I am not ready for summer to end.  Outside my window, purple Morning Glories are still blooming, and my first heirloom tomatoes just barely ripened.  It’s been an unusual summer here in Healdsburg.  This past summer has been the coldest on record in 50 years, with July fully 7 degrees below the annual average.  Most mornings have been swathed by soupy costal fog so dense it’s nearly drizzly.  And then just as the summer heat took us by surprise, local kids went back to school.  In fact, Wal-Mart has been promoting 25-cent crayons for weeks already.  Around me everything, except my tomatoes, points to autumn too soon.  Darker, longer mornings, fleeting summer light.    While the academic calendar nudges me ahead, Mother Nature lags behind, about two weeks behind according to local grape growers.  Most of the grapes in our neighborhood have finally turned purple, absent a few stubborn holdouts in shady vineyard corners.  It’s shaping up to be a late harvest.

I suspect our first grape chemistries will start to trickle in just as our kids settle into school.  For the first year, I will be in charge of assessing the sugar and acid levels; I decide when to pull the gun and haul in our fruit.  And it makes me queasy.  I am going to rely heavily on our growers to help guide me through my first solo harvest season.  Harvest – you cut the cord (or literally cordon), and your babies leave the mama vine and suddenly become your responsibility.  I have spent months cold calling, begging, letter writing, and baking to procure the finest quality fruit from the best known growers in each region.  And now I have to do everything I can to not f*#$#*k it up!  It really hit home when Mark Pisoni said, “I will send you chemistries when you’re down south and fruit samples when you’re up north.”  Crap!  I can’t even identify “melon” or “pear” correctly in a finished wine let alone chew a grape, spit the seed and divine when it’s “done.”  Bruliam is growing up fast.

It’s hard to imagine that just two years ago we selected our first grapes from a pre-fab, drop down menu, with no real knowledge about how to make wine.  This year we are sharing vineyard space with some of the best respected names in the business.  Our barrels have been selected, wine plans detailed, and specific yeast strains ordered.  And now we wait.  The end of summer is always bittersweet, but I look forward to officially becoming your winemaker.

I almost fell backwards off the ladder and onto my ass.  My involuntary yelp startled the forklift operator who reflexively reached halfway out of his cab to pull the emergency stop on the conveyor belt.  The grapes piled up accordion style, then came to a brisk halt.  Everyone was looking at me.  I had barely regained my composure before pointing mutely at an 8-inch lizard slowly creeping across our grapes.  We locked eyes – (wo) man to amphibian, each equally stupefied by the presence of the other.  Listen, I am not particularly squeamish.  I spent most of my previous life chopping up body parts in a pathology lab.  But the humungous (relatively), stowaway lizard, half paralyzed by a 5 day cold soak with our grapes, had taken me by surprise.  And suppose he’d gone through the crusher-destemmer, lizard innards coating our fresh, ripe grapes?  What then?  What’s a little lizard rillette when you’re brewing up fungus and bacteria anyway?  Surely he’d (or she’d) be racked off with the lees and sediment before bottling, Bruliam drinkers no worse for the wear.  Not so says the TTB (the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau)!  Federal authorities are proposing legislation that requires wineries to list potential allergens on their wine labels, somewhat akin to the ubiquitous “contains sulfites” warning.  Such legislation is rooted entirely in the use of fining agents, products used to clarify wines.

Fining agents are added to wines to react with and mop up undesirable wine constituents.  Examples of those unwanted components might include brown discoloration, overpowering tannins or murky hazes.  Sometimes winemakers fine their wines proactively, so that hazes don’t form down the road in the bottle.  As you can imagine, chalky, murky wine is off-putting to consumers.  The problem is solved by mixing specific fining agents into the wine that react on contact.  The undesirable stuff (be it protein or protein-polysaccharide conglomerates) is bound up as a precipitate that can be filtered out and tossed away.  The resulting wine is alluringly sparkly and brilliantly clear.  Particular fining agents are selected specifically to gum up exactly what needs to be removed.  Protein-based fining agents are chosen to reduce the bitterness and astringency of excessive tannin polymers.  Since most proteins have a net positive charge at wine pH, they are the perfect agents to tie up unwanted tannins with H-bonds.  It all sounds pretty benign on paper until I reveal what is behind door #1…

 animal hooves, albumin, and fish swim bladders 

Let’s say it collectively and get it out of our system, “EEeeeww!”  Animal hooves and hides are the source of gelatin, raw egg whites provide albumin, and sturgeon swim bladders are the active ingredient in isinglass, a collagen protein.  (Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  The EU banned the use of ox blood years ago because of mad cow disease).  Yes it is true.  Animal derived protein products abound in the savvy enologists’ arsenal of tricks.  Other gross outs include polysaccharides mined from brown algae and insect parts (specifically the positively charged chitin derived from their exoskeleton).  You see, winemaking is a pretty ancient art, and our forefathers exploited everything in nature to achieve stability and clarity.  These fining agents predate silica beads and synthetic polymers and continue to work really well even today.  Frankly, most consumers would rather consume a hermetically sealed, perfectly formed hamburger patty from the supermarket than knowingly drink hooves and hides.

For most winemakers today, the core of this contentious debate is not whether to ban certain solvents or quit fining wine but instead how best to disclose this information to consumers.  Copious consumer education is required if “full disclosure” becomes government mandated.  A label proclaiming your wine may contain “potential allergens including but not limited to raw eggs, animal products and fish parts” is not only off putting but also overblown.   Never mind that only minute amounts, if any, of the fining agent is retained in the finished wine as a negligible residue.  It is the possibility of a theoretical allergen that drives the labeling frenzy.  Used correctly, fining agents are dosed at the smallest possible aliquot to achieve clarity and stability, with each molecule sticking to its respective partner.  And again, the fining agent+unwanted solute aggregate is removed from the wine before bottling.  An early study funded by Australia’s Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation concluded that residual allergens are indeed negligible in finished wines. 

Sometimes fining represents a last minute decision, a way to comb through and polish a wine just before bottling.  In this scenario, the wine labels would have been approved and printed far in advance of this winemaking choice.  The wines could not be bottled and re-labeled without deep financial consequences to the winery.  A blanket consumer warning on all bottles of wine represents the other extreme.    Ironically enough, warning labels would be slapped on bottles at wineries that don’t employ any fining procedures, freaking out consumers unnecessarily.  Or maybe it becomes more information overload, yet another “food warning” consumers scan without mentally processing.  In any event, the thorny labeling issue is sure to invite consumer outcry from vegans and lawyers and folks afflicted with “allergies” like headaches after they drink too much at parties. 

To be sure, life threatening food allergies are not a joke.  So perhaps a clause about eggs, fish or milk proteins is warranted.  But one must tread thoughtfully.  The Situation may crave raw egg protein shakes, but it’s a tougher sell for premium pinot noir.  Once you riff on algae and horse hooves, the romance is gone.  With potential legislation looming and Australia and New Zealand already required to disclose “allergens,” niche discussions about potential wine allergens are sure to find their way to Wikipedia soon.

To date, Bruliam has not employed fining agents in our winemaking strategy.  We are not opposed to using any natural materials that might make our wines better.  As with all of our winemaking choices, we will post our decisions here on our blog.

I really enjoyed my month long anesthesia vacation, I mean “rotation,” during my surgical internship.  It was a nice break from general surgery.  Nobody threw sharp instruments at your head when you misidentified a blood vessel.  The hours were better.  You could flip through a trashy magazine, hidden inside the cover of the New England Journal, while the patient was asleep.  Reclining in that cushy stool, you could snicker at the poor surgical intern holding her bladder and the retractor and rejoice, “Thank God I’m not scrubbed into that 12 hour vascular mess.”  But karma is a bitch; anesthesia is all about the spit.  And the phlegm.  And the disgusting saliva you had to suction away with a maddening, nauseating slurp.  Saliva is not my thing.

