In Vitis Veritas: Wine, Wisdom & Awakening

A few weeks ago, on November 11, The Whole 9 hosted a wine tasting in their fabulous and multidimensional art gallery in Culver City. The theme of the tasting was ‘Divas that Drink,’ and the powers that be (those powers being Lisa and Heidi, of course) invited me to help select a few tasty libations made exclusively by women winemakers and come up to the gallery to pour and talk and sip. Naturally, I jumped at the offer, and I’ve been itching to share the night with you since.

In attendance were both the expected (artists, photographers, wine professionals) and the unexpected (a golf instructor, a soon-to-be Christmas Elf from Santa’s Kingdom in the Westfield Mall). Indeed, the crowd was manifold, a collection of Whole 9 community members, gallery frequenters, wine enthusiasts, and those who came out in support of the ‘girl power’ theme of the tasting. The wines were equally diverse in terms of style and varietal, but in some ways the New World is a few steps ahead of the Old World of wine, so seeped in tradition it is, and there are many more female winemakers on the domestic front. For this reason we stuck primarily with American-made wines, with a dash of Spain for good measure: Domaine Carneros Brut, Carneros 2005 (Eileen Crane); Beringer Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Valley 2006 (Laurie Hook); Chateau St. Jean Pinot Noir, Sonoma County 2007 (Margo Van Staaveren); Bodegas Montecillo Crianza Tinto, Rioja, Spain 2005 (Maria Martinez-Sierra); and Covey Run Winemakers Collection Merlot, Columbia Valley, Washington 2004 (Kerry Norton).

The big hit of the night was unquestionably, and unsurprisingly, the Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Pinot Noir 2007. Margo Van Staaveren has been making wine and waves at St. Jean (rhymes with bean, by the way, not pawn!) for 25 + years and was named the Wine Enthusiast 2008 Winemaker of the Year—the first woman to be granted the coveted distinction, incidentally. The quality of Chateau St. Jean is no secret, and its widely distributed wines are some of the most well known in Sonoma County. Truthfully, I think all of this has very little to do with the fact that I opened significantly more bottles of the pinot noir than anything else that evening. Simply put, people love pinot. We are still mildly suffering from the cultural backlash following that movie—you know the one. And wine consumers are just like consumers of anything else; we like, wholeheartedly and quite sincerely, what’s trendy. That said, the Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Pinot Noir is perfectly gorgeous in the glass and on the nose, a glowing garnet smelling of leather, dried roses, and fresh raspberries. On the palate—dun dun dun duunnnn…it falls flat.

I don’t know what it is about this wine. It has all sorts of fabulous reviews from people much more important than I. It sells like you wouldn’t believe. But I imagine it’s like dating a model, or maybe Jessica Simpson: you feast your senses and you get all excited, thinking you’re in for a real treat, but pretty soon you realize there’s just not much going on. Similarly, I like Jessica Simpson; I think she probably has a good heart and I want to believe in her, the same way that every time I taste this wine, over multiple vintages, I feel a warm burst of hope when my nose comes near the glass, but by the time it gets to my mouth, it’s the same sad shake of the head.

The highlights of evening for me were the Domaine Carneros Brut 2005, an effervescent dream of a bakery full of fresh flowers, jasmine and orange blossom, big bowls of citrus scattered on the counters among the dough and the yeast. Domain Carneros also hosts one of my favorite tasting experiences of all time, by the by, and I highly recommend you stop there next time you are cruising though either Sonoma or Napa (as Carneros is so generously stretched in between the valleys, it is convenient for either). I was also a big fan of the Rioja, the Bodegas Montecillo Crianza Tinto 2005. The Crianza is the youngest of the Rioja wines (the word means ‘something raised or nursed’), and this $11 tempranillo is a vibrant, spicy treat full of ripe Bing cherries and vanilla bean. Maria Martinez-Sierra is known as a wildly charismatic yet shrewd businesswoman who occasionally invites the local Spanish growers over, gets them drunk, and then secures her grapes at the prices she wants to pay. If I said this didn’t make me like the wine just the teensiest bit more, I’d be lying. Girl power, baby.

