Ask a wine expert what to serve in accompaniment to a citrus salad like the one featured in this month’s Dining In, and the first concern will be how to take on the grapefruit. (Sauvignon Blanc is the standard remedy.) But because I wanted to focus on the tea, bergamot and oranges rather than grapefruit, I said, “How about if we forget grapefruit and focus on the other flavors?” Below are some suggestions from the smart people at Old Town Liquors. Two of the wines are a little pricey, but when you taste them, you’ll want them — at least for yourself and perhaps a close wine-drinking pal.
Gini Soave Classico 2005, $18. Too many Italian winemakers, if they can get away with it, will produce a Soave that is only 70 percent Garganega (a late-ripening white grape variety of the Venetoregion of northeast Italy). The Gini Soave Classico is 100 percent Garganega aged in stainless steel, which offers, as they say, pure expression of the fruit. A transparent straw color, the Gini Classico yields aromas of honey, almonds and dried fruit. It is a medium-bodied wine shaped by the zip of acidity you expect from a white Soave. There is something simultaneously steely and floral about the first swallow. It’s the wine to have if you opt for grapefruit over oranges in your salad — and also if you’re trying to feed a larger crowd.
The Furst Reisling Grand Cru Schlossberg 2002, $24. A completely seductive Alsatian Riesling, The Furst is a magnificent fusion of strength and delicacy. It is so brimming with minerals that just popping the cork put me in mind of the aroma of fresh rain on stones in a forest. Make that a forest that leads to a waterfall. This Riesling is the most palatable that I, long opposed to the grape (for I did not understand its history or what it is supposed to be), have ever tasted. It brought the salad to life, just as the salad enhanced the wine’s essences. Tart, racy and fruity all at the same time, The Furst is not unlike a top-tier drag queen. In fact, the wine’s label has a bit of a WeimarRepubliccabaret quality to it. Life is a cabaret, old chum — at least while the contents of this bottle last — a cabaret in a rain forest.
Curran Grenache Blanc 2005, $25. I did not even know of the existence of Grenache Blanc until I moseyed into OldTown. It turns out, according to the Oxford Companion to Wine, that Grenache Blanc is the white-berried form of the Grenache Noir grape and is “discreetly important” in France, where more than 6,000 hectares of the stuff are planted annually. In the U.S.there are fewer than 100 acres of it under cultivation. This particular Grenache Blanc is made by Kris Curran, the winemaker at Sea Smoke, near Santa Barbara, Calif., on her new personal label. It is, bar none, the most refreshing white wine I’ve ever tasted — so refreshing that it looks like water when you pour it from its mineral-green bottle. It has the aroma of apples, yet the first taste is more like, well, like a spritz of white peach just off the tree, only it’s not sweet. The most amazing thing about this luscious wine is that its fullness of body does not come from oak. It is aged in stainless steel. So its flavor is all about the high-quality fruit from which it is made. While this Grenache Blanc may, in the end, be too refreshing to complement bergamot (which is a flavor meant to calm and relax), it is nonetheless the wine to have on hand for the whole summer.
