Matos St. George cheese. But I repeat myself. Matos only makes one cheese, so that’s like saying Petrus Merlot blend. Semi-firm, nutty, creamy, heaven.

And getting to Matos Cheese Factory is as much of an experience as eating it. Words don’t do it justice. The long driveway past the vines and the cows. The alarm that goes off as you enter the back door. The rows and rows of cheese wheels aging just past the front counter. So I made a video.

The only thing I can’t reproduce for you is the amazing smell of the aging cheese and, of course, the incredible taste. For that you’ll have to visit for yourself:

Matos Cheese

3669 Llano Rd

Santa Rosa CA 95407

Ah, Facebook.

In 2008 in Wine: A Global Business (Second Edition), I wrote the following about Facebook:

Currently wineries are having a difficult time determining how best to take advantage of this communications channel. It may well be that the best way to leverage social networks and the vast amounts of data contained in them will be in interpreting, rather than influencing, consumer preferences.”

That was 2 years ago. In the period since, Facebook has tried to address the problem that wineries and other businesses were facing. Namely, “How do we use Facebook to sell stuff?”

Facebook’s answer, in December 2009, was the following: “We will give you unfettered access to folks’ public and private information.”

While this doesn’t specifically answer the question of how to use people’s private information to sell them things, it does answer the question of what business Facebook is in, and how they plan to monetize their user base. Moreover, it makes crystal clear the types of tactics businesses will be required to engage in to try and leverage the “vast amounts of data.” With this out in the open, it is now incumbent on wineries and brands to decide if they want to engage with Facebook on these terms.

The answer for all wine brands, indeed all business who value the trust and loyalty they have cultivated in their customer base, must be a resounding “No.”

To see why, you don’t have to go much farther than the recent New York Times info-graphic visualizing the ways in which Facebook has made it nearly impossible for users to secure their private information from complete strangers and businesses. Incredibly, their privacy policy has quintupled in size in the past 6 years and is now longer then the U.S. Constitution.

The danger for wine brands in continuing to use Facebook as a sales and marketing channel are legion, but perhaps the most compelling reason is relationships.

Direct to consumer

Direct to consumer is now vital for the health and survival of even medium to large wine brands. This direct relationship is based on trust. While most users might not know it yet, Facebook is quickly taking on water. It is a sinking ship. Key influencers are deleting their accounts and the media, which loves to tear down that which it has built up, is quickly jumping on the bandwagon and beginning to dig in earnest.

Very soon it will become exceedingly clear that allowing random strangers, businesses, criminals and perverts to see photos of you that have been uploaded by “friends” without your consent, and who have then “tagged” you in them for anyone to find is a gross invasion of privacy. Indeed, there is only one set of people who stand to suffer more than Facebook after their ham-fisted and greedy attempt to monetize a service they don’t have the courage to charge access for: Companies.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line: Even if you never plan to advertise or otherwise leverage Facebook’s “social graph,” You do not want your brand tainted, even by association, by the sh*tstorm that is engulfing Facebook.

(You’ve heard about the movie, right?)

Many wineries and wine brands have been reluctant to embrace social media because they didn’t see the benefit. In short, they were risk averse.

I say unto you now, there can be no doubt that the risks of maintaining a presence on, and thus providing a tacit endorsement of, Facebook far outweigh any benefits you can possibly think to imagine. Act accordingly.

You can delete your Facebook account here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account .

John Williams of Frog’s Leap was recently profiled in the Atlantic, a relatively respected journal of our times. John is a fantastic winemaker, and he lives his green ethos like no one else in Napa, and perhaps in the entire industry.

Yet even he finds himself getting annoyed by the questions from Atlantic environmental-advocate-cum-journalist Mark Hertsgaard.

…[D]espite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”

This, surely, is not the pull quote Hertsgaard was looking for when he pitched his editor at Atlantic on a trip to Napa for a story confirming the dire consequences of global warming for “every business on earth.”

Still, Hertsgaard, in need of fodder to pimp his new book and thoroughly committed to his viewpoint after 20 years of global warming activism, soldiers on.

