Woot Wine : One Week, One Wine (SM)

Some wineries we feature here don’t even have a tasting room. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But we don’t often encounter a winery with its own dungeon, drawbridge, moat, and battlements. Perched imposingly on the side of Diamond Mountain in Napa Valley, Castello di Amorosa wasn’t actually built in the Middle Ages. It was just built using medieval techniques and European stonecrafters. We’re talking cross-vaulted ceilings, brick buttresses, ornate wrought-iron fixtures, and other details you can’t buy at Home Depot.

We have no idea if winemaker Darryl Sattui is a closet D&D fiend. But Castello di Amorosa, an offshoot of his successful and acclaimed V. Sattui winery, is a fantasist’s dream. He went back and forth to Italy, modifying his design all the while to make it more and more medieval.

And the same attention to detail is on display in his Castello di Amorosa 2006 Gewürztraminer Anderson Valley, the Italian-bred varietal with the deceptively Teutonic name. It’s a dry white showing off all of the classic Gewürztraminer virtues: spicy clove, lychee, and rose aromas, full body, and concentrated fruit and spice flavors. It’s what the nobility would’ve quaffed with a smoked leg of boar while watching the jousting on Feast Day.

Indeed, Castello di Amorosa’s authenticity even extends to an authentic torture chamber, complete with iron maiden and other instruments of medieval persuasion. So not only is Darryl Sattui the first winemaker to feature Gewürztraminer on Wine.Woot, he’s also the first to own a stretching rack.

Of course, it’s only there for atmosphere. Darryl lives to make premium Italian-style wines, not to extract confessions from heretics. But still, if you post in our discussion forums, you might want to choose your words carefully this time.

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Tough gig, being a wine scout, lemme tell you. Everybody thinks it’d be a nonstop adventure. They think every day is like stumbling across Mickey Mantle playing on an alkali field, or Lana Turner working the soda fountain at a drugstore. Truth is, it’s a grind. You strike out way more often than you get on base. And you almost never hit a home run. You hear about some sensational Merlot up in the mountains, you spend days or weeks tracking it down, and the stuff tastes like Windex. You spit it out, shrug it off, and hit the road again. Nature of the game.

So my hopes weren’t high when I read a line in some small-town paper about this winery up in the Sierra Foothills. This Ursa outfit had won best Petite Sirah at the California State Fair two years in a row. But I’d tasted enough award-winning swill to know that all the medals in the world can’t make a lousy wine taste good. If they were so great, why were they just making 200, 300, 400 cases of each vintage? Why didn’t they grow any other varietals? Still, I had a job to do. I wheeled on over to El Dorado County, expecting to be gone again before my last sip stopped swirling on my tongue.

Let’s just say this old bird-dog learned a few new tricks that day. Each bottle seemed better than the last. The Ursa Vineyards 2005 Petite Sirah Sierra Foothills had that elegant, perfumy mountain-fruit aroma, with a robustly oaky palate. Their 2005 Petite Sirah Vineyard Blend combined equal parts Sierra Foothills, Central Coast, and Paso Robles fruit for a mixture spice and black fruit like nothing I’d ever scouted before. And the big, juicy Ursa Vineyards 2005 Petite Sirah Paso Robles reminded me why I got into this game in the first place. A blueberry nose spiced with subtle cinnamon and black pepper lead into a lingering dark berry palate with well-balanced tannins. With the first drink, I reached inside my jacket for a contract. I had to sign these kids up.

Now Ursa’s moving up in the world, taking their star turn on Wine.Woot. I’m still out here pounding sand, rustling the bushes, searching for the next big wine thing. But when I get down, when I feel like I’m wasting my time or wasting my life, I just remember the way it felt to sip that Petite Sirah. No matter what happens from now on, I’ll always be the guy who discovered Ursa Vineyards.

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(The long interval between blogs is the writer's fault this time; I've just been incredibly busy.)
 

