There are a handful of us who get together monthly to worship our wine via a mechanism commonly called a “blind tasting.” We call our events the “South Bay Wine Education Series.” Each month, we choose a different varietal and endeavor to educate our palates about the distinctive properties of each wine we taste. We each research, shop for, and bring our own selections. There’s usually about seven to nine of us around the table, which, as you can imagine, is completely filled with glassware. If we didn’t have large dining room tables to support our worship practices, we’d have logistical issues. Or we’d repeatedly spill wine from our TV trays!

Last week at the home of my dear friends Alexis and Bob, we tasted seven Cabernet Franc wines. The amazing aspect of this tasting was that there’s not a lot of pure-varietal Cab Franc available in the local marketplace. I know - I called around. The fact that we managed to not duplicate any labels (always an interesting sidelight to a blind tasting) was something I find rather astounding.

In this and future posts, I plan to list the results of the group tastings I attend and host so that you, gentle reader, can make informed purchase decisions about varietals you are considering. You’ll see how the group ranked the wines collectively, and underneath that you’ll see how I scored them on a 20-point scale. To aid our scoring, both individual and group, we use this wine scoring sheet. So that you can typically get the straight scoop quickly, I’ll try not to clutter these “results” posts with too much verbiage. (Except for this first one, of course.) You’ll find these tasting results in the Tasting Results category that appears in the navigation links to your right.

If you’d like to see the results of our previous tastings, I encourage you to post a comment.

Group Ranking

+3 Robert Sinskey 2001 Los Carneros, 13.7%, $29
+2 Burrell School “Le Grand Rouge” 2002 Santa Cruz Mountains, 14%, $28
+2 Hahn Estates 2004 Santa Lucia Highlands, Monterey County, 13.5%, $12
+2 Hawthorne Mountain 2002 Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, 13%
-1 St. Supery 2001 Dollarhill Vineyard, Napa Valley, 14.5%
-3 Cooper-Garrod 2002 Francville Vineyard, Santa Cruz Mountains, 14.5%, $22
-4 Stonefly 2001 Napa Valley, 13.2%, $18

Winehiker’s Ranking

Hahn Estates 17.5
Cooper-Garrod 15.5
Stonefly 14
St. Supery 12
Hawthorne Mountain 12
Robert Sinskey 11.5
Burrell School “Le Grand Rouge” 11

Next month, our chosen grape is Barbera. I think I’ll go exotic and whirl up some kind of olive-and-feta concoction to go with it.

~winehiker

With just 4 days to go until californiawinehikes.com becomes public, I’m pretty excited. So excited, in fact, that only one cup of espresso in the morning is all I need lately. So excited that I can’t seem to sit still long enough to post another blog. Or, is that “blog another post?”

But it occurred to me that those of you who have read my previous post could be anxiously awaiting the outcome of my recent day tour to Bonny Doon Vineyards. Sooner or later, I’ll be fully engaged in more regular blogging, I promise! Certainly I should tell you, after hiking 8 miles that morning at Fall Creek with two other good souls, Pam and Paul, and enjoying Pam’s hearty homemade lunch at Bonny Doon’s quaint picnic grounds, that we were more than ready, on a rare and warm blue day in December, to sip some wines - screwcap or otherwise.

Bonny Doon has a lot of wines at their tasting bar, ready to pour. If you’re not a member of their wine club, no matter - you still get to taste quite a few of the good ones, including their burly flagship wine, Le Cigare Volant, of which their 2002 vintage is an interesting blend of 39% Grenache, 32% Mourvedre, 28% Syrah, and 1% Viognier. ‘Twas mm-mm-good, and redolent of cherries and peppered smoked meats, if you can imagine that in a wine. And, it had a screwcap, too, though the 2001 vintage did not! But that was mainly due to the 2002 vintages being the first crops to end up in screwcapped bottles.

Tasters at Bonny Doon also get to enjoy another consummate amalgam, their 2003 Big House Red, a blend of syrah, petite sirah, and carignane. Never before had I tasted this particular combination of grapes, molded, as they say in their literature, as “a breakout hit for the recidivist partisans of the eclectic pan-Mediterranean blend.” In other words, methinks the French could like it, too. But I could be wrong. Though it tasted so right!

