Doug’s Top Ten Wines of 2009

My top ten wines of a year.
In no particular order…

2006 Pratoasciutto, Tenuta Grillo

The Pratoasciutto (the wine means dry meadow referring to the aridity of the soil) is 100% Dolcetto. I have always wanted to like Dolcetto - maybe it’s the name – but, unhappily, found most examples to be clumpy, fruitless and tannic. The nose here, however, is instantly appealing, oozing violets, black fruits, liquorice, and parma ham. The fruit is great, the tannins velvety and there is a bitter black cherry rasp to the finish that taps your taste buds on the shoulder and reminds them that lack of food is not a credible option. It is certainly a low-sulphur wine, yet the structure abides brilliantly. After three days the wine was still bright and fruity and sporting the bushiest of tails.

2007 Faugères tradition, Clos Fantine

In time orthodoxy bends, if not yields, and recently we have seen a grudging (almost niggardly) critical acceptance of the fact of natural wines (those wines which are made with minimal interventions in the winery). The major opinion formers still, however, consider the majority of these wines to be faulty, dirty, spoiled, undrinkable, too weird, a fringe attraction enjoyed only by wine extremists. Without anarchy or extremism there is no energy, no life, and no movement and things only change in that they become more so.

I love wines that are wild. I was slightly worried when I saw that the Clos Fantine sported a hefty 14.5%, but as soon as I poked my nose in the glass I was transported to what Sybille Bedford described in Jigsaw as “the sun-baked, cicada-loud, ageless country of scrub and terraced hills… the archetypal Mediterranean landscape of rock & olive, wild thyme, vineyards, light”. This is a living wine, unfiltered, unfined and unsulphured; it captures the spirit of the terroir. The inviting bouquet displays roasted fruits supplemented by game-and-gravy aromas and familiar garrigue notes of bay, sweet rosemary and roasted thyme and a bonfire smokiness lurks in each sniff.  It is not heavy at all in the mouth, the heat communicated in flavour not in alcohol, and the texture is smooth and sweet with a wonderfully agreeable taste of confit fruits bolstered by herbal savouriness and marmite flavours.

2005 Dinavolo Bianco IGT, Emilia

Buttoned-down fault-finders and prosaic palates will take one look and slam down the taste shutters when they encounter the Dinavolo, a wine so extreme that it comes back at you and seems so utterly reasonable that you wonder why ever doubted its wonderfulness. To appreciate the wine, however, you must cast aside (childish) prejudice and enter a whole different idiom of wine making. Aged four months (you read that correctly) on the grape skins, the colour of the wine is hazy “amber-cider” or lava lamp, and the nose is powerfully exotic and evocative. Imagine perfect peaches left on a window sill in the late summer sun and smelling their skins as they warm up and reveal their fleshy, textural, plumptious treasures. Initial flavours suggest ripe apricots as well as cider apples and red pears; the wine is clean and vinous with a good yeasty bite, warm fruitskins, beeswax, dry cinnamon, oatmeal and apple acidity to complete the wine. Amazingly youthful and not just alive, but actually living. Dinavolo reminds me of so many things – real bread baking the oven, a ripe wash-rind cheese oozing flavour, cloudy apple juice with all the good bits floating in.  As we were drinking this I was thinking that we were fortunate that our mentalities and palates hadn’t become pasteurised by over-exposure to correctly manufactured wines. Or perhaps we just got bored with meretricious crap.

1997 Domaine de la Granges des Pères

Undoubtedly one of the star producers of the Languedoc region, having planted vines on the stony south facing slopes of the vale of Gassac, near Aniane, next to Mas de Daumas Gassac, an area now much sought after and regarded as one of the finest terroirs in the Languedoc. Laurent Vaille trained with, among others Gérard Chave, Eloi Durrbach and François Coche-Dury and his superlative wine craftsmanship is beyond doubt.

Smoky, leathery/gravy browning nose lifted with spice, tarragon and thyme notes. The palate has good density, a delicious garrigue-scented herbiness and leathery, tea-like notes. It’s not a blockbuster style, but is savoury and quite complex. What I loved about this wine was that despite the evident accomplishment of the winemaking , it tasted so unforced and utterly agreeable.

2007 Sébastien Riffault “Raudonas” Sancerre Rouge

Raudonas is Lithuanian for ruddy and this wine is ruddy good. My expectations of red Sancerre are fairly low. Some examples are little more than glorified roses, others try to o’erleap their origins and tend to taste high on wood and mean on fruit. Seb Riffault is not in the biz of making wines that conform to your preconceptions. His Sancerre Blanc invariably gets the Tufton-Buftons of the wine establishment spluttering into their metaphorical mustachios. “Sancerre shouldn’t taste like that!” they expostulate. They wouldn’t recognise the red although it is less in the frighteningly funky idiom. This Pinot Noir has nerve and verve with red fruits driven through with iron filing minerality and thrilling earthy grippiness. It feels as if your tongue is a plough grooving through soil and stone. Who says that no sulphur wines can’t exhibit terroir?

