A spot-on article by Oregon Wine Press. Thank you, Stu Watson. You’ll have to enlarge to read, hold down apple key and + key for a mac, control key and + key for a PC.
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Peep it. It’s about our Holiday Chat Pack I wrote about below.
Tags: Food & Wine, Holiday Chat Pack
We thought it would be great fun to meet the people buying our wine. Since The Grande Dalles does not (yet) have a tasting facility and we can’t sit eye-to-eye with you adventurous people interested in our wine, what better way than to do it face-to-face digitally?
Here’s the skinny: through December 31st, 2010, with each purchase of our Holiday Chat Pack, you not only get one bottle each of our inaugural wines, but a 10-minute or so video chat with us. Yeah! You can choose from Scott, myself (Stephanie), Sam or Jack, or any combination thereof, although best bets would be with Scott for the vineyard and wine part of it, me for the girlie emotional aspect, Sam for the fun of it all (although he’s still hard to understand and has only been around for 2.5 years of the adventure), and Jack for well, dog things.
So if you or someone you know would like to get in on the wine adventure that is The Grande Dalles, out in the wilds of Wasco County, Oregon, in the Columbia Valley AVA, we’ve got the perfect way. It’s the Holiday Chat Pack. Hip hip, hooray!
Tasted our wines at World Class Wines store the other day down the road in Lake Oswego, Oregon. It’s a nice little wine shop with a rather eclectic and interesting offering. The owners, who are actually there running the place, are friendly, personable and real. I decanted our two reds in the morning and poured them back into their bottles before I went to work. My take on what they thought of the wines is this: they didn’t exactly know what to make of Leroy’s Finest but liked it, they flat out didn’t know what to make of Gampo (admittedly it was still pretty closed), and they quite liked Home Place. That said, they do want to buy some wine for the store, and they’d like me to come in for a winemaker’s tasting, as well.
It’s interesting learning what people do and don’t like about our wines. Most people view Leroy’s finest with intrigue, but some have disliked it outright because it doesn’t taste like riesling, or at least riesling from the US. The World Class Wines folks liked Home Place, but I think they were skeptical of Gampo. Conversely, an acquaintance and winemaker advisor of mine, who is a long time wine figure in Napa Valley (started/owned a winery, sold it to Mondavi, worked along side the late Robert Mondavi, refers to him as Bob, and is a wine industry educator) was very excited by Gampo, and said it tasted like it came straight from Italy. Go figure.
My gut feeling about the wines we would, and now do, grow and produce is they would not appeal to everyone because they are wines of composition and not performance as Matt Kramer has so eloquently described in a recent post.
This is my current take on our wines over a 24 hour period of tasting:
’09 Leroy’s Finest – lime, bay leaf, pine, capers and acidity that will remind you you’re alive
’08 Gampo – raspberry compote, cherry cordial, cooked beets, clove, grilled bread, fine tannins
’08 Home Place – crème de cassis, English fruit cake, wet earth, tobacco, cocoa powder, toasted coconut, chewy tannins
Tags: Gampo, Home Place, Lake Oswego, Leroy's Finest, Matt Kramer, Robert Mondavi, wines of composition, World Class Wines
It’s been a worrisome last few weeks. Scott’s been out and about with our wine, to select, highly esteemed Portland, Oregon restaurants and sommeliers who we felt would appreciate the obvious uniqueness of our wines. And now we seem to be at a standstill. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: our wines are so atypical for this local area and the current collective state of this industry, people don’t know what to do with them. How atypical you ask? Well, for one, they have tannins (gasp!). For another, they are well-structured, angular, some might say, with very distinct flavours, and they’re all 13.5% alcohol and under, ACTUAL, not fudged, numbers. These are wines that were made in our vineyard, the grapes carefully tended to and watched for the right picking time. Our wines are both elegant and robust, and individual beyond all get-out. These wines were made with a very clear vision, and it shows. And people don’t expect it, and don’t know what to think about it.
Really, how does one go about finding people who value individual wines? We’ve got to get more creative here. It’s obvious the wine industry is on the cusp of returning to more singular wines, personal wines, like ours. We’re seeing more and more how people who either lack or lost vision (like Kluge and Cosentino) are shaking out, little by little. We’re reading how over-ripe wines are trending downward. We feel in our gut the yearning for the “authentic” and real in all walks of life, not just wine, a return to a simpler moment that brings pause and reflection, instead of this non-stop go-go-going. BUT WHERE ARE THESE PEOPLE? WHERE ARE YOU?! I just hope we’re not too much before our time. But it’s starting to feel very lonely, and I’m not even out on our hilltop.
So that’s what we’re finding ourselves up against. Maybe we just need to stay away from these Portland bastion restaurants and try with the new, young, more experimental places; it seems the big guys have a system that works and they don’t want to introduce anything new to it. And that makes me gasp, for when one no longer values the distinct and individual, what is there left?
