Highest corkage fee in the world

Well, SOMEONE has to have the highest corkage fee in the world. It may as well be the French Laundry in Napa CA.

For only $150 they will extract the cork from your bottle of wine. Hell, I don't even let the restaurant pour the wine--it's just the tax we pay to be allowed the privilege of bringing our own wine to the restaurant.

Most restaurants pour only "baby" wines--they rob the cradle by buying and pouring wines that aren't even ready to drink yet. By the wine could have matured, it was already opened and poured for somebody. This is perhaps the greatest disappointment of the American Restaurant Experience. A few restaurants, such as Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa FL, have extensive wine cellars (OK, at Bern's it can't be underground, so it's a series of refrigerated warehouses), but those are more and more the exception.

It remains the best and cheapest way to have great wines for your dinner, to buy your own wine, age it for years in your own cellar, and take your bottle to the restaurant and pay a corkage fee. Why waste your money paying double or triple the wine's value, for a wine so young that you'll regret drinking it? Take your own bottle instead!

And never never never let the restaurant pour your bottle at your table. Tell them, right at the uncorking, that you will be handling the pouring. This is because the server doesn't know who wants how much wine, and indiscriminate pouring by the server will waste your wine into glasses where it won't be drunk.

Hooray for Olympic Provisions!

We had a stellar meal again there. With a fantastic wine. 2006 Cayuse En Chamberlain Syrah. The wine's bouquet faded after ten minutes, but at the outset it was amazing: forest floor, flowers, mushrooms, some pepper and lots of meat fat. What a nose! The wine was big and purply on the palate. Delicious. Had it with the French Board (wow) and a nettle pesto pasta. Amazing!

Check this out: A map showing areas of the world that will lose, and gain, the ability to grow quality winegrapes

This map shows scientists' best guess of the effects of climate change upon the world's winegrape regions.

Note that Tri Cities, Red Mountain, and Walla Walla will see loss of vineyard acreage due to the increasing heat. Ditto for the areas south of the Great Lakes. The Willamette Valley gains the ability to grow more kinds of winegrapes. Bordeaux and Napa are huge losers, as are much of Italy and Spain. This is why growers in Champagne are planting in southern England. Yes, southern England. It's a game-changer, folks.

The article is here.

Say "Aye" to Scottish wines!

This article makes the incredible posit that Scotland (specifically the south-facing northern shore of the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh) is making good wines. And Champagne growers are buying properties in England, because their traditional region is getting too warm for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes.

Our adaptations to the continuing warming of our planet are very creative. When will there be a land rush to the PacNW?

And, I hope, I very earnestly hope, that we can PLEASE move on from arguing whether the world is warming, and focus on WHY it is warming, and what if anything we should do about it?  Between the escalating deficits of this utterly bankrupt nation called the USA, and the radical and rapid weather changes of the planet, we are handing over to the next generation problems of such magnitude that our successors may be simply unable to make any dent.

Clay Amphorae - Perhaps the next big thing for wine

Upon thinking on it, the ancients knew how to make wooden containers (barrels) fairly early on. I wonder if they chose to use clay amphorae for making and storing wine, because of some preference for the clay material? Wiki says the Celts were making what we'd consider modern wooden barrels for wine in about 350BC (how cool is that?), and Herodotus mentioned the shipment of wine in palm-wood casks to Babylon, much earlier than that.

See the attached article. A guy in the Chehalem Oregon area is making amphorae and then making wine in them. They impart earthiness and minerality to the wines (no kidding! really?). It sounds pretty interesting, really.

Here is the article I found about the modern use of amphorae for wine.

Vines sleeping under a rare blanket of snow

third great wave of snow hitting Portland, Oregon now 1pm 2-8-2014.

Basics of food-wine pairing

What a great article about food-wine pairing. Summarizing:

1. Most meat and dairy contains fat. There are three ways to choose wine to "marry" well with the fat:
a. A wine with higher acid, which balances the fat;
b. A with higher tannin (from oak aging, or from time on the stems and seeds) cuts the fat in the mouth; and
c. A wine with higher alcohol matches the heaviness of the fatty food.

I might add that wine also cuts the fat chemically--just sautee some fatty meat and remove it, leaving some fat and fatty bits in the pan, and then add wine and scrape--the wine breaks up the fat. This is simplistic, but in my mind I visualize the wine's breaking up the fat before it can be deposited in my arteries ;)

2. With an acidic dish, make sure the wine has more acid than the food. This can mean reducing the amount of vinegar in a salad, or looking for higher-acid wines. In a white wine, about 0.70% Titrable Acid (TA) is a good target level to consider; in a red, it's often closer to 0.60%. If acid gets much higher than those target levels, then most wines will need some residual sugar (RS) to balance the high acid. But bear in mind that copious fruit in a wine can fool the tongue into thinking a wine is sweet when it's really dry.

3. Salty foods call for sweet or sparkling wines. 

4. Desserts need wines which are sweeter than the dessert.