Stainless Steel Growler

Our friends have returned home from an 11 week trip to New Zealand and Tasmania by way of Hawaii. We are the recipients of some pretty cool gifts including this stainless steel growler from Mehana Beer Brewery in Hilo, Hawaii.
We discussed how this growler could be used in the winery for repeat customers who would like to get their wine on tap. The stainless steel growler can contain 64 fluid ounces (2 liter) volume and the stainless steel construction can keep cold liquids cold. This is a far departure from using the typical wine bottles, but I found some information on line that might be good for the wine consumer as well as the wine producer:
"Wineries report that their wines on tap can go for 20-30% less than what they would charge for the same wines in bottles. It stands to reason: If they’re selling their wines in pressurized stainless steel kegs, they’re saving oodles of money by not having a bottling line, labels, corks and so forth, not to mention the astronomical power demands of a bottling operation. Beer breweries that forego bottling operations are enjoying similar savings.
Now for the part that everybody likes: Growlers are good for the environment. If you use and reuse (after thoroughly washing) just one container for your favorite beverages, think how many cans and bottles you are avoiding having to discard or recycle."
French winery co-ops have been selling wine on tap forever, so it might be something for us to consider, but for right now, it's a pretty neat gift from our friends and we'll be making use of it to hold our ice-cold water when we work in the vineyard.
References:
1. Living on the Cheap, For cheaper beer and wine, bring a growler. A what?, July 14, 2014, Posted by Susan Hauser.

2011 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir

We had our friend over for dinner during the middle of the week. We wanted to begin dinner with oysters, so we drove to Matunuck Oyster Bar in South Kingstown, Rhode Island where they will sell you oysters that you can shuck yourself. We were directed to the oyster bar where Mike, with an obvious passion for his job, explained the three different types of oysters they had on sale that day and gave me a taste of one of the Quonsets. Yumm! Mike also showed my husband how to shuck the oyster, it took him only a few seconds and made shucking look easy. We bought the Quonsets and the Matunucks for dinner. We drank a 2014 Chateau D'Epire Savennières with the oysters and the acidity of the Savennières was the perfect foil for the oysters. This is what we hope to be able to do, pair our Chenin Blanc wines with the local seafood and it appears that oysters will be the perfect match!

For our main course, my husband made pan seared duck breasts with berry sauce, an Internet recipe courtesy of Chef Robert Irvine. A fresh green salad with tarragon vinegar, honey mustard dressing and mushroom wild rice were the accompanying dishes. We paired the meal with this 2011 Littorai Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir.
We toured the Littorai facility in 2012, but we did not buy any wine at that time and always regretted it. Somehow we acquired this singular bottle of Littorai Pinot Noir and enjoyed it with our meal. The only thing that I can recall is that this Pinot Noir was perfect with the duck breast---I was too busy enjoying the company of our friend and the meal that my husband prepared, to critique the wine. May be next time we find ourselves in the possession of another Littorai, I can be more analytical.

Tartaric Acid---Wine Diamonds

Recently, I took a look at one of the red wine corks that we have and saw this shiny, glinting object that I knew was a crystal of tartaric acid. Doing some further online research into tartaric acid took me on a little trip down memory lane. (In a former professional incarnation, I was a small and macromolecular crystallographer, thus my affinity for crystals!)
Grapes, the baobab tree and the tamarind fruit are the only plants that contain tartaric acid.¹ The chemical structure of tartaric acid looks like this:

Tartaric acid is also used in cooking, where it is known as cream of tartar. When it occurs in wine, tartaric acid can exist as the potassium salt (potassium bitartrate), and when it crystallizes out of solution, are known as wine diamonds. In fact, Louis Pasteur was studying wine sediments when he noticed that there were two types of crystals. He tediously separated out the two forms of tartaric acid crystals that he saw under his microscope, and recrystallized the separated piles. He then found that the two forms of crystals rotated plane polarized light in different directions. What Pasteur had done was to separate out the mixture of D- and L-tartaric acid. When the two forms of tartaric acid are found together, they do not rotate plane polarized light and this mixture is called a racemic mixture. I found out that the word racemic comes from the Latin racemus, meaning ‘a bunch of grapes’).³ This elegant(tedious) experiment that Pasteur conducted lead to the discovery of molecular chirality!

Wouldn't you agree that this little cutie looks like a diamond!
References:
1. Patrick McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture.
2. The chemical structure of tartaric acid was drawn by the freely available drawing program from ACD Labs called ACD/ChemSketch Freeware.
3. Crystallography 365, Pasteurized Crystals – Tartaric acid, December 27, 2014.

Tangled Vines by Frances Dinkelspiel

I have to be honest, I would not have bought this book, but it was a Christmas gift and it opened my eyes to the seedy side of wine and more.
The topic of this book is the 2005 fire that occurred at Wines Central in Vallejo, California. The author, Frances Dinkelspiel has a personal connection with the fire because Wines Central was storing two wines that her ancestor, great-great grandfather, Isaias Hellman had made in 1875. It is a thoroughly researched book, with an even handed accounting of the person who set the Wines Central storage facility on fire, Mark Anderson, as well as the background of Rancho Cucamanga where the wine was made and how the two eventually intersected. Throughout the history of Rancho Cucamanga, there were occasions where blood was shed and fortunes were lost and then made. This is the story of early California wine making, the formation of the California Wine Association interleaved with the stories of current highly respected California wineries including Saintsbury, Viader, and Sean Thackery's Orion Rossi Vineyard. It is worthwhile reading through this history to arrive at the end. In spite of the travails that her book relates, Frances Dinkelspiel's recounting of the evening spent with Fred Dame tasting her ancestor's 1875 Port is why wine is so special. It's a good and fast read and filled in a bit of history that I was totally ignorant about.