EU may meddle with Rose wines...

Surely my regular readers would agree I am not strictly a "purist" when it comes to wine innovation - whether it is using screwcaps or applying other modern winemaking techniques if/when it is warranted.  My jaw dropped, however, when I read an article this week detailing the EU's desire to allow members to mix red and white wines to create rose (apologies for the lack of accent on the "e" throughout this post). Rose is a tremendously delicious dry wine which we Americans (and others globally) have more or less just "discovered". Sales have been booming for the last several years. Finally the myth of rose tasting sweet like your Grand/Mother's white Zin(fandel) has been revealed! Meanwhile, consumers are going bonkers as they discover how many different styles there are; there is something for everyone and every dish.

Provence, France is arguably the rose capital of the world. Whenever I think of sitting on the shores of the Mediterranean at a little cafe, I transport myself to Provence - and I am sipping rose. The folks there have worked particularly hard over the years to debunk the myth of cotton-candy sweet pink, plonk wines and created more awareness and appreciation for these delightful wines. In my mind at least, I think of it as a local effort to give these wines the international appreciation (or distinction?) of say, Champagne.

If the EU allows a broader definition of rose such that red and white wines are mixed rather than applying the traditional method of pressing the juice from red grapes, I fear the 'cheapening' of this lovely libation. Provencial rose (and other areas that use this traditional, sanctioned technique) will lose their prestige as the wines lose their vibrancy. And so today my question is:

For what real benefit is the EU doing this? Where is the market research that backs up this move?

wine exploration: Bierzo and Mencia

Were you nerdy about wine in 2006? If so, you probably read a few articles about Bierzo, or the indigenous grape varietal they cultivate there (Mencia). Maybe you even tasted it. (It was considered "up and coming" at the time - and perhaps it still is, though I've only ever tasted a handful of Bierzo/Mencia wines since.) I became a fan of Mencia back then, having sampled a wine from Bierzo at  my shop's annual Fall Grand Wine Tasting event. I ended up with half a case of Dominio de Tares Baltos.  Since then I've fallen off the Bierzo wagon.  I was simply ready for new adventures once I finished my 6 bottles.

But as my co-worker and I continue to reevaluate and revisit the 1200 or so facings we have on our shelves, I found the Baltos again and decided to give it a whirl once more.

Bierzo is a fairly small wine-producing region located in the Northwest of Spain, quite close to Portugal. After the phylloxera epidemic killed most of the vines in the late 19th Century, economic crisis made it additionally difficult for Spanish winemaking to bounce back. But when they did in Bierzo, locals stayed true to their roots (no pun intended) and grafted Mencia vines, the dominant, native red grape varietal there. Bierzo became its own Denominacion de Origin in 1989. By then they were producing wines using more modern techniques to celebrate the best of their local varietals.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed when I retasted the Baltos. I was hoping for a wine with a bit of lift, as we like to say, something with red fruit flavors, a touch of earth and something... unique, I suppose. I remembered the Baltos as being distinctly versatile, pairing with a variety of foods and satisfying many people's taste buds. What I found was aromas of brett, or a barnyard essence with a touch more "funk" than simply walking into a real barn (a smell I actually cherish  in a wine). Brett isn't a fault, per se (though it is controversial), but I was hoping for violets, black raspberries and sweet plums. The palate delivered a touch of black plum fruit, but its leather earthiness dominated. A gentle bite of licorice filled the back palette. The wine wasn't bad, but it wasn't doing it for me either.

Perhaps it was palette fatigue at the end of a long day tasting and evaluating 75 or so wines for the shop, but the bottom line is, I was underwhelmed.

As I discussed at the outset, Bierzo was considered an up-and-coming region just a few years ago. I write about this 'designation' often enough. The thing is, Mencia/Bierzo doesn't seem to have taken off - at least not here in Greater Boston. Frankly, I've tasted very little Mencia offerings. I'm not in a position to judge them as a whole one way or the other. But I am curious:

How many of you are familiar with the Mencia grape and what is your experience with these wines?

