I’ve been drinking a fair amount of wine outside of the confines of the Languedoc-Roussillon spotlight lately, and surprisingly quite  a few New World wines. I thought it was worth highlighting a few of these wines briefly.

With all the hype surrounding Bordeaux, it’s a shame that so many neglect the white wines. I always pick up a few at the annual BCLDB Bordeaux release. This is one of those spoils. Very funky and grapefruity, this wine (2007 Chateau Charbonnieux) also had superb acidity and balance – consistent with the buzz that 2007 whites vastly outperform the reds.

Lafon is really hard to find in Vancouver, and this single vineyard Macon is an amazing example of what he can do as a wine maker. It makes the mouth water in anticipation of the Cote D’or whites. This is probably the most balanced, complete and varietally perfect Macon Chardonnay I’ve yet had, and hands down the best chard I’ve had for $50. I picked up several bottles after tasting this one (Comte Lafon 2007 Clos de la Crochette Macon-Chardonnay).

Switching gears, I dipped into some of my collection of Washington wines. The Leonetti 2005 Cab was quite outstanding and well balanced, though very rich. Still, it is the acidity that makes this more drinkable and food friendly compared to most Napa cabs. It went very well with marinated Flank Steak roulettes.

The legendary Pax wines finally went on sale in Vancouver and so I picked up this wine (at $50 off), which is made from grapes grown in the highly respected Griffon’s Lair vineyard. This is textbook cool climate Sonoma Coast Syrah (i.e. from a vineyard actually close to the coast). Brine, olives, cherry, smoke. Pretty amazing stuff, though still too pricey at $90 a bottle.

A goody I brought back from my time in California. This is made by the famed Stolpman Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. Qupe and many others make well regarded syrah from this vineyard. Stolpman’s offering takes the fruit to maximal ripeness, almost on the verge of over-extraction, but not quite. Still, this is huge syrah and not for those looking for finesse. I enjoyed it for what it was.

I had this Rioja the day before the Lopez de Heredia tasting, which was a perfect comparison. This is fully modern and very fruit forward – the opposite style from LdH. However, I thought it was impeccably made with tons of forward cherry fruit and great secondary herbal flavours. In fact, it is one of the best Riojas I’ve had lately and it shows how the region can succeed with both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ wines.

Most of us wine geeks have pretty much forgotten about Australia, which is a shame. There are many great wines being made there that are nothing like the big jammy shiraz’s we’ve come to disdain. This wine is a fascinating approach to cab-shiraz. There is gameyness from the syrah, but huge structure and plummy dark fruit from the cabernet. I think the oak still needs a few years to fully integrate here, but it shows a lot of promise and a massive amount of complexity – cherry, plum skins, blackberry, roasted coffee beans, smoke, and a bit of cigar. A wine that is extremely long in the mouth, and very very elegant despite its great power. It is likely still too big for some, but I thought it was quite well made.

Alejandro Fernandez always seems to fly under the radar somehow despite how delicious these wines are. I can’t think of many other $35 dark and brooding reds I’d rather drink on a cold winter’s night. This wine is one of the few left in Ribera del Duero that truly combines modern cleanliness and fruit with traditional earth, herbs and soft texture. With the right amount of bottle age, this rounds out perfectly.

With my flight being cancelled due to volcanic ash, we decided to head to the much cheaper realm of Portugal to wait out the crisis. More specifically I am spending a few days in the famous wine town Oporto, the source of Port.

You can thank the bad internet connection for the lack of updates, but assuming my flight returns on time this weekend I´ll have reams of good content to follow over the next few months including all my reflections on the wines of Spain and Portugal, with in depth profiles of Jerez, Oporto and the dry wines of Portugal along with a few other surprises. Thanks for being so patient!

A highly respected U.S. Wine Magazine is holding a fundraising event for Haiti that involves donating a bottle of wine to auction.

From their website: “Brother, can you spare a bottle? Can you pull something special from your cellar, a bottle you’ve been saving? Perhaps you will contribute the bottle you were saving for Open That Bottle Night. Or maybe next time you’re at the wine store you will pick up an extra for us.”

The auction will be held on line, in the comments section of the Palate Press post on the auction. Palate Press will auction the wine in cases, as they arrive.

If you are interested in contributing, please go to the Palate Press website and post your donation in the comments.

This is a great idea and hopefully all my U.S. readers will contribute. Of course, in Canada, our arcane liquor laws make it illegal to hold private auctions for wine so we aren’t allowed to raise money for Haiti in this fashion. That’s right, charity fundraisers based on wine or spirit auctions are illegal in British Columbia unless run by the government or a government agent. Let’s all thank the government for making private charity fundraiser auctions pretty much impossible.

