The thought of being trapped underground for any length of time is enough to send some people off the deep end. The thought of being trapped underground for 3 months without any wine is a whole different ball game.
In the event you missed the news, an . Already the group has been trapped longer than any other in history. The miners are miraculously in good health and reasonably good spirits. One of them has proposed to his girlfriend. They've made videos for the world. They're getting vitamins, food, and anti-depressants.
But apparently they .
Now, there may very well be some very good reason why these guys shouldn't have any wine, but notwithstanding some dire threat to their welfare as a result (dehydration? rash decisions under the influence) it certainly seems like it would be the humane thing to do to pour some Carmenere down their little supply tube.
If they can't take a shower, at least let them have a glass of wine.
Winemaker's Cottage
This is a photograph of the cottage where the winemaker for J. Bouchon winery lives in Chile's Maule Valley. I never really imagine myself as a winemaker or winegrower (I'd much rather just drink the stuff, and I tend to kill plants) but if I were so inclined, I'd definitely want to live in the middle of my vineyards. It seems to me that if you are going to tie your livelihood to plants, and if you aspire to grow them to the peak of perfection, you should live with them for as much of your day as possible. Of course, it would help if your vineyards were in as beautiful a landscape as these. -- Alder Yarrow
INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.
To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow , while PC users should .
PRINTS:
If you are interested in owning a print of this image please contact photographer Matt Wilson
ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images.
There are a few categories of wine that qualify for the designation of "I just don't drink nearly enough of this stuff" in my house, and one of the top candidates is German Riesling. When it's good, it's just so damn good. It goes so well with food, and it makes you happy. What's not to love?
Of course, to the uninitiated (and that applied to me about six years ago) it can be an intimidating landscape to navigate. The inscrutable labels, the different levels of sweetness, the unfamiliar quality designations -- they all contribute to an unease for many wine lovers that I remember well. Luckily, I got over my fear and learned enough to navigate my way through the forest of umlauts and hard consonants, and have been rewarded with experiencing some of the most delicious wines on the planet.
This particular bottle is a near-perfect example of everything good that German Riesling has to offer, thanks to its legendary producer, fantastic vineyard site, and classic flavors.
The name on the label is one of the most well known in Germany's Mosel Valley, and even the country as a whole. The Loosen family has owned and farmed vineyards on the steep riverbanks for more than two centuries. The doctor on the label is one Ernst Loosen, who assumed control of his family's vineyard in 1988, and quite single-handedly took the estate to an entirely new level of quality in the three decades since.
Loosen had the good fortune to be working with some of the best possible raw materials on the planet. The Loosen family vineyards are some of the oldest and most distinctive vineyard plots in Germany, among which the vineyard that produced this wine, the Ürziger Würzgarten, may be the most superlative.
Translated to English, the vineyard's name means the Spice Garden of Ürzig, Ürzig being the little village that sits below the vineyard at the water's edge. Containing some of the oldest vines (some exceeding 120 years of age) owned by the Loosens, this vineyard is a mindbogglingly steep slope of bright red rock that sweeps up from the river's edge in a shallow bowl. Impossible to work mechanically, and dangerous to work manually, getting fruit out of this vineyard can only be described as a labor of love. It takes somewhere between 1000 and 1500 man-hours per acre each year to maintain the vineyard, whose old vines (many of which predate the phylloxera epidemic that wiped out nearly all of Europe's vineyards) yield precious little fruit.
The vineyard, like all of Loosen's Mosel vineyards, is farmed organically, and painstakingly by hand. The elimination of all chemical fertilizers and pesticides was one of Loosen's first decisions in his quest to elevate the quality of his family's wines. Likewise, the cellar techniques have been reduced to their most fundamental, with as little mechanical or chemical intervention in the winemaking as possible.
This wine is classified as a spätlese, which literally translates to "late harvest" and which means that the grapes used to make it were picked at least seven days after the normal harvest that would have yielded a dry, kabinett level wine. Confusingly the spätlese designation does not technically guarantee anything about the level of sweetness in the bottle, only that the grapes were a little extra ripe when they were picked. In practice, however, German spätlese, in particular, tend to be lightly to moderately sweet, this wine being no exception.
Dr. Loosen is now one of the most consistent and high-quality producers in the Mosel, and this is one of my favorite wines from his portfolio (the other being the spätlese from the fabulous Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyard). I highly recommend it to anyone, from those looking to dip their toe into German Riesling, to those like me who can't seem to find enough excuses to drink the stuff.
This 2008 vintage wine has just been released globally, and may take a little time before being more widely available.
