Three decades of Napa with Freemark Abbey

Last Tuesday at Spago in Beverly Hills, Freemark Abbey winemaker Ted Edwards brought a few bottles down from Rutherford, Napa Valley, to uncork with a few sommeliers, ostensibly to show them that the winery has had some staying power.

And how. Edwards showed a pair of 1995 vintage single-vineyard Cabernets from Bosché and Sycamore, and a pair from the same vineyards from 1987. But the pièce de resistance was a bottle of Freemark Cab from 1969, the same bottling that was served blind at the tasting that changed the world of American wine – the Judgment of Paris, in 1976.

Freemark Abbey was founded 70 years ago, when three Southern California businessmen, Charles Freeman, Markquand Foster and Albert "Abbey" Ahern, joined resources and concatenated their names to form the winery. For their first three decades, the wines were largely a local phenomenon, sold by San Francisco retailers and in restaurants until the late 1960s, when winemaker Jerry Luper’s stellar bottlings earned the winery a broader reputation for pure, limpid expressions of valley floor fruit, inflected with the firm distinctive earth note that came to be known as “Rutherford Dust.” Certainly Stephen Spurrier was sufficiently impressed to include the wine in his Paris Tasting in 1976, when California wines bested their French counterparts, stunning the wine world in the process.

What's behind the clash of red wine and some fish?

Japanese scientists have figured out why eating seafood with red wine can leave an unpleasant aftertaste.

There's something behind that frequently discredited rule that only white wine goes with fish, the researchers say. The flavor clash is caused by naturally occurring iron in red wine, Takayuki Tamura and colleagues report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Now here's a tough job: The scientists had tasters -- all of them with wine-tasting experience -- try 38 red wines and 26 white wines while eating dried scallops. The wines came from several countries.

The tasters ate a bit of scallop, tasted some wine and evaluated the aftertaste on a scale of 1 to 4. The diners found the unpleasant aftertaste was more intense with wines that had a higher iron content, the researchers say. The amount of iron in the wine varied depending on variety, vintage and country of origin.

Read the scientists' report here.

Of course, plain dried scallops are no diner's dream, and how the fish is prepared is among other factors in pairing food and wine. Plain, fried, sauced, the herbs and spices used all play a role. In their book "Wine and Food Pairing," Tony DiDio and Amy Zavatto suggest red wine can work with tuna, cod, lobster and other seafoods.

For more detailed suggestions for figuring out the terrain, there's a book by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, "What to Drink With What You Eat," which The Times recommends.

-- Mary MacVean

Photo: Mike Farwell pours a glass at Noir Food and Wine in Pasadena. Credit: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

David Lake, longtime Washington winemaker, dies at 66

David Lake, longtime winemaker at Columbia Winery in Washington state, died on Monday. He was 66; illness had forced Lake to step away from day-to-day winemaking duties at the winery in 2005.

He’ll be remembered as one of the pivotal wine figures of Washington state, a tireless innovator who never stopped exploring the viticultural possibilities of the Columbia Valley, his vast agricultural playground.

David Lake was born in Canada and worked in the wine trade in England, obtaining the ultimate credential, a Master of Wine, in 1975. His interest in wine took him to UC Davis, where he got his degree, and after a brief stint in Oregon, he came to Columbia Winery; his first Washington vintage was 1979. 

Lake was driven by constant experimentation in field studies, vineyard trials, and in the winery. He produced many groundbreaking bottlings, including Washington’s first vineyard designates, from Otis, Red Willow and Sagemoor vineyards; its first Pinot Gris and Cabernet Francs, and perhaps most significantly, its first Syrah. The Syrah came from Red Willow Vineyard in the Yakima Valley, a cool site for Washington, within sight of the Cascade Range, a place that reminded Lake of Hermitage in the Rhône Valley. With grower Mike Sauer he brought in cuttings and planted the vineyard in 1986; its first vintage was 1988. Syrah has gone on to become the state’s third-largest variety by volume, and arguably its most impressive red wine.

David Lake was as sweet-tempered, self-effacing and articulate a winemaker as I’ve known, a man raised with a quintessentially European palate who in his wines gave deference to balance, symmetry and exceptional food affinity. In truth Lake’s wines were always a bit like the man himself – poised, quiet, polished, possessing of a tranquil energy that was revealed through subtlety and nuance.

