Upstate New York wineries have begun issuing yellow and red “warning” cards to rowdy and inappropriate tasting room customers.  Having spent a solid eight years slogging through the cold, relentless winters of upstate NY, this is pretty frigging hysterical, on many levels. (I’ll leave the snide remarks about people braving a blizzard to sample a few ounces of NY wine to the Weather Channel).  First and foremost, do you really think an obnoxious, loud-mouthed, sweaty, disheveled drunken slob is going to respond favorably to the card system?  My guess is that he thinks it’s all a joke, unless the winery refs can pilfer some half-cooked uniforms from the shoe salesmen at FootLocker.  “Excuse me sir,” intercedes the costume-clad winery ref, complete with the black shin guards and knee-highs.  “I am going to have to issue you a yellow card for deliberately spitting your riesling at the tasting room attendant.”  Note lengthy pause as ref interprets drunken slurring as actual English language elocution.  “No sir.  I understand you think our wine is ‘crap.’  No sir, this in not Opus One.  I understand sir – no sir, you are correct; it does not snow in Napa Valley.” 

To be fair, upstate New York is spectacularly beautiful, four days a year when the weather doesn’t suck.  My recollections of biking around Lake Cayuga and wine touring around Seneca are all dappled sunlight, thick verdant canopies of leaves and uncrowded, winding roads – all great stuff.  I know the wine industry has matured significantly since I first wine toured as a med student, back in (gasp) 1996 or 1998.  A wedding I attended at Red Newt winery in 2004 was impossibly beautiful.  I just can’t fathom the soccer card system handling unruly drunks in tasting rooms.  The obvious corollary is neither can I imagine nerdy med students ever being rowdy enough to merit such disciplinary action.  Then there is the sticky slope of assigning the escalating tiers of drunken indiscretion the appropriately color-coated card.  What exactly distinguishes red card reckless stupidity from a yellow card merlot-miscue?

Let’s consider some complex cases culled from my own family experiences.  Watching my children (among others) demolish the colorful ornamental foliage decorating the perimeter of Mauritson Winery in Dry Creek Valley – yellow card.  OK, that one was easy.  Breaking stemware?  Red card.  What if I joined the wine club to redeem myself, even if their wine was overrated?  Am I demoted back to yellow?  What about spewed crackers?  Allowing kids to visit a winery at all?  Gotcha!

Many years ago, when our son was quite small, Brian and I toted him along to our deluxe-plus tasting reservation at Duckhorn.  This being a well reputed and hoity-toity kind of establishment, Duckhorn kindly provided an endless supply of dry, mouth-coating, thick & chewy wine crackers.  I am talking about the ones that turn saliva into paper mache.  I, in turn, fed them to the squirmy, restless toddler perched on my lap.  A few rounds of merlot into our vertical, Bruno lurched forward.  He started to gag and a long, yo-yo of glue-colored drool descended from the corner of his mouth.  The kid needed water, and all we had was hundred buck merlot.  Like a superhero, I spun around and grabbed the sippy cup of yesterday’s tepid water that I had stashed in my diaper bag for just such emergencies.  Then, before I could melt the Plaster of Cracker, Bruno hurled.  Thick, moist chunks of half-digested cracker cascaded across our table with a discharge radius 3 tables deep.  Red card.  We bought a case of wine.  We joined the wine club.  No reprieve.  Red card stays.

Now again let’s examine last summer, when I ran the Napa to Sonoma Half Marathon.  (I cannot believe I am about to reveal this to the internet community at large).  The event was over-sold, and like most running events, the Port-A-Potty line snaked in endless circles.  Pre-race, my nerves are always raw, and I feel like the sorry ladies in the overactive-bladder commercials that run during Desperate Housewives.  With minutes until the gun sounded, I took a cue from the gal in front of me.  During the Star Spangled Banner, I dashed behind her into the vineyard rows behind the crowd.  I dropped trou and relieved myself among the budding vines of Domaine Carneros.  I’d imagine drunken urination on trespassed property is a red card gimme.  But what about pardons for pre-race conditions?

My limited understanding of soccer is that one red card equal automatic expulsion.  I have already accumulated multiple red cards in both Sonoma and Napa counties.  I face ejection from my both my own and adjoining cities.  I’m reminded of Marge Simpson lamenting to Homer, “Oh Homer, we’re the worst family in the neighborhood.”  He brightly replies, “Maybe we should move to a larger community, dear.”

“Wine blogging is the attention-seeking barking of lonely poodles.”  Ouch!  But wait, it gets nastier.  Ron Washam, creator of the wickedly funny Hosemaster of Wine website, dedicates his own blog to eviscerating other wine bloggers.  He portrays wine bloggers as a self-important, puffed up crew of verbose and prolific hacks with no audience beyond mom and their fellow wine blogging brethren.  (For the record, both of my parents read my writing regularly.  It’s only my mom who comments).  “Basically the whole wine blog world is like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a whole bunch of loudmouths trying to shout over each other, only less dressy.”  Fortunately Brian would be more flattered than offended when Washam declared he could not distinguish the wine bloggers from the Trekkies at a recent wine writers’ conference.  Washam, himself a former fine dining sommelier with near 20 years experience, finds many wine bloggers’ absence of formal wine training particularly egregious (and it is).  Still, it’s an easy caricature- wide-eyed Midwesterners descending on the Santa Rosa wine blogging conference like bombastic, laptop toting locusts, “I’m actually in wine country, where they grow grapes and stuff.  I tried a couple of grapes right off the vine!”  Low blow, Washam.  We can’t all be lucky enough to live in Healdsburg (like you and me)!  And while it may not be nice to reduce wine bloggers to huffy, audacious phonies, Washam has a point.

By one estimation, there are 500 English-language wine blogs, with 200 more in Europe.  That’s a lot of background static.  And how could all of those folks be appropriately credentialed to sell you their opinion of wine?  I am not convinced they are.  One lecture topic from the Napa Valley 2010 Symposium for Professional Wine Writers was entitled “What Wine Writers Need to Know about Winemaking.”  Let’s hope they know something about enology before they headline “professional wine writer” atop their C.V.  Better yet, how can a wine blogger convince you to buy the wine they snagged as freebie, industry swag last week?  And to what end?  The San Francisco Chronicle notes, “For the most part, a blog mention doesn’t register on any radar.”  One winery owner explained that a blog mention “almost never” parlays into actual sales.  Millions (OK, thousands) of people read either Wine Spectator or Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, but very few read more than one or perhaps two wine blogs with any regularity, ours included.  Heck, we’re not even good enough to underwrite the booze at our kids’ preschool fundraiser.  Their inclusion criteria demands 90 points or better from only Spectator or Parker.  Add to this cesspool the growing leverage of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, and wine blogging is already a hulking, obsolete dinosaur.  Not only am I an ineffectual lackey blowing smoke up my own ass but I’m already a washed up has been.  And even if I wanted to Tweet a post, I’d have the strenuously difficult and arduously, grueling and laborious task of trying to condense my often long winded, wordy, and dense literary voice into a butchered, condensed and profoundly curtailed, 140 word-limited, verbal skeleton of the incredibly important and useful things I feel compelled to say.

Few wine blogs command meaningful traction in the marketplace.    Alder Yarrow’s blog, Vinography appears to be the singular exception.  Noting the uptick in sales after a blog mention on Vinography, one small winery owner compared the sales effect of Yarrow’s online review to “a 93 from Wine Spectator.”  That is high praise considering most blog mentions don’t convert to tangible wine sales of any sort.  Much of Yarrow’s influence is attributed to the detailed behind-the-scenes information he provides about the wines he reviews- stuff examining the personal histories of the winemakers or vineyard owners, information that breathes vitality into drab commentary about gravely soil or oak barrel regimes.  His website reviews wine “through its emphasis on the stories, the people, and the passion behind wine, all told from a decidedly down-to-earth perspective” (lifted from vinography.com).  This website also happens to be quite glossy and very professional, the side galleys decorated with all sorts of food, bev, and cooking product placements.  Writing about the colorful anecdotes behind the wines is a strategy familiar to most readers of this blog- only we lack endorsements of any sort.

Perhaps much of Hosemaster’s ire stems from the tsunami of misguided, convoluted, and incomprehensible wine reviews littering the wine blogosphere.  It’s a little like the commercial with a random guy in scrubs, scalpel in hand, about to operate on someone’s brain.  The nurse says, “Are you Dr. Smith?”  Random guy replies, “No, but I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.”  In defense of the Bruliam blog, and in full disclosure, I am sure readers already know I am a phony.  Rather than shill any old juice, we only try to sell you our wine.  Look deeply into your screen.  Your eyes will grow heavy and weary.  Repeat after me, “I only drink Bruliam wines…I only drink Bruliam wines.” While I am not comfortable providing you with tasting notes from every bottle I consume, I am confident that I can relay the basic mechanics of wine production in a literate and entertaining way.  Only now my anxiety hinges on crafting the condensed Cliff Notes to my blog.  Of the 864,000 online wine discussions tracked last October, ¾ transpired via Twitter and other social networking sites.  I am now seeking 762,208,972 friends so I can compete with Kim Kardashian’s $10,000 per Tweet payout.

In the Broadway musical “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,” a bereft, famished Snoopy laments that Charlie Brown has forgotten his supper.  When Mr. Brown arrives moments later with his dog dish, Snoopy culls his deepest baritone and intones, “Behold!  This brimming bowl of meat and meal, which is brought forth to ease our hunger.”  It’s a great mock-up of the famous Italian verismo opera style.  Similar sentiments should be incanted when serenading the lowly organ meat known as “sweetbreads.”  “Lo!  This rich and tasty beast neck gland, chock full of protein and cholesterol!”  I might be more inclined to pen another stanza and further sing its praises were it not so readily available in numerous fine dining establishments near you.  Yes, sweetbreads are staging a comeback, bringing their rich, smooth deliciousness to the current food scene.  Organ meat is sexy, and organ meat is back!

Less than 5 years ago, I knew of only one San Diego restaurant serving up crispy, warm sweetbreads – Piattis in La Jolla.  A chain restaurant that once operated a branch in Yountville, it was the only game in town known to me.  We all know San Diego is known for great, temperate weather and a laid-back surfer mentality but it’s far from a food lovers lair of rapture.  But fortunately, change is in the air and in the kitchen.  Within the last 6 months, I have relished perfectly cooked sweetbreads in three different preparations at three different places.  I’ve been raving about Whisknladle’s crispy sweetbreads with brussel spouts and salty pancetta for the longest but have tasted equally satisfying bites at both Addison and Cucina Urbana.  At Addison, Chef Bradley does a crispy coated, deep fried number alongside lemony risotto.  Most recently, I was absolutely delighted to nosh on sweetbreads atop sautéed spinach at Cucina Urbana.  All three plates are terrific choices for the uninitiated sweetbread novice.  As scary as “organ meat” sounds, when well prepared, sweetbreads are easy to eat- crispy on the outside with a rich, savory, melt-in-your-mouth revelation within.  In fact, preparing sweetbreads at home is one of my loose 2010 kitchen resolutions, along with dishing up some homemade rabbit stew.  But somehow rabbit seems easier – just dredge in flour, brown and braise.  Sweetbreads are less approachable to the novice home chef.  Or so I explained to our patient and awfully indulgent Cucina Urbana waiter.  Not 10 minutes later, he returned to our table with “really simple” instructions from Chef Joe in the back.  “Chef said you can’t go wrong with this at home,” he repeated, hoping to butress my confidence.  Basically I got a pared down skeleton recipe highlighting the most important technical details of organ meat preparation.  Chef instructed me to 1) blanch in aromatics 2) peel off the membrane 3) slice into disks 4) refridgerate and weight them down to flatten ‘em out and finally 5) dredge in flour and pan sear.  Unfortunately, I am a cook and not a Chef.  I require on more detail, like exactly how thin do I slice?  How long in the fridge?  How long do I sear them?  What kind of aromatics?  If Chef says, “3 minutes and 12 seconds,” I set a stopwatch to 3 significant figures.  More information was required.

Sweetbreads are really the thymus gland, a neck organ that involutes (ie shrinks) with age in both animals and people.  In humans, the thymus is responsible for generating the T cells of our immune system and involutes after adolescence.  Older livery lacks significant thymic tissue as well, so sweetbreads come from young veal and sheep.  Veal sweetbreads are more popular in the U.S. and should be plump and firm when purchased from the butcher.  According to the table in Harold McGee’s seminal text (On Food & Cooking), sweetbreads contain two to three times the cholesterol of normal cuts of meats.  He attributes this to the smaller size of thymic cells relative to the larger skeletal muscle cells.  Thus thymic cells posses proportionately more cell membrane per unit weight, with cell membranes being comprised of fatty sterols and acids.  I guess that explains the rich, tender texture.  Sweetbreads are 12-33% protein and 3-23% fat, with 220-500 mg of cholesterol.  Good stuff.  McGee also points out that blanching (submerging in a slowly simmering liquid) washes proteins and microbes off the meat and coagulates them so they can be skimmed off.  He helpfully notes, “Blanching also moderates strong odors.”  In our house, I am guessing that sweetbreads will rank well below the perennial preschool favorites like unseasoned mac and cheese and bland, tasteless chicken nuggets. 

