Notes from the Future – Page 5

Wine Warning Labels….Don’t Say I Didn’t Tell You So

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Alas, Amy Atwood’s mydailywine.com blog is no longer up and running. But she’s importing wine, so that’s probably a better use of her time. And at this point, ten years on, you can easily google ‘natural wine’ and a heap of articles will pop up. Or you could buy Alice’s book, Natural Wine for the People. Or subscribe to her newsletter, The Feiring Line, which I edit. Surprise!!

Originally published on July 23, 2009.

A recent post by Alice Feiring’s on her blog, In Vino Veritas, set off a small firestorm of a discussion on taste…good taste, bad taste, elitist taste, Devil Dog taste. The initial post was about Daniel Boulud’s “lowdown downtown place”, DBGB Kitchen and Bar. The bar is located on the Bowery, in the East Village, not far from the site of former punk-haven CBGB. For those not familiar with the intricacies of the New York restaurant scene or its gentrification geography, there’s a definite irony to a major multi-starred chef setting up shop on a street that was until only recently, best known for its many halfway houses.

I haven’t been to DBGB yet, but the post points out that the DBGB wine list is heavy on natural wines. Rather than lay out yet another definition of what makes a wine “natural”, I’ll just point you to another blog (mydailywine) which recently interviewed Alice. Since she is one of the leading voices discussing natural wine, her words should do just fine.

Now, back to the DBGB wine list. Lots of natural wines, which as Alice says in that post I pointed you to (go ahead, you know you want to read it now,) can be quite shocking. They don’t taste like other wines. Or to be more specific, they don’t taste like wines with big ratings from the big wine rating gurus. Which to generalize just a bit, is what many of the customers at a “lowdown downtown place” fronted by a big time fancy chef are going to expect.

Alice brought up the concept of warning labels. Since these wines can be a little, well, odd when not given a bit of context, why not put a warning label on the menu? Proceed with Caution. Or a skull and cross bones?

I had to laugh at the thought….because we tagged our first bottle with a warning label about a year ago: the Lopez de Heredia Rosado 1997 (now we’re into the 1998.) Fino sherry notes, exotic spices, very little fruit. Not so popular with someone looking for a lovely little Provincial rose. Generally, we were able to give verbal warnings, but sometimes if it was really busy, a bottle would manage to escape without getting its proper due. And often, that bottle would get returned because its new owner thought it was “off.” It wasn’t, it was just odd. So we would swap it for something else and drink it ourselves. A nice treat, but not so fiscally responsible.

The logical next step….a warning label:

Wine You Never Knew You Needed: Frappato

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Light, fresh, delightful reds as weird? Fast forward ten years and chillable, smashable, chuggable reds have almost officially be a category unto themselves.

Originally published on June 30, 2009.

Frappato is one of those grapes you’ve probably never heard of. We hadn’t until last summer when one of our sales reps came by with the winemaker and an open bottle of Valle dell’Acate “Il Frappato” 2008 (Sicilia, Italy). Given that the wine is a red from Sicily, we were expecting something big, full-bodied, typical of a hot island climate. But no – this Frappato was absolutely charming. Light red (but not quite into rose territory) with notes of bright fresh red berries and roses. It’s perfect for summer days and can be drunk just a little bit chilled.

The several times we’ve had it open at the store, the overwhelming consensus has been “it’s weird, but I really like it!” It’s not really weird, it’s just that most of us aren’t used to drinking reds that are so light, fresh, and really, delightful. A red doesn’t have to hit you over the head to be good.

So if you’re in the mood for something different – give this a try – we all need a little weird yet likable in our lives. Price: $18.99

Taste of Tribeca Wine Tour Debrief

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I have no idea what we poured and the page where I would have posted it is long long gone. But based on that blurry early-edition iPhone picture, it looks like it was a clairette from Provence, a gelber muskateller from Austria, and a Sauvignon Blanc Semillon blend from Margaret River in Western Australia.

Originally published on May 17, 2009.

I’m fond of a good debrief. It’s a holdover from my corporate days. My last debrief followed the madness that was New Year’s Eve. This one involves the semi-madness that is the Taste of Tribeca.

