Vinography: a wine blog

I've referred to it in the past as "the beast." Possessing tannins that need to be tamed through intelligent winemaking, Petite Sirah can truly be a monster of a wine. One of the least-well-known red grape varieties that are commonly grown in California, it does not command legions of rabid followers like those who attended last week's ZAP Zinfandel festival, or the loyal drinkers of Cabernet, or even those who swear by Syrah, from which it takes its misleading name. In the right hands, however, Petite Sirah can be a stunning wine -- deep, resonant, and rich.

Petite Sirah has been grown in California for a long time, but apart from some limited success in the 1970s at the hands of Carl Doumani and Stags' Leap Winery, wines made exclusively from this grape variety never really earned the respect or attention of mainstream wine lovers in any significant way.

Yet producers all over the state continue, quietly, to make Petite Sirahs, and many have no trouble selling them at all to an equally quiet, but passionate following of wine lovers.

And occasionally these producers not so quietly serve up their wines with roast meats and chocolate for anyone who dares drink on the dark side, if you'll pardon the expression. The next opportunity you have to sample their wares will be Friday, February 17th, when the society of winegrowers and makers known as P.S. I Love You holds its annual tasting at The Rock Wall Wine Company in Alameda.

Go check it out. Who knows, perhaps you'll fall in love too. The event web site has a list of the wineries pouring this year as well as a list of the tasty treats that await you in addition to wine.

P.S. I Love You Dark and Delicious Tasting
February 17th, 2012
6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
The Rock Wall Wine Company
2301 Monarch Street
Alameda, CA 94501 (map)

Tickets are $63 per person and in the past they have sold out. If available, tickets will be sold at the door for more than that. They should be purchased in advance online.

My usual recommendations for such public tastings apply. Wear dark clothes; arrive well slept and with food in your stomach (or chow down when you first get there); drink lots of water; and SPIT if you want to actually learn anything and enjoy yourself. These are big wines, often high in alcohol.

Image © 2012 Leigh Beisch

Some of the big news last week in the wine world had to do with the shifting buying habits of our friends Down Under. Thanks to the vagaries of the international currency markets, the Australian Dollar has appreciated greatly against the Euro, and for the first time since the Euro was launched, stuff from Europe is pretty cheap in Australia.

So, what does a wine loving country like Australia (they consume about three times as much wine per capita as America) do when imports get cheap? They stop buying Australian wine all the time and they start buying imported wine.

Much was made in news reports of the fact that Australians can now buy Moet Chandon Champagne for less money than they'd spend on locally produced Chandon sparkling wine (made by the same company).

While this news probably went over like a wet blanket for most wine producers in Australia, it's hard to imagine how this could have been avoided. For decades, Australian's have largely been drinking locally produced wines, both as a measure of pride as well as economic convenience. No doubt the (well placed) pride will continue to drive sales, as will old habits that die hard, but Australians need to be forgiven if they have a bit of a kid-in-the-candy-store moment.

Frankly, this particular situation sheds some light on the possible future for America should the Euro Zone collapse, or any of its major wine producers drop the currency. Many people have speculated as to what the current European economic crisis means for wine, and for the time being, it simply means that business is tough for many European wine producers.

But should things get messy, we may see a lot more gleeful buying on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. As much as I will bite my lip at the turmoil that will doubtless ensue if Portugal, or Italy, or Greece are left to founder on their own, it's hard to imagine not getting a bit excited about the wines of these regions suddenly being available at much more reasonable prices thanks to currency differentials.

Now I'm no economist, so the last thing I'm doing here is making predictions, but I can definitely relate to my friends Down Under who are taking not a small amount of delight in the fact that their money goes a lot further in European wine than it used to.

Photo of Australian currency courtesy of BigStock.

As a wine reviewer who gets paid next to nothing for his work, I have the luxury of only reviewing wines that I think are worth writing about. I've got no deadlines, no quotas to fill, and no obligation to anyone. All of which means that it's always a great pleasure to say nice things about a wine or wines that I enjoy.

But this is perhaps the most pleasurable kind of review I write. The review of a winery whose wines I can safely say are all spectacularly good -- so good that I will simply buy any wine they make, no questions asked. I'm on very few winery mailing lists, but this is one of them.

In many ways Peay Vineyards represents the quintessential family-run, boutique California winery. Run by brothers Nick and Andy Peay and their winemaker Vanessa Wong (who happens to be Nick's wife) they perfectly embody the care, attention to detail, and vision that marks all the best small wineries in the world.

