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Jon Karl

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  1. I don't know about that, Don. True: I don't play piano. But Goodbye Yellowbrick Road was the first double album I ever purchased ...
  2. Paul is the proprietor at the Nantucket Hair Salon on H Street near 15th and he's the guy who has been cutting my hair for nearly a decade. I may not have much hair left to cut, but Paul has always taken good care of me. I've never figured out why he calls the place Nantucket (the whale flag outside appears to be the only connection to the island), but Paul is simply the best. He never fails to send me out with a good hair cut and a smile. There are rumors that Rockwell himself has been seen at Nantucket, which may explain why Paul's jokes have taken a questionable turn of late, but I love this place. Jon Karl
  3. I am sorry to hear about your uncle, Don. The 2001 Ürziger Würzgarten Auslese is a mighty fine tribute. He may not have known the wine, but I imagine he'd appreciate the sentiment. Cheers to Uncle Bill.
  4. First, Congratulations to Mark on the great news. I always knew you were a populist. Second, a word to Donrocks: You should contact the Washington Post and ask them to correct their error. This was a clear donrockwell.com scoop. Third, questions: will there be a leak investigation? How did Rockwell get this scoop? Was the leak authorized or the information declassified?
  5. I meant to post earlier on this. A couple weeks ago, I had a terrific dinner at Tallula, my first since Andrew Markert took over as chef. I've always liked Tallula: great atmosphere, a smart selection of reasonably priced wines and good food. This was a great meal; the best I have ever had at Tallula and one of the best meals I have had in Virginia since the glory days of 2941. Highlights: Rabbit Pappardelle and Duck Twofold. I also found a little treasure on the wine list: The Sineann Champoux Vineyard merlot. I've never seen this wine outside of Sineann's tasting room. Bravo!
  6. I have really enjoyed this place in the past, but last night Taberna was a miss, the food uninspiring and even the service a little off. I liked the presentation on the sea bream, but after the guy struggled to fillet it at the table for a few minutes, one of the waiters pointed out that it wasn't fully cooked. They brought the whole thing back to the kitchen. Several minutes later it was back -- overcooked and soaked in oil served with some tired veggies. The scallops were passable. If I had ordered them at Old Ebbitt Grill I would have been impressed. The soup and the fava bean appetizers were the highlights, until I realized they cost nearly 20 bucks each. I am not sure what that amuse-bouche was because the guy who brought it out did not speak english. It appeared to be mushrooms of some sort. The most interesting part of the meal was the olive oil ice cream. It tasted a little like crayons, but in a good way. And minor, petty point: they drop a basket of bread at the table. No olive oil, no butter. Nada. The bright side: a spanish Touriga Nacional desert wine was excellent.
  7. A couple of weeks ago, I made an eye-opening visit to the Monticello trail, stopping at Barboursville, Horton and a newer winery in the neighborhood called Kenswick. In the past, I've enjoyed a few Virginia whites (Horton Viognier, Breaux's Seyval, some of Linden's whites), but the highest praise I had ever had for any Virginia red was "drinkable." No more. Barvoursville had several very good wines: the '06 Sangiovese, the '05 nebbiollo and, especially the '05 Octagon, Barboursville's flagship claret. These are serious wines. True, at $40 for the Octagon, there are better wine values out there, but it great to see serious wine right here in Virginia. I also love all the Jefferson propaganda. Who knew that drinking wine could be so patriotic? When Luca Paschina of Barboursville plays the Slater game, he pours his Nebbiolo reserve. A native of Piemonte, he considers the Nebbiolo to be his best wine; in the best years ('99, '01, '05) better than the flagship Octagon. At this tasting, I preferred the Octagon (some noticeable oak on the nebbiolo), but an Italian friend who knows as much as anybody about Italian wines, and who can be a bit snobbish on the subject, recently tried the '99 Nebbiolo and declared it the best Nebbiolo he's ever had outside of Piemonte. One tip: I went during the week when the place was empty. I hear it can be quite a zoo on weekends. Horton had some good wines: the sparkling wine, the viognier, some funky varietal from Georgia (as in Ed Shevardnadze's home), and plenty of wines that would confirm my previous assumptions about Virginia wine. Kenswick is worth the visit. It's owned by South Africans who bought the estate from Art Garfunkle. They've put a lot of money into the place (which is beautiful). The wines show some promise.
  8. You may want to stop by Penner Ash. They've recently built an impressive hill-top tasting room and the wines are quite good. Patricia Green is definitely worth a visit too. If you go there, tell Jim Anderson I said hello.
