Warren's Wine World a 100% rating free zone

Blaufrankisch - an Austrian red grape to know

Austria ... easily associated with Germany, although from a wine making perspective sharing very little in common. Riesling, yes. Gruner Veltliner, the white grape that established Austria's post-wine scandal industry, yes. But Austrian Gruner is nearly always spicy and very dry. And Austria is much warmer generally than Germany with hot winds blowing off the Hungarian plain. 

And, what about red wine from Austria? There actually is quite a bit. And very good although not big, alcoholic, tannic and rich. If you're addicted to Napa Cabernet you will frankly find it laking but, if you enjoy elegant, accessible, food worthy wines listen up.

Blaufrankisch (pronounced just the way it's spelled) is thought by some to be the same as Gamay and, in Germany is called Lemberger. There is a bit grown these days in Washington (Shooting Star Blue Franc), California and New York state (Fox Run). It is a rare grape that can ripen in these places and withstand the sometimes harsh winter weather to ripen again. They call Blaufrankisch "Kekfrankos" in Hungary where its used to make the notorious, sluggish, sappy Bull's Blood wine. 

Blaufrankisch produces a medium-bodied  wine with food-friendly soft tannins and pleasing acidity. Cherries and red berries strung to smoke, spice and black pepper aromas and flavors can turn toward gaminess. That makes the wine a natural with game and strongly flavored meats, cheeses and sausages. As RP says, pair simple wines with powerful foods, powerful wines with straight-forward foods. 

Several to try; Neckenmarkt 2005, Umathum 2005 or the Zantho 2006 (very nice price) are all from the Burgendland region south of Vienna in Austria where those warm breezes blow and the grapes ripen. 

Chinon - red wine from the Loire Valley

Chinon is a village that was once a country retreat for French royalty. South of the Loire River, east of Saumur, west of Tours with slopes of tufa (chalk) soil that shelter the best vineyards. 

Chinon is a delicate, medium bodied red that is nevertheless dark in the glass, silky and yet somehow weighty with acidity and edges of tannin to hold a grip and show an elegant/earthy finish. Cabernet Franc is the grape, all on its own. OK, maybe 10% Cabernet Sauvignon. It is bone dry, not heavy and not too alcoholic. A fine companion to good cooking. 

Next door neighbor, across the river to the north, Bourgueil is also Cab Franc with that 10% of Cabernet being more commonly included. Darker and more in need of some time in the bottle. Maybe more appealing to some but I prefer the elegant reserve of a well made Chinon. Try something from Couly-Dutheil. Don't be afraid of some age, these wines mature into truly intriguing and sensuous red wines.  

Passetoutgrain

an odd wine from France's Burgundy region, a rare wine. 

Made in fairly large amounts - more passtoutgrain than Premier and Grand Cru combined - yet very rarely exported. An "every day" drinking red wine of Burgundy found on many bistro and cafe wine boards. The word translates "nothing in particular." It is a blend of at least 33% Pinot Noir with as much as all the rest being Gamay. Green grapes (Chardonnay) can make up as much as 15% of the mix but rarely do. Although its legally produced in any village level zone anywhere in the region, the majority is made in the cote Chaolonaise where Gamay begins to take over from Pinot Noir and granite sub soils take over from limestone ... connection? 

A good passetoutgrain is light to medium in body, translucent with fresh aromas, red berry-fruit flavors and innocent, thirst quenching acidity. Although it's characterized easily as a country wine of little real stature, a good producer using Pinot Noir grapes from a good village can make a very pleasing, rambunctious and spirited red Burgundy. It should be drunk young but that means within three or four years of vintage. Many are made with more than a third Pinot Noir and thus have the ability to progress a bit over time.

Passtoutgrain wines accompany simple foods with great charm, all the foods associated with Burgundy and the earthy, homey restaurants and cafe's of the little villages. 

Try the Henri Jouan Bourgogne Passtoutgrain 2007. Very good producer from Morey St Denis. Expect to pay $20 to $25. 

wine list organization as a model for retail wine

In working on a way to organize the displays at a wine shop it seems that most shops adopt a combination of varietal and regional organization. So, they'll have sections for Chardonnay, Cabernet, Pinot Noir etc. as well as sections for France, Italy, Spain, Germany and so-on.  

The goal of every retail set-up is to promote and sell across the entire range of products selected. In the typical set-up, if a customer is looking for Pinot Noir it's very difficult to lead them over to the part of the French section that has the red Burgundy (Pinot Noir) displayed. If someone asks about Malbec, it's tough to lead them to a related wine like Cabernet or Cabernet Franc. I hear from my retail customers all the time, "My South African wines don't sell at all," or "I can't sell French wine to save my life." Part of this is certainly that the customer service staff are not clear on the varietal links of familiar grape types and European regions. It is also the result of dividing varietals across sections while maintaining varietal sections that look complete to the average customer. They're not seeing the full selection but they think they are.

