Aw, Malm…
Hey, remember that $20 Malm Cellars pinot that I wrote about way back when? Well, the new vintage is out. $37 at your local shop. Ouch.
Capitalism puts bread on my table every night, and most of the time we’re happy together, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have words every once in a while.
Back.
Oh yes. Where have I been? To quote a wiser man than I…
“Mawaige.”
Yeah, J and I got married. It was a blast. You should have been there. Actually, if you’re reading this, it’s very likely you WERE there. J was beautiful. I’d post a picture but that might make her slightly upset, what with the ruining of the anonymity and all. Trust me, it was an amazing day, one for the books. The caterer – Trumpetvine Catering, if you’re curious – did a great job. All local produce, everything tasted great. Highest recommendation if you’re thinking about a wedding in the Bay Area in the near or far future. Wines seemed to be received well. Honeymoon was lots of fun, but cut short by a nasty cold. Thanks, Dave! Just kidding. Actually, I’m not kidding – Dave did a lot for us. As did lots of folks, who all know who they are.
Oh yeah, and we went to The French Laundry.
I guess I could go into honeymoon stuff now, but there’s so much I haven’t touched on in the last few weeks…maybe a lightning round is in order just to get everything out that’s been stewing for a while. Onwards and upwards!
Girasole – only worth it on nights when La Buca is packed.
Il Capriccio Pizza – overpriced but decent pizza. I’ll take Casa Bianca, though.
Bottlerock – unimpressive, but not terrible.
Yai Noodle Shop (on Vermont) – a good neighborhood option. But seriously – cash only?
Cafe Venezia (Berkeley) – not bad, not great. A workmanlike effort.
2004 Zenato Valpolicella Ripasso - a nice wine and worth searching out for less than $25.
C&O Trattoria – house chianti equals good times. Gnocchi bolognese better than I expected, too. Atmosphere (and good company, if you have it) make this place.
2005 Zind Humbrechet Riesling – a little underwhelming. Many better rieslings for less than $20, in my opinion.
2004 Two Hands Shiraz Lily’s Garden – overrated! Now $20 more per bottle than last year’s vintage, up to about $55. A complete rip-off.
2001 Paitin di Pasquero Barbaresco Serra Boella – lovely perfume, very elegant. A good deal.
2004 Casisano Colombaio Rosso di Montalicino – decent. Very, very bright and acidic. Almost un-sangiovese-like. Needs time.
Oinkster – burger is good. Pulled pork is whatever.
Coming up next – some Napa wineries and Ad Hoc. Good to be back!
Wine Blogging Wednesday #31: Box Wine.
It’s all relative. That’s what they say.
Ask a wine critic what makes a great wine experience. You’ll probably hear words like balance, power, elegance, subtlety, beauty, depth. All expected, to some degree. All defensible. Respectable. Words you’d find yourself nodding along to as you hear them. But thing about your own wine experiences – your truly memorable wine experiences. (If you have had any – maybe you’ve never had a glass of wine before in your life. In that case, onward, ye temperate soldier! Cast not thine eyes upon the vines of treachery as thou drivest up Highway 29!) I’d be willing to bet that for nearly all of them, there’s a good story to go along with that wine.
Think about it – how many great wine experience stories go something like, “I bought this wine at the store. I took it home and drank it. It was great. It changed my life.” Probably not many – at least not that indistinct. If the wine really was that great, you probably remember what time of year it was, if not what day, who you were with, where you were, if you ate anything with it, and how long it took you to finish it off. Just like Tolstoy says, it’s all about context. Well first he says it’s about transitions, then context, but I can’t think of a good way to fit transitions into this discussion so forget that part. Who cares about Tolstoy anyway. Anna Karenina is overrated. That’s right, Nabokov, I said it!
All right, time for this post to go somewhere. Point is, wine is as much about the environment it is enjoyed in as it is about the quantitative pleasure that it itself can bring. And all of this goes a great deal toward explaining why I found the 2004 Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon, my contribution for this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday event, not all that bad of a wine. As box wines go, it probably isn’t the best you can find, or even the near-best, but under the right circumstances it can be enjoyed as a good sub-$10 bottle.
