DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Like drunks can’t think of an easier way to get another drink than ordering wine from UPS?

The funny thing is, despite the label’s admonition to the contrary, the UPS driver set this on the porch and called out cheerfully, “I’ve signed it for you already!”

And then, I swear to God, he hiccuped.

If you visit the diRosa Preserve, take the guides’ advice and stop by Artesa Winery. It’s set into the ridge on a neighboring property, with awesome wrap-around views, fountains, sculpture… I think they even make wine.

The place is hard to find, takes a while to get to, isn’t obviously near other wineries, and everything inside is expensive. Have someone else in your group spring for the tasting (yes, they charge for tasting; this is Napa), but make sure you find the “view terrace.” This is what you drove out here to see.

Flickr, as usual, has some great photos, tagged artesa.

Also, check out the virtual tour on the Artesa site.

We started with a floor-to-ceiling stack of empty wine bottles, three barrels and a dozen carboys full of wine from last year, and four huge bins of crushed grapes. The day’s agenda: bottle all the finished wine (86 cases!) and press all the new grapes (200 gallons!). Oh, and drink lots of wine — in the name of quality control, of course.

We had 20 people in three separate assembly lines. The first group managed the press: hauling buckets of crushed grapes to the press, filtering the juice, and pumping it into storage — some into oak barrels, some into glass carboys. This required some complex dance maneuvers. Once grapes had been poured into the press, the juice would run… so someone would have to hold the sieves and watch the catch basin, which would quickly fill… so someone else had to be ready to swap basins… but the full one would be needed shortly, so it would have to be emptied… so someone would have to hold a filtering screen above a plastic tub, which would quickly fill… so someone would have to pump off the juice into barrels, which would quickly fill — especially bad, because spilled juice in the cellar attracts vinegar bacteria, which could contaminate the entire winery, and nobody really wants 200 gallons of red wine vinegar, I don’t care how many salads they eat.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of hosing out of screens and tubs and wheelbarrowing off of empty grape skins.

I spent my time in the bottling group. The bottler is an ingenious device, a gravity-fed pan with three spigots. You have to suck each one to get them flowing, but so long as you don’t let them pull air, they’ll pour wine all day. Hang a bottle on each one, and the wine automatically starts to drain into it; when the bottle is full, the flow stops.

Full bottles were handed to the corker, who drove another manual device — basically a real long lever with a bolt at one end to push in the cork. Corking turned out to be nearly foolproof, although we did have one early bottle that somehow ended up with two corks in it. That may have been a ploy though (“I’ll take this defective one home with me!”).

We needed five people: one to feed bottles to the bottler, and cart away boxes; one to fill the bottles, an “expediter” to manage the passage of bottles to the corker and from there into boxes — this was me, which is why the position has a cool title — one to run the corking machine, and one to feed corks to it.

Standing in the middle of this provided a vivid education in process management. I wrote a nice review of a great book about process management last year; see The Goal. All those lessons came back immediately. There were as many opportunities for bottlenecks as there were people in this assembly line. If the bottler is fumbling to open a case of empties, or if he has nowhere to put the full bottle because the corker is behind, then the whole process stops. But optimizing a single stage would only reveal the next bottleneck in line. We made that line sing, I can tell you, but not without some concentrated effort. (The fact that we were all quaffing fresh vino wasn’t helping anything.)

Seriously, though, it was really satisfying to realize that fishing corks out of a bag doubled the time it took to put a cork in the bottle. This was the system’s biggest constraint, and it dictated the throughput of the entire operation. We appointed a “cork feeder;” within two minutes the backlog of full bottles dropped to zero… providing moments of valuable free time for the expediter to refill his tasting cup.

A third crew managed labeling: another 5-7 people doing a variety of things, but somewhat slowly because the first person in the line was doing too much: sliding the little foil lids on the bottles, lifting them from the ground, then holding them inverted in boiling water. Because my team was operating so efficiently we were able to take over the first two steps of this process, speeding up the labeling operation too. Woo!

Anyway, we bottled and boxed two cases of rose, about 70 of Cab/Syrah, and about a dozen of Pinot. I didn’t do one damn thing from my to-do list today, but it was the most productive day I’ve had in six months.

