Wino Road Trip in July

My wine club’s theme this month is “Wino Road Trip”. Its basically to encourage us to drink wines from the US that would not be in normal repertoire; so no wines from California, Oregon, Washington and no wines from Missouri or Illinois, since those are local to us. Since wine is made in all 50 states, this should be somewhat easy; of course not all states distribute and so it likely won’t be without some creative pre-ordering!
In my research, I found a blog post by Time Magazine’s Joel Stein: "Fifty States of Wine" in 2008 – you can find the article here. Its an old blog post, but funny:

“I'm not sure why my instinct, upon learning that all 50 states make wine, was to try one from each. If I found out that every state has a water park, I wouldn't try to go to each one. That's because water parks can't get you drunk.”

(he SO had me at this one!)
“I learned a few general truths. White is easier to make than red. Wines made at golf courses are not good.”…. “I also learned that you can make and apparently sell some truly disgusting wine: six of the bottles I tried with a dozen friends were unanimously deemed "undrinkable." But 11 of them were quite good”……

So, not counting Cali, Washington, or Oregon, the other states that had an “excellent” wine were: Colorado, Delaware, New Hampsire, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Pensylvannia, and Texas. (For the record, the wine from Missouri was “good” and the wine from Illinois was “bad”, although its worth noting that the wines were selected at random AND the blog post was from 2008)

You can find the list of all the wines where you can filter out the best (or worst) here. 

Another more recent blog post can be found here. (and I apologize to the other five million wine bloggers, I don't have time to find all of your posts!)
So, I guess wish us luck, as we try some new wines out….and if you have any good recommendations, feel free to send them our way! Check back in August for the results!

June 17th: A global toast to celebrate my birthday!

Ok, ok, in truth it’s a global toast to celebrate the anniversary of Robert Mondavi’s birthday, which (would have been) June 18th. However, the toast is on my actual birthday, June 17, so its just another reason to celebrate!

At 2pm Pacific time (or 4pm for us in the Lou) please raise a glass and toast Robert Mondavi for his groundbreaking movements in wine, me for my birthday, and all who love wine!

You can also watch the toast (for Robert Mondavi, not me) online- from the Mondavi website:

Please join us in celebrating this special day. We will be offering a complimentary glass of Fume Blanc in honor of Mr. Robert Mondavi’s , as well as enjoying festive music on our lawn. At 2:00, Margrit Mondavi, and our winemaker, Genevieve Janssens will be hosting a live toast. Website: www.toastrobertmondavi.com

The bubbly process

My wine club’s theme this month is Celebrate! Bubbly and Chards! While I was looking up information for my selected wine (to be discussed tomorrow) and that it was produced using the traditional method of making Champagne, I realized that I really didn’t know what the other methods were. I knew the traditional method (called either Méthode Champenoise / Méthode Traditionnelle) was the “best way” to make sparkling wine, but I didn’t know what the difference actually was.  Now I do (and so will you):

 

There are 3 (ok 4, if you count directly injecting carbon dioxide into the wine) methods of making sparkling wine.

• Méthode Champenoise / Méthode Traditionnelle
• Transfer method
• Metodo Italiano (Charmat process)

All sparkling wines are made from still wine, so they go through harvest, pressing the grapes, first fermentation, and blending steps, which are nearly identical if its going to be still wine or sparkling wine. At the triage step, the process differs from still wine: After blending, the winemaker adds the Liqueur of Tirage, a blend of sugar, wine and live yeast that will begin the wine's second fermentation.

 

The second fermentation is where the methods differ. In the Méthode Champenoise the bottle is topped with a top like a beer cap and the wine is aged while it undergoes the second fermentation process (at least one year for non-vintage and three years for a vintage sparkling wine.) After fermentation, the next step is riddling, where the wine is slowly (over the course of 6-8 weeks) rotated and turned from a horizontal state until totally upside down and the sediment is in the neck of the bottle. The bottle neck is dipped into a brine solution to freeze the liquid, the pressure in the unfrozen part of the bottle forces the frozen sediment out and a dosage (sugar and sometimes brandy) is added to adjust to the final dryness. The bottle is then topped with the cork and wire cage.

 

In the Transfer method, the wine is transferred from the bottles to a pressurized tank where the sediment is filtered out and the wine is rebottled.

In the Charmat process, the entire second fermentation process is done in a large pressurized tank. The result in this process is that the carbon dioxide has less time to integrate with the wines so there are larger bubbles that dissipate faster. Usually prosecco is made using this process (hence the name).