A fly in my glass

     Pity that poor woman standing off by herself, gazing into her wineglass. She's not shy; neither is she looking for gnats. She's checking out the meniscus – the curve of the wine's surface where color, or lack of it, at the rim that can indicate intensity and age. Now she tilts the glass while people around her look the other way and rattle their ice cubes. Meniscus-gazing has become a kind of vinous tic with her, as is the swirl-and-sniff routine.

She’s just wine-struck, a common condition not limited by gender or profession. This has no known cure other than penury and is on the rise with so much good wine around. By wine-struck I don't mean people who consume too much good wine, although that is often a concomitant exercise. I mean those for whom the evaluation of wine informs all experience - and sometimes drives friends and observers away.

The wine-struck spend their vacations touring wineries with other wine-strucks, separated from wet concrete floors by the waffled soles of running shoes once used to keep their owners trim. They keep wine under their beds, or in space once reserved for the cat. Every few weeks they lock themselves away with the new issue of The Wine Advocate or The Wine Spectator. On Saturday, instead of going to the hardware store like other civilized people, they peruse the shelves of wine shops and sample cabernet, zinfandel, and pinot grigio out of plastic thimbles.

The wine-struck and cigarette smokers often speak the same body language, although they're on opposite sides of the olfactory divide. When a smoker enters a strange house he no longer looks around for an ash tray because there won’t be one, but he does look around for a way to discreetly get outside for a quickie with a filter at one end. The wine-struck immediately looks for a bottle with narrow shoulders and a punt that may indicate a "decent” red, or the gleam of a good chardonnay without a tell-tale yellowish hue indicating either too much oak, or oxidation.

Not finding either, he accepts a glass of perfectly acceptable if not great wine and subjects it to the rigors of an oenophiliac, behavior that gets worse if he happens upon another wine-struck. At least smokers don't spend a lot of time comparing cigarettes and reading the small print on the packages.

The wine-struck person's social predicament is further complicated if the wine offered as an aperitif happens to be good. That means that the wines to follow may be even better, even great. Does he forgo a pre-dinner second glass in the interest of a clear head and palate later on, when the good stuff’s uncorked? Or does he take a heavy hit of the first because it may be gone by the time dinner’s served? Does he discreetly work his way toward the dining room, hoping for a glimpse of bottles on the sideboard, maybe even a quick perusal of a label?

Some people become wine-struck after long exposure to expense account lunches, but more often they finance their own introductions. Sometimes the experience is downright Wordsworthian in its mystical effect. There's the famous case of the wine critic who drank Coca-Cola in early adulthood, until he tasted riesling in Alsace, I think it was, because it was cheaper than Coke, and was so smitten that he gave up the latter and a career in the law for one pursue the ultimate nose around the world.

And consider the young oilman who was exposed to

bordeaux instead of milk by a young woman serving him dinner, bought a reference book about wine to discover what this miraculous substance was, and because he could afford it bought first-growths to drink with dinner for the rest of the week - Latour on Monday, Lafite on Tuesday, Haut-Brion on Wednesday, etc. He married the young woman, chucked the oil business, became a wine retailer and collected so much vino that the floor of their apartment threatened to collapse while his income declined.

Consider the wine widows and widowers who sit home nights their spouses attend wine tastings. Consider the reformed enophile I know one who was wild for wine at a time when his contemporaries favored chemical substances and politics. Now that the first of those subjects has fallen out of style, he has rejected wine as bourgeois, and drinks Coke, presumably to be different. A sip of cabernet still does for him what the madeleine did for Proust, except that his remembrance is still full of '60s rhetoric and a longing for peace marches.

Here’s some advice for the wine-struck: Lighten up. If your friend wants to see a movie, forgo the vertical Barolo tasting; if the party wine’s an unclassed Bordeaux, drink it anyway. And if you run into one of your own, try to help him or her with the problem. Talk about something other than wine.

Victims of the wine-struck can help by listening to at least some of what they have to say. Because you can learn a lot. Wine enthusiasm is contagious once you get beyond the intimidating factors - wine terms and procedures, and the sneaking belief that it's all a bunch of bull. It isn’t, actually, and once you open your mind - and palate – a tanta1izing blend of the intellectual and the sensual could flow in.

So the next time you see a woman staring into her wineglass at a party, and hear her say, "This cabernet is really immature. It has good intensity at the rim, and good depth, but so does jam," remember that’s preferable to hearing, "I have a bug in my glass.”

A reader on hang-overs (Too Much, 4/20)

Too much of a good thing. Our bodies have policies. Breaking these policies can have mild to severe results, from the hangover to the clap. Happy to say I’ve had countless bouts of one and none of the other. After all, I’m on a wine site rather than a skin site or medical site.

There was never a time when the hangover didn’t hurt, but lately, I’ve been more sensitive to it. Or maybe “good-sensed” to it. Hangovers always hurt, but being mid-30’s, they hurt more.

One new urban legend which came to me from a doctor-friend (a toxicologist, nonetheless) was to drink half a 5 hr energy drink before getting after it. No kidding, it helps a little. 

