Welcome to Wine of the Week, a new series in which Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley recommends a delicious bottle that you should be drinking right now. Last week, she highlighted a Cabernet Franc that smells like a California wintertime hike. Check for a new installment every Wednesday.
Chenin Blanc is the answer to so many wine questions.
What’s a complex, high-quality wine that can consistently be found at affordable prices?
What’s a wine that can appeal equally to a Chardonnay drinker and a Sauvignon Blanc lover?
What’s a white wine that can actually improve, not just deteriorate, with age?
What’s a wine that will pair well with a three-course dinner but also be pleasant to drink on its own, without food?
The answer to all of these queries: Chenin Blanc.
If you’re new to this versatile, deeply rewarding grape variety, one excellent place to start would be the 2018 Central Coast Chenin Blanc from Field Recordings, a winery in Paso Robles. It’s a mellow, refreshing wine that expresses some of Chenin Blanc’s signature characters — crisp acidity, aromas of flowers and orchard fruits and a distinctive note that often gets described as “lanolin,” a sensation reminiscent of wet wool that I find very pleasant. Apples and pears tend to abound in Chenin Blanc, and in this wine I get an aroma that reminds me of applesauce.
It’s a crowd-pleaser, the sort of wine I assume pretty much everyone would enjoy. For white wine drinkers who recoil from either Chardonnay’s creaminess or Sauvignon Blanc’s sharp herbal nature, here’s a wine that splits the difference beautifully, balancing richness, freshness and fruit all at once. It’s light enough to hold its own during cocktail hour but flavorful enough to be the bottle you open with a hearty roast chicken.
Best of all, it’s only $20. Affordability is one of Chenin Blanc’s great virtues in California, where in recent years this grape undergone something of a resurgence. Chenin Blanc — whose most famous examples come from France’s Loire Valley, same as Cabernet Franc, our previous Wine of the Week — was widely planted in California in the mid-twentieth century, but then fell out of fashion. Many of the state’s older plantings were ripped out. Only in the last decade or so have winemakers in larger numbers begun elevating Chenin Blanc again to the status it deserves. (Some true believers, it should be noted, stuck with Chenin during the unfashionable years and preserved the old vines, like Napa’s Chappellet and Monterey County’s Chalone.)
Field Recordings’ winemaker, Andrew Jones, has a knack for turning out unusual, surprising wines from the Central Coast. (He even adds hops to some of his wines and ciders.) Many of them are well worth trying. I would not classify this Chenin as unusual, though; it’s classic. If it becomes your entry point into Chenin Blanc, your next step might be to try Field Recordings’ single-vineyard Chenin from the Shell Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles. It’s a step up in weight and complexity, and double the price at about $40.
You can buy the wine at fieldrecordingswine.com or the following Bay Area stores: Wine Meats Cheese; Little Vine; Golden Gate Market (Sausalito); Zinz; Gus’s Community Market; Farmstead Wine & Cheese; Cordial Bottle.
Field Recordings Chenin Blanc Central Coast 2018 ($20, 11.9%)
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley
"that" - Google News
January 20, 2021 at 07:00PM
https://ift.tt/3sGNkk2
A California white wine that will please every palate: this $20 central coast Chenin Blanc - San Francisco Chronicle
"that" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3d8Dlvv
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar