Archive for the 'Regions' Category

When was the last time you read an article saying, “I hate French wine. It sucks. I never drink it anymore and I pour it down the drain.”

Talk about rash generalizations. Talk about Francophobia. Talk about intolerance.

But that’s basically what wine writer Alice Feiring said in an op-ed piece in the LA Times. Only she didn’t say it about France, she said it about California.

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is a great day to pop open a bottle of Schramsberg in memory of the co-founder of the pioneering sparkling wine cellar in Napa Valley, Jamie Davies, who died Tuesday at the age of 73 after living with Parkinson’s disease for many years.

I had known her and her husband Jack Davies (who died in 1998), since the early 1980s when I was the cub reporter- photographer- editor at the St. Helena Star newspaper. I counted her as an especially friendly face in the crowd at wine events in Napa, San Francisco and New York over the years. As did many other journalists, restaurateurs, chefs and wine sales people.

Read the rest of this entry »

You may remember my post about the book, The Red Wine Diet, back in November. Author and cardiologist Dr. Roger Corder clarifies the relation between red wine, what you eat and heart health in a revealing and memorable way.

He debunks a number of accepted platitudes on these subjects, and makes a bold argument that a previously little known group of compounds, procyanidins, is the key found in certain foods and in certain types of red wine that can open the lock to better cardio health and potentially longer life. But are these healthy wines good for your palate, too?
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve drunk wines over a century old. I’ve drunk wines aged in 50-year-old casks. I’ve drunk wines aged in barrels whose stave wood had been aged for four years before a cooper assembled it into barrels.

But until the holidays I had never knowingly drunk a wine aged in a barrel made from an oak tree more than 300 years old. On top of that, the oak tree had been planted under orders of Louis XIV of France at his over-the-top country place, Versailles.

Read the rest of this entry »

During a short stay in the Piemonte (Piedmont) wine region I met proponents of opposite sides of the ongoing debate over the use of small oak barrels for making Barolo, Barbaresco and the region’s other red wines. It’s a bit hard to believe that this philosophical battle continues after a generation, but it only shows how passionate Piemontese winemakers and connoisseurs are about the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fabio Luca Franzosi and Luciano Gobino with their $16,000 truffle

Every restaurant I went to in the wine country of Italy’s Piemonte region this month was serving truffles, because it was high season for the famous white truffles, or tartufi, of Alba. The season begins in early October and lasts through December, but people kept telling me that the truffle hunting gets better as the weather turns colder, so early November through mid December is apparently prime time.

While black truffles grow in various places in Italy and France and white truffles also grow in eastern Europe, only here do white truffles really show the, shall we say, assertive aroma that makes them precious. Read the rest of this entry »

Pietro Ratti, overlooking Barolo vineyards, says Italians come to the country in the fall to reconnect with their pasts

I’m just back from a business trip to northern Italy. On the return flight I made a lengthy list of potential blog topics. Here’s the first one, which seems appropriate for Thanksgiving week. I was struck that both Italians and Germans I spoke to said they admire the American Thanksgiving holiday because it has a simple agenda of family, feasting and gratitude, not national imperatives or overt religion. In the Piedmont wine region they were in the midst of their own seasonal feasting.

Last week in Piedmont the weather turned sharply cold, icing over small streams and making me wish I had brought gloves. The leaves had mostly fallen from the hazelnut trees but still clinged to a portion of the grapevines carpeting the steep hills of Barolo and Barbaresco.

Read the rest of this entry »

What the national appellations institute of France is about to do with the boundaries of Champagne, to appease Champagne wineries that want to expand production, may well come back to haunt those wineries.

Isn’t this the one wine region in the world that has fought hardest to preserve its regional brand? Isn’t it the one that has fought for decades if not centuries to stop wineries outside the Champagne region from calling their wines Champagne?

Read the rest of this entry »