Paul Worsterberg

Doc on France

Hear the one about a Frenchman who walks into a bistro and orders a bottle of Coca Cola instead of Bordeaux? It’s not a joke. Consumption of wine by the French is in le pissoir. According to a study in The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, wine consumption in France plunged from 7 billion bottles a year to 4 billion between 1980 and 2008. The latest data shows just 16.5 percent of adults in France are regular wine drinkers. Research by Toulouse Capitole University finds there are fewer French who order a bottle of wine on the table at every meal – except among the over-65 generation. The middle-aged now drink wine more with friends than with families, as was the age-old custom. And the under-30s rarely order wine even when out with friends. 
Doc Lang

Doc Lang.

Too much

It began with champagne, as good things and disasters often do. Laurent-Perrier rose’, to be precise, served in elegant flutes with some canapes. The champagne was followed by a glass - was it two? - of white Hermitage, among the fine but largely neglected white wines of the Rhone Valley. By then the guests were at table, eating oysters en croute and pursuing the philosophical vagaries of real estate and politics. Tomorrow did not exist.

Next came a glass of red Hermitage, full-bodied and quite elegant with the lamb. The gracious host produced an unusual red wine from Provence, with character and finesse, that carried them on an even keel through the salad course. The hostess then served an elegant gateau de pommes with a coulis of apple and calvados, the famous apple brandy of Normandy. “It’s nice to drink a little calvados with the dessert,” she added, and indeed it was. It seemed even nicer to drink a lot of it.

I lived nearby and so didn’t have to climb behind the wheel of a car. I simply toddled down the hill, assisted by gravity, glowing like a uranium rod. Sleep was instant and deep and lasted longer than it should have. I awoke, if that’s the right word, inside the belly of a rhinoceros.

The hangover lasted a full day, during which time I did absolutely nothing, receiving sympathy from some people but not from my wife. Only once did I glance in the mirror and told the thing I saw there: “Never again.”

Hangovers seldom get discussed, maybe because they were once considered a fact of life, or evidence of bravado, but are now no longer politically correct. The new moderation lays shame on over-indulgence, but despite this a hangover is still occasionally visited upon even the circumspect drinker.

The old saw is it’s cured with “the hair of the dog.” Guinness stout’s sometimes cited as the ideal combination of alcohol and nutrients to jump-start another day, but stout requires a strong stomach. Some get an instant hangover, usually from red wine, and consider themselves allergic to histamines. I knew two women, one a food writer and he other a movie producer, who were plagued by headaches after only a few sips of wine until they began taking half a Benadryl tablet beforehand. One of them no longer drinks alcohol in any form, and the other drinks sparingly. But the antihistamine was, in their words, near-miraculous.

I’m not recommending it with alcohol, just passing along some folk wisdom. On the surface, hangovers seem utterly non-productive, but they have their existential proponents. The novelist and poet Jim Harrison, has written of the sharpness of detail in a world observed by the hung-over and of its inspired paranoia that sometimes leads to creation of fabulous characters.

Hemingway must have learned early how to deal simultaneously with hangovers and writing, considering how much he drank (and wrote). And in his journals, which are full of over-drinking, James Boswell admitted, “My intemperance was severely punished… I lay till near two o’clock, when I grew easier, and comforted myself by resolving vigorously to be attentively sober for the future.”

Some things never change. Noah, the first vintner, made his first vintage and, according to the King James version of the Bible, “drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent." In other words, he passed out naked. Ham saw him - not a nice thing to do in those days, apparently - so Noah cursed Ham’s son and all his offspring.

Some people say many of the world’s insoluble problems can be traced to that first morning after.

Reader response (to Sniff, sniff... 4/6) and an interview

Great article and wonderful stories.... chemicals or the molecules of smell (or taste) are not the only things that influence our experience... past experiences, how our neurons are wired, the environment in which we are swirling - much more than the molecules.
Sondra, Cushing ME

This interview with me is by Tom Wark at Fermentation.com:

http://fermentation.typepad.com/fermentation/2012/04/james-conaway-interview-wine.html

The Doc takes on global warming...

How is climate change affecting vineyards? Will growers have to go north and Kamloops, Canada, become the next Napa? Well, it so happens that, for the first time, scientists are documenting a direct effect of climate warming on vineyards. Using decades of records in Australian vineyards, scientists are able to show that early ripening of wine grapes is directly linked to a heating climate and the consequent decline of water content. The records show that, in turn, is causing lower yields. The study, just published in Nature Climate Change, was done by climatologists and viticulturists at University of Melbourne. It concludes that in southern Australia: “. . . grape maturation dates have advanced about eight days per decade. . . impacting wine grape quality.” So, Kamloops, here they come.

Doc Lang

Coming into the subject

A reader asks how I got interested in wine, a common question often followed by: “Isn’t wine-tasting a marvelous excuse for getting smashed?… Isn’t the wine world glamorous?… And isn’t your real ambition to own a winery?”

And the answers are, in order: No, yes, and no.

I got interested in wine by drinking Gallo Paisano out of a gallon jug with a screw-off cap, a long time ago in California. I was living on the proceeds of a writing fellowship at Stanford, where my future wife and I also discovered the joys of eating in the company of this beverage - not just sourdough bread and pizza, but also such daring culinary leaps as lamb chops garnished with rosemary.

