Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog

Wet Paint & Wine

It's important for me to note that I endorse THIS in no way. THIS only minimizes the serious nature of wine and wine drinking. In fact, THIS purports to be humor, but in reality THIS is just another blow to the industry when the industry needs nothing like THIS.

Is THIS really what people want to read?

Only a few years ago THIS sort of thing would never fly. THIS would have been condemned. THIS really is harmful to a serious pasttime.

Again, I don't recommend you read THIS.

It's THIS I'm talking about.

The Bitch in the Black Dress

You can usually see her coming a mile away, leaving a wake of gawkers behind her. All gussied up in that sleekly cut black dress. Strutting and strolling like she knows her name and embraces it with delight.

She's the one that knocks you off your feet; stops you in your tracks with her dimensions, attitude, grace and come-hither look that seems to be tattooed across her brow and body.

There are certain wines that embody the nature of The Bitch in Black, a very specific wine description that was passed on to me some time ago by a friend who used it when the wine that just passed his lips was so compelling, so head and shoulders above the rest, so seemingly untouchable by nearby bottles and such that it forced him follow the bottled where ever it was carried. He would stand with glass in hand and announce, "Damn, this is The Bitch in Black," then roll his eyes back in to his head and find any way to get his glass full. Then he'd go on to explain the analogy to anyone who would listen as he pursued more of the wine.

A little crass, yes. A little demeaning to women in black, yes. But, since I heard the term and its explanation, it has ceased to reference the opposite sex, in any form of dress, for me.

Well, the Bitch in the Black dress returned late yesterday afternoon when I opened a bottle of 2006 Santa Barbara Syrah. This wine strutted its way past any CA Syrah I think I have ever tasted. I can't name the name of the producer only because I don't review wines here for a number of good reasons. That said, this is the first time in a very long time that the girl returned to my world in all her glory.

Funny thing is, the way my friend originally described the Bitch in the Black Dress really doesn't make me want to spend time with her. I really just want to watch her. I want to watch her effect on people, for entertainments sake. But this wine....This 2006 Santa Barbara Syrah, I want to spend time with. LOTS of time.

So, I need a new term don't I! I need a term that describes that woman that knocks me back on my heels, stuns me, and makes me want to spend as much time with her as possible. This girl is creamy like wet velvet when you rub up against her. She a complex soul that has the kind of depth that doesn't seem to have a floor. She's accessible, but you know the she's gonna get a lot better if you just pay a little attention to her and spend time with let her and let her develop and cultivate herself on her own terms. This is danger in its best form.

I need to find a new term. I need to find more of this wine and I need to spend more time with this girl.

A Melancholy Detachment

A melancholy detachment

A state of bemusement brought on by feelings of bliss

An internal debate between envy and happiness

A sadness provoked by missed opportunity

A state of barely composed elation that borders on pride-inspired excitement.

It has been a while since I spent time thinking how wine can help induce or maintain these and other emotional states. But it can.

Surely it's the effects of the alcohol in the wine and not the wine itself that lets us feel more of what we are feeling, which means cheap vodka or expensive bourbon will do the trick just as well. But, personally, I like to deny this reality and let myself confess that wine has the power to temper the ordinary and uplift our more unusual and memorable states of mind—simply because it's wine.

I think I read somewhere that drinking alone is one of the signs of an alcoholic. I tend to think that drinking alone is probably also one of the signs of a healthy desire to embrace one's state of mind. Further to that point, drinking wine alone is probably a safer way of tightening one's embrace around their state of mind. However, jumping into such an embrace straight away with bourbon, rum, cheap vodka or even gin is more likely to cause one to squeeze the life out of the moment too quickly.

But again we are talking about alcohol, aren't we.

The thing about wine is that while it is alcohol, in part, it's just not all that much alcohol. Because of its relatively low dosage, it allows a person in the midst of heightened self contemplation to slip more slowly into themselves. Vodka, taken at the same rate, leads to a careening tumble into misshapen thoughts. That's no good.

Last night I sipped on a well preserved 1985 Zinfandel that probably would have offended lots of drinkers. It was dry, leathery, but maintained a nice mix of porty blackberry and herbs from entry to finish. It had that under-ripe rhubarby quality that I like. It was 13% alcohol. I sipped on it.

By the time I went climbed the stairs to go to bed I had just finished a nice, long discussion with myself that brought only a few nuggets of clarity. But nuggets of clarity they were. Nuggets of clarity that imposed upon me a sense of quiet elation that I don't think would have emerged without the help of an old, dry, rhubarby Zinfandel.

So, at the risk of offending those who write lists of things that make us fear imbibing alone, let me suggest that a little alcohol taken alone in quiet solitude can be a pretty good thing.

