Blind Muscat's Crush

Blind Muscat doesn’t just mouth off about wine, though he does plenty of that; he makes his own, too, and does a pretty fair job at it. He’s got a couple of shopping bags full of amateur completion ribbons from the last ten years, and more to the immediate point, HE’S GOT GRAPES COMING IN RIGHT NOW. There are a couple carboys full of bubbling Viognier downstairs, and this season’s reds are not far behind.

Blind Muscat has never understood how someone can claim to be a wine writer and never make wine. Can you imagine a food writer who has never cooked anything? Not likely. And if you met such a culinarily impaired person, would you trust anything he/she/they wrote?

Making your own is a heap of fun, a great tax dodge (business expense), and the quickest way to figure out whether the winemakers and marketeers you talk to are blowing smoke when they tell you how they make their wine. I once took a poll on all this at a conference of wine writers: nearly everyone said they did gourmet cooking, yet only about a fifth of the participants had ever made a bottle of wine. Terrifying.

Here at subterranean cellars, Blind Muscat concentrates on Rhone reds and aromatic whites—thus the Muscat thing. This year, we’ve going to thaw some frozen, botrysized 2005 Chenin Blanc from the Yakima Valley via Brehm Vineyards, blend it with some freshly squeezed Chenin from Lodi, and the afore-mentioned Viognier (Contra Costa County, and produce something dry and something sweet from the results; and we’re gonna take batches of Amador County Syrah, Sonoma Syrah, Mendocino Grenache (two different vineyards), Lodi Mourvedre, Lodi Petite Sirah and Amador Zinfandel (a bunch of these grapes through Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley) and brew up a couple or three different Cal-Rhone blends. Plus our usual mongrel rosé, the Scheming Beagle, made from juice from whichever reds are available in a given year. 

We will be working our tails off for the next couple of months, while many of the rest of you are sipping someone else’s wine and pontificating about it. We will be sweating off weight, while you are drinking it on. A year from now, when we start opening these wines, we’ll be saving five bucks on our taxes for each bottle.

Grapes: bring ‘em on.