Out Of Crisis Comes Opportunity - Weds. Aug 13, 2008

Our assistant winemaker of the last seven years, Lynda, cut her family vacation on the Klamath River short for two reasons. First, the smoke was so bad that her husband and kids were wheezing and coughing a lot. Second, a dream job opportunity presented itself. I know it was a hard decision for her because we are like family at the winery, but if I were in her shoes I'm sure I would have taken the job. The timing, people, and nature of the job are a perfect fit for her life right now. I immediately listed a position on winejobs.com, and was overwhelmed by the response. I had over 50 applicants from 17 countries on five continents; fortunately more than half of them were from Northern California. Almost all of them were qualified, so I set about choosing those that I thought might be the best fit. While Lynda, and Chris before her, had worked only half time except during crush, I didn't want to limit the candidate pool, so I set about looking for applicants who had other skills and experience such as vineyard work, marketing, or mechanical skills (i.e. someone who could take on some of my duties in addition to the assistant winemaker responsibilities).

I thought I had settled on the right person, and was prepared to make an offer, when one of my closest friends, David Noyes, gave me a call and asked me to go for a walk (we often walk in a local nature preserve and discuss business, family, the meaning of life, etc.) David was the founding winemaker at Kunde Estate and worked there for sixteen years, leaving a little over two years ago to work on his own brand full-time. Prior to that he was assistant to Paul Draper at Ridge for many years. Although David had previously told me he was looking for a little outside income while growing his brand, I hadn't considered the possibility of what ensued. He ran into Lynda's new “boss” and found out Lynda was moving, thought about it and approached me.

We spent about four hours talking last weekend, and David has agreed to come work with me starting next week. I'm thrilled, and lots of people have been making comments like “I can't wait to try the wines you guys are going to make together.” 
 

Here's One For You, Nineteen For Me - Sun. Aug. 17, 2008

During the RPM tour, a question came up about all the taxes and government fees we pay. Back in 1988 we had to deal with 14 different agencies in order to build a winery, including paying $400 for an archaeologist to confirm that we wouldn't disturb any Native American burial grounds (the land had been continuously farmed for over 100 years). We currently pay annual or semiannual fees to many different states for permits to sell to distributors, consumers or both. Within California we pay the state for a Winegrower's license, a Processor's license, a Produce buyer's permit, a Weighmaster's license, a Grape Crush Report assessment, a Pressure vessel inspection fee, a Corporate filing fee and a Division of Water Rights filing fee. Sonoma County gets us for a business license, Food Handler's permit, Hazardous Materials Permit, Agricultural Burn permit, Scale Inspection fee, and a Weights & Measures business ID. I'm probably forgetting a couple, too. We pay excise and/or sales tax to a number of states, including California, and Excise tax to the federal government. The only tax I recall ever being diminished or eliminated was the Special Occupational Tax that came into existence during the tenure of a President who ran on the slogan “No new taxes” (although the 529% increase in federal excise taxes that passed during that administration is still in effect). Of course there's also the sales and property taxes that all businesses pay.
 

Nightmare On Maple Street - Mon.. Aug 25, 2008

The old county assessor's parcel maps show a 96 lot subdivision of our vineyard that was created in the late 1800's. In the early 1980's a developer tried to get a 36 parcel subdivision approved, but couldn't because the ground didn't “perc” well enough for nearly that many houses (there is no county sewer line nearby). The neighbors were thrilled when we bought the property with the intention of building a winery, as they had been resigned to looking at a subdivision. On the old map there were four named streets running through the vineyard, with Maple St. running right between our two winery buildings – through the crush and bottling area.

We bottled over one third of our annual production last week, and it was the most problematic bottling we've had since around 1993. Fortunately, nothing happened that would compromise wine quality, but otherwise, the saying “Murphy was an optimist” came to mind. We had two very full days scheduled, but had an almost two hour delay starting because a switch for the vacuum corker wasn't working properly. We had labeling problems all day long, and more vacuum problems at the end of the first long day. As a result, we had to stack several pallets of wine cork-up for two days, then flip and restack the cases for shipment to the warehouse. We also had to soak the labels off over fifty cases of wine (most still isn't done) and hand label them. Toby suggested a w00t “bleeped-up label” offering. These labels are much, much more difficult to remove than the mystery wine labels, which has led us to the conclusion that an issue with the adhesive was responsible for the application problems during bottling. The specified adhesive was exactly the same as before; our printer took leftover labels and is having them tested.

