I think about wine

BLOG MOVED!

2009-11-12T17:39:00.000-08:00

Hi everybody! My brother started using Wordpress for his blog, so I decided to try it out, and turns out I like it better, so I'll be blogging there from now on. http://ithinkaboutwine.wordpress.com

See you there!

Walkabout Paris

2009-10-17T14:43:00.000-07:00

Took a long walk, saw the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, and went to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

I did a lot of walking, plus I took the stairs when I got to the tower, so I was pretty tired and hungry. I had planned to go to the Pied de Cochon, which is a reastaurant that Nathalie's father started, and despite having looked up the address before leaving the hotel I couldn't find it, so I stopped at a pizza place and got a pizza and a huge beer.

Au revoir, Mas Carlot!

2009-10-17T05:48:00.000-07:00

Hellooooo, Paris. Haven't had much to report the last few days as far as work is concerned. Mostly just moving wines around, pulling the ones that had finished malo off their lees and putting them into clean cuves. It's been bitter cold in Bellegarde thanks to the Mistral, which can take a day that's just a bit cool and make it utterly freezing. Wore 2 sweaters and a scarf to work most days this week.
Thursday night I drove back to Mouries to say goodbye to the Cartier family, and have dinner with them and their importer.
Friday night I finally got to make dinner for Cyril and Nathalie, unfortunately with all the cleaning and packing I was doing I ended up pressed for time, and the potatoes came out under-cooked. Dammit.
I've been wearing all the same clothes for nearly 2 months now, and most of the stuff I brought with me was stuff I knew I was going to get wine all over anyway, so I gave a bunch of my clothes and my boots away to one of the Moroccans, who seemed pretty excited about it. Despite getting rid of some clothes my bags are still too full though. I think it's all the wine and salt.
Anyway, now I'm in Paris and I'd love to stay here blogging all day, but I've got some touristy crap to do!

Ok, French road signs suck at giving directions

2009-10-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

So, Bellegarde is a somewhat confusing little jumble of traffic circles and one-way streets, and I've been trying to figure out a shorter way to get from the center of town back to home, because my current route takes me straight into town, but then I have to take the long way out, past another traffic circle, and it's like an extra 2 miles to get back to the road where Carlot is located. So today, I tried following the sign from the center of town that points to Nimes, which is the basic direction of Carlot, but the route took me north of the road I normally travel on, then on a loopy path ending back at the traffic circle I was trying to circumvent. It was in fact even longer than the route I usually take that ends at the same traffic circle. So the sign in the center of town should in fact be pointing in the direction of the route I've been traveling the whole damn time.
So, that being said, today was pretty mellow at work. Putting things away, moving a few things around. I did draw the short straw for decuvage and spent an hour or so shoveling grape must, and I'm cultivating some pretty sweet blisters on my right hand. I also washed the bungs on all the red barrels. The process itself is not that interesting, however 'bung' is a funny word.

This is a bucket of dirty bungs.

This is a pyramid of clean bungs.

We also did some fining today, which is a process I've touched on before where something is introduced into the wine to attract the heavier particles and make them fall out of solution. Sometimes it's done with egg whites, which offends some vegans. In this case it was done with a pair of chemicals, one introduced and mixed into the wine, and the other mixed in about a half hour later. Not all wines have to be fined, but press wines are cloudier than free-run juice, and since the quality of the press wine this year is high enough to potentially end up in the final blend, it needs to be fined to bring the clarity level up to par with the rest of the wines.

On an unrelated note, I've decided to start studying for the Court of Master Sommliers' Certified level exam, with the goal of taking the test in November. That means a lot of studying between now and then. Today's little bit of info: Chilean wine regions from north to south; (all valleys) Elqui, Limari, Aconcagua, Casablanca, San Antonio, Maipo, Cachapoal, Colachuga, Curico, Maule, Itata, Bio Bio, and Malleco. My mnemonic device: Everybody loves a chicken sandwich. My cousin can consume many. I'll buy mayonnaise.

Drivin' around weekend!

2009-10-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

With just about a week left in my fabulous winemaking adventure, I figured I'd better make sure I see as much of the area around

me as I can. So Saturday I drove to Beaucaire, which is about 20km NE of Bellegarde, just down the Rhône from Avignon. It's a pretty little town, with lots of touristy things to do.

Unfortunately I didn't know exactly what those touristy things were before I came. I looked on the tourism board's website, but I generally find it's better just to go to the tourism office and ask. Unfortunately that only works if they're open. I took this picture with my watch next to it. 'Samedi' is Saturday, the day I was there, so this would seem to indicate they are open from 9:30 to 12:30, then from 3 to 8, and as you can see from my watch, it's just after 4, and they're not open. What I missed was the conditional sentence above the time, which I didn't understand at the time, because I didn't know what Pâques was. It's Easter. What it says is, the tourism office is only open Saturdays from Easter till the end of September. Shoulda come last week.

So I ambled about for a bit, and stopped off in a cafe to write in my journal. The only other person in the cafe was this man. I don't know how well you can see in this photo, but he has only two teeth, and one of them is gold. Bling bling, Monsiuer, bling bling.

After a bit more wandering I stopped at another cafe. I was trying to find some of the many touristy things that I know must exist so close to the center of town, but one of the rough bits about French architecture and city design is that damn near everything looks alike. So, at the second cafe, I noticed again that it doesn't seem like French bar and restaurant employees are strictly required to be nice to all the patrons. I didn't see the whole story, so I'm not taking sides here, but what I saw was as follows: A family with children was sitting out in front of the cafe. A girl who looked to be about 3 got up from the table and went inside unsupervised, where she grabbed a handful of sugar from a table where some men were having coffee. The waiter/bartender stopped her, took the sugar away, chided the child, and yelled at her mother. The mother yelled back, and the child returned to the family. Weird thing is, the family didn't leave at this point. I didn't understand all of what was being said at their table, but I'm pretty sure she said something along the lines of 'I don't care what he says, he's just some prick who works in a bar.' A few minutes later the girl walked in again unsupervised, the bartender yelled at the mother again, this time he definitely asked them to leave, she said 'we're going' and they left. I paid and left as well, because I was sure I wasn't going to get anything more entertaining out of that place.

I walked around a bit more and did manage to find one of the touristy spots. Apparently this village is known for eagles, and they have some sort of Renaissance eagle-show in the old fortress at the top of the hill. Unfortunately I missed the last show of the day. Perhaps I can give it another go this weekend before heading to Paris.

So, yesterday I went to the beach. They had a specially designated areas for dogs to poo, so you know I had to take a picture of the sign.

I wend to a village called Saintes Maries de la Mer.
I swam.
The water was wonderful and warm, although there was a bit of a breeze in the air.
Also a very touristy village, and with the beautiful weather, and it being potentially one of the last really nice days of the year, the place was bustling.

All the restaurants were open to the street, and all of them serving paella and fresh seafood. This area is also in the Camargue, which is well known for salt and horses and bulls and honey and rice, so most of the souvenir shops reflected the theme.

I was wandering around town and saw some sort of tourist attraction, and I didn't know exactly what it was, only that there were people up on the roof. I found the door and it was only two euros to get in, so I checked it out. Turns out the walking on the roof was pretty much the whole thing, but the view was amazing.

Today was pretty mellow at work. We drew the press juice off the mourvedre skins so it can be de-cuved tomorrow. We're still in the process of putting everything away for the winter, today we put a bunch of the hoses and pipes in the storage room. The Moroccans are still working on end of season maintenance on all the harvesting machines. Just about all of the wines are finished and we're working on getting them in the cuves where they'll rest for the next few months.

Language lessons

2009-10-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

So, it's not uncommon for somebody to say something to me and for me not to understand one or two words that are being said. There are some regional dialect issues from time to time, for example the word I'd learned at Gourgonnier for 'hose' was 'tuyau,' which the dictionary defines as pipe or tube. Here they also use the word 'manche' which the dictionary defines as 'handle,' which can be confusing when they use the same word to refer to a hose as to refer to the handle of a shovel.
So, today, Nicholas was trying to tell me to do something, the conversation went something like this:
Nicholas: Can you take 1 kilo of tartaric acid and put it in cuve 33 in a (word I don't know)
Me: A (word I don't know)?
Nicholas: (word I don't know) like women wear
Me: What?
Nicholas: Like woman's underwear, you know?
Me: I put on woman's underwear?
Nicholas: No, you put the acid in the (word I don't know) like women wear (mime running hands up and down leg)
Me: I don't understand.
Nicholas: Come here, I'll show you.
Me: I'm scared.
(we walk into the lab, Nicholas pulls a stocking from a box)
Nicholas: This is a stocking.
Me: Oh! A stocking!
Nicholas: You put the powdered acid inside, and put it in the top of the cuve.
Me: Ok, I understand. I thought you were asking me to do something very gay.

I also went to Bressades with Cyril today for tasting and to see the winery. It's a bit smaller than Carlot, they have about half the acreage in vines, but it's very cleverly arranged, with all the metal cuves for primary fermentation on top of the concrete ones, so the grapes are pumped in, then the wine is fed by gravity into the lower cuves when primary fermentation is complete.
It's almost dinnertime now, I was supposed to go to Nimes with Cyril and Nathalie, but their babysitter got sick, so we're eating at their house.

Long day.

2009-10-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

Just got done working and it's 7:45. The last hour and a half was mostly waiting though. We tasted through tanks with Alain again this morning, and made some more blending decisions. These decisions basically led us to moving around what seemed like all of the wine in the winery. All the pumps were active, and several moves were in the queue. Jordan, Nicholas, and I have been waiting for the last hour and a half for the last cuve of press wine to finish pumping onto the Mourvedre skins. Since it was the last to finish fermenting, and since the Mourvedre generally has the most punch to it, and since the press juice seems to far like it's good enough to maybe end up in the final blend, we're adding all the press juice to the Mourvedre skins to try and get them a little more complexity.
With all the wine moving around there was a lot of sanitizing to be done too. Normally the pumps and hoses are just rinsed with water, but at this point we're dealing with some wines that are going through, or have finished malo, and some that aren't done with primary fermentation yet. As we've learned previously, the bacteria responsible for malolactic fermentation can go after the sugars in the wine and raise volatile acidity, so it's very important to make sure the wines are completely finished with sugar fermentation before they're exposed to the malo bacteria. I also learned that there's a visual test for malo; wines that haven't gone through malo have a very purple color to their foam, while wines that have gone through malo have a white foam. This distinction of course applies only to red wines, and it also explains why most sparkling red wines, such as Australian sparkling Shiraz, and Italian Lambrusco have such intensely purple foam.
Also, the mosquitoes seem to be back in force today. Dammit.

Bugs in your wine.

2009-10-07T03:05:00.000-07:00

Provocative title, eh? Too much? I'm not trying to gross anybody out or put them off wine, I'm really just trying to give people a realistic look at where the things they eat and drink come from. All wine get some bugs in it, I firmly believe this. The harvesting machines bring in crickets, snails, grasshoppers and the like with the grapes, and flies and bees are attracted to the sugar and you can't help having a few of them end up in the fermenter. Now, all of the wine's going to go through multiple stages of settling and filtration, so it's not like you're likely to find solid evidence of this by the time the wine reaches your glass, I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that there is no such thing as vegan wine. You might now be thinking, 'but isn't all wine vegan, not counting the bugs?' but sometimes wines are fined, a process that helps clarify it by introducing a protein that will attract heavier particles and cause them to settle to the bottom of the barrel, and one of the preferred options for fining is egg whites. Some vegans have objected, saying this adds animal matter to the wine. Now, I'm not trying to step on anybody's veganism, I'm just saying that if you object to about one egg white per hundred litres of wine, you might just want to skip wine, because egg whites or no, there's probably been some snails in there too.

So, that being said, check out this picture. We de-cuved inside today, which is more complicated than doing it outside, where the press moves back and forth between the cuves, and it's really pretty easy. To do it inside, first we had to jimmy-rig the conveyor, hanging from the straps there, so the wine could be shoveled onto it inside the cuve, then carried out. The thing is, then it had about 4 feet to fall from the conveyor to the auger that pushes it outside, so there are 3 buckets, a mess of plastic, and one Moroccan in charge of making sure everything that falls ends up in the auger. They also had a brilliant solution to the sometimes-the-must-is-too-dry-to-move-easily problem. We installed a pump from the cuve that holds the wine coming out of the press, going back into the box with the auger, this way they were able to pump the wine back into the circuit when necessary, making it flow easier. This also made it a lot easier to fill the press, since the more liquidy the must is, the easier it flows into all the hard to reach corners.
Oh, and also today, I got a speeding ticket. Funny thing is, I didn't drive today. Apparently they do that take a photo of your car and mail you a ticket thing, which eats because I'm pretty sure I could have done the stupid lost American act if I'd actually been pulled over, and gotten out of it. And it's not even my fault, I was going 99kph in a 90kph zone, which is really pretty good considering the speedometer on the car doesn't work. Funny thing is, the ticket didn't actually come to me, since it's not my car, it came to Nathalie, so now she's got to send them a photocopy of my driver's license with a letter saying "I lent my car to this speed-demon American, please don't deduct points from my license."

You have to be kind of a renaissance man/woman when you work in a winery.

2009-10-06T11:11:00.001-07:00

You can't exactly stop everything and wait for the plumber or electrician to show up when something needs to be fixed, so everybody needs to know a bit about everything around here. Today I disassembled and reassembled the plug to a pump and the cuve lantern, and rebuilt the end of one of the hoses. Here's Cyril taking apart the control box on the jimmy-rigged conveyor belt.

My pants are also filthy, because I cleaned lees out of three cuves, so my jeans are covered in purple.

Today was another day of intricate ballet, with all pumps in operation, moving wine from this cuve to that one, inside and outside. Between yesterday and today we sent off 2 full cuves of finished wine from 2008, which Nathalie had sold to a negociant. We took all the rose that was still varietally segregated and consolidated it into 2 or 3 cuves. When the cuves are being filled with juice, somebody has to keep an eye on them from the top to make sure they don't overflow. You can get kind of seasick doing that, watching the bubbles on the surface of the wine move below you. It's like staring into the ocean at night.

We're in the process of pulling all the Syrah off it's must and consolidating the various vineyards together, which is a big process since there's more Syrah than anything else. We've got the Moroccans working outside, emptying one cuve, and meanwhile we're pumping the free-flow juice that went from that cuve into cuve 19 overnight into the cuve where it will rest for a while. The whites as well are being pumped out of varietal segregation and into their various blending tanks, as are the pinks. Many times since I've been here we've found ourselves standing about, waiting for something else to be ready to get done. Today was the first time we had to stand and wait for the pumps to be done with what they were doing so they could be moved on to their next task. By the end of the day, we had literally every single red wine hose in the winery in use, and even had to wait a few times because we didn't have enough double-male joints to couple them all together.

