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Celebrate Wine is pleased to be a part of a new wine-writing project called "Drink Local Wine." The site brings together wine journalists, sommeliers, bloggers, and other wine enthusiasts from 16 "non-west coast" states and Canada. The goal is to enforce the reality that North American wine is not just about California, Oregon, and Washington anymore.
At "Drink Local Wine," you'll find information about wines from Illinois, Maryland, Georgia, and Wisconsin...and, of course, my home state, Ohio. Be sure to take a look.
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There are not a lot of beet lovers in my family. I remember during a game of Trivial Pursuit with my grandfather Chuck the following question came up: "What vegetable goes by the scientific name Beta vulgaris?" Chuck gave the correct answer, with the explanation that no vegetable could be more vulgar than a beet. I enjoy red beets and go crazy over golden beets--in fact the only ingredients I dislike are those that are bland and flavorless (chickpeas, I'm looking at you). With colder nights, I thought that it would be fun to make a hearty pot of borscht, a soup that doesn't get a lot of respect thanks to lingering misconceptions from the Cold War. Borscht is boiled beets and sour milk, right? Just like the trope that Russian women are ugly, and we all know how that turned out.
Like garam masala, BBQ, pasta sauce, and kimchi, there are as many conflicting recipes for borscht as there are grandmothers in the given culture. Arguments erupt, friendships split, cities go to war against each other on the soccer field. Somehow millions of different people each have the Perfect Version of Dish X, the One True Recipe Since Time Immemorial, and woe unto the heretics.
Without any relatives from the former Soviet Republics, I have no dog in the fight. So in looking at various recipes I decided to go with one attributed to the famous Russian ballet dancer and defector Rudolf Nureyev. Chuck roast, cabbage, carrots, beets, potatoes, tomatoes, assorted flavorings... I roasted the beets before shredding them into the soup, and I increased the amount of beef and tomatoes for additional flavor and body. When serving, be prepared to add two things: salt and acidity, the latter from lemon juice, white wine vinegar, or if you're like me, hot sauce. It's a deep, rich, savory soup, but that necessary punch is best moderated by the individual diners. Whatever you do, don't forget the dollop of sour cream in the middle, and if you have it on hand, a sprinkling of fresh dill.
Frankly I don't know if you can pair a wine with this--I just started eating the soup and the bowl was gone before I thought to try it with the wine. With the earthy peasant heritage beer might be better, but afterwards I relaxed with a glass of the 2007 Bodegas Naia Verdejo. $13, 13% abv, 100% Verdejo from the Rueda region of Spain. Big peach and spice cake aroma, with full-bodied apple and peach flavors. It's easy to get a little tired of fruit bombs with red wines, but luscious fruit flavors can be refreshing in whites. My pairing advice for this wine wouldn't include borscht, but I think it would be a perfect wine for assorted appetizers or a muffaletta: the touch of sweetness and fruit flavors make you crave ham and olives.
Thanks to my friend Angela at Kirby Wines & Liquors for choosing the wine, though at the time I wasn't even thinking about borscht. I can stop by and ask for something like a "fun Spanish white" and she'll select a winner for me. I can't stress this enough: talk to the people at your local wine shop and find someone who works there with similar tastes to yours. Those folks have most likely tried a lot more wine (good and bad) than you, and can quickly find something you'll like in your price range.
Those of us living here know it's been positively FREEZING the past few days in San Francisco, but little did we know it's actually been SNOWING in wine country. Check out these pics of soon-to-be-opened, Gold-LEED certified winery (word has it it'll be the only one in Cali), Cade. A new venture from the PlumpJack Group (Go Gavin & fam!), Cade is slated to open its eco-friendly doors to invitation-only guests beginning in March 2009. Their PR team sent me these snaps of snow that fell on the gorgeous winery earlier today, and I just had to share. Clearly, the Juan Carlos Fernandez/Lail Group-designed facility - which is being billed as "one of the architectural showplaces of Northern California's wine country" by PlumpJack's PR machine - is a stunner. Can't wait to check it out myself - albeit in better weather.
