Wine in a Bottle-Shaped Can

For barbecues, or front porches on a hot night.

I’ve always liked my red wine on the cool side, and I’ve especially liked red wines that seem to encourage it, like Beaujolais. Now I’ve found one that downright begs to be cold—right on the bottle, in fact. Although it’s not in a bottle; it’s in a can. Or, rather, a bottle-shaped can. And, frankly, a ridiculous-looking one. If you inspect it closely, you can see that the can has a “chill spot,” a cute little dot that changes color when the wine’s cold enough, like certain macrobeers have. It also is decorated with silly, whimsical dots containing the words “very fresh” and “very fruity,” along with a picture of a young woman like you might see on the cover of a chick-lit novel. But the truth is that, despite myself, I like this absurd can/bottle. I like it in part because of the “get over yourself” silliness of it; and I like it because I’ve tasted so many good box wines recently that my prejudice toward the classic old 750-milliliter is breaking down. I’ve also read a lot about the vastly smaller carbon footprint of these new containers: They’re lighter and make shipping less expensive and less fuel-intensive. Most of all, though, I like this wine because I honestly think it doesn’t suck a bit. It’s a fun, cold quaffer that would go great with simple foods, or with a hot night and a chair on the porch.

2006 Mommessin Beaujolais Grand Reserve Red
Grapes: 100 percent Gamay
Aging: Get real
Alcohol: 12 percent (old school!)
Price: $14.99
My Tasting Notes: See above

Posted by Daniel Duane | last thursday at 3:56pm | 1 comment
Tagged with: wine, red wine, beaujolais, chill spot, wine temperature, mommessin, 2006 mommessin beaujolais grand reserve red

Drunk on Blackberry Wine

I heart Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Up in Napa again, for the weekend, I felt summer on the way: the tall spring grasses fading from green toward gold, the grapevines in full leaf, and the blackberry vines now budding with green berries. Last weekend’s rainstorms were gone on by, radish blossoms peppered the empty fields with their white and purple petals, and the odd orange poppy hung on in the better-watered bottom lands. In a few weeks, there will be enough blackberries to spend entire days out picking—I’m going to need an inflatable raft to get to one of the bushes, but I’ll find a way. And I have an idea of what I’ll do with the surplus. Preserves, of course, and perhaps a little freezing, for winter pies, but even more fun will be the blackberry wine I want to try.

The recipe comes from the just-published River Cottage Cookbook, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The author of The River Cottage Meat Book, Fearnley-Whittingstall lives in an English country home as a sort of full-time food experiment for his BBC cooking show. He farms, he fishes, he forages, he kills livestock and eats it. And, apparently, he makes wine. The recipe couldn’t be more simple: Pour two quarts of boiling water over four pounds of blackberries, mash the berries a bit, and let the whole thing sit for a few days, stirring every once in a while. Then create two and a half quarts of flavored simple syrup using sugar and the juices and zests from one orange and one lemon, as well as water, and add this to the pot. Now add one packet of baking yeast moistened with warm water, and put the whole thing into a demi-john fermentation jar at room temp for as long as it takes to become hooch. (Two to six months.) The next move is to rack the stuff—pour the juice off the sediment—and let it age for another six months before bottling. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Posted by Daniel Duane | last monday at 3:26pm | 6 comments
Tagged with: wine, blackberry wine, make your own wine, hugh fearnley-whittingstall, napa, blackberries, the river cottage cookbook

A Rainy Day in Napa

Buzzards and Sauvignon Blanc.

Napa was unseasonably cold last weekend as passing rainstorms cooled the air and drenched the fields. I went for a run on quiet country roads, past blackberry brambles where water droplets shone on the dark green leaves and white blackberry blossoms presaged the emergence of fruit. The nearby grapevines were in full green leaf—paler than the blackberries, brighter—below the gray sky, but with no fruit yet showing. I thought of conversations I’d had with produce farmers that very morning, at my Saturday market: A record heat had just been followed by a record cold, artichokes were off, strawberries abundant, it was all making them crazy with anxiety. Perhaps grape growers are worried too, though I doubt it. They’re in for a longer haul.

Big hawks looked black against the rain clouds, cruising over the great gray oak trees, and I saw a young crow following a much bigger, older crow, squawking and diving and circling, like a fighter plane pestering a bomber. Buzzards, for some reason, were everywhere; perhaps the smell of carrion carries better in wet weather, without the sun to bake it away. Below, I’m posting a picture—from Bruce Fleming’s upcoming show at Mumm Napa titled “Napa Valley Paradise”—that captures the mood. It’s a fall image, strictly speaking, but the sky is very much the one I just saw, here in the late spring. It’s titled Stormy Fall Vineyard.

And here’s a wine I seriously enjoyed recently, and consider absolutely worth tracking down.

2007 Hess Collection Lake County Sauvignon Blanc
Grapes: 100 percent Sauvignon Blanc
Aging: Mostly stainless steel, with a little used oak
Alcohol: 14.5 percent
Suggested Retail Price: $11
My Tasting Notes: This wine has such a lovely marriage of fruit and acidity. I drank a glass last night with a spring vegetable soup (asparagus, favas, chicken stock, Parmesan, pancetta, a few shiitakes, all from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon book) and thought it was sensational.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 4:03pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, napa, bruce fleming, mumm napa, napa valley paradise, napa valley, sauvignon blanc, white wine, 2007 hess collection lake county sauvignon blanc, hess collection

Nonlame Food Shopping in Napa

The new Oxbow Public Market.

I spend a lot of summer weekends in the Napa Valley—my wife’s parents have a place outside the town of Napa—and for years now I’ve been struck by the sheer lameness of the food-shopping scene. It’s astonishing: In the national epicenter of the food-and-wine lifestyle, with so many spectacular restaurants and literally millions of food-and-wine-obsessed tourists, the grocery situation has generally been on a par with Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1970. Even the Saturday farmers’ market in the town of Napa has been an embarrassment: Several weekends last summer I counted exactly zero organic vendors. (I hear the Tuesday market is better; also, on other weekends, I did find one or two organic stands.) By and large, the stands were just conventional Central Valley monoculture farmers asking boutique prices for supermarket produce.

To make matters more curious, this farmers’ market happens in a parking lot across the sun-bathed street from Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food, & the Arts, a huge and classy-looking building that promises to celebrate everything I hold dear, but that is somehow utterly impossible to engage with. The front of the building is an impenetrable monolith, and once inside you feel like you’re in the glorious lobby of a grand new museum, except you can’t figure out where the galleries are, nor why you would ever come back. As a result, the place hasn’t done especially well.

Enter the Oxbow Public Market, directly next door to Copia. Modeled after the celebrated Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco, the Oxbow Public Market opened in mid-December, and does in a single stroke what neither Copia nor the Napa farmers’ market accomplished in years of trying: It creates a must-visit destination for enjoying the food-wine synergy of Napa. On both of the last two weekends, throngs of tourists and (more important) locals stood in long lines at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, a spin-off of the great little diner in St. Helena housed in the market. Also inside its airy and beautifully designed food hall are vendors with everything we’ll ever need to eat and drink the way we want to eat and drink on Napa weekends: terrific seafood, all-natural meats, organic produce, and killer coffee from the ridiculously good Ritual Coffee Roasters. A Hog Island Oyster Bar is on the way. The Model Bakery, also based in St. Helena, is making great breads and desserts and full breakfast plates to be eaten on outdoor picnic tables. A true cause for celebration is the Fatted Calf shop, offering first-class charcuterie and specialties like duck confit, along with raw pastured meats and pastured chicken and eggs from Soul Food Farm, the current favorite of many high-end restaurants.

Most fun of all, and most deserving of a detour to see Oxbow, is the Oxbow Wine Merchant. The brilliant sommelier Peter Granoff—partner in San Francisco’s excellent Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant—was manning the register the other day, and he walked me through the offerings. In a big open space, with large windows and outdoor patio tables, this is much more than a wine shop. It’s a wine shop with a wine bar, a kitchen making wine-friendly light eats, and a first-rate cheese shop. Drop in for a bite and you can put together a sensational picnic, enjoying it on the spot.

The economics aren’t entirely there for Oxbow yet—it doesn’t have anything like the daily foot traffic of the Ferry Building. And it’ll need Napa locals to get serious about shopping there, which will put pressure on the alarmingly high prices (which are, no doubt, in turn driven by rents, and by the sheer economics of Napa real estate). But the new Westin Verasa Napa—an upscale condo-hotel complex—will soon open across the street, as will a Ritz-Carlton resort. Throw in the wholesale redevelopment of downtown Napa, with the beautiful riverwalk promenade opening up, and this once-dowdy town, long the back-lot service center for the wine industry, will be on its way to becoming the center of retail gravity for the entire valley. Given that I weekend nearby, and much prefer cooking to dining out, I consider this a great thing. I bet it will help Copia, too.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 4:15pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, food, napa, napa valley, food shopping, farmers market, copia, oxbow public market, ferry building marketplace, taylor's automatic refresher, ritual coffee roasters, hog island oyster bar, the model bakery, fatted calf, soul food farm, oxbow wine merchant, ferry plaza wine merchant, westin verasa napa, peter granoff

Grape Farmers into Winemakers

Like making lemonade from lemons, but with more alcohol.

I like grape farmers. I met my first real grape farmers over in Lodi, California, while reporting a story for the Los Angeles Times; these old German farming families had been selling grapes to big wineries for generations. But with all the consolidation in the wine business, they didn’t like the price they were getting at the farm gate; the only way to stay profitable was to vinify their own wine. So they built wineries, enticed their younger members back home, and hurled themselves at becoming winemaking families.

Something similar has happened with Milbrandt Vineyards, up in Washington state. Butch and Jerry Milbrandt grew up in a farming family in the eastern part of the state, in the high-desert sagebrush country. They were mostly in alfalfa and hay when the winery boom began, and in 1997 they added grapes.

