WTN: Ramonet, Heathcote Mail, Whitehaven

[Jenise]

An hour or three north of Melbourne is a little town called Heathcote with a little winery in the charming, gold rush era wooden building that was once the maildrop on the north-south run, and that's Heathcote Mail. We bought this 1998 Heathcote Mail shiraz when we visited there in 2000, for it had spicy, delineated and not-overblown fruit and a lot of structure. The wine drank well young but went to sleep and a bottle every 18 months or so has failed to find the wine ready. Well, that's still the case. Lovely, brambly nose, almost zin like with boysenberry notes, but it's flat on the midpalate. After a glass, we put the bottle aside for the next night. Unfortunately, we went out that night and got to it last night only to surmise that it had probably been better the night before, as it seemed to have faded all around rather than improve. Drat.

Looking for a white sipper yesterday for an aperitif, we opened a 2006 Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. I'm sorry, but yuck: bland flavors with ripping acidity.

It was a relief to move on to our dinner wine, a wine that is part of a project we're calling The Month of Living Pinotously. For October, we're having pinot noir with every dinner regardless of what the food is. Just for fun. Last night's dinner was bucati alla amatriciana, a pasta dish, if you're not familiar, whose sauce is a stew of tomatoes, onions, bacon and herbs (I used thyme and fennel seed exclusively). Because I'm using end of season tomatoes, and from a bad season at that, the tomatoes lacked robust ripeness and the sauce is on the delicate side for an Italian ragu. And because of that I decided I could go French, and we chose a 2001 Ramonet Chassagne Montrachet (rouge) Clos Morgeot. It's brother, the Boudriotte, had been quite beguiling a few months ago. By comparison the Morgeot is less spicy and more monotone, and perhaps more coloured and yet showing less fruit on the palate, but it did open up nicely over the course of an hour and it's lighter weight and minimal oak proved a good choice. That is, though I can't say the sauce emphasized anything in the wine (we imagined that a veal marsala, for instance, would have been more flattering), nothing in the wine was dampened or offended by the sauce and it was a fair match.

part of a project we're calling The Month of Living Pinotously. For October, we're having pinot noir with every dinner regardless of what the food is.

Nice choice. If I had to go with a wine made from a single red grape for dinner every night it would be Pinot Noir or Gamay.

Unless I had an unlimited supply of mature nebbiolo.

Looking for a white sipper yesterday for an aperitif, we opened a 2006 Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. I'm sorry, but yuck: bland flavors with ripping acidity.

Jenise,

I haven't tried the 2006 Whitehaven SB, but I tasted the 2004 & 2005 vintages and found them both to be interesting and lively. I'd be curious to understand what you thought of them.

-- Clark

Pinot every night.. I like that... I wonder if consciously or unconsciously you do some tailoring of your menu to the varietal, though, with all that tomato in the dish you describe, maybe not.

[Jenise]

No, Jim, I'm not tailoring the dishes. Now maybe at some subconcious level I'm not choosing certain dishes, like anything hot with chiles, though I'm doing nothing to curb my strong mediterranean tendencies. What it's forcing us to do is re-examine the way we think of pinot, as one grape with more or less one job to do--I think I'd gotten pigeonholed, and we have stopped drinking as much pinot as we used to and we have too much that's ready. This is a way of addressing both--it's a concept introduced to me years ago by a lovely Venezuelan man called "one-tile dancing"--as soon as your space becomes greatly restricted, subtle nuances expand, become very large, because that's all you have. So after 15 days am I almost tired of it? Do I look forward to being able to choose our dinner wine from the whole of the cellar again? Surprisngly not, and in fact the other night, when we were invited to dinner by friends and we had to drink the heavy residual sugar style of domestic syrah and cab blend they love, I was even more put off than usual. And even the 04 Van Duzer Dijon Clones pinot I took, which is a more extracted style though oddly beautiful, wasn't enough to bridge the gap. The pinots are training my palate to want and need a level of acidity and precision that's out of step with the way the world at large drinks.

If I kept this up for two or three months, I could be ruined!

[Jenise]

Jenise,

I haven't tried the 2006 Whitehaven SB, but I tasted the 2004 & 2005 vintages and found them both to be interesting and lively. I'd be curious to understand what you thought of them.

-- Clark

Clark, I don't recall having the Whitehaven before, so I can't offer any comparison. But I don't like the balance on this one.

Jenise,

Thanks for the note on the Heathcote Mail Shiraz. A friend brought us back a bottle of the 2000, and we enjoyed it two summers ago at a big dinner party. Looking back at my note, I found it to be very elegant, restrained and food friendly for an Aussie Shiraz. A great change of pace. I can see where waiting any longer might have been too much.

Michael

It's interesting you bring up acidity, Jenise. I don't know when I quite became aware of it, but a balance of acidity seems to be the thing that makes or breaks many wines for me.

We had the Mount Eden 2003 Chardonnay yesterday, and it was oakier than I remember the 2000 being. But, it was good oak, i.e., I didn't find the wine bad at all. As I reflected, I realized that it was the acidity that made the flavors work. I kind of subtracted in my mind the acid from the flavor profile, and I realized I would have hated the wine without it.

I'm just as aware of acidity in red as in white wines, though obviously some wines show more naturally than others. Pinot is one of those reds that does often show nice acid. For me, that imparts a degree of freshness and lightness, maybe even elegance is the word I'm searching for.

Zins often show good acidity. Syrahs are the reds I have over the last couple of years had the most trouble with, especially CA Syrah. And I think it is that the fruit gets so ripe that the acidity takes a backseat...and I have a hard time drinking many of them lately.

We've done the X wine for a week..but never more, and then it was Cab the last time we did it... but I think your take that it actually gives one a new view of what you are drinking is an neat insight. Breaking the rules in wine drinking, as in so many other things, can not only be great fun, but also a revelation.

Thanx for the great report.

[Jenise]

It's interesting you bring up acidity, Jenise. I don't know when I quite became aware of it, but a balance of acidity seems to be the thing that makes or breaks many wines for me.

It does for most people too, whether they're aware of it or not. Your experience with the chardonnay makes the perfect case. And you make me wonder something, all of a sudden. In this note I also complain about the balance in that Kiwi SB--I wonder if the fine tuning of all these pinots is what put me off that wine. That is, I might be temporarily intolerant of anything outside a certain narrow ratio of fruit to acid. I might find it hard to jump to anything from here.

Syrahs are the reds I have over the last couple of years had the most trouble with, especially CA Syrah.

I hear you!

And I think it is that the fruit gets so ripe that the acidity takes a backseat...and I have a hard time drinking many of them lately.

It absolutely does. If you have many in your cellar, don't do my experiment.

I didn't note the vintage, Jenise, but I tried this Sauvignon Blanc, too. I wasn't sure if I liked it. I wouldn't call it bland-this wine made me understand the term "cat pee" in flavor. Very strange almost unpleasant-but somewhat interesting, too. Maybe I was also reacting to acidity, too.

[Jenise]

Jenise,

Thanks for the note on the Heathcote Mail Shiraz. A friend brought us back a bottle of the 2000, and we enjoyed it two summers ago at a big dinner party. Looking back at my note, I found it to be very elegant, restrained and food friendly for an Aussie Shiraz. A great change of pace. I can see where waiting any longer might have been too much.

Michael

Michael, how nice to hear from someone whose had this wine--I figured it would be virtually unknown here in the U.S. I've got two more bottles of the 98. What I need to do next, I think, is open the wine to decanter in the morning and then check it's progress during the day. The sweet spot is probably two to four hours out. I don't sense that there's any point in holding these any longer.