Category Archives: Wine

We’ve been submitting L’Ecole’s wine list to Wine Spectator since 2007 and this year we got bumped up to their second-tier award.  Here’s what their website says:

Best of Award of Excellence
788 winners
Our second-tier award, created to give special recognition to restaurants that clearly exceed the requirements of the Award of Excellence. These lists typically offer 400 or more selections, along with superior presentation, and display either vintage depth, with several vertical offerings of top wines, or excellent breadth across several wine regions.

Who else has this award you may ask.  Oh, Jean-Georges and Gramercy Tavern.  You know what they didn’t get, though?  A green highlight, indicating a good value list.

For an upgrade on this iPhone shot, pick up a copy of the August edition, available now.

Rudi Wiest and Laura Williamson presenting "The Top Wines and Grosses Gewachs of 2008" at Rudipalooza this week.

Rudi Wiest imports some of the best German Rieslings in the world and he led a seminar at Tribeca Grill this week, where we sampled 9 different wines. 

Rudi had some great quotes throughout the seminar, including the title of this post.  It is silly to describe wines as intellectual, but this line-up was nuanced.

“If you don’t write it down, you’ve never going to be a good taster.”  It’s a good thing I keep this blog.

“Is there another grape that can do what Riesling does?”  I couldn’t agree more.

My favorite dry wine was the 2008 Rebholz Riesling Dry Grosses Gewächs, Im Sonnenschein.  Grosses Gewächs translates to “great growth” and refers to a system the Germans use to rank vineyard sites.  Im Sonnenschein is the vineyard name.  The grapes are grown in limestone soil, laden with martime fossils and the resulting wine was very different from another Rebholz we tried, where the grapes were grown on sandstone, just 200 meters away.  The Sonnenschein was round, ripe, smoky and had lots of floral, citrus and peach notes.  The acidity was the best part; it was so integrated, it had become one with the wine.

My favorite off-dry was the 2008 Reinhold Haart Reisling Spätlese, “Erste Lage”, Piesporter Goldtröpfchen.  Erste Lage translates to “top site”, similar to the idea above.  Piesporter means near the town of Piesport and Goldtröpfchen, meaning drops of gold, is the name of the vineyard.  This wine had a ton going on: flowers, black fruits, stone fruits, minerality and a finish that went on forever.  Rudi mentioned that when he has a Piesporter wine, he thinks of peach trees.  He was right again.

At Ray Isle's tasting table.

Earlier this week a small group of us went to taste with Ray Isle, the Wine Editor for Food & Wine.  I’d like to say I get invited all the time, but rather this was an auction item I bid on last year for Share our Strength.

The cabinets, counters and racks in "the office" were overflowing with bottles of wine. I felt right at home.

I won’t divulge the wines we tasted quite yet, as I’m hoping part of our tasting will be featured in the magazine within the next few months.  Just to give you an idea, though, we tasted some white wines made from red grapes (more off-the-beaten-path than Blanc de Noirs Champagne) and we also gave Ray our opinions on which reds would work well with which burgers for his upcoming event in Aspen. 

One of the wines had strong reductive odors (think sulfur and canned veggies), so Dave tried to expedite the aeration process using the blender. Oh, a man and his toys.

This past Monday, over 75 wine buyers, writers and sommeliers gathered to participate in a remake of the 1976 Judgment of Paris, dubbed the Berlin Tasting.  The Judgment of Paris was a wine competition organized by a British wine merchant named Steven Spurrier, designed to pit top-quality French and American Chardonnays and Cabernet Sauvignons against one another.  At the time, Spurrier only sold French wine.

The Paris tasting prompted these follow-up tastings: The San Francisco Tasting of 1978, The French Culinary Institute Tasting of 1986, The Wine Spectator Tasting of 1986 and The 30th Anniversary Paris Judgment Tasting, which took place simultaneously in both Napa and London.

Each time, American wines came out on top.  Back in 1976, this upset made the cover of Time magazine (the reporter, George M. Taber, was there Monday, too), while being ignored by the French press.  The 2008 movie, Bottle Shock, was inspired by this tasting as well.  Regardless of your opinion on subjectivity of taste and statistical interpretation, these events were a boon for new world wines.

Eduardo Chadwick, the President of Viña Errazuriz, wanted to see if this could work for Chilean wines and with the help of Spurrier, organized a tasting in Berlin in 2004, pitting his wine against top French and Italian wine.  These tastings were repeated year after year, from Brazil to Tokyo to Toronto to Copenhagen, finally arriving in New York this week.

The views from the ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental aren't shabby. The panel sitting at the front includes Eduardo Chadwick, Steven Spurrier, Francisco Baettig (chief winemaker for Errazuriz) and the founder of Vintus, their American importer.

We were given 10 wines to taste blind, and asked to pick our top 3.

My notes. We knew there were French, American, Italian and Chilean wines and that they were all from the 2006 vintage. On a separate sheet of paper, we simply noted our top 3 selections. Our first pick was worth 3 points, our second worth 2 points and our third worth 1 point. The results were tallied while we were all still there.

The results from the group:

1. Kai by Errazuriz (87% Carmenère, 9% Petit Verdot, 4% Shiraz)
2. Opus One
3. Château Haut-Brion
4. Don Maximiano Founder’s Reserve by Errazuriz (82% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Cabernet Franc, 5% Petit Verdot, 5% Shiraz)
5. Château Lafite Rothschild
6. La Cumbre by Errazuriz (97% Shiraz, 3% Petit Verdot)
7. Seña by Errazuriz (55% Cabernet Sauvignon, 16% Merlot, 13% Petit Verdot, 10% Carmenère, 6% Cabernet Franc)
8. Stag’s Leap SLV
9. there was a tie here: Sassicaia and Viñedo Chadwick by Errazuriz (100% Cabernet Sauvignon)

My top pick was also the Kai.  My #2 was the Stag’s Leap and my #3 was the Seña.  Spurrier’s top pick was the Chadwick and his #2 was the Kai. 

Were some of these wines not ready to drink yet?  Sure.  You might also think to yourself, with 5 out of the 10 wines from Chile (from the same producer), how badly could they fare? 

All that being said, had you asked anyone on the way in, I highly doubt he or she would have anticipated that a Carmenère-based wine from Chile would beat out heavy-hitters from around the world.