Update: What Calistoga means to Champagne

After my post yesterday suggesting that a new US wine law might make "California Champagne" illegal, I had input from two players: Korbel director of winemaking Paul Ahvenainen and Sam Heitner, director of the US Office of Champagne.

Not surprisingly, they don't agree on exactly what last week's TTB ruling means.

A recap: Calistoga Cellars will have to change its brand name on wines that do not include at least 85% grapes from Calistoga. It will not be grandfathered in, and this will apply in the future to any wineries with geographic terms in their names, should those places become official American Viticultural Areas.

One thing that won't happen is what I speculated yesterday, that Korbel will immediately have to stop calling its wine "California Champagne." Ahvenainen pointed out that Champagne is not a wine region in the United States, and the ruling at present only applies to US wine regions.

But while the US won Korbel's right to continue misleading consumers in trade talks with the European Union in 2005, that concession isn't necessarily going to be the law forever, Heitner said.

Heitner said that, in theory, the 2005 agreement came after the first round of talks that are supposed to have a second round. In fact, Heitner said the sides were supposed to reconvene within 90 days, though apparently that didn't happen.

"In theory, the EU and the US are continuing to talk about this," Heitner said.

Protecting Champagne, along with Burgundy, Port, Chablis and other wine regions whose names are used as brand names in the US, may not be high priority for the EU, but it's not an issue that's going away. And the positions of some of the US players have changed since 2005.

Most of the California wine industry, along with several members of Congress, lined up against Calistoga Cellars in support of the new TTB regulation. It's hard for me to see those folks turning around and strongly supporting Korbel (and Constellation, which makes Cook's) for doing exactly the same thing Calistoga Cellars was doing -- implying that its wine is made some place that it's not.

Heitner pointed out that as recently as 20 years ago, few Americans cared about this sort of law. The growth in power of the US wine industry, and the growing interest among American consumers in wine, has changed that.

"We're very impressed with the great strides the US wine industry has made in the last 20 years," Heitner says. "The protection of the Calistoga AVA is the latest in a series of steps that shows that the US wine industry cares where the wine comes from. I don't think there's any other country in the world that has made as many great steps in the last 20 years. At the same time, it would behoove the US to recognize worldwide regions such as Champagne and Port and others. The United States has a loophole that allows the misuse of Champagne on wines from California. But that is directly in conflict with the majority of other countries in the world."

A major part of Korbel's argument, as made by Ahvenainen, is that "champagne" no longer means a place, but has become a generic word, like Kleenex or Frisbee. That would be fine if growers in Champagne agreed, but they don't. The company that has been telling people for decades that Champagne isn't a place now says its argument is correct because people believe it. I'm always amused when people use the ignorance of the American public as an argument, but just because many people think aliens live among us or President Obama is a Muslim born in Africa doesn't make it so.

The question is, will France, the EU or the Office of Champagne approach the TTB and try to get the Calistoga ruling applied to European wine regions? "We continuously communicate with the TTB about multiple issues," is all that Heitner would say.

"The idea that there are Calistogas and Paso Robles -- at the end of the day, this is something the US embraces, that wine comes from a place," Heitner said.

"California Champagne" is now illegal, right?

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure about this, but I think the federal government might have made "California Champagne" illegal last week.

What happened was that the TTB (Alcohol Tax & Trade Bureau) finally published a rule on the application for Calistoga as an AVA. The TTB made the right call, requiring wines that say "Calistoga" on the front label to actually be made from at least 85% Calistoga grapes.

An important part of the decision was that Calistoga Cellars requested to be "grandfathered in," and was denied. Even though the winery was using that brand name before Calistoga became an officially recognized wine region, it will have to change its name if it doesn't use Calistoga grapes.

Moreover, this new rule applies to all AVAs, not just Calistoga.

Regarding Korbel and Cook's California Champagne -- why wouldn't this ruling also apply to them?

"Champagne" is a viticultural area recognized around the world. Korbel has always successfully lobbied the US, in trade talks with Europe, to allow it to continue calling its wines "California Champagne" because it established its business using that product name, even though almost every other sparkling winemaker in the world doesn't need that crutch.

But "Champagne" is not Korbel's brand name, or Cook's. If Calistoga Cellars has to change its brand name because of this ruling, why wouldn't Korbel have to simply take the word "Champagne" off the bottle?

As I said, I'm not a lawyer. I welcome those who are to read the ruling here in the Federal Register and find a clause that preserves Korbel's and Cook's right to continue misleading consumers. I can't find one.

