April 5, 2010 by Thomas.

How would I endure losing the pleasure of seeing a garnet-amber or brick red or golden gleaming wine in my glass?

How would I be able to write (or read) about wine without sight?

Come to think of it, without sight how would I read the notes on music sheets when I play piano?

How will I get to my favorite wine shop, see my favorite people, drive myself to New York City to meet up with old friends in convivial settings, look at my wife?

How would living in the dark be?

This past week I was given a scare and some potential bad news that made me think all the above.

I was preparing dinner, putting together a braised lamb shank concoction. As I made my way to cut some potatoes, a small dot appeared on what I thought was my eyeglasses. I rubbed the glasses with a cleaning cloth, but the dot refused to go away. It did, however, keep moving around.

Later that night, I noticed a flash of light off to the side of my left eye every so often. I mentioned this to my wife and she told me about floaters. I looked floaters up online and learned that they are little breakaway gel spots that happen to us as we age. I also learned that flashes of light can be a serious symptom and that I should call my eye doctor (I have one of those, because glaucoma runs in the family).

The doc took me in on emergency and gave me a thorough going over: dilation and a laser examination. In the process, I could see the road-map image of the blood vessels in my eyes. Weirdly fascinating.

The examination proved that the loosening gel is pulling at my retina—hence, the flash of light as it opens a tiny passageway where light gets in. But right now, it is only pulling. There is no tearing of the retina away from the gel.

The doc said that I must keep vigil over this situation, because if the gel tears the retina away some I will need laser treatment. The symptom will be more light flashes. If I happen to see a curtain-like closing over my eye, then I will need emergency surgery, as it would mean the retina had detached and I would lose sight.

This news, as news like this often does, started me thinking about what is and what isn’t important. Seeing is important, especially to a writer who is also a lover of stimuli such as the many bulbs we have planted around our property over the years and that are in full glory this spring, plus the forsythia and soon the fruit tree flowers—not to mention the striking beauty of the Finger Lakes region outside my porch.

I could live without seeing a computer screen, but could I live without seeing words or music notes in print, or the red and white of wine, or the beauty of my surroundings, or the beauty of my wife and others whom I cherish?

Sure, I could live, but could I enjoy it?

I’m going to be vigilant and keep a watchful eye, literally, on my condition. Plus, I’m going to look more closely at everything and everyone from now on. Beginning with tonight’s Tamellini Soave Classico with dinner.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
April 2010. All rights reserved.

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March 29, 2010 by Thomas.

The smaller the fish, the less heavy metals, because small fish don’t live as long as big fish and so they don’t accumulate much in the metals department. This is why I go for sardines and anchovies—well, not the only reason.

Both little fishes are healthy, too, for their polyunsaturated fatty acids, high protein to weight ratio, and their mineral content. It is, however, their taste that is truly appealing: sardines are wonderful grilled and both sardines and anchovies make terrific additions to a pasta sauce. The sardines need no tomato; just some olive oil and herbs. The anchovies like a little tomato.

The problem with sardines is that we can’t always get the fresh Mediterranean ones. The canned ones are of course useless for grilling, but they can be used in sauce. Yet, canned anchovies are much better for sauce; they add a lot more flavor and their bones are truly edible.

Here’s how I do an anchovies sauce for pasta for two.

It takes no more than two cans of flat anchovies—no capers. I drain the olive oil because it is too salty for me.

Since we haven’t any fresh basil right now, and since I hate dried basil for its blandness, I get two of my basil ice cubes from the freezer (at the end of each summer, I puree basil in olive oil and freeze the mix in ice cube trays to use throughout the winter for cooking and for pesto).

Throw the basil ice cubes into a large stainless pan on low flame.

Chop two shallots and sauté for a minute; chop two garlic cloves add to the shallots and sauté for a minute, then pour about 1/4 cup of sweet wine such as Marsala and simmer for a minute while stirring.

Add the tomato puree, the anchovies, 1/2 cup chicken or fish stock (I always keep some of my own stock frozen), two bay leaves, and a small cayenne chopped up finely (I keep these in the freezer too, from my garden peppers).

Stir everything up nicely and let simmer on low flame for five minutes and then stir again, give another five minutes and then cover the pan and bring the flame to its lowest possible point.