We also went about the process of taking apart various bits of equipment that won't be used again until next year. We cleaned and disassembled the whole receiving area for red grapes, and I even got to drive the forklift to take the stem bin over to the garage for storage. Forklifts rule.
By the end of the day I think I must have gone up and down the stairs at least 50 times. Last time I was in France I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks due to excessive wine and cheese consumption. This time I don't think I've gained a bit, may have even lost weight, and I'm pretty sure those stairs are to thank for it.

My legs hurt now, and I have a new episode of Heroes to watch. Goodnight all.

Last day of harvest again!

2009-10-05T12:48:00.001-07:00

Also, today I finally figured out what the deal is with the shopping carts at the grocery store! I had previously figured out that the carts aren't kept inside the store, but upon finally figuring out that they're kept out in the parking lot, I thought they were a rental-type deal, because you have to put a coin in them to detach them from the rest. Turns out the system is just to keep them from getting stolen, because when you take it back to where it belongs, you get your coin back. Pretty smart system now that I understand how it works. Keeps them from getting stolen, and makes sure people put them back where they belong.

Today we received the Cabernet, which was the last thing still on the vines, so as of tonight we are fully harvested.

This morning we also tasted tank blends with Alain, this time of white and rosé. We tasted through the various possible blends of the finished tank wines to decide on blends for the Tradition Blanc and Tradition Rosé.

Despite being done with harvest, there is still a lot of work to do this week, with all of the Syrah cuves still needing to be pulled off their must. It was an intricate ballet of pumps in the winery, taking juice out of one fermenter and into another, and assembling the white and pink blends we'd decided on during the morning tasting.

I spent about a half hour managing a yeast overflow situation when the yeast that was to go into the Cabernet was prepared too early. When you're getting yeast ready to go into the cuve, you mix it first with hot water, then a little later with some of the juice from the cuve it's going into. You let that all sit in a bucket for a while, then dump it into the cuve. Here's a picture of just one bucket of yeast for a smaller cuve. The problem is, once the yeast gets active, it starts to foam up like crazy, and often overflows the bucket it's in. In this case we were doing yeast for one large cuve of red, plus the rosé of Cabernet that was pulled off of the larger cuve, so we had 4 buckets of yeast going, and we ended up needing to wait to pitch it because not all the grapes were in yet, so all the buckets started to foam over. The foam will go down if you stir it a bit, but in this case there was so much I ended up having to dump it all into a bigger bucket, and still had to fight with it to keep it from spilling all over.

I didn't have an Champagne at my house, but I opened a bottle of Chateau Guiot Les Jumeaux Chardonnay with the guys in honor of the end of harvest. After that I went to the grocery store, which is when I finally figured out the shopping carts. I also learned an important lesson about reading labels. I was in the beer and soda aisle, and on the beer shelf I found something that looked like a store-brand beer called Panaché. So of course I had to buy it, because just the idea of Albertson's brand beer made me chuckle. Also, it was very cheap. However, I opened one after dinner and realized I hadn't gotten what I was expecting. After reading the label, I realized that I had bought something vaguely akin to a non-alcohol hard lemonade. A sparkling lemonade with less than 1% alcohol. Is it gay if I mix it with rosé and drink it anyway?

Chateauneuf du Pape!

2009-10-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting at a pizzeria called La Mule du Pape in the village of Chateauneuf du Pape. It's about an hour northeast of bellegarde. The landscape is the first dramatic difference you notice when coming from the Costières de Nimes to Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The Costières is all pretty flat, and it gets a lot more hilly when you get north of Avignon. A lot rockier too. The area is known for it's distinctive rocks, typically the size of a fist, which absorb the heat during the day, and hold onto it overnight. I went to visit Yannick (the guy who was working here, who I thought was named Nick the whole two weeks we were working together) and to taste his dad's wine, Domaine Eddie Feraud. The family has 4.5 hectares, a very small domain, and they make just one cuveé of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
We visited the vines, which are northeast of town on mostly sandy soil, and are mostly very old. They're also all goblet pruned, which means they're not trained into a trellis system, all of the plants are free-standing. This is in part because they're so old, and that's the way all the vines were done in this area in years past. Most young vines in this area are pruned this way too however, which is because machine harvesting isn't allowed here. Most harvesting machines, at least the ones I've seen here, are only compatible with trellis-trained vines. Everything is hand-harvested here, which also contributes to the drastic difference in price between Costières de Nimes and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Nick also explained the extensive work that is done in the vineyard during the year, with meticulous pruning and green harvesting, to get higher quality grapes at harvest.
There are 13 varietals allowed in Châteauneuf; 5 white and 8 red, with Grenache at the top of the food pyramid.

I tasted 2006 and 2007 from Eddie Feraud, which were very old-school, concentrated and powerful, with no new oak or barrique. The two wines were consistent with my experience with these two vintages from this area, with the 06 being lighter and more supple and ready to drink, while the 07 was pretty monstrous and, while drinkable, my preference would be to lay it down for at least 5 years. I also went and tasted at Domaine Durieu, Yannick is friends with the winemaker there. They're a much bigger operation, with several cuveés of Châteauneuf including a white, and some Côtes du Rhône and VDP wines. Their tasting room was much more fancy and formal, and the wines a bit more new world. Again, the 07 Châteauneuf was monstrous. They were also selling 2001 Côtes du Rhône for 6 euros, so I got a bottle of that to take home.

I walked up to the actual Châteauneuf, which is basically just a few old walls, though it used to be a full castle that housed the Popes of Avignon in the 14th century.

I also took a drive northeast of town to visit Clos du Caillou, but unfortunately they don't have a tasting room so I didn't get to go for the tour.

Painting barrels and whatnot!

2009-10-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

So, today started off pretty slow, not that much to do. Quick remontage in the morning, pulling samples and the like, then Jordan and I were assigned to paint the red barriques. Not everybody does this, it's just an aesthetic choice, but Nathalie wants them to look nice. The thing is with barrels, there's really no way to avoid dribbling on them at least a little bit, and sometimes a lot. This is no big deal with whites of course, because they don't leave a stain on the barrels. Reds do, so you can either leave them like that, with random drips and drops on each of them, or you can actually buy ones that are already painted red down the center, or you can take the lees out of a cuve that's just been emptied and paint the barrels with a sponge. That's what we did. The winery had an eerie feeling while we were doing the painting. He and I don't chat much when it's not work-related, and there were no pumps going like there usually are, the only noise was the door that refused to stay open or shut, and kept banging every time there was a strong gust of wind.
The afternoon was on track to be slow like the morning when Cyril and Nathalie arrived with an urgent change of plans. It seems that the volatile acidity in the cuve of pressed syrah was climbing, which it shouldn't, and it needed to be pumped off it's lees immediately, or the v.a. could climb above acceptable levels by Monday. All wines contain some volatile acidity, but if it gets out of hand it can ruin the wine. In this case it had started climbing because the bacteria that are in charge of malolactic fermentation had finished their job and apparently gotten bored, so they went after the small amount of sugar still left in the wine. Unlike the yeast, which makes alcohol out of sugar, the bacteria turns the sugar into v.a., so the wine had to get off it's lees and get stabilized asap. This is one of those times when being educated as enologists works in Cyril and Nathalie's favor. Were it not for her education, Nathalie may have missed the significance in the change in v.a. on today's analysis, and had she waited for her next meeting with Alain, the level could have risen too high.
I planned on celebrating the end of the work week with a steak, but I couldn't find good meat at the grocery store, apparently you have to go to the butcher, so tonight I'll be having a burger and fries and some Enfants Terribles.
Oh, and watching last night's episode of The Office.

No power.

2009-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

The lights just came back on.
Today at work we did a fair bit of the usual, but we also put together one of the vineyard blends. All the Grenache and Syrah blends have thus far been kept in separate fermenters. Today the Syrah blend that will go into the Tradition Rouge Grenache Syrah was assembled. After we pulled samples of all the finished Syrahs Nathalie, Cyril and Alain tasted through them, and blended them in various permutations until they arrived at the final blend. It's 50% from the Blanche vineyard (each of the kids has a vineyard named after them. Blanche, Eugene, and Olympe are all Syrah, and Achille is Grenache. There are other named vineyards on the property too, I haven't asked where those names come from.) 25% is from the Bergerie vineyard, and 25% from the Carlot estate vineyard.
I was dealing with wicked allergies all day. I had previously thought that I was allergic to sage, in Boise, but I don't think they have sage out here. I've had itchy eyes, runny nose, and sneezing all day. Normally when I feel this crappy I want comfort food, so at lunchtime I drove to the grocery store in Bellegarde for chicken noodle soup. The store, however, was not open. The close for lunch from...wait for it....12:15 to 3pm! Now I understand closing for lunch. A lot of people do it around here, and honestly I think Americans should do it more. What's getting me is the time thing. First of all, who the hell gets 2 hours and 45 minutes for lunch? Second, why the odd time frame? I get 3 hours, I get 2 and a half hours. Did they do some market research that told them there's a big shopping rush between 12 and 12:15?
So I had lentils and leftover chicken for lunch.
We finished assembling the syrah in the afternoon, and before going to the store I decided to finish watching Zach and Miri Make a Porno, which is an awesome movie. Even Jason Mewes was pretty good, and he's basically Kid Rock without the questionable musical talent. The power apparently went out while I was watching it, which I only noticed because my computer stopped charging. First I thought my power converter had crapped out, but after trying multiple devices in multiple outlets, I finally figured out there was no electricity.
I went to the store and bought chicken noodle soup and candles, then got home and realized I couldn't cook the soup without electricity, so I reheated my lunch over some tealights and had a romantic candlelight dinner for one. One of the Morroccans came over to ask me about the electricity. I told him I didn't know what was going on, but I gave him a handful of tealights because they didn't have any candles in their quarters. In return he gave me some fresh mint from the garden for tea, which seemed like a fair trade.
Now the power's back on and it's my bedtime.

Juice bath!

2009-09-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

Nicholas is still out of commission with a back injury, so at present it's just Jordan and me in the cave, with Nathalie coming by regularly to give us instruction. First thing this morning we gathered tank samples for more tasting by Nathalie and Cyril to decide which tank to empty tomorrow, and where to put it. We're also still dealing with cuve 7, which is a syrah with stuck fermentation. We've got 2 small fermenters with the lees from the white cuves trying to get it working, and this afternoon we pumped a few hectoliters of the mourvedre that's just finishing fermentation into the syrah cuve to try and get it working.
Jordan and I started the debourbage of the clairette that came in Monday. That's the process of pumping the clear top juice out of the cuve, leaving behind the heavier junk at the bottom. What I didn't know was that it's very important in this process to never stop the pump, because stopping the pump lets the wine in the hose fall back into the cuve, unsettling the settled heavier bits at the bottom, and mixing them back up with the clear juice. So, Jordan was up above, and I was down below with the pump when he started shouting something to me. It's hard enough to understand what's being said to you in the cave with a noisy pump running, to say nothing of the language barrier. I stopped the pump to ask him to repeat what he'd said. Rather than repeating it, he told me not to stop the pump, so I turned it back on, and again he started trying to tell me something. Again I stopped, and again he told me to turn it back on, so finally I turned it back on, and went up the stairs to ask what he was on about. He was trying to tell me to prepare a bucket of water to clean the pump when we were done, and then he told me why you should never stop the pump during debourbage.
The result of the whole debacle was that we had much more cloudy juice than we should have, so it wouldn't fit in the small cuve we'd planned on putting it in. By this time Nathalie had come around, and had gotten the story from Jordan. I had a feeling that his version of the story put the blame fully on me, and whether I was right or wrong she was definitely irritated, and we both got a telling off.
At this point the cuve that wasn't big enough for all the heavy bits was completely full, and we were about to move it all to a bigger cuve. I was up above to pump the juice out of the too-small cuve, when Nathalie accidentally pressed the button on the pump, causing the too-small cuve to overflow, showering me with grape juice. I proceeded to pass the rest of the morning in a decidedly ill humor, now having cold sticky grape juice dripping down my back and into a number of places I prefer not to have grape juice.
Lunchtime came, we finished moving the white juice around, and I got to have a shower, which cheered me up tremendously.
The afternoon was devoted mostly to cleaning and getting the cave ready to empty the marc out of cuve 32 tomorrow, and possibly receive the cabernet. I was assigned the task of cleaning 2 drapeaux. I can't think of an English word for them, drapeau literally translates to curtains, but these are big metal things with water tubes through them that are used to cool the cuves during fermentation. The rough part about cleaning them, especially when they've come out of a red cuve, is that they're covered with tartaric acid, which is deceptively difficult to clean off. You start off with a hose, and some of the bits just flake off, making it seem like the job's going to be easy as pie, but then you learn that the bits that didn't just flake off are holding on for dear life, and you've got to use some manner of caustic cleanser that's so nasty you have to wear gloves just to handle it.
And that was the second major chemical event today. The premises were also sprayed for mosquito abatement, which is awesome. But it does speak to the issue of organic farming in winemaking. I make the point quite often to customers that there are a great number of winemakers who adhere to organic or sustainable practices, but who don't get certified because they want to keep their options open. This is a perfect example. There is no organic option for taking care of a major mosquito problem, and even though in this case the spray was only dispersed on the areas of the property where the grapes had already been harvested, this treatment would have nullified an organic certification if Carlot had one.
At this point I'm keeping one eye on cuve 19, which is being used as the receptacle for the juice from cuve 32, which is to be emptied tomorrow. It's emptied by gravity, which means cuve 32 is just sitting with an open faucet, with a hose leading down into cuve 19. The danger here is that one never knows exactly how much juice one will get, so there's the possibility that cuve 32 will overflow cuve 19. So I'm checking it regularly while I watch Heroes.

Tasting day again!

2009-09-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

First thing this morning we pulled samples from all of the tanks and all of the whites in barriqe for tasting with Alain the enologist. The barrel samples of white were interesting, you have to kind of use your imagination, knowing that they will be mixed mostly in small percentages with the tank whites. The rose tanks are great, and I can't wait to taste them when they're complete. The red tasting was interesting too, we were considering which tanks were best for the Chateau Paul Blanc Syrah, which sees more time in wood, and which would be better for the Enfants Terribles and the Tradition. It was particularly interesting because Cyril and Nathalie didn't entirely agree with Alain on the blending, so after he left they pulled new samples of all the red tanks and tried blending them again in various permutations until they'd decided which ones to put where.
I'm off to the store again. I've been wearing the same clothes for a month and I'd really like to have at least one nice shirt to wear when I'm not working.