If you can get past the head-slappingly obvious title and the breathtakingly cliche use of “the Roman” bon mot in vino veritas, you will be rewarded with…Armageddon. Natch. Remember, there is a book to be sold.

We begin:

the ski industry — which appears doomed in its current form — is more visibly targeted by the hot, erratic weather that lies in store over the next 50 years. In France, the rise in temperatures may render the Champagne region too hot to produce fine champagne. The same is true for the legendary reds of Châteauneuf du Pape, where the stony white soil’s ability to retain heat, once considered a virtue, may now become a curse. The world’s other major wine-producing regions — California, Italy, Spain, Australia — are also at risk.

Too hot to produce fine Champagne? We grow some delicious pinot for sparkling wines in the Russian River, where the climate is hotter than Champagne. It goes into Gloria Ferrer’s high end Brut Rose. Delicious, fine stuff.

CdP cursed? The warmer it gets, the higher the points. 100 points, bro! I’ll take some of that curse please.

Hertsgaard even acknowledges that during the Medieval warm period the folks in England were making sparkling wines (don’t call it Champagne, Mark). He is also implicitly acknowledging that the current warming is not at all unprecedented in the history of wine growing, which is quite an admission.

Does he not realize that “recent trends” are not statistically significantly warmer? Or that, depending on where you pick your start date, there has been a recent global cooling trend?

Details, details.

The truth is that CO2 is good for plants. The truth is that warmer temps are good for both plants and humans. Every major leap in both agriculture and human culture has coincided with some form of global warming. Indeed, it is much preferable to be warm than to be too cold.

And the truth is winegrowers and winemakers know it. Consider this quote from the article:

Pancho Campo, the founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain, says “They are getting almost perfect ripeness every year now for Tempranillo. This makes the winemakers say, ‘Who cares about climate change? We are getting perfect vintages.’ The same thing has happened in Bordeaux. It is very difficult to tell someone, ‘This is only going to be the case for another few years.’”

Winemakers know. They know! These are boom times for wine quality, and it is undeniable.

Still, folks like Pancho Campo feel the need to piss on the parade by declaring the party will soon end. Only the case for another few years? Based on what evidence? The recent cooling trend? Or the climate models that don’t account for solar cycles, ocean oscillations, clouds, and water vapor?

No one I know of denies that there is warming. Not one AGW skeptic, not even the frothing right-wing nut jobs.

What is in violent dispute among researchers, however, is the cause of the warming (some combination of anthropogenic and natural causes) and whether or not the current warming is unprecedented.

Moreover, even assuming there is a cause for alarm, doomsday deadlines for adaptation and change have come and gone repeatedly. Based on the climate models we are already too far gone to make an impactful change on CO2 emissions.

Thankfully, research shows that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere trails global warming, not the other way around. You read that right: warming occurs first, CO2 increases second.

And yet:

White wine may well disappear from some regions. Climate-sensitive reds such as pinot noir are also in trouble. It’s not too late for winemakers to save themselves through adaptation. But it’s disconcerting to see so much dawdling in an industry with so much incentive to act. If winemakers aren’t motivated to adapt to climate change, what businesses will be?

What incentive to act, precisely? At our vineyard we’ve gone through 3 consecutive years with losses due to late season frost. The land we purchased up north in anticipation of future warming years ago is un-plantable due to the chilly conditions. Temp logs show no warming. In fact they show cooling. I welcome warming.

Every incentive is to welcome warming. We’re talking easier growing periods, higher yields where appropriate, riper fruit, higher scores, more sales.

This isn’t rocket surgery. And consider the alternative.

Going green did make the renovation cost 30 percent more, Lageder says

Going green, in this context, is madness. In this economy there is no money to spend on speculative hand waving. Conserving resources is a laudable goal (the recycling, responsible water use, less reliance on fossil fuels), but investing in wind turbines and huge solar arrays simply isn’t feasible economically. I do not have 30%. I don’t know anyone who does right now.

