Wine Community Pitches In for Haiti

This story of help sent to Haiti after the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake sets itself apart indeed. Design Diva Lavinia Campo, my High School bestie and the muse for my Meet Gewürztraminer – The Diva - September 7, 2011 blog post connected me to the I Am Haiti Art Scarves Project in late October.

At the behest of some concerned friends who implored him to reach into his network for donations to an orphanage in the town of Maranatha that was destroyed in the earthquake, documentarian Kevin O’Hanlon, founder of Films on Artists (follow @FilmsOnArtists on Twitter) took a unique approach to front line aid. In collaboration with Haitian born artist Richard Laurent, he brought paint, brushes and canvases to Haiti and encouraged the children of Maranatha School and Orphanage to paint the future they envisioned. Thus, in their very first artistic creations, they brought their innermost desires out front and took their lives into their own hands. Soon after, some of the works were sold at Kevin’s Rogue Space Gallery at the Chelsea Fine Arts Building in Manhattan to finance the reconstruction of the orphanage. That was just the beginning.


Kevin’s continued efforts have brought a great deal of attention to this project, including that of Frank and Caroline Fleischer, founders of the non-profit Franca Art and Fashion. Caroline, CEO of fashion industry consulting firm Talents For Fashion, envisioned a line of luxury scarves featuring the children’s artwork. Frank is the CEO of major textile manufacturers TMS Fashion, whose client list includes ESPRIT and Topshop. The scarves, which are digitally printed on the finest cashmere, will go on sale this Friday evening at the I Am Haiti Art Scarves reception in Chelsea (details below). They will sell for $100.00 apiece. Fifty percent of the proceeds – 100% of the profit – from the sale of the scarves will continue to sustain the Maranatha School and Orphanage.

Friday night’s event is sponsored in part by two generous wine providers so you can sip and shop in style:

South Pacific Wines LLC
For ten years, New York-based Kiwis Mei Fong and Michael Carr-Smith have brought a lovingly curated boutique selection of New Zealand wines into the United States from the regions of Hawkes Bay and Marlborough, with the recent addition of a Pinot Noir from the world’s most southerly wine region, my beloved Central Otago. The white wines, including a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and a barrel fermented Hawkes Bay Chardonnay from the flagship Crossroads label and the Unoaked Chardonnay and Pinot Gris that form the Curious Cove line, will be featured at this Friday’s event. Expect clean, crisp wines that have ripe fruit character and beautiful balance – even the 2007 Unoaked Chardonnay drinks like fresh juice! The author is proud to be an independent sales representative in Brooklyn and Manhattan for this importer. Contact veronique@southpacwines.com for retail and restaurant inquiries.

Available at Harlem Vintage in Manhattan and Zap Wines and Spirits on Court Street in Brooklyn.

Follow @CrossroadsWines on Twitter

Bouké Wines
Fellow WSET Diploma of Wine and Spirit graduate Lisa Donneson DWS founded Bouké in 2007 “to satisfy the tastes of an emerging generation of American wine drinkers who share her belief that wine should be an everyday pleasure for the senses” – a woman after my own heart! I had the pleasure of stocking her wines at my erstwhile Stapleton, Staten Island store, including her full bodied, beautifully balanced red blend and the slightly effervescent, super pretty Pérlant. She is providing a mixed case of her white and rosé wines for the evening. What a treat for all of our deserving I Am Haiti Art Scarves supporters!

Available at Harlem Vintage in Manhattan and Red White and Bubbly in Brooklyn. Find more stockists at www.boukewines.com

Follow @Boukewines on Twitter

I Am Haiti Art Scarves Introduction Reception
Franca Gallery
526 West 26th Street, #417
Chelsea, NYC
Reception
Friday December 9, 6-10pm
More Documentary Screenings and Events
Saturday December 10, noon - 8pm
Sunday December 11, noon - 8pm

For more information:

Visit http://iamhaitiscarves.com/
Press/Media Contact:

Marie Theodore 646.529.9349/ MarieDrivenpr@gmail.com

Follow @MarieDriven on Twitter
http://Mariedrivenonthescene.com/
For General Entry:
Teamexecutionpr@gmail.com

Meet Pinot Grigio/Gris - The Gemini

Everyone gets Pinot Grigio. This side of the Gemini's personality is very easy to understand, there are no surprises. As easy as he is to understand, he is just as easy to find. He's everywhere you are. Button-down shirts, sweater vests, khakis, clean shaven face, argyle socks, oxfords - that's a Pinot Grigio look. Just a regular guy. Perhaps he's a great looking regular guy, but you could definitely bring him home to meet the parents.

You can’t miss the evil twin - Pinot Gris. Same guy, different guise. Pungent cologne, bright red jeans, loud, artistic and bizarre - nothing you'd expect from his laced up alter ego! He and Sauvignon Blanc would get along well in theory but in practice they don’t blend! That would be far too much insanity in one room.

Really they are simply two names for the same gray-hued grape - Grigio in Italian, Gris in French, both mean gray. But as they've evolved in their respective homelands, they've evolved into two very unique styles of wine. So unlike Syrah grown in Southern France and Shiraz grown in Australia, the two incarnations of the gray Pinot are very different from eachother indeed.

In northeastern Italy, Pinot Grigio is the sweater vest. It produces light, crisp, clean wines that don’t offend. We call these kinds of wines “crowd pleasers”. From the Tre Venezie comes massive amounts of Pinot Grigio for easy drinking There are notable exceptions from Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige, smaller parts of the region that take pride in bringing the best out of the variety – floral notes on the nose, minerality on the palate – great structure in general. Nonetheless, they are true to their argyle socks.

In Alsace, the eastern French sliver of land isolated from the rest of the country by the Vosges Mountains, Pinot Gris has both his septum and labret pierced. The dry styles are funky with more body than most white wines of the world – in a way they remind me of extra virgin olive oil in both texture and aroma. The sweeter styles are rich, aromatic and complex, a wine geek’s dream indeed. Overall, Pinot Gris from Alsace (known once upon a time as Tokay Pinot Gris or Tokay d’Alsace) is unlike any other wine experience.

Based on the two benchmark regions, wines produced anywhere else in the world from this variety are named according to the style in which they produce. So you can expect Pinot Grigio from California to be crisp, clean, perhaps more fruity than the Italian version because of the warmer climate, but still simple. These wines are made for the uncomplicated palate, the baked potato set. Then when you see a Pinot Gris from Nelson, New Zealand, you should buckle your seat belt! These wines, like their French contemporaries, are for you food voyeurs who have actually thought about or even ventured a taste of monkey brains… don’t say ewwww!

Pinot Grigio and fried chicken are famous friends, much in the same way that sparkling wine and non-vintage champagne works (and interestingly, some Pinot Grigio does indeed come with a light spritz), the crisp acidity is the perfect foil for this greasy, salty summer favorite. Think potato chips, cheese nachos, over easy eggs – simple, savory, nicely salted, non-spicy, accessible standards.

You must think more gastronomically for Pinot Gris on the other hand. For starters, you can break the rule of white wine with white meat and voyage into the land of the other white meat – pork! Alsace, having been a part of Germany for a period of time, has rich food traditions that mix both cultures into a beautiful pot of proverbial stew. Think sausage with sauerkraut or a pork loin roast with winter vegetables, country or mousse pâté or even souse (braised pigs feet) on a Sunday morning tossed in a vinegar salad with onions and cucumbers, slight pepper. Pinot Gris will handle any of that like a champion for you. For those who don’t partake, duck or game meat give just as much of that rich flavor that hits you in your retro-nasal passages with a funk you hate to love for that Pinot Gris swag.