  9. I had an entertaining and enlightening three-day visit in the Willamette Valley. Global warming seems to be taking a break out there. For the third time in four years, it's shaping up to be a cool year. In Dundee Hills, the vines were just beginning to flower when I visited on June 22, even later than 2005 and 2007, two of the coolest growing seasons in recent years. Here are some highlights from the visit: Thomas This guy is making great pinot noir. Some of those out here who have actually heard of John Thomas doubt whether he really exists. He's not a member of any of the winery associations; his winery is not listed on any maps. He tends to keep to himself. As one winemaker put it, "If you walked in here with Sasquatch and John Thomas, people would say, "Is that really John Thomas?" It was a little tricky finding the place. He's off a dirt road outside the town of Carlton. He gave me his address, but warned that there is no number or mailbox marking his location. He told me look for the two wood posts that mark his "driveway". Thomas bought his property in Dundee Hills in 1982, which makes him an old-timer by Oregon standards. His four acres of vines is on a southern-facing hillside near Carlton. He says he spent three years looking for the site with specific criteria: altitude, slope, soil-type, etc. For his first several harvests, he sold his grapes to Domaine Drouhin. In off vintages, he bottles under a second label called "Acme." This is a one-man show: Thomas planted the vines, built the winery and does everything himself, except on the one day a year he harvests, and he brings in a few people to help pick and crush the grapes. Last year, harvest took seven hours. He built his winery building into the hillside next to his vines. He crushes the grapes on the roof (by foot) and the juice flows directly into his fermenters. As Thomas says, "This is the only winery in Oregon without a pump." Unlike most of the wineries out here, where the vines are planted in rows 12-feet apart to accommodate the tractors, Thomas' rows are 5-feet apart, and within the rows, the plants are separated by only about 3 feet. Thomas says he models this high-density planting after burgundy, where the planting is even more dense. As somebody later explained it to me, the close proximity forces the vines to struggle, competing with each other for water and nutrients. I spent an hour out in the vineyard with Thomas before going inside to taste some wine. He clearly loves his isolated hillside and is convinced he found an ideal spot to grow pinot noir. Inside the winery, Thomas had barrels of two very different vintages. The 2007s: light in color, elegant and already tasty, although he'll keep these in the barrel for another year or so. This was a cool vintage, the kind of vintage Thomas prefers. He didn't harvest until the last week in September. The 2006 looks significantly darker than the 2007, the higher concentration reflecting the hotter growing season, riper vintage. In 2007 he also made a few barrels of an incredible rose that he plans to bottle in a few weeks. This rose was one of the best wines I tasted in Oregon. Sineann This was an entirely different experience. Sineann is a decidedly new world operation. They make a couple dozen different wines (or more, I lost count) from Oregon, Napa, Washington and even a couple from a venture in New Zealand. This was an exhausting tasting. They lined up about 18 of their wines in the bottle and I tried at least that many out of the barrel. I liked some of these (especially the Oregon riesling, which is one of the best American rieslings I've ever had.), but a tasting like this can be hazardous to your health: none of the reds I tasted in the bottle had an alcohol level less than 15 percent. These wines are not donrockwellian (with the exception of the riesling). One more thing: This year, Sineann adopted 100 percent glass closures for their wines (except for the Kiwi stuff, which, of course, is screw cap). The nifty little things cost them 75 cents a piece. Brick House I had a great time here. Winemaker/owner Doug Tunnell is a former foreign correspondent for CBS News. When he left the news business in the late 1980s and said he was going to start an organic winery in Oregon, his colleagues were convinced he had gone hippie and would never be heard from again. He did something right: He is making excellent wines and living and working in a stunningly beautiful spot. He has 28 acres of vines, about two-thirds of it pinot noir; the rest is chardonnay and gamay noir. Tunnell wines are now biodynamic. He got off to the right start by getting help from Steve Doerner of Cristom, who he says helped him make his first few vintages. Tunnell is a traditionalist. No glass closures or 15 percent alcohol wines here. He uses oak sparingly. The chardonnay was in 500 liter barrels, none of them new and some 10 years old. About 1/3 of his pinot barrels are new French oak. For the first time, I did a barrel cross-tasting: the same 2007 juice from the same block but aging in barrels from two different coopers. There was a clear difference. The wine in one barrel (Cadus) was vibrant with no obvious oak overtones. The wine in the other barrel (Mercier) was considerably more tannic and duller. The barrel saleswoman had convinced Tunnell to try a single barrel of the Mercier, but he won't be using it again. The only explanation he could come up with for the difference was that the wood in the Cadus barrels is open-air aged for 30 months before it is used; the Mercier wood is aged 24 months. I can't imagine there is much of a market for Oregon gamay, but Tunnell is quite passionate about it. His beaujolais inspirations are Desvignes and a Fleurie producer named Yvon Metras, who Tunnell calls "the John Thomas of beaujolais." Out of the bottle, I liked all of Brick House's wines, especially the "Evelyn's" 2006 pinot noir and the 2006 "Cascadia" Chardonnay, which is made from his older vines. Before we left, I asked him when he last tasted his first vintage. As he thought about the answer, he got up, went to the cellar in his old Brick House (built in 1925) and came back with a dusty bottle of 1993 pinot, his first vintage, a wine made by Steve Doerner. It had been a while since he last tasted it and we were all happy to see that the 1993 Brick House is still doing just fine. Others Unfortunately, the folks at Evesham Wood were out of town, although I did get a chance to taste two of their very good pinots over dinner in Portland and, just last week I opened up a bottle of the 2003 Evasham Wood Cuvee Jay with Mr. Don Rockwell. It's an enticingly elegant wine. I had a great afternoon with Jim Anderson at the Patricia Green winery (located next to Beaux Freres). These folks are making some good terroir-driven pinots marked by sparing use of new oak and reasonable alcohol levels (think Ken Wright with less new oak and lower alcohol). Out of the barrel, I especially liked the 2007 Ana vineyard pinot noir. Chehalem had some good, restrained wines as well. I especially liked their Inox chardonnay, which, as the name suggests, is oak-free. By Chehalem's standards it is also mass produced (4000 cases) and costs 18 bucks a bottle.
  10. Thank you for suggesting La Tartaruga. It certainly is difficult to find, a tiny restaurant located on a narrow street about 10 minutes (walking) from the Pantheon. Blink and you'll miss it. The place is intimate, with a dozen (if that) tables. I liked the wine list: a modest selection of reasonably priced wines from all over Italy. I had a simple meal -- crostini followed by pasta with porcini mushrooms -- and loved it.
  11. Right, Don. But which road do I take?
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