Everyone sit on the carpet of tolerance.

It’s time for a lesson in race relations.

There are certain stereotypes that, despite our best efforts, persist even in today’s modern and enlightened era. Now to avoid any confusion we’re not going to tip-toe around any of this; we’re just going to come out and say it:

Not all Italians grow wine.

I know, I know, that may surprise some of you. It may even shock a few of you, but not every Italian family has a vineyard where they produce great wines like you’d find in this Donati Family Vineyards 3-Pack. Sure, the Donati family are dedicated to the point of obsessive in hand-tending each vine while researching sustainable growing practices to maximize the quality of their grapes, but they don’t do it because their last name is Donati. They do it because they’re nuts about wine.

Yes, of course the Merlot is smooth and fruity. The Cabernet Sauvignon has a big explosive flavor, certainly. And obviously the Claret is light-bodied with notes of fresh forward fruit. But that’s just because they’re good wines, not because they were made by Italians.

Knowledge is power. Go forth and let the world know: not all Italians are wine fanatics, and that’s okay!

But some of them are really REALLY into wine. And you should buy it from them.

2006 Donati Estate Merlot:

• Final 14.7% alcohol
• 735 cases produced
• Blend 93% merlot, 2% malbec, 2% syrah, 2% cabernet sauvignon, 1% petit Verdot

• Final: 14.8% alcohol
• 4392 Cases produced
• Blend: 45% Cabernet sauvignon, 35% Merlot, 7% syrah, 7% petit Verdot, 6% Malbec

2006 Donati Estate Cabernet Sauvignon:

• Final: 14.6% Alcohol
• 812 Cases produced
• Blend:  87% Cabernet Sauvignon, 7% Merlot, 2% Cabernet Franc, 2% petit Verdot, 2% Malbec

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Wine-A-Dub-Dub

Maybe you just rebuilt a motorcycle. Maybe you just did a hundred push-ups in the dirt. Maybe you’ve just got sweaty Warcraft hands.

It doesn’t matter how you got dirty. All that matters is that you ARE. How are you going to open a bottle of wine with hands like that? Who wants fingerprints on clean glasses? It can’t just be about the nose and mouthfeel. There’s got to be a little presentation too!

And this is why we’re so sure that you, the messy wine lovers of the Internet, will be so happy with the Napa Soap Company All Natural Soap and Lotion Set. Whenever possible, the Napa Soap Company has used local ingredients from the Napa Valley itself, ranging from a prolific supply of lavender to the cold-pressed grapeseed oil that appears as a by-product of the local wine industry. Hand made in limited quantities, this Napa Soap Company All Natural Soap is a great way to stay snobby while getting clean.

Look down your nose 99 and 44/100ths of the time as you scrub the Cabernet Soapignon Bar against your nails, enjoying the berry scent alongside the blend of olive, coconut, palm and sweet almond oils, chocolatey cocoa butter, grapeseed oil and a healthy dose of Napa Valley red wine. Tut tut at other people’s two thousand dirty parts while yours smell of light crisp citrus thanks to the Mandarin Chardonnay Bar Soap, a blend of white wine and four oils (kukui, meadowfoam, grapeseed and mango). And then relax with the therapeutic, moisturizing properties of the Black Olive and Syrah Lotion, mixing cold pressed grapeseed oil, avocado oil, rich shea butter, wine and pure botanical extracts, as well as the vitamins your skin so desperately craves!

After all, the best sommelier in the world wouldn’t work with dirty hands. So why should you? Cleanliness is next to snobbyness, and you can achieve both with a Napa Soap Company All Natural Soap and Lotion Set.

 Cabernet Soapignon Bar Soap:

•  Blend of Napa Valley grapeseed oil, olive, coconut, palm & sweet almond oils, chocolaty cocoa butter and a healthy dose of Napa Valley red wine
• Weight:  0.50 LBS 

Mandarin Chardonnay Bar Soap:

• Blend of white wine, grapeseed oil, mango oil, kukui oil, and meadowfoam oil
• Weight:  0.60 LBS

 Black Olive and Syrah Lotion (bottled):

•  Cold-pressed Napa Valley grapeseed oil, wine, avocado oil and rich shea butter, pure botanical extracts, vitamins and pure essential oil
• An attractive addition to your kitchen or bath
• Weight:  1.00 LBS

In the box:

• (1) Cabernet Soapignon Bar Soap 8oz
• (1) Mandarin Chardonnay Bar Soap 8oz
• (1) Black Olive and Syrah Lotion (bottled) 16oz

The Drinkable Duo! The Potable Pair!

Getting to the bottom of this case is going to be delicious

He’s Sauvignon Blanc, a tough-talking, no-nonsense, crisp, dry type of fellow with a firm line of acidity, softened by a rich mouthfeel. His roots are in California’s Napa Valley.

“You’re from Napa?” the teen delinquent asks. “But I thought that was a car parts store.”

“That’s the trouble with young people today,” Sauvignon Blanc says, hoisting the punk by his black leather lapels. “No appreciation for the finer things.” Then he slugs the young thug right in the mouth, and a suite of tropical flavors—guava, mango and passion fruit—take the fight right out of him.

Chardonnay pipes up. “You’re as intense as your apple, pear, and lemon aromas, Sauvignon Blanc.”

“Yeah, but I’m complex, too,” Sauvignon Blanc shoots back.

Chardonnay rolls her eyes. She’s a beautiful, clean-complected, fresh young woman with a green apple citrus zing. She’s a California girl too, charming and charismatic, yet elegant and mature. Like your high school’s head cheerleader at the tenth reunion, after having finished a PhD in something practical.

The young punk groans, coming to. He can smell Chardonnay leaning over him. Apricots. White floral honey. And… something else.

“Mmm,” he says, still a little dazed but recognizing it now. “Nice honeydew melons, babe.”

“Hit him again, Sauvignon,” Chardonnay says.

“With pleasure,” Sauvignon Blanc replies.

He’s Sauvignon Blanc. She’s Chardonnay. Together, they’re Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay.

They fight crime.

2009 Sauvignon Blanc:

•  Composition:  96% Sauvignon Blanc, 4% Semillon
• Appellation:  Yountville, Napa Valley
• Fermentation:  100% stainless steel tank fermentation
• Alcohol:  13.8%
• TA:  0.75g/100ml
• pH:  3.29
• Cases Produced:  1200 cases

Intense apple, pear, lemon and passion fruit aromas.  Typical of good Sauvignon Blanc this wine has a firm line of acidity, softened by a rich mouthfeel.  Tropical flavors of guava, mango and passion fruit compliment the citrus flavors of lemon and mandarin.  Fermentation occurs in stainless steel tanks at low temperatures to preserve the intense aromatics.  Native yeasts increase mouthfeel and complexity.

2009 Chardonnay:

• Composition:  100% Chardonnay
• Appellation:  Rutherford, Napa Valley
• Fermentation:  100% stainless steel tank fermentation
• Alcohol:  13.9%
• TA:  0.67g/100ml
• pH:  3.47
• Cases Produced:  3000 cases

Clean fresh aromas of honeydew melon, apricots, white floral honey and a hint of spice.  The green apple citrus zing is balanced by the rich creamy texture of this wine along with the delicious ripe fig, white peach, honeysuckle and apricot flavors.  An all stainless steel tank fermentation allows the fruit to shine and partial malolactic fermentation softens the palate and adds a layer of richness.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

It is quite rare, however, despite the nearness of the appellation and the saturation of wine in the Bay Area, for consumers to get the opportunity to get an in-depth or comprehensive look at the wines of Napa Valley. Perhaps it's just because Napa wines don't need much marketing help, or perhaps it's because the Napa Valley Vintners association exhausts itself with a few major events each year, but there just isn't a real good opportunity for members of the public to survey the breadth and depth of wines from the Napa valley.

Unless, that is, you happen to be a member of the Napa Valley Wine Library Association (Hint: you can become a member for just $75).

The Wine Library is just what it sounds like: a library with books about wine. Started in the early Sixties by a group of winery owners that realized the irony of having a public library in the heart of Napa Valley that possessed virtually no literature or resources about wine, the library association was built on donations of money and books from Napa's wine families over four decades. Now occupying a special section of the St. Helena public library and even owning a small vineyard out behind the building, the Wine Library Association is a membership organization that gives its members access to these materials, some of which are rare and historic, as well as to annual tasting events.

Each year the organization hosts a two part event: On Saturday they offer a full day seminar on a specific topic, often a certain AVA or certain varietal, and then on Sunday they offer a tasting event showcasing a specific varietal as represented by nearly 100 wineries in the valley.

This year's event will feature an all-day seminar on August 14th at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena entitled, "From DNA to Dinner: All You Wanted to Know About Cabernet." Led by UC Davis professor Emeritus and vintner Carole Meredith, the event features Cabernet paired with a multi-course lunch from the teaching kitchens at the CIA.

The following day, Sunday the 15th, around 80 wineries will pour their recent vintages of Cabernet (with a few other varieties thrown in) in the grove at the Silverado Country Club. If you've never been to the grove at the Silverado Country Club, it is an idyllic place for a wine tasting, even during a hot Napa day.

"That's all well and good," you may be saying, "but this is a members-only event and I'm not a member of the Napa Valley Wine Library Association." That's true. But a check for $75 sent in advance, or a check for $80 on the day of the tasting will do the trick. Membership is available on the spot, and covers the tasting plus any others that you choose to go to for the rest of the year. If you'd like to attend the seminar on the 14th, there is an additional cost of $150. Or, if that is the only part of this event you'd like to attend, non-members can just go to that for $175.

Sound like a steal? It is. Unless you're a member of the trade that attends Premiere Napa Valley, or someone willing to pay in the hundreds or even thousands for a package at the annual Auction Napa Valley, there is generally no other way to get the opportunity to taste so many Napa Valley wineries in a single setting. If you're serious about learning more about Napa wines, especially if you're interested in some of the less famous wines of the valley, this is an event you don't want to miss.

For those of you who make decisions about such tastings based on what you think you'll get a chance to taste, here is the list of wineries and the wines they'll be pouring (PDF).

Napa Valley Wine Library Association Member Tasting
Sunday August 15th
Silverado Resort and Country Club
1600 Atlas Peak Road
Napa, California 94558
707-257-0200

Annual membership dues for the Association are $75, or $80 if purchased at the door. Only checks and cash will be accepted, I believe, so stop at an ATM or bring your checkbook. Additional details on how to get membership in advance and on the event can be found on the Association's web site. Please note that the location for the Saturday event is the Greystone Castle in St. Helena

My usual tips for such outdoor public tastings apply: wear loose fitting but dark colored clothing (but keep in mind that it may be very warm for the outdoor tasting). Eat a good meal before going and drink lots of water while tasting. Decide in advance which wineries you would like to visit, and make sure to spit rather than swallow the wine to make sure you get a chance to enjoy (and remember) a number of wines.

This sort of conviction, married to excellent winemaking, is not as common in California as you might think, but there are few who could argue against Ridge Vineyards as one of the finest examples of such a fusion of skill and conviction.

The Ridge story begins in the earliest decades of winemaking history in California, when in 1885, Osea Perrone bought 180 acres of ridgetop land in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Carving out terraces into the rolling hilltops, he planted vines and constructed a winery which he named Monte Bello, and made his first vintage in 1892. After a couple of decades, the winery went the way of many California wineries under prohibition, and had to wait until 1940, when the property was purchased and replanted with, among other things, Cabernet Sauvignon.

In the early Sixties, a group of Stanford Research Institute scientists bought some fruit to make their own wine, and were so pleased with the results, that they bought the estate and rebonded the winery in time for the 1962 vintage. By 1969, the winery was producing about 3000 cases per year, and the original owners were joined by Paul Draper, the winemaker whose name has now become synonymous with Ridge Vineyards.

A philosophy major in college, Draper spent time in the Army in Italy before a stint in the peace corps in Chile during the early sixties along with a college buddy named Fritz Maytag, who would end up making his own name in beer and in wine as the owner of the Anchor Steam Brewery and York Creek Vineyards. Together, Draper and Maytag began their first, self-taught forays into the world of winemaking with grapes from a local vineyard.

These early experiments would prove formative in many ways, and when Draper returned to the U.S. his focus was entirely on winemaking, and by chance he managed to reconnect with his engineer friends from Stanford who jut happened to be looking for a full-time winemaker. Draper was an excellent candidate. The Stanford connection aside, in just a few short years Draper had become a competent home winemaker and was an easy choice for the role.

Despite the prodigious task of modernizing a winery that was essentially still operating out of an antiquated facility, Draper also set to work making his first real commercial wine. To say that his first efforts were notable might be understating the case. When a young man named Stephen Spurrier organized what would be the most famous tasting in the modern history of wine a few years later, one of the wines he chose to represent California was a 1971 Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon -- merely Draper's third vintage as a winemaker and the only red wine included from outside the already famous Napa Valley growing region.

Since that tasting, the Monte Bello Cabernet has become one of the state's iconic wines, just as Ridge Vineyards has become one of California's classic wineries. With the addition of their Lytton Springs vineyard and production facility in Sonoma's Alexander Valley outside of Geyserville, the winery has established itself as a preeminent ambassador for both Sonoma County wines as well as the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation.

The Ridge Vineyards portfolio has long been focused on Zinfandel (the winery's first vintage being 1964) with a couple of Chardonnays and, of course, the famous Monte Bello and Estate Cabernets added to the mix. Ranging from $15, to $150, the wines are relatively easy to get ahold of, and each continues to evidence the dedication to quality that Draper has mantained for more than forty years.

The winemaking at Ridge has not changed much over the years, and emphasizes work in the vineyards as opposed to work in the cellar. Having said that, the winery tirelessly experiments with techniques to improve quality, whether that is trying new kinds of barrels or different yeast strains for fermentation. In a lesser winery, without the guiding hand of someone like Draper, this might result in wines that were all over the map from year to year. But at Ridge, these experiments aren't passed on to the customers, they are learning exercises for the winemaking team, and the successful techniques or technologies are adopted after years of tinkering, and only if they help Draper and his team get even closer to their ideals for their wine.

Ridge is relatively unique in its continued use of a large amount of American oak in its wines, in particular for the Monte Bello Cabernet, as opposed to the French oak that dominates California and most of Europe. Sometimes fermentation takes place with ambient yeasts, while others are innoculated. I have a great deal of respect for Draper's lack of dogma when it comes to winemaking. For him, it seems, quality and honesty win, and there is no specific formula that will always get there.

This particular wine is a wonderful example of what Ridge Vineyards is known for, and does best. Made from fruit picked in seven different vineyards around Sonoma County, it can be thought of as a quintessentially Sonoma wine, offering the broad flavors of the county, and a glimpse into the history of winemaking in the region. This historical connection comes from the broad blend of grapes that go into the wine, which mirror the old "mixed blacks" vineyards that the earliest Italian immigrants planted when they arrived. Harvested all at once to make what is today known as a field blended wine, these patchwork vineyards and the Vino Tinto they produced are an incredibly important part of the state's wine heritage.

This wine which debuted in the 2001 vintage, is a field blend only in spirit, as the lots that make up the wine are fermented separately before blending. No added yeasts are involved in fermentation, however, which takes place in stainless steel tanks. The wine is transferred to 100% American Oak barrels, of which about 33% are new, and after secondary fermentation, the wine ages for about 9 months before bottling.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells of black cherry and cassis fruit. In the mouth the wine offers bright black cherry and cassis flavors wrapped in a blanket of faint velvety tannins. Chocolate and blackberry emerge on the finish. A blend of 74% Zinfandel, 11% Petite Sirah, 5% Carignane, 4% Mourvedre, 3% Syrah, 3% Grenache. 14.2% Alcohol.

Food Pairing:
This is a very well balanced wine that will go with a wide variety of foods thanks to its good acidity. Anything grilled, from spring onions to lamb would be a great pairing, and if you've got anything with a hint of spice give it a go.

Overall Score: around 9

How Much?: $17.99

This wine is available for purchase online.

Welcome old friend Peter Wellington of Wellington Vineyards back to the Woot blog for this look back at the 2009 vintage. Take it away, Peter!

Please accept my apology for the long delay in filing this report. My original intention was to write this in November (2009), but some unforeseen issues popped up and I’ve been behind schedule at work ever since then. There were three main topics that dominated local news stories about the wine industry last fall: unsold grapes, the European grapevine moth, and the big storm.

There have always been cycles of grape shortages and gluts, but during my almost 30 years in the wine biz I have never seen anything like the situation in 2009. Wineries were dropping grape contracts and commitments right and left over worries about inventory levels and cash flow. Almost every summer one will see listings for Lodi Cabernet sauvignon, Lake County Sauvignon blanc or Sonoma County Syrah grapes for sale, but this past year any and everything was available, usually at bargain prices. If you were looking for Dry Creek Zinfandel there were multiple choices. The same was true for Oakville Cabernet sauvignon, Russian River Pinot noir or anything else your heart desired. During crush I was offered “extra” grapes from several great vineyards at very low prices. The usual story was that a very prestigious winery had taken the amount stipulated by their contract but didn’t want / couldn’t afford to buy any excess grapes. I was tempted, but refrained from all these offers because of both budget and space constraints. Even behemoths such as Gallo and Constellation weren’t making their usual low-ball offers.

In October, toward the end of crush, the discovery of a “new” exotic pest in a Napa Valley vineyard was announced. The European grapevine moth (EGVM), Lobesia botrana, is the fourth new insect pest found in North Coast wine country in the past decade or so. So far none of them have caused significant losses for grapegrowers here. The first, and most serious, of the four was the glassy winged sharpshooter (GWSS), a very efficient vector for vine killing Pierce’s Disease (PD). Pierce’s Disease destroyed the Southern California wine industry in the 1880’s. PD was known as Anaheim Disease at the time, named for the utopian winegrowing colony founded in Orange County by German immigrants. It also devastated Temecula area vineyards in the 1990’s, after the introduction of GWSS. Quarantine and inspection of plant material (primarily nursery stock) from infested areas has been effective thus far in preventing GWSS from establishing a foothold in the North Coast. Near hysteria amongst growers has subsided into complacency, but a serious threat still exists. There are also quarantines in place for the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM), although it is likely more of a nuisance than a serious threat to vineyards. The Vine Mealybug probably falls in between the first two as far as the potential economic damage it could wreak. It can get inside grape clusters and cause bunch rot, and it is hard to kill because it burrows underneath the bark on grapevine trunks. Fortunately, unlike the GWSS and LBAM, it can’t fly, so it spreads very slowly unless moved by people and equipment.

From what I’ve read, EVGM is potentially more damaging than either LBAM or Vine Mealybug. In early April, when I wrote the rough draft for this blog, the only action being taken regarding EGVM was plans for a detection program. Because the discovery was made late in the 2009 season and EGVM is dormant in winter the extent of infestation was hard to determine.

A much more troubling situation has unfolded over the last three to four weeks (during April). The emergence of the first generation of adult moths since a widespread trapping program was instituted has revealed the extent of the infestation and how it may be spreading. Apparently the pest has been in the Oakville / Rutherford area of Napa Valley for at least two years (probably more), but was not identified because the USDA had neither specimens nor DNA in their database. Growers had found the moths, seen the damage, and brought specimens to the Napa County Agricultural Commissioner’s office, but no one could identify them. One of the USDA’s functions is to protect US agriculture from exotic pests; but how can you prevent a new pest from becoming established if you don’t know what it looks like? Shouldn’t they have a library of all significant pests that aren’t here yet?

Tens of thousands of moths were trapped in Napa Valley during April, and trapping there has been suspended so as not to overwhelm the state entomology lab. Eradication efforts are in full swing, with growers spraying pesticides (both “organic” and “synthetic”) on every vine in the infested area. Stray moths have been found in several other counties, and at least one small infestation exists outside of Napa, apparently introduced by a grape delivery from Napa. Quarantines are being formulated regarding shipment of grapes and handling of crush byproducts. We may have to build a hot compost for all our stems and skins this year to lower the risk of introducing the EGVM into our vineyard.

The third story of the 2009 crush is the one I care about most because it affected wine quality. Weather, of course, is the dominant (if not only) factor in vintage to vintage variation. Late August and September weather was quite typical for the North Coast. There were some intermittent heat waves, but nothing extreme, as in 1999 or 2002. My opinion is that the weather was better than in 2008, but nowhere near the ideal conditions of 2007. Quality should be good to very good for most whites, Pinot Noir, and everything else that ripened fully before the big storm. Our El Niño winter started with a bang on October 13th, when over five inches of rain fell here in one day. Everywhere in Sonoma and Napa got at least two inches, and cool weather with showers persisted for another couple of days. I don’t have the stats readily available, but I think this was more rain during harvest than in 1993, 1989, or even 1983.

The harvest pace was frenetic from Oct. 10th to the 12th, as growers and wineries tried to pull in everything that was ripe. We set a record for our biggest crush tonnage day ever on the 12th, processing over 25% of our red grapes in one day. I would never pick unripe grapes because of an impending storm, and we let several vineyards hang for more ripening. We did incur losses, both in tonnage and potential quality, but I think the resulting wine is still better than if we had picked those vineyards before the storm. Even before the storm, certain experts were predicting a below average quality vintage for Cabernet in Napa and Sonoma, based in part on analysis of the phenolic makeup of the ripening grapes. I personally am very happy with the Cabernet we brought in prior to the storm, and okay with what came in later, but it sounds as if it will go down as an uneven vintage overall.

Right From Don Diego’s Wine Cellar

It sounds like some sort of adventure story.

A vineyard resting on an ancient riverbed, high above the Alamo Pintado creek. Warm air flowing over nearby San Rafael, meeting cool Pacific breezes from the west. Can’t you just see the mysterious Zorro leaning arrogantly against the vines, tipping his hat to how you’ve fallen into his trap?

But this place isn’t fantasy. It’s the Buttonwood Farm Winery And Vineyard, thirty-nine acres of sustainably managed land, watched over by manager Armando Zepeda. As part of the magic, Zepeda’s team choose cane pruning instead of the more traditional spur, and it might be tedious for them, but they know it ultimately offers a higher quality crop. And this method is how the 2006 Buttonwood Farm Cabernet Franc is born.

A Cabernet Franc shows the classic Bordeaux flavor profile, but its manner is just a bit lighter than the popular Cabernet Sauvignon. There are classic aromas of earth and wet leaves, flavors of dried cherry, cranberry, cardamom, and a warm, smokey finish. We’re told this Franc is perfect with a grilled salmon and garlic smashed potatoes, and who are we to argue?

