California Wine & Other Wine Related Rants

A follow up to Gazapacho...

2007-09-07T01:32:00.000-07:00

I spoke of some possibly wine pairings in my last post. I think many may be looking at their garden and thinking the same thing. Ironically enough, I received a nice little recipe from my friend Robin Garr who oversses the internet's finest wine & food discussion boards. For a quick gazpacho recipe, visit last week's Food Lovers' Newsletter and see my pervious post on what to pair it with. Robin seemed to come to may of the same conclusions about food matches - Rose, dry, crisp spanish whites such as Albarino or Txakoli and (as I added) bubblies of all sorts always work....

Quick Gazpacho - and Finding A Wine For It

2007-08-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

(Note: I have discontinued the series of posts on choosing wine from a wine list as I have taken a job as Wine Director of a rival restaurant in Pittsburgh. But I will continue to write about matching food & wine, beginning right now.) If I take a peek at my garden, I have tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and corn. So I walked down to the grocery store and bought an onion and went to the fish market for some shrimp and - voila! - fresh gazpacho!

The problem is gazpacho isn't the easiest thing to find a wine for. Tomatoes have a good bit of acidity in them. + as a chef once taught me, the key to great gazpacho is a really good vinegar providing the balance.

If you search around the internet, you see a lot of people that aren't sure what will work. You also see a lot of people who give things a try and fail.

Here are my two suggestions. (1) Take a hint from the food. Where is gazpacho from? Spain. Try a crisp Spanish white. This was the solution I used. At my restaurant I'm currently pouring 2006 Albarino from the producer Vionta in Galicia. Crisp, fresh and lively, the albarino and gazpacho are perfect comlplements to each other, each as refreshing as the other. (2) One other choice is a rose with good acidity. I recommend either a Tavel Rose from France's Rhone Valley or an Italian Rosado.

In short, don't fret. You already know that you have the perfect ingredients for gazpacho in your garden. Follow my suggestios and you'll have no problems...

Garth Brooks - The Thunder Rolls (Brilliant)

2007-08-14T16:57:00.001-07:00

Here's a good video

The Thunder Rolls

2007-08-13T12:50:00.001-07:00

I seem to have an abundance of time recently :) Let's review, first, I nearly destroyed my shoulder and had to drug myself up for the better part of week. Then I had to skip out of town for a good friend's wedding (drinking a bit of madeira in the process). So I wake up Thursday, actually through no choice of my own, because frankly we were in the middle of probably the worst thunderstorms I have ever seen or heard. My power finally went out about 8:00 or 8:30 AM and about 10:00, bored out of my skull and with no TV, TiVo, computer/internet or radio, I went over a friend's house a few miles away. Sure enough about 2:30 as the storm continued if not intensified, his power got dinged too and I was back where I started. On Friday morning, with my power still out, I decided to leave my apartment and head for the "sticks", namely my mother's house about an hour away.

The end result no that I have returned to my home is that our "dinner" that we have been featuring in our choosing a wine from a wine list series of posts is becoming the longest dinner in history. Even so, I could't help but mention this article detailing the two upcoming and controversial films about the 1976 Judgement of Paris Tasting, a tasting that I have discussed previously. (I must admit that I was unaware of the two movies until this article was pointed out by Robin Garr, custodian of Robin Garr's Wine Lover's Page, a long running place for me to both learn and interact with wine geeks from around the world.)

I just want to add a small point, have we lost our _______ minds? (Fill in the appropriate adjective of your choice.) So I guess Sideways wins a few awards so now we're going to start making wine movies - in fact two rival wine movies - about a ______ wine tasting? I can just picture it now, thirty years from now, a movie about William Bellomo and I and our friends from Philadelphia cooking appetizers and drinking wine at the old apartment above the Detour (jazz club) in Manhattan.

Judgement at 13th Street

William Bellomo played by David Beckham

Alan Uchrinscko played by Ashton Kutcher

Doug Donovan played by Drew Carey

James Regan played by Ray Liotta

and starring Michael Madrigale played by Danny Devito.

Can't wait. Waterworld here we come...

Choosing Wine From a Wine List (Part 3)

2007-08-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

This post is part of a series of ongoing posts that I began a few weeks ago on choosing a wines from a wine list. If you have not read the previous posts, please first visit:

Choosing a Sparkling Wine
Choosing Appetizers

(NB: I have no affiliation or financial interest in the Sonoma Grille, the restaurant featured in these posts.)

-------

So here's where we stand:

Aperetif
NV Iron Horse Brut Russian River Cuvee

First Courses
Tapas for Two: Shrimp Tempura, Veal Cheek, Ahi Tartare, Sesame Fried Calamari
Serrano Wrapped Diver Sea Scallops
Wild Mushroom and Goat Cheese Strudel

Now we need a white wine. We have already determined that we'd like a white wine that will have some or most of the following characteristics (as explained in our previous post): we need a wine that is palate-cleansing; it will cut through fatty fish or greasy fried foods; it should match the spiciness of our foods, be earthy and ripe with good acidity. The wine list is here so that you can follow along.

I'll be honest, instinctively I was going to shy away from a California Chardonnay because many of them are too full-bodied, creamy and/or buttery for a few of these dishes. For example, a full, buttery California Chardonnay would be a terrible choose for Shrimp Tempura or Ahi Tartare. But let's go back to this.

When I think of a palate-cleansing, spicy, earthy, ripe white with good acidity, I think Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc. Those are the two wines that are the most likely candidates. We've already determined that we're drinking California no matter what in the first post because we're at the Sonoma Grille. And California doesn't specialize much in Riesling, a fact reflected on the wine list: not one choice above $50. I'm a bit tempted by the Wente because they offer fairly consistent value, but a $40 isn't special enough for this dinner. We're really looking between $50 and $100, $75 would be about perfect.

So let's look at Sauvignon Blanc. Between $50 and $100 we have four choices. Three of four are from the Napa Valley, and the Napa Valley is generally very hot. We don't want to take the chance of getting a rich, full, buttery Sauvignon Blanc an unfortunate side-effect of heat on white wine. That leaves us with the Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc at $97, probably too rich for my blood for a Sauvignon Blanc.

Keep in mind, many of these choices would work perfectly fine with richer dishes, but considering that are appetizers run the gamut from Ahi Tartare to Goat Cheese Strudel, we need a wine with more flexibility.

Let's peak at the Chardonnays, between $50 and $100.

BV Reserve 2001 (Carneros) 15 52
Domaine Chandon 2001 (Carneros) 55
Trefethen 2003 (Napa) 17 56
Talbott "Sleepy Hollow" 2002 (Santa Lucia) 18 57
Marimar 2002 (Sonoma) 63
Simi Reserve 2003 (Sonoma) 64
Ojai 2003 (Santa Barbara) 65
Jordan 2002 (Sonoma) 20 68
Staglin “Salus” 2002 (Napa) 74
Chateau Montelena 2003 (Napa) 223 77
Mer Soleil 2002 (Napa) 78
Kalin "Cuvee LD" 1994 (Sonoma) 82
Sonoma Cutrer “The Cutrer” 2002 (Sonoma) 85
Cakebread 2004 (Napa) 89
Michaud 2000 (Monterey) 90
Rochioli 2002 (Russian River) 95
Grgich 2001 (Napa) 97
Patz & Hall "Dutton" 2003 (Napa) 98

Fair or unfair, we are going to eliminate the Napa wines for the same reason that we elminated them in the case of our Sauvignon Blanc, we don't want to take the chance that the wine is to full. So let's look again:

BV Reserve 2001 (Carneros) 15 52
Domaine Chandon 2001 (Carneros) 55
Talbott "Sleepy Hollow" 2002 (Santa Lucia) 18 57
Marimar 2002 (Sonoma) 63
Simi Reserve 2003 (Sonoma) 64
Ojai 2003 (Santa Barbara) 65
Jordan 2002 (Sonoma) 20 68
Kalin "Cuvee LD" 1994 (Sonoma) 82
Sonoma Cutrer “The Cutrer” 2002 (Sonoma) 85
Michaud 2000 (Monterey) 90
Rochioli 2002 (Russian River) 95

The BV Reserve and Domaine Chandon are probably less than we want to spend, plus Chandon is best known for it's sparklers. They are also widely available. Talbott "Sleepy Hollow" I always love, but it's too rich for our purposes.

I'm eliminating Rochioli because, despite the fact that their wines are delicious, they are also too ripe for our purposes. I'm elimating Sonoma-Cutrer because that wine has skyrocketed in price and really should be $60. Jordan is tempting, but probably also too ripe. Marimar seems interesting, and if it was recommended by my server I might consider it, but I know little about it other than the fact that it is owned by the Torres family of Spain and the vineyards are largely Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast. Stylistically I have no idea where it falls, so short of a recommendation, I'm skipping it. Simi is too widely available. I want something that I might not have every day.

We're left with these choices:

Ojai 2003 (Santa Barbara) 65
Kalin "Cuvee LD" 1994 (Sonoma) 82
Michaud 2000 (Monterey) 90

Ojai can be pretty nice. Earthy and with good acidity. I'm going to pass on Ojai only because I have found in the past that their wines take a little bit of time to fully integrate the oak and the primary flavors. In two years, especially if the price remained constant, this might be my choice, but not today. Michaud Winery is owned by Michael Michaud, former winemaker of Chalone. The vineyard is way up in the mountains - mountain vineyards are cooler and have better acidity. This is an excellent choice. But I'm taking Kalin. I have always loved Kalin's wines. First of all you'll notice the vintage on the wine - 1994. Kalin always holds bottles, only to realease them much later. This very well may be the current release for all I know. Kalin wines tend to have good structure (+1); because of their age they show a variety of complex earthy and developed charcteristics (+1) without sacrificing fruit (+1); and Kalin Chards tend to fall on the light- to medium- side in terms of body (+1). This is my choice, but if you're uncomfortable with the Kalin, a unique wine when compared to its peers, you can get the Michaud.

Next we're going to pick our main courses and reds...

What to drink with George Washington...

2007-07-29T10:35:00.001-07:00

I'm fresh off a trip to New York as one of my best friends was married last Sunday. Actually, fresh probably isn't the best word, more like exhausted, but I digress. We'll return to the series on analyzing a wine list next time around, but I'm frankly just so happy to be relaxing after such a crazy week and a half. I was also reminded, since my hotel was in the financial district, of one of my favorite taverns in the whole world - Fraunces Tavern.

Fraunces Tavern is the restored tavern that was once the site where George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the boys used to hand out for their relaxation. More often, when they were there, they drank one of the world's finest but very much forgotten beverages, Madeira.

Madeira is a fortified wine made in the Madeira Islands of Portugal, which is prized equally for drinking and cooking. According to Wikipedia, Thomas Jefferson used Madeira to toast the signing of the Declaration of independence.

I have spent quite a bit of time studying menus from early America, and it's amazing how much different a wine list looked in the 1800's compared to now. A typical wine progression was often:

Champagne
Sherry
Chablis
Red Burgundy or Bordeaux
Madeira

This would be a set of wines I'd love but admittedly the taking in of both Sherry and Madeira at every meal is pretty eclectic. Either way, a toast to Fraunces Tavern, our Founding Fathers and of course my good friends Giovanni Ruffini and Yelena Sorokina who were wed last Sunday!

(N.B., if you'd like to read more about Madeira and other fortified wines, please visit my good friend Roy Hersh's web site http://fortheloveofport.com)

Kryptonite and picking appetizers...

2007-07-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

When last I blogged , I began discussing piece by piece what a wine geek might look for when looking at a wine menu. I chose a Pittsburgh Restaurant, the Sonoma Grille, as my sample restauarant and wine list, and in Episode I, we picked a sparkling wine to start with, NV Iron Horse Brut "Russian River Cuvee".

Then, I forgetting that I am not Superman and also forgetting that I am no longer athletic, decided to play two-hand tab football with some younger relatives. I was awesome on the first drive. The second drive, not so good. After landing directly on my shoulder after attempting to make a Deion Sanders-esque interception, I have now announced my retirement. And I don't mean in that "The Who" kind of way. I mean for good. I felt like Superman in that Lex Luther's swimming pool with the Kryptonite chained to me. For about a week. My flag football career is over because I have only in about the past 24 hours regained the ability to move my left arm and hence type. (Not so ironically, this coincides with the release of EA Sports College Football 2008.)

Back to the meal and menu. Okay, so we're sipping on some Iron Horse Bubbly and now we have to look at the appetizers/first courses and then start thinking about the white we will order. Let's look at the apps (http://www.thesonomagrille.com/DinnerMenu1.php?SECT=3)

[Disclaimer again: I have no affiliation with the Sonoma Grille. I know one of the bartenders vaguely that's about it.]

I'm going to purposefully order a variety of things so that this isn't to easy. (If you read part 1, there are four of us dining.)

My date and I are going to get the Tapas for two. One guest is going to order the Serrano Wrapped Diver Sea Scallops, and our other guest is a vegetarian and will be getting the wild mushroom and goat cheese strudel.