I walked out of the Little B.D. House with a bottle of Big House, having tasted perhaps 8 different screwcapped wines, all very fresh, all very delightful, all worth trying again. And already, sipping and comparing the Big House here at home, my palate is noting the distinct absence of tree bark. I’m beginning to think there’s something tangible to this screwy screwcap stuff. I’m beginning to think that screwcapped wines aren’t just for bottom-shelf winos any more.

(Incidentally, guys, for a real romantic treat, here’s a heads-up: open a bottle of B.D.’s Framboise “Infusion of Raspberry” for your lady. It’s easy! You don’t need to embarrass yourself with any cork-pulling appliances! Now see if the fireworks don’t begin. And, if you happen to be the kind of guy who is into presentation, serve it in thimble-sized chocolate cups like they do at Bonny Doon.)

Folks, I’m gonna be a convert someday. But I’ll be performing future comparisons, just to be sure.

~winehiker

If you’re a consumer of wine like I am, perhaps you have wrestled over the issue of synthetic corks vs. tree-bark corks vs. screwcaps. Which embodies the highest Zen? Well, I don’t always think of myself as a retrogrouch, but until recently, I found myself disdaining the very thought of buying a wine sealed with anything other than corks made of tree bark. Or, grudgingly, those colorful but difficult synthetic corks. But screwcaps? How mortifyingly repugnant!

Yet, despite my slightly antediluvian tendencies, I consider myself reasonably Earth-aware. I’ve since learned that tree-bark production requires many noxious chemicals and lots of production time - to grow the trees, harvest their bark, and produce the cork - only to have a propensity to leak, disintegrate, and therefore oxygenate a wine within the bottle.

I decided that I should question my traditionalist values - at least where wine corks are concerned! So, in advance of a pilgrimage tomorrow to Bonny Doon Vineyards, where they produce wines capped exclusively with screwcaps, I’ve been doing some reading.

It seems that screwcaps are the wave of the future.

In fact, 85% of wines produced in New Zealand are capped with screwcap closures, and Australia bottlers are not far behind at 50%. Apparently there is a loss of between 3 to 5% of wine that is sealed in a bottle with a cork. Some say 1 in every 9 bottles corked with bark have a taint. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I don’t wish to lose that much vino precioso.

As for synthetic corks, I knew that they could leak, but I had also suspected that they don’t biodegrade - apparently that hunch is true. I also haven’t liked them for purely functional reasons - most of these suckers simply refuse to come out of the bottle without me also biting my tongue and cussing. And that’s not good form when the objective is to delight in a good wine. Geez, how many worms must I break on my screwpull? What - use cork pullers to remove synthetic corks? Ha! You’ll needlessly disgrace yourself in front of your friends.

As to screwcaps: if they don’t harm the wine - and the evidence so far seems to bear that out - I’ll consider myself informed and look a little more favorably upon them. At least I won’t have to buy replacement worms.

Randall Grahm, celebrated founder/winemaker at Bonny Doon, is a screwcap evangelist. No doubt he has held many a side-by-side comparison tasting of wines from both cork-sealed and screwcapped bottles. We can probably assume that he and his staff have tasted the exact same wine from the exact same vintage in the exact same glassware, with the only difference being that of the two wines, one was sealed with tree bark and the other wasn’t.

(By the way, if you haven’t visited the Bonny Doon website, it is remarkably inventive and engaging, with plenty of wit and passion behind it. Not your typical winery website! While you’re at it, be sure to watch their Doontoon titled Vive Le Screwcap!)

From what I have gleaned from my reading, screwcap-sealed wine is typically fresh, crisp, fully flavored, and has a great mouthfeel and a lovely finish, whereas the same cork-sealed wine is typically much more lackluster. This appears to be the evidence with a number of different wine pairings, with and without food. The basic conclusion is that the screwcap versions are fresh and complex, just the way the winemaker intended them to be. The cork versions had been altered by cork contact and extra air exchange - causing the wines to be corked, or tainted by mold.

Regardless of the empirical data, you don’t want to keep a library of wines only to find that ten or twenty years down the road, your favorite Petite Sirah tastes moldy. Nevertheless, the wine industry is fast adopting the notion that with the screwcap closure, you are guaranteed that the wine you taste when you open your bottle will be as close as possible to the original wine. You won’t have mold taint, nor will you have issues with crumbled corks.

As someone who has scruples about screwpulls, I hope to find tomorrow that it’s worth giving up the pomp and ritual of pulling a cork out of a bottle to enjoy the best wine possible.

