Thanks again to everyone who participated in the ClubW.com giveaway, and special thanks to ClubW.com for offering up the loot! The giveaway is officially closed, and our randomly-selected winner is…

Jeff Eckles!

Jeff noted that he’d like to try some of the wines on offer from ClubW, specifically the 2007 Chateau de Mattes-Sabran Dionysus Corbieres, the 2012 Banyan Creek Gewurztraminer
and the 2009 Domaine de Milliere VDP Vaucluse Rouge. And so now he’ll get the chance to do that (for about $0.00, I suspect).

For those of you who aren’t Jeff, but are interested in checking out ClubW.com, they are also offering a discount code to you for being a 1WD reader (and yet, most of you benefitting from that will have paid me $0.00 for all of my work in reporting wine to you all of these years… the irony!). The code is “4111wine” (minus the quotation marks, naturally) and comes with a $13 value for signing up (basically one free bottle of vino). To redeem the code, just access ClubW.com from here and enter 4111wine into the Voucher/Referral box when checking out with your order.

Enjoy!

While we’re together here, I’ll also take the opportunity to report on a few 1WD-related happenings (humor me, okay?)…

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It’s not often that you hear a winemaker say things like this about one of their wines:

“We don’t care if people like it or not; if not, I’ll drink it!”

And yet, that’s exactly what Casa Wines’ Helder Cunha said to me earlier this year in New York City, when I worked my way through a tasting of the 50 Great Wines of Portugal as selected by MW/MS Doug Frost. Cunha was talking about a wine he makes from the grape Ramisco; and he feels passionately about the wine, because its made from a grape that is a “dying variety, even in Portugal.”

It’s a rare grape, even in a country known for its small plantings of nearly-extinct grape varieties, and one of which few wine geeks have ever heard. But Cunha seems determined not to let Ramisco go gently into the dark night.

Casa Wines sources its Ramisco fifteen hectares of a vineyard on Portugal���s west coast, a cool and foggy area known as Colares on the southwestern edge of Lisboa. You could, apparently, just about spit into the ocean from the vineyard. These old vines, literally on the beach, aren’t even head-trained. Cunha knew he wouldn’t get much out of them, but viewed them as special and was determined not to let them get grubbed up even as Ramisco became a footnote in a country known for grape variety footnotes.

“Instead of ripping this up,” he told me, “we said, ‘let’s see what happens’…”

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About a year ago, I unwittingly unleashed a minor sh*tstorm when I taste-tested some very good chocolates and paired them with some very good wine and found the match up to be not-so-very-good.

The main issue then was that the very good chocolates in question were designed specifically to pair with wines. And yet, time and time again I find myself coming back to a conclusion that is almost as certain in the wine and food pairing world as death and taxes are to the “real” world:

Most wine and chocolate pairings simply DO NOT work.

The vast majority of the time, the chocolate is too robust, and it clobbers the paired wine. This is because most still, dry wines – even hefty, hearty reds – just lack the jabs to counter chocolate’s overall lack of subtlety and bitter power-punch. The match-up might work for some people, but probably doesn’t work for most people.

There are, of course exceptions – more on those in a minute – but they are just that: exceptions. You’re usually far, far better served enjoying the wine and then later enjoying the chocolate, keeping them as far away from one another in the process, lest they start the palate equivalent of a Ballroom Blitz.

So you can imagine the pants-crapping emotions I experienced when I was recently hired to choose the wines for a wine and chocolate pairing corporate event held in Philly’s iconic Curtis Center. Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikeeeessssssssssssssssssssss!…

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We continue to live by the motto “Go Big Or Go Home” when it comes to guests for The Punch Down show (if you missed March’s guest – Gary Vaynerchuk, finally coming back to talk about wine – then get your butt to the video and get caught up), and it’s with great pleasure that we will host wine industry icon Jancis Robinson for Episode Four next week, April 2 at 1PM ET!

A Master of Wine since 1984, Jancis has authored over 25 books on wine, including The Oxford Companion to Wine (the hefty text that serves as the number one resource for WSET Diploma students), and the more recent (but equally weighty) tome, Wine Grapes – A complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties, including their origins and flavours.

Jancis has garnered nearly as many awards as there are grape varieties profiled in her latest book – she was Decanter Magazine Woman of the Year (UK) in 1999, won the Grand Award at the Society of Wine Educators in Sacramento in 2009, and in 2011 was voted third most powerful person in wine by Decanter.com.

I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with Jancis a bit, and I think the best way to give you a glimpse into her personality is to recount the exchange we had when we first met (at an event in Portugal a couple of years ago; you know, in the time before Interest). It sent something like this: Jancis walked up to me and said: “Hello! I had to introduce myself, you’re ‘The Dude,’ aren’t you?” To which I replied, “Ohhhh, no, that is not how this introduction is going down. You’re awesome, and I’m just a bug!”

Jancis could probably be forgiven if she decided to put on airs and offer ivory tower pronouncements about what wines we all ought to be buying. She’s taken exactly the opposite approach, however, embracing social media full-tilt and engaging with wine lovers directly in two-way on-line dialog, as well as pouring much of her efforts into her online presence at JancisRobinson.com.

So… think we’ll have much to talk about? Follow along at www.PunchDownWineShow.com for details, and as always hit us up with questions beforehand.

See you on April 2!

Cheers!