Okay let's start determining what we might be looking for in a wine by looking aty the important elements in the dishes:

Tapas for two:

Shrimp Tempura, Asian slaw, scarlet orange and apricot chutney: Normally with most breaded or deep fried things, I drink something with bubbles, either sparkling wine or beer. Our Iron Horse will continue nicely with this, but if we're going to drink a "still" white wine the slaw, orange, apricot combo leads us to something with sweetness - not necessarily sugar - but ripe fruitiness, spice and sour. This is a complex dish that needs a complex wine, not to full-bodied, but with a lot of character and probably a good dose of acidity to cleanse the palate just like the bubbles would.

Veal cheek and black truffle ravioli, roasted shallot cream, black pepper demi-glace: The truffle and veal cheek are going to be very earthy, the shallot cream sweet, the demi-glass spicy. Again sweet and spicy, and now a wine with some earthy flavors would probably be a good idea as well.

Ahi tartare, sushi roll, white truffle and wasabi mayonnaise, fried lotus root, Tobiko caviar: Spicy. Truffle again - earthy. Tuna is fatty, and the best thing for fatty foods is to use the counterpoint of acidity.

Sesame fried calamari, yuzu and roasted poblano remoulade: FRIED needs bubbles or acidity as we've already covered. Poblanos are a type of pepper of course, not real biting, but a little sweet and a little spicy.

And...

Serrano Wrapped Diver Sea Scallops: The Scallops have a fatty texture like the tuna + the spiciness of the serrano ham.

Wild Mushroom and Goat Cheese Strudel: The mushrooms, like truffle, are earthy. We'll go back to the goat cheese.

Okay so we need a wine that is palate-cleansing; it will cut through fatty fish or greasy fried foods; it should match the spiciness of our foods, be earthy and ripe with good acidity.

In the next post, we're going to start crossing off white wines from the list until we get a few possible choices for our white wine..

Mi casa su casa

2007-07-02T21:52:00.001-07:00

What I love more than anything else is sitting down and cooking a nice meal and enjoying it, along with a few bottles of wine, with some friends new or old. Since my readers are from throughout cyberspace, distance prevents this from happening. So, barring my inability to concentrate too long, I'm going to walk you through our imaginary dinner, or more importantly, our selction of wines, at a well-known Pittsburgh restauarant, the Sonoma Grille. Before you ask, I have no affiliation with it whatsoever, it just has a really nice wine list for lover's a California wines. Even wine lists in many other major metropolitan areas boast more eccentric, pretentious or what have you wine lists, this i s a good one to look at and perhaps have you look at a wine list the way I do.

Their web site is http://www.thesonomagrille.com/

Before we even get to food, we're going to start with a bottle of sparkling wine. The sparkling wine list is http://www.thesonomagrille.com/WineList.php?SECT=4&CAT=2&SEP=20.

First, what are we dealing with:

Kenwood Brut NV (California) $7/glass $28/bottle
Villa Sandi Prosecco NV (Italy) $8/$32
Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Blanc 2001 (Carneros) $44
Schramsburg Blanc de Noirs 2001 (Carneros) $75
Iron Horse "Russian River Cuvee" 1999 (Sonoma) $80
J Brut Rose NV (Napa) $82
Veuve Clicquot "Yellow Label" (France) $16/$90
J Schram 1999 (Napa) $175
Dom Perignon 1998 (France) $250

Okay. We're going to elimate anything above $100 for starters, because we're going to have four bottles of wine - 1 sparkler, 1 white, 2 reds and maybe after dinner drinks. We're also going to eliminate anything outside of California (although I love Prosecco): after all we're at the Sonoma Grille, not Alain Ducasse. We want to experience California. So we're looking at the following choices:

Kenwood Brut NV (California) $7/glass $28/bottle
Gloria Ferrer Blanc de Blanc 2001 (Carneros) $44
Schramsburg Blanc de Noirs 2001 (Carneros) $75
Iron Horse "Russian River Cuvee" 1999 (Sonoma) $80
J Brut Rose NV (Napa) $82

I've never had Kenwood sparkling wine, and I'm sure it's good, but frankly Kenwood is best known for it's Merlot, and Merlot is not a grape that goes into sparkling wine, so I'm deleteing that as well. (I'll be honest, I didn't know they made sparklers.) Gloria Ferrer is a nice enough choice. As one enters Sonoma County from the south, the vineyards that line the highway are Gloria Ferrer. You're in the Carneros AVA, one that straddles souther Napa and Sonoma. It is a cooler region owing to the breezes that blow north off the bay. This is a good choice, expecially if we're pinching pennies, but we're going to look further. I REALLY like Schramsberg. Schramsberg was the sparkling wine that Nixon served to the Chinese during a summit in the 1960's. Even so, we don't want Blanc de Noirs. Real Champagne (and those wines that copy it from outside of France) use three grapes in their production - Chardonnay (White) and Pinot Noir or it's lesser-known cousin Pinot Meunier (both Red Grapes). Blanc de Noirs (literally white from blacks) is Champagne made entirely from the two red grapes. While the color is still lightish, the body is fuller, in fact, fuller than we want at the beginning of a multi-course dinner with four bottles. By the same reasoning, we're skipping the Rose. Hence, we are left with one of my old-stand bys, Iron Horse "Russian River Cuvee", not an unenviable choice. The Russian River Valley is a coller microclimate perfect for sparkling wine production (as is Carneros as we have mentioned). By it's nature of using both white and red grapes, it's flavorful but yet refershing, and a perfect way to start the dinner.

Peruse the menu and the whites, and we'll start picking our appetizers next time...

Chinese Proverb

2007-06-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

"Once upon a time I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I woke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

When it comes to wine or anything else, I prefer quoting Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Chicago Nobel Laureate and my idol in re-iterating the Mahābhārata:

The Simple is the Seal of the Truth.

My first job in my entire life was working for a chemical processing company called Vertex Image Products. I thought I was smart, but more often than not the partners and shareholders in the company proved me wrong.

Im sure that to this day I don't undertand what went on behind the scenes. I'm also sure that my opinion didn't matter because I was the one person who had the least understanding of what was going on. In fact, I didn't know what the hell we did and when we were slow and I worked on the farm cows scared me.

I find myself in a weird position today in that it seems that no one in the wine industry knows what's going on. I truly believe that. The proliferation of "independant analysts" and bloggers and blah blah blah annoys me extensively.

I LOVE the fact that your hobby is wine, I LOVE the fact that you drink expensive wines daily because you are affluent, but frankly my opinion is that you shouldn't listen to the majority of the people that talk about wine.

Reviewers try to justify themselves through playing the reverse logic theme. "I have no professional affiliation, so I am unbiased." Rubbish. If you buy wine from someone ask of them not how much they know, but whether or not they have SOLD wine.

Any stock trader will tell you they learn more from their losses than their gains. A wine merchant, although there are seemingly none left, sometimes wins, sometimes loses; he evaluates what you like and don't like and hopefully in a case of 12, 7 are enjoyable to you. He goes from there.

The proliferation of wine has allowed lawyers, bankers and everyone in between to criticize outstanding wines from around the world. Let me give you a tip - blog frequency does not verify quality of opinion.

Ask questions. Have you visited these wine regions? If so, did you taste the best and worst producers? Why is this better than any other wine from that region? Wine professionals travel to France or California to reassure their opinions; tourists go to brag and eat expensive dinners. I prefer trusting people that havr looked at the bad and the good and know that their choice is the best suggestion. I would also prefer for possibly every person in New York to leave the wine business because frankly I don't need a retail employee to spit out facts they learned from a wine's distributor...

Say it ain't so...

2007-06-18T01:53:00.000-07:00

If you think that my "normal posts" are circuitous, this one will stop even my most devoted readers in their tracks follow along. A while back, I met my friend William Bellomo through a handful of mutual friends from Philly. We actually didn't put this together until much later, because at the time, we (myself from the City of Champions, my friends from the City that Celebrates Fictional Boxers for lack of anything to actually Celebrate and occassionally William) used to regularly gather on Fridays to have dinner parties: the only requirement was to bring a bottle of wine.

Well on Saturday - would that have been 2002 -- during the winter Olympics, I sat with the Fictional Boxer Idolators and actually rooted against Mario Lemieux. The USA was playing Canada in the Olympic Hockey tournament and I was being forced to root for John LeClair to defeat Mario Lemieux. It was very much akin to picking the grey Army Men instaed of the Green ones or (for you females) trying to hook up with Blair rather than Jo from the Facts of Life with the Dreamie guy. Simply unheard of.

So then it happened. We thought it might. The #8 Budweiser car and its driver (along with it's current and exponentially increasing $2Billion in merchandising) joined forces with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson - a fate truly worse than death. I strongly considered buying a case of Miller Lite rather than one of cool, crisp mildly-hopped refreshing American lager with nuances of beechwood aging. But I instead began to consider the other, more likable options. Being an emotional person, I considered the immediate purchase of #11 FedEx Merchandise, but cooler heads prevailed (although I have not eliminated the possibilty).

(Here's the point at the end of my seemingly random session of complaints.) Do you know what a corked wine is? A lot of people don't. Let's review. You're at a restaurant. The sommelier offers you a taste of the wine that you are about to consume. You don't like it. Do you send it back? The answer is emphatically no. The waiter allows you to taste the wine to ensure that it is not flawed. If he recommended it, and you detest it, you drink it and never come back. You are given a taste of wine to check for flaws, not quality.

I once submitted a bottle of wine to a journalist that I thought was best in class. (The wine was 1998 Fleurie, Vieilles-Vignes, Domaine Bigot/Alex Gambal.) It was truly unbelievable Beaujolais. The journalist brogught the bottle back to me the nest day and said "Taste this". It was floored. I gave him another and a few hours later he called me to tell me that it was one of the finest under $15 bottles of wine he had ever experienced.

When a wine is "corked", it smelles of wet cardboard. It's a little hard to describe until you experience it, and honestly that bottle of Fleurie was on of the most corked bottles of wine that has ever been. The wine itself is good, but a bacteria gets in the cork and permanently taints it.

This causes a lot of problems for wine geeks because somewhere between 5 and 10% of all wines experience cork taint - and it's completely random.

So to return to Mario Lemieux and Dale, Jr., recently a few producers of Grand Cru Burgundy have decided to begin bottling their Grand Cru wines in synthetic corks - that is corks that are not susceptible to being corked.

My opinion remains: wine is a living breathing thing. There is a better chance that I will drink a wine with the wrong dish or at the wrong stage in its development than pull the cork on one that is flawed. Call me traditional, but when I open a 30 year old-bottle of Vintage Champagne I want to hear a (rather improper by Sommelier's rules) pop. Somehow a screwtop doesn't cut it - even if there's a 10% chance that the cork will fail me.

I want a cork. I don't look down on a screw top - rather I evaluate a wine on quality alone: the importer doesn't matter, the price doesn't matter and the type of encolsure certainly doesn't matter. But do I really have to root for Jeff Gordon?

To Age or Not to Age?

2007-06-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I had the pleasure of having a quite delicious bottle of 1987 Robert Mondavi Cabernet sauvignon Reserve the other day. I always love to add a wine with a bit of age to it to any tasting I run because it allows people to experience something unusual and perhaps get them to understand what the fuss is all about. As they always say though, with an aged wine, there are no good wines only good bottles. Luckily the Mondavi was stored properly, and was just beautiful.

When a grape is presse and the juice has certain flavors and aromas typical of the grape. So for instance the juice from your Merlot will smell of plums, Cabernet Sauvignon will smell of black currants and cassis, Pinot Noir will smell like red and black cheries. These are called primary aromas. Primary aromas are present before the winemaker does anything.

Once the winemaker becomes involved and after fermentation occurs, some new and very different aromas - called secondary aromas -- are introduced. These can be quite varied, but the most obvious example is vanilla or coconut from the oak barrels. These secondary aromas add complexity to the wine, so that it smells and tastes like something other than just plain grape juice.

As a wine ages, an additional layer of complexity is added; indeed the more developed a wien is, the more prominent these aromas are, eventually coming to dominate the wine. They are tertiary aromas. The Mondavi in particular had a pronounced bouquet of dried leaves and also a bit of earthiness. These are the types of aromas that are in an aged wine. They can't be produced from merely grape juice alone, nor by a winemaker or fermentation. The intense bouquet of an aged wine can only be achieved through the gentle processes that occur in the bottle over the course of years or maybe decades. It is with age that a wine finally eveolves into a noble beverage to bee savored.

If you are going to age wine, here are a few tips:

The wine should be stored in a cool, dark preferably moist place. Cool - as in 55 degrees - ensures that the wine doesn't get "cooked". Dark because wine doesn't like light, and light can prematurely oxidise a wine.

If you stick to those three things, or purchase one of the many excellent designer wine cellars that mimics a traditional one, then you should have no problem replicating my experience with the 93 Mondavi.

Let's review...

