“Corked” Wines May Become Extinct
If you’ve ever taken that first sip of wine, whether cheap plonk or hoity Bordeaux, and gotten a mouthful of something that tastes like moldy gym socks, you’ve come unpleasantly up close and personal to the affects of 2,4,6- trichloroanisole or TCA, for short.
TCA is a chemical that occurs naturally in some cork trees and is responsible for the moldy gym socks aromas and flavors imparted to wine by TCA-contaminated corks. Estimates of “corked” wines range from one to five percent, which may not seem like such a big deal until you pop that wine you’ve been saving for a special occasion and find that it tastes like something that crawled out of your old high school PE class.
For years, cork producers have tried to sniff out TCA-contaminated corks by, well, having them sniffed by sensitive-nosed humans. With as much as a five percent failure rate, it’s not surprising that winemakers and wine consumers sniff at that process.
This summer, however, should see a new automated system that guarantees 100-percent accuracy in discovering TCA-tainted corks. It’s called DS 100+, developed over several years by the California-based Cork Supply Group, which claims it can sniff out TCA in cork at levels of one part per trillion, well below the amount that can be detected by humans.
The system will first be used on high-end wines and as its capacity is improved, be gradually offered to wine producers at all price points.
Even More Benefits From Drinking Red Wine
It may be too soon to label red wine “health food,” but research continues to show that health-conscious hedonists can feel better about putting down that kale and picking up that (glass of) Cabernet.
The antioxidants and tannins in red wine have already been touted as improving cardiac health, fighting cancer, protecting against Alzheimer’s Disease and lengthening lifespans. And now comes word of studies in the Netherlands and Belgium that indicate red wine (and chocolate!) can increase the diversity of microbes in your gut, something that correlates to better overall health and can also help fight mood disorders, obesity and other afflictions.
While the results of the two studies may be cheering to millions of wine drinkers everywhere, the details may be a little TMI for many of us. Researchers determined the microbe diversity levels in thousands of study volunteers by analyzing their. . . poop, which the volunteers froze and then had transported to the lab.
Fruits, vegetables, yogurt, buttermilk, tea and coffee were also shown to increase gut bacteria diversity, while the study indicated that fatty and carb-heavy foods and antibiotics decreased microbial diversity. So you really can say that red wine and chocolate are good for you.
Two Indicted for French Laundry Wine Theft
A pair of California men who allegedly made a very un-merry Christmas for the Napa Valley’s famed French Laundry restaurant by stealing 76 bottles of rare and expensive wines have been indicted on money laundering and transportation of stolen goods charges.
Alfred Georgis of Mountain View and Davis Kiryakoz of Modesto were arrested by federal agents some 16 months after they were said to have broken into Thomas Keller’s Michelin-starred restaurant on Christmas Day, 2014, when the restaurant was closed for renovations and its alarm was turned off.
Federal investigators not only fingered the dynamic duo for the French Laundry burglary but also for the thefts of high-end wines from a San Francisco wine shop and Silicon Valley steakhouse. Many of the more than 250 stolen wines, which had a total value of some $300,000, were transported to North Carolina and sold to a local collector, who reportedly paid the pair $57,000 in cashier’s checks and wire transfers, all under the $10,000 limit that would trigger scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Most of the French Laundry wines, which included multiple bottles from such stellar producers as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Screaming Eagle, were recovered and sent back to the restaurant. On the other hand, the San Francisco and Silicon Valley businesses weren’t so lucky.
If convicted, Georgis and Kiryakoz could face sentences of up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, meaning their Christmases will not be very bright for quite awhile.
Devastated Japanese Wine Region Hopes for a Comeback
When you think of a pleasant wine country vacation do you think bucolic back-country roads, soothing rural atmosphere, abundant natural beauty and a temporary refuge from the world’s problems? Or do you think earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown and enough radiation to make an entire region glow in the dark?
