Tasting the 2003 Pujanza Rioja
Last Thursday we had the first Tempranillo and tapas night at my house. Several pals dropped by (mostly for the novelty of watching me cook) and tasted a bottle of rioja I’d recently picked up in our local wine emporium. Our rating system is pretty straight forward: the scale is 1-5 stars with one being horridly vile plonk (I’ve judged a few in competitions, though thankfully its rare) and 5 stars which is a wine you should run, not walk, to buy.
The 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a blend of 90% Tempranillo and 10% Graciano. Our consensus is that it has medium bodied aromas of cherry, raspberry and white peppercorn. The predominant flavor is of raw cocoa powder and light red cherry. The wine was served with two Spanish dishes: Plate 1: A mild chorizo baked in a moderately spiced variation of patatas gravas. The wine went very well with this dish. Plate 2: A chicken and spicy chorizo pealla.
The wine as a stand alone and with Plate 1 got a consensus rating of 3.5 stars but with Plate 2 it did not fare as well; the wine simply lacks the body to stand up to the richer flavors in the paella. So for this pairing the wine gets 3 stars.
Overall the 2003 Pujanza Rioja is a decent but unexciting 3.5 star value at $25 so long as its paired with mild dishes.
Another day, another restaurant
This time I found a killer tapas joint in Manhattan. Sala One Nine. Creative dishes such as dates stuffed with almonds and wrapped with bacon are simple and delicious. The wine list is rather limited, though they do have a Mensia which is the grandfather of cab franc, but the food is simply scrumptious. If in NYC this place is definitely worth a visit.
Tempranillo Tuesdays (or maybe Thursdays)
Thanksgiving is over and it’s back to the grind for most folks, yours truly included, to the daily ritual which for this particular blogger is to amble out to the winery, toy with Cabernet and Tempranillo blends (which I should do more of) and this week at least get my act in gear re: Tempranillo Tuesdays or Thursdays. I need to choose two Spanish tapas dishes to pair with the first night’s wine, come up with some sort of scoring system that’s not utterly confusing (I mean really, what is the difference between a 91 and a 92 point wine… tell me please!) so I’m thinking about a star system (i.e. 1 star sucks and 5 stars means get the hell out of my way while I run to the store to wipe out my hard earned cash). I want this little experiment to include folks from within and without the industry so in any given week there will be winemakers, restaurateurs, sommeliers, serious and not so serious wine tasters and whoever else happens to show up. When I met my fiancé, I stupidly assumed that she knew what I was talking about when we were drinking wine. Now ya gotta understand, she’s a foodie, but she was completely perplexed when I started going on and on about white pepper and boysenberry fusion in wine and it finally clicked that most folks, probably some of my readers too, are equally intimidated or perplexed by wine-speak and inaccessible scoring systems and would just like someone whose not a pompous snob to tell them what they think of a wine in somewhat clearer terms. That’s why I feel its so important to include in these weekly tastings inexperienced wine tasters– inexperienced incidentally does not mean disinterested, a common misconception in my trade. Most wine professionals were just as confused by wine-speak at one time. Twenty years ago, I knew there were two types of wine (well, three types since my parents drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape) red and white. When I read wine notes like ” it has aromas of warm wet gravel” my reaction was something akin to: “as opposed to what? cold pond gravel….” So here we are twenty or so years later and I still don’t know what warm wet gravel tastes like, do you? I think not … I can just see it now, telling my friends:
Me: ”Hey guys, this wine has aromas of lychee nut and warm wet
gravel”
Them: “Sure Stew, whatyever you say.”
Me: “I swear I’m serious and Ill prove it to you– just give me a
moment to heat up some water and get some gravel out of
the goldfish bowl…”
All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to getting this weekly tasting program under way. I hope you are too.
