Blended Cultures and Blended Wine: Santa Fe, New Mexico

I don't understand Santa Fe, nor do I particularly want to. 

Before I arrived to kill a couple days, I had heard tell about this strange city in the mountains of New Mexico.  Okay, I heard it was a cool place to visit, but nobody ever really explained why.  It was always left rather vague.

Here is why Santa Fe is kind of a cool place: the culture.  Few cities in this country have a culture... or at least a culture that is anything other then American.  Most cities in this country look and act like every other city in this country, with a few exceptions:

New Orleans: .... trust me.  You know when you are in New Orleans.

Portland, Oregon: And you can smell when you're in Portland.

New York: ... Or so I am told.  Honestly I've not spent any time there.

I would add Santa Fe to this list.  There's something about this place.  It's not quite Mexican.  It's not quite Native American and it definitely isn't American.   .... It's just Santa Fe in all it's quiet glory.

 And that's the best way I can describe Estrella Del Notre Vineyard.  There is something at work here that couldn't really exist anywhere else.  And that is just kinda cool.

Vino De Manzanas:

A wine made from apples on the property.  This wine had a cidery taste that you would expect, but it was much cleaner and much drier.  It was fairly light, just a little sweet and quite refreshing.

Symphony:  So apparently, this is an actual varietal of grape.  Some mad scientist in California cross-bred a couple grape varietals over the course of a couple decades and finally came up with Symphony.  The result is a wine a that reminds me a little of muscat, but totally different.  It has the grapefruit and pear fruit inside, but there’s also a dry, floral quality to it especially at the end.  It’s a lighter refreshing wine that is truly awesome.

Pino Noir: When you drive up to the winery you see rows upon rows of grape vines.  These are the Pino grapes.  I picked up some black cherry, and some light floral qualities on the nose.  The palate contained some black cherry, and some raspberry.  It was light for a style, but nice.

Barbera: Another grape varietal that I had not heard of. This one apparently came with the first monks that established monasteries in the region almost 600 years ago.  Fun fact, New Mexico is actually the first American wine region.  It had a very light aroma, but it’s palate was earthy, woody with a generous helping of pepper spice and a slightly floral finish.

Rio Nambe: A blended wine.  The first thing I thought when I put my nose in was… it was hoppy.  I smelled northwest citrus hops.   It didn’t make sense, but there was a citrusy, floral quality about this wine.  The flavor had lots of floral earthy notes to it with just a hint of spice.

Tinto Del Soul: This was actually something they had from Santa Fe Vineyards, but what the hell.  This was noticeably sweeter then the previous wines I had up to that point.  I picked up some caramel and some raspberry among the pepper and spice that filled this one.

Holy Moly:  Here’s were, in my opinion, true Santa Fe culture begins to take hold.  It’s a zinfandel infused with chocolate, almonds and chili pepper.  The result is a wine that’s smokey and spicy on the nose.  The flavor has some chocolate covered cherry with a generous, but not overpowering spicy background that arrives and disappears like pepper in a beer.  

Pear Wine: We get a little into the desert category here, or as much as I am willing to go.  It was sweet just on the edge of being syrupy.  Pear and apple flavors were, of course, very very strong.  It was sweet but manageable and rather nice.

Tilting at Windmills: Los Alamos, New Mexico

There’s something kinda hidden about Los Alamos.  Over sixty years ago the greatest scientific minds were assembled here to work on the Manhattan project.  To this day Los Alamos has the National Lab and then there’s the Santa Fe Institute, a gathering of some of the greatest minds in the world that come together to try and figure out.. well..  everything.

What I am saying here is that there’s a lot of brain power in Northern New Mexico.  Sometimes, those great minds… they get bored.

The Ron is the head distiller for Don Quixote.  He first became interested in fermentation and distillation while a freshman in college.  He built his first still at the time which was quickly confiscated by campus police who didn’t believe his story that it was all for ‘reasearch purposes.’

On a trip to Ukraine, Ron met his wife, Olha.  She came from a proud distilling line.  Her father, a merchant marine couldn’t afford to pay his sailors so he offered them the best vodka and food as long as they sailed with him.

Ron’s engineering know how combined with Olha’s heritage and Don Quixote was born in the mountains of Northern New Mexico.

They have two locations in the area, one is Los Alamos and one outside Santa Fe. The downside is they only let you try five things at a time, which, given a really impressive selection is a bit torturous.  They had more then five… anything.  More then five red wines, more then five white wines and more then five liquors.  Hell, they have two grappas which I will get to later.  So I guess, what I am saying, there’s more to them then what I am about to say, but I really can’t say much.

