Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

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.

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."

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.

Voyeur du Vin: The Breitstein Collection

The Culinary Institute of America—the foodie CIA—in its California incarnation in St. Helena has many tasty things to offer: all manner of classes, an astonishing teaching kitchen, a first-rate restaurant, wine courses up the gazoo, a kitchen gadget shop to end all kitchen gadget shops, and one of the most photogenic exteriors in Napa. The latest addition, unveiled only a couple weeks ago, is a collection of historic California wines to die for: you can’t drink them, but just gazing on the bottles and the labels is worth a visit.

The exhibit is a portion of the personal collection of David and Judy Breitstein, owners of the fabled Duke of Bourbon wine shop in Canoga Park in Southern California—amazingly, Canoga Park is a wine-lovers’ destination—who are also longtime fanatic collectors of California wine. The 150+ sampling of rare and historic bottles donated to the CIA spans a good portion of the length and breadth of California wine, from Napa to Santa Barbara, from Cabernet Sauvignon to Riesling, from a Prohibition-era 1928 Angelica altar wine from Concannon Vineyard in Livermore to a 2002 Araujo Estate Eisele Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon cult wine from Napa.

No, there isn’t a tasting bar. But there are short, useful explanatory notes about each wine by Karen McNeil, the CIA’s head wine honchess, putting the wines in their historic contexts. And then there are the real, live, mint condition, honest-to-goodness bottles. These are wines you’ve read about, heard about, or—better yet—NEVERF heard about; but all of them made a difference in the unfolding saga of California wine.

The Breitstein Collection is on your way into the barrel room / Vintners Hall of Fame at the CIA’s Greystone campus. So in between fighting your way up to various tasting room counters on your next Napa visit, drop by the CIA and see the wines that made California famous. 

The Impossible / Unavoidable Tasting Note

Blind Muscat spent most of last week at the Symposium for Pprofessional Wine Writers in the heart of the Napa Valley--sometimes known as the Famous Wine Writers School. A number of interesting sessions transpired, about which more in near-future posts.

One of the most provocative segments was kicked of with a presentation by Eric Asimov, wine writer for the New York Times, titled “The Tyranny of the Tasting Note.” Asimov argued persuasively that overblown tasting notes—he cited some mind-boggling examples—are a prime source of the pervasive Wine Anxiety afoot in the US of A. Tasting notes cosseted in run-on sentences full of arcane descriptors and near-pornographic verb choices make most readers think they are idiots, or at least sense-impaired. Such notes amount to intimidation, not information, and they are surely not an invitation to pleasure, which is what wine writing should be about.

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?