A Little Sad

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mondavi It was a little sad. Our host pulled out a bottle of 1992 Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon and poured it around the table and we all immediately raised our glasses to the memory of Robert Mondavi, who recently passed away. The wine was lovely, everything a mature cabernet should be with a firm elegant character, a wonderful cigar box nose and that long, linear, intellectual finish that defines the variety at its best.

The sad part was not the passing of Mr. Mondavi, who lived a full and meaningful life into his nineties. It's hard to think of someone who lived a fuller life and no one left a bigger imprint on the American wine industry. The sad part was a wine blog post I read earlier in the day that grumped away about all the coverage of his death, wondered what the big deal was all about and why he should care. Writing a wine blog and not knowing about Robert Mondavi is like writing a blog about American history without knowing who George Washington was. How can a wine writer that doesn't understand the immense impact of Robert Mondavi provide meaningful commentary on the American wine industry? They can't and that's a little sad.

Understanding the sublime art that great wine can become is more than pulling the cork and giving it points. In every bottle of California wine that achieves greatness there will always be a bit of Robert Mondavi. To not understand that is to not fully know or appreciate that wine. It is the human spirit that raises wine from a beverage to an emotion.

We can be assured that there have been thousands of corks pulled from treasured old bottles of Robert Mondavi's wines in the last week and tens of thousands of glasses raised in his honor and memory. I can't think of a better tribute.

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Natural Spoofulation

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anfore gravner The passionate Alice Feiring and her new book, The Battle for Wine and Love, have fanned the flames of the natural winemaking debate. In particular she has bruised the feelings of the California wine industry, to which she has not been very complimentary. This has resulted in some lively back and forth on the side of the Californians in The Los Angeles Times, hardly a surprising forum for the pro-California view. I applaud Alice’s spirited attack on industrial wines and support of wines with personality and a sense of place. Her intensity has helped keep the debate a debate.

Extreme positions help sell books and it looks like Alice has done a good job in riling up the Californians and keeping her book in the headlines. I’m sure if the truth came out Alice, like me, has a long list of California wines she loves.

It’s becoming the spoofulators vs. the natural movement and the main spoofulators seem to be in California. Yet this raises the question of what’s really natural or not and at what point the line is crossed from one to the other. It’s not as clear as it may seem. At some point it is just as bad to do too little to the wine as it is to do too much. Bad wine is bad wine, natural or not.

Let’s take a look at the revered (I agree) wines of Josko Gravner in northeastern Italy on the border with Slovenia. Gravner ferments and ages his white wines on the skins and seeds for six or seven months in terra cotta amphorae coated with beeswax. This has a somewhat dramatic (to say the least) impact on the flavor and color of his wines. Is this natural winemaking or a kind of natural spoofulation? The wines of Gravner are extreme wines manipulated to that style by the hand of the winemaker. Are the techniques of Clark Smith more intrusive than this? I’m not sure this is a question that has been answered.

There are a few buzzwords out there that seem to define the natural wine forces: biodynamic, indigenous yeasts, little or no sulfur and never, never any machines.  Yet there are a whole array of interventions other than these that winemakers impose on their wines either because they dream of crafting great art like Gravner or because they are commercial winemakers that must put out a good tasting stable wine year-after-year to keep their jobs. It seems a bit preposterous to return to primitive methods of winemaking that more-often-than-not have the potential to produce faulted wines. Not all progress is inherently bad and any good winemaker will do everything needed to improve their wines. Many winemakers resolve this conflict between their desire to be part of the natural movement and the realities of putting better wine in the bottle by forgetting to talk about certain things when they talk to the press.

Great wines are made, they don’t just happen. That’s why they call them winemakers. There is an incredible array of tools and knowledge available to today’s winemakers. To not make use of any of these tools and techniques does not make any sense. However, what you do with these many new tools is all important. You can’t make wine without manipulation, but without a doubt you can’t make great wine with with over-manipulation. I believe in terroir. I have tasted it in wines way to often to have any doubt.  As long as a winemakers manipulations are designed to enhance that terroir I don’t have any problems with them.

