Closing in on the ninth decade, the beret and the smile are still unmistakable.

Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, now a California winemaking legend, turns 90 this year. For those who aren’t familiar with the tale, Mike’s life story could make fitting fodder for a TV wine drama: one of eleven kids; stomped his first grapes at age three; fled communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s; hit the Napa Valley wine scene just as it first began to bud, studying under the master  André Tchelistcheff; for all intents and purposes, practically invented the sciences of controlling cold sterilization, malolactic fermentation, and the proper use of oak barrels for wine; eventually went on to establish well-regarded and successful wineries under his own name.

The biggest feather in the beret, though, was the triumph of one of his wines – a Chateau Montelena Chardonnay – at the 1976 Paris tasting, an event that put California (and, to a large extent, all U.S. wines) back on the global fine wine map for good (for a detailed account of that fabled tasting, check out George Tabor’s excellent Judgement Of Paris).

Mike has been sunning himself in Palm Desert, but I was invited to catch up with him over email to talk about his wines and his legacy. At 90, the guy is still a sharp as a tack. Here’s the conversation I had with Mike, which includes his advice for advancing your own tasting prowess, followed by a  few thoughts on some recent releases from the apple of his vinous eye, Napa Valley’s Grgich Hills…

Read the rest of this stuff »

There’s still time, people.

Summer’s muggy, sunny weeks are not yet entirely on the wane. They’re just mostly on the wane. And so those bibliophile oenophiles who are looking for last-minute beach-side vacation or porch-side stay-cation reading to accompany a cold glass of Italian Vermentino in the hazy heat (you are drinking Vermentino, right?) still have time to indulge both of their passions before the leaves turn brown.

Which all felt like a reasonable excuse, I thought, to take a swipe at the growing stacks of wine book samples that have been piling up on my office floor (not quite as bad as my stacks of wine bottle samples, but it’s getting close!). I.e., let me trudge through the drudge so that you won’t have to!

That swipe yielded three books worth mentioning, all of which avoid being weighty tomes or polemics on wine philosophy, and are light-hearted enough in tone and design to fit right in with the collective American penchant for light Summer reading…

Read the rest of this stuff »

In this episode of 1WineDude TV, we’ve got our first video in my on-going Going Pro saga, in which I talk about something very simple that every budding wine writer should do to vastly increase their writing skills.

A couple of points for you before watching:

1. The reason I’m flushed and sweating (gross!) in this vid is that just before filming it I ran for three miles, showered, and then got dressed and jumped in front of the camera – basically, I didn’t give myself any real cool-down time.  I know, rookie error… just try to ignore it…
2. This advice is going to seem obvious and maybe even stupid to a lot of people.  If you’re among their ranks, rather than tell me I’m a shallow idiot in the comments, I humbly suggest that you forward this advice to a blogging friend who needs to see it – and I personally guarantee that you know more than one who needs to see this (if I’m wrong, then you can call me an idiot in the comments!).

Mentioned in this vid:

• Steve Heimoff
• GoodGrape.com
• RJ’s Wine Blog
• The Emperor of Wine

Cheers!

If you take a map of the Bordeaux winemaking region and flip it upside down, it becomes a (more-or-less) mirror-image of the Delaware Bay area that houses the New Jersey’s Outer Coastal Plain (OCP) AVA.

Yes, that would be South Jersey.

Yes, they make wine there.

Better wine than you might at first imagine, actually.

Of course, the inverted mirror-image likeness is about as far as the comparison between South Jersey and Bordeaux can go – after that, you have (very) different soils, (wildly) different average temperatures, and (incredibly) different winemaking histories.  But the point, which was being made to me by OCP winemaker and Amalthea Cellars owner Louis Caracciolo, was pretty clear: if you have a body of water to help mitigate the climate, why not try to make fine wines?  Even if it is in Jersey.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Amalthea with fellow bloggers John and Lisa Howard-Fusco, who run the fine locavore-styled website Eating In South Jersey.  I was tagging along as the wine guy, helping to assess what they considered to be some of the more promising wines being offered from S. Jersey.  The payoff for me, aside from expanding my wine brain and getting to hang out with John and Lisa, was being introduced by John and Lisa to one of S. Jersey’s best worst-kept secrets – roadside BBQ joints (read John & Lisa’s take on the post-tasting BBQ goodness here).

At the time of the visit, I’d enjoyed enough of Amalthea’s wines to highlight the OCP region over at the Wine Crush Blog as a spot to watch – or, at least, as some evidence that no self-respecting wine geek should scoff at the notion of quality cool-climate, East Coast reds.

Which isn’t to say that all of the Amalthea whites are bad, or that all of the reds were great.  But it is to say that I’m not sure if Amalthea’s Louis Caracciolo is a genius, or a nut-case…

Read the rest of this stuff »