Full disclosure: this wine was sent to me as a press sample.
Tasting Notes:
Near colorless in the glass, this wine smells of lychee, ripe pear, and honeysuckle flowers. In the mouth, a wonderful silky texture marries with bright mandarin orange, pear, and honeysuckle fruit flavors, a light sweetness, and a crackling mineral undertone that does, true to name, yield to a light spiciness. Fantastically balanced, this wine keeps on giving through a very long finish. Effortless to drink.
Food Pairing:
I'd love to drink this wine with any sort of Vietnamese food, like Vietnamese noodle bowl and Imperial Rolls.
Many of you had a lot of things to say a couple of months ago when I wrote a post entitled It was great to see such a passionate tide of enthusiasm for inducting various winemakers and historical wine personalities.
Those of us that make up the nominating committee talked a lot about many of the names suggested, and about many of the names that weren't suggested, and after much debate and voting, we've come up with the names for this years ballot.
That ballot has been mailed out to the wine writers in the Culinary Institute of America's database and the voting has begun.
The full details on who is on the ballot and some wise words about those who perhaps didn't get on the ballot by my colleague Blake Gray on his fine blog . Those of you who felt strongly about the ballot are welcome to offer your thoughts and criticisms on this year's candidates.
And if you are a professional wine writer and you haven't received a ballot, you should definitely let Blake know.
I absolutely love the fact that we've reached a point in this country where I don't need to explain why a sake tasting in San Francisco or New York might be an enjoyable way to spend an evening. In the six and a half years since I've been writing this blog, sake has gone from obscure to obvious, hardly known to hip. The availability and visibility of sake in the US has blossomed, driving by fine dining establishments and the increasing popularity of all things Japanese.
Despite this, however, the average wine lovers' knowledge of sake is extremely limited, mostly by virtue of not having tasted very much sake side-by-side in comparison with one another. And that of course, is where the comes in. This tasting event, the largest public sake tasting outside of Japan, is much more than just an opportunity to compare a few sakes. Nowhere outside of Japan do consumers have the opportunity to sample so many different, and so many high quality sakes as they do at this event. For anyone truly interested in sake, this tasting cannot be missed.
Hundreds of different sakes are on offer, including the dozens of gold and silver medal winners from the annual U.S. National Sake Appraisal, a competition held each year in Hawaii. Dozens of local restaurants serve up sake friendly food to accompany the brews, which are sampled by attendees using the traditional eyedroppers to fill their glasses.
The one difference between the Joy of Sake tasting and a normal wine tasting event has to do with the information that is available to the curious taster. While there are volunteers whose job it is primarily to make sure that the reservoir cups of sake don't run dry, these folks have an extremely inconsistent knowledge of what they're actually pouring. Unlike a large public wine tasting where the folks behind the table are informed about their particular wine, there is little or no information available about these sakes, should you fall in love with any of them, or have questions about what you are tasting.
Despite this lack of information, the event can be an incredible education to the attentive palate, and is always a great reminder to me of just how much great sake there is out there to be experienced.
For the second year, San Francisco has gotten the short end of the stick for this sake tasting. While the New York event seems to offer the usual selection of hundreds of sakes, the San Francisco event is billed as the Sake Soiree, and it is being held again at Yoshi's nightclub and restaurant, which is cramped and hot and noisy. To add insult to injury they've changed it from 3.5 hours to just three hours, and have raised the price $15 to $65 a person.
This is still an event worth going to for San Franciscans, especially those who are fans of sake or want to learn about it, but I recommend going early especially if you want to get some food.
JOY OF SAKE 2010
September 9, San Francisco
6:00 - 9:00 PM
Yoshi's Restaurant
1330 Fillmore St
San Francisco, CA 94115-4113
888-799-7242
September 23rd, New York City
6:00 PM to 9:00 PM
82 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10003
888-799-7242
Tickets are $65 per person for San Francisco and $90 for New York and can be . The price goes up at the door.
Sake tasting is even harder work than wine tasting, as sake is higher in alcohol and much more subtle in flavor. I recommend snacking your way through the tasting to keep your palate fresh. Maddeningly, in the past years they have not provided spit buckets with any regularity, so I recommend bringing your own spit cup or bottle if you are a serious taster. And if you truly consider yourself the latter, I also recommend bringing a small white wine glass, the better to appreciate the aromas.
Those of you who know me well understand the soft spot I have in my heart for iconoclastic winemakers. The crazier the better, in my book, but at the very least, so steadfastly committed to their idea of what makes for great wine that they're willing to persist in their quest even when everyone else says they are nuts.