Boil water for pasta for two however you normally do that (some add salt and olive oil to the water, etc.).

For this dish, I use either cheese ravioli or penne with grated Grana Padano cheese for topping. Either one is fine, or any other pasta will do, really.

When the pasta is cooked (about 8 or 9 minutes) drain and then lift the cover from the sauce and get rid of the steam and liquid that distilled in the cover. Add the pasta to the sauce, turn off the flame, stir for a few minutes, and serve, topped with chopped parsley.

The wine I drink with this dish varies, but it is normally a Mediterranean red of some sort. For my most recent anchovies sauce over ravioli, last night, I paired with Sella and Mosca 2005 Cannonau Di Sardegna Riserva ($12). It’s a perfect earthy wine for this elemental dish.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2010. All rights reserved.

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March 19, 2010 by Thomas.

A recent news update from Decanter Magazine included a brief blurb about
mountain bushfires having driven over 50 baboons into the Franschhoek Valley South African wine region in search of food—it got me to thinking about the baboons I’ve encountered over the years in the wine business.

The first baboon was that bank manager who didn’t believe in my business plan to start a winery. His response to my reasonable request for a business loan was that I had two things going against me: I never operated a vineyard and winery before, and I wasn’t wealthy. You see, banks lend either to people who don’t need the money or to people who might as well have been wearing a mask when they entered the bank, like derivatives traders.

What really pisses me off about the bank baboon is how right he was about my chance for success.

The next baboon I met actually came in a family. They were supposed to work my vineyards with me, and they did—sometimes, when they got to bed sober the night before, and when they needed money so that they didn’t have to go to bed sober the next night. When they did come to work, these baboons never skipped a break or lunch, but they had no trouble at all skipping vines or even rows of vines.

The baboons in Albany may have been the best, if you like baboons, I mean. One of the things about this clan was their penchant for yellow. If I sent my monthly wine reports to them and didn’t submit on yellow paper, in triplicate, something mysterious would take place and the records of my wine movements vanished. These baboons also had no sense of timing; they sent permits days or weeks after they were needed. The only thing that saved me from wanting to kill these baboons was their consistency, especially when you asked for a rule reading—the answer was always NO. I learned that the best way to deal with a group of baboons like that was not to talk to them at all, unless they started the conversation.

Having gotten the courage to go out into the world and try to sell wine to retailers gave me the opportunity for my next baboon sighting. These were the wine and spirit retailers who spent hours banging out tickets from the Lotto machine but had no time to sell wine that was on their shelves. Their cousins, the monkeys, gave me a terrific reason that they did not buy wine from a small New York winery: “I don’t need anymore monthly invoices.”

Some baboons were ok, even when they weren’t. That would be the ones known as tourists. They bought wine and that made them ok, but they also wanted to talk, and that made them baboons, especially the ones who just finished tasting a Chardonnay and a Riesling and then asked, “What’s the difference between Chardonnay and Riesling?” A baboon should always be silent.

The biggest and truly best baboon of them all, however, was I. I thought that I could start my winery on a shoestring. Well, that’s not exactly what made me a baboon. I thought that by starting my winery on a shoestring I could build it into a small wine family dynasty through hard work and dedication to quality. I certainly worked hard and I tried to learn all that I could to keep the quality up.  In the end, after eight years on the job, I was left with no shoestrings and a pair of shoes eight years old. But a baboon doesn’t need shoes, right?

In South Africa, the wine people complain that their baboons know exactly when the grapes are ripe enough to eat, which happens to be about a week before harvest, and they have been known to devour two to three tons of grapes in a week; they like Chenin Blanc and of course Pinot Noir.

You could say that for the South African wine industry the only thing they have to fear is feral itself. But then, one of the wine people has been quoted to say that the decrease in grape crops caused by the baboons resulted in better quality wine.

I suppose had I access in the Finger Lakes to real instead of human baboons to trim my crop, this baboon might have had a successful winery on his four hands!

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2010. All rights reserved.

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March 4, 2010 by Thomas.

According to the Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), the arm of the Treasury Department that regulates alcohol, in order to use the words Ice Wine on a label the grapes for that wine must have been harvested while frozen, the grapes, not the people who pick them, although they are frozen too, because to meet the requirement the grapes must be picked in the early morning hours and at temperatures well below freezing.