And for my readers in France ... time to hire some lawyers of your own and chew into this ruling. Bon appetit.

Wine reviewers should acknowledge "crowd pleasers"

I was reading a book I hate last week, by a fellow wine blogger, and it got me to thinking about how many wine critics are failing the public.

The book is "A Discovery of Witches," by Deborah Harkness, who writes the excellent Good Wine Under $20 blog.

I hate the book -- but not because it's bad. It's just not my kind of book. I want vampires to be ruthless bloodsuckers, not research scientist/philanthropists who host yoga classes for self-improving demons and witches. I want vampires to drain humans of their blood and throw them aside like empty beer cans, not fall so helplessly in love with them that they don't want to defile their perfect relationship with a tawdry act like sex.

So instead of finishing the book, I picked up the antidote: "Solomon's Vineyard," a noir novel from 1941 that was banned in the US for more than a decade. Now THAT was my kind of book: tough dialogue, mean characters, steamy atmosphere, murders and retribution. And it revolves around a vineyard run by a suspicious religious cult.

Sadly, it wasn't a great book, and not because of the period-authentic racism or implied pedophilia. It fell apart on the ending, and even though I like characters hard-boiled, this was a tad more acidic than I prefer. But I devoured it quickly, because it's the KIND of book I like, whereas Deborah's book I'll never finish.

Can you see the wine analogy here? Let me spell it out.

Pussified vampires are huge sellers, like big-bodied Cabernets or White Zinfandel. Fist-first noir stories are a niche with fierce advocates, like savory, cool-climate Syrah or red wines from the Loire. If you took 100 people off the street and forced them to read both books, the great majority would vote for vampires doing yoga.

However, I'm a critic, so I get to say not only that I like one book better than the other, but that it IS better, because it's in the style that I prefer.

Food for thought?

A whole meal with Sauternes: Can life be too sweet?

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Most people think of Sauternes as a dessert wine, with the famous exception that it's great with foie gras.
But can one drink Sauternes through an entire meal? Obviously you can, because plenty of Americans drink Coke with dinner.

A better question is, what's it like to drink Sauternes with an entire meal, with no foie gras or dessert?

Aline Baly, whose family owns Chateau Coutet, invited me to Benu in San Francisco to find out.

Why? Because Sauternes producers face a challenge getting their wine off the separate-but-unequal dessert wine list. Baly wants to call it "gold wine," rather than sweet wine, and she'd like to see "gold wines" get their own portion of the main wine list alongside the, er, not-so-sweet wines.

It sounds like wishful thinking, but actually it makes sense. As a group, Americans are tremendous hypocrites about sweetness in wine. We talk dry and drink sweet. People claim they don't want sweet wines, but Kendall Jackson Vintners Reserve Chardonnay is consistently one of our top sellers, and it tastes a lot sweeter than many Spatlese Rieslings. And back to Coke with dinner -- you don't see that much in Europe. Baly is just suggesting that people openly order what they actually want.

I let Baly do much of the ordering for me, as I often do with wine dinners. But usually the winery representative chooses no-brainer complementary dishes. Baly suggested pork belly and lamb dishes, and I was intrigued.

Sadly, she had to watch me eat all that yummy stuff while eating steamed fish herself because of a stomach problem she picked up in China. And she barely had any wine, though my wife and I tried to make up for her.

Baly brought 3 vintages of Chateau Coutet: a 1989, a 2006 and a 2007 ($60). You can buy the last, and best, one here. And my sponsor, which doesn't have the '07 yet, does have a good price on the 2004.

The '07 was clearly the best vintage of the three: it tasted of apricot jam and honeycomb with appealing minerality and good acidity. I enjoyed drinking the '89 because of its complexity, but the '07 was almost as good now and will probably outstrip the '89 eventually. It was significantly richer and more intense than the '06 because 2007 was a humid year that allowed plenty of botrytis ("noble rot") to develop in the 95-acre vineyard.

Here's what we had, and how well the Sauternes went:

Barrel-aged cocktails: the next big thing

 Bonnie & Clyde at left; Cortez the Killer at right.

Last week I finally tried the next big thing in cocktails: barrel-aged cocktails.

Blackbird, on Market St. in San Francisco, started barrel-aging Martinez cocktails (the cocktail that evolved into the Martini) last fall, but sold out because everyone needed to try them. So now they have two new ones.

