Author: cathy-harding

Holding a spit cup and tasting sheet in one hand, a wine glass and pen in the other, and cradling a sheath of papers between her forearm and chest, with her glasses sliding halfway down her nose, the wine blogger shuffled into the hallway to square off with eight wines from Maryland. Pressed around the little table to which the Free State’s vino was relegated, another half dozen bloggers were typing onto the tiny screens of their smart phones, all the while swirling and spitting. Inside the adjoining conference room, the scene was writ large as 80something wine types sampled and rated 40 or more Virginia wines. Welcome to the new age of instant wine judging: The Twitter Taste-Off.

A couple of weekends ago, I joined five or six dozen people from across the wine industry (though most were bloggers) for the annual conference hosted by drinklocalwine.com, whose mission is exactly what the name tells you, and which this year set up shop in Leesburg. (Media were comped for the entire weekend at Lansdowne Resort courtesy of the Virginia Wine Board, which, thank you ladies and gents of the Commonwealth, are your tax dollars at work.) Drinklocalwine is a labor of love for Jeff Siegal of Texas, now known as The Wine Curmudgeon, and Dave McIntyre, who covers wine for The Washington Post. Two geekier and more enthusiastic wine lovers you won’t meet. Prior to the Taste Off, topics of concern at the two-day conference included which grape varietals thrive in Virginia and why; whither local wine in restaurants that nonetheless tout local food; and the role of social media in the wine business.

Wine writing has changed dramatically in the past decade, with blogs and social link-up sites like Twitter crashing the gates once guarded by scorekeepers such as Robert Parker and Wine Spectator. Events like virtual tastings, or VTs, are now SOP on Twitter—notes being rapidly shared to the tune of 140 characters max. Once the drink-what-you-like school of wine writing took off, it was inevitable that regionalist factions would surface, too. 

Here at The Working Pour, where the philosophy “Drink local. And often.” prevails, we delight in finding the bandwagon so darn full, but while we made a valiant effort at tweeting and tasting simultaneously, eventually we gave up in favor of tasting and schmoozing. (Virginia has an abundance of personable winemakers, and, as an indication of how important this event was to their work, many of them poured at the Taste Off in person.) Our blogosphere colleagues managed well, however, with comments rapidly springing up on the big screen, such as this one from Sean Sullivan of Seattle, a.k.a. @wawinereport: “Finding lots of pretty cedar aromas on a lot of the #vawine BDX varieties.”

Ninety minutes later, the winners were announced. Breaux Vineyards led the reds with its 2002 Merlot Reserve and picked up the Media Choice award, too. Best white was the 2008 Albarino from Chrysalis. People’s Choice for best wine overall went to Michael Shaps’ 2008 Viognier. 

If you want to start drinking local wine, those are three lovely suggestions.

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Big news for wine-related tourism in the state: Last week, Governor Bob McDonnell announced that the Wineries Unlimited trade show will relocate to Richmond from Pennsylvania next year. His office estimates the 2011 event will bring over 2,000 visitors and $1.5 million to the Commonwealth.

And, as promised, Claude Thibaut, the stellar sparkling winemaker, released his Virginia Fizz late last month. A crémant-style sparkler, it’s now on the shelves at local wine retailers. 

“If it was about the money, I wouldn’t be here. I went from a high six-figure salary to just getting by.” Dominick Fioresi is explaining the allure of a two-year apprenticeship at Linden Vineyards in Fauquier County. He’s now in his second year after a 15-year career in Internet technology. “I was looking to learn from the master. I did my homework. Jim is very passionate about the winemaking. With Jim, it’s all about the wine, and I was going to learn from the Number One winemaker on the East Coast, bar none.”

The Jim in question is Jim Law, legendary back-to-the-lander, borderline curmudgeon, and much-admired hero in Virginia winemaking. As another pioneer has told me, “I never had a bottle of his wine I didn’t love.”