The ostensible reason for the TTB rule is so that consumers know that Ice Wine was produced in as similar a manner as the Eisweins of Germany and the Ice Wines of Canada, two places other than the U.S. where frozen grapes are harvested. I say “in as similar a manner” because in the U.S. the rules end with the requirement that the grapes be picked frozen. In the two other countries, the rules are more stringent, placing conditions not only on when to pick but how, and even on the prescribed temperature at which to pick.

TTB labeling rules plainly state that the word Ice must be followed by a space and then followed by the word Wine, but the rules don’t seem to care one way or the other what a winery wants to call a wine that was produced from grapes that had not been frozen on the vine, but had been frozen, as in cryogenics or a simple large freezer. These wines can be called Iced Wine or any other creative construction that hints at the real thing.

It’s all about the proper placement of words, or maybe the improper placement of them.

Ice Wine production is a lengthy and expensive process, and thanks to climate conditions, it isn’t possible every year. To produce Ice Wine you must start with grape varieties that are truly thick-skinned and able to hang on the vine for months without deteriorating much. The Ice Wine harvest can take place anywhere between Thanksgiving and sometime in January, depending on when the major frigid time of the late autumn-early winter season hits. The producer must have the luck to avoid botrytis while waiting—a process that is necessary for Late Harvest dessert wines that are purposely harvested as raisins but never frozen.

Wines picked at regular harvest time and then frozen give producers the opportunity to forgo certain trepidation from a long, dangerous wait.

If all goes well, grapes for Ice Wine are frozen and intensified inside their skins. The intensity of the frozen juice creates the opposite of what you might expect. Instead of the acidic fruit salad with honey overtone intensity of Late Harvest dessert wine, Ice Wine has a delicately silky texture with hints of stone fruit flowers; it attacks the palate with the feel of a flavorful liquid ball. In my mind’s eye, Ice Wine is like liquid in the shape of an ice cream scoop, an apt vision as this liquid ice cream seems drenched in a sometimes nutty, sometimes butterscotch caramelized syrup.

Ice Wine’s closest culinary brethren may be baked Alaska.

In fact, at a recent tasting of Ice Wines, I was floored by their “cooked” caramelized characteristic. I asked how is it that wine produced from frozen grapes can seem cooked? The answer was so simple it embarrassed me that I asked the winemakers on the panel whose wines it was that I had just tasted.

While waiting for the right freezing temperatures, grapes hanging out there endure swings of autumn and then winter temperatures that can range from pretty warm to pretty cool. During those long periods of back and forth, an enzymatic twist occurs as the grapes go through a kind of cooking and cooling process over and over.

When a producer leaves grapes to hang for extended periods of time, along with the risk of deterioration comes crop loss and loss of juice volume from the remaining crop. That of course increases the cost of producing the wine. This is where the other frozen wines have an advantage: since the grapes are picked usually during regular harvest, crop loss is almost nil. Even after time spent in the freezer the grapes provide more wine than their Ice Wine counterpart, and with less effort.

The freezer-frozen version can be found on retail shelves at half the price of Ice Wine and sometimes even cheaper than that. Yet, the profile of freezer-frozen wines recently tasted alongside Ice Wines did not deliver the exotic silkiness wrapped in caramel that makes the real thing of great interest.

Sadly, many consumers don’t know the difference between an Iced Wine and an Ice Wine that they may see side by side on retail shelves. If they make their buying decision strictly on price, then to me it’s as if the TTB rules have placed Ice Wine at a state-sponsored disadvantage.

Sure, consumers can ask, because on wine labels proper placement of words has meaning. But the immortal twisted syntax of another bureaucrat, Donald Rumsfeld, applies here: “sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.”

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2010. All rights reserved.

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March 1, 2010 by Thomas.

