Calistoga is a place, but Champagne is not

Congratulations to the TTB for deciding that Calistoga is a place after all -- but only because the locals speak English.

After a 6 year legal battle, the federal agency in charge of wine labels agreed that Calistoga is a wine region that can be used as an American Viticultural Area.

Anyone who has spent any time in Napa Valley knows this is a just decision -- the climate is much different in Calistoga than neighboring St. Helena. The irony is, I wonder how many producers will put Calistoga on their labels (Chateau Montelena apparently is already planning to). It's a nice town, but it's also one of the hottest parts of Napa Valley. I might be more inclined to buy a Napa Valley Cabernet than a Calistoga Cabernet, because I would fear roasted fruit.

In making the decision, the TTB ruled against Calistoga Cellars, which now has 3 years to either start using Calistoga grapes or change its brand name.

I'm not sympathetic. Calistoga Cellars has only been around for about a decade, and -- how can I put this politely -- it's not that good, either in quality or marketing savvy. It's just one more mediocre small winery in a valley that has no shortage of them, and it was fighting to prevent consumers from learning where their wine's grapes came from.

Now that this decision has been made, can we get the TTB to acknowledge that Champagne is also a place?

The argument is always made that Korbel and Cook's and Andre have spent millions marketing Champagne as part of the names, so they're grandfathered in.

That's just wrong. Korbel is Korbel (I like their brut rose), not Korbel Champagne. If they had to take Champagne off the label tomorrow, does anyone really think some housewife in Iowa will stop buying it? "Oh my God, I thought this was the same as Cristal, but it's only sparkling wine."

I have contempt for Gallo, which owns Andre, and Constellation, which owns Cook's, on this issue. These corporations are simply deceiving consumers. At least Korbel uses the methode champenoise. Andre and Cook's are carbonated wine.

French trade organizations have been complaining about this for years, but the US always digs in its heels to defend Gallo and Constellation. As a nation, we are wrong on this.

The TTB declared Calistoga a place because winegrowers with a few decades of experience think it might have unique terroir. Champagne houses have been making wine for centuries. The rest of the world recognizes its terroir. It's time for us to do the same.

Why Amazon won't sell wine -- the real story

Everybody in the wine world felt something when Amazon.com announced in October that it was canceling its plan to sell wine. Wine lovers and small wineries gnashed their teeth while retailers, distributors and wine.com popped corks.

At the time, everyone (including the Wall Street Journal) thought it was because of the maze of state regulations.

I learned this week of an issue completely unrelated to wine that had far greater repercussions for the world's largest internet retailer: sales tax. Not just on wine, but on everything.

Currently Amazon collects sales tax for only five states: Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota and Washington. It gets away with not collecting sales tax in the huge California market because it has no brick-and-mortar shop here.

However, in order to ship wine from California -- which was the plan -- Amazon would have had to open a retail outlet to comply with state law. Wine.com has one in Berkeley for exactly this reason. (Wine.com also has a shop in New York that's so obviously for legal requirements that it will not take cash.)

The problem is, once that California store was open, even if it was only 100 square feet with two items for sale, Amazon the company would have become a California retail shop for the purposes of state tax law, and would have had to start collecting sales tax on everything sold in the Golden State.

One of the main reasons Amazon is so attractive to consumers is its low prices. Adding 8.25% to the price of everything in California would eliminate much of that. The company calculated that the profit it made from selling wine nationwide wouldn't offset the potential loss of business from California alone.

Moreover, the sales tax issue would quickly have compounded. Once cash-strapped state legislatures in Florida and Texas and everywhere else realized California was collecting sales tax from Amazon, they would have reached for their share of the pie.

It's easy to say Amazon could have sold only wines from Washington and New York -- where they're already collecting sales tax -- and Oregon, which has no sales tax. There are some great wines from those states, but how big is the market for them? Amazon doesn't like to lose, but in this case, it would never have been the go-to wine website, not when consumers could go to wine.com and buy brands they already know.

Amazon's wine initiative is dead for now. But keep an eye on the California budget crisis, which is becoming like the never-ending TV show "24." (There's a bomb! A virus! A mole! How can we survive the hour!) There has been a lot of opposition to imposing sales tax on websites because the Internet industry is so important here. If that position ever changes, and Amazon has to start collecting sales taxes anyway, wine lovers might get an unexpected benefit.

Beer drinkers pretend to be wine drinkers

Americans claim we drink more wine than beer, but don't believe us. We're still a nation of beer drinkers who lie to ourselves.

