Got Gamay for Wine Blogging Wednesday April 21?

The Blog “Drink What You Like” is the host for April’s Wine Blogging Wednesday 68 – Got Gamay? a virtual gathering of wine bloggers from around the world who taste and blog about a wine based on a common theme each month thanks to  Lenn Thompson of New York Cork Report who started the monthly event over five years ago.

The host writes, “Selecting the topic for this month’s topic was an easy decision as I’ve developed quite a Cru Beaujolais fetish over the last couple of years.” Gamay is grown throughout the world, he points out, and adds “Gamay is unfortunately best know as the grape that produces Beaujolais Nouveau, popularized by George Duboeuf.”

Want to join us? On or before Wednesday, April 21st write about your Gamay tasting experience and post it on your blog!

So what will you drink? Unless I find a bottle of Washington Gamay, I’ve got a bottle of Louis Jadot Beaujolais right here which I found at my local grocery store and which might work to get something posted next Wednesday…but the following day, April 22, I will be attending the Delicious Wine Tour in Los Angeles and will have the opportunity to taste a lot of French wine.

I hereby declare that it will be my duty to focus on Gamay Beaujolais and report back here the most memorable Gamay they got.

And in the meantime, I’ve got a backlog of Washington wines to blog about as I sit here on pins and needles waiting to hear whether I got a scholarship to the Wine Bloggers Conference and whether they have enough money to fund me! (So if you can, please contribute!)


Why The Wine Bloggers Conference Scholarship Committee Should Select Me

The. video above gives you a taste of what a Wine Bloggers Conference is like and why I am applying for a scholarship to attend this year’s conference in Walla Walla, Washington where the emphasis on tasting, tours, and education will be on Washington wines. As a Californian who lives near the Santa Barbara wine region, I have access to tasting and purchasing an abundance of excellent California wines. Being near LA, I am also invited to industry events and wine tastings and can learn about wines from other regions.
But there is nothing like a Wine Bloggers Conference to really get to know the wines of the region that is being showcased. In recent weeks, in order to learn more about Washington wines and to write about them in the hopes of winning a ride on the WBC-Or-Bust bus (see the badge on the side bar?), I’ve been trying to find and taste Washington wines and have come up woefully and surprisingly short. Trader Joe’s and Vons offer little in the way of Washington wines (they offer mostly the same ones!), and my favorite wine store, the Ventura Wine Company, carries mostly California wines with only a smattering of wines from other places, and very few from Washington. And I’m not one of those wine bloggers being bombarded with wine samples either!
Even a trip on my own to Washington wouldn’t provide me with anything close to what the Wine Bloggers Conference can do when it comes to tasting a large variety of Washington wines, getting to know the different regions and what they have to offer, meeting the wine makers, and touring the facilities.
So it’s no surprise that the Wine Bloggers Conference sold out on Thursday way before the conference begins in mid-June 2010, and so the scholarship deadline has been moved up too. Learn more about the Wine Bloggers Conference Scholarship here and how you can help send a wine blogger to Washington! More funds are still desperately needed to meet the goal of sending 10 wine bloggers to Walla Walla. Learn more about the Wine Bloggers conference itself here.
Here’s my application about why I want to go and why the committee should select me:
  1. Full Name:
    Gwendolyn Alley
  2. Contact information:
    gwendolynalley AT yahoo DOT com
  3. Blog addresses and what you’re all about:

    Art Predator     http://artpredator.wordpress.com is my main blog Continue reading →

2010 Wine Bloggers Conference Scholarship Applications To Close Early!

Because the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla Washington has filled up and sold out ALREADY, WBC scholarship applications will NOT be accepted until May as originally planned but closed a month early on Friday!

However, if you still want to apply for a scholarship to the WBC 2010, you can still send in your application over the weekend (like NOW) and it will be reviewed: wbcscholarship at gmail dot com. They need to know the following about you and your blog:

  1. Full Name
  2. Contact information including email and phone number
  3. Blog address and what you’re all about
  4. Requested funds – please be specific, and indicate if you need the registration fee, full or partial hotel, full or partial airfare.  Remember, that times are tough and a lot of people need assistance, so please be honest and realistic about your requirements.
  5. In 250 words or less, please tell us why you would like to attend the WBC and why we should consider your application.