So I advocate a scheme of organization that riffs off wine list organization. Use varietal signs to identify where all the wines of a given varietal can be found together. Given that price points will merge and offer choice, it then becomes less of stretch for a customer looking for Pinot Noir to try a red Burgundy, for a customer looking for a German Riesling to try one from Washington state or for a customer asking about a Cote du Rhone to be informed that other Grenache based wines, from other places might offer pleasing alternatives. 

This kind of scheme has built in challenges but they are all good for the store's purchasing disciplines, for sales, for staff involvement and for customer satisfaction. It's still necessary to find strategic spots to keep most of a region's wines shelved together; so, the Italian whites could be shelved alongside the "Pinot Grigio" section, the Spanish reds could be next to the "Tempranillo/Garnacha" section and so on. The varietal signage can be arranged in such a way as to accommodate the most common blends. Thus Bordeaux wines, Claret and Meritage wines would fall between the "Cabernet" and "Merlot" signs. 

The wines of the world are varied and there is literally no system that can make it entirely simple. I know of several retailers and restaurant owners who are so concerned with seeming stuffy or high-minded that they choose to be satisfied with leaving out important categories or allowing them to languish, lost to staff knowledge and customer awareness.

A trend in the next decade is the re-emergence of helpful/knowledgeable retail sales ... and I would add restaurant sales. Consumers realize that ratings and recommendations from national publications are of limited practical use. This opens the door for people with passion to reinvent customer service and set up an organizational plan that will gently encourage exploration and product movement. Consumers still want and need guidance but they are finding it more in friendly face-to-face interaction. Price sensitivity occupies center stage with the consumer but there is a large segment, larger among consumers under 35, that wants to find the new and the different. I believe a scheme that integrates varietal and regional organization is the way of the future. 

Buy wines you DON'T recognize

I love wine because of it's taste, of course but also its cultural richness, the history, geography and even botany, chemistry and geology that's involved. I love wine because of its diversity and the fact - that hasn't changed in centuries - that each and every bottle is individual. This individuality is somewhat lessened in the case of a wine that is produced in silo sized aluminum tanks, in million case lots.
I sell wine and that almost cheapens the experience for me. Sales turns this wonderful, ages-old elixir, a transformation of grape juice into a multi faceted thing that might outlive in its bottle you and me, into a commodity.
Most people think of wine as a commodity, even people a lot like me who really love the stuff. They get caught up in the numbers.

There's no getting around it. Wine costs some money. It can be bought and sold. Forty years ago you could by a bottle of top flight Bordeaux for $15. Today, that same bottle costs $1500. Is this because wine is a good investment and always has been? No, it's because wine became popular outside it's native lands (Europe) within those forty years. Over that pretty brief span of years - when you consider wine has been around for 7000 years - people who did not know wine as a part of their table culture from the time they could first sit up at the table, adopted it as a mere symbol. A symbol of culture and prestige. So, we in the New World have f**ked wine up and made it into a commodity and an investment vehicle.

Cafe Maude

I went to Cafe Maude on Penn Ave. in Edina for the first time last night, after hearing positive things about the newly opened "neighborhood bistro." The Wine Group I taste with had targeted Maude for our weekly meeting, with bottles of wine wrapped in paper bags. We visit a number of area restaurants in rotation based largely upon their willingness to forgo corkage fees and the compatibility of the food with a wide variety of wines. Some of the other spots we visit include Sapor, Town Talk Diner, Trattoria Da Vinci and Arezzo.

good cheap eats

I think I'm nearing the end of my rope with "fine dining".
Part of it is pure economics, I can't afford to spend $80 for a dinner, twice that if I take my wife, and fine dining is no fun alone. Fine dining has begun to mean, fine as in "small". You order the pork shoulder and you get a little morsel of pork, wrapped in an exotic bitter green with a reduction of wild gooseberries, lemon aoli and fennel foam. And it's all served on a silver spoon siting in the middle of the plate. And I can cook. Maybe I don't have gooseberry reduction, and I can't make fennel foam but my wife and I can feed ourselves. Who needs the staid, quiet environment, the obsequious waiter, the quadruple mark up wine list.
We've decided that the best places are not the most expensive. Far from it. In the Twin Cities we have some real ethnic cuisines available and that's where the value is. Here are three places we think are fantastic.