White Heron & Competitions

When we started in 1986 and for many years afterwards we entered competitions as a way to get the winery noticed. If you come into our tasting room and peruse our scrapbook you will find information about medals we have won tucked away here and there.

Eventually we realized that none of the reviews (also tucked away in our scrapbook) or medals made any difference in our sales. This was primarily because we never won the super triple gold platinum award. This is because the un-oaked, fruit forward, and unfined style of wine we make does not fare well in competitions. We then stopped entering competitions as, on average, it costs $40 per wine to enter.

Why does the White Heron style not fare well in competitions?

A recent competition near here featured over 200 wines. I have myself worked as a judge in wine competitions. You are served a flight of comparable wines, say five Chardonnays. You rate these Chardonnays without food or atmosphere. You then move on to the next flight of Chardonnays. From each flight a wine is selected, assuming enough judges liked the wine. The wine selected is the wine that tastes the best compared to the other wines in the flight in that environment. The ‘winning’ wines from each flight are then returned to be tasted where eventually the ‘best’ wine of all is selected.

How I Ate My Way Through Swiftwater Cellars’ Wine in the Pines

Roll out the red carpet, the rockstars of Washington wine and celebrities of the pairing sphere were in attendance at Wine in the Pines at Swiftwater Cellars a few weekends back at Cle Elum’s Suncadia.

Wine in the Pines was stacked with a number of events through the weekend, offering a three-day food and wine festival dedicated to Northwest juice and bites. Completely poised to food and wine pairing, Saturday’s kickoff affair was buried in the winery’s cellar with 60 sets of eyes and ears in full devotion to Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein and TV host and original Thirsty Girl Leslie Sbrocco.

Son of celebrated author and Chef Joyce Goldstein, Evan Goldstein was spawn into the world of gastronomic culture and in 1987, he became the one of the youngest Americans and globally to pass the prestigious Master Sommelier examination. Since then, Goldstein has been creating wine education programs, launching hospitality schools and writing books like they are going out of fashion, including Perfect Pairings: A Master Sommelier’s Practical Advice for Partnering Wine with Food, which brought him to Wine in the Pines.

Leslie Sbrocco, Thirsty Girl extraordinaire and Today Show wine contributor, is also an award-winning author, national speaker and wine consultant within the culinary industry. Sbrocco’s first book, Wine for Women: A Guide to Buying, Pairing and Sharing Wine, helped to put her on the map with at-home female cooks striving for the real meal deal. Sbrocco can currently be found on her PBS show, Check Please!, and regularly has guest appearances on NBC and with her friend, Oprah.

Blend Seattle

A Wine Event Celebrating the Art of Blending

The measure of a chef, it’s fair to say, is his/her ability to pick the finest of ingredients, assemble them in such a way that the characteristics of each complement the others, resulting in a dish that delivers texture and flavor that pleases the palate. If, for example, you found yourself seated at Tendrils Restaurant at Cave B Inn, and ordered the special, you’d probably be pretty disappointed if they brought you a banana instead of Double R Ranch striploin on rustic blue cheese mashed yukons with black trumpet bordelaise. Nothing against bananas, but you don’t need Executive Chef Bear Ullman for that. You just don’t.

The same is true with wine and winemakers. Nearly every bottle you see on the shelf is a blend of some kind. Sure, there are the Bordeaux blends, “red wine” blends, table wines, etc., but even apparent single varietals are rarely 100%, and when they are, they’re often blends of different lots, different vineyards, different AVAs. A winemaker, like a chef, is constantly assembling constituent ingredients to make a great wine. A little of this for structure, a little of that for mouthfeel, a little of this for color, a little of that for body. (Imagine Dr. Frankenstein rolling Angelina Jolie off the assembly line.) Even if you pick up a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, for example, to be called such on the lable, the bottle has only to contain 75% of Cab. A quarter of the volume can be made up of whatever else the winemaker feels would enhance the overall composition of the wine, and it can make a big difference.