I am now working on my application in hopes that I will receive a scholarship and once again attend the fabulous Wine Bloggers Conference. I’d really like to learn more about Washington wines at the source–Washington!!–and share the experience here on Wine Predator with you as I did in Santa Rosa in 2008 and 2009 as well as in Lisbon 2009.

And if you can, please support the Wine Bloggers Scholarship fund and help send needy wine bloggers to Walla Walla Washington! The fund is $1500 short of its goal to fund 10 bloggers (and hopefully one of those 10 bloggers will be me!)

2010 Wine Bloggers Conference Sells Out! So Join the Wait List Now!

No, I don’t mean the Wine Bloggers Conference has sold out ethically–it’s sold out sold out! That means maybe if you’re lucky, and you join the waiting list TODAY, you’ll get a spot.

Why would you want to go? As someone who has attended the past two years in Santa Rosa as well as the European Wine Bloggers conference in Lisbon, I can tell you attending is an amazing experience. You can read about my experiences via the many posts I put up each year on the pages above.

The first year the conference focused on Sonoma country wines and those from New Zealand. In 2009, we traveled all over Napa to taste that region’s wines and there was a tasting of wines from Portugal also. The Portugal conference highlighted Portuguese wines in a way impossible without traveling all over Portugal. 2010’s conference will emphasize the wines of the host state, Washington with tours and tastings and talks.

These conferences bring to the wine blogger an astounding array of incredible wines. Often the winemaker is in attendance to share more about what makes his or her wines special. If you’re one of the 1,000 wine bloggers out there, you’d have the opportunity to up your game by tasting 100s of wines in the company of wine bloggers and wine professionals.

The conferences are a great value as well. The meals are absolutely fabulous and match marvelously with the wines! So what else could you ask for? Wine, food, friends, plus guest speakers and sessions designed to improve your knowledge of wine and wine blogging. Learn more at the Wine Bloggers Conference website.

If this sounds too good to be true, it almost is. Here are a few more details form the website about who should attend and how much it costs.

Who Should Attend

  • Citizen Bloggers who write about wine or the wine industry on their own. In 2010, we are also focusing on wine & food pairing and so invite all food bloggers as well!
  • Winery Bloggers who have a winery-related blog. We will have special content tailored to winery bloggers.
  • New Media Innovators who work in the world of blogging and social media.
  • Wine Industry members who would like to learn about new media or interact with bloggers.

Cost, Payment, Cancellation, and What is Included

The cost of the conference is $95 for citizen wine bloggers (those unaffiliated with a business or organization), $195 for industry wine bloggers (those whose blog is affiliated with a winery, retail store, or other business or organization), and $295 for non-blogger participants (industry, media relations professionals, friends and family, etc). We are able to offer a lower price to citizen bloggers and wine-industry bloggers because it is for these folks our sponsors underwrite the conference. If you are a member of OpenWine Consortium, you will receive a discount of $10 (just indicate your membership on the registration along with your member name and we’ll discount it automatically). Payment is required in advance by credit card.

Such a deal! There’s even a scholarship to help needy wine bloggers attend! If you can, please support this worthy cause with a small or large donation!

Lucky me–I won a copy of Corked!

My pal Jo Diaz ran another contest, and yes, I won! Her granddaughter pulled my name out of the hat, the last name of six winners of a copy of a book that Jo recently reviewed on her site, WineBlog.Org. So what’s the book and why do I want to read it?
According to Jo’s post which reviews the book, Kathryn Borel is an important new author, who recounts a road trip in France with her dad in Corked, a memoir “that’s filled with love, pain, and emotional growth through pushing the envelope.”

Jo says, “Her style of writing is very easy, raw, and revealing as she and her father Phillipe Borel ~ a retired hotelier and former chef ~ drive themselves through Alsace, Burgundy, Cotes du Rhone, and the Languedoc.” She continues later in her review that, “The book is filled with little revelations, and we’re all included in their journey, from solving all of the things that can, and sometimes do, go wrong between a daughter and a father.”