Next came New Orleans, where I worked for The Times-Picayune as a reporter and discovered that wine came in smaller bottles, with corks. Paisano was not to be despised with po’ boys, oyster loaves and steamed crabs, but even better was Wente’s “gray Riesling” with poached fish and crawfish tails.

Then we lived in Rome, where I worked for another newspaper. Our Italian whites were limited to Frascati, often drunk with huge mushrooms from the Alban hills that sautéed in olive oil and served like steaks. There is no food like Italian food, period, and the wines accommodated it in some mystical way. They were cheap and abundant; although we had little Chianti classico and no brunello or barolo, whatever the reds they were firm and memorable in their ways.

In Switzerland, where we lived on the top floor of a farmhouse and spent the winter skiing – believe it or not, that was once affordable – and those crisp Swiss wines live well in memory, served by our landlady with fondue and a slide show about the family’s cows. There was also cheese melted under electric heat and spread on little baked potatoes eaten with gherkins and spritzy white.

My first sip of burgundy came in Switzerland, too, from the Cote de Beaune. I can’t remember the village or the producer but I sure remember the taste. A French friend served it at a dinner party with veal in cream, on a very cold night, after placing the open bottles on the hearth.

After that, Penny and I made forays into France to smuggle lesser burgundies and Rhone wines back into Switzerland. Then, while working in Paris, we drank Bordeaux superieur, and inexpensive blends from the south - muscadet and, yes, lesser chardormay from Chablis, reasonably priced then and a great, steely wine for seafood and omelets.

In London, we moved up the wine list. “Hock" - West German wine in England - inevitably accompanied the first course. Then we got into the crus bourgeois bordeauxs and an occasional first-growth, and better burgundies. We were introduced to port and the ritual of the port decanter. (Don’t pass but slide the decanter, and if you do pass it you won’t be invited back.) Port with Stilton and walnuts was one of our great discoveries.

Finally, in Washington, I pored over Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine and began a long process of reading broadly about it and attending tastings. The subject appealed to me as a kind of index of the world, a small mirror of history and social values, as well as fun. I worked for a time for the Washington Post and ended up writing the wine column between writing profiles for the very politically and culturally engaged section Style then was, and in a few years tasted more wines than I ever knew existed.

Exactly how much I learned is another question, but I certainly learned a lot about human nature. Writing about wine isn’t a profession, really, it’s just an avocation that got slightly out of hand.

Bottle Stock:

Another voice clearly heard from Paso Robles: Austin Hope Winery, 20 miles from the Pacific in the Templeton Gap, offers a worthy antiphonal response to the power of the Rhone in its 2010 Grenache. Bright garnet, spicy nose, good up-front fruit and a lush, peppery finish suited to robust food.

More from Hawk and Horse:

I painted the horse and my dear friend, graphic designer, Harrison Goldberg, painted the hawk. We were inspired by ancient cave renderings of animals in motion. I see the hawk and horse on our wine label as being in a sort of synchronized flight. We like to leave the arguments to the attorneys! Cheers!

Tracey Hawkins, co-manager

Note: Blogspot can make commenting difficult, for mysterious reasons. If you have difficulty write to me directly and I'll post for you: conawayjim@gmail.com

My Traveler blog is http://intelligenttravel.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/06/free-to-see-masterpieces-on-the-mall/

Sniff, sniff...

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but what about wine?

Does cabernet present the same bouquet to every nose? More exactly, does it ring the same sensory bells in all of us? Anyone who has sniffed and sipped in company knows that cabernet can elicit associations as disparate as black tea and raspberries from knowledgeable people, and both can be right.

Many people taste wine the way they look at abstract art, making their own associations in what is a highly personal relationship. That's hooey, say the experts. Aromas in wine are the direct result of natural substances and their interaction and can be cataloged more or less like groceries. Recognition lies not in the ephemeral imagination but in knowledge of the actual, and in memory. Chardonnay that has undergone secondary fermentation contains some of the same substance that’s in milk: hence, it can accurately be described as "buttery."

While smell is a basic sensory perception, it’s also a tender and mysterious subject. Simply biting into a madeleine called forth the complex childhood of Marcel Proust reflected in Remembrance of Things Past. Such are the powers, and potential magic, of our fully-employed individual olfactories. It’s offensive, therefore, to tell someone they’re a kind of personal computer that requires only the proper statistical in-put to spread butter on their chardonnay.

Part of the problem is wine evaluators – and wine writers - who freely associate and then put forth a blizzard of descriptors. Such wanton nosing should be controlled, say the same experts. One of them, Ann Noble, who taught sensory evaluation at University of California at Davis, invented the Aroma Wheel which presented the one hundred most common aromas in groups making them easier to identify.

In on-going efforts to define terms, winemakers try to pin down the exact - that is, classifiable - smells and tastes in their wines to use as marketing tools. Years ago a group of Napa and Sonoma wineries adopted, after considerable research, strawberry, cherry and spice as flavors that distinguish their pinot noirs from the rest of the world's.

Regardless of the accuracy or the consistency of your nose, knowing some basics is important to your enjoyment of wine. One common confusion involves the distinction between sweetness and fruitiness. Many people reject riesling, for instance, as being sweet when in fact it displays the floral aromas and tastes of that grape but can have a crisp, dry finish.

