Wine Culture

The Mittelrhein is magical. Whether you visit the Rhine River valley by car, boat or on foot, you’ll fall in love with the steep, vine-covered hillsides peppered with castles. This wine region, which stretches from just south of Bonn to Bingen, is one of my favorites. Here I feel transported to a time of legend, and for good reason. The Mittelrhein’s crags are part of German folklore.

So – my wife and I started a wine club in the Monterey/Carmel area. It’s called The Tannin Salon. We meet religiously (kind-of) on the third Saturday of every month – there’s about twenty of us. Every meeting we focus on a different variety or region. No matter what the theme is, each meeting is always a lot of fun. It’s an edu-taining of the senses and a great way to engage wine seriously in a relaxed atmosphere.

Valencia Vas (Click Image to Enlarge) Rich. Bold. Nuanced. Delicate. Subtle. Words such as these are used constantly to describe the finer points of a great......... piece of music? Well of course they are. But they are also used just as commonly to describe a great wine. Given that wine and music can share so many of the same descriptive characteristics, it would seem logical that drinking a delicate and crisp Sauvignon Blanc while listening to a delicate and crisp piano sonata would enrich the experience of tasting the wine AND hearing the music. With this wine and music pairing theory in mind, Pop-Classical vocalist Valencia Vas has done something that is both innovative and yet obvious. She created an album of material and matched the characteristics of each song to a wine that shared those very same characteristics. I recently chatted with Valencia Vas about the project.

Bordeaux by Stephen Brook Bordeaux. The word alone conjures up thoughts of the finest wines the world over and the passionate oenophiles who clamor to get their hands on them. London author Stephen Brook, in his new book The Complete Bordeaux: The Wines, The Chateaux, The People , has produced what may be the definitive work on the wines of Bordeaux. In it Brook assesses over 1000 Bordeaux wine properties with detailed information on the grapes, wines, and production of each property. IntoWine caught up with Stephen recently to chat about the book and gather his thoughts on all things Bordeaux. Why this book now? Existing books on Bordeaux, such as Robert Parker’s or Clive Coates’s, were focused on tasting notes of individual wines, and paid little attention to lesser known areas of Bordeaux which offer good value to consumers. My book was intended to rectify that by including all regions of Bordeaux, as its title suggests. Many winelovers who might have bought Bordeaux routinely in the past may have become disillusioned by the soaring prices of the top growths, and it was part of my intention to discuss the vast number of excellent wines that remain eminently affordable.

During my recent trip to Germany, I spent a lot of time exploring wine regions in the western part of the country. On one memorable day, I drove most of the Deutsche Weinstrasse (German Wine Route) in the Pfalz wine region with my family.

It was pitch black as we made our way down the cliffside path. I carried the flashlight and my friend carried the champagne flutes and a cold bottle of Roederer NV Brut. We found a bench halfway down the cliff and settled in to wait. Before long, we heard the cries from the hotel above: “Happy New Year!”

All the grapes have been harvested. They have been crushed, de-stemmed, macerated, the musts have fermented. The once exhaustive aromas of carbon dioxide and alcohol have subsided. For those of us in the wine-production industry, it feels as though the leviathan wind that threw open the doors and windows and scattered our effects has finally left the building.