Mixing it up: Apple ice wine

I'm always enamored with folks who truly enjoy their work - ever happy to be challenged while doing what they love. It's how I got into wine, to be honest. And it seems this is often the case in this line of work.

Pop on over to WickedLocal today to meet the Holtzman's of Harvard, Ma. They're making their own nectar of the gods (ice wine) using the hottest commodity in their hood... apples!

Out with the old in with the new? What about the wine?!

Image c/o The Gowanus Lounge

I think we've all had a burst of reality thrown our way recently when we discovered one of our favorite ___ locations has a "closed until further notice" sign displayed in the front door.  Yuck. Certainly we're in a period where the cream will rise to the top, but sometimes your local fav isn't every body elses - or else they knew how to dish out a fabulous meal, but they weren't running the numbers properly. You get the idea. At the same time, I can think of 3 new bars/restaurants that have just opened, and which I've heard really good things about (within 3 miles of my digs, no less). Out with the old, in with the new? I hope not. But I'll take a few new places that will help keeps things fresh.

Meanwhile, many young adults are scooping up new homes. They are getting great buys on properties that were completely out of the realm of possibility just a few years ago. Other folks looking to get a new business off the ground may have a new opportunity to do so. Many I know in the trade for example, are now biding their time, waiting to set up their kitchens in prime spaces as they become available.

This week I read a really interesting (and well-written) article about a different kind of real estate, business and demographic phenomenon: California wineries for sale. As many winemakers/owners hit retirement age, they have no succession strategy in place. In some cases offspring want no part of the wine biz; in others there are no offspring to be had (45%!). Whichever the case, owners haven't "groomed" someone else to take over. What happens? Big companies swoop in and snag the property, and often enough, the brand itself. But what about the wine?!

Journalist Beppi Crosariol at Globe and Mail described the implications of this scenario, writing "the shift could usher in a new era of big-business control that will transform an industry known mainly for individualistic, craft wines into an ocean of McCabernets." Yikes! Who wants that?

Apparently not everyone. Another article I stumbled on cheered the little guys; small Santa Clara Valley wineries are starting to hit their stride - recently taking home several national prizes for their efforts and gaining important publicity as a result.

Hopefully there will be some happy balance in the months or years ahead. All in all though, these articles reaffirm my belief that tasting is believing. Some of your old favorites might not have the same juice, if you will, moving forward; and maybe that's ok, if you're willing to keep exploring and find other hidden gems.

Do you think we'll start hearing more about winery properties changing hands in Europe? Or does a deeper history, family tradition or even estate tax law prevent some of this?

Open That Bottle Night wine report

I hope you and yours had a wonderful time popping a cork or two last Saturday night for Open That Bottle Night. For my part, a handful of my closest friends descended on my place for a wonderful meal of braised paprika chicken, orzo and lemon-garlic asparagus. We started with an appetizer of oysters, a small aperitif of exceptional Dolin Dry Vermouth and a glass of white Bordeaux ('06 Ch. le Tucau, Graves). Then with dinner we moved on to our "serious" wines - those we had been saving for whatever special occasion had yet to materialize. I wasn't exactly sure what my bottle of Spanish wine from Terra Alta, Spain would bring - but I had high hopes, too. This isn't a region you often see here in the States; my bottle was actually hand-carried back from Barcelona by my best friend after her wedding there.

The Terra Alta D.O. boasts only 28 vineyards. The region is characterized by its Mediterranean & Continental climate (very cold winters, very hot summers), steep slopes and valley floors, and its proximity to its better known neighbor, Priorat. The cierzo breezes from the northeast do their part to keep the grapes dry, preventing rot. Terra Alta is considered an up and coming region, with many winemakers experimenting with better known grape varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah, which have been permitted since 1995. More often you'll find native grapes Garnacha Tinta and Carinena as well as Garnacha Peluda and Morenillo, as far as the reds go.

