Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Wine: The Best Defense

This is a story of heroism and self-sacrifice that got publicized all over the world thanks to Reuters and made the front page of the New York Times, but somehow has gotten scant attention in the wine world: GREEK FARMER SAVES HOUSE FROM FIRE WITH WINE.

In the midst of the fires that have ravaged Greece in recent days, George Dimopoulos, in the town of Makistos in the Peloponnesus, saw the fire advancing toward his house, ran out of water, and turned to his final line of defense: the stock of wine in his cellar that he had made two years earlier. Little by little, he put it in his hand-held crop sprayer and fought the flames, dousing his property with several hundred liters of wine and successfully defending his house. It was a tiny bright spot in a sea of devastation.

The only silver lining in this Greek tragedy is that the government’s bungling of the fire emergency may well mean that voters throw out the conservative Karamanlis regime in the upcoming elections. (If only Katrina had produced similar results in the US.) Meantime, let every wine lover—and every home winemaker—toast George Dimopoulos tonight for his resourcefulness and his devotion to the grape!

Gin and (Fever-Tree) Tonic

Blind Muscat has a lengthy and colorful medical history, including multiple surgeries and a number of obscure, hard-to-pronounce immune system disorders. But he’s never had malaria, and he owes it entirely to his love for gin and tonics.

Many converts to the joys of wine develop an aversion to, even a contempt for distilled spirits, or at least those not made from grapes. However much elegant, connoisseur-ish prose such prejudices are wrapped in, they remain juvenile. Grown-ups drink spirits, too, in the right time and place. And on a hot summer day on your back porch, a good, icy gin and tonic is worth a tankerful of Pinot Grigio.

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?

Joseph Phelps 1996 Le Mistral

I acquired this particular bottle a few years back while I was a member of Phelps Preferred, the wine club for fans of the venerable Napa Valley producer. I joined in order to get my hands on an assured supply of the Phelps Rhône-style wines, which have always been especially toothsome. Everybody else was in the club to get first crack at the Insignia; once it started costing a fortune, I stopped being Preferred—and gave up my Insignia allocation just before that wine started routinely getting thousands of Parker points. Blind Muscat’s timing has always been impeccable.

For example, in waiting a decade to open the 1996 Mistral. There was filet mignon on the table, and a comforting potato gratin, and it was clearly the Mistral’s time. It was delicious, still full of fruit but overlaid with a patina of mature wine flavors—cedar, leather, tobacco, all those things you’d never put in your mouth otherwise.

Drink Local, Very Local: Part II

The East Bay’s thriving warehouse wine scene held its second annual Urban Wine Experience Saturday, August 18, and it was a smash. Compared to last year’s debut, the upgrade was evident: more wineries pouring, plenty of tasty edibles from local purveyors and caterers, a bigger, more boisterous crowd, and some sticker shock—tickets priced at $35 in advance, $45 at the door. Best of all: the ability to buy any combination of mixed wines from multiple producers on the spot and cart it off with one swipe of a credit card—you’d think this was the 21^st century.

The tasting was held on the crush apron at Rosenblum Cellars in Alameda; which gives you an idea of the relative scale of Rosenblum (zeroing in on 200,000 cases a year) and the rest of the crew, all of whose production facilities would likely have also fit onto that crush apron as well.

Lotta good wine, reinforcing the judgment that these folks can make wine on a par with anybody else in California, even if they mostly do it in a non-traditional way, with no vineyards in sight (and no billion-dollar loans to buy those vineyards, either).

The Fabulous Finger Lakes

The great wines of California are known all over the world; Oregon Pinot Noir has an international reputation; and the scrumptious wines of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York are . . . a really big deal in Syracuse and Rochester.

The wines of the Finger Lakes are the best-kept secret in US wine, brilliant in the clarity of their cool-climate fruit, refreshingly higher in acidity and lower in alcohol than most California efforts, often possessed of a magical mouthfeel—and quite rationally priced.  From the pretty to the intense, these wines are finally beginning to get a dollop of attention from the wine press, catching up with an outstanding track record in competitions. In early August, the cream of the Finger Lakes (and New York’s other winemaking regions) were on display at Copia in Napa. To get some well-deserved attention, the New Yorkers moved the annual Governor’s Cup competition for the best New York wines right into the belly of the beast and put on one heck of a show. (Results can be found on the New York Wine & Grape Foundation website, http://www.newyorkwines.org/nygold/wineandfood.asp.)

Why Another Wine Blog?

When in the course of cyber events, it becomes necessary for one more wine nut to launch a blog, despite the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that he should declare the causes which impel him to this redundancy.

Blind Muscat fits the standard profile for a wine blogger: he likes wine—lots of wine, from lots of different places, especially when he doesn’t have to pay a fortune for it—and he likes to run his mouth. So the same combination of credentials that got him into wine writing several years ago, plus a stretch as a computer jockey, make him a likely suspect.

Every good writer, on whatever subject, has to have an interesting set of prejudices, and wine writers are no exception—despite the pretense of objectivity surrounding the numerology of 100-point scales and the like. A child of the ‘60s (now with grandchildren of his own), Blind Muscat can’t help but be intrigued by and root for under-appreciated wine regions and glam-free grape varieties. He thinks a day that sees 100 new people falling in love with wine is far superior to a day that sees the release of another $100 cult wine wannabe.

