Fungicide residue makes white wines sweeter

Wineries hoping to seduce drinkers with a sweet tooth have it easy: They can blast their grapes with fungicide, and apparently that will not only simplify farming, but might help sell the wine.

Five Spanish scientists published a study last summer that might have gone unnoticed if not for the Academic Wino, aka Becca Yeamans, who posted it on her blog yesterday.

I'll cut to the chase: White wines with higher levels of fungicide residue may taste sweeter and have more tropical fruit, apricot and floral aromas.

Wow. Talk about a reason to try to teach yourself to like drier, less fruity wines.

While the study has major flaws, notably that it has not been replicated, it's still a study I wish I'd never seen, but I can't unsee it now. I'll wonder from now on, when I smell tropical fruit aromas in Chardonnay, if I'm really smelling fungicide. And thanks, Spanish scientists, for spoiling floral aromas in white wine for me forever.

The scary thing about this study is that there's almost no good news for organic or biodynamic grape growers, nor even for low-fungicide growers trying to grow sustainably. It's as if a panel of sommeliers came out with a blanket endorsement for Monsanto.

My ninja quest for two great wines from Brazil

Brazil has real cowboys and plenty of livestock farming; it's the vineyard in the background that's unusual

I'm pawing through wine bottles at a party. People around me are clinking glasses, smiling, chatting in French and Portuguese and Spanish, but I'm grimly grabbing one bottle after another.

This was my quest to identify my second-favorite wine in Brazil. Admittedly it's not exactly scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro.

I participated as a judge in the Concours Mondial de Brazil, an offshoot of Europe's leading wine competition. We judged blind and at the time of the after-party we hadn't received the results. I remembered two wines that I loved, a Cabernet Franc and a Viognier. But all we knew was the grape (or "blend" -- just that, "blend") and vintage.

The Cabernet Franc was easy to identify: we tasted only three Cabernet Francs, and only one from 2009. All I had to do was paw through three tables holding more than 300 bottles to find the one meeting that description -- and it didn't matter if it was empty or not.

But we had judged three 2010 Viogniers. So I had a sense of urgency, as there was a reason these bottles were on these tables: people were drinking them. I knew that if somebody discovered my favorite Viognier before I did, there was a good chance it would be passed around and emptied before I could verify its identity, because it was one of the best wines in Brazil and my fellow partiers were all wine judges. You ever seen how quickly a crowd of professional drinkers can empty a bottle that stands above everything else? It's like piranha on a pata negra pig: Mmm, tasty. Hey, where'd it go?

Impressions of Beaujolais

I was never a Beaujolais fan, and one thing that always turns me off is the smugness of fans writing about it.

That may sound silly, as Beaujolais is one of the world's most commercially underappreciated wine regions. But Beaujolais lovers often open with an attack on every other red wine in the world: Too big! Too oaky! Not representative of terroir! Pathetic manipulated beverages for stupid people, not like the honest wines of Beaujolais, which are for the enlightened! The natural wine movement also has advocates like this, and I don't think they realize how much of a turnoff it is.

But I've had a few good Cru Beaujolais, and I like to be open-minded, so when I was offered the last-minute chance to visit Beaujolais in December on a press trip by myself, even though the plane ticket was booked on a Friday to leave the following Tuesday, I jumped at it.

This led directly to my column last week in Wine Review Online, because I met Georges DuBoeuf, far and away the most important man in the region, and spent a few minutes interviewing him about how he tastes 200 wines a day. It's a good story and very self-contained; the perfect column.

Yet I felt a little sad writing it, because one doesn't need to go all the way to Beaujolais to write about Georges DuBoeuf, and by narrowing the focus to him, I didn't have space to give my general newbie impressions. Those don't fit on Wine Review Online anyway, because I'm supposed to be an expert there. Here on The Gray Report is where I admit everything, including my ignorance.

So let's do that. My strongest impression, after a week of drinking nothing but Beaujolais, is this:

On the 100-point scale, uncertainty and types of consumer

Normally I'm bored by discussions of the 100-point scale, but I had a brief Twitter conversation earlier this week that gave me a small new insight.

