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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A comment on my last post, about how sommeliers may be more sympathetic to people sending bottles back, points out how complex the issue of flawed bottles is, and how worked up over it people are. Poster Shane Colella doesn’t hesitate to send back any bottle that is less than perfect, the same way one rejects a dish that’s not cooked perfectly.

Right on–the consumer has to stand up for his rights.

Shane concludes by saying, “I just can’t wait until the big boys in the wine world fully migrate to screwtops so we can all just get on with drinking the good stuff instead of running back to the cellar for another questionable bottle.”

I have a couple of problems with that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Has the tide finally turned on sending bottles back? Is it just me, or have sommeliers and waiters gotten better with this?

I dislike having to do it, but when I smell the musty, newspapers-in-the-damp-basement aroma of trichloroanisole in a wine, I still have to do it. I tell the waiter I think the wine is corky, she smells it and then there’s a moment when I don’t know if she’s going to believe me.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been down so long, bottom looked like up, as the old blues refrain goes. But now California Petite Sirah, of all varieties, is hot. The responsive people at Nielsen Scantrack answered a Wines & Vines request this week with a report that showed Petite Sirah sales at the thousands of supermarkets, drug and major liquor stores whose sales they tally have gone up more than 25 percent in the last year!

It was good validation for the grape grower and winery members of the Petite Sirah support group, PS I Love You, who gathered in northern Sonoma this week for their annual meeting and the sixth annual Petite Sirah Noble Symposium at Foppiano Vineyards, which has been making the deep, dark, tannic and age-worthy red-wine varietal since the beginning of time.

For fans of big reds, the good news is that more and more wineries are making Petite Sirah, and they’ve modified their grape growing and winemaking practices to make a more velvety, approachable wine that still has lots of body and tannin to sink your teeth into. I tasted 21 current or recent releases there and they were eye-opening.

Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by the response here on Unreserved to my post about winemaker Randy Dunn’s manifesto against high alcohol and posts elsewhere in the blogosphere, it’s an issue with legs, and not just those streamy things that run down the side of your wine glass.

Unlike Dunn, and many of the other people speaking out against high-alcohol table wines, my problem is not that wines over 14 or 15 percent alcohol don’t go with food. My problem is that they don’t go with my metabolism. I like to have a 3-4 ounce glass of wine before dinner while I’m cooking, another glass or two with dinner, and then another small one after dinner if it’s good enough to savor.

But I have to get up the next morning without a headache and have a good day.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now, this was unusual. A communication from Dunn Vineyards. If I’ve ever gotten any kind of PR outreach from the winery of Randy Dunn on Napa’s Howell Mountain I can’t remember it. So it must have been an important topic to spur Dunn, an individualistic Cabernet maker who in another time could have been a trapper-trader like John Colter or Jim Bowie, to go public with anything.

“It is time for the average wine consumers, as opposed to tasters, to speak up. The current fad of higher and higher alcohol wines should stop,” Dunn wrote in an email that went out to Wine Institute’s media list. “Most wine drinkers do not really appreciate wines that are 15 to 16+ % alcohol. They are, in fact, hot and very difficult to enjoy with a meal. About the only dish that seems to put them in their place is a good hot, spicy dish.”

(I digress to disagree with him on the hot, spicy dish thing. For my palate it just piles heat on heat. Really spicy food needs really fruity, fresh, un-tannic wine.)

Read the rest of this entry »