The Cellar: Great BBQ Red & Something Unusual
Sunday, July 17, 2016
If you are anything like me your BBQ is seeing a lot of use these days. And if red meat is your thing you’ll need to stock up on red wines in particular. Luckily there are a lot of really good, very reasonably priced reds out there.
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One wine I often recommend is the $12ish ‘Split Oaks Estates’ Cabernet Sauvignon from Lodi, California based Morro Bay Winery. The grapes for this wine have been sourced from the Lange Family who has been farming in the Lodi appellations for four generations dating back to the late 1800s. The location of the vineyard in Lodi provides for dramatic temperature shifts from day to night due to the influence of the delta breeze from San Francisco Bay. This allows for a slower maturation of the grapes resulting in a better ripeness/acidity balance and complexity.
The vineyards are worked mostly by hand with green harvesting, shoot removal and leaf pulling being employed to enhance flavor concentration. Harvesting is done at night when the grapes are cool to preserve the acidity within the grapes. As with a lot of variety labeled wines from California the 2012 vintage is technically a blend with 8% Merlot, 6% Petit Verdot and 1% Malbec adding to the complexity. The wine sees 21 days of maceration (juice/skin contact) which allows for the extraction of fruit flavors, as well as tannins for structure.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe resulting wine is juicy, fleshy and delicious. There is plenty of fruit to go around, but it is only ripe – not over-ripe. I like the savory elements about this wine as well, along with the subtle hints of oak. Finally, the wine displays a gorgeous acidic nerve that runs throughout the wine providing an element of freshness.
This week’s next featured wine is kind of unusual. In preparation for the next tasting at the Providence Wine Academy I am currently tasting a lot of wines from Southern France. Among the wines recently tasted is a Banyuls. As with many wines from France the label indicates a place rather than a grape variety. Banyuls is a 2500 acre appellation for sweet wines located in the sun-baked southeastern Roussillon – just a few miles from the Spanish border. While the dark-skinned Grenache grape has to constitute at least 50% of the red Banyuls most producers use a lot more.
Banyuls are considered a ‘Vin Doux Natural’ which is a French term for a wine with high amounts natural sugar. These wines are made by the ‘mutage’ method (similar to Port) – with the adding of neutral grape spirit during fermentation. The sudden increase in alcohol kills the yeasts resulting in a powerful wine with plenty of residual sugar. The featured Banyuls is the 2012 ‘Les Clos de Pauilles’ made by Domaine Cazes. This single vineyard bottling made from 100% Grenache. Maceration took place over a 5 week period followed by fermentation and rimage. The wine then aged for 18 months before bottling. At ‘only’ 16% alcohol this wine (while powerful) comes across surprisingly restrained and balanced. It displays the familiar stewed dark berries, prunes and raisons with a soft mouthfeel – perfectly balanced with acidity and not at all alcoholic. At $19 per 375ml bottle this is an absolute steal and a great, inexpensive way to try something truly unusual. Try it with your favorite pate, strong cheese or with dessert.
Cheers,
Steffen Rasch, CSW, is a Certified Sommelier and the proprietor of the Providence Wine Academy.
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