On occasion I write purely for the wine industry, and today I'd like to address the role of social media in the wine industry. Whenever I write these kinds of things, I like to remind people that by day I run a company called HYDRANT that gets paid a lot of money to help big brands be extremely successful marketing, selling, and engaging with their customers online. In short, what follows below isn't just random opinion.

Let's be clear, first, what I mean by social media, a phrase that has become widely used but perhaps not fully understood by everyone who uses it. Social media are those channels of interaction on the internet where the public has a voice. Any outlet at which an ordinary person, free of charge, can say something, create a piece of content, react to something that someone else has created, or establish relationships with people and companies falls under the banner of social media. This, of course includes blogs and Twitter, and social networking sites like Facebook, but also bulletin boards and forums, location based services like Foursquare, image posting services like Instagram, and several other esoteric services.

Of late there have been a number of blog conversations about what wineries should be doing, if anything, about social media. Fellow blogger Joe Roberts, of 1 Wine Dude, wrote a piece entitled "Where Can Wineries Really Innovate? In Engaging the People Who Actually Drink the Stuff!" in which he accurately describes many wineries' approach to social media as some combination of fear, scorn, exhaustion, or 'can't-be-bothered.'

Joe is correct to suggest that most wineries suffer from a deficit of consumer engagement in social media and are missing a huge opportunity as a result. This is nothing new, of course. The wine industry has been one of the slowest industries to adopt internet-based technologies, barely edging ahead of pawn shops, bowling alleys, and dry cleaners in having web sites, e-mail addresses, and actually using them both.

Even though those folks making wine are often farmers first, with little interest, and sometimes less ability than they might desire to engage with technology, that no longer justifies the lack of adoption that still plagues the wine industry. In an increasingly globalized world, where consumers are living, learning, connecting, and buying online, anyone who wants to sell a product in a competitive marketplace must be engaging their customers online.

As little as five years ago this wasn't true. But the world changes very quickly these days. The problem is, reality doesn't send you a memo before it changes. Just like it didn't send the people who made Rolodexes a note about their impending obsolescence. But you better believe that one day, the folks whose entire livelihood depended upon people buying rolodexes saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps just before they smacked right into it. Wineries that fail to comprehend the way the world is moving will quickly find their customers hanging out with someone else's bottle in hand.

And before you say (ahem, Steve Heimoff) that a great score from a critic can solve this problem, I urge you to look at the hundreds of deep discounting and flash sale outlets for wine, whose primary selling tools (for the bottles that wineries are shoving their way as fast as they can sell them) happen to be critics scores. If those scores were worth something, then wineries would be selling all their wines through traditional (read: non-closeout) channels, not funneling them to outlets where they're lucky to recoup their costs. Sure, a 98 point score from the Wine Advocate will sell more wine than some outreach on Twitter, but this is the exception that proves the rule. If I had a dollar for every 94 point rated wine I've seen selling at 50% off its retail price in the last year, I could buy a case of Chateau Lafite.

For most wineries, points don't sell wines, relationships do. Relationships with people, and relationships with brands. In that way, nothing has changed, and nothing ever will. This is the way that marketing works. But the relationships that customers have with both people and brands are overwhelmingly shifting to social media, and this goes for wine as well. It may just not feel that way to most wineries yet, in the same way that the folks selling Rolodexes thought everything was perfectly fine in the few days before the Palm Pilot (or whatever electronic PDA-thing truly rang the death knell of a six pound barrel of business cards) hit the shelves.

Which brings me to something called Vintank Social Connect. I spent a little time this afternoon getting a tour of this free web application that is now in its second or third incarnation, and I have this simple thing to say about it.

Are you listening wine industry?

Any winery in the world that does not have a free account on this service, and does not spend at least an hour or two every week using it, is dumber than a bag of hammers.

Vintank's software offers wineries an incredibly sophisticated set of tools to monitor their brand presence in the sphere of social media, and to engage with their customers in this space.

The fact that this tool is available for free (and, says its provider, will always be free) is simply staggering. It may well be the single greatest gift that anyone has given the wine industry since the invention of the steel fermentation tank. I'm not kidding.

