“Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive!”

The third Thursday of November is just around the corner and that can mean just one thing: “Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrive!”   This greatest wine slogan of all time is just one of media gimmicks and marketing hype which have turned this humble mediocrity into a profitable universal icon. 

So how did all this happen?  Before World War II Beaujolais nouveau was sold in barrels for local consumption, especially in the bistros of nearby Lyons where it was so popular it was called “the third river of Lyon”.  After the war they started bottling the stuff and sending it to Paris where it was also a great bistro hit.  Then George Duboeuf, Beaujolais´ largest negociant and tireless mass-marketing genius, came up his greatest promotion stunt: the Beaujolais-nouveau race to Paris.  The media

The Montmartre Wine Festival, 2009: Impressions

On June 4, 2009 I posted an article on the history of the wine festival at Montmartre. (read post)  So, serious wine journalist that I am, I thought I would go back to Paris and actually check it out in person.

I am writing the day after, so everything is by necessity a bit foggy and impressionistic. A petite husky-voiced street singers belts out chansons a la Edith Piaf while turning the crank on her little music box. I sit at a wooden barrel surrounded by bustling humanity and stare down at some Muscadet  in a plastic cup and six miniscule mini-oysters on a paper plate. A friend, empty plastic cup in hand, looks longingly at a vendor of Chateauneuf de Pape who is just across the street  but unreachable due to the human bottleneck in the narrow Montmartre

What do our politicians drink?

Francois Rabelais, the bawdy 16^th century satirical novelist and wine philosopher says “When I think, I drink.  When I drink I think.” (read previous post)   Well, sometimes when I drink, I think about drinking.  Okay “thinking” may be a bit glorified. “Idle speculation”?

Anyway, the Alabama pornographic-wine-label bruhaha (read previous post)  and a nice merlot from St. Emilion got me and some friends “thinking” about wine drinking and politics.  Hubert de Montille,the Burgundy winemaker and one of the salt-of-the-earth heroes of the great wine documentary/ melodrama “Mondovino“  came up.  This free thinker, when not stubbornly standing up to the evil forces of wine one-worldism, is a bit of a philosopher; “Wine goes hand-in-hand with progressive

A wine-film review:”Bottle Shock”

“Bottle Shock”, the 2008 Indy film very loosely based on George Taber’s Judgment of Paris, retells the “stunning upset” of unknown California wines from Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap over some of France’s fabled icons such as Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild in a blind 1976 Paris tasting with the crème de la crème of the French wine establishment as judges.  Nice little scandal!  

Well, this seems like pretty good raw material for a movie.  But the “Bottle Shock” brain trust apparently thought the story line needed a little spicing up.   How about a little sex and violence, a random sprinkling of  mystical wine philosophy, some pretty shots of Napa vineyards, and a few nationalistic stereotypes that make us proud to be Americans.  Now, we´ve got a winner! 

Wine pornography in Alabama

Well, what do you see in this image?  For the people at Cycles Gladiator Wines this little-known 19^th-century Parisian print “symbolizes a celebration of the freedom and happiness that pervaded Europe…in the belle époque”.  For the Alabama Beverage Board, on the other hand, it depicts “a person posed in an immoral or sensuous manner” which makes it unfit to grace a wine label.  Cycles Gladiator Wines put it on the label of its Cabernet Sauvignon, the government of Alabama decreed the label pornographic and banned it

The wine festival of Montmartre

I am away from Barcelona visiting Paris.  I find myself up in Bohemian Montmartre gazing through a wire fence at  the vines of  “Clos Montmartre”, the last active vineyard inside the Paris city limits.

 “Clos Montmartre” is found on a quiet picturesque backstreet up a hill from the Moulin Rouge where Toulouse-Lautrec drank his Earthquakes (half cognac and half absinth) and then died of alcoholism at  36.  It is just around the corner from the house where Maurice Utrillo was born, raised, and took to painting the

The showman of Clos de l´Obac

 

The Costers del Siurana winery is located in Gratallops, province of Tarragona, Catalonia. It was the first of the four mythic new-wave DOQ Priorat wineries that revolutionized the region in the 1980s. Alicia Juanpere of Catacurian Gourmet Food and Wine Vacations  said that Carles Pastrana, the owner and public face of Clos de l´Obac, was “the best of the winery”. Carles—animated, eccentric, opinionated, and playful—didn´t disappoint. After an interesting tour of the facilities, we adjourned to the tasting room with its beautiful stained glass ceiling and its fantastic views of mountains and white slate vineyards of the Priorat. Here the fun began.

Carles started off dumping on legendary Gratallops wine l´Ermita.   This $600/bottle, 97-points-from-Parker red systematically loses blind

AOQ Priorat and AO Montsant

Priorat, through a glass lightly

My friend Ricard Domingo and I are on our way to Falset.  About a two-hour drive south of Barcelona this town of 5000 inhabitants is this week´s center of the Spanish wine world.  We will be spending three days tasting, talking about wines, and whatever else might pop up at the Mostra de Vi, a wine fair for D.O. Montsant and D.O.Q. Priorat. 

We are reminiscing about wines in the good old days and how far Priorat has come.  In the 1950s Ricard worked in his father´s bar in Barcelona and some of their best wines came from the comarca (county) of Priorat.  They were not the D.O.Q. Priorat wines of today; they didn´t even have labels.  Horse carts delivered the wine in 60-liter bullskins or 120-liter wooden barrels.  No preservatives

DARWIN, SAVE THIS GRAPE (or NOT)!!! PICAPOLL

 In 2009 we celebrate Charles Darwin´s 200th birthday the 150^th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.  This got me thinking about Darwinism, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest.  If it works for apes it should work for grapes.

 

According to Julian Jeffs in The Wines of Spain “the forty or so varieties that were planted in the eighteenth century (in la Rioja) have been reduced to seven”.  Some of the 33 MIA´s are no doubt alive and well outside la Rioja.  But others no doubt share the fate of Calagrano.  Now prohibited in the la

Rabelais and A.C. Chinon

“Drink constantly.  You will never die”—Francois Rabelais

 

I really want to like the wines from Chinon, one of the only Loire Valley villages specializing in red wine.  This has less to do with wine per se than with Francois Rabelais. This bawdy 16^th century Franciscan monk and extravagant humorist is Chinon’s favorite son and he dedicated his great satirical novel Gargantua and Pentagruel to the “most noble and illustrious drinkers”.  Legend has it that his father made his own wine on Clos de l’Echo.  This property, widely considered the best plot in Chinon, now yields the single-vineyard flagship wine at Couly-Dutheil, perhaps Chinon’s most prestigious name.

In English the adjective Rabelaisian has come to mean crudely humorous; “gusty and exuberant with the pleasures of life—food, drink, and lovemaking”; “grotesquely exaggerated satirical”. Gargantuan means huge, prodigious, gigantic.