Dr Vino's wine blog

Sutter Home and white Zinfandel are practically synonymous. The Trinchero brothers of Sutter Home started making the sweet, pink wine from (red) Zinfandel grapes in the mid-1970s. To everyone’s astonishment, the wine exploded in popularity and within a few years was selling a million cases a year.

While this story is well-known, at least within the industry, what’s less well known is that white Zinfandel had been made before that time. In fact, George West had made a pink wine from Zinfandel near Lodi in the 1860s according to Charles Sullivan in his book Zinfandel: A History of the grape and its Wine. In the 1880s, Charles Wetmore, a journalist and head of the State Viticultural Commission, had suggested that making a rosé from free run juice zinfandel. Even In the 20th century, Sullivan noted that David Bruce made a white zinfandel in the 1960s.

Recently, we caught a glimpse of a white zinfandel from Ridge Vineyards, Yes, the esteemed Ridge, maker of Monte Bello and many excellent Zinfandels!

I wrote to Draper and asked about the curious history of white Zinfandel at Ridge. He was kind enough to elaborate on a topic that probably isn’t the first thing he’s like to discuss. His comments follow after the jump: Read more…

Who said wine isn’t a contact sport? In an attempt to break a world record, Harry Constantinescu, sommelier at the St. Regis Hotel in Atlanta, had a crack and a zing at sabering 22 bottles of Champagne in 60 seconds last Friday.

Above РPatricia and Pierre Bernault from Chateau Beaus̩jour whose wines are now available in the US market for the first time as of five days ago. On the left, Pascal Collotte of Chateau Jean Faux.

Enthusiasts of French wine often either love Burgundy or Bordeaux. For Daniel Johnnes, who imports many Burgundies as well as organizing the annual celebration of fine and rare Burgundy known as La Paulée, it’s pretty clear where his allegiance lies. The only catch: he’s just started importing Bordeaux.

I stopped by his tasting on Tuesday at Terroir Tribeca where the handful of new wines he’s importing were on display. Of note, the charismatic vigneron Pascal Collotte makes a solid red (merlot-cabernet franc) and a rosé from his 30 acres in the Entre-Deux-Mers region; The Bernaults, of the 30-acre Chateau Beauséjour in Montaigne-Saint-Emilion, make a merlot-cabernet franc blend from 45 year-old vines.

Here’s how Johnnes (right) describes his new venture, sourcing Bordeaux from outside the traditional négociant system.

“My goal was to break away from the pack that is bashing Bordeaux. The cool thing now is to love natural wine from the Loire. I’ve seen some sommelier friends do high fives over the fact that neither one has been to Bordeaux. But not all natural wines from the Loire are good, just as not all Bordeaux wines are bad.

These Bordelais are small growers, with a similar respect for the land as in Burgundy. They act as minimally as possible: the wines are unfiltered, low yields, with minimal handling and sulfur.

That’s hard, especially at these prices–you’re not going to get this level from California at this price ($12-$30).

I’m not going over to the dark side, I’m just saying “open your eyes and keep an open mind.”

Ah, meat. You’d think this one would be a no-brainer for pairing with wine as so many of the full-bodied reds made today are natural wine pairings.

But we don’t like to make it easy for you–that’s not impossible, after all!

So here you have it: raw (unspecified) meat that has been on Lady Gaga’s body in the form of her meat dress. Which wine would you pair with that?!? If you want a little less to, er, digest, you can keep the pairing at the sartorial level.

Funny, but the dress wasn’t on display during New York Fashion week, rather, the MTV Video Music Awards.

Keg wine and wine vending machines just got supersized: 500 and one-thousand liter tanks have landed in French supermarkets.

Bring your own resealable bottles, Poland Spring containers, jerrycans, whatever. Or you can get one at the store. Select your grade (red, white, or rosé). Pump. Print receipt.

Astrid Terzian introduced this concept that hearkens back to a bygone era when wine would arrive in Paris shops in tonneaux and consumers would bring their own flagons to fill. But today, Terzian says, she started this scheme in fall 2008 to fill a niche, tapping into two key themes, environmental awareness and the economy. (She actually wanted to buy a wine property and run a B&B but it was too expensive. So she turned to what she says she knew how to do: sales.) The elimination of packaging mass means that the wine can be shipped much more efficiently from a cost and carbon perspective.

The cost-savings are passed on to the consumer in the form of low prices of 1.45 euros/liter (about $2/liter). She installed her first machine in June 2009 at the Cora supermarket in Dunkirk and now has them installed in eight supermarkets in France. The wines vary; one is a 2009 from the Rhone, technically a vin de pays méditerranée.

As to customer reaction, Terzian says customers are taken aback at first, but then warm up to the idea, especially after a taste. They come back often, she says.

