Friday, June 24, 2011

Some interesting wines from Cal State Fair

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had volunteered at the California State Fair Home Winemakers Competition.
There were a lot of interesting wines entered in the competition. Since I am also a (1st year beginner) student of the AWS Wine Judge Certification Program, I wanted to post some of the wines we saw during the competition to introduce to my fellow students some of the wines they may encounter.

Here is only a partial list of the many entries: the Year, the Grape/Fruit, the Award, and the Score

2010 Pineapple Gold 94
2010 White Peach Gold 94
2010 Purple Tomatill Sherry Gold 94
2010 Cherry Gold 94
2010 Pineapple Silver 92
2010 Purple Tomatillo Silver 90
2010 Navel Orange Silver 90
2009 Red Heirloom Tomato Silver 89
2010 CabSauv, Berries Silver 89
2009 Yellow Heirloom Tomato Bronze 87
2010 Green Bell Pepper Bronze 87

2009 Lemon Gold 94
2010 Boysenberry Silver 89
2010 Ruby Red Grapefruit Bronze 85

2010 Petit Verdot Double Gold 99 Best of Show Red. Best of California

2010 LaFirein, Neiluccio, Primitivo Double Gold 98 Best of California,
(Neiluccio is a known variety, Primitivo is the same as Zinfandel, we think LaFirein may be Lagrein)

2010 Apple Double Gold 99

2008 Black Raspberry, Passion Fruit Double Gold 98 Best of Show Sweet,

2010 Red Raspberry Gold 94
2008 Golden Raspberry Gold 94
2010 Pinot Gris, Mango Gold 94
2010 Elephant Heart Plum Silver 93

2010 Watermelon Silver 93
2010 Strawberry Silver 91
2010 Peach Silver 89
2010 Blueberry Honorable Mention 81
2009 Honey Mead Honorable Mention 81

2010 Apple Port Double Gold 98

Plus some more common but perhaps less than broadly known ......

2010 Blackberry Port Silver 91
2009 Touriga Nacional Silver 90

2010 Apple Juice Fortified with Apple Brandy Silver 89
2010 Unfortified Pinot Noir & Brandy Bronze 86

2009 Aglianico Silver 90
2006 Corvina Silver 90
2007 Muscat Canelli Silver 90
2009 Marionberry Silver 90
2010 Viognier Silver 90
2010 Rousanne Silver 89
2010 Olallieberry Silver 88

2009 Tannat Gold 94
2008 Marzemeino Silver 91
2010 Piquepoul Blanc Silver 89

2010 Arneis Silver 90

I supported the panel of Judges that had the Arneis. One member knew that it was from Piedmont. For the rest of us it was a mostly unknown. We had one of the Chief judges come over to give us a short ampelography on the grape and offer his opinion on the quality and tipicity of the wine. There was a general impression that it was slightly flawed. (Maybe SO2). But i thought it a good example of what a judge can run into and the difficulty required to give it a fair grade when the 'ideal' example was an unknown.

john

Friday, June 17, 2011

A good week for free Wine !

My wine cellar ( ok, my kitchen closet ) was bare. I had been drinking fortified wines for the last couple of months and I had drunk all of them in preparation for my WSET -Unit 6 exam. I was out of wine.

Then this last week happened. Sunday, I volunteered for the California Home Winemakers Competition and in appreciation I got 6 unopened wines ( from the 2nd / backup bottles of each entry ), 6 wines that had been opened and poured, and for volunteering on Sunday as well, I got 3 additional unopened bottles.

So i drove home on Tuesday with 15 bottles of wine in my trunk, including: a Ruby Red Grapefruit wine, an apple wine, and other mostly red wines, generally zin, cabernet, and syrah.

After the competition we got to taste some of the winners. This was a real trip. I tasted lemon wines, golden raspberry wines, tomato wines ( actually quite good ), a totally awesome black raspberry wine, a bell pepper wine, among many others. I was looking specifically for the fruit wines because I was pretty sure I wouldn't run into them that often again at the Safeway store and I needed to be familiar with them for my experience for the AWS Wine Judge Certification program.