Outside the wine industry (i.e. many of my Fortune 1000 customers) pay thousands of dollars every month (gladly) for the kind of functionality that Vintank is offering every winery in the world for free. Forever.

So, what does it do?

Well, just imagine that there's this huge nightclub, that can fit hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in it, and regularly does, night after night. And the only way anyone gets into this nightclub is if they can prove to the bouncer at the door that they enjoy and drink wine. Not so hard to do, right? OK. And then once they're in, they can buy, drink, and talk with their friends about any wine in the world. Man, I want to go already, don't you?. And then imagine every single one of those conversations they have, every comment they make, every joke they tell, every story they relate, is recorded and transcribed. And then magically, you get to read every single one of them that mentions you.

Wouldn't you want to do that? Wouldn't you want to know what people are saying about you and your brand(s)? Wouldn't you be at all curious about whether people actually recommended your wines, or tweeted to their friends how much they sucked? Or want to know when a blogger reviewed your wine, or when someone complained on a wine bulletin board about an unusually high percentage of cork tainted bottles in their annual allocation?

If you answered no to those questions, then I can promise you that you will one day reap the bitter harvest of your own ignorance. If you answered yes, then you're thirty seconds and a free online account away from having the answers to all of them.

Vintank's Social Connect software mines millions upon millions of conversations about wine that take place in the social media sphere, and reports to you what people are saying about you and your products. It tells you who is saying it, where they said it, and helps you understand how influential those people might be. Simple as that.

It does a lot more, for those who want to dive into the world of Customer Relationship Marketing, but for many wineries, that may be leaping into the deep end of the pool too quickly. For most, it's enough to be able to see what people are saying about you, and to respond. And that would be a huge leap forward for most wineries. A leap they desperately need to make.

I have no relationship to the company Vintank, nor anything to gain by making this recommendation, other than a desire to prod the wine industry to make use of technology trends that many other industries are embracing, and profiting from, much more rapidly.

Facebook will have its IPO in the coming months. As part of its filing, it had to disclose its financials for the first time, which included $1 billion of yearly profit, representing a net margin of around 30%. That is but a tiny slice of the value that social media is producing in today's economy. Hundreds of businesses, some of them worth billions of dollars, have sprung up solely because of the functionality that Facebook has provided to the world.

It's time for the wine industry to stop treating social media like a newfangled gizmo, and start doing business with it.

Sunrise image courtesy of BigStock.

Petite Sirah has been grown in California for a long time, but apart from some limited success in the 1970s at the hands of Carl Doumani and Stags' Leap Winery, wines made exclusively from this grape variety never really earned the respect or attention of mainstream wine lovers in any significant way.

Yet producers all over the state continue, quietly, to make Petite Sirahs, and many have no trouble selling them at all to an equally quiet, but passionate following of wine lovers.

And occasionally these producers not so quietly serve up their wines with roast meats and chocolate for anyone who dares drink on the dark side, if you'll pardon the expression. The next opportunity you have to sample their wares will be Friday, February 17th, when the society of winegrowers and makers known as P.S. I Love You holds its annual tasting at The Rock Wall Wine Company in Alameda.

Go check it out. Who knows, perhaps you'll fall in love too. The event web site has a list of the wineries pouring this year as well as a list of the tasty treats that await you in addition to wine.

P.S. I Love You Dark and Delicious Tasting
February 17th, 2012
6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
The Rock Wall Wine Company
2301 Monarch Street
Alameda, CA 94501 (map)

Tickets are $63 per person and in the past they have sold out. If available, tickets will be sold at the door for more than that. They should be purchased in advance online.

My usual recommendations for such public tastings apply. Wear dark clothes; arrive well slept and with food in your stomach (or chow down when you first get there); drink lots of water; and SPIT if you want to actually learn anything and enjoy yourself. These are big wines, often high in alcohol.