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.
I like writing about imports but it always frustrates me how limited they are (in terms of availability) and generally how expensive. As a reviewer it can feel like I’m spending a lot of time writing for a very, very small number of people. When a box of affordable imports from Australian retailer Vintage Cellars came in though I jumped at it; this is more like it. Vintage Cellars has put a lot of time and energy into its quaffable import range in recent years and it shows. These wines are generally good, available and not expensive. Tasting through them was like a quick trip around the world. There are a couple of real bargains here.
As I write I'm sipping a glass of Californian red - a Robert Mondavi Woodbridge Cabernet Sauvignon 2005 to be precise.
It's fairly typical of the type of Californian wine readily available in the UK. Following the WineDudes request for some foreign thoughts on Californian wine the Woodbridge is 'research'. Not sure if the Wine Dude is going to utilise my barely coherant scribbles in a post or (update - he has) not but the crux of the article was that, while we can get hold of American wines in the UK most are the large brands (such as Gallo and this Mondavi) and the small quantities of boutique wines that many American wine bloggers rave about are never seen over here.
I hesitate to mention the ubiquitous Gallo in the same paragraph as Mondavi for both the Cabernet and this similar but slightly spicier Shiraz are very drinkable examples which offer more than a modicum of interest, something those massed Gallo brands never will.
Review0.3 Wine Tasting Note: Robert Mondavi Woodbridge Shiraz, 2006, California Stockists: Threshers and most supermarkets Price: £7.20 [More on Adegga / Snooth] Very similar in style to the Cabernet - sweetish full fruit, soft but evident tannins combine to make a highly drinkable fruity style of red. Broad flavours enveloping the blueberry/blackberry spectrum, not complicated but enhanced by some varietal spice. Not sure where Jancis Robinson gets the "very pinched and ungenerous" idea from as the wine appears fleshy, broad, lightly spiced and very drinkable. Alcohol 135%.
Aiming for a modicum of seasonal eating a dish of acorn squash with a tomato and cream minced lamb stuffing was paired with this red, the sweetness of the fruit playing nicely with the inherant sweetness of the squash and the stuffing. The softness held enough in the acidity and tannin stakes to counter the creamy richness.
Andrew BarrowScribblings Rating - 88/100 [3.5 out of 5]
Don Ziraldo is the founder of Inniskillin Winery in Canada and is credited with bringing ice wine to the forefront. If you?ve never had it, you should try it. It?s expensive ($100 for a half bottle) but OMG it is divine. I had the Cab Franc Icewine and it tasted like a liquid strawberry shortcake. Anywho, Ziraldo got married this past week to Anna Netter. But here?s the good part. The couple did a press release and here are just a few snipits from their article. The 58-year-old Mr. Ziraldo met his bride on the ski slopes of Whistler, but they lived apart for some time, "each continuing to travel and learn from other cultures. Gradually, thanks to their mutual interest in Buddhism, both learned that "there is no fear, only love." At the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece the couple exchanged eternity rings. Remember that kids ?there is no fear, only love?. WTF? I love it, they exchanged ?eternity rings?. Is that just basically what millionaires call a wedding band? And OMG, that hat and those shoes do not scream millionaire. I do like her dress though.
More details on the wedding: It took place at the jet-set Hotel Traube-Tonbach (Traube means grape in German), which "prides itself on its strictly enforced peace and quiet, and the glamour of its very upscale clientele." The wines were Inniskillin -- natch -- and the dinner menu featured venison and pike. The couple is honeymooning in the Bahamas with friends.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that they took ?friends? on their honeymoon?
Fact #1 JD Wetherspoon?s is a chain of pubs in England. There are 650 in operation.