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Pair of Fives

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    pair of fives Brilliance is a word that can mean many things: luminosity, intelligence, perfectly executed and, when it comes to flavor, lively and electric. All of those things come together in these two seductive, brilliant wines that are great values to boot coming in at under $25.

    • 2005 Clos de la Roilette, Fleurie, Imported by Louis/Dressner Every time I’ve served this wine each person at their first sip is taken back for a second as they ponder what has crossed their palate. Each knows that they have experienced something special. This is an extraordinary wine is that is is just so alive that it makes you take more pleasure in living. Concentrated elegance and finesse. (Buy online)

    • 2005 Bourgogne, Pinot Noir Vieilles Vignes, Domaine Joseph Voillot. Imported by Vintage ‘59 Imports – Anybody who thinks there are no great values coming out of Burgundy be prepared to be proven wrong. This racy, bright pinot noir also comes packed with loads of flavor and complexity on its rather electric acid frame. Here’s a pinot that can both sing and dance. A short stint in your cellar of two or three years will give you quite a bottle of pinot. (Buy online)

    A pair of 5’s may seem a long shot to those that think a lot of chips are required to get great wine, but sometimes a pair is all you need. These days it’s hard to imagine such a winning hand at this price range from anywhere other than France.

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Your Government is Protecting you: First Al-Qaeda and now Brunello

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mickey_binos You can feel safer in your bed tonight knowing that the United States government is protecting you from another danger. That new evil is, of course, Brunello di Montalcino that might have a bit of cabernet or merlot adulterating the sangiovese grosso. These are the same consumer protectors that brought you the 75% rule for American varietal wines, which requires that the stated variety make up at least three quarters of the named wine. So while it’s fine for an American producer of pinot noir to blend in 25% syrah or anything else the missteps of a few producers in Brunello will bring down the wrath of the TTB on all producers.

It’s great to know that our government is always on the watch.

US threatens to block all Brunello imports - decanter.com

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Beaux Vin

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beaux vyrd pinot 06 Oregon’s Beaux Frères is not only making some of America’s finest pinot noirs, but is also that most rare of things: a winery with courage. Vintage after vintage winemaker Michael Etzel shows the courage of his convictions and produces dramatically distinctive wines with a personality all their own. Some dismiss the success of Beaux Frères as mostly due to the fame of Etzel’s brother-in-law and partner, famed wine critic and publisher of The Wine Advocate, Robert Parker, but considering the stunning quality of these wines I can’t help but believe they would still be sought out by collectors everywhere with or without Parker’s impact.

While a bevy of authors have pilloried Robert Parker for dragging the wine industry down the road of standardized, jammy wines, his own winery is the polar opposite. The Beaux Frères Pinot Noirs are tight, structured wines with a decided spritz from natural CO2 when young. That’s right they’re a little fizzy. These are truly natural wines and the little spritz is a result of the natural, cool slow malolatic fermentation practiced by Etzel.  None of their wines are manipulated to make them ready to drink young and even the precocious 2006 vintage produced wines that need a minimum of several years of bottle age to unfurl their now tightly wound personality. These are wines that do not try to mimic Burgundy, but that set their own unique style, both as Oregonian and an expression of Etzel’s winemaking art.

The current release of 2006 Beaux Frères Pinot Noir, The Beaux Frères Vineyard, Ribbon Ridge is nothing short of exciting. In his notes Etzel describes this wine as, “a beauty and can be drunk young.” However, he must mean in relation to his wines from previous vintages as compared to other 2006 Oregon pinots this wine far from being ready to drink. The nose is already exotic with layers of black truffle, porcini and dense, black wild forest fruits, but it is not yet resolved and you can just sense the greatness that is to come as the components intertwine and integrate. The wine hits your tongue with a thousand tiny little bites from the firm acidity and the slight spritz of the CO2, but then quickly expands dramatically into the voluptuous textures you would expect from this forward vintage. What strikes you as you taste and smell this wine is the endless swirling of exotic characteristics that make the wine change from second-to-second as you savor each sip. If you must drink this wine now, please give it at least an hour in a decanter before serving. However, at $80 a bottle you may want to give it the respect it deserves and wait at least five years before releasing the treasure inside.

