The greatest problem for neophyte wine enthusiasts is “option paralysis”: walking into an LCBO and having no idea where to begin. Some fine wine connoisseurs complain about the LCBO’s lack of selection, but for most consumers, their frustration comes from the opposite direction: the shelves are stacked with hundreds of wine that they have never heard of before. No wonder so many people settle on the big, familiar labels: Yellow Tail, Ernst & Julio Gallo, or – God help us all – French Cross.
The underlying dilemma is simple. The techniques that allow a wine-maker to produce a consistently tasting brand in mass quantities at a cheap price, ensure that this wine will lack the character and charm that arise when winemaking is approached as a handcrafted art. Generally speaking, these are the wines that appear in the LCBO’s General Listing. But on the other hand, small producers who make their wine with love can rarely produce it in the quantities necessary to make it widely or consistently available. These wines are carried by Vintages, but in very limited runs.
One solution to this problem is to find the Holy Grail of the LCBO: a mass produced wine with handcrafted quality. Over the next few months, the Short Cellar will spotlight a few such stars with broad distribution. To begin, I’d like to offer you a bottle of Perez Cruz Cabernet Sauvignon Reserva ($14.85 [Ed Note: No longer available], Vintages #694208) from the Maipo Valley in Chile.
This wine is delicious year after year. The (latest) 2006 vintage is a blend of 90 percent Cabernet Sauvignon with a little Carmenere and Syrah. It’s a succulent, juicy wine with a charismatic nose of preserves, rawhide and roasted chestnuts. What really distinguishes it, however, is its plush mouthfeel: like a French kiss from a fruit and berry salad, if fruit and berry salads paraded around French kissing people.
I also have several bottles of the 2005 vintage in the Short Cellar. I opened one last year, and although I adored the dense braid of blackberry and chocolate, I noted in my wine journal that the tannins “tasted like an old leather boxing mitt.” That is not as much of a criticism as it sounds (I don’t mind the taste of boxing mitts, so long as they are not propelled into my mouth by a fist), but such strong leathery tannins indicate that the wine needs a few years to settle down in the cellar. I plan to bring the 2005 vintage out by 2009. But the current 2006 vintage, which is fruitier but less structured and complex, is drinking well now. No need to wait.
The other great thing about the Perez Cruz winery (pictured above) is that everything they make is delicious. Besides the Cabernet Sauvignon, they also produce (in much smaller quantities) a Syrah (i.e. Shiraz), a Cot [Ed. Note: No longer available] (i.e. Malbec) and a Carmenere [Ed. Note: No longer available] (i.e. Carmenere), all of which can be found by following the hyperlinks. I have tried both the Cot and the Syrah, and was astounded by their complexity, depth and dignity, although both would benefit from at least a couple years of further aging. They are superior choices for some Short Cellaring the next time you find yourself in the LCBO with some option paralysis.
Matthew Sullivan is a lawyer with the Department of Justice in Toronto. He writes a weekly blog entry here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca.