Bits and pieces

John On Wine: Bits and pieces

Originally published in the Ukiah Daily Journal newspaper on Thursday, April 16, 2015 by John Cesano

Jon Bonné was the wine editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and wrote a wine book, “The New California Wine.” Recently, Bonné has left the Chronicle and is heading east. He also intends to write a new book, “The New French Wine.”

During his West Coast tenure, Bonné championed wines of finesse, wines with lower alcohol, wines with lower sugar, wines with higher acid. These wines were, by and large, food friendly wines.

The wines that received less favor from Bonné were made from over ripe grapes, high sugar leading to notably high alcohol wines, over oaked, over tannic, huge fruit bombs, with overpowering winemaking notes. These wines, by and large, beat up food, destroying it.

Since his departure, several wine writers have celebrated his leaving, and more quietly some wineries have as well. Perhaps, the fairest criticism I read was that instead of finding and reporting on trends in California wine, Bonné tried to create those trends.

Overall, I liked Bonné’s writing, and found little to find fault with; I also like food friendly wines, although the wines I find so might fall in a broader range than his. McFadden, where I work, produces exactly the wines Bonné would favor, and if I didn’t love Guinness’ wines then I wouldn’t have applied to work for him. Simaine Cellars’ wines are, by contrast, huge; Victor makes incredibly deep wines, often with some damn high alcohol percentages, but every single one is solid, and they all pair well with food.

The wines chosen by Bonné for his Top 100 Wine list each year were also not monolithic in style. On the one hand, you would find the delightful Dashe Cellars Les Enfant Terribles Old Vine Zinfandel from McFadden Farm, a lighter, almost Beaujolais-esque wine, while on the other hand wines from Knez Winery repeatedly showed up on the list, and no Knez wine could be called a shrinking violet style wise.

Robert Parker Jr. is the most influential wine writer/critic in the industry. Parker does seem to award his highest ratings to some pretty gargantuan wines. The intensity of some of those wines seems to me to make them more of a meal by themselves than a suitable companion to other components of a full course meal.

At Jim Gordon’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley, Bonné and Parker got into it a bit. Parker had written a thinly veiled attack on Bonné and his preferences, and Bonné called out Parker during a Q & A following Parker’s keynote address. While warranted, and entertaining in a “is this really happening” way, the only people who really benefited were the wine writers who wrote detailed accounts of the exchange or posted video to their blogs — their view numbers were as stratospheric as the alcohol levels in a Parker 99 point rated wine.

Parker, for as long as he wants to be, will always be the king of wine writers. Bonné has a different voice, and I found it to be a worthwhile one. I would offer Bonné one suggestion, and that is to write about the wines, review them, rate them, list them, as he finds them, rather than to try to remake the industry to suit his preferences. As for me, that’s pretty much what I do, I take them as I find them, whether they are review samples sent to me, or wines I taste at dinners, or wines poured for me in a tasting room; each is different, and I simply ask myself, “do I like it?” For those wines I do like, I try to share here, with a note or two, and sometimes a food pairing suggestion. Anyway, I wish Jon Bonné good luck in his future endeavors and look forward to his next book.
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I have been asked to help judge wines at the Lake County 14th Annual Home Wine and Beer Makers Festival on Saturday, June 27, from 1 to 5 p.m., at Library Park in Lakeport.

There will be tastings of amateur wine and beer, as well as premium commercial Lake County wines. In addition to the wine and beer, there will be music, food, and auction, raffles, and art & craft vendors. Presented by the Lake County Symphony Association, tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door. For vendor information and advance ticket outlets, call (707) 277-8172 or (707) 277-7076.

I am honored to be tapped as a judge, and the invitation will undoubtedly lead to Lake County winery tasting room visits and a spotlight winery feature or two — long overdue. __________

A few weeks ago, a completely baseless — scientifically — scare about arsenic in wine was irresponsibly reported by CBS on their morning show, and spread like wildfire to many other news outlets. I had more than one customer ask me about it, and I wrote a piece for my blog at Johnonwine.com and posted it there because it needed to be addressed right away. Feel free to go to my blog, and scroll down to find the article.

