Top 5 Wines of 2009
Haven’t been doing a lot of top 5 lists lately. Will have to get back into that…
…right now!
I wrote this up in the waning days in December 2009, then realized that I had some good Champagnes queued up for the News Years Eve festivities. Better to wait until 2009 is officially over to publish the best of the year. Sadly, nothing cracked the top five.
Here are my favorite wines from the year, with my tasting note from the time in italics and any current comments in plain text.
Usually this the the part of the post where I remind you that these are wines that I owned and drank in 2009. While that is almost entirely true, I have to admit that my favorite wine of 2009 wasn’t mine. Still, it was from a bottle and was tasted in only the most austere, snooty of conditions fit for a wine blogger snob such as myself. Without further ado, that bottle was…
1995 Leoville Poyferre – France, Bordeaux, St Julien
Middleweight red color. Aromas of tar, leather, pepper. Great balanced palette. Nothing epic that’s trying to knock you over, just has a lot of everything in a nice balance… easy to drink. Good finish with big tannins and will linger and hang around before leaving your mouth dry. Still strong and even has a few more years left to unwind. 94.
Good stuff, indeed.
2006 Gobelsburg, Schloss – Gruner Veltliner Tradition – Austria, Niederosterreich
Pale yellow straw color. Thick and oily. The bottle was too cold out of the gate so I didn’t get much in my nose besides some forest and petrol. The taste was lively, acidic, and just okay. As the wine warmed, though, it took on weight and balance. By the end of the bottle it was really singing. Grapefruit, floral flavors, and that mid-European airport like petrol feel to it. Great finish, long, lingering and nice. 89.
This was our last bottle from our Austria trip in 2008. We bought it from a shop ajacent to the Nachtmarket. That’s one of the things I love about wine is that each one can remind you of something: where you bought it, where you had it, what you were doing around that time. It’s always fun to flip back through tasting notes and remember.
2004 Canalicchio di Sopra – Brunello di Montalcino – Italy, Tuscany, Brunello di Montalcino
Great nose. Tobacco, leather, nice earthy basement sort of feel. Deep flavors… black cherry in there somewhere. Still explosive and young. 89.
2007 Ridge – Three Valleys Proprietary Red – USA, California, Sonoma
Translucent dark ruby. Woody, forest, moss on the nose with a little herbal and floral backing. Some pepper came out later on. Dark red fruit on the palette: cherry and black plum. Nice finish, even if a little off balance and warm. Got bigger and put on a little weight as the night went on. Nice wine. 88.
2007 Elk Run – Gewurztraminer Cold Friday Vineyard – USA, Maryland
The first sniff gave me the same sort of I-don’t-know that I get in a lot of Maryland wines. I don’t quite know what it is (Old Bay?) but MD wines, both red and white, but it’s a little sulfuric, sharp… not particularly unpleasant but just distinct. The mystery aroma blew off after a few minutes. Past that, there was apple and beach, mostly round, full aromas. The wine had a Juicy Fruit, honeyed taste initially, very layered. Good acidity. The whole thing was almost a little wild. A nice, dry, light caramel finish followed. The wine changed for the better over several hours, giving out more fruit and maturing into complexity. On open, the wine was more of a New World style and after some time it developed a hint of minerality and Old World Characteristics, like something Alsacian. 88.
There was a four-way tie at 88 points. Elk Run won the second tie-breaker because it is a Maryland wine and this is a Maryland wine blog, after all.
January 6th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Glad you liked it… when’s the tasking of that Petrus you got?