'07 Rhys Alpine PN

[drssouth]

2007 Rhys Santa Cruz Mountains, Alpine Vineyard Pinot Noir, alc 13.5%...still very purple....nose is a bit muted...palate is savory and multi-layered with some drying characteristics....this has become very interesting....perhaps this could be confused with a village level Gevrey with about the same age on it...not sure the fruit that is left will carry this for many more years but right now this certainly benefitted from the time in the cellar...I have another of these to get to before too very long...

 

[Jay Miller]

That sounds promising. The Alpine is usually one of my least favorite pinots from them on release so I've been anxiously awaiting getting some age on mine to see what happens.

But I don't plan to touch my '06s or '07 for a few years.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jay Miller:
That sounds promising. The Alpine is usually one of my least favorite pinots from them on release so I've been anxiously awaiting getting some age on mine to see what happens.

But I don't plan to touch my '06s or '07 for a few years.

thanks to my friends' cheery sense of humour, i was recently offered a whopping three bottles of a new pinot from cali.

aside from the other obvious factors that would have caused me to decline, i got to wondering about what i might think if i actually drank cali pinot. so, i imagined plonking down 300 zlotys, and then waiting.

i imagined the bottles arriving, and then i imagined (well, it's imagination, right?) letting them settle down, and then popping a bottle, to check out the magic beans and to see if i rued teh cow.

i imagined popping another bottle, a week or so later, to check on my first impressions, and to think about when to pop the third, to see if i wanted to lay teh shit down to age or not

and, um. right.

this is not aimed specifically at you jay, but rather a more general rumination: why would anyone do this? i realise my own preferences lie at a myopic extreme on the scale, but why does anyone bother buying one or two bottles of hooch for anything other than a pop n pour one night stand?

and why does anyone lay down wine that they aren't at least somewhat familiar with, either because they have sampled a bunch of it of it in its infancy, or else because they know the grower well over time, and feel that they can form a judgement from a smaller sample?

indeed, given the vagaries of ageing compared to the brutal if predictable charms of youth, what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

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[Jay Miller]

So that one day I can pull a Tom Hill.

When I have more time I might post a more serious answer.

 

[Jay Miller]

re Tom Hill - his regular comment is "I've been following this wine from the very beginning."

Now the long answer. I originally signed up for the the new Rhys venture because they were

a) growing wine in the SCM. Santa Cruz has been responsible for many of my favorite ageworthy CA wines - Ridge and Mt. Eden in particular
b) trying to buck the CA trend by using wild yeast fermentation, picking earlier, using less oak, etc. I know that lots of people are doing that now but at the time I wanted to support the endeavour since I expected he'd be excoriated in the WA and WS
c) the owner was someone whose Burgundy palate I respected so I was curious to see what he'd do

So after signing up all of a sudden Allen Meadows gives the wines rave reviews and while my support is hardly necessary anymore since there's a wait list the only way I'll get to try the wines is to buy them on release. Also thanks to there being a decent concentration in NYC of people on that list I've been able to try new release bottles most years. We get together, everyone brings one to try early on and decide individually about aging the remainder. Those early results were very encouraging.

Early on I just bought a little of everything. I know that many people have a philosophy (which I respect) of only buying wine in larger quantities to follow it over its life but I don't have the necessary storage for that and I also enjoy drinking a greater variety that would be possible if I did that. And once again, I know enough people who buy them that I get to hear or read about how they are doing. Anyway, as I sampled the releases over the years I found some vineyards (and of course vintages) were more to my taste than others. I stopped buying the Alpine pinots for that very reason (I know several people for whom it's their favorite vineyard so the difference is stylistic rather than quality related) but am still buying my favorites - Home and Horseshoe in particular. But if it turns out I like how Alpine tastes with age I might go back to buying it again.

Regarding aging I just opened the oldest of my bottles earlier this year - the 2004 Home Pinot - and was very happy with how it turned out. Still young but complex and delicious. I realize that's not much of an aging track record yet but it is promising.