Any Port in a (economic) Storm

I've been thinking about THIS POST from Steve Bachmann's "Wine Collector" blog since it hit. Maybe anyone else with a retirement portfolio or investments should also.

Like most folks in their 40s, I've got IRAs, savings, investments, etc. The idea is to save up enough for when you retire so that you don't have to fight for a place on Van Ness Avenue where you can stand all day holding a sign that says, "Former PR Exec Down and Out...Any Amount will Help."

Well, recently I've started to think about just how big my own sign should be.

The volatility in the equities markets and the downturn in the housing market really bites. It bites into one's retirement plan in particular.

What Bachmann points out in his post, however, is that maybe wine is a relatively safer investment; safer particularly than stocks. The bottom line: While all the stock indexes have plummeted over the past 8-12 months, the value of collectible wine is still up 5.5% for 2008. A 5.5% gain in value for your investments in 2008 is looking pretty miraculous at this point.

What's interesting about fine wine as an investment is that it's not too difficult to learn the ins and outs. Certain wines, and there are relatively few, are the ones that tend to be collected, held and go up in value over time. Also, they are easy to procure either by buying futures before the wines are released or by finding them on the open market.

Bachmann lists four reasons why investing in wine is better than investing in stocks. Go read them. But one of these reasons, I think, is critical to the future:

"The aggregate supply of fine wine is relatively fixed as most of the greatest European producers have little room to plant additional vineyards.  The trends in global demand for fine wine, on the other hand, are fundamentally going up (broader wine consumption, wealth creation in emerging economies combined with treatment of fine wine as a luxury good, and the likelihood of continuing decreases in import duties in these countries)."

Of course, the validity of the above reasoning assumes we are not going into a multi-year, Depression Era-like global economic downturn. I think that's a pretty good assumption.

When I worked at Winebid.com in the late 90s I had a chance to meet a lot of serious collectors. I liked them. They were, on the whole, a somewhat odd, eclectic bunch who collected fine wines for a myriad of reasons. Few of them, as far as I could tell, had wine as the primary portion of their economic portfolios. But many of them were in fact collecting wine (and selling it) as strictly as an investment.

Then there were the flippers. These were the folks who found their way on to the Screaming Eagle, Grace Family, Bryant Family, Maya, and Harlan mailing lists. They'd put down the Winebid shipping address as the location to which their wines should be shipped when released. Their instructions were "put it up for auction upon release." They'd usually double their money.

These people eventually started taking a lot of crap from "authentic collectors" and "real wine lovers" who were pissed they could not get on these lists while the flippers did get the wine and just turned them over. They thought the flippers were uncouth gold diggers. I never had any problem with the Flippers. They always struck me as very entrepreneurial folks. I don't know the extent to which this still goes on because I've not followed the Cult Wine market that closely of late. But I suspect it does and if it does I can't see why anyone who can afford to be on the right lists wouldn't follow the same strategy.

However, flipping new releases isn't what Bachmann is talking about in his post. He's talking about a buy and hold strategy. And based on his stats and history, it appears to be a pretty good one.

The '79 Lives!!!

 

The '79 Lives!!!

...and with it, hope, maintaining its edge over despair!

The Care and Feeding of Dashed Hopes

The disappointment of imperfection and dashed hopes can be the worst kind, particularly when your expectations were set inappropriately high.

I'm not a big fan of dashed hopes and don't often take take it well when shown this kind of disappointment can occur.

Sometimes it happens in life, sometimes in wine. Among the most recent set of dashed hopes I've had to cope with was the disintegration of a set of wines I expected to find great joy from, but discovered, upon opening them, that they had died. And it didn't look like a good death they suffered.

Opening my 1976, 1977 and 1978 Stony Hill Chardonnay I had great hopes for that caramelized, apricot, nutty character I love so much in old white wine. To look at them they seemed fine. Golden colored, crystal clear. Magnificent looking 30 year old CA Chard.

They were undrinkable.

I don't know if I killed them or not, but I'm going assume just for the sake of my own peace of mind that I didn't (though it is a real possibility). They had been kept in a friend's temperature controlled, bonded garage for about 8 years since they were purchased at auction. It is possible that sustained heat may have overtaken their place of rest. Maybe it was just their natural reaction to my own neglect of their care and feeding. I'd not looked at them since I purchased them and placed them in storage.

Their nose was sour, acrid and oxidized in the extreme. I did sip each one, but really only out of sympathy and because they deserved and earned it.

