Tag: featured

  • EAT YOUR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES (DON’T DRINK THEM) – Guest Post courtesy of Stephen Meuse

    Wine director of Formaggio Kitchen Cambridge, Stephen Meuse, quietly maintains a truly unique wine blog that was an inspiration for ours. We particularly liked this entry of his and have reprinted it here with his generous permission. Hope you enjoy this taste and then head to the source for more :  http://www.thewineidea.com/

    EAT YOUR FRUITS AND VEGETABLES
    DON’T DRINK THEM

     by  //

    Years ago I interviewed the doyenne of Americans involved in the Burgundy wine trade, the knowledgeable and colorful Becky Wasserman, for a story in the Boston Globe. I met her at the Parker House (now the Omni Parker House) at the foot of Beacon Hill in its famous bar.  Becky isn’t one to put herself forward in any way and has a quiet, modest, retiring air.  She wasn’t exactly difficult to interview, but I found myself having to gently prod and probe to get much out of her.

    Mid-way through our chat her husband, the Brit Russell Hone, blew in like a gust of wind, heaved his massive bulk into a chair next to his wife and proceeded to highjack the interview. He seemed to be everything she wasn’t: voluble, opinionated, and more than a bit of a know-it-all.

    But he was interesting. At some point he went off on the stupidity of American wine writing and in particular on what he called “the fruits and vegetables school” of criticism, wherein the expertise of the taster hinges not on his judgment about the overall quality of the wine so much as in an enumeration of every smell and taste that could be teased out of it.

    That was around 2003 and I haven’t stopped thinking about the conversation.  It still comes to mind whenever I read tasting notes that take this approach.  The kind of wine writing the English have historically practiced isn’t characterized by this dogged pursuit of every nuance of scent and flavor; it rises – or aspires to rise – above individual sensations to give something more like an overall view of how the wine presents.

    You can see this in a representative Jancis Robinson tasting note, this one of a 2006 Alessandria Gramolere Barolo: Blackish with vague hint of rust at the rim. Very heady and opulent on the nose. Some freshness counterbalances the richness. Dry finish. At the moment embryonic. But it should get there. Relatively modernistic.

    Compare this with a tasting note by David Schildknecht (of the Robert M. Parker team) on the Soter 2011 North Valley Oregon pinot noir: sweetly ripe though tart-edged and piquantly pit-inflected fresh red berry fruit is garlanded with freesia and wisteria, but also tinged with smoky black tea and pungent green herbs. Somehow, the overall effect is not at all bifurcated or awkwardly edgy but instead reflects productive tension, culminating in a long, buoyant finish at once soothing and stimulating in its burst of berry seed-crunching.”   Points if you were able to stifle a laugh reading that last bit.


    Russell Hone of Becky Wasserman Selections

    Why the difference in these two approaches?  I have at two ideas to float.  The first is that British wine writing emerged in the early 19th century out of the tradition of note-taking by broker-shippers in Bordeaux and elsewhere.  These were the days before estate-bottling was common and most wine was bought in barrel by brokers who then blended various lots to make up a fairly consistent house style and sold these wine under their own label.  Berry Bros & Rudd still operate in this old-fashioned way.

    When you are buying to blend and private label the most important aspects of what you buy will be those that will make a meaningful contribution to the final shape and temperament of the wine.  In the end, it’s the overall impression that’s important, and this impression is made up of not of individuated scents and flavors so much as what I would call values.

    In making such a wine your main concern will be whether the final product is indicative of a wine from, say, the Medoc.  Is it well-structured and shapely?  Does it have steady fruit and adequate acidity. Is there enough body to satisfy?  (You can imagine a broker buying a barrel of wine that might be stridently acidic just to have on hand in the event he needed to add some zip to an otherwise flaccid cuvée. It makes sense that your note-taking technique would reflect the need to note this).  I consider these characteristics values rather than discrete flavor impressions and they are the aspects British and continental wine writing has tended to focus on to this day.

