It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full year since we launched this site and announced our plans to create our very own wine. 

And what a year it has been! 

To celebrate we’re going to take a couple weeks off from our regular publishing schedule.  While we’re gone, make sure to vote in our month-end Brigade picture contest and look for new posts starting the week of July 13^th.

Before we go, we wanted to reminisce about some of the highlights of this past year.  If you’re a newer member of the family, this will catch you up on our shenanigans.  And if you’ve been following us since the beginning, hopefully this will be a fun walk down memory lane.

First up, some of our favorite posts from the past year:

Behind the Bruliam Curtain – we reveal for the first time how we plan to pull this off.

How Proper is Your Pinot – one of our most popular posts, generating a ton of Google traffic for the site.  I guess we’re not the only ones confused on whether to capitalize wine varietals.

Salmon with Pinot Sauce and Pocket Pinot Chicken.  Kerith put up a number of great cooking videos this year, but the Salmon with Pinot Sauce and the Pocket Pinot Chicken  recipes were the most widely read and used by readers.

It’s A Small World (After All) – we recount how we were charmed by a dunce-wearing Italian gnome twice in one weekend.

Slow Down and Wait For Me! – Kerith magically ties together toddler tantrums and fermentation.

If You Smell Smoke, It Must Be a Campfire – few posts elicited as much response as Kerith’s post about her hatred of camping (specifically the “sh*t in a box” part) and how it reminded her of our smoke-tainted grapes.

Take The Cannoli – your unimpeachable hosts make lemonade out of lemons by “recycling” a cast-out case of wine.

Get A Job – Kerith confronts a career crisis brought about by our 5-year old.

Bruliam Wine Tasting Video – we get our very first sample of our Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir.  Also check out the later Blending video from the same wine.

Under My Uccelliera, -era, -era – we recount our adventures in Italy that led to a 97-point Wine Spectator score and an unusual baby name.

Drinking Holy Water – religious symbology reveals unfair bias against Jewish winemakers.

Next, a shout out to the Brigade:

If you haven’t checked out the line-up of Brigade pictures lately, click here for a refresher.

In the past year we’ve had submissions from all over North America as well as pictures from Asia (Thailand and Vietnam), South America (Brazil), Europe (Germany, Italy, and even underwater in Spain), Africa (Zambia), and Australia.

But, we’re greedy and we still need more!  If you have a Bruliam shirt, snap a picture and send it in.  If you haven’t gotten your shirt yet, complete the form here and we’ll get you one ASAP.

A word on the charitable aspects of Bruliam Wines:

We decided early on to donate 100% of the profits from this venture to charity.  You can see some of the charities we already support through our foundation here. 

As we’ve waited for wine to sell to generate those profits, we’ve been giving away $250 monthly charity prizes to winners of our Brigade picture contests.  By the end of June we’ll have given away a total of $2,500 to a number of great charities picked by our Brigade members.  You can see them those charities by scrolling through the Brigade page.  We’re thrilled to have partnered with you to support such great causes over the past year and we encourage you to continue sending in pictures for more chances to win money for your favorite charity.

So, what’s next?

We’ll be bottling our 2008 Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir in August and our 2008 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir in October. 

You may have noticed that we made some changes to our website by adding the Our Wines tab to highlight our two 2008 pinots.  We plan to overhaul that page over the summer so that we can actually start accepting pre-orders for the wines (we’ll firm up the dates after bottling, but the deliveries will roughly be scheduled for late 2009 / early 2010).

Our 2009 growing season is already in full swing.  When we hit September, it’s going to be even busier than last year with grapes from three vineyards to sort, ferment, and press.  Should be a lot of fun – and, just like last year, we’ll be extending an open invitation to all Brigade members to come join us at the winery for some messy manual labor (and wine tasting).

A parting favor:

With wine sales looming on the horizon, we need your help spreading the word about Bruliam Wines.  If you’ve enjoyed following our story so far, why not share us with friends?  Forward this e-mail to anyone you know who you think may want to join in the fun or simply send them the link below so that they can sign up to start receiving our e-mail updates:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=BruliamWines&loc=en_US

Kerith and I want to thank you all for your support an encouragement over the past year.  We’re looking forward to sharing the next stage of our adventure with you.

-Brian

I read Matt Kramer’s op-ed, “Just Drink It” with perverse humor and smug self-satisfaction.  “I told you so; I told you so,” looped through my subconscious on repeat play.  In his June 30, 2009 Wine Spectator column, Mr. Kramer denounces the wine industry, himself included, for encouraging a wine culture of such bloated pretentiousness and incomprehensible obscurity as to render it virtually impenetrable to us outsiders ( meaning those of us who regularly buy wine at Costco and then actually drink it).  Kowtowing at the altar of esoteric wine nonsense, these wine cronies devour the arcane facts like the yield per acre, brix at harvest, and the trendiest mode of fining only to taste, swish, and spit out the real goods in a ceramic bucket.  They pop the cork only after the liturgy of the 95+ point sacrament, ceremoniously uttered with gravitas reserved for the Pope.  All hush as the wine is decanted.  Following a pedantic dissertation detailing the vineyard’s soil content over the last 15 growing seasons, the nose is contentiously debated, like a bunch of lab-coat technicians dissecting a math theorem.  Is that the smell of tanned leather, fresh leather, raw cow hide or sweaty pleather?  Is red cherry, bing cherry, candied cherry or cherry cordial?  Tell me, Brigade, where is the joy?  For many, the festive world of wine has become a cold and scary place.  Even friends I know are red-faced to sheepishly confess, “I don’t know anything about wine,” a shortcoming more demeaning than admitting they flunked preschool or broke a vase and blamed it on the dog.  This obtuse, fatuous, fancy shmancy, unapproachable culture of wine has gotten out of hand.  Bring wine back to the people, please! 

Even Mr. Kramer admits, “Not once did any of us exclaim over the sheer pleasure of what we were tasting.  Not once did we deal with wine as something approaching ‘normality.’”  That sounds like a very sad party to me.  At Bruliam, we preach that wine should be special but never so precious that you fear drinking it.  Wine should be a fully integrated component of life and food and family, celebrating the daily, simple pleasures derived from that concoction.  Yes, Mr. Kramer, it is imperative that we “make wine a little less exceptional…and a bit more about life itself.”  Perhaps as wine royalty, Mr. Kramer was privy to the classified copy we wrote for the back of our wine labels, as our own verbiage supports those very same virtues.  We want to shout, “Do open our wine tonight and drink it heartily!”  Toast your day and allow our juice to raise the bar on last night’s leftovers.  And it was with this tingly feeling of rhapsodic wine gospel, consecrating the triumph of my personal wine philosophy that I embarked on my kids’ end-of-the-year school carnival.

And there, nestled between the Frisbee spin art station and the rubber duckie fishing booth, dear Brigade, I jumped the shark.  Dear Bacchus, spite my name and spoil my wine for I have committed hypocrisy of ferocious scale.  Even the powerful St. Urban – my favorite Catholic patron saint- cannot undo my horrors.  When an unassuming mommy friend inquired after the state of the Bruliam vino, I launched into a passionate, rapturous treatise on numerical clones, cranberry nuances, flavor profiles and mouth feel.  I used words like “restrained” and “brawny” and “austere” and “elegant.”  I gave discourse to the distinction between a jammy blackberry tinge a bright red fruit undertone.  And oh God help me for I was utterly clueless and misread every social cue.  I was not silenced until she blurted out (and I am not making this up), “That is beyond me; just give me a good margarita with lime.”  Gulp.  I was quiet.  In my maniacal fervor, I marched right into the Member’s Only Wine Geek Club, oblivious that my companion was uninitiated.  So dear Brigade, please forgive my frenzied musings on yeast strains, and just drink the wine!

Immediately after we finished blending our Anderson Valley Pinot Noir (in case you missed that video, please click here), we began the process all over again for our Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir from the Santa Lucia Highlands.

We’ve posted the Doctor’s Vineyard tasting / blending video below. If you can’t see the video, please click here.

Unlike the Anderson Valley, there was an abundance of fruit on the nose of the Doctor’s wine.  So much so, in fact, that we felt we had to dial it back and balance it out in order to arrive at the perfect spot for this wine.

We originally barreled the Doctor’s as a blend of 75% 115 clone and 25% calera clone.  During our blending session, we also added in some 667, 2A, and swan clone to make a wine that we truly love. 

We left the winery with a half bottle of each of our newly blended wines and enjoyed them both immensely over dinner that evening.  We can’t wait to see how they further develop in barrel over the next two months.  We now expect to bottle the Doctor’s Vineyard in August and the Anderson Valley in October or November.  This puts us on track for a late 2009 / early 2010 release date for both wines.

We’ve compiled two videos to give you a feel of what the blending and tasting experience was like last week.

The Anderson Valley tasting/blending video is below. Watch out for the Doctor’s Vineyard tasting/blending video next week.

If you can’t see the video below, please click here to watch it (note that it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to load after you press play – but we promise it is worth the wait).

The good news is that the intervention we had to take with the wine worked.  The smoky overtones are gone and there is now a very nice cranberry nose on the wine.  But, as a stand-alone, it is a very simple wine.

So, we spent about an hour trying out different clones and adding them in at different ratios to come up with a wine that we really love.  Our basic wine is 100% of the 115 clone.  In the end we blended in 10% of the 777 clone and 5% of the pommard clone.  This added both structure and greater fruit to the wine.  What we tasted at the end was exactly what we were shooting for with the Anderson Valley pinot – a lighter, more restrained and almost Burgundian wine.  We’ve very excited!

Next up is a couple more months in the barrel to let the new blend integrate fully.  Then we’ll be back in late August to taste it again and see if any more blending is necessary.

Blending marries the giddy high of drinking your own wine to disarming flashbacks of high school chemistry, chaperoned by Mr. Wizard.  A graduated beaker and a glass pipette ensure precise aliquots of each individual clone are added proportionally, science in a Reidel globe glass.  The butcher paper protecting the tasting table is scarred with the scrawl of illegible tasting notes and drying blotches of red wine.  We’re flanked by a phalanx of restaurant-grade, plastic flats of freshly steamed wine glasses, ready to battle Mother Nature and any smoke taint residua.  The mood oscillates between austere business and guarded ebullience.  More than any other step in the winemaking process, this one will bear the enduring stamp of our personal taste.  At this fantasy camp for winos, we’ll mix, taste, swirl, spit, contemplate and debate innumerable wine combinations until we settle on the recipe that will become our 2008 inaugural vintage.  No pressure, guys.  No pressure.

After reverse osmosis, my expectations were low.  I was skeptical.  Could a machine really perform the miraculous and isolate and remove a single, noxious chemical compound without sacrificing the nuances, depth, and organoleptic complexity that makes great wine sing?  Well, I was right – sort of.  I am happy to report that our first taste of the Annahala pinot noir revealed a lovely, sweet cranberry nose with a fruity flavor, nice balance, fine acid, and importantly- no smoke.  But that was about it.  We’re talking about your best friend’s, freckle-faced kid sister, not some smoldering hottie.  The wine’s pretty cranberry aromatic was simple, transparent and unlayered; I’d hoped for more.  Luckily by blending in some other pinot clones, we’d be able to elevate the aroma, flesh out the mouth feel, add some structure, and build complexity.  In other words, regain what we’d lost.

Now I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.  Before reverse osmosis, the wine was undrinkable.  Wet ashtray and smoldering charcoal won’t win you 90 points, even from the Reno, Nevada Chain-Smokers Wine Club of North America.  Yes, we had a serious job to do.  Really, tasting is a fun, happy buzz until you’re challenged to heighten the wine’s structure without careening over the abyss into cotton-mouth puckering tannic overload.  The process works like this: naked Annahala is ground zero, our control wine.  Then each clone is added to it individually, one at a time, in a 10:1 ratio.  If something works, figure out why.  Is it a better smell?  A more lingering flavor?  Does it coat more of your mouth or less?  If it tastes rotten (as sometimes it did), just spit and move on.  Then, it gets tricky.  If one clone lifts the nose to heaven but another adds some much needed tannin, try adding both in different proportions, like 2 ½% and 5% or 7% and 10% or 5% and 5%.  You get the idea.  This is a dishwasher’s nightmare.  Each permutation nudges the vino a little closer to perfection.  Swirl, sip, and scrawl.  Repeat.  Hope notes are legible 10 glasses later.  Mix more.  New combinations.  Now you’re just writing gibberish.

Happily, we converged on a final “recipe” that enlivens the cranberry, red berry profile that characterizes the pinots of the region while adding some depth, richer, creamier mouth feel, and greater mid-palate weight.  The 777 clone elevates the aromatics while the pommard clone adds structure and tannin.  The wine is still 85% Annahala juice, and do understand the clones we’ve added derive 100% from Anderson Valley pinot noir fruit.  So the integrity of our “terroir” remains intact.  In fact, I think we’ve crafted a really beautiful, restrained, elegant, cranberry/ red fruit driven pinot noir. 

Now back to bed, my darling.  Time to slumber in oak for a few more months.

 (A blending video will follow soon).

As you read this on Thursday morning, we’ll be sitting with our winemaker in San Francisco barrel tasting both of our 2008 pinots and discussing any last minute adjustments we want to make to the wines. 

This last step – the blending – while only one of the many decisions in the winemaking process, is also one of the most important.  Many of the world’s great wines are blends of multiple varietals.  Bordeaux are usually a mix of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, petit verdot, malbec, and sometimes carmenere.  Rhones are usually a blend of syrah, grenache, and mouvedre – and sometimes viognier.  How much of each varietal that the winemaker chooses to put into the final bottling is often a big factor in the quality and success of the wine.

Lesser known is the fact that most single varietal wines are also blends.  In the U.S., a wine labeled as pinot noir, for example, may derive up to 25% of its juice from other varietals without having to be labeled as a blend.  So wines that are specifically labeled as 100% pinot or cabernet suavignon are often a blend of grapes from different clones or vineyard blocks (different physical locations within the same vineyard).  Even a single vineyard designated wine need only derive 95% of the grapes from that specific vineyard.  As you may recall from our harvest video, our Doctor’s vineyard was fermented as 75% Calera clone and 25% Dijon 115 – all pinot grapes, all from the same vineyard.

We last tasted our wines in late February.  You can refresh your memories by viewing our videos of the Doctor’s tasting by clicking here and the Annahala tasting by clicking here.

With Doctor’s we loved the dark fruit forward taste and smell but were concerned about the lack of mid-palate structure.  With the Annahala, we had to make the decision to put the wine through a reverse osmosis cleansing process to remove the smoky overtones.  What other flavors and structure may have been stripped by that process will be determined this morning.

Sine the last tasting, our wines have benefited from three additional months of barrel aging.  Our first task will be to gauge how the wines have matured since our last tasting and to see whether our concerns from February are still evident.  From there, we will start experimenting with blending options to get to our desired end result. 

Our hope is to be minimally invasive, but our overriding goal from Day 1 has been to deliver wines that reflect both their terroir and our personal tastes.  We intend to accomplish that goal this morning. 

Wish us luck and look for updates starting next week!

Not much is happening in either the winery or the vineyards right now.  Our wine is currently resting in the barrels, maturing and developing the mouth watering burst of flavors we’re carefully nurturing.  Back at the farm, the vines have bloomed, but the berries are still small, hard, green pebbles of fruit.  They won’t turn purple until around mid-July.  The only folks busy are the feds at the FDA.  They need to approve our labels far in advance of our first bottling, approving design and verbiage and ensuring all of the required information is present.  This includes the ominous line about sulfites.  The BATF insists that all wines containing more than 10mg/L of sulfur be decorated with that well-known “Government Warning…Contains Sulfites.”

“Sulfites” is an almost-dirty word.  Urban myths include the oft circulated, “you won’t get as drunk or hung-over from wine in Europe because they don’t use sulfites.”  OK, this is absolutely untrue.  Their wines contain pretty much the same sulfite concentration as ours, but their governments don’t require their bottles to say so, until it’s imported into the U.S.   Before you protest, just recall the most coveted memories of your last spring jaunt to Tuscany, including that lazy, lingering 3 hour, 5 course dining extravaganza, each magical bite savored with a sip of extraordinary wine.  In contrast, here at home, I chase a guzzled glass of pinot with a scoop of cold, congealed Kraft macaroni, as I scrape my kids’ dinner into the trashcan with a Disney princess plastic spoon.  It’s no wonder my head hurts and my eyes are red.  It has nothing to do with sulfites; I’m sobbing with despair.  Even my mom claims, “I’m allergic to the sulfites in red wine.”  Actually, white wines have a higher sulfite concentration than reds, partly because the added tannins from the grape skins help preserve red wines better than whites, so less SO2 is required to ensure a wine’s stability. 

Unfortunately though, it is true that severe asthmatics should be legitimately concerned about sulfites, as some unlucky folks can develop a life threatening anaphylactic reaction.  Fortunately this affliction affects very, very, very few individuals.  If you want to play ER at home and think you might be susceptible to sulfites, try snacking on dried apricots (a 2 ounce serving has about 112 mg sulfites).  If you live to tell, then the measly 10 mg of sulfites in a typical glass of wine should cause no harm (for more information on this, click here).  Still, by law, all wines containing more than 10 parts per million of sulfur dioxide must carry the warning label, even if the winemaker never added sulfur herself.  This is because sulfur dioxide (SO2) is a natural by product of fermentation, so even organic wines made without adding extra SO2 will carry a high enough naturally-occurring sulfur concentration to require the warning.  Should your local, granola-crunching, wheat grass sprouting organic food compound shelf the rare sulfite-free wine, do drink it that night, as without added SO2 these wines wear no protection for long term cellaring.

So why bother with SO2 (”added sulfites”) at all?  Sulfur dioxide is a multi-purpose wine making tool, which prevents oxidation (i.e. premature browning and aging or spoilage), kills bugs (i.e. it is a powerful fungicidal and bactericidal antiseptic), and enhances gustatory qualities by protecting a wine’s aroma.  Dosing fresh grapes with a generous blast of SO2 in the fields prevents the grapes from browning en route to the winery.  Before fermentation, SO2 holds the unwanted bacterial population at bay, preventing the malolactic bacteria from gobbling up the yeasts’ sugar supply.  Early in fermentation, a rowdy bacterial population could be disastrous, producing unwanted, smelly, unsavory volatile acidity; SO2 can stop the malolactic bacteria before they even start.  Weirdly, although SO2 is fungistatic (i.e. kills yeasts), low doses of SO2 may result in a faster fermentation.  And contrary to intuition, even adding SO2 near the end of fermentation won’t stop the show; most often it actually facilitates rapid completion (Ribereau-Gayon).  I am guessing this because the SO2 kills any competing yeast strains, leaving only the guys tough enough to finish the job and carry fermentation to dryness.  Once barreled, wine is frequently dosed with SO2 to prevent premature aging and protect delicate aromas.  SO2 binds the chemical ethanal which makes a wine’s “flat” characteristics disappear.  Once bottled, SO2 will combine with the residual, minute amounts of oxygen in the headspace, over time preventing chemical oxidation.  In fact, extended barrel maturation and bottle aging would be impossible without the protective effects of SO2.  Of course its use must be judicious and thoughtful, as high doses smell terrible and taste bitter and rotten.  But overall, the benefits of sulfur addition far outweigh the cons.  No other known winemaking substance can do all of these jobs or do them as well.  Rather than strive to eliminate SO2 completely, a winemaker’s goal should be responsible use.

The tricky catch is that nobody knows exactly what “the right amount” actually means.  EU legislation dictates the upper limits of SO2 as 160 ml/l for whites and 210 mg/l for reds.  However in practice, most French wines tap out at about 105 mg/l for whites and 75 mg/L for reds.  In the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia, 350 mg/l is the SO2 limit for any and all wines.  One reason the nomenclature is so murky is that the effects of SO2 vary with alcohol concentration, pH, and even temperature.  As you know, all three of these factors vary significantly over the course of wine development.  Sulfur dioxide can also bind to other stuff- like oxygen, ethanal, and other chemicals, but only the “free” sulfur dioxide is active in the winemaking process.  And of course, as this is an equilibrium, SO2 binds and unbinds itself as a wine evolves.  As a result, free SO2 is measured in the lab, and enologists try to conform to general recommendations for appropriate wine storage (i.e. 10-30 mg/L free SO2 for bottling red wines). 

So in conclusion, don’t let our label scare you.  Drink freely and often; sulfites don’t bite. 

Thanks to all of you who provided great feedback on our initial label designs.  Based largely on your comments, we’ve come up with our final label design for the 2008 pinots.

As you can see, we’ve incorporated the vineyard and varietal information on the front.  On the back, we decided to go with the offset white design to provide a nice contrast (plus we just think it is cool). 

The big open space on the back still needs to be filled in with some poetic drivel about the majesty of our wines, but we’ll work on that after our barrel tasting next week.

Final Labels

Note that you’ll need Adobe Acrobat to open this link.

Summer is officially here, but you’d never know it from our weather outside.  The mornings are grey and heavy, sun obscured by a thick marine layer of costal fog.  We locals affectionately term our weather woes “May grey,” then “June gloom.”  The influx of summer catalogs and cheery newspaper insets, however, belie the wet, morning haze.  So every late afternoon, as the first rays of skittish sunshine finally emerge, a new stack of slick glossies peek seductively from our mailbox.  The Sunday papers kindly provide special foldouts ranking the local summer camp programs, promising everything from traditional day camp with s’mores to fluency in Mandarin.  On catalog covers, gorgeous toe-headed children romp through ocean whitewash, their salt-licked hair adorably tousled.  Angelic, chubby-cheeked preschoolers advertise $48 toddler bikinis with color-coordinated rash guards, oblivious they’re just a cog in the corporate consumer machine.  Their complicit endorsement sells the myth of summer, with 10% off each additional purchase.

