My wine descriptions can tend towards the flowery... sometimes they become long poems that have little to do with wine. I try and restrain myself. Usually I am able to bring my thoughts up just shy of overblown, just this side of ecstatic poetry. But I am realizing that the standard I should hold myself to is my own-- what does "speak" to me about a certain wine? What shows itself to me, what is revealed, and how to translate a complicated experience?
Writing about wine cannot be strictly intellectual-- it is a translation through ebbs and flows of an experience. It is layered and sewn, pasted and glued end to end. And back to front, sub-soil through sod through wind to tops of clouds. I have been letting my imagination run away with me lately, and have been hugely surprised that my tasting notes circle around to the beginning, all on their own. When it works, they curve around to the beginning after running a gamut of thoughts, smells, memories, and colors. They become a stack of trace paper with drawings on each page, they become a cross-section landscape of a summer rainstorm turned to dusk in the desert. My tasting notes have the potential to frame all of the ways I have dabbled in the world, all the ways I have of remembering things, all the quiets and noise, all the lights and the darks.
I've been trying to celebrate my own language of wine. My 'language' incorporates many different fields of study-- everyone's does! If there is Greek poetry in my notes its because I lived it in the mountains of Santa Fe-- wet sage and chamisa breeze through my book pages. If the trajectory of a wine speaks to me in curves and tapestry weights its because of countless hours spent walking through the dark and muffled quiet of Met museum storehouses, through dim lit picture galleries. Tasting notes have become a story-- an arc of sensations that curves back through older stories. I have smelled the powdery, sharp tang of high desert chamisa in a bottle of Foradori Nosiola. I have tasted hot chamomile-in-the-sun in dark sherry soleras of Sanlucar. I am starting to celebrate the verbose and the sensual in my tasting notes, the trajectories and tangents because that is how I experience wine. It is pre-verbal, it is nostalgic, it is haptic and tactile. It is happening before any of these words.
I remember a man performing a Samuel Beckett play on a dark stage in Taos, NM. When we went outside after, you could smell smoke in the air, through sagebrush. You sensed that wood stoves were leaving thick, smudged tracery above each house, and the sky was pitch black. I think this is why I have always loved living in desert landscapes-- there is less sensory noise, the spaces are more open and clear-- they are scrubbed with soap suds and sun in the morning, and stain brightly from a few select markers.
My friend that lives in the desert of West Texas told me that one mountain range bordering his property grew out of an old sea bed, a huge limestone shelf that has eroded down through fossils, sea creatures and chalk. The mountains on the other side are volcanic, and ring with a sharp metallic sound. I watched a storm roll towards me in that desert, and tried to understand the gold dust that kept falling on my white skin. His skin is bronze from the sun, he sat under a burning stick of incense laughing, saying that being dusted by anything was sacred.
In my writing I try to pull at a thread-- without unravelling the whole cord of spun experience and sensation. If I am lucky I can trace it through wines-- I find the personality of the winemaker in the wines and it is astonishing! In Sanlucar I came to understand two different winemakers by tasting through barrels of their sherries. One shone through her wines deep and quiet and shining in the dark-- a cold brook in the early spring. Another was loud and alive with yellow bursts of energy-- it was electricity and sea tang, burning in the sun, burned onto the crisp, hot sand-edge of coast.
Tasting the 2011 Domaine de Montbourgeau 'L'Etoile', (50% Chardonnay/ 50%Savagnin sous-voile, Jura, FR) today. Its a mixed experience, and somewhat confusing. This was one of my favorite wines when I first started working at UVA Wines in Williamsburg, BK years ago. It was a bit of a tough sell because of its salinity and vibrant sherry-like qualities. I remember it as tangy and laser-edged, clean but also incorporating the oxidized aromas and tastes of Savagnin under flor (chicken stock, turmeric, curry, tea leaves, sea-salt). When I started at UVA I had years of selling sherry under my belt. This was a wine I sold with zeal-- equal parts all things I loved about wine: clean, focused aromatics of an alpine chardonnay, and oxidized yellow viscosity and depth.
Today I feel nostalgic. Is this why the wine is taking me back to late Fall afternoons? Kicking through piles of old leaves, "after-school", walking home in somewhat meandering and lonely ways? The wine opened up with manzanilla sherry and apple blossom on the nose, pale gold and clear. What is confusing to my brain and palate is that half of this wine is sherry and half cold, crisp yellow apple aromatics. I can't seem to fuse the two. I want more of one or the other, not both. The wine opened up more to granny smith apple and blossom, & the purity of cold-pressed apple juice. There was a little yellow candle-wax in the viscosity, and slight yellow spice (curry, turmeric).
On the palate the wine became yellow sour apples, sherry tang sharp, savory & apple-turmeric spice. Do you see why this is confusing? It combines fresh and cooked elements in equal proportions. The body of the wine is a bit thin, but still very fresh. As I drank the wine it took on more savory baked apple components, and a curry powder (vs leaves). There was a hint of cinnamon but no sugar, baked yellow apples. And then the stack of descriptors congealed into a blustery late Fall afternoon: falling leaves, decay, cold wind, slightly sodden yellow fruit on the ground & dimmed aromatics.
The wine took on the shape of a cold, gray day that was spent indoors, looking out at the falling leaves and tree branches. There was a dusting of black tea leaves/oolong/tannin pucker and shorter finish. The baked apple atmosphere added a malty, vinegary depth and a tinge of dirty rainwater. Does this sound appealing? It is-- but not exactly the experience I was looking for. The brightness of apple blossoms folded into wet yellow flowers with a haunting of smoke and wet wood. Drinking this wine took me back to cold, clear, and lonely afternoons. It was the loneliness of childhood, of sharp experience, of watching lights come on in the houses across the street.
