Can wine make sunburns history? (Credit: Flickr User A.M. Kuchling)

In the Wall Street Journal, Lettie Teague tastes one of France’s most under-appreciated grapes — Muscadet. The varietal is a classic pairing with seafood — and seems to offer tremendous value. Good news for those looking for sub-$20 superstars!

Good news for those among us with fair skin (including yours truly)! Scientists at the University of Barcelona and the Spanish National Research Council believe that the flavonoids in grapes can stop the chemical reactions that cause skin cells to die. They hope to incorporate these miracle particles in skin creams to ward off sunburns and skin cancer. Let’s hope that drinking wine while wearing sunscreen is doubly effective.

The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reports on the relatively rosy outlook for wineries that concentrate on direct shipping to consumers. Industry observers believe that the wineries in the best financial shape — and with the best prospects for growth — are those with devoted customer bases they can reach directly. I can certainly understand that conclusion, as very few consumer goods have attracted my personal loyalty as strongly as some wineries have.

2011 may not be a vintage year for port, as the Douro Valley has suffered through hail and extreme temperatures this year. Sunburn is never good for grapes.

A French Military Man Lives on -- as a Grape.

Frenchman Christian Vanneque , who tasted wines at the legendary Judgment of Paris in 1976 and now runs a wine bar in Indonesia, made history Tuesday by shelling out $117,000 for a 200-year-old bottle of Chateau d’Yquem. That’s the highest price ever paid for a bottle of white wine. He plans to open the sweet Sauternes in 2017 to mark his 50th anniversary in the wine business. I’ll be on the lookout for my invitation to the tasting.

In other sweet wine news, 1WineDude highlights an odd study on those who enjoy a glass of vin moelleux. According to Professor Virginia Utermohlen of Cornell University and Tim Hanni, people who love sweet wines also tend to be more sensitive to light, sound, taste, and touch. Naturally, Utermohlen and Hanni conclude that this causes sweet-wine drinkers to go commando (?!).

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle offers a long feature article on New York state’s wine scene. I was surprised to learn that New York is actually the number-two wine-producing state in the country by volume.

To the north and east, Palate Press profiles wines in New Hampshire. The Granite State’s top grapes include the white seyval blanc and the red marechal foch. For all you history buffs out there, the latter takes its name from the Frenchman Marechal Ferdinand Foch, who played a key role in negotiating the armistice that ended World War I.

Wine Spectator reports on a new study that may muddy the waters a bit regarding wine’s link to breast cancer. Researchers at the Universities of Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto found that moderate wine consumption decreased the risk of breast cancer in women with the BRCA1 genetic mutation — but increased the risk of breast cancer in those with the BRCA2 mutation.

It’s not every day that we at Terroirist are invited to have dinner with an honorary Master of Wine. After all, there are only four in history — and only one who is still alive. But we recently received just such an invitation from Chris Hancock and his team at Robert Oatley Vineyards.

Robert Oatley (Credit: Robert Oatley Vineyards)

Robert Oatley is a giant in Australia’s wine industry. He got his start in 1969, building Rosemount Estate into a global powerhouse. He eventually sold Rosemount and started his eponymous winery in 2006 in Mudgee, New South Wales, in the southeastern corner of the Australian continent.

Hancock has been working with Oatley since 1975 and has probably forgotten more about wine than I’ll ever know. He began working in the mid-1960s with the Penfold family, where he made several vintages of the famous Grange bottling.

With the Robert Oatley label, Hancock says that he’s not trying to pursue volume but respect. He hopes that his wines reflect their varietals and regions and that they’re recognizable in the glass. To do so, he’s minimizing what he called “artifice” in his winemaking.

With this philosophy, Hancock appears to be pushing back against the reputation that Australia has developed in recent years for producing sub-par, over-extracted wines. (Hello, Yellow Tail?) He hopes that the days of the stereotypical “monotonous” Australian fruit-bomb are numbered.

The team at Robert Oatley Vineyards is spreading its gospel in person. Hancock believes that sommeliers are a very important links in the wine distribution chain, and so his colleagues are doing their best to educate these “local authorities” about the Oatley wines. They see sommeliers as “psychologists” of sorts, who pour not just wines for patrons but experiences too.

Needless to say, several sommeliers attended the tasting with us. Read the rest of this entry »

Chile's Wine Regions (Credit: theworldwidewine.com)

Recently, the Terroirists were invited to partake in an online “Blogger Tasting” sponsored by Wines of Chile, the Chilean wine trade group. We were a bit skeptical about how a remote tasting would operate, but the event was impressively choreographed.

