Calories in Wine went on site to interview Peter Poole of Vitis Consulting. In this first part of three interviews, we discuss the Temecula Valley Quality Wine Alliance. We also figure out what it means to a viticulturist to produce great quality wines in a region not necessarily known for it's fine wine. Guess what... it's all about the grapes! Temecula is not a classical wine growing region, leaning towards a more Mediterranean climate but, with proper planning we can produce some dynamite wines with perhaps we'll see some Grenache in our future? I can only hope.

Please make sure you check out the Temecula Valley Quality Wine Alliance here.

And you can listen to the interview on YouTube or below.

And if you would like to get more information from Peter Poole directly please contact him at vitisconsult@verizon.net .

I get the question asked of me all of the time - what wine would you recommend with this meal? Really? I don't know.  And I'm not one who really fully understands the science.  Yes, I said science.  When pairing wine and food it is a science of balance with the acidity and sweetness of both the wine and the food.  So in general, I drink and I eat but I rarely do both at the same time.  Odd but true - I just don't want to contaminate my wine! 

This article from The Arizona Republic has a wealth of information that I can point people to so I don't have to answer.  Reach Tarbell, the author, goes into great details about cooking with wine, pairing it up with Asian or spicy flavors but in a nut shell says

Food and wine pairing is all about alcohol content, acidity and/or tartness. Acidity acts to liven and support flavor at the same time that it cuts the oils, richness and heaviness that come from fish, red meats or dairy.

Alcohol, or lack thereof, relates to the style of cuisine or complexity of it. Wines with high alcohol levels will create a hot, peppery and spicy feeling with most any dish - and not in a pleasant way. So those from warm climates that have low acidity and high alcohol (warm-climate Chardonnay, red Zinfandels, Shiraz and Merlot) are best served as cocktail wines or on their own as a meal unto themselves. There are always exceptions, of course. A high-alcohol Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand has enough acidity to cut and balance the alcohol.

 For the full article please click here and enjoy!

I taste wine on this site, but should you believe me when I tell you it tastes like cherry pie?  This is a long debated point that goes round and round in the blogging world. Wine is a personal subject. Even the sensory things of color and aromas are personal. There's no getting around it - wine is a personal experience, which is why I find tasting notes to be interesting but rarely take heed in them. Alder Yarrow at Vinography always has the best diatribes and I highly recommend you check our his opinions on wine notes here.  

However, sometimes it is not the critics who take descriptive license, but the winemakers themselves.  Mark Fisher at Uncorked had a great article here where he discusses the back labels on the wine bottles. 

Do you ever get the feeling that folks in the southern hemisphere have, well, different way of doing things?  I mean, who wouldn’t want to taste a wine that boasts “wafts of toasted marshmallow, sweet custard pie and freshly snapped cinnamon sticks”?

Here are some other back of the bottle notes:

Deeply scented Black Forest cherries greet the nose and fuse with wafts of toasted marshmallow, sweet custard pie and freshly snapped cinnamon sticks. Dull hints of well seasoned oak support rather than compete with the floral scent of musky black roses and a savoury, thorny understory like briar growing through straw mulch after recent rain adds an appealing edge.

 Or this:

The palate is a combination of tangy fruit and well presented tannins which run through the palate as smoothly as a Humvee over judder bars on an ocean boulevard.

 Or my favorite (on a Sauvignon Blanc none the less):

sumptuous aromas that invoke thoughts of a baker's kitchen warm brioche and almond flan with lashes of cream.

Hello? It's like a cheap romance novel but there's alcohol involved! Excellent! But I trust it about as much as infomercial claims.

Scott asked me after the show this week how I know what to buy when I am in the store and I told him that I keep to my price point (I don't have romantic ideals that the $30 bottle will be better than the $10 one), I pay attention to my geography (because some areas are better at certain varietals than others), and I rely on a little thing called luck.  You can't be afraid to drink a whole lot of wine to find the ones you want to drink again. 

Anyone who listens to the show knows that I'm a big fan of the screwcap.  Not that I mind corks, but I get to my wine faster when I don't have to fiddle with an opener and then I can bring my bottle home from the radio taping and not abandon it.  Available from New Zealand and Australia for a long time, it seems that France is now coming on board.  Here are excerpts from an article in The Telegraph (link to the full story is at the end of this posting):

While New World wines have adopted the screw top for years - with up to 90 per cent of New Zealand wines and 60 per cent of Australian bottles using them – giving up the time-honoured cork has met with much stiffer resistance in France beyond the cheaper end of the market.

But according to one wine expert, two of the world's top names - Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, whose bottles can sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and Bordeaux's legendary Chateau Margaux – are now looking into screw tops.

...one of Burgundy's best-known producers, Jean-Claude Boisset, has already started them on top wines, including a Chambertin grand cru 2005, which sells for almost £100 a bottle. This year, a third of the producer's 200,000 bottles will use screw tops.

"We started at the high end, because we are convinced that screw tops are perfect for fine wines that need to age, as they protect them better than cork from oxidation," said Gregory Patriat, in charge of bottling at Boisset. "We're not staying that corks are bad, it's just that screw tops are better," he said.

 ...According to recent figures, of the seven billion wines bottles sealed each year, the number using screw tops has shot up from 300 million in 2003 to 2.5 billion this year. According to the world's best-known wine critic, Robert Parker, wines bottled with corks will be in the minority by 2015.

"The cork industry has not invested in techniques that will prevent 'corked' wines afflicted with the musty, moldy, wet-basement smell that ruins up to 15 percent of all wine bottles," he wrote recently wrote. The one exception, he said, would be "great wines meant to age for 20 to 30 years that will still be primarily cork finished".

I found it fascinating that they would start with the good stuff - and let the French traditionalists exhale a little to know that their wine will still cost too much even without the cork.

To read the full story, click here. 

Welcome to Calories in Wine, the 10 minute wine segment within the hour long radio show found on http://www.only2degrees.com.

Today we are tasting a pretty little Grenache named 'Bitch'. Before you start judging the wine by the bottle, let me just say that their 2005 was one of the best Grenaches I have ever tasted. I personally was stuck on an airplane and couldn't be there for the show, but Lisa and Darcy found my secret stash and drank without me. Let's see how they do on their own... we may need to re-record this week's wine trivia.

This week's show begins around minute 22, Episode 4 02-02-2008. Happy listening!