Unfortunately the study of wine necessitates spit, gross but necessary.  A few weeks ago, when I attended the Pinot Days festival in San Francisco, I spent 4 hours trolling from booth to booth with my red plastic spit cup.  I never really dwelled on the content of that icky plastic spittoon until recently.  Nestled within last week’s reading assignment, my UC Davis syllabus contained the following gem.  The author noted that the murky mixture of spittle and discarded wine will “cause “clots” in expectorated wine samples.”  To imagine a flocculating coagulation of spit + wine protein floating like an island in a frothy merlot sea will kill an appetite.  Even mine.

As it turns out, there is a considerable body of academic research concerning wine and saliva.  Who knew?  One researcher went so far as to measure how much spit your mouth produces after sipping, swirling, and spitting out a mouthful of wine.  In case you were curious, saliva production revs up after 10 seconds and peaks at 20 seconds.  After that your mouth kind of peters out and dries up without the “additional stimulation” of water or a saltine (Lesschaeve and Noble).  Better yet, researchers have identified a “new [spit] protein.”  Investigators invited folks to drink wine and grape seed tannin solutions and then analyzed their spit eight minutes later.  Spit study revealed a novel protein peak, presumably a conglomeration of icky saliva goo stuck to wine funk (ibid).

Most of this research derives not from pranksters and lovers of all things gory and gross but instead from folks studying the sensory analysis of wine.  Much is rooted in the study of wine tannins.  Tannins are of course the stuff of fuzzy purple teeth.  Tannins are what make those big cabs and syrahs so mouth drying and “puckery.”  Tannins are responsible for what the cabernet crusaders call “astringency.”  I am talking about when your tongue gets rough and sand-papery, your cheeks are sucked dry, and your lips crack after swigging too large a gulp of $12 cabernet.  Have you ever had the sensation that the more cab you drink, the more prickly your palate feels?  You’re not crazy.  Actually, research proves that unpleasant feeling is cumulative.

As you slosh back glass after glass, the tannins accumulate, and their effect is compounded like the vig you owe the bookie.  Researchers can actually test this by asking judges to keep sipping vino at specified intervals while continually rating the intensity of the astringency.  The fancy term is “carry over.”  Please tell us, sirs, is your tongue (a) barely brambly, (b) chapped and coarse or (c) harsh and coarse-grained like a scouring pad?  Does the NIH fund those scorecards?  By the way, increasing the time intervals between sips to 30 seconds “considerably reduced” the sand paper effect of each subsequent sip (ibid).

There happens to be logical physiology to explain why your mouth feels like a pumice stone.  Tannins, which are promiscuous chemical chains, like to hook up with any available proteins, whether intrinsic to the wine or not.  Saliva is chock full of proteins, including proline-rich ones, which are particularly attractive to polyphenols (i.e. tannins).  When you sip a tannin-heavy wine, the tannins stick to your salivary proteins and gum them up.  You feel your salivary flow rate drop, and “oral lubrication” decreases.  This is friction in your gums and postulated to be the mechanism of astringency.  (By the way, this is also the premise of protein “fining.”  You mix your immature wine with a protein solution to suck up the extra tannins before bottling).

The next time your host serves some young, outrageously tannic behemoth, your best bet is to pace at one swig/minute.  At least you’ll overcome the tannic carryover until you’re able to dump the remaining drops in a nearby planter.

Works Cited:

Lesschaeve, I., and A. C. Noble. 2005. Polyphenols: factors influencing their sensory properties and their effects on food and beverage preferences. Am J Clin Nutr 2005 81: 330S-335. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/81/1/330S.

Check out a brief video of this year’s pinot noir blending session below.  If you can’t see the video, please click here.

By now you all know that blending is the art of winemaking.  As you blend, taste, and spit, you strive to craft a composite wine that outshines each component individually.  What one wine lacks in aromatics is complimented by another that smells divine but lacks tannin.  And so it goes.  Last week, for the first time, Brian and I faced the quality vs. consistency dilemma.  Last year being our inaugural year, we had no benchmarks to match (other than the bottles of cult pinot noir we hoped to emulate).  Our 2008 Santa Lucia Highlands bottling offered ripe berry aromatics, sweet floral notes, and a killer structure with ample tannins and body.  This year’s batch from Doctor’s Vineyard had to measure up.  As we tasted through different blends, some were decidedly lovely but lacked the grip of last year’s juice.  We changed directions and re-blended to achieve greater year-to-year consistency.  We added more of the 667 clone to flesh out the body and amp up the tannins, plus a tad of the heritage Swan clone for those sweet aromatics. 

In the end, I think you will be thrilled with the results.  The Santa Lucia Highlands has the same ripe blackberry/raspberry profile with that wonderful underpinning of savory smoke and spice.  And it’s got muscle to boot.  Our Sonoma Coast offering has a great nose of fruit and earth and some pretty strong tannins.  Our Anderson Valley pinot has a trademark cranberry nose and a velvety smooth finish.

For now, the wine will meld in the barrel for another two months before bottling.

The pinot noir was tepid and so was the sauvignon blanc.  The bucolic serenity of sprawling grapevines harmonized with guttural spews of exhaust.  A serpentine parade of FedEx trucks stretched from the “Welcome!  Tasting Room Open!” sign on the gravel road to a nearby storage shed, each transport vehicle awaiting full palates of wine shipments.  A concrete patio led to the “tasting room” facility, co-opted from NBC’s The Office. 

We were welcomed by a trio of wood laminate desks surrounded by plentiful office cabinetry.  I would not have been surprised if a perfunctory front desk attendant had asked me to take a number and then handed me a clipboard of blank insurance forms.  In an adjacent room, another laminate wood desk/table was set with four open wine bottles, resting comfortably at room temperature. 

An uninspired tasting room attendant begrudgingly poured us a cursory sip from the first bottle of pinot noir, explaining we were lucky to be at the winery tasting a proprietary blend destined mainly for restaurants across the country.  Note to self: do not order this wine the next time you dine in Des Moines.  But hey, kudos to them; at least it was consistent.  The pinot was just as I remembered it, a cherry cola / cherry Triaminic hybrid, and warm too.  A cloying artificial red fruit taste stuck to my cheeks’ insides.  Not even the warm sauv blanc (served last) could wash the flavor away.  Talk about a long finish. 

When Brian and I inquired if we could buy a chilled half bottle of the white to go with our picnic lunch, I was politely informed the winery lacks the alcohol license that permits guests to drink wine on their patio.  Who knew?  I washed down a homemade sandwich with the water that had been baking in my minivan; the dashboard thermometer up-ticked to 93 degrees.  As we retreated to the patio, I noticed the tasting room manager swap out the warm sauvignon blanc for a cold one.  I hope the next visitors have a better experience than ours.

To be fair, the winery offers an expanded tasting of their single vineyard designates, which I presume must be booked in advance.  Brian and I were only allowed to press our sweaty noses against the glass partition dividing the insurance claims cubicle from the good juice on the other side.  While Wine Wednesday was kind of a bust, I have to give this label props for consistency.  Every year the winery blends that restaurant bottling to embody the essence of a cherry Vicks cough drop.  This approach is one, well-practiced side of the blending equation.  The flip side is blending wine to produce the best concoction you can muster.  Ideally both goals are the same.  Other times consistency and quality are mutually exclusive.