    The second idea concerns what I have long felt is a fundamental insecurity about wine that dogs Americans and influences the way we experience and talk about wine. When you don’t understand something you scan the data for something you can recognize and connect with.  Americans, I think, take comfort in giving names to the smells and tastes they encounter in wine because they find in them something familiar, something we all have a vocabulary to express, and the result is a comfortable illusion of comprehension.

    Recognizing a scent and connecting it with something you already know gives you something to say about the wine when you might otherwise not know how to respond to it.  Sometimes one does sense horse stable or peach pit or wisteria in wine, but these individuated elements aren’t what I would call values.

    When I was new to wine I discovered that I was rather good at the fruits and vegetables apart of it and was pleased as punch when I could pre-empt a group of tasters by identifying a few discrete tastes and smells – with the result that others immediately experienced them, too.  As I got better at this it seemed to me that I was making splendid progress; that I had broken the code.  Over time, tasting with more experienced people made me realize how foolish this was.  Being able to connect a flavor in wine with the flavor of some other thing in the world didn’t help me make judgments about the quality or character of wine because these elements weren’t values, the things that matter.

    Here’s the discouraging part: Since coming to this conclusion wine has become MORE not LESS difficult to evaluate for me.   It’s harder, much harder, to asses values than to accurately name individual flavors and scents, and what’s more, values require context — something that a taster develops only with a lot of wine experiences and time to mull them over.

    I don’t consider myself to have arrived as a wine taster, but I think I’m finally paying attention to the right things.

    Stephen Meuse can be reached at stephenmeuse@icloud.com

     

     

  • Chateau Le Payral – The embarrassing luxury of experience

    “The most important thing to know about my wines now is that all our work is in the vineyards!” This was the beginning of my afternoon visiting with Thierry D’Auhliac on a recent February afternoon. As we headed out of his house towards his backyard and surrounding vineyards, Thierry began to explain that his whole focus presently was in the vineyards, the soil, the building of life, vitality, and diversity.

    Thierry, a true Bergeraçois, is the seventh generation to farm this land, and proud to remind me that 2016 had marked his twentieth harvest. What made this afternoon all the more memorable was that it was all outdoors. We spent the whole afternoon climbing in and out of his van, from plot to plot. Here the best for Sauvignon Gris, that one best for Merlot, and still another couple sites that were best suited for his youngest vines, Malbec. We passed some beautifully slopped rows, each in various stages of winter’s pruning. We even passed an old tractor that his father, long-retired but unable to stop working, had stranded at the base of one vineyard, and Thierry sort of holding back a laugh at the site of the machine lodged between two huge limbs.

    The photo above is a larger plot planted to Merlot and Cabernet Franc

    Thierry began his tenure at Chateau Le Payral with a focus in the cellar, but began to realize that his soils had real variation and some varietals might be better suited on different soils, so began the long process of replanting some varieties. This proved to be a huge help in the cellar, and he witnessed the difference in the wines, reds with better ripeness and polish, and whites with more acidity. And while he has been certified organic since 2006, and farming biodynamically for years now, his current focus is on the soil, building the topsoil and hummus and trying to avoid too much compaction.

    Thierry is a tinkerer, and sort of engineer at heart. He has taken the time and effort to develop his own blend of cover crops, which he sows in alternating rows, leaving the natural grasses in the alternate rows. This blend of seeds is even grown and propagated on his farm, so he doesn’t have to buy seeds, also ensuring that each plant type is adapted to his soil and microclimate. More importantly, Thierry has developed an incorporation method that he believes is better than the typical turn-over. He doesn’t mow, just makes a low pass with his tractor, a hotrod version, that pushes the growth down, flattening the whole mass, yet still keeps all the vegetation in the row, beginning the natural breakdown process. This custom-fitted the tractor with side and rear attachments enables him to do multiple actions all with one pass of each row, reducing the further reducing soil compaction.

    At the end of our afternoon, Thierry went into a barn returning with a shovel, I was sure he was ready to get to work. Instead, he headed to a nearby parcel of vines and began digging, turning over a few shovels of soil. Proudly he asked me to regard the different clear layers of soil, different colors, the rich layer going many inches down. And he picked out all the worms, proudly proclaiming that even in winter his soils were alive.

