The 33 year-old Intern

No longer a 33 year old intern

2011-08-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

I feel so bad not posting here in so long. The longer it got the more guilty I became until eventually I couldn't face it. Sorry...

Since I last posted I have done internships at Coldstream Hills in the Yarra Valley run by the great James Halliday and with his help I have been a stagiaire at Domaine Simon Bize in Savigny-lès-Beaune in Burgundy since 2009. While working at Domaine Bize I fell in love with the terroir of Savigny-lès-Beaune and I have now set up a "nano-négociant" in a garage in Savigny-lès-Beaune making villages rouge and blanc starting with the 2011 vintage. A true garagiste!

My wine label is called Le Grappin and I will be focusing on exploring the lesser known, amazing terroirs of the Côte d'Or — for every Chambertin, there are many hidden gems of vines; not only in Savigny but across the Golden Spike.

I hope you can come by and visit me blogging the beginning of a new wine label — an Australian trying to make his way in one of the oldest wine regions in the world at http://blog.legrappin.com.

Lack of Posting....

2008-06-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the sparse posting. I have returned to the UK after harvest to my end of semester exams as part of my Bachelor of Wine Science degree as well as a house to move into - and next week I am off to Australia for two weeks at college doing all of this semester’s practical exercises and experiments.

As an interlude I thought I might post some humor from one of the must read wine industry blogs, Fermentation. Tom’s blog can be a little “inside baseball” but he calls it as he sees it. He had a post on why the chicken crossed the road according to various wine industry icons. Some of my favorites:-

The Wine Spectator
Non Vintage Chicken—The Road
This is a superb effort by the chicken that we haven't seen in a number of crossings. A lovely blend of supple movement and a robust gate propelled chicken across the street and to a finishing hop upon a smooth, well delineated finish. 94 Points

The Publicist
We wanted to create the greatest crossing ever! Our chicken is dedicated to hands-on crossings that highlight the terroir of the road. This is by far the finest crossing the chicken has ever offered.

The Wine Blogger
I don't care why the chicken crossed the road. I just blog about it for my own pleasure and to try to make chicken crossings more accessible to the average chicken. Before bloggers appeared on the scene the mainstream press ignored the average chicken crossing and focused only on Roosters. Bloggers are taking back Chicken Crossings and putting them in the hands of the chickens again!

Funny stuff!

I've done a photo of everyone else in a tank...

2008-05-02T12:13:00.002-07:00

So I guess it is only fair to do mine. I am also rocking the traditional harvest beard at the moment (it is unlucky to shave during harvest, it angers the gods and stuff like that).

Fighting Frost New Zealand Style

2008-05-01T23:31:00.000-07:00

The biggest danger from these sub zero overnight temperatures is not damage to the fruit (the sugars in the berries lowers their freezing point far enough below zero to not be a worry) but the vine going "night-night". Two things can happen, the first catastrophic, the second kind of forcing your hand.

The catastrophe is frost - if the water inside the cells of the leaves freeze, the leaves will immediately die. Remember that water when frozen expands; the pressure from the expanding ice bursts the cell walls open and thus instantly kills them. Without leaves the vine can not photosynthesize any more sugars and flavor compounds and the grapes will not mature further. A real bummer if you still have "green" fruit.

The second scenario is that the vine believes it is now winter and starts going into dormancy. This process is less catastrophic since it is slower - leaves will gradually turn yellow, red and then fall off. A vine can still ripen fruit (although at a much slower rate) after 50% of its leaves have senesced and it may take a week or more to get to this point. Enough cool weather and this scenario is inevitable.

So what can you do? In New Zealand, some grape growers may water their vines when there is a frost warning - this is a double-edged sword since the water may prevent the frost from setting but the vine will then take up that water and dilute the flavors that it has spent all summer developing. Not many growers of grapes destined for premium wines would employ this tactic (one would hope).

The much more expensive option is to create wind. In Gibbston one often sees what look like windmills - but instead of harnessing wind to generate energy, these bad boys generate wind from energy. Usually hooked up to temperature sensors that will turn them on anytime that the temperature approaches zero, the wind they create moves enough air to prevent frost from setting in. At Peregrine we don't have wind machines so we need temporary ones - otherwise known as helicopters! Every morning when there is a frost warning, two or three helicopters show up at 4am to fly over the vineyard until 8am or so, again generating enough air flow to stop frost damage. Gnarly stuff!

Winery Recycling Tip #316: How to reuse beer bottles

2008-04-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

Who needs expensive fermentation bungs when remnants of recent beer fines can do the trick!

NB: A beer fine (usually a six-pack) is assessed on the winery staff for making stupid mistakes - like for forgetting to turn the cooling on a tank of cold-soaking pinot. How else do you expect the beer fridge to remain stocked over harvest!

The Germans are wimps. This is REAL cool climate winemaking!

2008-04-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

The danger of making wine below the 45th Parallel was apparent yesterday when we showed up to work at 8am and the thermometer read 1° C. And it was snowing too - the temperature the whole day never got above 8° C. You don't know how cold it can get on a crush pad with water spraying everywhere - boy, oh, boy!

With the grapes still a couple of weeks away from physiological maturity this is going to be a race against Mother Nature. As my flatmate might say "this *%@# ain't going to get ripe!". Here's hoping for the best.

Anyone can dig a tank but how many can do "crow" pose at the same time

2008-04-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

Yoga teacher and harvest veteran, Elizabeth Keys, digging out a Pinot tank. Om shanti.

How to look fab and graceful when digging tanks

2008-04-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

Ummm, not so much...

2008-04-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

You say Pinot Grigio, I say Pinot Gris!

2008-04-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

Last week we were bombarded with Pinot Gris - the "Grey Grape" and favorite quaff of housewives the world over. While being made from the same grape, in France the wine made from Pinot Gris is called Pinot Gris (surprised?) while in Italy it is named Pinot Grigio. Since the Italian style is more fruity, New World producers usually refer to their versions as Pinot Gris or Pinot Grigio depending on how fruity their winemaking style is.

Normally Pinot Gris is processed like most whites - immediately de-stemmed, crushed, pressed and then usually fermented in stainless steel tank (for some creaminess some winemakers may also ferment a small portion of the final blend in barrel). However Pinot Gris may also be left on its skins for a short period before pressing - the juice picks up some pinkish-grey coloring (which will fall out during fermentation owing to its instability) but it also develops some floral characters which is appealing.

Below are two press loads of Pinot Gris that we processed at the same time last week. The first press held grapes that were left on their skins overnight and the other was full of grapes that were pressed immediately after crushing.

Notice the very different coloration. I will let you know about any different flavors and aromas that develop after fermentation - I know I am excited whether you are or not is another matter!

Harvest Meals

2008-04-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Other than a good nights sleep, a hearty meal and some booze are the things one craves during harvest. I have been very lucky at Peregrine and Felton Road to have some great meals and some tasty wines to help those long days go a little quicker.

At Felton Road, Nigel Greening (the owner), would cook lunch every day from mainly wild produce. It is well known amongst local farmers that if you show up with a hogget or a deer you might get some wine in return! The front office at Peregrine take turns to cook dinner for the harvest crew on the long days which is greatly appreciated.

To get a feeling for some of the amazing food we have been lucky to partake in, here is a recipe for a lunch that Nigel prepared for us. Paired perfectly with a 2005 Pegasus Bay Riesling!

Green curry of Blue Nose

Green Curry Paste
4 chilli
1 onion
2 Lemon Grass
1 inch of ginger
1 oz fresh corriander
3 Garlic cloves
1 TSP ground coriander
1 Tsp Cumin
2 strips of lime zest
1 Tsp Blachan
1 Tsp Salt
2 tablespoons water

The curry

1 tin Coconut milk or 2/3rds tin coconut cream.
water to make up to 600ml
45-60ml Nam pla
1 tsp palm sugar
1 lemon, Juiced
3 lime leaves
Blue Nose fillets (or any firm white fish)
Baby aubergines, bamboo shoots, veg, whatever you fancy.
a bunch of Basil
Green chilli's: 1 or 2 seeded and chopped.
Green Curry Paste as above

Fry the paste in a little oil for about 5 minutes.
Add the stock ingredients and cook for 2 minutes.
Add ﬁsh, and veg and cook gently for 4 minutes.
Add basil and chilli at the end and serve.

How to spend $1000 in five minutes at a winery

2008-04-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Above is a packet of dehydrated lactobacilli - our little microbial friends who turn malic acid into lactic acid.

This is five minutes later - five malolactic inoculations ready to rock - at the cost of $1000 a packet, these are some expensive measuring jugs!

Malolactic fermentation (MLF) is the process where lactobacilli convert malic acid, which is more acidic, into the less acidic lactic acid. This lowers the pH of the wine and also creates a rounder mouthfeel - lactic acid is the main acid in milk! Malolactic Fermentation is a must for all red wines and most whites - your steely unoaked chardonnays and rieslings are prevented from going through malolactic fermentation to retain more "crispness" in the mouth and keep the acid at a palate cleansing level.

For years scientists couldn't understand what was in it for the lactobacilli since no energy is released when malic acid is converted into lactic acid. Very recently however it has been shown that the electrochemical gradient of having a higher pH inside the bacterial cell (all the malic acid) and the lower pH outside the cell (the wine now having lactic acid instead) is high enough for the bacilli to use it as a generator (think of a battery - the voltage is the electrical gradient between the two terminals). Amazing, huh? Life will always find a niche!

Random Harvest Photo

2008-04-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

Sophie Matthews rocking the morning Pinot Noir punchdowns.

Day 3: Gewürztraminer

2008-04-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

After almost two days on the skins we drained the free run Gewürztraminer juice out of tank and then pressed the left over skins for the rest of the juice. As you can see the free run has this "pinky" tinge to it from its time on the skins. As soon as it appears it is gone. The picture below is from just an hour later.

Once we sent all the free run juice to tank we then pressed the skins in this massive press which slowly inflates and deflates its bladder over a two hour period to extract more juice without extracting any bitter or vegetal flavors in the seeds or skins. The blended free run and pressed Gewürztraminer juice will settle overnight in tank and tomorrow we will rack (transfer from one tank to another) the clear juice so we can then filter the solids (suspended proteins etc) that will settle at the bottom for the remaining juice. As well as making more wine, this last bit of juice has a lot of valuable complexity through its contact overnight with the solids. Hopefully today I will get some photos of the wicked filtration machine we use!

After a couple of days at Peregrine

2008-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

Busy, Busy, Busy. First thing I learned on the job is that 12 hour days are not just common here, they are expected. Boy, was that right. A 12 and a 13 hour days straight off the bat - and when you are doing manual labor you get tired to the bone. Sleep feels very deserved.

It has been enjoyable working on some new varieties of grapes for me. Yesterday we processed Gewürztraminer - a very aromatic German variety. The flavors that most associate with this variety is lychees and turkish delight (rosewater flavored jellied sweets). The berries are a mauvy-grey color - not quite white, not quite red. It is also best tasting wine grape I have ever had - extremely moreish and very hard to stop eating when lunch is hours away! One thing about getting to eat wine grapes is that you can never enjoy table grapes again - they are so bland and watery in comparison.

Gewürztraminer is an interesting grape to make wine from. For every white I can think of it is very important to get the juice off the skins as soon as possible after crushing (despite its violent name, it is actually a rather gentle breaking of the skins so that the juice can flow from the berries) because the skins often have unwanted phenolics (some of them being green, vegetal flavors - one common one being capsicum). Gewürztraminer, on the other hand, has very desirable floral . and thus after crushing and destemming the juice that has been released from the berries and the skins are both pumped into a tank for a few days to intermingle (official winemaking term being skin contact). This allows the aromatic compounds in the skin that is so prized in Gewürztraminer to leach slowly into the juice over a couple of days.

Today we will press the juice in a wine press (a bladder gently squeezes the rest of the juice that remains in the skins) and then put all the juice into a tank for fermentation. I'll try and get a photo of the Gewürztraminer being pressed so you can get a better idea.

Gewürztraminer is often a great pairing for Asian food. The little bit of sweetness from the residual sugar cuts the spiciness and the aromatics often complement the pungent aromas of Asian cuisine. A Thai Green curry is a classic match. Personally I enjoy a chilled Gewürztraminer on a lovely summers day, sitting under an umbrella with a wicked selection of antipasti. Try some with your chorizos, salumis and anchovies - Gewürztraminer just laps up all that fatty goodness!

Rolling with the punch(downs)es

2008-04-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

I got some tough news today. This has been a weird harvest in Central Otago as almost all the whites are harvested and most of the Pinot Noir is still on the vine - usually it is the other way around. Normally when it comes time for all the hard work on Pinot Noir in the winery the whites are ready for their pressing, leading to a ton of work to be done and many late nights. However since almost all the whites are already in there will be no time pressure on the staff when it finally comes time to work the Pinot Noir hard. The ramifications of this is that Felton Road no longer has enough work for me. Such is the life of a harvest intern... Que syrah, syrah.