Brian and I frequent different local wineries for different reasons.  Some we visit for the awesome wines.  Others have gorgeous grounds that afford us a brief respite from reality as our kids run amok, and we gulp down a perfectly quaffable libation.  But it’s rare to seek out a spot that offers neither. 

Still I’d be an imbecile to bitch about it.  A bad day of wine drinking is still a pretty good day.

Wine Wednesdays: we’ll drink the wines so that you don’t have to.   

Happy summer to all.  We at Bruliam Wines are thrilled to announce the highly anticipated return of our greatly lauded summer fluff series.  Good Morning American brings you a summer concert series, and I spew discordant logorrhea, every single week.  Rejoice loyal readers; “Wine Wednesdays” are back.  Even my mom told me last year’s were great, and she and my step-dad are avowed teetotalers.  (Take that you crummy wine blog award judges!).  Summer 2010 promises an expansive look at northern Sonoma County wines with a decided emphasis on the Russian River Valley.  We vow to cover as many wineries as we can between 9 am and 2 pm (preschool hours) or until Child Protective Services squelches our penchant for retrieving the twins mildly buzzed.  And trust me.  I’ve completed over eight years of post graduate study in areas wholly unrelated to enology, so I am uniquely qualified to be your tasting guide.  After roto-rooter sinus surgery as a teenager, the ENT promised my sense of smell would be permanently dampened.  I cannot identify mulberries, sarsaparilla, or gooseberries.  After scoring a rare seat in Cornell University’s ultra-popular “wines” course my senior year, I dropped the class before it started.  And so went my only formal wine tasting curriculum.

In previous blind tasting flights, I have demonstrated my incompetence again and again, with both domestic and foreign wines.  If asked to compare three wines blindly, two identical and one different, I am certain I could not distinguish the different wine from the others with any more accuracy than chance alone.  I generally can detect whiffs of raspberry and blackberry because I buy them in bulk containers at Costco.  Although I also consume copious amount of chocolate, descriptors like “cocoa nib” and “raw cocoa bean” routinely elude me.  So dear readers, prepare yourselves to meet yet another internet wine expert.  Trust that my mellifluous wine analyses are accurate and reliable today.  If I were to re-taste the same wines tomorrow, they might be different.

Before summer even started, a wine that was new to me elicited a gluttonous moan of joy followed by gulps and slurps.  It happened to be a Dutton Goldfield pinot noir from the Green Valley appellation.  (To be exact, it was the 2007 Dutton Goldfield Sanchietti vineyard pinot noir.  Don’t even try.  It’s sold out.  The winery literally sold the last two bottles the day before our visit).  This wine happened to be part of a pinot pack we’d snagged for cheap at a wine auction.  The other bottles hadn’t been particularly memorable so I had no real expectations for this one.  I was happily surprised by it’s rich, layered aromas of berry, spice and smoke.  The flavors were integrated; the mouth feel was grippy with good palate weight, and the finish smooth and long.  It was a Wow! wine, and the riot in my mouth inspired the first Wine Wednesday of the season.  (OK, I cannot believe I just wrote something so cheesy).

The Dutton-Goldfield tasting room is located in southwest Russian River Valley in Sebastopol.  The tasting room is lovely, spacious, and brand new.  Self-anointed “world’s most reliable taster,” I couldn’t wait to find out if I still liked their wines the second time around.  Happily, I did.  I thought their gewürztraminer was insanely and unapologetically aromatic.  It took me back to being a tween playing dress up and sneaking dabs of “exotic” perfumes like Shalimar.  The wine was heady and potent, with tropical fruit, jasmine and honeysuckle.  I kept thinking of that passage in The Sound and the Fury where Quentin is overpowered by the pervasive smell of honeysuckle.  But we are here to talk about pinot.  I especially liked their Freestone Hill pinot noir for its complexity and core of “baking spice” layered atop berry fruit.  I use “baking spice” as a wastebasket term when I smell cinnamon/cardamom/mace/nutmeg, the players in banana bread or pumpkin pie.

If you do decide to visit, you could bundle the trip with a visit to equally illustrious pinot producer Merry Edwards, just down the road.  Even if you don’t trust my wine reviews, and I use “review” loosely and humbly, I can identify a picnic table in a lineup that includes end table and pool table.  So I can relate with confidence that the Dutton Goldfield tasting room houses a lovely outdoor patio with shady picnic tables.  Pack a basket and savor your pinot al fresco.  And ladies, I won’t tell if you dab on that gewürztraminer in a pinch.  It’s sure to attract the likes of Steve Heimoff or James Laube across a crowded bar.

The girl who bikes next to me in spin class graduated from the same local high school as I.  We finished maybe five years apart (plus or minus 15 years).  When I get amped up over the extended Cure / Depeche Mode remixes that carry us over 17 minute “hill” excursions, her eyes glaze over.  After all, she was a zygote back in 1983.  So I was surprised to learn this bitty baby was a fledgling cork-dork.  In fact our spin instructor (who shares my musical sensibilities, not hers) gifted the wine baby a bottle of Toasted Head chardonnay to fete her completing her first marathon.  So after class, I asked wine baby if she knew what a “toasted head” was.  She thought it might have something to do with a bear or fire, since their label sports a cartoon of a fire breathing teddy.  When I explained it was a reference to the charred end-pieces of oak wine casks, she seemed genuinely interested, for the first 3 minutes.  Before long, I was stretching alone and talking to myself, like those folks with the stealth hands-free phone devices.  Luckily, I can finish my conversation with myself right here.

Almost all red wine and many white wines experience oak contact en route from fermentation to bottle.  Usually this is in the form of oak barrel aging, but cheaper alternatives like oak chips are also available.  Untangling the mysteries of wood barrels is a thorny process.  Fundamentally, oak can be classified as used or new, French or not.  But within these overarching categories, there are innumerable details that may affect the outcome of the finished wine.  So let’s begin where it all starts, with a tree.

The most highly pedigreed oak hails from France.  Premium French oak derives from specially designated forests in special parts of France (Alliers! Nevers!).  The trees are sawed in a particular way, and the planks are planed and dried.  Only then do highly trained coopers (i.e. barrel makers) use heat to bend individual wood staves into picturesque arcs.  The arching staves are placed within the metal hoops that stabilize the barrels.  There is no glue, no nails, and the barrels are water tight.  Besides using heat to bend wood, there is another byproduct of direct flame heating, a residual char affectionately called “toast.”  Toast comes in different levels, ascending from low to medium to high.  Each cooper does it a little bit differently, and you order barrels by cooper and toast level, custom wood for your premium juice.  It’s like designer jeans, with minute permutations changing the fit just enough that ladies care, and the men are confused.  Trained tasters can totally taste the difference between wine aged in a Francois Frere barrel vs. Seguin Moreau vs. Remond.  You could too if you had all 3 wines lined up in a row. 

Some scientists believe these differences have more to do with barrel age and duration of oak contact than with the origin of the barrels themselves.  So I have some more explaining to do.  The char lining the barrels contains unique chemical compounds that are neither intrinsic to grapes nor generated by fermentation alone.  In other words, crispy Cajun barrels give the wine somethin’ extra you can’t get anywhere else.  When you put wine into a barrel, these compounds seep into the juice and change the texture and flavor and aroma, generally in a favorable manner.  New barrels have more to offer, since the pool of special sauce is finite.  After a year of use, fewer chemicals remain to diffuse into next season’s juice.  After three cycles of use, the barrels are deemed “neutral” and have nothing more to offer than cheap storage, presuming you’ve fully paid off your barrel bills from two seasons ago.  Furthermore, the longer the wine is in contact with the barrel, the more stuff seeps in.  The highest rate of diffusion occurs during the first months of barrel aging.  So one could correctly argue that wine aged for 6 months in brand new French oak has more oaky tones than wine that sits for two years in neutral oak.  But bear in mind, there can be too much of a good thing.  Wine aged in 100% new oak for too long will taste like a Home Depot 2X4.  And some folks turn their noses up at barrel aging altogether.  The tag line “100% stainless steel fermentation and aging” has become a trendy moniker.