For those who don’t know…and are too finger challenged to click on the link, here’s the mini-debrief on that: Taste of Tribeca is the annual fund raising event for P.S. 234 and P.S. 150, the neighborhood’s original public schools (there are more that have/are popping up, but that’s not a subject for a wine store blog.) Parent-planned, parent-run. Most of the restaurants in Tribeca (which include some of the very best restaurants in the city) set up tables along Duane Park. Customers buy tickets to sample tastes from each of those restaurants. 1 ticket = 6 tastes and you can purchase as many tickets as you like.

This year, in addition to the food, there was a Wine Tour led by wine and spirits educator Steve Olson. At the first stop, Tribeca Green Market, you tasted New York State wines. At Chambers Street, Stop #2, they poured sparkling wines. At Frankly Wines, Stop #3, we featured light white wines. At the next stop, full-bodied whites, then light reds, then full reds, then dessert wines. Or something like that.

On to the debrief part:

1. 25, maybe 30 people is about the limit of how many bodies can comfortably fit into the store. And that’s if they’re generally standing in one place drinking wine. 30 people actually trying to shop in the store, no way.

2. I can actually use the big, white wooden boxes as reconfigurable display settings, tables, a serving station. All sorts of things. Just like my architect said!

3. At an event like this, it is really hard to generate sales (people are hitting so many wine stores, it’s tough to carry bottles around with them). I knew this from last year’s tour and tried to have order forms ready, but the best approach is to have cards with the wines being poured so people can remember what they had. And to get the wines up on the web site…which I’ll do right after my debrief!

4. I can talk a person’s ear off about wine if they let me. (This is not a new learning.)

5. Given the right wine, people who “don’t like white wine” probably do, if they can just get over the fact that they “don’t like white wine.’

6. Three wines is the perfect number of a tour like this. You can choose three obviously different styles that make it easy to compare/contrast. More than three wines, it’s tough to clearly explain how they’re different. It starts to turn into an exercise in hair splitting.

7. A sign that you’ve picked the right 3 wines: there’s no obvious favorite among the crowd. Very few people will actually like all three of them. Even if they appreciate all of them and understand why all of them are well-made wines that represent where they came from, it was rare to find someone who really liked all of them. (Except me, but I’m a bit of a “wine slut”.)

8. Chilled bottles are really drippy. Next year, more cloth towels.

9. People never use the spit buckets.

10. 2/3 ice. 1/3 water. Lots of salt = very cold bottles very quickly. We tell people this all the time. Yesterday we proved it to ourselves.

What did we pour? You’ll have to go to the Frankly Wines web site to see.

Another 3-Pack: A Year in Provence

Originally published on April 12, 2009.

3-PACK: A YEAR IN PROVENCE

What, can’t afford a year in Provence? Well, neither can I. But you can still transport yourself there recession-style – with a matched set of this region’s beautiful wines….for less than the cost of simply checking a matched set of luggage.

I’m on a huge Provence wine kick right now. Rose season is right around the corner, and Provencal roses are probably what springs to mind when most people think “dry pink wine”.

I’ve also recently had a few distributors taste me on some great reds from the Bandol subregion (probably the best known wine from Provence after the pink stuff) and some very nice ones from the broader Cotes de Provence region. The best Bandols are made from nearly 100% Mouvedre. The Cotes de Provence reds generally are a blend of Cab Sauv, Syrah, and Grenache, and Mourvedre. The best will have give off a whiff of “garrigue” which is just the fancy French term for the herbs you’ll find grown in Provence (sage, rosemary, thyme). You won’t feel like you’re eating an herb garden, but this subtle note makes these reds different from anything else in the world…and it makes them an ideal pairing for lamb that has been rubbed in….well, sage, rosemary, or thyme.