    After all the years, Thierry still enjoys spending time in his vines. The hard work and technique in the cellar is all behind him now. Now, its his work in the vineyards that has enabled him to achieve even better results in the cellar, lowering sulfur levels, and beginning with better, healthier grapes. He is planting a new parcel of vines across the road from his house, for many years it had been rented to graze cattle without knowing the soils were so well suited for grapes. And so he is beginning again his regimen of cover crops. This example is emblematic of Thierry’s work and mission.

    It was refreshing to visit Thierry and sense his passion and confidence in where he has come from, 20 years of hard work and diligence, and what lies ahead, moving from strength to strength.

    The photo below is of the new parcel, which will begin to be planted this season.

  • Machine vs Manual

    A couple years ago while visiting growers in Beaujolais, I learned a little known fact about growing grapes there. In the northern, “cru” appellations, grapes are trained exclusively in goblet, pruned to a low bush shape, and not allowed to grow on wire trellises. I had noted this practice on previous trips but never knew it is in fact required by the AOC’s (Appellations d’Origine Controlées). Training the vines to goblet is tradition but it also compels hand-harvesting of the grapes. An important, and often overlooked, detail affecting the character, quality and price of a wine

    Of course price is determined by many factors some more logical than others but one of the first and most basic is how the grapes are harvested. Luxury brands frequently market their wines as “hand-harvested”. The inference being the added cost of hand labor (and the presumed skill attached to said hand) leads unfailingly to higher quality and therefore justifies a higher price. In “premium-speak” the simple human hand has become, well, shorthand for quality. And not just for wine “products” — think hand-crafted, hand-stitched, hand-cut, hand-carved, etc. Yet I actually think there can be a lot of truth in this claim. Staying within the wine world here, there are qualitative differences to the work of a human hand (and mind and eye) that can’t, quite yet, be duplicated with machine-production techniques.

    This assumption of quality has become uncontested, unquestioned even for the wine world’s one-percenters. But when I see modestly priced, handcrafted wines passed over for moderately cheaper, conventionally produced “peers” I’m concerned we haven’t advocated well enough for the value of hearts and hands at every price point. The wines I’m thinking of have been handled just as lovingly as the trophy wines and just as logically need to charge a bit more for the effort. Yet too often modestly-priced wines are forced to justify even slightly higher prices in ways high-end wines never have to. Too often small, independent vignerons, farming and fermenting traditionally are lumped in with more industrial-minded, commodity producers.

    Harvesting grapes is back-breaking work and requires a dedicated team of knowledgeable, efficient pickers. The work lasts just a few weeks a year but is crucial to ensuring only the best grapes are picked. And this process requires a vigneron to maintain ties to the same team each year, pay them fairly and watch over the process as the harvest unfolds. I have seen vendangeurs in Burgundy arrive from as far as Quebec making an annual pilgrimage to work a couple different harvests and tour the rural countryside. Some growers rely on locals, friends and family for their team, and that can be the most idyllic, but not all small growers have this option, especially in a remote, rural areas. A manual harvest can ensure that each row of vines can be picked multiple times, helping to attain the critical goal of a small vineyard: to maximize the yields of each grapevine while picking only those bunches at peak ripeness. And picking whole and unbroken bunches of grapes means that a vigneron is more in control of when grapes become juice which is the natural start of maceration and fermentation.

    On the other side, new harvesting machines are quite remarkable, and light years ahead of earlier rudimentary ones. Earlier automated pickers used to actually rip and pull grapes, including leaf and stem matter, off the vine which then had to be removed, sanitized, or filtered out of the grapes. Modern machines now vibrate and shake the grapes off. Most important is that any machine today cannot pick a complete and unbroken bunch, rather the result is a mix of grapes and free juice. This has many repercussions, namely that machine harvested grapes can never be fermented in a whole cluster fashion, a popular and useful technique. Another drawback of using a machine to harvest is that the entire gross weight must be quickly treated to prevent oxidation and other bacterial problems. Sometimes though, the decision about harvest method is “baked in the cake”. The way a vineyard is planted, spaced, and maintained, can make the decision easy, such as in the northern Beaujolais. Young vineyards tend to be planted densely and pruned to accept a mechanized harvest, while old vineyards tend to be wider with independent plants that may render a machine difficult or useless.

