I recently attended the WTF?! Tasting at Brooklyn Wine Exchange, hosted by a company called WineChap, which is known for its quirky, entertaining events like the astrology-themed Wines for Signs. We tasted six “boundary-pushing” wines, each breaking the mold of conventional winemaking in its own way.

NV Domaine Mosse Moussamoussettes Pétillant ($23) An unfiltered sparkler with no yeast or sugar added.
2008 Red Hook Winery The Electric ($45) The soul of a late-harvest Riesling in the body of a Chardonnay.
2002 Gravner Ribolla Gialla Anfora ($90) An “orange” wine fermented in underground clay amphorae.
2008 Domaine le Briseau Patapon ($28) Made from the rare Pineau d’Aunis grape, put through even rarer semi-carbonic maceration.
NV Pechigo Rouge ($22) An uncommon red blend from biodynamic winemaker Sylvain Saux.
2000 Domaine de Montbourgeau L’Etoile Vin Jaune ($71) An oxidized wine from the Jura, with fino sherry–like flavors.

The tasting booklet’s overall rating for each wine involved choosing its WTF?! Factor— illustrated with one to five unicorns—and came with photos depicting each wine’s wacky aspect (like a centaur for the unlikely blend in The Electric). You might love them or hate them, but you’ll never say they’re ordinary. One sip and you might blurt out…WTF?! 

It's grilling season, and consequently I'll be appearing on Weekend Today tomorrow morning—Saturday—in the eight o'clock hour with some affordable wine recommendations for everything grilled. Malbec with burgers, albariño with grilled fish, zin with ribs, and one of my favorite dry rosés that I've tried recently—the 2009 Mulderbosch Rosé ($11), from South Africa—with grilled chicken breasts. If I don't run out of time (always a risk, since three and a half minutes goes fast), I'll wrap it up with a tangerine-and-peachy, lightly sparkling, lightly sweet 2008 Michele Chiarlo Moscato d'Asti ($14) to serve with grilled peaches. Should be fun, so tune in.

Go away for a few days (the F&W Classic in Aspen was this past weekend) and the whole world gets to changing around you: now they've got wine vending machines in Pennsylvania. Who knew? Local TV station WGAL has the story. Stick your driver's license in a slot, breathe into a tube, insert credit card, and hey presto—Dom Perignon in your shopping bag. It's a weird world.

The lavish Auction Napa Valley is this weekend and I desperately wish I could be there. There are some totally over-the-top lots that will go up during the live auction on Saturday. (Why, hello, lot #12 with your five-year vertical of magnums of Shafer Hillside Select accompanied by three nights at Auberge du Soleil, dinner with the whole Shafer clan and a bonus dinner at the French Laundry!)

Since I can't be in attendance, I took a spin through the online auction which ends Friday (tomorrow) at 3 p.m. PST. There are some pretty nice lots there that I wouldn’t mind waving my virtual paddle at. How about a two-night stay at Stony Hill Vineyard and a case of the last four vintages of its stunning Chardonnay? Or why not bid on a night in a luxury tent smack dab in the middle of Duckhorn’s Merlot vineyards followed by a day working the harvest plus six magnums to take home?

Thankfully, I kept myself from placing bids in the dictated $100 increments, but if I had an extra several thousand dollars in my bank account, I might not have been so modest. Get ‘em while you can.

Well, I shouldn't really say "unknown," because Woodenhead's wines are known to some people at least—but they ought to be known to more. I've thought this for some time, and the thought came at me again a while back when I was at the annual Pigs & Pinot event in Healdsburg, CA, that Charlie Palmer puts on. I was there as a judge for the Pinot Cup—a blind tasting of fifty Pinot Noirs from all over the world—and when our top choice was revealed to us, I was both pleasantly surprised and not that surprised at all.