Master Sommelier Fred Dexheimer led the event from New York, and the vintners appeared live from Chile in another window on our computer. Technology never ceases to impress.

None of us were terribly familiar with Chilean wines. Surprisingly, Chile is the fourth-largest exporter of wines to the United States. The industry suffered substantial losses after a massive earthquake hit the country in early 2010; at least 150 million bottles’ worth of wine was destroyed. But the industry seems to have rebounded.

My experience with the skinny South American country’s viticultural offerings has been confined a few Sauvignon Blancs as well as some big reds like Syrah andthe Carmenere varietal that Chile has claimed as its own. I’ve always associated Chilean wines with tobacco and menthol notes. Perhaps that’s because I need to drink better Chilean wines. Read the rest of this entry »

A few of Novy's Bottlings

Recently, I covered the rise of online wine discounters — and my experiences buying some of my favorite wines through them. Since then, I’ve come across a few other articles exploring the rise of these “flash-sale” sites.

Adam Lee, the winemaker and owner at Siduri and Novy, contacted Terroirist after reading my post to shed some light on how — and why — wineries work with sites like Lot18. The relationship between the two is far more symbiotic than I realized. Read the rest of this entry »

Uploaded to flickr by Steve Snodgrass

Discount online wine retailers are popping up with remarkable frequency. CinderellaWine and Wines ‘Til Sold Out were the first two to capture my attention, but since then, I’ve turned to sites like UncorkDeals.com from Wine Chateau and invino (formerly known as Winery Insider).

Each of these sites purports to offer significant discounts on quality wine. Some are, of course, better than others, but overall, I’ve been able to pick up some quality wines — often with free shipping — at prices far below retail. (Now whether I actually needed those wines is another matter entirely.)

Recently, I received an email from Lot18, another online discounter, touting wine from one of my favorite producers, Robert Keenan Winery. I visited Keenan on my first trip to Napa in 2007 and credit the producer with catalyzing my interest in wine. Keenan’s was the first wine club I ever joined, and I’ve been receiving four bottles every six months from them for over three years now. I’ve been impressed by every bottle of Keenan that I’ve ever uncorked. And the vineyard, on Spring Mountain, is absolutely gorgeous. Read the rest of this entry »

Les Jassettes to accompany New Year's Eve Dinner

Just before Christmas, Terroirist Greg started the trend of posting mini-reviews of the wines he’s been drinking. I’ll aim to do the same, periodically posting some thoughts on what I’ve opened up over the previous few weeks.

I try to hew to the 100-point scale as articulated on CellarTracker. That scale assigns “good” wines ratings of 80-84. “Very good” wines get ratings of 85-89, “outstanding” wines run from 90-95, and only those that are “extraordinary” break 96-100. I do my best to be honest about the meanings of those adjectives. So my 87 is smack-dab in the middle of the “very good” range — enjoyable, has characteristics that I enjoy, and very much worth drinking.

Wine-tasting is, of course, subjective. I’ve found that I tend to score wines lower than my friends, not necessarily because I found a wine significantly worse than my tasting partner but because I really try to reserve scores above 90 for truly outstanding or extraordinary wines.

I recognize that the 100-point scale comes with quite a bit of baggage. It’s my hope that my scores form just one data point for each wine I taste — and that folks see for themselves whether their palate and their experience with a given wine match up with mine. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Christmas, three of the Terroirists as well as Josh Genderson (of Schneider’s Capitol Hill Wine Shop fame), met at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, DC, for a wine dinner. The theme for the evening was 1990s California Cabernet.

We warmed up our palates with a 2007 Hirsch Chardonnay. The Hirsch vineyards are great, and Chardonnay grapes grown there are tough to come by. Aside from Hirsch, only Peay has sourced Chardonnay grapes from the Hirsch vineyard.

The wine was excellent. Subtle oaky butter notes, with bright fruits and biting acidity to give the wine a backbone. Some of us even noticed some stone fruits on the palate.

We then moved onto appetizers, a fantastic spread of foie gras, tuna sushi with avocado, and short rib ravioli. All were fantastic and are highly recommended.

The first Cab we opened was a 1998 Robert Mondavi Reserve. It was a pleasure to drink. Very light — remarkably so, for a California Cabernet — with a pleasant floral nose, soft fruits, mild tannins, and some subtle richness on the finish. This wine was perfectly in balance and is drinking exceptionally well right now.

(At this point, I must relay a most unfortunate story from an otherwise splendid evening. Josh brought a bottle of 1994 Joseph Phelps Insignia. A rather exciting bottle of wine. The sommelier poured it into a decanter and left it on our table. Somehow — the exact chain of events is still unclear — a menu came into contact with the decanter and sliced the neck off. The very valuable grape juice within the decanter spilled all over the table, floor, and the back of David’s pants. A wine tragedy. We contemplated licking the tablecloth but thought better of it.)