What’s that, you say? You’ve had Killer Juice Cab and it tastes like someone poured a gallon of grape juice into a pot, boiled it down to half its size, then left it to its own devices for a year in a basement? OK, that’s a valid opinion. I’m not here to say you’re wrong. As I said, it’s all about context. Let me set the scene for my tasting: We were on a bus halfway up a mountain in the middle of the Mendocino County woods. Middle of the night. No electricity – not even a flashlight. A few candles so we could see what we were doing. For food, we had a takeout pizza we’d picked up from town half an hour back. That bus is a place I’ve spent a great deal of time in and around over the last five years, much of it spent with the two friends of mine whom I happened to be sharing the bus with at the time. So I was in a good place, but certainly not the kind of place one would normally conduct any kind of wine tasting. Did the context affect my perception of the wine? Hell yes. Do I care? Nope.
Oh right, tasting note. The Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon came in a three-liter box painted black with a wacky flaming logo. (Too dark in the bus for photos, sorry.) The spigot took some work to extract, which was mildly annoying, but we didn’t experience any drip problems like boxwines.org did. Once poured (into coffee mugs), this wine has a much more purplish tinge than most cabernet; at first glance one might take it for a petite sirah. Not much of a nose; grapey, a little sweet. On the palate, well, fermented grape juice…no harsh metallic taste or alcoholic burn, but not much other than some unassuming fruit, maybe of the blueberry variety. No finish to speak of. Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll make this buy for my own kitchen any time soon. But as we huddled around the candles in the bus and ate cold pizza, it worked for us.
Thanks for the great topic, boxwines.org!
Now let us praise cabernet franc.
I was going to do this big intro about what the most underrated grape in the vitis vinifera family is these days, but I suppose the title sort of ruins it, doesn’t it?
So let’s get right into it: in my (admittedly worthless) opinion, cabernet franc is a sorely underappreciated grape in the U.S., and across the globe. It’s a grape that is thought of among many wine drinkers as a blending grape, something to lend complexity to Bordeaux blends and some California cabernets and meritage blends. Yet as Michael Steinberger notes, it’s the primary grape in the vaunted Cheval Blanc, and a key player in several other Bordeaux houses of great repute.
Cabernet franc is a grape that can wear many guises. It can be young and fruity, meant to be drunk very young and without painstaking introspection; it can be lean and herbal, lending a thin but potent wedge to drive into big, burly wines from regions like Veneto; or it can be peppery and a little tannic, with a core of spicy fruit, making it one of the great food wines of the world and a terrific bargain to boot. These last kind are the type you’ll most likely see in the Loire valley, where cabernet franc is the primary red grape and where great cab fran-based wines (occasionally bolstered with small amounts of cabernet sauvignon or other red grapes) can be found in such regions as Bourgueil, Chinon, and Saumur-Champigny.
A lot of people think that the movie Sideways dealt merlot a serious (and somewhat unjust) blow, but merlot is still a very popular wine in the U.S.; merlot will abide – it will endure. Cabernet franc, however, has a real bone to pick with the filmmakers. Only a relative handful of American winemakers actually attempt to make this varietal on a regular basis, and Miles’s frank (zing!) summation of his distaste for cab franc in the film certainly did nothing to boost its profile. The inclusion of the Cheval Blanc at the end of the film was certainly meant to be an inside joke to those who know better, but the actual outcome of the film was a net negative for a very fine grape. Cab franc was already struggling to keep its head above water; why throw it an anvil on top of that?
Part of the struggle that cab franc has endured may stem from the somewhat rigid climate it requires in order to really thrive. While it needs heat to fully ripen and preclude weedy, overly vegetal characteristics, too much sun and exposure will roast the grape and rob it of its pungent, zingy pleasure. And in regions of the U.S. that fit this particular environmental regimen, winemakers have more often than not planted varieties that have more established bases of popularity, such as pinot noir, chardonnay, or riesling.