I can't blame all our problems on suppliers and mechanical problems. I ordered the tin capsules for an entire year's worth of bottling back in November, the bottles in January and the corks in late July. During the blending process, the volume of our red table wine, The Duke, increased and I didn't give a second thought to bottling supplies. When I made a list of supplies for Sam to bring to the bottling area, we had just enough capsules for the Syrah, Grenache and Noir de Noirs, and were a little bit short for the Zinfandel and the Duke., but we did have some plain gold and plain red capsules left over from other projects. By the middle of the second day of bottling it became evident we were going to be tight on corks (it didn't help that the bottling company had gone through a couple of hundred while testing and fixing the vacuum problem). At that point I turned to Sam and said, “Gee, I never recalculated how many cases of glass we had vs. how much wine we actually have.” As we got toward bottling the last of The Duke, we ran through the custom “Wellington” capsules, the plain gold and the plain red capsules and knew we'd have 15 or 20 cases without capsules for tasting room pouring. Then the last glass pallet was almost empty. When there was less than five gallons of wine left in the tank we ran out of corks, so the last couple of cases got corked with samples from different cork vendors. After bottling 2071 cases in claret (Bordeaux shape) bottles we had 11 bottles left over. At least we don't have to worry about storage space for bottling supplies this winter. :)

I apologize for the long interval between blogs. Between time spent filling a key position, a week long vacation, putting up a w00t offering and our largest single bottling in years I just haven't been able to set aside much time. My spell check just suggested I replace Zinfandel with Infanticide:)

After running out, we dipped into our strategic oil reserves and came up with a few drops more. Take note, vinegar fans: Ginger Key Lime Vinegar has replaced the Raspberry Vinegar.

Eureka! We’ve struck oil! No, not the black sticky crude that bubbles up out of the ground – that stuff tastes terrible. We’re talking cooking oil. Infused oil, that is. Greasy gold! Tuscany tea! Next thing you know, old Woot’s a culinarian. And our kinfolk say, “Hey, can you get me a discount on that stuff?” (Note to kinfolk: no.)

This Gourmet Kitchen line of oils was created by food anthropologist and author Chef Clyde Serda. He’s not one of those evil oil barons you hear about – he’s a California Culinary Academy graduate and the 1996 CAPC Chef of the Year. These five flavors of Gourmet Kitchen chow-gloop are all but certain to bring a little class to your kitchen and a lot of pleasure to your palate. But heed this warning: unlike most Wine.Woot offerings, these are not recommended for drinking straight.

Let’s start with the three varieties of grapeseed oil. Because it’s neutral in taste and has a high smoke point, grapeseed oil provides a quiet, unobtrusive platform for the other ingredients to shine. What, you don’t know what a grapeseed tastes like? That’s exactly our point.

Sweet, smoky, and spicy your thing? Use the Sweet Smoked Chili Oil for sautéeing, drizzle it over pizza, or brush it on bread. Don’t be frightened by the Blood Orange Oil’s scary name. It’s a light, flavorful oil with a sweet, tart citrus thing going on, great for steaks, fish, poultry, and veggies. And the Sweet Roasted Garlic Oil displays the rich, intense flavors of – you guessed it – sweet roasted garlic. It’s divine with everything except durian, ostrich jerky, and Count Chocula.

But chefs cannot live by grapeseed alone. Perfectly ripe, gently pressed olives give the Gourmet Kitchen California Extra Virgin Olive Oil the smooth, buttery flavor you crave, you dog you. Try it on leafy greens with the complex flavor of the Ginger Key Lime Vinegar. One bite it tastes Asian, the next it's all citrusy, the one after that, it's somehow both. Never a dull palate with this stuff. (Don’t embarrass yourself asking why it's not green - Key Limes are actually yellow.)

Fellow citizens, the time has come to end your dependence on cheap vegetable oil. You deserve better. You deserve the security of knowing that your next meal won’t taste like it was scraped off the bottom of the popcorn bin at the movies. With these Gourmet Kitchen infused oils, you’ll build a bridge to the future. And then you’ll eat it.

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Attention, contestants in our Wine.Woot Mystery Wine Challenge! By now, you should have received your Wellington Vineyards order, including the mystery bottle(s). It’s time to pop the cork on it, take a sip or two, and make your best guess as to what varietal you just tasted. No, “Mad Dog 20/20” is not a varietal. If you have any questions about how this works, read the original Wine Challenge announcement or post your question in the discussion forum for this blog post.

Thanks for taking part in the largest wine tasting event in the known universe. We’ll gather the entries and salute the winners in a future blog post. Isn’t that recognition much more meaningful than some vulgar prize like mere money?

