wine sketchez

Williamson Wines – 2013 – Merlot – Amore – Dry Creek Valley/Sonoma County

This is one of those Merlots I wish all venomous, and vicious, and virulent toward the img_6824varietal would taste.  Just to shut them up.  But this is more than just a quick pleaser Merlot.  Initially, the olfactory is wrapped in thickly thrown riles of chocolate and cherry, vanilla and relaxed oak.  As it opens and wakes the notes show a tenacity that may startle the Merlot nay-sayers.  Williamson does an incredible job across varietals and vintages, but this offering shows a composition and voice that easily rivals their more expensive bottles, Cabernet or otherwise.  Sure, you could pair this with some burger with caramelized onions or some cut of steak, a pepper-said pasta, but I say sip this one on its own.  Let it educate you on how gorgeous Merlot can be and what a prominent presence can exude and echo from the glass.  While on glass two, and the bottle open for just under an hour, all the flavorous winks further purposed their collective and individual harmonies, chords.  I was smitten, I was instructed, I was encouraged.

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David Coffaro Estate Vineyard

Reaction:  Loved the quiet persuasiveness of the property.  No large crowds, just cozy buildings enveloped by Dry Creek’s floor.  The tasting room is quaint and concise in its stretch.  Jesse poured for me, starting with some Sauvignon blanc, then moving to Rosé and a sparkling.  All the reds had voice and character, wanted me to like what they said, each of them, and I did, everything from the Pinot Noir to the side-by-side of the Block 4, ’13 vs. ’14.  Just what I expected after all the vaunt I heard from people I know in the industry.  I walked around the tasting room a couple times to further take in the atmosphere of that room— barrels and bar, bottles, the music, the pictures, everything.  Just what I needed for a new experience in the valley.

Don’t want to simplify this label and its story down to “value wine”, but the price juxtaposed with the quality you experience in whatever bottle you open cannot be dismissed.  The reds don’t see excessive oak residency, which is a relief.  I didn’t want to leave, go back to work.  I’m being honest, it was hard to return to my car.  But, what I took away was not just a new story but a tempered approach to and presence of wine. The flavors were commanding but not bossy or offensive.  Wrote in my little pages, about the ’13 Black 4, “Tasty amalgamated percussion”, but I could say that for the winery as a whole, each project in their lineup.  Definitely musical, everything Jesse poured.  This winery has an sizable audience, not too universal yet not too esoteric.  Symphonically animated, everything about that room and its wines.  Be back soon…

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Barrel and Narrate

The half-marathon done, and I just scraped some time together to post– or write then post, a piece for client 1.  Now I wait for the day to further evolve and progress, the week to start, have to wake early tomorrow if I can, feeling quite tired from the half and not enough time I feel to get anything done.  Lectures to write, blog posts to finalize.. only way to stay ahead I feel and fear is to wake at 5AM, every morning.

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Alice leaves for school, to get some work done before her week lifts off and my son still asleep upstairs, very much with Time’s invitation to finish projects and brainstorm, and consider reality.. I’m creating all this content for other people, which I’m more than happy to do, but what if I dumped all gathered content, written and visual, and short videos, to one spot.. my site.. and the purpose?  Wine education?  Not so much.. just a telling of wine life, then maybe sell, I don’t know, ads or ad space, or whatever.  Truly get it monetized and have WILD wine-woven startup.. consumers and DTC and advertising, and blogging and letters and reviews.. everything that wine is and is meant to be, fun and Human and inviting.. if I’m sipping wine, what are the first words that me accost?  The other day I was thinking of odd or obscure words to describe the Arista Zin, that 2012 they’re pouring in the TR, and I wrote “Roman”.  I had to laugh at what I wrote, and I wasn’t sipping anything, it just made me laugh, but there was purpose and pertinence to the words.  Like a Roman soldier, something grandly-themed, something historic and history-shifting/making.

