We don't see many homegrown Sauvignon Blancs up here, so out of curiosity we picked up the 2005 JM Cellars Klipsun Vineyard the other day in town. Not austere, but restrained and elegant in the melon and citrus style, with a little green herb for complexity. Not cheap at $18, but not overpriced. Lovely with a shrimp salad.
Ready to tuck into a round of tangy smoked gouda from Pleasant Valley Dairy I've had aging in my cellar for three years, I decided my last 1994 St. Innocent Freedom Hill vineyard pinot noir's time had come. It was a good choice, as the wine though thirteen years old is still quite big, and as I suspected it's reached the too-far-gone stage where it's turning murky dark and sporting some soy sauce flavors. It would have been all wrong for typical pinot noir service, but the idiosyncratic cheese gave it a fine goodbye.
To go with a main course of rare duck breast in grapefruit sauce on snow peas, I chose a 1998 J. u. H. A. Strub Niersteiner Paterberg Spatlese. OH MY. I need to digress here: I keep saying I'm not sure I get reisling. So many taste of just coconut and grapefruit to me. And I love both, but I absolutely despise the coconut odor of tanning oil and the coconutty flavor that shows up in riesling is closer to that than real fruit to my palate. Not a fan. Every recent riesling I've had was that way and bored me, even 82 JJ Prum and 96 Weiss-Prum spatleses in Los Angeles with old friend Hucko a few weeks ago. Well, this Strub was so far out there in a different league than anything I've had recently, I can't tell you. Orange-y gold color, and it tasted of every orange and yellow fruit on the planet. Tangerine, lemon, blood orange, apricot, papaya, pineapple, honeysuckle--they were all in there. Every sip burst in my mouth like Chinese fireworks with all those flavors, and yet it finished dry and clean. I have never had a more stunning riesling, and the match with the dish was seamless. Absolute nectar.
During the week a friend opened a 99 Pio Cesare Barolo. Earthy, dusty, dried cherries, leather. Not terribly complex as baroli go, but drinking perfectly right now. If I were holding more, they'd all go into the drinking queue.