And that's exactly what most people said when they spotted Josh Jensen driving up and down California in his beat-up Volkswagen stopping here and there to get out of the car and sprinkle hydrochloric acid on the ground -- even those who were able to figure out what it was he was doing.
Jensen was looking for limestone. And a lot of it. Several million tons, to be exact. It was the secret ingredient that made the great Burgundies of the world what they were, and Jensen wanted to make wine that was just as good.
It was 1971, and Jensen had just finished working two harvests in Burgundy at Domaine de la Romanee Conti, and Domaine Dujac. Thanks to his father and some generous friends, Jensen had been drinking top Burgundies since before he was legally able, and despite an education that might have sent him into academia (Yale undergrad, Masters in Anthropology at Oxford), Jensen was in love with wine, and though his prospects better there than looking for a tenure track position somewhere.
That was before he started looking for several million tons of limestone close to the surface in California (a state with very little of it to begin with). Jensen's challenge was compounded by the fact that he not only needed a lot of limestone, but he needed it in a place with decent weather for grapes (e.g. not Death Valley), and he needed to be able to buy the land.
The wacko winemakers of the world that I love are nothing if not persistent. Eventually Jensen found his limestone, in a place that even thirty years later still feels like the middle of freaking nowhere.
Jensen found an old limestone quarry high in the Gavilan Mountains on the side of a peak named Mount Harlan, about 30 miles south of the town of Hollister. He bought 324 acres, and planted a few acres of Pinot Noir, before he had electricity, running water, or even a proper road to the property. He named his winery , Spanish for lime kiln, the remains of which he found on the property, and eventually restored. The first few years were hard going, but eventually, in 1978, Jensen harvested his first couple of barrels of Pinot Noir and has never looked back.
Over the past three decades, few winemakers in California could possibly compete with Jensen for fidelity to an original vision of what kind of wine they wanted to make. In those three decades, the only concession to modernity that Jensen has allowed is the addition of a mechanical crusher-destemmer to his operation. Apart from that he continues to make Pinot Noir the way he learned to in Burgundy: perfectly ripe, meticulously farmed grapes; whole cluster fermentation with native yeasts in small vats, punched down by hand; aging for at least 16 months, in French oak (of which only about 30% is new) and then bottling without any filtration.
In 1990 Jensen's patch of limestone (and about 7000 acres surrounding it) were granted the status of being an American Viticultural Area, but by then most people who cared about California Pinot Noir already had heard of the winemaker up on the mountain who was making some of the best Pinot Noir to be found outside of Burgundy.
Remarkably, that is still true today. Calera's single vineyard Pinot Noirs are some of the best around, yet more so than any other wine of their caliber, they are reasonably easy to find, and priced within the reach of mere mortals -- something to do with the fact that they don't have the words Sonoma or Napa anywhere on the label.
As further proof of his foresight and vision, Jensen has also long had a deep library program, meaning that older vintage wines are still available to purchase, in case you need to prove to yourself that his wines will last 15 years without blinking an eye.
Jensen often brings along these older vintages to tastings, where lucky folk like myself get a chance to taste them.
If you have not had a chance to taste the single vineyard wines of Calera, you are missing out on some of the most distinctive and characterful Pinot Noirs made in America. I recommend them highly.
Tasting Notes:
Bright ruby and orange in the glass with a bright amber color at the rim, this wine smells delightfully of red apple skin, river mud, and a sort of unspecific potpourri of spices. In the mouth, the wine distinguishes itself with two remarkable characteristics. The first is the sheer muscle of the voluminous tannins that still give a tensile structure to the wine, even as they are suede-soft in their feel against the edges of the mouth and tongue. The second is the bright acidity that still holds in suspension flavors of red apple skin, raisins, dried cherries and cedar. These flavors, poised as they are in very fine balance, linger through the very long finish with notes of cocoa powder.
Food Pairing:
Wines like this are often fun to appreciate on their own, if only to watch them shift and change in the glass with air and time, but if I were trying to find something to eat to complement the wine, I might opt for a classic tea-smoked duck from a little hole in the wall Shanghainese restaurant.
knows when it's onto a good thing. Building on the success of the long running and incredibly popular Aspen Food and Wine Classic, the magazine (actually it's publisher, American Express) has branched out to bring a similar, if somewhat abbreviated version to South Beach in Florida, and has become a major sponsor of the Pebble Beach Food and Wine event in Carmel, California
And now Food and Wine magazine has launched the , a four-day extravaganza of food, wine, cocktails and music at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Attendees to the event will have the opportunity to taste food from many of LA's top restaurants; watch cooking demonstrations by big-name chefs and cocktail mixing demos by top mixologists; taste wine from more than 80 different wineries (including some really excellent ones); and more.