And I’m really on a Provencal white kick. These wines can be tough to find here in the US. They’re made from not-very-well-known grapes like Clariette, Rolle, and Ugni Blanc. Semillon is probably the best know grape from the region, and it’s not exactly on most people’s list of everyday favorites. But if you like wines that are more about texture and subtlety than outright fruit, the region’s whites are worth seeking out. They’re the perfect match for grilled fish, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the amount of great grilled fish kicking around the Provencal coast.

So, if you’re intrigued, we have a three pack put together a Frankly Wines featuring a white, red, and rose. You can buy one on the Frankly Wines web site for $47.99. The regular price for all 3 bottles would be $54.97.

(Full Disclosure: I own the Frankly Wines store…

(NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Not anymore I don’t!)

…but if you don’t already know that, well, I need to work on being a little more obvious about it!)

Here are the wines:

Clos Bernarde Tete de Cuvee Rouge 1999: A “Provencal” blend (meaning everything but the kitchen sink), this red has mellowed out over the last 10 years: subtle red fruits, dried herbs, and very soft tannins. Like I said above, it’s perfect with lamb.

Clos Bernard Blanc de Blancs 2005: Provencal whites are difficult to describe – they’re more about texture and subtlety than in-your-face fruit. We don’t see many of them in the US…because they pair so well with the region’s grilled fish dishes, the French are reluctant to give them up to anyone else.

Chateau Routas Rouviere Rose 2007: The Provencal staple – dry, subtle, elegant berry flavors and a beautiful pink color. This is what most people think of when they think “Provence.”

The two Clos Bernarde wines are imported by Blue Coast, an importer which specializes in wines from Provence and the Côtes d’Azur (“Blue Coast” in always less romantic English). I like to mention this because the owner is a woman, and it’s fairly rare to find a woman running a wine importing company. Perhaps even more rare than a woman who owns and operating her own store.

The Perfect Wine Retailer’s Shoe

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I found them on Zappos — where you can order thousands of dollars of cowboy boots, try them all on in the privacy of your own living room, send back the ones that hurt like hell and keep the two pairs that apparently were made for your very specific feet (in my case, Lucchese, size 9, gives a blister-less fit from the very first wearing.) I suppose I could have done that at a shoe shop, but pulling too-small cowboy boots off your feet is something best not done in public.

Originally published on March 27, 2009.

After almost a year and a half at the store, I have decided on the perfect shoe. This is a big deal because in my old corporate gig, I wore heels. Very high heels with pointy toes. This works when you’re only walking from your desk to a meeting or out to lunch. Doesn’t work so well when you’re in a wine store, hauling around cases, standing behind the register, and making local deliveries.

The first 6 months or so that the store was open, I was pregnant, so the shoe choice was further constrained by what I could fit my feet into. Mainly very flat, funky sneaker-type shoes from my previous pregnancies. Over the winter, I wore out two pairs of fairly flat calf-high boots. Now I’m back into those flat, funky sneaker things, which I’m really starting to hate. Apparently, I’m finally starting to miss my heels.

So what’s a wine-hauling, hand truck-pulling, heel-loving girl to do?

Cowboy boots. I have decided I need one (or a couple) pairs of cowboy boots. They have heels, yet they’re sturdy. They’re pointy, yet they’re comfortable (once you break them in.) And they can work with jeans or trousers.

Now I just need to buy a pair (or two.) Anyone know where the nearest cowboy boot store is to 66 West Broadway, Manhattan?

Lend a Helping Hand Truck

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Sad to say that the handtrucks.com site doesn’t really exist any more. But thehandtruckcompany.com does!

Originally published on March 22, 2009.

The other day I was dropping off some wine for a recent event that Swirl Events was hosting. Anu, Swirl’s founder, and I got to talking about…no, not the wine I was dropping off, nor the event she was planning, nor any wonderful wines we had recently come across in our vast wine-drinking experience. We were talking about the hand truck I was using.

And it is a fabulous hand truck. It’s a Wesco Superlite Folding Hand Truck. Big rubber wheels, a retractable handle. Like the name says, it’s superlite and folds up to such a small size that on the way home from a delivery, I can just hang it over my shoulder and tuck it under my arm like a big purse…with wheels.