The Bonnie & Clyde is excellent and shows why one would want to barrel-age a cocktail in the first place -- to smoothly integrate the components in a way that a quick shake with ice simply cannot do.

An interesting aspect of this drink is that the base spirit -- High West Silver Whiskey -- was never aged in wood barrels, so that keeps the drink from getting a double dose of wood. High West is actually made in Utah, which is akin to making pork sausage in Israel.

The Utah whiskey is blended with Dolin white vermouth, an organic chamomile liqueur and baked apple bitters that came from a bartending specialty supplier.

What was best about it is that, if I couldn't see the ingredients written on the wall, I would have been guessing for a while. It had apple and chamomile notes, and the whiskey was so well-integrated that the drink had body but no bite at all.

The cocktail is made up in large batches and then aged in used rye barrels for four weeks. Some of the alcohol evaporates, so it's actually lower in proof than a freshly made version would be.

Blackbird's other barrel-aged cocktail showed the hazard of four weeks of aging together. It has a great name, Cortez the Killer, but is so dominated by Luna Azul Blanco Tequila that it's hard to taste even echoes of the other two spirits, one of which (Bonal Gentiane Quina Aperitif) is particularly delicate. That drink also has an overly woody taste; I left most of it on the bar.

San Francisco is not at the forefront of this trend; Robert Simonson wrote in the New York Times last month that it came from Portland via Australia.

Unfortunately for my readers in the wine industry, it's hard to imagine repurposing a used wine barrel in this way; they're just too big. But maybe I'm not ambitious enough. Cocktails for 1000, anyone?

How to succeed in the drinks business

This is a tale of two women, both drinks entrepreneurs.

Both found themselves out of a job, so they created products in their kitchen that weren't on the market before.

But the products are very different -- and so are their business results.

Nora Egger creates Elixir floral infusions in Cleveland using natural ingredients; it takes 15,000 rose petals to make a 9 ounce bottle of her Damascan Rose elixir.

"I make 40 gallons at a time," says Egger, 33, who was laid off from an international management recruiting job. "We manually fill, sticker, label; everything."

Nikki Halibur, co-founder of Adult Beverage Company, doesn't know what kind of vodka goes into Adult Chocolate Milk -- an outside company takes care of that. She knows the milk is shelf-stable, but doesn't know where it's from, what the vodka was made of or how many times it was distilled.

The products taste very different, of course -- the rose elixir is one of the best floral products I've ever had, with a strong rose essence, delicious in sparkling water and just waiting to be used by cocktail experts.

Adult Chocolate Milk is also the best of its kind I've ever had. I can honestly say I've never had a better combination of shelf-stable milk, generic industrial grain neutral spirit and chocolate so mild that you can barely taste it. It's like a not so tasty, provocatively named Bailey's Irish Cream.

The company's ad slogan invites you to "Re-taste your youth," but unfortunately in my youth shelf-stable milk was still rare, so in order to achieve this beverage folks had to add grain neutral spirit to reconstituted powdered milk. Still, this flavor really might take some of y'all back to the good ole days: red-faced parents lying on the floor, screaming fights at all hours, the sound of shattered glass, Mommy explaining why you can't see Daddy anymore.

Anyway, you can read the press release for Adult Chocolate Milk, as an Arizona Republic writer rewrote it for a national news audience, and USA Today picked it up. (The writer actually got something wrong, because Halibur told me there was no actual milk in creator Tracy Reinhardt's original recipe, but who cares about how the stuff is made? That's kind of the point of this post.)

You'll note that Adult Chocolate Milk is already in 300 stores. Halibur told me that after making just 7000 cases in the first three months of production, the company made 8000 cases in January, as the product got national attention, thanks to the fact that it's being trumpeted by a Real Housewife who earned her money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it. Turn your sound on to check out the website: I like the funky song a lot. Seriously.

Meanwhile, Elixir products are barely in stores on the East Coast, and haven't found a West Coast distributor, though you can order directly from the company here. Unfortunately there ain't no party going on at this website; you can practically taste the absence of Hollywood cash.

So the moral of the story is, if you want to get attention in the drinks business, don't waste your time sourcing great ingredients or making an artisanal product. Find the right product name and get it to Hollywood, and you're all set.

Food-wine pairing apps: tyranny in your pocket

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I get emails every week inviting me to write about some new wine or food related app. Recently one listed several of its recommended food and wine pairings.