Besides its supporters in the Loire and in spots throughout Bordeaux, there are a few other bastions of cab franc tradition. There are some cabernet francs made in the U.S. that earn high marks – Pride and Lang & Reed come immediately to mind. There are cab franc blends popping up here and there in Italy, either with corvina or other native Italian grapes. And while I generally think that the “internationalization” of wine has led to more wines tasting the same, I wouldn’t be devastated if it also led to more producers seeing what they can do with this unassuming, yet malleable and potent grape.
If you are interested in reading more about Loire reds, please check out Brooklynguy’s post about said wines, which puts it much better than I ever could. Brooklynguy, by the way, beat me to the idea of writing about these type of wines, forcing me to change up my style just to fit in. In the meantime, I wanted to do something to point out some of the better cab franc efforts out there, so I’ve decided to install a new feature that I hope to make permanent, but for the moment can only proffer semi-transiency to: The Cab Franc of the Week, which I will use to showcase a cab franc bottling of particular note. Of course, given my usual price range, the vast majority of these wines will be under $20 at retail, but luckily most cab francs fall under that range anyway (at least the European ones). And so without further ado, the Cab Franc of the Week for this February the 26th is:
2005 Charles Joguet Chinon “Les Petites Roches”
Joguet has been around long enough (four decades) to pick up some pretty positive press for their wines from the Loire. The only red grape he uses is cabernet franc, and his wines are generally built to age longer than most cab francs.
The Petites Roches bottling is a relatively new one to the Joguet lineup, but it certainly doesn’t act like a young wine – this is thick, dry stuff, balanced with fruit but steeled by a thick backbone of tannins that will take at least a couple years to soften. The nose was very nice, draped with black currant and bell pepper. The wine expanded on the palate, pushing the tannins and the herbs but never in a way that felt astringent. There was enough dark fruit to keep some of the strength in check, but if you find a bottle of this and take it home, try not to touch it for a while; I think you’ll be greatly rewarded.
New fixation.
So I’ve been watching a lot of Wine Library TV recently. A little too much, maybe. But I tell you, once you’ve gotten to the point where you are disagreeing on the particulars rather than the parameters of each specific wine that is tasted, you know that you’re dealing with someone who is dealing with wine on the same level that you are. And that’s a good thing.
For those who haven’t been exposed to WLTV, it’s a video blog run by Wine Library, a wine store in New Jersey, and hosted by the store’s director of operations, Gary Vaynerchuk. Each weekday, he sits down with a few wines, tastes them on camera, and gives his honest opinion on their worth, usually ending with a traditional score on the 100-point scale.
It doesn’t sound like much, and if you watch an episode at random, you may not walk away impressed. But Vaynerchuk has a strangely fascinating appeal on camera – very ebullient, quick-witted, and extremely candid. Rather than using his forum to shill for his company, he really tells you what he thinks – if it’s plonk, he says so. And frankly, my favorite moments of the show are almost never the actual tastings, but rather the small moments of humanity that pop up – the playoff beard for the Jets during the NFL playoffs, the odd response to a comment in the Wine Library forums, etc. It’s fun to see someone who is clearly as comfortable in front of the camera as Vaynerchuk. Like Eric Asimov, I’m occasionally left wondering where he pulls his incredibly varied and nuanced list of aromatics from when describing how a certain wine smells, but I respect his palate and his taste, so who cares?
It’s also exciting to see food and wine blogging starting to branch out a little. As the internet takes its first dive into the Youtube era, we’ve really started to see a change in the way that the web affects the world – now there’s video if everything, and you can see it right now if you want to. While the implications are sometimes scary, the power and democracy of it all is pretty awesome. So I’m very happy to see some wine love in this video wave – especially to see it thrive like Wine Library TV has. If I had any equipment at all, I’d love to contribute to the vlog world, but I guess I’ll have to leave that to the professionals. In the meantime, I’ll keep browsing the WLTV archives, looking for great wines (or duds) that I’ve had or wines that I’ve been waiting to try. Check one out if you can – good times for all.
