Scratched one off the bucket list

K

Keith Levenberg

Keith Levenberg
I've been to many of these Krug promo tastings in the past. Kudos to Zachys DC, they could have done another one of the same, but instead they charged a few bucks to enable a very reasonably sized group to tap into the 2002 Clos du Mesnil.

Krug Grande Cuvée 163ème Édition
This is a magnum so a year behind the current release of 750ml bottles. According to the ID code, it's based on the 2007 vintage (73% of the blend) with 11 other reserve vintages back to 1990, 37% pinot noir, 32% chardonnay, and 31% meunier. I would have guessed a much higher white grape percentage. Aromatics are very toasty - sawdust and some nuts. It's bright, pure, and cleansing with bracingly lemony fruit but it hits the palate like a sweeping chord even though it's focused on the higher registers. The attack is fresh and fruity but it's more tertiary on the back end, where it shows flint and root beer flavorings.

Krug Clos du Mesnil 2002
Much more reticent aromas than the Grande Cuvée, but with a hint of that jammy compote that I love about maturing Mesnil. Seriously acute on the first sip, a vortex pulling everything towards one pinprick point in the center. Despite being all chardonnay this is darker toned than the Grande Cuvée and in fact the flavors have moved past fruit to evoke things like grain, hay, creaky old wood floors. There is just a hint of that compote lurking in the back and forecasting some (much needed) sweetness and sunshine, but for the most part that trait is more manifest in its shape, which has brassy, bulbous contours at least once it has the chance to fan out from that initial spiky feeling. It is hard to taste a wine like this without thinking about its price tag for better or for worse. I'm grateful to have gotten the chance to taste it the cheap way. If you like Dom Perignon or Taittinger Comtes more than regular Krug, you will like Salon more than this. (You will probably also like DP or Comtes more than this.)

Krug 2004
37% pinot noir, 39% chardonnay and 24% meunier. Very deep in tone (here the red-heavy blend is not a surprise), but there is a hollowness in the middle. This is completely beyond fruit, a little metallic, a little funky (like, quite vividly, body sweat), and a little spicy (like coriander). The winery notes characterize the year as "Luminous Freshness," which is not quite the experience I'm getting out of this bottle. Fair to call this interesting but it doesn't ding very high on my pleasure meter.

Krug Rosé 21ème Edition
I am generally not a fan of rosé Champagne but I'm not even sure I would have noticed this was rosé with my eyes closed. It does have some slightly redder flavors in the mix, more on the rosy floral side than berries, but nothing I haven't tasted in a blanc de noirs that stayed blanc. Maybe there is juuuuust a bit of flaky cotton candy sweetness that surfaces on the nose. This is based on the 2008 vintage with reserve wines back to 2000--according to the Krug rep, deliberately made younger and fresher than the Grande Cuvée--51% pinot noir, 41% chardonnay and 8% meunier, made pink (barely) with 10% still Ay pinot noir.

Krug Grande Cuvée 160ème Édition
This is based on the 2004 vintage (65% of the blend), but I *much* preferred it to the 2004 vintage bottling. 12 reserve vintages back to 1990. Poured from a jeroboam, which in theory is supposed to hold its freshness longer, and it's still pure and refreshing but is showing serious payoff from the extra few years it's had in bottle (bottled in 2014). Aromatics are mature, beyond fruit. The flavors are basically the same as the 163ème but everything is thicker and bolder, especially the flint. This is the 163ème with a Super Mario power-up and my favorite of the evening.
 
That 2004 sounds nothing like the bottle poured at Crush last December. Zachys may have put on a good event but they poured you an off-bottle or a super-cranky one, and apparently no one called them on it. It’s much better than you described, and I liked it more than MV 164 that night at Crush. (NB: I don’t normally like Krug that much.)
 
I am pretty confident my take on the 2004 is more a matter of palate variation than bottle variation. The Krug rep was there and would have opened another if it was wrong. Others seemed to enjoy it more than me.

Tix were $55, which basically amounted to splitting the retail tab on the CdM and the rest were free. A Capital idea.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I am pretty confident my take on the 2004 is more a matter of palate variation than bottle variation. The Krug rep was there and would have opened another if it was wrong. Others seemed to enjoy it more than me.

