Photo By: Sarah Henry

After many months of eager anticipation, Berkeley favorite Gioia Pizzeria (2240 Polk Street) has arrived in San Francisco. And the iteration on this side of the Bay includes several notable additions that make it well worth the wait.

Most importantly, owners Will and Karen Gioia have added an impressive collection of beer and wine to their delicious SF menu. In addition to a rotating list of 5 Italian reds and 5 whites, the bar also features 6 satiating local microbrews. If you make your way over to the beautiful new Polk Street digs, you’ll be able to indulge in several limited edition beers from right across the Bay in Oakland: Linden Street Brewery’s exquisite Burning Oak Black Lager–roasted to perfection to taste slightly sweet with a very light body. Also on tap is Dying Vine’s Hop Candi, an English-style IPA with tender tones of rye and citrus.

From deeper in the Bay Area you can enjoy some fermented infectiousness from Heretic Brewing Company, based out of Pittsburg–not the one in Pennsylvania. This imaginative producer implores its drinkers to “be a heretic, don’t drink ordinary beer.” And their suds are anything but pedestrian. Evil Twin is an unusual blood-red ale with a perfect ratio of malt to hops, neither too sweet nor too bitter. If you’re in the Bay Area, be on the look out for their special releases, including Torment–a Belgian-style dark ale aged in French oak barrels that boasts a whopping 12% ABV.

The husband and wife team behind the eponymous restaurant received their culinary pedigree at Chez Panisse, so clearly you’re in for a culinary experience to accompany these inspired libations. The quality of ingredients and thoughtfulness of preparation really shines through in the dining experience at this new Russian Hill standout. When tasty East Coast-style pizza meets great West Coast-style microbrews its the best of both worlds!

NorCal Beer Blog

Why?

For starters, organic wines can often be, well, unpalatable. And biodynamic wines are seen by skeptics (of which there are many) as a superstitious European way of farming at best, and a science fiction level hoax at worst. Perhaps that is why the the two certified organic wines on our tasting list don’t even put that information on the bottle. All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised by the wines that we tasted, and quite impressed with BevMo’s commitment to sustainability.

2010 Frog’s Leap Rutherford Sauvignon Blanc – $17.99

The Frog’s Leap sauvignon blanc is a certified organic wine, an impressive feat for a major Napa brand with 130+ acres. This is a ‘cocktail’ sauvignon blanc, meaning it’s meant for sipping and not necessarily with food. It’s very ripe, with flavors of pineapple and peach, and has a round finish thanks to 10% of the blend spending some time in neutral oak.

2011 Vigilance Lake County Sauvignon Blanc – $14.99

The Vigilance label is a partnership between Lake County’s Shannon Ridge and BevMo. Bevmo has been involved right from planting, and all the wines under this label are sustainably farmed.  This sauvignon blanc is a fantastic value (especially at the Club Bev price of $10.04). A much more acidic and herbal wine than the Frog’s Leap, I imagine the Vigilance pairing very well with most spring cuisine.

2010 ZD Napa Valley Chardonnay – $29.99

I’ll be the first to admit that I generally dislike the ‘California’ style of chardonnays, all butter and oak with no acid to back it up.  The ZD is one of those rare examples where the California style works: you still get all those gooey butter and oak flavors you’ll expect from a Napa chardonnay, but there is enough acid left to make this a very well balanced wine. I liked it even more when I found that it is certified organic.

2010 Vigilance Lake County Cimarron – $19.99

Another really well made, particularly well-priced wine from the Vigilance brand. This one is a zinfandel-based blend that is bright, juicy, and crowd pleasing. A perfect BBQ wine that just happens to be sustainably farmed.

2008 Benziger Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon – $19.99

A Sonoma cab that’s biodynamic, delicious, and under $20? Yep. Hoaxes aside, this is a delicious cabernet from Sonoma. It might not have all of the ripeness that people love in the cabs from it’s neighbor county to the east, but this Benziger has flavors of herbs de provence, dark berries, and subtle tannins.

In addition, BevMo also used the Earth Day timing to announce that they are accepting corks for their new recycling program. You know you’re never going to make that cork picture frame, so why not let those corks be made into something actually useful? Just bring them to  your nearest BevMo.

