Beating the Bushes – A Practicum

Posted on January 3, 2012 by
Wine male

Image by @Doug88888 via Flickr

A hallmark of being in the right place at the right time is the wisdom of carrying the right stick with which to scare up opportunity. If it’s a 14th Century Nordic cudgel (and you’re more softspoken than you’d like to be), your efforts will be a bit brassier than your game (target) requires, leaving a blushing wound where the smile should have been situated. Similarly, bring a pencil, thin dowel or knitting needle with which to “generate a little productive dialogue” and you’ll wind up creating nothing more than a 30-second memory in your prospect’s mind – as substantial as a carpenter ant’s sneeze. There’s an art to finding a mutual balance point when hunting for what you want – or convincing someone else that her/his needs will undoubtedly be fulfilled by caving to your pitch.

I could be talking about wine sales, or I could be talking about proposing marriage, or I could be talking about training unruly sots to tuck their elbows in at the tavern. The point is that when you have a goal to accomplish, there’s generally a resistance to overcome – an an art to doing so – be it human objection, circumstantial difficulty, chemistry, friction, culture, economy, astronomy (ie: the planets were lined up just so), whatever. There’s simple math all around us: the logic, the beauty, the austerity, the graciousness of natural law – a law upon which the tangible universe all around us relies, and according to which stuff just works. When you weed the garden, your crop thrives. However, when you allow the weeds to propagate, nature is still operating in its wonderfully balancing way. It might not sound right, but think about it; weeds are people too! That garden just may have a weedy destiny, despite the gardener’s intervention. Energy fills voids. Heat from one room seeks to balance the cold room next door. The pause after the logical pitch/proposal creates the empty space for an opposite reaction. Therefore, when he shouts: “SO, YA GONNA MARRY ME OR WHAT??” she responds in kind: “HAIL NO, FOOL!” He must rustle the shrubbery with the energy he wants to receive. Golden Rule stuff. Simple Math.

So the wine salesman says to the restaurateur, “Assuming we can help one another, I’d be honored to see my wine on your list. In addition, I’d be delighted to refer anyone and anyone to your awesome restaurant.”  And the restaurateur says to the wine salesman 30 days later, “I hope your check arrived in the mail today. If not, please let me know and I’ll get that sorted right away. By the way, is there any more of that delightful syrah available to us?”

That’s another abstraction of what Simple Math is. Just in case you were going to ask again if I love calculus, I don’t. But if you look at a rose, the math involved in its design really hits the spot for me. Natural law – beautiful.

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Making the Most of a Vintage

Posted on October 17, 2011 by
Vintage

Image via Wikipedia

As we all know, a vintage is simply a year. The word “vintage” connotes more than just a number, depending on what you’re talking about. In the case of, say, an uncle, it’s deferential to refer to his vintage when he’s celebrating a birthday if he’s unhappy about getting older, slower, more gullible, whatever. Just say, “Wow, you’re only 65? Born in what, ’46? That was a great vintage, Uncle Fester! Hell, you look great.” In terms of cars older than 25-30 years, we always seem to allude to “vintage cars” – meaning old – but when talking to a guy like my pal who restores these, the vintage becomes the year of manufacture. He digs ’61 Chevy trucks, by the way, and would bust me in the grill (get it?) if I were to say that ’63s rock harder. Besides, what do I know? But the vintage is everything to him, and I love him like my very own dog. So for wine, yes, vintage indicates when the grapes were picked, of course – but should never, ever cause one to generalize about the yumminess of what’s in the bottle (re: Calistoga 1998, Haut-Medoc 1983, Beaune 1948) because A) The wine pundits make sweeping generalizations for us based on high-production wines that were submitted in order to judge a winegrowing year; B) your trash may be my treasure; and C) sweeping is reserved for musical passages, glances and brooms.

A vintage can indicate the mere character of a calendar year. For me, 2011 has been a kick-ass vintage that was determined well before bud break.