Microdistillaries are a hard-to-find commodity in this world, so I stuck primarily with the spirits, although I did try a couple of the heavier reds.

Cabernet: The first thing I was told about their dry reds is that they were going to be sweeter then I was used to.  This was because the cuisine of the area tended on the spicy side.  Dry, peppery, oaky, these are great qualities in a red wine, but they just don’t go with the food in the area.  So, fair enough.

The cab had a port wine, raspberry and dark cherry aroma and I got a pretty much identical sensation in the flavor.  It was slightly sweeter then similar wines, but not overly so.  Dry red wines often leave a person wishing for a steak.  This is not the case here.  In a way the wine stands on its own.

Merlot: Very similar aroma to the cab.  I picked up a little more pepper on the palate and it was a little drier, but other then that I really couldn’t detect a huge difference between the two.

Okay enough with the wine.  It’s distillation time.

Bourbon: Made from blue corn and wheat.  Blue corn is used in a lot of cuisine here and has a slightly sweeter flavor.  I didn’t get that as much from the bourbon.  It was incredibly smooth, though.  There was some leathery, oaky notes.  It was slightly sweet but I don’t know if I could pick it out from any other high-quality bourbon.

Grappa: The story of grappa, as I was told, was that this was a peasant drink in old Italy.  As soon as the rich folk had used the grapes for their wines, the peasants would gather the rest, get what juice they could and distill it down.  They had two types at Don Quixote, aged and un-aged.  I went with the un-aged since I was told it wasn’t as sweet.  Light, semi neutral spirit.  I picked up some light port wine and cherry flavors along with a nice smooth character.

Gin: This was far and away my favorite.  Even those who consider gin, as one of my friends would put it, "pine trees and ass," would have to give this creation some props.  It’s made from blue corn again with New Mexico herbs and spices including juniper (of course) Pinon Chamisa Sage and lemons.  The result is this wonderful aroma like the desert after a rainstorm.  The astringent juniper berries are mellowed by the slightly spicy, slightly sweet concoction with just a hint of citrus in the back. Unlike the bourbon you can pick up quite a bit of the extra sweetness from the blue corn here.

The Purists: Denver, CO

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."

Frank Zappa

Posted on the Lone Tree Brewery Website.

There are places where people go to indulge in the art and the craft of drinking.  It is a place where everyone, and not just this lone lunatic, smells their beer before drinking.  It's a place where asking for a menu will get you a nod to the beer list scrawled on a black chalkboard above a row of pints.  It's a place that makes beer, and beer alone.  They will sell you beer, you will drink it and life is good.

Lone Tree brewing is a place like that.

'Tasting room' is the term often thrown around for a place like this, but I'm not much a fan of that term.   For one, it assumes you can't get a proper pint there.  This is not the case. You can.  You can get two or three if you like.  Five or six even.  Someone might start sizing you up for a flight out the front door much past that, but it's an option.

Second, there's a pretension attached.  Tasting room brings images of people in suits swirling wine around their mouths and spitting it into a bucket. (And they call themselves civilized.)  It's a pretension that might serve the wine world, but rarely serves beer.

 If anything, this is just a neighborhood bar.  It's a brewery that opens it's doors everyday so that people can stop by and enjoy a pint or two, just like any good neighbor should.  There's no kitchen for food, although I hear tell that it's a favorite destination for local food trucks.

It's a neighborhood bar for the beer geeks in the area.  Within minutes of sitting down and ordering a tasters flight I found myself engaged in conversation about the finer points of Lone Tree's beer selection.  The people I talked to knew just about every bar and restaurant that brews it's own beer  in the greater Denver area.  They gather here because, "The beer is good.  It's close.  It's quiet.  You just can't beat it."

Left to right: Helles, Blonde, Irish Red, Pale, IPA, Stout

Mountain Momma Hells:  Grassy pilsner aroma but with a flavor that blows pretty much any other light beer I've had in quite a while.  I picked up a good amount of light malt with a slight peach or light fruit flavor. There's a tiny bit of herbal hop character blended in there as well.  It became one of my favorite beers here and probably one of my favorite of all-time when it comes to the light styles.

Ariadne's Belgian Blonde: There was a very light woodsy aroma here.  The Belgian character took over in force in the flavor with lots of fruity esters lots of clove and cinnamon spice but not so much that the beer is undrinkable.  Overall pretty standard for the style.

Acres O Green Irish Red: No aroma to speak of.   Nice malty,woody, slightly smoky flavor right off the top.  The smoke quickly fades and some light spicy hop character takes over and it finishes just a little bit dry.