By Victoria Gutierrez

Wente Vineyards

An Evening with Foreigner

Wednesday 7/11

Earth, Wind & Fire Guiding Lights Tour

Monday 7/16

Sheryl Crow

Monday 7/23

An Evening with John Fogerty

Wednesday 8/1

Diana Krall Summer Nights US Tour

Wednesday 8/15

Steve Martin And the Steep Canyon Rangers

Wednesday, 8/29

Tickets will go on sale to the general public on May 19th and can either be purchased individually for $89 or accompanied by a four-course dinner at the award-winning Restaurant at Wente Vineyards for an added fee. Another enticing feature of the summer concert series is the buffet-style dining available on the lawn for parties of ten.  You can go with a crew of friends to enjoy an incredible meal while being serenaded by some of the finest headlining acts in music today.  And the wine is certainly not to be overlooked, either.  For over 125 years, the cool nights and gravelly soils of the Livermore Valley have produced some of the more robust Cabernet Sauvignons the region has to offer.  They also make an exceptionally well-balanced Morning Fog Chardonnay, which is really saying something considering that I am not traditionally a Chardonnay kinda guy.  But theirs boasts a gentle, buttery mouthfeel that doesn’t overdo the fruitiness common to the varietal.  On a warm summer evening, it’s the perfect way to wash down some twangy bluegrass from the Steep Canyon Rangers.

Karl Wente and Wente Vineyards (Video)

The offer is to help relieve the pain brought about by Tax Day and clearly cheap booze is the perfect way to alleviate stress. BLT Restaurants feature full bars, with impressive wine lists and local beers on draft.  Personally, I’m a big fan of their 5 at 5 Happy Hour, offering 5 food items and 5 drinks for only $5 between the hours of 5 and 7PM daily.

If you find yourself in the lovely city of San Francisco this week—surprisingly bereft of a BLT to call their own—fret not, for down in the Financial District you can enjoy some Tax Day-inspired specials at Credo (360 Pine Street).  They are opening up their private dining room for a special 4-8PM Happy Hour with discounted beverages as well as $0.99 pizza for all the 99%ers out there.

Uncle Sam’s Deadline Date is traditionally quite a frugal time to go out on the town and enjoy a few cocktails.  It is a perfect way to spend that ridiculously large refund check that you have coming your way.  And if you’re not that lucky and owe the IRS more than you expected, you might as well drink away your sorrows on the cheap.  Either way, Tax Day brings into focus one undeniable truth: there’s always a good excuse to hit the juice.

Photo courtesy of WineGeek. On the right, a sample of wine that has been aging under flor.

Oily, nutty, salty, an acquired taste… what could possibly satisfy these qualifications? Sardines, definitely. Olives, for sure. A wine? Usually, the flavor descriptors for a wine include berries and baking spices, never venturing further down the savory path much past leather and tobacco. A very specific wine, however, meets the requirements: manzanilla sherry.

All sherry comes from Jerez, a piece of Andalusia in the southwest corner of Spain. All sherry, with the exception of a dessert sherry called Pedro Ximenez, is made from an unremarkable grape called Palomino. While it may seem odd, the choice of a neutral and downright boring grape is what makes sherries so special. By starting with a blank slate as a base wine, the unique process by which sherries are made can shine.

First in line to enjoy the spotlight on the Palomino stage is the soil. While some parts of Jerez have barro (clay) and arena (sand) soils, the best sherries start in albariza, a white and crumbly clay full of calcium, magnesium, and sea fossils. Like wines from Burgundy and Champagne, this calcium-rich soil brings sharp, tangy, mineral-like flavors. The next big influence in the unique flavor of sherry is the aging.  After the Palomino grapes have been crushed and fermented like any run of the mill white wine, the wine is slightly fortified with a neutral grape spirit and then put into barrels. Not just any barrels, but very big (600 liter) and very old American oak barrels called ‘butts.’ The new sherry is aged in the butts for a year.

At this point, there’s a whole bunch of boring butts laying around the winery. What next? The butts are put into a solera. This is an aging system, often made by stacking up the butts. The top row holds the youngest wine. When it’s time for bottling, wine is siphoned out of the bottom row, with the oldest wine. A bit is left in that bottom row, and then wine from the second-to-bottom row is used to fill the bottom row back up. Then the third-to-bottom fills the row beneath it, and so on and so forth. What you end up with is a final product of sherry that has many different ages of wines all blended together, packing a ton of complexity into not a lot of time. All sherry has spent at least three years in a solera, and the oldest soleras have bottom rows that can have up to 100-year-old wine in them. Since a vintage can’t be put on the bottled wine (it’s made up of wines of several ages), sometimes the year the solera was started will be put on the label.

