Archive for August, 2010
Barrington Coffee Roasters Daterra Reserve 2005-2007 Vertical
I recently had the privilege of taking part in a vertical tasting of three vintages of coffees from Brazil’s Daterra Farms, all roasted by Barrington Coffee Roasting Company. According to Barrington Coffee’s Barth Anderson, “each year Daterra chooses what they deem to be ‘the best’ of all of their coffees and they give it the Daterra Reserve distinction. It is a choice they make based upon cup quality, rather than uniformity of varietal or terroir.” Excitingly, what this means is that because Daterra grows a number of different varietals of coffee, each year the Daterra Reserve distinction may be bestowed upon a different varietal. Anderson stated that, “As they use an appellation system for keeping their coffees geographically distinct, they certainly have the ability to offer exactly the same coffee from each years harvest. But this doesn’t necessarily guide them in their choice of each year’s best. This did, however, happen to be the case in ’05 and ’06 with the Acaia.”
Barrington Coffee created their Landed Aging Program as a means of carefully aging those coffees that they believed would further develop and improve with time. In their warehouse they have a number of coffees aging, from a variety of producers and vintages. They began the program several years ago, and now have multiple vintages on hand from many of the same producers, allowing them to stage exactly the kind of vertical tasting that I took part in. Coffees that are part of their Landed Aging Program are sealed in special bags and stored in a temperature controlled environment, with the goal of allowing them to age gently and evenly.
Now, as anyone who has thought about aging wines knows, not all wines get better with age. Some, such as those from Barolo and Sauternes are known to improve with age, showing well after decades. An extreme example of this would be the longevity of Vin Jaune from France’s Jura region, wines that are known to show beautifully after six decades or more! Yet, most wines are not meant to be aged, and holding onto them too long simply results in a wine that is a lesser shadow of its former self. Barrington Coffee faces a similar dilemma in choosing which coffees to include in their Landed Aging Program. Not all coffees will improve with aging, and yet the very practice of aging coffee (on purpose) is in its infancy, and we know little about what qualities a coffee needs to have to age well.
From the outset of their Landed Aging Program, Barrington Coffee has been putting away vintages of the Daterra Farms Reserve, a coffee that has a very good reputation. The varietals are not the same each year, but vary from year to year. The 2005 and 2006 are both Acaia and the 2007 is Yellow Bourbon. The 2008 and 2009 (not included in this tasting) are Red Bourbon. All this really means is that Daterra Farms felt that for each of these specific vintages, these varietals were the best of their many lots of coffee. It’d be interesting to speculate as to why Acaia was the choice two years in a row, followed by three straight years of bourbons. Anderson stated that, “[this] helps to illustrate how even the same varietal on the same plot of land can exhibit different characteristics from year to year.” So what leads to these year-to-year differences? What in the growing season results in such vintage variations?
Tasting Notes
This vertical tasting was done as a cupping, with the coffees initially presented one at a time, followed by side-by-side comparisons.
2005 Vintage (Acaia varietal)
The nose has notes of macadamia nuts, milk chocolate, black cherries, and cinnamon. The palate is gentle and softly textured, with warm sweet flavors of almonds, chocolate, caramel, and roasted peanuts, complemented by a touch of orange zest. The finish is tantalizing, lingering, and sweet. Of the three vintages, I found this one to be the nuttiest of them all, full of peanuts, almonds, and cashews.
2006 Vintage (Acaia varietal)
The nose on this vintage has notes of cayenne, cardamom, brown sugar, and roasted nuts. The palate is softly textured, opening with flavors of smoke and toast, and then transitioning to sweet flavors of vanilla, turbinado sugar, and cocoa powder, with an undercurrent of almonds and lime citrus. The medium-length finish leaves lingering flavors reminiscent of the palate. This coffee was the sweetest and smoothest of the three.
2007 Vintage (Yellow Bourbon varietal)
Right from the start, this coffee is an entirely different experience from the previous two vintages. Notes of smoky game, chocolate covered cherries, spices, and pie crust waft out of the cup. The body is firm with a supple texture supporting sweet flavors of caramel, apple butter, milk chocolate, almonds, hints of citrus. A brightening acidity offsets this collection of sweet, mellow flavors. The gently rolling finish exhibits flavors of milk chocolate and key limes.
