Sedona WineFest Day 1

  Yesterday was the first day of the much anticipated Sedona WineFest. This post will be fairly short as I'm behind in my chores out in the pasture and gotta get out there pretty soon. I've been to quite a few of these to-do's as a customer but this was my first opportunity to work one. If today's crowd at the 'Fest is HALF what yesterday's was the whole thing is going to be proclaimed an enormous success. It was slated to begin at 11 a.m. I met my boss, Lisa Pender from the Pillsbury Wine Co.'s tasting room at 10 to unload many cases of wine. There were already customers lined up at the ticket desk to get in!! Imagine, grown up, normal, successful looking people who couldn't WAIT to drink wine at 10 in the morning! By the time we got to the last hand truck full of wine cases I looked down the hill and could see what looked like a line of cars backed up half way down Airport Road.
 
  For those who've never been to one of these deals,  here's how it works. You pay your entry fee, and you get a spiffy wine glass and usually 6 tickets, which will get you some tastes at the various winemaker's booths. Some winemakers charge a flat rate: one ticket for one one ounce taste, while others tier their charges depending on their per bottle costs. A less expensive wine may be one ticket whereas a 65 dollar bottle may be 3 or 4 tickets. Six tickets won't get you a lot of tastes, and so you can go to the ticket table and buy more for a buck apiece. Individual winemakers get paid back a half dollar for each ticket by the show organizers, which in most cases doesn't even cover the wholesale price of the wines they're sampling.
So the show is really all about selling bottles, cases and the PR that comes with being there.

  The crowd was easy to handle. In recent years I've become really wary of crowds and being in places where there are more than a few people I don't know really well. I'm a bit agoraphobic and was concerned about having one of my famous panic attacks and so took an extra pocketfull of Xanax just in case. I'm happy to report I didn't need any. A wine tasting crowd is a HAPPY crowd! I was hoping to meet at least a few snooty snobs who I could goof on and have writing material for this blog, but to my chagrin didn't meet a single one. While about 90 percent white, this was otherwise a crowd of regular folks, regular folks surprisingly knowledgeable about wine. Uniformly inquisitive, polite and happy as can be.
  I'll report more tomorrow and post some pics, but now have to get going with chores before getting the "buck perfume" washed off myself and heading out.

  One wine I want to mention now before I forget. Javelina Leap Winery in Page Springs has a fortified, Port-like Zinfandel in pretty short supply. If you're a Port or Sherry drinker ( I know, most Port drinkers have long since shed their satin smoking jackets, put out their cigars and quietly crumbled to dust) you really ought to see if you can get ahold of a bottle of this stuff. A bit too much alcohol on the finish but it's very interesting otherwise. 30 bucks for a split sized bottle. Personally, I think it would have been even more successful if they had a brandy to fortify it with rather than the grain alcohol they used, but I guess you can't do that unless you've got your own brandy to use, and distilling is a whole other deal. It went a long way towards getting rid of the made-yesterday-and-stored-in-the-reach-in-uncovered taste of the Three Flatbread offering from the Hilton Sedona that I had for lunch. Awesome wines at this fest. Food? Not so much.
  More tomorrow, thanks for reading!

The Merkin V and O Cafe page

I've made a separate page to keep track of the progress on the Merkin V and O Cafe project. As I mentioned in a previous post, Maynard James Keenan ( I sure wish that guy had an easier name to type. I'm going to have to make a text file that I can just copy/paste) recently received a license to serve liquor at a Cornville location. I made it into a separate page that you'll see in the very upper left of this page. I meant to get over there today and take some pics of the bare lot as a starting point, but the goats got the better of me and I had to spend several hours repairing my breeding buck's pen. He's in full rut and the girls are teasing the poor guy mercilessly. He's nearly destroyed his pen trying to get to them. But I digress. Look for pics in a day or two. I'm working tomorrow and also will be at the Sedona Winefest Saturday and Sunday so there may not be anything new for a few days. Have a great weekend and buy some local wine if you can wherever you are....remember, no kangaroos, geckos, giant roosters etc. I just took a sip of my wife's glass of herding cats and it may have mellowed a bit since being opened two days ago, but it's still not a bargain.
Salute!

I used to hate homework

 Not anymore.... I spent some time yesterday at the Pillsbury Wine Co. tasting room in Cottonwood doing homework. Studying up on Freitas Vineyard's wines, which will be available at the upcoming Sedona WineFest this weekend. Her Ray's Red, Merlot and San Giovese will be available and  you're going to be pleasantly surprised if you're not familiar with this small, family run estate operation from Cottonwood. If you're suffering Merlot overload, and they're all sorta beginning to taste the same, try the Freitas take on it! Thanks to Veronica at the tasting room for walking me through the Freitas wines, her depth of knowledge is impressive and her easy going manner sure evens out the learning curve.

