Monday, 11 September 2017

'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?

"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.

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.

'Foutre d’Escampette' 2015, Domaine de L'Octavin

Things used to be simpler. Penguins were without a doubt my favourite animal and I hated Chardonnay. It reminded me of those constantly condensing glasses at awkward art shows and tasted like vanilla butter cream pie from a can and yes this applied to all of them thank you very much, now please pass the red.

Then I had a Chardonnay by Axel Prüfer and it was crunchy, not buttery, earthy, not creamy. It tasted like hazy sunshine dappling over lazy water or running barefoot across a spring-flowered prairie: hair-flowing, fresh-aired, care-free and problematic: I liked it. But I took it in my stride, put it on the list and told people it tastes how it ‘wants’ to taste without being forced it into format.

I called it a ‘wild’ Chardonnay and an exception to the rule and was ok with that, bandying about terms like ‘straight-jacket’ and ‘homogeneity’ and posing questions like standardisation vs. individuality?

I remember trying to explain the taste of electricity.

But of course when things seem simple you have to be sure you're not being stupid, and this wine reminds me of the time we went to Arbois / when I realised I was being stupid.

Domaine de L'Octavin's "Foutre d’Escampette" 2015 tastes like a long summer day at a lake legs long over the dock, swimming out to the far raft, watermelon slices in bags, emerald-green slash brown water with light streams cutting through.

What it’s not like is vanilla butter cream pie, and if they’re pouring this at art shows I wanna be there which is to say that I was totally wrong and that both penguins and Chardonnay can be ok.

Tasting notes:

Looks like cold sunshine through smoke. Tastes like hay and lemon-pithy lees with a hint of almond and stony white plums not quite ripe. Long lingering finish and cold water on your face acidity. Clean tasting, dirty name.

"Foutre d’Escampette" 2015

Domaine de L’Octavin, Alice Bouvot and Charles Dagand

Chardonnay

Arbois, Jura

(Brought to the table by Clavelin for Le Carton pop up Dead Sheep, Living Wines).

More notes on Domaine de L'Octavin

Notes on a Chardonnay raised by wolves

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.

"Tavkveri" 2016
Mariam Iosebidze
Tavkveri
Kartli, Georgia

Picking Tkemali

La Cosa, The Thing 2014

For me wine is for fun, for drinking, for talking, for dancing, for taste and sometimes for thinking. Like a good tomato I like it best unadorned, sans hoo-ha, flip-flap or hullabaloo (I eat the best tomatoes over the sink). So with tomatoes vaguely in mind, we started a pop up wine project. A place for ourselves and the undies-wrapped wines in our suitcases: a no frills, no chairs, no beer-affair with an up-turned bookshelf for a bar.

We call it Le Carton and next time we’ll be pouring wines from Georgia which is kind of killing me 'cus that's all the way in October and it's only August and I’m not allowed to drink any of the wines until then. But this isn’t about then. Actually I wanted to talk about our first pop up: that time we played bar on a street corner outside a club in the rain, that time being the first time I tried "La Cosa, The Thing".

The Thing is a sweet wine made by Bodegas Maestro Tejero from high-grown (1.000m) Muscatel de Alejandría gapes (stems, seeds, skins and all) and it smells like raisins. Like plump to burst raisin-bread toasted to caramel, slightly burnt, both sides buttered-raisins and raisins fresh stuck in fried dough powder sugar down your shirt. Of butter-oozy hot cross buns and boozy English wedding cakes and way wine cellars smell like raisins and basically any raisin you can think of except awkward musili raisins

(Turns out the maestro does effectively, if not in fact, make The Thing with raisins; relying on noble rot to shrivel some of the grapes ((commonly grown to make raisins)) and hanging the rest out to dry for two months.)

The next thing I’d say is that drinking The Thing in the rain will make you forget it’s raining. Take a sip and sit back for (rocket) l a u n c h, sour watermelon acidity shooting >>>shocks<<< through to the dark sides of your teeth, fruity sugar stardust ricocheting around where your dentist tells you to clean better and giving you a big acid s m ile.

Tasting notes:

Looks like a chunk of fossilised amber with things in it (unfiltered, though no mosquitos). Smells like raisins and early-stage fermentation. Tastes intensely fruity — of kiwi, rhubarb stalks dipped in sugar, an apple picked in August, yellow grapefruit, salted limes, watermelon Jolly Rancher yes I know this isn’t a real fruit — spliced through with laser-like acidity that blasts your palate clean after each sip, taking you on to the next and next and next.

"La Cosa The Thing" 2014

Bodegas Maestro Tejero

Muscatel de Alejandría

Segovia, Ribera del Duero, Spain

'Vej' 2014, Podere Pradarolo

When people ask me where I'd like to live I say somewhere with good tomatoes and mountains in that order. Georgia happens to have both plus wine — something I'm slowly accepting as a third condition — but this isn't about Georgia. And nor, with 560 odd photos to edit, pages of memories and memory-memories to process, could it be. Not yet. We got back eyes red on the red eye Saturday morning and where I suppose a real writer would have already drafted something about anything, I cleaned jars to make room for the spices we carried in our suitcase next to all the wine and labelled the vinegar mother Ramaz gave me, 'VINEGAR!!'.

But it's also sorta about Georgia. For one, we only opened the bottle because I was too nostalgic to drink anything red. For another, in Georgia we'd asked if anyone was making an orange pet nat. The answer was no, but that someone in Italy was. And guess who.

The first time I drank "Vej" 2014 was the same week I discovered how much sense it makes to sit on a beach naked. We were camping and went to Ghent for pizza one night, drank a bottle, took two for the road: it was a pretty glorious week. The second time was at a small wine fair last October. We'd been picking grapes, stacking crates but mostly drinking with Ernesto (Costadila) and Denis Montanar, and went home by way of Venice and, Padua. There we met 'the guy that made that wine we drank at the Superette' and I remember wondering whether it was really true when he told us what he was pouring, what we were drinking, was the first or the only — I forgot — natural orange pet nat. True or not, it was another glorious week.

On Sunday we opened our last bottle after taking all day to cook Indonesian and clean jars. Not Georgia, raining and no tomatoes, but pretty glorious.

Tasting notes:

Colour of sun shining through a clouded-plastic cup of orange jello. Smells like sweet Christmas tangerines or mandarines, I never know the difference but here I think I mean tangerine, and heady summer night orange blossom, ripe to bursting pear and crumbly Amaretto cookies. Tastes like pineapple, raisons, apricots, dry thyme and pink HubbaBubba chewing gum. Boring label.

"Vej" 2014

Podere Pradarolo

Malvasia di Candia Aromatica (270 days skin contact)

Varano de' Melegari, Emilia-Romagna