Wine Spectator is wrong: adding sugar to California wine should remain illegal

Last week Wine Spectator published a blog post  titled "Why California Winemakers Should Be Allowed to Add Sugar."

The reason: because California wine is not ripe enough. Geez, if we could only get rid of these weak-sister wines under 16% alcohol and get us some real he-man drinkin' bottles!

Writer Ben O'Donnell, an assistant editor, doesn't exactly say that. His point is more nuanced, and I think he expressed it better Friday under the 140-character restriction of Twitter:

"The notion that 'California terroir' is one all-encompassing thing is a fallacy and that's what I pointed out in the article."

O'Donnell also said on Twitter:

"I'm for anything that could help people explore/experiment/develop in these 'frontier' regions."

I have to write this as a tiny voice in opposition to Wine Spectator just in case there becomes a serious move in California to legalize chaptalization (adding sugar to fermenting grapes to raise the alcohol level of wine).

Chaptalization in California is Spectatorization. It's winemaking on PEDs (performance enhancing duplicities). And it's wrong.

Croatian and Slovenian wines: a cross-border tasting

Croatian winemaker Ivica Dobrinčić and family will soon have EU passports

Politically, Croatia and Slovenia are at odds with each other. But wine-wise, they share a lot -- some of which Croatia will have to give up when it joins the European Union on July 1.

Both countries are known mostly for aromatic white wine, but like the nearby Alto Adige region of Italy, they also make reds.

I had the opportunity to taste some of the best of these borderland wines recently at an event organized by importer Blue Danube Wine Company; tasting notes are below.*

The history of Croatia and Slovenia has been intertwined with neighboring Italy and Austria for centuries, as both were often part of the same larger country (Austria-Hungary; Yugoslavia). Grapes in the area sometimes have names in four different languages.

That's a battleground now. Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and its wineries immediately and successfully petitioned to own the name Teran, a red grape. You'd think this wouldn't be a problem, but EU bureaucrats don't really understand wine. Italians had to stop calling one of their grapes "Tocai Friulano" to avoid a conflict with Hungary's Tokaji dessert wines. Isn't this the same?

Well, no. Italian wineries apparently actually did rename a local grape after the famous Hungarian wine to sell it. In this case, Teran in Slovenia and Croatia is actually the same thing, grown a few kilometers apart. It's like saying the word "banana" can only be used for fruit from one country.

Sexism in the wine industry: Observations from a blog post

Last week I wrote a post asking people how common they think sexism is in the wine industry, and asking for insider stories of sexism that people have actually witnessed.

I got very few of the latter, even though the post was widely read and I opened my blog to anonymous comments, which meant I spent the whole week deleting unrelated crap. (A little inside-blog thing: if you have lots of pageviews and you don't check your comments, bots will place links to weird gibberish sites.)

I ran a very unscientific opinion poll, and while about 30% of respondents believe sexism is common at all levels in the wine industry, about the same number of people think it is not unusually common.

Here are the highlights of the observations I did get:

* Women are underrepresented in management. This is the most serious point.

* Women viticulturists may not always be included in men's discussions of vineyard management, even if that is their job.

* Some male winemakers joke openly about sex with female interns.

Sample Europe's food culture in two hours!

One of our European cuisine experts

I'm here today to announce "Lucky Bread," a great event coming to San Francisco, which will represent everything European: all that great food from the exciting, exotic continent, in just two hours.

At "Lucky Bread," 20 chefs, including 3 who are actually from Europe, will present bite-sized portions of European cuisine. We'll celebrate European ingredients and European flavors.

And of course there will be cocktails! Bartenders will create three cocktails to represent the essence of European taste.

France, Slovakia, Portugal -- it's all one big homogeneous continent, and you'll taste it all on one tiny plastic plate! Just $125 a ticket! Make your reservations now!

(Note: Change "Europe" to "Asia" and this is a real event.)

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook.

California Chardonnay is completely different now: it's all about citrus fruit

No medal!

My column for Palate Press this month is about my misadventures judging at the California State Fair wine competition, where it will surprise my blog readers to learn I was miserly and stubborn.

The column, all 1456 words of it (that's like 2 columns for the price of one!), is philosophical hand-wringing about the meaning of medals. I didn't have space to address the most interesting trend in wines I tasted:

California Chardonnay is completely different now: it's all about citrus fruit

Remember when California Chardonnay meant oaky, buttery wines that tasted of tropical fruit? There has been a backlash against that style for a few years, but it  seemed like a stream of artisanal wines against a tidal wave of highly rated goo.

Well, the tide has turned. Mainstream California Chardonnay now is lean, with citrus fruit flavors, not butter and toast.

I know this because I tasted dozens of California Chardonnays, many of them submitted by California's largest wine companies: Constellation, Gallo, The Wine Group.

How common is sexism in the wine industry?

I saw a he-said, he-said argument about sexism in wine media this week and it got me to thinking about the state of sexism in the wine industry.

About 20 years ago, the wine industry was male-dominated at every level. Today, women winemakers are common, and some wineries have advertised specifically looking a woman to take the post. Women general managers are more rare, but they exist.

Women sommeliers were rare as recently as 10 years ago, but don't seem so anymore. One place I don't see a lot of women is in wholesaling, which is the most consistently profitable occupation.

But I don't really know what it's like for women in the wine industry, and I'm curious. So I thought I'd do two things: take a poll, and open this post up, for the next week only, to anonymous comments. I'd like to hear insider stories of sexism that people may have actually witnessed.

On the poll, you can select more than one choice, and you can also write in your own.

Chardonnay is murder: Wine in a noir story

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman wrote the first short story in the 2006 collection "Baltimore Noir," and Chardonnay is an accessory to murder.

Lippman, who is married to The Wire creator David Simon, has published 11 novels about reporter-turned-detective Tess Monaghan. This story, "Easy as A-B-C," is a one-off not about Monaghan; it's a mere 11 pages in the paperback version.

Our unnamed narrator is a married building contractor who has an affair with a younger woman who buys his dead grandmother's house and hires him to renovate it. After they start getting it on, he begins putting some of his own money into the work. Here we set the tone:

One twilight -- we almost always met at last light, the earliest she could leave work, the latest I could stay away from home -- she brought a bottle of wine to bed after we had finished. She was taking a wine-tasting course over at this restaurant in the old foundry ...

"Nice," I said, although in truth I don't care much for white wine and this was too sweet for my taste.

"Viognier," she said. "Twenty-six dollars a bottle."

"You can buy top-shelf bourbon for that and it lasts a lot longer."

"You can't drink bourbon with dinner," she said with a laugh, as if I had told a joke. "Besides, wine can be an investment. And it's cheaper by the case. I'd like to get into that, but if you're going to do it, you have to do it right, have a special kind of refrigerator, keep it climate controlled."

"Your basement would work."

And that's how I came to build her a wine cellar, at cost.