the magic is back

a bottle of frank cornelissen's contadino 4 from the 2006 vintage opened in new orleans in 2012 was one of my first conversion wines: a bottle that changed my mind about what we should drink and why we should drink it. ashy, fizzing, the colour of rhubarb stems, the scent of ripe crushed raspberries and cider, the flavour of basalt and cinders. it was a magic bottle, and each case of contadino would have, if you were very fortunate, a single magic bottle. (often it would have no magic bottles but many undrinkably acetic ones.) nonetheless, i lavished hard-earned doubloons on more contadino from various later vintages hoping to replicate that first experience. no luck. with each successive vintage, contadino remained a crazy patchwork long-macerated blend of red and white grapes but slowly became more extracted and stable. reliably tasty; no longer a catalogue of wine flaws with the potential to be confusingly and improbably delicious.

but the magic is back with last night's bottle of cornelissen's susucaru 6 (vintage 2013)—one of a pair which traveled from etna to cambridge ma to london, to be opened on the spur of the moment at the remedy. the other bottle was undrinkable but i drank it anyway. vive la variance.

sicilian overload

otto is never crowded at lunch, the vegetables are good, and the pastas are usually excellent. bucatini all'amatriciana seems to be a menu staple and is always portioned with restraint and generously supplied with guanciale. the list of wines by the bottle is intimidatingly long, but worth attention. munjebel 8 is 100% nerello mascalese grown on the slopes of mt. etna, from frank cornelissen's 2010 vintage. extraordinarily intense, and with the scent of freshly wetted tephra—carbonic, limestoney, ashy. full of unexpected contradictions, it is rich and deep, brittle and vibratory, dense and weightless. but maybe more dense than weightless. a single glass would have been perfect; three at lunch was perhaps a bridge too far.