On the bright side, starting today I am working at Peregrine wines, a larger winery in the Gibbston Valley that primarily produces Pinot Noir from vineyards in both the Gibbston Valley and the Cromwell basin (of which Bannockburn is at the southern end). In addition to Pinot Noir, Peregrine also makes Riesling, Gewurtztraminer, Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. The winery itself has won many design awards (see picture above) and I will post some photos soon.

The chickens "help" us pick

2008-04-02T12:47:00.002-07:00

Part of the practice of biodynamics is to use animals where possible to complete tasks that may on other farms fall to machinery or use of chemicals. For example, running sheep through the vineyard in early spring to eat the grasses and other cover crops being grown between rows and thus turning them into powerful nutrients for summer vine growth.

At Felton Road we have a brood of chickens - not just for some of the most tasty eggs imaginable - but to help keep insect pressure down. When we were picking the Block 4 Riesling the other day the chickens were more than happy to follow us around and pick up any falling earwhigs. Given their enthusiasm I have to believe that they were tasty little morsels indeed!

The view from my picking bin

2008-03-31T11:18:00.001-07:00

8:05am - Calvert Vineyard, Felton Road, Central Otago, NZ

Harvest is underway with Riesling

2008-03-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

We have started picking at Felton Road. A touch of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that was ripe earlier than others but the bulk of the Riesling came in on Thursday and Friday.

Above you can see one of the lush ripe bunches of Riesling. When Riesling ripens it takes this lovely "blushy" hue and tastes fantastic! Riesling is perfect when picked around 21° Brix (Pinot Noir is around 24-27° Brix and similarly for Chardonnay). Felton Road makes three Rieslings - a Dry Riesling with residual sugar being less than 9g/L, their main Riesling which is made in the Kabinett style (off-dry with about 40g/L of sugar) and their Block 1 Designate Riesling, a Spätlese style sweet Riesling (around 80g/L residual sugar).

I had the pleasure of tasting a 2001 Felton Road Riesling last week and it was to die for - lovely carmelised peach and floral aromatics with still crisp, youthful acidity to balance the sweetness. I would whole heartedly endorse putting any 2007 Felton Road Riesling you can get your hands on away for 6-10 years to really tease out the full complexity. One of the best New World Rieslings you will try and 2007 was a cracker year for Riesling in Central Otago. Get on it!

Clyde Wine and Food Festival

2008-03-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I traveled down to Clyde for their annual Wine and Food Festival to understand more about the Alexandra wine region. As I have alluded to in the past there are three wine making regions in Central Otago - Gibbston Valley, Alexandra and Bannockburn (where Felton Road is located).

Whereas Gibbston Valley's issue is sometimes not getting fruit ripe enough and ending up with "vegetal" flavor in their Pinots, Alexandra's problem seemed to lay more with having overly ripe wines with not enough acid or tannins to give the wine structure. Tasty on first sip but the wine ends up "blousy" and unsatisfying.

The one exception I found was the well made Three Miners. Their 2006 Pinot Noir had a ripe cherry flavor with some juicy acid, silky mouth feel and with some light oaky tannin to fill out the wine on the palate. It is a bargain at NZ$25 where most Central Otago Pinot Noir is north of NZ$35. Their vineyard in Alexandra is very new so they have a bright future indeed as the vines mature. Currently they only distribute in New Zealand but I am sure you will see them in the US and UK in the future as production expands. Keep an eye out!

I still think that the real quality Central Otrago Pinot Noirs are being made in the Bannockburn area, and since over 70% of Pinot Noir vines are here, other vintners seem to agree. Just my $0.02.

The owners car

2008-03-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

The recipe for perfect Pinot!

Tasting the 2005 Bouchard Père et Fils

2008-03-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I had the great fortune to attend a tasting of the 2005 Bouchard Père et Fils red Burgundies at Carrick Vineyard. A veritable who's who of Central Otago winemakers were here to taste a great selection of wines from this renowned négociant. Bouchard Père et Fils are definitely on the way back after some years in the wilderness in the 80's and early 90's and we picked up a distinctive "house style" that was very new worldy - clean, vibrant, juicy and slightly confected wines that were very drinkable (read soft tannins). On the negative side, for me, the wines were sometimes too oak driven but I am told this will integrate with time. A few were outstanding, most were well constructed but there was also definitely a difference in quality between most of the domaine wines and the négociant wines. Whether this is down to viticulture, wine making technique of the vintners that Bouchard bought the barrels from or both is unknown but the domaine wines, with one exception (which may just prove the rule), were noticeably better.

So on to some tasting notes: -

Côte de Beaune - Beaune, Volnay & Pommard

Beaune wines are usually quite supple and round, not quite as muscular as those of the nearby Pommard and not quite as elegant as the floral Volnays.

Beaune 1er Cru 'Grèves - Vigne de l'Enfant Jésus' (domaine wine)
Grèves is one of the best of Beaune's premier crus (some say that it should really be grand cru). 'Vigne de l'Enfant Jésus' is a Bouchard Père et Fils soley owned 4 hectare (10 acre) section of 'Grèves on a steep and sandy slope. The wine was a brilliant light cherry in color, you could shave in its reflection. It was a rich, ripe and robust wine that gave up spice and cherry on the nose. The confected note (powdered sugar, candied fruits) that would show in many of the wines in this tasting was evident. Tannins were "chewy" but the wine lacked a mid palate.

Beaune 1er Cru 'Tuerons' (domaine wine)
From a 21 hectare (52 acre) site south of Grèves of which Bouchard has 2.6 hecatres (6.5 acres), this wine is the only "bargain" of the night being south of $60 a bottle at retail. The wine was a touch "milky" and reduced (read sulfur) in the beginning which blew off over the next hour. Tannins were a touch dry but the wine was rich and also had a high toned finish. If you see this around $50 it is well worth a purchase to cellar for 10+ years.

Volnay’s are the most delicate and fragrant of Côte de Beaune due to the lighter limestone soils.

Volnay 1er Cru ‘Caillerets’ ‘Ancienne Cuvée Carnot’ (domaine wine)
Bouchard has 4 hectares (10 acres) in this vineyard on the south side of the commune. The wine was a deeper cherry than the other Volnays in the flight. Lovely spicy, aromatic nose, with a hint of cocoa (some of that confection again?). Chewy tannins, lovely cheek coating mouth feel, and some mid palate depth with some creamy oak.

Volnay 1er Cru ‘Clos ds Chênes’ (domaine wine)
Considered one of the best premier cru Volnay sites, Bouchard has 0.85 hectares (2 acres). Lightest color of the three Volnays. A ripe cherry, briary nose with a powerful aromatic flowers. Chewiness in the mouth. This is a ripe wine – some of that Bouchard new worldiness again.

Volnay 1er Cru ‘Taillepieds’ (domaine wine)
South of the village and on the northern side of Clos des Chênes, Bouchard owns 1 hectare (2.5 acres) of this 7 hectare (17 acres) site. Our side of the room had a bad bottle, not corked per se but muted and oxidized. I personally would be very disappointed if I paid $100+ for this bottle and opened it in 10 years. Upon tasting a glass from the other side of the room this was the best wine of the flight. An absolutely brilliant wine in the glass – a cherry mirror! High toned, aromatic nose – elegant, spicy and floral. Feminine but also rich and deep, killer acid and good palate depth. A well made wine with a charry, toasty oak that just rounded out the wine, rather than overpower it. Worth the price of admission.

The opposite of Volnay – Pommards are big, strong and muscular. Le Corton is at the northern end of Côte de Beaune produce the biggest wines on the Côte.

Pommard 1er Cru ‘Rugiens’ (domaine wine)
Rugiens is considered one of the classic Pommard sites on a steep, rocky slope near the border with Volnay. Bouchard has a small 0.4 hectare (1.5 acre) plot. An earthy nose, perhaps a little “leafy”. Big powerful red cherry but some dry, hefty oak tannins brought the wine down. Broad and powerful Pommard flavors abound. On its own probably a great wine but outclassed in this company.

Le Corton Grand Cru (domaine wine)
Bouchard owns 3.6 hectares (9 acres) half way up the south-facing slope of the Corton hill. A dark, brilliant cherry in the glass. Power and brawn with deep, deep fruit – hefty mid palate and earthy undertones. Cheek coatingness and chewy tannins. The oak distracts a bit but with a long time in the cellar it should just add some toasty, charry notes (one hopes). This is a very masculine wine. I would age this for a LOOOONNG time if I had a bottle.

Côte de Nuits

Nuits-St-George usually produce rustic, rich wines due to the very complex soils in this commune. Often you pick up some ‘minerally’ notes too. Gevrey-Chambertin is the most northerly of the more prestigious Côte de Nuits communes and ‘Le Cazetiers’ is north of the village adjacent to the revered ‘Clos St-Jacques’. Gevrey-Chambertin wines are full, rich and often meaty.

Nuits-St-Georges 1er Cru ‘Cailles’ (domaine wine)
I love Nuits-St-George. The darker berry, rich wines from his commune rock my taste buds. Bouchard owns 1 hectare (2.5 acres) in this 7 hectare (17 acre) site on ths south side of the commune. This wine was the best premier cru wine of the evening for me. Rich and lush, this wine was the whole package. Dark, deep, brilliant cherry in the glass. Lovely, lifted aromatics – this wine had some yin to go with the more traditional Nuits-St-George yang. Lovely silky tannins just made this a great wine. Kudos!

Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru ‘Cazetiers’ (domaine wine)
Bouchard has a miniscule 0.25 hectares (0.6 acres) on this renowned 8 hectare (20 acre) site. Much lighter than the Nuits-St-George in color, but still with that brilliance that marks the 2005 vintage. Sweet fruits on the nose (a tad leafy too which detracts). Powdered confectioners sugar, sweet cherry and chewy tannins. Nice wine but no match for the Nuits-St-George it was paired with.

Grand Crus

Chambertin Grand Cru (domaine wine)
Chambertin is one of the great grand crus. Situated on a gentle incline with limestone soils, Chambertin lies above the Routes des Grand Crus. This was my wine of the evening and I would be tempted to buy a bottle, despite the north of $300 price tag to revisit in 15 years. A rich, dark cherry in the glass with very bright sweet fruits on the nose. Pure, clean floral notes waft from the glass promising an elegant wine. Then in the mouth then wine comes at you with bright darker fruits, rich and firm with robust tannins and rocking “palate bleed” (you can just feel the wine sinking through your tongue). A finish that goes on and on – there is just so much to this wine. Wow!

Chambertin ‘Clos de Beze’ Grand Cru (nègotiant wine)
The two following wines, both non domaine (meaning that Bouchard bought the barrels of wine already made), were controversial and I thought they let the side down. I found this wine virtually undrinkable. Incredibly reduced, like sucking on a burned matchstick, the sulfides stuck out like a sore thumb and a wine fault that I can not forgive from a grand cru. Leaving that aside, the wine was musky and spicy on the nose and very robust and ballsy in the mouth. Some of that “confected-ness” came back again (like “redskins” for those Australians reading this). Too much oak. Not worth the $350+ in my opinion.

Mazis-Chambertin Grand Cru (nègotiant wine)
Another wine that was outclassed in this company and again I wonder whether this is again because it is a non domaine wine. Some nice savory notes, but the drying and severe tannins and overextracted oakiness (note, just because a wine is grand cru doesn’t mean it needs 100% new oak). Sweet and disappointing. I would be upset if I paid the $300+ price tag on this wine.

Bonnes-Mares Grand Cru (domaine wine)
Bouchard has a tiny 0.25 hecares (0.6 acres) of this 15 hectare (37 acre) grand cru site that straddles Chambolle-Musigny and Morey-St-Denis. Supple, silky but still rich and deep. A hint of band-aid that doesn’t detract from the wine in my opinion but just adds complexity. Big blue fruit with a gamey edge that was intriguing. I am sure this is a killer wine on its own but just not quite up there with the other grand crus at this tasting.

Clos de Vougeot (domaine wine)
Clos de Vougeot at 51 hectares (125 acres) is the largest grand cru in the Côte de Nuits and is regarded as a second tier grand cru by many and the quality of the wine often depends on how high up the slope you are – the higher, the better. Bouchard’s small domaine parcel is at the top but they also often blend in some purchased wine from down in the lower part of the Clos. From what I understand the 2005 vintage version is made from the domaine parcel only. Very bright and sexy. Silky, rich mouth feel. The wines robustness allows it to hold its charry oak well and gives it tremendous presence. My number three grand cru of the evening. Allen Meadows of Burghound thinks this may be the Clos de Vougeot of the vintage. If so, the cheapest of the Bouchard grand crus at $250 may be a steal.

La Romanée Grand Cru (nègotiant wine, made by Chateau de Vosne-Romanée)
At just 0.85 hectares (2 acres), La Romanée is the smallest A.O.C (Appellation Controllee) in France. Directly up-slope from Romanée-Conti and adjacent to Richebourg, this monopole is regarded as one of the grandest of grand crus. At $1400 a bottle it better be too. I thought it was the second best wine of the night, behind the Chambertin Grand Cru, and the best wine of the flight but most of the room preferred the Bonnes-Mares (the final three blind wines were served as a separate flight from the first three blind grand crus). Intoxicatingly floral and spicy (cloves?) nose. A delicious savoriness and lively cherry fruits – this is a classy wine. A feminine finish that went on and on – like your local Amway representative it would just not go away. I kept returning to this wine again and again. Only three bottles of this wine came to New Zealand and two were consumed at this tasting. I would love to see this wine again in 20 years but alas the $1400 tag is a touch outside my budget. And by the way, the only other bottle in New Zealand was bought that evening by an anonymous participant at the tasting!