More white grapes and remontage

2009-09-28T12:35:00.000-07:00

We got in the rest of the clairette today, and pumped it into a cuve to settle. The juice that came in Friday had been sitting over the weekend, to allow the heavier material to sink to the bottom of the cuve. The good juice on top was pumped into a new fermenter today to start fermentation, and the thicker stuff at the bottom went into the two cuves of mourvedre.

The mourvedre is getting a lot of pumpover time to extract color and help it through fermentation, it should be done with primary in a couple of days. It was mostly just me and Jordan in the winery today, so when Nathalie told us to do the pumpover for maximum aeration, Jordan got a little creative, here's the picture. The wine on the ground surrounding the bucket gave me the impression that this wasn't necessarily the best way to do it.
There were an obscene number of mosquitoes today. All the water we're moving through the winery for cleanup and whatnot makes for perfect breeding conditions for them, and unlike the mosquitoes that I'm used to, who come out generally in the early morning and the evening, the French seem to have developed a supermosquito that could give a rat's ass that it's hot outside, and will eat you alive regardless. I'm very itchy.
We also pumped the remaining finished marsanne and roussanne out of the cuves in order to gather all of the lees to be used to help along a cuve of syrah that's currently stopped fermenting.
After work I went to the grocery store, and I finally figured out why I can never find a shopping cart. Bags are also hard to find. It seems the French have decided that the best way to make sure everybody remembers to bring their own bags when shopping is just to not have bags at the checkout. I'd seen shopping cart return in the parking lot, and I'd seen people with carts in the supermarket, but I'd spent the first five minutes of every shopping trip so far looking for carts at every entrance, with no luck. It turns out they're not free. You have to put a one-euro coin in the cart in the cart repository in the parking lot to free it from it's fellows. Or find one that somebody else didn't return to it's resting place. So that pretty much eats, but at least now I know.

Paella!

2009-09-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

Went to Guiot yesterday for the end of harvest paella party. Paella is a traditional dish in this area, and it's typically made with a combination of seafood; fish, mussels, shrimp, etc, as well as chicken, rabbit, and sometimes sausage.
We had a great meal outside, with plenty of Guiot rose. After eating we played petonk, which is the French version of bocce ball. It's played with one small ball, which is tossed about 5 meters from the players, and each player has two larger balls, and the goal is to be closest to the little ball. It's a fun game, although I did have to serve as the official smack-talk translator between the Australians and the Frenchmen, which is no easy task.
I got lost on the way home because it was dark, and the road I'd come in on was one-way, so it ended up taking me twice as long as it should have to get home, but I made it.

A few fun new ways to spend money!

2009-09-26T02:54:00.000-07:00

I finally got my laptop back which, for the new hard drive, labor, and tax cost me about 130 Euros, which is just shy of $200.
Wednesday I went to visit Alex and Numa Cornut at Chateau Guiot. Alex ended up occupied fixing a tractor out in one of the vineyards, but I tasted through the wines first with a French woman named Sylvia who works there. Then Brendan, one of two Australians currently working harvest there showed up to tell her there were customers there to taste. However, Brendan speaks about 2 words of French, and Sylvia speaks about 2 words of English, so I had to translate. I'm not sure how Brendan and the other Australian get along here when Alex and Numa aren't around normally, but that must be tough. I still feel intimidated doing new things when I'm not sure if I'm going to understand what's being said, and I'm told I speak quite well.
So Brendan took me through tasting some tank samples, and some barrel samples of 2008's, then Numa arrived, back from helping his brother fix a tractor. Numa and I had a very interesting chat about the influence of Robert Parker, and what Numa has noticed as a decrease in Americans' preference for extremely oaky wines. He gave me a few bottles of Guiot wine, and invited me to an end-of-harvest paella party today, which I'll be going to as soon as I finish writing this.
I left there just about 6:30, and I was about 17km from Nimes, which meant I'd be able to make it before the computer shop closed, but they hadn't called yet, so I didn't know if it was done. Still I decided to give it a shot. I tried calling as I drove, but there was no answer. I tried again, and again, and finally somebody picked up at about 6:45, just as I was entering the city. The computer was not ready. I turned around and headed to the gas station next to the grocery store, which was the closest one I knew of. I had tried to buy gas the night before, but apparently the '24 hour' gas stations here only accept French bank cards after the attendant has left for the evening. Despite having a sign with Visa and Mastercard logos, the machine wouldn't take my card. I was starting to get worried. I had just under a quarter tank. I drove back toward home, and on the way stopped again at the station I'd tried the night before. This time there was a woman working in the booth, and she told me to use Mastercard I just had to fill up and then pay her on my way out. I filled up and paid. It will be a long time before I complain about the price of gas in the US. About 33 Liters of unleaded cost me over 50 Euros. I left the gas station and the car started to klunk. I had put the wrong gas in the car.
The real irony here is the fact that I've been making a real effort, and doing a very good job at making sure I know exactly what I'm being asked to do at work. I'd say I typically understand 50 to 75% of the actual words that are being said to me most of the time. Sometimes more, but I'd call that the average. Now, through inference and reading body language and just generally knowing what's going on in the winery, I'd say I know what I'm being asked what to do on the first try 80% of the time. When I do have to ask for clarification it usually just takes asking once to figure out the meaning of whatever words I didn't understand.
So that's why it's ironic that I didn't perform the retrospectively seemingly elementary step of asking what kind of gas to put in the car I'm using. I'm sure it's due in fact to the fact that I've never put anything but unleaded in any car I've ever drive. Also, the fact that I was desperate to get some gas in the car.
Needless to say I didn't make it very far, and thank god I had a cell phone. Cyril came and picked me up. We tried to siphon the unleaded out of the car, but the car has anti-siphoning technology of some sort, so we left it and Cyril called a mechanic the next morning.
In the end it was all ok. Apparently a diesel engine, though it won't run on unleaded, won't be harmed by having unleaded in it, while an unleaded engine that gets fed diesel is well and truly screwed.
The real bummer for me at the time was that it put a damper on what had been a pretty awesome day for me up to that point. I did decuvage (shoveling grape must out of the fermenter) in the morning, which is rough work, but I was no worse for wear, and was proud of myself. It's like being in the garbage smasher on the Death Star, but it's full of really thick mud and you've got to shovel your way out. We prepped two other fermenters to receive Mourvedre Thursday, and Thursday afternoon we bled off the rosé, which I hadn't gotten to see before. The rosé is made using the saigneé method, which means the red grapes go into a tank, they're allowed to sit for a while to extract color. How long depends on the grapes. In this case, the Mourvedre sat on the skins for about 6 hours before being bled into another fermenter.
Also on Wednesday, Cyril came over from Bressades to borrow some wine. He has a cuve of white that had stopped fermenting. There are a few ways to deal with this, and one is to introduce some wine that is still fermenting vigorously. We've done this once here at Carlot already. We had a tank of Syrah that had stopped, so after emptying a cuve of Roussanne that had just finished, the lees were left in the cuve, and the Syrah pumped in. Today, Cyril took about 5hl of Marsanne that was fermenting well to add to his stuck fermenter.

That's all I've got right now, and I have a paella party to get to.

Sulfur stinks.

2009-09-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I found out that I hadn't correctly understood the way we're using gravity flow to empty the finished cuves into cuve 19 (aka The Cuve Under the Stairs). I had thought the cuve being emptied was just opened in the morning, but it's actually opened the night before and allowed to drain all night, that way the must is essentially pressed under it's own weight, and it's relatively dry by morning.

I'm working with 3 other guys here: Nicholas is the one in the middle, he's the foreman essentially, he's in charge when Nathalie's not around, he has a wife and a daughter and they live on the west side of Nimes. He has invited me to dinner sometime this week to meet the family. There is also a Nick, who is on the right here, his family has a tiny 4.5 hectare place in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. And on the left is Jordan, who comes from Burgundy, and whose father has a place in a Burgundian appellation I'd never heard of before. So that's the team.
This morning Nathalie gave the Morroccans a break and had Jordan empty the cuve, and since most cuves take 2 pressings to empty, Nick got the honors in the afternoon. Tomorrow morning is my turn.
Today I also added sulfur to a wine for the first time, which smells a bit like lighting 1000 matches and then sniffing the smoke. After nearly adding way too much because I confused milliliters with centiliters, I got the job done. I thought it important to note exactly how much was used too, considering all the hubbub out there about sulfite allergies and whatnot these days. I used 150ml of an 18% solution in a 35 hectoliter tank, which works out to about 0.000007714258%, or roughly 0.07 parts per million. Later I found out that sulfur is actually added at several different points during the winemaking process, but still, even if they put in ten times as much by the time the wine is done, that still only makes .7ppm.
Anyway, we've got everything cleaned and prepped for tomorrow now, and I've got to go grocery shopping. I'm out of baguette, and it just wouldn't be very French of me not to have baguette in the house. I think I need cheese too, come to think of it. Here's hoping my computer is finished tomorrow!

Bullfight!

2009-09-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

I drove to Mouriès today for lunch with Eve and Yves. It's really not that far, only a 40 minute drive, and it's remarkable how different the landscape is. The Baux de Provençe area is in the Alpilles mountains, which aren't really big mountains at all, they're more like granite foothills, but definitely make for very different growing conditions. Eve made a tomato tart for lunch, with pastry crust and cheese and tomato and herbs. I need to try that out when I get home. I picked up the couple of things I had left behind at Luc and Lucienne's house, and some wine to give to Nathalie and Cyril, since Nathalie gave some to Eve the day she dropped me off here.

This weekend was the Green Olive Festival in Mouriès, so I went to the village to check out the party. It's also bullfighting weekend here, and apparently churros are a big thing this time of year or something because every food cart was selling them. There were also street vendors with all sorts of regional products, organic produce, and pretty much anything you can make with olives or olive oil was for sale, proudly marked as having been made with local oil.
There was traditional dancing and costumes, and I don't know if this guy's unibrow was part of the costume or what, but it's nice, right?

There was also bullfighting, and since I knew that they don't kill the bull during the fight around here, I went to check it out. The way it works here is, there are about 15 guys (here at least, I don't know if there are more in bigger arenas.) and their job is to grab 2 strings that are tied, one each at the base of the bull's horns. There are two different jobs it seems; some of the guys are actually trying to grab the strings, others are just trying to get the bull's attention, kind of like rodeo clowns, but no goofy costumes. The arena is all stone and concrete, then about a meter inside the arena there's a fence that goes all the way around the inside, so when the bullfighters are being chased, they run and jump the fence to get away, and of course the closer they come to getting gored in the backside, the more the crowd cheers. They jump really high really fast, and it seems like a really impressive display of agility, but as Cyril pointed out later, having a pair of horns pointed at your ass is pretty good motivation.

It's kind of hard to catch on film, but in the picture here you can see one bullfighter running from the bull, jumping, and almost kicking me in the head, then another comes from the other direction to take a swipe at the ribbon.

Unfortunately even though they don't kill the bull, the thing they use to try and grab the ribbon is metal, it looks a bit like a brush you might use on a horse, and one of the bulls must have caught a scratch above the eye, and as soon as I saw the animal bleeding that sort of spoiled it for me. It was about time to go home anyway. I grabbed some frites at one of the food booths and hit the road.

I got home about 7:30, so when I went to drop off the wine for Cyril and Nathalie I was invited to dinner. We had rabbit, rice, salad, and cheese. It was quite nice. I got to formally meet the children, although they were all on their way to bed. The oldest is Blanche, then comes Eugène, the boy I met last night, then the second daughter, Olympe, all three of whom look like their mother, then the youngest, Achille, who looks just like his father.

Now it's bedtime and I have an upset stomach. Perhaps the unrefrigerated mayonnaise I had with my frites was a bad choice.

Surprise visitor

2009-09-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

So, I step out my front door and have one of those creepy horror-movie moments when, in the dim twilight, I see the silhouette of a small blonde boy standing in front of the fountain across from my door, looking at me. It quickly turned from a creepy horror movie moment to a cute French kid moment when I realized it was one of the Marès children (Eugène, I learned later), who was feeding the fish in the fountain. It then changed again, now from a cute French kid moment, to an American who's speaking gibberish moment when, after saying hi, I meant to ask if he was feeding the fish, but got the word wrong and instead asked if he was feeding the peaches. He was confused.
I tasted tank samples with Nathalie and Cyril and the enologist Alain today, which was very interesting. The wines are of course very young, but each tank has a disticnt character already. We tasted the press wine too, which was pretty good. No rough or vegetal character that can often spoil the taste of press wine. They don't decide right away what to do with the press juice, they wait to see how it is, and if it does taste good that's a bonus, especially in such a low-yield vintage.
We finished work early and I went to take my computer to the repair shop in Nimes. The good news is the hard drive is a relatively easy fix, and not too expensive. Bad news is I lose all my pictures since my last backup, which I think was September 9th, so that eats.
It's also bullfighting weekend in this region, and of course the repair shop had to be 2 blocks away from the arena, so I parked the car about a kilometer away and walked. I did want to stay and check out the festivities, but I had left the car on a curb and I wasn't entirely sure it was going to be there when I got back, so I figured best not to dawdle. It was still there. I went to the grocery store again to get everything I've forgotten so far, and to activate my cellphone since I don't have a computer for the next 5 days.
I drew a couple of ideas for a patisserie/sandwich shop with a speakeasy-style bar in the back that I've been tossing around in my head.