Oak aging serves a number of useful functions.  First and foremost, it accelerates the aging process.  Hard edged tannins are softened, vegetal and bitter notes are diminished, and varietal character is enhanced.  The wine is more nuanced, layered and complex.  How can this be, you ask?  Drum roll…and now for the biochemistry (quick and painless, I promise).  The biochemical players comprising the toast can be roughly divided into 3 categories.  (1) Byproducts of polysaccharide pyrolysis.  This means that fire breaks down the sugars in woody cellulose.  This yields stuff like furanic aldehydes, which include guys like eugenol and vinyl-4-guiacol.  Sound familiar?  These are the same players in smoke taint, but to a much lesser degree. (2)  Oaky lactones which tend towards oaky and coconut flavors (3) Decomposition of wood ligins yielding almond and vanilla flavors.  OK, done!  Please, don’t unsubscribe…join the legions of Bruliam fans who tolerate biochemistry once/quarter.

As soon as we finalize the contracts on our grapes for 2010 harvest, we’ll be ordering our custom oak barrels from France.  We plan to keep you posted.

Dear Mr. McInerney:

Please find enclosed one extra large pair of women’s underpants and one magenta sharpie marker for you to use to autograph my left buttock.  A pre-paid/pre-addressed mailer is also included to facilitate return of the aforementioned autographed panties to me.  Thanks in advance.  I am really and truly your biggest fan, Mr. McInerney.  I’ve read most everything you’ve written and really liked your last 3 columns for the WSJ quite a lot.  (That first one was tough to swallow – but then again what juices of love are not?).  In case you couldn’t tell, that’s your face on the front of the panties.  I enlarged your dot-matrix portrait at Kinko’s and then used my bedazzler to recreate your likeness with pink rhinestones.  That’s why the panties are XL.  I couldn’t fit your whole face on the sexy, little ones I’d originally bought at Victoria’s Secret.  But no matter, so long as you know that the President of the Jay McInerney for Editor of Wine Spectator Fan Club doesn’t have an extra large ass.  It’s kind of more medium plus.  I am also writing to find out about any upcoming tour dates you might have this summer.  You may recall from my Facebook page that I already have a picture of me and my other boyfriend, Tyler Florence posted up top.  I was hoping to add a picture of the two of us to my ultimate fan link.  By the way, I have tried to friend you like 5 times, and you never respond.  Someone told me that you can reset your preferences to ignore friend requests, but I’m sure that’s not true.  You’re probably just busy writing the next Great American Novel about an impotent white ex-pat who meets a whale, dreams of throwing kids off of a cliff, and moves from Oklahoma to California to drink oaky chardonnay.  (Ha ha get it? “Oakie” and “oaky?”  I graduated with honors in English Literature from an Ivy League college).

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I imagine you ask me to edit your work for grammatical errors.  After I point out that third comma splice, you look deeply and gratefully into my eyes and wonder out loud how you ever wrote anything before I came into your life. 

I also have this weird recurring dream about the two of us.  We are at a trendy Manhattan bistro sipping Dom rose champagne, oddly enough.  (I guess that first column affected me more than I thought).  You take my hand in yours and whisper, “This is so fruity, like Kyle’s gay dog dry humping Cartman’s leg.”

I respond back, “No, this is fruity like Ricky Martin’s coming out last week,”

Ever the king of wine-centric similes, you quip, “No, fruity like Maksim’s spangled spandex on Dancing with the Stars.”  Just wait until I get to the part about the acid, mouth-puckering like Kate Gosselin’s angry paparazzi face.  Oh Mr. McInerney, you make me woozy.  As an avid reader of US Weekly and People, I really “get” your columns.  You know just how to make a gal feel like a real wine pro. 

Please let me know about your summer tour schedule as soon as possible.  I’d like to book my airfare before it gets too expensive.  I’m a little short on cash after I bought 35 cases of rose sparkler at BevMo.  It’s the closest I’ll get to the Enotheque.

Sincerely,

Your #354 Fan

There is a little bit of Rachel Berry deep inside all of us, some more than others.  If Taylor Swift’s music pierces the soul of anguished tween girls across the Midwest, then Rachel Berry embodies every over-achieving, approval-seeking, type-A adolescent.  These are the girls who grow up to become overbearing, validation-craving, histrionic Jewish mothers.  During a recent episode of Glee, after Rachel wailed, “I am like Tinker Bell, Finn. I need applause to live!,” my husband just turned at me and stared, very hard, for a long time.  And it’s true, that elusive gold star is sweet to accrue (and wear like a gaudy wrist corsage for all to admire).  But my obsessive, self-absorbed quest for world-wide admiration is exhausting and requires work.  Like I have to put myself out there to be judged, by doing things like blind tasting wines, where I usually fail.

I recently re-visited the source of my greatest shame and again subjected myself to that most loathsome and tedious of tasks – blind tasting wines before an audience.  I am happy to report I’ve shown very little improvement from my last ineptitude where I failed to link “pencil shavings and cassis” to the vines of Bordeaux.  On this occasion, my only clue was “4 different red wines.”  My mission: correctly identify each grape varietal while Russian gangsters blindfolded me with burlap scraps they ripped apart with their teeth and caressed my brainstem with the trigger of an automatic rifle.  Each bottle was randomly assigned a color-coated wine bag to distinguish it from its neighbor (and presumably make me feel red rage at my infantile green envy when my colleague outperformed me).  While tasting, I made incoherent tasting notes like “hmm- smells briny, like oysters – what is it?” and “berry nose reminds me of pinot but it’s not pinot - what is it?”  And that’s the joke of the game- I had no f*&%&king idea.  Happily I still got the steak and passion fruit mousse prize even though my score was only 25%, dropping me below the bottom third of my graduating medical school class.

Blind tasting wine is all about sensory memories and sparking neural connections between stuff you drink sober enough to recall on cue and what is in your glass right now.  When I marvel how my Master Sommelier pals not only identify varietal but also region, producer, and year of vintage (!!), they are humble and blather about their “taste database.”  Whatever.  It’s still the coolest party trick I’ve seen.

If you want to blind taste wines at home, you probably ought to follow some ground rules.  First you need to pick a theme.  For example, you might taste only merlots, then purchase ones from around the globe and pick your favorite (although I don’t know why you’d ever pick merlot for anything).  Only the most sadistic of men will rig the game so that devouring the glistening, juicy steak crackling before you is contingent on correctly identifying the contents of each bottle.  Instead spare yourself the humiliation; blind taste for fun and choose your favorite.  Generally, the bottles should be about the same price.  This is no caveat of snobbish whim, although it is always entertaining to see if your wino-wonko buddies can pick the boxed wine from a lineup.  I encourage you taste around a similar price point because it helps equalize winemaking techniques that affect taste and aroma.  For example, new French oak barrels are really expensive.  Cheap wines cannot afford to lounge around for 2 years in new French oak.  Instead they settle for used barrels or swimming over a small mountain of oak chips (like the stuff in your bbq smoker).  Furthermore, cheap grapes from hotter climes, like the San Joaquin Valley, have lower acid.  The amount of acid in finished wine affects how you perceive taste, mouth feel, and finish.  (You can always add acid back to unfinished wine, but that trick is costly too).  Across a level playing field, you can select your favorite wine with more assurance and precision.  Lastly, follow the 4 S’s (plus 3 more).  See, swirl, smell, sip, (slosh it around your mouth, then either spit or swallow).  Only the self anointed pros taste in black glassware as to remain uninfluenced by color.  You should not.  Look at the color.  If the wine you suspect neighbor contributed looks brown and murky, tell him to stop being such a cheap prick and pawning off the wine stashed behind the radiator.  Plus, you’ll only lose friends when your colleague screams, “I know it!  Gruner Veltliner!” and it’s actually cabernet.