I heard about all this over dinner with Butch, near the ballpark in San Francisco. He’s a no-nonsense agricultural-type guy, with no wine-country affectation. He told me flat out he’d opened a crush facility on his property as an economic move, and eventually started making wine from his own grapes. He still supplies grapes to more than 50 other wineries, and he sells bulk wine all over the country and even makes house-label wines for various clients—this is not a small operation, nor the kind that makes wine-lovers feel all warm and fuzzy. Butch talks openly about using oak chips, for example, to help flavor his lower-price-point wines. But I enjoyed the dinner in part for the odd things I learned—like the difficulty of getting distribution. The way Butch told the tale, it has a lot to do with huge conglomerates like Southern Wine & Spirits and Constellation Brands, and their hold on key liquor labels. No distributor can survive without those big liquor brands, so the conglomerates can force them to take wines as well, thereby squeezing out wineries that don’t have leverage.

Something else I learned that night: You can “cork” a perfectly good bottle of wine by recorking with the original cork upside down. Apparently this can introduce TCA into the bottle and spoil it in a hurry.

Another tip, vis-à-vis box wine: Don’t buy boxes that look rounded, because it means the bag inside has swollen.

Here’s a Milbrandt wine I genuinely liked, and I bet you would too.

2005 Milbrandt Vineyards Legacy Merlot
Grapes: 77.5 percent Merlot, 19.5 percent Cabernet, 3 percent Petit Verdot
Aging: Butch told me they’d aged this in one-third new oak, one-third older oak, and one-third interstave barrels, which apparently means they’ve inserted some new oak material into an older barrel, to give it a little more life
Alcohol: 15 percent (yikes!)
Suggested Retail Price: $24.99
My Tasting Notes: I drank this wine twice—once at home, with dinner, and once with Butch. Both times I liked what was so jammy and Merlot about it, such as the soft mouthfeel and the toasty, smoky aroma and the dense, raisinlike ripeness of the fruit.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, May 23, 2008 at 3:32pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, grapes, grape farming, winemaking, milbrandt vineyards, winemaking families, wine distribution, red wine, merlot, 2005 milbrandt vineyards legacy merlot, legacy merlot, butch milbrandt, washington state, economics of winemaking, southern wine and spirits, constellation brands

An American Wine Dynasty

Gundlachs and Bundschus came together in the 19th century to make great wines.

I’ve written recently about French winemaking families that go back for generations, and it turns out there’s one American family with similar history: Gundlach Bundschu. I met Jeff Bundschu recently, for lunch in my neighborhood, and we had so much in common (surfing, first and foremost, but also mountain biking, and being the same age and having children the same age and sort of looking alike, too) that we almost forgot to talk about wine. But once we did, I came away feeling that his family’s story was one of the great California stories. It starts in 1858, when a Bavarian named Jacob Gundlach bought 400 Sonoma acres and then went home to Bavaria to marry his childhood sweetheart. What I love about this piece of the story is all that’s left out. Went home? How, for God’s sake?! A Gold Rush–era sailing ship around the Horn, no doubt, and up the east coast of South America, then to New York, and on across to Europe.

Anyway, the Civil War broke out in the year of their first vintage, and Charles Bundschu partnered with Gundlach in 1868. The phylloxera outbreak that destroyed the vineyards of Europe hit here, too, and Gundlach and Bundschu were deeply involved in the ultimate solution: grafting European vines onto resistant native rootstock. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 came at a time when Gundlach Bundschu had a block-long winery in the city, vinifying all the family’s Sonoma grapes and selling the wine overseas. The postearthquake firestorm destroyed 1 million gallons of their wine and three of the family’s homes, so they left the city and rebuilt their lives on the vineyard properties, again making enough wine to have warehouses in New York and sales accounts overseas.

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition, marking the 1915 opening of the Panama Canal, had a Gundlach Bundschu wines exhibit, but only four years later the whole operation was shut down by Prohibition. Most of the grapevines were torn up, and upon repeal in 1933, Gundlach Bundschu sold the harvest from its remaining vines to other wineries, including Niebaum and Almaden. But 36 years later, in 1969, Jim Bundschu replanted the entire family property, and the 1973 vintage was the first new one bottled under the Gundlach Bundschu name. In the year 2000, Jim’s son, Jeff, took over the family business, which he still runs.

And as he sat across from me at lunch, talking about his nine-foot longboard and the waves on the Sonoma Coast, and where he likes to mountain bike up in Sonoma, I was struck by the rarity of this guy’s past, and how it encapsulates the entire history of California winemaking. It must be quite a feeling, to live in this ageless and ever-changing state of ours, but with all that time and continuity on your side, all that family integrity. The rest of us, by comparison, are just passing through.

2007 Gundlach Bundschu Gewürztraminer
Grapes: 100 percent Gewürztraminer
Wood: Strictly stainless steel
Alcohol: 14.5 percent (whoa!)
Price: $25 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: I’m crazy about Alsace Gewürztraminer, and I thought this wine was operating in that tradition, with enough acidic brightness to back up the riot of unusual fruit and nut flavors. In my view, Gewürz is an odd-but-beautiful bird of a grape, making a huge range of wines in which most suck, but this is a very solid new-world example.

2005 Gundlach Bundschu Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 11 months in “fine-grain, medium toast French oak barrels (45% new), primarily in Tonnellerie Remond-coopered wood”
Alcohol: 14.1 percent
Price: $38 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: This wine comes from vineyards right up against the border of the Carneros appellation, and it reflects that: It’s a cool, restrained, balanced sort of Pinot Noir, not overpowering. It would make a terrific food wine.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 3:15pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, history, winemaking families, gundlach bundschu, jeff bundschu, california wine, sonoma, gewürztraminer, pinot noir

Old Wine and New

Two very old bottles turn out surprisingly good; the new wine’s not so bad either.

Several entries back, I wrote about some old wines I’d been given. The set-up went like this: Hearing an old family friend lament that he’d cellared French wines for too long, I told him not to pour them out. This friend is named Denis, he’s been cellaring French wines for decades—he spends several weeks in Paris every summer, drawing and painting—and I asked if he’d consider giving the wines to me so that I could turn them into vinegar and give some back to him. “I’ll make you the best salad dressing you’ve ever had,” I told him.

Denis liked the sound of that and obliged: Through my father, in a brown paper bag, he passed along two bottles of Chablis grand cru, a 1988 and a 1987, both from Blanchot, and both from producer Francois Raveneau; two bottles of Sauternes from the same period; and a bottle of 1970 Château Mouton Rothschild. I simply never see wines this old, so instead of pouring them right into my beloved vinegar crock, I opened them with company; partly I wanted to see if they might be drinkable, partly I wanted to make sure they’d make decent vinegar. Two old friends were over—Matt and Kevin, neither of whom could be called a gastronome or even a real sybarite, as they’re both highly fit surfers focused more on Omega-3 fatty acids than on gustatory pleasure. Matt, in fact, knows more about surfing and the history of surfing than any other living human being, having written the definitive books on the subject; and Kevin is one of the very few people to have both climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan and surfed the monster waves at Mavericks, south of San Francisco. But both men like a good time, and although their significant others are vegetarians, Matt and Kevin will savor a good steak when it’s put in front of them; I invite the two over for regular “meat nights” as often as they’ll come, usually making their lady friends something veg-positive like a wild nettle frittata.

As it happened this time, I had two high-quality young wines I wanted to try: a relatively expensive Piña D’Adamo Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, and a merely somewhat expensive Xavier Monnot white Burgundy. To make for an interesting comparison against these young wines, I opened the Rothschild an hour early, letting it air after all those years under a cork. Matt had only just arrived when I opened the chilled Chablis. It wasn’t ruined by any stretch, but to my palate there was something odd about it: a curious urinelike depth of flavor utterly unlike the steely clarity I remembered from the first time I’d had a grand cru Chablis, 15 years earlier in the company of the same Denis. Instead of the racy minerality I recalled, this one had an oddly rounded apricot quality (go figure). But Matt and his wife, Jody, without even knowing what wine they were drinking, were absolutely thrilled by it. So was my wife, L. They all loved this Chablis and couldn’t get enough, and the same was true for Kevin and his girlfriend, Jean. Which left the Xavier Monnot entirely to me, a treat I enjoyed.

The Rothschild was a similar experience, at least in ways. This wine, too, was not at all ruined—it was absolutely drinkable. It also had the earthy mystery we hope for in a wine that old, along with leather and tobacco and spice and a kind of dried, crushed-rose-petal quality. But in comparison to the huge Piña Cabernet, it was quite clearly a faded wine, and I shared the universal preference at the table for the younger bird. The next night, however, when another friend dropped by—a guy who has been to the summit of Mount Everest three times, once as part of the first American team to ski down from the very top—the Rothschild seemed to have unfolded more, and the two of us drank every drop and tried to plan a good joint adventure for this summer. By the time he went home, we’d come up with a beauty.

2005 Piña Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon D’Adamo Vineyard
Grapes: 100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon
Wood: 18 months in French oak, half of it new
Alcohol: 14.7 percent
Suggested Retail Price: $72
My Tasting Notes: This was a rich, plush behemoth of a Napa Cabernet, mouth-filling and juicy with superripe red fruit and big-but-smooth tannins, and although it’s expensive, you won’t feel cheated.

2005 Xavier Monnot Monthelie “Les Duresses”
Grapes: 100 percent Chardonnay
Wood: 12 months in 25 percent new oak (a light wood touch, in other words)
Alcohol: 13 percent
Price: $42.49 from the Wine House
My Tasting Notes: I liked the sheer crispness of this wine, such an interesting quality in a juice that does show Chardonnay traits, certain elements of tropical fruit against this firm acidity. It’s a pretty racy, structured wine.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 3:25pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, old wine, aging wine, french wine, chablis grand cru, chablis, blanchot, francois raveneau, château mouton rothschild, cabernet sauvignon, white burgundy, 2005 pina napa valley cabernet sauvignon d'adamo vineyard, pina, napa valley, d'adamo vineyard, 2005 xavier monnot monthelie les duresses, xavier monnot, chardonnay

Summer Rosé

Warm weather, grilled chicken, and wine

Here’s a cause for celebration: I’ve just had my first 2007 vintage rosé, as sure a sign as any that summer is on the way. It was the cheap but truly lovely Bieler—once again in fine form—and I drank it with a whole chicken rubbed with herbs and cooked on the grill. Divine!

