Wine tasting: Complices de Loire "La petite timonerie" Chinon (100% Cabernet Franc), 2013.

(For all the wine tastings I've done in 2016, click the "wine2016" label at the end of this entry, or just "wine" for all the writing I've ever done on the subject.)

Greetings again, my libatious friends! For those who need catching up, I'm a writer in Chicago, fulfilling a New Year's resolution to finally get better educated about wine, who has started the process by doing thoughtful tastings once a week of the world's 20 most popular types of grapes, doing the run chromatically from the heaviest reds (which I started right after New Year's in the middle of winter) to the lightest whites (which I'll be getting to at the beginning of May, just in time for the warm weather). So far this year I've now gotten through Syrah/Shiraz, Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Chianti, Merlot, (Red) Zinfandel, Garnacha/Grenache, and Gamay; and that leaves only one red left in this series, the decidedly "Old World" (i.e. European) Cabernet Franc.

Much like last week's Gamay, this was not a type of wine I was very familiar with before going into this tasting series; but unlike Gamay, whose unfamiliarity is due to it instead mostly being known by the region most famous for it (Beaujolais), the reason Cabernet Franc is unfamiliar is that the vast majority of wineries grow it just as a stalwart grape to mix with others, not to bottle on its own and promote as its own varietal. (In fact, along with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, this is one of the three grapes used for the famous Bordeaux blend of French red wine.) In fact, about the only place that still does so is the ancient Loire Valley region of France, which has actually been making wine since literally the birth of Christ, and in the Medieval Period was much more highly thought of than the upstart Bordeaux region. Reflecting its actual genetic relationship, Cabernet Franc grapes are much like Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in taste (sour/savory, unsweet); but much less intense in aroma, flavor, or its lingering quality, greatly helped by these grapes becoming ripe much earlier than most other reds, cranking up their acidity and thus their tart, citrus-like aftertaste (but see my detailed tasting notes below for more on that).

The winery I tried tonight, Complices de Loire, is based out of the village of Chinon which is considered Ground Zero for fans of Cabernet Franc wine, and actually buys their grapes from eight different respected vineyards around the region, instead of growing their own. (Interestingly, much like you usually only see in trendy New World wines, CdL gives fun little brand names to each of their wines, and makes a concerted effort to produce cool little hipster-looking labels; the wine I tried is known in English either as "Little Pilot" or "Little Wheelhouse," depending on which online translation tool you trust.) This is now my fourth Old World/European wine of this 2016 project (two from France, one from Italy, one from Spain -- and among the New World wines, one from Australia, one from Argentina, one from South Africa, one from Washington State, one from Oregon, and one from California), and while I can definitely see the argument that Old World fans make about why they're fans -- that European wines are more complex, more subtle, more nuanced, because of being grown in temperate regions around a lot of other produce whose traits they pick up -- in general I have to admit that I've liked New World wines much better, grown in hot environments that really cook those grapes and lead to these extremely bold tastes that can't be mistaken for anything else. It'll be especially interesting, then, to start the next educational project I'm doing after this one, where I'm going to spend the whole summer doing thoughtful tastings of as many different kinds of French wine I can get my hands on, literally the oldest of the Old World wines still made in the world, and that really puts the "sub" in "subtle and nuanced flavor."

Complices de Loire

“La petite timonerie” Chinon 2013 (100% Cabernet Franc)

Chinon, Loire Valley, France

12.5% ABV

$15 (Andersonville Wine and Spirits)

Look: Extremely light in color and texture, the closest I've gotten this year to a legitimately pink wine.

Smell: The same kind of sour/savory aroma as Cabernet Sauvignon, no wonder since these grape types are genetically related, but profoundly in intensity and how far the aroma carries across the room.

Taste: Light on the tongue but an extremely sharp and tart taste, so much like citrus that it makes my mouth water after swallowing, a bit to the wine's detriment if I'm to be honest. A flat-out unsweet taste that will turn off many casual drinkers, I now wonder if this is a reflection of all Cabernet Francs or just this particular brand. Would CERTAINLY go well with cheese or salty snacks, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend drinking it by itself or with a heavy meal like steak. (UPDATE: After further research, I've learned that a historically popular pairing in the Loire Valley is Cabernet Franc and goat cheese, which made immediate sense the moment I read it.)

After a Full Glass: After an entire glass paired with pasta in cream sauce, the more herbal/leafy tastes started coming out on the tongue, a good example of why Old World fans say that European wines have a more “subtle” and “complex” taste than currently trendy New World wines from hotter climates. Also, it was interesting to note after further research that Cabernet Franc is one of the few kinds of contemporary wine that will literally get noticeably better after storing it for ten or twenty years in a cellar; and that it's one of the few kinds of contemporary wine that legitimately gets noticeably better when pouring it into a decanter a full hour before serving. Talk about Old World!