I love my hand truck. And no, you can’t borrow it. Buy your own at handtrucks.com (yes, this site really exists.)

Days That Drive a Wino to Drink

Originally published on February 12, 2009.

What I’m about to describe isn’t exactly a typical day. Most days, at least in my little retail universe, are a mix of placing orders, writing checks, chasing down distributors who always seem to lose my checks, printing out shipping labels, picking out mixed cases, helping customers, fighting with the cash registers, dusting, putting stickers on bags, sorting out deliveries, stocking shelves, and maybe tasting through a few wines with a sales rep or two, occasionally with a winemaker in tow.

Wednesday was a little bit different.

I started out with my 10am blind tasting group. On deck, 5 different wines made from the ever popular Tannat grape. On the off-chance you haven’t heard, Tannat is the star grape of such star regions as Madiran, Irouleguy, and Uruguay. It’s inky dark, deeply tannic, and perfect with steak, stews, or cassoulet. Not exactly breakfast wine, but what can you do when duty calls. There are 2 Tannats at Frankly Wines and we’ll probably be getting a third soon….because every boutique wine store should have 1 Tannat for ever 100 square feet of floor space. It’s in the manual.

NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: It’s totally not in the manual. First, there is no manual. And second, if there was a manual, it would most certainly advise against having more than one Tannat at a time, period.

Blind tasting finished, I brushed my purple teeth and headed off to a winemaker lunch at Alto. I love winemaker lunches…especially when I don’t have to plan them. This one was with Elizabetta Foradori, possibly the chicest Italian grower/winemaker I’ve yet to meet. She does magic with the Teroldego grape which, on the (probable) chance you’ve never heard of it, is a very old grape that makes its home in the northern alpine reaches of Italy. Some day soon I’ll go on about my growing fascination with alpine wines, but for now, I’ll just lay out what we tasted: 2 vintages of Myrto (a white made from the very non-international grape Incrocio Manzoni), the current vintage of Elizabetta’s Teroldego Rotliano (a fresher, younger-drinking style of Teroldego) and 6 vintages of her more serious, age worthy Granato (also made from Teroldego) going back to 1986. That’s 9 wines. For lunch. Survival tactics include lots of bread, a gallon of water…and a conveniently-located red plastic spit cup by my place setting. Red plastic may not seem terrible chic, but neither is a table full of drunken wine buyers.

Lunch over, teeth brushed again, and off to a Burgundy tasting at the Design building. Less zoo-like than I had expected, but still plenty of of French spoken, plenty of men in suits, and plenty of elbows making their way to the Grand Cru wines. I settle in next to a spit bucket and concentrate on distinguishing the Volnays from the Pommards, while dodging elbows and spit streams, balancing my glass, scribbling highly evocative tasting notes like “powerful”, “more perfume than the last one”, “a little more earthy”, “berries”, and muttering in fake French. I generally ignore the price list, as one 6-packs of some of these wines would suck up most of my weekly open-to-buy. There are probably 20 tables at the tasting. I make it to about 5 before the tasting ends and I head outside.

Going for full-on contrast to my Foradori lunch at Alto, I have a hot dog and bad coffee for my 5.30PM snack. Then off to the International Wine Center for my weekly Diploma wine class. This week,we’re studying the Loire, a region best loved by fashionable Parisians and New York-based wine geeks. We’re learn that come test time, even if you smell stone fruits in your Pouilly-Fume, you should say you smell melon, because it will make the graders happy. There’s a discussion about whether a wine is medium+ alcohol or high alcohol. And another about the odd purple color of a Cabernet Franc, which looks suspiciously like a Malbec. We taste 7 different wines, and I realize I’ve already drunk 4 of them at some point in the recent past, outside of class. Of the other 3, I’ve had similar styles from different producers. Since I’m not a fashionable Parisian, that must make me a New York-based wine geek.

As if a day filled with 5 Tannats, a Teraldego vertical, and a bunch of Burgundies hadn’t already proved that point.

The Most Quoted Man in the Wine Business?

Originally published on December 30, 2008.

