Reporting from the November Napa Tweet Up
Once a month a group associated with the wine and hospitality industry, who also work with social media get together at a gallery in Napa. The cost of admittance is a Twitter Address and a bottle of wine. Most months we have wine themes so it offers a chance to sample of wide variety in the course of the evening, so I bring my little spit cup along because I don’t want to miss any.
In case that sounds greedy please understand that as a tour guide I visit wineries all the time and don’t taste. I am being paid to drive and not drink. As I often joke with my clients, “If I could drive them around and drink, well, I would do that for free!” So many of the wines I taste at the Tweet Up are from vineyards I’m familiar with, but haven’t experienced as a finished product. It is a great educational opportunity.
It is also a chance to catch up with friends about what is happening in wine country. A couple of notes; even though harvests were down flavors were excellent so the vintage of 2010, at least on the shelves should be a good year. Good for the wine makers, rough for the growers. The Ceja family is breaking ground on their new winery building in Carneros this week. Wishing them good stars, that’s what Mozeltov means in Yiddish.
The price for top of the end Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa was topping $20,000 a ton in places. Absolutely excessive, but if you’ve got the market and the wine club you don’t want to let them down. We heard that the Cosentino Winery in Yountville is closing its doors with wine still fermenting in the tanks. That’s a shame, although I suspected some kind of management problem since every time I went there they had a new manager running the front of the house.
Considering the size of the great recession there have been very few winery closings. There has been some shifting around and tightening of belts but the smart money seems to be betting on wine country. The consensus seems to be that the winter and coming spring are looking good for Napa and Sonoma. A lot of east coast trips aren’t happening for Californians and as we all know our biggest numbers of fans come from the Golden State. Meanwhile the North East and Texas, the next biggest source of visitors are doing great with record brokerage bonuses and energy companies doing what they do.
This month the theme wine was ‘whatever you want’, so I had a chance to try lots of different things. Of course my favorite for the evening was what we brought, a 2005 Quixote Petite Sirah. It was delightful, rounded, deep, with good acid and profound color, satisfying and good natured. There were a bunch of good wines but I realized that I really have turned into a Sonoman, my two other favorites of the night were a Cline Zinfandel and a St. Francis Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. But at least Quixote is firmly in the Stags Leap District of Napa, so all is not lost on me.
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