The ever elegant DCV Sauvignon Blanc

Ruffle feathers tomorrow. Today, settle in and settle down. Here’s my take on a benchmark-y, stable, classic line-up of wines from California that will break few-to-no balls, bones, habits,  relationships or banks.

Both lines are relevant to my column in today’s Portland Press Herald, wherein I try to loosen the grip of what’s-in-the-glass fetish, and open up the conversation about the true juiciness of wine residing in process. That’s it: Wine is a process, not a product. A living thing, not a lump of money or sense-satisfaction in a convenient tasty-liquid format.

The column is kind of long-winded (big surprise) with perhaps too little payoff, but I felt I needed to write it to set up how I’m going to shift the perspective of future columns somewhat.

Most of it came out of my recent trip to Slovenia and Italy, and several moments of revelation therein. Visiting different winemakers in Vipava, Karst, Trentino, Friuli, and the Veneto, I heard different perspectives and arguments on viticulture and vinification each time: simultaneously, everyone was disagreeing with each other and everyone was right. I wanted them to get together and discuss. I wanted the truth!

But they won’t all get together. So it’s up to me, you, and other interested drinkers to connect the strands. To approach each taste of wine (and/or of life) as if the only important matter is the story, the entire sequence of events and methodologies that led to the wine’s birth, and its ongoing development in bottle, in glass, in mouth, in soul.

Any good Sagrantino di Montefalco is rare, expensive, and requires many years in bottle before its two sides come together. But Montefalco Rosso is the (cheaper) first step: Umbria’s famous grape, blended with Sangiovese and some other stuff. Easier to love, but still emotionally intoxicating. Read all about it…

Fruit, flowers, and spices galore: there’s no better way to welcome spring

I do pull out a “two-night stand” metaphor because for me Muscat drinks like sex, lusty and sweaty with someone new, but you wake up in the morning and still want to hang. Yeah!

We don’t fetter said access (much, at least, anymore) when it comes to non-alcohol arts (literature, film, music) and crafts (hello, Etsy), but with wine and spirits you gotta do what the man says.

In a “control” state such as Maine, with four tiers of legal administration necessary to get a wine to market, you are restricted in what you can drink. A combination of Puritanism (all drinking is bad) and consumerism (one wine is as good as another; it’s all “product”) conspire.

Read on, here, for more. And then, let’s all commit to a little good ol’ pressure-on-our-legislature to democratize the market.

A scrumptious Minervois from Benjamin Taillandier

My most recent Portland Press Herald wine column is the third in a series on “natural” wine. Regardless of your feelings on this category of sorts, it’s growing in importance, and the debates are worthwhile. They signal where wine drinking is going in this country, in this world.

This week I try to focus on what to expect from the tastes of natural wine. What to expect is…the unexpected! That’s the point. Some of the wines taste just delicious, some are…interesting. Which can be great, and still delicious, or not good at all. Just like other wine! Either way, familiarize yourselves with them. Your world will open.

The indigenous Bobal grape makes this Manchuela wine

I’ve met a bunch of people lately who are ordering cases, because they’ve found something in wines fermented with natural (“wild”) yeasts and bottled with either no sulfur or a tiny amount, that tastes like life — like a more vivid, lifelike version of life!

Jean Pierre Robinot’s “Fêtembulles”, one of a growing number of spectacular “natural” wines available in Maine.

I’m undergoing a touch of the ol’ identity crisis, friends. Comes from wearing a hat or two too many. I work in retail, helping to sell wine in a group of stores that focus on local produce, meat, dairy and other products. We work on a small scale, nurturing relationships with many local producers.

In a store in New England, you can’t really do that for wine, but you can try to sell wine whose producers reflect similar values: small-scale, relationship-based, earth-respecting. The thing is,  I also write about wine, hoping to discover more fascinating and true wines, explore what they say about the real world, and try to share these experiences in a spirit of ardent love.

Anyway, the crisis: In retail, any good merchant is out to help the customer, and to do that well you need to be catholic in your tastes, empathic, selfless, non-judgmental. Some wine writers might try to do this as well, but I think it’s a con. I’d rather clearly state my biases up front: less Willy Loman, more the opinionated Jack Black character from “High Fidelity”.

I’ve recently gotten consciously turned on to “natural wines”, and I can’t turn off, or back. I don’t right now know the way to go on selling (or writing about) conventionally made wines, even if they “taste good”, because I’m a foot soldier in some sort of revolution, and I’ve crossed the Rubicon.

(Whether something “tastes good” is actually a lot more complicated than whether it tastes good, if you get me…)

The debates continue about what even constitutes a “natural wine”, but my most recent column in the Portland Press Herald is a continuation of my attempt to discuss it. Call it Part Un of my interview with prominent natural-wine importer Zev Rovine. No matter where you draw your lines, we’re talking about wines that are grown organically (and usually biodynamically), ferment exclusively with their own indigenous (or “wild”) yeasts, and receive either no sulfur at all or a very small amount just before the wine is put in the bottle.

Part Deux is coming soon. As to what the hell I write about after that, since the number of natural wines available in Maine, where most of my readership resides, is on the slim side, I have no idea.

Anyway, there are all kinds of call-outs in the recent press, especially at Gambero Rosso and Intravino. Regardless of where you stand, I think it’s an exciting set of discussions, and most importantly, many wines that are in one way or another allied with the “natural wine movement” are undeniably delicious. They can be strange (or not), they can get funky or play it straight. They are usually exciting. If you care about wine, and if you care about culture and where we’re all heading at this moment in world time, you owe it to yourself to participate in the conversation.

Which, by the way, I’ll pick up again soon in future posts and articles…talk to you then…

In addition to the Rebula, there’s also Ravan (made from Tocai Friulano, or as the Slovenians sometimes call it, Zeleni Sauvignon), and the Wine of Wines, Amfora (made in traditional 3,500-liter qveri, Georgian clay amphorae).

This is singular wine, for real. There is nothing like it anywhere else, because there’s no land like the land of Collio/Brda — it’s the only winemaking region where the climate and soil of the Alps meets the climate and soil of the Mediterranean — and there’s no one like Jean-Michel Morel, the Bordelaise ex-French-Foreign-Legionnaire, who makes Kabaj wines.

Please enjoy these wines, made by and for true adventurers. Thanks to Blue Danube Wine Co., and Devenish Wines in Maine, for making it possible for us to do so.

(There, did I get your attention?)