Notes on a dinner with Fritz Hatton.
We attended a small dinner at friends in Vancouver and Fritz Hatton was in attendance. He’d recently organized a large auction of the host, Rob Caine’s excess wines, mostly Burgundy and had many interesting stories to tell, and brought some wines from his own Napa winery, Arietta, which I had never tasted before.
2010 The White Keys – a blend of 80/20 sauv blanc/Semillon, this crisp clean white had only been bottled two weeks before, but seemed not to have suffered any trauma from that. The oak was very nicely calculated, something one (well this one, anyway) yearns for but seldom sees in Californian wines. There were some nice fruit notes in this that made it a great combination with some finger food served with it on the deck.
The next wines were served blind, although given the source, there was little difficulty in ascertaining where they came from!
2005 Dom. Leflaive Puligny Montrachet ‘Clavoillon’ 1er Cru – developing some colour, an enticing nose of mellow fruit with a citrus edge that showed a nice spice with time in the glass, and in the mouth smooth and supple with good length.
2004 Dom. Leflaive Puligny Montrachet ‘Clavoillon’ 1er Cru– an interesting spicy vanilla nose, marred (for me, not for Rob or Sid Cross, the other guest, who seem to have much higher tolerance) by significant sulphur. Mellow and tasty with good acidity and length. I’d probably have preferred this one had it not smelled like a freshly struck match!
2005 Dom. Leflaive Batard Montrachet Grand Cru – excellent slightly sweet fruit driven nose, and a lovely elegant supple wine on palate, well balanced.
2004 Dom. Leflaive Batard Montrachet Grand Cru – some good oak in this nose, and I got the definite impression that there was a little RS that softened the wine and made if doo friendly. Big mouth presence, memorable wine.
2002 Arietta H Block Hudson Valley Napa Red Wine - this wine is made from 60% cab franc and 40% merlot, grown in ‘H’ Block, a plot formerly utilized by Newton, but more recently by Arietta. I had zero preconceptions going in on this one as I did not know the wines and had intentionally not boned up on them with any specificity to avoid forming and ideas beforehand. This was a very dark wine with pronounced blackberry and cassis fruit, with some cocoa (the merlot?), smooth elegant tannins, great concentration of fruit in midpalate, and exceptional length. I am not often as impressed with a wine on first tasting as I was with this one, and I found it to be in the old Napa idiom of simply being an excellent well made balanced wine, thankfully NOT one of the all too common ‘stun them with fruit and they’ll ask no questions’ approach. Well done, Fritz!
I had been tasked with bringing a dessert wine, as Rob doesn’t cellar much of that type, and the prospect of bringing something for wine aficionados of this calibre was an imposing one. I opted for a very unusual wine I had picked up in the early 1980s when I had been down racing vintage sports cars at Laguna Seca, and did winery visits on the way home.
1978 Joseph Phelps Selected Late Harvest Johannisberg Riesling – allow me to blow the horn of a wine I had brought – this was really amazing stuff! Like many of this sort of wine (mostly not made any more) this was very high residual sugar – in this case, as high as I can ever recall, at 30% and was harvested at 48%! It still managed to come in at 10% alcohol. Like quite a few (including the old 1970s Ch. St. Jean TBAs) this wine was dark brown and people would laugh at you if you offered it to them as a white wine. For whatever reason, the California wines of this style seem to darken much sooner than do German TBAs. It was raisiny in the nose, unctuous and mouth filling and had amazing acidity, so avoided the cloying effect of some. A bit surprisingly, it still showed some petrol varietal notes in the nose, something I have rarely seen with TBA style Gewurz even at a younger age. I suppose the aromatics that come from the Riesling are more persistent and do not break down as quickly. A memorable wine I was happy to contribute (and my last bottle!).