February 12 2007
The Law of Attraction says that you attract to your life a manifestation of what your thoughts are; your latent dominant thoughts will find a way to become manifest reality. That’s definitely true as one of my New Year’s resolutions was to learn more about Biodynamics. Not two short weeks after I write that down and I find myself meeting up with a couple of guys that own a Chicago based distributor (profiled at this link on Good Grape) and they have a keen interest in Biodynamic wines.
Damien Casten, one of the co-founders, a student of wine with a subtle wit, has also written a fantastic primer on BioD that I’m going to share here in three parts. It’s an accessible read and gives a nice overview into the world of biodynamics, including it’s origin.
Damien is the President and Co-Founder of Candid Wines, a wine distribution and event company in Illinois that specializes in small production organic, sustainable and biodynamic wines from around the world. Damien was bitten by the wine bug at Taillevent while living in Paris as a twenty-two year old. At a meal where every bite was fantastic, a 1985 Hermitage La Chapelle paired with venison was out of this world. That was a happy moment.
It took another few years for him to abandon the corporate world and go to cooking school, but the memory of that three star meal was strong. After attending the New England Culinary Institute he went back to France and worked for two years in kitchens including the Michelin three starred Lucas Carton. In his spare time he traded labor for wine and knowledge at one of Paris’ most remarkable wine shops and cooked with friends. Today, Candid Wines is in its second year of operation and is proud to count among its clients and producers some of the world’s greatest wine-makers and chefs.
Making Sense of Biodynamics
Two unidentified wines. One is the color of pale straw with a tinge of green. It is crisp and flinty with good acidity, a touch of petrol and great length. It would be terrific with hot and spicy Thai food. I suspect its German Riesling. The second is the color of honey suggesting roundness and a creamy texture. It has lower acidity and a floral, peach-like nose. It smells and tastes like soft, pretty viognier from the northern Rhone. This would go beautifully with roasted apricot, goat cheese, thyme and honey. A bit of sea salt on the apricot and happy times are ahead. Do I sound confident? I was. Unfortunately, tasting wine blind is like playing golf; every once and a while you nail one and for a moment you think “I’m can play this game”. And then you shoot 105.
Both wines are Alsatian rielsings. They were made by the same producer using grapes from the same vineyard that are treated identically from vine to bottle. How then can they be so different? The answer is terroir. The producer, Jean Schaetzel of Domaine Martin Schaetzel in Alsace, is obsessed with capturing the essence of the time and place in which his wines grow. He wants you to taste the influence of the local ecosystem on each of his wines. He wants your mouth and nose to tell you that Riesling grown on granite soil in the Kaefferkopf vineyard tastes flinty and crisp while Riesling grown on limestone is honeyed and round. In this quest, Jean has, through his own trials, come to embrace much of the ‘super-organic’ method of farming called Biodynamics, even when he can not explain why it is effective. The method has many critics who question its scientific foundation. It also has a growing number of adherents, including some of the most renowned winegrowers in the world.
Organics and Biodynamics – A Shared Philosophy
Grape growers the world over who have adopted organic and biodynamic farming methods share a set of common beliefs. They seek sustainable methods that produce the highest quality grapes while inflicting the least possible harm on local and global environment. Non-organic pesticides are out. In are native grasses that protect topsoil and provide homes for beneficial insects that eat pests. Excessive treatment of the vines is replaced by the use of compost, made from decomposed organic matter, and a belief that healthy, vibrant soil full of insects, worms and bacteria is the best defense available. These are folks who are trying to leave the campsite cleaner than it was when they found it.
While they share a basic set of beliefs, proponents of biodynamics claim their methods go several steps farther: Organic agriculture rightly wants to halt the devastation caused by humans; however, organic agriculture has no cure for the ailing Earth…Biodynamics is a science of life-forces, a recognition of the basic principles at work in nature, and an approach to agriculture which takes these principles into account to bring about balance and healing.
