Archive for April, 2008

Everyone in the California wine industry has been buzzing about the severe frosts this spring. Since I first posted on this topic on March 19, we’ve had a series of nights when the temperature dipped below freezing.

When I first wrote, it was merely the threat of damage to the young spring growth on the vines that was the issue. Then about 10 days ago it was no longer a threat but real damage. Growers in many parts of the state, and in fact in many different states, had new spring growth nipped in the bud or frozen in the shoots by unsually cold temperatures.

What does this tell us about global warming?

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I suspected that Jancis Robinson had more to say about her widely quoted remarks at the Wine Creators conference in Spain last weekend. So after my post yesterday on this topic I asked her for details and she provided them.

She thinks her brief comments about wine writers being parasitical and needing to have more humility were taken “completely out of context” on Decanter.com, and resulted in “witch hunters” going after her on eRobertParker.com. She pointed me to an elaboration on what she said in Spain on her own site yesterday. Here are a couple of key paragraphs.

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Author Jancis Robinson chastised her wine-writing colleagues recently for not having stiff enough spines. According to a Decanter article she told them at a posh gathering in Spain that they need to be more open about wines they like and dislike and resist vintners efforts to “keep us sweet.”

Ironically, the event itself was sponsored by La Melonera, a wine-related development project, and journalists attending were treated to two days of great wines along with discussions between winemakers from several countries and international journalists. It was unclear whether the journalists had to pay the 2,000 Euro fee, or were admitted free as is often the custom at wine industry events.

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What type of wine package does the least damage to the environment? The answer to the question is not quite as simple as you might think.

It seems obvious that glass bottles with cork closures and tin capsules would be the right thing to buy on Earth Day, since all these items are recyclable. But it may be that wine in the clunky but inexpensive bag-in-box format goes lighter on the earth.

Greenness and light carbon footprints are hot topics in the wine industry right now, as wineries, regions and the competing packaging companies shoot almost daily press releases touting their green credentials. It’s a hot topic in a lot of other industries, too, according to this USA Today article.

But with everybody patting themselves on the back there may be a whiplash effect when the issues get better sorted out. First of all, glass is heavy, and packaging wine in glass makes it a very heavy thing to transport as Tyler Colman of the Dr. Vino blog and others have examined very closely.

The heavier an item is, the more ship, train and truck fuel it requires to move it from the winery to you. That makes its carbon footprint heavier, which is bad for the atmosphere and contributes to climate change, most experts on the subject say.

Especially unfriendly are the trendy, super-heavy wine bottles that seem to weigh as much empty as they do full. These are beautiful and artistic, but any winery that sticks with this packaging is going to have some explaining to do to the public.

There is no compelling practical reason for these babies other than their heft in a consumer’s hands. Wineries can get the same protection from light and the same aging potential from a much lighter bottle.

Boxed wines count very little of their weight from the package, so liter by liter, they win the contest for the least spewing of gas and diesel fumes per mile to market.

The cork companies have seized on the green credentials of their products, pointing out how many trees and animals are saved and how much carbon is turned to oxygen by preserving and using the cork oak forests in Portugal and Spain.

The key point here is that you don’t have to cut a cork tree down to harvest the cork. Workers strip a layer of cork off the tree about once every nine years, and the layer grows back with no other damage to the tree. That’s about as renewable as it gets. Of course they do have to ship them halfway around the world to wineries in California and Australia, which must burn a lot of diesel.

Makers of other bottle closures like screw tops and synthetic corks, however, argue that their products can be manufactured closer to the wineries, using comparatively few raw materials, little energy and are recyclable, too.

Some wineries are starting to package their wines in plastic bottles like soda. I love San Pellegrino in plastic because it’s so lightweight and unbreakable, so it won’t put me off to see wine in plastic bottles. By the way, what’s more absurd than sending water around the world in heavy glass bottles? Wine is absolutely eco-responsible compared to that.

The greenest wine packaging of all is probably the refillable jug or carboy. If you’re lucky enough to live near wineries (and everyone does now because wineries operate in all 50 states, about 5,000 of them total in the US) and one of them lets you bring your own container and fill it up, then you are in a very green place. (Or at the very least you can be a wine locavore and drink the local juice.)

I believe that in California The Hess Collection Winery in Napa and Preston Vineyards in Sonoma County have offered this opportunity from time to time. Who else lets you bring your own jug?

When was the last time you had a truly bad bottle of wine? Not one that you just didn’t like, but one that stank?

“Corked” bottles are the most common today, and bottles that taste “corked” but really went bad for other reasons. It used to be common to open a funky-smelling or stale wine, or a fizzy wine that wasn’t supposed to be sparkling.

Thank god and the world’s winemaking universities that we don’t have to put up with many truly flawed, terrible wines anymore. But it does still happen. In the last few weeks I’ve had a very barnyardy Chambourcin and an otherwise nice Chardonnay that seemed to have a veneer of burnt rubber.

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How are wine drinkers supposed to understand the language that wine writers use to convey the tastes of wines they like when some of it comes from way out in left field?

Even winemakers themselves compare their creations to things as extremely unpalatable as cat pee and insecticide. What do you think when you read a tasting note for a Sauvignon Blanc that alludes to “cat pee,” for instance?

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The Sandbar & Grill hangs off the side of Pier 2 in Monterey harbor. You walk half-way out the pier, smelling the creosote from the timbers, hearing the seagulls calling overhead and watching dive boats putter toward open water while their passengers strap on scuba gear. Then you walk slowly down a flight of wooden stairs. Very slowly, that is, because an elderly patron is in front of you, gripping the stair rail for dear life while three relatives grip her to guide her down.

The restaurant sits at boat level below this commercial wharf because the space was originally a fuel pumping station for the marina. Walk in and you go back in time. It feels as if it might almost be the 1940s, certainly no more recent than the 1970s (even though I found out later that the restaurant is fairly new). The Sandbar & Grill welcomes a largely local clientele in a town teeming with tourists. You don’t find the Sandbar on the touristy Fisherman’s Wharf; it’s on the next pier down.

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What should a restaurant do when its wine list is wrong? It takes work to keep a wine list completely up to date. The more wines on the list, the more work it is. But when a restaurant runs out of a listed wine, or when a new vintage arrives to replace the listed one, the restaurant needs to handle it promptly. It’s not that difficult, really.

Even a list bound in leather can be updated in a few minutes with a quick edit in Word and a swift printout from the HP whatever in the manager’s office. Knowing how easy it is to keep a list up to date makes it all the more frustrating for a customer when a restaurant blows something this simple.

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