Ah, summertime!  Long, lazy days of sunny promise.  We wait for those achingly protracted hours of extended daylight, when the midday heat is so oppressive our usual fevered pace slows to a crawl.  Finally there’s time to finish that project we’d planned to start 6 months ago.  Maybe you’ll finally tackle that novel you’ve always meant to read- Anna Karenina, War & Peace, or even Remembrance of Things Past, in original French.  By mid-August, the lofty tomes are abandoned, and we’re already anticipating the evening chill that signals autumn’s arrival.  Another season of high hopes and sweeping goals buried for another year.

This summer, we hope to spend some time in Sonoma County.  I’m certain the inland heat will be more oppressive than to what I am accustomed.  So my summer expectations are as languid as this: uncover the perfect picnic wine.  Call me an underachiever and mock my mediocre expectations (or simply envy my job).  Sure we here at Bruliam Wines would love to think you’d pick our pinot for all your backyard picnic needs.  But given the global economic meltdown, we’ll forgive you for packing a $12 rose instead.  So drink around and help me find that ideal red blend of frivolity, easy sipping, and lighthearted fruitiness that pairs perfectly with brown-paper wrapped sandwiches, homemade brownies, and watermelon spears.  I need a wine to slurp in the shade or share with friends at an impromptu backyard barbeque.  And preferably a cheap one.  After all, this is supposed to be a low risk, easy going tonic, to soothe sunburns and peeling noses.  Find me wine that captures the ephemeral, fleeting sense of endless possibility which heralds the start of summer.  Bottle just the expansive hopefulness without any of the melancholy that inevitably follows.  I’d even spend $17 a bottle to drink that!

In her post on Monday, Kerith touched on the wild world of wine investments.  As a purported “investment professional”, I figured I needed to spend some time digging into the opportunity a little deeper.

On the most basic level, wine investment is about supply and demand.  There is only so much wine that Chateau Latour, for example, can produce for its first growth Bordeaux bottling – it only has so much land, growing so many tons of grapes, and fermenting and pressing those grapes into so many bottles of marketable wine.  This limited supply runs up against a level of demand that fluctuates based on macro-economic factors and the marketing/scoring machines of Robert Parker and Wine Spectator.  With the 2000 and 2005 Bordeaux vintages declared “Vintages of the Century,” the demand instantly increased and sent prices for those vintages skyrocketing. 

Much of that buyside demand in recent years has come from the so-called BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.  The BRIC countries, until the recent market meltdown, were flying high on commodity prices (oil, natural gas, and metals predominantly) that enabled them to generate huge amounts of cash.  That cash funneled into a number of asset classes outside their borders, including wine – specifically “trophy” wines like the first growth Bordeaux, grand cru Burgundies, and a few California cult cabs (although it is interesting to note that California cult cabs are apparently much lower down the international investment totem pole than the top tier French wines).

As an individual, there are a number of ways to invest in wine:

The most basic is the direct investment.  You buy a bottle of wine, hold it, and sell it for more money at some point in the future.  If you are fortunate enough to get first growth futures for a hot vintage or are on the mailing list for a California cult cab, you can basically flip your investment for an immediate gain.  The rest of us need to buy wines of pedigree once they are brought to market and hope that others will be willing to pay more for those wines in the future.  This type of investing is similar to buying an individual stock.  You can buy a share of Google, GE, Home Depot, etc.  Hopefully it appreciates over time and when you sell it, you can sell it for a higher price and take a profit.  Like buying an individual stock you need to be able to understand the risk/reward profile of each wine.  Some of the considerations include whether you are buying at a good price, is there a reasonable possibility that the wine will appreciate over time, is supply limited, can you store the wine in a way so as to preserve value during aging.  The direct investing method also has one additional inherent risk and reward.  The risk is that your willpower will shrink and you will open the bottle.  The reward is that if you aren’t able to sell the bottle at a reasonable profit you can drink away your sorrows with a fine aged bottle of premium wine.  To that end, I came across a very amusing video from Gary Vaynerchuk featuring Jim Cramer from CNBC where they talk about direct wine investments.  It’s on the long side, but very entertaining.  Click here for the video.  As a side note, this is particularly funny since it was filmed right before the market crash and Gary’s view on wine and Jim’s view on the stock market are both unabashedly bullish…

The second method to invest in wine is through an actively managed fund.  Like mutual funds and hedge funds, the managed wine funds enable individuals to participate in wine investments without necessarily having the knowledge, access, or facilities needed for successful direct wine investments.  Most of these funds are structured more like hedge funds.  They advertise as alternative asset class funds, require investors to meet accredited investor status (basically, a representation that you are a knowledgeable investor with sufficient assets to afford to lose your shirt if things go badly), require minimum investment amounts and lock-up provisions, and the managers of the fund are paid based on a percentage of the investment returns.  Most of these funds are domiciled and managed overseas for a variety of legal issues.  One fund I came across was the Wine Investment Fund whose motto is “Fine Returns from Fine Wines”.  And, in fact, their returns do seem “fine”, as you can see here.  While investing in an actively managed wine investment fund does take some of the guesswork out of the process, it is far from riskless.  In addition to the same supply and demand issues that affect the direct investment model is the relative illiquidity that a managed fund presents.  Most require a long lock-up period and, even when adhered to, I’d be somewhat concerned with ultimate liquidity.  After all, the fund takes your money and buys wine.  It then needs to sell that wine to provide you a cash-out return.  As many hedge funds have realized over the past year, selling assets (wine, in this case) at a price near their perceived value is often difficult, especially if the selling is taking place under time pressure or in a down market.

A third way to invest in wine is through index futures.  Yes, just as we’ve seen an explosion in index funds and their cousins, the ETFs, there is now an index investment mechanism for wine.  The Liv-ex 100 Fine Wine Index represents “the price movement of 100 of the most sought after fine wines”.  It only includes wines of 95-points or better that have a strong history of secondary market sales.  The index is weighted heavily towards red Bordeaux, although also includes smaller allocations of other French and Italian wines.  The advantage of index investing in wine is the same as index investing in the equity markets – you get a broader market approach which, in theory, creates less volatility and steadier returns, all with lower fees than a managed fund.  In this case, you also have the added benefit of greater liquidity as you are investing in an exchange traded index rather than a single bottle of wine or a portfolio of wine managed by a fund.

So, where does this leave those of you who might want to invest in wine as an asset class?  Frankly, I have no idea.  The concept is so foreign to me that I’m not sure I can render any useful advice.  I can logically understand the argument that wine, as an asset class, is sufficiently uncorrelated to the equity markets as to provide a true alternative investment opportunity.

But, in order to properly view any asset as an investment vehicle, you have to be able to remove emotions from the buying and selling decisions.  That’s hard enough to do with a stock or bond.  How in the world can you do that with wine, whose value is often derived specifically from the emotional connection that you have to it? 

As a purported “investment professional” I simply have no idea.

Brian and I are pretty conservative folks.  We invest for retirement conservatively, and our returns had been steadily profitable but never flashy or astronomical.  (Now, of course, we’re tanked like the rest of you).  Ever traditional, our kids have garden variety saving accounts and standard 529 college savings funds.  All straightforward, even for non-business minds like mine.  Even with the current devaluation, I’m way too chicken to trade in a college fund buoyed by a broad swath of blue-chip type stocks for say, a case or two or twenty of Chateau Margaux.  But not so for Erica Abramson of Great Neck, NY.  In an article appearing in the June 15, 2009 issue of Wine Spectator, she details how she built a 1500 bottle capacity, state of the art, investment-grade wine storage facility in her home in which to house her children’s future college nest egg.  Apparently she’d axed an investigation into more traditional college savings funds as “[her] husband kept saying, ‘Oh, the market’s going to collapse.’”  Now 898 bottles later, she’s at just over 50% capacity.  The article points out that sure, a classic, perfectly preserved 1982 Margaux has appreciated by 1,374%, far more than Brian and I could ever hope to gain under California’s 529 plan.  But also the 2005 first growth Bordeaux have nose dived nearly 30% since their release price.

More than any other category of wine in the world, French Bordeaux are bought, sold, and traded as investment commodities.  Buttressed by history of greatness, quality and long ageablilty, an entrenched, multi-tiered ranking system crowned by the five first growths, and significantly higher production than the wines of Burgundy or Barolo, the French Bordeaux put the “trade” in the wine trade.  Even their selling rituals involve the complex choreography of a three way ballet between grower, broker and merchant.  The broker is the middle man who chills with the chateaux owners and tastes maturing wine in barrels, relaying his/her impressions to the merchants on the outside who actually sell the stuff to the thirsty public.  This way the merchants gain second-hand knowledge of expectations for each vintage before wines are released for sale.  At first, just a small proportion of the finest wines are sold as futures in the spring immediately following harvest.  Lucky investors with VIP access can opt to buy the immature wines at a relative discount, prior to aging and before the wines are shipped for full scale release at a higher fixed price.  But futures are also purchased with an eye to good faith and stomach of steel, as quality, flavors, tannins, and structure may be altered with aging, often favorably but perhaps not.  The “Bordeaux stock market” is actually a real phrase.

Consider the Bordeaux Index Wine Investment based in the UK.  This firm helps investors avail themselves of the wondrous “low risk, high yield” world of wine investing.  They claim to “combine financial discipline, market insight and wine knowledge to optimize returns.  All portfolios are tailored to meet the specific risk appetite and investment horizon of the investor.”  Sounds just like Merrill Lynch or a friendly chap in an eTrade commercial.  Benefits are summarized as “Generated annualized returns of over 25% per annum in the past 5 years; Tax free (if certain conditions are met); Diversification – Fine wine has a near-zero long-run correlation with all major debt and equity markets; Security of asset ownership; Fee free structure.”  Hey, sign me up!

Let me push my snippy quips aside and wash away the ugly, green tinge from my jealous cheeks.  I am certainly envious of that rarefied crew of lucky drinkers (or investors) who can afford to buy and hold cases of this stuff at a time (a case of 2000 Lafite Rothschild will run you about $20,500).  But on the other hand, I am staunchly opposed to the very idea of wine as investment.  I firmly believe that wine is for drinking and sharing and enjoying, right now.  Sure big, tannic wines require more aging but that just means we’ll drink them later.  Artists, poets, wine lovers and authors weep over the beauty, nuances, and grace of magnificent wines, not over their investment portfolios.  (Sorry, poor semantics.  Yes we’re actually crying with the rest of you!).  But you know exactly what I mean.  Wine is a living, breathing organic entity that can transform itself profoundly from one sip to the next across a romantic summer evening.  Or it is the conviviality and shared warmth of an impromptu, al fresco dinner with friends.  Wine is emotional and personal and from the heart, while a stock portfolio is cold-hard number crunching data, mathematical algorithms, and all business.  Please don’t confuse the two.

So what about Erica Abramson back in New York?  Even she cheekily admits, “If the investment doesn’t hold up, at least I can drink it.”  Oh dear, dear Erica, just drop the pretense and open a bottle or two tonight!

I completed my surgical internship at Loma Linda University Medical Center, a Seventh Day Adventist affiliated hospital.  Growing up, I’d never met any Seventh Day Adventists, so their religious mores and traditions were entirely foreign to me upon arrival in the ER.  For instance, there is no caffeine – anywhere, at least legitimately.  It’s hard to psych yourself up for a “great day” in the ICU or a long night of trauma call with only diet Sprite for pep.  Luckily, terrific floor nurses provided us with contraband, high octane joe, and a neighborhood Starbucks knock-off turned a profitable business just across the street.  Abstinence from alcohol goes without saying.  Strangely, the hospital cafeterias are devoid of pepper (a stimulant) and meat, too.  I suffered many bouts of turkey-like sandwich reflux since we were awarded free meal tickets for enduring overnight call.  As a Jew, dietary restrictions are not new to me.  Under Jewish law, I am taught to abstain from all pork products, shellfish, and dairy/meat in combination.  Obviously, God puts the brakes on my ridiculously hard-core pizza with prosciutto, beets, and pancetta-caramelized onions.  But then he’s never specifically tasted it either.

Despite this embarrassing richness of kindling for incendiary explosions of un-PC, base, and immature religious jokes, it was the hospital’s wall murals that became the central target of our offensive one-liners.  A religious-themed collection of oversized murals decorated the walls of the public spaces, each depicting Jesus with a physician.  In every painting, and there were quite a few of them, Jesus would be lurking over the physician’s shoulder as she/he treated patients in their various fields of medicine.  For instance, we saw Jesus in the OR, whispering into the surgeon’s ear, “Hey man, don’t nick that artery.  The aorta’s a real gusher!”  Or “Listen, I think that kid in the corner has mumps.  I’d check the CDC website if I were you,” as he leaned in close to the pediatrician’s left ear.  Being Jewish, I felt severely disadvantaged: Jesus doesn’t feed me the answers; I have to study instead.  I learned this the hard way after one surgeon threw a scalpel at my head after I failed to correctly identify a particular nerve.  He actually made me break scrub, go down to the library, retrieve the Netter anatomy atlas, and return to the OR after researching the correct answer.  Then after answering a few questions about the pertinent anatomy, I was allowed to scrub back in on the case.  This happened three times over the course of a 2 hour case.  Jesus, are you out there?  Throw me a bone, man.

To this day, I remain curiously drawn to traditional religious imagery.  It is so thickly intertwined with memories of my surgical internship.  Perhaps this is why I was instantly taken with the label on Emmerich Knoll’s Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Vinothekfüllung Loibner, adorned with a golden-hued image of a Pope or some Cardinal holding a staff.  He looked like the no-nonsense kind of guy who might whack a girl with a long stick for forgetting her Austrian geography (see picture below).  But since I love Grüners, I moved past the haunting label.  And happily so, for this small production “Vinothekfullung” bottling was another among the amazing wines we tasted for Brian’s birthday.  If you’ve never tasted a Grüner from Austria, please go sample one soon.  Grüners are accessible, fresh, tropical-fruity, often peppery and sometimes honeyed white wines from Austria.  Vibrant acidity allows this wine stand up to some serious food, like the sweet pea risotto in our pairing.  But, enough wine talk; back to the opulent label.

I have since learned that the gilded, crimson-caped icon adorning the bottle is one Saint Urban of Langres, a French saint and bishop who was consecrated in 374.  On the label, he clutches a staff in one hand and bunch of grapes with the other.  He is flanked by two, fat naked cherubs, one of whom is also holding grapes.  The myth of St. Urban tells of his hiding from religious prosecutors in the vineyard.  Of course afterwards, once St. Urban was deemed safe, the vineyard hands who hid him conveniently converted to Christianity.  So by proxy, St. Urban is considered the patron saint of vintners, wine growers, and all persons working in the wine industry.  He is also invoked against alcoholism, but that seems like a conflict of interest, right?  A multi-tasker, St. Urban also protects against blight and frost, two natural disasters I’m hoping to avoid in our 2009 harvest.  (Unfortunately “protection from smoke taint” wasn’t specifically addressed on the saints website or I might consider converting to Catholicism myself.)

All this now brings me back full circle, feeling a little left out of the action because of my religious standing.  So do Catholics get special enological/viticultural dispensation from God, on behalf of the patron saints of wine?  Somehow I don’t think invoking the hard-partying, hung over, and polytheistic Bacchus carries the same weight.  I think I’d better check to see if our winemaker Chris is Catholic.  He may be the best option out there for a couple of wine-making Jews.

I am easily awestruck.  When my sister-in-law confided that she’d almost run over Cameron Diaz with her new Lexus, I got chills.  This was my closest connection to a Hollywood star yet.  I sometimes boast another LA pal sat next to Adam Sandler at synagogue last Yom Kippur.  And then she saw Thom Filicia of Queer Eye fame at a neighborhood Chipotle outpost in the same week!  Of course as an Us Weekly subscriber, I am already intimate with most Hollywood A-listers.  Last year, in a lopsided game of one upsmanship with my star-sighting neighbors to the north, I famously was convinced that Apolo Anton Ohno was in my track club; turns out I was wrong.  I conceded to misidentification only after concocting vivid scenarios in which my new BFF and I were photographed together in the front row of DWTS.

Show-stopping wines and famous wine personalities leave me equally undone.  You probably recall my heart palpitations as I unintelligibly stuttered into Josh Jensen’s answering machine.  Scoring a paparazzi shot next to Gary Pisoni left me high for days.  Thinking about Le Pin makes me tingly.  I read about lavish wines as often as I can.  But to be blunt, my reading material reflects an extravagance that far exceeds the holdings in my personal cellar.  While my bloated bravado sounds pretty legit when I recount the relative merits of DRC vs. Echezeaux, I’ve never actually tasted the former.  Then last weekend, in celebration of Brian’s birthday, the edifice dividing wine fiction from actual wine tasting began to crack.  Super som Jesse Rodriguez had personally collected a magnificent array of “birthday juice” to toast Brian’s 37^th year.

He wasn’t kidding.   In a lineup of sensational vino, the piece de resistance was a Paolo Bea Montefalco Rosso Riserva.  I blurted out, “I know this stuff from Jay McInerney,” before realizing its implications.  I’d never tasted this wine before and certainly didn’t “know” celebrated fiction author Jay McInerney, as in hanging out together for a summer barbecue and sharing a beer.  My weird confession was like insinuating a friendship with Jennifer Garner after internalizing some semi-intimate quotes printed in a Vanity Fair interview; it sounds stalker-ish and creepy.  But I sort of feel like I do know Jay McInerney through his killer essay collection, A Hedonist in the Cellar (and it is here that I sheepishly confess that I have not yet read Bright Lights, Big City).  His pieces resonate with me, and his images stick.  As Jesse revealed the label, I recalled McInerney’s colorful musings on Paolo Bea.  He writes, “I felt kind of like Keats encountering Chapman’s Homer.”  I love that!  “I was thinking of Michael Corleone/Al Pacino’s smoldering, rustic Sicilian bride in The Godfather.” Oh yes my “still unravish’d bride of quietness!”  He continues, “I imagine [the winemaker] stomping the grapes with his feet and bottling by hand.”  Now flash forward to what I vaguely recollect telling Jesse.   “He thinks some vestigial virgin sorts all the grapes by hand.”  So yes, my exact recall of pertinent imagery was a little convoluted, but hey, we were already 7 glasses of wine into dinner…

What we actually drank was a red blend: 60% Sangiovese grape, 25% Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, and 15% Sangratino de Montefalco, called the “Montefalco Rosso Riserva.”  To be precise, McInerney’s invocation was to Paolo Bea’s 100% pure Sangratino de Montefalco bottling, but I was still equally dazzled.  In fact 3 years ago, just after Hedonist was released, this very essay inspired my own frenzied search for any bottle of Sangratino, for Brian’s then birthday surprise (FYI: found one at the Wine Bank).  I will say Bea’s Rosso Riserva was magnificent with crispy, pan fried sweetbreads, a creamy parmesean sauce and outrageously rich caramelized onions.  And then to halve my six degrees of separation to three, Jesse recounted pouring McInerney a Paolo Bea at The French Laundry some years back.  As if that weren’t enough, I grabbed the NYT book review the next morning only to see McInerney’s dark, brooding face staring back to me in a full page black and white portrait, honoring his current release How It Ended: New and Collected Stories. So obviously, I know McInerney.

As always, I reveal these details not so you’ll google “Paolo Bea” to score your very own Rosso Riserva right now but instead to nudge you to read and learn about wines beyond what feels comfortable today.  Sure it’s better to drink in the flesh than to read in the abstract.  But if you’re stuck in the middle seat on a 10 hour flight to Paolo’s farm in Umbria, you’ll be hard pressed to find his wines on the flight attendant’s cart.

For most of this school year, our 5-year old has been indoctrinated with the non-stop green mantra of “reuse, reduce, recycle”.  Not a day goes by, it seems, that he comes home without some sculpted concoction cobbled together from reused paper towel tubes, paper cups, some beads, sand, and a copious amount of tape.  All his favorite books now include recycling themes, and the highlight of his year was our day trip to the Miramar Landfill, followed by a visit to the city’s Environmental Services department to pick up a second blue recycling can.

The hysteria reached a fevered pitch last week with the Earth Week celebration (didn’t that used to be Earth Day, by the way?) that culminated in his full blown lecture to us about what we should be doing to recycle more at our house.

In the midst of this dissertation, I popped a bottle of wine and discovered to my dismay that it had turned.  Maybe it was the cork taint / TCA issue Kerith wrote about in her previous post.  Or maybe it was just bad wine to start with.  As I walked to the sink to pour out the offending booze, our mini recycling advocate screamed, “No Daddy, don’t throw it out – you need to recycle it!”. 

OK, enough.  I’m all for recycling, but this was ridiculous.  I already recycle the bottle and the cork.  Now I have to figure out a way to recycle the wine too?  “Sorry bud,” I replied in my father-knows-best voice, “you can’t recycle the wine – you just have to pour it down the sink.” 

That micro-second of parenting detente was quickly extinguished by my lovely wife’s input.  “Actually,” she corrected, “I just read an article about people recycling their unused wine by turning it into ethanol for car gas.”

