After six generations of pressing grapes in California, the Mirassou family has only one son left who owns a wine brand: Steven Mirassou.

But he can’t legally use his own name on his bottles, despite the fact that Mirassou’s have been making wine since the mid-1800s, probably longer than any other CA winemaking family. He cannot use the family name because Gallo picked up the Mirassou brand in 2003. David Mirassou now represents that brand for Gallo, but the San Jose winery where they once made their products is long gone.

The family-name-scooped-up-by-the-big-conglomerate story that seems to be rampant in the wine world (whether you’re a Mondavi in CA or a Taylor in NY) doesn’t seem to have slowed Steven Mirassou down much, though.

After setting up shop under the Steven Kent brand (which is as far as he can go legally in terms of sticking his name on the bottles) in Livermore, along with La Rochelle winemaker Tom Stutz he’s crafting some of the most stunning – and exciting – wines in all of California…

While Livermore is home base for Mirassou’s Steven Kent Winery (and is home to the grapes that go into what are probably SKW’s best wines – more on that in a few minutes), the area isn’t the focus for their sister brand, La Rochelle.

“With La Rochelle, we’re trying to find ‘grand cru’ vineyards up and down the [CA] coast,” Steven told me when I stopped in to taste through something like 900 of their more recent releases (okay, more like 20).

SKW on the other hand, is focused on Bordeaux varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. According to Steven, Livermore was once the king of those plantings on the west coast: “people often forget that Livermore had the highest concentration of Bordeaux varieties in the late 1800s in California.”

If the SKW juice is any indication, it’s a tradition well worth maintaining. SKW’s reds are not cheap – the high-end goes for $100 and up per bottle – but they’re stellar examples of why people ought to be thinking of areas outside of Napa and Sonoma when it comes to world-class Bordeaux-style fine wine on the Left Coast.

While there were no clunkers in the lineup that I tasted through with Steve and Tom, there were several highlights that stood out amongst the good-looking crowd; some of this is pretty glowing, but those who know me here understand that I emphatically call it as I see it and in this case I have to call it emphatically good (and if you don’t know me by now… you will never ever know meeeee……) – deal with it, okay?

2010 La Rochelle Rosella’s Vineyard Chardonnay (Santa Lucia Highlands)
Price: $65
Rating: B+

With all the brioche and apples this is throwing out, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was practically Blanc de Blanc Champagne (which in a way it is…). Balanced between zesty and creamy, it’s got the bustiness of CA Chard and the dance moves of its more svelte European counterparts.

2010 La Rochelle Four Sisters Vineyard Pinot Meunier (Sonoma Coast)
Price: $38
Rating: B+

A more interesting bottle of red you’re unlikely to encounter, assuming you’ve got your wine geek radar on full-blast. Spicy, herbal, and full of red berries and flowers, this is a pretty, feminine, and at turns delicate wine that has vibrant rustic and smoky edges. Interestingly, this wine was aged in oak barrels with French heads and American oak bilges (I’ve no idea if that made it more compelling or not, but it is compelling). I was like a dog at the fire hydrant with this wine, I would’ve sniffed it all day if we hadn’t had 800 other wines to taste in the lineup after it…

2009 La Rochelle Spring Hill Vineyard Pinot Noir (Sonoma Coast)
Price: $48
Rating: A-

A stunner. For the price (which isn’t cheap), it’s actually an incredible bargain. Berry compote, citrus pith, liveliness, meat and earth and spice and flowers and a sweet jam undertone… sh*t, it’s just all the stuff I love about SC Pinot. She’s got curves people, and they are sexy curves… but the price point makes it more an Overachiever than a Sexy Beast.

2009 Steven Kent Winery Cabernet Sauvignon (Livermore Valley)
Price: $60
Rating: B+

What set this wine apart for me was the spiciness; yeah there are red, tangy, food-friendly fruits, but there’s a ton of smoke and chilies and cigar action, too. A bit of meat and dried fruits add to the complexity but with all that going on it has grip and focus, too. It should unfurl into something lovely and suitable for framing in about five more years.

2008 Steven Kent Winery “Clone Thirty” Ghielmetti Vineyard Cabernet Collection (Livermore Valley)
Price: $100
Rating: A-

Not cheap. But definitely not slouching, either. The best way to explain this complex beast is to give you a dump of the tasting notes: “tar, black & red fruits, chocolate, savory, tight, a ton of both acidic and tannic structure, black and dense and deep but elegantly constructed; texturally stunning with a tea leaf finish.” If that doesn’t get you at least somewhat thirsty then I cannot help you.