I admit that some of the wines that i brought home, I tasted once and poured out. Not that the wine was bad, just that it wasn't that interesting enough for me to invest my time in it beyond becoming familiar with the taste and characteristics. That is one of the pleasures of 'free' wine - you don't feel bad if it goes in the sink and down the drain.

------

Then yesterday I had a great time at a tasting of "Wines of Navarra". I had volunteered to help out with the people who were staging the event. The Oxbow Wine Merchant in Napa was the local sponsor and the "Wines of Spain" and especially the region of Navarra supplied the wines and the literature about them.

This was a fun event and as well as the public tasting, there was also an on-line virtual tasting and a simultaneous "tweet up" about the event where tasters were encouraged to let others know about the tasting and if there were any wines they liked.

We had over 125 people tasting 10 different wines and there were 2-4 pourers keeping busy all of the time. i was totally surprised that I could remember where a particular taster was in the order even if he/she was gone for several minutes before returning to taste the next wine. i suppose that people who do this more often get good at it. For me it was a surprise - but at same time it reminded me of 30 years ago when I was an air traffic controller and had to keep aircraft locations in my head.

It is a lot of fun to actually work with the public and be a pourer. I don't have the full skill set to actually keep up the patter and actually sell the wines as I am pouring them, plus we were much too busy to even try but maybe that will come in time. Note: We were not actually selling the wines, it was purely educational and we didn't actually have any wines available to sell, but when I talk about 'selling' I mean giving the taster the full story about the wine, a handle by which to remember it, something he/she can take home and then remember that wine later on.

After the event was over, the best part came. The pourers were offered the opportunity to take some of the wines home. In fact because it had been such a busy and popular event we were given several bottle to take home.

So now my wine closet is full again. Such is the life of a wine student.

john

California State Fair Home Winemaker's Competition

I had a great time this last week. I was a volunteer for the California State Fair Home Winemaking Competition. This event and its sister event - the Commercial Winemaking Competition - are one of the largest in the country, the amount of work that goes into setting it up is incredible. I want to write a little on what happens behind the scenes.

Before I even got involved, the Competition rules had been set up, the applications made available to the home winemakers and the sample wines had been coming in over the previous month. Each wine was received, recorded by type, grape, and residual sugar. They were stored in a Woodbridge Winery so California's normal summer heat wouldn't spoil them, and the data about each wine was entered into the competition database. Each wine got a 4 digit number.

Once the deadline for receiving the wines had passed, the wines were grouped by type and then turned into tasting flights - i.e. groups of similar wines that would be tasted together. Here is where the residual sugar came into effect. The flights tried to taste from dry to sweet. A lot of work was done to create flights that would work and give each wine a fair chance.

Each bottle ( actually a set of two, in case one was corked, or additional pours were needed if the wine made it to the finals) got its numbered label, additionally, one of the two bottles got an additional numbered label on a ring over the neck of the bottle. The wines were in numeric order by the order they were received. This order was different from the order they would be tasted, since they could be received in any order and needed to be recorded when they were received, while the tasting order would be by type and flight.

Both bottles of an entry were then boxed together. 6 entries to a case. Each box was then numbered so the wines could be put back into sorted order.