But back to vitis vinifera in California (because I don’t have the time or desire to get nerdy about the vines outside of my own locale)…yep. You can see it coming. I’ve seen it before, when the shit hit the fan, when rains came at the wrong time, when temperatures didn’t subsequently rise enough to prevent moisture, mold and general ickiness down to the root tips…when naysayers said, “Oh boy; we’re in the trash heap now.” It’s been a bit hairy for early-harvested varietals in Napa-Sonoma (whites, pinot, syrah, sangiovese and the like) but it ain’t over yet. There’s less fruit, sure, but the quality is awesome thus far, according to those tasting and testing. Now here we come to an interesting point: successful winemaking begins with effective, intuitive viticulture. If you’ve got a Jim-Bob-Johnson winery pushing out small quantities and utilizing clean techniques, you’re looking at a greater likelihood of quality down to the bottling line. Alternately, if you’re talking about the 5-million-case Miller-McPherson-Kerbopple Holding Company dba McFurdiger Enterprises squeezing out SKUs and product from 10 tons per acre, employing only the finest in mechanical harvesting technology and low-payroll, high-production, undocumented labor units to supply the marketplace with only the most reliable $4/bottle bullshit, then yes, the 2011 vintage may be seen as something somewhat sketchy and cause the overseas-closeout-liquidation-cutesy-animal-label marketplace to lather up their forklifts for more participation in the big lie they actually foist off as fine wine. But there’s no farmer thus far whose boutique-level efforts have ever characterized the quality of a vintage (in the press and on heavily-trafficked wine websites), at least to my knowledge. And you’ll always find joy in a bottle somewhere, somehow; maybe even believe that a winery you never heard of has just spun straw from gold and earned your loyalty. You just have to experiment. Put the shiny magazine down, hang up your smartphone for a while and let your palate be your guide. What. Do. You. Like?

I need to tip the hat here. I discovered John Anthony cabernet a few years ago and was KNOCKED OUT. It was the 2003 vintage. Enough said. Also, if you’ve ever drunk a Trefethen ’98 cab, you cannot tell me it’s not extremely well-made, only that it may not  be your bag. The point is that when you take what the Earth has offered and do something mindful with it, it will work out. She doesn’t hand you awesome wine, only the building blocks.

I am opinionated and made sure to create fictional corporate names in Paragraph 3 while using real brand names in the next one out of respect for sheer awesomeness. That, friends, is what simple math is all about. It just is, and it’s everywhere. Hopefully this post inspires insightful discourse and discourages hopelessness when you consider whether you’ll want to buy any 2011 California wines.

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A “Meet the Makers” Chat on ToutSuite

Posted on September 15, 2011 by

Excellent times on toutsuite.com

The next show (just me doing an intensive interactive pinot tasting) will be on the same site on October 25th at 6 pm. You can chime in via telephone or Twitter. Just remember to sign up or sign in first. See you there!

Cheers,      Christian

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Simple Math Releases New Pinot Noir Amid Ooohs and Aahs

Posted on July 19, 2011 by

Friends, you know who you are. Spectators, speculators and good sports, here’s more for you to digest. We come to the point in history when it once again proves itself as a repeating entity. When folks learned to like my ’08 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir (caps used out of respect for the grape), many realized that it was not unlike the dodo – fondly remembered, studied, referenced, etc. – but nowhere to be found. Sold out. Heck, even I have only 2 meager bottles of the stuff; how wrong is that? So then, when I announced the imminent arrival of a 2009 bottling of similar nature,

a drop in the bucket

here today, gone tomorrow

save for a few improvements and availability in magnum format, the early birds got their worms and the rest of the people “thinking about it” couldn’t get any. That wine was gone in about 8 weeks, travelling to good homes in bags, baskets and boxes, packages and pokes, sacks and sidecars, Harleys and handcarts, rickshaws and Range Rovers, canoes and carry-ons, in wagons and on Pogo Sticks, and even down pantlegs – the latter two modes of wine movement warming my heart the most. Thus, what I had to do was forewarn the peeps and prospects about a new release – the 2010 vintage. Yes, from different fruit: the Windsor Oaks Vineyard. And yes, from a different appellation: the Russian River Valley. And yes, made in a style very similar to those previous two darlings from the Sonoma Coast – Dijon clones, the pie crust component, French oak, no filtering, food-grade acidity levels that allow for excellent aging…you know, a Simple Math style, no matter from whence the grapes shall have grown. I started offering this as a future about a month before release, and pouring barrel samples for one of the pickier portions of our profession – sommeliers. The comments from the start were: “This is young but is going to rip my heart to shreds in a few months.” “Stunning.” “Thanks for letting me taste this; I know you won’t have any by the time it’s fully showing.” Of late, now about three weeks on the streets and having been hand bottled (as gentle as its gets), it’s nothing but good news. I heard last weekend, “We’ve been buying pinot for decades – Rochioli, Peay, Hanzell….we came here to find something up to par, and you have done it. What a find.”