2007 Bieler Père et Fils Côteaux d’Aix-en-Provence
Grapes: A blend of 70 percent Grenache, 30 percent Syrah
Aging: 100 percent stainless steel, and not for a long time, either. This is a rosé, after all.
Alcohol: N/A
Price: $11–$12 suggested retail
My Tasting Notes: Just what you’re looking for in a cheap rosé: watermelon and cherry, clean and crisp, and great with strong-flavored foods, especially anything saturated in garlic.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, May 16, 2008 at 2:38pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, rose, summer, warm weather, grilled chicken, 2007 bieler père et fils côteaux d'aix-en-provence, grenache, syrah, watermelon, cherry, garlic

Cold, Heartless, Sensational Winemaker

Neill Robb of Redbank is passionate about being dispassionate.

Neill Robb doesn’t like the word “artisan.” Neither does he like to talk about winemaking in terms of love, either. Or art. Or mystery.

“I’m a tradesman,” he says, in a way meant to dismiss hype. “I’m just a professional winemaker, and that’s all. It’s not about passion. It’s about making the absolute best wine I can. People don’t want to hear that. They think I’m a cold, heartless bastard, and I am a cold, heartless bastard when I make wine.”

Small and compact of build, with an intensely ruddy complexion, Robb is being modest; he’s apparently been making sensationally delicious wines since he first opened his Redbank Winery, in Victoria, Australia, in the early 1970s. I haven’t tasted his past vintages, but his current releases impress me a great deal. More importantly, though, I love his way of talking and his no-BS lack of pretension.

Robb grew up in the Australian wine industry, following around a viticulturist father. The moment of truth came when he was in his early twenties. “I had no money and a pregnant wife, so I did the only intelligent thing I could do: I resigned from my job. I was pretty much unemployable, anyway. I was too angry,” he says. “Decided to go out on my own, borrowed some money to buy property.”

The land he bought, in the Australian Pyrenees region, was largely overgrown with red ironbark eucalyptus trees. “Hard as hell that wood, ruin all your tools,” Robb tells me. He knows what he’s talking about, too; he built himself a house with that wood. He also built himself a winery, planting his first vines in 1973. He’s got 45 acres of grapes now, and he produces 8,000 cases a year, both for an export label he calls Hundred Tree Hill, and for the 1,000 annual cases of a bottling called Sally’s Paddock. Named for his wife, it’s a single four-acre block where he dry-farms the entire blend of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

I ask about the joys of his life. “Wake up in the morning and I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he tells me. “I do what I feel like. It’s a pretty free life.”

And then we begin to drink.

2005 Hundred Tree Hill Chardonnay, Redbank Winery
Grapes: 100 percent Chardonnay
Aging: 40 percent of it spends four months in 1- to 2-year-old French oak, so the oak flavor is very subtle, strictly background.
Alcohol: N/A
Price: $24.99 online
My Tasting Notes: I thought this was very balanced and accomplished, a take-me-home-and-love-me kind of wine.

2004 Hundred Tree Hill Cabernet
Grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc
Aging: N/A
Alcohol: N/A
Price: $24.99 online
My Tasting Notes: This one had a big, herbaceous nose, and when I asked Robb about it, and if that came from the Cab Franc in the blend, he said something funny. “Yeah, I used to use the term forest floor, until I tasted a forest floor,” he said. “I find a lot black cherry—sour cherry—character in this wine. There’s thyme in here, spice. It’s fully mature fruit as opposed to ripe fruit.”

2005 Sally’s Paddock
Grapes: Robb reckoned it was 35 to 40 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 35 to 40 percent Shiraz, 15 percent Cabernet Franc, 5 percent Merlot, and some Malbec
Aging: N/A
Alcohol: N/A
Price: AUS$49.99 online
My Tasting Notes: I liked this wine so much it made me want to shake the guy’s hand, so I did. It’s flat-out terrific, mouth-filling and complex and full of character, but also very specific. Not at all a big, generic international red.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 3:25pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, daniel duane, wine tasting, tasting note, redbank, victoria, australia, pyrenees, hundred tree hill, sally's paddock, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, chardonnay, 2005 hundred tree hill chardonnay, 2004 hundred tree hill cabernet, 2005 sally's paddock, neill robb

A Place for Wine

The San Francisco Wine Center is a great model for wine storage and wine community-building.

I dropped by the San Francisco Wine Center the other day—happened to be in the neighborhood, around the block from the great wine shop K&L, near the Giants’ stadium. I parked by a desperate and destitute crowd outside the St. Vincent de Paul Society—madmen, loners, abused orphans, all crazy in that alternate America—and then I jogged across a wide and sunbaked street and walked up a block of narrow sidewalks and fast traffic and odd little quasi-industrial businesses. Not a boutique shopping strip, by any means; just the hardscrabble backside of San Francisco’s downtown, a place for mechanics and porn shops and printing presses, except that our world is changing and even this real estate is still priceless and so it’s all in flux, all growing, evolving, hemmed in by new live-work lofts and speculative dreams of the still-more-glamorous San Francisco to come.

Nothing fancy on the outside: just a sign, a loading dock, an office. But inside, the San Francisco Wine Center is somebody’s dream made real, a testament to the power of capital, and to our changing economy. It’s a friendly, low-key self-storage facility for wine—but with wine pick-up-and-delivery service, so you don’t have to drive down there all the time, and a line of wines for sale, and a schedule of food-and-wine events. This place has been built to encourage community and social life, with a couple of nice lounges you can rent.

The hope, apparently, is that you’ll get yourself a little (or big) locker, to ensure that your collection doesn’t spoil in the warmth of your closet back home, and then you’ll drop by so regularly in pursuit of your bottles that you’ll meet other collectors in the corridors, and perhaps pop a few corks and share memories and discuss vintages and varietals and the like. In other words, you’ll make friends through a shared interest in wine. It’s nicely done, all of it, and if I lived nearby and didn’t have a cool basement, I would very seriously consider joining up; perhaps I’d find someone to share a locker with, to bring down the price.

But it’s also provocative, because of the courage it took to build: two entrepreneurs (Brian McGonigle, Paolo Mancini), with a long background in wine, looking around at the explosion of wine-storage facilities and wine-inventory software, and deciding there’s another way these businesses can work, another need nobody has filled. A trend, you might say, that isn’t yet trendy. And so they bet the farm, and they work hard in the way of young men building a life, and they make it a reality, and then they wait to see what happens. Takes guts.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, May 12, 2008 at 3:49pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, wine storage, wine community, san francisco wine center, brian mcgonigle, paolo mancini

Selling Wine, Writing About Wine

Kermit Lynch’s oeuvre spreads far beyond his wine business.

If you cruise wine websites much, or look at wine books on Amazon, you’ve probably noticed one or more lists of must-read wine books. You’ve probably also noticed how very short these lists are. What’s in even shorter supply, within those lists, is books that are truly worth reading—for their literary value, I mean, not just for their informative value. For some reason, wine does not inspire great books of literary nonfiction at anything like the pace and regularity of food. Adventures on the Wine Route, by Kermit Lynch, is a perennial presence on these lists, and I’ve written before about how curious a document I find it to be—starting with but by no means limited to the fact that it includes no adventures and no wine route. It is, rather, a fairly random collection of highly opinionated reminiscences from Lynch’s years as a wine importer. But it’s a terrific read nonetheless, and it’s a terrific read because Lynch has an authentic literary gift: He can write truly accomplished sentences, and his physical descriptions of places and people are first rate. It’s also a terrific read because Lynch’s writing is much like the wines he loves: utterly idiosyncratic.

For this reason, I picked up another commonplace Lynch title on lists of wine books, Inspiring Thirst. At one level, this book is an act of almost breathtaking vanity: Page after page includes nothing more interesting than Lynch’s little bottle-by-bottle write-ups from years past. He’s a good writer, but I can’t imagine anybody capable of making bottle write-ups work as a literary form, or at least not anybody short of an early-20th-century modernist in the Gertrude Stein or James Joyce mode. At another level, this book is absolutely worth having, and here’s why: Peppered among the arcana lie odd essays and rants and raves that show a great wine-loving mind thinking aloud, over many decades. The very best of these concern a man I wish I had known: Richard Olney. There are several essays about Olney here, including one by the great novelist Jim Harrison, whom I consider the greatest living food writer (by a very long country mile), and one by Lulu Peyraud. But others are simple musings on the loneliness of dining alone, and first-rate evocations of small, curious villages.

In sum, a book absolutely worth owning and reading, but not to be approached without an understanding of what it is: far closer to the peculiar notes and scrapbooks of a brilliant oenophile than a coherent work, and perhaps more interesting for that reason.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, May 9, 2008 at 3:33pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, wine books, kermit lynch, adventures on the wine route, inspiring thirst, richard olney, jim harrison, food writers, lulu peyraud

Over the Hill

Great wines whose finest expression will be in a vinegar barrel, perhaps.

The first true wine collector I knew was my father’s best friend, Denis. He had been to France many times as a young man—back in the 1960s, when both the currency markets and the adjusted prices of wine were profoundly different. French wine was, in those days, relatively cheap; Denis began buying by the case, stashing his collection in the basement of another friend of his and my father’s.

I was always aware of this collection, even in high school, because I knew the son of the man with the basement. We were pals, and he was always joking about sneaking down and stealing a bottle of Denis’s French wine, for us to get drunk. In truth, I can’t remember if he ever did. If so, it can’t have been often.

Anyway, that was ages ago—20-plus years. And just recently, I overheard Denis lamenting that he’d held onto some of those wines far too long, that many were over the hill. His great love had always been grand cru Chablis—at some point in my 20s, I tasted some with him and got my first sense of the word steely as it pertains to wine. But his Chablis, he said, had begun to fall apart. To make matters worse, in his opinion, Chablis is no longer made in that old steely style.