More recently, the horribly unscientific and downright dangerous tripe of Vani Hari, the “Food Babe” blogger, received a thorough takedown by Yvette d’Entremont on Gawker, which has gone viral on Facebook and elsewhere.

While I prefer a wine made with organically or biodynamically grown grapes, that preference is more political than health based. I simply prefer supporting organic growing practices to the use, and overuse, of Round Up and other herbicides, and arsenic loaded fertilizers and insecticides, that many “conventional” or “sustainable” (a term that means nothing) growers indulge in.

That said, there are endless examples of delicious conventionally grown wines, and I am confident that they are no less “healthy” than organically grown wines.

The Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op has a spectacular selection of wines, sourced locally, and grown organically, priced terrifically. The Co-op buys in quantity and passes the savings on, clearly. For those who share an organic leaning preference, their wine selection is definitely worth browsing.

 

A Wine Dinner and Mendocino County Loses a Friend

John On Wine ­ –
A wine dinner and Mendocino County loses a great friend

Originally published in the Ukiah Daily Journal on March 13, 2014 by John Cesano

 

If you read this column, you know that I love wine, and I love food, but I really love wine and food together. I’ve written about the Chef’s Wine Dinners at Crush, each one featuring a different winery or brand: Saracina, Barra and Girasole, Bonterra, and Coro Mendocino. I wrote about the crab and bubbly pairing at Patrona that featured the sparkling wines of Roederer Estate. At the insistence of you, the folks who read this column, I ate at Uncorked, pairing a variety of plates with a flight of different wines. Up next, I’ll enjoy Testa Wines at Saucy in Ukiah during a four course wine dinner on Wednesday, March 26 starting at 6 p.m. The cost is only $60, includes wine and food, but does not include tax or gratuity.

This is a working menu and may change before the dinner, but it should inspire you to call and reserve a spot at the dinner. First course: Bosc pear, ricotta and rosemary ravioli in a dreamy sauce; served with Testa White, a blend of Sauvingon Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Viognier, Muscat and Pinot Gris. Second course: little gem romaine, Pennyroyal blue cheese, red wine vinaigrette, white pepper cracker; served with Testa Grenache, a delicious wine with notes of light berry and spice. Third course: braised short ribs, red wine pan reduction, Peruvian potato & root vegetable gratin, sauteed dino kale; served with Testa Black, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Carignane and Petite Sirah. Dessert, the fourth course: brown butter pound cake, caramelized pineapple, sweet crème, Testa Charbono syrup; served with Sherry. I’ve made my reservation. To join the fun, you’ll need to call too, before all the seats are gone, (707) 462-7007.

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I met Virginie Boone a couple of years ago. Virginie tasted wines from Mendocino and Lake County for Wine Enthusiast magazine and then rated them on a 100 point scale and wrote a review of each. The old Mendocino Winegrape & Wine Commission, through Jan Mettler of Boss Dog marketing, invited Virginie up to visit some of Mendocino County’s more unique wineries and tasting rooms, and I was fortunate enough to score a visit with Virginie for McFadden. The first thing I noticed was that Virginie was relaxed, not stuffy or pretentious, but smiling and pleased to be visiting a beautiful area on a gorgeous day, and being able to taste wines made the day more joyous for her. Virginie let me know up front that she was a bit pressed for time, had a couple more stops to make and could taste perhaps four wines. I ended up pouring nearly a dozen wines, telling a little story about each, completely blowing her schedule (if you have visited the McFadden tasting room on a weekday when I’m in, then you know I do hour long experiences and not slam-bam tastings), and she was quite gracious about the hijacking of her time.