In the meantime, head on over to Palate Press and check out their efforts.

UPDATE – Local BC Efforts in the wine industry to raise money for Haiti (click for details):

1. Regional Tasting Lounge fundraiser

First off, Pinot Gris and Pinot Grigio are the same grape in different languages. However, the linguistic divide also tends to represent a stylistic divide, with the French Pinot Gris of Alsace being richer and fuller than the Italian Pinot Grigios of Friuli, which are generally more austere and acid driven.

It’s also easy to write-off a grape like Pinot Gris, since we so often taste overly alcoholic, sappy fruit gob versions of this varietal which bring all the joy of a pear flavoured hard candy. In fact, I have often done the same, instead tending to go for rieslings. This wine, along with Movia’s Pinot Grigio, however, are special renditions of this grape that are well worth seeking out. They will probably change your perceptions of what Gris can do.

Alsace is somewhat of a weird place in the world of French wine, having only recently (since 1975) adopted a “Grand Cru” system that promotes the sanctity of terroir. The process of definining the fifty Grand Cru sites that now exist didn’t even finish until the 90′s. Prior to all this, there was no way of differentiating where wines were made based on their labels, and this is all the more astonishing given that most experts believe Alsace to be the most geologically complex region in France, even moreso than Burgundy. Further, Alsace leads France in organic and biodynamic wine production.

There are many other anomolies to Alsace, including the tendency to sell wines as single varietal wines, when some top growers there believe that blending is the best way to express the terroir of a site, and not a single varietal. Others, like Domaine Weinbach, are happy to make single varietal wines, believing that certain sites do express themselves better through one variety over others, even as other sites produce wines from multiple varieties that have similar perfumes. So, in the end, Alsace is a web of intricacies available to discover, and also a world of unique history and differing philosophies about how best to express the region in the future.

This Pinot Gris is not made from a single Grand Cru site, but is rather blended with fruit from the Grand Cru Scholssberg and the best parts of the domaine Clos des Capucins. Its nose provided a nice perfume of loam and pear. The palate was impressive and represented classic Pinot Gris: nectarine, apple, stone, lemon rind, and tons of minerality. I also detected a unique type of citrus I could not clearly identify – something akin to tamarind – and a little melon. This is quite rich and full, but also possesses extremely complex layering of mineral and stone elements underneath the rich orchard fruit. It’s a pretty fantastic pinot gris, and one that will likely change your perceptions of the possibilites of this style if all you have previously tasted are the cheaply made wines with extremely high levels of residual sugar, but no real balance. I highly recommend this as a fantastic Christmas gift for any lover of richer white wines.

Excellent
$70 at Marquis

The buzz online and on the street now is that Vancouver City Council has decided to go back on their by-law proposal to institute a 50-50 law that would have prevented restaurants from having sustainable business models (See my original post here).

So, this seems like a victory, right? And, in some ways it is. In other ways it is shockingly poor policy making. Not only has Vancouver City Council decided to axe the 50-50 law (a good thing), but they have dropped the entire proposed By-Law No. 4450 amendments, which included promised extended hours for restaurants. So, it looks like the shame that is Granville Street on weekend evenings will not abate anytime soon. For those of us looking for a little responsible fun without being challenged to a fist fight by a drunken idiot? Well, we’ll have to stay at home. How about this for an Olympic slogan: Vancouver: Where Fun Comes to Die.

However, the shock and horror seen throughout the community on the proposed 50-50 law, and the resulting grass roots campaign to stop it, shows that at least sometimes us lowly citizens and consumers can make change. That, I think, is the biggest lesson from this colossal waste of time and money.

The City of Vancouver took aim at the heart of Vancouver’s restaurant industry two weeks ago with the introduction of by-law amendments that could have the effect of putting numerous restaurants out of business or forcing them to create unsustainable business models.

The tabled by-law amendments came amongst the more positive announcement that Vancouver was extending late-night licenses for some establishments that served primarily liquor. However, these amendments are seriously biased against the food primary establishments. Given how much Vancouverites love their food culture, this will come as a shock to many. Here are some of the amendments:

1. The 20% of food primary restaurants that have existing licenses to close later than 1am will be required by the City as of January 1st, 2010 to close at 1am on weekdays and 2am on weekends, effectively stripping these restaurants of a portion of their licenses, for which they undoubtedly paid a premium. No ‘grandfather’ clauses will qualify.

