Grass(y)roots Bordeaux + One Marmande

Tonight CK and I are off to taste some Santa Rita Pinot at our little College Town Wine Shop before dinner. 
She's not free until 5 so I have some time to kill- just enough time to sink my teeth into Bordeaux's Garage wines and stalk the wine producer who'll be pouring! 

One of the ideas of this blog is to look at regions that Everybody Knows- and to see them in a different light. 
Why not start with the most entrenched & entitled merchant corps of all time- the Bordelais?

I've got two exemplary wines to change our mind about Bordeaux today. The gateway wine to today's post is the Granville-Lacoste from Graves, (southern appellation of Bordeaux, known for whites as well as reds.) 

Granville-Lacoste (75% Sémillon,20% Sauvignon Blanc,5% Muscadelle Graves, Bordeaux, France)

importer: Kermit Lynch production: 8,667 cases  

status: natural (or lutte raisonée-the good fight)

Granville Lacoste proves that even people who are unlikeable and super-anal can and do produce lots of things we want to consume. If you have eyes for Kermit Lynch wines, more probably than not you've seen this wine stacked up against Domaine Tempier in that corner of the shop- it's one of Lynch's longest held imports, and it's cheap-o bandit-o.

Kermit's winemaker profile- written by one of the nicest guys in the business- can't quite cover up the fact that the producer Hervé Dubourdieu seems like he might be a bit (ahem) difficult. 
But the wine is par for Kermit. Delish. ($18 if you know where to go)

Elian da Ros (Rouge Marmandais, Bordeaux, France)**

importer: Vin de Garde Wines, Portland production: (10.000 max, from 16 hectares) *

 status: biodynamic and hippie as all get-out.

Technically not in Bordeaux but in the no-man's land of Marmandais- better known for it's tomoatoes and grain production- this wine exemplifies the "go somewhere blah and make something excellent-" way to excel in winemaking.

There was literally No-One making quality-let-alone natural wine in the Marmandais before Elian took his jaunt to Zind-Humbrecht and returned the hometown Da Vinci. 

While it's vaunted- this wine is as annoying as fuck to research. The guy's website is half in Latin for christ's sake- and the other half is in French. Some of the best info you find in English on him is through Spring- the Parisian restaurant with everything mysteriously in English- whose wine club is to die for. 

 Lucky for us both I happen to  speak French- and am just pissed off enough to publish everything I can about Elian da Ros here- in English. 

This is what you'd call a baba-cool wine. It's made in the Marmandais, as Andrew Jefford says, "If Bergerac is Bordeaux's country cousin, then the Côtes du Marmandais is Bergerac's. "

Elian da Ros is actually the name of the vintner, and the self-titled domaine.  He worked five years at Zind-Humbrecht  before coming back to the Marmande to take his dad's selection massale grapes away from the co-op and start making his own with a newly dug Chai. 

Elian info:

Jancis' 2005 Chant Coucou review 

Andrew Jefford's musings on the Marandais

Spring's profile of Elian

Photos from Mineral Wine (the Da Ros importer to Canada, and from SFGate)

*Cases per hectare

**You may recognize the Marmandais as one of the wines I had a few days ago with the Frenchman in  Carbonic is Shit.  I'm still not sure which Elian da Ros we had- but it was good. He has almost all Bordelais varietals- white & red. 

Other Garage Wines (more in Graves & Entre-Deux-Mers proper) that came in 2nd place- and may get a review at a later date:

1. Girolate, Reignac @ St. Loubès & Ch. Tour Mirambeau from Despagne

2. Ch. Bonnet @ Grézillac from Lurton

3. Ch. Thieuley @Créon from Courcelle

Musings from the producer who's pouring tonight: 

“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” - Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution)."

BOO-YAH for hippy farmers. Here's hoping they make some money. 

Coming next: Why Everyone's Website IS ALWAYS DOWN

after I've had my fill of Terry's  2012 German Catalogue....

Carbonic is shit

Or- How to Speak the Truth Like a Frenchman

How best to start a layman wine blog than to hit up the most outré wine bar in SF? That's right, I wangled my lovely self into Terroir for the first time last night, and it proved to be all that's been promised.

Let me back up a step... my current hell-job at a magasin de vin-cum excellence- threw me into contact with a visiting Frenchman- a vineyard manager no less. As my hands have been of late more trained to pruning than to typing- you imagine my delight as I got his wanadoo 'mail' and what could be a safety rope out of retail hell.