(Special thanks to our good friends and Bruliam fans who went all out to organize a truly wonderful evening of wine tasting and fabulous food.)

“Golf’s big problem: No kids.  Still intimidating for beginners, the game isn’t attracting young people.”  Now that’s a Wall Street Journal headliner you’ll never confuse for a reference to the wine industry.  Can you imagine reading “Tasting room’s big problem: No kids?”  Of course not, although fledgling wine drinkers are often intimidated.  But it’s really the kid part that sounds so audacious.  Because, let’s face it, nobody chooses to wine tour with kids.  They are a cumbersome afterthought, dragged from one tasting room to the next like a whining, complaining, cheerio-encrusted white albatross.  And I understand.  You never even intended to bring them in the first place, until suddenly you had a babysitting crisis or crisis of mindfulness that made gutting it out at a winery with three kids seem like a terrific idea. 

Generally I’ll mislead and betray my own kin to lessen the blow:

Start with, “Hey kids, we’re going to a farm!  You guys love farms!”  The forced peppiness is requisite.

“Will there be ponies?”  (Darn it!  She always asks that one, and it always ends badly).

“No, no ponies,” I continue gamely.

“How about cows?  Or chickens?”

“No and no.  This is a very, very special kind of farm.  A grape farm.” 

Be prepared for glum resistance, crestfallen faces, and occasional sobbing.  My kids usually regain composure after they’re strapped into the car.

The other plausible misrepresentation is to play out the picnic scenario.  “Hey kids, we’re going on a picnic…at a winery.”  Armed with coloring books and plenty of candy for bribes, my kids and I have covered much of the Russian River Valley, Dry Creek Valley, and Alexander Valley.  But with summer around the corner, I am not sure my one-year-smarter kids can still be baited by last year’s “grape farm” hoax.

Fortunately, Francis Ford Coppola seems to like my children, even if I don’t.  He is reinventing his namesake Geyserville winery as a family friendly enterprise.  It’s scheduled to open July 4^thand is just one freeway exit north of our Healdsburg home.  Construction appears on schedule, and a job fair to hire over 100 people was advertised in our local newspaper.  However, exact “family friendly” details have not been fully disclosed.  But to be fair, in the past year, the winery has hosted both Halloween and Easter events as well as the starting corrals for the Healdsburg half marathon.  Friendly stuff.  Once opened, the new facility promises two wading pools with rentable changing cabins, a big courtyard patio, poolside bars, a stage, amphitheatre, and eventually bocce ball.  According to the paper, Mr. Coppola envisions folks “playing freely and joyfully throughout the property” with “music and dancing and puppet shows.”  The winery will even host the summertime Geyserville Neighbor’s Farmer’s Market.

It’s easy to be snarky.  Hey Mr. Coppola, what wine do you pair with goldfish crackers?  Yeah, well what about the colored ones?  Do you provide child care so I can ditch these pipsqueaks and actually enjoy the place?  Are those “uncrustables” or palate cleansers?  But this is the first I’ve ever heard of a winery actively recruiting families.  And it sounds like a smart marketing campaign to me.  The focus is on his more moderately priced wines.  And really, what parent couldn’t use a glass of wine on a weekend afternoon, when our kids don’t have school for entertainment?  In fact I will risk being a pariah and state that most moms will spend more money at wineries that accommodate or even tolerate our kids (low expectations, friends).  I for one maintain an ongoing mental tally of which wineries provide kid-friendly amenities like paper and crayons, old legos, or cookies and crackers without being asked.  I am not expecting Disneyland, but please spare me the disdain.  I don’t always like my own kids either.  I’ll offer up this real life occurrence as proof.  On a recent date night at Dry Creek Kitchen, our favorite Healdsburg sommelier Drew suggested a pinot noir from Arista Winery.  “Oh I know those guys,” I interjected.  “They gave my kids otter pops last summer.”  And yes, we ordered their wine.

This past weekend some friends joined us for a Zinfandel blending party at Alderbrook Winery in Healdsburg.  The event was designed to replicate the blending process winemakers’ use to orchestrate the final composition of the finished wine.  For this exercise, Alderbrook provided each participant with three different glasses of Zinfandel, base wines “A-C,” plus a glass of Carignane, wine “D.”  Using pipettes, graduated cylinders, and a judicious dose of moxie, we were set loose to mix, blend, taste, spit, dump, re-blend, and try again until we hit gold, that unified chorus of harmony in a glass.  (Cheesy but true.)  After crafting our personal super-blend, we were asked to mix up a big 1000 ml beaker-full which was individually bottled, corked, and foiled for us to take home.  Then we made our own labels using magic markers and colored pencils.  I may suggest this artistic D-I-Y to the mommy hosting our next preschool birthday party.

Wine blending combines artistry with methodical precision.  Different lots of wine are mixed, tasted, and remixed until the integrated parts fuse perfectly.  It is incumbent on the winemaker to gauge how minute permutations in the ratios of the blending wines affect the final mix, if at all.  Adding or subtracting < 5% volume of a given wine from the composite brew can perceptibly alter what you taste and smell.  Sometimes nudging a blending wine just a few percentage points in either direction renders the final concoction undrinkable; other times it’s way better.  The base wines integrate differently based on their relative proportions.  And when blending on a small scale, say in a wine glass, it’s imperative to document exactly how much of each base wine muddles the mix so that the recipe can be extrapolated from that one glass to hundreds of barrels, in identical ratios.  Sometimes tasting glass after glass of nearly identical wines is maddening, since eventually my taste buds burn out, and they inevitably all taste the same.  I think that’s called “buzzed.”

Presumably your base wines are different enough to provide a template of how to proceed.  You may aim to blend a more tannic, astringent wine with something rounder and softer or a wine with more front palate-weight with one that warms the back of the throat, to indulge every single taste bud.  Base wines may be as similar as same varietal, same vineyard, different clone or as divergent as zinfandel and petit syrah.  And winemakers are at liberty to blend and bottle their wines in any way they wish.  However, what the label can say about it is another issue altogether.  In the United States, state-specific laws dictate the connection between the label and the concoction inside.  For example, a label stating “Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford Hill, Napa Valley” means that 100% of the grapes are from California, 85% must be from Napa Valley, specifically and 75% of the grapes are indeed cab.  Theoretically, through blending trials and taste tests, a winemaker may decide her melange-du-95-points should include 50% cabernet grapes from Colgin, 30% cab grapes from Harlan, 5% cab from Della Valle, and 15% Thompson seedless from a Salinas Valley grocery store.  And happily you don’t even need to specify which grocery chain it is on your label. 

Disclaimer: This is purely a fictional example.  I made it up for fun.  Sonoma County vintners will in no way suggest, insinuate, or blindly guess the composition of Napa Valley Cabernet.

