Archive for the ‘wine characteristics’ Category

Here we have it — more irrefutable proof that drinking wine is good, and drinking red wine is really good.

Here’s how it’s been scientifically proven (again)…

A researcher named Dan Buettner studied cultures all over the world in order to write a book called, “Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zone Way.” I have no idea what the Blue Zone is, but I heard him interviewed on The Splendid Table, a show I listen to on National Public Radio (also known as My Sole Source Of Information About The World). As it happens, though, I almost never hear a whole show on NPR, because I’m listening to it in my car, and when I get to where I’m going I step out of the car and miss the end — unless I have a “driveway moment,” and sit in my car looking like a dummy or a stalker until the show finishes.

So Dan was talking about one of the cultures he researched for his book. These folks live on an island something like 30 miles off the coast of Turkey. What makes them unique is that they’re incredibly long-lived;  they’re hale, hearty, happy and healthy at 90 or 100 years old. One of the dietary tricks to which he attributes this is a tea they drink every night that keeps their blood pressure low. OK, that’s great, but I personally wouldn’t stretch the boundaries of time and medicine just for a cup of tea. But the other dietary habit they follow is…

- eating a Mediterranean diet combined with red wine.

That’s not news, you say. We’ve heard the whole “Mediterranean diet” thing before. But here’s the twist: Dan’s research showed that the combination of the two is what’s magical. The benefits aren’t maximized if you slam a glass of wine after work, or sip it as a late-night, TV-watching beverage. You hit the health and wellness jackpot when you drink red wine with a meal rich in whole grains, legumes (that’s beans), lean protein, olive oil, nuts and fresh veg. When these goodies and red wine combine in your digestive track, they create their own antioxidants! That’s in addition to the antioxidants already present in the wine! As Buettner put it, “This is one case where 1 + 1 equals 3.”

Wow, I  feel myself getting younger already. I’m gonna head to the market and load up on the freshest stuff I can find, break out the garlic and olive oil (well, I always do that anyways), and pop open a bottle of red wine.

Oh wait, I always do that, too. Oh well, guess that means I’m gonna live to be 100, which is OK, as long as I can still drink wine in my nursing home. Cheers!

 

Find the book on Amazon.com:  Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way

We met Annie Shull yesterday. She was standing behind the wine bar in a very nice Scottsdale retail shop, pouring wine and talking to the customers who wandered up. She does this a lot, as do the sales and marketing people from other up-and-coming wineries. The mission is to take their wine to the people — to pour their vintages down the throats of willing wine drinkers, thus building, one wine drinker at a time, a devoted following for their wines and winery.

Annie’s winery has jump-started that process. Raptor Ridge Winery in Newberg, Oregon has gotten such great press, almost from the very beginning, that they’ve happily sold out many of their vintages well before the next year’s release. All the name publications — Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, and Wine & Spirits, which has named them a Winery of the Year — have awarded them many 90+ ratings. And that’s a very good thing.

Raptor Ridge’s winemaker is Scott Shull, Annie”s husband, who launched their venture in 1995 like many small producers: in his garage and on his kitchen table. His focus is Pinot Noir, and he sourced grapes from vineyards throughout the Willamette Valley. His winemaking focus is on allowing each vineyard to shine. He ferments and barrel ages each vineyard lot separately, and then produces each cuvee (there do about eight Pinot Noirs and a Pinot Gris) by tasting and blending just before bottling. This winemaking is as hands-on as you can get, from the vineyard right through to the bottling line.

The results speak for themselves. I tasted four of their wines, and was impressed with each for different reasons.

The Raptor Ridge Pinot Gris 2009 is a fabulous example of this varietal, which has become Oregon’s signature white grape. The nose is aromatic with peach and citrus notes and a suggestion of sweetness, but the palate is laser-beam clean, with tangy tangerine fruit and very crisp acid. The finish is anything but cloying, finishing rich but dry. I see why this vintage of Raptor Ridge Pinot Gris earned top ratings.

And speaking of vintages, I asked Annie whether there was truth to the now-commonly-held belief that 2007 was a crummy vintage in Oregon, while 2008 was the best ever. She pointed out that it was the wine press who fed us this theory, and that it wasn’t necessarily borne out across the board. In fact, her wines suggest the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a report I just read on thedrinksbusiness.com:

Moët & Chandon is to lower the dosage of its market-leading Brut Impérial from 12 grams per litre to 9 g/l according to its chef de cave Benoît Gouez. This follows the decision by Dom Pérignon’s chef de cave Richard Geoffroy to gradually lower the sugar levels on the prestige cuvée, having dropped the dosage for its late-disgorged Oenothèque Champagnes.

As previously reported by the drinks business, Geoffroy said, “There has been a strategy of lowering the dosage in the last 10 years and we are now between 6 and 7 g/l.”

Hmmm… I’ve been selling Champagne (the real stuff) for quite a few years. Many of the people who buy it want to “treat themselves to a bottle.” They don’t mind that the price is considerably higher than many other very good sparkling wines — they’re buying it because it’s pricey. They figure that if it’s expensive, it must be good, and that’s what makes Champagne a treat.

Problem is, most of those folks don’t drink Champagne, or even wine, very often. That usually means their palates aren’t accustomed to truly dry wines. I’ve heard many say, “I spent a lot of money on Dom Perignon because it was supposed to be so special, and I didn’t even like it.” Yep, it’s too dry and yeasty for their palates.

