We were supposed to have lunch again next week. Another rerun of gyros and tea and idle talk, but that won’t be happening. What necessitates my entries is all too often the same impetus – somebody dies and I feel the need to respond. In some cases, it’s a famous name and I want to add my plaudits (or occasional corrective). The news that’s Paul Bocuse has passed elicited a slim smile; he was a showman who happened to be a great chef. His accomplishments have been enumerated enough; I can only add my view of his restaurants as a place of grand food and dining with a shmear of Las Vegas to it (sorry, Vegas). At my first visit, Le Grand Chef signed our menus (perhaps there was a small stipend on the bill for that), but I was pleased enough to hang it in my office.

Subsequent visits saw much the same menu and experience, though one meal sticks to the mind. Upon leaving, we nearly knocked over Don King who was pontificating into a TV camera in the parking lot. While I didn’t again spot the boxing impresario, there was sometimes a bit of a Don King feel to some of what happened in that palace. But there was also a homey feel, in its way. I thought about this on that Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, reading about his passing. I had on a dark suit I hadn’t worn for years; I was headed to the funeral of a cousin. Something was bunching up my suit pocket and I reached in to pull out a couple of notes and a cardboard napkin ring from Restaurant Bocuse, along with wine notes written on the back of it. Clearly it had been a while since I had worn that suit, but it seemed a bizarre coincidence.

I flew back to KC for a couple of days and then flew back to San Francisco again. Upon landing I received a text from the stepdaughter of an old friend of mine. She had called me to the hospital the night before; during the time I was in the air he had passed away. It was all very unexpected but then even a long illness with a grim prognosis rarely prepares us for the reality and finality of death. My friend Randy and I hadn’t been active in years, but we still both lived in KC and had split some gyros just a week before. It sucks. It sucks for his stepdaughter, his friends and, well, you know. But there is only one direction to life, I suppose. Randy had done plenty, and he was perhaps proudest of his relationship with his stepdaughter.

It’s a sense of loss that pervades each and every sentient being, on any waking day. Last week, Bruno Giacosa. A few days later, Mark E. Smith. Again, the coincidence that I was reading a biography of Smith when I got the news; he smoked like a BBQ joint and drank like a man in a hurry. He was a paragon of sheer punky orneriness, though some of his ex-band mates used far stronger language to describe his mercurial behavior. I don’t suppose my musician friends know that Giacosa was one of the inventors of modern Barolo. And I doubt if any but a few wine people cared about Mark E. Smith’s passing. I never got to see him perform; that rankles since only a few years ago, long after I had amassed a collection of Fall CD’s and records that fills an entire shelf, he played in Kansas City. I was, as usual, out of town. My friends tell me that it was a great show, and (or but) Mark E. quite openly picked his nose throughout the concert. My friend Shawn tells me that he was actually quite congenial and that they drank whisky late into the night, cigarette after cigarette.

I can’t praise them all enough. Others have done so in other places. But I haven’t seen or read enough about Mark E. Smith; reading Renegade (not quite his autobiography, more a series of rantings and ravings straight from the man’s slurring mouth), I came away with a stronger respect for his steadfast hold on his own vision. He fired people constantly because he wanted to shake it up and was always changing the sound. He hated that most musicians found a niche and then just sat there. No one could accuse him of that.

But they would charge him with being a bastard; that wasn’t unusual. If he didn’t like what you were playing he’d tell you that in front of everyone. He fired one guy on his wedding day. “Congratulations,” he said over the phone, “by the way, you’re sacked”, and hung up. It’s a story that had some legs to it; Smith seemed to almost relish the notoriety. The full story is that he was calling the guy to fire him but the guy had kept the wedding quiet; he didn’t want Smith to know. Friends invited only; Smith famously saw no need to be friends with his bandmates. It was a business to him, an endeavor for which he wanted to constantly challenge himself and everyone else. If you were getting too comfortable, and you wanted to do the same thing again, you were in the way.

