idea of drinking rubies drink Sébastian Riffault "Raudonas" 2011

I like drinking wine out of plastic cups more than probably most anybodies. I like my wine cloudy, unstable and fizzling and if it’s a really good day it’ll be all three plus red and cold. Give me rough and unsettled or watered down with spritzy water to drink during the harvest time, wine. But I also like wines that make you 

s 

i

n 

g 

cus they're so clean.

Wines as crisp as the sound of you biting into an Autumn apple straight from the tree crap-bit-of-juice-got-in-your-eye can be; precise as we think the Germans to be. Patrick Bateman ebony handled razor blade sharp and also just normal sharp. 

Last week I drank Sébastian Riffault’s "Raudonas". I say my god but here I’ll say my gosh because this was definitely something made on earth and I don’t think the earth gets enough credit. You could taste it. The earth I mean. Earth and flint (Sancerre, Loire), spice, cranberries and rubies. Like Thanksgiving but better or at least easier. Singing almost singeing — sides of your tongue gettin’ all juicy — acidity, a long finish and whistling Indian arrow straight purity. In a word, for the sake of adding one more word: 

unctuous. 

And no, I don’t drink everything out of plastic cups.

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Sébastian Riffault "Raudonas" 2011

Pinot Noir
Loire

From: La Officina