Wines of FreshDirect: Recession Proof Your Wine Portfolio
Lan Zur carmenere is the Bear Stearns of the FreshDirect wine world. While it is probably worth $50 a bottle, you can get it for $10. The tastes are reminiscent of big Bordeaux blends: lots of cedar, leather, smoke and fruit. But, it isn’t from France, its Chilean and at this price alone, it is worth buying a case. Maybe the wine store will throw in a prime brokerage business for free. It’s worth a shot.
Winery: Lan Zur
Grape: Carmenere
Region: Chile
Year: 2005
Source: FreshDirect is out this week. I’ll post a link when it is available again. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled at the Astor Place wine warehouses of the New York
Price: $10
Color: Cherry red
Nose: Opening up this bottle is like opening a Hope chest, with big cedar notes right off the bat. A little time out of the bottle and some gentle persuasion, and you pick up leather, plum and raspberry, with cheese, onion and asparagus. There was a lot of Bordeaux in this nose.
Taste: “Alright, you’re gonna have to share this one,” said Mrs. WineHazard after that first taste. For the uninitiated, this means the bottle is good and was she ever spot on. The wine enters with pronounced raspberry, plum and chocolate before descending to mid-palate with strong scorched earth flavors, cedar, tobacco and a touch of rubber. The finish is smooth, with lingering tannins wrapped around cedar and salty leather. The longer the bottle stayed open the more it resembled an Old World Bordeaux blend.
What I like: This bottle could easily be marked up to $50. At $10 it is a steal and a great bottle to have on hand. Open it up for an hour and you’ll see the fireworks go off in your head with those first tastes. One warning, it has big wood and earth flavors. This might put off some who like more fruit forward wines.
What I don’t like: Nothing. So instead I lead my loyal readers to a great story of how the carmenere grape was believed lost to the plague only to be found in the mountains of Chile. Curl up with a glass of the good stuff and enjoy a wine fairy tale courtesy of The Wine Files:
http://thewinefiles.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-was-lost.html
26. March 2008 at :
Wonderful Post Eric! It got me interested so I poked around after reading the winefiles blog. There are differing stories about why this wine disappeared from France, http://www.dallassecretwine.com/carmenere.html, tells an entirely different story. According to that writer, the end of the Carmenere grape in French Bordeaux was not entirely due to the Phylloxera plague in Europe. He, or she, suggests that
“Carmenere requires a lot of heat to ripen and that means an awful long hang time on the vine for grape growers. You have to have patience here. That is precisely why the Carmenere grape fell out of favor with the French in Bordeaux, which is where Carmenere originated. Carmenere used to be a part of the traditional Bordeaux blend, but it took entirely too long to ripen. This meant that if French winemakers crafting their award-winning Bordeaux wines were counting on Carmenere to be a part of the blend that makes up their wine, they would have to be willing to gamble with September rains at harvest time in order to pick ripe
Carmenere grapes. Rain at harvest time essentially wipes out all the
good weather you could have possibly had throughout the growing season
because it dilutes the juice of the grapes. So the French figured, to heck
with it, we don’t need that grape in our Bordeaux wines anymore. I
suspect that the role that the Carmenere grape played in the blend is now
being facilitated by larger quantities of Cabernet Franc in the blend.
So that brings us to South America, Chile to be exact. Despite what you
might think initially, Chile really doesn’t have long summers. (Their warm
season would be the exact opposite of ours by the way.) So once again,
that means wine grape growers must be patient in order to let Carmenere
ripen fully on the vine. This I’m afraid is where many Chilean vintners fall
way short. Why, I do not know, it certainly doesn’t rain that much in
Chile, but they rush this process anyway. When a grape is picked early,
before it ripens, it tends to take on herbal aromas and flavors in favor of
the fruitier styles and nuances. This to me separates the good red wines
from the bad ones. I prefer a more balanced or ripen grape wine by the
way, to the weedy, less ripe versions. But I commend
the winemakers in Chile that are determined to make great wines from the
Carmenere grape. I would hate to see yet another alternative disappear
from our choice of wines for the table. That is precisely what Carmenere
wines are, table wines. Good with food, but not great to sip on while
contemplating life. I picture them being very good wines to serve with
vegetarian dishes. Something like stuffed bell peppers or vegetarian
lasagna.