“Well, don’t pour it out,” I told him. “Give the stuff to me and I’ll make vinegar with it and give it back to you. You can make the salad dressing of a lifetime.” I keep vinegar crocks of both white and red wine, and I told him how it worked.

Denis takes notes in daily conversation, writing down small thoughts he wants not to forget; pulling out his little paper pad and pencil, he scrawled a reminder to himself.

A few weeks later, while I was visiting my parents, my father said that Denis had left something for me.

It was a big paper grocery bag holding two bottles of grand cru Chablis from the 1980s, two Sauternes from the same period, and a Mouton Rothschild red Bordeaux from 1970 with a Chagall painting on the label. Curiously, the ullage—that little air gap below the cork—looked normal on every bottle. I’m not an expert in the aging of wine, but I have come to understand that this can be a promising sign. For that reason, I decided to open the bottles with company and let them breathe and taste them before I submitted them to the vinegar crock.

Last night was the big moment, as I invited two of my best friends over for our semiregular “meat night,” a gathering in which I make lots of steak, and we eat it. In my next post, I’ll tell you what happened.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 3:40pm | 1 comment
Tagged with: wine, vinegar, french wine, old wine, aging wine, grand cru chablis, grand cru, chablis, homemade vinegar, sauternes, mouton rothschild, bordeaux, ullage

Napa's Lush Pregnancy

An image that evokes the expectations of summer.

I’ve been posting these Napa Valley photographs—part of an upcoming show by Bruce Fleming, to run this summer at Mumm Napa—in part because my own Napa season begins soon. My wife’s parents spend their summer weekends in the valley, and we often join them. Our girls love swimming in a nearby pool, and the baking heat is a great break from San Francisco’s wind and fog. I like this particular photograph—it’s called Green Valley Summer Vines—for the sense of lush pregnancy: a vintage well on its way, deep into its growing season, but not yet nearing the anxious time of harvest.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, May 5, 2008 at 3:28pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, california, green valley, napa valley, mumm napa, bruce fleming

Soaring Expectations

A Freeman Pinot Noir accompanies two nights of pleasurable dining.

One of the great pleasures of writing about wine is opening a bottle without expectation, with no real advance understanding of the winery, and being knocked out. I had that experience the other night with a bottle of the 2006 Freeman Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. This is not a cheap wine—$44 a bottle—and I got it as a sample, or I wouldn’t have popped it for an impromptu family meal with my wife and kids. But I did, interested in checking it out, figuring it might go nicely with a simple chicken dish I’d made. I was so thrilled by what was in my glass that I got way too drunk. That’s what great wine does to me: makes me drink and drink and drink, with every sip taking me further into elation about the flavors, and then I’m hammered. (Yeah, right, the wine made me do it …)

Anyway, I got a chance to have dinner last night with Ken Freeman himself. We met at Delfina, a San Francisco restaurant that makes me happy for two reasons: First, it’s terrific; and second, my wife and I met and fell in love in that neighborhood, at about the time Delfina opened. So it’s a sentimental thing.

Ken is a kind, reserved fellow; I very much enjoyed his company and his story, about how he and his wife had worked international business jobs, started drinking and enjoying Burgundy, relocated to the Bay Area, discovered Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and its beautiful, restrained elegance, and set out to buy a small winery of their own.

While we talked, he opened their Sonoma Coast bottling from their very first vintage, 2002—the one called Akiko’s Cuvée, after his wife, who helps with the winemaking. (“I think these wines embody my wife; it’s a woman’s touch,” he said.) She must be something, because the wine was astonishingly beautiful, with the most soft and pure fruit, and delicate tannins integrated perfectly. These are such good food wines it’s ridiculous.

Good wine, of course, warms up a conversation. Ken told me about how his wife hailed from 20 generations of Japanese women who have never worked, making her 80-hour weeks at the winery a big change. Their property, when they bought it, had a run-down house, six acres, and an old defunct winery with a 2,000-case permit. They were able to rent out part of their winery—and therefore part of their permit—to Kosta Browne, maker of another beautiful Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir. The Freemans didn’t have any vines at the time, so they sourced from tiny vineyards around the town of Occidental, which is awfully close to my vision of paradise (and looks not at all like wine country, by the way). I remember one detail in particular: The Freemans have finally bought their own vineyard land and are planting 14 acres of it and putting the other 16—which are all redwood forest—into the Sonoma Land Trust. As Ken told me about this, he mentioned that anywhere you’ve got redwoods, you can grow good wine—redwood terroir, in essence, is Pinot Noir terroir. I love that notion, and I love it in a sentimental way.

What I remember most, of course, is the wine itself, both the bottle I opened at home (described below) and the one that kept broadening and opening as our meal went on.

2006 Freeman Russian River Valley Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 10 months in 100 percent French oak—34 percent new, 25 percent one year old, 41 percent two- and three-year-old barrels
Alcohol: 14.2 percent
Price: $44
My Tasting Notes: These wines are such an unusual experience, as California wines go. They’re not at all big, and they don’t hit your mouth hard at the start. This one in particular opens like a cool flower on the tongue, revealing blue and red fruit so clear and balanced it’s hypnotic.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, May 2, 2008 at 4:17pm | 5 comments
Tagged with: wine, pinot noir, california wine, freeman winery, 2006 freeman russian river valley pinot noir, ken freeman, delfina, sonoma coast, akiko's cuvee, kosta browne, sonoma land trust, redwoods

Cooking and Drinking Through Southern Italy

A new cookbook from the owners of A16 in San Francisco.

A16, the terrific southern Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Marina District, is about to publish its first cookbook, called A16: Food + Wine ($35), and my advance copy looks terrific, especially for wine-lovers. There’s so much noise these days about wine pairing—Gewürztraminer with Asian food, say, or Champagne with pizza—that a core principle occasionally gets lost in the shuffle. I’m talking about the fact that wines and cuisines grow up together, and that pairing regional cuisine with its local wine isn’t just an act of cultural fidelity; it’s also a good way to get the flavors right. Drink a Provençal rosé with garlic-intensive aioli, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Buy this book, which is billed as “A cookbook and wine guide celebrating the traditions of southern Italy, from the country’s top southern Italian restaurant,” and you’ll get a few dozen ways to experience the same thing. That’s because wines from southern Italy have so completely taken over A16’s wine list as to make the place a rare kind of specialized wine bar. I’ve never been in a restaurant where I recognized so few varietals, and could order so many by the glass. The food is largely from the same part of the world, so every meal has the potential to be an adventure.

Best of all, the book—which includes delectable-looking recipes for tuna conserva four ways; octopus and ceci bean zuppa with escarole, garlic, and chiles; and roasted sardines with breadcrumbs, green garlic, and mint—appears to have been a genuine labor of love, as you can feel in these opening lines: “A glass of crisp Bombino Bianco paired with a slice of creamy mozzarella burrata. Ruby-red Nero d’Avola served with a blistered pizza margherita. Juicy Casavecchia beside a plate of roasted or grilled rabbit … we don’t just offer these wines to our guests for the sake of discovery, though; the wines simply belong with the gutsy country cooking of Campania.”

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:32pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: wine, pairing wine with food, italy, southern italy, a16, a16 cookbook, pairing regional cuisine with local wine, campania

Picturing Carneros

California in the full flush of spring, when the rains have been followed by hot sun, and the wild mustard is tall and thick.

I drank far, far too much last night—a 2005 Schramsberg blanc de blancs, a 2005 Super Tuscan that shall remain nameless (because it was extremely expensive and terrible), and an after-dinner sip or three or five of Averna, the Italian liquor made with bitter herbs.

I’m suffering for it, though not too much; it was a wonderful night, and one I’ll describe in detail in my next post, along with descriptions of the wines and a plan that hatched at the night’s end for buying a whole pig from a local farmer.

In the meantime, though, here’s another image from the Bruce Fleming collection “Napa Valley Paradise,” to be shown this summer at Mumm Napa, in Rutherford (I’ve written about it a bit already). This particular image is called Carneros Mustard Field, and what captures me is how very Carneros the photograph is. I like the mustard, too—I like how fully bloomed it is, showing this part of California in the full flush of spring, when the rains have been followed by hot sun and the wild mustard is tall and thick, but before the howling April winds have turned it all bone dry again. The image is so representative of Carneros, though, a swath of vineyards arcing over the low southerly toe of the Mayacamas Range, which separates Napa and Sonoma. What makes the terroir special is the exposure it gets to marine breezes, and you feel it everywhere, when you visit: sea winds coming across the coastal range from the Pacific, local cold air off the northern reaches of the San Francisco Bay. The views are usually wonderful, and unusual—vast wetlands, a few highways, distant mountains. I’ve always liked Carneros wines, and the landscape pleases me even more.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, April 28, 2008 at 3:47pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, california, carneros, schramsberg, super tuscan, averna, bruce fleming, napa valley paradise, napa valley, mumm napa, carneros mustard field, terroir

Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, and Zinfandel

Three very different wines, one very nice meal.

If you cook repeatedly from the same cookbooks, the way I do, checking off recipes as you work your way through, you gradually come to feel the chef’s personality in his or her recipes. Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, for example, expresses a kind of musky, earthy, poetic sensuality, rooted in the soil; Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, by contrast, carries the man’s fiercely perfectionist classicism, his reverence for high culture, and his commitment to excellence. And then there’s the late, great Richard Olney, and his Simple French Food. It’s not an easy book to engage with: There are no pictures, and recipes like larded pork liver in aspic don’t really entice the contemporary palate. But I’m finally far enough inside that I’m acquiring a feel for a culture, and for Olney’s very personal relationship to that culture. The mood is quietly delicious, never ostentatious: family meals in a French-comfort-food style, and yet devastatingly tasty. Many of them carry lessons about spontaneity and thrift, too—like Olney’s “bread omelet.” It’s hard to imagine anything sounding more humble, working less hard to sell itself. But once you’ve made it, you realize that it’s a demonstration of how two eggs, a big chunk of dried-out old bread, and a little cheese, cream, and butter can be transformed into a divine light meal for two.