(A brief note on the hell-job: Germans get a bad rap for their efficiency and no-nonsense attitude. This does not even Come Close to the soul-sucking ennui that pervades any French retail establishment. You thought the French were snobbish or cold? No- that is their deep need to share the life-despair their workplace impresses upon them. That noted. What did the Frenchman say after he visited hell-job? "I thought I was in Paris! It's not such a funny place there, non? Everyone's face is so beouf-") 

So now: Terroir- the bar that's the cool of the cool- vanguard in the natural wine debate (although you better not call it a debate while you imbibe inside those walls). The bartenders' skin shimmers not with perspiration but with tiny pearls of Ph-factors and anti-sulphur agents.
I mean, they were pitted against Williamsburg's Terroir and made them eat wine-grass. 

For those of you who are all "what the Frizzantino is she talking about?" there is a thing that exists, called The Natural Wine movement. The list of fundamentals that its apparatchiks subscribe to include but are not limited to the following:
1. Natural yeasts
2. No additives (water, food coloring, sulfer, pig parts- all of the stuff that IS in most California wine we've been schlugging).
3. Indigenous grape varietals
4. Scattering the tears of a unicorn- prior to veraison.

Ok- so I might have exaggerated on the last one. If you want real info- you can look into Isabelle Legeron's beautiful and scrappy description here. If you want the counterpoint (or what you can call a counterpoint from an industry that controls 99% of the market- I might call it whining), you can find it here.

Briefly- a natural digression.
IMHO- each 'natural' wine needs to be judged on its own. Most industry long-timers will tell you they saw the evolution of the wine industry- the introduction of thorough sanitation- better picking practices, etc, that more or less eradicated what used to be a sea of "flawed wine." That'd be wine with lots of unfriendly microbes- turning it sour, making it rough, generally leaving you wanting a mint.

More on this later- I don't want to spill all my beans in one basket.

So Terroir- possibly one of the most intimidatingly cool endroits, met its match in one of the most intimidating forms of human- the french winegrower. Not only do they know shit- but they can pronounce it. Unless it's in English.

But how was it?? 
Despite the entrance- which was slightly awkward, as a bottle of  Jaquesson had just been sabered open with a wineglass, (honestly- we saw the video after) and in so doing had knocked over a candle- the whole night was a fucking blast. 

We had about 5 wines each- here listed more or less in order:  

Domaine de la Tournelle- Jura

Sarazinière  Macon

Broc syrah "Drystack" Bennett valley

J.P. Brun -something

Marandais-Languedoc

Ollivier- Domaine de la Pepière Loire "Granit" 

Montesecondo Chianti Classico 

Xeres Amontillado *

Moscato d'Asti *

*forgot to take notes

I think it's pretty fan-tripping-tastic that two fairly picky/experienced drinkers can work their way through 9 wines with the only negative comment coming from the Loire red- and as such was pretty brief 

"Carbonic is shit." 

Signing off from too much coffeeland, 

-J

(More on that drinking experience in a forthcoming post... "Bonjour Ivresse!")

WTF- or time to explain these scribbles.

So here I am, in the midst of a career change in the East Bay-why would I add the chronicle of my fascinating, individual existence to the sea of schlock that's currently floating like a giant whale in the inter-ether?

Well, for the time being,  there is a very defined project- an Aufgabe, as they say. I need to expand my palate- get my tongue-brain synapses syn-napping, stuff my head full of fascinating wine knowledge!
And someone (cough) may or may not have been too cheap to get a moleskin.

Honestly? The hour has long been nigh to get jiggy (serious) about wine knowledge, and for me the only way to make sure that happened in my corner of California was to write it the fuck down. I think muckracking about one wine a day wasn't too much to ask, given I have at least 30 pass through my hands any given day; I could give my mouth (and our brains) one in exchange.

My modern day Virgil on this trip will be the inimitable Hugh Johnson, my tome his World Atlas of Wine,  as I navigate the 7 levels of hell which most definitely is internet wine blogs, importer profiles, and hours of Italian winemakers philosophizing on youtube. (Not satiated? Really?- look here)

 This is how Cupboardist was willed into being- if I'm lucky it will be the poor man's graft of Scott Schuman and the Garagiste- a wine blog for those of us whose cave is the old-fashioned anglo-saxon wooden box in the kitchen- where they store their relief from the world's woes.

Of course along the way more and more sexy personal details will creep in- that's what'll lead to the multi-million-dollar film deal, but at the heart this remains a blog about our relationship to wine.
One semi-professional's chronicle of the bay area wine scene, wine-by-wine history and culture- and some of the myriad follies of single people drinking.

-or- as the inimitable N says,
"drinkin' thinkin', & crystallizin'
...in the cold blue light of the morning after."