Sprung from the legendary blood of forbidden lovers suffering the wrath of a father king, slender jungle orchids climb skyward, their fruit bearing heavenly scents. The Aztecs demanded tlilxochitl, this black gold, in tribute after conquering the tribes who first unlocked vanilla's secrets. As intense as it is ethereal, vanilla possesses a singular, breathtaking purity of aroma. Barrels imbue wine with much of the vanilla we taste. Their singed oak can offer up an echo of flowers in ancient forests, or deeper notes of caramel and butterscotch. Sometimes floating above the wine's fruit, sometimes wrapped around it, and sometimes welded awkwardly to a woody frame, vanilla's elemental allure is hard to ignore and easy to love.

Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa, California
Henschke "Louis" Semillon, Eden Valley, Australia
Château de la Maltroye Chassagne-Montrachet, Côte de Beaune, Burgundy, France
Jean Macle Vin Jaune Château-Chalon, Jura, France
Cantina Giardino "Sophia" Blanco, Campania, Italy
Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana Oloroso Viejo Sherry, Andalusia, Spain


This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine

So, what does a wine loving country like Australia (they consume about three times as much wine per capita as America) do when imports get cheap? They stop buying Australian wine all the time and they start buying imported wine.

Much was made in news reports of the fact that Australians can now buy Moet Chandon Champagne for less money than they'd spend on locally produced Chandon sparkling wine (made by the same company).

While this news probably went over like a wet blanket for most wine producers in Australia, it's hard to imagine how this could have been avoided. For decades, Australian's have largely been drinking locally produced wines, both as a measure of pride as well as economic convenience. No doubt the (well placed) pride will continue to drive sales, as will old habits that die hard, but Australians need to be forgiven if they have a bit of a kid-in-the-candy-store moment.

Frankly, this particular situation sheds some light on the possible future for America should the Euro Zone collapse, or any of its major wine producers drop the currency. Many people have speculated as to what the current European economic crisis means for wine, and for the time being, it simply means that business is tough for many European wine producers.

But should things get messy, we may see a lot more gleeful buying on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. As much as I will bite my lip at the turmoil that will doubtless ensue if Portugal, or Italy, or Greece are left to founder on their own, it's hard to imagine not getting a bit excited about the wines of these regions suddenly being available at much more reasonable prices thanks to currency differentials.

Now I'm no economist, so the last thing I'm doing here is making predictions, but I can definitely relate to my friends Down Under who are taking not a small amount of delight in the fact that their money goes a lot further in European wine than it used to.

Photo of Australian currency courtesy of BigStock.

But this is perhaps the most pleasurable kind of review I write. The review of a winery whose wines I can safely say are all spectacularly good -- so good that I will simply buy any wine they make, no questions asked. I'm on very few winery mailing lists, but this is one of them.

In many ways Peay Vineyards represents the quintessential family-run, boutique California winery. Run by brothers Nick and Andy Peay and their winemaker Vanessa Wong (who happens to be Nick's wife) they perfectly embody the care, attention to detail, and vision that marks all the best small wineries in the world.

Coming upon the 100-year-old house perched high on a ridge above Sea Ranch in the far north of Sonoma County, with its vines cascading down the hillside towards the ocean four miles away, you might imagine that the two thirty-somethings sitting on the porch were the latest in a long line of farmers who had worked this land. But before Nick and Andy bought the 80-acre property in 1996, it merely bore the faint traces of a few fruit trees and sheep that once roamed its chilly pastures.

Nick Peay got the wine and food bug early, and after college he headed straight into a career in the wine industry, working first for Schramsberg and then La Jota, before heading for U.C. Davis where he got a degree in Enology and Viticulture. After graduating he moved on to work for Newton and Storrs, and began plotting to convince his brother Andy to help him start a winery one day.

Apparently all it took was a really nice bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a rack of lamb at the right moment, just as Andy Peay was rethinking his likely future as a Wall Street analyst. After taking a year off to travel, Andy dove into the wine and hospitality world, working a harvest at Cain Vineyards and Winery, spending some time working at the Jug Shop in San Francisco, and all the while getting his MBA from Berkeley.

On the weekends, the brothers would hop into a truck and cruise the back roads of California wine regions looking for the perfect piece of land. Their criteria: an extreme, cool-climate vineyard site where they could push the limits of winegrowing and winemaking, utilizing Nick's knowledge of viticulture, and his wife Vanessa's skill at making wines from cool climate fruit.

