Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Carbon-Neutral Wine

Wineries today tout their green credentials almost as much as their scores from influential wine magazines. Solar power, sustainable or organic or biodynamic (s/o/b) viticulture, and "carbon-neutral" winemaking are all marketing buzzwords for wineries. In today's column in The Washington Post, I focus on "carbon neutral" - what does it mean, and why should we consumers care? And in this video, I interview Dave Pearce, chief winemaker for New Zealand's Grove Mill winery, which was the world's first to attain "carbon-neutral" certification. The video was shot on my new Flip camera in a restaurant, and the light was focused on the center of the table, which means the wine glasses look great while Dave and I resemble shadowy creatures in a county fair house of mirrors, but oh well. I'll get the hang of it someday.

psst - Grove Mill's wines are good, too! Especially the Sauvignon Blanc and the Riesling. The Pinot Noir ain't shabby, either.

Cheers!

Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses

In Bordeaux, Vinexpo week has been blessed with stunningly beautiful weather – bright, sunny skies, warm-to-hot-but-not-stifling temperatures, and steady breezes leading into cool nights. It’s been such a treat after all the rain back home.

That rain had me in a bit of funk as I was writing two columns on rosé for The Washington Post, with summer temperatures in mind. You can still check them – one from June 17 on Old World rosé, the other from June 24 on some worthy ones from the New World. (Don’t forget to click on the links for “Rosé Recommendations” to find some extraordinary wines for your summer sipping pleasure!)

Cheers!

Dave

Photo: Julia Ewan, Washington Post

More on the Loss of Billington Wines

In the fallout over the demise of Billington Wines, there is at least some good news: Alfredo Bartholomaus, the company’s founder and a joyful bon vivant, will not be slipping away into full retirement just yet. Leonardo LoCascio, president of Winebow, informs me that Don Alfredo will join the new division Winebow is setting up to represent former Billington brands. While Alfredo’s son, Alex (at left in the photo, with his father), is likely to head the division, the elder Bartholomaus will serve as a consultant and brand ambassador, leading trade and media trips to South America and representing the brands before the press, much as he has done over the past several years. So those of us who know and love Alfredo can still look forward to pisco sours, poetry recitals, and lots of good South American wine.

You can read my full report on the closure of Billington Wines on The Washington Post Food section blog, All We Can Eat.

The Recession Claims Billington

The recession has taken a bite out of the Washington, D.C., wine community with the recent demise of Billington Wines, the Springfield, Va.-based company that helped put South American wines on U.S. dinner tables.

Billington closed its doors May 15, citing the loss of some of its primary clients to other importers, depressed demand for wines because of the economy, and declining sales at Havens winery in Napa, which the company purchased in 2006.

The company’s Web site still had no news of this development as of May 26, but it was confirmed to me by Alfredo Bartholomaus, the company’s founder.

Details are still to be worked out, but most of the wineries in Billington's portfolio will now be represented by Winebow, the New Jersey-based company that grew from an Italian specialty importer into a major import and distribution powerhouse. Many of Billington's sales force, including Bartholomaus and his son, Alex, who has run Billington the past several years, will also work for Winebow.

Alfredo Bartholomaus, who emigrated to the United States from Chile in the early 1960s, started Billington in 1985. His main client then was Cousiño-Macul, Chile's oldest family-owned winery. Working primarily “out of the trunk of my car,” Bartholomaus introduced American retailers and restaurants to the value that Chile produces with inexpensive wines that outperform their competition. His company was one of the first quality importers to spring up in the Washington area – a market that thrives today.

In recent years, the company developed the Big Tattoo line of wines from Chile and Germany, which not only provided tremendous value at $8, but also donated proceeds from each sale to local charities.

“I came to this country with one hand tied behind my back, and I have been fighting ever since,” a defiant Bartholomaus said Tuesday. “I will keep fighting. I will still be around.”

(Some disclosure is in order. Like most wine writers in the Washington, D.C., area, I count Alfredo Bartholomaus as a friend and mentor. He has been a gregarious and effective missionary on behalf of the wines from Chile and Argentina, always with a keen eye, rapier wit and precise palate for the value these wines represent for consumers.)