Coming upon the 100-year-old house perched high on a ridge above Sea Ranch in the far north of Sonoma County, with its vines cascading down the hillside towards the ocean four miles away, you might imagine that the two thirty-somethings sitting on the porch were the latest in a long line of farmers who had worked this land. But before Nick and Andy bought the 80-acre property in 1996, it merely bore the faint traces of a few fruit trees and sheep that once roamed its chilly pastures.

Nick Peay got the wine and food bug early, and after college he headed straight into a career in the wine industry, working first for Schramsberg and then La Jota, before heading for U.C. Davis where he got a degree in Enology and Viticulture. After graduating he moved on to work for Newton and Storrs, and began plotting to convince his brother Andy to help him start a winery one day.

Apparently all it took was a really nice bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a rack of lamb at the right moment, just as Andy Peay was rethinking his likely future as a Wall Street analyst. After taking a year off to travel, Andy dove into the wine and hospitality world, working a harvest at Cain Vineyards and Winery, spending some time working at the Jug Shop in San Francisco, and all the while getting his MBA from Berkeley.

On the weekends, the brothers would hop into a truck and cruise the back roads of California wine regions looking for the perfect piece of land. Their criteria: an extreme, cool-climate vineyard site where they could push the limits of winegrowing and winemaking, utilizing Nick's knowledge of viticulture, and his wife Vanessa's skill at making wines from cool climate fruit.

Vanessa Wong is also U.C. Davis trained and before joining her husband for the first harvest in 2001 she spent several years working as a winemaker around the world for labels that include Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, Domaine Jean Gros Burgundy, and Peter Michael Winery in Sonoma.

The family planted 48 acres of vines on their property in 1998: 35 acres of Pinot Noir, 8 acres of Syrah, 6 acres of Chardonnay, 1.8 acres of Viognier, and two little postage stamp size plots of Roussanne and Marsanne. The vineyards are managed directly by Nick and a full-time crew of 8 vineyard workers, and are farmed organically (though they are not certified). Because of the remoteness of the vineyard, the winery was built in Cloverdale, about an hour away.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Peay Vineyards for me has always been how they seem to have gotten everything right. I'm sure there were missteps along the way, but the fact that they were able to strike out into the middle of nowhere, into a climate that many thought unfit to grow wine grapes, and not only manage to make wine, but to make wine of such distinct character and quality is a testament to the talents of everyone involved. It's not an accident that theirs is one of the coolest Syrah vineyards in the United States.

Vanessa crafts their wines with a delicate touch. The wines are almost always fermented with native yeasts and are carefully managed through the winemaking process according to the needs of each varietal. The oak program involves a minimum of new wood allowing the fruit to shine, and the wines are almost always bottled unfined and unfiltered.

This particular wine comes from those minuscule .6 acres of Roussanne and Marsanne that Nick describes as the "most trying vines we farm." Finicky, temperamental, and susceptible to the vagaries of weather much more so than other grapes (this wine won't be made in 2011, thanks to the rains), these vines yield tiny amounts of extraordinary fruit. The production hovers somewhere between three and six barrels each year (roughly 85-100 cases), and tends to be snapped up by the winery's mailing list customers (the only way I manage to get ahold of it).

Fermented in old oak barrels with indigenous yeasts, this wine ages in neutral oak on its lees (bits of the skins and yeast left over after fermentation) for 11 months before bottling. In 2006, the wine was 65% Roussanne and 35% Marsanne, and only 85 cases were made.

I tend to like what happens to Roussanne and Marsanne as they age, so I've been hanging on to this bottle for some time, and decided to pop it open with dinner this week, and was very happy to have done so. It's a beautiful wine that is both delicious when it is first released, but will reward anyone with the patience to leave it on the shelf for a few years.

Tasting Notes:
This wine has mellowed to a deep medium-gold in the glass, and smells of honey roasted nuts, jasmine flowers, and old parchment. In the mouth it has a wonderful weight on the tongue, with a mix of mineral and herbal flavors like chamomile, while roasted apple, butterscotch, and honey also play across the palate. The finish has a nutty quality, and lingers for some time. Despite having a little weight, the wine's acidity ensures that it is lively and gulpable. Excellent. 14.1% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
This was surprisingly a very good match with a bunch of salumi and mostardas that were on the table while we opened this bottle.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $44

Unfortunately this wine is not available for purchase on the Internet, and this vintage has probably long since disappeared from most people's shelves and cellars. Current vintages are available to mailing list customers only.

If there is one public wine tasting event that rivals San Francisco's yearly ZAP Zinfandel tasting for sheer size and chaos, it could only be the annual SF Chronicle Wine Competition Tasting. Every year this competition is judged by more than 60 wine professionals, in which they award medals to their top choices from among over 5,000 wines from all across America. This competition has grown over the last ten years to be the largest competitive tasting of American wines in the world.

