Old and Classy or New and Sexy?

New season of Mad Ants basketball means a new season of Buckets and Bottles, whether you like it or not. Here's my goal for the year: shorten these bad boys. The problem, though, is that I tend to get on stream of consciousness rants and out pours a 1,500 word article that no one (including me) really wants to read. Let's see if I can stick to my new philosophy. Here we go...

Watching this Celtics-Heat game and seeing the older Boston squad systematically dismantle the younger, sexier Heat reminds me of the difference I'm noticing between last night's Chianti and tonight's Pinot Noir. The C's know all the veteran moves and have all the savvy that the Heat lack, just as the Chianti - made by an ancient Italian winery - shows all the touches of pedigree and class that the California Pinot does not.

I probably sound like a pompous ass commenting on pedigree and class (see how I can rhyme?), but there's truth to what I say. The Pinot - incidentally made by Robert Mondavi - is mass produced and shows no evidence of effort to create quality wine, whereas the Chianti is smooth, complex and made as if it were an artist's chef d'ouevre. The flavors of the Pinot are simple and flabby - cherries, raspberries, smoke, tobacco and leather tasting like they've all been jammed together. The Chianti, however, has flavors that go on for days - the layers of flavors are readily discernible and you could spend ten minutes just picking out the dozens of different flavors.

I say this not to imply that the Mondavi isn't perfectly drinkable, but rather to point out that there is a giant difference between boutique wines that you have to search for and mass-produced and creatively marketed bottles that you can grab for $9 at the grocery store. There's no reason to turn your nose up at a $9 bottle, but on occasion it's worth the splurge to get into a $30+ bottle that's been hand-crafted by a winemaker with years of experience in the trade.

Similarly, while we all get caught up in the hype surrounding the Heat, it's only a fool who gives up on a Celtics team that carries a minimum of four Hall of Fame players who have been honing their trade for many years in the League.

Chardonnay. Great for Lobster.

Another fine Mad Ants win the other day against the Maine Red Claws. We can't seem to beat anyone else this season, but we simply own these guys and they are one of the top teams in the D-League. Perhaps we simply match up well against them, or more likely the Red Claws chronically underestimate us. Assuming the latter, I'd like to discuss a wine varietal that is also often underestimated (and coincidentally pairs perfectly with lobster!): chardonnay.

Too often I hear wine drinkers say, "I am not a fan of chardonnay because they are all too rich and buttery for me." Though many California wineries end up with buttery chardonnays that are loaded with yeast and oak flavors, the grape is actually one of the most versatile, if not the most versatile varietal on the planet. With varied winemaking techniques, chardonnay can be light and refreshing, deep and complex, fruit-forward or even find itself made into a sparkling wine.

To create the butter bombs for which they are famous, California winemakers use three techniques: new oak barrels, malolactic fermentation and aging the wine on its lees. Aging chardonnay in oak barrels is no different than wineries in Burgundy or Washington State; however, by using relatively new oak barrels, Californians ensure that their wines are imparted with a strong oak flavor. By contrast, Burgundian and Washington chardonnays are aged on older oak that will give them a more mellow flavor.

The second technique California wineries use is malolactic fermentation, which is a second fermentation that converts malic acid (which gives some wines a sharper acidity) to lactic acid (which is much softer and smoother). This second fermentation often lends a softer and more full-bodied mouthfeel to the wine. Malolactic fermentation is common in red wines, but its use with white wines depends on the region. Again, many French and Washington wineries use this technique, but in varying degrees.

The final technique used by California winemakers to give their chardonnay its distinctive buttery taste is to age their wines on the lees. Lees are the dead yeast left after fermentation. While most wines are separated from the lees before they are aged, some wines, such as many California chardonnays, are left to age with the lees so that they take on a strong yeasty flavor.

In contrast to California, other wine growing regions do not often use all of the above techniques, though they will use one or two of them. Washington State wineries, for example, use malolactic fermentation but do not often use new oak barrels and do not often age their wines on the lees. As a result, Washington chardonnay typically has a brighter, more fruity taste to it.

Australia also uses some malolactic fermentation, but many Australian wineries use no oak at all on their wines, instead choosing to age them in steel vats. Such chardonnays are marketed as "unoaked" or "naked" chardonnays and with their bright citrus flavors are more similar to sauvignon blanc than to buttery California chardonnay.

While much of this is more than you need to know about chardonnay, the important take-away from this post is that chardonnay is no simple wine. Depending on the region from which your chardonnay comes, you are likely to find a style of chardonnay to fit any meal or occasion. Unoaked chardonnays from Australia (note that I am generalizing the regions here, and you should be able to find unoaked chardonnay from every chardonay-growing region in the world) are great for warm summer evenings, and even rival vinho verde in their refreshing qualities. Rich and buttery chardonnays from California make for great food pairings with white-sauce dishes. Washington and Burgundian chardonnays, with their soft mouthfeel and bright fruit flavors often pair very well with salads.

