Cafes & Wineries

Yesterday would have been Liz and my 11th anniversary. On our third (and last) anniversary, in 2000, we were given a bottle and encouraged to put it away and drink in eight years. At that time the election hadn’t yet been decided, but what had been put in place in the next three months, by a power greater than any of us, was the downward spiral of my wife’s health and the last days of her life. We were cut off, never got a chance to drink that bottle of wine.

This weekend, while rooting among my wine closet I found that bottle of wine. It was an Italian wine, and it was red, and from a very good vintage. Now the issue isn’t whether the wine is ready to drink. I’m not sure I am.

The last eight years have been a time I would never had imagined in my life. I never planned to turn 50 as a widowed person. Jobs and friendships, loves and passions have all tried to make up for the giant hole that formed in my personal ground zero. And yes, we do rebuild, if ever so slowly this next time.

So I will put that bottle of Italian wine back in its slot in the wine rack and maybe let it rest for another time.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

California’s Anderson Valley remains one of its least known and most under-appreciated wine regions. In particular I believe it to be under-appreciated for its Pinot Noir, in particular, and in some cases, its Alsatian varieties of wine. I offer a slight caveat to the latter because while Anderson Valley is certainly known for producing wines in the style and varieties of those found in Alsace, France, in my experience they are mixed in quality.

But when winemakers manage to get things right, Anderson Valley can produce some stunning examples of wines that might, in the right circumstances be mistaken for their Alsatian forbears.

Such is the case with the newest release from a little outfit known as Handley Cellars. Perhaps the best adjective to describe Handley Cellars might be “quaint.” This small, family-run operation is located in the heart of the Anderson Valley, just up the road a piece from downtown Philo, at the 19th century Holmes Ranch.

U.C Davis trained winemaker and owner Milla Handley has been making wine since 1982. Handley got her start as a winemaker in the Seventies working at Chateau St. Jean and then later at Edmeades winery when she moved her family to Anderson Valley.

These days, with the help of her family and “co-winemaker” Kristen Barnhisel, who joined Handley in 2004, Handley now produces a modest 14,000 cases a year with fruit from the Anderson Valley estate as well as other sources throughout the valley and further afield. The portfolio includes both a number of Alsatian style wines, Pinot Noir, Sparkling, and dessert wines.

This is the first vintage that Handley has made a Pinot Blanc, however. The fruit is grown on mature vines (planted in the early 90’s) in the Hein Vineyard at the northern end of the Anderson Valley.

After harvesting on a cool morning, the grapes for this wine are pressed directly into tanks where it settles for a few days before fermentation begins. After the primary fermentation to dryness, some of the juice (15%) goes into neutral oak barrels, while the rest goes into stainless tanks for about six months. Only a small portion of the wine goes through a secondary, malolactic fermentation before the wine is bottled.

About 400 cases are made.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Light greenish gold in color, this wine has a nose of cold cream, old paper, and surprisingly, jackfruit. In the mouth, flavors of jackfruit predominate amidst silky textures, nice acidity, and a hint of incense and spiciness on the finish. Utterly lovely.

Food Pairing:
This would be a lovely cheese wine in my opinion, especially with saltier hard cheeses like aged gouda or aged piave.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $20

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

If you′ve read many wine labels, especially those of wines that cost more than $25, you′ve almost certainly seen on that contains the phrase “fermented with wild yeasts” or “native yeast fermentation.” This indication that the winemaker has not used a so-called “commercial” yeast is often a telltale clue as to the overall philosophy of the winemaker. Making wine without commercial yeasts can be more difficult, more unpredictable, and more risky than some are willing to accept. Those who do eschew commercial yeasts often do so because they are committed to making what they believe is a more natural wine, both for its lack of “intervention″ by the winemaker, as well as because the yeasts that do end up driving the fermentation are believed to be from the vineyard and part of its ecology.

Without a doubt, making wine without commercial yeasts represents a more traditional method of making wine, but apparently the more we learn about yeasts and winemaking the less it seems that there actually is any such thing as a wild yeast fermentation.