Biodynamics was born in Europe in response to the environmental damage associated with the introduction of chemical pesticides and heavy machinery in the early twentieth century. New techniques increased potential output but some farms suffered from inconsistency. In the 1920’s a group of German growers sought the advice of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian doctor, poet and philosopher who wanted to reconnect the physical and spiritual worlds that he felt were being separated by new technology. His response was biodynamics, a method of farming built on three main principals; self-sustainability through biodiversity on farms, the use of “preparations” added to compost to restore health and vigor to soils, and the interconnectedness of terrestrial and cosmic energies.
When pushed to the extreme, this philosophy implies complete self-sustainability with every need of the farm being met by products from the farm itself. Furthermore, the most stringent form of biodynamics espouses a connection between the energy of the plant and the energy coming from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. The timing of planting, harvesting, pruning, spraying and even bottling is dictated not just by the phases of the moon but by astrological calendars and perceived cosmic influences.
Pt. II will be posted tomorrow and focuses on concentrated areas of biodynamic practice and thought-leadership
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Posted in, Free Run: Field Notes From a Wine Life. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print | Email This
February 11 2007
Am I living the crazy wine life in Indiana? It sure doesn’t seem like it sometimes, especially as I read accounts from fellow bloggers jetting off here and there tasting in barrel and generally having a high time living with the grape. But, I try to keep in mind that progress can be measured differently by different people.
As a wine enthusiast of the first order I certainly follow wine and the wine industry to a greater extent than the average Joe. Actually, I follow the wine industry greater then the ‘Above Average Joe,’ too. And, generally, when I read reports on wine consumption research I do so with a wary eye because everybody’s research is radically different—not a little bit different, but a lot of bit different. Outside of the fact that wine consumption is increasing in the states, everybody has a different spin.
I recently read statistics that say that NFL football fans spent 63% more on wine in 2006 than 2005, but the average household spending on wine that represents that 63% increase is only $94.30 per household for the year. I try not to snicker. $94.30 on wine? In a year? Puhleeze … Don’t tell my wife. If she knew this, she’d cut my wine spending off the 14th of January.
I think a tank of gas for those RV’s camped out at the Daytona 500 costs more than $81.40, but this increase is newsworthy according to Nielsen Sports.
Other reports, as we also saw this week, offer different perspectives: not about wine consumption in niche sports segments, but wine consumption by consumers—categorized as core and marginal consumers.
According to research by Wine Market Council, Core drinkers account for 17.4 percent of the total population and marginal drinkers comprise 17 percent. Core drinkers account for a whopping 92 percent of the volume of all wine consumed—a truly stunning statistic. More than 92 percent of all wine sold is sold to 17.4 percent of the market. Even more interesting? According to the research, more than half of Core drinkers reside in suburbs.
Based on these sorts of statistics, I try to remove myself from any wine piousness and realize that there are a lot of people that have an interest in wine, but are still very much in a growing and learning phase. Exhibit A is our local fishwrap, the Indianapolis Star. They had the wherewithal to publish an article a couple of days ago highlighting the Wine & Chocolate Lovers Extravaganza in Indianapolis. In particular, two “wineries” on the Indy Wine Trail are doing promotions around the extravaganza and are featured in the article—both are based in Carmel, In. Both wineries, it should be noted stretch the boundaries of what a winery is—occupying storefronts in a commerce district in a suburb in a Midwestern market without any grapes of their own.
Carmel is a suburb north of Indianapolis, IN and is, according to demographics, one of the five wealthiest towns in the country right up there with Palm Springs, Naples, FL, some place in New York and some place in Arizona. There’s a lot of money in Carmel and, presumably, based on Wine Market Council research, a lot of wine drinkers, too. So, it’s just peculiar to me that the two wineries in this town, associated with a marketing effort for a wine trail--this wealthy community--features a winery that makes wine from kits and a winery that makes wine from just about everything except grapes. Pina Colada wine, anyone?
Within the confines of decorum, I don’t want to slag on Grape Inspirations or Ferrin’s Fruit Winery, undoubtedly run by decent people trying to have fun and make a buck.