In sum, this was a very fun, thought-provoking experience. Being able to taste three consecutive vintages of the coffees that Daterra Farms felt were the best from each year’s crop really illustrated both how coffees change over the years, and how different varieties age in such unique ways. As I mentioned earlier, the last two vintages have been bourbon varietals, same as the 2007. It would be a great experience to taste the 2007, 2008, and 2009 side-by-side when the 2009 is released this fall, and then again a couple of years down the road, when they’ve all gotten a few years of aging in. Something to look forward to I hope!
De Forville Nebbiolo d’Alba San Rocco 2007
There are some wines that you know are going to be good, even before you’ve had the chance to try them. Whether because of the producer or the importer, or perhaps the recommendation of a trusted source, these wines bring a wonderful degree of promise and sense of expectation to the glass. This was one of those, a wine that I had often imagined tasting and looked forward to with much anticipation.
The reason was two-fold. Firstly, De Forville is a Piedmont estate (and I love the wines of Piedmont) that I’ve read very good things about, especially the wines that they make from the famed Nebbiolo grape. Secondly, their wines are brought into the U.S. by Neal Rosenthal, my favorite wine importer by a long shot. The combination of a Piedmont wine, the Nebbiolo grape, and Neal Rosenthal as the importer was very exciting.
The De Forville family founded the estate in 1860 after first settling in Piedmont after leaving Belgium in 1848. Since then, the estate has been passed down from generation to generation and is managed today by Valter and Paolo Anfosso. The estate’s total holdings measure 10 hectares in the villages of Barbaresco (3.5 hectares) and Castagnole Lanze (6.5 hectares). The Nebbiolo grapes for this wine come entirely from the San Rocco Seno d’Elvio vineyard in the Barbaresco area.
In San Rocco, Nebbiolo d’Alba vineyards account for only 4.66% of the total plantings, with the majority going to Dolcetto d’Alba, Moscato d’Asti, and Barbera d’Alba. It’s one of the lesser areas of vineyards of those that contribute grapes to the great DOCG wine Barbaresco. Nonetheless, while Nebbiolo may not account for a large percentage of the grapes grown here, this noble variety has a long history of being planted here, and the De Forville estate uses Nebbiolo from throughout their holdings to produce a very well-regarded Barbaresco.
De Forville produces their wines pretty traditionally. After crushing, the grapes are left to ferment on their skins for as long as 4 weeks in the case of their Barbaresco. In late November, the wines are racked into large oak barrels (called “botti”) where malolactic fermentation occurs. Some of the Barbaresco and a Barbera that they produce are additionally aged in small oak barrels.
Tasting Notes
The nose is a complex blend of cranberries and candied cherries with the medicinal element of a ludens cough drop, underscored by a hint of a vanilla, and a foundation of warm earthiness. The palate is medium textured with huge, gripping tannins that threaten to grab hold of your taste buds and not let go. There are flavors of bing cherries, black licorice, tart raspberries, cocoa powder, and chili powder.With softer tannins the flavors would be more melded and pronounced, but at this stage they end up being just slightly muted. The finish is full of fresh, red fruits, with bowls of cranberries, raspberries, and strawberries, with subtle hints of mint and chipotle.
An absolutely intriguing wine, that I’m very lucky to have had the chance to try. I think it’s great now, and will be really stunning in a few years time.
It’s rare that I taste a wine and feel that it was opened before its prime. I’m really not that sophisticated when it comes to aging wines and having the patience to wait until they hit their prime. But in tasting this wine, and feeling the grip of those tannins and the influence that had on the presentation of the wine’s flavors, it was quite clear that in a few years, once those tannins mellowed and smoothed with time, the wine would be an absolute beauty to behold. So go! Buy a few bottles of this, stash them in your cellar, perhaps under the floorboards so that you forget they’re there.