A recent thread on the Mark Squires bulletin board addressed this very topic, and I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to check it out. The discussion ranges across a number of different issues regarding yeasts, often getting quite technical, but the gist of it can be boiled down to a simple set of arguments.

First, it is clear that there are yeasts on the skins of the grapes out in the vineyards, and that when no commercial yeasts are added (and sometimes even when they are) some these yeasts can also be found working away in fermenting grapes in the winery.

However, it is also true that most of the time the yeasts that do the most work in fermenting the grapes in the winery are very different yeasts than are found in the vineyard. Which begs the question where, exactly, did they come from?

The answer, according to a lot of winemakers and researchers, is from within the winery itself. No matter how well a winery is sanitized, it tends to harbor all sorts of biological elements, including complex “cultures” of yeast that breed, mutate, and even evolve in the little ecosystem that is the winery.

If the winery ever has used commercial yeasts, this local culture will most certainly include some of these commercial yeasts. And if it hasn′t it will likely include yeasts that were brought into the facility on humans, pets, equipment, insects, and more.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the decision to not use commercial yeasts to ferment the wine doesn’t really mean that what you′re getting instead is some natural cocktail of yeasts that are specific to a vineyard. A native fermentation it may be, but the yeasts that are chowing down on the grapes are much more likely to be native to the winery building than they are the vineyard, and in many cases they may include commercial yeasts as well.

I′m certainly guilty of romanticizing native yeast fermentations as a writer. Along with the decision not to fine or filter the wine, this decision generally says something to me about the quality of the wine. The fact that winemaking yeasts aren’t entirely wild doesn’t necessarily undermine that meaning, but it certainly does call into question just how much justification there might be for prejudice against commercial yeasts as somehow “unnatural.” Biodynamic winemaking, for instance, clearly proscribes use of commercial yeasts as yet another unnatural intervention in winemaking.

The process by which grapes ferment involves sometimes 80 or more different kinds of yeasts, the actions of which are affected by pH, temperature, sugar levels, and thousands of compounds in the grapes, not to mention anything we humans might do. We’re still trying to figure out just exactly how it all comes together.

As intrigued and excited as I am about the degree to which science is gradually deepening its understanding of what wine is and how it comes to be, I also love the fact that it’s so complex that we′ve still got a long way to go.

Mystery is a good thing. It means we need to keep drinking.

Read the yeast discussion on the Mark Squires board.

Thanks to Jack at Fork & Bottle for pointing me to the discussion.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

I’ve always privately believed that if everyone just drank a bit more wine, the world would be a better place. Who knows if that’s really true, but apparently it’s quite likely that if everyone drank more wine, the world would be more democratic.

According to analysis by Jon Bonné, Wine Editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, Obama was elected by The Wine Vote.

What’s that, you ask? Wine drinking liberal elitists? Guilty as charged. But get this little statistic:

Amount of wine produced in states that McCain won: 4.3 Million Gallons
Amount of wine produced in states that Obama won: 773 Million Gallons
Percentage of wine produced in America that comes from states that Obama carried: 98.6

Harper’s Index eat your heart out. The whole thing makes me giggle. And while Obama is a big beer lover, it’s clear that the White House wine cellar will get a lot more attention starting in January than it has for the last eight years.

Check out Jon’s blog post.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Yesterday, at an event for the local farmers and winemakers, there were a few Texas wines at the tables. One particularly appealed, insofar as it corresponded with what I have been thinking about in terms of what American terroir is.

First the wine. Cabernet Sauvignon from the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. High acid. Very High. Almost to the point of being volatile. Naturally. Tender tannins. Harry Waugh of Latour would have loooved it. A creamy almost uncanny balance. I talked to the winemaker about the wine and related an earlier tasting of grapes from the same vineyard, but made by a different winemaker. The earlier wine had been taken through Reverse Osmosis almost to the point of stripping certain fleshy parts of the wine out, making the acidity factor even more stark. The earlier winemaker told me he had done that (R.O.) because the wine naturally had this aspect of what some folks would recognize as volatile acidity and he tried to “work it out.” It didn’t work for him and in the process he took some of the buttresses that held the wine up, resulting in a wine that tasted as if it had had plastic surgery that had gone bad. Fortunately the second winemaker knew what the characteristic of the vineyard was and didn’t fight it, but rather let nature be. I don’t even like Cabernet for the most part, but this was a lovely drink.

