I have not enjoyed my visits to Napa Valley in the same way I did in the early 1980’s.  So, I have been asking myself if I am excited to be heading back to the Napa wine scene today after a purposely extended hiatus and so many years of waning interest in another visit to my interpretation of the “Disneyland of wine culture”?  Ornate tasting rooms to seal off the real guts of a winery, tinted limo windows to hide the drunken loads they carry, pretty labels and bottles to mask pours of mediocre wine, handsome young tasting room staff to anesthetize against regrettable price escalation, gorgeous mountain and valley terrain downplaying tourist traffic creeping up and down valley border roads, and all else that camouflages any essence or connection to an authentic, indigenous, local wine culture and its people.

I prepared myself for this return visit using some skills I taught players during my ice hockey coaching days, “Keep the game small”.  Hockey is a series of one-on-ones, two-on-twos, two-on-ones, and so on.  Forget the arena and full sheet of ice, and stay focused on rewards from small vignettes you carve out of the natural flow of the game.  Hating parts of Napa Valley is not intended to sound arrogant, but it smacks so much of everything that went bad over the last twenty years in our domestic lifestyle and economic universe.  Over investment, creation of hype, price escalation, oversupply, lack of authenticity, thoughtless consumerism, and so on.  Yet, like everything else, there are morsels of wonder and greatness to be found in it all, new young wine makers with passion and purpose that defy cult wine culture. Venerable old wineries that are staying with their game.  That’s all good.

On this trip, I am traveling with a good group; some business colleagues, a group of good people we do business with that we enjoy spending time with, and one pretty special guy that I have been drinking wine with since the early nineties and have traveled around wine producing regions with some frequency.  We are going to eat well, drink well, and connect and reconnect with some talented wine makers coaxing authentically California wine from their vineyards or acquired fruit.  I am going to keep this Napa game “small” for me, staying focused on those vignettes.

One of the few wine blogs I try to read every day is written by Steve Heimoff.  I have great respect for his perspectives and work.  In a recent post he reminded me of how empty an ordinary visit to Napa’s tasting rooms can be:

I don’t do the tasting room thing anymore, since my job gets me past the tasting room right into the winery. But I understand that the tasting room is the average consumer’s window into wine country, and I have enormous respect for tasting room employees. They have to be nice to everyone, even when people aren’t being very nice to them. They have to know all about the wines they’re pouring, and they also have to be prepared to answer all kinds of off the wall questions.

And then there is the issue of personal taste.  I have spent the last ten years shifting my wine interests away from domestic wines (or course, not completely, but mostly) to old world wines.  It naturally occured, as did other phases during almost 30 years of appreciating fine wine.  There are still many wines from California and Washington State that wow me; but the elegance, beauty, and purity in flavor that my palate has been looking for is more often than not found in old world wines.  I was reminded of this when my friend Richard Auffrey at The Passionate Foodie recently shared some excerpts from Terry Theise’s book  which represents this powerful,  influential, and mystical importer’s interpretation of the “general” differences between old and new world wines:

“All things being equal, [old world wines are] more artisanl, more intimately scaled, humbler, and less likely to be blown about by the ephemeral breezes of fashion….Old World wines ….have about them a certain reserve. They’re not aloof, but neither are they extravagant, gregarious, life-of-the-party wines. They don’t play at loud volume, and they can seem inscrutable to people with short attention spans. They are, however, kinetic; they draw you in, they make you a participant in the dance.

New World wines are marked by a kind of effusiveness that turns the drinker from a participant into an onlooker. These big, emphatic wines put on quite a show: explosions and car chases in every glass. If you’re new to wine, this can be reassuring. You get it. You needn’t worry there are subtleties you don’t grasp

This week I look forward to drinking and discovering a few more US wines that live right in the middle of Theise’s two camps of experience.  Cabernets, Chardonnays, and Syrahs that are in neat balance with good structure, providing richness of fruit that ought to dominate California wines, and not old world wines.  They embody nuances gleaned from the Napa sun and red earth they are born out of, which neatly knit into the fabric of these well structured and correctly ripened California wines.  They are the essence of California wines.  So, we will be keeping our game small….focused on our own company and staying ready to be wowed by the selected few folks we have decided to seek out to tell us their stories of California wine.