Eureka! We’ve struck oil! No, not the black sticky crude that bubbles up out of the ground – that stuff tastes terrible. We’re talking cooking oil. Infused oil, that is. Greasy gold! Tuscany tea! Next thing you know, old Woot’s a culinarian. And our kinfolk say, “Hey, can you get me a discount on that stuff?” (Note to kinfolk: no.)

This Gourmet Kitchen line of oils was created by food anthropologist and author Chef Clyde Serda. He’s not one of those evil oil barons you hear about – he’s a California Culinary Academy graduate and the 1996 CAPC Chef of the Year. These five flavors of Gourmet Kitchen chow-gloop are all but certain to bring a little class to your kitchen and a lot of pleasure to your palate. But heed this warning: unlike most Wine.Woot offerings, these are not recommended for drinking straight.

Let’s start with the three varieties of grapeseed oil. Because it’s neutral in taste and has a high smoke point, grapeseed oil provides a quiet, unobtrusive platform for the other ingredients to shine. What, you don’t know what a grapeseed tastes like? That’s exactly our point.

Sweet, smoky, and spicy your thing? Use the Sweet Smoked Chili Oil for sautéeing, drizzle it over pizza, or brush it on bread. Don’t be frightened by the Blood Orange Oil’s scary name. It’s a light, flavorful oil with a sweet, tart citrus thing going on, great for steaks, fish, poultry, and veggies. And the Sweet Roasted Garlic Oil displays the rich, intense flavors of – you guessed it – sweet roasted garlic. It’s divine with everything except durian, ostrich jerky, and Count Chocula.

But chefs cannot live by grapeseed alone. Perfectly ripe, gently pressed olives give the Gourmet Kitchen California Extra Virgin Olive Oil the smooth, buttery flavor you crave, you dog you. Try it on leafy greens with the delicate, crisp flavor of the ever-so-slightly sweet Raspberry Vinegar. Don’t worry about the vinegar’s occasional cloudiness. That just means it’s all-natural, unpasteurized, and awesome.

Fellow citizens, the time has come to end your dependence on cheap vegetable oil. You deserve better. You deserve the security of knowing that your next meal won’t taste like it was scraped off the bottom of the popcorn bin at the movies. With these Gourmet Kitchen infused oils, you’ll build a bridge to the future. And then you’ll eat it.

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A decade or two back, comic book publishers conjured up a fiendish marketing gambit: multiple covers for the same issue. If you can’t sell comics to more people, why not sell more comics to the same people? The hardcore fans snap up those “variant” covers to this day, providing a nice little income stream for the comics industry while requiring almost no additional effort.

Scott Harvey’s new offshoot, Super Hero Wines, applies this trick to the premiere issue of its new InZINerator, with three different front labels for the same wine. The difference is, owning three bottles of the same wine isn’t redundant. Unlike the latest exploits of Bluddslayer and the Psychic Lava Mutants, this Zinfandel-Barbera blend only gets better with repeated “readings”.

BAP! Forward, luscious fruit that leaps out of the glass! THWOK! Muscular flavors of allspice, raspberry, and mocha! ZAM! Firm tannins and a lingering finish! The label may be designed with a younger audience in mind, but there’s no age limit to enjoying InZINerator’s meaty European-style drinkability. Well, except for the drinking-age laws, we mean.

Mild-mannered Scott Harvey’s identity is no secret. You know him as Wine.Woot user ScottHarveyWines. He’s stayed active on the message boards long after his previous Wine.Woot offering ran its course.

Scott unleashed his nephew Michael Harants to design these labels when Michael wasn’t busy working on special effects for the upcoming Star Trek movie. Michael has obviously learned a thing or two from the comics industry, and the result is the three variant labels you see before you. You can keep them in plastic bags if you want – comics people say it preserves the collector value. But with all due respect to Michael and his labels, we think InZINerator’s real value lies inside the bottle.

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Hey, we’ve been meaning to ask you: where was the first officially designated American Viticultural Area? If you said “Sonoma, California”, “Hudson River Valley, New York”, or “up my butt”, you clearly have never played World Wine Challenge.

On the other hand, if you said “Augusta, Missouri”, you might be familiar with the PC game that tests your wine creds with over 500 randomized questions about global wine lore.

