Monterey Pinot Noir

posted by philip in Wine

Hands up if you’ve had a wine from Monterey.

Of the 850 wines that I’ve rated on Snooth, I’ve had around 15 from there. Pretty poor considering the size of the region and the quality of wines made there: 40,000 acres of grapes farmed, across 9 AVA’a along an 85 mile long valley with over 80 wineries calling the county home.

Monterey was originally flat, until plate tectonics forced the landscape into the mountains of today. This led to all the fertile top soil collecting in the valley, making that area incredibly fertile (lots of lettuce is grown there). The wineries are generally situated along the narrow band between the fertile valley floor and the inhospitable upper reaches of the mountains.

If you look at the image below, you can see that the valley acts like a wind tunnel. Hot air rises and moves out to see, where it descends and then the cool (wet in the morning) air gets blown onto the land as a ‘land breeze’. By mid afternoon its a solid 30 miles an hour, before it calms down at night. These cool winds keep the temperature around 65 degrees up by the bay, where the growing season is incredibly long: wineries are often harvesting into November.

Thanks to Brad Martin of Morgan Winery for allowing us to use this image.

Down in Arroyo Seco it doesn’t rain much. Around 6-8 inches annually in common (compare that to 30-40 in Napa). Due to this, and the alluvial soils, irrigation is a necessity. However, as a result, wineries can control exactly how much water the vines receive.

Because of the cool conditions and the long growing season the resulting wine is very Burgundian: high acidity, lots of minerality. However, different than Burgundy, the wines tend to have a more youthful fruit forward, clean fruit expression.

I attended a Monterey Pinot Noir tasting recently and here are the four wines I tried:

Morgan Winery Double L 2006 Pinot Noir ($62) - A real family owned winery, founded in 1982 they didnt event have a tasting room until 2007! Made from 11 year old vines, this is the only organic winery in the appellation. The grapes come from 12 clones across 8 rootstocks giving them a lot of diversity. Its grown on poor soil, with dense plantings. Rich powerful nose of cherry and leather, very fruity in the nose. A very powerful wine, firm tannins, still young and tight, but with a lot of potential. Very mineral, very acidic. (Snoothrank: 4)

J. Lohr Fog’s Reach Vineyard 2006 Pinot Noir ($35) - J Lohr originally planted pinot noir in the 70’s, but ripped them out after 5 years. Apparently they were old clones and back then no one really knew how to grow pinot too well. In 2002 they replanted 4 dijon clones on 2 rootstocks giving 8 different combinations. This is their first release of this wine, so i was excited to taste it. Yields were 3 tons per acre, and they did an early morning harvest, the grapes were indoors by 10am, and then they did individual berry (rather than whole cluster) sorting. The wine opens with a slightly hot nose, but its very fruity too: cherry and pomegranite. Starts slowly on some very soft tannins with some minerality. There’s more body on the finish, including some minerality and raspberry. Still its a softer pinot than the nose suggests. Finish is nice, if a tad tight. (Snoothrank: 3.5)

Carmel Road Monterey 2006 Pinot Noir ($19) - 30,000 cases made. Estate grown coming from 4 vineyards east of highway 101. Opens with a touch of alcohol on the nose, followed by lots of leather and cherry and a surprising amount of minerality. Its very Burgundian in style throughout. In the mouth this wine has notes of cherry and a hint of spice and lots of nice tannins on the finish, with a hint of vanilla. What intrigued me most was the persistent minerality throughout - from the nose to the finish. Pair with spaghetti bolognese. (Snoothrank: 3.5)

San Saba Vineyards 2006 Pinot Noir ($28) - The grapes come from the 4 major dijon clones (115, 667, 777 and pommard 4) which were planted 5 years ago. Opens with a light elegant nose, with some light earth. Its very fruity too - bright strawberry tase. Ultra light wine that has soft persistent tannins. The strawberry persists to the finish. A bright youthful, yet elegant wine. Aged 9 months in 50% new oak. 600 cases made. (Snoothrank: 4.5)

Crushpad’s Fusebox

posted by philip in Wine Industry, Wine

Crushpad had its annual NYC bash yesterday afternoon in the beautiful penthouse loft of Studio 450. Perched high above the Hudson River the views and space were the perfect compliment to the event itself.

