Olivia Wilder has asked me back for The New Art of Living on Sunday. I should be on around 8:50 p.m. central time (though the show has been running late).
And Olivia’s effort was the second most popular program on the network a couple of weeks ago. I was on that one, so the question becomes: Would it have been first without me?
The wine grape world is divided into three main categories – vitis vinifera, or European-style wine grapes like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay; native grapes like concord and catawba; and hybrid grapes like chambourcin, and seyval blanc.
Why don’t you hear more about native and hybrid grapes? Because most wine made in the world is made with vinifera. It’s the easiest to grow in most of the important wine regions, easiest to make wine with, and mostly makes the best wine.
But this doesn’t mean that hybrids and native grapes (the ultimate list is here) aren’t legitimate wine grapes. More, after the jump:
Malbec, despite its surge in popularity over the past couple of years, remains a mystery to most U.S. wine drinkers. Is it supposed to be an easy drinking wine, similar to California merlot? Or is it supposed to be a little more complicated, like a mid-priced French wine?
The answer may well be the High Note (about $13), which makes room for itself between those two groups. The wine, put together by the company that brought the world Fat Bastard, isn’t completely malbec. Rather, winemaker Fernando Buscema blends the malbec with cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and petit verdot. The result is a wine with quality malbec fruitiness but more backbone than most malbecs.
Serve this everything from spaghetti to roast lamb to roast chicken. One warning, though: availability may be limited. Enough of the wine was made – the catch will be getting it into U.S. retailers.
Portuguese red wines are so little known that that they might as well be made on Mars. When’s the last time you saw a Portuguese wine on a retail shelf?
This is a shame, because Portuguese wines almost always offer value, and often tremendous value. Forget that you’ve never heard of the wine regions and that you can’t begin to pronounce the names of the grapes (most of which are also used to make port). Focus on the wines, which are food-friendly, very accessible, low in alcohol, and fruity and tannic without being overwhelming.
That’s an especially accurate description of the Vale de Bomfim (about $12), which is the third or fourth cheap, quality Portuguese red that I’ve tried this year. (Among the others: the Altano 2006). It’s a quintessential summer red wine, the kind that will pair with burgers and barbecue and long Sunday afternoons with not much to do.
• Big 2009 crop: Expect to see one of the biggest harvests since 2005 this year, reports Paul Franson in Wines & Vines. Estimates are that it will be one-half million tons bigger than 2008, and will approach the epic 2005 harvest. That one was so big that it took the state several years to work its way through all of the grapes. For wine drinkers, this should be good news by lowering grape prices and boosting quality for mid-priced wines.
• Appeals court upholds New York law: This is not unexpected, given the 2005 Supreme Court decision that legalized direct shipping between wineries and consumers didn’t lift the restriction that barred consumers from buying wine from out-of-state retailers. Still, the appeals court’s logic was interesting. It wrote that the three-tier system, which requires producers to sell to wholesalers and wholesalers to sell to retailers, prevents “the existence of a 'tied' system between producers and retailers, a system generally believed to enable organized crime to dominate the industry." Which century do the appeals court judges live in?
• What went wrong in Australia: This article, by the New York Times’ Meraiah Foley, is the best explanation I’ve seen about the crisis facing the Australian wine industry.My favorite quote: “But that wave soon turned into what Mr. Hayward described as ‘a perfect storm of laziness’ in which no one — neither wine media nor importers nor the top United States sommeliers — felt the need to learn much about Australia besides South Australian shiraz.” That’s so accurate I wish I had written it.
