Schildknecht

A lot of the fun of drinking wine is finding affordable bottles you haven’t met before. The days of doing that bumming around Italy or Northern California seem to have dissolved in the glare of globalism. Still, these can be good days for the hunt if you follow small importers with similar tastes. One of these is United Vintners in Cincinnati and its representative, David Schildknecht. Big Red recently got in half a dozen new choices from Schildknecht and I have been having fun with them. One was the Ladoix I talked about in my last post. I have recently had a couple of others. First was Ch. Micalet 2001. This is a wine made in a small Bordeaux village, tucked anonymously between St. Julien and Margaux. The wine is half merlot and half cabernet, purple-black, an aroma of violets and then black currants, with a whiff of tobacco leaf. In the mouth it has a creamy texture, a little vanilla and more black fruit, with sweet tannins and a long finish. My first thought was of a California meritage wine but when I paid more attention there were signs of a complex Bordeaux. All in all, almost a steal for twenty dollars. The second was a white Burgundy, 2002 St. Romain, made by Verget for eighteen dollars. I simply pulled the cork and the scent jumped up to greet me with a mixture of stones, pears and some simple flower. When I poured it, I got a gold color and additional notes of honey and citrus. When I was halfway through the glass, Julia walked in and asked what I was drinking, saying she could smell it from the next room. For some inexplicable reason, the wine kept bringing Cate Blanchett to mind. On an only vaguely related note, during a tasting in Bloomington last year, Schildknecht mentioned particularly a restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky, called Jonathan’s. He liked the food and praised the chef’s palate for wine as well. So we were in Lexington over the weekend and ate there. Jonathan is indeed an imaginative and accomplished cook, whose menu is obviously connected with the South – fried green tomato salad, country ham with asparagus, lobster grits, you get the idea. I had some beef medallions with morels (lots of morels) that made be a happy man. With this I had an Oregon pinot noir (Erath 2003) that was delicious if not complex, and to my delight served in a Riedel pinot noir glass. One of the charms of the wine list is the reasonable markup in price: The Erath was $32.