Virginia wine updates: Sweely’s new name, and an honor for Breaux

The worst kept secret in Virginia wine is now official: Sweely Estate winery, purchased last summer by Steve and Jean Case of America Online fame, will be renamed Early Mountain Vineyards, with a grand opening scheduled for later this spring.

Sweely ... er, Early Mountain Vineyards

The Cases were planning to have a basic website up and running this morning, a spokesman said.

The new name refers to the history of the site in Madison County, north of Charlottesville. The land used to be owned by Joseph Early, who served with George Washington during the Revolutionary War and later hosted the nation’s first president on his travels through the Old Dominion.

In totally unrelated news (except that it’s about Virginia wine), Breaux Vineyards in Loudoun County is celebrating this week, as their viognier was listed by British wine scribe Oz Clarke as #87 in his new book called “250 Best Wines 2012.” The Breaux 2010 Viognier was also hailed last summer by British writer Jancis Robinson after her Virginia tour.

I’ve been consistently impressed with Breaux’ viognier because of its restraint. It seems a tad unripe at first – at least compared to other more flirtatious wines – but it is well focused and I find myself coming back to it for extended, thought-provoking conversation (not to carry a metaphor too far, though it is late as I write this).

The recognition from Clarke and Robinson are vindication of Breaux’ efforts to market its wines in the United Kingdom, through Christopher Parker’s New Horizons venture. I’m always amazed that it’s easier to find Virginia wine in London than in D.C.

So congratulations to Early Mountain Vineyards on a new start, and to Breaux for a well-deserved accolade!

Worth Reading This Week: A Californian’s perspective on Virginia wine

A visiting friend has kept me busy this weekend, but here’s a late roundup of (last) week’s wine writings worth weading:

What happens when a Californian wine writer with a sharp palate and an open mind visits Virginia? You get Patrick Comiskey’s delightful roundup of the Old Dominion’s wine scene in Zester Daily. I met Comiskey for the first time last month when he was in-state (we both were judges at the final round of the Virginia Governor’s Cup competition, which will announce its winners this Thursday), so he not only had the chance to visit several wineries on a whirlwind tour, but he tasted 135 of the state’s best wines over a three-day period. Of course, he didn’t know which they were, but they gave him a sense of where Virginia is, enologically speaking.

Revisiting an early call to “Drink Local”

I wrote this exhortation to “open your mind to local wines” in Dave McIntyre’s WineLine #56, in August 2006. That was more than two years before Jeff Siegel and I created DrinkLocalWine.com. Looking at it now, I’m a bit chagrined that I still hear some of the same arguments against local wine that I lamented six years ago – especially the price/value theme. Yet think of how much has changed: “Local wine” has exploded in the market, and acceptance has grown dramatically. Virginia’s wine industry alone has nearly doubled in size and more than doubled in economic impact since I wrote this. Social media, especially blogs, have helped turn a new generation of drinking age adults into local wine fans. The “locapour” movement has, with some halting success, linked wine to the “eat local” movement. And best of all, I don’t hear the Cheval Blanc comparison anymore – winemakers are justly proud of their wines and no longer feel the need to identify with a more famous wine region. They are forging their own regional identity.

Hey, the economy's improving - time to update this poster!

Although I live along the East Coast, I find a distressing amount of consumer
resistance to the idea that good wine can be grown here. “Oh yeah, I hear there’s
good wine in New York, but we can’t get it here,” is a common complaint (or excuse) in
the DC area. Or I hear this one: “Yeah, this is an excellent wine from Virginia, but the
nerve of them to charge 20 bucks!”

WoW: Angulo Innocenti Cabernet Sauvignon, Argentina $20

Here’s a Wine o’ the Week (WoW): the Angulo Innocenti Cabernet Sauvignon 2010, ($20) grown in the La Consulta region of Mendoza, is what I like about Argentina’s cabernet. There’s ripeness and extraction, without the heaviness, prominent oak or high alcohol that afflict too many modern cabs these days. And it has that wonderful aspect that Argentina’s altitude lends to its red wines – structure that tells you the wine has tannin, but without that overt grip that makes your teeth itch. I’m a sucker for texture in a wine, and this one is silky with some rough edges, as if the fabric had a raised nap on one side. That’s the tannins, and they should mellow out in a few years.

