Grape Juice

The icewine harvest for the 2011 vintage wrapped up in February, much to the relief of grape growers, who offloaded their precious goods onto winemakers, who then faced the task of continuing the sterling reputation of the region’s international icewine fame. For the winemakers, the process is slow and painful, with sluggish ferments, sticky messes, and stylistic choices that can severely impact the financial viability of their wineries.

Icewine is expensive for a reason, though looking at the tiny 375mL bottles and the big ole price tag attached to them can be baffling for the average consumer. I try to explain it to people starting at the vineyard. Icewine grapes are a very high risk venture for growers. They stay on the vine approximately 4 months longer than their non-dessert siblings and as such, incur greater costs of management. Careful attention to rot, to weather, and to sugar levels means constant monitoring by both grower and the winery vineyard specialist, and this labour must be compensated for above and beyond the normal harvest processes. Icewine juice then, comes at a premium. The cost per litre easily outstrips other winery intakes, and the ponderous nature of icewine production means a lot of extra man hours and a lot of extra stress. These factors (along with marketing, and in some cases, greed) combine to mean higher prices for fans of this style of dessert wine.

You may recall that back in January, Michelle and I had the opportunity to work at the Niagara Icewine Festival, pouring Mike Weir Estate Winery’s first icewine, a 2005 Vidal. Through that experience I was able to get a completely different perspective on the regional treat, by answering questions and interacting with interested members of the general public, some of whom had never tried any, others who had driven hundreds of miles to get their fix at the festival. I learned some very valuable lessons in those two days, some heartbreaking, others just plain curious, and in the end I have a better understanding of the challenges faced by the marketing teams trying to highlight their products for the sea of faceless consumers.

Lessons Learned:

• No matter how sweet you make it, people will always want it sweeter. I’m sorry to break it to you winemakers, but balance means nothing to some people. You could offer the sickliest, flabbiest excuse for an icewine, one that makes your teeth hurt even thinking about it, and more than one person is bound to tsk quietly and say “I thought icewine was supposed to be sweet“. Oddly enough, this seemed to happen most often with American icewine lovers who made the journey up to enjoy the festival. I have no idea what they’ve been drinking that could have possibly been sweeter than some of this stuff…
• No matter how dry you make it, people will always want it drier. This is the counter camp to the first point, and generally applies to people who don’t typically like icewine, or dessert drinks in general. Even icewines with high balancing acidity (Rieslings come to mind), or higher alcohol (more sugar consumed), will still be too sweet for some people. They will ask you for your “least sweet wine”, to which one of my compatriots behind the tasting bar declared, exasperated, “they’re icewines, they’re all sweet”. I really have to tip my hat to the folks that tried icewine despite the fact that they were petrified of the sugar content. We had some brave soldiers, some of whom were surprised to actually find one to their liking, which made the whole event worthwhile.
• If it ain’t red, it ain’t cool. There was one red icewine at the Niagara Icewine Festival, a Cabernet Franc from Mountain Road Wine Company. Despite resorting to tactics approaching debaucherous, the rest of the ice bar couldn’t drag visitors away from the bloody red stuff. Every third person that approached the bar would ask “I hear there’s a red icewine, where is it?”, in which case we’d point dejectedly, again, down the bar. The line at one point threatened to swallow the entire tent, and swirled into the frosty outdoors. No other wine managed a line-up deeper than three people. Red icewine is the big fad in Niagara right now. Love it or hate it, it’s what the people want, and heaven help you if you can’t deliver. It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, it doesn’t even have to have a big name brand behind it, it just has to be red.
• If it’s white, it better not be Vidal. Again, sorry winemakers, but Niagara’s stalwart icewine grape, the hearty Vidal, doesn’t seem to be cutting it for people anymore. It doesn’t matter if you barrel ferment it, if you oak age it, if you dress it up with fancy packaging or a clever name…after trying one Vidal, people assume they’re all the same and want variety. Although there may be enough diversity in a single varietal to pack dozens of tents, that’s not the common perception and thus being the eighth Vidal in a row full of Vidals makes you almost invisible. At one point I found myself stuck between the dreaded Cab Franc and a pair of perky whites made from Riesling and Gewurztraminer. Despite imploring people to give the Vidal a try while they waited in the enormous red line, or claiming that Mike Weir’s wines were guaranteed to improve your golf game, it was very difficult to get people to try the unfairly labelled ‘plain Jane’ of the bar.