2007-06-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

I led a very enjoyable tasting this evening for an avid group of participants. I will get to a discussion of "aged wines" as promised in my last post in the next few days. Until then, I will leave you with this:

I truly enjoyed 1993 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve this evening. I have to respect a producer that can maintain market share by producing wines of good quality at affordable prices but at the same time is capable of producing profound wines. Yet, Mondavi is hit or miss at the high end for me. Tonight was a hit. The best Mondavi I have tasted was the '78 en magnum (wine #12) about five years ago. At the same time I basically skipped an '87 Reserve Cab about seven years ago (a gift from a client) in favor of an $18 bottle of Jean-Louis Grippat St.-Joseph from the Northern Rhone. I wish Grippat were still alive and making affordable simply yummy wines.

In any case, I don't think the Mondavi was profund, but wow was it good. A nose of dried leaves and earth. A hint of cassis. At its peak. Perfect balance. This wine is a good example of why my personal perferences (which lean toward elegance and balance) lead me more to very good '93's than the more voplutuous '94's. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I do so love a wine in perfect harmony, and the Mondavi did that and more...more later...

I do wish to highlight a few things I refrenced in my tasting tonight and upon which I have previously blogged. There are a few random items that came up during our tasting, so here are the relevant links:

Why don't I like what the experts do?
Because the experts, or at least, I, like balance...

Why do Chardonnays taste differently?

Birth Year Wines

Tapas

I know if you were at my tasting tonight you are curious about Liquid Gold? Here's the extended version...
Liquid Gold
Liquid Gold Part 2

And by the way, I didn't mention this tonight , but Matt Karmer does a great job of explaining most of the California wines one will encounter...

My Pick for the Year's Best Wine Book [2006]

If you participated in my tasting this evening, thank you for a splendid evening. I learned a lot.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme

2007-05-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I ever smelled sage in a wine. Not just a little hint, but plunged my nose into the glass and immediately felt as though my entire nasal passage was filled by the smell of fresh sage. (The wine was 1997 Beaune 1er Cru Greves "Vigne de l'Enfant Jesus, Bouchard Pere et fils).

While I've always been a huge fan of sage, across the board I love all fresh herbs. They are highly under-utilized by the home chef, who can add just a touch to almost any dish and improve its flavor and expression immensely. Since my plants are finally coming up, I thought I'd pass on some quick and easy ideas for what to do with your herb garden. If you DON'T have an herb garden, consider it this year. For the price of a handful of plants ($10), a few flower pots ($15) and some soil ($7) the results are, to steal a phrase, priceless.

Rosemary - cut up new potatoes, douse heavily in olive oil, garlic salt pepper and finish with fresh rosemary. Put it under the broiler. A great side for your next cookout. Or get some baker's yeast, flour, water and olive oil, mix in some fresh rosemary and put your choice of olives, sund-dried tomatoes, etc on top for easy foccaccia.

Basil - Insalata Cabrese is a favorite. Fresh buffalo mozzarella, slice tomato, and basil leaves drizzled with olive oil. Or ender fat from pancetta, sautee garlic and shallots, add whole tomatoes and basil and cook low, slow and long for a great pasta sauce.

Sage - one of my all-time favorite appetizer/first courses, from David Rosengarten: Sausage-Stuffed Radicchio Cups.

Parsley - Add chopped parsley, capers and a bit of dry mustard to Chopped Tuna for the best tuna tartare.

Send me your ideas if you have more to add, we'd love to add it to our recommendations.

(My mint is still coming alive, but you can be sure that when it does, I will be mixing up a mint julip and doing some sun tanning).

I have some interested wines to taste later in the week, and hope to explore a much discussed question, to age or not age in my next post...

The Golden Rule

2007-05-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I became an Uncle recently, so I have been spending much of my free time trying to explain terroir to my niece Riley. I got into an argument with a few people on a wine discussion board regarding this very subject.

Here's the rundown.

Wine, like anything else, gives people who know (or claim to be in the know) a possibility to make you feel dumb (if you let them). Now I love Rielsing; I actually probably drink Riesling more than any other wine, mainly because they are generally lower in alocohol than other wines and so I can drink a whole bottle and not worry about the side effects. The problem is that Riesling people have a certain air of importance about them - you mean YOU don't think Rielsing is the greatest wine on earth.

Now admittedly, I am like that about Burgundy, but I freely admit that. I freely admit that I think that Burgundy is the greatest wine on earth (red or white) and I am a pretentious, arrogant slime because of that. But I'm not smug about it. It is what is.

More importantly, if YOU think that MERLOT or some other grape is the greatest grape in the world, I'm fine with that. I ahve often said that as a professional, I don't taste a wine thinking whether or not I like it, I taste a wine thinking who would like it. That my saound like a very capitalistic approach, but I don't mean it in that sense. YOU and I like different things. I like Haydn [a dead white guy] and George Strait for music, I like Burgundy for wine, I like the engravings of Albrecht Durer [another dead white guy], I enjoy sage more than basil, and I live and die black and gold with the Pittsburgh Steelers, Penguins and Pirates.

I'm only an expert in one of those cases - wine - but you still don't have to agree with me. I strongly suggest the wine sthat we have available for sale. If you read my posts, it's obvious which ones I prefer. But My 90 pointer may be your 80 pointer. Give us a call or send us an email. Although Riley may eventually hate Haydn's Symphony 101 "the Clock Symphony", for now, she's going to sleep every night to it (or well, occassionally she's at least sleeping). I won't do that to you!

More Cowbell?

2007-05-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

I (you, we) hate the prices of wine. Wine is an imperfect market as I learned very quickly working for an auction house. Although stocks can dip or crescendo on the whims of one investor (Buffet buys a railroad - all of a sudden we think we're playing Monopoly), given the number of stocks that's not the norm. Wine's different. Public opinion and quality are very irregular.

I was recentlt preparing a list of wines to be tasted for a business group and I had a few ideas going into the project. Nothing earth-shattering: I like themes like "A Walk Thorugh Napa Valley", "An Introduction to the Wines of France", or something like that. In particular, the latter is very inclusive and is a good theme. The novice interrogates, "Oh, so Sauvignon Blanc is from the Loire. Tell me more...". The more advanced taster asks, "Do you prefer Chateauneuf-du-Pape from 1998 or 1999 and why?" In short there's a broad range of exciting possibilities about which we can talk, and I feel out the audience.

Here's the thing, I've been given a budget that's "too high" for what I feel I can accomplish in a tasting, unless of course I'm reviewing, for example, the evolution of 1998 Grand Crus from Burgundy. I'm putting together my list, and I'm ignoring the budget, because my wines are going to be less. Why? Because once you're getting into the $60-$80 range (minimum) per bottle, another $40 doesn't really buy you better wine, unless you're talking vintage wine (i.e. '74 Heitz Martha's Vineyard) - and then the event becomes more than a gathering and instead a few hours for analysis and contemplation.

I have to be honest, I think wine can/should be less expensive than most people think it is. If two couple commit $30 - $40 once a week, you can taste 104 wines a year (all other dinners excluded) and cook a really nice brunch each weekend + have an appropriate amount of wine for a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon for the young and adventuresome!

So as is typical of my history, I'm currently planning on a "down"-sell, but that's all right. I much prefer wines that are appropriate to the goals of the event (or consumer in question). In the end, more cowbell doesn't always do it...

It's a Girl!

2007-05-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

After a false alarm Monday and another 20+hour wait on Thursday, I am finally an Uncle. Riley Elizabeth Puckey needed a bit of time in the oven but I'm happy to that she is doing fine and came home to my sister's today.

Now, I'd imagine her parents are thinking about things such as college, whether she'll be a ballerina or a teacher, you know, the important things. Of course these are the last things that a Wine Consultant like myself would want to be bothered with right now; the most obvious question is, how will the 2007 Vintage turn out, since these will be Riley's birth year wines. I admit that I'm pretty twisted.

It's an important consideration. Very few years produce excellent wines in every wine region, and not every well-made wine will age for the requisite twenty-one years or more required to head into adulthood in style. As a wine consultant, if I had a dime for every time I was asked, "My daughter was born in xxxx, what wine should I buy to celebrate her 21st Birthday", I would already be retired. So without further ado, for your consideration and reference, here's my far-from-complete, super-unofficial birth year wine chart:

2005 Bordeaux, Sauternes, Burgundy, Northern Rhone, Southern Rhone, Spain, Australia
2004 Port, Spain, Italy, selected Bordeaux and California Cabs
2003 Rhone, Burgundy, Bordeaux
2002 Burgundy, California Reds, Australian Reds
2001 California Reds, Burgundy (Cote de Nuits), Sauternes, Rhones north and south
2000 Bordeaux, Port, Rhones especially Southern, Italy
1999 Burgundy, Rhones especially Northern, Italy
1998 Rhones, Bordeaux (Right Bank), selected Burgundy
1997 Italy, California
1996 Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux (Left Bank), Spain

That'll give you a decade to play with for starters. Keep in mind that buying the best producers as well as the producers noted for longevity will go along way in making sure Birthday #21 is special, but without proper, that is, impeccable, storage, you might as well just flush your money (and wine) down the toilet...

Bing!

2007-04-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

Being a big fan of Bill Murray (a living White Guy) and Anton Chekhov (a Dead White Guy) I couldn’t help but think of the above quote from Groundhog Day this afternoon as continued working my way through some of the latest releases of Pope Valley Winery. It was the Rose that had me particularly yearning for this weather to break.

The new apartment into which I moved several months ago has the perfect little area for a picnic with some vino and me as the grillmaster. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to make an assortment of light appetizers for a handful of my good friends – tapas – which if you read this blog regularly, I’m sure you already realize that I’m a pretty big fan of quite a few simple yet interesting dishes, much like my wine.

I cracked a bottle of Pope Valley Winery’s 2005 Sangiovese Bella Rosa this evening and it had me thinking of my upcoming gathering. First, my projected menu:

pan a la Catalana // pimientos estilo gernika // aceitunas mixtas
toasted bread topped with garlic, tomato & coriander
grilled poblano peppers with sea salt
mixed Spanish olives

serrano y manchego // champiñones al ajillo
Spanish cheese wrapped in ham
fried oyster mushrooms

paella de chorizo // pollo y limon // coredero moruno
seafood & sausage paella
chicken cooked in white wine, lemon juice and thyme
skewered marinated lamb

Now there’s no doubt in mind as I drink this wine that I’m going to have to add some tuna tartare to the list, but this wine is what I’ll be serving – along with some Sangria and some sherry and probably some Madeira when it’s time to relax.

I have always personally thought that the White Zinfandel Craze is kind of off base. Not that I have a problem with pink wines – by all means I love rose wine. But White Zinfandel comes from the (red) zinfandel grape. Zinfandel generally achieves uber-maturity, and so when making White Zin, rather than fermenting it to 16% alcohol they leave a bit of sugar. (Sugar converts to alcohol in fermentation. To simplify, if a winemaker leaves some unfermented sugar in a wine, the alcohol is less.) I generally don’t like sweet wines unless they have quite a bit of acidity to counterbalance them (such as in a well-made German Riesling). That’s why I’ve always thought lower-alcohol grapes such as Pinot Noir and (as is the case here) Sangiovese make better rose – pink wines.

In the bottle I have before me, the Pope Valley Winery 2005 Sangiovese Bella Rosa, I have a wine that served just slightly chilled (European Cellar Temperature – about 55 degrees), would pair with just about anything – and certainly please the most discerning palate when served with a diverse menu of foods such as those listed above. I’m looking forward to my upcoming picnic and more bottles of Pope Valley’s Wine. Dry, versatile and spicy with a touch of clay and a touch of chocolate. Nice acidity, fresh and aromatic. I can already taste it with pan a la Catalana and some paella. I suggest you to do the same! For the record, this would be great with one of my favorite slightly pretentious but inexpensive brunch items - an omelette of tomatoes, leeks and steamed mussels. Or Quiche. Or just about anything else one can dream up for a nice brunch...

So although I am starting to belive the words of Phil Connors, who tells us, “There is no way this winter is *ever* going to end as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any way out of it,” I’m looking forward to some tapas and rose REALLY SOON, on the deck with some friends!

What clear liquor is drunk more often than Vodka, Gin or Rum?

2007-04-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

The surprising answer is Soju, a Korean distilled spirit with which thanks to many very good Korean friends I have quite a bit of experience. Although it's a bit of a departure from my normal topics, a recent and very informative episode of The Thirsty Traveler got me thinking that it might be a good topic to explore.

Admittedly I have had A LOT of Soju at select celebrations with some of my best freinds in the world, but knew little bout the beverage itself until now. What follows is mostly information collected from The Thirst Traveler and from Wikipedia. But I hope you enjoy learning about this exotic beverage all the same.

Soju is an alcoholic beverage with origins in Korea. The main ingredient is rice, almost always in combination with other ingredients such as wheat, barley, sweet potato, or tapioca (called dangmil in Korean). Soju is clear in color and typically varies in alcohol content from about 20% to about 45% alcohol by volume (ABV), with 20% ABV being most common. Its taste is comparable to vodka, though it is often slightly sweeter due to the addition of sugar in the manufacturing process.