After years of classroom teaching, the advent of the highly selective apprenticeship program (only two apprentices at any given time—and they must commit to staying in the Virginia industry) seems inevitable for Law, a champion of old-fashioned values and purity in winemaking. Where winemaking has joined the league of the credentialed, spawning college courses, certificates and advanced degrees, Law believes in a hands-on training sequence that starts with apprentices, moves through journeymen, and results in masters (among which, after 30 years of winemaking, he rightly counts himself). “I taught for decades and found it frustrating that people who had an intensive 16 hours in the classroom thought they knew it. There was no evolution. And they produced pretty mediocre wines. 

“I think you have to have a deeper understanding,” he adds.

Thoughtfulness is a watchword for Law, who prizes (and makes!) wines that are “intellectual, long-lived and pair well with foods.” Indeed, on the afternoon I visited Law and his pair of apprentices—Jonathan Weber was three weeks in, at that point—they took their seats at a well-appointed yet modest table for the daily 4 o’clock “blending trial.” The atmosphere became nearly convent-like at one stage, as four Petit Verdots—candidates to fill out the mid-palate of the 2009 Hardscrabble Red— were blind sampled. “In order to taste objectively, you need to be quiet and taste under the same conditions,” Law said.

While he may not be unique in his seriousness of purpose as a winemaker or even his aversion to additives in the winemaking process, Law is in the minority among Virginia winery owners in keeping his operation closed to weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, whathaveyous. The sign at the bottom of his hilly road, situated in some of the most beautiful countryside your urban narrator has ever enjoyed, states “No buses, no limos, no groups larger than six.” Looking for a party? Head up the road a stretch.

But for those seeking a serious wine experience, Linden is a magnet. “This is very soulful, very healthy,” says Fioresi, despite the fact that his work has included, besides obsessively tending to 22 acres of vineyard and racking wine in the tank room, “taking the trash to the dump and changing a toilet seat.”  He adds that he’s been surprised to discover—first-hand, of course—the degree to which you have to mind the details in a vineyard and winery. “I don’t think half the people realize the work it takes to be successful,” he says.

Characteristically, Law eschews a formal application process. He relies on word of mouth to find apprentices. He asks for a letter about a prospect’s interests, including what wines he or she likes. He even claims that he wouldn’t mind if the answer were Yellow Tail, “as long as they can say why.” 

 “Vigor” is a term that comes up a lot in discussions of Virginia winemaking. It has to do with how energetically vines grow, based on the kind of soil they’re in and how much sun they get. It’s not always a good thing for a plant to be vigorous—at least as far as the quality of the grapes is concerned.

But there’s little doubt that vigor is an admirable—possibly necessary—quality in a vigneron. We present Exhibit A, Jeff Sanders. C-VILLE first met him nearly three years ago when he and his wife Michelle were fresh into their adventure to build a winery and grow grapes in Free Union. Now, as they schedule a grand opening for their Glass House Winery for the end of the year, Jeff can reliably be found everywhere at once as he prunes the six acres of vines, installs the geothermal floor in the 2,000-square foot copper-tiled winery, and learns the craft of winemaking from his consultant, longtime Virginia winemaker Brad McCarthy. Oh, and he’s also designing and managing the construction of a tropical conservatory that will abut the winery. “It’s a hobby of mine,” Jeff explains about the banana trees, cinnamon plants and other lovely exotics that he’s been growing in a greenhouse (that he built himself, naturally). “It will be interesting next to the winery and tasting room. People can enjoy a tropical setting in February or March.”

“He doesn’t do less than three things at a time,” Michelle says of her always-active husband. To which he replies, “I worked in an office for too long. I like visible results.”

Not that Michelle sits idle while the Tasmanian Devil stirs up dust clouds around her. Glass House is a family operation, and Michelle manages the office work and the ordering. Such decisions as opting for glass closures (rather than the traditional cork or the increasingly popular screw cap closures) resulted in days of research and calls. On top of which, Michelle is a chocolatier. She’ll be selling her sweets at the winery once it’s opened, and hopes to perfect a dark chocolate candy with a wine-ganache center. Don’t these people ever sleep?