Been following…

01. Following Constellation Brands. D@P

Trans: “I am drinking the stars!” Dom Perignon

02. Ugh, going home to bathe, drink, and sleep. S@TA

Trans: “Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of good wine.” St. Thomas Aquinas

03. I spoke 2 soon. S@J

Trans: “One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.” Samuel Johnson

04. Wine taxes pay off national debt. T@J

Trans: “By making this wine vine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt.”  Thomas Jefferson

05. Join the party 2nite. J@HV

Trans: “He who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long “ Johann Heinrich Voss

06. Champers 2 win or 2 lose. @N

Trans: “I drink champagne when I win, to celebrate…and I drink champagne when I lose to console myself.” Napoleon

07. Wine theft at doctor’s office. R@P

Trans: “Drink a glass of wine after your soup and you steal a ruble from your doctor.” Russian proverb

08. Wine 4 dinner; then, pleasing myself. @P

Trans: “When a man drinks wine at dinner, he begins to be better pleased with himself.” Plato

09. Mixologist told me sun+water=wine. G@G

Trans: “Wine is sunlight, held together by water!” Galileo Gallilei

10. No wine=no 2 nite, baby. @E

Trans: “Where there is no wine there is no love.” Euripides

11. No wine; need drugs. @Tal

Trans: “Wine is at the head of all medicines; where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary.” The Talmud

12. Bread & wine & u 4 me. O@K

Trans: “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.” Omar Khayyam

Wine quotes

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
March 2010. All rights reserved.

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February 23, 2010 by Thomas.

The five or six of you who follow vinofictions may have noticed the absence of a post for a few weeks. What used to be weekly, slipped to every other week, and then to “post when I feel the urge.” Lately, the urge has been usurped by my activity reading and commenting on other wine blogs. Luckily for my real life, I don’t read all the wine blogs out there, but the ones I do read hold me fast at times: some for their humor, some for their glibness, some for their good writing, and some for their ability to raise the hairs on my back and motivate me to vent.

The other day, after I bemoaned my personal blogging fate, a wine industry colleague asked me why I don’t review wines. He knows me well, but obviously not well enough, as he believes that I have a decent palate for wine. Before I snapped back at my colleague with my standard quip, “why should anyone care what I like?” He said, “And don’t give me your standard response. Wine reviews are what people want from a blog.”

Little did my colleague know, but I had long ago come to that conclusion. It was in fact partly behind my choice not to write reviews. My whole life has been accented by an attempt to tweak prevailing wisdom or, with any serious good luck, to maybe change things.

Such hubris needs to be guarded against. The person who sets out to make change likely isn’t going to be the one to effect change—that happy fate often falls to the humble who plod along doing what they love, and doing it well.

Still, my colleague made me think.

Wine became part of my life as early as age seven in Brooklyn. Over my young years, I helped the next door neighbor who hailed from Napoli, as most of my neighborhood had. We loaded boxes of grapes into his cellar for him to press and I helped him move things around and clean up in the cellar. With my first sniff of just emptied barrels of wine that he had bottled, a lasting fume took residence in my soul. Later, I drank some of the wines (cut with water, of course) at our dinner table—they were all red wines, and they each reminded me of what we called tar beach, the smell of an asphalt rooftop in mid July. And they tasted like earth, and not really the Good Earth!

How curiously stimulating wine was to this seven-year-old.

Later, I became the only 19 year-old on the block that owned a corkscrew, used during those times when, flush with cash, I could forgo Thunderbird for a Monsieur Henri Selection to go with that tube of airplane glue. Hey, it was Brooklyn, circa 1960s; what did you expect?

As the years went by, I shed the glue and sundry bad habits and built a relationship with wine. Later still, my horizons opened during my military service in the Vietnam period, as I met people that had life experiences to teach me, and then by my own travel abroad after I got “back in the world,” as we used to say.

In the 1970s, I lived in Iran for two years around the same time as Cat Stevens, but neither for the same reason nor in the same place. My trip was for work and for education. Drinking Iranian Riesling and a red wine named 1001 began a thirty-plus year infatuation for me with the connection between wine and civilization. Then, it was on through Europe, with parts experienced along the soon-to-vanish last stops of the Orient Express.  From Holland to Greece and many points between, I learned about food and wine, not to mention that I found cultures other than the American form—that actually work.

Soon, I found myself studying the winemaking process; then, I practiced at home what I learned; then, I was licensed to make the stuff commercially; then, licensed to sell it; and then, licensed to wax philosophic over it. Not really. There is no license for that. There’s also no license that gives you the privilege to tell others what a wine should be or taste like, and that was okay with me. I didn’t want the horns that I believe it takes to “know” the unknowable, what Lucifer promises but always manages to extract a price for in return.