I consulted both The New Professional Chef, CIA, 6^th ed. and On Cooking, Techniques from Expert Chefs, 2^nd ed. for more detailed mise en place.  I now know that prior to cooking, sweetbreads first must be soaked overnight in cold water to remove all traces of blood.  I am hoping Chef Joe presumed I already knew that one.  That critical step kind of got lost in the game of telephone connecting his busy, restaurant kitchen to my four top table.  Next you must blanch the organ in court bouillon for 20 minutes (Ah-ha! Aromatics defined!) before removing the membrane by hand.  The CIA text provides great color photographs detailing the pressing technique.  Adjacent photos demonstrate how to bisect a kidney and deglove cow tongue of its tough, outer membrane.  This was starting to look awfully familiar to me- like autopsy pathology, except the last time I bisected a kidney it was to identify infection or tumors.  The whole sweetbreads-yourself experiment was starting to look more ick and less sweet.  But February is a good a time as ever to whack out those pesky New Year’s Resolutions, so I intend to bravely forge ahead.  We all know Julie & Julia has already been done so I will spare you my whining about how I’m pining for a book deal, too.  Instead I promise you Bruliam video footage when I prepare sweetbreads at home in the upcoming weeks.  After all, it’s a great pair with pinot noir.

Only one of my children is truly wine obsessed.  While we eat dinner, she waits patiently nearby, one ear tuned to the TV and the other to the clink of our glassware.  Every ten minutes, she saunters over to investigate.  “Is it wine time yet?”  she propositions.  Exasperated by the repeated interrogation, Brian and I guzzle the last third of our bottle, if only to point out, “Look.  It’s empty.  We drank it all.” 

“No it’s not,” she persists.  She reaches for the rose-colored meniscus of backwash pooled in the belly of the stem. 

“Fine, it’s yours,” I concede.

“Guys!  GUYS!  It’s wine time,” she joyously proclaims with too much gusto, commandeering her sibs for the obligatory tasting.  She sips with great relish and thoughtfulness, mimicking the whole swirling and sniffing charade.  It would be cute if it weren’t so weird.  (Do I really look like that?)  She is still contemplating the contents when her siblings reply with the preprogrammed, “Mmmm!  Pinot,” even when it’s not.

Having endured innumerable wine tastings disguised as kid-centric picnics, our children are pretty well versed in wine lingo.  Words like “press,” “zin,” and “the crushpad” color our vernacular, so the kids assimilate our conversations, even when it’s not directed to them.  Interest, understandably, waxes and wanes with the natural cycle of the vine.  When Brian and I are in the throes of harvest, the kids pretend play “winery farm” or “tasting store,” reinventing our jobs and hobbies for the pinot precocious preschooler.  I wasn’t sure whether I’d be subtly reprimanded or excommunicated from the playground when our girls’ teacher reported back that one of them was offering up “tastes of her wine” from her water bottle at lunchtime.  (I’m relived to report she was sampling pinot, at least).  The wine business can be a touchy subject for elementary aged school kids.  We’d hate to give the wrong impression or support underage drinking.  On the other hand, our son supplied wine grapes for sharing last year, so his class could sample ripe wine grapes firsthand.  That seems benign enough, but I’m still in the dark as to my child’s ultimate plan for his burgeoning cork collection.  Would it be too embarrassing if he toted 100 corks to school for his 100 Day celebration?  More specifically, 100 wine-stained, used corks hidden inside an unmarked brown paper bag?  Would his fellow doe-eyed, innocent kindergarten mates ever correctly guess what he’d collected and counted for 100 Day?

I’m hopeful playing vino-curious is the kids’ effort to engage themselves in our world rather than a creepy foreshadowing of alcoholism.  After all, I usually puke if I drink more than 3 glasses of wine in an hour; metabolizing juice with more than 15% alcohol defies our nerdy DNA.  So I turn the other cheek and pretend to not know my own children when they loudly banter outside of well known Sonoma County tasting rooms querying one another if they prefer, “Viognier or the pink one.”

“Rose.  You mean, rose,” my preternaturally mature wino-baby corrects her twin.

My wine consumption started in college, with Gato Nego, a South American red decorated with a miniature plastic cat leashed to the bottle neck by a teeny cord.  My wine education started with the Wall Street Journal.  I have been reading John and Dottie’s weekly “Tastings” column for so many years now that I consider their vino-dictions an immutable precondition of the Weekend Edition.  And so I was disheartened, befuddled, and stupefied to read that their 579^th column (over “12 years- a full case!”) would be their last.  I suppose they are the latest victims of the economic woes slaying newspapers across the country.  While their dual salaries plus the cost of all of that wine must have been a tremendous financial undertaking for the Journal, their column was the only one that brought great heart and humanity to this notoriously staid and data-driven newspaper.

You’ve probably already noticed that I refer to Mr. Brecher & Ms. Gaiter by their first names, John and Dottie, as if they are my actual friends.  This is because I feel like they are, in a more tangible way than my weird, fetishist obsession with wine/fiction writer Jay McInerney.  While John and Dottie’s wine column educates across wine regions and varietals, it is actually about the intersection of life and work, wine and love.  They divulge both family vacations and romantic dates, all for our voyeuristic pleasure, carrying us readers along in the sidecar of their wine-centric lives.  They open their hearts joyously and share their contagious enthusiasm and passion for drinking wine.  In fact having read their heartwarming autobiography, Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage, I’m privy to the details of how they fell in love, dual career trajectories, their painful journey to conceive a child (they have 2 girls), and how they finally landed such a plum gig in wine journalism.  It was in that autobiography, reading about their hard-won firstborn’s birth, that I first learned of the French tradition of putting a drop of wine to a just born baby’s lips.  This act seemed so simple but so graceful, connecting new with old, the drink of the ages with fertile soil and fertile bodies, that I co-opted it as my own when my children were born many years later.  So yes, I know John and Dottie well, and like any friend, I mourn their job loss, too.

I hadn’t actually intended to post a blog about two wine journalists I only half-way know.  Can you imagine my writing about my buddy Bob (Robert Parker) or hanging out with Jim (James Laube)?  But the other morning, during an especially sweaty and treacherous spin workout, my mind wandered to the way this influential husband and wife wine tasting team informed my personal wine style.  Countless times their column has served as the springboard for my own musings.  Again and again I’d read how John and Dottie were so moved by a certain wine’s moxie that they’d call up the vintner to discuss what made that bottle a standout.  Super sleuths first, their traditional journalism background provided the tools to dig to the bottom of any barrel!  Just last year it inspired me to pick up the phone and call the actual Josh Jensen, in the flesh, to inquire after Calera’s vino-lok.  And like John & Dottie, I try to avoid endorsing a specific wine for you to buy or taste (other than my own!).  Instead I encourage readers to taste more often, try new varietals or regions, and think about why they did or did not enjoy them.  What you think is dreadful may represent my favorite producer, and that’s OK.  It makes wine is fun, satisfying, and deeply personal.  Well before kids, the Tastings column inspired my monthly wine tasting club, comprised of dorky, fledgling pathologists-cum-novice winos.  Never have I been as proud as when Brian and I were mentioned by name in the 2003 Open That Bottle Night post-festivities retrospective.  Ironically, Brian received more “Hey, I saw you in the Journal” e-mail tidings after John and Dottie’s shout out than he has for all of his finance citings combined, over 15 years.

And about Open That Bottle Night, that genius of a holiday borne entirely from John and Dottie’s merlot-tinted imagination.  Singlehandedly they transformed a dreary, winter weekend into a country-wide wine party and annual tradition.  For nearly ten years now, John and Dottie have implored, cajoled and noodged us readers to open that special bottle of wine that we’ve been hoarding for centuries for the mystery occasion that never materializes.  On the final weekend of February, they urge us to shake off the winter blues, pop the cork, and tell them about it.  It’s unprecedented really.  A few weeks after the event, John and Dottie publish a multi-page compilation of anecdotes, recipes, and one-liners cataloging America’s most treasured bottles and the people who drank them, with a little footnote explaining what they imbibed at home.  It’s an interactive give and take, and they make us readers the stars, like real friends would do.  Can you fathom Paris Hilton inviting the collective readership of US Weekly to party next Thursday night in their favorite panties and then tweet her explaining which skivvies they selected and why?  It’s preposterous.  Those stars are not like us, but John and Dottie are.  They’re just a regular ‘ole married couple who fervently love wine and want us to share their fun.  Although their column is kaput, John and Dottie will always have a special place in my heart and in my cellar. 

Should they need (an unpaid) wine writing gig, I give them an open-ended forum and opportunity to share their thoughts here, on the Bruliam blog.  If they do, we’ll donate $500 to the charity of their choice.  John and Dottie, are you out there?

While getting my hair colored for the holidays, my hairdresser recounted the itinerary from his recent South African getaway.  His trip included a stay in Stellenbosch, a famous wine growing region, where he lustily overindulged in the local red wines, which he “absolutely cannot” tolerate here “because of sulfites.”  He went on to explain that South African wines contain fewer sulfites allowing one to drink all day long, without feeling bad. 

“What do you drink when you’re at home?” I asked.

“Chardonnay,” he quipped with flourish.

Now I have no idea whether or not South African wine producers employ a lower concentration of sulfites than we Californians do, but it is an interesting question.  More pointedly, though, I can definitively tell you that the preservation of white wine requires more sulfite than red ones.  So drinking white wine domestically but red vino abroad exemplifies the miraculous, phantasmagorical power of what I call The Vacation High.  Drinking anything in South Africa’s wine country sounds divine but fails to unravel the myth of sulfites.  So why is it that red wine requires less SO4 than whites?  It’s the phenolics, the lovable chemical compounds with the funny name.  And they look like this:

 ************DISCLAIMER- CARTOONS ARE MERELY A USEFUL PICTORAL- TEXT TO FOLLOW IS ENTIRELY COMPREHENSIBLE.********************

(Sorry, guys.  I know I’m a real S.O.B to lure you with a sassy hairdresser anecdote only to bait-and-switch with the biochemistry…)

Phenolics, sometimes referred to as polyphenols, are chemical compounds produced by plants, including grapevines.  The phenolics we care about are soluble chemical compounds located predominantly in grape skins and seeds.  Phenolics include things like tannins, which make your mouth feel dry and puckery and the anthocyanins that color red wine red.  As you know, grape juice from both red and white grapes is clear.  Red wines are hued because they are fermented in conjunction with the grape skins; white wines are not.  In other words, to make white wine, you smoosh grapes and ferment only the juice, discarding the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems.  With red wines, you squash the grapes and mix the juice, pulp, skin, seeds, and maybe even some stems together and then ferment the whole thick, gooey glob en masse.  Then you drain off the juice later.  This means that through the process of fermentation, unique skin and seed components are extracted into red wine that are absent from whites.  These diverse compounds are united in that their chemical silhouette each includes a hexagon-shaped ring.  Beyond that, the compounds look and function differently, modifying different aspects of a wine’s personality, taste and mouthfeel.

There are 6 different classes of soluble phenols.  Only one team, the cinnamate esters, is found in the pulp, their great distinction being the only soluble phenol present in white wines.  Two different phenolic gangs control color: the anthocyanins and the flavonols.  Players on tribe anthocyanin have names like peonidin, delphinidin, and petunidin-3-glucoside.  Of course these compounds were first isolated from a colorful garden of peonies, delphinium, and petunias before being noted in grape skins too.  The flavonols are color co-factors that make red wines appear richer and redder.  The flavan-3-ols live only in grape seeds and taste bitter.  This is why we squeeze the grape skins and seeds so judiciously at press, lest we crack the seeds and leach the bitterness into our finished product.  When the flavan-3-ols congregate into chains called polymers, they make tannins.  Tannins, of course, are responsible for astringency.  Then over time, as wines age, the tannin chains grow even longer, softening that distinct, mouth-puckering quality.  Tannins also polymerize with oxygen exposure, via oxidation reactions.  In a way, tannins act like an oxygen sponge, absorbing the harmful effects of oxygen without wrecking the juice.  Since red wines contain more phenolics than whites, they can absorb, or “consume” more oxygen without detrimental effect.  In fact, sometimes oxygen exposure improves red wines, by mimicking and hastening the effects of aging thereby mellowing any acerbic, tannic harshness.  In contrast, white wines fade from vibrant straw and honeyed hues to murky brown after very little exposure to ambient air.  This is why white wines require more sulfites, potent anti-oxidants, to maintain their delicate color.  Hearty red wines already posses a built in oxygen buffer through the phenolics extracted from the grape skins and seeds.  (Plus brown discoloration is more obvious in pale, white wines than inky, purple reds).