Those were my main take-away points from the weekend’s festivitiies. The mixed crowd of fans and skeptics, newbies and connoisseurs, made for a decent cross-section of consumers. I do wonder whether marketing departments pay enough attention to ’simple’ interaction situations such as these when they’re trying to read trends and attract new demographics. The one-on-one feedback and offhand comments were invaluable in altering my conceptions of how people perceived icewine as a stylistic entity.

In my inane need to collect things, and as part of some cork sourcing I was working on, I came across a site that offered me the opportunity to become something the likes of which I didn’t even think possible. Fame? No. Fortune? Nope. I could become, with the passing of a simple test, a certified Cork Dork.

The cork information and education program offered online at Real Cork USA, technically qualifies you to be a certified cork expert, but I prefer Cork Dork. The simple questionnaire, approved by the Portuguese Cork Association, tests your knowledge of cork harvest, production, and use.

Here’s Real Cork USA’s take on what they’re trying to accomplish:

Becoming knowledgeable on cork is incredibly important. In learning and understanding the unique and complex characteristics of this natural product you will also consequently increase your perspective and knowledge on wine. After reading through the information available on this website please complete the Cork Certification Course. If you can answer 80% of the questions correctly, you will be a certified cork expert. The questionnaire was designed and approved by APCOR – Portuguese Cork Association – leading the world on cork closure issues. In addition, you’ll be entitled to receiving valuable material on cork to share with your friends, clients, colleagues, students, teachers and family. So please enter your mailing address after completing the questionnaire. Wishing you a corking success!

I couldn’t resist adding such an absurd(ly cool) title to my name, so I took the test and passed with a whopping 96%. I have yet to receive any corky propaganda, either through the mail or through email, and have my fingers crossed that I’ll at least get some sort of cheesy certificate to frame and display as a testament to my endless capacity for useless knowledge.

It’s not often that we get slap-happy promoting contests and the like here, but this is one that absolutely should be plastered on every spare pixel of foodie/wino webspace: A Menu For Hope.

Now in it’s fourth year of giving the annual campaign, run by the indomitable Pim of ChezPim.com and supported by her legions of altruistic food and beverage bloggers, is looking to top the astounding sum of $62,925.12 that they pulled together for the UN World Food Programme last December. Originally launched to help survivors of the devastating tsunami that struck SE Asia, the event has grown into a yearly drive to help provide relief to those who need it most.

Keep your eyes peeled for posts to start popping up on all of your favourite consumable blogs and open your hearts from December 10-21 to help those less fortunate than yourselves. A measily $10 will buy you a raffle ticket — that means skipping only one Venti low-fat mochaccino from Starbucks — and you can spend it on whatever prize most appeals to you. For an idea of what sort of gustatory delights might await this year, have a look at the items that were up for bid last time around.

More information on this wonderful campaign can be found here. It’s not difficult to participate, whether it be by buying raffle tickets, or spreading the word, so get into the Christmas spirit and let’s see if we can’t smash last year’s total.

Oddly mirroring the explosion of pirate culture as a result of lovable lout Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, a swash-buckling, treasure-hunting fervour has also enveloped the wine world. In recent years there has been a strong backlash against wine snobbery and a renewed sense of adventure when it comes to ferreting out the hidden gems and bargains of the industry. I think it’s fantastic.

The increasing popularity and pull of wine blogs, making a wider variety of wines from all over the world accessible to a broad audience, has certainly helped to spearhead the questing spirit by letting lesser known wines, regions, and producers get some time in the spotlight. The on-going debate over the credentials and abilities of the reviewers behind this segment of wine media is, to me, far overshadowed by the opportunity to discover wines that were previously unheard of, and also to be able to get an appreciation of a wine from various perspectives, and various points in the maturation of a wine-loving palate. To poo-poo a reviewer for his or her inexperience is to forget the beauty of culturing wine tasting as a hobby.