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by fatboy:

and why does anyone lay down wine that they aren't at least somewhat familiar with, either because they have sampled a bunch of it of it in its infancy, or else because they know the grower well over time, and feel that they can form a judgement from a smaller sample?

indeed, given the vagaries of ageing compared to the brutal if predictable charms of youth, what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

Because you don't like how it tastes in its youth and, having already laid out one's hard earned zlotys for it, opted for the "wait and see if the ugly duckling turns into a swan" approach rather than the well-documented fatsink approach?

Mark Lipton

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jay Miller:

So after signing up all of a sudden Allen Meadows gives the wines rave reviews and while my support is hardly necessary anymore since there's a wait list the only way I'll get to try the wines is to buy them on release. Also thanks to there being a decent concentration in NYC of people on that list I've been able to try new release bottles most years. We get together, everyone brings one to try early on and decide individually about aging the remainder. Those early results were very encouraging.

thanks. i hadn't thought about the communal amortisation of "youthful risk" as a dimension.

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[Unknown]

originally posted by MLipton:

Because you don't like how it tastes in its youth and, having already laid out one's hard earned zlotys for it, opted for the "wait and see if the ugly duckling turns into a swan" approach rather than the well-documented fatsink approach?

good answer. teh fatsink is not to be encouraged.

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[Keith Levenberg]

originally posted by fatboy:
what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

Lack of unlimited funds?

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by fatboy:
what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

Lack of unlimited funds?

Indeed. And, in light of that, a desire to partake of the interests of choosing, keeping, tasting wine for aging but with the recognition that you will _never_ drink like the lord of the manor so 3 bottles is better than none.

 

[Levi Dalton]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by MLipton:

Because you don't like how it tastes in its youth and, having already laid out one's hard earned zlotys for it, opted for the "wait and see if the ugly duckling turns into a swan" approach rather than the well-documented fatsink approach?

good answer. teh fatsink is not to be encouraged.

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An interesting point, for sure.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by fatboy:
what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

Lack of unlimited funds?

to be clear: are you sayingthat the best way of allocating limited funds is to spread them across many lots of two or three bottles of hooch?

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[Unknown]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Indeed. And, in light of that, a desire to partake of the interests of choosing, keeping, tasting wine for aging but with the recognition that you will _never_ drink like the lord of the manor so 3 bottles is better than none.

my question was prompted by my wondering about the current practices of

1. "awarding" people absurdly small quantities of wines that are meant for ageing

and

2. actually buying those allocations.

i was mulling on whether these practices to some extent preclude the idea that one can go through the steps involved in tasting / choosing, and ageing a wine. and whether the same practice largely guarantee that people will never get to drink like the lord of the manor.

it's a theme i've pondered before, and i've been pondering it again in the light of teh rudi affair and various recent experiences in which i've been offered "highly sought after" hooch in such vanishingly small quantities that it made me laugh out loud.

i've noted before how chasing the various forms of critical evaluation leads people into acquiring collections of bottles that are, to a large extent, incoherent and mutually uninformative, albeit that they may share some form of appellation relationship or what not ( this is especially so in burgundy in my experience, but doubtless it is just as bad in other places where i lack the experience to notice it).

not only do i tend to see a lot of wine going to waste in these kind of broad shallow collections -- in the form of hopelessly out of phase bottles opened at geek fests to the disappointment of their owners -- but it seems reasonable (to me at least) to assume that broad, shallow collections will inevitably make opening out of phase wine more likely, because they necessarily contain less information about when to open a given bottle than narrow, deep collections.

and, in a similar vein (and leaving aside any aesthetic arguments about terroir, or having a relationship with a wine), it seems likely to me that joe doe who drinks his three dozen bottles of briords each year is going to develop a better understanding of that wine and its consistent elements over time than bill doe who drinks one or two bottles.

which is where teh rudi ruminations begin to kick in: if briords were to become allocated and scarce (suppose that some evil plutocrat decided to have whole vintages bottled in double magnums for his own nefarious purposes), then although to some degree joe doe is in a bind (how far is he willing to chase teh price of briords?), at least insofar as he is willing to chase said price, his experience will likely reduce his risk of getting suckered into buying fake briords. (that is, as long as he gets to taste it before he buys...)

otoh, whereas bill doh might feel less like splashing out for briords, if he does, he is also more likely to be gulled into splashing his cash on teh ersatz muscadet, whether he pre tastes or not.