Sounds good to me!

Thanks to Jo and Hatchet Book Group for the new book!

Wine Blogging Weds #67: Some Red Wines for the White Wine Lover

For the March rendition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, host Joe Roberts, @1WineDude, prompts us to find a red wine for the white wine drinker. Immediately, my mind went to an Australian sparkling shiraz, like Paringa: fun, bubbly, inexpensive, yet tasty. But no, Joe says which STILL red wine would you choose.

Since I am competing in the WBC-or-Bust campaign to get one of 12 spots on the bus to travel around Washington wine regions before and after this year’s Wine Bloggers conference in Walla Walla, a Washington red seemed an obvious choice. And since the following day is a Washington merlot Twitter tasting, the varietal and the region seemed clear-cut–I could get more bang from my buck!

Since there isn’t a lot to choose from around here, I asked the Wine Guy at Trader Joes, (who also blogs) which wine he would recommend. He suggested the 2007 Red Diamond which he felt was an excellent choice of a red wine for a white wine drinker. Bonus, it’s a Washington merlot AND a great value he said.

So I knew a Red Diamond merlot would be one wine I’d be tasting. But what else, I wondered.

Which got me wondering about the prompt itself: who is this mythical white wine drinker? What white wines do they like? Why don’t they drink red wines?

In real life, given this challenge, I would base my recommendation on what I knew or learned about the person. Then, I would base my decision on what was the occasion and what food was being served.

What food screams red wine to me? What food really elevates the experience of the wine–and vice versa? Which food demands red wine? STEAK!

I immediately imagined the scenario of the red wine drinker and the white wine drinker at a steak house trying to agree on a bottle of wine and settling on wines by the glass. If that mythical white wine drinker sticks to his or her white wine allegiance, he or she is missing out.

What else to try for this challenge was determined by the generosity of Shane Gelinas of the Gelinas Wine Group. Yesterday I had the good fortune of attending an industry tasting of Gelinas wines as well as wines from the Truman Wine Company. When the tasting was over, I asked Shane if I could take some wine home with me–especially wines that I didn’t get a chance to taste (because I spend too much time talking with winemakers!!). He told me to take what interested me that was open so I picked up two reds (a Folkway Cab which I hadn’t had a chance to taste and was VERY anxious to, a 2006 Latria Spanish grenache carinene blend, a 2007 Groundwork grenache I adored, and I was offered two whites which I had tasted and liked a lot.

Now that I had for wines for WBW#67,  the question was: what should I pair them with for dinner?

No surprise here: I picked up a ribeye steak for myself, and a chicken breast for my spouse which we prepared with pesto and oyster mushrooms, plus mushroom risotto and green salad on the side. (He’s recovering from a traumatic bicycle accident where he broke his C2; only yesterday was he permitted by his doctor to take his neck brace off. His “chew” muscles are still getting strong enough for a steak, even a tender rib-eye!).

First off,  we (my friend Dave, my husband and myself) tasted the 2007 Red Diamond Merlot, under $10 out the door from Trader Joe’s. We didn’t like the nose when I first opened the bottle–a little strange and funky with an alcoholic chaser. In the glass, the color was nice with some depth. There was a surprising richness to the wine, almost syrah like, with plum and cherry, but no cola. It had a bright, clean finish, and for how much fruit character it showed, it was also nicely balanced.

This Red Diamond merlot wine would be a great choice for a white wine drinker. And if he or she didn’t like it, you’re not out a lot of money. We were very happy with this wine at this price.

Second up, we dove into a 2006 Latria Montsant red blend of 50% Garnacha and 50% Carinena. According to the bottle, Montsant is a region of northeast Spain in the province of Catalonia and these grapes are from a high elevation vineyard, about 1500′.

We really really liked this wine but agreed it would not be a go to wine for the typical American white wine drinker.

It was really pretty in the glass, and an overhwlming nose that made me want to swoon! David described it as “truffley.” The balance between fruit and spice and acids and tannins makes this a great wine for tapas or a meal of just about anything. However, we suspected that the minerality and tannins would put off most white wine drinkers–unless they like super minerally whites! This would be a good choice for a white wine drinker who prefers wines in a more European style while others would turn up their noses. We were surprised and impressed by its nice long finish. Great wine for only $12 at B & L; usually it’s around $15 which is still a marvelous value.

