Jamie Goode on Wine Being Wine . . .

An interesting article by Jamie Goode and something to certainly think about. What he doesn’t realize is that this is already happening in a relatively large way with Gallo’s Apothic brand - bourbon barrel aging, coffee infusing . . .

Always fun to share his articles and to start discussions with them!

http://www.wineanorak.com/wineblog/uncategorized/why-wine-must-be-wine

Vermouth was already answered in a reader response, and of course, there is chinato.

Right, vermouth (and other wine based amaro) is wholely worthwhile, and more of that ilk seems interesting to me. But giving it a name other than wine seems right as well.

He makes a comment “There are a range of things you can legally add to wine as processing aids, but these aren’t to add flavour”…which appears not to be quite true anymore. It appears that the TTB will approve any tannin extracted from any woody plant…there’s a tannin powder out there extracted from the wood of herbal plants apparently giving a range of herbal flavors…and others from ‘exotic’ woods that give various citrus or fruit flavors. Seems like this should be allowed but called something other than wine as well.

Embarrassing story:

When I was 25, I had to be in Bullhead, AZ for an afternoon. I had never been before, and I saw a liquor store and went “wine hunting.”

Wrong kinda store but they had a thing called MD 20/20 “Grape Wine.”

I chortled and talked to the store guy about this hilarious wine. He gave me the low down on this and things like Night Train and Thunderbird. I grew up in Reno and had managed to miss these! So, I bought a bottle and held onto it until 1993. As I was packing for a move, I discovered it and cranked it open with a couple of friends and drank it on the beach in So Cal.

It’s terrible, but I imagine better than Apothic bourbon wine or coffee wine.

Yup, flavored wines are a genre that has been relatively unexplored in Calif. Matthiasson & Massican vermouths are terrific.
BryanHarrington and Cana’sFeast make a Chinato that is very good. Passito wines are another largely unexplored area in Calif.
And Visciola?? A no-brainer for the SuisunVlly.
Tom

I love this story, and hope that everyone understands that one does not have to be drinking fine (or even potable) wine to properly appreciate it:

Don’t knock 'em until you’ve tried them. I did.

Angelica has a long history in CA, usually from the Mission grape and served with lemon. And for some reason, flavoring wines seems to be really popular in Uruguay - I’ve had a number from different wine makers.

19 crimes wines are doing well in the category of bottle marketing to the max. This is beyond the catchy label craze.

I love this story, and hope that everyone understands that one does not have to be drinking fine (or even potable) wine to properly appreciate it:

http://www.bumwine.com/

Hummph. These are the high end of bum wine. I remember “Santa Fe White Port” in the early 70’s. 58 cents/375 ml. Thunderbird was 65 cents. The other labels were way more expensive! The brown bag was free. [wow.gif]

Early in the story I thought it might be about semantics and legal definitions that control what can be done to fermented grape juice and still call it wine. But it’s really a plea to stifle exploration of new tastes and markets with creation of new beverages based on fermented grape juice. When read from that perspective, I don’t agree.

Many of us, myself included, are dismayed at the change in style in some of our old favorites brought on by modernization. We blame Rolland and Cambie (not so much Peynaud) and other innovators for bringing the change. We blame Parker for popularizing it. We blame consumers who like it, some of us sounding like grumpy old men throwing insults like “sheep” and “score whore” at them.

Seeing a favorite producer turn to creating something no longer enjoyable is a good enough reason to be grumpy. But it’s not a good enough reason to condemn innovation. There will still be some traditionalists. It may take some willingness to try other producers to find those in our wheelhouse.

The sky isn’t falling. We survived Bartles and Jaymes and MD 20/20. Wine as we know it and love it will still be around. Let innovators innovate and marketers market.

I loved Anton’s MD 20/20 story. I have a couple.

First was my fellowship mentor who knew I was into wine. At the end of the fellowship (an ophthalmic subspecialty) he gave me a bottle of the stuff as a punny gag gift. We tried it ITNOS. The pun went beyond the name as it was literally a gag-inducing gift.

Decades later at a dinner party, the hosts, whom I’d met at a couple of tastings, blinded me on a wine, extolling its virtues as a great QPR that they were thinking of stocking up on as a house wine. But they wanted an independent opinion from their “wine expert friend” about ageability before backing up the truck. It tasted sweet, sickly and grossly alcoholic, like I imagined antifreeze might. It was a challenge to swallow it (no spit bucket). I didn’t recognize it as MD 20/20 or I would have been on to their gag. Being at a dinner party with several non-wine-geek couples I’d just met, I was in a very uncomfortable spot. I managed to come up with “Very unusual. It’s not a style I like and I don’t think it’s meant for long-term aging. If you love it put away just a bottle or two to see what happens.” The hosts revealed they were trying to punk me with MD 20/20 and everyone had a good laugh.

Angelica has no added flavoring, though. Traditionally it’s just unfermented (or barely fermented) grape juice fortified with spirits, basically like a Port but fortified very early. Some wineries allow the fermentation to proceed for awhile before fortification (so the wine ends up less sweet), but my understanding is that this was not the traditional way to make Angelica. There are variations on this procedure and on aging the wine so you have Angelica made in several styles, but none of them have added flavoring.

The only producer I know of who recommends adding lemon is also the only one I know of that makes one from non-Mission (Chardonnay). They also don’t know what they’re doing, having obviously pressed right away, so no skin contact. It’s simple and boring. Not a mystery why they suggest their customers doctor it.

