Bacchus
Go to the web site madwines.com and you will see the madness. Esquin Wine Merchants is located on 4th and Lander near Quest and Safeco Fields in Downtown Seattle, Washington. Although many of their wines are worthy, there are far too many wines to shake a stick at. Their size and ability to purchase massive volumes of a particular brand makes them the wine sales king in the Pacific Northwest. They are so big that you hear crazy rumors about them like, “there are four floors of wine”; something a friend told me a few years back but totally false. They do have one large floor for retail sales and they also offer 4,000 sq. ft. of wine storage that is open to the public.
So while I was there I decided to grab a couple of pinot noir’s that the European Wine Buyer, Arnie Millan, recommended I try. He told me of the aforementioned ways in which they secure the wines to drive the retail price down and promised that the wines would deliver on fruit expression and complexity. Each wine was priced at $10 so I reckoned there would be no harm done to give them a try. I picked up the 2007 Domaine Michel Juillot from Burgundy and the 2005 Mischief and Mayhem Red Burgundy which is a collaboration between Aussie winemaker Michael Twelftree of Two Hands and British wine merchant Michael Ragg of Berry Bros & Rudd. I had hopes that the M&M would show well due to the New World influence. Both wines contain 12.5% alcohol v/v - a little on the light side.
The Domaine Michel Juillot had a nice sandalwood, vanilla and spice nose upon the first glass and I could taste currants and strawberries with plenty of acid. I think this wine would have gone great with dinner (as with all pinot noir) but I drank it while holed-up in a hotel preparing for a meeting the next day. I noticed that the complex aroma faded after the second glass and the acid became more pronounced. It was harder to drink as I went along which is why I mention the food, and it should be something fatty like salmon or roast beef.
The Mischief and Mayhem possessed intense fruit more toward currants than strawberry and there was a nice mushroom aroma and flavor from prolonged sur lie ageing (aka, lees ageing) and batonnage (aka, lees stirring). There was a nice lifting layer of vanilla and spice and the acid supported the fruit and was not dominating. A side note about lees aeging: after fermentation, winemakers will leave some dead yeast cells (lees) in the barrel to add a toasty, creamy, nutty, sometimes mushroom-like character to the wine. This occurs through the autolysis (enzymatic cellular breakdown) of the yeasts cells over time. Sur lie ageing is a risky move with pinot noir since the lees can absorb the fleeting fruit that is so difficult to attain with this variety.
At $10 I recommend both of these pinot noir’s to everyone for ”kickers” but make sure that you polish them off in one sitting as the light fruit fades the longer the wine is in the presence of oxygen. After drinking these $10 bottles I want to try some higher tier pinot - looks like I’m going back to Esquin….
