In the weeks before the inauguration local papers in the Veneto were all abuzz with the news of a dinner Obama had at one of the top Italian restaurants in the country, Spiaggia in Chicago, where he drank Proseccos from three producers, including the La Tordera Prosecco di Valdobbiadene Brut, which we know Spiaggia pours by the glass. So not only to we finally have a wine-loving President again in the White House, but he has good taste enough to drink La Tordera!

Ferragu` Valpolicella 2005 and Moziese Nero d’Avola 2006 both just won DOUBLE-GOLD medals at the San Francisco International Wine Competition, the oldest and most prestigious competition in the US. Just a few weeks earlier, the St. Pauls Pinot Bianco “Ploetzner” 2007 and the La Tordera Prosecco Extra Dry “Alne’” won PLATINUM awards (Unanimous Gold and Best of Class) at the Los Angeles International Wine and Spirits Competition.

The Ferragu, by the way, had also won a Chairman’s award at Riverside earlier this spring, and the Moziese a Gold medal at the Dallas Morning News WIne Competition. This is the second year that the La Tordera was recognized at Los Angeles. Two years ago (we did not enter it last year) it won “Best Sparkling Wine” of the competition at L.A.!

We love wine competitions. And they love our wines. I am a judge, in fact, in three Southern California competitions: the Long Beach Grand Cru, which started as a benefit for the Long Beach Legal Aid Society; the Riverside International, which is also not terribly well known across the country but attracts a very highly qualified collection of judges and a very eclectic array of wines from untraditional growing areas; and the Los Angeles International Wine and Spirits Competition, previously known as the L.A. County Fair Wine Competition before it got a corporate sponsor and upscaled its image, but for many years one of the most prestigious competitions in the United States. Judging in a competition is hard work (how would you like to start your day at 8:30 AM tasting through 40 tannic and of-variable-quality young Cabernet Sauvignons or Petit Syrahs?) but it is a great opportunity to taste a bunch of wines you might otherwise not get to taste, learn from others in the industry, and network.

We also like to see how our wines do in blind-tastings, where there is no influence of the “story” behind the wine, no prejudice for or against a well-known (or unknown) brand, and no preconception (at least at many competitions) based on price.

But, after being a judge on these competitions for more than 10 years, I can also say unequivocally that the results are often unreliable, and occasionally very unreliable. For certain there will always be “mistakes made.”

Yes, we tout our medals, and honestly, despite the above statement, the medals do mean something. But what I think means more than anything is consistency. What we are proud of even more than our Gold Medals is the fact that when we enter a group of wines in a competition, we consistently win medals for nearly all of them. This speaks to the quality of the portfolio even more than a given medal or lack thereof does. Because the process is inherently flawed, and the results somewhat of a crap-shoot.

Why do we say this?

Let me count just some of the ways the process can produce odd results:

1) The judges often taste over 100 wines in a day. Need I say more? Palate fatigue anyone?

2) The judge may not know anything about a particular type of wine, especially one from a region the judge is not very conversant with, and so has no benchmark in his mind against which to judge it. On the other hand, a judge may know too much about the varietal when it comes from a particular region and as a result have a benchmark on his mind that is too rigid and does not allow for regional character, if it is in fact a different region.

3) There are typically 4 judges on a panel.. Maybe one really “gets” a particular wine, or it is a type he particularly understands, but the other judges do not. The one judge is probably right, but he can be outvoted. So a wine that deserves a Gold winds up with a bronze. (Perfect example, our Passito di Pantelleria: Several Master Sommeliers, who have tasted large number of these, have declared the D’Ancona to be the best they have ever tasted. The head of the government agency responsible for Sicilian wines has said off the record that he thinks it is the best one there is. When we taste people on it, they typically swoon. Yet it was not given any medal at Los Angeles, meaning, typically, that the judges considered it flawed. There are only two possible explanations: the judges did not know what to make of it (if you are used to dessert wines in the high-acid, late-harvest German model, and do not understand “Passitos,” you might consider the wine “oxidized,” for example), or there was indeed a flawed bottle, but the judges, not knowing enough what to expect, did not recognize it and call for a backup. One thing is sure: it is a “Best of Class” wine if there ever was one.)