Lastly, phenolics are important to our health.  You have probably heard about them on 60 Minutes or read about them in the newspaper.  Indeed many of the cardio-protective effects of red wine are attributed to phenolics, in particular the final chemical class called “stilbenes.”  Within squad stilbene, the most famous player is resveratrol, touted to reduce heart disease, prevent dementia and diabetes, protect against colds and influenza, increase bone density, and even slow aging.  As you can imagine, resveratrol is the focus of frenzied scientific and drug research.  But before you guzzle away your inhibitions in the name of science and good health, remember “a 150 pound man would have to drink 1,500 bottles of pinot noir a day to get the same dose of resveratrol that [one researcher] gave his mice.”  (Wine Spectator, May 31, 2009).  So yes, science supports red wine for healthy hearts because red wines are chalk full of phenolics, the loveable chemical compound with the funny name.

Are you looking for a New Year’s Resolution you can really keep?  One you can sustain for 365 days with minimal deprivation, asceticism, or hardship?  One you can contemptuously flaunt with derisive success while your neighbor schleps to Weight Watchers?  One that showcases your will power, persistence and gut-wrenching drive while your office mate surreptitiously scarfs down Krispy Kremes in a dark closet?  How about “drink more wine?”  For the second consecutive year, John and Dottie from the WSJ have compiled their annual list of wine resolutions.  They advocate wonderful stuff like engaging a sommelier and jotting down tasting notes from your first sip to the last swallow, observing how wine changes over time.  For their complete list, please click here.

Sampling wines from different states sounds especially entertaining.  If you have competitive friends, craft a map of the United States as a Bingo card.  The first person to finish wines from all 50 states yells out “Sloshed!” before passing out and buying the next round of drinks.  Joshing aside, I fully champion the resolution to research your wine.  When you can’t tread the clay soil of Pomerol, at least you can Google it.  Every nugget of wine knowledge contributes to the story of that bottle, making it more personal and more enjoyable for you. 

To that end, I would add to their stellar list, “Pay a Restaurant Corkage Fee.”  Unearth that precious bottle of wine that you’ve been saving for a festive occasion and let someone else cook and clean for you.  Better yet, compile a crew of food and wine loving pals and ask each to contribute a bottle of wine that is meaningful to them.  Get lost in your friends’ rapturous wine tales and be transported.  This is what happened to us when we joined 2 other couples for dinner at a local Italian joint near Healdsburg over the holidays. 

As soon as we’d packed into the minivan (pathetically unhip but practical for transporting 6 adults), audible burbling of “What did you bring?” crackled in the Cheerio-scented air.  It was all very dishy and conspiratorial.  I reverently asked the driver if I could hold her bottle on my lap as it was rattling around precariously in the driver-side cup holder, one designed for a Venti Starbucks, not a 750 ml bottle.  None of us had discussed bringing wine in advance of our gathering, but it was obviously a given for such a vino-centric crowd.  One couple grew grapes and the other worked in wine distribution.  Amazingly our three bottles spanned 2 hemispheres, 3 countries (United States, Australia, and Italy) and three varietals (cab, Shiraz, and a Brunello di Montalcino).  But best of all, each wine told a unique story and embodied the sentiments and memories of the donor. 

We selected a 1997 Kenwood Artist Series Cabernet Sauvignon that was gifted to us by a winemaker friend.  This particular bottle represented the first vintage from his first year working at Kenwood.  It was presented with the caveat, “drink it…soon.”  Ever literal and with the giver’s warning still reverberating in our eager ears, we cracked it 24 hours later.  Plus we rarely purchase cabs ourselves so we felt inspired to pop open an old California classic, especially one from such a decorated local label.  (Beyond Kenwood’s long-standing reputation, the label showcases the green and gold rolling hills of a landscape portrait by French expressionist Rizo).  The grape growers proffered an Australian Langley Shiraz of deep personal importance.  Years ago, the wife passed an extended sojourn in Australia, befriended the daughter of the winemaker, and ultimately worked at his winery.  So for her, this wine was a potable reminder of her winemaking roots and cherished friends abroad.  Then double dipping in sentiment stew, this particular bottle had been gifted to her on her wedding day by the other couple dining with us, who understood how meaningful her Australian experience had been.  Since it was our first time dining with the grape growers, we were touched to be included in consuming this extra special bottle.  Lastly, the wine importers toted a youngish (2004) Gaja Brunello, a nod to our love of Tuscan wines and the regional fare of our Italian restaurant. 

Since the Gaja needed some air, we started with the old cab.  In fact when the poor waiter accidentally reached to decant the Kenwood instead of the Gaja, we all screamed, “Noooooooooooo” in geeky, panicked unison.  As for the old stalwart, the tannins were soft and supple.  Muted whiffs of dark berry and cherry complimented a smooth, mellow texture.  The shiraz was bright and fruity with a little spice, singing with homemade fennel-flecked sausage and lentils.  Lastly the Brunello was lusty, fruity and delicious.  Of course we were lucky to dine with friends who swoon over wines like tweens watching Gossip Girl.  But it was the story, passion, and conviction driving their wine choices that made each bottle magical.  Like knowing the musical themes before you first hear an opera or studying Michelangelo in print before a trip to Italy, Art, even drinkable art, becomes yours.  The stories forge connections.  Context and details make every wine more delicious. 

So in 2010 I say, dear Brigade, do your research, pick wine tales above fish tales, and pay the darn corkage fee. 

Cheers to a great 2010!

The most common misconception about Bruliam Wines is that we actually own grapevines.  Contrary to popular belief, one needn’t own vines to produce wine.  Most anyone can buy grapes from farmers and make the kind of wine that they love to drink.  But that seems counterintuitive to folks.  So instead the conversation usually goes something like this:

Kerith is approached by old friend whom she hasn’t seen in a long time.

Old friend: “How are you?  Geez, your kids are getting pretty old.  You must be back to work by now, right?”

Kerith: “I’m not practicing medicine, but we’ve started a wine brand, so I work on that.”

Old friend: “Oh, so you own a vineyard.”

So I launch into a 25 minute treatise about our operation, vineyards, clones, fermentation temperatures, and yeast, which pretty well scares them away until another 20 or so months have passed.  But I can’t help myself.  There is a siren-song allure to crafting a perfect wine.  By that I mean concocting a beverage that reflects a certain growing season in a particular place, truly “time in a bottle.”  (OK, you can gag now).  This heroic quest fuels our insanity, a peripatetic crusade to amass small lots of grapes from a bunch of select locations.  And we’re not alone in our grape grabbing mania.  Outsourcing fruit is becoming increasingly popular, especially in this age of boutique wine producers.  The model we follow aspires to the success of Brian Loring (Loring Wines) or Adam Lee (Siduri Wines).  Both labels produce a number of exceptional pinot noirs from California and Oregon, without owning any vines at all.  In fact Siduri purchases grapes from 20 different vineyards, creating small lots of vineyard specific pinot noir.  Indeed we shared that vision when we opted to purchase grapes from both Monterey County (Santa Lucia Highlands) and Mendocino (Anderson Valley).  We sought to make two distinctly different pinot noirs, products of two very disparate climates, soils, and terroirs.  Unfortunately as you know, Mother Nature got the best of us in 2008, with the smoke taint.  But for the 2009 harvest, we’ve given the Anderson Valley another try, after a terrific, fire-free growing season.  Plus we’ve added a Sonoma Coast offering, from an exceptional vineyard called Gap’s Crown.

The most fantastic success story to date is the modern fairy tale of Kosta Browne.  Once upon a time two guys wanted to make some pinot.  Like Cinderella herself, they worked and toiled, cleared plates and tidied up after dinner service.  When no fairy godmother materialized to bankroll their dream, they pooled their collective tip money (widely acknowledged in urban wine myth as $20 bucks / night) to purchase their first ton of grapes.  This past September, Michael Kosta and Dan Browne sold the controlling interest in their company to Vincraft, a wine-focused private equity group, for almost $40 million.  Their mega cash payout is not exceptional given their insane track record for crafting critically acclaimed wines (43 of 49 pinots scored by Wine Spec ranked 90 points and higher).  What is astounding is that these two “stoked….really excited” guys don’t own a single vine (WS, 9/09).  Vincraft is essentially buying their star power and enology “It-factor,” and I presume full access to the Sebastopol warehouse where their mastery spins grapes to gold.  To top off their can’t-get-any-better year, Wine Spectator has named their 2007 Sonoma Coast pinot noir their #4 wine in the top 100 of 2009.  Oh yeah, did I mention their Sonoma Coast is a blend from 4 vineyards, including Gap’s Crown?

In my very first viticulture lecture, UC Davis professor Dr. Mike Anderson warns students against trying to both grow grapes and vinify them.  He admonishes, “I’m going to now, and probably later, caution you against doing these things.”  He goes on to show a diagram with three bubbles: one surrounds a photo of grapevines, another displays a barrel room, and the third overlaps both with a couple of baseball-capped guys standing on a crusher-destemmer.  The caption reads, “You have to do both, don’t you?”  Dr. Anderson scolds, “I’m gonna tell you again, I think it’s a really bad idea.”  So my first farming lesson proved that even the experts endorse winemakers buying grapes from dedicated farmers.  My second epiphany confirmed the above adage.  Farm science should be left to those better suited than I.  Enduring 4 hours of lecture on irrigation was about as boring to me as your reading my jargon-heavy musings on sugar transporters. 

A few weeks ago my girls’ swim teacher voiced an out of the blue request.  He asked if we ever allowed weddings at our Temecula vineyard.  I said, “We don’t own a vineyard…” 

“But you make wine, right?” he protested.  His delightful presumption was not illogical; if we live in San Diego and make wine then we must own a vineyard in Temecula.  To be magnanimous, I offered up full access to the warehouse in the meth-laden corner of San Francisco where we work, but that wasn’t exactly the idyllic, pastoral setting he’d envisioned.

Wine touring with children is different from wine touring without them; it’s worse.  Over the recent Thanksgiving holiday, we were brazen enough to attempt this suicide mission with not only our three children but also an additional 5 kids ages 6 and under.  We were joined by two other families, other parents with equally barbaric thresholds of pain tolerance and self-destructive tendencies.  We started at Mauritson, which seemed a reasonable choice given the beautiful green swath of front lawn where the kids could joyfully frolic while we adults savored the Rockpile bounty.  As you can guess, nothing with kids is ever quite as idyllic as you envision.  At one point, just my babysitter and I were left to corral the herd of children while the other adults (who are obviously much smarter and babysitter savvy than I) enjoyed a leisurely winery tour.  She and I just stood there, horrified, as the boys sabotaged the defenseless foliage decorating the periphery of the lawn.  One boy after another dove head first into the flowering bushes, their wild arms opening and closing in a primitive chomping motion.  For well over 15 minutes they entertained one another by repeating the same frenzied crunching, like the teeth of hungry lawn mower killing anything in its path.  And I just stood there, frozen, unable to rally from this fog of awe and bewilderment.  There they were, ages 6, 6, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3, and 2, the physical embodiment of birth control, ready to scare any leaf-peeping, love-blinded honeymooners into immediate celibacy.  Luckily the winery was low on tourists that morning.  Sometime after the plants were near dead, my son ambled over to me, bow legged and visibly uncomfortable, picking at his bum.  “Mom, I have rocks in my underpants,” he whined.  And that about sums up our experience; it was as prickly as sitting on a cactus – naked.

But still we adults begged for more self-flagellation and deeper emotional canings.  We wanted to taste at Papapietro Perry, an absolutely wonderful, small production, boutique label specializing in pinots and zins.  Their tasting room is simple, a single tasting room absent any winemaking facility or vineyards or grounds beyond the gravely parking lot.  It is one structure among the many mom and pop producers comprising the aggregate “Family Wineries” on Dry Creek Road.  In addition to the tasting bar, their facility is brimming with wine country mementos, t-shirts, and house wares, sparkly doodads beckoning chubby preschool fingers to grab and touch.  Miraculously though, they provided family entertainment, a glass bowl of crayons and paper.  (As a quick aside, I am always reinvigorated to discover another winery that recognizes the elementary school set.  It doesn’t require much effort to finance some coloring books, markers, paper or Otter Pops.  It’s incredibly generous, and impactful on us consumers, when a winery demonstrates such thoughtfulness.  Obviously Child Protective Services may be alerted should we leave our wee kin tied to a stake in front of a winery.  Pleasant or not, we must tote that baggage along.  If you’d like a list of more kid-friendly wineries, please drop me an e-mail).  So yes, Papapietro Perry is equipped to deal with children, but not the entire kindergarten.  Of course the glass bowl shattered, and my twins started to howl.  What could I do but grab as many handfuls of touristy trinkets as I could palm?  I hoped compounding my wine purchase by several hundred dollars worth of useless ornaments would assuage my guilt, for I was responsible for a path of destruction piloted by 8 kids amped up on fruit rolls and no nap.  For me, the crash of the bowl was like an alarm, signaling the end of a long, trying day.  It was time finally to head back home, relax, and open a couple of bottles of wine in our backyard, where our neighbors don’t mind when we duck tape the kids to a tree (or at least they don’t say anything to us about it).  Sitting outside, I sifted through the Papapietro loot.  Nestled among the trinkets was the niftiest wine cork key chain.  What cheap and genius advertising!  Immediately I swapped out their cork for a Bruliam one, a project requiring no skill, tools, or hot glue gun.  It’s a craft that even you can do at home, with some 29 cent eyes from the hardware store.  What better way to preserve the memory of your first Bruliam experience than with a brand-new-for-the-holidays keychain?  Twenty times a day, every time you schlep to the grocery store, dry cleaners, soccer field, or drug store, you’ll be reminded of our label.  And who knows, if your kid tosses your electronic car keys into the toilet, maybe they’ll bob to the top before the fetid water shorts the circuit. 