It took about ten seconds for the pieces of that statement to fall into place for our son.  You could almost see his little brain processing away:  click, click, click….recycling, wine, cars, gas…click, click, click….wait, it could all work together!  He could connect his two favorite things in the whole world – recycling and cars – through wine.  To say that his head exploded cannot do justice to the outburst of pure joy that gushed through his little body.

So, pray tell, how does one fill up their gas tanks with unused chardonnay?  Well, I’m going to leave all things science to Kerith.  But, apparently this is a very real thing.  Distinguished periodicals ranging from the New York Times to the Vegetarian Times (yes, really) have covered the story.  In fact, the blurb Kerith found from the Vegetarian Times (via Brigade member Mandy B. - but unfortunately I can’t find the article link online) says that the governments of France and Italy are providing subsidies of $630 million annually to underwrite the conversion of unused wine into ethanol for automobile gas.  This older New York Times article mentions over 100 million liters of wine a year being converted into ethanol in France.  Even in Australia they’re experimenting with the concept.

So, where does that leave our 5-year old recycling hero’s crusade to save the earth?  Well, we’re not going to blow up the basement trying to convert crappy wine into ethanol.  But, maybe it’ll give us something to do with that smoke tainted wine if it doesn’t turn around…..

If you’ve ever suffered the appalling indignity of opening your favorite bottle of vino only to discover that it’s “corked” on your first sip, you know that “wet cardboard” or “moldy, damp newspaper” are more appropriate descriptors.  Cork taint is one of the most often discussed and also unforgettable defects to afflict the humble juice of the gods.  Today cork blight is though to contaminate anywhere from 2-10% of the world’s wine, which extrapolates to the sound of $650 million dollars worth of wine gurgling down the kitchen drain.  (And now a moment of contemplative silence).

The chemical implicated in this musty mess is “TCA,” one 2, 4, 6-tricholoranisole.  Its scent profile ranges from wet, moldy newspaper or cardboard to damp basement to moldy, dirty socks to musty mildew, and even “nasty chlorine-y” and wet, dirty dog, none of which elicit any sort of olfactory pleasure.  In fact, severe cork taint renders most wine resolutely undrinkable.  And the biggest problem is that we humans have a rather low sensory threshold for this chemical, noted as 5 parts per trillion per online sources and 4 ng/L in my textbook.    At 10ng/L of TCA, a wine is considered significantly damaged.  In other words, a little TCA can go a long way.  It is also worth noting that other chemicals, like TeCA (2, 3, 4, 6-tetracholoanisole), also cause moldy, unpleasant off-odors in wines, but it is TCA that originates most specifically from cork.  But do understand dear readers that TCA doesn’t happen into existence on the back of some hapless, sad-sack, unsuspecting sheet of cork.  To release its evil odor requires a partner – fungus.

In my 5 minutes of very extensive internet research, I discovered numerous wine websites that incorrectly indicted TCA as the responsible fungus, when in reality the chemical compound TCA is a by-product of fungus metabolism.  As it turns out, common airborne, wood and soil dwelling fungi, like Penicillium, Aspergillus, Trichoderma, and Streptomycetes, are plucky enough to salvage “edible” carbon energy from unusual substances like cork.  When desperate for food, the fungi degrade the cork’s long carbon chains into usable energy, and in the process, liberate volatile phenols (smelly chemicals) that integrate with the wine and alter its aroma.  Eliminating either their food source or the fungi is not that easy.  Even after corks are boiled and chlorinated for sterility, fungi still eat them, especially in a damp, humid, poorly-ventilated cellar, where the hungry, microscopic critters generally lurk.  And the story stretches even further back into the dark haunches of the soil-packed cellar wall.  In fact the TCA actually evolves from a chlorinated derivative, called chlorophenol.  In other words, fungi spin an odorless chlorophenol into 2, 4, 6-trichloroanisole.  A-ha!  If you think it sounds like “chlorine,” then you’re right.  Researchers speculate that the very chlorine based disinfectants and sterilizing/bleaching agents used in wineries provide the “Cl’s” that the fungi need to manufacture TCA.  Today wineries in the know are phasing out chlorine-based chemicals in favor of high temperature autoclaving.

Tenacious molds may discover good eats not only in the carbon sources of cork but also in the carbon found in wooden containers, the walls of a humid wine cellar, or even in wooden transport pallets, storage crates, and timber accented roofs.  In other words, once entrenched, the fungi can contaminate an entire winery and ruin batches and batches of wine.  Indeed this is what happened at Beaulieu Vineyards which let 3 vintages lapse (1997-1999) before laboratory tests confirmed that BV was infected with TCA.  Even our new favorite winery, Hanzell, once suffered in the clutches of TCA – an expensive problem that briefly halted sales of the 2000 chardonnay and required a complete winery overhaul with new hoses, equipment, ventilation systems, and alternative sterilizing techniques.  They’ve since shared their extensive knowledge with other wineries, teaching other TCA-plagued wineries how to cope with this irksome problem. 

Most often, corked wine is carried out to sea by way of our trusty sewage system, but back in January, Harold McGee (my favorite food scientist) divulged some intriguing data.  In a January New York Times column,  Mr. McGee talks with UCD wine chemist Andrew Waterhouse who claims plastic saran wrap can remove the offending odor of cork taint.  Apparently, the chemical structure of plastic wrap, known scientifically as polyethylene, is pretty similar to TCA.  Waterhouse counsels to simply pour ones blighted beverage into a bowl and toss in a smooshed up sheet of plastic wrap.  Mix, pause, and then poof!  The TCA “sticks” to the plastic wrap and malodorous phenols disappear; wine’s as good as new.  In the article, Mr. Waterhouse admits, “It’s kind of messy, but very effective in just a few minutes.”  Another wine writer’s column, The Cellarist, put this theory into action and found the “corkiness” indeed diminished but the fruity characteristics were reduced as well.  But better reduced than undrinkable, right?  At least you can still spike your spaghetti sauce.

Ever timely, even the latest issue of Wine Spec weighs in with a short bit on TCA and your health.  The mag assures its readers that consuming TCA-tainted wine poses no known health risks.  Pascal Chatonnet of University of Bordeaux notes, “Don’t worry about your health, there is absolutely no risk.  However, there is also no pleasure in tainted wine.”  Here, here!  So the next time you dine in a fancy A-list restaurant and you find yourself nose-to-nostril with a strong whiff of TCA, by all means, send that wine back.  Or better yet, embrace your inner Mr. Wizard and ask the wait staff for a sheet of plastic wrap from the walk in behind the kitchen.  You may impress the sommelier enough to garner a free bottle of booze on your next visit!

We’ve started working on our labels for the 2008 vintage.  Click the links below to check out the first drafts and let us know your thoughts.  We expect to be making a number of changes from these initial ideas, but we’d love to get your feedback.

Bruliam Label 1

Bruliam Label 2

Note that you’ll need Adobe Acrobat to open these links.

Over spring break, I took my kids to the San Diego Zoo.  Towards the end of our bus tour, we came across an egregiously malodorous and wholly disgusting camel, lounging in its sandy enclosure, foaming at the mouth.  Really.   He was actually foaming.  Copious quantities of frothy, white expectoration accumulated all around the beast’s mouth as he masticated contentedly.  One of my girls shrieked, “What’s that smell?  Camel poop?”  I think a combination of camel dung and fetid spittle would have been more accurate.  With the frothing camel now emblazoned in your mind’s eye, perhaps you’ll recall your mother’s oft repeated mantra, “Only camel’s spit.”

Every night in the bathtub, I admonish my kids, “No spitting.”

“Get that dirty bathwater out of your mouth.  And don’t spit it on your sister.”

At swim lessons I reiterate, “Get that water out of your mouth.  And no spitting.”

So why then do most adults blush at the very idea of tasting, swishing and spitting wine in public?  Seems, instead, it should be occasion to celebrate the most ingrained transgression of childhood. Shouldn’t one relish the perverse pleasure in engaging in an act so offensive that it is only sanctioned in the presence of copious amount of alcohol?  Funny though that we all end up wasted on the Napa Valley wine train since we’re all too embarrassed to spit.

Most sommeliers I know spit all of the time; they’re professionals.  Professional posers not only spit but also aim to recreate that weird, guttural whistling as they aerate the wine and suck air though their teeth.  I am too self conscious to emulate such posturing…way too fatuous.  A confirmed non-spitter, my resistance was recently tested and failed.  Here’s what went down: we attended a mass market wine tasting called The Family Winemakers of California.

As Brian described in a previous post, we were unable to secure early admission as professional members of “qualified” wine trade and were forced slum it with the masses during the public exhibition.  Over 240 family wineries poured and hawked their wares from long rows of plastic tables, preaching to slosh-happy consumers, often 3 deep.  In local newspaper, the event had been promoted as a wine tasting for true enthusiasts, empowering either the winemakers or winery owners themselves to promote their craft directly to the consumer.  And sometimes this was true.  But more often than not, we were the disappointed victims of sales gimmicks or gorilla marketing.  Unfortunately, aggressive sales reps in tight T’s were more fluent in variations of the Cosmo martini than the pinot clones of Louis Martini (not that Brian minded the mini skirts).  Even some of the folksy, hippy types from our beloved Anderson Valley sent regional sales reps instead of enologists. 

A well-regarded, sommelier pal suggested we taste a particular pinot.  By the time we fought our way to the edge of the table, literally the last pour of the last bottle was tossed back by a large, sweaty guy with a New York accent who’d elbowed himself right in front of my spot.  After being nudged repeatedly by a boozy blonde who kept stuttering over the pronunciation of “gewürztraminer,” I knew nothing could possibly taste good now.  So when some sales gal from some unknown winery guilted me into accepting a plastic cup of her tepid cab, I slogged some back, swished, and then spit.  Just like that.  It was the perfect venue for nurturing a nascent skill since it was crowded, loud, and everyone around me was toasted.  I grabbed another glass of something I couldn’t stand to fully consume, and I spit again.  It wasn’t so bad.  Thinking too hard about that thick, unsanitary concoction of saliva and spewed wine induced some temporary nausea, but ick-factor aside, it seemed to work.  Still, do I dare spit in the beau colic cocoon of those over produced, mega-million dollar Napa tasting rooms, the ones with the piped in classical music tinkling in the background?

Unsure how to proceed, I commandeered wine star Mollie Battenhouse for free advice.  A New York-based Advanced Sommelier and Master of Wine candidate with over ten years experience in the food/wine industry, I knew she’d elucidate the spit/dump/swallow conundrum.  Mollie writes, “Ah, spitting.  It is tricky, and unfortunately, does require a little practice to get it right (no drooling down the chin or splash back).  It is also gross, but, somehow becomes less so once you have to do it all the time.  So, most professional tasters will spit while tasting, and if you want to really be able to taste the wines and take notes, tasting more than about 5 wines without spitting is almost too much.  Spit if you want to taste a larger amount of wine and be able to really study them, or taste for fun, and don’t spit.  Another good method is to spit while taking notes, then move on to having a taste to drink of your favorites from the tasting.  That’s my favorite method.”

I was afraid to ask about the liability of spitting within range of tasting notes.  Does spittle splatter cause noticeable ink smudge?

Also popular online is the oft quoted and highly detailed spitting how-to from Slate’s wine guy Michael Steinberger.  He famously asks Daniel Johnnes, Wine Director at Montrachet in NYC, how to spit spectacularly.  Mr. Johnnes explains, “It is essential…to put the right amount of wine in your mouth; he recommends between one-quarter and one-half ounce. Once you have tasted the wine and are ready to expel it, you pucker your lips, tighten your cheeks, and press your tongue up against your top teeth, broadening the tongue so that it extends past the molars on each side. This pools the wine between the top of your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The key, Johnnes says, is muscle control and force: You need to generate sufficient power to push the wine out while maintaining your form throughout the process.”

Still I take Ms. Battenhouse’s advice to heart: taste for fun and don’t spit.  I fear that hocking a huge wine loogie at our favorite, white tablecloth joint would shock and alienate our dining companions beyond reparation.  As for now, I am best served to reserve any spitting for the shower, when errant cascades of shampoo inadvertently drip into the corners of my mouth, not unlike that fetid, frothing camel.

As you may recall from last week’s post, we recently opened a bottle of the 2006 Calera Cuvee Pinot Noir and were surprised to see it closed with a glass Vino-Seal.  Ever the trooper, Kerith picked up the phone and called the winery.  While the first person she talked to was friendly and helpful, her questions were a little too probing, so her call was turfed straight to famed pinot-master Josh Jensen.  Now, on with our story.

Historically, corks were bigger.  Obviously this is a situation where greater length and thicker circumference make all the difference.  In aeons past, the great chateaux of Bordeaux shipped their wares to Great Britian by sea.  In the hulls of unrefridgerated ships, heavy, dark glass bottles with thick, long cork stoppers endured year round journeys, through summer’s heat or winter’s chill, all to satisfy the Brit’s insatiable appetite for “claret.”  Sometimes the goods received were perfect, but other times bottles from the same vintage of the same vineyard arrived as bitter, brown vinegar soup, hence the adage, “there are no great old wines, only great old bottles.”  Today vintners employ glass bottles that are thinner and lighter and, yes, cheaper.  Even the corks are on average 10 mm shorter, sometimes even 15 mm shorter, of lesser grade, and so cheaper too.  This inevitably increases the incidence sporadic bottle oxidation, ruining a wine before it reaches peak maturity.

Researchers today aim to create an infallible, reliable seal that is impermeable to oxygen over time.  An ever-expanding coterie of unique closures now floods the marketplace, many of which are backed by scientifically rigorous trials.  The first screwcaps were issued by France in the 1970’s.  Despite early research demonstrating no discernable difference in Bordeaux capped with screwtops vs. corks, the “Stelcaps” were scrapped after strong market resistance and failure of their liner materials.  The screwcap was redesigned in the 1990’s, with a sleek exterior veneer camouflaging the cheesy telltale rings.  This omnipresent model successfully has topped our vino ever since.  By 1995, Switzerland was using over 10 million per year!  And France?  In 2002, Michel Laroche closed his Grand Cru Chablis Le Clos with the now ubiquitous twist-off.  By 2005, over 80% of all Australian whites were topped with screwcaps.  Today, the wine shelves at Vons are teeming with them. 

Battling head to head with the screwtop is Diam’s synthetic “corklike” alternative.  Diam was developed by Sabate, the world’s second largest wine-closure manufacturer.  So certain of the superiority of their synthetic closure, in 2005 Sabante boldly sold off its natural cork business altogether.  No TCA taint has been reported to date with Diam closures, and the wine within appears to retain its full spectrum of gustatory nuances.  With its oxygen barrier nearly foolproof, only time will dictate whether the Diam closure can withstand 10 or 20 or even 40 years of aging.

In May of 1999, the Aussies instigated a scientifically minded wine closure smackdown that pitted natural cork against Diam, agglomerate cork, and screwtop closures.  All in all, the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) tested 14 different wine toppers to close the same unoaked semillion.  At regular intervals, the bottles were opened and closed, and the content tested by many parameters.  Degrees of oxygen permeation and sulfur dioxide depletion were dutifully noted and recorded.  In the end, when the numbers were crunched, the screwcap was the undisputed king of the oxygen barrier.  Oxygen permeation in the screwcap bottles shifted between 0.0002 and 0.0008 mL/day while the cork closures oscillated wildly between 0.0001 to 0.1127 mL/day.  Obviously this degree of variability is unacceptable.  With natural cork, it now becomes highly probably that one bottle may suffer premature oxidation while its neighbor may not.  Yet we cannot decipher which is which until the wines are decanted, and it’s too late.

Portugal’s cork industry, of course, dismisses this research as rubbish, as do other well known wine researchers in Europe and Australia.  However the fact remains that cork’s performance vacillates significantly.  All wine closures permit minute amounts of oxygen to enter the wine at bottling; it is likely consumed by chemical reactions within days to weeks.  As such, wine closure devices should be ranked by degree.  A small degree of oxygen settling into the wine at regular intervals over time will not hinder a wine’s aging potential.  But variable or greater amounts of O₂ are problematic.  As oxygen is dissolved and the preservative sulfur dioxide depleted, the wine matures, phenolic compounds are altered, and its shelf life is depleted proportionally.

The yin and yang of the GCD is more ephemeral and difficult to quantify.  It seeks to discriminate between the effect of cork vs. synthetic closures on the organoleptic qualities of a wine.  How is the taste, aroma, flavor, or mouthfeel affected by different closures?  And can we trust scientific studies that hinge on personal palate preferences?  And what about Mr. Jensen’s Vino-Lok?  That clever glass closure was awarded a photo and a caption in my most current wine text but did not yet merit a discussion in the body of the text.  Halliday and Johnson write “The Vino-Lok glass stopper (and attendant capsule) has aesthetic appeal, but has not been in use for sufficient time to prove its long-term seal capacity.”  But if it’s good enough for Calera, it’s good enough for me.

Frustrated by an “unacceptably high” prevalence of sporadic cork taint in any given vintage, Mr. Jensen sought out better technology, starting with screw top experiments in 2002.  Following two years of intense discussion, the Calera wine company instituted the glass Vino-Seal closures in 2005, on trial basis for their viogniers.  By 2006, all of their Central Coast pinots were sealed with these glass stoppers, as well.  Today the viogniers, chardonnays, Central Coast pinots and the cuvee pinots are all topped with glass.  (Incidentally, the seals are called “Vino-Seal” here in the U.S. as Sutter Homes owns the term “Vino-Lock.”).  Dora notes, “They hold up great, and people love ‘em.”  We agree.  However, we didn’t know the Vino-Seal is oxygen-resistant enough to preserve the spunk in a half consumed bottle of vino, at least overnight.  According to Dora, in the Calera tasting room, unfinished bottles are simply “gassed” with inert gasses (usually argon or an argon-nitrogen blend) and reclosed with the Vino-Seal for the next day’s tourists.  We could shelve our own oxygen-sucking, air stopper device at last! 

To date, the greatest downside of Vino-Seal is the labor intensive bottling and significantly higher costs.  To correctly employ the stoppers, one must purchase compatible glass bottles, which are available exclusively though a company called Encore! glass.  While Encore! bottles are not overpriced compared to other glass suppliers, only 3 styles currently are available, with no half-bottles manufactured at all.  Plus a Vino-Seal closure runs 0.58 cents a pop while the highest grade cork tops out at 0.48 cents each, a significant difference over thousands of cases of wine, not to mention the man power required to gas the headspace and insert each Vino-Seal stopper by hand, bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle.  According to Dora, Calera employs a bunch of extra folks on the bottling line when the season arrives.  But why were a few cuvees still closed with traditional cork?  And who buys those bottles?  Are they VIP?  Or do they just like to live on the edge?

As it turns out, there is no mystery at all.  The cork-sealed allocation was specifically requested by a Japanese importer who presumably took all 10,000 bottles of cork-topped ‘06 Mount Harlan Cuvee Pinot Noir.  Mr. Jensen writes, “They are quite traditional and it’s taking them time to get used to Vino-Seal, but we’re nudging them in that direction.”

Some pictures of the Calera Vino-Seal:

Ref: Halliday and Johnson, The Art and Science of Wine, Firefly Books Ltd., 2007

If you’re like us, some of your earliest wine memories center on “California Chardonnay.”  I used to have 3-4 “go-to” chardonnays that I felt comfortable ordering from a restaurant wine list while on a date – Mondavi, Jordan, Ferrari-Carano.  All qualified as easy to find, generally over-priced wines that I knew would be good enough to get me through the meal and, hopefully, onto dessert.

And then somewhere along the way, I lost my taste for California chardonnay.  Maybe it had to do with the glut of over-oaked, overly-buttery wine that came on the market in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.  Or maybe it was just that my taste buds developed to the point where I realized that the same flavors that I relied on like a security blanket were, in fact, really not very food friendly.  So I moved on from California chardonnay – first to sauvignon blancs, then to gruner veltliners and rieslings, and most recently to white Rhone varietals like viognier, marsanne, and rousanne.  In fact, the pendulum swung so far away from chardonnay that Kerith and I became fond of the ABC rule.  No, not Always Be Closing (although that’s a good rule too), but Anything But Chardonnay.  I would even go out of my way to avoid the so-called “un-oaked chardonnays” being sold by both domestic and foreign producers.  And, yes, there is a whole wide world of amazing chardonnays crafted in Burgundy.  But, I feel under-educated about those wines, and while I’ve enjoyed them when guided by knowledgeable sommeliers, they’re just not wines that I feel comfortable buying on my own. (Not to mention the outrageous price tag for a Montrachet).

But just when I thought that I was firmly set in my ways, something changed.

Kerith and I spent 3 ½ gloriously kid-free days in and around the Sonoma Valley last week.  Before we left, we asked a very trusted source for a referral on a can’t-miss pinot noir producer in Sonoma.  Without hesitation, he responded, “Hanzell” and then worked to get us a private tour and tasting.

Hanzell was created in 1948 when Ambassador James Zellerbach purchased a 200-acre parcel about one mile north of the Sonoma plaza in the Mayacamas Mountains.  In 1953, 6 acres were planted to pinot noir (and are now the oldest pinot noir vineyard in the U.S.) and in 1957 the first vintage was barreled.  Today, the property includes 42 acres planted to vines, with three quarters chardonnay and one quarter pinot noir.  All of the wine they produce is from fruit they grow on the estate.  An interesting side note about Hanzell is that Zellerbach, along with his winemaker Ralph Webb, were at the cutting edge of technological development in winemaking at the time.  You can read more about their achievements and the winery’s impressive history by clicking here.

