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W. Blake Gray
Apr 29, 2014
As an architect in her 30s, Elena Walch married into the family of the largest vineyard owner in Alto Adige, Italy. She's a strong, driven woman, and Werner Walch may not have known what he was in for. Today, her name is on a wine label, not Werner's. And Elena Walch wines are some of the best known from the region, particularly her delightfully balanced Gewürztraminer, one of the best examples in the world of a difficult wine to do well.
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W. Blake Gray
Apr 1, 2014
Freixenet might be the best-known wine in the world. The Spanish company makes more than 100 million bottles of Cava each year, with more than half of it in the familiar black bottle of Cordon Negro Brut. Most wine companies of its size are corporate. But Freixenet -- which owns 17 other wineries worldwide -- is still owned by the Ferrer family and run as a family business. I recently visited the company headquarters in Penedes, Spain, but I'm not going to try to tell you the Freixenet story per se. I'm just going to share 10 things I found interesting.
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W. Blake Gray
Mar 4, 2014
Kumeu River makes, year after year, some of the best Chardonnay in New Zealand. Nobody in their right mind today would try to plant grapevines on land so close to Auckland; it's worth much more for housing. But the Brajkovich family uses the land to support a true family business: Michael is the winemaker, his two brothers and one sister oversee the vineyards and the marketing, and his mother is managing director.
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W. Blake Gray
Feb 4, 2014
Canada doesn't have any need to sell wines in the US. But it wants to anyway. And I do mean Canada the nation. At a recent trade dinner to show off British Columbia wines, I sat with an official from the Canadian consulate. On my left was a guy who makes dessert wine by fortifying grape wine with walnut brandy. That's the image of Canadian wine if there even is an image: A little nutty, but not mainstream. Canada is the 31st largest wine producer in the world, just below Algeria. Japan makes 50% more wine. The US makes as much wine in a week as Canada makes in a year.
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W. Blake Gray
Jan 14, 2014
I'm going to simplify Sherry for you. Or at least, I'm going to explain how simple it now seems to me. I was seeing it all wrong. You see, I was worrying about the classifications and the ages and which ones had flor on them and when the flor died and how many different barrels the wine had been in and…blah blah blah. Here's how they drink Sherry in Jerez, where it's from: "A glass of Manzanilla. Por favor."
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W. Blake Gray
Dec 10, 2013
Every new wine region creates its own kind of wine, a point people don't always grasp. Oregon Pinot Noir doesn't have to be Burgundy; We now have a new kind of Pinot Noir. But with Qupé Bien Nacido Syrah, it's even more striking. The long, cool growing season, safe from damaging fall rains, allows an expression of Syrah that just wasn't possible before. Sure, it can taste of ripe fruit, but there's plenty of freshness and a mouthfeel that's not rich, but precise. And it's consistent, year after year. Same with Au Bon Climat's Chardonnay. You taste these wines today and wonder why anyone ever doubted it would work. But 40 years ago, it was cabbage and kale.
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W. Blake Gray
Nov 12, 2013
Southwest France is on a charm initiative across the US. It's a good reminder that at the price, these wines are pretty charming. Here's a story we hear often from France lately: The region has a lot of wine to sell. In the area between Bordeaux and the Spanish border, there are nearly 40 million cases of wine made each year by more than 850 independent producers, plus 23 co-ops.
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W. Blake Gray
Oct 15, 2013
Faced with an ocean of wine to sell, Bordeaux has come up with a new category. "Clairet" is like a dark rosé, in which the juice is left on the skin for 24 to 48 hours longer than ordinary French rosés to extract more color and a little tannin. "I think Clairet is outstanding," says Régis Chaigne, owner and winemaker of Château Ballan-Larquette. "It's different from what you can taste elsewhere. It's very easy to drink with food. It's fruity. It has the deep color. It's very modern." Clairet is an intriguing idea on a number of levels, both for production and marketing. But it does confront different challenges on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
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W. Blake Gray
Sep 17, 2013
Rollie Heitz wasn't supposed to be the winemaker of the Heitz family. His brother went to enology school, whereas Rollie got a finance degree. "The idea was to work at the family winery," Rollie says. Yet now here he is, making wine, in a converted house down a winding lane just south of Calistoga. Rollie's winery is called Midsummer Cellars and it's tiny, rolling out just 1600 cases a year.
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W. Blake Gray
Aug 13, 2013
"Where is this Riesling from?" It's like the high-school class of your nightmares. We're all sitting nervously in an auditorium, hoping not to be called on -- and we're all wine "experts." Master Sommeliers hedge like crazy: "I think it's Old World, though it has some New World characteristics." This scene repeated itself over and over in July at Riesling Rendezvous, a major international conference held recently in Seattle. He thinks it's German, but it's from Canada. She says it's definitely New World, and it's from Austria. Only one country's Rieslings were as consistently distinctive as they were delicious, and though they were so distinctive that they were the easiest ones to guess about regarding location, it might still be the last country you'd guess: Australia.
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W. Blake Gray
Jul 23, 2013
I just spent three days in the Cognac region, immersed in the stuff, and not once did I get a snifter of it to drink straight. Not once did we have a glass of Cognac after a meal.
The locals like Cognac as an aperitif. And they don't drink it straight: they like it with sparkling water on ice. Or, best of all, they like it in a cocktail created for Cognac, the Summit. That said, maybe it's not relevant how people in Cognac drink the local spirit, because from the beginning it has been meant for export. Only 3% of all Cognac is consumed in France. It's one of the most international spirits -- a staple of airport duty-free -- and yet it also seems to have a very limited audience.
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W. Blake Gray
Jun 25, 2013
Kathleen Inman is not a proselytizer; you have to talk to her for a while before you learn the depth of her convictions about what makes a good wine. She's not into unusual varieties: She makes Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris. She doesn't make orange wines or no-sulfite wines or wines that taste weird. Because of this, she has managed to fly under the radar. But California sommeliers know who she is: One of the first people to make wines in the more restrained style that is quickly gaining popularity.
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W. Blake Gray
May 28, 2013
Most wineries smell like wine. Ed Kurtzman's winery smells like popcorn. Kurtzman makes Pinot Noir, Syrah, etc., from grapes from up and down the California coast. But he doesn't toil among the vines; he works in a converted warehouse in San Francisco that used to be called the Stone Tile Depot. The owner subdivided the huge building about a mile south of AT&T Park in one of San Francisco's few remaining industrial areas. Kurtzman and his wines rent one side, and Thatcher's Gourmet Popcorn rents the other.
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W. Blake Gray
Apr 30, 2013
Angelos Iatridis makes wine in northern Greece with as much high-tech precision as anyone in the world. So when you taste them, knowing that, they're a shock. Sure, there's ripe red fruit in the Xinomavros. But the unifying thread is minerality; one wine, his Old Vines Reserve Xinomavro 2009, tastes like plum juice squeezed from a stone.
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W. Blake Gray
Apr 2, 2013
Wines are much better lately at Pierre Sparr, and the reason is backwards from what you normally read. Five years ago, the Alsatian winery was a small business that had been in the Sparr family for 300 years. Pierre Sparr rebuilt the winery and vineyards after World War II, and his sons took over from him. By the early 2000s, the winery had slipped. It was buying a large proportion of its grapes from a local co-op, but the poor quality of the wines, and thus difficulty in selling them, was hurting the farmers as much as it was the Sparrs. So the co-op, Cave de Bebleneheim, made an unusual decision: To buy the Pierre Sparr winery and brand.
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Elena Walch: Shaking Things Up in Alto Adige