Tag: Red

Tasting

Gamay Noir: the Sansa Stark of Wine Grapes

Posted on by Josh

(The night is dark and full of small spoilers. Tread carefully past the picture for the wines!)

I mention Beaujolais to people – in the same way that I might bring up Sansa Stark in a Game of Thrones discussion – and I watch as faces crinkle before I make my case for the dark horses.

Gamay is a red grape that hails from the Beaujolais region in France (and Sansa hails from Winterfell, but you knew that), and it’s fashionable to dislike Beaujolais. The ditzy Beaujolais Nouveau variations of the 1970s and 1980s – all laden with pear drops, banana, and bubble gum flavours from carbonic maceration – once represented half of all Beaujolais sold. It’s since dropped to around a third, but I find that a large fraction of consumers can’t seem to shake the image of what might be the essence of season 1 Sansa.… read more

Tasting

Rosé? For spring? Groundbreaking.

Posted on by Josh

Seminar led by the Wine Diva, but I’m quoting diva Meryl Streep, obviously. If you didn’t get that reference then why are we even friends? But really: I would wholeheartedly pair The Devil Wears Prada with a Loire wine. You’d need something light – maybe aloof – yet cutting, and dry. Also, that movie turns 10 this year? What?

I’ve once again come a little too underdressed for such an event, but I can’t help it because it’s muggy, sunny, and I like mesh a little too much. Cool off with Loire wines? Probably one of the favourite French areas of from last year’s Europe trip. My wallet cried.

Anyways, I think my main point here is that people need to get excited about weird Chenin Blanc and elegant light reds. … read more

Life · Quaffing · Tasting

24 wines for turning 24

Posted on by Josh

This post serves two purposes: a sincere smile-and-nod to the 23rd year of my life, and a spring cleaning wine dump of, coincidentally, a number of bottles that equals the number of anniversaries since I was pushed out of my mother. Alas. The past prime number of a year has been good to me, and I’m stoked for the next. Beyond this whole becoming-an-adult thing, I’ve done many things including completing the WSET Diploma (i hate to keep mentioning about it – but perhaps the youngest in BC to do so!), changing jobs, travelling to New York, travelling to France, travelling to Spain, and other things that would probably be best not to put on the internet. Heh.

And home. Oh God – connecting to your roots and family – sometimes I dig myself way too deep into wine culture and its countries that I forget where I come from.… read more

Tasting

8 Variations on Braida’s Barbera, the Arya Stark of Wine Grapes

Posted on by Josh

(Spoiler alert, sort of! Seek refuge underneath the picture below to avoid such things.)

I always saw Barbera as the Arya Stark to Sansa Stark’s Gamay Noir. It’s neither the king nor the queen of Italy’s Piedmont, which, in effect, belongs to Nebbiolo’s Barolo and Barbaresco, but it’s also not the bourgeois Dolcetto. No: I see Barbera as a trick, a ninja often producing wines unfortunately crafted into expressions that are sour and thin and second or third-rate, when in fact, it can produce wines with such concentration and shrill acidity, you’d swear that your mouth was being deliciously pierced by castle-forged steel. It’s a grape that brings in cash for producers while Nebbiolo unfurls itself in the cellar.

And, when it’s oaked – a style that Giacomo Bologna of Braida pioneered in the 1970s with Bricco dell’Uccellone – you might lose a bit of Barbera’s vibrant mouth-puckering red fruit (read: its identity), but you get more spice, mystery, and complexity.… read more

Tasting

You can’t spell “Amarone” without “moan”: on 18 bottles at the 2016 VIWF

Posted on by Josh

I don’t know what my point is. Amarone is great before sex? In lieu of it? During, as a suggested pairing that I’d secretly sneak into some conservative wine magazine one day? Maybe, if your sex consists of dark chocolate, Careless Whisper, and a comfy mattress. Which, let’s be real: Amarone is basically a liquid version of such.

