2012 - The Year In Review

Given the lack of activity in this blog one might think little to no wine passed my lips in the past twelve months. That would be wrong. 2012 was a busy year. Lots of wine was consumed and notes taken but the real highlights were the trips afield. In February there was a cruise on Holland America down into Mexico. I have grown to like cruises. What I don’t like are the wine prices onboard. I try to embark with as much wine as I think is needed even if it means enlisting fellow travelers as mules. This is not necessary with Holland America as they allow a generous personal wine allotment. I also like to do cruises with my mother-in-law. She needs to be taken onboard in a wheelchair which means that I get her walker. So if you are ever going on a cruise and you see a little old lady being wheeled up the gangplank followed by a guy pushing a walker loaded down with at least one case of wine, you will have found me! Say Hi. I might share a bottle with you.

May found me in Granada, Spain on a work related trip. Andalusia, specifically in the southwest, is sherry country. Through the good graces of Classical Wines I was able to organize a tasting for our little group at Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana. In what was to be a recurring theme for 2012 I had come down with a head cold which meant my appreciation of the wines was limited but I must applaud the generosity of Senor Hidalgo (6th generation winemaker) for making time to give us a guided tour and unbelievable barrel tasting of his outstanding sherries. Also of note during our trip was the availability of inexpensive aged wines in several restaurants. Spain definitely stays on the wine Bucket List for the future.

To celebrate my 60th birthday in June we took a short trip to Santa Barbara which turned out to be partly a reliving of Sideways the movie, and partly new discoveries. We took the train, conveniently bypassing the LA freeways, to Santa Barbara with the soundtrack of Sideways playing in our heads. With a hire car we based ourselves in the unique little village of Solvang and enjoyed dining à la Miles and Jack at the Hitching Post II and the Los Olivos Café; and yes, Miranda did have a glass of F^#k!&g Merlot. We also had dinner at the Ballard Inn in Santa Ynez and tasted at many excellent wineries that didn’t get the nod from Sideways. But the real discovery was the Wine Ghetto in Lompoc. A bunch of wineries in a Lompoc industrial park with the finest being Piedrasassi; they even had a friendly Standard Poodle!

In October we did a road trip to UC Davis, where Miranda’s highlight was to celebrate her 30 year class Reunion. For me a highlight of the Davis trip was, you guessed it, wine. The Dean’s Office at UC Davis arranged for us to take a personal tour of the new Robert Mondavi Wine and Culinary Institute and Good Life Garden. Continuing the benefits of being married to a good woman we then stayed with a long time veterinary friend of Miranda’s and her winemaker husband in Sonoma, and then on to Mt Veeder overlooking the Napa Valley with Miranda’s cherished old friends Ridgie and Buttons. We visited wineries in Napa, Sonoma and the Anderson Valley and yes, for several days I had a head cold and could smell absolutely nothing. But when my nose began to work I really appreciated the discount that winemakers offer each other and we filled Miranda’s little Subaru with three cases of wine! Most memorable were sampling wine at various stages of fermentation at Russian Hill Estate Winery, and a visit to Lagier Meredith, the smallest mountain vineyard in Napa which is only reached by traversing an (almost) death defying switchback one lane road. Outstanding wines, especially their Syrah. Worth every stomach clenching curve. Carole Meredith told us a little trivia about Precious Bane, their recently released excellent Syrah fortified. Its named after a novel written by Mary Webb, the great aunt of Carole Meredith. A character in the book is named Jancis Beguildy. And the parents of a very well know wine writer/critic named their child after her - Jancis Robinson!

On the way back down to San Diego we also dropped in to a few, but nowhere enough, wineries in Paso Robles. This is one region I need to revisit for several days. There are great examples of Syrah in Paso, like the 2005 McPrice Myers Les Galets Vineyard Syrah that I am sipping as I type. Richly complex and still a pup at 7. Who said 15%+ wines have no aging potential.

What does 2013 hold for Shiraz? Stay tuned because February will find us in Australia on a wine tour of Victoria, specifically Rutherglen, and the Barossa and Clare Valley regions of South Australia. Then in April we will again visit Davis and hopefully there will be time to visit a few wineries in Napa, Sonoma and Anderson Valley. Who knows maybe I’ll blog a little about these wine adventures.