I had planned to spend a great deal of time with these friends. I wanted to look at them, spend time with their aromas, dissect the vintage variation, and slowly down them in moderation while thinking back on 1976, 1977 and 1978. Their condition made it nearly impossible for me to extract a single memory of those years.  I think disappointment distracts the memory.

I really don't know if I want to invest the time and energy into these kind of relationships in the future. It's not the first time I've been disappointed and suffered though dashed expectations. But the more it happens the less willing I am to invest the remaining cache of hope that's still above water. It seems easier to invest in short term frolics where no expectations is the name of the game.

I'm tempted to pull out the remaining 25 or so Stony Hills in the collection and start uncorking. I just can't bring myself to do it right now. I want the disappointment to dissipate first.

How Average is California Sauvignon Blanc?

Just how average (or below average) is California Sauvignon Blanc?

I was thinking about this today when I opened what turned out to be a really beautiful SB from Dry Creek Valley. Nice grassy component, citrus, pear, slightest hint of melon, zero wood, great backbone. I loved it.

Now there was a time when Dry Creek Valley in Northern Sonoma was considered a great place to plant Sauvignon Blanc. But you don't hear that much anymore. In fact, it seems that Lake County is the only place really trying to make a reputation on the grape.

But I got curious. How are California's SB's ranked and rated? Wine Spectator has a very searchable database of scores. So I went there. I wanted to know what percent of CA Sauvignon Blancs scored 90 points or above and what percent scored less than 80 points.

I was kind of shocked. The percentage of California SBs over 90 points seemed very low. So I started looking at the percentage of SBs from a couple different CA appellations that scored 90 points or above. Then I started looking at non-California SBs that scored 90 or above. Then I started looking at all white wines reviewed and all red wines reviewed and all wines in the Wine Spectator database that were scored 90 points or above. In every case I stuck to the 2005-2007 vintages.

It doesn't look to me like the Wine Spectator is very impressed with CA Sauvignon Blancs. In fact, it doesn't look to me like the Wine Spectator magazine is too impressed with the Sauvignon Blanc grape in general. It turns out that no varietally labeled Sauvignon Blanc produced anywhere in the world from the 2005-2007 received more than 93 points from the Wine Spectator. And there were only 4 such wines out of the 1,121 that were reviewed.

Of all Sauvignon Blancs rated by the Wine Spectator from these three vintages only 9% received 90 Points or above.

In the August 31 issue of the Wine Spectator there was an article on California Sauvignon Blanc. I went to it to figure out what the magazine thought good California Sauvignon Blanc tasted like:

"The best examples are crisp and refreshing, with a fragrant profile and juicy fruit flavors."

I can't argue with this description of what the best California Sauvignon Blancs should taste like. You can't argue taste. But there's no question that The Wine Spectator finds Sauvignon Blanc in general lacking compared to all other white wines and California Sauvignon Blanc in particular to be lacking by comparison to all other wines.

Interestingly, if you look at reviews of Sauvignon Blanc from The Wine Enthusiast from the same vintages we see a kinder appreciation for the varietal. 18% of California Sauvignon Blancs receive 90 points or better.

I'll Have My Booze Just In Case

I've thought a little bit about natural disasters. Out here in CA it's all about the big earthquake. I have a pretty substantial emergency kit stocked with cloths, food, batteries, radios, water, etc. But what I forgot to put in there is booze.

These people were not as delinquent as I:

It appears that the Hurricane Gustav spurred lots of people to stock up on booze.

Why?

Is it a matter of not wanting to ride out the storm sober? Maybe they figure that so many stores will be knocked out of commission in a Hurricane they may end up with no access to alcohol for a while. (Is that a bad thing?) Or maybe they figure water won't be potable and you can count on alcohol not being tainted. I'm not sure what it is.

But it is kind of funny.

I've got about  20 cases of wine here in the house in Glen Ellen, stashed in various places. I figure as long as my roof or walls don't  come down and fire doesn't break out during an earthquake my stash is relatively safe. It's all fairly close to ground or pretty darn secure. So, I'm safe if the big one hits. I'll have my booze.

But just to be safe, I'm putting a case of that wine in my Earthquake Emergency Stash. I feel better already.

A Moral Failure

I'm at a loss to understand how one can commit the moral failure of demanding that while a 20 year old be allowed (encouraged!) to stand toe to toe with another man and attempt to kill him for his country, he not be allowed to sip Pinot Nor.

This is the position of MADD, AKA "Morally Absent Day after Day" "Mothers Against Drunk Driving".

It's about time: A group of college presidents are asking that our nation re-evaluate our 21 year-old drinking age. I'm not sure exactly what motivates them to take this brave, but nearly suicidal, position. However, I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the fact that in addition to trying to control binge drinking on campus, they are also required to police binge drinkers on campus. If common sense ruled, these colleges would have more time to spend explaining why binge drinking isn't such a great idea.

