malbec

ESCORIHUELA 1884 RESERVADO MALBEC (2009)

My Fellow Inebriates,

I’ve been really caught up with ebay since I decided to bid on a painting yesterday. It’s easy to set up an ebay account, but let’s face it, I’m a bear, so I have no idea how to conduct myself in an auction.

I put my bid in yesterday, and it immediately went up 50 cents. OMG! So I raised my bid by 50 cents. Again! Another 50 cents! And again! Somebody wants the same painting I do, and very badly.

A new Barack Obama & Penelope the Unicorn painting, celebrating this most special season. This unique piece of art also features Baby Jesus in a manger, who is visibly overwhelmed by the unexpected display of reverence. This original painting is certain to become a family heirloom for the lucky bidder; unpacked with reverence each holiday season and displayed in a position of honor. - Artist Dan Lacey

Just then my dad walked by and yanked me off the computer. He told me somebody has an automatic bid in there, and that if I sit with my paw on the bid button, five days before the auction closes, I will just drive up the price unnecessarily, because no matter what I enter, my opponent will automatically raise me 50 cents (up to whatever his/her max is, which I can’t possibly know). Whoa! I had no idea.

Maybe this is what comes of art shopping while sky-high drunk.

But isn’t that what all art connoisseurs do? Don’t they stagger around art galleries whisking champagne glasses off omnipresent waiters’ trays, ready to splurge on objets d’art? Isn’t that what wealthy, cultivated people do?

My mum said yes, it is what they do. However, she added, the terms “wealthy” and “cultivated” have never before turned up in the same sentence as “Liquorstore Bear,” so it’s sort of moot.

I was bored out of my furry head and anxious to boot about whether I would ever possess this painting. So I figured I’d drink a bottle of malbec.

My last tango with an Argentine wine was the Escorihuela 1884 Reservado Syrah, a thoroughly enchanting wine. I’ve been wanting to try S.A.E.V. Eschorihuela’s other varietals, starting with the malbec, but for ages I couldn’t get my mum to buy it. That’s because she once had a bad malbec experience with some Marcus James back before she became middle-aged, and has ever since associated malbec with gouda and feet.

I love exotic aromas and tasting notes, so this just intrigued me all the more, and finally we bought the ESCORIHUELA 1884 RESERVADO MALBEC. Would it smell like feet, I wondered?

Malbec is a pissy varietal, prone to rot and basically the sort of grape that drives vintners to consider setting the whole vineyard on fire. A good malbec is hard-won,  full in the mouth, plummy and purple, bursting with fruit.

We pulled the cork and poured the wine into Reidel stemless glasses. I think we should have decanted it, but we were too lazy. “Breaking Bad” was at a season-end cliffhanger and we wanted to start drinking right away. “Breaking Bad” has some seriously nasty scenes in it, and I wanted to get good and drunk before I saw anybody get waxed with a shotgun.

My dad has this client who often skips the decanting stage too; he just puts his wine in the blender. If I weren’t scared of the Cuisinart I would have done that with this wine, because it benefited by opening up, and probably needed more time than I was willing to give it.

Fresh cherries hit me with the first sniff, an earthy chorus of purple fruit playing back-up. The wine had a parching dryness and fierce tannins  from eight months’ ageing in American and French oak barrels. The mouthfeel was big and concentrated. And the good news: I couldn’t detect either feet or cheese.

At 13.7% I didn’t expect this malbec to be such a creeper, but it got me really loaded—so much so that I almost returned to the computer to make another bid on my painting. Luckily I passed out instead.

ESCORIHUELA 1884 RESERVADO SYRAH (2009)

The house was feeling downright funereal, and wine seemed in order. One of my visitors had urged an Argentine malbec upon me recently. No objections here, so I hustled my mum out the door to fetch one.

She really took her bloody time. I had to distract myself by reading the news, which filled me with paranoia and dread—especially this item, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/05/MN3V1LOKC9.DTL, about an asteroid that will barely (bearly) miss us next Tuesday. If only I’d been able to contact my miserable parent to exhort her to get three or four bottles so we could have a properly apocalyptic evening.

Unfortunately restraint ruled the day, and she returned with one wine bottle, and not a malbec (she was not to be, seemingly, commanded by a 7-inch ursine alcoholic) but a syrah, albeit from Argentina as per my instructions. Fair enough.

Scientists tell us very casually that asteroids skirt our atmosphere by mere hundreds of thousands of miles every decade or so. OMG, people. I had no idea. I thought the main threats to my life were young children bent on torture. I thought I might get accidentally beheaded one day maybe, or lose an eye. But here we have massive rocks the size of city blocks careening toward us with a frequency I couldn’t have imagined.

I asked my friend Scarybear if he knew about such things. He told me to chill out and added that I am a “retard.”

So when the wine came back I was relieved. I just had to endure some DTs throughout dinner/bedtime and we were on.

The 1884 RESERVADO syrah (2009) had a real cork, something I hadn’t seen in a while, and of course yet another reminder of my limitations vis a vis dexterity.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this wine was that it was perfect out of the gate. No need to decant—my tremors bowed instantly to this supple, intensely violet, complex syrah.

As the wine opened up it revealed ripe black fruit, hints of mocha and vanilla, and lovely, balanced tannins. Aged in French and American oak for eight months, this wine lingers on the tongue with an unforgettable intensity.

And at $16.99 it’s an absolute steal: the sort of wine I RECOMMEND buying by the case—the sort of wine I’ll be hitting Santa up for this Christmas.

By the time we finished this bottle I didn’t even care about that stupid asteroid. But I’m still preoccupied with my thumblessness. Find me an invention so I can open bottles, people, and I’ll be yours forever.