2. All restaurants, under the new by-laws, will be required to sell as much food as alcohol, and drinks can only be served with a meal. Read this last sentence very carefully because the out-dated 50/50 rule is back to put every single restaurant serving alcohol in contravention of their liquor license on a regular basis. The days of ordering a quality bottle of wine would be over, by law.

This last point affects every restaurant, be it casual dining, fine dining, corporate chain or otherwise, and furthermore Counci plans to eliminate any past loop holes by changing the previous 24 hour sampling to an 8 hour sampling.

3. The cost of City-issued business licenses will be increased to pay for the bureaucracy required to make these changes. Every food primary restaurant will also be subject to an annual $3.00 fee. The total amount of money this raises, somewhere in the neighbourhood of $450,000 annually, will be spent entirely on a new task force of inspectors whose sole mandate will be to enforce the 50/50 law. These ‘food police’ not only have the power they need to fine or suspend restaurants by way of their business licenses, but Council have also passed a measure without public consultation allowing them to raise the penalties to $15,000 for a contravention.

This is yet another example of government bureaucracies getting it all wrong. Why punish food primary restaurants with puritanical and ludicrous laws that lack both logic and fairness? Doesn’t this prove that bureaucrats are unable to make effective decisions when it comes to liquor licensing and distribution in the province? Will this by-law have the effect of increasing the already steady rate of restaurant closures in Vancouver given the poor economy? Hopefully this by-law amendment will never get the force of law and I hope that the restaurant industry and consumers can put enough pressure on the City to abandon this ludicrous law.

This little group I’m involved in – The YVR Wine Bloggers and Sommeliers – is hosting our first public event on Tuesday, November 10th at Scott Landon Antiques (2349 Granville St.). For me it is really exciting to have an event for the public designed to have passionate people educate them in a non-pretentious way about wine. And, the cost of entry is a very low $25 ($35 at the door).

It will be a “wine show” style tasting with approximately 10 tables. Each table is going to teach one simple wine lesson – for example:

Table 1 The difference between Old and New World;
Table 2 The difference between Warm and Cool Climate;
Table 3 Method Champeniose vs Charmat Method etc etc.

After visiting each of the ten tables the hope is that attendees will have a solid understanding of fundamental wine styles and will have tasted examples of each. I can attest to the high quality of people involved in this and encourage everyone to attend. Wine education can be expensive, and often a bit stuffy. This event promises to nix both of those barriers and give you the tools to pick out a good and interesting bottle when browsing the wine shop. There are only 100 tickets, so it very well could sell out. I will be working at one of the tables, so I hope to see some of you there!

To purchase tickets online go here.

Update: Unfortunately, due to slow ticket sales this event has been cancelled this year. Look for it to return next year.

Marquis Wine Cellars is sponsoring a fundraising wine tasting on November 4th, 2009 at the Vancouver Museum. It is entitled French Fête and is a fundraiser for the Fraser Academy School. Fraser Academy specializes in children with dyslexia, ADD and other motor skill output issues. They teach them the necessary skills not only to learn but be successful in business and life.

They will be pouring an excellent selection of French wines, from Burgundy, Bordeaux, Alsace and Champagne. I’ve been to this event before and very much enjoyed it. It truly is an excellent opportunity to discover wines – many of which are from small producers – that you may not have had the opportunity to taste. The wines will be paired with some of Vancouver’s top restaurants such as Le Gavroche, Provence, Salt, & Benton Brothers Fine Cheese, just to name a few.

Tickets are $75.00 per person and they are available by calling the store 604-684-0045 or emailing them at info@marquis-wines.com.

Due to the increasing size of this blog and my movement towards blogging on more and more craft beer I have decided to create a dedicated beer site where I will put mirror posts of all my beer reviews from now on. Dedication brings better searchability and better management of the two main niche’s on which I write. The main point is to make all the beer reviews I do more accessible and searchable. Just Grapes will still be the main blog.

The name of this sister blog? Just Grains.

Hi all, so some may have noticed a bit of a facelift here. This coincides with this blog’s new domain at http://www.justgrapeswine.com/ – which will be fully activated within the next 3 days. Until then, keep using the old address. And after then, expect a redirect to the new domain.

I figured after a year and a half of blogging it was time to make this a little more professional in look. Hopefully this will also coincide with some more articles looking deeper into the wine industry – but rest assured that reviews will still make up the core of this site.

Cheers, and thanks to all for reading!

P.S. if you have any comments re: fonts, colours, etc. Please let me know so the site is as readable as possible.