After recovering from the loss of the Insignia, we moved onto a 1998 Philip Togni Cab that we’d decanted. This was a big wine, with chewy tannins and more prominent fruits than the Mondavi. It was delicious but didn’t have the balance of the Mondavi.

Our final wine was the star of the night — a 1991 Peter Michael Les Pavots. The Mondavi and Togni were both excellent, but the Peter Michael blew them away. The wine was virtually perfect — balanced, substantial fruits, all sorts of secondary characteristics, a pleasant finish. None of us could find a fault within this wine. The heft of the wine was even more remarkable, given that it was almost 20 years old. I believe that the Terroirist who contributed the Peter Michael paid $130, and it tasted every bit of that $130.

For dessert, we had a half bottle of late-harvest Chenin Blanc from McKinley Springs, a small winery located in Washington State. It was like honeyed candy. A perfect way to end the evening.

Credit: Banshee Wines

The global economic downturn has increased demand for high-quality wines at bargain prices.

Enter what you might call winemakers without wineries. Entrepreneurs like Cameron Hughes and the folks behind Banshee Wines have emerged to help fill that demand.

Hughes has attracted some impressive media coverage, with profiles in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Banshee appears less well known but has been marketed aggressively by K&L Wines.

Hughes and Banshee seem to have similar business models. Both buy bulk wine from established, high-end producers. Banshee makes proprietary blends from its barrels to sell under its own labels. (For a window into how this process works, check out this ad posted by Banshee on a bulk wine trading blog.)

Hughes styles himself as a negociant, buying wine from wineries around the world and selling it under one of five labels: The Flying Winemaker, The Lot Series, Hughes Wellman, Zin Your Face and Frunza.

Both Hughes and Banshee claim that they source their wines from producers whose offerings often cost more than $100. By keeping mum on their suppliers, Hughes and Banshee are able to sell (theoretically) high-quality wines at low prices. Most Hughes and Banshee wines cost less than $30 — and usually run less than $20.

I’ve tasted one wine from each winemaker — a 2006 Cameron Hughes Lot 88 Zinfandel and a 2009 Banshee Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir. Both were relatively inexpensive; the Hughes only ran $13, while I picked up the Banshee for $19.99.

The Hughes was very interesting. It had odd notes of raisins and aromas I’d normally associate with port on the nose. The wine was equally interesting on the taste: notes of pepper, dried fruits. But while the wine had quite a few notable characteristics, they weren’t all positive; the sum seemed less than its constituent parts. Certainly, the Hughes was unlike any Zinfandel I’ve ever had.

After my experience with the Cameron Hughes, I had low expectations for the Banshee. But it blew me away. The wine was absolutely delicious; a great nose, with rich, earthy notes reminiscent of soil on the palate. Full candied fruits on the taste as well, with cola notes as secondary characteristics.

This Banshee is a steal at under $20 — and would be a good deal at a price point $10-$20 higher. It matches up very well with California Pinots that cost much more, both in terms of sheer taste and complexity.

Courtesy of Peay Vineyards.

When driving down Highway 29 in Napa, it’s easy to forget that many top winemakers don’t make their wines at beautiful hillside estates. They work in decidedly less idyllic locales — like office parks and industrial warehouses. My first experience with warehouse winemaking was at Novy/Siduri in Santa Rosa.

Peay fits a similar mold. Nick Peay manages family vineyards along the Sonoma Coast, but the winemaking facility is in a warehouse in Cloverdale.

We visited during the Peay fall open house, when members of the mailing list had come to pick up their orders. The Peays had incredible wood-fired pizza from a local outfit called Pangaea’s.

Andy and Nick Peay, as well as Nick’s wife winemaker Vanessa, were pouring wines from all sorts of vintages. Staffers were also wandering about the party with interesting concoctions. I tasted an unfiltered rose that had just finished fermenting and looked like pink lemonade straight from the tank. It was delicious, though I think the final product will be very different.

The highlight for me was the 2009 Peay Vineyards Pomarium Estate Pinot Noir, which has not yet been released. With some wines, after I stick my nose in the glass and take the first sip, I just know that I’m drinking something special. That was the case with the 09 Pinot. Perfectly balanced, with a fragrant nose, full fruit flavors, and all the subtle secondary earth and mineral characteristics that I love about Pinot. David called it the best Pinot Peay has ever made, and I’m inclined to agree — without having tasted the Peay library myself.

(See David White’s previous account of Peay.)