Tag Archives: regional wine

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Winecast 73: Randall Grahm and ingredient labels for wine

Randall Grahm
Randall Grahm: Labels will force winemakers to do a better job of making wine.

“The consumer has a right to know what’s in their wine”

Few people have worked harder or longer for ingredient labels on wine than Randall Grahm, who was using them on his Boony Doon wines at least a decade ago. So who better to talk to about the latest developments in adding ingredients and nutrition fact boxes?

We recorded this podcast a week ago Sunday, a couple of days before the federal government announced it would start the rulemaking process to add the labels to wine, beer, and spirits. Not surprisingly, Randall — whom I’ve known for longer than both of us would care to admit — predicted we’d get the labels sooner rather than later.

Know, too, that Randall was on his best behavior — so no name calling or punny insults. Rather, just solid, sensible reasons and analysis about ingredient and nutrition labels and how to make them work:

• One of the reasons that labels have become more accepted- — the rise of the natural wine movement, which makes a point to talk about what’s not in the wines.

• Why so much resistance still? Additives are a crutch to make wine easier to make, he said — “artificial fixes. … If you had to put everything on the label that you put in the wine, you’d have to be a much more fastidious winemaker.”

• Wine remains confusing to most consumers; labels will help make it less confusing.

• There is room for discussion about what needs to be included.  Randall suggests ingredients that remain in the wine should be listed, so yes to sulfites and grape juice additives like MegaPurple.

• Most of the objections the wine business makes to labels aren’t necessarily obstacles. It’s possible to add the information to back labels without a crisis, he said, and this comes from someone whose labels were artistic. Most big producers can afford to add the labels; perhaps there can be an exemption for smaller producers.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 15 minutes long and takes up 10 1/2 megabytes. Quality is good to excellent.

More wine podcasts:
Winecast 72: Denise Clarke and the progress — and challenges — for Drink Local
Winecast 71: Paul Tincknell and solving all of wine’s problems
Winecast 70: Ray DelMuro of Refresh Glass and recycling wine bottles

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Winecast 72: Denise Clarke and the progress — and challenges — for Drink Local

Photo od Densie Clarke
Denise Clarke

“You’re making a commitment to s special product”

Denise Clarke is one of the pioneers of the regional wine movement. She was there when we held the first Drink Local Wine conference in Dallas, worked with us for the Colorado event, and has been spreading the gospel ever since as a wine marketer and wine educator.

So who better to talk to about Drink Local, as much of the country celebrates its local wine month in October? We talked about the progress regtional wine has made, as well as the challenges that remain. Included in our discussion:

• Yes, quality continues to  improve, and those of you who haven’t tried a regional in a while should try again. Denise says she hears that a lot, and wishes wine drinkers would be more open minded.

• Hybrid grapes, which traditionally have been spurned by many winemakers and most wine drinkers, have come into their own thanks to the regional wine movement. We discussed chambourcin, which makes terrific varietal wine, but there are many others.

• Regional wine must do a better job marketing its product, focusing on what sets it apart from mainstream wine — that it’s less traditional, less formal, and more fun.

• One surprising challenge: That there are fewer wine writers interested in Drink Local — not because they aren’t interested, but that there are fewer media outlets that run regional wine writing.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 14 minutes long and takes up almost 9 megabytes. Unfortunately, the quality is not what it should be, and especially for the first minute. But bear with it..

More wine podcasts:
Winecast 71: Paul Tincknell and solving all of wine’s problems
Winecast 70: Ray DelMuro of Refresh Glass and recycling wine bottles
Winecast 69: Nick Vorpagel and the dilemma of the independent wine retailer

Winebits 743: Local wine, best-selling wine, technology

tash 80
It was difficult enough writing a football game story on this; can’t imagine what tasting notes would have been like.

This week’s wine news: A study finds local wine may not be all that local, plus supermarket wine dominates a best-seller list and the Trash-80, which helped the WC get to where he is today

Not so local: Canadian researchers have found that wine drinkers define local wine differently than they do local food. The study, from Brock University, said a majority of wine drinkers consider a wine local if it comes from anywhere in North America and Canada. This is in marked contrast to local food, where a majority of those surveyed said local was with 100 km (62 miles) of their home. This is not surprising, given what we learned during Drink Local. It was always difficult to get food writers and bloggers interested in the project; they seemed to think that wine wasn’t local the way that food was. It was one thing to actually see the pig that would be turned into that night’s pork shoulder roast and another to understand that wine could be local when grapes were just grapes. It’s worth noting, as Becca Yeamans does in her analysis of the study, that this is not necessarily a representative sample of all wine drinkers. Still, it does take a step in figuring out what’s going on with the perception of local wine.