Beaux Frères produces wines of great integrity and character because they are made by a winemaker with the same attributes. Mike Etzel makes what he believes. These are wines that must be on anyone’s list of the best American pinot noirs. (Buy online)

 

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Put A Cork In It?

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Fewer sales reps are more paranoid these days than cork salespeople. They barrage you with emails damning all other types of closures. At trade shows they meet winemakers with frigid stares that have changed over from cork to something else.

The battle is fully engaged on what is the best closure for a wine bottle and as always, in the heat of battle there is often more confusion than fact. Much as a war correspondent sees through the smoke of conflict, writer George Taber has cut through all the brouhaha to offer us a clear look at the cork conflict in his book, To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science and The Battle for the Wine Bottle. Taber is also the author of Judgment of Paris, which is bound for the big Hollywood screen. The journalistic temperament that Taber brings to his book, a rarity in wine writing, should be no surprise as he is a twenty-one year veteran of Time Magazine.

The combat is about the dreaded TCA (2,4,6 trichloroanisole) that destroys anywhere (depending on whose giving the stats) from 3% to 15% or so of every bottle of wine sealed with a cork in the world. These are the so called “corked” bottles as wines spoiled by TCA have a distinct musty character that can range from the wine seeming just not quite right, to bottles that almost make you gag. What makes TCA the nightmare of winemakers it that most affected bottles are consumed by unsuspecting consumers that are unaware the the wines are actually spoiled, instead thinking that whatever the winery is just doesn’t make very good wine. This dramatic rate of failure combined with disastrous PR has turned many wineries away from natural cork to closures like screwcaps, crown caps and glass stoppers.

To Cork or Not to Cork is a must read for wine professionals and aficionados alike. Don’t expect to have the best closure revealed in the last chapter as Taber presents the whole story without judgment as you would expect from someone with his journalistic credentials.

As Taber points out, all closures currently in use have potential issues so the jury is still out and the closure of the future probably is not invented yet. My major issue with many cork fundamentalists is the constant reference to the tradition of cork and the romance of the ritual and sound of pulling a cork. Screw tradition, the argument should always be about wine quality not superficial issues like romance. What’s romantic about a corked bottle of $50 wine?

Perhaps in the end the solution will be different closures for different wines. After all, cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir age very differently and what is good for one may not be good for the other. Put a cork in it? The answer seems to be sometimes yes and sometimes no. Whatever happens in the future, the century old monopoly of the cork is over.
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Wordy

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Every once in awhile I like to remind Wine Camp readers that I can be significantly longer winded than I am in my normal posts on Wine Camp. So here I provide an annual reminder that I don't employ an editor by providing links to some of my favorite longer articles:



Habitual Innovation

I thought the article titled “Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?” by Janet Rae-Dupree in the Sunday Business Section of The New York Times was an outstanding look at the process of innovative thought. You can read the article at this link:

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits

Here are some of the most meaningful quotes:

  • In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside ourcomfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in theworkplace and in our personal lives.
  • The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder
  • It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

 

The Dave Brubeck Quartet

 

DaveBrubeck_01 I’ve had a very good year jazz legend wise. In the last six months I’ve had the honor of seeing Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Dave Brubeck play live. As all of these great artists are now closer to one hundred than fifty years old, I note with sorrow that it is an experience that I’m unlikely to repeat.  While I realize that at their age that none of them was at their peak form, what I felt from each of them was a deep knowledge and intelligence in each note they played.  The energy of youth had been replaced with a deeper feeling and experience that made their playing more sublime than powerful. The depth that age brings can be just as seductive as the pyrotechnics of younger players.

This edition of The Dave Brubeck Quartet includes veterans Randy Jones on drums, Robert Militello on saxophone and flute and Michael Moore on bass. Brubeck left the lead roles to these worthy musicians who solidly carried the evening. Militello is in the tough role of being compared to Paul Desmond, who played on most of the pieces that the audience was familiar with as he was the composer and the sound that made Take Five a big hit. However he admirably struck out on his own instead of trying to reproduce the Desmond sound. It has often been said that Desmond was the sound of a dry martini, but Militello would have none of that as his playing had a rougher, more dramatic edge than the svelte playing of Desmond. On bass Moore was nothing short of stunning, but the highlight of the evening was two drum solos by Jones, which included a fitting show stopper on Take Five.