The flavors here are all dark fruits, with some sense of earth (again, that texture). And if you brush your teeth forgetting you still have half a glass, there’s an appealing mintiness as well.

Imported by Vineyard Brands. Distributed in DC and MD by Bacchus; in Virginia by J.W. Sieg.

Locapour message still getting muddled

What’s wrong with this picture? (Besides some missing vintage dates.)

I snapped this last night at Tautog’s Restaurant in Virginia Beach, after shaking my coat free of snow from a freak ocean squall. The Virginia Wine logo prominently greets diners as they enter the restaurant, and this place was hopping.

To be fair to Tautog’s, they do have a few Virginia wines on the list, and we enjoyed a 2008 Jefferson Vineyards Meritage with our entreés. It was a bit lean at first but paired really well with my Tuna Martinique, a grilled tuna loin that had been marinated in lime juice. The match was better than I expected, to be honest.

For the record, our other wine was a Hendry 2009 Albariño from Napa Valley. Crisp, lean and citrusy, and yes, I saved a little to try with my tuna. It worked too, responding to the lime, but I preferred the Jefferson’s interaction with the char from the grill – maybe because of the surprise, if nothing else.

After my initial ambivalence about the signboard (glad they had it, but not all those West Coast wines featured), I was happy with the wine selection at Tautog’s. Thoughtful choices at fair markups.

Worth Reading: Bye-Bye TTB? And those wacky 2010 Germans!

Worth reading this week on the blahgosphere (actually the last two weeks – since I missed last Friday):

A big shout-out to W. Blake Gray for his insightful reportage on President Obama’s proposal to kill off the TTB, the federal office that regulates the wine industry, and hand over authority to the Food and Drug Administration. Blake gives a well-reasoned prospective on what it could mean for consumers and the wine industry, including ingredient labeling. This was one of those pieces that had me shaking my head and saying, “Damn! Wish I’d written that!”

Photo: German Wine Society

And so did Jon Bonné’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on the 2010 vintage in Germany. Bonné literally bares his wine-geeky soul as he struggles to make sense of a year that achieved wonderful success and mediocrity at the same time. So good, it almost made me quit wine writing altogether. Added bonus: the photo caption uses the word “porphyry.” That’s porn for geologists.

The Drinks Business brings us yet another story about a product name translating badly into Chinese.

Has Joe Roberts jumped the shark? (No, seriously, congrats, dude!)

Where’s Geraldo Rivera? The British Army bomb squad blows up a hidden cache of pre-World War II wine. But how did the mortar shells get inside the wine cellar? Imagine sticking your corkscrew in the wrong place – “This wine explodes with flavor!”

 

 

Figeac: The misunderstood Premier Grand Cru Classé of St. Emilion

Yummmmm , Figeac ....

Opportunities to participate in a vertical tasting – spanning several vintages – of a premier wine are rare, so I jumped at the invitation to participate in an 11-vintage retrospective of Chateau Figeac, a Premier Grand Cru Classé producer in St. Emilion, in Bordeaux.

I was one of two dozen wine lovers who poneyed up a modest $90 for a four-course dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse near Dupont Circle last month for a chance to meet Eric d’Aramon, owner, director and chief winemaker of Figeac. The bacchanal was organized by Panos Kakaviatos, a Bordeaux lover who writes for Decanter and several other magazines. The wines were donated by the chateau.

To be honest, this was the type of evening that gives wine geeks a bad name. There was much preening of wine knowledge with discussions of faults and comparisons of the wine to other bottles tasted weeks before. And the wines are expensive – the 2009, the current vintage, retails for about $300. For us, though, the evening was an ideal opportunity to get a sense of a famous chateau’s character and its wines, and to forge a relationship, however fleeting, with the winery’s owner.