Fact #2 Constellation Brands is a wine GIANT. They sell more than 80 million cases a year. They own Alice White, Almaden, Arbor Mist, Cook's, Covey Run, Inglenook, Vendange, Dunnewood, Farallon, Great Western, J. Roget, Marcus James, Paul Masson table wines, Taylor California Cellars, Viña Santa Carolina, Banrock Station, Hardys, Leasingham, Barossa Valley Estate, Chateau Reynella, and Nobilo just to name a few. Seriously, they own hundreds of wineries.
Fact #3 Constellation often does ?private labels?. This means that they take one of their wines, let?s say Alice White for example, and they put it in a bottle with a different label on it. So, if you were a mega retail store *cough Total Wine cough* you could take that Alice White and call it Blue Flame *cough ass in a glass cough* and when people want more, they can only get it at your store b/c the consumer doesn?t know it?s Alice White?.for example.
Fact #4 JD Wetherspoon?s let several different companies compete for their house wine. Whatever wine was the most popular for the trial period would win an exclusive with all of the pubs for a contract valued at nearly 150 million dollars.
Okay, now that we know the facts, let?s look at what really happened. It seems that an email was leaked from the Boss of Matthew Clarks Brands (a division of Constellation Brands) to all of their employees (around 300 people).
Wine distributor Matthew Clark emailed staff asking them to buy up to eight bottles of wine each at JD Wetherspoon's pubs in Bristol - and then claim it back on expenses. Employees were told to buy Nottage Hill Chardonnay and Shiraz, and Echo Falls - all of which are produced by Matthew Clark parent company Constellation Europe. If each of the firm's 300 employees had "done their bit" and splashed out on eight bottles of wine, it would have increased sales by 2,400 bottles in the city's pubs - potentially tipping the balance in its favour. The plan to artificially enhance the wine's popularity was devised as Constellation battled with rival firms for the exclusive rights to supply wine to JD Wetherspoon's 650 pubs.
Nice. I?d love to buy wine and expense it back to my boss. Somehow I don?t think he?d go for it. I have to say though, this doesn?t shock me so much. I wouldn?t put anything past Constellation Brands. So I guess my point here is know your brands, and know what you are buying. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1200200.ece
When pigs fly?I mean drink beer
So, in Tasmania (off of the coast of Australia) there is a local tourist attraction that has been getting a lot of flack lately. If you go to the ?Pub in the Paddock? you will find Prescilla and PB and they chug beers. But get this, Prescilla and PB are pigs. Yep, people can pay to ? and I quote ? ?pour bottles of beer down the willing throats of resident pigs?.
Dude, I would totally pay to see that. But PETA would like to go on the record and state that they are not down with it and they want to have the pigs rescued.
"Whilst it is a difficult pill to swallow ... it's certainly not cruelty, unfortunately," RSPCA state chief executive Rick Butler told PETA.
Pub owner Anne Free said Wednesday she was outraged that the tourist attraction had been attacked as cruel in the latest edition of a magazine published by animal welfare group Choose Cruelty Free. "When it's very, very quiet, I often actually have to go over and give them a couple of drinks because, yeah, they do look forward to it," Free told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. Note to self: If you ever go to Tasmania, you must go see the beer swilling pigs! http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14035561/
Boozehounds
Heartland Brewery has just begun marketing their new beer called Slobber Lager. This non-alcoholic beef flavored beer is made specifically for dogs.
"It's damn good," said Jon Bloostein, owner of Heartland Brewery, after taking a sip. Polo, a Bichon Frise, took a sniff and slurped down the whole bowl in a few seconds. Simba, a Shih Tzu, was more hesitant. After several whiffs and plenty of encouragement, he took a few gulps. But Diva, a Rottweiler, couldn't get enough. She finished one bowl and moved on to the next. Still thirsty, she sipped from a pint glass, then drank straight from the tap. "She's a beer drinker!" said Allison Cardona of the ASPCA, who helped bring the dogs, all available for adoption, to the tavern for the taste test.