This basic process is the same for all sherries, which come with different classifications – fino, manzanilla, amontillado, oloroso, and more — depending on where they were made, how long they aged, and how they aged. But manzanilla, in particular, is quite unique.

Manzanilla sherry can only be made in the very tiny, very near to the sea town called Sanlúcar de Barrameda. All the way up to going into barrels, it’s made the same as any other sherry. But, when filling the barrels, the winemakers will only fill the barrel about three-quarters full. Here’s where things start getting peculiar.

Ambient yeasts and organisms in the air are just a fact of life; airborne particles are how we have sourdough bread and Lambic beer. Sanlúcar de Barrameda’s close proximity to the Atlantic ocean lends it a microclimate that is temperate, very humid, and extraordinarily friendly to yeast. As the butts of sherry hang out, partially filled to allow maximum air exposure, a funny thing starts to happen. The abundant yeast starts to create a yellowish, filmy covering on the top of the wine (picture your grandma’s lace tablecloth). This covering is called flor, meaning flower, because the yeasts are basically flowering on the wine. A quick note on fino sherry: fino starts just like manzanilla, with a flor, but a sherry not made in Sanlúcar de Barrameda won’t have a climate that can support the growth of the yeasty covering for the entirety of the wine’s aging. I like to think that fino sherry is manzanilla lite.

While this was definitely an alarming development to the very first fellows making wine in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, it’s now a very welcome sight.  The first thing the flor does is protect the wine from further oxidation; a small bit of air gets through to lend the sherry its distinctive ‘nutty’ flavor, but for the most part the covering keeps the wine fresh and bright.  The second thing that the flor does is impart all sorts of yeasty, bread-y, apple-y flavors.

Manzanilla sherry is one of the only wines known to have a salty, or briny, flavor similar to fresh oysters. The other is Muscadet, a white wine grown on the Atlantic coast in the Loire Valley in France. Lovers of these wines like to wax poetic about how the salty sea air blowing through the wineries deposits a salty flavor in the wines. While a nice thought, and one that reminds you of where these wines are coming from, the salty flavor of manzanilla sherry and Muscadet comes from the yeast itself and has nothing to do with sea salt. Think of brewer’s yeast or Marmite: while the latter does have some sodium added, the presence of yeasts breaking down can impart salty and even umami flavors.

According to Francois Chartier in his Taste Buds and Molecules, the presence of the flor in a manzanilla sherry increases the complexity of the wine in a truly quantitative way. Let’s get geeky for a moment: a manzanilla sherry, at bottling, can be broken down into about 300 volatile (aromatic and delicious) molecular compounds. A full thirty-six of these are developed solely under the presence of the flor. More than ten percent of the flavor comes from yeast! Digging a little deeper, these thirty-six compounds include nutty and salty acetaldehydes that are also present in Spanish ham, buttery and cheesy diacetyls, and a compound called acetoin that links manzanilla to apples, broccoli, coffee beans, and even asparagus.  All those compounds make for a complex and aromatic wine, which is why it’s not totally surprising that ‘manzanilla’ means ‘chamomile’ in Spanish.

In short, the time that a manzanilla sherry spends aging under its cozy flor blanket makes it an extraordinarily versatile wine for pairing with food.  It’s always good to start by pairing a wine with the cuisine that it grew up with, meaning that a manzanilla sherry is always going to be phenomenal with coastal Spanish cuisine.  Moving beyond classic pairings, manzanilla is a good bet with most Thai, Moroccan, and Indian dishes (though I love to just sip on it when I’m nibbling cheese).

Unique, complex, pairs well with food… no wonder the wine geeks of the world can’t sing sherry’s praises enough. Most wine professionals are going to tell you that sherries, and particularly fino and manzanilla sherry, are the most underappreciated wine out there. The beauty of an underappreciated wine is, thanks to the laws of economics, it’s also one of the most affordable.  Even when buying the very best manzanilla sherry out there, you’re going to have to try really hard to have to shell out more than a twenty spot.