Even without descriptors, you may detect a lot about quality just by swirling the wine up the side of the glass (to increase evaporation), and taking a few short sniffs (rather than a major inhalation), and concentrating. Initial impressions are the most revealing, so try to articulate and remember them. Then take a sip and move the wine around inside your mouth, but don't swallow it. Draw some air in through your lips and over the wine, close your lips and exhale through your nose. Finally, swallow.

Sounds tricky - and maybe silly - but you'll find that it enhances flavor. Finally, relax and enjoy the conversation - which is now probably about your bizarre behavior.

A new appeal

In this the season of the Supreme Court’s least memorable performance I bring you… David Boies. You remember: he successfully argued for the landmark decision upholding the constitutional right of same-sex marriage, with his old adversary Ted Olsen.

Now Boies is a vintner as well as a lawyer and apparently knows something about grape, as well as jury, selection. The address on the label of Hawk and Horse Vineyards is St. Helena, Napa Valley, but he has vineyards of volcanic soil up in Lake County from which have evolved a big, deeply-hued cabernet and an elegant dessert wine – Latigo - in half bottles, also made with cab, that’s intensely flavorful and gallops on after you’ve swallowed it.

As you might have guessed, these wines aren’t cheap - $65 and $45. The hawk and horse on the label are either racing, or arguing, I’m not sure which, but definitely on the move.

Pretentious punts

We’re in the era of product enhancement, in case you haven’t noticed, including the pretentious punt. That's the indentation in the bottom of a wine bottle that gives the glass added strength which it rarely needs these days. Bottles with shallow punts cost less and often indicate inferior wine, whereas deep punts used to indicate quality. Often they still do, but nowadays a bottle of over-priced, over-oaked, alcoholic drek, too, can come in a Fort Knox of a bottle with a three-inch punt.

A wine bottle’s generally considered a means to an end, the world concerned only with its contents. But the bottle will outlast the wine and ends up on the kitchen table the next morning, or in the trash, to mock the reveler. The evolution of wine bottles is closely tied up with the history of wine, and questions of bottle size and shape are still subjects of debate.

Wine was first stored in amphorae that had been sealed with pitch, and then in barrels. Bottles were used only to serve wine until about 1700, when corks started appearing in bottles to keep out air and allowing wine to age and improve. But corks also dry out unless the bottles are turned on their sides, so as a result wine-bottle shapes evolved from pot-like containers to cylinders that could lie flat and be easily stacked. Presto, the wine cellar!

Over the years wine producers developed standard shapes and sizes of bottles that vary according to the origin and expected shelf life of a wine. The most common bottle size is 750 milliliters or 26 fluid ounces, but because good wine ages better in larger bottles many wines come in 1.5-liter magnums, which hold two bottles in one. Bordeaux also comes in double magnums, and in imperials, which hold about eight regular bottles. Champagne has its magnums, double magnums, jeroboams (four bottles), methuselahs (eight bottles) and salmanazars (twelve bottles).

For many, the choice of bottle size pivots more on consumption than storage considerations. Around our house standard bottles usually have wine left in them, which means putting in a rubber stopper and evacuating the air with a plastic pump. Some people consider this tacky, or ineffectual, but they’re wrong, at least on the second point. If you do it immediately after pouring, the wine – particularly reds – will be fine for a day or two.

If you abhor tackiness and the effort required to pump, a smaller bottle would save you some money from otherwise wasted wine, but half-liter bottles are proportionately more expensive and, from a producer/seller’s point of view, a pain. But half-bottles take up less storage space. And, because wine ages faster in them, some cabernets and other reds not yet ready in full-sized bottles can be drunk earlier in the smaller bottles.

Many half-bottles have the screw-on caps discussed earlier, which don't affect the taste of the wine and are cheaper and more efficient than corks. But they, like half-bottles, wine in boxes - and honest punts - lack of sex appeal.

More on spiced wine (really)

Continuing John in Santa Cruz's March 26 discussion: So, do any
winemakers today experiment with spicing wine? If so, are
any of them any good? And do winemakers have any idea
what grape Falernian was or how to make it?

Doc Lang replies:
According to Wikipedia, Falernian was Aglianico, a wine
prized by Romans and grown on the slopes of Mt. Falernus
between Latium and Campania. Now I too am reading Spice,
The History of Temptation, and Turner cites a medieval
compilation of ancient writings that gives this recipe
for a spiced honey wine: "six scruples of myrrh, 12 scruples
of cassia, two scruples of costus, four scruples of nard,
four scruples of pepper, six pints of Attic honey, 24 pints
of wine and store in the sun at the rise of the dog-star
for 40 days. Some call this nectar." My problem with the
recipe is basic: what's a scruple? (Don't think I've ever
had one.) From further reading I find that spiced wines
fell from favor in the 16th Century with the development
of the technology of bottling and corking. It was no longer
necessary to disguise the spoiling of wine, primarily with
cinnamon, cloves, cassia, ginger and pepper. Until air-tight
sealing, wines quickly went sour in poorly made casks and
leather sacks, and records of English royal accounts tell
of servants pouring barrels of wine down drains, and giving
it away to the poor. One Peter of Blois reported that wine
served in King Henry II’s court was "sour or musty, muddy,
greasy, rancid, reeking of pitch and quite flat. I have
witnessed occasions when such dregs were served to noblemen,
they had to sift it through clenched teeth and with their
eyes shut, trembling and grimacing…" Poor things.