In their annual pre-Thanksgiving Wall Street Journal column, John and Dottie proclaim, “There is no perfect wine for Thanksgiving dinner,” which really takes the pressure off of those guys looking to impress their fiancée’s Screaming Eagle-guzzling dad.  On the other hand, our most beloved WSJ wine columnists strongly endorse savoring an American pinot noir with the cranberries and bird this year.  And you know what?  It’s the best time ever to be a pinotphile.  After years of playing the shrinking violet behind the shameless, self-promoting shadow of big brother cabernet sauvignon, American pinot noir is poised to explode.  Be thankful this year that we’ll celebrate restraint, elegance and balance instead of brazenly overoaked, astringent fruit bombs (not that I’m biased or anything!).  Never mind that John and Dottie themselves are planning to drink an aged California cab on Thanksgiving Day; if we’d attentively cellared a 30 year old Mondavi Reserve, we’d devour that too.  But for those of us lacking a deep, thoughtful cellar brimming with spectacular old reds, indulge instead in a sexy, berry, floral-spiked or earthy funk-flecked American pinot noir.  John and Dottie cajole and implore us to “go with an American pinot noir” for good reason.  Pinot’s cranberry and red berry mirror the tastes in our favorite Thanksgiving foods and are soft and wonderful to drink.  In fact they confess to being “somewhat obsessed with Pinot from Hirsch vineyards.”  Their words must thrill the whole Hirsch pinot noir operation because only weeks before, Matt Kramer from Wine Spectator cited Hirsch among the finest examples of Sonoma Coast pinots.  He went so far as challenging us readers to relish an “extreme Sonoma Coast” pinot noir before dying.  Is that ever a divine endorsement of wine or what?    Oh transcendent incantation, Kramer extols “America’s pinot noir treasures” like the holy sacrament.  (By the way, as a Jew I can say that).  So go with pinot, dear Brigade, and support our brethren. 

Last year, I was so undone by schlepping our children from San Diego to Los Angeles in our infernal family adventure of misery and pain that I never though to ask our hostess what we drank.  Whatever it was, it was absolutely perfect.  Grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, and friends eclipse any wine label I can fathom.  In this year’s episode of wretched perdition and suffering part deux, we intend (stupidly) to extend that 2 hour drive to LA all the way north into Sonoma County.  No wine in the world, not even the most fortified ports of old, can soothe the excruciating, endless torment of 10 long hours in the car with 3 kids aged 6 and under.  I am hoping that by Thanksgiving Day, my heartburn will have abated and my bald patch will have resprouted (no such luck for Brian, unfortunately), after having pulled out handfuls of hair just past the Long Beach freeway exit (3 hours and 20 minutes down, only 6 hours and 40 minutes to go!!). 

But beyond the travails of toddler travel, this Thanksgiving Brian and I are incredibly thankful for the opportunity to oblige our passion for winemaking and finally release our inaugural offering to you.  So this Thanksgiving, we will pop open a bottle from our personal stash of Bruliam wine and toast you, our loving cheerleaders and ardent supporters.  We thank you, Brigade, and cheers!  May you enjoy a peaceful and fulfilling Thanksgiving holiday.

Like so many life experiences, I knew about it, I’d read on it extensively, but I’d never experienced it firsthand.  After all, I never thought it could happen to me.  In fact, just this past summer, I’d boasted in an online discussion that I’d never suffered a stuck fermentation (in my oh-so-extensive single year of harvest experience).  Now let me eat crow and cower at the toes of the great karmic gods, for hubris followed me to Rockpile.

“High Brix juices pose a fermentation problem for yeast” (Bisson and Butzke).  We knew the Rockpile fruit would be challenging.  Given the high Brix and the variable berry composition, which ranged form super ripe to full fledged raisining, we braced for an uphill battle against every conceivable handicap.  Our grapes came in at over 30 °Brix.  My UC Davis literature doesn’t even propose guidelines for the nutritional supplementation of grapes over 27 °Brix.  We were in unchartered territory, for me at least.  None of this was addressed in my neatly packaged, academic syllabus.  Further complicating matters, the acid was high (yeah!) but so was the pH (boo!), meaning that if we added neutral water to dilute the sugar, it would just push the pH even higher.  But we went for it, starting “au natural,” waiting for the must to start churning and bubbling on its own before supplementing with Clay’s cultured “Rockpile” yeast.  Everything looked remarkably good.  The sugar dropped, and the cap held firm.  In fact, fermentation began so smoothly that we’d almost forgotten about those pesky raisins.

“Once cells lose viability or permanently adapt to the adverse conditions of the environment by reducing sugar consumption, it is very difficult to restore the rate of fermentation” (Bisson).  Zinfandel is infamous for unevenly ripened clusters, and our super ripe fruit was no exception.  We’d have to contend with raisins living in our must.  Since we’re a mom and pop-sized operation, we ferment our wine in small, one ton plastic bins.  I think you’ve seen them in video clips and photos.  They are plastic boxes, devoid of fancy hoses, screens or pump attachments.  As the must ferments, the raisins sink to the bottom of the box and stay there, rehydrating in the juice, leaching their potent, sugary venom into our percolating concoction.  Contrast this with large production fermentation tanks.  These bad boys employ sieve like grates so that during pumpovers, the raisins are ensnared in the mesh and removed from the vessel.  This is a tremendous advantage which is lost to us.  Instead, for every bit of sugar our yeast consumed, the raisins just spit out more.  And the yeast got used to it, foreshadowing the problems ahead.  Not only does this hinder any attempt to get a “true” sugar reading, but also for every step forward, we took two steps back.  Amidst this chaos, the alcohol content was slowly rising.  Unable to sustain a reasonable rate of fermentation against an unrelenting tide of sugar and stressed by the ascending alcohol, our yeast first grew sluggish, and then they gave up.  Simmering quelled to the tranquil lull of the single, rare bubble.  Brix chipped away in appalling 0.1 degree increments until it arrested altogether.  And there was still substantial residual sugar in our half-fermented must.

“By the time the rate has dramatically slowed, it is often too late” (Bisson).  It’s not like we hadn’t tried every trick in the book.  As the tizzy of agitated turbulence slowed to a near simmer, we hurled life vests and buoys at our sluggish juice.  We dumped in yeast hulls, ghostly silhouettes of deceased yeast, thought to sop up toxins and magically bring dead fermentations back to life.  We moved the must into a small heated tank, hoping the warmth would stimulate the yeast to rev their engines for a final push.  We aerated the juice and ultimately racked it, hoping to get some oxygen in there, too.  None of it worked.  Obviously, like Dr. Bisson warned, it was too late.

“Re-initiation of fermentations that contains a large population of nonviable cells is particularly challenging” (Bisson).  Amen, Dr. Bisson.  We were sitting on a box of dessert wine riddled with dead yeast, with no option other than to restart the entire process in earnest.  So Clay’s awesome second in command mixed up some new yeast with fresh juice and added it back in small aliquots to our steadfastly stuck stuff.  Behold the sugar dropped by a point and then stopped again.  Everyday our morning e mails started with an excited, “What happened today?  Is it dry yet?  Is it dry yet?  Is it dry yet?” only to be answered by a mournful, “Not yet.  Down 0.1.”  It was excruciating.  Days rolled into weeks, and finally the cap began to collapse.  When the once-firm raft of floating grape skins started to soften, disintegrate, and sink back down to the bottom, we knew it was time.  We had to press our zin, even though it wasn’t dry.  We had no choice.

We dropped into the winery on Halloween weekend (with pumpkin bread).  Clay was all smiles, as that morning’s chemistries declared that our wine had ultimately fermented to dryness in the barrel.  And it had been a sizeable drop, from about 1.3 °Brix into negative numbers (which indicates dryness).  Nobody knows if this dumb luck was secondary to the aggressive racking, final aeration, or any of other Hail Mary gimmicks we employed in final desperation.  None of this, by the way, is either sanctioned or condoned in my trusted textbook.  But that doesn’t sway my interest in or appreciation for academic enology.  I’m still that nerdy, literature searching, article reading kid with specs and braces.  It’s just cool to have some renegade maneuvers in my winemaking armamentarium for the next time my yeast go rogue.  But I promise you this, next year we’re gonna harvest that fruit a lot, lot sooner.  

Works cited:

Linda F. Bisson
Stuck and Sluggish Fermentations
Am. J. Enol. Vitic., Mar 1999; 50: 107 – 119.

Linda F. Bisson and Christian E. Butzke
Diagnosis and Rectification of Stuck and Sluggish Fermentations
Am. J. Enol. Vitic., Jun 2000; 51: 168 – 177.

I had been dissed for sure but worse than that, I’d been ignored.  A “dis” implies an acknowledgement followed by the deliberate rebuff, but I hadn’t even been acknowledged.  In fact, I yearned to be dissed, to relish that singular moment of acceptance before being thrown to the rabid, foaming dogs.  Instead, my ego was spurned in a scornful heap at the bottom of the cold shoulder totem pole.  Instead of a scarlet “A,” I was branded “loathed & rejected.”  Obviously, this is not what I had intended.  Folks are generally happy to be at the receiving end of my home-baked goods and tell me so profusely.  One woman in Brian’s office, for whom I have been baking lemon pound cake for over 10 years, still ignites my self-esteem by admiring how my cake trumps all others.  It makes me feel great.  I am not used to being snubbed over pie.  But that is how it started.

Sonoma County provides a sensational bounty of fresh produce, and the mouth-watering, summer blackberries are no exception.  Extraordinary eaten right out of the cardboard container, the berries are outrageous in a fresh fruit galette.  “Galette” means “free form tart made without the confines of a pan.”  Instead of sculpting the dough into a pretty, fluted pie pan, you just roll it, toss in the fruit, and fold up the edges.  Rustic and lovely, you can chalk up the irregular circumference and aesthetic variance to artful, homey appeal.  (I meant this part to be cracked, really).  This divine dessert, I staunchly believed, would be my gateway to Rockpile heaven.  Never mind the chutzpah or smug conceit that drove my irrational fantasy.  I thumped my chest like an aggressive ape, ready to conquer.  I had enough swagger to imagine my unprofessional cooking non-credentials as edible bullion, a glistening treasure.  I would woo the Mauritson wine collective with the hypnotic aroma and mesmerizing taste of my blackberry-peach dessert, and they would do my wine biding.  Unencumbered by the “rules” of viral marketing or conceptualizing the paradigms of a marketing MBA, I figured I’d just show up, ambush the winemaking team at the winery, and deliver my caloric creation in person.  After securing my salivating, dessert-craving audience, I’d get down on my knees and plead for grapes.  Well you can guess exactly how that went down.

When I showed up in the tasting room lobby, flaunting the glory of my tarte terrifique, a kind tasting room attendant ushered me back to meet with Clay’s wife, since Clay himself was out of town.  She introduced me with a breezy, “An old friend of Clay’s is here to see you.”  Gulp.  “Old friend” was generous; we’d never met (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night).  His wife queried, “So how do you know Clay?”  Of course, I didn’t.  Suddenly the whole “ambush ‘em with a pie” tactic felt dirty and wrong.  Celebrity stalkers have been arrested and charged for transgressions less creepy than this.  Note to self: mistake #1- never bake for someone else’s husband.  It makes the baker (i.e. Kerith) seem pathetic, desperate, cloying and weirdly stalker-ish.  Double that if you don’t personally know any of the parties involved.  I dropped my galette in the employee kitchen and quickly exited the winery, shamed and deeply embarrassed.  I sent a follow-up e mail explaining that I have no criminal record, I stopped eating bulk candy without paying in college, and I am a fairly decent human being looking to legitimately purchase a small volume of Rockpile grapes.  I never heard back.  Stalker-gate was closed for the season.

