Here’s a wine that was released just yesterday, and should be readily available pretty much everywhere: Trimbach Pinot Gris Reserve 2006, AOC Alsace, at $18.95 and 13% alc/vol. We bought it for dinner yesterday kind of on a whim, but with at least a foggy (and in the event, correct) recollection that someone at WineAlign liked it. It’s a classic Alsace Pinot Gris with a kind of pear-Royal Gala apple nose, nicely enhanced with hints of minerality and lanolin on the nose and a rich, but lively food-friendly palate. Pear and Royal Gala can easily go the wrong way with me — too much of a good thing — but the minerality and acidity prevent this from becoming cloying. Well worth $19, and a good match for a dish that needs a white with some oomph to balance it.

But a few white wine notes:

Tiefenbrunner Pinot Grigio 2009. DOC Alto Aldige. 13.5%/$16.95. Generous nose with ripe bosc pear [not "bosc bear" as I originally typed], hint of minerality, classic wet stone, hint of yeast/biscuit/wet wood. Dry, with med+ acid and body, slightly bitter after-taste typical of PG. Richer than 2008, which we also liked. This has more character than the same producer’s Chardonnay from the same region, which may be more widely available.

Jean-Michel Sorbe Blanc, AOC Reuilly/ 12.5%/$17.95. Very attractive Loire Sauvignon Blanc. Yellow peach, floral, perfume, powdery, grassy, hint of wet stone; good follow-through to palate.

Domaines Schlumberger “Les Princes Abbées” Pinot Gris 2007 AOC Alsace. 13.5%/$19.95. Lovely fruit on nose – fresh pear, spice, lanolin, vanilla cream, durian (?), dried apricot, toast/oak. Fruit driven but has some complexity. Barely dry, med+ acid and body. Good balance.

Moltès Gaetzbrunner Riesling Terroir 2006 AOC Alsace. 13%/$19.95 on sale for $17.10. Yeast, honey, kumquat and apricots, tropical fruits. Yeast and “tropicality” in balance. Dry but not very dry. Med+ acid and body in balance.

Surani Pietrariccia Fiano 2008 IGT Salento. 13.5%/$16.95. Lemon, minerality, lees, subtle tropicality/spiciness. Dry, med+ acid and body. Richness balanced with freshness.

Sort of. We haven’t uncorked any of the reds yet, but we’ve entirely finished our Niagara whites, including a 13th Street Riesling I bought from the LCBO here in Toronto.

I am still scratching my head wondering why I bought a bottle of the 2002 (!) white Equinox at Peninsula Ridge, even though it was marked down from $40 to $25. It tasted good in the glass at the winery is my excuse, but I should have known better. I’m sure it was a fine wine back earlier this decade, but now it is decidedly tired, with hints of rubber on the nose and gaps in the palate that really should not be there. It is (or was) an interesting blend of Chardonnay, Sauvingnon Blanc, and Viognier, still probably available in its 2007 incarnation on restaurant wine lists (though the 2007 has sold out at Vintages, except for a single bottle that theoretically exists at the Main Street LCBO in Hawkesbury, Ont.). It’s made only in really good vintages, and I would suggest looking out for the 2010 version, but the star winemaker at PR, Jean-Pierre Colas, has moved on to 13th Street. According to Gord Stimmell (in the Toronto Star) the new regime at Peninsula Ridge “has really shifted gears under new winemaker Jamie Evans, with a shift from luxury level into affordable wines.” Which I assume is to say they are moving downmarket, so I’m not sure what is going to happen to the Equinox. (Funnily enough, Colas is still described on the winery website as “the man behind the success of Peninsula Ridge”.)

The Peninsula Ridge 2008 Reserve Riesling is considerably better, though I suspect it too benefited to some extent from rose-coloured tasting glasses at the winery, being considerably more impressive on the nose than on the palate. The nose was a very honeyed with tropical fruit notes, with hints of limestone and lemon as well. After that you expect something more on the palate which wasn’t quite there.

