Box Wine for our Camping Trip (The Horror, the horror)

The Austin Area Paddlers Meetup group made its annual freeze trip, and overnight kayak camping trip from Bastrop to Boy Scout Island, on January 28 – 29.  The last time Donna and I did an overnight kayak camping trip I brought good wine that I had poured into a pouch. Unfortunately I did not bring enough and, in addition, the wine got very cold.

So this time I thought I would try some boxed wine. The two wines were the 500 ML versions of Bota Box 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon and Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon.  Both wines are made in in Lathrop, California which is in the Central Valley.  Very few areas of the Central Valley are considered areas where good grapes are grown and, in fact, the large wine makers use grapes from that area to make big bottles of wine and box wine.

The primary reason for the grape quality is the extreme weather. Heat and cold extremes can be damaging to grapevines and impact fruit and winemaking decisions. Extreme heat (temperatures greater than 95°F) in either the growing season or the ripening period negatively impacts wine grape production by “shutting down the vines,” through inhibition of photosynthesis and reduction of color development and anthocyanin production. While a few days of temperatures greater than 86°F can be beneficial in the ripening potential, prolonged periods can induce heat stress in the plant. 

Annual weather variation is the reason that so much attention is paid to vintage. The vintage of a wine is the year the grapes were harvested, and knowledge of the weather conditions in a region in a given year will reveal much about the potential quality of the wine made in that region that year.

The graph below, which represents the Central Valley city of Modesto, California, shows that there are three months where the high temperature is (consistently) greater than ninety degrees. Despite the rainfall information shown in the graph below the area is also prone to summer flooding, something grapes do not like.

Compare the Modesto weather to that of Sonoma, California, an area known for good wine grapes. Note that there in only one short period where the temperature approaches ninety degrees, so the extremes found in the Central Valley and, therefore, Lathrop, don’t exist so a good harvest is much more likely.

Interestingly it does not seem that either wine maker has its own vineyards, so it is likely they just buy grapes from companies who grow grapes to sell to wine makers. Consistency would be a big problem if that is the case.

The following are my reviews of the two Central Valley box wines I tried.

Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon

The first box I tried was the Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon. It was a pale red, not a deep red like a Cabernet should be. Its aroma was slightly vinegary, so I had very low expectation. But it did not taste bad. It went down smoothly with no acid overtones or astringency.  As the color indicated it was thin, like it had been watered down, and it lacked “oomph.” It was kind of like “Cabernet Light.”

All in all it was a pretty good wine for a camping trip. I would never buy it for anything else, but its small package and  its okay taste make it a good choice for camping.

Bota Box 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon

The second box I tried was the Bota Box 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon. The company description reads like this: “Bright medium brown brick red color. Bright, fruity, spicy woody savory aromas of black currants, cranberries, blonde tobacco, and potters clay with a chewy, tart, dry full body and a peppery, complex, breezy finish with firm, well-integrated tannins and moderate oak.” There’s those blackcurrants again!

First I tried to see the color. It was not a deep read like a Cabernet should be—in fact I could see through my glass (actually a plastic cup). Regarding the aroma I’d say “potters clay” hit it on the head. I did not say “earthy” by the way. It had sort of a wet dirt odor. So, what about the taste?

It was not very good. I guess the best word I can find to describe the wine is “harsh.” Would I buy it again for a camping trip? No.

WARNING

When you are camping it is easy to overlook the taste of bulk wine and to overindulge. Take my word for that.

Freeze Trip

To read about the box wine I brought on the trip, go to my other blog here:

http://the-wet-exit.blogspot.com/

Austin Area Paddlers Meetup

For more information on the Meetup group, go here: https://www.meetup.com/AustinAreaPaddlers/

How to be a Wine Snob - Lesson 1

If you want to be a wine snob you must be familiar with the jargon associated with snobbery. I will present six especially important terms in this post with more to follow. I will let you memorize these before presenting more. By the way, if you use these terms in even a slightly obnoxious way accept that fact that you will most likely be mocked behind your back.