Blending is an art and a science, to me one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of winemaking.  I like to think that we really elevated the aromatics of our ’08 Santa Lucia Highlands pinot by adding a mere 2 ½% of “Swan clone,” a California heritage clone from the contiguous vineyard site.  Last Saturday, for example, I started with wine “A,” which I felt had the richest, most beautiful color, fruitiest aromatics, and heavier tannin.  Brian, in contrast, started with wine “B” which had a lovely, mouth-filling richness with much softer tannins.  Clearly mine will be killer drinking at next year’s event while Brian’s label should read “drink now through May 15, 2010.”  In fact, all four of us participants selected a different base wine to use in greatest proportion.  That is what makes wine so wonderful.  Everyone’s palate is different.  My supremely awesome blend of wonder is very different from my husband’s.  If you’ve never attended a blending seminar, they are a blast.  Educational and fun, they really provide a lively window into the details of winemaking.  They are even better when they conclude with a decadent lobster boil and ice cream.  Just don’t forget your calculator, point dexter. 

Lobster Boil – Before…..:

….and After:

“Mooch” – derived from French “muchier,” to hide, lurk

If you can’t pad your bra, ladies, then pad your wine cellar.  As we slog though this relentless tide of economic misfortune, I have perfected an irrefutable strategy to enhance the quality of the wine you drink without costing you a single penny.  Would you like to upgrade from box wine to Bordeaux?  How about swap out anything with an animal label for one etched with a chateau?  Then listen closely friends, as I disclose the secret to getting the most exclusive wines at no additional cost to you.  No, I am not proposing you erect some sloppy, ad hock wine blog in return for “reviewing” freebies.  What I’ve got trumps that has-been scheme any day.  I am talking about recalibrating your wine ethics, just resetting your moral compass a little further south, when we’re talking about wine that is.  Now I understand that the Good Book explicitly dictates “Do Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wine Cellar.”  But I am here to tell you to covet until you are craven.  In fact stake out your neighbor’s house with night vision goggles.  How else are you going to know what they drink with dinner and if it’s better than what you’ve already got?  Engage in some low risk reconnaissance with UPS to discover what wines are being delivered to their doorstep.  Better yet, track any comings and goings from the yellow DHL van – a sign they’re paying out for the good European stuff.  Really organized people may choose to rank their neighbors on a spreadsheet, based on presumed cellar contents and estimated value.  Considering that data,  you can better plan your grocery shopping and intended food/wine pairings.  Step #2: after the stake-out comes the most critical step: the thinly-veiled mooch.

As a good and compassionate friend, you certainly don’t want your neighbor’s cellar contents to go to waste.  You must help them consume their finest selections lest they spoil before the expiration date issued by Wine Spectator.  This is where graciousness guides your fate.  Invite them to dinner and propose they bring their favorite wine to share.  Here is the clincher – tell them to be prepared to explain why their wine is special and why they chose that particular selection.  Since wine is a joyous, communal beverage best shared among friends, this tactic provides ample cover from being labeled a gluttonous, parsimonious, freeloading bastard too miserly to buy her own s^*t.  I assure you; you will be overjoyed and moved by your friends’ generosity and goodwill.  You may even regret acting like a miserly Philistine – that is until you get a sip of that grand cru Burgundy that costs more your minivan lease payments.

I don’t mean to sound crass.  This endeavor started with the most honest and forthright intentions – a spring lamb dinner.  I asked a number of my wine loving pals to each contribute a bottle or two and express why their choice was meaningful to them.  In fact, I figured I was doing everyone a favor by containing costs with a special, diminished corkage fee.  Then the e-mails started to roll in.  Woe is the shameful, despicable woman who cowers in the blazing glory of her friends’ unselfish largesse.  Only a coarse and pitiful wretch would try to leverage such kindness for her own loathsome pleasure.  (Are you looking at me?).  As I mentally ticked off their proposed wine selections, I quivered a little bit inside.  Big-hearted and absurdly generous would be an understatement.  Lest some established wine writer point a finger and call me a “douche”, I will refrain from disclosing the details of each exquisite wine we tasted.  Suffice to say, my spring lamb bounty of wonder included obscenely awesome white Burgundy, cult California pinot noir, gorgeous and smooth aged Napa cab (from someone you’d know), chewy, monumental Zins that made the lamb sing (yes, those are actual angels and harps that you hear in the background), and an epiphany of a dessert wine from a special place in France that starts with “S” and rhymes with blow-terne.  Wow right?!!?  Not only were these wines mind blowing but also their attached stories were beautiful.  My dining companions recounted everything from marriage proposals and 10-year wedding anniversaries to memories of carefree French vacations.  I was touched to witness my buddies participate so fully.  So what did we contribute, you query?  Since full disclosure is our policy, I sheepishly admit we provided a magnum of Bruliam pinot noir.  However that was not our original intention; our (very kind and ferociously supportive) friends requested it.  When you can’t afford better wine, find better friends.            

Thank you, thank you to all involved in my personal palate expansion that evening. 

It was my Sophie’s Choice.  How could I decide whom I loved best when two equally luminous beacons of vino-rrific wine writing shared my heart?  Even worse, how might I love anew without denigrating the memory of my original paramour?  Unfortunately after reading Jay McInerney’s inaugural Tastings column for the Wall Street Journal, my heart wasn’t split but was sunk.  After months of frenzied internet speculation, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Mr. McInerney and Ms. Lettie Teague will be alternating weeks at the helm of the weekend On Wine column.  They are now a permanent installation, filling the shoes of the much missed husband and wife team John Brecher and Dottie Gaiter.  You probably recall that I am still a fanatical devotee of John and Dottie’s prose, but prone as I am to soft-core celebrity stalking, Mr. McInerney has me quite bewitched.  He is probably my #1 writer-crush, which is itself a ridiculous seduction as you’d never see Mr. McInerney posing bare-chested and pouty as a bikini-briefed Cosmopolitan centerfold.   

I have always loved his wine writing style, a breezy, intimate affair littered with smart allusions to pop culture and all kinds of sexy.  Equal parts wine geek and social observer, he gets titillating goose bumps from the “semi obscure” wines of Alsace all while immodestly ogling a local winemaker’s wife whom he compares to classic beauty Tea Leoni.  Yes, I am easily charmed.  His best wine columns from Home and Garden magazine have been published in two great collections: Bacchus and Me and A Hedonist in the Cellar.  So I really, really wanted to love his first WSJ column, but it left me cold – out in the cold, all by myself.  While Mr. McInerney was prancing around the rarefied world of $160,000 Italian racecars, I felt like the jilted lover, last year’s discarded goods.  To those who don’t subscribe, his first column profiled Dom Pérignon Rosé, more specifically the 1990 Dom Pérignon Œnothèque Rosé, which retails for nearly $400 a bottle.  Sure perfection and artistry in a glass are just that.  And bubby perfection comes at a steep price.  But dear Jay, you have sent me a clear message.  I’m an outsider peering into your awesome, amazing, celebrity-suffused existence.  The pink tinged fantasy of Dom Pérignon Œnothèque Rosé exudes such over the top fabulousness that even the Real Housewives of New York City seem like inelegant party crashers.  This is no place for suburban “soccer moms,” even us edgy ones who drink Riesling.  I am uncomfortable and out of my league here.

John and Dottie’s greatest charm was their accessibility.  “Wine for the People!” their columns declared.  They’d urge us readers to seek out our first Carmenere or cajole us into retrying Beaujolais Nouveau.  We were complicit in their wine journey, exploring new finds together, like alcoholic compatriots.  But Mr. McInerney, your first column was like pining after some phantasmagorical couture lay out in Vogue or an impossibly, immaculate home in Architectural Digest.  This is a fantasy world, a fairy tale – no place for me.  Give me a wine I can turn to after my kid has decorated her bedroom wall with permanent Sharpie pens, preferably something I can grab on the fly at Trader Joes.       