The wine industry divides roughly into two camps: Those who are all about the wine and the wine only, and those who want to also create a wine “lifestyle,” both for themselves and for their customers. The Sanderses fall into the second camp. Their intensity reflects the decisions that led them to put aside their plan to move around the world in three- to five-year intervals and instead to lay roots in Free Union. “We said, ‘Is this something we’d stick with and do?’ If not, then, ‘No, don’t do it,’” says Michelle. “But we love the area and have faith in Virginia wine.”

Glass House will release about 400 cases in its first year, starting with a soft opening in June when limited supplies of Viognier and Pinot Gris will be available. They plan to bottle a Meritage blend, and Jeff looks enthusiastically towards making Barbera, too.

Tough financial times hit Delfosse

Local winery owners Claude and Genevieve Delfosse avoided a foreclosure auction of their 318-acre Nelson County property on March 30 with a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the Western District Bankruptcy Court four days earlier, according to trustee Stephen Scarce. Claude Delfosse, reached for comment, said it was “not the winery” that had filed the application. He referred all questions to his attorney, who did not immediately return calls. Chapter 11 aims at reorganizing debt and letting a business re-emerge as healthy. Delfosse said the “winery is open for business as usual.”

Michael Shaps has found a surefire way to sell Virginia wine: Open the Burgundy first. For the past seven years, Shaps, Virginia’s best-known winemaker and one of the few whose label carries his name, has been crossing the Atlantic to create red and white Burgundies with a French business partner, Michel Roucher-Sarrazin. It’s a small, but exquisite operation (about 800 cases of estate wine and another 1,000 cases of modestly priced négociant wine) that, he says, moves mostly through word of mouth—much like the Michael Shaps wines that he makes here and that encounter the prejudice facing all Virginia wines. Shaps & Roucher-Sarrazin has to get onto shelves somehow, so Shaps pays personal visits to shopkeepers in three American markets (Mid-Atlantic, New York and Boston).

“If they like the Burgundies,” he says, “they’ll try the Shaps.”

If they like the Burgundies? Well, call us a cheap date, but when Working Pour poured the 2005 Meursault for our select taste-testers, by which we mean the discerning couple with whom we drink the good stuff, we experienced nothing short of l’amour for the mellow wine that somehow carried both honey tones and minerality. Trés charmant, indeed. (If you can’t rely on us, ask Wine Spectator, which has given Shaps & Roucher-Sarrazin scores in the high 80s and low 90s.)

Shaps was headed to his winery and house in the Côte de Beaune within days of our conversation (though, full disclosure: He graciously made time to drop off a couple bottles of his $80+ wine). Regrettably, his many commitments stateside have cut down on the frequency of his trips to France. The custom crush side of Virginia Wineworks, the business he opened with Philip Stafford in 2007, is on the verge of significant expansion to as many as 12,000 cases in 2011. Meanwhile, the Virginia Wineworks wine that Shaps supervises is getting a facelift—goodbye to the Constructivist worker-guys on the label; hello to something more appealing to the ladies (the majority of wine buyers). Then there’s the high-end Michael Shaps label, not to mention the consulting he does with wineries across four states.

He admits that he overextends himself, but if his heart were the only consideration, Shaps says, “I’d be happy doing the Burgundies and Michael Shaps.” Easy to understand why—especially the Burgundy part. He met Roucher-Sarrazin in the early 1990s, when Shaps decided “to drop everything and move to France” to learn winemaking. He interned with the man only two years his senior who, in time, became his partner. And though their enterprise is costly, given the mystique of Burgundian terroir—leasing a mere two rows of vines in Vosne-Romanée, for instance, runs them about $23,000 annually, thanks to the strength of the Euro—Shaps is enchanted by the traditional ways. 

He recounts when he and Roucher-Sarrazin were finalizing the contract for their winery and gite in Meursault, “I had to rewrite an entire paragraph in French. It’s the Old World, where your handwriting is your word.” 

That’s why the wear and tear of crossing time zones fades quickly. “It takes me back to why I got into winemaking,” he says, “to something authentic.”

