This week we’re hosting two tastings, because there’s so much exciting stuff happening with wine, and we want to get it in front of you. On Wednesday, we’re tasting five reasonably priced wines that are perfect for a wide array of holiday entertaining, and then on Thursday, an all-Hungarian evening with our pal, wine importer Eric Danch.
Wednesday 11/12
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off wines tasted
Vignoble Simian “Mon p’Tit Camion IGP Méditerranée 2024
Krutzler Blaufränkisch rosé Burgenland 2024
Nestarec “Bêl” Czech Republic 2024
Poivre d’Âne “Le Litron” Vin de France 2022
Vino di Anna “Sfuso di Anna” Vino Rosso Sicilia 2022
When I hear a wine described as “cheap and cheerful,” I am filled with dread. Vague images of an inexpensive midwestern smörgåsbord, steam tables laden with sweet, Swedish meatballs, and dessert carts offering colorful Jello; sideshow carnies at the state fair, beckoning me to look behind the tent curtain; my maudlin old aunt Naomi, wheezing in pleasure and slapping her knee at some inane, sexual word play in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Is the antonym of cheap and cheerful expensive and miserable? And why must the goal of a wine be to cheer us up? Why is cheer forced upon us as a desideratum? Perhaps, and I wouldn’t blame you at this moment, the beast in you demands you feed it, now, rattling its cage and commanding something sanguineous and gristly, to match its temperament. The truism that I cannot stop muttering to myself, a chestnut so old and well-polished that it hardly merits mention, is the profound lack of correlation between the pleasure you take in any given bottle of wine and how wide you opened your pocketbook to pay for it. Many things might provide us with a sliver of cheer in these dark times: a piece of pie, for me, but wine, even an inexpensive one, can offer that and much more.
Wine, like other dimensions of our life as consumers, is a commodity saturated with symbolic exchange and the social capital that attends to that. A pricy bottle of Napa cabernet, Scarecrow, let’s say, will set you back $1000 (the matching bespoke leather bottle bag is a mere $100—go ahead, you deserve it); a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Richebourg, if you can find it, and depending on the vintage, may be had for a tidy sum of only $3,000. Is the value proposition here that these wines offer Valhalla-levels of pleasure that we mere mortals cannot presume to even dream of? Or is the whole thing a mirage of false scarcity that helps the chosen folks who consume this way wake up in their mornings, happy to be alive and amongst the chosen? And here goes cynical fuck old pappy again, railing against the cherry-picking hipsters, who sweep into the shop when they hear that the latest allocations of anointed FOMO wines have dropped. Their glazed, jaundiced eyes searching only for certain bottles of rare Jura geek wines—everything else is just a blur of noise, interested less in wine, really, and more so in its totemic presence.
The theme of our first tasting this week is reasonably priced wine of the sort you can buy for the holiday feasts you may have planned in the next few weeks. Delicious, compelling wines, some of which are bottled in jumbo-sized, liter bottles. Food-friendly wines that won’t overwhelm the food you so lovingly prepared for your guests, but when you pause for a moment and take a sip, cause you to stop and say, “hey!”
We’re starting with a shockingly reasonable bottle from Provence, certified biodynamic, all vermentino, dry, fresh, a little floral. Next, a dry, light, vibrant blaufränkisch rosé from Burgenland—zero sugar, seductive. To follow, a medium-bodied red from the slopes of Mt. Etna, and then two liter-sized bottlings, one from the Czech Republic, mostly grüner, but with a bit of müller-thurgau for aromatic complexity; the other from the south of France, all syrah, but made with just a quick maceration and little else.
Thursday, 11/13 6-8 pm
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off wines tasted
Tokaj Nobilis “Pezsgő” Brut 2020
Tinon “Megyer” Furmint 2021
Heimann & Fiai “Piros” Siller 2024
Wetzer “Blumenthal” Kékfrankos 2020
Sziegl “Hársfás-út” Kékfrankos 2020
For our second tasting this week, we’re damn pleased to host our old friend Eric Danch, representing his import portfolio, Danch & Granger Selections. Eric is doing a bang-up job importing a wide spectrum of traditional wines made from the patrimonial grape varieties from central and eastern Europe, and we’re always down to host him when he’s in town. Well, Eric is indeed in town this week for “Bor” (which means wine in Hungarian), a large trade tasting of Hungarian wines, and we thought we’d leverage the opportunity to have him back at the shop to taste through just a tiny sliver of the Hungarian wines he imports. He’s an incredible conversationalist, equipped to yammer on about all things central and eastern European wine, anecdotes out the wazoo, what he ate, saw, and smelled during his last trip to Romania–but don’t pigeonhole him, as the conversation will inevitably stray down the road less travelled.
We’re starting with a dry, mineral sparkling wine from the Tokaji region, a volcanic terroir in the east of the country, made from the crown jewel of Hungarian white grape varieties, furmint. Although Sarolta Bárdos grows several other traditional Hungarian white varieties, she is genuinely a furmint specialist, and this wine shows what to expect from a dry version of the grape. Following the fizz, we’re tasting another, quite different furmint, from French expat Samuel Tinon. It’s an electric bottle with astonishing, mouth-watering acidity and a nearly homeopathic dose of residual sugar (2 g/l, about half a teaspoon per liter)—the residual sugar is invisible here, but welcome, for without it, the wine would be a searing mouthful.
Following the furmint, we’re tasting three red wines. First, a light “siller,” a type of wine that occupies the margins between a light red and rosé. Historically significant in Hungary (a similar wine is grown in Germany, and referred to as “Schillerwein”) but, as many things vinous and not, nearly destroyed during the central planning-dominated Soviet era, Siller is having its day. Light, dry, low-tannin, served with a bit of a chill, this siller is made from unmacerated kékfrankos (blaufränkisch) to which whole clusters of kadarka are added. To finish, two different kékfrankos-based wines that shed a little light on just how expressive and nuanced this grape can be: one from the center of the country, south of Budapest, dense and herbal; the other from the west of the country, at the border with Austria, older vines, tannic, and a bit feral. |