I need to move and write with everything as I ran the half this morning.  My best time ever for a half-marathon.  Not by much, but I did well.  That needs to be my momentum with this site, this startup.. and what to call the idea?  Not sure, but I need to think about it.  One thought was “enoguistix” but I hate that ‘ix’ sound.  And I’ve used ‘eno’, or ‘oeno’ too many times already.

Think I hear Jack upstairs stirring a bit.  Good.  Need to shower before Mom and Dad’s and decide what wines I’m bringing up there, or wine, singular.  Have to drive back, remember, and I don’t want to be slowed or with wandering attention as wine and beer seem to do now with my thinking and scribbled conceptions.  Must be a mark of aging, I don’t know.  But even if it’s not, it still reminds me that so much has to be done and there’s not much allowance for idleness, or even a mere moment of still.  M2’s arrival approaches and everything has to be set, scenic, empyrean.

‘fermentopia’.. no, don’t like the ‘topia’.  UGH!  Then what?  How about…  Don’t want to write it here.  Or at all.  Not now.  Going to let the ideas bounce around with each other till something adheres.

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MOCK SOMM: Kosta Browne Winery, Giusti Ranch, Russian River Valley, Pinot Noir, 2013

IMG_6243So I opened it. Yes, I opened it. Because I wanted to. And I’m sooooo glad I did, elated actually, visibly fractionalized in my joy. The first Kosta Browne I’ve ever opened in my home– “Oh, Mike, you’re such a follower…” Yeah, so? Don’t you buy the wines you follow, or open the ones from the producers you admire? And I didn’t buy this enigmatically verbal bottle, actually. It was a gift from Mr. Michael Browne himself, and I drink this and feel inspired and moved and wanting more exploration of Pinot, but why, I think, none of them will be this good, with the amorous ebb of thick cherry and raspberry and a little Dutch chocolate.. not much pepper or spice but a marvelously meek terrestrial hug and herbaceous jab on “the finish”. But this wine doesn’t finish, it’s prose and poetry and a novel and a short narrative flash. And I couldn’t be more eased and in a wondrously warping Utopia oeno-coma with this bottle, this modernized yet integrity-checkered staple doing true to those imbued Burgundian roots.

Drank the remaining two glasses the following night, which is tonight. And it’s gone. And I’m lowered, with a reflectively slow but charged tide and cognitive seismology, and how, well it’s a Kosta Browne, what do you mean ‘how’? This Pinot makes more more a lover of the type but also more reserved– I mean, how many out there are with this fortitude and charm, allure, enchantment, bewitchedness? Honestly I’m not in my prowess usual to react to what I met in this gifted bottle– and Pinot, such a shapeshifting character and amebic transient of a wine structure I’m not at my most stalwart with the pen, this evening. I’m looking to the Kerouac ‘Book of Dreams’ for answers, since I feel and felt and still so much feel like I’m dreaming after finishing a KB Pinot in my new house, that I’m just a sipping wine-loving-writer-wandered, shamed, and humbled, and taught. And maybe that’s why he gave me the bottle, my new friend Michael, to teach me something; about wine and about Pinot and about me, my unionization of wine and Literature and about everything, some Postmodern pondering. For what? That’s the point: no “point”. Just the moment, the capturing of it in my wine journal, this dream, this new bottle Beat in Pinot’s pervasive pulse– cherishing the trenchant charm of what this is; wine and love and Art, all in Pinot, from a lagniappe, a chorded exhortation and discourse; a class, a notestream, and lecture and story and containing instructional and ambrosial hilarity. A wine that teaches and so much else in its verses, and that’s what I should have been writing about this entire oration; the musical tide of this RRV Pinot’s voice. It was like Michael told me, about the river of Life, riding it and seeing where it takes you, and at times it’s trying and turbulent, but the reward’s there. And I sipped one of them last night and this eve. So I’m sent, taught, reconciled.
Vino. And Literature. Like I’ve always lauded.

MM97

(5/17/15)

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