Your Homework
Your homework for this week and weekend is to try 2 Pinot Grigios and 2 Pinot Gris. Ask your favorite retailer or browse your favorite wine website for wines from the above mentioned regions. Your two Pinot Grigios should definitely be Italian – go for a $10 bottle and get a recommendation on a $20-25 one (please avoid that one overpriced brand for which you only are really paying a popularity fee – you know who you are!). Both of your Pinot Gris can be French, or you can do as Gris does and have an adventure in another part of the world. The thing is when the wine is labeled Pinot Gris its bound to be interesting! Do Tweet your notes to @wineLIFE_, #PinotGHW. Tell us which one was your favorite (please include the wine’s name, vintage and region), how much you paid for it and its best qualities. You can also post notes on the wineLIFE Facebook wall. Don’t you just love these assignments??

Meet Sauvignon Blanc - The Rebel

When I think about Sauvignon Blanc, I remember that guy who went against every imaginable grain. He didn’t play sports or join clubs because it was too normal – he was an individual. If everyone was wearing red that year, he wore blue or black. Instead of a letter jacket, he rocked a

tough leather and perhaps some chains. When all his friends were listening to pop and hip hop, he preferred grunge and painted his fingernails black. A true rebel. Not the boy next door.

When I put my nose into a great glass of Sauvignon Blanc, my reaction is usually “What the funk???” Because it gives you what you wouldn’t expect from a wine – freshly cut grass, green bell pepper, scallions, etc on the nose, and if it isn’t a lower end Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, or something similarly new world, you will be shocked and appalled by the austerity on the palate! And that’s the way he wants you to react when he enters a room. Just like he wasn’t interested in team sports or clubs in school, he’s not for corporate – he owns his own Harley Davidson shop so he can dress however the funk he wants and talk bikes all day. Sancerre, located at the inland end of the Loire Valley in France, is the official homeland of Sauvignon Blanc. It is also grown in Bordeaux, and when blended with Semillon and sometimes Muscadelle (not related to Muscat, Muscadet or Muscadine) it is Graves (pronounced Grahv) the official white wine of the region. Sancerre set the standard for grassy Sauvignon Blanc, that beloved “cat’s pee” swag that true Sauvignon fans look for in their glass. From these wines you can experience citrus flavors, particularly lemon or lemon zest and grapefruit, and they’re invariably bone dry.

On a different vein, Sauvignon Blanc proliferates in the Marlborough region of New Zealand’s South Island, brand new world. More audacity – of all the random places to take root! Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc can be grassy with that cat’s pee vibe as well, but on the palate they take on a distinct passion fruit flavor, with less austerity than their French contemporaries. They’re much more user friendly, in their own rebellious way.

In general, because of characteristically high acidity, Sauvignon Blanc is a great food wine. I like it with fried foods, anything salty or creamy like baked macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, fried clams, fried fish, French fries, eggs benedict – yes, why not have a glass of wine with breakfast, it’s a wonderful way to start a day! Also I love Sauvignon Blanc with dried sausage or cured meats, and semi-soft cheeses (avoid blues, the acidity in those cheeses will clash with the high acidity in the wine).

Your homework for this week and weekend is to drink six Sauvignon Blanc. You are excused from this assignment on Thursday, as September 1 is #CabernetDay, but then you must dive back into your devoirs! Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé (the other Loire Valley Sauvignon benchmark) are highly recommended. Quincy is a less expensive alternative to these, not quite like the authentic article but at least you will be drinking from

the same region at about half the price. Marlborough is also a must. These are ubiquitous and plentiful – shop in the US$13-$18 range, you can almost pick blind because they are so consistent! If you can get a Graves or another white Bordeaux called Entre-Deux-Mers, grab one for a unique experience. Then see what is produced near you. Sauvignon Blanc can pack up and move anywhere to thrive, so you’ll find wines from various US States, Austria, South Africa, Italy, Chile and various other locals in your store or on your fave wine website.

Then just for kicks, treat yourself to a Sauternes. This is the celebrated dessert wine of Bordeaux, the only place in the world famous for making sweet Sauvignon Blanc (blended also with Semillon and Muscadelle). You deserve dessert! Do Tweet your notes to @wineLIFE_ #SauvBlancHW. Tell us which one was your favorite (please include the wine’s name, vintage and region), how much you paid for it and its best qualities. You can also post notes on the wineLIFE Facebook wall. Bottoms up!