now, suppose that the price of briords climbs to where it's a three bottle allocation and no pre-taste. if bill lacks the experience to differentiate between le vrai muscadet and another tasty saline infused flagon of hooch, any disquiet he feels on opening his first prize bottle of briords will be largely philosophical. joe doe, on the other hand, faces a practical problem. if we assume that his heroic tippling of muscadet has attuned teh doenose to the nuances of teh briords, the absence of same is likely to bring about near kochian levels of bogus wine disquiet in him (and, what is more, without him having to call in some english dudes smelling of mothballs to cut teh capsules &c. on the remaining two bottles of his allocation).

i have no idea how many rudi victims are joe does rather than bill does, and i guess, on one hand, it doesn't matter. one might reasonably say that fakery is absolutely bad, and i'd tend to agree.

but, practically, it seems reasonable, now i think about it, to suggest that a higher ratio of bill does to joe does all round is going to make he lives of teh rudis and teh kaponzis easier. and if that is that case, then, one might also suggest that to some extant, bill doe's approach to wine actually encourages teh rudis and teh kaponzis.

if joe doe were to think this way, then as he ruefully surveyed the sorry remains of his useless fake briords allocation, one might even forgive him for dismissing bill doe's philosophical musings on fakery, and suggesting that bill actually deserves everything he gets.

indeed, had joe doe really gotten stung for his fake briords, he might even be prompted to suggest that not only has teh wine industry failed to adequately detect and deal with the fakery he had been bitten by, but with its combination of wine critics overhyping hooch and boozeslingerls laying down teh tight allocations of same, it is actually doing all that it can to promote teh conditions that provide a ready breeding ground for a new generation of teh rudis and teh kaponzis.

something like that, anyway.

fb.

 

[Tom Glasgow]

Your point is well, interesting.

But the Rudi fakes were all well aged. Jay's assured his bottles are genuine.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Tom Glasgow:
Your point is well, interesting.

Jay's assured his bottles are genuine.

of that i'm sure.

fb.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

fb,

You've said several different things worth commenting upon.

In re small quantities of wine: This is a bigger problem than just wine. If a producer has X units of a thing and X/2 paying customers is it not reasonable to offer 2 units to each (even if that is only a tenth of the amount needed to support 'proper' use)? Said another way, how does a producer choose who to say no to?

In re the Rudiz and their ilk: They made frauds of wines that were already naturally rare, presumably exactly to avoid any Joe Does in their audience.

In re Joe and Bill's contentment: Another bigger-than-wine issue, I think. Perhaps it is Joe's nature to be focused and probing while Bill is always the dilettante? Perhaps it is Bill who seeks new vistas while Joe knows every stone of his 1/4 acre? Both positions can be valid, depending upon your perspective.

In re absolute badness of fraud: Well, yeah.

In re P. T. "There's a sucker born every minute" Barnum: Well, yeah.

In re the wine industry having failed Joe and Bill: Well, yeah.

 

[Keith Levenberg]

originally posted by fatboy:

originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

originally posted by fatboy:
what are the thought processes behind buying and keeping just a few bottles of anything?

Lack of unlimited funds?

to be clear: are you sayingthat the best way of allocating limited funds is to spread them across many lots of two or three bottles of hooch?

fb.

That's a decision everyone has to make for themselves. Personally, I prefer 3 bottles each of more things over case quantities of fewer things.

 

[MarkS]

Who needs a case except a paahty?

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

I'm a case buyer, for a long time, with no regrets. It allows me a much better sense of the way a wine ages to follow it over a long period. And if I guess wrong about when to open a given bottle, it doesn't feel like a tragedy. And I must say, when I get down to my last two or three bottles, I hoard them as if they were a diminishing rarity sometimes.

That having been said, there is no doubt that this habit has reduced the range of wines I drink. And when I benefit from the range of wine in the cellars of 3 bottle a lot people, I'm aware of the cost of the choice. So it doesn't seem to me a clear cut choice to make.