Umami (u-mɑ-mi)—Umami is a word borrowed from Japanese and is defined as “savory taste.” Sometimes it is described as brothy or meaty.  Hondashi, a Japanese powder made from a smoked and dried Bonito, imparts an umami taste to miso soup.  When it comes to wine, impress your friends by saying something like, “Mature wines with softened tannins and nuanced umami make for a better match for powerful foods such as parmesan, tuna and shiitake mushrooms.”

Terroir (ter-wär)—Terroir is the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography, climate, sunny days, and so on. Let’s say that you have a friend who comments on a wine and suggests that the vintage, appellation and variety make it a very good wine. You do an eye-roll (not too obvious but just obvious enough) and say, “The terroir of this wine makes it somewhat inferior to others from the same region where a mist rolls in early in the morning but, hey, if you like it, that’s what counts.”

Pyrazine (per-a-zeen)—There are three types of pyrazine: Isobutylmethoxpyrazine, Isopropylmethoxpyrazine, and Sec-butylmethoxpyrazine Um...okay, but what is it? It is an aromatic organic compound that is an important component of many fruits and vegetables. The first is more prevalent in fresh bell pepper, the second in green asparagus or peas, and the third in beetroot. Of course, anyone reading this knows exactly what beetroot smells like, right? Pyrazine is considered an important aspect of a wine like sauvignon blanc but in a red wine—forget it. So, if at a party, read the label on the bottle so you can prepare for a witty comment. If the wine is a sauvignon blanc from South Africa, say something like, “Ah. The overtones of pyrazine in this wine make it the perfect companion for the seafood you served us.”

Cuvée (kü-ˈvā)—This is a term used to describe a type, blend, or batch of wine, especially champagne. It normally refers to a blend of very good wines. You might suggest to friends that they try the Cuvee Rouge at some local winery. Add, for emphasis, something like, “Normally I wouldn’t drink a red from (fill in the blank) but this particular blend was quite good.” Unfortunately the term is now being applied to coffee blends. Such snobbery!

Minerality—Minerality in wine is one of the most cerebral and challenging concepts to grasp. A wine described as mineral literally expresses the mineral elements of the soils on which it was grown. Minerality is also an expression of terroir.  Calling a wine “mineral” is a major compliment, as minerality implies complexity, depth and sophistication. Say something (after reading the label on the wine), “Oh my God. The minerality of this wine is exquisite. Undoubtedly it is from the south of France.”

I have tried wines from parts of California that are not known for their soil. One, in particular, came from an area that had sandy soil. The minerality of the wine was—sandy. Ugh.

Brooding—The word brooding is a relatively new wine snob word. When used to depict a wine, it means that the wine is dark in hue and densely concentrated. Wines described as brooding are almost always red, and typically express dark fruit flavors such as blackberry, black cherry and (my favorite) blackcurrant. This term is also used to describe a wine that expresses other “dark” notes such as dark chocolate, black licorice, tar or tobacco. Tell some friends about an especially wonderful wine you had, saying, “It was seductive and brooding on the palate, a magnificent combination of blackcurrant and blackberry fruits followed by essences of licorice, oak and smooth tannins that felt like velvet in the mouth.”  If you want to be a true snob use the word “cassis” instead of blackcurrant.

By the way, many Spanish wines are considered to be brooding which is why, perhaps, I like them (although I always used the term dense—shame on me).

The Nose Knows

Trivia Question: What is the difference between the nose, aroma and bouquet of a wine?

Answer: twenty-five percent chemistry, twenty-five percent imagination, and fifty percent snobbery.

Okay. Maybe it is not all that easy.

Chemistry

Here is a simple answer to the question: the nose and aroma of a wine are terms applied to young wines. The bouquet of a wine is a term applied to a “mature” wine—you  know, the kind of wine a person with an extensive wine cellar might buy and store for a number of years so it can age in the bottle (a legitimate aging process).