The fact that Brubeck played two sets of almost an hour each as he closes in on his 90th birthday is amazing. While he left a lot of the evening to his bandmates, his quiet, elegant solos reminded that you were in the presence of greatness. As I write this I am listening to his latest recording Dave Brubeck Indian Summer, which is a subtle and gorgeously complex solo effort. It is a brilliant and compelling recording. Fortunately he had the energy to share a few pieces of this beauty with the audience at this concert. The passion which this quiet, restrained recording radiates is nothing short of stunning.

The evening inevitably concluded with Take Five, but the quartet transformed the almost fifty year old standard into an energetic and fresh interpretation that thrilled the entire audience from jazz novices to aficionados. For me I left feeling privileged to have been given this experience as I often wonder if you can really understand a jazz artist if you don’t see them play live. One thing for sure, as often as I’ve heard Take Five, it will always sound more alive to me now that I have seen Brubeck play.

Below is the same Quartet that I saw perform in a 2006 concert. 

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Photo by Skip Bolen

Take Five White Rabbit

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The guy next to me kept screaming “White Rabbit!” at the top of his lungs for the better part of two hours. It was a Jefferson Airplane concert in 1971 and the band, despite a change of personnel could not escape their hits. No matter how well they played that guy would only be happy if they played White Rabbit.

Last week, while attending a performance of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, a true jazz legend and creator of West Coast Jazz, the guy in front of me screamed “Take Five!”. It seems no matter how many decades pass that fans are more interested in hearing your hits instead of your music. In Brubeck’s case he has progressed far beyond his Take Five days and created am amazingly diverse body of work. Yet, even with all he’s done since Take Five was recorded in 1959 I’m willing to bet that the majority of concert goers were there to hear Take Five, which is probably the only jazz composition most could name from memory. Of course, I’m sure few of them knew that the piece they were screaming to hear was not written by Brubeck, but by the late, great Paul Desmond, who played saxophone for The Dave Brubeck Quartet when they recorded Take Five.

Winemakers face the a similar dilemma. Once you get a big score, your big hit, you can feel locked into that style. It takes great courage to evolve your style in a way you believe in instead of just playing the same old hit over and over again. What most consumers don’t understand is that a winemaker can be relatively unhappy with a wine even though it gets a high score. As difficult as it is to believe, behind closed doors winemakers are often amazed at a high score they’ve received. What happens if you get a 93 from Robert Parker on a wine you’re not particularly pleased with? Do you keep making that wine or follow your own vision?

Brubeck seems to have resolved this dilemma perfectly as when he did finally play Take Five for the crowd, it was not the Take Five of 1959, but a piece that reflected the talents of the current Dave Brubeck Quartet. While it started with the famous chords and catchy quintuple time, it soon evolved, in the great tradition of jazz, into a distinctive exciting performance with a personality all its own.

Great winemaking should take its cue from the improvisational spirit of jazz as each vintage is a singular performance that deserves its own riffs.

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Worth Reading: Expression and Comprehension

A Blog on Champagne, Wine and Food, by Peter Liem

Interesting commentary on the concept and tradition of terroir.

“The problem is that not enough tasters, whether professional or amateur, are equipped to recognize distinction of character. One of the difficulties is that it’s far easier to identify technical quality than quality of character, and often I feel that many people are too easily satisfied with the former. Even the way that we taste is oriented largely towards the identification of technical quality: blind comparisons, sterile conditions, numerical scoring. On the other hand,we have not yet developed a system for identifying character, which is far more difficult. One could even say that the idea of character,while ultimately identifiable, defies the whole concept of systemization.”

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Hillary Scores Free Bourbon for Obama and McCain

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DIAGEO CAPITALIZES ON HILLARY’S PUBLICITY STUNT

An article in Ad Age calls Diageo “as shameless as politicians,” claiming the company“pounced” on the free publicity after Hillary Clinton’s shot-and-a-beer act earlier this week. As you’ll recall, Hillary took a shot of Crown Royal and drank a beer in front of TV cameras in an Indiana bar, and Diageo is apparently using the incident as a marketing opportunity (do you blame them?).

