Oh What a Tangled Web

At first blush, North Platte Nebraska would not seem to be a hotbed of wine controversy. My own experience with Nebraska is a brief spell there as a lad, on a cross-continent camping trip, and using Bruce Springsteen's album of the same name to clear out unwanted guests from my home.

But it turns out that there's a lot more than just the junction of the North and South Platte rivers going on in Lincoln County. According to the Napa Valley Register, Nebraska liquor commission officers seized and destroyed over 1000 gallons of illegal wine.

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Oak, Not Just for Breakfast Any More

If you're like me and a lot of other folks, you might have a propane barbecue. While the convenience is great, there's just something about charcoal from a good hardwood fire that makes barbecuing even better. For years I've saved the trimmings from my grape vines, and occasionally begged some from friends who have vineyards, to do a little extracurricular 'cuing. Tossed on top of charcoal, the dried grape wood adds a delicate winey-ness to grilled foods.

(For my American friends, yes, I know it's either low and slow or hot and fast, and grilling isn't the same as barbecue. I'm sorry. My only excuse is that I'm a Canadian. Plus, I don't want to stir up the whole Texas vs. KC thing. Unless of course someone would like to supply me with unlimited samples of each so I can make a definitive judgement. It could take many years of eating, but I'm willing to try.)

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Je me souviens

Not much activity today, as I've been in a food-coma. We went to Restaurant St. Amour last night, and had the full-pull degustation menu. Nothing like having your blood-sugar and lipid count spike in the high percentages for three or four hours while you enjoy many glasses of finely matched wines with your meal. I recommend the foie gras. And everything else.

Today we're off in search of Chicoutai, a Quebec liqueur made from cloudberries. I've had the Finnish version, Lakka, before, but not the Canadian. It's been in, or poured on three or four dishes I've eaten in the last few days, and I'm very interested to try it out on its own.

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Eating Quebec

Quebec City is Canada's oldest, and it's a great and wonderful place to be. I was here over the weekend at the Vinexpert/Distrivin conference, meeting with our retail partners and seeing old friends and making new ones. My friend and co-worker Yves taught my Winemaking Excellence 101 course (with a little help from me) on Saturday, and the general retailer conference was Sunday.

Saturday night after work we went out for dinner to a wonderful restaurant, Le Patriarche. I had the do-it-yourself table d'hote, a five course dinner:

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Live, From the Internet, It's . . . Another Blog!

I was in downtown Vancouver the other night at a book signing, and decided to drop in on Caffe Artigiano, a hipster coffee shop such that only Vancouver could manifest. The patrons, individually and collectively had more tattoos, piercings, street cred and attitude than I could possibly manifest, even if I had sixteen lifetimes and an unlimited supply of body parts to stick needles into and through and skin surface area to decorate.

Still, they make very good coffee. Strange as it may seem, I probably drink more coffee than I do wine (although I spit less of it out, so I guess that evens things up) and I'm fond of high-end beans. No fancy-pants drinks though: I know it's not a popular stance, but I think that mochas, whatchamacinos and frappe-type drinks are simply milkshakes in disguise. Rather than gulping down eight hundred calories of milk, sugar and fat to get an ounce of coffee, I'll just take sixteen ounces of drip coffee, please.

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The Fifteen Dollar Cup of Coffee

I was in downtown Vancouver the other night at a book signing, and decided to drop in on Caffe Artigiano, a hipster coffee shop such that only Vancouver could manifest. The patrons, individually and collectively had more tattoos, piercings, street cred and attitude than I could possibly manifest, even if I had sixteen lifetimes and an unlimited supply of body parts to stick needles into and through and skin surface area to decorate.

Still, they make very good coffee. Strange as it may seem, I probably drink more coffee than I do wine (although I spit less of it out, so I guess that evens things up) and I’m fond of high-end beans. No fancy-pants drinks though: I know it’s not a popular stance, but I think that mochas, whatchamacinos and frappe-type drinks are simply milkshakes in disguise. Rather than gulping down eight hundred calories of milk, sugar and fat to get an ounce of coffee, I’ll just take sixteen ounces of drip coffee, please.

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Wine--It Makes Everything Better. Or Worse.

It's an old saying in the restaurant industry that customers eat with their eyes. I always thought this would make spicy food less appealing, but iI learned that it's a metaphor for how perception informs reality: if you think something is going to taste good, it's going to taste good to you. Seems clear enough, but here's the kicker: apparently we drink with our preconceived notions.

In a 2003 study by Dr. Brian Wansink of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, diners were given free glasses of wine with their meal. Some were told it was a French wine, others were told it was a local (North Dakota) bottle. It was, in fact, Two-Buck Chuck in both cases. But the people who were shown a French label ate more dinner, and rated the food higher. Those who thought they were getting ND wine ate less and rated the meal 'average'. Same wine, same food, different perception.

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Two Buck Chuck, the Musical

It's an old saying in the restaurant industry that customers eat with their eyes. I always thought this would make spicy food less appealing, but iI learned that it's a metaphor for how perception informs reality: if you think something is going to taste good, it's going to taste good to you. Seems clear enough, but here's the kicker: apparently we drink with our preconceived notions.

In a 2003 study by Dr. Brian Wansink of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, diners were given free glasses of wine with their meal. Some were told it was a French wine, others were told it was a local (North Dakota) bottle. It was, in fact, Two-Buck Chuck in both cases. But the people who were shown a French label ate more dinner, and rated the food higher. Those who thought they were getting ND wine ate less and rated the meal 'average'. Same wine, same food, different perception.