I also took the opportunity to pour a wine she had recently rated lower than I felt was right, letting her know it was our fastest selling wine; an amazingly food-friendly wine, and a wine made from the same grapes that another writer had raved about and put on his year end Top 100 Wines list. I pointed out that sometimes wines tasted through a “Parker” filter come up short but, when tasted in place, the different flavors that a piece of land and climate give to a wine can expand the envelope of what is considered varietally correct, like the way McFadden’s Zinfandel is a lower alcohol, Beaujolais-esque, sweet tart candy noted delight instead of a high alcohol fruit jam bomb.

Virginie, to her credit, ended up including McFadden as a “recommended producer” of Zinfandel in a feature piece she wrote over a year later. Virginie visited the county often, more often than many of her counterparts at other publications. She came up to the farm in Potter Valley, toured with Guinness, picked her own corn, which just minutes later was served up with wild rice salad and beef from the farm, all washed down with delicious wine and bubbly.

We ended up as an editor’s pick for Best Year End Sparkling Wine in the magazine. More widely, Virginie sat as a judge, tasting the county’s best wines at the Mendocino County Wine Competition and was open to visits to attend events like the upcoming Celebration of Mendocino County Sparkling Wine on April 5 and the spring Hopland Passport on May 3 & 4. If this feels eulogy-like, it is. Virginie hasn’t passed away, but has been asked to review the wines of Napa and Sonoma counties for Wine Enthusiast. Fortunately, Virginie also writes for the Press Democrat and hopefully her visits to our county will still inform some of the pieces she writes there. Taking over the taste, rate, and review duties for Mendocino and Lake County wines at wine Enthusiast is Jim Gordon. Jim knows wine and wine writing, as the former managing editor of Wine Spectator and the producer of the annual Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in Napa. Earlier this week, I sent an email inviting Jim to several Mendocino County wine events. I hope Jim visits at least as often (more often is great) as Virginie did, and I would share that Anderson Valley is not the entirety of Mendocino County, and there are excellent wines and new styles to be found outside of Napa County, if you open yourself up to them. Welcome Jim Gordon.

 

Gordon Ramsey audition, waiting on the Symposium, Petite Sirah love, packages in the mail, tri tip and pork belly

CBS has CSI; NBC has Law and Order. Both have spun off myriad incarnations.

FOX has Gordon Ramsey. Hells, Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, Cookalong, and coming later this year Masterchef.

Masterchef is another BBC import, and turns amateur but passionate cooks into cheftestants, competing against each other, until only one is left.

I am going to be attending a casting call in San Francisco later this month, bringing the elements to plate a prepared dish with five minutes preparation – a different thermos for each part of the dish, presentation plate, spoon, tongs, cutting board, knife, steel, towels, napkin.

I’m bringing my involtini on polenta with homemade Italian red sauce, and a bottle of red wine. I think wine is part of a meal, and ingredient of the dish. So I’ll also be bringing wine, corkscrew, and wineglass as well as all of the food pack. I think I may look for a cooler with wheels and handle.

I’m hoping my brother auditions in either New Orleans or Los Angeles, we could be the Masterchef version of Top Chef’s Voltaggio brothers.

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I applied for a fellowship award to attend this year’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley, February 16-19, 2010.

On the Symposium  website’s page for Fellowship Opportunities, it says, “awardees will be notified by telephone and or e-mail by January 8, 2010, and their names will be posted on the Fellowship page at the Symposium website…those who are not awardees will be notified by e-mail.”

Last night, looking at the site’s page for registration, I found the statement, “Fellowship recipients will be notified by January 15, 2010.”

I thought I would know whether the writing samples I provided scored well enough with five judges to earn a Fellowship award by tomorrow, and I was already antsy, anxious, at waiting. Now I think I may have to wait another week before finding out my fate.

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I did win two tickets to a terrific food and wine tasting Friday evening, February 19, 2010 (and yes, I can attend the Symposium and tasting on February 19, 2010), Dark & Delicious 2010 in Alameda, CA. Dark & Delicious pairs Petite Sirah from great producers with foods prepared by some of the top chefs in the Bay Area.

