The Battle for Wine and Love

Alice Feiring wrote a book in 2008 called "The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the World from Parkerization." I was intrigued because I too was getting a little tired of overly extracted, unctuous wines tasting like extracted raisins and wanted to hear how Alice saved the World. When the book came out it caused controversy and polarization among book reviewers, but I didn't read the reviews until I read the book twice. The second time I read the book, I had finished my UC Davis online course and while I don't agree with all of what Alice writes, in my opinion, some of the parts are better than the whole. The chapter on Alice's meeting with Dr. Roger Boulton and Dr. Douglas Adams showed me a different perspective because the book used in the course was written by Roger Boulton (Singleton, Bisson, and Kunkee) and Dr. Douglas Adams "taught" part of the Viticulture course. My take away from this is that while the UC Davis online course talks about the mechanics of making wine, both Roger Boulton and Doug Adams want us to put into our winemaking more than just the mechanics. So, we need to be familiar with all of the techniques for making wine, but we should try to make wine the way that we know how. In rereading the notes from all of the UC Davis online course, without the pressure of assignments and exams, I am finding that the authors have indeed presented all points of view.
Alice also tries to present all points of view in her book, even interviewing Robert Parker to get his side of the story. All in all, the book is a good read and it has made me rethink my approach to making wine.

2009 Laurent Kraft Vouvray

We had this Vouvray with cheese and crackers. It went well with the herb coated goat cheese, but not too well with the hard aged goat cheese.
The alcohol content is 12% and the bottle is labeled a "Sec". The color was a pale yellow. The nose was lush with pears and apricots and the flavor was fruity but with a touch of citrus--lemons. Overall, the wine was well balanced.
One thing that we noticed upon opening the bottle and pouring was the evolution of very tiny bubbles. Is this the case with Vouvrays?

HR 1161 or the CARE Act

Jim Gordon wrote about this in the Editor's letter column in the June issue of Wines and Vines. HR 1161 was called HR 5034 in the last session of Congress this year it is called HR 1161 or Community Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness (CARE). According to Jim Gordon, HR 1161 would strip away Commerce Clause protections that allow regulated interstate shipment of wine to consumers, upend decades of settled case law and undermine federal authority over alcohol.

We don't make any wine yet, so we don't direct ship to our consumers. But when we visited a few local wineries earlier this year, the take home message for startups like us was to ensure that we had a viable market strategy. We learned that the profit margin for selling wine is best when people buy directly from the winery, whether it is at the tasting room or via direct shipping. When selling to a local restaurant, the profit margin is not very good because our wine would be competing with other wines so to incentivize the restaurant owner, the wine needs to be as reasonable as the winery can manage and still make some profit.
Some online articles to read include:
Wines & Vines June 2011 There is a video of Jim Gordon explaining what HR 1161 is about.
Wine Spectator March 2011

UC Davis Enology Access URL

UC Davis has created a website for Enology and Viticulture related topics.
I learned about it by looking at the following seminar give in 2011:
Seminar on Enology Access
There are two sites that you can get to if you use Google. You should go to this site: EnologyAccess.org
It's good to look at both the Seminar as well as going to EnologyAccess.org. There is a lot of material on the site but the Forum itself does not have too much content.

Alma Rosa 2007 Pinot Noir

We don't see this wine in Connecticut and were surprised to see it in a wine shop called Tamura's Fine Wines and Liquors in Hawaii. Alma Rosa is the winery founded by Richard Sanford. We often wondered what happened to Sanford Winery, with the quirky little tasting room in Santa Barbara County near Buellton. In 2006, we heard him give a talk on organic farming when we went to the International Pinot noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon. Richard Sanford was one of the early proponents of organic viticulture on the West Coast. After that, silence. Then we began hearing about a new winery called Alma Rosa owned by Richard and Thekla Sanford. We knew that 2007 was a great year in California and we were surprised and delighted to find it in Hawaii. The wine was dark garnet in color, it was well balanced and the overall taste was spicy but the aroma was rather nonexistent. The wine could stand to be cellared for a while. We purchased this entry level pinot for around $20.00 so it was a good value.

Book Review: The Botanist and the Vintner

"The Botanist and the Vintner" is a detailed examination of phylloxera, written by Christy Campbell complete with maps and dates to chronicle the spread of the devastation. The subtitle, "How Wine was Saved for the World" is a tacit, perhaps overly ambitious promise that Campbell doesn't quite manage to keep. The book begins with a scene from the Napa and Sonoma grape growing regions in 1994, where use of an infra-red film camera and computer imagery showed the spread of phylloxera. Campbell intends to contrast this high tech sleuthing to what occurred in the late 1800's as European grape vines were attacked by an unknown malady. There are three parts to this book, Denial, Anger and Acceptance. In Denial, Campbell is setting the historical stage: One of the first places where a curious phenomenon occurred was in Ireland in 1867 where Malcolm Dunn, the head gardener to the Seventh Viscount Powerscourt, noticed the grape vines in the Viscount's glass grape-house turning red-brown and drying up and falling. This reference to Ireland is to remind us that in 1840, a mere two decades ago, the blight Phythoptora infestans destroyed all the potato fields leading to the Great Potato Famine. Names mentioned in the historical setting include Pasteur, Darwin, Planchon, Laliman, Riley, and Guyot. The historical setting also pinpoints ground-zero of the phylloxera occurrence in France.
In Part II, Anger, while the battle against phylloxera was being waged, France and the Second Empire of Napoleon III was engaged in a war against Prussia and it's ally Germany. The artillery used against phylloxera in the beginning was carbon bisulphide, effective against insects as well as being a neurotoxin to humans. A decade passes as other chemical and biological controls were tried without showing any efficacy. Understanding the lifecycle of the causative agent, the aphid, Phylloxera vastatrix was in progress and investigations into using American rootstock were also underway.
In Part III, Acceptance, the phylloxera was now affecting not only France, but Spain, Portugal, Austria as well as Australia and California. It was a global plague. This is where Campbell's book fails for me because there is only one mention of Thomas Volnay Munson, the American whose work was critical in identifying varieties of rootstock that could provide resistance to phylloxera. I guess it is impossible to provide a comprehensive book about how wine was saved for the world. Perhaps Christy Campbell needs to write a sequel.