IDENTICAL BUT DIFFERENT TWINS, A THEORY OF RELATIVITY
(Originally posted on 12/27/2014)My friend Steve Cottrell, who has a large collection of well cellared old domestics, holds an annual Christmas open house in which he shares some with other wine lovers and friends. He usually pours several into decanters and asks us to guess what they are. This year he put out five decanters, each a different shape and size. He told us there were four wines and a "mystery wine", giving us the names and vintages of the four ahead of the tasting. Several hours later when he declared the correct answers we all realized we had be[...]
FRENCH SOUL, AMERICAN SOIL; MAISON DROUHIN IN OREGON
French soul, American soil. Maison Drouhin’s catchy motto for its Oregon wines. Drouhin, better known in Burgundy as a giant winemaker and negociant, legitimized Oregon Pinot Noir in the 1980s by buying land there and making wine under the Domaine Drouhin label. In a recent tasting of seven randomly assembled BYOB bottles, all Oregon Pinot Noirs, we serendipitously sampled this flagship wine along with Drouhin’s latest, Roserock, from Eola-Amity Hills. The occasion gave cause to ponder that motto.The wines we tasted were all typical cold climate Pinots similar to Burgundy, but with some distinct differences. They were light in structure, lean[...]
MILLENNIALS AND WINE
A prior blog I wrote about young wine drinkers seeking to break out of Moscato and into more serious wines (see Moscato Mania: Prelude to Deliverance, 9/16/16) was published in Karima magazine (karimamag.com). The publisher, Angela Karim, whom I referred to as Signora Moscato in my blog, told me afterwards that my essay resonated will her Millennial readers. As a tail end Baby Boomer, I usually don’t resonate with Millennials much, my own children included. I was pleased, butalso intrigued. Who exactly are Millennials and what do they seek in wine?Millennials are loosely defined as having been born around the early[...]
FOX’S PERILOUS FUTURES; PITFALLS IN THE “EN PRIMEUR” MARKET
This man, John Fox was recently convicted of running a $ 45 million Ponzi scheme that defrauded 9000 people. He was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. So what? In the aftermath of Bernie Madoff ($ 36 billion) and Allen Stanford ($ 7 billion), Mr. Fox’s scam is chump change. Except that Fox did not engage in securities fraud. He did it with wine.Fox was owner of Premier Cru, a once swank, now defunct Berkeley wine shop that I visited in the 1990s as a novice in the wine world. It used to be in Oakland those[...]
” I ATE HIS LIVER WITH…..” HANNIBAL LECHTER’S REAL CHOICE, AND MORE ABOUT WINE IN FICTION
I was recently taken by a wine scene in a crime novel I am currently reading, A Conflict of Interest, by Adam Mitzner. In it, the night before his surrender to the FBI, a rich white collar criminal takes his lawyer to dinner at Peter Luger, a famous steakhouse in Brooklyn. When the waiter arrives with a wine list he rejects it. He already knows what he wants. He asks for Amarone, bring us your best he adds with a flair. Amarone would not have been my top guess for a wine to impress guests in such a restaurant. More[...]
AGING POTENTIAL OF WINES; HAZARDOUS PREDICTIONS
Of all the intimidating mysteries in the wine world, the aging potential of given wines is up there at the top. To be sure, for a vast majority of wine lovers this is a non-issue. Most wine is consumed within less than an hour of purchase. But us wine geeks – all right, let’s call ourselves collectors – obsessively grapple with this subject. How long do we cellar a given bottle? When do we know it has reached its peak? How do we tell what vintages are more age-worthy than others? First there are the basics. Certain wines are known[...]