Blind Muscat's Cellarbook

Truly Interesting Tastings

Wine writers and other folks in the trade go to a lot of tastings. Besides the attraction of free booze in daylight hours, for the people into ratings numerology, they're a handy way to keep score; for the rest of us, they're a handy way to keep current with trends, styles and producers. But every now and then, there's a tasting that's truly eye-opening, and I've been lucky enough to go to two of them recently, both involving sparkling wine.

In the Spirit

Our household received our first holiday card of the season in the mail today. Not from anyone in either of our families, not from old friends, but from the fine folks at StaVIn. purveyors of an endless array of oak alternative products--staves, beans, dust, anything you can make out of oak, they make it and sell it in a big way. Only in my case, they sell it in a small way--a couple 8 ounce bags of cubes a year, enough to perk up certain wines in neutral old barrels.

Sure, this card is less than personal, even though it has facimile signatures of all the staff inside. But what I love about getting their card every year for the last decade is that it reminds me that I'm part of the wine industry, not just as a writer but as a (tiny little) producer. It's a very warm, fuzzy feeling, just right for the holidays.

I know not everybody who writes about wine feels this way--it's common to feel like an outsider looking in, and I think many folks feel that distance helps with objectivity. Everybody's free to have their own take on this; there's no right answer. But for me, identifying with the industry and its fate, its ups and downs, feels right; it's the winemakers and the growers and the tasting room volunteers and, yes, the oak alternative vendors who are my reference point, probably more than the cohort of writers who do the same thing I do. I have no beef with the writers; just a different kind of bond with the hands-on participants.

So thanks, StaVin, and happy holidays to you and the rest of the folks who put good wine on all our tables.

2007 Cooper Mountain Reserve Pinot Gris

Mouthfeel is a definite growth industry in the wine business, both for wineries and winemakers wanting their products to make a viscous impression and for the suppliers who have put dozens of products on the market designed to  do that very thing. Ten years ago, mouthfeel was an afterthought; now it's front and center--and on the sides and back of your mouth as well.

I will admit to being a mouthfeel man, and I'm especially fond of encountering good mouth in relatively delicate wines, whites like low-alcohol German Rieslings, for example. And so I was smitten a while back by a bottle of the Cooper Mountain 2007 20th Anniversary Reserve Pinot Gris from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. If ever a whole category of wine was mouthfeel-free, it has to be the tide of watery Pinot Grigio, imported and domestic, that has been sweeping the country lately. This is the same grape, and a tactile world apart.

Legalize Cachaça!

When you distill sugar cane into liquor, you get rum, right?

No, no, no. Rum is what you get from distilling molasses, after that gooey dark stuff gets made from the cane. When you simply ferment and distill the juice of the sugar cane itself, you get cachaça, the Brazilian national spirit. And when you do it right, you get something very much like a sugar cane eau de vie--clear, un-oaked, fresh, fruity and aromatic, smooth as silk.

Winery Cat, R.I.P.

A great number of wineries, especially in the Napa Valley, make a big deal out of their resident dogs. Here at subterranean cellars, we've always had a winery cat, the same one since the beginning of our 12-year run--an infectious, seriously orange Manx-based critter named Roughy, short for Orange Roughy (since a fish name seemed all too appropriate for a cat and his food-crazed owners).


My parents were farm people from southern Indiana, and they passed on to me the notion that household animals had to earn their keep, not just be decorative. Which is why I've never understood winery dogs. I mean, do they herd grapevines, or what? I suspect they mainly make their owners seem more virile. Cats catch mice, as Roughy did in my winemaking garage more than once--though of course what he then did was bring the still-living, squirming rodent inside, show it off to us, and then chase it around the house, until it disappeared under the couch. But he had the right idea.

Here Comes My 16th Nervous Grapedown

You may have noticed -- both of you -- that this has become a derelict blog in the last few months. I've got my reasons: a serious, protracted health adventure, involving (as usual) life-saving drugs that are worse than the underlying disease; the need to still make a living, which has meant prioritizing paid work, which this is not; negotiating two book contracts, both of which seem headed for signing; and the usual, universal distractions, like trying to figure out why Olympia Snowe has become the most important legislator in the United States. I mean, my derelict blog gets to more people than vote for her.

But I have high hopes. In October, I plan to upgrade the status of this blog to spotty, at least once a week; and in November, the bar will be raised to erratic publication, maybe twice a week; and by December, stable if less than daily. All I have to do to achieve these lofty goals is get my home grape crush out of the way.

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Death Panels for Napa Cab

Santa Rosa, CA, September 2 -- Dan Berger, prominent wine writer and frequent critic of high-alcohol, high-extract Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, has announced the creation of wine industry "Death Panels" to pass judgment on whether wine lovers and collectors should bother to hold onto recent vintages of these highly-prized (and highly-priced) wines.

"Sarah Palin, who made up the whole death panel thing about health care reform," says Berger, "is an idiot, but the idea of cutting off life support for these zombie wines makes a lot of sense."

Muscat's Monthly Morsel: Label Approval Follies

Careful readers of these Morsels have no doubt noticed that Blind Muscat does occasionally stretch the truth. Engage in some poetic and enological license. Just flat make stuff up. But this one is entirely honest: a day in the Orwellian world of TTB label approval.