Here is a more complex answer to the question:  generally speaking, the nose of a wine is the broad category for a wine’s scent, and it is made up of all the aromas the wine emits. The aroma and bouquet refer to the scent or smell of a wine, composed of compounds derived from the grape, the fermentation process, and aging. Tasters tend to use aroma both in the broadest sense to refer to any and all odors, and also more specifically to those found in a young wine. Bouquet in tasting parlance is commonly reserved for older wines, recognizing, as everyone knows, that wines change significantly when they are aged in oak.

Oh—but---what if the wine is stored in a steel tank?

The fermentation and aging of wine is perhaps the most important aspect of creating an outstanding finished product. The length of time a wine is aged and the material in which it is aged can make the difference between producing a mediocre product versus an award-winning contribution.

Oak wine barrels have been used for centuries in the fermentation and aging processes of wine. Aging wine in oak wine barrels provides the wine with aromas that would typically be found on your spice rack – nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, vanilla and clove to name a few. It can also impart (a dirty little secret) flavors from a wine that have been previously aged, and that may not be a good thing. You gotta clean those barrels!

Stainless steel wine containers, on the other hand, can be used forever and are easy to clean, whereas the life of an oak barrel is between two and three years. In addition, steel containers impart no flavor into the wine, so the wine you make is the wine you get.  They are perfect for experimenting with exact flavors. With oak barrels it is difficult to control the wine’s exposure to air, and this exposure can alter the flavor of the wine dramatically. Steel barrels allow much more control over flavors.

Here is another factor: the companies with which I worked had steel containers that ranged in size from 1,000 gallons to 600,000 gallons. Higher quality wines, as you might imagine, used smaller containers so they could be treated more gently. I imagine that a 1,000 gallon oak barrel would require a pretty big tree to make!

Finally, the use of oak barrels is diminishing. Steel is quickly becoming the most popular container for aging wine and, in fact, most (meaning more than fifty percent) of wine is aged in steel now. I can’t get accurate statistics better than that, although I could, if not under non-disclosure agreements, tell you of the wine makers I know that no longer use oak at all.

But wine makers are sneaky. You may find a description of wine put out by a maker that says something like “aged using oak.” Well, that could mean that the maker used oak staves, oak chips or oak cubes to add aromas to wine.

Imagination and Snobbery

There is a reason I am discussing the topic of wine aromas.

This past weekend my wife and I went camping at Big Bend Ranch State Park. I will write about that trip in my other blog “The Wet Exit,” but we did have a wine experience I want to discuss. I brought three bottles of wine with me: one bottle of “The Show,” which I intended to have with chili the first night of our trip, one bottle of “Rutherford Ranch,” which I intended to have with our filets the second night of the trip, and one bottle of “7 Deadly Zins,” which I intended to have with a fantastic peach and apricot chicken dish Donna had made.

Well, the first night was a bit of a disaster. “The Show” sat outside while we tried to get our tent up and while the temperature plummeted to about forty degrees. It was so dark Donna could not find her cocktail ingredients so asked for some of the wine. She took one sip and said, “I can’t drink this. Open the Rutherford Ranch.” Talk about a wine snob!

Anyway, the next night a nice young couple named Brandi and Robert dropped by. We invited them to hang out with us by our fire and they did, but first they went back to their tent and returned with a bottle of “Luc Pirlet Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve” for us to take home. I had never heard of the wine so when I returned home I researched it. I found the following four reviews.

REVIEW 1

One of the best values France has to offer. This 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from southern France gives you a lot of flavor for your dollar. Fruity with blackcurrant and blackberry aromas, spices and green peppers. This could be your everyday go-to wine from now to next May.

REVIEW 2

Don't perceive this as a near 90 point wine. Solid up front maraschino cherry fruity goodness, but not enough concentration and layers for a big score. The color is just about perfect dark magenta. The nose has wet earth and the barnyard in front of cherry and strawberry. The entrance is vanilla laced, candied strawberry and cherry. If the mid palate had more character this would be quite the good $10 value wine, but still has no reason for shame. So much balance the oak and tannins are intricately involved while being shy and perfectly content to enhance. The finish starts and concludes with a metallic tone that tends to overwhelm the fruit.

REVIEW 3

This wine is full bodied and well-balanced with aromas of blackberries and clove on the nose and notes of blackcurrants and spices on the palette. 