This three pack will go perfect with the warm grilling months, maybe even crawling all the way into early autumn. Don’t try to fight it. You’re caught. Just accept that you’ve been beaten by the mysterious man in black and give in to the fun. This three pack of 2006 Buttonwood Farm Cabernet Franc makes it easy to just enjoy the fantasy.

2006 Buttonwood Farm Cabernet Franc:

•  Appellation:  Santa Ynez Valley – Estate Bottled, Buttonwood Farm Vineyard
• Harvest:  November 3, 2006
• Bottling Date:  August 28, 2008
• Release Date:  February 1, 2010
• Alcohol:  14.8%
• Brix:  23.6
• pH:  3.51
• Blend:  100% Cabernet Franc
• Cases Produced:  281

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Washington
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

4UP

8-Bit Vintners meets Wine.Woot, home of the Boss Monster? It’s like Mitchell vs. Wiebe on wine-infused steroids.

When Woot Cellars released our first videogame-oriented wine last year, this Mike James guy was the only rival in the arcade. His 8-Bit Vintners seemed to have the same sense of humor, the same affection toward our shared geeky roots, the same blocky label design embodied by our Boss Monster – only he was a real wine guy who really knew his stuff. We lined up the quarters and prepared for a challenge.

But why fight? Instead of the antagonistic Mortal Kombat model, we looked to the collaborative spirit of Ikari Warriors. Rather than let our mouths write a check our joysticks can’t cash, we figured we’d join forces for an unstoppable two-player juggernaut of wine ‘n’ pixel fun. Not only is this way less stressful, but we also get to enjoy 8-Bit’s Player 1. This Syrah-based blend of fruit from vineyards throughout the Columbia Valley, Wahluke Slope, and Walla Walla Valley is as accessible and approachable as Centipede, but as complex and intriguing as Defender. Before we knew it, we were tipping some into our empty grape soda bottle and hoping arcade security wouldn’t notice.

There’s room in the 8-bit universe for more than one videogame-themed wine. Welcome to the party, 8-Bit Vintners. You wanna jump on this Gauntlet machine? We could really use a valkyrie.

8-Bit Vintners Player 1:

• Appellation: Walla Walla Valley, Wahluke Slope, and Columbia Valley
• Blend: 50% Syrah, 30% Tempranillo, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Carmenere, 5% Malbec
• Harvest Date: August and September 2007
• Bottling Date: July 2009
• Cooperage: French, American, and Hungarian for 18 to 22 months
• Alcohol: 14.1%
• pH: 3.74

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
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If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Okay, let me try this one more time.

Because I’m starting to get more than a little angry.

This here, this is a wine rack. With me? And it’s made by Wine Line. So that makes it a Wine Line Wine Rack. Okay, fair enough. But they decided to brand the product as their “Wine Vine” rack. So that makes it a Wine Line Wine Vine Wine Rack. And it holds 12 bottles, so it’s a 12 Bottle Wine Line Wine Vine Wine Rack. But it’s also stainless steel, which is a nice touch. So now it’s a 12 Bottle Stainless Steel Wine Line Wine Vine Wine Rack.

Have you ever worked in Marketing before? We’re never going to fit this on a box! The name is 18 miles long! Forget about mentioning how it holds wine or champagne bottles with a neck diameter around 1 1/8 inches for easy label identification. We’ll never fit the bit about easy access and space-saving design. People will never make it to the limited lifetime warranty. THEY’LL HAVE DIED FROM OLD AGE BEFORE READING THAT FAR.

We’re going back to my idea: “Wine Thing.”

Features:

• Made from 18/10 stainless steel
• Holds up to 12 bottles of wine and/or champagne
• Includes a mounting level and installation hardware appropriate for most solid walls
• Instant label identification
• innovative and stylish storage solution

Additional Photos:

• Wine Rack & Accessories
• Package
• Bottle Holding System

In the box:

• Wine Vine Wine Rack
• Wall Mount Template
• Level
• (2) Endcaps
• (3) Wall Mount Spacers
• (3) Screws
• (3) Hole Covers
• (24) Bottle Leveling Spacers

Jeff contends that a shakeout of these sites is coming, and points to the acquisition of Woot! by Amazon.Com last week as a harbinger of greater consolidation and/or lots of fallout in this space.

I agree that such a shakeout is inevitable, but I disagree with Jeff about when. From everyone I've talked to, the amount of excess wine inventory on the market is truly massive. The consolidation in distributors in this country (from 7000 to 700 in the last 20 years according to Barbara Insel of Stonebridge Research Group) combined with the drop in demand for wine over $40 means that there are thousands of smaller wineries with millions of cases of expensive wine out there that most retailers, restaurants and distributors aren't touching with a ten foot pole.

These wines will need to get sold somewhere, as they can't just sit around. They not only have to get out of the way for the next vintages that need to sit in the warehouse, they need to be turned into cash to pay for labor for the harvest, barrels for the next vintage, and all the other cash intensive aspects of keeping a winery going. For more detail, see my article: The Coming Carnage in the California Wine Industry.

How much inventory is out there? No one knows the complete answer, but I think it's plenty enough to easily support another year or two of these deep discounters, who will continue to proliferate (I know of two more waiting in the wings about to launch) until, as Jeff says, they start going "poof" just like the wine.

Until then, there are some amazing deals to be had by anyone who has the means to be buying wine in this economy.

Here's the list of the deep discounters / closeout artists / flash sales for wine that I know of:

Wine Woot!
Wines 'til Sold Out
Wine Spies
Cinderella Wine
Wine Heist
Vinfolio Flash Sales
Cellar Thief
Winery Insider
Wineshopper
Vinobest (French)

Read Jeff's article.

As you might expect, I have a fantasy of opening some great bottles to share with her when she officially turns 21. She will, of course, be drinking wine long before that in the security of our home and with our supervision. But my hope is that by the time she's 21, she will not only be interested in drinking wine, but be able to tell the really good stuff from all the rest.

Which is why I'm about to start buying some "birth year" wine for her. She was born in 2008, and some of those wines are starting to hit the market now, especially the whites and the Pinot Noirs.

The question, though, is what to buy?

While my wife and I haven't yet set a budget for this endeavor, which we will do eventually, I am formulating my strategy for what I want to buy.

The wines have to meet four primary criteria for me to consider buying them:

1. The specific wine must have a track record of improving with age for 15+ years
2. The wine must be from a well-known producer who makes wine to age
3. The 2008 vintage must not have been a disaster in the producer's region
4. The wine must be something I'd want to drink anyway

This means that I'm not going to be buying just anything expensive from the 2008 vintage.

Instead I'll be sticking to some very safe bets.

I'll be looking at potentially buying wines among the following:

1. Taittinger, Bollinger, Henriot, or similar vintage Champagne. The 2008 vintage was decent (not phenomenal) but top producers will have made good wine. The 2008 vintages, however, won't be released for several years, as most top producers are on 2004 at the latest, with many current releases being the 2002 vintage.

2. Alsatian Riesling from producers like Zind Humbrecht, Marcel Deiss, or Trimbach. The 2008 vintage in Alsace seems to have been a fantastic one, and these Rieslings age forever. As a bonus, compared to some of the other wines on my list, they will be relatively inexpensive.

3. German Riesling from producers like Donnhoff, Muller-Catoir, JJ Prüm, and Muelenhof. 2008 seems to have been a slightly better vintage in Germany than it was in Austria, and these wines are fairly ageless. A great German Riesling with 20 years of age on it is a truly gorgeous experience.

4. Barbaresco and Barolo from producers like Giacosa and Giacomo Conterno. These are producers that make great wine in just about any year, and the 2008 harvest was pretty good in Italy's Piedmont region. The Barolo's won't be available until 2012 at least, but the Giacosa's Barbarescos should be available next year.

5. A very select few (only because I can't really afford many) red Burgundies from producers that really knew what they were doing in 2008. It was a tough year in Burgundy, but top producers can make great wine in all but the most disastrous vintages, and 2008 was far from that. I'll take a look at Faiveley, Prieur, Denis Mortet, and others, while fantasizing about being able to afford to buy Armand Rousseau.

6. One or two Brunellos, because Ruth would want me to and because when aged well, they are so fantastic. However, a massive hailstorm hit Montalcino in the fall of 2008, and many producers lost 20-40% of their crops. Hopefully, skilled producers were able to recover, though prices will no doubt be up. If I'm doing particularly well when they're released in 2012 or 2013, I'd love to own a couple of bottles of Soldera Brunello, but more likely I'd be buying folks like Il Poggione, Poggio Antico, Col d'Orcia, Poggio di Sotto, etc.

7. A bottle of Chateau Climens Sauternes. It's my favorite.

8. A couple of bottles of Williams-Selyem and Rochioli single vineyard Pinot Noirs from the Sonoma Coast and the Russian River Valley.

9. A couple of bottles of Cornas or Hermitage from the Northern Rhone, and a couple bottles of great Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the Southern Rhone. While 2008 was a tricky vintage in the Rhone, I expect good things from folks like Clape, Chave, Thierry Allemand, Chateau Beaucastel, and Chateau Rayas.

10. Maybe, just maybe, one bottle of Cos D'Estournel Bordeaux, which is one of my favorites that I can somewhat afford, a bottle of Heitz Martha's Vineyard Cabernet, which I absolutely adore with 20 years of age on it, and perhaps one or two others from Napa. The really good Bordeaux is too expensive.

So that's essentially my wish list for now. It's a hard list to make as there are so many, many great wines out there that can age well. It could have included Lopez de Heredia whites and reds from Spain, some Aglianico-based wines from Campania, some whites and reds from the Loire, a select few reds from Australia.... But my budget is not limitless, nor is the space in my cellar, so it is what it is.

What do you think? Have you bought "birth year" wines for your kids? What did you buy, and what was your strategy?

As if this weren't bad enough, there's now a movement, even a congressional bill (H.R. 5034) that has as its singular goal, to make sure both that this situation never changes, but also that it can only become much worse for consumers over time.

I know, it sounds crazy, but the folks who profit from making the ordering of wine over the internet a crime are out to make sure that it stays that way. The National Beer and Wine Wholesalers organization has managed to lobby several Representatives to draft what almost every Alcohol trade organization in the country is the most anti-consumer piece of legislation they've ever seen.

I wrote about this bill when it first emerged from whatever backroom or cesspool that creates this kind of Congressional perfidy. Since then a wave of opposition to the bill has emerged in this country, and kindled the slightest bit of faith that the backbone exists to stand up to the prospect of having our lives run by those who can afford to pay politicians enough to create laws in their favor.

The bill itself has now been "held up" for a time, and no more hearings are going on about it due to a somewhat mysterious concern over a "constitutional issue" with the proposed legislation.

In the meantime, no doubt daunted by the overwhelming opposition from the public and the industry, the Wholesalers have created HR5034.Org, a web site worthy of the most heinous spin doctors in the industry.

But rather than take my word for the new heights of disinformation that this site offers, I suggest you listen to the guy who spends a lot of his time fighting the good fight for wine consumers everywhere.

Go read Tom Wark's article that demonstrates just how deceptive the Wholesalers are willing to be in order to make sure that their interests could never be subject to judicial review.

If you're an adult, legal consumer of any alcoholic beverage, and believe you should have the right to order it on the Internet no matter where you live, you should pay attention to this issue.

We value our freedom as Americans, in particular our freedom to make our lives better by changing laws when they are unjust. That freedom may soon be threatened.

Read more.

For those who aren't familiar with La Paulée, it offers the opportunity to spit out thousands of dollars of wine in the space of a couple of hours. In other words, it's one of world's best Burgundy tastings, where attendees get the chance to sample some wines that are made in such small quantities, and at such high prices, that most people never have a prayer of getting their hands on some.

Not all the Burgundies at
La Paulée are that elusive, but they are mostly all that good.

La Paulée is an annual event started in 2000 by sommelier Daniel Johnnes in the spirit of an event known as La Paulée de Meursault, which has been held, in some form or another since 1923 in and around the commune of Meursault in Burgundy, France.

The French version began as a communal dinner among wine producers, and evolved into its modern incarnation as an extravagant lunch that follows the Hospices de Beaune wine auction every year. This luncheon (to which I have never been) is really more of a feast of wine that begins in the early afternoon and lasts well into the evening. It is marked by good food and in particular, by incredible old Burgundies brought from the personal cellars of all who attend.

It was this spirit of conviviality, as well as this passionate consumption of what he considers to be the world's greatest wines, that prompted Johnnes to hold his own such celebration. The event now flip-flops back and forth between New York and San Francisco, and offers an over-the-top experience for anyone who loves Burgundy, or simply wants to get to know it better.

I get a press pass to the grand tasting, but the real event is the evening grand dinner, which I can't afford to attend, and since press passes to that aren't available, I merely live with the fantasy of one day finding a ticket to it in a bar of chocolate, or something like that.

But in the meantime I'm always deliriously happy to buckle down and taste a lot of really fine wine at the grand tasting. This year's tasting improved mightily on the one held two years ago in the logistics department. Spit buckets were plentiful and the room was arranged with much more space available for tasting. It was still crowded, of course, but the press and crush that marked the 2008 tasting was gone. You could actually stop to have a conversation with a winemaker if you wanted, instead of being edged out immediately by the next person looking for a taste. The food, provided by the likes of A16, Perbacco, and Quince, was excellent.

Below are my notes on the wines I tasted.

White

WHITE WINES SCORING BETWEEN 9.5 AND 10

2007 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chenevottes"
Near colorless in the glass, this wine has a fantastic nose that mixes herbal and mineral aromas with amazingly perfumed pine sap and lemon zest aromas. In the mouth, the wine offers amazement from the moment it hits the tongue. A terrific melange of flavors that range from the nutty to the piney are shot through with an incredible lemon and grapefruit essence that is captivating. Like balancing a kitchen knife on the point of another kitchen knife, the wine hangs in perfect balance through an incredibly long finish. Wow. $74. Click to buy.

WHITE WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 9.5

2007 Domaine Faiveley Corton-Charlemagne
Pale gold in color, this wine has a phenomenal nose of rainwater, cold cream and wet stones, as if it emerged from a cave of limestone. In the mouth the wine explodes on the palate with lemon juice and lemon zest shrapnel. A tart minerality grips the bright fruit with a firm grasp and allows it to vibrate through the long finish. Mouthwateringly delicious. $180.

2007 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Pucelles"
Pale gold in the glass with greenish highlights, this wine smells of unripe apple and the fresh zest of a pomelo. In the mouth the wine has a crystalline minerality and offers flavors of tart lemon zest, grapefruit, and hints of unripe apricot that linger in a long gorgeous finish. Delicate and powerful in the same breath, this wine sings like a struck chime. $??

2008 Domaine Matrot Meursault 1er Cru "Perrières"
No tasting note.

2008 Domaine Matrot Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chalumaux"
Pale gold in color, this wine has a powerful nose of piney apple and raw quince aromas. In the mouth the wine is electric with lemon zest and pink grapefruit juiciness. Fantastic acidity makes this wine vibrate even as a resonant mineral foundation courses its way through the wine like a river of stone. Very long finish. Outstanding. $60 Click to buy.

2007 Domaine Philippe Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chenevottes"
Pale greenish-gold in color, this wine has a wonderfully mineral nose of cold cream, pastry cream and rainwater aromas. In the mouth a burst of pink grapefruit dances a jig with lemon curd smeared on a cold marble slab. Wonderful acidity and fantastic balance drive this wine through a long and lip smacking finish. $60 Click to buy.

2007 Hospices de Beaune Corton-Charlemagne "Cuvée François de Salins"
No tasting note.

2008 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Saint-Aubin 1er Cru "En Remilly"
Near colorless in the glass, this wine has a nose of explosive lemon essence and pastry cream. In the mouth the wine is just as dynamic, with juicy lemon oil and piney, sap flavors that zip around the palate on the back of racy acidity. Fantastically delicious. $40. Click to buy.

2007 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Meursault 1er Cru "Perrières"
Palest gold in the glass, this wine smells of nut skin and lemon zest. In the mouth the wine does a wonderful trick of being both rich as well as crystalline in its minerality. Flavors of lemon, lemon zest, and wet stones course electrically through the finish. Outstanding. $100. Click to buy.

WHITE WINES SCORING BETWEEN 9 AND 9.5
2007 Domaine Bonneau du Martray Corton-Charlemagne
2007 Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils Beaune 1er Cru "Clos Saint-Landry"
2007 Domaine Brocard Chablis 1er Cru Vaulorent
2007 Domaine Brocard Chablis Grand Cru Les Preuses
2007 Domaine Brocard Chablis Grand Cru Bougros
2007 Domaine Christian Moreau Père et Fils Chablis Grand Cru Valmur
2007 Domaine Christian Moreau Père et Fils Chablis Grand Cru Les Clos
2007 Domaine de la Vougeraie Vougeot 1er Cru "Le Clos Blanc de Vougeot" Monopole
2007 Domaine de Montille Château de Puligny Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Folatières"
2007 Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault "Clos de la Barre"
2007 Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault 1er Cru "Charmes"
2007 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet
2007 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Clavaillon"
2008 Domaine Matrot Meursault 1er Cru "Charmes"
2007 Domaine Philippe Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chaumées"
2007 Domaine Philippe Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Maltroie"
2007 Domaine Ramonet Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Ruchottes"
2007 Domaine Ramonet Bâtard-Montrachet
2007 Maison Louis Jadot Pommard 1er Cru "Les Rugiens"
2007 Maison Louis Jadot Corton-Charlemagne
2008 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Saint-Aubin 1er Cru "Les Champlots"

WHITE WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 9
2007 Domaine Alain Chavy Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Folatières"
2007 Domaine Ballot-Millot Meursault 1er Cru "Genevrières"
2007 Domaine Ballot-Millot Meursault 1er Cru "Perrières"
2007 Domaine Blain-Gagnard Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Clos Saint-Jean"
2007 Domaine Blain-Gagnard Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Boudriotte"
2007 Domaine Blain-Gagnard Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Morgeot"
2007 Domaine Blain-Gagnard Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Cailleret"
2007 Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils Meursault 1er Cru "Genevrières"
2008 Domaine Brocard Chablis Boissoneuse
2007 Domaine Bruno Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Boudriotte"
2007 Domaine Bruno Colin Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Truffière"
2007 Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay "Au Champ Salomon"
2008 Domaine Christian Moreau Père et Fils Chablis 1er Cru Vaillon
2007 Domaine Dujac Morey-Saint-Denis Blanc
2007 Domaine Leflaive Mâcon-Verzé
2004 Domaine Long Depaquit Chablis Grand Cru "La Moutonne" Monopole
2002 Domaine Long Depaquit Chablis Grand Cru "La Moutonne" Monopole
2001 Domaine Long Depaquit Chablis Grand Cru "La Moutonne" Monopole
2007 Domaine Marquis D'Angerville Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Clos de l'Arlot" Blanc
2008 Domaine Matrot Meursault
2007 Domaine Michèle & Patrice Rion Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Les Terres Blanches" Blanc
2007 Domaine Philippe Colin Chassagne-Montrachet
2007 Domaine Ramonet Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chaumées"
2007 Joseph Drouhin Beaune 1er Cru " Clos des Mouches" Blanc
2007 Maison Deux Montille Pernand-Vergelesses 1er Cru "Sous Frétille"

WHITE WINES SCORING BETWEEN 8.5 AND 9
2007 Domaine Alain Chavy Saint-Aubin 1er Cru "En Remilly"
2007 Domaine Ballot-Millot Meursault 1er Cru "Charmes"
2008 Domaine des Comtes Lafon Mâcon-Chardonnay "Clos de la Crochette"
2006 Domaine Long Depaquit Chablis Grand Cru "La Moutonne" Monopole
2008 Joseph Drouhin Chablis 1er Cru "Sécher"

WHITE WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 8.5
2007 Domaine Alain Chavy Puligny-Montrachet
2007 Domaine Alain Chavy Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Clavoillons"
2007 Domaine Bruno Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "Les Chaumées"
2008 Domaine Christian Moreau Père et Fils Chablis

Red

2007 Domaine Faiveley Corton "Clos des Cortons"
Pale ruby in color, this wine has a mostly indescribable raspberry cocaine (if there was such a thing) aroma to it that will completely stop you in your tracks. If you can bear to get your nose out of the glass and actually taste this wine, you will find crystalline flavors of tart sour cherry dusting a wet forest floor and a deep mineral aspect to the wine. Perfectly balanced and poised, the wine has a minutes long finish that begs for silence and stillness. Phenomenal. $100. Click to buy.

RED WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 9.5

2007 Domaine D'Eugénie Clos de Vougeot
Pale garnet in the glass, this wine smells of a gorgeous, piney forest floor dusted with fresh raspberries. In the mouth bright, flavors of black raspberry are blown about in a dusty blanket of earthiness. Wet dirt and cranberry flavors linger on the finish. Great acidity, fine grained, muscular tannins, and a wonderful balance pervade the wine. Excellent and distinctive. $260. Click to buy.

2007 Domaine de Montille Pommard 1er Cru "Les Pézerolles"
Pale ruby in color, this wine has a wonderfully rustic nose of briary raspberry aromas. In the mouth it is impeccably balanced, with fine grained tannins and delicate acidity that wrap around a core of redcurrant and raspberry fruit. An undercurrent of that same briary woodiness works its way through the wine into the finish. Delicious. $83. Click to buy.

2007 Domaine Denis Mortet Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru "Champeaux"
Pale garnet in the glass, this wine has a fantastic nose of violet, cranberry and raspberry aromas. In the mouth soft cranberry and black raspberry fruit lays on a bed of velvety tannins. The wine has an utterly compelling texture, somewhere between velvety and satiny on the tongue and seems to have a bluish fruit quality to it as well, whatever that means. Fantastic length and deep deliciousness. $140. Click to buy.

2007 Domaine Denis Mortet Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru "Lavaut Saint-Jacques"
Pale garnet in color, this wine smells of violets and cherry fruit. In the mouth it has a silky sexiness that is difficult to ignore as incredibly juicy flavors of raspberry, orange peel, and forest floor dance like fairies in a glen across the palate. A fantastic earthiness rumbles below the tinkling fruit that shines brightly with the wine's great acidity. Lovely finish. $140. Click to buy.

2007 Domaine Faiveley Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru "Les Cazetiers"
Light garnet in color, this wine smells of raspberry fruit, briary green stems, and a wet stone quality that is quite disarming. In the mouth flavors of raspberry, redcurrant, and a hint of green, even minty herbs course through a raceway sketched by beautiful acidity. A fantastic texture of silkiness pervades the wine and it lingers in the finish with aromas of pine boughs and that mint character hanging just out of reach. Outstanding. $60. Click to buy.