Wine tasting: "Cigar Zin" old vine Zinfandel, 2012.

(For all my 2016 wine tastings, click the "wine2016" label at the end of this entry, or just "wine" for all the writing I've ever done on the subject.)

Welcome, new readers! To get you quickly caught up: One of my New Year's resolutions for 2016 was to finally get better educated about wine, which dovetails nicely with two of my other resolutions (to start throwing more dinner parties at my apartment, and to do more intellectual and creative things simply for the sake of being intellectual and creative). I'm starting the process by trying wines from around the world made out of a total of 20 different types of popular grapes, moving my way chromatically from the darkest red to eventually the lightest white; so far this year I've been through Shiraz, Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinoir Noir, Chianti and Merlot, which means this week I'm finally ready to try the uber-popular Zinfandel for the first time!

And make no mistake, despite its "bubba" reputation among wine aficionados, Zinfandel is still far and away one of the most popular types of wine in America in the 2010s (especially among consumers of low-end "jug" wine), and constitutes an entire ten percent of all the wine made in the entire state of California. In fact, Zinfandel is known as the grape that "made" the California wine industry, albeit through an interesting turn of events in the 1980s; see, this high-sugar, thin-skinned grape does only so-so in the hot California climate (some years see great harvests, some see terrible ones), which led the owner of Sutter Home Winery in one of these bad years to ferment the grape juice with the skins for just a tiny amount of time before removing them, resulting in a light, highly sweet pink wine that he called "White Zinfandel" (ironically because the Food and Drug Administration forced him to, lest he be accused of false advertising*).

[*And even more ironically, although this grape was touted as a "California native" breed when that industry was being bolstered in the '80s, it turns out that this is merely a child of Italy's Primitivo breed of grapes; which even more ironically turns out to not be from Italy at all, but rather from the Croatian region of the "Fertile Crescent" area of Mesopotamia where the act of making wine was first invented seven thousand years ago.]

It's this White Zinfandel that's much more popular than the dark red Zinfandel I tried tonight, with mine in particular being a batch from the treasured "old vines" that miraculously survived Prohibition; but make no mistake, plain ol' Zinfandel (or Red Zinfandel as some people call it) is not the sickly sweet pink concoction we normally think of when we hear this term, but rather a bold and fruity dark red much more akin to Cabarnet Sauvignon. In fact, the wine I tried tonight was specifically branded "Cigar Zin" as a marketing ploy, in order to invoke other such masculine treats as cigars and steaks, although unfortunately the Cigar Zin website is out of date and doesn't contain much information about the company, a real shame since half the pleasure of these tastings is learning about fascinating wineries scattered across the globe. By the way, the White Zinfandel is coming -- it's fourth on the list from now, after Grenache, Cabernet Franc and Garnay -- and given how many notoriously mediocre brands of it are out there now, I'd love your advice on an actual excellent White Zinfandel to try for my tasting. Send it my way to ilikejason@gmail.com, with my thanks!

Cigar Zin Wines

“Old Vine” Zinfandel, 2012

Sonoma, California

14.9% ABV

$16

Look: The brightest red I've so far tried this year, catching the light magnificently.

Smell: I suspect that what we feel about the aroma of a wine is the aspect most influenced by what other people tell us; for example, after I read that the makers of Cigar Zin named it that as a marketing ploy to match it in people's heads with other “masculine” treats as steaks and cigars, sure enough this wine started seeming to have traces of cigar and steak as part of its aroma. Apart from that, though, this smelled basically like the other deep reds I've tried this year, with a strong aroma of “not-sweet sweet” fruits like blackberries.

Taste: Although this looks and smells like the deep reds I've tried this year like Shiraz and Malbec, it tastes a lot different – a much sweeter and lighter taste than its aroma and look would make you think. It also goes down the throat delightfully smoothly, with almost no hint of tannins whatsoever, and kind of tastes like licking out the semi-solidified remains of an old jar of homemade jam. A big surprise, which I'm assuming at this point is a reflection of Zinfandel grapes having such a higher sugar content than other comparable deep red grapes.

After a Full Glass: After having an entire glass with a plate of pasta, I realized that this wine leaves a tingling sensation in the back of the mouth/top of the throat with each drink, which I believe is the result of it being the most alcoholic wine I've so far tried in 2016 (and at 15 percent, likely the highest I'll ever try this year). Unlike the Merlot I tried in my last tasting, this held its uniqueness quite well against the spicy Cajun pasta I had paired with it.

Wine tasting: Union Wine Company's "Underwood" Pinot Noir, Oregon, 2014

(For all my wine writing this year, click the "wine2016" label at the bottom of this post, or just the "wine" label for all the writing I've ever done on the subject.)