REVIEW 4

Milk chocolate and dark cherries abound with ripe tannins and integrated oak and spice flavors. The finish is pure velvet and lingers on for quite a long time. An elegant wine with nicely balanced tannins. Great for pot roast or grilled flank steak.

Wow! These reviewers sure have great olfactory systems. I have to ask: who among you reading this has ever smelled a blackcurrant? I have had the jelly, but have never seen a currant in person.

Here is a fanciful description of a blackcurrant: There are three major characteristics of blackcurrant: firstly, its dark red color; secondly, its sour sweet fresh taste derived from an ideal blend of organic acids, sugars and minerals, bringing with them many nutritional and medicinal benefits; and thirdly, the aroma components which enhance the delightful flavor of blackcurrants.

Here is a technical description of a blackcurrant: Blackcurrant aroma contains many volatile compounds and terpenes, ß-caryophyllene, terpenoid, ketones, esters, ß-pinene, limonene, a-Phellandrene, etc which exhibit synergistic effects to create the unique aroma of the berry.

Got it? No? If you have never seen or tasted a blackcurrant there may be a good reason: until recently it was illegal to grow them in the US. Although popular in the 19th century in America, blackcurrants were banned in the early 20th century by the US government because their bushes can carry a disease fatal to white pines that threatened the then booming timber industry. The federal ban was finally lifted in 1966, but it took until 2003 for several states, including Connecticut, New York, Oregon and Vermont, to make it legal to grow blackcurrants in the US again. FYI blackcurrants typically don’t grow below the Mason-Dixon line because they need long, cold winters.

So, when I read reviews like those I presented I have to chuckle. It seems that every reviewer has to add something about the aromas they find in the wine and my guess is that either their imaginations take over or their snobbery does.

When I opened the bottle of wine I examined the color—it was a nice, deep red. Then I inhaled the vapors—I got a good, earthy aroma. Then I tasted it—it was a bit light for my liking but very smooth. I liked it.

Given the reviews above, you might wonder what the label on the bottle says. Here it is: The Luc Pirlet Cabernet Sauvignon is dense and spicy. It exhibits a medium to full body and it is enjoyable with grilled meat, spicy food and BBQ.

Note that the label says nothing about fruitiness or aroma. The wine is described as a Vin de Pays d'Oc, which means “country wine,” and except for the “dense” portrayal, I agree entirely with what the label description. At about $12 at HEB it is a pretty good bargain. 

Comments about nose, aroma and bouquet are, of course, welcome.

To read about the camping trip please visit my other site.

http://the-wet-exit.blogspot.com/ 

Introducing the Texas Wine Snob

How I Became a Wine Snob

I am a self-confessed wine snob. What does that mean? There are probably a hundred different definitions that I like but this is the one that is most applicable to me: a snob a person who believes himself or herself to have superior tastes and is condescending toward those with different tastes. That definition certainly applied to me when it came to wine.

A few weeks ago, though, I heard a “Freakonomics” broadcast that asked this question: Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? The answer, in short, is—not necessarily. The broadcast talked about a test that had been run in which some “wine snobs” were given expensive wines to taste and cheap wines to taste, although they were told that they were all expensive wines. The wine snobs were unable to tell the difference between the expensive wines and the cheap wines. Many similar tests have shown that the label on a wine as well as the cost of a wine can create a preconceived notion of how a wine will taste.

Uh oh. Was I the kind of person who thought he could tell the difference between expensive wine and cheap wine? I decided to try my own test at home to find out. By the way, since I have stopped working my concept of “relatively expensive” has changed, so I limited my budget to $25 or less.  Anyway, I asked my wife Donna to pour one glass of $25 wine, one glass of $12 wine, and one glass of (ugh) a $4 wine. I then asked her to pour one more glass of one of those wines so there were four glasses to taste. After that I tried to determine, in order, which wine was the best, second best and worst. I got it right but it took three tries! The truth was that I had a hard time telling the difference between the $25 wine and the $12 wine, but I was able to detect the $4 wine. I hate to admit it but the $4 wine was not awful. I would not buy it again, but it wasn’t something I would pour down the drain.