“Most of us are not very good at recognizing our risks until we are hit by them,” explains Chris West, the director of the UK government’s Climate Impact Program. “People who run companies are no different.” Before joining UKCIP in 1999, West had spent most of his career working to protect endangered species. Now, the species he is trying to save is his own

*Sad trombone*

Who is this Chris West? Dear Lord, the man is daft. And a bureaucrat. But I repeat myself. Business owners make their money based on risk!

Entrepreneurs are paid because they actively seek out risk where others fear to tread. They capture economic surplus based on risk. They are paid when their risky activities succeed.

Sheer pablum, and a fitting end to a flacid and inane bit of environmental journalism.

Wine and baseball are intertwined in the best of ways. Both the growing season and the playing season overlap almost perfectly. Pitchers and catchers report in February, foreshadowing the beginning of spring training. In the vineyard we prune and train our vines in February in anticipation of spring.

Play begins in earnest in April, and hope is in the heart of every fan for the possibilities of a great season. Bud break and initial vine growth occur with the crack of the first bat.

Early season injuries can devastate a team (~cough~ Jose Reyes ~cough~) just as easily as early season frost can decimate a vineyard.

In September and October the seasons wind down and the harvest and playoffs begin amid frantic activity and excitement. A winner is crowned as baby wines are barreled down for the winter.

And when it’s all over and the last leaves fall from the vine, we’re eager to sit down, reflect on the past season and begin looking forward to the new.

I love baseball.

Each year, in the quiet period after crush has ended and before the work of growing begins anew, I take a few weeks to work on a project that both interests me and expands my skill set. 4 years ago, along with my family, I decided to start building a winery. Last year I wrote a desktop database client and a companion iPhone app for the winery (BTW, here’re my thoughts on the recently announced iPad).

This year my mind turned to baseball. For my wine geek friends who aren’t into baseball ( but should be) you can click away now. It’s about to become a baseball stat geekatorium up in here.

Basically I said to myself, “self, you’ve always wanted your own baseball stats database, and a pretty way to access it. You also need to get a deeper understanding of mySQL and php for projects like Help a Winery Out. Why not do that for your yearly project?” To which I replied, “hell yeah.”

There are so many incredible resources out there for the baseball fan with some technical chops, it’s breathtaking. Retrosheet, for instance, is a complete record of every play made in every game stretching back to the 50s, and they are adding more historical data each year. And it’s completely free. Truly remarkable.

So I downloaded the sucker and got to work building a cool way to interface it.

Now, dear reader, if you count yourself as one of those baseball purists who don’t sugar the whole fantasy baseball thing, you may want to click away at this point as well. That should leave under ten interested readers. Excellent! You are my peeps.

Here’s what I built. It’s called Rotobase. Like Fangraphs but for fantasy baseball nuts.

I think I do these projects now as a reaction to being unable to complete my winery project. I feel a very pressing need to complete *something* and “ship” it each year, even if it isn’t a bottle of wine.

Happily next year will be different. Bottles of wine will finally ship. Which makes me wonder if my desire to do these projects will ship with them.

For now I’ll be competing in the NFBC Auction (nationwide high stakes league) in Vegas in March and using this tool to aid me in my research.

Wish me luck!

Fair use is made of cropped copy of a photo appearing on Uncork for a Cause

Charlie Palmer’s annual Pigs & Pinot event is a well regarded and, if this year is any indication, well attended event. Which is why it is both surprising and completely unacceptable to receive the following email:

Dear Candace,

We are very sad to bring this news to you today. Demand for Pigs & Pinot this year was incredibly high, so high in fact, that our technology server was not equipped to handle the volume of ticket purchases made on the website yesterday at 12PM. This resulted in six times the amount of tickets allocated for online purchases to actually process prior to the system showing ‘sold out’. Furthermore, the system failed to process credit card transactions because of this overload and consequently you were not charged for your tickets.

We regretfully inform you that your ticket purchase was processed after all of the Pigs & Pinot tickets were sold out. We’ve racked our brains on how to accommodate all of the extra ticket holders, but unfortunately there just isn’t enough event space to accommodate everyone this year. What this means is that we have to cancel your order for Pigs and Pinot 2010. Due to the processing error, your credit card was not charged, so no charges will appear on your credit card statement.