Palates develop, change and become more finely tuned, this much is true, but so much about wine tasting is about a visceral sense of enjoyment and in its subjectivity, acts as a glaring snapshot in a series of progressions that compile personal preference, technical knowledge and descriptive ability. You can never know it all, you can never be perfect, and let’s face it, the vast majority of consumers out there are currently in the throws of beginner-to-intermediate level knowledge, exactly when blogs can be most influential in broadening horizons and suggesting bottles off the beaten path.

How then, to promote a love and understanding of wines across all regions and price ranges? In statistics, a sampling method called stratified sampling exists that acknowledges a sample population that may be composed of a number of distinct groupings or categories. Regarding each of these groupings as separate “strata” allows for higher analytical precision and the ability to evaluate data within each of the various subgroups. The same sort of stratified evaluation is easily applicable to the wine world, where a vast selection of potential strata just sit quietly, waiting to be exploited by reviewers and drinkers alike. In the sea of wine now readily available via online shops, blogs, and outlets, never has there been a greater, or more important, opportunity to change the way we think about wine ratings. What we need is a large dose of what I call The Theory of Wine Relativity.

Is it really fair to compare a first growth Bordeaux from a stellar vintage to a Finger Lakes meritage from an off year? Not really. And yet simple number scalings, taken out of context and plastered on sales tags all over retail stores are essentially doing just that. It removes the air of subjectivity from the number, removes a sense of place and adds a slam of finality that has the ability to doom or elevate a wine in the consumer’s opinion.

One of the greatest opportunities I feel any reviewer has is to comment on a wine within the scope and development of our own talents. To compare it with what we have seen in the past, what we know, what we like, and also the status quo. Within each of our own personalized “strata”, we are able to evaluate a wine through a lens quite unlike that of our peers and offer something that mere numbers lack: perspective and passion. Some of these strata are intrinsic to the very process of tasting and reviewing, others require a good deal of knowledge and/or research, but all can help to form a more complete picture of the wine involved. It’s a might bit egotistical to think that someone Google searching a wine will be content to read a single review, yours, and make a snap judgement based on your recommendations alone. We live in the information age, where dozens of reviews can exist for individual wines and more often than not, an aggregate sense of characteristics is what fosters interest.

The point? Write what you know. How does it stack up to other wines you’ve had from that region/vintage/varietal/producer? Are there other similar wines that you would recommend more? Does the wine represent solid bang for your buck (QPR)? Would you personally buy it again? Most importantly, what exactly did you like; what didn’t you like? Give the wine a sense of place, lay out your own experience with it and leave it to people to make their own judgments. We don’t yet have an objective enough system of quality to make speaking from on high a viable option. The key is to remember that there are people out there who might like the very characteristics that you’re so intent on bashing, and what you see as a negative, might be someone else’s positive. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Take the descriptors “highly extracted”, “high alcohol”, and “jammy”…they scare the bejeebus out of me and are a giant red flag in the world of my personal tastes, but to other people, the bigger, the bombier, the brawnier, the better!

I suppose, from my perspective, our “job” as wine bloggers is to expand horizons by increasing the number of wines that are getting spotlighted. We have the opportunity to make people think, and to make them think for themselves by providing an information service. We spark interest (or controversy) in mainstream and (more importantly) off the beaten track bottlings that deserve some attention. Qualifying your tasting notes experiential details anecdotes may be the most important thing we have to offer over the dry, lamely presented reviews in major publications, who are so crippled by space restrictions that the tasting note becomes but a descriptor barcode, and not a true representation of the wine itself.

Now, I’m not slamming the traditional publications. I believe that they’re invaluable to the industry and definitely a needed part of wine media. What I’m saying is that bloggers have the chance to expose things differently, to be more free with their thoughts and ideas, and to add a dimension to wine journalism rather than just top up the layer of traditional thought.

Get creative, don’t be afraid to do things differently or to slough off conventional wisdom (but also know when it’s an appropriate aide), and help spread the word about the wonderful world of wine. That’s why we’re all doing this, isn’t it?