I almost die, and my computer skips the 'almost'

2009-09-19T04:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday started out standard; remontage, battonage, delestage, etc. Nathalie invited me to have lunch with her and Cyril, which was lovely. We had omlettes. It seems like eggs aren't so much of a breakfast food around here. On my way back to work I stopped at my room and saw that my computer was frozen, so I restarted it and went back to work. A bit later, it was just Nicholas and I, and he had to take a couple of samples to the office, and after finishing the tidying up I was doing when he left, I had nothing to do, so I went to check the computer, which was now giving me the Blinking Question Mark File Folder of Death, which generally means that either my OS has been corrupted or my hard disk has failed, and either way almost certainly means all of my photos for the last 10 days are lost, because that was the last time I did a backup.
After giving up on the computer, I went back to the winery, but Nicholas still wasn't there. I had nothing to do, but I knew Cuve 19 needed to be emptied because it had just been pumped out, and I was apparently feeling proactive. The problem is, carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and the door to Cuve 19 is the lowest point in the cellar, so it's always a bit of a dodgy place to hang out. There is also a lot of CO2 in the cuve, which comes rushing out as soon as it's opened. So I opened the door and it turned out there was more wine left in the cuve than it had looked like from above, and it came pouring out the door. Having forgotten to bring the remote control for the pump, I ran up the stairs to turn it on, but it didn't pump fast enough and the wine was already overflowing the trough below the door. I ran back down the stairs and directly into a cloud of CO2. My heart already racing, and adrenaline pumping, I found out what it's like to breathe and breathe but take no air. I just managed to get the door shut when stars started popping in front of my eyes and my vision started to blur. I had stopped the flow of wine, and I went for higher ground. It took me a while to recover. Meanwhile, Nicholas had returned, and when I told him what happened he explained that's why you never, ever empty a cuve alone. He pointed out that if I hadn't been able to get above the gas in time, we might not be having this conversation. I passed the rest of the day in less than prime condition. I was very preoccupied about the computer, and still shaken up, and it turns out it really does take quite a bit of my concentration to understand and speak French.

This is what a cuve full of CO2 looks like just before you open the door and it tries to kill you.

After work I told Nathalie about the computer, she let me use one of the office computers, and she called a computer repair place in Nimes for me. They were open until 7, and it wasn't yet 6, but it was in Nimes, which meant I'd have to drive myself, and I'd never driven in France before. It also meant I'd have to talk about computers in French, which isn't exactly a strong department of my French vocabulary. Still, there was nothing to be gained from waiting, so I set off. Driving in France is exactly as disconcerting as riding in a car in France. The roads are too narrow for comfort and you feel you're going too fast because your speedometer says you're doing 80, and you can't do the math in your head fast enough to figure out that's only like 45 or 50mph or something. But even when you think you're going way too fast, you get passed by some dick on a loud motorcycle doing 120.
Nimes isn't that far, and I made it to the computer shop to find they don't support Apple. They gave me the name of the place and directions. It wasn't far, but it was near the center of town, by the bullfighting arena. Ironically, the only part of town I'm at all familiar with. The streets are more confusing and the traffic is worse nearer the center of town, and I got lost. By the time I got my bearings it was near 7, and it was raining. I decided to bag the computer store and try again today. I'm on my way as soon as I finish typing this entry. I turned around and went to the Casino. Casino is the grocery store chain in France. They come in all different sizes, there are little ones in the villages, then there are gigantic, mall-sized ones like this one. It's basically like any large grocery store in the states, but with a way better bakery and cheese selection. But no peanut butter. Also, the beer selection's not great by Northwest standards, but still better than you find most places I've been to. I remembered to buy honey, tea, baguette, beer, pastisse, almond syrup (pastisse and almond syrup is my new favorite coctail, it's called a Mauresque, but I'm not sure I'm spelling that right.) chicken, detergent, socks, shampoo, herbs, pasta, olives with anchove, sausage, and lentils. I forgot olive oil, nail clippers, and something else, I think. Good thing I'm going by there on my way to the computer store.

My ipod works at least, but I wish I'd loaded Rosalie onto it. I'd really like to listen to that song.

Pumpovers, yeast food, tasting juice.

2009-09-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

I got to taste juice from several tanks that had just barely started fermenting, it was my first time tasting that many different juice samples all at the same time, and the first time I've been able to detect distinct differences between samples of what's basically still just grape juice. I tasted syrah from two different vineyards, one was much less extracted than the other, so it got additional pumpover time. Nathalie likes to do most of the work early in the fermentation cycle, and once the wine nears the end of primary fermentation she prefers to leave it pretty much alone. I tasted one roussanne and two marsanne tanks. The roussanne was very pretty, rich, and very floral. The marsanne was more reserved, with more minerality and some banana bread character to it.
We're doing longer pumpovers than we were doing at Gourgonnier, both for additional extraction and to help kick off fermentation. We're also doing something else that I keep forgetting the word for, I think it's debranchage, it's essentially a more aggressive version of pumpovers, where nearly all the juice is drained out of the cuve, in this case it's gravity-fed into a concrete cuve below the floor of the winery, then it's pumped back into it's original cuve, which breaks the cap up more than just regular remontage, and gains additional color and extraction from the grapes. We also did the second step in a process called 'pied de cuve' which is an attempt to re-start a cuve that has stopped fermenting. About 5hl of juice is pulled off of the stuck tank, and 5 pulled off of another tank that's fermenting very rigorously, and they're put together in another fermenter overnight, which lets the happy yeast from the good tank start going after the sugar in the stuck tank. Today we pumped the whole 10hl into the stuck tank, and tomorrow we'll find out if the whole process worked.
Most of the harvesting here is done by machine, and I got to have a look at the harvester today, it looks like a monster truck with teeth. I'll try to remember to get a picture tomorrow.

First day at Mas Carlot!

2009-09-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

The rainy morning was a perfect for the sad goodbye I bade the Cartier family this morning. Fortunately they're not far away and hopefully I'll have the time to visit them while I'm here at Carlot. We took the long way getting here, stopping in the Camargue region, which is in the delta where the Rhône river splits as it approaches the ocean. It's not more than a half hour drive away, but a pretty different climate, much wetter. Eve's uncle Pierre has a winery there, the wine is vin de pays appelation, so he has a lot of leeway with what varietals he grows, he has some grenache, mourvedre, merlot, a few hybrids, roussanne, etc. He also grows rice. The region is known for honey, rice, horses, bulls, and apparently mosquitoes, as my numerous bites can attest. They're not like Idaho mosquitoes, who are rightly too ashamed of their miserable existence to show their faces in the fully light of day, and only come out in the early morning and evening. These Camargue mosquitoes will eat your face off at high noon if you're not careful. Not far from Pierre's vineyards, there's a wildlife preserve. I can't quite find the right word in English, it's not quite a marsh, but it's not quite a lake. The French word is 'etang', which the dictionary translates as 'pond', but it's much bigger than a pond. Click here to see it on the map.
We drove part of the way around the etang, we saw some of the famous horses and bulls, and flamingos! Yay! I'd never seen flamingos before. After that we went to a grocery store on the outskirts of Arles, and I found out that French people DO have malls! However, their gigantic, Wal-Mart sized grocery stores have a much better cheese selection, and you can buy a whole rabbit, head on and everything!
So, we arrived at Mas Carlot about 2:30 in the afternoon, I got my stuff settled. I'm staying in a little apartment with my own kitchen and everything, so the downside is I won't have dinner with the family every night like at Gourgonnier, but I can cook all my own food, and I can eat in my underwear!
I'm already very excited about all the new things I'm going to learn here. Mas Carlot has about 75 hectares of vines, compared to the 44 at Gourgonnier, so the operation is much larger, and the winery is proportionately bigger. They've got some fancy high-tech gadgets that I'll describe as I begin to see them in use. They've also got concrete fermenters, which is pretty traditional in this area, so that's something new and fun too. They have stainless fermenters too, as well as a lot more barrels than they use at Gourgonnier. Today I did some battonage, which involves a metal rod with sort of a half-propeller on the end, which is inserted into a full barrel, and used to stir up the lees. This is done to add body to white wines. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what's done with the white at Gourgonnier, which is taken off its lees pretty early, to preserve the very clean, crisp character. Battonage makes a white richer and rounder, and is most often done with chardonnay, although I completely forgot to ask what varietal I was batton-ing this afternoon.

Ok, that's it for this exciting installment. Stay tuned for more, now I'm gonna go make myself some chicken for dinner!

Last day at Gourgonnier

2009-09-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

Last day of work at Gourgonnier. Plan was to leave after work today to go to Mas Carlot, but it’s 6pm and we just finished pressing the Sans Soufre Cuvee, so it made more sense to stay here tonight and do some laundry and head over there tomorrow. At this point all but the one small fermenter of vin de pays has been removed from it’s skins and pressed. Malolactic fermentation has begun for most of the reds, and finished for a few. I don’t know if I mentioned, but I am tremendously grateful to the Cartier family for giving me the opportunity to learn from them, and I will not soon forget my time here. I am looking forward to whatever tomorrow has in store for me.

Labeling day!

2009-09-14T07:06:00.000-07:00

Woohoo, something new! So, since Gourgonnier sells their wine to several importers in the US, and since the wines going to each importer needs to bear a back label saying who it was imported by, the wines here are not labeled when they're bottled. They go into bottle and are stored in bins like this.

So when an order comes in, the machine gets all set up with labels. The label depends of course on which wine, but also on which importer. Today we did orders for Diyonysos Imorts in VA and for Michael Skurnik Wines in NY. Both orders were 2007 Rouge Tradition, but Dionysos likes the new labels, and Skurnik likes the old labels, so we did the first order (3,000 bottles labeled, boxed, and palletized in 2 hours) then we switched labels and did the other. Since we weren't bottling today I didn't get to see the whole machine in operation, but basically the way the whole thing works is, the wine is fed via hose to the bottling machine, which of course has bottles in it. There bottles are filled then fed to the corking station by conveyor belt, then via the same conveyor belt it gets a cap, there are two units that tighten the cap on the neck of the bottle, then it's transferred to a spinning platform where it gets the front label, then the back, then back onto the conveyor belt and out of the machine, where it's packed by hand. The full case then gets stuck through a unit that tapes it top and bottom, and the finished box gets a sticker bearing the name of the importer, and it goes on the pallet. And that's pretty much my whole day right there.

Oh, and for lunch we had cured ham. Yay!

Now that was a long day.

2009-09-13T07:14:00.000-07:00

So, first thing yesterday I went to an old abbey with Eve and Luc. It's now a historical site where they also have art shows, so there was a photo expo inside too. A big chunk of the abbey has been destroyed, I don't know if by time or by war or by what, but most of it is still standing, including the tower, which is 26 meters high, and it's 126 steps to the top. I counted.
So, after the abbey and lunch, Eve and Yves and I loaded up the car and drove north for a birthday party for two friends of Eve's in the Ardeche region. On our way we passed a place called le Monde du Nougat (Nougat World). Apparently the Ardeche region used to make a lot of silk, and Eve's hippie friends live in an old silk factory. The birthday party had everything you could want, there was music and mutton and sumo wrestling and everything.

Oh, also, alcohol and marijuana. The beer on tap was Kwak, which is a Belgian beer that's 8% alcohol, and may explain partly why I'm having a bit of a hard time remembering the concentrating, remembering and spelling. Also, at some point during the evening somebody was walking around with a water bottle full of some unidentified cloudy booze, insisting that everybody try it. It tasted like kerosene filtered through a dirty gym sock, then flavored with artificial kiwi.

When we arrived at the party, just outside of a tiny, tiny village, there were 3 sheep in a pen just at the entrance to the designated parking area, which was designated by a couple of bright hand-painted signs on cardboard. We parked the car and were greeted by the birthday girl, Maude. The party was inside a little stone-walled courtyard. There were inflatable sumo suits and a sparring ring, a big canopy erected with counters underneath made out of pallets and two-by-six covered in fabric. At the far end there was a long table that was just starting to be loaded with food, and a long barbecue being lit. Yves and I chatted while Eve disappeared with Maude. It turns out Idiocracy is one of Yves' favorite movies. After a little while I took part in the sumo wrestling.

A large container of mutton appeared and the pieces were put on the barbecue. For a second I thought maybe I should go count the sheep again, but it was dark.

I met a friend of Eve's who's a winemaker in this area, and learned that Grenache, Syrah, Gamay, Viognier. It's not a very well known region in France, but he said the wine quality has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. He also told me that there's an American grape that goes by the name of Clinton here that ended up here when vines were brought over for root stock grafting, and he says some of the best wines from the area are from this grape. It was after my conversation with him that things started to get weird. The reggae band was replaced by a rap band. Apparently French hippies love American rap music. I couldn't understand the frontman well enough to tell if he was any good, but Yves said he wasn't great. It did sound like he was rhyming Ardeche with Ardeche an awful lot. Eventually they started just playing songs off of a cd, and the frontman was still on stage with a mic bouncing his hands in the air (like he just didn't care) and singing along when he could, which wasn't that often because it was American rap and he didn't seem to know many of the words.
Then Jerome, the winemaker I'd been talking to, suddenly had his shirt torn off for reasons I was never able to ascertain. Then the first award for Drunkest Guy at the Party went to a stumbling guy long black hair in a ponytail, who went onto the stage, then promptly dismounted, nearly taking a lighting tree with him. I pointed out to Yves that Ponytail was performing a valuable public service by being so drunk, thus letting me know that I'm not the drunkest one at the party, and I can keep drinking. The second award went to a guy who, earlier in the night, claimed I wasn't an American because I didn't know that Nirvana was why Seattle is famous. At least I think that was his line of reasoning. He won the award when, too drunk to stand, he sat on a barrel that was being used as a beer cooler, toppled it over, soaking himself and several people around him.
This morning when I woke up the first person I spoke to was Ponytail, who was trying to locate his pants, and who told me it was a good thing his girlfriend wasn't there because she'd freak out about him losing his pants. At least I think that's what he said, he was talking kind of fast, I don't think he realized I wasn't a native French speaker, since all I said was 'bonjour'.
After a breakfast of baguette, more mutton, jam and coffee, we broke down the tents and headed out. I didn't see the sheep in their pen when we drove by.

Tasting wine and learning new words.

2009-09-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

So, Henri the enologist was here today, so we tasted all the wines, which works out perfectly since one eager reader recently asked me what the wines taste like at this point. So, thanks for the excellent question EagerReader1119. With the heat in this area, the wines can go through malolactic fermentation pretty quickly, so the white and the rose have to have sulfur added pretty early to stop malo and retain the freshness of the wine. At this point we have one cuve of Grenache that has finished malo, the sans soufre cuvee is still fermenting, the Carignane has finished fermentation but is still on it's must and hasn't started malo yet. The cabernet has all been pressed and racked and should start malo soon. So, the white and the rose taste pretty finished, although they still have to settle and clarify, and there's still more co2 than there will be in the finished wine. The reds are funny at this point. The Sans Soufre which isn't finished yet still tastes sweet, but it's developing more power and depth, the wines that are finished with primary fermentation but haven't yet started malolactic have definite varietal identity, but are still very lean. The Grenache is great, supple and fruity, concentrated. Awesome. Gourgonnier had a small harvest, and Henri says that everybody else he works with has had the same issue. The harvest is small, but there is good concentration and acidity in the wines.

