Alvaro Palacios 2007 Camins del Priorat

*Bottle #93: Alvaro Palacios 2007 Camins del Priorat
*Price Tag: $23
*Running Tab: $1,267
*Retailer: McCarthy & Schiering, Queen Anne

I am first to admit that I don’t know right from left with Spanish juice. Unfortunately, amongst a group of wine industry peers, it took failing a pop quiz on Spain to outwardly own up.

Accept failure? Never. Use this necessary learning experience in my blog? Of course!

Starting from the basics, I went to a trusted wine shop, knowing that the lovely staff would step in as my guide dog on this blind adventure of a wine region I should be able to see with greater clarity.

That’s when I was introduced to Alvaro Palacios with sincere enthusiasm. Figuratively – the Man vs. Food host Adam Richman doppelganger was not in store but a fair representation of his wine was – the Camins del Priorat.

You’re Not as Indie as You Think You Are

Sad news, counter-culturalists: You may ride in a bicycle gang, or wear retro T-shirts that slam “The Man,” but you can’t escape the fact that you are a corporate supporter of Globalization. You slide into your skinny black jeans, slip on your hemp necklace, spray-paint a shirt across your chest and wrap up in your pea-coat, then top it all off with a John Deere baseball cap you picked up at Goodwill (do you even know what a tractor looks like?), but you are still a tragic hipster. Tragic, I say, because there is one area you have forgotten to investigate. You don’t drink Starbucks; you refuse to go to Wal-Mart. They destroy small businesses, you say, in a self-important way. And yet, when it comes to beer, you pay no attention at all.

“But wait!” you cry, “I only drink cans! I go for the $2 beers! I support small places! For the love of god, man, I drink Pabst!” Indeed you do. Or perhaps Schlitz, or Hamm’s, or Oly Gold, looking back with fondness on the 1960′s beers that you see as a far cry from the globalization that plagues today’s world.

Lightning strike: Your PBR is brewed by Miller.

WSU Enology Team Wins Best Paper Award for Work Addressing Issues Faced by Winemakers

PROSSER, Wash. — Washington State University scientist and extension enologist Jim Harbertson is the lead author of a paper that has won the 2009 Best Paper in Enology Award from the American Society of Enology and Viticulture.“It’s humbling to be recognized by my peers and colleagues like this. Some great enologists have been recipients of this award. It’s exciting and professionally satisfying to be recognized and to join that group,” said Harbertson, who is based at WSU’s Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center in Prosser.

The award-winning paper, “Chemical and Sensory Effects of Saignée, Water Addition, and Extended Maceration on High Brix Must,” investigates several winemaking techniques under the conditions of high brix, or high sugar, situations. Winemakers often work with fruit that undergoes extended ripening and that may, as a result, have elevated Brix levels.

Madness in the Making: Jamie Peha Takes on Merlot

Jamie Peha is a spy.

If she’s not a spy, then maybe she’s a ninja, a mercenary or a guerrilla. The reason I speculate about this is because Jamie Peha seems to have her finger on the pulse of everything going on in the wine and food world(s); whenever there’s an “explosive” event, she seems to have been directly involved; and yet if you weren’t looking for her, you’d hardly know she was there. She’s the invisible hand that guides more than you can imagine.

Last summer, I had an idea for an event, but I am not a natural-born event planner, and I didn’t know where to start. A fellow wino asked me if I knew Jamie Peha, and I had to admit that I didn’t—the name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was pointed out to me that we’d been Facebook contacts for quite some time, and I hadn’t even noticed. We set up a meet-and-greet over some vino, chatted a little, and within a week, I had a menagerie of people calling me interested in contributing to my event. I was wholly unprepared for the onslaught of support, and had to postpone.

Since then, we’ve both attended and been proud media sponsors for several of her events, but with her newest extravaganza quickly approaching, I decided that I needed to pin her down to get the skinny on her, and on Merlot Gone Mad.

