I’m sure I’ve written in past ravings about how weird it is that the Wine Fest is so much upon us so quickly.  I really do remember last February’s weekend as if it were yesterday.  (Now, if I could only remember what happened yesterday…)

But gadzooks.  Egad.  And several other Elizabethan words of amazement.  It’s baaaaaaaack, and your Wine Fest committees are starting to experience a quickening of pace, a pounding of heart, a trembling of hands.  Suddenly, there’s a lot to do.

Carolyn Rogers, faithfully supported by the auction committee, has put the finishing touches on the Grand Tasting and Auction program and catalog…after having 12 different people suggest/recommend/demand changes over the last few weeks.  I hope Carolyn is sleeping better now, but I doubt it.

We’ve had a recent trustee gathering, where everyone gets updated on how far behind the eight ball we really are (not very), and another one is in the works for early February.  After that…it’s showtime, folks.  Our aspiration, as most of you know, is to raise at least $1,000,000 for the Children’s Hospital and other children’s charities in Southwest Florida. 

We also have one more sit-down with Jerry Shmoyer, Glyn Williamson, and their incredible staff at Miromar Lakes.  Discuss the layout of the tables, where’s all the ice coming from, how many of this will we need, and how much of that.  Fortunately, we’ve done this before, been stung by and learned from our mistakes.  In theory, we should do better this year.  In practice, there is simply no question about it.  The auction lots are awesome, up at least a notch or three over last year.  (Would you like a few nights in a luxury castle in Tuscany?  Bid early and bid often).  The wine selection…well, let’s just say it’s a panorama of locations, styles, and varietals, and nobody will go thirsty.

 Speaking of the wine, it’s crazy time in the cellar.  Now that the auction lots are finalized, Marshall Hanno is supervising me in sorting through the hundreds (and hundreds) of bottles we’ve acquired through purchase and donation, figure out which ones belong to which distributors, which ones are part of auction lots, and which ones we’ll actually get to drink.  He’s the detail guy.  Fortunately, I have some other assistance in this task.  The assistance of an excellent bottle of Beringer Private Reserve 1997.

Then, of course, there are the cases and cases that have to find their way to the individual host homes for the Friday night dinners.  That part is fun, too.  It’s why they invented hand trucks, dollies, and other things with wheels.  Finer wines come in heavier bottles, and we drag them all over Southwest Florida just before the dinners.  If you want to volunteer to help, now’s the time.  Strong backs and weak minds welcome. 

Oh, yes…I almost forgot.  There are all the dinners to arrange…keeping up with the host couples, putting out last minute fires, accounting for the reservations at each home.  The dinner invitations have been mailed out, and very soon about 350-400 responses will come pouring in.  It’s why they invented Ester Lee Machiz.  One of the reasons, anyway.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of other stuff, too, but I’m too wired to think of it right now.  Further updates to come.  The closer we get to Feb. 27, the less coherent they will be.

Even though they’ve been making wine in Argentina for a very long time, the history of the vine in that country has been a troubled one.  When I teach my class on Argentina and Chile, I tell attendees that the topic is more about politics and economics than winemaking.

We’ve all seen Evita, and even though the show takes some liberties with historical reality, there’s no questioning that Argentina has had its share of political upheaval during most of the 20^th century.  Governmental instability means no foreign investment, which means no French or American winemakers coming to the country to develop and promote its obvious viticultural advantages.  But next door in comparatively-less-turbulent Chile?  Big difference.  They were miles ahead.  Not any more.

Here’s a surprise.  Argentina is the 5^th largest grower of wine grapes in the world.  There are more vines down there than in all of Australia and New Zealand combined.  And they’ve been planting them since the mid 1800s, when French growers brought in cuttings from Bordeaux and mostly from Cahors.  As it happens Cahors is the home of the Malbec grape, and what Cabernet is to Napa, Malbec is to most of Argentina.

Before its rise to international regard over the past 20 years, most of the wine produced in Argentina was for local consumption.  Since there’s an abundance of irrigation water flowing down from the Andes, the growers went for quantity over quality, pulling 9-10 tons an acre off the vines, making watery, weak bulk wine, and selling it in cardboard cartons.