So, for a little while there, I was thinking that Fred was a little annoyed by me. Fred is Eve's uncle, and does most of the day-to-day winemaking stuff in the winery. Now I'm just thinking he takes a little longer to warm up to new people, because he's been very pleasant and chatty with me, and taking the time to explain what's going on in the winemaking process, even when it takes an extra minute when I don't understand. Fred's a funny guy, he's a slight-built man, not more than 5'6", with glasses and less hair than he must have had when he was younger. His stature makes for a funny sight sometimes when he's moving around some of the larger winery equipment. He looks like a kid who's trying to reach something on a shelf that's just a little too high. He's got that look of confidence like he knows he can do it, with his tongue stuck out to the side in concentration. With the help of Fred, Arnaud, and Eve I learned some new words today too. Ecuruil is a squirrel, which isn't a particularly important word, but apparently they are fairly rare in this area, because Fred and Eve were both excited to see one. I also learned a new phrase, which translates to 'to put flies up your ass' which basically means to be anal retentive. I also learned another saying, which translates to "when the river runs red, it's time to take the muddy road." I will let you interpret that as you wish.

That's about it for me today, I gotta get a shower before dinner.

I gotta start taking notes in the middle of the day or something

2009-09-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

By the end of the day I'm having a hard time remembering everything I did today and keeping it separate, especially with the midday nap that people take around here. I didn't sleep very well last night, I kept waking up. Yesterday we discovered there was an air leak in the press, so today we had to do our best with a less-than-perfect press, and finally we had to stop half way though emptying one cuve and wait for the repair guy, who arrived at 5:30, and is just leaving now at 7:00, apparently he patched it up, and we'll see how it works tomorrow. Looking at the repair job, it looks like the kind of repair job that could have been tackled with duct tape. We've got 4 cuves left to be pressed; the sans soufre cuvee, the carignane, and 2 cuves of vin de table. It's a complicated ballet moving the wine around in a winery this size. It's not like they've just got a whole row of empty containers lined up for after the wine is pressed. Fred has a whole map drawn out in dry erase marker on the side of one of the fermenters of where everything is coming from and where it's going. The fermenters are labeled numerically, and by volume. For example, there are 5 210 hectolitre containers labeled 1-210 through 5-210. Not all of them go in proper order either, for example there are only 10 158HL containers currently in use, but they're numbers 8-158 through 17-158. So, for example, 2-210 and 3-210 both contained grenache. All the free-run juice from 2-210 that would fit went into 7-158. The rest went into another temporary holding tank. The must was pressed, the first press went into the holding tank with the free run, the second press went into another holding tank just for press juice. The cuve was cleaned, then the free run and first press from 3-210 went into 2-210, then the second press from 3-210 went into the same holding tank with the press from 2-210, and finally the free run that had started in 2-210 and was now waiting in 7-158 was pumped back into 2-210, so now we have one large cuve of just grenache juice, and the press juice waiting in a holding tank. This process takes about 3 days. From the time sitting in 7-158, some of the lees settled to the bottom of the Grenache, so that had to be scraped out of the container so that the rosé could be racked off of it's lees, and the 3 less-than-full fermenters of varietally segregated rose could be mixed together into 2, now residing in 6-158 and 7-158. This whole process involved cleaning lees out of several containers, which is essentially like scraping two inches of mustard out of a shipping container.

After work Eve proposed we all go to town for pizza, and I love me some pizza. We stopped at hers and Yves' apartment on the way, the two of them have a massive flat-screen tv, and Yves loves Midnight Club on xbox360, which I'd never played before. Not that I needed another reason to really, really want a giant tv and an xbox360, but now I have yet another.

Upon arriving at the pizzeria and ordering a beer, I remembered that I love beer. I mean, I love wine too, but there's an expression I've heard from more than one American winemaker, "Its takes a lot of beer to make good wine." And that's an attitude that doesn't seem prevalent in this area at least, where everybody seems to be content drinking rosé for every meal. Not that I'm complaining about the rosé by any means.

After dinner it occurred to me that I really should not eat pizza. I absolutely adore it, but as a result I always eat too much, and large amounts of dairy products don't get along that well with my digestion anyway. However, after further examination I found that I had just a small fraction of the reaction that I would typically expect from that kind of cheese binge, and I began to think that perhaps this whole pasteurization mess that all of our American cheeses have to go through is perhaps a pile of horsehockey.

Ok, that's it for now. Until tomorrow, eager readers!

I did pumpovers all by myself!

2009-09-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

Eve and Luc went to an organic farming expo, so it was just me and Fred and Arnaud in the winery today, and I was in charge of making sure the pumpovers got done, and taking the measurements on the still-fermenting wine. Not that it's all that complicated, but I still did it all by myself. It seems that a small rip has developed in the press that's preventing it from pressing as hard as it should be able to, so there's some uncertainty as to whether or not we're going to be able to de-cuve the last fermenter of Cabernet tomorrow or not. There's also speculation as to whether I will be the one doing the de-cuve-ing. Obviously I'm here to learn, and to do any work I'm asked to do, however climbing inside a fermenter and shoveling out grape must isn't necessarily something I'm all about. It's kind of like the trash compactor on the Death Star in there. Today I also learned exactly why it's vital to push most of the must through the big hose after emptying each fermenter by running water through it, because if you leave the hose full of grape must in the sun, the must will dry out and create plugs, and you'll fry your pump trying to push them through. Oh, and also, the US should totally start having nap time in the middle of the work day. And a 9a.m. rosé and baguette break.

My hands are purple.

2009-09-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

So, we did a little pressing yesterday, but I wasn't that involved in the process. Today I got to hold the giant hose, which is not a sexual thing at all, so clean your minds. Yeah, like I'm one to talk, today at one point, while I was handling the big hose, Eve asked me in French if it was getting hard yet (meaning the handling of the hose, because it's pretty goddamn heavy when it's full of grape must) and it was really only the fact that I was pretty sure the joke wouldn't translate that kept me from saying 'that's what she said'.
Anyway, the way it works is, there's a big metal box with an auger in the bottom. The juice is drained from the cuve, then the door at the bottom is opened and you start pulling all the must out with a pitchfork. At the beginning, the tank is full up above the door, but eventually you get enough stuff out that a person can get in through the door (not me fortunately), then somebody goes inside and keeps shoveling. Meanwhile, the metal thing with the auger in the bottom is catching all the must and pushing it through a big pipe, about 4 inches in diameter, which leads to the press. I'm quite certain that the word 'muck' was invented to describe something just like grape must. It's slimy and messy and it gets everywhere, especially when it's coming out of the big hose at unpredictable intervals. What happens is, air pockets form in the pipe, so you'll get big sections of must, then when the air comes it forces the last of the must out like an air gun, so it explodes all over. Also, there's just enough room in the press for all the must in the fermenter, so when the press starts to get full you have to start shoving the must all around to make as much room as possible, which is why my hands are purple.
So, most of the Grenache is pressed, the Syrah is almost entirely de-cuved and pressed, and the Cabernet will be done tomorrow or Thursday. The Sans Soufre Cuvee is still fermenting, as is one fermenter of Grenache, and the vin de table. That's about it, and I need a shower before dinner.

Last day of harvest.

2009-09-07T08:29:00.001-07:00

So, after the art show Saturday night I went to Eve’s apartment for dinner with her and her boyfriend. I had my first beer in a week and it was delicious, despite being a Heineken. I tried my first pastisse, which was not bad, basically like milky licorice with alcohol. Eve’s boyfriend Eve loves xbox360 and guitars. They both love Battlestar Galactica and True Blood, among other things. My less than perfect French came in handy, because they haven’t seen the last season of BSG yet, and I’m sure I would have blurted out something if I was capable of blurting in French. Is blurting a word? That doesn’t look right. Anyway, I had a lovely time. There wasn’t too much work to be done Sunday, just the pumpovers, then we went into the village. I didn’t understand how exactly the system worked, but basically it was all of the clubs and groups and activities that are in Mouriés, like tai chi and painting and fencing and astronomy, and they all take sign-up. I don’t know if you sign up for a whole year or what. It was basically like club sign-up in school, but not just for kids. We had a picnic in the park, and I had a lengthy discussion about wine, a subject about which I seem to be quite good at speaking in French. Not everybody here is aware that Americans even make wine anywhere other than California.

I had been instructed a few days earlier that keeping the fridge flush with cold rosé, and that Lucienne and Luc had friends coming to dinner Sunday night, and that more rosé than usual would be advisable, so when we returned from the picnic I made sure the fridge was stocked. The friends, Joél and Florénce arrived just in time for dinner. I tried andouilette for the first time. Bobby warned me ahead of time about andouilette. He tried it on his trip last year without knowing what it was. He was unpleasantly surprised. Andouilette is a sausage, and like most sausages it has a lot of assorted things in it. It’s the distinctive odor that makes andouilette, unique. And it’s the fact that it’s supposed to smell like that which makes me wonder why anybody would ever eat it. My co-worker Arnaud put it quite succinctly; he said “Good andouilette is like politics. It should smell a little like shit, but not too much.”

Today we did more rémontage, plus some pressing. As most wineries do, here at Gourgonnier they keep the press juice separate from the free-run juice. The press juice can be more rough and harsh than the free run juice, so everybody deals with it differently. Here it will be kept in a separate vessel until assemblage, at which time they will decide whether the incorporate it into any of the blends, or just put it in the vin de table.

We picked the last of the grapes today too, which means that much less work for me to do around here, so hopefully the grape maturity is a ways behind at Mas Carlot.

AWESOME art show.

2009-09-06T01:45:00.000-07:00

So, I misunderstood Eve a little yesterday, it wasn't a quarry that became a cathedral, it was a quarry that's now called the Cathedral of images, so it's this amazing, huge cut stone space where stone was quarried for buildings all around this area, so now there's this gigantic room, probably 10 meters high, cut into the mountain itself. And they weren't showing Picasso's paintings just by themselves, it was like this moving retrospective through Picasso's career, moving through his work, set to music. I don't think the pictures will do it justice entirely, but they're here.

Ok, we just finished remontage and we're going to visit the village now.

Windy Saturday

2009-09-05T03:10:00.000-07:00

You may already know this, but in case you don't here in the Rhône there's a wind called the mistral, which blows down from the north. It blows at all times of the year, it can be warm or cold, and it's generally pretty strong. Today's the first day we've had it since I've been here, so it's very windy outside. Not knocking-trees-over windy, but definitely no-eating-outside windy. The other major effect of the mistral is that it blows all the clouds out to the ocean, so it makes for a stunningly clear day. I took a walk in the hills after lunch and took some pictures. Hopefully this gives a bit of an idea just how bloody windy it can get.

Luc and Lucienne took me to eat at a restaurant in Mouriés last night, a beautiful place that unfortunately wasn't that busy. If I understood correctly it was formerly a farmhouse, there was a large open patio in the front for seating, and a lounge and a few smaller rooms inside for private parties. The lounge/great room was formerly the garage for the larger farm equipment. We all had the same tasting menu, it was all in French so I wasn't entirely sure what I'd be getting, but the words I did recognize sounded fine, and Luc and Lucienne seemed to have great confidence in the chef. Unfortunately I didn't notice that the first course was melon-based, so it wasn't exactly my favorite thing. There was a diced mixture of fennel, melon, and celery root with olive oil, and a little drink of a melon puree. The main course was quite good, grilled beef, mashed potatoes that were mixed with a lime confit that was awesome, and which I totally want to try making when I get home, and crayfish. Dessert was tiramisu, but a more liquid version than I'm used to. It was served in a glass, rather than like a cake, the top layer was a chantilly cream aromatized with rosemary, which was awesome. The rosemary scent was very subtle, but gave a regional authenticity, what with all the rosemary that grows wild around here. Below the cream were peaches, a kind of custard, and a cookie on the bottom. All in all an excellent meal, and very kind of Luc and Lucienne to take me, despite the fact that I'm running low on clothing and must have looked an ass going out to eat in a Simpsons t-shirt.
Oh, also at dinner I found out that pineapple tomatillos (in French, physalliz) are common around here. The restaurant was serving them as a garnish on one of their cocktails.

Today is a lazy day for work, there is no more grape-picking until monday. I got to sleep late, eat breakfast, and just did the rémontage with Éve, which only took about an hour and a half.

Later this afternoon she's taking me to someplace which, if I understand correctly, is an old quarry that became a cathedral, and is now used to show artwork, and they're
showing Picasso paintings, so that should be super-cool.

Last night I also learned an interesting fact about the olive trees in this area. When I first arrived I noticed that a lot of the olive trees seemed to be planted in this funny circular formation, with anywhere from 3 to 6 trees to a group, like you can see here.
Apparently it's not what it looks like. There was a major freeze here in 1956, and almost all of the olive trees, most of which were very old already at the time, froze all the way to the ground. However, they didn't die. That spring they began sending shoots up from the ground, and since the root systems were already established, the farmers figured just let 'em grow, so now the olive groves all look like this, with what look like little clusters of trees, but in fact each cluster is one tree, most of which are at least a hundred years old.

2009-09-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Another day of grape picking, and forgetting sunscreen, but at least I brought my hat today. Picked Grenache from 7 until 2:30, now I’m sitting by the pool. Not much new to report for today. I did determine that sneakers are much more comfortable for picking grapes than boots, although new sneakers will not look so new at the end of the day. Nearly all of the grapes are picked now, there is just one small block left I’m told. It must be a much warmer pocket here than at Mas Carlot; my email from Nathalie a few days ago informed me that they’ve just started bringing in the Viognier, and the rest of the grapes are still on the vine. I did successfully carry on what I hope was a fairly coherent conversation with Eve’s father Luc, and mother Lucienne, and her sister Laure last night at dinner without Eve’s translation assistance. I still need them to speak fairly slowly, it sometimes takes me a minute to find the word I’m looking for, and I’m sure I’m mis-conjugating my verbs half the time, but I think I’m communicating reasonably well. I’m guessing Bobby must have had a rough time while he was here, speaking as little French as he does. I’m also finding it hard to keep English, French, and Spanish separate in my head; I keep talking to Frankie in French, and even as I’m typing this I keep misspelling English words. I think that’s about it, here are some photos from the last few days.

Grape-picking day!