I unfortunately passed on the opportunity to pick up a bottle of the 2008 Rusty Shed Chardonnay at Flat Rock, which has received very positive reviews from a number of sources. It’s a full-oak Chard, and correspondingly on the pricier end of moderately priced, and my slight (and J.’s quite pronounced) anti-oaked-white bias led me to go instead with the much less expensive 2008 unoaked “Unplugged” Chard. The latter is a pleasant, well-made wine, with maybe melon on the nose with a hint of floral and minerality as well, following through to a well-balanced palate with a good finish. Well made, just not very interesting on the front end.

Which leaves my most satisfying Niagara white purchase of recent weeks as the 2008 Thirteenth Street “June’s Vineyard” Riesling, which I purchased at the LCBO earlier in the summer after reading a positive review somewhere — maybe Crosariol in the Globe since it seems to have fallen through the cracks at WineAlign. 13th Street makes two Rieslings — one in a more German style with a Rheingau clone in the Funk Vineyard, and this one in a drier more Alsatian style from grapes grown in “June’s Vineyard”. (It’s been a while since I’ve tasted the Funk Vineyard Riesling — I remember it being slightly off-dry, but that may have changed.) We got petrol, limestone, citrus, a hint of honey, and peach or apricot on the nose, with a substantial palate that follows the nose and gives some interesting notes on the finish. It’s still available here and there, with reasonable quantities available at a number of Toronto-Central locations. It looks like the Funk Vineyard is only available at the winery, and it ain’t cheap (about $25). Based on past experience I would guess that’s probably $25 times several well spent, but as I say, I haven’t tasted it recently.

It’s an interesting curiosity, and well done as an example of what it is, but the bottle I bought of Giusti Piergiovanni Lacrima Di Morro D’alba 2008 has got to be classified as one of the weirdest wine experiences I’ve ever had. It’s an opaque deep purple, with a decidedly purplish rim, and a strongly floral nose of rose and Earl Grey tea. I have not a clue what one would eat it with. It’s one of those wines where one thinks, y’know, this would be really interesting as a component to give aromatic interest to something else.

Here are a few highlights from our wine notes. All Vintages, current availability unknown. (Not to harp on it or anything, but one of the nice features of WineAlign is that it automagically does an inventory search of stores near you for any wine in their system.)

Reds:

Cennatoio Chianti Classico 2006. 13%, $24.95. A classic Chianti Classico with cherry, herbal, violet, earthy, and cedar/sandalwood notes. Dark ruby, darker than you’d expect from a non-riserva. Worth the extra $$.

Fumanelli Valpolicella 2008. 12.5%, $12.95. Straightforward fruity pizza wine, but not in a bubblegum way. Good $13 weekday wine.

Domaine Puig-Parahy “Georges” 2007. 13.5%, $13.95. Not a lot of bottles left the system but a few here and there. A great value southern French blend of Grenache, Syrah and Carignan — basically fruity (raspberry) with hints of spice, dried herbs, and sandalwood. Apparently it has seen no oak so I have no explanation for the spice and sandalwood.

Whites later, maybe.

Tony Aspler has been doing this for some years on his TonyAspler.com web site. I’ve been subscribing to his reviews for a few years, most recently renewing my subscription last January.

Since then, however, I’ve come across WineAlign, which collects reviews from a variety of sources but whose main reviewers are John Szabo and David Lawrason. Lawrason is well known as a wine critic — I think he used to be the Globe’s wine critic before they took it in-house, and he has been involved since in Wine Access magazine and now the Toronto Life wine column. Szabo is not as well known to me, but he is the wine consultant responsible for the wine lists at Terroni and Indian Rice Factory — I cannot say anything about the latter from personal experience but the diverse list of affordable Italian wines at Terroni is one of the features that makes Terroni more interesting than your average Toronto trattoria.