Insert obscene Sopranos quote here.
Bechamel.
Basil.
Sausage. (This is why you do not see pictures of the tomato sauce or ziti. Also, it is why you do not see more pictures in general. I am not very good at food photography.)
Baked ziti. One of life’s great pleasures, both to make and to consume. There are many components of the baked ziti, which makes a chef a bit of a traffic manager as it comes together. But the end result, if overseen correctly, is almost always worth it. This batch was good, but not my best. I think that the fresh mozzarella I used was not quite up to snuff – I should have made a trip to the Cheese Store of Silverlake. Ditto the sausage. Also, using lactose-free milk instead of whole milk in the bechamel probably had an effect, although I don’t know how much of one. Nonetheless, I was satisfied.
Whenever I make something relatively complicated like ziti, I am compelled to break out something from the wine closet. Since we only had one sangiovese-based wine in there at present, we opened our 2005 Avignonesi Vino Nobile de Montepulciano. Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, by the way, is an oddly named wine, since it doesn’t involve the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grape at all; instead it’s made from the sangiovese grape in Montepulciano. This, to me, would be like making a wine from syrah grapes in Napa and calling it “Napa Pinot Noir,” but whatever. The wine was very nice – a perfume of raspberries, lavender, and cedar, and a plush mouthfeel with some dark chocolate, a floral component, and the Suckling magnet, crushed berries – but I think I liked the Il Lastro Chianti Rufina from last night’s meal at Briganti a little more. The Il Lastro seemed like a more pure expression of the sangiovese grape, and it had more structure as well. The Avignonesi was cheaper, however, so that’s a factor, too. It’s tough to find good sangiovese wines for less than $20, so this might be a repeat buy if I can find another bottle.
One more quick note before I go – the New York Times has an article up about looking for the perfect Italian red sauce. It’s interesting, and certainly contains echoes of feelings and thoughts I have had about trying to interpret and/or mimic the sauces and dishes I’ve had in the homes of my Italian relatives. That said, I’ve never understood the purpose of putting fully cooked meatballs in a vat of tomato sauce. When you do this, you let that wonderful brown, crispy crust on the meatball – one of the meatball’s most winning characteristics – get all soggy with sauce.
I understand that people want their tomato sauce to have that meaty richness to it – that’s why you warm up the sauce in the same pan that you cooked the meatballs in (after deglazing it). Always throw the meatballs into the pot with the spaghetti and sauce when you’re in the last stage of cooking the pasta, after it’s been drained pre-al dente. That way, the meatballs aren’t completely dry, but they aren’t given the chance to go limp on you, either.
I suppose I shouldn’t quibble. The world’s army of Italian grandmothers could probably fill a thousand cookbooks with what I do wrong in my ziti recipe. And frankly, meatballs never go in the spaghetti in Italy – this is an American tradition.But I’m not really looking to cook like an authentic Italian, because I’m not. Meatballs in the same dish as the spaghetti is fine, as long as they have that crust. The ingredients to make great meatballs can and will vary according to what’s on hand and what’s fresh, but day-old bread or fresh bread crumbs are a must. If you want a great resource on making meatballs, though, I would first consult Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking. No Giada for me, thanks.
Taking off.
We’re going up to the Bay Area this weekend, but I wanted to mention a few things before we leave, as I never know if/when I’ll get the chance to post up there.
There’s been quite a bit of talk today about the relative worth of the Zagat books, most of it stemming from the fact that a piece by SmartMoney (not available online) claimed that Zagat’s grades were inflated and that the ratings in the famous and ubiquitous Zagat guides that should serve as constants – i.e., chain restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory – in fact varied wildly according to location.