His book is a bit of a hoot, but I know all five hundred or so of his songs. He bitches about the business, needless to say, but it’s insightful. God, I’m glad I was never in the music business; I thought the wholesale business was mean and hateful. It’s a monastery by comparison. “I always thought the pure essence of rock and roll was a completely non-musical form of music. I hate it when people say, ‘Oh, but the production’s so bad on it and I can’t hear the lyrics properly.’ If they all want that they should listen to classical music…Writers like that are too serious and precious about their ‘craft’ as they call it. There’s no fire or danger there, because they’ve thought it all out. I’m not a big music buff, but every song I hear reminds me of some other f**ker, and give or take a few tracks here and there you can’t say that about The Fall. Something that is original does stand out to me, always has.”

He was dismissive of emo and the rest of it. “Indulging in depression, like it’s a lifestyle choice, I hated that. I’ve always wanted The Fall to be the group that represents people who are sick being dicked around; that have a bit of fight in them.” You gotta keep that fight in you, though I hope I haven’t been a drunk bastard to my friends and co-workers. But you gotta keep that fight in you until it’s done. Randy used to keep after me about that. I don’t know if he kept fighting (that’s pretty much what I told him before I walked out of the hospital room, keep fighting), but he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.

Toto, I’ve a Feeling We’re Not from Kansas Anymore

It’s a reasonable enough solution; you’re trying to start a winery and you need grapes. And let’s say you live in the Midwest. You could choose some unfamiliar hybrid grapes from a local farmer you just met or…go shopping in California. Or Washington. Or Pennsylvania. Or any place that has proven grapes with familiar names like Chardonnay or Cabernet.

Maybe it would be better, if you were an intrepid Midwest winemaker to, say, learn about Valvin Muscat, how it’s flavorful but has a name that sounds part grape, part machinery. Wait, the TTB now lets you label Valvin Muscat as just plain Muscat?? Okay, bad example. Say it’s Traminette or Ravat 34. Who the hell wants to sell a wine called Ravat 34? If you have the option of buying some Zinfandel, why would you go to the trouble of learning about Ravat 34, finding a grower that knows the first thing about growing it, talking to ten different neighboring wineries in the vain hope of finding someone who will share with you their yet unreported success with Ravat 34 and then coming up with a name for your wine other than Ravat 34?

It’s not an unusual choice. But decisions have to be made if you are to run a business. Perhaps the name of your wine should be “Hobson’s Choice”, perhaps not. Perhaps you should take the easy road and buy some grapes or even some wine from someone else and name your wine “Cabernet Sauvignon”.

So you see why wineries have so frequently chosen the latter course. Today the bulk trade is growing aggressively, not only in the U.S., but throughout the world. According to The Drinks Business, the bulk wine category accounts for 38.6% of global wine exports, while bottled wine represents 54.3% of global exports and sparkling wine is at 7.1% (even as fizz continues to sparkle in sales growth). There’s no duplicity in shopping for wine or grapes to supplement your own production; if nothing else, it’s a natural development of a burgeoning global marketplace for wine. As that market grows and the number of players increases, there are efficiencies to be achieved when differing players find and hone their particular strengths, each bolstering others in the chain.

But wine is not a chain or a widget; everyone knows that. The history of American wine sales is replete with examples of large beverage companies that assumed making and selling wine was little different from, say, selling Pepsi. For Pepsi (or Coke or such others), it was a hard-earned lesson and they quietly retired the field.

When we buy a bottle of wine, we like to believe that we are buying something real, something authentic. The very basis of the Denomination of Origin system is to provide a buyer a sense of authenticity; that the wine is truly from a place. The DO concept (or AOC or AOP or AVA or GI or what you like) exists throughout the world in versions that may be draconian or that may be little more than window dressing, it is true. But the message inferred is the same to a consumer: by printing a place name on the label you are telling me that this comes from a special place, and the wine should carry specific characteristics as a result.