The northeastern Italian wine, a style of Valpolicella, is famed for producing sumptuous Corvina-based wines from dried grapes. My tasting notes usually consist of some kind of full texture, a handful of dried fruit, some level of chocolate, a variety of spices, and present structure that never tears the mouth apart. I’m tasting (almost) all of them at the Vancouver International Wine Festival (like I did with Prosecco, Nebbiolo, and Brunello), in order to further understand the scope of the styles.… read more

Tasting

“1000 Years in Tuscany”: Getting Sangio-crazy with Barone Francesco Ricasoli

Posted on by Josh

I was never really a history buff in high school. What I did, though, was take all of the sciences and maths unnecessarily earlier than I needed to, during, which I hate to admit, the coinciding apogee of the Big Bang Theory. I once took pride in every comparison to Leonard Hofstadter I received in university – which was purely from a fashion standpoint, of course – because I realized how dull I found quantum mechanics. Cringeworthy half-stories aside, I really mean to say that I’ve totally reversed: I’ve started to appreciate history in general as I got deeper into wine, and sometimes it’s such a shame that having serious game plans to taste wines means I have to skip principals and their stories.… read more

Tasting

A bored ho tastes Bordeaux (2013)

Posted on by Josh

bordeaux2013

Bordeaux is in a bit of a tough spot at the moment – which isn’t saying much – but it’s far from being an underdog: Eric Asimov discusses this in a New York Times article in May 2010. The region in question once simultaneously exuded both normalcy and the unattainable; a seemingly conventional gateway wine to all other wines, yet having this aura of hubris and higher social status. But now that so many more wines are available, and with a new generation seeking wines that are anything but normal, it seems that less people are raising their hands for the classic French region. But I mean hey: people still whore out special bottles of Bordeaux for likes on Instagram, and a blog post on the mass-produced Mouton Cadet 2012, for some reason, is quite statistically popular.… read more

Tasting

Evolve Cellars

Posted on by Josh

Three things immediately come to mind when I hear the word “evolve”: Pokemon, Digimon, and evolutionary biology. My childhood aside, let’s add Evolve Cellars to the shortlist for a potential fourth: my favourites among this Summerland quartet are the heftier rosé and red that seem to go against the predictable BC pattern of interchangeable off-dry rosés and the oft-disjointed reds. The red of the vintage prior to the current release won a gold medal at the 2015 BC Wine Awards; the wine’s birth was crafted by Lawrence Buhler, winemaker. Huzzah.

The whites, though, along with the rosé, are part of Evolve’s very first vintage release, the grapes being sourced from the Sundial Vineyard on the Black Sage Bench in Oliver, probably attributing the rounder, denser versions of the grapes.… read more

Quaffing

Why you gotta be so Mavrud?

Posted on by Josh

Don’t you know I’m human too?
Why you gotta be so Mavrud?
I’m gonna marry her anyway- 

k sorry I’ll stop.

Weird Bulgarian grapes. Let’s do it.

zagreus2011vinicamavrudAccording to Wine Grapes, Mavrud is one of Bulgaria’s two best quality indigenous red grape varieties (the other being Shiroka Melnishka or Melnik), with several variants that differ in terms of size and colour. The late-ripening small berries often produce tannic and acidic wines that apparently take well to oak, and this example has indeed seen new French oak for 12 months – and it’s not obvious. This wine in particular sees Mavrud grapes that have been dried for 2 months before fermentation, creating somewhat of an Eastern European answer to Amarone. Very cool stuff.… read more

Life · Quaffing · Tasting

2015 ends and 2016 trends

Posted on by Josh

I’m a bit late to this #bye2015hello2016 stuff! Anyways, I’ve said it way too many times than you care to read: I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. But this is the first year where reflecting and looking forward to the next year has felt the least forced. Despite my abrupt and perhaps ephemeral positivity, I won’t be superimposing any fortune cookie pieces of advice onto filtered landscapes anytime soon – March seems to be my I-fucking-hate-everything downfall month anyway, so we’ll see how much my outlook relapses.

joshlikeswine2015

At the beginning of 2015, I made the tongue-in-cheek resolution to be a bit more selfish: to not to be guilt-ridden about having a balanced serving of things that make me happy and to give less of a shit about what other people think.… read more