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Another Spin On High Alcohol Wines

Tina Caputo, managing editor for Wines and Vines magazine, has some interesting things to say on the high alcohol debate over in her wine blog, The Wine Broad.

While there is something of a high-alc backlash going on within the industry, I don't think we'll see consumers dumping their Napa cult wines down the drain in protest anytime soon. The simple fact is that a hell of a lot of people really like that style of wine. I'm a little sick of it myself (it would be nice to be able to drink two glasses of California red with dinner without getting hammered), but that doesn't mean we should burn all the Zin producers alive and rid the store shelves of the over-extracted offenders.

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Conference Blogging

It's a busy month at Casa Winexpert. August 13th was our Western Retailer Conference, held in (sunny!) Pitt Meadows BC at the beautiful Meadow-Gardens. This annual gathering for Winexpert and it's retail partners is always a great event. Not only do I get to see old friends (some of whom I've known for 15 years now) I get to stay in touch with our network of Western retailers, find out what's on their minds and catch up on gossip and shenannigans.

This year we had a great speaker in, Kevin Graff of the Graff Retail Group. His talk on retail excellence was informative and dynamic--plenty of good information and motivation to charge up everyone to make their stores better. We also announced new wines: our Estate Series Crushendo South Australian Single-Vineyard Shiraz and one other, slightly secret varietal that everyone went cuckoo-bananas over.

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On the Road With Wine

I haven't updated the blog for a week, as I was on holidays--yep, they let me off the ranch once in a while. I'm always on a short leash, however, as I wound up touring Yakima Valley wine country with my wife.

Washington state is a beautiful place, and the image most folks have of the damp, cloud-shrouded, caffeine-fueled city of Seattle is completely belied by the desert just on the other side of the Snoqualmie pass. Take a left at Everett, snag the 405, through the pass on 90, take a right at Ellensburg and you're suddenly in dry sagebrush, rutted mountains and brilliant fields of grapes, apples and corn as high as an elephant's eye (I had no idea those were the units used for measuring corn growth).

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Nutritious Wine

According to the New York Times, the US Treasury Department has proposed changes to the laws governing alcohol labels. Up until now they've merely warned about getting pregnant while operating heavy machinery, but in future they could include serving size, alcohol by volume, servings per containerand levels of macronutrients like calories,carbohydrates, fat and protein.

Predictably, large manufacturers are for it and smaller players (without the laboratory or marketing resources to easily make such packaging changes) are against it. Some Winexpert kits are being made into commercial wine for sale in the USA, so it would affect us as well, but I honestly think it's a positive thing. You can't sell a bottle of water without a nutrient label, so why would alcohol be different? Plus, I want to know if I'm getting vitamins and minerals in my glass of Viognier, so I can feel virtuous.

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More Alcohol Notes

Yesterday I wrote about Randy Dunn's letter decrying alcohol creep in modern wine. Today I found a great article over at Appellation America (they also feature the Randy Dunn letter and have a great analysis of the issue) about the trend in Napa for De-alcoholising premium wines. (Full disclosure: Winexpert deals with some of the alcohol-mitigation companies mentioned in the article. We don't use their de-alcohol service, but we do buy products from them.)

Now I'm confused: the de-alcoholising folks claim that it's a service that allows winemakers to hang grapes until they're fully 'ripe', while keeping alcohol content below the pain threshold. On the other hand, Randy Dunn says that their grapes are over-ripe, and you can't tell Rutherford Cab from a Stag's Leap, and terroir is out the window, lost in the overdone fruit.

I take his point. In the article he talks about how 'herbaceous' didn't used to be a dirty word when describing wines. When I first started drinking fine wine we did a tasting of a dozen or California Cabernets at my house, including Newton, Beringer, Cakebread, BV, Duckhorn, Kendall-Jackson, Heitz, etc. (what can I say, it was the 80's and a time of wretched excess). I can't recall any of them exceeding 13% alcohol, much less pushing 15.5 like I keep seeing on 'cult' wines from California these days, and all of the wines were good to excellent, even with a herbaceous note or two.

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High on Alcohol

The Sonoma Press Democrat's Wineblog had an interesting piece today. Randy Dunn, California Zin Guru and the winemaker behind some great Howell Mountain vintages is has written an open letter chiding wineries for letting alcohol content get out of hand.

This is a very interesting development. Influential wine critics (like Robert Parker) are blamed for imposing their personal tasting preferences on wine. A Parker rating of 90 points will generate a hundred times the sales of a rating of 89, and it's well-understood that he favours very fruity, under-structured reds with very high alcohol levels. As a consequence more and more commercial wines are coming in at 15-16% alcohol. To achieve the sugar levels necessary to produce this much alcohol, grapes have to be left on the vine until they're nearly raisiny-ripe. This leads to soft tannins, low acid and cooked, 'jammy' fruit.

It also leads to the 'Pepsi Challenge' effect. Most folks will remember the advertising campaign which pitted blind tastes of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola, where Pepsi always came out on top. This is mainly due to the fact that Pepsi is lower in acid, and sweeter than Coke. If they're only taking a sip, most people favour the sweeter, softer style. But if you're drinking a whole can that sweetness can become cloying, and tiresome. Same deal with big, overcooked fruity wines: if you're tasting thirty or forty wines at one, the sweetest, fruitiest, 'biggest' wine will stand out, while the more delicate and structured wines with more acid and more challenging tannins will seem (by comparison) harsh and less lovable.

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