As we drove through the gates and up the windy mountain road, we sensed that we were in for a special treat.  We were super excited when we learned that our tour was going to be conducted by Hanzell’s winemaker, Michael McNeill.  What followed the cursory introductions was pretty much nirvana for wine geeks like us.  We hopped into the vineyard’s luxury SUV and proceeded to take a rambling tour through the vineyards.  At some point, we got out of the truck and walked into the vineyard and got into a long discussion about bud-break, trellising, row spacing, and frost.  All the while, the sun was getting higher in the sky, burning off the morning haze and giving us an amazing view across the valley and south toward San Francisco (see picture below).  We then headed over to see the winemaking equipment and the cave.  It was all heavenly. 

But, through it all, I had a nagging concern, “Why is this guy spending SOOO much time talking about the chardonnay?  We’ve already told him 10 times that we make pinot, we’re into pinot, and we came here because of the pinot”.  Not wanting to be my usual brusque self, I decided to go with the flow.  We ended our tour with a quick look at Hanzell’s museum-like original winemaking facilities and then were led up a narrow staircase to a special tasting room they’d built in the attic of the 1950’s-era winemaking barn.

As we sat in the cozy room with a huge window looking out over the original 1953 vineyard and down the mountain into northern Sonoma, Michael pulled two decanters of wine from a cupboard.  He explained to us that Hanzell’s wines are made to age and that when opening recent vintages, it’s important to decant them – even the chardonnay.  “OK,” I thought, “enough with the chardonnay.  Who cares?  Decanted or straight from the bottle, it is still chardonnay, and I’m here for the pinot!”

Well, you can probably guess how this story ends.  Michael poured us each glasses of both the chardonnay and the pinot from the decanters.  Following protocol and etiquette, I went with the chardonnay first.  To say that I pretty much blacked out after that is probably a stretch, but only a little one.  I actually don’t remember much about the pinot that followed (although I remember it being very good).  But the chardonnay?  The chardonnay was like an epiphany packed inside a revelation and wrapped in divine intervention. 

The wine notes describe the vintage as follows:

An elegant fragrance of chamomile, lemon and grapefruit pith, with darker tones of honey  and bees wax followed by hazelnut and even savory elements of thyme and walnut. An even, mineral-dry, taut character to the wine when it first hits the tongue extends with a rounded fullness as it begins to develop in bottle.

I’m not going to pretend that I could taste grapefruit pith in the wine (I’m not entirely sure what grapefruit pith is, to be candid).  But, to say that this wine was merely good or great really doesn’t do it justice. 

This was truly an “aha! moment”.  This was not only what was possible with California chardonnay, but it was what California chardonnay should be.  Finally I understood why so much of the previous two hours had been dedicated to this grape. 

As our tasting wound down and our conversation moved from wine making to family and kids, I could feel the heartache coming on at the thought of leaving this magical moment.  I sipped as slowly as I could (we were politely provided with spitting canisters, but there was no way in hell I was spitting any of this stuff out), and I came up with as many questions as I could think of to keep the conversation moving just a little bit longer.  But, ultimately, the visit came to a close.

I’m expecting our shipment of the Hanzell chardonnay later today.  I didn’t even order any of the pinot.  Again, the pinot was awesome.  But, their wonderful chardonnay redefined the entire varietal for me. 

I’m not sure how much of that magic will be lost when we next enjoy a bottle while being distracted by requests for more water, a new video, or some other inanities from our kids. 

But, I suspect that the experience, much like the wine, will be well built for aging.

Some pictures from our visit:  The view across the Hanzell vineyards towards the San Francisco Bay and Kerith with winemaker Michael McNeill.

Josh Jensen is a legend of California winemaking.  The hero of the compelling and beautifully written biography The Heartbreak Grape, Mr. Jensen is to pinot noir what Russell Crowe is to movies – the consummate actor’s actor, wildly talented, driven, focused, and at the top of his game.  Outspoken and opinionated, Mr. Jensen is also portrayed as a methodical, diligent perfectionist, a man passionately dedicated to his craft, which happens to be the near obsessive quest to create perfect pinot noir.  His Calera vines are the only commercial flora growing in the lonely, desolate Mt. Harlan AVA, struggling alone in dry, limestone soil that closely mirrors the “terroir” of Burgundy’s most illustrious vineyards.  Informed by a traditional, “Burgundian” sensibility, Mr. Jensen is a central character in the urban legends of suitcase clones, the shady and surreptitious importation of trophied French cuttings to California soil.  And so it was with great surprise and amusement that I recently unwound the foil on a bottle of his 2006 Cuvee Pinot Noir and discovered the bottle sealed by an aesthetic, nifty, and certainly avant garde glass Vino-Seal.  This is the first time I’d seen one in actual use, more impressively on a bottle of California pinot noir.  Even more curious were the detailed enumerations decorating the back label: “32,868 btls Vino-Seal glass closure, 3000 btls Cork finish.”  Since the label listed the winery’s phone number, I decided to call.

A lovely woman named Dora answered the phone and my preliminary questions, but she deferred me to Mr. Jensen himself when I asked about the 10:1 ratio of Vino-Seal closures to traditional cork.  “Really?”  I mused with astonished bewilderment.  “He’ll actually talk to me?”  As she patched me through to his voice mail, my hands began to shake.  I stuttered and spent a good 45 seconds trying to correctly pronounce the tongue twister “Heartbreak Grape.”  I felt like a giddy preteen backstage at a Jonas Brother’s concert.  My six degrees of separation from viticultural stardom had commenced.

The Great Cork Debate (”GCD”) is not new to winemaking.  In fact, global acceptance that natural cork is an imperfect oxygen barrier sealant has sparked a proliferation of closure alternatives, some good and others discarded in the lab.  Already you’re intimate with wines closed by screw tops or synthetic (”fake”) cork closures, maybe even really expensive bottles.  Perhaps 8 years ago, I was flabbergasted to discover a bottle of PlumpJack Cabernet sealed with a screw top cap, a topper I’d predominantly associated with cheap boxes of Franzia.  But the tides are turning, friends.

Harvested from trees in Portugal and Spain, cork bark is stripped, seasoned, boiled, hand sorted, and cut into strips.  Finished corks are punched out and mechanically sorted into uniform grades.  This natural cork is an amazing substance.  Filled with billions of hexagonal, gas-filled cells per cubic inch, cork is pliable, compressible, buoyant, and hearty enough to withstand the obscene pressures holding a sealed bottle of bubbly at bay.  Ever organic, cork can expand or contract to maintain tight contact with the variable irregularities of a wine bottle’s neck.  But alas, it also permits a slow, steady seeping of oxygen into the bottle over time.  The change that emanates from such oxygen exposure is known as “oxidation.”  Your whites morph from straw colored beauties into murky, amber-colored muck, reduced shadows of their youthful gustatory glory.  Fruity flavors are diminished, and disintegration worsens with time.  When oxidation is extreme, wines are rendered undrinkable.  Regardless of which side on the cork you land, researchers universally agree that the oxygen-barrier capacity of cork fluctuates greatly from bottle to bottle, and variability increases with age.  While one cork perfectly preserves a 19^th century Petrus, another permits offensive oxidation after only a few short years.  Unfortunately, we can’t distinguish one from the other until the bottle has been opened and the wine oxidized beyond repair.

And then there is the TCA, the acronym for the mold byproduct trichloroanisole.  A topic itself, today I will suffice to say that TCA bestows a yucky, musty, moldy aroma and taste to infected cork-stoppered wines.  It is plausible that if your favorite wine lacks a certain je ne sais quoi and verve from one bottle to the next, you’ve been the unwitting victim of low level cork taint.  Unfortunately the mold responsible for cork taint is tenacious and obstinate, and once entrenched in winery equipment, it is difficult and expensive to eradicate.

Coming up in part 2 next week:  some cork history and the answer to your burning question – did Josh Jensen return Kerith’s call?

Maybe it’s the shell shock from a generally positive week in the market or the fact that we’ve been busy working our way through a half-bottle sampler from Calera this week, but I figured it was a good time to provide some short updates on a number of subjects.

And besides, after my wife’s amazing post about Uccelliera and the naming of our son earlier this week, how can I even compete?

So, here we go:

As you probably saw in this post, we attended the Family Winemakers of California event in Del Mar a couple of weeks ago.  We were ungraciously denied entry to the “trade-only” portion of the show and had to instead elbow our way to the booze with the rest of the riff-raff.  Despite the indignity, we did find a couple of nice surprises, notably a mostaco called Frivolo from Vino Noceto.  It’s only 7% alcohol and has great fruit and some slight bubbles.  I’m betting that this will be our preferred summer wine for 2009.  At only $15/bottle you can’t beat it.  It was also a treat to be able to meet Gary Pisoni and Mary Elke, among others.

Speaking of Gary Pisoni, Jocelyn A was the first to correctly to identify one of our pinot heros.  At Jocelyn’s request, we’ve sent off $250 to the Central Asia Institute, which promotes and supports education for girls in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Remember, the best way to win money for your favorite charity is to send in your Bruliam t-shirt pictures!!

If you are wondering, the guide we had in Italy who led us to Uccelliera is a man named Pino Teresi.  Pino’s been running wine and food tours in Tuscany for many years and has actually developed quite a following.  Along with his wife and son, they now also own the Fattoria Borgonuovo – a small group of rental homes in Tuscany for visiting families.  I can’t recommend him highly enough for area tours.  And, who knows?  Maybe he’ll introduce you to a burgeoning winemaking star.

We recently received a second barrel sample of our 2008 Doctors Vineyard pinot from the Santa Lucia Highlands.  The strong fruit was still prevalent, but the mid-palate issue that we were concerned about in the first tasting (click here for a refresher) was absent.  Possibly a nuance of barrel samples?  We’re not sure.  We’ll be up in northern California in May or June to do more sampling and blending.

Speaking of wine tastings, a number of you have mentioned that you never saw the video of our second wine tasting – the one with the smoke taint.  Here’s the link.

Finally, we’ll be taking a little Spring Break of our own next week, so no new posts until April 6^th.  That should give you all plenty of time to send in your new Bruliam t-shirt pictures!!

When I was very, very pregnant with our first child, Brian and I spent two weeks wine touring in Tuscany.  Typical ambitious, obnoxious, and single-minded Americans, we landed in Tuscany with James Suckling’s rankings of the ‘97 Brunello vintage crumpled and hot in our fists.  We demanded our hotel concierge book us back-to-back, hourly tours of the top ranked Brunello producers so we could stockpile bottle after bottle of this highly lauded vintage.  After all, we were here for the vino, not some snail’s pace, lackadaisical lifestyle.  Frankly, we were schooled in the Napa Valley, graduating suma cum laude in wine commercialism and hedonistic consumerism.  Like 007 agents, we were slick and cunning enough to scout out 5 or 6 cult California cabs on the same stretch of highway in a single morning.  After trying to explain in her broken English that it is simply impossible to visit Altesino, Siro Pacenti, and Marchesi de’Frescobaldi Castelgiocondo at 9am, 10am, and then 11am, our concierge simply shook her head and walked away.  Much to our surprise, the very next morning, she approached us with a small white slip of paper; on it: the name of an English speaking wine tour guide, who, for a certain price, would fuel our conceit and spearhead our witch hunt for the sold out ’97’s.

We convened the following day – we with our Wine Spectator approved agenda of the right wines and our giude, Pino Teresi, with a broad-rimmed sunhat.  It was one of the hottest summers on record.  I pretzeled my pregnant self into his mini Peugeot and with a sputter and a disconcerting rev, we rattled off into the impossibly spectacular Italian countryside.  Throughout the morning, our very patient guide chauffeured us about, bouncing over rocks and unpaved roads in search of our holy ethanol grail.  But after lunch, he simply told us we’d be visiting his friend, a “winemaker.”  Great!  Here comes the old “bait and switch”.  In an intricate anti-American chianti conspiracy, our guide would pawn us off on a no-name “winemaker” making mediocre, table-grade crap, and the two of them would split the profits from any dreck they sold.  Unamused, I wasn’t about to waste any of our limited time visiting some uncredentialed, no-name peddling sub-par Brunello out of his garage; this wasn’t a game for amateurs. 

But the choice wasn’t ours to make.  Like a played out sitcom, we lurched across the dirt onto a skinnier rock driveway and rumbled up to a crumbling, old house.  We ascended some rickety steps and were announced by our guide’s gregarious “Ciao!”  Waiting outside on an uncovered porch of sorts and obviously anticipating our arrival was a disheveled, somewhat dirty Italian guy waving us on up.  “You like the Brunello?”  he asked.  We concurred.  And then he glanced at my gravid, swollen belly.  “Ah baby,” he pointed.  “Wine makes baby strong.”  He pantomimed his best Arnold Schwarznegger bicep flex.  “You come.”  And we did.

He led us down to a dank, claustrophobic cellar stocked with some French oak barrels.  He reached for his thief and siphoned out generous alicuots of barrel samples, one after the next, from newest to most aged.  Periodically we were interrupted by a visit from his Italian mama (whom I feared might fracture a hip ascending and descending those steep stairs).  Each brief exchange was a flurry of sharp, unintelligible Italian.  I imagine their discourse was something like this:

Mama: “Why do you waste your time with this wine and that wine?  It smells all day and all night.  And it is a mess.  Look at yourself.  You wash behind those ears?”

Italian wine guy: “Maaaama.  Can’t you see I am with my friend?  Plus I’m sure these pasty, pushover Americans will buy a case of this stuff.  Just leave us alone.”

Mama: “When you get a real job?  Be a lawyer like your brother in Milan.  This?  This is just a mess and a joke.”

Italian wine guy: “Leave us be, mama.”

This happened 3 or 4 times during the course of our visit.  Our Wine Guy kept feeding me sample after sample, for the baby.  Listen, I had no problem drinking sporadic half glasses of wine during my second and third trimesters – but not goblets full.  And this poor wine guy, he seemed confused, shocked and even disconsolate when I failed to drain each glass completely.  He said, “Your baby.  Bambino.  Your baby is Brunello Bambino.  Brunello Bambino.”  And before we left, he gifted me with a bottle of his wine, a 1998 Uccelliera, for our unborn bambino.  Who was this guy anyway?  Uccelliera – never heard of it.

Of course the rest is Overstreet lore.  Starting that evening, we referred to our unborn tot as ”Bruno,” since he was anointed “the Brunello Bambino” by a real-deal Italian winemaker.  What better story for two wine obsessed yuppies?  No one thought it would stick, and naturally, it did.  Of course, my in-laws hated it.  “What Jewish kid is called ‘Bruno?’” they lamented.  “Lucky we didn’t name him ‘97 after the famed vintage,” I countered wickedly.  And the wine?  Well, we drank it in the hospital, toasting Bruno’s birth, coating his newborn tongue with a few sloshy drops, adopting the French tradition.  After that, we never saw the wine again; he was small production and didn’t export much.  We had a brief “Ah-ha” moment at the French Laundry in Yountville a couple of years later when I spied Uccelliera by the half-bottle on their superb wine list.  I excitedly tried to recount the wine’s significance to our waiter, who was flatly unimpressed. 

Until today…

Smiling out at me from page 33 of the April 30, 2009 Wine Spectator is Our Italian Wine Guy!  Andrea Cortonesi of Uccelliera, the very guy who named our precious firstborn child!  And wouldn’t you know it?  His 2004 Brunello is the top rated wine of James Suckling’s latest report, with an all star score of 97 points.  “Complex aromas of rose, blackberry, blueberry, dark chocolate.  Full-bodied, with velvety tannin.  Intense.”  Well, Mr. Cortonesi, Italian Wine Guy of my heart, it looks like you’ve done it.  I’ll drink to that!

Below is a picture of the famous “Bruno” tasting event with Mr. Cortonesi.  Also below is a picture of our gifted bottle which we opened at the hospital after Bruno’s birth.  At the bottom is a scanned version of the Wine Spectator article (since it’s not yet up on their site).  If you can’t see the pictures, please click here.

 Barrel Tasting at Uccelliera, 7/17/03:

Bruno’s first wine – 1998 Uccelliera Brunello – 10/22/03:

Andrea Cortonesi of Uccelliera – from the April 30, 2009 Wine Spectator:

Imagine you’re at a 5 star Hawaiian resort, lounging on a raft in a gorgeous, salt-water infinity pool; that’s a vacation.  Now imagine that same pool bisected by a semi-permeable membrane, with salt water on one side and fresh water on the other.  When water automatically flows down its gradient, from a high concentration (i.e. fresh water) to low one (i.e. sea water), well that’s osmosis.  The semi-permeable membrane permits water flow through its microscopic interstices but blocks the salt crystals as they bump up against the divider.  Should we apply enough pressure, we could force Nature’s hand and reverse the current’s flow, pushing water from the salty side to the fresh water side.  Compelling water to travel uphill, from a lower to higher concentration, by application of external pressure, dear Brigade, is reverse osmosis.  This is the very principle behind desalinating sea water, squeezing the water out and leaving sea salt crystals behind. 

Now let’s contemplate a rainy spring that bloated orbs of sweet grapes into tasteless blobs.  Should this crop result in a diluted and weakened wine, you could use reverse osmosis to suck the excess water out and concentrate what’s left behind.  This might occur more than winemakers care to admit; reverse osmosis is a dirty word.  So now consider that reverse osmosis enables an automated apparatus to pluck only the guiacol and 4-methylguiacol from smoke tainted wines.  Optimists are in awe of such scientific marvels.  Pessimists grumble that the subtlest, desirable phenols are invariably stripped away with the malodorous whiffs of smoke, charcoal, burnt bacon, and wet ashtray.

Reverse osmosis is controlled by a big machine that siphons a colorless, filtered “permeate” from the unfiltered, wine-colored “retentate.”  The wine’s color, flavor, varietal character, and choice aromas are retained in this “retentate,” while the filtered stuff may or may not be discarded.  The RO machine exploits “nanofilter” technology to barricade most molecules behind its filter wall; only the tiniest compounds, generally set at 100 daltons or less, can shimmy through.  As it happens, water is the smallest component of wine, so it, naturally, comprises much of the filtrate.  Ethanol, acetic acid, ethyl acetate, and lactic acid are also pretty teeny and wash up in the filtrate, too.  Conversely, tartaric acid, citric acid, and malic acid are bigger than the chain link and remain behind.  We’re told that anthocyanins (the ‘wine coloring’ that gives wine its hue) and other phenolics (smells) are also too cumbersome to wiggle through the filter fence.

In the next step, the permeate is treated to remove particular compounds (like guiacol).  Right then, the residual residue is readily recombined with the retained retentate (righteous alliteration, yes?).  Companies that specialize in removing specific, undesirable molecules from finished wine promote their methods as minimally invasive, gentle, and above all selective.  Only the damnable taint is expunged while the remaining vino is essentially undisturbed, only better.  The two big companies that advertise this work are Memstar and VA Filtration.

We plan to employ the VA Filtration system.  According to their tricolored website, it’s portable!  And easy!  You can rent it for days – or weeks!  (Maybe I can borrow it for home to filter the food particles from the backwash in my kids’ water bottles).  Web aesthetics aside, the verbage on their site sounds sunny.  They explain the procedure in much the same way that I did to you.  In their own words, “The wine is separated into two streams (a permeate and concentrate stream) using nanofiltration membrane elements.  The system operates at pressures of between 225 and 350 psi. The permeate stream is then passed through a second stage treatment process, where the offensive compounds are removed.  This treated stream is then recombined with the concentrate stream and returned to the feed tank.  Each pass through the system reduces the G and 4MG levels by 25-30%.”  In case you’re stupefied, “G” is guiacol and “4MG” is methyl guiacol.  Psi represents a unit of pressure, the force needed to move liquid against its natural gradient.  At the very least, the scientific content appears solid, even if their ill-advised, pixilated logo reeks of unprofessional cheesiness.  (I am wary of the shockingly unprofessional use of rotating loops of flashing words).  But my gravest torment is the grim annotation completing the bottom of the web page.  Written entirely in caps is the warning:

“N.B. WE WILL BE POSTING MORE INFORMATION ON THE SMOKE TAINT ISSUE AS WE BECOME MORE FAMILIAR WITH THE EXTENT OF THE PROBLEM. “

What??!!  Aren’t they supposed to be the experts?  Listen, as we become more familiar with the extent of our smoke blight, we’ll keep you informed, too.

A couple of weeks ago, we listed some of the growth scenarios we were considering for 2009 and asked for your input (click here for a reminder).  A number of you did respond, both online and offline, which we greatly appreciated. 

What did we decide?  First, we commited to a 2009 vintage for both the Annahala Vineyard (of 2008 smoke taint fame) and Doctors Vineyard (of super boysenberry and missing mid-palate fame).  While we’re still working through some 2008 issues, we’re very confident that both of those wines are going to turn out great.  Hopefully the 2009’s will be just as good, if not better.

We’ve also decided to add a third pinot noir to our line up – this one from Gap’s Crown on the Sonoma Coast.  Under agreement through CrushPad, we actually have to label this as Split Rock Vineyard , but rest assured it is Gap’s Crown (we’ll discuss this interesting nuance in a later post).  Split Rock, like Annahala, is managed by Premier Pacific Vineyards.  The vineyard is located between 320 feet and 820 feet above sea level on the western side of Sonoma Mountain.  It gets a great cooling effect from the ocean breezes coming through the Petaluma Wind Gap.  You can click here to get the rundown on the vineyard from the folks at Premier Pacific.