After that fiasco, I re-strategized.  I figured I’d complete my UC Davis coursework and then devote the summer 2010 to acquiring quality Zin grapes for next year’s harvest.  But the plucky, can-do attitude rattled around in the back of my head.  After all, between the recession and the bumper crops of grapes in 2009, I’d eavesdropped on some anecdotal mumblings about small time mom and pop producers like me actually securing some pretty sensational fruit.  Some dude working out of CrushPad managed to score a ton of pinot from Gary Pisoni, quite a sensational feat.  Another bought some grapes from Savoy in Anderson Valley, another coup.  So once our 2009 pinot was secure, I spontaneously cold-called a Rockpile grower listed on the AVA website.  I explained my predicament, a small time wine maker looking to purchase a ton of zin.  Suspicious, he demanded, “How did you get this number?”  (I think it may have been his personal cell phone).  “It’s posted on the website, sir,” I stammered.  And despite evidence to the contrary, I am so not a stalker, thank you very much!  Luckily, this guy was very, very nice and offered up some leads.  One call led to another and astonishingly, I got a phone call a few days later from a grower looking to unload some Rockpile zin that needed to be picked yesterday.  The fruit was that ripe (over-ripe, I suppose).  I explained that I wasn’t exactly in the position to vinify the fruit on my own just yet, although I hoped to down the road.  “Don’t worry,” he said.  “My nephew does custom crush.  I’ll talk to him, and he’ll do it for you.”  “Who is your nephew?” I wondered aloud.  “Clay Mauritson” he gamely countered.

I didn’t want to flub our big score by blurting out, “I don’t think he’ll work with me.  He thinks I’m a crazy stalker.”  So I just handed the phone to Brian.  Details were disclosed; a deal was drawn.  We’d get the grapes at Mauritson Winery as soon as we could get to Healdsburg to receive them.  I think you’ve seen the video, so the rest is history.

Ironically, when I first met Clay in person he said, “So you’re the pie girl!  You know I was out of town and didn’t even get to taste it…” 

Now every time we meet up to work on the Bruliam zin, I proffer some home baked treats.  I want Clay and his hard working crew (you know who you are!) to like me.  Unfortunately, I think they still view me as a stalker, albeit one armed with delicious baked goods.

Herein, dear Brigade, we commence our final musing on normal fermentations for the 2009 harvest season.  When we last convened, we’d abandoned our heroic yeast to fight a lonely battle against the rising tide of ethanol toxicity.  But as I’d mentioned last week, those plucky yeast rely on some nifty tricks to fortify their body armor and better withstand the alcohol soak.  As you know, high alcohol concentrations mess with yeasts’ cell membranes by forcing a tsunami of acid inside their insides faster than they can push it out.  Alcohol also inhibits proteins like enzymes or sugar transporters and screws up their membrane fluidity (that is the Austin Powers beaded door curtain-like component of their outsides).  This concept of “membrane fluidity” is paramount.

The plasma membrane is like a double layer wall surrounding the yeast, with fixed, unbending parts and fluid, flexible parts.  The wall includes certain windows and docking ports that uniquely fit specific things, like sugar or nitrogen.  When a fructose molecule floats through the grape juice to approach a hungry yeast, it looks for an open parking spot so it can “park” on the yeast’s surface.  Like compact spots for mini Coopers and giant spots for Hummers, the yeast has different hexose transporters (sugar corridors) that recognize different substrates (like glucose versus fructose).  A glucose molecule fits into a specially configured parking place like a puzzle piece in a puzzle.  After the sugar docks and locks, the transporter becomes a Transformer©, changing its orientation and configuration.  It will about-face and flip from facing the grape juice side to facing the inside of the cell, taking the sugar with it.  The sugar is dumped inside the yeast and consumed for energy.  The Transformer© transporter then undergoes a second shape shift to face back outwards again, ready to usher another sugar through its membrane wall.  Obviously the Transformer© transporter is pretty rigid, since its shape is fixed to receive only sugar.  However it sort of floats around in a lipid (i.e. fatty) bilayer.  If the plasma membrane is too stiff, the transporters are straight-jacketed.  The proteins can’t shape shift, and the sugar is stuck outside.  If the membrane is too fluid, then the transporter gets all wiggly-wobbly, loses its shape and can’t do its job either.  High alcohol concentrations disturb this perfect balance.  But if the yeast can adapt its membrane composition before the must is too ethanol toxic, it will live long enough to take the wine to dryness (i.e. consume all of the sugar in the juice).   

Yeast tolerate a higher alcohol environment by altering their plasma membranes in a number of technical ways.  These include amping up the levels of sterols, swapping out saturated fatty acids for unsaturated ones (which means more double bonds), and increasing the relative protein content.  What you need to understands is that #1) these membrane adjustments require oxygen and nitrogen (the building blocks of protein) and #2) the changes must be securely in place before the alcohol level gets too noxious.  Adding more nutrients or nitrogen once the yeast are already petering out is like fastening your seat belt after you crashed; you’ve already missed the boat.  In other words, unless the yeast have ready access to a protein source, sterols, and unsaturated fatty acids at the beginning of fermentation, they won’t have the necessary tools they need to bulwark their body armor.  When a brisk fermentation grows sluggish and the rate of sugar consumption slows down, it’s usually an alcohol tolerance problem.  You’ve got to understand this fundamental concept.  The more sugary the grapes at harvest, the higher the potential alcohol of the finished wine.  Those yeast are going to need a lot of protection and TLC.  They’ve got to buckle down and secure their cell membrane or face death by acid-fried innards. 

With our Rockpile lot, that’s exactly what happened; our inaugural zin fermentation stuck.  What happened and how we overcame this potential disaster will be the subject of future posts.

Kudos to all readers who themselves endured three consecutive weeks of fermentation kinetics.  Next week’s post will be a light hearted carrot to lure you into a final discussion of stuck fermentation.

Blogging about how sensational our Doctor’s pinot tastes and smells is a joy.  Fermentation mechanics are not, but it is the essence of winemaking, so Brigade, we must soldier on with our science lesson.  Today we’re going to talk about the most exciting part of the fermentation curve in greater detail.  We’re going to focus on the maximum fermentation rate – those magical 48 hours where the sugar (°brix) dropped from 21.8 to about 0.8.  At the 0.8 mark, the slope of the curve decreases dramatically, and the °brix falls by a mere 0.4 over the next 24 hours.  This point where fermentation slows back down again is called the transition point.  It’s important to know about since it has predictive value.  For instance if the transition point hits when the must still measures more than 5° brix, your vat may be at risk for sluggish fermentation and possible arrest.  And check out the temperature, too.  While the sugar plummets from 21.6 to 0.8, the temperature of the juice sky rockets from 17.4 to 30.8°C.

Like Paris Hilton says, “That’s hot.”

The maximum rate of fermentation corresponds to the greatest yeast biomass.  In other words, bedroom hanky panky in the early part of fermentation drives the faster stuff later.  Early on, the yeast must reproduce robustly enough to attain the maximum number of critters sustainable in this environment, which happens to be 10⁸ cells/ml.  Imagine all of these single celled organisms consuming sugar and releasing alcohol.  It is a big job (that happens to be a biochemically exothermic process) so the yeast release heat.  That is why you see the temperature rise so dramatically.  And the heat is good.  It increases the yeasts’ metabolic rate and boosts the rate of fermentation overall (remember from high school chemistry that enzymes go faster with heat?).  Heat also discourages spoilage bugs by basically frying them to death.  Color extraction is maximized, as well.  The only downside is that a really hot fermentation may stick in the later phases, and of course, the yeast could boil themselves to death.  It’s a little like Bikram yoga.  It starts off steamy, which feels awesome, but after 45 minutes crammed into a room with 37 other sweaty people, sweat begets sweat, and the collective, accumulated heat becomes oppressive.  You need to take a bathroom break.  Instead of the restroom, the yeast enjoy a cooling punch down, two or three a day to be exact.  Then after that transition point, fermentation slows down and wraps up.  Concomitantly, the alcohol rises, sugar dwindles to zero, and the yeast die.  The process is self-limiting and runs its course.  But we’ll delve deeper still to grasp the details perfectly.

Yeast are surrounded by a plasma membrane.  It keeps their insides from mixing with the outside, like our skin but more fluid.  In some ways, it’s like one of those red bead-string doorways from an Austin Powers love lair.  It can sway, swish, and alter its configuration in different circumstances.  On the other hand, other membrane parts are more rigid, like a baby’s shape sorter toy.  The plastic cylinder can only slide through the circle hole but not through the triangular or butterfly-shaped orifice.  These different shaped holes are analogous to the transport proteins spanning the yeast plasma membrane.  They are doorways to the yeast innards, and only certain stuff can get through.  Sugar, for example, shoots through an exclusively-shaped tunnel and is dumped inside for fuel.  Only sugar can ride that passageway.  Luckily, there is more sugar in the fermenting must than inside the yeast, so sugar shimmies down the natural concentration gradient (from high to low), and the yeast doesn’t have to expend any energy at all to get it inside.  Just imagine if you could ride that doughnut conveyor belt in the Krispy Kreme factory, cruising under the cascading shower of sugary glaze, filling your mouth with delectable frosting without expending a single calorie.  It must be great to be a yeast…except when acid piggyback rides a sugar molecule and ends up inside the yeast, too (indigestion anyone?).  Remember our grape juice is acidic, way more acidic than the neutral yeast, meaning the acid (in the form of protons, H⁺) is also working a favorable gradient.  The only problem is that now the yeast must expend energy to push the proton back out the door.  This isn’t a big deal if the yeast is floating in a sugar bath, like grape juice, where ready meals abound.  But late in fermentation, when sugar is sparse, things might get dicey.  As the alcohol concentration rises, it messes with those rigidly shaped tunnels and screws them up.  Now the protons are flying into the yeast faster than they can pump them back out.  This acidifies their insides, which they don’t like very much.  In fact, high alcohol is toxic to yeast, and even the staunchest fighters can only survive 18%-19% alcohol at best (& 19% is rare).  This is one reason the yeast die in the presence of the rising tide of alcohol.  But they have ways to combat this, by fortifying their membranes, like wearing armor. 

We’ll talk about how they do that next time.

It is hard to believe, dear Brigade that a full year has passed since we last convened to discuss harvest.  The pleasant musing of callow youth and inexperience offered up romantic incantations to the wise, old farmer, squeezing a single berry betwixt a dirt-stained thumb and forefinger, proclaiming harvest time had come.  Harvest was ordained (cue trumpets and archangels), so we hopped the next Southwest flight to San Francisco to hand sort our fruit.  Apparently, I had it all wrong.  Now having completed the first two courses towards my UC Davis enology certificate, I’ve been taught the gauzy visions are just that, poetic garbage begging to be balanced by the cold, hard facts- numbers and data.  UC Davis tells us in no uncertain terms that “none of the flavor and aroma compounds [in the grape berries] are directly correlated with sugar and acidity (Bisson).”  In other words, one can’t reliably predict the amount of sugar and acid in a grape by taste test alone- you need to measure it.

Many parameters can be used to assess berry ripeness, but the most common triad is °Brix, pH, and TA (“titratable acid”).  Degrees brix measures the soluble solids in the grape juice.  Even at its ripest, a grape is still 80% water by weight, but rounding out that last 20% is sugar.  Over the course of the growing season, the leaves hang out in the sunshine, working the spring and summer photosynthesis, generating sugar to transport to the fruit.  As the berries accumulate more and more sugar, they sweeten up until they’re ready for picking.  We can use a tool, called a hydrometer, to measure how much glucose and fructose resides inside the grape, and that value is the °Brix.  For red wines, harvest ready fruit ranges from 24-27 °Brix.  I give a range, since °Brix varies with temperature, vine location, sunlight, and across innumerable, individual vineyard practices.  The “right” number is also dictated by the desired wine style.  Even still, we can make some interesting generalizations about °Brix.  Usually, fruit with higher brix results in wine with more varietal character, which taste testers prefer in blind trials.  Ann Noble studied this.  She made 3 different Zinfandels: low, medium, and high alcohol wines, made from grapes with low, medium, and high °Brix.  Here is what she found.  In all rated attributes, the high alcohol wines from the ripest grapes were ranked first.  The highest alcohol wines manifest greater intensity of bitterness, berry and black pepper flavors, and greater viscosity.  Thus in Zinfandel wines, the flavor attributes that comprise varietal character are strongly correlated with sugar accumulation.  It would appear that more sugar=better wine, but first the caveats must be disclosed.  Grape berries don’t hoard sugar indefinitely; eventually berry sugar peaks, and then even drops.  By that point, you’ve missed the optimal window for harvest, and fruit quality declines.  As the fruit ripens, berry flavors transform from green vegetal tones into red fruit (strawberry, cranberry, apple) to black fruit (blackberry, plum, cassis) and finally to jammy date/raisin.  You’re aiming for the sweet spot, before it’s reduced to Gerber’s pureed prune.  Secondly, the more sugar in the berries, the harder the yeast must work to churn it into alcohol.  When the sugar is too high, sometimes the yeast hit the wall and just crap out.  They die, and you’re left with sweet dreck, which is not only stylistically unacceptable for our wine portfolio but also drastically increases the likelihood of bacterial spoilage.