Which is a very long introduction to something I have been talking about to wine folks across the country lately. This idea of American terroir.

It started with thoughts about California terroir (where I lived for half my life, growing up there) and feeling something in my environment before I knew the terms. In those many trips from Southern to Northern California going back to school and stopping in Templeton or Paso Robles, Gilroy or the many little vineyard plots along the way, I would taste a Zinfandel or a Charbono and note something that seemed oddly much like something inside me. Something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. But it was concrete. Real.

I know there are critics who think California wine is big and bold and ripe and, well, immense. And other than those creeping levels of alcohol, I really am having a hard time understanding what their frame of reference is. Certainly not from growing up drinking the wines of Italy. Or France. Or Virginia, for that matter.

Today I went into a natural foods café and ordered a glass of carrot and celery juice. As I was drinking it, I was really enjoying the earthiness of the carrots, the nervous edge of the celery. It was a perfect drink, and it had tons of terroir from the organically grown produce. A chap behind the counter said I should try it next time with a little apple juice. As I was walking outside in what seemed like a perfect California day (in Texas) I thought to myself, “That would make it fruity.” I didn’t want more fruit. I enjoyed the balance of the fruit with the muddiness of the carrots and the salty-spicy green quality of the celery. It didn’t need to be manipulated with sugar from the apples to make it more pleasurable.

Take a handsome woman. Or man. Lets say someone from Croatia. Or Louisiana. In their natural state some of us prefer that to a more enhanced look. Some like breasts that aren’t enormously out of proportion. Or lips that don’t look like that got into a fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. Muscles that look healthy, but not menacing. Many of us like wine like that.

A few weeks ago, while in the Maremma, I tasted fresh Merlot grape juice before it started fermenting. It was direct, fresh. The fruit was there but it wasn’t hulky. Maybe that it was pre-oak, pre-malolactic and pre-spinning cones, that attracted me to the promise of the wine to come. Just like the carrot-celery juice. It was standing there in front of you, pure and natural. Senza manovra.

I think California gets a bad rap. From folks who think they know what California wine is. And from winemakers who have mistaken their winemaking hats with their deity hats. I know when I talk to some of my winemaker friends like Robert Pellegrini, how they seethe when people try to reinvent California wine. In the meantime, folks like him have their wines downgraded by the critics in favor of more voluptuous wines with a hedonistic bent. Pave paradise to put up a parking lot. And a tram.

I hear you, Bob. I too, remember the promise of California. And that seems to be a forgotten promise in today’s menagerie of players along the coast, from the numb and number corporate-crunching wine machines to the post-mid-life crisis wine lifestyle gazillionares.

Last February I went up to Stony Hill at the invitation of Peter McCrea. It was the Napa of my childhood, still as I remembered it in the beginning. The wines were a pleasant 12 ½%. There was no overpowering weight of wood. Acidity was healthy, bracing. The taste of the earth was present. That is how I see terroir in America.

And as America seems to be at a turning point, wouldn’t it be a great time for all of us to put down our preconceptions about what we think California wine is, or should be, and just “let the sunshine in?”

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Most people faced a with the choice of merely a specific color of wine to drink will consider their stated preference between the options of red, white, or pink. My choice is none of the above. If I had to swear my allegiance to one color of wine, it would be orange.

I have a friend who has seriously suggested that the world ought to acknowledge orange as a legitimate fourth color when it comes to wine. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I would seriously suggest that everyone drink as much of it as they can get their hands on.

Orange wines aren’t easy to come by, but to my mind they represent some of the most exciting wines being made on the planet. And this wine is a perfect example.