But Moet et Chandon White Star wasn’t. It was my go-to Champagne because it was not as dry as all the others. It was considered an “Extra-Dry,” which in the totally un-logical language of Champagne-speak means “not as dry as Brut.”   Apparently others felt the same way, because it was the clear market leader in the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »

Tradition is important. It means commitment, stability and pride.

And longevity is as important in the wine business as in any other: if a winery is still in business after a century or more, it says that they must be doing something right.

The folks at Rocche Costamagna are doing many things right. This venerable winery has been making wine in Italy’s Piedmont hills since 1841, continuously managed by descendants of founder Luigi Costamagna.

The Piedmont region sits at the base of the mountains in Northwest Italy and is best known for its big reds, Barolo and Barbaresco. They’re made from the Nebbiolo grape, which produces big, bold, tannic wines that’ll age for years and years.

The Alba region, nestled in the center of Piedmont, also produces a grape called Dolcetto, which makes a dry red wine that’s lighter-bodied and lower in tannin than its big cousin. At first I was puzzled by the name of this grape: even with my very elementary understanding of Italian, I know that “Dolce” means sweet. “Dolcetto” literally translated means “little sweet one.” But Alfred, my Italian wine broker, set me straight. “Don’t be literal,” he said. Think of this word as meaning “little young one,” because the Dolcetto grapes are the first picked at harvest time. Oh, now I get it… Read the rest of this entry »

Wine from Austria? Really?

You mean that country with all the mountains?

The country where the Von Trapp family fled over the Alps after singing their little hearts out in “The Sound of Music?”

Yes, we’re talking wine from Austria — very good wine, actually.

There have been wine grapes grown in Austria for centuries — every European countryman (and woman) has always enjoyed wine every day, and most of it is made locally, even in chilly Austria. While the western half of the country is filled with the soaring Alps, the eastern half  produces wine grapes that until relatively recently — i.e. 10 or 15 years ago — were mostly shipped to Germany. They were blended with German grapes to make less-than-top-notch country wines.

But 10 or 15 years ago some Austrian said, “Hey, wait a minute. Why don’t we bottle and sell our own wine. And if we’re going to put our own label on it, let’s make it good.” And that’s what they did.

The grape they’ve poured their resources into, and that’s become Austria’s signature grape, is Gruner Veltliner. This white grape thrives in Austria’s cool continental climate. The mild summer weather produces good acid in the grapes, creating a crisp, aromatic white wine.

At a blind tasting recently we tasted Green Eyes Gruner Veltliner 2009, which seems to be designed with the American market in mind: the label is anything but traditional. But the wine is good.

The nose offers snappy pear, citrus and a slight floral aroma, with a pale straw-yellow color. The palate is crisp, but not so acidic it turns your mouth inside out (like I’ve known New Zealand whites to do). I tasted more citrus and pear, with some flinty minerality. It’s not heavy on the palate, and the overall balance between fruit and acid was good.

This kind of white should be drunk young, and very well chilled. If we ever get any warm weather (we’re working on a string of 35-degree-fahrenheit days), Green Eyes will make a great summer refresher.

You won’t find Gruner Veltliner everywhere just yet, but its star is on the rise. The U.S. wine market has discovered it, so look for it to start appearing in wine shops and the wine aisle of up-scale food stores. You should check it out — I think it’s a new experience you’ll enjoy. Cheers!

I’m intrigued by the debate that’s raging among winemakers, critics, and wine consumers about alcohol content in wines. I wrote a post a few months ago, “How High Is Too High,” where I laid out the basic arguments on both sides.

OK, I admit that I didn’t present a totally unbiased opinion — I think my verbal “body language” showed that I sided with the go-for-it, balls-to-the-wall kind of wines.

But I just came across an article that takes the debate to a new level. It’s written by Eric Asimov, the very respected wine writer for The New York Times. You can’t get more respected than that…

So in his column, “A Gadfly in the Pinot Noir,” Asimov recounts the tale of a panel he moderated at a recent Pinot Noir symposium. Now, that’s not a situation that would seem to invite verbal fireworks, but there was a dramatic twist near the end of the proceedings that has created a mini-uproar in the wine community.

Check this out, and let me know what you think.

By ERIC ASIMOV, The New York Times

IT’S been called the Ol’ Switcheroo, and the Great Pinot Noir Kerfuffle. Depending on your point of view, it was either a surprise changeup that proved a point, or a dirty trick that proved nothing at all. Either way, the stunt that the winemaker Adam Lee pulled at a pinot noir seminar earlier this month has evoked both claims of vindication and cries of outrage throughout the wine-drinking world. Read the rest of this entry »

In Italy, wine is life. Period.

Wine is part of every meal, and every meal in Italy is a special occasion. Italians live to eat, not eat to live, and wine is as much a “food” as pasta.

So in every region of the country, from cool Friuli in the shadow of the Alps to balmy Sicily basking on the Mediterranean, the locals make their own wine from the grapes that grow in their neighborhood. If Italians aren’t drinking what they’ve made themselves, they’re buying it by the jug, poured from a barrel in the wine shop in the local market.

Sounds like wine heaven, doesn’t it?

Back here in the United States, most of us eat to live, and consume a ridiculous percentage of our meals behind the wheel of our car, rushing from one Must Do to another Have To Go To. When we drink Italian wines, we usually stick to two varieties:

- Chianti for a red (served up in the straw basket that later passes as a candle holder for every generation of poor college students);

- and Pinot Grigio for a white, which too often tastes like lemon water. Read the rest of this entry »