Doing my best to navigate the Catalan description on the back of the bottle, I anticipated the Ede Aria 2003 would be a big boy, with need of decanting.  The wine was a blend of three grapes: Garnacha Peluda (40%), Syrah (35%) and Cabernet Sauvignon (25%). My inspiration for the paprika braised chicken was distinct from the wine I knew I would have on offer, so decanting was a priority to soften any rough edges and remove the sediment the wine was likely to throw. Since I know my friend prefers fruit-forward wines to uber-dry ones, I hoped this wine would deliver a nice silky mouthfeel, with both red and black fruits apparent. Finally, given the region's proximity to the Priorat, I hoped it would have a gentle herbaceousness and a touch of earthy leather. I was pleased to discover it delivered on all of the above!

The other two wines we opened Saturday night were the 2004 Stevenot Tempranillo (Sierra Foothills, California) and the 2004 Villa Antinori Toscana (Tuscany, Italy).

Yes, Saturday evening I traveled the world with my friends! It was a pleasure to do so.

What wine(s) did you open for OTBN? Any highlights or disappointments in the mix?

a celebration (or two!) of wine approachability

Several years ago I found myself sitting in my doctor's office picking up a copy of "O" magazine. Not much of a magazine reader, I was just thumbing through it to pass the time. And then an article about a group of nine women, passionate about wine, caught my attention. They called their close-knit wine education group "Divas Uncorked" - and they were hanging out, talking about wine just up I-93 in Milton, MA. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I was deep in the throws of my professional leap to the wonderful world of wine and together, however informally amongst themselves, they were doing what I hoped to do. In a nutshell, they were described as dynamic, and engaging - and when it came to wine their motto was approachability. They believed wine was a vehicle for all kinds of things: fun, new adventures, new learning and community.

When I discovered last week their public, 10th anniversary Vintners dinner was just a couple of weeks away, it was easy to approach them about an article for my new, Monday wine column on Wicked Local/Somerville (yea!). Learn more about their festivities here - and then tell us:

What's your wine motto?

fun with wine (news)

I can't help but feel excited and playful what with Open That Bottle Night on tap for tomorrow night and a few very cool new projects in the queue (more on those later...). So today I bring to you a sampling of lighthearted highlights from my wine reading this week. Let's start with the most whimsical piece and go from there, shall we?

Let's face it:  most of us spend way too much time at our computers, for better or worse. Anytime someone figures out a way to help us play while we work, I'm all for it. From Arwye Wan and the folks at Yanko Designs comes not only the wine cork USB memory stick, but now also the flash drive. This is user-friendly wine love if I ever saw it. Check them out!

Next, we have Girl Scout Cookies! What? Yep. America's favorite seasonal treat (or so I think) meets wine at the hand of Doug Morris, of Old Town Bread, Co.. Girl Scouts of South Eastern Massachusetts is holding their annual fundraiser, where Chef's from some of our favorite - and finest - local restaurants will participate in the name of the cookie, or well, the Girl Scouts who sell them. With such an illustrious team in the kitchen, it's a bit surprising wine hasn't entered the picture to date. Katie Curley of The Daily News reported, "a surprise entry from Morris will be a savory cookie of smoked salmon with a red wine reduction on cinnamon-flavored Girl Scouts' Daisy Go Round Cookies." Check out Curley's article to learn more about the Who's Who in Culinary & Cookies, or click this link and go to "Cookie Creations" to support the event. (Hotel Commonwealth, March 12, 6-8pm)

Finally, in what was meant to be a more sobering article about wine and the economy, I found Inside Bay Area's recent article on marketing high-end wine in a down economy fairly positive. Here are three reasons I feel this way:

1. Guerilla marketing, if you will, among some of the more high end wine producers of California might mean good news for consumers. The folks at Honig and Cakebread, for example, plan to take more of their wares on the road, giving consumers a greater opportunity to taste and enjoy their high-end wines locally.

2. If you've been sitting on a wine club waiting list since before dirt, this may be your moment to get in on the fun. There should be more high-end juice available with sales generally lower. This means there's more to go around for folks who aren't local and want "in" via special Club-only shipments.