In picking to go with this vineyard, we did extensive due diligence (i.e., the best part of this gig: business-expensed wine tasting!) on wines from both this region and the Sta. Rita Hills / Santa Barbara region.  We ultimately decided to go with Sonoma Coast because those wines more closely gelled with our personal tastes in pinots – more subtle, refined, and red-fruit oriented.  Over the years we’ve had a number of wonderful pinots from this area and they’ve been almost universally delicious.  We also liked that the vineyard is located almost exactly in between our existing vineyard sites in Anderson Valley and the Santa Lucia Highlands.  Geographically, we felt that this gave us a great means of contrast through California’s diverse growing regions.

So, we’ve still got a lot of work yet to do on the inaugural 2008 vintage, but we’re already getting excited for the 2009 harvest.  We’ll keep you updated on harvest events as we get closer.

As a resident and fellow, I was always confounded by the visual criteria and complex nomenclature required to classify melanocytic lesions.  In other words, under the microscope, the cellular journey from freckle to cancer can be slippery, especially categorizing the minute permutations that separate “really weird, atypical brown splotch” from “almost but not really cancer yet.”  Nobody ever agrees.  Some of path’s greatest lore recounts a famous, international dermatopathology conference where the field’s greatest academics congregated to create a unified system for classifying all of those brown lumps and bumps.  After hours of deliberation, all experts but one, the esteemed Dr. A, consecrated the newly minted naming system.  Purportedly Dr. A guffawed, stood up, and simply walked out.  In his view, pathology’s newest mode d’emploi just didn’t cut the mustard.  (And today he continues to classify brown bumps with his own, personal naming system).  As my old department chair oft repeated, “We’re paid for our opinion.”

And so the Art of Medicine and the Art of Wine here too intersect, as the world’s most esteemed sniffers and tasters churn out charts and numerical tallies of everybody’s wines and respective vintages.  Sometimes these spectacular palates and gifted wine writers just don’t taste eye-to-eye either.  Each shoulders the other’s antipode bearing a bridge that spans from “the greatest vintage in all eternity” to “worst plonk in the history of man.”  Take the recently released 2004 Barolo vintage from the esteemed Piedmont region of Italy.  James Sucking of Wine Spectator fame (12/15/08 pp99-103) enthuses “the biggest success of 2004 is Barolo…the 2004 vintage, which I rate 93 points in Barolo, is better than 2003 and 1999…so aromatic, delivering subtle, refined, and beautiful fruit and polished tannins.”  Sounds spectacular, right?  Compare this to John and Dottie’s review in the WSJ last Sunday.  Their title, “A Waning Affair with Barolo,” says it all.  After a representative tasting of 2004’s priced under $70 they report, “Darn it.  They really just weren’t that impressive.  You can’t imagine our shock and disappointment.  Flight after flight left us cold…the bar, overall, seemed lower…the wines lacked soul and intensity.”

To his credit, Mr. Suckling warned Barolo hounds to stick with top producers who worked extra hard to control crop yield, since excessive crop yields resulted in “diluted wines.”  This mirrors the WSJ’s sentiment that “too many tasted diluted- thin around the edges; overly grapey.”  Also, bear in mind that of the 30 Barolo’s highlighted in Mr. Suckling’s report, only one cost less than $70, with two more priced from $72-$75.  The other recession-proof offerings soared as high as $445 per bottle.  Ouch!  Maybe there is something to be said for the ephemeral and much debated link between wine quality and cost.  Of the 5 Barolo’s that John and Dottie loved the most (or disliked the least?), all were rated between 87 and 95 points by Wine Spectator.  John and Dottie’s top dog, the Giacomo Grimaldi ‘Sotto Castello di Novello,’ garnered 92 points from Mr. Suckling.  But Mr. Suckling’s top-rated wine of the Wall Street Journal bunch, the 95 point Corino ‘Vigna Giachini,’ scored just a “Very Good” from John and Dottie, kind of like a B/B+ on their scale.  Sounds arbitrary?  Confusing?  Well take heart, Brigade.  After all, they’re just paid to give you their opinion.

“You always have choices,” I untiringly tell my kids, in automatic, repeat mode.  When I’ve got extra spunk, I might say, “You can eat what I’ve prepared for dinner or consume the default – PBJ.”  When I am defeated and less magnanimous of spirit, those options plays as, “You can eat what I’ve prepared for dinner or wait until breakfast tomorrow.”  Lest I sound like some smug diviner of quixotic, parenting gems, do understand I generally cave after 10 minutes and dole out banana slices or Gogurt squirts.  Still, the same can be said of our Anderson Valley pinot (less the amelioration of smoky phenols via addition of Gogurt).  With great relief, choices abound. 

Like a wino’s 12-step program, I graciously accept the requisite for intervention; we must treat our wine.  Culling optimism, I can honestly promise you that we will do everything necessary to provide you with a delicious, fragrant, lovely bottle of wine.  Ironically, the Anderson Valley juice was intended to be the hands-off love child of Mother Nature’s great bounty, fermented with native yeast and crafted with minimal handling.  Now, compared to Doctor’s Vineyard, the most intensive interference is necessary.  The dreamer’s fix is to presume that our barrel sample lost some “je ne sais quoi” in shipping, and any future, on site samples will be replete with aromatic, fruity abundance.  This is clearly the best case scenario: just have patience and taste again soon.  However, if replenishing fruit is necessary, we may meddle, tinker, and muck about until we find a suitable blend.

Of this we are certain: smoky, charcoal flavors are oppressive in the untreated wine.  By contrast, the treated variant tastes flat, insipid, dampened, and generally devoid of obvious fruit.  So we will treat the smoke taint and get the rest up to snuff. 

Don’t let the video scare you!  If you can’t see the video below, please click here.

Last Friday we were thrilled to received a package containing three barrel samples from CrushPad – one sample of our 2008 Doctors Vineyard pinot noir, one sample of our 2008 Annahala Vineyard pinot noir, and one post smoke-taint treated sample from Annahala.

Knowing that we’d need to wait until Sunday for the full tasting of the Annahala pinots, we decided to rip right into the Doctors pinot.  We set up the camera and recorded our impressions for your viewing pleasure.

How was the wine?  You’ll need to watch the video to find out.  If you can’t see the video below, please click here.

 Next up:  We’ll find out if we’ve been smoked out of the Anderson Valley!

Imagine a medium bodied red wine, lovely to sip but crafted with enough bright acid to add zest to your meal.  You identify a coalescence of red fruit, perhaps with pomegranate and some white pepper.  The wine isn’t too terribly tannic, great for non-cab lovers, but possessing decent weight and body nonetheless.  Really tasty!  Is your mouth watering yet?  Too bad I am not in the business of reviewing wines.  Not only is my own palate undistinguished and plebian but also my primary service to Bruliam is as the hooded Grand Marketing Inquisitor, the dark shadow lurking behind your neck chanting “buy my wine; buy my wine.”  On the other hand, if I do come across something cool or unusual, I will always share a glass with you, albeit virtually.  As you already know, during my San Francisco excursion, I was lucky to drink something entirely new to me, the 2003 Terenzi “Colle Forma” Cesanese del Piglio, an Italian DOC wine from Latium, the region southeast of and encompassing Rome.  Blessed with rolling hillsides, abundant sunshine and fertile volcanic soil, this south-costal area produces both reds and whites alike.  To taste something akin to what I drank, look for bottles celebrating either the Cesanese Commune or Cesanese di Affile grape. Apparently, this rare wine is making a comeback, so who knows, perhaps you’ll see one on a shelf at your favorite wine boutique sometime soon.  For the record, the predominant grape variety in this wine is the Cesanese di Affile, a more richly flavored clone of the Cesanese Commune.  While some Cesanese del Piglios are comprised 100% from this grape, Italian wine laws permits adulteration with other stuff, too.  Per tradition, up to 10% of its composition may include other DOC sanctioned varietals including Sangiovese, Montepulciano, Barbera, Trebbiano toscano (Passerana) and Bombino bianco (Ottenese).  The white wine is often added for acidity and aroma. 

Nectar of the Gods?

Per popular myth, this wine was the favorite of the Roman Caesars, professing quite a venerable pedigree for something I’d never heard of before.  It is said to be the only grape indigenous to the area, and per my limited internet research, the grape isn’t cultivated beyond this region either.  Interestingly, Cesanese di Affile is said to be as difficult to grow as pinot noir, a loaded but worthwhile comparison.  Actually the berry itself is rather small and thought to be more complexly flavored than its coarser, big-berried mama, the Cesanese Commune, not unlike the low yielding, small berries of our best pinot vines.

The particular wine we had, the 2003 Terenzi “Colle Forma” Cesanese del Piglio appears dedicated to local consumption, with only 330 cases allocated for US export.  Even still, this very same wine showed up on another wine blog, Snooth, reviewed with a meal from yet another SF foodie institution SPQR.  He said:

What an interesting wine, recommended with dinner by Shelly, the Sommelier at SPQR in San Francisco. Not too aggressive to sip while waiting for the antipasti – with which it paired perfectly. A little too hot to handle the very peppered Carbonara.

The wine is very pretty and shines brightly yet retaining a dark purple shade. A beautifully interesting nose reminiscent of Moroccan spiced carrots – with cinnamon and clove and caramelized sweetness leading into a very round mouthfeel full of broad black cherry fruit flavors. It is not quite flabby, but I would have liked the acids to fill my mouth. The chalky tannins and plum flavors rest on the mid tongue while the acids prickle and burn around on the finish.   

Hungry for Hog?

Italian wine gurus suggest the ideal food parings to be hard cheeses, meat or game.  In stark contrast, I paired mine with decadently creamy mozzarella burrata, salumi, and a kick ass, thin crust pizza.  And you know what- it’s all good.  But my favorite morsel of Cesanese trivia is its unusual pork connection.  Traditionally, this wine is racked early, like in November, rendered ready to imbibe all the sooner.  In fact it is supposed to be available “when a hog is slaughtered and hams, “lonze” (cured fillet of pork), sausages and blood puddings are made.”**  How’s that for culinary inspiration?

 Here’s to drinking something new!

Grape: 100% Cesanese d’Affile
Vineyards: South-facing at 1,475 ft above sea level in Piglio, 305 cases per acre
Vinification: Harvested by hand; light maceration for 25 days on the skins at controlled temperatures below 30°, in steel tanks
Ageing: 10 mos, temperature-controlled, all stainless steel; finished in bottle circa 4 mos
U.S. allocation: 330 cases
Alcohol: 13%
Service: 64-68° F

Orange-red in the glass, there’s a scent of red berry and herbs on the nose, brandy-soaked cherries, and plum skins. Ideal with light sauces, red meat, roasted meat, and strong cheeses.

Sourced from:

http://zoliwine.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/romes-finest-red-grape-cesanese-di-affile/

**http://www.italianmade.com/wines/DOC10079.cfm

http://salviabianca.com/lazio.php

We are eagerly awaiting our first barrel samples of our Anderson Valley pinot noir.  According to the UPS tracking number, we should receive them sometime today.

As you may recall, our Anderson Valley pinot from the Annahala Vineyard is the wine with the potential smoke taint problem (you can click here to see our recent video post on the smoke taint issue).

In talking to our winemaker Chris earlier this week, he told me that he’s started to treat some of the other Annahala pinot with reverse osmosis and activated charcoal to remove the smoke flavors.  We’ve asked him not to treat our wine until we’ve had a chance to taste it.  So, Chris is sending us a sample of our untreated wine along with a barrel sample of another Annahala pinot that has already been treated.  We’re hoping that this will give us a good before-and-after comparison.  While we’re all for removing the smoke flavors, we want to make sure that nothing else is getting stripped out of the wine through this process.

We’ll be tasting the wines over the weekend and video taping our first impressions for your enjoyment.  We’ll also let you know if we’re going to be going forward with any treatment for the smoke taint.  If so, I’ll be let Kerith take the lead on explaining the science side of the “cleansing” process.

Wish us luck!

Also, thanks to everyone who contacted us after the post last week asking what we should do for the 2009 vintage.  We’ve already reserved our allocations for 2009 from Doctors and Annahala and we’re leaning toward making a final decision on a third wine.  As Uzi from Stomping Girl Wines wrote, “Make what you like to drink. You can’t sell what you are not passionate about! Worst case, you’ll drink it yourself.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

“Mom, you should get a job,” counseled my son from the back of the minivan.

What??  I nearly swerve off of the road.  Must I actually endure career advice from a 5 year old, one whose most passionate vocational aspiration entails a hand drawn, homemade book titled What do People Do All Day at the Landfill?

My son peered at me from atop his Auto Trader magazine.  “You know,” he continued, “while the girls are at school.”  He was serious; I was stupefied.

Besotted with equal bits curiosity and amusement, I had to encourage him.  ”So what kind of job could I have?”

Without a beat, he posited, “You could work at Costco.”  It’s not like we couldn’t use the employee discount.  Maybe he had a point…

“Well isn’t taking care of you and your sisters and cooking and cleaning enough work?” I mused.  (Stop laughing.  I do clean- on occasion).

“No,” he insisted.  “You should drive the miniloader and stack up palates of water.”

“Well what about working on our wine company?  Isn’t that a job?”

“No.”

And there it is: the crux of my personal, existential dilemma, exposed by a child who aspires to see his mom behind the wheel of a heavy duty construction vehicle.  I am no longer practicing medicine but am too terrified to return to pathology.  Each day is idled away with the hour long aliquots toddler ballet, gym, swim, and art classes.  On the side, I drink and taste and cook on your behalf, sumptuous calories consumed for the good love our beloved Bruliam Brigade, due diligence indeed.  Of course all this begs the question, “really, is this a job?”

Obviously, Brian and I love wine.  And food and wine.  And eating and wine.  But unless you’re contracted by some magazine or newspaper to review the local restaurant scene, there isn’t much of a “job” in what I do.  For one, there’s no health insurance, benefits, or 401K.  Heck there isn’t even a salary, since we’re entirely not-for-profit anyway.  Plus, what happens when you’re commandeered by your kid’s preschool teachers to volunteer in class and “talk about your job?”

Some weeks back, my son’s curriculum included a “Be All You Can Be” unit highlighting different jobs in our community.  All parents were encouraged to come to class and explain what it is that they do.  Giddy with anticipation, our son, of course, rushed to sign us up.  “Daddy can come in and talk about being a company,” he gushed, excited and gesticulating wildly.

“What can I do?” I asked him.

“Talk about cooking,” he solemnly replied.

To be fair, his teachers did ask me to chat up my culinary school experience and discuss what it means to be a “chef” (their generous title, not mine).  But what if I had headlined as “winemaker” instead?  Given the daily prominence of wine at our table (and our girls’ moniker “daddy’s special water”), I suspect our iterations as “wine people” is integrating naturally into our kids’ consciousness.

Still, I fear the day when my child’s classmate responds to mom’s requisite query of “how was school today, honey?” with their own half-truthed interpretation of Bruliam LLC.  “Bruno’s mommy taught us how to distill grain alcohol in the backyard- without going blind.  Don’t worry, mom.  The explosion isn’t that loud.”  How the heck do I spin that?

EPILOGUE:

So what did we drink in San Francisco?

Terenzi “Colle Forma” Cesanese del Piglio (2003)

More on this unusual varietal next week.  (And no I hadn’t heard of it either until I got to the restaurant).

It’s finally arrived – the moment that I’ve been dreading since we formed Bruliam Wines almost a year ago. 

What is the cause of the growing pit in my stomach and the surging bile in the back of my throat?  It’s time to actually make the big business and financial decision about the 2009 harvest.

From the time we first contemplated the business plan for Bruliam Wines, I had little concern about the financial risk of our first year’s product.  Maybe I’m overly confident, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to have no trouble selling out our 2008 pinots.  If nothing else, we’ll result to old fashion Jewish guilt and/or teenage-level peer pressure to convince all of you to buy some of our inaugural vintage.  And if it is as good as we expect, we’ll probably be successful at convincing you to buy quite a bit of it.

But now the real financial risk begins.  Now we have to decide what to do for the 2009 vintage.  Before our 2008 has finished aging, long before it is in the bottle, and at least 8-10 months before it goes to market, we now have to commit to buying our 2009 grapes.

The primary question we have to tackle is whether we want to expand our production for 2009 or leave it as it.  Our 2008 production of 600 bottles (50 cases) is pretty limited and if our 2008 vintage turns out well, we feel confident that the demand for the 2009 vintage should keep up with an increased supply.

So if we do decide to expand our production, how best to do it?  This is where the financial risk crosses with long-term business planning. 

Here are some of the options currently being contemplated:

1. Expand production from the existing vineyards- our 2008 vintage is coming from Annahala in Anderson Valley and Doctors in Santa Lucia Highlands.  This would give us more pinot to sell from the beach heads we’ve already established.
2. Add a new pinot from another area.  Great pinot options abound in California from the Sonoma Coast and Santa Rita Hills.  Having greater geographic diversity will enable us to position and sell the pinots differently.
3. Add a new varietal.  Kerith and I are passionate about pinot, but it is not all that we drink.  Expanding Bruliam to encompass different varietals will open up the business prospects to a wider client base and a range of pricing options.  Some of the varietal options are:
   1. Add a chardonnay.  The classic Burgundian counter-point to pinot noir is chardonnay.  We can source grapes from the same or similar vineyards as the pinot and work with the same winemaker.  The problem is that Kerith and I don’t really love chardonnays – even when they’re made in a Burgundian style (with limited oak and butter overtones).
   2. Add a white Rhone (viognier, marsanne/rousanne).  These are the whites that Kerith and I like to drink and that ideally that we’d like to make.  Unfortunately, the economics of doing so don’t make a lot of sense.  Even if we were to sell out these wines, we’d be lucky to break even.  That means that these would be more of a labor of love than a profitable commercial undertaking.
   3. Add another red varietal.  Neither Kerith nor I are big Zin or Syrah drinkers.  That leaves the cabernet / cabernet blend option.  From an economic standpoint, doing a high-end cab or cab blend makes all the sense in the world.  Wine drinkers will regularly spend 2x-3x on a cab blend than they will on a similarly well regarded pinot.  The issue, however, is the longer time in the barrel (20-24 months, most likely) and the need to buy more grapes than will actually be turned into bottled wine to provide for blending options.  So, while the margins are higher on cabernet than on almost any other wine, we’d be tying up capital longer.

Underlying all of this is the need to maintain a degree of consistency in our business plan.  How many producers of super premium pinot noir also make world class cabs?  In our experience, there aren’t too many.  But that shouldn’t necessarily restrict us either.

So, what are we going to do?  We’re not really sure just yet.  But, we’d like your input.  Let us know what you think we should do by voting in the poll below and by sending us your comments or e-mails.  If you can’t see the poll, please click here.

We’ll let you know of our decision in the coming weeks.

By the time you read this, it will be over.  I will have either successfully or unsuccessfully shouldered the burden of selecting wine at a fine Italian restaurant – solo.  I almost never dine out with just girlfriends, so the prospect of doing it in another city is cause for celebration indeed.  No kids, just girls, free to spend long, lazy 10 hour stretches sifting through racks and racks and racks of gauzy, overpriced chiffon blouses.  But then I’m also anointed “Weekend Wine Guru,” by default.  Sure I’d traveled alone before having kids, usually to medical meetings, where I’d breezily take charge with drink.  But back then, I was a myopic California cab-aholic, reducing the expansive global world of wine to 10 or 12 well-known, “big name” producers.  In some way, things were easier then, even if I drank massive, mouth-puckering tannic behemoths with delicate, lemon-laced turbot.  Now less callow, I actually cringe at the gaping chasm between my enological enthusiasm and my actual knowledge and fledgling palate.

Best option: ask the sommelier.  I know firsthand that A16’s wine team is terrific; guiding newbies through a challenging and overwhelmingly, expansive Italian wine list is what they do best.  That said, some general parameters still require calculation.  I’d like to be democratic and polite, inquiring of my dining companion, “Red or white?”  But instead I’ll narrow the field by 50% by opting for red, which is my preference (plus I know my pal doesn’t actually care).  Then we’ll negotiate details.  The first challenge is price range.  Since I plan to foot the bill, this should be my choice, right?  Wrong.  The cost of wine is a dicey subject, since it twists and writhes at the core of our wine consciousness and informs every sip of that 750 ml’s.  Do you approach a $350 and a $35 bottle of wine the very same way?  Where is your comfort level?  Can you still have fun knowing every sip is costing you $25 a gulp?  Or does extreme indulgence and financial gluttony amplify your Bacchanal pleasure?  On the other hand, nothing says class and style better than a box of Franzia.  What if my dining companion (incorrectly) fears she can’t “appreciate” an ultra-luxe drink?   Then she won’t indulge heartily, and where’s the fun??  The moral: monitor and accept your personal wine finance barometer but indulge your companion’s.

Next step: take your partner through a series of simple, straightforward questions.  “Big or small?” is a solid start.  Wine, of course, stretches from quaffable, easygoing bottles of fruit-packed giggles like Beaujolais Nouveau to inky, thick, chewy, tannic Australian monsters.  To your surprise, your answer may not even delimit or exclude a particular varietal, since some merlots taste thin and soft while occasional pinots play to masquerade as syrah.  Descriptors like “big and fat,” “light,” “soft,” “dense,” or “smooth” do more for a sommelier than a broad sentiment like “find me a cab.”  Basic adjectives work especially well for more expansive or esoteric wine regions that export fun, interesting and downright weird grape varieties we’ve never even heard of before. 