It was always a mystery to me the way wine grips people. Today, the only thing that I think I know is that wine is elemental—like blood. Too often, however, instead of viewing wine as part of our id we place it squarely in the part of us that is ego.

With the launch of vinofictions about four years ago, my intention was to wade through the PR and the crap that surrounds the subject of wine and then try to tell things the way they are. It’s not only painfully clear that few people want to hear it, I am painfully aware of how egotistical my intention was.

Therefore, I’m not so sure when my next vinofictions post will be or if a next one materializes what the subject of it will be, but I am sure of one thing: I have no intention to review wines.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
February 2010. All rights reserved.

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February 5, 2010 by Thomas.

This might be a stretch, but wine and the health care debate in the USA seem to have something in common.

The sad state of affairs for wine producers has been written about, interminably, especially the ones who’ve been used to charging high prices for their products only to find that at the slightest mini-economic meltdown that wipes out retirement accounts, home ownership, venerable corporations, and more jobs than there are cockroaches in New York City, these producers can’t move their over-priced plonk. They have been forced (some of them) to charge closer to what the wine is worth.

The situation is enough to make one wonder what it is that motivated buyers to lay down all that cash over these past few years. Maybe it has something to do with the concept, “I’ve Got Mine (IGM).” To interpret: my income from derivatives and bonuses is so great, who gives a rat’s ass if you can’t afford to pay an unreasonable price for 750 ml. of fine-tasting alcohol. I will pay it—until I can’t.

In Massachusetts recently, voters seemed to respond to the IGM message that they have their state health care system and it works for them; why should they send a senator to congress who would force them to help the rest of us gain such a system?

Yep, it’s IGM: a mantra that pervades the right tilt.

Notice that wine drinkers didn’t stop drinking wine when their incomes tanked; they simply lowered their standards. That fact caused one wine blogger to claim that it proves wine drinkers are in it for the buzz—hmmm, maybe so.

Notice, too, that Americans (well, a majority of us) haven’t stopped buying health insurance as the price of premiums surpassed the value of the insurance. The credit card industry seems the only one to have kept pace with the cost of health insurance; banks get away with interest rates that used to send to prison the mobsters on the corner of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood with which this writer was intimate.

In fact, as a side parallel between health care and wine, the government has reversed the definition of the word “usury” from bad to good while the feds at TTB have changed the definition of the word “ameliorate” in reverse order. But I digress…

Why haven’t we stopped buying expensive health insurance and why have we stopped buying expensive wine?

The answer is so simple it is often missed. With wine, we have choices.

There’s a lesson in the fact that as people stopped buying expensive wine, expensive wine producers were forced to respond by reducing their prices. We can probably end the sorry state of affair in the health insurance situation by doing the same thing.

Tomorrow morning, every American with a health insurance policy should cancel it.

By taking that step, we would all lose our health care, but no doctor or hospital will be able to make a living either. How long do you think it would take the idiots in congress (and the idiots who claim IGM) to understand what we are saying through such an action?

If it weren’t for the volume of drinkable cheap wine available on the market, I’d probably have trouble sleeping at night, wondering how to raise the next million to send to the health insurance bureaucracy. Still, I have to hand it to the insurance industry (an industry that I believe was invented by Italians—mea culpa for my ethnicity). Long ago, the health insurance gangsters devised a system to sell a product based on fear and also to make sure that there is no competition, which is the exact reverse of the wine industry.

Wine is in trouble today because it sells a product based on joy and there’s too much competition.

Wow, instead of proving that wine and the health care debate have things in common, I’ve lurched uncontrollably into identifying a truly skewed American lifestyle. Better stop now, before I look for a sharp razor…

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
February 2010. All rights reserved.

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January 21, 2010 by Thomas.

Come April 2010, New York State appears ready to lurch from Byzantium into the 21st century.

That’s when the state’s governor presents his new budget to the legislature, which  manages to pass it on time once a century.

In any case, for the 2010 budget Governor Paterson has taken two bills, Assembly (A8632A) and Senate (S5787) together to construct a proposal that would allow wine sales alongside groceries in New York—and this time, it might pass.

