Sláinte

Moist, heavy clouds sit haughtily on crags above the moors. A rocky beach is littered with dark green sea-weed, washed ashore by the rough, black sea. A dark city of red brick and grey stone stands stalwart against the wind and rain, a warm pub being the only comfort from the cold and damp. Thick cattle move lazily over fields of emerald verdure. A broken castle is torn apart by the thistle and covered by the yellow-flowered gorse. This is the land of the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher, the ancient Baile Átha Cliath, Temple Bar, the hills of Cork and Kerry, and Giant’s Causeway. This is Ireland.


When people think of this ancient place, they might think of Celtic symbols, rolling green hills, tattered castles, or pubs, but few ever think of wine. And there is a good reason – grapes will not grow here! But thousands of years ago, people from this area fashioned a wine in a similar way to their continental counterparts – but fermented their alcohol from honey. They called the intoxicating alcohol mead.


Mead is a delicious drink. Its smell only slightly resembles honey. Rather, it smells more of a mixture between humid, tropical flowers and a cool, damp rum cellar. Its taste is sweet and warm, both smooth and sticky while drinking, but dry in the aftertaste. With only a casual observance of the glass, one could mistake the color and texture for a Chardonnay or other moderately colorful white wine. But one sip would give this wine away as something unique and rare to the palate.


Though the drink is originally from Ireland, it is rarely still found in that country. It is about as rare to find as the famous, highly-alcoholic, home-brewed Poitín. Only the older Irish really recall the days of honey-based wines and moonshine sweetened with honey.


But while the drink is losing its popularity in its homeland, it is gaining prominence in other areas of the world. It is increasingly popular in the Northwestern portion of the United States, where many varieties of honey can be found. For you see, like any grape-based wine, mead can come in a variety of tastes due to the type of flower the honey-bees gathered their nectar from or the fruits that the mead is fermented with or aged with in the barrel. Many new tastes of mead are just now being crafted in areas thick with honey. It is an exciting time for this unique, ancient-yet-still-developing wine – and well worth a taste.

photo; orange honey mead, from Ring of Fire, Homer Alaska

Signs of the Antebellum or the Postpauper?

A grid of two-lane roads serve both as interstate highway and local tractor path between the hot, steamy, relatively poor states of the American South. There are few interstate highways in the South, and a view of the local environs is mostly concealed by tall pines and sycamores – purposefully left in thick bunches alongside the roads either to protect the roadway users from unsightly residences or to protect residents from intrusive “fur’ners”. So the South is best seen from those local two-lane roads, which are sometimes the only choice of conduit between two areas of sizable population.


Imagine yourself driving along those back-woods roads of the Deep South. The sun is punishing the land – the only quenching relief is the shallow, sandy creeks that feed the swamps and lakes. Every now and then a critter crosses the road in front of you, and sometimes an unrecognizable, lifeless creature lays in a mess on the side of the road. Every half hour, you pass through a cross-roads with some old, crumbling buildings. Every hour, you venture into a little town with a few nice houses built from old money and a dilapidated main street with over half of the buildings unoccupied. Signs of economic tragedy are everywhere – a mossy trailer-park, a sun-bleached “for sale” sign, a cemetery with grass growing to the top of the tombstones, a Wal-Mart parking lot full of old, rusty trucks covered with Confederate flags, signs along the roadside telling you to pray to God for better times (or otherwise, go to hell).


Sometimes, these roads seem desolate and hopeless. But every few hours of wandering, you come across a little jewel. Sometimes there is a town that has retained its splendor of a century-and-a-half ago, and then there are a few cities restoring their old downtowns, and then there are the rolling fields of cotton and peanuts and the orchards of peaches and pecans. There is hope in this place. And there is a little secret that only the locals know about – Muscadine wine.


You laugh? How dare you!


I am as serious as the Frenchmen that first tried to ferment this New World grape in Spanish Florida five-hundred years ago. It is a grape unlike anything that Europeans had ever seen - its vines withstood the rot and fungus that infected all of the European varieties that the French and Spanish first tried to cultivate.


But though it was first cultivated by Europeans, this wine’s personality is clearly Southern. Its drawl is sweet and soft. It makes one think of easy times and cool nights watching the moon’s reflection on smooth water. Sounds of Savanna’s riverside quay, Charleston’s market, Mobile’s port, North Carolina’s tobacco fields and Birmingham’s iron mines echo through the mind with one sip of this sweet nectar. Its rich, sweet smell calls on one to remember Southern food – sweet tea, sweet potatoes, collard greens, fried okra, fried chicken, pulled pork, and corn bread, while also presenting a hint of that sweet, musky smell of an old, cold French cellar where distilled Cognac is aging in oaken barrels.