If you are one of the many winedrinkers who underestimate chardonnay, take my word for it and crack a few bottles from different regions. It may take a few tries to experience all of the different types, as wineries using malolactic fermentation and aging their wines on the lees will not mention this on the label. Unoaked wines, however, will often shout loudly about it, so you can either read the labels yourself or ask the wine steward or sommelier for an unoaked bottle.

Spring day means Vinho Verde!

It's game day in Fort Wayne - Mad Ants v. Maine Red Claws - but what's really important is the sunny 60 degrees that is going on outside. I like to think of myself as fairly hardy when it comes to winter weather, but Fort Wayne winters are particularly tortuous. Needless to say, today's sunshine is a welcome respite.

So, with the sun beaming through my office window, I want to talk about a great warm weather wine - Vinho Verde. Although its name literally means "green wine", it can actually be a red or a white wine, with whites made from Albario, Loureiro or Trajadura grapes being the best representatives of the class. Rather than referencing the color of the wine, "green" refers to the relatively young age at which these wines are made to drink - typically within the first year after bottling. As a result of their youthfulness, vinho verde wines have a very light and fresh taste that works well as an aperitif on a summer day (or on a 60 degree day that feels like summer because it's been 5 months since you've seen the sun).

In addition to being a great tasting wine, it doesn't hurt that vinho verdes are quite inexpensive, with most bottles falling in the $8-12 range. My favorite bottle is from Broadbent, a widely available bottle that retails for around $11. The highly level of acidity and the bright citrus flavors of this wine are perfect for grilled lime chicken and fresh summer vegetables, like radishes and cucumbers. Combine this wine with that meal, add a sunny day and some friends on the patio and you've got a great thing going on.

Not my usual detail for a blog, but vinho verde's simple pleasures aren't cut out for a long-winded explanation. Simply wait for the sunshine, pop a cork (or twist a screw) and enjoy. In the meantime, I'm going to go sit in the sun for a few minutes before I head over to get ready for tonight's game.

Nuts and Bolts. Nuts and Bolts.

Mad Ants down by 1 with the ball and 1:30 left in the game. Rob Kurz drives the lane and gets hammered. No call. Sean Sonderleiter reaches in on the rebound and is whistled for a foul. In frustration, Rob protests the call emphatically, but in no way challenges the referee directly. Oversensitive referee calls a technical foul. Reno hits the technical free throw, then hits the two free throws from Sonderleiter's foul to go up 4. Momentum is lost and so is the game: Reno 94, Mad Ants 90. It has not been often in the past three years that referees' calls have directly cost us games, but this one was egregious in the extreme.

As frustrating as the call was, there is no better time for me to get a bit more in-depth about SCREW caps. When I last mentioned screw caps, I was discussing how some new world wineries are breaking away from the centuries-old practice of stopping wine bottles with cork by using alternative closures, such as screw caps or synthetic corks. This break from tradition is necessary because corks have a 5-10% failure rate, resulting in lost profits for wineries and higher prices for consumers (to offset those lost profits).

New world wineries, especially those in Australia and New Zealand, have been at the forefront of these changes for several years now because their cork failure rates are on average higher than any other wine-growing region in the world. This high failure rate is not a simple case of bad luck. Wine corks are made from cork trees grown primarily in Portugal and Sardinia, Italy, meaning that European wineries have the first opportunity to choose the best corks. American wineries then get to choose, followed by South African and South American wineries and finally Australian and New Zealand wineries. There are exceptions to this order where individual wineries have negotiated contracts with cork producers, but by and large Australia and NZ wineries get the short end of the stick. Having last pick at cork each year means that these wineries have failure rates hovering at 10% and above.

To overcome this disadvantage, winemakers in Australia began experimenting with screw caps well over ten years ago. While they found that screw caps greatly reduced their wines' failure rates, they ran into a whole new problem: wine consumers have for decades associated screw caps with cheap wines such as Boone's Farm and Thunderbird. Furthermore, they discovered that many consumers considered the romance of pulling a cork out of a bottle to be essential to enjoying a bottle of wine.

While these challenges have been daunting, they have not been insurmountable. The use of screw caps has spread across the New World and is now even discovering limited acceptance by some European wineries. Consumers are also beginning to embrace this new technology, as the confidence of knowing a bottle will not be tainted is beginning to outweigh the romance of using a corkscrew.

Still, there remains much distance to travel before screw tops are widely accepted, and there is still a very large question as to how wines age when under screw. Corks allow for a minute amount of air transfer as a wine ages, contributing to a wine "maturing." Screw caps, however, do not allow any air to pass into the wine, theoretically limiting the amount of maturing that can occur. Still, there has not been enough research done into this question to deliver a firm answer and many wineries appear willing to accept that risk.