Gallup has been running an opinion survey on alcohol since 1939. A couple of years ago the poll got attention because for the first time, more survey respondents named wine as their favorite beverage, rather than beer. This was also true in 2009.

Numbers tell a very different story. In 2008, 705 million gallons of wine were sold in the United States -- compared to 6,628 million gallons of beer. That's more than 9 times as much.

So either the average beer drinker consumes 9 times as much as the average wine drinker -- not impossible, I grant you -- or, more likely, a whole lot of people claim they prefer wine when they've got a fridge full of Blue Moon (a MillerCoors product, FYI.)

One thing hasn't changed about Americans' drinking habits in 70 years. This year 36% of American adults claimed to drink no alcohol at all; the figure has stayed between 35 and 40 percent for decades.

Of course, since beer drinkers were already lying about preferring wine ... makes you wonder how many empty booze bottles are found behind the homes of "teetotallers."

Blind tasting -- it's not just for wine

This week I've been having a discussion with a friend on Facebook who claims that all red wines taste the same. He's across the country from me, so I had to send him blind-tasting instructions by email, and it occurred to me that the concept is worth sharing.

I love blind tasting, and not just with wine. Whether it's bottled water, sea salt, olive oil, coffee -- if there are three different items to compare, I want to get my mouth involved.

Some of the joy comes from discovering cheaper items that are just as good or better than more expensive items. But I just like comparing. This is why the Coke vs. Pepsi taste-off was so popular in the 1980s: it was the only blind taste test I can remember being held for the general public in shopping malls. It wasn't the soft drinks that were fun -- it was the process.

So here's a copy of my email to my friend about how to conduct a blind taste test (I suggested buying two Syrahs, one from warm Paso Robles and one from cooler Santa Barbara County, neither cheaper than $10 or more expensive than $25). If you haven't done this yourself, try it with any product you like: soda, chocolate bars, slices of apple, whatever. Blind tasting really is fun.

Here's how I'd do it. Have another person there. Have her pour one glass of each.
Smell first; your nose is more acute than your tongue. Stick your nose in the glass and take a big sniff. Take several. Take notes on the aromas.
Don't worry about being technically accurate. Concentrate first on the smell of the fruit -- is it cherry? Blackberry? Raspberry? Currant? Then try to put a label on other aromas: Wood? Raw meat? Pepper? Play doh? Iodine? Don't worry about whether it sounds good or not, try to get something down that describes it to yourself.
Then, taste one. Pros swish it in their mouth with a little air and spit it out, but you don't have to do that. But don't gulp, you need to stay sober until you're done.
Again, write down your impressions -- this is key. The main reason people don't remember what wine tastes like is they don't take notes, then they get wasted.
Then do the same with the other one.
See if you can guess which is which. If you do get one from a cool climate and one from a hot, the cool-climate Syrah should be peppery and possibly even gamy. The hot-climate Syrah should have richer fruit and more alcohol.
If you have multiple people, you can have several people do the experiment at once -- this is so much fun, you can make a party out of it. One person has to sacrifice themselves as the person who knows which is which.
Mainly, you're just forcing yourself to pay attention to small differences that you normally don't. If you can tell the difference between lagers, Syrahs should have differences that are even more extreme.
I hope you enjoy this. I do this exact sort of thing several times a week, every week, and not just with wine. I love for my wife to give me two similar items to blind-taste; pastured eggs from different farms (very low recognition rate), different brands of soy sauce, you name it.
On some products, it really doesn't make a difference what you buy. I can't tell one regular, non-seasoned sea salt from another. We have two different kinds of water filter and I can't distinguish the effects.
But wine always tastes different. When I like the cheaper one better, I'm happy, but this almost never happens unless the cheaper one costs at least $10, hence my lower limit.
Enjoy, let me know how it goes.

U.S. conservatives think pasta is "ethnic"

Everybody loves Italian food, but in this land of two Americas, there's a huge gulf in how we perceive it.

If you're liberal, you probably see pasta, pizza, focaccia and pesto as part of your everyday arsenal of food choices.

But if you're conservative, eating angel hair pasta with pesto is a walk on the wild side -- almost like admitting you once had a gay fantasy.

It took a summer-long poll from hunch.com to explain something about San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood I had never understood.

The poll, described here, correlated people's political beliefs with the foods they like. Some of the results are intuitive: Is anyone surprised that liberals like veggies on their pizza while conservatives want meat? (I like anchovies, which fits as I discovered on hunch.com that I really should be a libertarian.)