...And Wine for All

Wine is universal. Vitis Vinifera, the grape species populated by the many beloved varieties that are made into the wines we enjoy everyday, has a very special and unique power. Unlike with other fruit, wine made from these grapes can give a world of different flavors that seem to have nothing to do with grapes at all!

What I mean is that wine made from, say, pineapples will taste just like pineapples, plum wine tastes like plums, but when Chardonnay grapes become wine, the wine can taste like green apples. Young Pinot Noir can taste like a salad of fresh raspberries, red cherries and cranberries. After a little time in an oak barrel, it can smell like baking spices - cinnamon and nutmeg, perhaps tobacco leaf and cedar, and it can have the flavor of hickory smoked bacon. Sauvignon Blanc can smell like freshly cut grass and green bell peppers, taste like citrus fruit like grapefruit and lemon, sometimes even passion fruit. No other fruit can do that!

So when I say wine is universal, I mean that with all those wonderful possibilities, there’s a wine out there for every palate. Seriously. If for example you enjoy eating grapefruits, and you love lemonade then I would think you should start buying and trying Sauvignon Blancs from around the world. If you grew up in South East Asia eating lychees, star fruit, rambutan and food cooked with ginger and lots of spices, get with some Gewürztraminer (say it with me now: ge-VIRTZ-tra-MEE-ner)

This is not the same as pairing wine with food. While that is a fun and interesting exercise, it does not definitively address the issue of personal taste and palate memory. If the flavors in a wine are familiar to you, then you will better be able to relate to that wine, and so it can serve as an easy go-to for you. Like when I first tasted Chardonnay, I just didn’t get it. Growing up in a West Indian household, I did not eat apples really - certainly not green ones. So I downshifted to White Zinfandel (don’t judge me). Bubblegum! Yes, I’ve had that! Then I shifted back up into the real wine world by trying some Riesling - yeah, tropical fruit flavors. Now we’re talking! Suddenly wine wasn’t alien to me anymore. Soon afterward, I took my first wine class - the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Certificate at the Birmingham College of Food in the UK - and the rest is history.

Drink what you like based on what flavors resonate best in your food life. That is my best piece of advice for your wineLIFE!

How We Select Wine

How do we Select Wine for wineLIFE Wine Shop?

The short answer is that we taste. We’ve tasted every single wine in the store at least once. People bring us wine to taste, and we try them, and based on their cost, we decide whether we can a. stand behind it as a wine of quality and value for money and b. fit it into our growing catalog of wines (gratuitous plug).

The long answer is still simple. In our store, we want to offer our customers a well chosen selection of wines. So we started by categorizing everything we tasted - first just into groupings like white, red, rosé, sparkling, then into grape variety categories. And so evolved our Chardonnay (including a lovely, oaky-buttery number from upstate New York and an Unoaked refresher from Australia), Sauvignon Blanc (including an austere white Bordeaux and a fruity Argentine darling), Riesling (including both sweet and dry versions and a great 3L Bag-in-Box), Pinot Noir (including one great Chilean under $15 that actually tastes great) and Malbec (including one with a few years of age on it) sections. Thus we began filling in other areas - Sparkling wines with simple sweeties, crisp Cavas and a Blanc de Blanc Champagne, Cabernet and Bordeaux Red blends.

We also wanted to support local as much as possible, so we made sure to fit in a strong offering of wines from the North Fork of Long Island and the Finger Lakes. Rounded out with some great Italian reds, which will expand into a World Reds section (because honestly, we’re probably not going to have a Sangiovese section in the store), an international selection of rosés, some Pinot Gris and Grigio and some great stickies, we have a store we can be proud of.

Now if we could just wean our customers off that damned Bitch Bubbly...

Why Wine is Awesome Reason #10 - Travel

In the spirit of my Uses for Cheap Wine series that is evolving through this blog, I’ve decided I should start another series, because just as there are indeed many good uses for cheap wine, there are many reasons why wine is awesome.

