The Saleschick of the Year Award has been awarded to me.

And here's why: At a tasting in a southern suburb of Buffalo yesterday, I sold over a case of a 2005 Altesse.

You read right: Altesse.

I began each pour with the caveat of "I have to warn you, this is a weird one.." I went on to describe the odd almond/cheese/metallic notes that make it a partner for fondue and therefore gravy. I know, the two have NOTHING in common, but it worked, and I honestly do think it would pair well. One woman even bought four bottles, putting back the Chardonnay she was going to serve at Thanksgiving.

In a search for a photo of Altesse to go with this blurb, I re-found one of my favorite sites: The Wine Info Site. In addition to having photos of some supremely esoteric varietals (y'all can find those Hungarian grapes there, if you guys are reading this!), The Wine Info Site is apparently out of The Netherlands and the English translations are sometimes hilarious. Case in point: Altesse is a full-bodied grape variety with plenty of taste, for white wine. It is grown in the Savoie, France. This grape is also called Roussette and produces strong wines with a pleasant dosis of acidity and a herbal taste with a touch of mineral.

I do totally agree about the herbal taste with minerality, but what the schmeck is a 'dosis'? Is that the Latin plural of 'dose'? And I adore that Altesse has plenty of taste "for white wine."

• Chambertin and Musigny are definitely a cut above Grand Echezeaux. Just more complex. This statement is probably heresy to some and completely obvious to others. Can't win.
  

• Comte de Vogue Musigny is variable and I'm not sure it's quite all there. Something to mull over given the high prices.

• On the other hand the 1990 Musigny is a butterfly finally coming out of it's 18 year cocoon. This will need another 7-10 years? - but it's a knockout.
  

• Armand Rosseau Chambertin. Amazing wine, year after year.
  

• Best white of the night '99 CM. Some people liked the '90 but to me that shouldn't be what a CM is about - a little too much flabbiness not enough acidity and minerality. The '96 was a close second - perhaps an off bottle but tonight at least the '99 won on the nose.
  

• Best red of the night was '90 Rosseau Chambertin. On the other hand I think in due time the '90 Musigny will be incredible and possibly better.
  

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

As a fugitive of the cubicle nation I’ve learned a few interesting things.  Some about myself and some about actually jumping ship and really trying to get things going.  In fact, I don’t have much time today but this blog is an important part of my life and I don’t want it to go dark for too long.

So its about three months since I was officially “jumped” and the main thing I’ve learned is this - have your shit together, ducks in a row, and get ready because having little visibility into where the money is going to come from is a scary thing.  Don’t let all these entrepreneurs tell you “oh yeah, just do it; shit or get off the pot; blah blah blah”.  All crap.  There is NOTHING impulsive about jumping ship and going it alone.

If you’re part of the cubicle nation you’ve most likely gotten extremely good at your job and that gives you confidence to “give it a try”.  Recognize this - while you may be a genius in your field, you do NOT know everything you should to go it alone.  Go into it with your eyes open and allow yourself to “know what you don’t know”.  Business development, marketing, networking, tech services, administrative assistant, bookkeeper, customer support, legal secretary, etc…

Its not that you CAN’T do all this stuff, but just know that you’ll need to plan some time where you don’t have money (or assume you don’t) figure out how you’ll pull that off - assuming no income - and then when you’re OK with that you can go for it.  Because what will happen is things will take longer then you think and you need to make sure you’re not rushed into bad decisions for your business just because of the uneasy feeling that “no visibility” gives you.  In fact, you want to figure out everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph as a way to give yourself visibility into your business and the more visibility you have the better you’ll feel about the jump.

Next - you can’t get away from politics.  Now granted, there are no office politics unless you want to count arguments over why the dogs haven’t been walked in a week and the potential of withholding of certain marital obligations as politics.  But the politics that I’m talking about are around meeting new people, making a name for yourself, and building your business.  I’m not big on politics and generally as a consultant, even early in building the business, I tell it like it is, turn down business that while I’m perfectly capable of doing the work, it doesn’t add to my “portfolio” if you will.  Its a tricky thing breaking into new markets and its clear that there are “circles” everywhere you go.  I’ve always known that and I’ve been ready for it.  But its more important to understand that going into it then I would’ve thought before making the leap.  So I think its important to communicate that out - You are not getting away from politics by escaping from the cubicle nation; you are just dealing with a different type of politics.  So “how to gain friends and influence people” is still an important skill!!