Who is Jamie Peha? “I’m kind of an idea person,” she told me over a glass of Camaraderie Cellars Merlot on a recent night at The Tasting Room, “and an event person, and a business person.” That’s the short answer, one that barely scratches the surface, like what I imagine a “Cliff’s Notes for Dummies” would look like if it tried to explain the Peha phenomenon. Chatting with people around the industry seems to illustrate that all roads lead to Peha, and “Six Steps to Jamie Peha” would be taking the long way around.

The Mendoza Connection

When Daniela Romero heard Washington State University’s Markus Keller talking about irrigation during grape ripening, her curiosity was piqued. After all, applying water close to harvest time was simply not done.

Keller was teaching a grape physiology course at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, deep in the heart of Argentina’s wine country. Romero is a graduate student at the university, and she asked if she could join Keller’s research team in Prosser to learn more about his tradition-defying research.

“Keller’s research is important to the wine industry, because it will influence the way growers add water to their vineyards. In most of the world’s wine regions, irrigation during grape ripening is thought to dilute the sugars in grapes–but this belief does not have any scientific foundation,” Romero said.

As Keller pointed out, “The European wine industries and their many regulators have it all figured out: irrigation during grapes’ critical ripening period is generally a bad thing and must be strictly regulated.”

A quote from the International Organization for Biological and Integrated Control in their 1999 Guidelines for Integrated Production of Grapes illustrates Keller’s point: “Irrigation of vines for wine production will not be applied after véraison or highly restricted by the regional guidelines in order to guarantee the good quality of the wine.”

“The tacit assumption is that irrigation boosts berry size and dilutes the quality-impact components of the grapes,” Keller said. “So pervasive is this argument that, even in the New World, many wineries encourage growers to withhold irrigation water during fruit ripening to avoid any perceived adverse effects.”

Keller and former graduate student Marco Biondi put the assumptions to the test–with startling results that fly in the face of viticultural tradition.

Domaine Paul Autard 2008 Côtes du Rhône Rouge

*Bottle #92: Domaine Paul Autard 2008 Côtes du Rhône Rouge
*Price Tag: $15
*Running Tab: $1,244
*Retailer: 12th and Olive Wine Company

The value of young love is often times discounted.

Ask any 14-year-old girl about what her parents think of her boyfriend of three weeks – whom she totally loves more than like anything in the whole wide world and nothing, not even a curfew or her tyrannical parental units, will EVER stop them from being apart. EVER.

Such intensity and merit of youthful infatuation can be slightly overlooked but fortunately, for 17-year-old Jean-Paul Autard, his young love for his family’s vineyard and winery was not taken lightly. Now, after decades of dedication and fidelity, Jean-Paul has been managing the domaine ever since.

The Fine Details: The Ability to Blend Art and Science Helps Make Great Wines

When sipping a glass of a fine winemaker’s red blend in front of the fire, it’s easy to appreciate the art that went into that glass.

But anyone who has tried to make wine finds him or herself quickly caught up in what amounts to a science project.

“Winemaking is certainly creative,” said Carolyn Ross, assistant professor of food science at Washington State University and an expert in the sensory analysis of wine. “But at its core, winemaking is a scientific endeavor. What folks often forget is that those two things are not incompatible.”

Take the fine art of fining, for example. Fining agents are substances added at or near the end of the winemaking process in order to improve clarity, adjust flavor, aroma and wine stability. In other words, fining tweaks a wine’s sensory qualities.

And the sensory quality of wine is, of course, what enjoying a glass of great wine is all about: the mouth feel, the unfolding bouquet, the color, the acids, tannins, and other qualities that wine writers deploy armies of adjectives trying to describe. Ross takes a scientific approach to those armies of adjectives be finding ways to quantify their chemical properties and by training panels of wine tasters to communicate the importance of individual sensory qualities.

“Fining is critical for consumer acceptance of white wines as a haze or sediment in the bottle may eventually lead to consumer rejection and economic loss to the winery. Together with racking and filtration, fining agents improve clarity, define aromas and increase shelf life,” Ross and her colleagues wrote in a recently published article in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.

But, the researchers add, fining may also “impact the sensory quality of wines,” though how much sensory impact fining has depends upon a complex relationship between the fining compound and the type of wine being fined.