Asked via email which is her favorite container to bring to fill, she says she uses a five-liter jug since it is “neither too big nor too small–and it’s typically French.”

UPDATE: I neglected to mention in the post that I think this, regulations permitting, will come to the US within a year. I told that to someone in the wine trade today. And he replied that he is already working on it!

UPDATE 2: My only question about the pump wine (aka Chateau La Pompe) is if it comes to New Jersey and Oregon, will they require full serve as they do for gas?!

La Cuve, Réserves Précieuses

We’ve talked about children and wine education before. And recently about divers finding old wine under the sea. So I was surprised to stumble on a reference in a book I was reading to my kids the other day, The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau, by Dan Yaccarino.

“When diving in the waters near France,” Yaccarino writes, “Cousteau and his crew found a sunken ship full of wine jars over 2,200 years old! They tasted the wine. Alas, it was bitter.”

My seven-year-old son thought it was cool to taste something outrageously old, even if it was “bitter.” (Apparently, Cousteau’s comment at the time was that it was “a poor vintage.”) Here’s the same 1952 discovery in another book, for grown-ups:

“[Cousteau] checked his depth gauge. Two hundred and fifty feet. … He tripped his reserve valve to give himself an extra five minutes. … And there it was. Looking like an object in a museum … an amphora lay half buried on the slope in front of him. With the last measure of his strength, Cousteau pulled the amphora free of the bottom.”

Funny we get the tasting notes in the kids’ book. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any video from on-board the Calypso. But I’m sure it was captured in the ABC series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”

SIPPED: impossible pairings!
The robotic sommelier videos are back! And this could be the funniest one ever! Click above to view the encounter between diner an open/close-minded diner and an exasperated somm.

SIPPED: Red, white and…blue?
“Viagra-spiked wine nearly kills husband” [winetimes.co.za]

SIPPED: good times
Elin McCoy plunges into the fun of Beaujolais 2009 [Bloomberg]

SIPPED: go, go godello
“Northern Spain has become a white-wine Valhalla.” [Slate]

SIPPED: wine’s fake Rolex?
Beijing Boyce posts about finding a wine labeled as “Benfold’s” for sale in China.

SPIT: wine competitions
NY Cork Report says they won’t participate as judges in competitions any more. Discussion ensues.

SPIT: oak barrels
Want all the oak flavor with none of the…oak? Say hello to flexitanks! They can “impart flavours, tannins and aromas.” [weeklytimesnow.com.au]

SPIT: the wrong kind of bubbly
“Drinking cava on shipboard is worse that shooting an albatross and will lead to a similar fate!” Reader comment

The August 30 issue of the New Yorker contains a much-discussed profile of the Koch brothers, the billionaires bankrolling the Tea Party and libertarian organizations. But who wants a Tea Party when a Wine Party would be much more fun?

The words “billionaire” and “Koch” are familiar to ardent wine enthusiasts; the book The Billionaire’s Vinegar depicts William Koch, industrialist and disgruntled wine collector, as a lawsuit-wielding sheriff bent on ridding the fine wine world of counterfeits. However, the brothers in the New Yorker story are actually Charles and David who still control Koch Industries; after acrimony came to a head in the family company, they bought out William (and his brother Freddie) in 1983. Litigation simmered among the brothers for the following seventeen years.

Taking a page from his brothers’ playbook, what if Bill were to fund a Wine Party, bent on liberalizing the country’s wine shipping laws? He has already burnished (or tarnished, depending on your perspective) his reputation with high-end collectors. But restrictive interstate shipping laws plague wine enthusiasts in many states. Although there has been a greater liberalization of shipping laws from wineries to consumers in the past five years, laws governing wine retailers-to-consumers remain much more restrictive with only about a dozen allowing the practice. This stifles innovation in wine retail and reduces selections to broad swathes of consumers, while keeping prices high in many markets. Judicial challenges remain the key weapon in this fight and Bill Koch has much experience in litigation.

Further, wholesalers of beer, wine and spirits have initiated a legislative campaign to freeze wine shipping laws as they are. While this effort seems be going nowhere, they will doubtlessly return in the next legislative session and probably be better prepared. Thus having financial largesse on the pro-shipping side would make this a more formidable fight in the legislative arena, where, all too often, money counts for more than votes. But citizen unrest can be fomented with some Champagne bottles sabered as effigies of unblocking the system. Above all, the wine party would not just have to be against interstate shipping laws but could be for many things, such as discussion, eating (come on, who is anti-eating), and, of course, truth!

Bill Koch has already written himself into the story of fine and rare wine in America. By diverting a portion of his wine funds to this more populist approach, he could earn the adoration of Joe Wine Sixpack.