BoozeReviews.net

Well kids, you may have noticed that I’ve been suspiciously absent from this little beast of a website I created.  Truant.  Cutting class.  In fact, you could go so far as to say that I’ve been an outright traitor.  In response to the resounding fictional chorus that just shouted “why?!”, I’ll say this:  I’ve been busy making wine.

Yep, I decided to suck it up and put my money where my mouth is.  So I got with a winemaker friend of mine (who shall forever remain nameless so as not to sully his otherwise good reputation), I bought some fruit and he agreed to help me make the wine in his winery.  Yesterday I put 60 gallons of my own estate-grown Pinot Noir into a very expensive Francois Freres oak barrel.

So here’s the deal:  I am going to review my own wine next year when it’s ready.  And I’m going to be as gutteral and crude about it as I am with all the others I review.  BUT, until then, I just don’t feel right bashing anyone’s labor of love unless they overtly deserve it.  I know now what hard work it is to make this shit that I swill every night.  So from here until I review my own brew, I will only write reviews about booze I find to be better than crap.

If you see it here, and I wrote about it, then I thought it was good.  Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.  This new rule applies only to wine.

So, now, down to brass tacks:

This Sonnet Pinot I’m halfway through is Out-Stand-Ing.  I mean, it’s curl-your-toes and soil-your-pants good.  I had a friend once who claimed that farting while spilling one’s man-seed was the ultimate pleasure.  It’s as good as that.  Er, I mean, I imagine it’s as good as that.

Being an ‘06, this is a new Pinot; but you’d never know it by looking at it.  Perhaps hearkening back to its source vineyard’s name, it’s got a rich amber/ruby color in the glass like a moderately aged cab, only lighter.  But unlike most age-worthy wines, the tannins are already perfectly integrated– you can’t get integration like this in all but the very best aged cabs.  I mean, this stuff is supple.  Supple, in all its glorious pretentiousness, being a word that usually makes me want to smash shit.  But I have to use it here because there is no better word.  Say it:  supple.  It’s onamonapoetic.  It sounds like what it tastes like.  High points and low points that are somehow smoothed out by the vowel sounds.  That’s this wine.

This is not a fruit bomb.  This is not a tannin load.  This is not a combination of fruit and tannin.  This is an A+B gives you C kind of thing.  The balance of the two components gives you a third entirely unique component.  It’s not overtly acidic, nor does it taste like a high pH kind of thing.  It shoots right down the middle– it feels like the winemaker stayed out of the way and simply worked with some primo fruit, let it ripen perfectly, harvested it at the right time, sorted it well, and then let it be what it is.  Of course, I could be wrong.   But that’s what I want to think here.  I just don’t think you can manipulate a wine to taste this good.  It has to want to taste this good.  Wine like this can only be made in the vineyard.

This is not to discredit the winemaker.  Tony Craig, being the winemaker who put David Bruce on the map, is no slouch.  Instead, I think it’s a testament to a winemaker who knows when to stay out of the way and let good fruit be great, just offering a bit of coaxing and encouragement.

(Now watch, Tony will find this and post a  comment here saying “that fruit was so beat up it looked like one of Rick James’ crack-whore groupies– I had to manipulate the hell out of it in order to make it presentable”).

OK, so I guess I’m supposed to dole out a score now…

Let’s start out with 120 points on our 100 point sliding scale.  Then I’m going to deduct 10 from that total because I’m a recovering Lit major and came out the other end of University with a low Shakespeare threshold.  Shakespeare on the bottle almost made me not want to buy it.  Even so, I’ve had to quickly finish it off so as not to accidentally read the bottle and relapse into a Shakespeare induced I-forgot-to-study-for-finals-and-I’m-at-school-in-my-underwear panic attack.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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