Vanessa Wong is also U.C. Davis trained and before joining her husband for the first harvest in 2001 she spent several years working as a winemaker around the world for labels that include Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, Domaine Jean Gros Burgundy, and Peter Michael Winery in Sonoma.

The family planted 48 acres of vines on their property in 1998: 35 acres of Pinot Noir, 8 acres of Syrah, 6 acres of Chardonnay, 1.8 acres of Viognier, and two little postage stamp size plots of Roussanne and Marsanne. The vineyards are managed directly by Nick and a full-time crew of 8 vineyard workers, and are farmed organically (though they are not certified). Because of the remoteness of the vineyard, the winery was built in Cloverdale, about an hour away.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Peay Vineyards for me has always been how they seem to have gotten everything right. I'm sure there were missteps along the way, but the fact that they were able to strike out into the middle of nowhere, into a climate that many thought unfit to grow wine grapes, and not only manage to make wine, but to make wine of such distinct character and quality is a testament to the talents of everyone involved. It's not an accident that theirs is one of the coolest Syrah vineyards in the United States.

Vanessa crafts their wines with a delicate touch. The wines are almost always fermented with native yeasts and are carefully managed through the winemaking process according to the needs of each varietal. The oak program involves a minimum of new wood allowing the fruit to shine, and the wines are almost always bottled unfined and unfiltered.

This particular wine comes from those minuscule .6 acres of Roussanne and Marsanne that Nick describes as the "most trying vines we farm." Finicky, temperamental, and susceptible to the vagaries of weather much more so than other grapes (this wine won't be made in 2011, thanks to the rains), these vines yield tiny amounts of extraordinary fruit. The production hovers somewhere between three and six barrels each year (roughly 85-100 cases), and tends to be snapped up by the winery's mailing list customers (the only way I manage to get ahold of it).

Fermented in old oak barrels with indigenous yeasts, this wine ages in neutral oak on its lees (bits of the skins and yeast left over after fermentation) for 11 months before bottling. In 2006, the wine was 65% Roussanne and 35% Marsanne, and only 85 cases were made.

I tend to like what happens to Roussanne and Marsanne as they age, so I've been hanging on to this bottle for some time, and decided to pop it open with dinner this week, and was very happy to have done so. It's a beautiful wine that is both delicious when it is first released, but will reward anyone with the patience to leave it on the shelf for a few years.

Tasting Notes:
This wine has mellowed to a deep medium-gold in the glass, and smells of honey roasted nuts, jasmine flowers, and old parchment. In the mouth it has a wonderful weight on the tongue, with a mix of mineral and herbal flavors like chamomile, while roasted apple, butterscotch, and honey also play across the palate. The finish has a nutty quality, and lingers for some time. Despite having a little weight, the wine's acidity ensures that it is lively and gulpable. Excellent. 14.1% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
This was surprisingly a very good match with a bunch of salumi and mostardas that were on the table while we opened this bottle.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $44

Unfortunately this wine is not available for purchase on the Internet, and this vintage has probably long since disappeared from most people's shelves and cellars. Current vintages are available to mailing list customers only.

The judges hand out hundreds of medals and awards. Those awards are released to the public, and then about a month later, many of the award winning wines, plus a lot more are poured for the public in a four-hour event that takes over Fort Mason for a Saturday afternoon. There are usually cooking demonstrations and food booths, and various other diversions.

Regardless of how I feel about such wine competitions, this tasting, like all such public events, represents an incredible opportunity to educate your palate and discover new wines to enjoy. This tasting in particular offers a unique chance to taste wine from a lot of less well known wine regions (i.e. not California, Oregon, or Washington) in addition to hundreds of wines from the places that most people know and love.

So if you don't have plans February 18th and want to expand your wine horizons, the experience is well worth the price of admission.

2012 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting
Saturday, February 18, 2012 2pm - 5pm
Festival Pavilion - Fort Mason Center
Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94123 (map)

Tickets are $65 if purchased in advance, $80 at the door. You can purchase tickets online.

My usual tips for large public tastings: get a good night's sleep; go with food in your belly; wear dark clothes; leave the cologne or perfume at home; drink lots of water; and if you want to really enjoy yourself, SPIT!

