Wine Beneath The Palms

Washington wines beat Bordeaux wines in SoBeFest tasting

 

 It wasn’t quite the “Judgment of Paris” -- the 1976 tasting in which top California wines bested their French Bordeaux counterparts and put American wines firmly on the world map for quality.
 But at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in February, two merlots from Washington State beat merlot-based wines from top Bordeaux producers chateaus Cheval Blanc, Angelus, Trotanoy and La Conseillante.
 Coming in first at the blind tasting was the 2005 Northstar Walla Walla Merlot, at $50 a bottle; second was the 2005 Northstar Columbia Valley Merlot, at $40. The Bordeaux wines cost $210 to $1,200.
 One might consume a tiny grain of sodium chloride with the results, since all the wines were from the 2005 vintage, and American wines are known to be ready to drink before French wines. Still, there are bragging rights along the Columbia River today.

Nice weather, good, cheap wines at South Beach Festival

 

   It was the South Beach Wine & Food Festival at its most charming: 70 degrees with a light breeze – perfect wine tasting weather in the big, white tents on the sand beside the Atlantic Ocean in Miami Beach.
   Approaching the wine tasting tents, one runs the gauntlet of pretty young women in bikinis holding out trays of martinis, tequila and beer, trying to dull your senses before you reach the wine.
   But one perseveres and reaches the wine tables, where winery reps pour their wares and chat about them with the wine fans.
    ‘‘I'm doing a story about inexpensive wines," I told them. "What do you have under $12?"
   "We make lots of $20 wines, but we brought a lot of $10 ones to the tasting because that's what everybody seems to want right now," said Dan Cooper, Florida manager for AV Brands.
   ‘‘You have to look around the world. California is still kind of high."
   Another sipper overheard.
   "You're looking for the cheap wines? Great. I'll follow you," said Andy Korn of Orlando.
   And he did. Pleasant fellow, though. Told me what he thought of the wines.
   We found some pretty good ones for $12 and less. The Loredona Riesling came in 24th in a Wine Enthusiast magazine list of 100 best buys in this price category. The Graffigna
pinot grigio was packed with fruit for a wine that can sometimes be bland in
its less-expensive forms.
   One good and interesting wine I tried was the Tocai Friulano from the Italian vineyards owned by Lidia Bastianich and her son, Joseph. She's the chef-host of Lidia's Italy on television; he's a wine expert and partner with chef Mario Batali in New York restaurants including Babbo.
   Good stuff.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

   • 2006 Loredona
Riesling, Monterey, Calif.:
intense, juicy ripe peach
aromas and flavors; lightly
sweet; $12.

   • 2006 Bastianich
Tocai Friulano, Italy:
green pears, smoke and
minerals; very dry, power-
ful; $11.

  
• 2007 Graffigna
Centenario Pinot Grigio,
San Juan, Argentina:
intense, zingy, juicy ripe
pear and green pineapple
flavors; $9.

RECOMMENDED

   • 2007 Carmen
Cabernet Sauvignon,
Maipo Valley, Chile: soft,
sweet black cherry and
black coffee flavors; $8.

   • 2006 Voga Merlot,
Sicily: soft, sweet red
plums, $8.

   • 2008 Two Oceans
Shiraz, Western Cape,
South Africa: smoke, black
cherries and milk chocolate,
soft and sweet; $8.

   • 2007 Rondolino
Vernacia di San Gimig-
nano, Italy: green pears,
minerals, cinnamon; $10.

   • 2007 Bodega Mal-
bec, Mendoza, Argentina:
sweet and zingy, red rasp-
berry flavors; $7.

   • 2006 Balduzzi
Cabernet Sauvignon
Reserva, Maule, Chile: soft
and sweet, anise and black
cherries.

   • 2008 Los Vascos
Sauvignon Blanc, Casa-
blanca, Chile: crisp cut
grass and green apple aro-
mas and flavors; $11.