See photos of the entire process in my winemaking gallery.

The SF Weekly has a cover story on Fred Franzia, the founder of Bronco Wines and father of Charles Shaw (“Two Buck Chuck”) wines. It’s a fascinating peek under the soiled bedsheets of the somewhat incestuous wine industry.

One of the most interesting parts of the story describes Bronco’s purchase of winery names that have been grandfathered into the law regulating appellation labeling. In short, there’s a way to put a “Napa” label on Central Valley wine, and Bronco knows all about it.

Read the story: Discount Dynasty

An older story from the Napa Valley Register recounts much of the same history in many fewer words, and also describes why “Two Buck Chuck” actually costs $3 outside of California:
The voice of ‘Two Buck Chuck’

According to the Chronicle’s wine writer,

The tongue only has four taste zones — the tip is sensitive to sweetness, the back portion responds to bitterness, the forward edges detect saltiness and the back edges react to sourness.

And so bad science is propagated yet again. Here’s the truth about the taste map.

The article contains this related and interesting bit about the impact of the shape of a wineglass on the drinker’s perception of flavor and aroma:

At a tasting that Riedel conducted, he actually proved that the thick oakiness of a Chardonnay tasted leaner in a Montrachet glass and a Zinfandel lost much of its sweet cherried fruitiness in a goblet meant for Bordeaux.

I used to see those Riedel glasses at wineries all the time. I always wondered if they were for real, or just a marketing scam aimed at people with more money than sense. I guess it’s time to start buying Riedel stemware now.

New Zealand’s Marlborough region features a “44-mile-long, inn-to-inn walking trail that seems custom-built for wine enthusiasts”. John Flinn scores by terming it the “Appellation Trail.” Ha!

Here’s the whole story: Walking New Zealand’s Wine Country

It reminds me of the Rotweinwanderweg.

Stories about people who can sip a glass of wine and tell you the varietal, the country of origin, the region, the year, and sometimes even the vintner:

• Noses Seek Wine Geekdom’s Biggest Prize, a NYT article about students preparing for the “Master of Wine” certification, administered by the Institute of Masters of Wine in London. “There are only 244 Masters of Wine worldwide.”
• A Man with Great Taste, a VIA magazine article about Larry Stone of San Francisco’s Rubicon, one of only 106 “master sommeliers” in the world, according to the London-based Court of Master Sommeliers.

We’ve attended blind wine tastings — even hosted a few. I know from experience that I am generally unable to distinguish flavor components. When I hear someone say “vegetal,” I can taste vegetal, but if nobody would say the word I would be unable to come up with it alone. I’d probably enjoy a component-tasting class if I felt I could free up a months’ worth of evenings to study and drink wine. Hmm, actually that might not be a bad thing.

More stories about Larry Stone:

• It’s 4 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Sommelier Is?… about A-list San Francisco sommeliers getting together to blind-taste wines after work.
• The Day-to-Day Life of a Sommelier… a chat with Larry Stone that has little to do with his day-to-day life, but answers some good questions like “can wine be sent back, and should the customer be charged for it?”

If you know nothing about wine but want to sound like you do, just memorize a few of these aroma words and component flavor words. Flinty or stemmy? Steely or coppery? Maybe just having a vocabulary of possibilities at hand makes it easier to identify the flavors.

In Awash in Pinot Noir, the LA Times describes a winery like none I’ve ever seen:

Working out of three rented rooms on the second floor of a Palos Verdes Estates shopping center with a staff of five part-timers and a college intern, [Castle Rock Winery’s owner Greg] Popovich buys wine on the spot market, paying a consulting winemaker a per-case fee to blend and bottle it in rented space in Napa Valley’s Calistoga. He then ships it to almost every state in the country through a network of independent distributors.

It’s wine without the winery. Without the vineyard. Without the winemaker, even.

Sam Adams Brewing Company used to outsource manufacturing of their lager, before they had a brewery of their own. An A-B employee friend of mine sniffed that Sam Adams couldn’t really be considered a real beer for that reason. But at least the Sam Adams folks had a recipe! The brewing was contracted out, but the final brew was not left to the whims of the hired help.