I am fortunate to taste more than one man’s fair share of special wine every month.  Tonight, in the context of a business dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar with a young, smart, scrappy, web marketing guru from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we experienced the most compelling red wine I have tasted this year, and most probably one of the top ten recent release wines that have ever touched my lips.  It comes from the Loire, in limited quantity, and more specifically, is the entry level bottling crafted at the venerable estate run by brothers Nadi and Charlie Foucault.  This bottle served as vessel to an expression of Cabernet Franc I had never dreamed possible.  Meet the 2005 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny.

While my interest in the Loire has intensified during recent years, I had failed to wrangle even one bottle of the Foucault brothers’ wines.  On the edge of my seat this Thursday evening in the East Village, after a few twists of  the screw and the pop of one small cork, I entered that rare space of wine enthusiast heaven where aroma and flavor memories are born to stay with dedicated winos for life.  How can a wine this rich and thick, produce a mouth feel so light and velvety?  How does a wine so pointedly flush with sweet and bright black cherry juice, approaching the richness of liqueur and the elegance of kirsch, stay so seamlessly packaged in its web of soft tannins?  And, how can a wine as silky and fruity as the 2005 Clos Rougeard marry up with the earthy, smoky, herbal tones that create nothing short of a multi-dimensional liquid wonder?  If ever a classy, sex bomb of a wine existed, here it is.

No surprise, the wine is imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, who even pinch themselves thinking about the privilege of holding this wine in their already impressive portfolio:

Just our luck.

We have a cult estate. Every three-star restaurant in France hustles to get a small allocation. No one in America, outside of the lucky few, has heard of it.

This estate has been in the family for several generations. Basically, the Foucault brothers (Nadi and Charlie) tend exceptional vineyards, harvest at small yields, vinify in barrel, let the wines bubble for a couple of years in a glacially cold cellar and bottle without filtration.

And what you get is the some of the top red wines of the Loire Valley and in the very top of France as a whole. Charles Joguet, the great winemaker of Chinon, once said: “there are two suns. One shines outside for everybody. The second shines in the Foucaults’ cellar.”

And guess what?  While you can find the 05 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny here for about $50, I would not hesitate spending $100.  While I recommend a lot of wine, this one rises to the top of the chart, and for $50, it is an intense value.

Have you ever tasted these wines?  What do you think?

I like discovering young wineries working their own infant vineyards as wine makers unveil unique styling and a reliance on their own maturing vines that are not yet naturally producing lower yields with more intense and concentrated fruit.  While it can take years to release the untold treasures embodied in newly planted land, it is absolutely possible to capture and present a house style early on.   When those style characteristics include restraint,  flavor purity, solid acidity, consistency, and honest varietal interpretation, I stand at attention as I did tasting through the recent releases from Loomis Family Vineyards.

During a recent dinner at a favorite BYOB spot, I had our group taste through the  portfolio of one remarkable rosé, a Grenache Blanc, and a red Rhone varietal blend.  The names of these wines are Air, Snow, and Ember respectively and the blended varietals include Grenache Blanc and Viognier for Snow, and Grenache Noir, Syrah, Mourvedre, and Counoise in Air and Ember.  With this first release of Ember, second vintage of Snow, and the third production of the rosé, Loomis Vineyards confirmed a house style that delivers old world varietal representation, doses of acidity that make the wines excellent food complements, serious concentration without anything resembling over-ripeness, and complex aromatics that present themselves over time in the glass.  For California jammy fruit fans, beware; Loomis  produces anything but fat, soft, round California wines.  They are special exceptions to the Napa fruit parade, offering bright, clean and pure old world flavors that are chasing their own identity that can only be found in their own patch of earth in this southeast corner of Napa Valley.  I wrote about Loomis Family Vineyards enthusiastically last year after swooning over their first Grenache Blanc release.  Here are my notes on the current release:

2009 Air: Rich, dark pink, peach skin coloring.  Light and elegant attack with steely, stone-like flavors.  A nose of melon rind, stewed strawberries,  and muted floral aromas are present.  The mouth feel is surprisingly rich and full considering the restrained elegance at first blush, and it is finished with a big streak of well married acidity.  A very long finish lets this amalgamation of flavor and textures persist for a very long time.  It is absolutely the most compelling wine of the three for drinking now.  This is a very, very special old world style rosé from California.