The next two parameters are closely intertwined: pH and TA.  Both contribute to the tartness of the finished product, which gives the wine lively zestiness and focus, qualities of supreme importance when pairing wine with food.  Dear Brigade, acid is good.  Low acid wines are bland and flabby and age poorly.  Low acid wines are also more susceptible to microbial infestation and spoilage.  Grape berries begin their lives as small, hard, green acid balls- think sour patch kids.  Over summer, sugar increases and acid drops.  This is due to respiration (the berries metabolize their malic acid for energy) and dilution (the berries get bigger and acid is tamed by water).  In the real hot spots, like California’s Central Valley, the poor, scorching berries respire their malic acid a lot faster, so acid levels are much lower overall, and pH is higher.  These grapes have high sugar (from abundant sun) and low acid; they’re used to make bulk wine.  Generally, the increase in sugar parallels the rise in pH (as acid drops).  When we harvest our fruit, we like to see our acid (“TA”) at 7 ½- 8 g/L and pH=3.2-3.5.  There are even fancy formulas that try to combine the TA, pH, and brix into one equation to generate one optimal ripeness parameter, like brix x (pH)² , brix/TA, and brix x pH.  Unfortunately, none perfectly or reliable predicts the optimal date for harvest.  They are simply more tools to help guide these decisions.  Compressing the complexity of berry ripeness into a single variable for selection/ prediction of an optimal harvest date is not only incredibly reductive but also inconclusive.  Consider for a moment an over cropped vine- one with too many uncontrolled berry clusters.  Since all of those berries will share the same finite amount of sugar, the amount of sugar per berry is low, but so it the acid.  Plug your numbers into the equation and the ratio is acceptable, but you’ll still make mediocre wine.  Or return to those Central Valley grapes.  “Optimal ripeness” is achieved well before the maximal °Brix, since the longer the berries hang on the vine, the more the acid drops.  You see, harvest is the final chain that ties viticulture to enology.  Once picked, you’ve sealed their fate.  The berries are delivered from the farmer to the enologist, with all of the fruity essence and flavor that ultimately shapes the finished wine.  While vintners can adjust acid levels and correct for defects in the laboratory, a grape deficient in berry flavors will never generate a berry flavored wine.  And while a farmer cannot control the weather or predict an onslaught of unwanted pests, harvest date can be selected and controlled. 

We had planned to pick the first of our Sonoma Coast grapes on 9/15.  Our numbers looked good, and the berries tasted ripe and fruity.  Unfortunately, fifteen hours of preharvest rain quelched that idea really fast.  A forecast for cool weather promised the brix would hold steady while the berries dried; harvest was delayed until 9/20.  On 9/16 we got word the block of 667 clone was green-lighted for 9/19 instead.  So we hand sorted our fruit yesterday.

We still have more pinot clones, and two other vineyards to go.  So the next time I show you something like this, you’ll know what I’m blathering about!  

2009 – Split Rock – Pinot Noir has updated harvest information-

Here are the most recent measurements taken from your vineyard block-
Brix: 25.50
pH: 3.35
TA: 7.50

Works Cited

A. C. Noble and Mark Shannon
Profiling Zinfandel Wines by Sensory and Chemical Analyses, Am. J. Enol. Vitic., Mar 1987; 38: 1 – 5.

 Bisson, L, Syllabus UC Davis Extension – Wine Production for Distance Learners, The Regents of the University of California 2005.

People often confuse my technical wine acumen with being an exceptional wine taster, when in fact, I am not.  Plagued by seasonal allergies since elementary school (in addition to pudge and a headgear), I have been sticking all kinds of medicinal concoctions past my nares for over 20 years.  My sense of smell is actually pretty rotten.  Brian complains I over-season everything, which makes for some fairly self-destructive curry blends from time to time.  So I’m doomed to respiratory mediocrity and will always be a sub-par sniffer.  Recently, while peering up from the nadir of wine tasting hierarchy, I sought to advance my caste.  I was thrice tested, and dear Brigade, all three times I failed.  In blind tastings of three vastly different, classic, European premium wines, I languished miserably in each instance, failing even to identify even the country of origin correctly.  I’ve now been demoted back to wine preschool with Kendall Jackson (Just kidding, KJ!  We’re buds now!).

Towards the end of summer, our uber-neighbor, the wine gifter, treated me to a blind taste of a superb, unique, fascinating, and exceptional white wine.  It was aromatic and spicy, but entirely different than any reisling I’d tasted.  I excluded chard or a sauv blanc, and knew most certainly this wine was not American (or Aussie, or from New Zealand for that matter).  And that was all I could muster.  Stupefied, I was prompted, teased, baited with hints, and ultimately razzed for my utter ignorance.  After the great reveal, I discovered I’d floundered Michel Chapoutier’s famed white Hermitage, the giveaway clue its composition: 100% marsanne.  First tally – Kerith 0; Wine Gods- 1.

Jesse Rodriguez, a Master Sommelier candidate, can blindly identify thousands of wines.  Not only can he recognize grape varietal but also he often distinguishes the producer, vineyard or even the vintage!  To me his precision and depth of wine perception is mind blowing.  Even more recently, Jesse tantalized me with the prospect of redemption.  He afforded me an opportunity to blind taste some red wines, which I hoped would weigh the odds more favorably in my direction.  Not so!  The inaugural whiffs of the first wine were less fruit forward than the remaining vapors.  So I got bogged down by some licorice and earthier-stuff, which I should have ignored until the sample bloomed into its decadent fruitiness.  I was hedging towards northern Italian, maybe Barolo, despite the relative pallor of the juice.  Flummoxed, I requested help.  “Rhymes with…” I joked…sort of.

Instead Jesse gave me, “Cassis, pencil shavings.  Think classic.  Cassis.  Classic…”  I was beleaguered, even broken. 

“Think classic, cassis,” he prompted again. 

Eager to impress, I weakly offered up, “Bandol?”  Really??  Can you fathom a stupider answer?

“Uh, no,” Jesse replied, as politely as possible.  Shut down again.  Kerith 0; Wine Gods-2.

For uninitiated (apparently myself included), “pencil shavings and cassis” is Morse Code for “left bank Bordeaux.”  My misguided implosion was like answering “lavosh with feta” when Papa John queries, “Name a round, flat dough topped with tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni.”  Already demoralized, my third trial was a dead duck from its inception.  I bungled a Rioja, even though I’ve drunk plenty throughout my imbibing career.  (For the wine geeks, an old world style aged in new American oak gives Rioja a strong, characteristic vanilla-y-oaky overtone).  So I totally flunked, times three.  In my defense, I’d never tasted a white Hermitage before, and those rare, stolen sips of Margaux or Latour left me unprepared to blindly recognize the lesser communes of the left bank.  The Rioja?  No excuse.  Since my record pretty well sucked, I got to thinking about wine palate training.  The process is not unlike surgical pathology.

To non-medical folks, and even most practicing clinicians, evaluating tissue under the microscope is a confusing, daunting experience best delegated to the pathology weirdoes haunting the hospital basement.  What to me is most obviously colon cancer is to you just a blob of undecipherable purple, pink, and blue hieroglyphics.  The disorganized splotches look more like bad modern art than a “diagnosis.”  But with continued practice, diagnostic skills are honed, and the blobs actually look like stuff, from a human being.  Then again, if you’ve never seen a certain type of tumor before, the odds are pretty negligible that you’d call it correctly the first time around.  So as residents we learn by sharing a two-headed microscope with senior residents and professors, slowly learning case by case.  Once when I was a teaching fellow, I came across a classic skin lesion with a microscopic pattern so distinctive, gloriously swirly, and highly unusual that it can only be that one single thing.  Giddy with intent, I aimed to conquer that miraculous pinnacle of professorship when pupil and mentor merge as one.  I sang, “Oh the storiform, whirling, pinwheels of spindly cells – it’s beautiful, it’s classic.  Name it for me!”

And the intern just started at me, blankly, unsure what to do.

I gesticulated imaginary, undulating wave forms with my arms, chanted the magic code “storiform, fascicles, swirly pattern…”

I urged, goaded, and pleaded, “Whirly, swirly…whirling circles of spindly cells…think classic skin lesion…”

I got nothing but a deadpan glare, her eyes glazed with frustration and angst.  (Then again, at least she didn’t venture something lame like, “freckle” or “Bandol”).  Evidently, she’d never seen the “DFPS” before, and all of the hints, clues, and interpretive dances in Twyla Tharp’s repertoire wouldn’t have helped her guess the right answer.  But you’d be darned sure that when she saw that same tumor a few weeks later, she knew exactly what she was looking at.

Flash forward to Jesse’s expectant insistence, trying to coax that “left bank” response from the cobwebbed recesses of my mute pea-brain.  “Think classic…”  Like the intern, my best chance is to nail it the next time around.  I’m reminded of that most overused adage from my third year of medical school: “If you hear hoof beats, it’s a horse…not a zebra.”

Last week we detailed the brand new approach to restaurant wine lists that the new Cucina urbana is bringing to the San Diego dining scene. 

Today we’re lucky to nab an interview with Cucina urbana general manager and defacto sommelier Ben Kephart.  Ben crafted Laurel’s fantastic wine list and is now confronted with the challenge of building an entirely new wine list from scratch for Cucina urbana.

Cucina urbana emphasizes wine values, encouraging patrons to hang out, sip, taste, and enjoy a bottle or two of vino to go with Chef Joe’s new small-plate Italian creations.

We were lucky enough to try Cucina urbana during it’s opening week and absolutely loved the concept, the food, and the wines.  We can’t wait to go back upon our return to San Diego.

Ben, thank you for taking the time to talk with the Bruliam Brigade.  We’re grateful for your time and expertise. 

(Ben’s answers are in red below each question).

First of all Ben, tell us a little about Cucina urbana and what you guys are aiming to create with this new vision.

Thanks for checking in on us, Bruliam Brigade!  Our concept was to create a complete transformation from a high-end, fine-dining establishment (Laurel) into a more rustic, comfort-driven experience with reasonable pricing.  Nothing on our dinner menu exceeds $20, and wines are sold at retail price in our wine shop from $14 – $50.

 Please tell our readers how you landed such a great gig?  We’ve known you with Laurel for some time now, and you’ve always been a fresh-faced youngin’ in a restaurant that carried somewhat of an old school reputation.

You’re so flattering!  I’ve been in the restaurant business since the age of 16, and most of it has fallen toward the fine-dining end of the spectrum.  The process of the reconcept has been the most exciting project I’ve ever been a part of professionally, and I am grateful to Tracy for including me in this process. 

What sparked your interest in wine.  I’m imagining a precocious 8-year old requesting Corton Charlemagne instead of Tree Top apple juice at birthday parties.

Ha!  That story sounds so much better than mine, can you just print that?  Interestingly enough, wine was not even around my home as a youngster (short of the bottle or two that my parents would receive as gifts and never open).  Toward the end of college, I began managing at a hotel and working at a small fine dining restaurant and discovered the endless world of wine.  I began picking up a bottle or two of something that I’d never tried before each week (mind you, slim pickings in Central Pennsylvania) and reading about wine as much as I could.  Again, your story sounds MUCH better than mine!

What wine experiences have informed your wine preferences?  Have particular regions, varietals, or wine makers influenced you more than others?

Building the list at Laurel was a wonderful experience in wine education.  While there was an absolute presence of some old-world big-hitters, nothing was really off-limits for that wine program.  We would sprinkle in selections from Spain, Italy, Argentina, Chile and even a few oddballs from Lebanon, Greece and beyond.  Regarding specific experiences, there are so many great ones to recall – but a particularly fascinating one was a lunch with Serge Hochar of Chateau Musar in Lebanon.  Hochar’s wines usually create polarizing opinions, but are chocked full of personality and unique characteristics.  Tasting all the way back to the 1972 vintage, it seems as though his wines show off more ‘youthful’ characteristics as they age – peculiar?!  While he acknowledges this trait, he was not quick to offer any explanation as to why this may be, I guess we’ll all keep scratching our heads!

Tell me how you reconcile your personal tastes in wine with selecting restaurant wines.

While we all have our preferences in wine styles, it is not my job to create a wine program that highlights my favorites.  There are so many different expressions of every grape varietal that suit many different palates, so why try and push my palate onto others?  If a wine program was filled with just my preferences it may read something like this: Champagne and Burgundy!

Obviously the great perk of your job is drinking and tasting world class vino all day long.  But, I’ve got to ask, what’s the greatest perk of your job?

That is definitely among them!  It’s great to help select wines for the restaurant, then turn around and help a guest find their perfect bottle of wine.  As any lifer in the restaurant business will tell you, there are no two days alike in our crazy, crazy world!  I don’t think you’ll ever find me sitting behind a desk pushing paper.

How closely do you and Tracy collaborate on wine selections?  How about you and Chef Joe?

The wine program is absolutely a collaborative effort, and a marriage of food and wine.  Tracy chose the ‘Wines of the Americas and Italy’ concept for the program because it best suits the style of our cuisine, and our chef, Joe Magnanelli.  She is the most amazing business owner I’ve ever worked for, because she has genuine compassion for this industry and is so incredibly ‘hands-on’ in all areas of the restaurant.  While Joe’s primary responsibilities lie in the kitchen and mine in the front of house, we both take active interest and provide feedback on each other’s departments. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t pose the “chicken and egg” question.  What comes first, the menu or the wines?  Will this equation differ with the new place, with emphasis on wine values?