So does the 2005 vintage live up to the hype? You bet! As Allen Meadows (The Burghound) has said every wine seems to be tasting “up in class” – your villages like premier crus and your premier crus like grand crus. Also Bouchard is definitely back – and they seem to have learned a lot from the new world about clean, well constructed wines. I would definitely recommend Bouchard Père et Fils as a house to explore for newcomers to Burgundy.

51,324 green bottles sitting on the line....

2008-03-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

This week the mobile bottling truck came into the winery to bottle the 2007 Felton Road Central Otago Pinot Noir. It took us three days to bottle and package the approximately 4,000 cases of wine - 70% of which will leave these shores for the export market. For each run we had to put different back labels on - for instance for the US the bottles needed a "don't drink while pregnant" warning and Australia needed a calculation of how many standard drinks it contained (8.4). Nothing is more tedious in a winery than bottling but it has to be done - glad it is out of the way though!

The view from my window

2008-03-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

I am living at the winery until a house comes available next week. I don't know if I want to leave. This morning I went down to let the chickens out of their tractor and snatched some "Felton Road Free Range Eggs" for breakfast. Tasty!

Meet Jancis

2008-03-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

Jancis, the winery cat, and her namesake. Poor girl is tired after "supervising" the bottling line from her perch on the gangway.

A Felton Road Primer

2008-03-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago I promised that I would continue my introduction to Central Otago with a post about Felton Road. Well better late than never I suppose...

Felton Road was planted in 1992 by Stewart Elms on a 15 hectare (37 acre) site near Bannockburn (on Felton Road...duh!) to Pinot Noir (55%), Chardonnay (30%) and Riesling (15%). Stewart was the first to plant grapes in this area of Central Otago even though Bannockburn in the Cromwell Basin was known to be its warmest region, being home to the majority of fruit orchards in this part of the world. Due to Felton Road's phenomenal success here, over 70% of Central Otago Pinot Noir is now planted in the Cromwell Basin! Three different soil types were identified on site - Waenega (a very deep fine sandy loam) , Lochar (a shallow fine sandy loam) and Scotland Point (very deep gravelly loam). Block 3 is predominately on Waenega, with a few rows on Scotland Point while Block 5 has half its rows on Lochar and half on Scotland Point. These two blocks (which make up the Block designated wines that Felton Road is duly most famous for) are on perfectly north facing slopes so that sunlight is maximized for the development of ripe Pinot Noir. With the vinification of the Block 3 and Block 5 grapes exactly the same, and their adjacency in the vineyard (see the above map - click to enlarge) the differences between the wines can truly be said to expressions of terroir.

Along with the original Elms vineyard, Felton Road has a long term lease on the neighboring 10 hectare (25 acre) Calvert vineyard which is planted 100% to Pinot Noir and along with Nigel Greening's purchase of Felton Road in 2000 came the 7.5 hectare (19 acre) Cornish Point Vineyard. Cornish Point is truly an experimental Pinot Noir vineyard with 18 different combinations of clone and rootstock! All of the Felton Road vineyards are farmed biodynamically (the principles of which I will explain in another post) and wine is made using sustainable methods (all water is recycled, spent lees and pomace are added to the organic compost that fertilizes the vineyard etc).

Guiding the winemaking is Blair Walter who has been Felton Road's winemaker for all 11 vintages. With a degree from Lincoln University, with time also at Oregon State University, Blair has also worked in Burgundy (Domaine de l'Arlot), California (with John Kongsgaard at Newton Vineyard), Oregon (Cristom), and Australia (TarraWarra Estate). Felton Road's vinifications are all wild ferments (grapes are allowed to ferment naturally with yeasts that are naturally present in the vineyard and winery) and with Pinot Noir the fruit is only destemmed, not crushed. This means that the grapes ferment inside the berries which imparts some carbonic (feminine, fruity) flavors to the wine. The full color, flavor and soft tannin structure of the Pinot Noir is developed by long cold soaks before fermentation begins and extended maceration (a period on the skins at the end of fermentation before the pomace is pressed to barrel). The Central Otago Pinot Noir is aged in French oak for 11 months and the Block 5 and Block 3 wines see a longer 14 months before bottling.

The next two months are going to be very exciting as I further my quest to produce world class Pinot Noir. On Tuesday the harvest is on as the first fruit comes into the winery - some Chardonnay and Riesling and perhaps some Pinot Noir. I can't wait!

Gibbston Valley Harvest Festival

2008-03-15T21:07:00.000-07:00

Within an hour of arriving in New Zealand to start my two months at Felton Road I was on the gate at the Gibbston Valley Harvest Festival helping to collect tickets and park cars. Well over 2,000 people showed up to the event which was held on a beautiful sunny day in Central Otago.

Gibbston Valley is where the pioneers of Central Otago first planted vines - Chard Farm, Valli, Gibbston Valley and Peregrine were all there. Pinot was first planted here in the late 80's but the region hasn't grown to the extent that the region around Bannockburn (where Felton Road is), which now has 70% of the Central Otago plantings.

The Pinots were variable in quality, in my opinion. Rockburn and Valli had made some cracker jack Pinots in 2006 but there were others that had obvious vegetal characters. Gibbston is a marginal area for Pinot being cooler than Bannockburn and they can struggle to get ripe flavors in many vintages. When the season is warm enough the super long hang time can often mean killer Pinot but in other vintages you can be left with fruit on the vine that have not reached flavor maturity while leaves have started senescing (with no more photosynthesis, there will be no more fruit development).

A great introduction to the region. Tomorrow we start bottling the 2007 vintage at the winery, and will try and get some photos up!

Some quick tasting notes

2008-03-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

Had a lovely evening with the "Folks" sitting on their deck overlooking Sydney Harbor on my way to New Zealand for harvest. Some crackerjack wines and Sydney Rock Oysters - can't be beat.

2006 Bindi Quartz Chardonnay
Some say this may just be Australia's best Chardonnay and I can see why. It took some time to open up, but when it did it was magical. Burgundian in construction, lovely full, soft and sexy mouth feel with some smooth oak. Lemon, melon, green apple scents waft from the glass intoxicatingly. The acid in this baby promises some benefit from ageing. A winner of a drop!

2000 Giaconda Estate Chardonnay
While a bit of an unfair competition since this bottle had a six year head start, Rick Kinzbrunner, for me, still holds the title of making Australia's best Chardonnay. Luscious and richly honeyed, the oak that is often overwhelming in youth is completely integrated with six years. The mouthfeel alone is worth the price of admission. Toasty and briôchy, with lovely fruit and a killer finish - this is a well constructed wine. Major kudos! While it can last a few more years in the cellar, the 2000 is tasting so well I say drink up!

As a control we also had a bottle of 2006 Penfolds Bin 311 Tumbarumba Chardonnay. While outclassed by the Bindi and Giaconda, this wine was no slouch and a bargain at AUD$30.

Tonight I fly for my two months of harvest at Felton Road and start by directing traffic in the carpark for the Gibbston Harvest Wine Festival tomorrow. Hopefully I will get a chance to post some tasting notes from the event soon.

Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free/ We've golden soil and wealth for toil/ Our home is girt by sea;

2008-02-08T04:45:00.000-08:00

First an apology, as some of you know I have just moved to the UK and being in the middle of moving house, my wife getting a dream job and preparing for my move to New Zealand next week for two months of harvest has meant the blog has suffered. I promise lots of fun stuff once harvest starts for me next week. Another season of rotting fruit for a living! So now that the apology is out of the way, back to original programming

One of the benefits of being in London and being part of "the trade" as they say is getting to attend some pretty amazing tastings. Last month I rocked up to the annual "Australia Day Tasting" put on by Wine Australia at Arsenal Football Stadium. Over two hundred producers (with well over five hundred wines) showed up to highlight the diversity and quality of wine from Australia.

One of the new initiatives from Wine Australia is their "Regional Heroes" program, designed to highlight the iconic wines from regions that have distinct and diverse characteristics, was on display through focused varietal tasting rooms dedicated to Shiraz, Cabernet, Semillon, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc. To me it was quite clear that while Australia still produces the world's best Semillon, and some Shiraz that can compete with top Rhône producers, we are still taking baby steps with our Pinot Noir and there are still only a couple of producers of Chardonnay that can be said to be playing on the world stage.

Some of the highlights of the tasting for me:-

2006 Ten Minutes by Tractor Pinot Noir
Brilliant light cherry color. Elegant floral nose and scrumptious red fruit flavor. Great palate weight, soft integrated tannins and feminine finish make for a great example of Mornington Peninsula Pinot!

2005 Yabby Lake Pinot Noir
Where Ten Minutes by Tractor was light on its feet, this was all power! Dark cherry in the glass. Rich, opulent and broad balanced by lovely acidity. My only gripe is that it was missing a bit of mid palate. Very different example of what Mornington Peninsula can be.

2006 Bay of Fires Tigress Pinot Noir
A Tassie entry - very light strawberry color, translucent almost. Screaming acid which works with a high toned floral wine. Tannins are a tad harsh right now but this is only a puppy. A couple of years in the cellar should make for a great refreshing Pinot for Turkey day!

2005 Stonier Reserve Pinot Noir
The Pinot standout of the day. I have been disappointed in my experiences with Stonier before, but not this time. Brilliant and bright red cherry in color. Yummy red fruits (cherry, raspberry and wild strawberry) and highly floral. A touch of baking spices, super soft tannins, crisp acidity and a singing, long finish make this wine a winner. This tastes so good right now!

2005 Giaconda Estate Chardonnay
One of the few estates that can be said to compete on a global level with the best of Burgundy and California this wine combined the soft mouthfeel of sur lie vinification, peachy and creamy malolactic notes with a lovely high toned finish. The oak is dominant at the moment but my experience with Giaconda is that it needs time to integrate before showing best. A stunner in 4-5 years.

2006 Shaw & Smith M3 Chardonnay
The new kids on the block. A stony and briny flavor (think a beach of slate with the surf misting around) with some lemon and melon and toasty, briochy oak. Super long finish. I may be a convert.

2005 Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay
The first wine I started collecting (since 1995) and still one of Australia's best Chardonnays - although I think they have ceded the title in recent years to the likes of Bindi and Giaconda. This wine was classic Leeuwin Estate. Honeyed with ripe peach and pear. Has that "maltiness" that Leeuwin always seems to have when young and a charry oakiness that needs a few years to integrate. Lovely soft mouthfeel from traditional sur lie vinification. This wine still has its baby fat in full view and while it will be a good wine, not the best I have seen from the estate.

2006 Glaetzer Amon Ra Shiraz
Ben Glaetzer is a genius and is younger than I am! He is already making world class wine and his 2006 Amon Ra is no slouch. Rich, blackberry, spicy and deeply brooding. A softer oakiness that comes from his "new school" use of French rather than American wood. This wine is unctuous in the mouth and should be a stunner in 5 years. Kudos!

2004 Kay Brother "Block 6" Shiraz
Made with fruit from vines planted in 1892 (since phylloxera wiped out France in the late 19th Century these are probably some of the oldest vines in the world!). Aged in 100% American and Balkan oak in the traditional Australian style, this wine was a deep inky purple in the glass. Notes of pepper, blackberry and meat predominate. Cheek coating tannins. Superbly concentrated - this is a wine to enjoy on its own in your favorite chair and contemplate. A Parker favorite - he gave it 98 points!

2005 Brokenwood Graveyard Shiraz
Always a favorite in the Nielsen household - this is Hunter Shiraz at its finest. My experience with Graveyards is they need 10+ years to shine and this one was a tight as a drum. Just a brilliant, rich dark wine with amazing clarity. Traditional Hunter spice and sweet leather came through. Black cherry and blackberry. Its 80% new oak shows but that will mellow with its 10 years in the cellar. A little "hot" on the finish which should integrate with time (hopefully).

2005 Giaconda Warner Vineyard Shiraz
The "best in show" Shiraz for me by a country mile was another Rick Kinzbrunner stunner. Floral and "blue fruit" dominant (which I love in a Shiraz) with tannins that were so soft and luscious. Boy, oh, boy this is a winner!

2005 John Duval "Entity" Shiraz
Deep purple, blackcurrant and blackberry. Big robust tannins says "age me! age me!". Lovely spiciness and some oak that needs time to integrate. A super long finish - ahhh, this is wine! Incredibly well constructed wine that shows off John's skills from his 28 years at Penfolds including 16 years of being in charge of "Grange". Get in on this one before the world catches on!

As if the French weren't behind the eight-ball enough already!