But, living the crazy wine life in Indiana, just to be sure, also means that two wineries are featured in your newspaper—one that makes wine from concentrate from a Canadian company and another that makes chocolate wine.
To wit, the following quotes from the article (left unattributed here to protect the innocent), referencing promotions for the Wine & Chocolate Extravaganza:
“People love to come in, walk up to the chocolate fountain and stick a pretzel or piece of fruit in and let chocolate run over it.
Wine paired with the chocolate will be Old Vine Zinfandel or Razzlot, a raspberry Merlot.”
Or this one …
Wineries provide a wine experience. When you come here you’re buying the wine experience. You get an explanation of the wine and get to taste it.”
Living the crazy wine life in Indiana? Or, making my wine life crazy? One of the two, that’s for sure … but, I have chocolate wine and research to comfort me.
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Posted in, Good Grape Daily: Pomace & Lees. Permalink | Comments (3) | Print | Email This
February 10 2007
The first annual American Wine Blog Awards is still accepting votes for the nominees in seven categories.
Good Grape is nominated in two categories—Best Wine Blog Graphics and Best Overall Blog. I also write for my employer, Inertia Beverage Group, who is nominated in the best single subject blog. The nominations are very flattering; if you are so inclined to vote for this site, Inertia or any of the extremely worthy competitors please do so here.
Of the seven categories, the one I’m most interested in seeing the results for, my equivalent of the Best Movie award, is the Best Winery Blog category. This is a murderer’s row of good winery blogs … a veritable battle royale of winery blogs doing battle for ultimate supremacy: Stormhoek, Cima Collina, Dover Canyon and Pinot Blogger.
All of the candidates are extremely worthy, and there a couple of others that I can think of (Paging: El Bloggo Torcido, the Twisted Oak Winery blog) who could also very easily be on the dais as a nominee.
The winery blogging category, to me, represents the most hotly contested category because each of them bring something completely different to the table and are very personal, engaging and well done.
Because the finals are based on popular vote, something akin to calling in for your favorite singer on American Idol, there is a strong predisposition to consider candidates as favorites based on their reach. In the online wine space two things are predominate—high-end computer savvy folks and high-end wine lovers—educated people across the board.
If Vegas were establishing a betting line I’d put my money on Stormhoek as 2-1 favorites based on their melding of appeal to the computer-savvy folks along with their good, value priced wines. They also offer sheer reach of audience from across the pond and the collateral pick-up based on having Hugh from Gapingvoid.com as their marketing guru. But, there is the not so subtle fact that they are something of a global brand (albeit small with a can-do attitude) coming from South Africa and a primary commerce beachhead in the UK, with a smattering of placements in the US. I like to think of them as the Ben & Jerry’s of the wine world—individual and interesting, but are their fans paying attention to vote?
In contrast to the quirky, underdog appeal of Stormhoek, what Pinot Blogger, Dover Canyon and Cima Collina offer is a personal relationship with the winery.
Josh at Pinot Blogger is starting a winery, Capozzi, and acting as a trailblazer in leveraging the internet to cultivate an audience for his nascent high-end pinot. He writes a smart, technologically savvy and insightful blog about the issues, personalities and decisions that he makes along the way. It’s not hard to admire the very obvious good business acumen he has when making decisions for his winery, his baby. But, he doesn’t let those decisions cloud the bigger picture—to create an enduring successful winery creating world-class pinot noir. This and more is all evident through his blog.
Cima Collina and Dover Canyon, both established wineries, write from different approach, both led by female writers of established wineries, they wrap you up in a warmth and memoir-ish dialogue that engages you in the personality and back story of their ventures, creating a connection along the way.
Go vote for your favorite out of this stellar lineup. All bets are off for the winner, but I have a hunch it may be a dark horse from the three domestic wineries and not the one with the most perceived scale.
For a good batch of posts from Josh at Pinot Blogger check out their Capozzi Winery category found here
For a good batch of posts from Cima Collina check out their archive from October found here.
For a good batch of posts from Dover Canyon check out their main page found here.