Tags: 13.5% alcohol, Cosentino, Kluge, tannins, wines
Steve Heimoff’s recent blog hits close to home, and the point is not about Cosentino Winery apparently closing. The point is about what probably led to its closing. The quote from the owner, Mitch Cosentino, was he would “do it all myself again, like I did in the beginning,” this in reference to his new wine venture where he personally will focus on making small production wines. From the sounds of the article, Cosentino had spread himself too thinly—across too many SKUs, across too many purchased grapes—to where there was nothing recognizably Mitch Cosentino in the wines; his wines became just like everybody else’s.
As I’ve mentioned before the only hope I have for our wines is when you taste them you know they could only have come from us – from our vineyard, our hands, and our hearts.
This question has gone through my mind many, many times over the past 5 years, but never more often than the last few weeks. Financially, we have a lot riding on this. Of course the second vintage is in barrel now, and 2010’s will be shortly, but as the old saying goes, “The first impression is everything.” Right before the 2008 harvest I was at the vineyard with the winemaker who would help me make the wine, and he said that he couldn’t guarantee any specific qualities in the wine seeing it was the first harvest from a new site and so on. My response to him was, “All I care about is when people taste our wine they know that it could only have come from The Grande Dalles and our vineyard.”
I think we’ve captured that in our first vintage, but the problem is it’s not easy to sell something unique, and you can multiply that problem by 10 when it’s coming from someplace new and from “unknown” people. I wonder, should we have made wine more in the vein of what people expect, you know, “yummy,” “jammy,” “inky-purple,” “fruity,” “unctuous,” etcetera? Would that make it easier to sell? Then I ran across this quote on Vinography from Matt Kramer’s new book Matt Kramer on Wine:
“Isn’t taste what fine wine is all about? Nope. You’d think it would be, but it’s not so. Let me push this further: the purpose of fine wine is not to give pleasure, but to give insight. . . . The greatest wines literally mark the land for us. They tell us something about the earth that we could not otherwise know. This is their pleasure, an insight so intrinsic that it endures and repeats itself over generations. Everything else is just, well, taste.“
What Matt says is exactly what I’ve thought about wine and our wine for years and years. There are a whole bunch of good tasting wines out there, but in my opinion the ones that show what Matt Kramer calls “somewhereness” are far and few between, particularly those from the US. I know new and unique things are almost always initially viewed with skepticism, I just hope that at some point people “get it” about our wines.
Tags: Matt Kramer, Matt Kramer on Wine, The Grande Dalles, Vinography
I’ve been sick—a cold (hence the online silence + I had been working on the website + I’m knitting Sam a “tractor” sweater)—the last week or so and someone suggested bay leaf, hot water, and lemon as relief, a Sicilian grandmother’s remedy from the old country. I was on it. After I made myself a cup, and put Sam to his nap, I settled in to try to catch up on some of the wine world’s goings on; my first (and only) stop: Stu Smith’s site, Biodynamics is a Hoax.
What a hullabaloo going on there, if you haven’t visited, and lots to digest, that is if you care about biodynamics and vineyard farming. Disclosure: I know very little about biodynamic farming, and at one time some years ago, when we were beginning the prep work to plant our vineyard, I felt a little pressured that we should be doing something like this, as it seemed to be all the rage, and obviously still is. In something like a fear-based state of mind that we do things right, and in an ignorant state (or innocent? hmmm, where to draw the line between the two?), I felt the draw of herd mentality. So, I got what was at that time the only copy of Nicolas Joly’s Wine from Sky to Earth: Growing and Appreciating Biodynamic Wine from the Multnomah County Library (five years later there are two copies) and set out to learn more. Fine enough. But somewhere between the dung-filled horn and crystals the skeptic in me took hold, and after months of renewals and collecting dust while I thought I might get around to it, I returned the book to the library. I should’ve skipped ahead to the moon planting bits, that’s what I was really interested in. My old-world Swiss Oma would plant to cosmos rhythms, and I romanticized about moonlight sowing (!). But I digress (as usual).
Tags: biodynamics, dung-filled horn, Multnomah County Library, Nicolas Joly, Rock Flour Hill, Sicilian grandmother, Stu Smith, Swiss Oma
Finally. This is a big day for us; for any of you who’ve launched your own start-up website, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, imagine a substantial project you’ve invested a lot of yourself in, one that you are able to claim as yours and one that you are both proud of and surprised how you ever got it done. Like that.
Enjoy.
Tags: startup website, The Grande Dalles
Our new website is almost done. Hooray! Sad to see our little splash page go, but now that we have wine, and we’ve been to NY and actually talked to people about it and blah blah blah, it’s time. Here it is, a little preview of what we hope to officially launch sometime next week. I didn’t design it, but provided the concept, as well as the copy, and Scott helped a bit with that, too. Just a few more tweaks and we’re good to go. Stay tuned.
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