2008-01-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

According to Decanter, a French court ruled that articles on wine in newspapers should carry the same health warnings as you would see on bottles and in advertising. From Decanter:-

'Any communication in favour of an alcoholic drink, such as a series of articles in favour of Champagne, constitutes advertising and is therefore subject to the public health code,'

The court said that the article was 'intended to promote sales of alcoholic beverages in exercising a psychological effect on the reader that incited him or her to buy alcohol'

French wine is already at a disadvantage on the world market (of course I am ignoring the 0.001% of the worlds wine that is the 1st Growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy). Their wine labeling laws even prevent winemakers from specifically naming what grapes make up their wine (educated wine consumers may know that Châteauneuf-du-Pape red wines are a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Mouvedre but does 99% of the wine drinking public know that?) unless they are willing to call their wine "vin de pays" (table wine) with all of the negative connotations that have always been associated with it.

No wonder Australian brands like Yellow Tail have beaten the French into submission on the world stage!

Genetically Modified Pinot Noir?

2008-01-10T04:05:00.000-08:00

French and Italian scientists announced in the recent issue of Nature that they have successfully sequenced the genome of Pinot Noir. Why Pinot? Because Pinot Noir is one of the most ancient varieties and is the parent of many other varieties - thus understanding the genome of Pinot Noir allows us to understand the genome of the Vitis vinifera species as a whole.

The main thrust of the research was to help find ways to introduce disease resistance in a GM Pinot Noir - for instance it maybe possible to create a resistant breed of Pinot Noir to Pierce's Disease and other grapevine diseases spread by insect vectors (similar to what has been done with Bt Corn).

More intriguingly for now for Pinot Noir freaks like me is a glimpse into what makes this most beautiful of varieties so special. Pinot Noir was found to have 89 genes that contribute to flavor and aroma. These genes contain the coding to create the enzymes involved in synthesizng the volatile compounds that we pick up as "fruits", "earth", "game" etc. Thus it is theoretically possible that understanding these genes and "tweaking them" could increase enzyme production and potentially make a more flavorful wine.

Seeing as we already have a genetically modified yeast strain, where the genes that control acetate ester (e.g. benzyl acetate is "peachy" and isoamyl acetate is "banana-like") production are over-expressed, resulting in a more fruity wine being vinified, can GM wine be really that far away? How could a Gallo or a Casella resist if given the opportunity?

Get on the bus now!

2008-01-09T03:17:00.000-08:00

One of my mentors that I have learned a great deal from has officially released the inaugural vintage of Shane Wines.

Shane Finley, who is the Associate Winemaker at Kosta Browne, and learned the ropes working under Pierre Gaillard in the Rhône, and also worked at Torbreck in Australia, Paul Hobbs and at Copain Custom Crush on such brands as Carlisle, Copain and Pax amongst others. A fine resumé of Syrah making indeed!

His initial offering is miniscule, The Unknown, his largest bottling is only 125 cases so get on the list as fast as you can. Shane's wines are a true marriage of New World fruit and Old World vinification resulting in a style that is at once powerful and voluptuous, and yet also complex, elegant and floral.

And at $38 a bottle, an absolute steal for sure!

What says Iowa like wine?

2008-01-04T03:13:00.000-08:00

Dr Vino has a fun post up on his blog that plays the old "if you were [insert inanimate object] what would you be game" with the Presidential hopefuls.

My favorite ones:-

John McCain: He used to be more of a loose cannon eight years ago. Now, the fire in the belly appears as mere embers. His wine is a 10 year old Turley Zinfandel, fiery in it’s youth, now sadly without vigor.

Dennis Kucinich: Given his hhhhot young wife (born 1977), he clearly likes youthful reds. We’ll put him down for a California Pinot, most recent vintage available.

John Edwards: he’s made it far on his “two Americas” theme. We know what that means–beer America and wine America. We’ll split the difference and put him down for a Franzia box wine.

It has been rumored though that on a trip to Estonia in 2004 that Hillary and McCain got into a "vodka drinking" contest so maybe wine isn't their tipple of choice!

A reminder of the power of wine to inspire

2007-12-28T01:06:00.000-08:00

I just received in the mail Campbell Mattinson's new book, Why The French Hate Us, which is available for sale here.

Campbell has always been one of my most favorite wine journalists because he is not afraid to wear his beliefs proudly and has always been an unabashed supporter of Australian wine and the rightful positions of our "icon wines" alongside the best of Hermitage, Montrachet et al.

I will return to comment on this book because it focuses on issues with the Australian wine industry that has had me concerned, and as an aspiring wine maker, more inclined to pursue my dream in California.

But for now I wanted to share a anecdote from the opening chapter where Campbell recounts the moment that wine became more than just "booze" :-

...something changed in me forever, at the sip and the taste and the sensation of a particular wine. I was bitten by Dracula or a werewolf or, more appropriately, by a malaria-carrying mosquito. Something went funny in me. My heart got an erection. From that moment, I may have looked the same, but I was changed. I had become a mad wine hunter. I suddenly wanted to be on intimate, personal, intense terms with all of the most beautiful wines that I could afford - or could wangle to drink.

While being a "wine geek" for many years, it was that fateful 2003 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast that I ordered off a wine list in Scottsdale, Arizona that changed me forever. The exquisite beauty, the artistry, its ephemeral chameleon-ish morphing from one sensation to another broke me. In that moment I knew that I had found my life's calling - I had to craft a wine as outstanding as this and I would travel to the ends of the earth to apprentice with the greatest wine artisans to acquire the tools and inspiration to make it happen.

How does an aspiring winemaker earn money in the "off-season"?

2007-12-21T02:24:00.000-08:00

Well this one is loading and unloading trucks (or lorries as Brits call them) full of fruit bound for UK supermarkets!

A day after registering at all the local temp agencies I have got a job from 3pm to 11pm driving a forklift for one of the largest importers of fresh fruit in the UK. Yesterday I shuttled pallets of Pineapples from Costa Rica, Peppers from Israel and Tomatoes from Egypt from the cold room to the packing area, where they were labeled with the barcodes and tags of the supermarket chain they were bound for, and then onto waiting lorries.

Not much money, it will take a bit over a month to earn what I used to in a week in advertising sales, but the squid should help keep me out of mischief. Unfortunately the pay also means that it takes me 8 hours to earn enough to afford a bottle of Saxum, Dehlinger or Copain!

In the UK, the Americans have conceded the Shiraz/Syrah war

2007-12-19T06:16:00.000-08:00

Why fight it?

Fetzer, one of the biggest US brands on UK shelves (not that there are many here outside of Gallo, surprising since the dollar is so low is against the pound) has given in to the Australian juggernaut that is SHIRAZ!

I had a bit of a giggle myself so I had to buy the bottle. I suppose with people having to remember Côtes du Rhone and Shiraz, the marketing department at Fetzer must believe that there is not enough space for Syrah in the public consciousness and went "Bugger It! We lose to the Aussies enough in sport, might as well throw in the towel on varietal spelling as well!"

And Americans have the gall to call the French "cheese eating surrender monkeys"!

Central Otago: Otago, maybe. Central, hardly.

2007-12-16T06:27:00.000-08:00

Readers of the blog may already know that in April I am off to Felton Road in New Zealand for the 2008 harvest. So I thought I might write a couple of posts about who Felton Road is and why I am so excited to be heading there to learn how to craft Pinot Noir.

Felton Road is located in Central Otago on the South Island of New Zealand, which at latitude 45° is the most southerly wine growing region in the world.

Unlike the rest of New Zealand's viticultural regions, Central Otago has a continental climate, rather than a maritime one. Most of the New World's most promising Pinot Noir regions so far have been maritime ones -- Russian River Valley in California, Mornington Peninsula in Victoria for example, in which the delicate Pinot Noir grapes are cooled by morning fog and cool ocean breezes. Central Otago, on the other hand, is dry (less than 500mm of rain a year, often much lower), with very low humidity, and has a climate most similar to Burgundy of any of the New World's Pinot Noir regions. Central Otago is also 300m above sea level (again, similar to Côte de Beaune) with the same hot Summers and frigid Winters. The dry continental climate also means that the Summer nights (with no cloud cover) are cool with temperatures getting as low as 1° C at harvest time. This big variation in diurnal temperatures is perfect for Pinot Noir which excels in such conditions - the reason being that the hot days (and greater UV penetration at 300m above sea level) ensures proper sugar and flavor development while the sudden drop in temperature overnight keeps acid levels high - a key quality of top Pinot. As an aside, this is one of the reasons why I think the Macedon Ranges in Victoria will end up being Australia's great Pinot Noir region but that is another subject for another time.

Another reason why Central Otago holds great promise is the poor quality of the soils. All the great vineyards in the world have poor soils. Vines are essentially weeds and grow in pretty much any conditions. However when nutrients and water are too readily available, vines tend to put too much energy into vegetal growth as well as producing too many clusters of fruit. This leads to plump, flavorless grapes unsuitable for premium wine. Under "stressful" conditions (low nutrients, little water) the vine thinks to itself that it is in danger of dying and will instead put all of its available energy into passing its genes into the next generation - just what a vigneron wants! Low water also ensures that berries stay small which is especially important for Pinot Noir which needs a high skin to juice ratio to produce world-class wine. Central Otago is mainly sand on top of a gravel base, which allows water and nutrients to drain quickly and thus become unavailable to the vines.

Thus Central Otago has all of the necessary ingredients to be the "Southern Burgundy". In fact in the mid 1890's the New Zealand government paid for Romeo Bragato, a Yugoslavian viticulturist to travel around the country and recommend the areas with the most potential for the development of a wine industry. In his "Report on the Prospects of Viticulture in New Zealand" he wrote:-

"There is no better country on the face of the earth for the production of Burgundy grapes than Central Otago."

Sadly, his report was ignored and instead it became sheep country and it wasn't until Felton Road was founded in 1991 that this began to change. Felton Road's 14.4 hectares of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling that were planted in 1992 represented over 20% of the vines in the whole of Central Otago at the time! Felton Road's incredible success since their inaugural vintage in 1997 has made the wine world take notice and now there are over 1,00 hectares under vine with the region well on the way to being considered alongside the Willamette Valley, the Russian River Valley, amongst others, as the future of New World Pinot Noir.

Central Otago is obviously still an incredibly young wine growing area - Felton Road's oldest vines are only fifteen years old and they were the regions pioneer's but it seems like Romeo vision of Pinot Noir heaven has finally arrived -- even if it is 110 years late!

1983 Château Margaux (Bordeaux, France)

2007-12-16T03:27:00.000-08:00

Also enjoyed at Bennett and Linda's with a lovely rack of Australian Lamb.

Intense garnet in the glass - clarity has held up well with age. Cigar box, cedar, violets herby nose - this is Bordeaux. There was still enough fruit, predominately cassis, to pull all the other flavors together but this bottle was definitely in its prime. The vanilla from the oak highlighted the fruit and the silky smooth tannins were a delight with the lamb.

This was my first bottle of Château Margaux and I hope it will not be my last. An incredible food wine and a great match for the lamb.

Score: 93 Points
Price: $700 (Wine House)

2002 Sine Qua Non "Just For The Love Of It" Syrah (California, USA)

2007-12-15T08:18:00.000-08:00

By golly, have I been on a roll. My FIFTH Sine Qua Non in a little over a month, this time courtesy of Bennett Traub and his wonderful wife Linda who hosted Emma and myself for a farewell dinner at their house before we jaunted off to our new home in England.

Now before I get into my tasting note, I wanted to get out in the open my thoughts on "100 Point" wines. This wine was my second Robert Parker 100 Pointer, the other being the 2003 Sine Qua Non "Poker Face". My opinion has always been that there is no such thing as a "100 Point" wine - I mean what happens if you come across a wine that is better? It's not like we live in Nigel Tufnel's world where we can go to eleven ("You're on ten on your guitar. Where do you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly!"). As I pondered this conundrum for the umpteenth time Emma turned to me and said "Well if it's not 100 points, what is the fault [in the wine]?". Ummmmm...

The best thing about Sine Qua Non for me is that it has never (in my five bottles) not lived up to the hype. A dark, brilliant purple in the glass - a hint of what was to come. An exquisite, otherworldly nose that refused to be pinned down. Constantly evolving, first showing mouth-watering meatiness including bacon fat and beef blood, before pushing into more floral (violets) and peppery, coffee territory. In the mouth this was an extraordinarily well constructed wine - Manfred's talents as an artisan can not be exaggerated. The wine had linearity without being straight-forward, it was mouth coating without being unctuous, it hit on every spot on your palate and finished with a clear, ringing finish that I could still taste after the hour long car ride home. This wine had everything.

Still, I haven't got my head around the "100 Point" thing so let me do an artful dodge for now and give it a 99.999 which rounds up to 100. Ehh?!

Score: 99.999
Price: $630 (Saratoga Wine Exchange)

1998 Sine Qua Non "E-Raised" Syrah (California, USA)

2007-12-05T11:03:00.001-08:00

Am I a lucky bugger recently or what? Getting to try my first four Sine Qua Nons in the period of a month.

Like the Sine Qua Non's before, this wine did not disappoint. For an aged wine, the color has stood up well. Dark and brooding, with no hint of brickishness even at the rim! Rich and ripe black fruits, bacon fat, and violets on the nose - a hedonistic delight of aromatics. Exquisitely well constructed wine on the palate - silky smooth, integrated tannins, with a long linear progression of flavor and an elegant finish that goes on and on like the Energizer bunny. Big and brooding yet still delicate and elegant - does wine get better than this?