As President of the NYC Chapter of Women for WineSense, it is a privilege and duty to make my annual pilgrimage west to Napa Valley, land of our founders. Each spring for the last 3 years, I have travelled to California to celebrate and collaborate with many lovely, successful and fabulous members and officers from Women for WineSense chapters nationwide. Two out of those three years were Grand Events, most spectacular occasions, the second of which I dutifully attended and thoroughly enjoyed even though I was 6 months pregnant with my daughter Ché Elizabeth. Last year, during the height of the economic revolution, although we decided not to have a Grand Event, there was still a congregation, a very important annual summit took place as usual. While many important and serious discussions ensued, wine was poured and vineyards were toured.

The truth is you can travel just by trying wines from different parts of the world. While wine’s character is largely determined by the grape varieties it is made of, there is an undeniable sense of place in almost every bottle - not just in the packaging but in the character of the wine itself. For example, you can take a mini tour of the world by trying a selection of Sauvignon Blancs from different places - visit Northern France, the South Island of New Zealand, South Africa and the North Fork of Long Island all in one week on your tour.

Nonetheless, there’s nothing like the being there in person. Voyaging to the places where wine is grown offers such a unique look at a place you often go to for other reasons, as perhaps in Spain, Chile or California or it can take you to places you wouldn’t otherwise go to at all, such as the Upper Loire Valley and the aforementioned North Fork of Long Island (a sleepy farm area that still pales in comparison to the Hamptons in summer appeal, but is now a fantastic destination for wine touring!). Add the experience of drinking the region’s wines and enjoying the foods that they do best - MAGIC!

Wine has given me both many reasons to travel and the opportunity to enhance my travel experiences by adding in winery and vineyard visits and tasting through otherwise unbeaten paths all over the world as well as very close to home. The great thing is that you can always recapture a little of that by enjoying those wines again later, and the pictures tend to be really awesome when you get back home.

Photos from Previous Women for WineSense Grand Events, Enjoy!

Uses for Cheap Wine #17 - Wine Rack Filler

You LOVE wine! You’re the kind of collector who never has a full rack or wine fridge - you just can’t not drink it! Well, here’s my advice for how to keep your wine indulgence satisfied and still maintain a full rack, because let’s face it, an empty wine rack or wine fridge is NOT acceptable.

On a $500.00 budget:

Take some of your allocations from your favorite California mailing list wineries, perhaps wait until you get your tax refund, and buy:

2 Williams Selyem Pinot Noir @ $54.00 each (or you can split this up into a Pinot Noir and a Zinfandel for more variety, although you would get variety if you got two different Pinot Noirs from WS - the cuvées from different vineyards offer different flavor profiles)

1 Vie Les Amours Syrah @$42.00

1 Anomaly Cabernet Sauvignon $89.00

Treat yourself to a couple of special bottles from the Old World:

1 Chateau Calon Ségur St. Estephe 2005 $90.00

1 Guiseppe Quintarelli Valpolicella $100.00

And then...

you could pick up 4-6 more bottles at your favorite local wine retailer for $45.00 or less TOTAL COST, because the market is abundant with cheap wine, and a lot of it is surprisingly decent!

2 Mia Prosecco, (dry sparkling wine from Italy) $6.99

1 Mil Piedras Malbec, Argentina $8.99

1 OCD Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand $9.99

1 Amour Vin de Pays de Vaucluse, France $4.99

1 Falkensteiner Rieden Zweigelt (dry red wine from Austria) $8.99 for a 1 liter bottle

Total expenditure to fill your rack: $468.95 + tax. And you didn’t even have to buy Yellow Tail!

The truth is there is a lot of flexibility in what you can fill your rack with. Personally, if I didn’t have a toddler running rampant in my apartment, I would do the above, and put all those fabulous pricey bottles on top, reserving the bottom spaces for a revolving supply of good, cheap vino. And no, I don’t let my higher end stuff sit around too long either, because let’s face it, a special occasion can be the evening I come home to a my warm apartment and I’m feeling extra thankful, and then I’m popping the cork on my $89.00 Anomaly Cab to enjoy with leftover Truffle Risotto with Pork and I’m pouring some into my daughter’s sippy cup and mixing it with a little water.