Thank you to The Whole 9 for hosting such a fabulous event, and here’s to having another one soon.

Cheers.

As predicted, those old sinuses cleared up just in time for Friday night, and after a day of light chores and a long lunch, we decided to stay home and keep it simple. See, board games and wine has got to be one of my favorite evening activities ever. Last night, the custom came to Los Angeles with homemade pizza, our good friends Tim and Megan, and a friendly game of Cranium.

I topped the pizza, and Tim had already decanted the zin by the time it came out of the oven. Those who know me already know how I feel about pizza and zinfandel—suffice it to say that I would be pleased if that was the only thing served at my wedding some day—and as the zin was tasty but nothing to write home about, I am going to breeze over this part of the evening and invite you to join us after the plates are cleared, the game is out, and the real star of the evening has arrived: the 2006 Nobility, the special treat from R.A. Harrison Family Cellars I mentioned last week, next to a pile of Point Reyes blue cheese.

R.A. Harrison Family Cellars is a small winery in Napa owned and operated by Roger Harrison, a.k.a. Mr Botrytis. The man has been on the team responsible for making the award winning Nightingale Sauternes-style dessert wine at Beringer Vineyards since 1983, and when it comes to noble rot, he know what he’s doing. In 2008, after 25 five years of working with botrytis cinera at Beringer, Roger branched out and opened his own winery to further his dream of making these top-quality, extremely rare dessert wines in the style of the infamous Chateau Y’Quem in Sauterne, France. The Nobility, presumably named after the noble rot that gives it its signature concentrated honeyed sweetness, is the winery’s premier wine. And it’s damn good.

Some things in life just go together. Wine and cheese, of course, is one such thing. I know I don’t need to preach this to an audience such as yourselves, but allow me to say one thing: if you’ve never had Sauternes or a Sauternes-style dessert wine with a funky blue cheese, you simple haven’t lived.

Made with 50% Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley and 50% Semillon from Sonoma County, the Nobility tastes just like the golden sun that graces both of the beautiful valleys. It is fresh honey electrified with dried apricots and lemon zest. The Point Reyes Blue fills your mouth with bitter, salty cream. The sweetness of the wine cuts the funk, and acidity wipes your palate clean. The experience is like being a child again, running barefoot through tall grass under a hot sun, chasing clouds right to the edge of the waterhole and launching in feet first, the stick of summer immediately disappearing even as you crawl out of the water, anxious to be hot again simply so that you can cool off one more time. A bite of blue cheese, a sip of Nobility. Your tongue begs you for more. You concede. Well, we did anyway. Time and time again. And at 14.4% alcohol and one bottle of red already down, our repeated concessions started to show in our rosy cheeks and our increasingly creative Cranium strategies. When we pulled the Copycat challenge and Megan started singing “I Will Always Love You” as an impersonation of Celine Dion—and I got it right—I knew we had another successful night of perfect pairings.

Cheers.

It’s been a big week. My past few months of relative unemployment—or low-employment, shall we say—has left my pockets tight but my schedule refreshingly loose, and this shift back into the land of alarm clocks and managers feels about as smooth as the Loma Prieta. This past weekend, with Monday looming ominously ahead as the beginning of my first real workweek in a while, I felt the need to both cut-loose and relax at the same time. So, I do the obvious: sneak away to the mountains with my pen and journal, two books, my boyfriend, and one outrageously good bottle of wine.

We arrived in Lake Arrowhead around 5pm just as the lowering sun began to cast golden streaks across the sky, mirroring precisely the shade of the turning fall leaves clinging precariously to the trees. The lake was on fire with reflected light as we pulled into Jensen’s to grab the bare necessities we didn’t bring from home: a fresh loaf of bread, some cheese, and half and half for our morning coffee. My father has a cabin tucked away in the trees in Arrowhead, and Tom and I are blessed to have access to the place as a little retreat, a quick two-hour drive from the beaches and the chaos of LA.