There are two styles of Soju - old style and new style. Old Style Soju is extremely high in alcohol, and as far as I can tell pretty similar to a grappa or something similar. Old Style Soju is made with rice. New Style Soju has more variable contributions, often beginning with rice but also other additions such as tapioca or sweet potatoes. It's probably this mixture of ingredients that makes Soju remind me of Gin more than other "White Liquors".

Along with the mass-produced brands, which are widely available in Korea, there are several regions which are famous for making soju in a more traditional way, with the soju made in Andong being the most famous ( apoint that The Thirsty Traveler episode pointed out). I must say that for me watching elderly Korean women making artisan Soju in Andong as featured on the television program was one of the most truly fascinating things I have ever seen.

Soju is typically consumed in small shot glasses. The traditional toast is "Kombe!" A guest (and host) will often show respect by pouring and/or accepting the shot of Soju with two hands. When drinking with an elder, it is customary to turn your body entirely away and do the shot facing away from this person as a sign of respect.

What to eat with Soju. Again The Thirsty Traveler showed a beautiful recipe. A thin slice of flattened beef is layered with cooked black rice and julienned carrots. It is rolled and tied. The exterior is seared and flambeed in flaming soju, about 30 seconds a side. Set it aside so the jusices stay inside and then slice medallions.

Kombe!

Follow Your Heart

2007-04-06T00:36:00.001-07:00

Those of you who know me best know that I had open-heart surgery when I was younger. I went for a standard checkup at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh today, where I had my surgery in December, 1976. As expected (or at least as I hoped), I am in perfect health. I gave some thought to my next blog while I was in the waiting room, and, in one of those many "You might be a Wine Geek if…" moments, couldn't get Chateau Calon-Segur out of my head (see label). Not as bad as when I was at a relative's house who had a magnet on their refrigerator of the 1982 Farmer's Almanac for some unknown reason and I thought it was '82 Petrus, but still fairly geeky. Despite the image of Calon-Segur's label in my head, I started instead to think about what was going on in the wine industry in 1976. That's an easy answer: the 1976 Judgement of Paris, a tasting I have mentioned elsewehere.

In my opinion, the Judgement of Paris is possibly the most overdramatized, preposterous piece of marketing nonsense in the wine business, although those who I offend with that comment would probably point to terroir as the same. Before everyone beats me down, let me give you my reasons.

First though, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Judgement of Paris let me briefly quote from Wikipedia as I often do to save my restating and retyping that which anyone can find with a simple Google search.

Until 1976, France was generally regarded as having an unchallenged reputation as the foremost producer of the world's best wines. In that year a wine merchant in Paris, Steven Spurrier, organized a prestigious wine tasting in Paris, now known as the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 or the Judgment of Paris.
The 11 judges were Steven Spurrier, Patricia Gallagher of l'Academie du Vin, Odette Kahn, editor of the Revue du Vin de France, Jean-Claude Vrinat of the Restaurant Taillevent, Raymond Oliver of the restaurant Le Grand Vefour, the sommelier Christian Vanneque of Tour D'Argent, Aubert de Villaine of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, Pierre Tari of Chateau Giscours, Pierre Brejoux of the Institute of Appellations of Origin, Michel Dovaz of the Wine Institute of France, and Claude Dubois-Millot. Blind tasting was performed so that none of the judges knew the identity of what was being tasted.

The results were that 1973 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon beat out its able competitors from both California (and more importantly) Bordeaux, including the famous Chateaux Mouton-Rothschild, Montrose and Haut-Brion. This signified (at least for Americans) that California wines could compete with the best in the world (and I certainly agree that they can).

Why do I think the Judgment of Paris is ridiculous? Mainly because I think blind tasting and/or rating wines I ridiculous.

Blind Tastings

Blind Tastings are tastings in which the participants have no idea what wine has been poured for them. In this way, they have no pre-conceived notions as to the quality of wine. I have done blind tastings a million times, and still find them meaningless. I remember the first time I visited Domaine Daniel Dampt in Chablis. I had never had a wine from the Domaine before I arrived, but I was and am intimately familiar with the vintages and vineyards of Chablis. Following a brief tasting of his current vintage, five wines from the year 2000, he poured me a wine blind. After some evaluation I correctly identified the wine as 1997 Chablis Premier Cru Cote de Lechet. I also remember once tasting a wine and saying, "I would bet my job that this is a Premier Cru Meursault from the 1997 vintage": it was 1996 Staglin Rutherford Chardonnay. Luckily I was able to keep my job. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. It's like the stock market or playing darts. Over a sustained period of time, everyone I know in the wine business gets more wrong – and oftentimes vastly wrong – than anywhere close to right. As Emile Peynaud claims in his book, in a truly "blind" tasting where participants can't even see the wine, most degustateurs have a difficult time determining which ones are white or red.

But, in the Judgement of Paris they weren't picking wines, they were rating them. Personally, I think this is more ridiculous than trying to identify wines "blind". Magazines, most notably the Wine Spectator, claim that because all wines are tasted blind, there is no slant. On the other hand, "independent" reviewers such as Robert Parker indirectly point out that because they accept no advertisements, there results are not biased. Either way, they're all in the business of sales. Despite the fact that I am a wine professional, I, like you, do buy wines for myself, and I'll put myself entirely into the hands of anyone who has a palate I respect, ads or no ads, blind tastings or not.

When David Heimbourger (my apologies if I misspelled this) worked predominantly in Acker Merrall's retail store in Manhattan's Upper West-Side (last I checked he was largely running tastings and corporate events) I would regularly give him a price and a quantity and let him pick. "Dave, give me six bottles of good, cheap whites from Germany, Alsace and the Loire, around $120 total, and I'll pick them up tomorrow". I trusted him, as many of my clients trust me. In the end that's all that matters.

But I digress. Here's the thing, all wines are not created equal in a blind tasting. There's a reason why wines are served in a particular order (although modern cusine has skewed this quite a bit). Different wines have different characteristics. Let's take an extreme case. Unoaked Chablis (the real stuff, from France) would get lost in a tasting with nine Chardonnays from Australia, because it is less fruit-driven, is not as full-flavored and has lower alcohol. Its merits are lost. This is similar, by the way, to beer. Put the subtly powerful Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter among nine highly-hopped American Microbrews, and it has a good chance of finishing last although it is one of my favorite beers in the world.

So in the end, the 1976 Judgement of Paris while signaling an uptick in notoriety for California helped promote blind tastings as a useful tool, although in only rare cases, in reality they aren't. It also wrongfully promoted the notion that wines can be given a number or rating. They can't. As I always say, if you like it today, right now, then it's a 90 pointer. If you don't it's not. And that number may very well change depending on your mood, your company or what you're eating the next time around.

Uncle Pythagoras Would be Proud

2007-03-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

I wanted to talk today about the use and misuse of the word "terroir". I will not give in to my desire to defend my beliefs as a "terroirist" despite my yearning to do so. But, whether one agrees with terroir or not, its frequent misuse only adds to everyone's confusion. Continuing with my theme of Dead White Guy refernces, I was thinking of how similar it was to the Pythagorean Theorem: in a right-angled triangle the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse, c, is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides, b and a, that is, a2+b2=c2. One of the simplest equations ever written, but the greatest minds tried to prove it for centuries to no avail. Terroir is the Pythagorean Theorem of Wine.

Terroir is the combination of natural factors that affect the way grapes grow. I personally stick with a pretty rigid definition, namely that within the larger arena of climate, one can largely determine the character of a grape by knowing the vineyards soil, altitude, slope and aspect. The point is not whether you agree with my assessment of terroir or not. What bothers me is the misuse of the term terroir.

I FREQUENTLY see posts on discussion boards or white-collar-professionals-cum-weekend-wine writers who think that terroir means earth. "The 2005 Chateau _____ Vintage Champagne was full of terroir with earthy tones throughout." Without delving to far into details and exceptions, Champagne grows on Cretaceous Chalk, so if it was "full of terroir" or tasted of the soil, wouldn't its flavors be dominated by chalk?

The French word for earth is terre not terroir. True terroir comes from the root terre, but it's not a direct correlation. The word sinister has its Latin roots in decribing one who is left-handed, but I have yet to hear someone refer to Osama Bin-Laden as that bastard, left-handed murderer.

The use of the word terroir is not restricted to wine. Its used for other agricultural products such as cheese, but also things such as forestry, specifically oak. Scholarly research, such as that of Drs. Paul Kolesar and Bruce Beaver of Duquesne University, doesn't examine how much earthiness an oak barrel imparts on a wine (and certainly not how much the wood tastes like earth!), but rather the characteristics of oak due to the sum total of natural influences and how this in turn affects the chemical composition of the wood. It's the same thing for grapes.

March Madness Update
In an earlier post "The Ides of March", I revealed my pick for the NCAA Tourney, Georgetown. I also revealed that I am usually out of contention very early. Turns out I was spot on, as Georgetown is heading to the Final Four, and I am in the bottom 3% of ESPN's Tourney Pick 'Em.

An Apple a Day...

2007-03-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

Wine writers and professionals write tasting notes very differently. The "old way" consisted of less flavor and aroma descriptors and concentrated a bit more on charcteristics more fundamental to a wine and its development: texture, balance, length in the palate, etc. Most of the traditional British Wine Writers favored this method. Among them is the venerable Clive Coates, M.W. (Master of Wine). Here is an example of one of Coates' tasting notes, from one of my favorite Red Burgundies, 1965 Volnay Premier Cru Champans from the Marquis d'Angerville.

"Medium-full color. This is a little lean for the vintage. But perhaps it is still closed. The nose is classy and aromatic - nutty. The finish long and satisfying. The genrosity I'm sure will appear. Very good but not the class and depth for great."

It doesn't matter that I enjoyed the wine more (several years later). What is important is how his tasting note differs from the more modern approach, generall attributed to or at least having its beginnings with Robert Parker. An example from Mr. Parker. It is the same wine, vineyard and producer, but from a more recent vintage, the 1999 vintage:

"The medium to dark ruby-colored 1999 Volnay Champans, from a 4-hectare parcel where 50% of the vines are 40 years of age and the balance over 10 years, displays a sweet blackberry nose. Medium-bodied, this wine has an excellent depth of fruit, a supple, velvety texture, and a fresh personality. Loads of intense blackberry, cassis, plum, and spice flavors can be found in its juicy and expressive character. Drink it over the next 7-8 years."

It is not my intention to debate these two disparate techniques here, but rather examine the oft-asked question: can wine writers really taste such sensations? I emphatically say yes, though I admit that my notes tend to be somewhere in between the two examples given here and if anything are usually less wordy than either.

Nonetheless, as I was sitting down for a wholesome meal of pork chops, sauerkraut and baked apples Sunday, I did my own taste test, that I invite you to repeat at home. I had purchased three types of apples, Macintosh, Fuji and "green" apples to bake with some brown sugar and to accompany my main course. If wine writers and professionals are going to distinguish between Macintosh and Fuji, they'd better have distinguishing characteristics. So I sliced away and set about my tasting.

Very quickly it became clear that the three apples smell and taste very dissimilar. The green apples as expected were typified by a brief sugar-sweetness as they tocuhed my palate and then dominated by the pronounced attack of biting, lemony acidity that followed through forever in the finish. The texture of the Macintosh struck me as it had a waxiness that was not present at all in the green apples and appeared only in traces in the Fuji apples. Flavors and aromas of bananas distinguished the Fujis. In fact the dry, waxiness coupled with the aromas and flavors in the end reminded me very much of the taste of banana as well. I'd like to repeat the experiment with other families of foodstuffs, but my initial observations are that when I say I taste green apples and when I say I taste Macintosh apples, that I am correctly pointing out very distinct flavor sensations. I suspect that with a little practice, or maybe your own experiment or two, you can do the same.

The Ides of March

2007-03-15T01:48:00.000-07:00

This will be the last bit of culture of any sort that will be squeezed from me until at least after I'm effectively eliminated from my NCAA Tourney pool. If history is any indication (and this post will have a bit of history or at least historical context for the nerds among us), that will mean that I will again be blogging away about wine no later than Sunday, but possibly earlier. (For the record, I picked the Hoyas, and my sentimental favorite to do well was NC State because Sophomore Ben McCauley is from my home town. They got screwed by the committe and didn't make it much to my surprise. Also for the record, I coached his older brother and also defeated his father's team in a parents versus coaches game at our Championship Celebration, but the last time I saw Ben in person he was in second grade: I gather he's a bit bigger now.)

Anyways, do you know what a Hoya is? You would if you knew greek. It was once a requirement for all Georgetown students to learn both Greek and Latin and their cheer was accordingly half Greek-Half Latin, Hoyas Sextus, literally Behold that Man. You would only know that if you either went to Georgetown, knew both Greek and Latin or were a sink of useless knowledge like me. If you are one of the few that know either Greek or Latin, you may have read the words of the Greek historian Strabo, a contemporary of Caesar, who comments that, “the vine, as you thus proceed [north of Provence], does not easily bring its fruit to maturity.”* Why might that be? Because the further north one proceeds, the cooler the climate and ripeness is more difficult and alcohol is generally lower. Two milennia ago, when the wine trade was first really kicking in among the civilized world, Julius and Brutus and friends went for the sweet stuff with high alcohol.