It is an adventure in itself to find one of the few little wineries that make Muscadine wine. As far as I know, there are currently eight in Alabama (mostly in the hill-country of the northern part), one in the southern, least-populated part of Georgia, a few in the northern part of Florida, and quite a lot in the Yadkin Valley area of North Carolina and Virginia. If you happen to find yourself wandering through one of these areas, I highly recommend capturing the essence and hope of the South with a glass of cold blush or white Muscadine wine.

Photo: Carlos, white Muscadine, from Chautauqua Vineyards, Florida

O, Canada!

Very few people think of Canada when they think of wine. And though most of Canada is land better suited for wheat, rhubarb, animal grazing, boreal forest or muskeg, there is a hidden valley in Western Canada that produces some of the best wines in the world.

This valley is one of those little miracles of nature. It is just far enough away from the ocean to be dry, but it is close enough to stay temperate throughout the year. Mountains block the arctic winds from freezing the area too thoroughly in the winter, and a natural lake system gives the land enough ground-water for orchards and vineyards. The first settlers of the valley from a European descent quickly noticed the area’s grand ability to bear fruit. But it was only a few decades ago that farmers began to plant grapes.

The grapes, especially (but not exclusively) those of a white variety, make some of the most delicious wine on earth. Anything from Merlot to Sauvignon Blanc to Pinot Grigio will grow in this valley. But this writer’s favorite pick of the region is the Pinot Blanc.

The Pinot Blanc is an in-between grape, and therefore, rarely anyone’s favorite. It smells of fresh, spring-green flowers, but the scent is not as developed and classical as a Riesling. When you breathe it in, you breathe in a cool breeze on an early spring evening. Its golden color is neither dark nor light – but that perfect tone that glistens with its own incandescence when condensation has just begun to stick to the sides of your glass. It has the acidity of a Chardonnay that grabs the tongue, but it is light like a Sauvignon Blanc, refreshing on a hot summer evening.

This poor grape is highly understated. It can go with so many foods and so many situations, but it never grabs the taster. It only soothes and fits with your mood – it aims to please like a desperate lover. And like a desperate lover too malleable to your whim, you will cast her aside after one bottle.

I know you.

But if you will only have one bottle of this perfectly suitable wine, you must have a bottle from the Okanagan Valley. The Pinot Blanc here is of such high quality that her simple, agreeable, affable personality might entice you to come back to her again and again.

Photo: Pinot Blanc 2007, Calona Vineyards, Okanagan valley, Canada

The Gypsy of Grapes

If you travel north on US Highway 101 from San Francisco, you will remark upon the cool breeze, the crisp sunshine, the marked contrast between the semi-arid, scrubby, evergreen and brown, Mediterranean flora and the lush, rolling, tall and strong vineyards. You will revel in the beauty of the countryside and the quaint northern Californian towns as you pass through Sonoma County, and then you will notice the terrain begin to change. The fields strewn with small, scrub-brush will turn into short forests as you climb in elevation and latitude – you are seeing the beginnings of the ancient forests of the Northwest. Just here – past Santa Rosa, as you dip into the draws on the north side of Alexander Valley – an interesting little mystery awaits you.

Here, in a few vineyards, an old secret – an old taste - is kept alive. This grape was introduced to America in the early 19th century. Its popularity grew and waned in various locations, and then nearly disappeared. It was kept alive in the Central Valley of California by various horticulturalists – who then experimented on the grape and turned it into a rosé.

But unlike its more popular brother distilled with more sugar and less skin, the wine made of this grape in its pure form, in a region that supports its proper growth, tells a story as mysterious as old European folklore. When you taste wine of this grape, you are immediately thrown back in time – you are drinking the same wine that fortified both Dracula’s Wallachians and the Ottoman Turks before going into battle against one-another. If you enjoy this wine with some prosciutto and bitter cheeses, you are thrown into a small, noisy Sicilian café two centuries ago – you can smell the salty air and dusty walls; you can hear the excited voices and busy cobble-stone street sounds.

The wine tastes strong, tart, and warm. It grabs at the tongue and tells you a story. Though its origins are unknown and its existence is continually threatened by the fickle tastes of Americans, it is not afraid. Its motto is carpe diem, and Latin may very well have been a familiar tongue to it.

And all of this mystery and excitement comes from a grape that grows not two hours north of San Francisco. The grape – should I tell you? – fine, it is the Zinfandel. Not the so-called “white” Zinfandel. It is simply the less popular, less flamboyant original, old-world grape that came over from somewhere around the Mediterranean and now resides somewhere in America. And it patiently waits to take you on a trip back to other lost worlds.

