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The Mouse Crisis

 

 

                   Please head on over to TheFeiringLine.Com for the mousey story 

The Clay Story (Dirty Wine, P.2)

The Dirty Guide to Wine is coming on June 13th! Curious? Take a look here, with Pascaline Lepeltier. Direction by Christy Frank, video and sound by Peter Zanger.

Oh, yeah, and that's me in the red hair, Alice. Available for Pre Order!

https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Guide-Wi...

 

The Dirty Guide to Wine

Coming to you June 13th, but available for pre-order on Amazon! 

 

 

Read Penelope Bass' full review on Imbibe.com

 

 

 

 

Slo/Czech. The next wine frontier?

From the archives of The Feiring Line...the natural wine newsletter. It's a fantastic resource for what you should know and drink in the world of natural. 

 

 

2015 Vintage in Burgundy? Hmm.

After tasting through quite a few 2015s from all over Burgundy I have to report it was a difficult vintage....for me. Other folks seemed to love it. But then I'm almost always showing up with a different take, like on the 2005 vintage. Praised by others, avoided by me.

 

 

Jean Claude Rateau early in the 2015 vintage

But while I still believe that you stick by your favorites year after year, this is the vintage to  stick to who you know or listen to those you trust.

The snapshot was this: Hail was no stranger to the area and it heartbreakingly hit Chablis late in September, but spared most other spots.  In general it was a very warm summer (check out the 15-16 degrees of ETOH in southern Burgundy, aka Beaujolais). Little rain meant very thick skins, meant more skin than juice. In addition, depending on picking time, many wines had relatively low pHs.

All of this was evidenced in in a blind tasting put together for me in Beaune by the BIVB. This was a great opportunity because I got to taste outside of my norm. In that assortment of 102 wines  I was confronted by quite a few that seemed acidified and rough. I came away with a mouthful of tannin that was unusually harsh for the delicate grape, pinot.

Some typical descriptors from my scribbles? Orange juice, klutzy, rude, tarry--without charm, paint by numbers, weird oak juice, caramel finish. For the whites? Plenty of peach juice. White wines can be lovely though many seemed short. 

And so those who handle the grapes as gently as possible, use full cluster (or at least a good bit), work more with infusion than extraction are the winners here. It's a short list but more will be coming. Producer picks for me so far include those of: 

Alice et Olivier deMoor 

Dominique Gruhier

Giles Ballorin

Jane et Sylvain

Sylvain Pataille

Claire Naudin

Domaine Lafarge

Chanterêves (extremely elegant)

Chandon de Briailles

Maison Harbor (look for La Justice)

Jean Claude Rateau

Dominique Derain

Pierre Fenals

Julien Altabar

Fred Cossard

Jane Eyre (Corton Reynards & Côtes de Nuits Village)

 

Chile, Fires, País and Pinochet

In this month's Feiring Line, the natural wine newsletter you'll want to read about rebirth of the real wines of Chile and how a plot to reforest has created havoc on the wine industry and the natural richness of the country. 

 

 

 

 

For more on the issue of the land, you'll want to read Luis Gutiérrez reporting in ... yup... The Wine Advocate. 

 

                                      

 

 

 

 

 

Subscribe!

 

Days of Porotos Granados

 

                                                                   cranberry beans and aji

 

 Back in January I visited Chile and the Secano Interior lands with dry farmed old vines and great history. The info is plunked into this April's issue of TFL, devoted to the campesinos making pipeños don't know what that is? Well, sign up and find out. But there were outtakes to my story and a summer dish of beans and beauty was one of them  

During the stay I was treated to several homemade versions of a soup or a stew that was a staple, Porotos Granados. Delicious.

You'll see it everywhere. It's like the jonjoli of Georgia -- you can't have a meal or gathering without seeing it on the table. It's so welcoming with big sheets of sliced corn from a local variety that is as thick as a giants forearm. Beautiful sure but the taste is uncommonly intense for the simplicity of the ingredients. 

One of the first I sampled was at an impromptu picnic in Roberto Henriquez's vineyard-- from extremely talented hands.

 

                                                                                            To the left is the chef, Felipe Macera. The right, the talented winemaker  Marcelo Retamal. 

 

Another soupish stew came to my bowl through Manuel Moraga's charming life partner,  the flaming-haired Paola Marini, who kindly sent me this recipe. 

 

Paola's Portos Granados

 

We use a fresh summer bean, that is planted for this meal named Juanita or Pajarito the mostly known , planted in farms and small  vegetable gardens  to cook this traditional plate at Summer time. 

 

 

 

 

+ 1/2 kilo summer fresh beans (cranberry beans)

 

+4 medium sweet corn kernels  ... 3 grated of the cob  and  1 cut off the cob to get a milky solution ... 

