Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Randall Grahm, the Higgs Boson, and Terroir

Eric Asimov of the New York Times did an interesting profile of winemaker/wine provocateur Randall Grahm in print and online versions about a week ago, portraying the boy from Bonny Doon as a "new man" whose "new idea is to get small." After a stretch of years in which the Big House brand and the Pacific Rim Riesling venture rocketed production up to 450,000 cases, Grahm has spun off and sold whole lines of wine, dropped production to 35,000 cases, purchased new vineyard land in San Benito County near San Juan Bautista (appropriately, the town whose Mission was the setting for "Vertigo"), and focused back on the purist of original, distinctive, terroir-driven wines. 

But Blind Muscat has learned there's a little more to this new phase. A modest project on the Franco-Swiss border, deep under the ground, far away from the prying eyes of the wine media and the TTB. Yes, the rumors are true: Randall Grahm is hoping to turn the 2008 Cigare Volant, now in barrel, into the world's first Big Bang wine by drenching it in super-charged elementary particles from the Large Hadron Collider.

The Blast and Der Bingle

Blind Muscat recently came across an amazing piece of unintended causation, definitely worth sharing: about how a 19th century volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia changed the way the Brits thought about Christmas. Maybe the rest of you knew this, but not me -- and I found enlightenment in a wine book.

I tripped across this info while reading New Zealand viticulture researcher  David Jackson's excellent little book, called simply Climate, a concise overview of cool winegrowing climates in particular work and how they shape viticulture and wine style. The book includes a brief treatment on global warming and its implications, which begins with the following rather arresting historical reflection on the last Ice Age, ending 12,000 years ago: "Had viticulture been practiced, 'cool-climate' wines would have been grown in southern Spain and northern Africa and warm-climate wines may have been produced in what is now the Sahara Desert."

Death By Quinoa

This post has very little to do with wine, but it does concern things Blind Muscat may or may not be putting in his mouth, so it's close enough for blogging.

I've just been through a stint in the hospital, one of the reasons for this blog going near-derelict in the last few weeks. The condition is question is a flare-up of a fairly rare auto-immune weirdness known as Wegener's Granulomatosis, named for a combination of the guy who first systematically described it and for the fact that it ends up forming nasty little granules. It's a flavor of a family of auto-immune conditions known as vasculitis, and the Wegener's variant attacks small blood vessels in the kidneys and lungs. Since I only have one kidney anyway, having lost the other years ago for unrelated reasons, this can be a bad thing.

Wine Books Are Back

We all know that print is dead, and we all know that all the good wine writing anybody cares about is online. Or, perhaps not.

I picked up a tantalizing piece of information yesterday from Elliott Mackey of the Wine Appreciation Guild, the country's largest distributor (and sometimes publisher) of wine-related books, everything from technical tomes to travel guides. We were sitting together at a tasting, passing the time, and since I had the topic of wine and the recession on my mind after writing a major piece on that for the upcoming June issue of Wines & Vines, I thought I'd ask Elliott how the wine book business was going.

Well, it's booming.