Through the Grapevine #22

Wine news and just a smidge of commentary for June 26, 2024

The News

Heat waves have been rolling across much of the U.S., so it feels appropriate to begin with some cold wines.

• First there’s Vinepair’s take on chilled reds. One of the dividing lines in the wine world is whether your response to chilled reds is, “You can chill reds??” or “Obviously, this isn’t news. Did you want the Gamay, the Valdiguie, or the newest from Field Recordings?” I have a bottle of Blaufränkisch in my fridge right now, so you can guess my side of the line, but it wasn’t that long ago that I thought a chilled red was one served at cellar temperature. It’s still hard to find chilled reds if you’re buying your wines at a standard grocery or liquor store, or even a more traditionally oriented wine shop. If you want to try the trend, look for a wine store with a broader selection, or one that describes itself as a natural wine shop. Or send me an email and I’ll do a bit of sleuthing for options in your area.

  
  Speaking of chilled reds, I shared this bottle of Cabernet Franc with my neighbors this week after it came highly recommended as “a definitive Cab Franc” from one of my favorite natural wine bars in this area, The Punchdown.

  

  It was a scorcher of a week so I served this even more chilled than I usually would, straight out of the fridge. Of course, it warmed fairly quickly and the aromas and flavors really began to emerge. Ice cold or room temperature, this is freaking delicious. Also, one of my neighbors is a winemaker from the Loire Valley, and when he examined the bottle (with great approval!) he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! This is my friend!” This kind of thing happens all the time here, and it’s part of why I moved to a winemaking region, but I am still not used to it.

• Also in the category of cold wines for hot weather is dry sherry. This is behind a paywall, but my short time in Sevilla, Spain taught me to love a glass of dry Sherry on a hot day, and I’m glad someone agrees, even if it’s the Wall Street Journal. You will want a Fino or Manzanilla sherry, and you’ll do yourself a favor if you buy one that is over $20 rather than the $12 versions that are mostly meant for cooking. Drink it with a little snack in the style of tapas; in Spain I would have mine with a small piece of Spanish tortilla/omelette, but here I’m more likely to just have some hard cheese. If you want to be extra Spanish, you can precede your sherry with a vermouth on the rocks with an orange slice and an olive. I’ll take mine with extra olives on the side.

• On the other side of warm weather is this article about climate change, warmer winters, and their effects on wine - especially on “mousiness.” Not familiar with mouse taint? I’m relieved for you, but you can read about it here and hope never to encounter it in your mouth.

  Wine Without Winters

• On an unrelated topic but one that concerns me personally, Napa and Sonoma wineries are seeing a drastic reduction in visitors, and it’s probably related to the drastic increase in tasting fees. Anecdotally, not a day goes by without someone saying, “I remember when it was free to go wine tasting in Napa!” Well, that’s before wine tasting became a leisure activity in itself, and when wine tasting was more focused toward wine buying. Tasting rooms, if they existed at all, weren’t fully staffed, full-service entities of their own; someone who owned or worked at the vineyard would just pop over and pour a bit of their wine for the occasional visitor. Now guests’ expectations have risen, tasting is a major part of the business, and we have to charge for a spacious and appealing tasting space, staffing, accompaniments, and of course, the wine itself, because casual drinkers who stop by to just try out a few wines are not buying enough wine to make it worth popping open five or six bottles. Hosting, pouring, and educating in a tasting room has become a profession (Hello, it’s me!).

  
  All that said, Napa prices - and to a lesser degree Sonoma as well - are absolutely haywire. Instead of going to two or three wineries a day, many tourists are finding that they can reasonably visit one or two during their entire vacation, and that is a real problem for all of us who work in the industry. Eventually everyone but our most affluent customers are going to stop coming here at all. I have noticed more of the wineries moving toward tiers of experiences and including lower-cost options, which I think is a helpful shift, especially when it’s accompanied by more flexibility for walk-ins.

  
  The article also mentions tipping. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I will say that for tasting room staff, more U.S. wineries are advertising tips as a significant part of the expected compensation, at the same time that confusion and sometimes hostility toward tipping is on the rise. Most tastings are booked and paid in advance. Many people don’t carry cash. Unless they buy wine and have an opportunity to tip on a card, guests can’t tip even if they want to. Much like front of house restaurant staff, tasting room staff are likely to be caught in the middle between employers who want to pay less and count on tips to keep these jobs appealing, and customers resisting the tip economy by punishing their servers. Yay. ***This is not a complaint about my own job, just an observation about the direction of the industry.***

• Every day is a good day to roll your eyes at the Three-Tier System. And write to your elected officials to do away with antiquated laws that hamstring small producers.

• No day is a good day to roll your eyes at people who just don’t know things, contrary to this snotty NY Post headline. Sometimes people don’t know how rosé is made. No need to clutch your pearls. If you happen to be one of the people who does know, you can just explain without shaming them.

Which is a good segue to announce a new feature that I’m starting this week…

Housekeeping

Every day someone asks me a question couched in embarrassment and prefaced with, “I have a stupid question.” I’m sure there are stupid questions, and there are certainly questions that have surprised me, but so far I haven’t encountered stupid questions about wine. A “stupid question” is just a gap in knowledge that is keeping you from knowing a whole lot of other things that depend on that piece of knowledge. So, I’m starting an occasional feature called No Stupid Wine Questions, the first of which will premier later this week. I have a trove of these questions from my work in wine retail and hospitality, but I’d also love to take some of your questions. No shame, drop them in the comments or email them to me at stacey@justasmidge.com if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.

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The Best Thing I Drank This Week

I’m calling this Weird Wine Week, as I seemed to be unintentionally going out of my way to introduce my neighbors to wines they would never find on their own.