[wine] Bordeaux Style Grapes from Anywhere at JP's

Greetings, Great food, interesting wines at Vincent. Thanks Annette for getting us in. Thanks to Dave T. for the Dujacs (2). Heading to JP's this week. Vin du juor is Bordeaux style grapes (Sauv. Blanc, Cab Sauv., Cab Franc, Merlot, Petite Verdot, and a couple of others) from anywhere. Varietals and Blends, although I suppose blends are more in brdx character. A rough estimate of the vintage charts is that most anything from 1997 or older is drinking well now. Dial that forward to 2000 or '01 for Washington and Australia. For California, it's 2000, 98 and 94 and older. Thursday Brdx grapes from anywhere at JP's JP's American Bistro JP Samuelson 2937 S. Lyndale 55408 (612) 824-9300 No idea who's/how many are coming. Here are 10 likely suspects. bob bill lori ruth jim/louise/susan_hickman nicolai karin Cheers, Jim Progressive Sale at the Cellars. Not sure how many of Brian's wines are still being stocked or are in stock. January 18, 2006 Wine Talk Rolling Out Those Chewy Behemoths By FRANK J. PRIAL IN a series of articles in The New Yorker beginning in the mid-1930's, the writer Frank Sullivan set out to do battle with the inane and the banal in popular writing. He created a clich� expert, Mr. Arbuthnot, and made him the scourge of triteness. Mr. Arbuthnot turned up intermittently in the magazine into the 1950's, well before wine writers began to impose themselves on the reading public. Because they are everywhere now, it seemed appropriate to resurrect Mr. Arbuthnot and query him about wine and writing. Q. Mr. Arbuthnot, do you consider yourself a wine expert? A. No, I am a clich� expert, but I have looked into the literature and have concluded that my expertise is needed even if I can't distinguish a Bordeaux from a Burgundy. Q. How so? A. Let me start with the word "nose." Poking into current wine literature, I found "brilliant" noses, "subtle" noses, "off" noses and "troubling" noses. Some wines, I learned, are said to have memorable noses while others, it is claimed, have no noses at all. I quickly determined that a wine's "nose" is not a gross physical appendage but its bouquet or aroma. Even so, constant repetition has made a clich� of the word, one of the worst sort because constant use has debased it into argot. Q. Are there other wine words that upset you as strongly? A. Indeed there are - if you can call them words. I refer to "chard," "cab" and "zin," nicknames as it were for important grapes. Are the words chardonnay, cabernet and zinfandel so difficult to pronounce? Did Baron Rothschild ask, "How much cab have you planted?" when he bought Ch�teau Lafite? Is the great white wine of Le Montrachet actually derived from something called chard? Q. You have forgotten zinfandel. A. No, it warrants special consideration. The zinfandel appears to be a fine, robust grape that lacks some of the charm of cabernet and chardonnay. For this it has suffered a worse fate than either of them. Its often obstreperous fans delight in referring to it as "zinful" and joke about "mortal zin." Q. Anything besides wine books you find troubling? A. The worst offenders are often the winemakers themselves and their spokesmen. They no longer make wine, they "craft" it. "We craft our wines," they write, or "these wines were crafted," or, worse still, "hand-crafted." How else would you "craft" something than with your hands? I found, too, a phrase borrowed from the business world: "roll out." A new wine is no longer introduced, offered or announced; it is rolled out, like an 18-wheel truck. The phrase has nothing to do with barrels, which of course, can be rolled around in a wine cellar. It refers to new airplanes being rolled out of the hangars where they were built to go on display. Does one "roll out" a delicate wine? I hope not. Q. What about the wines that aren't delicate? A. Some, it would seem, are anything but. They are "behemoths," "mammoth," "stupendous, large-scale, full-throttle" and "blockbusters." They may have "husky mouth-feel" and can display "massive quantities of fruit, glycerin and alcohol." They can be, as one writer described a California cabernet: "Opulent, as well as tannic, with huge chocolaty, roasted herbs, cassis aromas, magnificent flavor concentration, a big graceful richness on the palate and stunningly focused components that coat the palate with viscous flavors and superlative purity of flavor." All that and "food friendly" too? Q. And what about Champagne? A. Some writers refer to all sparkling wines rather childishly as "fizzies," others desperate for another word for Champagne use "bubble" as a noun, as in "a bottle of the bubbly." But the most overworked Champagne clich� is "vintage." Once, vintage Champagnes - wines from a single harvest - were rare. Blends from two, three or more years were the norm. Now almost every year is a vintage year, and the term "vintage Champagne" has become mostly a clich�. Q. Dare I ask for your closing thoughts? A. My brief exploration into the wine world leads me to believe there are almost as many clich�s as there are wines. There are catchphrases that are also clich�s. Like "excellent value for everyday drinking" or "perfect now but will last 10 years or more" or "great wines begin in the vineyard." And lest you think hackneyed stuff is all of recent vintage, here, from Alexis Bespaloff's "Fireside Book of Wine," is the legendary Andr� Simon, writing in the 1930's on a 1905 Margaux: "The 1905 was simply delightful; fresh, sweet and charming, a girl of 15, who is already a great artist, coming on tiptoes and curtseying herself out with childish grace and laughing blue eyes." Q. Thank you, Mr. Arbuthnot and do come back. With wine clich�s, it appears that we've only scratched the surface. -- ------------------------------ * * Dr. James Lee Ellingson, Adjunct Professor jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * University of Minnesota, tel: 651/645-0753 fax 651 XXX XXXX * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *