Lummi Island Wine Tasting April 11 ’12

Posted at April 10, 2014

In Search of Terroir

One objective of the blog this year is to provide more information about wine “footprints and fingerprints,” aka terroir — the particularities of where the grapes were grown and who made the wine. At it turns out, this information is not so easy to come by for a lot of wines, so it is a great pleasure when a winery website goes into some detail about these things. Such is the case with Chateau Montfaucon (see slide show), which makes the Cotes du Rhone rouge we are pouring this weekend, and which has been in the same family for many generations. If you browse their website you will find some great photos of the landscape and a sense of the local history and their winemaking philosophy:

“From the vineyards to the cellar we work delicately and with maximum care to preserve the quality and purity of the fruit: We only pick the grapes by hand. In order to enhance the balance of the wine, we co-ferment up to five varieties in the same tank. This increases the exchange and integration of different grapes during the important fermentation time. By controlling temperature and time on skins, typically 8 to 14 days, I am looking to extract only soft and silky tannins.”  

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Wine Club Members Only: Our Own French Imports! 

Join us on Sunday, April 27th, 2014, 3-5pm for a spectacular pre-order tasting of Ryan Wildstar’s French wine portfolio. These wines are currently available nowhere else in Washington and are being offered exclusively to Artisan Wine Club Members at one-time only pre-sale prices! Ryan is the US representative for each of the wines we will be tasting and many of you have visited some of these wineries on Ryan’s Wine Tours over the last two years. So you know how good they are!

At this special tasting event you will get an in-depth perspective on the wines, their regions, and their winemakers, accompanied by tasty cheeses, knockout chocolate, and charcuterie. Time and location are still being worked out, but space is limited so please RSVP to reserve a spot. Tasting will include several wines from each of:

           

Chocolate Therapy

Let’s face it, Life is often challenging, and at those times we all need a little help, a little boost. The downer you are the bigger boost you need, and that’s where Chocolate comes in. Chocolate is there for you. It doesn’t criticize; it’s never passive-aggressive; it doesn’t make judgments. It’s There for you in the deepest possible way: sometimes it’s your Only Friend. Yes, yes, Sad but True. Because we never know when Life’s Delivery Person is going to show up with something indigestible, we all need to keep a little secret stash of Chocolate tucked away. File it under “Emergency Preparedness;” when the worst happens, you don’t want to be without it.

For all these patently Sensible reasons, we have restocked our chocolate shelves with more offerings from Theo, Seattle’s Premier Chocolatier, and we have also just brought in more of the very refined bars from “Dick Taylor,” a surprisingly elegant outfit in Arcata, California. “Dick” and “Taylor” are the last names of two of the partners in the firm, who have come to making chocolate from the somewhat unusual practices of building wooden boats and playing acoustic music. When you taste their chocolate, you will Understand: this is about taking Chocolate to higher level than we usually experience. No, these are not bars you wolf down; these are bars you can enjoy looking at. and inhaling, as well as savoring…definitely a Cut Above. Like, if you just spent your entire fortune on some hopeless cause, and you needed just the right taste of antidote to make it All Right, this is The Stuff…I’m just sayin’…!

 

The War for Everything: Chapter Whatever: Images

In many respects it’s been a Quiet War, mostly fought sotto voce across the Globe over the last 30 years. There was a scene early in the recent TV series (which I liked a lot) Battletar Galactica in which the President (played by Mary McDonnell) says to the Galactic Captain, who wants to continue the Fight, words to the effect: “There was a War. It’s Over. We lost. ” Implication: “It’s not about trying to Win, it’s about trying to Survive.”

Last week I mentioned a bit about how the World of Digital Images is being controlled by a few giant companies which have been harassing bloggers and web designers for years to pay outrageous penalties for “illegal use” of images found online, and which are very difficult to trace to a definitive origin. I was pleased to learn this week that the company harassing us has recently adopted a new strategy. Instead of its usual practice of releasing packs of Legal Hounds onto the foggy e-moor of the Internet to track us down and devour us, they have decided to take a new direction, opening up some 30 million images for free use by bloggers. In return they ask that we use “embed codes” which generate images as in  this post from last July.

I am hoping that this decision will get these harpies off our backs, but the larger implication here has not changed. What is really going on is that the Very Few now own so much of Everything that it is inevitable they will own All of Everything before very long, like one big Company Store.  In a way, that’s just the latest form of Feudalism, which I have always considered the “default” human socioeconomic system, so we shouldn’t be surprised. On the other hand, it means that, as Marx predicted, the inevitable result of marrying “private enterprise” to government is the reduction of the working class to a struggle for bare subsistence. What’s the matter with us? Why aren’t we all marching in the Streets?

 

This Week’s Tasting

Andrew Murray Elleven “Unplugged” White ’12 California $16
Unoaked, crisp, dry blend of chenin blanc (smooth and haunting) and sauvignon blanc (bracing and racy).

Ventisquero Carmenere ’10 Chile $10
Glass-staining purple. Smoke-accented aromas of black and blue fruits and violet, with a peppery topnote. Juicy and light on its feet, with a seamless texture and good clarity to the fresh blackberry and blueberry flavors.

Montfaucon Cotes du Rhone ’11 France $13
50% Grenache co-fermented on skins with syrah, cinsault, carignan from 40 yr old vines; matured in concrete tanks. Good ripeness and lots of minerality along with fleshy plum, blackberry and licorice notes. A floral hint adds charm on the finish. (read more)

Maryhill Winemaker’s Red ’11 Washington $11
Aromas of berry jam, chocolate, and cinnamon, with fruity notes of strawberry, caramel, and hints of white pepper, oak, and tart marionberry.

Ciacci Piccolomini Ateo ’10 Italy $16
Juicy cab-merlot blend that shows excellent up-front intensity, with notes of freshly cut flowers and mint that give the dark berry fruit an attractive sense of lift.

Wine Tasting

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