February 29, 2024 | FEATURES | By Theo Tannahill
Welcome back to Three Bros!
For this review, we reckoned with a question that tore intellectual ruptures so deep we were unsure if we would ever recover: What is wine’s purpose?
But first, some background. For the selection process this week, the Three Bros once again found themselves at Coaltrain Fine Wine. This time, we managed to push past the temptation of the conveniently placed sale wines and dive deeper into the full selection of the cellar. After finding ourselves incredibly lost while Finn was in the beer aisle confusing German Kölsh with German Gewürztraminer, we acknowledged our meager skills in wine-related fields and asked Coaltrain’s resident sommelier for some recommendations. We weren’t quite sure if he knew what we were looking for when we asked, “What is your most chill, quirky and indie white wine?” but, nevertheless, he led us to this week’s wine: a 2021 Bodegas Margon Albarín.
In a first for Three Bros, this is both Spanish as well as a white wine. Wow! Margon Albarín is from the Province of León, a rising region in the winemaking world located in the high plateaus of northwestern Spain.
“What makes this wine so interesting?” one may ask; well, as we were informed, it is the grape itself. Albarín – completely separate from the incredibly popular Albariño – was an almost extinct indigenous Spanish grape until 2002, when a small winery named Monasterio de Corias began a revitalization effort that has since brought Albarín back into the Spanish wine consciousness.
Its resurgence has been driven by small wineries, so it is still a rare presence in a U.S. wine shop; only a few hundred cases are imported to the U.S. every year. Despite its rarity, its relative anonymity leaves the price lower than one would expect. This bottle only clocked in at $24. Luckily for us, and unluckily for Colorado wine enthusiasts, we were the ones to stumble upon a bottle.
At first glance, the bottle exudes an upscale elegance. It feels like a white tablecloth, marked in the center with resplendent gold lettering. It’s not overstated; its refined nature is original to it. The label is delicately composed and ready for some sort of display, whether that be in a tasting room or in a restaurant that serves some sort of complex seafood tower. It has a quality of affluence which, in our honest opinion, demands our respect.
Now, back to the question proposed at the beginning of the article. As we sipped and shared our various thoughts, we realized that we may not be the wine connoisseurs we conceitedly believed ourselves to be and now faced the challenge of tackling this controversial wine. There was no general agreement on how we felt about the Albarín. It wasn’t like the white wines we were used to, no longer coming from a spigot on a plastic bag somewhere in the backyard of 1020. There was very little sweetness and, where we expected a crisp, light taste, we instead found a savory salinity. The main tasting notes were of green apple and citrus, with a somewhat minty and tropical note. The apple was the strongest flavor, but not in a typical sense. Instead, it tasted like a bite of green apple layered with a slice of extra sharp cheddar. Not creamy, but an unexpected combination of savory and sour. After beer-bonging a glass, Finn’s watering eyes and quizzical yet dismayed expression were enough to tell that this was not a wine to drink for drinking’s sake.
It was fervent, robust and incongruous, much like a gray pantsuit in a Jersey Mike’s. As Mason noted, “it hits you in the ear drums.” It would be great with a charcuterie plate, shrimp cocktail, or possibly caviar” but unfortunately, we had none of those on hand. It felt like a wine one would be served at a tasting in a picturesque vineyard in northern Spain, fresh out of an ice bucket and placed on a neat and thoughtfully laid out table. Unfortunately, drinking it at a plastic Ikea table on a cold Colorado Springs evening did not bestow quite the same aesthetic joy.
Our major conflict with this wine was its drinkability. It was hard to put down more than one glass. Obviously, binge consumption is not the goal of a wine like Albarín, but we found that its complexity reached a point where we weren’t exactly hankering for more and had a hard time getting down what we already had in the glass. Many times, throughout our tasting, we swirled, sipped, puckered our lips, and we were left with inquisitive expressions on our faces as we pondered the intense complexity of this wine. Yet, after the tasting, we couldn’t help but feel as if we had been manipulated. For $24.99, we had signed up to play the role of sophisticated consumers, but the sophistication had never arrived. Perhaps it never was there internally, or never arrived externally – we were just left a little drunk on a Monday evening.
This was where the opinions were split among the group. Some of us (Mason and Finn) agreed that low drinkability could mean the wine is inherently bad, but others (just Theo) maintained that low drinkability does not necessarily mean low quality, and it should not disqualify it. In some sense, wine’s basic quality is to be drunk and consumed, much like a wine bag, but there is also a culturally constructed meaning as something that challenges, opens new sensory pathways, and constantly reinvents itself. We came to a consensus that, like good art, wine is something that transcends the innate thirst for gratification and becomes something more than its mortal form.
In our new, definitely annoying, and massively egotistical tradition of referencing philosophers, we decided to turn to Derrida and Foucault. Wine’s position as a linguistic concept is that of a literal beverage, but what is signified by the cultural construction of wine transcends the constricting barriers of language. Wine represents rich and storied historical phenomena, where the idea of “good” is relative to context, experience, and relative perception. It’s impossible to evaluate anything beyond the confines of our perceptions in a world that is entirely constructed, and thus wine’s purpose is built entirely by the self and how one comprehends the meaning and significance of the world around them. So why should you listen to us? Because this is our third wine review, and we may be a little too self-confident.
Sapientia Vino Obumbratur,
Three Bros