If the latter choice doesn’t quite set you racing to make travel plans, you can only imagine the Herculean task facing the folks at Akiu Winery in the Japanese prefecture of Miyagi, which since 2011 has been battered by 9.0 and 7.1 earthquakes, a tsunami with waves of up to 125 feet, and the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Fukushima, which caused the evacuation of 160,000 people and made portions of the region uninhabitable.
Still, the Japanese are giving it a shot, with millions of dollars of private and government money poured into the area to bring back its moribund foreign and domestic tourist business. Though Japanese soils aren’t considered ideal for the production of high-quality vinifera grapes, there’s nonetheless a boom for locally produced wines, which in the case of Akiu will include estate-grown Merlot, Pinot Gris and Gewurztraminer.
Winery and government officials hope Akiu will be a major part of that effort, helping to revive not only the area’s tourist industry but restaurants and other local businesses that have yet to recover from the string of natural (and unnatural) disasters. Whether images of neatly planted vineyards will replace those of a nuclear moonscape is a question that will take some time to answer.
It’s a Wasp Eat Bug World Out There
Pest control is an important part of the wine business. And we don’t mean dealing with hordes of drunken tourists staggering around winery tasting rooms.
We do mean the kind of pests that can decimate a vineyard, like the phylloxera infestation that almost destroyed the French winemaking industry in the mid 19th Century. Thankfully, phylloxera is now no more than an occasional annoyance, but Mother Nature can be a crafty old biddy, and there are plenty more vineyard-unfriendly pests where phylloxera came from.
But instead of blasting these new-found pests with a variety of industrial-strength poisons, some Napa Valley wineries are turning to Good Mother Nature to keep Bad Mother Nature in check.
Case in point, mealybugs, which cause the devastating leaf-roll virus. When spraying insecticides wasn’t effective, the vineyard manager for Spring Mountain winery hooked up with a UC Berkeley etymologist to release various insects that preyed on mealybugs into Spring Mountains vineyards. A parasitic wasp called anagyrus did the trick. It lays its eggs in the body of the mealybug, and when they hatch, the baby wasps eat the bug from the inside out, sort of like a bad Hollywood horror movie.
Or take one of the latest scourges of the valley’s vineyards, the glassy-winged sharpshooter. It causes Pierce’s Disease, which blocks the flow of water in a vine and eventually kills it. There is no know cure. Bluebirds, on the other hand, hate the glassy-winged sharpshooter and will eat them up as if they were five-star dinners at the French Laundry. So Spring Mountain installed more than 1,000 birdhouses throughout their vineyards to give bluebirds a home, and they’ve been gobbling so many of those nasty glassy-winged pests they’re no longer much of an issue.
Of course, bluebirds don’t have much of an affect on those hordes of drunken tourists. But we can always hope.
Trump Wines As Polarizing as The Donald
There’s no more controversial figure in politics these days than Donald Trump. And that controversy apparently extends to wine.
Even though he famously doesn’t drink, Trump does in fact own one of the largest wineries on the East Coast, called not at all surprisingly, Trump Winery. It’s part of a 2,000-acre estate that includes a hotel and some 200 acres of vineyard in the hills of Virginia not far from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in the town of Charlottesville.
Producing sparkling wine, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Rosé of Merlot, and a pair of red blends, the winery draws on Virginia’s extensive history of winemaking that dates back to 1607. Reviews of the wines are mixed, though generally better than one might expect. But some local restaurants are keeping Trump wines off their wine lists, afraid of bringing the controversy of the presidential race into the dining room.
As Charlottesville sommelier Erin Scala was quoted as saying, “a welcome table is not one that pours liquid politics down your throat.”
On the other hand, Virginia Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry Todd Haymore praises the winery for “attracting visitors from across the country” and “helping the cause” of making Virginia the East Coast’s prime destination for wine and wine tourism.
“Liquid politics” or “tourist attraction?”
Perhaps it will take an election to decide if Trump wines will make America grape again.