Bad tasting note of the week

This wine tastes like these! Isn't that helpful?

After I ran a terrible tasting note from the Tampa Bay Times two weeks ago, I got an email from a longtime reader in the retail business. He passed along the tasting note below.

I don't know if I can make "bad tasting note of the week" a regular feature, but as PBS might say, maybe I can with support from readers like you.

I don't want to go all Natalie MacLean and run tasting notes without attribution. No, no: Full credit must be given where it's due, and if the note has a photo of the writer with it like this one, so much the better.

This note makes me feel a little lacking visually. I don't usually bother to describe white wines' color unless they're cloudy, but Gil comes up with "a bright fine citrine-yellow color with a star-bright core." He can see the Spanish sun in the glass!

And just in case you didn't know the other name for Japanese gooseberry, read on.

6 changes the Baseball Hall of Fame should learn from the Vintners Hall of Fame

I am chairman of the electoral college of the Vintners Hall of Fame. Soon after taking the position in 2007, I helped developed its voting procedures, bylaws, etc. There's probably nobody in America currently more involved with the creation and changing of Hall of Fame standards than I am.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame was a huge inspiration for us. It's easily the most successful and important Hall of Fame in the world. People don't get anywhere near as passionate about the football Hall of Fame or basketball Hall of Fame.

Unfortunately the Baseball Hall of Fame has lost its way. This year, the strongest ballot of the last 75 years went to voters. It included the all-time home run leader, the best pitcher of our generation, the best-hitting catcher ever, an All-American guy with 3000 hits, and more.

Who got in? Nobody was elected. The Veterans Committee put in three obscure guys: A catcher who played before gloves were invented, and an owner and umpire who retired before television was invented. All three have been dead for more than 74 years. It's hard to imagine anyone going to Cooperstown, New York to see them inducted.

One thing I've learned at the VHF is that you can put great candidates in front of a group of voters, but you can't make them choose them. I thought Robert Parker belonged from the beginning but he wasn't elected until last year. Our entire nominating committee thought Eugene Hilgard was the single most important person not in the Hall for several years, but his work came nearly a century ago and voters kept ignoring him. So we created our version of baseball's Veterans Committee and put him in.

And we stopped there. We didn't usher in 30 19th century vintners that nobody today has heard of.

More importantly, we've never stopped inducting deserving candidates from the present. We don't allow individual voters to say, "All today's wines are on steroids. I'm sending in a blank ballot," and undermine other voters' choices.

When our voting procedures have unveiled flaws, we've changed them. The Baseball Hall of Fame just suffered the most flawed election in its history. It's time for it to make changes. This has been done many times in the past and it's necessary before the next ballots go out.

Here are 6 changes the Baseball Hall of Fame should learn from the Vintners Hall of Fame:

1) Don't limit the number of players someone can vote for

Chefs and winemakers can only be dictators by the will of the people

The current meme that chefs have become dictators started, far as I can tell, with an excellent Pete Wells column for the New York Times last October.* Wells said that a consumer of a tasting menu "may feel as much like a victim as a guest."

* (Thanks to early reader Elin McCoy for pointing out that Frank Bruni wrote about chefs as dictators 6 years ago.)

This week, Corby Kummer got some attention for Vanity Fair with a lengthier article on the same topic titled "Tyranny -- It's What's For Dinner."

Kummer is a good writer, but it's a long whine by a privileged guy who eats for a living about the assignments he has to take.

I nearly published a blog post last year about a dictatorial San Francisco pizza chef. Una Pizza Napoletana owner Anthony Mangieri refuses to take reservations or sell side dishes. He just did an interview with the Chronicle's Paolo Lucchesi in which he said that even though many people have asked him to start selling salads, "I'm not doing it, because it's not the right thing."

Mangieri is a dictator. His restaurant is his kingdom, the same as the chefs Kummer complains about. Charlie Trotter won't start dinners two hours after the reservation. Thomas Keller wants you to stay and eat great food all night. Grant Achatz sells prepaid seatings at his restaurant like theater tickets. Yes, they're all tyrants.