Paul Grieco is a co-owner/wine director at Hearth, Insieme, and his very cool wine bar Terrior. Terrior has one of those wine lists that wine people can spend hours reading. This “reading of the wine list” activity can often be extremely annoying to the dining companions (a.k.a the husband) of certain wine people. This is because most wine lists are exactly that – just big lists of wines. Not so at Terrior – Mr. Grieco’s list is fun, or at least not completely boring, for non-wine people to read. There are pictures and stories and cool fonts, and it’s all bound up in a three-hole punch binder with graffiti scribbles on the front. And the last time I was there, it included an entire page on Chateau Musar, which is the way straight to my heart. So wine people can pour over the actual list, while the non-wine-people-husbands are reading the other stuff.

But I digress.

Mr. Grieco may be the most quoted person in the wine business today. At least the New York wine business. He was quoted by Eric Asimov in last week’s The New York Times “Dining” section. This is when it occurred to me I had seen his name a lot over the past year. And then there he was again, in this week’s “Dining” section, quoted in an article on Sherry by Florence Fabricant. That sealed the deal. Twice in the same publication in one week and a day. If this rate maintains, we’ll see Paul Grieco quotes 52 times in 2009. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing – his quotes are pretty good…quite “quotable”.

New Year’s Resolution #1? To be quoted just once in the New York Times. Or even mentioned…quotes are not even required. Eric Asimov, Florence Fabricant…can you hear me?

Maybe it would help if I actually sent out a press release.

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: It took a while, but it happened. I’ve been mentioned and quoted in The New York Times more than I can count. OK, that’s a lie. I know exactly how many times I’ve been in the NYT:

The 2010 article about new, cool wine shops
Two different pieces about Serge Hochar and Chateau Musar during his 2012 tour
And finally, starting in 2014, six different Wines of the Times Tasting Panels

And you know what. It never gets old. It. Never. Gets. Old.

Database Madness at Frankly Wines

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: As Rich, a.k.a. Happy Robot, mentioned in the comments on the original post, maybe I should just use tags. He was ahead of his time – these days, tagging is the standard. I still wrestle with how to manage a system where you can add as many pieces of info as you like for a given field (the “tag” field) but I also held on to my iPhone 6 for, oh, six years because I didn’t want to give up my headphone jack. So I may not be the best judge of tech advancements.

Originally published on December 28, 2008.

We’re less than 2 weeks away from getting the Frankly Wines web site up and running. Or rather, the e-commerce version of the web site. The current site exists as 1 snappy page of html code I taught myself while waiting for my license to come through. Not a bad place holder for a girl who hasn’t done computer coding since BASIC was the language of choice.

The new site is being done by Jeff at Pixalt and it’s going to be very cool. Simple, easy to navigate, lots of room for content which I can easily update myself, synchs with my in-store POS system….it’s a fully functioning e-commerce site!

And it’s almost ready…the only real thing holding it up is the database coding…and the person responsible for that is…me!

You would think this would be easy. Just type the info into the fields for producer, vintage, region, size, etc. Except my POS system doesn’t have fields for all of those items, so there’s a bit of jury-rigging required. But that’s not the problem – there’s not a small business owner around that’s not well-versed in the fine art of jury-rigging.

The real problem is the database architecture for the grapes. (I did database work in a past life, so I’m entitled to throw around the phase “database architecture”.) Here are some of the problems that are irking me:
What do you do when you have 1 grape that goes by multiple names (syrah/shiraz, tempranillo + about 5 different aliases, grenache/grenacha)?

What do you do about the vast number of wines that are traditionally blends? For example, I what’s in a Bordeaux Blend, so I could just set up a category “Bordeaux Blend”. But will someone looking for a Cabernet Sauvignon know that grape is one of the main grapes in a Bordeaux Blend? Similar issue with Rhone Blends and those looking for Syrah/Shiraz. Will they know that a “Rhone Blend” will probably make them happy? Wine geeks will say “duh,” but most wine drinkers are not wine geeks.