Wines, by necessity, have to carry the same mood in order to pair, so last night I tried an experiment, opening three very different ones to go with a family meal of rolled chicken breasts, turnip gratin, and garlicky salad. The breasts, incidentally, were another Olney miracle: so not fancy, so not dazzling on the face of it. Just a couple of flattened breasts marinated for an hour in herbs and oil and lemon juice, and then rolled up, pinned closed, and grilled. And the turnip gratin: What’s more homely than that? And yet it was so divine that even my little girls ate their fill.

Anyway, pour yourself three small glasses, rather than one, and taste around between bites, and you learn something. Here’s what:

2007 Hess Allomi Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc
Grapes: 100 percent Sauvignon Blanc
Wood: 10 percent new French oak (which isn’t much, right? Just a touch of oak flavor?)
Alcohol: 14.5 percent (whoa!)
Price: $18
Other Info I Like Knowing: These grapes were harvested from a relatively high-altitude Napa vineyard, at 770 to 950 feet, and were raised according to the Wine Institute’s Code of Sustainable Winegrowing Practices. The former leads me to wonder if the cooler air at higher altitudes might have something to do with the wine’s nice acidity, and with a bright, crisp quality I don’t personally associate with Napa Sauvignon Blanc. The latter just makes me feel good.
My Tasting Notes: This was my wife’s preferred wine with the chicken mentioned above; it’s a very, very good Sauvignon Blanc, with quite a combination of interesting fruit and firm acid.

Wingnut Zinfandel
Grapes: 100 percent Zinfandel
Wood: “That’s not something we talk about in the tasting notes,” I was told Alcohol: 13.9 percent (downright restrained by the standards of hot-weather California Zin)
Price: $12.99
Other Things I Like Knowing: The chief winemaker on this bottling was Joel Gott, of Joel Gott Wines. He’s a partner in Three Thieves, and he’s got a gift for sourcing good grapes and making quality wines at a good price. This wine reflects that. Also, this wine is essentially a branding experiment: The Wingnut label was the winning entry in a label contest run by the winery, and was created by a 23-year-old design student. It’s a pretty clever one, I think.
My Tasting Notes: A great wine at the price, with nice, soft fruit, mellow tannins, a plummy richness, and plenty of acid. It would go great with the usual Zinfandel foods, like barbecue, but it’s not a hot, monster red like some, and would therefore be more versatile and less likely to overpower food.

2006 Robert Skalli South of France Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: N/A
Alcohol: N/A
Suggested Retail Price: $19.99
Other Things I Like Knowing: The grapes for this wine were grown on Corsica, as part of Skalli’s project of making new-world wines on old-world land (I wrote about the Skallis earlier this week). So instead of growing the old Corsican varietals—which he does also, through his Clos Poggiale AOC Corse line—he replants old Corsican vineyards with grapes he can sell in the Californian and Australian way, labeled according to one of the major international varietals.
My Tasting Notes: This was my favorite pairing with the chicken; it’s not a wildly complex wine, but it is restrained and balanced, verging on peaceful.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, April 25, 2008 at 3:17pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, sauvignon blanc, pinot noir, zinfandel, cooking, pairing wine with food, paul bertolli, chez panisse cooking, thomas keller, bouchon, richard olney, simple french food, hess collection, allomi vineyard, 2007 hess allomi vineyard sauvignon blanc, three thieves, wingnut, joel gott wines, joel gott, robert skalli, south of france, 2006 robert skalli south of france pinot noir, napa, clos poggiale

Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Building of a Dynasty

How the Skalli family got into wine.

I was in a rush that day, hurrying from work to a wine company dinner, tasting as many bottlings as I could before scooting home to read bedtime books with my daughters. Parking in front of a McDonald’s, on a dirty urban street in one of the few rough neighborhoods of San Francisco, I hurried down the windy sidewalk and into an unlikely wine-tasting venue: Yoshi’s, a Japanese restaurant and jazz club.

In a private room, Robert Skalli and his son David waited with their local publicity people. They’d already opened a number of bottles from the new Robert Skalli line of French wines aimed at the international market—eschewing the conventional French labeling regime, in other words, Skalli offers a “South of France Pinot Noir” and a “South of France Chardonnay.” Because “South of France” is not an official French winemaking region, Skalli has enormous latitude, including the freedom to bottle and label wines in the new-world varietal-focused way. He has even been converting old vineyard properties to this sort of modernized production—all while he acquires and preserves more traditional winemaking properties, like one in Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

But every person has a story; every gathering of humans has something curious hidden somewhere, behind somebody’s eyes. In this case, it came in answer to the simple question of how the Skalli family got into wine. I was talking to David Skalli when I asked this; David is a nice-looking Frenchman with dark hair and eyes and olive skin and the conventional outgoing charm of a successful financier, which he is. In fact, David doesn’t work for the family wineries; he runs his own mergers and acquisitions consulting group, helping with the purchase and sale of wine and spirits companies. But his answer began with one of those statements that no American can ever give you:

Well, you see, our name is really Cohen-Skalli, and the Cohenim were originally based in Andalusia, in the 15th century, but my family had to flee the Inquisition—we are Jewish—in 1490. So we moved to Sicily. That’s what Skalli is: It’s an old way of saying Sicily. So, really, we are the Cohenim of Sicily. But we only stayed there two generations and then moved in maybe 1530 or so to Morocco, because it was a Spanish-speaking colony at the time and we helped with other Sephardic families to develop trade between the Arabic and Christian worlds. We were mostly trading wheat in the 1800s when the French colonized Algeria in a war, and so we moved to Algeria and began trading wheat and wine to the French.

I want you to picture the room, though it will not add to David’s story: bland upscale corporate, with nervous wine-industry trade-mag editors and writers, the Skallis dressed like the international businessmen they are, the wines solid and accomplished, waiters bustling around. Dirty street outside, Japanese-food smells occasionally wafting in from the kitchen, the floor carpeted. But here’s why I want you to picture it: When we think thoughts like “Wine is a business,” we don’t often get positive feelings. That room expressed everything negative we feel instead, and yet David’s story rescued it for me. David’s story, which I’ll let him finish in a moment, reminded me of the ancient and very human aspect of the international wine trade, of the degree to which business is the business of mankind.

‘The French allowed Jews to own property in Algeria,’ David told me, ‘so by the end of the 19th century we owned property, and then, in the early 20th century, a French law allowed Algerian Jews to become French citizens. So we did. My great-grandfather also started vineyards in Algeria, along the border with Tunisia. And we also began selling wheat to the biggest pasta and cereals maker in France. In the 1950s, when they could not pay off their accounts, they gave us a share in the company. Then, in the 1960s, during the terrible wars between the Arabs and the Israelis, we left Algeria and bought vineyards in Corsica and Languedoc and eventually in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. By the 1980s we owned the pasta company 100 percent. Then, four years ago, a private equity group bought it from us, at a price we could not refuse.’

My own family history has nothing like this, and I found it impressive: the continuity, the will to survive and succeed, the building of a dynasty. The wine? Well, clearly it is something the Cohens of Sicily have traded in, back and forth across the Mediterranean, for a very long time.

Here is the bottle I liked the most:

2005 Maison Bouachon Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Grapes: 60 percent Grenache, 30 percent Syrah, 7 percent Mourvèdre, 3 percent other CDP varietals (like Counoise, Terret Noir, Muscardin, and Vaccarèse)
Aging: Their literature says this wine was aged in French oak barrels and in big casks for 12 months prior to blending, with an additional few months in bottle. They don’t get more specific.
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: I couldn’t find a retail price for the 2005; the 2003 is $32.76 at WineZap.com
My Tasting Notes: I like the weird old-world eccentricity of Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines, and this one had a kind of truffle-tobacco-herbal aspect that I found interesting and pleasing.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 12:49pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: wine, châteauneuf-du-pape, yoshi's, robert skalli, south of france, french wine, david skalli, david cohen-skalli, family history, wine dynasty, maison bouachon

Elegant Evening, Casual Picnic

Dinner party and park party, wines for all times.

I’ve been thinking about the pleasure of wine and the precise moments I’m most aware of it—not just the drinking moments, but also the passing instances of reflection. For example: the minute a recent dinner party ended and it was time to take out the garbage. The guests were gone, and most (though not all) of the wine bottles were bone dry and bound for the recycling bin. Stepping onto my dark front porch, in the cold San Francisco night, I felt this terrific wave of well-being. It was the contrast: from the bright light and warmth and close air of my dining room, with all its clatter and noise and aroma, to the fresh, cool darkness on the street. Somehow it isolated the satisfaction I’d found in eating and drinking with family and friends—a Corbières red, a Sonoma Coast Pinot—drawing a frame around the feeling so that I could see it more clearly, and see, also, the peaceful beauty of yet another clear night.

Here’s another one: Sunday afternoon in a heat wave, I made a picnic of a wild nettle frittata, sautéed black chanterelles, broccoli di ciccio sautéed with garlic and red peppers and then cooled and tossed with Parmesan, as a salad. Packing all that in a big bag, along with some plates and forks and a tablecloth and some strawberries, I drove L and our little girls a half mile away to a neighborhood park. The day was waning—the shadows long and the light pale gold—but the air was still warm, and we spread everything on the green grass. The girls—3 and 5 1/2—ran and ran and laughed and then came back to eat. I’d brought some box wine that I’d received as a sample, little single-serving deals. If ever there was a moment to drink it, I’d figured, this was the one. So that’s how it went: a good meal on a big lawn, a small drunk coming on, hour after hour with my family.

The elegant evening wines:

2004 Fort Ross Sea Slopes Reserve Pinot Noir
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 23 months in French oak, half new
Alcohol: 14 percent
Also: Unfined, unfiltered
Price: $49 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: The main thing I have to say about this wine, despite the fact that it was absolutely gorgeous, is that it was a slow reveal. It was a little tight at first, quiet, not saying much; notably more beautiful an hour out; astonishing by the next evening, when I polished off a remaining half bottle. A contemplation wine—where you sit there holding the taste in your mouth, letting it light up your mind, and marveling at the complex pleasure wine can bring.

