TN: Jo Pithon 2005 Anjou Les Pepinieres

It's taken me a while to get here, but finally I tried a Loire Chenin Blanc, the Jo Pithon 2005 Anjou Les Pepinieres. Much like Cabernet Franc, Chenin Blanc is considered an inferior varietal outside of the Loire Valley. Inside the Loire Valley, however, it can produce dry, off-dry, sweet, sparkling and even Botrytized dessert wines in a variety of styles that only Riesling can match in terms of versatility. Top appellations include Savennieres, Anjoy, Vouvray, Jasnieres and even Chinon, where a small amount of Chinon Blanc is made from Chenin Blanc.

This wine is an experience. When first opened, it smelled honeyed like a dessert wine, but also showed some acetone-like volatile acidity and a brown color suggesting oxidation. Not to worry: it seems this producer employs oxidative winemaking techniques. Since the wine had already met plenty of air, I figured decanting wouldn't hurt. With some of the VA blowing off, the bouquet acquired a honeyed, musky aroma with banana nut bread and spiced rum showing up as well. I'm guessing there's some Botrytis involved here, as well as some isoamly acetate accounting for the banana aromas and oxidation causing the 'nut' in the banana nut bread. Whatever the case may be, this was awesomely unique and funky smelling. The palate, however, was essentially dry despite the dessert-like aromas. The flavors were nonetheless rich and mouth-coating, yet paradoxically weightless due to the acidity. There was the strange sensation of not feeling the acidity up front, then mouth watering on the long, minerally finish.

I'm guessing the volatile acidity level or oxidation might have crossed the threshold into being a 'technical flaw,' but this was just a pleasure to drink. This is a white wine for a red wine drinker that doesn't rely on excessive ripeness and oak like a Cali Chard to add depth. I'm sure there's some oak and ML involved here, but it's all integrated and well balanced. Tons going on for the price.

Pros: Complex Honeyed Bouquet, Rich, Weightless, Long Finish, Minerality

Cons: Volatile Acidity, Oxidation

Decant: Yes, to open up bouquet

Price: $21
QPR: Good (out of Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good or Excellent with Fair denoting expectations were met for the price point)

Graphical Representation

I've been a bit agitated recently with the subjectivity of tasting notes. One man's raspberry is another's black cherry, after all. I'm an advocate of structural descriptions like acidic, tannic, and full bodied, just to name a few, as opposed to description by analogy like naming very specific smells and flavors. But the question is, how does one best convey these structural terms?

Ann Noble's Aroma Wheel offers a great starting point:

While there are specific aromas listed, aromas are grouped into families such as fruity, herbaceous, woody and so on. The broader families are what I'd term as structural descriptors, as opposed to analogous descriptors. However, the aroma wheel doesn't paint a full picture because it only addresses smells.

To bring flavors and mouth feel into the picture, I've come up with a polar plot representation that I'm hoping will offer a relatively straight forward graphical depiction of a wine. It's still subjective, of course, but it largely dodges terms that rely heavily on individual experiences:
The 9 (it could be more or less, certainly) structural categories are:

Body - A measure of weight or viscosity, ranging from light bodied at the smallest radius to full bodied at the largest radius.

Aroma - The strength of the aromas, with a very 'tight' wine having a small amplitude.

Fruity - The presence of fruit character, ignoring whether it's blackberry, cherry, citrus and so on.

Herbaceous or Earthy - These are sort of arbitrarily grouped, but represent the strength of aromas and flavors of bell peppers, mushrooms, veggies, leafy stuff and basically anything that grows or come from dirt.

Funky - This encompasses meaty, barnyardy and sulfrous aromas and flavors or even aromas like ethyl acetate (nail polish remover smell) that could be considered flaws. It's kind of a measure of umami, as well as generally unexpected qualities that are neither fruit nor veggie.

Floral or Spice - Again, an arbitrary grouping to limit the number of categories, but I think of these as both 'high-toned' aromas.

Oak - This category includes vanilla, toast and certain spice aromas as well as the occasionally astringent woody flavors and mid-palate weight resulting from barrel aging.

Tannin - Purely a measure of the intensity of mouth-drying tannins, though there is some ambiguity as tannins can be astringent, soft, sweet, fruity and so on depending on their source and maturity level.

Acidity - This is how sour a wine tastes, as well as how mouth watering it is. The more sour, the higher the acidity and the larger the amplitude plotted.

Here I've plotted a 'stereotypical' Parkerized wine and an Old World wine as an example. The graphical representation really highlights that the modern, California style wine stresses fruit, oak and density in the mouth, while a typical French or Italian wine will often be focused upon aromatics, earthy and funky qualities, and acidity. It also suggests the two styles are near polar opposites in terms of acidity, funkiness, fruit expression and use of oak.

Since I've been critiquing standard tasting notes, I guess I ought to propose an alternative. Well, here it is. I'll be using these polar plots with my notes to offer a graphical representation of each wine I post here. I'll be interested to see how this little experiment turns out. My thinking is that at the very least it may make it easier to justify the use of terms such as balance or complexity. Chances are if you see a curve that's more spiky than round, a wine is not balanced and probably lacks complexity as well. Meanwhile, a mundane wine may have a round shape to its plot with small amplitudes, indicating that it's balanced but provides little of interest to the taster.

