What you are about to read may shock you. Younger readers should only proceed with adult supervision.
Here goes. Those big, oaky, buttery chardonnays you California wine drinkers love to guzzle? (And you know who you are.) Well, the vintners of California are no longer limited to getting that flavor from an oak barrel. Nah, you can just put some oak tree right in the wine! Wine aged in oak barrels, which are porous, evaporates at a rate of about 10 percent of the total volume. That's a lot of gulps of Gewürztraminer lost to the ether. If you age the wine in stainless steel barrels, no 10 percent loss. And if you grow wine in California, where a whole shitload of the world's wine is grown, you need not sacrifice that authentic, barrel-aged flavor: you may add it back in, in the form of wood chips and sawdust.
I know all of this is true, because I got it from a source even more reliable than the Interwebs: a guy pouring me drinks. Last Sunday, with our friends
Maura and Dwayne, we hit the trail. The
Connecticut Wine Trail, that is. And we had a delightful time learning all about the decidedly partisan wine-making politics of Gary Crump, co-owner of Priam Vineyards in Colchester, Connecticut. Mr. Crump hails from New Orleans, by way of Washington, DC, where he was on a staff of economic advisers to President Clinton until 1998.
If you want to avoid wine with sawdust-type additives, Mr. Crump tells us, ask for barrel fermented wines. "Barrel aged," apparently, is a euphemism indicating that sawdust and wood chips are fair game. We also learned at Priam Vineyards that wine harvested by machine contains what is known in the industry as MOG: material other than grapes. Ie, stems, leaves, birds nests, birds .... So you want to look for handpicked grapes as well (unless you like your Zinfandel with a hint of cormorant). And, like everything else, how you grow your grapes is political. Dry farming, which relies on the vagaries of the local climate
—how much rain and sun you get in your growing season
—yields about 3 tons of grapes per acre. You can get a lot more grapes by irrigating, but you don't get the same flavor out of your grapes. More problematic is that much California wine is grown in very dry areas. California doesn't have enough water for its residents to begin with, and putting a whole bunch of water into an arid ecosystem raises all kinds of problems. Don't get Gary Crump wrong: there's plenty of great wine, conscientiously made, in California. Just know what you're drinking.
Now, to keep with a recent False Reckonings trend, here is a photo of a cat:
Maura and Dwayne's new cat Melvin was recovering from losing his manhood the previous day, and not at all interested in tasting wine.
Last weekend we waded our way through throngs of European tourists celebrating the weak dollar to see Barneys Recycled Christmas display (check out their collection of green, fair-trade, organic, and sustainable gifts here). It was definitely spiffier than anything we saw on Fifth Avenue. And it warmed my heart that it was composed entirely, as my father would say, of "a bunch of used shit." Those are, of course, aluminum cans you see above. They also had those ubiquitous miniature lights strung with green 2 liter pop bottles, and a bunch of ornaments made out of Metrocards (which, for those of you not nearly so urbane and sophisticated as me, grant access to the New York City subway).