The judges hand out hundreds of medals and awards. Those awards are released to the public, and then about a month later, many of the award winning wines, plus a lot more are poured for the public in a four-hour event that takes over Fort Mason for a Saturday afternoon. There are usually cooking demonstrations and food booths, and various other diversions.

Regardless of how I feel about such wine competitions, this tasting, like all such public events, represents an incredible opportunity to educate your palate and discover new wines to enjoy. This tasting in particular offers a unique chance to taste wine from a lot of less well known wine regions (i.e. not California, Oregon, or Washington) in addition to hundreds of wines from the places that most people know and love.

So if you don't have plans February 18th and want to expand your wine horizons, the experience is well worth the price of admission.

2012 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting
Saturday, February 18, 2012 2pm - 5pm
Festival Pavilion - Fort Mason Center
Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94123 (map)

Tickets are $65 if purchased in advance, $80 at the door. You can purchase tickets online.

My usual tips for large public tastings: get a good night's sleep; go with food in your belly; wear dark clothes; leave the cologne or perfume at home; drink lots of water; and if you want to really enjoy yourself, SPIT!

Moon Over Sonoma
SONOMA COUNTY, CA: A full moon rises over an oak tree in Alexander Valley.

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I'm sure I'm going to catch hell for this post from any number of quarters, but it needs to be said.

Big wine companies are favorite punching bags for wine lovers that would never buy their products. Sometime's there's a good reason for this, like when they throw their weight around in the marketplace in ways that aren't exactly good for the industry. The bigger the company, the bigger the mistakes they can make as well.

When they make mistakes, sometimes these companies can be hung out to dry simply because they have deep pockets. And that's exactly what seems to have just happened to Gallo and Constellation Wines .

You may remember a bit of a scandal last year involving these two big players in the wine world. They bought a bunch (3.5 million gallons) of wine from the southern part of France that was supposed to be Pinot Noir and put it into their Red Bicyclette bottles. It turns out, however, that it was only partly Pinot Noir, and happened to contain a lot of Merlot and Syrah as well.

The wines were fraudulently sold by a number of parties in France, all of whom have been prosecuted under French law, even on appeal.

The incident was a severe embarrassment for Gallo in particular, who apparently thought they were buying legitimate Pinot Noir. There are tests, usually involving DNA sequencing, that can determine the grape variety of a wine, but they are very expensive, time consuming, and aren't normally used in the course of, say, buying a few thousand gallons of bulk wine.

Gallo and Constellation took the steps that you would have expected a company to take when faced with this situation. They pulled whatever product they could off the market, apologized, and cooperated with the authorities that were going after the folks who perpetrated this fraud.

But then three wine consumers in California sued Gallo and Constellation, along with two of the guilty parties in France, alleging "unfair competition, fraud and false advertising." Now Gallo and Constellation are paying these people and their lawyers $2 million to settle the case out of court.

We hear various politicians talking about "tort reform" in this country, and stupid lawsuits like this are exactly what they're talking about.

These consumers were in no way damaged or harmed by the fact that the wine they purchased wasn't 100% Pinot Noir. The suggestion that competition or the market as a whole suffered as a result is equally specious. Gallo and Constellation certainly made a mistake by buying the wine they did, but it should not result in paying litigation happy consumers who thought they could make a buck by going after a big wine company with deep pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for consumer protection. If Gallo had failed to disclose that it put peanuts in its wine, and some allergic person died of anaphylactic shock, Gallo should be held responsible. If the wine they sold wasn't actually wine, but was some concocted fake beverage that they synthesized in a lab, then I think there would be grounds for fake advertising claims, like in the 80s when all those "juice" companies were forced to put just how much real fruit juice they were using on their packages.

Those who generally disdain companies like Gallo, will at this point no doubt be shouting at their screens "They knew! They knew," but I don't think that's true. To my knowledge there is not a shred of proof that Gallo or Constellation knew that they were buying adulterated Pinot (which, admittedly says something about the quality of the wine that goes into their bottles). Now, if for some reason it came to light that Gallo and Constellation knew exactly what they were doing, that would change things slightly (i.e. intent to defraud versus an accident) but ultimately the issue is the same: these folks are being wrung for dollars because they did by accident that many winemakers in California do on purpose all the time.