OK, I have to run but I think I’ll be doing more and more around communicating my Cubicle Nation Fugitive experiences as they seem to be coming fast and furious and they are actually interesting as I learn from this.

Cheers!

Deciding when to pick from Adopt A Grape 2008 on Vimeo.

Dubbed the "first lady of wine" by one Robert Parker, Heidi Peterson Barrett makes damn good wine (think Screaming Eagle) in Napa, and now you can listen to her talk about how she decides what and when to harvest in this video just posted by one of her winery clients, Fantesca. Filmed on October 2, Heidi discusses not only Fantesca's harvest but that of the region as a whole, so it's a nice 3-minute primer on what's happening in the vineyards in and around Napa about this time. Personally, I was super lucky to meet Heidi earlier this year in Napa at a fantastic gathering of women in wine, and if you click the link to "read more" you can check out a pic of the two of us. Not my best pic - but then again, that hardly matters when one is so close to Ms. Hallowedness of Wine. Cheers!

Many people would be able to identify a bottle of wine that was truly faulty and, in a restaurant, ask for a replacement. But would you be able to tell what the fault was or what to blame for it? It is all to do with perception threshold. Different faults require different parts per thousand or even million to be perceived.

Some people are more sensitive to certain faults than others so while the host, who may taste the wine as it is brought to the table, is happily quaffing, one or more guests could be secretively retching into their napkins. Depending on how well you know your host and judging, diplomatically, how much of an ego dent your comments could produce, it might be worth discreetly asking people to have another careful sniff.

 At a wine faults workshop this week, it was made clear that a fault is only a fault if the people drinking the wine consider it to be. For example the "fault" brett - produced from brettanomyces yeast acting on the phenolic acids of the grape - is a characteristic that some tasters love and some winemakers deliberately introduce. It can produce strong animal characteristics that enhance a wine's complexity and increases some people's pleasure.

Of course it is very important to get the balance right because the smallest increase tips a wine over from animal (yum) to bretty (yuck).  And even in the lower doses some people adore the fragrant pong while others will recoil in horror at the filthy stench. Perception is all.

Then there is actual corkiness. Produced by TCA, TBA and TeCA it has various origins like the high levels of chlorine used to clean the winery and equipment, the breakdown of other cleaning agents by funghi in the winery - low ventilation and high humidity contibuting to high levels in the atmosphere.

The cork industry is keen to point out that it is not something inherently present in the corks more of a contamination at the winery. The plastic in alternative closure linings etc are equally susceptible to this contamination. With increased awareness, far higher standards of hygiene than ever before and alternative cleaning solutions available the problem should be getting better. However despite some high profile cases in California back in 2004, there are still many wineries taking the easy option and continuing bad practices.

At the other end is a sulfide problem that produces a tomato, truffle, cabbage, rubber character. This is reduction, the opposite of oxidation and the result of a complete seal which prevents any movement of oxygen into the wine. Unlike oxidation though, this can be corrected sometimes as simply as swirling the wine in the glass or decanting the bottle thereby allowing some air contact and dissipating the bad aromas.

This problem has been most associated with screwcaps which provide such an affective seal that all the positive benefits of cork permeability have been lost alongside the problems that can occur for freshness through excessive permeability.

New Zealand wineries have famously chosen to address this by slightly oxidising the wine before bottling in order to achieve balance once the wine is in bottle. As is often the case with the New World, they are quick to respond to problems and criticism.

However this is a dangerous and nervy solution and not always successful. Pascal Chatonnet, leading faults scientist, oenologist and consultant to wineries all over the world, argues that some of the essential character and originality is lost through this process and the overall quality and elegance is compromised, though this is not necessarily understood by the consumer as the original wine is not available to compare.

What is important to the cork industry is that while a consumer might recognise the wine is faulty, the only real language employed to describe or attribute the fault invokes cork. This is of major concern and is where the charm offensive needs to conentrate, for cork may not have played any part whatsoever.

For consumers the challenge to the industry as a whole is to find a closure with the correct level of permeability and which is kept free of contamination. It is in everybody's interests and with a more frank discussion opening up we can only hope that solutions won't be too far away.

Review by W. Blake Gray.

Is wine food or alcohol? Most Americans would immediately choose "alcohol," perhaps laughing at the question.

