Dr Vino's wine blog

In 1993 Englebert Prieler, an Austrian vintner, decided for the first time to bottle a single-vineyard wine from the grape variety Blaufränkisch. When it came time to sell the wine, he priced it the same as his better known Cabernet Sauvignon. However, the Blaufränkisch bottles languished unsold until a Swiss collector bought them all as a block. Adding insult to injury, the asking price at the winery was only 20 schillings (about 1.50 euro) a bottle.*

Things have changed. The 2006 vintage of that same wine, a fuller style of Blaufränkisch, now sells for about $130 per bottle in the U.S.

While Blaufränkisch is hardly a household wine term, it has risen from nothing in 1995 to, well, more than nothing. Read more…

I had heard about the fires in Sonoma 2008. But I had never tasted them.

David Hirsch poured me a sample of his 2008 “The Bohans-Dillon” pinot noir at the recent trade tasting of his New York distributor. And guess what: it had a smoky notes swirling around the dark cherry fruit. If you like chipotle or a peaty whisky, and you like California pinot, I predict you will love this wine! (The smoky taste can come in non-blaze years from the “toast” level of barrels.) If you don’t but want to keep it in the Hirsch Vineyards portfolio, then perhaps try one of the 07s, such as the pricier “M,” which is smoke free.

Describing that hot summer when the fires came in July, Hirsch said that “we almost died of asphyxiation.” He added that people like to “drink pinot and talk terroir.” Well, he said, this was the terroir of 2008. By contrast, he said that 2007 was “a blessing.”

Here on the blog, we previously discussed geologists who debunked “minerality” as coming from the soil. But this smokiness in the glass appears to have come from the fires! Putting the “air” in terroir, one might say.

For more on smoke and de-smokifying wines, check out this story in the SF Chron or this one at Forbes.com.

Jason Haas went to Sacramento thinking thin. He came away disappointed.

Although it’s known for belt-tightening of a different kind, Sacramento is not known as a weight-loss destination. In fact, Haas, the general manager at Tablas Creek Vineyards in Paso Robles was attending an enormous wine trade show. He recounts on his blog how set out to find a lighter bottle for his top wine, Esprit de Beaucastel, a red blend that retails for about $50. But, in the end, he wasn’t happy:

It became clear that the bottle manufacturers have been taken by surprise with wineries’ desires for lighter bottles. Most of the lightest bottles that they make still are intended for the lowest-end wines. They look cheap. What we’re looking for is a bottle that looks like a top-end bottle, but weighs half as much. And, somewhat to our surprise, those bottles just don’t exist yet.

Read more…