 

Great wines poured at South Beach Wine & Food Festival

 

     The best wine I tasted in my tour around the grand tasting tent at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival was the 2006 Chateau Lascombes Grand Cru Classé Margaux, at $70. Oh, it was nice. Black raspberry aromas and flavors, with cinnamon, cloves and mocha. Very smooth. 
      The most interesting new wine (to me, at least) was the 2006 Vatistas Dry White Wine of Monemvasia, from the assyrtiko grape, from Greece, at $25. It was rich and dry, with flavors of vanilla and minerals. Always fun to try something new.
      I scoured the tents for good wines in the $12-and-under category that everybody seems to want these days. Check my column on Thur., Feb. 26 for tasting notes.

Americans keep drinking wine, but cheaper wine

 

 I had a page-one story in Thursday’s paper that said Americans are drinking slightly more wines these hard economic days, but making cheaper choices. I wrote the story way too long. So here are some interesting outtakes:

· Collectors are snapping up bargains at auctions, buying $500 French wines that last summer would have cost $1,200.
·   Investors are sitting on their wines, not always making
profits but usually beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
· Mel Dick (pictured here), president of the wine division of Southern Wine & Spirits of America, believes the trading down is temporary.  "People who have been buying $100 bottles will go to $60 or $70, but they won't change their lifestyles," he says. "And when times are better they'll be back."
· Chip Cassidy, wine buyer for the 31-store Crown Wine & Spirits chain: ‘‘I had this college law professor in the shop and I was showing him a $22 wine and he said, 'No, no, no. Show me a $12 wine.' ‘
· Elaine Fredrikson, California wine consultant, agrees: "The young professional who might have thought little about putting a $30 bottle on his table every night is now looking for a great $12 bottle. People have
stopped going out to dinner, but they're cooking at home and putting more inexpensive wines on the table there."
· Jeffrey Wolfe, owner of Wolfe’s Wines in Coral Gables, is finding good, low-priced wines in Spain. “In Southern Spain there are good wines now from the Yecla, Jumilla, Alicante regions. The 2006 Castano Monastrell from Yecla is only $7, and it's marvelous."
· Wine shops and big-box stores selling inexpensive wines also benefited from cheap wines imported from Italy, Chile, Argentina and elsewhere.
   "Because people were trading down to less-expensive wines, there was a flood of bulk wine coming into the U.S. to be blended and bottled here at good prices," Fredrikson said.   So while Franzia's winery is in
California, its cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and other wines sold in boxes is often from abroad, mostly Argentina, she said. And because of the boom in demand for pinot noir -- still hot from being featured in the 2004 movie Sideways -- demand is exceeding the supply from California and Oregon. So U.S. producers like Beringer, Coastal
Estates, Beaulieu Vineyards, Turning Leaf, Fetzer and others are using grapes from Italy, France and elsewhere -- also at good prices.
· For decades, small, high-end California wineries have tried to sell their wines almost exclusively in restaurants. They believe it adds prestige. And they figure selling their wines to 12 different customers in restaurants will give it more publicity than selling a 12-bottle case to a wine shop customer. So retail shops could get only tiny allocations of
those wines.  Those wineries have changed their tunes, says Fredrickson.
   "They really had to scurry to get more of their wines into retail shops."
· Elsewhere in the world, wine is in flux: Exports of French champagne to
non-European countries including the United States were down 6.2 percent in 2008, according to the Champagne Vintners' Committee. New York auction prices for top Bordeaux and Burgundies have dropped by at least 25 percent since last August, according to The New York Times. A 12-bottle case of the 1989 Chateau Haut-Brion Bordeaux, which
sold for $20,000 in November 2007, is now under $10,000. Buyers who invest in wine have run into the same credit crunch that's hurting sales of houses and cars.  Investors
are plodding ahead. At Andrew Lampasone's Wine Watch in Fort Lauderdale, customers weary of stock market losses early last year were buying top wines and asking him to store them as investments. That's
continuing in volume this year, he said, but at lower prices. "Certain people still buy wines as investments," he said. "Will it go back up? Well, it will do better than General Motors. It won't go from $200 to $2."
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Pinot noirs like it cool