2009 Steven Kent Winery Lineage (Livermore Valley)
Price: $145
Rating: A

This wine is like a drop-kick to the face where the boot sole on the end of your chin is made of cigar box spices. Probably the most “velvety” wine that SKW has out in its lineup of recent releases, there is also an insane amount of fruity and herbal complexity on the palate to go with the smoothness. Spicy Mexican-style chocolate, black licorice, cocoa, and espresso bean also show up. Give it a few years of rest and the result is going to kick some serious ass.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at What’s In A Name, Anyway? (Recent Releases From Steven Mirassou’s Not-Quite-Family-Named Brands) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

The world of wine critique is fraught with logical contradictions.

Case in point: take this excerpt from a recent interview with critic James Suckling on Liv-Ex.com on the topic of evaluating wines while they are still in the barrel, as is often done during En Primeur in Bordeaux (emphasis mine):

“The key thing to remember is that the nose isn’t important at all. I learnt that from Daniel Lawton, one of the great negociants of Bordeaux. The important thing is the texture – the quality of the tannins and how they relate to the acidity and alcohol – and then the finish. Wines with long seamless finishes are really the great wines. It’s not all about power. It takes a long time before you can taste En Primeur properly. There’s a hierarchy in Bordeaux that helps as you can kind of figure out what should taste good. But to really understand how wines evolve you need a good 10 years of tasting.”

The logic issue here is that we know scientifically that the vast majority of our sensory experience in tasting wine comes aromatically and retro-nasally. So one (but not the only!) interpretation of the above quote is that En Primeur ratings are meaningless, or at least limited in value to consumers, because the aromas – and therefore the majority of the wine’s sensory experience – cannot be fully evaluated. The contradiction being that the wine world largely treats those ratings as not having any such limited usage.

Issues like that one crop up all over the place in the wine world, if you’re willing to look hard enough. And so it should be of little surprise to many of you when I tell you that the act of rating wines falls squarely into what is commonly called “bad science” in the scientific world…

To explain this, we first need to explore what’s meant by “bad science.” David Deutsch lays out a compelling definition in his excellent book The Beginning of Infinity: bad science offers explanations that are easy to vary, and therefore are not actually explanations of how things truly work.

For example, saying that someone lost a vintage of grapes to hail because of bad luck is bad science. It’s bad science even if that grapegrower has had many random unfavorable circumstances befall him before, a string of seemingly convincing “data” to bolster this claim. The data in this case are irrelvant because a) those random events cannot directly predict or explain the subsequent unpleasant events and b) we can substitute any manner of explanations in place of “bad luck” (“the will of the gods”for example) all of which are equally incorrect. In other words, the explanation is too easy to vary – accepting it is no better than acting on blind faith. That’s an over-simplification, but you get the drift.

Now, if we were able to trace back the meteorological events leading to that hail storm, and were able to gather enough data and causal links from the formation of the clouds to the weather events that triggered the hail above the poor guy’s vineyard, we would end up with an explanation and evidence (the formation of hail) that’s pretty difficult to vary. This is “good science” – it explains what happened, and the results could be used to accurately predict future similar events.

What does this have to do with criticism?

Wine ratings are most often presented via scales that imply scientific precision, however they are measuring something for which we have no scientificly reliable calibration: how people sense (mostly) qualitative aspects of wine. Yes, there may be objective qualities about a wine that can indeed be somewhat calibrated (the presence of faults, for example) but even with these we have varying thresholds of detection between critics. That’s important because it means that the objective (i.e., measurable) quantities of those elements are not perceived the same way by two different reviewers, and so their perception of the levels of those elements cannot reliable be calibrated.

But it’s the subjective stuff that really throws the money wrench into the works here. How we perceive those – and measure our enjoyment of them – will likely not be fully explainable in our lifetimes by science. That is because they are what is known as qualia: like happiness, depression, pain, and pleasure, those sensations can be described but cannot effectively be measured across individuals in any meaningful way scientifically.