I am a firm believer that while wine is important, it only becomes relevant with a great menu.  Joe’s cuisine has always been extremely wine-compatible and provides for both classic and interesting pairing opportunities.  Food always comes first in a restaurant, even when you can buy a bottle of wine for as little as $14 in our restaurant!

Please give our readers some tips to find recession friendly wines.

Ummmm, come to our wine shop at Cucina urbana?!  When the dollar needs to stretch, it’s always a good time to look at South America.  Altocedro Malbec ($17 in our wine shop) and Trivento Torrentes ($14) are wines that are far more serious than the low price tags they carry.  Spain and New Zealand are some other great bets for a good, reasonably priced summertime wine. 

How does one go about creating a wine list from scratch?  Do you have a big excel sheet breaking it down by region, varietal and brand or do you follow you gut?  Is it a clinical or romantic process?

It was a fun and challenging process, both clinical and romantic.  We tasted hundreds of wines during the month that Laurel was closed and created a massive spreadsheet with notes, likes/dislikes, and pricing.  The goal was to narrow the field to about 100 selections, and represent wines of the Americas (north and south) and Italy.  We chose to categorize wines in an unconventional way, rather than list them by varietal and region.  On our list you’ll see categories like ‘Feats of Strength’ or ‘Lighten Up’.  We’ve had a lot of fun playing around with what fits into these categories, and it’s certainly refreshing to break away from the mundane version of wine lists!  Once cuts were made, we went through about 20 versions of the list before it actually went to print and the doors opened!  Already, it looks quite different than the day we opened 2 months ago and will continue to evolve. 

Recant your most magical wine epiphany – the time the skies opened, a rainbow appeared and archangels with harps started to sing.

The first memorable bottle of wine that I enjoyed was from Gundlach-Bundschu (Zin) in college.  Most of my experience with wine until that point was (gasp) from a box!  The lush jammy fruit and spice of such a reasonably priced bottle was truly a moment that made me realize how wonderful wine can be.

Are you will to divulge some of your personal favorites?  Please tell us why you like them.

I tend to try something new rather than resort to an old favorite more often than not.  But since you asked, here are a few of my favorite producers (in no particular order): DuNah, Sea Smoke, Olivier LeFlaive, Owen Roe, Domaine de Vieux Telegraphe.  These producers have one thing in common – great wines regardless of vintage conditions, no easy feat!

 Our last question is a word association game:

1. I say picnic wine and you say?   Malbec or Albarino
2. A  wine to impress you boss:   My Boss?  A bottle of Rose
3. A wine to impress a new date:  How about the current date?  Champagne, champagne, and champagne.
4. To celebrate a job promotion:   Sea Smoke ‘Ten’ Pinot Noir
5. Toast a 25^th wedding anniversary: Veuve Clicquot ‘La Grande Dame’ 1996
6. Money no object white:  Chateau D’Yquem 1967
7. Money no object red:   anything from Domaine de la Romanee Conti (I’m not buying, right?)

Ben, we’re so excited about Cucina urbana. We have so many wonderful food and wine memories from Laurel and we can’t wait to create new ones with you under the new flag.  Brigade – this is a place worth supporting in town.  If you haven’t already, get out and try it!!

Editor’s Note:  We revisited Cucina urbana this past Saturday night and the place was full.  The food and service were still excellent and apparently they are packing ‘em in nightly.  Congrats to Ben, Tracy, and the whole Urban Kitchen crew!

Nobody likes restaurant wine markups.  It’s hard to enjoy a meal out when the restaurant essentially re-sells you the same bottle of wine that’s in your fridge but at a 200% markup.  Amongst the wine-drinking, foie gras nibbling and amuse buche masticating foodies who power the fine dining machine, that price margin, which ranges from fair to downright greedy, is perhaps the most contentious subject of all.  Up here in No Cal, most local joints are pretty reasonable in the price gauging smackdown.  Many restaurants showcase the local wines and locally farmed produce, so one need only drive a few miles down the curvy road to procure the very same bottle headlining the wine list before you.  Some even waive corkage fees altogether when diners tote their own Sonoma County wines.  Diners here reap the benefits of a symbiotic food-wine “locavore” culture that empowers the patron and drives their restaurant selection.  That is no easy feat in this economy.  And even with waived corkages and mid-week locals’ specials, restaurant dining in Healdsburg has slowed. 

Back home in San Diego, locally owned, non-chain restaurants are failing at an alarmingly high rate.  Even the best loved, San Diego institutions are vulnerable to the market flux.  So when more folks spend Saturday night at home, the brave few still financing dinner on a maxed-out Visa are shouldering the burden of higher wine markups to compensate for plummeting earnings.

Breathe deeply, and allow the maddening frustration of restaurant wine markups to leave your yoga-zen self.  Close your eyes and visualize an inviting, low key, rustic, Italian-inspired restaurant in beautiful downtown San Diego where you can still buy a bottle of wine for $14.  (Yes, it’s true!).  And a well trained staff is on hand to guide your menu selections to match the juice.  What if that restaurant encouraged you to amble through a wine shop where all bottles cost less than $50 and bring your purchase to dinner so you could enjoy your bottle of wine at retail value, without any markup?  And the greatest stroke of genius yet – the wine shop is located right in the restaurant.  After you’ve made your wine selection, the waitstaff escorts you to your table to dine.  Cucina urbana, formerly known as San Diego’s landmark Laurel restaurant, has redefined itself with a new wine/food concept for a new economy.  Cucina urbana will rely on its tasty offerings and exciting, extensive well-priced wine cellar to lure the loft-living, local yuppies from their couches and balcony barbeques.  The atmosphere is relaxed and warm, an ambiance that encourages passers-by to hang out at the wine bar for a while or better yet, upgrade that $17 store-bought bottle of wine with a perfectly crisp pizza with pancetta and fried egg.  Heaven – and no clean up required! 

So who is the brave man who drank though hundreds and hundreds of value-priced wines to seek out the best-priced gems and bring them to the discerning consumers of San Diego?  Who could parlay an old school wine list into something innovative, fun, and fresh, appeasing even the most cash-strapped victims of San Diego’s faltering real estate market?  Who is the hometown hero who brings the joy back into a casual, delicious wine-feast with friends? 

Brigade, I bring you Ben Kephart, the wonderful, knowledgable, and all-around terrific general manager who spearheaded the wine program at Cucina urbana and crafted this thoughtful, well-priced wine list entirely from scratch. 

And lucky for us, he has agreed to a Bruliam interview to divulge the secrets of a well-priced and delicious restaurant wine list. 

Look for his interview next Monday.

During our first weeks in Healdsburg we attended a winemaker’s dinner at a local restaurant.  When we sat down at the long, communal table, I was seated next to the owner and founder of the sponsoring winery, which bears his family name.  The owner is a congenial, gregarious bear of guy who always speaks his mind, sometimes without regard for the conventions of social grace.  He was quick to denegrate the fading aromatics on the pinot we’d chosen from our own cellar to share at this “family-style” event, while promoting his own juice as vastly superior to most other donated selections.  (Really, though, who can blame him for wanting to promote his own stuff?).  That said, bringing together a table of strangers under the premise of a communal, three course meal, affording everyone the opportunity to taste 6-10 different wines with food, including multiple bottles gifted from his own label, all for $60/person, is a supreme gesture of goodwill and generosity.    

The woman to his other side was wine novice, and the winery owner was eager to educate her about his different wines and why they paired appropriately with different food courses.  When I divulged that I write a wine blog, he immediately accused me of being just another contributor to the “wine problem.”  The problem, of course, being the continued mystification of wine, making it seem inaccessible and downright scary to the uninitiated quaffer.  “You bloggers are always telling people what to drink and making it harder than it is,” he opined.  “Listen, deciding if you like a wine is simple:

#1) When the wine is in your mouth, do you have the urge to swallow it and then take another sip?

#2) When you take a sip and eat a bite, does it make the food taste better?

#3) When you taste it, do you want to share it with a loved one, like, ‘Hey honey, you’ve got to try this stuff!’”

I absolutely agree.  Wine is that easy.  And wine should be shared; it is a communal beverage after all, meant to be consumed with food, like a food.  But this is where things get dicey.  You’d be hard pressed to go to a grocery store and ask the clerk, “Can you help me?  I am looking for something for dinner,” without some foreknowledge of what you enjoy eating.  The clerk replies, “Well what do you like to eat?  What are you looking for?  Fish?  Beef?  Pasta?  Salty foods?  Fruit?  Spicy stuff?”  You tell her, “I have no idea, but I know that I like it when I swallow it…” 

I think you get the crux of the dilemma.  Without some framework for talking about food or wine, absent a common language that includes some set criteria and descriptors, it’s hard to capture exactly what satisfies your deepest cravings.  To a non-wine geek, this can be a frightening prospect.  In fact, I recently queried our nanny about what wines she likes to drink.  The response?  “Oh I don’t know.  Usually white but sometimes red.  Oh, I don’t know.  I like it when I have it.”  If I were a sommelier or even bar tender at a local restaurant, I would be seriously hard pressed to help her order a glass of wine.  And when you’re paying upwards of $8/glass, you’d better hope you like what that waiter delivers.

So enter the wonderful world of the winery tasting room.  For those of you who have never visited a winery or sat in a commercial wine tasting room, now is the time.  Lickety split, I sent our nanny off to taste (for her first time ever) right here in the central Healdsburg square, where both big and small wineries have well appointed, tasting outposts.  Her best experience?  The Kendall Jackson tasting room.  Yes, that behemoth of buttery, oaky chardonnay whose reputation has almost become a parody of itself reigned supreme.  (And I now vow to never again mock KJ chard and posit its wine as apotheosis of commercial, homogenized, industrial, mass produced, toxic, oaky drek).  She came home absolutely elated, excited about food and excited about wine. Not only did tasting room guru “Father Frank” explain the wines and guide her through a tasting but also he rambled off innumerable ideas about how and when to drink them, complete with recipe ideas and basic food/wine pairing guidelines.  The best bit was halving a watermelon, carving out the heart to leave the empty watermelon shell and filling it with a fun, easy summer white wine.  Then chop up the heart, put the cubes back into the wine, and let the melon soak up the fruity juice.  Serve icy cold.  If Michael Pollan’s somber article about the demise of home cooking is truly representative of “The Family Dinner” on an average night (“Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” NYT Magazine, July 28, 2009), then “Father Frank” may be onto something, doing his best to bring the energy, verve, and magic back to homemade meals, one bottle of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay at a time.

Better yet, our nanny now has a rudimentary toolbox of wine know-how that she can employ at will.  Presented with a restaurant wine list or even just browsing at Bev Mo, she can use her newly minted wine vocabulary to convey exactly what she hopes to purchase.  Now I bet she won’t feel like her 8 bucks/glass were wasted.

Epilogue:  I am excited to try the Kendall Jackson Anderson Valley Pinot Noir she gifted us.  I had no idea that the KJ corporate machine was cultivating vines in the quirky, remote Anderson Valley.  I misjudged the giant, and I stand corrected!

From the moment I first saw Healdsburg’s picturesque central square, I knew I could make a home here.  This small town had all of the trappings of a yuppie paradise wrapped in the premise of “rustic” country living.  Locally owned and eco-conscious coffee joint with $6 lattes and hipper-than-thou barista?  Check.  Awesome outposts for lavish culinary and viticultural indulgences?  Yup.  Casual, neighborhood eateries with character and warmth?  Got ‘em.  There are at least three kid-friendly burger/ pizza stops, a doughnut shop, and a fancy, high end grocery store with knowledgeable butchers.  We’ve even got a handful of upscale women’s boutiques to satisfy an impulsive hankering for $200 designer jeans, should an unforeseen, personal existential crisis require immediate resolution.  Sounds suspiciously like La Jolla, right?

Clawing upstream against a sweeping current of bourgeois yuppiedom is a significant, counter-culture movement to “keep Healdsburg weird.”  This is bigger than a handful of gangly, preteen boys loping around the square in skintight black jeans and shades, a la Joey Ramone circa 1979.  I am talking about an insular, local pride, best embodied by the free-spirited gyrating and body swaying (um, “dancing”) of longtime residents enjoying the summer, outdoor concert series.  Every Tuesday night during the summer, the city of Healdsburg sponsors free concerts in the square, which coincide with local farmer’s market stalls, a famed tamale cart, and colossal mounds of hot, fragrant paella cooked up outside the Oakville grocery.  Protected by some zany and wonderful grandfather clause, concert goers can drink in the square, open bottles and all, so long as the music is playing.  When the music stops at 8 pm, weeknight alcoholics must seek shelter in the local bars and surrounding restaurant haunts.  It’s genius!