What do you do with the really non-traditional blends, the kitchen sink blends that give such joy to many winemakers. A category of “Gewurztraminer/Riesling/Pinot Grios/Pinot Blanc” might be the most accurate, but I don’t have room for such a long descriptor. And the generic “White Blend” is just too, well, generic. I can’t remember someone ever coming into the shop and saying “I’m looking for a nice white blend”…I doubt on-line shoppers would either.

So these are the things that keep me up at night. Check out the new site when it’s up to see how I decided to solve these pressing conundrums….and speaking of Conundrum, how on earth would I code that one!!!

Gift Idea #3: Dessert Wines (yes, I know Christmas is over)

A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I still think we don’t drink enough dessert wine.

Originally published on December 26, 2008.

So my concept of posting daily gift ideas didn’t actually happen. I got hung up on the dessert wine post and couldn’t move on. Every time I would start to write I would get hung up on details like how the wines are made. I’d start to drop terms like “botrytis”, “noble rot”, “fortified”, “late harvest” and found myself getting far too technical. And then I would fall asleep. (Because I would usually start writing around 11pm, after the shop closed, the kids were asleep, and I’d sorted out orders for the next day.)

So I’m determined to finish this post before the 12 days of Christmas come to a close. And in the interest of doing just that, I’m going to just do a list. And if I drop a fancy wine term, I’m going to resist the urge to explain it, or even just mention that it’s a subject for another post. If you don’t know what I’m on about, don’t worry, just trust me – these wines are all yummy. Maybe just the thing to cap off a New Year’s dinner (before you break out the bubbles.)

Now, onto the actual post…

Dessert wines get a bum rap, which is a sad thing because they can be extraordinarily good. And in this glum economic environment, they can offer a bit of decadence without forcing you to join the ranks of the foreclosed. Because they’re generally quite rich, a little goes a long way – and you can serve a small room full of people from one bottle.

Here’s my list:

Chateau d’Yquem the grandaddy of all sweet wines. It’s the tippy-top wine Sauternes, the sweet-wine-only sub-region of Bordeaux. In my former life at Moet Hennessy USA, I was able to enjoy more than my fair share of bottles – and it is fabulous! Lusciously sweet but balanced by serious acidity and an extra zip of minerality that makes it uniquely d’Yquem. In my opinion (and let’s be honest, this blog is all about my opinion) this is one of those wines that lives up to the hype.
Other Sauternes (or Barsac, which is just a sub-region of Sauterns) – I’m especially fond of Doisy-Daene which has a certain lightness and elegance to it that can be rare in wines from this region. There are other chateaux that carry the name Doisy (Doisy-This, Doisy-That) and they’re all nice enough that if you pick up the wrong one, you’re still in for a treat.
German Rieslings – these remain one of the best bargains of the wine world. They can be confusing, so if you’re confronted with a shelf full of them, ask for help. You’re probably in a shop where the staff will be more than happy to talk to you about them, so don’t be scared to ask.
Tokaji – A region in Hungary with possibly the oldest history of sweet-wine production. The lushest, most expensive sweet wines from the region will be classified by puttonyos (6 is the sweetest.) Lately, the US market has started to see “Late Harvest” Tokaji hit the market. While these wines may get the sniff from purists, they’re good value and more versatile than the major sweeties from the region.
Wacky Stuff – sweet wines tend to bring out the craziness in winemakers. So if you’re feeling experimental, consider a fortified wine from Uruguay, made from the tannat grape (Vinedo de los Vientos’ Alcyone – like adult-only liquid chocolate). Or Malamado, a port wine from Argentina, made from the Malbec grape (the perfect match to anything with chocolate and raspberries). Or the Piandibugnano Nanerone, from somewhere in Italy (intensely aromatic, almost floral, yet rich, with cherry notes.)
Napoleon’s Choice – unique, but not wacky, Klein Constantia’s Vin de Constance is what Napoleon drank on his death bed, or so the story goes. It lively, yet lush, elegant, with a this almost crystalline purity of fruit at the core. I like it very much.

So there – hopefully some of these dessert wines (a.k.a. sweet wines) have your mouth watering. If not…too bad…more for me!

Category: Notes from the Future