Once size is settled, go with “fruity or not?” and “dark fruit or light?”  A colored coated fruit palette arches across cherry, cranberry, strawberry, raspberry to blueberry, blackberry, plum, and cassis then right past raisin, fig, jam, and prune straight through to chocolate, licorice, black pepper, and spice/clove (which I realize aren’t “fruit” per se).  Some folks like jammy fruit-pie-in-your-face while others dig a mélange of confounding aromatics that dwarf the berries behind a haze of smoke, earth, mint or pepper.  Lastly, when dealing with the Italians, I think asking oneself “rustic or not” is entirely appropriate.  There is something evocative and romantic about a local, rough hewn wine that tastes cleanly of fruit, earth, and sun.  Unpolished and even a little clunky, this is a dusty, unlabeled bottle that a local, white-haired farmer extricates from a trap door in the basement, while explaining enology is just a hobby, and that this is a wine a he crafts for pleasure and family alone.  It elevates simply prepared, fresh cut pasta to magic.  These quirky Italian gems are the olfactory opposites of the gleaming, polished, streamlined perfection of Italy’s finest super Tuscans, Brunellos, and contemporary Barolos.  These premium superstars are like sleek Ferraris, macho and smooth, nuanced to indulge an exclusive international palate, and I love those babies, too.  Frankly I value my signed, unlabeled bottle of 1999 Siro Pacenti Brunello di Montalcino above two of my three children. 

And so begins the courtship with the sommelier.  Give and take, and talk, talk, talk.  “Show me a medium-bodied $45-75 bottle of Italian red wine with forward fruit balanced by some earth, something a bit more refined and smooth, fairly mild tannins, and good acidity for food.  Oh, and sommelier, please make it a wine I’ve never tasted before.”

If you read Kerith’s post last week on the smoke taint update, you may have noticed a little disclosure under the video we posted.  You see, YouTube decided recently to start automatically muting all videos containing music owned by Warner Music Group.  Apparently they are in some sort of copyright spat and we’re all getting dragged into it too.  The original audio that we had planned for the video was, unbeknownst to us, owned by Warner and, as such, we had a very rude awakening a few minutes before the post was about to publish that all of the audio (i.e., the 30 seconds of music and the 5+ minutes of the interview with our winemaker) had been muted.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I have nothing against protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights.  Sagient is built almost entirely on intellectual property and nothing pisses me off more than learning that someone has co-opted our data without paying for it (in case you’re wondering, yes we do have the means to check and yes we have had to enforce our IP rights in the past).

That said, there is something incredibly annoying about spending 10-15 minutes uploading a video onto YouTube and waiting 30 or more minutes for it to process before being informed that the audio has been muted out due to copyright issues.  Isn’t there some way for them to detect the issue before wasting 45 minutes of my time?  Or how about giving me the ability to pay some fee to use the music rather than just muting the whole video.  Wouldn’t YouTube, Warner Music, and the musician actually like to make a couple of bucks from our usage (speaking of IP, I’m calling dibs on that idea).  And, frankly, who the hell else is using Tom Paxton’s 1963 masterpiece Bottle of Wine – I’m pretty sure Mr. Paxton would be happy to make a couple of dollars from our videos.

Out of immense frustration, I spent some time searching around last week on Google and YouTube trying to make heads or tails out of this new ridiculous muting policy.  Somehow or another I stumbled upon a video which pretty much shut me right up (it’s at the bottom of the post).

There are so many great moments in this news report from 1981, but two of my favorite are:  1) at about the halfway point they interview a guy and under his name it actually says “Owns Home Computer” just like it might read “Senator”, “Astronaut”, or “NFL Linebacker” – that’s how unusual this guy was back then; and 2) at the very end of the report, the anchor comes back on screen to talk about the download times.  I’ll let you listen all the way through to get to that punch line.

So, in the midst of all of my frustrated blogging about digital music rights and video upload times (while using one of three computers I have access to), I’m reminded at how far we’ve come in a very short period of time and how Bruliam Wines wouldn’t even exist were it not for the technological advances of the past 25+ years.

Bottom line:  I’m going to stop griping about YouTube and just enjoy the fact that such things now exist.  At least for a few days…

Enjoy the video – it is a blast!  If you can’t see it, please click here.

We hope you enjoy our latest installment of cooking with Bruliam Wines!  The recipe follows after the video.

If you can’t see the video, please click here.

Pinot Pocket Chicken Recipe

2 cups thinly, vertically sliced sweet onion (like Vidalia or Oso sweet)

1 tbsp sugar

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 ounces goat cheese/ chevre

4 teaspoons olive oil, divided

Salt & pepper for seasoning

1 tablespoon Italian seasoning

1/4 to ½ cup chicken broth

½  cup pinot noir

4 (6-ounce) boneless, skinless chicken breast halves

2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley (optional)

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Heat 2 teaspoons for olive oil in a small sauté pan over medium heat.  Add the onions to the pan and sprinkle with 1 tbsp sugar.  Cook until onions start to soften and turn translucent, about 5 minutes.  Add the garlic cook 1-2 minutes more.  Reduce the heat to medium-low and allow onions to turn golden brown.  Add ½ cup of pinot noir.  Simmer until liquid is absorbed, about 10 minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat, and season the mixture well with salt and pepper.  Add chevre, stirring until the mixture is creamy and the cheese melted.  Set aside.
3. Trim excess fat and rib meat from each breast (if present).  Beginning with the thickest portion of the breast, use a sharp knife to cut horizontally into the chicken breast creating a “pocket.”  Cut deeply into but not completely through the breast, so it holds together.  Create a pocket in each of the 4 chicken breasts.
4. Season the top side of each chicken breast with salt and pepper and Italian seasoning blend.  Divide the onion mixture into 4 portions, and stuff an equal portion (about 1/4 cup) into the pocket of each chicken breast.
5. Heat remaining 2 teaspoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat.  Add the stuffed chicken breasts seasoned side down and cook 3-4 minutes, browning well.  Carefully flip the chicken over, so the seasoned side is now up.
6. Slowly add ¼- ½ cup of chicken broth to the pan, scraping the bottom to loosen the brown bits.  Place the pan in the oven for 12-15 minutes, until the chicken is firm to the touch, cooked though, and juices run clear.
7. Serve immediately, spooning remaining pan sauce over each breast.  Sprinkle with parsley, if using.

Whether we’re out to dinner, lunch, or coffee, or just hanging around our neighborhood, we’re lucky our friends love to inquire of the status of our pinot.  But after the pleasantries, it seems most folks are cagey and pointedly curious about “that smoke stuff,” as in, “what was it that happened to those grapes again?”  Ever voyeuristic, scandals always eclipse happy endings.  Whether watching Britney melting down on a gurney or philandering politicians caught without their pants, we can’t avert our eyes from a smoldering implosion.  Bruliam, of course, is no exception; wine mishaps, disasters, blunders and banana peel pratfalls trump a seamless fermentation any day.

If you can’t see the video posted below, please click here.

Note:  We’ve been having a lot of trouble with YouTube and our audio.  Right now the video is working fine, but it seems to be a fluid situation.  If when you play the video and get no audio, please drop us a line to let us know.

And so it begins, in mid June 2008, when Mendocino Country suffered devastating forest fires that affected some 53,300 acres and caused $50 million in estimated damage (click here to read an article on the fires).  Thick smoke blanketed the narrow, long throated valley and smothered the developing grapevines near veraison, when berries morphed from green to purple.  Flanked by steep hills and a ridgeline peaking at 2000 feet above the valley’s base, our grapes choked at the depths of a smoky basin; the polluted, stagnant air had nowhere to go, even as the fires were contained.  Worried the resultant wine might taste like the soot, ash and smoke encasing our berries, we sadly learned that the scientific evidence proved us right.  Australian studies (click here if you want to read one) that deliberately smoke developing grapes conclude that the smoke compounds from the air are thereafter measurable in the tested berry bunches.  The smoky compounds penetrate both leaf components and wound sites along the vine.  Finally meticulous work has demonstrated that smoke taint compounds applied to scalpel severed leaf flaps and decapitated shoots are ultimately absorbed in the fruit itself.  And those compounds are in the grape skins, not the pulp, exacerbating the taint in red wines, where intensity of color and flavor is directly proportional to contact between grape skin and juice.

In one preliminary tasting of 2007 smoke tainted wines from north east Victoria, 7 Australian winemakers were asked to articulate the characteristics they most frequently noted.   “Ash, drying, bitter, smoky, bacon, campfire (recently extinguished), and ashtray” were the winners, although “toasty/charcoal, dirty, smoked meat, and aniseed” appeared frequently, too.  As you may recall, “campfire” was precisely the odor that induced my gut-wrenching reenactment of high school camping expeditions.  The Aussies have the most data on this stuff, as they suffered devastating crop loss and vineyard damage in both 2003 and 2006/7 brushfires and are now the most proactive in fielding new scientific data on the subject. 

To date, we already understand the basic biochemistry of smoke taint, since the burning embers of forest fires mirror the charred interior of toasted oak barrels- only amplified.  When oak barrels are “toasted,” chemical compounds from the resultant char leech into the wine as it ages, adding layers of complexity and flavor.  From experience with oak barrels, we know guiacol and 4-methyl guiacol are the most important compounds (i.e. odiferous phenols) comprising the chemistry of smoked wood, although other secondary compounds are noted.  Wood is 25% ligin, which is itself a long chain of phenol monomers, and as it burns, pyrolysis liberates these aromatics.  The very act of combustion fragments those long monomer chains into smaller, free floating phenols, which we interpret as that distinctive ashy, smoky scent.  The resultant reekiness varies with burn temperature and the material combusted.  That’s why Z, our resident Aussie winemaker, aptly noted Australia’s burning eucalyptus trees liberated a more potent stench than our 2008, Anderson Valley, oak tree forest fires.  Better a 2X4 plank than menthol, I suppose.  But most frustratingly, there is little to do but wait.

As noted in the PressDemocrat, “We’re making a guesstimate of 20 percent to 25 percent of the area that was burned really got toasted.”  And that’s a lot of guiacol.  Charcoal filtration and reverse osmosis may reduce the levels of smoke taint chemicals, but we’re warned to proceed with caution.  Testing is limited, and you risk stripping away the good stuff with the bad.  As for us, we’ve got malo and some preliminary aging behind us.  Our next step is to stay calm, withhold rash judgment, and taste what we’ve got.

Data sourced from “Understanding the sensitivity to timing and management options to mitigate the negative impacts of brush fire smoke on grape and wine quality- scoping study.” Department of Primary Industries, Victoria, Australia 2007.  MIS: 06958/ CMI: 101284/ Dr. Mark Krstic

I came across the video posted below on the Wall Street Journal’s website.  It shows an inside look at how the people at Wine Enthusiast magazine go about their process for rating and ranking wines.

At Bruliam we are always wary of numerical wine ratings.  Everyone’s tastes are different and how a magazine rates a particular wine is usually reflective of the tastes of the article’s author or editors, and not necessarily an indicator of whether we readers are going to enjoy that wine.  In fairness, many of the magazines do a good job of expanding on their numerical scoring through in-depth reporting on the wines and regions, but the reality is that the only thing that is typically remembered or discussed is “the number”.  

And the commercial power of “the number” is undisputed.  For a large wine producer, the difference between a score of 90 and 89 on a particular vintage could easily translate into millions of dollars in sales.  For a small producer like Bruliam, it often is the difference between instant success and lingering struggle. 

Is that fair?  Of course not.  But it is what it is.  That doesn’t mean that sub-90 point wines should be shunned or dismissed.  In fact, as a consumer there is a significant upside to 89 point wines.  We’ve had hundreds of wines over the years that scored below 90 points that we’ve enjoyed immensely.  And, candidly, we’d have a whole lot of trouble picking out a low 90-point wine versus a high 80-point wine in a blind tasting.  Yet, because these wines have been saddled with the scarlet number, they are often priced much more reasonably than their higher rated cousins.  

If you are interesting in investigating 89-pointers, there is an entire blog site dedicated to them – the 89 Project.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Should our wines ever get reviewed by the major publications and actually score in the 90’s, we’ll be marketing the heck out of that score (and, of course, praising the infinite wisdom of the reviewer).

You can view the video below or if you can’t see it, please click here. 

One final note on this – this is really their job and we are all in the wrong business.

Near daily discoveries in the field of wine science now elucidate once mysterious wine conundrums, from the labor-intensive detection of individual aromatic phenols to the whodunit gene sequencing that authenticated Zinfandel’s origin.  In fact, research now shows that very specific once tolerated, off odors in wine are actually secondary to microbiological infestation.  What was once regally deemed terroir and accepted as “aromatic complexity” is now simply a yeast contamination problem.  Even today wine aficionados wrestle with categorizing wines as having a “barnyard” or “sweaty saddle” aroma, since to non-wine lovers such endearing terms sound kind of gross.  Of course these monikers were never intended to be pejorative but simply were considered a component of a wine’s typicitie.  Nowhere was this more evident than in the great French Burgundies (made from the pinot noir grape). 

Lusty earthiness and wet soil aside, when descriptors like “wet mouse fur, manure, medicinal, plastic, wild game, rubber boots, wet leather, and horse sweat” encroach on polite dinner conversation, perhaps it’s time to find classier friends.  But these adjectives are just partial list of the sometimes yummy (”bacon”) and more often rancid (”tinny metallic fish taste”) olfactory descriptors of Brett tainted wine.  Brettanomyces/Dekkera yeast is a ubiquitous critter that colonizes wine equipment, oak barrels, hoses, and other sundry winery equipment.  And once that tenacious microbe moves in, he’s a hard house guest to eject.  Judicious sulfide use, complete fermentation to dryness, low cellar temperatures, low pH, and limited exposure to oxygen all help curb Brett’s voracious appetite for sex, multiplication, and yeast porn in your bottle.  And here’s what we know: Brett uses 2 unique enzymes called “CD” (cinnamate decarboxylase) and “VPR” (vinyl-phenol-reducatse) to spin the odorless precursor cinnamic acid into distinct, potent volatile phenols- like the reeky stinkers annotated above.  It is these ethyl-phenols that are responsible for the funkiness that we smell- and what the experts smell, too.

So imagine sitting around a formal wine tasting in the swanky offices of Wine Spectator Magazine ranking and tasting old Burgundies.  The conversation goes something like this, “Do you smell shit yet?”

 ”Nope, not yet.  Maybe sweaty, or even musty, more like Matthew McConaughey after Bikrams yoga.”

 ”Really?  This one smells especially crappy to me, as in poop-crap, like merde and manure.  Maybe you should get your sensory threshold recalibrated.” 

Yes, it’s true, wine scientists have terms for this stuff.  The “perception threshold” is the minimum concentration at which stank is identified in a dilute alcohol solution by 50% of “trained tasters.”  The “recognition threshold” is the same as the perception threshold but in actual wine.  Adding stench to stank (if such an aphorism exists), the “preference threshold” is the concentration above which the overall aroma of a wine is affected.  Maybe “compromised” is a better word, as in “smells like someone crapped on a grapevine.”  But even so, Brett abounds.  Ribereau-Gayon’s tome cites a study where almost 30% of red wines analyzed contained volatile ethyl phenol concentrations above perceptible thresholds (which happens to be 440mg/L).

So let’s break down the science since it has some interesting corollaries.  First of all, a pungent mustiness (i.e. an odoriferous volatile phenol) that is offensive to 50 out of 100 people may not even be noticeable to the remaining 50 sniffers.  A pregnant lady’s tolerance for off odors is certainly more nuanced than that of a pack of rowdy, football-watching, beer guzzling, chili and bean eating Steelers fans (who are obviously stinkier than Chargers fans).  And what if some folks dig the Brett profile?  Yes, science has proven that Brett is a wine fault that detracts from the intended fruity character of your favorite beverage, but still, rankest stench to one is fine perfume to another (and some very famous winemakers would agree).  This is why wine is great.

And while we’re at it, let’s save Wine Spec some big bucks in these trying economic times.  Lest the bottom line fall on wine consumers everywhere, we can dispatch our own dream team of low cost, expert merde detectors.  Just bring in the mommies.  Next time you’re at the playground or your kid’s gym class, just wait until inevitably one mom turns to another to exclaim, “You smell that?  Some kid has a dirty diaper, and it’s not my baby.”  How do they do that?  What exactly is the perception threshold of a dirty diaper?  And just how much of an elite trained smeller does one have to be before developing the olfactory synapses to correctly identify another child’s poop from your own?

Epilogue: For all of you poop-centric, immature, Beavis and Butthead fans, “bunghole” is a technical wine term.  It refers to the hole bored on the side of a liquid-tight, wooden barrel.  Its stopper is called a “bung.”  When the bung is adequately tightened and submerged beneath the surface level of the aging wine, the barrel is considered impermeable to ambient oxygen.

An article recently appeared in the New York Times addressing some changing trends in wine sales due to the current weak economic climate.  You can click here to read the article.

The author identified a couple of interesting trends:

People are buying cheaper wine, but making it up on volume.

The article cites two retailers who say that their revenues remained largely unchanged in 2008.  While the average sale price was down 17% versus 2007, the number of bottles sold was up 15%.  The article also quotes a wine industry consultant who believes that people may be buying more wine at retail stores because they aren’t spending as much at restaurants.  Despite the tone of the article, I’d bet that things are not all rosy for wine retailers.  Some quick math using the numbers provided by the Times reveals that retail revenues are down about 4.5%.  If you then factor in the higher cost of sales due to the volume (needing more staff, storage space to accommodate more bottles, etc.), I’d bet that bottom line profits year-over-year are down somewhere in the area of 15%.  Of greater long term concern for the retailers would be the continued shift to lower priced bottles where profit margins are smaller.  I’ll guess we’ll have to wait and see how 2009 shapes up for these guys.  As for the restaurants, it’s been a tough time all around.  We’ve had a couple of neighborhood restaurants go out of business in the past few weeks, and I suspect that more will follow suit.  If people are not going out as often to eat then that’s a problem.  If people are going out, but not ordering as much alcohol, then that’s a big problem.  Restaurants make most of their money on alcohol sales, and if people are pulling back on boozing it up while out on the town, then I suspect a tough environment for restaurateurs is going to get even tougher.

A number of party hosts are now serving one wine (cheap) to guests and serving another (expensive) to themselves.

Really?  People have the audacity to do that?  That’s pretty shitty amazing.  Why bother?  There are literally hundreds of inexpensive wines that are absolutely wonderful.  All of the major wine publications put out annual lists detailing the top wines under $10 or under $20.  Pick some up, and try them.  They’re often better than wines that cost two or three times as much.  That said, my favorite line in the whole article concerned this topic, “the host was drinking Bordeaux; the guests were drinking Chianti.”  Umm, I’ve had a number of really crappy Bordeaux and a number of ethereal Chiantis.  Quite frankly if you give me a budget of $50 or $100 for a Chianti and the same for a Bordeaux, I’ll have my Chianti running circles around that Bordeaux.

Vodka sales spiked in October.  No one knows why.

I found this to be really amusing.  Why would vodka sales “skyrocket” during the worst market period in our lifetimes?  Any sorority girl worth her appletini will tell you that vodka has a wonderfully unique characteristic – it is very hard to detect on the breadth of the imbiber.  So, you can drink as much vodka as you can handle at lunch and go back to watching your portfolio fall off a cliff and no one will be able to smell it on you (the alcohol that is – the smell of fear is palpable).

What does this all have to do with Bruliam?  Well, at some point we’re going to have to sit down and figure out a pricing strategy for our wine.  When we launched the brand, our primary pricing indicators were wine comparables.  We checked out how other premium boutique wineries were pricing their pinots and that gave us an idea on the market’s acceptable range.  Now it looks like we’re going to have to factor in the general economic conditions, the retailers shift to stocking lower priced bottles, falling alcohol sales at restaurants, and, apparently, competition from olfactorily undetectable spirits.

Or maybe we’ll just keep it in the barrel until the market rebounds.

Prologue: Sometimes writing a weekly blog is an explosive torrent of words and ideas that I can’t tame quickly enough; other weeks I am less inspired.  Early last week both Brian and I were equally jubilant and coy with one another regarding our fledgling bon mots.  I cryptically told my husband, “Mine is already written- in my head,” pointing to my left temple.  Brian concurred, “Yes, mine is all up here,” pointing to his bald, right temple.  Then I knew.  Shocked, I said, ‘Are you writing about…it.  The case?”  Sure enough, we’d independently tackled the same topic.  With a Thursday post, Brian had seniority over whatever I’d compose to follow his debut shout out on topic.  But such is life when love, passion, hobbies, work, and hearty alcohol consumption repeatedly intersect daily.  Luckily, we came at it from slightly different vistas.  And so I give you yet another he said / she said.  Behold my narrative interpretation of our holiday events. 

When was the last time you tried a new wine?  I’m not talking about “I really like Robert Mondavi Estate Chardonnay, but I’ve never tasted the Reserve Chardonnay” kinds of new wines.  I mean some geeky, esoteric grape like Malvasia or Terret, or maybe a wine from any of our lesser known wine producing United States.  Tennessee anyone?  What about from an unlikely wine producing country, like Vietnam?  Isn’t that the New Year’s mantra of most wine writers and enologists this time of year?  Try something new!

At the risk of sounding like an oeno-nerd or self-righteous buffoon, I’ll disclose that we’ve been drinking new stuff all week.  In a strange collision of sordid details, my step dad, a years-long, avid teetotaler, was knighted guardian of several cases of his friend’s wine- from which Brian and I pilfered a mixed case of booze.  Rather than steal wine in a panicked frenzy, we burglarized with discipline and academic precision.  I opted mostly for weird-ish stuff that I’d always wanted to taste.