Moon Over Sonoma
SONOMA COUNTY, CA: A full moon rises over an oak tree in Alexander Valley.

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Big wine companies are favorite punching bags for wine lovers that would never buy their products. Sometime's there's a good reason for this, like when they throw their weight around in the marketplace in ways that aren't exactly good for the industry. The bigger the company, the bigger the mistakes they can make as well.

When they make mistakes, sometimes these companies can be hung out to dry simply because they have deep pockets. And that's exactly what seems to have just happened to Gallo and Constellation Wines .

You may remember a bit of a scandal last year involving these two big players in the wine world. They bought a bunch (3.5 million gallons) of wine from the southern part of France that was supposed to be Pinot Noir and put it into their Red Bicyclette bottles. It turns out, however, that it was only partly Pinot Noir, and happened to contain a lot of Merlot and Syrah as well.

The wines were fraudulently sold by a number of parties in France, all of whom have been prosecuted under French law, even on appeal.

The incident was a severe embarrassment for Gallo in particular, who apparently thought they were buying legitimate Pinot Noir. There are tests, usually involving DNA sequencing, that can determine the grape variety of a wine, but they are very expensive, time consuming, and aren't normally used in the course of, say, buying a few thousand gallons of bulk wine.

Gallo and Constellation took the steps that you would have expected a company to take when faced with this situation. They pulled whatever product they could off the market, apologized, and cooperated with the authorities that were going after the folks who perpetrated this fraud.

But then three wine consumers in California sued Gallo and Constellation, along with two of the guilty parties in France, alleging "unfair competition, fraud and false advertising." Now Gallo and Constellation are paying these people and their lawyers $2 million to settle the case out of court.

We hear various politicians talking about "tort reform" in this country, and stupid lawsuits like this are exactly what they're talking about.

These consumers were in no way damaged or harmed by the fact that the wine they purchased wasn't 100% Pinot Noir. The suggestion that competition or the market as a whole suffered as a result is equally specious. Gallo and Constellation certainly made a mistake by buying the wine they did, but it should not result in paying litigation happy consumers who thought they could make a buck by going after a big wine company with deep pockets.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for consumer protection. If Gallo had failed to disclose that it put peanuts in its wine, and some allergic person died of anaphylactic shock, Gallo should be held responsible. If the wine they sold wasn't actually wine, but was some concocted fake beverage that they synthesized in a lab, then I think there would be grounds for fake advertising claims, like in the 80s when all those "juice" companies were forced to put just how much real fruit juice they were using on their packages.

Those who generally disdain companies like Gallo, will at this point no doubt be shouting at their screens "They knew! They knew," but I don't think that's true. To my knowledge there is not a shred of proof that Gallo or Constellation knew that they were buying adulterated Pinot (which, admittedly says something about the quality of the wine that goes into their bottles). Now, if for some reason it came to light that Gallo and Constellation knew exactly what they were doing, that would change things slightly (i.e. intent to defraud versus an accident) but ultimately the issue is the same: these folks are being wrung for dollars because they did by accident that many winemakers in California do on purpose all the time.

By law in California, in order to call a wine Cabernet Sauvignon and put it on the label, only 75% of the wine has to be Cabernet Sauvignon (and only 95% of it has to come from the same vintage). The rest can be whatever the winemaker wants. And if you think that those $3, $5, and $7 wines you're buying at the grocery store are 100% pure, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Most large (read: non-artisan) winemakers manage their production at some level using the bulk wine market, purchasing juice here and there both to ensure that they can produce the volume they need to meet their targets, as well as to find blending components they think can help them make a more appealing wine. Even smaller winemakers will buy some extra grapes or even some extra wine that allows them to turn a few extra barrels of something into a second label wine or a special bottling. Why? So they can sell it. Remember folks, the wine industry is a business, first and foremost.

So while I'm no apologist for the behemoths of the global wine trade, I certainly am appalled at the fact that our legal system not only permits, but tacitly encourages the kind of lawsuits that these companies have been needlessly subjected to.

I'm sure that in the future I'll be criticizing Gallo and Constellation for something, but for today they have my sympathies.