Asked their favorite "cuisine," liberals named Chinese, Japanese and Thai. Conservatives said Italian.

Suddenly I understood why in North Beach vendors sell t-shirts with giant letters proclaiming that the wearer has eaten Italian food, making various puns about the experience (i.e., "Don't kiss me, I just ate Italian food"). For years, I was bewildered by these (as I was by most North Beach restaurants). Who takes a vacation to San Francisco to eat indifferently prepared spaghetti swimming in a bowl of red sauce, then buys a tote bag to brag about it back home? Don't they sell pizza in Peoria?

Now I understand. To liberals, Italian food is so commonplace that it's not even a separate cuisine anymore. But for people who are truly conservative -- Billy Graham followers, not Mitt Romney economic Republicans or Sarah Palin dummies -- anything beyond meat and potatoes really is exotic.

This will not be news to those of you with conservative family members. You might want to watch their diet for them: turns out 63% of conservatives eat fast food a few times a week, and 30% eat fresh fruit less than once a week.

It got me to wondering about the way conservatives think about food. I confess that while I have Republican and Democrat friends, I have maintained no friendships with true conservatives; they live in a different world from me. So I have to look at the hunch.com poll for guidance.

Here's a theory, and it is just that. True conservatives believe we should deny the urges of the body, particularly urges to pursue pleasure. Conservatives believe strongly in shame, and think its absence is what's wrong with this country.

Spending too much time, effort or money on food would be shameful. Hence the popularity of convenience foods.

But it goes deeper than that. To make a dish like green curry, with its complex blend of flavors, is creating temptation. Meat loaf, on the other hand, is fulfilling. It does the job food is required to do, without excessive ornamentation that could arouse impure thoughts of greed and gluttony.

This would explain another philosophical question I've always had: why do people look so much larger at conservative events than liberal events, given that conservatives are aware that gluttony is a deadly sin? It's not gluttony, it's purely diet -- and the diet stems from attempting to avoid foods that would stimulate gluttony.

What makes this interesting is that while liberals are a messy group who never agree on anything (including that statement), true conservatives tend to present a very united front.

That means that smarter minds than mine have already considered these philosophical questions, while in the employ of Kraft and ConAgra and McDonald's. From now on, I'm going to look at food advertisements differently, thanks to this poll. There's a natural tension -- ad agency people are definitely not social conservatives (remember, I'm not talking about Republican vs. Democrat here), but if they do the best for their client, they'll reach out to the social conservatives who buy macaroni and cheese in a box, or eat Big Macs four times a week.

Deep thoughts for a Thanksgiving weekend. I'll conclude by saying, wow, Americans of all belief sets have lousy taste in cheese. Conservatives like Velveeta -- that's not even cheese -- or Colby, which I believe is half cheese, half orange wax. Liberals aren't any better: brie? That's such a cliche, it's like naming as your favorite wine the one you were served on an airplane last week. The cheese industry has a lot of work to do in this country on both sides of the great divide.

Consistent bargains from McManis Family Vineyards

I'm a city boy, but I like farmers. Give me the choice between a product made by a multinational or something of the same quality and price made by people who work the land themselves, and I'll always pick the latter.

That's why I have an affection for McManis Family Vineyards. They're fourth-generation family farmers in Ripon, in California's Central Valley. And they compete in the toughest of all price categories -- the $10 price range.

Wander into a big wine store and take a close look at what's available around $10. Most come from big corporations, which have the economy of scale to cut costs on every expense -- glass, labels, shipping, you name it.

If you see a winery you haven't heard of, pick up the bottle and look closely at the back label. Odds are good that it will be produced and bottled by somebody other than the brand on the front. This means it's likely a private label wine, possibly made specifically for the store you're at. There's nothing wrong with such a product, but it's purely a commodity.

As far as I know, there's no family named High Peak or Leafy Ridge or any of the other generic topographical names that private label makers prefer. But there are McManises (proprietors Ron and Jamie are in the photo with their kids Justin and Tanya), and if you buy their wine you're supporting their family.

That's all well and good, but who cares if the wines don't deliver? Fortunately, they usually do.

Don't misunderstand -- these are budget wines made in the American style. This winery uses oak chips, alcohol reduction and all the other technical tricks of the budget-wine trade, and I give them huge credit for being up front about it while big companies hide their hands. (Mini rant: There are very few wines for $10 that are not manipulated products. If you're one of these people who talks about "natural" and "terroir" and all of that, you need to support wineries in their back-to-the-land efforts by paying more for your daily wine.)