I got a trial subscription at Wine Align and I find both Szabo and Lawrason interesting and helpful. Szabo in particular is of the “I am allowed to have a point of view” school of wine reviewing which makes reading him genuinely helpful, especially since I happen to share his point of view on some things. In a sense, the whole idea is that since you get to see reviews from a variety of sources, you’ll have a better chance to figure out which critics’ views “align” with your tastes, and let them have more influence on your purchasing decisions. (The reality is that there probably isn’t much point in subscribing unless Szabo’s and Lawrason’s tastes “align” to some extent with yours — you can get the other reviews easily enough elsewhere.)

This excerpt from a recent blog post is a nice illustration of Szabo’s style and the “Wine Align” concept:

This will undoubtedly be a polarizing wine, with many swooning over its full-bodied ripeness and others, probably far fewer, wondering what just hit them over the head. You’ll see in the Vintages catalogue that Robert Parker rates this wine a 90-91, while I was considerably less enthusiastic at just 86. I found the fruit fully baked and raisined and the alcohol, at an exaggerated 15.5% (on the label), well, exaggerated. No balance, no finesse, no poetry, just sheer mass. Any long time First-in-Line or WineAlign readers will likely have already figured out which wines ‘align’ with my tastes so this won’t be surprising. I know Minervois is a hot region. I lived next door to it and traveled through it during the hot summer of 1998. I’ve visited Domaine des Aires Hautes and tasted 16-17+% alcohol barrel samples and found them excessive then too. I know that properly managed vineyards can produce fully ripe fruit at less vertiginous alcohol levels, as plenty of other producers in the area manage to do, so I’m left wondering why it’s necessary. I suppose it’s because lots of people including well-known and respected critics like the style. I can’t help thinking that if I wanted to drink amarone or fortified wine, then I would probably buy amarone or fortified wine. In any case, I encourage you to pick up a bottle and see for yourself – it will at least be warming on a cold winter’s night.

By contrast, Aspler can be a helpful reviewer, but it’s often difficult to figure out what he really thinks about a wine and why.

Wine Align charges about $40.00 a year for a subscription, with a free trial for about 60 days. Worth the cash, especially if you’re at all adventurous and want to make the most of the limited selection brought to us by Vintages and the LCBO.

So I decided to use my Civic Holiday today to get a sense of what the new AGO is really like. I didn’t go back to the new Frank Gehry space, preferring to concentrate my efforts on the first two floors.

In general, the new space is clean, well-organized, and visitor-and-art-friendly. There’s a small but functional and reasonably welcoming cafeteria in the basement where I had a quick lunch (grilled club sandwich and coffee). If all you are looking for is a decent bite to eat, this is a much better bet than Frank — which is high-concept and expensive but not really memorable as a food experience. I later discovered the Members’ Lounge in Grange House which serves (I suspect) essentially the same food as the cafeteria in a more attractive setting.

As far the collections go, the AGO is in a rather strange situation. They are the lucky recipients of the Ken Thompson collection, which has incredible quality and depth in the kinds of art and artifacts that Thompson was interested in. There are rooms full of works by well known Canadian painters (from Krieghoff to Lauren Harris to David Milne), an enormous collection of of model ships, and a large display of Chinese snuff boxes. And much more. Not everything is to my taste but it is clearly the work of a serious collector applying intelligence and taste to the investment of a very considerable personal fortune. Apparently Thompson did not collect a lot of European painting, but what he did collect was and is memorable — notably, of course, that Rubens but also some early Flemish paintings. In the Canadian paintings rooms the curators have given up on finding wall space for labels, opting instead for a read-and-return Gallery catalogue for each room.