Dr. Silvius's revenge

No, they're not wine. However...

Martinis taste great. Lots of people drink them – even wine lovers - or what passes for martinis. Like vodka in a cold glass, which isn’t. Neither are the other concoctions put together by bartenders who these days often know little about the art of mixing and feel entitled to charge extra for simply picking up a shaker. The martini was favored traditionally by the upper class and attacked from the left as a vestige of imperialism, as if grain alcohol in a stemmed glass could be shamelessly mercenary while chardonnay in the same thing's a sign of enlightenment.

The benefits of a real martini are recognized: stimulated appetite, fluid tongue, uplifted psyche. A martini contains no more alcohol, and fewer calories, than a couple of healthy glasses of wine. Most everyone has an idea of when a martini should be drunk. To my mind the mood should be good, the present uncluttered, the future promising.

The deceased novelist, Robert Benchley, famously wrote the line, "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." Don’t know exactly what he was talking about but I don't think of martinis and bad weather as complementary. Ideally, they should be drunk on a fine evening, either at home as a prelude to lamb chops, say, or in a strange locale as a toast to the spirit of adventure, or in a comfortable old sock of a bar, preferably with a friend.

The real martini's cold and contains no ice cubes, which dilute both taste and punch. They should be violently shaken - yes, James - in a metal container with ice and then quickly poured into a flared glass that has spent half an hour in the freezer; they should have squeezed over them flat lemon rinds that imparts tiny globules of lemon oil on the clear skein of gin and ice shards and are then discarded.

Sip, don't gulp. Success, as always, depends upon quality: the real thing's gin and white vermouth from a bottle that didn't belong to your father and is kept in the frig. Gin was a Dutch invention by a Dr. Sylvius, in the 17th-century, and hailed as a diuretic. He used pure grain spirits and the oil of the juniper berry, which gives gin its unique flavor. The Dutch never realized that preparing to pee could be so much fun. Within a few years all Holland found itself suffering from ills that could be cured only by gin, which crossed the Channel and became the national drink of England, setting back economic development by more than a century.

English gin's drier and less aromatic than the Dutch variety. Good ones are Tanquery, Beefeaters, Boodles, even the aromatic Bombay that's flavored not only with juniper but also with coriander, orris, and almonds and almost makes vermouth almost superfluous. Vermouth surfaced about a century after gin, in Italy and France, both versions blends of wine and stronger spirits aged in contact with as many as 50 different herbs, the Italian one slightly sweeter.

The earliest incarnation of a martini appeared in a 19th-century book of recipes as the "Martinez" - a concoction of mostly vermouth mixed with a shot of gin and some bitters. By 1900 it had become known as the martini, half gin and half vermouth. By the end of World War II it was 15 parts gin to one of vermouth, and has evolved today into what is often a glass of straight gin or vodka filled with ice cubes, olives, pimento, onions, toothpicks, little plastic swords, straws, old rinds and assorted junk.

"The martini's a complicated cultural artifact," the head of Johns Hopkins's classics department, Lowell Edmonds, once told me. The author of The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization, he added, "It means so many different things to different people: civilized and uncivilized. Classical and individual. Sensitive and tough... People have always thought the martini belonged to the past, even when it was invented."

For user rules I offer the wisdom of Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I'm under the table,

After four I'm under my host.

Blowback

Readers, and Doc Lang:

Hey Nose... you now have another Ear. Love how you write!

Nancy, Washington DC

Thanks, Nance

Dear Doc,
I know air is the enemy of wine, and corks can lose the seal. But polymer stoppers are the pits, harder to pull and practically impossible to unwind from corkscrews. Why don't vintners just go to screw tops, which are reliable and easy to remove?
Puzzled

Dear Puzzled,
It's snob appeal, known by MBA's as marketing. There are good wines being sold now with metal and plastic seals, but it'll never happen with high-end ones. Example: the restaurants would never go for it. Picture the waiter bringing your Margaux to the table and instead of the nice little pop of cork there's a scrrrrrk of metal unscrewed. And who'd sniff an aluminum cap? No, corks will never go away. Now the plastic plugs, I could suggest to vintners another place for 'em.
Doc Lang

Here's another question from a reader which I will pass along (with reservations) to the Doc:
I'm reading a book, Spice, the History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner, in which there are numerous references to the Romans spicing their wine. He says there is a reference to Pliny's Natural History to a recipe for cinnamon-spiced wine. He also cites a "honey-spiced wine" and a "spiced wine surprise" but doesn't give the recipe for it. Also, Turner writes that the Romans favorite wine was "Falernian."
John, Santa Cruz

The Red Room

It’s very… well, red. Red flocked wall paper (ceiling, too, as I remember), red divans, even a red felt pool table in an adjoining space. The style’s something between plushest man-cave for up-scale wine savants and what one jealous vintner calls “fin de siècle bordello,” which is both harsh and inaccurate. For one thing, the furniture’s too nice - real antiques, lovingly restored, and delicately sat upon by those accustomed to the thin air of Napa Valley’s elite.