When the governor tried this move last year, the state’s wine and spirits retailers organization was dead against the idea and any form of it, proving once again how entrenched regulated complacency can become. The organization didn’t even want to consider using the proposal to press its members’ needs and get a few things changed in the regulations, like allowing wine and spirits shops to sell groceries and beer, which they cannot do, and which wasn’t in the governor’s plan.

Another opening that the retailers let go by was the possibility of using their potential acquiescence as a bargaining chip to press the State Liquor Authority (SLA) to relax some of its Byzantine interpretations of the state’s alcohol control laws with the kind of rules that slap a fine on retailers who try to sell beautiful wine gift bags around the holidays (they can package wine in bags, but they can’t sell the bags).

One SLA interpretation forbids mom and pop retail stores from taking advantage of volume discounts by forming cooperative buying groups. That one rule may have been the most responsible for the steadily declining number of neighborhood shops and the rise of giant stores across the state. Or the SLA could have been forced to relax pricing and discounting filing requirements that are the basis of much under-the-table wheeling and dealing in the industry that no one likes to admit.

Other matters that the retailers could have used to press the SLA concern licensing hurdles like the rule that says before applying for a license to sell alcohol at retail the applicant must sign a lease or own the space planned for the store. So, while waiting for the retail license process to complete, which can take up to one year in New York, depending upon who contests the application and who needs to get paid off, the applicant pays rent on a vacant storefront.

There are so many similar and oppressive SLA rules that continuing would make this blog entry appear surreal.

Some of the above nonsense is addressed in the new proposal, the most sweeping of course is that wine and spirit shops would be allowed to sell food items and grocery stores would be allowed to add wine to their shelves (I don’t think, however, that beer will be allowed in wine and liquor shops—yet).

The second grand change on the list is in the way licenses will be issued. No more will you have to lease a space and pay rent on it while you await the Byzantines to stamp all the right documents. A temporary license will be issued pending approval for a real one. Plus, once issued, licenses will become commodities with value, modeled after the taxi medallion that in NY City can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

There are other proposed changes, many of which I have yet to dig into. It’s enough for now to know that the governor is proposing and this time the retailers seem to be getting on board. Perhaps someone did a seminar to persuade them not to be like Americans seem to be with regard to health care reform and say no against their own best interests just because things are the way they are and we are used to it.

With a few exceptions, the NY wine and grape industries have been on board. Those of us in the wine business in the 1980s felt that “change was gonna come.” We didn’t think it was going to take this long, but now that it appears to be on the horizon, it is cause for celebration.

Now, if the state could only do something about its dysfunctional political system as well as its oppressive and punitive property tax system, we might bring New York all the way through the 21st century—intact.

The new rules
Alcohol Control

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
January 2010. All rights reserved.

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January 14, 2010 by Thomas.

The Location is the office of the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America.

Craig Wolf’s secretary: “Sir, you have an invitation here to go to a tea party.”

Mr. Wolf: “Idiots. Why would they think I’d go to a non alcoholic party?”

Secretary: “It might be a good idea to see what they are up to.”

Mr. Wolf: “Hmm.”

Later that week at a tea party hosted by Sarah Palin’s publisher to sell books.

Ms. Palin addressing the throng: “So, you see my friends. Bein’ a rogue isn’t like bein’ smart or anything—I doan get accused o’ that, you betcha. No, friends. Bein’ a rogue means goin’ out there every day and doin’ what you do, you know, the way liberals do it but only doin’ it more true to the things that we know we must do because when you do the things that you know you must do you can see things comin’ atchya before they come atchya. So, be a rogue like me an’ drink a lotta that tea, there, ‘cause it’s good for ya, doanchya know? Now line up an’ I’ll sign the books.”

Mr. Wolf finally gets to Ms. Palin. Holding out a book and a card: “Ms. Palin, I admire you greatly. Here’s my card. I have a proposition for you.”

Ms. Palin, dreaming of dollar signs: “Oh, WSWA. An organization close to my heart, you betchya.”

The next day.

Mr. Wolf: “Hello Ms. Palin. So glad I caught you. This is Craig Wolf.”