Listen, I am all for special occasion wines, and I truly wish every family dinner in our home could be granted “special occasion” dispensation.  We all need more beauty, more splurges, and far more indulgences in our busy, overextended, mean little lives.  But sadly, most nights, a $12 vino from Costco is as good as it gets.  Because Mr. McInerney, your prose has been known to make my ovaries tingle, I’ll still be looking for your column next weekend.  So darling Jay, please woo me back and show me something I can drink with dinner tonight.

At least I’m not the one responsible this time.  After a smack on the proverbial ass with a ruler, I shut up, fast.  At this point, I’ve spent the better part of a year writing about not writing about smoke taint.  I even prefaced a recent comment in an online (closed forum) wine class with “You know, I am not really supposed to be talking about this, but…”  Then one evening last week, a Bruliam supporter sent us a link to the Wall Street Journal.  The article was full disclosure on the Anderson Valley smoke taint by the Anderson Valley winemakers themselves, the very folks we first pissed off way back in November 2008.  The next morning the story ran on the front page of the Journal (note: a subscription to the WSJ.com website may be required to view this story).

It is hard to imagine Anderson Valley smoke taint as front page WSJ material.  Of course we unabashedly support and will continue to make Anderson Valley pinots, but their production is a tiny fraction of California pinot noir output.  It is almost a cult thing.  The hippie-tinged, xenophobic Anderson Valley is the antithesis of the robustly marketed, glossy tasting rooms decorating the Russian River Valley and Carneros regions.  Despite that, the Anderson Valley spokespeople opted for a regular news media outlet for their confessional tale, rather than a wine publication or wine business publication.  Seems a little weird, right?  Adam Lambert comes out on the front page of Rolling Stone magazine while the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association gets dishy with Mr. Murdock?  I suppose they’re tapping the big spending, wine loving readership of the weekend journal.  In any event, smoke taint is no longer a big, poorly-kept secret.  Like us, most of the winemakers interviewed for the article copped to reverse osmosis and CO2 sparging.  There was desperate blending and eventual resignation to Mother Nature.  After a year of tinkering, we surrendered, too.  Our barrel of “08 Anderson Valley pinot was ultimately swirled down the drain.  Most of theirs will be sold on the bulk market.  Look for an uptick in smoky-ash descriptors on your next bottle of 2 Buck Chuck.

Most of the article’s interviewees echoed a story like ours.  When we first tasted our grapes at harvest, they tasted alright – no smoke.  Then during fermentation, weird, unappetizing aromas wafted skyward, like murky, gurgling witches’ brew.  When we went to press, the free run juice tasted like ash and smoke, burnt charcoal and campfire embers.  The press fractions were worse.  Nothing seemed to help, except the dramatic and stripping effects of reverse osmosis.  Post processing, the smoke flavors were gone but so was the elegant, juicy cranberry fruit that first hooked us on the Anderson Valley terroir.

Our story jives with the current research.  Scientists once believed the smoke stuff was in the grape skins.  This certainly would explain why our press fractions, where we mashed down the skins and pulp really hard to squeeze out the last bit of juice, tasted even more rancid than the free run. But new studies show the problem is more complex than that.  Today researchers believe the smoke-smell chemicals (predominantly guaiacol, 4-ethyl guaiacol and 4-methyl-guaiacol) manifest in tainted grapes as some kind of bound precursor compound.  In other words, the chemical responsible for the offensive smell is tethered to a neighboring chemical, like a ball and chain.  Since the smell is effectively “incarcerated,” you wouldn’t know it’s there.  At harvest, the grape berry tastes alright.  The only thing you even know for sure is that your vineyard wasn’t burned to a crisp, thank goodness, but you recall wearing a mask for a week or two because the smoke from neighboring forest fires was so oppressive.  So you harvest your crop and presume that you’re out of the woods.  But then as fermentation commences, the smoke smells are slowly released, as the chains break, and the stank busts free.  The scientific name for this is volatilization.  Enzyme mediated hydrolysis releases non-volatile precursors as volatile compounds (i.e. stuff we can smell).  You see, the enzyme acts like a chain-saw, cleaving the bond that holds the stench at bay.  The more you saw, the more chemicals you release into the wine and into your nostrils.  Think of cutting the string on a helium balloon and watching it float away into the stratosphere.  Voila- volatilization.  This theory explains why the smoke chemicals (G, 4MG, and 4EG) keep accumulating in the tainted wine, even after it has been pressed off of the skins.  Studies show the chemicals keep increasing through secondary fermentation and even during aging, so the highest concentration ends up being in the finished wine.  In one UC Davis experiment, grape juice from smoke tainted berries contained only 1 μg/L of smoke chemical at harvest.  After 3 days of skin contact, the juice contained 203 μg/L of guaiacol, at press it measured 249 μg/L, while the finished wine contained 388 μg/L of guaiacol.  As you can see, if the levels of smoke chemicals continue to accumulate throughout the winemaking process, even after all skin contact has ceased, you’re basically screwed.

This has repercussions for grape growers and winemakers alike.  I know of many well-known wineries releasing no Anderson Valley pinot noirs from the ‘08 season of smoke.  At one winery, the growers and the winery are splitting the cost of the tainted grapes.  Nobody wins, and they absorb the hit equitably.  Ideally, wine grower / wine maker couplings are deeply intertwined, long term relationships.  Nobody wants to risk losing their fruit in great years like 2009, for being petty and parsimonious in ’08.  Unfortunately, things have grown more contentious in Australia where winemakers are suing a land conservation consortium that initiated forest fires for brush control during harvest.  The winemakers contend the conservationists should be held fiscally responsible for the financial loss incurred from ruined, unsalvageable, tainted grapes.  The land people, on the other hand, defend their position as brush control that prevents future and uncontrolled forest fires.  The judge has sided with the land guys who have since agreed to postpone future brush fires until after harvest is complete.

Here in Nor Cal, all is not lost for some enterprising wineries who are marketing smoke tainted wine for what it is.  Philip’s Hill has released an ’08 called “Ring of Fire.”  As for me, you all know how I feel about campfires and camping.

Barrel tasting ignites a specific strain of anticipation. In barrel, wine is still evolving, so you never know what you’re going to get. Tannins are polymerizing, wood components are integrating, and chemical compounds are seducing, oxidizing, and reducing their neighbors. After all, if the wine were finished, it would be in a bottle. And so it was with exuberant and intoxicating joy that Brian and I were privy to a barrel tasting session with Jeff Pisoni, winemaker for his famous namesake wines and arguably more famous namesake vineyards. Jeff derives from a three-generations-long pedigree of California farmers, from grandparents who turned their first real profit from a bumper crop of celery. Jeff and his older brother Mark now run the enology and viticulture sides of the family business (respectively), buoyed by the effusive magnetism of their wine-celeb dad, Gary Pisoni. Perhaps you remember him from my photo-op? Anyway, Brian and I had been graciously invited to barrel taste through their different pinot noir vineyards, scattered across the Santa Lucia Highlands. Yes, I know. Life is unfair. I hoped the contents of each wooden cask would express the unique microclimate that coaxed the fruit from bud to barrel. In fact, I was particularly ebullient this time, since Jeff planned to guide me through each barrel as identified by its particular rootstock strain. Something about the technical nerdiness of rootstock and clonal selections enlivens the mad scientist roosting in my heart.

