The Red Mountain AVA

We make no secret about our fondness for Washington State wines.  That's been the case since the late '80s when Washington seemed to come of age over night as a fine wine venue.  Columbia Valley was hailed as Washington's Napa Valley and everything coming out of there seemed to validate the claim.  

At the time we didn't know anything about Washington except that the wine country was on the other side of the mountains from the great coastal urban centers.  The wine country was, in fact, very desert-like compared to the coast but more importantly, it was at the same latitude as Bordeaux and Burgundy, the two finest wine appellations in the world.  That latitude meant a longer growing season with two more hours of sun daily than what California could get.  The diurnal effect of warm days and cool nights meant a balance of acidity and sugars in grapes resulting in rich ripe wine flavors.  Columbia Valley's nutrient poor sandy loam and volcanic soils were also ideal for wine grapes, forcing tap roots deeper for sustenance, taking up mineral trace elements in the process. 

What we didn't know at the time was just how large the Columbia Valley American Viticultural Area (AVA) is.   The Columbia Valley AVA encompasses eleven million acres including a border overlap into Oregon.  Fifty thousand acres are currently in vines and 99% of Washington's wine production calls Columbia Valley home.  Basically Columbia Valley is Washington State in wine terms.

The AVA was created in 1984 at the insistence of Chateau Saint Michelle Winery just as they were discovering the potential quality of their product.  By the time we discovered the greatness of Washington in the late 80s one carveout had already happened.  That was the Yakima Valley AVA.  Since then eight others have been legislated including Red Mountain which was carved out of Yakima in 2001.  

The Red Mountain AVA is the smallest fine wine district in the state.  It encompasses 4,000 acres with 2,000 currently in vines.  It is Cabernet Sauvignon-focused with fifteen wineries currently making award winning wines there.  Hedges Family Estate and Kiona Vineyards are a couple Red Mountain properties that we tasted decades ago and still remember today.  Their hedonistic Cabs are powerful and complex and yet, elegant.  

Our current favorite Washington State winery is Matthews in Walla Walla.  We think their wines are as good as anything coming out of Washington.  At their website matthewswinery.com they are proudly announcing their new Red Mountain wines.  And we can hardly wait.

Barbera

We've been having a lot of fun the last couple years selling all kinds of Italian Barberas here at the store.  Usually our sales have been everyday-priced lighter reds that are frankly perfect for most of our dinner table needs.  Wines like these show cherry, blueberry and raspberry fruit flavors and when put in oak, vanilla and additional complexity.  So why buy inferior bargain Pinot Noir when you could have something as fine, flavorful and food-friendly as Italian Barbera?

While the cheap stuff is nice, should you want to spend twenty or thirty dollars on your dinner red, Barbera offers a sophisticated alternative to Nebbiolo, the great wine of Italy.   While young Nebbiolo can be closed and hard as nails, Barbera shows a soft body with ample accessible fruit.  Again, perfect for most of our dinnertime needs.

Barbera d'Asti is the best known and best quality Barbera in the marketplace.  Asti is located just south and east of the center of the esteemed Piedmont wine appellation in northwest Italy.  The Nizza DOCG appellation lies entirely within the Asti borders and is home to the very finest Barberas.  Nizza boasts century old vines offering intense cherry and blackberry fruit.  Some examples from this region may be as hard and closed as young Nebbiolo so if you choose one of these, have your decanter handy.

Ampelographers are the scientists who study grapevines.  They have determined the Barbera grape had its origins in the nearby Monferrato region.  The earliest written Barbera documentation is from around 1250 but using DNA science, the ampelographers peg its origins back to the seventh century.  It is believed to have a common ancestor with the Cotes du Rhone grape, Mourvedre.

Piedmont is the finest wine appellation in Italy and the Nebbiolo-based Barolos and Barbarescos can command prices beyond most of our pocketbooks.  That is where Barbera comes into play.  It is a vigorous and prolific vine that does well wherever planted.  Nebbiolo is difficult and requires the best vineyard locations.  Barbera is planted everywhere else.  While Nebbiolo sales pay the bills, for those working in the Piemontese wine trade, it's Barbera that is the popular favorite.  

And by the way, if you enjoy the fresh fruity zing that Italian reds show so well, you're probably tasting an incognito Barbera component in the blend. 

How popular is Barbera?  Of the historic Italian wine grapes it ranks third in plantings behind Sangiovese and Montepulciano.  In Piedmont half of all vineyard plantings are Barbera.  In its entirety Italy has fifty thousand acres in Barbera.

The Girard Winery

At the urging of the earnest young salesman, we brought in what were offered to us as the best red and white wine from Girard Winery of Napa Valley.  The red is their Flagship Meritage blend, Artistry; the white is Sauvignon Blanc.  Both carry the Napa Valley appellation.