That was then.  This is now, and we can thank people like the Catena family for that.

Nicolas and Laura Catena

Nicola Catena came ashore in Argentina from Italy in 1898 and planted his first vineyard in the Mendoza region in 1902.  Time went on.  Nicola’s son Domingo took over, and became one of the largest vineyard holders in the area.

Then came the problems.  Inflation.  Revolution.  Economic collapse.  Meanwhile, Domingo’s son Nicolás had earned his PhD in economics and taken over the vineyards in the mid 1960s.  Nobody who has a doctorate in economics wants to live in a society that suffers from 1000% inflation, or under a government that does wacky things like declare war on England.  He left the family business and went to teach in a calmer, more level-headed place.  The University of California at Berkeley.  In the late 1960s.

Catena vineyards. Nice background

Good move, because California wine country was just up the road, and Nicolás and his wife Elena took advantage of the opportunity (to say the least) and pretty much sampled their way through the whole area.  This, incidentally, was just at the time when California wine was beginning to make a serious (and well-deserved) impact on the international wine world.  Inspired, the Catenas returned home.

Fast forward.  Today, Nicolás’ vineyards in Mendoza, some of them at elevations of almost 5,000 feet, are producing wines that routinely receive classic scores from critics like Robert Parker.  I’ve mentioned before in these writings that people come to winemaking from all sorts of weird directions, and Nicolás’ daughter Laura is a poster child for that observation.  She studied to be an emergency room physician, and earned degrees from Harvard and Stanford, but today she does what we all want to do.  She makes killer Malbec, and other wines as well.

There’s a lot to it.  Precise vineyard management, hand pruning, resisting the urge to use all the runoff from the Andes for irrigation, leaf thinning, hand harvesting, and all the rest.  Hey, if it were easy, we’d all be doing it.

Watering the grapes...but not much

The work of Nicolás and Laura earned him recognition as Man of the Year in 2009 from Decanter magazine, and their 2007 Malbec was recognized as one of the Top 100 Wines of the Year by Wine Spectator.  Speaking of which, the magazine’s critic James Molesworth, in a December 15, 2009 article on Argentine Malbecs, rated six of Catena Zapata’s wines in the top eleven….all 93-plus points out of 100.

In the tasting room -- the fun part

Obviously, they’re doing something right.

Sometimes, wine people find themselves in a strange new part of the world.  They look around.  They regard the ground at their feet.  They sense the air and temperature.  And they say to themselves (or to whoever happens to be close by), “Wouldn’t this be a great place to grow (insert grape name here).”

The Tablas Creek Winery

That’s exactly what happened to Francois and Jean-Pierre Perrin, best known for their landmark Château de Beaucastel winery in the southern Rhône.  Along with Robert Haas, the founder of Vineyard Brands, they stood on some ground in west Paso Robles and regarded the limestone in the soil.  They studied the temperature variations and rainfall numbers in that place about 11 miles from the Pacific and concluded that it would be a jolly dandy place to plant Rhône varietals and produce Châteauneuf du Pape style wines.  So they set about doing just that.  It took years.

The Vineyard

First, they named the place Tablas Creek, for the small stream that runs through the property.  They imported vines from their French estate, and, after waiting through a three-year agricultural quarantine, they planted a wide selection of the varietals used in their heritage red and white Rhône blends.  It so happens that in Châteauneuf du Pape, winemakers can legally use up to 13 different grapes in the traditional blend.  (I memorized them once, but then I got a life).  So the Perrins showed up in Paso Robles and started to plant their 120 acres with Grenache Blanc, Grenache Noir, Syrah, Mourvedre, Picpoul, Counoise, Roussanne, Marsanne, and the other obscure varietals so important to the historic CNDP recipes.  Since 1997, they’ve been fermenting with native yeasts, blending their brains out, producing truly traditional red and white blends under the name of Tablas Creek Esprit de Beaucastel.  By 2010, almost all the land will be under vine, and it’s all certified organic.

