The feedback from the twitterati is included below after the jump (if you chimed in already via twitter, your response may be listed for all of the 1WD faithful to see – don’t say I didn’t warn ya!).

The short (and grossly oversimplified) answers to the question, by the way, seem to be "Yes!" for wine geeks and "No, who cares as long as the juice tastes good!" for the majority of people, based on the twitter responses that I received.

The topic of wine yeasts, and why they seem to touch off a hot-button reaction among wine pros and the geekier of wine aficionados, requires a bit of a primer, because to most wine drinkers, this is gonna be some pretty esoteric shiz.

During my last trip to Napa, I stopped into Chimney Rock for some barrel samples tasting (that’s samples of wines from barrels, not tasting samples of barrels) and spent a few hours geeking out over all things wine-related with the affable Elizabeth Vianna (CM’s winemaker who last week was promoted to GM).  Elizabeth is open, honest, and easy to get along with, and she’s not shy when it comes to expressing her opinions.  And yet, when she was explaining the winemaking process behind each of Chimney Rock’s wines, she became almost apologetic when she mentioned that they – gasp! – inoculate their wines with cultured yeasts! 

Imagine, the audacity!  The HORROR!!!…

I think Elizabeth got skittish around the yeast topic because it’s almost as divisive among wine pros and wine geeks as Biodynamics (ok, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s close).  For some reason, the topic of which style of yeasts are used by winemakers has taken on way, way, way too much importance in wine geek circles, and occasionally in reviews and profile pieces where it feels, through implication, as though any wine not using native yeasts, (or if filtered, and/or fined), must somehow be inferior to those that take things as far as can reasonably be done au naturel (when it comes to the wine itself, I mean, not the winemakers… though I certainly wouldn’t put nude winemaking past a good percentage of the winemakers that I know… ok, whatever…).

Now, generally speaking, winemakers have two options when it comes to yeasts.  They can use wild yeasts (which exist naturally in the winery and wherever the grapes where grown); or, they can inoculate with cultured yeasts to start fermentation.  Either way, without yeasts converting sugar into alcohol, you’re not gonna get any wine - so we’re not talking about the importance of yeasts, just about whether or not it matters to people if the yeasts used are cultured or not.

Cultured yeasts are more predictable – they are cultured specifically for behavior at certain temperatures, and/or for flavors that they help to impart into the finished wine.  Wild yeasts typically are less predictable, a bit more difficult to work with as a result, but can (in the best cases) impart what some consider to be rougher-hewn but more characterful flavors than the "cleaner" ones that result from their cultured counterparts.

I’m certainly not saying that any process performed behind closed doors in a winery should be ignored by consumers; the end doesn’t justify all of the means, but honestly… how far should we rationally take this stuff?

Case in point: do Chimney Rock’s wines suffer somehow from not using wild yeasts?  It’s an impossible question to answer without somehow having side-by-side wines made from grapes in exactly the same location and in exactly the same way except for the yeasts involved.  But I can tell you this: Chimney Rock makes some really, really good wine – and personally, I don’t give a sh*t what type of yeasts they use.   And neither should you, if the thing you care the most about is what’s in the bottle at the end of the process.

Great wines are made in the world’s most storied wine regions with both categories of yeast, and if there’s a morally-superior yeast option then it certainly has never revealed itself to me in the bottle. I can tell you I have personal preferences when it comes to what I like, particularly with Chardonnay (when it’s not coming from Chablis), where I like the characterful complexity that wild yeasts can impart.  But my personal predilections do not equate to one wine being inherently superior to another.

My friend Steve McIntosh from Winethropology.com summed up it best, I think, when we exchanged some thoughts over e-mail on the topic of why yeasts don’t really matter:

“I’ve always associated cultured yeasts with beer-making more than quality winemaking. Of all the wineries I’ve toured and winemakers I’ve rapped with, the topic of yeast has only come up anecdotally. Even then, they’ve only mentioned it when they use wild yeast. I guess I had (mistakenly) assumed that most higher-end wineries rely exclusively on hands-off, wild-only yeast.

Then, just yesterday, I was chatting with a winemaker on Facebook. This is a guy whose wines I’ve been loving and recommending for a while. Right there on his Facebook page is a picture of his boxes of Lalvin Rhone 4600 and T73.

WTF?!? Commercial yeast?! In some of my favorite wines?!? It can’t be.

Of course it can. It is.And not just his wines, either.

