His name's not Jim, but Melville winemaker Greg Brewer is about as dandy as they come. I met Greg and his colleague Stephen Janes (pictured, on my left and right, respectively) while at San Francisco's annual gathering of Pinot-philes, better known as Pinot Fest. The three hour tasting featured more than 40 producers of the absolutely fabulous stuff and included, besides Melville, such well known names as Flowers, Marcassin, Domaine Drouhin, and Etude.

Greg and Stephen were the most hip of all the wine folks at PinotFest, and I thoroughly enjoyed tasting and chatting with them. It helps that Greg is a good friend of my buddy David Rosoff, Los Angeles wine personality extraordinaire and general bon vivant (who has, unfortunately, left us a for a short time to perform his wine magic in Manhattan). Any friend of David's tends to be similarly vinously inclined and colorful, and I was extremely pleased to find Greg and Stephen to be just that.

Besides having a cool winemaker, Melville's a pioneer of top-notch Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in the western part of the promising Santa Ynez Valley. They believe in Burgundian style wines (cheers to that) and specialize in reserve wines that express the character of the particular site on which they're grown - what many people call terroir. I love this quote from the Melville site, describing Greg's winemaking philosophy:

"We are consistently pushing ourselves and our vines by continually 'twisting the lens' of our light trying to eliminate any element of the vineyard which is either unnecessary or excessive...so we can harness the energy of the plant into a small quantity of fruit that will be the sole recipient of its soil and photosynthesis."

Wow. You go, Greg. It all sounds so...deep.

And so winemaking should be. Anything that can transport you in the way that a well made and unfettered with (read: un manipulated) wine from a great vineyard site can is absolutely worthy of such a descriptor. Bravo.

And by the way: Greg is also part owner and winemaker at Brewer-Clifton, another fabulous Santa Barbara-area producer of Pinot and Chardonnay. It's not easy to come by this stuff, but when you do, snap it up. It won't disappoint.

Greg's winemaking philosophy:
www.melvillewinery.com/gbphilos.html

Brewer-Clifton
http://www.brewerclifton.com/

Melville
http://www.melvillewinery.com/

Posted by Courtney at 06:47 PM • Comments (0)

At a charity wine auction I attended recently someone jokingly put a bottle of infamous Thunderbird Wine on the $100 table, with its 99 cent price tag brazenly still stuck to the top of the bottle. I appreciated this person's humor so much that I purchased the bottle and determined to make a decent cocktail out of the stuff.

Enter much contemplation and some online research to draw inspiration. I discovered several things during the course of this research, and the end result was only a greater conviction to somehow transform the boozey wine so that, although it might never compete with cocktails made from some of the world's more venerable cocktail ingredients - top notch vodkas and winning vermouths come to mind - it might at least transform the nearly undrinkable nature of T-bird into something you can actually get down without choking.

But before I reveal my recipe (which is, by the way, surprisingly palatable), I'd like to share some tidbits I dug up online about the merry wine:

- It's produced and bottled by Thunderbird Ltd. in Modesto, CA, home to global wine conglomerate Gallo. Coincidence? Most definitely not. Although the bottle reveals nothing about its relationship to Gallo, the behemoth is most certainly the creator of the stuff. The bottle also says "Serve cold." If you must drink the stuff, this is an absolute must.
- It was launched after Prohibition with a radio campaign that became something of an anthem for the gutted boxcar set: "What's the word? / Thunderbird / How's it sold? / Good and cold / What's the jive? / Bird's alive / What's the price? / Thirty twice." Guess Thunderbird pricing hasn't kept up with inflation. Probably the only wine the value of which has actually decreased over the years.
- Venerable resource Bumwines.com, which profiles the top five "bum wines" on the market, insists that Thunderbird is the worst of the entire lot. They go on to say "As you drink on, the bird soars higher while you sink lower." They conclude by saying "we highly discourage driking this ghastly mixture of unknown chemicals unless you really are a bum."
- Wikipedia.org weighs in as well with a nod to the stuff's other target market--underage drinkers: "It is somewhat notorious for being a popular choice of alcohol for underage American drinkers, along with Boone's Farm." Reminding us that we've come a long way since high school.