Any demimondaines along for the ride are well-behaved and apparently aware they’re enjoying one of the more striking of the valley’s hidden resources. And the pour here is too good for anyone whose sensual pursuits are other-directed (more later about the wines). The Red Room lives in the interior of the old Raymond Winery in St. Helena, which has been radically reappointed since the days of the Raymond brothers, who would be astounded to see what has become of that workhorse on Zinfandel Lane.

Its owner, Jean-Charles Boisset, scion of the largest wine-producing family of Burgundy and third largest in France, is married to Gina Gallo, granddaughter of Julio. So his feet are firmly planted in two high-powered if very different, bi-continental wine worlds, and he’s making the most of both. Appealing, energetic, Jean-Charles was in, yes, Mondovino, the controversial wine documentary, and sometimes mentioned as a candidate to replace the late Robert Mondavi – one of several – as spokesperson for this, one of the most prominent vinous destinations on earth.

Some dismiss the notion, but I’m not so sure. Truth be told, Mondavi was primarily a showman, his personality and ability to stay on message for most of his long life redounding to Napa’s benefit. Jean-Charles is as outgoing as Mondavi ever was and has the European bona fides Mondavi longed for. His Red Room is available to ranking members of Raymond’s wine club, and anyone else willing to pay $500 a year for the privilege.

Like all owners of older wineries – Coppola springs forcefully to mind - Jean Charles enjoys grandfathered perks no new vintner could possibly get today. And you never know who you might encounter in The Red Room. When I was there, Delia Viader, owner of Viader vineyards on Howell Mountain, took me gently to task for, she claimed, making fun of the buttons on her blazer in my book, The Far Side of Eden. (What I remember was all the mud her vineyard dumped into St. Helena’s drinking water.) Mark Pope was also bending an elbow. The agreeable owner of The Bounty Hunter, the choice watering hole for fine wine (and now spirits) in downtown Napa, had just paid many thousands of dollars for primo cabernet at the trade auction. I remember when Mark was just starting out as an itinerant seller of hard-to-find vintages, with a media profile that included a three-legged dog as a side-kick.

You won’t find any of those in The Red Room.

That time of year...

It's spring and you’re looking for a light wine for a pig roast and you see this rose’ called Hogwash, a lovely pink hue conjuring up a scrubbed porker. You like the imagery and buy a couple of bottles, knowing everybody will get a kick out of it, except that you probably can’t because Tuck Beckstoffer Wines makes only a thousand cases and other people have already had that idea, most of them living south of the Mason-Dixon. Well, persevere. Hogwash is made of 100 per cent Grenache from two different vineyards, one in Paso Robles and the other in Mendocino, a proper porcine marriage of SoCal and NoCal that Beckstoffer says will stand up even to Carolina barbecue. I’m not sure any wine will do that, but this is definitely a rose’ on trotters for fourteen bucks and you also get a nice picture of a pig.

A reader on di Rosa and Doc Lang

Thanks, it’s a delight to get the view of the West from the East. Thanks also for the di Rosa piece.

I'm pretty sure Doc knows that most foils today are relatively inert alloys, but I will be looking for my concerned Berkeley neighbor to advise not drinking directly from the bottle (unless it is a screw cap).

Richard

Napa Soda Springs

Just grow it

We sometimes forget that one of the strongest arguments in favor of drinking wine is environmental. Viticulture is agriculture, and vineyards are preferable to houses, malls and office complexes. (I know, monoculture, chemicals, and snobbery are just some of the downsides, but overall grapes trump concrete.) So, any serious person, including those who drink wine, is concerned about what's happening in the natural world:
From National Geo Traveler's

In Focus: D.C.’s 20th Environmental Film Festival

Posted by James Conaway

Film still from The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. (Photo courtesy of Lucy Walker)

The 20th anniversary of D.C.’s Environmental Film Festival is underway (March 13-25) and shouldn’t be missed, in part because there’s nothing quite like it. This assemblage of films from around the world makes the urgency of climate change both real and provocative, and provides a running history of the environmental movement itself.

Symbolically, Washington’s cherry trees are already in bloom, ten days early, as the Japanese ambassador pointed out at the ceremony for this year’s winner of the Polly Krakora Award for artistry in film. It went to Academy-Award-nominated director Lucy Walker for The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, an alternately riveting and sad film about the 2011 disaster and its aftermath that manages to avoid difficult questions.

After the ceremony, one exasperated viewer stood to ask if there was evidence that building on Japan’s coastal plain would be prevented in the future, something neither the ambassador nor the director addressed. Yet it’s clear from the film that the clean-up and disposal of waste from last year’s devastating tsunami has caused a second, equally dire environmental disruption.

The vast majority of the films on display at the festival (many of which are premieres), however, bring riveting and entertaining attention to explicitly environmental problems. There’s something for everyone here, from Wild By Law (which presents the story of the Wilderness Act‘s creation) to Wild Scandinavia. Other don’t-miss features include California Forever: Parks and the Future, Shattered Sky, and Aral: The Lost Sea.

Ken Burns will even be on hand on the festival’s final day to present a special sneak preview of his upcoming documentary, The Dust Bowl.