2004 Domaine de Fontsainte “Réserve La Demoiselle” Corbières
Grapes: 70 percent Carignane (100-year-old vines), 20 percent Grenache, 10 percent Mourvèdre
Wood: 12 months in French oak barrels
Alcohol: 13 percent
Price: $15.95 at the Kermit Lynch shop in Berkeley
My Tasting Notes: This is a pretty darn rustic and interesting wine. A lot going on, fruit and leather and musk, and I thought it had a curious herbal bitterness in the finish. It’s the kind of thing I like, because it’s so distinctive, and so not Californian. But harmless and soothing it is not.

The casual picnic wines:

Bandit Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay
Grapes: Who cares, right? They’re both straight-up California varietal wines, mostly the one on the label with a little blending.
Appellation: 100 percent California
Wood: You’ve got to be kidding
Alcohol: 13 percent for the Cabernet, 13 percent for the Chardonnay
Price: $6.99/$7.99 at many liquor stores
My Tasting Notes: The wine was unpretentious, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was delicious. I liked it. I liked the fruitiness, the acidity, and even the packaging. I liked also the ice cream we got afterward.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, April 18, 2008 at 4:29pm | 2 comments
Tagged with: wine, dinner party, picnic, family, friends, red wine, corbières, pinot noir, sonoma coast, box wine, fort ross vineyard, sea slopes, 2004 fort ross sea slopes reserve pinot noir, domaine de fontsainte, 2004 domaine de fontsainte réserve la demoiselle corbières, three thieves, bandit, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, california wine

Smith-Madrone Cabernet with Steak

Terroir is the foundation of a house; vintage is the house itself.

Stu Smith was 22 years old in 1970, the year he walked through a Douglas-fir forest that had been a vineyard back in the 1880s. Abandoned during Prohibition, the land was densely wooded, but Smith could see redwood grape stakes shoved over sideways by the two-foot trunks of trees. “I imagine a bird sat on the stake, pooped out the seed, and up popped a tree,” Stu told me, on the telephone. He said he had loggers cut out all the trees, and then he and his brother dug out the rocks and roots from the soil and burned back the stumps. This was all at a time when the American wine industry was a provincial one: “I don’t think there were 35 wineries,” Stu says. “It was much slower.”

Anyway, one thing led to another and Smith-Madrone has become a venerable name in California Cabernet, and Stu’s opinions have taken on the tone I hear from a lot of the good winemakers these days: “We frankly have been making wines to our taste ever since. We don’t really make wines for judges, and we don’t make wines for wine critics. We make wines we think are relatively classically structured and have elegance and balance and complexity. We think it’s our job to get the vintage into the glass of wine, to provide something unique. I like to say that terroir is like the foundation of a house—it’s the same every year—but vintage is the house you actually build on that structure, and in some years there’s very little change, but in others it’s as different as a Frank Gehry or a Queen Anne Victorian.”

Why do I care? Because I had a sample of his 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon recently, and I drank it alone—wife and girls out that night—with a pan-fried sirloin and a good magazine and a view of some glittering city lights in the darkness. And the wine brought me immense satisfaction: Every sip was a little journey, enriching and interesting and yet well balanced and not at all challenging. I thought it was fabulous.

Here’s Stu’s take on the 2003:

“Well, it’s unfined and unfiltered, it’s still evolving, it’s got a little Cab Franc, a little Merlot. ... It’s a big wine, an interesting complex wine, not excessively tannic. Some people think it’s excessively soft, but it gets people talking about the wine. It’s also a wine that gives people a lot of pleasure. It’s what I think a wine really should be: It makes a statement, it has character, and yet it’s not over the top. My brother liked it better than I did in the beginning; it’s a wine that’s really evolved in the last couple of years being in the bottle. It’s got a good future ahead of it; I think they’ll last 15 years or more.”

2003 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon
Grapes: 82 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 10 percent Merlot, 8 percent Cabernet Franc
Wood: 22 months in new American oak
Alcohol: 13.8 percent
Price: $40 from the winery
My Tasting Notes: I’ve given them above, more or less. It’s a deep and lovely wine, rich and interesting and balanced, and transporting if you’re in the right mood. Everything I want out of a Cabernet.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 3:38pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, california, napa valley, smith-madrone, cabernet, cabernet sauvignon, vintage

Bright Yellow Vineyards

Wild mustard is one of the great symbols of early spring in Northern California.

Mustard Filled Vineyard—that’s the name of this image by Bruce Fleming, and it’s part of his show “Napa Valley Paradise,” to be shown at Mumm Napa in Rutherford this summer (and which I’ve written about in previous posts).

Wild mustard, to my mind, is one of the great symbols of early spring in Northern California. Surfers see it up and down the coast, when the big January rains give way to February sunshine, and the grasses green up strong and suddenly the hills light up yellow. Walking back from the water, refreshed by the cold and soothed by the surf, and certain again that life is not all work without play, one feels a giddy sense of good fortune. Wading through flowers colored like the sun, over grass the very color of life, under a blue sky, with the Pacific booming behind—it’s enough, finally, a more than adequate gift. And to see those same flowers surging up below the grapevines is to feel the wild earth amid the orderly crop rows, the degree to which the land is just the land, and not entirely a wine factory.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, April 14, 2008 at 3:40pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: wine, bruce fleming, wine country, wild mustard, wildflowers, california, spring, napa valley paradise, napa valley, mumm napa

Romance, Rosé, and Roma

Blackbird Vineyards’ first release of rosé.

How’s this for a well-spent youth: Aaron Pott, the winegrower for Blackbird Vineyards, fell in love with wine at age 9, during a family trip to France; studied oenology at UC Davis as an undergraduate; and then got a master’s degree in viticulture from the Université de Bourgogne, in Dijon, France. And that was just the warmup. The good part came at age 25, when he landed the job of winemaker at Château Troplong Mondot, a grand cru classé in Saint-Émilion. I’m sure the work was wonderful, but what sounds even better is this part. He says: “I fell madly in love with the owner’s sister. There were three owners, really, siblings—two of them were the sisters who lived at the château. They hadn’t spoken in years, but they lived a meter apart.”

“Did you fall in love with the good one or the bad one?” I ask.

“The good one.”

Anyway, here’s the part I like most: The migrant fruit-pickers rolled through the countryside at harvest time in their beat-up old jalopies, towing trailers to live in. Pott remembers them as flamboyant characters, and he remembers most of all that French law required him to give them each a liter of wine for every day they worked in the fields. Because the wine was very valuable, Château Troplong Mondot gave the field hands the saignée wine—the first free-run juice colored up with the lees from the prior year (and one of the ways that rosé is made). “We’d hear them all night, playing their Gypsy guitar and singing until 6 a.m.,” Pott told me, “and then it was time to start picking again.”

Blackbird Vineyards hasn’t yet released its first rosé, but it will soon, and it’ll be lovely (based on my tasting, over dinner), and I’m told it will be far less expensive than the winery’s proprietary red wine. For what it’s worth, you can think of Blackbird’s red wines like this: Michael Polenske, a successful hedge fund manager and wine-lover, has created Blackbird by researching and buying first-class vineyard land in Napa, hiring first-class talent in Aaron Pott and winemaker Sarah Gott, and producing a wine that aims at the barely existent category of the “Cult Merlot.” The wines are not cheap—$79.95 from Calwine.com—but they are a whole lot less expensive than the Cabernet Sauvignons playing at the same level of seriousness, and holy smokes are they delicious.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, April 11, 2008 at 3:47pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: wine, rose, aaron pott, blackbird vineyards, château troplong mondot, michael polenske, sarah gott, red wine, merlot

The Fish, the Sauce, the Wine

The meal was pure reverie, and I had yet another small data point to add to my evolving sense of how to match food and wine.

One often hears it said that, when pairing wine with a mild fish, the sauce is a key consideration; if you’re preparing a strongly flavored sauce for the fish, the advice is usually that you should pair the sauce rather than the fish.

So it was, the other night, that I tried pairing two reds with a plate of skate wing over potatoes lyonnaise in a red-wine jus. The dish came from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. I don’t use the book often, but I’m always, always impressed when I do. The recipes do tend toward hidden complexity: Just to get the required quarter cup of red-wine jus, you’ve got to reduce an entire bottle with aromatic vegetables and herbs; just to get the potatoes right, you’ll first make onion confit, which in turn means simmering onions for two hours.

Not that Keller expects anyone to live this way. His explanation of bistro food (or, rather, Bouchon food), makes perfect sense of all this by explaining that flavor enhancers such as onion confit and red-wine jus would simply be part of the restaurant’s pantry, always on hand. Reaching to grab them, therefore, would take only an instant but give the dish terrific power. And it’s true: The Bouchon recipes are powerfully flavored, but in a subtle and well-integrated way. It’s perfect dinner party fare, in fact, because it’s glitzy without the appearance of great effort, and immensely delicious without calling attention to curious ingredients or preparations.

Anyway, I made this dish for L on a weeknight, and made a point of not telling her what I was doing. This is a key part of my strategy, these days: If I make a big deal about a dish, or in any way imply that I think she’ll like it, I nearly guarantee a lukewarm response. Autonomy is hugely important to most human beings; it is especially important to both of us. If I feel L pushing me to accomplish a home-improvement project, I will unconsciously dig in my heels against it. She is the same way with food: If she feels pressured to like it, she won’t, or at least she won’t admit it. So I behaved no differently than I would’ve behaved while boiling plain dry pasta: Just whipping up a little dinner, no fuss at all. Then I slipped the plate in front of her and opened two wines—a Merlot and a Sangiovese—certain one would work.

“This is amazing,” L said, with her first bite. “Oh my God, this is so delicious.”

But the wine, the wine … neither red was quite right, and I was desperate to make the right pairing while the food was still warm.

“Try a complex white,” she said.

