Corrupt Review: Ordinary FellowI Like These Wines a Lot. And It Is From.... I Can't Bring Myself Say It.
I knew I’d achieved my goal of becoming a wine snob when I casually employed the phrase “old world.” The person I said it to tilted her head and scrunched her eyes, silently wondering if I were merely a dickhead or an actual colonialist. I explained that I am merely a dickhead. My dickhead cellar is filled with 76.1 percent European wine. Much of the new world wine was obtained corruptly. Almost all of it is from California. One of the first ways I tried to display my snobbery was to dismiss wines from unestablished regions. Bordeaux? Indubitably. Burgundy? Most verily. A sparkling wine from England? No, thank you. Then my brother-in-law Ian started working at wineries in the Finger Lakes. Not only does he make some delicious wine - in Upstate New York, an area known for being upstate from New York – but he took me to other wineries there making interesting stuff. I’ve also had good wine from Michigan. And Texas. That’s actually it. But that’s three places that I was pretty sure shouldn’t be making wine. Now I’ve got wines in my cellar from South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay (juicy-but-mouth-drying tannats and dark-red tannat dessert wine). By opening my mind, I have become an even more annoying wine snob, one who talks about Uruguayan wines. Still, it took me a year to open the Ordinary Fellow wines that were sent to me by a publicist who must be mad at me. That’s because they’re from Colorado. And Colorado seemed like a mountain too far to cross for wine. But Pen Parsons, a British winemaker, is making wines from grapes from vineyards grown at 2,000 feet above sea level. I have no idea how high that is, or why you can’t usually grow grapes high up, but apparently it’s why people hadn’t been making wine in Colorado. The first thing you notice when you try his wines is how cool the labels are. Some fold out like magazine centerfolds so you can rotate them and show a different label. This would be great if you were going to a party, if one of the sides didn’t say the word “Colorado” on it. All the labels spout Walt Whitman-like poetry bragging about the wine’s greatness and exalting the common man.
The winery looks less like an estate and more like one of the breweries I visited on a three-day beer tour of Denver an editor sent me on for reasons that seemed to make sense at the time. It’s a former peach-packing shed Ben transformed into a British pub for wine. They serve things I disapprove of such as wine slushees, wine cocktails, and kombucha. They brag on their own website about being “voted #5 Best New Winery Experience by USA Today.” It is where Whitman would claimed to drink wine. But the zippy pinot noir ($65) and, especially, the mellow syrah ($48) were quite good. My wife Cassandra, in fact, has asked me to buy the syrah with our own money, which I am mildly considering. Decanter magazine gives them really high scores which means an editor at Decanter also likes them. They produce such small quantities that, fortunately for me, the syrah isn’t available anywhere. Trust me. Anywhere. Could I tell the wines were from Colorado? No one can, because no one has ever drank wine from Colorado. Could I tell they were from somewhere weird? No. I could tell that they tasted “new world.” They had a lot of fruit, but they weren’t goopy, hot with too much alcohol, or muscular. They were chill. Maybe they were kind of Colorado. And maybe I can be snobby about noticing that. You're currently a free subscriber to The Corrupt Wine Writer. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Thursday, May 8, 2025
Corrupt Review: Ordinary Fellow
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