Exhibit A: the Portuguese vinhos verde.  I recalled reading about this unusual varietal in my UCD enology class- something about harvesting green, unripe grapes.  (Perhaps that should have been the first hint!)  To celebrate the inauguration of our well executed theft, I cooked up some halibut (a perfectly acceptable if uninspired pairing with white wine), and we popped the cork.  It was, to be generous, jarringly and wincingly acidic.  Now I don’t know the first thing about vinhos verde producers or vintages, so it is entirely possible that I Forrest Gumped upon the worst of the lot (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night…).  I ran to retrieve my class notes and scrawled in the margin was the following, “é acid, ê CHO, ê EtOH; ML in bottle with fizz.”  Yup, that summed it up.  The grapes, grown in cool, wet Minho, are over cropped, never fully mature, and are picked at a relatively low sugar concentration.  The resultant wine is very highly acidic and low in alcohol.  Because malolactic fermentation is completed in the bottle, the finished wine is lightly carbonated.  When Brian held his wine glass to light and said, “That’s weird, I’ve never seen that kind of sediment in a bottle of white wine before,” I guess I had forgotten to tell him that those specks were deflating bubbles, not grime.  Note to self: remember to vet and surreptitiously sample “unknown” wines before mentally committing to blog about them.

But it is about the process, dear Brigade, not the end product.  So in the name of intrepid wine explorers everywhere, I opted for more self flagellation.  The next night we opened a Riesling produced by the secondary label of a very well known and prestigious California vintner.  I made a steamy chicken vindaloo, seasoned with garam masala, cardamom, and garlic, dizzying in its bursting Indian aromatics.  I was super-excited since I love, love, love Rieslings, especially with food, but frankly this one smelled like gasoline.  I’m unsure whether it was a volatile acid problem or my personal olfactory failure from last week’s viral rhinitis, but I just kept getting fumes.  And it didn’t taste much better.  Clearly the fanciful message to “spice up your life and try new wines” was sinking fast.

Obviously this wine experiment is much more fun when the bottles are free and/or the economy is vibrant.  There is nothing romantic about the loud, wet glunks of a near-full bottle of wine being poured down your kitchen sink.  But that shouldn’t stop you from trying.  Some of the best wine steals today are lesser known, smaller production, imported drinks- from the “fighting varietals” of Chile to Australia’s current wine glut.  And yes, while some will be easily delicious, others will require more concentration and coaxing.  But you may get lucky and find a new house favorite.  For me, I am still at it.  I plan to make some chai spice biscotti to go with a California dessert wine tonight after the kids go to bed.

As we enter another new year, the signs of transformation, renewal, and resurrection are everywhere.  From the annual ritual of dense January crowds of resolution-wielding neophytes sweating away on my cardio machines at the gym to the near give-away sale pricing at the soon to be bankrupt retailers, it’s clear that we are awash in the season of rebirth.

And so, it was with little surprise that on January 2^nd we found ourselves on the periphery of one individual’s very personal transformation.  While visiting with relatives over the new year, the conversation turned to everyone’s holiday experiences.  With a heavy sigh, our relatives detailed their non-traditional holiday season.  They’d spent New Years Eve staging an intervention for a good friend who long suffered from alcoholism.  With the blessing and aid of their friend’s immediate family, they successfully placed their friend into a rehabilitation program. 

As we congratulated them on their resolve and commiserated with them on the difficulty of such an emotionally draining experience, someone uttered the following offhanded remark, “And to top it all off, the family just dropped off eight cases of wine that they had to get rid of.  What the hell are we going to do with eight cases of wine?  We don’t drink wine, and they don’t want it back…”

Hmmm.

Now, I try to think of myself as a generally empathetic person (although some may disagree), and I really wouldn’t want to benefit from the bad fortune of others (well, there are some whose bad fortune I would very much like to benefit from, but that’s a whole other issue).  But, really, what would you do?  Eight cases of wine.  The person is in rehab and returning the wine would only tempt fate and beget failure on their arrival home.  The “custodians” of the wine don’t even want it around; it’s only taking up their much needed storage space.  So, isn’t it a win-win-win situation for us to ease some of our relatives’ pain by relieving them of their unwanted guardianship.  Isn’t it the honorable thing to do?  Heck, it’s practically a mitzvah!

OK, OK, even I’m not that delusional.  Nonetheless, Kerith and I exchanged glances across the room and, sensing her shared view, I humbly suggested that perhaps we could help out our relatives a little bit.  And they jumped at the offer.

Feeling like a couple of vulture-jackal hybrids, we were led to the storage area and left to our own devices.  We immediately agreed that it would be wholly inappropriate to simply abscond with all eight cases.  That would be just ridiculous (and frankly, we didn’t have room in the car).  But taking too few bottles wouldn’t be much of a favor.  So we tentatively settled on taking a case of wine for ourselves and then “compensating” our relatives by separating the remaining stash into wines that were worth saving to give to others versus those that should go into the recycling bin.  Good plan, right?  Well, we thought so. And then we started going through the cases.

I guess when you have an alcohol problem, access to any alcohol trumps access to highly acclaimed, ethereal wines of notable vintages.  Suddenly the Christmas morning-like glee of having full run of eight cases of wine turned into the disheartened discovery of a proverbial lump of coal in our stocking.  We quickly realized that we’d be lucky to salvage 12 bottles of any quality or pedigree. 

The line from The Godfather came immediately to mind, “Leave the gun.  Take the cannoli.”  And so we did.  Selecting only varietals we’d never had or wines from geographic areas we weren’t normally exposed to, we filled our case and sheepishly beat a path back to our relatives to report that we had done all that we could.

What was our take?  It included a red blend from Argentina of 85% bonarda and 15% syrah, a vinho verde from Portugal, a pinot noir from Germany, a riesling from Monterrey County, and a muscat canelli from an undesignated area of California.  We’re looking forward to trying some of these out, and we’ll give you our tasting report in the coming days.

I’m tempted to close out this entry with some statement about the cycle of life being reflected in the passing of this noble wine from someone who could no longer have it to others who will fully appreciate it.  Or how the wine itself is a metaphor for all of the suffering endured by this person and their family, and how its removal is hopefully the first step in a recovery for all.  Or maybe, that like the growing season of a vine in the vineyard, the alcoholic friend is entering a period of needed dormancy from which they will hopefully emerge as a new bud – stronger, healthier, and ready to take on a new season of living.

But, let’s be frank.  Any Talmudic-like attempt at philosophy in this case is pure self aggrandizing puffery.  We fell into an opportunity, and we took it.  Nobody was hurt in the process and, hopefully, we did a little bit of good and maybe ended up with some drinkable wine. 

In other words, we decided to just shut up and take the cannoli. 

And after a rough 2008 for many of us, that’s a resolution worthy of a new year.

S. cerevisiae

budding, uni-cell fungus

happy to make wine.

 Yes – a haiku ode to our simplest wine making creature.  As you well know, S. cerevisiae is content to metabolize grape sugar into wine – pretty much every time.  Lacking the creativity, internal machinery or motivation to do otherwise, wine yeast render the biochemistry of wine relatively straightforward.  Conversely, lactic acid bacteria, of the sort responsible for malolactic fermentation, present a greater scientific challenge as they possess more tricks in their sugar consuming armamentarium.  For instance, both yeast and lactic acid bacteria disassemble glucose and fructose (collectively called hexoses because they have 6 carbons) into stuff called pyruvate, but then the lactic acid bacteria uniquely transform pyruvate into lactic acid.  It is this so called “lactic fermentation” that categorizes their kind.  And this is OK; we like lactic acid in our wine.  But what happens when they eat other junk, beyond simple grape sugars?  Thinking caps on; biochemistry ahead; Here we go.

Like cockroaches feasting on garbage, greedy lactic acid bacteria can also digest stuff like 5 carbon sugars, citric acid, and malic acid, especially when grape sugar concentrations are low.  You already know how they turn sour-apple malic acid into mellow, round lactic milk acid, so now let’s tackle the other stuff.  First up: the 5 carbon pentoses (think of a stop sign- a 5 sided pentagon).  For this, lactic acid bacteria must engage their “pentose phosphate pathway” since 6 carbon grape sugars are chewed up differently than 5 carbon sugars.  Like the sixers (hexoses), sometimes the fivers (pentoses) end up as ethanol – i.e., wine.  Other times, the end product is acetate.  Clearly, mocking modern wine science, those one cell, mini-monsters spin pentoses into acetic acid-acetic acid as in vinegar - rotten, spoiled wine.  Vexing.

Citric acid metabolism is even crazier.  Imagine a candy factory with a conveyor belt that sends bulk chocolate down one path to get M&M’s, another for Snickers, and a third for basic Hershey’s bars.  Same starting material; different end products.  In the same way, lactic acid bacteria digest citric acid, a principal organic acid of wine, in different ways depending on their different environmental conditions.  Transported through one door, citric acid becomes a source of acetoin compounds – like the buttery popcorn smell – yum!  Or it can be transformed into lactate (that’s OK) or even wine (better yet!).  Sometimes though, citric acid is converted into cellular material, bricks and mortar to fix bacterial cell walls.  Now I am all for home improvement, but in this case the by-product of Flip This Microbial House is acetic acid, again, meaning more wine spoilage.  Luckily for winemakers, we can predict the conditions that favor butter over vinegar, so we load the biochemical roulette wheel to our liking. 

Fermenting wine is a smorgasbord of bacterial food options, so much food and so many ways to eat it.  Perhaps this helps you understand why malolactic fermentation is so critical to winemakers.  Beyond the mega organoleptic qualities, it promotes microbiological stability.  In other words, through MLF, we control how and when wine bacteria consume all of their available nutrients – from grape sugar to the weird stuff like pentoses and citrate.  Last thing we’d want is for some rambunctious bacteria to go crazy in your bottle of Bruliam; I’d be mortified if you uncorked fizzy vinegar at your next dinner party.  You see, lactic acid bacteria aren’t the only critters who eat this stuff.  Their bacterial brethren have similar tastes for citrate and ribulose.  With malo, we simply inoculate to ensure every potential particle of edible bacterial sustenance is consumed before we bottle.  And so we eagerly wait for e-mail updates like this one:

In our Anderson Valley pinot the malic acid is almost to zero; we’re on our way.

Welcome to the holiday season, dear Brigade.  In these stressful days of scarce mall parking, heightened family drama, and present-giving anxiety, even we Jews are not immune to overwhelming despair and general malaise.  Maneuvering my way  through the crowded aisles of Target, shuffling in time to the omnipresent, aural thud of “Little Drummer Boy” on the PA gives me a sour stomach.  And so, friends, what better time to turn to alcohol than in this zeitgeist of desolation, social fatigue, and emotional strife?  So this week, as inspiration to imbibe both at home and on the town, I give you our highly anticipated and supremely phenominal interview with San Diego’s favorite celebrity sommelier:

JESSE RODRIGUEZ, Addison at the Grand Del Mar

Bruliam:  Jesse, as Wine Director at the Grand Del Mar you wear many different hats.  From stocking and organizing the cellar to seeking out great, new wines to promoting small volume, boutique winemakers to interacting with dinner patrons, you’re in 100 places at once.  Please describe for our readers a “typical day,” if such a thing exists.

Jesse Rodriguez:  There really is no typical day. There is so much going on that you can never really have things set. The only constant is that service starts at 5:30 p.m. Everything before that changes all the time.

Bruliam:  Sometimes when you pair Chef’s spectacular foods with amazing wines, magic happens.  Jesse, what defines that ephemeral food-wine pairing that we’re always striving to complete?

Jesse Rodriguez: The “perfect-pairing” is such an open loose term. I might think that a specific wine would pair well with a certain dish, however, the guest might then inform me that they only drink Cabernet. So the wine I would suggest or pour with the course might not pair as well. I do my best work when the guest gives me full reign to select the wine of my choice to pair with the dish of their choice. I think that the basic principle is to look at the protein. I consider how the protein is cooked and what sauce and accompaniments are served with it. From there I can set up a well-rounded pairing that would compliment the food best.

Bruliam:  Newcomers to wine are easily intimidated.  What advice can you give to a wine novice who sits down to dinner only to contend with a massive, 500 page wine list?  Where can one begin (aside from asking the sommelier for help!)?

Jesse Rodriguez: I always suggest that the guest asks for assistance from a sommelier. We want to help you find the perfect wine for you and your guests. Let us know what style and price you are comfortable with and we select a wine to satisfy your taste and your budget.

Bruliam:  Sometimes even we don’t know where to start with the awesome wine list that you’ve complied at Addison Del Mar.  Take us through your thought process when we sit down to eat, call you over, and say, “Jesse, help!??!  We need some wine!”

Jesse Rodriguez: I look to what the needs of the guests are before I offer my input. It is important for me to not only understand what you like, but also know what you dislike. My goal is to exceed your expectations.

Bruliam:  What aspects of your wine and food education do you draw on most strongly when you’re advising diners?

Jesse Rodriguez: I try to think like a chef. I always try to envision what the course looks like, how it’s prepared and how it’s cooked. From there the wheels in my head start spinning and suddenly I have a plethora of suggestions.

Bruliam:  What advice do you have for restaurant patrons looking for that “perfect” bottle of wine to compliment their meal?

Jesse Rodriguez: Ask a sommelier!

Bruliam:  We all know that the dinner patron asking for  “light to full bodied red or white wine smelling of smoke, burnt game, tar, flowers, berries and mango but tasting of earth, smelly gym socks, and ripe fruit- of all kinds ” is just blowing smoke up your a@&&*#!!!!  On the other hand, I’m guessing that you can guide us better if we’re able to describe what we want or like or dislike in a wine.  What can we do as wine lovers to help make your job easier?  I’ll rephrase this by asking what is the best way for us to come to dinner prepared to help you advise us on the best possible wine choice for our personal palate?

Jesse Rodriguez: Simply let the sommelier know what you like and what you want to spend.  It makes our job 100% easier!

Bruliam:  What are some ways that novice wine geeks can practice their tasting skills at home?  Any games, tricks, or tips?

Jesse Rodriguez: I recommend to buy herbs and fruit from the store and do a component tasting and smelling. This will re-calibrate your sense of smell and allow you to develop an elevated sense of tasting and smelling.

Bruliam:  We all know Wall Street is tanking, the Euro is still strong (albeit less so than a few months ago), and Richebourg will never be a bargain!  Can wine consumers still find good values on a restaurant wine list?  What tips do you have for landing a great tasting but moderately priced bottle?

Jesse Rodriguez: Ask the sommelier what they recommend. For example you like Super-Tuscan red’s; they are expensive and can easily tax your wallet. Let the sommelier know what you like and ask if there is a Super-Tuscan they would recommend that is affordable. You may end up finding something you have never thought of trying.

Bruliam:  Be honest, now.  How does price range affect the wine advice you give restaurant patrons?  Please assure our readers that you won’t discriminate against them if they order the cheapest wine on the list!

Jesse Rodriguez: There are plenty of respectable wines that are not over priced. We offer 35 selections on our list for under $40 a bottle. As with everything, the price does not always determine the quality. Regarding service, we would never discriminate against a guest who chooses an affordable wine. Our main goal is satisfying the guest and we would never want anyone to feel they needed to spend top-dollar when they didn’t have to.

Bruliam:  I know you do a lot of wine education, both at the restaurant and behind the scenes.  Tell us about that.

Jesse Rodriguez: I try not to think of it as teaching but rather exposing knowledge to individuals who may not have had interest in learning about wine before. The way I see it is the more educated and wine savvy our staff is, the more we can encourage people to push the envelope with food and wine.

Bruliam:  We were lucky enough to attend the last winemakers dinner that you organized at Addison.  What special, wine-related treats do you have coming down the pike, and how do we score invites?

Jesse Rodriguez: We have some special dinners still in the planning stages.  Simply e-mail me at jesse@addisondelmar.com if you are interested and I will put you down on the invite list!

Jesse, once again, congratulations on passing your exam and qualifying as a Master Sommelier candidate.  What an accomplishment!  We also want to thank you for taking the time to answer these questions for our Bruliam Brigade.  Wine is a huge, dynamic, ever-growing subject, and your insights are invaluable.  We hope that we and our readers will be seeing you soon at the spectacular Addison at the Grand Del Mar.

Dear Brigade, this post was my holiday gift to you – a sweet, delicious confection.  After a two week holiday hiatus, we return to the titillating biochemistry to malolactic fermentation.

Cheers and happy holidays to all.

As I sit in my office watching eight people on CNBC talk over each other while “debating” the merits of yet another U.S. government backed bailout plan, two questions come to mind: 

First, when are the rest of us going to get some type of personal bailout?  If Wall Street can have one and the auto companies can have one, then shouldn’t I get one to help cover Kerith’s Nordstrom bill?  And, second, when is someone really smart going to take advantage of all of this bailout talk to market their own product while generating a little humor in this otherwise bleak time?

Lo and behold, just a few minutes later an advertisement pops into my e-mail box promoting a new wine offering:  Bailout Wine.  Not only does the name play to people’s current fears, but it actually offers a personal bailout of sorts.

The gimmick is simple, yet ingenius.  You can currently order a bottle of the 2007 Bailout Cabernet from CrushPad for $39 a bottle.  However, the wine isn’t going to be bottled until August 2009 and that’s where the “bailout” comes in. 

For every 100 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average between your purchase date and the bottling date, they’re going to refund you $2 per bottle.  That means that if you purchase the wine when the Dow is at 8,800 for $39 and the Dow drops to 7,300 by the bottling date, you’re going to end up paying only $9 per bottle.  If the Dow goes up during that period, the price is locked at $39.  And the wine is probably going to be quite good regardless of the price with fruit sourced from vineyards in Oakville, Mt. Veeder, and Pritchard Hill and made by CrushPad’s top notch crew of winemakers. 

Talk about a great hedge!

Congrats CrushPad – brilliant idea.  I just ordered two bottles.  At the very least, I figure that the $60 I just potentially saved on the wine should just about cover a few days worth of interest payments on Kerith’s Nordstrom account.  Now if I could just get the U.S. Treasury department to lend me a couple of billion…..

You can learn more about Bailout Wine by clicking here.

They have a pretty funny promotional video that I’ve posted below.  At this point all we can do is laugh, right?

If you can’t see the video below, please click here.

My brother sounded perturbed.  In between running to Ikea, Target, and Crate & Barrel for his mother-in-law, he had left messages on both my cell phone (which I never answer) and at the house; problems lay ahead.  All I could imagine was that we’d been demoted, as an entire family unit.  The mother-in-law, who has one toddler grandson of her own, had invited our whole, rambunctious clan to join her and her family for Thanksgiving in her immaculately adorned, Pasadena historic home.  And now, envisioning shards of shattered Limoges teacup and magic marker doodles embellishing her wallpaper, she’d chosen to snap the olive branch precariously tethering our 5 man entourage to her family tree.  Even if I could contain our egregious mess within my minivan during travel, a trail of half-eaten banana slices, sticky, slimy fruit rolls, and a random collage of Hello Kitty stickers would inevitably follow my three kids into her color-coordinated living room, like ants queuing up to a forgotten cookie crumble. 

When I finally got around to returning my brother’s phone call, he beat-around-the-bush, sheepish and tentative, opening with benign pleasantries.  Finally he said, “Listen, I was wondering if you could, you know, um- well… just bring your own wine.”  Pause.  “It’s not that we mind paying for it.  We just don’t even know what you guys like anymore.”

What??!!  Angina and fearing a solo family Thanksgiving for that?  Unfortunately, starting a wine company has duped even our most beloved into thinking we’re legitimately knowledgeable about “Wine”.  Did he miss the blog post about my being a poser?  Has my business card title “wine proprietor” invoked such anxiety and pressure in our hosts and hostesses that they needlessly perseverate whether the wine they’ve selected for dinner is too cheap, too expensive, too fancy, too plebian, or the wrong vintage, wrong country, wrong grape or wrong color?  Clearly, being a newly minted expert is exhausting my friends.  Of course I told my brother not to worry, and that we’d bring our own buzz.  (Although to be sure, even a jeroboam or two would fail to dull my glaze to the potential destruction my kiddies could accomplish in mere minutes when left alone with eye-level, china statuettes).

For three days Brian and I pontificated and played the wine geek card, arguing the best possible match for the smorgasbord of turkey, green bean casserole, and marshmallow topped sweet potatoes we’d soon inhale.  I even set out our snappy, leather wine tote to curb the possibility of flying Hot Wheels chipping our best bottle on the I-5 north.  Thanksgiving morning we loaded the kids, the clothes, the toys and snacks galore, one ratty, stuffed eeyore and two security blankies and topped the mountain of muck with a plastic potty seat and a super-size pack of Costco wet-wipes.  And then we re-loaded the kids again (wrong colored socks and two missed potty opportunities later…).

Wouldn’t you know it?  The kids were great – really well mannered and surprisingly mellow. 

And our perfectly selected wine choice?  Well, in the pre-departure chaos we’d somehow managed to forget the bottles at home, on the kitchen table. 

What our hostess poured for us instead was the most delicious, perfect Thanksgiving wine I’d ever tasted, although I never even got a chance to find out what it was.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions recently asking what’s going on with the wine.  Well, basically, it’s undergoing the malolactic fermentation process and starting the aging process – the aging prcoess will last for about another year. 

Our friends at CrushPad just put out a new video detailing what’s going on currently in the wine making process and I thought you’d all like to see it. 

The best news?  We’re only a couple of months away from getting our first barrel samples!!