This was all done even before I came into the picture. I started on the Sunday before the event which was going to be on Tuesday. Here was the process.
  • We set up both rooms, the "cellar" room and the "judging" room. Tables and chairs were arranged.
  • In the cellar room, boxes of wines were taken to the appropriate table and the wines were laid out in sorted (reception) order.
  • Once all the wines were lined up, picking sheets were printed. These sheets had 1 to 15 wines on them and each sheet constituted what would be a tasting flight that would be given to the judges.
  • Wines were picked - 1 bottle from each entry, and were put into empty boxes and then moved to their position on the "flights" table. For example Table "P" had 5 flights of about 10 wines in each flight. Each flight was then numbered : P-1, P-2, P-3, etc. Again each wine in the flight had already been ordered by sweetness.
  • By the end of Sunday, 1 bottle of every entry had been picked and boxed and on the appropriate table for the pourers to create their flights.
  • Each of the pourers' tables - labeled from "A" to "Q" corresponded to one of the judges panels. Each table had 5 flights of wines and each flight had been cross checked at least 2 times for correctness.
  • In the Cellar - there was still one bottle for every entry, and the celler had been checked to make sure that at least 1 bottle from every entry had made it into a flight.
About 768 entries were categorized into about 85 flights so the average was about 9-10 bottles per flight, although some flights were only 1-2 bottles and a couple had 15 bottles.

The Judging was held on the following Tuesday. The judges' tables were also lettered "A" to "Q". Each judge has been asked which wines he was most comfortable judging. The judging panels were grouped by interest, this had also been done in advance.

The Volunteers arrived early on Tuesday and were broken into teams. Each team had a specific role and also specific locations where they were allowed to go and locations from which they were barred. This was to prevent cross contamination of information about the wine from the cellar to the judges.

Here were the teams:
  • The Cellar crew. Responsible for replacing corked bottles, pulling wines for finals tasting, and also putting wines together for distributing to the volunteers when the competition was over.
  • Pourers. They poured each flight, put the glasses on the trays by which they would be delivered to the judges.
  • The Stewards. They were not allowed in the pouring area. They could only received the numbered glasses and trays and transport them to the judging room. There they would place the wines in order in front of the judges.
  • Communications: One communications table in each room managed the order of events. They knew when new flights should be served, which bottles needed repours, and kept everything running in general
  • Data crew printed labels, entered scores into the computers, checked the work of the judges and the clerks. They enabled the transition between the 3 phases of the competition.
  • Clerks supported the judges, tallied the judges scores, and made sure all the scores were correct and complete (hopefully) before handing them off to the data crew.
  • Table assistants. They watched each table to see who needed water, or cracker refills. Who needed "bug juice" to clear their palates. They also moved into clear empty glasses and dump buckets between flights.
  • Administration and team leads. Managed the resources and people and kept everything moving.
There were 3 judges to each of the 17 ( "A" to "Q" ) panels and another 5-7 senior judges who were available to answer questions about potentially obscure grapes, or to confirm a possible fault in a wine.

Even further behind the scenes, the people running the event had to provide food, water, breaks and lunches, for the about 100 volunteers and the about 60 judges.

I am really, really impressed with the people who could pull all of this off. The logistics are incredible. And despite the effort involved, the people who make this work are all really supportive of each other and everybody works together to make this a great event.

I was really honored to work with them and hope / plan to do it again.

john

Unit 6 exam - I could cry.

June 6th was my WSET Unit 6 exam for Fortified Wines. It didn't go well.

I have been studying and tasting fortified wines for about 3 months. I made some great study notes excerpted from the Oxford Companion to Wine. I had separate lists of dates and events by type of wine ( Sherry, Port, Madeira ). I had summaries of key facts and dates by major producer. I had tasted ( and really enjoyed !) about 20 different wines. I thought i was ready for the exam.

I woke up early that Monday morning. About 5 AM with thoughts of the exam on my mind. A final review, I figured, a final refresh and I would be ready to go. So I studied for the next 2 hours, had my breakfast, and got ready for my 1.5 hour drive to where the test was being held. I arrived about 1 hour early.

But I was feeling a little tired. I started to drink a can of soda that I had brought, however, it wasn't the normal diet coke that I might drink but was the full-on sugared variety. No No No, my mind screamed. Don't drink sugar when you are tired, you will crash later on when the test is in full force. So I went to get some coffee.
Now normally I am a decaf drinker. I like the flavor and believe that coffee in general can be beneficial but I know I can't handle the caffeine. But I needed the boost, so i ordered a half-caf latte.

