Archive for August, 2007

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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