Some of my readers have complained in the past about the quality of wine and food festivals in the Los Angeles area, so I would expect this event to set a new bar for both the quality of food and the quality of the logistics. The event also features a lot of music, a nice touch to complement all the food and wine.
Consult the event web site for lots of information about the schedule of events, which celebrity chefs will be in attendance, and more.
The Inaugural Taste of Beverly Hills
September 2-5, 2010
Behind the Beverly Hilton
9900 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills 90210 ()
Tickets start at $150, with various VIP passes available for all events and special access. They should be .
Valet parking for $30 will be available at the Beverly Hilton, and self-parking will be available in Century City for $12 with a free parking shuttle.
Southern Pinot
One of my greatest regrets from my trip to Chile last year was that I didn't have the time to get down to the tiny region of Biobio to check out one of the new frontiers of extreme winegrowing. One of the most southerly winegrowing regions in the world, this small, cool appellation has begun to yield some very interesting fruit, but perhaps of most interest is the Pinot Noir, shown here in all its Fall harvest glory. There aren't many wineries down in Biobio, but many top producers are starting to put in vineyards there, so it won't be long now. -- Alder Yarrow
INSTRUCTIONS:
Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.
To set the image as your desktop wallpaper, Mac users should follow , while PC users should .
PRINTS:
If you are interested in owning a print of this image please contact photographer Matt Wilson
ABOUT VINOGRAPHY IMAGES:
Vinography regularly features images by for readers' personal use as desktop backgrounds or screen savers. We hope you enjoy them. Please respect the copyright on these images.
Perhaps as unlikely as it may seem, one of the keys to my appreciation of wine lies in an esoteric principle at the heart of Japanese culture and philosophy.
The 18 months I spent living in Japan were among the most intense of my life, and some of the most rewarding. I developed a deep appreciation for many aspects of the Japanese culture (not to mention the food), even at the limited level of understanding I was able to cultivate without speaking the language beyond the first-grade-level tourist vocabulary I attained by the time I left.
In particular, I am fascinated by the aesthetic principles that find their intersection in Japanese gardens, traditional wood architecture, and the ritual and philosophy of the tea ceremony. In these three arts, the Japanese have created a vocabulary that I find much more suited to describing some of wine's most ineffable qualities than we posses in English.
Before I can talk about how that vocabulary is meaningful to me, however, I need to share some background on how I think about experiencing wine. So bear with me a moment.
Talking about wine in any language is difficult. I will admit to having fantasized at times (OK, frequently) about being a -- someone who, by virtual of some unique wiring, perceives some things with an unusual combination of senses, such as hearing sounds as particular colors. I fantasize that if I had such an ability, it would be easier to describe and talk about wine, and more importantly, to experience it in a more profound way.
Words are blocky and difficult to wrangle into semblances of meaning that approach what I enjoy in wine. Despite a somewhat established vocabulary for the discipline, in order to capture anything about wine that transcends the clinical, we must resort to metaphor and symbolism, as we struggle to express an experience that is, at best, only partly linguistic.
While the deconstruction of wine into its components plays a role in its critical evaluation, and for some, its enjoyment (just like those who enjoy picking out the melody line of a single instrument in a symphony), wine also offers the opportunity to be understood in the context of a singular experience, or a sum total, if you will. Of course, we experience wine in a series of shifting and fluid experiences, from the moment we first smell it to the moments in which the taste still lingers after a swallow, and everything in between. Our perception of a wine shifts and changes through the various mechanical aspects of sipping and swallowing, and over the course of time in the glass. Just as we see a landscape, a painting, or an oriental rug not in a single glance, but in a series of rapid, infinitesimal twitches of our eye (the technical term is ) that our brain stitches together for us, so too is my sense of a wine made up of little bursts of perception and memory that fuse together into a "sensibility" of what that wine is all about.
At some point, though, and not necessarily at a fixed and predictable point in this experience, we often have a sense of the wine as a whole. It might be after a full glass, it might be at the end of the meal, taking the last sips of the wine before leaving the table, it might be days later in reflection. But if we're considered, and attentive to the wine, there is some moment that we can apprehend it as a whole.
It is at this moment of appreciation for a wine that I have come to appreciate and understand the beauty of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, and its ability to capture a complexity that we cannot easily express in our own English language and our vocabulary of beauty.