The screening locations themselves — from the National Archives to the AFI Silver – will take you around the city and beyond and amount to another, fascinating historical and architectural tour of the nation’s capital.

go to: http://intelligenttravel.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/19/in-focus-d-c-s-20th-environmental-film-festival/

Di Rosa

The Di Rosa Preserve

James Conaway

The sheep on that hillside off Highway 28, just north of San Francisco Bay, remind me that this place, called Carneros, is named for rams. It was once considered useless for anything but pasture, but today extensive vineyards indicate a different reality — primo chardonnay and pinot noir and, indirectly, art.

Those sheep aren’t moving because they’re made of flat, poly-chromed steel, droll heralds of a very different Napa Valley attraction (and one you should see before heading north to the more familiar tourist-oriented Napa). The di Rosa preserve is an astonishingly rich sensory experience and a journey through a vibrant Bay Area art scene from the 1950s to the present. This mother lode of painting, sculpture, drawings, photographs, and installations will, quite simply, stun you — and, if it doesn’t, you need life support.

The di Rosa, reason enough to wind your way north from the Golden Gate, is probably the largest collection of significant regional art in the country, featuring work by every artist you should know about from the Bay Area – William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Deborah Butterfield, Paul Kos, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown and many, many others. If you don’t know about them, don’t sweat it: part of the charm of di Rosa is its movable feast of discovery.

The provenance of the preserve itself is also interesting. Rene di Rosa was a Yale graduate who came west in the ‘50s, worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, knew all those Beats we’ve heard about and most everybody else, quit his job – that’s what you did in the ’60s — and moved to Carneros to write a novel. But he was more smitten by the art all around him than anything else, and he had both the presence of mind, and some financial wherewithal, to collect it.

He was also generous of spirit, and encouraged young artists at the center of a tempestuous and still resonant time. Among the work on display is a toy-encrusted “Rhinocar,” by David Best, a vintage Oldsmobile with a rhinoceros head for a grill. No child can resist it. And right next to it is the current show, new work by the painter Hung Liu, vibrant, laminated oils of Chinese subjects.

The long historical throw of the di Rosa is apparent in several wonderful gallery spaces, but any sensible visitor will want to take the jitney tour — kids go free — which will take you through the grounds and the peacock-patrolled house where di Rosa lived with Veronica, his wife, a water colorist and sculptor who created the steel sheep that greet you upon arrival.

Di Rosa was an environmentalist before that term had cache and, with money acquired from selling off vineyards, constructed the preserve, complete with a 35-acre lake enhanced by a palm-treed island, and a vast sculpture garden that leads you past “Poetry House 4” by Alan Shepp, “Cactus Garden” by Gordon Huether, “Roller” by William Warenham, and “For Veronica” by Mark di Suvero, which catches the afternoon light, yet another luminous reminder that there’s more to Napa than wine.

conawayjim@gmail.com

Fruit flies: an exchange

Dear Doc Lang,
The New York Times reports scientific findings
that male fruit flies who are sexually inept
turn to alcohol more than the ones who are
successful seducers. So I want to know how do
I get rid of these drunk losers? They're always
sneaking into my place and acting up, getting
in my face. Is there any wine they don't like?
Bothered

Dear Bothered,
Alcoholics drink anything (even Yellowtail).
What you should do is, before going to bed,
leave some wine (or even apple cider vinegar)
in a glass placed by a light. They'll dive in,
but fruit flies can't swim. Next morning you'll
find them floating dead in the glass.
Doc Lang 

Now buy this

I’m often asked for a really good California wine that’s really a bargain, as it should be, the implication being that because it’s made in the U.S. it should be cheaper than wine made elsewhere. The sub-text is: why shouldn’t Americans be able to buy American wine at a patriotic price point? Well, it’s a silly premise (really), since the cost of making wine is real wherever you are, and if you want good cabernet, chardonnay, or whatever, you have to pay for care, skill, and decent grapes.

That said, most anything made by the Donati family of Templeton, Central Coast, is a deal, relatively speaking. The vineyards are part of the AVA Paicines sub-appellation, with such august neighbors as Calera and Chalone. The Donati wines are almost entirely Bordeaux varietals and sell from between $15 and $20, with one spectacular spike at $35 – Ezio, the Donati meritage blend of all five Bordeaux grapes, balanced with ample fruit that if Napan would cost fifty bucks.

I recommend the Donati cabernet ($20), merlot ($18), and Claret ($15). All prices fluctuate according to where you’re buying, of course.

Send a comment to conawayjim@gmail.com, and join up at right.

Caveat emptor

Doc Lang's response to the reader's question below about lead foil on bottles (March 15) is - simplistically - "apparently so." Consequently I'll add my own: corks are not wrapped in lead foil, the neck of the bottles are. So at most exposure of wine to lead is minimal, and the free flow of wine across a surface that has merely touched lead isn't much of a hazard. That, at least, is accepted wisdom.
Because Doc Lang's expertise has been tacitly questioned by Ralph of Philadelphia, I asked Doc Lang for a bio, which I don't think is going to make Ralph happy. Here it is:

I am a contributing expert to Nose, having abandoned
a nascent career as an unlicensed medical practitioner
to devote myself to a lifelong study of the varied
effects of vinous imbibulation. My selfless experimenting
has garnered frequent comment and citations from authorities
I conduct much of my research up a creek on the Eastern
Shore of Maryland.
                                         Doc Lang

A reader asks:

Doc Lang, what’s up with why vintners persist in wrapping wine corks with lead foil? It’s been long supposed that the downfall of ancient Rome was due in part to their eating off lead platters and getting their drinking water through lead pipes. Ingestion of lead causes bizarre behavior: the Romans sicced tigers on Christians, chased Republicans from the Senate, took baths together, and gave orgies a bad name while parading around in togas and sandals with leaves on their heads. I can’t help but wonder: do trace amounts of lead from many bottles of wine explain the current primary season?

