Summer in Boston. It starts sometime in late June, dries up the remnants of the three months of rain that preceded it, and beats a hasty retreat a few days after the returning students have lugged their belongings from U-Hauls to their fourth-floor walk-ups in the full blaze of 95-degrees-and-humid afternoons.
For many, summer sipping means decorative, fruit-based cocktails with stuff sticking out of them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but some of us aren’t quite so willing to give up our wine. The problem is that not all wines work as well under the warm rays of the sun as they do in the fierce gale of a Nor’easter.
You’ll often hear wine types insist that heat is the enemy of wine. By this, they usually mean that storing wine at room temperature or above hastens its demise, but this isn’t the only reason that wine prefers cooler environs. When a wine — any wine — gets too warm, its alcohol sticks out like a drunken thumb. That nice, refreshing pinot noir from a few months ago starts to taste like cherry-flavored whiskey, while high-alcohol hulks like Port start to burn like Everclear.
Thankfully, the generous (and, incidentally, oenophilic) god Frigidaire has provided us with an easy solution: a nice quick chill. Throw everything — even those big reds — into a bucket of ice or the fridge for a few minutes, and the problem of excess heat goes away (at least for a little while; unless you’re a speed drinker, you’ll probably need to repeat this a few times over the course of a bottle). This is especially useful during grilling season. Nothing goes better with grilled meat and most grilled vegetables than zinfandel (the red kind, of course), but no grape is more alcoholladen: 15-percent-plus is the norm rather than the exception these days. So cool — not frozin — is the rule.
If circulated Freon isn’t on hand, however, you’ll need to reconsider your wine choices. Lower-alcohol wine — German riesling, for example — can help keep the heat down, but a steady diet of just a few wines can get a little boring. Instead, choose from a broader range of wines that welcome a good shiver. Here are a few ideas — decorative umbrellas not included.
Summer’s a traditional time for marriages, but here’s a non-traditional one (after all, this is Massachusetts): Domaine du Tariquet “Côté Tariquet” Chardonnay-Sauvignon, made in the same region of southwestern France as Armagnac. These are grapes not often seen together, because the latter’s neon fruit can easily overwhelm lightbodied chardonnay. Here, however, tasty tropicality and firm acidity are brought together with the faintest hint of sweetness.
From a land that knows something about summer heat, the Vergelegen Sauvignon Blanc (from South Africa’s Western Cape) takes intense yet crisp sauvignon blanc flavors into the red zone, something that only happens with the best examples of the variety. Yes, that’s right: taste carefully and you’ll find a hint of bright red cherries amid the more traditional grass and Granny Smith apple.
A lot of older wines taste like a fading autumnal sunset. Here’s a youngster that tastes like sunrise: the Bellotti “Cascina degli Ulivi” Gavi from the Piedmont in Italy, all blossoming greenery and ripe summer melon in blinding light, good by the chug but complex enough for a long, contemplative sip.
When a California winemaker labels their wine pinot grigio rather than pinot gris, they’re doing one of two things: grasping at the huge market for the innocuous but popular Italian wine, or indicating that they’re not making it in the dense, spicy Alsatian style (in which case they would label it pinot gris). The latter is the case with the Palmina Pinot Grigio from Santa Barbara County, which is zippy and refreshing, something not often achieved by California whites. Expect green-tinged citrus and the faint tingle of herbs.
The Edmunds St. John “BoneJolly” Rosé is a pink version of this regularly delicious gamay (“BoneJolly” is a pun on Beaujolais, where gamay reigns) from El Dorado County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. It’s a tasty burst of summery red fruit and it comes under screwcap, which makes it a perfect picnic wine; no longer does forgetting a corkscrew mean either recreating a bottle-smashing scene from West Side Story or going without.
Some wines don’t mince words. Such is the case with the Two Paddocks “Picnic” Pinot Noir from New Zealand’s Central Otago, a lighter,more refreshing version of their serious reds that’s just begging for a blanket on the Esplanade. This, by the way, is Sam Neill’s winery — just in case it amuses you to drink wine made by the guy who played the Antichrist.
Thor Iverson can be reached at wine@stuffatnight.com.
