RACY WINES IN A RACY VINTAGE; NEW RELEASES FROM HEXAMER

These “showed” quite well when I speed-tasted them at the winery last October, much to my delight and somewhat to my surprise.

Why surprise? Call it the saga of zingy wines in a zingy vintage. Harald’s wines have always been keen (though they’ve become more accommodating over the years) and I have a theory that zingy wines really shine in relatively soft vintages, when their brilliance is welcome and refreshing. In a year where everything is zippy, wines that are already zippy can seem to pinch. So I sat in Hexamer’s tasting room and was pleasantly surprised.

The more I taste 2023s the less sure I know what to make of them. My working hypothesis is that the wines are bracing not because of markedly high acidity, but because of markedly low pH. But something tells me, if I was schlepping from grower to grower as I tasted for my portfolio like I did in the olden days, I’d run this notion by all of them and they’d look at their lab analyses and tell me that pH was on the low side but not so extreme. And I’d be floundering again. Sometimes a vintage is simply….what it is. And ’23 tends to finish with kitten-claws. And as I have said too many times, this “thing” is only a “thing” in the micro-examining environment of “tasting” and much less present in the “normal” context of slurping and enjoying. In this group, the typical ’23 coarseness on the finish was not present until the wines had been open 2-3 days.

With all of this in mind, into the breach we go.