 

 

+a squirt  of milk

 

+1 liter and 1/2 water

 

+Onions  chopped in small cubes

  

Olive oil

 

+Thyme   (Chascudo in Chilean)

 

+Aji  Cacho de Cabra (this is a small fresh hot picked pepper)

fresh from the stem

 

+Small pinch of ground black pepper

 

+Ground red pepper

 

+ Salt

 

 

Heat the olive oil and add the  onions ,black pepper, ground red pepper ...the whole  fresh hot aji split open but whole and about 15 sprigs of thyme.

 

Put in the beans stir for a minute and add the corn and the liter of cold water. Once it boils, you might want to add a bit more of water and boil softly for a liquid finish  .. add the squirt of milk.

 

It should take about 3/4 of a hour until beans are ready .

 

•

 

That's it.

 

Note: I have seen red squash or pumpkin added or the thyme replaced with basil, or some cumin seed. Put the squash in with the beans. And remember, just add enough water to cover. 

 

 

Paola kind of cheats at lunch by making a pesto to go with her porotos. Well, she is Italian, after all.

 

 

Embrace the "Snobs." Don't Drink Cheap(ened) Wine

The Joys of Processed Wine and  Ignore the Snobs, Drink the Cheap, Delicious Wine was the two-titled opinion piece from writer Bianca Bosker. It appeared in last week’s New York Times. It didn’t strike a nerve but it did press buttons. “The story shouldn’t have been titled cheap wine, it should have been cheap shots,” wrote Vermont winemaker Deirdre Heekin. 

 I’m not sure those who reacted to the click-bait of it all were being fair. Any thinking person who read Bosker's conclusion (or the titles), would guess the writer was clearly out of her mind. But while I would have rather believed that explanation, I expect something else had to be going on.

For me the Op-Ed’s problems were elsewhere; credibility and believability. Or as the Times magazine cover suggests, "Is truth dead?" In that Times piece was a deep bait and switch that you would only know if you read the Bosker book. Which I did.

 

Photo grabbed from Marko Kovac's facebook page. I've no idea where he found it. 

 

The Cork Dork--which reveals more about Bosker's ambition and competitive nature than any love for or knowledge of wine--energetically chronicles her journey towards the first certified level of the Master Sommelier exam.

This is more like running the Turkey Trot than the Boston Marathon, but through the study one should pick up some tips.  However, being considered a pro or an expert does not come along with that first pin. I suppose this is why there are so many misleading and wrong statements in her essay such as "learning to savor the delicate aromas of aged Barolos from organic growers in Piedmont." That's a weird one? How old? This was one of the worst farmed areas for ages. Organic except for the very few is a rare thing.

Then there's,  “I spent long days studying the farming practices that distinguish the Grand Crus of Burgundy.” 

Farming practices do not separate the Grand from the Village, geology and micro-climate do. There’s a bunch of other stuff I can take on in the essay. While this might seem like small potatoes, it does makes me question her wine knowledge and grasp of the market. But what really confounded me was her flip from her book to a flop of a different conclusion in the Times.

Here’s the deal: The Op-Ed was a condensed version of one of her book's chapters entitled, Quality Control. In that chapter she discusses wine additives and the way marketing team can shape a wine.

The essay oddly reads as if she were on a Treasury press junket. I don’t know whether she was or not, but one understands that she drank and liked Treasury's Kool-Aid. There she was, tasting the wines after a certain natural wine bashing and then  she drops this bomb;

These maligned bottles have a place. The time has come to learn to love unnatural wines.”

Honest opinion here: Treasury and others of their ilk should run and grab this concept for a press release. It’s perfectly transparent. Its message? “So what if we load up wines with process and additives? We make wines of pleasure.”

So in the Times she says processed wines are great.

In her book when at the same big table tasting yeasted, chipped, mega-purpled, reverse-osmosed, acidified, enzymed, Velcorined wines, she seems to have had a very different experience.

They reminded me of blueberry smoothies with a shot of vodka and Hershey's syrup stirred in. But I was trying to keep an open mind. Price is a spice, I reminded myself, and don’t be such a snob. Truth be told, I didn't want to finish them. There was nothing new that revealed itself after the second sip.

 

In the memoir she couldn’t drink the wines.

In the essay she embraced them.

Okay. Fess up. Which one is it? And what would prompt the author to so drastically change her opinion from book to post. In the age of press manipulation, the whole situation left me uncomfortable, and that the Times printed it, took her seriously was part of it. 

Eric Asimov recently wrote a fabulous column, wine is food. Bravo. Absolutely. Fresh orange juice or concentrate? Fresh strawberry or artificial flavor. Genetically modified tomatoes or a syrupy, black acidic one. Wine from grapes or from 60+ additives. Which one do you want to drink? The answer seems is self-evident. To paraphrase Aubert de Villaine, “Do I have to prove that the sun rises?”

