Archive for the 'Regions' Category

My home state of Ohio has taken one giant leap backward, restricting Ohioans’ access to direct-shipped wines from out of state. Effective today, citizens from Akron to Zanesville and everywhere in between can no longer order wine delivered direct to their homes from out of state wineries that make more than 150,000 gallons (63,000 cases) a year.

This rules out the largest wineries but also a lot of medium-sized high quality wineries, too, whose products are in high demand. To me, it sounds like Buckeye-staters can no longer order wine directly from biodynamically farmed Benziger Family Winery, or single-vineyard Merlot from Duckhorn Vineyards, or Petite Sirah from Markham Vineyards.

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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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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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Once upon a time, in the 1960s, Pinot Noir was practically nonexistent in America. But then a young winemaker named David Lett, educated in California, moved to the Willamette Valley, founded The Eyrie Vineyard and with many years of hard work put Pinot Noir on the map.

Jump to the 1970s and practically no one had heard of Syrah either. A young winemaker named Gary Eberle began working with this Rhone grape variety at the Estrella River Winery in Paso Robles, and pretty soon founded his own winery to make Syrah as well as other wines. Paso Robles became synonymous with Syrah as the varietal became a staple on wine lists and in home cellars.

Similar trend-setters are laboring today to perfect the next unique varietals. In the early stages of a grape’s introduction to North America we don’t always know who the eventual masters of it are, though. Take Tempranillo, the Spanish grape that forms the backbone of Rioja’s elegant, and Ribera del Duero’s powerful, wines.

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I believe that the best way to decide how good a wine is, is to taste it without knowing what it is. To taste it blind.

Because that’s the main point of drinking wine: the flavor impressions you get purely from the wine. But often other factors affect your enjoyment,too. As a critic, I was trained to ignore these factors (and honest blind tasting ensures that) but as somebody who simply loves to smell, taste and swallow wine, I’ve got to acknowledge the other factors that come with the wine.

Sometimes this is knowing exactly where the wine came from, walking down the vine rows with the owner and getting a feel for the wine’s terroir.

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I live in Napa Valley and I often get a bit defensive when I read what outside observers say about the posh life and over-the-top wineries here. When I first moved to the valley in 1979 the place was hardly toney — Main Street in St. Helena at the time had a Western Auto Store downtown and two scuzzy hotels with dive bars. I have not been able to totally accept the outside media’s view of Napa as a rural version of Fifth Avenue.

In the valley today, wild, off-the-beaten-track roads still wait for cars to accelerate over them, giant hawks and eagles soar overhead, coyotes howl from the ridgetops on moonlit nights and a good number of down-to-earth people still work their jobs, raise their kids, bitch about taxes and the rich noob vintners’ various follies and — here’s where it does get a bit different from mid-America — throw middle of the week potluck parties with up to $1,000-a-bottle BYOB wines.

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Had a very enjoyable wining-dining experience Tuesday night at Go Fish, the newish restaurant in Napa Valley, that demonstrated two bylaws of wine appreciation yet again:

1. Red wines go with fish, and

2. Make a point of straying from your usual wine types frequently.

Go Fish is a Cindy Pawlcyn restaurant in the space formerly known as Pinot Blanc (and much more formerly as Vern’s Copper Chimney, but that’s an item for a memoir and not a blog) right on Main Street/Highway 29 in St. Helena. Cindy is one of the pioneer California wine country chefs, and was or still is involved in a bunch of other restaurants, including the Meadowood resort restaurant, San Francisco’s Fog City Diner, Napa Valley’s Tra Vigne, Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen and the long-running Mustards Grill, the first place I ever ate rabbit.

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If you’re into California Cabernet Sauvignon you may have heard of Rutherford dust. For many years critics and connoisseurs used the term as a descriptor for something good that they smelled in Napa Valley Cabernet.

What they were really saying is that it smelled like the prototype California Cabernets, which came from the original Inglenook and Beaulieu vineyards in the little township of Rutherford, located about midway between Napa and Calistoga in the center of Napa Valley.

Beaulieu Vineyard’s long-time charismatic elf of an enologist, Andre Tchelistcheff, popularized the term Rutherford dust, when he said, “It takes Rutherford dust to grow great Cabernet.”

Nobody really wants their Cabernet to smell like dust, so eventually (most) people got over using the term in tasting notes. It still is used, however, by a non-profit trade association including wineries and growers that grow grapes in or make wine from Rutherford vineyards. The Rutherford Dust Society annually stages what, for me, is one of the best media wine tasting events, and this year’s tasting was held yesterday.

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An article more than a year ago in the San Francisco Chronicle has stuck with me. In an insightful feature piece, author Stephen Yafa got inside the head of the sommelier by interviewing four who were at the top of their profession in acclaimed San Francisco restaurants, and asking them to bring two of their favorite bottles — wines they were excited to share — to the interview session so all could enjoy them. (Another wrinkle on how writers get to taste unique wines for free.)

So, four great sommeliers in the capital city of California wine country brought eight fantastic wines. Guess how many were American wines? Not quite zero, but just one out of eight. When you consider that American wine drinkers vote for American wine two-thirds of the time, that critics go ga-ga over lots of them, that collectors have elevated some of them to cult status, it just seemed asbsurd to me.

Independence Day is as good a time as any to ask why it was that the sommeliers weren’t excited about American wine. It couldn’t be from lack of choice. With 4,500 or so American wineries now in existence, making at least 20,000 different selections, in all states and from dozens of grape varieties, you’d have to say there’s plenty to choose from.

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