December 4 2006
Phew, if you blink or miss a day, you miss a lot. The wine blogosphere is rife with lots of interesting stuff lately. Check out the following links from the wine blog digerati and some of their musings ….
Tim at Winecast has the post: Wine Geeks in a Virtual World
This details a meeting of some blogging folks on Josh’s (from www.pinotblogger.com) Island. The possibilities with Second Life and VR are really fascinating.
Mark at Uncorked details a small world incident that has to be read—he comes in contact with an owner of the winery in a colliding set of circumstances that can only happen in one those “Can you freakin’ believe it” moments in time. Read it here.
Alder at Vinography, who isthisclose to really hitting a larger consciousness in the world of wine, references a mention in the current issue of News & Word Report on his site today. Kudos and continued Godspeed to Alder for fightin’ the good fight in emerging as a new voice in the world of wine. His post can be found here.
One of the best new wine blogs, in my estimation, is GrapeCrafter. I think he’s still trying to find his voice, but the mission, in the writer’s words: “connecting the human soul with the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.” Check out his blog here.
Dr. Vino has an excellent post on Homaro Cantu, his restaurant Moto and the avant garde food movement that’s been going on with Cantu and a number of other disciples. As an aside, Cantu seems to have a publicist working overtime with a cover feature in Fast Company and elsewhere in ’06. But, alas, it must be with some bit of envy that Alinea, a Chicago neighbor, is named best restaurant of the year by Gourmet magazine.
And, finally, fitting to finish with them both because they both are doing some of the most interesting writing in the wine blogosphere, Dr. Vino and Tom at Fermentation weigh in on Gallo’s latest marketing efforts to take over a whole freakin’ appellation. You can read it here and here.
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December 3 2006
I’m not normally a klutz, but recent events have me re-thinking that notion.
You see, it used to be that I was rock solid steady in not creating any publicly embarrassing blunders around food or drink.
In a social situation the one thing I can be counted on for is the correct usage of my silverware, the proper placement of my bread plate and no accidents with a sweeping gesture requiring a wine emergency for our wait staff to assist me or my dining companions with additional napkins to blot the spilt mess. In short, I’m not the guy that’s going to drop a glass of red wine on somebody’s new carpet.
Over the course of the last six weeks I have dropped three glasses of wine, two in the space of twenty four hours—one in a tasting room with about 150 new friends breaking into stunned silence, another in the kitchen of friends at their vacation home (negative bonus points for the glass being crystal) and another still in my own kitchen with a freshly poured glass of red.
Clearly, I’m moving into some weird stage in my life where my manual dexterity is moving from more preternatural levels to a mere mortal’s existence.
The excellent Indianapolis food blog Feed Me/Drink Me by Braingirl has a post on a wine spill at a restaurant and the ensuing clean-up with Wine Away. It seems her own gesticulations caused a glass of tempranillo to go wayward and the waiter swooped in with an incident saving spray of Wine Away.
I never saw a need to buy a canister of this miracle juice; blame it on to many Sunday mornings zipping through the MacNeil Leher hour and Meet the Press on my way to ESPN stopping briefly enough to hear the vaguely Midwest by way of New Jersey dulcet tones of the Oxypower and Orange Glo guy. If I ever had a need, I would just Oxy it out. And, plus, well, I never spill anyways ...
Based on the endorsement of Feed Me/Drink Me, I’m picking up some Wine Away, the miracle product that is has some excellent p.r. notices going for it from mainstream publications, as well.
Resting easy, I might send a couple of spray bottles out as holiday gifts along with a good bottle of red. My new case of the “drops” be damned.
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December 2 2006
I’ve been reading The Far Side of Eden by James Conaway and A Tale of Two Valleys by Alan Duetschman—two non-fiction Napa Valley-based books where the author takes a social reporting perspective on the state of the Valley; the new money that has poured in over the last 15 years, the outsized personalities, the ego and the old guard—a segment of folks that are clinging to the life that attracted them to the Napa area over the course of the 30 years. These differing groups, with obvious human dynamism are frequently in conflict with each other.
Despite the commonalities in subject matter, these are two different books—The Far Side of Eden is a literary tome with a well-crafted narrative and A Tale of Two Valleys is more of a long form article with some juicier bits of gossipy chatter.
Somebody should option either one of these and write a screenplay.
Forget Mondovino, the documentary that took on the globalization of wine, and forget Sideways the buddy road movie with California’s Central Coast as its backdrop and adapted from a book. And, really, forget A Good Year, the movie based on a book by Peter Mayle.
What is my recommendation for this screenplay? It should be a mockumentary ala the movies that Christopher Guest has been doing—This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and the film currently in theatres, For Your Consideration.
