Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Bottles Over Broadeway

Well, fellow wine fans, we all have special reason to rejoice that the stage hands’ strike in New York has been settled, because that means nothing will stop the December 1 premiere of  “Wine Lovers: The First Wine Tasting Musical.” OK, it’ll be off-off-Broadway, somewhere on West 72^nd street, but you never know how much trouble a good old-fashioned strike can cause.

“Wine Lovers” is not just some generic wine education class gone berserk; it’s the project of a number of folks with serious theatrical credentials, “Jersey Boys” and that sort of thing, working up a concept by Gourmet magazine wine and spirits contributor Michael Green. The plot has not yet been telegraphed to a thirsty public, but it somehow revolves around an over-active wine instructor and an oddly matched pair of students, and it promises to give the audience some food, er, drink for thought about love, wine, screw caps and whatever else.

Weird Italian Grapes #319: Marzemino

Having pursued this wine thing in a mildly fanatical way for several years, Blind Muscat has gotten intimate (through swallowing) with an awful lot of grape varieties, some of them pretty obscure. I always try to serve dinner guests at least one bottle they’ve never encountered before, and I make a point of getting at least one more new variety under my palate’s belt every month.

I figured meeting my quota for October would be easy, because I would be spending a week in Italy, home, like Spain and Greece, to an astonishing array of indigenous vines with histories stretching back hundreds of years, some of them grown only in one tiny picket of the country. As it turned out, this press trip focused on the Chianti-Brunello zone, where familiar old Sangiovese is king, and on the Maremma, where the usual international suspects—Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah—are the stock in trade. We did run across some Greco Bianco in white blends, and Colorino and Ciliegiolo in with the reds, but those I had some experience with before.

The Wine (Bottle) Carbon Footprint

Blind Muscat has been preoccupied lately with worrying about wine’s carbon footprint, and in particular the wine bottle footprint. The standard 750 ml wine bottle weighs about three pounds, half of that wine and half glass. For the new breed of steroid bottles designed to make you think the wine is more substantial simply because the container is more imposing, the packaging outhefts the liquid by 25-50%.

What other consumer product has this ghastly ratio? Helium tanks, I guess, outweigh their contents by a mile and radioactive isotopes are transported (I hope) in beaucoup de protective armor. Caskets generally weigh more than their residents. Some prepared foods in glass jars (all those gourmet mustards and chutneys none of us knows what to do with, for example) approach the 1:1 imbalance, but their contents typically get doled out over an extended period of time. Perfume bottles outweigh their contents, especially since the glitz of the glass is a major selling point; but few of us go through a case of perfume in a week.

Wild Boar Management, Tuscan-Style

Any wine region surrounded by forested land has to cope with the damage wrought by wild boars (sometimes known as feral pigs). The critters not only eat grapes; they rip up vines more efficiently than most tractors. Growers try fencing to keep them out, loud noises to scare them away, and guns and ammo to clean house once and for all.

In Tuscany, the preferred method for controlling the pesky cinghiale is cooking and eating them, preferably in a richly flavored Cinghiale al Ginepro, braised in juniper berries. It’s an age-old win-win (well, except for the boar): fewer vineyard pests, happier humans.

Chianti, Old and New

For people who drink a broad range of international wines, the offerings from the Chianti region in Tuscany in central Italy soon become a comfortable old shoe—versatile with varied menus, rarely all that expensive, usually reliable and rarely astonishing. Overshadowed in recent years by all the hoopla surrounding the so-called Super-Tuscans, wines based on Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot rather than the traditional Sangiovese, Chianti has become something of an undifferentiated blur, a generic fallback wine for all occasions.

So it was eye-opening to visit several producers in close succession recently, enough of a sample (of the hundreds and hundreds of producers in the Chianti Classico zone) to demonstrate that there are huge differences in approach and quality: old-time producers still making great wine, other old-timers who are coasting on their reputations, and some new producers pushing the envelope from within the traditions of the area, not simply dropping them in pursuit of yet another Cabernet.

Wine and Money, Italian Style

My recent press trip to central Italy included some time in Tuscany’s Chianti country, where I had visited once before, but also forays into the Maremma, southwest of Chianti along the Tuscan coast, and Umbria, east of Tuscany, neither of which I had set foot in previously. The Maremma in particular provided a great window into the booming high-end Italian wine industry and into the amazing things money can do.

I knew from reading and tasting that the Maremma has been hot for a while—broadly construed, the area includes Bolgheri, home to “Super-Tuscan” wines like Sassicaia and Ornellaia, and the Morellino di Scansano DOC, quickly establishing a reputation for its  own take on Sangiovese. (For a quick overview, try Rosemary George’s summary at http://www.wine-pages.com/guests/rosemary/maremma.htm.) But cruising through this money-magnet region was something else altogether.