Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Potato Starch vs. Polysaccharides

Blind Muscat isn’t sure why he’s ending the year with a post about vodka. He doesn’t much life vodka and hardly ever drinks the stuff; he thinks the term “vodka Martini” is an oxymoron, and that the fashion for flavored vodkas is a sign of the decline of Western Civilization.

The goal of vodka-making is to create a flavorless distillate, legally defined as neutral spirits. It is the diametrical opposite of gin, whose goal in life is to cram in as many flavorful botanicals as possible. Vodka costs more than EverClear or, for that matter, ethanol, both of which are much more efficient at altering the consciousness of the drinker. Vodka is like a piece of writing with no ideas in it—which may be why it is so popular with the children of the Internet.

Old, Sweet Wine

Blind Muscat knows that the Big Buzz in old wine drinking is dry reds, Bordeaux in particular. I will confess that the few examples I have had of that genre have been less than thrilling, more necrophilic than hedonistic. But old sweet wines: now that’s the ticket. Pick the right one, and you’ll get more intensity than an old dry red, though perhaps less evanescence.

Remember the Sharpshooter?

Whatever happened to the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter? When this nasty little plant-sucking critter flew into the vineyards of the Temecula valley ten years ago, spreading the fatal, bacteria-based Pierce’s Disease to every vine it visited, the alarm went out: the California wine industry seemed doomed, sooner rather than later.

Pierce’s Disease (PD) and the bacteria that causes it, Xylella fastidiosa, have been around forever, and a variety of other insects have spread it through vineyards up and down the state, adding up to yet another of those chronic maladies grape growers have to deal with. But the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter (GWSS, called by those who deal with it regularly “gwis”) put Pierce’s on steroids, spreading it faster and farther than previous disease vectors by a couple orders of magnitude. If the bug was already in several counties in southern California, how long would it be till it hitch-hiked up the Interstate and sucked the life our of Napa and Sonoma, too? There was no cure in sight, no stopping the plague—described in detail by hyper-ventilating stories on the covers of all the wine magazines.

Menu For Hope Food/Wine Bloggers’ Raffle

Especially toward the end of the year, all of us are bombarded with a zillion requests for donations to worthy causes—and most of them are indeed flat-out worthy. Here’s one more to consider—with the bonus that your winning raffle contribution might land you a personal tour of the elBulli kitchen laboratory with Ferran Adria, or dinner with Eric Asimov of the New York Times, or any one of a number of tasty collections of wine. You might even win, for a paltry $10, the mixed case of nifty bottles from the East Bay warehouse wine crowd donated by yours truly, Blind Muscat.

This fund-raising raffle is the work of food and wine bloggers all over creation, now in its fourth year. The recipient of the money raised is the United Nations World Food Programme—and what better cause for food and wine zealots than combating world hunger? Last year, the effort raised a tad over $60,000, and there is every chance this year will do even better.

Rieslings of the World, Unite!

Movie stars and hillbilly singers have their fan clubs, and grape varieties now seem to need them, too.

Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) has evolved from a small band pf wineries trying to rescue the reputation of the red variety of this wine from obscurity into the world’s largest gathering of drunken white people, every January in San Francisco. The annual Rhone Rangers tastings were built on the same model and are headed the same way. There are a number of quasi-religious Pinot Noir celebrations each year, at which the devoted spend time escalating their descriptive adjectives and congratulating each other on how hip they are. For the truly hard-core, there’s PS I Love You, hoping to transform Petite Sirah from an obscure, minor grape variety into a well-known minor grape variety. (These comments are offered by someone who has actively participated in all of these efforts, including writing a book about a pioneering Petite Sirah producer.)