Speaking of Benjamins, you might want to mention the early days of America when you’re convincing a frightened dinner party to try manzanilla sherry. Sherry was the first wine brought to the New World, and the Founding Fathers kept a whole bunch of it in their private cellars.  If it was good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for us.  That being said, the flavor of a manzanilla sherry will make you question the boundaries of exactly what wine should taste like. Stick with it, though, and you’ll be privy to a wonder of the wine world that few bother to discover.

by Victoria Gutierrez

Randall Grahm pruning in San Juan Bautista

There are moonlight wine tastings in British supermarkets and a calendar advising when conditions are right for drinking certain varietals. Some folk swear by these practices … and others swear at them. So, should you start asking a bottle of wine, “What’s your sign?”

The question really is this: how much truth, if any, is there to the belief that astrological signs affect what adult beverages you drink and, more specifically, how the ingredients are grown and made?

Planting according to the phases of the moon is a practice as old as agriculture itself, but employing the same celestial portends as guidelines for tasting the fruit of the vine is much more recent. It’s generally based on biodynamics, a holistic agronomy system created by philosopher Rudolph Steiner in the late 1920’s.  Adherents believe that not only the vines are impacted by phases of the moon but, even more surprising, that the finished wines themselves are also influenced by celestial conditions. What this means is that proponents claim certain times of the month are best for bringing out qualities within the wines. The four aspects of influence are divided into the categories of flavorful “fruit,” aromatic “flower,” and tannic “root” or “leaf” (all those planty adjectives).

Not all biodynamic growers are convinced about the sky-palate connection, but most agree that the main reason for embracing the philosophy is the preservation of terroir.  Randall Grahm, founder of the award-winning Bonny Doon Vineyard, adds, “Biodynamic practice seems to enhance root-hair fungi that aid the transport of minerals into vines and make the resulting wines more resistant to oxidation and capable of much longer ageing.”

For more than two thousand years, Chinese have practiced astrological agriculture, and the Farmer’s Almanac still looks to the heavens for guidance. But, while some biodynamic wineries go so far as to stir the lees (the yeasty sediment) during prime lunar cycles to add flavor to fermentation, hard scientific proof lags way behind anecdotal allegations. Many biodynamic success stories are also true of organic farming techniques.

Ages-old organic farming in remote Georgia

Mendocino’s Frey Vineyards is not only America’s first organic winery (1980), it was also the first to be certified biodynamic (1996). Derek Dahlen, Frey’s vineyard manager, acknowledges that the two agricultural practices are very similar in their prescriptions about natural balance, techniques of planting and harvesting, abhorrence of chemicals in both growing and processing, and in their desire for soil improvement and long-term conditioning. What separates the Orgs from the Bios is the celestial component and some esoteric biodynamic methodologies: composting yarrow flowers in a red stag’s bladder, burying a manure-filled cow’s horn, and fermenting dandelion seeds in “cow mesentery” (gut membrane).  Strangely enough, it’s easier to secure and spread the unusual mulch ingredients than it is to stick to a lunar schedule. “It’s challenging sometimes to plan everything around the window, especially when the weather proves uncooperative,” says Dahlen, “but we do our best—including some harvesting under the full moon this past October.”

You already know that October’s is the harvest moon, but there are other agrarian-linked full moons through out the year. They are the sap (March), seed (April), flower (May), Sun (June), Mead (July) and wort (August). As to why such a system of full moon designations might have validity, some believers refer to the gravitational pull of the moon on the earth’s tides and claim that moisture in the soil, or even within plants, may respond to the moon as well. Marion Owen, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul, writes that the moon’s last quarter is the best time to till the soil “because that’s when the water table has dropped to its lowest point,” making the earth lighter and easier to turn over. This is also a “good time to prune plants… so less sap will flow out of the cut ends.” The final quarter is also an auspicious time to graft fruit trees, fertilize, and weed. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to do when the moon is dark. That is the perfect time for planting vines that need strong roots and, according to Owen, “harvesting crops that mature above ground as they are filled with vitality and energy.”

Like wine, beer also has a place in the greater cosmology. Noted Astrologer Heather Roan Robbins told me, “Brewing is yeast-based; we want the yeast to grow, so start that on a waxing moon, preferably the second quarter and in a fertile earth or water sign.”

If you are not a home brewer, there are a few biodynamic commercial imports from Belgium and Australia, including Leirekin Biere Biologique and Glenbar Lager.

Randall Grahm cautions with this caveat: “Biodynamic practice does not automatically mean your produce is superior. You still need to be a competent farmer.” He speaks from experience, having practiced biodynamic growing in California’s Salinas Valley “but never completely overcoming some of the real challenges of farming in an inhospitable environment.”