 

When California started getting serious about making fine wine, in the 1960s and
1970s, it had little experience inwhere to plant which grapes. So it made mistakes. One of
the big ones was in failing to plant pinot noir grapes in cool areas.
   And so for California growers it came to be called ‘‘the heartbreak grape'' because it was so hard to grow and turn into good wine.
   They might have known; pinot noir is the chief red grape of France's cool Burgundy area, and it turned outto like the same conditions in California.
   So when the root louse phylloxera devastated California's vineyards in the 1990s, forcing replanting of most of the vineyards, some saw it as a blessing in disguise. It let them replant their pinot noir on cool mountains, in valleys filled daily by the cool fogs of the nearby Pacific Ocean and other low-temperature locations.
   Today California is making much better pinot noirs.
   California's TAZ Vineyards chose a cool-weather location for its Fiddlestix Vineyard, the north side of an east-west valley in Santa Barbara County's Santa Rita Hills, where fog comes in each morning and tempera tures rarely exceed 75 degrees.
   For its Cuyama River pinot noir, it grows grapes at 1,000 feet  between Santa Barbara
and San Luis Obispo counties to catch ocean  breezes.
   "Pinot noir tends to bud and ripen earlier than other red varietals," says TAZ
winemaker Natasha Boffman. ‘‘Excessive amounts of heat and sun can produce sugar
ripeness without allowing the grapes to achieve full flavor ripeness."
   Boffman divides the vines into 32 blocks that are vinified separately.
   "As a bottling date approaches, the separate blends are tasted and assembled to create a final wine most expressive of the Fiddlestix Vineyard," she says.
  Fess Parker Vineyard -- yes, owned by the actor who played TV's Davy Crockett --
turns to the cool Santa Maria Valley and Santa Rita Hills, also draped by fogs from the
Pacific, for its grapes.
   Also seeking cool weather Lynmar Estate grows its grapes in Sonoma County's
Russian River Valley on its 47-acre Quail Hill Vineyard. It, too, divides its vineyards
into blocks and ferments them separately for later assembly.
   When pinot noir grapes are to be used in sparkling wines, winemakers say cool
weather grapes are even more important, to preserve the acids that give bubbly its
crispness. Scharffenberger Cellars goes north of Sonoma County to the Anderson Valley and Mendocino County for its grapes.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

   • 2006 Ashley's Pinot
Noir, Fess Parker Winery,
Santa Rita Hills (single vine-
yard from Rancho Las Her-
manas, formerly Ashley's
Vineyard): intense black
plum and espresso flavors,
full-bodied and smooth; $50.

   • 2006 TAZ Fiddlestix
Vineyard Pinot Noir, Santa

Rita Hills: aromas and flavors
of red plums, cinnamon and
licorice, intense fruit, ripe
tannins, crisp acid, opulent;
$35.

   • 2006 Quail Hill Vine-
yard Pinot Noir, Lynmar
Estate, Russian River Valley:
aromas of flowers and red
fruit, flavors of black cherries,
firm tannin, crisp; $60.

RECOMMENDED

   • 2007 Fess Parker
Pinot Noir, Santa Barbara
County: dark cherry and dark
chocolate flavors, crisp and
smooth; $28.

   • 2006 Fess Parker
Bien Nacido Pinot Noir,
Santa Maria Valley: lively red
cherry aromas and flavors,
with hints of bitter chocolate,
crisp finish; $50.

   • Nonvintage Scharf-
fenberger Cellars Brut
Sparkling Wine, Mendocino
County (65 percent pinot
noir, 35 percent chardonnay):
myriad tiny bubbles, bright
red plum flavors, creamy tex-
ture; $20.

   • TAZ Cuyama River
Pinot Noir, Santa Maria Val-
ley: flowery aromas, flavors
of black cherries and herbs,
soft and ripe, with bitter
chocolate finish; $28.