Third in line, we poured the Groundwork 2007 Grenache from Sans Liege. Jane and I loved this wine at Tuesday’s tasting and I loved it again today. It was excellent with my steak as well as my husband’s pesto mushroom chicken. It was beautiful all around–in the nose, the mouth, the soul. We all three loved this wine. The alcohol is a stunning 15.3%  but because it was so well balanced (and not at 70 degree room temp but about 60) it didn’t taste hot. It was very complex with floral, fruit and earth flavors including cherry, truffle, and caramel as well as spice; somewhat like a carnation.

It danced on our tongues–our enthusiasm alone would convince a white wine drinker to give it a whirl across the dance floor of a palate.

I assume this is not a cheap date but wow, is it great! This wine would make a grenache believer out of just about anyone.

DING DING DING! I just heard from Curt, winemaker at Groundwork that this wine retails for only $19! This is a screaming deal! FInd some, buy some, serve it to a white wine drinker and tell me how it goes! (Or just enjoy it yourself!)

Fourth and finally, we experienced Folkway’s Black Ridge Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. This is an absolutely beautiful wine in every way imaginable.

How could a white wine drinker not fall in love this wine–and with the person who shares it? As David put it, “You don’t need a Ph.D to figure out and enjoy this rom-com of a cabernet.”

Not to say that this wouldn’t satisfy a more sophisticated red wine drinker because it certainly would! With plenty of blackberry and cherry fruit lively acids bringing it into balance, and a long savory finish, this cabernet is a steal at $36. It was supple, satisfying, pleasing–euphoria in a glass, and a knockout with my steak.

At the tasting, I talked at length with one of the brothers, Lino Bozzano, who is producing this wine and I look forward to visiting their winery and writing more about them! BUt for now, this post is clocking in at over 1200 words so that, my friends, brings this month’s Wine Blogging Wednesday to a triumphant close: three winners for the white one drinker, and four winners for red wine drinkers!

How Will Extreme Walla Walla Washington Winter 2009 Impact Wines?

One of the blogs I read about wine and wine related issues is Ken Payton’s Reign of Terroir.

I met Ken at the 2009 Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa; we both took refuge under a shady tree during a tasting at Dry Creek Vineyard. We also ran into each other at the EWBC in Lisbon the following November and we both traveled to the cork forest.

Along the way, I’ve learned that Ken is a blogger of the journalistic vein; he’s willing to ask the tough questions. He’s quick to take notes and record conversations of interest. He’s bright, articulate, edgy, and opinionated–and he has weighed in on comments here in this blog as well.

Recently, Ken posted a two part series on climate change and viticulture based on conversation with climatologist Gregory V. Jones who Ken says is  “America’s most rigorous voice in the science as it relates to climate change and viticulture.”

I highly recommend both of Ken Payton’s blog posts on climate and wine but what caught my eye the most, because I’m thinking a lot these days about Washington Wine in order to be competitive for the WBC-Or-Bust contest, was this specific example:

The act of singular events like winter freezes are a little less extreme of late, but they still occur. Walla Walla this past December got down to 10 degrees; that’s at the damaging point for grape vines. Those kinds of things still happen. They just don’t go away. These extreme issues, whether they be with rainfall, hail even, of Winter freezes or Spring frosts, they are still risks to the industry depending on where you are.

Should I win a spot on the WBC-Or-Bust bus, this topic will be something I will want to follow-up on: how climate change is impacting the wine industry in the Northwest and in Washington in particular. I’ve been curious about climate change since I was an undergrad environmental studies major at UC Santa Cruz (where I went following a stint working in Ridge’s tasting room and where we had as a test case Randall Grahm’s Bonny Doon Vineyards!)  I wonder whether wineries will be willing to have front door conversations on this touchy subject. Certainly, the wineries should be prepared to discuss their sustainable practices and the ways they are reducing their carbon footprints.

Word count clocks in at over 400! And I thought this would be a short and sweet post!