Yes, we can come to pretty good agreement on a wine’s color, and on the fact that it smells like, say, strawberries. After that, the qualia perception gets pretty tricky, however: my perception on how vibrantly I perceive that strawberry aroma might be quite different from yours. Once that factors into how you and I would “rate” that wine’s aroma, we start to diverge, and potentially quite dramatically at that.

It’s a bit like you and I cutting our fingers accidentally when trying to open a wine bottle: ask us how we’d rate the pain on a scale of one to ten, and we might both say “2″ but there is NO calibration possible to ensure that our twos are meaningfully comparable – it only appears that way because we chose arbitrarily to use a numeric scale in reporting our perceptions of the pain. Substitute our perception of a wine’s balance for finger pain in that example and you can see we have a problem.

I am grossly oversimplifying this, by the way, in order to prevent this piece from ending up as ten thousand words (the qualia rabbit hole is very, very deep). The point is that the qualia can directly impact the rating, and so are not irrelevant.

Mistaking qualia perception as either accurately measurable or removing it as scientifically irrelevant has lead to a lot of “bad” science in the wine world, in some cases coming from what would otherwise qualify as “good” scientific data.

Interestingly, fine wine is acutely susceptible to this problem of differing qualia perceptions specifically because of how wonderful it is – it contains more complexity in offering more qualia (styles, flavors, primary and secondary aromas, textures, tannins, acidic structure, etc., and the senses of balance between them) and therefore a lot more room for error (of the scientific kind, I mean) between individuals.

A relatively recent example of this can be found in the Journal of Wine Economics’ publication of article by Robert T. Hodgson titled An Analysis of the Concordance Among 13 U.S. Wine Competitions. In that article, Hodgson gathered data on wines submitted to medal competitions and concluded that “the probability of winning a Gold medal at one competition is stochastically independent of the probability of receiving a Gold at another competition, indicating that winning a Gold medal is greatly influenced by chance alone.” The trouble was that Hodgson a) removed all of the factors that lead into how the judges came to their ratings, on the grounds that they are statistically irrelevant, which lead to him b) treating the qualia perception differences between judges and competitions as fungible when in reality they are not – they simply cannot yet be measured accurately (and may not be done so in out lifetimes, given the scientific complexity of that task). So in effect Hodgson made a critical error in assuming that the ratings in each competition are reached in way that can be measured scientifically and interchangeably. But they aren’t – the qualia rule the day when it comes to wine reviewing. Good approach, but the conclusion is bad science.

What does this mean for wine ratings?

Wine ratings (mine included!) are all at least partially “bad” science, and are not meaningfully comparable between reviewers, at least not scientifically, because all of them will at least partially perceive the qualia presented in those wines differently in ways that cannot be measured. This is true despite the fact that the scales are often comparable, and despite the fact that the wine world occasionally sports a serious hard-on for comparing ratings from different critics.  It is true despite the fact that the wine business does not want it to be true. It is true because if wine ratings cannot be reliable compared in a scientifically meaningful way, then they should NOT be treated as fungible (even if everyone happens to be treating them that way now). They are NOT accurate science.

“So what?” you might ask, “aren’t they all close enough for government work? Don’t lots of wine critics appear to agree at least somewhat on wine ratings for many wines?”

The answer to that while many critics appear to agree, it is NOT close enough for any meaningful comparison, and we cannot safely assume that any two critics reach equivalent scores in exactly the same way (or even objectively). Why? Because we have no way to accurately measure their qualia perceptions, and so we have no way of estimating how close to objective accuracy those ratings are individually, let alone across individual critics. This assumes that there is some objective accuracy to those qualia perceptions (interestingly, The Beginning of Infinity does suggest that there might be objective qualia like beauty – but we are likely many generations away from getting a handle on that scientifically).

What does this mean for everyday imbibers? It means that you shouldn’t assume that different reviewers are rating wines in the same way or even on the same scale, even if those scales appear to be identical superficially.

Accepting any wine review, or even a collection of such reviews on the same wines, as an ultimate determinant of that wine’s present and future enjoyment across individuals is “bad” science, and no better than accepting them on blind faith.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel, though.

If you have found that a reviewer’s ratings and descriptors and – importantly! – their relative perception of the levels of those elements in a given wine at least seem to closely mirror your own, then you may have found someone who likely perceives fine wine qualia similarly to you. Seek out those reviewers and listen to them. Just don’t take their 95, A, 5 puffs, or any other scale to be replaceable by anyone else’s.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Why Rating Wine Is Bad Science from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Twenty years on after her departure, her status has not change a single jot: Fisher’s still the greatest food writer who has ever lived.