Tix were $55, which basically amounted to splitting the retail tab on the CdM and the rest were free. A Capital idea.
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In this case I am having a hard time buying it based on your note, and I have never been an apologist for Krug, my skepticism solidified by some lackluster MV bottlings in the early 2000s and the over the top, sometimes oxidative, and barrely style.
 
How is it that the word 'apologist,' which is most at home as an antagonistic taunt in political debate, so frequently finds its way into wine threads.

Not taking a shot at you, in particular, Jayson; but I see this often and wonder about it.

Anyway, off-topic; apologies.
 
Apologist has been co-opted through the natural evolution of language (and to the dismay of linguistic conservatives) to meet the wine geek need, just as (I believe) I am co-opting the word co-opt in this sentence as compared to its traditional usage.

And the beat goes on.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
There I always thought I was a linguistic lefty. Lamentable.
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No need to be an apologist for linguistic lefties. [I’m not allowed to use smiley face emojis on WD to express my comrade-ery with you without offending the far left politburo, so you will have to picture it.]
 
Forever and a day, apologist has meant something like defender, so I don't understand the issue here. Rather than being co-opted, the word is merely being used.
 
I second Oswaldo, though I think an apologist is one who defends by any means necessary and beyond all reason. That did seem to be how Jayson was using the word, or how I took him to be using it at any rate.
 
I get the impression the usage/meaning of the term has shifted on account of its aural similarity with "apology," on account of which it's very often used to mean "one who defends something they should be apologizing for." After all, the word originally connoted reasoned defenses, not defenses beyond all reason.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I get the impression the usage/meaning of the term has shifted on account of its aural similarity with "apology," on account of which it's very often used to mean "one who defends something they should be apologizing for." After all, the word originally connoted reasoned defenses, not defenses beyond all reason.
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This, but the “shift” was before our time.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Forever and a day, apologist has meant something like defender, so I don't understand the issue here. Rather than being co-opted, the word is merely being used.
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Yeah. I didn’t mean to imply, but now see I did, that the change in usage of apologist was recent and for wine geeks. I have been using the term in what I always understood to be the conventional sense since I was a teenager.
 
How recent the shift was depends on perspective, I think. Certainly within my lifetime, writers such as CS Lewis were described as “Christian apologists.”

Mark Lipton
 
The use of the word apologetic to describe a vindicatory defense, often of Christianity goes back to the 18th century according to the OED. Its definition of apologist is much more neutral, though it gives a sentence with the clearly negative connotation going back to the 19th century. I would guess that it was the bad odor around apologetic that led to the negative implication of apologist.
 
I've always presumed the attribution implied a dig, but I see now that this construction is unduly limited.

Were I now to adopt role of apologist for this point of view, after reading these clarifications, I would be reduced to begging the question.
 
Scratched another one off the bucket list. Reasonably priced on the wine list at a neighborhood restaurant (sadly not my neighborhood); our group got the last bottle.

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet 2008
This wine is a mineralogist's dream. Just from a whiff of it, it smells like you're going to be drinking a salt lick (big aromatics - no swirling necessary). At least that's what it smells like after some airing out - at first it smelled like a salt mine + a sulfur mine. The palate is consistent. It comes across more solid than liquid to an extent I don't think I've ever experienced in any white Burgundy, though maybe in the occasional riesling; it has that salt-rimmed-tequila thing that some rieslings have, too. If you define the apex Burgundy vineyards as having the ability to aggregate the qualities of the not-quite-apex vineyards without diluting any of them, this qualifies: it has the acuity and precision of Chevalier (at its most precise) combined with the opulence of Batard (at its most opulent). The brassy color in the glass causes someone to remark that on pure sight you might think it's premoxed, but it's not. It does, however, have some of the buttered popcorn/candy corn that the Monty grand crus feature when they're at their ripest, which makes the rapier-like cut all the more remarkable. And it's just as cutting at room temperature. Poured first and finished last - it had enough torque you could get a whole lot out of a short sip and I figured (correctly) it would do nothing but get better and better the longer you could keep it in the glass, so I stretched it out. It didn't change vastly over time, except the first hour or so it took to kick the smack of sulfur, but it's pretty nice to spend a few hours with a daisy-cutter of a Montrachet you can bomb your palate with whenever you feel like it.
 
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