Historically, few civilizations were more obsessed with celestial observation and time than the Maya so, if you believe that time’s up for all of us at the end of this new year, then don’t worry about planting, harvesting or even tasting. Then again, according to other interpretations of ancient Maya beliefs, the world has been created five times and destroyed four. Providing the celestial signs are auspicious, I’ll drink to that.

by Paul Ross, Drink Me Magazine’s Travel Editor

Essentially, it’s a philosophical clash between the traditional way of doing things and a modern approach. Consumers equate a good glass of wine with the fanfare of foil cutters and corkscrews. For hundreds of years, winemakers have been using cork to seal their precious nectar of the gods, and it has worked 90% of the time, so why the hell should they change anything now? Call it evolution, call it carpe diem, call it whatever you want but the fact of the matter is that as human beings it is only natural for us to want what is newer, better, more exciting … and wine is no exception. Screw cap closures are steadily gaining ground on the traditional cork usage. According to Wine Business Monthly, “the number of wineries using at least some screw caps has risen from a mere 5 percent in 2004 to 34 percent in 2011.”

Of course, there are pros and cons to both types of closure systems, and at the forefront of that debate seems to be the issue of aging wine, especially with red wines over $25.00. According to a trial testing conducted in the 1970’s by Dr. Bryce Rankine (a leading Australian wine academic) concluded that, “the range of wines examined retained their quality with a stelvin closure [screw cap closure] significantly better than with a cork.”

On top of these findings, screw cap closure systems have been proven to be more reliable in a cellaring scenario. Screw cap bottles can be held at any humidity, bottle orientation (say goodbye to keeping bottles on their side to prevent corks from drying out) and are far more resistant to temperature variations. Wines using the screw cap closure do not have to worry about cork taint or oxidation, as well.

In 2002, Argyle Winery became the first winery in the Pacific Northwest to implement the screw cap closure system on their wines. Today all of Argyle’s table wines are sealed under the Stelvin closure and continue to be trendsetters in the industry. It was the shattering of myths that made Argyle ‘cross the line’ from cork to Stelvin closures. Myths such as wine needing oxygen to age and cork being the best seal for wines meant to cellar were proven as false statements. Even notable writers such as Harvey Steiman from Wine Spectator said that, “Few corks are perfect, which is what leads to bottle variation, while screw caps almost always make a perfect seal…Under screw caps, wines age as they would under a perfect cork in ideal cellar conditions.” (Wine Spectator, November 15, 2003).

Hogue Cellars, a large winery in Washington’s Columbia Valley, just recently concluded a thirty month study on the effect of screw caps on their wines and – in a move that did not surprise winemakers or academics, but stunned marketers – found that their wines perform much better under screw caps. They are moving their entire production of wine to be bottled under special Saranex-lined screw cap enclosures.

Clearly the screw cap system has been proven to be successful at containing and aging red and white wines, so now it is just a matter of time before the old mindset of cork superiority falls by the wayside.

By Dustin Oien of TheBlackDoor.com

Wonderfuls are known for sweet taste and health benefits, so Twin Pomegranates Wine has the best of both worlds. The wine produced by Twin Poms has not been pasteurized and does not have artificial ingredients added to change the flavor or color (as some grape wines do). It is said to help fight heart disease, high blood pressure, and free radicals. It also may help with premature aging as well as prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our 100 percent pure pomegranate wine is not a sweet wine,” Nick Davis says. “Since the wine is made from fermented pomegranate juice, it tastes and smells like pomegranate.”

It has residual sugar to balance the large quantities of citric acid in pomegranate juice, but not so much as to taste sweet. In fact, the wine tastes slightly tart. There are a couple other pomegranate wines in the market, but nothing like Twin Poms. Davis says other competitors’ pomegranate wines are sweet while theirs errs on the dryer side.

“Brian and I don’t drink too many sweet wines, therefore, we wanted to produce wine we like and would buy,” Davis said. “All our wines are first of their kind.”

Twin Poms has three varieties: Pomegranate Wine, Sparkling Pomegranate Wine, and Pomegranate/White Wine Blend. They first produced the 100 percent pomegranate wine in 2009. Ten months later, they introduced the pomegranate/chardonnay blend and, last year, the sparkling pomegranate wine was created.