The winning wine—against some extremely tough competition—was the 2007 Woodenhead Buena Terra Vineyard Pinot Noir ($60), a silky, seamless combination of sweet cherry and tangy raspberry notes, with a hint of cola and a light gaminess. It's sourced from a vineyard on Eastside Road across from Rochioli (which in Pinot-land is pretty much Park Avenue), and was made, as all the Woodenhead wines are, by Nikolai Stez.

Nick started off as cellarmaster at Williams Selyem during the early days of that winery, and has kept contact with original owner Burt Williams—in fact, buys fruit from Williams' Morning Dew Ranch vineyard for another terrific Pinot. The 2007 Woodenhead Morning Dew Ranch Vineyard Pinot Noir lures you in with a fragrant spice note, resolving into graceful spiced berry flavors and a tangy fresh-orange acidity.

Finally, also worth looking into is the 2007 Woodenhead Humboldt County Pinot Noir ($42), about which I seem to have written "like a twisted wire of smoky herbal notes running through sweet raspberry, then crisp at the end." Evidently I was getting alarmingly poetic at that point in my tasting. Regardless, the vines this wine came from were apparently pulled out after this vintage, so this is the last of it to be had.

Woodenhead's wines are not easy to find in stores, since production is small, but they can be ordered directly from the winery (or bought from their tasting room, an extremely pleasant place where you can also chat with Nick and Zina Bower, his partner in both the winery and life). And that Pinot Cup-winning wine is still available, I believe.

 

Our May story on Bonny Doon and the brilliant chef behind their new Tasting Room, Charlie Parker, inspired me to try pairing vegetarian dishes with big red wines at home. If only I had the professional finesse of Bonny Doon. Earlier this week Ray Isle gave me half a case of big reds from the F&W tasting room for the experiment, which I was about to take on the subway when it started to pour. Since I had to hold an umbrella with one hand, I could only grab two of the six bottles with the other: a 2007 Praxis Lagrein and a 2006 Masi Campofiorin. Then, once I was at home I discovered the Campofiorin was corked.

I made my stuffed red bell peppers anyway, filling them with cooked red quinoa and feta cheese, and simmering them in a tomato sauce spiked with a pinch of chile flakes. Finally I tried them with the Lagrein. They tasted just how you'd imagine stuffed bell peppers would, if they'd been garnished with blueberry jam. I had much better luck with the 2009 Hofer Grüner Veltliner in my refrigerator: the faint floral notes married well with the juicy bell peppers, while the white pepper and zippy acidity lightened the rich stuffing. But there is nothing big nor is there anything red about Grüner-Veltliner, though it may be one of the most vegetable-friendly white wines out there. So I'm going to take a page out of Randall Grahm's book and try again.

Meanwhile, enjoy these brilliant vegetarian pairings from Charlie Parker:

• Savoy Cabbage and Sunchoke Pizzas with a Dolcetto

• Smoky Ribollita with a Sangiovese

• Roasted Turnips and their Greens, with a Syrah

 

When Kavita Faiella told me she’d passed up an offer to become the sommelier at England’s legendary Fat Duck so that she could move to India and oversee the wine program at the new Aman Resort New Delhi hotel, I thought she was crazy. (The talented young Aussie had also been interviewing with the French Laundry.) Why would a sommelier who had worked in Sydney with chefs like Neil Perry decide to move to a hotel in a very non-wine drinking country, where sommeliers are an anomaly? According to Kavita, the country’s only female restaurant sommelier, India is a sommelier's dream. Here, her top three reasons:

1.    While working at restaurants like Rockpool in Sydney, Kavita would place bets with servers on who could sell something other than a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. "In India, people don’t come in and flip to a certain page of the wine list," she says. "They don’t have a wine style, so it’s just as easy to sell an Albariño as it is a Sauvignon Blanc."
2.   "There is absolutely no pretention around wine in India. People don’t feel embarrassed or intimidated by not having a wine background. "
3.    Kavita likes the challenge of curating a wine list that appeals to both wine geeks and wine novices. "At the hotel, the wine list has to appeal to the group of people who are very globally savvy and have traveled a lot, as well as to people who are interested in wine but may not have been exposed to it. That means I need to create a list full of secrets and quirky information that wine people will know and get, but also have explanations and stories that will entice experimenting among those who don’t have a wine-drinking background."

