John's blog

WE'VE MOVED!

The Wine Culture Project's older posts are archived here, but we have moved into new, cleaner, fresher and sleeker digs.  Link below.

www.winecultureproject.wordpress.com

Climatically, the region is warmer than other parts of the Loire Valley and is more similar to Beaujolais and Macon. However, nights are cool, summers do not get too hot over an extended period of time and frost is always a risk in the spring time. And the grapes are grown at an altitude of 400-600 meters which contributes to already high acidity levels and focused, clean and sometimes under ripe fruit flavors...

I didn’t know it then, but the ’89 ‘Les Picasses’ was one of the first ‘real’ wines I ever had – free of the heavy hand of interventionist winemaking that unfortunately crafts the majority of wines in the marketplace today. Louis/Dressner was, and still is, the importer of the wines from Olga Raffault. In a sudden twist of fate, last year, I was lucky to start selling the wines from Raffault and others that Joe Dressner spent years bringing into the United States. In the course of the last 18 months or so, I shook Joe’s hand a couple of dozen times at trade tastings and at the David Bowler office. I never met him previously, but once I met him early last year and heard him speak passionately about his growers and their wines, it became clear to me instantly why I loved drinking his wines in the past – Raffault, Pepiere, Lunau-Pepin, Closel, and Texier...

Besides Bandol, perhaps the region I most anticipated visiting this summer when traveling with the David Bowler European Wine Bus Tour was Chablis.  We had traveled through Rioja, Provence, the Rhone Valley, Beaujolais, the Cote d’Or and finished in Champagne and Paris.  But no region lived up to what I had imagined through my studies more than Chablis.

We met our Chablis producer, Patrick Piuze at his winery (if you can call it that – more like a shed with a basement on a side street in downtown Chablis).  After the usual tour of the ‘facility’ (at this point, ten days into the trip, If I saw another stack of used oak barrels I was going to head back to the bus for a nap), we took our bus as far as the winding roads in the vineyard would allow, then we finished the trip to the top of the Grand Cru vineyards by foot.

Though this is a piece on the place, not the producer, it’s worth communicating how Patrick introduced himself to those in the company who did not know him.  To understand Patrick is to understand his path to winemaking.  In his own words, “school didn’t like me and I didn’t like school.”  After deciding to not follow through on college, Patrick bounced around from learning the basics of winemaking while surfing in Australia to working in a wine shop in Montreal to learning the craft of making world class Chablis from the best in the region – Brocard, Verget and Leflaive (the good Leflaive).  Falling in love...

It occurred to me while I finishing Terry Theise’s book, Between the Wines, that I haven’t written much over the past few months. I am not one to care much about traffic on my site, but there might be more people visiting the Branch Dividian tribute page than The Wine Culture Project. Since I don’t make any money off of the site (and I am not trying too), the amount of hits I get on a daily basis is not important to me. What is important is that when people visit the site they enjoy and hopefully learn from what they read. And since I haven’t been writing much, many of you loyal readers haven’t been learning about my thoughts on wine’s sense of place. I apologize if you have been waiting, but here are a few reasons why I haven’t been writing much.

One of the regions that I have studied and have enjoyed drinking is L’Etoile. Located to the northwest of the town of Lons-le-Saunier, the appellation of L’Etoile, like the rest of the Jura, has a continental climate that enjoys warm summers and very cold winters. Though summertime temperatures can be similar to or warmer than Burgundy to the west...

I’ll Take the ’96 Veuve Cliquot, Please

This week, in her series Vintage America, Talia Baiocchi writes about the history wine lists as she focuses on wine lists that appeared before the turn of the 20^th Century. Historical documents fascinate me. And those that focus on the importance of wine on our cultures past doubles down on the fun factor. It comes as no surprise that Sherry, Champagne, Bordeaux...

Over the past couple of days I have been reading a few blogs that are dealing with a topic that often becomes, like so many political issues dominating the headlines, heated and after awhile, tired and pointless. The galvanizing issue is a simple one – the importance and validity of wine writer’s scores for popular wines. As many of you know, the backbone of publications like Decanter, Wine Spectator, Wine and Spirits and The Wine Advocate is the scoring system that its paid critics use to recommend wines to the public. What is often overlooked by collectors, retailers and the average wine drinker is the writer’s informative and educational prose describing vintage and place, but that’s neither here nor there. Most people read these magazines and pay a premium to access their websites in order to chase down...

A New Santa Cruz

On Sunday, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Bonne dives more deeply into relatively unknown vineyards areas within the Santa Cruz Mountains. Though the region turns out world-class Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir...

*The Fuck You Cancer t-shirt above was made for Ryan while he fought his ass off against Leukemia.  They are made by close friend, Christina Contaldi and are available for purchase at her website linked to the shirt.  All proceeds will go towards Livestrong.