Ms. Palin: “Who?”

Mr. Wolf: Craig Wolf of WSWA. I gave you my card yesterday at the book signing.”

Ms. Palin: “Oh, yeah. I was goin’ to call ya in a few minutes, doanchya know?”

Mr. Wolf: “Ms. Palin, I represent an organization of family businesses that I know would respond well to you if you were to speak at our annual meeting. And this year, the meeting is being held in the Family Values capital of the country, Las Vegas. I’m sure I speak for all the families in my organization when I say that we want you to be our keynote speaker and talk about free enterprise. Besides, it would be great exposure for you and your book. All of these families are rogues, you know.”

Ms. Palin: “Oh, thank you Mr. Fox. But ya know, up there in Alaska we learn fast that exposure getsya frostbite. My fee is $100,000, Mr. Fox.”

Mr. Wolf: “It’s Wolf.”

Ms. Palin: “Huh?”

Mr. Wolf: “Wolf. My name is Wolf. You called me Mr. Fox. Anyway, that’s a little steep for my organization…”

Ms. Palin, cutting Mr. Wolf off in mid-sentence: “I’m very sorry, but I didn’t give up a governor’s gig so I could sleep in Greyhound Bus Stations across the country pluggin’ a book that I didn’t even write. That’s my fee Mr. Coyote.”

The time is April 2010. The place is Las Vegas. The meeting is for the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America. The keynote speaker is Ms. Palin.

Mr. Wolf: “Well, thank you all for the warm welcome and for joining us this year in fun-filled Las Vegas. As promised, I now have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker.  Here she is, ex Vice Presidential candidate, ex-governor of Alaska, ex mother-in-law, and extra hot Ms. Sarah Palin. Let’s hear it for her, folks.”

As the applause dies down Ms. Palin steps up to the mic and looks over at Mr. Wolf: “Thank you so much for that accurate introduction Mr. Jackal…”

Mr. Wolf cuts her off in mid-sentence: “The name is Craig Wolf, Ms. Palin.”

While the crowd roars, you can hear Ms. Palin ask Mr. Wolf: “Is it ok if I call you Craig?”

Ms. Palin speaks: “Well, I haveta tellya that I’m so pleased to be here tonight to talk about free enterprise, because no where on this earth is there a place like America for free enterprise. It’s tough now, but when we get Barak Osama out of office in 2012, we’ll also get the government off our backs. An’ I doan think we should stop at the federal level—I unnerstan’ that the families here do business in all the states. What we’ll need ta-do, as I know you agree, is get the states outta your business, too (she winks).

Oh, I did some checkin’ around before I came here. I know that you are regulated under sumthin’ called the Three Tear System. Whassup with that, anyway? Maybe the frustration of workin’ with the bureaucrats causes tears, but that’s no reason for the state to rub it in an’ name the system after it (she winks).

Anyways, I checked an’ I know all about your vendors, the wineries, wantin’ to direct ship across the country. I mean, whassup with ships? Which waterway would they use to go from California to the Evil East Coast? What’s wrong with flying? Oh, I know, but planes are safe, really. I fly allatime an’ I have never met one terrorist on a plane. Not one, doanchya know, and with the miles that I rack up doin’ this book tour an’ all.

Now this tea party of yours tonight shows how much free enterprise can do for business. I mean, I saw the bills racked up for you guys at this hotel, and the money you people have already lost at the tables is big time. It’s more than I’m makin’ in a week right now, but my fleece machine is workin’ hard an’ the tea party crowd will pay up if they want me to run again for office—any office. You betchya.

So, bein’ a free enterprise country means making money. An’ no government should prevent you from doin’ that. In fact, I’ll pledge to you right here tonight that if you families can come together with about a million cool ones, I’ll take the fight to federal and local governments. We’ll dismantle this cryin’ shame known as the Three Tear System.

Whaddaya say to that? No more tears.”

As Ms. Palin leaves the stage amidst a resoundingly quiet house, she runs into a man she does not know. “Can you tell me where Craig is?”

The man: “Oh I’m sorry. Mr. Wolf is no longer with us.”

Ms. Palin: “Aw. I didn’t even know he was sick. Who do I see about that certified check?”

