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The Concept:

Leave it to the Swiss to come up with such a fantastic and original idea: a wine bottling party to promote Swiss wines in New York City! Swiss wine journalist Chandra Kurt came up with the idea. She then pitched her proposal to two world-renowned Swiss wineries, Jean-René Germanier and Provins, both of which graciously consented to have their wines bottled in a special event at the City Winery.

The Venue:

The City Winery, located at the heart of Soho, is the only winery in the City of New York. It was founded by Michael Dorf in 2008. It is a fully equipped winery, producing wines using wine grapes from all over the world. French winemaker David Lecomte heads the City Winery’s professional wine making team. Next time you are there, try his Petite Syrah. You’ll find it hard to believe you’re drinking wine made in NYC. The City Winery is a great place for hanging out. It is place where people can get together, enjoy wines produced on-site and listen to live music. Artists like Suzanne Vega and Elvis Costello have performed there. Want to try your hand at wine making? The City Winery also offers aspiring wine makers and hobbyists the opportunity to make their own wines.

The Wines:

Two wines, one from each participating Swiss winery, were selected for bottling. One of them is a white wine, a Petite Arvine “Cru des Domaines” 2007 from Provins. The other is a red wine, a Syrah “Cayas” 2008 from Jean-René Germanier (see Jean-René Germanier Winery post for my Cayas wine review and tasting notes).  A barrel of each wine was shipped to NYC with the help of Laurent Crolla of Swiss Cellars, a distributor of Swiss wines in the United States.

The Party:

Winemakers, sommeliers, wine experts, gourmands, wine importers, wine enthusiasts, and members of the media were amongst those invited to attend this first-of-its-kind event for Swiss wines. Swiss Wines in the City started with a “bottling party.” It went exactly as you imagine: the wines described above were bottled right in front of the guests. After the bottling party, there was a dinner party. The guests were then able to sample a wide variety of wines from the cellars of Provins and Jean-René Germanier.

After Party:

After dinner, we headed to Terroir, Paul Grieco’s latest wine bar and a top NYC hot spot located in Tribeca. We were just in time to share some of the Swiss wines with sommeliers and food critics from all over the country who had just attended the 2010 James Beard Foundation Awards. Cheers!

Six months ago, Wine Vibe was already a great wine education blog. It had news about the wine industry, accounts of wine tastings I’ve attended, stories about wineries and vineyards I’ve visited, helpful guides on serving and drinking wines, and exclusive wine reviews. I wanted more, however. I felt Wine Vibe could do more, be more and share more, so I decided to push the envelope – and thus began an extensive and definitely expensive overhaul of the Wine Vibe blog.

I began with a redesign of the way Wine Vibe looked. I then went back to my old posts and revised them extensively to make them even clearer and easier to digest. This took a lot of time out of my busy schedule, but I felt that I needed to do it to give you – my readers – greater value for your time. After revising the posts, I removed 99.5% of the external links in the posts. I wanted Wine Vibe to be your one-stop wine education resource, so I hired researchers and compiled an internally available, comprehensive glossary of wine lingo and grape varieties. I hired programmers to create custom applications that would make the site more interactive.

I also hired animators so I could add multimedia content to the blog. As a final step, I got professional translators on board and had Wine Vibe translated into 6 other languages apart from English. Then I had the site thoroughly reviewed by industry professionals.

It’s been seven months since I started revamping Wine Vibe. I plan to add more features and applications, compile a list of the who’s who in the wine industry, add more animations, post more pictures, and create more multimedia content. I am happy to be back and I have a dozen new great posts pending to be posted once they are translated.

Cheers!
Sébastien Gavillet

Typical Format

First, the theme and the basic criteria are set. Next, the competing sommeliers are selected. Up to three sommeliers are chosen to compete. The competing sommeliers have to volunteer, of course; these sommeliers compete for personal glory and do not represent their establishment. Once the candidates have been selected, the location (usually a private residence) is selected next. During the contest, the competing sommeliers may be required to prepare as many as three dishes. Most of the cooking must be done on-site. The sommeliers must not only cook the best dishes; more importantly, they must pair their dishes with the right wines. The “best somm in the kitchen” is chosen by a panel of three judges who can be chefs, sommeliers and/or food critics. Typically, the judges select the winner based on food presentation, originality, taste, and wine pairing.

A Toast-Worthy Experience

Let me tell you. There really is nothing better than when gourmands get together and show off their hidden culinary skills, share their favorite dishes and pair them with the perfect wines. If you get lucky enough to get invited to “Somms in the Kitchen,” don’t forget to bring the required bottle of wine. And it had better be decent wine! When you have twenty plus sommeliers in the house – sommeliers, I might add, who work in some of the most prestigious restaurants in the country – the last question you want to hear anyone asking about your wine contribution is, “Who brought this bum wine?” Cheers!

George Taber’s new book, To Cork or Not To Cork, was the focus of this lecture.  This book is about the problems associated with the use of cork.  It also presents the various wine closure methods that can serve as an alternative to wine cork.  The pros and cons associated with these methods are also discussed.

I have not read this book yet, so I will not discuss it here.  Let me just say that there really is no perfect cork, as George so unequivocally stated; otherwise, there would be no such thing as “cork taint” in today’s wine.

Australian Wine and Cork Taint

This is my two cents on why Australian wines are the world’s most corked (i.e. cork tainted) wines.

In my opinion, it is not the long journey from Portugal to Australia since South American wines do not suffer from this issue.  I think the problem originates from the Australian Customs’ practice of fumigating all incoming containers that contain wood or wood-based products.  Perhaps, the corked wines problem in Australia is related to the fumigation process.

Did I hit the nail on the head with my theory?  Until next time!  Cheers!

For your information, I do own this book.  This book is about the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, an event that is generally considered to be a key turning point for the entire wine industry.  If you don’t know anything else about the 1976 Paris Wine Tasting, just remember this.  It was the event that put California wines on the map.

Indeed, the 1976 Paris Tasting challenged the age-old wisdom that said Old World wines are better than New World wines.  What made this tasting so revolutionary was the outcome:  Californian wines were voted better than French wines in a blind wine tasting by French wine experts!  You can just imagine the resulting outcry when the results were revealed.  The judges gasped, whispers broke out and all you could hear was “Ce n’est pas possible!”

My “Judgment of Paris” – My Take on the 1976 Paris Wine Tasting

Now, I’m not here to defend the French wines and say that the outcome of the contest was incorrect, but I do have a few objections.  Mainly, I object to the means by which the vintages for the Burgundy White Wines were selected.

If you have read my past write-ups, you would be aware that, at blind tastings, I prefer a horizontal selection of wines if they come from the same AOC/AVA.  In the Paris Wine Tasting event of 1976, California wines were pitted against Burgundy wines.  California and Burgundy are not in the same region, obviously, so origin should have been considered in the selection of vintages.  To put it simply, what might have been a good year in California might not have been a good year in Burgundy.  As it turned out, 1973 was in fact one of the worst vintages for Burgundy in the last 40 years or so, whereas 1973 was a fairly decent year for California.

The quality of the vintages used for the red wine tasting was much fairer, though.

Overall, I am grateful to the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 for it showed the winemakers worldwide that they have to be more diligent and that they have to constantly keep up their efforts to make better wines.  This is the main reason why today, we can enjoy what George Taber aptly called “the golden age of wines.”

Enjoy the golden age of wines, folks!  Cheers!