Anyone who feels they are or might be allergic to wine, or allergic to sulfites in wine, or is simply curious about whether allergies are exacerbated (or not) by wine, or, for that matter, is simply bored at the moment, ought to read this wonderfully cogent post by Dr. Vino over at his blog. It's clear, direct, and cuts through a huge amount of the blather surrounding this subject. It's also well worth looking at the two National Institutes of Health papers (on histamines & wine and on sulfite reactions & wine) he mentions as well, especially if you don't mind a dose of science with your work down-time reading, as well as this one (also on histamines & wine, with a contrary position) which he doesn't. 

 

Only a true wine geek would make the four-hour drive from Mumbai to Nashik to go wine-tasting in the 100-plus-degree heat. But some prodding from F&W’s always-curious wine editor Ray Isle, coupled with a meeting in Mumbai with Rajeev Suresh Samant, the wine visionary behind India’s Sula Wines, convinced me it was my journalistic duty to leave Mumbai's chaos and investigate what was going on in India's wine country. In the last five years, a wine scene has slowly emerged in India’s major cities. Wine bars are popping up in design stores; retail wine displays are being added to specialty-food shops; India’s social set are joining wine clubs; and drinking red wine has become fashionable among the Bollywood set.

Nashik-based Sula Vineyards is now pioneering wine tourism in India to fuel the growing wine interest. It opened the country’s first tasting room in 2005 and has since added an Italian restaurant, as well as a six-month-old Indian restaurant. Two years ago, Rajeev opened Beyond, a modern, three-bedroom guesthouse set amid the vineyards, with an infinity pool and a private chef on call. I spent the day touring the barrel rooms, watching elegant women in saris prune the vines and tasting the dozen-plus styles of wine that Sula produces under the guidance of Sonoma winemaker Kerry Damskey. Throughout my trip, I noticed that Sula’s excellent sparkling wine and Chenin Blanc were featured on every restaurant’s wine list.

I also got a sneak peek at Sula’s 20-room eco-resort and spa, which will open later this year. With more than 500 people visiting the winery on a weekend day and new wineries like York and Chateau d’Ori opening nearby, I couldn’t help but feel Nashik will soon be, well, not quite Napa, but perhaps Mumbai’s equivalent to Long Island wine country.

I didn’t plan on drinking 1962 Jaboulet Cornas on a Monday night. But it was the inaugural wine dinner at Bar Henry, the subterranean restaurant in New York City’s West Village, and the small wine region Cornas is, according to my very smart wine friend, the most interesting part of northern Rhône. That same friend also said that Bar Henry has one of the city’s best wine lists these days and there were eight different vintages of Cornas being offered, so not going seemed like a bad idea. In fact, the ’62 Cornas was not the wine of the night (it was “dead of air, not old age,” someone at the table noted). John Slover, Bar Henry’s awesome wine consultant and the dinner’s organizer, said the wine of the night was the ’89 Verset  (“the most elegant barnyard ever”). Robert Bohr, one of Food & Wine’s favorite wine experts, liked the 1983 Verset best. (He called it “smoking.” For Slover, it was "also elegant barnyard but with softer tannins.") Me, I loved the ’90 Verset. My friend Augie, whom I wish would bring back his terrific blog, augieland, compared the flavor (though not the nose) to the chalky, sweet candy cigarettes we had when we were kids, which might be why I liked it so much. I learned something else from Augie: Finish your Cornas dinner with Champagne. Specifically, the not-so-well-known-but-delicious 2000 Gaston Chiquet Special Club Brut.