We understand what a disappointment this is and would like to offer you the first option to purchase two tickets for Pigs & Pinot 2011 when they become available later this year.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment this may have caused (we’re just as sad and disheartened as you are, trust us) and are available to take any questions or comments by phone at 707-431-2800.

There has been such an outpouring of support for Pigs & Pinot this year which we are incredibly grateful for as we continue our efforts to raise valuable funds for Share Our Strength, while highlighting exceptional local Sonoma County wine producers.

Regretfully,
The Pigs & Pinot team

My wife purchased tickets at the stroke of noon and received confirmation no less than a minute after the tix went on sale. We find it hard to believe we were somewhere in the back of the pack given the timing.

More likely is that they had no way of discerning who attempted to purchase what when. Technical difficulties tend to come in bunches. Ticket assignment was, apparently, completely arbitrary.

Moreover, the offer to purchase tickets for next year has to be one of the worst customer service moves they could have taken given the circumstances. This makes no one happy, is completely crass (locking in lost revenue a year in advance) and the math doesn’t even add up. If you have 6 times more demand than tickets this year, how can you possibly offer an early sale to everyone who was passed over? Silly and false.

I for one won’t be taking Charlie up on the offer.

A superior solution would be to simply add a scaled down tasting event to the schedule to accommodate the folks who were arbitrarily excluded through no fault of their own.

In a down economy, to experience demand like this is a terrific honor. You should do everything in your power to nurture it.

Instead, it’s more of the same from an industry that is utterly tone deaf when faced with success. The answer is not to enhance exclusivity, it is to do everything possible to be inclusive.

You won’t be getting a second chance with the majority of these folks, and this year’s success will likely not be replicated due to this abysmal customer service.

As an industry we can do better. Much better.

A couple items in the news and the on the blogs prompted this post. First was the recent discussion by Jeff over at Good Grape about Tom Johnson’s (author of Louisville Juice) contention that wine bloggers don’t link to each other.

One of the reasons for this, Jeff says, is because of the dearth of meta stories that are news-driven and thus have universal effect and interest. I think he’s right.

Two other stories this morning also prodded me to post. One is this story on CNN talking about winemakers fighting climate change.

Another is this recent post on Palate Press discussing where to plant a vineyard in 2099 due to effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

EDIT: Another one from today (12/8): French wineries join Greenpeace.

Bottom line – it looks like we have a universal, news driven wine story, and so I thought I’d provide some perspective from a farmer/winemaker in the Russian River Valley.

Global Warming and Wine Grape Growing.

First, some context. I believe that the earth has been warming over the past century. I think this is pretty well established. The question is: why has it warmed? Also, I am not going to take a stand on the global policy implications of warming. I’ll leave that to the politicians.

In terms of the wine industry, the relevant questions are: how will the warming affect grape growing, and will the the warming be detrimental or will it have a positive impact? In making these determinations, it is also very useful to have an opinion as to whether the rise in temps is due to CO2 “forcing”, or if warming is a cyclical thing and should be regarded as temporary.

How Will Warming Affect Wine Grape Growing?

The short answer is: we don’t know. The reason we don’t know is because the climate isn’t homogenous, and warming on a global scale may or may not adversely impact viticulture on a meso scale.

In 2007 I wrote about UC Davis Climatologist Richard Snyder’s work studying Napa temps.

I wrote the following as a conclusion (click through to see slides and a link to a news article on his talk):

What’s interesting is that the single biggest danger global warming poses for wine growers is that the incidence of these extreme weather events will increase, not that average temps will increase. San Pablo Bay protects Napa Valley from overheating quite well, and as temps increase Dr. Snyder predicted that fog due to evaporation from the bay will increase and stretch farther up the valley, insulating the grapes.

And given the fact that it is in nighttime temps that we are seeing the real effect of the temperature increase, what we have is a recipe for better grape growing conditions. Since grapes can continue to ripen at night when temperatures are relatively warm, global warming – paradoxically – might be just the thing to help out growers losing tonnage late in the season because phenological ripeness hasn’t kept pace with sugar accumulation.