2007 Domaine Faiveley Échezeaux
Pale ruby in the glass, this wine has a nose of bright raspberry and wet stone aromas. In the mouth the wine has a classic, regal composure with flavors of raspberry, redcurrant, and a stony minerality that hang beautifully in balance like some creation of Alexander Calder, as ocean breezes waft underneath. Wonderfully long finish. Delicious.

2007 Domaine Perrot-Minot Morey-Saint-Denis "La Rue de Vergy"
Pale ruby in color, this wine smells beautifully with the perfume of violets and cranberry skin. In the mouth the wine has an incredible stained glass window quality to it, shining with light and flavors of raspberry and redcurrant. An aromatic sweetness suffuses the wine, and fantastic acidity lifts the whole luminous swell across the palate. Delicious.

RED WINES SCORING BETWEEN 9 AND 9.5
2007 David Duband Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru "Les Sentiers"
2007 David Duband Échezeaux
2007 Domaine Chevalier Père et Fils Ladoix 1er Cru "Les Grechons"
2007 Domaine Chevalier Père et Fils Corton-Charlemagne
2006 Domaine Chevalier Père et Fils Corton "Le Rognet"
2007 Domaine D'Eugénie Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru "Aux Brulées"
2007 Domaine D'Eugénie Grands-Échezeaux
2007 Domaine Denis Mortet Gevrey-Chambertin Vielles Vignes
2007 Domaine Denis Mortet Gevrey-Chambertin "En Champs"
2007 Domaine des Comtes Lafon Volnay 1er Cru "Santenots du Milieu"
2007 Domaine Dujac Morey-Saint-Denis Rouge
2007 Domaine Dujac Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru "Aux Combottes"
2007 Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche
2007 Domaine Georges Roumier Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru "Les Cras"
2007 Domaine Georges Roumier Bonnes-Mares
2007 Domaine Marquis D'Angerville Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Clos de l'Arlot"
2007 Domaine Marquis D'Angerville Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Clos des Forets Saint Georges"
2005 Domaine Michel Gay et Fils Beaune 1er Cru "Les Toussaints"
2005 Domaine Michel Gay et Fils Corton "Les Renardes"
2007 Domaine Michel Gros Nuits-Saint-Georges "Les Chaliots"
2007 Domaine Michel Gros Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru "Clos des Réas"
2007 Domaine Michel Gros Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru "Aux Brulées"
2007 Domaine Michel Gros Clos de Vougeot
2007 Domaine Michèle & Patrice Rion Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Clos des Argillières"
2007 Domaine Perrot-Minot Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "La Richemone"
2007 Domaine Perrot-Minot Chambolle-Musigny 1er Cru "La Combe d'Orveau"
2007 Domaine Perrot-Minot Charmes-Chambertin
2007 Domaine Pierre Gelin Fixin 1er Cru "Clos Napoleon"
2007 Domaine Pierre Gelin Chambertin-Clos de Bèze
2007 Domaine Ramonet Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Boudriotte" Rouge
2005 Hospices de Beaune Corton Grand Cru "Cuvée Charlotte Dumay" Rouge
2007 Maison Louis Jadot Clos de Vougeot
2007 Maison Louis Jadot Domaine Duc de Magenta Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Morgeot "Clos de la Chapelle"
2006 Thibault Liger-Belair Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Les Saint Georges"
2007 Thibault Liger-Belair Clos de Vougeot

RED WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 9
2007 David Duband Nuits-Saint-Georges
2007 David Duband Morey-Saint-Denis 1er Cru "Clos Sorbè"
2007 Domaine Bruno Colin Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru "La Maltroie" Rouge
2007 Domaine Charles Audoin Fixin "Le Rozier"
2006 Domaine Chevalier Père et Fils Ladoix 1er Cru "La Corvée"
2007 Domaine D'Eugénie Vosne-Romanée
2007 Domaine de la Vougeraie Côte de Beaune "Les Pierres Blanches" Rouge
2007 Domaine de la Vougeraie Gevrey-Chambertin "Les Evocelles"
2007 Domaine de la Vougeraie Clos de Vougeot
2006 Domaine de Montille Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Aux Thorey"
2007 Domaine Georges Roumier Chambolle-Musigny
2006 Domaine Jean Grivot Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Aux Boudots"
2006 Domaine Jean Grivot Échezeaux
2007 Domaine Marquis D'Angerville Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Clos du Chapeau"
2005 Domaine Michel Gay et Fils Savigny-lès-Beaunes 1er Cru "Aux Serpentières"
2005 Domaine Michel Gay et Fils Beaune 1er Cru "Aux Coucherias"
2007 Domaine Michèle & Patrice Rion Nuits-Saint-Georges Vieilles Vignes
2007 Domaine Tollot-Beaut Savigny-lès-Beaune 1er Cru "Les Lavières"
2007 Domaine Tollot-Beaut Corton-Bressandes
2007 Hospices de Beaune Pommard 1er Cru Clos des Epenots "Cuvée Dom Goblet" Rouge
2006 Hospices de Beaune Mazis-Chambertin Grand Cru "Cuvée Madeleine Collignon" Rouge
2007 Thibault Liger-Belair Vosne-Romanée "Aux Réas"
2007 Thibault Liger-Belair Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Les Saint Georges"

RED WINES SCORING BETWEEN 8.5 AND 9
2007 Domaine Ballot-Millot Pommard 1er Cru "Les Pézerolles" 8.75
2006 Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils Beaune 1er Cru "Grèves" Vigne de L'Enfant Jesus 8.75
2006 Domaine Bouchard Père et Fils Volnay 1er Cru "Caillerets" Ancienne Cuvée Carnot 8.75
2007 Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay "Clos du Roy" 8.75
2007 Domaine Charles Audoin Marsannay "Les Longeroies" 8.75
2007 Domaine Georges Roumier Morey-Saint-Denis 1er Cru "Clos de La Bussière" 8.75
2006 Domaine Jean Grivot Vosne-Romanée 8.75
2006 Domaine Jean Grivot Nuits-Saint-Georges 1er Cru "Roncière" 8.75
2007 Domaine Michèle & Patrice Rion Chambolle-Musigny 8.75
2007 Domaine Tollot-Beaut Chorey-lès-Beaune 8.75
2007 Domaine Tollot-Beaut Beaune 1er Cru "Les Grèves" 8.75
2007 Joseph Drouhin Grands Échezeaux 8.75

RED WINES WITH A SCORE AROUND 8.5
2007 Joseph Drouhin Beaune 1er Cru " Clos des Mouches" Rouge

So what did they do? What any self-respecting wine lover would do.They drank some.

Believed to be Veuve Clicquot Champagne dating from between 1782 and 1788, the wine "had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles" according to diver Christian Ekstrom.

While that isn't much of a tasting note, it still sends shivers of delight down my spine. How cool would it be to taste such a piece of history? A champagne that is almost as old as America itself would certainly be one of the most amazing things you would ever have the opportunity to consume.

Before this find, the oldest vintage of Champagne that had been tasted in modern times was the 1825 vintage of Perrier-Jouet opened for wine experts and the press last year.

It's not clear exactly how the determination was made that these were Veuve Cliquot, or what will happen to the 29 remaining bottles which presumably fall under the jurisdiction of the Finnish government.

The same BBC article suggested that unnamed "wine experts" suggested that the bottles could sell for about $69,000 each at auction.

Given the chance, I'd much rather have a sip of one of these bottles than an old claret that might have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Anyone want to bet whether Bill Koch will get his hands on some?

Read the full story.

The famous sign that welcomes the world to Napa Valley hosts a quote by author Robert Louis Stevenson: "...and the wine was bottled poetry." In the early 1880's Stevenson took his honeymoon in the northern end of Napa valley, and wrote about it in a book called the Silverado Squatters. In it, he describes his visit to the property of German immigrant Jacob Schram:

"Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley, eighteen years old I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds on the verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave: all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished a certain neophyte and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted all. I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more. Much of it goes to London - most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste.

In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannesburg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered: and the customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a flavor, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass."

Jacob Schram was indeed a penniless barber. At the age of sixteen, to avoid being drafted into the German army, Schram set off to find his fortune in the New World, on a steamer to New York, where he first apprenticed as a barber, and then south to the Caribbean, across Panama (no canal yet) and then on a ship to California. Shaves and haircuts, trims and tonics, paid his way until he reached the Napa Valley, where he set up a barber shop in Napa City, found himself a wife named Annie Christine Weber, and settled down to a life of modest prosperity.

In 1862, as the government was beginning to offer land grants to spur development, it occurred to Schram that that he might trade one sort of shears for another, and with his savings, he purchased 200 acres on Diamond Mountain, and slowly began to plant vineyards.

Schram, and some of the others that made up this earliest wave of Napa viticulture, benefited greatly from the coincidental completion of the transcontinental railroad in San Francisco. Large numbers of Chinese immigrants who had to be "imported" specifically to work on the railroad were fanning out from San Francisco looking for work. Many found it in the burgeoning vineyards of the Napa Valley, including the Schram farm, where they helped plant the vineyards and dig what would be Napa's first underground wine caves.

By the time Stevenson visited in 1880, the winery had 50 acres of vines and was producing roughly 8000 cases of wine per year. When Schram passed away and his son took over the family business in 1905, the winery was producing more than 25,000 cases of wine.

And then.... the first World War and Prohibition finished off what was left of the Napa wine industry after the Phylloxera epidemic just a few years earlier. The winery was sold to an investment firm, and Schramsberg wines were no longer sold.

Over the next few decades, the winery changed hands several times. Some of the owners started producing wine again, and in 1951, the current owner, Douglas Pringle revived the Schramsberg label, and began producing wines, including sparkling wine. In 1957, the property was designated a state Historical Monument, and in 1965, Jack and Jamie Davies -- he a successful executive, she an art gallery owner -- purchase the property with a grand dream: to make world class sparkling wine in California.

And for more than forty years, the Davies' family pursued that odyssey with remarkable success. Schramsberg Vineyards indeed became an icon not only of the Napa Valley, but of California and the nation. From the first use of Chardonnay for sparkling wine in the U.S., to one of the earliest uses of the traditional Methode Champenoise for making sparkling wine, Schramsberg was an early pioneer of American sparkling wine.

Today, after the passing of both his parents, the Davies' son Hugh continues their legacy and presides over the production of some of the finest sparkling wine made in America.

The winemaking for the estate's roughly 60,000 case production begins with grapes from the estate's original acreage, as well as many contract vineyard sources for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay around Sonoma and Napa counties. Whether owned by the Davies family or farmed on contract, all of the grapes are carefully farmed and picked by hand. The winemaking involves a portion of the grapes (depending on the wine) fermented in barrel. Portions of the wine are also aged for extended time in the barrel, and these barrel aged wines are then used as blending components in several of the winery's bottlings.

As with Champagne, the wines undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle deep in the cool, humid caves that were dug by Chinese laborers more than 150 years ago. As the bubbles are forming during this second ferment, the bottles are "riddled" or turned to allow the yeast to accumulate in the neck before it is disgorged and the bottle topped up, corked and sealed for sale.

There are very few sparkling wines in America that can begin to equal the quality and complexity of Champagne, but Schramsberg is unquestionably among those few. With a few years of age on it, their top bottlings can hold their own among many tete-de-cuvees from France. While I enjoy their commercial bottlings, I have perhaps been most impressed with some small bits of very late-disgorged wines that the winery often makes available at the annual Premier Napa Valley auction for the trade. These wines, which have 10 or more years of aging on their lees are truly world-class and among some of the best wines I've tasted from Napa Valley.

Full disclosure: I received these wines as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:

2002 Schramsberg Vineyards "J. Schram" Sparkling Wine, North Coast
Light greenish gold in the glass with very fine bubbles, this wine smells of unripe apples, lemon zest, and chamomile. In the mouth it is tart and edgy, with sour lemon zest and chamomile flavors that meld with a light yeastiness. The wine has a somewhat angular and slightly bitter cut to it that makes me think it would benefit from a little more aging. It's juicy however, and quite refreshing. A mix of 83% Chardonnay and 17% Pinot Noir. Score: between9 and 9.5. Cost: $100. Click to buy.

2006 Schramsberg Vineyards "Blanc de Noirs" Sparkling Wine, North Coast
Pale greenish-gold in the glass with medium-fine bubbles, this wine has a nose of unripe apples and quince aromas with some smells of wet stones. In the mouth it offers crisp and bright flavors of baked apples, lemon juice, and wet stones. Great acidity and hint of sourdough yeastiness round out this delicious wine. 100% Pinot Noir. Score: around 9. Cost: $28. Click to buy.

2006 Schramsberg Vineyards "Blanc de Blancs" Sparkling Wine, Napa
Pale greenish-gold in the glass with very fine bubbles, this wine smells of citrus pith and wet stones. In the mouth the wine is quite delicate with lemon juice, wet stones, crisp ripe apples, and the barest hint of brewers yeast. The wine finishes cleanly with lingering flavors of lemon zest. Very, very tasty. 100% Chardonnay. Score: around 9. Cost: $25. Click to buy.

In addition to the wines above, Schramsberg makes 7 other sparkling wines and some Cabernet under the J. Davies label.

If sommeliers were doctors, they'd spend a good portion of their time dealing with boastfully self-diagnosing patients that had never gone to medical school and people who couldn't be coaxed out of the waiting room to get examined.

More than one accomplished sommelier has, perhaps not even in a moment of unguarded and slightly tipsy honesty, told me how much they appreciated those diners that actually understood what their job was, and used them in the way they are trained to be used.

But the world is fraught with danger for even the most expert and helpful sommelier. Take Eric Asimov's article in today's New York Times, which offers yet another stumbling block in the way of helpful sommeliers everywhere: a story of an astonished diner who is troubled, if not mildly outraged, by a sommelier who tasted the wine first before pouring it for the diner and his companions.

Of course, there will always be people who, unfamiliar with the ceremony and services involved in fine dining, are taken aback by some practices. I can remember my own bumbling and minor frustration as a young man the first time I was taken out to eat in a restaurant where they pushed my seat in for me and placed the napkin on my lap. I didn't know what was going on, and was embarrassed that I didn't know.

But the issue raised in Eric's column is clearly not the product of inexperience. This diner simply wasn't used to the idea of someone else tasting the wine he had paid for. To him, and doubtless to many others, it's likely a question of principle: I bought the wine, therefore I should get to decide who gets a sip and who doesn't. Even my blogging colleague Joe Roberts, of One Wine Dude is on the record in the story expressing some amount of dismay at the idea of a sommelier tasting the wine in advance without his knowledge.

Come on, people. You don't think the cooks taste the sauce before they put it on your dish? Let sommeliers do their jobs.

I don't doubt that many people might bristle a little at someone tasting their wine before they themselves do. But I think these same people may not really know what a sommelier's job is. Now I'm no sommelier myself, but here's my understanding of what you should expect when there's a sommelier on the floor of a restaurant you're dining at.

1. There should be a wine list available for you to look at, that should include a variety of wines by the glass and by the bottle, across a range of price points appropriate to the restaurant.

2. The sommelier has either personally put that wine list together, or is paid to know it almost that well. Which means they should have a sense of how the wines match the menu, the style and character of the wines on it (i.e. how they taste), and of course, what wines they've actually got.

3. You can have a conversation with the sommelier if you want, and they will recommend wines to you based on your preferences, your food choices, and/or your budget. They should be able to answer just about any question you have that is relevant to the role that wine will play in your evening's meal. They should not be there to push any specific wine, sell you wine if you don't want it, or try to get you to spend more than you really wanted to.

4. On occasion the sommelier's responsibility will also include matching specific wines to specific dishes as part of a wine flight that goes along with a specific menu created by the chef, or to a menu of your choosing.

5. The sommelier's job (and the wine director's if they are different people) also includes making sure that the wine is purchased from reputable sources, stored appropriately, and served at the correct temperature, with proper stemware. The sommelier (or often the waiter, as well) will (always by default, but definitely at your discretion) pour the wine for you and your companions throughout your meal.

6. In states or countries where it is legal, the sommelier will also care for a bottle of wine that you have brought with you to the restaurant to consume, with the same level of attention as any bottle they might be selling you. This includes understanding how and when you wish the wine to be opened and served, and at what temperature.

7. Importantly, the sommelier is also paid to ensure that you get a sound bottle (or glass) of wine -- one that is not spoiled, prematurely oxidized, cooked, corked, or otherwise tainted. And this includes that bottle you might have brought with you. (As an aside, everyone should note that this point does not include ensuring that you actually like the wine that you ordered).

It's this last set of responsibilities that give the sommelier license to, and I might even say the duty, to taste any bottle that they open in the restaurant. And by taste, that means pouring a very, very small amount (half an ounce, perhaps) into a glass or a tastevin to smell and taste before offering the bottle to the diner for evaluation.

Sommeliers are trained or experienced enough, if they are truly worthy of holding the title, to spot flawed wine in ways that even very experienced wine lovers are not. Having them taste a bottle, even if it is one you've brought from home, is like having someone who can, in a matter of seconds, check to make sure that the brakes aren't going to fail in the car you're about to race off in.

Of course, practically speaking, sommeliers don't have time to taste every bottle they open in a restaurant, but some are much less in need of professional evaluation before being served. A brand new vintage of California Chardonnay does not need to be inspected in the same way that a 1980 Meursault does. For the most part (but not categorically) screw-capped wines don't need advanced tasting.

From my perspective, I'd love a sommelier to taste every wine I ever buy at or bring to a restaurant from this day forward. Even if, as it so happened a couple of months ago, all it means is that I can commiserate with them about how badly corked the bottle was that I had brought to dinner. The sommelier tasted it first and then, knowing I'd want to smell, came out to my table with his glass and a grimace. He didn't have to get the glass within two feet before I could smell how badly corked the wine was. We bemoaned the loss of a great Brunello, and then he was off to find me something to replace it -- in my price range, and with the particular style I was looking for.

I know I don't need to tell many of you readers how to let sommeliers do their jobs. But for some of you, it might be news that it is not only acceptable to have a sommelier take a sip before you do, it might also be a good idea. No one likes to start a dinner with a bad taste in their mouth.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

But of course, Dom Pérignon is more than just a brand. Unlike the Nike logo, which will get slapped on everything from T-shirts to flip flops, the signature shield-like label of Dom Pérignon is only placed on Champagne made in one location, by one house, under the supervision of the cellar master or chef de cave Richard Geoffroy. You will never know exactly how many bottles of it they make, nor will you ever know exactly their winemaking regimen for assembling it each year (other than the fact that they do not use Pinot Meunier, the traditional third grape allowed in Champagne apart from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay).

But what you do know as a consumer, is that when you open a bottle of Dom Pérignon, what's inside will be good. Moreover, if you are a frequent or even occasional consumer of this pricey Champagne, you will have a very clear idea of how it will taste.

Say what you will about the fact that Dom Pérignon is a brand created by a massive corporation (Moet & Chandon) inside another massive corporation (holding company Luis Vuitton Moet Hennesey), Dom Pérignon pulls off the winemaking equivalent of a hat trick every year. Year after year, the fact that Dom Pérignon can make such consistent Champagne, and Champagne that is so consistently good, to a certain extent renders any epithet concerning corporate scale a purely philosophical exercise.

Making consistently world-class Champagne at this scale is a truly remarkable feat. As usual, it helps to start with great raw materials. By virtue of the history and bankroll of its parent, Moet & Chandon, Dom Pérignon has access to fruit from all the 17 Grands Crus vineyards in Champagne (and in particular the 8 core Grands Crus of Aÿ, Bouzy, Verzenay, Mailly, Chouilly, Cramant, Avize and Le Mesnil) as well as the historical Premier Cru from Hautvillers, the site of the Abbey where D. Pierre Pérignon perfected (but did not invent) the process we now call methode champenoise. Each vintage is a blend, or to use the proper term, an assemblage from across the Champagne region. The amount of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vary each year, sometimes up to 20% with no strict formula.

The assemblage each year has two goals -- to embody the spirit of Dom Pérignon, which is to say, remain firmly within the bounds of the house style, and then to also express what the vintage has offered in Champagne. As chef de cave Geoffroy puts it "Each vintage is a unique opportunity to reinvent ourselves and unveil the harmonious dialogue between the expression of nature and style." Geoffroy is an interesting chap. Trained as a medical doctor, but from a wine family, he eventually decided his heart belonged in the cellar rather than the hospital, and returned to the wine world as a winemaker. He became the chef de cave at Dom Pérignon in 1985, and is the fifth person to hold the title since the winery's first vintage in 1921.

Dom Pérignon the brand began as merely the library reserve of Champagne house Moet & Chandon, which has been making Champagne since 1743. It was the world's first prestige cuvee Champagne to be released, and in 1943 it became its own separate winemaking project.

The Dom Pérignon portfolio of wines can be confusing to the uninitiated, especially because of the existence of their reserve Oenotheque line.

Dom Pérignon makes one vintage brut Champagne blend each year, except in those years they opt not to release a wine at all. Since its inception in 1921, Dom Perignon has only been released 36 times. The wine is aged on its yeasts in the bottle for at least seven years before release. Bottles released after seven years get a gold label, and are sold as just plain Dom Pérignon.

However, not all the bottles are released after seven years. Since 1990 some bottles have been held at least three more years (and up to eight years longer) and then released as Dom Pérignon Oenotheque, with a black label. And, perhaps less well known, an even smaller quantity of wines in great vintages are held for up to 25 years and also released as Oeonotheque. Because these wines come from the winery's library (hence the name) even though the practice was begun in 1990, vintages of Oenotheque go back to 1969.

Finally, in very good years Dom Pérignon also makes a rosé, which is created in traditional style with the addition of red Pinot Noir wine in the final blend. The rosé ages in bottles for at least ten years. Just like their regular champagne, however, an Oenotheque version of the rosé is also made by holding back bottles for extended aging.

A couple of days ago Dom Pérignon announced the release of their 2002 vintage wine, as well as their 1996 Oenotheque bottling. I didn't get a chance to taste those, but I did get a chance to taste a bunch of vintages spanning two decades at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic in June. While not my favorite top Champagne, I certainly have never met a bottle of Dom Pérignon I haven't liked, including the 1976 I found under my grandmothers wet bar and cherished until a few years ago when I opened it for some dear friends. The Dom Pérignon style is linear and precise, and a bit steelier than my true preference (which leans towards the yeasty and vinous), but the crystalline minerality that I find in every bottle is hard not to appreciate.

TASTING NOTES:

1988 Dom Pérignon Champagne
Poured out of magnum, this wine is light yellow gold in the glass with incredibly fine bubbles. It smells of wonderfully yeasty, butter cracker and lemon juice aromas with the remarkable perfume of marzipan. In the mouth, the bubbles are merely tickles in a soft wave of silky smoothness. Beautiful, delicate acidity lifts a fine lace skein of gorgeous tart sourdough bread and wet limestone that ripple with supple muscles of lemony goodness. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $300. Click to buy.