By contrast, the Gallery’s own main collection is a much more hodgepodge affair. Essentially, they have a few really good pieces from here there and everywhere, and a lot else that is not as memorable. They have dealt with this situation in a fashion that is interesting though only partially successful. Sensibly, they have eschewed a chronological approach, beginning their European Gallery with a room full of some of their best stuff — Dutch paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Cuyp, etc. In other galleries they have adopted a more thematic approach, mixing old and new, European and decidedly non-European. Some of these galleries work better than others. There is an room full of paintings of women, which makes for an interesting reflection on how women have been portrayed in the arts through the ages. (There is also the suggestion, worded so cautiously as to say almost nothing, that men have portrayed women differently from women — a theme perhaps worth exploring further.) Not quite as successful but still worth considering is an attempt to group together a number of European paintings (and a contemporary shadow-puppet film) as exploring themes of multiculturalism and cultural conflict.

Some other attempts to make use of this approach are not nearly as compelling. Perhaps the most striking failure of curatorial imagination is the presentation of the older pieces in the Museum’s Canadian collection. The paintings are thrown hodgepodge (Pitti-Palace-style, as it were) on to a wall, without any kind of labelling or identification (to be fair, I think a number of them were also presented this way under the old regime). The one piece of curatorial text that is supposed to assist the viewer is the suggestion that we should look for the power relations expressed in these paintings. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. The best I can come up with is that the curators don’t think they’re very good paintings (some of them clearly are not), but they’ve been on the wall so long that people will complain if they take them down, so why not leave them up as an exercise in deconstruction for the viewer?

The curators have unfortunately done something similar, minus the hamfisted political overtones, for the gallery with their Impressionist and pre-Impressionist European paintings. The Impressionists (some nice Pissaros, but nothing spectacular) get their own space and actual labels; the unidentified (largely but not entirely?) pre-impressionist works on the other wall get the Pitti Palace treatment. I suppose it’s a statement of sorts (they point out that these methods of presentation are faithful to the respective approaches taken in the salons where these paintings would have been first shown), but frankly some of the paintings on the non-Impressionist wall are more interesting than those on the Impressionist wall and it would be nice to know more about them.

This kind of thing is really a failure of curatorial intelligence, and this is the most disappointing thing about the new AGO. We all know the AGO is not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and they need to work with what they have. As some of the new galleries demonstrate, the thematic approach can be an effective way of presenting art that is arguably not of the the first rank but nevertheless not lacking in value and interest. Perhaps it’s just that this approach needs to be handled in a less hamfistedly political way.

Along the same lines, I started my day at the Gallery with the Drama and Desire special exhibition. There are a few really impressive pieces here, as well as some stuff that is at least worth seeing. (I suspect the unstated theme of the exhibit is to some extent “it’s what we could get our hands on”.) It’s mixed in with a lot of fairly ordinary French and English painting, especially in the earlier galleries of the exhibition. Like the other galleries, it’s a mix of really good, decent, and indifferent, which could be redeemed by some kind of context/history/whatever for the viewer. And there’s clearly a story here, but we’re not getting much of it from the curatorial notes on the wall.

2006 Farina Valpolicella Classico Superiore Ripasso “Le Pezze” ($14.95, 13.5%). This is currently available at Vintages though stocks in Toronto Central are starting to get low. A good value on a $15 red, with a very fruity red berry nose with a hint of sandalwood and spice. A hint of candiedness which seems to have put us off the first time we tasted it but not so much the second time. Barely dry, medium and med+ body, med- tannin, average balance and finish. A yummy everyday-ish wine.

Gabbiano 2008 Chianti (bottled by Beringer Blass Italia [!]) ($14.95, 12.5%). Another good value everyday-ish wine, with a classic cherry-sandalwood nose with a hint of spice. Not the most complex Chianti, but authentic. This is readily available on the LCBO general list.