To the latter claim, I’ll offer the weak defense that two cooks, given no matter how rigorously identical a set of instructions, will invariably produce two different dishes. Put Nancy Silverton in one California Pizza Kitchen and Johnny Five in another, give them the exact same recipe, and you’ll get two different pizzas (one made with passion, the other with hilarious robot antics). I’m not saying that the variation can be entirely explained through differentiation in the kitchen, but other than wild hypotheses about sociological environment, I don’t know how much deeper you can get into that particular problem. To the former, I would say only that Zagat Los Angeles gives Enoteca Drago a 22 for food, while The Ivy gets a 23 and Panda Inn gets a 21(!). Which is another way of saying that if you really put any stock in the Zagat restaurant ratings, I’ve got a Thai joint I’d like to sell you.
Elsewhere, it seems like half my traffic comes here looking for info about Malm Cellars, so I’ll throw a bone to the lions and say that I tasted a glass of the 2005 Malm Cellars Cross Blend tonight. It was a good wine, a cab-syrah blend that was fruit-driven, yet with decent structure and medium tannins, so it might reward sitting in the cellar for a year or two. At $17, it was a decent price, although I think I would probably rather fork out the extra three bucks for a bottle of the Malm Pinot Noir. Or you could buy the 2005 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc at about the same price, and enjoy one of the best cab francs made in the US for a good value. The Lang & Reed has a wonderful mix of chocolate and raspberries coating a core of herbs and a tiny amount of mint that keep the wine from getting too fat. A sultry, complex wine that I really like. I often feel like cab franc is what malbec wishes it could be, but maybe I just haven’t had enough good malbec yet. I’ll probably regret those words soon enough.
In other news, K&L Wines Hollywood has yet to open. What the crap! Do they think I can wait forever?
Burgundy tasting at Silverlake Wine.
J and I went to a Sunday tasting at Silverlake Wine this past weekend, and it was a lot of fun as usual. Silverlake Wine is one of our favorite haunts, and the Sunday tasting is their most ambitious tasting of the regular flights they do every week. We end up making it to about one of these per year; the time we went last year, the featured wines were small production Central Coast syrah. We ended up buying 2 of the 4 wines that day, I think, one for ourselves and one for a gift. Although at $20 per person and with wines usually north of $30 offered for tasting, the financial damage can pile up faster than you can say “Grand Cru Classe.”
This Sunday’s tasting was one I was really looking forward to because I knew the theme was Burgundy and Burgundian wines are my worst area of wine knowledge. Other than some vague ideas about pinot noir, chardonnay, and terroir, most of it is a blank slate for me. On top of that, most of these wines are so damn expensive, I can’t even buy a few to get a foot in the door to the room of knowing something. Since I can’t afford bottles, tastings are going to have to be the way I expand my Burgundy experience. Now is the time!
A quick and very rough primer for the curious on the levels of Burgundy wines:
- Grand Cru – I will never be able to afford these. Apparently they are good. This means very little to me, though.
- Premier Cru – These are also generally very expensive. Although I actually own a Premier Cru Burgundy, and it cost me less than the Village level wine I bought at this tasting. Interesting how that works.
- Village – From what I gather, wines produced at the Village level are given the name of that village’s best vineyard. They can be good to not-so-good.
- Bourgogne – This is the only stuff you will regularly see below $30, and sometimes not even then.
On this brisk day, Silverlake was pouring five wines, starting with an Adami Prosecco Brut as an aperitif. This was nice – not the best Prosecco I’ve had, not the worst. Hard to work up much feeling about it one way or the other, although I do like Prosecco and was glad to have a glass of it.
First up for the main event was the Domaine Raymond Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne Blanc 2005. As George, SLW co-owner, explained it, this wine would normally be a Village wine, designated “Meursault,” except that the owners decided to bring in some dirt to fill in a depression in the vineyard. Oops. There’s the penalty flag…let’s see what the AOC referees have to say: “Illegal enological formation. Fifteen yard penalty, remains fourth cru.” There goes your Village ranking. This was a really interesting wine, though. The nose recalled the exact scent of crusty white bread and artisanal butter. And I mean EXACTLY. It was a trip. On the palate, it offered more bread, although not as much as the nose did, along with a little minerality and some fruit notes – pear, etc. Not much of a finish on this one. A good wine. The bread on the nose was a serious trip. For $31, though – not quite enough “dough” for our dough. Oy. Sorry about that one.