2009 Snow: Bright, racy citrus and melon on the nose with a medium richness, bracing acidity, and long finish.  The wine is interesting because it has excellent construction and balance beginning to end, but the aromatics and flavor dimensions are muted.  It is second best to last year’s release, and I wonder if the wine will eventually open up (it has plenty of time ahead of itself for safe cellaring) and show the multitude of aromas and flavor components found in last year’s version of this wine.  I am going to wait to see how this wine progresses over the next couple of years, and drink one more bottle nearer term since it serves as an excellent foil to rich finny and shellfish as is.

2008 Ember: A fair amount of alcohol and jam on the nose.  Serious pepper spice.  These aromatics hint at a massive glass of wine and I wondered if I was about to witness a violation of the restraint and balance I was falling for in these wines.  I was not disappointed and the wine coated our palates with a silky feel, again supported with the Loomis tell-tale dose of acidity and long finish.  The wine does have a big tannic bite and I bet that will melt away nicely over the next ten years and reveal the velvet fruit core as the wine becomes more fit to drink.  I would choose to cellar this wine for at least three years.  I like this wine for its construction and elegance that hint at future greatness.

I strongly recommend these wines. especially the rosé for immediate pleasure.  You can buy them direct from Loomis Family Vineyards here. The program is young, but the style definition is classic and exciting.

In two small steps for the wine world’s social media content creators, traditional broadcast and print media recently moved in giant steps towards integrating social media wine content inside traditional media formats.  Camouflaged and stealth like, Gary Vaynerchuk, Alder Yarrow, and Tyler Colman set in motion a series of watershed events that just might debunk the fundamental “party platforms” supporting both sides of the tiring but raging debate between traditional and social media wine writers on whose wine content has more value.

Earlier this week,  I opened US Airways’ in-flight magazine and noted current contributors included some high profile wine bloggers including Tyler Colman and Alder Yarrow as well as a bevy of bloggers entrenched in other content specialty areas of the blogosphere including William Keens on running business meetings and Carlos Portocarrero on personal finance.  Their contributions, in my opinion, added up to the most compelling content in the magazine.

It is a strategy that Dan McCarthy, CEO of our rapidly evolving traditional media company NCI and blogger at ViralHousingFix, and I have been kicking around for our own local shelter magazine portfolio; curate the best social media content and present it to readers in traditional print and online media products.  I asked Alder about the level of commitment US Airways made to him:

Kudos to US Airways and the editors at Pace Communications who publish the magazine for the airline.   Republishing Alder’s wine content from blog to magazine is personally validating both as a wine blogger and publisher of traditional shelter magazines.  If social media content is regularly curated across the web, why aren’t more traditional media operators moving that content into other media formats that also aggregate engaged, niche audiences?  Aren’t they deserving? The answer lies at the center of an editor’s admirable bias for creating original and unpublished content, a now dated strategy that has dictated media pros’ operating mindsets for a very long time.  Unfortunately, in today’s proliferation of powerful online content by once unknown authors, a wall is constructed between editors and these important and engaging content sources, ultimately creating a disservice to readers.

Yesterday, SIRIUS XM Radio announced a regular, live, two hour weekly new show featuring the wine world’s undisputed social media icon Gary Vaynerchuk.   In this move, SIRIUS exhibited a lack of prejudice towards the creation of a mainstream wine personality, exclusively chiseled out over social media wine networks.  Granted, Vaynerchuk has taken his celebrity to serious enough heights that minimizes the size of SIRIUS’ leap, but the event is groundbreaking enough and credit goes to SIRUS XM Radio’s Scott Greenstein, President and Chief Content Officer, who said:

Gary’s entrepreneurial spirit and energetic expertise in wine make him and Wine & Web the perfect match for satellite radio and our cutting edge, sophisticated audience.  His passion for life and wine is infectious, and will resonate with people of all ages and backgrounds.

Eliminating Vaynerchuk as a viable radio personality would have been a missed opportunity.  Discriminating against the curation and recreation of already-published content is an injustice to media audiences.  Should museums stop featuring works from classic painters and sculptors that were already exhibited elsewhere? Getting beyond this is the first step in a practical approach for moving content from the social web into traditional media products.  US Airways and SIRIUS XM Radio have now proven that in the sphere of wine content and beyond with their landmark strategies.