4) Again, perhaps the judges don’t have experience with that type of wine. They recognize it is made well, but don’t know if it is “as good as it gets” so, afraid to stick their necks out, they give it a Bronze or Silver rather than a Gold

5) The glasses are not large. More complex wines typically need the extra breathing room to show themselves, so often simpler, fruit-forward wines do better than more complex wines. See also point one. The thing competitions are best at is weeding out bad wine. They are less reliable at judging complexity.

6) You have only a few seconds per wine, really (see point number one). The real best way to evaluate a wine is to re- taste it over a period of hours. That’s not going to happen.

7) Good wine is usually made to go with food. There isn’t any, (other than some bread, and some cheese or occasionally Graber olives for palate refreshers or to cut the tannins). The best way to appreciate wine is usually over dinner, (and paired properly). Not happening.

Really great wine often needs time to open up. The wine may be presented to the judges before it has.

All of the above taken together suggest that there are many reasons a wine might be missed and given no award even if it is deserving. Or why any individual wine, if basically sound, might get a higher or lower medal than perhaps it “deserves.” That is why we feel that the most significant sign of the quality of our portfolio has been the high percentage of medals we have always received. At the San Francisco Intl. Wine Competition (the oldest and most prestigious wine competition in the US) we got medals this year for 14 out of 17 entries. At LA it was 11 out of 14. We have seen similar results in other competitions and in past years. We are, frankly, very proud of that…

OK, now you can forget all of what I just said, and express appropriate congratulations for our Double-Gold (at SF) and Platinum (at LA) and Chairmans Award (at Riverside) winning wines!

- Steve

Much to my dismay, I find myself buying into the game of promoting and expectantly awaiting scores in Wine Spectator for our various wineries. I say “to my dismay” because I am not sure how to reconcile using these scores for promotion while at the same time not believing in them.

Let me say to start off: I trust my own palate. I know how good the wines are, and I know that the Spectator will judge some correctly in my opinion and others incorrectly in my opinion. Even if they give a good score to a wine doesn’t mean that I agree with their tasting notes. For example, the most recent issue gives an 89-pt score to our Cantina San Paolo (St. Pauls) Gewurztraminer Exclusiv St. Justina. I think it deserves higher, but, OK, 89 is a pretty good score for a white wine in Spectator. But the tasting notes are like Martian to me. I don’t know anyone who has stuck his nose in this wine and not gotten a glassful of rose petals and lichees. Classic Gewurz descriptors, to be sure, but in this case spot-on. What I love about this wine is that it has the varietal precision and intensity it does (which is what won it a Gold Medal at the San Francisco Intl. Wine Competition this year) and yet it also has a certain lightness and grace that most Alsatian and Alto Adige Gewurz lacks. This is a wine that is not only impressive but also drinkable.

So how does J.S. describe it? “Complex aromas of pineapple skin, peach, and spices follow through to a full-bodied palate, with good acidity and a medium finish.” “Pineapple skins??” How does one go from rose-petals and lichees to pineapple skins? What do pineapple skins even smell like? Is this the same wine? How should I react to an 89-pt score if it sounds like the evaluator has a completely different perception of the wine? This is, of course, our problem with scores. They give a false sense of objectivity and mathematical certainty to something that is quite clearly deeply subjective.

And yet, I also do believe, based on what “insiders” tell me, that the wines really are tasted blind and that although naturally the scores are only a snapshot of what one taster perceives at a given moment in time, in comparison to everything else he tastes at that same moment, and will be influenced by what he has tasted before, what side of the bed he woke up on, etc., there does exist a certain kind of internal integrity to the process. So from that point of view, although one has to recognize all the flaws in the entire concept, if a winery does consistently well, there is actually something to be proud of in a way. In this case, using a complex mathematical evaluation of all the scores for all the different wines of Alto Adige in the November article, Cantina St. Pauls (with 3 separate 90-pt scores and others in the high ’80s) comes out as the “third-highest-scoring” winery in Alto Adige, and so somewhat justifies the comment in the tasting notes on the 90-pt Pinot Bianco “Passion” that “This is a cooperative on the rise.”