It’s tempting to speculate that other maritime winegrowing regions might react in a similar way, but more studies for each region would need to be undertaken. The truth is we just don’t know.

Indeed, we simply have no evidence to suspect any sort of universal calamity to befall grape growers due to an increase in global average temperatures, and this needs to be noted in any discussion about wine and global warming.

Global Warming’s Cause: Man, Nature or a bit of Both?

Why does it matter what the cause is, if most people agree there is warming?

The answer is: if it’s man made, it will continue. If it’s an artifact of natural cycles, it will likely reverse course in the future. In one future the climate never cools. In the other the climate behaves like a sine wave, with global temps rising and falling with a relatively flat trend line.

In practice, a winegrower’s stance on the issue has profound implications.

As one example, I was sent this link to a Decanter story about Hugh Ryman of Chateau de la Jaubertie in Bergerac pulling out his Merlot vines due to warming. His actions are predicated on his belief that the warming will either continue, or that current temps will stabilize as the new normal.

This is not a cheap endeavor on his part, and pulling old vines is always a cringe-inducing affair. In the Russian River and Sonoma, the lack of many old vines is frequently lamented, even though they were replaced with the best of intentions at the time, in the name of progress.

There are of course consequences to inaction as well. If your wine quality is suffering for whatever reason, change is usually required. Grafting over to new varieties is typical in the New World, for instance, when the whims of the market change.

For those with skin in the game, it behooves us all to take a hard look at the science behind the cause of the warming and determine how big a bet we want to place on the accuracy of any prediction where climate is concerned.

My Current Opinion, Subject to Change

Until just very recently, I was a firm believer in AGW. We have purchased extremely marginal land up north and began vineyard planning and collecting temperature data in anticipation of future warming. In the face of what I saw as overwhelming consensus on AGW, our family put our money where the science told us to.

I’m now a skeptic.

In general, viticulturists and vineyard developers are used to and comfortable with trusting science and the researchers producing it. Science is a good bet. Sometimes it works out (phylloxera) and sometimes it doesn’t (UC Davis in the 70′s advised most folks to plant on the valley floor in Alexander Valley if they wanted the best quality). But we’ve never had reason to doubt that the researchers were only after the truth and had out best interests at heart.

I don’t have that same confidence anymore for the top-tier scientists in Climate Modeling. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Why? In a recent editorial in Nature, the evidence for AGW is characterized as the following:

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential.

If the leaked CRU emails show anything, it is that the public was wrong to confer to scientists a level of deference that is utterly unmatched in any other professional endeavor. They are as petty as everyone else, and the sausage-making behind the scenes is ugly indeed.

Programming code and comments from the leaked archive indicate that data massaging was taking place. It is not clear if this code was used to produce published results, but it was present, uncommented, in a finished version of an influential temperature reconstruction.

Regardless though, the fact that such manipulative code exists is reason enough to demand a full and transparent accounting of how the models provide the predictions they do.

The extent to which the raw data and metadata used to build temperature reconstructions was destroyed is incredibly worrisome as well. It means that replication will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and replication is at the heart of the scientific method.

Ultimately the above is important because, as the Nature editorial points out, the evidence for AGW rests on the inability of the climate models to account for warming without CO2 “forcing” and its attendant feedbacks (cloud cover, water vapor etc.) which are not well understood. The models are validated with past data, and are an accumulation of much good science. However the models are a product of a complicated set of assumptions, not observations, and can’t account for the lack of warming in the past decade. In fact, the warming in last decade is below even the most optimistic predictions the models made back in 1999.

Indeed NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth (now famously) wrote

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Looking at all this, I’m forced to confront the uncomfortable idea that I can no longer credulously accept the notion of AGW. It may well be that man is the cause of the recent warming, but we are not ready to grub up any vineyards, buy any more property, or do much of anything else based on the evidence at hand.

Let me be clear, the above is not evidence that AGW isn’t occurring. It is simply a wake up call. Appeals to authority are no longer (and should never have been) acceptable as explanations.

Unfortunately for the climate scientists, the predictions of warming they provide us are entirely predicated on us trusting them and the closed-source climate models they create.