I do know a little bit about wine because I had the opportunity to work with wine makers. When I had my own consulting practice some of my clients were large wineries. My role was to develop simulations that would assist the wineries on their wine-making schedule based on the predicted grape harvest, the storage of wines based on the type of wine, the blending of wines, the movement of wine throughout a facility, the shipping schedule of wines and many other factors. In order to develop the simulations I had to learn the wine-making process in minute detail.

Wine-making can be either simple or complex. There are actually companies who make very cheap wine using the following process: add water, sugar and yeast to grape concentrate. Repeat a couple of times and, when the wine is ready, bottle it. This process is typical for carbonated wines that are sold around the holidays.

Then there are processes that increase in complexity and, therefore, cost, based on the value of the wine. A general rule of thumb in wine-making is—the gentler you treat the wine, the better it will be. The right equipment will assist in the handling of the wine, but equipment that treats the wine gently is more expensive, thus affecting the cost of the wine. Some wine-makers, especially the French, don’t use much mechanical equipment at all and instead rely on a gravity-fed process.

Below is a snapshot from the simulation I developed for a red wine process. Each of the boxes shown in the snapshot can contain thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of computer instructions. The boxes are there to help the client understand what the simulation is doing.

Note the reference to “Free Run.” "Free Run” is the terminology used to describe the juice that flows freely from freshly picked grapes before they are pressed. When truckloads of grapes are stacked up on top of each other some juice is released due to the weight of the load. “Free Run” juice is considered to be exceptionally fine and requires a process of its own, despite the fact that it makes up only a small percentage of the juice that is processed. The fact that the client made use of the free run juice is an indication of the quality of wine that was being made. The process is so complex that a simulation of one harvest year could require an entire day to run.

One of the most important lessons I learned about wine-making from my consulting, however, was the following: 

• You can make good wine from good grapes, 
• You can make bad wine from good grapes, 
• You can make bad wine from good grapes, 
• But you cannot make good wine from bad grapes

This is sort of an industry joke. Just line wine-tasters, wine-makers can be snobs. A maker of a fine wine may look at the appellation (origin of the grapes) of a competitor’s wine and scoff—you cannot make good wine from those grapes.  When it came to Texas wines my clients were like—Oh my Gawd! In their opinion there was no way any wine made from Texas grapes could be any good at all. This is how I developed my opinion of Texas wines.

By working with my clients I also learned a lot about tasting wine, mainly because one of my clients insisted that we have wine with lunch every day so we could discuss what we were drinking. Lunch was kind of “wine tasting 101” for us. This client also had a Starbucks on the premises and provided Mary See’s candy after lunch. I think they were trying to overcome the effects of the wine with caffeine and sugar. It was a great contract.

Because I was often on site in California a lot during a two-year period, I wound up drinking, and appreciating, a lot of good wine, and not just at lunch. Hey—I was on an expense account. I also learned a lot about the wine business, especially how some bottlers try to trick consumers.

At one time wine bottlers would purchase grapes from places like the Central Valley in California, an area that produces mostly “bad” grapes. They would then ship the grapes to Sonoma, for example, and label the wine as a Sonoma wine because it was created and bottled there. In 2000 California passed a stringent law that stated, among other things: A wine may be labeled by a grape or varietal name such as Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, but it must derive at least 75% of the volume from the grape designated, and at least 75% of the grapes must come from the named state or county, such as “Sonoma.”

Therefore, a wine that is labeled Sonoma Cabernet must be 75% Cabernet, and 75% of the total wine in the bottle had to come from grapes grown in Sonoma.

The picture below is a good example of a well-labeled bottle of wine.

Because of my knowledge of the California and Federal wine labeling laws I was under the impression that every bottle of California wine had to list the blend of wines it contained. Apparently that is not the case.