(While we're on the subject of dead white guys, was it not Santanaya who proclaimed that, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."?)

Human beings are born with a propensity toward liking things that are sweet. (I can't find a reference for this although I've read it often, so you MD types please comment or otherwise chime in.) Since alcohol has an apparent sweetness to the palate, the macro-wineries of California basically give the consumer what they have always wanted (from the time they were children), wines with high-alcohol or wines with a bit of RS (Residual Sugar) or both. There's nothing wrong with that in of itself, I'd just like to think that most people would like their palates to advance to enjoy a wider diversity of flavor sensations than they did when they were just out of the womb. I always try to sell someone the wine that's right for them, but occassionally I fail. One of my best friends hates practically every wine that I pour, and even when I have one that I think he might like, he hates it. I simply tell him, if you have a wine (or a food item) that you don't like, try to enjoy it as best you can and think to yourself, "What might someone else enjoy about this?" That way, slowly but surely, you very well may enjoy the flavor the next time around.

* Strabo. Geographia. IV.1.2.

Millionaire's Salad

2007-03-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

I have to be perfectly honest: before I started this entry, I had never heard of millionaire's salad. It came to me in a roundabout way. It also as far as I can tell is the most inappropriate name for a dish that I have ever seen, since the ingredients will likely cost you under $10 if you're serving less than an army. But let's backtrack a bit first.

Back in the day, I used to regularly attend wine dinners at the now defunct Judson Grill in Midtown Manhattan. Judson was great, the service was outstanding, and the food was really solid, especially for a place of it's size. I loved ending dinner with a milkshake of vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, seltzer water and a shot of Jack Daniel's. It is porbably my favorite dessert in the world to this day.

Every time I ate ate Judson Grill, there was at least one dish that blew you away, and one such dish was a hearts of plam salad. It was so perfect in it's simplicity, yet so refined. ever since then I have been a fan of hearts of palm.

Heart of palm, also called palm heart, palmito, or swamp cabbage, is a vegetable harvested from the inner core and growing bud of certain palm trees (notably the coconut (Cocos nucifera), Palmito Juçara (Euterpe edulis), Açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea), sabal (Sabal spp.) and pejibaye (Bactris gasipaes) palms). It looks a bit like the white part of a very small leek, and when it is cut up, its white concentric circles look the same.

I popped in to Trilogy Restaurant in Pittsburgh for a simple appetizer or first course and a glass of wine a few nights ago. I had a nice glass of 2003 Summerland Chardonnay from Santa Brabara and took a peak at the menu. Sure enough, hearts of palm salad. Now as I just learned prior to sitting down to type this up, hearts of palm is traditionally served in what is called millionaire's salad (who knew?). Since I had never heard of this, and because it's quick and simple to make, I thought I'd mention it here, before I move on to telling you about the Trilogy Salad I did have.

Millionaire's Salad is artichoke hearts, olives, pimentos, and muchrooms with a red wine vinaigrette and some spices (the recipe I found calls for garlic, thyme and parseley). Since it sounds so delicious and simple, and since I suspect that many of you have heard of such as salad I though it deserved mentioning. I also think it would be a nice spring salad and alternative to your normal antipasti.

But here's what I had, and my very abstract recipe for it as I remember it from Trilogy.

* 1 14oz can hearts of palm, drained and sliced into dimes sized circles
* 1/2 lb shrimp, boiled or otherwise pre-cooked however you'd like
(grilling the shrimp might actually be nice come to think of it)
* 1/2 box of pre-cooked pasta, al dente, erring on the harder rather than softer side for texture

I'd put some oil and vinegar on them and let them sit and chill for about two hours and then add about 4 Tbsp. of basil pesto and salt and pepper to taste. Sqeeze some lemon juice over it, mix it up one last time and serve...

So there you have it, two simple, inexpensive salads that will add a liitle bit of diversity to your next gathering. Try it with a clean light to medium white, such as:

2005 Bourassa Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc
2004 Adastra Chardonnay, Carneros
2004 Temecula Hills "No Oak" Chardonnay, Temecula

Ernest Gallo 1909-2007

2007-03-07T01:55:00.000-08:00

It is with sadness that I report that Ernest Gallo has died. I have had my hand on the keyboard and eyeballs on the computer screen all day and was unaware of this event until just now. To paraphrase the CNBC announcement that just played in my background, "Ernest Gallo took a recipe for wine that he found in the Modesto Public Library and turned E & J Gallo into the world's largest winery". That's the embodiment of the American Dream.

Here's how Gallo changed the industry. Gallo was the first wine company to hire and train a sales staff spefically to market its brands in individual markets. For example, let's say I sell Chateau Alan at a retail store in New York. I speak to a rep for the New York distributor if I have questions. That rep also sells 300 other wines form all over the world. He gets Chateau Alan from another company in California who has about 50 different wineries they represent. With Gallo, there's a Gallo salesperson in all markets, who is responsible for Gallo products and that's it and he or she works for Gallo. That's the case a little more often with other large wineries and wine conglomerates, but Gallo was first.

I found this amusing write-up from the James Beard Foundation:

"After the war, Ernest devised a bold new advertising campaign for the company, transforming America's relationship with wine with his famous "lifestyle" billboards and ads. And in 1945, he brought his little winery to national attention by convincing Life magazine to attend a grape crush at the winery (the key selling point was a scantily-clad woman bathing in wine). But Ernest's success was due as much to little things as to big ones. He constantly visited stores across the country that stocked his wine, checking on bottle positioning, displays and sales. (He was, as Anthony Dias Blue of Bon Appétit recalls, once arrested in a tiny town in Texas for lurking in local liquor stores. When he explained that he was Ernest Gallo, the sheriff reportedly replied, "and I'm George Washington," and carted him off to jail). Ernest was tireless-and effective. Between 1948 and 1955, sales rose 400%. He set down his precepts in a three-hundred-page secret marketing "Bible" that the family still uses. He is, Dias Blue asserts, unquestionably "a marketing genius."

Here is the E&J Gallo Press Release.

So, raise your next glass to a wine industry innovator and legend who lived the American Dream to the fullest...

Glory Days

2007-03-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

I ended last night in conversation with a friend about modern business classics such as Den of Thieves, Liar's Parker, The Smartest Guys in the Room and A Random Walk. We were discussing the efficiency and inefficiency of financial markets. It got me thinking again about wine prices and my most recent "random walk" down the aisles of a wine store.

As I perused the selections available, a few bottles of Calera Pinot Noir, the single-vineyard stuff, caught my eye. $55 a bottle. If you have been into wine for a while, you'll remember the following. If you're new to wine, the story is as meaningful as ever.

Calera is an outstanding producer of California Pinot Noir. For a while in the mid-1990's, Calera was fairly cultish, tough to find, expensive vis-a-vis its peers at the time, but certainly of high quality. I dug out my notes on a seven-year old Calera from a wine dinner on February 3rd, 2001:

1994 Calera Pinot Noir, Selleck
Very good concentration of raspberries and cassis. Structured by nice, ripe tannins. Nice wine...etc, etc.

A fine showing by a seven-year old California Pinot Noir being that most are made in a more fashionable, drink-me-know fashion.

It was right around this time give or take a year or maybe a few months, that Josh Jensen of Calera came out with his now (in)famous newsletter of new releases wherein he explained that the he was rasing the price of Calera's single vineyard offering from $55 to $80 per bottle in order to keep his prices even with other top Pinot Noirs from California. Everyone in the wine business walked around with the same type of buzz that many of us had Tuesday morning as we saw months of growth in our 401(k)'s vanish (okay, perhaps I'm being a bit melodramatic, but you get the point). Not long thereafter, although quality has never waned, Calera dropped off the radar quite a bit.

So, during my recent "random walk" it was fitting that I saw Calera Selleck vineyard waiting for me on the shelf. After a period of time where Calera Pinot Noir was overpriced, the Calera stable has experienced a "market correction" and has returned to $55 dollars a bottle, right back where it was about seven years ago. I had visions of Jim Cramer in my head ("Buy!Buy!Buy!") and picked up a bottle to enjoy with a steak that evening. Admittedly, I enjoyed every last sip.

[Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days plays in the background. Fade.]

California Dreamin...

2007-02-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

As the checkered flag dropped on yesterday's Auto Club 500, a 500-mile race in Fontana, California, I couldn't help but think to myslef that I wish I had made a weekend of it. I could've left Fonatana in the early evening following what was a pretty exciting race, caught some zzz's and been off early this morning to head down Route 15 to Temecula. Temecula is a great starting point for one's exploration of California's relatively unknown South Coast wineries, and one couldn't do better than beginning the morning at Temecula Hills Winery.

Admittedly, Temecula Hills winery is quite a bit larger than the micro-wineries we normally represent, but that doesn't mean there still isn't that homey feeling. The reason most wineries in the surrounding areas are on the larger side is part geography, part history. First of all, it is generally less mountanous here, and as a result there are less obtrusive geographical boundaries that naturally separate tracts of land. Secondly, this area is relatively new to commercial planting, and so a small number of (in my opinion very wise) investors were able to walk in and find the space to plant vineyards without restriction. This is not unlike what happened in the "lesser" AVA's located in the Central Coast in the 1960's.

Here's the difference. There are several ways to make the "rich, buttery" Chardonnays for which California wineries were long noted. The two most common are through full malo-lactic fermentation and the other is through the use of oak. If a winery employs both techniques without care, the result is an opulent, blowsy white that is more of a meal than a refreshment, and not entirely what I want.

This needs explanation. When Chardonnay grapes ferment - that is, turn their natural sugars into alcohol - that is called primary fermentation. The wine that results has a lot of green apple flavor and acidity, something known as malic acid. There another conversion that takes place, malo-lactic or secondary fermentation, that changes this more biting acidity into a creamier textured acidity, lactic acidity. (Think malic - milk, it is the same acid.) So there is a smoother mouthfeel. Winemakers allow malolactic fermentation to occur in varying degrees, some may choose no malolactic, full malolactic or somewhere in between. If the grapes are ultraripe, ultrasweet and high in alcohol (alcohol adds apparent sweetness to alcoholic beverages such as wine) then the wine becomes too "soft" in the mouth, very full, too creamy and overall not that friendly with most foods.

The same thing can happen with oak. Oak adds a certain vanilla, coconut flavor to the wine (in varying degrees depending on a lot of factors, a topic I hope to explore in the future). With the vanilla, coconut flavoring from oak and full malo-lactic fermentation and a lot of heat (and hence ripeness and alcohol), the wine becomes unbearably clumsy, weighty and sweet.

Luckily, one of our favorite stops in Temecula, where it is quite warm, is Temecula Hills Winery. Realizing that balance is always required in a wine (balance, as my regular readers already know, is what I most prize in a wine), Temecula Hills makes their Chardonnay sans oak, offering instead, pure, natural Chardonnay flavors and the essence of sunny Southern California. They opt for an unoaked Chardonnay, skipping the sweet oaky flavors that might throw the wine out of balance. The wine that results is fresh, flavorful juice that has a nice backbone.

Those of us on the east coast about now could probably use a bit of sunny, Southern California in a bottle. If you do, like I do, I recommend 2004 Temecula Hills Winery Unoaked Chardonnay without hesitation. Sunshine in a bottle - without the sunburn: Enjoy!

The Results Are In: Double Gold Best in Show

2007-02-23T21:41:00.001-08:00

I discussed one of our latest additions, Escafeld Winery, earlier in this blog, and, having already covered their peppery, chocolatey Zinfandel, as promised I wanted to follow up on my outstanding recent tasting of Escafeld's 2004 Petit Verdot.

Many of you may be unfamiliar with the grape Petit Verdot, but even those of you who do not know it, may have had it, at least in small doses. Petit Verdot is typically an element in Red Bordeaux, adding tannins and color to the better known Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes. Being part of the "classic Bordeaux Blend", California vintners eventually planted the grape as well.

If you drink only California Cabernet Sauvignon's and similar wines, you may still think that you have never had Petit Verdot: think again. Petit Verdot plays a supporting role in many of the most popular Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines made in California today. Names such as Rudd, Murphy-Goode, Seavey and even last year's Wine Spectator Wine of the Year, Jospeh Phelps Insignia, all contain Petit Verdot.

What's great about Escafeld is that rather than being and endnote to the story, their Petit Verdot is the body of the work. Don't be led down the path to fool's gold in thinking that if Petit Verdot is never seen alone in Bordeaux that it won't make anything special; Monterey County is a long way from Bordeaux. Given that it is often quite easy to tell the difference between Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa as opposed to Sonoma, wouldn't it make sense that Petit Verdot would take on different charcteristics than it does 6,000 miles away in France's famous Medoc?

