WTN: When the Canary sings

[Jenise]

Poured Spanish wines last night for the neighborhood. We set up four tables: Portugese and Canary Island, Tempranillo, RdD and Priorat, and dessert wines which included Warres Warrior, Cossart & Gordon Madeira and a nifty little locally made 'port'.

2014 Suertes del Marqués Valle de la Orotava Medianías Viñas Viejas
My WOTN. Premier cru Burgundian in weight and texture, with higher than average acidity and riveting complexity. Picked up notes of green peppercorn, sumac, pomegranate, raspberry and cactus pear. Best version of the mission grape I've ever tasted. Going to order some for my cellar.

2014 Casa Santos Lima Vinho Regional Lisboa Confidencial Reserva Red Blend
Tasty red fruits with some good backbone and nicely perfumed nose. Great QPR at $13.

2014 Casa de Mouraz Dão Red Blend
Soft and easy texture, modestly complex, all red fruits. Good, but a bit wan and simple compared to the wines above.

2011 Bodegas LAN Rioja Reserva Tempranillo
Very good no age showing yet, it's just a very nicely integrated Reserva. Soft tannins though, drink over the next five years.

2016 Emilio Moro Finca Resalso Tempranillo
Very aromatic sweet and French Oak-spicy nose, though I don't know for certain that FO was used here. Dynamic on the palate with a nice balance of friendly acidity and tannins.

2015 Condado de Haza Ribera del Duero Crianza Tempranillo
Savory, a bit vegetal though not objectionably so. Not sure if it's travel-shocked (expected to receive the '14, they delivered the '15) or what, but this underperformed my expectations from what I've always thought of as a baby Pesquera and was last place at the tempranillo table among the 80 tasters present (but one person did tell me it was her WOTN).

2015 Celler Cal Pla Priorat Black Slate Porrera Grenache Blend, Grenache
Big fruit and tannins, power with finesse. An excellent introduction to Spanish grenache, and a big hit with, new world drinkers, and pretty nice for us old world types too.

2015 Bodegas Ateca Calatayud Atteca Old Vines Garnacha, Grenache
Modern style, polished and forward. Big blue and black fruit that one would not recognize as grenache, with alcohol at 14.9% adding unwelcome heat to the finish.

2015 Bodegas y Viñedos Valderiz Ribera del Duero Tempranillo
Complex and substantial, the weight of RdD and the 80% French Oak brings a lot of high-end class to this bottle. Outperforms it's $29 price--drinks like $50.

2015 Whidbey Island Winery Port Cold Creek Vineyard Washington Port Blend
Would never be mistaken for Portugese Port, but the sangiovese base gives a very pure sweetness to this delightful and affordable locally-made dessert wine.

Thanks of LAN notes. Haven't bought much lately, but with CVNE usually my go to Rioja everydays as La Rioja Alta and LdH are now more special occasion

2014 Suertes del Marqués Valle de la Orotava Medianías Viñas Viejas
My WOTN. Premier cru Burgundian in weight and texture, with higher than average acidity and riveting complexity. Picked up notes of green peppercorn, sumac, pomegranate, raspberry and cactus pear. Best version of the mission grape I've ever tasted. .

I think this is the other Listan grape than the one that is close to Mission

http://www.suertesdelmarques.com/our-wi ... n%C3%ADas/

I find the Canary wines a fascinating exploration (I usually like, but I always like trying)

[Jenise]

Dale, when I looked it up yesterday for the hand-out I was writing, the grape (singular) was shown as Listan Negro, or is it Negra, and same site said it's the same as Mission. Today when I went to put this note on Cellar Tracker, I was alarmed to see several grapes listed in addition. So I dunno.

Appropos of not much, one of the best wine flights I've ever had in a wine bar was in SF, a flight of three Missions: Canary Islands, Chile and a Harrington from California. The somm came out of the back room to meet the person who ordered this. Said he's always surprised anyone's geeky enough to order it, and always wants to be sure that the person who did did so knowingly. Fun set of wines that charted the path of Spanish missions from Europe and up thru the Americas.

[David M. Bueker]

Sandlands now makes a Mission. My tiny allocation of one bottle arrives next week.

[Jenise]

Can't wait to hear about that, Dave. The Harrington I mentioned to Dale was lighter and drier than the other Missions in the flight. The only OTHER California version I had was maybe 20 years ago, if I can admit to living that long, at some no-name little winery in the Sutter's Mill area a friend and I stopped at on a lark. It was a Friday which I remember because I complained that the wine, one red wine was all they were pouring, was oxidated. The preciously innocent little old lady pouring suggested I come back the next day "because we open a new bottle every Saturday." We thanked her, left, and went into hysterics as soon as we got to our car.

But I really came back to this thread to talk about a second bottle of the Canary Mission which was opened Friday but not consumed until Bob and I had it with last night's corned beef. Though both this and the Friday night bottle I commented on were both opened earlier in the day, the effect of an additional two days plus the ability to take a big pour and enjoy it over several hours--OMG. I didn't praise it highly enough. This is my 100 pt kind of wine--to the extent possible for a young wine, that is. This hit every single hot button I've got. Fans of Burgundy and the Burgundian aspects of Sicily's finer Mt. Etna wines would totally get this, too. In a blind tasting I might have wondered if it wasn't Sicilian--except that it has even more depth than any Sicilian wine I've ever had, and I like the category a lot.

[Jenise]

mission.jpg

Wild coincidence but stumbled over this pic taken at the wine bar mentioned above in San Francisco. The Harrington Mission is on the left, a Canary Islands mission's on the right.