2009-09-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

After writing in my journal, I read bit, and finally fell back asleep sometime after 3.
At 6:10a.m. I woke and hit the snooze button.
At 6:20a.m. I woke and turned the alarm off.
At 7:15 a.m. I woke, cursed, and dressed as fast as possible. I shoved 2 Clif bars in my pants pockets and ran out the door. I found Eve in the garden and she drove me to the vineyard, I ate one Clif bar on the back of the ATV on the way out. Thanks to Dad and Bobby for telling me to take them with me. Tip of the day is, Clif bars are awesome. Yesterday's omitted tip of the day, Sweet n Salty Nut bars, while delicious, do not survive well in your pocket after a full day's work.
I also learned last night that most of the men working on the picking crew are Moroccan, and are Muslim, and this month is Ramadan. That means these guys are getting up at 4 a.m., eating and drinking all they can, then working all day picking grapes in the sun when it's 32 degrees centigrade (I don't know exactly what that is in farenheit, about 90 I'd guess. I suppose I could look it up, but clearly I'm not going to.) This really did make me feel like a candy-ass when my back started hurting half-way through the day. From my time picking I learned that Syrah grows in longer bunches than Grenache, and that the Syrah clusters have pretty distinct shoulders, while the Grenache has more of a conjoined twin kind of thing. I learned that goblet pruning makes for prettier, more consistent clusters which are more backbreaking to harvest. I learned that not all Muslims know George W Bush well enough to hate him. And finally I learned that, when instructed to watch your fingers when handling grape clippers, you should also watch your hands. I nipped the heel of my left hand, but not that badly. But now that I've sustained injury the adventure has truly begun! I don't know if "It's not really an adventure until you hurt yourself." Is something I've actually heard Jen Adams say, but it was her voice in my head when I thought exactly that after cutting myself.
I count myself blessed that this work is not my full time job, although I do have to do it again tomorrow. Fortunately the Cartiers have a pool, where I spent about 3 hours lounging away the day's lower back pain. Tomorrow I will take aspirin before work. And I'll wear a hat. And sunscreen.
Eve won't be here for dinner tonight, which means I've got to make conversation in French without any translation assistance. Fingers crossed!

It's dark outside.

2009-09-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Merde.
I woke up in the dark, which is a bad sign when you're still dealing with jet-lag, because it typically means you've woken up way too early, and are going to have a hard time getting back to sleep. In this case, it means that I have woken up too early, and I'm going to have a hard time getting back to sleep.
I woke from more fitful dreaming. Perhaps I'm having too much cheese before bed. I can't remember the context of the dream, just the feeling of having been dealt an injustice. Of having been given something I deserved, that I had earned, and at the same time having it taken away.
The clock read 1:23 a.m. when I woke up. I need to get back to sleep, I'm supposed to go pick grapes at 7a.m.. I sat in the dark for a while, listening to the moth that's trapped in my room flying into the wall over and over again. Moths are morons. I found out last night that the French word for Moth translates to 'butterfly of the night,' and I wondered if I'd like them anymore if I thought of them as butterflies. I don't think so.
I tried to count sheep, but the sheep turned into some kind of muddy water or oil coming out of a fountain and forming numbers in the sky and in my mind they were getting my feet all wet and dirty, plus I couldn't settle on which language to count in, so I stopped.
Then I started entertaining myself with fantasies that I'd actually publish this whole adventure, and the book would be wildly successful and I'd do a book tour and insist that my publisher get me on the Jon Stewart show. It was at that point that I decided I was brilliant, and got up to start writing.

When I turned the light on I found out that the moth was actually a grasshopper. There are some big-ass gnarly grasshoppers here. Like, the kind that don't just fly away when you get close to them. They sit in the grapevines, and when you reach in to pick the grapes they look at you like 'we don't take kindly to your type around here...'

First day of work

2009-09-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

I set my alarm for 6 am, woke up at 9. Ironically I was having very fitful dreams about being late for work. Eve's family is very nice. We ate dinner at her uncle's house with some friends of theirs who apparently summer in a caravan on the Cartiers' property. I don't remember their names, but they had a little girl named Caroline and a yorkshire terrier that looked like a bigger version of Chiqi and Maddie. It was their last night in town. We had pasta with fresh tomatoes and merguez sausage and rosé. When the cheese course came, Eve's aunt was concerned that the cheeses might be too strong for me. She clearly didn't know who she was dealing with.

The place where I'm staying is a less-used part of the house. The whole chateau is connected, but divided into sections, so I'm between Eve's parents' house and the winery. I'm just thinking how much some in the states would pay to make their houses look like this, and here's this place just sitting here barely used.

As I'm writing this I'm sitting outside under a canopy of grapevines eating toast and homemade quince (fr. coing) jam and drinking tea out of a bowl. Go ahead, tell me you're not jealous. Last night I tried a fruit wine made from néfle, which is a tree fruit that's apparently native to this part of the world, and also grows in Japan. We looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it grew in the US, but the Wikipedia page was in French, so I didn't understand it that well. Eve's uncle Fred has the Japanese variety. Eve's aunt's name is Blanchine and her cousin's name is Olivier.

---
We had salad, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, bread and cheese for lunch.
Today we did pump-overs, topped off some barrels, and married together some wine from last vintage with new juice for the vin de table. I got an email back from Nathalie, she tells me I'm going to have to practice my French before I get there. Good thing Eve is the only one here who speaks English.

I did my p90x chest and back workout, made it almost all the way through before my shoulder started to hurt. Eve's mom made Tian, which is a provençal dish with onions, potato, eggplant, zucchini, tomato, and pretty much everything else from the garden, it was awesome. We also had a toast spread called Melet Provençal, which is a puree of fennel seed, anchovy, and pepper, which was pretty awesome, and I'm definitely going to try and make it when I get home. Eve's dad made pork chops.

During dinner I explained why we call the funny bone the funny bone, and found out that the french nickname for the humerus translates to 'the little jew'. I was not able to obtain any explanation for this.

I didn't think I could possibly hate the 100-point system any more....

2009-05-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

First of all, it's not a 100-point system.

Here's the breakdown of what the points mean from Allen Meadows who, of all of the writers using the 100-point system, is one whose opinion I respect far more than many others....

95 - 100: Truly incomparable and emotionally thrilling. By definition, it is reference standard for its appellation. Less than 1% of fine wine (eg $30+ per bottle).

90 - 94: Outstanding. Worth a special effort to purchase and cellar and will provide memorable drinking experiences.

85 - 89: Very good to high quality. Wines that offer high quality, some flair and generally very good typicity. “Good Value” wines will often fall into this category. Worth your attention. 80 - 84: Average to Good quality. Fine wine, but solid rather than exciting.

70-79: Good wines, acceptable. But personally I find life too short to waste on boring wines

60-69: Not faulty, but plain and low quality fruit, e.g. dilute. Or crass winemaking, e.g. dolled up with oak chips. These points yet with no redeeming features.

Now, how exactly do we even consider this a 100-point system when only 40 of the points on the scale are used? And Meadows will actually score good wines under 90 points. A constant reminder to his readers that IT DOESN'T HAVE TO GET OVER 90 POINTS TO BE A GOOD WINE. I'm sorry if I seem a little aggrivated, it's just that I've recently come across 2 websites dedicated exclusively to wines that have scored over 90 points. I'm not going to link to them here, because I couldn't bear the thought that I might actually direct traffic to either of their sites. They're both built entirely around the premise that nothing that gets under 90 points is worth drinking. This is, in my humble opinion, and if you will please forgive my language, a massive pile of rancid horseshit.

As is evidenced by Meadows' point breakdown above, it's more of a 6-point system than a 100-point system, since the subtlety of difference between, say, a, 86 and an 88-point rating is basically subjective and meaningless, and here's why: Meadows rates the 2005 Joseph Drouhin Chambolle Musigny 89 points, and the 2005 Joseph Drouhin Gevrey Chambertin 88 points. By his own definition, that means they are both "Very good to high quality." But which one's better? Is he saying the Chambolle is a better Chambolle than the Gevrey is a Gevrey? Or just that the Chambolle is a better Burgundy overall? How accurately can you quantify that kind of a distinction, and how reliable can it possibly be? How many factors of circumstance, environment, and taster fatigue could have come into play the day Meadows tasted these 2 wines? Can you really make a objective distinction between an 86 point and an 88 point wine? And more importantly, do you need to? Can't we just agree that they're both very good wines? So far we're just talking about the differences between two similar scores from one writer, we haven't even touched on what it means when a wine gets scored by multiple publications. Check this shit out... The 2005 K Vintners The Boy got 92 points from Jay Miller of the Wine Advocate, and...wait for it....74 points from Harvey Steinman of the Wine Spectator. Can you say "What the fuck, Batman?" Ok, to be fair maybe Harvey got a bad bottle or something, so how about another example? The 2005 Penfolds Koonunga Hill gets 91 points from Robert Parker, and 85 points from Harvey Steinman. That means, according to their respective pubications' scoring definitions, while for Harvey, the wine just barely qualified as "Very good: a wine with special qualities," for Parker, the wine is "An outstanding wine of exceptional complexity and character." And while Harvey feels the wine should be consumed immediately, Parker contends that the wine can be cellared and consumed until 2018. This discrepancy in opinion reflects another major flaw in the 100-point system: why even bother all using the same rating system if there's no consistency? Presumably all of these writers intend for their scores to be used as a resource for the consumer, to help people make decisions on what wine to buy, but is it really any help whatsoever when one publication gives 91 points, and another 85? Wouldn't it be just as easy for consumers to understand if Parker just called it 'outstanding' and Harvey just called it 'very good'?

And last but not least, there's the 100-point wine. This has got to be one of the most obnoxious parts of the 100-point system. Are you really telling me there's such thing as a perfect wine? And more importantly, are you really saying there's a difference between a 99-point wine and a 100-point wine? Aren't 'not reccomended', 'mediocre', 'good', 'very good', 'outstanding', and 'classic' enough rating options?

Seriously.

Holy overpriced Chardonnay, Batman!

2009-04-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, Rombauer is one of our top-selling chardonnays. I don't care for it, not my style, but the important part is, we sell it for $28. This place in Seattle's got it for $39.99! Seriously!

Kacher wines to look forward to!

2009-03-22T13:42:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so I never did get around to writing another blog post, or putting up tasting notes while I was in France, but we've ordered our wines based on what I tasted while I was there, so here are a few of the things that're coming in that I'm particularly excited about...

Domaine Fondreche has 3 Rhone reds named Persia, Fayard, and Nadal, all of which I thought were fantastic. I actually tried a bottle of the 04 Nadal last night and it was drinking great. All 3 of these should be priced in the mid-$20's. We'll also be getting Fondreche's 08 rose, which was suuper good, much like the 07, very light, very elegant, beautiful color, and perfumed like strawberries and roses. Fondreche is also producing a new entry-level red called Altitude 1912, a VDP Valcluse blend of Merlot, Grenache, and Syrah. It's a great value wine, should be right about $10, an everyday wine with good acidity and a nice balance of power and elegance.

From Chateau d'Or et de Gueles and Petite Cassagne, we'll be receiving all of our old favorites. The d'Or et de Gueles Costieres de Nimes Select, and the La Bolida were both outstanding, gripping and powerful wines. The Petite Cassagne Rouge is, once again, an outstanding value, the white is, if possible, even better than the '07, and the rose was one of my favorites from the whole trip.

We'll be getting 2 reds from Mas Carlot; the Grenache-Syrah, and the Mourvedre-Syrah "Enfants Terribles." I tasted multiple vintages of both of these and they are really impressive wines. We'll be getting rose from them as well.

The 08 Mas des Bressades Grenache Syrah was particularly impressive for how complete it was in it's youth. Tasting so many young wines, they can all start to blend together in your mind and taste the same. The Bressades Grenache Syrah, however, was very well-integrated, and delicious, with black tea, potpurri, and black raspberry aromatics.

There are alot more than just these, but these are the ones that I'm super-extra looking forward to. There are also Burgs, Chateaunufs, Cote Roties, and some Alsatians that I really loved, but those won't be coming for a bit longer, the wines above will be arriving in mid-May, and I just can't wait!!!

Chateau Montelena kicks ass

2009-03-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

If you've had the misfortune of catching me on a rant about what's wrong with California wines, you know that I think many of them, particularly many that are highly regarded by certain wine publications, have too much alcohol, too little aging potential, and are not good food wines. That's why I'm always excited when I taste American wines that aren't over-alcoholic, and that will actually work with food.

I tasted 05 and 06 Napa, and 02, 03, 04, and 05 Estate Cabernet, as well as 07 Chardonnay from Chateau Montelena the other day. All of the wines were excellent. No mystery how the Chardonnay won the Paris tasting in 1976. (If you're not familiar with the tasting, rent the movie Bottle Shock.)

The standouts among the reds were the 02 and 05 estate cabs, but the 03 and 04 were both excellent, and at a $40-ish retail, both vintages of the Napa were fantastic values. Alcohol content ranged from 13.7 to 14.3, and they all worked great with beef stew. They also all showed good aging potential, which is consistent with the last bottle of Montelena Cab I had, a bottle of '86 estate which I tasted recently. At nearly 23 years old, the wine still showed marvelous fruit, structure, and acidity, and still had potential to last several more years in the bottle.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Chateau Montelena kicks ass.

I'm thinking I might have to change my scoring system

2009-03-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

So, the more I think about wine, the more I think I might need a bit more depth in my scoring system. I mean, the 4-point system seemed brilliant in it's simplicity when I first decided on it. After all, the Michelin Guide is the most respected restaurant guide in the world, and 3 stars is their highest rating. 3 Bicchieri is the highest rating from the Gambero Rosso. However, I keep running into situations where I've decided that a wine is a 3-Awesome wine, then I taste another one that I also think is a 3-Awesome wine, but then I have to think about whether one of them is better than the other. Plus, neither the Gambero Rosso nor the Michelin Guide ever actually give out zero stars/bicchieri. A restaurant that gets even one star from the Michelin Guide is expected to be excellent. I, on the other hand, plan on writing about wines at all different quality levels.

So, I'm thinking I need to add an Awesome. Zero Awesomes for wines that I reccomend avoiding. 1 Awesome for wines that are drinkable, but I've definitely had better. 2 Awesomes for wines that are good. Certainly there are better wines out there, but this is a wine that gets the job done. 3 Awesomes is a wine that I whole-heartedly reccomend. It's a great wine in it's category, shows good value and ageworthiness for it's price. 4 Awesomes for a wine that is absolutely classic. This is a wine that you will remember, a wine you will talk about late at night when you recount some of the greatest bottles you've had in your life. As my friend Dave would say, the kind of wine you'll tell your grandkids about.

Opinions? Comments?

Testing mobile blogging

2009-03-15T10:35:00.001-07:00

I can blog from my phone now. Maybe now I'll do it more often.
Here's a picture of the Burgundy section of the cellar in my store.