Either that, or you’re from Augusta, Missouri. How’s the Norton looking this year?

Since only the truly gifted can drink wine 24 hours a day, the rest of us will have to fill our dry hours soaking up vinous knowledge in popular quiz-show form. Certified Wine Educator Barry Wiss infused World Wine Challenge with all the certified wine education he could muster.

Players can play at three difficulty levels – Drinker, Student, or Hopeless Alcoholic. After each answer, you can click “Learn More” to delve into the issue in greater detail. And while 500 questions may not seem like a lot for a trivia game, if you play it in the appropriate state of mind, you won’t remember any of them next time.

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Are you the kind of wine drinker who comes to Wine.Woot to find the same stuff you see at the supermarket? Do you prefer to stick to a handful of standard varietals rather than try anything unusual? Do you only patronize wineries named after animals? Can you only really enjoy a wine if you feel like you’ve overpaid for it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, this offering isn’t for you. See you on Thursday. Maybe we’ll have some Chardonnay or Merlot from a winery with a name like Whimsical Purple Rhino for, like, forty bucks a bottle.

On the other hand, maybe you seek a fresh, flavorful experience at a reasonable price, and you come here for wines that you can’t find anywhere else, and you appreciate the craft and tradition of a family-owned winery that’s been doing this since the 19th century. If so, you’re in luck. Because these two types of V. Sattui Riesling are rare pleasures. And you can only get them in two places: at the V. Sattui winery in Napa, or right here, today. Guess where you’ll pay less for it. Like, way, way less.

The shape, label design, and color of those four bottles may put you in mind of beer bottles. But rest assured: they’re full of nothing but 750mL each of the best Riesling in California. Says who? Says the California State Fair people, that’s who. They bestowed that honor upon the V. Sattui 2007 Riesling Dry. Now you, too, can indulge in the same full-bodied, supple aromas of peach and tangerine that sent the State Fair judges into such raptures, even if you’ve never been anywhere near California. The more delicate, sweeter V. Sattui 2007 Riesling Off-Dry may not have as impressive a CV. Not many wines do. But it’s just as stunning in combination with any spicy cuisine, from Beijing to Bangkok, from Delhi to Durango.

Truth be told, serious wine insiders need no reminding of V. Sattui’s reputation for fine Rieslings. They’ve been known as one of Cali’s best for, oh, a few decades now. The Brotherhood of Wine Snobs may revoke our membership for revealing the secret, but we wouldn’t feel right if we didn’t let you know. If you’re adventurous enough to give ‘em a try, you know where the button is. If not, well, you probably couldn’t have handled it anyway.

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We’ve seen a lot of Wellington Vineyards this year. We’ve laughed a little, cried a little, learned a little, and drank a lot. And now we’re faced with the last Wellington offering of 2008. How better to mark the occasion than with a properly celebratory selection from the more obscure corners of the Wellington empire?

Since he doesn’t play golf or raise pigeons or sniff glue, Peter needs a passion in his life, and these kinds of small-lot wines are it. How could you not love the heavenly-smelling Wellington 2006 Grenache, Estate Sonoma Valley? Fresh cherry, raspberry, plum, pepper and allspice aromas introduce this soft, full-bodied, mildly chewy blend of old-vine and young-vine Grenache. At a mere 224 cases, it’s a rarer pleasure than a warm night in San Francisco.
Almost as scarce is the Wellington 2006 Syrah, Estate Sonoma Valley. Just 311 cases of this smoky, meaty, fresh ‘n’ fruity red were made, so you’ll be among the few who experience its full, fleshy entry and rich, fruit-laden middle.

But you probably already know what Grenache and Syrah are like. To make this a real party, here comes the Wellington 2006 Noir de Noirs, an old-vine blend of four varietals you won’t find on the wine list at TGI Friday’s. It’s mostly something called Alicante Bouschet, with smaller amounts of Lenoir, Grand Noir and Petite Bouschet. The result is a rough-edged, wild-eyed red bursting with savage fresh-grape flavor – a wine you can drink with a fork, if you can tame it first.

Yes, we’ll miss Wellington Vineyards the rest of this year. But we’ll miss it a little less with these three bottles to remember it by. During the long months of fall and winter, we’ll just keep reminding ourselves: we’ll always have Sonoma.

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