I also mentioned another alternative closure - synthetic cork. A short while ago, before screw caps became all the rage, it appeared that synthetic cork would emerge as the alternative closure of choice for wineries. It was thought to have none of cork's failure issues, while still maintaining the romance of popping a cork. As time has passed, however, synthetic cork has proven to be more susceptible to wine taint than previously thought and consumers have been averse to plastic in their wine bottles.

With synthetic corks on the way out, and with more wineries adopting screw caps in lieu of natural cork every year, it appears that wine consumers will have no choice but to discard their prejudices against screw caps and learn to love twisting a bottle open instead of uncorking it.

As for me, I am going to get over my griping against the officiating and unscrew the cap on a bottle of appropriately named Bitch wine, a grenache from Australia.

Old Vines and an Old Zag

Although the season has not gone exactly as planned, we had a welcome development the other day: Dan Dickau - he of the floppy hair and Gonzaga pedigree - signed with the D-League and we promptly traded Kyle McAlarney to the Springfield Armor for Dan's rights. Certainly Kyle was a favorite of our front office - a great kid and a mean 3-point shooter - but Dan is a floor general who can control the tempo of the game and has great court vision. Add in the veteran savvy that he has picked up over the course of 6 NBA seasons, and he has just the combination of skills we need to make the best of this team's talents. Sure enough, the first two games he started were decisive Mad Ants victories, coming in back-to-back games against the Erie Bayhawks.

In honor of Dan's arrival, I grabbed a bottle of 2006 Old Vine Zinfandel from the Klinker Brick Winery in Lodi, California - www.klinkerbrickwinery.com - at my new favorite bottle shop, Belmont Beverage, for about $16. The significance of this bottle is certainly not the Brick in the winery's name - which would be much more suitable if I was talking about our 2007 center, Larry Turner, instead of Dan. Rather, I chose this bottle because Dan's veteran savvy on the basketball court can be analogized to the complex characteristics that grapes grown on old vines contribute to a wine.

"Old vine" is a term used on wine labels to convey to the consumer that the grapes used for the wine were grown on mature vines. Most grape vines can live for 120 or so years, with their yields declining after the first 20 years. These declining yields make for not only smaller numbers of grapes, but smaller berries and fewer clusters, meaning more concentrated flavors, sugar and color. True to form, wines made from old vines are unbelievably good: they are rich and complex and make you feel like you should be chewing your wine instead of drinking it. Of course, less grapes per plant means less bottles produced means higher prices for you, so do not expect to pay less than $15 or so for old vine wines.

There are exceptions to that rule, and therein lies the problem with old vine wines: there are no legally defined specifications to determine what an "old vine" is. While most wineries seem to apply that term only when their vines are 50+ years old, certain shrewd (unscrupulous?) wineries have harnessed the growing consumer enthusiasm for old vine wines and have begun to apply that term to wines that are from significantly younger vines and do not have old vine characteristics. Unfortunately, as consumers we do not have many protections against purchasing these faux old vine wines. The best tips I can give are to 1) avoid large wineries with sophisticated marketing departments and 2) if a winery produces two or more zinfandels and they have an old vine zinfandel listed separately in their product line, then you should be safe.

As for the Klinker Brick, it was definitely in the category of Legitimate Old Vine Zinfandel. Deep color, huge nose and a finish that seemed to carry on for days. If you want to get a feel for old vine zinfandel at its best - and at an affordable price - this wine is a great option.

Cold as Ice

Another loss the other night to Rio Grande Valley. Like Iowa, they are unreasonably good, so I was not particularly depressed at the outcome. The rough part of this game, rather, was that a winter storm descended upon Fort Wayne, causing radio stations to say things like, "there is nothing going on tonight that you should be on the roads for. Stay home." Perfect. Thanks for that. Fortunately, we still had quite a few hardy souls who braved the weather to get to the Coliseum to see RGV systematically dismantle us.

Result and crowd aside, the brutal weather inspired me to write about a wine that holds a very unique niche in the wine world: ice wine. Ice wine is a member of the dessert wine family, along with late harvest wines, botrytis wines and an assortment of other wines with a high residual sugar (the sugar left in the wine after fermentation) content. All of these wines are delicious when served as dessert, but ice wine is particularly coveted by wine drinkers.

Ice wine is made when white grapes (often Vidal grapes) are left on the vine until the first hard freeze occurs, sometimes several weeks or even several months after other grapes are harvested. Two major things occur when grapes are left on the vines so long. First, ripening grapes produce sugar, meaning that the longer the grapes are left on the vine, the higher their sugar content. This is why "late harvest" wines are also classified as dessert wines. Second, and more unique to ice wines, the hard freeze causes all of the water in the grape to freeze, meaning that pressing the grapes produces a more concentrated juice that is akin to liquid sugar.