Notoriously difficult to translate, wabi-sabi lies at the heart of the Japanese aesthetic philosophy (which is itself closely tied to ), and to a certain extent, the traditional Japanese culture. The words were originally strung together in the context of the aesthetics of the tea ceremony, an art form which profoundly influences many aspects of the Japanese culture.
The does a nice job at an attempted definition:
Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; sabi meant "chill", "lean" or "withered". Around the 14th century these meanings began to change, taking on more positive connotations. Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.
From an engineering or design point of view, "wabi" may be interpreted as the imperfect quality of any object, due to inevitable limitations in design and construction/manufacture especially with respect to unpredictable or changing usage conditions; then "sabi" could be interpreted as the aspect of imperfect reliability, or limited mortality of any object, hence the etymological connection with the Japanese word sabi, to rust....
Wabi sabi can change our perception of our world to the extent that a chip or crack in a vase makes it more interesting and gives the object greater meditative value. Similarly materials that age such as bare wood, paper and fabric become more interesting as they exhibit changes that can be observed over time.
For me wabi-sabi is a fusion of several tensions -- harmony and dissonance, new and old, sculpted and organic -- as well as the emotional state of wistful reflection that these tensions produce.
I wrote some time ago about , and wabi sabi is at a level deeper still. The wines that I find I am most drawn to, that compel my attention as I appreciate them as a whole, evoke the notion of wabi-sabi.
These are wines that are not symmetrical, nor polished perfectly smooth. They have rough edges. They do not follow a formula. They do not harmonize in major chords, they have a faint minor key to them. They show their patina of age, or in the roughness of their youth they choose not to obscure their rawness with anything, but leave it bare to my palate.
Wines that are wabi-sabi evoke something deeper than flavors, deeper even than a place. Wabi-sabi involves a deep connection with reality, in a way that is unvarnished, but also rich and profound in its intimacy. And this is what I find in the most magical wines.
Of course, not all great wines embody this aesthetic principle, and nor should they. And I am certainly not dogmatic in my quest to drink only such wines. Some wines are profound and equally pleasurable for other reasons, even those that can be said to be truly the opposite of wabi-sabi in their fresh, vibrant purity, or their lush, rich opulence.
There is also presumably such a thing as too much wabi-sabi, though I have yet to experience such a surfeit in my life. Instead I merely savor those moments when I can take another sip of a wine, close my eyes, and experience that poignant sense of mortality, beauty, and imperfection that is evoked by the wine, but ultimately lives within me.
I've long said that wine helps me maintain my sanity. Well it turns out I may have been more right than I know. that while it doesn't necessarily make me smarter (damn!), it may help me stave off dementia or whatever special breed of insanity waits for me in my old age. Chalk up
Of course like all studies, this one has its limitations. Thankfully it wasn't performed on lab rats, but actually featured real people. Norweigans, specifically -- about 5000 of them. So the surest way to make sure that your cognitive abilities don't decline in old age would be to move to Norway, drink a lot of wine, and presumably eat lots of .
Interestingly, the study suggested that wine consumption only aided women's cognitive function (and beer consumption had negative effects) both wine and beer consumption enhanced men's cognitive function over time.
And the men of the world rejoiced.
The real question is whether or not the study is more broadly applicable beyond Norway, but just to be safe, I'm going to keep drinking wine. How about you?
There are a few categories of wine that qualify for the designation of "I just don't drink nearly enough of this stuff" in my house, and one of the top candidates is German Riesling. When it's good, it's just so damn good. It goes so well with food, and it makes you happy. What's not to love?
I absolutely love the fact that we've reached a point in this country where I don't need to explain why a sake tasting in San Francisco or New York might be an enjoyable way to spend an evening. In the six and a half years since I've been writing this blog, sake has gone from obscure to obvious, hardly known to hip. The availability and visibility of sake in the US has blossomed, driving by fine dining establishments and the increasing popularity of all things Japanese.
Those of you who know me well understand the soft spot I have in my heart for iconoclastic winemakers. The crazier the better, in my book, but at the very least, so steadfastly committed to their idea of what makes for great wine that they're willing to persist in their quest even when everyone else says they are nuts.
knows when it's onto a good thing. Building on the success of the long running and incredibly popular Aspen Food and Wine Classic, the magazine (actually it's publisher, American Express) has branched out to bring a similar, if somewhat abbreviated version to South Beach in Florida, and has become a major sponsor of the Pebble Beach Food and Wine event in Carmel, California
Recent Comments