Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Feiring Gets Even

In a development that set the world of wine on its collective heels, wine writer, blogger and artisan production advocate Alice Feiring announced over the weekend that she had purchased Constellation Brands, the world's largest wine company, lock, stock and barrels.

The author of The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization said she was able to acquire the 95-milion case international wine conglomerate with the proceeds from her book and the speaking tour that followed. (Her book remains more popular at Amazon.com than the latest edition of Robert M. Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide.) The purchase price was not announced, but Feiring indicated that "Tim Geithner would understand."

"This seemed like the least I could do," Feiring said, "if I want to put my money where my mouth constantly is. Constellation is the very symbol of corporate winemaking, shameless manipulation, the reduction of a magical, soulful treasure to a mere mass-consumption beverage. If you hate homogenized wine, you have to like my move. Plus, by putting it on my credit card, I have enough frequent flyer miles stashed away to visit every great vineyard in the world."

Feiring is still mulling over options on the future of Constellation’s vast holdings, multiple brands, and far-flung properties. "I thought about just shutting the sucker down," she said, which would have meant a huge financial loss but a "sweet" tax break. "I will at least personally supervise the demolition of the facilities that produce Mega-Purple," she noted, referring to a Constellation wine concentrate product used behind the scenes to enhance color in many commercial wines. Another possibility would be to break Constellation up into numerous small wineries--50,000 operations at 2,000 cases per winery might be a ballpark estimate--and hand them out to budding winemakers who promise to follow the natural path, swear off reverse osmosis, never send samples to Parker, and avoid the use of electricity or indoor plumbing in their new facilities.

Jose Fernandez, President and CEO of Constellation Wines U.S., did not return calls.

Rumors are also circulating that Feiring is in negotiations to purchase all or part of  Robert Parker's Wine Advocate, infusing new capital in the enormously influential publication in exchange for the opportunity to insert her own comments on his comments for each wine he reviews. Meanwhile, it was disclosed that Fehring has purchased the server farm that hosts eRopertParker.com, the web incarnation of and bulletin board for all things Parker, which means she can literally pull the plug on her nemesis if discussions of a future role with The Wine Advocate go badly.

Iberian Reveries

Blind Muscat spent a day in his version of Heaven last Thursday--in an auditorium at UC Davis listening to lectures about grapes and wine. The occasion was the annual Varietal Focus session, this year devoted to Iberian varieties--dozens of 'em--that are rapidly getting more attention in the import market and with wineries looking for something different to grow and bottle. It was an excellent program, some interesting wines, and a glimpse of what will surely be a growth segment in the wine marketplace.

Temperature Check

Decades. maybe centuries of received expert wine wisdom tells us that red wines should be served at around 60º Fahrenheit, whites around 50º. But most of keep our reds in houses where "room temperature" is more like 70º and chill our whites in refrigerators that are down near 40º, and those ten-degree gaps can have a major impact on what ends up in our glasses.

Blind Muscat thought he had this figured out, between the selection of cooler places for storing reds and taking whites out of the fridge a bit before drinking, and so on. Then he started using a thermometer, and discovered he was fooling himself big time--and you may be, too.

Omnibibes of the World, Unite!

Blind Muscat recently penned a review on Vinography of a new edition of the wine lover's classic, George Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar-Book, reissued with extensive notes and annotations by the University of California Press. The book is a fine read, and perhaps a bit surprising, since only a small amount of it has to do with wine. Saintsbury drank everything he could get his lips around, at least once, often several times just to make sure he got it right: whisky, hard cider, beer of all sorts, raki, anything you could ferment or distill, and all with great gusto.

It occurred to me after the review was posted that the man was an omnibibe--a word that had never to my knowledge entered my mental space before that moment, but an obvious analog to omnivore, or the more recently fashionable locavore. Clearly, a job for Google, where I found an alleged 115 hits, really boiling down to more like 15, and most of them duplicates from a couple of usages. (Not to be confused with Omnivibe, which yields 7,130 or so hits, many having to do with an iPod sound docking system, and no doubt, some with intriguing devices for group erotic encounters. Didn't have time to follow all the links . . . )

Pigs, Flu and Wine

Seems that in reaction to the spread of the (A)H1N1 flu strain--formerly known as the swine flu--several Catholic dioceses have decided not to offer their communicants wine as part of the communion ritual, fearing the risk of transmission. As discussed on Beliefnet, the central Church authorities think "the need for the introduction of widespread liturgical adaptations for the prevention of the transmission of influenza in the dioceses of the (U.S.) is not evident at this time" Nonetheless, folks in Texas and Tampa and elsewhere are gonna have to swallow those wafers with a dry throat.

This reaction strikes Blind Muscat, himself a former Papist, as odd on at least two counts. First, it's somewhat remarkable that a substance said to contain the "essence" of the blood of Christ can't fight off a motley viral strain. Second and more important, altar wine contains another substance, by no means imaginary, that will likely do the trick -- alcohol. Ethanol levels in table wine pretty much neutralize any known human pathogen; Chardonnay, for example, makes an excellent disinfectant for swabbing down your kitchen counters. So the chances are that bringing cup t lip would reduce the spread of the flu, not encourage it.

Blind Muscat thinks taking the juice out of Communion shares a logical paradigm with the Egyptian slaughter of innocent pigs. Better to drop the transubstantiation thing--but that's another topic.