January 2 2007
A post-holiday hangover? Nah. But, January is here. 2 ½ looooong months til spring. And, for now, It’s time to slough off the palate from a season of conviviality and good fortune and get ready for the everyday drinkers i.e. back to the budget wines.
Alas, I wish every bottle I drunk was a winner. Unfortunately, for me and most of the free world, you get the occasional clunker. Sometimes a wine is just not worth a darn, or, through no fault of no one, our palates will turn parts finicky and mercurial.
But, the holidays offer up the equivalent of baseball spring training for wine lovers—hope springs eternal. Choices are more carefully cultivated and the corks pulled have a higher propensity of excellence—if only because our spending creeps up a bit.
I drank numerous clear winners over the holidays. And, the good news is, and good news, increasingly for ’07 and beyond, is the fact that I can buy these wines online—instead of the restaurant with mark-up or the tasting room, as I did with the two wines mentioned below.
My wife and I enjoyed an excellent dinner at our favoriate local restaurant, Oakley’s Bistro, on New Year’s Eve. I wished there was a formal wine pairing, but the small wine list, carefully chosen, had the Babcock Pinot Noir—a relative restaurant bargain with a 1x mark-up on its retail price of around $18 a bottle. With my wife eating beef while I enjoyed pork tenderloin, the Pinot seemed like a happy go-between.
The ’05 Babcock Pinot Noir Tri-Counties Cuvée, in its fifth vintage, is so called because it’s a blend of Santa Barbara County Pinot from the Babcock vineyards, fruit from Monterey County and some fruit from Rabbit Ridge in San Luis Obispo.
Typical of Central Coast Pinot’s this ’05 is rich, silky and sumptuous. Fruit forward with strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, a touch of spice and very moderate tannins, this wine, at retail, would be a superb Pinot bargain.
The winemaker, Bryan Babcock, said this of the exteme value, “The wine is awesome, and as you taste it you will be wondering, ‘How can Babcock afford to put this stuff into the Tri-Counties Cuvée?’ Well, all I can say is that when you have a really good Bi-counties Cuvée put together and you need some juice from another county to make the name work, you what you gotta do.”
Indeed. He did the right thing, though. The wine is sold out on his web site, but still available in the channel. Pick some up if you can find it.
Later on New Year’s Eve, it was a perfect opportunity to pop the cork on the L. Mawby Consort Sparkling wine. I picked up the Consort back in October on a wine tasting trip in the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan.
L Mawby is, perhaps, Michigan’s most celebrated winery at a time when Michigan wine is beginning its ascent to national respectability. I was kicking myself, though; I should have bought the L Mawby Talismon. The Talismon is L Mawby’s flagship sparkler and the wine that has built their reputation—it’s made in the methode champenoise style, which is both time consuming and expensive (Read more here). Sometimes my inherent cheapness forces me to miss out on things. I bought the Consort for $18 instead of the Talismon for $27. I rationalized that $9 bucks is $9 bucks, especially when I don’t drink sparkling wine that often. I wish I had the Talismon to try, especially since I’ve seen it on one or two year end Top 100 lists.
L Mawby and its namesake, Larry Mawby is also featured in the recent book, The Great Wines of America (The Top 40 Vintners, Vineyards and Vintages) by Paul Lukacs.
According to the book, Mawby made his first sparkling wines in 1984, had a breakthrough in quality in 1990 and has made nothing else but sparkling wine since 2000. And, while his second label includes fruit from elsewhere, his flagship L Mawby wines are crafted exclusively from grapes grown on the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan.
The Consort is a nice sparkling wine; it’s extremely lively and fresh, and would easily be discernible head-to-head from a deadening inexpensive mass market competitor. Bottle # 37 out of 348 was mixed with a dash of liqueur and made for a nice digestif before giving way as a celebratory quaff later on that night.
In the aforementioned book, Larry Mawby is quoted as saying, “Passion even more than money is what we need here. Those of us who started in Michigan thirty years ago were nuts, but we had passion. We need more of that now.”
Cheers to Larry Mawby and his passion. He makes some tasty sparkling wine and I’m always a supporter of people that wear their emotion on their sleeve and follow their hearts. My resolution for ’07 is to drink more passionate peoples’ wines, less of the clunkers and to support the small winery that sells online. If the hours leading up to and occurring shortly after midnight on January 1, 2007 are any indication, I’m off to a good start.
Keywords: L Mawby Sparkling Wine, Babcock Pinot Noir, Michigan Wine, Central Coast Pinot Noir
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