Punching bag image courtesy of BigStock

These were but a few of the vociferous arguments made on 5 January against a bill introduced to the New Jersey state legislature that merely proposed to allow New Jersey state wineries (of which there are now more than 40) to ship their wines to state residents, just like wineries in the neighbouring state of New York. The individuals offering these arguments were primarily representatives of the state's liquor wholesalers, who purportedly spent more than $1 million trying to prevent this legislation from coming up for a vote.

Welcome to America, where for 25% of the households in the country, it is easier to purchase guns than a bottle of wine on the internet thanks to the laws of the states in which they live.

To buy wine in Pennsylvania, for instance, you'll have to make your way to a liquor store run by the state government, with a selection driven more by bureaucracy and the whims of distributors than by any sense of what consumers might want....

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com.

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you're not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It's only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Sunshine, gathered from flowers by tiny apian efforts, forged into ambrosia that tasted of immortality to the Greeks and Egyptians. The alchemy of honey seems no less marvelous even to those that have braved the swarm to witness its creation. Like honey, wine serves to transmute the world's most basic elements into a form seductive and irresistible. When wines taste of honey they seem to taste of sunlight itself, a brightness that coats the mouth with a satin warmth and gently tugs at the heart like a summer breeze. The scents of honey wafting from a glass urge us on to abandon.

Marc Kreydenweiss Wiebelsberg Riesling, Alsace, France
Chateau Climens Sauternes, Barsac, France
Ken Forrester "T Noble Late Harvest" Chenin Blanc, South Africa
Royal Tokaji Wine Co. Tokaji Aszú 6 Puttonyos Mézes Maly, Tokaji, Hungary


This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine

A big part of wine's allure is that it is so many different things: a source of alcohol, a source of pleasure, a gateway for entry into the mystical, the erotic, the enlightened, the divine, the silly, and sometimes the idiotic. But for thousands of years, it has also been a commodity--and that's where this book comes in.

Worrying about wine as a commodity seems uninspiring, even tawdry, compared, say, to worrying about the distinctive terroir of some patch of dirt in Alsace. But without the buying and selling, we'd all be home winemakers, wine production would still be primitive at best, none of us would ever have heard of Argentine Malbec, and that special spot in Alsace wouldn't have its own Facebook page. Money makes the wine go round, and Wine Wars helps to make sense of it all.

Veseth teaches political economy at the University of Puget Sound, is active in the American Association of Wine Economists, and writes the Wine Economist blog. The book's central metaphor is the "wine wall"--the complicated, diverse array of regions, grapes, brands and price points that can be found at most any wine shop or supermarket. Shelf by shelf, Veseth decodes the logic of what's where on the wine wall and how it got there. The book's subtitle--The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists--highlights three dynamics threaded through the story: the bad old days of cheap, insipid, industrial wine (Blue Nun, a wildly popular parody of good German Riesling a few decades back); the much better days of modern, efficient, technologically advanced, global winemaking (Two Buck Chuck); and the militant defense of fine, terroir-driven wine by another whole tier of producers around the world.

Not to spoil the end of the story, but Veseth remains hopeful in the end about the mix of wine dynamics. Despite the seemingly crushing power of global price-cutting and homogenization, he thinks distinctive, even quirky wines have a bright future--in other words, something for everybody.

Along the way, his overview of economic forces that have shaped wine's career take the reader on a number of historical excursions and international visits. We learn about the German discount wine juggernaut behind the "surfer dude" cosmetics of the Trader Joe's chain, the convoluted, multi-century relationships between French winegrowers and British drinkers, the marketing logic behind how Costco arranges its shelves and bins, and the rise of Hong Kong as the center of world wine auctioneering. The treatment is breezy and easygoing; not only are there no intricate economic formulas, there is not one single table or graph between the covers.

Nonetheless, Veseth does get to some fundamental economic realities behind the surface of wine, and even readers who pay attention to the ups and down of the wine market will learn something. For example, most wine fans know that the emergence of New Zealand as a high-profile player in the international wine trade is a very recent development, maybe two decades old, seemingly out of nowhere. More studious geeks know that the years of New Zealand's obscurity were also years when the main grape varieties grown were French-American hybrids, thought to be more suitable to cooler climates but not likely to make any export waves. That reliance of non-competitive grapes might seem to be the prime reason for decades of international non-competition.