Hey, if we can’t sell the wine, we can’t bring it in, and then you don’t get the opportunity to taste it. So if the Spectator scores can convince people to take the wine seriously and taste it, then they are useful and we can’t honestly ignore them or pooh-pooh them. We wish people would rely on their own palates, and we wish every wine shop would be able to develop a hand-sell relationship with its clientele so these scores would matter less, but in the current reality of the wine business, we are obligated to give these scores some level of importance and prominence…

Fortunately, our wines are continuing to appear more and more on the Spectator’s radar. With 94 for Cascina Adelaide, 90 for St. Pauls, 91 and sometimes higher for Savignola Paolina, it is beginning to be clear to a larger audience the kind of quality we represent. In the end, we have to admit to being gratified by it….
- Steve

(Originally Posted 12-26-07)
I was feeling guilty about not having written in a while. Certainly it is not for a lack of things to talk about. Every day in this business is an education. It is just that sometimes it is a very frustrating education. And certainly there is not much that is more frustrating as a general category than logistics.

The fun part of this business is discovering great wine, meeting passionate people, visiting and learning about the geography and history that makes for great wine, finding the unexpected and serendipitous food pairing, turning people on to something they haven’t tasted before or heard of before, seeing a worthy brand become known….that end of this work is what propels us onward and involves us in a way with which we will never tire.

And then there is the small problem of getting the wine here!

Here’s just one example: our newest treasure: Azienda Agricola D’Ancona Passito di Pantelleria.

OK, granted this is somewhat of an extreme situation, but, unfortunately, not as rare as one would hope.

The island of Pantelleria is off the coast of Sicily but is in fact even closer to Tunisia than to Sicily. So one could say it is somewhat remote from the Italian mainland, but, well, it is after all still part of Italy, and certainly has a proud heritage and tradition, not to mention being a place that makes one of the most exquisite dessert wines in the world, a passito made from the Moscato di Alessandria grape, known locally as Zibbibo. We were excited to find something there that we thought would further enhance our portfolio.

We were introduced to the two sisters who are the moving force behind this winery at Vinitaly in April of 2007. It took only one taste for us to become very interested in bringing in their wine. I was hardly an expert on Passito di Pantelleria when I first tasted it, but it seemed to me to be more subtle, more balanced, more pure, more honest; in other words, more of a “Tesori Wine,” than any other Passito di Pantelleria I had tasted before. After receiving a few samples and tasting them with a few of our key trusted colleagues, to make certain we were not crazy, we decided to move forward. (We have since been told by several experts that it is probably the best Passito of Pantelleria they have ever tasted, and possibly the best one made - period..)

The first thing one has to do is get label approval. There are a whole list of things that must be on the label, including the infamous “Government Warning,” the name of the importer, the alcohol percentage, etc., and there are a series of specifications making clear exactly how those things are to be written, including the size of the letters (for example, the alcohol percentage has to be in letters no smaller than 1 mm high and no larger than 3 mm high, while other required elements need to be at least 2 mm high) But unfortunately, anything can come up as a reason for our government, in its wisdom, to reject a wine label.

We transmitted all the requirements to the winery, and they set about trying to modify their label to meet those requirements, as best they could understand them (we speak English and we still need a consultant to help us!), including re-writing the text on the back label in English (which for reasons too arcane to explain here is considered the official, or “front” label in this case). All this took some time, but finally we had a label that seemed to meet the rules, and we submitted it.

Then we wait of course - no way to know how long it will take before some clerk in the TTB office gets to it.

At the end of August (!), we finally learned that the label had been rejected. Why? Because in the text of the explanation of the wine, the winery said that the wine was made from the Moscato di Alessandria grape. Even though this statement was simply part of the text, because it was on the “front” label, and because it was the name of a varietal, it has to be larger than the surrounding text, or made to stand out in some way. So (to put it simply) we had wasted about 2 monthds and had to re-do the label, resubmit it, and wait again.

