As mentioned in This Space before, Blind Muscat spent the first half of the year writing down everything he knows -- and more -- about home winemaking. The "and more" part refers to the dozens of professional winemakers who pass on their own insights on various grapes and tecn hiques along the way.
And now it can be yours:
The Rockpile American Viticultural Area (AVA) on the northwestern edge of Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County is tiny. The designated area includes about 15,000 acres, but most of them are vertical; planted acreage is about 165 acres, with another 50 or so plantable, at least in theory. Eight vineyards make up the Rockpile Grape Growers Association; about 15 wineries -- none of them located within the AVA -- bottle wines from the area.
The wines are something else: big, flavorful, intense reds, prominently Zinfandel but also Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Petit Verdot, and a few others varieties. The wineries that deal in Rockpile fruit include some very serious names: Rosenblum Cellars, Carol Shelton, JC Cellars and Seghesio, for starters. A chance to taste though lots of them yesterday afternoon at Rock Wall Winery in Alameda -- the new startup for Kent and daughter Shauna Rosenblum, now that the mothership has been sold to the Diageo drinks conglomerate -- was a treat, reinforcing the impression I already had from random drinking that there's something special about the place.
Continue reading "Truly Interesting Tastings: Rockpile at Rock Wall " »
Wine writers and other folks in the trade go to a lot of tastings. Besides the attraction of free booze in daylight hours, for the people into ratings numerology, they're a handy way to keep score; for the rest of us, they're a handy way to keep current with trends, styles and producers. But every now and then, there's a tasting that's truly eye-opening, and I've been lucky enough to go to two of them recently, both involving sparkling wine.
Our household received our first holiday card of the season in the mail today. Not from anyone in either of our families, not from old friends, but from the fine folks at StaVIn. purveyors of an endless array of oak alternative products--staves, beans, dust, anything you can make out of oak, they make it and sell it in a big way. Only in my case, they sell it in a small way--a couple 8 ounce bags of cubes a year, enough to perk up certain wines in neutral old barrels.
Sure, this card is less than personal, even though it has facimile signatures of all the staff inside. But what I love about getting their card every year for the last decade is that it reminds me that I'm part of the wine industry, not just as a writer but as a (tiny little) producer. It's a very warm, fuzzy feeling, just right for the holidays.
I know not everybody who writes about wine feels this way--it's common to feel like an outsider looking in, and I think many folks feel that distance helps with objectivity. Everybody's free to have their own take on this; there's no right answer. But for me, identifying with the industry and its fate, its ups and downs, feels right; it's the winemakers and the growers and the tasting room volunteers and, yes, the oak alternative vendors who are my reference point, probably more than the cohort of writers who do the same thing I do. I have no beef with the writers; just a different kind of bond with the hands-on participants.
So thanks, StaVin, and happy holidays to you and the rest of the folks who put good wine on all our tables.
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.
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.
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 . . . )
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.
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."
Books and Buddies
A few days back, while I was busy smiling broadly about publishing my opus on home winemaking, the following email exchange occurred over the course of a couple hours between me and two old high school friends.
Mike, who lives in Toronto, sent out the first note in the series to me, to our mutual friend Gordon in Vancouver, and about 50 other people. I replied to him and Gordon, and from then on, it's just the three of us commenting on the meaning of books and many other things in the modern digital world.
Mike: If you are interested, here is a link to Book Thug interview about my new book, Cosmographia--a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic:
http://www.bookthug.ca/newsletter/michaelboughn2010.html
Thanks,
Mike
Tim (to Mike and Gordon): And if either of you needs to pick up a useful skill, check out my recent publication, Home Winemaking for Dummies --
Continue reading "Books and Buddies" »