1993 Dom Pérignon Champagne
Light yellow gold in the glass with incredibly fine bubbles, this wine smells of sweet cream and lemon zest with butter crackers. In the mouth the wine has a gorgeous smoothness, a glassiness with a beautifully fine texture. Gorgeously balanced, a sweetness pervades the palate, counterpointed with an almost cucumber greenness mixed with a toasty sourdough quality. A beautifully long finish has a sour leafiness with white flowers. Tremendous. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $190. Click to buy.

1995 Dom Pérignon Champagne
Light to medium gold in the glass with very fine bubbles, this wine has a nose of buttered sourdough toast, wet stones, and lemon blossoms. Honey roasted nuts emerge with some more air. In the mouth the wine has a fantastically satin cloud of mousse with lemon curd and toasted sourdough floating along on a river of minerality. Fantastically balanced and poised, the wine sings through an incredibly long finish with hints of golden delicious apple skins. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $190. Click to buy.

1999 Dom Pérignon Champagne
Light greenish gold in the glass with very fine bubbles, this wine has a nose of wet stones, white flowers, and a hint of warm sourdough aromas. In the mouth the wine is exceedingly silky, with wonderfully bright mineral quality of wet limestone, white flowers, and lemon zest. A long SweeTart finish lingers with citrus qualities. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $140. Click to buy.

2000 Dom Pérignon Champagne
Light gold in the glass, with a hint of green and very fine bubbles, this wine has a bright, mineral-driven nose of sourdough toast and wet rock aromas. Gorgeously smooth in the mouth with a very fine mousse of bubbles that buoy up flavors of bright lemon and crackers, with lemon zest, sourdough and sweet tarts lingering in the finish. Gorgeous acidity, fantastic balance. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $130. Click to buy.

1995 Dom Pérignon Rosé Champagne
Gorgeously coppery salmon in the glass with incredibly fine bubbles, this wine smells heavenly. Full stop. Sit back on your heels and let this sucker wash over you with aromas of orange blossoms, roasted nuts, and what can only be described as liquid limestone. In the mouth the wine has a fantastic, flawlessly smooth texture, with an incredible soft silky mousse of bubbles, and otherworldly flavors of orange peel, raspberries, wet limestone, and a fantastic hibiscus quality that lingers in a long finish. Amazingly poised, perfectly balanced and truly exceptional. A wine that I would love to drink every day of my life. Score: between 9.5 and 10. Cost: $300. Click to buy.

Okay Fine We Redid The Chorus So What

And now, it’s the smash hit that’s on all the charts, an ode to the Wine Aerator that can change how you drink, Soirée Bottle Top!

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Took The Oath In 1797, If You’re Wondering

You want to impress your friends? Drop some WikiScience on ‘em:

Wikipedia says that “(the) arrival of Zinfandel in the United States may have been via the Imperial Nursery in Vienna, Austria, which likely obtained the vines during the Habsburg Monarchy’s rule over Croatia, which was expanded when Austria acquired the Dalmatian territories of the former Republic of Venice in 1797.” Isn’t that amazing? What other grape has a life that sounds so much like the plot of a Robert Ludlum thriller?

And yet, it’s not just the grape you’ll be enjoying when you start in on the four pack of 2007 Bushnell Vineyard Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel. It’s the flavors. It’s the nose of ripe raspberry and black pepper, followed by a spicy, jam-like concentrated fruit flavor. The lingering finish with a hint of toasted oak as an undertone will have you imagining that dangerous countess across the room. A Rothschild? A Hapsburg? Or just some pretender with a pistol aimed at your heart? The only thing that might save you now is a daring escape. But what daring escape could match the escape that comes through a delicious bottle of Zinfandel? See what we did there? Pretty sweet, right?

There’s no other wine that can segue into dalmatians, Venice, World War One and the presidency of John Adams as easily as the majestic Zinfandel. And with scores of 86 points from Wine Spectator, 89 points and Editor’s Choice from Wine Enthusiast, 92 points from Just Wine and 92 points plus a rating of Exceptional from the World Wine Championships, the 2007 Bushnell Vineyard Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel is more than just a conversation piece. So get this four pack for your next party. Show your guests the adventure their palate has been missing.

2007 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel, Bushnell Vineyard:

•  Appellation: Dry Creek Valley
• Composition: 90% Zinfandel; 10% Petite Sirah
• Aging: 11 months in French & American oak barrels
• Alcohol: 14.9%
• Acidity: .585g/100ml
• pH: 3.72

• 86 Points:Wine Spectator MagazineJune 30, 2010
• 89 Points & Editor's Choice:Wine Enthusiast Magazine
• 88 Points, a "puff" & Great value: Connoisseur's Guide
• 95 Points: Just Wine Points
• 92 Points & Exceptional:  World Wine Championships

Bushnell Vineyard Zinfandel has a very fragrant nose of ripe raspberry and black pepper followed by spicy, jammy concentrated fruit flavors. Structured, rounded and full in the mouth, this wine has a long, lingering finish laced with slight toasted oak undertones.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Here’s The Pitch

I’m telling you, Murray, it’ll be like that movie Sideways, but with explosions. Lots of ‘em.

Look, I know my last few ideas have been… a little lacking. Who knew America wasn’t ready for a film about time-traveling robot chefs stuck in the Middle Ages? But, hey, “Dragon Filet-ers” did pretty well on the DVD market, didn’t it? No? Forget I said anything, then.

But THIS idea, Murray, this is the one. I feel it. This is gonna finally put us on the map with all those big time production companies. You ready for this? You sittin’ down? Yeah? ‘Cause here it is.

“Wine Cops”.

Huh? HUH? Isn’t that great? Doesn’t your imagination just explode with the possibilities?

I can see by the look on your face that the answer is “no”. Well, before you call security, just hear me out.

Dig this: Mitchell Vitis and his rookie partner, Joey Bottles, they’re wine cops. Hence the title, you see. Special agents of the Food and Drug Administration, they travel all over the country solving, you know, wine crimes. Whatever those are. We’re still doing some research. BUT, when they’re framed for the murder of a big time winemaker, Vitis and Bottles will have to use their “grapevine” of contacts to make an “assemblage” of clues before they find themselves “fermenting” in prison. You like those puns, Murray? ‘Cause the whole script is like that. No, really.

And we’ve already got a great winery we’re working with, too. Yeah, Pine Ridge. They’ve been in the business of producing wonderfully unique wines for over thirty years now, so they know their stuff, Murray. Very critically acclaimed. We even wrote them into the script! Yeah, see, Mitchell is a big fan of this 2006 Carneros Merlot. We felt that its intensity of the ripe red cherry flavor combined with its complex structure of dark chocolate, briar spice, green tea and candied cinnamon really say a lot about the character’s hard-boiled nature.

And Joey? He’s young and bright, just like this 2006 Pine Ridge Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Just like how Joey begins opening up to Mitchell throughout the course of the film, this Cab, with its aromas of blueberry, red cherry, and dark notes of coffee and caramel, really shines 30 minutes after decanting, revealing deep tones of black tea, briar, and toasty oak under its fresh, sweet dark berry and baked cherry start.

Are you intrigued, Murray? Yeah? ‘Cause I figure I’m only gonna need about $347 million to do this thing RIGHT, you know? So, if you could… Hey, what’s security doing here? HEY, PUT ME DOWN! This is an outrage! I better not see this movie on the big screen without me attached to it, Murray! You hear me!

2006 Pine Ridge Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon:

• Varietal: 83% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Malbec, 4% Petit Verdot, 4% Merlot, 1% Cabernet Franc
• Release Date: September 1, 2008
• Aging Potential: 10 to 15 years
• Appellation: Napa Valley
• Alcohol: 14.1%

2006 Carneros Merlot:

•  Varietal: 91% Merlot, 8% Cabernet Sauvignon and 1% Malbec
• Appellation: Carneros-Napa Valley
• Alcohol: 14.1%

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Got Something To Celebrate?

“In victory I deserve it. In defeat I require it.” That Churchill fellow knew what was up.

Just had a baby? Just outlived a rival? Just found the love of your life? Just found out you won’t be paying alimony? There are few experiences in life that let you say “Hey, it’s like I’ve got a second chance to start again!” When one of these save states comes around, shouldn’t you be ready?

A two pack of Woot Cellars Reboot! Sparkling Wine is the heir and a spare of celebratory sham-paigns. Ice it up, pop it open, fill the glasses and toast to the wonderful new you. Did you buy that dream car at age forty? Finally dating an underwear model? Or did you just complete your Physics doctorate and sign on with CERN? Whatever you’ve done, Reboot! will be there like a mushroom from a brick, to offer comfort and joy. Best of all, the two pack means that you’ve got an extra man!

When an event comes along that makes your whole world shine, you can’t just grab a sports drink and call it a night. You’ve got to celebrate, and as soon as possible, because one day, this too shall pass. But hey, not yet, right? So pump up the Howard Jones and pop that cork on your Woot Cellars Reboot! Sparkling Wine!

2001 Brut:

• North Coast
• Private Reserve
• Harvest Dates: August/September 2001
• Average Brix at Harvest: 21.6° Brix
• Average TA/pH at Harvest: 0.76 gm/100ml, pH 3.15
• Fermentation Characteristics: 24 days @ 55° F
• Cellar Storage/Aging: Average of 50 months “en tirage” (on yeast in bottle)
• This is an estimate at this stage
• Analysis at Disgorging: Alcohol 12.74% v/v
• Residual Sugar 0.69% (gm/100ml) Total Acidity 0.84 (gm/100ml) pH 2.88
• Varietal : 76 Pinot Noir
• 24% Chardonnay
• Appellation : 66 Russian River (Syar Vyds, Kent, Prudential)
• 34% Mendocino County (Cox, Todd)

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Dr. Fourzvagho

She was from the Alexander Valley. He was cold as the Russian River. But together they found a four pack of… love.

When he left for the frozen north that best suited a Chardonnay, they called him mad. They said, “You’re only two bottles, my friend! Sure, you’ve got scents of Meyer lemon, peach, vanilla, toasted almond and honey, as well as a palate with the texture of a creme brulee, as well as a long finish of caramel, nutmeg and cinnamon. But, Russian River, you cannot survive without… love!” But he paid them no mind.

But then, at the cabin, he met… her. She introduced herself as Hoot Owl Creek, but all he could see was the entirety of her Vioginer grapes, hand harvested, and that was apparent. She was lovely, bright fruit aromas that matched his own, featuring Meyer lemon, grapefruit, pineapple, cantaloupe, and a dusty floral aroma of almond and orange blossom, all encased in vanilla, hazelnut and honey. Her full flavors, her mouth, it was orange zest, tangerine, pear and a silky honey vanilla finish. Maybe she was only two bottles of a 2007 but, then, so was he. And he knew, in this wasteland, she’d never survive, without… love.

Together, they made a pact. A four pact, if you will. The two bottles of Russian River Chardonnay and the two bottles of Hoot Owl Creek Viognier. Together, forever, with flavors we are sure that you’ll… love.

2007 Chardonnay Russian River:

• Produced and bottled by J Vineyards and Winery, Healdsburg CA
• 750 ML
• Winemaker George Bursick
• Appellation Russian River Valley
• Harvest Date September 4 – October 8, 2007
• Bottling Date August 2008
• Release Date September 2009
• Wine Alcohol 14.3% by volume
• Wine Acid 5.90 grams per liter
• Wine pH 3.55
• Production 5,700 cases
• Contains sulfites

2007 Viognier Hoot Owl Creek, Alexander Valley:

• Produced and bottled by J Vineyards and Winery, Healdsburg CA
• 750 ML
• Winemaker George Bursick
• Appellation Alexander Valley
• Harvest Date August 25, 2007
• Bottling Date January 2008
• Release Date April 2008
• Wine Alcohol 13.7% by volume
• Wine Acid 0.58 grams per 100ml
• Wine pH 3.37
• Residual Sugar 0.75%
• Production 1,100 cases
• Contains sulfites

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

OC: Original Carneran

Bouchaine was Carneros when Carneros wasn’t cool.

Bouchaine 2006 Estate Pinot Noir, Napa Valley-Carneros:

• Appellation: Napa Valley ~ Carneros
• Varietal: Pinot Noir
• Alcohol:14.5%
• Maturation:11 to 12 months in mostly French
• oak barrels, 40% new
• Clones include: Dijon 115, 667,and 777; Pommard; Swan

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Classic has served as a wonderful little homecoming for me for the past few years, as I grew up in Aspen and, in fact, worked at the Classic as a grunt when I was about 15 years old, schlepping milk crates of dishes to and fro. I didn't understand what the fuss was about back then, and can only shake my head now at what I might have been able to learn if I had really paid attention.

As usual the event this year offered some wonderful moments.

Friday night I found myself sitting with a small group of folks that included Jacques Pepin, his daughter Claudine, chef Jose Andres, and a friend from high school, among others. Andres at one point asked Jacques Pepin if he was hungry, and when he got something vaguely resembling a positive answer he leaped up, and said, "Let's go! Jacques Pepin is hungry!" He then led me, my high school friend, and Claudine Pepin's husband on a raid of the kitchen as well as the various street food stations that were set up as part of the festivities that evening. I was more than content to conspiratorially carry trays of food in the wake of Andres, who produced laughter and parted the crowds everywhere he went. I was only briefly distracted by the opportunity to taste a glass of 2002 Clos de la Roche Vielles Vignes out of magnum when I crossed paths with sommelier Richard Bohr, so briefly that I didn't remember the producer (perhaps Ponsot?).

Breakfast the first day consisted of a blueberry muffin followed by a tasting of "two decades of Dom Perignon," which was a wonderful chance to take the measure of consistency that the house manages to produce vintage after vintage. The star of the tasting, which included 2000, 1999, 1998, 1995, 1993 and 1988, was the 1995 rosé which was sublime in its balance between fruit, and savory, mineral character.

Saturday afternoon I had a chance to taste some of the greatest wines on the planet, the current and a few past vintage releases from J.L. Chave. From the Saint Joseph to the Hermitage Blanc and Hermitage, the wines were all exceptional, but the one that nearly made me weep was the 2000 Hermitage Blanc. Pure perfection in the glass, it made me want to weep. Every expletive in the book wouldn't have been enough to adequately cover the sublime balance of power and delicacy wrapped in utter deliciousness that was this wine. I will sort through my tasting notes and offer a review sometime soon, but for now I'm just savoring the memory.

After an evening spent tasting one dish from each of the Best New Chefs recently annointed by Food & Wine Magazine, the real partying began, and as always I am amazed at the collective liver capacities of those who so rightly merit the label of food and wine professionals, especially at 8000 feet of altitude. Magnums of riesling disappear in a snap, and the mountain of tequila bottles is something to behold.

The capacity for consumption seems equally matched, if not outdone, by a staggering generosity, with simply stunning (and often very, very expensive) wines appearing from nowhere to be showered on a mixed group of friends and strangers alike, with no discrimination. Among other things I was simply handed a glass of 2001 Thierry Allemande "Cuvee Reynard" Cornas poured from a magnum by a total stranger who seemed as utterly delighted to share it with me as I was to drink it.

Finally, I was quite pleased with how my two seminars "South African Gems" and "Secrets of the Napa Valley" were received. When I run these seminars they consist almost entirely of storytelling and I'm endlessly delighted by how people grab little nuggets of personal meaning for themselves out of my ramblings. When people come up afterwards and say how much they liked a wine AND how they love the idea that no one really knows all the different types of grapes that are grown in the ancient vineyard that produced it, I feel like I've done my job.

I videotaped (or tried to, with my little Flip camera) my seminars but haven't had time to review the footage yet. If the audio is good and you can actually see me in frame, I'll post them, along with my notes on the wines that I served in upcoming posts.

More to come.

As regular readers know, I spent some time in Australia back in March of this year, exploring some of the wine regions I hadn't been to and visiting some of the country's smaller producers. My summary of that experience included some thoughts on the challenge that Australia faces in the wake of the global financial crisis and shifting preferences of global wine consumers. In particular I was interested in the dichotomy between where the money is in the Australian wine industry (the big exporters) and where I believe the future is for their industry (smaller producers).

I wrote:

"Indeed, some of the most exciting wines I had in Australia are made by tiny producers who don't make much wine, and export even less to the U.S. It seemed rather clear to me that Australia hasn't figured out a way to easily make this diversity available to the world at large, perhaps as a result of scale, but perhaps also as a result of a focus of its energy on "simpler" ways of communicating to global consumers about Australian wine. Australia (by which I mean primarily the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, the main trade body in the country) should be celebrating and promoting its smaller producers more."

Well I learned recently that the folks in Australia have been thinking along the same lines, and have launched what I think is the best marketing campaign I have ever seen or heard of for a wine region.

It's called A Plus (Australia Plus) and it's so brilliantly simple, the tag line explains it completely: "every one has a story."

It's a web site where every winery in Australia can submit a photo, a brief story about what makes them interesting, and put a link to their web site. Visitors can browse all the stories, vote on the ones they like the best, and share their favorites with friends. But most importantly they can see the stories.

The stories are short. Some are funny, some are profound, but mostly they're all at least interesting, which is more than you can say about 95% of the winery web sites and marketing campaigns in existence.

At the moment, the site is focused on the wineries themselves, and seeks to build up a comprehensive library of stories. But according to Paul Henry, the director of the Australia Wine and Brandy Corporation who responded to my questions about the campaign, this is merely the first phase of a dedicated effort over an extended period of time to use these stories as the basis for retelling the larger story of Australian wine to consumers everywhere, or as he put it "I believe the artistic term is 'finding one's voice.'"

Stories are what we care about. Stories are meaningful, and they are memorable. Wine is ultimately a story, of a place, of the people who farm it, and the unique circumstances that lead to the creation of every vintage.

Despite this, it's the story that gets lost in all the concern for points, tasting notes, and pricing that pervades the wine marketplace today.

And that's why I'm so impressed with this A+ campaign. It's such an honest, soulful departure from the usual ways in which countries or wine regions go about marketing themselves. You've certainly seen those campaigns before -- the ones that could be selling anything from Viagra to time-share vacation rentals. They always remind me of the campaign that ad exec Dudley Moore created in the movie Crazy People: "Come to Greece, the French can be Annoying."

The A+ web site is well executed, and it has a ton of potential. There's a lot more that can be done with these stories as they begin to accumulate, but the site is a great start and just what Australia needs. Provided that they can:

1. Actually get Australian wineries to participate (they'd be silly not to)
2. Get global consumers to the site (not an insignificant challenge)
3. Figure out how to leverage the content and the buzz on an ongoing basis

I predict it will be a great success. Of course, there's still the challenge of selling the wine, but stories have sold stuff since the beginning of time.

Check it out.

I've now leafed through both The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World and Living With Wine several times, and probably will again. While it's somewhat crude to us the word pornography to describe each of these tomes, perhaps the authors and those familiar with the increasingly acceptable phrase "food porn" will forgive me. The books, replete with centerfold after centerfold of stunning images from wine cellars around the world, are surely the wine collector's version of Playboy, albeit more highbrow. One focuses mostly on the wine cellars of some of the world's greatest wineries, the other focuses on private cellars. Together they represent a drool-worthy composition of what you get when you combine design, history, architecture, wine, and (almost always) gobs and gobs of money.

Living With Wine, by Samantha Nestor with text by Alice Feiring and Photographs by Andrew French came out last year in time for the holiday gift-giving season, and offers an intimate view into roughly thirty temples built to honor that luxury of luxuries: the wine collection.

Most of the cellars showcased in Living with Wine are in private homes, though the book includes New York restaurants Alto and Adour. Ranging from the stark modern expanse of an Asian influenced museum piece to a barrel-vaulted, limestone brick nave, the cellars are beautifully lit and photographed. Each includes a profile of the owner (though some remain anonymous) and often some dialogue with the designer or architect. As if the money shots of magnums of grand cru Burgundies or California cult cabs weren't enough, the profiles also include a listing of the owners most prized bottles.

To some, the very notion of a wine collection -- at least one that contains valuable bottles to be cherished for a time as opposed to just a few more than can be drunk in a single setting -- represents a sort of overt luxury that is not only out of reach, but distasteful. Anyone who might scoff at the pages of the Robb Report or Architectural Digest, will find plenty to disdain in the pages of Living With Wine, which clearly showcases a wanton disregard for cost as much as it does the craft of showcasing wine collections big and small. But that, after all, is part of the fantasy, is it not?

If Living with Wine gives us the opportunity to fantasize about what we might like to build for ourselves, The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World, edited by Astrid Fobelets, Jurgen Lijcops, and Janneke Sinot, on the other hand gives us the opportunity to fantasize about where we might like to visit. Instead of private homes (though the book does include a few stunning private cellars) its pages reveal the "back rooms" of some of the world's greatest wine estates, hotels, and restaurants.

Lacking a table of contents or any apparent organizational principle (that's just how much the editors want you to simply flip your way through) and offering only a paragraph or three about each location, The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World becomes simply a visual feast of Old World wine history embodied in the remarkable fusion of glass bottles and architecture.

My eyes widened with delight at the incredible crypt-like staircase that leads to the cellar of the hotel Don Alfonso south of Naples, Italy; I marveled at the quarry-hewn caves of Chateau Ausone in Bordeaux; and I delighted at a view of the vaults of dusty bottles in the cellars of Massandra in the Ukraine and Chateau Ksara in Lebanon that I have imagined while appreciatively sipping their progeny.

Anyone whose pulse quickens at a pile of bottles overgrown with mold (but not so much that you can't read the little sign: 1934 Clos Vougeot) will want to ensure they enjoy The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World with a full glass of red wine. A pencil and notebook may come in handy as well, to write down all the places that need to be added to the bucket list of places to see (and drink) before you die.

Both Living with Wine and The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World offer many different flavors of perfection when it comes to the celebration of wine in ways that don't involve actually opening a bottle. The armchair collector and armchair traveler will find inspiration in both.

Samantha Nestor, Living With Wine, Clarkson Potter 2009, $47.25, (Hardcover).

Astrid Fobelets, Jurgen Lijcops, and Janneke Sinot, editors, The Most Beautiful Wine Cellars in the World, 2nd ed., Van den Heuvel 2009, $56.39, (Hardcover).

Full disclosure: I received review copies of these books.

I found some nice bottles that all had one thing in common: none of them were made in America. Most were French, some were Italian. I wouldn't have really given that much thought except for the fact that hours earlier I had been unboxing wine samples and groaning at the massive influx of rosé, or more correctly what passes for rosé in California -- clear bottles filled with a liquid so dark it might be Benadryl. Or Pinot Noir, for that matter.