You Heard it Here First

Maynard James Keenan, leader of the alternative (or something) rock  band Tool, philanthropist, winemaker extraordinaire and all around renaissance guy has just been approved by the Powers That Be for a liquor license at the location (read: bare lot) of the old Maxwell's Produce stand on the corner of Cornville and Loy Roads. To be called "Merkin V and O Cafe", presumably after his remarkable Merkin Vineyard wines.

One can only wonder if the boys at the Yavapai Board of Supervisors know what a Merkin is. I betcha dollars to donuts they thought he meant 'Merican. 

As I came past the place on my way home just a while ago, there was a team of guys busily digging up the pigweed and clearing the lot. 

Thanks again to Johnny Montezuma for bothering to call the county and schmooze some nice lady into looking up the permit. More to come on this one I'm sure.

Wines with animals on the label...Off topic post warning

After the wine tasting on Saturday at Casey's Corner I was gabbing with the owner Mike about local produce. I mentioned my French Climbing Zuccini and was extolling it's virtues. "Bring me some" he said, "I'll buy it or trade you for it". So I ran home to get some. This squash is the best tasting and most hardy and prolific squash I've ever grown. You can look it up if you want more information about it. Anyhow I came back with ten pounds. "How much do you want for it?" Mike said. I allowed as how I had no idea what it was worth but threw him 50 cents a pound and he said sure. I decided I'd trade him for one of his cheap wines. I shoulda taken a 6 pack of Budweiser instead. I have a general rule of never buying a wine with an animal on the label. Wine marketers near and far have discovered two really important things. First, as most wines are sold at grocery stores and women still make up the bulk of family grocery shoppers, women buy more bottles of wine than men do. They've also discovered that women almost exclusively shop LABELS when buying wine, and animals are a big hit with the ladies apparently. Geckos, goats, giant roosters, bucking broncs, you name the critter, you can find it on a wine label. Mike's biggest seller is a South African "Merlot/Pinotage" (whatever that is) called "Herding Cats". Cute name, cute tigers on the label, 5 dollars and sixty American cents, what's not to like? I'll tell you what's not to like, THE WINE. Not that it isn't drinkable, but there are plenty of American cheapies out there that are far less expensive and more palatable than this stuff. For 10 bucks and change you can buy a GALLON of Carlo Rossi Paisano. Without going into great detail, when Carlo Rossi emigrated to the U.S. long ago he sought to produce an affordable quality table wine like he remembered from Italy. He succeeded. My fondness for Paisano goes back 30 or more years. Spending several months in Europe and a good deal of that in Italy, every town has these little hole in the wall shops big enough to hold a barrel of wine with a pump on it and a kid to fill your container for a few lira. Old men women, kids and smartly dressed hot shots all stop by to get the day's wine for the table. It's a commodity, a necessity not some fancy luxury. Paisano tastes EXACTLY like that wine and even though the Evil Gallo Brothers now own Carlo Rossi, the taste and the legend continues, the wine hasn't changed. The moral of the story, cutesy labels do NOT make good wine. Nuff said.

Notice the very hip lower case title

You Might Be A Redneck.....

  If you go to a wine tasting in Cornville. There, I just had to get the Cornville Redneck joke taken care of first. Last Saturday I decided to go give Casey's Corner Store's wine tasting a try. The owners there have completely changed the place. While I'm usually not a fan of "gentrification" or whatever you call it, the old Casey's Corner was a dump, plain and simple. Cigs, cheap beer, soda pop, fishing bait and gas. True, you could get wine there, if your tastes ran to MD 20/20.

The store has gradually undergone a complete metamorphosis. The gas pumps are gone. A local artist has completely muralized the outside walls of the place in a kind of Cactus Wren-Coyote-Saguaro-Magical Desert motif that's quite nicely done and just kitschy enough to be cool. I haven't inspected the entire building but no kokopellis jumped out at me, and that's a GOOD thing. Inside, you'll find lots of natural and organic edibles, local produce, eggs and even grass fed beef raised about a half mile away. But the wine's the thing here. They've gone to great lengths to stock a very impressive selection of wine considering the size and location of the store. Obviously, they can't buy in Costco quantities and so you're gonna pay a bit more per bottle, but if you show up for their Saturday wine tastings, you not only get to keep the glass but all the wines in the store are 10 percent off.

That Jeep is no countrified decoration, there's a guy with a hammer under it.

.
Each weekend they feature one or two different wines. A six wine tasting costs 7 dollars, including the cutesy tasting sized glass. This is less than half the going rate for flights at any of the other tasting venues in the valley and is a great deal. You're limited though, as they bring in a distributor's rep to conduct the tasting of only those brands being featured. Big deal. If you go to Caduceus or Page Springs or Pillsbury's rooms or any of the others, you're limited to their wines by default.

