The other day I stopped at a very popular restaurant and bar near my apartment. I had been to a tasting and wanted to actually drink a glass of red wine and not have to spit it out. I sat, took out my tasting notes and began composing a post. I'd seen Long Island wines on their by-the-glass menu, so I asked the buxom young waitress what Long Island reds they had that day. The only one was a Lieb Cellars Merlot 2004. "Sure," I said, "that sounds all right."
The glass she brought was enormous -- containing a quartino of wine at least, which I thought was generous in light of the $8 cost. (Many stingy glasses of $15 or $20 wine are for sale in this city.) I sipped and swirled and tasted this Merlot over 45 minutes.
Color: Dark purplish red. It looked rich and chewy.
Aroma: Rich and pleasant with coffee and blueberry predominating, heartily tannic. Slightly vegetal overtone, promising a good food wine.
Flavor: The aromas translated into smooth tastes of coffee and blueberry, finishing a bit austerely tannic after a rather sweet start. The finish was pretty long and definitely gave me the sense of fruits of the bosky undergrowth.* Acids and tannins gave this wine unexpected structure.
Final thoughts: I liked this Lieb Cellars Merlot quite a lot, it's rich but balanced, neither too heavy/sweet/woody nor thin and characterless like some of the other North Forks wines I've drunk recently. (Blame dismal weather in 2005 for that.)
If I'd drunk it with a meal, I'd have liked it even more.
The big shtik out on the Island is that "we have a climate like Bordeaux" and other such stuff. (In summer maybe, but in winter it's much colder over here.) The climate and soils, which are sandy and morainic -- Long Island was formed as glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age -- do give the region's wines a very different taste profile from California's.
As I sipped this glass I thought, "Yes, you could be in maritime southwest France. Not Pomerol, certainly, but somewhere in Aquitaine." Ausonius would probably have liked it very much too. It might even have put a smile on his face.
*I've always wanted to use "bosky" in a sentence of my own construction. I tell you young people, stay away from Alexander Pope. Read him and and you're ruined for life.
Hey terry. My mac is in the shop but i am into the Gabrio thjing. Letr me know when you would like to do it.
Keith
Posted by: East Village Wine Geek | March 02, 2007 at 12:43 PM