La Stoppa winery began in 1973 with the vision of Rafael Pantaleoni, who purchased the estate with the hopes of making a small amount of wine and an honest living for his family. The land, which occupies a nook in the Piacenza province of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, has been planted with vines for well over 100 years. The estate’s original owners left Pantaleoni and his daughter, who now runs the winery, a gift of some extremely old vines growing both Italian and French varieties.

With a lot of work, the Pantaleoni family have retained and nurtured some of the oldest vines of the estate, as well as carefully replanting and restructuring the vineyards to include more of the local varieties. The roughly 70 acres of vineyards in the shade of the estate’s medieval tower are rather sparsely planted as well as nutrient poor from a soil standpoint. Consequently, those 70 acres don′t produce much fruit, but Elena Pantaleoni and her winemaker Giulio Armani make good use of what they get.

And by good use, I mean making wines that speak of a startling vision, of which this wine named Ageno is perhaps the best example.

This wine is made from a combination of three white grape varieties: Malvasia, Trebbiano, and the extremely local variety known as Ortrugo, with the majority of the wine being Malvasia grown on 36-year-old vines. As a blend this is already somewhat unusual, but things get truly wacky as soon as the grapes are picked and destemmed, for instead of being vinified like a white wine, this one is treated like a red, which means chiefly that it is fermented with native yeasts in contact with its skins for more than 30 days. After this it is pressed off into a combination of steel tanks and neutral oak barrels where it ages on its lees (the sediment that settles to the bottom of the barrel) for 12 months before bottling without filtration of any kind.

This is the third vintage of Ageno of which only about 160 cases are made. This small quantity means that it may be difficult to find, but if you can, it is worth all the effort and whatever price you might have to pay, as it represents both a great achievement of artisan winemaking as well as a perfect example of why orange wines kick ass.

Tasting Notes:
A gorgeous medium amber-orange color in the glass, with a distinct haze of cloudiness, this wine has a phenomenal, almost otherworldly nose of exotic flowers, saffron, and orange creamsicle. On the palate it is weighty, with a texture that is almost tannic in quality, gripping the tongue with like a velvet glove. From a flavor standpoint it is nearly indescribable — brown sugar, honeysuckle, saffron, cream soda, and unbelievably, the distinct flavor of coffee and cream on a finish that can be measured in minutes. Evolves gorgeously in the glass, and I highly recommend decanting for 1-2 hours prior to serving, especially if you can keep it cool while decanting.

Food Pairing:
While the amazing individuality of this wine begs for careful consideration on its own, I enjoyed it with hard Italian cheeses and Jamon Iberico.

Overall Score: between 9.5 and 10

How Much?: $30

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

It doesn’t seem like eight years has passed since we entered the new millennium in 2001, but it has. It was the beginning of a very difficult time my wife Liz passed away in Feb 2001, the political process started to change and the world changed with it. September 11 showed up on the world’s doorstep, and many of us have been taking it one day at a time, hoping for better days to come.

As I was jogging this evening by the high school, a speaker announced over the stadium address system, that there were refreshments in the concession stand. He described the available items: candy, popcorn, hotdogs, and then he said three little words, “for your pleasure.” It sounded like a throwback in time when things were so much simpler and in its uncomplicated message I thought back over the last 40 years and what some of our cinematic dreamers and Italian wine visionaries thought the world would be like in 2001. And while it sure wasn’t all that they projected in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, it sure has been a heck of a trip. So, at this time I’d like to jump into the wayback machine, back to 2001 and see what wines I would have predicted for the past, here in the safety of the future. Of course the wines are from the Italian trail, and beyond.

Ever since the time I attempted to simultaneously sell a Tuscan Novello and a Vernaccia di Serrapatrona, that would have been about this time in 1984, I have wondered why Italian wines chose me. Not just me, but for some of the hard stuff, I sure have had my share of those assignments. Driving around with a delivery van full of baby Sangiovese alongside a quirky, dry, foamy red wine made by a madman in the hills of the Marche. What was I thinking then? Even now it sounds bizarre. Don Quixote, only this time we weren’t looking for windmills. We were looking for space stations for these special travelers. And in honor of those two wines, in the 2001 of our little story here, we have an homage: Novello Di Ascoli, a modern wine about reincarbonization.