Here’s an image from about two months ago:

2010 SMC Pinot Shiner

along for dinner in SoCal

I’ll keep this short so you can keep sharp by addressing two notions – 1) Q: What aboot consistency, fella?  A: My goal is and always be consistency in quality and value. I can’t be married to one vineyard because sustainability is a cornerstone of the whole project. If a crop fails, I keep my shirt by remaining nimble, flexible and mature – then I take the growers I know out to lunch and help them strategize for survival, seeing as how we’re all in this together.  2) Q: But I can get good pinot for $10.  A: But you can’t get great pinot for $10. And if you feel you can, remember that $25 of that budget behind the scenes went into brochures and bribes to big-box distributors who can deliver those huge quantities to your humble burg, population 3000. This is not a diss. I was raised in such a town and know the game.

If you would like to examine yet another wine in a crowd of wines and think about wine all the time and become an armchair expert on wine and promise me you won’t call me to ask technical questions about wine (it’s already on the website) – check it out. Simple math, really – it’s very fairly priced and people like it and are buying it from under your feet. That’s all there is to it. I’ll let you in on a secret, too. If you haven’t joined the mailing list and would like to, there’s a great way to really do summer right on a 3-pack of my BBQ wines, paying $60 for $78 worth of goodies. Check it out.

Thanks for reading, wonderful folks. Be well, and be sure to visit the new tasting room some time around September 1st. It’s listed on the contact page but there’ll be more info very soon!

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Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

Posted on February 16, 2011 by
Vertical lineup of Pinot noir wines from the B...

the "Rhonal variety"

In this crazy world, there’s more than enough noise for you, if that’s your cup of tea. The ability to filter is of utmost importance for a number of reasons, perhaps mainly for sanity maintenance. If you can keep your head clear, you can accomplish just about anything. Picture Neo dodging bullets with that far-off look on his face, like either a Boddhisattva or an idiot savant. Be that, and your efficiencies will come into line, and you’ll swat your emails, your problems, your projects off course like so many horseflies. (note: Trust me – East Coast horseflies in particular don’t give up after one swat – but the analogy was invigoratingly satisfying).

It bears to reason that in your job, product knowledge has a relative component to the point above because when you’re peddling wares or ideas, you have not only boatloads of extracurricular data in your head fighting for airtime but scads of information you’ve picked up to help you perform your task as best you can. The way to handle my husband just texted me that the water heater has died in tandem with this microprocessor does not run on biodiesel despite what a blogger told me is fairly simple: read a kajillion self-help books on meditation and organization. Right? Naw, not necessarily. One answer among several, though, is to wake up in the morning with a firm grasp on what one does for a living and embrace getting better at it.

It’s not about the cache of where you work (location, location, location) but rather what you do and improving upon it (vocation, vocation, vocation). Do you have a gig as a host at a shi-shi bistro? Will you ignore me, the guy who tips 30% because I hate math and would rather just round up to the nearest ten buck increment, or will you dispense with the iPhone and greet me like it’s the last conversation you’ll have before being interred in Gitmo? I’m not a good employee because I aspire to rule the world a bottle at a time, but I got to CEO by bull__ing with the best of them, acting like there would be no other place I’d choose to while away a shift, including bed. And 9 of 10 customers surveyed afterwards preferred this saccharine antic. The 10th was a masochist and preferred rudeness (see iPhone texting, glazed-eyed apathy, etc.).