The cabin is built on a steep slope overlooking a small ravine with a running creek, and the back part of the porch floats about 200 feet in the air, eye level with the trees and the flying squirrels. Tom and I set up camp on padded Adirondack chairs overlooking the ravine, the severed stump of a tree that comes right up through the deck between us serving as a table. On a wooden cheese board, while I got the fire going, Tom set out big hunks of our French loaf, sliced Vermont sharp cheddar (my favorite), a small dish of olive oil with sea salt and rosemary, and some black currant jam. As the oblong shadows of the birches stretched long across the porch, I cracked the bottle and poured two purple glasses of the Sbragia Family Vineyard ‘Wall Vineyard’ Cabernet Sauvignon 2004.

This single-vineyard jewel hails from Mt. Veeder, the distinguished AVA (American Viticultural Area) within Napa Valley, up in the peaks of the Mayacamas Mountain Range that serves as a physical boundary between Sonoma and Napa Valleys. 2004 was the first year that veteran winemaker Ed Sbragia made wine for his family’s winery with the fruit of this remote vineyard owned by Duane Wall, and it’s no surprise that he got it right the first time around. Napa Valley mountain fruit is known for its structure, power, and sense of terrior, and the Sbragia ‘Wall Vineyard’ Cab is no exception.

Never has a wine more intensely mimicked my surroundings. Dense and dark, crème de cassis and cedar rose from the glass, and the heady oak from two years in French barrels matched the smell of wood embracing me here in this tree-house of a cabin. Black plum, currant, mint, and licorice wrapped their velvet fingers around me and Tom and I sat in silence, listening to the wind in the trees and the flutter of blue jay wings as we got lost in the wine. To me, the wine is a wine old man, his heavyset frame resting soundly in a worn leather armchair. He keeps a collection of cigars in a mahogany humidifier and regularly indulges, caressing the tobacco gently as he thoughtlessly swirls a 25-year single malt scotch in his right hand. Though his appearance implies he is no one to trifle with, his eyes are kind and his hands are warm. He is a man of letters, a generation of yore, and he doesn’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.

Our silence is eventually broken when halfway through the bottle, as the birds quiet and first stars begin to peak through what’s left of the crimson sky, Tom looks at me and says, quite seriously, “This wine is amazing. It’s…it’s God’s breast milk.” I crawl onto his lap and together we savor the end of a bottle for the books.

Cheers.

Big wines, big story.

.Secui duos.

Yes, I’m not sure ‘BIG’ is necessarily the most appropriate term for the bottle of Falesco Montiano, Montefiascone, Lazio 2001. It’s more like cowshed, wet newspapers, and my big brother’s room in high school. I watch Fred and Brent look quizzically into their glasses, then at each other.

“Corked?” Fred asks.

Nose plunged deep into my glass, I dig for fruit. I take a sip, swirl it around a bit, swallow, and keep digging for fruit.

“Not sure,” Brent replies.

“Wow. That’s got to be a first.”

“Let’s just give it a minute, Fred.”

I need to make an admission here. Italian wines are hard for me. Not hard as in I don’t like them—because I do, very much so—but hard as in they were really the last wines I got around to exploring, and because they are so different from the bread and butter of my youth (namely California Cabernets and Zinfandels), I have a hard time distinguishing defects. More accurately, I sometimes look for flaws where none exist, sort of like my father. (Just kidding, Dad.)

Still, this self-knowledge aside, something is not quite right in this glass. The conspicuous lack of fruit and overwhelming smell of animals and shoe soles indicates… something. Hesitant to over-identify and start pointing fingers at flaws, I lean towards the relatively mild and nonviolent presence of Brettanomyces. Often called simply Brett, Brettanomyces is a yeast that can cause wine to spoil. While many winemakers and consumers consider low levels of Brett attractive in an earthy, barnyard, shabby-chic way, the yeast produces several compounds as it grows in wine that alter the character of the juice, and it is not always welcome. The aromas to look for when detecting Brett are classically referred to as ‘horse blanket,’ ‘manure,’ and ‘band-aid.’ Mmmm. Most often found in California Syrahs and French red Burgundies, I give my glass of Italian Merlot a dirty look for throwing me this curveball in front of a group of good-looking men.