“Fining is definitely where some basic scientific practice is essential to making a good wine,” said Ross.

Ross and her team fined Chardonnay and Gewürztraminer made by a well-known Washington winery which donated the wine to Ross’s team specifically for this series of experiments.

“There’s hasn’t been a lot of research done on the fining of Washington wines,” Ross pointed out. Because wine is so chemically complex, it is very “place specific”: grapes of the same variety grown in different areas produce wines with varying sensory qualities and so research, too, needs to be place specific.

Which Whiskey is Which, and Why?

“Here’s to cheating, stealing, fighting, and drinking. If you cheat, may you cheat death. If you steal, may you steal a woman’s heart. If you fight, may you fight for a brother. And if you drink, may you drink with me.”

–Old Irish Toast

So you have finally grown weary of the subtlety of wine, and the flavorless-unless-girly-infused-or-served-as-faux-martini allure of vodka, and now you are ready to acquire some hair on your chest, a throaty voice, to pass up the soft feather touch for a kick in the jaw, a body blow, a slam-back, burn-your-throat excursion down whiskey street. But you stand at the intersection, looking in all directions, and wonder where to enter the grain mash roundabout. Well, fear not, intrepid explorer. Herein, we at Wino have provided a road map to your enjoyment, along with recommendations of where to start. Of course, we skipped the wine pairing. Because that would be stupid.

Overview

Whiskey, quite simply, is an alcoholic beverage which is distilled from grain mash. Different varieties use different grains, which may include barley, malted barley, rye (mmmm rye), wheat, or corn. Generally, whiskeys are aged in charred oak barrels. Typically, whiskeys are distilled to 80-90% alcohol, and then water is added. This process allows whiskey to maintain the flavor of its grains. In other words, keeps it from becoming vodka. A lot of the flavor can also come from the barrels in which it is aged; most whiskeys spend at least two years in the barrel, which contributes to the color as well.

Merlot Gone Mad

Event: Merlot Gone Mad
Date: May 2, 2010
Time: 3:00-6:00pm
Location: Tulalip Resort Casino
Tickets: $45

Washington State merlot is among the finest in the world and there is a movement locally that reinforces that now is the time for merlot to reclaim its rightful seat at the table…the wine table, that is. Washington State merlots have over-delivered in quality for many years, yet merlot has still received a bad rap. Merlot Gone Mad is here to change that, and on May 2, 2010 at Tulalip Resort Casino more than fifty Washington State wineries will showcase their finest merlots and educate attendees as to why this varietal that flourishes in our state is actually a secret weapon. Merlot Gone Mad is a benefit for the Washington Wine Industry 501c3 Foundation.

Seattle Times columnist Paul Gregutt recently wrote that “recent data reported that merlot actually turns out to be the most-purchased wine variety – red or white – in the country. “ Paul goes on to say that in Washington State many vintners actually blend merlot into their Cabernets to improve the wine. In a state where Merlot can stand on its own and improve quality, texture and flavor in other blends; its time to let the secret out and bring everyone else to the party. On March 25^th, the first Twitter Washington merlot tasting had folks across the globe tasting Washington merlot and sharing their views via social media. Truly new ground for connecting merlot lovers and offering wineries the opportunity to gain followers, raise awareness and get their wines moving. This superstar grape was also recently touted in a Costco Connections article by Annette Alvarez-Peters where she stated “Washington merlots are fruit forward, well balanced, structured and delicious. The vineyards of eastern Washington are ideal for producing high-quality merlot grapes. Long, warm to hot days and cool, dry nights allow for optimum acidity levels and stunning flavor development.”

Wino Interviews Robert O. Smasne of Smasne Cellars at Taste Washington

We got a chance to spend some time with Robert O. Smasne of Smasne Cellars and AlmaTerra at Taste Washington last weekend. Smasne currently makes wines for twenty-two different wineries including a few of his own projects, so if you’ve been drinking Washington wines, odds are you’ve had a Smasne wine and enjoyed it. Take a look at what Robert Smasne has been up to.