If you can’t see the video below, please click here.

Do you have the post – Thanksgiving kitchen blues?  Have 4 consecutive days of roast turkey, turkey sandwiches, turkey-egg scramble, turkey pasta, turkey enchiladas, and turkey ice cream parfaits left you in a culinary rut?  Fear not as Bruliam Wine’s dynamic interview with Chef William Bradley of Addison Restaurant at the Grand Del Mar will inspire your inner foodie and coax the foie gras right back into your busy weeknight meals, where it belongs! 

Chef’s personal recipes for roasted beets and cabernet butter follow, so read on fellow Brigade for the best calorie-free indulgence of the decade.

Bruliam Wines:  Chef, you create such beautiful, flavorful, fresh delicacies at Addison, and it is truly a treat to have you here to answer some questions for our palate-curious, Bruliam Brigade readership.  Thanks for putting prep on the back burner (pretty clever, eh??) to answer some of our toughest foodie questions.

First things first: we all know we won’t get drunk from coq au vin, so what’s the point anyway?  Why is wine an important cooking “ingredient?” 

Chef Bradley:  It creates balance on the palate.

Bruliam Wines:  Of course we’re here to promote pinot, but many recipes call for “a light red wine” or a “full bodied red wine.”  What does that mean?

Chef Bradley:  The light red wines I incorporate in my cuisine are really used to emphasize the acid with the soft tones of fruit.  When my recipes call for full bodied red wine, I look for wines that have robust fruit flavors that I would like to include in the dish. 

Bruliam wines:  Is that the same as the cheap, generic “cooking wine” we see next to the vinegars at Vons?  

Chef Bradley:  Not at all. 

Bruliam Wines:  Help our readers decipher what constitutes a passable cooking wine.  

Chef Bradley:  A good food for thought: “Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink.” A passable cooking wine is an every day wine. A good food for thought: “Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink.”

Bruliam Wines:  Tell us a little bit about your cooking philosophy and what most inspires your menu? 

Chef Bradley:  Simplicity and harmony are strong philosophies that inspire my ever changing menu.

Bruliam Wines:  Who taught you to cook?  

Chef Bradley:  My mentor is James Boyce. I worked with him for over seven years.

Bruliam Wines:  Who most influenced your cooking style? 

Chef Bradley:  Alain Passard from the Restaurant L’Arpege in Paris.

Bruliam Wines:  When I pick your brain for cooking advice at home, you always tell me “low and slow.”  Tell our readers about this cooking style. 

Chef Bradley:  This style of cooking is the artisan approach to which I have adapted to over the years.  This low and slow method allows you to control the temperature and texture of each ingredient you are cooking. 

Bruliam Wines:  I have already copy-catted your low and slow roasted beets; they were easy to prepare and delicious.  Can you recap that technique for me here?

Chef Bradley:  See attached beet recipe.  (recipe follows the interview)

Bruliam Wines:  What other foods can home cooks prepare using a similar method? 

Chef Bradley:  Roasted shallots, fennel, or any other type of root vegetable that you particularly enjoy.

Bruliam Wines:  Go ahead and spill your favorite food-pinot noir pairing!  (We just want to copy that too). 

Chef Bradley:  Baked red cherry clafoutis with brown butter ice cream.  I have a huge sweet tooth.

Bruliam Wines:  I bet you knew this one was coming: you’re trapped in purgatory for eternity with an inexhaustible supply of only 5 ingredients.  What are they and why? 

Chef Bradley:  Peanut butter, jelly, bread, Ruffles, and cold milk. 

Bruliam Wines:  Why? 

Chef Bradley:  Because I don’t go more than two days without these.

Bruliam Wines:  What’s your favorite cooking gadget that you just can’t live without?

Chef Bradley:  Vitamix Blender

Bruliam Wines:  What’s your best tip for home cooks who yearn to cook like a pro? 

Chef Bradley:  Clean as you go so you can relax after eating.

Bruliam Wines:  Chef, would you mind sharing your favorite wine-based recipe with our readers?  

Chef Bradley:  Please see attached recipe for cabernet butter.

Bruliam Wines:  Chef Bradley, thank you again for your time.  But I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that I’d rather be eating your food than reading your words!  I hope to see you at Addison very soon and encourage our readers to seek out your spectacular food for their next special occasion meal.

Chef Bradley:  Thank you!

Verbena Roasted Red Beets

Chef William Bradley – Addison Restaurant

(Serves 4 people)

Ingredients:

 4 Aluminum foil 12″ squares

4 large red beets

8 Tbsp. of sea salt

8 Tbsp. of brown sugar

24 verbena leaves

2 Tbsp. lime zest

Extra virgin olive oil

2 cups of arugula

Method:

Verbena Roasted Red Beets

 Using aluminum foil, make four 12″ squares.

In the middle of each square, place one large red beet.

Season each beet with 2 Tbsp. of salt and 2 Tbsp. of brown sugar.

Place 6 verbena leaves on top of each beet.

Tightly seal beets by folding up each corner of foil.

Place in 200 degree oven and cook for 1 hour.

After cooking, remove beets from oven and cool to room temperature for an additional hour.

Remove beets from foil and discard verbena leaves.

Gently peel skin from beets using a towel and cut beets into quarters.

Arrangement:

Lay quartered beets on four individual plates.

Sprinkle with sea salt and grated lime zest.

Finish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a few leaves of arugula.

CABERNET BUTTER (SERVE OVER STEAK FRITES)

Chef William Bradley, Addison Restaurant

(Serves 4)

Ingredients:

2 whole shallots, peeled and diced

1 tablespoon organic pure cane sugar *

1 bottle of delicious Cabernet (your choice)

6 ounces of softened, unsalted French butter *

4 tablespoons finely chopped chives

2 tablespoons of finely chopped fresh thyme leaves (do not use dry thyme)

Sea Salt to Taste *

*Can be bought in specialty food stores

Method for Cabernet Reduction:

Place diced shallots in a heavy duty sauce pot.  Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and the whole bottle of Cabernet wine.  Cook over low heat and reduce down to ¾.  After reducing, allow wine reduction to cool to room temperature.  

Method for Cabernet Butter:

In a mixing bowl, add butter, chopped chives, chopped thyme leaves, and wine reduction.  Using a rubber spatula, slowly mix all ingredients together until fully incorporated.  Season with sea salt to taste. 

Chef Notes:

This is a great and easy wine recipe that goes great over steak frites or any grilled protein.  Butter will keep up to a month in the refrigerator.

Dearest readers, today we turn our rosy cheeks from the comforts of slurping savory soup to that most nefarious and treacherous of all enology subjects: biochemistry.  This blog commences the first in a series of posts about secondary fermentation, also called malolactic fermentation.  Like primary fermentation with yeast, malolactic fermentation (hereafter dubbed MLF) is mediated by microscopic critters that imbibe one wine component (malic acid) and spit out another (lactic acid).  Today we’ll meet its star player, Oenococcus oeni (O. oeni), a heterofermentive lactic acid bacterium, typecast by his ability to convert glucose (sugar) into lactic acid plus carbon dioxide, acetate, and ethanol (wine).  As with wine yeast, there are clones within the Oenococcus species itself and fancy DNA manipulations that distinguish Mr. Frank Oenococcus from Mr. Jack Oenococcus and Mr. Mark Oenococcus in a lineup of bacterial offenders.  And like with primary fermentation, MLF occurs either spontaneously or is forced by inoculation with lab grade bacteria.  However, quite unlike primary fermentation with yeast, this step is entirely optional.  Even without it, you still have drinkable wine.

MLF, the conversion of malic acid to lactic acid via bacteria, is a process that ups the ante in premium wines.  In fact, most of the wines you drink have probably undergone MLF and you didn’t even know it, since you’re so accustomed to its sweet end-product.  MLF heightens wines’ aromas, increases its complexity, and enhances all of its organoleptic qualities across the board, from creamy, mid-palate weight to fragrant bouquet.  By products of this chemical conversion include spooky names like ethyl lactate which embellishes a wine’s fullness and body and diacetyl, the curious compound responsible for that fat, buttery popcorn aroma in some oaky chards.  After MLF, wines become softer, more approachable, and less aggressive (and no, it cannot be applied to your hyperactive, yippy puppy or terrorizing toddler).  MLF also imparts velvety softness, greater body, and a richer, fuller texture (and no, you can’t apply it to your over processed hair either).  You see, MLF transforms malic acid, imagined as the biting tartness of unripe, green apples, into softer, mellower milk acid (lactic acid).  With MLF, a wine’s overall acidity decreases via direct decarboxylation, so for every molecule of malic acid, one acid group evaporates- poof- with its resultant gustatory pleasures. 

 Now stay with me friends.

 This is the chemical structure that defines carboxylic acid (R-CO₂H):

Malic acid is a DIcarboxylic acid, HO₂C-CH₂-CH(OH)-CO₂H,  containing 2 of those CO₂H guys, one flanking either end of the molecule.  Compare this to lactic acid, a MONOcarboxylic acid, HO₂C- CH(OH)- CH₃, which has only one CO₂H.  (FYI: the other CO₂H had evaporated into the air as carbon dioxide, CO2).  And there it is!  You have literally LOST an acid group, molecule for molecule, transforming a chemical with two CO₂H guys into a chemical with only one CO₂H guy.  So not only do you have fewer “CO₂H guys” overall (less acid) but also you’ve replaced puckery, tart, green apple acid with softer, richer milk acid.  Volia, the magic of chemistry!  (Now don’t you wish you’d stayed awake in that 7^th grade chemistry class instead of throwing spit balls in Amy’s hair?)

 Why does this impressive creature, Oneococcus, use malic acid anyway?  Why can’t he eat sugar like his BFF Mr. Yeast?  Lactic acid isn’t buttery, is it?  So where’s the butter from?  Hey, didn’t you mention something about acetate up there?  Isn’t that vinegar?  How do I know you won’t screw up your own brew with this MLF garbage?  If you’ve already got wine, why bother?  The answers to these and other enticing chemical quandaries will be addressed in the upcoming weeks.  But fear not fortuitous friends; I’ll be alternating these topics with awesome interview bites from super sommelier Jesse Rodriguez and star chef William Bradley, both of Addison Grand Del Mar.  Stay tuned!

With the holidays fast approaching, I often find myself in one of the most stressful times of the year. No, I’m not worried about family get togethers, painful travel, or finding appropriate presents for loved ones.  Every year at this time, I have to start selecting wines for the annual Sagient holiday party.  Over the years, the company has grown and the holiday party has grown with it.  What once was a small group of people sharing a table in a downtown steak house has become a full restaurant buy-out complete with multi-coursed tasting menus and paired wine selections.

As with any large party, picking the appropriate food and wine can be a major pain.  This year, however, I’m feeling more pressure than usual.  Maybe since I’m now “in the business,” I feel that my wine selections for the party will be more carefully scrutinized.  Maybe it’s because we have more wine drinkers in the office these days and so the standard cabernet/chardonnay selection just ain’t going to cut it anymore.  Or maybe it’s because in this tight economy I feel obligated to get a little more cost-conscious on selections without giving up on quality.  Whatever the reason, it is crunch time on wine selections with the party only four weeks away.

And so it was with much amusement (and just a little bit of envy) that I came across a posting on a NY Times blog about the recent holiday party held by Paulson & Co.  Paulson & Co. made about a zillion dollars last year shorting the subprime housing market and apparently is on track to do quite well again this year (shorting is betting on a price or asset to decrease in value).  So, what did these “master of the universe” types have for their holiday party? All first growth Bordeaux.  Not too bad, right?  You can see the menu below and read the article and see the full menu by clicking here.

For the Sagient team members who follow this blog – sorry, no first growth Bordeaux this year.  What is on tap?  Well, I enjoy torturing the staff a little bit so we’re going to keep the selections (and the location) secret for a while longer.  One thing that I can disclose is our final “wine” selection of the evening.  Nothing like a shot of cheap jet fuel grappa to end the year!

Here’s looking forward to the 2009 holiday party where we’ll hopefully be toasting with some Bruliam pinot noir!

Lamb Stew with Chickpeas and Pomegranate Molasses

(co-opted from Cooking Light January 2006)

Please scroll down for the video.

Stew is a delicious, satisfying, seasonal specialty that is relatively easy to make.  You can add or change ingredients on the fly – like substituting one root veggie for another (who cares if you use carrots, parsnip, potato, or rutabaga?).  It’s virtually indestructible, simmering for hours over low heat while infusing your kitchen with that heady smell of hearty comfort food and sweating onions.  You can double batches with ease, freezing some for a busy evening or allowing leftovers sit in the fridge for a few days, as the flavors develop even more complexity and harmony.  Use the “low and slow” cooking technique, which entails cooking with low heat for a more prolonged period of time.  Increasing cooking time at lower temperatures helps dissolve and tenderize the muscle tissue of the cheaper, tougher cuts of meat commonly used for soups or braises.  These meats also have a higher fat content that prevents them from becoming dry and tough after hours in the pot.  Look for beef stew meat, leg of lamb, or pork shoulder.  There is no reason to splurge for Kobe beef, New York strip or rack of lamb for simple stews.  Besides wasting money, it spoils the simple, humble grace of great soups.  I assure you that after 2 hours of simmering, your meat will be spoon tender and wonderful.

Below I will detail the 7 easy steps that will transform your life and restore the power to you.  If you envision it, you can be it!  Just kidding.  However, I will simplify and demystify the 7 easy steps that define great stews, so even a novice cook can wow pals and in-laws with a soulful, rich, homemade meal.

 1.  RIGHT PAN & RIGHT MEAT

Choose a Dutch oven or a large, heavy, lidded enamel pan with tall sides, like one of those gorgeous Le Creuset oval braisers, preferably in that creamy spring blue or that golden orange wash (are you listening, Brian?).  A tight fitting lid ensures no liquid escapes during prolonged simmering and that heat stays constant within.  But any heavy-duty soup pot and lid will do.  As I mentioned, ask your butcher which cuts of meat work best in stews.  This particular recipe specifies lamb leg.  Try to cut your meat into roughly equal sized cubes, so it cooks more evenly.  (FYI: The butchers at Homegrown Meats in La Jolla will happily cube the lamb leg for you).

2.  SAUTE AROMATICS

Aromatics include stuff like onions, leeks, garlic, and shallots.  Use any combination to create a base flavor for your stew.  Allow the onions to turn golden brown and carmelize a little.  You should have brown bits stuck to the bottom of your pan.  These sticky pieces of food create big flavors later on.  Once you’ve browned the onions, remove them from the pan so you can start on your meat.

 3.  DREDGE IN FLOUR

I like to use seasoned flour with salt and pepper.  Dredge the meat cubes in flour and then shake off the extra.  The flour helps create a tasty, crispy brown crust on the meat that seals the juice inside.  The admixture of flour fluff and melted fat also creates a roux of sorts that helps thicken your final product.

4.  BROWN YOUR MEAT

Heat your oil and then add your meat in batches.  Please don’t crowd the meat.  You must ensure your meat cubes have enough space around them to adequately brown up on all sides.  Remember, you’re just searing the outside of the meat; it is still totally raw in the middle (so don’t sample it just yet).  Aim to get a nice layer of brown yummy bits on the bottom of your pan.  You need these for flavor.

5.  DEGLAZE

Add your liquid (traditionally wine or broth) and scrape the bottom of your pan as you pour, and the broth comes to a boil.  The browned bits, called a “fond,” should release fairly easily.  This is the best part.

6.  LOW & SLOW

Cover and simmer your stew.  Simmering is not boiling or vigorously percolating or even chugging along.  Simmer means bubble- pause- bubble- bubble- pause.  It is a perambulating stroll, not a sprint.  Your meat needs time.  Believe me, if you go from raw chunks to cooked through in 20 minutes, your meat will be rubber.  So relax.  Have a glass of wine or read a book.  Hang out.

7.  ADD VEG LAST

So you can’t really “simmer” carrots for 3 hours.  You’ll have grey, tasteless, texture-less mush.  So unless you’re going for puree, add veggies last.  They only need 20 or 30 minutes, depending on their size.  That way you’ll confidently identify a carrot cube from the potato wedge with each bite.

Feel free to change up this recipe or pair it with another wine varietal altogether.  The Middle Eastern-inspired flavors of the pomegranate molasses sing out for allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, and even a pinch of clove.  Experiment, and add other spices for fun.  You can also toss in golden raisins, dates or dried fig.  It’s all good.  Drop me a line and let me know how your stew turned out and the wine you chose as its partner.  I’d love to know.  A Bruliam Kitchens Production follows below.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.

From Cooking Light January 2007

Ingredients

Cooking spray

2  cups  chopped red onion

6  garlic cloves, minced

1/3  cup  all-purpose flour (about 1 1/2 ounces)

2  pounds  boneless leg of lamb, trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces

1  tablespoon  olive oil

1  teaspoon  salt, divided

2  tablespoons  pomegranate molasses

2  (14-ounce) cans less-sodium beef broth

2  cups  (1/4-inch) slices carrot

1  (15-ounce) can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained

2  tablespoons  chopped fresh mint

1/2  teaspoon  freshly ground black pepper

4  cups  hot cooked couscous

Preparation

Heat a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Coat pan with cooking spray. Add onion; sauté 10 minutes or until tender and golden brown. Add garlic; sauté 1 minute. Spoon onion mixture into a large bowl.

Place flour in a shallow bowl or pie plate. Dredge lamb in flour, shaking off excess. Heat oil in pan over medium-high heat. Add half of lamb mixture; sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon salt. Cook 6 minutes, browning on all sides. Add browned lamb to onion mixture. Repeat procedure with remaining lamb mixture and 1/4 teaspoon salt.

Add pomegranate molasses and broth to pan, scraping pan to loosen browned bits; bring to a boil. Stir in lamb mixture. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 1 hour or until lamb is just tender.

Stir in carrot and chickpeas. Simmer, uncovered, 45 minutes or until lamb is very tender. Remove from heat; stir in remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt, mint, and pepper. Serve over couscous.

“A sense of place,” it’s the one of the greatest compliments a wine aficionado can bestow upon a wine maker.  More than the French word terroir, for New World wine lovers, “a sense of place” means that a wine tastes like the culmination of mindful farming, precise harvest, watchful fermentation, and conscientious aging.  Lovingly crafted, such wines stand in defiant opposition to the insipid, mass-produced, hot, over-oaked drek lining the shelves at Vons.  If you can taste fruit, warm sunshine, wet earth, clean rain, and a complete palate of complimentary, wonderful, ancillary flavors then you know firsthad what elevates a “sense of place” wine from simple drink to poetic muse.  It is why a pinot from Oregon should taste different than one from California, Otaga New Zealand, Okanaga BC, Maipo, or Yarra Valley.  It should be the winemaker’s stamp that reads “This is my wine.  I made it with heart and care.  It is unique and extremely special.  I hope you like it, too.”  It is what we strive for in our impassioned zeal to create the best pinots on the planet.

With a more generous and fanciful spirit, “a sense of place” is also a metaphor for the bewitching way a great wine transports us into the intimate recesses of our own imagination.  Nowhere has this been better played than in the recent WSJ article entitled “The Lamb-Chop Test.”  There John and Dottie taste tested 10 wine-shop recommended wines alongside simple broiled lamb chops, divining the best pairings of the day.  Beyond which wine “beat” another, the most alluring part of their prose was hearing those lovebirds detail the sappy, nostalgic places they imagined they’d been sipping their stuff.  They write (without irony), “The dinner had an altered feel depending on which wine we were tasting.  With Consilience Syrah, we were sitting around a fire on a beautiful night; with Gorrondona from Spain, the meal took us to a friendly provincial restaurant; with a 1999 Rioja, we were at a very fancy, white-tablecloth place.”  Obviously all crazy, wine-obsessed nuts share a passion for poetic hyperbole, lest you think my camping-flashback nausea was all in jest.

Today, in a humbler offering than a world class, white-tablecloth meal, I thought I’d share a personal, favorite wine-food pairing of mine: Lamb Stew with Chickpeas and Pomegranate Molasses with Tor Kenward’s Rock Syrah.  When I first tasted this particular syrah, at fancy white-tablecloth Addison Grand Del Mar, I was incontestably certain that it would pair magnificently with my (what cheeky impudence- it’s a Cooking Light recipe!) lamb stew.  The bold wine, equal parts juicy, ripe red fruit and peppery earthiness, would transform a hearty, braised, meat stew into something really special.  Plus the pomegranate molasses had a piquant fruity kick that could cut though the heaviness of this big wine.  And so, with a half bottle between us, a hot bowl of steamy lamb stew, and the persistent tinkling of Bob the Builder’s theme song in the background, Brian and I drifted off to the most romantic, magical place of all: that precious moment of quiet and calm in our very own House of Preschool Horrors.  Of course it was over almost instantaneously, first when Kid #1 pestered us for a sip of ”daddy’s water” followed by Kid #2 screaming to fast forward through the part with Muck and the porcupines. 

Please understand, this is not an endorsement to rush to your computer right this minute to buy the very same vintage of that very same wine (although it’s one we love).  Instead I challenge you to cook something satisfying and delicious tonight and pair it with whatever is in your cabinet right now.  Who knows where it will transport you?  And if you’re a little buzzed, you may find the bottle speaking or singing to you or even directly “saying to the lamb, ‘Get on my shoulders, little buddy, and I’ll carry you.’ ” Thanks John and Dottie; you’re always an inspiration.

Next week I will share the aforementioned recipe along with some simple techniques for mastering awesome, super-duper stew.