Um, I am sure the dogs love it but why is the brewer drinking it? Ew! Beef flavored beer? Count me out. My dog is fat enough as it is so he?s definitely not getting any.
Schramsberg has just come out with a new sparkling wine meant to compete with the likes of Krug, Dom P., and Cristal. It is called J. Schram Rose 1988 and there were only 800 cases produced. Rarely will you ever see an American Sparkler go for more than $75 but this one??$120. "It appears in a world where Dom Pérignon Rosé is $200, and Cristal is probably $350. The Krug Rosé is certainly in that range as well," said Shramsberg head winemaker Hugh Davies. "This wine competes with those in terms of flavor, finesse and character.
Yeah, but it?s still Schramsberg and I doubt it competes with Krug. Strike that ? There is NO WAY it competes with Krug. If anybody out there can get a hold of some, I wanna know what it?s like. Ooooh I would love to have it in a blind tasting. http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Features/0,1197,3361,00.html
Last night was our anniversary so Kipp and I got a babysitter and hit the town. First we went to Milner's in Winston Salem and I had a glass of Renard Rose. It was just kinda meh... From there we proceeded to go to several different bars and I actually ran into an old sorority sister at Foothills. Anyway we came home at 8:30 (I know, were wild right?) and I fixed Steak with a mushroom and Humboldt Fog (bleu cheese) sauce. We had an '01 Spotteswoode with it. That review will come tomorrow. But for now read my review of Martinelli Pinot that I had at an impromptu wine dinner with Jon and Sam at my house on Sunday.
Martinelli '02 Moonshine Ranch Pinot Noir The nose was earthy and powdery all at the same time. It also had a lot of blackberry with some hints of white pepper. The palate was all cherry cola and sweet black cherries. There was some hidden acidity on the mid-palate with a very sweet, very lush blackberry jam finish. Yeah, it was over extracted but damn, it was GOOD. I have one more bottle and I think I'll let that one sit for about 3 more years.
Ringing in at 13.5% alcohol by volume, this cheap wine was an equal match to the FishEye Merlot. From Ripon, California, this wine lets the fruit speak for itself. Along with the dark plum taste, I also experienced a little pepper in the nose.
At only 8 dollars a bottle, I found this to be a great wine. I had mine with Spicy Montreal seasoning. Try it! Rating: 7/10 Price: 7.99 Place of purchase: L&L Grocery Vineyard Info: FishEye Winery Ripon, CA www.fisheyewines.com
Torbreck’s top shiraz – the Run Rig Shiraz, priced at well over $200 per bottle – is probably Australia ’s most hedonistic wine. It leaps out of the bottle like a rattlesnake, all fanfare and bite. It is, always, dangerously drinkable. It is thick with flavour and accented by sweetness, its spicy, gravelly, smoky complexity ramping its class through the roof. There’s always been a question mark though: this tastes so bloody good the day it is released – what happens if you stick it in the cellar? Is it Australia ’s best early-drinking wine, or will it develop and evolve if given time? A tasting in the Barossa Valley recently of every vintage yet made of Torbreck Run Rig Shiraz (including the just-released 2005) threw a crust of clear answers.
Port wines can seem like a challenging subject. There are all sorts of bottlings: vintage date, late-bottled vintage date, Colheitas, single Quintas, and still others know as ruby reserve, crusted, or white — and let?s not forget the various tawny Ports of 10, 20, 30 and 40 years of age. Why are there so many different bottlings, and where does one begin to explore all of these fortified wines? Thankfully, we had the opportunity to talk with Louisa Fry from the Port and Douro Wines Institute, an inter-professional council of growers and producers from this famous Portugese region.
Join us as we hear about the origins of Port, what it takes to get a vintage declared, and whether it’s called Port or Porto. We?ll also discuss the amazingly steep terraces of Portugal’s Douro region, and the varieties of grapes that are able to be blended into the final product. Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without hearing about the optimum time to drink Port.