Luigi Bosca 2006 Malbec Reserva, Vistalba Vineyard Mendoza (Argentina) ($16.95, 14%). This was widely available for a while at Vintages but seems now to be largely out of stock in Toronto Central. Strong dark fruit nose — plum, chocolate, blueberry/cassis, spicy dark fruit, tobacco, hint of something charred. A very rich nose and palate with very full body. Average balance and finish. We found it somewhat fragile with exposure to air, developing some rather odd notes towards the end of the bottle. Typical of our ambivalence toward Argentina Malbec — rich, yummy, not much sense of terroir, attractiveness on the nose and palate due in part to its heavy dose of alcohol.

Chateau le Barradis 2006 AOC Bergerac (south-west France) ($13.95, 11.5%). Organic. A slightly odd wine, completely the opposite of the previous wine. Shy nose, hard to place fruit (maybe strawberry), slight hint of green, meatiness, spice, sour cherry, develops secondary aromas with air. Medium acid and body, med- tannin, avg+ balance and average finish. A light red with some interest on the nose which carries through to the palate, goes well with food. A bit like a good light Ontario red (apparently made primarily with Merlot and Cabernet Franc). Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but very good value at $14 and good with food. Apparently not widely popular since still quite a lot left at Vintages.

2008 Santa Julia Reserva Malbec (Mendoza) (about $14, 14%). J. just viscerally disliked this wine, leaving rather too much of it for me and ultimately for the sink. It’s a high alcohol, plummy red with a hint of spiciness, medium tannin, no terroir to speak of and a bit of a confected feel to it. The Luigi Bosca is much, much better.

We have unfortunately started to give up on the $7 reds we used to like and buy regularly — both the Farnese and the Citra seem to be heading increasingly in a fruity/candied/carbonic direction. I don’t think it’s just a matter of being able to afford better wines these days, but the $14.95 Italians mentioned above are increasingly becoming the wines we buy if we want an everyday red on a weekday.

The great bargain of the Ontario wine world, as far as I’m concerned, continues to be the basic $12.95 general list Peninsula Ridge INOX Chardonnay. We first ran into this wine in its 2007 incarnation, which we liked a lot and thought was excellent value. The 2008 has a yeasty-biscuity-minerally nose, with generous citrus fruit and good follow-through on the palate. Stock up and drink now — we found the 2007 starting to fade a bit by last Spring.

Another good value from 2008 is the 2008 Malivoire White, a blend of Chardonnay, Riesling, and Gewurtztraminer readily available at the LCBO (may technically be Vintages — not sure) for $14.95. It has a racy nose of minerals and fresh green fruits with a hint of yeast and honey that carries through nicely to the palate. J. found the Riesling-Chardonnay combo nose a bit offputting, even before she knew it was a combination of Riesling and Chardonnay. She did admire the graphic design on the label though.

Slightly more expensive at $22.00, but worth the extra money if you’re in the mood for a good Riesling, is the 2008 Tawse Wismer Vineyard Foxcroft Block Riesling. It has a nose of lees, honey, green apple and limestone, with a hint of acidity on the nose. It’s only 11% but that’s enough to the give the nose presence. Good follow through to an off-dry palate balanced by quite a lot of acidity. A cool-weather Riesling (no petrol or tropical fruits) but nicely made with a generous palate and enough interest on the nose to take it above the standard $15 bottle.

The only real dispppointment in the whites department so far was a rather expensive-ish Riesling from Flat Rock, the 2008 Nadia’s Vineyard, which had an interesting nose but sort of vanished into lightly flavoured mineral water on the palate (very dry, high acidity, a bit of a spritz, but no follow-through from the nose or body to speak of). It’s $20 and 10.5% — spend the extra $2.00 on the Tawse which is a much more rewarding experience.

We haven’t been able to sample the standard $14-15 bottles for 2008 yet (Cave Spring, Henry of Pelham and the like). The 2006 off-drys were really nice, though for some reason the basic 2007s went all flabby and unfocused (the 2007 Cave Spring Estate Bottled, still available for around $18, is quite pleasant but maybe a bit *too* petrol-ly). I’ll be curious to see what happens with 2008.

