A history lesson in a glass

Wine lovers like to wax poetic about “tasting history” when drinking an old wine, as if the warmth of that long-ago summer can be felt and a memory, or an historical event, conjured from the glass. Such history lessons are rare and expensive.

This wine honors Chile’s past, but its Fair Trade certification helps make life better for those working the vineyards today.

But tonight I tasted the early history of wine in the Americas – a sparkling wine from Chile made entirely with País – the Mission grape brought by the Spanish Conquistadores when they colonized the New World in the 1500s.

As I write this, I have just one or two sips left in my glass, so I’ll start with the tasting note before getting to the history lesson. The Santa Digna Estelado Rosé non-vintage sparkling wine is part of the Miguel Torres portfolio in Chile (again, the Spanish influence). On Wine-searcher.com, it retails for about $19. My sample came from Dreyfus Ashby, the New York-based importer. The wine tastes like a really good grapefruit soda, without the sweetness – it’s fruity, citrusy, bright and refreshing. I think of it as a very good Cava rosé. It would make a nice Valentines Day sparkler for budget-minded lovers. Although I’ve enjoyed Santa Digna wines before, I was expecting more of a novelty wine with this sparkling País. So already, we have a winner.

But this is more than crossing a wine off your list of grapes to join the century club. For the history lesson, I turned to Jancis Robinson’s Wine Grapes, her recent tome that has become the ampelographical bible of our times. Here I quickly learned that País is not just Mission, but that both are actually names for Listán Prieto, a grape that was thought to have been lost to its native Spain due to phylloxera. Recent DNA testing demonstrated that Listán Prieto is in fact the grape that was taken to Mexico in the 1540s by Franciscan priests, who called it Misión, and to Chile and Argentina at about the same time by Spanish Conquistadores, who called it Uva Negra, or black grape. The name was later changed to País, or country in Chile, while the Argentines rechristened it Criolla Chica, or Creole girl – suggesting a whole ‘nother story altogether.

At the same time as its journey to South America and Mexico, the grape arrived in the Canary Islands, where it was called Moscatel Negro. And then in 1629, the grape made its way into what is now the United States, in the Rio Grande Valley of southern New Mexico.

The Torres of Chile website has more details about the wine, which is Fair Trade certified. A portion of the profits goes to help improve the living conditions of winery workers in Chile.

So much to learn from a glass and a book.

(Santa Digna Estelado Rosé sparkling wine is distributed in Washington, Maryland and Virginia by Elite Wines, and sells for about $19 retail. It can be found at Cleveland Park Wine and Spirits in the District; Annebeth’s in Annapolis in Maryland; and in Virginia at the Grateful Red in Arlington and Whole Foods Market locations in Alexandria, Charlottesville, Richmond and Tyson’s Corner.)

The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine

Regular readers of this blog know my buddy, Jeff Siegel, aka The Wine Curmudgeon. We are co-founders of DrinkLocalWine.com, the website that became a movement (or at least anticipated one). Jeff is the Eugene Debs of wine consumers, always championing the little guy who buys wine once or twice a week at the supermarket and rarely pays more than $10 a bottle, rather than the wine collector who spends the equivalent of a mortgage payment each month on wine. Let the magazines of the “winestream media,” Jeff’s favorite bête noir, chase after those people. Jeff is happy with his more numerous, if less affluent, readers.

Jeff writes primarily about cheap wine not because he prefers it but because he can afford it, the same reason other people do. He doesn’t equate cheap with bad – he sniffs out the inexpensive wines that are well made and provide exceptional value, and puts them in his “$10 Wine Hall of Fame.” He knows there’re a lot of crappy cheap wines out there, and that many people drink them. He just still respects those people, and that sets him apart from most wine writers.

Jeff is now hard at work on a new book, The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine. It will include a lot of the wit and no-nonsense wisdom that infuses his daily blog posts, with advice on how to navigate the aisles of your wine store to find inexpensive values, how to read a wine label (not as easy as distinguishing “chardonnay” from “merlot”), and much more. Publication will be in late spring or early summer, in ebook and traditional print editions. Here’s Jeff describing the project in his own words:

 

And he needs our help. True to form, Jeff is not going with mainstream media to produce his book. He’s raising funds to cover production costs through Kickstarter, a Web-based program affiliated with Amazon to help aspiring authors and other entrepreneurs get, well, kickstarted. For $25 you can help Jeff defray his costs and reserve your copy of the book. There are also other pledge levels with incentives, just like NPR. He needs $8,000 by February 19. As of today, he has $3,090 pledged.

Think of it as Bordeaux futures for the cheap wine crowd. For the price of two-and-a-half bottles of wine, you will get advice that will help you save money every time you enter a wine store. I’ve made my pledge, and I’m looking forward to my autographed copy of The Wine Curmudgeon’s Guide to Cheap Wine.