For more info on the Wines of Portugal: www.ivdp.pt
Wine started flowing through taps in dozens of homes during an Italian grape festival in Marino, south of Rome.
At the heart of the town's famous Sagra dell'Uva??, or Grape Festival, is the moment when sparkling white wine flows from the fountains in the main square.
But this year locals and tourists had to make do with water, as bad plumbing meant the wine supply was switched by mistake to local homes.
...
"But this year," Mr Palozzi said, "Due to a technical error, instead of connecting wine to the fountains, we accidentally channelled it into some local homes.
"Apparently the people living around the square who got the wine coming out of their taps were very surprised, they thought that it might be some kind of present from the local council! It only lasted three minutes, we corrected it straight away."
labor day is next weekend and many of us will be grilling up hot dogs, bratwurst, and other traditional picnic fare that is difficult to pair with wine. In a recent article, Washington Post columnists, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg offer suggestions on what to serve with "dinner in a long bun." Among their suggestions are an Alsatian Riesling with bratwurst, a Rioja with a chili dog, and Chianti with Italian Sausage.
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Following the theme of my last post about Americans? increasing awareness of the quality wines that many artisan producers of Argentina are exporting, I?m pleased to post the first installment of my interview with Ed Lehrman of Vine Connections. Along with his business partner, Nick Ramkowsky, they formed a company that not only imports the wines of artisan Mendoza producers, but selectively forges meaningful, long term relationships with them. As Ed Lehrman explains in the interview, this type of involvement encompasses much more than shipping and distribution, extending into representation, consulting, label design and many other crucial aspects which in the end, bring American consumers the types of genuine artisan wines that multinationals couldn?t even conceive of delivering.
Based out of Sausalito, CA, Vine Connections has been at the forefront of the changing of the guard, in terms of tastes, that I described in my last post. Their portfolio includes excellent California, New Zealand and Japanese Saké producers, alongside the wines of star Mendoza winemakers Susana Balbo and Pedro Marchevsky, along with others to look out for, such as Mapema, Tikal and La Posta del Viñatero. If you really want to know what Argentines really like to have at the table and moreover, the breadth that Argentine wines are capable of achieving, I encourage you to explore the types of artisan producers that Vine Connections represents and whose work, over the coming years, will ultimately triumph over the characterless, corporate-backed South American wines saturating our shelves.
I would like to thank Ed Lehrman for taking the time to provide his in-depth responses concerning Vine Connections, its vision and inspiration. Our conversation unfolded over e-mail:
*What is the vision behind your company and what were some of the key experiences that led you and your business partner to get started?
- My partner, Nick Ramkowsky, and I have both been in the wine business since 1986 (we started very young), and we could have done any number of things together. Nick was a small California distributor at the time, and I had just sold my direct-to-consumer wine business where he had been one of my suppliers. A fateful trip together in May of 1999 launched us into the importing/national sale & marketing business. We spent about a week in Mendoza on that trip tasting wines from bottle, barrel, tanks?you name it?and we met some incredible winery owners and winemakers. By the end of the week, we were looking at each other and asking, ?How does the 5th largest wine producer in the world hide incredible wines like these from the US?? It seemed like this must be the opportunity of a lifetime for wine guys like us to lead the charge in introducing Argentine wine to the US, and in a way that they would be fully appreciated for their quality and authenticity, and not just their price. As an aside, of the first 12 wines we imported from Argentina, the LEAST EXPENSIVE wine was $22 retail! So in fact, Vine Connections was originally formed in order to be an Argentine wine importer. *Compared to other importers, what is the depth of Vine Connection's involvement with the producers its represents? (in terms of consulting, marketing, other assistance, etc.)