To most of us who take wine and food seriously, wines of pleasure are not  concocted grape beverages from ground that I wouldn’t want to walk on let alone eat from. What gives pleasure is deliciousness from great winemakers who can work soils responsibly and give the grapevine an unadorned and unspoofed voice. 

If this piece that would land on April Fool’s Day I would have gotten it. But it didn’t. But frankly, any writer who confesses, as she has, to have a weakness for old champagne --which is a game only the well-heeled can play-- comes off as someone sipping out of her coupe and saying let them drink cake, or rather Layer Cake.  

'15/'05 Burgundy. What's the hype?

"Extraordinary," said Decanter. "Best vintage since 2010," said Forbes. Tim Atkin was a little more subdued, "a very good to great vintage for reds." But, Janicis Robinson went further, "Seriously impressive," she wrote. 

If you read about Burgundy you know that there's a  gushing about the vintage 2015.

 

 I have a history of being odd man out. I don't know why I see the world differently, it could be a curse, but I do.

I loved the tannic 1998. I loved 2006. I found the weird vintages of  2007 (difficult and rot plagued) and  2011 particularly charming.

And as far as the famed 2005? Jancis Robinson wrote. "In general all the wines are charming, truly succulent and they faithfully express their origins. Can one ask for more?" Alan Meadows had proclaimed it, "One of the great Burgundy vintages of this century for Pinot Noir,"  but for me? Not so much. Not at release and not ten years on.

I have no idea why my colleagues gushed about it. But in politics and vintages are controversial, even if from our vantage points the truth seems obvious. For myself, I can add it to the incredibly difficult (for me and my wine glass) 2003 and 2009 vintage. It was confounding to me how this could have been acclaimed. Yet, unlike the '03 and '09, '05 still hasn't budged. It reminds me of one of these melons that arrive in the market that go from unripe to rotten. I know, that's harsh. I'm not saying they're rotten, but they just don't yield. And I am afraid that when and if they finally loosen their seams, they'll die before they live.

So, why? 2005 was also a very solar vintage. And solar in Burgundy, when that's all you get, makes for the kind of wine that is the opposite of the kind of nuance we want when we go to this hallowed strip of the Cote d'Or.  I remember in June of 2005, meeting with Philippe Pacalet. Now, he's not a vigneron but as we went to taste in his cellar he voiced his fears. "The sun, it's too much for the vines," he said. He was mostly correct. 

Those who worked the vineyard in both '05 and '15 as if they were in a cloudy, cool vintage... failed. Those who worked by rote:  leaf-pullings, fruit dropping, over hedging, extraction and destemming made, to me, charmless wines. In vintages like that stem inclusion and/or whole cluster--with a few exceptions--seemed to help the wines. It's like putting on a hat for shade.

As I hinted, even ten-years on, I was still contemplating the vintage when confronted with over 100 examples to taste.  

I thought, now's the time I will understand. Out of those 100 only a handful pleased me, and more reds than whites. They were from both Beaune and the Nuits. The sun didn't cause sun-stroke in the wines. I found complexity and a depth.Where the great majority--from very well-considered estates-- so many others were stunted by the tannin-- not the structure--these had a window open and vibrancy. Certainly not a vintage light on its feet, but I felt the best of the vintage, had the sun, sure, the tannins were unapologetic, sure, but instead of the opaque, there was the transparency I look for in my Burgundy.

Who were they? 

de Montille, Mugnier, Lafarge, Dujac, Berthaud, D'Arlot, Chandon de Briailles, Rousseau, Jérôme Galeyrand, a little wine from Epineuil, from Dominique Gruhier. For the whites? Roulot was a standout as was Bonneau du Martray.                                            

Here are some of the survivors....

   

                            

     

                                              

 

And here you go.

So now we're at 2015?

Superb? Meh.

As a vintage? Difficult.

Some great wines of pleasure? Without a doubt.

Who and how? Stay tuned-- coming to The Feiring Line soon. Subscribe! 

 

when Hugh Johnson talks about natural wine

When the wine writer emeritus Hugh Johnson told Washington Post wine writer David McIntyre that "orange" wines were a sideshow and a waste of time fur raised on Facebook and Twitter. He went on to say, "Making good wine is hardly modern technology, it’s just experience and common sense. And hygiene!"

He's right about the part on making good wine, of course. But the sharp that stuck in the throats of wine drinkers who have come to love skin-contact wines (full disclosure, I did write a love poem to Georgian wine, home to skin-contact) was that this wonderful writer, (thoughtful enough to write me a fan letter after The Battle for Wine and Love came out. I was completely honored.) the very same one who wrote The History of Wine, failed to realize that orange wine was nothing new but a revival of all things old, and made by common sense and without a doubt, hygiene.