I was on the other side of the hill today (Napa) taking an exam under the watchful eyes of the Society of Wine Educators. Wish me luck, and if you can mentally manipulate ScanTron readers from a distance, feel free to bend to your will the machine about to mark any of my answers as incorrect. Cheating is OK if it employs Star Trek techniques. Anyway, I came back to the Sonoma side and idled into a very famous tasting room. What do I have now, 5 or 6 wine business cards? I ask about industry comps and upon acceptance, deal her the Jack in my poker hand. She’s been around, 20 years my elder, and by default earns a great deal of my deference. I’m just genteel like that. But it starts to go haywire from an informational standpoint, and you’ll see the impact of her ‘tude as we go along here. I remark that the driveway was the longest one I’d seen since Highway 128. She glowers. I was just sayin’. I wasn’t sayin’, you know? I say that the place is just huge, huger than I’d expected, and that I was there to taste some wine from a renowned winery after having opened one of their early-’80s zins and being impressed with its ageability. She’s nonplussed by my proferral of props. I’d expect some warmth on that one.

She says this is a multi-generational, tiny winery. I ask how much they produce. She says 250,ooo cases. M-hm. Tiny.  She takes the spit bucket away from me and offers a stainless steel martini shaker, saying that they don’t allow spitting into spit buckets. Not in those words, but hence another disconnect. She pours a pinot for me, and here it gets good. 1) “Pinot noir is a Rhonal varietal.” Come again? I asked thrice for clarification/verification and nearly got a spanking. nkay. Who the hell took my world away? Then 2) “How does this compare to your pinot?” Apples/oranges? Whaddya mean? (And she’s wont to repeating her questions without rephrasing, which is like reasoning with the Headless Horseman.) “I mean, is the finish spicy?” So you’re asking if my pinot has a spicy finish? Well, yes. Erm, I use Dijon clones, and this is clearly of Pommard, and it doesn’t make sense to compare dissimilar pinots except on their own merits, and your question about spicy finish seems to be one of quality and I’m just confused by this line of questioning…. More silliness ensues, but she’s really a rude person. I taste an ’08 cab franc, and we go on to, as she puts it, “the reserve”. What does that mean? From a technical standpoint, what – oh, this is a totally different varietal, OK – so anyway, back on the rails, are we talking about barrel selection, time in oak, bottle ageing, what connotes “reserve”? Answer: “From a technical standpoint, it means this is what the winemaker wants to call reserve; it’s his special wine.” (repeat the Q & A, seeking a rephrased answer – to no avail). She hands me a receipt, even though it totals $zero (comp – thank you), and wants to know if I’d like to take a brochure.

I hightail it out of there, never to return. But not without telling her that I’d diligently seek out the heritage of pinot noir as indigenous to the Rhone Valley!

Education is key. If you’re going to carry the overhead of a tasting room, you’d better hire people that know wine. Your visitors can absolutely slay your winery by word of mouth in the blink of an eye. I don’t care how many hundreds of visitors you get every week. Let’s understand what’s in our own backyards and promote California wines to visitors in a knowledgeable and professional manner. That will keep the numbers where they need to be, rather than be subsumed by the $5 South American plonk taking over our marketshare. Vocation, vocation, vocation.

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Fuel Injection for the Wine Marketplace

Posted on September 11, 2011 by
Liquor Store Clerks

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

I called on a retail account today and was told that there are indeed a few bottles of Simple Math “peen-yot” available. Uh-oh. Readers, are you getting the kind of help you need at your local bottle shop, or you earning short shrift? Enter the simple math formula. With refinements, of course.

To reiterate the theme, you take what you want, what you need to accomplish it and which alliances make sense. You build your widget using the finest screws you can find and refuse to pay government prices. You offer the widget at a fair or even ridiculously generous price. You help your peers, pay your karma tickets and situate yourself in the right places at the right times.

Then, to refine or embellish on the theme, you partner with your marketplace, encouraging and empowering, educating and engendering mutual gratitude through universal success, with emphasis on creating winning episodes for your ultimate supporters – the consumers. At the end of the day, it’s Jane and John from Anytown, USA who may build upon a memory with your widget on the table. Jane may have a penchant for telling Jackie and Josh all about this new widget she’s discovered, becoming knowledgeable and spreading the cheer that comes from erstwhile expertise – in this case of wine, her stature of connoisseur. (Remember, a connoisseur is only someone who readily identifies her likes and dislikes – she doesn’t have to publish a textbook.) John, on the other hand, may be interested in heralding the arrival of a newfound brand; he may dig the label, the logo or the name itself. He may be wont to tell Jared and Josephine about it (particularly if they have a natural affinity for any of the aforementioned elements (say, the symbol that looks just like pi but isn’t). John might also enjoy opportunities to show his widgetary conquest to larger groups (say, in a dinner setting with colleagues from JebCorp Enterprises).