Now maybe the drink was half-caf and maybe it wasn't but i got wired. I could feel my body racing, "I can manage this" I thought as I walked into the test. And at first I was OK.

We had 3 wines to describe. The first was clear - a fino sherry, that one I could almost tell just from looking, and of course the particular aromas gave it away. The 2nd was a golden color and not especially bright or clear. I wasn't sure about that one. The 3rd was a light-gold and again from appearance only it looked like a Muscat and I figured I would be in pretty good shape.

I did my best to describe the wines. The Fino and the Muscat VDN were easy. I described the 2nd wine OK, I think, but didn't connect that it was a white port and lost 2 points on that one when i picked the wrong country and region.

This took around 35 minutes. This left only 25 minutes to write the 3 essay questions / paragraphs that remained. ( The whole test has to be done in 60 minutes and you have to describe 3 wines and then write 3 paragraphs on whatever fortified wine topic that is part of the syllabus ). In the weeks prior to the test I had been timing myself on my wine descriptions and I was taking the generally allowed 10 minutes per wine. I had only gone over this limit a little but every minute counts.

I was good on the topics, I was comfortable with all 3 and had even psyched out one that would be on the test - either that or got really lucky - but I had done extra study on the Madeira Wine Company and here was that question on the test. But 25 minutes is not a lot of time, and I started to panic a little. This was bad. My adrenaline picked up, and started interacting with the caffeine that already had my body wired. I was getting hyper. Next my hand started shaking. After about the first paragraph, the shaking was getting bad, and my hand started cramping up. I had hand cramps happen before a couple years ago when I was taking a writing course - but I was able to work through the cramping. But this time the shaking and the cramping together debilitated me.

The 2nd paragraph was messy. I had several times when I would try to write a word and my hand shook so badly that the letters would not form. I stopped. I took a drink of water ( having to hold the bottle with both hands to stop the shaking ). I tried again and like a first or 2nd grade school child I had to print out each letter. I lost considerable time.

By the time i was on the 3rd question, I had only 6-7 minutes left and i could hardly write. My writing is never that good even at its best, but now letters were hardly readable by even me. It was sad. I could cry. If the examiners throw out my paper as unreadable I will totally understand, and I am getting myself prepared for the retake.

This is a much bigger issue, however. Even if I don't get an adrenaline-and-caffeine-cocktail induced shakes, i know that my hand could very well cramp up after about 30 minutes of writing. I remember that I read a couple of weeks ago, a blog from another WSET student. He had written that in order to prepare for his tests, he had spent a lot of time practicing writing. When i first read that i thought of sentence structure, paragraph layout, the usual "tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them" structure for a good essay. Now I am considering that in a different light.

Other than my writing class, during which most of the time I ( like now ) did my work on a type writer, I only had to do 1 final paper hand-written, because it was a timed test and no computers were allowed. I have been using computers, electronic e-mail, MS Word, or Open Office for probably the past 20 years. Other than grocery lists, I write very little by hand. And this factor is just one of several that helped me to fail the test. ( At least i think I failed. I don't have a lot of hope ).

Other than a re-take of Unit 6, I still have several more circumstances where i will have to hand-write answers and paragraph for an hour or more. Specifically, Unit 1 - coming up in November will require a full 1 hour hand-written essay I can't have the same circumstances befall me again.

So. I now have 3 additional tasks that i have to fit into my schedule.

1) I have to practice writing. I have to retrain those muscles and get them fit once more.
2) I have to speed up the amount of time it takes me to taste and evaluate a wine. 10 minutes is much too slow, even though 3 wines in 30 minutes or 6 wines in an hour is thegenerally allowed time on WSET tests.
5-7 minutes or less should be the amount of time I take. I just need to react a little more, contemplate a little less, and have the required terms just flow from my pen.
3) I have to find a comfortable pen, one that fits me well enough that I am less likely to cramp up. I have big hands and I think a fatter pen might help.

I am never going to drink coffee, any coffee, before a test again. My adrenaline will be enough.

john