Abdication.

To abdicate is to renounce the throne. Why anyone would abandon their claim to the monarchy is beyond me, I'd love to be Queen.  However, not all abdications are negative in nature.  Let's face it, if Edward VIII hadn't let his libido get in the way of his duty to old Blighty we (the royal we?) wouldn't have been blessed with the unparalleled 68 year reign (thus far) of HRH ER II.  Rather, in my humble opinion, an abdication with a negative impact would be the act of usurping the employment of a crown cap closure on my favourite Grüner Veltliner (GV).  And it happened.  This particular abdication, probably of no consequence to most, has caused me quite a bit of consternation.

I loved the old closure on the H&M Hofer GV, I found the crown cap snappy and interesting.  Starting with the 2018 vintage, the Hofer GV is now sealed with a boring old screw cap.  It is my suspicion that using a crown cap on wine, when the consumer expects this type of closure to be reserved solely for beer bottles, negatively impacted the sales of this Austrian wine in the United States.  It is fair to point out that Hofer also changed the bottle shape (more Bordeaux-ish now) and the glass colour, but those two items are not nearly as distinct as a crown cap and, to be honest, probably would go unnoticed by the consumer.  Ho hum.  Alas, nothing remains unchanged.  I'll survive, I suppose, but perhaps I need to buy myself a tiara and wear it whilst enjoying a glass of this GV in the future.

Yesterday's wine.

I had two wonderful wines with Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. 
A 2017 H&M Hofer, Grüner Veltliner (Weinviertal DAC), paired perfectly with my roast turkey and herby potatoes.  This crisp white wine even with the notoriously-difficult-to-pair brussels sprouts, sautéed with pancetta and onions, that are Vinomaker's favourite.  Delicious. 
For dessert, a traditional pumpkin pie with whipped cream, I imbibed in a 2007 Errazuriz, Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc (Casablanca Valley DO).  Again, delicious.  I gave thanks that my taste buds were having such a good time.

Capping it off.

I don't know how he does it, but once again Vinomaker brought a wine up from the cellar, to have with dinner recently, that he hadn't the foggiest idea as to how the wine came to be in Vinoland in the first place. Vinomaker is a veritable international-wine-man of mystery, I tell ya!
Unlike other times, when Vinomaker will pour a glass of mystery wine for me to taste blind, this time he handed me a corkscrew and had me open the wine instead.  However, the bottle didn't have a cork closure, or even a screw cap. Nope, to open this bottle of wine I had to turn the corkscrew around 180° and use the bottle-opener end.  How exciting, something fun and unusual, the wine bottle had a crown cap closure. But wait, not only did the bottle have an unorthodox closure, but the bottle, a sort of wine/beer bottle hybrid, was a full litre in volume.  Whoo hoo!  I was being entertained so much by the packaging that I didn't even look to see what the wine was, other than it was a white.
The wine turned out to be Austrian in origin: a H&M Hofer, 2013 Grüner Veltliner (Weinviertal DAC).  What a great quaffing wine; tart, refreshing, appley, citrusy, with a tiny hint of herbaceousness, this Grüner Veltliner was just delightful.  I don't care how this wine made its way to Vinoland, I just know I want more to appear.

Sprechen sie wein?

It's week 5 of my Wines of the World class.  Tonight found me and my fellow students traipsing through the cool-climate vineyards of Austria and Germany.  With 17 wines being poured again this session, I had some exploring to do.  After allowing myself a brief, internal titter in reminiscing about the Austrian wine industry's diethylene glycol scandal of 1985, I immersed myself in the task at hand.  It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it!

Even though these two countries more or less share the same language, I found the wines of Austria and Germany to be quite different, at least that is what seemed to be the case in the sampling of Teutonic wines being offered.  You don't have to be conversant in the lingo to understand German weins although one particular German word did keep popping into my mind.  Not surprisingly, that word was zucker.
Overall, the German wines displayed just a tad too much sweetness for my palate.  I did however enjoy a Mönchhof 2009 Spätlese Riesling which showed a perspicaciously finessed balance of sugar and acid.  My favourite wine of the evening turned out to be Austrian, a Laurenz 2011 Grüner Veltliner which was clean and fresh with a subtle white peachy-spiciness.  And it was dry.

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