I finally got the opportunity to meet Rusty Gaffney, MD, aka “The Prince of Pinot” and creator of the Pinot Noir newsletter “Pinotphile” when I participated in the World of Pinot Noir event last week.  I have enjoyed reading his newsletter for quite some time.  It is well-written and entertaining and I find it particularly informative about what other winemakers are doing (I don’t get out much these days, so really don’t have much opportunity to find out for myself).  If you haven’t discovered this newsletter yet and love Pinot as much as I do, I would highly recommend it.  And, it just so happens that he wrote up a generous review of the wine we poured at the event—our 2005 Chula Vina Pinot Noir—click here to read what he says.

Now—Cima Collina available in many locations in Bay Area

Doug and I did a sales trip up to San Francisco yesterday and met with a few folks up there. We are now available at a number of online and brick-and-mortar sites in the area:

The Wine House, at 129 Carolina Street in SF, and also an online store.

The Jug Shop, Chuck Hayward has chosen to carry both our 2005 Chula Vina and Tondre Grapefield Pinot Noirs. 

Arlequin Wine Merchant, at 384 Hayes Street in Hayes Valley.  Ask Chris about our wine!

K&L Wine Merchants, in, I believe, all of their locations throughout California.

An Aside…..

We went to lunch at A16 in SF yesterday (wonderful lunch, by the way), and enjoyed the fact that they have, first of all, a tremendous by-the-glass list, and second of all, the current California by-the-glass wines are all made by female winemakers.  We happened to choose what turned out to be two astonishing white wines:  Viognier from Cold Heaven and a Malvasia from Palmina — both wineries I had never heard of before yesterday.  Both were the most well-crafted examples I’ve ever tasted from California….It is these kinds of inspriational and surprising experiences with wine that keep us all going and one of the main reasons I love this industry. Ooh La La!

 

Here’s an article of interest about Mary Ewing-Mulligan, the U.S.’s first “Master’s of Wine” honoree, and how she discusses the (novel) concept of trusting one’s own taste or palate.  In this article, she encourages people to try new wines and not stick with just the four top varietals (Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir or Merlot), and to try wines from various regions as well.  She says “Just remember, it is your mouth and only you know what tastes good to you.”

Having been in the wine industry long enough [to know better], ahem, I have had the opportunity to taste wines with thousands of people, and here’s one general thing I’ve noticed over the years:  people can get a little apprehensive and all hung-up about wine—they are unsure of their ability to “taste” it—“taste” being the ability to name the flavors and aromas that one notices in a wine.  People often want to know what I taste because I am the “professional”, ie I have the ability to “taste” and they don’t.  They seem to think that wine professionals are “super-tasters and -smellers” and the rest of the population is not as blessed.  I think all of that is just hogwash.

Here are some definitions for you:  hypergeusia is an enhanced ability to taste; hyperosphrenis is an acute sense of smell.  I’ve never met a person working in a winery who is hypergeusic or hyperosphrenic.  If winemakers had either of these conditions, they wouldn’t be winemakers because they couldn’t deal with all the smells in a winery.  At a given time a winery can smell like mold, rotten eggs, nail polish remover, sulfites.  Objectionable smells and (sometimes) flavors happen.  It’s life in a small, artisan winery or Gallo [RIP Ernest], or any of “Constellation’s” galaxies, and I can guarantee you that anyone with a hyper-sense of smell or taste would not be able to deal with it.  So if that’s the case, then where does that leave winemakers?  Winemakers—at least those I know—are pretty normal people with a passion for wine that has led them to taste more wine than most people.  The art of tasting wine simply comes with practice and exercise and a little study.  It is a continuum—once one walks the path of developing the senses, they will disover new vistas, and after that newer still.  Sappy, but true.  It takes practice to connect a smell or flavor with a name and then recall it.  It takes practice to single out aromas in a wine.  And like anything else, as one gets better at noticing the details, more details come along to be noticed…..

There you have it—my proclamation on the subject.  [You read it here first].  If you really want to develop your palate—get to work!  How hard can it be?  And in the meantime:  trust in your own palate, drink what you like, and have fun. 

I am busy finishing our 2006 Cedar Lane Sauvignon Blanc as I am hoping to bottle it next week, and have to squeeeeeze a weekend, semi-business trip in between now and then.  I’m excited about this sauvignon blanc—the whole winery is perfumed with it’s aroma.  More next week when we will (hopefully) be bottling this up!!