I think that this wine is quite simply outstanding. The wine has a firm texture, full fruit, a sleek mouthfeel and great length. You could drink it with anything from Burgers to Spicy Pasta (like the Italian Sausage Marinara concotion simmering on my stove right now). Either way, I'll skip the sales pitch and let the judges decide. The results of the recent San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition:

All Other Bordeaux Varietals - 2007 Award Winners

SCHOTT ZWIESEL Double Gold Best of Class
Escafeld 2004 Petit Verdot San Antonio Valley, Monterey County, CA

SCHOTT ZWIESEL Gold
Cinnabar Vineyards 2003 Malbec

SCHOTT ZWIESEL Silver
Berryessa Gap Vineyards 2004 Malbec Berryessa Gap Vineyards
deLorimier 2003 Malbec Alexander Valley Estate
Mosaic 2004 Malbec Alexander Valley
Opolo Vineyards 2004 Petit Verdot Paso Robles
Rancho Sisquoc 2004 Malbec Flood Family Vineyards
Reininger Winery 2003 Carmenére Walla Walla Valley 7 Hills
Snake River Winery 2004 Malbec Wood River Vineyard
Stonegate Winery 2003 Petit Verdot Napa Valley, Wappo Vineyard
Stryker Sonoma Winery 2004 Petit Verdot Knights Valley Speedy Creek Vineyard

SCHOTT ZWIESEL Bronze
Forest Glen Winery 2003 Malbec
Lapis Luna 2004 Petit Verdot San Luis Obispo
McKenzie-Mueller Vineyards & Winery 2003 Malbec

As an addendum, the 2004 Escafeld Petit Verdot is the first ever winery to bear the AVA name of San Antonio Valley .. things look pretty promising so far!

Trust me...

2007-02-18T21:51:00.000-08:00

A recent post by our CEO, William Bellomo gives further details on Silver Mountain owner Jerold O'Brien.

Selling wine is a tough job in some ways. My clients who have known me for five or ten years get used to trusting me and know that I will do my best to bring them the best wine for them. Those long-time customers, who I prefer to think of as friends, understand my sometimes simple and straightforward words. For those friends of mine, I tell them "listen buy Silver Mountain wine".

The pinots are great. The chard is great. These are wines that are priced well below what they are worth and deliver. Given the facts that William has presented in his blog, it is clear that Mr. O'Brien is an interesting an accomplished gentleman. But more than that, we have a great time in Santa Cruz when we visit him. He is extremely pleasant anmd very welcoming. When I can sell great wines, at great prices, made by great people, my job suddenly becomes easier.

I would love to have you visit Silver Mountain's product page. Our inboxes and phones are always waiting for you. If you have any questions, give us a call. These are great wines, at great prices, made by great people. Trust me.

The Great American Grape

2007-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

As a follow up to my previous post that included my resipe for Al's Super-Easy Chili, I wanted to discuss what wines to drink with it. Instinctively, maybe refelxively, if I am asked what wine to drink with Spicy Tex-Mex dishes or just anything on a grill save grilled fish, my answer is usually Zinfandel. After all, we are talking about "the Great American Race" and from a gastronomical standpoint, grilling is as American as Apple Pie and chili probably figures in there somewhere as well.

So why Zinfandel? From wikipedia,

Although similar to other varieties of the Vitis vinifera imported from Europe, Zinfandel was long considered "America's vine and wine." Zinfandel was brought to the United States (Long Island) from a varietal collection of the Imperial State Nursery of Vienna in the 1820s. In the cooler climates it was grown in greenhouses. In California the first Zinfandel vineyards were planted in the 1830s. Its popularity grew swiftly, and by the end of the 19th century it became the most widespread variety in the US.

Vintners have grown Zinfandel in quantity for over one hundred years. Many of the oldest wineries in California grow Zinfandel and the vines are now treated almost like historic landmarks. At the start of prohibition Zinfandel was California's most popular and successful variety. During prohibition, limited home winemaking and the production of sacramental wine was allowed, and Zinfandel remained popular with Northern California's home wine makers. However, on the East Coast Zinfandel fell in popularity and was replaced by thicker-skinned varieties. Zinfandel's tight bunches left its thin skins susceptible to rot on the slow train rides to Eastern home wine makers. The creation of White Zinfandel in the 1970s further saved the vines by providing a larger market for the grape. In the 1990s the market for premium wine increased sufficiently that old vine Zinfandel became valuable on its own.

(Further reading of the article will show that we have in more recent times come to the conclusion that Zinfandel is probably actually from Italy, a realtive of the Primitivo grape; even so, Zinfandel secured it's place as "the Great American Grape" long ago.)

So if Zinfandel is "the Great American Grape" and foods such as Burgers and Chili are our cook's badges of honor, wouldn't be lucky if the wine and the food paired well together, so that we, like the French, Italians, etc. would have wines that go with our regional cusine? The fortunate answer is that they do.

Take, Escafeld Winery's 2003 Monterey County Zinfandel, one of our latest discoveries. Even Al's Super-Easy Chili is an incredibly complex blend of flavors - cumin, chili peppers, green peppers, black peppers, tomatoes, kidney beans, onions, beef, pork, vinegar, garlic, sharp cheddar cheese - that's a lot of different flavors in one little bowl. A wine with subtle flavors just simply doesn't work. I regualrly make the argument that Red Burgundy (Pinot Noir from France) is the world's most versatile red wine, but the Musignys and Gevreys of the world need not apply here: although they have remarkable complexity, Pinots, especially those from Burgundy, are more about finesse than pronounced flavors (not too mention haunting aromatics that would get lost in the robust scents of chili). Escafeld's Zin on the other hand, hits the spot. The interplay of spice and sweet fruits (raisins, ripe berries) not to mention the chocolatey finish mimcs the contrapuntal flavors of, for example, spanish onions and chilis.

We have already implied the nextrequirement for a Chili-wine: it must be robust, an appropriate descriptor for the Escafeld Zin. What I like a lot about the Escafeld Zin is that, while it is a full-bodied ande robust wine, it is still a wine of balance, the most important element in any wine for me. Robust yes, but all the elements are in equilibrium; not unlike the addition of vinegar in the chili, as I described it in my previous post. Too much, and you get a really strong acetic taste and smell, and you might as well start agin. But there is a certain point in any dish where the right amount of salt or acid (acetic, i.e. vinegar, or citric, i.e. lemon, lime, orange, etc.) or any wine where the right amount of alcohol, sugar, ripeness, tannin and acidity are all in perfect balance. So once you have the chili down pat, it will require much less effort to pull the cork on Escafeld's 2003 Monterey Zin. A "Great American Wine" with a "Great American Dish" during the "Great American Race": robust, balanced and simply delicious.

For more on Escafeld winery, visit their product page on www.avawine.com or visit the entertaining Vineyard Diary of our friend Elsbeth Wetherill, co-owner of Escafeld vineyards. Among other things, you can read Elsbeth's comments on Escafeld Winery's 2004 Petit Verdot, Double-Gold "Best of Class" Winner in the recent San Francisco Wine Chronicle Competition - the subject of my next blog entry.

The Great American Race

2007-02-14T16:32:00.000-08:00

With "the Great American Game" just finished and the "the Great American Race" coming up on Sunday, it seemed like the perfect time to make a large a pot of chili and then to follow it up with a good dose of some of our new arrivals.

Part #1) Let's start with the chili.

A lot of people ask me for my chili recipe because, well, I make a good bowl of chili. The problem is, I don't really have a recipe. I also don't really do the whole measurement thing when I'm cooking, preferring instead to let my sense of smell and taste guide me. But since, it's a frequent question, here's a approximated version in a nut shell. Most people don't know the secret indgredient IMO of a good bowl of chili - vinegar. Believe me - it makes all the difference. The most common mistake people make when cooking is not using enough of the handful of things that enhance the wonderful flavors of your dishes (that is, salt, citric juice such as that of lemons and vinegars iof various types). If you don't believe me, make gazpacho some time. It's real easy. Try one bowl with no vinegar to finish it off. Try another with cheap red wine vinegar. Try a final one with good, aged red wine vinegar. I'll bet that you can tell the difference. It's the same idea here.

My easy version is as follow:
- One large chopped green onion
- Two large chopped spanish onions
- 1/4 cup chili powder
- 1 T garlic
- 1 lb. ground beef
- 1 lb. ground pork
- beef suet
- 3 large cans of diced tomatoes
- 3 small cans kidney beans

Put a large saucepan over medium heat. Put a few chunks of beef suet into the pan until it becomes liquid. Add the minced garlic, being careful not to burn. Add green pepper and cook until begins to soften. Add onion until it begins to soften. Add pork, beef and chili poweder and begin to brown. One the meat has browned the whole way through, drain tghe excess moisture and fat from the chiili. Put in your tomatoes and kidney beans and a salt and pepper to taste (this is more than you think - maybe a 1/4 cup each). Cook for as long as you can on a slow simmer, three hours or even over night if you can. Take a taste about 1/2 hour before serving and vinegar to taste. Try about a third of a cup, let it simmer for 10 minutes, and if it's still not piquant enough ad some more and repeat until you have chili with some flavor.

By the way, this makes a lot of chili, but it even goes further (and tastes better I think) if you cook up a big bowl of white rice and top the rice with the chili and then chopped red onion and sharp chedder cheese. Also, if you are interested in Texas Style Chili (chili with no beans) this recipe is complicated but the results are worth it...

Next time: finishing your pit stop with wine.

Liquid Gold

2007-02-01T22:47:00.000-08:00

I'd like to continue with my previous post and tie everything together. The fact of the matter is that my first bottle of Sauternes was a bottle by the massive French firm Barton & Guestier. It was a wine that most aficianados would frown upon. At that moment in my life, it was the most profound sensatory experience in my life.

The only experience that rivals my first Sauternes was my taste of a most celebrated one - 1975 Chateau d'Yquem. Chateau d'Yquem, in any year, is recognized as being quite a bit better than any of its rivals - for reasons not worth getting into here. It is so recognized that it is officially recognized as such by the French INAO, the governmental agency that classifies wines. Sauternes is classified as follows:

Superior First Growth (Premier Cru Supérieur)
Château d'Yquem, Sauternes

First Growths (Premiers Crus)
Château La Tour Blanche, Bommes (Sauternes)
Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey, Bommes (Sauternes)
Clos Haut-Peyraguey, Bommes (Sauternes) (Château Clos Haut-Peyraguey)
Château de Rayne-Vigneau, Bommes (Sauternes)
Château Suduiraut, Preignac (Sauternes)
Château Coutet, Barsac
Château Climens, Barsac
Château Guiraud, Sauternes
Château Rieussec, Fargues (Sauternes)
Château Rabaud-Promis, Bommes (Sauternes)
Château Sigalas-Rabaud, Bommes (Sauternes)

Second Growths (Deuxièmes Crus)
Château Myrat, Barsac (Château de Myrat)
Château Doisy Daene, Barsac
Château Doisy-Dubroca, Barsac
Château Doisy-Vedrines, Barsac
Château D'Arche, Sauternes
Château Filhot, Sauternes
Château Broustet Barsac
Château Nairac, Barsac
Château Caillou, Barsac
Château Suau, Barsac
Château de Malle, Preignac (Sauternes)
Château Romer, Fargues (Sauternes) (Château Romer du Hayot)
Château Lamothe, Sauternes

No one really doubts that Chateau d'Yquem is a one of a kind, even the legal authorities in France. The best wine I ever had was almost without doubt the 1975 Chateau d'Yquem (a particularly good year in Sauternes); it is scored 100pts out of 100 by Robert Parker the world's leading wine authority, in other words a perfect wine.

'75 Yquem goes for about $1200 a bottle give or take nowadays, but is it worth it? My opinion is "yes", making it the first time in my life that I agree with Robert Parker I believe. Nonetheless, my experience with '75 Yquem is equalled by my Barton & Guestier of unknown vintage drunk with a friend at 6AM in a fraternity house in Chicago. 100 pointers can be disappointing if they're not shared at the right moment, with the right company.

Never believe the hype of 100 point wines (or 95 or 90 pointers for that matter). A bottle of wine is an experience. I guarantee that over the course of my life I have a higher percentage of "90 point nights" with the most simple of wines, and I know for a fact that I have had too many disappointing nights with wines that were critically acclaimed.

In summary, every wine "is worth it" if you enjoy drinking it, the company with whom you share it and that moment in time where you felt more relaxed than you do every day at work or what have you. A good wine, like a book, or an opera, or a movie or a Steelers game is incomparable at that moment in time. If you don't enjoy it, no matter what the scores say, it's not worth it...

Are Gold Prices Rising?

2007-01-25T21:38:00.000-08:00

No. This is not another investment blog (it seems that we have enough of them). I'd like to talk about Liquid Gold, or what we wine lover's call Sauternes. The real topic is the most difficult question I get asked as a wine consultant - "Is it worth it?"

When I was in college, I began to become interested in wine. I learned the fundamental principles of the snob - the only good wine is red wine, etc., etc. - most all of them were wrong. Being the inquisitive type, I researched more extensively on the subject of wine. Eventually, I cam across the concept of Botrytis Cinarea [BAW-TRITUS].