Quite confused

Berkeley

Santa Cruz

I will revisit the Santa Cruz appellation this summer, but meanwhile some background from my piece in Saveur:

One of California's best and most beautiful wine regions,
the Santa Cruz Mountains, also happens to be one of its
least known. That's perhaps because it's horizontally
challenged, a kind of oenophile's Bhutan, where wine pilgrims
get hopelessly lost amid the winding roads and vineyard
managers worry almost as much about shifting tectonic
plates as they do about the state of their vines. There exists little level land for planting in the Santa Cruz
Mountains (SCM) appellation, where I went in search of the
defining character of the terroir. Here, winemakers must
consider countless variations of slope, exposure, and altitude.

Established in 1981, the appellation extends into parts of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties but comprises only about 1,600 acres of vineyards; those located here are required to be at least 400 feet above sea level on the western side of the mountains and 800 feet above on the east. At any elevation, the soils in the SCM are surprisingly diverse, made up of sand, clay, and other elements. Add to these factors widely fluctuating temperatures and sunlight that ranges from intense to spotty. These conditions are ideal for some grapes; the question is which ones. Even as winemakers experiment, they're producing good, varietally diffuse wines, some of which can be counted among California's best.

Located just south of San Francisco, the mountains overlook the Bay on the east and, on the west, the cold Pacific Ocean, frequently shrouded in shifting mists like an image from a Japanese block print. The art of winemaking has been practiced here since the 1850s, but until recently there were only a few dozen wineries; now there are more than 60. Santa Cruz has long been known for a certain countercultural verve, which I remembered from my first visit here, 20 years ago, and some of that spirit lingers despite today's sophisticated winemaking and marketing techniques.
"Is this wine going to make the world a better place?" asked Randall Grahm, founder of the famed Bonny Doon Vineyard, reflecting remnants of Aquarian idealism. Winemaker David Bruce, one of the largest producers in the SCM, was a true "garagiste" before the term was coined. Bruce was known for his experimental, assertive pinot noirs. I found him in his namesake winery and listened to him explain why he chose the SCM in the first place: "Here the wines talk to each other."

If that's true, the region is a vinicultural Babel going back to the time of Martin Ray, California's legendary mid-20th-century winemaker. The temperamental Ray learned the rudiments of wine
from another larger-than-life personality, the Frenchman Paul Masson (an early advocate of what later became the SCM), and Ray eventually acquired his own vineyards in the Santa Cruz. He argued constantly over his contention that local producers should make only 100 percent varietal wines, and he charged what were, at the time, enormous sums for his vintages. From his notorious dinner parties, held in his concrete aerie above the Bay, he was known to expel guests who expressed opinions about wine with which he didn't agree. Embroiled in several years' worth of battles with investors, Ray lost the property in 1972, with Mount Eden Vineyards to be
overseen by Eleanor and Jeffrey Patterson.

Most mornings the Pattersons enjoyed a stunning view from Ray's old porch. Some mornings, though, a sea of fog below appears to swallow the San Francisco peninsula whole. Later in the day, when the fog rises, temperatures up here plummet while those on the formerly dank valley floor will climb, a reversal that confuses visitors but suits the grapes just fine. Struggling on slopes of quickly draining Franciscan shale, the berries tend to be small but intensely flavorful. Jeffrey also supervised the production of pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon, but his estate chardonnay is his best-known wine, although fewer than 4,000 cases were made back in 2001. It was a balanced wine built to last without exhibiting a Californicated oakiness, and it presented a stunning example of what the SCM is capable of.

Another early disciple of the hands-on, Burgundian style of winemaking, Ken Burnap, bought land on the western side of the SCM in the '70s and established Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard
after traveling California in search of the perfect place for growing the temperamental pinot noir grape. If pinot noir was a person, Burnap once told an interviewer, "it would be committed,"
meaning institutionalized. Working with Jeff Emery, a geologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Burnap dry-farmed and punched down the fermentation cap by hand. Emery took over from Burnap in 2004 and drew from a vineyard that's just two miles away from the original.

If any qualities are common to Santa Cruz pinots, it's deep color and full body; the challenge is to bring out the grape's subtleties. One winemaker who has worked with pinot for years, Michael Martella, produces wine under his own label; he was also the winemaker for the Thomas Fogarty Winery, established in 1981. Martella dipped into the traditions of Burgundy, Bordeaux, and the
Rhone Valley, producing syrah and cabernet blends. Martella considers the SCM appellation unique. "Part of it is the soils and cooler climate," he said, but it's also the community.

More to come on Santa Cruz.
conawayjim@gmail.com