New High-tech Wine Cap Design: An advance, Or...

A competition, called Big Bang, founded in 2000 by students at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management has awarded its top prize of $15,000 to a design for a new wine bottle closure that would allow the wine to breathe much like traditional bark corks.

The folks behind this certainly seem to have all the knowledge and experience needed to do this.

Their team, Advanced Enological Closures, set out to design a better bottle cap because cork taint, a byproduct of a fungus that infects cork and makes wine smell like moldy mop water or sweaty gym socks, now contaminates the corks of an estimated one in 20 wine bottles on store shelves, ruining billions of dollars of wine annually. Although synthetic corks have been developed in response to the problem, they allow too much oxygen into the bottle, according to Keller. Overly oxidized wine has a shorter shelf life and can develop a fingernail-polish odor. Screw caps -- another alternative to bark corks -- are a viable option for wine white, but do not allow in enough oxygen for fine red wines, Keller said. Without enough oxygen to draw on, red wines start to smell like burned rubber or matchsticks as they age. LINK

But wait! The idea does seem a bit strange, especially given that oxygen is the enemy of wine.

The team's design, a "breathing screw cap," has small vent holes and is fitted with a liner made of alternating layers of thin metal and a porous polymer. The liner can be customized to allow optimal oxidation for specific varietals, something that is impossible with bark corks. A patent is pending for the design.

"If you open up lots of bottles of the same wine, you'll notice variability from bottle to bottle because of differences in the amount of oxygen that gets in," Keller said. "With cork, you just never know. Our product will give a level of control that the wine industry has never had."

Then there was this.

Keller's design offers the prospect of a cap that eliminates the worry about taint while still letting in oxygen.

His team's patent-pending design – which so far lacks a catchy name – is a 5-cent disc that fits beneath a screw cap. Made from alternating layers of polyethylene – the same material used to make sandwich bags – and perforated aluminum or tin, it can be fine-tuned to match the oxygen demands of different varietals.

"Pinot noir needs a little, cabernet sauvignon needs a lot," Keller said. LINK

That last statement sounds just a little, no make that a lot, like rubbish. It is known that oxygen levels can vary among different grape varieties, but that has been demonstrated during the winemaking process. To my knowledge there is no evidence that different grape varieties require different levels of infusible oxygen during aging. To reconfirm just how important a lack of oxygen is to wine I turned to the best source of knowledge on screwcaps, Tyson Stelzer. Here is a little of what he wrote in 2007.

The question of the ageing rate of wines in screw cap has been a hot topic of late. It is my belief that the rate at which mature notes (or "characters," as we say Down Under) develop in screw-capped wines is in fact absolutely no different to that under traditional closures. This is evidenced by the fact that wines under screw cap age at a similar rate to those with the very best corks. For a wine under an average cork, however, oxidation effects give the impression of accelerated ageing, which has led to the notion that wines mature slower under screw caps. I believe that the absence of oxidized characters in screw-capped wines gives the mistaken impression of slower ageing.

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More criticism has been levelled at screw caps by the media in relation to reductive characters than any other fault. I encourage you to view these accusations objectively and judge for yourself. If there is a causal link between screw caps and reductive characters, as some claim, then we should be tasting more reductive wines under screw cap than under cork.

Check it out for yourself, but my experience, and that of hundreds of experts with whom I have had this conversation, is quite the opposite. In my own tastings in recent years, comprising thousands of predominantly Australian and New Zealand wines, I have encountered more reductive wines under cork than I have under screw cap.

The managing director of the AWRI, Professor Sakkie Pretorius, commented recently that "The idea that there is a high incidence of post-bottling reduction in wines sealed with screw caps is a false premise. With Australian wines, where the AWRI has particular expertise, this is demonstrably not the case…. Our position, which we believe is undeniable, remains that the propensity of a wine to develop 'reductive' aromas post-bottling is a function of the wine, and that post-bottling reduction is not the 'fault' of the closure but may be exacerbated by the closure if the wine has a propensity for such aromas to develop."

"In his Screw Cap Symposium presentation, Peter Godden discussed data from one of our AWRI Advanced Wine Assessment Courses which indicates a higher incidence of reduction in wines sealed with cork compared to wines sealed with screw caps. Two subsequent courses have provided similar data." LINK

That seems pretty clear to me.