I had this wine in a blind tasting of twenty Syrahs that scored 95 or more points from Robert Parker and I ranked it Number 1 overall. Damn shame that this wine is so expensive or I would be backing up the truck. I don't know how long I can wait to get on the mailing list... best guess - 2018, anyone?

Score: 98 points
Price: $395 (Blicker Pierce Wagner Wine Merchants)

Wrapped Up in Books

2007-12-04T12:47:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in the post before last I have been in the middle of exams. To make things more crazy and stressful, I am also packing for our impending move to London!

I know what you might be thinking - "there's no wine industry in England" (well there is some good sparkling being made in the South) however my wife and I will be using the UK as a "home base" as I will be traveling much of the year on my quest to work with the world's finest Pinot Noir artisans. In fact I will be traveling from April through July to New Zealand and Australia so if I end up doing a harvest in France or the US I will be gone for over half the year!

Because of all this craziness, instead of doing a wine post, I thought I might highlight some articles that have interested me lately:-

Alder Yarrow's take on when wine tastes best
Professor Warren Moran's research article on Pinot Noir and Terroir in New Zealand
Clark Smith defends wine manipulation

I hope to be back to regular programming soon!

Harvest photos but in a cool web 2.0 kinda way

2007-11-28T16:33:00.001-08:00

Photos from harvest

2007-11-28T16:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry that posting has been so light! I have been furiously studying for my final exams for Microbiology and Scientific Statistics as part of my Wine Science studies. In the meantime check out some photos from harvest!

Promise to be back to regularly scheduled programming soon!

It's Over...

2007-11-22T10:30:00.000-08:00

So my internship is finished at Kosta Browne and back to the reality of being a wine science student. What an amazing ride - three months of hard yakka, intense learning experiences and amazing friendships.

So what did I learn? I learnt that the skills that made me a good advertising sales person are not necessarily the skills that make you a good wine maker. In advertising sales, creativity is king. In winemaking, being able to carry out a task the same way, every time is the most important thing. In advertising sales, very few mistakes are uncorrectable - it is pretty easy to re-submit a proposal if you put an extra zero in the wrong place. In winemaking, an extra zero can ruin tens of thousands of dollars of wine that can not be replaced. In advertising sales, attention to detail helps. In winemaking it doesn't help -- it is EVERYTHING.

I also got to see a few myths exploded. For example, it has been said that being a good winemaker is like being a good chef. It couldn't be further from the truth. A chef has twenty or more times a night to get a dish right; a winemaker has only one chance a year to get it right. To top it off, he will often not know for sure if he got it right or not for a year or so as the wine evolves in the barrel.

What I really learnt was that I love this job and I definitely made the right decision to pursue this career. I am already chomping at the bit for my next harvest, starting in April, at Felton Road in New Zealand.

The best summation of the wine making process I have heard

2007-11-11T09:53:00.000-08:00

From a post at the eRobertParker forums:-

As you now know Jim, wine making is 40% moving things around, 50% cleaning stuff and 10% drinking beer.

Damn straight!

And now the end is near....

2007-11-10T09:14:00.001-08:00

The end of harvest is upon us, so there is less to do out on the crush-pad, and there is now time to check in on things that have escaped our attention for the past few months. Here I am on the top of the 2006 barrels, preparing to sample from all of them so we can run some tests on them in the lab.

Bottling the 2006 wines will be upon us in January so we need to check in on them all and see where they all are in terms of pH, volatile acidity, titratable acidity and SO₂. All of these numbers are important in terms of "barrel health", so to speak, and also impact blending decisions. For example, you may have a target pH of somewhere between 3.5 and 3.7 for your finished wine in bottle. If you have a couple of lots with pH's around 3.8 you want to find a home for them with lots that have pH's that are much lower.

Checking SO₂ levels is a key test with bottling around the corner. SO₂ is an important preservative that ensures the wine remains stable during its time in the bottle - i.e. no "in bottle" re-fermentation by any bad yeasts or bacterial spoilage. Most winemakers want S0₂ levels to be in the early thirties parts per million before bottling so running a free SO₂ test in the lab will let us know how much more we need to add. Adding too much SO₂ at once can also "shock" the wine (the wine hides its flavor and aromas) for a while so it is much more preferable to slowly raise SO₂ levels reaching your target just before it goes into bottle.

Next week, I am going to be spending a lot of time in the lab helping out our oenologist so I will post more about the tests we run at Kosta Browne then!

2004 Sine Qua Non "Poker Face" Syrah (California, USA)

2007-11-10T08:43:00.000-08:00

I had the luck to have this wine alongside the Sine Qua Non "Into The Dark" at the Jemrose Vineyards harvest party.

This wine, along with being my first experience of Sine Qua Non, was also my first Robert Parker "100 Point Wine".

Decadent is the perfect word. Rich, lush, black fruit, pepper, violets, coffee, meat and some toasty oak notes on the nose - what a heady mix! The darkest of dark purple in the glass. The palate was immensely lush, yet focused, building and building up to a crescendo of fruit - an explosion in your mouth, finally finishing with some focused acidity.

I could get used to this - unfortunately my position on the wait list probably won't come up for 10 years or more!

Score: 96+ points
Price: $400 or so (Winecommune.com)

2004 Sine Qua Non "Into The Dark" Grenache (California, USA)

2007-11-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

Had at the Jemrose Vineyards Harvest Party (more on the party later) - a very generous gift from Russell Bevan!

O-M-G, this is my first ever "Sine Qua Non" - a cult winery that is impossible to find and has a wait list of over 5 years - and it lived up to the hype.

This is a full throttle wine, it comes at you with pure force of personality, yet it is still incredibly graceful and lithe. Imagine an athlete that is a dual gold medalist in gymnastics and weight lifting!?!

Black cherry, licorice and smoke with silky, fine grained tannins. Must be some big time alcohol in there by no heat on the palate. Color was a spectacular deep black-purple. Mouth feel was like sucking on velvet.

Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy...

Score: 98 points
Price: $250 or there abouts (WineCommune)

2005 Rosella's Vineyard Horizontal Tasting

2007-10-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

To celebrate harvest, Emma (my wife) being back from China, and having Rosella's fruit in the door, I put together a horizontal tasting of (almost) all the producers who made a 2005 Pinot Noir from Rosella's, most of which came from my cellar (plus a few trades with winemakers - thank you to those who did, you know who you are). We also threw in a "ringer" to add a twist to the tasting. Gary and Rosella Franscioni own a pug so we thought it would be appropriate for our two little boys, Chester and Mister Darcy, to be the "hosts of the tasting.

Aside: A horizontal tasting is when you select a year (and often restrict it to one vineyard) and taste producers against each other to get a sense of the quality of the vineyard, the vintage and of course the different producers idea of the best way to make a killer wine from very similar grapes. A vertical tasting on the other hand is when you select one wine, say for example of Penfolds Grange, and taste different vintages against each other to get a sense for the wine as it evolves and the style/quality. All of the wines were served "single blind", which means we knew what wines were in the tasting but not which bottles were which since we emptied all the bottles into unmarked decanters.

Overall the tasting was very enjoyable. The unique Rosella's "citrus" component was evident in most of the wines but there were many different approaches taken to expressing Rosella's, some pulled off better than others. The bright red fruit was also in evidence across all the bottles and there was plenty of refreshing acidity to go around. A lot of the wines also had that "funk" (forest floor, mushroominess) one sees often in Rosella's. I am glad that I have stocked my cellar pretty full of most of these puppies!

So how did I rank them?

1. 2005 Kosta Browne Rosella's Vineyard
This wine was the stand out of the tasting for me. Mouth coatingly voluptuousness and superb palate weight - bright red fruit, orange zest, grapefruit, baking spices and cleansing, refreshing acidity. A damn sexy wine.

2. 2006 Kosta Browne Rosella's Vineyard (Barrel Sample)
Very young but this wine has some promise. A perfect yin-yang match of masculine power in the mid palate with the feminine high toned lift in the finish. I like this a lot! I hope I am not developing a house palate. ;-)

[this wine was the ringer to confuse everyone and was the #2 wine for the group - a hint at what a great year the 2006 vintage will be for Kosta Browne]

3. 2005 A.P. Vin Rosella's Vineyard
Excellent well crafted wine. Rosella's citrus (grapefruit on this one), red fruits (raspberry, strawberry) and a touch of the "funk". This wine gets your attention with its power and acid. Well done Andrew!

4. 2005 Loring Wine Company Rosella's Vineyard
Citrus, raspberry, strawberry and cranberry - wow! What tasty juice! Tannins give this one some backbone. Cleansing acidity balanced the fruit well. Neck and neck with #3 for me. Could have gone either way. Definitely one of the best crafted wines of the tasting. As always, Brian delivers.

5. 2005 August West Rosella's Vineyard
Ed Kurtzman brings it with this wine! Baking spices, grapefruit, raspberry, lemon zest, and cherries - and throw in a bit of funk for good measure. Lovely mouth weight. These #3, #4, #5 wines were so close - different but very good. I took the rest of the bottle home later to have with dinner and it continued to get more impressive. So glad I have eight more of these in my cellar, the most of any 2005 Pinot Noir.

6. 2005 Siduri Rosella's Vineyard
Plush, velvety and ripe. Very funky (which I like) but the fruit was hiding a bit for me. Still a delicious wine. This was Emma's #2 wine.

7. 2005 Vision Cellars Rosella's Vineyard
A little thin for me but well received by the group. Ripe fruit, a little bit of harshness from tannins which were less integrated than the higher scoring wines. Not a bad drop but outclassed for me by the others in the field.

8. 2005 Roar Rosella's Vineyard
Could this wine be any more polarizing. My wifes #1 wine (and the #1 of many in the group), several in the tasting including myself ranked this at the back of the pack. Way too much oak for my taste with what I call a "halo" mouth feel (all sides and roof with no mid-palate weight). In the positives though, this one had a great floral nose that I didn't see in many others. Lacked the complexity that the top wines showed.

9. 2005 Morgan Rosella's Vineyard
For me this wine was last by a long way. Bitter, astringent, and green (unripe fruit). Tannin sticks out like a poke in the eye. Not enjoyable.

All in all, I think the tasting showed what an amazing vineyard Gary and Rosella have and how unique the flavor profile is from their little plot. Who would have thought that you could get grapefruit and mushroom funk in the same glass?

The wine paired well with my signature harvest dish -- Salmon smoked over dried Rosella's stems.

Does working in a winery get any better than this?

Day 16 - Rosella's

2007-10-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

Time to get our tasty wine into barrel for its 16 months of aging before we blend and bottle in January 2009.

Yesterday we drained and pressed the must from our Rosella's fermentations. Basically this involves removing the wine that can be separated from the must by gravity or in our case a pump - this wine we call the "free run". The rest of the must, which without the free run, we now call the pomace is then placed into a piece of equipment which imaginatively is called a "press" and is placed under pressure. This releases even more wine that is inside the skins. This wine we call "press" wine.

In the "old days" a winemaker would slowly increase the pressure of the press as he/she tastes the wine coming out of the press at regular intervals until he/she makes a "press cut". This is the point where it is deemed that any more wine that could be extracted will have more negatives that will outweigh the positives of having more wine. As pressure is increased, and seeds are crushed, all sorts of unsavory flavors and tannins are extracted (next time you eat grapes, try chewing the seeds..yuck!). These days the computers that program the presses are sophisticated enough to never get to this point - extracting just the right amount of wine. Or most winemakers will stop the press (especially at the high end of Pinot Noir) well before one would ever need to make a "press cut". Press wine has a different flavor profile and it has a more viscous, mouth coating texture, which really works in the final blend.

Here I am barreling down the free run into a new Ermitage barrel. I really like Ermitage barrels, traditionally used for Rhône wines, especially on Rosellas 828. It gives the wine an exotic, spiciness which lifts the feminine, high toned flavor that we get from Rosella's 828. We also used a new Cadus barrel, which also delivers some spiciness and some creaminess which I love and also a new Remond Bertrange, which is just sex on a stick for Pinot Noir - voluptuous creaminess and a full velvetly mouth feel. Matched with these new barrels were two once filled Rousseau barrels (which deliver a bit of power, some iron fist to match our velvet glove if you will) and some neutral barrels (which impart no oak flavor since they have been used 3 or more times).

Some may think that once it is in barrel that wine kind of rests - in fact, it couldn't be further from the truth. Wine is an amazing living animal, always changing - sometimes asking for love, sometimes going through the wine equivalent of the "terrible twos". Our job as wine makers is to be open to "listening" to what the wine wants over the next 16 months and help each barrel to develop into the best damn delicious juice it can be!

Fark!

2007-10-26T17:46:00.001-07:00

Have a look at the photo above. Notice anything unusual about the tank in the foreground?

Yes the arm is completely bent and broken. How did I do it and what did I learn about the laws of physics?

I was barreling down the free run wine from our Rosella 828 fermentations which we drained into this variable head tank that you see the top of in the foreground. A variable head tank works by having a lid that can lower down to various levels allowing you to have a 2-ton up to a 5 ton tank. The lid is held in place with a gasket that you blow up to a pressure that does not allow air into the tank.

