The 2007 ZAP Festival: a winehiker’s impressions

Delightful, harrowing, entertaining and educational. That’s how I describe today’s experience at the 16th annual Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) Festival media/trade tasting in San Francisco. I couldn’t let the evening pass without offering you a glimpse of my experience via the following vignettes du vin*:

I spit more volume of wine today than I drank the entire 2006 holiday season. Those that know me may find that difficult to believe.

It may not be the gospel Truth, but I believe – I fervently BELIEVE!, brothers and sisters – that I tasted well over 100 wines today. I have never before experienced any wine tasting of this magnitude. And yet I managed to keep my head despite holding out my spit cup instead of my wine glass at least twice. OK – three times. One pourer whose teeth were already a light shade of purple (name withheld) almost poured into that spit cup, all the while pontificating streaming (and valid) oratory about the wine he was about to pour. I’d divulge the wine but I might not be protecting – oh what the hell, the wine was a 2004 Esterlina Zinfandel from Philo in Mendocino County.

I shared a mid-morning taxi cab from the CalTrain station to today’s Fort Mason slosh-fest with Stephen B. Herrick, a venture capitalist who also happens to be the Wine Director of the very exclusive Bohemian Club. Stephen was rich with California wine history knowledge, and I listened raptly. Our cab arrived at Fort Mason way too quickly.

I had arranged to meet fellow bloggers Ryan Fujiu and Ben Bicais, CEO and Founder, respectively, of calwineries.com, and found myself palling around all day with those guys. Also met up with Joel Vincent of WineLifeToday.com and Vivi’s Wine Journal as well as Josh and Marshall from WineQ. Amazingly geeky but wonderfully savvy and passionate about their respective wine businesses, these young hotshots are the first generation of wine-tech gurus and are forces to be reckoned with now. If you operate a family winery and want to maximize your marketing potential online, check out what these gentlemen are doing and take advantage.

Ryan, Russ, Ben, Josh, and Marshall after a hard day’s work tasting dozens of zins.

I had expected to meet up with podcaster Tim Elliott of WineCast.net, who flew out here to San Francisco from Minnesota just to attend this megatasting. If I hadn’t left the house without my cell phone this morning, I probably would have hooked up with him. A missed opportunity to ham it up in front of Tim’s camera, for sure. Sorry, Tim. (Can I say “damn it” here? Or here?)

Today’s ZAP media/trade session lasted from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and then the public was allowed in. That’s right about the time the noise level notched up, wineglasses started breaking, and peoples’ specific gravities began to transmogrify. One formerly-focused fan abruptly found a large prop in the room, though artful and eye-catching, to not be a terribly sturdy thing to lean upon. Down he went. Twice. Ouch.

There was no shortage of attractive women at ZAPFest. I couldn’t help but notice one with a brightly-colored and very purple “wineglass tattoo” prominently displayed on the bridge of her nose. With zin-fueled bravado despite not having swallowed (honest!), I approached to save her some latent embarrassment and saw her miraculously shape-shift from “deer in the headlights” to fawningly grateful. Unfortunately her phone number places her in the Milwaukee area code. It’s true: the beer there could never match the zin here. Well, there’s always Skype. But darn it anyway…

I may have surrounded myself with wine geeks today, but aside from cell phones, there seemed to be a distinct lack of technotrappings among the wine glitterati that attended. I didn’t see more than one Treo, hardly any cameras, and no laptops at all, though there was a space upstairs for the “news scoop”-hungry that I didn’t venture into. Perhaps the absence of technogadgets was due to the fact that everyone really needed one hand to hold a wineglass, one hand to hold the spit cup, one hand to hold the loaf of palate-cleansing french bread, and one hand to write notes with. Who says technology wins when it’s zins that rule?

I’ve never seen a grungier-looking wineglass than the one I drank from today. Um, I mean “tasted from”. In the photo below, note that there’s still a siplet or two of luscious liquid that made it home intact despite the harrowing cab ride, the (yawn!) hour-and-a-half train ride back to Sunnyvale, and my tripping headlong as I later climbed the steps to my own front door.

San Francisco, with its many steep hills, colorful neighborhoods, and horrendous traffic, is the best darn place for a harrowing cab ride. Tim the cab driver is a rockin’ blues fan, is engaging and entertaining, self-assured, at the top of his game, and scared the freakin’ gol-dang hell out of me. Those moments from Fort Mason back to the train depot go down as my best cab ride ever. Scariest, too. Kinda reminded me of driving in Bangalore, India, only four times as fast.

While I had prepared a list of 50 wineries whose wines I wished to taste, there were wineries whose tables were attracting more than the average share of eager wine tasters. Some of the queues at these tables were three-deep, large enough to cause Ben, Ryan, and me to wish we each possessed retractable arms. And this was just the trade tasting, mind you – the public tasting was going to go at least seven-deep. One such queue was at Javelina’s Leap, a winery which had been totally off my radar. Despite all my surfworthy research, I’d never heard of this particular winery. It wasn’t the crowd that drew me to taste their wines – it was a tanned, athletic, and very spirited female pourer who had drawn the mostly-male crowd. Apparently the buzz wasn’t just visual. Not to be one outflanked, I squeezed in for a pour, and discovered the best wine I tasted all day.

It’s true: I never swallowed. At least not until after I arrived home. I think the human tongue retains wonderfully osmotic properties, however. And while it was weird to swish a sensationally substantial amount of zinfandel yet not feel the accustomed effects of alcohol, I know that I found myself to be artificially happy, albeit mildly, despite my enforced self-discipline. I found it intoxicating, if only in a cerebral sense, that I could still manage to sense any nuances in the wines after what turned out to be five nonstop hours of swishing and schmoozing.

I can’t help but admit that I thoroughly enjoyed today’s extravazinza. I’m certain I’ll do it again. Until then, you might enjoy drinking my top five picks from today’s ZAP Fest.

~winehiker

*I’m fairly certain that “vignettes du vin” will never be a search term that will land ‘net surfers here. Or will it?

Related posts:

• Top Five Zinfandels of the 2007 ZAP Festival
• ZAP! Calling all wine bloggers
• Marvelous Monday links

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under grape squeezins, tasting venues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.