Fine wine on a tight budget...
January 25, 2006
The very first wines I ever drank independent of parental supervision were cheap Chiantis that came packaged in a woven wicker basket. College bonus credit went to all the students of 1976 who, like me, stuck a romantic candle in the empty bottle, and let it drip all over the place in two or three colors until it looked disgusting. There were even special drippy candles in those days that dripped much more readily than regular candles, and in multiple black-light colors. By the time you got done, you could spend much more money on candles than wine.Cheap Chiantis of 1976 were unbearably bad, unconcentrated, pointless, fruitless, and tart. On paper, they looked like a bargain, and were much cheaper than the upmarket Bolla Soave and Valpolicella we would splurge on.
Chianti's low-point, in the US at least, was probably the 60s and 70s. Tuscany had essentially been de-regulated decades before, and almost anything red from Italy could find a way to call itself Chianti, if it wanted to. Rigid enforcement of meaningfully defined geographic wine regions came later.
Quality failed to motivate a world market awash in Chianti for a dime. Italian restaurants in the US were cheap and predictable and not exactly crying out for the first Super Tuscans.
Continental cuisine -- the kind of cooking you might see in one of Sean Connery's 007 movies -- was all the rage. It was easy to cook (steamed chicken breast with Orange Tang sauce over wilted watercress) but hard to pin down: French? Northern Italian? Belgian? All of the above, and we called it Continental.
Hard as it is to picture today, California wines in the 60s and 70s were almost universally disrespected, and the idea of growing Italian varietals in California, an idea that's so popular today, would have seemed as unlikely as electing Ronald Reagan president.
Origin control regulations of 1984 finally turned the tide for Tuscany, and now Chianti of all kinds can stand with other great wines of the world and charge great wines of the world prices.
Something's missing though. Truth be told, we did it for the wicker.
2002 Minini Chianti (about $6, imported by Masciarelli Wine Company, 877-335-6620)
At long last, wine lovers hail the return of cheap Chianti, but with a twist: this time 'round, it tastes good! This is a light colored red with nice wood and smoke aromas, and some earthiness that makes me think it's maybe syrah instead. It tastes fine and fruity on its own, but this Minini is even better with almost any red Italian dish you can name. This is slightly more than $1 a glass, so you can pop one open even if that credit card bill did come today.
I Likes What I Likes
I apologize profusely for being so behind the power curve on this important breaking news: Johnny Depp's favorite wines.
Madame Figaro magazine ran a Depp-erview last week that revealed Chateau Calon-Segur was his favorite, but Petrus, Chateau Cheval-Blanc, and Cos d'Estournel are OK too. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti represented for Burgundy.
"(Chateau Calon-Segur) is a marvelous wine that you can drink every day and it's also very affordable," he said of the 75 Euro wine, further demonstrating that it's all relative.
Depp has a tattoo that says "Wino Forever," but it used to say just "Winona."
Our Wine In China
China may be the world's sixth-largest wine producing nation right now, but just wait a second and it will be number five. I heard an energy analyst speaking at a conference, and he said China would add another eight giga-watts of electricity this year. The whole UK is barely eight giga-watts, and that took 100 years just to hook up.
When Chinese wine making starts changing at the same speed and on the same scale, the wine world is going to be turned upside down, and it's started already. Suntime International Wine owns the nation's largest vineyard -- let's call them the Gallos of 1967 -- and they've hired professional managers for the first time. Yantai Changyu Pioneer Wine offered 1 million yuan a year (about $175,000) for an old Bordeaux hand.
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