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Posted in, Around the Wine Blogosphere. Permalink | Comments (15) | Print | Email This
February 8 2007
Quickly on the heels of my tardy, perhaps disqualified effort for Wine Blogging Wednesday (WBW) # 29, comes WBW #30—this time hosted by my frequent collaborator Tim from Winecast.net
The wine of choice for this monthly exercise in drinking and keyboarding is Syrah—no restrictions on place or origin, price, New World vs. Old World, etc.
I was glad to see Syrah and I think it was selected based on its accessibility and variability at price point. You can pretty much find a Syrah at your desired price.
The one thing I admire about Syrah is, unlike a Pinot, Zinfandel, Merlot or a Cabernet, I can pretty much drink any Syrah and be assured that I will be able to find some enjoyment in the glass.
To me, Syrah and Riesling are the only two grapes where I can pick up just about any bottle and have confidence that it’ll be a decent quaff.
Though I’ve been knocking it out of the park with Pinot pick-ups lately, Pinot is usually the last thing I buy because, living in a as yet childless house, the thing I look forward to after kissing my wife and nuzzling the dog is opening up a bottle of wine—the mystery and allure of what’s in the bottle coupled with the cork, the pour, the swirl, the sniff and the taste is where all the pleasure is for me. Actually drinking a glass is a distant secondary pleasure to the build up to the taste. But, it’s a significant buzz kill when the wine ends up being a bummer, as is so often the case with a Pinot, particularly Pinot’s in the everyday drinking price range.
So, I tend to drink a fair amount of Syrah, if only because I don’t like to be disappointed.
The Montes Alpha 2004 Syrah from the Colchagua Valley Apalta Vineyard in Chile was my choice for WBW.
Normally, I might pick up something that would demonstrate a little street credibility, but I got this one at Costco--$14 bucks. No shame, here. I’ve come to appreciate Costco’s wine selection, and they’re the biggest wine retailer in the country with a reputation for bringing to bear high quality despite the quantity of sales.
The Montes Alpha doesn’t disappoint. I drank the ’04, a wine still getting some tailwind from the ’03 being named to the Wine Spectator Top 100 list in 2005 with a 91 rating. A rating duplicated for the ’04, as well. It’s a beautiful wine and a bargain at $14—easily a $25 dollar wine value with more Old World nuance than New World bombast.
Well balanced overall with nice acid, integrated tannins, ample dark cherry fruit, vanilla, spice and some earth all melded seamlessly to provide a glass of joy. This is pretty close to what I would drink everyday if I weren’t ‘wine promiscuous.’ It’s a great wine. It does need a little bit of air, opening up in the glass after ½ hr. to an hour. So, don’t feel bad for pouring and revisiting the glass later on in the evening.
Chilean wines are going through something of a renaissance with a significant upgrade in winemaking quality—according to Wine News (full article found here):
Ancient redwood aging vats are being chopped into kindling, replaced by smaller, top-quality French and American oak barrels. Computerized stainless steel fermenting tanks are providing the temperature control to preserve the intense, natural fruitiness of Chile’s grapes. And when Casa Lapostolle began shipping its wines in refrigerated containers for the long trip across the equator to the United States, it prompted other Chilean wineries to start following suit.
Those vintners who mounted the offensive have been rewarded with an impressive series of small victories, prompting them to declare that Chile can produce wines as good as any in the world. And that, yes, indeed, they are capable of turning out a Chilean version of a grand cru.
I don’t know about a grand cru, but they sure can turn out a second label. Pick up a Syrah, for my money, always a good bang for the buck and pick up the Montes Alpha 2004 Syrah from Colchagua Valley—an extreme value and a delightful wine.
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Posted in, Good Grape Wine Reviews. Permalink | Comments (2) | Print | Email This
February 7 2007
A couple of days ago, I wrote a post intended to be delivered in two parts. The overall gist of the post, as something of a wine outsider myself, was the fact that I’ve been intrigued to meet numerous people over the course of the last several months that are outsiders to the industry who have arrived at entrepreneurial ventures that are trying to drive change in the wine industry.