As simple and romantic as that explanation is, the truth is that producing ice wine is fraught with financial peril for the winemaker. If a freeze does not come soon enough, the grapes may rot on the vine, meaning the potential loss of an entire vintage for a winery. Of course, as with wineries that use cork, the risk of loss is passed along to you in the form of outrageous prices for many ice wines. Indignation aside, I believe that ice wines are worth every penny and I will go out of my way to get my hands on them.

Although I have not yet blogged much about wine and food pairing, it is important to highlight my comment from the opening paragraph that sweet wines are delicious when served as dessert. Sweet wines are a great way to wash down a meal, but their sweetness does not make for good pairing with sweet desserts. The combination of residual sugar, naturally sweet alcohol and acidity ends up clashing with the dessert's sweetness and neither the wine nor the dessert will show their best.

Any Port in a Storm

Remember how I said in my last blog that we are 0-6 against Iowa? Make it 0-7. Iowa is good - and by "good" I mean they could beat the Nets and the Bobcats right now. Still, I was expecting us to show a little grit and win at least one of those seven. No such luck. Instead, we now sit at 10-17, hoping to climb back into the playoff picture.

After witnessing our lack of fortitude the past several games, I decided to search for solace in one of my favorite types of wine: Port. Port is a fortified wine, meaning that it has distilled spirits added to it (roughly equivalent to taking a basketball team and adding Charles Oakley). While this sounds like the concoction of an alcoholic chemist, it makes for truly delicious drinking. Here's how: fermentation in wine is the process by which yeast eat sugar, breaking it down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When distilled spirits are added before the process is complete, it kills off the yeast, leaving more sugar than is found in a fully fermented wine and creating a sweeter tasting wine. Corollary benefit: fortified wines also have a higher alcohol content than table wines.

Some common examples of fortified wine are Madeira, Port and Sherry. As with so many other old world wines, these fortified wines are named after their regions of origin: Madeira comes from the Madeira Islands off the coasts of Europe and Africa in the Atlantic, Sherry comes from Jerez, Spain (Sherry is an English bastardization of Jerez), and Port is named after the city of Porto in Portugal (get it? Port? Clever).

New world wineries, however, do make wines in these styles and typically refer to their wines as Madeira, Sherry and Port. There is a vociferous debate surrounding whether new world wineries should be able to label their wines as such: the European Union states that only products from those regions can carry such labels, but common practice tends to ignore those rules. While the debate carries real significance for the marketers of those wines, it is purely academic for you, the wine drinker. Good Port is good Port, regardless of its origin; I have had great bottles come from not only Portugal, but also from Australia and the U.S.

When buying a port, you will see several different descriptors on the bottles, the most common of which are Tawny, Ruby and Vintage. Tawny ports are aged in barrels, which exposes them gradually to oxygen, resulting in a brownish tint to the wine. Further, contact with the wooden barrel gives Tawny Ports a slight nutty flavor. Tawny Ports are also slightly sweeter than most other forms of Port. Barrel-aging is a very expensive way to make wine, so be prepared to spend a bit more money for Tawny Port.

By contrast, Ruby Port is aged in stainless steel and concrete containers. This is great from a cost-savings perspective - cheap production methods for the winery make for inexpensive and accessible wine for you - but steel and concrete do nothing to enhance the character of a wine. That said, Ruby Port can still be a very enjoyable drink with great Port characteristics and I do not mean to turn you off to it.

The third common descriptor found on Port bottles is "Vintage Port." With table wine, all of the grapes in a wine were from a given year, or vintage. Port houses (the accepted term for Port wineries), however, often combine wines from different vintages. This is not a bad thing at all, but rather ensures consistency in a house's product from year to year. In years where exceptional weather creates fine grapes (roughly 3 times per decade), Port houses will declare a vintage and will create port from grapes harvested in that year alone. The rarity of vintage years, and the resulting scarcity of Vintage Port, means that you will pay handsomely to get your hands on these wines (I do economics like Adam Smith).

The bottle I chose the other night was Warre's Warrior (www.warre.com), from Portugal, which I found for about $18 at Belmont Beverage. Readers around the country should be able to find the Warrior at most upscale wine shops. Fun fact: Warrior is the world's oldest brand of Port, having been shipped under that label since the 1750's. While wine snobs would scoff at me for saying this, almost all Port tastes nearly the same to me: there is usually a plummy flavor that dominates, combined with spices and chocolate. The differences I find are in the levels of sweetness, intensity of flavor and length of finish, all of which the Warrior delivered on. Definitely a bottle that I would drink again.

For those of you open to exploring the wine world, Port is a great avenue to take, and the Warrior is a solid starting place. On the same side of that token, if any of you are looking to infuse your basketball teams with fortitude from external sources, Port is also a good option.