By law in California, in order to call a wine Cabernet Sauvignon and put it on the label, only 75% of the wine has to be Cabernet Sauvignon (and only 95% of it has to come from the same vintage). The rest can be whatever the winemaker wants. And if you think that those $3, $5, and $7 wines you're buying at the grocery store are 100% pure, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Most large (read: non-artisan) winemakers manage their production at some level using the bulk wine market, purchasing juice here and there both to ensure that they can produce the volume they need to meet their targets, as well as to find blending components they think can help them make a more appealing wine. Even smaller winemakers will buy some extra grapes or even some extra wine that allows them to turn a few extra barrels of something into a second label wine or a special bottling. Why? So they can sell it. Remember folks, the wine industry is a business, first and foremost.

So while I'm no apologist for the behemoths of the global wine trade, I certainly am appalled at the fact that our legal system not only permits, but tacitly encourages the kind of lawsuits that these companies have been needlessly subjected to.

I'm sure that in the future I'll be criticizing Gallo and Constellation for something, but for today they have my sympathies.

Punching bag image courtesy of BigStock

'It will cost the economy thousands of jobs.'
'It will reduce tax revenues and destroy retailers.'
'It will result in an epidemic of teen drunk driving.'

These were but a few of the vociferous arguments made on 5 January against a bill introduced to the New Jersey state legislature that merely proposed to allow New Jersey state wineries (of which there are now more than 40) to ship their wines to state residents, just like wineries in the neighbouring state of New York. The individuals offering these arguments were primarily representatives of the state's liquor wholesalers, who purportedly spent more than $1 million trying to prevent this legislation from coming up for a vote.

Welcome to America, where for 25% of the households in the country, it is easier to purchase guns than a bottle of wine on the internet thanks to the laws of the states in which they live.

To buy wine in Pennsylvania, for instance, you'll have to make your way to a liquor store run by the state government, with a selection driven more by bureaucracy and the whims of distributors than by any sense of what consumers might want....

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com.

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you're not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It's only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image © 2012 Leigh Beisch

Review by Tim Patterson.

A big part of wine's allure is that it is so many different things: a source of alcohol, a source of pleasure, a gateway for entry into the mystical, the erotic, the enlightened, the divine, the silly, and sometimes the idiotic. But for thousands of years, it has also been a commodity--and that's where this book comes in.

Worrying about wine as a commodity seems uninspiring, even tawdry, compared, say, to worrying about the distinctive terroir of some patch of dirt in Alsace. But without the buying and selling, we'd all be home winemakers, wine production would still be primitive at best, none of us would ever have heard of Argentine Malbec, and that special spot in Alsace wouldn't have its own Facebook page. Money makes the wine go round, and Wine Wars helps to make sense of it all.

Veseth teaches political economy at the University of Puget Sound, is active in the American Association of Wine Economists, and writes the Wine Economist blog. The book's central metaphor is the "wine wall"--the complicated, diverse array of regions, grapes, brands and price points that can be found at most any wine shop or supermarket. Shelf by shelf, Veseth decodes the logic of what's where on the wine wall and how it got there. The book's subtitle--The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists--highlights three dynamics threaded through the story: the bad old days of cheap, insipid, industrial wine (Blue Nun, a wildly popular parody of good German Riesling a few decades back); the much better days of modern, efficient, technologically advanced, global winemaking (Two Buck Chuck); and the militant defense of fine, terroir-driven wine by another whole tier of producers around the world.

Not to spoil the end of the story, but Veseth remains hopeful in the end about the mix of wine dynamics. Despite the seemingly crushing power of global price-cutting and homogenization, he thinks distinctive, even quirky wines have a bright future--in other words, something for everybody.

Along the way, his overview of economic forces that have shaped wine's career take the reader on a number of historical excursions and international visits. We learn about the German discount wine juggernaut behind the "surfer dude" cosmetics of the Trader Joe's chain, the convoluted, multi-century relationships between French winegrowers and British drinkers, the marketing logic behind how Costco arranges its shelves and bins, and the rise of Hong Kong as the center of world wine auctioneering. The treatment is breezy and easygoing; not only are there no intricate economic formulas, there is not one single table or graph between the covers.

Nonetheless, Veseth does get to some fundamental economic realities behind the surface of wine, and even readers who pay attention to the ups and down of the wine market will learn something. For example, most wine fans know that the emergence of New Zealand as a high-profile player in the international wine trade is a very recent development, maybe two decades old, seemingly out of nowhere. More studious geeks know that the years of New Zealand's obscurity were also years when the main grape varieties grown were French-American hybrids, thought to be more suitable to cooler climates but not likely to make any export waves. That reliance of non-competitive grapes might seem to be the prime reason for decades of international non-competition.