Haven’t sampled much by way of 2008 reds yet. Tasted one of the mass-market VQA Cabernet Sauvignon bottles at a party, a not surprisingly it was pretty green. But mass-market Cab Sauv from Ontario is not usually a satisfying experience, even in a good year. I’m curious what the 2008 Malivoire “Red” blend is like — it’s a companion to the Malivoire white blend discussed above.

Well, actually we had our trip to Boston planned for at least two months. J. read in the NYT about a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition coming to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and we realized we had a bit of time in late June, and, besides, J. had never been to Boston and I hadn’t been since 1999 or thereabouts.

We flew Air Canada, which was uneventful on the way down, and slightly more eventful on the way back since they cancelled our flight. We were fortunate to get seats on the next flight out which was also the last flight of the day. In town, we stayed at the Copley Square Hotel in the Back Bay, which was apparently the first hotel in the back bay, having been in business since 1891. It was just renovated last year and re-opened with a modern hip international-style look — a bit hipper than we really needed or would ordinarily be willing to pay for, but they had a very good promotion for their “interior view” rooms. Since these rooms remain a nonnegotiable part of the hotel’s structure, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were more such promotions in the future. It’s very conveniently located just off Copley Square, near a number of other hotels, shops, and restaurants, within reasonable walking distance of many attractions and convenient to the subway which will get you pretty much anywhere you’re likely to want to go. The 39 bus also stops right at the hotel’s doorstep which is actually probably the fastest way of getting to the MFA.

We spent our first day wandering around Boston, up to the old North End — an slightly odd combination of Revolution Era landmarks and Boston’s Little Italy — where we visited Old North Church and drank iced coffee and double espresso (J. and I. respectively) in an Italian cafe. We wandered back through Quincy Market (now unfortunately transformed into a food court) and downtown with lots of photo ops, finally getting back to our hotel via Boston Common, the Public Gardens, and Newbury Street.

Our second day was devoted to the MFA. The special exhibition — on till mid-August — is a comparative exhibition of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, three leading Venetian sixteenth-century Venetian painters. All are obviously first-rate artists, but our favourite by a long measure was Titian — J. putting it in terms of Titian being a “once-in-a-century” painter and the other two “once-in-a-decade” painters. Tintoretto is interesting, with canvasses characterized by great energy and outward drama, but Titian is often capable of capturing the same dramatic intensity with greater complexity and richness. Their later works sometimes made us think of El Greco and Rembrandt respectively. I’m not sure what to make of Veronese based on what was on offer — I think numerically he had slightly fewer paintings on display than the other two — and a certain amount of what I saw struck me more as not-Titian or not-Tintoretto than as something distinctively Veronese. Apparently Titian himself — a generation older than the other two — preferred Veronese to Tintoretto, though that may have had as much to do with personal and professional reasons as with any view of their respective artistic merits. In the evening after dinner we walked through the Back Bay and parts of Beacon Hill.

We went back to the same neighborhood on our third day to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a palazzo-style building built to order to accommodate the collections of its founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Gardner was a woman of considerable means and strength of personality who acquired a very distinctive collection of art, mainly European pre-1900, which in its day was more significant than the collection next door at the MFA. It’s still a very impressive collection, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, with a number of significant old masters (including another famous Titian). It is also the scene of one of the most (in)famous art thefts of the last century, dating from the early 1990s, where about a dozen works were stolen including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer.

We had some time left in the afternoon and took the subway over the Cambridge to see Harvard University, unfortunately a bit underwhelming as far as we were concerned. I think perhaps we have just spent too much time hanging around universities.

We spent our last day in the Back Bay, taking in views at the Public Gardens, walking along the Charles, and finally popping into Trinity Church, a remarkable Romanesque-style Episcopal church designed by the American architect H.H. Richardson and dating from the 1870s. It is interesting partly for its engineering, sitting like other buildings of days on multiple wooden poles that carry the weight of the building through the Back Bay infill to solid clay.