Chianti: 2001 was a little project that went beyond Chianti 2000. I’m not sure if people realize the first Italian in space was Sangiovese. A little known experiment resulted in growing and harvesting the grapes aboard the International space station. Limited release, only about 20 cases, hydroponically grown. It was intended to test the ideas of extra-terroirestrial winegrowing. It is an amazing red wine, without the pull of gravity and ratings. No, only the influence of the astro-agronomist-winemaker, an American of Italian descent. It challenges the limitations of the Italian wine trail that we terrestrials put on it. Buckminster Fuller said, “Whatever nature lets you do is natural.” I wish all of you could have tried it with me. But alas, a quick trip to Washington D.C., some time ago, was the only opportunity any of us will have. But there will be more. Watch for a sparkling wine to come, made in zero gravity, called Zero-Zero. No dirt on their space-boots, but lots of ardent advances orbiting above us.

Down in the Cilento National Park, there is a colony of Italians who speak Esperanto. They escaped the area around Vesuvius many years ago and decided to leave behind their dialect. But they took their grapes with them and started making a red wine for the new millennium, to coalesce their past with their future. It is a cult wine on the islands around Naples and further south. I have only seen and had it once, from a private cellar in Panarea. The wine reminded me of the reds made by Galardi. I have heard people say they have traded two bottles of Le Pin for one bottle of “Vulkano” Campania Ruga. I have tried both wines. I would say two bottles of Le Pin for one from the Esperantani’s is a fair deal.

About 11 years ago, in a place near Colfiorito, there was a terrible earthquake. When they got to digging out some of the buildings, rescue workers found a lab book from a vineyardist, describing a project code-named “Il Grifi”. The project, like its name, had as its goal to combine three grapes to make a new wine. Here the vineyardist had been researching, via recombinant DNA, the creation of a wine that had as its parents, Sangiovese, Sagrantino and Montepulciano. And yes, for many years in Umbria and the Marche, winemakers have blended these grapes together to make various wines. William Sylvester, who starred in the Stanley Kubrick film, had made a film in Italy and was fascinated with this area and with wine. So he funded this little known experimentalist. Italy loves to resuscitate ancient things: statues, grapes, legends. In this case, as we headed back to 2001, we discovered that the wine had finally been made, in minute quantities. An amazing wine, combining the ephemeral verve of Sangiovese, the tannic and alcoholic power of the Sagrantino and the lubriciousness of the Montepulciano. Joy upon joy, an almost perfect wine in time for the new age. But alas, only one year was made and only 1113 bottles. They were mostly served at an autumn Sagra in Colfiorito for the special red potato named after the area, which makes the most wonderful base for the local gnocchi. The wine disappeared into memory, along with the best gnocchi I had ever had. The wine? Sangrapulciano.

Two wines, Navicella and Passeggiata, were “good soul” efforts to make right the promise to reach the moon before the end of the decade. In the Italian’s efforts, though, it managed to arrive about 30 years later. End of decade, end of century, end of millennium, hey it’s only time, no?

Navicella was the wine intended for the first course, something from the aquaculture tanks. Passeggiata was created for the second stage, more experimental than the first wine. It was a sci-fi way of twinning tradition (Navicella) with innovation (Passeggiata) and for those who experienced the wine, I’ve been told it was a magical. Again, this was eight years ago when the Italians were embracing the next big thing. Now we are earthbound again, arguing this time over tradition vs. innovation. There are a few of these wines available on the auction circuits. A large enological school in Northeastern Italy was in incubating site for these wines. The Lega Nord, and a then unknown party operative, put an end to it. That little known operative would someday, in the future, join with Berlusconi and attempt to influence events in a larger and more important wine producing region, with near cataclysmic results.