My outrage quickly dissipated, recalling just how damn good his last Grenache was. Sure, the romantic in me wants to believe that nothing is ever added to the wines I serve my friends and family. But the truth is that my attention quickly refocuses on what I love the most about wine: the experience, not necessarily the ingredients.”

Amen to that!

Where do you stand on yeasts?  Should we get our vinous panties in a wad, or is this much ado about nothing when it comes to enjoying wine?

Here’s what some of you said on the topic last week:

billward4: Not in the lees, er, least.

vinniebasile: Wild yeasts add to the ‘terroir’ aspect of wine which I enjoy…but then, sometimes that’s not necessarily gonna be a good thing.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Do You Care About Wine Yeasts? (Crowd-Sourcing Wine Learning) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Was I interested?  Well… Duh.

I was amazed at the finished product that Alana produced for me, which you can see below (click to embiggen), for those of you who are tweetdeck fanatics and never visit anyone’s twitter pages directly.

I’ve been thinking about giving Alana’s biz a plug on here for a few months, and never really got around to it because I suck and should be destroyed, and probably should mow Alana’s lawn and then pay her $2 when I’m done.  Anyway, better late than never!

Here’s how Alana describes her new biz:

“I create custom websites and logos for individuals / small companies, offer graphic design & logo services, as well as social media services (from setting up an account for someone to running an account should the individual want to outsource that).”

You can check out her wares at www.sixtwentymedia.com which should be going live soon, or email Alana if you’re interested in a kick-ass twitter background.

And yeah, I know this has nothing to do with wine but you’ll get over it because you’re cool like that.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Mad Props: Custom Twitter Background Edition from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

It’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack…!

Wines of Germany will be launching their very own TasteLive.com events page, and to celebrate they will be kicking it off with a redux of the on-line live tasting that we’d originally scheduled for the end of October.

I’ll be your blogger co-host for the on-line tasting, which will take place at 8PM ET / 5PM PT on December 3rd.  This event is gonna be good – both upstate New York’s House of Bacchus and Manhattan’s Roger Smith Hotel will be hosting tweet ups for the event, and the wines are all kick-ass Rieslings from four of Germany’s premier Riesling-producing regions. 

These wines all do a great job of representing their place of origin and how the terroir of those areas impact the final flavors of the wine produced there (they’re probably the next best thing to being there yourself):

Selbach-Oster, Riesling, Kabinett, Mosel, 2007/2008

Leitz, Riesling, "Eins Zwei Dry," Rheingau, 2008

Dönnhoff, Riesling, Nahe, 2008

Darting, Riesling, Durkheimer Nonnengarten, Kabinett, Pfalz, 2008

Join me on Dec 3rd, get the word out, and don’t forget to RSVP at TasteLive.com. 

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Wines of Germany TasteLive Launch Event Redux – Dec. 3rd! from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Remember Internet chat rooms?  Sure you do – those were the simple, on-line places where you could converse, via written text-based messages, with other seemingly like-minded folks about an endless array of topics, ranging from politics to puppy grooming.  Well, converse until the person on the other end asked “Are you a chick?  are you hot?”

Back in those days, I had two buddies who would frequent on-line chat rooms dedicated to topics about Wars, and strike up a group conversation.  Once they thought that they’d earned the trust of the folks chatting on-line, they would say something deliberately inflammatory like “all of the Star Wars books suck!” and start a short-lived but vicious flame-war, during which they would often change sides to try to confuse the poor people who jumped into the fray.  It was kind of like an all-out Star Wars chat room ballroom brawl.

Ah, the heady, youthful and poignantly ignorant days of the Internet!

Forums came next, but aren’t real-time, and in the on-line wine world the forums most closely associated with print media (eRobertParker.com and Winespectator.com) have been marred by the negative perceptions of hostility on the part of both members and moderators.

In these more recent days, the chat room and the on-line forum have been superseded.  We have seen the future of on-line wine chat, and it’s full of wine twits like me.

There is a place where wineries, media, bloggers, and wine lovers are congregating to chat about wine on-line, and it’s called twitter.  And if you love wine, you need to be part of this virtual community.

I’m not going to ‘explain’ twitter here.  Mostly because it’s very difficult to explain twitter, and I’m lazy.  Instead, I’m just going to try to convince you that if you’re not yet part of the wine community on twitter, then you need to be.

Fortunately for me, that’s actually pretty easy, because it pretty much boils down to one only reason (and even I can explain that one!)…

Everybody else is doing it, and you can’t reap the benefits of its value until you join in.

That’s it, really.  I’m done.

