For me wine is for fun, for drinking, for talking, for dancing, for taste and sometimes for thinking. Like a good tomato I like it best unadorned, sans hoo-ha, flip-flap or hullabaloo (I eat the best tomatoes over the sink). So with tomatoes vaguely in mind, we started a pop up wine project. A place for ourselves and the undies-wrapped wines in our suitcases: a no frills, no chairs, no beer-affair with an up-turned bookshelf for a bar.
We call it Le Carton and next time we’ll be pouring wines from Georgia which is kind of killing me 'cus that's all the way in October and it's only August and I’m not allowed to drink any of the wines until then. But this isn’t about then. Actually I wanted to talk about our first pop up: that time we played bar on a street corner outside a club in the rain, that time being the first time I tried "La Cosa, The Thing".
The Thing is a sweet wine made by Bodegas Maestro Tejero from high-grown (1.000m) Muscatel de AlejandrÃa gapes (stems, seeds, skins and all) and it smells like raisins. Like plump to burst raisin-bread toasted to caramel, slightly burnt, both sides buttered-raisins and raisins fresh stuck in fried dough powder sugar down your shirt. Of butter-oozy hot cross buns and boozy English wedding cakes and way wine cellars smell like raisins and basically any raisin you can think of except awkward musili raisins
(Turns out the maestro does effectively, if not in fact, make The Thing with raisins; relying on noble rot to shrivel some of the grapes ((commonly grown to make raisins)) and hanging the rest out to dry for two months.)
The next thing I’d say is that drinking The Thing in the rain will make you forget it’s raining. Take a sip and sit back for (rocket) l a u n c h, sour watermelon acidity shooting >>>shocks<<< through to the dark sides of your teeth, fruity sugar stardust ricocheting around where your dentist tells you to clean better and giving you a big acid s m ile.
Tasting notes:
Looks like a chunk of fossilised amber with things in it (unfiltered, though no mosquitos). Smells like raisins and early-stage fermentation. Tastes intensely fruity — of kiwi, rhubarb stalks dipped in sugar, an apple picked in August, yellow grapefruit, salted limes, watermelon Jolly Rancher yes I know this isn’t a real fruit — spliced through with laser-like acidity that blasts your palate clean after each sip, taking you on to the next and next and next.
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"La Cosa The Thing" 2014
Bodegas Maestro Tejero
Muscatel de AlejandrÃa
Segovia, Ribera del Duero, Spain
