Les Welcome
Whether by intent or tragic mis-typing, you’ve landed on the home of Les Garagistes winery collective. If you’re new to our dark cabal, a rich and heady stew of bad French grammar and subterranean winemaking awaits. But where to start? Here are a few suggestions:
- First, you might take a quick stroll through last year’s vintage escapades, accumulated over the two critical months of September 2009 and October 2009 (remember that the posts are presented with the earliest at the bottom of the page).
- Then, who are these Garagistes and where do they get off? And didn’t I hear they were dead?
- We sully the fine pages of Fine Cooking Magazine
- Winehenge: the movie. If that’s not enough to get you to click…
- A French oak barrel primer
- Red, Rex Sox (Yankees fans, be forewarned)
- Plastic capsules and why we switched to paper
- Lastly, mourn with the Moody Blues as they appear to lament the end of a Les Garagistes harvest.
Thanks much for stopping by. We’ve got fruit lined up for 2010 — with new varietals ensuring we’ll be making even more up as we go along — so another exciting vintage is just ahead. Hope you can join us for it, and let us know what you think of what we’ve cobbled together.
Vintage port
My wife and I stopped by a friend’s house after Thanksgiving, where as luck would have it her father had recently opened a crusty old bottle of port.
Now, I’ve always liked port, but never really embraced it. Sure, it efficiently delivers both dessert and alcohol in one convenient glass, but it’s often more like a sweet, sloppy puppy than a poised, mature animal.
This was an entirely different species. To begin with, it was from Taylor Fladgate, one of the giants of Oporto. But better, the last time it had seen the great outdoors was 59 years ago. Yes, The Bicycle Thief had just illuminated post-war Italy, the Marshall Plan had just passed Congress, and Harry Truman was only a few weeks away from gaining the White House. That 1948.
The bottle had the telltale (and traditional) swab of white paint across its base, just below where the label would have been had it not rotted off decades ago. It’s a simple marker for those lucky enough to carry a bottle home that one side of the bottle is up, so the sediment (or “crust”) settles in one place for easy evasion when you (or your grandchildren) get around to pouring it.
Michael Broadbent, the charming lion of British wine critics, had this to say about the 1948 in The Great Vintage Wine Book:
Tasted 19 times [ Ed: ! ] since 1958, invariably magnificent. Still fairly deep and intense; beautiful bouquet, lively fruit, scented, citrus, vanilla; sweet, full-bodied, powerful yet perfect flavour and balance with glorious blackberry-like ripeness. Most recently lovely, shapely, ethereal.
Broadbent wrote this in 1991, but 16 years later, it crossed my palette as if we’d shared the same glass. What’s truly remarkable is that even at the close of its sixth decade, it’s still wonderfully alive and full. Deep, resonant layers of flavor, like floating down through successive panes of tinted glass, each a slightly different tint, opacity, and delight.
“Most recently lovely, shapely, ethereal.” I say, old chum: spot on.
Comments are off for this post