Official rules plainly state no unattended picnic gear until after 4 pm, but try setting up camp at 4:03 pm and you’re basically relegated to the foliage in an old tree in the back corner.  The most motivated folks arrive well before 2 pm to babysit their lawn chairs and relax with a novel.  By 3 o’clock the square is a bursting patchwork of colorful picnic blankets lined up edge to edge to edge.  But the good news is that even for the people sequestered in the boondocks, you can still tiptoe around the blanket corners and across folding chairs to join the dancers up front.  Frizzy haired ladies in long prairie skirts and Birkenstocks dance with aging dudes with long, grey ponytails and cowboy boots.  These guys are the real old timers, predating us city slickers with Williams Sonoma baskets, heavy Rabbit corkscrews, and $12/ounce local chevre.  Most mornings at the local coffee haunt, we fit right in with the other families – moms with a kid on one hip and an organic scone and steaming soy latte in hand.  But in the Tuesday musical mosh pit, we’re the fringe, outsiders looking in. 

As one of my kids summed it up, “Mommy, we had a great time dancing with all the funny mans and ladies!”  (And for the record, the local goat cheese is well worth the splurge).

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Robert Frost, “Mending Wall,” 1915

Maybe it’s the midday heat.  When it’s 95 degrees outside, and your brain’s grey matter is sizzling like Zingerman’s artisanal bacon, slow motion is the new warp speed.  Any sudden moves provoke the disapproving scrutiny of our neighbors savoring a cold beer on their covered porch next door.  The problem is compounded by on-street parking.  Unlike home where I ascend straight into an isolating garage, here I am forced to confront the humanity living on either side of me.  I can no longer skulk home unnoticed, obscured by a phalanx of Trader Joe’s bags and oversized, Costco boxes.  Most likely, though, it happened because we live in such physical proximity to our neighbors.  I see their kids peeking though the slats in the wood fence dividing our property from theirs and hear their gleeful yelps as they splash through their Elmo Slip and Slide.  (As an aside, I am pretty sure the neighbors must hear me shrieking at my own kids to “clean up,” “LISTEN!” and “Stop throwing food!”  Apparently the contractor can’t construct a fence either that thick or that tall.)    In any event, these factors culminated in a tsunami of goodwill that prompted me to actually introduce myself to both sets of new neighbors, something I have never done in San Diego, not in the 30 years I’ve lived there.  Embarrassingly enough, I do not actually know who lives next door to me on the uphill, north side back at home.

It turns out that our right-side neighbor is in the wine industry, which is, evidently, the very best kind of neighbor to have.  He is a wine distributor who offhandedly remarked that he often lugs home half-full bottles of discarded, top quality wine, unconsumed leftovers from the daily tastings he conducts for work.  Heroically, I offered to rescue the spurned bottles myself, proffering my own digestive tract as a means to dispose of this forlorn and unwanted juice, especially as his pregnant wife probably wasn’t good for more than a few swallows anyway.  Ever magnanimous and helpful, I extended every favor to help ease his burden of unfinished and perfectly drinkable wine.  And that is how it began.

While I was rolling out cookie dough for my kids, I amicably thought to punch out a few snacks for our neighbor’s kids too, as I famously bake far too much and far too often.  The morning after that first cookie drop-off, at precisely 8:20 am, the wine guy’s wife knocks on our door to proposition us with three half-full bottles of South African red wine.  Brian and I had great fun tasting two Ernie Els cab/syrah blends side-by-side.  Incidentally I most preferred the 2006 Englebrecht Els proprietor blend, with dark red fruit and plumy flavors, cherry, spice and softer tannins.  The third wine, from a label called Cirrus, is a cool concept- a collaboration between Ernie Els and Jean Engelbrecht of South Africa and Ray Duncan of famed Silver Oak, here in California.   My only regret is that we hadn’t yet purchased a barbecue to tame those hefty, tannic bad boys with some grilled meat.  Round 1: complete.

I reciprocated the next day with some yellow heirloom tomatoes from our backyard garden.  In return, we were sumptuously gifted with four spectacular Italian reds, including two awesome Brunellos.  I tapped into the 90 point Rosso di Montalcino, a lighter red, as I cooked dinner, since I simply couldn’t wait.  Using fresh herbs from our garden, I crusted mini lamb loin chops with herbed Dijon mustard accompanied by baby, herb-roasted potatoes.  The meal perfectly complimented the oh-so-smooth and forever, lingering mouthfeel of the 2004 and the 2003 riserva Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcinos.  The gaminess of the roasted lamb melted into the earthy spice and leather in the juice.  For Robert Parker’s full report on these 95 point beauties, please click here.  The final wine was Barolo from famed Piedmont producer Angelo Gaja, and it did not disappoint.   The rich and full 2003 Dagromis Barolo to me embodied a more approachable, New World style with oak, dark fruit and spice.  Paired with food, I sensed no bitterness at all.  In the vast, other worldly scoreboard of karmic exchanges, I think I am definitely getting the better side of the deal. 

The sentimental persuasion of classic Americana and small town life wields a powerful aphrodisiac, but frankly the town of Healdsburg charmed us years before we’d even met our big-hearted neighbors.  Still I cannot conceive a sweeter seduction than the genuine warmth of this small town life, even when the thermometer inches past 100.

My online enology class includes a mandatory “group discussion” board where participants can post questions and ideas pertaining to the reading assignments or just about winemaking in general.  To date, no thread has incited more traffic than a post about lateral and vertical complexity in wines and that complexity as a measure of quality.  Of course, we all differ in our opinions of what constitutes a quality wine, which encompasses everything from cost to availability, varietal and style, ageability, trade ratings, and most fundamentally whether you like what you smell and taste.  But more importantly, I think the concepts of lateral and vertical complexity provide a useful framework for examining what’s in your glass the next time you slowly savor a glass of your favorite juice.

Lateral complexity refers to the “forward” characteristics that we first encounter in smelling and tasting a wine.  This is the initial chemical composition, and it may include many different sensations at once.  First you might smell banana and then flowers.  If you pause to chat and then swirl again, your next sniff might yield tropical fruit and perhaps more banana.  In this case, your nose identifies the most obvious scents that are present in the greatest concentrations first.  After your “nose cells” (for lack of a simpler term) are full of one smell, they become desensitized, and we’re then able to eek out additional, less obvious scents.  It’s not that we’re better smellers now.  Instead you’ve cleared your smelling cells so you can detect other stuff.  But if you wait and try again, clean out those sniffer cells and have another go, you’ll still smell the same original set of characteristics: banana, flowers, and tropical fruit.  So at your next cocktail party if the guy in the velvet dinner jacket waxes poetic about the “fruit forward” pinot, he means that it has the obvious, intense, and immediate aroma of cherry and cranberry right up front.

This is quite different from the more delayed, layered complexity that is termed “vertical complexity.”  As your wine sits in the glass, exposed to ambient oxygen, its chemical composition changes dramatically.  That banana smell is a volatile compound, so it evaporates into the air and floats away into the ether.  This “unmasks” different, new hidden flavors that were unappreciated just an hour ago.  And of course, what I smell may be different from what you identify with your personal nose cells.  To make matters worse, sometimes weird and funky smells must be tolerated up front in order to sniff the good stuff after the wine “breathes” (i.e. sits in your glass exposed to oxygen).  I vividly recall opening a lauded bottle of Condrieu at a fancy San Diego institution only to suffer an olfactory sucker punch from the immediate and overpowering scent of stinky cheese.  We were dining with another couple, and the other wife concurred; it smelled like runny, wet aged blue cheese.  Now I happen to love stinky cheese, but this took me quite by surprise.  By the books, these wines are all apricot, pear, almonds and violets.  And sure enough, after a good 10 or 15 minutes, the wine smelled like ripe fruit and the cheesy overtones had abated completely.

I am not advocating drinking your juice with your pinky in the air and using a fake British accent to classify the aromas in your glass.  But the concepts of lateral and vertical complexity provide a great paradigm for thinking about the wonderful richness of wine and how it changes over time.

For those interested, Ann Noble of UC Davis has created a wine aroma wheel which helps categorize smells from broad subtypes like “fruity” or “woody” into specific subgroups like “tropical fruit” and “cut green grass.”  She also has tips for creating aroma standards at home that you can use to train your nose.  It’s a steal at $6 a pop.   http://www.winearomawheel.com/

My father used to tell me, “You can be whatever you want after medical school;” he was only half joking.  Even at an early age, I was innately aware that my predestined genetic composition precluded careers in certain exclusive field, like prima ballerina, pop/actress phenomenon, professional princess, or Maria Von Trapp’s extra child in The Sound of Music.  And so I embraced my fate as a future physician bravely and with some naïveté.  Growing up, medical aspirations were always coupled to a second, sexier profession like doctor/artist, doctoring writer, or a tap dancing surgeon.  These hybrid phantoms followed me to college where I was a premed English major. 

I spent elementary school perfecting my teacher’s pet mojo so that every successive report card included the sentence, “Kerith is a pleasure to have in class.”  Middle school study skills were honed for high school to secure a future in the Ivy League.  Brian reduces my entire high school academic career to one searing image: Reese Witherspoon in the movie Election.  He says, “Have you seen the movie Election?  Kerith was the Reese Witherspoon character – only worse.”  Of course this is entirely untrue. 

Next, college was a calculated, strategic campaign to ensure my medical school application would eclipse the others, a red buoy bobbing above the crushing tide of biology and biochemistry majors.  Four years later, medical school led to the surgical internship I’d so coveted.  I had successfully scaled the icy precipice of academia and encountered the apex on July 1, 1998.  At precisely 7:01 am, the denizens of ICU nurses turned their attention from the outgoing intern (now officially a resident) and descended on me like a swarm of buzzing, blood hungry mosquitoes.  I was the only intern covering 15 or more very sick neurosurgical patients, all on ventilators, all needing my attention immediately.  I thought I might throw up.  Actually, I didn’t vomit that day, but the very next I nearly passed out in the O.R. until a kind nurse led me out into a cool room for some orange juice and jellybeans.  That happened to me two more times that first month.

No longer beholden to rounding on post-op patients on weekend mornings, I now look forward to a more meandering pace devouring a latte and the Modern Love column in the Sunday Times.  The voyeuristic stories are a telescopic lens into someone else’s love life, encapsulated profiles of different relationships between parents and children and husbands and lovers and siblings.  Not all are fuzzy.  Some are tragic and heartbreaking, even devastating.  But none have yet chronicled the relationship between an individual and their job, as in, “I love my job.”  Or not.  What are the ramifications for a person’s psyche, self worth or personal identity when they despise what they do?  Brian recalls my calling him at 2 or 3 am sobbing on the cold, linoleum floor of the women’s surgical locker room.  Fifteen minutes into wailing about how much I hated my job, I abruptly stopped to say, “I have to go now and take out someone’s appendix.”  Brian wasn’t worried for me but for the poor guy on the table in OR 3.

I had worked so very, very hard to clench my spot in competitive world of surgical training, and it stunk.  It was not until after I’d already committed myself to Riverside Country Hospital, after the first moments of that first horrible morning passed in slow motion that I realized nothing was as I’d expected.  And nothing really ever is, is it?  What can prepare you for marriage or kids or suddenly being responsible for the lives of people you didn’t even know existed before you walked through the sliding glass doors to the ICU?  My patients’ generosity became my albatross, and the guilt gnawed my insides raw.  They gifted me with hand knit blankets, bags of Jamaican coffee beans, and every sort of sugary, delicious indulgence, but at the end of the day, I still hated my job.  I screamed at the poor medicine residents in the E.R. and made one cry.  I was mean.

Internship seems ages ago now.  To call myself a physician today would endanger the lives of those seeking my “professional medical advice.”  Once on a plane, some years ago, the flight attendant paged overhead to inquire if a physician was on board.  Their request was repeated three or four times, each with increasing urgency.  I slumped in my seat and stared out the window, hoping nothing about my outward appearance would divulge that I was in fact a failed, ex-MD pretending to be nothing of the sort.  Thankfully the older gentleman in front of me finally responded, a retired family doc from New Jersey.  Funny how that degree once defined me so completely.  Now I am incredibly lucky to have Bruliam Wines.  While our wine business is a joy, I still struggle to categorize myself professionally. 

Today I am a wife and mother, but that is not income producing.  I suppose I am a “writer” since I have a blog (doesn’t everyone), but that sounds ridiculous and pretentious, especially for an unpublished fop who writes for fun.  I am a student, indulging my passion for wine with online enology classes, and a sort-of winemaker, with Chris’ help, of course.  Ever a student, I am hoping my online “certification” will somehow galvanize enology as a legitimate career choice for me.  My new “whatever I want” is a patchwork of half identities cobbled together as best I can.  It’s not exactly resume building stuff, but at least I can now definitively say that I love my job. 

A few weeks ago, my kids were at the beach on a play date with the kids of an old, elementary school friend of mine.  She asked me if I was interested in speaking at Career Day at our high school alma mater.  Incredulous, I queried, “You want me to talk about surgical pathology?”  After all, I did practice actual medicine for the few short months between the end of my second fellowship and the birth of my first child.  She paused and looked at me quizzically.  “No,” she clarified, “I want you talk about what it’s like to find your passion late in life.”

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!

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).