2004 Burgundy

2009-02-09T10:32:00.001-08:00

With 2005 having been such a talked-about vintage for Burgundy, as it was for many other places in the world, the 2004 and 2006 vintages have been more than a little bit overlooked. In our store we've discounted a ton of 04's because everybody's all about buying the 05's. But here's the thing, 05 is a great vintage, and as such it's going to take a long time for those wines to mature. The 04's are coming up on their 5th birthday now and I had a dinner last night with 9 different 04's, and they were all showing marvelously. They're delicate, elegant, they have great fruit and great acidity. Taking a look at my handy-dandy Robert Parker vintage guide, it seems that the Wine Advocate rated the 05 vintage for Burgundy in general between 96 and 98 points. Meanwhile, the 04 vintage was rated between 80 and 85 points. Now, not that I needed more reason to think that that particular publication has it's head firmly entrenched up it's own backside, nor did I need further evidence that the 100-point system for rating wines is woefully flawed, but if I did, my tasting last night would have been all the proof I could have asked for.

!Update!

2009-01-19T14:01:00.001-08:00

So, during the tasting at Monnot, we were joined by a group of singers called Les Cadets de Bourgogne. They sing amazingly, I'll post some video. At this point in the evening, their songs have taken a turn for the decidedly bawdy. I'm not sure entirely what it was about, but I was just involved in a song that involved every man in the room walking in a circle and then alternately raising one leg, then the other, while grabbing one's crotch. I did not expect to be lying on the ground in a circle of grown men grabbing my groin on this trip.

Robert Kacher trip

2009-01-19T13:18:00.001-08:00

It’s Monday 1/19. Friday in Paris I walked around the city, tried to walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower but didn’t make it. Stopped at the least touristy-looking place I could find, a little wine bar called l’Embouteillage.

This is the owner, Bobby. I had wine and cheese and stayed there about 3 hours speaking as well as I could with the owner and customers. When I arrived there were 5 men standing at the bar in the front, playing a game that involved rolling two little plastic pigs like dice, then determining your score based on how they landed. There didn’t seem to be a lot of rules, except that you had to accuse everybody else of cheating constantly. Afterwards, I was a bit too tired to go anywhere else. I walked through a small section of the Louvre then went back to the hotel.

That’s when the Jet-lag started to get me. I went to bed at 8 and woke up at midnight and couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.
I met up with the group and took the train to Colmar. We tasted Rene Mure and Ehrhart and had a traditional Alsatian stew with Lamb, Pork, Beef, potatoes and whatnot, followed by salad, then cheese, then apple tart and some gewürztraminer eau de vie. I’m planning a heart attack sometime next week from the amount of cheese I’ve been eating. Yesterday we drove to Beaune, walked around the city for a minute, and tried wines from Albert Morot and Pommier. This morning, after breakfast we had wines from Domaine Marc Morey, then with lunch, two Givrys from Joblot. Last night was also the first night I’ve slept more than 4 hours, and I’m still catching up on my sleep. After our 4 course lunch I could have really used a nap, but I had just enough time to check my email before heading back out to dinner and the wines of Xavier Monnot. Now I’m entirely exhausted and sitting in the lobby of the hotel tasting calvados. At least I can sleep in tomorrow. There will be tasting notes and photos with this post when I have time, I just wanted to put this up so everybody knows what I’m doing.

2005 K Vintners Guido and pizza!

2008-12-22T04:03:00.000-08:00

I've been holding on to this bottle for a while now. We didn't get much of it at the store, and I only managed to get my hands on the one bottle for myself. The first thing I thought when I tasted it was "Holy crap, I wish I had a case of this!"

This wine completely changed my perception of the winemaker Charles Smith. His wines in general have gotten a lot of critical acclaim, and he's most well known for his syrahs, and most of the ones I've had are very big wines, yet this Guido was astonishingly delicate. It's 86% Sangiovese and 14% Syrah, and it showed more authentic Sangiovese varietal character than any Sangiovese I've ever had from Washington. My wine-drinking teammate and I actually had a bottle of 2005 Vino Nobile di Montepulciano a few weeks ago, and as we were drinking the Guido we both wished we had another bottle of the Vino Nobile just so we could compare the two.

The Guido smelled so perfectly like Sangiovese, full of cherries with just a little red licorice and dried flowers. The palate was delicious and elegant, again showing cherries and raspberries, amazing balance, and pairing extremely well with our Chicago Connection sausage pizza. My only regret is that we drank it so soon. It was so delicious, yet still seemed young, and I'm sure it would have continued to improve for a good long while. I've been keeping my eye on K Vintners' website and talking to my distributor, waiting for this wine's next release and I haven't seen anything so far. I REALLY hope Charles hasn't lost his vineyard source for this wine.

3 Awesomes.

Thanksgiving wine blog!

2008-11-30T09:26:00.000-08:00

Man, I haven't blogged in a while. And that sentence right there kind of embodies what I've always hated about the word 'blog'. It sounds like slang for a bowel movement.

Anyway, Thanksgiving has just passed. My parents had the feast to end all feasts at their house. 29 people altogether, a 36.5 pound turkey that looked more like a suckling pig than a bird, and more wine than the assembled guests could possibly have consumed. I know I tasted a lot of wines, but for the sake of brevity I'm just going to talk about the ones that really stood out.

Among the whites, the first thing I drank was the 2008 Jelu Torrontes. I was super-stoked that I liked this wine as much as I remembered liking it, because I hadn't actually tasted it in a while, and it was one of the #1 recommendations in the store. We sold over 5 cases in the couple of days leading up to Thanksgiving, and I really hope everybody enjoyed the pairing as much as I did. It was everything I remembered; beautiful aromatics, the palate full of rich fruit and citrus, and cleansing acidity. I didn't drink a whole lot of whites overall, since there was so much good Pinot Noir all over the place, but the one other that really stood out was an 2006 Dönnhoff Niederhauser Hermannshöhle Riesling Spätlese, which was AWESOME. If you've read my last blog post, you know how I feel about Riesling. I had this one with a slice of pecan pie and it was so good I almost passed out. True, it could have been the effects of the turkey, or all the wine I'd had up to that point, but either way, it worked fantastically with dessert. I'm actually a big fan of spätlese wines with desserts because they're not super-sweet, so rather than having a wine and dessert that are competing for who can be the sweetest, the wine lets the pie lead the sweetness parade, and the acidity of the Riesling comes behind, leaving your palate cleansed and refreshed.

Also, I had a bit of 2007 Cuné Rioja Rosado which once again confirmed my opinion that dry rosé is AWESOME! Seriously, if you're one of the folks who still thinks that just because it's pink it must taste like Beringer White Zin, please please please try a dry rosé. It will change your world.

So on to the reds. It should be no surprise that the table was a veritable sea of Pinot Noir, although contrary to the way the table often looks at my dad's house, not all of it was French. 2004 Stephen Ross Stone Corral Vineyard Pinot Noir was unmistakably American in style, full of rich, sweet fruit, cola, and clove. 1997 Paul Hobbs PN was definitely one of the oddest wines of the night. It showed a lot of new world fruit, but also had this crazy intense Chinese spice and ginger action on the nose. We also had a bottle of 2007 Ocio PN from Cono Sur. I was particularly interested in this wine because, as anybody who's asked me for an inexpensive Pinot Noir can tell you, I freaking love the entry level Pinot from this producer. As a matter of fact, I've found literally every wine I've had from them to be a great value in it's price category. The regular Cono Sur Pinot Noir retails for $9.49 and is genuinely the best cheap Pinot I've ever had. At $48 retail, the Ocio definitely isn't in quite the bargain category of the basic version, and it's got some stiff competition from California and Oregon from wineries like Ken Wright, Etude, Flowers, and Cristom, and the Ocio can definitely hold it's own with the big boys. It's a rich, silky style full of lush baked cherries and rose petals. I liked it.

Now, despite being the official standard-bearer for domestic wines in the store and in my family, I have to admit that two of my favorite wines for the evening were in fact Burgundy. First was one that I've had a love affair with since the first time I tried it; the 2005 Marechal Bourgogne Cuvee Gravel. This was far and away my favorite basic Bourgogne of 2005. It was every bit as delicious as it has been previously; juicy cherry cobbler fruit with fantastically balanced minerality and acidity. And last but not least, the wine of the evening, the 2001 Michel Magnien Chambolle Musigny Gruencheres. This was truly an incredible wine. I've spoken highly of a lot of wines up to this point, but this Magnien made them all look clumsy. The wine was so elegant and so perfectly balanced I actually stopped in the middle of a conversation and stared at my glass after I first tasted it. The acidity was incredible, and yet the wine didn't seem remotely tart, just mouthwatering and lush, with a finish that just wouldn't quit. 3 awesomes doesn't even seem adequate to describe this wine.

That's about all I've got for now.
I'll try not to leave so much time between posts next time.

I mean, it's not like I stopped drinking or anything.

I'm not trying to sound preachy or talk down to anybody.....

2008-07-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

....but seriously. Ok, a customer came into my store today to pick up his wine club wines. The function of our wine club is to expose people to new and interesting wines. The customer pays a set fee, and we pick out two bottles a month for them. We try very hard to make sure that the wines are diverse, interesting, and above all, good wines. Last month one of the selections was the 2006 Selbach Riesling Kabinet. One of my co-workers reviewed the wine for our newsletter:

2006 Selbach Riesling Kabinett,
Although the 2005 vintage will forever go down in history
for its exceptional wines, the 2006 vintage is not to be overlooked.
The harvest yield was lowered due to poor weather
conditions, but those wines that did succeed are just as good,
and arguably better, than that acclaimed ’05 vintage. The Selbach
Kabinett is a good example of the high quality wines
produced in Germany during this year. On the drier side, this
wine has significant complexity and depth for a standard table
wine. A nose classic of Mosel wines, characterized by honeydew,
petrol and lemon, opens to an intense palate of citrus
peel, lemon, wet hay and green melon. The finish has a unique
grassy quality, backed by a relative amount of acidity to serve
well as a food companion. This wine would pair well with
spicy Asian dishes or lighter fare such as chicken and shellfish.

I thought the wine was kick-ass. So, imagine how it made me feel when the customer, after picking up his wines for this month, remarked "Last month we had riesling, tell them not to do that anymore. Riesling sucks!"

Now, I don't like to make absolute statements when it comes to wine. I think wine is a very subjective experience, however I have no reservations about saying absolutely that Riesling does not suck. That being said, there are plenty of Rieslings that do suck, they're generally mass-produced, cheap American Rieslings that you can find at gas stations. Basically what seems to happen to many American wine drinkers is that, in their early twenties, before they've developed a pallet for good wine, and they don't like the taste of dry wines, and they're poor college students, they end up drinking these cheap Rieslings which have all the sweetness and none of the acidity or structure that make good Rieslings good. Eventually their palates develop and they realize that these are not very good wines, and they get the mistaken impression that these wines are actually what all Rieslings taste like.

This is genuinely a tragedy. The major thing missing from Rieslings that do suck is acidity. Acidity is what makes your mouth water, what makes wines pair well with food, and what makes the difference between a sweet wine that is cloying and leaves a coating on the inside of your mouth, and one that is mouthwatering, refreshing, delicious, and generally awesome. It seems like every day I have a customer come in and tell me they don't like Riesling because it's too sweet, and one by one I try to set them straight. For every one person who I or one of my co-workers manages to re-educate and convince to try pairing a sweet German Riesling with spicy Asian food there are hundreds of people who will never realize that it was poor winemaking and poor growing conditions that made the cheap Rieslings they've had before suck. For every one person I turn on to dry Riesling from Alsace, Australia, or Washington, there are hundreds of people who may go their entire lives without knowing how awesome dry Riesling is with roast chicken.

So please, if you're reading this and you're one of the thousands of people who think that Riesling is sweet wine for old ladies and College kids, please put your hand in mine and trust me. Buy a bottle of German Riesling, order some spicy take-out from your favorite Asian restaurant. If you don't have one, then some spicy chorizo tacos will work too. Try this pairing and it will change your perception of Riesling. And if you're not convinced on the sweetness thing, or if you just don't like spicy food, then pick up a dry one (your wine professional can help you find one), put a chicken in the oven, or grill some seafood, and open your mind to one of the world's great white varietals.

Riesling is awesome.

Australian Premium Wine Collection Tasting

2008-06-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

A little while ago I had the chance to go to San Francisco for the Australian Premium Wine Collection's portfolio tasting. It was a great tasting, plus I got to take a trip to San Francisco for my birthday.

Australian wines are still a relatively new to me, and up until recently I would have divided them into two categories: Yellowtail and Amon-Ra. In the 'Yellowtail' category, you've got the value brands that are often advertised on billboards or on the side of buses. While they are a pretty good wine value, I would generally rather pay the extra money to get something I'd really enjoy. In the 'Amon-Ra' category, you've got the big, highly extracted, high-alcohol wines that are so beloved by Robert Parker's Wine Advocate. The 2006 Amon-Ra recieved a 97-100 point rating from Parker, it's big, full of rich blackberry and mocha, vanilla, coconut and spice. I can see what some people like about wines of this type, but as somebody who prizes elegance, subtlety, and food-friendliness, there are a lot of wines out there that I'd reach for first.

Now, all that being said, I've been drinking a lot more Australian wines lately, and I've found a lot of wines that don't fall into either of these categories. This tasting introduced me to several wines that have helped me re-evaluate my image of Australian wines.

I started with whites. Unoaked chardonnays from Wishing Tree and Elderton represented good values, both relatively inexpensive, refreshish, light without being uninteresting, and both with good acidity. When it comes to white wines, Australia's particularly well known for Riesling, and now I see why. The Clare Valley has the warm days and cool nights that allow the grapes to develop great natural acidity. The wines are vinified dry and generally come out very Alsatian in style with a lot of petrol and floral character on the nose, great acidity, and often a very distinct minerality which comes from the high content of shale in the soils of the Clare Valley. My favorite Rieslings were from Rocky Gully, Frankland Estate and Mount Horrocks. The Mount Horrocks was particularly interesting. They have a dry riesling which is good, although a little spendy, they also have a dessert riesling called Gordon Cut, which is made in a unique style. 20% of the fruit is picked at normal ripeness and vinified into dry wine. The remaining fruit is left on the vine, but the clusters are cut most of the way from the vine so that they stop recieving nutrients and therefore don't ripen any further, they just become raisins on the vine, at which point they are vinified into sweet wine, and then blended with the dry wine. The result is a dessert wine with remarkable acidity, and a sugar level that's sweet and delicious, and not all syrupy or cloying. At nearly $30 retail for a 375ml bottle, it's not exactly cheap, but it is well worth it.