Next up was the 2003 Domaine Ferret Pouilly Fuisse Les Vernays. Domaine Ferret has apparently been overseen through the years by a long line of female vignerons. Cool. This wine was showing a lot of oak – old French oak, if I can be allowed to hazard a guess – but the oakiness came through in more of a rustic, interesting manner than just bread notes. Certainly a rich wine, richer than the first; it had more of a fruit element than the Dupont-Fahn, too, and generally seemed like a more complex and complete wine. This one, unfortunately, was north of $40, and I wasn’t quite enough in love with it to pick it out, so…
The 2004 Domaine Michel Gros Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits – the domaine of one of the three siblings in the legendary Gros family of Burgundy – was third, and wow did it have a unique nose. Earth. Wet earth. Forest floor? More like a bog. A peat bog. A swamp, even. Okay, maybe not a swamp, but it was impossible not to think of some place wet, green, and mossy when you stuck your nose in the glass. Something that almost smelled like driftwood, except not as salty. Maybe this was a slightly off bottle…hard to say. (That’s the problem with tastings like this – no time to sit around and wait for the wine to evolve in the glass.) If you kept at it, you could also pick up a little chocolate in the bouquet as well. On the palate, this wine buzzed with acidity. There was fruit there; a tight core of raspberry with some cherry notes and some smoke – but this is a wine that needs a couple years at least to tone itself down before it can be properly evaluated.
The last wine of the tasting was the 2004 Jayer-Gilles Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Nuits. Stick your nose in the glass and wow – that is terrific stuff. This is what I’ve been looking for from the nose of a Burgundian pinot – a perfect balance of earth and fruit. I’m sure there are better examples from Cotes de Nuits and other places, but this is the best I’ve tried. It’s evocative of loam and mushrooms, and at the same time is round and sweet with raspberry and cherry. On the palate, it shows some similarities to the Michel Gros in that it has a good deal of acidity, but at the same time there’s more fruit than in the Gros, making me think that this might be a better bet down the road. Cherries, chocolate, and some spice, followed by a nice finish. I felt like this wine was clearly the best of the flight, and despite the fact that it was the most expensive wine of the day…I bought a bottle.
Yeah, it was expensive – almost $50. Way more than I am usually willing to part with for any bottle. I probably spent too much, but I feel like this wine was what I was hoping to find when I went to this Burgundy tasting, and I feel like it’s only going to get better in the short term. It seems like a good food wine, and since it’s pinot it’s more flexible around a menu than, say, a Mollydooker Shiraz. I’m sure that for my Burgundy dollar, I could have spent my money in a number of different ways that would have provided more bang for my buck, but I liked this wine. So I got it.
So dipping a toe into the Burgundy waters was not too bad. Now all I need to do is find that box of money…
UPDATE: looks like S. Irene Virbila has made the Dupont-Fahn Bourgogne blanc that we tasted here the LA Times’ Wine of the Week. No mention of the bread, though. Whatever. Did she go to the tasting? Were we possibly in the same room at the same time? Perish the thought.
Wine Blogging Wednesday #30: Wrap up.
Tim over at Winecast has posted the round up for Wine Blogging Wednesday #30, the quest for New World Syrah. The entries this time were many (50) and varied (four continents’ worth of wine), and the summary features lots of good writing on a lot of good wine, so if you haven’t already, head on over and peruse the results. Good readin’, good drinkin’. Tim (I hope) avoided a major disaster recently involving frozen pipes, fire, and his wine cellar. I’m no scientist, but I know that frozen water plus fire plus wine equals bad. For someone who probably spent less time this weekend with cellartracker than with his cellar cracker (ugh! sorry!), he did a great job getting everything up, so cheers to Winecast. Check it out.
A big freaking deal, part IV.