What Veseth adds to the picture is that for many years, New Zealand followed an official policy--known as import substitution--of encouraging domestic production by creating barriers to foreign imports. In the case of wine, this meant that backward production practices and grape choices had a free ride, and no incentive existed for joining join the modern wine world. When New Zealand dumped the import substitution strategy and opened the doors to trade in and out, New Zealand winegrowers suddenly discovered they could grow amazing Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and the rest is drinking history.

This kind of information may not change the way your next glass of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc tastes, but it surely will help you understand how it got there. And that, to go back to wine's many wondrous properties, gets us back to the lure of enlightenment.

Mike Veseth Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists, Rowman and Littlefield 2011, $24.95 (hardback).

Tim Patterson writes for several wine magazines, blogs at Blind Muscat's Cellarbook, co-edits the Vinography book review section, and is the author of Home Winemaking for Dummies.

The Mustard
RUSSIAN RIVER VALLEY, CA: Flowering mustard growing between the grapevines signals the beginning of spring as seen in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, California.

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Download this image by right-clicking on the image and selecting "save link as" or "save target as" and then select the desired location on your computer to save the image. Mac users can also just click the image to open the full size view and drag that to their desktops.

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EDITORIAL USE:
To purchase copies of George's photos for editorial, web, or advertising use, please contact Getty Images.

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James Ontiveros, on the other hand, was spending his sophomore year at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo going to classes during the week, and on the weekend, planting a Pinot Noir vineyard that now bears his family name. This wasn't a little project to help out on his family vineyard, which can often be the reason that certain college kids find themselves putting rootstock into the ground in their spare time. While Ontiveros' family has been connected to the Santa Barbara area for a staggering nine generations (which is why their last name is on everything from historic buildings to roads in the area) they were, up until recently, primarily cattle ranchers. But as the lands surrounding his family ranch gradually gave way to vineyards and more vineyards and more vineyards, the young Ontiveros began to think his decision to major in Animal Science might not be the most advantageous for the future.

By the time Ontiveros was a sophomore, he had switched to crop and fruit sciences, and had met Paul Wilkins. The two bonded over wine with some of the other students at the university.

While Cal Poly didn't offer wine studies, that proved no impediment to Ontiveros nor Wilkins, both of whom landed jobs and internships in the wine industry while they were still in school. While he wasn't busy helping Kendall Jackson manage its relationships with winegrowers in the area, Ontiveros was planting 8 acres of his family's ranch to Pinot Noir. Wilkins, for his part, landed an internship at Alban Vineyards, and got the opportunity to learn winemaking at one of California's most prominent boutique wineries.

Their careers in the wine industry diverged for several years, with Ontiveros doing stints at Gallo, and Wilkins becoming assistant winemaker at Alban. But in 2005 Wilkins left Alban and started consulting on his own, and one of his first clients asked him to see if he could track down some fruit from a vineyard named Ontiveros. Reunited, the two college buddies joined forces to make wine from Ontiveros' property under the label native9, and shortly thereafter started another project that they dubbed Alta Maria.

The Alta Maria label offers four wines, a Cabernet, a Chardonnay, a Sauvignon Blanc, and this Pinot Noir, each in quantities of a few hundred cases. The winemaking is done by Wilkins, whose training primarily on Rhone varieties clearly doesn't keep him from doing very fine things with Pinot Noir when he wants to. The winemaking itself tends to be minimalist, using native yeasts whenever possible, and I'm not entirely sure about the filtering regimen. New oak is kept to a minimum, as well.