3. Finally, just this week Boston natives Peter and Diana Merriam opened their new Napa tasting room - but they're not giving up production of one of their best value "high end" wines, which clocks in at $35. Count on 4.5 glasses of fun for a mere $7.77 each; that's pretty great value, if you think of it. Plus, the Merriams will be offering custom crush to other folks; it'll be interesting to see what - or who - else comes out of their new digs, given how high a bar they've set for themselves.

All in all, not a bad week for wine! Let's top it off, shall we? Be sure to OPEN THAT BOTTLE!

Carmenere: something old, something new...

There's something great about finding something you thought had long been lost, or even just finding something you had long forgotten. The idea is the same. There is a magic to the rediscovery, almost heightening your original experience because of the novelty of the find. This happened to me a couple of years ago when my mom had us go through our respective "boxes" of childhood stuff to consolidate our treasures. I remember finding a terrific array of goodies from my first "club", where I was deemed Secretary. I was - and still am - completely humored by the fact that my newsletter writing style and go-get-'m/take-no-prisoners/ra-ra approach as an 8 year old lived on in my daily correspondence with colleagues in 2006. Funny stuff.

Carmenere is to 19th Century Bordeaux, France as my email writing style today is to 1987. Just imagine researchers' surprise and delight in the mid 1990s when the Carmenere grape was found alive and well in Chile - after it was long thought distinct due to the onset of phylloxera in Bordeaux. Difficult to replant and prone to disease because of the weather conditions in Bordeaux, Carmenere (one of the 6 original "noble" varieties of Bordeaux) was considered a lost cause and not replanted after the phylloxera epidemic. Somehow, someway, Carmenere grape plantings arrived in Chile - and the varietal thrived in its new dry, warm habitat. The 'funny' thing is this varietal was thought to be Merlot.... for quite a long time Chilean "Merlot" was distinct. Finally, in 1994, research was undertaken to sort things out - and Carmenere's true identity and history were revealed.

Today Carmenere is not just used as a blending grape, but known in its own right as one of Chile's best single varietal wines. Don't get me wrong, I've tasted a lot of bad Carmenere, with bitter, stemmy flavors and a distinct green bell pepper vegetal quality dominating. But when it's on, it's on. Good examples show tremendous depth for a "middle-weight", including red and dark fruits, a touch of earthiness, tobacco and leather, as well as a distinct smokey character or even a mocha/dark chocolate element. No kidding. All that in a bottle of wine!

Just this week I retasted the well-known 2007 Terra Noble Grand Reserva  Carmenere.  It's smokiness and darker tones (e.g. dried herbs, tobacco and leather) made me channel a great big stew of lamb, carrots and potatoes,  sitting in front of my (theoretical) fireplace. I realized somehow thus far I had neglected to share this something new/something old with my readers. Well, better late than never! This wine will certainly carry us through the inevitably blustery March right on into Spring, when our barbecues will be ripe for action thereafter.

But as I said, there's a lot of Carmenere on the market and it doesn't always delight. Chile is, after all, an up and coming area experiencing a few growing pains. And I think Carmenere may be more of an acquired taste than an automatic winner for most consumers. No surprise then, today's question is:

What's your experience with Carmenere?

the "just do it" of wine: open that bottle night '09!

Open That Bottle Night logo

I think a lot about wine. I think a lot about sports. I think a lot about the weather (granted, often I'm dreaming of warmer, sunnier climates).  Truth be told, I think a lot and when I get something in my head, it really sinks its teeth in. Case in point: for weeks I've known today I would post about Open That Bottle Night, a little something Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher from the Wall Street Journal dreamt up ten years ago. Their idea? To give people an "excuse" to open that bottle of wine they've been saving. It's the "Just Do It!" for wine lovers around the world - because, let's face it, it can be hard to decide which occasion is special enough to cause you to pop the cork on that bottle you've been saving for the last 20 years.

