Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: ASEV Dumps Science Fad

Napa. CA, June 26 -- After 60 years of trying to foster serious scientific inquiry into North American winemaking, the American Society for Enology and Viticulture (ASEV) has decided to bail--bag all the refereed journal crap, go for the moment.

Appropriately enough, this year's Annual Meeting was held in Napa, in the heart of the California wine country, after decades of rotating the gatherings of wine researchers and winemakers between cities large enough to have hotels with facilities that could accommodate a wine trade show--whether or not the locations (Reno, San Diego, etc.) had much to do with wine. The abrupt change in focus was announced by incoming president Christian Butzke, researcher and professor of Enology at Purdue University in Indiana, on the morning of the second day of the conference. The first clue was innocent enough, tucked into his introduction to a highly technical morning session, when he  observed, "For all the science you're going to hear today, remember that we still can’t tell the difference in the lab between a $20 wine, a $200 wine, and a $2000 wine." The audience smiled, nodded, and zoomed in on the chemical chicken wire diagrams on the first PowerPoint slides.

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Feiring Gets Even

In a development that set the world of wine on its collective heels, wine writer, blogger and artisan production advocate Alice Feiring announced over the weekend that she had purchased Constellation Brands, the world's largest wine company, lock, stock and barrels.

The author of The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization said she was able to acquire the 95-milion case international wine conglomerate with the proceeds from her book and the speaking tour that followed. (Her book remains more popular at Amazon.com than the latest edition of Robert M. Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide.) The purchase price was not announced, but Feiring indicated that "Tim Geithner would understand."

"This seemed like the least I could do," Feiring said, "if I want to put my money where my mouth constantly is. Constellation is the very symbol of corporate winemaking, shameless manipulation, the reduction of a magical, soulful treasure to a mere mass-consumption beverage. If you hate homogenized wine, you have to like my move. Plus, by putting it on my credit card, I have enough frequent flyer miles stashed away to visit every great vineyard in the world."

Feiring is still mulling over options on the future of Constellation’s vast holdings, multiple brands, and far-flung properties. "I thought about just shutting the sucker down," she said, which would have meant a huge financial loss but a "sweet" tax break. "I will at least personally supervise the demolition of the facilities that produce Mega-Purple," she noted, referring to a Constellation wine concentrate product used behind the scenes to enhance color in many commercial wines. Another possibility would be to break Constellation up into numerous small wineries--50,000 operations at 2,000 cases per winery might be a ballpark estimate--and hand them out to budding winemakers who promise to follow the natural path, swear off reverse osmosis, never send samples to Parker, and avoid the use of electricity or indoor plumbing in their new facilities.

Jose Fernandez, President and CEO of Constellation Wines U.S., did not return calls.

Rumors are also circulating that Feiring is in negotiations to purchase all or part of  Robert Parker's Wine Advocate, infusing new capital in the enormously influential publication in exchange for the opportunity to insert her own comments on his comments for each wine he reviews. Meanwhile, it was disclosed that Fehring has purchased the server farm that hosts eRopertParker.com, the web incarnation of and bulletin board for all things Parker, which means she can literally pull the plug on her nemesis if discussions of a future role with The Wine Advocate go badly.

Iberian Reveries

Blind Muscat spent a day in his version of Heaven last Thursday--in an auditorium at UC Davis listening to lectures about grapes and wine. The occasion was the annual Varietal Focus session, this year devoted to Iberian varieties--dozens of 'em--that are rapidly getting more attention in the import market and with wineries looking for something different to grow and bottle. It was an excellent program, some interesting wines, and a glimpse of what will surely be a growth segment in the wine marketplace.

Temperature Check

Decades. maybe centuries of received expert wine wisdom tells us that red wines should be served at around 60º Fahrenheit, whites around 50º. But most of keep our reds in houses where "room temperature" is more like 70º and chill our whites in refrigerators that are down near 40º, and those ten-degree gaps can have a major impact on what ends up in our glasses.

Blind Muscat thought he had this figured out, between the selection of cooler places for storing reds and taking whites out of the fridge a bit before drinking, and so on. Then he started using a thermometer, and discovered he was fooling himself big time--and you may be, too.