Great rosé is light and lithe, and dances on the palate with bright acidity. It is crisp and bright with faint floral and fruit flavors twined with rivers of wet stone and maybe fresh herbs. Hints of orange peel or hibiscus, strawberry and watermelon are all welcome.

Bad rosé, which includes 95% of the rosé made in this country, is overly fruity yet with a bitter aftertaste. It tastes of cherry and cranberry and cough syrup, and in some cases, it's actually sweet. Of course, let's leave aside White Zinfandel for the moment, which is its own category of beverage that isn't exactly trying to be a proper rosé. The folks who make that stuff and the folks who love it get a pass in this rant.

Of course, this isn't the first time I've cursed in frustration at the sorry state of rosé in this country, but what I don't understand is why it doesn't really seem to be getting any better. It's not like there aren't plenty of examples of how to do it well. It's not like American winemakers haven't managed to figure out how to make decent Pinot Noir. It could hardly be as difficult as growing The Heartbreak Grape.

The only reason I can think of for the pitiful state of rosé in this country is that most consumers don't know the difference between good rosé and bad. Otherwise why in the world would they keep drinking Merlot that is only one or two shades of red lighter than the wine it was pulled out of a few days earlier? Or maybe it's just that most American winemakers are too lazy to be bothered with learning how to make rosé properly and can't be bothered to pick their grapes before they hit 26 Brix?

Well in the event that you're a consumer who's not sure if you know the difference between good rosé and bad, here's a quick lesson.

Good rosé is simple to spot, and you don't even have to open a bottle to get pointed in the right direction at least.

Unless your rosé has the word Tavel on the front label (the rosé-only appellation in France's Rhone Valley that tends to make darker -- but very good -- rosé) a proper rosé should not look like this:

Instead, this is what rosé should look like:

Or ideally even lighter -- light copper, pale salmon, or even just a hint of pink. As light as possible. Not ruby colored. Not garnet colored. Never to be mistaken for a red wine.

And, unless the grapes are in the hands of one of the world's most talented winemakers, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot really aren't viable options for making good rosé. Try Grenache, Cinsault, Carignan, Pinot Noir, Gamay, or even Sangiovese or Tempranillo.

While I'm not a winemaker, and couldn't even pretend to know what I'm doing, I do know that the most important step in making proper rosé is deciding to grow the grapes as if they're going to be made into one, rather than growing the grapes as if they're going to be made into red wine. This means, at the very least, picking them earlier.

Yet so few American winemakers seem willing to do so. What they do instead is make a red wine, and then bleed off some of the juice, in a process known to the French as saignee. While this method itself does not spell problems, as much good rose is made that way, but invariably winemakers don't do it soon enough (hence the rosés that are darker ruby than pink). And because the grapes have been grown, harvested, crushed, and soaked like they are going to be a darker red wine, they have far too many tannins, and other bitter compounds that are fine and dandy in a big red wine, but death to a proper rosé.

Of course, there are a few American winemakers that do know how to make a proper rosé and have proven it by doing so. One of the best rosés made in this country comes from Robert Sinskey, whose ever-so-pale rosé of Pinot Noir has made its way into Whole Foods with some regularity. Other producers who know what they're doing include Tablas Creek, Fort Ross Vineyard, Clos Saron, and York Creek Vineyards. If you're buying pink wine from America, I'd stick to those names.

But by far the best way to ensure you're going to enjoy a proper rosé this summer is to buy French. Look for words on the label like Aix en Provence, Côtes de Provence, Cotes de Ventoux, Bandol, or even Côtes du Roussillon.

Thanks to the efforts of folks like RAP, the Rosé Avengers and Producers organization, we've thankfully reached a point in this country where rosé is actually somewhat fashionable. Now we need to take the next step and actually make it good.

Here's how it works. Every year, the nominating committee gets together and sifts through the hundreds of worthy names to try to come up with a selection of a few people who have had the greatest impact on the California wine industry. Yes, I know, the award should therefore be called the California Wine Hall of Fame, but we've hashed that one though every year, and the Vintners Hall of Fame is what it will stay, despite not every inductee being a vintner. But I digress.

Our job as the nominating committee is to arrive at a list of maybe a dozen or two dozen people that then get presented to essentially every professional wine writer in the country to vote on.

The nominees fall into two categories: Pioneers (folks who have been dead for more than 10 years), and everyone else. Beyond that, the criteria simply have to do with the scale of impact that the person has had on the California wine industry (i.e. large). Inductees can be growers, scientists, journalists, retailers, most anything in addition to winemakers.

Here's the list of everyone that we've inducted so far:

Leon Adams
Gerald Asher
Maynard Amerine, Ph. D.
Andy Beckstoffer
Frederick and Jacob Beringer
Brother Timothy
Al Brounstein
Darrell Corti
John Daniel, Jr.
Jack and Jamie Davies
Georges de Latour
Paul Draper
Ernest and Julio Gallo
Randall Grahm
Miljenko "Mike" Grgich
Agoston Haraszthy
Jess Stonestreet Jackson
Charles Krug
Zelma Long
Louis P. Martini
Carol Meredith, Ph.D.
Justin Meyer
Robert Mondavi
Gustave Niebaum
Harold Olmo, Ph. D.
Andrè Tchelistcheff
Carl Heinrich Wente
Warren Winiarski

The question is, who should be next? The inducting committee is meeting next week, to begin assembling the list. We keep track of the list of folks that don't make the final cut each year, so we've got a good starting point, but it occurs to me that all you readers may have some good ideas.

Who do you think has had a disproportionately large impact on the entire California wine industry, to the point that they need to be memorialized in a bronze plaque in the historic barrel room of the Greystone castle in St. Helena? I'm particularly interested (personally) in names not associated with Napa and its history, which is slightly over-represented in the existing Hall of Fame.

No one knows exactly when the first vines were sunk into the impossibly steep granite hillsides in this particular elbow of the Rhone river valley, but in all likelihood there were grapes growing on the hillside now called Hermitage for more than five centuries before Jesus Christ was born. A mere 326 acres in size (smaller than some Bordeaux estates, aficionados will be pleased to remind you) the thin scrabbly soils of Hermitage's granite hillside represent one of the worlds most singular expressions of terroir, and the apogee of what the Syrah grape is capable of, in my opinion.

Originally called "Ermitage" with an "h" tacked on later for reasons none too clear, this appellation played host to some of the most famous wines in Europe outside of Bordeaux starting as far back as the 16th century. Indeed, though no one particularly cares to remember, there were times when the top Chateaux in Bordeaux used to augment a particularly thin vintage with a little Hermitage for color and body.

If there is one family name indelibly associated with the terroir of Hermitage, it would be Chave. One only need look at the neck of one of the domaine's wine bottles to understand why. Written there in fine print you will see the words "Vignerons de Père en Fils depuis 1481" -- Wine growers from father to son since 1481.

Domaine JL Chave owns about 35 acres of this hillside and has been farming it for more than a century. The family still owns about three acres of vines in the Saint Joseph appellation, which has been passed down through the family for more than sixteen generations.

JL Chave is currently run by the soft spoken Jean-Louis Chave (the modern incarnation of the domaine was named after his grandfather who bore the same name). Chave has been gradually assumed responsibilities for the estate from his father Gerard over the past few years, after getting his MBA and oenology degree here in the United States.

I recently had the pleasure of listening to Jean-Louis talk about his wines, and more importantly, the place where they are grown during a seminar at the Aspen Food and Wine Classic. I hope he will forgive me for my somewhat patchwork reconstruction of some of his remarks, which were punctuated by the ecstatic tasting of his current release wines, as well as some older vintages.

"Yes, we have been here for 16 generations. But I don't sell a name or a brand. What I do is explain and share the history of Hermitage. What is important is not the people that make the wine but where the wines come from. Hermitage has been here before us and will be around after us. It is more important than anything.

I think a lot of people don't know about Hermitage. When they know about the Rhone, it is more the southern Rhone. We are the Northern Rhone, of course, but we are not the very north. We like to say North of the South. We're not in Provence yet. We are in the region where we cook with butter, not olive oil.

It is not a warm place. It is pretty cold. We have more in common with Burgundy as a matter of climate than Chateauneuf-du-Pape as a matter of principle.

Our vineyards are on the hills because they need to look for the sun. Hermitage is Hermitage because it faces south. If there is a place that ever was supposed to be a home for grapes it is Hermitage. I thank my history and my family for finding it. We are very lucky to have these vineyards.

More than anything Hermitage is great, in the sense of Grand Vin, and quite unusually, it is great for both the white and the red wines. It is very rare to have an appellation where you can make both red and white at the same level of quality.

White grapes are nearly one fourth of the appellation, and in our case very, very old vines. Eighty to one-hundred-year-old Marsanne and Roussanne. We have both these grapes, but we don't know how much of each. People ask me what the percentage is of our white wine, and I am being honest when I say we don't know. When the vineyard was planted, the people who did it didn't know they were two different kind of grapes.

The red is Syrah but we don't ever use the word Syrah. We only say Hermitage, or Le Meal, or the various other parcels in the vineyard that give their own personality. The grape is a vector for the soil to express itself in the wine. Granite is the backbone. It gives the tightness in the spine. And then some parts of the vineyard give the flesh and the spice.

We make each parcel separately, and we keep them that way. You have to wait until the very end to see each wine express its personality, and then to finally be able to answer this question: what is Hermitage? There are different answers to that question, but as we like to say, we don't propose more than one each year. Making wine is not our job, it is our life. So this blending every year is not something to do on the day you go into your cellar and say "I feel well, I'm going to blend today." You think about it all the time. You blend in your mind, all the time. It is definitely emotional, and the emotional is important. But you can't be entirely emotional about it, because it is also your livelihood. You need to be objective sometimes, too.

When you look at our bottles you see what you need to know about us. We don't want to be Chave, we want to be Hermitage. That's where the wine comes from. It just happens to be Chave."

Despite making only three primary bottlings each year, the family actually makes dozens of wines, vinifying each section of the Hermitage hillside separately, as each parcel has a slightly different aspect and soil composition, and only blending after the wines are finished and aged in old oak casks or in stainless steel. Very, very little new oak is used on these wines, letting the hand-picked, gently pressed grapes do the talking.

In addition to the white and red Hermitage, the family also makes a red from their property in St. Joseph, and in some years a special red cuvee called Cuvée Cathelin, and an even rarer Vin de Paille dessert wine made from air-dried white grapes.

The wines are nothing short of spectacular, and without question, some of the best in the world. I am particularly fond of the Hermitage Blanc, which I have had occasion to taste only three or four times in my life, but each time I continue to be astonished by what is most definitely one of the world's greatest white wines.

Chave wines are made in minuscule quantities each year, and then only a portion of that production makes its way to the U.S.

TASTING NOTES:

2007 J.L. Chave Hermitage Blanc, Rhone Valley, France
Pale gold in the glass, this wine has an unbelievable nose of sweet cream and honey, lemon curd and jasmine aromas. One of the things I love about this wine is that it really smells like nothing else in the world. In the mouth, the wine has an incredibly sexy texture of liquid glass with a satin polish. Flavors of honeysuckle, beeswax, lemon curd, yellow melon, and a myriad of other fantastic floral flavors swirl and dance on the knife edge of balance that this wine seems to walk. An incredibly long finish rounds out the package. Score: between 9.5 and 10. Cost: $169. Click to buy.

2003 J.L. Chave Hermitage Blanc, Rhone Valley, France
Light yellow gold in the glass, this wine smells incredibly like a combination of piney aromas, honey, bee pollen, and beautiful floral notes. In the mouth, the wine has the usual gorgeous silky texture with flavors of bee pollen, honeysuckle, jasmine, and a fantastic smooth, granitic minerality and length. Impeccably poised and at once both delicate and powerful, the wine demands to be drunk. Fantastic. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $199. Click to buy.

2000 J.L. Chave Hermitage Blanc, Rhone Valley, France
Light yellow gold in the glass with a hint of green, despite being ten years old, this wine looks like it was just bottled, and may have even gotten lighter in color as it has aged. From even a foot away, this wine has a nose of incredible savory, even salty, bee pollen, lemon curd, and honeysuckle. In the mouth it is simply perfect. No other word suffices, and no string of expletives could possibly capture the unique combination of flavors and aromas. An impeccably balanced mouthful of liquid sex that smells like the spiritual essence of golden delicious apples mating with honeysuckle on a nuptial bed of slick wet granite. Flavors of lemon curd and yellow melon swirl through the mouth as the wine lingers for minutes in the finish. This is one of those of utterly fantastic, smack-yourself-over-the-head-with-the-wine-bottle wines. Fucking beautiful. Score: a perfect 10. Cost: $110. Click to buy.

2007 J.L. Chave Saint Joseph Rouge, Rhone Valley, France
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells of bright mulberries, cherries, and delicate, mouthwatering spices. In the mouth the wine attacks with a bright burst of spicy cassis and plum flavors that bounce and swirl with an agility brought on by fantastic acidity. Strong violet flavors emerge on the long finish along with faint tannins. Almost irresistible in its mouthwateringness, having tasted it at this age, I would be hard pressed to keep myself from drinking it, even knowing it would improve for 15 years. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $60. Click to buy.

2006 J.L. Chave Saint Joseph Rouge, Rhone Valley, France
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells of ripe plums, black cherry, and dried cherry fruit. In the mouth, velvety tannins that are lightly tacky in texture and almost playful in the way they tuck into corners of the mouth surround wonderful flavors of black plum and cassis. As the wine moves across the palate, hints of leather and bits of chocolate mixed with wet earth emerge. A beautiful and distinctive wine. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $48. Click to buy.

2007 J. L. Chave Hermitage Rouge, Rhone Valley, France
Dark garnet in the glass has a nose of absolutely incredible purity. Cassis, violets, licorice and a deep woody spice explode out of the glass even at arms length. In the mouth, the wine proves impossible not to swallow. Fantastic flavors of cassis, violets, hints of anise, woodsmoke, and a deep stony minerality are all welded into a seamless, sexy whole. Fantastically balanced, with near-perfect acidity and fine grained, muscular tannins that bring to mind the blue-black rippling beneath the hide of a prize bull. Utterly pure wet stone and violet scents suffuse the minutes long finish. Score: between 9.5 and 10. Cost: $169. Click to buy.

2004 J. L. Chave Hermitage Rouge, Rhone Valley, France
Medium to dark ruby in the glass, with a hint of brick at the rim and faint sediment, this wine smells of faintly smoked meats and granite in the rain. This aromatic image of a slab of mountainside drenched from the sky lingers even as gorgeous leathery flavors of dried apples, cherry, and aromatic cedar run across the palate. Gorgeously powdery tannins swirl and play tag with the bright notes driven by great acidity. The finish is long and delicate. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $159. Click to buy.

2001 J. L. Chave Hermitage Rouge, Rhone Valley, France
Medium ruby in the glass, with a hint of brick at the rim, this wine smells of sandalwood, incense, leather and smoked meats. Some wines, after you smell them you just pray for them to taste exactly as they smell. This is one of those wines. If I could drink those aromas... But in the mouth, the wine is differently delicious, giving me two reasons to love it. Wonderful balanced flavors of leather and cedar and dried apples begin the song that is this wine, followed by and incredible long refrain of cocoa powder and wet wood powdered by lush tannins. Outstanding. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $185 . Click to buy.

Here's what it looked like, courtesy of my little Flip camera placed on the edge of one of the tables.

The video offers the full seminar for those with the patience to watch. The wines I highlighted in the seminar are as follows:

2008 Vins d'Orrance "Cuvee Anais" Chardonnay, Western Cape
Light greenish gold in the glass, this wine has a nose of cold cream and buttered popcorn. In the mouth the wine has a bright, fantastic acidity that brings to life juicy flavors of lemon curd, white flowers, and lemon peel that linger with a really nice minerality in a clean finish. Fresh, vibrant, and full of fruit, this wine is a pleasure to drink. Score: around 9. Cost: $25. Click to buy.

2009 Kleinood "Tamberskloof" Viognier, Stellenbosch
Light greenish gold in the glass, this wine smells of unripe peaches, orange peel, and wet stones. In the mouth it is bright and zingy with great acidity and nice flavors of unripe peach, mandarin oranges, and lemon zest that linger through a long clean finish. The wine lacks the characteristic thick unctuousness of Viognier, which is one of the reasons I like it. Lithe and dancing on the palate, it is quite delicious and in my experience the best example of the variety grown in South Africa. Score: around 9. Cost: $n/a. The wine is sadly not yet available in the U.S. If purchased in South Africa it would cost about $10 US.

2005 Sadie Family Vineyards "Sequillo" Red Wine, Swartland
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells fantastically of forest floor, juicy cherry, and cedar aromas. In the mouth the wine has an explosively aromatic and juicy quality that simply forces you to salivate. Flavors of cherry, black cherry, licorice, and cedar swirl amidst faint tannins and a faint rumbling of minerality underneath. An amazing complexity of flavor, balanced so well makes you wonder why anyone bothers to use new oak on wines at all if you can get something this tasty without any. A long finish of cedar and anise rounds out the package. Definitely one of the better wines being made in South Africa today. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $32. Click to buy.

2005 Kanonkop "Paul Sauer" Red Wine, Simonsberg Ward, Stellenbosch
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells headily of sweet oak and black cherry, with tobacco undertones. In the mouth the wine has a beautiful smoothness to it, a liquid velvet quality that is quite disarming. Flavors of sweet oak, cherry, and tobacco dominate the wine, which is wrapped in faint smooth tannins. To be honest, the oak is a bit strong at this point and needs some time to better integrate to the wine (as I have seen it do in older vintages). A coffee with milk flavor emerges on the long finish. Score: around 9. Cost: $35. Click to buy. (Note that the 2005 vintage is just being released).

2006 Stellekaya "Orion" Cabernet Sauvignon Blend, Stellenbosch
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine has a wonderful nose of green herbs, violets, and black cherry aromas. In the mouth it is smooth and supple, with a rippling glassy musculature of firm tannins. Flavors of cedar, cocoa powder, and cherry swirl through the center of the wine, and hints of violets emerge on the finish. Excellent acidity and wonderful balance, despite being a lush, powerful wine. Score: around 9. Cost: $35. This wine is available in the U.S. but can be difficult to find.

2006 Stark-Conde "Three Pines" Syrah, Jonkershoek Valley
Inky garnet in the glass, this wine smells beautifully of pine, cassis, and black cherry aromas, but with a purity and a resonance that is immediately striking before you even put it in your mouth. On the palate the wine has a remarkable presence that is hard to describe as anything other than clarity. It knows what it is, in the same way a dancer knows how to move with the music. A wonderful welded medley of black cherry, cassis, and wet stones mix with a shifting smoke of incense, spices, and green herbs. Juicy and earthy all at the same time, while sliding across the tongue in a satin slipperiness, this is one hell of a sexy wine. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $35. Click to buy.

This year I wanted to highlight some of the least known wines or producers of Napa in an attempt to get people to broaden their horizons, and showcase some of the diversity that flies a bit under the surface of the sea of Cabernet.

The seminar was also an excuse for me to share some real gems -- a few of which are some of my absolute favorite wines made in the valley, to the point that I actually buy them with some regularity.

I tried to make a video of this seminar as well, but the conditions were less favorable than the South African seminar. It was popular and because they squeezed so many folks into the tent, there wasn't table space for my tripod and flip camera. As a result I had to fudge it a little and I ended up with a video with lousy sound and my head cut off a lot of the time. So no video of this one to share, sadly.

Instead I'll offer my tasting notes on the wines below, and some brief thoughts on why they qualify as some of Napa's secrets.

2008 Smith Madrone Riesling, Spring Mountain District
Near colorless in the glass, this wine smells of rainwater, lychee, and wet stones. In the mouth it offers delicate flavors of unripe pear, lychee, and wet stones with a lovely wet chalkboard quality on the finish. Balanced and comely, a small bit of residual sugar adds a lip smacking quality to the wine. Score: around 9. Cost: $25. Click to buy.

Smith-Madrone is a lesser known producer that has a great "lost in time" quality to it. Founders Stu Smith and Charles Smith revived an ancient vineyard site that Stu found while hiking on Spring Mountain. The first thing they planted? Riesling. Some of those vines are now 30+ years old and are yielding a tiny amount of fruit that goes into this bottling, which is one of California's very best. Very few people have had a Napa Riesling, and few get to try this one, which is sold almost entirely to those in the know.

2007 Heitz Cellars Grignolino, Napa Valley
Light ruby in color with a hint of purple, this wine has a nose of bright huckleberry and blackberry fruit aromas. In the mouth it has a bright strawberry jam, cassis, and spicy cherry flavor that makes it difficult to take life seriously. Excellent acidity and a bouncy juicy personality make this wine a real pleasure to drink. Not complicated or complex, just damn fun. Serve slightly chilled for best effect. Score: around 9. Cost: $15. Click to buy.

One of the best values of any wine in Napa, this is also perhaps the least known bottling by a famous producer. In 1961 by Joe and Alice Heitz bought a little 8-acre property from a Swiss-Italian farmer looking to get out of the wine business. The entire property was planted with his favorite grape, and one he was sure would be the future of Napa valley: grignolino. Originally from the Piemonte region of Italy, the grape is grown almost nowhere else, but the Heitz family in its wisdom has preserved the original acreage. If you don't get your annual allotment of Martha's Vineyard Cabernet, you might pick up a case or two of this wine (or the rosé they also make from the grape).

2007 Lang & Reed "214" Cabernet Franc, Napa Valley
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells of cherry, tobacco, and as it gets more air, some wonderfully floral aromas. In the mouth the wine has a wonderful polish and presence, with flavors of cherry, cedar, cocoa powder, fantastic acidity, and wonderful velvety tannins. Incredibly lush and juicy, the wine has a rich timbre to it that makes it super delicious. Outstanding. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $40. The wine will be released on Bastille Day (July 14th) 2010. Call the winery and get some if you want it.

This wine is a secret for two reasons. One, because Lang & Reed wine company, dedicated to making Cabernet Franc in a valley obsessed with Cabernet Sauvignon, flies very much under the radar for most people. Two because this wine (until my seminar three weeks ago) has never been tasted by the public. A brand new bottling made from the only plantings (to anyone's knowledge) of the Etay 214 clone of Cabernet Franc direct from the Loire, it is the latest in a series of stellar wines made by John and Tracy Skupny, the high school sweethearts who fell in love and then fell in love again with Chinon as they traveled around the world together.