I just saw a piece on the Wine Spectator site today by James Suckling about the great 2001 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva wines that are just hitting stores. In his blog, Suckling calls the our era a “golden age” for Brunello. Suckling’s enthusiasm mirrors that of his coworker Bruce Sanderson, the Spec’s Burgundy critic, who has been raving about the 2005 vintage on his own blog over the last week or so – ravings that have been echoed all across Europe recently. These love letters to modern European wine follow Suckling’s (and Robert Parker’s) ecstasy over the 2005 Bordeaux vintage, and Sanderson’s backflips over 2005 German rieslings, and the emergence of surprisingly good German red wines…
Put it all together, and you have what appears to be an apotheosis of European wine culture, at least according to one of the biggest and brawniest media signposts out there. Many of the wine world’s most powerful engines are running on all cylinders all at the same time, which is a staggering achievement – if true. All the hype could be just that; I haven’t had any 2005 Bordeaux or Burgundy, and all the Brunello I’ve tried in my life you could count on one hand, so I don’t have the experience to tell you one way or the other. But the excitement in many corners is palpable, even if the only way most of us can judge that excitement is through the prices on the bottles lining the top shelves of our wine stores. Hundreds of thousands of people are really excited by the wines coming out of vineyards and into their kitchens, and for good reason. Wine is an ever-expanding phenomenon, and its growth has seen a parallel growth in global viticulture from which nearly everyone has prospered.
So how can this be a bad thing?
Well, in itself, this “golden age” is not a bad thing. The trouble comes in when people are so excited about the trajectory that modern wine is on that nobody wants to mess with anything, especially if it is connected to the same reasons that things are going so well in the first place. If the train is picking up speed, why hit the brakes? Why force changes on the world that would slow down Margeaux and Beaune and Mosel-Saar-Ruwer and Montalcino when they’re all riding one of the all-time great hot streaks?
The trick is, of course, that there’s no going back once we’ve passed on from this age into the next – the one where it’s too hot in Bordeaux to grow cabernet franc, the Gevrey Chambertin is starting to taste like it was farmed in Lodi, and Lodi itself has to ban kerosene to prevent its growers from torching their own fields for the insurance. If (when?) we get there, we’re stuck. In the world of climate change, EVERY point is the point of no return. We don’t even know how much temperatures would continue to rise if as of tomorrow, we cut all worldwide CO2 emissions to zero. But they probably would.
For the most part, however, people don’t care, because of many reasons. Global warming is complicated. There’s no real solution to it at the moment. Stopping it involves giving up some of the things people value most right now – travel autonomy, comfort, isolation. The popular support just isn’t there yet, and it’s unlikely that that wil change any time soon.
So we’ll keep making wine, and keep celebrating it, and marvelling at our luck to be alive and drinking wine at this point in history. And then one day, those wines that keep getting better and better will release a vintage that seems a little pruny, contain not quite enough acid, and we’ll think, “Huh, this wasn’t quite as good as it was a year ago.” And the next year, we won’t buy a bottle. Instead, we’ll pick up a bottle of zinfandel from Sweden we’ve been hearing good things about. And we’ll go on with our day.
And with that, I’ve pretty much said my piece on global warming, cool-climate winemaking, and all that arglebargle. But there are lots of men and women out there who are far more knowledgeable and eloquent that me on the subject, and I heartily encourage you to go out and find them. To get you started, here are some of the sources I used to gather some of the info for my posts. For starters, there’s the Los Angeles Times article I already linked to. One of the quoted scientists in the article, Gregory V. Jones, has a web site at his university that contains many of his papers on the subject of climate change as it affects vineyards and wine. At least those papers were there – currently the “Research” portion of his web page says “Under Construction.” For a discussion on how a cooler climate affects the syrah grape, check out what Nick Peay has to say here. Bruce Cass has a piece about California’s cool climate regions on his web site that’s worth check out if you need an introduction. Clos Pepe Vineyards has a good explanation of the regional characteristics of the Santa Rita Hills AVA here. There’s lots more that I’ve read and even more that you could find, but I’ll stop there. My high horse is about to pass out from exhaustion.