“They are all my favorites but if I had to choose one, it would be the 100 percent pomegranate wine. It has an incredible amount of pomegranate character,” Nick Davis says.

It is a “virtual wine company,” so their wine is made by a winemaker at a custom crush facility in San Luis Obispo. They harvest their grandfather’s pomegranates in Madera, then transport them to San Luis Obispo for processing.

Once the wine is produced, bottled and labeled, the Davis’ then sell and market it in the Central Valley. After making their first batch, they approached Save Mart Supermarkets and were given the opportunity to sell Twin Poms in twenty two stores.

“Our wine sold so well, Save Mart told us they want to expand distribution into all their Save Mart stores and since it owns Lucky’s grocery too, they wanted to place it in all of Lucky’s too,” Davis said. “After selling wine for 16 months, we now have distribution in 243 stores.”

Davis says in the past couple years many consumers are spending less on wine due to the economy, so they’re able to cut out the middleman and sell the pomegranate wines at wholesale prices in the $10-$12 range.

Nick Davis has a degree in Oenology/Viticulture and Brian Davis’ degree is in Marketing, both from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. The two came up with the idea of pomegranate wine in the summer of 2008 while thinking of how to get involved in the wine industry. Seeing how competitive and saturated the grape wine industry was, the two decided to make pomegranate wine.

Having a family in agriculture helps too; the brothers know firsthand how crops grow, and the challenges involved in agriculture.

“We know what it takes to get ag products to the store shelf where most people unfortunately, have no clue,” he said. “All this helps us connect with our fans on a deeper level.”

Davis says pomegranate wine is nothing like grape wine, but people compare it to grape wine all the time. Many often ask what it tastes like and are pleasantly surprised by its flavor after trying it. Customers even have started experimenting with using pomegranate wine in cocktail recipes.

For more information visit twinpomegranates.com.

by Kim Horg-Webb

Bodegas Grant is located in El Puerto de Santa Maria, southwest of Jerez on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. El Puerto is best known for its Fino and Amontillado sherries, as a coastal town is ideal for producing these fresh and delicately-profiled wines. A bodega’s vicinity to water creates a heartier flor – a layer of flowerlike yeast on the top of the wine – within the barrel to protect the wine from oxidization, maintaining the wine’s intended delicacies.

Grant’s fino, called “La Garrocha,” is distinctly floral, with bright meyer lemon and sea air on the nose. The palate grows in fresh fruit character for just a moment, before turning dry and  briny with just a touch of peach blossom to finish. It shows amazing balance between freshness, acidity and oxidation; its delicate playfulness makes me wonder if that’s why it is named after the dance– la Garrocha.

By Amy Murray of Cask SF

Viticulturists and soil go together like cats and catnip. They need to feel it, grind it up, smell it, taste it, and analyze it endlessly. And they have good reason: while no one has been able to prove it chemically, try convincing yourself that you can’t taste the white chalk in Champagne from the limestone vineyards, the volcanic rocks in a Sicilian wine, the big rocks in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the dollar bills in a Napa Cabernet. Chemistry, poetry, and cynicism aside, the structure of the soil is the most important factor in whether or not a grapevine is going to be successful. And when we talk structure in soil, we’re talking about water retention. A layer of clay will keep rain close to the surface. Sandy and loosely packed soil does the opposite, channeling the water away quickly and forcing rootstock to reach thirty feet down. Slate or limestone stress the vines by forcing roots to break cracks in them in search of water. Yes, you want stress — that’s what gets the most concentrated flavor out of grapes. Don’t like your dirt? Some folks try tilling, adding limestone, even blasting with dynamite, all in an effort to tailor the soil’s characteristics.

After tackling the soil, it’s time to plant some roots. Not intact vines, but just roots — all thanks to a six-legged pest called Phylloxera. In the 1860’s, some crazy Frenchman decided he wanted to experiment with a few American grapevines in France. Unfortunately, some of the bugs joined him for the ride over the Atlantic. Over the next twenty years, Europe saw most of its vineyards die a slow death of yellow, shriveled vines. Concurrently, American winemakers experimenting with French vines (which produce wines far superior to their native American vine brethren) also saw their vines die. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that they figured out the problem: Phylloxera likes to eat the roots of grapevines, but American grape species are immune. Ironically, Europe learned to cope with the foreign pests by grafting their own vines (Vitis vinifera) onto American roots (Vitis rupestris, known as St. George). This solution also allowed for American winemakers to successfully grow French grape varieties in the US. Fun fact: geneticists in the eighties created a rootstock called AxR1 that had one American parent and one Vitis vinifera parent and convinced most of California, Washington, and Oregon to plant vineyards with it. Billions of dollars were lost when they realized that the rootstock, even as a hybrid of the two species, was not resistant to these nasty little buggers.

