Julien Meyer Sylvaner 2001
Do you believe in great wine? Here’s one from Alsace. And amazingly it’s a Sylvaner.
Do you believe in great wine? Here’s one from Alsace. And amazingly it’s a Sylvaner.
Alsace wines are improving. Notably they are becoming drier.
Good wine, but I’m happy it’s gone.
Some nice festive drinking.
As an occasion is followed by another, I opened a big gun from the cellar today. A Riesling from Alsace. I reported on some problems with Alsatian wines here and here, but this bottle was simply outstanding.
René Muré is, in any ranking, playing in the premier league of the region. The winery owes its success largely to the Clos Saint-Landelin, a monopole parcel within the grand cru of Vorbourg. With its sun-absorbing sandstone this vineyard belongs to Alsace’s hottest, and consistently produces very powerful wines with record ripeness (lots of VT and SGN level wines, and regular botrytis) but also a strong mineral imprint. For power and concentration of flavour, they are sometimes reminiscent of the Rangen de Thann vineyard (whose terroir, however, couldn’t be more different: volcanic basalt). In the past, I’ve especially enjoyed the dry Rieslings and sweeter styles of Gewurztraminer from here.
This lone bottle of Riesling Clos Saint-Landelin 1999 was purchased for a miserable 15€ on sale in a wine shop in Verona (of all places). I now regret having wasted luggage space for some silly Amarones and not having bought more of this (the current vintage is 23€ ex-cellars). It is really a spectacular wine. Enormously rich. An impressive fully mature deep yellow colour. Nose shows a high amount of botrytis (this varies from year to year; the 2002 Riesling had close to none) in an explosive raisiny, spicy bouquet that also shows quite some peppery, stony minerality and freshness for balance. Palate is massive and impressive, broad and powerful on attack, so mineral that it initially feels dry, although there is quite a bit of residual sugar. A fairly weighty, structured, solar, oily, terroir-driven, peppery, botrytis-spiced whole. Acidity is also rather present, adding to the fairly virtuosic balance of this wine. No denying the high alcohol but this is really a substantial wine, and it carries it with grace. While this quintessentially Alsatian full-blown style might be challenging to the uninitiated, this is really Riesling – and wine tout court – at its best.
Today was the last day of the five-day tasting marathon I blogged on the other day. Bad lack throughout. The Menetou-Salon from Henry Pellé I much looked forward to was awfully corked. And the Giuseppe Rinaldi Barolo Brunate–Le Coste 2004 was oxidative and underwhelming.
And we had another controversial Alsatian. I have never liked the wines of André Kientzler as much as some of my colleague tasters, but there is no denying this is currently one of the top domaines for dry Riesling. So expectations for their Grand Cru Osterberg Riesling 2007 were justifiably high. It’s an obviously good wine, but difficult to really enjoy. It has a pretty odd mixture of late harvest aromatic notes (raisins, peaches and honey) with a searing acidity that somehow doesn’t taste fresh at all. Alcohol is high (14%), which only adds to the searing impression. In my experience, a Riesling needs to have really superior concentration and body to sustain 14% alc. This wine, oddly, seems a little thin in texture, although it is built around a solid mineral core.
Osterberg is a vineyard with a quintessentially Alsatian mixture of soil: sandstone, limestone, gravel and even some marl. Sandstone usually yields wines that are very high in acidity, and rather quiet in their youth. Surely this shows in this Kientzler 2007. I kept the bottle open for three days and retasted it several times. Hardly any change, and hardly much pleasurability: this is intellectual, ungiving, mildly off-putting wine. It only shone when served with a dish of braised young cabbage.
Tomorrow we have a themed tasting of Argentine wines, which already makes me shiver with horror at the amount of oak and extract I’ll need to inhale. Today, we went through an assorted bunch of wines from Italy and France. Among them, the
Domaine Weinbach Alsace Muscat Réserve 2007. Although it’s never been as exciting as the Riesling offerings from this stellar domaine, I expected a lot more from this. It showed very average, losing even to a cheaper Alsatian Muscat from Laurent Barth (which was really, really good). The Weinbach had a faint varietal nose (apples and grapes) over a core of cool stone, and a rather thin palate with a greenish acidity. Better as it warmed up in the glass, revealing a richer medium body and good balance. But still not the expression and cut one associates with the Weinbach name.I took the bottle home to retaste with dinner… and there was obvious TCA (cork taint). Upon opening, it was so minor as to pass unnoticed (even among a half-dozen experienced tasters), but clearly robbed the wine of freshness and complexity. This makes you think of how many faulty wines are assessed as if they weren’t…
The other noteworthy wine of today was the Romano Dal Forno Valpolicella Superiore Monte Lodoletta 2003. Dal Forno is about as high one the Italian wine hypometer as can be, but I dislike his heavy, showy style and interventionist winemaking. Still, given the prices and recognition these wines command, it is also worthwhile to taste them when an occasion arises.
This wine is an amarone in all but name. It smells of prunes, stewed cherries, tobacco, chocolate and spices, and has 15% alcohol. It is to the best of my knowledge made of dried grapes like amarone, and is priced higher than almost all amarones (73€ here in Poland at the current exchange rate). So why call it a Valpolicella? For Dal Forno, it is his ‘second label’ or ‘second selection’ wine: perfect grapes go into his Amarone, and less-than-perfect ones go here. But if you don’t know about this curious policy, you’d be nonplussed by this.
Is this 2003 a good amarone? No. There is far too much extraction and new oak for good balance. The wine smells stewed, tasted stewed and finishes dry-tannic. There is no freshness or finesse, and the fruit is dead. Amarone comes in various guises; I like the more vinous, crisp, less sweet style, and you might like the richer, more powerful one, but balance is the key to success in both. This wine is unbalanced. It tries to impress with its sheer power but goes far too much in the extraction.
Will it ever integrate? We left it in the decanter overnight to see. But predictably, it only got worse. Whatever little freshness of fruit was there upon opening was gone; all that was left was alcohol and oak tannins. Admittedly, it didn’t oxidise even with 18 hours in the decanter. But there was no drinking pleasure. Even the label drinkers among us were skeptical.
