Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

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Wine industry trade shows provide wonderful insight into the sometimes mysterious world of wine. Nothing cuts through the intentional obfuscation of the marketing departments like a stroll past the rows of tanks and the stacks of barrels, the demonstrations of cleaning equipment and the array of pumps, the shelves of “natural” additives and racks of electronic measuring devices. Blind Muscat’s idea of a breath of fresh air.

And so it was this past week up in Portland at the trade show attached to the annual meetings of the American Society for Enology and Viticulture. But I was saddened to discover that my new favorite vendor, one I only discovered this past January at the Unified trade show in Sacramento, wasn’t there: The Rodenator.

The Generic Napa Press Release

In addition to writing articles with my byline on them for various magazines, I pay some of the bills with commercial wine writing—websites, press releases, tasting notes for wine clubs, that sort of thing. Last week I was on the verge of such a gig, working with a publicist who had gotten a feeler from a Napa Valley wannabe winery and needed a writer to help tell their tale. But it turned out that the potential clients’ plan was 1) hire someone to make a wine that the Wine Expectorator would rate at 95 points, and 2) hire someone to make up a good story about the winery. The publicist declined the gig—good for her—and I’m reduced to doing a blog posting.

So in honor of this past weekend’s Napa Valley Wine Auction, and as a public service for those prospective cult producers who have no clue, here is my—free!—template for the Generic Napa Cabernet Press Release:

David Jones, Gone Too Soon

The Bay Area wine writing community is mourning the passing of David Jones, arguably the hardest-working—if not the most famous—of our fratern/sorority. David died in his sleep June 3 after a year-long fight with ALS—Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable wasting syndrome more romantically known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

David was smart as a whip, more energetic than a firecracker, possessed of one of the most astute palates on the planet—and one hell of a nice guy. He wrote for more magazines and ‘zines than anyone could count, judged up and down the state, and played an essential, under-the-radar role with an outfit called WineWorks, the plumbing and wiring that got so many writers together in one place with so many wines over the years for tastings that nobody could pull off on their own.

Why Size Matters

Wednesday’s installment of the email wine and spirits industry press release links from Business Wire carried two intriguing stories about wineries that are doing something for the environment, one flashy, glitzy and way cool, the other boring and mundane—and ultimately more important.

Statistical Revelation

Further proof of the wonders of accidental information.

While working on some writing about Spanish and Portuguese wine this afternoon, I had occasion to go out to the Wine Institute website in search of some statistics on world wine production and consumption. The production rankings were familiar:  France, Italy, Spain, the US, Argentina, and so on. But the per capita consumption figures made my day.

In Praise of Kit Wines

When both of you who read this blog last tuned in, I was promising to head off to a conclave of home winemakers in the Sonoma wine country. Sure enough, I spent Wednesday and Thursday with home grape maven Peter Brehm, touring vineyards in Sonoma and Napa from which he supplies grapes to folks all across the continent, and then Friday and Saturday inside the Sonoma Doubletree yakking with homies from hither and yon about the intricacies of doing it in your garage.

Free the Homies!

Blind Muscat hates it when he has so much paying work to do that he can’t get around to giving it away for free on his blog. Quel bummer.

But here’s a story worth ripping out of the wine world headlines: the fight to make sure home winemakers can deliver a bottle or two of their hard-won products to an off-premise (away from their garages) location and put them into competitions. Without, that is, running afoul of The Law.

The Merits of Meritage

It’s Blind Muscat’s job to go to a lot of wine tastings, which isn’t as much fun as you might think, There’s usually something interesting to be discovered, but often it’s more of the same, just with a bigger crowd.

This one was a treat. The Meritage Association held a 20^th anniversary celebration and tasting at Pres a Vi restaurant in San Francisco’s Presidio April 22 and invited some of us press types, and it was a delight.

Food OR Wine?

Yesterday the New York Times ran a fascinating article by Keith Bradsher about drought in Australia and its contribution to the growing world food crisis. The short of it is that six years of drought have made many stretches of land in Southeastern Australia no longer viable for rice cultivation, putting farmers, mills, and even whole towns out of business. The drought has reduced Australia’s rice crop by an astounding 98%, adding to the perfect storm of factors that have produced mass hunger and food riots from the Philippines to Cairo to Senegal to Haiti.

The reason this is a wine story is that even if there isn’t enough water to grow rice, there is enough to grow winegrapes, and that’s exactly the conversion that’s going on. helping to feed the apparently unstoppable growth of Australian wine exports. It’s a perfect example of our friends, those good old free-market forces, working their magic, and another reason to love capitalism. But for Graeme J. Haley, the general manager of the town of Deniliquin, dateline for the story, “Rice is a staple food. Chardonnay is not.”

More on Portland Distilleries

In my last post, I surveyed the explosion of small craft distilleries in Portland, the start of what will no doubt be a national wave. I mentioned that because of a flight delay, I missed a scheduled lunch with Steve McCarthy of Clear Creek Distillery, an old college friend and the Grand Old Man—or maybe, Grumpy Old Man—of Portland spirits.

I’ve known Steve for years – we got drunk together at Reed College in Portland in the mid-1960s. Steve was chair of the campus Young Republicans (he later saw the light), whuch favored solidly liberal positions for the time—recognizing Red China, getting the heck out of Vietnam, and so on. I headed up the campus Young Democrats, whose positions were, dare I say, a bit farther to the left. Years later, when I got into the adult beverages racket, I visited Steve’s stillhouse a couple times and wrote him up. So for my immediate purposes, I figured I could fill in his recent story with a phone call (I still owe him lunch).