Wes, actually pressing grapes for Angelica immediately with no skin contact is a legitimate option. When I spoke about making Angelica a few years ago with Marco Cappelli (of Miraflores Winery, formerly with Swanson - he very likely has more experience than anyone in making Angelica), he told me that this was one of the traditional ways of making it, but that it will produce a wine with no real aging potential and little if any complexity, and he certainly recommended keeping the juice on the skins for several days if possible before pressing and fortifying it. But if you’re aiming for something sweet and simple for quick release, then no skin contact might be the way to go, though it seems a missed opportunity. That does seem odd to make Angelica from Chardonnay in any case.

You’re right Ken - it isn’t flavored. My bad. I was focused on the lemon, which a number of people in the LA area said was traditional, but honestly I’m no expert on the subject. And I’ve never heard of it from Chardonnay.

But Angelica does have considerable aging potential. Cappelli compares it to Port in that respect - fortified and slowly oxidized to produce something akin to a tawny Port. It used to be a mix of roughly half juice and half brandy but I think that today sufficient brandy is added to get it to 18%. The reason people today partly ferment the juice is that the TTB has decided that to be called wine there has to be some fermentation, but from what I’ve read and been told, that was not necessarily the practice in the 1700s and 1800s.

Gypsy Canyon in Santa Rita makes some from vines that supposedly date to the 1880s.

Because you guys like this kind of stuff, if you haven’t read this great resource from UC Davis, here are a few excerpts:

"Angelica, as it used to be made (and apparently is no longer), was not so much a wine as a fortified grape juice, such as the French call mistelle and the Spanish mistela: this is a drink that properly belongs to the class of cordials rather than of wine (compare the Scuppernong wines of North Carolina). To a must that has not yet begun to ferment, or has only partially fermented, brandy is added in such quantity as to arrest the action of the yeast. This was an effective way to handle the Mission grape, which under the hot skies of southern California gave a fruit almost raisined, rich in sugar but low in acid, so that its dry wines were flat and unpalatable. With the sweetness retained, and the preserving alcohol supplied by the addition of brandy, the juice, christened angelica after the City of the Angels, became a popular wine—some will say deservedly, others not.

The methods used in the missions were of the simplest, though such descriptions as exist do not always agree and are not always very clear. As in New Mexico, the ready availability of cowhides and the relative scarcity of wood determined the choice of materials. The standard method of crushing seems to have been by pouring grapes onto a cowhide, perhaps suspended over a receptacle, and then setting an Indian to treading the grapes with his feet. The juice expressed by this means was caught in leathern bags, in barrels, or in brickwork cisterns (some of these remain at San Gabriel), where it fermented; red wine, of course, fermented on the skins and stems of the crushed grapes; for white wine, the juice was drawn off to ferment separately. The skins might then go into a primitive still for brandy.[28] Most of the Franciscan fathers were natives of Spain and may be supposed to have had at least a general notion of how wine was made. "

And then there’s this:

Mission wine, which thus became practically extinct in the second quarter of the century, nevertheless had a curious survival in an unlooked-for part of the world. In the 1920s, in Paris, an English wine lover encountered an expatriate Pole who told him that, at the turn of the century, at Fukier’s, the best restaurant in Warsaw, “the choicest and most expensive dessert wine” came from California. The Englishman, finding himself not long after in Warsaw, remembered what he had been told, went to the famous restaurant Fukier and asked for its California wine. He naturally supposed that it must be California wine such as other restaurants had, and was curious to know how it could be both the most expensive and the best available in a distinguished restaurant. The waiter told him that, fortunately, there were a few bottles still left, some of which were brought to the curious diner: “Imagine my surprise when I found that they were of wine from the Franciscan missions of California grown during the Spanish period, a century and a half or so ago. The wine was light brown in colour, rather syrupy, resembling a good sweet Malaga in taste, and in good condition.” The age is a bit exaggerated—in all likelihood the wine was from the 1820s and therefore just a hundred years old—but the recrudescence of such a wine in so unexpected a place is sufficiently surprising and pleasing. The description is pretty much what one would expect if the wine were an previous hit angelica next hit type such as described earlier. And it is curious to note that this latter-day description agrees with one of the earliest accounts of mission wine: the German traveller Langsdorff, calling at Mission San Jose in 1806, noted that the wine of the place is “sweet, and resembles Malaga.” It is not likely now that anyone will ever have a chance again to taste the Franciscan wine of Old California.

I still have a bottle of the 1875 Isaias Hellman Angelica from Cucamonga. Bottled in 1921. Not a mission made wine, but a commercial one made from Mission grapes. Last had it a few years ago and it is fabulous. Rich, complex, smoky. Not overly sweet due to good acidity. Unfortunately, the major stock of this wine was destroyed in that warehouse arson fire in Vallejo.
No way I’d add lemon to this. Worse than mixing Lafite with Cola.

Thanks, Greg! I believe I’ve seen that first passage but not the second one, though I’ve read some of the same anecdotes elsewhere, such as the one with Langsdorff.

You’re correct about why Angelica must be at least slightly fermented for the TTB to approve it as wine on the label. We’ve done that with the ones made at Harrington, but we typically press and fortify pretty much at the first signs of fermentation starting.

I think we may have hijacked the thread topic - maybe Angelica deserves its own separate discussion! [cheers.gif]

Very cool, Eric. I’ve read about that Hellman Angelica but never have had the opportunity to try one. As you may know, the stories of that Angelica from Cucamonga Valley and the Vallejo warehouse fire are entwined in Frances Dinkelspiel’s book “Tangled Vines”.

Love all of the comments, but I think most are missing the ‘gist’ of the article. Yes, there’s always been Vermouths and other similar products - we are talking about a whole different thing these days . . .

Forgetting about all of that, what are your thoughts on winemakers and winemakers know making ‘coffee cabs’ or ‘peach chardonnay’?

Cheers.