My wife and I were at HEB a couple of days ago where I saw a number of relatively expensive wines simply labeled “Red Wine.” When I examined the wines I was unable to find out what they consisted of or where the grapes came from. I went on line to research one of the wines, a wine that cost almost $70 a bottle and still could not find what the grapes where. I actually had to download a PDF file to get this description of the 2011 wine: Varietal Composition: 81% Cabernet Sauvignon, 12% Merlot, 7% Cabernet Franc--Appellation: Paso Robles. This is actually suspicious because, given the percentage of Cabernet, the wine could have been labeled as such. It is quite possible that the vintage of the wine described in the PDF is not the same as the wine being sold.

Paso Robles is part of the Central Coast, an area considered to a producer of “good grapes.” Despite that I could not see putting down $70 for a wine that has little or no information on the label.  The California labeling laws are strict, but apparently not strict enough. In 2015 the entire California congressional delegation had urged federal regulators to “more aggressively enforce” the labeling rules that “ensure that consumers receive truthful and accurate information” about wine.

When you are gainfully employed you may want to take the risk of buying a $70 bottle of wine that you know nothing about. Now that I am retired, though, my days of spending $70 on a bottle of wine are long past. In fact, I don’t think I have ever spent $70 on a bottle of wine--$50, maybe, but not $70.  My current approach is to find wines that I like that are prices I can tolerate.

My opinion is that I don’t think you have to spend much more than $20 to get a very good bottle of wine and, in fact, you can find good wines for much less. Below are some of my favorite red wines, all of which can be purchased at HEB. Here are some wines I recommend: Rutherford Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, about $24,  St. Francis Cabernet Sauvignon, about $18,  The Show Cabernet Sauvignon, about $12, and Michael David Winery 7 Deadly Zins, about $12 at HEB (gets a 97 score from some reviewers).

Other wines I like are: Jean Leon Gran Reserva, a Spanish Cabernet. (Unfortunately I cannot find it around here and, besides, I think it costs about $30. Gotta stick to my price guns!), Bodega Norton 2014 Barrel Select Cabernet Sauvignon, an Argentine wine, about $12, Concha Y Toro Marques Casa Concha Cabernet Sauvignon, a Chilean wine, about $20, Marques de Riscal Cabernet, Spanish, about $20. This used to be my favorite-don’t know why I have not bought it in a while. There is a $9 version that comes from newer vines. I will have to try it!

Back to Texas Wines

I posted a version of this a week or so ago and publicized it via NEXTDOOR.COM. I got some pushback from people who are involved in the Texas wine industry so I decided to do some research.  I discovered that the Texas wine business is booming because, among other factors, grapes require much less water than other crops such as cotton.

If you research where Texas ranks as a wine producer you may find that it ranks behind states like New Jersey and Florida. What? You have to be careful when looking at statistics. It turns out that Florida, for example, makes wine out of many different tropical fruits, such as mango. New Jersey wineries (and wineries in other states) import juice/wine from California and finish it on site.

Texas actually ranks fourth in wine production if you exclude New York State (which I do because New York produces very sweet wines and Kosher wines). The big three are, of course, California, Washington State and Oregon.

In the ten years or so since I consulted to the industry a lot has changed. Texas is increasing its wine quantity and I have to believe that the wines have increased in quality as well. I have decided to bone up on my wine-tasting skills and then discover as much as I can about Texas wines. If you have any suggestions for me regarding Texas wines, please let me know.

In the meantime I will continue to blog about wine in general and provide information about the wine-making process, factors that affect the quality of wine, wine trivia and so on. If you read my blog you, too, may be able to self-declare as a wine snob based on the information I provide.

Technical Reading

 If you are interested in some technical reading, you can read an article I wrote for Wine Business Monthly at this web site: https://www.winebusiness.com/wbm/?go=getArticleSignIn&dataId=3563

You will have to join but it is free and you get very good information about the wine industry.

Listen to the Freakonomics pod cast here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-do-more-expensive-wines-taste-better/

My Other Blog

I have another blog called "Gregs-INTO.com." The INTO stands for "I'm Not Too Old." It is geared towards getting "mature" folks invloved in sports they normally might not consider, such as white water kayaking. Here is the link: www.gregs-into.com