Photo: Francis Coppola, Zinfandel, from California

There’s Good Wine, and Then There’s Table Wine

A cheap, standard, red table wine is a necessary evil for simple, easy dishes like pasta, pizza, or anything else starchy and matched with a tomato base. But the great downfalls of a table wine is the incessant acidity that seems to grapple with digestion instead of aiding it, and the fact that if you drink too much of it, you will wake up with an incredible, numbing head-ache.

One can immediately label themselves a beginner when it comes to enjoying wine by declaring that they enjoy a “nice” wine from certain areas. For, you see, there are certain areas of the globe where a “table wine” is not actually a table wine, but something to be aged and enjoyed. In a cheap French convenience store, for example, a unique, robust, and beautiful wine can be found for less than five dollars. But there are other areas where a “fine” wine is nothing more than an over-priced table wine. I know this reveals my inherent bias and gross ability for the over-arching generalization. However, a word of caution: do not be “that guy” or “that gal” who says that they love a good Cabernet or Merlot from Chile or a good Shiraz from Australia. In my experience, those grapes do not enjoy that environment.

Sure, those grapes grow in abundance in those respective areas. But they do so grudgingly. Their flesh takes on the bitterness of their demeanor, and the juice produced harbors little sweetness, rendering the alcohol too powerful to the tongue and stomach. A certain smokiness bites the back of the throat, and it is called a specific “taste”. It is a common characteristic found in many poorly located wines. South Africa, Chile, Australia, and California all seem to want to force certain grapes to come from their areas – grapes that do not want to be there – and in doing so, create a wine that is angry at the drinker. And yet, most beginner wine-tasters feel comfortable with these types of wine.

My theory is that these grapes, taken out of their native soil, exposed to unfamiliar environs of all sorts, rebel in a standard way. The wine they create tastes the same, regardless of the region. And a beginner, feeling comfortable with the standardized taste, feels comfortable with the familiar – and declare with fervidity that they enjoy these wines the most.

I am not saying that all grape varieties from these places are plain and standard. Far from it! However, I think the places previously mentioned are young at the art of wine as a region, and still have a knack for mass-producing wines that should have never existed in the first place. This being said, that familiar standard taste of the “forced vino” is convenient if found at a cheap price for hot, spiced wine in the winter, a socializer at parties, and, of course, as a cheap accompaniment to a simple, warm, meaty, tomato-based dish of food.

photo; pizza with VEO Grande from Chile

River-chilled Riesling

Since I first tried Riesling at a winery in New York while I was in college, I have adored the grape. It is versatile and able to flourish in many different climates. It is always tangy and sweet – when it is dry, the tang is what bites the sides of your tongue; when it is fermented with more sugars, the sweetness of it tickles the back of your tongue. It is best served chilled, and when it is, it tastes like a sour apple jolly rancher.

One of my favorite Riesling growing areas is Washington. Though the grape is originally from the borderland between Germany and France, it thrives in the Columbia River valley of central Washington. This grape grows up around big, straight pines and hardwoods, it hears the rushing, cold waters of the Columbia River, and it is familiar with the thrilling delight that a warm sun can bring after a chilly night.

Knowing that this grape grows in rugged, scenic land is important when deciding how best to consume it. In all of my research, I believe I have stumbled on the best way to enjoy a bottle of Riesling from Washington. First, you get out of the city. If you live in a city in the northwestern part of the United States, then you already have an advantage, but any city close to a river that runs through a wooded area is fine. Drive out of the city, and get off the highway. Take the smaller back-roads until you find a crystal-clear, shallow, rushing, cold river or creek. Then hike along the river until you find a nice place to start a fire along the banks – preferably someplace where you can get a moderate amount of warm sunshine, but you have a few trees to block the wind.

Now, your first priority once you’ve found the perfect place to enjoy your wine is to make your wine the proper temperature. Take your bottle down to the creek-bed and find an eddy where you can leave your bottle without worrying that it will wash away. Once that is done, start your fire. Once your fire has some healthy, glowing embers and is emitting some real heat, take out the bratwurst you brought, skewer them on the straight stick you just whittled, and roast them in the fire. Once the skin in brown and just beginning to crack, put the brat on a potato-bread bun and put plenty of spicy brown mustard on it. By now, your wine should be chilled. Retrieve your wine from the creek and enjoy it with your brat.

Then enjoy another brat with your second glass.

Just imagine, you are enjoying the same wine and meal that an Alsatian family might have enjoyed on the banks of the Rhine hundreds of years ago. But you are in your own area of the world, enjoying it your way.