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Ron Santa Teresa 1796 Antiguo de Solera Rum
Lately, my curiosity has been piqued by a spirit that’s new to me: rum. Up until now, I’ve discounted rum, hewing to the relatively common notion that whisky was a more complex and dynamic spirit. And for someone such as myself, who is as interested in the hows, whys, and whos behind the bottles, whisky is a field rich with things to learn. I’ve made my way from scotch, to bourbon and other American spirits, and have dabbled in learning about whiskies from other countries.
But rum lay outside of this narrow (whisky-centric) worldview. As it turns out, this has been to my detriment.
Rum has a history that is at least as long, and certainly as interesting, as that of whiskey. Records of rum distilling in the Caribbean islands goes back to the 1400s, and many rum authorities believe that distillation may have been going on long before this. The logic behind this is that rum was first distilled from molasses, which itself was the by-product of sugar production, the one industry that really thrived in the Caribbean back then. Molasses was considered useless by sugar producers, and was usually thrown away. That is, until they learned how to distill it to produce rum. The international thirst for rum steadily grew to encompass all of the western European countries and the early American colonies, becoming an insatiable market for the rum distillers. And if they weren’t distilling rum, they were shipping molasses to other countries who were distilling it themselves.
The romance between rum producers and their public eventually faded, and rum fell onto hard times as its popularity waned. Still, it’s amazing to consider the argument (whether or not you accept it) that rum was truly the first American spirit, as argued by Wayne Curtis in And A Bottle Of Rum. Especially since rum plays a distant fiddle to most of the other distilled spirits on the market today, and the US government has long since proclaimed bourbon to be America’s national spirit.
Yet, while rum may reside outside of the limelight, it is by no means a dying spirit. There are a wide range of very good producers, and lots of excellent bottlings.
One of the principal elements separating the many producers, is their production method. Rum can be distilled from either molasses or sugar cane. Molasses-based rums are by far the most common, whereas sugar-cane based rums are made by relatively few distilleries, most notably all of the Martinique distilleries, where rum (known there as Rhum Agricole) is governed by a French Appellation d’Origine Controllee (AOC) designation (much like French wine). The AOC rules stipulate that rum must be made from sugar-cane, and specifies the different aging methods and age designations that can be used. Rum distilled from sugar cane is not necessarily better, just different.
Ron Santa Teresa is a Venezuelan distillery that has been distilling rum since 1796, and was the first licensed distillery in the country. They distill their rum from molasses that they obtain from a nearby sugar mill that processes sugar cane grown on the Santa Teresa estate. This satisfies most, but not all, of their production needs, and thus sugar cane is sourced from other estates to complement their own supply.
This particular bottling is unique in that it is produced using the solera method, whereby rums are transferred through a series of barrels during an aging period that may last for a decade or more. During this process, rum is transferred from barrel-to-barrel, with each barrel never being fully emptied. Thus over the course of time, rums of many different ages blend together in the different barrels, and ultimately, the last barrel in the solera ends up containing rums of significant age (and quality). In some distant way, this is similar to the approach taken by High West when they blend 6- and 16-year old ryes together and bottle them. But the significant difference is that the solera method allows the rums a longer time to marry together in the barrel, ultimately producing a spirit where the multiple rums have a better chance of coming together to form a seamless whole.
Tasting Notes
The rum pours a lovely amber with interwoven gold hues. The nose has notes of macadamia nuts, nutmeg, maple syrup, figs, and cherries. The palate has a soft, velvety body, and a gentle texture. The flavors are deeper and sweeter here than on the nose. Chewy flavors of grade B maple syrup, almonds, cherries, late-season raspberries, figs, and a subtle hint of pears. The finish is enduring with notes of maple syrup, fruits, and a hint of citrus.
This is a delectable rum, full of rich, warming flavors. You can really sense how the solera aging has softened the edges, producing a smoothly textured body that supports the rich flavors nicely. As I said earlier, I’d love to compare this to a sugar cane-based rum, just to witness the differences between the two, however subtle they may be. But as a benchmark for molasses-based rum, this is very good.
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