Importer Ed Barker talks about and pours three fantastic New Zealand white wines that he imports, and reminds us that New Zealand can strut its terroir just as well as Napa and the Loire!
Let’s shoot through some background info on this wine:
- The 2006 vintage is the first time Olivier Guyot’s wines have been imported to the US (there’s a big reason why which we’ll get to in a moment!).
- The wine has been grown biodynamically since 1998 (shorthand on biodynamics: “The farm is a living organism, and nothing from outside of the farm should be brought in.” Fertilizer comes from native animals, pesticides/herbicides come from indigenous plants.)
- Marsannay is the most northerly wine-producing town in Burgundy proper- the grapes that don’t die on the vine, turn out some of the most bracing examples of Pinot Noir in the world.
- If you’re drinking this wine, you are testing yourself as a wine lover- very few “fun” flavors are initially available on the palate. The evolution of the wine both in your mouth and in the bottle is extraordinary though.
Tasting notes: give this bottle two to five hours of breathing (pour a little bit out so there is some air in the neck of the bottle that can react with the wine.
You do get very normal blackberry and raspberry aromas on the nose, but in the palate and the finish, it gets weird. Wild acai and blueberries run throughout the mid-palate, and the finish draws all of these fruits back together again sucked through a steel pipe lined with burnt cocoa dust.
Steely, bracing mineral flavors are what sets this wine apart from its more fun-loving Burgundy counterparts, and is the main reason no one wanted to import this wine to possibly fail when set against the stereotypical American palate. If one said “rustic” they would be wrong because “rustic” implies the homey scent of thriving vegetation; here though one finds the wine’s fruit drawing its flavor more from the shadowy crevice of the north side of a mountain than from the straw huts hiding playful fauns’ snacks.
The Guyot Farm:
I’m hard on Spain. I’ve tasted and sold enough Rioja to kill a legion of horses. I need something more than just the “bright cherries and toasty oak” that I see in the majority of Spanish reds that get grand acclaim here in New York City. In the last ten years, Spanish wine has been putting me to sleep.
Last night though, Pesquera’s 2005 Ribera del Duero Crianza woke me up again! Yes, there cherries and oak are there (in fact, these guys use American, French, and Spanish oak barrels). The cherries and oak are built around one of the largest and most bodies I’ve had in a wine this year.
How serious was this wine? We kept the wine uncorked for a total of eight hours before giving our final opinions on the bottle. Green and black olives, toasted peach pits, and a hint of a smoky, aged cheddar dominated the nose. The palate ran into a wall of Bing cherry jam. The finish reminded us that this wine came from dirt; coffee and baked topsoil were strewn throughout the finish.
What does it need to be paired with? Something that will give you a heart attack; Baked brie smothered in caramelized onions and mushrooms, peppery soy-soaked steak, or salty wild boar sausage.
If only they had this completely made up totally awesome job for celebritys’ winetastes:
Vulture checks out Stephenie Meyer’s celebrity playlist, and it’s all Stereogum-approved and shit. I wonder if Apple employs a person whose entire job is to create “hip” playlists for celebrities.
If we had celebrity wine “taste” lists, I would happily make sure that everyone knew that the hotness skilled actor, Clive Owen, “only drinks Bonnes Mares,” and I would whisper to all the right people that Jennifer Anniston is “just like YOU!” and only orders wines that are “you know… those, like, really dry… but not like ‘grrr shaking your bones’ dry sauvignon blancs… like something that is really good ice cold!”
Inspiration via Lindsayism- where we all discover that Twilight’s creator’s (yes, the creator of the teen vampire series that your KIDS love) music tastes are way “indier than thou.”