Good Grape Wine Company

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Sound the bell and set the Tivo.  The “Top Chef” finale is on tonight (check your local listings).  Without question one of my guilty pleasures, season 3 comes to a close with a new winner being named from a final three. By far the most entertaining of the three seasons and refreshingly free of the sophomoric drama from season 2, I love Top Chef for the same reason I enjoy fine dining—it’s the restaurant/kitchen as theatre. One of the shticks the show uses to wring some drama out of the start of every episode is an individual test called a “quick fire” challenge.  In short, it’s essentially a timed, stress test cooking battle that is usually 20 minutes or less and requires some sort of extra creativity or handicap in execution. An example of a “quick fire” is having to cook a trout dish for noted chef Eric Ripert in the outdoors with a hot plate perched precariously on a wooden stump.  Or, create an amuse-bouche from a selection out of a vending machine—sometimes they are absurdist, but mostly they are pretty entertaining and one of my favorite parts of the show. If you want to get a better idea of a quick fire, or make a nomination to turn these Bravo “quick fires” into a show of its own, I then respectfully submit to you Ben from Benito’s Wine Reviews. Apparently on assignment for work for an extended period of time, he has done two absolutely brilliantly entertaining posts on hotel cookery—essentially a quickfire challenge whereby he creates a fabulous meal in the confines of his hotel room using a coffee pot and a microwave. His first attempt he creates a very authentic nicoise salad and in his second attempt he put together a Mediterranean tasting plate with couscous, chorizo, dolmas and some tzatziki and warmed pitas.  This is good blogging fun over at Benito’s, complete with a wine pairing.  Kudos to him on his hotel “quick fires.” If you’re interested in reading up on Top Chef before the finale, check out any of the following links: Food & Wine magazine Bravo TV Blogs, including Anthony Bourdain Television without Pity episode recaps Elsewhere, the issue of immigration reform is something I’m not completely comfortable commenting on—mostly because it’s a multi-faceted issue, with no easy answers, and there is likely a significant amount of nuance that I’m not in tune with.  It’s a lightening rod issue and I’m not going to go near it with an opinion, though I will note that I am generally right of bleeding heart and left of being a moderate.  However, make no mistake, this affects the wine industry significantly. Wine Spectator had a good article late in August that summarizes the issue and says in part: The new immigration policy, announced by Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, involves a more vigilant watch of the Social Security numbers and other information provided by workers to their employers. Where there are discrepancies or invalid information, employers must fire the workers or face fines of as much as $10,000. Due to the very nature of this issue, precise figures are unavailable, but no one disputes that illegal aliens make up a significant portion of the 50,000 employees required to produce California wine. “Because of where we are, [bordering Mexico], and the number of people we use in California, I’d say a figure of 70 percent [illegal workers] might be on target,” said Karen Ross, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers, a Sacramento-based advocacy organization. And it’s consumers who’ll likely be picking up the tab. “Over time, wine prices follow costs,” said Daniel Duckhorn, CEO and chairman of Napa-based Duckhorn Wine Co. Labor accounts for a major portion of the operating costs of wine production, he explained, adding, “It’s a given that if costs increase, wine prices will go up.” Despite being namby pamby about having an opinion, what I will note is two things: 1) If recent reports on the industry are correct and imports are eating directly into California wine sales, and labor is becoming tighter potentially causing prices to go up, and California is currently only marginally competitive against imports from a QPR perspective, is there something pretty dramatic happening before our eyes?  In five years will we be in full-on domestic wine crisis mode?  2) Announced on October 1st and effective October 1, 2008 a new U.S. citizenship test will be announced that moves away from a focus on facts like “How many stripes are on the American flag?” to more conceptual questions like, “Why does the flag have 13 stripes?” (From Newsweek) The impetus for the change is a move away from a naturalization process by rote memorization of fact to more of a process that instills patriotism in American history.  They call it “Americanization.” I dunno, but this test sounds exclusionary to me—Mexicans come to America with no language skills or, at best, English as a second language, leave their families behind, work their tales off in the vineyards and elsewhere in a quasi-secret society, frequently doing jobs that nobody else wants in order to wire money home and now to become a legal citizen they’re going to have to go through testing that will make them learn concepts about US history that most Americans learned in 7th grade and promptly forgot in 8th grade. That all said, I think the larger issue and one that will have to be addressed eventually is the fact that imports are going to eat the domestic markets lunch in wine sales over the near term.  It’s a lot easier to head this off at the pass instead of addressing it after the fact when CA producers are lamenting high costs, lagging sales and a worldwide image problem for the US wine industry. In our quest for effective “Americanization” we might actually be foreshadowing a cutting off at the knees of one of our best p.r. stories internationally—the wine industry. To see sample questions from the current test, see this link For more background on the new test, see this link For a lengthy press release on the challenges in the California Wine Market, see this link http://www.goodgrape.com/index.php/543/