Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Bottling Barack

Inauguration mania is upon us all, and what fun it is! Counting the hours until the Bushies return to their natural, ideologically-enclosed habitat in the slumping private sector; listening to the celebratory concert on the Mall with not only Stevie Wonder, not only the unlikely threesome of Will I Am, Cheryl Crow and Herbie Hancock, but Pete Seeger at 89 lining out the words to “This Land Is Your Land”—including the “Private Property” verse that was excised from so many published songbook versions of the song in the shadow of McCarthyism.

And for those of you who, like Blind Muscat, mainly think with your mouths, there’s more to enjoy than just Ben And Jerry’s “Yes Pecan” ice cream. Brendan Eliason of Periscope Cellars in Emeryville, part of the swarm of urban warehouse wineries in the Bay Area, has outdone himself with an Obama election tribute wine, appropriately dubbed, “Yes We Cab.”

Judging Humility

My recent stint as a judge at the San Francisco Chronicle wine competition was an object lesson in the virtue of humility among wine “experts.”

Never having done a competition quite this long and large before, I approached Cloverdale with some trepidation, mainly around two points: would I have the stamina to go through more than a hundred wines a day for three and a half days and still be able to taste something, anything? and would I end up on a panel that included some raving egomaniac, someone who believed in his or her own infallibility, something I have often encountered on wine country press trips?

50-State Wine Strategy

Blind Muscat just got back from three and a half days of wine judging in scenic Cloverdale, Sonoma County: the 2009 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. 4,763 wines submitted (OK, I and the other judges only did about 10% each) from 26 states, making this the biggest juried cross-section of US domestic wines. Blind Muscat has never done quite this much or a marathon judging, quite this much sipping and spitting without a break, and many interesting lessons were learned.

The best part of all was the Sweepstakes winners, decided the fourth morning as about 60 judges ripped through the 91 wines that had already been dubbed Best of Whatever Class—Best Zinfandel, Best Sauvignon Blanc, etc.—or had at least gotten a Double Gold—all the judging panel members thought it was a Gold. And the winners were: for Best Sparkling, a wine from the North Fork of Long Island; Best White, a Riesling from Monterey; Best Pink, a dry Grenache Rosé from Temecula; Best Red, a tie between a Cabernet Franc from New Mexico and a Syrah from Paso Robles; and Best Dessert, a Tawny Port from Sonoma County.

AND THIS JUST IN: I realize, two days after this post, that the fruit for the Sonoma Tawny, from Geyser Peak, came from THE CUCAMONGA VALLEY in a very obscure corner of Southern California. In other words, not one ultra-premium, ultra-pricey North Coast grape made it into the Sweepstakes.

Napa, eat your heart out.

Spanish Half Measures

I meant to review these two wines late last year, and then one thing after another happened, and then the holidays happened, and then here we are. The interesting angle is mainly the marketing concept (though the wines aren’t bad at all), and by now, the concept has presumably worked—or not—without any help from Blind Muscat.

The label created for this pair of wines is The Spanish Quarter, and the entries are a white blend of Chardonnay and Albariño and a red blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Tempranillo. The wines were put together by the Codorniu Group. a huge Spanish wine combine, big in the Cava business as well as in still wines, owner of California’s Artesa (formerly Codorniu Napa), etc. These folks have a lot of good juice to work with, in this case coming from the Costers del Segre region, an up-and-coming area inland from Barcelona in Spain’s northeast.