We were joined on Sunday by 150 friends, family and supporters to celebrate the debut of Farmstead Wines. To those of you who were there, THANK YOU! You helped make our cocktail party cum wine tasting a huge success. If you missed it because you were at the Oscars or another stuffy wine tasting hopefully you’ll be inspired to join us next time. Paul Finlay and the Alibi Room seamlessly combined a fun, relaxed atmosphere with a luxurious  food and wine pairing experience. Five wines in the Farmstead Wines collection were each paired with two delicious canapes highlighting the wines in different ways. The Alibi staff made each new wine magically appear so guests tasted each wine with unique canapes. A room-full of people sipping wines, eating tasty morsels and enjoying the company is what a wine tasting should be like. 

In case you don’t get enough reality television competitions, there is a new one for wine. Now, shows like Top Chef, Top Model, American Idol, I can sort of wrap my head around. But a competition to be a winemaker is too much for me. This is obviously not going to have anything to do with wines that I am interested in…Unless Fox is going to surprise us soon with Next Top Farmer!

(The cartoon is from the smart, funny and talented Hugh MacLeod. Check out his site at www.gapingvoid.com

Maybe you have heard of something called "grower Champagne?" It is champagne made by the very farmers that grow the grapes. What’s the big deal? Well, lots of wine-savvy folks, like Alice Feiring, have a hard time understanding how you could even serve factory champagne. Factory champagnes (no need for me to name names- basically, if you’ve seen an advertisement, it’s made by a factory) are often made with plenty of chemicals, marketing shtick and $$$. "Grower" champagne is more likely to be made using natural, environmentally friendly farming techniques and traditional methods. It almost always tastes better too. Now, if you can buy bubbles like this, you would probably want to drink normal wines of similiar quality. But how do you find them? People like Joe Dressner and Kermit Lynch have been importing them for a long time. Part of the problem is that noone knows exactly what to call them. "Grower wines" just doesn’t have the same ring without the sophistication of champagne to lift it up. And your spell-check is likely to reject the term "winegrower." There is a solution- VINEAROON! According to Thomas Pinney, whose treatise on the history of wine in America is without peer, "Some words that were borrowed early from the French have not survived into modern English, evidently because the things they named no longer existed in England: vigneron (winegrower) and vynour (vine dresser) are instances.
What was true of the language in England was even truer of the language in the North American colonies. The English colonists came without a winegrowing tradition, and were, for centuries, unable to build one in the New World." Pinney continues, explaining the current state of english wine vocabulary, " French terms still felt to be alien but in fact used by writers in English include: appellation, brut, cave, cépage, chai, chambrer, chaptalization, climat, clos, cru, cuvage, cuvée, éleveur, marc, négoçiant, ordinaire, remuage, sec, sommelier, terroir, vigneron, vignoble . One of these terms, vigneron , was anglicized as vinearoon in the days of Shakespeare, but it did not survive long."
Let’s bring it back. The modern anglicized version is vinaroon. Say it with me,”vin·a·roon” (vi-nə-ˈrün). People still grow their own grapes and make the wine themselves! Even though we speak english, we want to drink these wines. So, we must have a word. Next time you bring someone a bottle made by the same person who farms the grapes tell them it is "vinaroon wine." Unless you prefer to speak in affected french.

The wines of Renato Fenocchio are about to leave Italy and begin their voyage to North America. I just received a note from Milva saying she is applying the back labels by day and painting the front labels at night. Yes, you read that correctly- Milva is handpainting the labels for some of the wines. To be specific, the 2004 Barbera d’ Alba "Super Elena."

Renato and Milva only made 113 magnums of this amazing barbera from the renowned Starderi vineyard. Named for their youngest daughter, Elena, this wine is WOW. This is what Barbera should be like. Red fruit and currants expertly aged to contribute notes of wood and smoke. Delectable, sweet tannins. The Starderi vineyard is considered to be one of the best vineyards in the Piedmont, where both La Spinetta and Gaja have plots. One of the key differences is that Renato and Milva care for their grapes themselves. All of these factors alone make this a very special wine.

Originally, they planned to give them away as gifts. I convinced them to sell me 75 of them, but Milva insists on handpainting the labels as she originally planned. The image depicts the Starderi vineyard and the legal coordinates of latitude and longitude of the vineyard. Use the contact form if you would like to reserve some.

One of the first questions my wife Sarah asked when I suggested that I wanted to import wines was something like, "How can you do that when you care so much about local eating?" I have spent a great deal of time thinking about this question. There are a few answers. I believe in the pleasures of the table. I know wine as connected to the land. This is different from "terroir," I view vignerons as having an intimate conversation with the earth. This conversation continues when the wines are shared at a table. Wine is a social catalyst and an agricultural good, not a commodity. So, I don’t necessarily eat local because I am a tree hugger. For me it has always been about getting the best possible ingredients at peak flavor. Please read Gina Mallet’s review of Michael Pollan’s latest work. I am a fan of her rejection of North American puritanism.

Some ingredients like oils, spices and travel well. At least compared to a tomato.

Preserving local economies sometimes requires working beyond your own local economy. I strive to buy foods from local farmers. Some farmers who grow grapes can’t sell enough wine in their local market to put food on the table. Globalization is not going away- even if you don’t completely agree with Thomas Friedman, market forces and international trade are here to stay. So, let’s harness some of those forces to help small family farms. They have to compete against huge wine factories that can sell wine for less than the glass bottle itself costs a small farmer.

As 100 Mile Diet authors put it, you should work to sustain your own local economy and when you go outside of it, you should only buy things at the very highest level of quality. Fair trade, environmentally friendly, handmade, and it better be delicious. To quote James MacKinnon: "as far as I’m aware, no one in the local foods movement is suggesting that we all need to get all of our food from our local food systems: trade has always been a part of human culture. It’s a question of balance. Over the past few decades we’ve swung toward getting most of our food from increasingly distant sources, and as a result we’re eating worse food at a higher environmental and social cost, and have also lost a critical connection to the landscapes and communities we live in. Local eating is about correcting that imbalance - we eat first and foremost from the places we live in, and then look outward for certain fairly traded, environmentally sustainable goodies."

This is why we only work with winegrowers. If you buy wine from companies that buy grapes, you never know what is in your, ahem, can. In case you haven’t read the latest issue of US Weekly, Paris Hilton has her own wine. The world has completely forgotten that wine is a product of the Earth. A combination of thirst for celebrity and the dominance of the scoring system has changed the way wine is made in many places. Although there is no end in sight to starlet DUI  stories, we may be approaching a turning point for wine.

Tyler Colman, aka "Dr. Vino" is one of the most influential wine writers around. In a recent post he surmises that the heady days of "fruit bomb" wines may be coming to an end. A bit of background, in case you missed this trend- in an effort to garner high scores many wineries began making fruit forward, high alcohol wines, devoid of place. We weren’t ever interested in this trend (unless you count Boone’s Farm in college) and only work with farmers who grow their own grapes and make their own wine. This way, you never have to guess what’s in the bottle or how it was made. So whether it’s tannin powder or plastic surgery you can really only fool people for so long anyway.