Memaloose is an idiosyncratic little winery down on the Columbia River who consistently produce tasty but different wines that purposefully cleave to no commonly accepted standards about wine other than making it taste good in a way that makes your palate do a double take. Or so has been my experience after tasting, over the last couple years, several of their reislings and a cab franc, all of which were interesting enough to make me put this 2010 Memaloose 'Mistral Ranch' in my cart yesterday without any idea what it was other than red. I knew only that they make memorably unpretentious wine from grapes grown on land that has been in the family since Lewis and Clark rowed by--or something like that.
And so, still in the dark as to the contents, we opened the bottle to have with pasta in a smoked pork and fennel sauce last night. Black color--not cloudy but clearly not fined and filtered. At first sniff, the wine had a nose I called skunky for lack of any better word--it was a little bit herb and a little bit brett but maybe neither. On the palate, light black fruit, mostly acid. With time in the glass the nose became hugely floral in a way that was odd but not unpleasant, and the acids dialed so far back it became soft. Overall the wine was light in body but not dilute, but I still couldn't grasp the fruit. It reminded me a little of a Guigal Cotes du Rhone we had several years black that was solid black and a little grassy, a wine that was hard with tannins where this had very little. Well in fact that was close; it's mostly syrah, but with about 25% counoise (a grape we never see around here, which I guess explains the nose) and a few cents worth of grenache thrown in. In the end a very pleasant drink, and though not a wine that would rate higher than an 86 by a strictly clinical evaluation, that observation seriously understates the amount of fun we had sipping and discussing it over the two hours the bottle lasted. Glad I bought it.