Backing up for a second to tell you about Crushpad themselves. This is the company that Snooth lost out to in the Wine 2.0 VC event on Vator.TV last year, but when you see what they do and how alternative a take on Web 2.0 they have, you may very well forgive them. Crushpad is Winemaking 2.0: you go see them, buy a barrel of grape juice and tell them how to make your wine. They’ll work with you on taste, style, aging, bottling and even on branding, distribution and compliance. Its clear that if you want to retire to Napa and start your own little winery, you should ‘try before you buy’ and go use a service like Crushpad.

Wine making is damn complicated, and I wouldn’t have the first clue where to start. Lets say I want to make a Cabernet that will simply bowl you over with its intensity, I know that I need the best fruit, years of oak aging and enough alcohol to start a forest fire, but then I’d get lost. Target pH? Should we amellorate? What does amellorate even mean? How often do we stir, or rack the wine on its lees? OK, thats where the experts come in, and you get to play producer, while the directors do the gritty, detailed work.

OK, very cool, but for those of us who aren’t ready to plonk down $10,000 on a barrel of juice, let alone $14 million on that quaint Napa estate, there are still options. Crushpad make something called the Fusebox, which is basically a geeks chemistry kit for adults. Kind of like those kits you may have played with as a child - pouring pipettes of liquids into beakers and swirling gently - this kit offers exactly that, but, of course, with wine!

$120 gets you 6 little bottles of wine for you to blend, using the supplied pipettes, beakers and instructions into your very own Opus One knock off. This belongs squarely in the wine aroma kit category, its pure geek heaven.

PS. If you want to read my reviews for the commercial brands that use Crushpad to make their wines, click here. These are uber-niche small lot hand crafted wines. Some of the wineries there literally made a single barrel of each wine (25 cases), and so, as mighty as Snooth database of wines may be, I was pleased as pie to come home to see that every single wine that I tasted that day had already been lovingly entered onto Snooth’s site, buy one of our users. So, thank you very much for that, you made my day!

Separated at birth?

posted by philip in Snooth

Snooth was out in force at Friday night’s Mashable party at Webster Hall, NYC. None other than Grandmaster Flash was spinning (far too heavy on the decks, at one point he managed to fling a handful of records off the table with his exuberance). A strange evening which culminated with me being interviewed for some fashion TV channel, 2 questions into it, me still in what I wore to the office that day, it was fairly clear to the interviewer that I was a lost cause.

One of our engineers, Chris Carpita, was then mistaken for Gary Vee’s brother. The guy was convinced Chris was AJ, and couldn’t get past the fact that there was no connection, other than the wine industry. I don’t see it myself, but check for yourself:

Chris Carpita of Snooth - separated at birth from - AJ Vaynerchuk

Not sure why Chris, an Operational Engineering major, was ever photographed in a labcoat, but thats all Google images gave me.

One that I do see myself, though, is Paul Mabray, Founder of Inertia Beverage Group, who looks (and sounds) suspiciously like Paul Walker, star of 30 trashy teen movies, such as “The Fast and the Furious” and the cheerleader film, “She’s all That”. See for yourself:

Paul Mabray, IBG - separated at birth from - Paul Walker, teen heart throb

Are there any others in the industry? Tom Walk, Randy Hall, me?

Uncommon bottle sizes

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

Wine bottle sizes, like most other things in this frequently quixotic industry, are hard to categorize. Wikipedia shows 26 bottle sizes, but with tetra-packs, wine in a box and other non-standard packaging Snooth has close to 50 sizes in the database. Many of them may have fun names: piccolo, meaning small in Italian, for the 187.5ml tiny airplane sized bottle for example, but they play havoc with the concept of average prices. And this is why I’m writing this.

Before we modify how the average prices for a wine are calculated on the site, I’d like to turn it over to you to hear what would make the most sense to you.

If a wine is only available in Rehoboam and Methuselah (3 and 6 liters respectively) sizes, would you rather we calculated a theoretical average for the 750ml bottle based on standard conversion rates for bottles of that size, or should we just say something like “Price = $2,000, based on 3.0l bottle” and let you figure it out when you clicked through to see the individual bottle prices?