THE RETURN OF THE BIRD
A trip to the local liquor store yielded two simple ingredients I used with a traditional bar cocktail shaker, plenty of ice and a strainer to create what I've dubbed "The Return of the Bird." Here's what's in it:

Good pour Thunderbird
Dash Rose's Grenadine syrup (available at most liquor stores) for color and sweetness
Squirt of lime juice
Float of Schweppes Ginger Ale soda

This concoction hardly rocked my world, but was such a significant improvement over the stuff alone that I feel it's a real accomplishment all the same. It looked and tasted rather like a cosmo, and drinking it out of nice martini stemware further diverted my attention from the actual contents of the stuff. And, as recommended on the bottle itself, I served it VERY COLD.
www.bumwines.com

Posted by Courtney at 06:15 PM • Comments (0)

Big time book publisher HarperCollins and fashion uber retailer Saks Fifth Avenue recently announced a partnership in which the publisher put a out a book called "Cashmere If You Can", a tale of a family of Mongolian cashmere goats living atop the retailer's Midtown Manhattan store. Yes, really.

Conceived by Saks' own internal marketing machine, the tale shies from overtly plugging the megastore, instead (hopefully) creating buzz about the place simply by way of a good story with, you guessed it, fabulous product placement.

The New York Times says that HarperCollins has already signed on to do another book with Saks and is negotiating additional projects with, among other types of retailers, packaged goods companies.

This all led me to wonder if wineries might be amongst the gaggle of packaged goods companies racing to be a part of the "product placement within a book" trend. It hardly seems terrifically far-fetched. After all, with rampant consolidation afoot in the wine world and consumers faced with an increasingly homogenous group of Yellow Tail-esque wines on supermarket shelves, why wouldn't wine brand makers seek out new ways to differentiate themselves?

And so I started thinking about how these wineries might bring storytelling to life in a vinous vein. The first idea that came to me was that of a winery-dwelling Quasimodo type who would, rather than troll the bell towers of Notre Dame in Victor Hugo's epic The Hunchback of Notre Dame, slink around the barrel room of a spooky old winery at night, stealing samples from the best barrel lots. I couldn't help but chuckle at how this would give a whole new meaning to term "wine thief."

Bad jokes aside (or maybe not entirely), I would welcome the opportunity to intersperse my usual bedtime reading with some well-told grape-themed tales. On that note, I leave you the following title suggestions:

A Tale of Two Wineries
From Harvest to Happiness
A Crush Story
Brave New Grape
A Love Story: When Yeast Met Juice

The End

www.saksfifthavenue.com

Posted by Courtney at 03:13 PM • Comments (0)

What do Pinocchio, Cyrano de Bergerac, Miss Piggy and many other lesser known olfactorily gifted individuals have in common? You guessed it: they all have huge noses.

The state of having a large schnoz - a condition that has provoked countless individuals to fret about their appearance and sent droves to cosmetic surgeons over the years - is actually a good thing when it comes to drinking wine. The reason is that tasting wine is really much more about SMELLING the stuff than it is about DRINKING it. Here's why:

Wine is made up of a host of volatile elements that give off complex aromas during the tasting experience. The human tasting apparatus, comprised of our tongues and the walls of our mouths, can only perceive four tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. The complex "tastes" that we believe we perceive when tasting, it turns out, are actually vaporized aromas that pass through the retro nasal passage at the back of our throats when drinking. These aromas, together with those we initially sense when nosing a wine, comprise our overall perception of a wine's flavor profile. We truly "smell" a wine's flavors much more than we actually "taste" them.

And, while it's more the internal olfactory (read: nose-related) equipment that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to wine, a case can STILL be made for those proboscidean folks (read: possessors of abnormally large schnozes) who're looking for rebuttal material next time someone rags on their prized organ. Turns out that nosing a wine while it's in the glass is still a great way to assess its character and quality. Sommeliers are all about sticking their noses into their glasses, and the further in you can get it, the better. Big nosed folks have an advantage here, no denying.

Noted big nose downsizers: Jennifer Grey, Michael Jackson
Big nose fetishists online: www.cyberium.net/bnguy/bnfaq.htm

Posted by Courtney at 09:06 PM • Comments (0)