Finally, to our great relief, the label “passed” the second time around. It was now October and the winery could actually print the labels and apply them to the bottles destined for our shores. (Of course this meant laboriously removing the existing back labels from their existing bottles, because the TTB does not allow any labels to be stuck on top of existing ones!)

Now we could speak about getting the wine on a ship. Hah! It’s not exactly as if there is a truck that can pick up the wine on the island of Pantelleria and take it to the warehouse of our shipper in Livorno. It was too late to get the wine here in time for the holiday season, but, well, at least we could ship before the end of the year…and in fact, after a great deal of work on everyone’s part, a way was found to transport the wine from Pantelleria to Livorno. Our container was scheduled to depart on December 21, so of course there was plenty of time…

The wine finally left the winery on December 6, after a tremendous logistical effort to coordinate the transport via Sicily. In order for our container to depart on December 21, the wine had to be in Livorno by the 15th (new anti-terrorism rules require the container to be sealed at least 5 days before departure!).

However, on December 10th, a truckdrivers’ strike was announced all over Italy that lasted until the 14th! So our wine, after making it to Sicily, never left Sicily until the 18th! Meanwhile, having lost the departure on the 21st, we had rescheduled for the 31st, with a new closing date of Dec 24th. But as you might guess by now, the wine from Pantelleria did not quite make it up to Livorno before Christmas (bad weather, holidays, no sense of urgency on the part of the truckers….), and so now sits in Livorno waiting for us to combine it with additional shipments sometime in January.

By the time it gets here, it will have been a project nearly 11 months in the making, (during which time the dollar has lost another 10% of its value against the Euro). We hope we ordered enough, because, on top of everything else, we have a short window in which to ship the wine each year - there is no effective way of shipping from Pantelleria to Livorno in a temperature-controlled environment, and this is, well, nearly Africa - so we can basically ship between about October and April - May at the latest, if we do not want to worry about compromising the quality of the wine before it gets here (we always - without exception - use temperature-controlled containers from Italy to California).

Do we get paid back for this kind of Herculean administrative and logistical effort? Well, to be honest, only in one respect - the satisfaction we finally experience when you taste this wine for the first time, do a double-take, close your eyes, and are left momentarily speechless.

We wish that experience on you as soon as possible, but in realistic terms, it looks like you will have to wait at least until March of ‘08, at least with this wine!

The wait will, in this case, be worth it.

I wish you all a lovely holiday season, nurtured by some great wine, and a 2008 rich with new and enlightening experiences, at least most of them, hopefully, more pleasant than dealing with logistics!

Auguri per un felice anno nuovo!

Steve Bloom

The fun part of this business is discovering great wine, meeting passionate people, visiting and learning about the geography and history that makes for great wine, finding the unexpected and serendipitous food pairing, turning people on to something they haven’t tasted before or heard of before, seeing a worthy brand become known, that end of this work is what propels us onward and involves us in a way with which we will never tire.

And then there is the small problem of getting the wine here!

Here’s just one example: our newest treasure: Azienda Agricola D’Ancona Passito di Pantelleria.

OK, granted this is somewhat of an extreme situation, but, unfortunately, not as rare as one would hope.

The island of Pantelleria is off the coast of Sicily but is in fact even closer to Tunisia than to Sicily. So one could say it is somewhat remote from the Italian mainland, but, well, it is after all still part of Italy, and certainly has a proud heritage and tradition, not to mention being a place that makes one of the most exquisite dessert wines in the world, a passito made from the Moscato di Alessandria grape, known locally as Zibbibo. We were excited to find something there that we thought would further enhance our portfolio.

We were introduced to the two sisters who are the moving force behind this winery at Vinitaly in April of 2007. It took only one taste for us to become very interested in bringing in their wine. I was hardly an expert on Passito di Pantelleria when I first tasted it, but it seemed to me to be more subtle, more balanced, more pure, more honest; in other words, more of a ‚Tesori Wine, than any other Passito di Pantelleria I had tasted before.