Paneling wine + music at VINO2015

I am, as I’ve noted ad nauseam lately, insanely behind on my producer/feature write-ups. That streak continues unabated at the moment, but this time it’s in favor of actually bringing you some vino recommendation (you’re welcome!).

I recently had the great pleasure of being a panelist speaker at the enormous VINO215 Italian wine trade and tasting event in NYC. I’ll get to some highlights from the tastings in a few moments, but first I wanted to tell you with as much humility as I could muster that my panel TOTALLY KILLED IT. I mean, look… we had… THIS:

That’s just Awesome with a capital A, (in the words of Martin Short’s Ed Grimley) “I must say!”

Which is, of course, my humorous attempt to tell you that I thought that my fellow panelists and moderator totally killed it in talking about the intersection of wine and music, and that I was basically just trying to keep up with them.

Of course, VINO2015 was chock-full of enough tasting opportunities to pickle all of your livers several times over, and so here are my takes on a few that turned my wine-geek-critic-type-guy head (with apologies in advance to the VINO2015 organizers, who focused on Southern Italy, while I apparently focused on Northern Italy, as you’ll soon see). Also, for those of you complainy-pants who constantly moan that I never talk about inexpensive wines, this your chance to bite it! (I mean that respectfully… I think…)…

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Question: What do you get when you cross a law-school trained producer of films and commercials with a former professional mountain snowboarder?

Anyone???

In the case of Tanner Dafoe (named after Jeff Tanner and Rob DaFoe, the producer and snowboarder, respectively), you get some fairly complete and substantial Cabernet Sauvignon priced like the California cult red that it is, only (blessedly) with more acid.

What, you didn’t see that one coming?

That Tanner Dafoe can price their (very) small production wines (less than 200 cases for the most part) the way that they do (over $100 per bottle), and yet produce Santa Ynez Valley Cab so complex that the lofty price tag seems justified, is a bit of a minor miracle in the high-end CA wine world. Based on the uncorked contents of a large wooden box full of samples that I received recently from this duo, the hype surrounding their mini-cult endeavor ought to be entertained seriously, if not believed outright.

Even if the guys look like a pair of Metallica or Rolling Stones roadies (sorry, somebody had to say it… c’mon, just look at that picture!)…

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As you read this, I’ll be in Hungary, a trip of which half is a curated media tour, and half a working stint doing video interview stuff that I will discuss later, but about which I am particularly excited (not just because it’s a paying gig, but also because it involves one of my personal fave white wine grapes, one that is seriously underrated and underrepresented in the U.S. market at the moment; much more to come on all of that soon).

Today, I’m going to be talking about a different paying gig that I recently took on, and a previous media jaunt.

The gig is a monthly run over at Snooth.com, and in the first installment (for the September “edition”) I dish on some of my favorite wines from the the IPNC 2014 alfresco tasting, held in the pre-dinner hours on both days of that event (the next installment will be on Chablis… I know, life is hard, right?). I also photo-bomb Sokol Blosser’s vineyard view in that piece (sorry, guys!).

Now, the Snooth article is only so long, and I found myself with a smattering of other fine Pinots about which I wanted to pontificate, but for which we just didn’t have enough room in that first article. And since this is my blog and I can pretty much do whatever the hell I want here, today we’ll be pontificating on those leftovers, which are themselves totally capable of making a superb, captivating meal. Think of them as the post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich lunch of IPNC 2014 Pinots…

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