Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

San Benito County

You’ve got to love a wine region that supplies grapes both to anonymous, industrial, jug-wine conglomerates and near-cult producers like Williams Selyem. Which means you ought to love San Benito County.

Say what? San Which? Is that in California? I’m amazed at the number of my friends in the Bay Area who don’t recognize the name of the county, let alone think of it as having anything to do with wine. It’s the county south of Santa Clara County, west of Merced and Fresno, and most important, east of Monterey County, from which it seceded in the 1870s. San Benito is probably best known for the Mission San Juan Bautista, in the town of the same name, the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” the 1958 thriller staring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. The dizziness in this film had nothing to do with adult beverages.

Beringer Sparkling White Zinfandel

A few days back, I checked in on a discussion on The Wine Broad’s Board about good mass-production wines, including the issue of whether any such thing could possibly exist. I offered the Beringer Sparkling White Zin as one of my picks in this category, which helped prompt a rant about soulless wines from another commenter. All of which made me decide to chill another bottle and foist it on some unsuspecting friends.

Blind Muscat's Crush III

This is as good as home winemaking gets: pressing grapes in your driveway with your grandkids.

My stepson and daughter-in-law, who live down in the Santa Cruz Mountains, signed up for one of those try-a-condo promotions in Las Vegas for the middle of September, and my wife Nancy and I said we’d stay with their kids while they did their fling. Turned out, of course, that when mid-September came, I had grapes up the wazoo, as well as in the garage, in all states of fermentation and neediness. I couldn’t go more than a few blocks from home for more than a few hours; which meant that while the parents were off in Lost Wages, Nancy was down in Boulder Creek with the grandkids, and I was home tending to the grapes and the cat.

The Perils of Pairing

What put me into rant mode was the cover of the current (October) issue of Food & Wine, but it could have been anything. The issue promises “7 easy rules for pairing, plus 67 wine-friendly recipes,” all under the page-wide banner, “wine made simple.”

Where do I start? What exactly is a “wine-friendly” recipe,” and how does it differ from a “normal” recipe, and are we to presume that previous issues have offered “wine-hostile” recipes? If you need to follow at least seven rules before putting wine and food in your mouth at the same sitting, how “simple” is this stuff, really? And for that matter, who decided that wine should be “simple”?

Wines? In Brazil?

When Blind Muscat got the invite for the Brazilian wine tasting he attended this afternoon, he had to make it a priority. I mean, don’t those folks just drink beer and cachaça, the moonshiner’s answer to rum?

Well, of course not. If globalization means anything it means that folks will do their best to grow grapes and make wine anywhere on the planet, within some pretty broad climate limits; and they will succeed, the transfer of knowledge and capital being what it is. So, not to my surprise, the range of offerings from the 11 wineries represented at this event, sponsored by Wines From Brazil, tasted . . . pretty much like wine.

Smashing Summer Chenins

Mention Chenin Blanc to any serious student of wine, and the response will be, “Oh, yes, Chenin Blanc, the great aromatic white wine of Vouvray and the Loire.” It’s an automatic reflex, regardless of how much Chenin Blanc (if any) the respondent has consumed lately. You might also get a mention that the same variety shows up in South Africa as Steen—or used to, before the South Africans started ripping it out to make room for more Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. And then there’s another segment of wine drinkers, probably less schooled, who remember California Chenin Blanc as a great, slightly sweet, entry-level, let’s-knock-back-some-wine favorite from 20 years ago, before they moved on to more “serious” beverages.

Chenin Blanc has all but disappeared from the California wine scene, ripped out most everywhere to make way for other vines. There are a handful of holdout wineries here and there, and a few growers in Clarksburg, up near Sacramento in the Delta, who continue to tend it as a regional specialty. So when Blind Muscat came across not just one but two excellent specimens of this wine in a single month, it was clearly cause for celebration.

Blind Muscat’s Crush II

Making wine at home is a pale imitation of doing serious commercial winemaking. The scale is vastly smaller; the financial risk differential is enormous; plus, you never have to worry about selling the stuff, which is the hardest part. But it is an instructive microcosm, rich with lessons, setbacks, triumphs and insights.

Today—actually, yesterday—we’re in setback mode. Blind Muscat and his pal Steve (who styles himself Mini-Blind) spent most of Labor Day trekking out to the fine town of Herald, northeast of Lodi, to pick up a couple hundred pounds of Chenin Blanc. This variety, the star of the Loire, is headed for extinction in California, victim of its own success a couple decades back as an entry-level, slightly sweet, not-too-threatening wine, a legacy that makes it vinifera non grata with today’s “serious” wine drinkers.

Yeast On Steroids?

It’s harvest time in the Northern Hemisphere, and it will soon be asserted, far and wide, that one of the reasons alcohol levels are climbing faster than Bush’s poll ratings are dropping is that currently available commercial yeast strains yield more alcohol than their fungal ancestors did. Alas, this claim is widely wrong—at least within the reality-based winemaking paradigm.

The notion that modern (post-modern?) yeasts deliver more alcoholic bang for the Brix is another urban wine legend, something that could only be true if the laws of chemistry-as-we-know-it were repealed.  We know two basic things about yeasts: they are the only single-celled fungi; and what they do is convert sugar to alcohol, until they die off. More specifically, the yeastie beasties take one sugar molecule and turn it into two ethanol molecules, two carbon dioxide molecules, some heat and very small amounts of some other by-products. There’s only so much carbon in the sugar to redistribute into the new substances; all the yeast nutrient in the world can’t talk a yeast cell into making two and a half ethanol molecules, or three.