Will Jane or John feel empowered when they tell their tales about the groovy new widget? You bet. We like to share good news. There’s enough crud clogging the cortex these days. But what happens when they faithfully pass along the information their awesome local retailer has given and proclaim the good news about this new peen-yot? Well, for one, egg on face, particularly if Jackie digs Burgundy or if Josh racks riesling in his spare time. It spells RSVP doom, and, gosh darn it, that new bottle will probably be filed above the refrigerator for a while and in the blue curbside bin come spring cleaning time, not to mention in the annals of embarrassing moments. When it comes to this type of widget, JebCorp, Josh, Josephine, Jared and Jackie may assume then that Jane and John know exactly Jack about the subject. John may ditch the whole conquest and return to the joy of java and Jackie to a jejune jag of juicing.

There’s a bright side. One sunny day, the staff of Western Widget closed up shop for three hours and went to a trade show. A marvelous time was had by all. As far as the eye could see, there were red widgets, white widgets, tannic ones and soft, booming widgets and sublime. Here, there and everywhere were widget producers that had various ways of describing their wares. One could take in whatever one desired and say “uncle” when the going got too esoteric. But through it all, the basic information was as freely available as wind in the Alps. The staff simply ate it up. This was a field trip to remember!

Upon returning to the shop, the doors were flung open and a new joy was expressed – lo, a lust for product knowledge that was a palpable energy in the air! The shelves practically shuddered with excitement as the widgets in stock thrummed and jostled in anticipation of finding new homes. And after about a week, as customers filed into the shop with the usual desire to be guided, one by one the appearance of glazed looks began to vanish. Each new customer told a friend and, before long, a line would form outside the shop before it opened each morning – a line comprised of people who had developed an understanding of widgets even beyond the ones they’d generally see on the shelves. Certain widgets would be snapped up and sold out, and customers’ friends would stream into the shop asking for the particular widgets their friends had shared over dinner the previous evening. Demand began to tangibly overshadow supply, and you could see stacks of Widget #11 and #42 moving in and plowed through even before being unpacked (putting a big grin on the delivery driver’s face). It was like Tickle Me Elmo all over again; heck, an Ivy League Beatles stampede! All gently ushered by friendly staff, mind you. These customers knew several places where they could get the widgets, but they picked Western Widget because it was there that they learned about their passions. Like a reading at a bookstore, it was, or a slicing demonstration at a cutlery shop. And through it all, the staff loved their jobs. They were continuously empowering themselves and earning reputations all around town. The owner, you ask? Oh, mark my words, the owner of Western Widget was not only able to actualize her professional goal of making a mark on her local widget culture, but she was also making ends meet far beyond her expectations. The accountant told her, “You can pay fair wholesale prices for what the widget producers need. They can keep on producing, you can keep reaching for the harder-to-get widgets, and I can take that much-needed vacation in Bora Bora.”

Well, the last part was a fantastical addition to what we all know is a fairy tale. But we can dream, and that’s the most wonderful part of being human.

 

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Secret Tasting July 31st in San Francisco

Posted on July 21, 2011 by

We’re going to do a quick and special pairing of Simple Math wines and nicely matched foods at a secret location. Mailing list gets first shot, and passwords will be handed out as I see the tickets selling. Here’s the event link:

Your ticket covers the wines and the food – and 90 minutes of Q&A with the winemaker.

I’ll be featuring: 2010 pinot, 2009 rose, 2008 chardonnay, 2007 syrah/grenache, and MAYBE 2008 cab/cab franc/syrah. Even better, a bottle of the now “sold-out” 2009 Sonoma Coast pinot will be on hand to taste. This will let you understand the development of a young pinot and get a snapshot of the ’10′s future. Psst! There are a couple of bottles of the ’09 you can still buy – but you have to be in the right place at the right time.

See you there.

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