Archive for July, 2007

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.)

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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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Is it better for wine critics and wine competitions to buy their wines at retail, rather than accept free samples from wineries and importers, as is usually the case? The risk of getting what Robert Parker has called a journalist’s cuvee or writer’s cuvee from a winery instead of the real wine that people are buying in stores is, theoretically, always there.

A winery, an importer, a rogue PR person bent on getting only 90-plus scores for his client takes a day off from blogging, goes to the store and buys a few bottles of $60 Russian River Chardonnay or $200 Montrachet. It’s easy with a home winemaker’s tools to empty a few bottles of the client’s wine, refill them with the expensive stuff, recork them, even with the original corks if he took them out with an ah-so. A bit trickier is replacing the foil and spinning it on, but with a supply of the right foil caps and a foil spinner that you can rent from a home winemaking store, it’s not difficult.

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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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I’ve been mulling over the status of Two-Buck Chuck as the best Chardonnay in California for about two weeks now and I still can’t accept it. The news leaked on about June 27 that judges at the California State Fair Wine Competition gave Charles Shaw Chardonnay California a double-gold medal, but the official results of the judging won’t be released until Thursday, July 12.

How could a simple, cheap wine come out of a respected wine competition with a double gold medal? I was going to let the question go and get on with my life when I did a blind tasting of four Chardonnays last Friday. It was strictly blind.

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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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Just when you think the world is becoming more enlightened about the stopper on your wine bottle, something happens to show how hard and how long the struggle will be to get over corks. Recently I met a nice couple in the publishing business, apparently affluent, apparently sophisticated, apparently in their late 50s, but he at least was apparently a cork snob.

We were discussing barrels, oak alternatives (chips), winemaking techniques, grape growing practices, and marketing topics including corks, synthetics and screwcaps, products that they call closures in industry jargon.

Screwcaps have come a long way from the cream sherry days, I told him, and they’re working great on not only New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and California rose, but on hiqh-quality, expensive red wines, too. He reacted like I’d just brought Nancy Pelosi into the steam room at the Bohemian Club (although I’m not sure they have one).

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