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The barriers keep falling for Virginia wine. First Claude Thibaut’s sparkling wine was served at the Obamas’ State Dinner. Then, earlier this month, Veritas winemaker Emily Hodson Pelton poured her 2009 Viognier for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama. The occasion was the International Women of Courage Awards. About a year ago, Pelton says, the State Department chef, Jason Larkin, visited Veritas and the region “so that he had an understanding of Virginia wines.” When the time came to plan this event, he rang Pelton.

“So honored” to be there, Pelton soon succumbed to the auspiciousness of the occasion. “At first, I was so excited that my wine was there. Then Hillary and Michelle started speaking, and I sort of forgot about my wine because I was in awe of all these strong, amazing women.” 

All roads lead to the Virginia Vineyards Association annual meeting. Well, maybe not all roads, but at least the ones that Working Pour was pursuing last week. As we headed into the Omni for talk of things like rootstock and electronic aroma meters, much on our minds was the Pinot Noir scandal that has rocked the French and California wine industries. Last month, 12 figures from the Languedoc-Roussillon region were convicted in a wide-ranging scheme to sell fake Pinot Noir to EJ Gallo, the Budweiser of wine. Gallo used the wine—actually cheaper Syrah and Merlot—in its Red Bicyclette brand, which retails for about $9. The perpetrators made about $9.5 million on the fake Pinot, which they sold to Gallo from 2006 to 2008. Naturally, U.S. litigators are now on the trail, and a class-action suit on behalf of American wine consumers is in California courts.

Given that Virginia law permits as much as 25 percent of a bottle of wine to be something other than what its label purports (Cabernet Franc, for instance, could contain Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot without requiring consumer disclosure), how are local winemakers viewing the Gallo controversy where wine drinkers bought one thing, thinking it was something else?

“Who cares?” answered the smiling Jim Law, arguably Virginia’s best winemaker, when we buttonholed him in the lobby. “If the wine tastes good, what difference does it make?” Law, whose Linden Vineyards yields 5,000 cases a year (that’s about an hour’s volume for Gallo), elaborated: “I don’t like varietal wine. People don’t want their wine to taste like a grape. To me a grape is a way of expressing terroir.”

Earlier in the week, Justin Bogaty, winemaker at Veramar Vineyard in Berryville, suggested the Gallo issue could be good for wineries like his and Law’s. “Gallo is such a big entity that things tend to get lost,” he said. “This bodes well for smaller boutique wineries. We put our name behind it and you can come meet us, as opposed to a larger corporation where someone might not know what’s going on.”

Frantz Ventre, the French winemaker at Sweeley Estate Winery in Madison, says, “You have to be true and honest to the customer.” His 2006 Cabernet Franc includes 5 percent Merlot, for instance, blended to make the wine “a bit more interesting, a bit more complex.” And though the label doesn’t spell that out, Ventre says, “we are very open to explain what’s in our wine to customers.”

In a very real way, you can trace the Gallo scandal to the 2004 movie Sideways, with its famous reverie about Pinot Noir and its impassioned condemnation of Merlot. (After Paul Giamatti’s monologue, what everyday wine drinker wouldn’t want the luxuriously delicate Pinot Noir, especially if she can get it at supermarket prices?) Indeed, Sideways was a touchstone throughout the VVA meeting. It was a boon for Napa Valley tourism, and more than one wine businessperson last week commented that the Virginia industry would welcome something similar.

It may be happening, even without Hollywood’s help. The state Wine Marketing Board reports that for 2009, total Virginia wine sales increased by 7.9 percent. Even better, sales at wineries (hello, tourist dollar) were up by 17.6 percent over the previous year. But here’s the most interesting part: In Virginia, overall wine sales rose by a comparatively modest 2.8 percent.The takeaway on all those figures? Within the state, Virginia wine is stealing market share from other wines—even the inexpensive stuff that presents itself as fancy French wine. In time, that news could be even more upsetting to the likes of Gallo than the revelation that they’ve been had.