Notes on a dinner with Fritz Hatton.

We attended a small dinner at friends in Vancouver and Fritz Hatton
was in attendance. He’d recently organized a large auction of the
host, Rob Caine’s excess wines, mostly Burgundy and had many
interesting stories to tell, and brought some wines from his own Napa
winery, Arietta, which I had never tasted before.

2010 The White Keys – a blend of 80/20 sauv blanc/Semillon, this crisp
clean white had only been bottled two weeks before, but seemed not to
have suffered any trauma from that. The oak was very nicely
calculated, something one (well this one, anyway) yearns for but
seldom sees in Californian wines. There were some nice fruit notes in
this that made it a great combination with some finger food served
with it on the deck.

The next wines were served blind, although given the source, there was
little difficulty in ascertaining where they came from!

2005 Dom. Leflaive Puligny Montrachet ‘Clavoillon’ 1er Cru –
developing some colour, an enticing nose of mellow fruit with a citrus
edge that showed a nice spice with time in the glass, and in the mouth
smooth and supple with good length.


2004 Dom. Leflaive Puligny Montrachet ‘Clavoillon’ 1er Cru– an
interesting spicy vanilla nose, marred (for me, not for Rob or Sid
Cross, the other guest, who seem to have much higher tolerance) by
significant sulphur. Mellow and tasty with good acidity and length.
I’d probably have preferred this one had it not smelled like a freshly
struck match!

2005 Dom. Leflaive Batard Montrachet Grand Cru – excellent slightly
sweet fruit driven nose, and a lovely elegant supple wine on palate,
well balanced.

2004 Dom. Leflaive Batard Montrachet Grand Cru – some good oak in
this nose, and I got the definite impression that there was a little
RS that softened the wine and made if doo friendly. Big mouth
presence, memorable wine.

2002 Arietta H Block Hudson Valley Napa Red Wine - this wine is made
from 60% cab franc and 40% merlot, grown in ‘H’ Block, a plot formerly
utilized by Newton, but more recently by Arietta. I had zero
preconceptions going in on this one as I did not know the wines and
had intentionally not boned up on them with any specificity to avoid
forming and ideas beforehand. This was a very dark wine with
pronounced blackberry and cassis fruit, with some cocoa (the merlot?),
smooth elegant tannins, great concentration of fruit in midpalate, and
exceptional length. I am not often as impressed with a wine on first
tasting as I was with this one, and I found it to be in the old Napa
idiom of simply being an excellent well made balanced wine, thankfully
NOT one of the all too common ‘stun them with fruit and they’ll ask no
questions’ approach. Well done, Fritz!

I had been tasked with bringing a dessert wine, as Rob doesn’t cellar
much of that type, and the prospect of bringing something for wine
aficionados of this calibre was an imposing one. I opted for a very
unusual wine I had picked up in the early 1980s when I had been down
racing vintage sports cars at Laguna Seca, and did winery visits on
the way home.

1978 Joseph Phelps Selected Late Harvest Johannisberg Riesling – allow
me to blow the horn of a wine I had brought – this was really amazing
stuff! Like many of this sort of wine (mostly not made any more) this
was very high residual sugar – in this case, as high as I can ever
recall, at 30% and was harvested at 48%! It still managed to come in
at 10% alcohol. Like quite a few (including the old 1970s Ch. St.
Jean TBAs) this wine was dark brown and people would laugh at you if
you offered it to them as a white wine. For whatever reason, the
California wines of this style seem to darken much sooner than do
German TBAs. It was raisiny in the nose, unctuous and mouth filling
and had amazing acidity, so avoided the cloying effect of some. A bit
surprisingly, it still showed some petrol varietal notes in the nose,
something I have rarely seen with TBA style Gewurz even at a younger
age. I suppose the aromatics that come from the Riesling are more
persistent and do not break down as quickly. A memorable wine I was
happy to contribute (and my last bottle!).