I made the mistake of not releasing the air from this gasket (nor removing the bung that also seals the tank - consider me 0-2 here) before I barreled down. I had barreled down about 200 gallons of wine before I realized my mistake. Too late the damage was done!

It amazes me that the vacuum that I created could bend a steel bar - physics 101 lesson for today I guess.

Fark!

Day 14 - Rosella's

2007-10-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

On Day 14 we determined that the Rosella's bins had finished their fermentations and it was time to prepare to drain and press.

Above I have graphed the fermentation so you can see basically how it ran. The left axis is temperature in °F and the right axis is ° Brix (the units we measure sugar content of the must in). You can see from both the temperature and Brix readings, the fermentation really took off around Day 6 and peaked on Day 10 which is how we want a fermentation to run at Kosta Browne. 86°F peak temperature is perfect - if the temperature goes into the mid 90's, you risk the yeast being killed off and being left with a "stuck" fermentation (where you have sugar left in the must but no viable yeast to digest it - basically a nasty bacteria's wet dream!) and if temperature is too cool, in the 70's say, you don't get full tannin and color extraction. Can't ask for anything more than one in the mid 80's which we hit.

Remember, we added the DAP and Superfood on Day 8, which was a great call - just what the yeast needed to get the fermentation in our sweet zone.

A pretty textbook fermentation really, if I do say so myself!

1975 Château Palmer (Bordeaux, France)

2007-10-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

Since we were sorting the last of the merlot from Jemrose Vineyards for the new Jemrose Estate label, Shane Finley (the Associate Winemaker at Kosta Browne) opened this treat for us.

Château Palmer is a third growth Bordeaux estate in Margaux, whose grand vin is a blend of 45-ish percent Merlot, 45-ish percent Cabernet Sauvignon and between 5 and 8 percent Petit Verdot.

1975 was heralded at the time as "a vintage of the century" (funny how the French always have around ten or more of those a century) but not all of the wines have been up to the hype. Our bottle deteriorated very quickly in the glass. The first few whiffs were classic aged Bordeaux. Plums, earth, mushroom and dried herbs filled the nose. Very smooth, soft palate with a touch of grip left from the tannins. I was amazed they were still here after 32 years!

An enjoyable wine, but I wish it held together more. It was all over in about an hour - completely fell apart on us. Oh well, back to the sorting table

Day 8 - Rosella's

2007-10-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

Well, fermentation is well and truly underway. The Brix reading this morning was 21.3 and the temperature of the must was 67.9° F - the yeast are well established and multiplying.

At this point in time it is important to help the yeast as much as possible. Yeast need both nitrogen based nutrients and O₂ to build strong cell membranes (which for yeast is where all cell metabolism takes place). Above you can see me introducing O₂ via a sparger at the end of my punch down device (the sparger is submersed in the photo, you can only see the shaft of the punchdown device). Introducing O₂ can be dangerous at the wrong times since most of the "baddies" are primarily aerobic organisms (remember the post about wine microbiology?) but when a fermentation is firmly established the yeast will out-compete any "baddies" for sugar and O₂, so no worries there!

The other thing yeast needs is nitrogen based nutrients (remember we discussed YANC, or Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen Content here). If yeast do not have enough nitrogen they will start to break down amino acids such as cystine to acquire the nitrogen. This digestion releases sulfur which reacts with acid to form H₂S (hydrogen sulfide - rotten egg smell). So every morning before punch downs start we smell the fermentations to see if we can pick up any "fartiness" (no better term for it really) and decide to add any nutrients and/or O₂ to help our yeast out.

For nutrients we have two options which we often use in combo. One is called "superfood" which is like a "protein shake" for yeast, full of all sorts of amino acids, vitamins, minerals that a growing yeast needs. The other is "DAP" (diammonnium phosphate) which I like to call "yeast crack". Since yeast needs to convert any nitrogen-based nutrient into ammonia before metabolizing it, DAP just gives them a double dose straight into their system.

Happy yeast who are ready to work overtime!!

Tasting with a school-mate

2007-10-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

Erin and I finally caught up for a drink last week - we are only 10 miles away from each other and with the craziness of harvest we haven't had the chance to see each other. Quite embarrassing really considering that we normally live 7952 miles away from each other.

Erin and I both study at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia in their Wine Science program and while I am at Kosta Browne for harvest, she is at Alderbrook - a producer of Dry Creek and Russian River Valley wines (most well known for their Zinfandel).

What do two wine students do when they hang out? Well, they drink! We opened a bottle of 2001 Dehlinger Goldridge Pinot Noir and scarfed it down. Erin didn't want to post her notes on the wine so instead we have notes from "Taster X":-

A nose of savory meat, dirty and gutsy. Awesome, total mouth feel - a meal in a glass! Integrated and complex, almost salty, superb weight.

I agree, this wine was special. Good times, good times...

Felton Road! Woo Hoo!

2007-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

I just found out that one of my dreams came true! I have got a job at Felton Road for their 2008 harvest. A 2001 Felton Road Block 5 was one of the wines that inspired me to take the plunge and become a wine intern and I am so excited to be able to work with Blair and Jane and the rest of the crew at Felton Road.

Felton Road is a boutique winery in Central Otago, the most southern wine making region in the world. While known for their amazing Pinot Noir (their latest release of Block 5 received the highest rating amongst 2006 NZ Pinot Noir from Steve Tanzer, one of the world's best wine critics) they also produce some Chardonnay, Riesling and Vin Gris. All of their fruit is bio-dynamically farmed which is very exciting to me.

I start in mid April for a few weeks in the vineyards, picking the harvest and then will move into the winery to make the wine. All the wine is in barrel by end of May so it will be another intense 6 weeks.

I am so excited!!

Merlot really "jacks" me off!

2007-10-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

We got some fruit in from Jemrose Vineyard today - Merlot. One of the bummer things about Merlot (which I learnt today having never worked on it before) is that the rachis (a cluster of grapes minus the grapes) is very brittle and breaks up into little bits that we call "jacks" when the clusters pass through the de-stemmer.

Unfortunately our de-stemmer lets these "jacks" fall through into the newly de-stemmed fruit. So what is one to do? Well pick them out by hand! Here you can see Pete, one of my fellow interns, and Michael Browne, the head winemaker, sitting under the de-stemmer and picking out "jacks". Imagine sugar syrup and twigs dropping on your head for an hour and you can imagine how much fun we were having!

Thank god, Beer o'clock rolled around two hours earlier!

Day 6 - Rosella's

2007-10-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

It is now 36 hours since we inoculated the Rosella's and we have done two punchdowns since then. At this stage punching the cap down is to mainly help the yeast colonies that might be forming in certain parts of the must (winemaker term for fermenting juice and skins) mix throughout the rest of the must. Punching down also integrates a bit of 0₂ which the yeast need to multiply.

Every day we take Brix and Temperature readings which help us understand how fast or slow the fermentation is going and whether it needs any help. Today's readings show that Brix (approx. measurement of sugar content in the must) was 25.4 and temperature was 59° F - basically where we were when we inoculated 36 hours ago. When you are punching down you kind of know how the fermentation is running (cap feels hot, CO₂ escapes when you break through the cap etc) but the numbers give us a more accurate guide and back up our sensorial judgement.

We should see some activity by Day 7 as the yeast colonies grow and start to get chomping!

2005 Amisfield Central Otago Pinot Noir (Central Otago, NZ)

2007-10-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Very dark, deep color in the glass - I love it!

Fresh red fruits on nose and palate: strawberries and bright red cherry. Some interesting spices and earthiness too.

Very "juicy" and mouth watering with a long cleansing finish. My flat mate loved it!

Well worth the $27 tariff!

Score: 90 Points
Price: $27 (Bottle Barn)

Day 4 - Rosella's

2007-10-16T07:47:00.000-07:00

Time to make some wine! On Day 4, we brought our four fermenting bins of Rosella's out from the cold room into our fermentation room. The four days of cold soaking has really brought out some lovely citrus and feminine sweetness in the juice. Yummy!

In order to inoculate we culture up some yeast. At Kosta Browne, we predominately use a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae called RC212 to run our fermentations. RC212 is a Burgundy strain that works well on Pinot Noir and is known to give great color extraction - important in Pinot Noir where sometimes wines can be thin on the looks front. RC212 is also quite alcohol tolerant (can survive up to 14-16%) and heat tolerant as well (up to around 94° F) which helps in California where we have ripe fruit (and thus alcohols in the 14-15% range) and with the new wood tanks we use for some of our fermentations. The wood fermentation vats give an incredibly sexy mouth feel to the finished wine but the wood retains a lot of heat. Thus it helps to have a yeast strain that won't die on you and leave you with a "stuck" fermentation. RC212 is known to need a lot of nutrients (remember the YANC) or it will start using any sulfur compounds in the juice to create hydrogen sulfide.

To culture yeast we take dried powdered yeast from the fridge and slowly adding water we allow the yeast to wake up from their slumber. Once our yeast starts to froth we slowly add juice from the bin/tank we are inoculating until the temperature of the yeast is within 10° F of the juice temperature (since we just brought the bins out from cold soak the juice was 58° F when we inoculated) both to give the yeast some food to eat, live free and multiply, and also to make sure they don't get "shocked" by the cold temperature when we pour it into the juice.

Once the juice is inoculated we now call it the "must". We now sit back and wait and see how our little yeast babies adjust.

2005 Chasseur Durrell Chardonnay (Sonoma Valley, USA)

2007-10-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

Lively golden straw color - this wine promises a lot just at first glance. Lush tropical notes on the nose, not overpowering passionfruit or banana though, think guava! Tasty Golden Delicious apple and apricot fruit notes and a bready, first rise of dough, smell and taste that is divine.

The wine has all of the mouth coating fattiess you want from a Chardonnay with none of the cloying butteriness that often comes with it. Smooth, long clean finish makes you want to go back for more.

Reminds me more of a Meursault than any Californian I have tasted recently. Just "sex on a stick"!

Score: 95 points
Price: Not Yet Released (Chasseur Wines)

Day 3 - Rosella's

2007-10-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

So Day 3, its time to see what kind of "numbers" the Rosella's is giving us this year. While at the end of the day wine comes down to taste, there are certain numbers that help guide a winemaker to get the most out of the grapes as possible. From what I have learned so far, it is far more important to see the "numbers" as a guidepost, your sherpa if you will, on your expedition to craft the best wine possible from the grapes you have in front of you, rather than as a "be all, end all" recipe for wine.

With this is mind, Lydia (Kosta Browne's resident enologist) and I ran what you call a "juice panel". A "Juice Panel" gives the wine maker an idea of the amount and types of sugar, acids, and nutrients available for the yeasts to do their work. We ran several types of tests. The first was a simple Brix reading with a pocket refractometer.

As you can see here, we have a nice Brix reading of 27.1 which is right in the sweet spot of tasty wine. Brix is a pretty good approximation for the sugar content of the juice and thus the amount of "fuel" we have available for the yeasties. 1 Degree of Brix will produce somewhere around 0.55% alcohol so this Rosella's juice will give us a projected alcohol of 14.5%. Just about where you want it.

We then run some acid trials where we slowly titrate NaOH (Sodium Hydroxide) into a sample of the juice to see its buffering capacity. Sodium Hydoroxide reacts with the acid in the wine and the amount of NaOH that the juice sample can take for any given pH target (say pH 3.50) gives us an idea of how much the juice will be affected by any change in its acid levels.

We also run some tests to find out how much YANC the juice has. YANC is a nice acronym for Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen Content. In order to live free and multiply our yeasties need nutrients, mainly in the form of nitrogen compounds, in order to healthily digest the sugars in the grapes into alcohol. Too little YANC and the yeast struggle, often giving off odors of ethyl acetate, and hydrogen sulfide and worst case scenario you get a "stuck" fermentation where all the yeast die before all the sugar is converted to alcohol. Trust me, you don't want that to happen. As you can imagine knowing how much YANC is available is pretty helpful to a wine maker (and there are several things we can add to the juice to increase the levels -- a topic for another time).

All in all, the Rosella's juice looks in great shape and ready to make some killer Pinot. One more day of resting until we inoculate and get 2007 Rosella's underway.

Day 1 - Rosella's

2007-10-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

So the Rosella's grapes have been sitting in the cold room for 24 hours and it is time to "bleed" some juice which we then take to make rosé -- the proper french term is saignée. Those damn frogs, they always know how to make a simple process sound sexy!

Above you can see me siphoning off some juice from one of our Rosella's Pisoni Clone fermenting bins. Some calculations based on the flavor, sugar content, pH level etc of the juice allows us to determine how much juice we need to "bleed" off. The main consideration being to increase the skin to juice ratio, which concentrates the flavors, structure and color of the finished wine (and also to make a tasty summer rosé).

The Rosella's juice that we bled off was sweet and flavorsome and had some lovely feminine qualities. This stuff has some promise alright to make some killer Pinot!