“A little bit of Brett, I’d say.” This is my only comment before I decide to bite my tongue and wait it out.

Brent tells us a bit about the Falesco, which is 100% Merlot and one of the most well-known wines from Lazio, while I write the names of the wines next to a complex series of arrows drawn on a cocktail napkin in an attempt to remember what’s what. After a few minutes, we come back to the Montiano.

It has opened up.

Indeed, its true colors are shining through. The cowshed I feared was Brett has blossomed into the unmistakable aromas of everybody’s favorite flaw: The wine is corked. Our old friend TCA (trichloranisole) has reared its ugly head.

Present in about 10% of the world’s wine, TCA happens, and it’s never pretty. It is a compound that contaminates the cork of a bottle, and subsequently the wine inside it. While completely harmless, it is not pleasant and will suck the life out of the most vivacious of wines. The go-to tasting term you’ll want to put in that back pocket of yours for corked wine is ‘wet cardboard.’

The Montiano was mildly corked, but the aroma of a wet dog bed persevered, and we all had to accept it and hand over our glasses to Fred. Shaking off both the discomposure of my delayed diagnosis and my disappointment was not terribly difficult, because by the time I had scribbled “CORKED!” in my tasting journal with devil horns perched on top of the ‘O,’ Fred had placed a new bottle of the Falesco Montiano 2001 on the bar, yanked from his reserves in the back of the shop.

The glasses are switched and the new wine is poured.

There is a collective sigh of relief heard around the bar. The first note for this second-chance bottle in my tasting journals reads, “Yay!”

The wine is opaque and deep ruby in color, very little signs of age on the rims. The nose is softer than I expected but incredibly herbaceous, showing me violets, lavender, and a little bit of rosemary. Cooked tomatoes and black plums sweeten it up a bit, and a meaty, iron character pulled into play as we sat together. The alcohol is perfectly suited to the flavors at 13.5%. This wine is the modern Italian-American grandmother. Not quite traditional, though still markedly Italian, she uses 3rd generation recipes while watching Sex and the City on the small TV on her kitchen counter. She buys her chickens from the butcher whole, preferring to carve them up herself before wiping her hands on a dishtowel and pulling you up onto her lap to read Harry Potter. She’s a big personality but she’s easy to be around and reminds you of all the things you have been meaning to cook. As a cold-blooded descendent of Scottish-Irish folk and a girl who spent most of her childhood without grandparents, I’ve always wanting a sweet smelling, meat cleaver wielding, loud talking Italian grandmother to tell me sassy stories of yesteryear over a glass of grappa. So, I make a mental note to track down a few bottles of the Falesco Montiano—this savory Italian treat that’s BIG on character—for my personal collection.

It is at this time that I venture over to the Châteauneuf du Pape Rouge La Crau, Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe, Côtes du Rhône, France 1999, which has been patiently waiting by my left elbow. This wine, true to the Châteauneuf du Pape subdistrict of the Southern Rhône, is a red blend, Grenache-based with small amounts of Syrah and Mourvèdre. It is start bright in my glass, a brilliant, glowing, dark cherry red. I lean in for a sniff and a sip. Once again, I will quote my scribbled tasting note on this wine for you, as I think it most acutely demonstrates my first impression of this lovely Southern Rhône and how it relates to our ‘Size Matters’ theme: “This is big, as in AWESOME.”