2001 Farella Park "Alta" Red Wine, Napa Valley
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine has a nose of sweet tobacco, cherry, and wet earth. In the mouth this blend of 70% Cabernet Sauvignon and 30% Merlot has a lovely, soft tannic structure and velvety texture that caresses flavors of cedar, cherry, tobacco, leather, and wonderful earthiness. Perfect acidity, wonderful clarity and length, with fantastic mineral qualities that linger in the finish, this wine would be very difficult to peg as 10 years old. Aging beautifully, it has another 10 years of improvement ahead of it. Outstanding. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $75. Click to buy.

Farella Park Vineyards, run by winemaker/philosopher/botanist Tom Farella is one of my favorite secret wineries in Napa. Located in the often-overlooked Coombsville region of the valley, Farella winery was started in the 70s by Tom's dad, Frank. Tom started working there as soon as he was able, and now, despite being relatively young, he has nearly 30 vintages under his belt. He took over as winemaker fully in 1990, and it took him 10 years before he felt like he understood the vineyard enough to make a wine that fully expressed its potential. In 2001 it was time, and he created "Alta." I was truly privileged to offer a taste of this wine to the crowd in Aspen, and they were quite lucky to have a chance to taste it, given the small quantities that were made, and even smaller quantity that remains in the winery's cellar. It is one of my favorite Napa Cabernets.

2007 Casa Nuestra "Tinto St. Helena" Red Blend, St. Helena, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine smells of mocha, dates, prunes, and wonderful blackberry aromas. In the mouth the wine has taut, leathery tannins that make a fist around flavors of blackberry, cocoa powder, dried figs, black cherry and dusty earthiness. The finish has a distinctly dusty quality with lingering flavors of leather and tight earthiness. Unique and distinctive, the wine is quite young and will benefit from three to five years of bottle aging. Score: around 9. Cost: $35. Click to buy.

Whenever someone asks me where they ought to go "off the beaten path" in Napa, I send them to Casa Nuestra. With its pen of goats, rock and roll blaring in the tasting room, and gregarious tasting room staff (and their wine club secret handshake), it is one of the least "Napa" wineries in Napa, if you get my drift. This wine is special because it comes from an ancient mixed black vineyard planted with (hold on to your hats): Cabernet Pfeffer, Zinfandel, Alicante, Mourvedre, Mondouse, Carignane, Refosco, Pinot Noir, Petit Sirah, Gamay, and four or five varieties that have yet to be identified. Actually the wine comes from a new vineyard in front of the tasting room that has been painstakingly grafted from this original vineyard onto newer, healthier rootstock. The winery now makes this bottling, a traditional field blend of all the above grapes, and a blend from the original vineyard called Tinto Oakville. Every year I have a different favorite, this year it was Tinto St. Helena. One of the more unique wines in Napa.

2005 Spencer Roloson "La Herradura" Syrah, Napa Valley
Inky garnet in the glass, this wine smells of deep, black cassis, white pepper, and briary blackberry fruit. In the mouth the wine has a fantastic weight and texture on the palate, with velvet glove tannins that caress flavors of blackberry, espresso, woodsmoke, and cassis that swirl on top of a foundation of deep minerality. The finish has a lovely tart, floral quality. Impeccably balanced, with a raw yet restrained power, the wine is frankly, impressive. Quite possibly the best Syrah made in Napa. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $48. Click to buy.

This wine is a secret for the opposite reason of the 214 Cabernet Franc. This will be the last vintage that the public gets to taste of this wine. The 2006 vintage wasn't bottled, and in 2007 the vineyard was sold, and the winemaker, Sam Spencer no longer has rights to the fruit. This is a double shame, not just because of what this wine demonstrates is possible from this vineyard, but because Sam planted and farmed this vineyard for the previous owners. A wonderfully unique vineyard that has a bowl-shaped 180 degree exposure, it was planted with "suitcase cuttings" from (if my memory serves) Hermitage in the Northern Rhone. The 2005 is, poignantly, my absolute favorite vintage of this wine, and a demonstration of what a great loss it will be to no longer get to taste it.

* * *

There are very few "true" secrets in Napa. Most of the roads are pretty well traveled. But the wines above will reward anyone looking for something special off the beaten path. A few are really only available by calling the winery, which I highly encourage you to do. Tell them I sent you.

The Man. The Wine Maker. The Legend.

What does the man who has done everything do for an encore? He crafts one of the finest wines in the country, of course.

Just reading about some of the things wine owner Vito Bialla has accomplished in his life leaves me winded. I mean, here’s a guy who’s served his country in Viet Nam, started his own highly successful business by the time he was 20, and became the only person ever to run two Ultraman competitions within 6 days. Not only that, he’s also one of the decorated extreme distance swimmers in the world at over 60 years of age and has even led a team of world class swimmers across the Sea of Cortez to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project. Woof! I can barely pour myself a bowl of cereal without needing a nap, but not this guy.

So it comes as no surprise that when a man like Vito Bialla decides it get into the wine making business, he does it with the same amount of determination and commitment that he’s applied to his own life. Creating anything less than one of the world’s best wines is completely out of the question. That’s why he’s gone to great lengths to ensure that every bottle that leaves his winery is as perfect as it can be. Only the best 100% hand-picked, hand-destemmed grapes are chosen from the top Atlas Peak Vineyards of Napa Valley to create this Bialla Vineyards 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon. Offering a mix of rich currant, cedar, tobacco, mineral, and iodine, this full-bodied wonder’s flavors flow through splendidly and ends with a firm tannin finish. With a 92 point score from Wine Spectator, this amazing cult-wine is well-structured and intense, much like Vito Bialla himself.

In life, there are two types of people: those who do great things, and the rest of us that attempt to cling to their coattails and enjoy the fruits of their labor. I, for one, plan to celebrate my own life’s mediocrity with a glass of Bialla Vineyards 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon. As long as I don’t get a cramp lifting the glass, that is.

2007 Bialla Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon:

• Acres: 1.6
• Clones: Cabernet Sauvignon 7, 8, 337   Merlot 181
• Rootstock: 7/101-14, 8/SO4, 337/101-14, Merlot/101-14
• Training: Cordon trained
• Pruning: 92% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Merlot

• Date picked: Cabernet Sauvignon - October 1; Merlot - September 11
• How picked: Hand harvested
• Brix: Cabernet Sauvignon 27.1-27.5, Merlot 26.7
• TA: Cabernet Sauvignon 0.55 -0.63; Merlot 0.68
• pH: Cabernet Sauvignon 3.75-3.80; Merlot 3.65

• Fermented in separate 1-ton lots
• 50% whole berries to fermenters
• 3-day cold soak at 50 degrees F
• 3 punch downs per day
• 88 degree fermentation temp
• Maceration days: Cabernet Sauvignon 30; Merlot 21, Pressed to 1.2 bar, combined with free-run immediately

• Oak type: 100 % French oak (Sylvain, Saury, Bel Air, Demptos, Gamba)
• Ages: 100% New
• Forests: Center of France, Allier
• Toast levels: Medium plus
• Rackings: Six rackings

• TA: 0.59 g/100mL
• PH: 3.95
• Alcohol: 15.57 % abv (alcohol by volume)
• Residual sugar: < 0.02 % (g/100mL)

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

We know what you’re thinking; we thought the same thing.

But no, “White Zeppelin” isn’t a euphemism.

In fact, it turns out it actually refers to Stillman Brown’s brand new debut never-before-seen White Zeppelin 2009 Chardonnay. And he’s sharing a limited production with Wine.Woot.

The Woot family of sites doesn’t often get a lot of debut items. We don’t know if you’ve looked around, but our M.O. is usually electronics that were a questionable idea two or three years ago. Not so this time. This time we’re bringing you a blend of clone 4 Arroyo Seco Chardonnay and Viognier grapes with huge stone fruit aromas and grapefruit flavors.

It’s so good, in fact, that it won silver at the 2010 Orange County Fair despite being just two weeks old. And here at the Woot family we know the importance of associating yourself with an overachiever.

2009 White Zeppelin Chardonnay:

• 97% Chardonnay, 3% Viognier
• 14.53% alcohol,
• pH 3.43,
• Production: 200 cases

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

ReRhone

They say life begins at forty. If this is true, Andrew Murray has had one heck of a gestation period.

Let’s recap, shall we? 1999, age 27: The Chronicle names him a Winemaker To Watch. 2004, age 32: Food & Wine Magazine names him the #1 Taste Maker Of The Year, at the top of their list of under 35s. 2006, age 34: The Chronicle gives three stars to his 2004 Tous les Jours Syrah. 2009, age 37: sells a Syrah Trio on Wine.woot. Really, what more can a man do in life?

That’s why we’re so pleased to see the return of Andrew Murray’s exceptional Rhone varietals in today’s three pack of delicious wines. Take, for example, the 2007 Syrah Terra Bella Vineyard. With grapes from the hilly reaches west of the 101, in Pasa Robles, this Syrah comes from the best possible fruit the vineyard has to offer. Very ripe, yet well balanced, the wine it creates is the darkest in the cellar with distinctive aromas and the flavor of blueberries and raspberries. Sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it?

Or what about the 2006 Espérance? Named in homage of the inn in Vezelay, where the young Andrew Murray first stayed while researching his varietals, this wine is a Murray-style recreation of the great reds of Southern France. It’s rich, concentrated, with aromas and flavors of ultra-ripe strawberries, black cherry, and blueberry, mixed in with the spiciness of cinnamon, vanilla, and crushed black pepper. And did you know that Espérance means hope?

And then, there’s the 2006 Grenache. As the grenache is one of Andrew Murray’s interests (he names it one of the best and most interesting of all the grape varieties in the world), this wine is handled very carefully. Planted on steep North-South facing rows in gravelly, lime-rich soils in a warm to hot climate, the grapes have been watched carefully, with very specific prunings, thinnings and the clean up of cluster wings and tips. This results in the best possible fruit at harvest, and an exciting wine at the very end of the rigorous winemaking process. As Winemakers has commented, “The aromas of this wine make it obvious that you are drinking a Grenache…they include the tell-tale wild strawberry, black cherry and a spicy peppery quality. It is a very powerful wine, with a medium-full body and soft lingering finish. It will be at its best if consumed within 3 years.” And who are we to argue?

These three wines represent the exciting growth of a man who is just now entering his prime. He’s respected by his peers, a master in his field, loves his work, and isn’t even forty. So, sure, we can understand why you might want to hate on him personally. It’s only natural to be jealous. We kinda hate him too. But one thing you won’t hate is his three pack of Rhone varietal wines. And we’re very glad to have Andrew Murray back with us again.

 2007 Syrah Terra Bella Vineyard:

•  Varieties: 100% Hillside Grown Syrah
• Vineyard Composition:
• 100% Syrah, Terra Bella Vineyard, Paso Robles
• Alcohol: 15.9%
• Production: 400 12bottle X 750 mL Cases
• Release Date: January, 2010

 2006 Espérance:

• Composition: 60% Grenache Noir, 25% Syrah, 15% Mourvedre
• Appellation: Central Coast
• Vineyard Composition: 75% Brave Oak Vineyard , Paso Robles / 10% Terra Bella Vyds, Paso Robles / 15% McGinley Vyd, Santa Ynez
• Ageing: Aged 22 months in French Oak
• Production: 500 cases produced
• Bottling Date: August 1, 2008
• Alcohol: 15.1%
• pH: 3.75
• TA: 5.7g/L

 2006 Grenache:

• Composition: 90% Grenache Noir, 10% Syrah
• Appellation: Central Coast
• Vineyard Composition: 90% Brave Oak Vineyard, Paso Robles / 10% Watch Hill Vyd, Los Alamos
• Ageing: Aged 18 months in French Oak
• Production: 450 cases produced
• Release Date: March 1 2007
• Alcohol: 15.4%
• pH: 3.78
• TA: 5.7g/L

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Victory Lap

Wellington Vineyards must really, really like you guys. They’re finally letting you have a crack at their personal stash.

Not that a run-of-the-mill Wellington bottle is anything to sneeze at. And not that Wellington’s been stingy with its affections before, what with the numerous superb Wellington deals they’ve offered here before, not to mention Peter Wellington sharing his wisdom on our blog. (Although his blogging has taken a back seat to more “pressing” matters lately, he’s earned a barrel full of slack-off credit from us.)

But today the relationship ascends to a whole new level. Wellington doesn’t bottle a Reserve very often, busting out the R word only when they can muster up a blend better than their single-varietal Cabs or Merlots. They’ve only bottled Victory six times in 17 years. And one of those times was 2005, when every grape they touched turned to gold.

The 2005 Victory Reserve shows the winery at its most Wellingtonian. Powerful, subtle, complex, and intensely aromatic, it’s the first Victory to include a substantial Petit Verdot element along with the dominant Cabernet Sauvignon and the little splash of Merlot. The finished product has a something-for-everyone thing going on. Your nose gets cassis, mulberry, dark chocolate, licorice, orange peel, violets, cedar, vanilla, and pepper. Your mouth revels in paradox: a rich but not heavy entry, a chewy but not harsh finish.

Now, don’t go overthinking this, agonizing over what it means, wondering where your relationship is going. You and Wellington Vineyards are still just having a good time and if things get more serious, well, you can decide what to do when that time comes. Just take it slow, try to resist popping the 2005 Victory Reserve open right away, and stick it in your cellar until it feels right to make that next move.

2005 Victory Reserve, Sonoma County:

• Composition: 70% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20% Petite Verdot, 10% Estate Merlot
• 14.4% alcohol
• 3.65pH
• Production: 471 cases
• Release date: December, 2008

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Tova, listen to us: we’re your parents.

We’re really not on board for this idea, okay?

Honey, you’re 13. The simple fact is you’re just not ready to set sail across the globe. Well, because it’s dangerous. And not just for you, y’know. What sort of self-centered jerk would take off with little to no regard for the people who will have to eventually risk their lives trying to track you down in 30-foot swells?

Maybe you should try winemaking.

Your mother and I are just saying that it worked for Laura Zahtila. She bought her vineyard in 1999 and already she’s making award-winning wines like the Laura Zahtila Vineyard 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Vineyard Georges III! Have you tried this?

Well, no, of course you haven’t. You’re 13.

Yes, we acknowledge that circumnavigating the globe would be a pretty satisfying venture to accomplish. But what about crafting a deep, purple wine with plum, sour cherry, and toasted oak flavors? Surely people would be more impressed by a 13-year-old who can manage to extract a luxurious finish and soft, supple mouth feel.

Plus, you wouldn’t be all alone stranded in the Indian Ocean and dodging waves bigger than office buildings.

Oh, you’re right Tova. We can’t stop you from following your dreams, no matter how terrible and dangerous they may be. After all, we’re only your parents.

2005 Laura Zahtila Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon:

• Appellation: Napa Valley
• Alcohol: 14.2
• Sub appellation: Rutherford
• TA: .61
• Varietal: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
• pH: 3.80
• Harvest Date: October 21, 2005 and Nov. 1, 2005
• Cooperage: 100% French Oak
• Brix at Harvest: 24 and 25
• Production: 864 cases

This wine has a deep, concentrated violet-purple color and wonderful, floral bouquet.  Clone 6 cabernet fruit saturates the palate with nuances of rich plum, a hint of sour cherry and toasty French oak.  A long and luxurious finish adds to the lovely, velvety mouth feel.  This wine was aged for 21 months on 40% new French Oak barrels.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

People at work are always surprised to find out I can cook

Melting cheese is “cooking,” right?

I don’t know why my coworkers peg me as a culinary ignoramus. Maybe it’s because the only thing anyone at my job ever sees me eat is my lunch, which is usually a half-dozen of those beef sticks from the gas station that come packaged together with a little square-cut beam of cheese, which I wash down with a liter of Coke Zero (I’m watching my figure).

But that’s the workplace me. A guy has to be efficient on the job. I take lunch at my desk, so I can’t really make time or space for a fancy spread.

At home, though, I’ve been getting into the finer things. I dine European style. At least I do now that I heard of Raclette.

OK, I’ll be honest: The Raclette is new for me. I used to pretty much live on baked potatoes or lunchmeat that I melted cheese on in the microwave. Kind of low-class, I know. But it turns out there’s this European dish from Switzerland and France that’s—get this—melted cheese over baked potatoes or lunchmeat. Well, they don’t call it “lunchmeat;” they call it “charcuterie,” but I’m American, so.

Yeah, they sure know how to live over there in Europe. And I should know. Ever since I picked up this Raclette thing, my quality of life has gone way up. Plus it’s easy to use and easy to clean, and sized just right for one or two people. (One if it’s me. Two if it’s a couple skinny Frenchies, I guess.)

Anyway, it’s great! I feel like a hundred times more sophisticated! And there’s no going back for me. I’m a new man. I’m totally going to start putting my Combos and my Jack Links turkey nuggets in little finger bowls and call it tapas.

Features:

• Melt cheese under the burner while grilling on top
• Cheese is warmed on one side, so that the softened cheese can be scraped off the top
• Enjoyable for dinners, a quick snack,  camping or for a picnic
• Compact design
• Easy to use

Additional Photos:

• Mini Raclette - Detail
• Retail Package

In The Box:

• Mini Raclette
• 2 Enamel Pans
• Removable Grill

It Is Your Destiny

There is a turning point in every life.

The day Picasso mastered a squiggle. The day the Ramones got in the elevator. The day Madonna bought her first bra. And that lunch back in 1999, when Vic Bourassa met Robert Mondavi and brought out a bottle of his own homemade wine.

Of course, Mondavi has been considered by many as the godfather of California wine, so his encouragement was worth more than the cost of the entree and two desserts. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Vic Bourassa continued his hobby, and turned those few homemade bottles into the Bourassa Vineyards in Napa Valley, which is where today’s four pack of 2006 Synergy Cabernet Sauvignons was born.

Remember that story when you begin to enjoy the aromatics of sweet cherry and flowery herbs, the palate full of rosemary, black currant and cinnamon, the firm oak flavors and the long, lovely, enjoyable finish. The Synergy Cab is surely a well-made wine, but without that first encouragement, would Vic Bourassa have continued in the same direction? Maybe instead he’d have given up in frustration, turning to root beer or perhaps even salt water taffy. What a loss that could have been!

Thankfully, Bourassa and Mondavi were in the right place at the right time, and their moment together led to this delicious wine which you see here today. Just think: maybe by simply being here to order this four pack of 2006 Synergy Cabernet Sauvignon, you’ve found a turning point of your own.

2006 Bourassa Vineyards Synergy Cabernet Sauvignon

•  Varietal: 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 14% Merlot, 5% Petit Verdot, 3% Cabernet Franc, 2% Malbec.
• Appellation:  Napa Valley
• Barrel Aging: 36 Months in French Oak
• Alcohol: 13.9%
• Production: 1,088 cases
• Bottle Size: 750ml
• Winemaker: Gary Galleron
• Produced by: Bourassa Vineyards

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Little wineries with high quality wines are like buried treasure, I guess, but these days my goal is not to hoard but to share as widely as possible.

I first discovered Cooper Garrod Vineyards at a trade tasting for the Santa Cruz Mountains Wineries Association. I was making my methodical way down a table of producers and so when I got to the Cooper Garrod table, I dove in, though I hadn't ever heard of the winery before. About halfway through the lineup of bottles I started to realize that these wines were all well above average in quality, some were truly excellent, and all of them had a personality that spoke of meticulous winemaking with very little fancy technique. By the time I finished all the wines, I was pretty excited. I found myself looking around the room, wondering why everyone wasn't mobbing the table.

Cooper Garrod Vineyards is a 3,000 case production winery nestled in the hills above Saratoga, California. The winery represents the agricultural legacy of the Garrod Family, who purchased a modest 120 acres of land in 1893 that looked down on the spreading orchards that covered much of what is today known as Silicon Valley. The land they purchased was itself orchard land, and the family settled down to making a living growing apricots and prunes like many of the other farmers in the area.

Exactly 100 years later, the granddaughter of those early farmers, Louise Garrod, along with her husband, George Cooper, established a commercial winery on the property. The farm had been planted with grapevines since 1973 when George, a WWII fighter pilot and NASA test pilot, retired and decided to keep himself busy making a little wine for the family. Cooper was lucky enough to befriend legendary winemaker Martin Ray, who was one of the pioneers of single varietal winemaking in California, and helped establish the Santa Cruz Mountains as a serious winemaking region in the 1930's and 40's. With Ray's help, Cooper became more than competent as a winemaker over the next twenty years, and in 1993, with the help of his eldest son, Bill Cooper, and his nephew Jan Garrod, the family established the small winery that they still run today.

The family estate is planted with 28 hillside acres of completely dry-farmed grapes, a little less than half of which are planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, with the rest split somewhat evenly between Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay, and Syrah with a tiny bit of Viognier and Merlot thrown in. As with many such family operations, the grapes are all picked by hand before being meticulously sorted, destemmed and crushed. They are fermented in small lots, often with "native" yeasts and the red wines are laboriously punched down by hand (a process in which the floating fruit and skins are pushed down into the fermenting juice to circulate air and extract color from the skins) at least four times daily. Most are bottled unfined and unfiltered.

Among other things the winery produces four Cabernet and Cabernet Blends, including this single vineyard wine. All of the Cabernet based wines are released "when they're ready." Perhaps influenced by Martin Ray, who was a proponent of extended aging, George and Bill Cooper tend to let their wines sit a bit longer both in oak and in bottle before release. This 2004 is therefore the current release of this wine.

The Lone Oak Cabernet Sauvignon is made from grapes grown on a steeply terraced hillside vineyard that was planted in 1989. The three-acre plot sits at about 1,000 feet of altitude on the eastern side of the Santa Cruz Mountains and faces South, soaking up the sunshine. The grapes were picked in multiple passes through the vineyard, destemmed and then fermented in batches with usual punch-down regime. Secondary fermentation took place in French oak barrels, and then the wine aged for an additional 21 months before bottling, and then another three years in bottle before release.

Cooper-Garrod's wines are generally made in what most would consider an Old World style. They are restrained rather than brash, and some might even be mistaken for French Bordeaux if tasted blind. Anyone interested in honest wines that are good values and testaments to the quality of modern winemaking in the Santa Cruz Mountains should most certainly seek them out.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a wonderfully aromatic nose of classic green herbal, cherry, and graphite aromas. In the mouth the wine has a classic bordeaux complexion of pencil lead, cherry, leather, and rich espresso notes. Lovely cherry and unspecific floral aromas float around through the finish. Great acidity and fantastic balance. A mere 13% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
This wine, with its wonderful balance of earthiness and fruit will accompany many things well. I'd love to try it with a gourmet burger and fries. Right NOW.

Overall Score: around 9

How Much?: $28

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

If by chance you haven't heard about this saga rippling through the world of fine wine, never fear, the major motion picture will be coming out in 2012, directed by David Koepp.