“It used to be that whenever the cameras came around, you’d see the politicians hiding their drinks behind their back,” said a Diageo spokesman to reporter Jeremy Mullman. “But she was using it … as a way of touching the people.”

While Diageo isn’t planning to use Clinton’s image in any Crown Royal ads, the company reportedly plans to send bottles of its obscure Jeremiah Weed Bourbon Liqueur to all three remaining presidential campaigns. Diageo hopes to boost the brand through sampling, word-of-mouth, and a brand website launched yesterday.

When asked why the company wasn’t using the “watershed” moment to promote Crown Royal, the spokesman pointed out: “Well, you all are doing that for us.” (from WineBusiness.com)

A Humble Critic

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Here's an interesting comment from one wine critic on wine criticism. Jancis continues to prove that she is one of the most thoughtful wine writers today. One can't miss the cult of personality that has grown around certain American wine critics whose followers often seem more concerned about the critic than wine itself. This can be seen in the fact that even the slightest criticism of such critics will generate howls of protest and comment spam against the perpetrator.

Robinson's comment, "We must always remember that we are parasites on the business of winemaking" should be in the back of every critics mind. Considering Robinson's status as one of the most influential wine writers in the world this is an striking statement that only adds to her already substantial and well earned respect within the wine trade.

Critics should be guides, not gurus.

See the Decanter article at the link below.

Jancis Robinson: critics should show more humility - decanter.com - the route to all good wine

More Taste, Less Filling

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My flight was delayed and I was facing a three hour wait at DFW so I decided I might as well eat. Picking out the most promising restaurant I could find, I sat down at the bar and ordered the simplest thing on the menu, which is always my defensive eating strategy in such places. I was in no hurry so stretched out my dining experience as long as possible. During those forty five minutes or so the guy next to me downed four Coor’s Lights. With nothing else to do, but watch my barmates, I noticed they were all drinking light beers. On top of that they they were all drinking a lot of them and not a glass was in use. Lots and lots of long neck lights were being downed while the draft lines went undisturbed.

Coming from Oregon I’m used to anybody and everybody drinking craft brews. Besides the fact that there seems to be as many brew pubs as gas stations in Oregon, you even find a line-up of craft brews on tap on the dumpy-ist country tavern. Here taste in beer tends to run to IPA’s with such bitter hop intensity that Coor’s Light has more in common with Perrier than our local brews. Living in such a place makes you forget what most Americans want in their food and drink.

What they want is little or no flavor or extremes of flavor. In some ways the Oregonian adulation of beers with so many hops that you can taste nothing else is just the mirror image of the Coor’s light drinker who likes it because it has almost no flavor at all. This is why we have such extremes of flavor in our culture and why you have people washing down blistering hot Tex-Mex and Asian foods with flavorless beer. Look what we do to Sushi, that most delicate of foods, as we insist to douse it in wasabi and soy sauce, which only insures we can’t taste if the fish is fresh or not. Sushi insiders know if you want the chef to give you the best fish you have to show him you’re not going to ruin it.

This is a huge dilemma for winemakers. Are we faced with making only innocuous industrial wines or supercharged spoofulated wines to stay in business? Fortunately no, as wines with complexity, balance and elegance can never be mass produced and there will always be a niche market for such wines. However, such producers have to accept that most Americans will never understand their wines as their palates just are not attuned to delicate, complex flavors.

On this same trip I was lucky to eat at the excellent Parkside Restaurant in Austin Texas where chef Shawn Cirkiel features one of the best selections of the freshest oysters you’ll find anywhere. The people next to me asked many questions about the oysters. They’d been to some great restaurants including Gary Danko and The French Laundry and were clearly into food. When their pristine oysters arrived they requested Tabasco and proceeded to obliterate each and every nuance of the assorted oysters in front of them. For wine the Tabasco is too much new oak, over-ripe grapes, dry ice and all the other over-manipulations of modern, spoofulated winemaking.

Today taste in America means more is better. Light beer is popular because you can drink more of it. Burning hot food is popular because anybody can taste it. Huge portions must be a great deal, right? It’s no wonder that wines with the most (most flavor or most advertising) are the most popular at all points on the price spectrum.