In later years, Lake’s wines and wine style seemed to fall out of step with the tastes of the general public, outstripped by wines of a flashier, more demonstrative style, with levels of alcohol and extract that flew in the face of his sensibilities. In my last tasting with him in 2004 he seemed to acknowledge to me, with a bit of resignation, that the wine world was passing him by, but that he was unable to be anyone but himself, a fact for which I’m grateful.

– Patrick Comiskey

Photo credit: Columbia Winery (above) and Patrick Comiskey

At Disney, Michael Jordan steps off the floor

Michael Jordan, master sommelier, longtime general manager of Disney’s Napa Rose restaurant and the architect of its award-winning wine program, is leaving the restaurant business. After 35 years in the industry as a chef, sommelier, restaurateur, manager and wine educator, after having held every appreciable position that a restaurant has to offer, including dishwasher, Jordan is stepping off the floor to start a wine company, called Word.

Jordan will be leaving one of the most comprehensive wine programs in California. Not only did he create its enviable wine list, he also developed a culture of wine at the Napa Rose and at Disney that flourished under his direction: In the nine years he was there, more than 400 staff members attended wine education classes and went on to take exams from the Court of Master Sommeliers.

L.A. Wine Fest pours its heart out

The weather was kind for wine this weekend. For the Los Angeles Wine Fest, held at Hollywood’s Raleigh Studios, Saturday was touch and go with scudding clouds and canceled garage sales and cemetery film screenings all around. But Sunday the crowds were rewarded with the very sundress and straw fedora weather we’d been craving for nearly a week. With a glass in hand, it all looks so much better.

L.A. Wine Fest is in its fourth year; much more than the weather threatened the health of this year’s event. But the bad economic forecast hasn’t curtailed Angelenos’ interest in wine, nor, for that matter, their thirst. This year’s festival featured more than 3,000 participants over two days, sampling more than 500 wines, beers, spirits and sakes, a smattering of designer soft drinks, and even one beverage that purported to remove from your palate any tannic evidence of any of the aforementioned beverages. It’s called SanTasti, a mildly sparkling palate cleanser, and it works scarily well.

For the most part, the wineries represented here were not the critical darlings of the Wine Spectator and Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate with scores in the middle 90s. Most were the sort you encounter from wineries on a given Central Coast wine route, which gather followers in their tasting rooms and retain them in wine clubs and on mailing lists. Of course their lack of critical acclaim hardly makes their wares any less quaffable, and there was plenty of quaffing of wines from many corners of the world, including local talent from Malibu from the likes of Rosenthal, Cielo and Trancas, and a debut entry called Cornell. My personal favorites among the domestic producers included Stoller (Oregon) and Kenneth Volk and Core from the Central Coast. Among imports, Torbreck (Australia) put on a good showing, as did the impressive sakes of Boutique Sakes. Perhaps the most eclectic entry came from Los Altos importer Blue Danube, which poured unusual wines from Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Far Niente takes a new route

Far Niente is an iconic Napa Valley winery that can’t seem to sit still. Recently, it announced that it would be debuting a new wine – a Pinot Noir, for which it has jumped the Mayacamas Mountains over to the next county. The new wine is called En Route, and it comes from the Russian River Valley.

En Route is the company’s fourth winery: the flagship, Far Niente, was founded in 1982 by Gil Nickel, an Oklahoman who in his home state built the nation’s second-largest family-owned nursery company, before turning to wine in the 1980s. In the Napa Valley, he found an old winery, Far Niente, and resurrected its name and its 19th-century edifice in Oakville. Ten years later, Nickel founded Dolce, a winery devoted to the production of a single dessert wine. Eight years after that, he founded Nickel & Nickel to focus on single vineyard wines. Nickel succumbed to cancer in 2003; his family maintains his legacy, and Dirk Hampson, Far Niente’s longtime winemaker, now manages the estates.

As the flagship, Far Niente has always been known as a craft house, keen on fashioning fruit for an endurable, consistent, lasting house style. They became synonymous with Chardonnay, and their Cabernet – lush, well-structured, lavishly oaked – was an instant Napa classic. Between that and Dolce, the gold standard of Napa stickies, there seemed to be plenty of laurels to rest on. But in the course of producing Napa wines, Nickel got more and more enthralled with single vineyard expression, which led to the formation of Nickel & Nickel, for which a separate winery was built in St. Helena. Nickel & Nickel produces no less than 10 single vineyard wines, some of which venture beyond the Napa Valley, particularly for Syrah and Pinot Noir.

The rise of Austrian reds

At a recent tasting of Austrian wines at Ammo in Hollywood (whose Austrian general manager, Benny Bohm, seems to attract any continental type with a Germanic accent), I met Willi Klinger, the trade attaché for Austrian wine, who rattled off a set of statistics that reinforced how lucky we are to have any Austrian wines at all. 