Graphite

Graphite, unlike quince and toast (a.k.a. pain grillé), is not something one typically tastes. And yet it's a fairly common tasting note descriptor. Well, you can taste it, but you'd really need to go out of your way to do it. There's plenty of precedent for non edible descriptors like barnyard, flint, smoke, cedar and so on. However, graphite is nothing more than carbon bonded in sheets. The reason anything smells is because of volatile compounds such as esters. When your compound is bonded together into a crystal, you're not going to smell much of anything.

It appears likely that graphite as a wine descriptor is related to other terms such as #2 pencil lead, pencil shavings and even cedar. After all, most people experience graphite as a component of pencil lead (though lead is a misnomer since pencils no longer contain any lead). But it turns out that graphite isn't even the proper description for the writing part of the pencil. It's graphite and China clay, which has kaolin in it. Kaolin, apparently, has an earthy, metallic aroma.

Yet most people don't smell the kaolin by itself. It's usually ground up with the cedar wood part of the pencil and mechanically volatilized. Thus while pencil shavings have a distinct smell, they're neither lead, graphite, kaolin or cedar individually. They a mix of kaolin, cedar and perhaps the yellow paint or other impurities in the clay,

In sum:

Graphite = WRONG. It smells of nothing, is not readily tasted, and what smells in pencil shavings is just about everything else.
#2 Pencil Lead = WRONG. It's overly specific, and pencils aren't made from lead anyway.
Pencil Shavings = OK. Between the cedar and mechanical volatilization, there's a very obvious and unique aroma associated with it.
Cedar = OK. Even as a chunk of wood, it is distinct and very aromatic.

It seems in the interest of unnecessary degrees of specificity, the wine world has rather ironically added a term with an ambiguous meaning to its lexicon. What good is a descriptor if it has no commonly understood meaning? Ask several winos what graphite actually means in the context of wine, and you'll likely get several different answers. This is a case where everyone would be better off if the pretense were to be dropped. Wine is already complicated enough between the appellation system, hundreds of varietals, stylistic preferences and myriad terroirs that it's wholly unnecessary to invent meaningless descriptors. Let's stick to the logical ones: metallic, earthy or even, yes, pencil shavings.

TN: Chateau Nenine 2006 Cotes de Bordeaux

The Chateau Nenine 2006 Cotes de Bordeaux is a blend of 40% Merlot, 40% Cabernet Franc and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon. It's also inexpensive and available at Trader Joe's.

It's not terrible, but not interesting, either. The nose is tight, with only Bretty band-aid and some metallic cherry aromas. I don't often call a wine thin, but this wine qualifies. There's just not much intensity to the flavor. It's mostly a medicinal cherry flavor anyway, so maybe that's a good thing. On the finish there are drying tannins and little else.

On one hand, this isn't over-extracted and over-oaked in the way a cheap California wine would be. But it's equally boring. An unstructured fruity wine from Spain or Southern France would be far better at this price point.

Pros: Not Offensive
Cons: Thin, Dull, No Finish, Hollow mid-palate
Decant: No
Price: $8 from Trader Joe's
QPR: Mediocre (out of Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good or Excellent with Fair denoting expectations were met for the price point)

TN: Alexander Valley Vineyards 2007 Cabernet Franc

The Alexander Valley Vineyards 2007 Cabernet Franc is a bit of a rarity in California; it's a mid-priced Cab Franc. AVV, located as one would expect in the Alexander Valley AVA (pictured to the right of the neck of the bottle), is a fairly large independently owned producer, and they seem to be known as a reliable producer that offers good values. Maybe that qualifies AVV as the rough equivalent of an unclassified chateau in Bordeaux. I've tasted their Cabernet Sauvignon and definitely felt it was unexpectedly honest, elegant and complex wine for the price, albeit not the most structured Cab. Their Cab Franc also fits that bill pretty well.

The nose was pretty tight. Despite the low amplitude, the pitch was correct for a Franc: tobacco, cedar and currant with barrel influence in the background. The taste was even better with good freshness and an elegant, seamless quality to it. It was a medium bodied wine with moderate extraction, and it showed a pleasant chocolate-like bitterness and light dusty tannins on the finish. There was a certain juiciness to the wine giving it a more fruit-forward impression than its French cousins, but it nonetheless had decent balance and structure.

Looking at the wine's data sheet, AVV notes 14% ABV, 6 g/L TA and 3.53 pH. For a California Franc, those are great stats. Often California Francs tend towards very high alcohol and poor acidic structure, yet still show a lot of bell pepper aromas. This wine hits that sweet spot of medium acid, medium alcohol and moderate herbaceous nuance. Perhaps it's less aromatically complex and structured than a Chinon, but it seems a nice reflection of its own terroir. Certainly it's not over-oaked, over-extracted or over-manipulated like so many CA wines in this price range.

Pros: Balanced Earth and Fruit Expression, Fresh, Elegant, Medium Body
Cons: Tight Aromatics, Lacking Some Complexity
Decant: Yes, to open up aromas
Price: $21
QPR: Fair/Good (out of Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good or Excellent with Fair denoting expectations were met for the price point)