The man: “I’m Joe Bison and I’m Mr. Wolf’s replacement. I’ll take care of the check for you.”

Ms. Palin: “Oh boy. Do you mind if I call you Joe?”

Mr. Bison: “Sure. It’s only for a few minutes anyway.”

Ms Palin: “Huh? Well, listen, can you get me that check right away. I’ve got another gig tonight speakin’ at the annual gathering of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.”

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
January 2010. All rights reserved.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | 14 Comments »

January 8, 2010 by Thomas.

When does an emerging wine region fully emerge?

In the mid 1970s, I worked for a production company in New York that put together a multi-media program (16 mm film and three 35 mm slide projectors) for the Beaulieu Vineyards visitor center in Napa. By 1979, the program needed some updating and so I traveled to Napa to meet with Leigh Knowles, who was then the President of Beaulieu, to talk about the changes necessary.

It was three years after the famous Paris tasting that catapulted California’s Napa wine world onto the stage, but in 1979, Napa was not yet a dynamic traffic jam. In fact, V. Sattui was selling wine out of what I believe was a VW bus, and not for effect.

Although it was a well-established wine region more than 100 years old, to me, in 1979 Napa was a sleepy place that seemed emerging.

Now—with hindsight—it’s easy to see how wrong I was. Napa had already emerged; I just didn’t know it yet. Even though I was drinking and enjoying many wines of Napa, my mindset was steeped in European wine regions.

In the nineteenth century, Keuka Lake’s Village of Hammondsport was a Finger Lakes community where the first scheduled airplane flight really took place, and where a naval aviation industry spawned; it also hosted a dynamic wine industry as old as (or older than) the one at Napa. This was no sleepy community.

In 1976, as Napa came out of its deep sleep, a 96 year-old Hammondsport winery was the sixth largest wine company in the U.S. It might still be around today, had corporate mania not gobbled it and spit it out after cashing in on its assets.

While Napa began to enjoy the press coverage of the Paris event, New York wine enjoyed a small revolution of its own—the state legislature finally opened up winery licensing to accommodate smaller wineries, and the Finger Lakes was ending a full decade of successful Vitis vinifera vine and wine production in a region once thought to be inhospitable to that grapevine species.

At the time, only a handful of wineries existed in the Finger Lakes region—34 years later, more than 100 make the region their home.

So why did a wine blogger recently refer to the Finger Lakes as an emerging wine region?

He did so because that is what the region’s image has remained ever since it began to emerge anew in 1976.

Like any other wine region, there’s good, bad, great, and not-so-great wine produced in the Finger Lakes—wine is always producer-specific. Therefore, this wine writer doesn’t buy the notion that lack of quality keeps the region in an emerging holding pattern, as many have opined.

Many producers of Finger Lakes Riesling wines have proven themselves over and over, and consumers willing to try the region’s sparkling wines would be pleasantly surprised by many of them. But as I learned with my attitude toward Napa 30-plus years ago, mindset makes for powerful denial.

So, what keeps the Finger Lakes region from having fully emerged? Here are some thoughts that might explain it.

Generally, Finger Lakes wineries are not focused—the region offers too many wine styles that it probably shouldn’t. Plus, its message is confused. Does it want to be a national industry or a local tourist draw?

If the Finger Lakes wine industry seeks national attention and distribution, it will likely have to increase production of its best wines.

Not enough critics have told enough wine geeks to drink Finger Lakes wine, and that places the wine industry in a Catch-22: although it emerged many years ago as a quality wine-producing region, until someone else proclaims that it has emerged it will continue to be viewed as emerging. (I recall Robert Parker being quoted in the 1980s that the future of the New York wine industry will remain provincial.)

I welcome other opinions as to why, after 152 years of commercial wine production, and after 34 years of a vinifera revolution the Finger Lakes remains an emerging wine region to many.

In my view, it’s up to the Finger Lakes region to agree on a focus and stick to it–and then get out and build the Finger Lakes brand.

If you are reading this entry anywhere other than on the vinofictions blog, be aware that it has been lifted without my permission (and without recompense), and that’s a copyright infringement, no matter that the copyright information appears with it.

Copyright Thomas Pellechia
January 2010. All rights reserved.

Posted in Uncategorized | Print | 10 Comments »