Which requires us to venture rather farther out on the limb, where things get wobblier. Roquefort cheese is a particular thing from a particular place and, according to French law, it must embody those particulars in its production, its origins, its smells and tastes. When we say that a Zinfandel comes from Paso Robles, we are making the self-same claim. It’s generally warmer there than in many other coastal California sites, but it is near the coast nonetheless. So its character should reflect those climatic influences in ways that make that Zinfandel special in specific ways, and different from a Zinfandel grown a hundred-fifty miles to the northeast in Modesto.

But climate is as mercurial as the latest election poll; and the wine industry bases its hierarchical pricing upon the notion that certain places tend to make good wine year in and year out not only because of their climatic situation but because of their soils too. We will merely snake along that slippery slope for today (to mix our metaphors) by saying that reasonable people disagree on the issue of soil influence. I’d like to kick a couple of boulders down the slope by pondering how centuries of experience, offering us specific soil characteristics in wine can be summed up as mere winemaking tricks. How is it that Chablis’ remarkable oyster shell aromas are due to sulfur usage, as some narrow-minded pendants are wont to insist, but who am I to say?

Let’s just agree to pretend for a moment that certain places on the planet give us certain kinds of wine. If mere winemaking trickery were enough to create hundred-dollar wines, well, surprise, everybody would do that. It is not so. Certain places are special for a myriad of reasons.

And the last fifty years have seen new wine from new lands around the world offering proof that we have not yet exhausted the possible combinations of vineyards and grapes. Only a few miles from Rome, outside the little town of Montefiascone, is a plot of Merlot that makes delicious, remarkable wine. It was planted about twenty-five years ago by one of the geniuses of Italian wine, Ricardo Cotarella, so winemaking has something to do with it. But the land that is modern Italy has been dedicated to wine for three millennia or so, and they’re just now finding a spot that makes great Merlot? I would state it thusly: if Rome still hasn’t figured out where its best prospects lie for certain highly regarded grapes, why are we so critical of early efforts with, say, Geneva Red or Brianna, two of the Midwest’s potential winners? Give it time; give it time.

But my circuitous argument lands here: unless you plant grapes of your own, in your own place, how will you ever know if there is such potential? How will you ever discover something great? Those wineries which rely upon purchased grapes from elsewhere cheat themselves, their neighbors and their children of a future all their own. And should California fall into the sea, as predicted by Hollywood, where will they turn for their source material? Having starved their own state’s farmers of the grape business, those farmers will have moved on to more lucrative crops, and the opportunity to conjoin a particular farmland to a particular grape, hopefully conserved and watched over by succeeding generations, each learning from their predecessors, this too will be lost.

It’s not an idle or trivial matter. Midwestern winemakers often find themselves short of grapes, at least good grapes from varieties that have a consumer market, and that are grown with these winemakers’ stylistic goals in mind. Why? Because not enough wineries are shopping for those grapes consistently. Farmers aren’t stupid. They grow what people want to buy. When Midwest wineries buy their grapes from the West Coast, the farmers there start planting more grapes for bulk purchase (with the attendant qualitative implications of that statement) while farmers nearby move on to soybeans or kale.

Many of the wineries that I speak to about this issue are evasive; few want to admit that a bit of purchased juice can coax more out of their own state’s grapes. Federal law allows 25% non-Missouri wine in a wine labeled as Missouri; in certain difficult years, they are allowed even more leeway. And Kansas wineries, particularly those who utilize purchased grapes, managed to gut the Kansas Farm Winery law; before 2014, if you had a Farm Winery license, at least 60% of your grapes had to be Kansas grown. Today, that number is 30%. How does that help Kansas growers and farmers? It doesn’t. It helps those who seek a short-term fix to a long-term problem. And wine production will always best be answered by long-term solutions.

