Wine is the only thing that is judged without standards. Anything else - beer, jam, quilts - there’s a book that tells you what to expect.
If we judged dogs the way we judge wines, they’d murder us in our beds and rightly so. The American Kennel Club has established precise standards for 169 breeds, and you don’t hold a collie to a schnauzer standard.
Varieties vary too widely to write standards for them. Judges need to be told place names. I forever am beating this drum, and a few competitions are starting to do this, Dallas Morning News being the first to go all out.
Meantime, the best you can do is to vet reliable winemakers and study your appellations on your own.
Actually, there is nothing wrong with that he posted, though he should have created a link on deals.woot, then posted it, but you are not allowed to “referral” links, to my knowledge.
Clark Smith’s responses here and his own page, while not enough to induce me to take what I regard as a shipping risk, have certainly intrigued me enough to look for access to his wine.
Hello Everyone, Mike Faulk here (Clark’s Assistant). Clark would like to host a pot luck BBQ here in Santa Rosa, CA. We had a date of June 15, but that doesn’t seem to work for most. We have 3 dates in August - 3rd, 10th, and 31st. if any of those work for most of us.
You will find the discussion thread under the “gatherings” tab in the community section. Clark’s book "Postmodern Wine Making will be out by the August dates and it would be a great time to talk about the book. Please join the discussion if you are interested in gathering with us so we can solidify a date. Happy Wooting and we look forward to meeting you.
What a wonderful post, from a plethora of great posts today by Mr. WineSmith! this finally did it for me as I was doing my best to not buy more wine. If your Crucible shows up, I will have to partake. Thanks for your contributions to this board. In for 1!
Totally love various aspects of the website, it just lacks the actual information about the wine, even the terroir page is too unrelated.
Teach a bit more about the specific wine you are offering on the page
This can be in a quirky way aligned with the theme of the overall site, can incorporate those teaching points and why is this wine related to the brand - the message is not conveyed well yet… but the direct link to the external “buy” page without getting to some further information about the wine and why we should be drooling about it is not working well in my humble opinion.
Thanks for being part of this community btw. hope to see you during my visit to the Bay Area June 21-July 3 sometime (will be up in the wine country likely the last 3 days or so of that visit).
I just returned from some time in Tuscany and compared to what is in place in Italy, our AVAs are kind of a joke.(Not with regard to value, but amount of regulation)
I am struck by how dramatically differently the French and Italians regard terroir. To them it is EVERYTHING.
While I agree that “Napa Cab” or for that matter Grand Cru Burgundy is not necessarily a guarantee of quality, it is a good starting point for the average consumer. Unless I have tasted the wine, how am I to know what is in the bottle?
I believe the correct approach probably lies somewhere in the middle.
As an overtaxed American living in CT, I very much would like to buy great wine at a great price. I really, really want to believe that with proper adjustment of the all the variables that you describe, I can make a better wine than classified Bordeaux from grapes grown in Kansas, however, I remain skeptical.
I bought the Diamond Ridge petit sirah, I believe, one of the wines you are involved with. I really wanted to love it(Petit Sirah is one of my favorite varietals) but it just seemed flat with little bouquet or depth.
I am hopeful that that was just a bad bottle and I anxiously await the other 3.
Given your great comments, I will probably give this offering a try.
Clark, while you’re here and answering everything, I’ve got a question not directly related to this wine.
I was recently at Palmaz Vineyards and took a tour of their amazing facility, and was, as an engineer, completely blown away with the design. The entire facility is built around the gravity flow, as an alternative to using pumps. The entire facility uses no pumps for the wine all the way through bottling. It was explained that the “tannin molecules” can get agitated and not bond with the proteins the way they should from the pumps, and that gravity flow solves this issue.
Is this true? Do pumps really affect the tannic structure of a wine? I know the idea of gravity flow is a very expensive alternative, and it’s probably not worth it. I just want to know if it really does what it’s supposed to, and also know if it’s something that time in a bottle can help with.
Thanks for the feedback on the site. I think you are right about the lack of information about the wine style and technical info, which I am usually very strong on. I get a lot of suggestions from marketing people that the technical stuff gets in the way, and this is an experiment in geekiness reduction. I’m very glad to see push back from the technical crowd, with whom my heart lies.
I trust I have supplied in this discussion all you need in terms of style, ageworthiness and technical details. If not, please inquire further.
Those are good dates for me. One way to hook up with me is to come to my Barbershop Chorus Spring concert on June 22nd. We are a AA Champion chorus and have an awful lot of fun. I’ll bring some wines to share after both performances: http://chordsmen.groupanizer.com/
Otherwise, I’m generally available. I live in a 101-year-old church in downtown Santa Rosa, which would be a good place to get together. Email me at clark@winemaking411.com and we’ll work out something.
Sorry to hear that you had a disappointing experience with the DRV, and I am pretty sure you have a bad bottle. The mnost common comment on that wine is “Wow!” Let me know and we’ll get you a replacement. Do decant and breathe the wine. It’s a young beast.
The amazing thing about tasting American wines by region is how much regional character there innately is, despite the lack of regulation. Terroir really does trump technology to a very great extent.
There actually is a guy growing credible Bordeaux varieties in Kansas City, but not quite to first growth standards. I wuld point to the Montecello Meritage efforts for that, to say nothing of their Viogniers and Sangioveses, for which Thomas Jefferson recognized the potential.
In their own way, places like Iowa, Michigan, Vermont and New Mexico are now demonstrating capability to make world class wines. A healthy skepticism is indicated, but check out my reviews on www.appellationamerica.com under Best Of Appellation wine lists and you’ll be astonished. We really are living in a Golden Age of Discovery. Woe unto the complacent!
We are all still learning. Gravity flow was the was to go before electricity, and had many advantages for wine quality. Winemakers are divided on this issue, and I can only give you my observations.
When we remove VA or alcohol with reverse osmosis, the wine gets quite a bit of pumping. We nevertheless generally see striking improvement in the wines, but it’s a little hard to tell if the benefit of the adjustment is simply outweighing the detriment of pumping. My instinct is that there is some truth, but that the effect is grossly overstated.
Some of the problem with pumping is the use of carbon seal centrifugal pumps, which aerate the wine. I am inclined to feel that a delicate wine like a Pinot Noir or Sauvignon Blanc is more likely to be vulnerable in this way.
Big reds made in small batches can actually suffer from too little pumping. It is vital to dissipate the CO2 and fermentation odors from these wines, and when held in stainless or glass and never moved around, they can be quite coarse and funky. If you come across such a wine, just shake the hell out of it and you’ll be amazed at the improvement in texture.
Probably completely unrelated, but I attended a Mollydooker wine tasting last year, and one of the things the host did, was take off a glass of the wine, then plug the bottle and shake. Seems recommended by the maker for bottles less then two years old, since they bottle with Nitrogen with reduced sulfites, they want a shake to release the Nitrogen and improve the flavor.
Yes, the Mollydooker shake is quite famous, and it works. In their case, the problem arises from screwcaps, which protect the wine from oxygen, but problematically so for big reds. Here you’re not so much dissipating CO2 as aerating the wine and opening it up, plus dispelling H2S and other stinky sulfides (not related to sulfites).
Tried this at the NorCal Vintage Bordeaux tasting Saturday.
When I initially tried this, I felt it was an average California red table wine, something you’d expect to find at TJ’s in the $10-15 range. However, once it had time to breath, it really opened up, morphing into something much, much more enjoyable.
Lots of deep dark fruit, hints of spice, sweet tannins, juicy black cherry, blackberry, cocoa, somewhat complex, with a moderate finish.