Also, based on the above, you could actually fill the whole rack for $100.00 or less!

My final piece of advice: Always leave one or two spaces open for those unexpected bottles you get as gifts. Whoever said it’s better to give than to received obviously never got anything, and unlike in France, we are happy to accept a bottle from a friend around here!

Epiphany in a Glass

The thing that makes wine grapes so very intriguing is the fact that the wines they become can smell and taste like so many different things in the world - flours and fruit, vegetables and minerals, spices, fur, tar, cedar - the list goes on! No other fruit can claim this talent. In my wine drinking adolescence, I remember how often I’d hear people talk about “buttery” Chardonnay. I had no idea whatsoever what they were talking about. It was a time when I started to question the validity of all these colorful descriptors, started thinking that the aromas and flavors they were talking about were implied - I mean come on, you can’t really smell butter in a glass of wine?! Or for that matter berries, smoke, citrus fruit, tea leaves... stop the nonsense! And then the day arrived when I was sitting in a wine tasting with a glass of California Chardonnay in front of me, thinking to myself “what the heck am I going to write for a tasting note?” I picked the glass up by its stem, pointed my nose downward over the rim and inhaled - “I SMELL THE BUTTER!!” Yes, everyone turned and looked at me, but they all understood my elation - as a wine aficionado, I had arrived.

As my wine education progressed, I learned more about the naturally occurring chemical compounds that create these smells, such as pyrazines that make Sauvignon Blanc smell like green bell pepper (I remember that epiphany well in a glass of Sancerre - it is those same pyrazines that make green bell peppers taste like green bell peppers!), and the lactic acid that makes Chardonnay taste like butter (the same lactic acid that makes butter taste like butter - see the pattern forming?) Not that I had to learn all of these chemicals by name - not that anyone has to learn them. Happily, my epiphanies continue even today, as I discover new things through my many wine tasting (read: drinking) experiences.

Its fun as well to revisit the things that I have discovered in the past, like last night, enjoying a glass of J. Bookwalter’s Subplot No. 22. from Columbia Valley, WA (NV) at Sweet and Lowdown in the Lower East Side and I suddenly felt something hard click against my tooth. I was tickled to find wine diamonds, those tartrate crystals that sometimes form when wine is changing temperature, clinging to one side of my empty glass. They are not common anymore, as most wineries will cold stabilize the wines before releasing (the wines are chilled down to make the tartrates form, and then filtered out and bottled), but they are a naturally occurring phenomenon in wine, and I remember the first time I spotted them myself while tasting a Pinot Gris in one of my WSET lessons. A few years later, I was working in a retail wine shop in SoHo when a woman came in looking very displeased, complaining that there was glass in her wine. The feeling of the little crystal on my tongue took me back to that memory, and although she would not believe me when I tried to explain, I felt good at least that I could offer an explanation. What can I say? I guess one woman’s epiphany is another woman’s fright.

I’m looking forward to my next epiphany, though its becoming harder, as I have discovered so much already. Time to really get my feet stained!

Real First Fruits - Southern Hemisphere Harvest Preview

Wine drinkers are often taken of guard when they find Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand on the shelves of their favorite stores vintage dated in the current year.  The simple explanation is that by April, vineyards in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Chile and Argentina have finished their harvest.  So while Northern Hemisphere wineries rush to market in November with the first wines of the vintage - Beaujolais Nouveau from France, Novello from Italy, even the North Fork of Long Island gets in on the act with Macari's Early Wine - the kiwis are shipping their first Sauvignon Blanc to US shores.  And unlike those rushed first fruit bottlings, these wines are finished, and usually quite delicious.  

I ran a Southern Hemisphere Harvest Roundup in April 2007 while I was writing for The Nibble and I'm feeling the urge to do it again - oh boy!  

Come back next Monday for the report!