What, you want evidence?  Alright, alright… How about this…

The entire spectrum of people who are poised to influence the future of wine (how it’s sold, how it could be made, what brands to which Gen Y will start to connect) are talking about wine collectively on twitter.  Dale Cruse has dedicated a substantial portion of his wine blog to documenting this wine twiterati, and it’s likely that from those same ranks will one day emerge the future power brokers of wine media (please note I said “future” and NOT “current”).

Don’t believe me?  Well then, consider this: Darren Rowse, the mastermind behind the truly awesome and inspiring ProBlogger.net and one of the few people globally who can make a comfortable living doing nothing but blogging (not to mention being someone who not only has his finger on the pulse but is actually influencing how the future of social media is taking shape) picked up on Dale’s Top 10 wine twitter people to follow and highlighted the list on his twitter-focused blog.

I think that my good friend Jeff Lefevere summed up the importance of the wine world going on-line in this quote, taken from a recent interview with Jeff published by Sacre Bleu Wine:

“The long-term impact of this whole Internet thing is our media is changing.  Newspapers and magazines aren’t going to go away, but we’re seeing the big ship make its long turn and instead of the Internet being one component of a marketing mix that is predominantly offline, we’re seeing the Internet turn into the main focus supported by offline activity.  It’s a 180 degree change we’re going through now and the natural result is some new voices will emerge that are no longer hindered by legacy gatekeepers.”

If the Internet is the main focus for that juggernaut Argo wine ship, then twitter is its “wave motion gun.”  Damn, did I just throw out a Starblazers reference?  CHECK IT!!!

Now, at this point you might be thinking “But Joe, I’ve heard that only 14 year-old girls use twitter?”

You have my permission to smack whoever told you that squarely in the face (you may want to first ascertain that this person is smaller than you, doesn’t know some form of martial arts, and/or is a slow runner before administering the face-slap).  Look at it his way: how many 14 year-old girls do you know who discuss fine wine online?

In case you haven’t noticed, most of the wine people talking on want to talk to you on twitter, as well.  They’re offering an open invitation for you to join the conversation, in fact, provided you don’t do it simply to perform blatant sales pitches to them (hint: that’s not conversing, it’s being the annoying ‘close / loud talker’ at the party ).  For example, some of you may have noticed the [ SARCASM WARNING! ] subtle reference to my twitter account located on the blog:

[ END SARCASM ]

I guess what I’m saying is that the on-line wine world has reached a critical mass on twitter.  There’s no turning back at this point.  Twitter itself could crash & burn, but the conversation would still remain (taken up at Facebook or possibly on another service that has yet to be invented).  The point is that the conversation is happening, and you can’t be heard unless you join in now.

Just one word of warning – apparently, using twitter negatively impacts a form of memory called, uhm… ahhh…, crap, I forget…

Cheers!

(Images: generatorland.com, umd.edu, 1WineDude, bloggodown.com)

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Why You Need to be a Wine Twit from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Damn my over-processing brain.

I was going to write about two wines that I tasted last week while I was in in Napa & Sonoma for the Wine Bloggers Conference… technically I was actually (sweltering) in Tacoma when I tasted them, but I received the wines in Napa & Sonoma…

Anyway, I was going to write about these wines when my ever-processing, never-lets-me-rest brain decided to switch it up on me.  Now, it turns out I’m writing about not getting these wines. Or, writing about writing about not getting these wines.  This will all clear up in a minute or two.  I think.

The wines in question are C. Donatiello’s Rose, and the new 2006 release of Prime Cellars’s Cab.  Both of them are very, very good wines, the kind of wines that I want to get to know and want others to get to know – small production, interesting, made by up-and-coming, passionate winemakers who are tweaking things, trying to find the right balance and improving their wines early on with every vintage.

The thing is, I’ve been wondering if I should write about these wines.

Because chances are that you can’t get them…

Here’s my take on the C. Donatiello Rose:

08 C. Donatiello ‘Marie Pavie’ Rose (Russian River Valley): Ultra low-production, slightly oakey but all strawberry, all dry, & all good. #

You probably can’t get it unless you’re in Headlsburg, and are a friend of the winery, because Chris Donatiello doesn’t sell that wine – which is a pity, because it rocks.  I’m getting increasingly impressed with what Chris has been able to achieve in terms of quality across his entire spectrum of wines (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir at the moment) in such a short amount of time.

