Archive for September, 2007

Being in or near the wine business it’s easy to forget how little a lot of people know about some of the things that the industry takes for granted. Sometimes I cringe when I hear a winemaker talking to a consumer group, and throwing in jargon like “appellation” and “AVA” and “TTB” when they’re talking about something as simple as what’s on their wine label.

One of the things that people should pay more attention to on a label is the appellation. That’s the place name. It’s not the place in small print saying where the wine was cellared, bottled, or “vinted” whatever that means, but the bigger print usually on the front that says Bordeaux Superieur or Rioja or Sonoma County. For US wines, AVA is another way of saying appellation. It means an official American Viticultural Area recognized by the TTB (Tax and Trade Bureau) of the Treasury Department.

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Have you ever caught yourself doing something wrong, something you always say you don’t do? Worse yet, has someone else caught you doing something you’ve told them you don’t do? And just to add another layer of complexity, has that person catching you ever been from Bowling Green, Ohio?

The deed was done on a recent trip to Cleveland for a wedding. I was sitting at a sidewalk table outside a great Italian cafe called La Dolce Vita in the Little Italy section of the city with a few friends from my college era. The sky was blue, the temperature was a perfect 73, the humidity was low and I was choosing the wine because they had figured out that I make a living writing about it, while they manage hospitals, raise money for music schools, volunteer as EMTs, diagnose sultans with various infectious diseases at the Mayo Clinic, and so on.

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It’s easy to lapse into an all-Cabernet diet here in Napa Valley, so it’s refreshing to try something different whenever possible. I had a great time drinking three out-of-the-box bottles recently.

A thirst-quenching and slightly off-beat white is a Semillon from the new Fortitude brand of Etude Wines, based in Napa. You could spend a lot of time in wine shops and not encounter any varietal Semillon from this state.

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Not long ago beliefs that could easily have been labeled superstition governed a lot of what happened in vineyards and wineries. If deer were eating your grapes, you didn’t build a fence to get rid of them, but you shot one of them, cut the carcass into chunks and hung the chunks from trees at strategic spots around the perimeter of the vines. The deer would get the idea.

Grape growers in California used water witchers to find where to drill for water. Vignerons in France wouldn’t let women into cellars because they believed that if a woman was having her period it would spoil the wine.

It seems like one current superstition going around is that yeast has gotten stronger in recent years, and that explains in part why wines are higher in alcohol. Tim Patterson did a great job of debunking this myth and has gotten a lot of compliments and commentary on his investigation.

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It’s fun to hear Fred Franzia — maker of Two-Buck Chuck and many other California wine brands – speak. I just listened to a discussion on public radio that was supposed to pit Franzia against a wine writer and a wine business journalist to get some lively discussion about wine snobbism.

Franzia did his part, declaring that if anyone uses any more words than “it’s good” or “I like it” to describe a wine then they’re a snob. He is really down-to-earth and says what he thinks, so it’s refreshing to listen to him talk, but he’s also smart and cleverly made several points that made him and his Bronco Wine Co. look good.

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Jane Wyman and Luciano Pavarotti died in the last week. Both had connections to Napa Valley wine from the 1980s. I know. I was there.

Wyman, who had a great career in movies including an Oscar for best actress, was the star of TV’s “Falcon Crest” in the early 1980s. I was a newspaper reporter and photographer and got to visit the sets in Napa Valley where the show’s locations were taped, including Spring Mountain Vineyard, whose graceful white Victorian mansion was the home of Wyman’s character, Angela Channing.

Pavarotti made at least one visit, too, to make a forgettable movie whose name I can’t, er, remember. I got a press pass to attend the filming one day at the Charles Shaw winery, where Pavarotti and a beautiful actress were going up in a balloon. Yes, that Charles Shaw, now famous as Two-Buck Chuck.

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I’ve had some great exposure to both Zinfandel and barbecue this summer, and the results challenge both the traditional sommelier’s advice as well as what some of the Zin makers themselves recommend.

For one thing, a really good barbecue joint opened up in Napa city earlier this year, named BarBersQ, so us country folk in Napa who are mostly city folk on an extended vacation have been able to get a real taste of country ribs and Southern style slow-cooked pork and beef. I also spent several days in north Texas for my sister’s wedding, staying at a working horse ranch that’s also a B and B and eating beef brisket at two out of three meals. Thank God for cole slaw or it might have been an exclusively carnivorous stay.

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You’ve got to admire ambition in winemakers, but there ought to be limits. Last month I attended a seminar at Meadwood resort in Napa Valley. Sitting in the biggest meeting room of the small resort listening to a great roster of heavy hitters in the California wine business speak, I remembered another speech in the same room about eight years ago.

The Napa Valley Grapegrowers sponsored the recent program, but the one that came flashing back in my memory was hosted by the Napa Valley Vintners. The little bit of oratory I remembered wasn’t part of a presentation, per se. It was in the introductory comments by the vintners’ president, or program chairperson, at the time, and I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who that person was.

What I do remember were words to this effect: Welcome to the Napa Valley, the greatest wine region in the world. Not “a great wine region” or “one of the greatest wine regions in the world” but “the greatest wine region in the world.”

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