November | 2011 | VINEgeek

I’m always game to try something unusual when it comes to wine. On this blog you’ll see as much Baga as Bordeaux, as much Tannat as Tuscany, and more Mourvèdre than Merlot and Malbec combined. So you know when I had a chance to taste a Tempranillo Blanco, I was all over it. That’s right, white Tempranillo. Not white as in “white” zin, but white as in not red. The grapes themselves are not typical red Tempranillo, but a white- (well, green-) skinned mutant.

Producer: Bodegas Juan Carlos Sancha ‘Ad Libitum’

Grapes: 100% Tempranillo Blanco

I’ll let Wikipedia tell the tale:

In 1988, Jesús Galilea Esteban found a cluster of white grapes on one of the Tempranillo vines in his vineyard, Murillo de Rio Leza, located in Rioja. He removed the cluster, leaving a heel which in turn produced two buds of white grapes. Galilea then contacted the Rioja government agency CIDA, who grafted the buds at their research station in February 1989.

CIDA concluded that apart from the leaves and fruit being a little smaller, the new plants were identical to normal Tempranillo in most respects, and confirmed this with DNA evidence. The most notable difference was that the grape skins were green-yellow rather than the usual blue-black, due to a natural mutation in a single skin colour gene. Similar mutations appear to have happened in many other grape varieties, such as Pinot Noir and Grenache.

CIDA, once the mutation had stabilized, expanded their collection to 100 vines in 1993, and started to make wine on an experimental scale. The first bottling of wine was in 2005, from a hectare of vines planted in 2000. It was fermented in stainless steel tanks and aged in oak barrels. The green-tinged wine had discreet aromas of flowers and tropical fruit such as pineapple, refreshing to drink but lacking a little in acidity. White Tempranillo is currently being distributed to growers having been registered with the State and approved for use in the Rioja D.O.Ca.

Appellation: Rioja

Vintage: 2009

Vineyards: Organically-farmed 1.5 hectare vineyard with clay and limestone soils. Dry-farmed.

Winemaking: Stainless steel fermentation. Native yeasts.

Alcohol: 13%

Price: I paid $16.83 via Garagiste. Closer to $25 online.

Tasting notes: I had no idea what to expect with this one. It starts off with a bold, aromatic nose of stone fruit and petrol. On the palate, it’s an intriguing mix of peach, plum skin and nuttiness with a pleasant bitter note. It has an oily palate presence and finishes long.

Overall impression: A must-try wine for the wine geek set. B+

Free association:

More info:

A good read from 2009 in Decanter on “the rise of indigenous grape varieties” in Rioja.

Image used in Oddball Wine of the Week header found here. If anyone knows the original source, let me know and I’ll credit.

I recently finished reading Liquid Memory: Why Wine Matters by Jonathan Nossiter, better known for his controversial film Mondovino. The book, like the film, is full of opinions, strongly held and stridently stated.

The central idea of the book is that “wine is among the singular repositories of memory known to man.”

Why is wine unique in its relation to memory? Because it is the only animate vessel of both personal memory – that of the drinker (or maker) and the subjectivity of his experience and the memory of that subjectivity – and communal memory. That is, it is communal to the extent that a wine is also the memory of the terroir, which the wine expresses as an evolving, active taste. As communal memory, it is above all an expression of place as a communal identity, the history of the civilization of that place and the history of the relationship to its nature (especially soil, subsoil, and microclimate).

Like many of Nossiter’s assertions, this may be a bit overblown, but I find myself being sucked in by the romance of the idea nonetheless.

Despite the showy intellectualism of the above quote (and much of the book), the other stated goal is to de-snobify wine, deflate the anointed critics and get you to trust your own palate. Yet the overall sense one gets is that if he overheard you ordering wine in a restaurant, he’d definitely be judging you and putting you in one of two categories: savvy or ignorant.

That said, I really enjoyed reading the book. If you flipped through my copy of this book, you’d find countless circled and underlined passages, notes of agreement and disagreement in the margins, and even a few inspired (but poor) drawings. The book is provocative and cerebral. It makes me fall in love with loving wine if that makes sense.

Whether you are sympathetic to the sentiment of the book or not, it will stretch your thinking about wine. And thinking about wine is almost as fun as drinking it (at least for this geek). I hope you read it if you haven’t already. To encourage that, I plan to share some of my favorite quotes from the book in blog posts over the next few weeks. I’ll start here with this one:

When I enter a wine shop or when I scan a restaurant wine list, I feel a surge of excitement, like someone arriving at the doorstep of a potential love affair.

VINEgeek

Monthly Archives: November 2011

Oddball Wine of the Week: Tempranillo Blanco

Liquid Memory

When I enter a wine shop or when I scan a restaurant wine list, I feel a surge of excitement, like someone arriving at the doorstep of a potential love affair.

grand cru geekery