Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Food OR Wine?

Yesterday the New York Times ran a fascinating article by Keith Bradsher about drought in Australia and its contribution to the growing world food crisis. The short of it is that six years of drought have made many stretches of land in Southeastern Australia no longer viable for rice cultivation, putting farmers, mills, and even whole towns out of business. The drought has reduced Australia’s rice crop by an astounding 98%, adding to the perfect storm of factors that have produced mass hunger and food riots from the Philippines to Cairo to Senegal to Haiti.

The reason this is a wine story is that even if there isn’t enough water to grow rice, there is enough to grow winegrapes, and that’s exactly the conversion that’s going on. helping to feed the apparently unstoppable growth of Australian wine exports. It’s a perfect example of our friends, those good old free-market forces, working their magic, and another reason to love capitalism. But for Graeme J. Haley, the general manager of the town of Deniliquin, dateline for the story, “Rice is a staple food. Chardonnay is not.”

More on Portland Distilleries

In my last post, I surveyed the explosion of small craft distilleries in Portland, the start of what will no doubt be a national wave. I mentioned that because of a flight delay, I missed a scheduled lunch with Steve McCarthy of Clear Creek Distillery, an old college friend and the Grand Old Man—or maybe, Grumpy Old Man—of Portland spirits.

I’ve known Steve for years – we got drunk together at Reed College in Portland in the mid-1960s. Steve was chair of the campus Young Republicans (he later saw the light), whuch favored solidly liberal positions for the time—recognizing Red China, getting the heck out of Vietnam, and so on. I headed up the campus Young Democrats, whose positions were, dare I say, a bit farther to the left. Years later, when I got into the adult beverages racket, I visited Steve’s stillhouse a couple times and wrote him up. So for my immediate purposes, I figured I could fill in his recent story with a phone call (I still owe him lunch).

Walking / Drinking Tour of Portland

Once I heard that Portland, Oregon had become the epicenter of a resurgence in craft distilling, I had to check it out. I am fond of Portland (college daze) and, of course, fond of distilleries; better yet, I can usually find a way to get paid to check such things out. And so armed with a bunch of phone numbers and addresses, I flew up that way this past Thursday to spend the afternoon on Distillery Row.

The trip did not start auspiciously. My flight on Southwest was an hour and a half late taking off (those pesky mechanical problems, due no doubt to never doing inspections). This delay cost me my first appointment of the day, lunch with Steve McCarthy, founder of Clear Creek Distillery, Portland’s first, launched back in the 1980s. (Steve will get his own post, soon.) So I moved on to destination two. When my Former Eastern Bloc cabbie took me from the airport to what was supposed to be my destination, I quickly realized he had gotten the address wrong, despite many repetitions, so I ran after him, yelling and flailing till I got his attention, and finally reached the right address.

Food and Wine Follies

Last night, I moderated a panel I had put together for the San Francisco Professional Food Society on the “Pleasures and Pitfalls of Food and Wine Pairing.” I’d been working on this for several months, trying to get my dream team panel in one place the same night, and so, on April Fool’s Day (a good date to take up such a topic), we descended on the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.

Speakers included, alphabetically, Jon Bonné, editor of the SF Chronicle Wine section; Tim Hanni, one of the first American Masters of Wine and now a renegade who pokes well-researched fun at the wine education establishment; Dr. Hildegarde Heymann, the sensory analyst in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology and a leading researcher on this pairing business; and Burke Owens, formerly of COPIA and now doing marketing for Bonny Doon. The setting—Victor’s Palace on the 32^nd floor of the St. Francis, overlooking the city as night descended—was spectacular; the food and wine for the hands-on pairing part was excellent stuff; and the panel was in fine form.

The Moleskine® Cult

At a recent lunch and tasting sponsored by an ambitious and well-heeled winery, the 20 or so writers in attendance were all presented with a personalized gift, a small, hardbound blank notebook, about 3-1/2” by 5-1/2”, embossed on the cover with the winery logo.  It didn’t register much with me, but all around me, people were giving off sounds of delight—“Oh, cool, a mole skin.”

“A what?” I asked. “A mole skin, you know, one of those great little notebooks—I use them all the time,” came several responses almost in unison. ”Uh, okay,” I said.

I knew immediately I had stumbled across a cult.

Guns, Wine and Liability

Sunday I spent my afternoon at the annual Rhone Rangers tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There was a lot of good wine (especially among the whites), the usual overdone wines (especially the Syrahs), and I had an OK time.

But it wasn’t the same—because I couldn’t pour my own wine this year.

2005 Coltibuono Chianti Classico

Once upon a time, before the Chardonnay craze, the Cabernet Sauvignon craze, the Merlot craze, and the current Pi9not Noir craze, there was Chianti. With or without the straw-covered fiasco packaging, it was everywhere, the wine most likely to be encountered and ordered on wine lists across the country. Besides being cheap (single digits for really good ones through the 1980s) and plentiful, Chianti was much-believed because it was so versatile at the table. It went with everything from sole to steak, soup to nuts. Medium body, modest alcohol, refreshing acidity, dry finish—and you could take the bottle home and stick a candle in it. Along with dry rosé and pre-steroidal Zinfandel, it was a perennial go-to wine.

Two or three wine revolutions later, the fanciest estate-grown, Riserva Chiantis are priced somewhere in the $30-$40 range, no longer everyday wine in my marginal tax bracket.

The Future of Wine Writing, Part Three

This rambling, triple-tiered speculation about wine and words started with the observation that any discussion of the future of wine writing should properly start with considering its content, not its technological delivery vehicle, and noted some topic areas clearly suited for the digital sphere. Then we moved on to consider whether there are any Big Ideas left to discuss in the wine world. and listed several—global warming, emerging wine regions, the import squeeze on US wines, sustainability, truth in labeling, and the demise of the traditional model of vertically integrated winemaking—the same person/family grows the grapes, makes the wine, brings the wine to market. If these are among the Big Ideas of the future, where and how do they and their large intellectual ilk get examined?

The Future of Wine Writing, Part Two

The first panel of this triptych on the future of wine writing took a look (and some swipes) at what are by far the most popular, frequent types of content: wine reviews and ratings, winery and regional profiles, and tips on food and wine pairing. All of these categories should find their natural home on the web, and are indeed headed just that way. But what about Big Ideas in the world of wine: are there any such things, and if so, what’s the proper place to write about them?

I can think of at least half a dozen issues facing winedom that are meatier than a Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Taken together, they presage an unprecedented era of change, yea even tumult, in wine-as-we-have-come-to-know-it, and they are likely to be a major part of the substance of serious wine writing in the next few decades.

The Future of Wine Writing, Part One

Of all the sessions at the recent Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in Napa, the most interesting and contentious (the latter helping explain the former) focused on something called Media Convergence, the proliferation of digital outlets for wine writing—web sites, blogs, podcasts, internet TV, etc.—and their impact on more traditional print media—newspapers, magazines and books. Given that new outlets are popping up everywhere, I might have called it Media Divergence, but in any case, it’s clear that the landscape for wine writers is changing rapidly and permanently.

The panel was chaired by Vinography blogger Alder Yarrow and included Brett Anderson, head of editorial development for CurtcoMedia (which includes the plutocrat lifestyle-oriented Robb Report); Linda Murphy, former managing editor for WineToday.com, now writing for several prominent magazines and web outlets; Elaine Marshall, wine director for the Sunset magazine wine club; and Laura Levy Shatkin, a developer of Wine Taste TV and producer of the “Taste” local TV show in Chicago.

Yarrow opened the festivities with an intentional provocation: ”Print is dead.”