“This block is Pisoni clone on 3309,” began the ever affable Jeff, detailing the exact pedigree of each vineyard cluster. Using a glass thief, he siphoned our aliquot directly from barrel to glass, so we could compare same vineyard, same clone, but different rootstocks side-by-side. This was in contrast to Pisoni clone on 5C rootstock. Then we sampled more of the Pisoni/5C combination with minute permutations, individual barrels representing different expressions of the vineyard space- for example hillside versus valley floor. Never before had I been gifted such an intimate education in taste testing vineyard and rootstock selections side by side. And it’s not pretentious, charlatan, bull-sh#@, either!! Comparative, thoughtful tasting revealed both subtle and big differences. The Pisoni on 3309 tended to be bolder, more tannic, darker and brawnier while the 5C grapes yielded more perfumed, aromatic wines with bright acid structure. Never for a second should you believe that farmers select rootstocks for their flavor profiles. Instead rootstocks are selected for soil composition, water availability, pest resistance, and vigor. Some rootstock selections forage deep in the soil, drilling past pebbles and rocks, pillaging for minerals and water. Others seem to skim the topsoil and shallow loam. But it makes perfect sense that grapes of the same clone planted to a rootstock with shallow roots taste different than the same grapes grown on deep, scavenging roots. In the end, the grapes reflect the panoply of sun and shade, leafy vigor, rainfall, location, soil composition, limestone, soil-bred pests, temperature, sea breezes, climate, clone, and yes, rootstock. Isn’t this what frogs call “terroir,” you ponder? Yes it is, but only French people can claim it.

Grapevines have 2 components – the stuff you see and the stuff you don’t. The above ground part is called the scion. It determines the grape type, like cabernet versus chardonnay. Below ground are, of course, the roots, aptly named the rootstock. Rootstock breeding reflects the evolution of phylloxera resistance, dating back to France’s tragic, 19th century phylloxera epidemic. In the 1860’s, these savage soil critters were inadvertently introduced into French vineyards from American plant cuttings and quickly demolished the French crop. Scientific trial and error soon demonstrated that affixing American phylloxera resistant roots to fancy French grapes up top yielded a pretty good crop. Then, like all things in life, it grew more complicated.

Pinot noir aficionados are familiar with the unrelenting, numerical assaults of the Clone Wars. Pinot clones roughly fall into three categories: (1) California heritage clones, (2) UC Davis propagated, virus-free with a Stamp-of-Approval clones, and (3) French government sanctioned, legitimate Burgundy imports. This has not stopped enterprising viticulturists from illegally hoisting French cuttings to transplant into vineyards back home. These so-called “suitcase clones” are conveyed cloak-and-dagger style, incomparably sexier than the UC Davis number system. Basically the UC Davis clones are identified through digit-letter combinations, like 2A, while the legit French plants sport a 3 digit sequence like 777 or 115. This number clone is then grafted to a rootstock, identified by its own numerical or number+letter designation, like 5C or 1103P or 101-14. There is no obvious pattern. The “P” is for “Paulsen,” the guy who bred it. Maybe 1103 is his ATM PIN? The grafting process is provided by a certified nursery in advance of planting. That way a farmer can exactly match her grape choices to the soil they’ve got- whether it’s loose and sandy or rocky with compacted clay. I’m relaying the specifics just in case someday you too find yourself ensnared in numerical shorthand bearing no resemblance to high school algebra. Was that the 777 on 140R or the 115 on 420A we just tasted?

Speaking broadly, both Pisoni rootstock selections (5C and 3309) are suited to shallower soils. One choice (the 3309, V. riparia x V. rupestris) was initially bred to flourish despite constant rainfall. Both rootstocks are phylloxera resistant with one choice conferring better nematode resistance than the other. One loves limestone; the other doesn’t. One propagates easily; the other does not. And so it goes. In the end, I was able to tie the theoretical knowledge I garnered in my UC Davis viticulture class to something tangible, something I could drink and describe. Plus what better way to spend a Saturday morning, especially one en route to the Santa Rosa Costco to buy bulk toilet paper? On my next Costco run, I’ve got to swing back by Jeff’s place to drop off some cupcakes.

A few years ago, I used to tease my husband that Tyler Florence was my #2 fantasy.  I’d imagine myself decked out in La Perla and Laboutins, whipping up something splendid in my kitchen, when I’m interrupted by the doorbell chime.  When I opened the door, a hunky Tyler Florence would be lazily leaning against the doorframe, smiling, a la Food 911 on the Food Network.  So when I saw Mr. Florence working his app station at Pigs and Pinot this past weekend, I was like a fanatical teenager yearning to reach out and touch Justin Beiber at a radio promotion.  I sauntered over to his station, all composed and friendly, requesting a photo.  As Mr. Florence leaned in for the shot, I put my arm around him, in a half-nelson.  I looked at him sternly and growled, “Now pretend like you like me.”  Click!  Behold my second celebrity paparazzi shot (below).  After famously and incorrectly insisting Apolo Anton Ohno was in my track club, I needed the irrefutable evidence of Mr. Florence’s and my love fest.  I wonder if I am on his Facebook page, too?  Adding snapshots with Mr. Florence and Gary Pisoni to two ten minute phone conversation with Josh Jensen, I calculate that I am a solid 8 seconds of fame ahead of Kathy Griffin’s Big-D-List-Celebrity-Life.

Oh yes, his food was pretty fabulous, too.

(Written with apologies to the dreamy Mr. Florence who was beyond kind and gracious to everyone he met at the event).

As promised, the sweetbreads cooking video is posted below (if you can’t see the video, please click here to watch).

A special thank you is in order to Chef Joe at Cucina Urbana who coached me through a lot of the prep work involved.

Sweetbreads are delicious and may be prepared with a straightforward sauté.  However, they do require some due diligence as you’ll likely have to preorder the meat and prepare the court bouillon at least one day ahead. 

Here is what I did:

1)     Prepare and cool court bouillon one day ahead.  (recipe per CIA cookbook)

2)     Soak sweetbreads in cold milk and refrigerate 6-8 hours or overnight.

3)     Remove sweetbreads from milk and discard milk.  Rinse meat in a colander under cold water.

4)     Bring both sweetbreads and court bouillon to room temperature.

5)     Place sweetbreads in stockpot or Dutch oven and cover with court bouillon mixture.  Gently simmer over medium heat for 10-12 minutes or until firm and whitish in appearance.  Do not boil.

6)     Remove sweetbreads from broth mixture and rinse in colander under cold water for 10 minutes.

7)     Gently remove the outer membrane and any obvious veins.

8)     Roll sweetbreads in cheesecloth, like a burrito.  Place sweetbread “logs” in a loaf pan and place a second loaf pan on top of the first.  Weigh down the top pan with a brick, rock, or heavy cans.  Refrigerate for a few hours or until firm and sweetbreads have flattened.

9)     Remove sweetbreads from the pan and break into “chicken McNugget sized pieces.”  Remove any remaining bits of cartilage, vein, or membrane.

10)  To prepare breading combine ¼ cup cornmeal, ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup panko breadcrumbs.  Season generously with salt and pepper.

11) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

12) Melt 1-2 TB butter and 1-2 TB grape seed oil (or another neutral oil with high smoke point) in a sauté pan over medium-high heat.  Allow butter to foam.  Swirl to combine.

13) After foaming subsides, dredge sweetbread pieces in flour mixture and drop into hot pan.  Repeat with remaining pieces.  Allow sweetbreads to brown.  When sweetbreads are crisp and golden brown, flip with tongs.  Season with addition salt and pepper to taste.

14) Place pan in the oven and continue baking for 5 minutes.

15) Serve with lentils and veggie sauté of pancetta/garlic/mushrooms/ red wine and spinach.  Season well.  Sprinkle with chopped chives for flourish.

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 character-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.