In fact, minimalism might be a defining characteristic of these wines in many respects, from the rather stunning image on the label -- a cluster of ancient iron nails, the sort of which held together both the houses and the shoes of California's earliest homesteaders -- to the rather remarkable pricing of the wine. I'm not in the habit of regularly commenting on the price of wines, instead letting my readers decide what they think is value or not. However, a California Pinot Noir this good for $25 should not go unremarked upon. It's exceedingly rare to find pretty good Pinot at anywhere close to this price point, let alone a wine this fantastic.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Light to medium garnet in the glass, this wine smells of the damp forest floor and the bright fruit of raspberries. In the mouth, tart, sour cherry and raspberry flavors have a silky coolness to them that is stunning and quite mouthwatering. Green herbs and willow bark mix with earthier tones as the fruit continues to vibrate thanks to excellent acidity. Fine grained tannins hang in the background as the wine lingers through a moderate finish. Quite elegant.13.9% alcohol.

Food Pairing:
What won't this wine go well with? With low alcohol and high acidity, it's a fantastic food wine that I'd love to drink while munching on a chantrelle and goat cheese tart, for instance.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $25

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Earth. The first of the elements that the ancients held as the basis for all life. The source of all our sustenance. Wine has always been inextricably linked to the dirt, the root of terroir. That wine can sometimes taste or smell of earth should come as no surprise. Like walking through the spongy loam of a dark wet forest, scents of soil and mushroom, dust and mud often resonate with a dark bass note underneath other flavors and aromas. Flavors of earth are often borne on the textures of tannin, as if the very liquid had been strained through deep roots. Wines that express something of the dirt from which they spring are revered for this transmutation of place into taste, and justifiably so. The smell of the wet ground touches the deepest memories of our species, reminding us from whence we came, and to where we will return.

Mayacamas Cabernet Sauvignon, Mt. Veeder, Napa Valley, USA
Vignes du Maynes "Manganite" Rouge, Macon Cruzille, Burgundy, France
Chateau Beychevelle, St. Julien, Médoc, Bordeaux, France
Quinta de Roriz "Prazo de Roriz", Douro, Portugal


This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine

The flavors of wine are magical and beautiful, and worth celebrating, almost as much as they are worth drinking.

It is my pleasure to introduce a new series of weekly content on Vinography called The Essence of Wine.

This writing and photography project has been years in the making. Or more correctly, I have fantasized about it for several years, and only recently encountered the collaborators that I felt could truly help me bring it to life:

Photographer Leigh Beisch
Capturing the soul of food is more difficult than you would think. Food photography these days is glaringly unoriginal and boring for the most part -- often as hopelessly derivative as it is clinically sterile.

Photographer Leigh Beisch's images of food possess a rare beauty, poetry, and warmth that capture the energy and allure of great food.

Leigh studied painting and photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Moving from New York to San Francisco with her husband, an animator, Leigh opened her own studio and quickly attracted major clients like Williams-Sonoma, making a name for herself by creating stunning photographs for product packaging and cookbooks.

"My work as a painter influences my photography," says Leigh. "Color, shape, texture and the boundaries of the frame are subjects in and of themselves and I try to capture an emotional response to the subject and the setting, as much ad abstract paintings do."

Leigh's visions has led to commissions that range from editorials for magazines to store displays. Her work has won numerous awards including several Communication Arts prizes in photography and design as well as awards from Graphis and American Photography among others. The cookbooks that she has photographed have received awards from IACP, James Beard and Gourmand.

Prop Stylist Sara Slavin
Requiring equal parts sculptor, chef, painter, and engineer, good prop stylists, especially those that work with food, are worth their weight in saffron.

Art director and prop stylist Sara Slavin collaborates with photographers, designers and publishers on commercial and editorial projects throughout the country, with a special emphasis on the culinary and related arts.

She has co-authored numerous lifestyle books and has acted as art director and stylist for such books as Odd Bits, Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet and Pure Dessert, Salumi, Williams-Sonoma Entertaining, Country Cooking of France, Southern Pies and Gwyneth Paltrow's My Father's Daughter.

Her clients include Williams-Sonoma, Restoration Hardware, Design Within Reach, Diageo Estate Wines, Food & Wine Magazine, Chronicle Books, Artisan Publishing, Sunset Magazine and 10 Speed Press.

Each week, Leigh, Sara and I will be bringing you a bit of visual poetry -- an original photograph and some prose -- that captures some of wines most essential elements. I hope you enjoy these as much as we are enjoying their creation.

See The Essence of Wine.