Pinot noirs like it cool

   

     When California started getting serious about making fine wine, in the 1960s and 1970s, it had little experience inwhere to plant which grapes. So it made mistakes. One of the big ones was in failing to plant pinot noir grapes in cool areas.
   And so for California growers it came to be called ‘‘the heartbreak grape'' because it was so hard to grow and turn into good wine.
   They might have known; pinot noir is the chief red grape of France's cool Burgundy area, and it turned outto like the same conditions in California.
   So when the root louse phylloxera devastated California's vineyards in the 1990s, forcing replanting of most of the vineyards, some saw it as a blessing in disguise. It let them replant their pinot noir on cool mountains, in valleys filled daily by the cool fogs of the nearby Pacific Ocean and other low-temperature locations.
   Today California is making much better pinot noirs.
   California's TAZ Vineyards chose a cool-weather location for its Fiddlestix Vineyard, the north side of an east-west valley in Santa Barbara County's Santa Rita Hills, where fog comes in each morning and tempera tures rarely exceed 75 degrees.
   For its Cuyama River pinot noir, it grows grapes at 1,000 feet  between Santa Barbara
and San Luis Obispo counties to catch ocean  breezes.
   "Pinot noir tends to bud and ripen earlier than other red varietals," says TAZ
winemaker Natasha Boffman. ‘‘Excessive amounts of heat and sun can produce sugar
ripeness without allowing the grapes to achieve full flavor ripeness."
   Boffman divides the vines into 32 blocks that are vinified separately.
   "As a bottling date approaches, the separate blends are tasted and assembled to create a final wine most expressive of the Fiddlestix Vineyard," she says.
  Fess Parker Vineyard -- yes, owned by the actor who played TV's Davy Crockett --
turns to the cool Santa Maria Valley and Santa Rita Hills, also draped by fogs from the
Pacific, for its grapes.
   Also seeking cool weather Lynmar Estate grows its grapes in Sonoma County's
Russian River Valley on its 47-acre Quail Hill Vineyard. It, too, divides its vineyards
into blocks and ferments them separately for later assembly.
   When pinot noir grapes are to be used in sparkling wines, winemakers say cool
weather grapes are even more important, to preserve the acids that give bubbly its
crispness. Scharffenberger Cellars goes north of Sonoma County to the Anderson Valley and Mendocino County for its grapes.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

   • 2006 Ashley's Pinot
Noir, Fess Parker Winery,
Santa Rita Hills (single vine-
yard from Rancho Las Her-
manas, formerly Ashley's
Vineyard): intense black
plum and espresso flavors,
full-bodied and smooth; $50.

   • 2006 TAZ Fiddlestix
Vineyard Pinot Noir, Santa

Rita Hills: aromas and flavors
of red plums, cinnamon and
licorice, intense fruit, ripe
tannins, crisp acid, opulent;
$35.

   • 2006 Quail Hill Vine-
yard Pinot Noir, Lynmar
Estate, Russian River Valley:
aromas of flowers and red
fruit, flavors of black cherries,
firm tannin, crisp; $60.

RECOMMENDED

   • 2007 Fess Parker
Pinot Noir, Santa Barbara
County: dark cherry and dark
chocolate flavors, crisp and
smooth; $28.

   • 2006 Fess Parker
Bien Nacido Pinot Noir,
Santa Maria Valley: lively red
cherry aromas and flavors,
with hints of bitter chocolate,
crisp finish; $50.

   • Nonvintage Scharf-
fenberger Cellars Brut
Sparkling Wine, Mendocino
County (65 percent pinot
noir, 35 percent chardonnay):
myriad tiny bubbles, bright
red plum flavors, creamy tex-
ture; $20.

   • TAZ Cuyama River
Pinot Noir, Santa Maria Val-
ley: flowery aromas, flavors
of black cherries and herbs,
soft and ripe, with bitter
chocolate finish; $28.

Of mice and men. And wine

     

      Dazzled by all those medical studies that say drinking red wine will prevent everything from heart disease to Alzheimer’s? Check out this nifty satire in The New Yorker magazine.