Tune in to what top wine bloggers and experts are decanting into cyberspace with handpicked highlights of their latest and greatest. In this episode, we find advice for long-unopened bottles, tips for making the coming Year of the Rat more festive and a long list of reasons to think again about Merlot.
If you have a special bottle of wine gathering dust somewhere — the one that’s remained unopened through the years, perhaps with some fond memories sealed inside — start looking for the corkscrew.
Because Saturday night, Feb. 23, is Open That Bottle Night 9, as good an excuse as any to finally have a taste.
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher at The Wall Street Journal explain:
Imagine if an evil genie took some of your very best memories and hid them in a wine bottle. That’s what so many of us do to ourselves. These dear bottles have a special way of retrieving warm and often-forgotten memories, but you have to pop the cork to release them. That’s why we invented Open That Bottle Night.
A nice read on what various friends of theirs have stashed and swear to finally open. You might be tempted to do the same.
You’ll also find a handy primer on the care and handling on what might be rather fragile vintages.
But that’s not the only wine-benefiting festivity on the horizon, as Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg at The Washington Post remind us.
The Chinese New Year (Lunar Year 4706) begins on Feb. 7, ringing in the Year of the Rat. This most important of Chinese holidays, celebrated by one-quarter of the world’s population, merits an extended 15-day celebration, and its time-honored food traditions are beautifully enhanced by the right wines.
Perk up the Chinese cuisine with their selections of fruitier wine, ranging from a “beautifully balanced, crisp, fruity and minerally” 2007 Rudolf Muller Riesling Kabinett ($11) to a 100-percent pinot noir-based NV Gruet Methode Champenoise Rose Brut ($16) from New Mexico, “with strawberry notes and a hint of vanilla on the finish … terrific with our Peking duck.”
The article includes a sumptuous pairing chart, to bring out the best in, say, those shrimp dumplings or whole steamed fish.
Meanwhile, at Wine Enthusiast, Tim Patterson offers a smorgasbord of reasons for reacquainting ourselves with that once top-selling red that has fallen from popular grace, Merlot.
A widespread urban legend says that Merlot was whacked sideways off its pedestal in 2004 by a certain movie set in Santa Barbara’s Pinot Noir country. In fact, according to industry insiders, the leveling off started two or three years earlier. Mark Pucylowski, buying director for Sam’s Wines & Spirits in Chicago, noticed that some of his California producers were grafting over to Syrah well before Merlot became a cinematic expletive.
In some cases, the fall from grace was well deserved, particularly the California Merlot that “was planted on marginal sites and/or asked to bring in too large a crop.”
But there are still plenty of good ones to be had.
And the Wine Enthusiast Tasting Panel brings us a long list of some of the best — originating everywhere from France, Italy and California to Washington State, Australia and New Zealand.
And many of them sit well within the Wine News Review fairly frugal affordability index, including the Banrock Station 2005 Merlot (South Eastern Australia) at $5 (not a typo).