With regard to Rhys, since they are likely to allot you only 2 or 3 bottles of each wine as I understand, one's choices are limited in any case, particularly if you want a range of their wines. They make a lot of different vineyard marked wines, and if one bought a case of each, one would have very little else in one's cellar, even if they let you do that.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

In re small quantities of wine: This is a bigger problem than just wine. If a producer has X units of a thing and X/2 paying customers is it not reasonable to offer 2 units to each (even if that is only a tenth of the amount needed to support 'proper' use)? Said another way, how does a producer choose who to say no to?

i guess i'm trying to at least raise the idea that we might look at it in a slightly different way.

jays's post prompted me to jot these thoughts down, but they are not a response to same. as far as i'm concerned it totally sucks when teh hype machine turns its capricious attention towards ones own particular corner of the wine-universe, and the practically unlimited supply of a hooch x that one has invested time, energy and not a little love getting to know suddenly dwindles to a couple of overpriced bottles. i can fully understand why jay continues to buy, and while i've found that my interest in a wine or a grower is slowly strangled when similar shit happens to me, i claim no virtue for that -- i admire jay's consistency, and feel a little bummed for him.

the story he recounts above is salutary. what changed? well, really, just the points changed. teh burghype decided to pad his sales with a little cali coverage, and jay got caught in teh hypefire.

one might blame meadows, but the idea i'm trying to bounce around is that in fact, we ought to blame ourselves. why did rhys suddenly fly up in price? because folks suddenly found out that there were points in them thar bottles, and folks likes points. all folks. my plumpness is not excluded. i gave up reading burghump after the first year, not because i think meadows is clueless, but rather because as many of our former brethren were once wont to loudly aver, i find no utility in a rag filled with fruit adjectives and randomly generated numbers.

worse than that, i discovered that i was beginning to hanker after wines that i knew i wouldn't care for simply because the lottery wheel had rung them up a big number. shit, i even found myself buying them. i had succumbed, just as every other monkey on teh bored has succumbed.

we are all points whores. maybe we sneer at numbers, but that just means we get our panties moist over something else. the fact is that everyone who is monomaniacal enough to post here often finds themselves hankering irrationally for a wine that they have only ever heard about, often from people whose opinions they don't even value that much. so while i'm currently jonesing some unchapatalized muscadets that david lillie planted in my fat noggin, and i can somehow justify same on the basis of david's genius for muscadet, the fact is i've felt the same irrational urge to try shit after reading or hearing some turd talk about it -- because the story sounded cool.

and i will again.

back in the day, teh dysfunctional extended family surrounding this bored provided a stabilising influence against teh hype. sort of. there were at least some louder voices counselling against the tendency of wine dorks to feel varying degree of inadequacy unless they have tried the latest, hippest, pointiest hooches, and advocating teh more personal, involved approach to appreciation.

and if it didn't entirely succeed (unwittingly or not, those voices became, in their own ways, alternative sources of hype) at least it diversified the hyping.

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

Another bigger-than-wine issue, I think. Perhaps it is Joe's nature to be focused and probing while Bill is always the dilettante? Perhaps it is Bill who seeks new vistas while Joe knows every stone of his 1/4 acre? Both positions can be valid, depending upon your perspective.

there are some differences though:

wine is finite in many different ways. you can hang a picture in a gallery for all to see. a bottle empties. you can trudge round every opening in town if your inclination is to make sure you see every picture there is to see. you can only sample so much hooch before its time to fight .sasha for a couch to sleep on.

that said, i take your point. as you may have noticed, i'm not trying to advance a strict line. i do think that only being able to buy 3 bottles of wine is bonkers, especially if someone wants money for it, and intends it to age (it strikes me as being akin to selling ice sculptures as an investment proposition in nevada). my feeling is that we, as the generation of imbibers that grew up amongst teh porkers and suckling pigs, have been been bombarded with propaganda in favor of bill teh dilettante's world view.

i just think that it might be time to stand up for focused joe and his probe a little more. sure, for aesthetic reasons that i think are often quite wine local, but also to help counterbalance other silly aspects of teh hype. i guess i think a world where i talk to great, dedicated growers who live continually in fear of fashion change (and i kid not about this), and where schnooks send me oily emails offering a tic-tic-tic limited period once in a lifetime chance to spend a huge crop of zlotys on a pointless quantity of an unknown hooch made rather conventionally from a vineyard containing but a single clone, well, for me that is a world that has tilted too far in favour of bill teh dilettante.

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