One of the initial questions we always ask when purchasing California wines is, Who owns them?  Conglomerates and mass marketers who paint by the numbers scare us.  We prefer to put our faith in the hands of a talented winemaker who doesn't unduly manipulate the fruit of a vineyard.  The Paint By The Numbers set will smooth out all of the rough edges and amend the product to fit a form thereby ensuring whatever baby is there, it will go out with the bath water.  The latter hopefully retains the baby and more to make a product of distinction.   

Girard Winery was established in 1974 with vineyards in Oakville and Yountville.  A winery was built in 1980.  The winery namesake, Steve Girard, operated the winery until selling it to Leslie Rudd of Rudd Oakville Estate in the mid 90's.  Girard then opened Benton-Lane Winery in Oregon, eventually selling that to industry giant, Augustin Huneeus.  From our limited research, Rudd apparently did little with the Girard property.

After several years of inactivity, in 2000 the Girard Winery name was sold to long time Napa wine industry insiders Michael Stewart, Chuck Sweeney and Pat Roney.  Stewart and Sweeney were the owners of Vine Cliff Winery; Roney had several ongoing ventures including a custom crush facility called "Bin to Bottle."  Together they formed the company Vintage Wine Estates and accumulated a stable of wineries to include Clos Pegas, Cosentino, Delectus and Swanson.   

Currently the Girard Winery is located in Calistoga in northern Napa between the Vaca and Mayacamas Mountain ranges.  They have a state-of-the-art winery there that emphasizes balance in their winemaking.  Artistry is made from a five acre plot adjacent to Clos Pegas.

Pinot Noir Rose

This post was intended to be a pitch for the Les Boursicottes Sancerre Rose which happens to be 100% Pinot Noir.  It is imported by the remarkable value-oriented Scoperta Importing Company of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  Much of their portfolio is affordable to most of us.  Les Boursicottes, however, is pricey.  Internet pricing indicates it may be a thirty dollar suggested retail, but our current 2019 vintage needs to go, so it's half of that now.

Scoperta, being a smaller importer, doesn't offer scads of information about their wines so we decided to pivot to a post about Pinot Noir Rose in general, only to learn there isn't much information about roses...period.  Wine Folly does a pretty good job of assigning flavor profiles to different varietal roses but that isn't what we wanted.  We wanted to know what makes Pinot Noir Roses, in particular, so good.

Pinot Noir is the great red grape of the world.  Cabernet Sauvignon is more widely planted and seems to do well in most places, as long as it's not to warm; but Pinot Noir at its best is a truly transcendent experience.  Unfortunately that kind of experience seems to be limited to Burgundy, France and maybe just a couple other places.  In other words, ninety percent of them are disappointing.  So if you want to hedge your shopping bets, get a Cabernet.

But why are Pinot Roses so good?  Here I have to confess - I don't know.  I cut cheese for a living so that one's beyond my pay grade.  But the romantic side of me wants to believe there is something magical about the Pinot grape.  As we said, the grape only does well in a few locations around the world, yet Pinot Roses seem to always overperform.  What gives?

We think we have two explanations.  

The dark and dirty secret about Pinot Noir in the marketplace is that a whole lot of it is rarely the single varietal Pinot Noir wine the consumer thinks it is.  Most California producers know their pinot juice is weak so they blend it with Syrah or something else to achieve fullness.  That way they can make a pretty good red wine.  It's just not Pinot Noir.  Could some of the Pinot Roses out there be similarly blended to achieve a fullness that mediocre pinot lacks?

Secondly, when good ethical producers have a bad vintage, they punt and turn that juice into rose.  So if the terroir that produces reliably good Pinot Noir as a rule is now turned into rose then it follows that that rose would also be superior.  Or something like that.

So have we achieved anything here?  Probably not.  But if you want to try some good rose, try a pinot.  And if you need a good dinner wine, try the Les Boursicottes.

Delft Blue Cheese

Stilton, Roquefort, Gorgonzola.  We've sold 'em all.  Delft is new here.  It's probably more similar to the softer Danish types or real Italian Gorgonzola.  In any event, it's definitely not a crumbler.  

Delft is a rich and creamy cow's milk cheese that is absolutely charming on the palate.  It has a mellow fat buttery taste with underlying sweetness.  There is no saltiness at all to this cheese and coorespondingly, no aggressive wang at the end.  Just a nice clean finish with that same lingering sweetness.  

Visually this cheese appears just like it tastes.  It has a milky whiteness with spare attractive blue veins.  The cheese is firm enough to slice as long as your slice is moderate considering its texture.  Delft is also supposed to be meltable if desired.