You see, almost two-thirds of all Austrian wine is consumed in the country itself, with much of the remaining third exported to Germany and Switzerland. The U.S., though, surprisingly ranks third in imports (at just a tiny fraction of the other two countries) with a healthy share of wines brought in on the higher end – the Americans, in short, prefer quality to quantity.

The vast majority of the wines imported are white – notably their spicy, pea-tendril-scented Gruner Veltliners and pristine Rieslings (with the occasional Muscat, Weissburgunder, Welschriesling and Zierfandler thrown in for good measure).

But what’s really interesting right now is ...

Getting to the bottom of a glass of Champagne

Let’s say you’re one of those rare wine lovers who can resist the many charms of Champagne long enough to wonder about it; like, what is Champagne, the place, like? What goes into making it? Who goes to the trouble of making it? What are they after? Why does it taste the way it does? And most important, how do they get all those bubbles into the bottle? 

The answer to many of these questions can be found on a fine new website called Champagneguide.net, authored by winewriter Peter Liem. (I must disclose that Liem and I both serve as correspondents for Wine & Spirits Magazine.) Three years ago, Liem decided to move to Champagne, becoming one of the only wine writers writing in English to do so currently. He settled in the village of Dizy, in a small flat nestled among vines and growers. Since then, by his own account, he has been "making a nuisance" of himself in the cellars and salons of the region, interviewing winemakers, tasting wines, taking meticulous notes and drawing very contemplative conclusions about the wines, the villages and the overarching style a given house aims for. The result is one of the more fastidious, comprehensive and useful tools in English you may ever have at your disposal for getting at the mysteries of what is otherwise a very mysterious region.

While still under construction, and under constant revision (of a possible 5,000, there are only about 100 handpicked Champagne houses profiled here, so Liem’s "updates" may never be finished), there is already an impressive amount of information on the site, usefully arranged. In most cases, the history of the domaine is explored, as well as an objective assessment of its desired style, what is found in a typical blend, which villages and vineyards it may come from, and how many vintages of the base wine – the still wine used to create the sparkling wine – you’ll find included in the non-vintage blend.

Extensive, detailed tasting notes of all current wines accompany the profiles – more than 600 in all – and they are routinely thrilling. “Its powerful depth is buttressed by firm acidity,” he writes about Tarlant’s Cuvee Louis Extra Brut, “and an intensely chalky minerality that persists throughout the finish, feeling vivid and almost forceful in its tenacity.” Liem’s notes break down the region’s wines with an effortless precision that just may make your next sip of bubbly something to ponder.

-- Patrick Comiskey

ChampagneGuide.net is available by subscription for $89 a year, about the cost of a fine bottle of vintage Champagne. A sample page can be found here:

http://www.champagneguide.net/home/sample_content

Photo credit: Erik Unger / Chicago Tribune

 

Pairing with sherry: Craft LA competes in Copa Jerez

The Sherry Council of America, a Washington D.C.-based advocate group for the Spanish wine, recently held a sherry and food pairing competition at the Astor Center in New York. Five teams of finalists, including Matt Accarrino, chef at Craft in Los Angeles, and sommelier David Lusby, competed with specially prepared dishes and sherries to match.

Even by the standards of most wine geeks, sherry geeks are extreme. The wines, made by a special aging method in the torrid vineyards of Jerez in Andalusia, Spain, are virtually ignored by the general public, usually written off as sweet or silly, equated with those breathy television ads for Harvey's Bristol Cream in the '70s. Nothing is further from the truth, but convincing people of this in a restaurant setting is no small feat....

Surfas fills hole with cheese counter

You know that gaping hole that used to greet you near the registers at Surfas in Culver City, where the coffees used to be? Well, it was filled, finally, last week -– with cheese. After weeks of construction, a gleaming new cheese and charcuterie counter is now open for business, its own island in the expansive specialty food and restaurant supply store.

Tucked near the freezer case, it’s staffed by cheese-o-philes eager to give you a taste of any one of the 80 cheeses in stock, including ripe Delices de Bourgogne, a cocoa-rind Cardona goat’s milk cheese from Carr Valley Cheese in Wisconsin, and my current favorite, a smoky, nutty Gouda-style called Vlaskaas, from the Dutch company Beemster. A small selection of charcuterie, which includes Fra Mani salumi and jamon iberico, will expand in the coming weeks.