So it looks like my two-bottle "head-to-head" wine tastings are over for now, soon after they begun -- and that's because I've officially started up my plans to start having dinner parties at my place on Friday nights, and it dawned on me this week how much wine I need to start stocking up in order to make it through all those dinners. (I'm having eight people over every Friday, and plan on pairing two types of wine each time with a "first half" and "second half" of dinner*; simple math shows that that's four bottles of wine I need to provide every single week, which means I need to start saving every other bottle I buy instead of drinking it myself.) But, since I follow the Mediterranean eating plan, I'm still having a glass or two of wine every night before bed; so I'll still be trying out new brands on a regular basis, slowly making my way from the heaviest types of grapes to the lightest, just now only one bottle at a time instead of cracking open two at once. (Live in Chicago and want to attend one of these dinners? Just drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know -- the whole point is to bring together interesting strangers for fascinating conversations, so you're welcome too.)

(*I'm done serving courses at dinner parties; it keeps me so busy in the kitchen that I don't have time to actually sit at the table and enjoy the company. So for my dinner parties in 2016, I'm basically having a "first half" that consists of a handful of tapas-like small dishes paired with a white wine, then a "second half" of a main entree paired with a red wine, ending with sherry and dessert and beginning with cocktails and appetizers. Because if you're not getting your guests wicked drunk at your parties, you're doing something wrong.)

Tonight -- Pinot Noir from Oregon! This is the wine that was made really famous by the movie Sideways, namely because of the grape's fussiness -- since it has a thinner skin than most other dark reds, it's more susceptible to the rot and disease that come with cool and wet weather, but that's the same thing that lets it only really thrive in cool and wet weather to begin with, since it ripens early and has a hard time withstanding the blasting heat of a place like Australia or South America -- which means that when you come across a good bottle of Pinot Noir, not only did someone go to a lot of trouble to make sure it came out all right, but the nature of the wine means that it profoundly picks up the odors and tastes of the things that were around it when growing, something that wine lovers call a "complex" bottle. In fact, this is one of the big things that Pinot Noir is known for, that it can taste much more differently based on where in the world it was grown than, say, more stable grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. (And yes, "Pinot Gris" and "Pinot Blanc" are basically variations of the Pinot Noir grape; all three get their name based on the fact that their small grapes grow in tight spiral-like clusters, looking somewhat like a pine cone. Interestingly, this type of grape can be traced all the way back to Biblical times, and was one of the first types to do well in France back in 600 BC when they started making "fine" wine to begin with, although there it's generally known as "Red Burgundy" after the region where it's grown.)

Oregon is considered the number-two place in the entire United States for great Pinot Noirs, just behind their neighbors in northern California; Union Wine Company, for example, is located ten miles south of Portland, in the "Willamette Valley" region where the vast majority of Oregon's wine industry is located. Like many of the more modern "New World" (non-European) wineries, Union takes a cue off the beer industry and gives a brand name to each type of wine they make; the brand I tried tonight is called "Underwood," although they make other brands of Pinot Noirs as well. And an interesting piece of trivia too -- Union is the first company I've ever seen that also sells their wines in 12-ounce aluminum cans, and all their branding and graphic design unsurprisingly has a decidedly hipster bent.

Union Wine Company

“Underwood” Pinot Noir, 2014

Oregon

13% ABV

$14

Look: A bright and transparent red that catches the light well.

Smell: Lighter in intensity than the Shirazes and Malbecs I've tried in previous weeks, but still strong enough to be distinct. Like many others, this seemed to me to have reflections of cherries and cranberries in its odor, but I'm not sure if that's me detecting that on my own or me being influenced by what others have had to say.

Taste: Like “Cabernet Sauvignon Lite” – a full and sour taste like the dark reds I enjoy, but with not as strong an intensity, much like the difference between brewing tea three minutes versus six minutes. Still, like the Malbecs last week, this is not the “sweet sweet” we associate with a lot of fruit, but the “dark and barely sweet” of something like cranberries or blackberries.

After a Full Glass: After an entire glass that was drank at the same time as eating, it was easy to see why people are so in love with Pinot Noirs when they want to have a good red wine, because the intensity of its flavor almost magically receded into the background to let the food flavors instead shine through, unlike previous taste tests with Shiraz and Malbec where the wines generally maintained their own unique identity even when eating food at the same time. I mean, I myself don't mind that intensity in drinks – I also drink stout beer and unsweetened black coffee on a regular basis – but if your goal is to drink wine that blends seamlessly with the food you're eating along with it, it's hard to deny that Pinot Noir is exceptional for this purpose. (Also, perhaps this is such a popular wine because it gets you schnockered without realizing it; this has 50 percent more alcohol than a typical white wine you might drink with dinner, but without the intense and dark flavor of Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz that reminds you with every sip, "Don't forget, bub, you're drinking a hugely alcoholic wine right now," and I must admit that even after just two glasses I was feeling highly woozy from my Pinot Noir experience.)