Now if screwcaps could just deliver my favorite all-time best sound in the world. I think that’s what I’ll miss most. But I will look to the future, if it means embracing stored wines that are just as good as the day we first tasted them.

Someday in the not-too-far-off future, when the mass demand and supply of wines - both large-operation and boutique - reach critical mass, we retrogrouches are going to puzzle our children when we ask: What is the sound of one cork popping?

~winehiker

Kevin and I accomplished a lot yesterday. After I’d furnished him my files for the site’s about us, FAQ, and resources pages, Kevin had diligently pursued formatting them to style and uploading them to his webserver. We’ve got a little ways to go with the resources pages, the look and feel of this blog, and some other minor cleanup, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with our progress this week.

So, last night I felt like celebrating and poured myself a glass of 2002 “Rezerve” Zinfandel from Sobon Estate in the Shenandoah Valley, one of California’s Sierra Foothills appellations. This was a wine I had purchased at the winery, having taken a sojourn to the Fiddletown, Shenandoah, and Fairplay subappellations of Amador County in early October.

I had opened the Sobon 3 nights earlier, and it had been quite fine then, but last night it was oh-so-much-more tasty, with the tannins having softened but the berry and cherry notes still lively. You know, this wine is 15.9% alcohol! That’s a pretty dang high heat factor, to be sure. But you can always tell exemplary winemaking when you taste the fruit and texture but don’t feel all that alcohol on your palate. Could be why this particular Rezerve Zin took a Gold Medal at the Amador County Fair Wine Competition. Yum! Wish I had more of it.

But tonight, still in a Zin mood, I dug into my Picchetti stash and poured myself another 2002 vintage from Picchetti’s Bellicitti Vineyard in Saratoga, an upscale district tucked into the southwestern corner of Santa Clara Valley. This Zinfandel is a little softer than the Sobon powerhouse, but slightly spicier, with a hint of plum that I didn’t perceive in the Sobon. I don’t feel heat from this wine, either, but then it’s (only) 14.5% alcohol.

As I write this post, I’ve been out of the room on occasion, but I’ve noticed that the finish from this Picchetti Zin has lingered on my palate. Gosh, I love everything that’s come from that Bellicitti vineyard, I really do. I believe this wine’ll go well with that tangy meatloaf I made the other day.

Speakin’ o’ which, it’s about time I ate, too.

Heck, I would pour either of these delectable Zins for good friends.

~winehiker

We’re about to launch next month! And as I go over the final content edits on my new travel destination site, californiawinehikes.com, I find myself pausing for a moment to reflect upon the journey I’ve taken this past Summer and Fall. The seeds for building this wine-hiking business here in The Golden State had sprouted in my noggin at a critical time. Yep, it was right about the time I got a layoff notice from my job of nearly eight years.

It had been pretty good for a while here in Silicon Valley. But in most of these past five years, corporate restructurings and downsizings have been commonplace in the area, and I had survived maybe 7 or 8 previous “reductions in force” where I worked. I wasn’t too terribly flustered, then, when the notice came in May of 2005. My employers handled it pretty well, I thought, having offered me severance upon completion of a two-month transition, a period in which I would conduct some training and complete my current project work. Then, of course, say my goodbyes.

I wasn’t flustered, no. And yet it was a significant moment.

Significant, because it was in those two months, and the months since, that I found myself seeing the future. While it’s taken me on a breathless run, the future has shared its thoughts, reminding me of what I already know: that there’s room for passion and perseverance.

Now, in January 2006, this site you’re visiting is the result. I’m really glad you’re here! You and I have got some sauntering to do together. And after we’re off-trail, we’ll sip something truly divine.

I have much to be grateful for, not the least of which are the website-building efforts of Kevin McNeese of KMWebDesigns, who spearheaded the technical side of this project that is californiawinehikes.com. Thank you, Kevin, for all of your patience, tenacity, and willingness to dive into deep water, where learning lives. Especially, thank you for your honest-to-gosh hard work on this project. I can promise you there’s going to be more of it.

And to those of you who have believed in me, I thank you, I think of you, and I salute you, vino rosso in hand.

Today, my heart beats!
Your encouragement fuels me.
Et tu, A Sante!

~winehiker

P.S., if you’re in the market to have a website built for yourself or your company, I recommend checking out additional news from Kevin, this page from Kevin’s portfolio and external merchant reviews about KMWebDesigns.