I disagreed with them, not because they were bad, but because they were prescriptive and unimaginative. Porterhouse steak -- Cabernet Sauvignon. Thank you, I needed to spend $2.99 to learn that.

The thing is, I prefer Pinot Noir with steak, and not because I'm weird; it's a pairing first recommended to me some years ago by a sommelier at Bern's Steak House, an institution that should know a thing or two about the topic.

And that got me to thinking about the whole concept of a food-wine pairing app.

There are two extremist theories of food and wine pairing. There's the "perfect pairing" theory, espoused by many glossy magazines. Here's a recipe, and with it you should drink not just Sauvignon Blanc, but Loire Sauvignon Blanc -- and not just that, but this one particular Sancerre.

And there's the diametrically opposed "anything goes" theory, usually espoused by people fed up with the "perfect pairing" theory. This theory says if you want to drink Cabernet Sauvignon with steamed crab, go right ahead.

As is usually the case, the truth is in the middle. Most foods will be good with a wide range of wines, but not an unlimited range. With crab, I recommend Chardonnay, Viognier, sake, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Muscadet, my list could go on and on ... but it would never include Malbec or Syrah or any other heavy red.

However, a great chef could take that as a challenge and could make a Syrah-friendly crab dish if she really wanted to. I was reminded of that last week at Skool restaurant in San Francisco, where chef Toshihiro Nagano had been tasked to come up with pairings for Tamas Estates Central Coast Zinfandel 2008.

It wasn't a great assignment for a seafood restaurant -- come up with foods that will best showcase a $10 Zinfandel. When I saw the menu, I thought it would never work.

One dish was Coca Flat Bread with Aji-Himono, Caramelized Onion, Goat Cheese, Sun Dried Tomato, Ume-Olive Tapenade and Local Greens. Aji-Himono (dried horse mackerel) is very fishy; I love mackerel and other fishy fish, but it usually isn't great with red wine, and goat cheese doesn't help.

Another dish was Sauteed Local Black Cod with Tamas Zin Reduction and Japanese Mushrooms. Black cod is so delicate, I was sure the wine -- and maybe the sauce -- would overwhelm it.

The only sure-fire semi-hit was Washugyu Beef with Tamas Zin Reduction and Flash-Charred Brussels Sprouts. Beef and Zin, sure; I only doubted the sprouts.

Of course I was wrong about all three. The black cod dish best showed the Zinfandel, brightening its fruit. The flat bread was delicious and brought out more body and texture in the Zin. And the beef made the Zin taste murky -- but the Brussels sprouts were fine with the wine.

Which brings me back to my point. Can you imagine a wine-pairing app that would show "Black Cod -- Zinfandel"? It worked because of the sauce and the mushrooms, and because the chef tasted this particular wine. It might not have worked with a more expensive Zinfandel that might have been heavier or spicier.


But the nature of apps isn't to put Evan Goldstein by your side when you order, asking you how much salt is in the dish or whether or not the wine is barrel-fermented. It might irritate the iPhone user, but all this stuff matters.

Instead, you get "Risotto -- Barolo." Well, what if the wine list doesn't have Barolo? What if you don't like Barolo? Can you dial up another choice?

Food and wine pairing is mysterious and counterintuitive and, despite the title of Evan's book on the topic, rarely perfect. Psychologically, that's the reason some people obsess on it, because the success rate isn't great. We are intermittently reinforced with something like goat cheese-roasted beets-Sauvignon Blanc that works so beautifully that we keep trying to recreate the magic.

I don't know if the medium of apps can deliver this message. I would trust the chef or sommelier of a restaurant to choose a pairing rather than any wine or food expert I know who hasn't tasted the dish in question.

When cooking at home, you can start with the simple principles, there for a reason: fish/white wine; red meat/red wine. But you quickly pour on the complications: sauces, spices, more or less fat, different styles of wine.

I rarely write about food and wine pairing because it is so complicated, and because I don't have a comfortably extreme view like the two theories above. When I want to showcase a wine at its best, I try to pick the right food for it; recently I opened a bunch of Mourvedre-based wines with cassoulet because they're both earthy and a little gamy and the Mourvedre would bring some nice spice. Was it perfect? Of course not. If I had a test kitchen, I might make 10 different Mourvedre-friendly dishes only to learn that some went best with one wine, and others with another.

All I'm saying here is that if you have a pairing app that tells you One Dish -- One Wine, immutably, with no wiggle room, it's a tyrant in your pocket. It's time for your own revolution.