Day 0 - Rosella's

2007-10-09T23:39:00.000-07:00

Today the last fruit for Kosta Browne arrived for harvest and we saved the best for last - my favorite vineyard, Rosella's Vineyard. We get both the Pisoni and 828 clones from Rosella's which we sorted today. The photo here is a "grapes eye view" as it falls onto the elevator that takes it to the crusher/destemmer.

As you may notice from the title of the post I am going to take you through the whole process of the Rosella's arriving in the winery until it goes into barrel in two weeks or so. The grapes arrived on a truck that left Rosella's at 6am. By the time they dropped some fruit off at A.P. Vin and headed up the highway to us it was 11am. Still the fruit was nice and cold - which is very important since we don't want to let any nasty bugs get a foothold before the must is inoculated with yeast in a few days.

Here is a cluster of Rosella's Pinot Noir Clone 828. The cluster is very tight with great shape - like a little hand grenade. The flavor just zinged -- zippy acidity with some of that characteristic Rosella's citrus. We destemmed the Rosella's into six fermenting bins - three for the 828 clone and three for the Pisoni clone.

These beautiful de-stemmed honeys will spend their next four days or so chilling out in the cold room (which is a nippy 55°). That little bit of time just lets the skins and juice get to know each other in a relaxed atmosphere before we sic the hungry yeasties on them and start making some damn tasty wine!

Sometimes the only thing that gets you through the day...

2007-10-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

... is the thought of that ice cold lager at the end of work. Like they say "it takes a lot of beer to make a little wine" and with our 14+ hour days at the moment, boy you need it.

Tomorrow we have our last big day of grapes - Rosella's and Kanzler for Kosta Browne and the first Syrah of the season for Shane Wine, over 20 tons to process along with maintenance of all the fermentations we have running (40+ bins and 11 tanks of rotting grapes).

I bet the keg will be tapped by 3pm.

Crazy times!

2007-10-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

Almost all of our fruit is in the winery now - with the cool weather the vines really slowed down and so instead of getting fruit evenly spaced out it came all at once. In the last week we processed over 50% of the whole harvest worth of fruit - 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week.

Here I am in a fermenting bin of Garys Vineyard Pinot Noir. This bin is made up of 100% whole cluster fruit. This means that we have not de-stemmed the berries and we are fermenting the "whole cluster" of berries. Retaining the stems for fermentation helps bring extra complexity and structure. However punching the cap down can be very hard, especially at the beginning of fermentation. Sometimes the only way is to get your feet sticky!

Von Simmern Riesling Hattenheimer Nussbrunnen Kabinett Trocken 2005 (Rheingau, Germany)

2007-10-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

Like sucking on a peach stone that got dropped on slate.

Tasty minerality, green apple, guava, lime peel, and lemon custard. Great acid and grip, with a long clean finish with a "titch" of sugar.

Superb value!

Score: 89 points
Price: $14 (wine.com)

2005 Pisoni Estate Pinot Noir (Santa Lucia Highlands, USA)

2007-10-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

Wow! This is one of the best Pinots I have tasted this year!

Deep, deep ruby red. Beautiful expressive nose of blueberry, raspberry, baking spices and subtle oak notes.

In the mouth this wine takes you off on the ride of a lifetime. Starting with the bright raspberry, red cherry and citrus that Santa Lucia Highlands is famous for, it then builds and builds, coating the sides of your mouth and the flavors just bleed through your tongue!

The wine has lusciously soft tannins but still has the structure of a wine that will age well. This is a fruit driven wine, no doubt, but Pinot doesn't get much better than this.

Score: 95 points
Price: $59.99 (Wine Pavillion)

I love punchies!

2007-09-28T05:35:00.001-07:00

Once fermentation is underway, we punch down the cap twice a day. Our little friends, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, are chomping away on grape sugars and turning it into ethanol, CO₂ and heat. The CO₂ that is released pushes the grape skins to the surface and the heat "bakes" the skins into a soft cake that we call the cap. Above you can see that half the tank is punched (look at all that creamy goodness bubbling up - thats CO₂ coming up) and the other half is still caked.

The problem with a cap is that the skins are where all the flavor, color and tannins are so we need to push the skins back under the juice occasionally. It also has the effect of helping the fermentation lose some excess heat which it especially important in these wooden tanks since the staves hold their temperature well. At Kosta Browne we punch down twice a day during fermentation.

I love doing punch downs. The smells and the exercise remind you that wine is a living thing and keeps you close to the wild side of nature. Because at the end of the day, wine is just rotten grapes!

2005 Yering Station Reserve Pinot Noir (Yarra Valley, Australia)

2007-09-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

I was very much looking forward to this bottle which I brought back from my recent visit to Australia. We had it at the winery yesterday with lunch (one of the great perks of working at a winery - wine for lunch!).

Unusually "brickish" and light in color - if I had to go on color alone I would have said a 2002 or so Pinot Noir. Refreshing acidity and with a "juicy" mouth feel, silky tannins with tart red cherry and baking spice.

Overall, I found it flat and one dimensional which was disappointing considering the huge wraps Winewise gave it.

Maybe we had an oxidized bottle?

Score: 87
Price: $34.99 (Fine Wine House)

Microbiology of wine

2007-09-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

Smack bang in the middle of harvest I needed to fly back to Australia as part of my Wine Science degree to stare at microbes under a microscope for four days.

Microbes are a very important part of a winery. Of course, wine is made through the action of our favorite friend, Saccharomyces cerevisiae or wine yeast, which converts sugar in the berries into ethanol (alcohol) and CO₂. There are also other friendly microbes like Oenococcus oeni that help give red wines and many Chardonnays their soft mouth-feel.

However there are also many nasty bacteria and yeasts that if given a chance would love to screw up your wine. The most well known is a family of bacteria called Acetobacter that converts ethanol into acetic acid - more commonly known as vinegar! Not only is this a major wine fault but it is also very noticeable since acetic acid is what we call volatile - in other words it likes to leave the wine as a gas and thus is picked up by our nose very easily. Acetic acid is also often converted through some other chemical reactions into Ethyl acetate which smells of nail polish. Tasty! So next time you have a glass of wine that you think might not quite be "right", stick your nose in and see if it is because of a vinegar or nail polish taint. If it is you can say damn those nasty Acetobacters!

So what can a winemaker do? Luckily, for us Acetobacters need O₂ to survive and once fermentation by our wine yeast (you remember our friend Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is underway enough CO₂ is given off to kill any Acetobacters. But before and after fermentation we need to be very careful. This means after crushing the grapes, the must (winemaker term for the juice and skins) needs to be covered with a blanket of CO₂ at all times until fermentation is happily chugging along. After fermentation it means keeping all the barrels topped up with wine and during bottling it means that we need to flush the bottles with an inert gas like Nitrogen or Argon so there is no O₂ in the ullage (winemaker term for space between the wine and the cork/screwcap) that can let Acetobacters get a foothold when your wine is happily sleeping in the cellar.

All of these nasties mean that we spend a lot of time keeping things clean in the winery. In fact, for each hour of what you might term "romantic winemaking" there are three hours of washing up. Its all worthwhile though to ensure that your next glass of vino doesn't smell like yesterday's salad dressing or your overly made up Aunt Ethel!

A great pinot tasting at university

2007-09-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

One of my fellow students at Charles Sturt University brought a couple of very interesting barrel samples to the bar last night. Like Kosta Browne, he likes to ferment small lots, treat them in different ways (always with love) and then use interesting oak barrels for maturation.

Last night we had two 2007 barrel samples - both came from the same upper block of their estate vineyard (his winery is in Tasmania), both were barreled from the same fermenter. Both had spent six months in a 2006 François Frères oak barrel - since it is 2006 barrel it has been once-filled with 2006 wine, this is the second fill (normally this tones the oak influence down as compared to a new barrel). The only difference? One barrel was made with oak from the Allier forest and one from the Tronçais forest (he had brought a third bottle whose oak came from the Vosges forest but he dropped that in the driveway?!).

Both bottles were raw and primary, typical of most barrel samples, with a bit of H₂S aroma (H₂S usually blows off the wine over time in barrel, maybe a subject of a post in the future perhaps). There were marked differences between the two. The Allier was much more feminine, with elegant and elevated oak notes while the Tronçais had a more powerful and primary oakiness. On this occasion I did enjoy Tronçais barrel the most - in the past, with Californian barrel samples primarily, I have had a preference for the Allier but it just worked with this particular block of fruit.

What I took away from this was the influence of where the wood in a wine barrel comes from. A lot of the time we spend so much time talking about the advantages and characteristics of one cooper over another, maybe we should look at the forest a bit more. Food for thought and maybe for tasting when I am back in the winery.

First Wine in Barrel

2007-09-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

Our Amber Ridge went "dry" (the yeast have finished their job and converted all the sugar into alcohol) so it was time to get the wine out of the fermenters and into barrel. We had a few different fermenters going for the Amber Ridge fruit. We had two 8-ton Rousseau wooden fermenters full of Amber Ridge clone 667, one with fruit from the upper block, one from the lower block. We had a 8-ton steel fermenter full of Amber Ridge clone 777 and a few 1.5-ton plastic fermenters with some Amber Ridge clone 115 and clone 667 where we used some different strains of yeasts.

At Kosta Browne, we like to keep all of the lots separate to keep our blending options open. So we barrel down each fermenter separately, rather than blend it all into one large tank, and then into barrel. We also like to use a variety of barrels that give the wine different characteristics as it matures, again to increase our blending options and hopefully the complexity of the finished wine. Here you can see me "barreling down" one of the 1.5-ton plastic fermenters into a Saury (a French cooper) barrel that was first filled with wine in 2003 so it will impart very little or no wood to the wine as it matures. You need to keep a damn close watch or wine will come flying out the top pretty quick and at $50 a bottle it not only gets you drenched, it gets expensive fast too!

Vineyard Sampling

2007-09-16T12:37:00.001-07:00

This morning we got up at 5am to drive up to the Yorkville Highlands to visit Weir Vineyard. Shane Finley, the Associate Winemaker at Kosta Browne, is getting some fruit for a new label he is starting - a great coup considering that Williams Selyem makes a Weir Vineyard Pinot Noir! The seven acres of Pinot sit on a south facing hill slope to get maximum sun, but is cooled by the marine layer that is funneled through the Anderson Valley straight from the Pacific. The great Pinot areas in California all have this marine influence so I was excited to get out there.

Our job this morning was to "walk the rows" and to bring some samples back to the winery for analysis. The vineyard is planted to clones of Domaine Romanee-Conti, 2A, Pommard and Rochioli and Shane is getting them all except for the Pommard. The Domaine Romanee-Conti and the Rochioli clones tasted like Pommard which gives an elegant red fruit profile. The 2A is richer and darker with blue/black fruit, so they should mingle well in the finished wine. The grapes were getting close but they were still a touch "green" in flavor. Hopefully this cool weather we have will hold and they can get another week or so to hang!

So how does the 2007 season look?

2007-09-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

Harvest is in full gear here in Sonoma. At the winery we have about 15% of our fruit in already and our first fruit from Amber Ridge has finished its cold soak and fermentation is just kicking into gear. The berries have been very small this year, giving the juice an amazingly rich deep purple hue after cold soak (because of the high skin to juice ratio). These are going to be some dark pinots!

Above are some samples of Keefer Ranch. We get six different Pinot Noir clones from Keefer Ranch - 115, 2A, 23, 667, 777 and Pommard. Clone 23 is my favorite - up here in Sonoma it gives the wine a beautiful green apple tartness. Just spectacular. We sampled the Keefer juice this week and the flavor is just about to pop - we should see the fruit in the winery this week just as it hits its peak. What a great time of year!

Harvest in ON!

2007-09-04T16:18:00.001-07:00

Today we got our first blocks of Amber Ridge Pinot Noir in the winery. The fruit from the 667 clone was especially tasty - voluptuously rich blue fruit and some sassy acidity. We put our new "crush-pad" (where we process the grapes) through its paces today - 37 half-ton bins of grapes were sorted, crushed and de-stemmed. "Crushing" is a misnomer, especially for Pinot Noir -- in the winery we want to treat the berries like the delicate children they are.

First, we sort through the harvested fruit (the crew at Amber Ridge started harvesting at midnight with the first 16 bins showing up at 8 am) by picking out leaves, looking for damaged fruit (e.g. bird damage or botrytis infection) and "second set" clusters (fruit that appears in the middle of summer and thus does not get ripe) and generally making sure that just the tastiest grapes end up in the fermenter. The grapes are then destemmed and the naked, whole berries are put into fermenters for their "cold soak" whereby the grapes are chilled to around 55 degrees for a few days before fermentation is allowed to begin. Cold soaking helps with color extraction, something that can sometimes be challenging for Pinot Noir, and also has the benefit of allowing the juice to slowly bleed out of the grapes, passing over and through the skins where the vast majority of a grapes flavor lies.

If the Amber Ridge fruit today is any sign then we will be in for a "cracker" of a 2007 vintage.

I am the ape-man, I am the walrus, koo-koo ka-choo!

2007-08-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

Climbing barrels is tough work - but fun! In order to save space barrels full of wine are stacked four high - empty barrels are six high. So to do things like sulfur dioxide additions, topping wine (or taking barrel samples... hmmmm, barrel samples) you need to hop on up! It takes a bit to get used to but once you are going, you'll be a "barrel monkey" in no time.