Out last find caused a little flap among the retro-futurists in the room. Paraspruzzi was proposed to bridge the workers in the fields, those who tromp through the primal slime in their waders, with the elevated shapers of fashion. Originally the marketers wanted to call it “Chiaccerone”. Another on the board wanted to name it “Lo Scroccone”. But it was felt that normal wine lovers wouldn’t know how to pronounce it. Not that Paraspruzzi is that easy, but it sounded like the celebrity photographers who were known to frequent all the “in” places looking for those same nine beautiful people to snap up.

This was actually one of the most successful of the wines; it had a run of three vintages. Later as it was being packaged to sell to one of the large Euro-spirit-lux corporations, there were a string of lawsuits. As it turned out, everyone spent more on lawyers than the plan could ever return in ten years, so the project was jettisoned. A real shame, because the wine had a bona fide grip on the cognoscenti of the Italian wine industry. The bloggers never found out about it, this was buried deep in Puglia under the cover of an ancient Masseria. The remaining wine fetches a pretty Euro.

There lies my time and space odyssey of 2001, following the wines of the future back to the past. Submitted for your pleasure.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Starbucks is getting closer to Costco. While Starbucks is experiencing slower sales the chain has long sold its beans at Costco. Until recently Starbucks refused to offer discount cards despite requests made by Costco. This fall, however, Costco will begin selling five $20 Starbucks gift cards for $79.99, a savings it doesn’t offer to customers in its own stores. The members-only retailer expects

Original post by High Volume Sales Rep

I never tire of looking out an airplane window at the shifting landscape below, mottled with the patchy light of cloud and shadow. The view is always new, fluid and streaming like the same river that we are told we never cross twice.

Wine holds the same fascination for the same reasons, as if that proverbial river was bottled but still moving — shifting and changing in defiance of its containment. Whenever I have the good fortune to drink older wines, I am reminded that they indeed move and shift in their own time, as if, like dogs and hummingbirds and tortoises, they live at speeds separate and inhuman.

To observe wine, though, is not to gaze upon it from above, studying its topography from afar. Rather, we swim in wine as it swims in us, feeling the currents tug us, feeling the cool liquid in our skins with the aromas that speak memories.

Scent mystifies me. The link between aroma and memory is no more surprising, I guess, than the way that aroma takes the five tastes of the tongue and transforms them into what we know is the difference between orange and mango. Yet when the merest whiff of my glass throws me fifteen years into the past I sometimes reel with astonishment. Nostalgia will certainly always be olfactory to me, even though I haven’t read the Proust to prove it.

Writing about wine seems best when it is the most difficult — when I am gasping at straws to describe something that falls in between a flavor and a feeling. Drinking great wine is the closest I ever get to synesthesia, a feeling that I might describe as experiencing memories that I have yet to acquire — as if they hang suspended in the space between the wine’s swirling surface and the lip of the glass, ready to be plucked.

Each glass holds for me an ephemeral potential for a future memory just as much as it does a concrete and utterly tangible reflection of the past season that created the vintage. These future memories are the tastes and smells of things that I have yet to taste or may never taste. The exotic fruits that ripen uncounted and undiscovered in the rainforest the spices of a desert people I will never encounter; the perfect combination of sea breeze and tropical flower found only on a certain atoll.

The greatest wines dangle such propositions in front of me, exhilarating even as they are frustratingly hard to pin down. I’ve spent the last three hours of this plane flight across the country wondering off and on just what that flavor was that I was tasting the other night at a friend’s house — that moment that froze me in a small bubble while the conversation continued around me. It was familiar, while at the same time being exotic and unlike any flavor I had tasted before.

Moments like that, even the memories of them, are more than enough to eclipse moments like the really nice bottle of Chardonnay I brought to dinner with friends on Saturday, only to find it amber-colored and oxidized. They are enough to keep me watching the lightning storm on the horizon from my plane window, thinking about what curiosity tastes like.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Starbucks will be offering free coffee to those that exercise their right to vote on Election Day. Starbucks will be offering voters a free tall 12 ounce brewed coffee on November 4th.

Original post by High Volume Sales Rep