I've read many accounts of the issues, allegations, facts, and emotions surrounding the various players in the scandal. I've also watched with interest as the story has started to become less about the cantankerous Koch and his bottomless legal coffers, and more about the growing epidemic of counterfeit wine in the upper echelons of the wine industry.

And now Michael Steinberger, one of my favorite wine writers, has just penned a truly exceptional piece of investigative wine journalism that throws new light on many shadowy nooks and crannies of the luxury wine market, including the role that Robert Parker may have unwittingly played in encouraging the growing counterfeit wine industry.

Even if you have gotten a little tired of this story, as I have, this lengthy exposé is worth reading in its entirety. I'll go out on a limb here and peg it as the most likely contender I've ever seen for a James Beard Journalism award. It's great stuff.

Check it out. You'll never want to buy another magnum of 1921 Petrus again.

No matter the fuss some people raise about the increasing globalization of the wine industry, the fact remains that there's nothing to be done about it. It just is. Technology, demographics, politics and economics have shaped the world to the point that even those who would seek to avoid the effects of globalization can no more do so than they can decide to fly by flapping their wings.

And even those that might take baby steps to take part in the global marketplace cannot avoid the sometimes bizarre implications of the ability to sell to anyone anywhere.

Take the startling realization that Adelsheim Vineyards recently came to in the course of exploring international markets for their excellent Oregon Pinot Noirs. As reported in a blog post by Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post, David Adelsheim is having to dramatically change his labels in order to sell his wine to audiences like the British and the Japanese.

For those unfamiliar with Adelsheim VIneyards, for years the bottles have been labeled with artwork done by Adelsheim's wife Ginny, including wonderful portraits of their daughter Elizabeth, who can be seen growing older vintage after vintage on the succession of labels.

The award winning labels themselves have become as famous as the wines, so changing them was not something to undertake lightly. But apparently if Adelsheim wants to sell his wines to the British, the labels need to look more "French" and if he wants to sell his wine to the Japanese, the girl on the front making eye contact with the buyer has got to go.

I shook my head when I read that, and marveled at the craziness of the world we live in. When a tiny little Oregon winery is thinking about branding to appeal to specific cultural values and buying triggers, you know the world has, in the words of journalist Thomas Friedman, become very, very flat.

Read the story at the Washington Post.

Do low yielding vineyards necessarily produce better wine grapes?

Measuring by tons per acre, hectoliters per hectare, or as I prefer to put it, "bottles per vine" (because the first two commonly used measurements don't account for vine density, and because it's simpler and better) doesn't provide an easy assessment of fruit concentration or wine quality, though it is an important factor in most cases. Assuming that the vine is in balance, with the right number of leaves per cluster, optimum canopy and vine orientation for the varietal and area, there are still other complexities. Lower yields from smaller berries that have a higher skin to juice ratio (because of the cube/square law) will be more highly flavored since it is the layer just under the skin that provides almost all of the biochemicals from which aromas and flavors come.

Let's take two examples to show how complex this can be; on a very cool coastal hillside with poor soils, a vine won't be able to ripen more than one or two bottles worth of grapes per vine, so the yields must be kept very low; by thinning, for example. If the vine is an excellent clone of Pinot Noir or Syrah, you may achieve spectacular results. If it's Sauvignon Blanc or Cabernet Sauvignon, the resulting wine may be concentrated but overly weedy and herbal. Now let's consider a much warmer area, perhaps with richer soil. At very low yields, the vine's much larger photosynthetic resources will enable it to ripen the grapes too rapidly, resulting in high sugars but incomplete, simple flavors; though Pinot Noir doesn't belong in the area at all, the other three varietals would benefit from having extra weeks of 'hang time' for the fruit to mature, as the vine has to divide its energies among a score of grape clusters instead of a few.

All of this assumes that the winemaking process has been adapted to the fruit's chemistry and flavors . . . do you see how complex this can be? I have grafted over or planted some fairly extreme vineyard sites over the years, and I always seek to control yields, but it's only part of the artistic and scientific process that goes into making outstanding wine. And here I haven't said anything about wine personality; perhaps my next post . . .

Stillman is also extending an invitation to all Wooters to attend his annual fund raiser and party this August 11-15 in Cayucos, CA. The party benefits the Cal Poly Wine and Viniculture scholarship, and features the musical stylings of both Dread Zeppelin and Meth Leppard. Take a look at at the invitation so you fully understand what you're getting yourself into.

And in this corner: weighing in at 274 pounds and hailing from parts unknown…

THE ALBINO RHINO!

And there’s the bell! 14,000 fans have packed inside the Saddle Dome to watch Steve “The Steve” Stevens defend his Intergalactic Continental Void in Canada Title Belt against the most monstrous of challengers in the Albino Rhino! Jack Grapple here, calling the action alongside 46-time American Samoa/Polynesian Title Holder “Darling” Darryl Dangle.

“Good to be here Jack, and good to finally see a fine wrestler the caliber of the Albino Rhino get his due and his shot at glory!”

Oh you have got to be kiddin’ me, Dangle. The Albino Rhino is the lowest of the low! A thief! A Charlatan! Why, he used his mineral flavor and firm acidity to lure away Stevens’ manager and girlfriend, “Lacy” Lucy Diaz! He’s absolutely despicable!

“Maybe to you, Grapple, but I see him for what he is: an opportunistic fighter who plays the game the way it’s meant to be played.”

Quick kick to the midsection there, but it doesn’t seem to faze the Rhino. And I have to disagree with you there, Dangle. Wrestling is a sacred sport, a hallowed tradition that doesn’t need the scents of apples, citrus, and flowers that this GOON brings to our federation! Oooh! Rake to the eyes by the Rhino and Stevens is down!

“Cry all you want, Grapple, but you can’t deny the talent! You can’t deny the glory! You can’t deny the Rhino!”

I sure as hell can, Dangle, and I will! Real fans know this guy’s nothing but a punk, and I hope Stevens puts him out of commission for good here tonight. Oh! No! Clothesline! The champ is down! And now a Vietnamese Death Punch! This looks bad!

“Oh it looks beautiful, baby! Here it comes! Here it comes!”

Stevens is dazed, wandering around the ring, right into the trap the Rhino has set up. Oh come on Stevens, snap out of it!

“It’s too late, baby! The Rhino’s ready!”

GORE VIDAL! GORE VIDAL! OH MY GOD THE ALBINO RHINO TOOK STEVENS OUT WITH HIS FINISHING MOVE, THE GORE VIDAL!

“This one’s over, Grapple! Crown him!”

One, two, THREE! Ladies and gentlemen I can’t believe it and I sure as hell don’t like it, but here’s your new champion: The Albino Rhino!

Woot Cellars Albino Rhino:

•  Varietal: 88% Albariño 12% Riesling
• Harvest Date: September 23, 2009      
• Total Acidity: 0.63g/100ml 
• pH: 3.41
• Alcohol: 13.7%                            
• Residual Sugar: 7.02 g/l (dry)
• Brix at Harvest: 23.4˚Brix

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

BYOPitons

OK, dude, I admit I was pretty POed when I saw what you’d done with our canteens.

Replacing all of our water with 2006 Clif Climber Red? Total jerk move, I thought. Out on a hike, that water could make the difference between survival and, uh, un-survival or whatever. Believe me when I say, dude, that I was ready to throw you into a ravine for that little stunt.

But for some reason, I took a sip. And then another. And one more. By now I had calmed down. I could see – or, rather, taste – the beauty in what you’d done. This California red blend combines the dark ruby color, cherry and spice aromas, and ripe, juicy tannins of Zinfandel and Syrah with the depth and structure of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. By the time that Petite Sirah-style long, juicy finish set in, I was ready to forgive.

Then I noticed that it’s made by the same Clif people responsible for every climber’s favorite protein bars. At that point, dude, my hate turned to hugs.

Now, of course, wine and rock-climbing don’t mix. No problem, though: once we found what you’d put in our canteens, we never left base camp.

2006 Clif Climber Red:

•  Blend: 32% Zinfandel, 28% Syrah, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, 11% Merlot, 4% Petite Sirah
• Alcohol: 14.7%
• Release Date: Fall 2009
• Cases Produced: 5,000 Cases
• Winemaker: Sarah Gott

Dark ruby in color, the 2006 Climber Red features enticing aromas of blackberry and spice while juicy flavors of raspberry and black cherry are the introduction to this well balanced wine. Intense notes of black fruit, cocoa and espresso commingle on the mid palate as the integrated tannins carry the ripe fruit flavors through for a long luscious finish.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Table Salt For One

“Pepper! You’re back! Did you see her? Did you talk to her? Did she say anything about me? Tell me everything, please!”

“Table Salt, you said you weren’t going to do this. You’ve still got a lot of healing to do. Just let it go.”

“Come on, man! It’s driving me crazy. She hasn’t taken me out of the cupboard in a month now. She’s seeing another spice, isn’t she? Is it Cumin? Paprika? Tell me it’s not Garlic Salt because, I swear, if it is…”

“Will you listen to yourself? Serious, T. S., just stop with all this. She’s moved on, okay?”

“Moved on without me? Impossible. We used to flavor everything together, her and I. How could she just stop adding me to things, huh? Can you answer that?”

“Alright, fine. You want to know? It’s that important? Yes, she’s seeing other spices.”

“Spi… spices? Plural?”

“Yep. Four of them. A quartet of sea salts, actually. Flavors everything she cooks with them lately. Not bad salts, either. At least, they’re a lot less whiny and clingy than some of the other salts I know.”

“What? That can’t possibly be true. How come I’ve never seen them in here with us?”

“Well, that’s because they never leave the counter top, T.S. If she’s not flavoring meats with the iron-oxide enriched Alaea Hawaiian Sea Salt to seal in moisture, she’s barbecuing with the clean, smokey flavor of the Northwest Alderwood Smoked Salt.”

“Yeah, but that’s just meats. When she needs someone to flavor up her popcorn, she’ll be back.”

“No, T. S., she won’t. The Sonoma Gourmet Sea Salt handles all her general uses, and with no additives. Every one of her new salts have all organic and natural, too. Face it, buddy, she’s living a new healthier lifestyle now, a life that you could never give her.”

“Even for breads, soups, and sauces? She must need me for something!”

“I’m sorry, man. She got the Sel Gris French Sea Salt for that now. Good lookin’ salt, too. Truly beautiful. Dissolves so quickly and evenly, I… well, I don’t think she misses you at all.”

“I see. And she’s happy?”

“Yeah, buddy. She really is. Aw, come on, friend. Don’t look so down. You knew this was coming eventually. Look, why don’t I introduce you to my friend Sumac, huh? She’s Mediterranean, you know. Very exotic.”

• Serving Size ¼ tsp. (1.5 g)
• Servings Per Container 63
• Amount Per Serving
• Calories 0
• Calories From Fat 0
• % Daily Value
• Total Fat 0 g 0%
• Saturated Fat 0 g 0%
• Trans Fat 0 g
• Cholesterol 0 mg 0%
• Sodium 590 mg 25%
• Total Carbohydrate 0 g 0%
• Diatary Fiber 0 g 0%
• Sugars 0 g
• Protein 0 g
• Vitamin A 0%
• Vitamin C 0%
• Calcium 0%
• Iron 0%

Alaea Hawaiian Sea salt - Alaea Hawaiian sea salt is non processed & rich in trace minerals, all of which are found in sea water.  A small amount of harvested reddish Hawaiian clay (Alaea) enriches the salt with iron oxide, and seals in moisture when you are grilling your favorite foods.  Goes great with all types of red meats, and is especially beneficial for roasting, cooking, and as a garnish.

Sel Gris French Sea Salt - This gourmet French sea salt has a unique color that makes it a truly beautiful salt.  The gray hue comes from its extremely high level of minerals & nutrients.  The soft, moist crystals will dissolve quickly & evenly, making it ideal for baking breads, soups, & sauces.  The moisture content is characteristic of this salt, & makes it a favorite among chefs.

Sonoma Gourmet Sea Salt - Sonoma sea salt is solar evaporated from the clean waters of the Pacific Ocean, which makes it a great all around full flavored salt.  This pure, natural & unadulterated sea salt contains no additives, & is produced on the west coast of the United States.

Northwest Alderwood smoked salt - A must try for BBQ's!  This pacific sea salt is slow smoked over real alderwood, giving it an authentic, clean smoke flavor.  The traditional Alderwood flavor combined with the sea salt to use in any of your favorite recipes, both on & off the BBQ.

But I am choosing to note the sad (and all too common) denouement of Rosenblum Wine Cellars, whose parent company Diageo announced its intention to close the popular winery in Alameda last month and shifted production for the brand, which will continue to exist, up to the BV facility in Napa.

I wrote a story last year year entitled How to Kill a Wine Brand. I only need to write that story once.

The sale of Rosenblum for more than $100 million was, of course, a triumph for founder Kent Rosenblum, who built a wine brand from nothing to become one of the darlings of the California wine industry. Under the terms reported at the time, Rosenblum and his operation were to be left alone to do their thing.

But that was before the wine industry fell off a cliff. And Diageo doesn't have a strong track record of allowing its acquisitions to be truly independent, as opposed to simply brands in the portfolio.

So while it's not entirely a surprise that the beloved Alameda winery will no longer host the thousands of loyal customers in its big hangar of a space, and will no longer incubate other small wine labels as it has done for years, it certainly is a damn shame.

Of course, bottles bearing the Rosenblum label will continue to show up on store shelves for the coming years, and there's a chance that they may still be just as good as they used to be. But they certainly will lack some soul that they once had, even if you can't really taste the difference.

I consciously nurture my own appetite for wines I have never tried before, and whenever possible try to encourage it in others. These days, when I find someone who is interested in breaking out of a rut of Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, or Zinfandel I often direct them to the dry red wines of Portugal.

Portugal, of course, became world famous for its sweet fortified Ports, almost to the exclusion of all its other wines. The worldwide appetite for Port casts a long shadow that many of the other wines of Portugal have been trying to squeeze out from under for some time. Vinho Verde has achieved some level of recognition by a certain set of consumers, but the dry red wines, made from many of the grapes that go into the fortified wines, are some of the most under-appreciated wines in the world in my opinion.

I long to visit Portugal's Duoro valley. Judging from my extensive vicarious exploration of it by photograph, it is certainly one of the most spectacular wine regions of the world, with improbably steep, vineyard-covered hills plunging down to the sparkling curves of the Duoro river. These serpentine canyons of grapes are increasingly producing red table wines of great complexity, and more importantly for today's consumer, of great value.

Of course, while it may be new news to Americans, red table wines have been made in the Duoro for a long time, and in the case of Quinta de Roriz, for more than two centuries.

Back in 1750 or so when Robert Archibald was wandering around on the hillsides of the Duoro river valley, there was no particular protocol for starting a winery. You just found a piece of land and planted some grapes and figured the rest out later. In Archibald's case the grapes were secondary. The first thing he did was build a wooden box he could hide in to shoot at game. A guy's gotta eat. But once he had a few wild boar, pheasants, and other miscellaneous varmints in hand, he needed something to go with grilled game. So the vines went into the ground.

By 1764, the bowl-shaped property nestled into the fold of the Upper Duoro valley at a big bend in the river had been given the name Quinta de Roriz, and it has been producing wine ever since.

Like most of the historical Duoro estates, Roriz has always been known for its Porto, barrels of which graced the docksides of many a European shipping port during the 19th Century, thanks to the unslakable thirst of the continent, and in particular, the English. Roriz was one of the first producers to export its wines to Europe, thanks to particularly enterprising ownership. Starting in 1815, the estate was owned by a member of the van Zeller family until the estate was acquired last year by the Symington wine empire, currently the largest landowners in the Duoro.

Quinta de Roriz still produces vintage port, along with three different still red wines, of which this is the most basic. Made up of a blend of 38% Touriga Nacional, 26% Tinta Barrroca, 20% Tinta Roriz, 14% Touriga Franca, and 2% Tinto Cão, it has a classic profile. The grapes come from younger vines on the property. The wine is fermented in stainless steel and then aged for a brief 7 months in French oak before bottling. Roughly 3600 cases are made.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Dark garnet in color, this wine smells of rich blackberry and mulberry fruit, with a dark black cherry undercurrent. In the mouth the wine has a wonderful dry richness and smoothness on the palate, and a brightness thanks to excellent acidity. Flavors of black cherry, wet earth, mulberries, and cassis rumble around through a long finish. Very nice.

Food Pairing:
This wine has a wonderful character to it that will match well with many foods, especially anything with a charred fattiness to it. Crispy pork belly anyone?

Overall Score: around 9

How Much?: $16

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Commenter King Krak, suggested that "My thinking on this is that it's simply a smaller percentage of the population are passionate about wine."

My first reaction to this idea was dismissive, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if it really might be true. I also started wondering if there might be an inverse relationship between what I will call the strength and homogeneity of the wine culture in a country and the tendency for people to blog about wine.

Let's get the following disclaimer right up front: except for the consumption numbers below, I have no data to back up the following line of conjecture. It's 100% pure speculation, and I welcome any corrections or damning evidence to the contrary.

There are definite differences between the US and nearly every European country when it comes to wine. The biggest one can be captured in a single statistic: annual per-capita consumption of wine. In the US, we drink on average 9.68 liters of wine per year. In the UK, they drink 19.14 liters per year. In France they drink 53.22 liters of wine per year.

I believe a significant cultural difference accompanies this variance in consumption. Or perhaps more accurately, I believe a significant cultural difference drives this difference in consumption. The cliché of wine as food in Europe comes from somewhere.

Here in the USA, we have what on a bad day I'd call a stunted wine culture. Being more optimistic in general, a better characterization might be fledgling. But in either case, the relationship Americans have with wine feels at best slightly dysfunctional. As I have written before, our relationship with wine is riddled with class connotations, self-esteem problems, and intimidation. Wine in America is not commonplace enough to be treated like any other beverage. Instead it gets a vaunted status that carries with it a lot of oppressive baggage.

Could one of the consequences of this situation be the existence of the demographic called the wine geek? It certainly seems somewhat plausible that the desire to immerse oneself in the passion of wine, and then turn around and evangelize it to the world (or at least your closest friends) seems much more likely in a culture where most people only drink wine on special occasions, as opposed to a culture where wine is part of every meal. Add to that situation the deep penetration of internet technologies and a dash of American ego, and perhaps you have the ingredients for the wine blog explosion in the US.

I wonder if America has more wine writers per capita than the UK, France, Italy, or Spain? Does a country with a relatively constrained wine culture produce a stronger market for writing about it? Note that I'm not just talking about the proclivity to drink wine, as there's obviously not a correlation between low per-capita wine consumption and the number of wine geeks in a country. Just ask the folks in Burundi, whose annual wine consumption hovers around .1 liters per capita.

But even absent this correlation, the converse of the American situation seems equally plausible to me. "Why write or talk about wine when you can just drink it," the average Italian might say. Sure, there are wine critics, writers, and magazines in most European countries, but I wonder if, like wine bloggers, they may be fewer in number for that reason? Your average European might be less inclined to pick up a wine magazine (or more to the point, start a wine blog) for the same reason that there aren't a lot of tanning salons in Tahiti.

This is obviously not a well researched thesis, and probably won't stand up to even the most cursory of analytical inquiries, but there's something to be said, I think for the aspects of American wine culture, versus the rest of Europe, and the reason why there might be more wine bloggers in the US than everywhere else.

Which is presumably why the CEO of Taittinger Champagne recently said at a press briefing that Champagne's main competitor in the luxury market wasn't cheap California sparkling wine, it was Viagra.

I'm not kidding.

Of course, he might have been, but no matter how firmly his tongue was placed in his cheek, there's a certain amount of truth to the notion.

Wine tastes good on your lips, but it tastes better on the lips of your partner.

Great debate continues in the over-wrought world of wine and food pairing as to whether the match between the two is best tested by eating first, and then drinking, the reverse, or the middle ground I like to describe as "chew while you chug."

When it comes to wine and sex, however, I'm firmly in the wine before sex category, though I've never complained about a well chilled glass of Champagne afterwards.

Matching wine and sex is a lot easier than wine and food, thanks to the versatile nature of sex. It goes well with just about any wine, provided that the wine is served at the correct temperature (if you need a mnemonic: warm Chardonnay = no roll in the hay).

I've been keeping track of particularly successful matches over time, both my own and my friends, and have been surprised at how many are measured by conception -- I owe my own daughter to a nice bottle of Champagne, and a killer Russian River Pinot Noir -- though that may just be the particular life stage that my friends and I happen to be in at the moment. Six years ago I remember a particularly great evening thanks to a bottle of Vino Nobile de Montepulciano.

But back to the general theory. I find red to be better than white when it comes to truly great pairings. This perhaps is not entirely a surprise, but on the other hand, nor is it anywhere close to a hard and fast rule, so to speak.

And let's not forget the magic of the unplanned pairing,

Wine and sex paired well make sparks. Your skin feels warmer, time moves just slightly slower, and your heart feels full. What's not to love about that?

As with any wine match, I think it's important to get the proportions correct, but this may be more important with wine and sex than with other pairings. Too little and you might as well not have had any. Too much and things can get sloppy. However, I'm a firm believer in the idea that there shouldn't be any rules when it comes to wine pairings. I encourage you to find your own balance of flavors.

There is however, one place where I have to draw a line. Not because of any particular allegiance to the folks in Reims, but purely on the principle of the whole thing. Wine will always be more romantic than popping pills. Viagra truly is no substitute for Champagne.

Photo of a particular Michigan wine that I have not personally tried, courtesy of Melissa Schneider.

Hey, turn it up!

This is one of my favorite songs!

Muscardini, guess you better order this three pack now
Muscardini, baby, guess we’ll be drinkin’ red wines down
You’ve been runnin’ all over town
I guess we’ll have to get the corkscrew, spin it ‘round

All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
Enjoy the Sangiovese
With berries, cinnamon and dark fruit tones

You’ve also got a great Syrah, ‘bout two thousand seven
It’ll roll around your tongue with hints of vanilla
Your mouth is gonna smile wide
Muscardini, Tesoro’s won awards around town
You’ve been runnin’ all over town
I guess we’ll have to get the corkscrew, spin it ‘round

All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
All you’ll wanna do is drink Muscardini’s three pack red wines
Enjoy the Sangiovese
With berries, cinnamon and dark fruit tones

2008 Monte Rossa Sangiovese :

• Harvested Sep. 18, 2008
• Bottled Aug. 29, 2008
• pH 3.65
• Alcohol: 14.6
• Cases 559
• Monte Rosso Vineyards
• Sonoma Valley, Sonoma County

Awards:

• 2009 Sonoma Valley Wine Competition ~ Gold
• 2010 SF Chronicle Wine Camp ~ Silver

Aromas of raspberry, blackberry and cinnamon. Savor the bright cherry and dark fruit with a long, slow finish. A food friendly wine.

