Dave McIntyre's WineLine

Storm Diary, The Second Chapter

Thursday, August 12, 2010

This latest storm hit at 7 am, with a fury that I had only seen once before: seven years ago when my house nearly burned down after a lightning strike. I watched out the kitchen window as wind and rain circled our patio and thunder and lightning rolled and crashed around us. After about 20 minutes, the storm seemed to lessen, and I tried to calm my daughter by saying the worst was over. But it wasn't. The second phase was stronger, more virulent than the first. The wind created waves in our swimming pool, sloshing water over the edge. I can't really remember when the power went out, only thinking that I wasn't surprised. In all, the storm lasted 50 minutes, unusually long. There were no loud crashes on our house, no leaks in the roof. But when it subsided and I looked out the kitchen window, I saw a tree a few houses down the hill cleaved in two. To the left, the large oak in our neighbor's yard that my wife always feared would someday fall on us was also a casualty - but it fallen away from us, onto another neighbor's deck.

This was the third time in as many weeks that destructive storms struck the Washington area. Last week, while we were in Charlottesville, a freak storm hit Old Town Alexandria. This time, there were reports of motorists being rescued from flood waters along Rock Creek in the District and Sligo Creek in Silver Spring. Local radio and newspaper reports featured an apartment building in Gaithersburg that was sliced in two by a large oak, miraculously with no one hurt.

There was little or no coverage of our neighborhood. But as I grabbed my camera and walked around our little enclave of Burnt Mills, I felt as though I was in a war zone. Hundreds of trees had been split or felled by the strong winds. A house around the corner on Oakwood Drive was crushed by an uprooted oak, another damaged by a fallen fir. Utility poles were snapped in two, chunks of asphalt were torn from the streets, and up at the elementary school, so many trees were decapitated that it looked as though a giant had ripped a hole in the woods. These trees were splayed across Colesville Road, the only way to get out of our neighborhood, closing it in both directions for hours. There was no way I would get to work this day.

As I walked around, I took photos of every broken tree I saw, even though they all began to look alike after awhile. I was amazed that more houses weren't damaged, and that, when all was told, apparently no one in our neighborhood was hurt. It was as if God was angry, but not vengeful.

Friday, August 13

Shaving and dressing without light is almost routine now after the first storm kept us out of power for four days. The damage this time seems more intense, so we think it may take longer to restore electricity, but the damage is more localized than two weeks ago when the entire county was devastated, so maybe there is hope. Colesville Road was open, so I could get to work, and when I came home there were crews from Toledo Edison in our neighborhood untangling downed wires and replacing fallen poles and transformers. A PEPCO damage survey crew drove by. Yet when we returned from dinner at a friend's house, the neighborhood was still dark, and the thrum of generators drowned out the crickets and cicadas. My wife swears never to stock the freezer again. Our daughter wonders why we can't just buy a generator like all the noisy neighbors.

Saturday, August 14 

Walking around the neighborhood this morning, the progress in cleaning up is evident. Trees have been chainsawed into sections, damaged homes covered with blue tarp like bandages over boo boos. I traded anecdotes with a neighbor I had never met, who told me one of the storm's victims was a 400-year old oak tree that was one of the oldest in Maryland. I had walked by that tree hundreds of times since moving to this neighborhood without realizing its history or significance.

The Toledo Edison crews arrived at 8:30. The crew captain told me our lights should go on "Before we leave here tonight."

Indeed, the power tripped on just before 3 pm. Only 56 hours this time. Given the destruction around us, we feel lucky. The neighbor's oak will have to go; the half that leans toward our house is now precariously supported by less than half a trunk.

Although our power was back on, we still went to my mother-in-law's for dinner. I'm tasting Chablis this week, so I pulled four bottles from the warm fridge. They tasted wonderful. Note to self: Chill Chablis really well, then leave in a turned-off refrigerator for 56 hours to attain the perfect temperature.

 

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!

How Green a Wine Drinker Are You?

Choosing wines keeps getting more complicated. Not only do we have to worry about the quality of what gets in our glass and then our gullets, but now we're told we should drink "green" or "natural" wines, according to how many or how few pesticides were used in the vineyard. We're urged to support winemakers who parade around the vineyard in dark robes on the night of the autumn solstice, chanting weird incantations and burying manure-filled cow horns among the vinerows.

Favoring organic or biodynamic wines may make sense - there's plenty of reasons to do so, including, arguably, quality of the wines. But now we're urged to think about more than quality. Recently, I joined the collective wail against heavy bottles. Some wines claim to be "carbon neutral," because savings in emissions at the winery through solar power or other eco-friendly practices offset the greenhouse gases produced in getting those wines to market. Boxed wines are having a renewed vogue, in part because they take less space in landfills than bottles and cost a lot less to produce and transport.

If we care about all this, then here's another thing to consider: Cork. Somewhat out of vogue because of the market's infatuation with screw caps, the cork industry is beginning to argue not only that it has the cork taint problem under control, but that its stoppers are the only natural ones available. Plastic "corks" are, well, plastic. Screw caps use a petroleum-based seal, as do the glass stoppers sometimes used in Germany and Austria.

Cork forests absorb CO2, and cork stoppers themselves even retain a small measure of that greenhouse gas. Used cork stoppers can be recycled into other products, such as flooring, automotive gaskets - even the nose cone on the space shuttle or your badminton shuttlecock.

Will avoiding screw caps help fight global warming? Well, we're bordering on ridiculous hyperbole with that claim. But if we shun bottled water, and we no longer use plastic grocery bags, and we choose one product over another because it features the recycling symbol .... Well, then it's something to think about.

Down With Heavy Bottles!

Moving some bottles around in my cellar yesterday, I was struck by how many I had that seemed extra heavy and would not fit in my wine racks. I'm partly to blame for the latter hindrance, because when I had the cellar installed four years ago I bought the cheapest racks available. (Rather spend the money on the wine, I thought!) But the weight of some of these really got me thinking, as I straightened out my creaky back for the umpteenth time. Just how heavy are these things?

So I took some bottles upstairs and pulled out my kitchen scale. The most striking finding was in comparing two bottles of California Pinot Noir. Edna Valley Vineyard 2006 Paragon, a slim Burgundy-styled bottle that fit easily in my rack, weighed in at 2 pounds 11 ounces, or 1,230 grams. Sanford Sta. Rita Hills 2006, in contrast, weighed 3 pounds 11 ounces, or 1,665 grams. As you can see in the photo, the Sanford is a little taller and a little wider than the Edna Valley. But much heavier.

An entire pound's difference. Twelve pounds per case. About 600 - 840 extra pounds per pallet (depending on the number of cases in a pallet, which seems to vary - perhaps larger bottles make for larger cases, resulting in fewer cases per pallet?) How much extra transportation cost (for both the empty and the full bottles) in getting this wine to market? What effect not only on our pocketbooks but on greenhouse gas emissions? Per bottle, perhaps negligible; but industry wide? I weighed several different bottles of varying shapes - the Edna Valley and the Sanford represented the extremes.

Wineries have made a big deal lately about "going green" and reducing their "carbon footprints." Many have installed solar power - it takes a lot of electricity to keep those barrel rooms cool, after all. Others tout sustainable, organic or biodynamic viticulture as ways they can be good stewards of the land. All these steps are laudable. But more can be done.

So I say to winemakers - put your egos in the wine itself, not the bottles that hold the wine. Use lighter bottles.

Jancis Robinson has been railing against "bodybuilder bottles" for some time, and this year launched a crusade to rally consumers against heavyweight bottles. Count me on your team, Jancis!