It's easy to see a parallel to certain winemakers, who make you sit on a waiting list and buy wines you don't want in order to eventually get some that you do.

There's also a sort of tyranny in extreme "natural" winemaking: this wine is going to be ungainly because that's what came out of the barrel, and he's not going to fix it, so you'll just have to love it as it is. Winemakers who insist that "organic wines" must be made without sulfites are tyrants.

Tyranny is a good headline word, and I could have been ahead of the curve. So why did I write up a  blog post about Mangieri's pizza dictatorship, and not publish it?

Napa Valley faces the problem of success

Could the Napa Valley Wine Train ease commuter traffic?

Napa Valley is the only place in the world where anyone can enter the wine game at any level and succeed.

You can be a penniless intern and work your way into a career-making apprenticeship. Or you can be a successful business magnate in any field, overpay for a winery and vineyard and transform yourself into a country gentleman/vintner in a way that's just not possible in Bordeaux or Burgundy. Or anywhere else, really.

Napa Valley is a magnet, the same as Broadway or Hollywood, albeit for people for whom food lights the stars in their eyes. Servers in restaurants have big dreams. Men and women with advanced degrees take entry-level jobs mucking out barrels.

They keep coming because people keep succeeding. Napa Valley survived the economic downturn with far fewer winery bankruptcies than most analysts expected. There are still plenty of jobs there, but not many pay all that well.

Napa Valley also has a similar housing problem to Jerusalem.

Does "All wine mostly taste the same"?

Last week, the 12-week-old website First We Feast stirred up Internet attention with a provocative post titled "20 Things Everyone Thinks About The Food World (But Nobody Will Say)."

Point #10 is "All wine mostly tastes the same." Here it is:

You might think I'm going to spend this post putting down this point, seeing as I write every week about wines that (should) taste as dramatically different as Madeira and Zinfandel. It is one of the five points out of 20* that I think is wrong.

* (For such strong positions, this is a good percentage. How many opinion columnists do you agree with 75% of the time?)

But it's not all that far wrong. Here's why:

When tasting notes are bad

Courtesy Seduction Meals.com

New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov is becoming famous for opposing tasting notes. On the macro scale I don't agree with him. But I had a moment on Jan. 1 that made me see things his way.

I stopped by Ritual Coffee for a macchiato. I don't know how many of you have access to a shop like Ritual or Four Barrel or Blue Bottle or Sightglass, the leaders of San Francisco's artisan coffee movement. Each imports and roasts its own beans, often from single fincas (the equivalent of single vineyards). Forget Starbucks or Peet's: single-variety, single-finca coffees are where it's at.

I like these shops; they all make great coffee. But I just don't get their tasting notes.

Ritual had a choice of three different types of beans for espresso. The tasting notes were written with authority. One said, "Tastes like blackberry, vanilla and peach galette." Another said, "Tastes like red grapes, boysenberry and plum." I forget the third; I was staring at the words "peach galette."

I have NEVER had a coffee that tastes like peach galette.

Baltimore Rainwater Madeira: Taste what my ancestors drank

Madeira was the preferred wine of the early United States. Not only did it still taste good after spending months in the stuffy hold of an ocean liner -- it actually tasted better.

Look back on menus of fine clubs and wedding parties from the US in the 1700s and 1800s and you'll see Madeira everywhere. Different parts of the country preferred different styles, depending on the climate.

What else could you drink in Lousiana, where the ground was too swampy to build a proper cellar and the heat too oppressive for table wine to survive? You'd want a Madeira with a little sweetness to stand up to the cuisine, but throughout the South, you'd want it lean enough to drink with dinner. In New York, you would have a rich Madeira for after-dinner toasts.

In Baltimore, the preferred style was called "rainwater" because of the lightness and texture. This name has been around for Madeira forever but is one of the few terms not officially defined by the Madeira Institute. The implication is that the barrels of wine mixed with rainwater, diluting them. Today, that's a disaster. Why would anybody want that?

Let me take you back to Baltimore in the summer of 1894.