Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

2007 Cooper Mountain Reserve Pinot Gris

Mouthfeel is a definite growth industry in the wine business, both for wineries and winemakers wanting their products to make a viscous impression and for the suppliers who have put dozens of products on the market designed to  do that very thing. Ten years ago, mouthfeel was an afterthought; now it's front and center--and on the sides and back of your mouth as well.

I will admit to being a mouthfeel man, and I'm especially fond of encountering good mouth in relatively delicate wines, whites like low-alcohol German Rieslings, for example. And so I was smitten a while back by a bottle of the Cooper Mountain 2007 20th Anniversary Reserve Pinot Gris from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. If ever a whole category of wine was mouthfeel-free, it has to be the tide of watery Pinot Grigio, imported and domestic, that has been sweeping the country lately. This is the same grape, and a tactile world apart.

Legalize Cachaça!

When you distill sugar cane into liquor, you get rum, right?

No, no, no. Rum is what you get from distilling molasses, after that gooey dark stuff gets made from the cane. When you simply ferment and distill the juice of the sugar cane itself, you get cachaça, the Brazilian national spirit. And when you do it right, you get something very much like a sugar cane eau de vie--clear, un-oaked, fresh, fruity and aromatic, smooth as silk.

Winery Cat, R.I.P.

A great number of wineries, especially in the Napa Valley, make a big deal out of their resident dogs. Here at subterranean cellars, we've always had a winery cat, the same one since the beginning of our 12-year run--an infectious, seriously orange Manx-based critter named Roughy, short for Orange Roughy (since a fish name seemed all too appropriate for a cat and his food-crazed owners).


My parents were farm people from southern Indiana, and they passed on to me the notion that household animals had to earn their keep, not just be decorative. Which is why I've never understood winery dogs. I mean, do they herd grapevines, or what? I suspect they mainly make their owners seem more virile. Cats catch mice, as Roughy did in my winemaking garage more than once--though of course what he then did was bring the still-living, squirming rodent inside, show it off to us, and then chase it around the house, until it disappeared under the couch. But he had the right idea.