I've been amped up since the Super Bowl about OTBN, I can't lie. I find February is the longest month of the year. By the end of the cold, damp, snowy eck of Feburary, I have wicked Spring Fever. Fortunately, OTBN happens every last Saturday of February. It is like a little light of hope at the end of the tunnel. A little light of goodness - whether I waited too long to open that bottle or not! There's no football the next day to look forward to either, so you can plan a fabulous brunch instead.

pouringwineintoglass

I've been biding my time to put together this little Friday post to remind everyone they have just one week to plan accordingly - whether it'll just be you and your hunny, or a small group of your most appreciative wine friends.  But in my great anticipation and enthusiasm, I couldn't help asking around to find out who has what planned....

Wouldn't you know it, I haven't heard one plan yet. People. How can you forget this wondrous event is just one weekend away? Worse yet, how can you not know we are not just Opening That Bottle, but we're celebrating the 10th year of the event! Just to check if I am going crazy, a random lack of publicity for this momentous evening, I will now Google "open that bottle night".

1,610,000 entries loaded for 2009 alone.

Huh.

Well, if you didn't know, now you know! Open That Bottle Night is not to be missed! If you don't have a bottle of 10 or 20 or 5 year old anything, it doesn't matter. It's about the spirit of the occasion - of opening something you wouldn't just uncork with dinner - or something that, frankly, needs an excuse to be opened lest it be lost to the wine gods forever. For me, I think it will be a bottle of Spanish wine my best friend brought back from Barcelona for me after her wedding there. (I attended the Turkish Cypriat festivities, but couldn't make the trip to Barcelona for part deux. Her father-in-law is quite the vino lover, hand-selecting the wines for the occasion. I was sorry to have missed it! And my friend brought back one of the two remaining bottles for me to enjoy.)

So put on your party hat and get ready to raid your collection! We have 8 days and counting....

What are your plans for February 28th OTBN?

2007 Burgundy: a challenging vintage

Like the growers champagne tasting I attended in December, the ones I make a real point to get to are not run of the mill, but more of a treat. HD for wine lovers, if you will. Last week I had the pleasure of attending two Burgundy 2007 tastings. The Sorting Table and Wildman & Sons were in town to share their portfolio of 2007 Burgs with the trade. Burgundy is considered one of the most difficult regions in the world to work. Pinot Noir is an incredibly finicky grape and the climatic conditions each year are just as challenging. No surprise, these are really special events where invitees taste wines that can go for as much as $300+/bottle.

These tastings are also incredibly challenging to attend. Because of the timing of the event - just a few months post-harvest - the wines are typically barrel samples, which have been 'bottled' for the tastings here in the States; they are meant to give us a taste of what these wines will become. And by "become" I mean in quite a while.... Burgundy's reds (almost exclusively Pinot Noir) are not thought to come into their prime for at least another decade, and sometimes as much as three. The whites (almost exclusively Chardonnay) can also be aged for quite some time.

The 2007 vintage is said to be one of the most difficult in recent memory - but producing solid wines for those who tended their vines methodically, with tremendous care throughout the ups and downs of the vintage cycle. It was a long, warm spring suggesting an earlier harvest would be necessary. But it proceeded to rain, with temps consistently below average, throughout July and August. Finally in late August the sun decided to shine again and the northern winds arrived to dry things out in September. For those who really worked hard all vintage to give the grapes a chance - and then waited to pick - the fruit was ripe enough to produce concentrated, nuanced wines.

Those with greater experience tasting young Burgundy argue the Chardonnays are more consistently better than the Pinots in '07. For my part, though I hesitate to generalize, at each tasting I found the whites, indeed, were very vibrant, delightfully unadulterated and rightly displaying their characteristic minerality and searing acidity. The reds I tasted were mixed; the best offered the lovely concentrated fruit, nuanced earthiness and tremendous finesse one should expect from great Burgundy, while others were more diluted and characterless.

For the sake of this post (and my lengthy word count) I've deliberately refrained from going into greater detail about each of the specific (important) sub-regions within Burgundy - and the villages within these - which do make a difference on the predominant characteristics of a given red/white Burgundy. I fully encourage you to dig deeper to learn more about each. But, for a report on the 2007 vintage, definitely check out this resource. Very helpful, delightfully nerdy information therein.

Have you experienced great Burgundy? What vintage was the wine?