“Really?”

“Trust me.”

So I did, pulling out a Domaine Zind Humbrecht Pinot D’Alsace, and my goodness what a dream. The rest of the meal was pure reverie, and I had yet another small data point to add to my evolving sense of how to match food and wine.

Although the potatoes were indeed drizzled with a red-wine jus, the preponderance of flavor came from that sweet, unctuous onion confit. And the skate wings themselves had been pan-fried with a great deal of butter and lemon. The red-wine jus, therefore, added a kind of bass-note depth to an overall taste experience that was dominated by citrus, butter, and rich sweetness.

The Alsatian wine was perfect because it had just enough sweetness and viscosity to harmonize. But it also had the bright Alsatian acid to pick up the dish’s high notes. Of course, the best part of all was the satisfaction this gave my wife, and the hope I entertained that it might further lure her into my nightly food-and-wine celebrations.

2005 Domaine Zind Humbrecht Pinot D’Alsace
Grapes: I haven’t been able to find the exact blend, but it is probably Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay, and Auxerrois. As one Alsatian winemaker has put it, speaking to their wild range of blends and varietals, “When you listen to Mozart, you don’t ask what percentage of violin there is, or what percentage of oboe. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they all play harmoniously together. If I can distinguish the varieties, then it’s no longer wine. Wine is music; wine is harmony.”
Wood: I have no idea
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: About $21
My Tasting Notes: I think this wine is a bargain at its price, a beautiful synthesis of fresh fruit and smooth, racy acidity. A terrific food wine, especially where you don’t need something austere.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 3:30pm | 1 comment
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, 2005 domaine zind humbrecht pinot d'alsace, fish, pairing, sauce, skate wing, thomas keller, bouchon, merlot, sangiovese, red-wine jus, alsatian wine, mozart, pinot blanc, chardonnay, auxerrois

California's Do-Re-Mi

Domestic peace, naps in the grass, and a climate that always gives more than it takes.

Here’s another image from Bruce Fleming’s “Napa Valley Paradise” show—which I wrote about earlier—and I’m struck this time by the aesthetic beauty of the composition, and by how deeply it captures the democratic side of California’s beauty. Looking at gated Malibu mansions or distant wine-country chalets, it’s easy to feel locked out by this most expensive of paradises. As the old song goes, “California is a Garden of Eden … but believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.”

But California has also always offered as much free public beauty as anywhere on Earth: from the grand public seashores to the high mountains. In fact, the very essence of the California experience, for many of us, is the unmediated encounter with the natural world. And to my mind, this image, titled Oak Tree and Lupine, captures the wine-country contribution to that picture: the pure, quiet beauty of the Coast Range and its warm valleys, where the landscape is far less grand and far more soothing, almost poetic. This is not the California of Big Sur or Yosemite, where the grandeur yanks you out of yourself into a confrontation with the awesome sublime. It is the California of domestic peace, naps in the grass, and a climate that always gives more than it takes.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, April 7, 2008 at 3:49pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, wine country, california, bruce fleming, napa valley paradise, napa valley

Sémillon and Sheep Jokes

I do love when these staid winemaker meals go off the rails a little, venturing into vaguely offensive territory.

Peter Lehmann’s Sémillon has a curious and beautiful flavor profile: dry and pretty and grassy, but a little more fruity than the French versions.

“It’s all about the fruit, that wine,” he tells me. We are sitting at dinner together, at an Australian-inspired San Francisco restaurant called South, and we’re having a few laughs despite being there in our professional capacities. “It doesn’t see any oak at all, and you see that green cast? That’s a sign it’s been well handled. It’s not oxidized at all. It’s absolutely fresh, and it’s three years old! That’s the screw cap, too. Keeps the wine alive. It’s like biting into a fresh, green apple.”

The wine isn’t expensive—about 11 bucks—and Lehmann says it’s the biggest-selling Sémillon in Australia. “Although we’re getting killed by Sauvignon Blanc.” He says he can’t grow Sauvignon Blanc in the Barossa; it just has no character there.

Picking up the bottle, I read idly on the back label that I should expect aromas of lemon flower, honey, and lanolin. “What does lanolin smell like, anyway?” I ask. “Isn’t that something you find in hand lotions?”

“Ah, you know the smell,” he says, as if it were obvious. “It’s from sheep’s wool.”

I laugh out loud, loving the cultural gulf we’ve just revealed. I haven’t the vaguest idea what sheep’s wool smells like. “That’s really very funny,” I say. “There are very few Americans who have the slightest clue what lanolin smells like, and yet sheep are common enough in Australia that you can put it on a wine label and people will know what you’re talking about.”

“Ah yeah,” Lehmann says. “Aussies definitely know. And you tell a Kiwi it smells like lanolin and he’ll butter up. It’s an aphrodisiac over there.”

To be fair, my own sense of humor is every bit as coarse, and we have gotten to this pass in the conversation by covering quite a lot of wine, equal volumes of food, and a growing sense that we understand one another. So if you’re offended, blame me: I got us here.

But I do love when these staid winemaker meals go off the rails a little, venturing into vaguely offensive territory. It’s a sign that two actual human beings are meeting one another. Lehmann is an immensely appealing guy because he’s a hard-driving winemaking businessman from way back. His wines are a great value too—and not just this Sémillon, but also the big Barossa Shiraz bottlings for which he’s so well known.

2005 Peter Lehmann Barossa Sémillon
Grapes: 100 percent Sémillon
Wood: None
Alcohol: 11.5 percent (nice and light, huh?)
Price: $10 from the Hess Collection, which imports the wine
My Tasting Notes: Good value for a large-production wine, it’s balanced and crisp and refreshing. Good as a cocktail or with a light meal.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, April 4, 2008 at 3:55pm | 0 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, sémillon, australia, sheep jokes, south restaurant, peter lehmann, sauvignon blanc, barossa, lanolin, barossa shiraz, 2005 peter lehmann barossa sémillon, hess collection

Sensory Symphony

A perfect, rapturous moment between me, an egg, and a rosé.

At the home of a client, recently, I received a gift. It went like this: I’d dropped by for a work session, and we’d spent a productive hour at her kitchen table, when suddenly it was time for lunch.

“I have nothing but eggs,” she said.

“I love eggs,” I replied, knowing that from this particular client an egg would not just be an egg. She has a stupendous food sensibility, and buys only the finest of local, sustainably raised ingredients.

“You do like eggs?” she replied. “Hmm …” This pleased her. “I’m going to have to make you an egg in a spoon. And that means I have to build a fire.”

This woman has a fireplace in her California kitchen, a country-farmhouse-style fireplace at counter height, to allow for cooking. A cast iron Tuscan grill allows her to move food around, raise and lower it, and shuffle the coals. She clearly enjoys doing this, so she built a fire with oak logs.

When they’d burned down, she began poking and scraping with various fire tools, cobbling together a bed of embers. Then she fussed around in a drawer until she’d found a large copper spoon with a deep bowl and a very long handle—made, apparently, for just this purpose. She rubbed the inside of the spoon with olive oil, then cracked a beautiful little farm egg into it.

Sprinkling the egg with sea salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes, she carefully extended it deep into the fireplace, holding it just over the embers. Very quickly, the egg puffed up like a soufflé, and then she slipped it onto a piece of sourdough toast and set in on my plate.

While I wasn’t looking, she’d apparently also pulled together a salad of tiny arugula leaves from her own backyard garden, and tossed them in a garlicky vinaigrette with her own vinegar, made from odds and ends of white wine left over in various bottles.

“Eat, eat,” she said gently. “Don’t wait.”

So I did, bringing the egg to my mouth and catching the softest scent of oak and taste of smoke as I bit into the absolute best egg experience—one of the best food experiences, period—of my life. I took bites of those perfect, just-picked greens in between, and then noticed that she had poured me a glass of rosé. So I broke my no-wine-at-lunch rule and drank deep, and it all came together in one of those rare little sensory symphonies.

2006 Domaine de Fontsainte “Gris de Gris” Corbières Rosé
Grapes: 60 percent Grenache Noir and Grenache Gris, 15 percent Syrah, 10 percent Carignan, 10 percent Mourvèdre, 5 percent Cinsault
Wood: None
Alcohol: 12.5 percent (according to the label)
Price: $13 at Kermit Lynch
Detail Worth Passing Along: Kermit Lynch has been importing this wine for almost 30 years.
My Tasting Notes: If I tried to tell you something precise about this wine, you’d have to assume I was making it up. After all, I drank only one glass, from a bottle open for who knows how long, with food, and in a state of rapture. So I will offer, instead, this memory: It was the absolute perfect wine to serve with an egg cooked over wood embers and accompanied by arugula in a garlicky dressing. It was fruity and bright and utterly fabulous. If Kermit Lynch has a few bottles the next time I visit, I will definitely buy them. I pass these “Tasting Notes from the owner of the Domaine” along, too, as gleaned from Kermit Lynch’s import office (in part because this description resonates with my memory): “A crystalline salmon color with superb amethyst tints. Wine immediately gives off notes of raspberry, cherry, and freshly picked strawberry followed by exotic aromas of pineapple and mango; on the palate, the density of fruit mingles with a vivid acidity. Very persistent.”

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 3:07pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, rose, eggs, fireplace, 2006 domaine de fontsainte gris de gris corbieres rose, 2006, domaine de fontsainte, gris de gris, corbieres rose, kermit lynch, grenache noir, grenache gris, syrah, carignan, mourvedre, cinsault, corbières

Rosé and Offal

One of these things, everyone likes. The other, not so much.

“When the food gestapo finally kicks down our door,” I said to my wife, “and I confess under duress that I simply cannot love the flavor of pork kidney, no matter how hard I try, will you back me up?”

“I always back you up, baby. You know that.”

I do know that. It’s true. But I know also that I sometimes strain my wife’s loyalty, and that I had strained it that very night—by serving her the pork meatballs recipe from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. The recipe called for pork variety meats, so I’d picked up a liver, heart, and kidney from Marin Sun Farms at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, here in San Francisco.