I have to be honest, my position on the drinking age is affected not one iota by fears that if it is lowered to where it should be, 18 years old, more drinkers might die in car accident. It doesn't even enter my equation. I'm much more concerned that the 21 year-old drinking age probably does more to extend a childhood mentality among those that should be expected to act like adults.

See, here's the thing. If the 21 year-old drinking age reduces drunk driving, as MADD insists and some studies show, then wouldn't a 35 year-old drinking age reduce drunk driving even more? What in the world is stopping MADD from advocating a 35 year-old drinking age? What is it that makes an 18 year old too immature to be trusted with a Cabernet, but mature enough to shoot an Iraqi in the face with a large caliber side arm? I'm just not sure I can pinpoint that difference.

I wonder if Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD knows the answer to that question? She apparently is possessed of a great deal of information. Why just the other day she declared unequivocally about the colleges to which the brave administrators advocating discussion belong that, "It's very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses."

I certainly hope she's right.

John McCardell, a former president of Middlebury College in Vermont and a member of the college presidents calling themselves the Amethyst Group said, "It is a law (the 21 year old drinking age) that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory."

How is it that a group of 18, 19 and 20 year-olds could have so much more common sense than the president of MADD?

It strikes me that if we are really going to take MADD's advise and treat adults like children in the area of drinking alcohol, we really should be intellectually honest and go all the way by prohibiting anyone under 21 from entering the military, voting, or, when they break the law, trying them as adults. The 21 year-old drinking age is a moral failure by the United States. Not the only one, to be sure. But one that should be taken note of.

Gimme That Snickers Syrah!!

I hope I'll be forgiven, in this case, of trying to figure out what utility an "Electronic Tongue" able to identify a wine and it's chemical make up has for my own life and career. As it turns out, I can already identify what's in a wine pretty much by looking at the label on the wine. So what's in it for me, a lowly wine PR dude and wine drinker?

To be sure, I understand what the scientists find exciting about this and Dr.Ebeler from UC Davis states it nicely: "One of the most interesting aspects is the ability to predict sugar, acid and alcohol content using sensors that are not specifically sensitive to these components."

Further, I  understand what those 8 or 9 people in the world willing to pay a million dollars for an ancient bottle of wine see as this e-Nose's utility. And yes, it will be nice to have a simply,  cheap way to determine the identity of a wine (or its fraudulent nature) if you happen to trade in wines that tend to be counterfeited regularly.

But what about me? Will I need a portable e-Tongue in my life?

I'm not sure yet. I do know I would not want one if it could not use it to identify the different varieties in a blended wine. I had an email conversation with one of the e-Tongue project's researchers, Celiea Jimenez, to determine if the e-Tongue was capable of doing this. In short, they aren't sure. Damn!

So, while I can't quite find any particular utility for the e-Tongue as currently configured, that's not to say I'm some sort of Vinious Luddite. Because here's the devise I really want: A portable machine that can interpret a uniquely coded, e-mailable file that is a digital representation of the aroma of a specific wine and produce that wine's unique aroma for me to examine through my own nose. I want an e-Nose! And damn the consequences!!

What consequences? Well, first, consider the utility to someone like me. I estimate that over the last 20 years I've sent or arranged to be sent more than 3,000 bottles of wine out to writers and reporters and bloggers as media samples. That cost my clients a lot, it cost our planet a lot, and it's not fun to do as far as projects go. What if I could just email Robert Parker, Jim Laube, Eric Asimov, Tyler Colman, Dr. Debs, and others an electronic sample of my client's new wine??? They could sit at their desk and quickly evaluate the aromatic qualities not just of my clients' wines, but of hundreds of wines at a sitting.

And consider the marketing potential of an e-Nose. I imagine the same e-Nose Aroma Synthesizer sitting in grocery stores across the country (except in TN) where customers choose the wine they are considering purchasing, pushing a button, then pushing their nose into a tube to inhale the glorious aromas of a 2007 New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc ("Mmmmm Gooseberry and Cat Pee!!!!", said the shopper.).

The problem, or consequences, of course is that easy and cheap delivery of aroma would lead to the necessity felt by many marketers and producers to exaggerate their product's aroma...to make it stand out beyond the other typical wines that consumers would inevitably, once they start sniffing synthetic aromas 20 at a time, come to find incredibly similar.

This compulsion to stand out would inevitably lead producers to offer "Chocolate Merlot", Cranberry Chardonnay, "Calvin Klein Cabernet" and "Snickers Syrah". And is that so bad?