Wine’s Cornucopia: An Illusion?

Do you feel overwhelmed when shopping for wine? The sheer magnitude of choices is daunting. There are wallabies and penguins and rabbits, oh my! Do you prefer to go Barefoot or wear Flip Flops, socialize with Old Farts or Fat Bastards, gnosh on Layer Cakes or Cupcakes, ride Red Bicyclettes or Red Trucks? The wine shelf is a cornucopia of variety. 

And it’s a lie. Sort of.

That’s the lead to my column in today’s Washington Post, and you can guess which phrase got cut. No matter. This is an important topic, because it cuts to the heart of our perceptions of wine and how we idealize it – or not. You probably do idealize wine, if you’re reading blogs like this one, but most of the people who buy a wine for dinner once or twice a month and read my Post column looking for bargains – well, they probably don’t. Most people don’t – for most, wine is a beverage, not unlike Coke or Pepsi, just with a kick and an air of sophistication. So in a Coke-or-Pepsi world, does it really matter that more than 50% of the wines sold in the United States are produced, licensed or imported by just three companies?

This column was prompted by a study out of Michigan State University about brand concentration in the wine industry. Jeff Siegel at The Wine Curmudgeon and Mike Veseth at The Wine Economist have also written provocatively about this study.

So I hope you’ll read the column and comment, both here and on WashingtonPost.com, to get a dialogue going.

Here’s a comment on the Post website from AnthonyR1978, a wine retailer.

As a wine retailer, I am constantly frustrated with customers coming in and asking for mass-produced wines like Cupcake or Kendall-Jackson. When told that we do not carry those labels, many customers walk out in a hurry and do not even bother to ask for other suggestions. On the other hand, I have many great customers who appreciate small production or unique, interesting wines so there is a greater interest in these wines that have character. Unfortunately, it is sometimes easier to sell these “corporate” wines rather than swim upstream trying to sell wines that no one has heard of.

I see many of these mass produced wines ending up in the hands of Millennials which has me worried about the younger generation. It seems they do not take the time to understand what it is they are buying and trying new things. To them it is easier to just buy the same wine they know and are familiar with. It is interesting to see how our beer culture has gone the opposite way with many people searching out microbrews in lieu of Budweiser and Miller.

This insight is a bit counterintuitive, because Millennials are supposed to be more adventurous, open to trying unusual wines out of the mainstream and not beholden to top critics and their 100-point ratings. Maybe when they buy wine to eat in, they’re more conservative?

What say you?

 

 

Virginia’s record wine sales show the Old Dominion’s for real

Maybe this regional wine thing is for real after all.

Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell announced this week that Virginia wineries sold nearly 485,000 cases of wine in 2012, a new record. Virginia wine sales have risen by an average of more than 8 percent per year over the last three fiscal years, according to the Virginia Wine Marketing Office. Wine tax collections added $1.7 million to the commonwealth’s coffers.

This is quite impressive, considering the U.S. economy has been stagnant to say the least over that time period. People are supposed to be “drinking down,” and Virginia wine isn’t exactly cheap. (Though I’ve always argued that it isn’t – usually – overpriced.)

There’s more good news: Sales to distributors outside of Virginia increased by more than 24 percent in 2012, to more than 14,000 cases. This is a sign of a maturing wine industry. “Local” wines are traditionally sold primarily at the winery, but Virginia wines can now be found as far away as Illinois and Florida, as well as in Washington DC, a traditionally tough market for Virginia. (Lee had trouble crossing the Potomac, too, after all.)

Interestingly, the biggest driver of Virginia’s growth last year was a 300-percent surge in exports. The primary markets were the U.K. and China. The former is not such a surprise – Chris Parker’s efforts to export Virginia wine to his homeland have been well chronicled.

Inauguration Whine: Me Donner Un Break!

Yes, that’s right, “Give me a break!”

President Obama is making headlines again in the silly little oenosphere (a word I just made up) because Korbel will be the featured bubbly at the inauguration luncheon at the U.S. Capitol after he takes the oath of office for his second term. I wrote about this four years ago, and it really wasn’t news then. Korbel has been the bubbly of choice for this luncheon since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985.

Why is the wine selection worth writing about? Because Korbel is one of the few U.S. wineries still allowed to call its sparkling wine “Champagne,” grandfathered under a 2006 agreement with the European Union designed to protect the use of place names in wine labeling. So it is at least a minor insult to the French to be serving an American “Champagne” at such an august gathering. I wrote about the authenticity issue last month in my Washington Post column, so I’m sympathetic.

The wine we should NOT be talking about, if only because it’s presence on the menu is nothing special.