A Sea of Blue…..

Here is Cara putting the finishing touches on our 2005 Hilltop Ranch Pinot Noir.  We are excited about this wine as it is the first vintage from our own estate vineyard in Carmel Valley.  This will be a special package and will be released in November 2007…...

The finalists for the 2007 American Wine Blog Awards have been announced, and This Blog is a finalist in the “Best Winery Blog” category.  The other nominees (and some of my favorites, too) in this category are:  Mary Baker’s Dover Canyon Winery Blog, Pinotblogger with Josh at Capozzi, and Stormhoek from South Africa.  Thanks for the nomination and good luck to all.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog, if you have found it to be informative, entertaining or insightful, if you think this blog is worthy, click here to express yourself and vote.  While you’re at it, take some time to check out the other categories as well.  There are folks out there in the wine blogging world who are doing great things—find out what they are doing and vote for your favorite in each category.  Thank You.  Voting ends Friday, February 16th.

A very thoughtful relative gave us this wonderful book by Susan Sokol Blosser:  At Home in the Vineyard.  I’m glad she did.  I just finished reading it and highly recommend it if you are at all interested in the history of Oregon Pinot Noir, Sokol Blosser Winery, and/or women in the wine industry.  This is a story about two visionaries (Susan and her husband) with a little “hippie” influence in the 70’s who undertake the daunting tasks of planting and managing vineyards, starting a winery and raising a family in a sleepy, rural region in Oregon (now the world-famous “Dundee Hills”).  It is also a story about Susan’s own perserverance as a woman in a man’s world in the 1970’s and how she overcame the challenges of running a business in that environment. 

For me this book was really inspirational.  Learning about how hard Susan and Bill worked to bring their (then) naive and crazy dreams to life is a reminder that anything can happen with enough effort and resolve.  The folks who started the wine industry up in Oregon are all regarded as “Pinot” pioneers and leaders, but with a laid-back, Oregonian manner that has set a postive and intelligent precedent for the rest of us to follow.  Cheers to Oregon and to Susan Sokol Blosser for making her story available!

  You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…....John Lennon

Last week we had a fun “Wine-down Wednesday at Tarpy’s Roadhouse.  The place was packed and we saw many of our friends and we made many new ones as well.  Here are some photos:

 

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This past Wednesday, we had a dinner at Grasing’s.  Kurt Grasing did a wonderful job with the food, and we tasted for the first time our 2005 Tondre Grapefield Pinot Noir which was very well-received.  Look more for this wine in the near future…..

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Click here to read the Monterey County Weekly’s story on Cima Collina from their 2-01-2007 issue.

Fining is a process in winemaking often used to clarify wines or take unwanted materials in wine or juice out to alter the aroma, flavor, fermentability, bottle aging, color, biological or chemical stability.  The use of fining as a winemaking tool depends upon the wine, vintage, grape condition, the winery’s winemaking goals, and, of course, on the winemaker.  Various fining agents are used depending upon the type of wine and what the winemaker wants to achieve with it:  bentonite (a grey clay) is used for a variety of things from clarity in juice or wine to treating a heavily botritysed juice.  Most fining agents, though, are proteins of various molecular sizes and charges that are used to “pull out” a variety of solids or flavors.  These include:  gelatin, milk, PVPP, egg whites, or isinglass (a collagen derived from the swimbladders of sturgeon, which, as one might expect, smells quite pleasant), to name most of them.

Much Ado About Nothing?

In the wine drinking world, there does seem to be some confusion over fining as one will often see the phrase “unfined” or “unfined, unfiltered” on the back label, unintentionally implying that fining is somehow undesirable. At one time in recent history in the industry, it was a la mode to specify that a wine was not filtered or fined because these methods were said to be interventions that truly great wine did not require.  I think this attitude was mainly an overreaction to the overuse of fining in the industry’s infancy here in North America.  Nowadays, though, fining is looked upon as a sometimes necessary tool and one to be used with the lightest touch possible. 

To illustrate what fining can do to or for a wine, let me use this example:

In Shakespeare’s time—the Elizabethan era—actors in plays were male regardless of the characters they portrayed.  This meant that underneath the costume of the most mesmerizing and tragic Desdemona could be an uninteresting altogether forgettable lout of an actor, while the Fool in Lear, once stripped of his fool’s costume might altogether be sexy, leading man material (oh my).

