Oh The Places You'll Go!

                                                                  The View From Canlis in Seattle

The very first bottle of wine Andis ever sold was to our good friend and neighbor Isy Borjon.  He came into the tasting room 5 minutes after we opened on that very first day and bought a bottle of Barbera, took it back home and drank it with his family that afternoon. 

With every bottle of wine opened and enjoyed a small story is lived - a relaxing evening, a beautiful afternoon at the winery, a date night, a memorable dinner.  That first bottle, that first story is a perfect way to begin.  Here, almost 4 years later there have been over 150,000 of those small stories lived while enjoying a bottle of Andis.  We have heard some of those stories from locales across the globe – pictures of Andis in Egypt, Africa, Mexico, South America, and Europe.  Just amazing all the places and all the stories those bottles have been a part of. 

Last week Andy and I were in Seattle pouring the wines at Canlis, one of the truly great restaurants, not just in Seattle but anywhere in the United States.   They were good enough to add the Semillon and the Grenache to their wine list where Andis will now be represented alongside some of the most amazing wines on the planet.  Next week we will be in New York City pouring at a few of the most incredible restaurants there – such a privilege.    

We feel so fortunate that people have enjoyed the wines so much and made us a part of their lives.  It all started with one bottle, who knows where it can go from here!      

The very best bottling runs are very boring bottling runs.  And that is NOT what we got last week!!  We had two days to bottle 4000 cases of wine of 11 different individual packages.  A monumental task no doubt, but normally no problem with our great Cellarmaster Steve preparing the wines and veteran  mobile bottling pro Harry running the truck.  All was well and good until 778 cases in when, ZAP! down goes the vacuum pump (the machine pulls a vacuum in the neck of the bottle before inserting the cork – how cool is that?).  No vacuum pump, no bottling….. but with no way to reschedule the team jumped into action.  Trips to Tracey, Stockton and Fairplay followed…..some poor guy in a machine shop in Stockton stayed up ALL NIGHT to rewind the motor and by 8:30 the next morning we were back on track. 

It has always amazed me just how complicated filling, corking, labeling, and foiling a bottle of wine can be.  That’s why we LOVE working with Harry – with his years of experience he is never flustered and always gets the job done.   When I asked him last week how many bottles of wine he had run through his truck over the years, he casually answered “A little over a billion I figure”…….Billion….with a B…..WOW!!

The world of food and wine is a fascinating place to spend your life.  It runs such an incredible spectrum…from the utterly necessary to the unquestionably indulgent.  We participated in an event last week that brought both ends of that spectrum together in an incredible way.  We were the featured winery at a fundraising dinner that raises money to get homeless and abused women off the street, equip them to work in the culinary industry though a 600 hour training program and then find them employment and get them back on their feet.  The program is sponsored by St. John’s of Sacramento and held at Plate’s Café in South Sacramento.   As is often the case in this universe, not only was it a great cause, but a REALLY good time to boot.  The folks who attend these dinners are totally into food and wine, energetic, and gracious - and they even said nice things about the Andis Wines : ).  If you live in the Sacramento are you might want to check it out!  A lovely, lovely evening.   

 

Heard a great segment on NPR this morning about an auction that took place this week where the French Presidential Palace sold many of the most collectable and expensive wines from their wine cellar to raise money to buy more affordable and early drinking wines.  Love it!!  While the mere mention of some of the great names that went on the auction block this week will make any wine lover weak in the knees, it is great to see wine being treated (even in an old world country like France) less and less as a trophy and status symbol and more like the daily respite and pleasure it is.  I can also imagine this great news for likely hundreds of winemakers throughout the country making highly delicious, desirable, and affordable wine who did not happen to get classified 150 years ago.  God forbid we drink from cellars other than those deemed worthy in the mid 1800s……..Just another little sign of the further democratization of fermented grape juice!!

Sediment Happens!

We had a wonderful couple come in to the Andis tasting room this weekend.  Both of them relatively new to the appreciation and consumption of fine wine, they had previously been in the winery and absolutely fell in love with the 2010 Andis Grenache.  A few nights later while enjoying the bottle they had brought home with them they were very bothered to discover in the last glass of the evening a bit of dark grainy sediment.  Wondering what had gone wrong they diligently trekked back to the winery the following weekend (a tough assignment indeed) to see what was amiss with the wine.  I was very happy to be there to chat with them as we have found that sediment is one of the most misunderstood aspects to wine consumption.   So I told them the truth – “sediment happens”.   Here is the best explanation of bottle sediment I have run across:

 The tiny crystals you find in your wine glass, and sometimes first in the wine bottle … are not only the least likely to taste bad, but are treated by some as a sign of a better wine. So if you find crystal sediment in your wine glass, there's no reason to worry or fret.

The crystal sediment you might find in a wine glass is called tartrate and forms from tartaric acid in grapes. Not all fruit has tartaric acid and its presence in grapes is what allows us to make better wines from grapes than we can from any other fruit. Because tartaric acid doesn't remain dissolved in alcohol as easily as it does in grape juice, it binds to potassium after fermentation and forms potassium acid tartrates — the crystalline solids creating the sediment in your wine glass. Because red wines have probably been exposed to cold temperatures less than white wines, they are more likely to form tartrate crystals.

In theory all wines should probably form tartrate sediment, but modern wine production has introduced cold stabilization and fine filtration which remove most to all tartrates. More expensive wines that have been created according to more traditional methods, thus eschewing cold stabilization and filtration, are more likely to produce tartrate sediment. People who prefer the traditional methods of wine production, which includes a lot of wine drinkers in France and Italy, will treat the presence of tartrate sediment as a sign of quality.

The tartrate sediment in your wine glass or wine bottle won't hurt you if you consume it and it isn't going to ruin the flavor of your wine, so you don't need to worry about separating the crystals from your wine before serving and drinking. However, there is also no value in consuming this sediment so don't go out of your way to do so.

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            http://wine-tasting-reviews.com/wine-basics-drinking-buying/open-wine/209-sediment-wine-decant-lees-tartrate.html 

So not only is sediment not bad, it’s good!!  Sure it is not the best to have a mouthful of tartrate crystals as the final memory of a great bottle of wine, but, with some gentle decanting and a little patience that is easily avoided.  To me it is always a sign of a less manipulated, less processed wine.  And in the era of mass production that is a nice thing indeed!