Hospice du Rhone last week was going to be my most serious wine tasting experience to date. I planned on taking copious notes and reporting back to all of you. A combination of factors prevented me from doing that. So I'll just toss out a couple of random observations. Before I forget, Max, Bill Easton took your email address and said he wanted to get ahold of you. The wine tasting for me started with dinner on Friday night. I met up with two friends, Linda and Bennett, and met two of their friends, Dick and Carollee. I'm long-time friends with Linda and when she started dating Bennett I started getting into wine. Dick and Carollee are also knowledgeable. That makes Linda and me the amateurs. At Friday we had a great dinner at Paris in Paso Robles. The featured winery at that restaurant was Vino Robles. We started with a Vino Robles rose that was forgettable and then had a viognier that was good. Then they brought out a Vino Robles Huerhuero Syrah. I pronounced it a good wine and Bennett and Dick immediately said it was overripe. I'd go with their judgment. And it was kind of the start of a pattern that happened at the next day's grand tasting. I'd say I love a wine and someone would point out a flaw. The third wine was a Vino Robles Jardine petite syrah and everyone agreed it was the best wine of the night from Vino Robles. I bought a bottle of it the next day. The last wine was something of an oddity and I was hoping to get the group's feedback. It was called Endpost and they served it with ice cream and chocolate. Bennett and Dick called it tart. That's charitable. I'd say it was bitter. And acidic. I kept running my tongue over my teeth to make sure it didn't strip off the enamel. I don't think any of us took more than two sips. They said at the restaurant it was made from grapes at the end of the rows, the ones that were the quickest to ripen. So it's overripe and acidic. When I bought wine the next day the owner of the wine store said they should have served it with cheese because serving it with ice cream and chocolate gave people the wrong idea. So anyone have a clue what they were trying to do?
The wine Bennett and Dick brought, however, might make some of you green with envy. Bennett uncorked a white 1984 Chave Hermitage. He served it between the rose and the viognier. I tend to do some oafish things as a wine newbie and my first experience with a Chave Hermitage (likely my last, too) was one of them. Bennett had it on ice and only poured a little bit into our glasses. He said it was too cool and needed to warm up. I waited a minute or two, tasted and it didn't seem like anything special. Then I waited another minute or twice and drank down the rest of the small amount I was impatient and wanted to move on to the viognier. After a few minutes, though, I came back and tried the Hermitage again, after it had warmed up enough. Wow. What a wine. So complex and such a long finish. *This* time I did my best to savor it. Wine this good maybe shouldn't be wasted on rookies like me. It was clearly a well-made wine. Complex to describe, but crisp and fruity but not too fruity. We had about a fifth of the bottle left and Bennett sent it back to the kitchen for the chef. We ran into the chef on the way out of the door and he said he had not gotten the bottle of wine. God, I hope it didn't get dumped or something. So Bennett brought that one from that end of the price spectrum, there was also another great wine from the other end of the price spectrum. It was a 1983 (I think) Cornas, all syrah, that he bought in the late 1980s for $9.75. You can see the sticker on the bottle in the photo on this Web page.
So now the big event was on Saturday, the grand tasting. Based on suggestions from this group and by following the lead of more knowledgeable people at the show, it was a blur of mostly pretty good wines. I'd drink just about every one of the ones I tried again. The big stars seemed to be Pax and Saxum. Both had the same scene around their tables. Wine tasters holding out their wine glasses and surging towards the tables like fish going up a fish ladder. The wine purveyors on either side had no one interested in them, and if they did, people had a hard time getting to them. I fought to the front of the Pax line and got a syrah that was great. Sadly, they were serving three and I didn't know which one I got. It was too hectic to try to get to the front again. Saxum has a mostly grenache blend called Rocket Block that I thought was fantastic. It also has 16.6 percent alcohol. More knowledgeable drinkers thought that was too much. I dunno. If I could afford it, I'd buy it. Alban Vineyards and Linne Calodo were also stand outs. I had a marsanne at Tablas Creek that really seemed nice. It was probably the best white I had during the night. I had tasted a marsanne at Tablas Creek last year and it didn't get my attention. Maybe my taste buds were tuned after the Hermitage. Cedarville continues to make great wine. Bennett observed that they're really coming into their own as far as developing a distinctive flavor. A vineyard owner we went with really liked the syrah from L'Aventure. I didn't try it, since I wasn't doing spitting as I had planned. but it seemed to get good reviews. I didn't go to any workshops, but Bennett said in one workshop each participant tasted about $1,000 worth of wine. Bennett and Dick said the best thing they learned was about an overlooked grape that grows in northwest Spain that's being developed again. It's a cousin to Rhone varietals. They said the name, but I forgot. If anyone's interested, I can ask them about it.