For the casual user the fact that we could calculate a theoretical 750ml price might be useful in quickly comparing different wines, as they’d all be forced to a common scale. However, for the collector, and especially for someone trying to value their cellar, this would prove to be a source of frustration.

Drop me an email and let me know your thoughts, or just leave a comment below. We’ll see whats popular and put that in place.

Calling all bloggers

posted by philip in Website Updates, Snooth

We’re in the process of building a tool to help bloggers monetize their sites. Its still in private beta as we’re working out the bugs and we’re still looking for more people to help us test it.

If you are interested please message me through the site: here.

I’m excited by this, but am trying to keep quiet until its ready for a formal release…

European Wine Bloggers Conference

posted by philip in Snooth, Wine Industry

The first European Wine Bloggers Conference is being held in Logrono, Spain from the 29th to 31st August. In true Web 2.0 style, its going to be held as more of an un-conference.

Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and Robert McIntosh are doing most of the legwork on this important project, but what really interests me is how open and collaborative even the planning stage is. If you head on over to their site, you can participate in choosing and defining the round table discussions, for example. They also mandate that any presentation materials be distributed in advance, giving the audience time to fully digest and absorb the content and be ready to ask tough thought provoking questions during the talks themselves.

Proposed topics that I’d personally like to hear more about or get involved in are: wine communities, blogging standards and blogging technology.

Good luck guys - it sounds like the event is coming together. I’ll be reading the materials when they are published online and hope to hear about the fantastic turnout at the event itself.

Getting things done (or not)

posted by philip in Snooth

I’ve enacted a new policy and emails will be answered (or deleted, if they are viagra ads) in the order they are received. I have quite a backlog, so am hiding out here on the forums to avoid beginning.

Point being, if you emailed me and havent heard a response yet, please be patient, your message is important to us, you’re the next caller. Expected wait time 24 hours. :)

Seriously though, I’m moving as fast as I can and will write you back. Promise.

Friday night thoughts

posted by philip in Wine Industry

Its Friday night and very quiet in the office as the rest of the office has left (they were up most of the night moving the site to our shiny new servers - am hoping you can all see the difference when you use the site). I’m feeling reflective so thought I’d jot down some thoughts about trade groups and efficiency.

Yes, I love efficiency and Snooth’s in part founded on that principle: its more efficient for you, the use, to have a single port of call to research your wines, its more efficient for wineries to have one standard of data feed to support and for them to have one site to monitor the public sentiment on their products.

When Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape posted a call for the two most forward thinking wine industry trade groups to merge, I immediately said I thought it was a good idea. Most people disagreed with Jeff, and maybe I was supposed to as well, as I’m on the Advisory Board for the Wine 2.0 trade group and one of the two Admins for the Open Wine Consortium group for Wine Technology Companies (the other being the fantastically quirky Randy Hall of WineBiz radio, who was wearing his “Bobs Bitch” tshirt when I met him).

Having one industry group is simply the ‘efficient response’. It may be hard to actually create, or outside of the respective founders interests, but thats not for me to judge.

This brings me to my next cry for efficiency: wine bottle shots.

Every winery takes a beautiful and artistic photo of every wine they produce. They may have the bottle next to a full glass of their wine, or perhaps carefully positioned on a rustic picnic table, with a bunch of grapes on one side and some corks on the other. Its beautiful, romantic, evocative.

Unfortunately, this is not what online retailers want. They want standard bottle shots. White background, high resolution, standard lighting and standard angles so every bottle shot looks the same and gives the store a sense of uniformity. So every online store now has to hire a professional photographer to re-shoot every bottle of every wine they sell.

With around 25,000 wines sold in the USA each year and hundreds of stores in the US alone having to photograph every bottle they display online the inefficiency is galling.

Conservatively, consider this:

200 stores, each needing 2,000 wines photographed per year at a cost of $50 per bottle shot (and these numbers are very conservative). Thats $20 million.

If there was a standard and the wineries took a second bottle shot that adhered to the standard we’d save $19.9 million dollars.

Stores would be able to offer bigger discounts to the consumer, wineries (at a minimal cost) could ensure their brand was visually represented at its best at all times across all stores, and everyone would be happy.