Moving on to reds, I started with the couple of Pinot Noirs that were available. I've never been impressed with Pinot Noir from Australia particularly considering how well the grape does in New Zealand. I've often felt that the Aussies should just stick to the several other varietals which do work well in their climate. The first two Pinots that I tried did nothing to change my opinion, however the last I tried, from Grosset winery, was excellent. It was elegant and floral, with fruit that was juicy but not over-extracted, and a little clove and cola character on the palate. I can definitely say that this is the best Australian Pinot Noir I've ever had. However at a retail price over $40, there are a lot of less expensive Pinots from other regions that are of at least comparable in quality.

I tried a number of Grenaches and found them to be very hit-or-miss, a lot of them either too light and generally unremarkable, or too extracted and high in alcohol, but I did find a few that managed to find the balance, and showed very well. The 2006 Tir na N'og Old Vine Grenache demonstrated that it's possible to have balance and extraction at the same time. The nose is full of sweet fruit preserves, baking spice, and grilled bread. The palate starts with big fruit and a bit of spice, and finishes with blackberry, espresso, and mocha. The 2005 Old Failthful Northern Exposure Grenache has a similar sweetness in the nose, although less of dark fruit. It actually reminded me vividly of easter candy, the palate was very nicely integrated, with black currant and blueberry fruit, and charmingly fine tannins.

One of my favorite reds was from Hewitson winery, their Old Garden Mourvedre was one of the most unique and interesting things I tried all day. The nose was a combination of ripe red cherry, crystallized ginger, and baking spice. The palate was fantastically complex with sweet fruit, ripe tannins, and hints of savory spice.

Shiraz is, of course, the main event at any Australian tasting. I re-tasted the 2004 Command Shiraz from Elderton and I still think it's fantastic. I was also quite fond of a few I hadn't tried before, including the Hewitson Ned and Henry's Shiraz, the 2004 Coates Shiraz, with a distinctive tart cherry character, and some black tea and potpourri aromatics. One of the most unique of the Shiraz (Shirazes? What's the plural of Shiraz? Anyway...) was from Craiglee. I tried three vintages, the 2001 showed white pepper on the nose, with licorice, and was almost Barolo-ish. The 2003 was similar, showing more fruit extraction, and the 2005 showed the most fruit, and more of the mocha and vanilla that's common to so many of these wines, but still with the distinctive white pepper character.

Unfortunately by this point I'd been tasting wine for over 2 hours, and my palate was pretty much shot. We departed the tasting for a seafood restaurant in Fisherman's Wharf. I had some fresh oysters and a tuna melt with a beer.

Beer is the best thing in the world after a long wine tasting.

Fresh oysters are awesome.

2005 Amavi Walla Walla Syrah

2008-04-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

So, the 2005 vintage was rather anxiously awaited by Walla Walla wine fans because of the disaster that was the 2004 vintage. An unexpcted freeze in 2004 damaged a massive number of vines in Walla Walla, forcing many wineries including Amavi to look to the Columbia and Yakima valleys for fruit for their 2004 vintage wines.

The major advantage for Walla Walla growers heading into the 2005 vintage was the fact that Walla Walla is a wine region that doesn't have to worry about phylloxera, so their vines are planted on their own rootstock. As a result, the vines that were killed off by the cold in 2004 didn't all have to be replanted, and they were still able to produce fruit for the 2005 vintage.

The growing conditions in 2005 are generally described as ideal, with a cool April budbreak, good temperatures through the growing season, and a slow cool-down through the end of the summer that lead to good hangtime, allowing the grapes to develop flavor complexity and excellent acidity.

The nose on the 05 Amavi opens with tart black cherry, bright blueberry, and smoked meats. As it sat open, it developed darker characters of spice and coffee, with a really charming sweet basil character. The color is clear and beautiful violet. The wine was aged in 100% French oak, 1/3 of it new. The oak opens the palate , but is very well integrated, and leads immediately into juicy blackberry, blueberry and black cherry, with dark coffee, fresh earth, and mineral. The tannins are smooth and works together with the acidity to create an impressively long finish.

This bottle retails for $24. Now, when it came to rating this wine, I had to think about it for a while. I've had better Syrahs, that's true. I've also had cheaper syrahs, but I have never had a better cheaper syrah, so I've gotta give this one...

3 Awesomes!

Domaine la Bouissiere Gigondas 2005

2008-03-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

So, I was actually planning on having my first post on this blog be an introduction to Piedmont, but it turns out I drink a lot of wine, so it looks like I'm going to be doing a lot more tasting notes. Last night I was at my parents' house for grilled flank steak and mashed potatoes with a little truffle oil, which was paired with this great Gigondas.

So, I checked the back-story on the winemakers, apparently they're French or something. But seriously folks... Anyway, the most interesting thing about Gilles and Thierry Faravels' vineyard is one of the highest elevation vineyards in the Gigondas appellation. Oh, Gigondas is in the Rhone, just in case anybody doesn't know that. There are 13 allowed grapes in the Rhone (Thank you, Scott). Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre are the most well-known, and the only 3 in this Gigondas. The family vines average 30-50 years old. Vine age and high elevation work as a team, like Sonny and Cher... I don't really know where I was going to go with that comparison, so never mind. I guess I could go back and erase it, but if you're reading this then I obviously decided not to. The point I was trying to make was that growing conditions make for a more elegant style of wine than many other Gigondas producers. The nose is very pretty, with blackberry and spice and a little cocoa powder action to it, the palate is rich, but stops short of being the big, chunky baked-fruit affair that some wines of this region can turn into. With dusty raspberry and blackberry and some chocolate on the palate, bright juicy fruit, fine tannins and excellent acidity, this wine showed well at this age, but it's not shy about telling you to lay it down for a few years.

As I continued my research, I learned that the Faravel brothers are just the type of winemakers I've always respected. They've been farming their vineyards organically since the 80's, and they use as little added sulfites as possible in all of their wines. The grapes are always hand-picked, the wines always gravity-fed from tank to barrel, and the wines are rarely fined or filtered.

I was going to give this wine two and a half awesomes, but I was really trying to stick to the 3-point system, and if I'm going to use half-awesomes, I should have just made it a 6-point system, or a 10-point system. I thought about adding a second level of scoring, like it gets two awesomes and a gold star or something, but that seemed a little silly. So, after thinking back over my original criteria, I'm giving this one two awesomes. I can't go so far as to call it perfect, but it's an excellent Gigondas, a great food wine, and at $30 retail, an excellent value.

Two Awesomes!

My first tasting notes!

2008-03-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

Hooray! I tried a wine last night, and here's what I thought about it!

2004 Mount Eden Vineyards Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon, Santa Cruz Mountains.

Ok, I have to admit that I was a little turned off by the packaging of this wine. I know that's petty, but here's the thing: the wine is labeled as Cabernet, but in smaller letters on the front of the bottle is the varietal breakdown, it's actually just enough Cabernet to be able to be legally labeled Cabernet, the rest is Merlot, and a splash of Cab Franc. Now, don't misunderstand me, I have absolutely no problem with them making a blended wine, and I think they actually do a great job of it, my problem is, if you're going for a Bordeaux style with your wine, you're not doing yourself a favor by labeling it as Cabernet because people looking at the bottle are going to think it's just another big California Cab. That's just what I think though, maybe I'm a nitpicky little baby.

So, first impressions out of the way, I tried the wine. The nose was the first indication that this wasn't a typical California Cab. The fruit didn't jump out of the glass at me, and the oak, far from the overpowering wood of so many wines from Napa, was almost a whisper underneath the cassis and tart black cherry fruit. So far, I was intrigued. Moving on to the palate, remember that tart black cherry I talked about? Holy god! I'm sure that my first impression on the palate was tainted by the fact that I was still expecting something typical, and that's absolutely not what I got. I reset my expectations and went back in for another taste, and I was really impressed by how well-made this wine is. It's got blackberry and cassis and a very subtle ribbon of vanilla to go along with that tart black cherry, very fine tannins, and acidity that makes it cry out for food.

After tasting the wine I've got to stick with my initial criticism of the labeling. I think this is a really good bordeaux-styled wine, and as such, should just be labeled with the varietal breakdown, or just labeled as a red blend.

Ok, this is the end of my notes for this wine, and I guess I need like a ratings system. I'm not a big fan of the points system because then you get into the whole "what's the difference between a 92 point wine that costs $60 and a 93 point wine that costs $25" b.s. So I'm going to opt for a simpler 3-point system, using 'Awesome' as my unit of measurement.
A wine receiving 3 Awesomes is pretty much perfect as far as I'm concerned. It's classic in style, and well-worth going to great lengths to find.
A wine receiving 2 Awesomes is a good wine, I enjoyed it, it's worth it's price, I totally recommend it, I consider it to be a standout in it's category either on measure of quality, value, or both.
A wine recieving 1 Awesome is also a good wine, but I've had better. I'm not offended by it, I don't hate it, but I'm not over the moon about it either.
A wine receiving no Awesomes sucks. Now remember it's just my opinion, and who the hell am I? I'm just somebody who drinks a lot of wine and has a big mouth. If I taste a wine that makes me want to spit it out immediately, if I taste a wine that tastes absolutely nothing like the varietal it's supposed to be, if I taste a wine that makes me say 'screw it, I'll just drink water,' that's a 0 Awesome wine.

So, the Mount Eden 2004 Cab scores 2 Awesomes. Hooray!

Some basics on Piedmont

2008-03-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

I started my relationship with wine while working in an Italian wine bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since Italians were the first wines I really got to know, I thought they'd be a good subject for my first post. But then I got all busy writing tasting notes about the Cabernet and the Gigondas below, and I put this post on the back burner, but here it is, finally complete in all it's glory.

So, we've got a map of the wine regions of Piedmont over here, and as you can see, it's a little complicated. I'm going to do my best here to break down the basics.

To many uninitiated American consumers, one of the most recognizable areas in Piedmont is the Asti area. Some great wines come out of this region, however it's fame comes not from the quality of wines, but rather from that Martini and Rossi Asti Spumanti garbage that was marketed all over TV in the 80's. I've met a lot of people who have shied away from any wines with the d'Asti designation because of this association. Rest assured, that mass-marketed plonk is in no way representative of the real wines from the Asti region. The Asti Spumanti crap from tv was a bastardization of Moscato a'Asti, a low-alcohol, slightly sparkling, slightly sweet white wine that I happen to love. As an aperitif, it's a great alternative to Champagne, with acidity that makes them a great palate cleanser, which also makes it a great wine to serve between courses, especially if you're changing from one wine to another, or serving sorbet or anything like that. It's also an awesome wine to serve with spicy food, and if you've never tried pairing lightly sweet wine with spicy food, you're missing out. A sweet German Riesling with some spicy Thai food can be an incredible combination, and I absolutely love Moscato d'Asti paired with spicy seafood tacos. I might have to start putting recipes on my blog too, because my spicy seafood tacos are the stuff that dreams are made of.

So, whites aren't really the big thing in Piedmont. The only other white that I can even think of off the top of my head is Roero Arneis. Arneis tends toward delicate, grassy, sometimes floral character on the nose, crisp on the palate, finishing with an almost nutty character.

If there are any wine people reading this, you're probably getting pretty irritated at the fact that I've been talking this long about Piedmont without mentioning Barolo, and to those people I say, calm down. I'm trying to make this crap accessible here, and this is some dense material. So, Barolo is the big daddy wine of Piedmont. It's frequently referred to as "The king of wines, and the wine of kings." It's kind of weird to me that, while Barolo and Barbaresco are commonly described as the masculine and feminine expressions of the Nebbiolo grape respectively, no body's ever tried calling Barbaresco "The queen of wines, the wine of queens." I guess that does sound kind of gay though.

The Nebbiolo grapes tend to ripen earlier in Barbaresco, and the wines undergo a shorter maceration, and so generally mature earlier, usually becoming ready to drink within 5-10 years of vintage. Barbaresco commonly shows aromatic notes of roses or violets, with tart cherry, truffles, and licorice on the palate. Barolos generally need at least 10 years to reach maturity, especially the more traditionally styled wines. Mature Barolos will also tend to show floral characteristics on the nose, but they will generally be accompanied by darker character of tar, leather and tobacco.

The folks in Piedmont can't sit around waiting for their wine to mature all the time, of course, so they also make several wines which are meant to be consumed within just a few years of bottling. Nebbiolo grapes are also used to make younger wines called Nebbiolo d'Alba and Langhe Nebbiolo, which can be great entry-level wines for somebody trying to learn about Barolo and Barbaresco, but not wanting to spend a fortune. These wines are only required to age for 1 year before bottling, and are generally lighter, less intense versions of Barolo and Barbaresco. Also intended for early consumption are Barbera and Dolcetto, and you can generally find a broad selection of good quality wines from each of these grapes for under $20. Both wines are generally light to medium bodied. Barberas are generally slightly smoky, with ripe fruit flavors. Dolcetto's name translates literally as "little sweet one," however these are not sweet wines. The name most likely is a reference to the sweetness of the grapes, but may also refer to the aromatics of the wine, which can be very fruity and floral, and can give off the impression of sweetness on the nose. There are also a few producers who make barrique-aged Barbera wines, which are generally more intense and complex, and will last much longer in the cellar. Unfortunately there's not a different DOC designation to alert the consumer of which they're buying, so often the only way to tell is by price, as the barriqued versions are usually about 50% more expensive than their counterparts.

Ok, I'm done talking about Piedmont for the moment. I know I didn't cover everything, so I'm sorry if there are any Freisa Fanatics out there who feel overlooked.

I'm sure I'll have something else I need to spout off about before too long.

Until then, may the force be with you.

Why are you writing a wine blog?

2008-03-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

Leil, why are you writing a wine blog?

Well that's an excellent rhetorical question, self. Here's why: I know some things about wine. I'd never claim to know everything, and truth be told, there are even some basics that I have trouble with. I can never remember which bank is which in Bordeaux, and if you named a Burgundian appellation, I'd have trouble telling you whether it was Cote de Beaune or Cote D'or. That being said, I do know some stuff, and I'm always trying to learn more, so this here's my wine blog. The areas about which I know most are Italian and American, and I'm working on beefing up my knowledge of French and Spanish wines. I'll put things that I know on here in the hopes that it helps people who want to learn about wine, and if there's something you thing I should know about, please feel free to post comments. I'll also post tasting notes on here of wines I'm drinking. I do work in a wine store, so most of the wines I'm tasting will be wines I'm selling, but I will do my best to be even-handed with my tasting notes, and not just try to sell stuff.

Thanks, and cheers.
Leil