(Updated thanks to comments from Ron & Jamie, below): With the recent purchases of several vineyards in Lodi, the McManises farm 65% of their grapes themselves. Their original ranch, planted to Chardonnay, even has its own AVA: River Junction. They're still buying a third of their fruit, putting them in competition with the Gallos and Constellation and the rest of the Top 30 US wine companies for both product and shelf space.

This year, the standout is the Merlot. Merlot is still so beaten down by "Sideways" that the grapes are super cheap on the bulk market; some even went unharvested last year because they couldn't sell for what it would cost to pick them. I used to hate budget Merlots, which always came from grapes grown in inappropriate spots. (updated) The McManises must have found a cool hillside in the Central Valley planted with these grapes, because I thought the wine had Napa or Sonoma fruit in it.

I usually like the McManis Family reds much better than the whites, and this year is no exception. But they always produce a few wines of great value, and they're real farmers, which to me has value on its own. If you need affordable wines for Thanksgiving, look no further.

Tasting notes:

McManis Family Vineyards California Petite Sirah 2008 ($11)
Black like teeth-staining ink, this wine has plenty of ripe blackberry and black plum with an underlying light note of peach. It's potent but not hot (14.5% alcohol), with decent acidity. It's a big wine with balance, and superb value. 89

McManis Family Vineyards California Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 ($11)
An standard-variety red wine, with flavors of ripe blackberry and vanilla, but solid crowd-pleaser for this price range. Good wine for Christmas parties. 88

McManis Family Vineyards California Zinfandel 2008 ($11)
Very ripe and sweet blackberry flavors with notes of earth and coffee in the aroma and a bit of vanilla on the finish. Good value in this price range. 87

McManis Family Vineyards California Syrah 2008
Most of the McManis lineup tends toward the internationalized; not this one. This is a feral wine, with an aroma so meaty it's almost like hamburger. Sweet blackberry on the palate, though with a strong meaty note and a little vanilla. Pretty masculine stuff, although honestly too much so for me. 86

McManis Family Vineyards River Junction Chardonnay 2008 ($11)
Like drinking sweet butter. Many people like this; you know who you are. NR

McManis Family Vineyards California Viognier 2008 ($11)
Bright apple flavor but very sweet; almost an Apple Jacks flavor. Simple, and probably a pleaser of crowds I don't belong to. NR

McManis Family Vineyards California Pinot Noir 2008 ($11)
Good value for Pinot Noir, this has a deep cherry flavor and medium body, though the vanilla is a bit strong. Enough acidity to keep it food-friendly. I've had a lot worse Pinots than this for three times more money. 88

McManis Family Vineyards California Merlot 2008 ($11)
What more can you ask for at $11 -- it's varietally correct and delicious, with flavors of cherry and coffee and notes of tobacco and smoke. Easy to drink, but with some complexity, this is one of the best domestic red wines in this price range I've tasted this year. 90

What's in your vodka? Who knows?

Earlier this week I found myself at a charity event seated at a table sponsored by a major vodka brand I won't name. Let's call it Holey.

The other 8 people at the table all worked for this brand, selling and marketing it. I tried to strike up friendly conversation about the brand's new high-end vodka.

"How is this vodka different from your regular vodka?" I asked.

"It's more expensive," a marketer said.

"OK, but is it made different?"

"We made it to be the most expensive vodka on the market."

"OK, how did you do that? What's it made of?"

"This vodka is made in Russia."

Let me interrupt to point out that these people -- 8 of them -- all spoke perfectly good English, were well-dressed and are apparently well-paid. Moreover, they knew I am a wine and spirits writer, and they were there to represent the brand.

"Is it made from wheat?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter what it's made of. All that matters is the filtering."

"OK, is there some special filtering process?"

"It's the best, that's all that matters. We created this to be the top of the vodka market."

And that's that. I tried a few other avenues of inquiry, but nobody at the table knew a damn thing about this expensive vodka -- except that it's expensive.

I overheard some of their strategies. One guy was going to use his relationship with a bar to demand that it be included in featured cocktails. Another was going to chat up a DJ friend to get her to scream about it between songs. One guy left the dinner before dessert to visit three bars, planning to order it and pester any bartenders who didn't have it prominently displayed.

I told this story the next day to a wine/spirits store owner from Los Angeles. He stopped me about one minute in and said, "You don't have to say another word. I talk to these guys every week. I know what they're like."

So there you have it, vodka fans. What are you getting when you buy the most expensive vodka at your local bar? Nobody knows -- not even its salespeople.