The first post highlighted a distributor in Illinois who I believe has a tremendous business model—essentially taking a linear model like the three-tier system and turning it inside out with a maniacal focus on building a high-end wine book while at the same time conducting events to drive consumer demand to retail—bottle shops and restaurants—where their wines are placed. It’s just beautiful in its correctness and the fact that virtually nobody else does it this way, at least in practical terms.
Usually, in hindsight, when success has been assured, others guys would call them “lucky.” There’s not a lot of luck involved and surely a lot of hard work—or as a mentor used to tell me, “Luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.”
But, the way wineries are proliferating and shipping laws are changing, I’m not surprised that a distributor is seizing on a different business model and value proposition and, perhaps, it takes a fresh set of eyes on the situation to drive real change.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for future peril in the wine industry is the diametrically opposed trends of distributor consolidation, while at the same time small boutique wineries growth is running amuck. Shrinking distributor’s options decrease the viability of small wines finding a home. So, it’s with some relief to see potential for an outlet for these wineries with boutique distributors. But, there are other options, as well.
We’re in the midst of tidal wave of change in the wine industry, the least aggressive change may actually be the area that traditionally drives the most change—technology and the Internet. Certainly, online consumer direct sales is an area that is growing significantly and has almost limitless possibility for growth.
The Wine 2.0 space, occupied by emerging Internet companies hoping to seize new direct customers sales, are in many ways, on more solid footing then their distribution brethren. This emerging Wine 2.0 channel, built on the backs of pioneers like wine.com who haven’t adapted to changing times, includes a lot of players with overlapping qualities—some are community based, others do commerce, others aggregate customers in order to deliver a sale to winery partners. All of them are trying to establish a beachhead in what is fast becoming the Wild West similar to the dot-com era in the late 1990’s
I was at Wine 2.0 in November when I first made the acquaintance of Justin Smith, a young entrepreneur starting up a site called Boutique Wine Cellar.
Then, as now, Justin and his business partner, Kevin Finn, struck me as the kind of guys with enough youthful moxie and wine industry “outsider-ness” to maybe do something interesting—particularly around technology and wine.
Justin explained that, while he is now in his early to mid twenties, he first became interested in wine in the early 90s at a Grgich Hills blessing of the grapes ceremony. Given that Mike Grgich, then of Chateau Montelena, was the winemaker for one of the Chardonnay’s at the 1976 Paris wine tasting event, it’s hard not to like a guy (Justin) that knows wines historical roots or has good taste, one of the two, and perhaps both.
Well, Boutique Wine Cellar launched their site today. And, by appearances, it has legs, not of the vinous ‘in a glass’ variety either—legs in terms of being a smart launch with good elements of success—design meeting function.
If you take a site and combine elements of social networking like myspace.com, user based recommendations like Amazon.com, recommendations like on Cellartracker and online commerce via direct purchasing and wrap that around a subject and product that engenders passion like wine, then you might be onto something.
And, as their name indicates, they are focusing on boutique wine which is equally smart given the demand for small wines from small producers by most wine enthusiasts online.
The challenge in all of this is securing customers, because this Wine 2.0 space is fragmented—it’s the double-edged sword of opportunity meeting “outsider-ness.” Simply, no clear cut winner has emerged to grab consumer’s full attention. WineQ launched in December, with a “NetFlix for Wine” model and there are likely a half-dozen other wine projects taking shape at the time of this writing, as well.
But, I have faith that these guys are smart and are doing the right things to do the simultaneous grab of wineries and alliances to drive traffic. Sooner or later, opportunity meets preparation and Justin and Kevin may well be the “lucky guys.”
(Full disclosure: my employ, Inertia Beverage Group, is working with Boutique Wine Cellar though I have had zero—actually less then zero—contact through my job responsibilities). My opinions are my own.
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Posted in, Tasting Safari: Wines You Can Buy Online. Permalink | Comments (4) | Print | Email This
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