Toots Oatmeal Stout: This is a stout on the drier end of the flavor rainbow.  Chocolate aroma with a dry, roasted flavor.   Some woody, earthy flavors peak through with maybe a hint of leather as well.  

Outta Range Pale: Sweet orange citrus aroma which translate into the flavor profile as well.  I picked up some spiciness as I went on as well, but overall it was a nice, balance pale, although it might be flirting in IPA territory, methinks.  

Hoptree IIPA: This was a hop bomb that sort of crept up on me.  At first... the citrusy, floral hops were there and in force.  Their more astringent qualities were tempered by the malt so it was rather nice at first.   After a while... Maybe it was the fact that some of the medicinal flavors were starting to peek through or maybe the sheer amount of malt needed to tame this bastard was starting to get to me, but  after my 6oz sample I more or less had it with this.  It was pretty good, but the taster was about enough for me.

Pizza and Beer, Rocky Mountain High Edition: Denver, CO.

I'm sensing at pattern.

Pizza and beer are, of course, a match made in fat, happy, drunken heaven.  The two words flow together like poetry.  In fact, if I were to yell, "Who wants pizza and beer?" everyone would raise their hands with the possible exception of those who had recently had pizza or those who don't drink. (You're in the wrong bloody blog if you're in the latter category.  Seriously, how did you even get here?)

So it shouldn't be all that surprising that I am running into more and more pizzeria/ microbreweries scattered among the landscape.  For example there is Oggies, a chain I have been seeing with more and more frequency across this great land and I recently ran into Papago brewery in Arizona that doesn't specialize in pizza per se, but they have a certain mad scientist approach to the dish.


Dads and Bros. Breweria is one of those, a pizzeria and brewery shacking up together, splitting the bills and making sweet love.

"It's actually the smallest microbrewery in Colorado," said Paul as he was pouring me my taster's flight.  The first thing I liked about this place was the staff.  The good people slinging beer would stop and talk about their beer and the brewery.  The owner occasionally wandered by to glad-hand patrons, shoot the shit and ask the key question,

"So what do you think of the Basil Watermelon Wheat?"

More on that in a moment.

"It's kind of cool to operate on this scale, you know?  It allows us to kind of experiment."

The second thing I liked about this place is that they are a bit of a wild card when it comes to brewing.  They have some pretty standard brews, as you will see in a moment, but every once in a while, there's something quite a bit different.  A beer that makes you're eyes go wide and forces you to look down into your glass to see what they hell you just drank.  In a good way, mind.

Basil Watermelon Wheat: "Not our most popular beer," Paul said when I ordered a pint.  "People either really like it, like you.  Or people...don't."  In the middle of a hot summer day, I thought this was a nice beer to have.  It has a very, very light fruity aroma.  As far as the flavor goes, the name pretty much says it all.  Watermelon's flavor is so light it's amazing that it comes through at all and it's backed up with a sweet slightly minty herbal flavor.  Watermelon and basil.   I don't see myself filling the fridge with this beer, but for something refreshing and different, I'll give it a swig or two.

Fathom Amber: The aroma on this beer had a very nice sweet toffee, caramel character to it.  Unfortunately, this is one of those where the smelling the beer was better then actually drinking it.   The richness in the aroma was gone and the flavor was very light with herbal, woody flavors mixed in that clashed with the malt.  It wasn't bad, but not my favorite.

Toffee Porter: Mocha coffee aroma.  This is a coffee porter with a sweet chocolate character that makes for a much sweeter beer.  There was no bitterness that I could find, just a lot of creamy coffee mocha flavors.

Citrasmack: Okay now that we've finished with all that malt, it's time to temper that with a dose of hops.  Citrasmack had a nice spicy citrus aroma.  The flavors from the hops were a little strange.  I wouldn't say they clashed, but it was one of those times where couldn't quite decide whether I like the thing or not.  I picked up some pine and citrus throughout with a lemongrass finish.

Liquid Resume: Ah, if only every job application required one of these.  This pale ale was basically a lighter version of the Citrasmack.  I picked up more earthy flavors among the pine and citrus with just a little more spice.  I got most of the qualities from the IPA, but at a volume that was more palatable.

So it's like this.  The past week was spent in kind of a slow stagger down the rocky mountains.  I started in Denver, wandered into Santa Fe, passed out for a moment in Flagstaff and finished in Phoenix.  It all happened in the space of a week, but screw it, I'm reporting it over the course of the next month or so.

It's a lot of territory to cover, so grab a pint or two.
Cheers.