I will have more on the demise of Billington Wines, both here and on The Washington Post’s Food section blog, “All We Can Eat,” at washingtonpost.com.

The Terroirists Are Coming!

The “Return to Terroir” tasting came to Washington this week, courtesy of the French Wine Society. It wasn’t as big a tasting as in New York the day before, but I only had to find parking along Reservoir Rd., not shlep to the Big Apple and back in one day.

I also had the opportunity to have an extended conversation with three leading apostles of biodynamic viticulture: Nicolas Joly of Coulée de Serrant; Christophe Erhart of Domaine Josmeyer; and Mathieu Deiss, the newest generation of winemaking at Domaine Marcel Deiss.

There were about forty wineries at the tasting, mostly from France, but also from Spain, Austria, Australia, Italy, Chile and of course the United States. I won’t bore you with tasting notes. One does not take notes at a tasting like this – one shmoozes, one kisses up and hopes to be kissed, one tries to get an impression of wines to be explored later, all the while keeping a vigilant eye out for a familiar face or an uncrowded spit bucket.

But I can give some impressions: Biodynamics is a fascinating and somewhat controversial farming philosophy – some call it a religion – and the wines are not by definition good. Many of them are, but there is still the possibility of too much alcohol or heavy-handed oak. The idea of biodynamics is to express a particular terroir, and some of these terroirs do not match our preconceptions of what wine should taste like – they are challenging wines; often delicious, sometimes not, never boring.

With biodynamics, I feel a bit like Fox Mulder on The X-Files: I want to believe. It makes sense that taking care of the earth will produce better wines. To be honest, though, I’m not at all certain that I could pick an organic or biodynamic wine from a blind tasting lineup.

I need to explore these more.

More on this tasting and my conversations with the winemakers to come …

Happy Birthday, Wine Curmudgeon!

The Wine Curmudgeon celebrated a birthday this past weekend.

Not the Curmudgeon himself, Jeff Siegel, the Dallas-based wine columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but the Wine Curmudgeon blog. Jeff started it a year ago, and it has become a daily read - and a daily delight - for me from the very beginning.

Jeff and I met three years ago on a wine junket to Chile. As we swirled, sniffed and spit our way through the Colchagua, Maipo, Aconchagua and Casablanca valleys, I came to appreciate Jeff's straight-shooting attitude about wine. He would cock his hat, and a skeptical eye, at any statement that smelt of pretense or marketing hype. Forget the shtick, just show him the wine. It better be good, and it better be cheap.

This honesty shows through in his daily posts on The Wine Curmudgeon. Jeff constantly searches for contenders to his $10 Wine Hall of Fame, and he throws literary darts at anyone who would try to convince us to pay more than a wine is worth. He even lampooned himself, describing the delightful travails of a wine writer who flits from lunch with a winemaker to two trade tastings and a wine education class in a (not-so-typical) day's work.

Jeff is also an untiring champion of local wines. He is probably the country's leading journalistic authority on Texas wines - I know, sound the trumpets! - and he was my co-instigator on DrinkLocalWine.com and "Regional Wine Week," last month's effort to gather wine writers and bloggers across the U.S. and Canada to write about wines "from around here." (It was a great success, Jeff tells me - he's much better at tracking Internet hits than I am.)

Jeff and I may never agree on the virtues of Norton, but we agree on a lot. Happy Birthday, Wine Curmudgeon! Here's to many more years of good reading!

Chile's Ambassador of Wine

We expect ambassadors to promote the agricultural products of their country, but Chile has someone special in Washington - an internationally recognized wine expert serving as its ambassador to the United States, actively promoting Chilean wine to American journalists, importers, retailers and consumers.

In fact, Mariano Fernandez had assumed his post only a few days before he scored his first diplomatic triumph - convincing fellow judges at the Atlantic Seaboard Wine Competition to award a gold medal to a wine he particularly liked. The next day, when all 20 judges in the competition tasted the gold medal winners, Fernandez' favorite won Best of Show.

You can get to know Fernandez - and his views about the future of Chilean wine - in my Nov. 12 column in The Washington Post.

Cheers!