The Wine Curmudgeon

Mini-reviews 46: Beronia, Toad Hollow, Neprica, Mazets

Reviews of wines that don’t need their own post, but are worth noting for one reason or another. Look for it on the final Friday of each month:

• Beronia Tempranillo 2010 ($15, sample, 14%): Spanish red is rich, has lots of red fruit, and is professionally made. That it doesn't especially taste like it’s from Rioja is only a problem if you care about those things.

• Toad Hollow Chardonnay 2011 ($13, sample, 13.9%): California white is unoaked, and mostly tastes as it always does, with green apple fruit. But seems to be a hint of sweetness.

• Tormaresca Neprica 2011 ($12, sample, 13.5%): This vintage of the one-time favorite is more balanced and Italian than the 2010, but still firmly in the international style with lots of sweet red fruit.

• Mazets de Saint Victor Côtes du Rhône Villages 2010 ($10, purchased, 13%): This French red blend has funky, Rhone-like aroma, but that's about the only interesting thing. Thin and watery in the middle and quite disappointing.

Wine with lunch and the end of Western civilization

The Wine Curmudgeon, as a general rule, eats lunch at home -- a sandwich with a couple of glasses of water while hoping the phone doesn’t ring. It ain’t glamorous, but it is effective.

About a dozen times a year, though, I get to have wine with lunch. It’s usually a meal with a visiting winemaker, but it could also be a media trip or just because – either I’m taking the day off or someone suggests it. And, in those dozen times a year, I’m reminded that sometimes, effective isn’t enough. More, after the jump:

Wine of the week: A to Z Chardonnay 2011

From the scores are stupid department: Someone on CellarTracker, the blog’s unofficial wine inventory web app, gave the A to Z chardonnay an 85. If this wine is only an 85, I’m going to start writing rave reviews of over-oaked, too alcoholic California chardonnay.

To be fair, I can can understand why someone would not treat Oregon's A to Z ($10, purchased, 13.5%) with the respect it deserves. It doesn’t have any oak, and if you expect chardonnay to taste like a vanilla milkshake, then this wine will confuse you and you’ll score it lower. Which is just one of the many reasons why scores are stupid, since they don’t account for individual likes and dislikes. In wine, one size does not fit all.

What the A to Z does have: Crisp, juicy green apple fruit, classic for this style of chardonnay; a little richness at the back, which makes up for the lack of oak; and an intensity that is quite refreshing. Serve this chilled on its own, or with any white wine dish that isn’t too rich, and especially grilled seafood. Highly recommended, and a candidate for the 2014 $10 Hall of Fame – unless, of course, you like a lot of oak with your chardonnay.

Winebits 274: Tasting rooms, grape harvest, George Taber

• How tasting rooms work: Ever wonder why wineries have tasting rooms? Or if they make a lot of money? Or why a wine in the tasting room is often more expensive than in a store? Rob McMillan at the SVB blog goes a long way towards answering those questions, and asks one of his own: Do too many wineries use the tasting room to make money at the expense of the tasting room’s ability to market the winery? This is the sort of analysis the wine business needs more of, and something that consumers need to know, too. It’s one more advantage to know how the business works when it comes to buying wine.

• Breaking records: Remember that California grape shortage? Long gone, and probably not to be seen for a while. The official numbers are in, and the 2012 harvest set records. The crush totaled 4.4 million tons, up 13 percent from 2011 and 1 percent more than the previous high in 2005. Also significant: Red grapes accounted for more than half of that total, part of what may be a long-term trend toward red wine among consumers. Prices were also up quite a bit, in the double digits for many varieties, as producers were making up losses from the less bountiful 2010 and 2011 harvests.

• He was there: I’ve never asked George Taber about the 1976 Judgment of Paris, probably the most important moment in the history of modern California wine. George, who worked for Time, was the only journalist present, and saw California wines best French wines in a blind tasting. You’d think, as nosy as I am, I would have annoyed him about it over and over. Now I don’t have to, thanks to this interview, which covers the event thoroughly: “The story about the Paris tasting in Time magazine was only four paragraphs long. It was a secondary story in the Modern Living section, the filler. Nobody in the world except me will remember what was the first and more important story: It was about a new theme park in Atlanta….”

Boony Doon and Skinnygirl, the strangest of wine bedfellows

There they were, one of the most interesting and honest wines in the world sitting next to one of the most manipulated and most cynical.

What kind of cosmic imbalance caused this? How did the trickster of the gods manipulate the retailer's inventory software. Ad think of the embarrassed sidewise glances.

How could Randall Grahm’s Bonny Doon Vin de Gris rose – “one of his best roses… austere and fresh and dark,” as I wrote last year  -- end up next to Skinnygirl’s pink wine, made not to taste like wine but to contain 100 calories and which Elin McCoy said is “barely acceptable chilled plastic cup party fare?"

Grahm makes wine that tastes like wine. The Skinnygirl, to quote from its producer, Beam, Inc., is a “brand that continues to blaze new trails and is solutions-driven.”

Guess who sells more wine? Is it any wonder the wine business makes me so cranky?

Expensive wine 48: J Vineyards Pinot Noir 2011

Winemakers like to talk about “difficult” vintages, where the weather was too cold or too dry or too something. We tend to forget, given modern winemaking technology and California’s usually perfect weather, how much of wine involves farming and depends on things that the winemaker can’t control.

I mention this because J winemaker Melissa Stackhouse had one of those too something harvests in 2011. There has been a lot of Winestream Media chatter about how difficult that harvest was (cooler and wetter than normal), most of which isn’t relevant to those of us who are trying to decide if we should spend $37 for a bottle of wine.

In the case of this pinot noir (sample, 14.3%), the answer is yes. Stackhouse turned difficult to her advantage, producing a wine that is much more interesting than the over-ripe, over-alcoholic examples that are the current favorites. It’s not an insult to say that this pinot noir tastes like pinot noir: raspberry fruit, some black pepper and smokiness, and a little oak on the back -- but also the restraint that separates pinot noir from other red wines. I was particularly impressed with the wine’s balance, something sadly lacking in post-modern California pinot noir, regardless of price. It’s both a food wine (lamb, of course, but also roasted pork) and something to sip and enjoy.

The caveat: There are only 7,000 cases, less than half of normal. Chalk it up to the difficult vintage, which reduced grape yield. No doubt it will be gone quickly.

Why so much wine analysis is so useless

Consider this, from a story about chardonnay's declining popularity:

"In analyzing the report, Napa Technology said the United States’ large Spanish-speaking population and the growing popularity of Spanish food seemed to be contributing to the growing popularity of Spanish varietals."

Yes, chardonnay, though still the best-selling varietal, isn't as popular as it once was. But to give credit to Hispanic wine drinkers, who make up just five percent of the country's core wine drinkers as measured by the Wine Market Council, seems silly at best -- and lazy and sloppy at worst.

I don't think Proctor & Gamble, or the analysts who follow the company, stumble through that kind of fuzzy thinking when it looks at the sales of its products.