A Few Good Wines

Here are a few of the “new” wines I have found, quite by chance over the last two weeks. They all should be available in fine wine shops.

* Marimar Torres, scion of the famed Spanish winemaking family, has released a Pinot Noir, her first from densely planted vines on her gorgeous Green Valley vineyard in western Sonoma County. The wine, from the 1992 vintage ($25), is a masterful combination of delicacy and richness, with cherry and cloves intermixed with traces of earth and pepper. It’s an elegant and full-flavored wine that needs at least another year in the bottle before it awakens from bottling sleep. Just 1,007 cases of this first release were produced.

* The week before, I stopped in a deli and heard the wine salesman extolling the virtues of the 1993 Tiefenbruner Pinot Grigio from the Alto Adige region of Italy ($7). I bought a bottle and tried it. It was spicy and rich, a delicious wine and a lot better than many pricier Pinot Grigios on the shelf.

* Truly impressive and a real bargain is 1992 Monthelie “Clos le Meix Garnier” ($23), imported by the highly respected Martine Saunier. Monthelie is a red wine region near Volnay in Burgundy. It’s neither well known nor highly regarded, though the wines generally offer good value.

This one has a wonderful story. Owner Armande Douhairet, says Martine, is in her 80s and has no heirs. She cannot will the property to a non-relative without disastrous financial consequences, and at the same time, French inheritance tax laws could, upon her death, cause a breakup of the vineyard.

To protect the ancient vines from the tax collector, Martine says, Douhairet adopted her enologist, the famed winemaker Andre Porcheret, who had been with Domaine Leroy. Over the next few years, Douhairet is slowly, legally, granting more and more of her property to Porcheret.

The wine itself is a Porcheret masterpiece, with impeccable fruit, a minty note in the aroma, and marvelous depth, anything but what you would expect from Monthelie. At the price, it’s an excellent buy in finely crafted Burgundy.

* Tom and Nick Martin, Paso Roble’s Martin Bros., have a striking new wine that has no appellation and no vintage date, though all the fruit was harvested in 1992. Called Martin Bros. Gemelli ($24), the wine is all Nebbiolo, half of it grown in Italy’s Piedmont and half in their own vineyards.

The Italian grapes were crushed and fermented at the cellars of the grower, well-regarded Barolo producer Franco-Fiorina. Then the 550 gallons of wine were air-freighted in a special container from Milan to the United States, where they were blended with the Martins’ estate-grown Nebbiolo.

The final blend is wonderfully aromatic and complex, showing the rose petal/cherry aroma of the grape variety, and plenty of the tartness one associates with Barolo. But there is a clove and cinnamon aftertaste to the wine, something I have never seen in Barolo.

* Finally, the other day I tasted a marvelous 1989 South African red wine called Rustenberg Gold. A mix of Bordeaux varieties, predominantly Cabernet, it was loaded with character, bursting with herbs and cherries and toasty notes from oak. The wine is delicious. I told the importer, master of wine Peter Koff, that I’d never heard of Rustenberg.

Koff said the winery was founded 300 years ago and has made world-class wines in the last two decades. This one, at $20, is superb.

Because of now lifted apartheid-based trade restrictions, South African wines have been back on the U.S. market for only a year, so their prices are lower than they would be if the brands were better known. (A Cape Wine of the Month Club, based in Huntington Beach, carries a wide selection of wines from smaller South African wineries. All are excellent, and all are reasonably priced.)