So, I’m a skeptic. It is a noble intellectual position, and I won’t let ad hominim cries of “denialist” sway me.

What will sway me? A clear accounting of the issues raised by the leaked data and emails, complete and transparent reconstructions of key paleoclimatic data, and public disclosure of all code used to predict future climate change. In short, good science.

My mind is open to whatever may come.

UPDATE: A very good discussion of the problems with AGW by Joe D’Aelo

Some very important reporting from W. Blake Gray.

For the impatient, the reason is: taxes.

Read the whole post.

A little over 4 years ago (November 18th 2005 to be exact) I wrote the following:

Welcome to pintoblogger.com, a blog I’ve created to outline the long and painful processes involved in starting and building a family winery in the Russian River Valley.

I’ll be honest, just typing the words above was daunting. I have no illusions that the project will be either quick or painless, but, as they say, nothing worth doing ever is. How bad can things really get when you’ve got the opportunity to build something you are truly passionate about anyway? I guess we’ll find out!

Maybe I’ll look back on this blog three years from now shocked at my own naivety. Maybe I’ll be a shattered man, broken on the rocks of eno-commerce. Or maybe we’ll have made some great, distinctive wine we’ll be proud to call our own. Either way it shakes out, it should be interesting to read.

Well it’s been over three years and I still don’t have any wine to sell (though I have plenty to drink). The length of gestation of this project hasn’t come as any surprise to me, as my initial post shows, but I have been at times perplexed and disappointed at the twists and turns the saga has taken.

In 2007 we were to crush at Vinify which, if it had actually occurred (botched compliance paperwork by our consultant torpedoed the deal), would have meant that our inaugural release would have been this year. This was disappointing at the time, but in hindsight perhaps it was a blessing. Clearly 2009 was not a good year to spring a new luxury Pinot on the market.

In 2008, licking our wounds, we decided that we would start construction on our winery ahead of launching the brand in the marketplace. It was a bold move, but the numbers panned out even at very small production levels (we happen to have some good construction industry connections). While our banker was skeptical, he seemed to be willing to move forward based on both a strong marketing and business plan and some really novel ideas about how to get the wine into the hands of consumers. Indeed, my current biz plan still calls for a completely revolutionary way of looking at tasting rooms. I’m very excited to put it into action.

But then the great crash happened, banks became saddled with illiquid debt, became horrifically risk averse, and we became less attractive as a result of our own financial issues. Yuk.

So, back to square one. Custom crush. Pragmatic, but constraining. Such is life.

Luckily I’m being assisted by a good friend and will have a small amount of wine coming to market next year.

Through the entire roller-coaster ride, this blog and the folks I’ve met through it (and via Twitter) have been a constant source of encouragement. Pinotblogger has opened many doors for me both professionally and personally, I’ve contributed to textbooks on wine marketing, speak regularly at universities, was approached by a literary agent (Candace Bushnell’s no less) about turning our story into a book, and our mailing list is approaching 1700 people. Good times.

I regret not one day. Not one. It’s been quite a ride, and I can’t wait to see how the first act of this play ends. Even if it takes another four years!

Thanks for reading, for your continued support, and for joining me on the journey. I’ve got mad love for you.

Photo by farleyj

Honestly, ask yourself: have you sniffed taint recently? I mean really sniffed taint? Rigorously. Methodically. Intensively.

Do you know how to rectify your taint after you’ve sniffed it? Are you certain?

Did you know that not all taints are foul smelling? Some folks think some taints smell pleasant. It really depends on the person.

There is so much to learn about taints, in fact, that UC Davis has put together a 2-day taint symposium. There you can go and sniff taints – uninterrupted – with your peers. It’s really quite exciting.

I’ll be going. Will I perchance see you there as well dear reader? I hope I do!

