QRW | Spring 2010 | All Things Grape and Small

We’ve always felt that Champagne was the elixir of life. And now we have scientific evidence. To wit, a University of Reading study, published in last December’s British Journal of Nutrition and reported by the London Telegraph (December 14, 2009), concludes “that champagne has the same health benefits as previously found in red wine.” More specifically, the antioxidants in Champagne “slow down the removal of nitric oxide from the blood, lowering blood pressure and therefore reducing the risk of heart problems and strokes.” The study cited French Champagne, which usually contains a high percentage of antioxidant-rich juice from black grapes (i.e., Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier), as being especially good in this regard. As if that were not enough, Champagne is also thought to enhance one’s looks, to which end, reports the Los Angeles Times (December 27, 2009), “Beauty companies have captured its essence in a range of products.” Among the numerous examples are The Grapeseed Company’s Pink Champagne Organic Soap ($8.95), Eminence Organics’ Mimosa Champagne Tonique toner ($38) and Z. Bigatti’s Re-Storation Champagne Gel Cleanser ($69). This makes perfect sense, says cosmetic chemist Joseph Cincotta, as Champagne’s powerful antioxidative properties protect “the skin’s vital collagen and elastin from environmental free radicals and oxidative stress.” Yet all of these findings raise a question: does one drink Champagne or bathe in it or both? We prefer the first option — but to each his own.

And there’s more good news about wine and health. A Spanish study featured in last November’s issue of the journal Heart avers that drinking up to a bottle (yes, a whole bottle) of red a day reduces the risk of coronary heart disease by 50 percent. A Portuguese study published last October in the British journal Toxicology says that the polyphenols in red wine aid digestion by encouraging the release of nitric oxide, a stomach-relaxing chemical. And a U.S. National Cancer Institute study detailed last October in the British Journal of Cancer claims that “the risk of thyroid cancer decrease[s] with increasing alcohol consumption, by approximately six percent per ten grams consumed daily.”

Here’s one from the “Hard To Believe” department. Gouais Blanc, an undistinguished white grape once banned in France because of its inferior quality, was recently discovered — via DNA “fingerprinting” — to be the genetic mother of some of the world’s leading wine grapes, among them Chardonnay, Gamay Noir, Aligoté and Melon. The father, or pollinating grape, in each case was Pinot Noir.

Francis Ford Coppola Presents has brought suit against the cork and bottle manufacturer Vincor, claiming that defective bottles and corks supplied by the latter ruined all 55,000 cases of Coppola’s “Encyclopedia” collection wines bottled in 2008. Coppola reportedly paid Vincor $685,000 for the bottles and corks in question.

The 2009 Hospices de Beaune charity wine auction raised $7.5 million, the second highest total in the auction’s 150-year history. The annual event, which benefits a hospital trust and each November auctions several hundred barrels of red and white wine from the Hospices’ extensive Burgundy vineyard holdings, is often seen as a gauge of the Burgundy market in general. If that’s true, then don’t look for any bargains among 2009 Burgundies.

A 67-year-old man, Matteo De Dominicis, was arrested in Australia last December and charged with a plot to extort almost $5.6 million from John Casella, the CEO of Australia’s Casella Wines, producer of the hugely successful Yellow Tail brand. Police in Australia’s New South Wales region charge that De Dominicis extorted around $580,000 from Casella in 2008, and then, in December 2009, demanded that Casella pay an additional $5 million. No one is saying anything about the basis of the extortion nor why Casella waited so long to report it.

Police in Seoul, Korea arrested a 62-year-old man last December for marketing cheap Chinese wine with phony United States labels on it. The enterprising crook had reportedly been at it for two years, selling over 50,000 cases of the ersatz American wine — at an obscene profit, of course — to cafes and restaurants throughout South Korea.

Tour d’Argent, the illustrious Paris restaurant, auctioned off 18,000 bottles from its 27-room, 450,000-bottle wine cellar last December, raising a total of €1,542,717 (about $2,110,000 USD) in the process. The restaurant will use some of the money to buy 2009 Bordeaux futures.

The Culinary Institute of America has announced its 2010 Vintners Hall of Fame Inductees: the late Leon Adams, one of America’s seminal wine writers and a founder of the Wine Institute; Andy Beckstoffer, the well-known California grower with over 3,000 acres of vines in Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties; the late Al Brounstein, founder of Napa’s iconic Diamond Creek Vineyard; and Zelma Long, the renowned consulting winemaker who was chief oenologist for Robert Mondavi in the late-1970s and later spent 17 years as winemaker and CEO at Sonoma’s Simi Winery. Previous Vintners Hall of Fame Inductees include Robert Mondavi, Ernest and Julio Gallo, and André Tchelistcheff.