Omnibibes of the World, Unite!

Blind Muscat recently penned a review on Vinography of a new edition of the wine lover's classic, George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book, reissued with extensive notes and annotations by the University of California Press. The book is a fine read, and perhaps a bit surprising, since only a small amount of it has to do with wine. Saintsbury drank everything he could get his lips around, at least once, often several times just to make sure he got it right: whisky, hard cider, beer of all sorts, raki, anything you could ferment or distill, and all with great gusto.

It occurred to me after the review was posted that the man was an omnibibe--a word that had never to my knowledge entered my mental space before that moment, but an obvious analog to omnivore, or the more recently fashionable locavore. Clearly, a job for Google, where I found an alleged 115 hits, really boiling down to more like 15, and most of them duplicates from a couple of usages. (Not to be confused with Omnivibe, which yields 7,130 or so hits, many having to do with an iPod sound docking system, and no doubt, some with intriguing devices for group erotic encounters. Didn't have time to follow all the links . . . )

Pigs, Flu and Wine

Seems that in reaction to the spread of the (A)H1N1 flu strain--formerly known as the swine flu--several Catholic dioceses have decided not to offer their communicants wine as part of the communion ritual, fearing the risk of transmission. As discussed on Beliefnet, the central Church authorities think "the need for the introduction of widespread liturgical adaptations for the prevention of the transmission of influenza in the dioceses of the (U.S.) is not evident at this time" Nonetheless, folks in Texas and Tampa and elsewhere are gonna have to swallow those wafers with a dry throat.

This reaction strikes Blind Muscat, himself a former Papist, as odd on at least two counts. First, it's somewhat remarkable that a substance said to contain the "essence" of the blood of Christ can't fight off a motley viral strain. Second and more important, altar wine contains another substance, by no means imaginary, that will likely do the trick -- alcohol. Ethanol levels in table wine pretty much neutralize any known human pathogen; Chardonnay, for example, makes an excellent disinfectant for swabbing down your kitchen counters. So the chances are that bringing cup t lip would reduce the spread of the flu, not encourage it.

Blind Muscat thinks taking the juice out of Communion shares a logical paradigm with the Egyptian slaughter of innocent pigs. Better to drop the transubstantiation thing--but that's another topic.

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Randall Grahm, the Higgs Boson, and Terroir

Eric Asimov of the New York Times did an interesting profile of winemaker/wine provocateur Randall Grahm in print and online versions about a week ago, portraying the boy from Bonny Doon as a "new man" whose "new idea is to get small." After a stretch of years in which the Big House brand and the Pacific Rim Riesling venture rocketed production up to 450,000 cases, Grahm has spun off and sold whole lines of wine, dropped production to 35,000 cases, purchased new vineyard land in San Benito County near San Juan Bautista (appropriately, the town whose Mission was the setting for "Vertigo"), and focused back on the purist of original, distinctive, terroir-driven wines. 

But Blind Muscat has learned there's a little more to this new phase. A modest project on the Franco-Swiss border, deep under the ground, far away from the prying eyes of the wine media and the TTB. Yes, the rumors are true: Randall Grahm is hoping to turn the 2008 Cigare Volant, now in barrel, into the world's first Big Bang wine by drenching it in super-charged elementary particles from the Large Hadron Collider.

The Blast and Der Bingle

Blind Muscat recently came across an amazing piece of unintended causation, definitely worth sharing: about how a 19th century volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia changed the way the Brits thought about Christmas. Maybe the rest of you knew this, but not me -- and I found enlightenment in a wine book.

I tripped across this info while reading New Zealand viticulture researcher  David Jackson's excellent little book, called simply Climate, a concise overview of cool winegrowing climates in particular work and how they shape viticulture and wine style. The book includes a brief treatment on global warming and its implications, which begins with the following rather arresting historical reflection on the last Ice Age, ending 12,000 years ago: "Had viticulture been practiced, 'cool-climate' wines would have been grown in southern Spain and northern Africa and warm-climate wines may have been produced in what is now the Sahara Desert."