Growing grapes to make fine wine is a problem that can only be answered by time. If your business model is to be a wedding chapel and event space, then it is likely that your goal is to make serviceable wine. My decades in the industry have convinced me that those who seek to make fine wine set aside all other goals in an effort to reach that pinnacle. Fine wine may or may not happen, but fine wine does not happen by accident. It is a remarkable confluence of luck, tremendous work and thought.

Serviceable wine has a thirsty market; make no mistake. But serviceable wine is a commodity; the ocean of Australian wine with cute animals on the labels languishing in close-out bins over the last five or more years is proof of that. Historically speaking, the cheapest wine wins. Over the last five years, Aussie Shiraz has been supplanted by Argentines making tasty, cheap Malbec. Soon it will be the Chinese, planting hundreds of thousands of acres of vines intended to provide the world with more serviceable wine. If I were writing a business plan today, I would not want it based upon serviceable wine, but upon something special. Something unique to who I am and where I live. In that way, people who live around me would value what it brought to my community and to my region. Others far away might want to taste my wine because it is unique to my place, and perhaps I would grow a market for what I made, a market the Chinese (not to pick on them, but you get the point) would not be able to imitate and supplant at lower and lower prices.
Today there is some dissembling about all this. It seems unfair to pick on a winery in these pages, so let’s consider the travails of one distillery, Templeton in Iowa. For years, they insisted that they were making their own amazing rye whiskey, and it’s inarguable that their rye whiskey was damned delicious. But the truth comes out in our social media era; it turns out that Templeton was buying rye whiskey from MGP in Indiana, like most smart rye whiskey producers. Some have not forgiven them for this lack of candor.

There should be truth in labeling. We often look to our government to protect those names, as other governments often do. But there are many who would rather keep government’s nose out of their business. The TTB is currently promising to take a closer look at veracity in wine labeling; wines sold only within their state’s borders have been labeled in ways that would never pass muster if submitted for COLA approval. Some companies might prefer the government to go sniffing someplace else. And with the TTB still reeling from the “sequester” cuts of 2014, they haven’t the manpower to police these matters adequately.

So it falls to the wineries to do what is right. And while everyone winery has the right to conduct business in its own best interests, its long-term prospects are ruled by one imperative: what is your unique proposition? Instead of being just another winery, shopping from the same California broker, why not reflect your own place and your own community. Instead of pretending to be from Kansas and selling them California, why not just be from Kansas? I live in that state, so I know it can be embarrassing at times to admit you’re a Kansan, but how else will we create change?

A wine label is a marketing tool. The most powerful marketing message that your label can employ is to tell people who you are and where you come from. We are in an era in which transparency is rewarded and any semblance of duplicity is likely to be ripped apart by the pack of angry vultures collectively known as social media. How much are you willing to offer them your red meat?

The Jefferson Cup Invitational Wine Competition has concluded and there’s some press popping up around it.

BY DOUG FROST
Special to The Kansas City Star, October 12, 2016

Sitting in my usual dim sum restaurant, I noticed Christmas decorations overhead. I was so horrified I almost stopped chewing on my chicken feet. Is it really that time?

Not quite, but the media are pivoting to the holidays, and entertainment guides have started popping up in newspapers, magazines and social media. They all promise to simplify your life. But not this columnist: I promise to complicate things.

Most of these guides offer sage notions of matching food and wine. After providing listicles of their Top 10s, they conclude by telling you to stop worrying about any of this (at least the good ones do) and drink whatever you like. Me, I’ll start out with that premise. I’ve been shouting it my whole career because I have a problem with authority. Also, because we all like different things, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

The prevailing notion of these erstwhile guides is that you should select a wine to go with a dish based on each sharing the same flavors. One insists that cranberries go well with California Zinfandel. Yes, Zinfandel has the flavor of cranberries, among many other flavors.