Calistoga, Napa Valley’s most northerly region, is California’s latest American Viticultural Area (AVA). The U.S. Treasury’s Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau awarded the designation — which is akin to the controlled-appellation systems employed by European countries — last December. The new, 2,500-acre AVA, which includes such notable wineries as Chateau Montelena, Araujo and Clos Pegase, sits just above the St. Helena AVA, with the Diamond Mountain District AVA to the west and the Howell Mountain AVA to the east.

Mark C. Anderson, the man charged with setting a devastating Vallejo, California warehouse fire that destroyed $250-million-worth of wine in October 2005, pled guilty in U.S. District Court last November and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The 61-year-old Anderson, who ran a wine-storage business out of an office in Sausalito, set the blaze to cover up the fact that he had stolen much of the client-owned wine he pretended to be keeping at the Vallejo facility. Also destroyed in the fire were several million bottles of wine belonging to 92 Napa wineries short on warehouse space of their own.

Interloire and the Bureau Interprofessionel des Vins du Centre, two wine trade groups in western France’s Loire Valley, have embarked on a three-year, $3.7-million marketing campaign in the U.S. The Loire Valley offers some of the most delicious — yet at the same time, largely overlooked — wines in the world. But perhaps this new campaign can awaken Americans to the joys of Chinon, Bourgueil, Muscadet, Vouvray, Savennieres, Bonnezeaux, Coteaux du Layon, Quarts de Chaume, Saumur Champagny, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. We certainly hope so.

Which is better for your teeth: red or white wine? It’s red wine, according to a recent New York University College of Dentistry study. Yes, “red wine is an amazing staining material,” admits NYU’s Dr. Mark Wolff, “but white wine makes the teeth more susceptible to staining.” That’s because white wine is more acidic than red, and acids “etch the outer surface of the tooth ... , making it more susceptible to chemicals that have pigment in them.”

Bouchard Père et Fils, a major player in Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, has branched out into Beaujolais, with the purchase last September of Château Poncié, a 300-acre (136 in vines) property in Fleurie.

University of Barcelona researchers claim that consumers are swayed by label designs when making wine selections, and are particularly attracted to brown, yellow, black and green colors — especially in combination — and to rectangular and hexagonal shapes. And in a somewhat related study, German researchers aver that the color of the room in which one drinks wine dramatically alters taste perception. Indeed, subjects given the same Riesling to sample in differently lighted rooms claimed that the wine tasted sweeter and/or better in red- and blue-tinted rooms than in green- and white-tinted rooms.

Stanford University scientists say that, at the present rate, global warming could reduce the amount of viable wine acreage in the United States by 81 percent over the next 90 years. The scientists delivered the dire prediction last December, at a meeting in San Francisco of the American Geophysical Union.

Oregon’s Domain Serene has reached an out-of-court settlement in their lawsuit against former winemaker Tony Rynders, whom they had accused, among other things, of sharing trade secrets with competitors. The two parties would not give any details of the settlement, except to say that they had “agreed to disagree” regarding the particulars of the suit and would go their own ways without further litigation.

The economy may have been dismal in 2009, but it did not keep Americans from drinking wine. To the contrary, U.S. wine consumption rose 0.6 percent in 2009, the 16th consecutive year to show an increase.

The Chinese are crazy about Château Lafite-Rothschild. And they’ll seemingly go to any length to acquire the famed Bordeaux First Growth. Last November, for instance, robbers broke into a Hong Kong warehouse and made off with 228 bottles of 1982 Lafite valued at almost $900,000. But was the haul really ’82 Lafite? Word has it that there’s significantly more of this fabled Lafite vintage floating around China today than was actually produced by the Château. Somehow we’re not surprised.

Château Labégorce-Zédé will soon be no more. Starting with the 2009 vintage, the Margaux Cru Bourgeois will be absorbed into its neighbor, Château Labégorce — which has the same owner, the Perenco oil group — to form a single, 150-acre estate.

Dan Karlsen, formerly of Chalone Vineyards and Estancia Winery, has been named winemaker and general manager of California’s Talbott Vineyards, a top Monterey County producer of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Pro football Hall of Famer Joe Montana is selling Villa Montana, his 500-acre vacation retreat in Napa Valley’s Calistoga region. According to San Francisco Business Times (November 9, 2009), the estate includes a Tuscan-styled, 9,700-square-foot main house, along with a ““ professional-grade’ equestrian center, two creeks, a pond, full-sized basketball court, skeet shooting range, caretaker’s residence, guesthouse, pool and spa, gym, Bocce ball court, and a producing olive farm.” The asking price, should you be interested (and who wouldn’t be?), is a mere $49 million.

Randy Sheahan