In Europe, though, that wasn't the case for centuries. Before water purification became widespread, wine was safer to drink than water. The idea that wine is primarily an intoxicant is relatively recent, and like so many influential memes in the world today, it comes from the United States.

Paul Lukacs' book American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine was inspired by the author's realization at an Italian wine event that U.S. wine has become not only the best in the world (as measured by critics' ratings), but that U.S. wine -- fruit-forward, big-bodied and high in alcohol -- is changing the style of wine throughout the world. Even those who vehemently oppose the former idea must concede the latter.

If all Lukacs, chair of the English department at Loyola College in Maryland, was interested in was those two points, he could have started his timeline as late as the 1960s, perhaps with the opening of the idea lab that was Robert Mondavi Winery. In fact, he expends a lot of verbiage assuring us that American wine, until the end of the 1960s, almost invariably reached its highest peak at "serviceable."

Instead, digging into the history of American wine, Lukacs found himself fascinated by its relationship to alcohol. This continuing theme of the book ends up far more interesting than another retelling of how Mike Grgich and Warren Winiarski proved, in Jim Barrett's words, that "kids from the sticks" could make wines better than the best of France, and a helluva lot more useful than one more polemic about high-alcohol wines.

Prohibition was a defining time in America's relationship with wine and liquor, as well as crime and honesty. Lukacs points out that if the wine industry had been smarter, Prohibition could have been an era when Americans became wine drinkers.

Here's why: When Thomas Jefferson opined about the benefits of wine, one of his strongest points was that it led to temperance. What Jefferson meant by temperance was not teetotalling, but drinking wine in moderation with dinner, the way it had been consumed in Europe for centuries. Like many citizens of this always-culturally-conservative country, Jefferson didn't want to see his neighbors getting blasted at the saloon on bourbon and rye.

Prohibition could easily have gone in a different direction. Home winemakers were allowed to make a fairly large amount of wine for their own consumption, and some California grapegrowers actually did better shipping their grapes to the East Coast than they had selling to the California Wine Association monopoly that had dominated the industry for more than 20 years before Prohibition. A few politicians argued that wine should be entirely exempt from Prohibition. Imagine how that would have changed the roaring '20s: no speakeasies, no culture of lawlessness, less corruption, less capital transferred to criminal enterprises.

Instead, the country got a dozen years of bathtub gin that promoted the sanctimonious-in-public, sin-in-private behavior we still exhibit regarding sex and media. For the most part, unlike French, Spaniards and Italians, Americans don't drink to appreciate the beverage; they drink to drink.

Lukacs blames the wine industry for not promoting its product as one of temperance and culture, instead selling it in saloons as just another flavor of booze. He points out a number of occasions in the late 19th century when the wine industry had a chance to differentiate itself from liquor purveyors, but chose not to.

The disturbing thing about this observation is that little has really changed regarding wine's place in American culture. Those of us who write about wine or work in the industry are a step removed from the way middle America sees it.

I'm writing this from San Francisco, where wine does belong on the dinner table for the most part. But I read this book while on vacation in Honduras. The island of Roatan is dominated by American tourists, many from middle America. People who drank wine there didn't stop at one bottle; they stopped at near-unconsciousness. When I told people I work in the wine industry, the inevitable reaction was not "Do you get to taste a lot of good stuff?" but "How great it must be to get wasted every day!"

I'll get off my high horse now (horse riding makes my butt hurt). Lukacs' other main point of interest, which is far less convincing, is his respect for and concentration on non-West Coast wines, and even worse, wines not made from vinifera grapes. It's interesting to read a book on American wine history that's not focused on California, but if you're writing a book about American wine's "rise" by world standards, you're wasting your time talking about wine from Ohio and Indiana and Missouri. And please, hold the Catawba and pass the Cab and Pinot.

Lukacs is a very polite writer; he reads like a courtly and well-read man who would be pleasant company at the dinner table. The downside of this is the constant feeling that he's keeping a soft focus on the foibles of wine celebrities.

For example, he cites Ellen Hawkes' excellent "Blood and Wine" as a source on the Gallo brothers, but doesn't use her many hard-hitting and fascinating anecdotes. Thus I found the book most interesting in sections when it discussed people about whom I know little, like Nicholas Longworth, whose Ohio-grown pink Catawba made him the first commercially successful winemaker in America. I also was interested to learn that former preacher Thomas Welch invented non-alcoholic grape juice because he was, in words I would use but Lukacs never would, a teetotalling zealot and insufferable prig. Seriously: Jesus could work miracles, yet He didn't see the need to turn water into non-alcoholic grape juice. (Oops, high horse again. Sorry.)