Châteauneuf du Papes are about ‘terroir’ more so than many other wine regions. ‘Terroir’ is a French term that translates, essentially, to the special characteristics bestowed on a wine by the geography of the vineyard where the grapes were grown, including weather, soil, the slope of the land, growing techniques, and so on. Grenache is easily susceptible to oxidation and thus winemakers in Châteauneuf du Pape often avoid fermenting the wine in porous wooden barrels, opting instead for cement tanks. This lack of oak removes that man-imparted toasty character found in so many reds and really allows the fruit and the land to speak for themselves. It is liberated. The wooden shackles are removed and the wine dances naked through golden fields of mustard flowers, skipping and twirling in a primal expression of both self and oneness with the earth! It’s very exciting.

Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe is considered one of the top producers of Châteauneuf du Pape, and this wine delivers on that reputation. It is dense and earthy, with juicy, wild raspberries and a leathery, gamey quality. They tend to be higher in alcohol and this wine is right there with them at 14%, but it is balanced and the alcohol contributes to a full mouth-feel with a satiny texture that will make you swoon. It is a wine to be cellared, and the 1999 is drinking gorgeously with 10 years under her belt. She has blossomed into a young woman in loose linen riding bareback on a chestnut-colored horse, her long, flaxen hair tied back in a red silk scarf. All day long she has been picking wild berries and stashing them in a leather satchel tied round her neck and now, sun-kissed and windblown, she laughs out loud at the splendor of the countryside as she leads her mare to a nearby stream for a restorative drink of pure water. She is a nature goddess. I want to be her. Instead, and not too sadly, I just sit at the bar and let my mind wander, luxuriating in the moment, drinking it up, and thanking the wine gods for both Brent’s spontaneous appearance and for the fact that all true wine lovers share the same philosophy—that wine is meant to be shared.

I am going to leave this night here, readers. I don’t mean to diss the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars ‘Fey’ Cab 1999, as it was perfectly pleasant, but it’s like asking me to go to dinner with John Mayer when I’ve just climbed out of bed with Jeffrey Dean Morgan—I mean, maybe some other time, if it comes to that, but right now, it’s just not going to happen.

Cheers.

Welcome to my kitchen, my cellar, and my adventures in wine, food, and flavor. This blog is the synthesis of my greatest passions: wine, words, and exploration.

A very brilliant writer once told me, “Write what you know.” I know wine and I know food. Most importantly, I think, I know what it means to seek. I was trained as both a writer and a wine professional by some top dogs, and became a sommelier through the Master Court at The Culinary Institute of America in the lovely Napa Valley. My approach to wine, however, is often nontraditional. Like life, wine and food are about open-mindedness, experience, nourishment, and spice. I embrace a perspective that honors wine and food as an art, as a lifestyle, and as a cultural and spiritual medium through which we can explore what it means to be human and alive.

In Vitis Veritas is a small twist on the familiar Latin phrase in vino veritas, attributed to Pliny the Elder back in the 1st Century, meaning, “in wine is truth.” The accepted interpretation of the saying suggests that one tends to reveal their true feelings and secrets after a few too many swigs of the bottle. Well, I’m not going to contest that here (yet), but methinks Pliny may have had a deeper design in mind. Perhaps Pliny saw wine as the miraculous, naturally-occurring phenomenon that it is—a living, breathing, metamorphic substance that touches us on a very primal level as a reminder of a few of life’s simple truths: the best things come from the earth, there’s something out there for everyone, and love what you have while you have it, because we know all too well that everything, even the greatest wine, has a shelf-life. In vitis veritas.

Tonight, I’ll be toasting this new venture of ours with an old and very dear friend (and my last bottle of this favorite vintage of mine, I might add), the Stags’ Leap Winery 2002 Petite Syrah. This molten, inky jewel from my home turf of Napa, California, was the wine that stole my heart when I first started getting really serious about big reds, and like any first love, my affection for her lingers no matter where I may roam. She is a woman in a sapphire velvet dress, leaning lightly against a piano in a dark lounge, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling suggestively from one hand, a glass of blackberry brandy held to her lips by the other. She’s soft to the touch but don’t be fooled—she’s got a backbone of steel. Let me tell you, there is no one more enjoyable to party with.

Now, please, pour the wine already!
Cheers.

Allison