Yes, Mr. Johnson, today, we do know how to make a really good wine and many times--though not always--the ancients had something to teach us way more than the modern laboratory does. Cleanliness of course is key. All agreed.

Back in something like 2006 the first skin contacts started to arrive on our shores. Many weren't successful. Some had dried, starched fruit and aggressive tannins. But over the past decade as the skins were more understood as a way to make wine without addition, when the use of clay for fermentation spread (grape juice takes to clay as butter takes to toast), and winemakers learned to do less, great "orange" wines have proliferated. Not because they were a style, but because they had a purpose. They have developed a juiciness that combine the refreshment of white with the satisfaction of red. Many are in this category. Some are raised in wood like Radikon, La Stoppa and La Garagista, but others raised in clay like Vodopevic, Pheasants Tears and Iago.  

The disappointment here was not that Mr. Johnson didn't like orange wines. He gets to. But from this scholar and historian, we all expected a more thoughtful and researched statement and opinion.

Now we have another piece from him, in Decanter, where he seemed to suggest that natural wines were the wine equivalent of the Paleo Diet. In it he posed the question; 'Is "natural" a self-justifying word to cover any sort of accident?'

I think it's time for Mr. Johnson to take a break from garden writing for a minute to reconsider his words. Give us the courtesy of a more well-researched response instead of falling down the tweet drain --the second son of the blog--where unsupported feelings have become the norm. There are plenty of wines that are made like a military bed, tightened so extremely that an accident surely has happened. And yet it finds its way into a bottle. This statement is a little aggressive.

Then he dances with a lovely line that could have had some truth to it. "Wines like unmade beds are the In Thing." 

But what exactly does he mean?  What is his unmade bed and how tight does he like his sheets? Hospital corners? A little rumpled just enough to remember the night of passion?  Give us a little there, there. 

I kind of liked his unmade bed analogy.  Today, there are indeed too many wines, "like unmade beds." These to me are unfinished, quick to the bottle before the flavors and aromas have evolved to stability. Many are being supported mostly by newcomers to wine who find these wines fresh. This is a state of infatuation that can stay with the drinker for I'd say, up to ten years. And to some sommeliers who are following trends it could be an 'In Thing.' And my sympathies are with him if he has fallen victim to such a wine director. But there is life beyond the bottled wine still in progress, and surely he's had these --because they are some of today's most celebrated wines, but failed to identify them.

However, when he suggests the word natural is a coverup tactic, is he actually suggesting that  Burgundy, Bordeaux, Brunello, Barolo, made according to the spec sheet, still with ridiculous amounts of very bad and sour wood taint, too much acrid So2 addition, tannin addition and sloppy acidification, not to say anything about chemical agriculture, are superior? Do those get pass? Or is it that Mr. Johnson knows how to avoid those wines yet does not yet know how to navigate the world of natural?  In that case he should subscribe to my newsletter. 

The most stupefying sentiment, however, was tucked into his penultimate graf. 

The sales pitch for natural wine usually tells you that conventional wines contain a lot of non-grape juice gunk. Fish guts: horror. Egg whites: poison. Sulphites: allergens. Colouring: dishonest. Sugar: cheating.

There seems to be a high ground – is it moral, ethical, fashionable, hygienic? – shared by ‘naturalists’ and vegans. Then again, if you read the list of preservatives and allergens on any supermarket packet, you may want to give up eating altogether.

Mr. Johnson fails to acknowledge the 72+ which sail beyond chaptalization and fining... and coloring? Really Mr. J, do you want your claret colored? And by the way, who is giving this so-called sales pitch?  He also ---and surely he knows better--understands that most of todays wines are not made by commonsense and vintage, but by marketer and machine. And I don't know about you, but I don't eat processed food with anything artificial in it.

Look: Most of us have come to natural wine because the other seems dead. Lifeless. Natural wine, made with grape alone from healthy soil---the good ones, and there are many--make us happy.

Many of us choose our food the way we choose our wine and choose our wine the way we choose our food. Meaning any list of ingredients that I don't want to ingest, whether in cookies or in wine, I don't. Real food alone. Yes. Grape alone. A little So2 perhaps. Minimum intervention. Yes.

These wines mesh with our philosophy AND excite our senses. This is not the 'in thing,' this is not a fad. This is the future.

However, buried in the ill-edited piece is the nut of the piece: change natural wine to alternative wine.

Hmm...would that be like alternative fact?

Nope. That won't work. To those of us who only drink natural and natural enough, there's nothing alternative about it. Those wines? They're the real thing.