"No, Captain! That's Cedric. He's a friend."
"Merci, Cedric. Remind me, we'll send him a Red Cap and a [bottle of Brunn Grüner Veltliner 2011.]"
As I wrote in my last post, I picked this bottle up on a whim from my
favorite coffee/wine shop, mostly because I liked its soda pop-style-red and
white cap. The bottle is a promising bright green and the label is simple and ambiguous;
there is no description of the wine shown. I was intrigued by this small
mystery and then delighted when I got home, did a little digging and discovered
that the winery is in the Kamptal, an Austrian wine region, along the Danube!
After living a few tram stops from the river in Budapest for a semester, I am
an enthusiastic fan of all things Eastern European. I was understandably
excited to have a night off to taste this family-grown wine and I was not
disappointed.
First Sip Thoughts: Hot DAMN, that is delicious.
Seriously though, this may be my favorite white wine that I’ve ever
tasted. Until this summer I was a red wine drinker, through and through. Then,
the hot weather this year inspired me to drink about 20 gallons of Pinot Grigio
a week (most notably anything with notes of green pepper). Although I’ve come
to love white wines, I always fall back on something warm and red and dry as a
rule. Brunn might have just changed my go-to, the same way that my go-to movies
became Wes Anderson movies the first time that I thoroughly watched The Darjeeling Limited (Anderson 2007). It’s
full without being too heavy, well balanced, but it has a kick. A slight
tartness that makes your tongue tingle and your very back teeth ache for a second.
I finally understand what they mean when they say that a wine has “mineral”
flavors. It’s hard to explain, but I feel like I can, less taste, and more
sense the earth that these grapes were grown in, stoney and a little metallic.
In case you haven’t seen it, (seriously though, see it.) The
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, tells the story of Steve Zissou (Bill
Murray) beginning at the lowest point in the arc of his oceanographer/explorer
celebrity. The focal relationships in the film are those between Steve and his
possible son, Ned/Kingsley (Owen Wilson), his estranged wife (Anjelica Huston),
his best friend and “B Squad Leader” Klaus (Willem Dafoe) and the journalist
writing a story on his latest film (Cate Blanchett). The picture is a study of one man’s creative angst, egotism and eventual
redemption.
Sweet but not too sweet, just like life, that’s how this wine and this
movie are. Like all of Anderson’s movies, Life Aquatic features a vivid, beautiful aesthetic and romanticized
premise undercut with familial tension, death and ugliness. It’s like… you’re
going to have fun and you’re going to laugh… but you might also cry. In fact,
my only possible criticism of this wine is that it might not have the
complexity to match the corresponding film. The advertised citrus notes are
evident but the taste, while it intensifies, does not reveal as much as I would
like upon the second and third glass. The bonuses are that this bottle will make you feel as great and adventurous as the film and that it comes with its own, red, little Team Zissou cap.
To me, these two are a great match. Take them or leave them, but if
you don’t like them, “get your ass the
hell off of my boat.”
Pairing Notes: Drink a glass of Brunn Grüner
Veltliner (garnished with a Crayon Pony Fish) and watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with a friend who feels like
family.
Note: This isn’t a technical study or an in depth analysis of this
film. There are plenty of those, already. This is really just me editorializing
on the relationship that I found between this wine and this movie, because I
think that that’s more interesting. This will probably apply to most future posts,
unless the movie is really not well
liked or known.
Credits:
Film Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362270/
Wine Info: http://theartisancollection.us/BRUNN.html
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