Hot brands: A host of supermarket wine brands heads this year’s Hot Brands, compiled by the company that owns the Wine Spectator. Among the wines are Josh Cellars, Bota Box Nighthawk, Barefoot Fruitscato, Bread & Butter, Stella Rosa, La Marca, 19 Crimes, Kim Crawford, and Santa Margherita. The formula to identify a Hot Brand is complicated, but the gist is that these wines showed tremendous growth at a time when wine itself did not. And what do they have in common, save for their lower prices? Almost all are supermarket brands, which shows again how much the wine business is changing.

High-tech: John Roach, the man who helped make the personal computer ubiquitous — and who sent the WC down the rabbit hole with the portable TRS-80 100 — died last week. I mention it here because much of what the post-modern world has evolved into, including the blog, depends on Roach’s vision. The Trash-80, as we called it, was not the first personal computer, but the portable version was the first I used. Originally, it had acoustic couplers, so I had to find a pay phone to file a story. The upgraded version had a phone jack, so at least that part was easy. The rest was never easy, and that includes reading what I typed on that impossibly small screen.

Winebits 724: Happy 14th birthday to the blog

local wineThis week’s wine news: Stuff that makes the WC shake his head, because some things never seem to change — even after 14 years

Hooray for Texas wine: No less than the Wine Enthusiast — about as Winestream as it gets — sings the praises of Texas wine: “Over the last 30-plus years, Texas winemakers have honed their craft and the state’s wine has established regional and national esteem.” Wow. Who knew? (Yes, sarcasm.) What’s most annoying is not that Texas wine deserves recognition, but that every time an article like this appears in a major wine magazine, it seems like big news. Which, of course, to those of us who have been advocating for Drink Local, it isn’t. Right, gang?

Love those chateau: Talk to winemakers and marketing types, and they still insist that putting a castle on a wine label is a smart thing to do. Now, a British study reinforces that approach, because premiumization: Consumers judge the quality of wine by how much it costs and what the label looks like. In blind taste tests, however, they couldn’t tell the difference between £6 (about US$8) and £36 (about US$48) bottles. As if that isn’t depressing enough: Corks and heavy bottles are thought to denote quality, and one-third of those surveyed ranked a £10 wine (about US$13) with an image of a French château on the label as more premium than one costing almost 10 times as much.

Where is Romania? Here’s a long story blaming the woes facing the Romanian wine industry on the Cold War, when too much of its wine was cheaply and poorly made. The problem with that excuse, as we’ve seen before: Who buying wine today remembers that? Communism fell more than 30 years ago — two generations in wine drinking time.  The reasons aren’t complicated: Declining wine consumption, lots of wine from lots of other places, and the reluctance of importers, wholesalers, and retailers in the U.S. to handle something that no one has ever heard of.

Pat Brennan, 1942-2021

Pat brennan
Pat Brennan, 1942-2021

Pat was a Texas wine pioneer, but more importantly, he was a genuinely nice guy

Pat Brennan, who died last week after a long illness, made his mark in the Texas wine business in any number of ways. Perhaps most importantly, he helped make viognier the state’s signature white grape, and his Brennan viognier was not just one of Texas’ best, but one of the best in the U.S.

Pat did such a good job with viognier that the one time he made a chardonnay, it sat on the tasting room shelf. “We educated our customers so well about viognier that they didn’t want to buy the chardonnay,” he said with a laugh.

But there was much, much more to Pat than that:

• A tremendous sense of humor, even when the joke was on him. I first met Pat during one of those wonderfully 100-degree Texas summer days when he was pouring his wine at a steak cook-off in a town called Hico. It was the first vintage of the viognier, and the polite thing to write in an obituary is to note that it wasn’t Pat’s best effort. Which he knew, and always laughed about when I told the story over the years to people tasting his wine for the first time.