Drink Local, Very Local

Surrounded by wine country on all sides—Napa and Sonoma to the north, the Livermore Valley to the east, the Santa Cruz Mountains to the south—the near East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, Livermore, Alameda) is fast becoming a fine wine region of its own. Not an appellation, of course, since there’s no way to grow grapes in this fog-prone, concrete-covered stretch of urbanity, but a hotbed of small commercial wineries (and one big dog, Rosenblum Cellars) showing definite potential for turning out first-rate bottles.

A subset of warehouse winemaking talent was on display July 28 in a cooperative tasting held at Periscope Cellars (the name reflecting the winery’s previous life as a submarine repair facility) in Alameda. Periscope was joined for the day by Harrington Wines, a Berkeley Pinot specialist; Eno Wines, which shares space with Harrington in Berkeley, focused on Rhones and Pinot Noir; Urbano Cellars, a tenant within the Periscope complex offering its very first wine; and Edmunds St. John, a grizzled pioneer of the Easy Bay warehouse scene with more than 20 vintages of terrific Cal-Rhones under its belt.

Sometimes it’s nice to have the romance of the old-school wine country, much of it manufactured, stripped away and just get together with some folks and knock back some sips in a thoroughly glamour-free setting—bare floor, piles of boxes, clutter everywhere, winemakers pouring from behind card tables, five credit card check-out stations (one per winery) lined up like a public television fund-raising phone bank. No frills. My friend Wanda Hennig, trying to do some photography to go with an article she’s working on, came up empty, though she did manage to snap this shot of me deeply lost in thought while talking with Sasha Verhage of Eno.

There were a number of tasty wines, almost all of them red. Standouts for me included Steve Edmunds’ 2005 Redneck 101, a Syrah/Grenache blend from Mendocino; Bryan Harrington’s Galante Vineyard (Russian River) and Chalone (Monterey) Pinots; and Brendan (Periscope) Eliason’s 2005 Deep Six, a zany blend of grapes never before found in the same bottle.

Overall, this sample of East Bay efforts could hold its own with any random grouping of five Sonoma wineries or five region-of-your-choice producers.

To get a directory of (most of) these operations, try the East Bay Vintner’s Alliance website. And for a tasting of the whole lot of them, head for Rosenblum Cellars, 2900 Main Street in Alameda, on August 18th from 3-6pm. More info and a link for buying tickets on the EBVA website.

Jost 2005 Bacharacher Hahn Riesling Kabinett

A great example of a contemporary German Riesling Kabinett—which means that it isn’t anything like your parents’ Kabinett at all. Global warming has already heated up the slopes along Germany’s wine rivers (the Bacharacher Hahn vineyard is in the stretch of the Rhine called the Mittelrhein) that fewer and fewer grapes come in at the traditionally low sugar levels classified as Kabinett; this one is surely at least in the Spätlese range, numbers-wise, maybe even an Auslese. Whatever: it’s delicious.

The endearing virtue of traditional Kabinette, besides low alcohol, is their charm: fragrant, delicate, inviting, downright cheerful. Jost’s 2005 is still plenty charming, and a delightfully modest 10% alcohol, but it also packs its own kind of punch. The wine gets your attention as soon as it zings the tip of the tongue, then explodes into a mouthful of refreshment. There are peaches and nectarines and even plum-skin flavors—another example of the Riesling grape’s unique ability among white varieties to deliver red fruit. Off-dry, great acid balance, high slurpiness factor. Pairs perfectly with warm weather, with or without food.

Don’t let another summer go by without a Jost Kabinett.

Price: about $20. Importer: Terry Thiese / Michael Skurnik. Alcohol: 10%. Points: Blind Muscat don’t give no stinking points.

Michaud 2003 Chalone Appellation Pinot Noir

These days, Chalone isn’t just a winery high up in the Pinnacles in Monterey County; it’s an official AVA, a distinct growing region named after that pioneering fine-wine effort but home to a handful of other, smaller wineries as well. Michael Michaud put in 15 years as Chalone’s winemaker, but eventually gave up under the weight of repeated corporate overhauls and struck out on his own in 1997 with ten acres of nearby land on which he grows Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Sangiovese, Syrah and Pinot Noir.

Michaud’s whole line of wines are expertly made, varietally true, elegantly balanced and capable of evolving in the glass—what you get on the first sip is not all you get. This 2003 Pinot tastes like a Pinot, not a Syrah (the 13.9% alcohol helps); there’s fruit to burn, but it’s plums, not prunes. All the Pinot spice and silky mouthfeel you could ask for.

“Save the other bottle of this wine for when we have duck,” said my wife. Not that she and a friend visiting from Boston minded downing this one with smoked turkey and cheese grits.

Like any small, struggling producer, Michaud’s wines aren’t easy to find at your local wine warehouse. There’s a list of distributors and retailers on the Michaud website, from which you can also order multiple vintages of his wines directly.

Price: about $35. Alcohol: 13.9% Points: Plenty—Blind Muscat says you can dance to it.