I mean no offense to Greg Popovich. In fact, I applaud him for selling $10 wines — anybody willing to challenge the epidemic idea that California reds have to cost $20/bottle is doing the right thing as far as I’m concerned.

I guess I’m stuck on the (admittedly outdated) idea that wines should be made by a family businesses with their own land, their own facilities, their own winemaker, their own mission. The idea of buying bulk wine and mixing it together somehow doesn’t conjure images of handcrafted vino.

Then again, nobody ever promised me handcrafted vino for $10/bottle.

Still, the idea of commodity wine just isn’t very appealing. The same thing applies to mass-market bread, coffee, olive oil, beer, and any of the other gourmet foodie-foods that have already enjoyed their renaissance.

Ironically, commodity Pinot probably pretty good anyway. Excuse me while I step out to Trader Joe’s… I’ll need to make this decision empirically.

The Chron has published a list of their Top 100 Wines of 2003.

Of particular interest are the three reds with single-digit prices. It seems to me that wine prices have climbed steadily for the past ten years, at least until Two Buck Chuck came along — but you won’t find Chuck on the list. It might only cost $2, but it is not a Top 100 wine. It’s merely drinkable, and then only if you’re so busy gloating over the low price that you forget to swallow.

Which is not to say that we haven’t put away a few bottles of Chuck ourselves…

I do wish they’d come up with some $5 Zinfandels though.

Long-time readers may recall our mention of a vertical Zin sampler offered by Dashe Cellars. On a recent day of some personal importance, we drank the oldest bottle of the trio, a 1996 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel. According to the label, the Zin was blended with small (but unspecified) amounts of Carignane and Alicante Bouschet.

This wine is huge. Monstrous berries, with none of the high-alcohol heat that often accompanies Zinfandels. It was perhaps not as balanced as some of our other favorite Zins, but we enjoyed it immensely, and quickly, with 100g of Ritter Sport Halbbitter. Sensational!

And so I found myself in Healdsburg, wandering around the square, when I stepped into the Sebastiani tasting room for a few minutes to see if they might be pouring some Zinfandel. They were, as it turns out, but it wasn’t very good.

They were also pouring a new “tasting room selection,” apparently not available elsewhere. I’m not immune to marketing scams… but I’m also not immune to good deals on tasty red wine.

I’d never heard of Ruby Cabernet, but I have to say I enjoyed it more than I expected. It’s not a Cabernet blend, but a hybrid grape — a cross of Carignane and Cabernet Sauvignon, developed especially for warm inland California regions. I’ve just looked up some details on this and laughed out loud at a comment in the Super Gigantic WWW Winegrape Glossary: Ruby Cabernet is “currently used in jug-wines as ‘backbone’.” Ha!

There are really only two rules for buying wine at tasting rooms. You can follow one or the other. The first is this: buy only in bulk, to take advantage of case discounts. Or, for infrequent social visits, you can follow the second rule: buy only a bottle or two and try not to think what you paid for it.

It was with rule #2 in mind that we bought a few bottles of Ruby Cabernet. What they’re selling, and what we’re buying, is the right to stand around in a million-dollar room sipping free vino, pawing the fancy oils, vinegars, cookbooks, glassware, grape-themed tchotchkes, etc. and acting like well-to-do people on vacation.

Of course it helps that we were well-to-do people on vacation.

I received a newsletter and catalog from the proprietors of Dashe Cellars. Their 1997 Zinfandel was a memorable bottle of wine. It’s not offered as a part of their online catalog, but does appear in their newsletter, within a 3- or 6-bottle sampler — also including the ‘96 RRV Zin (recently selected, according to Michael Dashe, by Chez Panisse for an upcoming Zinfandel event) and the ‘98 Todd Brothers Ranch Zin. All in all this is a very tempting package. Zin drinkers beware — this is a limited-availability item. The only reason I’m telling you about it at all is that I’ve already ordered one for myself!

Stumbled across a cache of 1996 Mazzoco Zin today. We try not to keep Zins that long; in fact what’s most exciting about this is that it implies that there’s a cache of the 1997 just behind it.

1997 Zin… Mmmmm.