Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Death March With Chianti Classico

The title of this post is stolen shamelessly from Tim Goodman, the San Francisco Chronicle’s TV critic, who tags his annual series of dispatches from the fall television season preview marathon in Hollywood, an endless round of film clips, eight-martini lunches and starlet-availability moments, “Death March With Cocktails.”  I’m two days back from a press trip to Tuscany and Umbria, just long enough to get my mind and my body into the same time zone. Like Goodman’s journeys, it was full of high points and lower-than-low points, but most of all, grueling.

Blind Muscat's Last Crush Report

The crush is done here at subterranean cellars (Blind Muscat’s garage, driveway and basement). All the grapes are in, everything has been fermented, the whites are settling, the reds are starting their malolactic adventures. The last batch of Syrah was pressed two days ago, and the last of the whites and pinks have come out of the refrigerator that was needed to keep their fermentation temperatures down. (No tanks with glycol jackets at sub cellars.) My wife has the refrigerator back.

The timing was just about perfect. The last grapes got harvested just before the rains started to become a regular feature of the season in the North Coast wine country. And the frenzy of fermentation wound down just in time for me to hit the road—the air, actually, on a flight to Rome, gateway to a week in Tuscany. The thought of having to drink all those low-alcohol Italian wines, is, well, mouth-watering. More in about ten days.

2001 Pietra Santa Cienega Valley Dolcetto

I mentioned Pietra Santa in a recent posting about San Benito County, one of the many lesser-known and over-producing wine regions in California. But I wanted to get back to one particular wine from these folks, a knockout value that has just gotten cheaper. You won’t find it on some nearby wine shop shelf, but you can still order it (depending on where you live) direct from the winery.

So why am I so worked up about this wine? California’s experience in recent years with growing Italian grape varieties has been a mess, full of false starts (the Atlas Peak Sangiovese fiasco) and unmet expectations (the tale of Montevina, the Cal-Ital subsidiary of the Trinchero family’s Sutter Home, which promised to blaze the way and ended up selling far more Zinfandel and Syrah). So when somebody gets it right, that’s cause for celebration.

The Search for Serious Torrontés

Since I first tasted a wine made from the Torrontés grape several years back, I’ve been a fan. It’s the white counterpart to Argentine Malbec in the sense that only in Argentina are these wines a Big Deal, the star performers for both the domestic and export markets. So when the tasting road show put on by Wines of Argentina came to San Francisco, I knew what I wanted to focus on. 

Whenever I attend these big walk-around tastings, I pick some slice of the action to concentrate on—a variety, a region, a price range, something manageable that I can bring into focus and explore in some depth before palate fatigue sets in. Going from Table 1 to Table 942 in order, switching from whites to reds to dessert wines to bubblies and back again, over and over, is great fun but rarely a learning experience, at least for me.

The Wines of The District

After dismissing the notion of wine terroir for many years as just another French philosophical abstraction designed to cover up moldy cooperage, the premium California wine industry has gotten into turf definitions in a big way. American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) are popping up all over the place, subdividing and subdividing like pond algae. Some of them make a lot of sense, some have only marketing logic behind them; in almost all cases, since an AVA designation tells you nothing about what grapes are grown there, they have a lot less meaning than European their appellations and denominations counterparts.

And then there’s Napa’s Stags Leap District. This relatively compact corner of the Napa Valley is one of the most self-conscious AVAs in the country, with its own promotional organization and its own website. There is no varietal identity crisis for this AVA: the Stags Leap District is Cabernet Sauvignon country, with some other wines produced just for the fun of it.

The Galilee Gulp

First I thought it was a piece of spam, or some sort of internet prank, but, no, the press release was for real: Israeli wines for Christian consumers. Haroz Vintners, located in the heart of the renowned Norcross, Georgia Wine Country, is evangelizing like crazy for its Grapes of Galilee line of wines (Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay) made from grapes grown near the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. And their target audience: Christians, especially Catholics in the US.

“I hope to provide a way to strengthen the bond between Israel and many other people through bringing wine from Galilee to the houses of the Christian community,” says Adam Haroz, who founded the company along with his father. The inspiration was apparently a trip to Israel on which Haroz noticed the fondness of Christian travelers from the US for "holy water” from the Jordan River; it was a small step from holy water to what Advertising Age dubbed “Divine Wine.”

Temecula Takes on the Drunks

If there’s one thing more common in Wine Country tasting rooms than inflated tasting fees, it’s boorish, clueless, slap-worthy drunks. There’s nothing that complements the taste of a fine artisanal Pinot Noir like a brain-dead, rocket-fueled covey of batchelorettes in full stagger. The proliferation of touring van and limo services, providing a rolling platform for designated drinkers, has amplified the problem substantially.

Finally, one California wine region has decided to do something about this particular plague. Napa? Sonoma? Sideways Santa Barbara? Nope—it’s the plucky little Temecula Valley Winegrowers Association, down in the wilds of Riverside County east of Los Angeles. Large numbers of people, including many in the industry who should know better, think of the Temecula Valley only as the place that got destroyed a while back by Pierce’s Disease and the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter. ‘Tain’t true, but that’s another posting. Temecula is booming, and with the eighteen zillion thirsty residents of the LA-Orange County-San Diego-San Bernardino mega-sprawl living within an hour’s drive, the Temecula wine trail is a hot ticket—and a magnet for loutish behavior.