I never expected my wife to love it—the recipe fell more into the category of what we call, in our household, my “arts and crafts projects.” These are vaguely self-indulgent acts of more or less nonutilitarian creativity, as defined by my wife’s very low likelihood of wanting to eat any. Acknowledging all this, and putting a name to it, has been healthy for our marriage, because it has removed any pressure on L to eat the dishes that fall into this category (larded pork liver in aspic, anyone?), and it has likewise freed me up to make said dishes. Everyone, after all, is entitled to random creative acts.

So it wouldn’t have been a big deal, on an ordinary night. But then something unexpected happened: My in-laws agreed to come for dinner. I love my in-laws, they love food, and they’ve taken me to a lot of spectacular restaurants, so I’m always wishing I could cook for them. But it doesn’t happen.

I complain about this, periodically, to L: “Why don’t your parents ever come over, anyway? Is it our house? Is it my food?” L just laughs and smiles and ducks the question, taking the blame herself and muttering something vague about how she and her mother both prefer it this way. Because my wife is exquisitely articulate, and allergic to fuzzy thinking, I know that this is not the whole story. But I never get any further, and I usually just let it go for another few months.

Anyway, all of a sudden, they were coming. It was a gorgeous spring evening in California, cool breezes and radiant light, even some added fun: My brother-in-law’s kids were tagging along with my wife’s parents. Great little boys, they are much loved by my little girls, so we had a party on our hands.

Which brings me to the menu. Why oh why couldn’t I have been roasting a simple chicken? Or turning out some beautiful braise? Or even just making a ragoût of spring vegetables? Why did I have to be experimenting with organ meats?

Well, my mother-in-law insisted she loved the dish, which was some consolation. My father-in-law said that he liked it too. My wife took a tiny nibble and shoved the plate ever so slightly away. I ate quite a lot, trying to convince myself that I loved it like everything I’ve ever made from Olney, but the truth was that the taste of the kidney, in the mélange, was almost unbearable.

The only thing that rescued the meal, in my view, was the beautiful Fort Ross rosé we drank, a flawless accompaniment. Here’s the upshot on organ meats: I’m not done trying, not willing to give up. I have eaten and loved heart meat; I have eaten and loved a variety of liver meats. But kidney … I’ve just never liked kidney.

Anyway, the wine, which was beautiful:

2006 Fort Ross Vineyard Rosé
Grapes: 100 percent Pinot Noir
Wood: 1 month in used French oak, 3 months in stainless steel (hey, this is a rosé, so it’s not about wood)
Alcohol: 14 percent
Price: $16 from the winery
Other Winemaking Data I Think Is Worth Repeating: The 2007 vintage should be released within the next few weeks. Also, this wine is made with free-run juice bled away from the red Pinot Noir program. Fort Ross has just bottled the 2007 vintage and will probably release it in six weeks.
My Tasting Notes: To my palate, this rosé has more backbone than many. It’s a well-structured wine, in fact, with good acidity and a bright, fresh fruit quality—but quite distinct from the lighter, more fruit-forward rosés.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, March 31, 2008 at 3:45pm | 2 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, offal, variety meat, organ meat, rose, marin sun farms, richard olney, simple french food, kidney, heart, liver, fort ross vineyard, 2006 rose, pinot noir

Picturing Perfection

Further thoughts on wine-country imagery.

Having posted a first Bruce Fleming image on Wednesday, part of the “Napa Valley Paradise” photography exhibit at Mumm Napa, and offered my initial thoughts, I’m posting a second image today. And in the time since, I’ve thought more about wine-country imagery and my own reaction to it.

I suspect now that one element is the sheer value of the real estate. In other words, the emotional impact of a landscape, at least for a Californian soul like my own, is to some degree shaped by an understanding of the economics of it. And, in the glorious images of Napa vineyards and wineries, we are indeed looking at a peaceful pastoral landscape. But we’re also looking at multimillion-dollar properties that have become the trophies of the very, very wealthy, or the investment holdings of large corporations.

Nothing wrong with either; if I had the resources, I’d be tempted to buy some myself. I would love to grow my own grapes and make my own wine and cellar it beneath my country home and press my own olive oil and maybe raise some healthy pigs in the yard, and some chickens too, and live out that dream. I’m envious of those who can.

So perhaps it’s that envy, that sense of being shut out, and of the exclusivity of California wine-country visions, that colors my aesthetic reaction. Looking at a Bordeaux or Burgundy landscape, you’re looking at much the same thing: not a pastoral idyll but a kind of Gold Coast. Many, many other wine-country landscapes, however, are not that way.

Here’s Fleming’s Quintessa Sunset.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Friday, March 28, 2008 at 3:54pm | 1 comment
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, wine country, photography, mumm napa, napa valley paradise, bruce fleming, california

Entering Paradise

Can a photograph really represent the beauty of wine country?

What do you think of wine country photographs? Does the beauty of the vineyards lift your spirit? The sight of tasting rooms among the gentle folds of the Mayacamas Range? Put another way: Does an exquisite wine-country image transport your soul to a dream life you wish you were leading?

I ask because Mumm Napa, the big sparkling-wine house in Rutherford, has plans to host a summer-long photography exhibit titled “Napa Valley Paradise,” with large-format images by Bruce Fleming. I have PDFs of two of the images; they will both be shown as huge prints, so a digital online reproduction can only do violence to them. For that reason, I plan to see them in person, as well. But because they are so accomplished, and because they raise thoughts and feelings I can never quite shake, I’ll show one today, and one on Friday (while I take a much-needed family vacation by the Monterey Bay, drinking copious interesting wines I’m dying to sample and describe).

I’d love to hear how these visions affect others. For myself, as I’ve said in related posts, the wine-country image is often confusing to me. I find the Napa Valley to be a hauntingly beautiful place, especially in the late fall when the vines change colors and the light comes in low and golden. It’s a truly gorgeous physical environment. But I struggle with painting and photography, however accomplished. I struggle with them because the grapevines are not what makes these places beautiful to me. It is rather the soft, rolling shapes of California, the curving hills and the warm sun and even the golden yellow of dead summer grass.

I was raised out here, and so was my mother, and I grew up rambling around the state on various family road trips—summer vacations, visiting friends, that sort of thing. The romance of the California landscape runs deep in my veins, and I suppose I feel a kind of cognitive dissonance when I sense a dream of Tuscany or Provence being written across my home, regardless of how much I love drinking the wine here.

Here’s the first of the two Bruce Fleming images I’ll post. This one’s called The View to Yountville. Check back on Friday for a second.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 4:05pm | 3 comments
Tagged with: daniel duane, chow, wine, tasting notes, wine country, photography, mumm napa, napa valley paradise, bruce fleming, california

The Model Bourgogne in Corbières

An eye into Domaine Sainte-Eugénie.

I am a regular contributor to Men’s Journal—I write mostly on nonwine topics, but occasionally on wine as well. It was partly in that capacity that I had a drink recently with Herve Gantier, part owner of Domaine Sainte-Eugénie, in Corbières.

Corbières is a region in southern France an hour or so from the Spanish border, 10 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean. The wines are mostly about Carignane, with Grenache and Syrah as blending elements. I’d enjoyed this man’s wine before, in a recommendation from a good salesman at a shop I trust. In our conversation, I hoped he could help me characterize it, give me some way to firm it up in my mind, give it an identity that would stick.

He began by saying it was all about the Carignane grape, which he considers the structure of the wine. “Grenache is the sugar and the aroma,” he added, “and the Syrah is the color and the finesse, because our Syrah is not the same as in the Rhône valley.”

Gantier lives in Puligny-Montrachet, in Burgundy. So why the interest in Corbières? “I like a lot the Corbières with the situation,” he said. “The South of France, the good weather, et J’aime beaucoup la nature. C’est tres sauvage et vierge.” Pressing further, I got the sense that he and a friend had been looking to go into business, vineyard land in Burgundy is too expensive, and Corbières struck their fancy. It’s not an ancient AOC, but that apparently appealed to Gantier. “I believe that it is a region of France where the nature is the most beautiful, la plus belle: You have the vines and the garrigues and that is it.”

I had already tried and loved his basic red wine, so he opened a rosé that had a clear, light watermelon color, much like the watermelon my daughter had eaten that very morning, at a café near our home. While I drank, Gantier laughed. He was looking at me, apparently wondering who I was and thinking about Men’s Journal; the title is commonly mistaken for Men’s Health, the magazine that often has a man with six-pack abs on every cover. I believe he was wondering how exactly he fit into the picture of my work. Then he broke into a laugh and patted his very ample stomach and said, quite happily, “I am the model Bourgogne!”

Indeed he was, and he seemed happy enough to make it look beautiful.

2004 Domaine Sainte-Eugénie Corbières Rouge
Grapes: 60 percent Carignane, 20 percent Grenache, 20 percent Syrah
Wood: 40 percent of the wine is put in smallish casks for up to a year, a move that sounds to me like a fairly light touch in terms of oak flavoring, and also in terms of expense
Alcohol: 13.5 percent
Price: $11.49 from the Wine House
My Tasting Notes: I think this wine’s a terrific value, rustic and layered and medium bodied. It’s not an overly big fruit bomb at all, but it’s got power.

Domaine Sainte-Eugénie Corbières Rosé
Grapes: 75 percent Cinsault, 15 percent Syrah, 10 percent Grenache
Wood: Nada
Alcohol: 12.5 percent (which appeals to me; I like to drink, but I don’t like to get too drunk)
Price: N/A
My Tasting Notes: See above, although the upshot is that I thought the wine was beautiful, and I’ll be scrambling to score more when it’s released, which should be in a few months.

Posted by Daniel Duane | Monday, March 24, 2008 at 3:22pm | 1 comment
Tagged with: wine, bourgogne, corbières, domaine sainte-eugénie, burgundy, red wine, rose, carignane, grenache, syrah, 2004 domaine sainte-eugénie corbières rouge, domaine sainte-eugénie corbières rosé, cinsault, herve gantier