I am hugely excited to taste great wines and foods, I love Petite Sirah, so this is right up my alley. I am also going to get to meet some other wine bloggers, including Eric Hwang. Eric handles social media marketing for Windsor Vineyards, I used to handle tradeshow marketing for Windsor Vineyards.

I think there might be a few tickets left, here’s the link to info: http://psiloveyou.org/dd10/

Thank you Jo Diaz for running a ticket contest.

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The mailman has been busy. I received the winter issue of Washington Tasting Room, an attractive, colorful new wine magazine, featuring beautiful photography and solid written content. Recipes, feature articles on selected wineries, a tasting room calendar of special events, and wine columns make this a worthy stand out magazine. I love that the writing puts me right in some of Washington’s tasting rooms, tasting wines; my wine knowledge is limited to California wines, mostly north coast wines, so any magazine that can educate me while entertaining is a must read.

I loved reading about Yakima’s downtown restaurants waiving corkage fees for folks who bring a wine bought that day from a neighboring downtown Yakima tasting room. The news piece quotes a restaurant owner “We’ll wash two glasses any day to sell more dinners…the program is working. The wineries love it and they’re sending customers our way.”

Thanks to John Vitale for sending me this complimentary copy.

From the Wine Appreciation Guild, I received Dr. Richard Baxter’s “Age Gets Better With Wine.” You’ll read my review when I read it – I’m in the middle of a novel so embarrassingly trashy I won’t share the title. I’ve skimmed Age Gets Better With Wine, and I look forward to getting into it soon; with 20 pages of references listed, it appears to be a solid work, and yet my skim suggested a user friendliness. More later.

Also from the Wine Appreciation Guild, I received a new wine preservation system. I am half way through my evaluation of the product and will post a review over the weekend.

Thanks to the Wine Appreciation Guild.

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Completely not related to wine or food, the mailman also delivered a package from a good friend Mike Jasper. The outside of the package was torn, trampled, dirty, cut, a letter of apology from the post office was included. The contents appear perfect however. Jasper sent me a boxed set of 4 discs covering the complete season one of A&E’s Rollergirls. I think Jasper actually knows some of the girls, and when visiting him a while back, we watched an episode and I was stunned by the “there is room on television for anything” aspect of the show’s existence. I am delighted to receive this fine gift, although it will likely wait some time before I view it.

Jasper also sent the October 2009 issue of Playboy so I could read the feature on the 1970s Oakland Raiders.

While I might read this issue of Playboy for the articles, I’m pretty sure my 12 year old son wouldn’t even glance at the Raider article, so I have to put this away.

Thanks Jasper.

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I was just going to put a pair of tri tips on the grill, when I got a call from my local grocery…my order of pork belly is available for me to pick up. Hurray, this is going to be a great week of eating in the Cesano house.

I’m thinking of trying Top Chef cheftestant Kevin Gillespie’s pork belly recipe.

As always, I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

Yes, I Wanna Be a Wine Writer.

Yesterday, I googled “wine and food blogs” to get a sense of what other writers were doing, and a couple of clicks later I found myself reading Alder Yarrow’s blog at Vinography.com

Yarrow is from, relatively, nearby in San Francisco and writes very regularly on wine. I like his writing style. Yarrow clearly knows wine, has access to all the cool wine writer descriptors but doesn’t come off stuffy. With writing that is accessible, and a confidence that allows for a little self deprecation, Yarrow’s wine blogging makes for an enjoyable and informative read.

One entry I found, posted Dec 10, was titled “So You Wanna Be a Wine Writer?“, and as I do want to be a wine writer, I clicked and read about The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley being held four days, February 16-19, 2010.

For four days and four nights, approximately sixty wine writers will “meet, teach, gather, eat, drink, learn, and celebrate their craft in the heart of the Napa Valley”.