Recently, Flipboard took a groundbreaking step towards making social content appear as magazine content, and “flipped” the concept by aggregating social content and reproducing it as a magazine, only online.  Jeff Battersby at Bloomberg Businessweek described it this way:

Flipboard is a “personalized social magazine” app for the iPad that aggregates nine of your favorite online media sources, grabs content from links posted on those sites or by your friends on Twitter and Facebook (including photos and video), and then presents that content to you in a beautiful, easy-to-read, magazine-like format. After almost two weeks of using Flipboard’s free app on a daily basis, I believe that Flipboard creates a Web media experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

While this may sound like standard RSS feed reader fare, Flipboard is unique among any of the feed readers I’ve used. Instead of simply collecting and displaying a list of recent posts, Flipboard grabs the content that each post links to, letting you view it all like a magazine article. So, if a friend on Facebook posts a bunch of recent vacation photos, Flipboard displays them all. Likewise, if someone you follow on Twitter posts a link to a video or article on the Web, you can view that video from within Flipboard (except, of course, if it’s Flash-based) and read several paragraphs from the linked article…. The overall experience is much more seamless and enjoyable than your typical feed reader, dedicated Twitter app, or even Facebook itself. As advertised, Flipboard has the feel of a personalized media magazine.

I have been using the app on my iPad and while I don’t necessarily require the transitional  presentation of social content to be comfortable consuming it, I suspect it is the first of many applications that will go a long way in making social content more digestible to hard core traditional media fans.  The battle lines are now drawn.  Hopefully, these events will serve to refocus the mud slinging between online and traditional wine writers.  It is about time to abandon prejudices of media platform and format in the judgment of valuable content.

If wine-searcher.com has its way, their claim and grip on wine market transparency will replace the joyful pleasures of physical wine browsing and shopping.  Wine enthusiasts will be relegated to replaying memories of crouching dusty floors and scavenging Sam’s (Chicago wino history) original North Avenue location’s end bins for discoveries and deals.  No longer will it be fashionable, as I was convinced it once was criss-crossing Long Island’s north and south shores, visiting eight wine shops on a rainy Saturday afternoon searching (oops, there’s that word) best prices and harder to find treasures along the way.  Wine-searcher, a survivor of the dot.com rush and the hard work of an enterprising New Zealander inspired by internet valuations and his work establishing digital commerce for venerable Berry Bros. & Rudd London wine merchant, makes things far simpler as evidenced on the site:

Wine-Searcher is a search engine of price lists from 18,032 wine-stores (a total of 3,936,146 offers). The site also offers a wealth of information about wine. Whether you are a merchant, winery, connoisseur, or consumer, this website is essential for pricing and locating wines.

Wine-searcher can take a lot of credit for dosing wine retailing with price visibility, but they also own the street signs dotting a path to the elimination of relationship cultivation with smart, enterprising, passionate, local wine retailers and chatting up fellow winos in the aisles and check out lines of those hardworking merchants.  In its place, wine-searcher often rewards the opportunistic, sly retailers who break the code and scam the system.  In an excellent recent article in the LA Times food section authored by Patrick Comiskey called “Wine-searcher.com levels the wine industry playing field”, the site’s entire impact on digital and physical wine distribution, the competitors it spawned and challenged,  is discussed in poignant and comprehensive fashion, and the lasting scar is brought to the forefront:

…wine-searcher.com’s accuracy is routinely questioned. A staff of 20 headquartered in New Zealand may not be sufficient to deter dubious price claims. Indeed, there are frequent complaints from wineries and shops alike about less-than-scrupulous retailers (many, it seems, with New Jersey ZIP Codes) who are believed to “game” the system, making offers of certain high-profile wines at suspiciously low, below-market prices. Then, when consumers inquire, they’re told the wine is sold out (if indeed there was ever any wine at all).

“They list wines they have never had and maybe never will, and then try and do a bait and switch,” says Peter Granoff, proprietor of the Oxbow Wine Merchant in Napa. “It is becoming a real problem for importers and wineries.”

Like everything else in our rapidly evolving digital communication era, tools that save time and create efficiencies displace long time rituals of richer and simpler times.  I do appreciate the easy research and sourcing options search engines and online marketplaces offer wine enthusiasts.   I often share wine-searcher links to wines reviewed on this site in case someone without access or contacts is moved to find some.  But the visceral thrill of physical wine shopping and interaction becomes lost to consumers exclusively reliant on online shopping.  The human interaction fueled by conversation, stories about sources and vineyards, relationship building between trade and consumer, and the art of digging through end bins are all at risk.  Maybe this is where space is created for a few hundred bloggers to stimulate connection and conversation?  Still, as a handful of retailers continue to abuse the online market system by taking advantage of innocent and naive online shoppers, the price for convenience is elevated exponentially. Is it all worth it?