Now here's the backstory: Delft is a town on the Schie River in South Holland between Rotterdam and Den Hague.  It is the historic home of the artist Vermeer and the home of Delftware, tin-glazed earthenware, aka Blue de Graven.  

Delftware was a local response to the extreme popularity of Chinese porcelain in the 16th century.  To this day the Delftware Chinese knockoff continues to sell both to new Dutch tourists and to its worldwide fan base.  

What does this have to do with the cheese?  Color-wise the cheese bears a definite resemblance to the earthenware that makes you think there is a connection.  Could Delft Blue Cheese be a knockoff of the dishes?

Wine Crime is Soaring...

Our post title is a shortened version of the title of an article from the February 27th edition of The Guardian online.  The whole article is interesting and entertaining and well worth a look-see, but one point made there made me think this post might be worthwhile.  

The article says, "Today it is estimated that as much as 25% of all wine in the world is not as described."  It is either adulterated, mis-blended or misrepresented on the label.  

When I read this, I recoiled in horror.  WTF!  This is my industry and it's unethical to the tune of 25%?  This is an outrage!  Then, after a little thoughtful introspection, my Claude Rains/Inspector Renault Casablanca catharsis kicked in.  Should we be "shocked" to find gambling/corruption going on here?  Of course not.  The scandals in wine industry history are legion.  If the truth be known, 25% is probably conservative.

Before we go any further, here are two points for clarification:

1. The Guardian article was about real corruption.  It cited a Yellow Tail wine scandal in England last year that involved counterfeit product on store shelves.  That is serious corruption.  

2.  Our beef is more nuanced.  It concerns deliberately loose wine laws that are meant to protect the industry when bad vintages, forest fires, earthquakes and other acts of God occur.  While that intention is good, it makes them vulnerable to exploitation by companies that want to increase their bottom line.  What if those intentions aren't harmless opportunities to increase profitability but rather a deliberate intention to deceive the public?  Is that serious corruption?

Yellow Tail isn't the product of some bucolic, back country Aussie vineyard as it's advertising implies.  It is sourced from some of the cheapest excess bulk juice inventory they can find.  So by misleading the public this way is Yellow Tail a fraud?  It depends.  According to Australian wine law if the label says it is Australian wine all of it must be sourced from that continent.  So to the best of our knowledge, Yellow Tail is legitimate in that respect.  Not so in our domestic wine law where our appellation system declares only 75% of the contents must be from that place.  

Recently we learned one of the premier wine companies of California, known for marketing higher priced wines, was importing a lot of Chilean juice.  In fact, many large California companies do the same thing.  Some own properties down there for that very reason.  It is an ongoing practice.  For many mega-producers fully 25% of  their California-labeled product may not be California wine at all.  Yet the practice is legal and the marketing apparatus will tout it as fine California wine.

Fess Parker

It occurs to me that I am old.  Most of you probably have never heard of the actor Fess Parker, or if you have, you have relegated him to the annuls of the bygone era in which he performed.  In other words, he was someone your grandparents remember.

Or maybe you've heard of Fess Parker Winery & Vineyard but never gave a thought to the historic figure whose name now lives on in this industry.

Fess Parker was huge in the entertainment culture of fifty years ago.  He starred in Disney pictures in the fifties and early sixties before becoming TV's Daniel Boone through most of that decade.  He was a larger than life Texan and a cinematic hero, at least for kids growing up at the time. 

Parker left acting in the early seventies, went into real estate and did well.  In 1988 he purchased the 714 acre Foxen Canyon Ranch in the Los Olivos District within the larger Santa Ynez Valley AVA in Santa Barbara County.  He began planting Riesling grapes in '89 and poured his first wines two years later.

Today Fess Parker Winery & Vineyards has 110 acres planted in Riesling, Syrah and Viognier.  They also market a Napa Cabernet and a Pinot Noir sourced from nearby Santa Rita Hills and Santa Maria Valley.  In total 75% of Parker wines are sourced from Santa Barbara County vineyards including Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that go into a sparkler.  One-third of Parker production over all is varietal Pinot Noir, 30% is Chardonnay, 20% is Syrah and 10% is Riesling.

And that brings us to the Fess Parker Riesling on our shelves right now.  We bought it initially three months ago and blew through it in no time.  It didn't hurt that we tasted it out here in the store.  Everyone loved it.  

Considering the lack of popularity for Riesling in general, we think the wine's reception was due to its inviting style.  It was different.  Its slightly off-dry style is prefaced with fresh friendly floral aromas leading into a bounty of fruity notes (with lychee nuts!).  We can't help but think some of their Viognier juice found its way into the blend.  And it doesn't hurt that its pricing is quite friendly too.