What? BAW-TRITUS...ahem...SIN-ER-REE-AH. Here's the big problem. From a biological standpoint - actually from the standpoint of a pure obsever - it's more disgusting than it sounds. So what is it? And what does this have to do with gold?

Wikipedia tells us that Botrytis Cinarea is:

Botrytis cinerea is a fungus that affects many plant species, although its most economically important hosts are wine grapes[citation needed]. In viticulture, it is commonly known as botrytis bunch rot; in horticulture, it is usually called grey mould or gray mold. The fungus gives rise to two different kinds of infections on grapes. The first, grey rot, is the result of consistently wet or humid conditions, and typically results in the loss of the affected bunches. The second, noble rot, occurs when drier conditions follow wetter, and can result in distinctive sweet dessert wines, such as Sauternes. The species name Botrytis cinerea is derived from the Latin for "grapes like ashes"; although poetic, the "grapes" disappointingly refers to the bunching of the fungal spores on their conidiophores, and "ashes" just refers to the greyish colour of the spores en masse. The fungus is usually referred to by its anamorph (asexual form) name, because the sexual phase is rarely observed. The teleomorph (sexual form) is an ascomycete, Botryotinia fuckeliana (see taxonomy box).

Let's rewind a bit. While "Is it worth it?" might be the most difficult question I get, the most frequent one is "How did you get in the wine industry?" Here's my answer...

I was in college in Chicago. I read about Botrytis. The descriptors made it sound amazing, in fact, at least one writer dubbed it Liquid Gold. I had to try it. So I took my bartending money and bought the cheapest Sauternes I could find - the only Sauternes I could find. It was about 25 bucks for the half bottle - not much in retrospect for a good bottle of Sauternes. I bought it before I went to bartend (looking back, it was likely an '83, a great vintage) and came home to my fraternity house, grabbed a bear and decided to go to sleep. I woke up a couple of hours later: I had to taste Botrytis, I had to taste Sauternes. Liquid Gold.

I said to myself "To hell with it", and there I was, in a Fraternity House in Chicago, uncorking a bottle of wine that would determine the future of my life. A "Brother" came downstairs as I sipped Liquid Gold with glee - at six AM.

...how does all of this tie in to the question "Is it worth it?"...if you are wondering, visit us tomorrow...

It's all in the balance...

2007-01-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

Last night, I decided to relax and catch some Jazz at the Backstage Bar at Theater Square in downtown Pittsburgh. I sipped a martini while I perused the small wine list, and immediately gravitated to the 2003 Bourgogne Pinot Noir from Joesph Faiveley. Just a standard, every day Red Burgundy, just what I wanted and at $7 a glass it wouldn't break the bank. The aromatic profile of the wine was just beautiful - a melange of red cherries and raisins. Real pretty. The problem came when I took the first sip as the tannins immediately parched my palate, prompting me to order a club soda just to scrape the wine from my tongue.

Wine has to be in balance. There's a lot of combinations that will make for a balanced wine, but what does that mean. Emile Peynaud's The Taste of Wine is a seminal book that is as influential now as it was when it was first written over thirty years ago. I do warn that this book is more than a bit technical from time to time, but there are important parts that will be understandable to all. Particularly interesting is his rather extensive treatment of how to write a tasting note. And for our purposes, the parts where he discusses balance.

In a nut shell a balanced wine follows the equation:

Acidity + Tannin => Sugar + Alcohol.

There are a few corollaries that result from this equation. Namely that if there is a lot of tannin in the wine, there shouldn't be a lot of acidity, and it certainly needs to be offset by either sugar or a good dose of alcohol. Why alcohol? I'm so glad you asked. :)

Alcohol has an apparent sweetness to the palate. Most people don't realize it but it's true. The easiest way to prove this (if you're either a real go-getter or the scientific type or both) is to set up this little experiment. Boil the alocohol out of glass of wine. Run it through glass tubing and into a beaker. When all the alcohol has boiled out replace the same amount of water into the wine as the amount of alcohol that came out. The result: the wine will be unbearably bitter, either too tannic or too acidic or both. That's because when the alcohol is in the wine, it's apparent sweetness balances the wine. Without it, the wine is plonk.

Many people criticise California wines for being too alcoholic, and it's true that some are. But in the best California wines, elevated alcohol can still make for a balanced wine - all you need is the appropriate level of tannin or acidity to work in concert with it. Conversely, if there's a lot of tannin in the wine (something that will happen naturally when it's warm out because the skins of the grapes thicken and that's where the tannin is), the wine requires high alcohol, or else it will become to tough to drink - a problem that occurred in the heat wave of 2003 in France - the very problem that tainted my experience with Faiveley's Bourgogne. It's all about the balance.

My Pick for the Year's Best Wine Book

2007-01-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd take a moment since we're at year's end/beginning to highlight my favorite wine book from last year, Matt Kramer's New California Wine: Making Sense of Napa Valley, Sonoma, Central Coast, and Beyond. I first picked this book up in I believe late January last year, and I don't think that I've set it down since.

What makes Kramer's book different from the scores of other California Wine books that are available? The pimary difference is that rather than simply offering page after page of endless tasting notes, Kramer's book educates the reader. Karmer sets the tone with his entertaining first section (around 50 pages in all) entitled "Thinking California". Not a history in the traditional sense of the world, Kramer contrasts the California winemaking mindset with that of Europe, tracing the overall mentality from the industrial wineries of the past to today's cult wines.

Kramer then takes the reader through each of California's major wine regions. He looks at each region as terroir unto itself and is refreshingly frank in telling the reader whether or not this approach can be justified or not with regards to each region. In some cases, Kramer willingly admits that the region in question is merely a geographic deignation with wines of no particular distinguishing characteristics. When it is justified, Kramer takes a closer look at wines of more refinement. In addition, Kramer profiles the finest wineries, putting them of course in the context of the terroir in which they produce wine.

Overall, Kramer's New California Wine is a must-have for any serious wine lover and is written with his classic, amusing, accesible words that have made him one of America's favorite wine writers.

End the year with a boom ... or rather a Zoom!

2007-01-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

A new year and a new winery for AVA Wine. I'd like to highlight this week the impressive and fairly priced (perhaps unfairly priced - for the winery - considering the quailty) of Zoom Vineyards. Zoom Vineyards is run by the two-headed monster of Matt Hughes who you may know from Verite, the ultra-premium Lake County affiliate of Kendall-Jackson and Christian Hackshaw, founder of Demeter Vineyards. While the winery itself concentrates on pure, small-lot Zinfandel from Lake County, I must say that a recent tasting of their 2002 Zinfandel from San Francisco Bay/Contra Costa County caught my eye, or rather my palate.

The 2002 Zinfandel, San Francisco Bay is one of the finest Zins I have tasted. It weighs in at 14.9% alcohol, but is not heavy on the palate, nor is its aromatic profile alcoholic, nor is its finish "hot". (A "hot" finish is one that tastes excessively of alcohol, perhaps reminiscent of terpentine, a common criticism of overly modern-styled wines - see my previous post for my thoughts on the subject.) This wine shows amazing restraint - and the price is tremendous for the quality of the wine, but in order to understand why, a bit of viticultural history is required. My continuous mantra through these blog entries is that a greater understanding of the individual wine leads to greater pleasure of the wine...

Old Vines
Old Vines are the key to this wine. There are arguments back and forth between old-world, old-school producers and modernists, but the proverbial thorn in the side of the modernists is that, quite simply, over the course of time the human race improves and learns. Wines from the prominent European viticultural areas do have an advantage, whether we Americans would like to admit or not: trial and error over the course of ten centuries has certain advantages to what is essentailly the cottage wine industry in California. Monks during the Crusades already knew the finest locations to grow vines. It's reasonable to think that in the forty years of the rebirth of the California wine industry, that they have learned less about the best-situated vineyards than Europeans have over many centuries. (This is not to say that they have not learned more rapidly, probably much more rapidly than any of the world's major viticultural regions how to do it right and fast.) Given this amazing head start of many hundreds of years, almost any other deprivement should have put the California wine industry irreperably behind, right? The fact that it didn't, is as a amazing as the story of the United States of America itself.

So what was the straw that somehow didn't break the camel's back? In 1919, 46 of 48 states ratified the Volstead Act making it unlawful to manufacture, transport or sell alcohol anywhere in the United States. Prohibition entered the constitution as Amendment 18 on January 16, 1920, and the California wine industry suddenly faced something more challenging than the head start that Europe had gained through centuries of expermientation. There were a little over seven hundred wineries in the budding California wine industry; by the end, it had almost dwindled to nothing. Many farmers ripped up their vines and planted other more lucrative, that is, legal crops that could be manufactured, transported and sold like any other agricultural commodity. The vines disappeared daily...

Of course prohibition was later repealed thanks the passage of the 21st amendment. There were obviosuly many long term effects, some of which I hope to discuss in future entries, but for now, I'd like to isolate the importance one factor in particular - that of the age of the vines.

The casual wine drinker may be unaware as to how important many seemingly insignificant factors are to producing top quality wines. Vine age is particularly poignant when considering the 2002 Zinfandel San Francisco Bay of Zoom Vineyards. In the 1920's, when nearly every vineyard was ripped up in California, it almost signalled the end to wine in America as we know it. Luckily a few vineyards and wineries perservered. While the French had their own problems (a vine pest named phyloxerra that destroyed most all their vines in the late 1800's), when prohibition was repealed in 1933, most French vines were already nearly 50 years old. In California, the wineries that gave it go following prohibition were forced to begin again, and the French now had an additional forty year lead. But why does it matter?

Old vines do something special. The longer a vine lives, the deeper it works itself into the soil. It can more easily reach water reserves far beneath the soil'd surface horizon and their more extensive network of vines has a greater area exposed to the soil, offering more outlets to seek nutrients from the earth. All other things being equal, old vines have the best chance of creating world-class wine.

Luckily, a small handful of vineyards continued through Prohibition. One of these was the Continente Family Vineyard in Contra Costa County. This is where we find the vines for the 2002 San Francisco Bay Zinfandel of Zoom Vineyards. The vines are 106 years old! I can think of only a handful of European vineyards whose vines exceed the century-mark in age: in the Unoted States, where five and ten year old vines are the norm, vines of this age are almost never seen!

So the 2002 Zooom Zin SF Bay is, despite it's youthful creators, a dinosaur of sorts, a beckon to the old days of California wine. Wines who siphon over 100 years of natural goodness directly into their grapes.

My notes, show that the wine is not overwhelming in spite of it's elevated alcohol (although in the grand scheme of things - under 15% is not all that high for powerhouse red Zins). The nose reminds me at first, not of Claifornia Zin, but of a complex, traditionally made Eurpoean wine, likely of Mediterranean climate. Its expressive, chocolately nose hints more of a top-shelf Italian wine - Brunello di Montalcino comes to mind - than California. The wine does not smack you in the face; in fact, it is rather subtle all said and done, and truth be told, it is quite intellectual, with each sip offering something new, than most every Zin on the market. The palate is so smooth, and finishes with a mouth-puckering note of tannin that will work perfectly with your braised red meats when it's cold, or your grilled steaks and burgers this summer. The rasin-filled palate has the weet, bitter and sour flavors of that dried dark fruit that hits and appeals all parts of the palate. The raspeberry highlights only a enhance the wine that develops and reveals itself in waves as it opens in the glass. What a beautiful wine! It's amazing what old vines can do...

I think Miles was wrong...for some

2007-01-03T21:13:00.001-08:00

The movie Sideways made Pinot Noir popular and Merlot passe. Everyone remembers Miles' now famous proclamation, "I am not drinking ******* Merlot! If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving!" As a Pinotphile myself, I understand where he's coming from. At the same time, the fact that sales of Pinot Noir are up 120% over the past two years gives me pause. As someone who has sold millions of dollars worth of Pinot Noir over the years, I can tell you this - I expect the sales to slow up in a hurry. If I were starting my own winery in California today, I wouldn't plant Pinot Noir. Let me tell you why.

First there are the basics - Pinot Noir is hard to grow. Pinot Noir is completeley different from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot or Shiraz. These wines derive their dense, purple hues from the thick skins of those grapes. The thick skins protect the wines from many harmful natural factors such as intense sunlight. The skin of Pinot Noir is usually quite thin. (A corollary of the thickness or lack thereof of the skin is that Pinot Noir is usually lighter in color.) Because the skin is not as thick as that of other red grapes, Pinot Noir is more likely to be damaged by natural elements and also highly susceptible to rot! Rot in your wine is bad! It tastes horrible. When Cabernet for instance is underripe, there is a vegetal green bean character that develops. I'd take a vegetal Cab over a rotten Pinot noir any day! If you don't believe me, try a bad 1983 Burgundy: then you'll understand why really quickly.

Because it's difficult to grow, and requires enormous attention, something of which I am largely incapable (I am mre the visionary-type than detail-oriented), Pinot Noir and I would be a bad mix. But that's not the real reason: the real reason is that, despite the current trendiness of Pinot Noir, I think most casual wine drinkers enjoy Merlot more than Pinot Noir, unless the Pinot Noir is made poorly (more on this below).