Don’t believe me? Try out the latest collection of some of her work, Musings On Wine And Other Libations (about $18; I received a review copy), which focuses almost exclusively on Fisher’s wine prose and is edited by Anne Zimmerman (who last year wrote the book on Fisher – literally).

What you will find is a writer who had an ability to ingrain context into wine tales that was so uncannily pure that I suspect it was enmeshed within her DNA, along with an editor who puts context on top of all that context. Musings On Wine And Other Libations ends up providing a surfeit of context that should get most wine geeks swooning.

And when you read Fisher’s insightful musing about vino, know this: as god as it is, it probably isn’t even her best writing…

She seems to have reserved that real magic for describing food. An example:

“As for potato chips, I do not remember them earlier than my twenty-first year, when I ate stupidly and well of them in a small, stylish restaurant in Germany, where we had to wait downstairs in the tavern while our meal was being readied to eat upstairs. Beside me on the a table was a bowl of exquisitely fresh and delicate chips, and when we finally sat down I could not face the heavily excellent dinner we had ordered. I was ashamed of my gluttony, for it is never commendable, even when based on ignorance. Perhaps that is why I am so stern today about no eating many of the devilish temptations?”

That’s from an essay she penned for The New Yorker, and in those few sentences we are transported not only to a German tavern (peripherally), but also to a spot in front of food (almost tangibly) and finally (and much more tangibly) are given access to Fisher’s private feelings, which make us alternatively hungry and then bloated in the short-lived self-disgust that’s so often the by-product of overindulgence. It’s easy in all of the context to lose sight of the fact that she was talking about eating potato chips. In other words, it’s masterful.

Musings On Wine And Other Libations occasionally flirts with romanticized descriptions, but Fisher’s work is a bit like a Mozart composition: take a phrase out of context and neither it nor the whole make much sense (in fact, it’s was a total bitch just to find a quotable excerpt for this review that could stand on its own). Fisher’s prose can does what so little food and wine writing can do now – actually make us hungry and thirsty. And that’s why it’s probably still the best, even so long after her typewriter went silent .

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at When The World’s Greatest Foodie Took On Wine from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

• 10 The Winery At Holy Cross Abbey Cabernet Franc (CO): Bigger than the CO mountain skyline & w/ that anise, damn nearly as pretty. $23 B+ >>find this wine>>
• 11 Infinite Monkey Theorem Riesling (Colorado): finite amounts of flowers, citrus & stony fruits, but all of them are pretty damn good $16 B >>find this wine>>
• 09 Septembre Cellars Chardonnay (Grand Valley): Attention to detail pays off; this case in loveliness, balance & appetite-generation $25 B >>find this wine>>
• 09 Ruby Trust Cellars Gun Slinger (Grand Valley): Not shy about slinging ripe red & black Syrah fruit your way, & at high velocities. $25 B >>find this wine>>
• 09 Ruby Trust Cellars The Smuggler (Grand Valley): Drop-kick to the face of peppery red fruited goodness (hurts, but hurts good). $25 B >>find this wine>>
• 11 Guy Drew Vineyards Pinot Gris (Colorado): "Stunning achievement" come to mind; will be even more stunning if he can do it again. $16 A- >>find this wine>>
• 11 Grande River Vineyards Viognier (Grand Valley): Crisp as that mountain stream that Coors likes to brag about (& more minerally too) $16 B >>find this wine>>

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Monday Mini Wine Reviews Round-Up For May 14, 2012 from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Based on feedback from ever-so-vocal-and-intelligent peeps like you, I do not supply the quiz answer directly in the post – you will need to tune back in later in the comments section for the answer. I’m still on the road this week in Australia, so once again I ask only for your patience on receiving the answer (which could be delayed a few days, depending on my access to The Global Interwebs while Down Undah).

State Of (Grape) Affairs

In the 1880s, which U.S. state was producing more than 2,000,000 gallons of wine per year?

•     A. Virginia
•     B. California
•     C. Missouri
•     D. Colorado
•     E. Texas

Cheers – and good luck!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Weekly Wine Quiz: State Of (Grape) Affairs from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!