Thursday, January 29, 2009

A Thief Among Thieves

This note comes to us via the New Haven Advocate, it tells us about a wine label you can find at a wine store in town, as it happens, the new wine has a Basque name.

Here you have it:

The Wine Thief's Lapartu

By Kathleen Cei

Following the popular Viña Ladrón (in both red and white varieties), a new private label red has just been released at The Wine Thief (378 Whitney Ave., New Haven; 203-865-4845 and 181 Crown St., New Haven; 203-772-1944, thewinethief.com).

Lapartu ($10) is a blend of 2007 carménère (80 percent) and syrah (20 percent) from Curicó Valley, Chile. Thief chief Karl Ronne met with winemakers at the Korta family vineyard a year ago to come up with the signature blend among tank and barrel samples.

Ronne describes carménère as similar to a cabernet/merlot blend, while syrah's known for its spicy fruit character. The result is fuller in body, texture and structure than you might expect from a wine in this price range. Since the Korta family hails from the Basque region of Spain, the wine is named Lapartu, the Basque word for "thief."


But I bet you may be wondering why such a strange name for a wine store, well, the provide the answer at the FAQ's section of their web page:

Q: What is a Wine Thief?

A: A long glass or metal tube used for drawing samples of wine from barrels during the aging process.
Wikipedia's version:

A wine thief is a glass or food-grade plastic pipette used in the process of wine making. It may be anywhere from 12 to 24 inches (30 to 60 centimetres) in length and may have a bend near one end. The wine thief is used to remove a small amount of wine from a cask, carboy, or other fermentation device for testing.

Home winemakers may also use a wine thief in connection with a length of tubing to syphon wine from one container to the other (a process called racking) or to transfer the wine to bottles.



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