2007 Unti Vineyard Syrah:

• Harvested Oct. 15, 2007
• Bottled Aug. 29, 2008
• pH 3.72
• Alcohol: 14.4
• Cases 200
• Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County
• Unti Vineyard

Awards:

• 2010 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition – Silver

Aromas of blueberries, blackberries, grilled meats and a hint of vanilla from the French oak barrels. Savor the big, berry fruit and structured body, with lots of tannins to chew on.

2007 Tosoro:

• Blend: Sangiovese 58%, Syrah 21%, Cabernet Sauvignon 21%
• Bottled: Aug 29,2008
• pH 3.60
• Alcohol: 14·4%
• Cases 454
• Proprietary Red Blend, Sonoma County

Awards:

• 2010 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition – Silver
• 2009 Orange County Fair Wine Competition – Gold

Aromas of plums, chocolate and dark fruit with a hint of herbs. Savor the full fruit with hints of ripe boysenberry.  The finish is beautifully balanced with velvety tannins. Enjoy with food.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

The Calcareous Era was a unique period in the planet’s history.

The temperature was much warmer, and red wine flowed freely.

Temperatures during this era were extremely conducive to varietals like those found in this Calcareous 2006 Red 3-Pack. In fact, ancestors of the 2006 Zinfandel were roughly four times larger than their modern day counterparts. Of course even this early in their history, they had already evolved a rich, silky texture and soft tannins.

Sure, the 2006 Syrah of today has small compliments of oak and varietal spice along with its dark and fruity bouquet, but in the Calcareous Era these beasts actually had sharp, jagged tusks. We can only assume they were used for defense, although some paleontologists have theorized they have served a purpose in mating displays and fending off rivals.

Of course no venture into this time of giants would be complete without the 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, which roughly translates to “Terrible Lizard King.” These gigantic wines, with their complex palette, blackcurrant and chocolate flavors, and full finish are often shown to be speedy predators in books and movies, although more recent research suggests they may have been scientists.

Yes, life in the Calcareous was truly survival of the fittest. Now stay tuned for a Deadliest Catch marathon narrated by Mike Rowe, followed by a brand new episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe interspersed with Ford commercials also narrated by Mike Rowe.

 2006 Calcareous Zinfandel

• Alcohol: 15.9%
• pH: 3.55
• TA: 6.3g/L
• Vintage: 2006
• Appellation: Paso Robles
• Production: 448 cases (18 barrels)

This rich, silkily textured wine is immediately recognizable, showing true varietal character and an intriguing spicy black pepper note. We think you'll find the '06 to be extremely well balanced, packed with forest fruit flavor and soft tannins complemented by gentle oak nuances, Its elegant styling complements many interesting fusion dishes and showcases the outstanding potential for this uniquely  Californian red variety on our calcium rich soils.

 2006 Calcareouos Syrah:

• Alcohol: 15.8%
• pH: 3.72
• TA: 6.08g/L
• Vintage: 2006
• Appellation: Paso Robles
• Production: 865 cases

Stunning color is always a feature of Calcareous Boutique Syrah. Signature dark and silky forest fruits such as cherry dominate the bouquet and carry through to the mid palate.  All complimented by a touch of oak and varietal spice. The finish is soft vanilla with a hint of white pepper. Perfect on its own or with spicy red meat dishes.

 2006 Calcareous Cabernet Sauvignon:

• Alcohol: 15.8%
• pH: 3.67
• TA: 6.7g/L
• Vintage: 2006 
• Appellation: York Mountain
• Production: 647 cases (26 barrels)

This Cabernet retains the abundant dark red and purple vibrancy of youth yet enjoys the complex palette and integration of maturity. Mountain top Manzanita aroma’s lead to blackcurrant, cherry and layered mocha chocolate flavors.  Extensive pre release bottle age ensures a silky soft texture and a full lingering finish. Very rewarding now, cellar for up to ten years.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Houdini Metallic Blues

Dear Melissa, thank you for the Houdini six-piece wine tool set. Unfortunately, the warden confiscated it on the grounds that it could be used as a weapon.

But that’s OK, because pruno usually doesn’t come in bottles with corks. The Rabbit corkscrew would be wasted on me. Now, if you have a tool that helps you open Ziploc baggies without spilling fermented sauerkraut all over the place, that might come in handy!

Don’t worry, I’m still the same wine lover I was before I got sent up to the joint. And when I get out, baby, we’re going to enjoy that Houdini set six ways to Sunday. We’ll be foil-cutting and cork-screwing and pouring and stopping and sealing and doing all the things that free men do with a bottle of wine. Won’t that be fine? Only 38 more months!

Just one thing, though: I hope you don’t mind the smell. Fermented sauerkraut is the kind of odor that really sticks to your hands no matter how many times you wash.

Your big man in the big house,

Wayne Ray Chester
Inmate #386775a-54

Delivered In Time For Father's Day

Features:

• Wine tool stand offers tools to open, serve and seal wine
• Includes stand to store the Houdini and all its accessories
• Lever style corkscrew tested for 20,000 pulls
• All metal gears

In The Box

• Houdini Lever Style Corkscrew
• Houdini Stand
• Foil Cutter
• Pourer / Stopper
• Wine / Champagne Sealer
• Spare Spiral

Now in it's sixth year, Pinot Days has firmly established itself as one of the largest and most exciting Pinot Noir events in America. If you enjoy Pinot Noir or are still trying to figure that out, this is an event that should not be missed.

Pinot Days offers a week of events, from winemaker dinners, to small tastings in retail stores, to seminars that focus on specific regions or specific producers. The main event of the weekend, however, is the grand tasting of 220 different producers from around the globe pouring more than 300 different wines. The tasting, as in past years, is heavily focused on California producers, but increasingly draws in participants from Oregon, Washington, New Zealand, and Burgundy.

For details on the various activities as well as a list of the producers who will be pouring their wines for the grand tasting, check out the event web site.

Pinot Days 2010 Grand Tasting
Sunday June 27th
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Festival Pavilion - Fort Mason Center
Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94123 (map)

Tickets for the grand tasting are $60 and should be purchased in advance online, especially if you don't want to stand in a long line at the event. Tickets for winemaker dinners and other activities range from $80 to $150. Details are available on the event web site.

Parking at Fort Mason is easier now that it is a paid lot, but for large events like this, you'd be better off parking several blocks away and walking. Or better yet, taking public transport.

Like all such large public tastings, you will enjoy yourself and learn a lot more by following my simple guidelines: get a good night's sleep, wear dark clothes, come with a full stomach, drink lots of water, and SPIT!

In 2005, a guy named Cameron Hughes met winemaker Sam Spencer. Sam, who has his own label called Spencer Roloson, had just been offered some choice Cabernet Sauvignon fruit, but wasn't interested in adding a Cabernet to his lineup. On a whim he offered to make the wine for Cameron, to bottle under his own label.

Now you need to know something about Cameron to understand why the idea of making his own wine was something of a radical concept for him in 2005.

Cameron has a long background in wine sales, and has lots of connections to wineries as a result. Over the years he's heard many times from winemakers who had multiple barrels of finished wine that they couldn't sell for some reason -- either there was no demand in the marketplace for it, or for some reason the winery ended up with more wine than they wanted after making their final blends. At a certain point the message sank in -- there was lots of wine out there, and some of it was really good wine, sometimes made by top winemakers, and it was available dirt cheap, as long as someone was willing to promise never to reveal just exactly where, or more importantly, who, the wine came from.

Cameron decided to become what you might call a modern California negociant (a French term for a type of wine producer who buys grapes or finished wine on the market and bottles them under his own label). He started buying wine from very reputable producers, blending it with other batches, and bottling it for sale under his own name.

Cameron Hughes wine has consisted of small lots of wine, each of which is marketed under simply a lot number and the appellation of the specific wine, and most often for prices between $10 and $20 a bottle. The wines have been sold almost completely through his mailing list and web site, as well as in Costco stores around the country.

To say that Cameron has been successful is a bit of an understatement. The concept of "Ten Buck Chuck" caught on like wildfire and he's barely been able to keep up with demand. But until 2005, his entire model was based on buying wine someone else had made and putting it in his own bottle.

The idea of paying someone to make a wine specifically for him didn't quite fit in the plan. So while other winery owners might have leaped at the chance that Sam offered him, Cameron hesitated.

But the fruit was too good to ignore. And it turns out that the timing was right. Cameron's dad was retiring that year from his job of 33 years, and apparently had an interest in having his own wine. A few phone calls later and a new wine label was born. With the help his best friend, Sandy Wellman, the elder Hughes pulled together the capital to buy the fruit and hire Sam as the winemaker for their project.

They made 199 cases of the wine without having a clear strategy, other than the fact that it wouldn't be part of the Cameron Hughes "extreme value" lineup. They weren't sure if they would ever make another vintage. Heck, they weren't sure if they'd even sell the first one.

But the wine was good, and so they decided to keep making it. This 2006 is the second vintage, and it is even better than the first. It is rounder and more refined than the 2005, which had some angular herbal notes that weren't objectionable, but weren't as pleasurable as the seamlessness of this wine.

The fruit comes from what was up until recently called the La Herradura vineyard on the east side of St. Helena at the base of Howell Mountain. Hand harvested in the early morning, the fruit is destemmed and then fermented in separate vineyard blocks after four days of cold soaking. After fermentation the wine is transferred to 70% new French oak barrels where it ages for 22 months before bottling.

Largely based on the success of their collaboration, Sam Spencer has now become the head winemaker for Cameron Hughes Wines, which means he's responsible for helping to source and blend all the wines.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Dark garnet in the glass, this wine has a nose of rich cherry and tobacco aromas. In the mouth the wine is exceedingly smooth and balanced, with velvety tannins and rich black cherry fruit, buoyed up by good acidity. A hint of woodsmoke enters towards the finish and lingers like a haze over sweet chocolate and black cherry fruit with a hint of earthiness. Nicely balanced and effortless to drink, this is an example of why people love Napa Cabernet so much.

Food Pairing:
This is a classic red meat wine. I'd love to drink it with Texas barbecue.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $50

This wine is only available for sale through the Cameron Hughes web site.

If I were I an investigative journalist with a lot of time on my hands, or a behavioral economist with a fast command of world trade facts, I might be able to answer the question "why?" for each of the following. But I've got other things to do, so I'll just ply you with trivia and hope you win $50 from a friend the next time you're all sitting around at a wine bar.

The country with the highest per-capita wine consumption in the world is.... wait for it.... the city/state/country of Vatican City. The Pope and his boys (all 931 of them) drink 66.67 liters of wine per capita per year. Of course, that's only about a bottle every four days, which among my friends isn't nearly enough. But way to go Catholic church. I'd pay good money for the chance to explore their wine cellar for an afternoon. The second highest country is little Norfolk Island out in the middle of nowhere South Pacific, whose 1,828 residents (understandably -- can you say depressingly isolated?) drink more than the average French citizen.

There are more than twenty countries in the world who register effectively zero wine consumption per-capita per year, including North Korea (I guess our dear leader 's personal stocks of Bordeaux don't count) and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The country with the greatest jump in wine consumption per capita between 2004 and 2008 was Nigeria, with a jump of 1236.2% to .33 liters consumed on average. Anyone care to explain that? It was followed closely by Macau, whose consumption per capita jumped almost 690%.

The country with the greatest drop in wine consumption was again a little island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, Nauru. Perhaps they lost their wine distributor? But the 13,287 residents saw an 88% drop in per capita consumption between 2004 and 2008. The 574 residents of the Cocos Islands likewise saw a 75.6% drop. And poor Burundi, sandwiched between The Congo and Tanzania drank 73% less wine per capita in 2008 than 2004, though it's not clear whether this figure was skewed by the huge influx of refugees fleeing the fighting in the Congo, and clearly had better things to worry about than drinking wine.

Other interesting trends: more mainstream tropical paradises saw huge gains in wine consumption per capita over the four years, with the Antilles, St. Kitts, Turks and Caicos, and St. Vincent all posting 100% or greater gains. The middle east, especially Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates also posted huge gains, as well as a number of poor or unstable African countries like Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Malawi, whose leaders are probably spending more on wine than on some basic social services.

At the highest level, there are far more countries where wine consumption is rising than the opposite, and global consumption between 2004 and 2008 rose 3.5%. And that is most certainly a good thing.

If you're curious, take a look at the stats yourself (PDF).

I don't pretend to have an eye for what makes good vineyard property, but those who do are constantly saying the same things about choice pieces of land everywhere. Sometimes these pieces of land become famous, or perhaps infamous is a better word, for their frustrating combination of appeal and unavailability.

For years, even decades, the wine country of Santa Barbara, and the appellation of Santa Rita Hills held such a piece of land. Directly across the Santa Ynez river from vineyards like Sanford & Benedict and Fiddlestix, an elongated parcel of land hugged the northern banks of the river and cried out to many a winemaker as a prime location to plant Pinot Noir.

But the land, planted to beans, wasn't for sale. And so for years, winemakers and would be winery owners would drive by and drool, and people like me would naively wonder why no one was trying to grow grapes there.

But then one day, along came Bob Davids. The CEO of Hong Kong based Radica Games, a company that designed and manufactured electronic and video games, Davids was a Burgundy fanatic who one day decided that he wanted to make world class Pinot Noir in Santa Barbara.

Davids fell in love with the bean field, and set his heart on owning it. Through a combination of persistence and making offers that were increasingly difficult to refuse, Davids managed to finally convince the owner of Rancho Chabuchu to sell him 350 acres of land.

Davids planted nearly 100 acres of Pinot Noir (and a little bit of Chardonnay) as soon as he could, and the 24 different vineyard blocks became Sea Smoke Cellars, named after the fog which floods its way up the river valley and makes it possible to grow Pinot Noir this far south in California.

From the release of the 2001 vintage, the winery's first effort, Sea Smoke was a near instant success. With the coveted site, winemaking by the talented Kris Curran, and Davids' marketing savvy, Sea Smoke quickly became one of the more sought after Pinot Noirs in California. Sold almost exclusively to mailing list customers, the wine joined the ranks of the "hard to get your hands on them" Pinots like Marcassin, Rochioli, and Sine Qua Non.

The winery is a small operation, with only about six employees, and is run by Curran and viticulturalist/vice president/general manager Victor Gallegos.

A mix of 10 different clones of Pinot Noir in the 24 vineyard blocks are tended with an eye towards keeping yields low. The grapes are hand harvested in the early morning and brought to the winery where they are destemmed, first by machine, and then carefully by hand, to eliminate even the "jacks" -- the small bits of stem that make it through the destemmer. Keeping the vineyard blocks separate throughout the winemaking process, he grapes undergo a cold soak for a few days before a two to four-week fermentation. Secondary fermentation and aging take place in French oak barrels, of which generally 75% are new and the rest used. Overall production sits somewhere around 15,000 cases.

I've tasted the Sea Smoke wines over several past vintages, and I think the 2007s are some of the best I have tasted. I will be interested to taste the 2008's and 2009's especially since winemaker Curren was lured away in 2008 by William Foley. I am not certain who has been making the wines since.

Full disclosure: I received these wines as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:

2007 Sea Smoke "One Barrel" Pinot Noir, Santa Barbara County
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a nose of rick blackberry, cranberry, and violet aromas. In the mouth it is tart and lean with a gorgeous texture, light tannic structure and a core of cranberry and raspberry fruit. Balanced, powerful and expressive, the flavors deepen with time and air. Best leave this one alone for a couple of years. This wine represents exactly what its name suggests: one (the best one) barrel from the vintage, which in this year happened to be one of the used barrels, so no new oak involved. Only 280 bottles made. Score: around 9. Cost: $150. Click to buy.

2007 Sea Smoke "Ten" Pinot Noir, Santa Rita Hills
An astonishingly bright, medium garnet in color, this wine smells of cedar, chocolate, and cherries, with a hint of herbal greenness that is appealing. In the mouth it is tart and bright with a core of cherry fruit tinged with raspberries. Light tannins creep around the edges of the palate, firm but soft in feel. The wine finishes nicely with a zing of acidity. Takes its name from the 10 different clones of Pinot Noir that go into it. Score: around 9. Cost: $80. Click to buy.

2007 Sea Smoke "Southing" Pinot Noir, Santa Rita Hills
Bright, light to medium garnet in color, this wine smells of mulling spices, cranberry, and cherries. In the mouth it is smooth, and bright with acidity that works with light leathery tannins to frame a core of cherry, cranberry, and cedar flavors. An aromatic sweetness coupled with a wet stone and tree bark flavor lingers in a long finish. The wine takes its name from the south-facing slopes of the vineyards. Score: around 9. Cost: $52. Click to buy.

In addition to the wines above, the winery also makes a Pinot Noir called Botella, which is released with less aging, and a Chardonnay.

Okay, you got me, I don’t know much about wine.

But I honestly thought “Hanna-Barbera” would be a great varietal.

Theresa I am so sorry, I thought tonight would be special and you’re right: I should’ve gotten the La Famiglia Snows Lake Vineyard Barbera 3-Pack. THAT would’ve gone great with pizza, roasted meats, grilled seafood, or even spaghetti. I bet you could enjoy a bottle now and even cellar one or two for later if you wanted! Man, that would’ve been a great wine to pick up. I really dropped the ball here.

We could’ve enjoyed a wine with a dark, complex nose full of black cherry, honey baked ham, and cigar. Cigar, honey! Soft tannins, sweet oak, man I bet that wine tastes amazing. And it’s so red! So very, very red.

This “Hanna-Barbera Fun Wine,” though, is a pretty disconcerting shade of teal.

Well, we may not have a bold, explosive red wine, but we’ve got a thin, sugary syrup with some old cartoon characters on the label. We can make the best of any situation, after all! That should count for something, right honey?

Honey?

2006 Snows Lake:

• Variety: Barbera
• Vintage: 2006
• Optimum Period for Consumption: Drink now to 2016
• Appellation: Red Hills, Lake County
• Snows Lake Vineyard, Red Hills
• Varietal Composition: 100% Barbera
• Release Date: Released
• Harvest Dates: 10/30/06
• Sugar at Harvest: 26 Brix
• Time in Wood: 16 months
• Type of Cooperage: 2/3 American, 1/3 French
• Bottling Dates: 4/2/08
• Number of Cases: 380
• Alcohol: 15%
• PH: 3.8°
• Total Acidity: 0.6
• Residual Sugar: dry

2006 has deep intense color, and great structure, showing black cherry, cedar, and tobacco on the nose.  The mouth is rich and lush, with a smooth, long finish.

Rules and restrictions:

• Wine sold by winery (or a retailer in your state where necessary)
• You must be 21 or older to order
• Whoever receives the package must be 21 or older
• If you're drunk when the package shows up, you will not be allowed to receive it
• Wine cannot be delivered to a P.O. Box
• We highly recommend you use a business address as your shipping address

Thanks to stick-in-the-mud buzzkilling state legislators, wine may only be delivered to the following states:

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• District Of Columbia
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

If your state's not on the list, you're out of luck... for now. Keep up with the ever-changing laws over at ShipCompliantBlog.com, and/or sound the alarms with your state assembly person through FreeTheGrapes.org. Meanwhile, all Federal, state and local laws are complied with in providing this wine.

Best Of All, No Magnets Are Involved

“Good morning, I’m looking for… back in the garage? I see thank you.”

“Excuse me, are you that inventor I’ve been hearing so much about? The guy who made a car engine entirely out of bread and meat? Wow, it’s an honor, sir. I’m here from the oil industry and… WAIT! WAIT! PUT THAT SHOTGUN DOWN! I’M FROM THE OTHER OIL INDUSTRY! THE OTHER OIL INDUSTRY!”

“Phew, that was a close one. Anyway, as I was saying, I represent Extravagonzo Specialty Culinary Infused Oils. I’ve even brought this four pack to show you just how good Extravagonzo Specialty Culinary Infused Oils can be. Because we know that a delicious selection of edible parts can be made even better with the right lubrication, and we hope to get in on the ground floor.”

“Benefits? Well, Extravagonzo Specialty Culinary Infused Oils are made from First Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil with approximately 20% Grape Seed Oil. Grape Seed Oil is high in antioxidants and Vitamin E, plus has been shown to moderate blood cholestoral and blood pressure, as well as being used in liver regeneration studies. Plus it’s heart healthy, and high in Omega 3 and Omega 6. Say, could I maybe take a look at this thing? Wow, sausage pistons and twin overhead crispy bacon cams? How’d you solve the… oh, wow, I see it there, that’s brilliant!”

“Now, don’t think we’re some big shady company trying to scam you out of your invention. Extravagonzo Specialty Culinary Infused Oils are made in small batch quanities, you see. In fact, buyer Matt Caputo of Tony Caputo’s Market and Deli in Utah (winner of the NASFT Outstanding Market and Deli of the Year Award in 2009) says that our Garlic Infused Olive Oil is the best olive oil that exists on the planet today. Say, is that a bologna carburetor? Or prosciutto?”

“Look, we’re not saying you can’t consider other offers. We’re just saying that our oils are made from the real deal. Our Blood Orange Infused Oil and Meyer Lemon Infused Oil has real crushed citrus inside, and our Red Chili Infused Oil has real chili soaked in for flavor. When we make our Garlic Infused Olive Oil, the garlic is roasted in Grape Seed Oil then added to the Extra Virgin Olive Oil. We’re serious about flavor, you see, just like you’re serious about this delicious engine.”

“Incidentally, did you know our Blood Orange Infused Oil also tasted great on ice cream, as well as seafood and lamb? And if you use the Red Chili Infused Oil on pizza, you can spice up your… what? No, I was just saying, I had no idea that you were working on an ice cream rotary design and a pizza-based fuel injection system. No, really, I wasn’t spying, I’m just discussing flavor options. No, listen, HEY, HEY, PUT THE SHOTGUN DOWN, SERIOUSLY! SERIOUSLY!”

Roasted Garlic Infused Olive Oil:

• Made with Extra Virgin First Cold Pressing Olive Oil (EVOO) from Argentina
• Garlic is Roasted in Grape Seed Oil (GSO)
• Additional GSO is added to the batch, approx 20% total
• High in Anti-oxidants and Vitamin “E”, very healthy, raises smoke point to medium sauté
• Garlic is from Gilroy, CA
• Ingredients: Roasted Garlic Infused Culinary Oil: First Cold Pressed Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Grape Seed Oil (approx 20%), Garlic, Citric Acid

Red Chili Infused Culinary Oil:

• Made with First Cold Pressed