• A genuinely nice guy, who always went out of his way to help others understand and appreciate Texas wine. It didn’t matter if it was someone in his tasting room or wine writers – Pat would open the bottles and start talking about what he was trying to do in Texas. Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post and I once drove the two-plus hours to Comanche to taste Pat’s wines because it was so much fun to do.

• And then there was Comanche, which is not only in the middle of the nowhere but was dry when Pat opened the winery there in 2001. That meant he couldn’t sell his wine from the tasting room, cutting off a key source of revenue. Pat didn’t gripe about it much; he just worked with others to get the law changed, which happened several years later.

• The cleanest winery I’ve ever seen – operating room clean. Which was not surprising, since Pat was a physician. In those days, regional wineries that were that spic and span were few and far between.

So if wine is about memories, and I’m convinced that it is, I’ll always remember Pat Brennan.

Photo: Carole Topalian via Edible Austin

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Winecast 62: Kimberly Johnson, Philosophy Winery

Kimberly Johnson
Kimberly Johnson: Local wine has to make itself part of local food and local agriculture

Kimberly Johnson and the challenges of running a new, small regional winery during the pandemic — and when your daughter doesn’t drink wine

Kimberly Johnson and Denise Roles Matthews picked a terrific time to start Philosophy Winery. a small regional producer in Maryland — just before the beginning of the pandemic.

Which, oddly enough, wasn’t a problem. Their first wine, a 2019 rose, sold out.

“I have to say, we did very well,” says Johnson, Philosophy’s winemaker. “Everyone was home, they had nothing to do, but to buy on-line, whether it be wine or from Amazon. … We also hand delivered.”

So good news for Drink Local, despite the circumstances. In this podcast, we talked about the challenges facing small and regional producers these days — as well as what do when your daughter doesn’t like wine”

• It’s not enough to start a winery with good intentions. Johnson says she and Matthews treated the process like any other startup, complete with detailed business plan. Which, as she found out, is not necessarily a common practice.

• Local wine needs to make itself part of the local agriculture and food movements. The goal, says Johnson, is to convince consumers that wine is as local as eggs, cheese, and vegetables.  This means using local grapes.

• One key to Philosophy’s success: Selling at festivals, farmer’s markets, and the like — just like other local food products. You have to give consumers a chance to taste different things, she says.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 13 minutes long and takes up about 8 megabytes. Quality is good — I’m kind of muted, but  Johnson is loud and clear.

Winebits 705: Drink Local, glass bottles, ancient wine

ancient wine
The Greek god Apollo apparently enjoyed a cup or two wine when he wasn’t spreading plague.

This week’s wine news: Is regional wine coming to the wine business’ rescue? Plus, one more analysis dissects glass bottles and wine may be even more ancient than we thought

Regional wine to the rescue? The mainstream media has again discovered Drink Local, offering it as a way to enjoy wine without crowds and high prices as the pandemic ends. Plus, writes Erica Lamberg in USA Today, “Just keep in mind your wine-tasting and winery visits may be different that you’re used to. But that can be a good thing.” Which, of course, is what those of us who support regional wine have been saying for years. Lamberg suggests Colorado, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, as well as Oregon – though it’s hardly off the beaten path. The first three are first-rate suggestions, and it’s especially nice to see Pennsylvania – not among Drink Local’s best-known states – on the list.

No more glass? Emilie Steckenborn, writing in the British trade magazine Harpers, doesn’t mince words: “The sustainability wave is sweeping across the world, and there’s hardly an industry that could see a more radical transformation than food and beverages. While consumers are happy to see changes in food packaging, the wine sector – with 19 billion glass bottles sold into the global market annually – is a slow mover.” Which, of course, is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. Still, that the article appears where it does, and that it speaks so forcefully, is a sign that more and more people who are part of wine see the need for change.

How old was it? Wine drinking in Europe may date to 4300 BC in prehistoric Greece – much earlier than previously thought. Archaeologists working in northern Greece have found thousands of ancient grape seeds and pomace – residue from pressed grapes – in the remains of a burned house near Philippi. That may be a couple of thousand years earlier than first suspected. As such, it’s the earliest evidence of wine drinking in Europe, and researchers expect the work to shed more light on the daily activities of ancient Greeks. So far, there is no evidence that the three-tier system existed in ancient Greece, but that’s probably just an oversight.

Photo: “Greece-0895 – Wide-bowled Drinking Cup” by archer10 (Dennis) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0