But cranberries are tart and Zin is not. In fact, it’s usually rather warm, ripe, even slightly sweet and figgy at times. When you put tart food with a wine that is slightly sweet (or vice versa), it can make both of them seem out of balance, as if you had a brownie and decided to suck on a lemon at the same time.

Or here’s another fraught match: apple and Chenin Blanc. Yes, Chenin Blanc has apple flavors, but like apples, Chenin Blancs vary from dry-as-dust to sweet-as-pie. If you serve a dry Chenin Blanc with a sweet apple dish, neither will shine.

Many chefs have been trained to suggest wines based on a concept known as “flavor bridging” — a dominant flavor in the dish is the “key” to the wine you should choose. I’ve had chefs tell me they’ll marry this fish dish with the Chardonnay by adding peaches to the dish.

Why peaches?

Many Chardonnays have a peach flavor. But why would I want to drink a liquid version of the dish in front of me? Chefs don’t drop everything on the plate into a blender and expect it to taste as good as all those individual elements.

Chefs know better. Look at how plates are composed: a traditional chef will offer a protein matched with a starch, a vegetable, an appropriate sauce or seasoning, a bitter green leaf and citrus slice to finish. The goal is for each element to highlight the others in a constellation of differing flavors.

I’ve seen this bridge building ad nauseam. Lamb with mint sauce is a classic. So someone matches the dish with a “minty” Australian Shiraz (some Aussie reds are genuinely minty in flavor); makes sense, right? Except mint sauce is usually sweet, and such wines are often very tannic, astringent and even bitter.

You don’t see them serving spaghetti squash with two other squashes (but don’t they share the same flavors?) and maybe some spaghetti on the side. They know better. Still, certain famous chefs continue to promulgate this notion of flavor bridging, and cooperative writers have complied, selecting their wines by finding flavors in common with the foods.

But if nothing else, flavor bridging is boring. So what’s a person to do, now that I’ve complained about all these misguided guides?

Well, first off, let’s return to the first principle: drink what you like. Stop worrying about things going together or not going together.

Most of us like things to be fair and balanced (and get angry when certain media usurp the term for something that’s anything but). The safest guide (as rules don’t really exist) is to ask that the wine doesn’t overwhelm the food, and the food doesn’t overpower the wine.

That’s it. Nothing too complicated.

It’s the same with my Chinese restaurant. I asked about the Christmas decorations and the waitress said, no, they hadn’t put them up this week or last week. They just keep them up year around. It’s easier and simpler.

Doug Frost is a Kansas City-based wine and spirits writer and consultant. He is one of only three people in the world to have earned the titles of master sommelier and master of wine. He contributes a monthly wine column for The Star’s Food section and the Chow Town blo

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/living/food-drink/article106698212.html#storylink=cpy

I open a bottle of Texas (yep, howdy, boy, Texsus is wut ahm talkin’ bout) Pet Nat wine and it’s a fisssssss not a Pop! All is well and good. Pet Nat wines, you see, are not always fully sparkling. Usually they’re a bit light on the heady alcohol, but this being the Great State of Texas, this stuff is 13.2%. By Pet Nat standards that is freaking close to Port. But then the Pet Nat world is not your normal wine world – its name was birthed in the Loire Valley but its roots reach back to antiquity. Any wine bottled before fermentation was completed was likely to be naturally petillant, or pet nat. Yeast, you see, also produce CO2 while they are converting sugar to alcohol.

A few Loire producers decided to cute up this old thing by giving it the darling moniker of Pet Nat. It’s worked. Lots of people are doing it the Pet Nat way. Even in Tejas.

So visiting some of the central Texas wineries that interest me, and Williams-Chris is definitely once of those, and amongst all the reliable wines they sell is a genuine Petillant Natural (cuz it says so on the label) Rose 2015. I buy one and chill it to chill out on my Austin evening. Dried strawberry, touch of cranberry and red currant. Kinda cool. Clean. True and tasty.