What Veseth adds to the picture is that for many years, New Zealand followed an official policy--known as import substitution--of encouraging domestic production by creating barriers to foreign imports. In the case of wine, this meant that backward production practices and grape choices had a free ride, and no incentive existed for joining join the modern wine world. When New Zealand dumped the import substitution strategy and opened the doors to trade in and out, New Zealand winegrowers suddenly discovered they could grow amazing Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and the rest is drinking history.

This kind of information may not change the way your next glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc tastes, but it surely will help you understand how it got there. And that, to go back to wine's many wondrous properties, gets us back to the lure of enlightenment.

Mike Veseth Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists, Rowman and Littlefield 2011, $24.95 (hardback).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat's Cellarbook, co-edits the Vinography book review section, and is the author of Home Winemaking for Dummies.

The Mustard
RUSSIAN RIVER VALLEY, CA: Flowering mustard growing between the grapevines signals the beginning of spring as seen in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, California.

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ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by photographer George Rose for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images. These images are not to be reposted on any web site or blog without the express permission of the photographer.

If I were doing now what I thought I would probably do with my life as a sophomore in college, I would be a photographer living in a tent or an old VW Bus somewhere, splitting my time between rock climbing and taking pictures of stuff that most people wouldn't give a second glance. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but I offer it as proof of how little sense I had of what path my life would take.

James Ontiveros, on the other hand, was spending his sophomore year at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo going to classes during the week, and on the weekend, planting a Pinot Noir vineyard that now bears his family name. This wasn't a little project to help out on his family vineyard, which can often be the reason that certain college kids find themselves putting rootstock into the ground in their spare time. While Ontiveros' family has been connected to the Santa Barbara area for a staggering nine generations (which is why their last name is on everything from historic buildings to roads in the area) they were, up until recently, primarily cattle ranchers. But as the lands surrounding his family ranch gradually gave way to vineyards and more vineyards and more vineyards, the young Ontiveros began to think his decision to major in Animal Science might not be the most advantageous for the future.

By the time Ontiveros was a sophomore, he had switched to crop and fruit sciences, and had met Paul Wilkins. The two bonded over wine with some of the other students at the university.

While Cal Poly didn't offer wine studies, that proved no impediment to Ontiveros nor Wilkins, both of whom landed jobs and internships in the wine industry while they were still in school. While he wasn't busy helping Kendall Jackson manage its relationships with winegrowers in the area, Ontiveros was planting 8 acres of his family's ranch to Pinot Noir. Wilkins, for his part, landed an internship at Alban Vineyards, and got the opportunity to learn winemaking at one of California's most prominent boutique wineries.

Their careers in the wine industry diverged for several years, with Ontiveros doing stints at Gallo, and Wilkins becoming assistant winemaker at Alban. But in 2005 Wilkins left Alban and started consulting on his own, and one of his first clients asked him to see if he could track down some fruit from a vineyard named Ontiveros. Reunited, the two college buddies joined forces to make wine from Ontiveros' property under the label native9, and shortly thereafter started another project that they dubbed Alta Maria.

The Alta Maria label offers four wines, a Cabernet, a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon Blanc, and this Pinot Noir, each in quantities of a few hundred cases. The winemaking is done by Wilkins, whose training primarily on Rhone varieties clearly doesn't keep him from doing very fine things with Pinot Noir when he wants to. The winemaking itself tends to be minimalist, using native yeasts whenever possible, and I'm not entirely sure about the filtering regimen. New oak is kept to a minimum, as well.

In fact, minimalism might be a defining characteristic of these wines in many respects, from the rather stunning image on the label -- a cluster of ancient iron nails, the sort of which held together both the houses and the shoes of California's earliest homesteaders -- to the rather remarkable pricing of the wine. I'm not in the habit of regularly commenting on the price of wines, instead letting my readers decide what they think is value or not. However, a California Pinot Noir this good for $25 should not go unremarked upon. It's exceedingly rare to find pretty good Pinot at anywhere close to this price point, let alone a wine this fantastic.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Light to medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of the damp forest floor and the bright fruit of raspberries. In the mouth, tart, sour cherry and raspberry flavors have a silky coolness to them that is stunning and quite mouthwatering. Green herbs and willow bark mix with earthier tones as the fruit continues to vibrate thanks to excellent acidity. Fine grained tannins hang in the background as the wine lingers through a moderate finish. Quite elegant.13.9% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
What won't this wine go well with? With low alcohol and high acidity, it's a fantastic food wine that I'd love to drink while munching on a chantrelle and goat cheese tart, for instance.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $25

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.