The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers

Yarrow describes chatting and learning from the best wine journalists and writers in the English speaking world, a real immersion takes place; we’ll sit together with, chat and learn from people I look up to. Past aspiring writers who attended the Symposium have gone on to “land a major story for the [San Francisco] Chronicle wine section; another got a string of stories in a major wine magazine; still another just launched his own wine magazine; and several more published their first books. Perhaps most impressively, one or two even started blogging”.

Now, the cost of attending is about $1,600, and is quite fair for the cost of the Symposium, hotel room, food (catered by Michelin starred chefs at Meadowood) and wine; but it is beyond my ability to pay. I am not a paid wine writer, a professional, but an aspiring wine writer. I write because I have to, something inside of me gets antsy if I don’t put finger to keyboard.

My goal is to write about wine. I would like to take my penchant for blogging and rudimentary skills as a writer, combined with my experience in wine marketing, my degree in marketing, and turn it all into a career in winery social media marketing. I could really use the professional boost that the symposium offers. The opportunity to write and be critiqued, guided, by established, successful wine writing professionals is incredibly valuable to me personally and professionally.

About halfway through Yarrow’s piece, he mentions scholarships, more formally described as fellowships. Last year 15 Napa wineries underwrote the costs of the Symposium for 15 fortunate wine writers, fellows. This year, 16 fortunate fellows will receive fellowships.

The wineries who covered the costs of attending the 2009 Symposium were Blackbird Vineyards (fellowship included an invitation to Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley), Chimney Rock Winery (fellowship included a tasting of Chimney Rock wines), Emilio’s Terrace, Franciscan Estate (fellowship included an invitation to tour with Director of Winemaking Janet Myers followed by lunch or dinner), Judd’s Hill (fellowship included an invitation to dinner with the winemaking family owners), Far Niente (fellowship included invitation to taste estate wines including current and select Cave Collection vintages), Peju (fellowship included invitation to tasting, lunch and tour of the winery with co-founder Herta Peju), PlumpJack (fellowship included an afternoon with winemaker Anthony Biali and General Manager John Conover, tasting at the winery), Raymond Vineyards, Robert Mondavi Winery, Rubicon Estate (fellowship included overnight stay on the property and private tour of the estate, followed by a tasting of Rubicon and other estate wines), Saintsbury, Shafer Vineyards, Silverado Vineyards, Terlato Family Winery (fellowship included a tasting of Terlato Family Vineyards wines), TOR Kenward Family Vineyards (fellowship included selecting of a special bottle from an extensive wine cellar and lunch with the Kenward family), and Tres Sabores (fellowship included a night or two of lodging at the winery’s Rutherford guesthouse and use of a Tres Sabores vehicle, and tour the areas farms and talks with organic growing movement leaders, and dinner with community members).

The fellowships came from tiny wineries like Emilio’s Terrace, with production of under 1,000 cases, to industry giants like Constellation (owns Franciscan and Mondavi above) and Terlato Wine Group (owns Chimney Rock and Terlato above).

Applications for one of the 16 fellowships for 2010 had to be postmarked yesterday, the same day I chanced upon information about the Symposium and fellowship opportunities.

I was to mail a simple entry application listing my name, address, phone, e-mail, website, media outlet/employer, and a bio of no more than 150 words. I was also required to provide five legible copies of each of two writing samples published within the last year. The maximum number of pages for the submission was to be eight. The two pieces I submitted were Wine…here’s what I want to share. and A tale of two Merlots and together they came to exactly eight pages.

So on the last day possible, I stumbled upon an incredible opportunity, and have submitted a (I think, I hope) winning entry. The packet was mailed yesterday. I took the large envelope up to the post office counter to have it be postmark dated in my presence. The postal employee said that first class, Ukiah to St. Helena, takes just one day.

Five judges, professional wine writers all, will score submissions, judges scores will be compiled and averaged, and fellowships will be awarded based on the highest average scores.

I will know, one way or the other, by January 8, 2010.