Much the same it is with wine.  Fining, when it might be unnessary to begin with and is then performed carelessly, can strip a potentially beautiful wine into lackluster dumbness.  On the other hand, if a wine is cloudy, a little bitter or not as “focused” as one would like it to be, careful fining with the correct fining agent can remove these distracting “outer layers” from the character of the wine to expose brilliance and sophistication. 

Gotta Have Those Legs?

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk a little about wine tasting terms.  Here’s a question:  Have you ever been to a wine bar when someone says “Wow, this wine has long legs?” and think “what the heck does that mean?”  Here is how the term “legs” is defined in The Oxford Companion to Wine”, 2nd ed., pg 403:  “...tasting term and alternative name for the TEARS left on the inside of a glass by some wines.” The definition for tears, on page 694, is this :”...tasting term used to describe the behaviour of the surface liquid layer that is observable in a glass of relatively strong wine….These traces of what look like particularly viscous driplets are also sometimes called ‘legs’, and give some indication of a wine’s alcoholic strength.”

Meaningful Wine Descriptors?

So, legs can give some indication of the amount of alcohol in a wine and this may be of some interest if one is attempting to characterize a “big-bodied” Pinot or an “ultra-ripe” Zinfandel.  In the end, although this term is well-defined, it really is not important.  There are wine descriptors, however,  that are commonly used in modern wine criticism with seeming importance, but are ill-defined.  Here’s a sampling of these descriptors (I lifted these descriptors from two well-known, recently issued glossy wine magazines): ”muscular”, “fleshy”, “energetic”, “racy”, “big-boned”, “easygoing”, “lively”, “angular”, “flabby”, “full-bodied”, “lean”, “poised”, “plump”, “tense”, “mellow”, “supple”, “thin”, “graceful”.  These terms are kind of anthropomorphic, but the bigger point I want to make here is what do these terms mean and do they carry the same implication they would for humans?  For instance, if a woman in this day and age is called “big-boned” it is not necessarily a compliment and could be taken as an insult, but describing a wine as “big-boned” means what exactly? Is that a good or bad thing??  (I’m not exempt here, by the way.  I know I use the word “flabby” all the time to describe mostly chardonnay that is low in acidity.  Buy my “flabby” may not be someone else’s—is your wine flabbier than my wine? yuck).

Many folks—Ann Noble—most notably, have worked very hard over the years to standardize wine descriptors so that most in the industry know what it means when a taster describes a wine as offering “blackberry” flavors or “smoky” aromas.  That is a great beginning, but there are definitely other characters in wine that obviously need descriptors.  Should they be standardized?  Is it even possible to do that?  In the meantime, how does one interpret current wine criticism?

Ew, fungus!  The word might conjure itchy gym-worn feet or that black mold growing in the shower.  Or what about mildew, slimemolds, water molds, and all of those other nasty little things?  But you might also be surprised that the lowly term “fungus” includes tasty treats as well.

What is fungus, anyway?

Fungi are neither plant nor animal, reproduce by sporulation, and include the likes of molds & mildews, yeasts and mushrooms.  Fungi feed themselves by breaking down organic matter and in turn help other organisms to flourish by doing so.  For instance, many mushrooms are “wood rotters”, ie, they are often found growing on either dying or dead trees or branches and essentially break down the wood to make its components biologically available to other organisms.  Yeasts, too, serve a similar purpose:  they digest carbon-rich sugars and turn them ultimately into ethanol, carbon dioxide and heat through a number of very complicated biochemical processes.  With wine or beer, fortunately enough, we have learned how to harness the potential of yeasts and then to preserve the resulting product to create enjoyable and tasty beverages (in nature, if left on it’s own, ethanol would quickly break down, with the help of bacteria, into, among other things, acetic acid, aka “vinegar”.) 

Coincidentally, wild mushrooms and pinot noir for me are one of the highlights of winter.  Together they are classic pair made in the sitting room of the organoleptic matchmaker:  the earthiness of the mushroom and the richness it lends to a dish (cream of mushroom soup, beef stroganoff, mushroom & cheese crepes…..) is perfect for an earthy, fruity pinot with the acidity to balance all the flavors on the palate. 

For more information about various mushrooms and their properties visit:  MykoWeb

Click Here for more information about our January 31st winemaker’s—and wild mushroom—dinner at Grasing’s in Carmel