Saturday's tasting featured Kokopelli Winery, Keeling-Schaefer Vineyards, and Canelo Hills Winery. Wouldn't you know it, the first wines I'm going to talk about here are technically not "Verde Valley Wines", but lest you get all huffy, all three are Arizona Wineries. Kokopelli I believe is sort of a Bistro-cum-winery. They don't actually grow grapes, but buy bulk product and make their wines in Chandler. Keeling-Schaefer on the other hand is a full Pearce, AZ estate vineyard and winery and Canelo Hills is a small family estate styled vineyard and winery in Sonoita.  I tasted 6 wines, Kokopelli's white zinfandel, cabernet, pinot grigio, Keeling-Schaefer's Three Sisters Syrah, their cabernet, and Canelo Hills' Sunrise.
All these selections ran in the 14 to 17 dollar range give or take.
Kokopelli's Pinot Grigio is very nearly clear. You could fill up an old Mountain Spring water liter bottle with it and take it to work and sip on it all day and nobody'd be the wiser until you face-planted your keyboard. More fruit than you'd expect from a P-G without sacrificing that nice grassy-ness. I've often described Pinot Grigio as wine for people who don't like wine, but this one was fairly interesting. Their White Zinfandel, on the other hand, struck me as downright sweet, although the information sheet's residual sugar doesn't hint at that. "It's very fruity" said the rep. Yeah, like a fruit roll-up is fruity. The color put me off too. The info sheet says "Peach", or something. If you're old enough to remember dying easter eggs with those little color pills you put into a cup of hot water and vinegar, you'll remember the orange color. That's the FIRST thing I thought of when I held up the glass. Their Cab had a thinnish mouth feel but a beautifully clear dark color and nice peppery oak flavors, without excessive tannin.

I enjoyed Keeling-Schaefer's Cabernet, but their real winner was the 2007 3 Sisters Syrah. Almost opaque, it had berries, tobacco and a slightly fruity finish. It has won several blind tastings against prestigious California and French varieties. I didn't care for the Canelo Hills offering. Too much tannin and a kind of brownish hue that didn't appeal. It might be a wine that takes more than a one ounce serving to appreciate, I'll give it that.
Ultimately, I bought a bottle of the Three Sisters. The 2006 is sold out completely and I'll bet the 07 does too. We enjoyed it on Sunday, with a slow roasted pork shoulder pot roast bathed in apple cider vinegar, apples, celery, onion and garlic and I've forgotten what spices. My son, the budding cook, has recently learned to make Gnocchi, and his rosemary and parmesan gnocchi tossed in extra virgin olive oil made the perfect accompaniment to the roast and a salad. Perfect birthday supper for yours truly. Be sure to come out on Saturdays and give Casey's wine tasting a try. Shoot, you can't stay HOME for 7 bucks these days.

Gnocchi, a serious carbohydrate sin

Verde Valley Wine Consortium

Last Wednesday I attended the monthly meeting of the Verde Valley Wine Consortium. This is a group composed of many of the movers and shakers in the valley's wine industry. I hate to call it an industry. It's not, clearly, and hopefully never will be. We've got enough industrial wine in this country. Anyhow, on the recommendation of Lisa Pender, manager of the Pillsbury Wine Company Tasting Room in Cottonwood, I went. The meetings are open to the public and very interesting. Anyone who thinks the valley's wine thing is some bunch of hippies trying to grow grapes instead of weed or a poorly funded flash in the pan that's doomed to failure will quickly have their eyes opened to exactly the opposite. It's not my place to publish their meeting minutes, but here are a few quick tidbits that I found quite amazing.

A representative from Yavapai College was present. Yavapai college has jumped on wine full force. They've planted a vineyard, albeit a demonstration siezed one at present, are offering viticulture and wine appreciation courses, and plan a full blown curriculum in winemaking and even hope to one day bottle their own wine! They have a very interesting painted wine barrel project ongoing wherein barrels are painted by local artists and placed at local wine businesses for a time. At the end of the project they'll be auctioned off, I suspect for big dollars, to help support the viticulture program. This endeavor is being heavily promoted by the wine trail discussed below. Here's a PDF that explains the program. Quite a few noted local artists are jumping on board and you can expect to see their barrels ultimately go for big bucks.

I think it's generally understood that the Chamber of Commerce is and has always been essentially an arm of the Republican party. I make no judgments in that regard, it's just how it is. As such, they're traditionally a very conservative bunch who do not eagerly embrace the newest business craze until they're sure it's got serious dollar potential and long legs. They are ALL OVER Verde Valley wines. I'd love to have been at the members only C of C meeting sometime in the recent past where they all slapped themselves in the forehead and realized "holy crap, tourists are actually COMING HERE FOR WINE!! WE GOTTA JUMP ON THIS!!" Well god bless 'em they have. Check out The Verde Valley Wine Trail homepage.