One of the objections of scale haters is that a rating is treated as an immutable truth by some of the audience, while this is not the true experience of wine.

Wine tasting has so many variables. Some wines are better with food. Wines have bottle variation. I just tasted with Georges DuBoeuf, who is not the first person to tell me some wines taste better in different weather conditions. A wine I consider a 92 one day might not even be a 90 next week, but a rating is fixed and permanent.

I give consumers more credit than many scale haters; I think many people know that a 92 means "a 92 according to one person's palate." Besides, if you can't give people that much credit -- if you think consumers are that stupid -- then I don't see why you'd want to take the grades away. But I digress.

The question, then, is whether a 92 is always a 92, even to one palate. My argument is that regardless of the fact that the answer is "no," most consumers desperately want that answer to be "yes."

Gallo's new Russian River Valley vineyard: Good, but does it fit?

I was unhappy when the US government last month expanded the Russian River Valley. That sounds like the Army Corps of Engineers blasted a path through an obstruction. In fact, it was a major legal victory for Gallo, which owns the 380-acre Two Rock Vineyard that's now in the prestigious RRV appellation.

Within a few hours of publishing my complaint, I got an email from a Gallo PR rep. Forgive me if this is inside baseball, but for the small community of us who have tried to write about Gallo in the past, getting outreach from Gallo was earth-shaking.

One PR guy who worked for Gallo for some years once told me his job, for a while, was to not return phone calls and not answer questions. They haven't been quite that paranoid for the six years or so I've been reporting on them, possibly because Ernest Gallo is no longer with us. I've never had anyone from Gallo be rude to me, but they also never used to volunteer information. The company philosophy regarding media seemed to be "no news is the only acceptable news."

Anyway, I was invited up to see Two Rock Vineyard. Again, earth-shattering: Not sending me a bottle, but offering me a tour and an interview. I asked to do some comparison tasting of wines from the vineyard and from Gallo's other operations in Sonoma County, and was told that could be arranged.

How excited was I? I was in France and Italy telling people that I had to get home to see this Gallo vineyard.

My mini-retail experience

Though I'm a Certified Wine Professional, I've never worked in retail sales or as a sommelier. But recently I had a fun encounter at my local food shop that made me realize somms and retailers have many days where they love what they do.

I overheard a woman ask the clerk, "Do you have any Tempranillos?" That piqued my interest. Who in California asks for Tempranillo -- not Rioja -- and why? The store staff pointed out a couple of Riojas, both Crianzas and affordable, and briefly described them. The woman put both in her basket, but looked vaguely unsatisfied.

I barged in. "Excuse me, I'm sorry to ask you this, but I write about wine for a living, and I want to ask you, why did you ask for Tempranillo?"

Turns out she had recently had a couple she liked in California tasting rooms, one from Lake Berryessa and the other from Clarksburg. She didn't remember the names. And she was going to meet her sister who she hadn't seen in 30 years, who lives in South Dakota now, and she wanted to show her some of the fine wines of California.

So Rioja -- though I love it -- wasn't the answer.

Alcohol-free "whisky flavored drink": Taste-testing ArKay

"Why would I want alcohol-free whiskey?" If you ask that question, the answer is, you wouldn't.

However, what if you can't drink alcohol because of your religion? ArKay is certified Halal, and the bottle's green and gold pattern reminds me of shopping in the Middle East.

Also, some people can't drink for medical reasons. How many TV dramas show somebody smuggling a bottle of Scotch to a hospital-bound patient? This is more sensible.

For that use, ArKay would be perfect, because its best feature is that it smells very much like whiskey. If blindfolded, I would guess that it's Irish whiskey.

ArKay was launched in December by a company headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, though the beverage itself is made in Mexico. Because it's legally -- and actually -- a soft drink, shipping it across state and national borders is no problem at all. So far, though, I couldn't find any retailers selling it, but give them time to find it.

I poured a glass of ArKay neat next to a glass of Tullamore Dew 10-year. They look similar. ArKay has the hue right but the 10-year-old whiskey is, not surprisingly, a little darker. Still, they look like variations of the same product.