Archive for March, 2008

Ten years ago the only Rieslings being poured at an extravagant tasting of international wines would have been from Germany. Maybe Alsace, too.

Nobody would have been looking for those, though, except some elderly Army veterans who discovered Riesling while occupying Germany after Dubya Dubya 2. People would have been shoving through to get to the latest, oakiest, thickest, malolacticest Chardonnay from Burgundy, Australia, California, Piedmont or even Tuscany.

But now Riesling is hot, and it should be.

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Time runs out to vote in the American Wine Blog Awards on this Saturday, March 29, at midnight, so I recommend going over to the tireless Tom Wark’s website, Fermentation, and clicking on the link in the left column to vote. If you read more wine blogs than UnReserved — yes, there are probably a couple of you — the ballot is a great prompt for revisiting your favorites and finding some new material, too.

On his post yesterday, Tom says the voting has seesawed back and forth, like race horses gaining and then losing the lead as they pound around the track. To give your favorite blogs a little tap with the riding crop don’t forget to vote for them.

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What do you think the hottest wine type in America is? Pinot Noir? Riesling? Malbec?

Yeah, those are all fast-growing. But their growth rates pale in comparison to premium rosé. Just as the color of White Zinfandel pales in comparison to the kind of dry, sophisticated rosé I’m talking about here.

Sales of rosé priced at $8 and above per bottle grew at a rate of 53 percent in dollars at retail stores during a recent 52-week period, as measured by Nielsen, the leading authority on beverage sales at major food and drug stores and major liquor stores.

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What is wine going to be like in a post-climate change world? Well, we don’t have to wait to find out. The future has been creeping up on us for some time:

Late April 1980, St. Helena, Calif.–I woke up in the middle of the night. My heart pounded. A loud, buzzing roar like fighter planes revving on the deck of an aircraft carrier broke the 3 a.m. quiet of my street. It was the first spring that I lived in Napa Valley, and for a few seconds I couldn’t identify the sound.

Then I realized it must be coming from the wind machines, even though I’d never heard them before. A farmer whose vineyard was near my house had ignited the monstrous internal combustion engines that ran the low-tech, high-horsepower frost prevention equipment. Each consisted of an 18-foot tower with an airplane-like propeller mounted on top. A gas-guzzling engine powered it at high speed. Read the rest of this entry »

Enviable collection of Barolo at Belvedere restaurant in La Morra, Italy.

IS NEBBIOLO THE MOST SITE-SPECIFIC wine-grape variety in the world? It just might be. What other varietal wine is as hard to duplicate in other parts of its home country, let alone other parts of the world?

The challenge occurred to me last weekend when we hosted nine friends for a dinner party. I pulled together a mix of newly released northern Italian wines plus Italian-style wines made in California. How did they compare?

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I know restaurants have to make money. I know they make much of it from wine and liquor sales.

I also know that people expect wine to cost more at a restaurant than at retail.

But this is ridiculous: A Sausalito, Calif., cafe was charging $6 a glass last weekend for a wine that’s widely known as Two-Buck Chuck.

Can anyone top that for sheer markup ambition?

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I thought that tasting a bunch of Ports with Rupert Symington of Portugal would yield a good post about how to enjoy Port, differentiating the various styles, food matches, etc. It did, but maybe I’ll write that one later.

More immediately interesting was an excellent new $11 red table wine that Symington poured. His family makes it in the Port region, the Douro Valley. It’s called Dow Vale do Bomfim Reserva Douro. It’s the type of bold but polished red that you can buy by the case and drink for Monday dinner and Friday lunch. California Zinfandel drinkers and Australian Shiraz consumers have another great option now.

Why the Symingtons are making this best-buy wine is a good story in itself.

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A myth of my youth held that you should eat at the restaurants where the most truckers stopped. They traveled all the time and knew who served the best food. Problem was, it turned out that the truckers only knew where the fattiest food, weakest coffee and cheapest menu were. I didn’t share their interests.

In Napa Valley, winemakers flock to the Rutherford Grill at lunchtime on any given business day. I’ve found they are a much more reliable professional group to follow in culinary terms.

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