2002 Vin de Paille, Domaine Ganevat

Vin de Paille is a selection of naturally super ripe grapes which are left to raisin traditionally on straw mats to concentrate the sugar before pressing. Sweet wine is best when it is made in a completely naturally fashion. During fermentation the yeast eats up all of the sugars in the wine it can stomach. If the yeast is vigorous it wants to digest it all until the wine is left dry. However, if there is still sugar left, the wine stays sweet. You can stop the fermentation by adding neutral spirit—as with Port or the category of wines called ‘Vin Doux Naturel (such as the French Maury or Beaumes de Venise). However, if the grapes are super-concentrated and super-sweet to start with, fermentation will “stick” at some point.

The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach
Andrew Marvell – The Garden

An exotic, regal nectar of apricots and peaches and plum jam in one sip, quinces, gooseberries and pineapples dusted with preserved ginger in the next. And the finish comes as if the sweetness had been carved to a point and layered with gently toasted brazil nuts.  I don’t give marks out of 100, but this would surely max out with extreme prejudice.

2007 Philippe Pacalet Gevrey-Chambertin

Philippe Pacalet’s Gevrey-Chambertin (drunk enthusiastically at the International Wine Challenge Dinner) was as perfumed and beautifully wrought as ever. How can I describe its fugitive loveliness? With its natural muskiness, fresh rhubarb aromas and delicious array of red flower and fruit flavours underpinned by filigree acidity this Gevrey expressed the sensuous charms that Pinot promises but rarely delivers.

2004 Barbaresco Asili, AA Roagna

Luca Roagna is a kind of intellectual traditionalist.  Whilst his wines require patience they are rewarding if you are looking for the most delicious expression of great Nebbiolo. Aromatically, they are redolent of rose petals (a very Nebbish characteristic) as well as tobacco leaf, mushroom, buffed old wood, crisp red berries and leather, the flavours held together a ramrod straight seam of spiced minerality shooting down the length of the tongue to the back of the mouth where it lingers for a long time.

As Kate Thal writes so perceptively in her blog:” It is not just the complexity and the astounding elegance, how every aspect fits so perfectly with another aspect, nothing superfluous or out of place.  These are wines with an added dimension that is not a flavour or a characteristic and which appeals beyond the sensual.  The closest I can get to it is to say that these wines have an internal energy and the drinking of them becomes an experience which is a heady mixture for the senses, the soul and the spirit.”

All the wines are rather wonderful, but the Asili from what is effectively one of the three greatest vineyards in Barbaresco, perfectly exemplifies the vital tension that makes you want to drink the wine now although you know you should age it another thirty years. If I say that it had an almost firm ethereal quality. Kate describes it the impression of “taut tannins stretch like skeins of silk over marbled minerality”.

2006 Massa Vecchia Bianco, Maremma

An exquisite blend of Vermentino, Malvasia, Ansonica, Trebbiano and Sauvignon this wine is fermented with the skins, which is conventional for red wines but still highly unusual for whites. The grapes are pressed by foot twice a day for five days then the wine spends three weeks on the skins, with a daily punch down. Aged in small chestnut casks, the resulting dry white wine is nothing short of thrilling, with a bright golden-amber colour and a powerful scent of wild herbs and just the slightest astringency (from the skins) in the finish.

Like so many white wines that see a combination of extended maceration and wild yeast ferment there is an al dente crunch to the mouthfeel – it is as if the skins are still in the glass. I always get a whiff of ginger, roasted coriander seeds and maybe some cinnamon from this wine and it is not too fanciful also to detect some sweet chestnut. The wine seems to take the buttered citrus and briny elements from the Vermentino and the vivid ripe apricot-cut-wth-cloves and orange peel aromas from the Malvasia. The finish is sustained, warm, exotic and beautifully balanced. Delicious stuff and a late candidate for my white wine of the year.

In 2007 the Vermentino and Malvasia are bottled separately. Tasting the above one would have to say that some of the most felicitous wines are field blends of all-and-sundry grapes.

1985 Arbois Camille Loye

Age shall not wither her…
This wine is the colour of cranberry juice, shiny and clear, as if glazed with acidity. The nose is equally appealing, an impression of rain on stone as well as delineated fruit flavours of morello cherries, bilberries and pippy raspberries. The wine fills the mouth without ever being fat: one can begin to detect secondary aromas of musk, leather and sous-bois, and, as it opens up further, some moss, wet earth and mushroom. There is something rather wonderful about a wine that doesn’t need to be profound to be beautiful.