But this year, that’s not what the French are pissed about. And as far as I can tell, the French aren’t even pissed. Their U.S. lobbyist, Sam Heitner, director of the Champagne bureau office in Washington, is pissed. Heitner started frothing, er, bubbling, at the mouth because when the Senate announced the menu, it listed the wine as “Korbel Natural, Special Inaugural Cuvée Champagne, California.” Under the 2006 agreement, “California Champagne” would be OK, but “Champagne, California” is not. The first, you see, implies that California is making a knock-off of Champagne, while the second, with its all-important comma, implies that Champagne is made in California.

Sacre bleu! As if consumers are really going to pick up on that distinction. And shouldn’t Heitner be concerned about the use of the words “Champagne” and “California” on the same label rather than the order of their juxtaposition? Serving a U.S. bubbly makes sense, but why not one that is self-confident enough in its quality that it doesn’t have to pretend to be something that it ain’t?

You can read the gory details about this tempest in a spit bucket on Decanter.com, the Los Angeles Times, and of course on many wine blogs.

But you may have trouble finding info about the other wines to be served, which are really the story. Decanter notes that a Riesling will accompany the lobster, and a Merlot will be poured with the bison, but it doesn’t mention that these will both be from New York. Sure, it helps that New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, is in charge of the luncheon, but this is a big coup for regional wine. The Tierce 2010 Dry Riesling from Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes and the Bedell Cellars 2009 Merlot  from the North Fork of Long Island deserve the recognition. Yet they are being overshadowed because of a stupid comma and a Washington lobbyist’s overzealous hunger to see his name in print.

Bedell 2009 Merlot, one of the wines we should be talking about for the 2013 presidential inauguration.

So Mr. Heitner, we’ve never met, and I know you’re only doing your job. But you also just pissed off an ally by whining about a technicality that nobody but you gives a flying leap about. The real story here is – or should have been – that New York wines will be served at this important luncheon, another sign of the quality being achieved by regional wines throughout the United States. (Four years ago, Barboursville wines represented Virginia at another inauguration function.)

Maybe I should take all my Champagne and pour it in the street while TV cameras watch, in a glorious re-enactment of the anti-French frenzy from a decade ago.

Nah, I won’t do that. But during the inauguration on January 21, and for a long while after, the bubbly I raise will be Yankee Doodle Dandy.

What’s Your Sign? Sun or Soil?

There are wines of the sun, wines of the soil, and wines of the test tube. I enjoy the first, love the second, and try to avoid the third.

It’s not that simple, of course. Wine never is, or we wouldn’t ask wine writers to ‘splain everything to us. The best wines combine sun (fruit) and soil (minerality) in an alchemy that defies description, try as we might to pin it down to a laundry list of gobs of this and that.

Sometimes, wines surprise us. I was surprised a couple times this weekend. I tasted a Torbreck Woodcutter’s Semillon 2010 from Australia’s Barossa Valley (that’s pronounced SEM-a-lawn to you antipodean luddites) that I expected to be rich but also racy, yet definitely on the sun/fruit side. Instead it seemed soft at first, its golden color suggesting oxidation and premature age. Yet its softness – which I initially took for a lack of acidity – turned into an advantage. As the wine warmed up about 20 minutes after I snatched it from the fridge and twisted open its screwcap, I could taste a hint of lime zest. What seemed (when too cold) a flaccid, low-acid wine was now limpid with citrus and quince. Will it age well for decades, as some Aussie semillons are known to do? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I enjoyed this bottle. A lot.

Austrian Wine: More Diverse Than You Think

Mention Austrian wine and  you might spark a discussion about Grüner Veltliner and Zweigelt. These are the best known white and red grapes of Austria, respectively, and the country can legitimately claim them as “native” grapes. I’ve probably helped this perception in my columns about Austrian wine over the past four years. Yet during my recent visit to Austria’s wine country, I learned that there is so much more than these two grapes.

Grüner rightfully has first place among Austrian whites, with Riesling close behind. But there are others: Gelber Muskateller makes lovely flowery dry wine, redolent of lychees and peach blossoms. Pinot Blanc is quite popular, more so than Pinot Gris. (The latter is typically labeled with its German name, Graüburgunder, while Pinot Blanc seems less likely to be labeled Weissburgunder. This is probably an indication of which grape is exported most.) Welchsriesling, which is not Riesling, is best in sweet wines (though Heidi Schröck makes a delicious dry version). Sauvignon Blanc is also grown, especially in Styria in the south.

Neusiedlersee, rumored to be a beautiful lake that influences the climate in Burgenland. It was so damn foggy when I visited that I never actually saw it. Someone showed me a large puddle with boats and insisted it was the lake, but I wasn’t convinced. (austrianwine.com)