These mockumentary movies are all filmed in a faux-documentary style in deadpan parody style, with hilarious results.
All of Guest’s movies mine the territory of marginally talented people fanatical about a niche of interest and on the cusp of some notoriety—the audience, comically, gets to enjoy the ensuing schandefreude.
In Waiting for Guffman, for example, a local theatre troupe in the Midwest puts together a show for their towns’ sesquicentennial and the troupe director, Corky St. Clair, indicates that a Broadway critic is going to view the show and a good review could take the actors all the way to Broadway.
Imagine the comedic territory that is unexplored for a mockumentary in the wine industry—wealthy titan of business from an unglamorous business with more money than palate and his impeccably groomed and much younger wife moves to Napa to enjoy the good life. Their attempts at society and community integration while developing a winery and their interaction with non-Anglo help and zoning officials is set against the backdrop of conspicuous consumption and a new circle of friends with lifestyle, but very little else in common. Meanwhile, a media industry hell-bent on canonizing the glamorous side of an otherwise agricultural life plays the foil as a Parker-like figure is sent up as the critic that could make the husband-wife team FAMOUS.
Pure comedy gold for whoever wants to make the next wine related movie—a parody of the excesses, foibles, and interplay between man, the classes and the land in the wine industry.
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December 1 2006
Caparone Winery is going to do it. They are going to overtake them …
Next to Crushpad wine, one of the objects of my frequent affection is Caparone winery in Paso Robles. And with this post, I think Caparone takes the lead in the “Good Grape Wine Fetish Society,” a special place reserved for items of merit and distinction based on my own whims and flights of fancy.
Caparone makes traditional Italian table wines … or, I should say, they price their wines as if they are Italian table wines, but the quality far exceeds the bottle price—just $14 a bottle. If you buy in the tasting room or are a part of the wine club it’s just $12 a bottle.
Beautiful stuff, this is wine is.
The Caparone Cabernet, in particular, is excellent, perhaps one of the finest California Cab values you’ll find from a winery without much distribution—or, I least challenge anybody to find a California Cab with fruit sourced from the very well-known for its quality Bien Nacido Vineyard that is as good as this stuff is for under $30 bucks a bottle.
Dave Caparone, the founder of Caparone Winery, and his son Marc do just 6000 cases and are actually scaling back a couple of thousand cases.
So, it was with interest that I read the email newsletter from Crush Wine & Spirits based in NYC. Crush, of all the wine retail newsletters I receive, is the best at writing compelling “remove your wallet from your pocket and buy some wine” sales copy in emails.
And, on Thursday of this week they featured the 2002 Caparone Cabernet.
Crush had this to say:
The style of the Caparone 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon “Bien Nacido Vineyard” is that of the great California Cabs of the 1970s and 80s, emulating Mayacamas more than Caymus. In fact, finding a wine under $20 with cellaring potential is exceedingly rare, if not unheard of. Without a doubt, it’s the most terroir-driven California Cab we’ve had all year.
More than just fruit, this wine shows a complex spectrum of dark leathery earthen notes and a beautifully taut structure. Caparone’s wines, like Mayacamas, Dunn Vineyards or Chateau Montelena, are also famous for their aging potential.
They do not, however, show the same austerity in youth that these legendary Napa Cabs do. The 2002 Caparone comes out of the bottle with a potent sense of energy, like a fist clenched tight around fruit and earth. Within a half hour, the crackling acidity and firm tannins mellow, the fruit and earth come alive, and the wine shows an astounding harmony.
This is stunning wine that has remained largely under the radar, which is fine with us, because it means the price has remained as “old school” as the wine itself.
At $16.99, this bottle is priced as if it were still the 1980s. Trying to figure out a quality-to-price ratio would be inane, it’s so obviously one of the best values in Cabernet from the West, period.
And, in my estimation, they are absolutely spot-on correct in their assessment. But, if you want a real laugh check out this link on the Caparone site that talks about their pricing policy--invoking the name of the 80s tv show Falcon Crest.
But, what’s the real Good Grape Consumer Tip of the Day as alluded to in the headline? I’m going to give you two bottles and ½ bottles of this great Central Coast Cabernet for free.
Either way, you’re going to have to pay for shipping for this wine, so you might as well just go to the Caparone web site and buy it for $14 a bottle and not $16.99 from Crush Wine & Spirits. When you buy a case from the winery you will be paying $168 bucks + shipping (a bargain for sure) versus the Crush price of $203. The delta? $35 bucks or the equivalent of 2.5 bottles.
Trust me, you’ll want to buy a case. And, if in so doing you feel equally magnanimous and want to send one of your free bottles to me as a thank you, shoot me an email and I’ll give you my mailing address … of course I’m kidding … kind of.
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