Prime Cellars is another CA producer (Napa this time) that I’ve been keeping my eye on, and I managed to meet up with winemaker Ted Henry at his ‘day job’ at Jarvis before the kick-off of the WBC.  I’d written about Prime’s inaugural release last year, and after tasting their 2006 Cab I think that Ted has started to hit his stride in terms of what he’s aiming for in Prime:

06 Prime ‘District 4′ Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley): Big & about as classic & concentrated black cherry as you can get. Bravo! #

At least the Prime can be ordered on-line, and shipped to one of the (few) states that will allow you to do that.  Otherwise, you’re going to have to hit some restaurants in the Napa / Sonoma area to try it.

Most wine writers probably get faced with the question of whether or not to write about wines that are difficult for their readers to obtain. As wine bloggers receive larger and larger volumes of samples, we’ll be faced with this question on a more regular basis, since statistically speaking the chances are fairly high that we’ll get wines that are harder to come by at a local wine shop.  Take Napa, for example – according to the Napa Valley Vintners Association, while Napa’s wine industry accounts for 34% of CA’s wine economy (responsible for about $42 billion of the U.S. economy annually), “about 70% of Napa Valley’s 400 wineries make less than 5,000 cases of a wine a year. 95% are family-owned.”  I other words, it’s the small stuff that add up to the big numbers.

Which brings me to the big question in my over-thinking mind:

Is it worth writing about wines like these?

I can’t imagine that highlighting these wines is useful for the average wine drinker who might be looking for a decent bottle of vino for dinner, or even to the enthusiast who would be interested in trying new producers (since s/he probably can’t get the wines outside of Northern CA).

But having said that…

I happen to enjoy reading about wines and learning about new producers, even if I can’t try those wines.  Because I’m a wine nerd. In my simple, nerdy view of the wine world, people need to know about producers like these, because their wines are probably going to get better over time, and it will probably be fascinating to watch (or taste) their progression.

So… I’ll probably keep writing about them.

Which means the real question is – Are *you* willing to read about wines that you (probably) can’t try?

I posed the question to the greater “twitterati mind” (a.k.a., my followers on twitter).   The result of this very quick and highly un-scientific poll were that people mostly did want to learn about wine even if it’s one that they might not be able to ever taste.  Seems that people, like me, just enjoy learning about this stuff. They also hold out hope that one day, they’ll be able to try those wines that they can’t access now.

Some sample responses:

PaDutchTravel @1WineDude ok, yes I still lik 2 read bout them, I can still dream and put on my wishlist. cuz u never no when u might be able 2 try some

PinotParty @1WineDude Sure, why not? Educate the wine-os. Love to hear it. If I’m resourceful enough, may even find a way to taste it as well.

AndrewSGHall @1WineDude Sure. Both cases (cost/availability) should only be seen as temporary. U also learn by seeing the limits of wine.

amaynard6 @1WineDude Sometimes. If it’s something spectacular and lives up to expectations, yes. If it’s anything less, no.

dfredman @1WineDude Not interested in notes on 1900 Margaux or 59 La Tache, but love to read about artisanal, eclectic, unusual and weird wines…

winebratsf @1WineDude yes because it’s a fascinatig glimpse into what I don’t have

allaboutvino @1WineDude Yes! I can live vicariously through them. :)

christywild @1WineDude well, in my opinion, I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t be able to try them…I try and make a note and to find them later

loseaneye @1WineDude In a long-form blog post they’re very interesting reads.

thirstforwine @1WineDude not really

LENNDEVOURS @1WineDude True geeks seek knowledge even if the wines are unattainable. At least in my never-humble opinion.

KathleenRake @1WineDude Yes, I like to read about them even if they’re unavailable, but I have to admit I get more excited when I can get them to taste.

mmWine @1WineDude not sure what a twitterari [ editor’s note” my misspelling! ] is. I love reading about wines I haven’t had before. Let’s me try to find them.

TheWineWhore @1WineDude Totally!

So… how about YOU ?

Cheers!

p.s. – I should note that because I was overflowing with wine from the WBC, I was finally able to try out a product sample that I’d been sitting on for months.  It’s basically a single wine bottle-sized bubble-wrap package called the Wine Mummy.  Wine goes into Mummy. Mummy goes into suitcase. Suitcase goes into water. Shark’s in the water.  Our shark.  Which is how it works, except for the parts I borrowed from Jaws.  Anyway, happy to report that the Mummy worked quite well, and my bottle survived two plane flights in perfect condition (which is good, since it was red wine and I wouldn’t have enjoyed getting those stains out of all of my travel clothes).  Worth a look if you’re traveling by air to wine country and are worried about bringing a bottle of something decent back home with you.

(images: 1WineDude, winemummy.com)

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Do You Care About Wines You (Probably) Can’t Have? from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!