    This is not to say that there aren’t good wines made using mechanization, if done well, with the proper guidance, and in small lots, the wines can be made very efficiently and cleanly. A new automated picking machine can easily cost many tens of thousands of dollars, and will only be used a few weeks of each year. This explains why machine harvests are used in larger regions with vineyards touching and overlapping each other, and in areas where the vineyards and scale of production are large, think parts of the Loire or Bordeaux, rather than Jura or steep-sloped Mosel.

    The biggest difference in the type of harvest is most evident in challenging years. Machine harvesting means making hard choices about chaptalization, sulfur use, etc. Manual harvesting takes more labor and time but allows a vigneron the chance to make a serious and rigorous selection, choosing only the best and/or ripest grapes to use. I am reminded of an old saying, “The real test for a good winemaker is whether they can make good wine in a challenging year.” And no doubt controlling every detail at harvest is the first step in that process. Still there are many ways to accomplish the same goals, so the decision about harvest method is also tied to what type of wine a vigneron is attempting to make, the size of their vineyards, production, etc.

    If a winemaker feels it necessary to use any and all methods to make the most volume of quality wine, then a machine might seem the best way to do so. However, if only making the best and most expressive wine possible no matter how much time and effort is the goal, then hand-harvesting is the only sensible solution. Understanding these sort of calculations each grower has to make is critical in knowing why two seemingly similar bottles can have very different prices. And these same choices should also be considered and understood by customers as well.

  • To what purpose, April, do you return again?

     

     

     

     

    “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” from Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

     

     

     

    April 2017 marks Mise’s fifth anniversary! A surprising milestone — in the way any reminder that life moves pretty fast is surprising, disorienting — and when considered together with the recent addition of our fifth team member, significant somehow. Or so one hopes. In any event, it has us lifting our heads from the daily grind and noting how far we’ve come and asking how we hope to grow. Or in other words : to what purpose does Mise return this April?

    The simple answer here is to announce the Mise Wine blog.

    “A blog! A WINE blog! By people who SELL WINE!” An ecstatic internet roars, “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”

    I know. It’s been done before. A lot. All I can say is we might have a different take on things. It could be worth reading. Time will tell.

    “A blog? Why that’s very 2009 of you Sully.”

    You’re right, blogs are no longer de rigueur for ideas to become read and relevant. Most opinion now is spawned in the scrum of social media whose torrent requires nearly every mention be flushed downstream without note. We will continue contributing to those conversations but we also feel there is value in expressing some ideas in more than 140 characters. Some relevant, fantastic stories won’t fit into tasting notes. Some commentary isn’t appropriate (or welcome) during sales appointments. There is context impossible to sum up at Friday night wine shop tastings within the scripted scene of pour, sip, smile and move along. And while we appreciate a snappy retort as much as the next person, some thoughts that compel us are too complex to be reduced to swaggering platitudes punctuated by “Boom!” At least they shouldn’t be. Not all the time.

    Moreover, most conversations at Mise are searching in nature, messy and open-ended. Like you perhaps, we’re motivated by ideas we don’t hear discussed in our daily lives or read in the wine press. These ambiguous subjects are what we’re most eager to explore in this blog (despite often struggling to explain them concisely to ourselves or to our customers). Elie Wiesel said, ‘he wrote as much to understand as to be understood.’ Of course our writings will be infinitely less significant than professor Wiesel’s but I’m inspired to the same purpose: to understand and be understood; through the process of writing and sharing; over time.

    Which brings me back to Edna St. Vincent Millay and her jaundiced view of April — a view I’m sure readers will bring to this blog.  The poem ends :

    It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
    April
    Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

    Elie and Edna — carrot and cudgel. While I have been known to babble and am at times I could be described (not inaccurately) as an idiot, I know for the purposes of this blog, babbling and strewing flowers will not be enough. 

    There you have it – a solemn pledge to keep the quality of our posts above the level of drivel and drool. Boom!

    More to come soon. Thanks for reading!

    -SMH

  • – Coming Soon –

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