I promised I’d go live as I finished the tastings, but from this point on things will decelerate, only because I have a week’s worth of tasting of Champagne Gimonnet, and then a few days of Heidi Schröck and then another 3-4 days gamboling amidst the flora of Champagne Gaston Chiquet.
It was interesting to taste those warm-spirited reds during a weather period for which they were somatically inappropriate. I do feel the larger environment matters, if only as a maker of mood, and tasting lusty reds when it’s hot outside creates a tiny discordant note, not in the wines, but in the gestalt of the experience. I’d say the same thing tasting fresh young Mosel Rieslings in a snowstorm. The tie doesn’t go with the shirt.
With the Champagnes (Glavier) the big discovery is the compelling expressiveness of Karen MacNeil’s “Crisp and Fresh” glass, which I was wary of using for sparkling wine. It’s an impactful glass, but you need to test-drive it; one wine was greatly improved in it and two were diminished.
Tasting as I do, with several different stems for each wine, reinforces my uneasy feeling that we can never truly know the taste of a wine, but only how it tastes from the glass we happen to be using.
Clearly pursuing this idea can make you crazy, and the only through thread I can find is to scrape out some commonality of identity that emerges FROM the Variousness. To personify it, one might say “he looks great in that color and OK and this color but he really looks shitty in that other color….” And while this may be true, it is still HIM beneath it all. But if you have to describe him, you’re stuck saying how he looked in the color he wore that day.
Read tasting notes from Weingut Sattler, and Champagne Glavier.