Bins, Bins, Bins

2007-08-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

I finally arrived to start my new career and I have been thrown in the "deep end". Hundreds of fermentation bins and barrels to sanitize before the first fruit arrives in a few weeks. It is often said that for every hour of what one would call "romantic winemaking" there is four hours of washing up. Well if that is true then I have a LOT of winemaking due my way!

That said this is a great time to be in the winery - getting to know your fellow interns, having time to scope out the facility and getting acquainted with all the barrels that will be loving filled with Pinot before too long.

So sorry there hasn't been a post in a while but the "Internets" are sketchy up here (something to do with all those series of tubes, I guess). Anyway, promise to post more soon!

2006 Château Guiot (Southern Rhône, France)

2007-08-15T20:17:00.001-07:00

Grenache & Syrah Rosé

Darker than what I would normally associate with French Rosé - looks more Californian. Attractive bright strawberry and raspberry nose with some spicy, stemmy action.

In the mouth, a more full flavor of red berries than most French Rosé. Very "juicy" - reminds me of a watermelon purée. Snappy acidity makes this a great Summer quaffer. Great choice for a house rosé. Damn delicious tonight with some wilted Summer greens.

Year in, year out Château Guiot can be counted on for a great value Rosé.

Score: 87
Price: $7.99 (Winex)

Goon bags are "greener" than bottles

2007-08-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

The pouch is the new goon bag. Says Chris O’Shea of Versus Wines:-

"Initial consumer feedback from around the world has been very positive to the wine pouch. The innovative design offers convenient handles for portability and on-the-go consumption, a leak proof tap, is light and easy to squeeze into a bag or picnic hamper and the packaging also allows contents to be cooled more rapidly than traditional glass."

He also goes on to say that pouches are more "green" than glass bottles since pouches have a lower carbon footprint than glass. Now I know that goon bags have other post-consumption uses such as for bedding but now they should be the packaging choice of green-conscious as well as the poor college student.

"Studies conducted on the pouch found that although glass is easier to recycle, even if 100% of the glass bottles produced were recycled and 0% of the pouches were recycled, they would still achieve a significantly lower environmental impact and less waste."

Selling goon bags as environmentally friendly. Thats a good one!

Save the world, use cork!

2007-08-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

The cork lobby is at it again.

"The production of screwcaps gives off over 10kg of CO2 per tonne compared with 2.5kg of CO2 per tonne for corks...

Seeing as how the cork industry has an overwhelming market share lead to protect against alternative closures (which have grown from 2% market share ten years ago to nearly 20% today), push-back is expected. A few years ago it was "romance" now it is "eco-friendly".

Now, I agree that cork is a renewable resource in that the harvest does not damage the oak and that cork forests provide a unique ecosystem that may not be replicated if the oaks are replaced with faster growing trees such as pines. I also get that an oak tree sequesters carbon dioxide over its long life time in order to produce the cork -- all good by me. However until cork taint (2,4,6-Trichloroanisole or "TCA") is virtually eliminated (I am talking less than 99%) - I am going to be looking to lower my carbon footprint elsewhere in my life.

I'm certainly not going to add to my carbon footprint by taking a tainted bottle back to the store!!

Gary V brings the "Thunder!" with Kosta Browne

2007-08-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen Gary Vaynerchuk on Wine Library TV you need to give his video-blogging a look. As he says he only knows two ways to taste - from his hip and his heart. He shoots from his hip and he comes from his heart. He is a little OTT but compared to the overly serious tasting notes you usually see, he is a breath of fresh air. His wine vocabulary is unique. He describes the second wine in this videocast as "stinky sock meets green pepper meets dirt with a chocolate bar on top left by a camp fire". Nice!

He tastes the 2003 and 2004 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coasts in this episode. As I mentioned earlier the 2003 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast was the bottle that made me want to become a winemaker and will always have a special place in my heart but as Gary points out the 2004 version is a to-die-for wine.

I can't wait to start working with Michael Browne next week!

"The wonderful, magical animal" - Crispy Pork Tails

2007-08-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

As all of my friends know, I have an obsession with all thing pork — that "wonderful, magical animal". Since I discovered the wonders of farmers markets and the beauty of unusual cuts thanks to The Omnivore's Dilemma we have been experimenting with everything from bison neck, to pigs trotters, to beef marrow bones and tripes. For anyone who is excited by the possibilities of viscera and butcher cuts that have been forgotten in our Walmartized world should check out Nose to Tail Eating. A passion for the taste of "real meat" is what is going to save us from the $0.99 beef mince that came from who knows where. End of rant...

To bring us back from the precipice of grey meats are innovative chefs like Fergus Henderson.

Fergus Henderson's creations since they involve all of the senses in the culinary experience do need wines that have ample mouth cleansing acidity yet follow with enough fruit to stand up to the sensory assault of such richly flavored meat. The following recipe which comes from Nose to Tail Eating is a great match for a rich Pinot Noir like the 2004 Alcina Russian River we enjoyed it with. If you prefer a white, a young Sauterne with bracing acidity like a 2001 Chateau Bastor-Lamontagne would be an excellent match for the velvety mouth-feel of this dish.

Crispy Pigs’ Tails

To serve four

8 long pig’s tails

2 onions, peeled and roughly chopped

2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

2 sticks of celery, chopped

a bundle of fresh herbs

3 bay leaves

10 black peppercorns

1 head of garlic

zest of 1 lemon

1/2 bottle of red wine

1.1 litres chicken of light stock

2 tbsp English mustard

4 eggs, whisked together

450g seasoned flour

225g fine white breadcrumbs

a large knob of butter

Steps:-

Place the tails in an oven dish with the vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, garlic, lemon zest, and wine, and cover with the stock. Cover with tinfoil, place in a medium oven, and cook for 3 hours, checking on it so it does not cook too fast; when done you should be able to easily pinch through the flesh. Remove from the oven. Allow to cool in the stock, but remove the tails before it turns to jelly and drain any excess liquid off them (you can refrigerate them at this point).

When they’re cold and firm, mix together the mustard and eggs and have ready three bowls flour, egg and mustard, and breadcrumbs. Dust them with flour, roll them in the egg and mustard mix, and finally coat them in the breadcrumbs so that they are well covered (do this just before you cook, otherwise the crumbs will go soggy).

Get a large ovenproof frying pan or roasting tray hot, add the butter, and when sizzling add the tails and roll them around (watch out, they can and will spit — be very careful). Place in a hot oven for 10 minutes, then turn them over, making sure there is enough butter, and roast for another 10 minutes, keeping an eye on them so they do not burn.

Serve hot with watercress or red mustard salad. Some may like a spot of malt or red wine vinegar on their tails. Encourage the use of fingers and much gnawing of the bone.

Get your hands dirty and fatty with this dish that is as much about the tactile senses as it is about aroma and taste!

<Best Homer Imitation> Hmmmmm, crispy pork tails... aaaaarrrrrrgggghhh </Best Homer Imitation>.

The old closure debate

2007-08-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

I am an unabashed fan of screwcapped wine (mainly because I hate corked wine but not needing a corkscrew is a plus too!) so I am always excited when I hear about consumer research that indicates that wine drinkers are accepting it more. A new study has come out that indicates that US consumers who are neutral or positive towards screwcaps has increased from 47% to 57% from 2004 to 2005.

While this is definitely a step in the right direction, closer examination reveals some problems.

While consumers may be "accepting" of screwcaps they aren't crazy about them. Only 15% say they are positive about screwcaps against 42% who say they don't like buying wine with this closure at all. Most disturbingly, a similar study that asked specifically about the context the screwcapped wine was going to be consumed in (and also included respondents from the UK, France and Australia) the acceptance of screwcaps by US drinkers plummets in more "premium contexts" - special occasions, gift giving & dinner parties.

As someone whose dream is to make super premium Pinot Noir the lack of acceptance of screwcapped wine in these contexts where consumers are willing to pay $30+ on a bottle of wine is concerning. However the two bright spots in the study are in Australia where the acceptance of screwcaps remains above 50% in all consumption contexts and the UK (Australia's biggest export market) which is also well above the US rates in "premium contexts" and just as high as Australia in more informal ones. One would think that the UK numbers will continue to rise once more producers like UK market leader Jacobs Creek put their entire range under screwcap including their Johann Cabernet which retails for £ 40.

Maybe it will take a Robert Mondavi to make the leap here? What do you think?

I like to call it the "goon bag effect" ™

2007-08-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

Sure, some may say that correlation doesn't imply causation. Others may say that wine consumption tends to rise and crime tends to fall with rising disposable incomes, implying that they both have a common cause (disposable income) but neither causes the other. Another explanation trotted out is that the US has an aging population and it is primarily the young who commit crime and older folk who drink wine.

Personally I subscribe to the "goon bag effect" ™.

More people are drinking boxed wine. Boxed wine makes people happy. Happiness makes people less likely to commit crime. Quod erat demonstrandum!

International Pinot Showdown — US vs Australia (with a Shiraz/Syrah coda)

2007-08-05T17:47:00.002-07:00

The name of the restaurant was all I needed to hear — Bird, Fish, Cow. Sounded like a great excuse to see how Russian River, one of America's top Pinot regions, matched up against Mornington Peninsula, which has been heralded as the region that will put Australia on the world Pinot map. Considering all the controversy that erupted out of the Mornington Peninsula International Pinot Noir Conference, the theme seemed timely.

Wines were tasted blind by a group of eight wine geeks in Sydney during my eight hour layover on the way from Los Angeles to Wagga Wagga. All that we knew was that one wine in each flight would be Australian and one would be American.

Flight One — 2003 Stonier Reserve vs 2004 Roessler Kanzler

The Stonier was leathery and had an unpleasant green stemminess along with a dash of band-aidy Brett and a dab of VA. On the positive side there was some bright red cherry, plush strawberry, and some snappy acidity. Once the bag was lifted it was a bit of a shock, I had really wanted to like this wine. Especially after James Halliday had practically drooled all over it. Bummer.

The Roessler was your prototypical Russian River Pinot on the first whiff. Cherry cola, forest floor, red berries (raspberry and strawberry) and baking spice. Super plush in the mouth, nice acidity to cut the ripeness of the fruit with a long high toned finish.

Group Vote: 8 votes for Kanzler, 0 for the Stonier

Flight Two — 2005 Port Phillip Estate vs 2005 Kosta Browne Russian River

The Port Phillip was very well constructed. Sandro Mosele is one of Australia's great Pinot artisans, a bottle I had recently of his 2004 Kooyong Estate Pinot Noir was superb. The Port Phillip was the most feminine wine of the day — not light, feminine. Opens with violet, dark cherry and maybe some plum. Very "juicy" in the mouth with elegant tannins that will make for damn tasty Pinot in a couple of years but still approachable now.

The Kosta Browne Russian River was a great wine. Seeing as I am working with them, I feel I must refrain from commenting except to say that I voted for this bottle.

Group Vote: 6 votes for Kosta Browne, 2 for Port Phillip

Anne "Swervin" Irvine with the flight's winner, the 2005 Kosta Browne Russian River

You say Shiraz, I say Syrah - 2004 John Duval The Entity vs 2004 Carlisle The Judge

Can you say Deep Purple? The John Duval was an opaque, deep purple verging on squid ink! Wow! Blackberry, violets, dark cherry, plum and some oak. In the mouth cocoa and vanilla show themselves too. Fantastic balance of fruit, alcohol, wood, and tannins. Will be even better in a few years when the tannins get a chance to settles down because the are B-I-G right now.

Carlisle is one of my favorite Syrah producers and so I was excited to have it matched up with the John Duval. Once it hit the glass, I was sure this was the Carlisle, in fact I was so sure I have fuzzy memories of offering to run down the road naked if I was wrong. Almost rivaling the John Duval for color this is definitely the Carlisle I have come to know and love. Big and ripe aromas fly out of the glass - the first thing that hits me is freshly baked blueberry pie and pepper. Blackberries, smoke, bacon fat and licorice follow. Massively rich mouth-feel — this is almost more of a sensory experience than a wine. Kudos to Mike Officer!

Group Vote: 5 for Carlisle, 3 for John Duval
(although it should be noted that the table thought that the scores may be reversed if the tasting was held in 2010.)

How did I get here exactly?

2007-08-04T20:15:00.001-07:00

It was a year and a half ago at the Los Angeles Angels Spring Training Camp. A belated birthday dinner at Mosaic - it snowed(!) on our drive to the restaurant in Phoenix. The wine list? Amazing! I had heard about Kosta Browne from fans on the Robert Parker Message Boards - $90 for 2003 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir as a birthday wine seemed fair game. What I didn't know then was that this bottle would change my life.

A year and a half later I find myself a week away from starting my new adventure by spending harvest at Kosta Browne, quitting a twelve year career in advertising, and earning an apprentice wage learning the ropes from some of the world's great Pinot Noir artisans.

With "The 33 year-old intern" I hope I will be able to let you in on the ups and downs of jumping out of the corporate world and getting my hands stained red. Great wines quaffed, musings on the industry, and some other random drivel is promised.