But for sections about Mondavi or the Gallos or Grgich, among others, what's not written here is more interesting than what is.

I can't finish this review without pointing out something that threw me off at the beginning: Page 3, to be exact. About the famous Judgment of Paris tasting, Lukacs writes, "Since Spurrier and Gallagher had promoted the event extensively, a crowd of spectators, including a number of journalists, came as well."

That's not true, and it's not a minor mistake. To be fair, Lukacs wrote this five years before the one (1) journalist at the event, George Taber, published his own book. But the fact that Taber was the only journalist present, and that he could speak French fluently, was crucial to the event's historic importance, because Taber got complete access to the judges' comments, while a flock of journalists would probably have been held back.

Sadly, I spent the next 359 pages doubting the veracity of everything. Did Thomas Welch really invent a system for simplifying spelling? Was Warren Winiarski really inspired to make wine by a winemaker in Maryland? If there's ever another edition of this book, that early error needs to be corrected.

Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine, W.W. Norton 2005, $13.56, (Paperback).

W. Blake Gray is a San Francisco writer and Chairman of the Vintners Hall of Fame Electoral College. His high horse is named Trigger Happy.

Dulka is one of the most famous wine producing families in the town of Sremski Karlovci, near Novi Sad in Vojvodina. They produce wine since 1920 and have won a handful of awards at the Novi Sad agricultural fair throughout the years. Apart from producing wine, this familiy also produces bermet and brandies of highest qualities.

They have just recently started growing Cabernet Sauvignon, and 2005 is their second vintage. However, this wine is quite rich in both aroma and taste, much richer and deeper than other pure Cabernets around. The color is dark ruby red, the nose rich, so reminiscent of forests and the flavours are those of forest fruit and chocolate. It’s a good wine, can be enjoyed on it’s own.

Score: 8/10
Price: 540 RSD (?6.5)
Retailer: Rodi? MB, Airport City, Belgrade

Technorati Tags: Wine, Serbian Wine, Vojvodina, Sremski Karlovci, Novi Sad, Bermet

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

OK, so I’m trying to insure that the Wine Bloggers’ Conference in Sonoma has good, solid Wi-Fi access.  I’ve spent a decade and a half in the networking industry and the last 8 years designing wireless products so when I setup a conference for 160+ BLOGGERS, i.e. many many laptops in the same room, I have my concerns because of the physical limitations of Wi-Fi.

So the hotel hooks me up with the contact information for their service provider (the Wi-Fi is outsourced which is typical for a hotel).  I send him a message stating exactly my concerns and pointing out that I’ve setup many tradeshow demos as well as conference networks that got hammered by a techie conference.  Here is the email that he sends back to me (understand, I am the hotel’s customer and I am selling out their hotel for this weekend and giving them untold exposure through media the whole weekend).  Is it me or is this dude kinda of a douche?

Dear Sirs-

There are a total of 19 APs interspersed throughout the hotel, not including extra devices occasionally set up by catering.  Depending on the unit, they?ll support from 12-36 users on the wireless (multiple internals).  This has been the design at the Flamingo since its initial design and installation, almost as if we knew what we were doing?

Please inform the users that the codes will be bound to the MAC address of the NIC they use at the time of connection and entry of the code.  They cannot switch computers and use the same code.  The time in contiguous and not broken up to when they are using the connection, ie: 3 hrs ? 9 hrs of 15 minute usage periods.

Also, be aware that the total bandwidth for the Hotel Guests use is 6mb/3mb.  Therefore, this should not be a time for these ?HEAVY internet users? to download all the Richard Simmons or Jane Fonda videos as this type of abuse will naturally hinder the enjoyable experience that such a convention should foster, human dialogue and contact.

I hope that you enjoy your stay at the Flamingo and that all elements of your convention are a total success.

JJ

Maybe its me, I don’t know…

Updated: The hotel worked on the service provider to create a parallel network in the main conference area that will be supported by additional APs on non-adjacent channels and they committed to having staff on hand throughout the entire conference should this network shit the bed.  I feel better about the chances of success.