Here’s the full itinerary of taints:

Wine production is all about flavor: getting it in the vineyard, enhancing it during processing, retaining it in the bottle and marketing it to the consumer. We are pleased to announce the creation of a new series of programs focused on all aspects of flavor development called “Wine Flavor 101”. Our goal is to expand the knowledge and recognition of wine flavor attributes, the specific impact compounds and their interactions and the mechanisms by which flavor can be manipulated or modified. A combination of commercial wines, spiked wines and wines deliberately made using different processing techniques will all be featured in the sensory recognition portion of these programs. The programs for December, 2009 include:

Wine Flavor 101A: Identifying and Reducing Flavor Negatives: Dec. 7, 2009 This seminar will include both lectures and sensory evaluation of these taint characters: 1) Green characters from the vineyard 2) Sulfur taints 3) Brettanomyces taints and 4) winery taints: the musty family. Each lecture will go into the nature of each of the taints and what can be done to avoid them, or recify them, if necessary. Following the lecture, attendees will be tasting wines that have either been spiked with the offensive compounds and/or research or commercial wines that clearly display the taint characters.

Wine Flavor 101B: Identifying and Reducing Flavor Negatives: Dec. 8, 2009 The second seminar in this series will cover the following taint characters in both lecture and sensory evaluation formats: 1) Oxidative taints 2) Lactic taints 3) Rose and floral taints and 4) Earthy and smoky taints

TO REGISTER FOR ONE OR BOTH SESSIONS, GO TO: http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/survey/survey.cfm?surveynumber=4278

MAP: The Wine Flavor 101A & B will be held in the Activities and Recreation Center on the UCDavis campus, on LaRue Road, just off Russell Blvd. Map and directions can be found at the ARC site here: http://campusrecreation.ucdavis.edu/cms/internal.aspx?uid=0ebe886d-4128-4f81-8922-66301b508950

THE PROGRAM

Wine Flavor 101A: Identifying and Reducing Flavor Negatives: Dec. 7, 2009
8:00-9:00: Registration, Coffee and Welcome: David Block
9:00-9:30: Overview of Wine Taints for this Session: Linda Bisson
9:30-10:15: Green Characters from the Vineyard: Susan Ebeler
10:30-11:15: Sensory Evaluation of Green-Taint Characters: Susan Ebeler
11:15-12:00: The Sulfur Taints: Linda Bisson
12:00-1:00: LUNCH
1:00-1:30: Sensory Evaluation of Sulfur-Taint Characters: Linda Bisson
1:30-2:15: The Brettanomyces Taints: Lucy Joseph
2:30-3:00: Recognizing Brett Taints: Lucy Joseph, Linda Bisson
3:00-3:30: Winery Taints: The Musty Family: Paula Mara
3:45-4:15: Sensory Evaluation of “Musties”: Paula Mara, Linda Bisson
4:15-4:30: Discussion/Questions: Linda Bisson

Wine Flavor 101B: Identifying and Reducing Flavor Negatives: Dec. 8, 2009
8:00-9:00: Registration, Coffee and Welcome: David Block
9:00-9:45: Overview of Wine Taints for this Session: Linda Bisson
9:45-10:30: Oxidative Taints: Linda Bisson
10:45-11:15: Sensory Evaluation of Oxidative-Taint Aromas: Linda Bisson
11:15-12:00: The Lactic Taints: Lucy Joseph
12:00-1:00: LUNCH
1:00-1:30: Sensory Evaluation of Lactic Taint Aromas: Lucy Joseph, Linda Bisson
1:30-2:15: Rose and Floral Taints: Linda Bisson
2:30-3:00: Sensory Evaluation of Floral-Taint Aromas: Linda Bisson
3:00-3:30: Earthy and Smoky Taints: Linda Bisson
3:45-4:15: Sensory Evaluation of Earthy and Smoky Taints: Linda Bisson
4:15-4:30: Discussion/Questions: Linda Bisson

If you have any questions, please either email me at klbogart@ucdavis.edu or call me at 530-754-9876.

And here’s the link to register. Cost is $400.00 for both taint-filled days.

Shit-de-merde! This wine is all Brett, all the time. Unless you have an aversion to the flavors and aromas of actual wine, it is best to stay away. Only the most jaded fruit and floral aroma haters need apply.

Based on this one dimensional sensory profile I guessed France, and from there the Rhone.

I was half right. To find out which famed producer made such a wine, click here.