Because of the skin differential, the wines are fundamentally different. Cabernet, Merlot and Shiraz age because of tannins. That is because tannins come (largely) from the skins of the grapes. Since Pinot Noir has substantially thinner skin, Pinot Noir doesn't age due to tannic structure. Pinot Noir actually ages due to acidity, or rather the balance of acidity and fruit. Whereas Merlot and its kin age because of the mouth-puckering tannin, Pinot Noir titilates the palate with mouthwatering acidity, much like most (non-sweet) white wines. Pinot Noir is a white wine in red wine clothing. And I don't think that's what most casual wine drinkers want in their wine. It's what I want, but what I want won't necessarily bring you enjoyment.

So we have a problem, as W. Blake G ray's recent SF Chronicle article discusses. Instead of making Pinot Noir the way they should make it, many California winemakers just leave the grapes hang on the vine longer to thicken the skins. It doesn't matter to them that in the first place, Pinot Noir is a cooler-climate grape and shouldn't be planted in 80% of the California vineyards in which it is found.

So we are left with one of three possibilities:

1) Until the Pinot Noir craze dies down (something I instinctively feel is already happening), people will continue wines that they don't like to be trendy.

2) Many winemakers will continue to try as hard as they can to make Pinot Noir taste like Merlot, Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon to cater to the latest trends, thus deceiving consumers into thinking they have developed a taste for Pinot Noir, when, in reality, they haven't yet learned the beauty of real Pinot Noir, that is, Pinot Noir that is graceful, light in color, svelte and equilibriously acidic.

3) The Pinot Noir craze will die of necessity, when most people realize that they prefer supple, fruit-forward Merlot to the vibrant, levity of Pinot Noir.

I can only hope as a true Pinotphile that three is the case. It will allow wineries such as Hunter Hill Winery and Adastra Vineyar ds to continue making Pinot Noir the way it should be made, from cooler climate sites (the Sonoma Coast and Los Carneros respectively). Although our visits to these wineries convince me that in spite of any trends in any direction, niether winery would budge from their current modus opperandi. That's why AVA Wine is proud to bring them to you. The goal here is to find representative exmaples of each of California's many AVA's (American Viticultural Areas), and in Hunetr Hill Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and Adastra Los Carneros Pinot Noir, you have two fine examples of this. You can drink either one of these and say to yourself, "This is what Pinot Noir should taste like," and if you don't like it, by all means, drink Merlot and don't feel guilty. Drink what you like and forget the current trends.

More on a "sense of place"

2006-12-12T16:58:00.000-08:00

As a follow up to my previous post, I’d like to direct you to a recent blog entry and discussion involving New York Times Wine Columnist Eric Asimov and winemaker Michael Twelftree. Asimov’s blog is here and you can find Twelftree’s side of story by following the link Asimov provided. While I generally agree with Asimov’s stance that in many ways expands upon my previous comments there are some additional points to consider.

Despite my relationship with AVA Wine, I am most noted for my expertise in Burgundy, precisely the lower-alcohol, food wines to which Asmiov occurs (at least in most cases). That being said, I unlike Mr. Asimov probably drink wine on its own at least half the time. And when I do drink it alone, I generally do prefer it to be lower in alcohol – in addition to Burgundy (both white and red), German Rieslings fit the bill nicely in this respect as well. If I opt for most California wines, Bordeaux or other fuller-bodied reds, I prefer to have them with red meat, a grilled steak usually does the trick. So in some ways, I guess you can say that I am in opposition to either Asimov or Twelftree in that, I only enjoy fuller, high-octane wines when they’re served with food; after all, if I going to binge, why not do it right and besides, if the wine has a good bit of alcohol, I’d prefer to have a big meal with it to try to avoid the negative affects of the alcohol. One of the worst ideas I’ve ever had was a a large tasting party where everyone was required to bring a bottle a Zinfandel – not White Zinfandel – but the alcoholic, intense, jammy red wine. After downing even small samples of 15 – 20 reds in excess of 15% alcohol, not one guest had their wits about them.

My I also posit the following? I know Asimov fairly well and appreciate his writing and knowledge as well. Twelftree I’ve met only briefly, but Mr. Asimov leaves out the fact that not only is Twelftree involved with Two Hands Winery in Australia but also runs a small, new negociant in Burgundy known as Mischief and Mayhem. The sources for Twelftree’s grapes in Burgundy are among some of the finest traditional producers in that region. So clearly Twelftree hasn’t lost sight of the fact that there’s room for more than one type of wine in the world.

Noting this takes me back to last weeks entry – where I basically told you that I like wines that taste the way they are supposed to taste. Wines from Diamond Mountain should taste like Diamond Mountain. Wines from the Napa Valley floor should taste just so. Even California Chardonnay comes in many forms - such as the steely, Silver Mountain 2001 Chardonnay from a cooler site atop high in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It may not be what most people think of when they think of buttery, full, sunny California Chardonnay, but that’s just the point: it shouldn’t be. When there’s snow on the winery ground’s at Silver Mountain, people are dining outside in downtown Soquel or a few miles up the waterfront on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Every wine comes from somewhere, and if you understand from where it comes, you’re enjoyment of the wine will be enhanced greatly. Now that I understand what Twelftree is trying to accomplish with his Australian wines, I’m sure my next bottle will be more enjoyable.

Head to the Mountains to Find Napa's Boutique Wines

2006-12-03T12:41:00.000-08:00

Let's face it -- visiting Napa Valley can at times feel more like Visiting Disney World. The sea of wineries that produce hundreds of thousands if not millions of bottles of wine is endless as one drives down Highway 29. That's why we usually "look to the hills" for our suppliers. Despite the incredible attention that the Napa Valley receives, most of it is directed along Highway 29, and the savvy shoppers looking for outstanding wines off-the-beaten track is luckily left with a few options, some of which we have been lucky enough to uncover in our extensive travels to California. Whether going east or west, the key to finding hidden gems in Napa is to do a bit of mountain-climbing.

The Napa Valley is bounded to the east by the Palisades and Mt. St.-Helena and to the west by the Mayacamas Mountains. (Bisecting the two is the Napa River.) The Mayacamas Mountains are further subdivided into three separate AVA's (American Viticultural Areas), or place names, that make wines with special individual charcteristics: Mt. Veeder, Spring Mountain and Daimond Mountain. It's up high on Diamond Mountain, poetically enough on Petrified Forest Road, that we found the amiable conversationalist, Richard Graeser and his traditionally made classic California wines.

First a bit of a lesson in terroir. Terroir is the untranslatable French word that describes the sum total of all the natural elements that affect wine. The primary component is climate, and then I use the alliterative collection of soil, aspect, altitude and slope to describe the remaining dominant features of terroir. These are the primary factors that affect the way the grapes turn out. All the winemaker then has to do is not screw it up!

Diamond Mountain is high up above the Valley Floor. On the Valley Floor, it gets very hot. Heat makes really deeply colored, full wines that are high in alcohol. The trick is getting enough acidity. Diamond Mountain is much cooler - because temperature decreases as you go higher up - think of the snow-covered top of a mountain. In a cooler climate, the terroir shines through more greatly because it is not masked by all the jammy fruit and high alcohol that is present in grapes grown in warmer sites. The wines are a bit more red in color and flavor profile and have better natural structure. So whereas the wines of the Valley floor have blackberries, black currants and ultra-full body, the wines from the Mayacamas Mountains more or less feature red currants, cherries and fraises de bois (wild strawberries). All the winemaker has to do is not screw it up!

I was sold on Richard Graeser immediately. An intelligent man whose former life consisted of running a large commercial farm further south, he immediately makes you comfortable. He is at the same time friendly and serious, and is just the type of straight-shooter with whom we like to work. He could see a pile of manure coming from a mile away, and while he enjoys conversation, he also likes to get his point across.

Our conversation quickly turned to the terroir of Diamond Mountain as we sampled some older vintages of his balanced, sophisticated Cabernet Franc. I told him that I loved California Cabernet Franc with proper age when properly made. He sized me up, knew that my comment was honest, and then agreed. I loved the redder fruits and equilibrium that the wine offered - exactly what I wanted from a cooler, mountain AVA. Mr. Graeser told me that it was his intention to make wines that represent Diamond Mountain. He could just as easily leave the grapes hang on the vines for much longer to try for greater maturity (darker color, higher alcohol), but he wouldn't do it. He's not trying to make wines that fit the current trends, he makes wines the way he likes them, the way that the Daimond Mountain wants them to be, the way I like them.

I sample hundreds if not thousands of California Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot each year. Most wine lovers envy the job of a wine professional, failing to realize that most of the wines I pour directly down the drain within seconds because they all taste the same. Not Richard Graeser's wines though, they taste like Diamond Mountain.

More on Graeser Winery

Graeser Winery 2002 "Alex's Ruff Red" Zinfandel Blend 6 Pack
Graeser Winery 2002 "Alex's Ruff Red" Zinfandel Blend 12 pack
Graeser Winery 2002 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 6 Pack
Graeser Winery 2002 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon 12 pack
Graeser Winery 2003 Late Harvest Semillon

Pete's Linkdom Of Wine and Other Stuff

2006-06-15T15:27:00.000-07:00

Pete's Linkdom Of Wine and Other Stuff

An Insiders look at the Food Industry.

2006-06-07T04:14:00.000-07:00

We've found this resource a good spot to keep up on the trends in the food industry.

The Food World - Food Producers and Exporters Directory. Food Business Directory

AVA's producers in the news!

2006-03-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

MercuryNews.com 01/25/2006 Tiny Soquel winery's journey to top state honor

Monterey Events - Passport Weekend

2006-02-19T03:20:00.000-08:00

Explore the wineries of Monterey County! You'll be ready to navigate the region with a 'passport' that entitles you to wine tastings, entertainment, special offers and great prizes. The Monterey Wine Auction & Gala on February 17 will benefit charitable organizations and scholarship programs.

California Wine and Food Magazine - Wine

2006-02-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

California Wine and Food Magazine - Wine

WINE BUSINESS ONLINE - News and Information for Wine Industry Professionals

2006-02-06T16:37:00.000-08:00

WINE BUSINESS ONLINE - News and Information for Wine Industry Professionals

Inside Bay Area - Bay Area Living

2006-01-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

Inside Bay Area - Bay Area Living

Bloomberg.com: Top Worldwide

2006-01-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg.com: Top Worldwide

Chicago Tribune | Wine country starts cleanup after rains

2006-01-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

If you have not yet heard from your favorite news sources, over the past few weeks there have been torrential downpours throughout California Wine Country. Although this article points out that, "There were no immediate reports of damage to wineries," we'll have to wait and see what if any damage has occurred to the vines. While the vines are currently in the dormant stage (following harvest), the real threat is that debris such as logs has flown into the vines. In some cases, at lower altitudes, vines were completely submerged.

Chicago Tribune Wine country starts cleanup after rains

Introducing Pessagno Winery ...

2006-01-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Pessagno Winery is the culmination of a 20-year dream of Stephen Pessagno, managing partner and winemaker, to produce limited quantities of exclusive, luxury wines from prestigious single-designated vineyards in Monterey and San Benito counties. The winery and tasting room is located along the River Road that winds through the Santa Lucia Highlands with scenic rural wine country vistas of the Salinas Valley at every turn, a perfect setting to experience Pessagno’s exceptional wines for distinctive tastes.

More on Pessagno Winery >>>

Battle over 'Napa' moves back to U.S. Supreme Court

2005-12-29T05:24:00.000-08:00

The 5-year-long battle over the meaning of "Napa" has moved to what should be the final arena -- the U.S. Supreme Court.

An Amusing Story Regarding the NCAAF National Championship & California Wine

2005-12-28T07:21:00.000-08:00

As the whole nation prepares for the NCAA Football National Championship game to be played on January 4th at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, it seems as though California Senator Dianne Feinstein has wagered a bottle of wine that USC will win!

We wonder if we can convert Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, into a Wine Club member at some point in the future?

ESPN.com - NCF/BOWLS05 - Senators bet wine, roses on outcome of Rose Bowl

Introducing Summit Lake Winery

2005-12-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

Bob and Sue Brakesman purchased the 21 acre Carlo Farazzi Ranch on Howell Mountain in 1971 with a dream of ownership and a passion to make a world class wine. Twenty-five years later, the dream and the passion are an on-going reality. Summit Lake Vineyards is well known for their commitment to produce award winning Zinfandels, and their hospitable down to earth style.

The epitome of a California Boutique Vineyard, Summit Lake is what we are always shouting about. Family operated and ferociously protected, it took me two weeks of groveling to get Bob's daughter Heather to let us bring these extrodinary wines to you. I strongly suggest you take advantage of the opprortunity AVA Wine Club has acquired, and buy up as much of these selections (especially their world famous Zinfandels!) as you can.

With a tasting room "by appointment only", and a perch atop Howell Mountain, Summit Lake Vineyard's limited production, quality driven wines will bring you back to winecountry with every sip.

More on Summit Lake Winery >>>