Once a vineyard owner has decided on the (hopefully) phylloxera-resistant rootstock, it’s time to pick a grape variety. The vine will be grafted onto the chosen rootstock; if the vineyard is just being planted, this will be done in the nursery. If the grape grower wants to leave the roots and get new vines, then ‘field grafting’ can be done by taping the new vines to the old rootstock. Just getting to the point of grafting takes an exercise in research, chemistry, history and voodoo: one must assess the soil and microclimate to pick a variety of grape… and then the perfect lab clone of said grape that will work best in the vineyard. Grape species are very susceptible to mutation, resulting in countless different varieties, and variations of those varieties. Labs such as the one at UC Davis have been successful in isolating this mutation phenomenon, cataloguing the variations, and making clones of the most desirable variations available to grape growers. These clones come with creative names like 337 and UDC4. At this point you have your vineyard, your dirt, rootstock, and vines. Now the fun begins.

The anatomy of the grapevine presents even more dilemmas over the course of a vintage. It’s important to train the vines right away by arranging the shoots, leaves and grape clusters for the best sun exposure and protection from the elements. Over the course of a few years, some vines will start to look like gnarly old bushes, neat and orderly hedges tied to stakes and wires, or swamp monsters. Another way to combat the sun, wind, and even rain is through proper canopy management (a backyard gardener would call it pruning). Leave too many leaves and the grapes may not ripen, but get too aggressive and there won’t be enough left to perform photosynthesis and ripen the grapes. Pruning can also limit the number of shoots that spring up at the beginning of the season, determining how much fruit you’ll have at the end of the year.

If I could stop the article here, I would… but then we would miss out on the factors that ultimately shape what ends up in the bottle. We’ve discussed
all the things that a grape grower can do to carefully control and choose the exact grapes to grow in order to create a specific style of wine. Unfortunately, disaster seems to strike wine country with a rather high frequency. The plagues of Phylloxera, nematodes, glassy-winged sharpshooters, and moths can take down an entire region in one vintage. Even fire presents issues for a vineyard. In 2008, massive wildfires in Northern California blew smoke over a large portion of Sonoma’s Pinot Noir vineyards. ‘Smoke taint’ became an immediate issue, with a lot of the area’s prized pinots tasting like the burnt acres surrounding them. After trying chemical wizardry to extract the eau de campfire, a lot of Sonoma wineries just ‘declassified’ their wines, putting them into lesser labels and selling them off at a discount.

Rain can also break a vintage. Rains early in the spring help to wake up the vines and convince them to bud and flower. However, rains in the middle of
the summer can cause vineyards to turn into a moldy, rotten mess. Rain during harvest plumps up the grapes, making watery wines or, worse yet, splitting the grapes and introducing bugs and bacteria. Wind seems like a natural fix for all that ails a rain-drenched vineyard, but too much blows blossoms and clusters off the vines and rips vines from their training (vineyards in Australia utilize huge eucalyptus trees as windbreaks). Hail, common in Northern Italy and parts of France, can sweep through a week before harvest and literally bring down the entire crop. It would seem that sun is all good for vineyards, but that’s not the case. Grapes and leaves can sunburn, turning unripe grapes into shriveled green berries. The 2010 vintage in Northern California was a prime example: the cool vintage forced grape growers to prune away a lot of the leafy canopy to maximize sun exposure for the grapes, and an intensely sunny heat wave in August reduced the exposed fruit to a sunburned waste of California raisins that no one wanted to eat. No one was dancing.

From bottom to top, the anatomy of the modern grapevine is affected by soil, roots, vine clones, and disaster avoidance. The laundry list of things that
can go wrong reads like a list of biblical plagues … and to think that we’ve brought a lot of them upon ourselves with experimentation, replanting, and
environmental impact. The next time you’re talking to a winemaker or visiting a tasting room, just ask for their opinion of this year’s vintage, or whether or not their Cabernet Sauvignon is clone 337; not only will you sound like a smart-ass, but you’ll be opening up a can of worms.