- It is hard to speak about other importers, since some do quite a lot and some just taste and buy. As for us, we take the approach that we are the winery?s own sales & marketing department and they can use us for as little or as much as they need. That may mean writing back label copy, helping with label design, or determining whether a new blended wine is even a good idea to add to their portfolio.
For all of our wineries, we do the copywriting for all printed materials since we can communicate their stories in English more effectively, and along the same lines, we handle most press relations since we are here and readily available. And I guess the most valuable thing we do would be called ?consulting? since we offer our advice on many topics based on our 40 years of working in the U.S. wine biz. *How does your company forge relationships with producers? In this vein, what is the process like for you when considering an addition to your portfolio? Do the producers come towards you in the way of trade events, do you travel to areas to scout, so to speak, or some combination thereof?
- We are very careful in this regard since our objective as an importer is to build brands and not just sell wine. That requires long-term relationships, so besides tasting backwards and forwards through a winery?s production, we spend as much as time as we can with the owners and the winemakers to see whether there is a good fit for working closely together. When we meet people who already think they know it all about winemaking, marketing, etc., we politely walk away no matter the wine quality. Our initial screen is the wines?they have to be particularly good since that is what we are known for importing. Then we start talking about their philosophies, their dreams, their business objectives, and where we should all eat dinner together (a meal with a potential supplier is always a good way to gain more insight).
This process means that while we have run into some wines that we like, we have sometimes been unwilling to take the winery on. The most common stumbling block for us seems to be that the winery lacks a strong winemaking philosophy, and often because they have abdicated this cornerstone to a consulting winemaker (and most often to foreign winemakers). As time has passed, we have pretty much settled into the idea of only representing wineries owned by Argentines and with Argentine winemakers since the winemaking vision is usually clearer and more grounded in expressing what makes Mendoza so special compared to other regions.
From the first moment that we meet a winery team, it usually takes about 18 months before we come to an agreement, do the ground work, and then start selling the wines in the U.S. It seems to work--we have never lost an Argentine winery and every brand that we represent has achieved a significant level of success.
I wish I could say that finding these producers followed a particular recipe, but in truth, all of our brands have come to us via different sources. The key is to have your radar on all the time so that the best ones don?t slip by accidentally.
*You represent Susana Balbo and Pedro Marchevsky's Dominio del Plata Winery?how did that relationship come about and how far back do you go?
- Well, if it weren?t for the ?dynamic duo? of Mendoza, we may never have been Argentine wine importers. We met them on our first trip to Mendoza in 1999, and they were so obviously talented and knowledgeable that they got us thinking a lot about the possibilities. We also formed a trusting relationship so quickly that it became obvious that we would work together, and together push forward a common vision of making Argentine wine part of the daily American fine wine conversation. That seems like an ominous task looking back now?we had no company yet and they were renting a very small winery at the time?but at the time it just seemed like destiny.
It’s time for a break. Back with updates from 20th November, and who knows - maybe the Autumn issue will also be out before the clock strikes December! a holiday time
A big, full-bodied, expansively-flavored, traditionally made Gigondas is a blend of 60% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 10% Cinsault, and 10% Mourvedre. Abundant herbes of Provence, heady, peppery notes are accompanied by sweet kirsch liqueur, plum, and fig characteristics. Dense, medium-bodied, and ripe. Nice, pure, plum-cherry finish.
Based at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail , its vines rising up the south west facing slopes, the Domaine des Bosquets encompasses 26 hectares at the heart of the appellation of Gigondas. This is one of the wines produced by the Brechet family
Score: 9/10 Price: ?18 Retailer: Somewhere in Marseille
Tecnorati
A big, full-bodied, expansively-flavored, traditionally made Gigondas is a blend of 60% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 10% Cinsault, and 10% Mourvedre. Abundant herbes of Provence, heady, peppery notes are accompanied by sweet kirsch liqueur, plum, and fig characteristics. Dense, medium-bodied, and ripe. Nice, pure, plum-cherry finish.