Wine Spectator #50 Wine of the Year

Aside from perhaps Champagne, Châteauneuf du Pape is one of the most complex wines to produce.  While 13 varietals are legally permitted, most winemakers don’t use them all.  But even so, you’re growing at least five or six kinds of red grapes, and another 5 or 6 whites, harvesting them and vinifying them separately, then blending and aging them for a year or more.  It’s work.

This whole blending thing sort of divides the wine world into two camps:  those who do it and those who don’t.  Many winemakers are justifiably proud of their “100% Cabernet Sauvignon” or 100% this or that, and many of them are fabulous…authentic expressions of a classic grape.  But we all know the kind of miracles blending can produce when the people down there in Margaux or Pauillac throw together some Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot, and maybe a little Malbec.  Châteauneuf du Pape is like that.

Hand harvesting

In fact, I had a kind of blending epiphany a few years back at a seminar with Ed Sbragia of Beringer.  We tasted through the five single-vineyard wines he uses in making Beringer Private Reserve, then tasted the final product.  Boing!  There were flavors in the blend that did not appear in any of the individual wines.  Some kind of synergy happens in the blending process, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

That’s what Tablas Creek does.  For them, blending creates balance, complexity, richness, and a whole bunch of other very desirable characteristics.  It also produces wines that pair well with a wide variety of foods.

So, at the Grand Tasting, you’ll have the opportunity to sample a bit of French tradition (and winemaking expertise) in some uniquely American red and white wines.  Just come to the Tablas Creek table and hold out your glass.

I took on the Wine Director job to become involved in a very worthwhile charitable endeavor.  When it comes to sick kids, we should all do as much as we can.  That goes for helpless animals, too.  But I have a confession to make.

As Spiderman never said, with great responsibility comes great opportunity.  One of my favorite things, and it happens right around now, is to join our participating chefs in tasting through the wines that will be served with the Friday night dinners.  A few days ago, I enjoyed doing just that with Chef Jeffrey Lucas of Ruth’s Chris Steak House.  Lucky for us, the wines we were tasting came from Honig Vineyards.

Mike & Stephanie Honig

Mike Honig was kind enough to send us, among other things, his Bartolucci Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon.  Jeffrey and I were already four bottles into the sampling and dinner discussion when we opened this particular bottle, and it stopped us cold.  Our eyes widened.  We stared at each other, at our glasses, at the bottle.  We giggled.

Bartolucci Vineyard Cabernet

Many of the vintners I’ve written about in these blogs are environmentally involved and go about their grapegrowing in sustainable ways.  Well, you can put the Honigs on the list.  In fact, they’ve devoted valuable vineyard space to an array of solar panels, so the sunpower gets into the grapes and into the electrical system all at the same time.

Honig uses this type of solar panel

The processes involved in organic and biodynamic farming are pretty clearly defined and detailed.  You don’t use pesticides or herbicides.  You meet certain criteria and get officially certified.  Sustainability…well, that’s a bit more slippery.  According to Mike Honig, it means “running the winery in a way that promotes the health and wellbeing of the planet, the employees, and the business.”  Each decision they make is based on the potential impact in all these areas.

The problem lies in trying to do a couple of things at once:  become economically prosperous while preserving the environment.  We all know how mutually exclusive those goals can be.  It’s why the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland back in 1969.

The grapes of Honig. Well, some of them.

Still, winemakers such as the Honigs work hard to resolve the conflict.  And in doing so, make wines that embody their skill, their concern, and their heart.

Mike started at age 22, when he took over management of his family’s winery, selling his wines around San Francisco from the back of his Subaru.  The rest, as they say, is history.

He’s now aided and abetted by his winemaker sister Kristen, whose own wine career began when she rode around Napa watching her parents taste wines at the (very) few wineries that were open at the time.  Later at UC Davis, she wandered away from her biochemistry studies due to the irresistible allure of the wine program.  The rest is….well, you know.

Kristen Honig Belair

We’re delighted to welcome the Honigs at the Southwest Florida Wine & Food Fest.  You’re gonna love ‘em.