Hopefully this post won’t sound too much like the last one that involved a horizontal tasting of great 2006 vintage wines sourced from throughout the world.  If it does we apologize, seen as we attended basically the same frigging tasting twice in two weeks, with decidedly different results.  And that’s the story.

This week’s blog revolves around the Errazuriz winery in Chile and their recreation of the ‘famed’ Berlin Tasting.  Yeah, we’d never heard of it either.  Apparently, if it is a blind comparative tasting and Steve  Spurrier is your honk (oops, sorry, ‘moderator’), it is inevitably going to have ‘famed’ affixed to its title due to that whole Judgement of Paris thing. 

Anyway, a few years ago Errazuriz put on this big shindig in Germany comparing its wines to the first growths, Sassicaia and so on.  Apparently the German tasters were in a Chilean kind of mood and their wines ended up trumping some of the finest wines in the world in a shocking upset.  Since then, the winery has been doing this gig once or twice a year in a different part of the world and charting the results every time.  And they had been winning, or at least coming pretty close, until LA that is.

Now let’s get one thing straight.  You really have to think hard about doing a gig like this in LA.  This is California, and most tasters in California are bound to have a California palate since they, well, live and work in California and were raised on California wine.  The ones that don’t have a Cali palate are more than likely schooled in tasting and preferring French wines over their years of study, with Bordeaux and Burgundy providing the model.  So, in the end, if you’re inviting all the ‘top tasters’  in Socal to your blind tasting, odds are you’re filling the room with a bunch of California homers and a few serious wine aficionados that taste thousands of wines a year and easily know the difference between a bottle of Chilean Cab and Chateau Haut Brion.  Not too smart if you’re  in it to win it.

But give the Erazuriz gang credit, they put their wines on the table and readily accepted the challenge.  So on with the show!

There were 10 wines for tasting, 5 from Chile, 2 from Bordeaux, 2 from Napa and 1 from Italy.  Here’s how the group scoring went, from 1 to 10 in preference based on a point system of 3 for 1st, 2 for 2nd and 1 for 3rd.

1st place- Stag’s Leap Cabernet SLV 2006.  Here you go.  The tasters fell hook, line and sinker for this one.  The bourbon barrel, freshly sawn wood treatment and jammy fruit landed the Cali heads in the room.  I thought it was Opus at first whiff (based on our previous tasting the week before) but wasn’t surprised to see SLV when the bag came off.  To Stag’s credit, they are really starting to clean up the wines and have dropped prices in the 2006 vintage, a big warm fuzzy.  Good wine but my second least favorite.

2nd place- Haut Brion 2006.  This wine was definitely showier than the bottle at the Frescobaldi horizontal.  A knockout, this was a pretty HB with, for this wine, a ton of fruit popping early.  It was obviously Bordeaux but the lack of Pessac minerality early on had me guessing Margaux.  A kick tail wine, Steve, Tris and myself all picked it as the #1 wine of the event, which probably vaulted it into second place.  Good thing because, if we hadn’t second place would have gone to…

3rd place- Opus One 2006.  That’s right kids, Opus is back!  Kind of.  Only the Winex boys prevented this gig from becoming a Cali sweep.  Ripe, creamy, a bit four square, chocolatey, there was a lot to like here and very little to dislike, all the winery’s previous Brettanomyces issues getting resolved from the taste of things.   Pandering, California juice at its finest…but it ain’t Haut Brion, especially with the bags on.

4th place- Lafite Rothschild 2006.  Robbed again, probably because this one was a little slow out of the gate.  Minerally, chewy, savory, dense, the old lead pencil thing didn’t emerge until they were getting ready to take the bags off.  A wine of undeniable class and swagger, it appears as if ’06 Lafite is going to be a good one.  Freaky as it may sound, Steve, Tris and myself all pegged this one as our #2 wine.  We’ve obviously been tasting together for too long…

5th place- Kai Carmenere 2006.  The Errazuriz clan break into the Top 5.  We felt relieved for the Chilean boys ourselves as they wiped the beads of sweat off their furrowed brows.  At every other tasting they’ve done, they’ve had at least two wines in the Top 5, until today.  Cali palate strikes, Chileans tremble.  This is nice stuff; big, solid, warm, chocolatey, fun to drink.  Short on style points but it made up for it with its bombastic air.  Yee ha!  Drink me!

6th place- Vinedo Chadwick 2006.  This is Errazuriz’s $150 super-duper jobber, and it’s a very nice wine.  Tons of fruit, just a hint of that peppercorny Chilean thing (but enough to mark it as such) , with a cooler Bordeaux-like vibe.  Very Cabernet, at first taste I thought it could be Sassicaia.  My third place choice.

7th place- Sassicaia 2006.  Bad showing for this one today.  The bottle we drank a week earlier blew it out of the water.  I though it might be a shorter, “okay” Lafite initially, but it gained some persistence on the palate after 15-20 minutes.  Good today, not great.  But believe us when we tell you this wine  is the bomb!  We’ve had it 4 times and this one has been the only stinker, and even still, it didn’t exactly suck.

8th place- La Cumbre 2006. What the heck is Errazuriz thinking putting a Syrah into a tasting with a bunch of Bordeaux-styled wines?  Sweet lord, I guess they just wanted to show off their awesome take on the genre.  It didn’t exactly work that way.  It came across as truly “bling” Chile in nature, well balanced, but with exactly zero Syrah character.  Not good when it’s Syrah.  I will say it was a fine red wine and I’d drink it.  But still…it left many tasters scratching their heads.

9th place- Seña 2006.  Yup, the “Super-Chilean” wine inspired by Bob Mondavi himself finished second to last.  It didn’t really offer a lot of any one thing.  It seemed a bit confused.  Cali in its fruit, Chile in its aromatic profile and short a layer.  Easy to drink but not able to run with this crew today. 

10th place- Errazuriz Don Maximiano 2006. Crackers!  Bummer for the boys as their wines took five of the bottom six spots.  Don’t know why this one finished so low.  It had better wood on it than the Stags and Opus One wines, as well as a creamier, more focused style.   Obviosuly Chilean but still, this wine excelled if you’re into ripe, oaky Cabernet, which should have caught the attention of over half the palates in the room.  Very new school. Oh well, better luck in Brazil.

I know this wasn’t the result the boys from the south were looking for but hey, they did show their wines can easily run with the best the world has to offer.  The problem is they are Chilean, and can be discerned as such.  They are the fifth option for most wine consumers, countrywise, and soon to be potentially lapped by Argentina.   The wines were all very well made, but they almost seemed a bit ashamed of their Chilean roots.  Big, ripe flavors, lots of toasty new oak, very modern in style, they were built to impress but in the end didn’t really appeal to either tasting camp.   The French wines had more layers and the Cali wines had more…well…California.  I keep thinking of the Von Siebenthal wines we’ve been selling as I write this.  They had soul, Chilean soul!  Which I think only the Vinedo Chadwick wine had to any extent.  The solution?  Seek out cooler climates? Use less new oak? I don’t know, and I’m not a winemaker.  But I do think Chile is on the cusp of something huge, something that can capture the spirit of Bordeaux and the sunshine of California in one bottle, and when they do, we’ll be the first in line. 

Here’s to the future, and thanks again to the gang at Errauzuriz for putting on this enlightening gig.  Cheers!