Organic Wine and Food Matching

Block House Vineyard, the Pelissa family's source of their Elizabeth ROSE My favorite wine in the world (by France’s Domaine Tempier) happens to be pink; and I’ll tell you why (whether you want to know or not): It has as much of a stony dryness and deep intensity of flavor as any red wine, but is as soft, round and fragrant as any good, chilled white wines. The best of all possible worlds, if you ask me. But if you harbor hang-ups about pink or rosé colored wines, my advice to you is: Get over it.  Because if not, you’re likely to miss out on some of the finest wines in the world. So it was with considerable joy that I was recently turned on another such wine: the 2007 Elizabeth ROSE Pinot Noir Rosé (about $20); vinified 100% from Pinot noir grapes, from a Yountville, Napa Valley vineyard cultivated in 100% certified organic fashion.  You’ve heard of the possibility of life being a bowl of cherries? This rosé makes life a bushel of strawberries, as f...

Susan Sokol Blosser. Susan Sokol Blosser is not a famous winemaker. In fact, in 1990 when her former husband, Bill Blosser, extricated himself from the Sokol Blosser Vineyard & Winery that they founded together in 1971, she took over the operations with the experience of just running the tasting room, doing the books, and, as she once candidly revealed, never having “grown anything but a sweet potato in the glass” (Reed Magazine’s Alumni Profiles , Spring 2007). But she quickly found grape growing already in her as a dormant gene; despite the fact, says she, that “I could never have imagined that I would develop such a deep connection to the land… I could have lived my whole life in the city and never known.”   What Susan Sokol Blosser is now famously recognized for is being one of the driving forces behind the Oregon wine industry’s green movement. She not only began implementing sustainable grape growing practices in quite visible fashion, she built an underground ...

Eating and Drinking Green Makes Sense   So now we that we have choices between organic and non-organic foods, eco-friendly and non-eco stiletto heels, hybrid and non-hybrid cars, etc., why aren’t most of us making the choice to drink green as well? I suspect that, on an intellectual level, many of us figure that since wine is an alcoholic drink made from grapes, the organic-ness of a bottle is neither here nor there.  The truth is far from that. If you’ve visited vineyards in California or France, for instance, and looked at an organic vineyard that happens to be next to a non-organic vineyard, the differences are quite visible. Compared to organic vineyards, non-organic or “conventional” vineyards always look lifeless, practically dead: all you see is dirt between the rows, since any growth apart from vines is usually zapped with herbicides.  In organic vineyards, you see not only wild grasses, brush and trees in and around the vines, and cover crops of herbs, beans...

Tom Gamble. The only things I feel bad about telling you about the 2007 Gamble Family Vineyards Yountville/Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc (about $28) is that not a lot of it was made (1,650 cases), and it’s not widely distributed in the U.S. But it’s my insensitive side (yes, even I have one) that makes me want to go on and babble about this beautifully dry white wine like a lawyer in love because, well, it’s probably the finest Sauvignon Blanc I’ve tasted in many years (those of France’s Loire River and New Zealand not excluded). How shall I count the ways? Unlike French grown Sauvignon Blancs, to begin with, the Gamble Family is not dominated by minerality; and unlike the vast majority of New Zealand and California grown Sauvignon Blancs, it is not focused entirely on fruitiness (or weediness) either. There is, in fact, a ringingly bright and penetrating white peach quality to the qubw, playing in the nose with fresh cream, wildflower, wet stone and distinctive licorice-like fr...

Anne-Claude Leflaive. Wine Spectator Magazine. There are many skeptics and wine geeks who do not quite see the value of some of Rudolph Steiner’s original formulas for enhancing the life of vineyard soil; such as “fermenting” cow manure in cow horns, then burying them over winter, and applying them as tea sprays in the spring (other applications are derived from ground quartz packed with rain water in cow’s horns, and flower heads of chamomile, stinging nettle, dandelion, valerian and yarrow). But if you asked longtime winemakers such as Mendocino Wine Company’s Paul Dolan, it is not a question of leaps of faith, it is the fact that these preparations do, indeed, work; reportedly, more effectively than other organic formulations, and certainly far better than synthetic fertilizers.  What is even more sobering is the fact that some of our greatest, most coveted (and expensive) wines in the world – like that of France’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Zind-Humbrecht, and Quintessa an...

  “Trying to uncover what a vineyard is trying to say,” says Steven Canter, winemaker of Quivira Vineyards in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley, “is like an archeologist brushing away the sand.”  Plucked by Quivira three years ago from the celebrated Torbreck Vintners in Barossa Valley, Australia, Canter is an American who had come to Sonoma in a roundabout way: first inspired by Kermit Lynch’s earthy, terroir driven imports from France, then wandering the world looking for the vinous meaning of life while picking up jobs as a cellarer in California, Oregon, Italy and South Africa.  The Quivira estate would make a particularly interesting Rubik’s Cube for any winemaker, as it sits on the gravelly, well drained yet fertile loam that has long made Dry Creek Valley a quintessential source of California style Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel and Petite Sirah.  Planted and replanted over a course of fifty years, according to Canter, “we could see what people were doing in the ‘70s, ...

It’s good to know there are still visionaries walking among us. In the late 1960s, armed with little more than the determination to grow a Pinot Noir as great as any found in France, Richard Sanford wandered up and down the coast of California before settling on a north facing slope in Santa Barbara (in what is now the Sta. Rita Hills AVA ), with the porous soil, chilling winds and cool, extended growing season that he deemed “perfect” for this fickle grape. Establishing his vineyard (originally called Sanford & Benedict) in 1970, Sanford toiled for years in virtual solitude, because it would be many more years before other vignerons would catch on and start to plant nearby. Call it luck, or call it prescience (in 1970, for one, who could predict Santa Barbara being called the Pinot Noir lover’s “Holy Land” in a multi-award winning movie?). To this day, Sanford’s original vineyard remains a quintessential American Pinot Noir: as spicy, zesty and finely textured...